THE GOSPEL AMji 
 THE MODERN Mil 
 
 SHAILER M ATH EWS 
 
 PPSSi^^g^J^-J* 
 
 u&s'if 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Alfred C. Barnes 
 
Cornell University Library 
 BR121 .M42 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 193 113 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 9240291 931 1 3 
 
l^dfytxioVa ILiirarg ILtctmes 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND THE 
 MODERN MAN 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON ■ CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO.. Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE 
 MODERN MAN 
 
 BY 
 
 SHAILER MATHEWS 
 
 PROFESSOR OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY 
 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; AUTHOR OF "THE 
 
 SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS," "THE MESSIANIC 
 
 HOPE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT," "THE 
 
 CHURCH AND THE CHANGING 
 
 ORDER," ETC. 
 
 ISTefa gorfe 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1910 
 
 All rights rturvtd 
 
Copyright, igio. 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1910, 
 
 Kotbiaoti Vresa 
 
 J. 8. CuBhIng Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGB 
 
 The Gospel of the New Testament . . . . i 
 The gospel in our modern society. I. The question 
 of method. The distinction between Christianity as a 
 contemporary religion and the gospel. The method of 
 a positive evangelical theology. — II. The gospel as con- 
 tained in the Nevi' Testament. I. In the Synoptic Gospels. 
 The teaching of Jesus. Place of Apocalyptic in his 
 teaching. His messianic self-consciousness. 2. The 
 teaching of the apostles. Christ as a deliverer from 
 Satan, sin, and death. 3. Is there more than one gospel 
 in the New Testament? The relation of Paul to Jesus 
 one of elaboration rather than of fundamental difference. 
 4. The function of Apocalyptic. — HI. The gospel in its 
 New Testament form involves historical elements, i. The 
 historical experiences of Jesus and the apostles. 2. The 
 gospel as the product of historical development : 
 (3) Messianism as a world-view ; (^) Two final thought- 
 forces of the Jewish social mind ; (<r) Sacrifice ; (a') So- 
 cial ideals of the ancient world. — IV. The gospel in the 
 New Testament although eschatological not wholly 
 other-worldly. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Modern Man 35 
 
 Elements common to the New Testament and modern 
 times. I. Four fundamental differences between the 
 vii 
 
vm CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 two periods. I. The modern age primarily scientific and 
 controlled by the conception of process. The struggle 
 toward free personality. The supremacy of the historical 
 spirit. 2. God now conceived of as immanent in uni- 
 versal process rather than as a monarch. The question 
 of miracle. 3. The modern world filled with a sense of 
 social solidarity. Differences between such conceptions 
 and the social inequalities of the New Testament period. 
 4. The modern world demands a scientific and empirical 
 basis of truth as contrasted with authority and meta- 
 physics. Universality of this attitude of mind. Diffi- 
 culties arising from these four classes of differences. — 
 II. Who is the modern man? 1. Not necessarily con- 
 temporary persons. 2. Nor merely the man in revolt 
 against the past. 3. The modern man is he who is con- 
 trolled by the forces making To-morrow. — III. Objec- 
 tions to this definition, i. It gives too little prominence 
 to theological reconstruction. 2. It gives too much 
 prominence to theology. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Content of the Gospel 63 
 
 Why should we attempt to bring the gospel rather than 
 a revised Christian system to the modern man? I. Two 
 current methods of adjusting the gospel to our modern 
 age. I . The method of literalism and its dangers. 2. The 
 method of a philosophy of religion indifferent to the 
 New Testament. — II. The method of historical resolu- 
 tion and interpretative equivalents. I. The method in 
 general. 2. Messianism as the interpretative and syste- 
 matizing concept. 3. Result of such process as express- 
 ing the content of the gospel. 4. The content of the 
 gospel one of life rather than of philosophy. — III. Doc- 
 trine-making as a social process. The method of finding 
 equivalents for the constructive and interpretative con- 
 ception of the New Testament, i. The equivalent for 
 the sovereignty of God. 2. The equivalent for escha- 
 
CONTENTS IX 
 
 tology as a method of portraying: (a) the teleology 
 of social evolution ; (l>) personal immortality and resur- 
 rection ; (<r) causality in the moral order. 3. The 
 equivalent for messianic salvation. — IV. The gospel as 
 a message of salvation, an exposition of the possibilities 
 of the spiritual life and order. Forecast of further dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 PART II 
 
 THE REASONABLENESS OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Jesus the Christ 91 
 
 The gospel conceives of Jesus as primarily a savior 
 rather than a teacher ; as historical rather than as ideal. 
 I. The gospel as amenable to the laws governing histori- 
 cal investigation. I. Universal recognition of the his- 
 torical aspect of the gospel. Radical criticism. 2. The 
 gospels as historical documents. 3. The gospels as 
 records of primitive Christian faith rather than of objec- 
 tive facts. The case of the resurrection of Jesus. — II. The 
 Jesus of history. I . In the Synoptic Gospels. 2. In the 
 Pauline literature. 3. In the Johannine literature. Gen- 
 eral conclusion. — III. The Christ of experience. I. The 
 content of the term " Christ." 2. Jesus as the embodi- 
 ment of the absolute moral supremacy of the spiritual 
 life. In what sense he was sinless. 3. Jesus as the 
 object of religious worship. 4. An existential conception 
 of the person of Christ demanded by judgment of his 
 moral worth. The New Testament explanations of his 
 person. — IV. Modern equivalents of the Hellenistic doc- 
 trine of the two natures. A Christological creed inevita- 
 ble for the modern man. Evangelicalism as distinguished 
 from orthodoxy. 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 FAGS 
 
 The Love of the God of Law i39 
 
 The universal sense of weakness. I. The problem of 
 physical evil. I . Satan as an explanation of evil. 2. The 
 immanence of God and evil. — II. Is God Love ? i . The 
 prior question as to the existence of God. 2. The prob- 
 lem of evil: (i) The answer of Christian Science; 
 (2) The answer of Jesus. 3. What is deliverance from 
 evil? — III. The gospel and pessimism, i. The grovrth 
 of pessimism. 2. The indifference of the " superman." 
 — IV. The courage of the cross. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Forgiveness of Sin 161 
 
 The place of sin in life. I. The nature of sin. I. The 
 teaching of Jesus. 2. The teaching of Paul. 3. The 
 modern equivalent for the evangelic conception of sin. 
 Corporate sin. 4. Three alarming facts; the ease, the 
 socialization, and the pleasure of sin. — II. The evangelic 
 warning against sin. I. The gospel's exposition of the 
 danger of sin. The modern man's conception of punish- 
 ment. 2. Sin as the violation of God's will. 3. The 
 reasonableness of the belief in the punishment of sin. 
 4. The power of Jesus to awake moral shame. — HI. De- 
 liverance from sin as a spiritual process. I. Deliverance 
 of sin not identical with complete moral perfection. 
 2. The Pauline doctrine of justification of faith. The 
 regenerate power of the divine spirit appropriated through 
 faith in Jesus as Christ. — IV. The question of the moral 
 order involved in the forgiveness of sin. The Pauline 
 doctrine of atonement. — V. The doctrine of the atone- 
 ment in the history of Christianity : i. The early con- 
 ceptions of ransom, sacrifice, and satisfaction; 2. The 
 permanent element in the Christian consciousness lying 
 back of theories of the atonement. — VI. The significance 
 ot the death of Christ to the modern man. i. His death 
 as an exposition of the justice of the moral order: Oi As 
 
CONTENTS XI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 involvedin the socialization of other effects of sin; (2) As 
 regards suffering resulting from altruistic service. 2. His 
 suffering a testimony to the divine love: (i) Jesus' faith 
 in such love ; (2) What is really meant by the forgive- 
 ness of sins ; (3) The resurrection as a complement of 
 the death of Christ. 3. The death of Christ as an expo- 
 sition of the ethical unity of God. — VII. The forgiveness 
 of sins positive as well as negative. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Deliverance from Death 208 
 
 A belief in immortality is the ansvrer of the race to 
 the challenge of death. I. The place of death in the 
 New Testament. 1. Hebrew and Jewish views, z. Early 
 Christian conception of the resurrection and of death as 
 a punishment of sin. — II. The a priori objection to the 
 resurrection weakened by the following considerations: 
 I. A belief in immortality involved in our knowledge of 
 life ; 2. The spiritual individual rather than society the 
 outcome of the evolutionary process ; 3. Argument from 
 the subliminal self ; 4. Prospect of scientific demonstra- 
 tion of the future life. — III. The resurrection of Jesus. 
 
 1. Starting-point of the faith of the early disciples. 
 
 2. Hypothetical explanations of this belief. — IV. The 
 content of the disciples' experience of the risen Christ. 
 I. Pauline beliefs the point of departure. 2. The gospels' 
 account of the resurrection as compared with the Pauline. 
 
 3. The resurrection as distinguished from the ascension. 
 — V. The resurrection of Jesus as an exposition of the 
 finality of the spiritual life. I. The resurrection more 
 than a mere wonder. 2. Its significance to the modern 
 man. 
 
Xll CONTENTS 
 
 PART III 
 
 THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Test of Life 239 
 
 Summary of the preceding discussion. I. The general 
 grounds for the alleged impracticability of the gospel. 
 I. An oriental religion. 2. Its individualism. — II. Spe- 
 cific grounds for denial of its practicability, i. Its ap- 
 peal to rewards and punishments. 2. Will to power vs. 
 love. 3. Love inferior to justice. 4. Excessive ethical 
 idealism. 5. Alleged ad interim ethics. 6. The funda- 
 mental struggle between the non-religious modern man 
 and spiritual order. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 The New Life in Christ 272 
 
 The gospel must submit to the test of immediate effi- 
 ciency. I. The meaning of salvation, i. In the teach- 
 ing of Jesus. The identity of the eternal life vpith the 
 spiritual life, to gain which is to be saved. 2. In the 
 teaching of Paul. Life in the Spirit and in Christ iden- 
 tical with the triumph of the spiritual life. — II. The 
 psychology of the spiritual life. i. The gospel as "sug- 
 gestion." 2. The gospel as the ideal governing religious 
 impulse. 3. The gospel as presenting the faith evoking 
 Jesus. — III. The gospel as a way to spiritual regenera- 
 tion through the spirit of God. 1. The spiritual life not 
 to be explained wholly in terms of psychology. 2. Re- 
 ligion as a search for reconciliation with God. 3. Moral 
 regeneration through spiritual life, because of reconcilia- 
 tion and union with the Holy Spirit. — IV. The con- 
 tinuity of Christian experience as an expression of the 
 spiritual life despite doctrinal variations. 
 
CONTENTS xm 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Power of the Social Gospel 299 
 
 I. The social significance of the spiritual life. I. The 
 kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus. 2. The 
 struggle between the spiritual and the materialistic 
 orders. — II. The power of socialized hatred. I. The 
 social power of the gospel commensurate with its power 
 to rouse a hatred of sin. 2. The place of tolerance in 
 the spiritual life. — III. The function of the church as 
 the social expression of the spiritual life resulting from the 
 gospel. I. The modern man's obligation to the church. 
 2. The development of social sympathy. 3. The social- 
 izing of the spiritual life, the supreme social function of 
 the church. 4. The spiritualizing of the new formative 
 forces in society. 5. The social meaning of the cross. 
 6. The insistence on faith in the working of God in 
 society. — IV. The problem of a divided church. Con- 
 clusion. 
 
 Index 329 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE 
 MODERN MAN 
 
 PART I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE GOSPEL 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Is the gospel of the New Testament to be "the 
 power of God unto salvation" for the modem man? 
 Or must it be replaced by a philosophy of religious 
 values that reduces the historical Jesus to a creature 
 of the unwarranted faith of Galilean fishermen, and 
 changes the church into a polite audience listening 
 to discussions of social reform ? 
 
 These questions are not merely rhetorical. Chris- 
 tianity was founded upon the Christ of the New 
 Testament. The history of the church is the history 
 of an attempt to make that Christ the inspiration 
 for Godlike living and the basis of an assurance of 
 divine forgiveness. Philosophies have come and 
 
2 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 gone, theologies have been supplanted by newer 
 doctrines, but the gospel of a way of salvation re- 
 vealed by a real Jesus has been the perennial source 
 of constructive Christian experience. Now, however, 
 we are told that the gospel in its original New Testa- 
 ment sense cannot be combined with the other 
 beliefs of modem men and is to be replaced by 
 some religious message more consonant with modem 
 thinking. We can see on all sides tendencies which 
 promise the fulfillment of this prophecy. We do 
 well, therefore, to raise the question frankly whether 
 the modern man's attitude towards evangelical 
 Christianity must be essentially skeptical and nega- 
 tive, and whether the gospel can be truly a force in 
 our modern world. 
 
 The situation is as critical for the church as for 
 the modern world. Unless the gospel can control the 
 formative men of to-day, it will require more than 
 one generation to regain the ground Christianity will 
 lose. The gospel, it is true, will remain the posses- 
 sion of the theologically simple minded; it will 
 continue to furnish the individualistic morality of our 
 common life; but it will not keep men and women 
 who have come under the influence of the truly 
 modern world from pessimism, moral indifference, 
 and the practice and philosophy of force. The 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 3 
 
 church needs these formative lives. Society needs 
 them even more. Evangelized leaders are as indis- 
 pensable as evangelized masses. If without their 
 influence the church will grow intellectually and 
 socially flaccid, without their power to infuse the 
 gospel into social transformation society will grow 
 materialistic. For a man, even though he be rich 
 and learned and formative, needs to be saved. And a 
 social order, even though it build transcontinental 
 railroads and turn its forests into books, needs to 
 be made the kingdom of God. 
 
 I 
 
 At the very outset of our discussion we are con- 
 fronted by the question of method. Where shall the 
 gospel be found? Modem Christianity as a re- 
 ligion is an historically developed system of doctrines, 
 each the product of a particular period. Far more 
 than the non-technical student of our religion is 
 aware, this body of dogma is the common property 
 of all Christendom. It is embodied in the various 
 symbols of Protestantism, but Protestants gained 
 it from the Roman church; the Roman church and 
 the Greek church as well drew it from those ecu- 
 menical councils which recall not only the world- 
 wide controversies they sought co settle, but also the 
 
4 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 time when all Christians were at one except as they 
 were heretics or schismatics. 
 
 Although ecumenical theology is derived from scrip- 
 tural teachings, it need only be read in the creeds 
 of Constantinople and Chalcedon to be recognized 
 as something different from the gospel of the New 
 Testament. Every word of the creedal sentences is 
 a shibboleth intended to separate some independent 
 thinker or school of thinkers from the Catholic church. 
 But is this Christianity the religion of Christ? And 
 is it to be the starting point of that theological recon- 
 struction we are all but unanimously agreed must be 
 undertaken if our rapidly growing educated class is to 
 be kept loyal to the church? No questions are dis- 
 cussed more earnestly or with more learning. And 
 the more we know of what might be called the 
 natural history of this Christianity of ecclesiastical 
 authority, the more are we convinced that it is the 
 descendant of a numerous ancestry of which the 
 gospel of the New Testament is only one member. 
 In our inherited corpus of doctrine we can see the sur- 
 vivals of Greek philosophy, Roman distrust of logical 
 thoroughness, the rites and mysteries of an orien- 
 talized Graeco-Roman world, mediaeval politics, and 
 even the traces of Indian theosophy and asceticism. 
 
 This is not to say that such eclecticism and solidifi- 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 5 
 
 cation of religious survivals into a religion nucleated 
 around the gospel could have been avoided, or that 
 on the whole it is to be lamented. For my part I can- 
 not see how the gospel ever could have become the 
 religion of a Hellenized civilization without being 
 clothed in Greek concepts. Nor could it have become 
 a power in the mediaeval world except it had been ex- 
 pressed in mediaeval terms and methods. The only 
 thing that need here concern us beyond the undeni- 
 able fact that dogma has a pedigree is the question as 
 to whether such a theological system shall be our 
 point of departure. In a search for the method by 
 which the gospel can be made more influential in our 
 modern world, shall we recast inherited beliefs, or 
 shall we begin with the New Testament itself, and, 
 as it were, repeat in our own day the process by which 
 the gospel has always been brought into intellectual 
 harmony and expression in earlier periods? 
 
 I have no hesitation in declaring for the second 
 alternative. 
 
 The study of the history of doctrine is illuminating 
 if a man would gain a conception of the actual situa- 
 tion created by orthodoxy to which he must adjust 
 his own message. It is helpful in developing religious 
 interest and theological balance ; it is indispensable 
 as indicating the process by which we may bring 
 
6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the gospel to our modem life. But it is not a point 
 of departure for theological reconstruction. The great 
 demand to-day is not for a manipulation of our inher- 
 ited theology into some form more acceptable to our 
 modern ways of thinking. It is rather for a frank 
 disregard of inherited dogma except by way of his- 
 torical evaluation and a return to the primitive 
 gospel itself ; to the gospel that founded Christianity, 
 conquered the Roman Empire, and embodies the 
 continuous realities of the spiritual life. True, 
 the apperceptive mass of doctrine — if the expression 
 may be pardoned — is one element in the situation 
 to which the gospel must be presented in that it 
 affects the method of presentation, and suggests 
 caution in adopting a radical program of illumina- 
 tion. But this mass of doctrine does not constitute 
 in itself the substance of a truly spiritual Christianity. 
 A sense of the truth of this assertion is the real cause of 
 the widespread demand to "go back to Christ," or, 
 rather, to bring Christ back to us. Inherited ortho- 
 doxy is so colored by outgrown philosophies, pre- 
 scientific conceptions, outgrown political ideals and 
 prejudices, as to be unusable by many an earnest man 
 and woman. To remodel the old house is more 
 expensive than to tear it down and use such materials 
 of it as are sound in erecting a new building. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 7 
 
 Here is one characteristic of a positive, evangelical 
 theology : it uses the material which theologies of the 
 past have employed. It would throw away nothing 
 which its analysis of the doctrinal development may 
 discover to be more than concepts used to interpret 
 eternal realities to a given age. But it starts with 
 the strictly evangelic data which have been worked 
 into the corpus of doctrine, rather than with that 
 corpus itself. It would use the bits of glass of the 
 mosaic figure, but it would not seek above all to 
 preserve the figure. 
 
 II 
 
 "What then is that gospel of the New Testament 
 which we would bring to our modern world? 
 
 Sometimes we speak of it as if it were the Sermon 
 on the Mount, or some philosophy of religion, or some 
 general message about deliverance in Heaven. 
 There is truth in each of these conceptions, for each 
 embodies some aspect or implication of the gospel; 
 but the definition which we seek is not in any of them. 
 If we would formulate the gospel with precision, we 
 must place ourselves back at the moment when 
 Christianity was first preached as a distinctive mes- 
 sage. Our method must be historical, not dog- 
 matic. 
 
 I. In the Synoptic Gospels we find the gospel as 
 
8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 first announced, a message of the approaching ful- 
 fillment of a religious-social hope — the establish- 
 ment of God's own kingdom through one whom 
 God had appointed and empowered for the task. 
 John the Baptist did not undertake to define what 
 was meant by Christ or the kingdom or the Day of 
 Judgment. He appealed to the definite expectations 
 of those to whom he spoke. His emphasis was not 
 laid upon a new doctrine, but on the fulfillment of the 
 noblest hope of Judaism. God was about to act. 
 The Judge was at the doors. The Christ, although 
 they did not know him, was already in the midst of the 
 people whom he would deliver. To prepare them- 
 selves for his Day and his new kingdom, men had 
 only to repent, be baptized, and live a life of social 
 helpfulness. 
 
 When Jesus took up the work which John was 
 forced to abandon, he began with the same message : 
 The kingdom of God is at hand. Men were to 
 believe that message. But while with John the 
 expectation was centered on the Day of Judgment 
 with which the kingdom was to be inaugurated, with 
 Jesus it was centered upon the deliverance which was 
 to be accomplished. It was good news — the gospel. 
 Therein he changed a negative to a positive hope. 
 
 Jesus was, however, not content to announce that 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 9 
 
 the prayer for national deliverance was about to be 
 answered. He knew that God's deliverance could 
 not be national and ethnic, but was to be personal and 
 social. The kingdom which God was to establish 
 could be enjoyed only by those who were like its 
 King. Thus there grew up his exposition of himself 
 as the Son of Man, the embodiment of the ideal life, 
 and the proclamation of the conditions under which 
 this life is to be lived in an evil world. 
 
 Four joyous truths combined to make the message 
 which he delivered ; God can be trusted as a Father 
 to save his children from Satan, sin, and death; 
 the kingdom of God is a certain and supreme good for 
 those who seek forgiveness of the Father ; eternal life 
 is a life of love, in quality like that of God ; and this 
 divine life is revealed in Jesus himself, as a forgiving 
 ministry of love to others, even though that ministry 
 brings loss and death. 
 
 It is difficult to say which of these four elements is 
 the more important, but as the substance of an evan- 
 gelical message the last was the more characteristic of 
 the religion which Jesus inaugurated. The original 
 gospel of Jesus was the product of a life-process — 
 the self-revelation of its author. He was living 
 the life of the Spirit. Distressed by circumstance 
 though he was, he was the type of that kingdom 
 
lO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 which was to come. His teachings were not the 
 result of speculation but of experience. To be- 
 lieve his teaching as to the Fatherliness of God, 
 the supremacy of righteousness, faith, and love, was 
 to listen to exposition of the supreme values of life 
 by one who was able to make them supreme in his 
 own living. For a man to make them controlling in 
 one's own life was to be morally like Jesus, possessed 
 like him of a joyous, emancipating trust in the Father 
 and a self-sacrificing love for men. As Jesus him- 
 self declared, it was to be perfect like God. The 
 sense of union which Jesus had with God was the 
 source of the '^ruth which vas to be men's Way to 
 Life. Whether or not they used the term, when men 
 believed this they believed that Jesus was indeed the 
 Messiah. 
 
 The program, if we may use such a term, in which 
 Jesus set forth this spiritual deliverance born of a 
 unique experience of God was to a considerable ex- 
 tent the messianic hope of the Pharisees, but that 
 program is never obtrusive in his teaching. The 
 early Christians attributed to him certain messianic 
 expressions which he himself probably never used, 
 at least in the precise form in which they stand in the 
 New Testament and in the other early Christian 
 writings; but it is not difficult for a thoroughly 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT II 
 
 objective criticism to dissociate such words from 
 those which were really his. Apocalyptic his teach- 
 ings indubitably were, but it is possible to dis- 
 tort and overemphasize the importance of this ele- 
 ment. The kingdom of God was still future, but he, 
 its founder and herald, was present and its spiritual 
 life could be lived in untoward surroundings if men 
 only dared. If he expected the kingdom would be 
 established by catastrophe — and after all legitimate 
 allowance is made for apostolic coloring in the reports 
 of his words it is not improbable that this was in his 
 expectations — such a catastrophe was not central 
 in his teachings. Indeed it all but disappears before 
 an impartial criticism of the sources. He looked 
 across the chasm that separated the two ages recog- 
 nized by current messianism, and centered the thought 
 of his followers on the present forgiving love of God, 
 the new social order the Father would establish, 
 the freedom, the love, the joyousness by which it was 
 to be characterized. This new sort of life, the Age- or 
 eternal-life, he embodied and sought so to describe 
 that his followers might seek and gain it. The escha- 
 tological pictures which we find in Jewish literature, 
 like the Book of Enoch and the other apocalypses, 
 were not the content, but the clothing of his message. 
 They might all be omitted and his teaching would 
 
12 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Still be the richest of all the sages. To change the 
 figure, they were the point of contact, or rather the 
 point of departure, of his teaching. 
 
 But one thing cannot be overlooked by any un- 
 prejudiced interpreter : Jesus believed that he was the 
 Christ. Not the Christ in the strictly Jewish sense 
 that in the future he would establish Judaism and 
 judge the nations, but in the deeper sense that he saw 
 himself embodying the very heart of a redemptive, 
 regenerating God. The spirit of the Lord was upon 
 him, empowering him to minister to the needs of those 
 who needed divine assistance and to save those who 
 needed to be delivered from Satan, sin, and death. 
 
 2. When one passes from the teaching of Jesus to 
 that of the apostles, he is conscious of a change of 
 atmosphere. That which was secondary or implicit in 
 the teaching of Jesus becomes prominent with Peter 
 and Paul. Jesus was Christ the Lord. That was 
 the simple creed of the first Christians, grounded not 
 only on their acquaintance with Jesus, but on their 
 experience of the Spirit, and primarily upon Jesus' 
 character, power, and resurrection from the dead. 
 Once having recognized in him this messianic value, 
 like true children of their time they forecast his 
 future in its light. His earthly life became of less im- 
 portance as they compared it with the future. Its 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT I3 
 
 supreme humiliation was not that merely of poverty, 
 defeat, and death. It was also the humiliation of a 
 heavenly being who humbled himself to be a man 
 and sufferer. Yet even thus he had been the one 
 who was to deliver Israel. Although his real mes- 
 sianic work was yet in the future, it was daily drawing 
 nearer. At any moment they believed the trumpet 
 might sound, the dead rise from Sheol, the Judgment 
 Seat be established, the New Jerusalem descend from 
 Heaven, the Christ conquer his enemies, and his 
 church be called to an eternity of bliss. Because 
 they believed him to be thus superhuman, they 
 worshiped him as the Lord of their lives and their 
 future. Their gospel thus did not center about a 
 dead, defeated Jesus, but about the triumphant, 
 triumph-sharing Christ. It was a message not of the 
 finality of suffering and self-repression, but of the su- 
 premacy of the spiritual surplus of the Christlike life. 
 For those who look at the central rather than the 
 outer elements of the thought of both Jesus and Paul, 
 there is no divergence sufficient to break an essential 
 unity in this elaboration of the gospel. To both 
 alike it is a message of a personal and social salvation 
 revealed and wrought through Jesus by God. If 
 we analyze Paul's message as it appears or is involved 
 in his writings, the messianic work which was to be 
 
14 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 accomplished by Jesus the Christ was the same as that 
 expected by all the early Christians, a divine deliver- 
 ance from the same three great and terrible enemies 
 we find in the teaching of Jesus : from Satan, who 
 had established his kingdom in the world and who 
 was bringing misery of all sorts upon men, both 
 bad and good alike; from Sin, that half -personified 
 principle which held humanity in its power because 
 humanity began in sinful Adam, and which no man 
 could escape because all men were "carnal"; and 
 from death, the horror of which ran throughout all 
 Jewish life. 
 
 This message of deliverance involved many subor- 
 dinate matters. Time was divided into two ages : the 
 first, in which the Prince of Evil reigned, and the 
 followers of Christ were to expect sorrow ; the second 
 the Age which was to come in which Christ would 
 establish the kingdom of God — an age in which 
 the wicked were to suffer and the righteous were to be 
 happy. This new age was to be ushered in by the 
 Day of Judgment. The writers of the Jewish apoca- 
 lypses described this awful day in detail and it was no 
 less real to the early church. But with this difference : 
 the apostles, like Jesus, made the basis of eternal 
 destinies then to be fixed, not one of Jewish or Gentile 
 birth, but rather the actual possession of the sort of 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 1 5 
 
 life which could make membership in the kingdom 
 possible. With the Christian the message of the 
 judgment was fundamentally a message of deliver- 
 ance by transformation of the individual by God's 
 Spirit into the likeness of Jesus. The man who had 
 accepted Jesus as Christ and had consequently 
 received the spirit of Christ into his soul awaited 
 calmly this day of terror to others. He was already 
 acquitted. The Judge was his Savior, in whom he 
 trusted. Death would separate him from the flesh, 
 the agent of sin, and the resurrection was to save him 
 from both Satan and death. The certainty of this 
 triumph was assured by the incontestable experience 
 bom of faith in the goodness of God, and by the 
 historic fact that the Jesus who had embodied this 
 life of the Spirit had shown the way to the divine 
 threefold deliverance. 
 
 It is only a hasty estimate that fails to see that the 
 deliverance thus foretold by both Jesus and Paul is 
 positive rather than negative, ethical rather than 
 magical. Although in its complete sense it was yet 
 future, germinantly it was already a present posses- 
 sion. Salvation did not mechanically come to a 
 man ; he waited, a new creation, for the coming king- 
 dom. Satan might buffet, but Satan could bring 
 only temporary sorrow; his age was about to end. 
 
1 6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Death might come, but death had been overcome; 
 those who possessed the spirit of the God who had 
 raised Christ from the dead, already possessed an 
 eternal life like that of Jesus. An evil age might bring 
 Christians suffering, but their Master had overcome 
 the age. His followers, living as best they could a 
 life like that of their great King, could well endure 
 the miseries of an evil age. They, if not their present 
 comfort, were safe. 
 
 3. At this point, however, we confront a question 
 which has been elevated into great prominence in 
 recent New Testament study. It is the very simple 
 question as to whether there is more than one gospel 
 in the New Testament. Or, to put it more specific- 
 ally, did Jesus give us the gospel and did Paul give 
 us a new religion — Christianity ? Such a question 
 will seem to many a man as irrelevant, if not worse. 
 Orthodox Christianity in its formulation did not 
 recognize the methods of modem Biblical theology. 
 It started with the Bible rather than the distinctive 
 messages of the various writers of the Bible ; least of 
 all did it distinguish between those of Jesus and 
 Paul. Any examination of theological treatises 
 will show that their writers have never hesitated to 
 combine any sentences from different parts of the 
 Bible which seem in any way to agree, and on the 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 1 7 
 
 basis of their combined teaching to formulate dog- 
 mas. In this way there has grown up a Christian 
 theology based upon an uncritical combination of 
 material. In cases where such material has not 
 been readily combined the inconsistencies of various 
 texts have been evaded or removed by exegetical 
 ingenuity ranging from the allegories of the early 
 church Fathers to the formulations of councils. 
 
 It is a characteristic of our modern study, however, 
 that it treats the Bible analytically. Instead of 
 treating it as an integral book, it compares the 
 teachings of its different authors and attempts to 
 point out similarities and differences in their develop- 
 ment. In the case of Jesus and Paul it was very 
 natural that this should at first tend to magnify the 
 differences between the simple, unphilosophical, 
 joyously creative religious message of Jesus and the 
 elaborated systemizations of Paul. With some 
 interpreters such differences become the controlling 
 factors in interpretation. In their opinion Paul in 
 comparison with Jesus is an absolutely new phenome- 
 non. His theology is not determined by a picture of 
 Jesus' life and in it we can find little of the gospel 
 which Jesus taught. " That which was everything to 
 Paul was nothing to Jesus." In Jesus we have a call 
 to men to submit their souls to God and His will. 
 
l8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 In Paul whoever believes in the incarnation, death, 
 and resurrection of Jesus as a Divine Being can 
 obtain salvation. Even in the case of less radical 
 scholars a pronounced difference is found between the 
 Master and the apostle,— a difference between "the 
 voluntary and immediate apprehension of God's 
 love in childlike confidence, and the belief that man 
 may venture to approach God, because God Him- 
 self has offered the necessary sacrifice upon the cross 
 of Christ." 
 
 The extent to which the self-consciousness of Jesus 
 varies from the interpretation placed upon him by 
 Paul must be considered later. At this point it is 
 necessary only to consider the main question already 
 raised as to whether there are two gospels. The 
 reply to this is immediate in the words of Paul to the 
 Galatians : " There is no gospel of any other sort or 
 kind." The contrast between the teaching of Jesus 
 and that of Paul is, of course, apparent to every reader 
 of the New Testament, but it is not a difference in 
 fundamental character. It consists rather in the 
 case of Paul of the exposition of the significance of 
 the person of Jesus and of the salvation wrought by 
 him in terms that made it applicable and tenable 
 among the Christians of his own day. The champions 
 of the view that sharply distinguish Paulinism from 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT I9 
 
 the message of Jesus have failed to distinguish between 
 two processes in the apostle's preaching, — the evan- 
 gelistic, which we find set forth in the Book of Acts, 
 the historicity of which is daily becoming increasingly 
 recognized ; and the educational, directed to those 
 who have already accepted Jesus as Christ and 
 who need to be taught loyalty to their new spiritual 
 experience. Paul certainly was far more informed 
 as to the historical Jesus than those who insist upon 
 his fundamental divergence from his Master are 
 ready to admit. But his great effort in writing to 
 Christians was not to do that which such Ministers 
 of the Word as Mark were capable of doing, but rather 
 to apply the gospel to the exigencies of the human 
 experience, and to defend it from the attacks of those 
 who sought to ingulf it in Judaism or some gnostic 
 speculation. The difference between Jesus and 
 Paul at this point is that between the formulation of 
 the imperatives of religious faith and the theology of 
 religious experience. In so far as the theologians of 
 the schools have been swayed by the perception of the 
 fundamental identities which bind together these two 
 stages of religious teaching, they have been justified 
 in combining the material that has come from Jesus 
 and from Paul. 
 Nor is it possible to rule out of court this funda- 
 
20 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 mental agreement in the redemption messages of Paul 
 and of Jesus by asserting that the Synoptic Gospels 
 as they stand to-day are the products of Paulinism. 
 Such a method is altogether too easy and too a priori. 
 To say that whenever the Jesus of the Synoptics and 
 the Jesus of Paul agree it is because the writers of 
 these early gospels have been influenced by Paul is a 
 begging of the question as naive as is alleged by 
 some to be found in traditional orthodoxy itself. The 
 central message of Jesus is the central message of 
 Paul, however much the apostle may have elabo- 
 rated and adjusted that message to local needs. 
 
 But we may go one step farther. Such an elabora- 
 tion of the systematic relations of the gospel as Paul 
 has given was imperatively demanded by the exi- 
 gencies of thought itself. No man is able to leave 
 religion uncorrelated with his experience. There 
 are too many fundamental questions that he must 
 answer. And unless the thinking of the centuries 
 has been incredibly artificial, the questions which Paul 
 raised concerning the relation of God's deliverance as 
 revealed in and accomplished by Jesus with such 
 problems as its dependence on Judaism, death, human 
 history, the moral order of the universe, and the 
 future of the individual, to say nothing of its rela- 
 tion to moral construction, are precisely those which 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 21 
 
 a man of any epoch must face and answer. And in 
 answering such questions he will inevitably follow 
 the same method as that adopted by Paul himself. 
 He will answer them in view of the person, the ideal- 
 ism, the death and the resurrection of Jesus, and in 
 the terms of his own age. 
 
 4. One point, however, still remains to be con- 
 sidered. It is that to which we must repeatedly 
 recur, namely, the relative importance of the appara- 
 tus by which Paul and, to some extent, Jesus himself 
 set forth the significance of the gospel : that is to 
 say, the forms of thought furnished by the apocalyptic 
 thought of New Testament times. 
 
 Here again we must postpone any complete dis- 
 cussion, but in view of present tendencies it should 
 be said that every interpreter must give large latitude 
 to his treatment of all apocalyptic forecasts. The 
 modem man has little of that instinctive sympathy 
 with symbolism which pervades early Christian 
 thought. The apocal)^se, like prophecy, is essen- 
 tially poetic. It is a lamentable exegetical method 
 that sees in its pictures any attempt at scientific accu- 
 racy. It is, of course, a fair question as to just how far 
 the authors, and particularly the first readers, of these 
 apocalypses regarded them as figurative, for a dis- 
 tinction between the literal and the pictorial is always 
 
22 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 hard to draw in Jewish thought. The genius 
 of Hebraism was unanalytic, with a constant tend- 
 ency toward solidifying qualities into quantities, 
 just as the Greek thought was constantly tending to 
 abstract general conceptions from concrete experience. 
 The Hebrew language, for instance, lacks adjectives ; 
 nouns must serve in their place. Figures of speech, 
 even of the most abstract sort, steadily tended toward 
 personification. The word and the wisdom of 
 Jehovah became subordinate mediators between 
 him and his world. Yet on the other hand, concrete 
 reaHties were constantly used in relations which 
 show that their use was symbolic. Isaiah represents 
 an angel as bringing a hot coal from the altar, 
 placing it upon the prophet's tongue, and then bidding 
 him to speak. It is impossible and absurd to place 
 many of the pictures of the messianic age in precise 
 scientific categories. Just as the rabbis, looking back, 
 described the Golden Age of pharisaism under Alex- 
 andra as the time when a grain of wheat was as large 
 as a kidney, did the apocalyptists describe the vine- 
 yards of the messianic age as producing bunches of 
 grapes yielding hogsheads of wine. No Jew would 
 be deceived by such figures. They would symbolize 
 to him the boundless fertility of the soil under the 
 blessings of Jehovah. So even more clearly in the 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 23 
 
 case of such figures as we find in the Book of Daniel, 
 the Enoch literature, and the Apocalypse of John. 
 Symbolism is there self-evident. 
 
 For these reasons the modem interpreter must be 
 slow to apply too rigorous methods to the apocalyp- 
 tic hopes of the early Christian. On the one hand 
 he cannot draw the line with precision between that 
 which is to be taken literally and that which is to be 
 taken figuratively, but on the other hand he cannot 
 safely say that symbolism is not present in all apocalyp- 
 tic figures. He must not overestimate the tendency 
 towards realism. To Jew and early Christian alike 
 the reality which these apocalypses contained was 
 more than that of the picture themselves. There is 
 symbolism in the cubical shape of the heavenly 
 Jerusalem and in the Son of man coming in the 
 clouds as truly as in the beast and his mark. 
 
 But eschatology must not be banished with its 
 pictures. Any interpretation in a truly historical 
 spirit will seek to recover that contained within 
 them, no matter how literally they may have been 
 taken by certain interpreters, for eschatology, as 
 will presently appear, is part of the content of the 
 gospel. In thus interpreting apocalyptic imagery 
 the student will be simply following the indications 
 of the writers themselves who bid those who "read, 
 
24 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 understand." And, as will appear later, not the least 
 important among the hopes contained in eschatologi- 
 cal programs is that of a social order, which though 
 not to come by observation or efifort, would be no 
 less real because it was to be introduced by God. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This message of a divinely accomplished deliver- 
 ance preached by the founders of the church claims 
 to be based on historical facts. That is evident on 
 every page of the New Testament. But this is alto- 
 gether too general a statement. To be precise 
 we must recognize that the gospel is historical in two 
 senses ; in that it is, first, a record of experiences, and, 
 second, an interpretation of that experience in ac- 
 cordance with the concepts of a definite historical 
 period. 
 
 I. In the first place, the gospel is identified with 
 definite historical experiences. Primarily, of course, 
 these experiences are those of the historical Jesus of 
 Nazareth. I do not raise the question as to whether 
 every detail in the New Testament accounts is sus- 
 ceptible of confirmation, nor the larger question as 
 to whether all those deeds and words attributed to 
 him by Christian centuries are genuinely his. But 
 this I would emphasize : the gospel as it stands in the 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 25 
 
 New Testament and as understood by Christians of 
 the pre-theological age includes a narrative of events. 
 Although Paul is not primarily interested in history 
 as such, we find him repeatedly referring to the life, 
 humiliation, death, resurrection, of Jesus. Once he 
 ejcpressly states these historical facts as constituting 
 a part of the gospel he preached. If possible even 
 more strenuously does an early Christian writer 
 like Ignatius insist upon the reality of the person 
 and the experiences of the crucified and risen Jesus. 
 And it is this concrete message as to Jesus together 
 with its implications for the spiritual life that has 
 constituted the substance of evangelicalism through- 
 out all the ages. The Christ was something more 
 than a "principle," something more than Truth. 
 He was a genuine person sharing in the course of 
 history but rising above the natural order that 
 had apparently crushed him, and sharing his 
 triumph with all those who share his spirit. 
 
 Similarly, the gospel of the New Testament em- 
 bodies the experience of the first Christians. Prima- 
 rily, such experience began with the acceptance of 
 Jesus as teacher, healer, prophet, and the Christ of 
 the coming kingdom. But their real enthusiasm 
 and evangelistic impulse was connected with their 
 belief in the resurrection of Jesus. They had seen 
 
26 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 him, heard him, and, if the gospels in their present 
 form are to be trusted, had put their hands upon him. 
 As to the nature of this experience of the risen Jesus 
 we shall presently inquire, but that it is an integral 
 part of the iirst preaching of the gospel there can be, 
 and is, no serious doubt. 
 
 But Christian experience as related in the New 
 Testament included also the "gifts" and the "fruit" 
 of the Holy Spirit. Whatever psychological character 
 we may ascribe to such experience it is obvious that 
 it formed a part of the original gospel message. The 
 promise of the Holy Spirit was to all those who ac- 
 cepted the testimony of the new evangelists and 
 believed on Jesus as the Messiah. The power of 
 God was announced as present in human lives, not 
 only as the assurance of an eschatological salvation, 
 inestimably precious as that was, but also as the 
 source of ability to work cures, make converts, and 
 grow morally strong in the spiritual life. In the 
 first defense of the new faith three arguments were 
 uppermost: the actual resurrection of Jesus, the 
 coming of the Spirit of God into the believer's life, 
 and the fulfillment of messianic prophecy. It is 
 obvious that the first two of these apologetic ele- 
 ments are in the region of history. 
 
 2. In the second place, the gospel is historical in 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 27 
 
 that the concept by which the experience and person 
 of Jesus were interpreted and evaluated was itself the 
 product of historical forces. 
 
 We know Jesus as a definite historical person only 
 as he lives for us in the records of the faith of his 
 earliest disciples. The gospel therefore is not simply 
 a record of the experiences of Jesus ; it is a message of 
 the redemptive value of these experiences as formu- 
 lated by those who had experienced the redemption. 
 That is one reason why Jesus is so real. He has been 
 worked into the very life of history. Now in the 
 faith of these disciples Jesus had a meaning and an 
 ofiSce. He was the Christ ; that is, — and the defini- 
 tion is fundamental, — the one whom God Himself 
 empowered by His own resident spirit to save His 
 people by establishing them as His kingdom. 
 
 It was impossible for these conceptions, in which 
 were expressed the power and significance of Jesus, 
 to have been other than creatures of an historical 
 situation. Experiences which become the substance 
 of any preaching are always expressed in terms and 
 thought-forms derived from the social mind in which 
 those who formulate it shared. How could it be 
 otherwise in the case of Jesus? We should not 
 expect the Grecian world, of its own accord, to have 
 thought of him as the Messiah. The Greeks did not 
 
28 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 have any messianic concept to employ. That came 
 from Judaism. 
 
 This Jewish social mind itself was the product of a 
 long historical process and embraced distinct ele- 
 ments each of which came over from the past. 
 
 First of all the messianic hope which furnished the 
 messianic interpretation itself was the outcome of a 
 long development. Some of its elements are to be 
 traced even to Babylon. It involved much more 
 than the use of a single term. It was a world-view 
 which extended from creation in the past to and into 
 a new Age that was to come. Not that the New 
 Testament writers explicitly distinguish between 
 their interpretation and the facts they interpret. As 
 has already been implied, to the early Christian the 
 acquittal at the Day of Judgment was as real an 
 element of the gospel as Jesus' teaching about the 
 Fatherliness of God, or his resurrection, or his sinless- 
 ness. Apparently Paul was as much convinced of 
 the present kingdom of Satan as he was of the coming 
 kingdom of God. The gospel in fact involved a 
 dualism that forced upon nascent orthodoxy its 
 first philosophical problem, namely, how a good 
 God could be incarnate in an evil world, and thus 
 compelled it to combat gnosticism. 
 
 Then, too, deep in the evangelic message we can see 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 29 
 
 embodied theological conceptions born of that social 
 experience which always finds expression in the re- 
 ligious thinking of an age. The Jewish social mind 
 had two final thought-forms in religion, — monarchy 
 and parenthood. The Jew of the first century could 
 thiak of no higher analogy of divine power than the 
 kingdom of that awful emperor who sat enthroned 
 upon the Palatine. Religion, so far as it dealt with 
 relations between man and God, was inevitably 
 expressed in monarchical terms. If God were the 
 king, men were his subjects, either rebellious and to 
 be punished, or loyal and to be rewarded. The test 
 and measure of their relations was the divine law. 
 The gospel in the New Testament presupposes this 
 theology. The human race had broken God's law. 
 The Sovereign of the Universe had nothing before 
 Him, therefore, but to punish, unless He chose in His 
 grace to forgive. Thus there arose that extension of 
 the monarchical conception of religion to be met in 
 the thought of Paul. But Paul did not originate the 
 idea of justification and an atonement in which the 
 messianic king suffered for his subjects. Both 
 analogies were drawn from the political practice 
 and were already operative in the religious thought 
 of his times. 
 Similarly in the case of the parental analogy. 
 
30 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 The heavenly Father, in the teaching of Jesus and of 
 Paul, has dignity as well as graciousness. In the 
 ancient family the father had rights and the children 
 had duties, and these reciprocal relations were not 
 affected by the father's waiving of his rights. He 
 could forgive only because he might punish. Sever- 
 ity and love were similarly involved in the family 
 government of God. 
 
 Another institution which became an integral part 
 of the original gospel message was that of sacrifice. 
 The interpretation of the death of Christ as a sacrifice 
 was thrust upon the early Christian by the religious 
 practice of the entire world of New Testament times. 
 Among Jews and Greeks alike no man came to 
 a sense of reconciliation with his god without com- 
 pleting the reconciling process in the dramatic act 
 of the sacrifice. The doctrine of the atonement, it is 
 true, was not at the start formally drawn from the 
 sacrificial analogy. As long as the institution 
 actually continued, it was enough merely to speak of 
 that death in terms of the altar. The rationalizing of 
 the death of Christ in the first thousand years of 
 Christian thought proceeded along the line of the 
 monarchical conception. Jesus, so teachers like 
 Origen asserted, gave himself as a ransom to Satan 
 that he might thus release those of his subjects whom 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 3 1 
 
 Satan held in his power in Sheol. But none the less 
 the death of Jesus was constantly described in terms 
 of the altar, and his blood was held to be the 
 archetype of the blood of bulls and goats. 
 
 The first preaching of the gospel message also pre- 
 supposed the fundamental social ideals of the 
 ancient world. Equality and fraternity were terms 
 of little but academic interest. So long as the king 
 was autocratic, his subjects differed widely in the 
 privileges they enjoyed, and these privileges ran from 
 that sorry minimum enjoyed by slaves to that maxi- 
 mum given to those nobles whom the emperor elected 
 to be his particular friends. The gospel, it is true, 
 breaks across these differences in classes by declaring 
 that all social differences among subjects of the king- 
 dom vanish, but such a state of equality was invari- 
 ably transferred to the ideal relations of the future 
 kingdom. In Christ, i.e., in the ideal social order of 
 the spiritual life he was to establish, there was 
 neither bond nor free; in the church there were 
 slaves. In Christ there was neither male nor female ; 
 in the church the woman was the weaker vessel. 
 
 IV 
 
 Were, then, these first Christians wholly other- 
 worldly, and did their message of salvation ignore the 
 
32 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 needs of the very real world in which the Christian 
 waited the coming of his Lord ? 
 
 The early Christians did not recognize any call to 
 save the Roman Empire or its institutions. They 
 were citizens of a kingdom yet to come. Pending 
 its arrival, they endured the Empire's oppressions, 
 obeyed as best they could its laws, and withdrew 
 as far as was practicable from its evil associations. 
 They married, bought and sold, died and were buried, 
 according to the customs of their neighbors. They 
 would keep themselves unspotted from the world, 
 but they did not attempt to save the world. They 
 sought to save men and women from the world. 
 
 Yet such statements though true are not the whole 
 truth. For restrained as was the early Christian 
 in the social expression of his new spiritual life 
 because of his belief in the speedy return of Jesus to 
 establish his transcendental kingdom, he was never- 
 theless socializing ideals that were to be of the ut- 
 most influence. Love and faith and sexual purity 
 are positive forces in any society. Even more potent 
 is the belief in God's working in the community of 
 those who worship Him and endeavor to grow like 
 Jesus in daily life. The kingdom of God as a social 
 ideal among the early Christians was eschatological, 
 but as among the Jews it was none the less social. 
 
THE GOSPEL OE THE NEW TESTAMENT 33 
 
 To question this would be utterly to misinterpret the 
 gospel on the one hand and the social influences 
 of Christianity on the other. 
 
 The makers of our great theologies — and all Chris- 
 tendom is one at this point — have built many of these 
 apocalyptic eschatological hopes into the structure of 
 historical orthodoxy. To hold all of them in strenu- 
 ous literalness, however, has been characteristic of 
 but few groups of Christians. From the days of the 
 Montanist there has been a tendency to treat the 
 eschatological elements of the gospel as figures of 
 speech, to refer them wholly to the distant future, or 
 to ignore them. Chiliasm, or, as we more commonly 
 call it to-day, millennarianism, has always been re- 
 jected as a controlling element in authoritative 
 dogma. But it has always been a disturbing factor 
 in the history of the church ; and naturally, for it is 
 clearly enough an integral element of the first preach- 
 ing of the gospel. Indeed, from one point it might 
 almost be said that the history of dogma has been in 
 no small degree the history of a struggle between that 
 Christian teaching which made eschatology its con- 
 trolling factor and that Christian theology which 
 gave preeminence to contemporary philosophy. 
 Every great theologian has been forced in some way 
 to adjust the apocalyptic eschatological element of the 
 
34 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 gospel to the perspective of the essential evangelic 
 message which he brought to his age. The modern 
 man of to-day, just as truly as the modern man of 
 the third or the fifth or the sixteenth century, must 
 needs face the problem for himself. But he must do 
 this methodically, appreciatively, sympathetically, 
 and not arrogantly or subjectively. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE MODERN MAN 
 
 The world we live in is obviously very different 
 from that of the apostles, and the presuppositions of 
 our thinking are vastly different from theirs. Indeed, 
 it would be difficult to overestimate the contrasts 
 between the age of the New Testament and our own 
 as far as the fundamental attitudes of the social mind 
 are concerned. In the outer forms of life there are, 
 it is true, many points of similarity. It would be 
 difficult to find a more modem period in history than 
 the first Christian century. Barring their inability 
 to apply steam and electricity to industry, — an ex- 
 ception of incalculable importance, — the men of the 
 first century of the Roman Empire were much like the 
 men of to-day. They had their great business cor- 
 porations, their art, their literature, their professions, 
 their universities, their "new women," their athletics. 
 Indeed, we learn that at Carthage students were dis- 
 orderly in lectures, that at Rome they failed to pay 
 their fees, and that at Alexandria professional 
 athletes were maintained through something closely 
 
 3S 
 
36 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODEim MAN 
 
 resembling that ingenious device of to-day, the train- 
 ing table. It is true the ancient world did not have 
 football, but it had gladiatorial sports as a tolerable 
 substitute. 
 
 I 
 
 But over against these similarities are at least four 
 fundamental differences : — 
 
 I. The modern age is primarily scientific and 
 controlled by the conception of process. 
 
 It is difficult for us to appreciate what scientific 
 thought must have been in a world that believed its 
 universe consisted of a flat earth around which the 
 waters flowed, with several heavens superimposed, 
 and with a great pit beneath in which was the abode 
 of the dead. There was considerable knowledge 
 in ancient culture of the movements of the heavenly 
 bodies, but all religious thought was affected by this 
 primitive conception of the universe. It was not 
 difficult, for instance, for the early church to believe 
 that all men by looking upward at the same moment 
 could see the Son of man coming in the clouds. To- 
 day we do not know just when we are looking up and 
 when we are looking down, and such a united vision of 
 an appearance in the heavens is physically unthink- 
 able, except on the part of those theologians who 
 give us to understand that at the second coming of 
 
THE MODERN MAN 37 
 
 Christ, God will probably enable men to have a new 
 method of sight. 
 
 A striking illustration of its fundamentally different 
 attitude toward nature is to be seen in medical 
 practice. In surgery, it is true, the ancient world had 
 acquired great facility, as is evidenced not only by re- 
 ports of very difficult operations, but also by the col- 
 lection of surgical instruments from Pompeii pre- 
 served in the museum at Naples. But in dealing 
 with disease equal progress had not been made. 
 It has always been easier for men to mend a broken 
 bone than to cure a cold. This difficulty was met 
 by the Jews in a very simple fashion. They laid 
 disease upon Satan. He sent miseries upon the 
 world, and minor devils into people. If a man was 
 crazy, he was possessed of a devil. If he had boils, 
 he had devils. If a woman was bent over by some 
 disease, she had been bound by Satan. Indeed, 
 devils might be said to have been the bacilli of the 
 ancient world. The way to cure a man was to find 
 some way to induce the devils to leave him. Some- 
 times this was done by conjuring the devil into a 
 certain plant, and then attaching the plant to the tail 
 of a dog, and then forcibly inducing the dog to pull it 
 up. Sometimes it was done by giving a dose so 
 nasty that the devil could not abide in the same 
 
38 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 body with it. Sometimes it was done by using magic 
 names. Such methods did not exhaust the medical 
 practice of the ancient world, but they were so 
 widespread as to enable us to appreciate easily the 
 great difference between the age of the New Testa- 
 ment and our own as regards scientific attainments. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to call attention to those 
 great differences of view of the universe and life 
 which have been wrought by physical and biological 
 investigations. True, the older philosophers, some- 
 times in almost startling fashion, anticipated the 
 general philosophy we have built upon scientific 
 discoveries, but no one would deny that a new intel- 
 lectual age began with the publication of Darwin's 
 "Origin of Species" and the resulting supremacy of 
 the theory of evolution. Thereafter men increasingly 
 have thought in terms of process. 
 
 The conception of the orderly, genetic succession of 
 purposeful changes played no r61e in the stratum of 
 society to which Judaism and the gospel appealed. 
 The eclipse was more significant than the sunrise. 
 In our modern world the wonder born of awe of the 
 unexplored universe has all but disappeared. Our 
 capacity for surprise has been ruined by the spectro- 
 scope, radium, the X-ray, and the experiments of 
 Professor Loeb. There is no man so bold as to 
 
THE MODERN MAN 39 
 
 prophesy how deep our science with its theory of 
 evolution may probe into the mysteries of existence. 
 Even the ether itself is threatened. One after 
 another the great secrets of the universe are being dis- 
 closed, at least in the sense that we can tell the 
 conditions under which certain phenomena invariably 
 appear. Our ignorance of the remainder no longer 
 is lightened by the appeal to devils or angels. We 
 are classifying phenomena so rapidly as to be con- 
 vinced that such classification means knowledge, and 
 that the universe is everywhere sane and law-abiding. 
 Health and disease have become matters of investi- 
 gation, and in so far as they involve the problem 
 of evil, they have become phases of the all-absorbing 
 search for the final unity of the evolving cosmos. 
 
 At the first glance this process appears full of con- 
 tradictions. It is not steady or unbroken. It has its 
 eddies and its counter currents. Progress is some- 
 times more than offset by degeneracy. But degener- 
 acy in turn is offset by regeneration and the great 
 movement begins again although not always in the 
 same quarter in which it has suffered a check. This 
 fact illustrates the apparent atomistic, divisive char- 
 acter of change. The world of nature as well as of 
 history seems full of unrelated and, to any science 
 we as yet possess, unrelatable movements and 
 
40 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 counter-movements. There is no such patent evo- 
 lution as some enthusiasts assume. 
 
 Yet in the face of these perplexities, the creative 
 thinkers of all time have held tenaciously to a world 
 of purpose and order, of unity and meaning, above 
 if not within the congeries of changes. History is 
 more than events in time. Only in the perception of 
 ordered change can thought rise above mere observa- 
 tion. And this unity compels the acceptance of itself 
 despite all the protests of those who would deny it and 
 allow existence to ravel out into innumerable unre- 
 lated existences. History itself, whether it be of the 
 realm of impersonal forces or of the realm of human 
 life, compels belief in this spiritual order that gives 
 coherency to all our experiences. But this compul- 
 sion is due to the acceptance of the unity of process 
 rather than that of states. 
 
 Humanity belongs to both these orders. On the 
 one side it is a mass of impersonal atoms and forces 
 subject to chemical and physical changes. On the 
 other it is possessed of identities with this spiritual 
 life that it has discovered as the source of unity and 
 timelessness. Its history, whether one looks at the 
 individual or the race, is a progress from the pre- 
 ponderance of the one to the dominance of the 
 other. As living organisms men recapitulate the 
 
THE MODERN MAN 4I 
 
 history of other living organisms ; as spiritual beings 
 they differ from all other life. Just when the 
 change from animal to animal-spiritual life occurred 
 science cannot tell us with assurance. Whether 
 life itself by God's will blossomed into a spiritual 
 person, or whether the spiritual nature came by 
 some divine creative fiat, is of no vital significance. 
 Religion looks not to origins, but to destinies. It 
 asks not Whence but Whither. But its answer to this 
 question of questions must be in strictest conformity 
 to what we know of human life and its history. 
 For only thus can it come into that conformity 
 with reality which the modern man demands. It, 
 too, like science must recognize process. 
 
 But religion looks forward to the outcome of that 
 process and endeavors to direct mankind thither. 
 Therein lies its task and its legitimacy. For the 
 spiritual life is no abstraction. It is as concrete as 
 humanity. To realize its powers, to define its de- 
 pendence upon and superiority to merely physical life, 
 to inspire and make possible its growth by bringing 
 it into dynamic relations with the equally real and 
 concrete Spiritual Life of the universe, this is the 
 supreme function of religion. 
 
 It is only the corollary of this conception of process 
 that every approach our modern world makes to its 
 
42 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 problems should be through history. Nothing is 
 known apart from its relations. The present is only 
 one phase of a continuous process. Nothing in the 
 finite world merely is ; it has become and may also 
 be becoming. Knowledge of any sort must therefore 
 involve an account of the forces from which a fact 
 under discussion arose or at least by which it was 
 conditioned. 
 
 This historical method is of first importance 
 throughout the entire field of investigation, but in the 
 region of religion it is all but revolutionary. We 
 cannot as yet see just what its full effect is to be, 
 but already it is a sine qiM non of an understanding 
 of the doctrines, rites, and institutions of all faiths. 
 Under its influence the sacred literatures are studied 
 in genealogical relations, and are traced to their 
 beginnings far back of written histories, and the 
 spiritual order that transcends the natural is seen to 
 be not static but ever more self-revealing. 
 
 Sometimes, it is true, the application of the histori- 
 cal method may overreach itself and its results col- 
 lapse because of their own weight. It too often mis- 
 takes resemblances for genetic relations and denies, 
 at least implicitly, the creative power of the free spirit- 
 ual life. Such I believe is true of some of the ex- 
 treme views of the origin and nature of Christianity. 
 
THE MODERN MAN 43 
 
 It is impossible, for instance, for me to see the rea- 
 sonableness of finding in almost every thought and 
 figure of the gospel adumbrations of Babylonian 
 myths of Gilgamesh. But even in this case it would 
 be unallowable to let dogmatic considerations affect 
 either the conclusions or the method bom of the 
 application of the historical point of view. Even 
 if the effect of such study is to dispell some of the 
 mystery that has hitherto overhung sacred things, 
 even though in some instances it may have reduced 
 sanctity itself to mere antiquity and have set forth 
 too nakedly opposing ideas time has allowed to 
 appear united, the historical method in religion has 
 its positive as truly as its speculative or negative 
 results. But whether friendly or hostile to current 
 beliefs, it is a potent factor in the modern mind. 
 For it is a correlate of process. 
 
 2. A second and closely akin characteristic of the 
 modem world is its conception of God as immanent in 
 this process rather than an extra-mundane monarch. 
 Sometimes it is true this belief extends over into a 
 general monistic conception. Monism, however, is a 
 metaphysical concept, and whatever may be its in- 
 fluence in a theological ontology, in rehgion a man 
 must be enough of a practical dualist to see that in 
 the act of faith God is objective to the human spirit. 
 
44 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 The believer in God does not believe merely in him- 
 self or in an impersonal process. Monism in itself 
 can never be a basis for a theology. For in experi- 
 ence we are dualists. But monistic or not, the world 
 of thought in which we live cannot conceive of God 
 as spatially absent from His universe any more than 
 it can conceive of a living man's consciousness as 
 spatially absent from his body. If, as is emphati- 
 cally the case, we are involved in difficulties when- 
 ever we try to think of God in terms of time and 
 space, we are in vastly greater difficulties when we 
 think of Him as apart from those energies which con- 
 stitute that situation of which we are a part. 
 
 Religious thinking is here at such agreement that 
 it may fairly be said to have reached a stage in its 
 evolution from which it will never revert. The primi- 
 tive man thought of his gods in terms of primitive 
 civilization and knowledge. They lived, so men 
 thought, in mountains, and trees, and fountains. As 
 civilization advanced men thought of God as a 
 king dwelling in a celestial world from which He 
 occasionally appeared to interrupt the ordinary 
 course of nature, or sent His Spirit to chosen indi- 
 viduals. He was not merely transcendent, he was 
 external. Our modern world thinks of Him as in His 
 world, expressing Himself personally, although some- 
 
THE MODERN MAN 45 
 
 times in forms which superficially viewed seem im- 
 personal. And if, paradoxically, just because He is 
 immanent men sometimes find themselves wondering 
 whether He is needed, and too often are tempted 
 to force Him into inactivity under a regency of Law, 
 the man of religious experience can never regard 
 God as a recluse. He finds the unity presupposed 
 by impersonal sciences in a spiritual order which 
 speaks through himself. God must be either the 
 personalized Whole or, as I am forced rather to 
 believe, the Person who, as over against our own 
 personalities, expresses Himself in the Whole. No 
 religion can ever suffice that makes Him anything 
 less than ourselves. And we are persons. 
 
 The political and juristic conceptions of God per- 
 sist in our own day, but they are no longer formative 
 in constructive religious thinking. Therein is dis- 
 closed an attitude of mind that distinguishes the 
 modern man of our day from him of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries with all his "illumination." 
 The doctrine of natural rights, whether in politics or 
 theology, notwithstanding its efforts to get behind the 
 state, did not dislodge juristic conceptions from theol- 
 ogy. On the contrary, just as in the field of politics 
 it set forth the natural rights of a proletariat as over 
 against the legal rights of king and noble, did it in 
 
46 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the field of religion set forth the rights of a proletarian 
 humanity as o\er against an autocratic church and 
 the God of decrees. But once formulated these 
 rights became, as it were, legally controlling. For this 
 reason, as well as for others, the eighteenth century, 
 with all its re\'olutions and deism, was more akin to 
 the first century, exen to the legalized Christianity 
 of Tertullian and Augustine, than is ours. A study of 
 its theologies and even of its religious negations will 
 furnish some of the best criteria by which to judge 
 how far removed is thought since the middle of the 
 nineteenth century from the unjisychological, un- 
 historical juristic religious concepts of all preceding 
 centuries. Nothing can better teach one the diflTi- 
 culties which any positive theology must at present 
 face. 
 
 Intimately associated with this conception of God's 
 personal relation with His world is the question of 
 miracle. The modern man cannot conceive of any 
 break in the causal, genetic process. True, he is 
 ready to admit that there may be events which arc not 
 yet located in any of its known formulas, but in such 
 a conception there is no place for that which, before 
 its recent apologetic manipulation, the word miracle 
 stood, — an event out of a causal series. 
 
 If this were all that can be said, our discussion 
 
THE MODERN MAN 47 
 
 might as well stop here. For the gospel cannot re- 
 main the gospel in its New Testament sense and 
 suffer the loss of all those events it calls "signs" and 
 " wonders." That would conceivably mean even the 
 loss of the historical Jesus himself. Yet on the other 
 hand, the modem mind cannot abandon the very 
 presupposition of its thinking at the behest of the 
 man to whom the gospel is inseparable from the 
 world-view of the first Christians. 
 
 If, however, we once drop the debatable word 
 "miracle" and use the word "event" many difficul- 
 ties vanish. No theist should object to such a change, 
 for it not only clarifies the question every defender of 
 Christian doctrine has attempted to answer, but it 
 also clears the discussion of a mass of prejudice and 
 metaphysical theology that has gathered about 
 "miracle." If God be in His world, all events are 
 of His will. They differ in being more or less 
 classifiable. Prove that an event occurred and we 
 find God there. He is as truly in the usual as in the 
 unique. The modem man does not need the latter 
 to justify his discovery of God in the former. What 
 he does need to have shown him is that there is room 
 within the universe of forces he knows for the expres- 
 sion of divine personality in unique events; that the 
 Spiritual Life to which he is at times so indifferent is 
 
48 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 free from the law of physical causality. True, the 
 burden of proof grows the heavier in proportion as an 
 event is unusual. But no alleged event can be regarded 
 as impossible until it has been shown to be in actual 
 contradiction, not to the general run of experience 
 merely, but to the great generalizations which have 
 been indubitably derived from nature and to the 
 supreme conception of life as we find it expressed even 
 in our own imperfectly free personalities. Break 
 down the a priori objection born of an alleged im- 
 mobility of experience and the supremacy of im- 
 personal naturalism, and the question becomes one of 
 testimony pure and simple. And that, too, without 
 the loss of significance to the religious life. Even 
 though we no longer hear His voice in the thunder, 
 God is present in His cosmos — the Universal Life 
 and Will and Love. And as spiritual beings men 
 may speak to Him who is Spirit. 
 
 3. If possible an even more remarkable character- 
 istic of our day is the growing sense of social soli- 
 darity. 
 
 • At first glance this might seem to be very similar 
 to the conception of unity present in the Roman 
 Empire. The Roman citizen was the Roman citizen 
 everywhere, and all about the Mediterranean 
 there was a developing sense of imperial unity. 
 
THE MODERN MAN 49 
 
 Bound together by roads and the almost equally well- 
 defined routes of the Mediterranean, the great Empire 
 could everywhere express itself administratively. 
 During the first century of the Empire this unity was 
 of necessity largely based upon military force, but 
 behind militarism there was something far more vital. 
 The provinces, although not possessed of the rights 
 of full citizenship, were none the less beginning to 
 evolve what under more favorable circumstances 
 might have become the rudiments of a representative 
 government. The cities also were passing through 
 an evolution of municipal equality which, though at 
 the start unobservable, was to develop in the third and 
 fourth centuries into something at once burdensome 
 and inspiring. 
 
 Such tendencies undoubtedly are no inconsider- 
 able bond of union between the twentieth and the 
 first century, but they seem almost trivial in compari- 
 son with the tremendous social movement in the 
 midst of which we find ourselves. The era of revolu- 
 tion of the eighteenth century gave rise to a political 
 equality so radical as all but to destroy the superficial 
 analogies between itself and the political equality 
 of the Empire under even Caracalla, Constan- 
 tine, and Justinian. The Roman Empire, despite 
 the provincial assembly, was ignorant of the con- 
 
50 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ception of representative democracy which has ex- 
 pressed itself in the constitutional monarchies and 
 republics of Europe and America. It is true that in 
 our political practice we are not quite sure whether 
 women ought to be included under the general term 
 Man, and the matter of taxes plays a considerable 
 role in the franchise in even such a modem nation as 
 Prussia. But we have no such distinction as those 
 between a Roman citizen and a provincial, between 
 the honestiores and the humiliores. We have abol- 
 ished slavery, which was one of the recognized in- 
 stitutions of human society of the olden time, and 
 women are rapidly achieving industrial as well as 
 political equality with men. Even the superficial 
 observer of society knows that the philosophy of 
 natural rights which brought about the revolutions 
 and republics of the eighteenth century and the con- 
 stitutional reforms of the nineteenth has long since 
 passed from the political into the economic and social 
 stage. The age in which we live is profoundly 
 interested in non-political rights. 
 
 It is impossible to overestimate the extent and in- 
 fluence of this new social feeling. Bom as it is in 
 large measure of the unconscious influence of Chris- - 
 tian idealism, it has spread far beyond the confines 
 of the church, and indeed, unfortunately, often makes 
 
THE MODERN MAN 51 
 
 the church itself appear unfraternal or the possession 
 of an economic class. The rise of socialism is only 
 one phase of a universal social consciousness which 
 none of us can escape. We see ourselves no longer 
 parts of a mere political unity, comparable with 
 citizenship in the ancient cities. We think in terms 
 of "situations," rather than of isolated individuals, 
 or even of individuals and environment. The exten- 
 sion of the concepts of natural law into history 
 has given us a sense of solidarity which sometimes 
 even threatens our estimates of the worth of the 
 individual himself. We have begun to realize that 
 individualism must be social and that the word 
 fraternity stands for something more than political 
 liberty and equality. 
 
 4. And, finally, another characteristic of our mod- 
 em world is its refusal to accept as the basis of truth 
 authority or metaphysical deduction. 
 
 In this we are the descendants of that century 
 of philosophy which began with Kant. The time 
 has passed when any majority can command univer- 
 sal obedience by saying, "It seems good to us and 
 the Holy Ghost." We know too well how creeds were 
 developed and formulated to have any great confidence 
 in their finality as the expressions of spiritual realities, 
 or to expect them to be understood without a knowl- 
 
52 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 edge of the philosophy, politics, and persecution from 
 which they so largely sprang. True, the scientific 
 spirit, despite its critical habit, has too often within 
 it something of the old authoritative temper, and 
 liberality is frequently more bigoted than the views 
 which it attacks ; but none the less a pronunciamento 
 must now be shown to be true, not shnply "ap- 
 proved." 
 
 It is difficult to overestimate the significance of 
 this habit of mind of our modern world. It has 
 long since ceased to be merely academic. It shapes 
 itself everywhere. You will find it in the anarchist 
 and the so-called Bohemian as truly as in the man of 
 the laboratory; in India and Japan as well as in 
 Europe and America. Even the Roman Catholic 
 turns Modernist, and the educated Mahommedan, 
 rationalist. Such an emancipation brings its blessing, 
 but no less truly does it bring its miseries. Who 
 has not seen some soul in spiritual agony as the 
 foundations built of authority totter, yet hesitating to 
 trust to foundations built of rationalized experience ! 
 But whether helpful or injurious, the spirit of criticism 
 and liberty is here, and we cannot, even if we would, 
 escape its control. The vote of the church can no 
 longer make us believe that the sun moves around 
 the world, and the vote of a scientific association 
 
THE MODERN MAN 53 
 
 cannot make us believe that anything is true which 
 denies the evidence of systematized experiment. The 
 doctrine of a uniformly authoritative Bible is being 
 replaced by the inspiring sense of the spiritual worth 
 of the Bible as discovered through historico-Iiterary 
 criticism and the experience of the Christian com- 
 munity. The modern man yields only to that he 
 finds to be real. 
 
 Here,, too, we hear struck still another new note. 
 The modem world believes that to be real which has 
 been found by methodical procedure and which can 
 be so correlated with the sane conclusions of normal 
 experience and widespread induction as to make life 
 richer in knowledge and the power of progressive 
 self-expression. Agnosticism, though moribund as a 
 philosophy, is but one phase of that exaggerated 
 caution which our scientific spirit begets. Since the 
 days of Kant we are slow to be too positive about 
 matters which lie beyond the range of the " practical 
 reason," i.e. of experiment and methodical test. 
 Empiricism has reached over into philosophy and 
 given us pragmatism. Metaphysics, like ecclesiasti- 
 cal authority, has been supplemented if not replaced 
 by that type of philosophy which finds its ultimates 
 in values rather than in alleged axioms or intui- 
 tions. 
 
54 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 These four basal elements of the world-view mark 
 off the modern world from the world of the New 
 Testament. But they do much more. They make 
 it difficult if not impossible for our age to use the pre- 
 suppositions that were embodied in and gave color 
 to the thought of its predecessor. The difficulty 
 clearly is not born of theology but of widening social 
 experience and knowledge. Just as the men of the 
 New Testament times could not free themselves 
 from their heritage of social mind, and the men of the 
 twelfth century could not break with the fascinating 
 dream of imperial unity, do the men of to-day find 
 themselves subject to the social mind from which 
 their thoughts sprang and of which they are a part. 
 
 II 
 
 Who then is the "modem man"? 
 
 I. Certainly not the man who is merely living now. 
 Humanity, as you ordinarily meet it, is an interesting 
 combination of survivals, many of them the ruling 
 characteristics of periods long since passed. If a 
 man wUl take the trouble really to get acquainted 
 with people who are in his own social circle, he will 
 find that there are representatives of every conceiv- 
 able form of thinking, from that of the most advanced 
 specialist in the very van of discovery to that of primi- 
 
THE MODERN MAN 55 
 
 tive man. For it will not do to look for primitive 
 men and women among the uncultured classes ex- 
 clusively. You will find them the next time you go 
 out to an afternoon tea. There is many a primitive 
 man who keeps a valet, or rather whose valet keeps 
 him. In point of view of the conventions he is 
 infallibly well informed, but his passions, his ideas, 
 his judgments of humanity, his estimate of the domi- 
 nant motives of life, his standards of right and wrong, 
 are those of man in the savage state. To many 
 men and women civilization means simply pressed 
 trousers and Paris fashions. Their outer selves are 
 as charming as possible ; their inner selves are rein- 
 carnations of Ab, the cave man. There are plenty of 
 people whose ideas are those of Genghis Khan. 
 True, they do not count heads as a measure of their 
 success ; but if they are men they count dollars, and 
 if they are women they count hearts. That is to say, 
 their primary interests are those of the marauder. 
 There are other people going about their daily 
 tasks with circumspection and with careful regard 
 for the conventions, yet deep within themselves they 
 cherish a view of the universe and of God, which to all 
 intents and purposes is fetishism. They do not dare 
 to say their children are well without knocking three 
 times on wood, and upon no consideration would they 
 
56 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 walk under a ladder or sit among thirteen at table. 
 So far as they live under the control of such presuppo- 
 sitions they are reincarnating in our complex civiliza- 
 tion the superstitions of primitive society. 
 
 In fact it is hard for any of us to escape thinking and 
 living as survivals of early ages. We still point up to 
 heaven, and we still throw rice after newly married 
 couples. 
 
 2. Nor is he alone the modem man who is in 
 revolt against the past. It is true that men of this 
 type in appropriating the name are not altogether 
 without warrant. Liberty to select his name may 
 fairly be accorded any man at his philosophical 
 christening. But such an appropriation of a term is 
 somewhat ungenerous, in that it implies that only the 
 iconoclast can claim to possess the modern spirit. 
 Even if, as von Hartmann expects, the future may 
 develop an attitude of mind that is genuinely pessi- 
 mistic, we have not yet universally come to feel that 
 the universe is the product of a supreme will that 
 needs the help of humanity to get itself reunited to a 
 supreme reason. It is more reasonable to regard the 
 modern man as the "free spirit" of Nietzsche, who 
 would erect an entirely new ethics on the ruins of our 
 modern society, and who claims already to have 
 grasped a meaning of the universe which is " beyond 
 
THE MODERN MAN 57 
 
 good and evil." But here again the use of the term 
 is too considerably narrowed, and is made to include 
 only those qualities which can appeal to a particular 
 class of men out of sympathy with too many of the 
 really constructive forces of to-day, and in particular 
 too devoted to a materialism that denies to the super- 
 human spiritual life a freedom it predicates of the 
 human. We must seek a definition of wider extension. 
 3. A formal definition of modemness is not diffi- 
 cult. He is the modem man of any period who is 
 controlled by the forces which are making To-morrow. 
 In a period like that of the Maccabees he was the 
 modern man who embodied the ideals which made 
 the little city state of Jerusalem into the kingdom of 
 John Hyrcanus. In the days of Julius Caesar he 
 sympathized with the growing unity which culminated 
 in the imperialism of the Antonines and the legislation 
 of Justinian; in the twelfth century he championed 
 the rise of the free cities; in the sixteenth century 
 he was swayed by the forces bom of the new learning, 
 the new individualism, and the new world; in the 
 eighteenth century he enforced the political conse- 
 quences of the doctrine of natural rights and had a 
 share in freeing thought from ecclesiastical control 
 and the state from an outgrown feudalism and an 
 absolute monarchy. 
 
58 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 The modern man of to-day is he who is controlled 
 by those ideals which are transforming his inherited 
 world into the newer order which his children will 
 inherit. He is the child as well as the maker of To- 
 morrow. That is to say, he is the man who is con- 
 trolled by the four outstanding transforming charac- 
 teristics of the age which have already been described. 
 Such control may be conscious or unconscious, but he 
 can no more help thinking of God as finding eternal 
 self-expression within the universe than the Hebrew 
 could think of Jehovah directing the affairs of the 
 world from heaven. He thinks as instinctively 
 in terms of process as the ancient world thought 
 in terms of static being. He may be neither a social- 
 ist nor a social reformer, but he feels the growing sense 
 of brotherhood and cannot think of social relations 
 in terms of insulated individualism. He may not be 
 technically a scientist, but he knows that truth can- 
 not be based on authority other than that of reality 
 itself. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Two objections among others may be raised to this 
 definitioa 
 
 I. In the first place it may be said that it gives 
 too little prominence to theological reconstruction. 
 
THE MODERN MAN 59 
 
 Social sympathies have not always characterized 
 theologians, and it is clear that if they are to be 
 recognized as conditioning the acceptance of the 
 gospel, new and troublesome questions will arise. 
 For we must face the actual practicability of a Chris- 
 tian ethic. Theology has seldom judged it necessary 
 to raise such an issue. It has been content to deal 
 with individual spiritual experience, the rewards and 
 punishments of the future, and the clothing of some 
 philosophy with scriptural expressions. 
 
 The answer to such an objection is very simple : 
 It is beside the mark. "Modern man" is not co- 
 extensive with "theologian." Important as is his 
 function in the religious world the theologian is 
 far enough from being the controlling factor in to- 
 day's religious thought, and the gospel is face to face 
 with questions other than those he raises. The 
 really vital religious issues are those set by the social 
 order itself, and these cannot be answered by the use 
 of exclusively theological methods and presupposi- 
 tions, but by the test of life itself. Theology must 
 be brought to see that our day's interest in meta- 
 physical definition is not so intense as its interest in 
 social reconstruction. Our modem world has as 
 little patience with Aristotelian syllogisms as with the 
 literature of Euphuism. But it has a profound and 
 
6o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ever growing interest in human needs. If theology 
 would not die of intellectual dry-rot, it must be- 
 come biological and social. 
 
 2. The second possible objection is the precise 
 opposite of the first. It may be urged that such a 
 conception of the modern man gives too much promi- 
 nence to theology. A belief in an immanent God, 
 it may be objected, so narrows the field as to limit 
 discussion of the acceptability of the gospel to those 
 already predisposed to religion. And thus the atheist 
 and the agnostic are excluded. 
 
 Such a limitation, however, is unavoidable. True, 
 some "modem men" are thoroughgoing champions 
 of naturalism and to them any call to recognize the 
 inner world of spirit, in which and because of which the 
 inconsistencies, the minutiae, and the otherwise mean- 
 ingless infinitude of changes find order and meaning, 
 would be idle. But such men can find their philoso- 
 phy satisfying only as they neglect or distort the super- 
 naturalistic facts of the spiritual life, the timeless values 
 that gleam forth from all events in time. Those who 
 believe in God and the world of spiritual freedom, 
 be that belief never so unlike that of conventional 
 theology, are the only persons to whom the gospel can 
 make its appeal. And this class forms the overwhehn- 
 ing majority of those who share in the new social 
 
THE MODERN MAN 6l 
 
 mind. Atheists and confirmed agnostics there may 
 be, but they are few enough, and I am persuaded that 
 many even of them would prefer to accept the gospel 
 if they judged it amenable to the ordinary laws of 
 thought. Judging this impossible they prefer the 
 religion of philosophy to the religion of the New 
 Testament. The prevailing attitude of the modern 
 man toward Christianity is one of intellectual con- 
 fusion, but of moral sympathy. Moral discontent, 
 apprehensive curiosity as to the outcome of death, and 
 that sense of dependence and helplessness which 
 every man sooner or later feels in the presence of the 
 universe, can always be counted upon as motives to 
 lead thoughtful men to give respectful attention to 
 any serious presentation of the real message of Jesus. 
 The church has a real mission to men and women 
 who are utterly out of sympathy with religion, but 
 it owes quite as important and even more pressing 
 service to that rapidly growing class who consciously 
 or unconsciously find their faith imperiled by the re- 
 ligious implications of the modern mind. Sometimes 
 such persons most irritatingly boast of modernism. 
 Sometimes, equally unfortunately for their own peace 
 of mind, they lament their inability to think in terms 
 of those older presuppositions which make the gospel 
 so easily acceptable. Sometimes they grow impatient 
 
62 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 and arrogant, but at heart every such man knows him- 
 self to be morally imperfect and longs for the peace 
 that comes from the harmony of reUgious conceptions 
 with those of the philosophy and science he has 
 come to see are not to be denied. And it is this four- 
 fold attitude of mind with which the gospel must be 
 shown and can be shown to be consonant. If we 
 are to bring the gospel to the modern man, we must 
 set forth the permanent values of the Christianity of 
 the New Testament, and above all of the historical 
 Jesus himself, in the light of evolution, divine 
 immanence, social solidarity, and a sense of reality 
 bom of scientific method and a perception of worth. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 The old gospel faces a new age. Therein lies its 
 problem. But is it worth answering? Why go 
 back thus to the New Testament and seek to recover 
 and reenforce the primitive eschatological gospel? 
 Why not rather seek to discover truth by an explora- 
 tion of religious experience as we know it to-day, 
 using the New Testament as one of its many sources ? 
 Or, on the other hand, why should we not accept some 
 approved theology and find peace in submission to 
 ecclesiastical authority ? 
 
 Such questions are legitimate. The gospel is not 
 identical with Christianity, if that term be used to 
 represent the present religion that originated in the 
 gospel but has taken up elements from civilization. 
 But, whether we like it or not, a truly evangelical 
 Christianity is not only the religion most susceptible 
 of philosophical justification, but it is a religion that 
 will rise and fall with the New Testament. Even a 
 better religion than that of Jesus and Paul would 
 
 63 
 
64 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 not be theirs. For my part I am perfectly ready to 
 substitute something better for the gospel as soon as 
 it appears, but I am as yet unable to imagine anything 
 more final than the religion of Jesus as found in the 
 New Testament. Christianity as we know it still 
 fails to represent that religion. Jesus still leads the 
 spiritual life. The religion of the future must be 
 evangelical or it will be socially powerless. At all 
 events that seems to be the testimony of two thousand 
 years of experiment. During those two millenia 
 every conceivable substitute for the gospel has been 
 tried. Docetism, gnosticism, Ophitism, and Mani- 
 cheeism in the ancient church ; chiliasm, fanaticism, 
 rationalism, and anathematizing sects of every sort 
 in the later church, all have failed. Only those 
 religious bodies who have preserved the continuity 
 of that doctrinal development which embodies 
 religion as it is set forth in the gospel of the New 
 Testament are to-day of commanding significance. 
 I cannot believe that it will be otherwise in the 
 future. The Christians of to-morrow will differ 
 from us in many particulars, but they will be at one 
 with the spiritual life as it is portrayed in the gospel, 
 or else they will shrivel into esoteric groups united 
 for the cooperative support of private chaplains. 
 The modern man has vested interests in Christ and 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 65 
 
 the gospel he would be foolish to surrender simply 
 because he finds it difficult to realize upon them. 
 For this if for no other reason he must be brought 
 to take the gospel seriously. It must be no mere 
 theological debate into which he is introduced. If 
 the gospel is not to be relegated by the educated class 
 to the antiquarians as a naive superstition, we must 
 frankly face the situation set by the new social mind 
 and discover a method by which men, without iso- 
 lating the world of religion from the world of science, 
 may hold to the teachings of the gospel as elements of 
 a religious world- view that will bring not only intellec- 
 tual peace but spiritual uplift. Skepticism is not the 
 sign-manual of spiritual enlightenment. We believe 
 as truly as we interrogate. Let us, then, count our 
 assets as honestly as we count our liabilities. How- 
 ever numerous our theologies, there is only one 
 gospel. 
 
 Such a task must be undertaken irenically, con- 
 structively and patiently, in full sympathy and utmost 
 cooperation with men of unscientific and unphilo- 
 sophical mind. If there is to be a reunited church 
 every Barnabas and Paul must give the right hand 
 of fellowship to every James and Peter. Your 
 born radical cannot understand why the average 
 man is so slow to break connection with the past in 
 
66 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 any phase of life and particularly in the region of 
 religion. He needs to be taught sympathy with those 
 who are wisely conservative and yet whose loyalty 
 to the things of the spirit is as intense as his own. On 
 the other hand, those who would estop real thinking on 
 religion by the assertion that "what was good enough 
 for my saintly mother is good enough for me" also 
 need to see that the life of the spirit is not iden- 
 tical with its temporal expression. The difficulty 
 with such an attitude of mind lies not in the regard 
 which the man has for what was sacred to his 
 mother, but rather in the fact that he cannot think 
 as did his mother. More than that, his own son, 
 lacking any such ties of sentiment, is in imminent 
 danger of falling into religious indifference. If the 
 children of religious reformers are very likely to be 
 spiritual dilettanti, the children of religious reaction- 
 aries are likely to be Epicureans. 
 
 I 
 
 Two current methods of determining the relation of 
 the gospel to our age are easily recognized ; the liter- 
 alistic and the negative. 
 
 I. There are plenty of people who are attempting a 
 divorce of their religious life from their best intellec- 
 tual efforts. But such divorce can result only in 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 67 
 
 misery. When religion becomes simply a matter 
 of sentiment, unregulated and unapproved by a man's 
 best thinking, it begins to lose its power to inspire 
 Christlike morality. 
 
 A merely superficial examination of the religious 
 world shows the truth of this generalization. On the 
 one side there is an increasing reverence for reality, 
 or, if reality is beyond our reach, a frank avowal of 
 ignorance. On the other side there is a strong 
 pressure being brought to bear upon the religious 
 man, which, whatever its terminology, amounts to 
 this : Stop thinking over fundamentals ! Accept cer- 
 tain doctrines as final because the church has held 
 them in the past and it is impossible either to disprove 
 or to prove them. Rest content in enthusiasm for 
 religion as distinct from theology. Accept the au- 
 thority of the church and cease the attempt to find 
 reasons where submission to ecclesiastical decisions 
 alone can bring peace. Was it not Augustine, the 
 father of both Roman and Protestant orthodoxy, 
 who said, " I would not believe even the gospel ex- 
 cept the authority of the Catholic church moved me 
 thereto"? 
 
 It is natural that such an attitude of mind should 
 express itself as hostile to any type of theology except 
 that formed by a literalistic use of the New Testa- 
 
68 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ment. Unwilling to abandon formulas hallowed by 
 the reverence of the past, its champions insist that, 
 regardless of modem views, certain things are to 
 be received on authority and are not to be sub- 
 jected to the ordinary processes of scientific testing 
 and systematization. The New Testament is to 
 be carried over bodily into our religious thinking. 
 Under the guise of a loyalty to the "old gospel" 
 there is thus propagated an enthusiasm which too 
 frequently leaves its possessor hostile to a sponta- 
 neous expression of his spiritual life in the concepts 
 of his own day, clinging to beliefs which can be held 
 only at the cost of that view of the world which is 
 dominating the thinking of to-day and will even more 
 dominate the thinking of to-morrow. 
 
 Whenever such a citizen of the world of churches 
 becomes a citizen of the world of laboratories he 
 encounters great difficulties. Too frequently he is 
 swept over into complete distrust of his older faith. 
 Chemistry and physics, biology and history, conspire 
 to aid the triumph of naturalism. Without properly 
 stopping to consider the foolishness of such an act, 
 many a man who has been forced from a literalistic 
 use of the gospel has turned away from the Bible in 
 much tbe same way as that in which he turns from 
 lihe sacred writings of other people. The diflSculties 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 69 
 
 which beset his olden-time religious enthusiasm have 
 been magnified, and he relegates Christian faith to 
 children and the masses and turns to Matter and 
 the great Unknown. 
 
 The subjection of the spiritual life to a literalistic 
 use of the eschatological gospel, however, does not 
 always result in such unfortunate agnosticism. It 
 also persists in the case of men who either deliber- 
 ately or instinctively have refused to come under the 
 influence of our modem world-view. The only 
 serious concession which they would make to the 
 world of science is as to the time of the second coming 
 of Jesus. This event Christians of this theological 
 type are ready to hold was seen by the apostles in a 
 "prophetic perspective" and therefore out of precise 
 chronological relations. Conceptions of this sort 
 obviously imply an abandonment of the modem 
 world as constituted by science, though they do not 
 always involve the complete subjection of the life of 
 the spirit to the bondage of the letter. Yet there are 
 thousands of men and women of noblest Christian 
 character, of splendid moral enthusiasm and religious 
 earnestness, who believe in a hell of Hteral fire, in a 
 personal devil, in demoniacal possession, in the abso- 
 lute inerrancy of all the Biblical writings, in the 
 creation of the world in six days, in the physical 
 
70 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 coming of Christ in the sky, and in the materialistic 
 resurrection of the body through a miraculous re- 
 combination of its original or other particles. Such 
 persons may be modem to their finger tips when it 
 comes to business, but religiously and philosophically 
 they are to all intents and purposes citizens of the first 
 century of our era. Theologically speaking, they 
 are contemporary but not modem. 
 
 No serious thinker can fail to respect such loyalty 
 to a literalistic gospel or to seek to emulate the 
 earnest religion it engenders. You will find it in the 
 hearts of consecrated evangelists, lay workers. Sal- 
 vation Army lasses and American Volunteers. But 
 what can be done in the case of a man who cannot 
 share in such indifference to the modern world? 
 Shall he be forbidden the kingdom of God except as 
 he first rejects his science and his belief of the God of 
 Law? Must he who passionately, even heroically, 
 holds to the absoluteness of the supranatural, time- 
 less, spiritual life, be forced to clothe his faith in 
 symbols he believes to be but relative and unsatis- 
 fying? 
 
 2. At the other extreme from these who thus 
 separate religion from thinking in the interests of a 
 literalistic interpretation of the gospel are those who 
 hold aloof from the gospel on the ground that it is 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 7 1 
 
 utterly inconsistent with current science and philoso- 
 phy. They emphasize the difference in the character 
 of the data given and demanded by science and 
 theology respectively and discredit religious certitude. 
 There is, it is true, among such persons a growing dis- 
 position to recognize religion as inherently human. 
 But interest in the psychology and history of religion 
 is too often seen to culminate in a pseudo-philosophy 
 that holds that religious experience is but a phase 
 of sex- and social-development. To persons of this 
 type, the gospel, in any approach to the sense that 
 we have seen it held in the ancient church, is a mat- 
 ter of merely antiquarian interest. At the best they 
 regard it as a sort of "suggestion" that may help the 
 unsophisticated to regain his health. 
 
 II 
 
 We are sometimes given to imderstand that there 
 is no third alternative; that either we must reject 
 the gospel of the historical Jesus in the interest of 
 science, or reject science in the interest of the historical 
 gospel. To the student of history, however, such an 
 antithesis is not exclusive. He knows that there is a 
 third alternative, that of true conservatism; viz. such 
 an historical evaluation of the gospel as it stands in 
 the New Testament as will disclose both its histor- 
 
72 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ical and its timeless realities and will make possible 
 a formulation of its content in modem terms and in 
 accordance with constructive principles which are 
 the equivalents of the controlling expositions of Jesus 
 and his message to be found in the New Testament 
 I. Such a method involves : — 
 (a) The discovery by the methods of historico- 
 literary criticism of the oldest records of the life of 
 Jesus and of the primitive Christian faith. 
 
 (6) The comparison of the world- view of New Tes- 
 tament times with the contents of such records and 
 the classification of the elements of the world-view 
 found in the gospel. 
 
 (c) The distinction between such world-view and 
 the positive data of the spiritual life of the gospel it 
 correlates or interprets. 
 
 {d) The discovery by comparison and other tests 
 of the elements of such world-view as are actually con- 
 structive principles of the gospel in the formulation of 
 the content of the spiritual life in a particular histori- 
 cal situation. 
 
 (e) The combination of the positive data of the 
 gospel m accordance with concepts which are the 
 equivalents of such of these primitive constructive 
 and interpretative concepts which have been foimd to 
 possess more than temporary and pictorial value. 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 73 
 
 It is not possible at this time to discuss the critical 
 process. Such brief treatment as we can give it 
 must be postponed to our discussion of the historicity 
 of Jesus. Just now let us assume that trustworthy 
 records springing from the followers of Jesus can be 
 found by criticism — an assumption all but imques- 
 tioned — and turn to the problems of discovering 
 what is the real content of the gospel both as regards 
 data and systematizing and evaluating concepts. 
 
 2. Starting with the original sources resulting from 
 the critical process we shall find our problem to no 
 small degree simplified. While the New Testament 
 as it stands is now almost imiversally admitted to con- 
 tain within itself material which has been superim- 
 posed upon the original teaching of Jesus, this added 
 material is not different in kind from the material in the 
 oldest sources. Criticism at this point removes from 
 the gospel distracting details rather than a general 
 world-view such as that which has already been de- 
 scribed as conditioning the men of the New Testa- 
 ment period. Further, if it is comparatively easy to 
 discover the general presuppositions that sprang 
 from the social mind of the first century, it is quite 
 as easy to recognize the particular controlling con- 
 cept by which the first disciples made intelligible 
 and real to themselves the significance of Jesus. 
 
74 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 As has already been said, this controlling concept is 
 messianism. To this we must find clear equivalents 
 in our modem presuppositions if our theology is 
 really to be evangelical. 
 
 The comparative study of religion enables us to see 
 that the messianic concept as it appears in the New 
 Testament is derived from the Judaism of Jesus' 
 day. For if we come up to the gospel through 
 the history of Jewish eschatology as seen in the 
 apocalypses written in the three centuries following 
 the attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to crush the 
 Jewish religion, we are struck by the almost complete 
 parallelism between the two hopes.* The two ages, 
 the present under the control of Satan, who must be 
 conquered, a heavenly Jerusalem which is to be 
 established upon the earth in the glorious age which 
 is to come, a Christ, a summoning of the dead from 
 Sheol in order to be judged, a Judgment Day, a lake 
 of fire, a resurrection of the righteous, all are in the 
 literature of Judaism, which, as has already been said, 
 is in turn a development of literary and religious 
 tendencies traceable to older Eastern religions. It 
 is impossible to see in them the characteristic and 
 peculiar contribution of Christianity to religion. 
 
 ' The reader who cares to pursue this subject may be referred 
 to my " Messianic Hope in the New Testament." 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 75 
 
 But thanks to such comparison we can distinguish the 
 characteristic facts of the gospel from the inherited 
 interpretative element. 
 
 3. As a result of the process involved in making this 
 first distinction between the content and the interpreta- 
 tive concepts we have the following formulation of the 
 positive elements which are involved in the general 
 conception of the gospel heralded by Jesus and elabo- 
 rated by Paul as a message of an assured way of sal- 
 vation from evil, sin, and death. 
 
 (a) The God of Law is the God of Love ; that is to 
 say, the imiverse both physical and spiritual, in which 
 we live, is an expression of a spiritual life that is 
 knowable, purposeful, and loving. 
 
 (b) This God of Love is redemptively revealed in 
 and by Jesus, his death being the exposition of the 
 unity of divine love and law. 
 
 (c) Man can be forgiven ; that is, can reach more 
 perfectly moral personal development and can triumph 
 over the effects of sin by a repentance that leads to a 
 volxmtary personal imion with God, and the consequent 
 all-sufficient reinforcement of his spiritual life by God. 
 
 {d) The act of faith which makes possible such a 
 union is evoked by the historical Jesus. To have 
 faith in him is to have faith in God. 
 
 (e) There is a certain and blessed individual im- 
 
76 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 mortality superior to the earthly life for those who are 
 possessed of a spiritual life like God's as revealed in 
 Jesus ; the guaranty of which is the historic fact of 
 the resurrection of Jesus. 
 
 (/) There is possible and certain a new social order 
 in which men's relations to each other shall be those 
 of brothers because they shall have become sons of 
 God, and are thus empowered to further the triumph 
 of the spiritual life in the midst of the temporal order. 
 
 Or, more systematically, the gospel is a message 
 of the redemptive love of the God of Law ; of God's 
 presence in Jesus ; of a spiritual and therefore more 
 individual life beyond death made possible by the 
 transformation of the repentant human personality by 
 dynamic personal union with the God of Love 
 mediated by faith in Jesus; and of a regenerate 
 society that shall bring blessing to the individual 
 because of the socialization of the regenerate spiritual 
 life of individuals, — all revealed as realizable and 
 morally just by the supreme teaching, the spiritual 
 experiences, the sinless life, the death and the resur- 
 rection of the historical Jesus, and further guaranteed 
 by the spiritual experience of his followers who ac- 
 cept the message as true and make it controlling in 
 their own lives. 
 
 The two foci of this good news, the historical Jesus 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 77 
 
 and the experience of the Spirit by Christians, cannot 
 be shown to be derived from any precedent expecta- 
 tion among the Jews of the New Testament times. 
 In fact, they contradict messianic expectations as 
 they are known to us in contemporary literature. 
 They cannot be accounted for by any sane religio- 
 historical method, and must be regarded as two pri- 
 mary and original contributions of Christianity to 
 religious history. 
 
 4. And further, it is evident to any student of the 
 New Testament that the center of this message is in 
 life rather than in teaching. But not in physical life. 
 The gospel presupposes and validates the belief in 
 spiritual life, which though not to be consciously 
 separated from the totality of our present mode 
 of existence is yet the true life of man, since it is 
 that which separates him from the animal and makes 
 him in the image of God who is Spirit. Indeed, one 
 might define the gospel as the exposition of the na- 
 ture, the moral possibilities, and the certain triumph 
 over the impersonal elements of our person, of the 
 spiritual life as it is finally revealed in the historical 
 Jesus. And this spiritual life, the gospel always 
 insists, reaches its moral power only as it is in renew- 
 ing imion with the Holy Spirit that comes to the 
 followers of the Lord who is the Spirit. 
 
78 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 III 
 
 I am convinced that any faithful exploration of 
 social and individual experience will confirm this 
 formulation of the heart of the gospel. It is because 
 men believed in these fundamental spiritual verities, as 
 well as in tlie figures and ethnic hopes in which they 
 were expressed, that Christianity cut loose from 
 Judaism, conquered the Roman empire, and is still 
 operative in our evolving civilization. The gospel 
 includes moral and social ideals which are more than 
 visionary because they have been incarnated in an 
 actual life. It is more than a philosophical generali- 
 zation, because it is grounded on the experience of the 
 cosmic spiritual life by definitely historical persons. 
 It has become dynamic through the ages because it 
 has reached the motive forces of character as some- 
 thing based upon facts made intelligible to different 
 ages through the medium of the best thinking of those 
 ages. 
 
 Doctrine-making is a social process which tran- 
 scends the individual's expression of his own spiritual 
 life. Dogmas are tlie authoritative formulations by 
 which the social mind of any age makes intelligible 
 to itself its religious experience. A theological 
 system to be effective must correlate all germane 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 79 
 
 religious facts with the ultimate and controlling 
 conceptions of its day. 
 
 It has been thus that the gospel has been brought 
 into dynamic relations with each successive and es- 
 sentially new social mind and thus maintained the 
 continuity of the spiritual content of human experi- 
 ence through historical changes. The third century 
 brought it into regenerating unity with its experience 
 through its "essence" philosophy, and its belief 
 in an eternally begotten Logos consubstantial with 
 God the Father. The Middle Ages used it to work 
 out the social and political reconstruction involved 
 in the magnificent though impracticable program of 
 a Holy Roman Empire. The Reformers brought it 
 home to human life through the agency of a new 
 estimate of the worth of the individual bom of an 
 enlarging world-consciousness. The modem man 
 can make it a source of individual and social regenera- 
 tion by interpreting it to himself and to his world 
 through those conceptions that are the best chaimels 
 to the center of his intellectual and spiritual being. 
 
 I. While a completely systematized theology is not 
 necessary to the success of an attempt to bring the 
 gospel to the modern man, in the very nature of the 
 case, we must, if possible, find some coordinating 
 principle that on the one hand shall bring the ele- 
 
8o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ments of the gospel into harmony with the controlling 
 world-view. If such a unifying thought is to be true 
 to the gospel, it must be an equivalent of the messianic 
 formula. Indeed, the method of equivalency must 
 control the entire presentation of the gospel if it is 
 to be true to its original content. For, as we have 
 already seen, the gospel was not merely a group of 
 truths and facts ; it was also the valuation of those 
 truths and facts in terms of messianism in the interest 
 of the spiritual man. That is to say, it was the his- 
 torical form given to ultimate spiritual realities, which 
 form itself, in so far as it, too, was the expression of the 
 spiritual life, has permanent value. For we cannot 
 altogether separate except in thought the elements of 
 a religion of the Spirit. If only it can assimilate the 
 proper elements from its intellectual and social en- 
 vironment it is enriched and strengthened. And this 
 has been true of the Christian life. But it has always 
 expressed itself in thought forms that enabled it to 
 function in particular historical situations, and these 
 thought forms themselves are useful only as they 
 enable the spiritual life inspired by the gospel to ex- 
 press itself normally. The endeavor to find equiva- 
 lents for the successive organs of spiritual self- 
 expression is not an uncritical perpetuation of the 
 identical New Testament conceptions or those of later 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 8l 
 
 dogmas. Terms used to express a thoroughly social- 
 ized concept grow symbolic rather than strictly 
 definitive. In religious history they are the points of 
 contact at which the spiritual life of one age realizes 
 its unity with and draws inspiration from the spiritual 
 life of the past; the means by which experience is 
 aided by experience to enriched development. 
 
 Let us then briefly attempt the discovery of the 
 modern equivalents of messianism; that is to say, of 
 the concepts in which the content of the gospel as 
 above formulated can be made to minister to the 
 religious life of the modern man. 
 
 The general scheme of messianism involves in itself 
 certain component concepts which, despite the unac- 
 customedness of their formal expression, are obviously 
 contained in our modem world-view. The three 
 most important of these concepts are the sovereignty 
 of God, eschatology, and salvation. The equivalents 
 of these three elements are fundamental for any at- 
 tempt to set forth the gospel from the point of view of 
 the modern man. 
 
 I. The first equivalent is that for the belief in the 
 sovereignty of God. 
 
 Sovereignty was an analogy, but it was the most 
 inclusive analogy under which the ancient world 
 which shaped our ecumenical orthodoxy imdertook 
 
82 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 to set forth its conception of God. The modem man 
 with his democracy and his science can hardly be 
 expected to get full value from either the concept 
 or the terms of such a world-view. God is more than 
 a sovereign. He is God. Yet sovereignty expresses 
 a reality which cannot be overlooked — God as the 
 ultimate and controlling reality in human life both in- 
 dividual and social. We do not look to Him to find 
 any likeness to the oriental monarch, but regarding 
 Him as immanent Life, beneficently working through, 
 determining and expressing Himself in the age- 
 long process which involves both matter and history, 
 we conceive of Him, not as Process, but as the source 
 and guide of all progress. Humanity must submit 
 to and conform to God, conceived of not as politically 
 but as cosmically personal. Here the conception of 
 the God of law persists, with the difference that law 
 is no longer regarded as the statutory enactments of a 
 sovereign but as the expression of God's rational and 
 beneficent will as seen in the very nature of things and 
 most of all in the spiritual order from which we derive 
 authority and assistance for our own spiritual life. 
 
 2. The second equivalent is that for eschatology. 
 
 I am aware that at this point I am very likely to 
 part company with some of those who may have agreed 
 with the positions thus far taken. Eschatology, with 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 83 
 
 its salvation by catastrophe and its strange imagery, 
 seems to many quite beyond the range of possibility 
 of acceptance by the modern man. But xmless I 
 mistake completely, persons holding such an opinion 
 fail to approach the subject with full historical 
 sympathies and so fail to analyze the actual content of 
 the concept. Eschatology, it is true, as represented 
 in the Jewish apocalypses is a bizarre mixture of 
 symbols, but he is a superficial student of the ancient 
 world who can see in these apocalypses nothing that 
 reaches into the depths of religious faith. When one 
 ceases to look at it in its broad lines, eschatology at 
 once appears to have been something more than an 
 irridescent dream. 
 
 In the first place it was a pictorial presentment in 
 terms of catastrophe of what we should call the 
 teleology of social evolution. For it was primarily 
 a politico-social hope. It looked not to a theological 
 heaven, but to a social order, the kingdom of God. 
 Its very heart was confidence in that divine deliverance 
 which God was to give His people by establishing 
 through the national Saviour an actual, triumphant, 
 and ideal society. Catastrophe was only incidental 
 to such a hope. It was simply the way in which the 
 ancient world conceived of God's accomplishing his 
 redemptive purpose in human history. 
 
84 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Eschatology, in the second place, included the 
 hope of personal immortality and resurrection. 
 Immortality was involved in the new social order 
 which God was to establish, since all the subjects of 
 the kingdom were to share in its blessings. The 
 resurrection was not that of the physical body from 
 the grave, but, if we correctly interpret Josephus, was 
 a formula for expressing the Pharisees' belief in the 
 efficient and superior form of individual existence 
 to be enjoyed by the righteous. 
 
 A third belief which eschatological pictures ex- 
 pressed was that of the inevitableness of the postponed 
 outcome of forces resident in national and individual 
 character. In its picture of the Judgment Day it set 
 forth a profound conviction common to all humanity ; 
 that which the Buddhist expresses in his doctrine of 
 Karma and which the apostle epitomized in his 
 axiom "what a man sows that he shall also reap"; 
 that which the modern idealist finds in the triumph 
 of an absolute spiritual order : — the conviction that 
 moral actions are moral forces producing results. 
 In a universe like ours, goodness ultimately cannot 
 bring forth pain; badness ultimately cannot bring 
 forth happiness. To believe otherwise would be to 
 distrust the reason and goodness of the immanent 
 God himself. 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 85 
 
 These three conceptions, the future divinely es- 
 tablished social order, personal immortality involv- 
 ing a further advance of the regenerate individual 
 through the resurrection, and the inevitableness of 
 pain or blessing as the outcome of character because 
 of God's working in the moral-personal realm — 
 these were the heart of early Christian eschatology. 
 Each is in a way the inheritance taken over from 
 Judaism, but none of them is merely formal or picto- 
 rial. Each possesses an ethical content as truly as a 
 religious. Feasts with Abraham, heavenly taber- 
 nacles, a New Jerusalem let down from heaven, cos- 
 mic catastrophes, the judgment throne and the lake 
 of fire, are the picture forms in which the regenerate 
 society, the regenerate individual, and the finality of 
 the moral order are set forth. Such fundamental be- 
 liefs as these cannot safely be lost from any religion. 
 Paradoxical as it may seem, eschatology in these 
 equivalents brings the gospel into closest touch with the 
 thought of the modem world. Any man who, in the 
 spirit of the New Testament, would attempt scientifi- 
 cally to minister to our day must embody it in his 
 message. He cannot omit the effects of God's pres- 
 ence and activity in social evolution, the future of the 
 individual, the triumph of righteousness and the 
 spiritual order. 
 
86 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 3. Thus, thirdly, messianism, because it is escha- 
 tological is but a part of the supreme conception 
 of divine salvation which the gospel revealed. In 
 that conception there are involved two elements : that 
 of the kingdom of God and that of the triumph of the 
 individual over sin and death. The first demands 
 that our theology be social ; the second that it make 
 a free, social, spiritual individuality the supreme result 
 of the redemptive process. 
 
 IV 
 
 Just what sort of theology will result from such 
 equivalents it is not our purpose to consider in detail, 
 nor is it so important as the question as to what sort 
 of contribution the gospel can make to the totality of 
 our spiritual life. Philosophical and theological 
 precision is here secondary to vital efficiency. Yet 
 such efficiency must to no inconsiderable degree 
 rest upon the reasonableness of the evangelic message. 
 Nor need we here lose heart. Indispensable as is 
 the final test of its individual and social efficiency, 
 our faith is not based on cunningly devised fables or 
 laboriously devised definitions. Suffice it to say that 
 the constituent truths of the gospel can fairly be 
 correlated with the facts given by various sciences 
 into working hypotheses that can be tested by 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 87 
 
 human experience, and so systematized into reason- 
 able acceptability by some controlling concept of the 
 modern social mind. Metaphysical explanations 
 and justifications we can leave to that type of theology 
 that prefers to begin with theories of knowledge and 
 the formative assumptions of a philosophy of religion. 
 Our own field is that of the creatively active per- 
 sonality finding, under the guidance of the gospel, 
 completest expression and realization in personal 
 relations with other personalities and with the God 
 of the ever progressing universe. 
 
 The true content of the gospel should not be ob- 
 scured by any analysis of its elements. Within our 
 humanity it sees two warring forces, the one lusting 
 back to the fleshpots of pleasure and the comforts of 
 that impersonal life from which humanity has so 
 valiantly struggled to be free; the other ever striving 
 for self-expression in that increasingly supranatural 
 spiritual life in which, be it never so dimly, it has 
 ever seen its goal. Freedom and salvation can come 
 only as this higher life of the spirit triumphs. And 
 the way to this triumph the gospel shows in its insist- 
 ence that it is possible for those who are in dynamic 
 union with God, and in its historical presentation 
 of Jesus as its perfectly individualized expression. 
 In him was life and the life is the light of men. To 
 
88 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 be saved is to live that life; to live it is to be saved. 
 That is the heart of the gospel. All else is naturalism 
 and the distractive allurement of Illumination. 
 
 Because Christianity thus opens the way to the full 
 realization of the spiritual life, it is redemptive. 
 To make the gospel anything else than a message 
 of deliverance, both negative and positive, would be 
 to give it a new character. Any religion to be of 
 significance must do something for its followers. The 
 moment it is reduced to a code of divinely authorized 
 worldly wisdom or to a philosophy with merely in- 
 tellectual appeal, it becomes the property only of the 
 intellectual aristocrat, and even with him it is always 
 exposed to the epigram or the syllogism of some rival. 
 We, as truly as the citizens of the ancient world, have 
 our Satan, our sin, our death. The fact that we do 
 not picture them to ourselves in quite the same way 
 as did the ancient world by no means destroys the 
 evils for which these awful names stand. Those 
 relentless natural forces that would enslave us and 
 ever bring us and all whom we love so much of sorrow 
 — we want to be delivered from them. The sin 
 which so easily besets us and attacks us so vmex- 
 pectedly and so viciously — we want to be delivered 
 from that. Death, which seems sometimes the 
 very quintessence of waste and irrationality as well 
 
THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 89 
 
 as terror — we want to be delivered from that. 
 Nor would we be saved alone and individually. The 
 sense of the solidarity of human society calls for the 
 regeneration also of the social forces that are always 
 making To-morrow. And here too the gospel meets 
 our needs. It thrills with the hope of the regenera- 
 tion of the social order. Its God would bring men 
 not only to a heaven beyond death but to the New 
 Jerusalem which is to be set up upon earth, a trium- 
 phant order of the spirit in which His will shall be 
 done as it is in heaven. 
 
 To establish the reasonableness of this message of 
 a salvation that consists in the social and individual 
 realization of the spiritual life as revealed in Jesus, 
 by showing it to be consistent with the dominant pre- 
 suppositions of to-day's thought and action, is to 
 evoke a response and allegiance on the part of the 
 modem man as truly as from those who do not share 
 in his view of the universe. But to make such mes- 
 sage reasonable is not an end in itself. The gospel does 
 not need above all to be proved to be true. I doubt 
 if many men were ever argued from sin over to God by 
 apologetics. They need to be convinced rather that 
 the act of faith evoked by the presentation of Jesus, 
 even though it be incipient and, as it were, tentative, 
 is justifiable from the point of view of the spiritual 
 
90 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 immanence of God, a divinely directed evolution, 
 historical criticism, and the ultimate values of life. 
 This is the method of the true apologetic : not the 
 discussion of the mutual relation of definitions and 
 speculations, nor yet the exposition of the metaphysi- 
 cal truth of various doctrines outside the limits of 
 experience; but the justification of the act of faith 
 in the God revealed in and by Jesus as rationally 
 worthy of a man wholeheartedly at one with the age 
 in which he lives. 
 
 Herein lies our next task. Having discovered 
 historically the content of the gospel as a message 
 of divine redemption we shall proceed first to show 
 that it can be accepted by the modem man as reason- 
 able because of its accord with his own constructive 
 thinking, and then shall attempt to show positively 
 that the gospel is a divine dynamic making towards 
 the emancipation and the perfection of personality 
 here and hereafter, and towards that better social 
 order toward which our modem in its constructive 
 moods is looking. 
 
PART II 
 THE REASONABLENESS OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 JESUS THE CHRIST 
 
 The gospel is a message of individual and social 
 salvation through the spiritual inworking of a God 
 who is at once love and law, revealed in and guaran- 
 teed by the experience of the historical Jesus. That is 
 the quintessence of Christian truth. But is this 
 guarantee itself of value ? Can we still believe in a 
 gospel that thus involves an historical person like 
 the Jesus the apostles preached? 
 
 It is not enough to say that history knows no other 
 Jesus with evangelic power, although such a state- 
 ment would be undeniable. A prophet of Nazareth, 
 a social reformer, an ethical teacher, a beloved 
 martyr, — neither is the Jesus who has conquered 
 the world. The only Jesus who can reveal and guar- 
 antee the evangelic method of deliverance from de- 
 spair, sin, and death is the Jesus who in the cold light 
 of criticism can be known himself to have conquered 
 
 91 
 
92 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 sin and death ; who, as the unique and perfect ex- 
 pression of the God-life, determines a man's rela- 
 tion to God. 
 
 True, the evangelic message of a God of love who 
 delivers man by reinvigorating him with new spiritual 
 power might still help us even if the Jesus of the New 
 Testament should disappear in the crucible of his- 
 torical criticism. The religious conception of the 
 universe built up by Christian experience would be 
 still a message of deliverance. Conceivably — but to 
 my mind tragically — Christianity might supplant 
 Jesus. As shaped by the century-long experience of 
 the Christian community, it contains much that is 
 self-validating. Social evolution enlightened by the 
 Christian church would teach us it is better to live 
 in accordance with the supposition that a God of 
 Law is a God of Love, that individual development 
 is not to be stopped short by death, that the spiritual 
 order is superior to the natural, and that a better 
 community is yet to be formed. But, apologetically 
 strong as such a daring, I had almost said reck- 
 less, position may be, it is weak indeed when 
 compared with the same teachings backed by an 
 assurance of the trustworthiness of the evangelic pic- 
 ture of a genuinely historical Jesus, the concrete 
 exposition of the supremacy of the spiritual life. 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 93 
 
 It is inevitable that the gospel should appear at 
 the bar of criticism. However much we may argue 
 that apart from any historical basis the essential 
 truths of the New Testament are in themselves ca- 
 pable of evoking faith, few of us have so accustomed 
 ourselves to the high altitudes of academic thought as 
 to find it possible to gain spiritual uplift in an alleged 
 historic fact we are convinced has become merely 
 "functional." An empty revolver functions ad- 
 mirably as long as the highwayman thinks it loaded, 
 but what if he discovers his mistake ? History that 
 has lost its historicity becomes, except perhaps among 
 philosophers, of equally dubious value. Your aver- 
 age modem man has not yet lost his WirkUchkeiisinn, 
 to wit, his common sense. 
 
 In so far as the gospel involves the historical Jesus, 
 in so far must it be amenable to the laws governing 
 historical investigation. 
 
 I. Throughout its history the church has been com- 
 pelled to defend its position against those who have 
 mishandled the historical substratum of its teaching. 
 It was the practice of many of the early sects to pro- 
 duce counterfeit gospels for the purpose of justify- 
 ing some peculiar view. A considerable number of 
 
94 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 these have come down to us either in whole or in part, 
 but with the possible exception of the Gospel of the 
 Hebrews they are utterly unhistorical. In them 
 all there are barely half a dozen incidents or sayings 
 that can be accepted as in any sense genuine. In some 
 cases these gospels contain elaborate descriptions of 
 events preceding the birth of Christ, of his boyhood, 
 of his crucifixion and resurrection, and of his descent to 
 the abode of the departed spirits. The motive in 
 such construction was either to give authority and 
 weight to certain peculiar views or to supply the 
 want of information about some period of Jesus' 
 life. Both purposes are equally open to moral ob- 
 jections from our own point of view. 
 
 While it is true that such writings as these testify 
 to the church's belief that Christianity is grounded on 
 history, they also testify to the indifference of the 
 early church to elemental historical accuracy. And 
 this, too, in itself raises difficulties. We have passed 
 from the age in which a doctrine can be substantiated 
 by the manufacture of historical evidence. Indeed, 
 the further we proceed in the comparative study of 
 religion the more are we likely to be convinced that a 
 religion's claim to an historical founder deserves 
 particularly careful investigation. This impression 
 has been deepened by the newer type of historical 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 95 
 
 criticism. In his zeal for discovering the actual 
 value of historical evidence the critic has at times 
 apparently assumed that everything was a lie until 
 it was proved to be true. We all recall how in the 
 first flush of rewriting Roman history the royal 
 period was thrown into the waste basket. The fault, 
 however, was not due to the method, but to the pre- 
 conceptions with which critical pioneers undertook 
 their work. 
 
 This has been equally true in the case of the 
 gospel records. In too many cases critics have been 
 philologians whose idea of criticism has been that of 
 literary analysis, or dogmatic liberals ,who loved bril- 
 liant conjectures better than sober corroborations. 
 It is true that this phase of criticism is passing as the 
 man with historical feeling has replaced ingenious 
 word-surgeons, and men of method those of a priori 
 temperament who made their theories a procrustean 
 bed for historical documents. At the same time, there 
 are still hobby riders in the field of criticism. In some 
 cases this hobby consists in a rearrangement of 
 material and an emendation of text on highly sub- 
 jective grounds. In other cases it takes the form of 
 an enthusiastic skepticism begotten of a monopoly of 
 some philosophical presupposition. In still other 
 cases negative criticism is due to an excessive ingenu- 
 
96 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ity which reconstructs the gospel history along lines 
 which are all but unintelligible to any one except the 
 critic himself. And in criticism as in everything else 
 it is not well to be too clever. 
 
 2. But after all allowance is made for scholarship 
 of this sort the historical method brings us face to 
 face with some very serious questions. When, for 
 example, were our present gospels written, and by 
 whom? The average man has ready only an indis- 
 tinct answer. The probability is that he regards 
 them as having been written as they stand to-day by 
 the men whose names have been attached to them by 
 copyists. The historical student, however, sees in 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke the reworking of 
 material very much older than the gospels in their 
 present forms. Matthew, for instance, embodies 
 matter which came from the apostle Matthew but is 
 also in large measure derived from the Gospel of 
 Mark reenforced by material drawn from collec- 
 tions of the sayings of Jesus other than those to be 
 found in Matthew and Luke, the whole being worked 
 together possibly by Matthew himself, but certainly 
 reedited by unknown writers. Much the same is 
 true in the case of Luke. Even in the case of 
 Mark evidences of redaction are not wanting. The 
 subjective elements and late date of the Fourth 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 97 
 
 Gospel are admitted by conservative and radical 
 alike. 
 
 The first stage of this criticism was thoroughly 
 destructive. The time of writing of the three Synop- 
 tic Gospels was placed very late, while that of the 
 Gospel of John was placed somewhere in the second 
 quarter of the second century and even later. 
 Within the past few years, however, critics are divid- 
 ing themselves into two main groups. By far the 
 larger of these, represented by genuinely historical in- 
 vestigators, has pushed the time of writing back until 
 the oldest strata of the Synoptic Gospels seem to be- 
 long to the period prior to the destruction of Jerusa- 
 lem (65-67 A.D.) and the Gospel of John to the end 
 of the first century. The other and more radical 
 group of critics is numerically small but has been 
 given undue importance by the fact that its members 
 have been given opportunity to express themselves 
 in the pages of the Encyclopedia Biblica. For these 
 latter writers the gospels possess small historical 
 value and represent merely the interpretation placed 
 upon Jesus by the early Christians. According to 
 criticism of the first type the figure of Jesus emerges 
 with ever increasing distinctness. According to 
 that of the second school Jesus is continuously 
 retreating into the shadows of the past, until he 
 
98 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 becomes barely the name of a man about whom we 
 know with certainty all but nothing. 
 
 The modern man will not abandon, he cannot aban- 
 don, the historical method because of this difference in 
 the results of its application, but between the pre- 
 suppositions of these two sets of critics he can hardly 
 fail to choose the more conservative. And for the 
 very good reason that the negative positions reached 
 by the second group imply something which from 
 the point of view of method is close to critical suicide. 
 The results of the less biased criticism on the other 
 hand flow from true historical science. The fact that 
 they have placed the historical foundation of the 
 gospel, in so far at least as concerns the faith of the 
 first disciples, upon unquestionable bases, is damag- 
 ing evidence only to the man who believes that no 
 method is scientific which proves something. It could 
 not be otherwise in view of the generally accepted 
 views regarding the structure of the Synoptic Gospels, 
 and the chief epistles of Paul. Critical analysis 
 has disclosed material which is older than the gospels 
 themselves in their present form, which can be best 
 described as coming from those whom Luke calls 
 "eye-witnesses and ministers of the word," while the 
 epistles of Paul carry us back to the days before this 
 material had been reduced to written form. 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 99 
 
 3. Yet at this point we reach a new difficulty. 
 That inveterate skepticism which assails every positive 
 evangelic statement having been defeated in the re- 
 gion of the dates of the gospels now assails this origi- 
 nal material with the weapons of psychology and a 
 theory of knowledge. In its extreme form it can see 
 in Paul only an obscure man who never did much of 
 anything except make a trip to Rome, and in his 
 letters only lucubrations of an unknown writer of the 
 second century concerning issues a century outgrown. 
 All one can say of these conclusions of van Manen 
 and his little school is that if the negative criticism 
 which destroys the historical existence of Jesus be 
 critical suicide this treatment of the Pauline litera- 
 ture is critical madness. 
 
 In its less extreme form the new criticism identifies 
 historical records with experience and holds that all 
 we have in such records is the judgment of value put 
 by the early church upon Jesus. According to this 
 view it is impossible actually to get at the historical 
 Jesus. We can only recover the recollections, the 
 impressions, the enthusiasm, and the faith of his 
 followers. And these results, it is claimed, yield very 
 obscure historical conclusions as to Jesus himself. 
 
 Particularly in the case of the resurrection is this 
 objection urged. This school of critics does not doubt 
 
lOO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 that the early disciples believed that Jesus had ap- 
 peared to them, but it insists that this belief was due 
 to pure subjectivism. The stories of the resurrec- 
 tion are the visualizing, so to speak, of the faith of the 
 disciples born of intimate companionship with Jesus, 
 and all that the gospel of the risen Christ really 
 amounts to is that the early Christians were so 
 convinced of the messiahship of Jesus that they could 
 not believe that God had allowed him to perish. 
 Under this conviction they thought they saw him. We 
 have in the gospel, therefore, according to this school, 
 correct statements as to what the apostles thought 
 they saw, but no evidence that there was anything 
 for them to see. 
 
 Now this reduction of history to experience must be 
 taken seriously. It has enough truth to make it 
 exceedingly difficult to oppose. If one urges that it 
 practically wipes the actual Jesus off the slate of 
 history, one is likely to be met by the indignant 
 asseveration that nothing of the sort is true ; that by 
 faith we are sure there was such a Jesus, but that, 
 as we cannot know him apart from the faith of the 
 disciples, we cannot safely accept the account of those 
 episodes in his life in which he differs from ordinary 
 men. 
 
 If on the other hand we attempt to argue that the 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST loi 
 
 situation in his case is no different from that of any 
 other historical person, and that we have as much 
 material with which to paint a general portrait of 
 Jesus as of Plato, or Socrates, or even of Marcus 
 Aurelius, we are told, as it were, with a shrug of the 
 philosophical shoulders, that no one of those three 
 men was said to have been raised from the dead. If 
 we reply that it seems extraordinary that so great a 
 movement should have sprung from a man with no 
 climactic experience, and that it would seem as if 
 he must have been more than remarkable not only to 
 compel the allegiance and the supreme definitions of 
 so keen a man as Paul but the God-valuation of 
 the modem theologian himself, our answer is the 
 issuance of the scholar's anathema — imscientific. 
 
 Now we must admit that if we allow Jesus to be an 
 ordinary person about whom we know nothing with 
 certainty, we cannot believe in his resurrection. And it 
 is also necessary to admit that when a person is dead 
 we cannot know him except in the sense that we know 
 something which people say about him. But that 
 by no means proves that there was not in the character 
 of Jesus something which warranted his contempo- 
 raries' estimate of him, and further warrants our ac- 
 acceptance of that estimate as the basis for our own 
 conduct. I never heard Webster speak, and I am 
 
102 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 ready to make all allowance for excessive admiration 
 as well as for excessive dislike in the stories that have 
 come down to us concerning him. But I have not the 
 slightest doubt that Webster was an orator and 
 statesman. I have no means of meeting the person 
 Socrates, and I am perfectly ready to admit that the 
 Socrates of the Platonic dialogues may be an idealized 
 portrait of the Socrates who nagged the Athenians into 
 thinking about serious matters and preferred the 
 market place to companionship with Xantippe. But 
 I have no doubt that Socrates lived, and that he was of 
 sufficient importance in philosophy to warrant the 
 portraits which Plato and Xenophon drew of him. 
 I certainly cannot think of him as a mere lay figure 
 on which Plato hung his own thoughts. 
 
 Similarly in the case of Jesus. It is desirable to dis- 
 tinguish as far as possible between the real Jesus and 
 those estimates and descriptions with which the New 
 Testament writers present him. But why should we 
 not get positive results from the criticism as well as 
 negative ? 
 
 The pressing task for the systematic theologian is 
 not so much that of the apologete who tries to find 
 the irreducible minimum, and builds therefrom, as it 
 is the constructive use of the results of a criticism 
 which has brought us beyond a reasonable perad- 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 103 
 
 venture face to face with the beliefs of the original 
 Christians. The business of a positive theology is 
 not to discover how much of that primitive belief can 
 be omitted, but how much of it is really correlatable 
 with other things we know, and so is capable of 
 being built inductively into a positive message for 
 to-day's life. 
 
 The question as to a real Jesus back of the experi- 
 ence and faith of the first disciples must be answered 
 by historians, not by metaphysicians. At the very 
 outset we must have done with the analogy which 
 finds a Jesus an sich as a sort of equivalent of the 
 Ding an sich of metaphysics. It would be difficult 
 to imagine a more unjustifiable source of confusion 
 than the parallel which is drawn between the meta- 
 physical diSiculty of distinguishing the phenomenon 
 from the noumenon and the difficulty of distinguish- 
 ing between historical testimony and the person or 
 event to which the testimony is brought. 
 
 II 
 
 This is not the place in which to trace in detail the 
 working of the historical method by which the Jesus 
 of history is found. It must suffice to set forth as 
 succinctly as possible its results as an answer to the 
 question, Is there more than one Jesus in the New 
 
104 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Testament ? And to avoid any suspicion of manipu- 
 lation of material we will formulate these results as 
 they come : from the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline 
 literature, and the Johannine literature. 
 
 I. The Jesus of history as gained by a study of the 
 oldest strata of the synoptic material has been some- 
 times described as a prophet, that is to say, a teacher, 
 more or less under the limitations of the messianic 
 hope of his day, but one who did not regard himself 
 as the Christ and whose "mighty works" the histo- 
 rian cannot regard seriously. Such a view, however, 
 is undeniably the minimum result of the projection 
 of a dogmatic position into historical processes. A 
 properly historical examination must give a different 
 formulation. There are certain deeds ascribed to 
 Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels as they stand to-day, 
 which are not to be found in the oldest strata of ma- 
 terial ; but, even in the case of the Infancy sections, 
 their absence does not affect the general estimate 
 which we must place upon him. The historical Jesus 
 can still be described by the study of the reports of 
 his words and deeds and his own self-consciousness 
 as contained in these oldest sources which have been 
 preserved in our Synoptic Gospels. In their light we 
 must say that he was a person of moral perfection, 
 possessed of remarkable powers to work cures through 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST lOJ 
 
 the evoking of faith on the part of others ; a teacher 
 who carried to what, so far as we can see, are their final 
 results, the religious and ethical possibilities and con- 
 ceptions of humanity ; a religious master whose very 
 life was an imperative call to trust in the fatherly love 
 of God ; and, although he never explicitly demanded 
 such faith of his disciples, one who regarded himself 
 as such an altogether unique manifestation of the 
 Spirit of God as to be able to deliver men from sin 
 and misery and death. Whether or not he concealed 
 for a while this belief in his messianic vocation, he 
 found, in the depths of his consciousness, impulses, 
 ideals, volitions, and powers which he believed sprang 
 from the presence of the Father who was thus em- 
 powering him for his supreme mission. 
 
 This self-estimate is one of the integral parts of the 
 original gospel message. So far from being tenable 
 appears to me the dictum of Schweitzer : " The Jesus 
 of Nazareth who appeared as Messiah, taught the 
 ethics of the kingdom, and died to consecrate his 
 work never lived. He is a figure sketched by ration- 
 alism, called to life by literalism, and supplied by 
 modern theology with the clothing of historical 
 science." 
 
 2. The Pauline conception of Jesus is that of a 
 heavenly Christ who became incarnate because of 
 
I06 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the love of God, who died as a sacrifice and was raised 
 from the dead, who already exercises his control 
 over his community, who sends the Holy Spirit to the 
 followers, and who will return from heaven to estab- 
 lish his kingdom. 
 
 It cannot be questioned that this Pauline concep- 
 tion of Jesus differs somewhat from Jesus' own esti- 
 mate of himself as recorded in our gospels, but it is 
 rather in the manner of a developed interpretation 
 than of a radically different estimate. It starts 
 with the messianic valuation, and presupposes a 
 knowledge of the historical Jesus. The Pauline let- 
 ters were without exception written to persons who 
 already had in their possession the elements, at least, 
 of our Synoptic Gospels. His effort was not so much, 
 therefore, to set forth the facts of Jesus' life as to show 
 how an already existing faith in Jesus could shape 
 itself to the exegencies of actual situations. Wher- 
 ever he finds it necessary to refer to matters which lie 
 within the range of the synoptic material, it is only a 
 hypersensitive criticism which can discover radical 
 discrepancies. Paul's God is the same Heavenly 
 Father whom Jesus revealed. To Him as reconciled 
 Jesus leads men, and in the great consummation 
 He will be all in all. Paul's elaboration of the signifi- 
 cance of Jesus, though enriched by his own experi- 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 107 
 
 ence and culture, is steadily along the line of Jesus' 
 own estimate of himself as the revelation of God's 
 power of spiritual salvation in terms of messiah- 
 ship. 
 
 The world of scholarship at the present time is 
 deeply concerned in the comparison of the Jesus of 
 Paul with the Jesus of the synoptists. This brief 
 statement will indicate that, in my opinion, despite 
 their differences, the two are fundamentally the 
 same, the differences in portrayal being due to the 
 method of exposition and the momentary exigencies 
 of the apostle's thought. Indeed, after a careful ex- 
 amination of the facts in the case, I am inclined to go 
 farther and to say that the man who wishes to under- 
 stand the significance of Jesus cannot do better than 
 to face Paul's problems and find in Jesus his own 
 answers thereto. 
 
 3. Even more pronounced discrepancies have been 
 found between the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the 
 Jesus of the synoptists. But a dispassionate exami- 
 nation will show that these differences lie again in the 
 region of interpretation. There are no significant 
 details of the life of Jesus given in the Johannine 
 writings that are not already to be found, at least 
 in kind, in the Synoptic Gospels. True, the Prologue 
 of the Fourth Gospel introduces the Logos doctrine, 
 
Io8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 but it is a valuation of Jesus that can be traced 
 only with difhculty throughout the gospel as a whole. 
 The persistent valuation there is again messianic. 
 The chronology, also, of the messianic revelation is 
 not that of the synoptists, but when we are quite 
 assured as to the proper order of the Johannine 
 material, it is altogether probable that most of these 
 difficulties will disappear. If one allows for the 
 practical and apologetic use which the Fourth Gospel 
 makes of the facts of Jesus' career, he will find in it 
 precisely the same elements that are to be found in the 
 synoptics. True, the line of demarcation between 
 fact and interpretation is in many places impossible 
 to draw, and the portrayal of Jesus in the Fourth 
 Gospel is theological and religious rather than baldly 
 biographical; but the real Jesus is there as well 
 as the author's comment, explanation, and valua- 
 tion. 
 
 To such conclusions as this, despite its eddies, the 
 main current of modem scholarship with its explora- 
 tion of the consciousness of Jesus, its analysis of the 
 religious experience of his first interpreters, and its 
 insistence on historical rather than dogmatic pro- 
 cedure, seems to me to be moving. Varieties of inter- 
 pretative details are undeniably in the New Testa- 
 ment, but they are interpretations that radiate from 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST I09 
 
 the same historical center. If one starts with inci- 
 dental statements and unique analogies, it is easy 
 enough to find in the New Testament only more or 
 less discordant descriptions of Jesus. If, because of 
 temperament or presupposition, one prefers differ- 
 ences to agreements, these discordant descriptions 
 will seem antagonistic. But if one starts with Jesus 
 and his own estimate of himself as included in the 
 oldest materials of the gospels, it is possible to see 
 how Christian experience in making real to itself 
 the value of that supreme person could use all these 
 figures and valuations, and yet cherish the Figure 
 himself unchanged. The unity of a circle lies at the 
 point from which the radii emerge rather than in some 
 point in the circumference which for the moment 
 attracts one's attention. In the case of the New 
 Testament that center is the historical Jesus of the 
 sources interpreted as the Christ — the one whom 
 God had empowered by His own resident spirit to 
 be a Saviour. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The relation of any creative personality to the 
 movement which it inaugurates is always compli- 
 cated. In some cases the founder of a religion be- 
 comes the controlling factor of its entire history. 
 His words become a veritable law which it is sacrilege 
 
no THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 to break. In other cases the movement sweeps 
 away from its founder, and takes up into itself such 
 various elements as to become quite other than that 
 originally intended. In still other cases the founder 
 of a religion disappears historically, and the reli- 
 gion that bears his name is in utter ignorance as to 
 his personality. In no religion except Christianity, 
 however, lonless it be Buddhism, is the personality, 
 as distinguished from the teachings of its founder, 
 of actual religious value. Even Mahomet is only the 
 Prophet of Allah. 
 
 Christianity is here unique in that it has always 
 made the personal experience of Jesus its center. 
 The teaching of the church has emphasized the facts 
 rather than the teaching of Jesus. Take from 
 Christian theology the person, the death, and the 
 resurrection of Jesus, and there would not be much 
 Christian theology left. True, at the present time 
 Protestantism is complementing its emphasis upon 
 these historical aspects with the ideals set forth in the 
 gospel, which are, to a considerable extent at least, 
 independent of historical episodes in the life of Jesus. 
 Indeed, it must be added that there is a tendency, by 
 no means weak, to dehistoricalize Christianity alto- 
 gether and make it into a religious philosophy as 
 indifferent to the historical Christ as Zoroastrianism 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST III 
 
 is to Zarathustra. But, as I shall repeatedly insist, 
 such a procedure is to create a different sort of reli- 
 gion from the Christianity the centuries have known, 
 and, in its efforts to avoid the Scylla of higher criticism, 
 is sure to fall into the grip of the Charybdis of 
 philosophy. If Christianity is to possess genuinely 
 religious power, it must remain true to the gospel 
 which makes the historical personality of Jesus an 
 actual contribution to religious history. 
 
 The gospel, however, is not simply a biography. 
 Merely to believe that Jesus existed is not to have 
 religious faith. It is conceivable that he might have 
 lived in Nazareth or some obscure city of Ephraim 
 and been all that he was as far as his personal ex- 
 perience of God is concerned, and yet have been of no 
 religious significance. If, then, some search of an- 
 cient records had foimd that he thus lived, one could, 
 in the scientific spirit, assent to the fact, and yet re- 
 main in such ignorance as to his real significance as 
 to see in him simply a footnote of religious history. 
 The real significance of the historical Jesus lies in the 
 fact that in him the Spiritual Life for which humanity 
 has searched was perfectly brought in terms of time 
 and human relationships. He is more, even, than a 
 mere example ; he is a datum for religious induction 
 as truly as the earthworms studied by Darwin were 
 
112 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 data for the exposition of the laws of life. In him 
 we have demonstrated the power of that spiritual life 
 to triumph over sin and death. Despite the jeers of 
 the crowds at the cross, the deliverance about which 
 Jesus talked was actually accomplished in his own 
 life. Deprived of its knowledge of this, as it were, 
 successful experiment in the spiritual life, the gospel 
 becomes simply an ideal which stands over against the 
 real world of human endeavor in much the same 
 way as the Platonic world of ideas stands over against 
 the world of experience. 
 
 But this is not to exhaust the content of the signifi- 
 cance of the Jesus of history. He is not simply a 
 datum to be treated as independent of the Christian 
 community. Darwin's earthworm was not the 
 founder of evolution. Jesus was the founder of 
 Christianity. And he founded it as something 
 more than a teacher. His paramount place in his- 
 tory was given him by those who loved him, saw 
 in him God's Messiah, and followed him and his 
 teachings as they would follow the veritable God 
 Himself, to the death. The Jesus of history became 
 the Christ of experience. Personal love of a histor- 
 ical character was transformed into religious faith in 
 him as more than a person in history. 
 
 In this Jesus shared in our common lot. A man 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST II3 
 
 can be a teacher only when some one is taught, a 
 leader only when there are those who are led. Soc- 
 rates without Plato would not have been the Soc- 
 rates centuries have honored. Jesus the historical 
 person of Galilee and Jerusalem became the Saviour 
 of the centuries as he became the Christ of the 
 Christian community. That is to say, as he evoked 
 faith in himself as the divine Saviour. 
 
 We are accustomed to the discussion as to whether 
 the "Christ of experience" is the Jesus of history. 
 The distinction, as has already been implied, is, with 
 proper limitations, legitimate. But there is need here 
 of clear thinking. Analysis discovers several " Christs 
 of experience. " There are : the Jesus who lies behind 
 the earliest documents of Christianity; the Messiah 
 of the completed New Testament literature; the 
 metaphysical Son of God, the incarnation of the 
 Logos of the creeds and the theologians; the "es- 
 sential" Christ found by moderns in history and 
 Christian experience and worshiped by the church 
 as God, all but detached from the original Jesus. 
 With which of these concentric personal ideals of the 
 spiritual life can the modem man concern himself ? 
 
 To an extent at first unrealized, with them all. 
 But he is to keep central the Jesus of history. Then 
 as he recapitulates, as it were, in his own experience 
 
114 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 that development of definitions and values of Jesus 
 which has marked the faith of the church does he 
 come to see that, to use Wenley's terms, the historical 
 Jesus who was is the metahistorical Christ who is. 
 If his starting point be the Jesus of the sources and if 
 his attitude be religiously sympathetic, his valuation 
 will proceed along the line followed by the first dis- 
 ciples. Jesus will himself compel his acceptance as 
 the divine Saviour, and the modern man's Credo will, 
 to that extent at least, be the equivalent of that of 
 the Christian community of all ages. 
 
 I. Fortunately we can recover the essential content 
 of the first confession of faith in Jesus as Christ. 
 It was not a merely formal definition. In ascribing 
 to Jesus the messianic dignity, the apostles and their 
 converts were using a well-recognized term of value 
 that implied rather than presupposed a metaphysical 
 estimate of his person. The historical and compara- 
 tive study so characteristic of recent years gives us 
 the content with some precision. The apocalypses, 
 the sayings of the rabbis, the expectations of the 
 masses, notwithstanding their differences, are here at 
 one. The Christ was to be more than a popular 
 hero; he was to be more than a conqueror. As has 
 already been said, he was to be the one whom God's 
 Spirit empowered to save His people. That is the 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST IIJ 
 
 very heart of the messianic hope that among the Jews 
 reached its most perfect expression in the Seventeenth 
 Psalm of Solomon. Its elements are there clear: 
 the presence through unction (or, as the Greek would 
 say, incarnation) of God in a human individual; 
 and \h.e sinless character and redemptive office 
 and power given that individual by such divine 
 presence. This deliverance to be accomplished was 
 described sometimes in terms of ordinary politics, 
 sometimes in terms of catastrophe; but it always 
 implied moral elements. The new Israel was to be 
 imperial because it was to be composed of "sons of 
 God," a "holy people." "The tribes shall be 
 sanctified;" "in holiness shall he lead them all, and 
 there shall no pride be among them that any should 
 be oppressed" — this was the noblest hope of Phari- 
 saism. A Christ that did not save the righteous would 
 be the Antichrist. 
 
 And these elements we find in the messianic title 
 the early Christians gave their Master. With it 
 they doubtless transferred also their inherited 
 beliefs as to preexistence and origin, but Paulinism 
 no more than Judaism centered about such quasi- 
 metaphysical conceptions. Spiritual life, goodness, 
 power to bring individual and social salvation, through 
 the resident Spirit of God, these are the central 
 
Il6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 elements of the messianic valuation wherever found 
 in the New Testament. It was because the historical 
 Jesus actually was believed by his immediate friends 
 to possess these characteristics that the messianic 
 title was given him. That is their persistent and 
 unanimous Christology. And these characteristics the 
 modern man also can discover in the historical Jesus 
 and in the Jesus who has worked in history. Age 
 after age has sought to express its estimate of his 
 redemptive power in its own equivalent of the messi- 
 anic description. The resulting definitions have not 
 always been regarded as such equivalents, and the 
 development of authoritative ecclesiastical dogma 
 has sometimes obscured their fimctional office. But 
 here again historical insight should enable the mod- 
 ern man to perceive the continuous spiritual content 
 rather than divergent concepts in theological valua- 
 tion. Discovering it, be his metaphysical formula 
 what it may, he knows Jesus as the revelation of a 
 redemptive God, and in his own terms expresses his 
 own equivalent for that eternal power of Jesus to 
 elevate and deepen the spiritual life which the early 
 Christians described as messianic. 
 
 2. From this point of view the modern man can 
 appreciate and, in the equivalent terms of his own 
 thinking, can derive help from the evangelic estimate 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST II7 
 
 of the holy life of Jesus. That, too, is implied by the 
 messianic valuation in terms of superhuman spiritual 
 life as it was revealed in the field of morals. 
 
 In the same proportion as we know what sin is do 
 we know what righteousness is. The older world to 
 whom sin meant something static or negative or even 
 substantial could discuss as to whether Jesus could 
 not or did not sin. To the modem man such a ques- 
 tion's all but unintelligible. Morality is not quanti- 
 tative. It is a relation of the individual to his 
 situation, a matter of social adjustment rather than 
 of absolute standards, however true it may be that 
 righteousness as an attitude of soul is timeless. 
 Actions are not good; a man is good. Moral struggle 
 which we see so clearly on the pages of the gospel rec- 
 ords of Jesus is only what would be expected of spir- 
 itual life marked by moral perfection. New duties 
 came to Jesus with the same interrogation as that with 
 which they come to all men. In him as in all human- 
 ity there was the struggle between the spiritual and 
 the physical elements of personality. In the wilder- 
 ness when he faced his own ideals, by the lake side 
 when men would make him king, on the mountain 
 side when Peter urged him to choose the lower idea 
 of messiahship, in Gethsemane when the apparent 
 unrighteousness of defeat tempted him to escape, 
 
Il8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 and on the cross when the awful doubt of God's own 
 goodness beset him, Jesus faced genuinely moral is- 
 sues. And there is yet to be shown any clear evidence 
 that he ever chose the secondary in preference to the 
 supreme good. The spiritual always was supreme. 
 Prescientific views of nature, to some measure at least, 
 he seems to have shared with the men of his day ; but 
 his moral decisions were infallible. He was sinless. 
 He, rather than his teaching, is our final standard of 
 the moral life. And what is even more, his perfec- 
 tion has revealed that the spiritual life can triumph in 
 the moral field. 
 
 So at least the heart of humanity as a whole has 
 testified. Those who have questioned the ethic of 
 Jesus have in reality charged him with not agreeing 
 with their own theories of right. He who sees in 
 Jesus one genetically related with the process in which 
 our race is involved can see how in truth he was sub- 
 ject to the backward pull of humanity, how he could 
 be tempted in all points like as we, and yet be without 
 sin. For temptations may spring from the tendency of 
 a good to dominate a life to which it has contributed 
 and by which it has been outgrown, or they may 
 spring from without in the form of some suggestion 
 to unworthy action made by an individual (like Peter 
 at Philippi) or a society (like Pharisaism as an aggres- 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST II9 
 
 sive institution) not under the domination of the 
 same high ideals of him to whom it is made. 
 
 We find here one of those contradictions that still 
 further set Jesus apart from all those who have lived 
 the life of the spirit. Not only have we no record of 
 his having yielded to temptation, but we have no 
 record of his ever having used in his teaching any 
 experience of repentance and forgiveness. Had 
 Jesus possessed the remembrance of such experience, 
 we should indubitably have had from him, with his 
 pellucid honesty and hatred of hypocrisy, some word 
 as to the peace which follows the consciousness of 
 forgiveness. Even less absolutely honest men like 
 Augustine and Pascal abound in such consciousness, 
 and with Paul it is central. This silence is his own 
 greatest testimony to his own sense of moral perfec- 
 tion. And, what is an almost equal marvel, men never 
 read such forgiveness between the lines of his call 
 to repentance. 
 
 Yet the sinlessness of Jesus was not a negative 
 quantity. He did not merely keep himself from 
 doing that which was wicked; he was no moral 
 valetudinarian kept from sin by a removal from the 
 world of actual endeavor. The sinlessness of Jesus 
 was positive. He kept from doing wrong by doing 
 right. In him spiritual life reached moral perfection 
 
I20 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 as it expressed itself in love. Because of this supreme 
 fact the gospel is again more than a philosophy. Its 
 message of the way of salvation is not that of teach- 
 ing which, like Buddhism, bids men kill desire. The 
 perfect spiritual life of Jesus expressed itself in actual 
 historical social relations. That is one reason why 
 he has always so appealed to life. In the same pro- 
 portion as men have made him an abstract doctrine, 
 be it never so precisely formulated, his power over 
 human hearts has wavered. Those have gained 
 most from him who have become as it were little 
 children, seeing in him help rather than a problem. 
 He dealt not with universals, but with the universal 
 as conditioned by the exigencies of actual life. The 
 spirit of the Lord was upon him to strengthen him to 
 such homely deliverance as giving sight to the blind, 
 hearing to the deaf, the gospel to the poor. 
 
 "And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the creed of creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
 More strong than all poetic thought." 
 
 In this exposition we see not merely a perfect life, 
 but we see the type of the perfect life. For in the life 
 of love which Jesus lived even to the sacrifice of 
 Calvary, we see the quality and the content of the 
 life of the spirit. That is the real meaning of sinless- 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 121 
 
 ness. Spirituality consists in love. To be perfect 
 like God is to be loving like Jesus. The spiritual life 
 seeks not poverty but wealth of self-expression. 
 "I came," said Jesus, in that marvelous verse of the 
 Fourth Gospel : " that they may have life and may 
 have it abundantly." 
 
 This social content of the spiritual life it is that 
 gives Jesus his supreme position among the founders 
 of religions. Moral perfection must come to others 
 as it came to him through the expression of the life 
 of the spirit in ordinary human surroundings. His 
 followers were not to be taken from the world. As- 
 ceticism, self-depreciation, abnormality in any form, 
 are no part of spiritual living. To be like Jesus a 
 man must not withdraw from life; he must plunge 
 into life. But in so doing he must maintain the 
 perspective of values which Jesus himself maintained. 
 Only thus can he approximate that perfection which 
 on its negative side is sinlessness and on its positive 
 side is self-sacrificing, loving service to one's world. 
 
 3. Yet moral perfection is not the greatest and 
 most vital quality men have seen in Jesus. They have 
 not only admired, they have worshiped him, and have 
 been saved by him. Through faith in himself he 
 evokes the spiritual life and compels its allegiance. 
 We are not now speaking metaphysically, but simply 
 
122 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 historically. Doubt or explain such faith by what- 
 ever psychology or philosophy one prefers, the fact 
 remains. Men have found the salvation of God in 
 him. 
 
 It could not be otherwise if he were what he be- 
 lieved himself to be. In the light of the history of the 
 term, to be the Christ meant to Jesus that God was 
 present in his person as the source of his redemptive 
 power. It is confidence in this estimate — an esti- 
 mate which was the property of Jesus as truly as of his 
 first interpreters, — that lies back of the emphasis 
 which historical orthodoxy placed upon Jesus as the 
 Son of God. The doctrine of the Trinity, although 
 it sprang in part from the irrepressible tendencies of 
 Greek Christians toward metaphysics, when formu- 
 lated in the creeds of Nicasa and Constantinople, 
 was really the outcome of a sense of the need of a 
 divine redemption for sinful man. That very shibbo- 
 leth of orthodoxy, the word " consubstantial,"" was 
 something more than a term of mere metaphysics. 
 Employed as it was because it expressed not so 
 much what the Athanasians believed as what the 
 Arians did not believe, it gives no support to the 
 charge that the Christians of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries were fighting over a diphthong. The real 
 issue was whether the redemption actually experienced 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 1 23 
 
 by those who had believed in Jesus was wrought by 
 God or by some being neither man, God, nor angel. 
 From the point of view of that sort of logic which 
 cleverly disembowels conclusions from major prem- 
 ises, the arguments against which Athanasius and 
 the Western world contended are imanswerable. But 
 the trinitarian formula was something more than a 
 speculation as to the nature of the Godhead before the 
 birth of Jesus. It was an attempt to express a final 
 judgment of value in terms of metaphysics. A divine 
 salvation argued a divine Saviour. That for which 
 Athanasius stood could not be expressed accurately 
 in any term at his disposal. The difficulty with 
 the entire discussion lay in its attempt to deal with 
 ultimate terms, and ultimate terms cannot be defined. 
 But the significance of God can be expressed by 
 symbols, and His nature in some way pictured by 
 combining terms which can neither be taken with 
 scientific accuracy nor combined in a precise result- 
 ant. That is exactly what men claimed when they 
 talked about the " eternal begetting of the Son" and 
 of his "consubstantiality" with the Father. Tech- 
 nical descriptions of God in the terms of Sabellius 
 and Arius are undoubtedly more intelligible, logi- 
 cally speaking, than are the formulas of the Nicene 
 creed. But their very intelligibility is an argument 
 
124 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 against them. Their precision of definition is 
 gained by the exclusion of values. 
 
 And, unless I altogether mistake, the modem 
 man with his presupposition as to the immanence 
 of the Spiritual Life, or, as the Greeks called it, 
 the Logos, and his growing knowledge that truth can- 
 not be reduced to deductive syllogisms, will, if only 
 he will use words not too rigorously, unexpectedly 
 find himself in sympathy with the Nicene formula as 
 that which on the whole best expresses in the terms of 
 "essence" philosophy the value which his own reli- 
 gious nature finds in the Jesus of the gospel, who was 
 the Christ of Paul. True, he is more interested in the 
 historical "person" than in metaphysical "natures," 
 but a Jesus who is a teacher about God is of vastly 
 different worth to humanity than a Christ who, like 
 the bit of carbon blazing with the electric current, 
 is an individual made incandescent by the actual 
 presence of God, the immanent Spiritual Life upon 
 which our own spiritual life rests. Many questions 
 as to the person of Jesus must be held open as long as 
 they wait upon the researches of honest criticism, 
 but they cannot invalidate the conviction that, how- 
 ever feeble and inadequate our vocabularies may be, 
 we have in Jesus God redemptively revealed in an in- 
 dividual personality. The modem man has assured 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 12$ 
 
 himself that Jesus is man of very man, but in his 
 surrender to him through faith, he will be restless 
 until he also feels in him God of very God. And 
 however he reaches this conclusion, whether it be 
 through the high altitudes of discussion as to the 
 nature of the Logos, or, distrusting all metaphysics, 
 through a Thomas-like surrender to the historical 
 Jesus, he finds in it a satisfaction of his deepest spir- 
 itual needs. 
 
 The Christian salvation has thus become an ele- 
 ment of the experience of the centuries. Jesus is the 
 one person to whom we can look with religious faith. 
 Plato and Socrates and Gotama Buddha are among 
 our teachers; but Western civilization, waiving all 
 questions as to his metaphysical deity, worships 
 Jesus as the only person who can bring to its members 
 and to itself a sense of divine forgiveness and an 
 experience of regeneration. 
 
 4. Such a miracle — for what other word pictures 
 the situation ? — in the range of spiritual experience 
 inevitably forces the modem man, if only he will 
 think long enough, into essential harmony with 
 the evangelic conception of Jesus' messianic per- 
 sonality. He himself becomes a miracle. Miracu- 
 lous, let us hasten to say, not in the sense that there 
 is in him any violation of the constructive laws of 
 
126 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 nature, but miraculous in the sense that in him spirit- 
 ual experience finds an exception in terms of perfec- 
 tion. Jesus was not apart from humanity. To 
 doubt that was as hateful a heresy to the fathers of 
 orthodoxy as to doubt his deity. He lived subject 
 to the conditions which control the relations of the 
 individual in any given historical environment. But 
 in him those relations were perfectly maintained in 
 terms of freedom possible only to the divine will. 
 If God were to have become individualized in the 
 historical situation set by the Judaism of the first 
 century of our era, we believe he would have lived 
 as Jesus lived. But such way of living, this quality 
 of the spiritual personality as exhibited in social 
 relations, is independent of peculiarities in the histori- 
 cal conditions. That Jesus spoke Aramaic was, as 
 the schoolmen might say, an accident; that he was 
 God incarnate and revealed is a matter of everlasting 
 significance. History here reaches over into religion, 
 not as furnishing a bewildering exception in the 
 spiritual order, but as presenting a perfect and im- 
 pelling exposition of that order. As Jesus himself 
 said, he was the Son of Man, the exposition in terms 
 of an historical situation of those timeless values 
 that shall characterize the kingdom of God. 
 5. But the gospel is not content to leave Jesus a sort 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 127 
 
 of lay figure to be clothed with the ideals of humanity. 
 To use the language of the schools, it conceives of 
 him in terms of existence as truly as in terms of values. 
 It never elaborates metaphysically the problems of his 
 person, but it has its Christologies none the less. 
 For in the exposition of his person as set forth by the 
 writers of the New Testament at least four expositions 
 of his person are given. 
 
 There is, first, the conception of unction which is in 
 all four of the gospels ; that is to say, the coming of the 
 Holy Spirit upon him at the baptism. The difference 
 between such experience and that of others is sharply 
 defined in the gospels. It differed from that of the 
 prophets by reason of its permanence. The Holy 
 Spirit abode in him. The difference between his and 
 the spiritual experience of the Christian believer is 
 that between the perfect and the imperfect, and even 
 more the difference in function. The Holy Spirit em- 
 powered him to save; it empowered others to be 
 saved. The Holy Spirit is repeatedly said by Paul 
 and by Jesus himself to work in both Jesus and 
 those who accept him as the Christ. But in the 
 latter case his work is to lead men into all truth 
 by taking and revealing to them the things of 
 Christ. 
 
 Second, there is the concept of Paul of the incama- 
 
128 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 tion in Jesus of the preexistent Christ. Just how 
 this incarnation was accomplished Paul does not 
 speak unless it be in the great passage of Philippians 
 in which the Christ is said to have emptied himself 
 and to have taken upon himself the form of a servant, 
 becoming in the likeness of man. Such a view ap- 
 parently presupposes the current Jewish belief of 
 preexistence of souls, and from that point of view is 
 perfectly intelligible. A doctrine of a merely ideal 
 pregxistence of the Christ in my judgment cannot be 
 established from the study of pre-Christian Jewish 
 thought. Every soul was held to be preexistent, and 
 at the moment of conception was conducted by the 
 angel who had it in charge from the treasure house 
 under the throne of God to its human embryo. 
 From such a point of view it was not difficult to con- 
 ceive of the Christ as having preexisted as the Christ 
 and to have been brought into a human body. 
 
 In the third place there is the conception of the 
 Logos who became flesh. It has only one clear ex- 
 pression in the New Testament, namely, in the Pro- 
 logue in the Gospel according to John. In many 
 ways, however, the Logos conception was the Greek 
 equivalent of the Pauline conception of the prehis- 
 toric Christ. As a Christian doctrine it differs from 
 that of Philo in that the incarnate Logos was a 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST I29 
 
 means of bringing man and God together, instead of 
 keeping them, as it were, apart. 
 
 The word is the means of self-revelation; so the 
 Logos or Eternal Word was the self-revealing aspect 
 of the personality of God, who found self-expression 
 in the individual Jesus. So consonant is this con- 
 ception with the entire trend of Greek thought under 
 the influence of which the gospel became a theology, 
 that it naturally became the controlling element of 
 Christology and gave rise to the first ecumenical 
 creed. That creed, it is worth noticing, however, 
 was not concerned with the person of the historic 
 Jesus, but with the relations of the prehistoric, 
 eternal Logos with God the Father. Christological 
 discussions prior to the Arian controversy were con- 
 cerned primarily with the question as to whether the 
 Logos had an actual human body. 
 
 Finally, there is the explanation of the person of 
 Jesus through the Virgin Birth as narrated in the 
 opening sections of Matthew and Luke. Nowhere 
 else in the New Testament is there any reference to 
 such birth, although there are a number of passages 
 which are not inconsistent with such a belief. It is 
 not a part of the gospel either of Mark or of John, and 
 is omitted in the Pauline formulation of the gOspel 
 as found in i Corinthians, chapter 15; it is not in 
 
130 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the list of the "principles" given in die Epistle to 
 the Hebrews. It is to be found in tlie oldest manu- 
 script of the gospel which has reached us, tlio Sinaitic 
 Syriac version, but at tlie same time it is tliere ex- 
 pressly said that Joseph begot Jesus. It first appears 
 in Christian theology in Ignatius, where, however, 
 it is referred to as a currently accepted article of 
 Christian faitli. 
 
 The attitude of many modem New Testament 
 scholars toward the Virgin Birth is one of unhesi- 
 tating rejection. Even in the case of men who are 
 not swayed by any anti-miraculous prejudices tlie 
 evidence that the infancy sections were parts of tlie 
 original gospel are judged to be not wholly satisfac- 
 tory. Hardly sufficient weight, however, has been 
 given to the argument for tlie pre-Christian character 
 of the messianic prophecy found in the songs of 
 Mary and Zacharias. If tlie sections as a whole were 
 invented by the later Christians in order to explain 
 the messianic formula of tlie Son of God, it is difficult 
 to see why tliese messianic descriptions, so admir- 
 ably expressing the religious conditions under which 
 they are said to have been given, should not have 
 been rewritten. This is true of much otlier Je\Aish 
 material, like the Apocalypses of Baruch and Fourth 
 Esdras, where Jewish material was appropriated by 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 131 
 
 the early church. On the other hand, the argument 
 that is sometimes so passionately urged that without 
 the infancy sections Jesus would be a bastard is faulty 
 in that it disregards the fact that if the sections 
 should be shown to be later additions of the Christian 
 church the entire story of his birth disappears. 
 
 The tendency of the more conservative modem 
 theologians is towards an apologetic position. 
 Whether or not the infancy stories shall survive the 
 test of criticism now in progress, the messianic per- 
 son of Jesus as it stands revealed in the entire New 
 Testament literature is unaffected. On all sides it is 
 agreed that the disciples accepted him as the Christ 
 without any knowledge of the Virgin Birth. Paulin- 
 ism radiates not from the manger but from the cross 
 and the tomb. If these sections should ever be re- 
 jected by theologians as a whole I cannot see that 
 there would be any vital change made in the evangeli- 
 cal message. The Nicaean formula, with its philoso- 
 phy of the two natures, would have to be replaced by 
 others which would utilize other concepts to express 
 the idea of the incarnation of the deity, but that is 
 already necessary in any case for those who have re- 
 jected the " essence" philosophy of the Greek schools. 
 It is not too much to say that already in modem the- 
 ology belief in the deityof Christ doesnot rise and fall 
 
132 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 with the historicity of the infancy sections. The 
 modem man who has found Jesus a Saviour can 
 await without apprehension the final decision of his- 
 torical criticism as to their origin and historical value. 
 In any case he has the Christ of Paul. 
 
 It should not be overlooked, however, that there is 
 a common element running through all four of these 
 explanations of the superhuman person of Jesus. 
 In them all he is said to be the embodiment and the 
 expression of God's Spirit. The Logos doctrine is 
 only an equivalent way of expressing this fact; the 
 Holy Spirit came upon him at his baptism ; his pre- 
 existent personality was anointed so that he was the 
 Christ; and that which was bom of Mary was said 
 to be due to the working of the Holy Spirit. And in 
 this common element of Christology the modem man 
 finds his approach to the philosophy of the person of 
 Jesus; for he recognizes in it the persistent element 
 which different Christologies have attempted to 
 express. He seeks in his own thought some equiva- 
 lent concept that shall make real and effective that 
 which the heart of humanity has already accepted as 
 final, namely, that God is in Christ reconciling the 
 world to Himself. 
 
 For he cannot fail to see that a divine person is 
 demanded to account for divine influence. While 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST I33 
 
 the modem man may well hesitate to attempt to rein- 
 troduce the Hellenistic discussions over the formulas 
 of the metaphysical deity of the incarnate Logos, 
 whoever recognizes the relationship of mind and 
 body knows that spiritual strength presupposes 
 something very close to that which the first masters 
 of theology called "substance" and "nature." 
 True, their philosophy and trichotomous psychology, 
 their distinctions between "essence" and "persons," 
 their theories of personality that made duality of 
 nature and will consistent with unity of person, have 
 passed ; but that which they intended to express the 
 religious man with historical intuition will feel is true. 
 The formula of Chalcedon itself in effect forbids a 
 too rigorous philosophy as to the way in which the 
 Logos and man became one Person in Jesus. Despite 
 all warnings humanity will make its adventurous 
 metaphysical definition of the Person who compels 
 such supreme valuations. Worth is obverse of 
 being. There must be energy in Jesus sufficient to 
 evoke his valuation as God. Shakespeare in the 
 world of poets was bom a Shakespeare capable of 
 winning the world's admiration as a supreme poet. 
 Jesus, the embodiment of a saving God, must have 
 been bom a potential Saviour. Although there are as 
 yet open questions concerning the historicity of the 
 
134 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 stories of the Virgin Birth, a man does not need to 
 withhold religious faith in Jesus until they are an- 
 swered. He stumbles as he tries to understand 
 some of the Pauline descriptions of a preexistent 
 Messiah not yet incarnate, and like Paul and the 
 makers of the original Nicene creed, he may be con- 
 tent with a simple formula of incarnation ; with his 
 growing perplexity over the relation of God and the 
 individual, of brain and thought, like the makers of 
 the Chalcedonian creed, he may hesitate to commit 
 himself to any psychological explanation of the per- 
 son of Jesus the Christ. But this he knows : morality 
 is ultimately an expression of the energies, the quality 
 of being. A divine salvation demands a divine 
 Saviour. If action and character are the outgrowth of 
 preceding and conditioning activities, he cannot stop 
 his search for the source of the experience of Jesus 
 with the baptism or with his filial words to Mary in the 
 temple. With the recollection of Jesus' own self- 
 estimate and of his triumphs over those temptations 
 to which humanity as humanity is liable, his knowl- 
 edge of physiological psychology with its insistence 
 upon the genetic development of personality forces 
 him back to the manger, there to find new meaning 
 in those words to Mary: "That which is bom shall 
 be called holy, the son of God." Whatever a man 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 135 
 
 may hold as to the Virgin Birth, in all reverence may 
 he say, that what the God-man Jesus was among 
 men, the unborn Jesus was among the unborn. 
 For the Spiritual Life of the Universe, that God 
 whom Jesus reveals, even in the mystery of his 
 conception must have touched humanity. 
 
 IV 
 
 Such an equivalency of the doctrinal interpreta- 
 tions of Jesus may meet with small response from 
 those who, preferring loyalty to undefinable terms, 
 cannot see judgments of value behind metaphysical 
 formulas, and prefer to let differences of terminology 
 obscure the common substance of faith. Still less 
 will it find acceptance from those who see in Jesus 
 only a hypersensitive, ecstatic temperament working 
 under the suggestion of a current eschatology, to 
 whom the first disciples attached their messianic 
 hopes. But Jesus' cautious use of the figures of the 
 apocalypses can serve as the basis of no such hy- 
 pothesis. Again we can trust the common sense of the 
 modem man. Ecstatics he knows, and alternating 
 personalities, but who is this child of a too-ingenious 
 religionsgeschichilichemethod and a pathological psy- 
 chology, who is also the example and savior of a world? 
 
 At all events, no man can deny that Jesus has been 
 
136 THE GOSPEL .\ND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 a Savior. To express that fact is the real purpose of 
 every Christology. All our philosophies and all our 
 shibboleths cannot obscure or add to this supreme 
 fact. Because of this, men whose response to him has 
 brought freedom and peace and moral power, avoid 
 calling him more than teacher or prophet only by 
 the over-cautious denial of the instinctive response of 
 their spiritual life to the Spiritual Life they find in 
 him. If Jesus has the value of God to the believer, 
 then either that judgment is unjustifiable or Jesus 
 actually possessed that which we may call deity. 
 And if so, then why should we hesitate to confess him 
 as divine and to trust him as divine and to expect 
 from him works worthy of a Son of God ? 
 
 In other words, just because of the messianic, that 
 is to say the redemptive, worth and accomplishment 
 of Jesus as seen in history and our own experience, 
 we find our faith precipitating itself in a Credo by 
 which we endeavor to make the Jesus of history 
 redemptively intelligible to the spiritual life of others. 
 We socialize our faith in words that at least symbolize 
 it in descriptions of his Person. Again, though in the 
 terminology of our modem world, we are at one with 
 the Christian of the past. For the church, the body 
 of believers, secretes its creeds as a li\ing organism 
 secretes its bony structure. To overstimulate the 
 
JESUS THE CHRIST 137 
 
 process may mean death, but to stop it means death 
 just as surely. The real office of formula is to help an 
 age make the experience of salvation intelligible and 
 consistently tenable. It is a social process in that it 
 presupposes community in preconceptions and social 
 experience. Thus it has been and must be with all 
 definitions of Jesus. Their real purpose is practical 
 efficiency. They have differed and must differ, 
 as the social mind itself has changed. But the spir- 
 itual content is the same. Authoritative Christology 
 has risen through the efforts of deeply religious men to 
 maintain scientifically or metaphysically both the God- 
 value and the man-value of Jesus. A social mind per- 
 meated with Greek thought debated as to the sonship 
 of the Logos before time began, tried to formulate 
 psychologically the relationship of the Logos to the 
 human Jesus, and then, deciding that there were in 
 Jesus two natures, queried if there were one will. 
 These were the questions which the ecumenical 
 councils attempted to answer in accordance with the 
 aid of a philosophy that has disappeared except as it 
 emerges in treatises on theology. Later centuries 
 saw in Christ still other reflections of their controlling 
 interests. To the Franks, as they went plundering 
 through Gaul, he was the God of War. To the mediae- 
 val lawyer, he was a feudal lord who gave church and 
 
IjS TfTK GOSPEL, AND TfTK IHIIKBH KAN 
 
 state in fieL TomedsEvalsdiooImeiihewasa God 
 wiio became incamafe to pay by his deadi the infi^ 
 nite debt due him by fiiiite men. Among lefonnexs 
 he was flie judge and the savior of those who trusted 
 him. To men of to-day he is the immanent Spiritual 
 Life of God focalized in a human pasraiality. 
 
 Foxtimatd^ a man does niA need to be evangdically 
 oifliodoxinoideTtobeevangdicaL Tho^ ismany 
 an honest sool \sbo would not agree with my ctHidn- 
 sions who would rival my peisonal kyalty^ to Jesus the 
 Savioar. In idigion, as in other phases of life, drfini- 
 tioiB are limitations in proportion as they are bdieved 
 to be more Aan symbolic. Hie modem man is prop- 
 erfy inqntient cl thecdogical shibbcdedis, as to ndiat 
 we bdieveodottf Jesus. For faith is not a dining of 
 him in terms ol being; it e die actoalfy making of 
 him, as he stands in the New Testament and later 
 human experiodce, a woddog, oontndling dement in 
 God-ward and man-ward self-eipressian. Faith 
 precedes our attempts to justify its reasonaMeness. 
 Its evidence is in e^ierienoe, not m creedal subscrip- 
 tion. And back of the kalekloGaqpe ctf creeds is the 
 persistent experiooce of a r^enoatm^ spiritual rec- 
 ondliatkin with God mediated by the Jesus who the 
 Christian community bdieves not only was but is 
 die redenq>tive revdatitm fii tbs immanent God. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 
 
 The Christ must be a deliverer. But he can 
 only deliver as mankind is convinced that God 
 is like him — Love. 
 
 "Deliver us from evil." So Jesus taught his 
 disciples to pray, and the petition is the same if 
 we translate the Greek "Deliver us from the Evil 
 One." For in the mind of the early Christians 
 evil was the work of Satan. Deliverance from his 
 kingdom is coordinate throughout the teaching of 
 Jesus and his apostles with deliverance from sin 
 and death. 
 
 Just why physical evil is in the world humanity 
 has never been quite able to discover. It is true 
 that men of all ages have endeavored to extricate 
 some sweetness from the bitter by an exposition 
 of the educational value of suffering, and of all that 
 misery which comes upon humanity from the physi- 
 cal universe. The Hebrew prophet thought of 
 labor itself as a curse which God brought upon men 
 139 
 
140 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 because of sin, but even the Hebrews in the course 
 of time came to see the blessing which comes to 
 humanity from labor. Later philosophers have also 
 taught us in the spirit of Brownmg to 
 
 " Welcome each rebuff 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough ; 
 Each sting that bids not sit nor stand but go! " 
 
 But such philosophy even at its best has never 
 quite satisfied us. Despite it there has always re- 
 mained a haunting fear of a relentless nature, 
 and from this fear has sprung that cry for help 
 which is the very soul of religion itself. Human- 
 ity is at one in the confession that in itself it is 
 physically impotent in the presence of a universe 
 that threatens at any moment to crush it. It may 
 know itself superior to that universe, but such knowl- 
 edge does not exclude suffering. We cannot find 
 deliverance from impersonal force in anything im- 
 personal. It can be ours only as we live in a 
 spiritual order over which impersonal forces have 
 no control. 
 
 I 
 
 I. It is from this point of view that one must 
 come to that element of the gospel message that 
 seems so remote to our age, — the deliverance from 
 Satan. 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW I4I 
 
 The belief in Satan is one of the sturdiest at- 
 tempts ever made by human reason to solve the 
 great enigma as to how there can be a good God 
 at the head of things and yet there be suffering 
 throughout His world. Ancient religion, whether 
 you find it in the uplands of Persia, the plains of 
 Mesopotamia, the hills of Athens, the valley of 
 Egypt, or the mountains of Judea, was dualistic. 
 Either the gods themselves were subject to some 
 implacable Fate or there were two gods, the good 
 God and the bad God, Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, 
 Jehovah and Satan. The explanation was satis- 
 factory for practical purposes. The good God was 
 struggling with the bad God and would ultimately 
 conquer him. But the good God was not in the 
 world and the evil God was. The Jew and the 
 early Christian believed that the prince of this 
 world was Satan. He was to be judged, it is true, 
 and his kingdom was to be overthrown and he 
 himself was to be cast into the lake of fire; but in 
 the present evil age he was, in the wisdom and in- 
 scrutable providence of Jehovah, bringing misery. 
 When he was conquered all those who were the 
 loyal subjects of Jehovah would be delivered; but 
 not till then. That was to be the beginning of the 
 messianic bliss. 
 
142 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Neither Persian nor Jew sohed the problem which 
 this explanation left unanswered, why such a rule of 
 Satan could be permitted by the good God. It was 
 enough for them to belie\-e that it was, and that 
 some day in the dim, glorious future it would be 
 understood and all evil recompensed. It was this 
 \^•hich called forth the sublimest heroism of the 
 Hebrew prophets. They felt the misery of national 
 collapse. They saw the chosen people of Jehovah 
 oppressed rather than supreme; they saw them- 
 selves the martyrs of the very people whom they 
 would serve. Yet they disdained pessimism. The 
 nation's suffering was vicarious; the servant of 
 Jehovah was to heal others with his stripes, and in 
 this faith they awaited the day when such deliver- 
 ance as Jehovah might establish should appear. 
 
 .And it was an even greater deliverance the gospel 
 foretold for all who followed Jesus' way. 
 
 2. The problem of evil has been intensified rather 
 than lessened by the growing conviction that God 
 is immanent, for, if he be immanent, he is certain 
 to be held responsible for the constitution of things 
 as they are. The sad complex of sorrow and suffer- 
 ing to which humanity is exposed has not only been 
 permitted by him but in some way seems due to him. 
 We are not content, for instance, to lay disease to 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 43 
 
 devils. We see that it is the outcome of biological 
 and chemical forces which are a part of the universe 
 itself. And although few men are philosophers 
 enough to understand Von Hartmann's view that 
 the will of the Deity, in some dark way, sundered 
 itself from the divine reason and thus made a world 
 of misery, the tragic query of our day is, Can the 
 God of Law be the God of Love ? 
 
 II 
 
 I. Possibly it might appear that a question 
 prior to this might be. Can there be any God at all ? 
 Materialism as represented by Haeckel would 
 answer this with an emphatic negative. The uni- 
 verse, indeed, is intelligible, but not personal. It 
 has its two cosmic laws, constancy of matter and 
 constancy of force, but there is no such thing as 
 spirit either in man or in the universe. 
 
 When such a view is set forth with a wealth of 
 learning it is no easy task to attempt its refutation; 
 and it is becoming generally admitted that a dem- 
 onstration of the existence of God lies outside the 
 region of pure metaphysics. Since the day of Kant 
 our philosophy has been forced to admit that ulti- 
 mate conceptions must be self-validating. It is in 
 the realm of practical reason, as Kant would say, 
 
144 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 or, as we now prefer to say, in the spiritual order 
 where values are timeless, that religion finds its 
 real support. If we cannot metaphysically prove 
 the existence of God, we can show that it is reason- 
 able and helpful to believe in Him. Only in Him 
 do we find the explanation of our own spiritual life 
 that finds coherence and unity above time and 
 change in the unrelated phenomena and the relent- 
 less contradictions of impersonal nature. If there 
 were more ultimate realities than God we should 
 be able to demonstrate His existence. So much at 
 least can be said for a pluralistic universe ! But 
 as long as He Himself is ultimate we are estopped 
 treating Him as less than ultimate. We can believe 
 in Him only as we yield to the overwhelming sense 
 of our need of Him, and to the spiritual life with its 
 persistence of values that imply Him. Naturalism 
 in all its forms gets its strength in the region of the 
 intellect. Religion finds its seat in the spiritual 
 region where we admit not only that a thing is, but 
 that it is of practical value to us in helping us to a 
 unity of self-expression and purpose. 
 
 Nor are we shut out from legitimate arguments 
 of another sort. Even materialism would hardly 
 deny that there are relations between the various 
 activities of the vmiverse which are strikingly 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 45 
 
 analogous to those which in human life imply pur- 
 pose. There are those, it is true, who would insist 
 that this is due to projection of our own experience 
 into the physical universe and that there are changes 
 but no goal. But the general drift of the evolution- 
 ary thought is steadily along the line which makes 
 ever easier interpretation of the universe in terms 
 of spiritual teleology. And in the same proportion 
 as purpose appears in the world are we justified in 
 attributing that pmrpose to a resident Soul. At 
 the very least the universe is such that it is suscep- 
 tible to such interpretation as our own experience 
 suggests; and it is axiomatic that the ultimate in- 
 terpretation of the universe must include those 
 activities which in ourselves we call personal. A 
 universe that contains or — for the sake of argument 
 — has produced thought and feeling and will can- 
 not itself be said to give the lie to a belief in a cosmic 
 Person working within our own external world, not 
 reaching over into our universe and doing things 
 from without. 
 
 But materialism is by no means the source of the 
 only opposition to this primary conception of the 
 gospel that the God of Law is the God of Love. 
 Agnosticism is a far more elusive and potent enemy, 
 for it belongs to that dark region in which ignorance 
 
146 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 and knowledge so offset each other as to leave the 
 mind in equipoise, or, what is more unfortunate, 
 indifferent. Here, too, the really corrective argu- 
 ment lies in the region of the practical quality of 
 faith. For no man can quite rid himself of that 
 irrepressible faculty. As Bishop Blougram argues : 
 
 "All we have gained by one unbelief 
 [s a life of doubt diversified by faith, 
 For one of faith diversified by doubt: 
 We caUed the chessboard white, — we call it black. 
 
 Belief 
 
 As unbelief before, shakes us by fits, 
 Confounds us like its predecessor." 
 
 Nothing could be truer, for, even granting that the 
 metaphysical arguments for the existence of God 
 equally balance, — a concession which I am very 
 far from being ready to make — it still follows that 
 a life working imder a belief in God is, despite its 
 moments of agonizing doubt, vastly more effective, 
 constructive, peaceful, and healthy, than a life of 
 negation which is tortured by moments of faith. 
 
 2. Yet, after all, the question as to the existence 
 of God is one with which the gospel is not pri- 
 marily concerned. It assumes His existence. It 
 never endeavors to persuade men that He is. It 
 rather would convince them that this God, the very 
 God of the cosmos, is one whose fundamental char- 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW I 47 
 
 acter is love, whose closest earthly analogy is pa- 
 rental. He is not Process, He is not God-idea. He 
 is Father. 
 
 But if he be a Father, how can there be misery and 
 suffering and all the other brood of evil? It is no 
 less a Christian than Augustine who cries, "What 
 flood of eloquence would ever suffice to portray the 
 tribulations of this life, to describe its wretchedness, 
 which is, as it were, a kind of hell in our present 
 existence?" 
 
 (i) A question like this which reaches down into 
 the very depths of existence is not to be answered by 
 a denial of the reality of the very conditions that 
 set the problem. That is as confusing as it is naive. 
 Since Schopenhauer there have been those who 
 have attempted to cut the Gordian knot of philoso- 
 phy by regarding the phenominal world as illusion. 
 Such attempts are not always avowedly anti-Chris- 
 tian. In the case of a system like that of Mrs. 
 Eddy, an attempt is made to justify such illusion 
 from the Bible itself. The fundamental premise 
 of the gospel that God is Love is forced to give a 
 conclusion which contradicts the generic experience 
 and convictions of the race. Since God is Love no 
 misery can be a reality. It is the creation of the 
 "mortal mind." If one can down this "mortal 
 
148 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 mind" by an insistence upon the thought that God 
 who is All is Love, misery will cease to exist. Therein 
 lies emancipation ! 
 
 There can be no doubt that psychologically it is 
 possible to produce nervous reaction by the use of 
 such a powerful suggestion as the evangelic view of 
 God. Certain classes of cures wrought by Christian 
 Science are too numerous to be denied. But men 
 still die and earthquakes still ruin cities, and fires 
 still lick up forests. The student of neurology in 
 any case would be slow to admit that the effect 
 produced by a suggestion of necessity guarantees 
 the truth of the suggestion itself. How much less 
 the philosophy from which the suggestion springs! 
 That must be established by comparing it with the 
 other things which we know. Why there should 
 be a mortal mind capable of producing these delu- 
 sions of evil is just as perplexing as the existence of 
 Satan. 
 
 (2) God can be regarded as Father only as He 
 is seen to deliver men from a real world of evil. 
 This deliverance, too, must not be something over 
 against the world of law. In some way it must 
 be correlated with process. Else there are two 
 Gods: the God of nature and the God of grace. 
 So the ancient Gnostics thought, and so must 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 49 
 
 we think, unless that deliverance from evil which 
 alone can make reasonable the Fatherliness of 
 God is seen to be a part of a cosmic order in 
 which there is room for both suffering and love. 
 That is to say, we must see that deliverance of 
 personalities is the final aim of the very cosmos 
 that makes suffering inevitable. 
 
 (3) The only genuinely Christian conception of 
 deliverance from physical evil is that set by Jesus 
 himself, viz. a spiritual life resting on the faith that 
 there are greater values in the universe than those 
 of chemistry and physics. Jesus himself was far- 
 thest possible from denying the existence of evil 
 from which God would deliver us. The age was 
 indeed evil and would make his disciples its victims 
 as surely as it made him. He practiced no auto- 
 suggestion in order to make Gethsemane an illusion. 
 The despair of the cross was as real as the cross it- 
 self. There is too much at stake in the moral realm 
 to risk training oneself to believe that non-existent 
 the reality of which is witnessed by the totality of 
 human experience. If the universe is not as satis- 
 factory as we should like to have it, it is the only 
 universe we have. To lose the capacity to face its 
 mysteries with level eyes, is too high a price to pay 
 for regaining one's health. 
 
150 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 3. The man who is in sympathy with the real 
 science of the day will not ask that the universe be 
 changed in order that he may escape sorrow; or 
 that the nature from which sin springs shall be 
 annihilated in order that he may be holy; or that 
 death, which seems so integral a part of life, shall 
 be abolished in order that he may preserve that 
 individuality which is a man's greatest treasure; 
 or that the forces of social evolution shall be changed 
 in order that there may be established a society that 
 shall be a fraternity. He knows that such demands 
 involve the very structure of the universe in which 
 he lives. The deliverance which he seeks is deliv- 
 erance in accordance with the world of law, a freedom 
 of soul that is born of spiritual growth and mastery. 
 The modern man in his desire to be saved can only 
 ask God to enable him, by faith and insight and 
 divine assistance, to rise superior to the impersonal 
 elements of the universe, to ally himself redemp- 
 tively with the onward rush of that imiverse as it 
 embodies the will of immanent Love. 
 
 And he has abundant grounds to welcome the 
 evangelic message of hope as yet unfulfilled. That, 
 in the great process due to the operation of God's 
 will which the ancient world described in terms of 
 eschatology and the modern man expresses in 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 15I 
 
 terms of evolution, there is something more than a 
 blind succession of changes — that is the quintessence 
 of the Christian view of the universe. Sorrow is 
 the shadow of joy. ' The slow emergence of per- 
 sonality from the husk of nature ; the steady growth 
 of the individual as he gains new spiritual rights as 
 over against physical forces; the sure, if sometimes 
 woefully slow, transformation of the social body by 
 the principles which have given worth to the indi- 
 vidual; divine discontent with things as they are 
 and persistent effort to make things as they should 
 be; all these elementary facts of social history ar- 
 gue the reasonableness of the faith in the reality of 
 the good God of Jesus. If in view of the darker 
 facts of life a Christian cannot be a thoroughgoing 
 optimist, he has every reason for being a meliorist. 
 He no longer fears the God of Law, for he not only 
 believes that the evils which spring from nature 
 are the inseparable concomitants of a process 
 toward the better that proclaims the Father, — that 
 as there could be no Better without a Worse, so 
 there is no Worse without a Better, — but he also 
 believes that he can himself, as a spiritual person 
 strengthened and inspired by God, rise above the 
 natural order in which change and suffering are 
 implicit, into the freedom of the sons of God; into 
 
152 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN^ M,\N 
 
 an eternal, not a temporal, order of existence ; out from 
 the kingdom of Nature into the kingdom of God. 
 
 In such an assurance, the modem man finds science 
 an ally. Our physiologists and psychologists are 
 already preaching something of the same gospel. 
 Fear rather than intellectual doubt is the great 
 enemy of humanity in their teaching as truly as in 
 the teaching of Jesus. If faith in God revealed and 
 interpreted by Jesus delivers us from the fear of 
 those forces which seem so heartless, it is only 
 corroboration when our physiological psychologists 
 tell us that fear is a breeder of disease and that 
 cheerfulness is the source of health. 
 
 Further, both the gospel and the scientific disser- 
 tation alike emphasize the supreme worth of per- 
 sonality. To both alike the significance of a man 
 lies not in what he is but in what he is becoming. 
 Treatises on economics are hardly more than a 
 cormnentary on the teaching of Jesus that a man 
 can afford to give everything in exchange for his 
 own life. Anthropology and the science of edu- 
 cation point unwaveringly to the evolution of the 
 free personality. Civilization might almost be 
 described as society's constant lengthening of the 
 chains which bind spiritual personality so closely 
 to physical nature. 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 53 
 
 To know the truth is indeed to be free. The 
 very discontent and struggle which the gospel causes; 
 the very difficulties which beset the man who at- 
 tempts to shape his life on the belief that love rather 
 than force is supreme, are testimonies to the worth 
 of the teaching. For, strange as it seems, such 
 struggles bring peace and health and joy. To 
 trust is to grow strong. To fear is to grow weak. 
 To estimate the outer world as good and yet not the 
 supreme good; to judge personality superior to the 
 forces of nature; to dare lose one's life in order 
 to save one's life, all this is as reasonable as its pur- 
 suit is heroic. 
 
 " Resolve to be thyseK; and know that he 
 Who finds himself, loses his miseiyl " 
 
 is the call of a greater than Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I. Yet, unless I mistake, it is here that the gospel 
 meets its most intense enemy. There is no middle 
 ground for an earnest man to take. If he has come to 
 distrust the essential gospel of the spiritual life, he 
 must become a neutral, unsjmipathetic observer of the 
 world, or a pessimist, the terrified slave of physical 
 nature. Nature and life themselves become evils. 
 Von Hartmann, it is true, is not popular in America, 
 
154 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 but the pessimism which he rationahzed is by no 
 means foreign to our experience. "The future 
 religion," he says in substance, "will be one whose 
 substance is the renimciation of all life in the wholly 
 blank and vague and limitless immensity which 
 knows nothing of itself and which is so aberrant 
 from its fimdamental condition as to produce, 
 contrary to its inherent nature, conscious beings who 
 must suffer and wail, and agonize as long as they 
 are conscious." Could words be in more complete 
 contrast to the evangelic proclamation as to the 
 goodness and love of God? Yet, stripped of the 
 peculiar philosophy which lies back of it, the pes- 
 simism of von Hartmann and of Schopenhauer 
 before him, is shared by many a soul who looks out 
 upon the catastrophies in nature and the inequali- 
 ties of our social life; who knows in his own ex- 
 perience the bitterness of sorrow, and who has found 
 in every action results incommensurate with effort. 
 Omar's distaste for the moral order as well as 
 his sense of the awfulness of the non-moral evils 
 of the world color much of our modern thinking. 
 
 " Ah Love! could you and I with. Him conspire 
 To grasp the sorry Scheme of things entire, 
 Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
 Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire? " 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 55 
 
 Pessimism springs not only from a disbelief in a 
 good God; it springs quite as truly from a disbelief 
 in the spiritual worth of man. The two are in- 
 separable. Whoever distrusts God distrusts man ; 
 and whoever distrusts man, unless he be inspired by 
 the faith of the gospel, comes to distrust God. The 
 outcome of such distrust, whether it be of God 
 or of man, may not immediately disclose itself, but 
 if the literature which unblushingly discloses the 
 nakedness of so much of our modern world is any 
 criterion, such results are sure to emerge. 
 
 What man of us, looking out into the confused 
 social order which we have inherited and which we 
 strive often so desperately to better does not at 
 times cry out with that poet we once thought might 
 become a prophet: — 
 
 ..." on, but on does the old earth steer 
 
 As if her port she knew. 
 
 God, dear God! Does she know her port. 
 
 Though she goes so far about? 
 
 Or blind astray, does she make her sport 
 
 To brazen and chance it out? 
 
 I watched when her captains passed: 
 
 She were better captainless. 
 
 Men in the cabins, before the mast. 
 
 But some were reckless and some aghast, 
 
 And some sat gorged at mess." 
 
156 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Sometime or other the most hopeful of us suffer 
 moments of pessimism, and some few, the specific 
 gravity of whose souls has been determined by the 
 exclusion of all the brighter and more hopeful ele- 
 ments furnished by Christian faith, sink to its 
 depths. Suicide itself seems a way to good. "The 
 door stands open!" "Death," says Hauptmann, 
 in the person of Michael Kramer, " is the mildest 
 form of life. The activities of the great world are 
 the shudderings of fever." And who can ever 
 forget the gathering despair of Rosmersholm with 
 the mad rush of the unhappy man and woman to 
 seek death in the mill stream? 
 
 2. Nor is the case bettered when the man who 
 has abandoned faith in God passes from pessimism 
 to an alleged superiority to morality. Von Hart- 
 mann declares that he freed himself from his Welt- 
 schmerz — that luxurious sort of pessimism of which 
 Germans alone seem capable — by writing about 
 it. Thereafter he enjoyed the undisturbed serenity 
 of the philosopher who lives in the world of thought, 
 absorbed in observation even of his own pain, and 
 expecting that men would escape from the illusion 
 of hope only in a far distant future. Nietzsche, too, 
 though fundamentally a preacher of what he re- 
 gards as a better day to dawn when conventional 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW I57 
 
 Christian ethics are replaced by a life wholly sub- 
 ordinate to the Will to Power, refused to admit the 
 truth of either optimism or pessimism. To espouse 
 either he declares would be to make oneself a de- 
 fender or a critic of the God of the theologians — • 
 for which class of thinkers, it hardly needs to be 
 added, Nietzsche has little use. 
 
 But how far is such indifference preferable to 
 that despair that can see pain rather than happiness 
 as the outcome of the world-process? Under the 
 atrophying influence of both, many a modern man 
 has lost hope in himself, in his universe, and in his 
 God. An attitude of soul which deadens all idealism 
 is the chief ally of popular materialism. Pessimism 
 has ceased to be an academic speculation and has 
 spread into life. And there the gospel must meet it, 
 conquer it, and replace it by trust in the Father of 
 Jesus. God the Creator can be vindicated when He 
 is seen to be God the Saviour. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is here we need that aspect of the work of a 
 redeeming God the church has embodied in its 
 doctrine of the atonement. The bearing of Jesus' 
 death upon our assurance of the forgiveness of sin 
 we shall notice later, but that death has here an 
 
158 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 equal meaning. It has come down to us across the 
 centuries, not mere dogma, but a formula of courage 
 and of optimism. The victory of this gentle life 
 over the forces of evil and of animal decay was 
 not accomplished from without, but from within. 
 His was the triumph of the spiritual life. Jesus 
 conquered the doubt and distrust and sorrow upon 
 which the pessimist seizes. And if ever a man had 
 justification for pessimism it was he. 
 
 It is a bitter thing to be defeated in the conflict 
 for personal advantage. Among the most pitiful 
 sights of life is the man who once succeeded, but 
 who now has failed. To meet such a one whom 
 you have Imown in former years in all the strength 
 of authority born of position and of wealth, and find 
 him now submerged in the consciousness of defeat, 
 is to enter into one of the tragedies of this strange 
 maelstrom we call civilization. But there is a de- 
 feat more bitter than that of the man who has suf- 
 fered defeat in his struggle for wealth, or fame, or 
 control over human lives. It is the defeat that over- 
 takes a man because he has put self aside and has 
 striven to help others; who has dared believe hu- 
 manity something better than it turned out to be; 
 and has striven to make men realize their own 
 spiritual possibilities. For such a life to find itself 
 
THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 59 
 
 rejected, misinterpreted, abused, betrayed, con- 
 demned as criminal, is to strain faith to the utmost. 
 And Jesus bore all this and more. For in one black 
 moment on the cross he shared also in that despair 
 which those feel who, seeing hope and friends for- 
 sake them, think God Himself unfaithful. 
 
 The gospel in teaching that God is love not only 
 faces this tragic aspect of life, but it makes it the 
 basis of the boldest hope the human mind has ever 
 reached. There have been men who have thought 
 the God of Law is the God of Love because they 
 were fortunate. But the gospel dares believe God 
 is love because Jesus was defeated. To it the 
 miseries of the Christian life are but the darker side 
 of the true life process. It insists that it is wiser to 
 act on the conviction that love is the divine life 
 and bear the consequent buffetings of outrageous 
 fortune, than to sacrifice that faith to immediate 
 success. The faith of Jesus grows contagious. We 
 also dare make the adventure of such trust in God. 
 
 But Jesus is here not merely example and influ- 
 ence. He is revelation. The dead Christ was the 
 risen Christ, set forth by God to faith, in his very 
 blood, as evidence that the God who forgives the 
 sinner is the same God who punishes sin. To the 
 man who believes in Jesus, the God of Law is more 
 
l6o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 readily seen to be the God of Love. The dead Christ 
 lives. That is the seal of the evangehc conviction 
 that the God of Law is the God of Love ; for in his 
 triumph are revealed the possibilities of humanity's 
 triumph as well. That is the truth which the Greek 
 fathers saw so clearly. The self which, simply be- 
 cause it is human, must inherit the miseries born of 
 chemical, physical, and social forces, can also, if 
 only like Jesus it be spiritually at one with the 
 God of things as they are to be, rise with Jesus 
 to the trust and courage and freedom which are the 
 inheritance of the sons of God. Who can separate 
 His sons from the love of God ? They have, with 
 Jesus, found their true life where Nature, red of 
 tooth and claw, can never reach them. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 
 
 Sm proposes a metaphysical problem of no small 
 difiBculty. Approach it as one may it refuses to di- 
 vulge its real nature or quite to explain its existence 
 in a God-ruled universe. None the less, sin, like 
 its fellow-mystery, life, is no stranger to the modern 
 man. A sense of its terrible power is another 
 prompting to that cry for help which is the heart of 
 all healthy religion. To minimize sin is to give the 
 lie to the most ordinary experience of life. We do 
 not need to define it in order to recognize it; we 
 do not need to know its origin in order to pray for 
 deliverance from its power. 
 
 I 
 
 I. Sin to Jesus was a terrible reality, not a mere 
 negation. He had no quarrel with ceremonials. 
 He came not to destroy the law, and with true con- 
 structive spirit he cautioned his followers from a 
 revolutionary break with their national religion. 
 But he was a deadly enemy of that tendency only 
 
 M l6l 
 
1 62 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 too common among Pharisaical teachers of all ages 
 to narrow sin to illegality. From the point of view 
 of the Pharisees Jesus was hopeless. He shattered 
 by word and precept all that carefully developed 
 exposition of statutory righteousness which was the 
 glory of the schools. His violation of the Sabbath 
 regulations of the rabbis was constant and open. 
 He scorned that minute conscientiousness which 
 could tithe mint and annis and cummin and make 
 ceremonial hand-washing before meals a matter of 
 supreme religious importance. He rejected fasting 
 as an offset for wrongdoing. Instead of the exces- 
 sive religiosity and minute punctiliousness of formal 
 ethics he emphasized those states and acts which the 
 morality of Pharisaism did not deny but neglected. 
 He laid down as a fundamental principle that it is 
 the life which acts and the life which is bad or good. 
 Text-books of morality have time and again listed 
 deeds which are wrong in themselves. Jesus goes 
 deeper. With him righteousness is not statutory 
 but hygienic. A man may become so thoroughly 
 degenerate as to be morally hopeless; he may get 
 into the grip of an eternal sin and reach the place 
 where he mistakes God's acts for those of Satan, 
 goodness for badness. For a personality so de- 
 generate forgiveness is impossible. 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 163 
 
 Any attempt at definition which seeks to present 
 Jesus' thought of sin falls short of what we instinc- 
 tively feel is his real estimate. One might as well try to 
 define life and death. If we say that his idea of sin is 
 that of conduct not controlled by love, we are not far 
 from the truth, for sin with Jesus is essentially anti- 
 social ; but such a formula seems too atomistic and 
 ineffective compared with his own vital analysis. We 
 might say that he teacher that sin is a quality of the 
 soul which leads to acts which benefit oneself at the 
 cost of somebody else ; that also is true, but it stirs 
 a response which is hardly more self-condemnatory 
 than that roused by the words of Epictetus. We 
 might say that sin with Jesus is that state of the soul 
 which expresses itself in acts which are injurious to 
 personality, his or another's, and indicate that a man 
 is imlike and hostile to a fatherly God. And here in 
 the religious field we come closest to Jesus' thought. 
 Out from such a soul there stream individual and 
 social ill — impurity and selfishness, anger and re- 
 venge, insincerity and pride. These are no abstract 
 qualities. Each one of them is the expression of per- 
 verted life. Any one of them sets a man against not 
 only his fellows but against his God. They all deny 
 that the Spiritual Life whose center is Love is the 
 supreme force in the universe. Therefore it was not 
 
164 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 merely because a man caused suffering to others that 
 Jesus so passionately warned men against that which 
 the moral sentiment abhors. With him sin not only 
 resulted in injury to others; by its very nature it 
 put the man himself out of sympathy with, nay in 
 opposition to, God. And this opposition, Hke all 
 anarchy and rebellion, he knew must bring suffering. 
 2. Paul expresses this thought more elaborately. 
 He sees in a man two warring forces, the spirit and the 
 flesh — the inner man and the outer man. By this 
 he does not mean to oppose a man's body to his soul, 
 for Paul never would have insisted that the bodily 
 impulses were wrong in themselves. He did not 
 agree with those philosophers of his day who beUeved 
 that matter was inherently bad. What he really 
 means by flesh is those impulses which we share with 
 the beasts. In themselves they are neither good nor 
 bad. They constantly prompt to action, but it is 
 only as they are made supreme or as they are mis- 
 used that they become sinful. All of them the 
 Christian ought to make thoroughly secondary and 
 to use legitimately. Sensuahty, the desire to suc- 
 ceed at the cost of other people, quarrelsomeness, 
 perverted religious instincts — all these are bad, 
 because they are the persuasions of animal im- 
 pulses and are contrary to and tend to enslave a 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 65 
 
 man's spiritual nature and make him less like 
 God. That, according to Paul, is exactly the situ- 
 ation of the unforgiven man. He has yielded to 
 the backward pull. The spirit which is in the 
 image of God, in that it can love and sacrifice 
 and hope and believe and serve, has prostituted 
 itself to the lower self, which hates and lusts and 
 lies and fights like the beasts. Personality itself is 
 injured. And such subjection, unless it be broken, 
 culminates in the experience of what was to Paul 
 the summary of terror, "the wrath of God." 
 
 3. The modern man with a belief in evolution 
 that is something more than purposeless genetic 
 change cannot do better than to close with this con- 
 ception of sin. For sin, in that it leads to unlikeness 
 with the God of Love, emerges clearly enough ia the 
 struggle of a lower self to get control of the spiritual 
 personality which would be loving like God. It is the 
 backward pull that makes Godlikeness so difficult. 
 The watchword of the lower self is life at the expense 
 of others ; the watchword of the higher self is life in 
 service for others. The struggle between those two 
 lives is the meaning of the contrast between the two 
 Ages, and is concretely expressed in that experience of 
 Jesus known as the Temptation. Cast in the form 
 of dramatic dialogue it is really an exposition of 
 
1 66 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 that typical moral struggle which, present in every 
 man, reached its highest expression in Jesus. He 
 alone among all men perfectly represented the Spirit- 
 ual Life, but like every other man he felt the struggle 
 of that lower self which comes over from the centuries 
 of development, and would check the growth of that 
 higher self which is farthest from the animal and 
 nearest to God. There was no harm in being hun- 
 gry, but when hunger would direct messianic power 
 it was temptation. There was no sin in seeking to 
 win a world ; it became temptation to sin only when 
 selfish ambition made messianic power its subject. 
 There was no sin in that faith which could trust God 
 to bear one up if one leaped from the roof of the 
 portico; it was temptation to sin only when an 
 irrational faith would tempt divine love. 
 
 Temptation comes, as we have said, when an im- 
 perfect good of the past surviving in oneself would 
 set up ideals for a growing spiritual life. In their 
 origin such survivals may be neither good nor evil. 
 In a true sense they lie outside the moral sphere. 
 Sin appears only when personality is violated or pros- 
 tituted to the service of that which is less personal or 
 impersonal. Only as they serve to subject better, 
 that is, the more Godlike elements of man's being, are 
 physical impulses an occasion of sin. By making 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 67 
 
 such survivals paramount man transforms this non- 
 moral tendency into sin just as he makes originally 
 harmless germs pathogenic. He perverts person- 
 ality itself by destroying the perspective of its 
 values. 
 
 Those impulses, complete obedience to which is 
 sinfulness, and a voluntary action in accordance with 
 which as supreme is a sin, will be found to be ex- 
 pressions of the two great elements of life — the im- 
 pulse to perpetuate itself in descendants and the 
 impulse to preserve itself from destruction. True, in 
 such elemental impulses lies in no small way the ex- 
 planation of the progress through which life on this 
 globe has passed. As we look back over the past we 
 cannot regret the existence of the impulses to propa- 
 gate and to preserve life. Without the first, living 
 beings would have long since perished from the earth. 
 Without the second, some weak organism or some 
 social institution ill adapted to progress might have 
 determined the course of evolution. But out from 
 the first impulse, if only it be made supreme in a man, 
 springs sensuality with its attendant vices; and out 
 from the second, if it be treated as supreme, springs 
 human selfishness and that mad competition which 
 results not in the survival of the spiritually fittest, 
 but in the pitiless victory of the strongest. To make 
 
1 68 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 either of these two exclusively vital impulses domi- 
 nant in conduct is to reduce life to the standard 
 of the animal. To make any of their more primitive 
 social expressions dominant is to revert to savagery- 
 A sin as distinct from sin may be described as volun- 
 tary action opposed to the divine purpose as seen in 
 the steady progress of life up from the vegetable into 
 the animal and so out into the social and ever more 
 personal realm. Its content is selfishness. To com- 
 mit it is to set oneself against a cosmic God. The 
 grosser sins are, of course, evidently cases of voluntary 
 reversions to lower types. A man who is a hypocrite 
 is voluntarily following the instinct to deceive others 
 in the interest of benefiting himself, and is exalting 
 an impulse which, however necessary for the animal, 
 is utterly out of place in a man who must live with his 
 fellows. Nor are other illustrations hard to find. 
 Is not the thief reproducing in himself qualities of the 
 animal who prowls by night ? Is not the man who 
 sinks his individual responsibility for wrongdoing in 
 corporations like a wolf that runs with the pack? 
 Did not Paul rightly characterize the desire of the 
 Corinthian Christians to quarrel and form rival theo- 
 logical parties as "carnal"? 
 
 The more refined sin becomes the greater may be its 
 danger. The world abounds in thieves, liars, and 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 169 
 
 adulterers, but it is not clear that they are the worst 
 sort of sinners. As civilization develops sin grows 
 corporate. We sin socially by violating social rather 
 than individualistic personal relations. Individually 
 a sinner may be kindly and pure and honest. There 
 is many a theater manager growing rich by pander- 
 ing to sexual excitement who is a faithful husband. 
 There is many a gambler who is never charged with 
 cheating. There are many directors and stockholders 
 of corporations who are exemplary in their indi- 
 vidual relations, but who in their corporate capacity 
 do not hesitate to connive at efforts to bribe legisla- 
 tures, adulterate foods, unscrupulously crush out 
 competitors, destroy family life by subsidizing 
 saloons, corrupt public opinion by distorting news, 
 induce unsuspecting investors to buy worthless 
 stock, crush out the lives of children in factories, 
 and underpay women employees in their stores. 
 Such men — and some women — are tempted to 
 protect themselves by retreating behind the theory 
 that such matters belong to the realm of business 
 rather than to that of ethics. But they cannot 
 thereby escape. The God who is working in human 
 society will not be deceived by charters, or bought 
 off by dividends. 
 4. Here we face three alarming facts : Whatever 
 
170 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 theory as to the origin of sin we may accept, the great 
 fact cannot be overlooked that, just because as human 
 beings we are a mass of recapitulated impulses and 
 social habits, we advance with effort, we degenerate 
 with ease. Here we face not a mere aggregation of 
 sinful acts, but a common tendency innate in our 
 very humanity, the "original" sin of the Latin 
 fathers. As far back as we can trace it — and Paul 
 acutely traced it to Adam — we find this ease of re- 
 version generically in the race. Nay, it increases 
 as habits grow socialized. We may call it bias, 
 we may split metaphysical hairs as to our responsibil- 
 ity for it, but the fact remains. We may endeavor to 
 gloss it over by some contradictions between deter- 
 minism and free-will ; we may cry out against it most 
 bitterly; but the fact of inherited tendencies that 
 make easy the reversion to a lower type both in indi- 
 vidual and society refutes all our denials. Sin is thus 
 more than individual wrongdoing. It involves that 
 progress in the social person of which we now make 
 so much. Once slavery was progress. Now it is 
 sinful. Once concubinage was legal. Now, in 
 Christian states, it is illegal. To revert to either — or 
 many another practice justified by a distant or even a 
 recent past — would be a sin. Yet who but realizes 
 that such an act would be easier than to live absolutely 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 171 
 
 according to modem law — to say nothing about 
 conforming to the supreme ideals of Jesus ? 
 
 A second fact is here evident. Society itself has to 
 no small extent become a minister of sin. Personal 
 wrongdoing lives on in its social results, institutional 
 or otherwise. Lives subject to the reversionary 
 influence find themselves from childhood in touch 
 with a social mind that suggests imitation of its evil 
 as well as of its better elements. With our knowledge 
 of the self and of society we see that Augustine and 
 Pelagius were both right. The backward pull is in 
 our nature, and social relations incite us to an imitation 
 of its expression in society. Individual and society 
 alike must be regenerate if sin is to be removed from 
 ourselves and our world. 
 
 The third fact is even more serious. Despite all 
 warnings as to results, the supremacy of the lower self 
 brings a certain sort of pleasure. 'J'hai is one reason 
 why sin is so attractive. A man does not steal be- 
 cause he feels that it is wicked to steal, but because 
 he gets hold of property. A man does not lie be- 
 cause he thinks it is wicked to lie, but because by 
 lying he in some way gets an advantage over some 
 one else. A man does not get drunk because he 
 knows it is wrong to drmk, but because of the satis- 
 faction he has in an orgy. Men do not organize the 
 
172 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 white slave trafHc in order to bring misery upon inno- 
 cent, credulous girls, but because there is a livelihood 
 in supplying vicious wants. Men and corporations 
 do not break laws because they like lawlessness, but 
 because there are material advantages in lawlessness. 
 Sin is so deeply intrenched in our social life as to be all 
 but ineradicable. And yet we can be saved from it. 
 
 II 
 
 I. The first step in the gospel's method of saving 
 men from sin is to arouse them to the danger of yield- 
 ing to this powerful tendency. Our modem hfe 
 needs a call to moral discontent. We are suffering 
 from indifference to everything except creature com- 
 forts. We are too complacent, too ready to think 
 that we are good because we are prosperous. We 
 may not be as conceited as the Pharisee, but most of 
 us cannot understand the humility of the publican. 
 Much of the appeal made to-day in the more pro- 
 gressive pulpits overlooks the fact that multitudes of 
 people are bad. God is a Father, we are told, and 
 men should come to him because he is loving. That 
 is true ; but no religion has ever long gripped human- 
 ity that has deceived itself into believing that men are 
 better than they are. Even the Christian Scientist 
 has his "mortal mind." It is no safer to trifle with 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 73 
 
 disease of the soul than with disease of the body, but 
 it is hard to make men believe that they really need a 
 spiritual physician. They would rather be amused. 
 
 The great difficulty confronting the attempt to re- 
 duce Christianity to a mere philosophy of values lies 
 in the fact that every such attempt is liable to pre- 
 suppose an awakened Christian experience. In the 
 long run the test of any religion will be its capacity 
 to arouse repentance and religious consecration. 
 It is one thing for a theology to nurture a life already 
 Christian ; it it is quite another to beget that Chris- 
 tian life. A church must be something more than a 
 theological orphanage. It must have its own spirit- 
 ual children. It is a sense of the reality of sin that 
 alone can make of the gospel anything more than 
 a graduate lecture course in Christian ethics. A 
 religious message that cannot stir sinners to repent- 
 ance is not the gospel of the New Testament. 
 
 That is not to say that a man must wait until he is 
 very wicked before he comes to God. It is not to say 
 that the pulpit should imitate Jonathan Edwards 
 and preach on " Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
 God." It is not to say that children who have grown 
 up under the beneficent influence of Christian fami- 
 lies should be forced to confess a guilt of which they 
 are not conscious. It is still farther from saying that 
 
174 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 we should not so educate our children that as they 
 grow in stature they shall also grow in moral sensitive- 
 ness and in favor with God. But it is to say that we 
 can no more overlook the fact of sin than we can 
 overlook the fact of tuberculosis. Whether those 
 whom we would bring to God are children or adults 
 the gospel should come as a message of salvation. 
 But you cannot get people, young or old, to want 
 to be saved unless they are convinced that there is 
 something to be saved from. 
 
 Now it is no more pleasurable to-day to convince 
 persons of the truth of a moral diagnosis than it was to 
 convince their fathers. Prophets have always found 
 that their physical comfort decreased in proportion 
 as they increased their hearers' moral discomfort. In 
 many cases wrongdoing seems to guarantee prosperity. 
 The Psalmist had his faith shaken by this fact long 
 ago. He saw the wicked prosperous and possessing 
 the good things of life, while the righteous seemed 
 to be exceedingly unfortunate. He found his faith, 
 as he said, ready to stagger. His disquietude has 
 persisted. Why do good men fail in business while 
 unscrupulous promoters grow rich? Why do bad 
 men so enjoy themselves? 
 
 Yet, just because of these stumblingblocks, men 
 must be made to see the danger of this reversal 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 75 
 
 of values. The mere fact of pleasure in sin must be 
 shown to be an evidence of moral disease just as 
 excessive appetite is an evidence of dyspepsia. 
 Men and children alike must be made to feel that to 
 yield to unworthy impulses, despite the ease and the 
 pleasure of such yielding, is dangerous and a guaran- 
 tee of suffering as truly as disease is a guarantee of 
 suffering. 
 
 2. Sin, as Jesus and Paul and the prophets taught, 
 is evidently something more than wrongdoing. It is 
 a violation of the will of God. It is an attack upon 
 the God of the universe. That can mean no other 
 outcome than suffering. Sin comes in when men 
 refuse to go on with a self-revealing God and seek to 
 make any stage of that process-revelation final. 
 They oppose the God who wills that the universe 
 and humanity shall become, not merely be. 
 
 Some sins do not involve an appreciable injury 
 to others. The spirit of rebellion against God, the 
 hatred of goodness, blasphemy and pride, may not 
 directly result in wrongdoing to our fellow men, but 
 they are sins nevertheless, for they are a revolt 
 against God's will as seen both in Jesus and in the 
 nature of things. There could be wrongdoing if there 
 were no God in the universe, and it would cause 
 suffering; but it is hard to see how we could then 
 
176 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 believe that suffering would necessarily extend to the 
 wrongdoer himself. But for the man who believes 
 in God there is no such uncertainty. A man may 
 evade the laws made by legislatures, but he can no 
 more evade the will of God in the realm of morals 
 than he can deceive the law of gravitation. The 
 same immanent Spirit that makes it certain that a 
 man who jumps off a cliff will be dashed to pieces 
 makes it just as certain that the soul that sins shall 
 suffer. We may wish that God was more good- 
 natured ; we may even sometimes succeed in persuad- 
 ing ourselves that He is; but such flaccid optimism 
 no more affects the nature of things than it affects 
 the laws of climate or of chemical combinations. A 
 terrible God is this God of Love, immanent in social 
 process. 
 
 3. But how are men to be convinced that such 
 future suffering is sure ? Is not God good ? Will the 
 Father punish His children for their mistakes and 
 their yielding to temptation ? 
 
 There are two replies that can be made to this 
 question. In the first place we know something of 
 how a loving God works. The man who cuts off his 
 arm never sees it grow again. The child who plays 
 with fire is burned. Shall God be any less a God of 
 Law in the moral world ? The God who has so made 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 77 
 
 humanity that the drunkard has delirium tremens 
 is the same God who speaks through the lawgiver and 
 the prophet and Christ, warning men of the outcome 
 of sin in their spiritual selves. One can even see 
 His punitive will in the inevitableness of suffering 
 from sin in ordinary experience. Dishonesty for a 
 time seems to be advantageous, but sooner or later 
 the God of Law makes the wrath of men to praise 
 him, and the thief, be he ever so respectable in his 
 thieving, pays the penalty of his crime. The past few 
 years, with their record of bankruptcy and suicide, 
 have shown that God is still in history and that men 
 cannot trifle with the eternal laws of righteousness. 
 
 So long as the God of process has not abdicated, we 
 must believe, also, that death transforms sin into suf- 
 fering. The terrible pictures of the Judgment Day 
 and hell have reality back of them. The loss of the 
 body in itself is as truly punishment for those who 
 have "lived to the flesh" as would be the loss of a 
 hand to a pianist. All that we know of human na- 
 ture argues that death makes a man neither better 
 nor worse ; it simply introduces a new mode of exist- 
 ence. And that new existence will be full of joy 
 or misery according to the readiness of the soul to 
 live in it. A man thrown into mid-ocean drowns. 
 A bad man in the spiritual world will be in misery. 
 
lyS THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 It cannot be otherwise. God is not mocked. What 
 a man sows he reaps. 
 
 In the second place the gospel would insist that 
 there is only one unforgivable sin; the living as if 
 love were not supreme. Such a living, as Jesus 
 warned the Pharisees, makes men see God only as 
 Satan ; refuses to forgive enemies ; fights and maligns 
 the representatives of love. That is the blasphemy 
 against the Holy Ghost. 
 
 To describe God as love is to herald the inevitable 
 defeat of every man who is not loving. For it is 
 God who is love. And can a man win against God ? 
 Obscurant definitions here will not avail. If the 
 process in which we are involved is dominated by 
 love, then he who is not loving must bear the 
 brunt of the process itself. 
 
 It is sometimes said that modem thought is re- 
 moving the punitive God from His universe. It 
 seems to me, on the contrary, that it is bringing that 
 God into the universe and even more into human life. 
 The God that the scientific investigator compels us 
 to accept is more a God to be feared than even the 
 Jehovah of the prophets. To be sure, for the eye of 
 faith there is love in the universe, but it is no wonder 
 that men who look simply at the darker side of the 
 reign of law grow pessimistic. It is a fearful thing for 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 79 
 
 an unloving man to fall into the hands of a loving God. 
 That sounds like a paradox, but it is more: it is a 
 reading of the universe. 
 
 4. The man who is not susceptible to fear can re- 
 spond to the gospel's appeal to his shame. Whose 
 conscience does not condemn him as he faces the 
 Master ? However unsatisfactory may be some forms 
 at least of the so-called moral influence of the atone- 
 ment, no man can deny the appeal which the suffering 
 Christ makes to the morally sensitive soul. Recall 
 Bernard and Francis. The picture of a Christ who, 
 although he had done no evil, found himself the vic- 
 tim of sin is a perennial challenge to the man who 
 would belittle the significance of sin. For he can 
 see that the motives which led the authorities of 
 Judea to take so pure and noble a life as Jesus' were 
 not peculiar to Judea. They are as old and as new 
 as humanity itself. Bad men hate loving men. 
 
 Nor are these the only appeals of Jesus. He stirs 
 humanity. Children as well as men find their moral 
 sense quickened in the presence of a hero and a mar- 
 tyr. And such a response of the spiritual self is the 
 source of moral convalescence in the same proportion 
 as it springs from even an unformulated recognition 
 of the worth of the principles for which the hero or 
 martyr stood. Perhaps the most quickening appeal 
 
l8o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 that the gospel can make to the modem man — and 
 to the modem adolescent — with his conventional 
 morality, is the Christ who bore testimony to the 
 dangers of sin by preferring the dangers of righteous- 
 ness. Even if he were an unhistorical picture he 
 would still have its power to stir the depths of the 
 moral life. How much mightier will he be as he is 
 seen to be more than allegory or symbol ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 I. This deliverance from sin and its consequences 
 promised by the gospel does not presuppose that a 
 man shall be immediately morally perfect. Deliver- 
 ance consists in evoking a Godlike spiritual life in a 
 sinful man. That is the difficult paradox for every 
 man who has rightly read his own nature, and which 
 to the Jewish Christian seemed dangerously near the 
 violation of the fundamental law of God Himself. 
 The faith of the early Jewish Christians who made 
 such trouble for Paul among the early churches of 
 Galatia is entirely intelligible. They believed that 
 Jesus was the Christ and that such faith would carry 
 them into the messianic kingdom which he was to es- 
 tablish, saved from death and from the condemnation 
 of the Judgment Day. But they believed that such 
 blessing was possible only for those who were Jews, 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN l8l 
 
 and therefore they endeavored both scrupulously 
 and unscrupulously to induce Gentile Christians to 
 perform the works of the law. True, after the 
 Apostolic conference at Jerusalem they were ready to 
 reduce the demands for ritual observance to a mini- 
 mum, but there still lay in the heart of the Judaistic 
 Christian the belief that if one were to gain the 
 blessing promised to Abraham he must be a member 
 of the Jewish community. 
 
 Over against this was the insistence of Paul upon 
 justification, or, as it might be more accurately called, 
 acquittal through faith. Paul's acute mind rejected 
 any conception of deliverance from sin that involved 
 the counting of atomistic deeds and the striking of a 
 balance. Human nature itself was infected. Faith 
 in Jesus involved a voluntary attitude toward God the 
 reverse of that which is exhibited in following the 
 tendency away from God. Paul saw only too well 
 that the tendency to make "flesh" supreme which 
 lay in man's nature in itself exposed a man to the 
 penalty of a broken law. It could make no difference 
 whether his violations were many or few. The man 
 who violated the law at a single point had actually 
 broken the law and was liable to punishment. He 
 was not responsible for the tendency, but unaided by 
 God he would yield to its power. However theoreti- 
 
1 82 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 cally he might be able to keep the law of God and his 
 own conscience, practically he was guilty. God must 
 pardon if he were to be saved from punishment. 
 
 2. So simple and consistent a scheme is entirely 
 intelligible to the modem man, but he carmot help 
 querying what there is in it for his own moral and reli- 
 gious life. His fundamental conception of the universe 
 makes it difficult for him to respond to the forensic 
 conception of God as a monarch who establishes days 
 of trial and passes individual sentences upon millions 
 of lives. His idea of law makes it hard for him to 
 think of a remitted penalty in a moral world, where 
 relations are genetic and only figuratively to be con- 
 ceived of in terms of the law court and a king. Moral 
 questions, like all other problems of the universe, can 
 be thought of literally by the modem man only 
 in the terms of law, of organism, and environment. 
 
 Has, then, this aspect of the gospel no meaning for 
 him ? And is it, precisely understood, no part of the 
 modem preacher's message ? We cannot so believe. 
 An evil act certainly implies an evil nature, and the 
 results described as Judgment Day and penalty are 
 among the fundamental facts of the modem man. As 
 his equivalent of the judgment he has the postponed 
 effects of the working of the causes in the moral world ; 
 and of the penalty, the suffering of the degenerate. 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 83 
 
 Nor is this all. The modem man can accept sin- 
 cerely the great truth taught by Jesus and his disciples 
 that God must be the Saviour if the man is tp be saved. 
 In the face of to-day's psychology and sociology who 
 would dare say the unaided individual is ever able 
 to prevent the outworkings of the forces of evil? 
 Every life has its unearned increment of character 
 bom of its social situation. It would have been 
 better or worse had it not been swept on by its en- 
 vironments. The very insistence of the New Testa- 
 ment upon the divine element in salvation makes it 
 the easier for the modem man to welcome and to 
 understand. The past is irrevocable except as its 
 consequences are overcome by the very powers that 
 are making a different future. 
 
 But if this irrevocableness is due to the working of 
 the immanent God, then God must save us. And 
 He must save us by enabling us to counterbalance the 
 awful tendency to sinful living that brings suffer- 
 ing. The spiritual life must be made triumphant by 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 Have we confidence to believe that each of us can 
 share in regenerating love ? Love we believe is at the 
 heart of things, but the love revealed by philosophy 
 and science is a heartless, relentless process-love that 
 saves the race by crushing the individual who refuses 
 
184 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 to conform to its ongoing. Most men want to be 
 saved themselves. Who can give us the assurance 
 that divine love can save the individual man or 
 woman, and who can show us the sort of life implied 
 by such a salvation? 
 
 The reply comes from the gospel: Jesus. In 
 him is to be seen the redemptive life of God. In 
 him was the spiritual life that triumphs over tempta- 
 tion and the natural order. Knowing him and his 
 teaching we know how to harmonize our life with the 
 regenerating life of God. We simply have to live 
 like our Master. So to live is to come under the 
 saving power of God. It is to establish a personal sit- 
 uation which in itself is dynamic, and the result of 
 which, so far as the individual is concerned, must 
 mean progress toward likeness with the God who is 
 one element of the situation. For in friendship per- 
 sonality always transforms personality. The fact 
 that such a divinely regenerate life will be ultimately 
 victorious over passion and sin and death, is to-day's 
 equivalent of that removal of guilt which Paul de- 
 scribed as justification. The loving God of the uni- 
 verse will save a man who tries to live like Jesus. 
 Of this we are sure. For such a man will have the 
 spiritual life, the "mind" of Jesus. 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 185 
 
 IV 
 
 But the experience of forgiveness and his certainty 
 of acquittal at the coming Judgment Day left in 
 Paul's mind the question : Is it just that one who is 
 morally imperfect should escape the consequences 
 of his sin? In such a case is not the moral order 
 threatened ? 
 
 This question, springing as it does from the keen 
 realization of guilt which so marked the Hebrew 
 religion, was never raised by Jesus. He simply 
 argued that God's fatherliness could be trusted 
 to welcome the prodigal just as implicitly as a human 
 father could be trusted to give good gifts to his chil- 
 dren. But such an answer did not and will not satisfy 
 minds that seek to systematize such forgiveness with 
 their world- view. The question of Paul was inevi- 
 table. 
 
 It is to be noticed, however, that Christian ex- 
 perience is here the point of departure. Paul did 
 not believe in the forgiveness of sin because he 
 believed in an atonement; he believed in an atone- 
 ment because he had experienced that which im- 
 plies that his sin was forgiven. Because of the gift 
 of the Spirit he never doubted that God and he 
 were actually reconciled and that punishment was 
 no longer to be feared by him. The further ques- 
 
l86 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 tion concerned not himself but the moral sover- 
 eignty of God. He found his answer suggested in 
 the very presuppositions of the world-view which 
 suggested the question as to the moral order. The 
 sovereign God wanted to forgive and had forgiven 
 those who had accepted Jesus as Christ. He had, 
 however, preserved the integrity of His law and of 
 His sovereignty in this act of grace, by setting forth 
 Jesus himself in his blood as the propitiatory gift 
 which sealed reconciliation. From a little different 
 angle Jesus was also conceived of by Paul as a king 
 who died vicariously for his followers — an analogy 
 doubtless suggested by the not infrequent punish- 
 ment of a rebellious king by the Romans as an off- 
 set for the exhibition of certain clemency to his 
 rebellious subjects. Jesus had borne death, the 
 punishment of sin, although he himself had not 
 sinned. God's sovereignty was therefore vindi- 
 cated and He was free to acquit those whom He 
 would. 
 
 The New Testament writers no more than Paul 
 ever elaborated systematically this atoning work of 
 Christ. They make it real to the believer by the 
 use of figures. But all of them — sacrifice, redemp- 
 tion, purchase — clearly enough possess the same 
 significance; the death of the Christ was a neces- 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 187 
 
 sary, an integral part of his very vocation as deliverer. 
 He died in behalf of sinners. Not, it is true, in the 
 sense that God had to be placated or appeased. 
 Without exception, the apostles held that God 
 Himself originated the plan of salvation. The sac- 
 rificial aspect of the death of the Christ was derived 
 from a belief as to what the death of the lamb did 
 for the man who sought reconciliation with God 
 at the altar. It brought the final assurance of 
 such reconciliation and removal of guilt. Christ 
 was the Christian's passover, and his death was 
 interpreted figuratively as the seal of the believers' 
 assurance of reconciliation. Viewed as a ransom 
 or purchase, the death of Christ was never in the 
 New Testament treated as an actual payment to 
 Satan or to God, but rather as the cost of his mes- 
 sianic work. He could not save without dying; 
 for death was the penalty of sin from which men 
 were to be saved, and the revelation of- the possi- 
 bility of such deliverance could be made only by 
 an actual and typical example of such deliverance. 
 In a truer sense than men have sometimes seen, 
 the Christ bore the sin of the world; for as part 
 of a world in which sin was socialized he bore to 
 the full its outcome of hate and violence and 
 death. 
 
l88 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 V 
 
 I. It was inevitable that this dogmatically un- 
 developed estimate of the death of Christ should 
 have ceased to satisfy the minds of those who en- 
 deavored to set forth their Christianity as a philo- 
 sophical system. Yet, somewhat strangely, the 
 doctrine of the atonement was among the last of 
 the doctrines to be systematically developed. Chris- 
 tianity conquered the Roman world without pos- 
 sessing any authoritative doctrine of the atonement. 
 Indeed, the Greek, as contrasted with the Latin 
 Fathers, with the Roman sense of law and its 
 punishment, always found in the death of Jesus an 
 element in their characteristic doctrine of salvation, 
 viz. that in Jesus humanity was brought to im- 
 mortality rather than to forensic guiltlessness. For 
 hundreds of years the figures of the ransom were 
 conceived of literally and Jesus was believed to 
 have given himself a ransom to Satan in return for 
 the release of the saints in Sheol. Such a concep- 
 tion rests upon the assumption that Satan had a 
 claim on man which God Himself had to recognize ; 
 and this is definitely stated by some of the greatest 
 of the church fathers. Indeed, so far was this con- 
 ception pushed that deliverance was believed to have 
 been accomplished by deceit, according to such 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 189 
 
 fathers as Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Leo, and 
 Gregory I. According to the latter the humanity 
 of Jesus was a bait offered by God to the devil, 
 who snapped at it and was left hanging on the in- 
 visible hook, Christ's divinity. Such a plan of 
 salvation was frankly called by one of its champions, 
 the great Ambrose, a "pious fraud." 
 
 Such a grotesque theory of the atonement, al- 
 though natural for the man who interprets certain 
 figures of the New Testament literally, was ob- 
 viously to be held only at the expense of a belief 
 in a moral God. Yet it was difficult to eradicate 
 it from the thought of men. Even to the present 
 day it will occasionally be met. But from the time 
 of Origen it was supplemented by the conception 
 of sacrifice, the outgrowth of social experience. 
 Christ's flesh, according to many of the early writers, 
 was an actual sacrifice offered to God. As early 
 as the fourth centiu-y we find the idea that such a 
 sacrificial death of God was the only means by 
 which the death decreed by Him could be van- 
 quished and thus harmony be brought between Him 
 and His love. 
 
 This conception of the death of Christ as sacrifice, 
 though imdeveloped as long as sacrifice was an 
 existing social institution, was given a new turn in 
 
190 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the West by the growing secondary Christianity of 
 the Latin church. The conception of merit through 
 penance was extended to the work of Christ. From 
 the days of Tertulhan Latin Christianity increas- 
 ingly believed that God needed to be propitiated 
 through suffering, and there grew up inevitably the 
 quantitative conception of such suffering. If there 
 was more suffering than there was guilt, or if a 
 man did more than his prescribed duty, he would 
 lay up merit. Thus there developed the theory 
 that, as Jesus was sinless, his sufferings and death 
 possessed merits which could be transferred through 
 the church to the elect. This conception, which 
 still survives in the Christian creeds, was supple- 
 mented by Anselm with the German conception of 
 composition (Wehrgeld) and the idea of honor per- 
 meating the age of chivalry. An injury to another 
 was of two parts; that to the person or estate, and 
 that to the "honor" or "dignity." It could be 
 requited by the lex talionis, or the injured party's 
 honor could be satisfied by the punishment or the 
 submission of the wrongdoer, or by the payment 
 of a sum of money. Every injury was thus easily 
 translated into a debt varying with the "honor" of 
 the person injured. In the case of God, humanity 
 owed him absolute obedience, but since men had 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I9I 
 
 sinned they owed him reparation. As God is 
 infinite the injury and consequently the debt to his 
 honor were infinite. Obviously mankind being 
 finite could not make the amende honorable to the 
 injured deity and would have been hopelessly lost 
 had not God become man and made infinite satis- 
 faction in the person of the God-man Jesus. This 
 belief, born of social practice, expressed by Anselm in 
 his famous treatise " Cur Deus Homo," was the first 
 attempt to utilize the death of Jesus in really sys- 
 tematic fashion. The "satisfaction" of the in- 
 finite debt owed by man to God whose infinite 
 honor he had injured could be paid only by God 
 who became man. The suffering of the human 
 nature of Christ was magnified to infinity by his 
 divine nature, and thus the way was open for God, 
 with honor satisfied, to forgive those elect who had 
 faith and works. 
 
 2. It is unnecessary to trace further the theories 
 of an objective atonement by the Christ. They are 
 all modifications of ransom, sacrifice, or satisfac- 
 tion. Not always as distinct as these original 
 types, they have seldom advanced far beyond them. 
 Whether God's justice or His law needed vindica- 
 tion makes small difference. All theories as to the 
 atonement implicitly or explicitly imply that the 
 
192 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 moral unity of God is threatened by His forgiveness 
 of sins. He is in danger of losing either His repu- 
 tation as the God of Law, or His right to forgive. 
 And it is to avert this threatened schism in the 
 divine character that the death of the Christ has 
 been set forth in accordance with the prevailing 
 concepts of various ages. 
 
 It has followed that no theory has been uni- 
 versally acceptable to the church. The social ideals 
 on which each has been built have themselves been 
 outgrown. Each has seemed to its critics to justify 
 God at the expense of violating some fundamental 
 ethical conviction of the Christian born of a higher 
 social morality. And thus it has come to pass that 
 throughout the history of the church there has been 
 no view of the atonement so acceptable as that im- 
 developed statement of the fact so variously ex- 
 pressed in the New Testament, — that the death 
 of Christ was an integral part and necessary out- 
 come of his work of salvation. The varieties in the 
 doctrines have never been unified by any ecumeni- 
 cal council and there is thus no orthodox theory 
 of the atonement on an equality with that of the 
 person of Christ. Throughout Christendom each 
 body of Christians, nay, I had almost said, each 
 individual Christian, has his own view of this central 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I93 
 
 truth of the gospel. There are those who believe 
 that Christ bore the quantitative equivalent of all 
 the punishments due to all the sins of all mankind; 
 others who hold that as the universal man he ac- 
 tually bore the punishment due humanity; others 
 who hold that God was graciously pleased to reckon 
 the sufferings of Christ as rendering satisfaction for 
 His law broken by mankind ; others who believe that 
 by union with Christ the believer shares in his death 
 and thus in the pxmishment borne by him; others, 
 that as a substitute for the believer he bore suffer- 
 ing which in their case would have been pimish- 
 ment; others, that by his death he expiated the 
 sins of mankind and appeased an angry God ; others, 
 that Christ offered in behalf of the race a universal 
 and representative repentance which literally broke 
 his heart so that he died of it. And the list might 
 be extended indefinitely. 
 
 Yet at one point the Christian consciousness of 
 the ages has been at one. The death of Jesus was 
 not that of a mere martyr. In some way the West- 
 ern world has found in it a release from its sense 
 of guilt. The moral influence theory of the atone- 
 ment represents a great truth, for his death was 
 certainly calculated to move men to an appreciation 
 of the love of God. But such a view is only par- 
 
194 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 tially satisfactory. Beyond the influence of the 
 death upon mankind there is, as the apostles and 
 the church have insisted, that which is a revelation 
 of the divine economy which brings intellectual as 
 well as religious peace. The modern man can 
 think of this economy in terms of transfer of penalty 
 only by abandoning his fundamental conception of 
 the relation of God to His world, but he cannot 
 overlook the inference that if Christ be all the 
 Christian community feels he must have been, 
 his death has a deeper significance than that of 
 the moral influence ol martyrdom. It is a reve- 
 lation of God's purpose and character. Its worth 
 is Christ's worth. 
 
 VI 
 
 But how shall the modern man express this con- 
 viction in terms intelligible to himself? The trans- 
 fer of penalty, sacrifice, and propitiation in the 
 original sense of the terms, the satisfaction of the 
 divine honor, the vindication of God's sovereign 
 law — all these formulas, however helpful to their 
 authors and in greater or less degrees to the church 
 of to-day either spring from philosophies, rites, and 
 political theories, which are meaningless to him, or 
 fail to express his own sense of the nature of the 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I95 
 
 cosmic God. If he is to grasp the meaning of the 
 forgiveness of sin in any sense like that of the gos- 
 pel, he must place the death of Christ among those 
 elements of his world-view that are the equivalent 
 of those in which Paul expressed his own sense of 
 its significance as a means of justifying his faith in 
 God. It must be discovered by being correlated 
 with the immanence of God, the divinely directed 
 process of which human history is one phase, and 
 social solidarity. 
 
 True, he may say he has no need of such a for- 
 mulation, that his faith in God requires no re- 
 course to the death of Jesus for vindication. But 
 none the less in the long run he will face the need, 
 and then just as he has found courage and hope 
 in the example of his Master will he find new help 
 and faith in a proper estimate of his death. 
 
 Nor is such an estimate impossible. Disregard- 
 ing all questions as to what figures can best express 
 our instinctive recognition of this deeper and, one 
 is tempted to say, cosmic significance of Jesus' 
 death, it is possible for a mind controlled by the 
 presuppositions of the modern world to see in it 
 certain literal truths of elemental importance. 
 
 I. In the first place it exhibits Jesus' faith in the 
 justice of God's moral order. 
 
196 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 (i) Jesus accepted as just the suffering involved 
 m tlie social effects of sin. 
 
 There is nothing in life more perplexing or mad- 
 dening than to see a man reaping the results of 
 other men's wrongdoing, yet, by the laws of heredity 
 and by the laws governing the socialization of in- 
 fluence, nothing is more common. The sins of the 
 fathers are visited imto the third and fourth genera- 
 tions and the misery born of violation of the con- 
 structive forces of society extend through war and 
 poverty and a thousand other media to imcounted 
 millions. To this great law Jesus became uncom- 
 plainingly subject. He must have regarded it as 
 at least just, as a part of the divine law. 
 
 (2) By his death Jesus also recognized as just 
 that other fact so desperately hard to understand, 
 that service rendered by love to the higher needs 
 of the world is at the expense of suffering caused by 
 the sin of others. 
 
 Vicarious suffering, through sympathy or body, 
 seems to be demanded from love in every phase of 
 human existence from birth to death. Just why 
 this should be true in the case of sin we are unable 
 to say. We only know that it is involved in that 
 struggle by which the good man overcomes the 
 force of his own and society's lower past. But just 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I97 
 
 because it does lie inextricably involved in the 
 social solidarity of human life we want to realize 
 its justice. Otherwise human history grows dia- 
 bolical. If the effects of sin were to be limited to 
 those who commit it, the problem would in a meas- 
 ure disappear, for humanity as a whole recognizes 
 the justice of punishment on the part of those who 
 do wrong. But why should the innocent suffer? 
 The question is a part of that larger question as to 
 whether the God of Law is a God of Love, but with 
 this difference : it involves our recoil from the inno- 
 cent man's suffering the consequences of another's 
 sin. Here again Jesus helps us with life rather 
 than philosophy. If he had judged such a fact to 
 be wrong we might have expected some protest from 
 his lips, but he submitted to the fact as a part of 
 the great world in which he was involved. Desiring 
 to love and serve men he suffered that which such 
 effort brought from the hatred of those whom he 
 would help. And by his faith we are inspired to 
 similar faith. 
 
 2. In the second place the sufferings of Jesus 
 exhibit his faith in the love of God. 
 
 (1) The attitude of Jesus toward these two laws 
 of social evolution was not that of desperate sub- 
 mission. On the contrary, he accepted them as 
 
198 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the will of a loving Father. He trusted the good- 
 ness of the immanent God who had so organized 
 humanity by His very presence that sin, by involv- 
 ing the innocent as well as the guilty in its conse- 
 quences, should be shown exceeding sinful. Such 
 an attitude of mind is the complement of that love 
 which would save humanity. But it is, if possible, 
 something even more heroic and wonderful. It is 
 one thing, like the condemned nobles of the Reign 
 of Terror, to help a fellow creature doomed to one's 
 own fate; it is quite another to believe that the 
 judge who pronoimces the common sentence is not 
 only just but loving. The faith of Jesus was far 
 enough from stoicism. In undergoing his suffering 
 and death Jesus exhibited no mere speculative con- 
 fidence in impersonal law. A submission to the 
 physical world by no means excludes rebellion at 
 suffering in a moral sphere. The situation in which 
 Jesus found himself demands faith rather than 
 logic. He saw no Reign of Terror in God's king- 
 dom. He drew trust in love from his own sense of 
 divine sonship. It was because of his inner experi- 
 ence of God as Father that he drank the cup in 
 Gethsemane. 
 
 (2) But self-devotion to an ideal and trust in a 
 loving God are not all that can be seen in the vicari- 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 199 
 
 ous suffering of Jesus. The question still remains 
 whether he was not after all another in the long 
 line of victims, and the consequent fear lest the life 
 of love which he chose as the only possible expres- 
 sion of his sense of God's presence is really weaker 
 than the life of hatred that hung him on the cross. 
 At this point we pass from the faith of Jesus to the 
 objective facts of his history. 
 
 True, such a question can in part be answered 
 by the response which our best selves make to any- 
 thing that is fine and heroic. The very uprising of 
 the progressively realized spiritual life within us 
 leads us instinctively to feel that it is better to fol- 
 low an ideal to the cross than to retreat with creature 
 comfort to the Governor's palace. In part, too, it 
 can be answered by the service which the Christian 
 commimity has been inspired by his self-devotion 
 to render to society. But even thus we are not 
 quite content. The -modern man, as we have 
 already seen, is sorely tempted to doubt even such 
 judgments of ultimate value. And here the his- 
 torical Jesus does indeed help us to freedom. The 
 gospel breeds new confidence in the supremacy of 
 the spiritual life even though it submits to vicarious 
 suffering by presenting the risen Jesus. He is no 
 longer a dead Christ; he is the risen Christ who 
 
20O THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 died. His resurrection is not set forth by the 
 apostles as an unrelated wonder. It is to them the 
 dramatic exposition of the fact that though he 
 suffer the worst sin can inflict, a man is not thereby 
 necessarily defeated. If only his spiritual life is in 
 right relations with God he is forgiven and trium- 
 phant over death itself. 
 
 For what is the forgiveness of sins? Juristically 
 considered it is the remission of penalty due not 
 only to individual sins but to human nature itself. 
 But what is remission of penalty from the point of 
 view of the presuppositions of modern thinking? 
 It must be something more than the mere abroga- 
 tion of punishment attached to the breaking of 
 statutes. Punishment in the moral sphere is not 
 external to the wrongdoer. We have passed the 
 stage of a forensic theology. The forgiveness of 
 sins means that in the personal sphere wrongdoing 
 can be prevented from resulting in its otherwise 
 inevitable suffering. Mechanical analogies are here 
 superior to forensic, for we know that one force 
 may be offset and so rendered inoperative by an- 
 other. But mechanical analogies themselves are 
 imperfect. In sin we are dealing with a diseased 
 personality, and in forgiveness we see the cure of 
 that which is diseased by the establishment of a 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 20I 
 
 new situation from which flow new and regenerate 
 personal outcomes in the place of those which other- 
 wise would have flowed from the sinful soul. 
 
 To have a life strong enough through personal 
 relations with God to overpower the force of the 
 "body of death," the survivals of animalism, in the 
 moral realm, is to have a life also strong enough to 
 overcome its other result, death. The Christlike 
 spiritual life is thus triumphant in man's entire 
 personality. And that is what the modern man 
 means by the divine forgiveness of which the earthly 
 is so poor an analogy. It is a dynamic, a regener- 
 ating reconciliation. 
 
 This is one message of the resurrection of the 
 crucified Christ. He stands forth as the very epit- 
 ome and absolute type of what humanity is when 
 forgiven. That generically human nature which 
 was his was transformed because of the divine 
 presence. He not only conquered sin in the region 
 of conduct; he conquered death by surpassing the 
 inherited physical nature from which sin springs. 
 In a sense far truer than the realists among the 
 schoolmen saw, in Jesus humanity was submitting 
 to himianity's ultimate test. And it showed itself 
 forgivable, not only in that Christ never yielded to 
 the backward pull which was implicit in his very 
 
202 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 humanity, but also in that by his resurrection there 
 was exhibited the actual outcome in spiritual life 
 of a union with God which forgiveness promises. 
 The gospel is profoundly psychological in insisting 
 that forgiveness must mean more than assurance of 
 pardon and peace of soul. It must mean also the 
 concrete effects of a reconciliation of two personali- 
 ties to be seen in the outcome of the development 
 of the weaker personality. And the ultimate out- 
 come of a personality whose spiritual life has re- 
 sponded to and so is filled with God, both the New 
 Testament and the modern man can see in the 
 character and the resurrection of the Jesus who 
 tasted the bitterness of death. 
 
 3. But our premises carry us one step farther 
 into that which is objective. In the death and 
 resurrection of Jesus God is revealed as an ethical 
 unity. That is the answer to the fundamental 
 philosophical question raised by the gospel — the 
 question of whether God can be "just" and the 
 "justifier" of those who accept Him. To its solu- 
 tion every theory of the atonement that is more 
 than that of exemplary martyrdom has addressed 
 itself. Each one of them tries to enforce upon those 
 who share in its presuppositions that the moral order 
 is eternal. Sin is not less dangerous, God is not 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 
 
 203 
 
 more lenient, because of the saving work of Jesus. 
 In so far as Christ really individualized the imma- 
 nent God did he exhibit in his experience the loving 
 character of Him who established and sustains the 
 process which attaches misery to sin. In his ex- 
 perience we see that such suffering is the sterner 
 side of the divine self-manifestation in humanity. 
 God is not indulgent in his forgiveness. He does 
 not reverse his universe in order to check that suf- 
 fering even though it pass upon so pure and in- 
 nocent a soul as Jesus. Therein is set forth "the 
 judgment of sin in the flesh," the awfulness of sin 
 in a socially united world. However faint may be 
 our confidence even in our own formulas, we can 
 see in the experience of Jesus the worth and mean- 
 ing of such a love. And in that assurance the 
 sense of guilt born of a social experience in which 
 law has become a universal presupposition, vanishes. 
 Suffering is seen first, but love is seen supreme. 
 While it is true we cannot see why man was so 
 constituted that moral development brings suffer- 
 ing upon its leaders, we can see that the forces 
 which compel such suffering, while immutable be- 
 cause the expression of God's will, are not supreme, 
 but are rather only the tragic concomitants of 
 that power of progress towards the spiritual which 
 
204 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 argues and reveals divine presence and divine love. 
 God as revealed in the dying and risen Jesus is seen 
 to be ethically at one. To see this and to believe 
 it is for the man who seeks to live the Christlike 
 spiritual life of love and faith and service to lose 
 all sense of fear and guilt. 
 
 4. This revelation of ethical unity in a God 
 who is both law and love, justice and forgiveness, 
 does not argue that the two qualities are coordinate. 
 The Christian conception of God, confirmed and 
 illuminated by a doctrine of the atonement, is one in 
 which love is really supreme. As has already ap- 
 peared, from such a point of view alone do we find 
 unity in the process of the universe and particularly 
 in humanity's struggle upward against sin and evil 
 towards a spiritual life like Christ's. How much 
 truer is it that only from such a point of view do 
 we find an explanation of that which the gospel 
 reveals as salvation. Love which is the supreme 
 quality of the spiritual life in humanity is but the 
 imperfect reflection of the Love which has been 
 revealed in the Son. But it is a Love which expresses 
 itself not alone in the single moment of the death 
 of Jesus, but, as the gospel always insists, in the 
 entire relationship of God and man revealed and 
 "chaptered up," as Paul says, in Jesus. "The 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 205 
 
 lamb was slain before the foundation of the world" 
 — this evangelic formula forever disabuses our 
 thought of the death of Christ as an appendix of 
 the work of God in creation and development in 
 either the natural or the spiritual order. " God so 
 loved the world that He gave his only begotten son 
 to save the world" — this is the evangelic formula 
 for the ultimate interpretation of the purpose of the 
 entire life of Jesus. Love divine in him stooped 
 to share in human weakness for the purpose of 
 carrying on that work which humanity unaided 
 could never hope to realize. In this love that seeks 
 to save at the cost of its own suffering do we see 
 the supreme and final meaning of the death of 
 Christ. He stands not over against God, seeking to 
 mitigate divine severity, but as the very embodi- 
 ment of a love that dares suffer to protect its own 
 law-abiding nature. And in his perception of such 
 divine sympathy and fellow-suffering the modem 
 man, even more than his brethren, makes his own 
 the words of Paul — who in all the agony and sin- 
 fulness of life deemed himself more than conqueror 
 through Him that loved us — " For I am persuaded 
 that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princi- 
 palities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
 powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creatiu'e, 
 
2o6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 shall be able to separate us from the love of God 
 which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 
 VII 
 
 Such an estimate of Jesus as removing all sense of 
 guilt by his revelation of the actuality of forgiveness 
 and the ethical unity and sympathy of God, reem- 
 phasizes the truth that what the gospel calls the for- 
 giveness of sin is really the negative side of what it 
 also calls positively the new life in Christ. A really 
 Christian soteriology must be vital as well as moral. 
 Its different aspects may be expressed by innumerable 
 figures, but the central fact itself must be more than 
 figure. Grounding as we do our view of sin in the 
 teaching given us by so many sciences that the indi- 
 vidual is a mass of survivals which tend to reassert 
 themselves, it is plain that in forgiveness we are deal- 
 ing with the emancipated spiritual life rather than 
 the removal of superimposed sentences. The Greek 
 fathers here saw more clearly than the Latin. The 
 deeper we probe sin the nearer do we find ourselves 
 coming to the problems of life and death and the 
 more are we convinced that any salvation that is 
 more than empty definition must involve all aspects 
 of personality. The gospel insists that we cannot 
 stop simply in the region of release from punishment, 
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 207 
 
 but must press on to appreciate the further and more 
 positive message of the regeneration of the per- 
 sonality itself. The gospel is not only reasonable, 
 it is dynamic. And the sinless, risen Jesus is the 
 concrete embodiment of the realities it contains. 
 Without him as a real person in history, belief in 
 the consonance of the spiritual life with the natural 
 order and confidence in its supremacy to that order, 
 would be but a justifiable hope and a working 
 hypothesis. Possessed of him this belief becomes a 
 faith that will move mountains. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 
 
 Death, like life, is without definition. Physiolo- 
 gists may tell us what they hope to discover, but they 
 can only tell us their hopes. We know that certain 
 chemical processes cease and certain others begin, 
 but we know little else as to what happens when a 
 man dies. For this if for no other reason humanity 
 would hate death ; but there is a deeper reason for 
 such hatred. There is the elemental impulse in all 
 living organisms to protect the generic life of which 
 they are a part; and this passion to perpetuate life, 
 either of the organism itself or by the way of de- 
 scendants, lies back of more of the elements of our 
 civilization than at first appear. 
 
 But humanity sees even more in death than a break 
 in the continuity of physical life. It wonders what 
 becomes of the personality. From the very moment 
 when primitive man first stood beside his dead the 
 question of the future has returned to turn mourning 
 to bitterness. Every man knows that death awaits 
 both him and those he loves. The answer of the race 
 to this fact has been a challenge to death. Account 
 208 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 209 
 
 for the belief in immortality as you will, it is deep in 
 the heart of the race. 
 
 I 
 
 The Hebrew saw little more than the darker side 
 of death. His dead he believed had gone into Sheol, 
 the great pit below the earth, and there they lived a 
 shadowy, gray life, without interests, longing for the 
 richer life they had left. Later, the Jew came to 
 think of Sheol as of something more than a place of 
 abode and imagined it divided into four great sec- 
 tions : the most miserable for sinners who had been 
 happy on earth ; the most blessed for the righteous 
 who had been miserable upon earth; and between 
 these extremes, two other regions, one for the sinners 
 who had been miserable and the other for the right- 
 eous who had been happy in life. But hatred of his 
 enemies as well as his persistent sense of moral fitness 
 led him to describe the first section or place of pun- 
 ishment more distinctly. To his imagination it 
 became a lake of fire prepared in the first instance 
 for the giants who were the children of the fallen 
 angels and the daughters of men, but also the place 
 of torment for demons and all those who had op- 
 pressed Israel. 
 
 I. This awful future was brought into relationship 
 with death. There was misery before the suffering 
 
2IO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 set by the sentence of the Judgment Day. All, 
 whether bad or good, for a time were disembodied. 
 Souls were naked in Sheol awaiting that great Day 
 of Judgment in which the wicked were to be sent to 
 the punishments of hell and the righteous should be 
 called upward to assume new bodies and enter the 
 glorious new kingdom which, already in heaven, was 
 to be established upon the earth. Such a conception 
 of resurrection of the individual sprang from a belief 
 in the resurgence of the nation. All Jews were to 
 have a part in the blessing of the messianic reign. 
 Sometimes the hope grew very materialistic. The 
 righteous were to have eternal life, says the Enoch 
 literature, were to live five hundred years and have 
 four hundred children. The fruits of the earth were 
 to be indefinitely increased and there was to be in- 
 calculable wealth of grain and wine. 
 
 It would not be fair, however, to say that the Jew 
 uniformly believed in the resurrection of the flesh. 
 The words of Josephus imply that the new bodies 
 into which the Pharisees believed the soul of the 
 righteous were to enter might be something very 
 different from those that were flesh. The entire 
 scope of Pharisaism would seem also to argue that its 
 conception of the resurrection had moved out from 
 the purely physical to something like a transcen- 
 dental conception. 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 211 
 
 2. It is this conception that to some extent at least 
 reappears in the Christian doctrine of the resurrec- 
 tion. The eschatology of the New Testament com- 
 bines after the fashion of the Jewish Apocalypses two 
 great conceptions : the resurrection of the individual, 
 and the establishment of a new social order. Of the 
 latter we shall speak presently. We are now con- 
 cerned with the former element. Bare immortality 
 in the sense of a mere continuous existence of the 
 personality after death is not the evangelic doctrine. 
 That is far more specific. The resurrection of the 
 dead as it is presented by Jesus both in the synoptic 
 and in the Johannine teaching is clearly more than 
 physical reanimation. Those who attain to it are 
 neither to marry nor to be given in marriage, and 
 Paul emphatically declared that flesh and blood can- 
 not inherit the kingdom of God, but that the new 
 body which awaits the Christian dead is a spiritual 
 body. Such a great change is really a deliverance 
 from death as well as from Sheol. That is to say, 
 the state of the personality which death established 
 is to be ended and the loss of the physical organism 
 is to be met by the gift of another better adjusted to 
 spiritual environment. 
 
 Distinct as this gospel is, it is no more so than the 
 teaching as to the basis on which this body of the 
 
212 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 resurrection is obtained. It is the outcome of the 
 transformation of the human personality through the 
 presence of God, the Holy Spirit. A man is not only 
 saved morally in the sense that he was given strength 
 to resist temptation, but he is to be saved, if we may 
 use the term, in a biological psychological sense. 
 
 Such a conception sprang directly from that of 
 death as the punishment of sin. To save a man from 
 sin is to save him from the consequence of sin and 
 sinfulness. So much, as we have seen, was revealed 
 in the experience of Jesus. The work of God in the 
 soul was held to be regenerating not because a man 
 thereby gained immortality, for it seems to have been 
 all but universally believed that all men survived 
 death in the sense that their shades went to Sheol, 
 but in the sense of an advance through death to 
 a higher, more spiritual life. The gospel properly 
 interpreted is something more than a series of naive 
 promises of heaven to good people and hell to bad 
 people. There is in it a genetic conception accord- 
 ing to which the future state of a personality is con- 
 ditioned by the adjustment of such personality to 
 the normal and dynamic situation created between 
 God and itself through the act of faith. He would 
 be a very superficial interpreter who failed to see 
 that this was an essential part of the gospel conception 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 213 
 
 of salvation. The difficulty of expressing it in terms 
 of a scientific vocabulary is, of course, evident. But 
 however expressed, the hope is fundamental in the 
 gospel. It is one thing to survive death ; it is another 
 thing to share in the resurrection. The one is static ; 
 the other is progressive. The Christian doctrine 
 of immortality is a phase of the Christian doctrine 
 of the evolution of the free spiritual personality. 
 Such an advance away from the conditions set by 
 merely animal existence to those set by more spiritual 
 environment can be enjoyed only by those who are in 
 proper relationship with the constructive forces of 
 the spiritual order. Sin by its very nature is a lack 
 of such harmony with God as makes for the develop- 
 ment of the personality away from that which it holds 
 in common with the beast. Sin, therefore, is some- 
 thing more than what we conventionally call an 
 ethical quality. It carries within itself forces of 
 degeneration which death completes. The gospel 
 teaches that chief among the results of this devolution 
 are, negatively, the failure to experience the resurrec- 
 tion in the Christian sense; and second, positively, 
 the suffering which comes from the unnatural rela- 
 tionship with God. It is true that in one or two 
 cases the New Testament speaks of the resurrection 
 of condemnation, but the reference here is to some- 
 
214 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 thing other tlian the resurrection of tlie body. It is 
 rather to the summoning of all souls from Sheol for 
 the purpose of judgment at the bar of God, an ele- 
 ment of the eschatological program tlaat Christianity 
 inherited from Jewish cosmology. Mere existence 
 was not a good to Paul. That which he longed for 
 and which he believed all sane men longed for was a 
 higher type of life which drew joy and peace and 
 noblest development from the normal, spiritual rela- 
 tionship of the soul with God; and this obviously 
 could be possible only to those who had experienced 
 the great reconciliation. 
 
 II 
 
 To a considerable extent these general conceptions 
 of the New Testament are independent of the his- 
 toricity of the resurrection of Jesus, but tlieir in- 
 fluence upon human lives and so their real place in 
 theology are in point of fact controlled by tlie disci- 
 ples' belief in the reality of that event. The modern 
 man, however, finds himself in a very different atti- 
 tude of mind from that of tlie early disciples. Where 
 a belief in individual immortality exists among the 
 scientific and philosophic classes it is Greek rather 
 than Jewish. Indeed it is undeniable that many 
 modern thinkers find it difficult to conceive of im- 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 215 
 
 mortality except in terms of society or of impersonal 
 influence or of the absorption of the individual soul 
 into the Whole. It is not strange, therefore, that 
 with such views on the one side and with a suspicion 
 of all miracles on the other, the resurrection of Jesus, 
 so far from helping the modern man as it did the 
 apostles to focus and give content to existing ideas 
 or expectations of immortality, should rather prove 
 an element of the gospel most difficult to accept. 
 
 We have here another illustration of the failure to 
 see that the gospel is something other than the mass of 
 opinions and dogmas which have grown up about it. 
 In particular do we have an illustration of the fact 
 that men allow their a priori objections to forestall 
 the results of historical criticism. Looked at in the 
 large, the refusal of our modem world to accept the 
 Christian evangelic hope of the resurrection is due 
 to the very simple belief that in the nature of the case 
 such a hope is impossible of realization. This ob- 
 jection, although involving the old suspicion of what- 
 ever is contrary to uniform experience, really goes 
 a step farther and estops the plea in rebuttal that 
 uniform experience has its exceptions. It seems 
 necessary therefore to consider the a -priori objection 
 to immortality before considering the resurrection 
 of Jesus. 
 
2l6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 I. A belief in immortality is a legitimate outcome 
 of what we know of life. 
 
 I do no mean to argue that a dissecting table is a 
 platform from which to peer into heaven, or that the 
 conception of life as a purely physical and chemical 
 process conduces to a conviction that it can continue 
 after such process has ceased. Nor would I use 
 the term in the sense of a principle which exists as an 
 independent force in the universe, although one 
 could plead great names for such a view. I would 
 use the term rather in a broader and I must confess a 
 less defined sense. This, however, is by no means to 
 ruin my case. The word is admittedly without defi- 
 nition, a sort of ideograph picturing a group of phe- 
 nomena the causes of which are not yet thoroughly 
 known. But this much seems clear; However life 
 originated it has been constantly struggling to ex- 
 press itself in more complicated forms and in ways 
 less dependent on what, for lack of a better term, we 
 can call impersonal forces. That is, it grows more 
 personal and individual. It is the at least partial 
 possession of these latter qualities that distinguishes 
 men from their animal kindred. Our vocabularies at 
 this point are likely to be misleading, but whatever 
 else life may include in humanity it is far more 
 elaborate and self-directive than in the beast or the 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 217 
 
 plant. Human personality as an expression of life 
 has in itself irresistible impulses to express itself in 
 still other and less materialistic forms. It makes 
 little difference whether we call this personal life a 
 spirit or simply a new aspect of life itself. There is 
 in every man a quality we call spiritual, — a quality 
 in a striking way to be described by the theist as in 
 the image of God. This spiritual life is that to which 
 all the past seems to point, and this it is that is the 
 seat of whatever creative freedom humanity has. And 
 this spiritual life is ever struggling to more complete 
 self-expression, — a fact recognized by all attempts at 
 psychological analysis as well as by every attempt at 
 formulating the impulse to moral idealism. It is as 
 impossible to say why life struggles thus to transfer 
 itself into higher and ultimately more spiritual terms 
 as to say why it seeks to propagate and protect 
 itself; but to recognize such an impulse is only to 
 take accoimt of that which really is. 
 
 Now a belief in immortality insists that this process 
 is assisted by the death of the physical organism. 
 It holds that as in the history of that life there have 
 constantly been developed types which are ever less 
 dependent on purely material situations, there comes 
 a time when, in terms of the spiritual personality, it 
 is sufficiently individualized to be completely superior 
 
2l8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 to the physical organism. However far we are as 
 yet from imderstanding the relationship of spiritual 
 life with the physical, we have come far enough to 
 recognize that the moral and aesthetic and rational 
 powers of the personality are something very different 
 from the physical life from which they have sprung. 
 Embryology, in either the physical or the spiritual 
 realms, is not to be confused with physiology. 
 
 2. The most serious answer to such a priori argu- 
 ments as these for the persistence of personality seems 
 to me to come from the side of sociology. And this 
 reply is in brief that such a new stage in the process 
 through which humanity is passing means the devel- 
 opment of a higher genus rather than the perpetuation 
 and development of the individual himself. And 
 it must be admitted that such an objection has great 
 weight. But at bottom it is a matter of the interpre- 
 tation of process itself. Is the end to which evolution 
 tends the individual or the group ? It would seem to 
 me that there can be only one answer : the ultimate 
 of the evolutionary process is the completed free indi- 
 vidual. That is to say, a personality that finds its 
 completed self-expression not in a physical, but in a 
 spiritual, more completely personal situation. The 
 history of humanity itself seems to warrant such an 
 interpretation. For social institutions have never 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 219 
 
 been ends in themselves. Men have tried to make 
 them such, but invariably there has arisen above the 
 institutional interpretation of society that more crea- 
 tive impulse to see in humanity persons on the way 
 to free individuality rather than a new race. He has 
 always been regarded the most nearly perfect man 
 who has proved himself most superior to the physical 
 and imperfectly personal forces in which he finds him- 
 self involved. From such a point of view death is a 
 new birth. The personality reached in our moment 
 of physical life is, so to speak, the embryo of that new 
 stage which is made possible by the emancipation of 
 self from the survival of the strictly physiological as- 
 pects of the process. Indeed, were it not that obser- 
 vation is so much more difficult, it would be hardly 
 more perplexing to see how a life like Jesus' can per- 
 sist through the change of death than how it persisted 
 through the change of birth. The paraphrase of 
 Professor Royce sums up the whole matter : " This 
 mortal must put on individuality." 
 
 3. Nor is this quite all that can be said. Men of 
 science are very properly cautious as to speculations 
 regarding the subconscious or subliminal self, but a 
 review of the psychological tendencies of the past ten 
 or a dozen years will show that, despite such caution, 
 the belief that the self is more than its conscious 
 
220 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 states has gained steady acceptance. Questions of 
 terminology cannot obscure this fact. Whatever 
 term may be used, whether the soul be regarded as 
 an infinitely etherized matter or as spirit, it is no 
 longer permissible to doubt that the self has qualities 
 and potencies which are other than those which used 
 to make the definitions of the soul. Below its out- 
 cropping in the conscious act or thought or emotion, 
 there is the great ledge of personality. 
 
 Difficult as is the method of its investigation, this 
 subconscious — I use the word only for lack of a 
 better — must form one element of every formula 
 of personality. On it an argument for immortality 
 can be and has been grounded. For its existence is a 
 constant reminder that the self cannot be conceived 
 of as a mere aggregation of conscious states and that 
 in this deeper, more spiritual imity there lie powers 
 which may very easily be conceived to survive those 
 conditions which make the separate states of con- 
 sciousness possible. That is to say, the self in other 
 conditions than those set by the nervous organism 
 might give rise to states of consciousness, wholly re- 
 gardless of memory in the ordinary physiological 
 sense of the term. Who of us remembers his in- 
 fancy? And yet our stream of consciousness is 
 unbroken. 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 221 
 
 I am well aware that much of this is speculation. 
 It could not well be more. But it is none the less a 
 speculation very different from that with which 
 Socrates would prove immortality in terms of pre6x- 
 istence, for it at least follows a trail whose beginnings 
 have been blazed by psychology. And as speculation 
 it is calculated to break down the other speculation 
 by which it is asserted that immortality is a priori 
 impossible. In fact, with all due regard to the un- 
 certainty of the nature of immortality and without 
 sanctioning all or indeed any of the particular hy- 
 potheses which have been derived from this theory of 
 the subliminal self, it seems to me beyond question 
 that we are to-day as never before in a position to 
 recognize the reasonableness of a genuine Christian 
 doctrine of immortality at least as a working hy- 
 pothesis. Having reached this point, the belief of 
 the disciples in the resurrection of Jesus and their 
 hope of their own appear far more tenable. 
 
 4. In the minds of many people this is as far as one 
 can safely go in the region of antecedent possibilities. 
 But there are others, of whom I confess I am one, who 
 find in themselves a growing readiness to believe that 
 sooner or later the existence of the human personality 
 after death will become a matter of experiment. The 
 work of the Society of Psychical Research and its 
 
222 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 allied organizations can hardly be said to have re- 
 sulted in convincing conclusions, but it has at least 
 raised questions which suggest positive rather than 
 negative answers. We certainly have not reached the 
 limit of that which can be known, but our ignorance 
 is no longer unillumined by hope. The human soul 
 can no longer be regarded as a function of the brain, 
 and telepathy and hypernormal communications 
 may yet reveal to us the truth and the meaning of 
 those doctrines which have long been based on hope 
 alone. At all events it can hardly be denied that the 
 question of immortality is passing from the region of 
 religion in the ordinary sense of the word to that of 
 science. Sooner or later the view of science, what- 
 ever that may be, will here prevail among modern 
 men. The desire for immortality will hardly be 
 taken always as conclusive evidence of a life after 
 death. That view alone can be regarded as final 
 which is determined by our knowledge of the human 
 personality. And even now such a knowledge bids 
 men pause before saying that personal energy is to 
 be conserved only by being transformed into me- 
 chanical and chemical forces. Values persist as 
 truly as electrons. 
 
 But to my mind this is to say that we may dare hope 
 that one of these days we shall find science doing for 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 223 
 
 the doctrine of immortality what it has done for our 
 conception of creation ; namely, furnish the religious 
 mind with clear evidence of the presence of reason 
 and law in human history and destiny. And al- 
 though I question much of his "evidence," I find 
 myself responding to these words of the late F. W. H. 
 Myers : — 
 
 "I venture now on a bold saying ; for I predict that, in 
 consequence of the new evidence, all reasonable men, a cen- 
 tury hence, will believe the resurrection of Christ, whereas 
 in default of the new evidence, no reasonable man, a century 
 hence, would have believed it. The ground of this forecast 
 is plain enough. Our ever growing recognition of the continu- 
 ity, the uniformity of cosmic law has gradually made of the 
 alleged uniqueness of any incident its almost inevitable refuta- 
 tion. Ever more clearly must our age of science realize that 
 any relation between a material and a spiritual world cannot 
 be an ethical or emotional relation alone; that it must needs be 
 a great structural fact of the universe, involving laws at least 
 as persistent and identical from age to age as our known 
 laws of energy or of motion." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Let us then look at the resurrection of Jesus from 
 the point of view not of that which could not be, but 
 of that which, not antecedently impossible, was or 
 was not according to reliability of evidence. Im- 
 mediately we see that we are by no means so stricken 
 
224 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 with poverty of such Evidence as it has sometimes 
 been alleged. The oldest documents which we have 
 in Christianity, the letters of Paul, center abo^it the 
 fact and describe the evidence on which Paul ac- 
 cepted it. This is by no means that of one person, 
 but of himdreds of persons, most of whom still lived 
 at the time when Paul wrote. The stories of the 
 resurrection in the gospels must have originated 
 during the lifetime of those very persons who could 
 have denied their existence. And it is to be borne in 
 mind that the sources of these gospel records of the 
 resurrection-faith are not derived one from the other, 
 but are almost without exception independent of 
 each other, thus representing the faith of Chris- 
 tians scattered over a very wide geographical 
 area. 
 
 I. If we start with that which is no longer seriously 
 denied even by negative critics, viz. that the early 
 Christians honestly believed they had seen Jesus 
 after his crucifixion, the only really vital question 
 before us is whether or not they were deceived. At 
 this point a man is certain to turn to his presupposi- 
 tions. If one believes that it is more probable that 
 they were deceived than that they saw what they 
 said they saw, the argument is closed, except as one 
 may attack that major premise by asking : Why is it 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 225 
 
 more improbable? The answer can only be, be- 
 cause it is contrary to the ordinary run of human ex- 
 perience — and we are back again on the ground of 
 Hume ; a position which as I have tried to show is 
 steadily growing less tenable. How, if there were no 
 facts to warrant its rise, are we to account for this 
 faith of the disciples — a faith which antedates the 
 organization of the church ; a faith which is older than 
 any Christian theology ; a faith which grew up in the 
 midst of the very generation and in the very city in 
 which the events were believed to have taken place ? 
 
 2. There have been a variety of hypotheses with 
 which to accoimt for the origin of the belief. We have 
 been told that Jesus was not dead; that he simply 
 swooned and was brought to consciousness in the cool 
 tomb. But this involves so many difficulties as to 
 have been abandoned by all serious students. 
 
 We have been told that the disciples deliberately 
 concocted the story for selfish ends. This, too, has 
 passed away as lying outside of that which is reason- 
 able. 
 
 We have been told that the Egyptians believed in 
 the resurrection of Osiris and the Syrians in the resur- 
 rection of Tammuz, and the Assyrians in the recall 
 of Ishtah's husband from Sheol. 
 
 We have had the disciples' belief referred to sun 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 myths and spring myths, and in fact to every sort 
 of myth that the student of comparative religion 
 has been able to discover. Just at present we have as 
 a suggested explanation that the belief in the resur- 
 rection was due to a combination in the disciples' 
 minds of auto-suggestion, religious faith, value 
 judgments, mob psychology, and the messianic hope, 
 the hypothesis being buttressed by reference to 
 legends as to the alleged resurrections of Saints. 
 
 3. I do not think I underestimate the difficulties 
 which lie in the belief in the resurrection as an histori- 
 cal fact. I am not prepared to deny that there may 
 be secondary additions in the gospels as they now 
 stand; but after all reasonable allowance has been 
 made, after the story of the resurrection has been 
 brought to its oldest form as we find it in the Pauline 
 documents, I must frankly say that for me all of these 
 explanations are more difficult than that which they 
 would explain. They refuse in the first place to 
 acknowledge in Jesus, in whom men find the worth 
 of God, any more power than they see in Socrates; 
 in the second place they assume that it is impossible 
 for any communication between the dead and the 
 living to take place ; in the third place they practically 
 assume that immortality in itself is an open question ; 
 and in the fourth place they assume that it would 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 227 
 
 have been possible for hundreds of men and women 
 so to deceive themselves, not consciously, but from 
 the excess of love and faith, as to believe that the 
 one, who had disappointed all their hopes, had given 
 the lie to their messianic expectations, and had become 
 the victim of their enemies, had appeared after death, 
 had ascended to God, and was to come again to 
 establish the kingdom which he had once failed to 
 establish. And finally, as if to intensify the diffi- 
 culties, they insist that the faith thus cruelly defeated 
 was so strong that when its possessors came together 
 it developed an auto-suggestion which was visualized 
 into a form so distinct and commanding as to become 
 the basis of a religion. For my own part, in view of 
 the weakening of the antecedent improbability of 
 personal immortality, I would rather make a working 
 hypothesis of the disciples' experiences as trustworthy 
 rather than of such highly subjective conjectures, 
 however much they may claim the support of a 
 scientific vocabulary. 
 
 And this conviction is strengthened as one recalls 
 that the chief witness, Paul, who claims to have seen 
 Jesus himself, was himself subject to visions. He 
 therefore knew the difference between an experience 
 of the risen Christ and those other experiences, such 
 as that one in which he is said to have been caught 
 
228 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 up in the third heaven. In fact, the entire history 
 of the apostolic church affords data which make it 
 evident that the very persons who believed in visions 
 and dreams made a distinction between such ex- 
 perience and the appearance of the risen Christ. 
 They were, so to speak, connoisseurs in visions, and 
 their testimony to the fact that their experiences of 
 Jesus were more objective than that of their visions is 
 in a fashion that of experts. ' 
 
 IV 
 
 But in what did they believe these experiences 
 consisted? In other words, what does the gospel 
 mean by the resurrection? 
 
 I. The point of departure for any investigation of 
 such a difficult matter is the writings of Paul, particu- 
 larly the fifteenth chapter of i Corinthians and the 
 fifth chapter of 2 Corinthians. From these chapters 
 it is apparent that Paul did not believe that the Jesus 
 who appeared to him was flesh and blood. Flesh 
 and blood, he declares, cannot inherit the kingdom of 
 God. It is also apparent that he finds it impossible to 
 give even a quasi-scientihc description of what the 
 body of the resurrection is to be. For when that ques- 
 tion is raised he at once proceeds to argue by analogy 
 that it is to be different from the body that is 
 
THE DELIVEEANCE FROM DEATH 22g 
 
 " sown." More positively he declares it to be a spir- 
 itual body. 
 
 In thsir present forms, our gospels are later than 
 the writings of Paul, and in all four we have accounts 
 which are much more concrete. The difference 
 between their views and the views of Paul must have 
 been as evident to tlie early Christians as they are to 
 us, but would doubtless be explained on the supposi- 
 tion that the Jesus who appeared to Paul was the 
 Jesus who had ascended to heaven, while the Jesus 
 who appeared to the disciples on the first Easter 
 and during the forty days had not yet " ascended to 
 the Father." And such a view has at least this justi- 
 fication : if the Jesus who had appeared to Paul had 
 been in precisely the same form as the Jesus who is 
 reported to have appeared to Mary Magdalene and 
 Peter, it is probable that when he raised the question 
 as to the nature of the spiritual body Paul would 
 have referred directly to the body of that Jesus who 
 was to him the first fruits of those who sleep. 
 
 Yet the words of Paul are not altogether out of 
 harmony with those of the four gospels, and any his- 
 torical method must proceed from those elements 
 which are common to all the gospels to those which 
 are peculiar to different narratives. Any resulting 
 discrepancies may then be tested by the Pauline con- 
 ception as that which is critically the oldest. 
 
230 THE GOSPEL -\XD THE MODERN MAN 
 
 2 . In such a procedure it becomes at once apparent 
 that all of the gospels look upon the risen Jesus as 
 possessed of certain powers quite unlike those pos- 
 sessed by him before death. True, the gospels con- 
 ceive some sort of identity- between the body of the 
 risen Jesus and the body that was laid in the tomb, 
 and to this the position taken by Paul in i Corinthians 
 can hardly be said to be opposed. But the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus was not of a sort with the raising from 
 the dead of Jairus' daughter and the widow's son and 
 Lazarus. In each of these three cases we have not 
 resurrection but simply the reanimation of the old 
 life. Ever)- one of the three was to die again. In the 
 case of Jesus, however, the resurrection was not to be 
 followed by death and was more than reanimation. 
 It involved some sort of passage from the pxirely 
 physical to a higher form of life less subject to the 
 limitations of the physical world, more personal be- 
 cause more spiritual. 
 
 It is customary among some scholars to make a 
 sharp distinction between the mode of existence of 
 Jesus during the forty days subsequent to his resur- 
 rection and that mode in which he is believed now to 
 be existing. That is to say, they regard the forty 
 days as a period of gradual transformation of the 
 body from the fleshly to the spiritual body. The 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 23 1 
 
 modem man is likely to be critical of such a hy- 
 pothesis, and yet if he once asserts that the faith of the 
 New Testament is not wholly one of misapprehension 
 he must at least treat it with respect ; for it is an at- 
 tempt at constructive theory. On the one side, al- 
 though the empty tomb does not seem to be absolutely 
 demanded by the Pauline conception of the resurrec- 
 tion, it is clear enough that the earliest stratum of the 
 resurrection hope presupposed a belief that the body 
 had disappeared. But by whom was it removed? 
 The ancient tradition is that the Pharisees charged 
 the disciples with removing it; but such a charge 
 is absurd on the face of it. Did then the Pharisees 
 remove it? So some claim. But what was to be 
 gained by such an act? It is, of course, true that 
 a priori argument at a distance of nineteen hundred 
 years is precarious, but the difficulty of explaining 
 away the ancient belief in the empty tomb should at 
 least suggest some hesitation on the part of those 
 men who would summarily wash the entire matter 
 off the slate of history. 
 
 The fundamental fact is that the early disciples had 
 some sort of experience of Jesus after his death. 
 This simple fact is as evangelic as it seems critically 
 assured. It is impossible for me, with what knowledge 
 I have been able to gain of the pre-Christian messi- 
 
232 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 anic hope, to see how the belief in the resurrection 
 could have sprung from the disciples' faith in Jesus 
 as Christ. Rather the contrary is true. Facts 
 compelled the belief; it was not created by the faith. 
 When it comes, however, to the shaping up of any 
 absolutely self-consistent explanation as to what these 
 experiences really were, it is mere elemental honesty 
 to say that such explanation lies beyond our power. 
 We certainly cannot uncritically mass the gospel ac- 
 counts into such a theory. At any rate no scholar 
 has ever succeeded in the attempt. But such an im- 
 possibility, I am sure, arises from our ignorance of 
 the soul and the nature of human personality on the 
 one side and the whole field of supernormal experi- 
 ence on the other. If it should ever be shown more 
 clearly than it is to-day that in certain nervous condi- 
 tions human beings are unusually susceptible to 
 super-physical influences, we might in such a fact 
 find a clew that would be worth following. At all 
 events it does not seem to me to be in any way un- 
 likely that some partial hypothesis will some day be 
 forthcoming. In the meantime it is not necessary 
 to wait upon the invention of new terms or the ability 
 to explain fully an experience that is well attested 
 as actual historical fact. 
 
 4. It is sometimes argued that the belief in the 
 
THE DELIVEBANCE FROM DEATH 233 
 
 resurrection of Jesus as anything more than a purely 
 subjective experience carries with it corresponding 
 belief in the "levitation" of Jesus. Undoubtedly 
 such is a possible inference from the New Testament 
 records, but after all the sting of "levitation" lies in 
 the belief that the early Christian Church held to a 
 physical disappearance of a flesh and bone Jesus 
 in heaven. That is to be denied. "Resurrection" 
 and "ascension" are not identical turns. It was not 
 the earthly body Jesus that disappeared in heaven, 
 according to the faith of the early disciples; it was the 
 transformed body. Even if they regarded the resur- 
 rection at its inception as physical, the ascended Christ 
 was the Lord the Spirit. This may not make the mat- 
 ter any more scientifically intelligible, but it certainly 
 makes the primitive faith self-consistent. How- 
 ever we may account for the story of the ascension 
 it is undeniable that in a few weeks (except in the case 
 of Paul) the experiences of the risen Christ ceased 
 and in their place came that spiritual enthusiasm 
 and invigoration which the New Testament calls the 
 "gift of the Spirit." 
 
 5. In any conclusion it is well to call to mind that in 
 the expectation of the early church the remarkable 
 thing in the resurrection of Jesus was not that he 
 alone of all mankind was to experience that great 
 
234 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 change. All the Christians expected the same in the 
 Day of Judgment. The really remarkable thing was 
 that he had showed himself alive after his passion to 
 his followers; that is to say, before the Day of Judg- 
 ment which they expected, he had had power suffi- 
 cient to break across the boundary of death a,nd to 
 impress himself in some way upon those who were 
 in particularly sympathetic relationship with him. 
 In him the triumph of the spiritual life is seen in the 
 realm of physical forces as it had been already seen in 
 the realm of morals. As Paul so strikingly declared, 
 he had brought life and incorruption to light. 
 
 I. It must be admitted that such a position as this 
 which I have outlined, with its frank admission of in- 
 ability to form a scientifically precise statement as to 
 the actual nature of the resurrection, may serve to 
 disbar it from acceptance by those who on the one 
 hand find no difficulty in taking the New Testament 
 stories at their face value, and on the other by those 
 who refuse to accept testimony as to any fact which 
 does not permit, through experimentation, undoubted 
 and complete correlation with our existing knowledge. 
 Like all attempts at finding the common divisor in 
 conflicting evidence, it is likely to be rejected by 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 235 
 
 divergent parties. But after all what does the reli- 
 gious man really demand in the case? Can he not 
 believe in the genuineness of some sort of a well- 
 attested experience of Jesus on the part of disciples 
 without knowing whether the risen Master ate fish 
 or kindled a fire? The sublime truth that stands 
 out in the resurrection of Jesus is the emancipation 
 of the spiritual life from the physical order as 
 culminating in death, not information as to physio- 
 logical details. 
 
 Even those scholars who now doubt the explana- 
 tion given by the apostles to their undoubtedly his- 
 torical experience are at one in insisting that their 
 own confidence in immortality is largely derived 
 from the gospel message; and that is something 
 which is not to be underestimated. The story of the 
 resurrection of Jesus is not meant to satisfy our 
 human lust for wonders. Negative and constructive 
 critics are one at the essential point that the gospel 
 brings new confidence in the purpose and goal of 
 human development. Immortality in the Christian 
 sense does not mean that human life simply takes up 
 its old interests. It means a new birth upward; 
 a new advance, a new stage of human evolution ; a 
 freer and more complete spiritual personality. 
 
 2. From the point of view of evolution something 
 
236 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 like the resurrection of Jesus seems to be demanded. 
 For, as has already been said, the course of evolution 
 has not been simply towards the production of new 
 species. It is rather towards the production of de- 
 creasingly animal and consequently increasingly free 
 spiritual individuality. It is at this point that the 
 gospel appears to give significance to the process. 
 In a sense almost startlingly true, Jesus is a second 
 Adam. As the first man marked the rise of the new 
 type of individual above the brute, so Jesus reveals the 
 completion of the next step ahead in the process of the 
 development of the spiritual individual. The a priori 
 probability that there should develop some life 
 through its identity with the End of the spiritual order 
 made strong enough to conquer the conditions set by 
 our physical limitations, is met by the message that 
 such a life has appeared. The a priori probability 
 meets the historical. 
 
 It is from this union that the resurrection of Jesus 
 as more than the creation of the faith of the dis- 
 ciples becomes of real significance to the modem man. 
 He will find difficulties in some of the details of the 
 record, but in the larger probability that such a per- 
 sonality as that of Jesus, so obviously at the pinnacle 
 of human moral development, should have had power 
 to express itself as triumphantly over the ultimate 
 
THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 237 
 
 collapse of physical nature as over the temptations 
 due to that physical nature, he will find a new help for 
 his interpretation of his own deepest longings and an 
 answer to that tragic question which we all face as to 
 the meaning of our life. The gospel is a message 
 of salvation not only in that it helps a man to be free 
 from sin, but in that it interprets and even glorifies 
 that all too seemingly relentless process in which we 
 find ourselves involved. We do not believe in im- 
 mortality simply because we believe in the story of the 
 resurrection of Jesus, but with that story immortality 
 gains a new value. We do not ground morality on 
 immortality as such, but on the spiritual quality of life 
 that can eventuate in such a triumph over anti- 
 personal forces as we see in the case of Jesus. The 
 resurrection is not something which must be believed 
 in addition to that which we do believe, but with 
 the weakening of the a priori objections against it, it 
 may become what indeed the early church and in fact 
 Christians of the centuries have claimed it to be — 
 a means of bringing life and incorruption to light; 
 a demonstration of the finality of the life of love. 
 
 And unless I greatly mistake, the modem world is in 
 serious danger of losing that estimate of the worth of 
 the spiritual life which is given by the gospel with its 
 insistence upon resurrection. With the assurance that 
 
238 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 the evidence of the resurrection of Jesus affords, a 
 modern man sees new significance in the ever present 
 moral struggle, gets new estimates of the worth of the 
 life of love and sacrifice, and a larger and more com- 
 pelling impulse to reproduce in his daily living that 
 supreme life in the spirit which was lived by Jesus 
 himself. He sees new meaning in the process in 
 which he finds himself involved, new hopes for the 
 race about which he had almost despaired. He 
 realizes as he otherwise never could realize the mean- 
 ing of God's presence in his world, and experiences 
 as he otherwise never would experience the regenera- 
 tion that comes to him who dares let God transform 
 his being. He will have many questions — his very 
 joy will prompt him to seek ever more completely 
 the meaning of the new life he lives. But of one thing 
 he will be assured : a reasonable gospel of deliverance 
 from death — not from dying — to him as to every 
 one who believes, whether he be modem or otherwise, 
 will prove itself to be a message of inspiration and 
 a moral dynamic. He will be less easily wearied in 
 well-doing as he sees that his labor is not in vain in 
 the Lord. 
 
PART III 
 THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE TEST OF LIFE 
 
 In our discussion thus far, we have been concerned 
 not so much with proving that the gospel is true in 
 itself as that it is reasonable from the point of view 
 of the modem man who recognizes the presence of 
 God in his universe and trusts the impulses and 
 potencies of his own spiritual life to seek foimdation 
 and reenforcement in God. In the great struggle 
 between culture and faith, — a struggle that ought 
 never to have arisen, but which ever since the days of 
 Goethe has been waged with unceasing energy — 
 two lines of strategy have been followed by the leaders 
 of Christian thought. The one has been the direct 
 defense of the Christian revelation in itself; the other 
 has been the establishment of the reasonableness of 
 the act and attitude of Christian faith. Both have 
 had their victories, but in our present day the second 
 line of defense is the more effective. Whatever 
 239 
 
240 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 may be true of the metaphysical arguments for the 
 existence of God and for the nature of the Trinity, 
 Christian faith itself can be justified. Its champion 
 can hopefully leave to the metaphysician the task 
 of proving truths that lie beyond experience; he 
 himself can show that it is reasonable to exercise 
 faith in God. The two lines of argument will 
 doubtless meet; they are by no means mutually 
 exclusive. But nevertheless the modem man finds 
 the religious and practical argument more in accord 
 with his hard-won anti-metaphysical temper. 
 
 If our task has been in any way fulfilled, it has 
 appeared that the gospel of the New Testament 
 when once seen in its elements and systematized by 
 the modem equivalents of its original coordinating 
 concepts, is consistent with those other facts and 
 presuppositions which the modem man has come to 
 accept. But it might appear that the gospel was 
 left, as it were, in stable equilibrium. A further 
 step must be taken. The gospel must not appear to 
 be merely tenable; it must be seen to have power. 
 "The man of science," says Huxley somewhere, 
 "has learned to beheve in justification, not by faith 
 but by verification." Verification means experiment, 
 the demonstration of practicability. If the gospel is 
 to be a message of deliverance, it must deliver. 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 24I 
 
 The evidence of practical accomplishment has al- 
 ways been claimed for Christian teaching. As 
 far back as the early apologists we find Aristides ap- 
 pealing eloquently to the great philosopher-Emperor 
 to acknowledge the Christians as taxpayers and 
 loyal citizens. The unknown writer of the beautiful 
 epistle to Diognetus declares that the Christians are 
 to the world what the soul is to the body. Through- 
 out the succeeding centuries the defenderof Christian- 
 ity has always found a great argument in the efifect 
 of Christian faith upon conduct, while the historian 
 has recognized the influence of the church in the 
 formation of European civilization. 
 
 Of late however the test has somewhat changed its 
 character. The importance of religion as an expres- 
 sion of human nature, at least in certain of its stages of 
 development, is admitted, but for various reasons 
 religion, and particularly the Christian religion as 
 expressed in the gospel, is judged not altogether 
 practicable or adapted to our modem life. Let us 
 look first at two general grounds for doubting the 
 practicability of the gospel. 
 
 I. It is argued that Christianity is an oriental 
 religion, and accordingly is ill adapted to the West- 
 em world. 
 
242 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 The general differences between oriental and occi- 
 dental minds are well known, at least in so far as 
 religions are concerned. The East is said to be more 
 meditative and mystic, the West more practical. But 
 the distinction certainly does not apply to the gospel, 
 true as it is of the teaching of the great Indian litera- 
 tures. The gospel may have originated in Palestine, 
 but it is not oriental in character. Nor would any 
 man who respects the definitions of his terms char- 
 acterize the Hebrew thought as philosophic. It 
 was intensely practical. The prophets never specu- 
 lated; they counseled action. The Jews since 
 Ezra's time have never been out and out orientals; 
 they have been cosmopolitan. So, too, in the teaching 
 of Jesus there is hardly a sentence that can in any 
 sense be said to be merely philosophical. Jesus is 
 more a prophet and poet than one who reflects over 
 the nature of things. The Fourth Gospel, it is true, 
 moves out into a little different atmosphere, but it is 
 largely a rsworking of the teachings of Jesus by the 
 evangelist, and even then it is far more akin to the 
 philosophy of the West than it is to the philosophy of 
 the East. The Logos doctrine was the bequest of the 
 Greek. I do not doubt that at some points the orien- 
 tal mind may discover significance in Jesus' words 
 that might elude the less intuitive thinking of our 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 243 
 
 modem world. But I fail to see any serious limita- 
 tions which are set upon the occidental interpretation 
 of the gospel on the ground that it is an oriental 
 product. Compare the gospel of Mark with the 
 Bhagavad Gita and then, if you can, say they are 
 of the same spirit. 
 
 2. A far more serious objection to the gospel on 
 the side of practical living is that it is excessively 
 individualistic. 
 
 It is a little diflBcult for me to appreciate the force 
 of this objection. The individualism which the 
 gospel inculcates is farthest possible from that 
 insulated individualism set forth in certain phases 
 of Christian theology and particularly in oriental 
 philosophies. According to these latter teachings, 
 perfection is to be reached by the complete with- 
 drawal of men from social life, by defrauding all the 
 social impulses. The individualism of the gospel, 
 paradoxical as it may seem, is social. A man is to 
 reach his fullest self-expression in the altruistic life 
 of love. That life alone can be reenforced by the 
 Holy Spirit. Salvation, in the terms of the New 
 Testament, consists in possessing the quality of life 
 which constitutes a man's being a member of the 
 kingdom of God; and the kingdom of God, no 
 matter how eschatological it may have been 
 
244 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 regarded by the Jews and the early Christians, was 
 a social order. 
 
 The claim that the gospel induces excessive in- 
 dividualism is true only of that perverted applica- 
 tion of its message which would insist that a man 
 reaches his salvation in other ways than those set 
 by the gospel itself. No man can fail to honor those 
 noble misrepresentations of Christian self-sacrifice 
 which led men and women to abandon family, and 
 city, and country, and seek peace with their God as 
 hermits. He will not altogether decry that search 
 for an individualistic salvation that seeks heaven 
 with its blessings rather than hell with its pains. 
 For even thus men have been led to a service to 
 society in almsgiving and homely helpfulness. 
 The evidence, however, of the unnaturalness of the 
 Christianity which such conduct involves is to be 
 seen in the fact that such men and women so fre- 
 quently slip over the border line into eccentricity, 
 or spiritual pride and unfraternal condescension. 
 Christianity in so far as it has attempted to repro- 
 duce the real spirit of the gospel has made toward 
 democracy. This in itself is an evidence that the 
 individualism which it inculcates has its social ele- 
 ment. The more other-worldly the Puritan was, 
 the more did he insist on town meetings. History 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 245 
 
 is punctuated by those self-sacrificing groups of 
 men who have attempted to live in some form a 
 communistic life in accordance with what seemed to 
 them to be the real principles of the individual's 
 life in the spirit. 
 
 And, after all, is not the gospel. Just because it 
 does magnify a true sort of individualism, much 
 closer to the nature of things than if it sought to 
 subordinate the individual to society? Which is 
 truer to fact — that the individual exists for the 
 benefit of society or that society is a part of that 
 situation in which the individual may reach his 
 most completely personal self-expression? To my 
 mind there can be only one answer to such ques- 
 tion. The entire process of history seems to be the 
 development of the free personality as over against 
 the production of a new society. Religion may be 
 described as the voluntary anticipation of the next 
 stage of this process whose goal is the perfected 
 spiritual individual, through personal union with God. 
 
 But the gospel of freedom is not to be taken too 
 literally. If men are not twins because they are 
 brothers, so in the larger fraternity of the spirit, 
 they are not free from limitations set by the neces- 
 sity of living in social groups. Society in the best 
 sense of the word is a means to freedom. One 
 
246 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 cannot read the works of Tolstoi without feeling that 
 in his reaction against the conception of govern- 
 ment to which he as a Russian is accustomed, he 
 has overlooked the social element in the free -per- 
 sonality. Cooperation among individuals is in- 
 volved in a personal environment. The anti- 
 governmental teachings of Tolstoi, serviceable as 
 they are as an antidote to mere conventionality, can 
 never become anything more than a sort of season- 
 ing in our social life. A truer conception of the 
 gospel as setting forth the way to the freedom of a 
 social individualism, will regard it as the real leaven 
 of society. 
 
 II 
 
 If, however, apart from over-statement we consider 
 the practicability of the gospel as a message of a free 
 spiritual life in a changing social order like ours, 
 we certainly face a most serious matter. For any 
 teaching that lies beyond the power of realization 
 will be powerless in the same proportion as men 
 realize its impracticability. 
 
 There confronts us at the very outset the funda- 
 mental question as to whether the conceptions upon 
 which the ethics of the gospel rest are really final. 
 Is the life of love and sacrifice the noblest sort of 
 life? Such a question will doubtless seem absurd 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 247 
 
 to those who have accepted the Christian ideal as 
 a social convention. Though no one has ever 
 embodied it fully, yet the consensus of opinion in 
 Christian civilizations has been that the ideal of love 
 and service, even at the expense of sacrifice, is really 
 that toward which humanity should strive. On this 
 we base our final apologetic: though Jesus — and 
 this seems to me the Ultima Thule of improbability, 
 — were to be shown never to have existed, the values 
 which the gospel has brought into life would be 
 eternal. 
 
 But we are no more content with such a minimum 
 of defense than with mere conventionally rhetorical 
 praise. If the gospel is to remain a power in so- 
 ciety it involves something pretty close to a revolu- 
 tion in many of the forms of our life. It is impera- 
 tive that those who claim allegiance to it should 
 pause long enough to face the fundamental ques- 
 tions which their profession of loyalty to Jesus in- 
 volves. 
 
 I. There are those who insist that the gospel as 
 an ethical ideal is imperfect because of its use of 
 reward and punishment. 
 
 There is nothing to which the academic ethicist 
 is so opposed as to rewards and punishments. And 
 his opposition is justified in the same proportion as 
 
248 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 those terms are seen to stand for arbitrary assign- 
 ments of fate in the way of bribes or threats. To 
 urge a man to be good in order that he may go to 
 heaven and not go to hell is a good deal like telling 
 your boy that if he will be honest you will give him 
 fifty cents. Virtue like honesty may be the best 
 policy, but a man who is virtuous through policy is 
 likely to be vicious when he judges vice the best 
 policy. Further, it cannot be denied that in certain 
 stages of civilization Christian teachers have so used 
 this appeal as to shock the moral sense of the more 
 intelligent members of the community. 
 
 It does not seem to me, however, that it is diffi- 
 cult to reply to such an objection. It is due to a 
 misunderstanding of the gospel and to a literalizing 
 of figures of speech. Substitute " genetic outcomes" 
 for "rewards and punishment" and most of the 
 difficulty vanishes. It is only the legalistic con- 
 ception of ethics which gives room for the distortion 
 of gospel teaching to which objection can be raised. 
 And the gospel laiows nothing of statutes. It knows 
 only personalities. Its purpose is to get men saved, 
 to possess a quality of life, not external goods, whether 
 in terms of prosperity or heaven. It teaches dis- 
 tinctly that evil states bring suffering and that 
 righteous states bring joy and peace. But neither 
 
' THE TEST OF LIFE 249 
 
 outcome is external to the personality. Each is in- 
 volved genetically as an outcome of states of ac- 
 tivity. One would not say that a physician was 
 dealing with rewards and punishment when he points 
 out that one course of action involved disease and 
 so suffering, or that another course of action involved 
 health and so physical comfort. Jesus was the Great 
 Physician. The gospel is his prescription. 
 
 2. A more fundamental objection, however, lies 
 in that philosophy to which Nietzsche has given 
 vogue, but which is really far older than he. Ac- 
 cording to Nietzsche the fundamental principle of life 
 is the "will to power." That is the precise oppo- 
 site of love. According to him, there are two sorts 
 of morality, that of the master and that of the slave. 
 Christian morality belongs to the second. It puts 
 a premium on weakness, and through its care for 
 the weaker tends to restrain the fundamental im- 
 pulse of life to master environment, both personal 
 and impersonal, and must therefore lead ultimately 
 to the deterioration of the race. Above all moral 
 conceptions which are the outgrowth of passing 
 social needs, and are given authority by religion, 
 there is the great impulse which, beyond all stand- 
 ards of good and evil, the masters of the race 
 must embody. 
 
250 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 It is not difScult to see that, despite its com- 
 mendable emphasis on the supreme worth of per- 
 sonality, such a conception of ethics is fundamen- 
 tally hostile to the one elemental presupposition of 
 the gospel that the universe is filled with love. Even 
 more particularly is it hostile to the conceptions 
 set forth in the teaching and death of Jesus. It 
 cannot be denied that it is based on something which 
 is true. One great impulse in life is to master en- 
 vironment, and morality and religion itself lie im- 
 plicit in this impulse. More than that, even with 
 all his exaggeration, Nietzsche effectively empha- 
 sizes the supremacy of the free spirit. But the 
 whole matter centers over the question as to whether 
 this impulse toward mastery is the only impulse in 
 humanity. Nietzsche here is not unlike Rousseau. 
 He finds his standards in the conditions of savagery 
 or low civilization. To him the Germans of Taci- 
 tus were superior to the Germans of to-day. That 
 is to say, he would undo the entire work of civiliza- 
 tion as tending to the production of the Appollonian 
 or slave morality. 
 
 Now it is quite impossible to hold that civilization 
 is degeneration. Granting that "will to power" 
 is a fimdamental attribute of life, it seems reductio 
 ad absurdum to hold that the moment that power 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 251 
 
 begins to express itself in the conquest of nature, 
 social cooperation to conquer those things which 
 hold the savage in subjection is weakness. But 
 such cooperation leads inevitably to ethical codes. 
 For over what is power to be exercised? Must it 
 be simply the power of the strong man over other 
 men? May not the highest type of power be ex- 
 pressed in that social cooperation which lies at the 
 basis of civilization and to which Christianity has 
 contributed? We can readily grant that there have 
 been periods in history and that there have been 
 individuals who have so mistaken the call to sacri- 
 fice as to make sacrifice an end to itself. But the 
 real gospel is the farthest possible from asceticism, 
 however many Christians may have been ascetics. 
 Christianity has itself a call to power; it has its vic- 
 tories. Only they are the victories not of the 
 physical man but of the spiritual. It complements 
 the impulse to power through conquest by the im- 
 pulse to power toward harmonization with already 
 existing personal forces. 
 
 In such a contrast between the teaching of Jesus 
 and the teaching of Nietzsche we are confronting the 
 fundamental antithesis that lies in the world of values. 
 Self-expression and self-development are undoubted 
 goods, and self-development can come only by con- 
 
252 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 quest, but the conquest which Christianity insists 
 upon is the conquest over things which are un- 
 spiritual and impersonal ; those from which civiliza- 
 tion constantly tends to free men. It would insist 
 that the power which must come to human life shall 
 be the power which comes through cooperation with 
 the higher forms of life. Primitive Germans con- 
 quered nature by killing wild animals; civilized 
 Germans conquer nature by breeding cattle. Primi- 
 tive man ruled over his fellows by terrorizing them 
 into physical subjection; in the Christian commu- 
 nity the individual is brought into subjection through 
 his own cooperation with the social will. The gos- 
 pel recognizes and rationalizes this principle by 
 insisting that love is a form of social cooperation 
 which involves sacrifice, not in the interest of self- 
 repression, but in the interest of self-development 
 along more potent, more personal, because less 
 animalistic, lines. And it bases its imperative 
 upon its belief in the love of that God whose spiritual 
 life conditions all spiritual living. The two con- 
 ceptions of power placed over against each other 
 mean simply this : reversion to " civilized " savagery 
 or advance to fraternity. 
 
 3. But even on the part of those who are not 
 ready to find in unloving force something which is 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 253 
 
 superior to good and evil, there is the belief that 
 justice is superior to brotherhood. Here again the 
 question at issue is the very nature of the gospel 
 itself. For the gospel has little to say about jus- 
 tice and very much to say about brotherliness. 
 
 The appeal to justice is an exceedingly powerful 
 motive. But it is an appeal that needs to be ana- 
 lyzed. In reality there are two attitudes toward 
 justice, that of getting and that of giving. The 
 impulse to get justice is not evangelical; the im- 
 pulse to give justice is. The great command that 
 Jesus lays upon his followers is not to have their 
 wrongs righted but to seek to right the wrongs of 
 others. To that end they must be ready to sacri- 
 fice, as he sacrificed. 
 
 It is easy enough to see that this is not attractive 
 doctrine, and that it cuts across some of the in- 
 herited elemental passions of life. Moreover, the 
 average Christian man is sometimes apt to think 
 that when he seeks his own selfish will he is really 
 doing the will of God. But despite the difficulties 
 of realizing its ideal, the emphasis laid by the gospel 
 upon the giving of justice, rather than upon the 
 getting of justice, is consonant with life as we know 
 it. Revolutions have seldom if ever won more 
 rights than the more thoughtful among the privi- 
 
254 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 leged persons of the time would have been ready to 
 grant. How much farther did the French revolu- 
 tion proceed in permanent accomplishments beyond 
 the rights which were freely surrendered on August 
 4, 1789? 
 
 Even if this generalization be open to question, it 
 can hardly be denied that to grant a privilege freely 
 in the interest of giving another justice is certainly 
 preferable to a recourse to revolution. But to give 
 justice is brotherhood, and to recognize the impera- 
 tiveness of such an act is to testify to the worth of 
 the gospel's estimate of sacrifice. Brotherhood is 
 not weakness; it is simply difficult. Yet in the 
 same proportion as men come under the ideals of 
 the gospel does it become operative. Nor does there 
 seem to be any social condition quite beyond its 
 power. Individuals, it is true, may cling to privi- 
 lege and force on a struggle to get rights. It is true 
 also that time is requisite for fraternal ideals really 
 to become operative through becoming socialized. 
 But gradually in one field after another the practical 
 power of the ideals of the gospel has exhibited itself. 
 Slavery was certainly a serious and complicated 
 problem, yet slavery in the Roman Empire was 
 abolished in the same proportion as Christianity 
 got control of the slave-holding classes. It is 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 255 
 
 worth while to remember this whenever tempted to 
 think despairingly of the problems set by our 
 present social order. 
 
 It may be objected that to get justice for others is 
 altruistic ; that the class struggle now in evidence is 
 not a struggle on the part of the leaders for their own 
 rights, but is a struggle on their part for the rights 
 of others. And this is true, but it is not contrary 
 to the gospel. To get justice for others by com- 
 pelling the over-privileged to give it to them may 
 be the very quintessence of love, and in so far the 
 motives of champions of the so-called unprivileged 
 masses are of a sort with that which the gospel de- 
 clares to be the very quality of God. The sad 
 thing about the situation is that such champions 
 should be necessary. But that is only to lament 
 the quality of human nature itself. The striking 
 thing is that at all periods in the development of 
 Western civilization there have been men and women 
 who have thus championed the weak at the cost of 
 genuine self-sacrifice. They have not always allied 
 themselves with Christian churches. Ofttimes they 
 have found in the Christian church the very persons 
 whom they had to force to give justice. But such 
 facts do not affect the fimdamental position that, in 
 thus seeking to get rights for others by forcing men 
 
256 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 to give justice when they were unwilling to be fra- 
 ternal, such reformers have been embodying the 
 spirit of Jesus himself, and their success is a further 
 argument of the work of the practicability of the 
 gospel message. It is the imprimatur of history 
 upon the social teaching of the Good Neighbor on 
 Calvary. 
 
 4. Again, there is the ordinary man — and with 
 him now and then the theologian — who believes 
 that the Sermon on the Mount is unworkable. 
 
 It is no answer to say that the Sermon on the 
 Mount is not the gospel, for it contains the ideals 
 which the gospel presupposes as the final ideals of 
 the spiritual life it undertakes to beget. If the ideals 
 Jesus taught are altogether beyond realization; 
 if an honest attempt to put them into our social life 
 must result inevitably, and always as in his own 
 case, in overwhelming defeat and sorrow; then it 
 may as well be admitted that they, and the gospel 
 that heralds them as the realization of the final will 
 of God, are unfitted to humanity. No religious 
 message can deserve acceptance that promises only 
 an endless suffering bom of ideals perpetually 
 maladjusted to social evolution. 
 
 Unless I utterly mistake, it is at this point that 
 the final test of the gospel has been made at different 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 257 
 
 Stages of the history of civilization and it will be at 
 this point that the final verdict will be given in our 
 day. The real issues which the gospel faces lie 
 among the plain people. No esoteric religion has 
 ever been, or will ever be, of any real significance 
 except in the way of tyranny or oppression. Cer- 
 tainly the gospel could never remain the gospel 
 if it once became the exclusive property of an 
 aristocracy. Just as certainly is it true that the 
 rank and file of men are testing the gospel to-day 
 on the basis of its actual efficiency to bring the 
 ideals of Jesus into social life. True, many church 
 members of the older sort fail to appreciate this 
 fact. They still think that precision in doctrinal 
 statement is the vital matter, and in too many cases 
 they are unwilling to take as the sufficient test of 
 loyalty to the gospel a determination to produce 
 among individuals and in society the quality of life 
 of Jesus. They want a confession of belief about 
 Jesus as well as a life full of confidence in Jesus. 
 But a knowledge of the situation as it exists outside 
 of the existing circles of ultra-ecclesiasticism can 
 lead to only one conclusion ; namely, the rank and 
 file of men have ceased to be interested in the ques- 
 tions of trinitarianism, the substitutionary atone- 
 ment, decrees, foreordination, or even the infalli- 
 
258 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 bility of the Scriptures. Such matters, it is true, 
 are still discussed in church circles and theological 
 seminaries, and by some clergymen, but the flood 
 of interest has passed these questions and looks 
 to the far more vital issue which, without the plain 
 man's knowing it, is that raised by Nietzsche. 
 The maxims of our social life in so far as they are 
 anything more than the luxury of idle moments are 
 maxims dealing with success. The ideal man of 
 to-day is first of all the man who amasses great 
 power by amassing great wealth; in the second 
 place he is the man who amasses power in politics; 
 in the third place he is the man who amasses honor 
 in some profession or non-commercial pursuit. 
 Theoretically the champions of these classes of 
 men justify their ideals in terms of social service. 
 Practically any service that costs much bother or 
 sacrifice is relegated to those who are leading, so to 
 speak, professional vicarious lives supported by men 
 who are pursuing the "will to power." 
 
 It must be admitted that our social order as it 
 now stands is not conducive to checking this pur- 
 suit of success as the final good. The man who 
 deliberately chooses the vicarious life will find 
 plenty of opportunities to emulate the martyrs even 
 though he may not have the distinction of being 
 
THE TEST OF LTFE 259 
 
 burned alive. The gospel is submitting to the 
 same general test that its followers endure. If it 
 cannot evoke from its followers the cooperative 
 impulse which Jesus calls love; if it cannot stimu- 
 late men to choose the higher sets of values rather 
 than the material ; in a word, if it cannot be indi- 
 vidually and socially redemptive, it will fail miser- 
 ably. 
 
 I cannot see how any fair-minded observer of the 
 history of Western civilization, and particularly the 
 student of democracy, can fail to see that in a broad 
 way the gospel is constantly and successfully pioneer- 
 ing in this precise direction. We are always in 
 danger of judging any great social movement by 
 individuals whom we happen to know. In this 
 fashion some of us who have been unfortunate 
 enough to be thrown into company with hypocriti- 
 cal Christians come to distrust the power of the 
 gospel in our present social order, while others of 
 us, who have been more fortunate in our com- 
 panions, are more optimistic in our hopes. But 
 experiences of either sort are, after all, misleading 
 when treated as universal. We must take a broad 
 outlook. The questions which we must answer are : 
 In the midst of this struggle for success do we find a 
 rising sense of the rights of the less favored? Is 
 
26o THE GOSFEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 our interest in the weaker growing more brotherly 
 or are we more tempted to treat them as delin- 
 quent or defective pawns in the social struggle? 
 Is the general tone of our social morality rising as 
 regards the care of children, the treatment of women 
 in industry, the insistence on humanitarian care 
 for employees ? Is there growing up a larger readi- 
 ness to consent to changes in some of the structural 
 relations of economic life, for the purpose of demo- 
 cratizing privilege? Such questions as these are 
 not to be answered by impressions drawn from 
 this or that man, but by the study of statistics, of 
 legislation, of commercial ideals, of philanthropy, of 
 education. And such a study, though it be as dis- 
 criminating as facts demand, will show that the 
 fundamental principles of the gospel in terms of 
 ethical life are increasingly influential. 
 
 It is no valid objection to such a hopeful view to 
 say that all this is in the region of ethics, not that of 
 religion. If the gospel is to be condemned for its 
 failure in these fields, it certainly is only fair play 
 to credit it with such successes as it has there achieved. 
 And as a matter of fact the ethics of the gospel is its 
 religion coming to self-realization in social relations. 
 The men and women who are most interested in 
 this social uplift are those who at some point or 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 261 
 
 Other have been touched by the dynamics of the 
 gospel itself. They may be far apart from the 
 churches, but the churches and the gospel are not 
 identical. More than that, the churches them- 
 selves are growing more evangelical. The power of 
 the vicarious life is greater to-day than ever before. 
 Jesus may be less thought of as the second person 
 of the Trinity suffering upon the cross to make 
 feudal satisfaction to a feudal God, but he is none 
 the less increasingly thought of as the "strong son 
 of God, immortal love," who took upon himself 
 our infirmities, shared the bitterness of our indus- 
 trial order, endured the buffetings of sinful men, 
 paid love's penalty to religious bigotry, and, through 
 the faith which he evokes, draws men to his own 
 ideal of vicarious life as that of God Himself. 
 
 It is only corroboration of this view when we see 
 the gospel powerful in individual lives. What tri- 
 umphs it has won over debased souls ! Drunkards 
 and liars, prostitutes and thieves, yes, even hypo- 
 critical sinners of so-called respectable classes, who 
 would otherwise be found among the miserable 
 outcasts denied admission to the New Jerusalem, 
 have been transformed by its power and made 
 fellow-heirs with the saints of all the ages! We 
 sometimes say that the age of great religious 
 
262 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 revivals is past, but the facts give the lie to the as- 
 sertion. The past few years have seen not only 
 innumerable revivals of the type men said were no 
 longer possible, but they have seen also an ex- 
 traordinary response the world over on the part of 
 individual men and women to the appeal of Jesus 
 for that sort of life which he himself lived. Evan- 
 gelism itself is being filled with the social spirit. 
 If we admit, as I believe we must, that as yet the 
 life of Jesus cannot be lived in our social order 
 without self-sacrifice, we must also admit that 
 the socialization of the gospel is proceeding, and 
 that the plain man finds it easier to-day to embody 
 the principles of Jesus than he did ten years ago. 
 This I admit is a statement that must bear the 
 test of facts. I make it not hastily, but in view of 
 what seems to me to be the indubitable evidence 
 of the new appropriation of the gospel by the men 
 of to-day. Give the tendencies everywhere discover- 
 able another decade of development, and its truth 
 will be less open to question. 
 
 5. There is also the rising school of radicals who 
 believe that the gospel's ideals were not intended 
 for the historically developing social order, but 
 were intended to serve ad interim during the bitter 
 period when the followers of Christ awaited his re- 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 263 
 
 turn to establish his new kingdom. Such an opin- 
 ion is based upon the assumptions that the catas- 
 trophe which was to inaugurate the kingdom was 
 an essential element in the thought of Jesus as well 
 as of his disciples, and that his teachings were in- 
 tended to set forth the way in which the expectant 
 Christian should bear the buffetings of an outra- 
 geous age. Any attempt, therefore, to develop such 
 ad interim ethics into a permanent ideal is judged 
 possible only by reading back into the New Testa- 
 ment conceptions of which Jesus and his apostles 
 were altogether innocent. 
 
 The seriousness of such a position as this is ob- 
 vious. If Jesus and his apostles were not con- 
 cerned with fundamental questions of humanity, 
 but only with a modus vivendi pending the speedy 
 coming of the kingdom from heaven, then it is 
 impossible to see how their words can be of any 
 lasting significance. They pass from the company 
 of the great teachers of all time into that of vision- 
 aries whose visions were false. 
 
 Such a position will seem to the average man 
 highly improbable, and indeed it may be to some 
 extent avoided by holding that the fundamental 
 thought of Jesus as to the fatherliness of God still 
 holds good, notwithstanding his specific ideals of 
 
264 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 society. But such a defense is as questionable as 
 the reduction of Jesus to an ecstatic enthusiast. A 
 Jesus that lacked moral uniqueness, who was never 
 raised from the dead, who taught only ad interim 
 ethics and was essentially an ecstatic, is not likely 
 to be of vital significance to the modem world, even 
 though he may have taught the fatherliness of God. 
 Yet the position has none the less sufficient jus- 
 tification to deserve attention. There can be little 
 doubt that the belief in the speedy return of Jesus 
 to establish his kingdom did to some extent affect 
 the social teaching of Paul. He believed that the 
 conditions under which the church existed were 
 temporary. He did not consciously plan for distant 
 posterity because he did not believe there was to be 
 any distant posterity. The age was to be suddenly 
 closed, and a new age was to be introduced. Between 
 the two there was no genetic relation outside the 
 community of the saved, that is, the church. But, 
 as we have already endeavored to show, such views 
 in the case of Paul are practically lacking in the 
 teaching of Jesus. Such traces of them as remain 
 in the oldest stratum of the gospel are incidental, 
 and to make them the controlling factors from which 
 to estimate the social ideals of Jesus is utterly to dis- 
 tort the perspective of the gospel. The same is in 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 265 
 
 large measure true of Paul. Ad interim ethics is 
 undoubtedly present in the apostle's letters to the 
 Corinthians; but it is not the gospel and he never 
 regarded it as the gospel. It was simply directions 
 as to how men who believed in the gospel should 
 live. The expectation of the speedy coming of Christ 
 was to be disappointed, at least in any such sense as 
 would satisfy the content of the expectation ; but the 
 new life of the spirit which was induced by faith in 
 Jesus as Christ was not subject to any ad interim 
 regulations. That new life was the eternal life. 
 
 Any fair interpretation of the gospel must not 
 over-emphasize the prominence of the catastrophic 
 element in the early Christian thought. Sooner or 
 later, as the novelty of the catastrophic idea passes, 
 we shall see that in the ideals of individual and 
 social life contained in the gospel we have what 
 is permanent. Both Paul and Jesus, but particularly 
 the latter, looked across the great chasm which was 
 to separate the one age from the other and centered 
 attention upon the quality of life which, beginning 
 in the present age, would reach fullest element in the 
 coming age. Such ideals may be criticised as too 
 high for the social order as we know it, but they 
 cannot fairly be criticised as not intended for the 
 present age. The gospel was for real men and 
 
266 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 women living in an evil age. The universal feeling 
 of the race has not been altogether wrong in its 
 perception of the dominating influence of Jesus. 
 Two millennia of experience cannot be thrust 
 aside by an academic overestimate of certain ele- 
 ments in the life of the early Christians. 
 
 6. Finally there is the fundamental opposition 
 of the non-religious modem man to the spiritual 
 order. 
 
 We have in our discussion, it will be recalled, 
 restricted the term "modem man" to those who 
 have religious interests, and with whom therefore 
 the gospel has common ground. But such a clas- 
 sification, while justifiable, needs to be supplemented 
 by the recognition of the influence of modem men 
 of a diS'erent type. It is one of the paradoxical char- 
 acteristics of history that the forces of illumination 
 and of culture often depreciate not merely Chris- 
 tianity as a body of formulated doctrines, but that 
 fundamental faith in the supremacy of the spirit 
 which Christianity presupposes. This conflict be- 
 tween the two orders of life, the order of physical 
 nature and the order of the spirit, was never more 
 sharply waged than to-day. 
 
 The representatives of naturalism fall roughly 
 into two classes: those who are dominated by a 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 267 
 
 materialistic interpretation of nature and those 
 whose devotion to idealistic relations is sesthetic. 
 
 If a plebiscite of men of science were undertaken, 
 it would probably show a majority in favor of non- 
 mechanical interpretation of the universe. Doubt- 
 less this majority would be not committed to evan- 
 gelical Christianity as such, although on this point 
 anything like trustworthy statistics are unobtain- 
 able. But in the world of science minorities are 
 often a potent leaven, and their influence extends 
 beyond the limits of statistics. The influence of 
 a man like Haeckel is far wider than among the men 
 of science who accept his findings, for it has extended 
 out into the great public and is exhibited throughout 
 the world in the establishment of clubs. The 
 members of these clubs believe themselves thor- 
 oughly modem and among them are many who 
 discount all religion, and Christianity in particular. 
 Similar is the case of many men who, although of 
 no particular intellectual attainment, have been 
 caught in the general spirit of revolt against the 
 past and pride themselves on a general negative 
 attitude as regarding religion. Men and women 
 of such temper who have also become Marxian 
 socialists are very apt to be bitter in their assaults 
 upon Christianity. 
 
208 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Again, there is the other class of modem men 
 whose interest is particularly in the more aesthetic 
 aspects of culture. They are, of course, in sym- 
 pathy with the general scientific position, but they 
 are particularly concerned with matters of litera- 
 ture and art. To a considerable degree they are the 
 modem representatives of the men of the Illumina- 
 tion and the Renaissance. It would be difficult to 
 discover how far such polite interest in the world is 
 atheistic, but so far as it is expressed in poetry and 
 in essays it certainly could not be characterized as 
 evangelical. Generally speaking, it is indifferent 
 rather than positive. If its representatives would 
 so far yield to the theological pressure as to become 
 interested in the formulation and justification of 
 religious belief, very possibly some of them might 
 be brought to sympathy with Christianity. Their 
 influence, however, like those of the more pro- 
 nouncedly scientific propagandists of non-religion, 
 is steadily being felt and is certain to be extended 
 still farther unless it is met by an intellectually 
 satisfactory apologetic. In so far as the influence 
 of these two types of modem men is unopposed by 
 an evangelicalism that agrees with them in accept- 
 ing the findings of modem science, it will injuri- 
 ously affect the modem men of the more religious 
 
THE TEST OF LIFE 269 
 
 type; for it represents a current in life which must 
 be opposed if it is not to be supreme. 
 
 The things which are not seen, humanity believes, 
 are eternal, but they need constant vindication. 
 We need to show to modem men of this anti-reli- 
 gious type that the Christian thinker does not hesitate 
 to accept the challenge of those who deny the validity 
 and finality of the spiritual order. For it is this 
 denial, whether positive or involved in religious in- 
 difference, that threatens our modern world. The 
 enormous development of material resources; the 
 mad search for pleasure; the growing and in some 
 cases intentional paganism of a society that once 
 called itself Christian, — all are among the startling 
 phenomena of our day. And yet idealism has not 
 been crushed out. Again and again it has risen from 
 its tomb just as its executors were celebrating its 
 death. So it is to-day. The very pressure of the 
 materialistic forces of civilization has served to 
 bring to the forefront the new idealism. And this 
 new idealism is an ally of the gospel, even though in 
 many cases it hesitates to afi&rm some of the elements, 
 particularly the historical, of the gospel which we 
 have formulated. It could not be otherwise, for it 
 is steadily developing and recognizing that attitude 
 of faith which the gospel presupposes. In the case 
 
270 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 of a man like Eucken this alliance is explicit. But 
 whether explicit or not every believer in evangelical- 
 ism, as contradistinguished from an ecclesiastical 
 orthodoxy, should welcome its assistance and be 
 ready to show that what it sets forth in terms of an 
 interpretation of the universe, Christianity also ex- 
 hibits in the specific experiences of Jesus and the 
 men of Christian faith. 
 
 These various forces which assault the reasonable- 
 ness and practicability of the gospel are, unfortu- 
 nately, too often ignored or minimized by the defenders 
 of evangelical faith. Such a procedure is greatly to 
 be deplored. Even though it may be true that men 
 are seldom argued into religion they are certainly 
 often argued out of it. To say that such anti-reli- 
 gious feeling is the expression of moral difficulties, or, 
 as it is sometimes put by earnest religious men, that 
 doubt implies sin, is to deepen the chasm between 
 the church and those modern men who are already 
 anti-religious, and to make more difficult the task of 
 the religious modern man who wishes to maintain 
 loyalty both to the modern world and to the gospel. 
 It is true that it is not necessary for men to go through 
 the agony of religious doubt in order to come into the 
 health of religious faith, but to assert that persons 
 passing through the process of theological reconstruc- 
 
TEST OF LIFE 27I 
 
 tion are sinful is a fatal mistake. A rational apolo- 
 getic at this point is as much needed to-day as it was 
 at the time of Justin Martyr or Paley. The fact that 
 the battleground and weapons have changed should 
 not lead us to minimize the fact that the battle is still 
 on, and that it has passed from the outposts to the 
 very fortress of religion itself. As to the final out- 
 come we can have no doubt, but it is the part of wis- 
 dom to see that the battle is not prolonged and that 
 the forces of the enemy are not increased by the defec- 
 tion of overdisciplined or wrongly trained defenders. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 
 
 To meet objections to the practicability of the gos- 
 pel isj however, to leave the matter only negatively 
 considered. At the best we have thus showed only 
 that in the past it has proved efficient. The real 
 question is whether it contains within itself an au- 
 thoritative appeal which can so transform men of 
 to-day as to do for them what it did for their less 
 scientific predecessors who lived in less complicated 
 social conditions. 
 
 But the word authoritative does not mean exter- 
 nal compulsion. Our discussion thus far will have 
 been utterly misunderstood if the impression should 
 have been made that the gospel is of the nature of 
 dogma. Jesus does not need any vote of ecclesias- 
 tical majorities to establish his truthfulness. To 
 attempt to apply the gospel in our present age is 
 not simply to bring over from the past that which 
 must be believed under penalty ; it is rather to at- 
 tempt to give control to the impulses of the spirit- 
 ual life by the use of facts that have both historical 
 272 
 
THE NEW LIFE EST CHRIST 273 
 
 and religious significance, and also by the use of 
 principles and ideals which the experience of the 
 Christian community have shown to be reason- 
 able and morally effective. The authority of the 
 gospel lies not in the presuppositions with which 
 it is approached, but in its capacity to evoke the 
 response of the spiritual life. It has the energy 
 of the ideal and not the command of the decree. 
 
 I. What is that salvation which the gospel of the 
 New Testament asserts can be brought to individ- 
 uals? We have defined it negatively as deliverance, 
 in New Testament terms, from Satan, sin, and death, 
 and in the modem equivalent as dehverance from 
 physical necessity, from the backward pull of the 
 vestiges of past stages of development surviving in 
 the individual and society, and from the collapse of 
 the process of physical development ia death. But 
 we have seen also that the gospel promises more than 
 mere rescue. Rescue is only the converse of that 
 positive deliverance which is in terms of transformed 
 and triumphant personality, raised by fellowship 
 with God into superiority to the impersonal world of 
 nature and the less personal forces that lead to sin. 
 How distinct this is in the teaching of Jesus must be 
 
274 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 clear to every one who attentively studies the oldest 
 strata of the gospel records. The later editors of 
 these strata may have been dominated to a higher 
 degree than Jesus by a conception of a catastrophic 
 deliverance, but they were not content to describe 
 even this great event of the future as merely a rescue. 
 Jesus did more than throw out a life line; he re- 
 leases a life force in every soul that trusts him. The 
 teachings of Jesus as revealed by sympathetic criti- 
 cism are fundamentally in terms of life. There is not 
 a suggestion of self-repression in his words. His 
 teaching as to sacrifice is a teaching of the subordina- 
 tion of a secondary, impersonal, to a primary, personal 
 good. Physical life may well be lost to gain a 
 spiritual life like that of God. 
 
 It can hardly be necessary to point out that this 
 spiritual life, to the full attainment of which the gospel 
 points the way, does not necessarily involve any pecul- 
 iar psychology, such as sometimes masks itself be- 
 hind the word spirit. Nor is it an abstraction gained 
 by eliminating concrete qualities. It is rather a 
 transformed life itself, the equivalent in our modern 
 thought of the eternal life of which Jesus so frequently 
 spoke. For eternal life with Jesus is neither a new 
 vital quantum nor yet a mere continuation of the 
 life one lives before death. The history of the term 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 275 
 
 cannot be shaped up from a philological analysis of a 
 Greek word. It is one of the aspects of a socialized 
 concept, the already familiar messianic hope. The 
 gospel presupposes those two ages which formed so 
 essential an element in the messianic program ; " this 
 age" full of misery and oppression of the righteous, 
 and " the Age to come" when the kingdom was to be 
 established, the will of God was to be perfectly done, 
 and joy was to be the eternal possession of the Chris- 
 tian. Everlastingness is involved in this life because 
 the Age is never to end, but it is only one of its ele- 
 ments. When Jesus and the apostles looked forward 
 to the Age-life they looked forward not to a primitive 
 conception of the reSmergence of the interests of the 
 physical life, but, as we can now see, to a higher type 
 of life, in which there was to be not only a continua- 
 tion of that evolution of individuality we already can 
 trace, but a blessed improvement upon everything 
 physical. The conflict between the natural and 
 spiritual orders — that is what the two ages of 
 Christian messianism pictured ; the joyous triumph 
 of the spiritual life in the spiritual order — that is 
 the blessedness of the kingdom of God. 
 
 To attain to this spiritual life is to be saved. Its 
 elements, or at least its potencies, are already resident 
 in the human personality, but need to be made 
 
276 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 supreme in self-realization and self-expression. This 
 can be possible only as a man is volitionally at one 
 with an environing God from whom he [has been 
 separated by sin. Such a radical change, however, 
 is possible only as one chooses to make paramount the 
 values of the spiritual life, or, as Jesus would say, 
 repents and seeks the eternal life of the kingdom of 
 God. The full establishment in one's living of such 
 a perspective of values in itself constitutes salvation, 
 for it is to have one's entire personal existence con- 
 trolled by the timeless ideal of love like that of the 
 eternal God. A personality controlled by the im- 
 pulses of the physical life, by devotion to things 
 which are temporal, like property or the physical life 
 itself, in the very nature of the case is not saved. It 
 is degenerating and reverting to impersonal living. 
 As Jesus himself taught, in seeking to save that 
 which is temporal and physical men neglect and lose 
 that which is spiritual and eternal. It is a grievous 
 mistake which some of our moral teachers are making 
 when they push the enjoyment of eternal life over 
 beyond death. From the point of view of the gospel 
 man will never be more immortal than he is now. 
 He is already either living the life of the flesh or the 
 life of the spirit. He is already "dead" or "risen." 
 That is the very keynote of the teaching of Jesus. 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST -277 
 
 In his devotion to those timeless values he sacrificed 
 everything that was temporary — family, occupation, 
 comfort, life itself. In him and in his followers the 
 eternally personal elements triumphed even in a 
 world of time over impersonal and sinful forces. 
 
 Inexplicable as some of the elements of this salva- 
 tion through the victory of the timeless spiritual life 
 are, we still can see that it is true to the fundamental 
 principle of life itself. For it demands not only ex- 
 ternal conduct, but an actual adjustment of one's 
 personality to the spiritual world of God. Regenera- 
 tion is no mere technical term. Morality is sancti- 
 fied into blessedness by the more complete personali- 
 zation of the man who chooses to trust and rely 
 upon God, the Absolute Reason, who is also Love. 
 
 We have not sufficiently recognized the supreme 
 place of this completer personalization of humanity 
 in the teaching of Jesus, for we do not really under- 
 stand his message imtil we see that the deliverance 
 which he promises is accomplished by such a trans- 
 formation of life from the tyranny of change to the 
 freedom of eternal values. The tyranny of natural 
 forces, it is true, can still be exerted over the imper- 
 sonal elements in our being. God can crush us in 
 earthquakes and avalanches, but in so doing he is 
 not working within the sphere of spirit. He treats 
 
278 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 US personally only as He loves and saves us. The 
 eternal life which Jesus would have men attain is 
 that which Plato dimly pictured in his Ideas, and 
 poets have sung in their noblest visions of the true 
 worth of the human spirit. Mankind is saved from 
 natural forces both without and within itself by a 
 divine fellowship that raises the human soul above 
 them and accustoms its activities to the primacy of 
 such immaterial eternal goods as faith and justice 
 and love. 
 
 2. The teaching of Paul is the same. Our theol- 
 ogies have preferred to shape themselves along the 
 interpretative, forensic thought of the apostle, but 
 in the light of the historical approach to his gospel 
 we are coming to see that what Paul was most inter- 
 ested in was personality that had reached self-expres- 
 sion in the new spiritual order revealed in Jesus. 
 Alongside of his striking exposition of the messianic 
 future in which the believer was to share, is his less 
 rigorous, less systematic, but profoundly more domi- 
 nating conception of the life in Christ. Even if it 
 is not possible to reduce many of these personal con- 
 ceptions of Paul to exact definitions, with him as 
 with Jesus they are finalities of experience. The re- 
 newed impulses of the Holy Spirit ; the new loyalty 
 evoked by the Christ ; the enthusiasm bom of a great 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 279 
 
 hope ; the sublime indifference to creature comforts 
 wherever they were in contrast with the goods of the 
 spiritual personality, — all these are the very heart 
 of Paulinism. The centering of thought upon formal 
 Paulinism has given us traditional orthodoxy and a 
 misinterpretation of the cry of "Back to Christ." 
 The centering of thought on these personal, vital 
 elements of the apostle's teaching will give us that 
 dynamic religion of the spirit which is the real con- 
 tribution of Jesus to human history. Even a super- 
 ficial knowledge of the history of doctrine corrobo- 
 rates such a statement. A Christianity without con- 
 viction is powerless, but a Christianity that has shifted 
 the center of interest from supreme personal values 
 to ecclesiastical conformity; that prefers plans of 
 salvation to salvation itself; that raises definitions 
 of the "natures" of Jesus above moral surrender 
 to the joy-giving Saviour; has always bred the spirit 
 of persecution. How pathetic is the history of the 
 church in those moments when, refusing to see that 
 the only thing which Jesus and Paul really demanded 
 is spiritual likeness with God as exhibited in Jesus, 
 it has attempted to find its ultimate goods in enforced 
 conformity to some philosophy masquerading as a 
 gospel. 
 We need to distinguish frankly between evangeli- 
 
28o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 calism in the true sense and orthodoxy. Orthodoxy 
 is an authoritative formulation of what certain ages 
 and men believed was the content of evangelicalism. 
 It is an evidence of the existence of convictions, but 
 not necessarily the existence of convictions as to the 
 supremacy of the gospel itself. We need to replace 
 the orthodoxy which Protestantism inherited from 
 Rome with the evangelicalism of Jesus and Paul. 
 The modem man sees this far more plainly than 
 those men who prefer the authority of councils and 
 Popes and tradition, no matter by what name they 
 may be called, to the authority of the Jesus who 
 evoked faith in himself as God. And in thus rec- 
 ognizing the "power of eternal life" he is more at 
 one with the gospel than perhaps he thinks. 
 
 II 
 
 I. From the point of view of psychology this power 
 of the gospel to bring spiritual forces into human 
 experience is due in part to its ability to arouse faith 
 in the God of Jesus. But faith, as every Christian 
 knows, is something more than mere assent to creeds 
 or anti-creeds. It is the making of conviction the 
 basis of conduct. In the very nature of the case such 
 response of the soul to what it holds to be truth is 
 a released impulse. The worth of its outcome will 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 28 1 
 
 depend upon how far the ideal by which the impulse 
 is directed and given content is in accord with reality. 
 Superstition is the bastard brother of faith. For 
 that reason if for no other it is the duty of Christians 
 to be able to give a reason for the hope that is within 
 them. The gospel when once accepted becomes a 
 constant source of suggestion tending to rule the per- 
 sonality in its self-expression. In the same propor- 
 tion as we consistently embody the impulse born of 
 the evangelistic suggestions that God is love, that 
 men may be saved by loyalty to Jesus, that life is 
 more than living, and that goodness, service, and im- 
 mortal worth are within the grasp of each of us, do 
 we live the true spiritual life of faith. Our 
 entire discussion has failed if it has not appeared 
 that such an act of faith, bom of the acceptance of the 
 gospel as reasonable and of Jesus as something more 
 than a picture, is rational. 
 
 At this point, in terms of mere psychology, Chris- 
 tianity is at one with every great religion. Each has 
 its elemental proposition which become the sources 
 of impulse. The difference between religions lies 
 in the content of the germinal teaching. The gospel 
 and the message of Mahomet, for instance, both in- 
 spire their followers with enthusiasm. The chief 
 difference between them at this point lies in the 
 
282 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 quality of life which the enthusiasm of Christians 
 and Mohammedans engenders. The Koran nerves 
 men to absolute self-repressing devotion on the battle- 
 field when Allah's will is only to be accepted. The 
 gospel has stirred innumerable men to service to 
 their kind as missionaries and social workers, under 
 the enlightened impulse toward spiritual freedom. 
 However much the modem man may doubt the 
 power of the gospel to affect his own life he cannot 
 fail to see that it has modified the lives of others. 
 And the marvelous thing is that it has been able to 
 survive the various theories and practices, the theol- 
 ogies and philosophies with which it has been medi- 
 ated to men. Indeed, one might almost say that the 
 greatest evidence that divine power is resident in the 
 gospel lies in the fact that the vagaries of its devotees 
 have not neutralized its influence. 
 
 2. It is self-evident that the saved life as presented 
 in this gospel is moral, but it is not moral in the sense 
 that it is imder compulsion from without. The 
 gospel is not a new law; it is a new power which 
 enables the human soul to adjust itself into harmony 
 with God and man. That is the central thought of 
 Jesus and Paul. The commandment had been super- 
 seded ; law had been supplanted by spiritual impera- 
 tives as the slave that led the child to school was 
 
THE NEW LIFE EST CHRIST 283 
 
 supplanted by the self-direction of the mature man. 
 However much a man needs that moral discontent 
 born of a knowledge of sin, his spiritual life is not 
 brought into self-expression by fear. It is evoked 
 by Jesus. Released as far as human will can release 
 from subjection to sin, it is raised into newness of life 
 by a surrender to Jesus. That is the attraction of the 
 cross to those whose eyes are not closed that they 
 may not see. We love him because he first loved 
 us. And to love him is to try to be like him. 
 
 In the very nature of the case no other motive is 
 so powerful because none is so normal. Love, not 
 fear, awakens love and casts out fear. The spiritual 
 life cannot be terrorized. It is free. And this free- 
 dom of the sons of God is never violated by Jesus 
 or the Spirit. The life that embodies that fruit of 
 the spirit embodied in Jesus and evoked by a knowl- 
 edge of him, has passed into a region of free per- 
 sonal self-expression above statutes. Here is the 
 conception of the real superman of which the 
 Nietzschean is a distortion. The free spirit is he 
 whose impulses are controlled and directed by an 
 ideal that is the anticipation in history of humanity's 
 goal. And that is the very paraphrase of Chris- 
 tian faith. For that ideal is Christ. 
 
 3. Spiritual liberty, however, is not without its 
 
284 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN M.\N 
 
 laws. But they are those of personal relations. 
 That makes the difference between liberty and license 
 on the one hand and liberty and compulsion on the 
 other. In its self-expression tlie spiritual life, as 
 the gospel alwa^-s insists, is conditioned by relation- 
 ship with other spiritual persons, and above all with 
 God. God is the final authorit}- because He is tlie 
 final reality. For our spiritual health demands that 
 we conform and submit to His \\'ill however it may 
 be discovered. 
 
 The gospel does not insist on merely subjective 
 judgments of values. They might lead to anarchic 
 confusion. Its fundamental thought is that the man 
 who undertakes to make its message regnant in his 
 life by his response to Jesus develops such an attitude 
 of reconciliation with God that through it he finds 
 moral direction. It leads men to the Light and the 
 Light becomes the minister of life. Therein lies the 
 possibility of a community of the Spirit, the true 
 Democracy of which men dream, in which men are 
 brothers rather than subjects. Therein lies also 
 spiritual, not outer authorit)-. As brotherhood is the 
 outcome of sonship, spiritual living is to be controlled 
 in its self-expression by loyalty to tlae new life itself 
 as determined by its environment of God. As a man 
 grows artistic in company with artists does he grow 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 285 
 
 spiritual in company with God. "His seed is in him 
 and he cannot sin; " that is the simple psychology of 
 the Spirit. "As many as live by the Spirit, by the 
 Spirit also walk;" that is its all-embracing impera- 
 tive. The spiritual life does not originate such an 
 imperative; it comes from a personal situation 
 wherein is God willing to do His own good pleasure. 
 In its interpenetration with the Absolute Person the 
 human spirit reaches freedom in obedience. It 
 reaches freedom because its self-expression is deter- 
 mined by perfectly personal relations and therein is 
 the only freedom it should ever want or ever can 
 have. It reaches obedience because if there be a 
 God in the universe and if we imdertake to put our- 
 selves in a personal relationship with Him He must 
 be supreme or He is less than we. Truth does not 
 save ; God saves men who — sometimes unexpect- 
 edly — in the search for truth and in the honest 
 attempt to embody truth, find Him and yield to Him 
 as a God. A religion with simply a god-idea is a 
 religion fit only for a solipsistic world — whatever 
 that might be. 
 
 In this recognition of the authority and the moral 
 liberty that alike come from loving personal relations 
 with God, the gospel is true to what we know of re- 
 ligion itself. For if one were to analyze religion to 
 
286 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 its very elements it would appear that its germ, so 
 to speak, is in the elemental impulse of life to pro- 
 tect itself. Only in religion this protection is sought 
 by getting help from environment, or some one of its 
 elements conceived of personally. Man finds himself 
 at the mercy of the world in the midst of which he 
 lives. He extends over to it his highest ideals bom 
 of his experience of persons, then seeks to make the 
 environment thus conceived helpful. He seeks to 
 make it friendly by being friendly with it. In fact, 
 with a little modiiication of Schleiermacher's words 
 religion might be defined as an attempt to reconcile 
 and so make helpful the superhuman personal envi- 
 ronment upon which mankind feels itself dependent. 
 Prayer is to religion what experiment is to science. 
 
 Such a definition, it is true, may appear formal 
 and abstract, but the study of religions will readily 
 give it content. The impulse to gain help from a 
 personal God upon whom men find themselves de- 
 pendent is always operative. There is, it is true, a 
 tendency in some quarters to substitute social ethics 
 for religion and to make the performance of duty 
 an equivalent for prayer. But such transformation 
 is really contrary to the elemental and determinative 
 characteristics of human nature. The gospel is 
 fundamentally in accord with life itself when it re- 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 287 
 
 fuses to eliminate the reconciling process. It makes 
 the relationship of reconciliation the very center of 
 its message, the Cross the symbol of its triumph. 
 More than this, knowing Jesus it knows that God 
 is ever ready to help, and has shown how He can help 
 and would incite men to seek His help. It clears 
 away all the misinterpretations which less ethical 
 religions have attached to the process of reconciliation 
 by presenting Jesus, the very embodiment of the 
 divine life, functioning as Saviour. It maintains that 
 God, so far from needing to be appeased, is reconcil- 
 ing the world to Himself through Jesus. It denies 
 that there is need of ritual sacrifice and finds salva- 
 tion in a free personal relationship with God with 
 which all forms of asceticism are grotesquely incon- 
 sistent. It finds its moral imperative not in the fear 
 of punishment but in full realization of the Spirit 
 by whom the spiritual life is evoked, strengthened, 
 
 and directed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 A man is not saved — and in the light of our 
 modem knowledge of human nature how true is 
 the word — until he is at one with God. He may 
 indeed be living a conventionally good life; he may 
 be performing acts which, thanks to the imitative 
 habit of mankind, are to all appearances like those 
 
288 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 that are the outcome of a genuinely regenerate life ; 
 yet at the same time at the center of his being he 
 may be bad. 
 
 There are in nature many analogies to this fact 
 of religious imitation. Insects resemble flowers 
 without possessing the life of flowers; animals act 
 like human beings without being human; flower- 
 less plants so shape themselves as to resemble true 
 flowers, without possessing the ability of real flowers 
 to ripen into fruit that shall in turn spring into new 
 life. And in all these cases the essential difference 
 is the same: between the two similar objects there is 
 no identity in life. 
 
 There is, of course, another side to the matter. 
 Really good deeds imply a good life behind them. 
 Regeneration is sometimes so subtle a process as to 
 elude consciousness and to be known only by in- 
 ference. But the principle holds true: the life that 
 is at one with God, that has been transformed by 
 His Spirit into love that is likeness with God — that 
 life only is the right life, the only basis of genuine 
 morality. 
 
 It is the old issue again which Jesus raised. 
 Measured by superficial standards, the legalism of 
 an arrogant Pharisee like him who once went up to 
 the temple to pray, was not unlike the joyous activity 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 289 
 
 of Peter and John, who also went up to the temple 
 at the hour of prayer. But at the heart of things 
 there was, and is, a profound difference. The 
 legalist makes acts the end of life; the gospel makes 
 acts the expression of personality. The one looks 
 to separate deeds that men have agreed to call 
 good; the other looks to a life which must express 
 itself in deeds that are good because they spring 
 from a life that is like God's, because it comes from 
 God. In the very nature of the case, the Christian 
 must champion the new life that blossoms out in 
 impulse and finds fruitage in good deeds. We are 
 not saved because we are good. We are good 
 because we are saved. Good deeds are the result 
 of our new life. The good tree must bring forth 
 good fruit. 
 
 There is abundant need that our preachers, waiv- 
 ing all right to pass final Judgment on men, should 
 insist on this primary fact in religion. To neglect 
 it, in the interest of an enthusiastic championship of 
 a more superficial morality, is to be untrue to the 
 essence of Christianity itself. We must help make 
 the very center of man's being Godlike. We are 
 not to insist that men should merely copy the deeds 
 of Christ; we are to insist that they shall have the 
 mind, the spirit, the life of Christ. A man is not a 
 n 
 
290 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Christian because, like Jesus, he is a carpenter. 
 Honorable as is the calling of honest industry, the 
 sign by which tlie spiritual life is to conquer is not 
 a wood saw. No more is a man religious because 
 he is an investigator of religion. The anchor that 
 is within the veil is not in the shape of an interroga- 
 tion mark, but of a cross. And the life that would 
 be genuinely good must be Christlike in its de- 
 pendance upon union with God. Just as a living 
 organism in the physical world can bear its fruit 
 only as it is in normal relation with its true environ- 
 ment, can the human soul bear fruit of real good- 
 ness only in personal dependence upon God. Is 
 not that but another way of saying what Jesus 
 said so beautifully when he declared that he was the 
 vine and tliat his disciples \A'ere the fruitful branches ? 
 
 For the regeneration of a sinful soul, however 
 little or much its process may be clear in conscious- 
 ness, however distinct or indistinct may be our 
 understanding of the gracious influences of the 
 Spirit that cause it, is a fact. Some day onr psy- 
 chologists will devote more attention to it. But even 
 when it forms chapters in our text-books, it will be 
 no more real than it is to-day or was in olden times. 
 
 Paul was no mean psychologist himself. True, 
 he did not have all the appliances of the modern 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 29I 
 
 laboratory with which to test reactions of nerves. 
 But for moral purposes he had something far 
 better. He had "the mind of Christ." He saw 
 that the new life that comes to the believer in Jesus 
 Christ was something more than a mere unfolding 
 of latent tendencies derived from one's ancestors. 
 He saw that faith in Jesus brought men into vital- 
 izing, transforming relations with God as truly as 
 belief in a radiator as a means of heating one's cold 
 hands brings the warmth of some great central fire 
 to the one who transforms that belief into faith and 
 goes to the radiator for its help. 
 
 And he saw something quite as important: that 
 the new life that comes from the presence of God 
 expresses itself in moral impulses that — let us say 
 it with all reverence — are like the moral impulses 
 of God. The fruit of the Spirit was love, joy, 
 peace, kindness, goodness. If a man puts such 
 impulses into action, he is moral. For what else is 
 morality than to live out the new life — the divine 
 life which is really ours because God is working 
 with us? In comparison with such gracious spon- 
 taneous morality as this, what can the legalist offer? 
 What, indeed, but the very sort of life against 
 which Paul warned the Galatians! 
 
 We are always in danger of judging character by 
 
292 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 counting up and comparing the sums of so-called 
 good and evil deeds. We are always tempted to 
 urge men to do things rather than to gain this up- 
 springing impulse that comes from the life with 
 God. But when we look to this easier and oitin 
 more popular morality we are mistaking the very 
 laws of the universe in which we live. We may 
 tie grapes to thorns and delude ourselves into a 
 genial optimism that we have wrought a miracle. 
 But as long as nature is nature, to raise grapes we 
 must plant grapevines. 
 
 The chief business of the preacher of the gospel 
 is not to urge men to be good, but to show them 
 how by coming to and living with God they may 
 become good. Reform springs from regeneration. 
 It can never replace it. The moment our churches 
 confuse the two they are in danger of losing their 
 birthright. We must needs preach ethics, both of 
 the individual and of society ; but ethics, like legal- 
 ism, is not the gospel. The chiefest blessing of the 
 Christian is not the call to do things for God, but 
 the gracious promise that God will do things for 
 and in him. 
 
 rv 
 
 It is plain therefore that there is nothing magical 
 in the gospel. No man can be saved a bad man. 
 
THE NEW LITE IN CHRIST 293 
 
 No man can be saved an unforgiving man. No 
 man can be saved except as a spiritual person. To 
 be saved is to be saved not for something future 
 but to membership in a world which is even now 
 in process toward spiritual ends. The newness of 
 life in Christ is a moral newness which expresses 
 itself primarily in faith energized by love. A man 
 is imchristian in the same proportion that he is 
 selfish. The spiritual man is instinctively social. 
 He wants not the separate star of Kipling, but the 
 Holy City of John. The working of the Holy 
 Spirit is always altruistic. A life in Christ is a life 
 like Christ's. The spiritual life that seeks simply 
 to save itself for the enjoyment of heaven is un- 
 spiritual. To cling to the cross may be refined 
 selfishness, but to bear the cross is to let the spiritual 
 life express its true social character in service to 
 others and, what is sometimes vastly more trying, 
 in service with others. 
 
 If it were for no other reason than the cost of 
 a life like Christ's, we should be impressed by its 
 seriousness. We are dealing here with the very 
 elementals of personality. Sacraments, theologies, 
 organizations, — all are secondary and functional. 
 The church must be done with magnifying the 
 perimeter of the spiritual life. 
 
294 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 Men of all sorts, but particularly modem men, 
 are restless until this elemental life finds its proper 
 environment of truth and God. That is no slight 
 demand, nor one to be ignored in the interests of 
 popularity and statistics. You cannot entertain 
 men into self-denial. Religion cannot be surrepti- 
 tiously introduced between stereopticon slides. If 
 this life in Christ is mere form, men want to know 
 it. If, as the gospel asserts, it is^^the only true life, 
 they want it made paramount. 
 
 V 
 
 It is always difficult to convince the man who 
 has starved his impulse to get help through per- 
 sonal relationship with the God of help, that any- 
 thing real comes from such a personal relationship 
 as the gospel insists is established by making Jesus 
 supreme in one's life; yet such a person has only 
 to look about him to see how influential such a con- 
 ception of life is. 
 
 The language of experience when once it is 
 loosed from the bonds of conventional phraseology 
 is a language that needs no lexicon. Priam beg- 
 ging the body of Hector, Achilles the wrathful, 
 Ulysses the much enduring, are no strangers to us. 
 We meet them on our streets. The grief that 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 295 
 
 killed Eli kills men to-day. David's agony of 
 love and remorse leaps still from the lips of fathers. 
 Three thousand years and more have passed since 
 a slave mother would not let her little boy be killed ; 
 near four thousand since Jacob toiled seven years 
 twice over for the love he bore his Rachel; but 
 mother love and romance have not yet perished 
 from the earth. 
 
 That Christian experience in which men surren- 
 der to the Spirit is as much a unit. Men tell their 
 stories in different words, but they mean the same 
 thing. They set forth "plans of salvation" satis- 
 factory enough to themselves but unintelligible to 
 others. They label each other by their differences 
 and forget that God has made all His true children 
 of the same spiritual stock. Yet when they speak in 
 terms of experience they see eye to eye. They realize 
 that their words are of necessity the mirrors of their 
 time, what their teachers have taught them. Strip 
 off this husk and they will find within the whole 
 family of God something common to the Christian 
 centuries — tlie salvation of a soul as it turns to 
 God revealed in Jesus Christ. 
 
 A wayward genius in the agony of remorse opens 
 the Bible for a message. The first verse upon 
 which his eye falls is to him the word of God. His 
 
296 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 life is changed and out from the heart of his pas- 
 sionate metaphysics Augustine cries: "Lord, Thou 
 hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless 
 until it repose in Thee." A brilliant young man of 
 twenty-one is riding through the forest of France 
 to join in one of the castle stormings of the Middle 
 Ages. He knows that his work lies elsewhere than 
 among wild adventures, but he persists in his re- 
 bellious mood. In the midst of the forest he comes 
 suddenly upon a church, God's voice in stone. 
 And Bernard the adventurer, the future Bernard 
 of Clairvaux the Saint, like Saul of old, falls from 
 his horse and there on his knees in the wayside 
 chapel "he lifts up his hands to heaven and pours 
 forth his heart like water in the presence of the 
 Lord." A gay man of thirty lies on his couch 
 composing a love sonnet. A vision of the Holy 
 Virgin stops his pen. He tries again. Again the 
 Virgin. He yields to the vision, and Raymond 
 Lull the man of the world becomes Raymond Lull 
 the martyr to trinitarianism among the Moslems. 
 A German student is overtaken in a thunder shower; 
 the lightning strikes at his feet. "Help! Anna, 
 blessed Saint ! I will be a monk," he prays. It is 
 the beginning of the deeper religious life of Martin 
 Luther. 
 
THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 297 
 
 And SO again and again it happens. Every man, 
 be he great or commonplace, meets the saving 
 God in a different way. Christians tell their 
 stories in different words, but their experience is 
 at bottom the same. These men could never have 
 agreed in every item of doctrine, but they all experi- 
 enced God as they saw Him redemptively revealed 
 in Jesus. That is the eternal equivalent, nay the 
 very content of the messianic valuation of the first 
 Christians. 
 
 Definitions, however, must here yield to words 
 that symbolize without limiting appreciation. The 
 more simply such appreciation is voiced, the easier 
 do one man's words become the prophecy of an- 
 other. Our great hymns are the pledge of a com- 
 mon life in Christ. A Unitarian wrote "In the 
 cross of Christ I glory"; a Roman Catholic wrote 
 "Lead, kindly light"; a Plymouth Brother, 
 "Jesus, thy name I love"; a Congregationalist, 
 "Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts"; an Episco- 
 palian, "There is a fountain filled with blood"; 
 a Methodist, "Love divine, all love excelling"; a 
 Baptist, "He leadeth me"; a Presbyterian boy of 
 ten years, " Jesus and shall it ever be a mortal man 
 ashamed of thee." Yet who of the thousands who 
 daily sing these songs of faith asks or cares whether 
 
298 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 their authors agreed in their theories of the atone- 
 ment or of the trinity? 
 
 The conscience-stirring, faith-evoking Jesus of 
 Nazareth, who, amidst the flux of words in which 
 men have tried to explain his person, has, through 
 the centuries, satisfied man's hunger for a know- 
 able, reconciled God, given the perfect revelation 
 of the spiritual life that is eternal, and proclaimed 
 the certainty of the life to come, is an unchanging 
 element of a Christianity that ever seeks to adapt 
 the gospel to a changing order. 
 
 If the modern man cannot understand or accept an 
 inherited Christology, he can at least in the depths 
 of his own spiritual life serve the real Person whose 
 redemptive energy doctrine seeks to estimate and 
 enforce. And in serving him he will know the 
 power as well as the struggle of the emancipated, 
 victorious, spiritual life. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 
 
 ^HE modem mind cannot stop with the indi- 
 vidual. It must pass on to the extra-individual. 
 We are seeing now as never before that a man is 
 more than he seems to be. Whatever may be our 
 philosophy as to heredity, it is certainly true that 
 every life inevitably responds in one way or another 
 to that environment in which it is integrated. But 
 that environment ceases to be merely external to the 
 life. The two constitute a situation which is not 
 susceptible of absolute analysis, but which must be 
 treated as a unit. The tree caimot live apart from 
 the soil, and the soil lives in the tree. 
 
 Similarly in the case of the spiritual life. So 
 dependent is it, as genuine life, upon the social 
 order in which it finds itself as to be inseparable 
 therefrom. That outer world of nature, concerning 
 which we speak so glibly, is truly also an inner 
 world, part and parcel of ourselves. Even more 
 intimate if possible is that world of personality of 
 which we are socially ourselves a part. Change it 
 299 
 
30O THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 and the soul changes. Change the soul and the 
 environment is changed. For both alike constitute 
 that spiritual situation in which we come to con- 
 sciousness, and which must itself progress toward 
 the kingdom of God. 
 
 Such truths as this are not novel. They are 
 simply reexpressed in terms of a nascent philosophy. 
 Jesus himself taught them when he held forth the 
 kingdom of God as that of which the individual must 
 be a member in order to taste the fullest joy. We 
 have already seen that, eschatological as that hope 
 may have been, it never ceased to be social. How- 
 ever great the difference between the Christian con- 
 ception of the kingdom of God and the Jewish ideal 
 of the kingdom of saints to be founded at Jeru- 
 salem, they are alike in the belief that the final 
 consummation of the deliverance of the individual 
 will be in his fullness of life in an ideal society within 
 which God is supreme. 
 
 It is worth while dwelling a moment upon this 
 truth which may seem hardly more than a platitude, 
 for many of the world's great religious teachers 
 have emphasized the necessity of the holy man's 
 withdrawal from human ties, like family and state 
 and business. The celibate, rather than the father, 
 has been the type of sanctity to more than one great 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 30I 
 
 religion. Even in our own world there are those 
 who hold that religion has nothing to do with 
 social problems and that the message of the gospel 
 is exclusively one of the individual's salvation in a 
 world to come. 
 
 I 
 
 The evangelizing of society will not be without 
 struggle and vicarious suffering on the part of those 
 who dare become its agents. 
 
 Our modem world suspects that the gospel is not 
 adjustable to our social life. As has already been 
 indicated in a previous chapter, the modem order 
 which has resulted from the century-long develop- 
 ment of civilization sets its special approval upon 
 activity and strength. Its most praised man is 
 the man who wins. Courage, daring, limitless 
 expenditure of oneself and one's possessions, a ca- 
 pacity to control men and to beat one's enemies, — 
 these are the acknowledged virtues of a commercial 
 age. And to a considerable extent they are the 
 virtues of culture. For the man of culture, how- 
 ever much he may sneer at commercialism, has a 
 deep-seated admiration and even a secret envy of 
 the man whose activities find results that are con- 
 crete and measurable. 
 
 Over against these accepted virtues of our modem 
 
302 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 world Stands the gospel with its insistence on the 
 primacy of love and its inevitably consequent self- 
 sacrifice. It is little wonder that an age that builds 
 Dreadnaughts should find unintelligible the words 
 of Jesus regarding non-resistance to evil. For 
 how is it possible for an age that honors the vic- 
 tories of force to appreciate, in anything more than 
 an esthetic way, the victories of the cross? 
 
 All this is, of course, only another form of the 
 age-long conflict between the spiritual and the 
 natural orders, of which the gospel is so conscious. 
 The doctrine of the two ages which came over into 
 Ch istianity as an integral part of its inheritance 
 from messianism is simply an unphilosophical way 
 of looking at a conflict seen by all thinkers since 
 thought began. The world of spiritual values has 
 always been confronted with the world of material 
 forces and standards. But this is a very different 
 thing from saying that the spiritual values as de- 
 scribed by Jesus presuppose a world of impassivity. 
 Salvation is not Nirvana. Jesus' call to love is a 
 call to the sublimest heroism. The courage of the 
 Greek is inferior to the courage of the Christian, for 
 physical courage may be simply a recklessness bom 
 of a lack of imagination. The gospel's recognition 
 of the supremacy of the spiritual order demands a 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 303 
 
 spiritual courage. What else is the call of Jesus 
 to his followers to take up their crosses, or of those 
 martial words of Paul with which he describes the 
 armor of the man of God or urges Timothy to 
 "fight the good fight of faith?" The note of con- 
 flict runs throughout the entire New Testament. 
 In very truth Jesus cast fire and sword upon the 
 earth. The Christian in his devotion to the life of 
 the spirit faces innumerable enemies to be overcome 
 at all costs. And some of these enemies are of his 
 own economic household. 
 
 The most striking evidence of the aggressive 
 power of the spiritual life to defend its own ideals 
 against even internecine assaults is the life of Jesus. 
 He was no more a Nitzschean superman than he 
 was effeminate. While other men have cham- 
 pioned spiritual life by the use of unspiritual weapons, 
 Jesus refused success even at the cost of the king- 
 dom of the spirit. If he opposed the unspiritual 
 world of Pharisaism, he did it wholly with the 
 weapons and in accord with the laws of the spiritual 
 ordeif. Hypocrisy, selfishness, pride, insincerity, — 
 these were the sins he attacked in his opponents. 
 His language, extreme as it is, will always be found 
 to emphasize the supremacy of the spiritual. 
 
 Now the struggle of our modem day is much 
 
304 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 like the struggle of Jesus. The gospel of the su- 
 premacy of the spiritual life bom of and like that 
 of the God of Love, is confronted by modem Sad- 
 ducees, who deny the existence of everything beyond 
 the physical world; by modem Pharisees, who are 
 seeking to erect a hedge of dogma about the gospel 
 itself; by commercialized traitors, who wish to make 
 Christianity a propaganda of comfort. Outside of 
 religious affiliations we find the avowed champions 
 of force and materialism and pleasure. All these 
 enemies must be met in strictest loyalty to the mo- 
 tives of the spiritual life, in patience, without mis- 
 representation or the lowering of spiritual self- 
 respect. But such opposition requires more than 
 mere passive resistance to evil. In the same pro- 
 portion as the spiritual life is controlled by the 
 ideals of the gospel it will be heroic. The sacrifice 
 to which it calls is that of everything which is un- 
 spiritual. Such a conflict demands a heroism 
 vastly more difficult than that of the battle field, 
 and a devotion to the rights of the community far 
 more searching than that of even patriotism itself. 
 
 II 
 
 It goes without saying that such a conflict can- 
 not be waged in the spirit of academic neutrality. 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 305 
 
 Among all the constructive forces none is mightier 
 than a socialized hatred of that which is lower than 
 the known best. Good men have always been haters 
 of the bad. Bad men have been haters of the good. 
 As Paul says, "The flesh lusteth against the 
 spirit and the spirit against the flesh, for these are con- 
 trary the one to the other." Throughout human 
 history great movements have come as men have 
 hated imrighteousness in institutions and practices. 
 No reform or revolution ever was successful on any 
 other condition. It is such hatred which distin- 
 guishes the practical reformer who knows good can- 
 not be erected except on the ruins of that which is bad 
 from the doctrinaire. No man ever illustrated this 
 better than Jesus. In him we see not only the ideal 
 champion of everything that is pure and of good 
 repute, but also the irrespressible hater of everything 
 that is low and mean and hypocritical. The posses- 
 sion of this sort of hatred makes love more than good 
 nature. How can a man be devoted to the spiritual 
 life without fighting all that opposes its very exist- 
 ence ? He that is not for Jesus is against him. 
 
 1. The social power of the gospel will be com- 
 mensurate with its power to rouse a hatred of sin, 
 — not of sin as a theological abstraction, but of sin 
 as we have seen it actually working its way out in op- 
 
306 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 pression and sorrow and personal decay, whether it 
 be in the world of politics or of industry or of the 
 home. The Christian community may not have the 
 impatient hatred of capitalism which gives vigor to 
 socialism, but it must give no quarter to any 
 social institution that makes material surplus su- 
 preme, whether it favor the capitalist or the laborer. 
 The Christian cannot be content to hold to ideals; 
 he must fight the enemy of ideals. The sword of 
 the spirit is not for full-dress occasions. 
 
 The ability to make such hatred of evil a nucleus 
 for the defense of Christian ideals is to be seen every- 
 where in our modem life, though not always in the 
 widest possible communities. There is the hatred 
 of the liquor trafiic, particularly of the saloon, which 
 has proved itself in concerted action; there is the 
 hatred of the white slave trafiSc, which is developing 
 into a national movement ; there is the hatred of op- 
 pression, superstition, and hypocrisy, which, though 
 by no means socialized as yet, is appreciably a nucleus 
 not only of denunciation but of constructive idealism. 
 In all quarters hatred of that which destroys is an 
 ally of that which is helping to build up. 
 
 2. It is no reply to such an estimate of the severer 
 side of spiritual life as it appears in the gospel to say 
 that we must be tolerant. Tolerance does not ex- 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 307 
 
 tend over to sin. The scientific spirit as it touches 
 the religious should not be permitted to take from 
 the modern man his sense of the difference between 
 goodness and badness. For tolerance, even in the 
 region of beliefs, too often is only a euphemism for 
 indifference. Real tolerance is thoroughly consist- 
 ent with a passionate hatred of everything ignoble 
 and demoralizing. It is well to emphasize this dis- 
 tinction. For the modern man is tempted to look 
 on other people's religious hopes and convictions 
 much as a traveler looks out upon the people of a land 
 through which he journeys. He is an observer, not a 
 missionary. Foreigners do not live as he lives, do 
 not dress as he dresses, but he does not undertake to 
 convert them. Thus in the case of his neighbors. 
 They do not believe as he believes ; they do not think 
 as he thinks. But he does not care to discuss matters 
 with them. Let one of them attempt to convert 
 him, and he hardly knows whether to consider the 
 attempt an insult or material for an after-dinner story. 
 It is a sad mistake to call this attitude of mind tol- 
 erance. A man must have moral convictions before 
 he can possess that virtue. Those polite writers 
 who regard religion as a survival of some prehistoric 
 ancestor and prefer devotion to the social organ- 
 ism which they have invented to a God whom they 
 
308 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 are attempting to expose, can hardly be expected to 
 appreciate other men's sensitiveness to their attack 
 on those religious convictions that have become the 
 basis of morality itself. Those men who light- 
 heartedly remove these religious bases of definite 
 Christian morality in the name of a scientific method 
 are no more necessarily tolerant than is the surgeon 
 who performs a successful operation on a patient who 
 dies. Even when they are willing that a man should 
 believe something, they do not want him to believe it 
 too vigorously. Yet even they are very apt to be in- 
 tolerant when they believe their indifference is threat- 
 ened. The man who holds that he is morally better 
 in proportion to the number of his beliefs is no more 
 rasping in his criticism of critics than is the man who 
 rejoices in his belief that he believes little or nothing. 
 There is no dogmatism so intolerant as that of un- 
 belief. 
 
 Tolerance is the child of conviction and love. It 
 never had any other parentage. To believe strongly 
 and yet doubt one's omniscience is no small achieve- 
 ment, but to believe strongly and yet permit a man 
 who does not agree with you theologically also to 
 believe strongly is one of the supreme achievements 
 of the spiritual life. Fanaticism easily becomes a 
 constructive force with fanatics, but the tolerance 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 309 
 
 that the gospel preaches is a constructive force with 
 men whose work outlasts generations of fanaticism. 
 For, changing the center of interest from doctrine to 
 life, it demands community in the spiritual life which 
 opposes the enemies of that life whoever they may be. 
 It must oppose a philosophy that denies supremacy 
 to the spiritual order in theory, and it must even more 
 vigorously oppose customs, institutions, and privi- 
 leges that deny it in fact. A man cannot serve God 
 and any form of materialism. The good fight of 
 faith is not a sham battle. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The social organ of a spiritual life that is aggres- 
 sive on both its destructive and its constructive sides 
 is the church. 
 
 Christian experience has large social significance 
 only when it is institutionalized. Christianity is not 
 a philosophy, but a movement inaugurated by his- 
 torical persons. Of necessity it involved its institu- 
 tions. The church is built upon the foundation 
 of the apostle as truly as that of the prophet. 
 Each of these two servants of the kingdom of God 
 had his message, but the prophet's work was done 
 when he uttered his warning and his exhortation. 
 Men might then make their choice between faith and 
 
3IO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 unfaith. But the apostle institutionalized his mes- 
 sage in the church ; therefore has it become a social 
 power. 
 
 No social institution is at the present time sub- 
 jected to more criticism than that of organized 
 Christianity. Particularly is it customary to condemn 
 the church of to-day because of the mistakes of the 
 church of yesterday. And such criticism is not with- 
 out its justification. The higher the ideals of an insti- 
 tution, the greater harvest of spiritual goods do we 
 rightly demand of it. Any student of history knows 
 only too well how far the church has yielded to the 
 limitations set by the simple fact that its members 
 are human and subject to the laws of social solidarity 
 and process. In all times it has found its methods 
 as well as its teachings conditioned by the state of 
 society in the midst of which it lived. In the same 
 proportion, also, in which it has become identified 
 with the state and has offered opportunity for political 
 ambition has it attracted men of imspiritual type to 
 its membership and often to its leadership. 
 
 But such criticism may overreach itself. I am far 
 enough from saying that the church, whether Greek, 
 Roman, or Protestant, has been all that it should have 
 been, but he is a prejudiced critic who fails to see 
 the wonderful contribution which the church, in even 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 3II 
 
 its imperfect institutionalizing of the ideals of the 
 gospel, has made to the development of the spiritual 
 life of the race. Insincere, selfish, bigoted as eccle- 
 siasticism has too often been, cautious as are many of 
 its present leaders in making any genuinely social 
 application of its teachings, it is undeniable that at all 
 times, whether past or present, the church has been 
 morally superior to its age. The modern man who 
 loses patience with it as an institution, who sees only 
 its faults and magnifies its too frequent recurrence 
 to the authority of organization rather than to the 
 authority of the spirit, is untrue to the very concep- 
 tion of historical process by which his thinking is 
 controlled. The church of to-day has its obscurant 
 leaders ; its leaders who have lost their bearings ; its 
 leaders who are apparently anxious to throw it into 
 bankruptcy; but it is none the less the one great in- 
 stitution of the times which is deliberately endeavor- 
 ing to socialize the fundamental principles of the 
 spiritual life as they are set forth in the life and teach- 
 ing of Jesus. It is indispensable in the same pro- 
 portion as he is indispensable. The modem man 
 should throw his weight into its already awakened 
 life. 
 
 Such an obligation is all the greater because the 
 church needs the enlarged social sympathies which 
 
312 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 are his. Take our modem world as a whole, and it 
 will be found true that those men and women who 
 are most intent upon social regeneration are those 
 possessed of the modem spirit. But it will be just 
 as true that if their spiritual genealogy could be 
 traced, it would be found to be rooted in the Christian 
 church. It is a sad mistake from the point of view 
 of both the church and of society, to have their 
 broad sympathies and their new perception of social 
 values lost to the Christian commimity. 
 
 In the same proportion as this new social sympathy 
 gives content to the expression of the spiritual life 
 will it be in accord with the real purpose of the gospel. 
 For, restrained by the expectations of the speedy 
 coming of Christ as were the early Christians, their 
 new life, begotten by faith in Christ, had its inevitable 
 social results. Modem Christians will be true to the 
 principle of the gospel when they, too, deal with the 
 organic, rather than the accidental, aspects of the 
 regenerate life. And their great mediums of expres- 
 sion will be the churches themselves. 
 
 2. Within the church the hatred of social in- 
 justice and sin can be both institutionalized and pro- 
 tected from developing into merely class hatred. 
 Whatever may be said of individual churches the 
 church universal includes all strata of society. In 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCUL GOSPEL 313 
 
 the same proportion as they realize their real commu- 
 nity of life will denominations and schools of Chris- 
 tians divert their energies from internecine warfare 
 to an attack upon those materialistic forces which 
 constitute their common enemy. 
 
 The atmosphere of struggle is dangerous to every 
 earnest soul. Hatred of sin if it be not, as in the case 
 of Jesus, subject to the control of love, may lead to 
 hateful dispositions. In making the destruction of 
 abuse and the punishment of oppression a part of his 
 self-expression, a man needs continually to be taught 
 that such negative activity is preparatory to the 
 constructive process along lines of brotherhood. 
 Socialism sees this in part, but the Christian 
 church will find here an outstanding opportunity 
 for social service. 
 
 3. The church must stand for the worth of men 
 in all efforts for amelioration. For it preeminently 
 recognizes the fact that such worth is to be found, 
 not in men as they are, but in men as they can be- 
 come through the making of the spiritual life su- 
 preme. Here, if anywhere, do we find the social 
 power of the evangelic message of the eternal life. 
 
 The first great requisite of any such spiritualiz- 
 ing of social evolution is a profound sympathy 
 with all those who are distressed in mind, body, or 
 
314 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 estate. Like its Christ, the really loving soul bears 
 the infirmities of the social order. Nor is this any 
 easy service. It is one of the anomalies of altruism 
 that it tends to protect itself in its ministrations to 
 others with the callus of professionalism. Nor is 
 this to be indiscriminately condemned. We do not 
 want the physician's sympathy, but his skill. Simi- 
 larly, all amelioration of the diseases of society, 
 whether they be economic, political, or domestic, 
 must be controlled by an intelligent diagnosis. Un- 
 enlightened sympathy may be as injurious in the 
 social world as in the medical. 
 
 But this is farthest from saying that the Christian 
 life should not be controlled by sympathy. It has too 
 often been true that the church has been content to 
 save individuals from the world without countenanc- 
 ing the aspirations for greater social justice in this 
 world on the part of the very persons whom it would 
 save in the next. It is always easier to organize 
 crusades to rescue some sacred place from far dis- 
 tant Turks than to liberate the peasantry on one's 
 own estates. It is always easier to move a church 
 to the suburbs than to maintain it as a contribution 
 to the spiritual needs of the slums or the boarding- 
 house district. I am not surprised that men who are 
 devoting their lives to obtaining social justice for the 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 315 
 
 oppressed should grow impatient of an institution 
 which, while proclaiming the supremacy of the spirit- 
 ual worth of man, is too often indifferent to cus- 
 toms and institutions which treat men as impersonal 
 cogs in political or industrial machines. We need 
 to learn the great lesson of Jesus that devotion to 
 things of the spirit must express itself as social 
 sympathy in such concrete situations as of citizen- 
 ship, marriage, industry, and culture. 
 
 But in its sympathy with the spiritual needs and 
 possibilities of humanity and in its opposition to 
 everything that is hostile to spiritual worth, the 
 church should not be led into indiscriminate at- 
 tempts to supplant the work of other social insti- 
 tutions. Its primary interest is not in good sewers, 
 shorter hours of labor, a living wage, and old-age 
 pensions. It is rather in the development of the 
 spiritual life which is threatened by a refusal to 
 grant such rights. But organized religion cannot 
 be indifferent to evils. It cannot substitute a com- 
 placent hope as to individuals for an earnest effort 
 to mitigate conditions that limit the number of such 
 individuals more heartlessly than any doctrine of 
 election. The recognition of social solidarity is 
 compelling the modern man to bring the ideals of 
 the gospel into transforming relationship with the 
 
3l6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 social forces themselves. Thus in its work of 
 ameliorating the condition of those who are suffer- 
 ing from the miseries which have resulted from civili- 
 zation, the church can often render its best service in 
 cooperation with social institutions like hospitals, 
 organized charities, civic reform. For charity itself 
 is in constant need of being inspired to fasten its 
 eye singly upon the worth of human souls as well as of 
 human bodies. Professional good Samaritans should 
 be helped to preserve the power to sympathize per- 
 sonally with the unfortimate. Impersonal charity 
 is on the road to impersonal sociological technique. 
 
 4. If the church is more than a good Samaritan 
 it must undertake to evangelize the great formative 
 forces which are making to-morrow. Only thus 
 can it socialize constructively the spiritual life of its 
 individual members. Social discontent, the up- 
 ward movement of the wage-earning classes, the 
 rapid consolidation of social classes, the absorbing 
 question of socializing capital, are all to a high de- 
 gree in danger of substituting economic and even 
 more pronouncedly materialistic ideals for that 
 spiritual impulse which they really embody. To 
 socialize the spiritual life means to spiritualize the 
 formative forces of society by means of individuals 
 trained to social sympathies. But just as truly it 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 317 
 
 means new legislation, institutions, customs, which 
 embody the spiritual rather than the economic 
 values of men and women; the extension of the 
 principle of atonement to the reconciliation of 
 social classes, as it once reconciled in one body Jew 
 and Gentile; the inspiration of such threatening 
 social forces as the desire for play and amusements. 
 
 At this point the function of the church is, per- 
 haps, more clearly seen by the modern man than by 
 the man who has standardized the past. But such 
 men themselves need to be taught that sociology is 
 not the substitute for the gospel. For they are con- 
 stantly exposed to the temptation to withdraw sym- 
 pathy from organized Christianity and to live a life 
 of impassioned helpfulness to their world in oppo- 
 sition to what they allege to be only the hypo- 
 critical profession of the principles of the gospel. 
 Every doctrine of the Christian church has its social 
 aspect, but most of all those doctrines which center 
 about the ultimate values of the spiritual life — faith 
 and love and Christlike sacrifice for others. 
 
 5. The gospel must socialize the spirit of Cal- 
 vary. Society cannot be saved as it is. It, like the 
 individual, must partake of the death of Christ. 
 Love cannot fully express itself while our social 
 order permits selfishness to succeed. Many an 
 
3l8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 institution and practice must be ended. Obviously 
 such a putting off of the social "flesh" will not be 
 without cost. Men cling tenaciously to illegitimate 
 possessions, whether they be wealth, privilege, or 
 prejudices, and they abandon them with agony. 
 But abandon them they must as our social order 
 comes increasingly under the sway of ideals of jus- 
 tice and love. History has no clearer lesson. The 
 cry of little children with lives crushed in mills and 
 mines, the mute appeal of ignorant masses forced 
 toward brutishness, the ever louder challenge of 
 women forced from home into depressing indus- 
 tries, will not pass unanswered. Their answer will 
 mean loss. One great mission of the gospel is to 
 educate men to let such loss come as sacrifice rather 
 than as coerced surrender. Such education cannot 
 be accomplished overnight. It presupposes slow- 
 growing social sympathy and wise counsels. But 
 without it social progress will be by revolution 
 rather than by that sacrificial unfolding of love 
 which Jesus illustrated and to which he calls men. 
 If such socializing of the spiritual impulses shall 
 come to compel an extensive reorganization of so- 
 ciety, that is only what is to be expected if every 
 knee is to bow to Jesus Christ and the will of God 
 is to be done on earth as it is in heaven. 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 319 
 
 Yet even the prospect of a new social order is not 
 .0 blind the Christian community to its unspectacular 
 mission to the spiritual life of the individual. There 
 may be regenerate men without there being a thor- 
 oughly regenerate society; but a regenerate society 
 cannot be composed of unregenerate men. We 
 need revivals if we are not to need revolutions ; chil- 
 dren growing up in the fear of the Lord more than 
 juvenile courts; illuminated men more than illumi- 
 nating programs. And it is the business of the 
 church to see that such men are forthcoming; men 
 of vision, of social sympathy, with consciences 
 trained from childhood to see the moral obligations 
 of corporations and labor unions, each ready to take 
 up his cross and to teach society to take up its cross. 
 Christians need to be taught the virility of such sac- 
 rificial life, for they are in danger of being feminized 
 to the point of submission to a laissez-faire opti- 
 mism. Society needs to be taught to share in the 
 adventure of a love which chooses the spiritual in 
 preference to the merely economic. A vicarious 
 tenth must replace the submerged tenth. If Christ- 
 like activity is not socialized, social evolution will 
 pass through a materialistic stage in which there 
 will be a Caiaphas and a Pilate establishing a Cal- 
 vary in every township. 
 
320 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 6. No defeat of the immanent God can be final. 
 That is the supreme message of the gospel. Gog 
 and Magog with all their hosts cannot withstand 
 the God of Law and Love. His kingdom is inevi- 
 table. That is the scepter of courage and hope the 
 gospel stretches out to men who are striving to 
 regenerate the social order. They are working 
 together with the God of a process that has a goal, 
 and in the midst of human nature which, with a 
 Christ in it, is salvable. This age can really be 
 made a better age, because God can work through 
 institutions and lives devoted to spiritual good. 
 To doubt this is to doubt that God is immanent in 
 His world and even more to doubt that society is 
 being brought by Him into fuller expression of those 
 higher forces which have already appeared in 
 individuals. 
 
 It is here that we see the social significance of the 
 prayer for the doing of God's will on earth which 
 Jesus taught his disciples; of that splendid optimism 
 which lay in the belief that he was the Christ; of 
 that hope which awaited his messianic activity; 
 and of that faith which saw in God not only Creator 
 but Father. To teach men to pray that prayer, 
 to share in that optimism, to be saved by that hope, 
 and to be steadied by that faith is the business of 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 32 1 
 
 theology and of the church. We need to pray for 
 the coming of the kingdom no less; but no person 
 can honestly pray that God's will shall be done 
 without undertaking to do it. In the same pro- 
 portion as Christian men fail at this point will they 
 lose the support of those heroic souls who have 
 given themselves to the furtherance of human weal 
 in full determination to improve our present social 
 order. For the gospel of the spiritual life is greater 
 than the church. Only as the church is a servant 
 of the kingdom has it a right to exist. To doubt 
 that God is working in extra-ecclesiastical efforts at 
 social betterment is to come dangerously near the 
 sin against the Holy Spirit. In the same propor- 
 tion as we grasp the content of the gospel do we see 
 that God brings in His kingdom by any man who is 
 working in the spirit of Jesus Christ. The history 
 of the fourth and the seventeenth centuries shows 
 lamentably that when the church has centered at- 
 tention upon doctrinal precision it has become a non- 
 conductor between God and His world. But such 
 centuries as the first and the sixteenth show also that 
 it has been the chief channel through which God 
 has led men forward toward the abolition of un- 
 righteous privilege and the elevation of the worth of 
 human life. The twentieth century is already de- 
 
322 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 manding a church that works rather than a church 
 that anathematizes. 
 
 Such facts are guideposts to the modem man who 
 has made the gospel his own. Truth can never be 
 established by argument alone; it must work out 
 vitally the peaceable fruits of righteousness in a 
 very real world that will move either toward God 
 or toward Mammon. Such fruits, since they are 
 in accord with God's will, must make the gospel 
 appear more gloriously true and final. Faith with- 
 out works is not merely dead; it was still-bom. 
 
 IV 
 
 The task of making the spiritual values of the 
 gospel supreme throughout our modem life is made 
 more difi&cult because of the present transitional 
 situation within the church itself. The fact that 
 the spiritual life must find its expression in accord 
 with elements of culture and other phases of our 
 experience will always serve to bring about diver- 
 gence of opinion. There never has been a time 
 when all Christians agreed as to all theological 
 formulas in which the gospel should be expressed. 
 The New Testament church had its parties; the 
 church of the first century its innumerable heretics ; 
 the Middle Ages its sects and rival schoolmen; the 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 323 
 
 period of the Reformation its Anabaptists. So, 
 too, the modem world has its divisions between 
 Greek, Roman, and Protestant Christianity, and 
 among Protestants the extraordinary spectacle of 
 innumerable denominations and sects. Yet, in- 
 credible as it sounds, all this division and sub- 
 division is an attempt to set forth in some desirable 
 polity and doctrine that which is common to all 
 Christians — faith in Jesus and a consequent new- 
 ness of life due to fellowship with God. 
 
 Of late there has developed a cross division of these 
 historical alignments, notwithstanding the steady 
 movement toward ecclesiastical cooperation be- 
 tween the great bodies of Protestantism. This new 
 grouping is along lines which are determined by 
 the presuppositions with which men come to the 
 exposition of the gospel. On the one side there are 
 Protestants who would have all spiritual life con- 
 trolled by the formulas of the past, thus standard- 
 izing the theological status quo which was set in the 
 days of Luther and Calvin and in some cases even 
 in the days of Augustine. On the other hand are 
 men who would make the spiritual life begotten by 
 the gospel superior to a doctrinal conformity, which 
 is only another word for an impracticable uniform- 
 ity. They seek correct doctrines but not doc- 
 
324 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 trinal correctness. They are Modernists within 
 Protestantism. The situation is strikingly like 
 that which existed in the New Testament church 
 subsequent to the appearance of Paul. The primi- 
 tive Christian insisted upon the maintenance of 
 divinely authorized Mosaic legalism as a part of 
 the new religion. The Pauline group, composed of 
 people whose past was radically different from that 
 of the primitive Christians, insisted that the primary 
 thing was not conformity to God's will as known to 
 the past but to God's will as expressed in what the 
 primitive Christians of Jerusalem themselves be- 
 lieved to be paramount — the new life in the spirit 
 induced by faith in Jesus as Christ. 
 
 In our modem world of Protestantism there is the 
 primitive Jerusalem church of doctrinal precision, 
 and there is the Gentile church of the modem mind. 
 Neither can claim to be the superior of the other in 
 point of spiritual life, for each confesses the ex- 
 periential knowledge that the fundamental element 
 of all faith is the gospel of salvation revealed by 
 Jesus. The real line of cleavage lies in the differ- 
 ent values placed upon the doctrinal legalism of 
 ecclesiasticism. One party is perfectly sincere in 
 insisting that there is no genuine Christianity ex- 
 cept as men believe in the infallibility and perma- 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 325 
 
 nent authority of the inspired Scripture, the Nicaean 
 formulas for the person of Jesus and the Anselmic, 
 legal formulas for the doctrine of the atonement. 
 The other party insists that it too would have the 
 truth as it is in Jesus, but that it believes in the in- 
 spiration of the Scriptures as the progressive revela- 
 tion of God's will known in the experience of the 
 spiritual life of God; in Jesus as a unique and 
 individualized revelation of God in history with- 
 out full pronouncement as to the metaphysical, 
 premundane nature of a Logos; in the necessity of 
 the death of the Christ as an integral part of his 
 vocation as Saviour. Yet to the one party as to the 
 other God has spoken in the regenerate life born of 
 Himself. To both the gospel is a positive, vital 
 message of salvation. 
 
 Can these two parties work together within those 
 denominations which still seem economically needed 
 as arms of the army of the Lord? Or shall Prot- 
 estantism be still further divided at the very mo- 
 ment when it is beginning what seems an epoch- 
 making cooperation of all Protestant forces in the 
 interests of a united front against evil? 
 
 If the sane counsels of the Spirit prevail, there 
 can be but one answer to such questions. The two 
 wings of Protestantism can unite in the common 
 
326 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 
 
 campaign of evangelicalism. To keep for a mo- 
 ment the military figure, let each arm have its uni- 
 form, its accoutrements, its organization, its com- 
 pany drillmasters, and its battle flags. But let 
 them remember that they have the same watchword, 
 the same general, and the same Fatherland. Let 
 them fight their common enemy, not each other. 
 We have been for many a year singing that we are 
 marching like a mighty army. It is time to stop 
 marching. The engagement has begim ! 
 
 Thus we reach the end of our discussion at the 
 very heart of the gospel. The spiritual life is not a 
 social surplus to be enjoyed only by those who have 
 shared in the economic surplus. It is our common 
 birthright as men and our common inspiration as 
 Christians. The gospel is not a philosophy but a 
 revelation of the supremacy of this spiritual life as, 
 perfectly embodied in the historical Jesus, it con- 
 quered the unspiritual order embodied in nature, 
 in sin, and in death. In making it the controlling 
 factor in our own spiritual self-expression, we are 
 not following cunningly devised fables; we are not 
 fighting against the constructive Will of an ever 
 evolving universe; we are not committed to words 
 and theories of the past. We are rather repeating 
 
THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 327 
 
 in our day the continuously expanding experience 
 of God as He is known in Jesus. The meaning of 
 that experience we shall make intelligible to ourselves 
 in concepts drawn from our own world-view, but 
 such doctrines thus formed will be but functional. 
 Our children and our children's children will repeat 
 the process as in their turn they seek the equivalents 
 of experience in truths that shall be to them the cor- 
 relate of reality. But though theologies be re- 
 newed in the future as in the past, the gospel as the 
 revelation in time of the eternal verities of God and 
 the human soul will be final. Orthodoxies will 
 replace orthodoxies, but evangelicalism as a loyalty 
 of the spiritual life to Jesus Christ will abide. 
 Modem men will succeed modem men, but he, the 
 Christ, will continue to evoke the faith and adoring 
 love of countless generations. Physical life will 
 end, but the life of the spirit will abide with its Lord 
 who is Spirit. Social orders will replace outgrown 
 social orders, but brotherhood will expand increas- 
 ingly until the Great Day when Jesus shall be su- 
 preme and the successive approaches of the spiritual 
 life toward him as its Type and Saviour shall have 
 culminated in a social order in which sin shall be 
 crushed, Christlike souls shall constitute the De- 
 mocracy of the Spirit, and God shall be all in all. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Ad interim ethics, alleged of the 
 
 gospel, 262 f. 
 Apocalypse, place of, in gospel, 
 
 21. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 153. 
 Atonement, Pauline teaching as 
 
 to, 1 8s f.; later views of, 186- 
 
 191; fundamental element, 193. 
 Augustine, 147, 295. 
 Authority, and the modem man, 
 
 si; of the gospel, 272, 282. 
 
 Bernard of Clairvaux, 296. 
 Browning, 140, 146. 
 
 Christ, term defined, 27, 114; con- 
 tent of acceptance as, 114 f. 
 
 Christian Science and the deliv- 
 erance from evil, 147 f. 
 
 Christianity, a dehistoricalized, 
 92. 
 
 Church, function of, 301 f., 309 f .; 
 need of cooperation in, 322 f. 
 
 Consubstantial, force of, 122-124. 
 
 Creeds, inevitable, 136. 
 
 Criticism, extreme results of, 19s; 
 general tendency of, 108. 
 
 Death, Hebrew thought of, 209 f.; 
 
 and sin, 177. 
 DeUverance, in the teaching of 
 
 Jesus, 9; not mere rescue, 273. 
 Devils, belief in, 37. 
 Dogma, as opposed to the gospel, 
 
 3-7, 63- 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 173. 
 Eschatology, in the history of 
 
 theology, 33; in the gospel, 23; 
 
 equivalents of, 82-8S; catas- 
 
 trophic element not to be over- 
 emphasized, 26s. ^ 
 
 Eternal life, 26s, 274. See Spir- 
 itual life. 
 
 EvangeHcaUsm m. orthodoxy, 279. 
 
 Evil, problem of, 140-143, 146 f.; 
 deUverance from, 148. 
 
 Evolution, modern man's belief in, 
 36 f.; goal of, 24s. 
 
 Eucken, 270. 
 
 Faith, justification by, 181. 
 Freedom of the spiritual life, 282 f . 
 
 God, sovereignty of, 29; imma- 
 nence of, 43; as Father, 29; 
 equivalent of, 81-82; as love of, 
 S, 204; existence of, 143-146; 
 as Saviour, 183; ethical unity of, 
 as seen in the death of Jesus, 
 202-204. 
 
 Gospel, in teaching of Jesus, 7 £.; 
 in the teaching of Paul, 12; as 
 a message of deliverance, 10; 
 only one in New Testament, 16, 
 18; historical elements of, 24- 
 31; methods of determining 
 content of, 3 f.; how not to be 
 brought to our modern world, 
 66-71; how to be brought to 
 the modem man, 71-90; con- 
 tent of, 7S-77; subject to his- 
 torical inquiry, 93; Jesus as 
 substance of, 109 f.; and sin, 
 172 f.; alleged impracticability 
 of, 241 f.; authority of, 272 ; 
 salvation in, 273-277; as sug- 
 gestion, 280 f.; and hatred of 
 sm, 30S f. 
 
 Gospels, when written, 96. 
 
 329 
 
33° 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Haeckd, 143, 267. 
 
 Hatred of sin, 304 f. 
 
 Hauptman, 156. 
 
 Historical method in the study of 
 
 religion, 42. 
 Holy Spirit, in relation to Jesus, 
 
 132; and the resurrection, 211; 
 
 work of, in the soul, 288 f., 293. 
 Hymns, expressions of spiritual 
 
 life, 297. 
 
 Immortality, argument for, 216 f. 
 Individual, goal of evolution, 245. 
 
 Jesus, birth of. i29-r32; con- 
 sciousness as Messiah, 12; his- 
 torical character of, 103 f.; sig- 
 nificance to the gospel, 109 f.; 
 gospel according to, lo; evokes 
 faith in himself as Saviour, 112 f.; 
 sinlessness of, 116 f.; tempta- 
 tion of, 118; as a revelation of 
 God, 121 f.; exiwsitions of his 
 person in the New Testament, 
 127 f.; as more than man, 132- 
 138; a SaNiour, 135 f., 130 f.; 
 of the creeds, 136-138; faith of, 
 159; significance of death of, 
 191 f., 194 f.; heroism of, 302 f.; 
 resurrection of, 159, 224-234. 
 
 John, gospel according to, interpre- 
 tation of Jesus, 107 f. 
 
 Josephus, on resurrection, 210. 
 
 Justice vs. brotherhood, 253. 
 
 Logos, as incarnate in Jesus, 128- 
 
 129. 
 Luther, Martin, 296. 
 
 Messianic hojw, in the teaching of 
 Jesus, 10 f.; equivalents of, 81- 
 86. 
 
 Metaphysics, modem man and, 51. 
 
 Miracle, 46. 
 
 Modem man, presuppositions of, 
 ch. 2: in the church, 23 f.; de- 
 fined, 54 f.; attitude toward 
 Jesus, 113; non-religious type 
 of, 266 f. 
 
 Moody, William Vaughn, quoted, 
 
 155- 
 Myers, F. W. H., 223. 
 
 Naturalism, champions of, 266. 
 Nietzsche, 156; position dis- 
 cussed, 249 f. 
 
 Omar, 154. 
 
 Paul, relation to Jesus, 13 f., 16 f.; 
 gospel according to, 10; esti- 
 mate of Jesus, 105 f.; views of 
 the prefiristent Christ, 127-128; 
 teaching as to sin, 164; as to 
 the life of the spirit, 278, 282, 
 290 f . 
 
 Pesamism, 153 f. 
 
 Process, modem conception of, 36, 
 39- 
 
 Raymond Lull, 296. 
 
 Regeneration, 277. 
 
 ReUgion, task of, 41; germ of, 
 286. 
 
 Resurrection, as an element of 
 eschatology, 84; in Jewish 
 thought, 210. 
 
 Resurrection of Jesus, objections to, 
 100 f.; fact of, 159; signifi- 
 cance of, 201, 234-238; argu- 
 ments for, 224-228; nature of, 
 228-233; significance of, 236 f. 
 
 Reward and punishment in the 
 gospel, 247. 
 
 Sacrifice, animal, as presupposed 
 by the gospel, 30. 
 
 Salvation, 273, 287 f. 
 
 Satan, author of evil, 37; deliver- 
 ance from, and its modem 
 equivalent, 140 f. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 154. 
 
 Sermon on the Moimt, practica- 
 biUty of, 259. 
 
 Sin, defined, 165 f.; in the teach- 
 ing of Jesus, 161 f.; in the teach- 
 ing of Paul, 164 f.; pleasures of, 
 169; as a violation of God's 
 
INDEX 
 
 331 
 
 will, 17s f.; and death, 177; 
 punishment of, 176 f.; salva- 
 tion from, 180 f.; forgiveness of, 
 200 f. 
 
 Social soUdarity, belief in, by the 
 modem man, 48. 
 
 Society, not final and of evolution, 
 24s; a means to freedom, 245. 
 
 Sovereignty of God, modem equiva- 
 lent of, 81-82. 
 
 Spiritual life, as related to the 
 
 gospel, 77, 87-89; social con- 
 tent of, 121, 299 f.; a life of 
 love, 293; its freedom, 282 f.; 
 democracy of, 284; and the 
 natural order, 302; heroism of, 
 302. 
 
 Tolerance, limitation of, 306 f . 
 
 Virgin birth of Jesus, 129-132. 
 Von Hartmann, 153, 156. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING 
 ORDER 
 
 By Dr. SHAILER MATHEWS 
 
 Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation 
 in the University of Chicago 
 
 Cloth i2mo $r.;o net 
 
 "... a most interesting and valuable contribution to the litera- 
 ture of a subject that is growing in popular attention every day. 
 While among the deeply, really religious and genuinely scientiiic 
 there is no conflict or antagonism where even there is not accord, 
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 at the seeming conflict between the demands of faith, on the one 
 hand, and the experiences of their own reason and the problems of 
 modern social and industrial life will find here much sage, illumi- 
 nating, and practical counsel." — Evening Post. 
 
 Other Books by Professor Mathews 
 
 THE SOCIAL TEACHINGS OF JESUS 
 
 AN ESSAY IN CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY 
 
 Cloth i2mo il'50 net 
 
 "The author is scholarly, devout, awake to all modern thought, 
 and yet conservative and preeminently sane." — Congregationalist. 
 
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NEW TESTAMENT HANDBOOKS 
 
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 Edited by SHAILER MATHEWS 
 
 Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation 
 in the University of Chicago 
 
 The History of New Testament Times in Palestine 
 
 The Congregationalist says of Prof. Shailer Mathews's " The Social 
 Teachings of Jesus " ; " Rereading deepens the impression that the 
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 as prophets." 
 
 The History of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament 
 
 Prof. Marvin R. Vincent, Professor of New Testament Exegesis, 
 Union Theological Seminary. 
 Professor Vincent's contributions to the study of the New Testament 
 rank him among the first American exegetes. His most recent publica- 
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 Philippians and to Philemon " (" International Critical Commentary "), 
 which was preceded by a " Students' New Testament Handbook," 
 " Word Studies in the New Testament," and others. 
 
 The History of the Higher Criticism of the New Testament 
 
 Prof. Henry S. Nash, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, 
 Cambridge Divinity School. 
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 inspiration of a kindred sort." 
 
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NEW TESTAMENT HANDBOOKS - Cbn/maerf 
 
 Introduction to the Books of the New Testament 
 
 Prof. B. WiSNER Bacon, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, 
 Yale University, 
 
 Professor Bacon's worlcs in the field of Old Testament criticism include 
 "The Triple Tradition of Exodus," and "The Genesis of Genesis," a 
 study of the documentary sources of the books of Moses. In the field 
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 the most recent of which is "The Autobiography of Jesus," in the 
 American Journal of Theology^ 
 
 The Teaching of Jesus 
 
 Prof. George B. Stevens, Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale 
 University. 
 
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 the most important of his works. 
 
 The Biblical Theology of the New Testament 
 
 Prof. E. P. Gould, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Protes- 
 tant Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia. 
 
 Professor Gould's Commentaries on the Gospel of Mark (in the " In- 
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 (in the " American Commentary") are critical and exegetical attempts 
 to supply those elements which are lacking in existing works of the same 
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 " An excellent series of scholarly, yet concise and inexpensive New 
 Testament handbooks." — Christian Advocate, New York. 
 
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CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS 
 
 By the Rev. WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH 
 
 Professor of Church History in Rochester Theological Seminary 
 
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 Titnes' Sat. Review of Books.. 
 
 THE APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION 
 
 An Introduction to the Study of Social Ethics 
 
 By FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODT 
 
 Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in Harvard University 
 
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 THE ETHICS OF JESUS 
 
 By HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 President of Oberlin College 
 
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 by analyzing these teachings he brings out " their unity, sweep, and in- 
 spiration. 
 
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