are ona pasa abe eae Par a is o=> oF ps pesiigeesaigsateteasteuneaes Aelia. FASE. SAETISe sepascasearas eS Pigaiagapassnierssasaepasu one Ebpreseererrreiietae rece tateniee peaeees pase 3; SSE, Bpetesstst ese i sas sans gazas Geese goss aeesh rag de’ as. = Peeeeeoaspebcreeyt See oiaaee ee seqsasasieasasee PES pesribe repre Goeiesaaea = a = Sap Sarees a toes “33 - y a7 2735222, Srore ries = 5 aj oa one oe te he G arr sates ae : an if is t i ttt Hately Pikis : Rien ttE t= —b wt t sf iti bets tg it i Library of Che Theological Seminary PRINCETON -: NEW JERSEY CS): PRESENTED BY Mt, — de . an pad eT ine Hsteaete ofl the c ohn B e W ae ed inrer British preachers Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/britishpreachersOOunse BRITISH PREACHERS BRITISH: PREACHERS The LORD ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH “Rev. G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY, M.C. The Right Rev. GEORGE C. PIDGEON, D.D. Rev. Professor H. R. MACKINTOSH, D.Phil., D.D. The LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER Rev. P. N. WAGGETT, D.D. Rev. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, D.D., D.Litt. Rev. W. R. MATTHEWS, D.D. Rev. ARCHIBALD FLEMING, M.A., T.D., D.D., H.C.F. Rev. Principal ALFRED E. GARVIE, D.D. Rev. Principal H. WHEELER ROBINSON, M.A. Rev. T. CHARLES WILLIAMS, D.D. Rev. JOHN WADDELL, M.A. Canon VERNON F. STORR, M.A. Rev. H. R. L. SHEPPARD, M.A. The LORD BISHOP OF SALISBURY The Very Rev. RONALD G. MACINTYRE, O.B.E., D.D. Rev. ANDREW K. WALTON, M.A. The Right Rev. BISHOP TALBOT, D.D. Rev. DINSDALE T. YOUNG, D.D. Rev. J. SCOTT LIDGETT, D.D. Rev. ARTHUR J. GOSSIP, M.A. Rev. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD, D.D. Rev. J. D. JONES, D.D. BRITISH PREAC SECOND SERIES Edited by SIR JAMES MARCHANT, K.B.E., LL.D. New York CHICAGO TORONTO Fleming H. Revell Company LoNDON AND EDINBURGH Made and Printed in Great Britain at the Botolph Printing Works, Gate Street, Kingsway, W.C.2 EDITOR’S NOTE THE reception given throughout the United Kingdom, our Dominions, and America, to the first annual volume of ‘“ BRITISH PREACHERS,” has encouraged the publishers to continue the project. The selection for the present volume has been made with the help of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, D.D.; Principal Wheeler Robinson, M.A.; Mr. Sidney Dark, Editor of The Church Times; Dr. Jacks, Editor of Huzbbert’s Journal; the Rev. James Black, D.D., and the Rev. R. C. Gillie, D.C.L., to whom the Editor is indebted. \_: . \ ' yt ‘ ie ot ‘ 7 “7 ia arr oy j GaN (oO: yale i ; ual < Oey AS Os Wg Meme Lt? ak t Le. y ‘ nA _ a? \ te » 46. A ‘ } ) ity 4 i At) ve ” 4 : ; ‘ ‘ ' i vip Mu | ee eee ee RMON in mae a) 5 4 iis Ne - a a ' if ‘ ' ‘ . 1G a . a .| ) e P aw pA Le J «, \ , eh ED RS Oca RS ee i+ - 28 ie ; : hes | ,f { ' + $ NER ia eb f ray - ; ; pe: } y f i t i Pi +! ‘ , 7 j laa ito be * i> “sae 7 J i rey | # 4 TR VR Mk Ag 1 7 ‘ , 2h » i “y f - 4 bbls HD : ‘ . ‘ ¥ F ? ; bag Hit ny A = * ‘ Wee abana r 1 4 i j F 4 A ’ if Con : Mae ' Gan £ «| ; oe 4 ‘ ae, oe. 4 } t f 4 SP’ y3 ‘(¥ q fi : t ¥ 5 Le ¢ Ci «i : ra ye ih oe Tee, be’ : WERXAGE f.7 i - x) ‘ ’ 4 waikeG Hay MA A , : i i \ : ’ ‘ ' . 4 ' rh , | ‘ ' , AW a | ow. # i A Sa nls { #55) i ; j rs ; 4 ‘ rah 7 os r Viv, ait: , wit pele an a | j ’ N Vlg ale On Ms i 7, ee Contents Tue Licut tHat LicutetH Every Man. By C. F. D’Arcy REACTION AND REvoLT A By G. A. Studdert Kennedy Tue Prayer oF Faitu By G. C. Pidgeon SOLITUDE AND FaItTH By H. R. Mackintosh Tue Creep In THouGHT AND ACTION By F. Theodore Woods Tue EucuaristT as SACRIFICE By P. N. Waggett In THE SANCTUARY ¢ By J. Estlin Carpenter Tue PropLuemM or SUFFERING By W. R. Matthews PAGE 15 a0 49 63 85 107 I2I CONTENTS THE ORDER OF THE COMPANIONS OF JESUS By Archibald Fleming Tue Gracious INvITATION By A. E. Garvie FORGIVENESS ; : By H. Wheeler Robinson Tue Law or LisBEerty By T. Charles Williams Reticion 1s Lire By John Waddell Toe Meraninc or Curistian DiscipLEsHiP By Vernon F. Storr Tue Test or Fait By H. R. L. Sheppard Tue Wortip or To-mMorRROW By St. Clair G. A. Donaldson In THE Becrnninc, Gop By R. G. Macintyre PAGE 133 fe, 155 169 183 197, 209 221 231 CONTENTS Tue Burssepness oF Mourninc By Andrew K. Walton A Srmprte Duty anp 1Ts Rewarp: Missions Past AND PRESENT By E. S. Talbot A Casuat Question AND 1Ts Mopern I[mptt- CATIONS ! : By Dinsdale T. Young y Tue Master Key By J. Scott Lidgett A Messacrt ror Grey Days By Arthur J. Gossip Gop’s ForciveNnEss DEPENDENT UPON Ours By W. E. Orchard How Jzsus Croszs THE Book . By J. D. Jones PAGE 243 253 263 273 285 395 323 F, : ‘ * Aff 1 ' 4 i 4 i ree ay f') Vee Citas ATs. Sen ee ya eek ee ary f ; , ; iv, ' { Cy 4l4y seek | ; ae arr Ve Mh) ae ae, ‘ vn , ; { Ty fy oe i , aie : 4 ie yet sent ; Wa ia ace iy ; *, 4 ‘ 1: ' i ; id j . ‘ J 4 > ' | | X Wik i # " tw! J 1 ' ti a¥ th fie ha ats ie 2, 7H ele j j tl , 45 ‘j A 7 } ¢! 2 { : (ao) rad 4 7? : a is ’ i i ; “¢ bee, ep Sas At ‘ j watad rg ; i: Ws (dad ot waa th a,! ri et . ae: Nd Te A. a et ; : ta tie, vy a Cae n. - a at 3, ty ad kt y , ie SE i P : ; ot ra, . 1 ; ] aq. : me ey ' tr inne ‘. \ bis : JOG =) : A i ware i Akard 4 ide Li f rut ‘ i i veil 4 told » . mA Ae Pee! f He \ 0 i a THE ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH Tue Most Rev. C. F. D’Arcy, D.D. THE ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH (The Most Rev. Charles Frederick D’Arcy, M.A., D.D.) Born in Dublin in 1859, he is a member of an ancient Anglo-Norman family, seated for many centuries in Co. Westmeath. First Science Scholar and Senior Moderator of Trinity College, Dublin, he obtained a First Class in Divinity, and was ordained in 1884. As a clergyman, he served for five years as a curate in Belfast, and for ten years in the rural parishes of Billy and Ballymena in Co. Antrim. In 1900 he became Vicar and Dean of Belfast, and in 1903 Bishop of Clogher. From Clogher he was translated to Ossory in 1908, and thence to Down in tort. In 1919 he was elected Archbishop of Dublin, and in I920 unanimously appointed Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. In 1920 he became Hon. D.D. of Oxford. He has been several times Select Preacher before the Univer- sities of Dublin, Oxford and Cambridge. He was Donnellan Lecturer in 1897-98, and again in 1913-14. Also Liverpool Lecturer in 1924. Among his published works are ‘‘A Short Study of Ethics,’’ which has been used as a text-book in the Universities of London, Calcutta, etc., and translated into Japanese for use in Tokio; ‘“‘ Idealism and Theology”? (Donnellan Lectures) ; “God and Freedom in Human Experience ’’ (Donnellan Lectures, second series), and ‘‘ Science and Creation ’’ (Liverpool Lectures). THE bIGHER SHAT EIGHTETH EVERY MAN Tue ArRcHBISHOP OF ARMAGH “ There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world.’ John i, 9g. (R.V.) THE Prologue to the Fourth Gospel is one of the greatest of all human utterances. Whether it be regarded in relation to religion, or theology, or philosophy, it has lived through the centuries as an inspiration to the mind as well as to the soul of man. The simplicity of its language is almost unrivalled: its depth of thought and the largeness of its conceptions are equally remarkable. Using terms which were then identified with a current philosophy of religion, it applies them, with a fresh significance, to those Christian experiences which were then regenerating human life. If we take the passage as a whole, we find that its earlier sentences deal with eternal principles, the later with historic events, in which those princi- ples find their signal application and fulfilment. The sentence I have taken as a text links together these two elements. It deals with eternal princi- ples, but with a view to that fulfilment in the person and life of Jesus Christ which gave to man a new % THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTETH EVERY MAN vision of the glory of God. The Divine Logos, the Light of the world, is the Light that lighteth every man, coming thus continually into the world. So we must, I think, interpret the saying. And from this continual coming, the thought passes on to the historic coming in the Person of Jesus Christ. “‘ The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” The final test of truth is the appeal to experience: ‘‘ We beheld his glory.” The few short years of the ministry of Jesus, with their labours and sufferings, became, for those who witnessed them and entered into their meaning, the supreme revelation of the glory of God; and, at the same time, a demonstration of the Divine Image in man, in every man. A Divine Light shines in every human soul. It is the same Divine Light which, with unparalleled brightness, shines out upon the world from Christ. In Him, the Word, the Divine Logos, which is the Light of the world, “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” It is not here only in the New Testament that this great doctrine of the relation of Christ to the previous history of humanity is to be found. In the opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews is expressed a doctrine of Divine revelation which, if not as profound, involves the same conception of gradual approach to the supreme manifestation in Christ. ‘‘God who in divers parts and in divers 4 THE ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH manners spake in time past unto the fathers in the prophets, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son.” More remarkable still perhaps is the doctrine of St. Paul on the law of conscience. In the Epistle to the Romans he writes: ‘‘ When Gentiles which have no law do by nature the things of the law, these having no law are a law unto themselves; in that they shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them.” This great doctrine of a law written in the heart, in obedience to which Gentiles, who were outside the commonwealth of Israel and had no share in the teaching and discipline of the chosen people, could yet do God’s will and, as St. Paul implies, even endure the judgment of God, is one of the most splendid examples of the largeness of thought which characterises the great Apostle. Oh! that the Church of later ages had been guided by the teaching of the passages I have quoted! The world might then have been saved from the hardness, rigidity, and cruelty which mark so much of the theological thought of Western Christendom and of the policies which sprang from it. We are taught then to see a Divine element, a heavenly light, in the soul of every human being, whether he be Christian or non-Christian. I shall not ask you to consider the relation of this teaching 5 THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTETH EVERY MAN to the doctrine of original sin as held by the historic Churches. But we may consider, in passing, that here we have a question which is of great importance in relation to social and political life. Low views of man’s nature lead inevitably to degrading doc- trines and methods in statesmanship and public life. For example, it was held by Macchiavelli, whose political philosophy had a profound influence on modern statecraft, that men are so constituted that they will always do evil if they possibly can; and this doctrine forms the basis of all his constructive thought. On the other hand, the modern political idealist usually proceeds on the assumption that men will always do good if they get the chance. Both views are equally far from the teaching of experience. The truth is that, while there is, in every man, a Divine spark of good, both as regards innate capacity and definite tendency, there are also clamorous appetites and passions which too often refuse to obey the law written in the heart. My purpose in bringing this question before you this morning is not, however, either to turn your thoughts back upon old theological problems, or to invite you to consider the social and political controversies of the present day. My aim is to bring the Christian view of man into relation with the facts and truths revealed concerning him by modern science. The world of late has been keenly interested in watching certain events in America, where a powerful section of the people, strong in religious faith, and fearful lest any movement of 6 THE ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH scientific thought should undermine the foundations of Christian belief, have been deeply stirred by the teaching of the modern doctrine of evolution. As a result, all the conclusions of geology, biology and anthropology are being attacked with more zeal than knowledge, and considerable numbers of Christian people have come back to the position of fifty years ago, when science and religion were set in opposition to one another as irreconcilable foes. To one who can recall with great clearness the anxieties and controversies of that time, this seems extraordinary. Watching year after year the con- tinual modification of scientific thought, involving the gradual elimination of the elements which seemed really dangerous to religion, we had come to a settled conviction that Christian Faith had successfully passed through its ordeal; and that science might indeed be hailed as, in its own place and degree, a truly Divine revelation. It is the scientific doctrine of the descent of man, as we know him, from more primitive forms of life which especially stirs the apprehensions of so many earnest Christian people. But why? Surely, if we have grasped the teaching of the great utterance recorded of our Lord in the fifth chapter of St. John, “My Father worketh even until now and I work,” we must realise that the conception of creation as a continuous process, going on throughout the ages, finds its place, as a deeper truth, in the teaching of the New Testament. But this passage does not stand alone. As we have seen, the conception of ze 7 THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTETH EVERY MAN the Divine Logos, the Light which lighteth every man, coming continuously into the world, until it appears with unique and supreme splendour in the Person of Jesus Christ, is the central teaching of the Prologue to this Gospel. It is the same truth which, as we have also seen, is taught with perfect clearness in the opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, a gradual age-long revelation corresponding exactly with gradual age-long creation. Now the great story of creation unfolded by modern science can no longer, with reason, be regarded as materialistic in tendency. or consider what that story records. A most marvellous advance, in which the following stages may be noted: the formation of the stellar and solar systems; the cooling of the earth and its shaping into continents and seas; the emergence of condi- tions which made life as we know it possible; the development of the vegetable and animal series in parallel lines, the one depending on the other; the higher organisation of animal life through the formation of a nervous system, and of brain; the appearance of man with his greater intelligence ; the making of human society; the passage from lower human types to higher; the emergence of civilisation, of literature, art, science, religion. Of such a marvellous order in creation there can be but one satisfactory explanation. Here is no series of happy accidents. The creative power which is behind the whole process was surely guided by a world-embracing purpose. That purpose was 8 THE ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH to create a society of intelligent moral beings, capable of knowledge, will, love—capable too of seeking those eternal things which belong to the realm of the spiritual. This view of the creative process is not only in perfect harmony with the results of scientific research, it also affords a larger and grander interpre- tation of those great religious experiences which are recorded in the Bible and which have been manifested in Christian life from the beginning. It further exhibits in a very wonderful way the relation of the Person and Work of Christ to all creation. The earlier stages of the creative process con- cerned the development of the vast mechanism of the material universe. In due time, when the necessary conditions had arisen, life appeared. At first, in forms so elemental that they are not easily distinguishable from the crystallisations of chemical processes. But soon there appear forms which display a new power—a power of self-direction. We usually think of that strange power which we call Will, as a possession belonging to the higher grades only of animate existence. Some have thought of it as an exclusively human possession. No doubt this is true of its highest development. But now science is revealing the wonderful fact that some true degree of self-direction is to be found very far down in animal life. Even those invisible animated jellies which inhabit every pool show some beginnings of that power which, in ourselves, we call the power of Will. And, mark, with the 9 THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTETH EVERY MAN emergence of this power there also emerge those powers which we call feeling and intelligence. Very faint at first, these powers grow in clearness and strength, all through the long history of animate being, until they reach their culmination in the life of man. Here we find the source of the tremendous struggle of life, with all its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and pains, its rewards and disappointments, its good and evil. These all spring from the same origin—the gift of Will. It is because of this that there is, and must be, a Law of Righteousness, a moral conflict, temptation, a choice between good and evil, a possibility of sin. We are now in a position to see that the Creator, when He imparted to His creatures some degree of His own qualities of knowledge and will, launched His Creation upon a supreme adventure. In the course of that adventure have come all the pains and agonies as well as all the pleasures and joys of life, all its sins and horrors as well as its attain- ments and blessings. Now the very meaning of the Christian message to the world is that He from Whom we derive our being has not left us to our self-made fate, but that, entering into our life, taking our nature upon Himself, sharing our struggles, He is winning our victory. And the crowning glory of Christianity is this— the Faith that, in Christ, God is using suffering and death, the curses of our life, as the means of our deliverance. Here is the eternal significance of 10 THE ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH the Cross of Christ. Only one power can overcome the opposition of contending wills and combine them in a moral harmony. That power is Love. And Love accomplishes its purpose by sacrifice. Taking upon Himself the sorrows and sufferings which afflict us, God is able to win us to Himself. In the might of this eternal love, and with all eternity before Him, we must believe that He will conquer evil and perfect His creation. And so it is that St. John, having caught the vision of the Divine Word at the beginning, and again as the Light of all history, is able to say: “‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.”’ Tf es <<. SARL Sake ity SST ¥ obs Rev. G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY, M.C. THE REV G. A. STUDDERT REN NEDY M.C. Or Irish extraction, Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy was brought up in Leeds, where his father was vicar of a parish in a poor district. Kennedy was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublins In 1908 he was ordained by the Bishop of Worcester and went to work at Rugby under the present Dean of Windsor. He was eventually returned to assist his father in his slum parish in Leeds, and in 1914 he was appointed Vicar of St. Paul’s, Worcester, a very poor parish of some 3,000 souls. He served as a temporary Chaplain to the forces on the Western Front from 1916 to 1919, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1917. He is at present Rector of St. Edmund the King and Martyr, Lombard Street, and Honorary Messenger of the Industrial Christian Fellowship. Among his publications are: ‘‘ The Hardest Part,” “ Lies,’”’ “‘ Food for the Fed-up,” “The Sorrows of God,’ ‘‘The Wicket Gate,” ‘*The Word and the Work.” REACTION AND REVOLT Tue Rev. G. A. Stuppert Kennepy, M.C. “I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done.”’ John xiii, 15. Or all God’s creatures, man is the only one that lives looking backwards and forwards at the same time. He alone lives with the echo of the hour that has struck and the anticipation of the hour that is to strike, acting together in his mind. To all other creatures the past is dim, being preserved only in the semi-physical memory of acquired habits; the past is dim and the future non-existent. But for man it is almost true to say that the past and the future are more important than the present, for if I could take away from you your memories of the past, your hopes, your fears and dreams of the future, there would be but little left. It is toa great extent this double power of memory and anticipation that has raised man to his present position of supremacy in creation. But like all great powers it carries with it deadly dangers and grave responsibilities. The chiefest danger lies in the temptation to use the past and future as means of escape from the difficulties of the present rather than as aids to the facing and overcoming of them. For most human beings the present is more or 15 REACTION AND REVOLT less painful and unsatisfactory. A thoroughly contented man is bound to be either a bit of a fool or a bit of a saint. Certainly anyone who is thor- oughly contented with the world as he finds it to-day must be suffering either from softening of the brain or hardening of the heart, or both, for both, alas! are common complaints. ‘“‘ Divine discontent ’’ is a catch phrase too often and too loosely used to-day, for much of our human discontent is devilish rather than divine. But there is truth in the phrase for all that. Discontents are the growing pains of a creature not complete and destined to a higher mode of life. But there les the danger, for men, being discontented with the present, are tempted to turn from it and take refuge either in the past or in the future. They idealise the past, or glorify the future, and so tend to live in an unreal world wrought out of their own im- aginations, hovering about in the never-never-land between the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age. In the history of mankind, as in the life story of any individual man or woman, there are periods of both kinds—backward looking periods and forward looking periods; they are moods of the universal, as they are moods of the individual, human soul. On the surface it would seem as though our dis- tracted modern world were torn between the two, as though the whole race of men were divided into two great hosts, the army of those who look back- ward into the past, and the army of those who look forward into the future. It would seem as though 16 REV. G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY the issue of our time lay between the forces of reaction and the forces of revolt. To millions of the very best men and women the present is quite intolerable and they are looking wildly round for a refuge from it. Some find it in the past. They long to revive the “ good old days’’ when masters were masters and men were men, when property was really private property and possessors could do what they would with their own; when trades unions ceased from troubling and employers were at rest; the days when governments kept to their proper sphere and neither meddled nor muddled as they do to-day; the days when Sovereign in- dependence meant Sovereign independence, and national patriotism was enough. All their glories are glories of the past, andif they look forward it is to a future which is to be a repetition and extension of the past. And so they wave the good old flag and sing : Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free, How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee ? Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set ; God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet. But there are millions of other men to whom the past means nothing, or even worse than nothing. They find in it little glory and no hope. The working men of England have begun to read history and they do not find it inspiring. They read it through smoked spectaclés—they cannot 17 REACTION AND REVOLT altogether help that because they live in the clouds of smoke and somehow that makes them see red. They do not go far back as a rule. It is mainly the history of Industrialism they read, and over that there hangs a perpetual cloud of smoke and shame, of dirt and cruelty. They are frankly cynical about the past. ‘‘ Mother of the Free’ is mockery to them, and “ wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set” they would say, with a sneer, was “‘ camou- flage’’ for Economic Imperialism. There are few subjects which have been so badly taught in our schools as history, and our people pay a penalty for it. The boy of 14 faces a world with a past which is to him nothing but a mist through which unreal kings and queens loom up like phantoms rising and falling mid wars and rumours of wars. When he begins to read history in the Labour College or through the Labour Press with Marx as his master, all that he has learned becomes to him a farrago of vicious nonsense, and he learns what he believes to be the reality of history, and it is nothing but a grim, grey, sordid struggle against oppression and wrong. And so the past is positively repulsive to him, even more repulsive than the present, and he there- fore throws himself into the future. Repudiating absolutely his debt to the past, he paints the future in glowing colours, a world in which there are to be no masters, where all men are to be free and equal ; where all will work and no one work very hard ; where all will have enough and none too much; a 18 REV. G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY world wherein man may take his ease and live, where the buzzers cease their buzzing and workmen can have rest. He calls this fair land the “ Socialist Commonwealth.” It is for him the heaven of his dreams. There are millions of men still for whom Socialism and hope are but two names for one thing, and therein lies its strength. Sometimes I have a fear of what will happen when they realise, as they must realise, that the hope is largely vain. On the surface it would seem as though the real issue lay between these two armies, the one looking back to the splendours of the past, the other looking forward to the glory of the future. But, if we look deeper, it becomes clear that there is no real issue between them, they are both dreaming, and whether a man dreams of the past or dreams of the future makes little difference in reality so long as he only dreams. Moreover, it is essentially the same dream that comes to both in a different form. They both want peace, they want to be free from responsibility and strain; unconsciously they want to sleep. It is a human, all too human, want; for the basic human sins are sloth and pride. When we talked after the War of a “land fit for heroes to live in”’ what we really meant was a land fit for sluggards to sleep in, and it was natural enough. We had been torn and bruised and battered, we had wept and been wounded in body and mind, and we wanted to sleep. We wanted and we still want to escape from sordid reality, and have a little peace. TQ REACTION AND REVOLT But that kind of peace is only found in the never- never-land of mad ideals and wild dreams. God will not let us sleep. All down the ages He has stung, whipped, called, wooed, driven, aye, some- times it would seem tortured men into life—more life—yet man is only half awake, for the last enemy that shall be overcome is death or sloth. Now Christianity has always bid men look forward, and look forward to a kingdom not only in Heaven but here on earth. Has she not always bidden her children pray as he prayed ‘‘ Thy Kingdom come on earth as itis in heaven ”’ ? But before the gates of the Kingdom it has always put two things, a Cross anda Judgment Seat. There isa Kingdom coming, it says, if you can make a sacrifice and stand a test. It has always preached judgment as the very essence of life. This truth all our modern knowledge of the tragic and terrible process by which we have come to be what we are, goes to substantiate, making it clearer and clearer that through all the length and breadth of the great sweep of life, from the lowliest creature to the full grown man, the process of natural selection runs and that there is no escape from it for any living thing. Whether you call it “natural selection ’’ or “‘ Divine judgment ”’ makes but little difference. As applied to men and nations “‘ Divine judgment ”’ is the more accurate and comprehensive term, for it emphasises the moral standard, as well as insisting upon the universal process of judg- ment. Civilisation is a perpetual process of moral judgment. Every new advance is a moral test 20 REV. G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY and challenge to which we must either respond or perish. It is this inevitable testing that both reactionaries and revolutionaries seek to evade, but seek in vain, for as God’s great purpose works itself out in history, the world in which we live makes higher and higher demands upon our moral nature, and it is only as we answer to these moral demands that any real progress can be made. First and foremost it would seem that God demands of men to-day a moral virtue the nature of which is as yet but little under- stood, humility. Without humility man can never be fit to bear the enormous weight of responsibility that the development of science and his new control over Nature impose upon him. Power tends to drive men mad and make them imagine that they can actually possess the world and use it for their own paltry purposes. But sooner or later they must awake from their frenzy and their dream, The tumult and the shouting dies, The Captains and the Kings depart, Still stands thine ancient sacrifice An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts be with us yet— Lest we forget. Lest we forget. Only as we grow to see the truth that, over and against ourselves, there is for ever set in awful and mysterious Majesty, One who is wholly Other, and infinitely greater, than ourselves, to whom and 20 REACTION AND REVOLT to whom alone the world and all that is in it belongs, to whom we ourselves belong, and whose Will we must submit to or miserably perish; only so can we remain sane and sober in possession of the new and perilous powers that we have been entrusted with. Particularly is it true that, without and apart from this deep sense of the reality of God and of responsibility to Him, the institution of private property under modern conditions will not work. The enormous aggregations of capital which are necessary in an industrial civilisation put into the hands of those who legally own and practically administer them, such great and far-reaching powers over their fellow men, that, unless there is in the legal owners a tremendous sense of responsibility, a. deep-seated conviction that their wealth is a trust fund, to be held and administered as a trust fund, they lead to quite intolerable inequalities, tyrannies and injustices which render the maintenance of the public peace well-nigh impossible. The purely mechanical device of shifting the power out of the hands of the self-seeking few and putting it into the hands of the self-seeking many, must prove vain and _ futile. It merely supplants those who are quite possibly knaves but not generally fools, and puts in their places those who almost certainly are both knaves and fools. To put one lot of bumptious sinners out of power, and another lot of bumptious sinners in, is not the way to make a new heaven or a new earth. There is no escape from the test. Above and 22 REV. G, 4. STUDDERT KENNEDY beyond all others those who possess wealth and the power wealth bestows, need Christ. They need to be brought up and to live in the knowledge of what He revealed, that every crown is a crown of thorns, and every throne a Cross of sacrifice. No crown is safe that does not wound, no throne secure that does not serve. Since He passed on His way to Calvary to His coronation as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the only Ruler of princes, the meaning of power has been revealed as Love which suffers, and suffering, serves. It is this splendid and tragic truth that we must somehow bring home again to the heart of the nation and especially to the leaders and teachers of the people, all little kings on little thrones— leaders of capital, leaders of labour, leaders of thought and leaders of fashion—the great ones of the earth must be like Him, the suffering servants of mankind. We are a good-natured and kindly people and our great men have always been open handed and generous, but much more than good nature is needed now. Good nature and generosity as a substitute for real humility is an imposture and a sham. We must have the real thing, the conscious submission of the human to the Divine, the manifest and obvious holding of wealth and power as a trust and responsibility. It is quite impossible to convince men who are suffering privation and hardship that our social order is just and righteous, when every picture paper supplies them with evidence that C 23 REACTION AND REVOLT | men of power and wealth are careless, irresponsible and even profligate. Envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness issuing in cynicism, suspicion and mistrust are bred in the hearts of men who have the bitter contrasts of our modern life placarded before their eyes. A plutocracy is a deadly thing unless it can develop a real aristocracy of merit. And so above all things there is need that, from the top to the bottom of society, there should run a sense of the awfulness and majesty of God, in trust from Whom we hold every power and every privilege we possess, and even the breath of life itself. A public schoolboy in one of our great public schools remarked the other day to a master who is a friend of mine: “I cannot see the necessity for all this teaching about religion and social problems. What use is it to us? We want to know how to behave ourselves among decent cultured people, and maintain our position in life.”’ That is a perfectly ruinous idea. No man is really fit to lead or rule, even as a very petty king in a very tiny province of God’s world, unless he has in his inmost soul knelt at the feet of that stupendous and awful mystery, the King who is crowned with agony and throned on the throne of pain, and has there offered up the ancient sacrifice of a “‘ humble and a contrite heart,’’ with all his pride in birth, power, wealth or ability, shattered and beaten to dust, with the wonder of his own infinite littleness and Christ’s infinite greatness stabbing at his vitals like a knife. 24 REV. G. A. STUDDERT KENNEDY Let us pray that as the nation stands by the graves of those who suffered for our sake, and owns them great, we may consecrate ourselves afresh to the service of the King Who reigns from the Cross. Still I see them coming, coming, In their ragged broken line, Walking wounded in the sunlight, Clothed in majesty divine. For the fairest of the lilies That God’s summer ever sees, Ne’er was clothed in royal beauty Such as decks the least of these. Tattered, torn, and bloody khaki, Gleams of white flesh in the sun, Raiment worthy of their beauty And the great things they have done. Purple robes and snowy linen Have for earthly kings sufficed, But these bloody sweaty tatters Were the robes of Jesus Christ. 25 h ! ib ae | Tue Ricut Rev. G. C. PIDGEON, D.D. THE RIGHT REVEREND GEORGE C. PIDGEON, B.D., D.D. First Moderator of the United Church of Canada. Prior to his appointment as head of the United Church, Dr. Pidgeon was unanimously elected Moderator of the last General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, which met in Toronto on June 3rd, 1925. Dr. Pidgeon continues as Minister of Bloor Street United Church, Toronto, during his term as Moderator, which extends over a period of one year. Son of the late Archibald M. Pidgeon and Mary Campbell of Grand Cascapedia, Quebec. Educated at Morrin College, McGill University and the Presbyterian Theological College, all of Montreal, Quebec. From 1903-1909, Minister of Streets- ville Presbyterian Church, Ontario; 1909-1915, Professor of Practical Theology in Westminster Hall, Vancouver, British Columbia; 1915 was called to Bloor Street Presbyterian Church, now Bloor Street United Church. Served as President of the Social Service Council of British Columbia, and as Convener of the General Assembly’s Board of Home Missions and Social Service for Canada. Represented the National Council Y.M.C.A. in France for seven months during 1917 and 1918. EPR AN ERG) bs ATT Ey Tue Ricut Rev. Georce C. Prpcton, D.D. “Tf ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” John xv, 7. BEFORE the average Christian’s mind is the glaring fact of unanswered prayer. God has promised to answer prayer and has not answered him in that on which he staked everything. If he could solve this problem he could believe anything. Yet would you be willing to take the responsi- bility of having all your prayers answered? Is your judgment so sound, your wisdom so unerring, and your knowledge of all the issues involved so complete that you believe it to be best for you and for all concerned that every desire of your heart should be granted? Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, longed for her son’s salvation and prayed for it day and night. When he proposed going to Rome, she dreaded the effect of the great metropolis on his passionate nature and prayed that he might be hindered. Yet he was allowed to go. Apparently her prayer was denied. But, as her son said years after, God in so doing granted her the hinge of her desire, for it was through his crossing the Mediterranean that he was finally a9 THE PRAYER OF FAITH converted. Often we ask amiss because we do not know. Often we ask amiss because our hearts are wrong, and we desire either wrong things or right things for wrong ends. Often we ask amiss because we cling to the lower, and God wants to wean us from the lower and win us to the higher. If God be a father, at once infinitely wise and loving, do we not in our heart of hearts want Him to choose for us the best? I doubt not that an examination of the Church’s experiences will show that her unanswered prayers are among her choicest treasures, Then why pray at all? Why not let God choose for us? One answer is that we pray because we must. Our souls thirst for the living God, and in earth’s parched wilderness they cry out for His presence. As Augustine says: “ Thou hast made us for Thyself and our souls are restless until they find rest in Thee.”” Further, we pray because we desire what prayer brings. Prayer denied is not the Christian’s normal experience; prayer as a factor in human life must not be judged by its standard. Prayer is a force; it produces results, God encourages prayer, and we offer it in order that His grace may be directed to the place it is required. With these thoughts as a background, let us study briefly Christ’s teachings on the subject of prayer and their verification by the experience of His followers. First, Christ teaches in the most positive way that prayer brings answers. This is the plain statement of our text. When a believer, living in 30 RIGHT REV..G. C. PIDGEON vital union with Christ, sees from that viewpoint that any particular thing is desirable and asks for it, he shallreceiveit. This is the law of the Kingdom of Heaven. You will note the implied limitation. It is those who are one with Himself and who pray in His Spirit to whom the promise is given. But, that granted, the statement is most explicit and emphatic. The normal thing is that prayer should get what it asks. The unanswered prayer is the exception to the rule. Still more definite are Christ’s teachings on the same subject elsewhere. In Matthew vii, 7-11 and the parallel passage in Luke xi, 9-13, He says: “ Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth ; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”’ Then, in explaining why this should be, he adds: “Or what man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent ? ” Or, as Luke puts it: “If he ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion ?”’ He concludes: ‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him.” You will note here the following. The Son of Man goes right to the heart of things as no other can do. Prayer is the approach of the soul to God ae THE PRAYER OF FAITH as a child approaches its father, and the Father loves to supply those things which the child desires. Why should prayer be answered ? Because there is a heart behind the universe which responds to the longings of ours, and is vibrant with sympathy for our need. When we ask He delights to give. These illustrations brush aside many difficulties which men feel about the efficacy of prayer. For example, this is a universe governed by law and God cannot interfere with its operation. Any well- ordered home is regulated by law, but yet in how many ways a father manages to gratify his little one’s heart and still maintain those laws. Or again, God’s righteousness requires Him to give us only what He sees to be best. Our prayers, therefore, can make no difference and would be wrong if they could. Life in a home answers this objection also. There a wise parent keeps his child’s interests before his mind in everything that he gives him, and will refuse any request rather than injure him. But in a myriad ways he gives the child what he wishes while still serving his child’s good. Love is an inventive genius in its plans to please and to bless, and to harmonise the two when they seem opposed, and the love of God puts no limit to His kindness to His child. The Master, however, does not leave the matter there. As if facing the question whether the presenting of the request can make any difference in the dealings of an all-loving God, the Master gives two parables in illustration of His position. One 32 RIGHT REV. G. C. PIDGEON is the parable of the man who comes at midnight asking for bread to supply his guest’s wants (Luke xi, 5-8). The friend is unwilling to disturb his whole family by rising at that hour, but the visitor will not take ‘“‘ No” for an answer. And, Christ affirms, “because of his importunity’’ he gets what he would not have gotten otherwise. His persistence and insistence, and nothing else, breaks down his friend’s unwillingness. Following out this thought, Luke gives the passage just quoted, which teaches that those who ask get for the asking. The other parable, the Unjust Judge, points the same lesson (Luke xvii, 1-8). This judge had no regard for justice, and when a widow appealed to him for the righting of her wrongs he refused her any consideration. But she kept coming and was likely to keep on coming indefinitely and to use still more strenuous measures to emphasise her plea. The margin of the Revised Version renders verse 5: “Because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her lest she bruise me by her continual coming.” She was evidently something of a militant—that petitioner of olden time—and there was no telling what she might do to a judge who denied her justice. In following the thought out Jesus says that if these people, the judge who cared for neither God nor man, the friend at midnight who hated to have his family disturbed, and the earthly father, would hearken to petitions under the circumstances indicated, how much more will God hear the prayers and supply the needs of His children. 33 THE PRAYER OF FAITH Prayer, therefore, is a power. Prayer brings results. God gives to prayerfulness what He does not give to prayerlessness no matter how efficient otherwise the prayerless may be. God loves to be trusted ; He wants us to expect large things from Him; and He “ will supply all our need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”’ “Thou art coming to a King ; Large petitions with thee bring ; For His grace and power are such, None can ever ask too much.”’ Now, when all this is said, any soul who has wrestled with God in prayer knows that we have touched only the fringe of the subject. Second, Christ teaches that the very heart of prayer consists in personal dealings between the soul and God. The object desired is the occasion for coming; the chief boon is the fellowship it brings about. Christ’s own example in prayer shows the closest relations as existing between Him and His Father. In fact, His mind and heart were so open to God that He discerned instinctively the Father’s will in each particular matter which came before Him, and made it the object of His life to do it. His apostles discerned the same truth and their prayer life was lived in communion with God. (rt) James has a striking phrase in chapter 5, verse 15: “The prayer of faith.’’ This phrase does not mean simply saying, after offering a prayer o4 RIGHT REF. G. C. PIDGEON to God, ‘‘ Now I believe that this will be done. God has promised to answer prayer; I take Him at His word and know that what I ask He will give.”’ The Godward movements of the soul do not take place in that easy and superficial fashion. The phrase, “‘ The prayer of faith’’ means the prayer which is pressed until God indicates to the believer that it is His will to grant it. Then a man accepts God’s assurance that his prayer is heard and acts on it. In I John v, 15, this truth is put thus: “Tf we know that he hear us, we know that we have the petitions we desire of him.”’ Side by side with this phrase place Ephesians ii, 8 : “For by grace have ye been saved through faith ; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.” That is to say, even the faith which receives is the gift of God. Not only does God give salvation freely ; He gives also the faith which receives it. He enables the sinner to believe unto salvation. Grace is needed for men to accept, and God imparts it to the soul that is willing. In that light “ The prayer of faith’ includes both man’s supplication and God’s assent. It is an accepted cheque on the bank of grace, and the resources of the eternal are behind it. What then is prayer? It means pressing our plea until we receive a response from God indicating His willin the matter. It may be assent; it may be refusal. Sometimes the plea will dry on your lips when you bring it to God, and you feel that in His presence you cannot press it. Sometimes you will 35 THE PRAYER OF FAITH be ‘‘ drawn out” as the fathers used to say, until you feel that His will is behind your plea. But whatever the answer our hearts come into touch with God, and that is the important thing in prayer. (2) There are a number of cases of prayer refused. In Deuteronomy ii, 23-28, Moses describes how he repeated his request to be allowed to go over the Jordan and see the good land for himself. But the Lord replied: ‘“‘ Let it suffice thee ; speak no more to me on this matter.’ Then God told him the preparations he was to make for Joshua to lead the people over. In II Corinthians xu, 7-10, Paul describes how he pled with God to remove his thorn in the flesh, and God said: ‘‘ My grace is sufficient for thee : for my power is made perfect in weakness.” That is to say, God denied the lower blessing in order that he might give a higher. The limitations of Paul’s nature were such that he could not receive the two, and God made the refusal of the lower the occasion and instrument for conferring the higher. Whenever Paul saw that element in the situation, he exclaimed: ‘‘ Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my weakness that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” In neither case was God silent. Denial of the request did not mean the closing of the Father’s heart against His child. He replied, and the love of the response, even in refusal, put the heart at rest. The great example, however, is Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane: ‘‘ Abba, Father, all things are possible 36 RIGHT REV. G. C. PIDGEON unto thee; remove this cup from me; howbeit not what I will, but what thou wilt.’’ There has always been a good deal of discussion about whether Christ’s plea was really granted or not ; Hebrews v, 7, seems to suggest that it was. But the significant fact is that Christ recognised that it might be refused. The reason was that He saw the possibility of a difference between His personal will and the absolutely perfect will of the Father, and, while He prayed until the blood drops fell, He hastened to add to every petition, “ Not my will but thine be done.’’ Prayer can never mean the perfect union of the soul with God until we are brought to this position—while we desire this, or that, perhaps with the utmost intensity, our soul’s deepest choice is that God should do only what is perfectly right and absolutely the best. Grant our request if He can consistently with this, but if it is a case of subordinating the one to the other, let the Father’s will be done. It is on this principle—God cannot give what is inconsistent with His own nature. When we ask in ignorance what He sees to be hurtful, or wrong, He can but deny His child’s request. Further, we are living in a world of sin and suffering, and many a thing that is good in itself is harmful in the circum- stances. Strong food is good in itself, but it would kill a typhoid patient. Wealth is a blessing, but in a weak man’s hands it has often proven a curse. There are innumerable considerations which determine the effect of what is received on the 37 THE PRAYER OF FAITH receiver, and a wise and loving Father must take them all into account. A missionary of exceptional experience and discern- ment once gave the following example, which may prove an illustration of the point before us. The dread of the missionary is the rice Christian. For the converts to lean on the mission for support is to ruin them, and for the heathen to feel that con- version means financial assistance is to ruin the Church. Yet, this missionary explained, his con- verts in abject need often came to him for help. He was compelled to refuse them. With an Oriental’s persistence they would ask: ‘‘ Do you not love me? ’’ He. would’ answer's: “ ‘Yes.’*\) “/Aremiyou not able to help me?’”’ He would be compelled to answer: “‘ Yes.” “Then why will you not do it?’ ‘“‘ Because it is not good for you.”” Then they would reflect: “‘ You say you love me, you are able to help me, and yet you will not do it because it is not good for me. I cannot see that.” Yet I think that we can appreciate both the convert’s difficulty and the missionary’s position. His love both for those people and for the cause of Christ compelled him to refuse. Does not this principle apply to many a prayer for wealth and for deliverance from present difficulty? May it not often apply to prayers for the restoration of the sick and the sparing of life? We may not be able to see how anything but what we desire can possibly be God’s will, but does not this human experience show that God may see differently, and that.when He does 38 RIGHT REV. G. C. PIDGEON see differently He is right ? We must trust where Wwe cannot understand, but the blessed thing in prayer is that God, in keeping from us the hurtful thing we long for, will do it in such a way as to bring us closer to His heart, and to impart the deepest joy, if only we continue in prayer until He responds, ‘‘ Disappointment—His appointment : Change one letter, then I see That the thwarting of my purpose Is God’s better choice for me. His appointment must be blessing Tho’ it may come in disguise, For the end from the beginning Open to His wisdom lies. “ Disappointment—His appointment : No good thing will He withhold From denials oft we gather Treasures of His love untold. Well He knows each broken purpose Leads to fuller, deeper trust, And the end of all His dealings Proves our God is wise and just.” There is need for submission here. Sometimes people have persisted stubbornly in a request, which was opposed to God’s revealed will, and the result has been disastrous. Balaam prayed for leave to go with the messengers of the King of D 39 THE PRAYER OF FAITH Moab and God refused it (Numbers xxii). They returned a second time, and the prophet, attracted by the promised rewards, repeated the plea when he knew it to be against God’s will, and God allowed him to go. But as the angel showed him on the way, the permission was given in anger and Balaam went to his undoing. God sent Hezekiah word that his illness would result in death. Hezekiah would not accept it “and wept sore” and prayed for restoration. God granted him fifteen years more of life (Isaiah xxxvili). In those years came all the mistakes and calamities of Hezekiah’s reign. In my experience as a pastor, I have known people say that they could not and would not believe a certain request to be contrary to God’s will, and that they could never believe in Him again if it were refused, and then live to wish, with an inex- pressibly deeper longing, that it had been denied. Press your prayer home by all means; God desires you to do so and it honours Him. Let no weak acquiescence in what you do not understand rob you of your blessing. But when God makes it clear to your soul that His will lies in a different direction, bow before His wisdom and love. He knows best, and “‘ To them that love God all things will work together for good.” (3) There are many instances of God’s assent to such petitions. We may take the Master’s example as our guide here. You may have noted the peculiar character of His prayer at Lazarus’ tomb, He came there with the full assurance that 40 RIGHT REV. G. C. PIDGEON Lazarus would then rise from the dead, as His conversation with the sisters showed. At the open tomb with the spectators standing by, He said: “Father, I thank thee that thou heardest me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the multitude that standeth around I said it, that they may believe that thou didst send me” (John xi, 41-42). Then He spoke the words which quickened the dead and restored him to his friends. Such a peculiar prayer! Not a petition in it from end to end! What did it mean? Simply this, that during those four days’ delay He had prayed the matter through and had received His Father’s reply. He came to Bethany to put into effect what God had already granted. This was not peculiar to the Redeemer. We see the same thing in Paul’s experience. While he was carrying on his work of evangelization in Corinth, tumults began to rage around him, and his own life and the lives of his supporters were endan- gered. But the Lord said to Paul in a vision: “ Be not afraid, but speak and hold not thy peace: for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to harm thee: for I have much people in this city”’ (Acts xviii, 9-10). Through all the insurrections which followed, he went on in the calm confidence that what God had promised His servant, He would fulfil, Similarly on shipboard, when the storm broke forth in fury and all on board gave up hope, the angel of the Lord stood by Paul and said: “Fear not, Paul; thou must stand before Cesar: 4I THE PRAYER OF FAITH and lo, God hath granted thee all them that sail with thee.’ Then he added: ‘‘ Wherefore, sires, be of good cheer: for I believe God, that it shall be even so as it hath been spoken unto me ”’ (Acts xxvii, 24-25). Then he proceeded, with a courage and resource that amazed even the toughened mariners of the Mediterranean, to take the practical steps necessary for giving effect to his faith. Paul had had wide experience in prayer and knew that when God signified his intention to answer a prayer, or to act in a given direction, he might rely implicitly on its fulfilment. This divine assurance directly given is one of | the features of the prayer life of our time. In one of his books, Charles G. Finney tells of an invalid of his acquaintance who had exceptional power in prayer. Toward the close of this man’s life, revivals had broken forth spontaneously in a number of places around his home and no one could discern any human instrumentality in their origin. After this man’s death, they found the record of his prayer activities. On a certain date there would be a note to this effect: “‘I have been enabled to-day to pray the prayer of faith for... I believe that God will soon pour out His Spirit upon it.”” At another date the same record of his hope for another community; and so on. By comparing the dates of the intercessions with the dates on which God’s power had been manifested in the places specified, they found that in each case the spiritual quickening had followed his believing 42 RIGHT REV. G. C. PIDGEON prayer. The very expression used is significant : ‘“‘T have been enabled to pray the prayer of faith.” It was not a mere matter of his own choice. God was with him in his intercession. In that hour his soul had found the connection with the purposes of the eternal. As he had stretched out the hand of prayer for a particular community, God took it in a covenant of blessing. This exactly illustrates what we mean by the answer coming to every petition that is pressed home. The prayer should be persisted in until the soul touches God and obtains His response, and when He indicates His assent we know that what we ask we receive of Him. Many other examples might be given. A business man came down to his office as calm in spirit as a child after a member of his family had undergone a critical operation. He was asked if he had not been deeply anxious, and answered: “No, not a bit.” “‘ How is that possible? ’’ was the next question. “I prayed the matter through this morning,’ he said, “‘and received the assurance that all will be well. I have not a particle of doubt about the issue.’’ A young ministerial friend of mine was sent by a physician to tell a young mother that her recovery was impossible. When he began to speak to her about the great change apparently so near, her answer was that her time had not yet come. She believed that she was indispensable to her husband and children; she had prayed for restoration and God had answered her prayer. She was confident as to the outcome. And the issue 43 THE PRAYER OF FAITH was exactly as she expected. Now we must not infer that this must happen in every instance which seems similar. God deals with each case by itself. What is best for one may not be best for another, and we cannot see the difference. The point is that when we desire fervently any blessing, we may consult our Father about it and He will speak to our hearts in response assuring us what His love will do. The conclusion of the whole matter is this. You have a living God, “‘ Closer to you than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet” is the heart of your Father, full of the tenderest sympathy for his weak and needy child. If you are out of touch with Him, the fault is yours, not His. He longs for His child to live in Him heart to heart. If, therefore, you are bringing a request to Him, press your plea until love replies. Be assured that infinite love is not unconcerned. Whatever may be the cause of the answer delayed, or denied, it is not indifference. Keep on pleading until the mystic link which binds the soul to its Saviour is formed, and, whether the specific request is granted or not, you will have received the purest blessing which God can give. “More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep, or goats, 44 RIGHT REV. G. C. PIDGEON That cherish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they raise not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friends ? For so the whole round world is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”’ 45 Rev. Proressorn H. R. MACKINTOSH, D.Phil., D.D. THE CREV.IPROPESSOR, HH U GHOSE OSS MACKINTOSH, D.Phil., D.D. Proressor of Theology, New College, Edinburgh. Dr. Mackintosh is the second son of the Rev. Alexander Mackintosh, M.A., of Paisley. Educated at Tain Royal Academy and George Watson’s College, Edinburgh, he went up in 1888 to the University of Edinburgh, and in 1892 to New College for theology. In 1893 he was Ferguson Scholar in Philosophy. After brief ministries at Tayport and Aberdeen he was elected in 1904 to the chair which he now holds. Among his publi- cations are: ‘‘The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ,” ‘‘ Immortality and the Future,”’ *‘The Divine Initiative,’ and ‘The Originality of the Christian Message.” SOLITUDE AND. FAITH Rev. Prorressor H. R. Macxintosu, D.D. “Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood . . . but I went away into Arabia.”’ Galatians i, 16-17. Every student of St. Paul has lingered with curious interest over this brief note of time in his memories of conversion. He is giving a rapid summary of the chief points in the story of how he became a Chris- tian, mentioning nothing which is unimportant, and closing the narrative with an unwonted and emphatic gravity, in which as it were he puts him- self on oath. ‘‘ The things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.”” Every item in the series of events has a meaning. Every one con- tributed to make him what he was. And in a singular way this item fascinates a careful reader. “When it was the good pleasure of God,” so we may pick out the phrases, “to reveal His Son in me, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood, but I went away into Arabia.”’ Here then between the cruel persecutor and the brave apostle lies this tract of solitude. The Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. There was no consultation with any human being; it was a time to commune, not with man, but with the ape SOLITUDE AND FAITH hills and with God. The spot was one hallowed in the great past. Here Moses had seen the burning bush, and spoken face to face with the Eternal. Here Elijah had roamed in his season of despair and drunk anew at the divine spring. And the man to whom Christ had spoken near Damascus and whose eyes were now wide open hastened away to the same region in which long before the prophets had wandered and thought and prayed. How long the Arabian sojourn lasted we cannot tell. Not less than a year, it would seem; perhaps even more. It occurs to us, as we read, that all the time a needy world was waiting for the re-. deeming message we associate with Paul’s name, yet he could afford to linger in the desert. It is just one more token (is it not?) that in God there is no haste. He moves slowly; He has all the time there is to ripen and fulfil His purpose. He will not rush the human spirit. Christ Himself, with a short life before Him, had reached the age of thirty when His public work began, and in two or three years more it was over. It seemed almost too long a preparation for the short measures of His earthly task. Not only so; after the baptism that equipped Him for the work He spent His forty days in the wilderness. So too the great apostle, in the crisis of his spirit, learnt patience by the delays that he suffered. There was a laying of the foundations deep in the solid rock. Surely it is worth while to mature silently in God’s presence until the hour for action strikes. Until the sound 50 REV. HUGH ROSS MACKINTOSH is heard and the man must rise up for his great task, he is left apart in that wilderness retreat. What he needs at that time is to be alone. Let us now try to see how in religion to be alone is at times a duty, and what the reward may be. (r) In the first place a man repents alone, for it is alone that he has sinned. All sin is a solitary business. When tempting thoughts come, when we smile upon them and make room for them, the very act cuts us off there and then from our fellows. It drops a barrage of smoke and gloom, and the blessed light of God is shut away. The loving look at evil drapes the soul in darkness. We are left in a deserted silence, and there we fight it out in the solitude we have chosen. How does the Evangelist picture the act of Judas after he rose from the supper-board with treachery in his heart ? “He went out immediately,” we read, ‘and it was night.”” That is what an evil purpose always means; like Judas, the man intent on sin goes out into the dark, and he goes alone. Then let the sin be done, and at once the isolation is in- tensified. As with the last light being quenched in a great building, there follows a darkness and a lone- liness that can be felt. No one who sins with open eyes but feels that thereby for the time being he is banishing himself from the company of God and man. “He that hath light within his own clear breast May walk in the centre and enjoy bright day : But he that hides a dark heart and foul thoughts wee SOLITUDE AND FAITH Benighted walks under the midday sun ; Himself is his own dungeon.”’ There is no way out of this prison-house except a penitence which is as lonely as the sin. It is useless to rush into the crowd and squander our- selves in company. The one method to make us fit for company again is to meet first with God and hear what He has to say to us. We must not shrink from that. Pains must be taken to effect it. “Thou, when thou prayest,’’ said Jesus, “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray.”’ In the old mystic phrase, repentance can only be something between God and the soul, the soul and God. There can be no intermediary or onlooker in that solemn privacy, that waiting loneliness into which we can let ourselves by a firm act of will-power and by laying hold on God. Every man who has ever done a real act of penitence, who has looked up into the Face of wounded love and taken from the unseen hand the incredible gift of pardon, knows that in that well-remembered hour the Father and he were alone together, and that the voice he longed for would have been drowned and lost in the tumult of the ordinary crowded hurrying life. The will to face solitude makes part of the price of having our sins forgiven. So narrow is the path to the mercy-seat, and back again, that two cannot walk abreast. And thus the loneliness that drops down upon the sinner is one of God’s mercies after all. When 52 REV. HUGH ROSS MACKINTOSH a light suddenly goes out, we look round startled . by what is happening; we begin to think, and feel for something that will turn the light up again ; and just so the wretched isolation of guilt is God’s call to us and God’s opportunity. He sets us apart in misery in order that we may call upon Him. He puts us utterly by ourselves that we may become more sensitive to the hand that is touching us in the darkness, He shuts us in, that we may have no choice but to think of Him. The solitude speaks to us. We can hear what it is saying, and as we listen the message shapes itself into a promise: “‘ Thou hast destroyed thyself, but in Me is thine help.” (2) Again, we must be alone if we are to ratify the decisions of the soul. One foible of evangelical religion always has been to attach what is probably an undue importance to violent and abrupt choices —resolutions arrived at perhaps in the heat of an excited meeting or too closely imitated from a companion. This is not to say that for moral agents life must not always depend on choice. It is not even to deny that most great choices come suddenly, with a leap at the last, even though we may have had a long run before we leapt. But experi- ence if it proves anything proves this, that when the excitement dies away, each of these tremendous choices must be reviewed and must be ratified, if it is to exert a permanent influence on character. We must go over it again, we must look all round it, we must ask what it implies—for ourselves, possibly still more for others. Something tells us 53 SOLITUDE AND FAITH that without this it will leave us with only a dying ripple of emotion. We shall be weaker than ever just because of that upheaval of the inmost feeling that ended in itself. All the storm and tumult will have gone for nothing. So we must get away into the secret place and have it out with our own heart. We must know what we are doing. Our first task is to be alone with God. As the preacher is pleading with men to be recon- ciled to God; as here and there he catches sight of some listener with grave eager face, manifestly ready to consider and reflect and ponder, he knows perfectly that when he stops, when the appeal is over, one of two things certainly will happen. Either the new thought seen and received may be drowned out in floods of talk—innocent and de- lightful talk, even if untimely—either this, or it may be carried off for private quiet thought and will. There is no escape from quickened higher feeling to compare with what we call general con- versation. Even religious talk has often been like a cushion held up to ward off the thrust at con- science. But in point of fact what a man most needs who has caught an arresting or thrilling sight of Jesus is to be alone, and to be silent. An experience of that kind goes for nothing if we will not deal with it worthily. We need a mind at leisure from itself; an attitude in which the revelation can be pondered over till its full meaning breaks upon us and we realise what it is calling us to; that concentration of being upon questions 54 REV. HUGH ROSS MACKINTOSH of life and death, there in the secret place, that stirs and prepares the will for a decisive act. “While I was musing, the fire burned.”’ To gain that essential silence a man does not need to leave his work or go out of the world. He can have it as he walks down the street or sits for half an hour in his room. But somehow he must reach it, if he is ever to know how much God means for him ; he must gain the quiet and the solitude where only the mightier movement of things is heard— sin and judgment, Christ and vanity, life and death. Is it not just in this definite region that we shall find the reason of many a case of half-hearted faith? It is not that these souls have never seen Christ. It is not that their hopes have not gone after Him. Like others, they have had great moments of longing and prayer and dream. But they have let these things pass and made no later use of them. They have never gone away to be alone and make up their mind for God. They have known by sure instinct that it would be better for them to give Christ a chance with them in secret, but they have not made time for it. And so the impulse to faith has never reached persuasion. To take hold of your life and re-shape it for God is something that can only be done when you have deliberately shut the door and faced the case for Jesus in the quiet. Among the laws of the spiritual life none certainly is more sure than this, that the truth offered to us will become a living piece of life only as we look E aye) SOLITUDE AND FAITH at it steadily for more than the passing moment, and as in solitude we force our way to the heart of its meaning. We need to read the Divine message twice if we are to comprehend it. Most of us could take as our own the words of a character in one of Mark Rutherford’s books: ‘‘ The voice of God, to me at least, hardly ever comes in thunder, but I have to listen in perfect stillness to make it out,” It is what a man thinks of when he is alone, when his mind is awake and he is using it to some purpose, that makes him what he is to be. When the new idea of Christian discipleship comes to us, at first we see it very vaguely. Its developments, what it will lead to if we follow it out, we cannot see at all. It is all abstract and impalpable. It even bewilders and eludes us. So, if we are to clear up the situation, we must face ourselves, and face Christ too, in a time of privacy. Therefore, if you wish to make anything of the Christian life, insist on getting by yourself and thinking the matter out. You can do it if you wish to do it. Do not let yourself miss the best God has promised because you will not give it the second lingering thoughtful scrutiny that it needs if its greatness is to be understood and loved. (3) We must be alone that we may grasp the richness and depth of Christian truth. St. Paul had just been converted. What sent him into Arabia was that in consequence of meeting with Christ he had passed through a convulsion. A whole world of new ideas and emotions came pouring 56 REV. HUGH ROSS MACKINTOSH in upon him, and at first they overflowed and drowned his faculty of understanding. So he made for the desert. There he set himself to realise the meaning of this new possession, this tremendous discovery of truth and promise. Did he return from Arabia in the same confusion as he had felt in going? No; he came back with a great original message of salvation for all the world of needy lives, and never again, so far as his letters show, did he feel the faintest doubt that Christ is mighty to save. In those lonely valleys where long since the manna fell, in the shadow of peaks which had burned beneath the feet of Jehovah, the Gospel of Paul grew into shape and power. He came back with a view of God and Christ wrought in a living whole that more than once has turned the world upside down. In one sense the Gospel is simplicity itself. As Jesus felt, no one can understand it half so well as a child. To respond to the love of Christ, to feel through Him the very touch and breathing of the Father’s mercy—that is the daily experience of the simple-hearted, who enjoy God as the flower spreads itself beneath the sun. And yet the Gospel has its heights and depths of meaning. It stands for the last and highest truth that man will ever know. There are glorious thoughts in it—about God, and the Cross, and the destiny of man as redeemed by the Cross—which outgo all our powers of interpretation. And it is shame to Christian men not to be striving always to understand them ny SOLITUDE AND FAITH better. A recent writer on some cardinal elements of the Gospel speaks of “the demand they make for an enlargement of human faculty to take in the unimagined greatness newly revealed in them by God.” They are always beyond us, these vast truths of salvation, but unless we find quiet times to think about them, to familiarise ourselves with something of their richness, they will fade from our interest and perhaps leave us wondering why we ever thought them great. Do you think the majority of Christian people have adequately wakened up to the fact that they are called upon to worship God with their in- telligence? Have we realised that Christ is to be loved not with the heart only, but also with the mind? Here is science bravely and uninterruptedly prepared to spend time and brains to any extent on the inquiry into the structure of the physical world ; every new step towards the surprising of Nature’s secrets is greeted with a thrill of exalted gratitude. Are we not going to exert ourselves with equal keenness to interpret God, to take in the whole meaning of Jesus Christ? Surely we have to catch on our minds, not the lowest form of belief compatible with a profession of Christianity, but something of the incredible wonder of Him who has ransomed us with His blood. But to do that, in any sense that goes deep, a man must be alone, and he must try with all his might to reach and master what is true. How do men make advance in other fields? By brooding over the subject-matter till gradually thenew 58 REV. HUGH ROSS MACKINTOSH paths of knowledge open out before the kindling mind. Is not that Wordsworth’s secret; is it not in that way he learnt and then taught to his generation— “ The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills ’”’ ? And we too must be sometimes alone if we are ever to brood over the Gospel that has saved us— to think about it so often and so intensely that it constantly reveals new depths and offers new gifts. That is the protection against poor and thin con- victions. Men and women, whatever we know of Christ, so that we could stand for it as part of our very being, is it not the fact that we have toiled for and made it our own in private and sustained reflection? We have gone aside, and had it out with the fact of Christ and our own mind. We have given the truth of Calvary a chance to sink into us and colour the very fibre of our thought and feeling. There is no other way of getting such a grip upon the Unseen as will empower a man to make a convincing appeal for faith to his thoughtful contemporaries. It is not by lending half an ear for half an hour to the meaning of God in Christ that we become capable of doing the best service anyone can do his generation—which is done not by getting up into a pulpit and preaching but by a man so occupying thought and mind with God’s message through the Saviour that, at any time kindness calls upon him for it, he can state warmly and wisely to the friend by his side 29 SOLITUDE AND FAITH who Christ is and what He can do for man. There is no exaggeration, I think, in saying that one of the sore needs of modern religion is a serious mental grasp of the Gospel of God, the great Christian ideas. We cannot meditate without being alone, and meditation is in danger of be- coming a lost art. The world is so much with us that we have too little explored the treasures of love and holy power stored for us in Jesus. Hence we get panic-stricken over the last scientific objec- tion to prayer, or the latest rumour that Jesus Christ never lived. There is a better way by far. Everyone who longs to do it can put aside the claim of smaller things and stand alone for a brief space each day in the presence of the Father. All can have a little chapel, with an ever-burning light, where they look upon God’s face, and regale the thirsty heart from springs of truth. But the great end of seclusion is that we may be prepared to leave it again. St. Paul did not spend his life in Arabia; he but made ready there for the larger task. It is when we have seen the vision, gazing long enough to catch its lesson, that we have something precious and real to give to those who in need knock at our door. It is as we look and look again at what God has revealed that the heart overflows for those without. We are sent back to life, simplified, cleansed, refreshed, with a true word of hope and courage for other men. There is no greater happiness than this. May none of us go through life so poor as never to have known that joy. 60 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER Tue Rt. Rev F. THEODORE WOODS, D.D. THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER (The Rt. Rev. Frank Theodore Woods, D.D.) Ex-officio Prelate of the Order of the Garter; Hon. D.D. (Camb. 1916, Edin. Univ. 1922). Son of the Rev. Frank Woods and of Alice Fry, daughter of Joseph Fry, who was the youngest son of Elizabeth Fry, the well-known philanthropist. He was edu- cated at Marlborough College, and Trinity College, Cambridge; and ordained in 1897. After holding cures in South London and in Manchester, he became successively Vicar and Rural Dean of Bishop Auckland, and subsequently of Bradford. Bishop of Peterborough, 1916-24: he was trans- lated to Winchester, 1924. Select preacher at Cambridge 1917 and 1920, and at Oxford, 1918-19. He accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury to the General Assemblies of the Church of England and of the United Free Churches of Scotland to bring to their notice the Lambeth Appeal for Reunion, 1921. Publications: ‘‘ Lambeth and Reunion ’”’ (joint author with the Bishops of Hereford and of Zanzibar), ‘‘ Interpreters of God,”’ ““The Great Fellowship,” ‘‘ Great Tasks and Inspirations.” THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION Tue Lorp Bisoop or WINCHESTER “ Behold, I thought... now I know,’’* II Kings v, 11 and 15. I AM not concerned with Naaman, but these two expressions of Naaman’s experience represent pre- cisely the difference which the Nicene belief has made. ‘ Behold, I thought ...”: that was the religious world before Jesus had unveiled God. “Now I know”’: that was the verdict of the Church as formulated at Nicza. Before Nicza each Church had its own baptismal creed, very similar, no doubt, they were, but there was no universal creed. Nicxa marks the final settlement of Christian conviction about the person of Christ. Not that the discussion is closed ; for all we know the Church may still be in its infancy. God has much new light in store for us, but it is inconceivable that so long as the Catholic Church exists there could be any revision of this central dogma. Instinctively the men who gathered in the city of victory realised that their decision was vital, and history has confirmed their instinct. In the words of a wise man, “If once the thinnest of * Commemioration of Nicw#a, Winchester Cathedral, October 14th, 1925. 63 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION thin ends of a wedge is driven between God and Christ, if once the equation, so to speak, is tampered with, the Supreme Creator and Ruler drifts away and becomes a cold abstraction, and Christ figures as a heroic rebel, perfect in goodness, but not perfect in power.’* For if Christ is not God, then we are condemned to a terrible uncertainty. However true it may be that the world’s best ideals were embodied in that life from the Manger to the Cross, yet in that case they were not counter- signed by God. “Behold, I thought ” that in that life there might be a perfect reflection of God, but I did not know; I thought that the values of that character were the eternal values, but I did not know; I thought that the issue of that life was the guarantee of immortality, but I did not know. Once detach Christ from God and the whole great glory of faith, hope and love becomes vague, misty, nebulous. What one thought was solid rock is discovered to be after all but shifting sand. We are by this time, I hope, rid of the notion that the Nicene Faith grew up gradually in the years which intervened between Christ’s life and the assembling of the Council. Some have not scrupled to assert that it was a development, and an unauthorised development at that, of the simpler faith of the men who personally knew Jesus as friend and master. The fatal obstacle to this idea, superficially attractive as it may be, is the witness of St. Paul. For here we have a contemporary of *D.C. Somervell: ‘A Short History of our Religion,’’ p. 121. 4 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER Christ who was familiar with those who had followed the Master through all the stages of His earthly ministry, who felt the full force of Jewish horror at the notion of a crucified Messiah, and yet who made the Godhead of that crucified leader the very touchstone of his gospel. To suppose that St. Paul’s doctrine of Christ was his own invention or was superadded by him to a simple faith is to fly in the face of the history of those early days. There were circles in the Church, and particularly in Jerusalem, in which St. Paul was far from popular, and in which his creed was vehemently criticised. But no faintest breath of criticism was ever raised against his doctrine of the person of Christ. Even if by some kind of critical gymnastic you can elim- inate the Nicene Faith from the first three Gospels you have to face two men who in this respect will give you no quarter, and whose witness remains unshaken and unshakable: one is Saul of Tarsus, and the other is John the son of Zebedee. What a scene it must have been, the scene at that victory Council! Heathenism was anything but dead. To realise that one need but look around on these scarred and mutilated veterans scattered through the hall. Yet the day of persecution was over, at least for the time being. The Catholic Church— that contemptible little army—had fought its battle and won its standing, but greater conflicts were in store. Faced it was immediately by the undisciplined hordes of the north, and ultimately by that whole great world, medieval and modern, 05 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION with its thousand controversies, its endless currents of opinion and speculations, upon which we look back, and by which in large measure we are still surrounded. But it was armed now for all time with the armour which no shaft has pierced, the armour which, Sunday by Sunday, we wrap around us: “‘ We believe in God, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, Begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God, Begotten not made, Being of one substance with the Father... by whom all things were made.” When we think of the millions who have been compelled to be content with hopeful guesses at the truth—‘‘ Behold, I thought ’’—we may be thankful indeed for the conviction which answers all doubts, which trans- forms character, which throws open the gates of heaven, which, like a mighty flash lights up the whole great panorama—“ Now I know!” Brothers, we are assembled as trustees for this, the greatest conviction about God and man that the world has ever reached. We glory in the fact that it was not reached, it never could have been reached ; it was given. Humbly and with profoundest adoration we receive it. But such a gift carries with it a fearful responsibility. “‘ We believe”; but what is involved in that Creed ? What do we know ? What must we do? 66 THE EORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER § We know, in the first place, that the greatest thing in the world is personality. The doctrine of the person of Christ involves the doctrine of the person of man. “‘ Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate . and was made man.” If that is true, then the worth of man, that is, of man’s personality, is immeasurable, If human personality was the chosen frame for the perfect picture of God, then no words can describe what man is and what man can be. In the deepest and truest sense this was God’s news, God’s-spell. Such knowledge was too high for the ancients. They could not attain to it. Aristotle thought some men were born to be savages, and others destined to be slaves, and ‘‘ women, appar- ently in all seriousness, as nature’s failures in the attempt to produce men.’’* And indeed there have been modern philosophies just as_ pessimistic. According to some modern teachers the interest has so shifted from the individual to the universal that personality recedes into the dim distance. But with Nicza before us we know that the world— may we not say, indeed, the universe—was created for personality. And we know more still, much more : we know that it is possible for man’s personality to be linked with God’s. This was the fundamental experience of the early Church. They could say with St. Paul: ‘I live, yet not I but Christ liveth *J.R. Illingworth ; ‘‘ Personality, Human and Divine,” p. 7. 67 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION in me.” It is by this that personality in all races and under all circumstances has been revalued. Man in Christ is not only of infinite worth for what he is, but of infinite worth for what he may become. We, of the Church, must lay this to heart as we think of the men and women of alien races, the multitudes of India, the natives of Africa. From the point of view of London or Paris or New York, they may be looked upon, if not with fear and suspicion, with, at least, a certain calm superiority. From the point of view of Nicea they must be treated with scrupulous respect. Their manhood and womanhood shines forth in the light of Him who, in the mighty words of Athanasius, “ was made man that we might be made God.” Many Christians say the Nicene Creed; not too many have learnt its values. For if life is in itself worth living, life in Christ is more worth living than any poor human words can describe. To fail to realise that is to drop below the level of the great Creed that we say. And even when we do realise it, the contrast with our own character and output is sufficiently humiliating. As Chesterton says, man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before, but he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. ‘‘In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures ; in so far as 1 am a man [ am the chief of sinners.’’ Christianity, as he says, combines these furious opposites. ‘“‘ The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s 68 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER soul.”’* Therefore it is, brothers, that the man who dares to say the Nicene Creed should be first humble, lowly, and penitent ; but he should also be buoyant, radiating, effective. He knows what God thinks of him: he knows what God did for him: he holds a faith, which lifts him over all circumstances and gives him victory over all temptations; he is one who has indeed discovered the secret of life. It follows that, if this is what I would venture to call normal life in the Nicene Faith, then the propagation of that faith becomes not merely an overwhelming necessity, but an irresistible enter- prise. We need in these days this note of exhilaration in our preaching, not an exhilaration purchased at the expense of reality, but the exhilaration which faces facts, the facts of wrong and evil, within and without, fairly and squarely. For surmounting them is a still greater fact, the fact of Him who “ for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.” That is the incredible wonder of history. That is the indescribable attraction of Jesus. It has meant—it means—the reconstruction of person- ality. Even Arianism with its utterly defective doctrine of Christ did a noble work of missions and was a power of life among the northern nations. If that was so, then @ forvitovt the true doctrine must be more potent still. It has been so and it is so. I trust that this Diocese, saying its Creed through your lips to-day, will more than ever sound this evangelistic note in all its activities, for on this * G. K, Chesterton: ‘‘ Orthodoxy.” 69 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION good news of personality all our work is built. We gather the children in the schools, the men in their various fellowships, the women in their Mothers’ Union, the girls in their G.F.S. and their Guides, the lads in their Brigade and in their Scouts, all because of the fact, incessantly fresh, that God has thought of them, that God has planned for them, that God loves them, that God has great things in store for them ; in a word, that He who “ for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven ’’ has noticed them, and that in that Divine notice the doors of a new world have been thrown open for them, a world of growth, development, usefulness, service, perfection, which, but for the Godhead of Jesus, would have been unthinkable. “‘ What is the news ?”’ said Tennyson to his landlady as he greeted her one morning. “Why, sir,” she said, “there is only one piece of news that I know of, that Christ came into the world to save sinners, and that is old news, and good news, and new news.” Aye, so it is. Then preach it up and down we must if we are to be worthy of this faith ! N In the second place, holding this faith, we know that the Christian values of character bear the hall- mark of God. The qualities of Christ’s character, that is, are the qualities of eternal life. In so far as through the Holy Spirit we can gain them, we live: 70 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER to be without them is death. They are summed up in the immortal Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. They are writ large in the daily life of Jesus as we watch Him in the Gospels. Is this ideal a mere chimera—a veritable Everest, distantly beautiful, but impracticable and unattainable? In the view of many, both ancients and moderns, the answer to that is in the affirmative. Some would go further and decry it as not merely impracticable but unnecessary and unwise. Every age has had its ideals of character. The Stoic aimed at living as nature directs, and sought to eliminate passions and emotions in a way which, however heroic it might have seemed, was doomed tofailure. The tariff he provided at life’s table was fine but ineffective. More attrac- tive superficially, at least, was the tariff of Epicurus and his followers—“‘ the philosophy of the pigsty,” as its enemies called it. Happiness is the end of life, he said. Not less divergent in their estimates are many of our day. Morals, said Nietzsche, depend on the geographical and historical conditions of a people. Every conception changes with time. ... ‘Values did man only assign to things in order to maintain himself. Good and evil, which would be everlasting, it doth not exist. All is in flux. Everything good is the evil of yore which has been rendered serviceable.” And the man in the street is ready with nis es- timate, which, broadly speaking may be summed up in the conventional phrase: ‘‘ Everyone for him- self, and the weakest must go to the wall.” Yet F 71 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION it is not so easy to say precisely what the ideals of the man in the street are in these days. The pres- sure of material estimates of life is fearfully strong, and yet the spiritual crops up in unexpected places. Many are leaving their old ideals, but it is difficult to describe the new ones, and in many cases they hardly know. themselves. Many would line up beside one of the characters in Mr. Wells’ latest book who, thinking over things, realises that “he had been one of the vast multitude of those who had come out of the war in the expectation of a trite and obvious old-fashioned millennium, and who expressed their disappointment by declaring that nothing had happened except devastation and impoverishment. ‘They were too jaded at first to observe anything else. But indeed he now realised that the European world had been travelling faster and faster since the break-up of the armed peace of 1914; and here were new types, new habits of thought, new ideas, new reactions, new morals, new ways of living. He discovered himself in the advent of a new age, a new age that was coming so fast that there hadn’t been time ever to clear the forms and institutions of the old age away. They weren’t reversed or overthrown, they were just disregarded.’’* In so far as the forms and institutions are merely *H, G. Wells: ‘Christina Alberta’s Father.” 72 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER conventional they may indeed be disregarded. But there are certain fundamentals which even the modern man will disregard at his peril, and chief among them is the standard endorsed by Christ, and therefore bearing the counter-signature of God. And here the Nicene faith is vital, for it may be said with certainty that any repudiation of the Christian ideal of conduct is always in closest con- nection with the repudiation of the Nicene doctrine on which it is founded. Given the Creed, the conduct follows. If it does not, the Creed is not sincerely held. Repudiate the Creed, and the conduct, though it may linger on like the warmth of a summer day when the sun has gone down, must ultimately give way. The fact is that if we of the Church wish to make the Creed believable, we must commend it by that which the world can see, namely, the conduct which follows from it. Dr. Burn has reminded us of a beautiful phrase in the Creed of Caesarea, which most unfortunately dropped out in its revision, and in which our Lord is spoken of as one who “ lived as a citizen amongst men.” The strongest buttress of the Creed of Niczea is the men and women who in this twentieth century exhibit as citizens amongst men the ideals which Christ proclaimed, and manifest those qualities of eternal life. It is not enough to say “who for us men and for our salvation came down ... was incarnate . . . was crucified, dead, and buried.” The question is, how far is His Body the Church prepared to do likewise, prepared to come down in thought and sympathy and suffering 73 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION on to the level of the world of its own day, penetrating with the unconquerable love of its Master into the dark places of sin and sorrow, and seeking, in some sense as He did, to bear the sins of the world. Thank God! the Church is not without this witness. It is not long since I was worshipping with some Sisters at Bournemouth in company with a hundred of Christ’s children, orphans and friendless, for whose souls and characters these women give their lives. It is not long since I shared a frugal meal with brothers in the Oxford House at Calcutta, men who have given and are giving everything that they possess of learning, knowledge, and love, for the leavening of the young student life in that great centre. Indeed, the great process is around us on every hand; up and down the country, up and down the Diocese, men and women, clergy and laity represent in ways which compel the attention, this loving, sympathising, healing Jesus. Indeed, when we think of the army of men and women, whether enrolled in some great comradeship like the Church Army, or in the still more far- reaching comradeships of the day schools and the Sunday Schools, we thankfully recognise that there is that to-day in Christ’s Church and in this Mother Church of ours which in some humble way corre- sponds to the mighty Creed. But we have yet to learn. Scores of thousands of our people hardly know the meaning of sacrifice, have even hardly learnt to give. If they had, the story of the Central Fund of the Church would be 74 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER very different. If they had, such enterprises as the one which is in our minds and on our hearts in this Diocese would not detain uslong. It is time, surely, that our people, and in particular the young people, the young men and women of the Church, should think more seriously of the tremendous implication of the Creed which they profess. The Society to which they belong and which is the trustee of this faith, is crying aloud for the service which they can give. We want the men in the ministry. There are a thousand posts full of scope and promise at home and abroad for which we want women. We want men and women of every class, not least, those of birth, education, and capacity, for the great campaign. Where shall we find them? They seem so long in coming, yet by the thousand they confess God in Christ, by the thousand they bow their heads—perhaps they even kneel—at the “ et incarnatus est.” But is that the real attitude of their souls? He would become incarnate in them; in them He would carry on the work of our salvation; through them He would reach out to men and women who, here at home and there abroad, so sorely need Him; in their characters He would exhibit the perfect ideal of conduct ; through them He would prove to the world that the Christian ethic, so far from being unattainable, can be repro- duced in daily life through the supernatural grace which He can give. After the Creed, the Offertory. Liturgically, yes! But actually—-is it so? My friends, I would have you realise the 75 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION tremendous obligation to personal conduct which rests upon all who say this Creed. It excludes that slovenly, easy-going worldliness with which so much of our so-called Church life is tainted. There was something in it challenging, menacing, breathing defiance. It was meant deliberately to exclude those whose faith was wrong, and, therefore, by implication, it excludes all those who have no intention of fitting their conduct into such a frame. To stand and say that Creed is to resolve humbly but definitely to exhibit in one’s own character a conduct which naturally follows. ‘“We want a creed which shall be so strong in its assertion of principle and moral duty that it shall arrest and convict those who do not mean to stand definitely on the side of right. A creed which shall stress belief in love, forgive- ness, atonement, sacrifice, honesty, simplicity, courage, ’’* And we have it. For the creed which stresses the facts of the Christ stresses the conduct which corre- sponds, Even now, and even then, a lurking scepticism tries to lift its ugly head. Is it really true that this ideal of discipline, service and sacrifice is what really matters? In every book we open, in every paper we read, placarded in every business house, the spirit of the world breathes out its scented enticements. We are almost hypnotised. Is it true * The Rev. Harold Anson. 76 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER that that lad who is making a stand for honesty in his work, that girl who is making a stand for purity in her life, that business man who is so particular about the absolute rectitude of his dealings, that poor woman who would rather starve than that the children should go uncared for, and uninstructed in the things of God—is it true that these are pursuing an ideal too good for this world, that they are putting a value upon life which, however heroic, can never answer? And indeed this scepticism strikes at the very heart of our Church life: is it really worth while, this discipline, this attempt to make contact with God in worship and in prayer, this resolve to live a regulated life, this denial of self which hurts us desperately and which seems to achieve so little. Is it all worth while? Had we not better come back to the ordinary valuation, be content with the conventional ideal, walk at a more reasonable pace? Then, just as we seem to be carried off our feet with this tide of worldliness, just as this germ of unbelief begins to infect our souls, we wake up, we find ourselves standing in the holy place; the thunder of the Creed is upon us. ‘“ Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.” Is that true? Down come the world’s valuations, clattering like a child’s house of bricks, and there, wonderful, austere, yet eternally satisfying, is Christ’s own standard. It is ours. From this time forth it shall more than ever be ours, and it will conquer: for Nicea is the city of victory, and in 77 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION all that that great name connotes the ideal shall be attained. By this sign we shall conquer. § Once more, the third great certainty of Nicea is summed up in the immortal sentence “ God is Love.” For, if that Creed is true, then at the very heart of Divinity is love, love radiating between the three wondrous Persons. Behold, we thought. In the War when faith was weak and fierce questionings were abundant, we thought; now we know. We knew all the time, but we are weak and we like to be reassured. If, indeed, it was God who lay in that Manger and who died on that Cross, then we are triumphantly positive that at the centre of things is love, and not only so, but positive that love is the final solution of. every problem, that there is no situation in which love cannot be used in its fulness Z that, as a wise man once said, love is perhaps the only thing that can never be excluded by circum- stance. In that Creed the three Persons shine on one another and on us. We believe in God, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Ghost the Lord and Giver of life. But that unity demands its reflection in the unity of the Church, and finally in the unity of humanity. I believe in one Catholic and Apos- tolic Church. That is a tremendous affirmation. Men are searching for that unity in these days with a new zest, and we of the Nicene Faith are 78 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER not the only people who are out to supply it. In far off days the Catholic Church in North Africa was overwhelmed by a fiercer and more ardent faith. To-day that same faith, the faith of Mahomet, is offering a brotherhood to depressed races, which, in some parts of Africa at least, surpasses that which is offered by the Christian Church. We hear rather alarmingly of secessions from the Church to Mahomedanism solely on this ground. It is reported from one province at least that hundreds of coloured people have left the Church in recent years for this reason. It is not the faith which is inadequate, but the presentation of it. Even here at home many of our people seem most inadequately to realise or to exhibit the warmth and zest of the brotherhood which their faith implies. Yet in this faith only lies hope of unity in the world, in this faith only lies hope of unity in Christendom. Whatever else has resulted from the Appeal of the Lambeth Conference and the conversations which have been carried on since, there is at least complete unity in the acknowledgement of “the Creed, commonly called Nicene, as a sufficient statement of the Christian faith.” Only in this faith can we be effectively drawn together. As Dr. Sanday said: ““The experience of more than eighteen centuries affords the very strongest presumption that nothing short of the Catholic doctrine will ever permanently satisfy the wants of Christian women and Christian men.” Conference after conference has explicitly or 79 THE CREED IN THOUGHT AND ACTION implicitly affirmed this fact. It may be true that ‘‘of conferences there is no end, and much dis- cussion is a weariness to the flesh.”” There may be those who sympathise with the pathetic complaint of Gregory of Nazianzus: “Of no synod have I seen a profitable end: rather an addition to than a diminution of evils. For a love of strife and a thirst for superiority are beyond the power of words to express.” I fear that to some extent that was true of Nicea; but when we think of Lambeth, or of Faith and Order, or of Stockholm, or of the Church Congress, we realise the potent attractiveness of this mighty faith, and we affirm our conviction of its complete capacity to draw together the scattered units of the Church. For if God is love, then among God’s people love must have its way. My friends, the fact is that this faith is so unutter- ably satisfying, positive, aggressive, that we must go forth to the world, exuberant and enthusiastic not merely to defend it, but to carry it into every corner of our life, social and _ personal alike. There is no room here for shyness or re- ticence. If the complaint be true from the in- tellectual point of view that we are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table, there is no call for such modesty here. There is, on the contrary, every call for an aggressiveness of love which shall be worthy of the terrific facts which, in saying the Creed, we dare to take upon our lips. We are faced with problems at home and abroad, Ours it is 80 THE LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER to make trial of the faith more deeply, more extensively; ‘‘experience will decide,’ and then to spread it, to advocate it at every opportunity, to advertise it up and down in our conduct and character. ‘‘ Behold,I thought. .. . NowI know.” Then, knowing, go forth and proclaim it. Brothers, we are here for a solemn act of worship. We dedicate this generation of our great and ancient Diocese to the service of the Most High. We praise God for the infinite mercy of a faith so glorious. To this faith we owe this temple: century after century it has been recited here: generation after generation of worshippers within these walls have lived and died in its light and strength. To this faith we consecrate ourselves. In this faith we shall conquer. SI Rev. P. N. WAGGETT, 5.58.J.E., D.D. THE REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT, S.S.J.Ei, D:D, Tue REV. Puitip NAPIER WAGGETT is the second son of John Waggett and Florence Blechynden Waggett. He was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. Interested first in Classics and then in Biological Science, in which he took a First Class at Oxford. M.A. Oxford and Cam- bridge (Trinity College). In the early days of school and college missions he was at the Christ Church Mission in Poplar, and later at the Charter- house Mission in Southwark, and he is now at the latter Mission. In the interval, as a Priest of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, he has lived in South Africa, America, Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster. During the War he was first a Chaplain in France, 1914-1917, being twice mentioned in Despatches, and later engaged as a Political Officer on the Headquarters’ Staff in Palestine; residing at Jerusalem and visiting Damascus, Beirut and other places in Syria. He contributed to the Cambridge University Cen- tenary Volume on Darwin; and to Hastings’ Dictionary of Ethics (Art. Heredity). He went to India on the Mission of Help, and was most of last year at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church of America, New York. Select Preacher at Oxford and at Cambridge. Among his writings are: ‘‘ Science and Religion,” “The Scientific Temper in Religion,” ‘‘ Knowledge and Virtue ’’ (Hulsean Lectures) (the Clarendon Press), “‘ The Industry of Faith,’’ and papers in the Aristolian Society, and the (late) Synthetic Society. He is a Proctor in Convocation for the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford. THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE* Rev. P. N. Waccerr, D.D. “Flee from idolatry. The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God: and I would not that ye should have communion with demons.... Ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s Table and of the table of demons.” 1 Corinthians x, I4, 20, 21. THE passage these words belong to is one in which the doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is taught in a way peculiarly impressive. It is taught us because it is assumed as known by the first hearers of the Epistle, and because it is made for them the foundation of a practical lesson. We shall presently see that the Apostle’s lesson falls to pieces unless the sacrificial character of the Eucharist in some sense is assumed. But we have some steps to take before arriving at this consideration. In our first Conference, excluding for a time the succours of faith and love, we place ourselves, for the purpose of a passionless reflexion, in a plane lighted only by history, and by such information as is open to all, believers and unbelievers alike. We considered the Holy Eucharist as it is an external fact, observable in the public history of mankind. * This Address belongs to a Course given at All Saints, Margaret Street. 85 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE In that history it stands, an institution plainly influential, because plainly effective. It has in point of fact absorbed the attention of the nations, and its appearance is in fact succeeded first by the neglect, and soon by the abolition, of sacrificial _ worship once famous and frequented. ‘ We agreed, further, that the simplicity and all-but poverty of our ceremonies in their essence affords a proof of the power of God shown in them, or at least an occasion for faith in the power seen in results rather than heralded by our preparations. The reproach that our Sacraments are natural and even common in their material, leaves us untouched. It would be more difficult to meet the plea, if it could justly be made, that our worship owes its influence to the use of every resource of art, splendour, science and psychological magic. At least in the earlier ages of our faith, the splendours, the apparatus, were on the other side. The Emperor of the world, bathed in the blood of bulls, endeavoured in vain to reanimate his own world’s dying attention to a dying religion. Mean- while men were drawn to an altar where there was nothing seen that might not be seen in every house. For all that could be seen was that simple men broke bread and ate of it in common, that they mixed a cup and shared it among themselves, But, we said, in those simple acts was found both the refreshment of men’s souls, and the satisfaction of their incurable desire to offer sacrifice to Almighty God. 86 REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT And now we leave the ground where we receive only the light of common day, and ask what is the true nature of this observance. The event we can point to in the world; what is the open secret of its influence ? I The Holy Eucharist is not merely an event in the world. It is that and more. It is an event in the Church. With respect to its inward, unseen, spiritual and efficient part, it is not in the order of nature, nor even an interruption of the order of nature. It is not a work of power like a storm or a mountain, nor is it a miracle breaking through the course of the world, like the storied cleaving of the Red Sea. It is neither product of nature nor miracle in nature. It is an event, a reality, existing wholly in the Spirit-bearing body of Christ, in that covenanted and consecrated assembly of His members which is both the expression and the organ of His unseen power. Even Christians cannot too steadily regard this truth, cannot too often repeat and enforce it. The very victory of Christ in the Eucharist tends to make our weakness suppose that this mystery has left the special sphere of His fellowship, and emerged into the unbelieving world. And because our central mystery is indeed om zs visible side, a fact and a spectacle of the visible world, we are G 87 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE apt to forget that what is visible may also be spiritual, and that our Eucharist, visible and invisible, belongs as such entirely to the sphere of covenant, and has its reality only in the Church. Yes, it is a mystery within the Spirit-bearing Body of Christ. Many of the questions which once vexed Christian piety—such questions as, what would happen to the inward part of the Sacrament in certain accidents that we cannot bear to speak of— supposing, for example, the Sacrament was stolen by the heathen—have really no substance. The Sacrament has its being in the sphere of covenant. Reserve to-day the corresponding truth that the Sacrament belongs to the spiritual life of the soul. Believe and affirm to-day that it belongs to the life of the Church; and has its being only there. This does not mean that it has no being, and belongs to the world that is no world, the world of notion and fancy, or to the artificial constancy of convention. No, it belongs to the true and real life, visible and invisible, of that Body which Christ, God and Man, both creates and welcomes, to that form of social existence, at last actual and permanent, in which the descendants of Adam, alive in the new man, become children of God. In human measures, the Eucharist is an affair between Christians, and the non-Christian cannot intrude upon it. In the judgment of Christian knowledge it is an affair between Christians and their Father in Heaven, for it is a reality of the Life of Christ. 88 REV, PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT II Within the Church, then, visible and invisible, the Holy Eucharist fulfils—in the measure of our eyes and study—a double work. It is a mystery of nutrition within the life of Christ, the refreshment of the unlapsed life of His members; and secondly (but only in our present consideration, secondly) it is the Church’s sacrifice, the sacrifice made in Christ by the power of the Holy Ghost, to God Almighty, the Blessed and Undivided Trinity. Consider it first as our Food. We know not what other powers may be exerted by Christ present in this sacrament; but we must consider the purposes of which we have assurance. We have not received to hold that this sacrament is a means whereby the life of Christ is bestowed upon those who have not that life. Not by this sacrament is the life given or restored to those who are dead. In this sacrament, the life of Christ, already present, is nourished by a new gift of the same life. There is a sacrament by which the life of Christ is extended to those who have not that life. It is the sacrament of Baptism. This also has its power in the Church. But it is a power of birth and of entrance, and by it the circuit of the Church is incessantly extended and fresh souls are added to the Lord. The Holy Eucharist is not, so far as we know and have a right to say, a means of extension in this way. It is a mystery of nutrition within the already constituted Body, and received 89 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE by those who are already living in Christ by the sacramental grace of Baptism, by the real gift of regeneration. This is what is meant by the words in the Catechism, “the Body and Blood of Christ are verily and indeed,” that is really and truly, in truth and in fact, ‘‘ taken and received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper.’’ We are meant to understand not that the gift varies with the growth or the alertness of the receiver’s faith, but that it is a gift for and to Christians, the faithful, persons already living in the life of the Church, that is in Christ, the True Vine. A fact of religious experience seems at first to contradict this teaching. We come empty and go away fed. We come weak and go away strong. We come as if lost and from outside, and we are restored to home. We come so faint as to be for all purposes dead, and are brought to life. And so indeed it is with us. Holy Communion, and nothing less than Holy Communion, is, as Dr. Pusey taught, the complete restoration of the Penitent ; and blessed are those who feel left for dead and all but already dead when they are deprived of this Heavenly Food, the Children’s Bread, the Bread of Pilgrims, the Bread of the strong. Yes, we are indeed in our inmost body, soul, and spirit refreshed “by the Body and the Blood as our outward bodies are by the bread and wine” (Catechism). But this fact of refreshment after faintness is only ours because our life is Christ’s Life. The go REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT hunger is His as well as the feast. The life in Christ in us hungers for the life of Christ given in the sacrament, the life of Christ which we already— so unworthily, so forgetfully—possess, desires, as- similates, feeds upon, and is increased by the same life bestowed upon us in each fulfilment of the mystery of Communion. No. The power in Holy Communion is not a bestowal of the Heavenly Food upon those who have not the Heavenly Life. It is the maintenance and daily pulsation of the Heavenly Life by oft renewed—and ideally continual—assimilation of the life of Christ, its heart and sole foundation. Yes, with fear of using unworthy or unwarranted words, yet, in humble faith, we may speak of “A mystery of nutrition within the living Body of Christ.’’ As we see this mystery with bodily eyes, It passes from hand to mouth, from priest to com- municant; but the hand and the mouth are alike within the wonder of the Body of Christ; and what we see in Church and venerate in Holy Com- munion, is a participatio of that Body to which we all belong, in fresh pulses of its heavenly health and power. Here Christ extends His love and life to all His members, and to each member severally, as a father—an earthly father—gives love within the home that is his extended self; nay, as the heart throws life to every part of the bodily frame not from a distance but from a sovereign seat within. OI THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE EL Secondly (in to-day’s thought, though not secondly in the order of origin), our Eucharist is the Church’s sacrifice made in the power of the Holy Spirit ascending in the antitypal fire, the reality foretold in type by the-fire of Aaron’s altar, and is offered in grace and truth, in reality and power, to God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The question is sometimes asked, “ Is this teaching scriptural; is it primitive? If you leave your special circle of fellow-worshippers, will it endure the collision of Christian thought based upon the letter of Scripture? ”’ To this question the answer may be twofold. Some would find it enough to answer that the thing we see has come to exist and to be believed in the Church. I cannot but believe that the primitive institution of our Lord, different from our service in appearance, possibly different in the minds of early believers, has rightly and by a real continuity come to be what we see. To believe otherwise, to believe that what has taken place has taken place by mistake, is to give up a practical faith in the words of the Creed, “1 believe in the Holy Ghost,” and “I believe in One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.” We cannot believe that what has happened in the Church, not here or there, not now or then, not in one age or place or among men of one particular blood, but always and everywhere, is om the whole a mere mistake. An universal feature of Church Q2 REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT life, evolving echoes, making all but substantial shadows, in bodies of worshippers which by lack of order are separated from the historic Church, cannot be a growth of irresponsible religious fancy ; and I cannot suppose that it is, unless | am pre- pared to believe that even our perversity has been allowed entirely to stray by the Divine Saviour Who has promised to be with us to the end of the age. Such an answer, carefully guarded, is more than legitimate. But it will hardly change the opinion of the critic I have imagined. We ought to meet him where he is. And in point of fact, the truth of the Eucharistic Sacrifice has strong grounds in the New Testament, the record and inspired legacy of the first age of Truth and Grace. It is less obscure than is commonly supposed to earnest students of the New Testament. And (let me inter- ject) the earnest student will be a fairly constant student, not content to turn to favourite texts nor to use the Scripture as an armoury of weapons. There are some who have scanty leisure for study and are ready to use it. But others have a good deal, and I venture the advice that they should use the Latin Vulgate more than they have yet. This great translation often illuminates the Greek you know by heart, and in a great many places represented (during the age when we read what is called the Textus Receptus) the very Greek text which has been laboriously recovered by the scholarship of the last half-century. 93 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE IV The passage read as a text really takes for granted and as known the truth of a sacrifice in the Eucharist. The Apostle is meeting certain doubts and fears felt by the Christians of Corinth about the use as ordinary food of things that had been offered to idols. This is not the time to consider in detail the Apostle’s direction and advice. He guards the liberty of those Christians who see no harm in such ordinary, unceremonial, and indeed un- ceremonious, use of the sacrifices of idol temples. But he says, it is wiser (for the sake of less liberally minded believers who might otherwise be led to do what is distinctly against their own conscience and their own view of an idol sacrifice), to refrain from such use of the provisions which are used at heathen dinner-tables and indeed come upon the market from the heathen temples. And his argu- ment introduces the Holy Communion in a manner which would be unintelligible to any who did not know its sacrificial character. The man who eats the provisions from the heathen temple becomes responsible, in some sense and degree, for the heathen sacrifice from which the provisions actually come. Now no man must be a partaker of a heathen altar if he also desires to be a partaker of the only real Altar, the Christian Altar of Eucharist. To share the gift is to partake of the sacrifice. The cup we bless, he says, is a communication of the blood of Christ. The bread we break is a 94 REV, PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT communication of the flesh of Christ. In the Old Testament, those who eat the Temple food, the flesh or the cakes of flour added to the slain beast, were certainly partakers of the @vovacrjpiov the altar of Sacrifice. That is his point. He assumes that his disciples know that those who partake of Holy Communion are brought in relation with an altar of sacrifice, a OQvoweryjpiov. Without this assumption there is no point of comparison and of contrast between the Christian Communion and the use of heathen temple provisions. His argu- ment and his plea is that we must not be concerned in two sacrifices, two altars, the Table of the Lord and the table of demons; we may not drink of the Lord’s Cup, and also of the cup of demons. The idols indeed are nothing; but those who eat of the stuff offered to idols become partakers of the sacrifice, though what they do is done without intention; and the sacrifice is offered not to God but to evil powers. It is notorious that there is a pretended sacrifice in the heathen worship. It is from the sacrifice that the food comes. Unless in the Holy Eucharist it is understood that there is a sacrifice, and that what we receive is a feast upon that sacrifice, the motive for avoiding the heathen food disappears. I regret that I may not trace the argument more closely. Our difficulty is that the point St. Paul assumes is the point we desire to prove. The fulcrum of his lever is the point of work in ours. But I think we shall easily see that the fulcrum is there. 95 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE Remember, I am not now showing in what sense the Eucharist is sacrifice. I am only pointing out that to the first Christians it was known to be our sacrifice here on earth; by what spiritual union with our Lord we have yet to acknowledge more explicitly. Let me recall once more the path of the Apostle’s argument. A liberal Christian of Corinth says “This wine from the Temple-market is like other wine; it is none the worse for coming from the heathen, and an intelligent and spiritually-minded Christian may and almost must use it, that by his use he may demonstrate the freedom of his con- science in Christ, and show a good example to those half-Christians who still believe in the idol’s reality and pay it an inverted reverence by avoiding it.” To such a man, right as his Christian liberty of conscience is, St. Paul answers, ‘‘ The wine is unchanged and the idol is nothing. But your participation in the surplus of the temple, your use of the stuff makes you concerned in the idol altar, its sacrifice presented to devils. How can you face this who come to Holy Communion ? ” What would be the force of this plea unless, sub silentto and unspoken, it was added, “ For by taking of the Bread of Communion you are concerned in the one true sacrifice, the sacrifice to God which is through Jesus Christ crucified and risen’”’? You — cannot use the two breads, because thereby you are involved in two sacrifices. You cannot be a 90 REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT communicant in heathen provisions since you come to that Table where God Himself is a Guest according to His promise, ‘If a man love Me [ will come in to him and sup with him and make him sup with Me.” He assumes the Christian knowledge that this board of Communion is an altar of sacrifice where God accepts with love and favour, through the mystery, His peoples’ only availing gift, the Death and Life of Jesus. V And here I all but suggest the criticism, “ But is not this sacrifice the true sacrifice, the Passion of our Lord?” Yes,indeed. “Is it not His finished work that has abolished, by replacing them, all the old prophetic sacrificial actions of Israel; all the groping of the heathen? Will not that save us, suffice us, without our doing anything corre- sponding to what the old worshippers did ? ”’ The answer is—‘ Our Lord has not provided His sacrifice of the Cross in order that it may act automatically without engaging in any way our wills and our obedience.’’ It is contrary to the whole tenor of God’s dealings with His people to suppose that He so acts for them as to save them the trouble of acting themselves. If we believed that the sacrifice of our Lord on Calvary had so wiped away all these things that men were to have no thought of sacrifice, but to dwell in the shadow of the Cross, 97 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE with or without conscious memory ; then we should suppose that God’s work was to rid human nature of its most important function. You might almost as well believe that God had done something which dispensed with all the thought and will of man outright, and accomplished his work in such a way as to leave them without any effort or thought; had saved them by an act of power quite apart from them. To accept the opinion that the sacrifice of our Lord has established a state of things in which we, in contrast with His old worshippers, have nothing to do and no worship to offer, but have only to live on, occupying the spaces of the earth, and we shall be brought at last to some “ far off © divine event ’’ on the bosom of the flowing stream of creation, would be to reduce the whole meaning and worth of our Christian life. It cannot be that the sacrifice of our Lord so replaces the ancient sacrifices as to make it unnecessary for us to have any share in it at all. It cannot be a sacrifice that prevails without making any claim upon our will. But perhaps it only demands a movement of our hearts? Do we not fulfil what you suggest is necessary when we believe in the atoning power of the death of Jesus? Is not this our sacrifice, to believe in the atoning power of the death of Jesus Christ, and rest in the confidence which that does in fact give? Here is a much more difficult point, and I beg you to consider carefully that things are not greater, more spiritual, nearer to the heavenly truth, or on a higher plane when they 98 REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT become merely notional, taking place in one’s own head, or as a pulse of feeling in one’s heart. There are many people who suppose that the simplicity of the Gospel lies in this, that it is merely notional and makes no demands upon the visible. What then is to become of the visible part of our lives? In respect of worship we may be certain it cannot be that God has left out of account all those powers which were formerly used in His worship. The careful thought, the sustained devotion, the roused will, the heart, the frame, the actions and the pos- sessions—all these God used of old. Will He not use them now ? Does not our faith naturally require that we should find somewhere in the Gospel life something for us to do, no less than God’s ancient worshippers did when, following the prescriptions handed to them by Moses, they brought animals for their faults, their ritual transgressions. Surely there must be some- thing for us to do. If God had not given us this mystery of the bestowal of the Body of Christ so as to be, in some sense, our sacrifice to Him, we should have been left desolate indeed. And the Christian mind would, I suppose, have reverted to the substantial worship of ancient Israel. Believers would have said—‘ This service, this meeting of yours which gives us nothing to do, makes no demand upon our obedience, which is such that we cannot tell in any way whether we have fulfilled God’s purpose or not, which has no duties and no bounden service, this is a frail thing like a breath, a whisper upon the wind, in comparison with a 99 THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE system which gave people something definite, and even difficult and costly, to do.” It is indeed vain that we come to God if we do not also labour to make the whole of our lives conform to the law of the Cross of our Lord even as it is exhibited to us in the Holy Eucharist. But we shall not do that any better by leaving out of our religious ob- servance anything which is a substantial and actual and costly and difficult fulfilment of His will, and a real means of entering by our own action into His sacrifice, which was made for us upon the Cross. VI The contrast between the Old Testament and — the New, between the Law and the Gospel, is not © a contrast between a system substantial, actual — and involving physical duties, and another that — is notional, consisting only of movements or states of the mind. Life under the old system was, no doubt, largely notional; and many of its duties were thought about and not accomplished. Ours, unhappily often confined to notion and intention, is meant to be carried out in practice. The old Church of Israel relied often on words and views, just as we are tempted to do. They trusted to the name of Israel as we trust to the name of Christian. They relied on movements of 100 | | REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT feeling as we do. No contrast can be established between the old state and the new which implies that the old was concrete and actual and the new unpractical and mental. Indeed we may say more. If such a contrast is ever set up by Divine authority, it is set up in the opposite sense. It is the old which was in word, the new kingdom is in power and effect. Vil But the contrast which may be justly drawn is this. The old believers received and displayed in image a reality still unknown to them. The pro- phetic and typical Law was given through Moses. Grace and truth—that is to say power and substance —came by Jesus Christ. A figure of which the interpretation was for the most part unknown occupied the minds of the old Israel. We have truth, the revelation of the actual, and grace, the communication of life. ° The old sacrifice prefigured a Divine action not yet accomplished. Our sacrifice looks back to a Divine action historically accomplished, and accom- plished in the life of man. We know that which we show, for it was behind us in time and is present to us in power. Before the Lamb of God was offered upon earth, they, not knowing Him, but hoping for a revelation, IOI THE EUCHARIST AS SACRIFICE offered the daily lamb in the temporal burnt sacrifice. We, knowing the sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God, and looking back upon His work, offer the memorial sacrifice He ordained when He said, “‘ Do this.” (I am endeavouring here to repeat one of two ever memorable instructions received from the great Bishop Temple by those whom he ordained to the priesthood. The other was upon the ministry of Absolution.) It is to mistake the character of our worship to suppose that it would gain spiritual reality, by refusing an actual and active obedience. But to this subject there may perhaps be an opportunity to return. My object to-day is mainly to direct your study to the passage in the Corintians, and I wish I had shown more exactly the cogency of the argu- ment to be drawn from it. The legal or scientific mind, reading that passage, will confirm the statement that it implies, because it assumes, the existence in the first Christians of an intelligent belief in the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, a concern in the sacrifice of our Lord upon the Cross which is secured in the par- ticular solemnity of the Breaking of Bread, and there secured not only in a reflexion accompanying the observance, but so implicit in the observance itself as to impose corresponding duties and restric- tions even upon the less considerate, and upon the more consciously ‘‘ liberal ’’ of its frequenters. 102 REV. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT To us, as to his Corinthian disciples, the great Apostle writes, ‘‘I speak to you as to men of good judgment.” I regret that the necessary limits of your gener- ously patient attention force me to offer you to-day words upon the Eucharistic sacrifice, so dry, so staccato, so wanting in recognition of the true life of sacrifice, the return of the created being to God its Source and its End. Whatever else we omit, let us not fail to re- member the use of the Sacrament as our escape to heaven, as the purifying of desire, as the means of access to Him who is in the midst of us, but whose touch we still so dreadfully need—a chink by which we may kiss the hem of His garment. In this desire to find and in this practice of seeking we are one with some whose faith falters at the bright affirmations of our intuition or—which is it >— is too swift-winged to wait upon the rumbling advance of our definitions; with those whose spiritual complexion is insensitive to the appeal of our modes of worship, or (is it?) whose spiritual delicacy forbids them to make, in regard to things so sacred, one step which they do not understand to be prescribed. Whichever group of the contrasted Christians is the swift and the strong, whichever is most alive in love, let us “ wait for another ”’ and try to keep together, that we may, by waiting, in effect hasten the hour of a united sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving. H 103 : is) i eg as aa ho ’ ie oe sae 0 i rl Pui itz Wits Wid areas Es se ineen he \ te ys id Ais 4) ve whe ay hashes oe vy Le 3 tH Va ce ae? he aah EET PUR enw tae Rev. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, D.D., D.Lrrr. THE REV. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, PD rae Dr. CARPENTER is the second son of the late William Benjamin Carpenter, M.D., C.B., F.R.S. He was educated at University College School, and University and Manchester New Colleges, London, and took his Degree as M.A. in the University of London in 1866 with medal rank. After ministry at Oakfield Road Church, and Clifton, and Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, he became Lecturer on the History of Religion in Manchester New College, firstin London and then at Manchester College, Oxford, of which he was afterwards Principal. He has been Wilde Lecturer in Natural and Comparative Religion in the University of Oxford ; Hibbert Lecturer; has lectured in the Divinity School of Harvard University, and delivered one of the courses in the American Lectures on the History of Religions. Amongst his publications are: ‘‘ The First Three Gospels, their Origin and Relations,” ‘‘The Composition of the Hexateuch,” ‘The Digha Nikaya” (in conjunction with Prof. Rhys Davids), ‘‘ Phases of Early Christianity,” ‘‘Theism in Medieval India,’’ and ‘‘ Buddhism and Christianity.” IN. THESSsANCTUARY. Rev. J. Estrin Carpenter, D.D., D.Litt. “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” 1 Corinthians xv, 409. WE have all heard these words many times beside the graves of our dead. They are endeared to us by long association ; it is impossible ever to read them without a thrill, for they are charged with more than the triumphant confidence with which they were first uttered; they bear with them the pain and the consolation of a multitude which no man can number. In themselves they belong to a group of ideas which most of us, I suppose, have ceased to hold. They emerge out of an argument which speaks to us no more. They point to a mystery which in reality soon lost its savour. We no longer await the trumpet call, or look for a bodily change in the twinkling of an eye as this mortal puts on immortality. But we have accepted them as symbols of types of humanity which still illumine the vast perspectives of our modern thought. We look back through hundreds of thousands of years, and the skull of that man of Galilee discovered in the soil of a cave a few months ago near the 107 IN THE SANCTUARY plain of Gennesaret shows us that in a very real sense the first man was of the earth earthy; and during the ages that have passed over him his successors have been slowly—how slowly we hardly dare to think—preparing for that other Man of Galilee who showed us what it is to bear the image of the heavenly. He made his gods at first in his own likeness; but as thought grew stronger, and insight clearer, and conscience tenderer, the vision of faith led him ever forward. The majesty of the whole at last dawned upon him. The splendour of its beauty, its variety, its wonder without, its love, its righteousness, its joy within, broke on him with rapture. He saw his power fed from this mighty fount. He felt his spirit quickened into nobler activity. He sent his mind to roam among the stars. He knew his life to be more radiant in its high endowments than the most brilliant of their blazing suns. There.was the meaning of the process ; there the force that bore him on; there the purpose that shaped his course; there the divine intent that fixed his goal; for “ of him and through him and unto him are all things—God blessed for ever.”’ And the secret of Jesus was that we are at once His sons and fellow-workers. God is our Maker and Begetter. He educates and leads and trains. As men looked back upon the Teacher’s activities He seemed to say to them, “ My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.’’ That labour indeed was prayer; the energy of that toil was worship. To 108 REV. F. ESTLIN CARPENTER maintain that work and realise that worship as the great aid to the attainment of ‘‘ the image of the heavenly,” the disciple has ever since built his homes of faith and devotion where the clamour of earth might be silenced and the voices of heaven be heard. For the highest things of the Spirit are known to us by reverence and wonder, by trust and adoration, or they are not known at all. Reason, indeed, must be our guide as we measure the distance of the sun, determine the constituents of a nebula, or search for the beginnings of life. Unless the world and our thought were matched, we could never find our way from hour to hour. But though we should know the behaviour of every atom into which this great globe should be dissolved, such intellectual triumph would never teach us that truth is better than a lie, and generosity nobler than meanness, and purity sovereign over lust, and love the eternal conqueror of scorn or wrath or hate. There is no way of knowledge here but by the education of experience. The higher souls must lift up the lower, the strong sustain the weak, the clear-eyed and the brave show the path to the dull and timid, Listen to the prophetic voices, “ Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect, yet follow me along the upward way, look with my eyes and you shall see what I have seen. The world shall be fuller to you of hope and gladness. Man shall be a nobler comrade, and God a more gracious Father. Enter the fellow- ship of those who do the Will, and out of the world’s 109 IN THE SANCTUARY conflicts you shall rise towards the Central Peace.”’ The race has long since heard such utterance, some- times proclaimed with confidence, sometimes only in faltering speech; it is still heard, thank God, even among the confusions of our time. The voice of the pessimist may tell us that it is a baseless dream ; the egoist may bid us realise that life is essentially the appropriation, the subduing of the alien and the feeble, and Christianity may be bitterly rejected as “‘the one great curse, the ineradicable blot on human nature.” “If Jesus of Nazareth,” continued Nietzsche, ‘“ had lived to my age’ (he was then thirty-eight), ‘‘ He would have renounced His teaching.’’ He had, in fact, never known its meaning. “ Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest, Cannot confound nor doubt him, nor deny. Yea with one voice, O world, though thou deniest, Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.” I know, indeed, that beside the common causes which are lowering the habit of worship in our day ——the cares of the world, the distractions of business, the desire for rest after the strain of affairs, the eagerness for pleasure and the zest for amusement which our critics tell us were so prominent before the war—there are deeper motives which keep men and women in silence and solitude. The intellectual unrest which has followed on the dis- appearance of old sanctions of belief—the protest IIo REV. F. ESTLIN CARPENTER against unworthy doctrines belittling august realities —the consciousness that the great moments of life when we see most clearly what we might be, resolve most vigorously, feel most deeply, do not always (perhaps even rarely) occur in church—all these and many other reasons have produced a vague dissatisfaction which quenches the impulse of devotion. In critical uncertainty the flame of love expires. On the one hand men are searching genuinely for a wider, deeper truth, and the Spirit of God is their prompter in the call for a passionate sincerity. They will have nothing to do with old conventions which for them have lost their meaning ; they perhaps distrust the teachers who have never grappled (for example) with a difficult piece of scientific investigation. They demand a religion which can be proved, and with scrupulous veracity they will listen to no word which does not come to them with the full demonstration of reality. But they do not recognise that there are various kinds of reality, and they do not always look for it in the right place. There are others, however, who are not driven by this imperious necessity for truthfulness of conception and utterance. They suffer, rather, from a malady of the will, They are the victims of a mental sloth which shuns great problems, and complains that the tasks set them are too hard. The effort required of them is too exacting, and they turn away indignant and morose. They have never learned the sublime responsibility of III IN THE SANCTUARY independence, and when the traditional creed of their youth breaks down, they say to themselves that they have done with it; in angry revolt they turn away stripped of their ancient faith, but unable to weave for themselves new garments of trust and hope. There is no bitterer commentary on the futility of much of the religious education of our day than this lack of courage, this unwillingness to face difficult issues, this reluctance to set out on the great adventure, ‘‘ Seek ye the Lord,” and brave the perils of the quest. Had they learned in youth that worship is the high enterprise of the soul, they would not thus lightly forego its joys. They would know that they cannot truly live their best life— and bear the image of the heavenly to which they are called—without the conscious endeavour to find their place in the mighty order by which they are environed. It has made them; to it they owe their powers, their gratitude, their homage; they are bidden to get themselves into right relations to it; they must reckon with both its goodness and its severity; they must welcome with lowly awe its surprises of delight—who are they that such joys should visit them ?—they must prepare for its hardness, and take its buffetings with good cheer; they must respond blithely to its call to action or submit patiently to its decrees of pain, and learn beneath its steadfastness to rest in peace. Thus is the image of the heavenly formed within us, and all this is learned in worship. 112 REV. F. ESTLIN CARPENTER Be it that the hours which we instinctively recognise as the highest often come to us outside the sanctuary—alone perhaps upon the mountain-top where the glory of a world not of our making enfolds us, or in the rushing harmonies of mighty music when the marvel of creative gladness bursts on our souls, or by the side of our dead where thankfulness and compunction meet as we recall all that they did for us and our poor returns, and the sense of the mysterious ties of life wider than our little span of years is brought home to us with irresistible conviction—we shall not be prepared for these ineffable experiences if we have not habitually nourished our hearts on holy thoughts, and kept alive our ancient pieties. Religion rises out of our attitude to life, which has been first suggested in our childhood and then confirmed by adult experience. If we are only grasping at the world’s good things, the moments of revelation will not visit us. We shall be only impatient and discontented with our ill-success, fretful at our failures, querulous because we have been slighted, jealous because of others’ advance. The image of the earthy will be stamped upon us. There are men who view their. rivals with suspicion because they have low views of human nature. In this loss of reverence and trust sorrow and suffering become a hateful spectacle. “Take them away,” we cry brutally, as they stand and moan and show their sores, “‘and shut them up that they be seen no more.” When pity dies the power of high and noble joy will perish also. 113 IN THE SANCTUARY We shall look up no longer to the heroes or the saints; the ascent of Mount Everest will rouse no ardour; our hearts will not burn within us when one man gives his life for another, and perhaps goes down into the darkness not knowing whom he has saved. We _ shall not ask ourselves whether we could have made the sacrifice, we shall know in our inmost hearts that we could not ; and we shall be degraded in our own eyes, for life without worship will cease to have any worth, and indifference will number us in the ranks of the lost. “It may be,’ I shall be told, ‘ but cannot I worship alone?” Doubtless the path of prayer is always open. There is a church wide as the dome of heaven, where the preacher is always preaching, and the winds and the waters make deep harmonies of praise. Yet the testimonies of experience are emphatic and deserve to be heard. And they tell us with warnings and encouragement that the members of the household of God will not be content to pray in solitude. We may seem to one another inarticulate and insignificant. We may know little of each other’s life-story ; we each carry about some incommunicable secrets of failure or achievement, victory or defeat, quickened en- deavour or disappointed hope. We each have our intimate and personal relation with our Maker, Father, Judge, Deliverer, Friend. But we also each know that we belong to a mighty brotherhood stretching all round the world, all history through. II4 REV. F. ESTLIN CARPENTER We live by the inherited experience of innumerable generations; the struggles and the successes, the sorrows and satisfactions, the energies and the lapses, the mortifications and the triumphs of ten thousand thousand souls beat in our desires, are reflected in our conflicts, and uphold our steps. This is the reason, for example, why the Bible still holds its cherished place in our public services. Its words carry us through millenniums of experience, and now embrace the globe. They embody in- finitely more than their first utterance, for they carry with them the hopes and the confessions, the praises and the prayers, of millions who have lived by their guidance and died in their trust. No modern speech can take upon it this weight of ages. The worship that cuts itself off from the past, unable to apply its venerable words, loses its base in the common life, and misses the strength of its sympathy and support. This sense of partnership in needs which all feel, and in helps which all can receive, supplies the natural foundation for all social worship. Each brings his contribution to the devotion of the whole. The worshipper who thinks only of what he can get, of the aid which he is to obtain, the burden of which he is to be relieved, the strength which he will secure, will come away unsatisfied because he has given nothing to the common store. That service will be dry and barren which is per- formed by others, and not shared at least in spirit by ourselves. You will go away unwarmed and 115 IN THE SANCTUARY fretful because you first came in cold and dull. You will be fastidious about the music, superior towards the prayers, critical of the sermon, because you have let the dead weight of your indifference fall upon each act, demanding that the worship should move you, while you should yourself have been upholding the worship. Let us remember that if we meet God here in the secret place of our own souls, that sanctuary has been built for us by the labours of a mighty fellowship. In the gladness of sacred song or the murmur of general confession we bear each one of us more than our own gratitude or humiliation before God. We are linked to the corporate devotion of Christendom; nay, the great themes of penitence and praise spread far beyond the beloved name of Christ; in trembling and wayward utterance they find expression in many an ancient faith; and they transcend the limits of our mortality, for wherever there are spirits throughout creation’s range who have put off the image of the earthy, there, too, are fellow-workers with the everlasting God. For it is in worship that we most know our kinship with the Infinite. There we recognise the Presence that broods over our life and calls us unceasingly to obedience and love. These are the energies that bear us forward towards the abiding Good. As we pass out through the gates of death, shall we not find another world which we and they have helped to make, a world where aspiration and endeavour shall come nearer to the truth which we have sought, and the 116 REV. F. ESTLIN CARPENTER right for which we have laboured? The con- flict and the turmoil shall drop away, and as the image of the earthy fades the image of the heavenly shall rise purer and clearer to the Eternal Light. 117 ian) ry THAD ie CRNA: iB us . 4 a 4 ‘ Rev. W. R. MATTHEWS, M.A., D.D. THE VREV. WALTER. GROBERT MATTHEWS, M.A., D.D. Dean of King’s College, London. Dr. Matthews is the eldest son of Philip W. Matthews, formerly Chief Inspector of the Bankers’ Clearing House. Educated at Wilson’s Grammar School, Camber- well, he spent several years in business in the City of London. He then entered King’s College, London, and took the A.K.C. with First Class Honours in 1906, and also the Plumptre, McCaul and Leitner Prizes. He graduated as B.D. in the University of London in 1907, and obtained First Class Honours in the Study of Religion in 1908; M.A., 1912; D.D., 1922. Ordained Deacon in 1907 and Priest in 1908, he served as Curate of St. Mary Abbott’s, Kensington, and St. Peter’s, Regent Square, and acted as Assistant Chaplain in the Magdalen Hospital. From 1916 to 1918 he was Vicar of Christ Church, Crouch End. He was appointed Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College in 1908. In 1918 he was appointed Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Dean. He was examining Chaplain to the late Bishop of Oxford, and in 1920 became Chaplain to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. In 1923 he was appointed Chaplain to H.M. the King. He has been Select Preacher in Cambridge, and is a Fellow of King’s College, and a member of the Senate of the University of London. He was Boyle Lecturer in 1920-22. Among his publi- cations are: ‘Studies in Christian Philosophy,” “The Gospel and the Modern Mind,” ‘“‘ The Psychological Approach to Religion,’”’ and several contributions to collective works. | THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING Rev. W. R. Marruews, D.D. “And kneeling down he prayed saying Father, if thou art willing, take away this cup from me.” Luke xxii, 42. To-DAY in our course of meditations on the subject of light from the Cross we reach the problem of suffering. We have already dealt with the insight which we gain from the Crucifixion on the theoretical question. We have seen, a few Sundays ago, how the Cross and Passion of the Son of God helps us to believe in the goodness of God. But there is another problem raised by suffering; one con- cerned not with theology but with daily life—a practical problem. This at any rate is plainly present to all men. They may perhaps not have reached that stage of reflective consciousness in which they consider the nature of the universe or draw up an indictment against its justice. Or perhaps they have passed beyond the rather elemen- tary stage of thinking that the world ought to be governed like a nursery in which good children are promptly rewarded with chocolates and bad children without delay put in the corner. They may have grasped the fact that this scheme of things is one, as Butler said, imperfectly 121 THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING comprehended by us and therefore that we must be contented to have no final solution of the place of suffering in the general purpose of God. But whoever you are, whether you are too stupid to be troubled by the theoretical problem of evil, or too wise to be greatly disturbed by it, you cannot escape from the practical problem. Suffering is not a concept buta fact. It meets usin the business and course of daily life. Even if we decide not to think about it, we have to act about it; we have to take up some attitude towards it. What shall we do with it? Here is the real problem ; and most of the spiritual and religious movements of history which have really stirred masses of men have been those which have had some kind of answer to this problem, have told men what to do with pain. The figure of Jesus in Gethsemane has perhaps gripped the imagination of humanity hardly less than the picture of Jesus on the Cross. The reason is clear. There is a human appeal in this solitary agony in the garden which is different from the heroic constancy of Calvary. Here we are admitted into the thoughts of the Crucified. We catch a glimpse of the mental suffering which was the chief part of the Passion. And I do not know any part of the Gospel story which is more significant to a candid person of the veridical character of these narratives. There are some who tell us still that the Gospels are mere mythology, a fairy tale composed about a fancied Son of God. The scene in the garden is the very last thing which would 122 REV. WALTER ROBERT MATTHEWS have occurred to the imagination of one who was composing a myth of that kind. Here we find the hero, the Divine Being, shrinking from death, labouring under the horror of the end which he foresees, and with strong crying and sweat like drops of blood, praying that the trial may be removed. These things are not mythology—they are the reports of facts. The practical problem of suffering is, then, one with which all mankind, including ourselves, is concerned, and one with which Jesus met and dealt in His own way. We shall, I think, most clearly apprehend the Christian answer and attitude if we set it in con- trast with others. And we will take our examples of other answers from the ancient world for two reasons. First, there were two methods of dealing with suffering, widely held and practised at the very time when Christianity appeared. And secondly, the thinkers of the ancient world generally put before us a problem in its general outline ; they give us its bare bones and its essential features, simply and plainly. Often, just because they know less than we do, they think more clearly on the main issue. The two views to which I have referred are of course the Stoic and the Epicurean. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that these names only refer to two sects of philosophers long extinct. Stoics and Epicureans are not all dead. On the contrary, I would go so far as to say that there are only three possible attitudes towards suffering. 123 THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING In this matter you must either be a Stoic or an Epicurean or a Christian. The Epicurean starts with the assumption that pain is the only evil and pleasure the only good. That at least, he thinks, we are sure about; and the obvious attitude towards suffering is to avoid it as far as possible, and to enjoy as many pleasures as opportunity affords. But the Epicurean was not a fool. He was a reflective person, and he saw full well that the profligate’s life was not the way of the greatest degree of pleasure. The greedy snatching at every pleasure which comes defeats its own end and leads to an overplus of pain. The wise man will exercise prudent self-control in order that his enjoyment may be unruffled. And in fact, since life is a sorry business at the best, the wise man will aim most of all at afavaxy, at imperturba- bility, never allowing himself to be carried away by hope or fear or immoderate desire. So far as possible he will lead a life hidden from the great conflicts and ambitious strife of men. He will cultivate his garden, hoping for peace to gain a little calm pleasure ere the end comes. And to this end he will free his mind of the hopes and fears of religion. It is useless to vex ourselves about matters which we cannot know, and foolish to suffer terrors of an unknown which may not exist. Do you think the Epicurean is dead? We can meet him every day. He forms a large part of the more prosperous classes in England. The Stoic, on the other hand, does not regard 124 REV. WALTER ROBERT MATTHEWS suffering as necessarily an evil. At least the truly wise man has risen above the plane where misfortune or torture can be to him a cause of fear. The true way of life is to attain autarkeva, self-sufficiency. And that can be done when we reach the condition of indifference to the desires which move ordinary men. It is our hopes and fears which unnerve us and make us children of chance. ‘The worldly hope men set their hearts upon Turns ashes—or it prospers; and anon, Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face, Lighting a little hour or two—was gone.’ If we would possess ourselves we must refrain our desires and our affections. Yes, even those that are most pure. Suppose your friend dies, says Epictetus, shall you therefore sit and bewail ? Shall you forget that he was born a mortal and subject to death? If the pot is broken in which you boil your meat, do you not send to the market and buy another? So be it in your friendship. Or shall you stake your soul’s peace on the little son you love so dearly? What harm if, when you kiss him, you murmur, “ To-morrow you will die: Are the Stoics all dead? On the contrary, something like the Stoic creed is the stay of the nobler spirits to-day who cannot accept Christ. I have a fancy, which I hope is not irreverent, to introduce into the Garden of Gethsemane a Stoic and an Epicurean, and hear what they will say to 125 THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING the Man of Sorrows Who is praying there. Let us listen to the Epicurean—or rather let us allow the Epicurean in all of us to speak. “What a singularly unsuccessful life we here see brought to a crisis! Here is one who was born in circumstances which might have been favourable to a calm and pleasant existence. Not in extreme poverty, living the healthy life of a prosperous peasant, removed from the dangers of public affairs, a little prudence might have given Him an existence more than tolerable. And yet the sad spectacle is not without instruction for the reflective man. When we ask what are the causes which have led Him to this deplorable position, we can see that they are two. He suffered from the illusion that there was some divine will which he had to serve. He believed in a living God; and he was consumed by a chimerical ambition to confer some benefit on His fellow-men. Even now He might steal away back to the peace of Galilee ; but though He dreads the pain that is coming upon Him, His superstition will not allow Him to avoid it. A melancholy instance of the danger of enthusiasm and the evils that religion may produce.” Let us hear the Stoic—the Stoic in ourselves, “This is indeed a spectacle which must shock a truly enlightened person. If there were any need to show that this man was not a great moral teacher, here is proof enough. These groans and prayers are unworthy. One who had attained a high degree of virtue would have become indifferent to the 126 REV. WALTER ROBERT MATTHEWS misfortunes of life. He would have confronted whatever came with calm self-possession. And we can see easily enough the source of this weakness. He has not detached Himself from the desires and affections of lower men. He loves His brethren too much, and He wished to bring in God’s kingdom. Far better would it have been had He learned to treat lightly the ties of love and the desire to serve, and understood that everything happens in accord- ance with the order of the universe which it is impious and futile to attempt to change.” Brethren, I apologise for introducing these figments of my imagination into the sacred solitude of Gethsemane. And yet they may have served to throw into relief the grandeur of Christ’s dealing with suffering, the power and sanity of His answer to the problem. How vulgar and pedantic these one-sided answers appear, beside the Christ who has mastered suffering and made it divine! Perhaps it would be well to leave it there: the figure of Jesus over against our little epicureanism and our stiff unnatural stoicism. But we will try to sum up in a few bare words the salient points of the Christian answer to the question, What shall I do about suffering ? The first is the great commonplace that suffering is really evil. We must never be deceived by a spurious spirituality which would argue that pain can be indifferent or even good. That is not Christian doctrine. Gethsemane and the Cross were real evils which Jesus endured not for their own 127 THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING sakes but for the joy that was set before Him. Suffering always and everywhere is bad. It repre- sents the frustration of human faculty, the defeat of life; and it is a large part of the task before man to conquer suffering, to eliminate pain. The life of Christian duty depends on the conviction that pain is bad; it consists very largely in acts of relief, in giving cups of cold water, in dealing bread to the hungry and clothing the naked. The questions addressed to the souls who appear before the Son of Man at the Judgment concern suffering and its relief and nothing else. “I was. naked and ye clothed me, sick and in prison and ye visited me.’”’ Christ agrees with Epicurus that pain is evil. But He draws the opposite con- clusion. Suffering is evil; not only mine but all suffering everywhere. It is part of God’s will that it should be overcome. Then, if I am to be really against pain, I must be prepared to realise its existence and extent. So Christianity would make us more sensitive to suffering; it has increased the area of sorrow by making hearts tender and con- sciences uneasy at things men never felt before. It has done this, not because it thinks suffering good, but because it thinks it is bad and contrary to God’s will. Until we feel the weight of human pain we are not likely to enlist in the army which, under the leadership of Christ, is to abolish pain and even death. But suffering is not the only evil nor the deepest and blackest. The ultimate evil is to be opposed to 128 REV. WALTER ROBERT MATTHEWS the will of God, and the highest good to be in harmony with Him. And even pain and suffering, which are in themselves evil, may be the means by which the child of God promotes His purposes and advances towards perfection. The will can transmute suffering into the gold of sacrifice. Brethren, our Christian faith has much to say to us on this practical problem. It does not set us the impossible task of becoming men of iron, wrapped in impassive indifference. It does not cheat us with the impossible hope that we can rise above the changes and chances of life. On the contrary, it teaches us that we are creatures of flesh and blood, with hearts that can suffer and feel sorrow. It does not advise us to be lurking cowards, sheltering from the hard facts of life. On the contrary, it calls us to take into our own hearts the swords that pierce the souls of others—to feel more keenly the woes of the world, to be afflicted in its affliction. But it shows us that even suffering may be creative ; there is no pain which cannot be offered for the increase of the world’s good, no pang which cannot be consecrated by the Cross. ‘‘ Father, take away this cup. Yet if it may not pass away except I drink it; let it be in accordance with Thy will, an offering for the accomplishment of Thy purpose.” 129 ¢ \ } f PO Gk mS Bie Wi Ae hiAay ajuy i i + Leg ry =. is ip Aan TR RA er es ra | i FI rey) a He ha oy ee phy r 4 na ae PeRe a ky Pe ete vy f =} Pet) Afanar 2) ee EIT a : “o@ em A: ‘ 3 A nf seni \ i ; : i ; ‘ } ’ i ; i : STASIS dey aes : Wa Uh etal ; ts" Wie a : ’ ; ‘aed ) : if q b ! ) } 4 : | 5 f ih . ‘ ff cal ‘ > a ‘ \ F f yey : i hon , A ih y 4 r i et ri ty ; ‘ 4 Rev. Principan H. WHEELER ROBINSON, M.A. THE REV. PRINCIPAL H. WHEELER ROBINSON, M.A. PrincipaL of Regent’s Park (Baptist) College, London; President of the Baptist Historical Society; formerly Tutor in Rawdon (Baptist) College, Leeds (1906-1920); and Minister of Pitlochry Baptist Church (1900-1903), St. Michael’s Baptist Church, Coventry (1903-1906), and South Parade Baptist Church, Headingley, Leeds (1917-1920). He was born in Northampton in 1872; and after some years of business life studied at Regent’s Park College, the University of Edinburgh (1891-1895), Mansfield College, Oxford (1895-1900), and the University of Strassburg (1899). Sometime Junior and Senior Septuagint Prizeman, Houghton Syriac Prizeman, and Junior and Senior Kennicott Scholar in the University of Oxford. Heé has published “‘ Deuter- onomy and Joshua,” in The Century Bible, ‘‘ The Christian Doctrine of Man,’ ‘‘ The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament,” ‘“‘The Cross of Job,” “The Cross of Jeremiah,’ and ‘“‘ Baptist Principles.” FORGIVENESS Rev. Principar H. WuHeeter Rosinson, M.A. “ Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.’’ Matthew vi, 12. A GREAT teacher of God’s Fatherhood has told us that the Lord’s Prayer declares man to be God’s child by nature. The truth of this is apparent. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus gathers the whole human family at the feet of their Father—the reverent child, praying that God’s name may be hallowed, the ambitious child, praying that His Kingdom may come, the obedient child, praying that His will may be done, the hungry child, asking for his next day’s portion, the erring child, asking to be forgiven, the tempted child, clasping the strong hand of God.* The scene is so homely that we forget the majesty of its meaning. The teaching is so simple and direct and familiar that we may not recognise within it a philosophy of life, a declara- tion of the kinship of man and God, and a philosophy of revelation, an assurance that what is true of man’s spiritual nature is also true of God. The Father is known by His children. He is greater, far greater than they are or can conceive; yet their * cf, Phillips Brooks, The Influence of Jesus; p. 19. 155 FORGIVENESS experience, in its own small way, does reflect His, for they all belong to one family. This general truth is expressly stated in the text, “Forgive . . . as we forgive.’ It brings together divine and human forgiveness as not different in kind, if they are in degree. The divine Father is asked to forgive as the human brother forgives. Divine forgiveness is the central fact of the Christian Gospel; human forgiveness is the central act of Christian morality. These are brought together as that which God has joined and no man can put asunder, Jesus does not encourage us to pray for forgiveness if we are not learning to forgive; how can we know the meaning of the higher, if we are ignorant of the lower ? I The meaning of human forgiveness is often mis- understood. Forgiveness does not mean submission to circumstances, bowing to the inevitable, doing nothing to avenge ourselves because we are unable to do anything. The man who says on what may be his death-bed, “I forgive him—if I do not get better,’ of course knows nothing of forgiveness. It is no slave-morality, dignifying weakness with a fine name. Forgiveness means at least the refusal to use a right within our power, the refusal to collect a debt we might collect if we would. That debt may be material or spiritual, an injury to our goods 156 REV. H. WHEELER ROBINSON or to our rightful dignity ; forgiveness will mean at least that we voluntarily accept the loss, or ignore the insult, and so far as in us lies, leave it out of the reckoning in our future thoughts and deeds. It is a mere travesty of forgiveness to say, “I forgive, but I can’t forget.”’ But Christian forgiveness is positive as well as negative. It is not content to put all resentment aside. It recognises an active duty to restore and save. My brother has injured himself in wronging me, and his injury calls me to be the Good Samaritan, just because the road of life has brought us together. I cannot wash my hands of him, and say it is not any concernofmine. Itismyconcern. The duties that seek us are more than those we seek. He has fallen morally if he has really wronged me, and it is my business to try to set him on his feet again. It is my business all the more when the fallen man proves to be my enemy. If we are reluctant to admit this, it is because we have not yet come into sight of the Christian standard of forgiveness. Of some of God’s servants it has been true that to wrong one of them was to make him a friend for ever. This takes us, or at least it takes the true saint, still further into the mystery of forgiveness. The really good man cannot identify himself with the evil man, in pity and love and helpfulness, without suffering. This is not to be measured by personal inconvenience, the expenditure of time and money and energy, the endurance of insult or blows, Its deepest aspect is spiritual. The very contact with 157 FORGIVENESS evil is an agony for the pure soul. That saint of God, Henry Drummond, to whom so many came to confess the loathsomeness of their souls, once told a friend, “I have felt I must go and change my very clothes after the contact.’’ The man who wrongs another bares his heart to him as to no priest in the confessional. The forgiving saint enters into a priesthood of suffering, and his suffering is a prophecy of what the penitent sinner shall himself come to know. The finest human forgiveness always anticipates penitence. It does not cautiously wait until its object be worthy. It does not require so much repentance to be weighed into the scales of morality before so much of the coin of forgiving love can be exchanged. There is always something suspicious in a zeal for the righteousness of God and the administration of His kingdom which enables us to postpone paying the price of forgiveness until somebody has been properly punished or properly humbled. A good deal of our own self-assertiveness, a good deal of our own wounded pride, may lie hidden behind our plea for justice. In this matter of forgiveness, we are too anxious to have it known that God is on our side, and not sufficiently anxious as to whether we are on His. If we knew more of Him, and of His ways, we should be bolder in forgiving. The door that is closed to well-merited rebuke may open to forgiving grace. It can inflict a holy wound deeper than any blow, and bring the godly sorrow of repentance, which is heaven’s joy. 158 REV. H. WHEELER ROBINSON If The meaning of divine forgiveness is often mis- understood, no less than the human. We think that it means escaping the consequences of our sins. In some bitter hour, when our sins have found us out, we are ready to cry for help to the God we have forgotten, and our prayer is to be saved from exposure before men, lest we shrink from what we shall see in their condemning eyes. The face of God is not so terrible to us—for we have never seen it. He stands afar off in our thought, and we are concerned only with what is nearest to us. Save me from this disgrace, this suffering, this loss; save me from this inevitable result I might have known, and in my heart did know beforehand, when I sinned; let me only escape, and I will go and sin no more. How often we have broken those cowardly promises! How mean and unworthy we should be in our own eyes, if we treated men as we have treated God! But such prayers are not really prayers for forgiveness, for they do not know what forgiveness is; such prayers are never gathered into the prayers of the saints which mingle with the incense upon the golden altar. The true prayer for forgiveness is that which cries, ‘Purge from the sin, but never from the pain.” There are natural consequences of doing wrong from which there is no escape. Nature is inexorable, and Nature is God’s. Broken health, 159 FORGIVENESS weakened will, sullied memories, lost opportunities -—who can make these as though they had not been ? Unkindness and injustice to others, cowardly shrinking from duty and its responsibilities, the poisoned word and the evil example—who can overtake these? Yet this does not mean that there is no forgiveness ; what it means is that forgiveness is something deeper than the escape from conse- quences. Those consequences can themselves be changed, not by removal, but by re-interpretation, Penalties can become privileges. The penitent man may even rejoice in the discipline of their chastise- ment. The wrong done to others becomes a new obligation and incentive to service. Surely Paul felt this when he remembered his share in the death of Stephen. Some would tell us that God’s forgiveness is very simple; He has but to say the word, and forget the sin. Did not the prophets, they say, call men to repentance, and promise divine forgiveness, without any elaborate machinery of atoning grace? Does not Jesus Himself, in the parable of the prodigal son, dwell on the ready and eager welcome of the father, waiting to be gracious? Does He not in the Lord’s Prayer suggest that forgiveness is to be won simply by the sincere asking? But think again of that prayer, “ Forgive... as we forgive.” If we know something of the deeper meaning of human forgiveness, its large demands, its patient service, its cost in suffering, we shall not think lightly of that which must be so much 160 REV. H. WHEELER ROBINSON deeper and higher, and so much more costly, the forgiveness of God. We shall not join in the careless optimism of Omar Khayyam, and say, © He’s a Good Fellow, and ’twill all be well,” or in the bitter word of Heine on his death-bed, ‘‘ God will pardon me, ‘tis His trade.” If the prophets promise for- giveness, they tell us something also of the sorrows of God, the anguish of His heart over human sin and disloyalty (like a husband’s over a faithless wife), the desolation of a people that takes the joy from God, the thought of God as the great burden- bearer, so different from the images of other gods that are carried on beasts of burden. The parable of the forgiving father sets forth only the joy of God at His son’s return; yet the very figure of human fatherhood should teach us that the joy itself is a measure of the sorrow now past, the cost of our sin to those who love us. The Cross of Christ is the revelation of that love, but it is more—it is the realisation in time of the love that is eternal, the sacrificial offering of a life so lived in fellowship with God that it becomes the life of God manifest in the flesh. It is not a ransom paid to an angry God, whose anger must be bought off—Jesus never said that. It is not a penalty required by an ungracious God _ before He would forgive—Paul never said that. “God commendeth His own love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The act of Christ is the love of God, and it could be that only because Christ became one with the 161 FORGIVENESS Father in the fellowship of holy love and forgiving grace. If the human forgiveness at its highest and holiest is always sacrificial, how could the divine be less? How can human sin be taken into the circle of divine holiness save as suffering ? iil The fellowship of man and God in forgiveness is seen in its perfection in the Cross of Christ, and heard in the cry of that Cross, “ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But, on the lower level of our imperfect human life, it is surely implied in the Lord’s Prayer which He bids us offer, “Forgive us... as we forgive.” Those words are not to be taken, as they sometimes are, as a sort of bargain with God, as though we forgave only in order to be forgiven. That would be a denial of the Gospel of grace, and a caricature of the Christian duty of forgiveness. Duty is never a bargain with God. Its glory is in its absoluteness. Its authority lies in its intrinsic character. He who has discovered the true nature of human forgiveness must forgive his brother’s debt, or he would incur a greater one himself. He would forgive, though he were not forgiven. That is the thought that stirs the heart of the apostle who counted himself a debtor to all men, whilst ready to cry, “I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake.”’ 162 REV. H. WHEELER ROBINSON When a man has learnt to say that, he has entered into a fellowship with the forgiving God like that of the son in a human family who grows into the full knowledge of his father’s purposes and aims. The words ‘“‘ forgive . . . as we forgive’’ describe the living spirit of the family. They are no external bargain; they are no arbitrary condition. The laws of God are never arbitrary. They spring from the nature of His being. Unless we ourselves know the forgiving spirit, we cannot come within sight of the forgiveness of God. That law of the Christian life is written plainly in the story of those two Christians of Antioch who had quarrelled; one, though a priest, refused to forgive his friend, who sought to be reconciled. Persecution came, and the priest endured torture valiantly, and was con- demned to die for his faith. His friend’s appeal to be forgiven was still refused. Then the martyr’s strength left him, and he recanted—only to see his friend step into his place, and die for Christ’s honour. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? ”’ IV The true emphasis in this fellowship of human and divine forgiveness must not be forgotten. Fatherhood comes before brotherhood, and Christian brotherhood is made possible only by divine Father- hood, holy and sacrificial grace. ‘‘ We love, because 163 FORGIVENESS He first loved us.” If we forget that, we may easily fall into the fault of the Pharisee, and our very virtue becomes a snare. It was not he who gave thanks for his own character who went down justified from the temple ; it was the man who could only cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” The forgiving spirit towards others is a true test of our fellowship in the family where divine forgiveness is known; yet the forgiving spirit is itself a fruit of the Spirit of Christ—“ love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self- control.’’ Christian morality is never an independent achievement. It is a fruit that grows by the river of life whose springs are fed from the hills of God. ‘““Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, for- giving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you.’ Gracious influences flow into the Christian life that are beyond our tracing, though they all go back to the beauty of divine holiness in Christ. When Wordsworth revisited Tintern Abbey after five years, he discovered his debt to the influence of the landscape’s beauty upon his thought and conduct—not only the conscious debt of refresh- ment through the memory of the scene, “in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din of towns and cities,” but also the feelings of unremembered pleasure, ‘‘such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.”’ 164 REV. H. WHEELER ROBINSON The Gospel of the forgiving grace of God is our one comfort when we are overwhelmed by the discovery of our own ungraciousness. ‘‘ God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.” We are not to be so discouraged by the imperfection of our offering that we go away from the altar never to return. We are to put right what is wrong in our relation to our brother, and then come back with the added offering of penitence. We are to think the more about that forgiving love of the Father which is the source and inspiration of the forgiving spirit towards our brother. In the grace of God there is the sufficient ground of assurance that we shall at last be delivered from our own want of grace; that deliverance is salvation. So, when we kneel alone to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and come to the words, “Forgive us... as we forgive,” let us sometimes stop praying and begin thinking, till holy thought itself becomes a prayer. a Dy ye 5 } ye ney , : coe COM ear aint a tis | Mi TARA be eee P pe : rh a Rev. T. CHARLES WILLIAMS, M.A., D.D. THE REV. THOMAS CHARLES WILLIAMS, M.A., D.D. MrnistER of the Welsh Presbyterian Church, Menai Bridge. Son of the Rev. Hugh Williams, and grandson of the late Rev. John Charles, Gwalchmai, Anglesey. The family have been ‘ministers from father to son for over 100 years. He was educated at Oswestry High School; Bala College; Aberystwyth University College; and Jesus College, Oxford. He graduated in Honours in 1898. Was brought up to the ministry, settled in Menai Bridge when he left Oxford, and in spite of calls to English and Welsh Churches in the big towns has remained there, but travels extensively both in this country and in America. He often preaches in London in Welsh, and in the leading English churches. He was Chaplain to the 6th Batt. R.W.F.; Secretary to the General Assembly, 1913-14, and a member of the Welsh Theological Board; Moderator of North Wales Presbyterian Synod, 1918-19; Moderator of the General Assembly, 1921-22. D.D. of Edinburgh University in 1923. THE GAW ORO EIBER TY Rev. ‘T. Cuartes Wituams, M.A., D.D. ‘“ Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”’ St. James i, 25. THE criticism usually made on this Epistle of St. James is that it does not contain a definite and adequate presentation of the Gospel. The value and point of its ethical teaching is readily and generally recognised, though perhaps even in that respect it would not be unnatural to inquire whether there is any real advance here on what would be expected, or found, in the Old Testament Prophets. What more, for example, do we find in St. James than in Amos? There is but scant reference in this Epistle at all to our Lord, and no teaching on the significance of His death in its relation to faith and the forgiveness of sin. We miss, in fact, what in St. Paul’s letters would be described as a Gospel. Is it in a true sense a religion that is taught here, or mere morality? In consequence of such con- siderations many devout and learned men were driven to agree with Luther’s classic condemnation, and gravely doubted whether the Epistle was, in any true sense, a contribution that had a right in 169 THE LAW OF LIBERTY the Sacred Canon. But surely this true disciple of Christ and this great student of his teaching, this man so saturated with the Master’s very phraseology, was not, even at so early a date, without a definite evangelical vision. He was clearly a man of considerable learning, particularly in the Wisdom Literature of his own nation. But had he a.Gospel? This is a most important issue for the Church of our own time. The supreme question for us to-day is, have we anything to tell the world which it does not know already, or which at least it could not have discovered without our aid? Is a sermon merely a leading article, with the Benediction at the end? Is the Gospel just another chapter, and at best an incomplete one, in human philosophy, or have we something for which we are not of our own selves responsible— something we have “received of the Lord,” a sacred deposit of truth to be grasped by faith, realised in experience and proclaimed openly as a Gospel? The soul of the Church is this gift of a Gospel. It is the only essential thing, but often the thing lacking. In theological opinion and ecclesiastical order the Churches are seemingly as far apart as ever. We draw nearer to one another only as we draw nearer to the heart of our spiritual message. Unity can never be reached if it is set before the mind as a definite object to be sought. If we concentrate on the Gospel, it will come naturally and unobserved as a by-product. The modern Church is supposed to possess a certain 170 REV. THOMAS CHARLES WILLIAMS gift for Church order, but our virtue may become our peril. We may be lost in our own schemes. As you are aware, the general law in every great movement is for the original idea which gave it being to crystallise in time into an organisation, which in turn always tends to attack and destroy the idea which gave it being. For that reason there must come at times a revolution in a State, and a revival in a Church to set free the living soul. Here in this verse we find a great Gospel in the revelation it contains, the obedience it demands, and the perfection of which tt 1s the only guarantee. I First, then, take the Gospel as presented here in the revelation it contains. It is the ‘“ perfect law of liberty.”” This great phrase must refer to the Christian doctrine and Gospel. It cannot be applied to anything which can be found in the Old Testament, nor in the great thinking of the classical eras. Had St. James done nothing but, by the grace of the Spirit, give this description of the Gospel, his contribution would have been considerable. It is one of the great phrases of Christian literature, not found elsewhere at all, here, as you remember, found twice. It may even be originally one of our Lord’s own, treasured in the mind of his devoted hearer. 172 THE LAW OF LIBERTY The Apostle evidently was a Jew, and to the Jewish mind the highest and ruling concept was that of law; not natural law, of which the Greeks and the modern world have known more, nor common public law in which the Romans were experts, but a moral and spiritual law existing in and revealed by the moral mind of God. This Jewish brain is the most wonderful phenomenon in the intellectual history of humanity. To the Jew, of ages long past, we owe practically all our moral ideas. Salvation is of the Jews. Other nations have also a great tradition for intellectual distinction, but their creative power has long since evaporated. They live only by the works of their past ; but the Jew to-day as a living force dominates the economic life of the world. Was it not said by someone who knew, that twelve Jews could even have stopped the war? What commerce means for the Jew to-day, moral idealism meant once. No greater thing therefore could at that time be said by a Jew of anything than that it was a “ perfect law.”’ And it would be well for us to reflect that the Gospel is a law, and the highest of all laws. The Gospel, it must be admitted, has certain definite characteristics which tend, when superficially re-. garded, to lead us to think that so far from being any kind of law at all, it stands for the sudden inter- ventions and the gracious irregularities of God. As illustrations of this, we may mention the place it gives to miracles in the natural sphere, and to 172 REV. THOMAS CHARLES WILLIAMS the forgiveness of sins in moral experience. Both these things are essential to the New Testament conception of a Gospel, and it is beyond our power at present to harmonise either with physical or moral law. St. Paul says that ‘‘ we know in part ” ; he might have put it that we know “in parts.” We know in sections; the modern tendency is to specialisation. It is often necessary to remind scientific men that the material universe, which they study, is not the whole of reality. A scientific man may well exclaim that miracles are not pro- vided, or accounted for, in his department, but then his department is not all there is. We are as yet but on the march, and the word miracle is one of the passing expressions of our intellectual pilgrimage. It will one day die out of the language, when we will have arrived at that great synthesis, which will both include and explain these mysteries, and we shall find, as Browning said, that all is love and yet all is law. Of this law the Apostle says two suggestive things; and the first is that it is a “Law of Liberty.” This is both arresting and daring. It strikes us at once as a challenging contradiction, Is not law the very negation of liberty? Can there be liberty if there is law? It has taken the world a long time to learn that it is bad law, not law in itself, that threatens human liberty. A ‘‘ perfect ”’ law in all the realms of human experience is the indispensable safeguard of liberty both of action and thought. In every moral act there must 173 THE LAW OF LIBERTY be these two aspects—a law fixed, definite, un- changing, defiant, imperative, which will brook no disobedience—and yet, at the same time, every moral act must be the free, full self-expression of personality. There is no real worth morally in doing anything because we are commanded to do it, even when we are commanded by God. The. heart of morality is freedom. It is also, we are told here, a ‘‘ perfect’? law. By that we are to understand that the Gospel is final and ultimate, not an interim arrangement like the Old Testament dispensation. It is God’s last word, because there is no more to be said. The Gospel exhausts the © infinite mind of God, because it is centred in the Son of God made man. It is the saving interven- tion of the Highest in our affairs, and is the ground of our undying hope. The proclamation of this stupendous message faithfully is the one great con- cern of the Christian Church. It was by this the Church started; it is only by this it can triumph. To neglect this will involve the inevitable relapse of the Church to Judaism and to paganism. I] Then comes the obedience which such a Gospel demands. If God approaches man so majestically, how ought He to be received? What adequate ‘Tesponse can man give? Nature in her full glory 174 REV.. THOMAS CHARLES WILLIAMS cannot be compared for simple, impressive majesty to the approach of God in His grace for the moral redemption of man. Our response is to “ listen.”’ Religion does not begin in the human playing upon the Divine, but in God speaking first to the soul, and securing the full attention of his total personality. The wonderful discoveries of our time would surely paralyse us if we had a little more imagina- tion. You pass a small cottage in the quietness and obscurity of the distant country, and when you enter you will find an old man probably there alone absorbed in “‘listening”’ to a concert held in London or in Paris. It is all carried to him there, he has only to attend. God too is speaking all the time ; though such are the preoccupations of our day that we pay but little heed. This true attention of the soul, this listening to God, is for us who minister in holy things the true equipment for our work. We must learn to be “ quick to listen and slow to talk.”” The apostle must, to begin with, be a disciple, and he must continue to be a disciple all the way. We listen too little and talk too much ; we read too much and pray too little. We must learn to retire oftener through prayer and medita- tion into the inner solitudes and silences of God. In that silence God speaks. We are told here, further, of two kinds of “listening.’’ There is the listening to forget, and the listening to obey. At times certain superficial evaporating impressions are made upon the mind, 175 THE LAW OF LIBERTY a passing emotion which leads to nothing. The Gospel is too great to be treated in that shallow way. It is spiritual discourtesy, and harms the soul. You will note the Apostle’s striking illustra- tion to emphasise this. ‘“‘ For whoever listens, and does nothing, is like a man who glances at his natural face in a mirror.” It may not, I admit, be the chief point in the words, but there is here a suggestive secondary implication. No one ever goes to the glass to see anyone but himself. He looks through the window to see a friend who may be passing, he goes to the album to recall a half-forgotten face; but no one goes to the mirror for anything but to see himself; great would be _his fright if he did see anyone else there! That is how a man should come to God’s Gospel—to get an honest portrait of his soul. We are becoming strangers to ourselves. When next you go to Church, do not worry as to how the minister preached; ask your soul how did you attend. There are certain moods of the mind even in God’s holy sanctuary in which a man is proof to all appeals. “So clear away all the foul rank growth of malice, and make a soil of modesty for the Word.” In further explanation of what is meant by this listening to obey, the Apostle employs three im- pressive words: “look,” “continue” and “do.” ‘““Whoso looketh ’’—not a casual glance but as a man face to face with an overwhelming vision which silences and stuns the soul. If we have not seen spiritual fact in that way, we have in reality 176 REV. THOMAS CHARLES WILLIAMS seen nothing. In this mystic contemplation we must “continue.” It is not to be an occasional inspiration, but a fixed attitude of soul. It has always to be kept up. To rejoice is often easy ; it is, however, hard to rejoice always. To pray is often a relief, but it is difficult to do it without ceasing. For many things man is promptly thankful, but how about being thankful in all things? And it is to end in practice, which is the spirit and purpose of all true faith. “Act on the Word” instead of merely “listening to it.’ There is nothing more devastating to the soul than waves of artificial emotion without any corresponding practical result. We are called to translate the thought of God as expressed in his Gospel of grace into the prose of our own life, and so be made worthy of it. {il Finally we have the perfection of which all this 1s our only guarantee. ‘‘ This man shall be blessed in his deed’’—not this man among others, and not this man even chief of all, but this man alone— he and no other. And to be “ blessed ”’ in the sense here meant includes more than a sense of outward well-being due to favourable circumstance; it means that all the deep elemental powers of the soul have been discovered and thrilled, and brought into full touch with their native environment in 177 THE LAW OF LIBERTY God. Religion is essentially an intensifying power in the soul. It makes the whole man awake and hungry for God ; and not God in nature or philosophy but the Personal God of grace in Christ. The sphere of this bliss will be service. ‘“‘ He will be blessed in his activity.”” We have not done well by giving so much prominence to the soothing idea of a final rest. Have you ever thought—you must have thought—about the use which God is going to make of the Perfect Church created, disciplined, saved and made perfect by the Gospel? This glorified Church will be the absolutely perfect instrument for carrying out the moral will of God. The angels have not our experience; they are the servants who cannot understand all their Lord intends. Is this Church saved at such a cost to be dismissed immediately, at their one first meeting together, and sent to lounge for ever on the garden seats in Paradise, touching a harp occasionally if not too exhausted, and do nothing further for God or men for ever more? Can that be regarded as a worthy destiny for man? Rather we should think of this life as a short introductory chapter in a book to be eternally written. The gracious programme of God remains to be for ever carried out, and we are to lose and find ourselves in His eternal service. Man can only be truly blessed in his deed. Brethren, you have listened to me very patiently. May I again with all the earnestness I can command plead with you to be loyal to this mighty Gospel ? 178 REV. THOMAS CHARLES WILLIAMS All else is secondary. It has been said that some of us in the holy ministry turn to social questions because we have lost our hold on the everlasting Gospel. The Dean of St. Paul’s said not long ago, “What is wrong with the Church is, the clergy have turned their attention from the unconverted to the unemployed.” You may not like that remark ; if so, you will have to write to the Dean. But before you write anywhere, give a thought to the solemn warning it suggests. God forbid that in a Christian pulpit any man should speak of the sufferings of our time but with tears of genuine sympathy. Yet the supreme tragedy after all is not that men should be without work—terrible as that is—but that man should be without God. The sad world, however, is gradually getting tired of its own pleasures, though it has little patience with our endless and often senseless squabbles. The field appears on all hands to be wonderfully ready for the harvest. Our age, which is in many respects the greatest in all history, is hungering for a simple, strong, sustaining and comforting Gospel preached, it may be, without much elegance or eloquence, but with convincing sincerity. This Gospel, which we have, we must hold and proclaim to the world with that tender catholicity of practical appeal which becomes a law of liberty so charged with the all-embracing love of God. Rev. JOHN WADDELL, M.A. THE REV. JOHN WADDELL, M.A. MINISTER of Fisherwick Church, Belfast. Third son of the Rev. John Waddell, B.A., of Newington Church, Belfast, and of Mary, daughter of the Rev. Robert Anderson, Banbridge, Co. Down. Married Esther, daughter of the Rev. R. J. Morrell, Bangor, Co. Down. Educated at Royal Academy, Belfast; Queen’s University, Belfast ; and the Presbyterian Theological College, Belfast. Twice Exhibitioner at Intermediate Exam- inations of Ireland, three times Exhibitioner in Royal University of Ireland; Scholar of Royal University and of Queen’s College in Ancient Classics. Graduated B.A. and subsequently M.A. in Queen’s University. Three times Scholar in the Presbyterian College ; Smiley Medallist in Oratory, Magill Bursar for Pulpit Eloquence. First holder of the Leitch Post-Graduate Prize of £100 in the Greek New Testament. Minister of the First Presbyterian Church, Bangor, Co. Down, 1902-14 ; of Egremont Church, Wallasey, Cheshire, 1914- 1920; and of Fisherwick Church, Belfast, since 1920. Author of ‘‘ The Life Here and the Life Hereafter.’’ Convenor of the General Assembly’s Committee on Church Work in Belfast. RELIGION IS LIFE Rev. Joun Wanppett, M.A. “Go, stand, and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.’ Acts v, 20. I WANT to lay the emphasis on the words “this Life.” It was a revolutionary description of religion. There is much in Christianity which cannot be called new. Many things in other philosophies and faiths of the ancient world were true and beautiful, before Christ was born. A great deal, therefore, had necessarily been antici- pated, and the Christian code was not entirely a novel revelation, but what Christianity brought into the world for the first time was the thought of religion as a life. The Greek schools had made men familiar with the idea of a philosophy to be accepted. When Paul preached in Athens he found a people there satiated with the pursuit of abstract truth, trying to stimulate their jaded appetites with futile searching after some new thing. Their failure and despair were due to their divorcing truth from life—a mistake which leaves men helpless in face of the buffetings of time and fate—and they acknowledged their ill-success by erecting an altar to the unknown god. In the same city, and in every Grecian community, there N 183 RELIGION IS LIFE had sprung into existence as a protest against such vain philosophising a new religion of ritual and ecstasy combined—the cults into which men and women were solemnly initiated, and which practised a popular fellowship of feasts and mystic observance. These did much to pave the way for Christianity by their levelling of social distinctions and their promotion of easy comradeship, but they were not, any more than the Academic Schools, a real religion. From his early days in Tarsus also Paul had been familiar with religion as the observance of a code. His orthodoxy had been unblemished, and he had striven to keep the Divinest law which the world knew till Jesus came. But the record of his failure and the weakness of the law itself is written with a mordant pen in that terrible seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. Philosophy, ritual, orthodoxy, alike fall short of essential religion. Religion is life—that is the new and _ startling announcement of New Testament preaching, an announcement which revolutionised the ancient world. Is it not true, that we require to lay the emphasis in these days also upon this great fact ¢ If Christianity is to any extent losing its hold upon men and women in the twentieth century, it is just because we allow it to be identified with codes or rituals or philosophies, and divorce it from life. For life is what men and women are supremely interested in, and religion must touch the central things, if it is to win its way and lay hold upon the human heart. Thought may be the basis of life, 184 REV. JOHN WADDELL but thought must find expression in will and action, before it becomes life. Life is movement, or as someone has put it: ‘‘ Life is what we are alive to.”’ That is why life is so poor a thing to many, because they are alive only to money and the main chance and their own selfish interests and gratification of the senses. Religion is life in a higher sense. It is love and beauty and sonship with God. Not things, but the meaning of things. Not position, but service. Not acquisitiveness, but the exercise of all our capacities in the mastery of the material and the use of the spiritual. As the psychologists say: “We learn things by expressing them.” Religion is life. Now, the life which Christianity preached as the essence of true religion, might, I think, be summed up under three heads—a new spirit, a new conduct, and a new power. The people of the ancient world had fallen into despair. Their religions could not inspire them, and the more noble-hearted men and women were, the more they felt their hopelessness. Suicide had become almost an inevitable end for the virtuous man. The light of expectation had gone | out. The early exponents of Christianity impressed the pagan world, perhaps most of all, by the lustre of hope which shone from their faces and illumined their lives. No philosopher had ever spoken of God as the God of hope, or suggested that religion could fill men with joy. But Christianity did not merely teach this new spirit ; it produced it. Walter Pater in one of his books tells of a lad in the days 185 RELIGION IS LIFE of the Roman Empire, who was attracted to a young soldier he had casually met, “ because of a certain something in his life, which drew him strangely and touched a deep chord in his soul. He found it difficult to explain. It was like a fragrance, a delicate perfume. It was like the shining of a very beautiful light. It touched and moved his very soul. It made him wonder. As they drew close together, he asked what it was, and he found that this soldier lad was a Christian, and bit by bit, in spite of his superstition, he too was drawn to Christ.” It was this new spirit which Christianity mysteriously put within men that sent them forth to be a power in the world. If we had more of it in these days, it would not so commonly be claimed that many who stand outside the Church are just as fully Christian as those within. There would be an unmistakeable quality and accent in the faith of those who belong to Christ, a victorious hopefulness, which would differentiate them from those who live on a merely material plane. The late Lord Morley, of all famous men who in a Christian land have held aloof from Christianity, was perhaps the best example of a pure and lofty character. How did he stand in respect of this distinctively Christian spirit of hopefulness when faced with a supreme test? Readers of his “Recollections’’ feel that “a cloud of sadness deepening into gloom toward its close hangs over his life record.” The war was a set-back to all his traditions, and there is not a gleam of hopefulness 186 REV. JOHN WADDELL in his later writings that the horrors of those terrible years might be the birth pangs of a better order. The same catastrophe overwhelmed Andrew Carnegie, who had built his hopes for the world on the pinnacle of a temple of peace to be erected by statesmanship and money. The war shattered that dream, and he had no higher hope to fall back on. “ Henceforth,’ writes his widow, ‘he was never able to interest himself in private affairs again. He died of a broken heart.’’ What a contrast are such examples of modern culture and modern paganism to the stalwart hope of the early Christians, face to face with a tyranny worse than Germany’s, and a corruption more putrid than even that of modern civilisation in Europe. The new spirit of Christianity is one which makes life seem worth while. People talk sometimes as though Christianity were simply a system which inculcates hope for the world to come. Because this world is so full of wretchedness there must be another, where the balance will be redressed. The very opposite is the case. Heaven is not a compen- sation, but a development. Because this world is so glorious, therefore the glory of heaven must be surpassing and unspeakable. That is the Gospel of Paul and the early Christian Church. Life is infinitely worth while here as well as_ hereafter. Don't forget that all the daringly optimistic things in the New Testament were written by men living under far worse conditions than we, by men in the grasp of a brutal oppressor, men who were exiles, 187 RELIGION IS LIFE prisoners, martyrs, but who had caught from their Master a new courage and an unquenchable hope. One is amazed often to find on what flimsy grounds the modern Christian is willing to abandon his faith—what a little thing is allowed to block his vision. Someone he has trusted betrays him, and so he flings his religion overboard. An employer who professes to be a Christian has ill-treated him, and so he will not go to Church. A fellow-member of the congregation has cold-shouldered him, and so he will have nothing more to do with Christ. Business reverses come upon him which he feels he has not deserved, and he sacrifices his faith and hope. Ah, brethren, we need to get out of these petty rocks and shoals into the deep sea. You have seen a vessel lying at anchor in the calm of a summer day. A few hours afterwards, storm sweeps down on the bay and the wind blows dead on shore, The wise captain will not stay there. He will weigh anchor and steam out to sea. He will not trust the cables in the narrow waters when the storm- wind blows and strains their feeble strength. The only place of safety is the open sea. It is so with our religion. Mechanical attachments to Christ, the cords of convention, the narrow seas of an easy surface faith are useless when the storm is up. We must move out into that wide ocean of God’s love and care, on which the early Christians rested, when with undaunted breasts they faced a world in arms and won it for Jesus Christ. Religion is a big thing—a thing that makes life seem gloriously 188 REV. JOHN WADDELL worth while—a thing that renders a man oblivious to petty insults and victorious over great trials, saved by an unconquerable hope. But further this new spirit evinces itself in a new conduct. It is not merely the observing of rules ; it is the living of a life. Feelings are not enough. They must be expressed in life. Love feeds on the expression of love. Someone has said: “ Despair has three heads: agnosticism, which makes the pilgrim lose courage in the pursuit of knowledge ; pessimism, which makes him lose courage in the strife for progress ; cynicism, which makes him lose courage in the search for virtue.” We have seen something of how pessimism can be routed by Christian hope. Let us now consider how cynicism can be conquered by Christian holiness. Since it became popular to say: ‘‘ Does it matter what a man believes?’ people have soon learnt to ask: “ Does it matter what a man does? ”’ It is inevitable, we are told, that nations should fight ; it is the law of nature that men should be impure; and so nothing can put a stop to the holocausts of men and women offered on the cruel altars of war and lust. Business is business, we are assured; there is no room for sentiment. Men must live, and short cuts are allowable. The rapacity of the rich is to be matched by the envy of the poor ; and all classes must be left to struggle blindly and selfishly for place and power and profit and ease. The goods of life are these tangible material things, and in com- parison with them, honour, truth, love, service, 189 RELIGION IS LIFE are of small account. That is the cynic’s creed. Are we to sink in the mire of acquiescence with a view of life like that? Are we to be content with a religion no better than the philosophy of Samuel Smiles—a smug satisfaction in self-help and self- gratification? Is that life at all, or mere animal existence? It is certainly not the Christian way— the way of service. Christianity is something higher and purer, nobler and more positive, than the life even of the decent fellow, who spends his allotted span in getting (as one prominent man expressed it) “as much happiness out of life as he can without interfering too much with the happiness of other people.” Christianity takes a far higher view of life than that. You bring a child into an engine house and turn a screw there. The child thinks only of the tiny screw and the hand he sees turning it as twisting a little piece of brass. But the engineer knows, that this turning of the screw is setting free the imprisoned steam that will drive machinery of incalculable power. That is an illustration of the two ways in which we may look at human life. We may see it childishly as so many little acts of small significance. A business is the taking of a partner, the selling of goods, the search for fortune—nothing more. But to the enlightened eye it is the opening up of oppor- tunities for God to work; the anvil on which character is hammered into shape; the window through which the everlasting light may shine; the avenue along which Christ may come to your 190 REV. JOHN WADDELL soul, or through you to some fellow man. What a strange dignity and interest it would lend to all our common life if we regarded it as the means whereby God works in us and through us for His own good pleasure! No single act or aspect of our daily business would be insignificant, all would have their true meaning in the point of operation which they give to God. Religion would become co- extensive with life—nay, it would be life itself— conduct, character, unselfish service. The world would cease to be a common place—still more, a place for frivolity or sin. The man could no longer live a mere surface existence ; for in a world with the depths and possibilities so opened up, to take a superficial view, and to reject the voice of God, speaking out of every circumstance and every situation, to conceive of life as nothing but the making of money and the eating of bread and the playing of games, would be seen in its true nature as a demoralising and a degrading thing. Professor Gilbert Murray puts the question in a pamphlet, what it was that sent so many of our young men out to the front at the beginning of the war with an extraordinary elation and readiness of spirit, and gives this answer: that for the average man to find something to do which he can do, and spend his whole life in doing, is the secret of a very high happiness. Therein lies the happiness of Chris- tianity, a great cause, a great Master, a great joy in service, and a great hope. I must compress our last point into a few words. IgI RELIGION IS LIFE The Christian religion is life, which manifests itself in a new power—the power to attain the ideals that it teaches. It was here that the ancient world failed. Philosophers could teach, but they could not give their scholars the strength to perform. The man who receives the hopeful spirit of Christ’s gospel into his heart has that within him which enables him to rise above the circumstances of life. Instead of clinging to the hope of a better world hereafter, because this world is hopelessly rotten and irremediably bad (which seems to be the doctrine of a writer like Dean Inge), he makes that better world his habitation here and now, setting up (as Matthew Arnold puts it in noble words) ‘a mark of everlasting light above the howling senses’ ebb and flow.” How is that possible? What is the motive power, and how does it take possession of a man’s soul? Go back to the early Church and you find it all plainly expressed in the records of those triumphant days: “ They went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them.” Napoleon said once: “‘ When I was in my prime I could get thousands to follow me, but I had to be there.” Well, brethren, Christ is here and that is the motive power, Christ in you the Hope of glory—the hope of all life. The message of the Resurrection, on which Christianity stands, is just this, that Christ has been liberated from the bonds of space and time to become your Master, your Inspirer, your Strength, the Life of your soul. You say, how can | know that He is here. How can I feel His 192 REV. JOHN WADDELL power? ... Does He not speak in the ideals that attract us like the luminaries of the nightly sky; in the shame that wrings our consciences when we sin; in the indignation which fires our hearts when wrongs are done; in the sick longing for a higher life, which calls to the very meanest of us in our better moments, and impels us to stretch out lame hands to God? Give yourselves up to these impulses and longings; yield your hearts to these better feelings and convictions; and there will come to you, perhaps suddenly, perhaps gradu- ally, but as certainly as to-morrow’s sun will shine, the assurance, that Jesus Christ with all His power and grace and loveliness is your Redeemer and Friend. “Thanks be to Him, Who never is dishonoured in the spark He gave us from His fire of fires, and bade Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid, While that burns on, though all the rest grow dark.”’ 193 tho ey a Pega PPry Asis ¥oK rane te, en ot ah ay hed BRN AP We Hey eee aks mss ay PROS at) iid. . | anki takai ae REN MeN Se POE age: ay? pay: PAG th ae eel ie Ph, Loe ea niet ET, SP a ee ome ich de da a Ke a % on * stg: PRES Pah ee ey er Le 4 Pind: OES ae ante shea * ra , , Pe ol hd 4 AAT | j { Bia MS ARE Sk at EA oe Bee £8 4 TUE TCR MEG Ani tae) ty, | hen kd ey wi sent CA SR SE i aa 1 A +h GANS AREe a Ry OAS Hy 2} Tey eee ef 4, bi ba inte 4 shh ie te Te, : TPR OERe (elbey te? ONSITE? oar le wnat aa Fis ny 1 lah ft wy he 4 fina pb tld baal i . ~~ cf why te, ie ee , we i 4 7 ; ‘ ' ) ( i ef ; i af + Vi As ee ' ; \iee i ’ Rk 4 lina e) " cya Vien ? bs \ oy t * ' */ e % ; * os 5 Af iii , "ef ay } ; : : 4 / ’ ¢ ‘ viwl ‘al > De ; By Nara yy Le A fae Rev. CANON VERNON F. STORR, M.A. THE REV. VERNON FAITHFULL STORK, M.A. CANON OF WESTMINSTER, and Examining Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Canon Storr is the son of the late Edward Storr, Indian Civil Service, and of the late Emily Mary, daughter of Rev. James Faithfull, Vicar of Cheshunt. Educated at Clifton College, he became in 1888 Scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford; and in 1895 Fellow of University College, Oxford. Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge University, 1904-7. Select Preacher at both Oxford and Cambridge. Was Canon Residentiary of Winchester, 1907-1916. Rector of Bramshott, 1901-1906; of Headbourne Worthy, 1906-1910; of Bentley, 1916-1921. Among his publications are ‘‘ The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1800-1860),” ‘‘ Christianity and Immortality,” ‘‘ Development and Divine Purpose,” ‘‘The Problem of the Cross,” ‘“‘ The Missionary Genius of the Bible,” and ‘‘ The Living God.” THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP Canon Vernon F. Storr, M.A. “ And as Jesus passed by from thence, he saw aman, called Matthew, sitting at the place of toll : and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.” St. Matthew ix, 9. “Fottow me”; two words only in the appeal which Jesus made to this customs house officer, but those two words take us into the very heart of Christian discipleship. The essence of such dis- cipleship is loyalty to a Person, and, if we would appreciate its meaning, we must think in terms of friendship, companionship, obedience rendered in love, the mysterious power of attraction exercised by a dominating personality. God’s progressive revelation of Himself culminated in the coming of the Perfect Person. That Person has ever since remained central in the Christian system, and devotion to Him is the key to the Christian way of life. Christ’s purpose, so far as we can gather it from the Gospels, was to establish among men a Kingdom of God, or a society whose members were to live in fellowship together, ruling their lives by certain principles. This society was to grow with the 197 THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP centuries. In ideal it was co-extensive with humanity. Its influence was to permeate every department of life. All life was to be brought under the sway of the new redemptive forces with which the Kingdom was charged. Now it is interesting to observe the method adopted by Jesus for the execution of His purpose. He might have done something very different from what in actual fact He did do. For example, He might, like the founders of the American constitution, have mapped out in advance an elaborate organisation for the Christian society, which should govern all its future growth, giving detailed directions for its develop- ment. Or He might have prescribed for the citizens of the society a code of rules for the guidance of their conduct, such a code, for example, as had been drawn up by the Scribes. But He did neither of these things. I do not say that He provided no organisation at all for His society; but what He did in that direction was of the very simplest kind. He left His followers two sacraments, one of ad- mission into the society, the other a sacrament of fellowship; and He gave a commission to His disciples, “the eleven and they that were with them,’ to carry on His work. In our Lord’s mind questions of organisation were clearly of secondary importance. Nor did He leave His society without any instruction for daily living. But He gave them principles, not rules; principles which could be variously applied as the circumstances of the society changed in years to come. A rigid rule 198 REV. VERNON FAITHFULL STORR quickly becomes out of date; a principle may be deathless just because it admits of manifold applica- tions. Shall we ever outgrow the need for showing love and humility and self-sacrifice? What in point of fact Jesus did was to select twelve men and train them. He took them into close association with Himself, patiently taught them, became their Friend, and gradually led them into a ripening sympathy with His own ideals and interests. They began to catch some of His spirit, and we see them becoming more and more attracted by His Person- ality. The education of these men is a standing example of the truth that religion is “ caught,” not “taught.” To these men was given the task of spreading the new religion. Like a fire which, leaping from point to point, brightens as it burns, so the new teaching diffused itself because one man told another the good news, and personality kindled personality to see fresh visions and realise fresh possibilities of growth and service. The call which came to St. Matthew comes to each one of us to-day. Jesus Christ claims our individual loyalty and devotion. That call, heard first by a lakeside in Galilee, has echoed all down the centuries, losing none of its intensity with lapse of time; nay, gaining rather something in urgency, as life’s complexity deepens and humanity searches wistfully for some sure guidance. ‘“‘ Follow me.” But the reply comes, ‘‘ How can I follow one so far above me? He so flawless, I so sin-stained ! He so strong and perfect, I so weak! Is it not O | 199 THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP mere mockery to set me in presence of this lofty ideal and expect me to reach it?” We may be sure that no word of mockery ever fell from the lips of Jesus; but the doubt of our questioner does send us to make further inquiry into the nature of the discipleship, whose essence we have defined as loyalty to a Person. This relationship between Master and disciple is a double relationship. There is the relation of the disciple to Jesus, and there is the relation of Jesus to the disciple. Let us consider each in turn. (x) The disciple is called to obedience and loyalty. Upon every life Jesus Christ makes a claim. No one, who has once really come face to face with Him, can be in quite the same position he was in before. He has seen something above him. He has heard a challenge. Henceforth life shows him two roads, one leading up to the mountain heights, the other down to the lower levels of the plain. Between them he has to choose. He may choose the lower road, as so many do; but even then there will come to him moments of regret and uneasiness, and an inner voice will accuse him of disloyalty. We cannot, then, evade the challenge, but it is fatally easy to underestimate its seriousness, There are thousands who make profession of following Jesus, yet who never really walk along the path of true discipleship. To register yourself as a Christian on a Church roll is not discipleship, neither is in- tellectual assent to the Christian creed. Disciple- 200 REV. VERNON FAITHFULL STORR ship is a matter of the will, of the heart, of the whole personality. The disciple is one who tries to reproduce in his own life the spirit of his Master, who tries to act in daily life as Jesus would have acted, who seeks to bring the whole of life under the control of the principles which made the life of Jesus the thing of eternal wonder that it is. Into such discipleship must enter the temper of self-sacrifice. There must be readiness to give up things for the Master and His cause, a glad acceptance of pain and suffering, a spending of self in the service of humanity. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.”” Above all, there must be the daily fight for character, the war with tempta- tion, the recollection of the holiness without which no man shall see the Lord. Now all this means effort ; it means the calling into play of the will. In all true Christian discipleship is a note of moral urgency. And as the call to follow sounds in our ears the question comes, Of what nature is my following? How much real earnestness is there in my life of religion, how much giving up of that which costs me something? Am I grow- ing in likeness to Jesus Christ? Can I begin to see my way to the hope of being able one day (it may be in the far future) to say with 5t. Paul, ““I have been crucified with Christ; yet 201 THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me’? (2) But over against the relation of the disciple to the Master stands the Master’s relation to the disciple ; and to this we now turn. If we study the life of a man like St. Paul, if we seek from his writings to gather what was the secret of that life and what its main controlling impulse, we find that the Apostle felt himself to be the recipient of power from a Christ who was alive. Discipleship for him was a following of Christ, because Christ gave the power to follow. “In Christ ’’ is one of the commonest expressions in his — letters. It has different shades of meaning in the different places in which it is used, but the central idea conveyed by the phrase is that of communica- tion of life from a higher source. Union with the Living Christ is the key to St. Paul’s teaching and experience. His teaching flows out of his experience ; and his experience had proved to him that he was not left to fight his way through life alone, but that there went with him a Divine Companion, wiser, stronger, more loving than himself, whose Personality interpenetrated his own, and enabled him to do things which he could never have done unaided. Here, then, is the answer to the question, How can I hope to follow Christ? We can so hope because Christ gives us power. Life and power are the words which lie at the centre of Christianity. When Jesus came to earth there were many lecturers and teachers holding up beautiful ideals of life, 202 REV. VERNON FAITHFULL STORR but those who listened to them said despairingly, “We have no power to reach those heights.” On that “hard, pagan world” moral impotence was written plain. Life was for thousands a weary thing, without inspiration, with no sunlight to touch the clouds to diviner beauty. And into that world came Jesus, bringing a yet higher ideal of living, but telling men of a power of God which could help them to live up to it. Jesus revealed to this disillusioned world new springs of life, offered Himself to men as the source of spiritual energy, said that their Father in heaven loved them and was holding out to them hands full of blessing. From that day to this men have come to that fountain to receive the water of life, and have gone away refreshed and strengthened. If we want proof that Christ gives life and power we must turn to Christian experience. There is the record running through history like a line of light; there is the continuous testimony from every class of person that Christ exercises this transforming influence. This experience cannot be set aside as pious fancy or illusion. Illusions are not so persistent, nor do they make for sanity and balance of living. No; for an effect so remarkable we must postulate an adequate cause. The only adequate cause is a Christ who is to-day alive. Some of those whom Christ has healed were in the very lowest depths of degradation. But one day they somehow found out Jesus and came to Him utterly broken and ashamed. They gave Him their 203 THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP lives, seemingly worthless, perhaps almost feeling it an insult to offer Him such a gift. Andlo! He smiled on them and received them. Fresh power came into them, gradually the hold of sin upon them loosened, and now they are in Him “ new creatures.’ Jesus Christ has to-day the same power to redeem even the most abandoned criminal. But it is not only the criminal He saves. He can give to every life a new aim, a new centre, a new freshness. He can send us all out to our tasks with changed outlook, making us feel that it is worth while to put our very best energies into our work. He is the great character-builder, the great source of inspira- tion for all humanity. ‘“ Behold, I make all things new.” That voice from the throne is a challenge to the world to make proof of His renovating power. ‘‘ Follow me,” then, means the giving of ourselves to One who just longs to help us, who is very patient with us, utterly tender, ready to forgive; yet strong with all the power of One who went through life without a sin, who fought death and conquered it, and now has all authority in earth and heaven, and holds His power that He may bestow it on us. Discipleship is the committal of ourselves to the keeping of the divine human Friend. A tree is known by its fruits, and such viele of ourselves to Christ will have its fruits in service for mankind. A selfish or self-centred Christian is a contradiction in terms. We follow One who came “not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” 204 REV. VERNON FAITHFULL STORR We find our true selves just in proportion as we seek to enter into wider relationships with our fellows. Here it is important to remember that the command “ Follow me” has nothing narrow about it. We can follow Christ in any sphere of life. Jesus always respected individuality. Part of His broad universality consists just in this, that He can meet the needs of our differing tempera- ments. Christ is ready to consecrate all human endeavour which is not sinful. “I am the Way,” said Jesus, and there is a splendid breadth about the saying, for His Way gathers up into itself all our lesser ways. Poet, engineer, man of science, trader, soldier—they can all be themselves and do their varied tasks, and yet all the while be true to Him. But if there is no real spirit of service, there is no real following along the Way. ‘‘ On the one hand,” wrote Dr. Hort in ‘‘ The Way, the Truth, the Life,” “ devotion to a person, human or divine, seems in our best moments the all in all of life. Yet it fades and becomes an unreality or a disease when it is not translated into wide and diffusive operation ; conversely all worlds of operation fatigue and desolate and come to vanity. In our finiteness we are driven to oscillate between the person and the world, whatever world it may be. But Christ's word exhibits them as meeting in Him. He, the most personal of persons, is also the dominating centre of every world.” Put that into simpler language and see what it means, It means first, that loyalty to Christ is 205 THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP no mere luxury of private emotion; it must show itself in service, or it will become like salt that has lost its savour. Secondly, it means that service without the inspiration which Christ gives, and without the aim which He supplies, will be in danger of becoming wearisome routine. But if we link our service to His Person and perform it in His name, and for His cause, then both work and worker will be transfigured. The work will be better done because upon the worker falls the benediction of His inspiring Personality. We give ourselves to Him; in response He gives Himself to us. We offer Him our service, unworthy though — it is, and He blesses it and makes it fruitful in ways beyond our ken. Day by day He sends us to our tasks with fresh hope and fresh courage, turning even our failures into the materials for future triumphs. “Follow me” is the story of our Christian pil- grimage on earth. Will the story of eternity be any other? Will not that other life be just a closer following of this everlasting Friend of man? 3 206 Rev. H. R. L. SHEPPARD, M.A. THE REV. HUGH RICHARD LAWRIE SHEPPARD, M.A. Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Mr. Sheppard is the second son of the late Rev. Canon Edgar Sheppard. Educated at Marlborough, he passed on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He became Secretary’to the Bishop of Stepney, 1905 ; Cuddes- don College, 1906; Chaplain, Oxford House, 1907; Deputy Priest-in-Ordinary to King Edward VII, and to King George V; Head of Oxford House, 1909-10; Chaplain of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, 1910; Extra Private Chaplain to the Archbishop of York, 1911; Priest in Charge of St. Mary’s, Bourdon Street, and Grosvenor Chapel, S. Audley Street ; Chaplain of the Cavendish Club; Temporary Chaplain in France in 1914; Hon. Secretary of the Life and Liberty Movement; Select Preacher at Cambridge in 1921; Lecturer in Pastoral Theology at Cam- bridge, 1921; Proctor of the Diocese of London ; Hon. Chaplain to H.M. the King. Among his publications are: ‘“‘Two Days Before” (S.C.M.), 1924, “The Human Parson,” 1924. He is also Editor of St. Martin’s Review. THE TEST OF FPAITH Rev. H. R. L. Suepparp, M.A. AN old year in pictures and cartoons is always depicted as going away to be unremembered and unloved; a new year as coming in full of hope. Punch had a cartoon to that effect recently. As I looked at it, I could not help finding myself caught under the subtle suggestion that everything had been all wrong last year, and that everything was going to be perfectly beautiful during 1926. Of course, neither of those suggestions is true. If good things are to dawn for us this year we must go out and fetch them in; the world will not get better because we hope it may. We will be full of hope, we will be full of courage; we will ask God that whatever may befall us this year, at least we shall not be found lacking either in hope or in courage ; but if brighter days are to dawn—and there is no reason whatsoever why they shouldn’t—we must get very busy. I want to ask you a series of questions. Do you want your country to be Christian, or do you not? Do you think that Christianity is really played out, and are you one who feels that Jesus is dead now long ago, and that He has nothing whatsoever to offer to life as it is to-day? Do you think, or do you not think, that if the principles that Christ 209 THE TEST OF FAITH taught were ruthlessly applied to human life things would get better? Does this Christianity have your vote? Would you will it to be true? And about Jesus Christ Himself—is He the nearest to God whom you’ve ever known or heard of ? Would you rather have Him as your God than anyone else in the Day of Judgment—if Day of Judgment there is to be—would you be judged by Jesus Christ, or would you prefer to be judged by some god of your own creation and fancy? We are still in name a Christian nation: do you wish us to be one in fact? Would you like your children to gtow up as real Christians, or would you prefer to. warn them against that old superstition? Is it our fault, or is it God’s fault, that Jesus is now so remote from our lives? When we did try to follow Him, were we better or were we worse ? There is only one way of testing the truth or the falsity of any creed, and that is by living it out and seeing what happens. Have we ever lived our faith out and seen what has happened? And if you answer, as some of you must, ‘“ Jesus Christ is dead now, let us find some other Saviour,” then say so frankly. The world needs a Saviour, and if you know someone who can save better than He can, then in God’s name let us know who. There is something fine in those who follow the star and go out into darkness not knowing where they go, seeking the truth, They may never come to the inn where the Child Jesus lies, but at least they are seekers after truth ; and if any of you who are seeking, 210 REV. H. R. L. SHEPPARD have found, for God’s sake tell us. We are still wanting a Saviour and we believe that Jesus Christ can be that Saviour, and we ask you not merely to tell us that our Christ is no Saviour but, if you can, to tell us someone who is stronger than He. There is nothing you can say in honesty that will shock. We wish the Faith we hold to meet every searchlight of reverent criticism. We believe it will emerge the stronger. But if you answer, as the vast majority of English people still would answer, ‘‘ Jesus Christ is the world’s Saviour,” if you can say in the words of the old hymn: “Thy touch has still its ancient power, No word from Thee can fruitless fall ; Hear, in this solemn evening hour, And in Thy mercy heal us all,” if that be your verdict, and I doubt not that it 1s the verdict of most of you, then surely it is time we really got busy taking ourselves and our own land back to our Saviour. It is time we claimed the habitable world for the Christ Whom we acknowledge. “ And that’s not done by song or sword or pen. There’s but one way—God make us better men.” “ Would to God,” once said an old Saint, “ that all cold-blooded, faint-hearted Christian soldiers of Christ would look again to Jesus and His love, and 2II THE TEST OF FAITH when they look I would have them look yet again and fill themselves with the beholding of His beauty.” There is, you know, a crisis in religion to-day. Thank God that that is so. The only ages in history where there have been no crises have been the spiritually dead ages. Whenever the Spirit of God breathes upon the souls of men the effect is to awaken.a great religious crisis. The crisis to-day in religion turns around the question as to whether Jesus Christ shall be supreme in the life of organised Christianity. It sometimes looks as if the spirit of convention and ecclesiasticism were running Him close. As things are now, Jesus Christ is not really supreme. We have never quite known what to make of Jesus Christ. If He came again might not even the churches combine together to persecute Him as a dangerous fellow, subversive to all ecclesiastical law and doctrine? What kind of welcome do you suppose that He would have at the Vatican, in the National Assembly, or in Free Church gatherings? When He spoke of the values of God, how many would really listen, how many afterwards would dare to follow after Him, even at midnight, I wonder ? Many have long since lost faith in the Society of Jesus being able to do anything more than provide a little consolation for those who have fallen out of the race of life, or a series of Prayer Book services for those who are that way inclined. And some of those are not people who may be thought to 212 REV. H, R. L. SHEPPARD have their hearts hardened against God. Some of them care passionately for righteousness and truth and justice. Somehow the Christian religion in its long history has become entangled with a multitude of things that do not really belong to it, with a great deal too much dogma, with a great deal too much philosophy, with a great deal too much convention. We have taken the Christ out of the open air, and the world has not always been able to find Him where we have put Him, If you take Christianity along with its latter-day entangle- ments, encumbrances, unnatural alliances and its irrelevances, it is indeed hard to understand its divine and perfect simplicity. Sometimes good men find it a very perplexing thing. It has been said—though some may think it. foolish—it has been said that if all the theologians and ecclesi- astically-minded would only take themselves off, Christianity would have more disciples to-day. Let me say a word to you who sit outside and criticise all the time, for you are as much to blame as anyone else, you who have seen the light and do believe in Christ but can do nothing more gallant than criticise. Please accept the full blame yourself for what has happened to organised Christianity. The better mind of the nation cares little or nothing for the niceties of ecclesiastical order—it does care for Christ. It is tired of the barriers that the churches have built, not against anti-Christ, but against each other. It is not interested in exploring the situation as between 213 THE TEST OF FAITH ourselves and Rome or the Free Churches. What it really desires—and I am heart and soul with its desire—is not that we should explore the situation, but that we should act as if the situation had never arisen. This business of “‘ Safety First’ is no use to the Church of the living God. The world needs salvation badly. It is haunting the places where it thinks such salvation may be found. It is like someone who has lost his way and cannot find it. It badly needs salvation from a life of selfishness back into a life of love. Nothing can happen until the Supremacy of Christ and His teaching about God is assured. You do not hesitate to confess your love and devotion for Jesus Christ. Are you really honestly trying to make things better in His Name, or do you like merely to sit outside and laugh at us, at those who are trying within the Body of Christ to try and make things better and nobler, to try to make the Church of Christ—and there must be the Society of Christ—more passionate, more real, more sincere? It’s so easy to throw stones, so easy to criticise, so easy to be superior. Are you not ina rather contemptible position? Not hesitating to acknowledge Christ, you will not do a hand’s turn to help His Society to bring itself to life. I know full well the faults of those of us who are inside. Sometimes we do seem so to bind His arms to His side with our conventions and controversies, that are entirely irrelevant to the Gospel of Christ, that the Lord Himself cannot stretch out His hand 214 REV. H. R. L. SHEPPARD to heal the wounds of His people. It’s high time that you and we did a great deal better. It is high time we remembered that Christianity did not begin in argument but in a deed, in a deed that was ‘done and in a Life that was lived. The propaganda of Christianity is as simple as this: ‘“ Follow Me,” “Go and do thou likewise.” The religious crisis and perplexity of to-day is caused because we will subordinate the thing done to the thing said. In the religion which Christ came to found upon the earth, something worth talking about was done before the talking began. Men will never be argued into the Kingdom of God; they can’t be, but they will always be led when they meet a real sincere Christian. You know of the man who said that he never quite understood Christianity but he had met it, and that is really the point. We have been devoted to our Lord in our speech, but never quite convinced that he was practical, never quite sure that a great movement run on His lines could be successful : never really alive to His genius, to His humanity, to His power. We have always gone on to the little path because we have been so afraid of tackling the great one; we have tried to keep Christianity alive in a parish hall, we have not dared to try it out in a public square. Jesus Christ did not care much for the local, He cared always for the universal. The great Church of Christ has not yet arrived, but it is on its way and it waits the warm hearts P 215 THE TEST OF FAITH of you who love the Christ ; it needs you in it in order that it may really become passionate again. It can arrive if you will give to it your best, if you will care for it, if you will love it, if you will go and try and make it very real and very strong and very sincere. We have, as I have said, refused to take Jesus Christ seriously. We have not believed that He meant what He said and was able to fulfil His promises. Christianity began in a deed, and again it began in a friendship. He chose twelve that they might be with Him as His friends; He calls them by their name. It begins and it ends really in friendship with Jesus Christ. Do you know the story of an episode that took place in Manchester many years ago, when the Salvation Army first came into being? A Salvation Army lassie stood within the dock, charged by people who in those days thought Salvation Army work most disreputable and unseemly, with ob- structing a very broad highway; and there was a young magistrate sitting on the Bench called Crossley—whose name some of you may know— and as he saw this child witnessing to her Christ in the face of the dull, respectable people who were attacking her, he got up from the Bench, he left the Bench, and slowly he walked into the dock to be by her side. That is one of the best examples that I know of what Christ can do for the one who really tries in difficulty to befriend Christianity and to be by the side of Christ. I believe with my whole soul that He can come down and stand by us while 216 REV. H. R. L. SHEPPARD we make our defence, and give us power and inward peace in external turmoil. And you who are looking for a Faith, not that you will have to carry but that will carry you, I ask you to-night to follow your own highest ideals, to follow the highest star that you see in the heavens —the star of service, the star of truth, the star of justice, the star of righteousness—follow it even if you have not ever seen the Christ, follow it as hard as you can. Be true to your own best ideals and one day even if you do not find Christ He will find you. : ‘“Q, young mariners, call your companions ; Launch your vessel and crowd your canvas, And ere it vanishes over the margin, After it, follow it, follow the gleam!” And I think if you dare to follow the gleam, you will ultimately come to the Christ. There are some days in history when the victory is only to the bold. Such a day is this. The Church that will not be bold and daring and adventurous has little to offer to a broken world to-day, and the man or the woman who won’t launch into the deep for the sake of ideals and dare with reverence to storm Heaven is of little service to a world that needs the salvation of its soul. 2A7 UA % pant i, yen om XK % tia), i i Ay hs: vag tela NF wok % i? siat es rs { RN a mis tt my pie AY a, Lars Baki sell +s. ‘ Muir gis? s 5 FY i \ fi J + a“ Vogt a a : . i , ” “s | . 4 oe a _» | ih Wi 1 ' Ais PLT, Sa tte ne sd ai iti aay ee : . , ahs # pitta d ul oe A v -~ 7m ¢ hI r rate " mibaee > 1) Der, ie ‘ Ape Sana C et rhe Oe CR MEA Mt hes rs fe ta mt | vies hee & i res ‘ Paar et ‘T i : ‘~ . ' ‘ i ' ; ; “a + 5 jun Hoe oe pl ite n we. pe 4 { Laan % ‘ ting A 5 elie iy, ‘ ; * i" y i ‘ ‘ t NE Ae ee wat ee Ne Meith LN ie) Sait Wri) ert. Pe A SAE Paleee ag . ’ ® ‘ Ane j * 3 ay as ‘ . SIL PAE 8 (okay, ie rON ELA) RAS : fi as v« ps3 4 in f ~ 2 6h 432 y x a “ - aa ‘7 i 7 PW wars ‘ : { * LOLA Cy , * n oa , f z ‘ ws \ ral i 4 a . YP 6 ' ca _ poy: Ua PEF RN VADER ge ae ‘ ah (Ga4> 4 F : i ee PIE | ” - * ¢ out >) , a Me iar 34 ae: . * $ : : o¥ Cy ; PA F ayy ’ ra ; ea ’ tes ie \ - ’ a Ok * he YC © 4 Soe river: ' , ? = Melee ne } - Ai iS cee Hes Auf eS 3 : us th jin Fy oe : we 53 5 é 4 é 4 ‘ ‘ 4 ‘ ‘ © 1 - ' ee | y * oh ‘ > } \ , ite ay ae = “ c “5 "q * 5 . + ' “y > ‘a es Als A tiaras et nN ca r i . 14 “4 F 5 7 r yh ait kity : * - 2 “a ui % 4 = ; 3 : . i + , r 1 et : I 4, Le a ‘ wis i (ART i j ¢ ? ir . t ‘ - r ‘ E » we } b oe g sae das i é r { ‘ oar Lapa : a + - 2 . 4 ‘ F 4 vie Pat ee > Si . Aw iw Hae n 4% 5 : i ne is fe wrea'J ae Tb ahr 7 q ~ a a4 ° A = ~ ‘ 7 fe i ( — nS : i & +3 ay oe ela vi ADB 43 ‘ oe t + by . 4 , ' * ’ 4 7 | ‘ x - * . t y ‘ Y i! ee | ry } 1 ; \ } + u v sd fo Ry K j ' j K i x a ¥ , ‘ : i ta ’ ‘ or : A 4 ‘ f ; * - | ' i i bo, . i Rey. DINSDALE T. YOUNG, D.D. REV. DINSDALE T. YOUNG, D.D. MINISTER of Westminster Central Hall since 1914. He was educated at private schools, then at Headingley Theological College, Leeds. He entered the Wesleyan ministry in 1879, and was the youngest candidate accepted by the Wesleyan Conference up to that time. He was called to churches at Highgate (London), Islington (Birm- ingham), “Centenary (York), Gravel Lane (Manchester), Bayswater (London), Nicolson Square (Edinburgh), Great Queen Street (London) ; and from 1906-1914 was Minister of Wesley’s Chapel, City Road, London. In addition to his regular pastorate, he conducts services and delivers lectures every week in all parts of the kingdom, travelling on an average 10,000 miles a year, and doing considerable literary work; also taking an active part in undenominational work of various kinds. In 1914 he became President of the Wesleyan Conference. His publications include: ‘“‘Girding on the Armour: Letters to a Young Preacher,” ‘‘ Neglected People of the Bible,” ‘The Enthusiasm of God,’’ “‘ Robert Newton: The Eloquent Divine,” ‘‘The Travels of the Heart,” ‘Messages for Home and Life,” ‘‘ The Unveiled Evangel,” ‘‘Heroic Leaders,’ and ‘“‘ Stars of Retrospect (an autobiography).” ee Oe a eee A CASUAL QUESTION AND ITS MODERN IMPLICATIONS Rev. Dinspate T. Younc, D.D. “ And he said, Dost thou know Greek ?”’ (R.V.). Acts XxXi, 37. WHAT concern have we in this episodical question of long ago? Surely some, perhaps much, or it would not have place in the Book of God. There was an unprecedented uproar in Jerusalem. The metropolis was in a ferment: it seethed with excitement. The innocent cause of the perturbation was that big little man St. Paul. Was he not the most commanding figure of history except the Incarnate God ? ‘The violence of the crowd ”’ bore him to the foot of the steps leading up to the Tower of Antonio, here called “‘ The Castle.’’ As he stands upon the steps “the Chief Captain,” Claudius Lysias, the ‘“‘Chiliarch ’—head of a thousand soldiers—ap- proaches him. ‘“‘ May I say something unto thee ? ”’ inquires the much-assaulted Paul, speaking in the expressive Greek, when the Chief Captain, startled, exclaims “‘Dost thou know Greek?” The A.V. reads it, “‘ Canst thou speak Greek,’ but the word ‘speak ”’ is not in the original language of the query. Long ago the Chief Captain has vanished into S 263 A CASUAL QUESTION eternity. The steps of ‘‘ The Castle ’’ have crumbled into dust. The fiery mob have gasped their last gasp. But the casual question, “ Dost thou know Greek ?”’ still points morals for us all. (1) WE ARE OFTEN NEEDLESSLY SURPRISED AT PEOPLE. The Chief Captain’s question bristles with surprise. He expected that if Paul spoke it would be but in the vulgar Aramaic, and lo, he speaks the language of culture. He had no idea that Paul was so educated. ‘“Canst thou speak Greek?” He was simply astonished. This is very true to life as we all know it. The Chief Captain still lives, and we often hear his surprised exclamation. And was it not a needless surprise? Paul was a University man. He was cultured to his finger tips. He had one of the greatest brains of history. He was of learning all compacted. | Yet the Chief Captain was immeasurably surprised that he knew Greek! Presently his surprise will be augmented. Yes. This mirrors modern life. We all often reproduce the réle of the Chief Captain. We are frequently needlessly surprised at people’s temporal estate. We had no idea that plain man was so well off! Yet why should we have been so surprised ? He was ceaselessly industrious and constantly frugal. We were amazed how well read 204 REV. DINSDALE T. YOUNG and intelligent was that unassuming man! But our surprise was needless. Assumption is not culture. The spiritual quality of men and women often needlessly surprises us. We say, “1 never thought that man was such a Christian.” “,I-never dreamed that woman could have been such a heroine amid sorrow.” But we did not know them, any more than Lysias knew Paul. And we did not know their inner life of devotion to the Saviour of the world. We knew not their prayers, their unseen sessions with their Bible, their gracious investiture with the Spirit of Christ. Yes. We often plaintively echo the old-time question of the needlessly astonished Chiliarch, ‘ Dost thou know Creek fi Incredible as it seems, we even express needless surprise of God. Why should God permit such providential happenings? Can God have revealed Himself in a book? Can the Son of His love have become man? Has He redeemed the world by a Cross? Does He justify the ungodly when they penitently commit themselves to the Saviour-Son ° Is it not really a needless surprise? Study God. Acquaint yourselves with Divine Revelation. Know the truth. And then our only surprise will be that we ever were surprised. So we see that the casual question uttered on the stairs of the Castle at Jerusalem is to all intents and purposes up to date. 265 A CASUAL QUESTION (2) WE OFTEN UNDERESTIMATE PEOPLE. The Chief Captain’s interrogation sprang from sheer underestimation of Paul. He had left several equations out of count. He mistook a mighty volume for a petty pamphlet. “ Canst thou speak Greek?” ‘‘ No man better,” is quaint old John Trapp’s comment. And the learned Puritan is right. Anon, Lysias hears Paul ring out a mighty speech in Hebrew, and ” when they heard that he spake in the Hebrew tongue to them, they kept the more silence.” In that amazed silence Lysias shared, ‘‘ And so should we,” pithily adds Dr. Parker. , The Chief Captain made a discovery we too often make—that he had underestimated the man he confronted. The fact is, Lysias had entertained preconceptions of Paul. He deemed him an “Egyptian.” He thought him a mobocrat. He imagined him a leader of ‘‘ murderers.” He had wrongly interpreted the personality. And Lysias had a rude awakening. Lo, this man knows Greek! He is an orator in “ Hebrew.” It transpires, too, that he is a ‘‘ Roman” and “ free- born.” The Chief Captain discovers that this despised man is altogether his superior. Ah! We have not travelled far from the stairs of the Castle in Jerusalem. We are constantly underestimating men and things. What mistaken preconceptions we often have! We thought that man was an ignoramus. We thought that man was a charlatan. 266 REV. DINSDALE T. YOUNG We thought that man to be a zealot. And we found knowledge, sincerity, balanced judgment, where we had never dreamed to find them. Some of us have such inordinate self-appreciation that it deceives us into underestimating others. We are the victims of our mistaken preconceptions. We apply the magnifying glass to self and the microscope to those around us. We have caught the trick of the Chief Captain in ancient Jerusalem. Too frequently we underestimate even our friends. ‘There standeth one among you whom ye know not,” is a principle all too commonly illustrated even in our homes. How little we know one another! Is it any marvel that we know not God? Alas! We underestimate none as we do the Christ of God. Are we not often ashamed that we have so inadequately understood Him? “ When we see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him.” Is it not high time some of us searched ourselves as to our underestimation of Christ ? “What think ye of Christ?’ Is He God the Son to us? Is He the Divine Saviour to us? Or are we standing on the stairs of the Castle echoing the depreciatory question of Lysias, and a greater than Paul is here ? What a comfort it is that the Saviour never under- estimates us/ He knows what is in us. He gives us credit for every evangelical aspiration. He marks not only what we are, but what we desire to be. He judges us by our best, not by our basest. 267 A CASUAL QUESTION He discovers the “‘ son of Abraham ”’ shining through the sordid Zacchzus. He swiftly discerns what the Puritans called “actings of faith’ towards Himself. Courage, Brother! Your character and your reputation are safe in His mighty but gentle hands! It may be our lot to be unrequited amid human society, but “the Lord knoweth them that are His,’ and His “ Well done! ’* shall not be lacking at last. (3) WE OFTEN ESTIMATE PEOPLE BY THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES. This is exactly what the Chief Captain did with Paul, Paul was a refugee from the infuriated mob. Paul was a prisoner. Paul was poor and despised. Lysias judged him by his untoward circumstances. “Dost thou know Greek?” The Chiliarch found he had misread the riddle of Paul’s personality. Really Paul was “‘ the Chief Captain,” always and everywhere. He had acquisitions that Lysias was amazed tonote. Lysias had assumed an unjustifiable superiority and credited Paul with an undeserved inferiority. In a word, he had estimated the great apostle by his circumstances. We are all so apt to do this. Personality is elusive, circumstances are obvious, or easily ascer- tained. Circumstances are etymologically the things which stand around us; but how different the man 268 REV. DINSDALE IT. YOUNG and the things which environ him! Yet we con- stantly confuse them, as the Chief Captain did. It is dangerous indeed to follow this illusory method. A shabby coat may conceal a duke. Genius may be housed in a cottage. A wayfaring man may be a saint of God. A dying man upon a cross may be the Divine Saviour of the world. You may live in a grand house, but your soul may live ina hovel. You may have a packed purse, but an empty heart. There is often a glaring and dramatic contrast between the circumstances of people and the people themselves. O, the mercy that Christ, the Righteous Judge, does not estimate us by our circumstances ! And yet, O, the terror of it for such as are not ever crying, “ Rock of ages, Cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee!” “Ts thine heart right?” That is the everlasting touchstone. I pray you emulate not the errant Chief Captain as he superficially queries on the Castle steps. (4) WE OFTEN FIND THAT PEOPLE ARE REVEALED BY EXIGENCIES. It was the tumult in decorous Jerusalem that disclosed the real calibre of Paul to the Chief Captain. He discovered that he knew Greek and Hebrew, that he was a University man, no “Egyptian,” but 269 A CASUAL QUESTION a freeborn Roman. And he discovered much more than this in Paul—if indeed he had eyes to see it all. Always life’s tumults reveal us. It is on the stairs of the Castle facing the “fool fury ’”’ that we see you as you are. Trouble has been a great revealer. You never knew what a believer your father was till that destructive loss befell him. You saw what a saint your mother was “in the cloudy and dark day.”’ Exigencies reveal us: be they sad or glad. Sudden prosperity brings out the hidden fineness of some natures, and sudden adversity shows how golden are some souls, Our Incarnate Lord was never revealed so gloriously as when He faced exigencies. How “ the death of the Cross” discovered Him to be “ the Lord of Glory.” And it is the exigencies of life which will reveal you. When your city is reeking with tumult we shall see what manner of man you are. And your dying hour will reveal you. “Our people die well,’ said John Wesley. C. H. Spurgeon said the same of his people. Simple clinging to the Saviour amid life’s changing scenes will eventuate in quiet resting upon Hi inm the final hour. ‘‘ How wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan? ” All this emerges from our overhearing the Chief Captain, Lysias, utter his trivial question on the stairs of the Castle in days long gone. 270 b Maid ((e Rev. J. SCOTT LIDGETT, M.A., D.D. REV. JOHN SCOTT LIDGETT, M.A., D.D. WARDEN of the Bermondsey Settlement since 1891. Dr. Scott Lidgett was educated at Black- heath Proprietary School, afterwards at University College, London. He entered the Wesleyan ministry in 1876, and was stationed successively at Tunstall, Southport, Cardiff, Wolverhampton and Cambridge. He founded, in connection with the late Dr. Moulton, the Bermondsey Settlement in 1891. He became President of the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches of England and Wales in 1906; and Hon. Joint Secretary in 1914; President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, 1908; President of the Free Church Commission, 1912-1915; Member of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases, 1913-1915; Leader of the Progressive Party on the L.C.C. since 1918. Amongst his publications are: ‘‘ The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement,” ‘Si ies Fatherhood of God in Christian Truth and Life,” ‘“‘ The Christian Religion : Its Meaning and Proof,” “‘ Apostolic Ministry,” ‘God in Christ Jesus: A Study of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians,” ‘‘ Sonship and Salvation,” ‘‘ A Study of the Epistle to the Hebrews.” THE MASTER KEY Rev. J. Scotr Lipncerr ‘D.D.* “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.” 1 John iy, 16. Tus Epistle is the most artless of the New Testament writings. Its very simplicity may make us neglect its profundity. The writer does not reason, he “beholds. He proceeds, not by way of argument, but of repeated declarations of what he perceives by intuitive vision. Hence the theological importance of what he says may easily be overlooked. Yet this is not only the sublimest and most far-reaching affirmation about God that has ever been made ; it is also the most original and daring. And yet, while it is daring, we shall come to see that it is the only declaration about God which gives a sufficient and satisfying explanation of all things. The way in which this statement is reached is as remarkable as the statement itself. The writer has a twofold foundation upon which his conclusion rests. There is, first of all, the supreme historic Personality of our Lord Jesus Christ. The opening words of the Epistle lay stress upon His reality and upon the writer’s intimate knowledge of Him, * A sermon preached in Liverpool Cathedral on Sunday, October 25th, 1925. 273 THE MASTER KEY “That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled. concerning the Word of life.’”’ This personality is at once frankly human and transcendently divine. In the next place, there are the spiritual affections which were manifested in this personality, and which His influence awakened and inspired in His followers. The-writer blends these two and makes them both the source and the substance of the final theology and the perfect religion. ‘‘ God is love,’ this is the theology; ‘‘ He that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him,” this is the corresponding religion. . God is personal, If anyone denies this, whether he be philosopher or novelist—and apparently in these days the opinions of novelists count with many people for more than the judgments of philosophers —his teaching may have importance for abstract thought, but has little or no bearing upon religion, for religious experience rests upon belief in and enjoyment of fellowship with a personal God. Yet the personality of God must be unspeakably greater than the personality of man. Not only is our personality finite, but we have to strive manfully in order to attain and hold fast such personality as we possess. The tragedy of many lives is that they either fail to attain true personality or lose it under the pressure and the temptations of life. The personality of God is eternal and infinitely | perfect. 274 REV. JOHN SCOTT LIDGETT But how is this More of the divine personality to be conceived? To this question four answers other than that of the text have been given, partly within and partly outside the Christian Church. And as our idea of God, whatever it may be, tends to produce a corresponding attitude towards Him, each of these four ideas of God is reflected in a distinctive type of religion. The first answer conceives of God chiefly as Sovereign Will, backed by almighty power. The grim paganism by which Israel was surrounded represented God as the magnified image of an Oriental despot. Even Christian thinkers, especially St. Augustine and Calvin, have sought to emphasise the personality and supremacy of God by laying the main stress upon His will. In their case, however, the influence of Christ has raised their doctrine to a far higher plane than could be attained by pagan religions. Yet so great has been the effect of such teaching that if you were to ask the man in the street to day what he means by God the probability is that he would reply: “The Almighty.” Indeed, this may be said to be the theology of the practical man, who has little use for God except as a power to be counted on or reckoned with. If this doctrine be predominant, the corresponding note of religion becomes that of submission to the will of God, how- ever inscrutable it may be. In this submission faith and fear will be blended in varying proportions accord- ing to the temper of the age or of the worshipper, fear predominating in paganism, faith in Christianity. 275 THE MASTER KEY The second answer interprets God in terms of Wisdom. He is the All-Wise. Men wonder, with Kant, at the starry heavens above—the infinite system and the majestic march of the heavenly bodies. They marvel at the ordered process of the seasons and the intimate relations between organic life and the inorganic world. They watch the evolution of nature and man, and find in all these the action of supreme Wisdom, selecting ends and adapting means to their accomplishment. Such is the theology of reflective minds, and their religious attitude towards God and life is mainly intellectual. It consists chiefly in the reverent interpretation of the plan and purpose of the world in the endeavour — to become conformable to it. The third answer conceives God as spiritually and morally Perfect. He is the All-Holy. In the attainment of this vision is to be found the triumph of the Old Testament. The Prophets came to apprehend the secret of the Godhead in the spiritual and ethical glory of Jehovah. He established His claim upon them not because He could crush them, but because He was worthy of a worship which called out and satisfied all that is highest and best in human nature. He is the eternal home and source of Righteousness and Truth, Purity and Grace. St. John pays his tribute to this conception when he says in this Epistle “ God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” Hence the religion of Israel emphasised holiness as its distinctive mark. “Be ye holy, for I am holy, saith the Lord.” It 270 REV. JOHN SCOTT LIDGETT was the religion of separation, the separation of a peculiar people to God, accompanied on the cere- monial level by a special consecration of men and places, days and sacrificial gifts, to His service. The imperishable service of the Prophets was that they raised this conception of holiness to the spiritual and moral sphere. Micah speaks for them all when he says: ‘ What doth He require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” This is the religion of the moralist. There is one more idea, that of God as Pure Spirit. The supreme I of God is so sublime as to blot out all that can be said of it and to absorb into itself all other personalities, as meteors fall into the central sun. God is approached by negation, by stripping off from the thought of Him all conceptions derived either from the consciousness of men or from the world that surrounds them, until the pure sublimity of ineffable Personality has been reached. This is the doctrine of mysticism, whether ancient or modern, whether Christian or Indian. Such a God can only be worshipped by the intense aspiration of ascetic contemplation. Man must be stripped of all his thoughts, affections, and desires in order that eventually he may be lost in God. We come from all these answers to the simple yet inexhaustible declaration of the text—God is love. This is the evangelic answer. God is the creative Self-giver who bestows Himself in creating and constituting His world on such wise that He may impart Himself ever more fully to it, and may receive 47 |. THE MASTER KEY from it the response of an ever-growing and joyful self-giving on the part of creatures who are called to be His sons. When God is seen to be Love the only religion that counts is that of “ abiding in love.” Before this great statement about God and religion could be made, love had to be re-born from above. It means not emotion, whether of passion or fond- ness, but the inmost inspiration and energy of self- devotion which brings all the parts and powers of God’s perfection and of man’s being into full activity for the establishment of spiritual fellowship between them. This great declaration is to be taken seriously. God and religion are either this or nothing. It is the highest that can be conceived, and in this great concern the highest, when revealed, eclipses all the rest, as the stars fade before the rising sun. Yet there is something more. The highest and best is the only explanation of all the rest. Will and Power, Wisdom, Holiness and Spirit, whether taken separ- ately or together, fail adequately to set forth the God Who creates, sustains and redeems His world. What can be the motive, the method, and the nature of a Creation which culminates in spiritual Person- alities in Whom has been implanted both the need and the capacity for fellowship through love? In a word, love alone supplies the spring and end which make Power truly and immanently sovereign, Wisdom really wise, by supplying to it a worthy purpose, Holiness essentially good and not repellent, Spirit not abstract but real. The answer of the 278 REV. FOHN SCOTT LIDGETT text takes up into itself and perpetuates in a higher and larger whole all that is true in the other ideas of God, and all that is permanent in the types of religion that correspond with those ideas. Thus the Incarnation of our Lord reveals and explains the relationship of God to the world. The artist, when he has completed his masterpiece, sends it out into the world and may lose sight of it alto- gether. His picture may eventually find its way either to the mansion of an American millionaire or perchance to a lumber room. God does not thus cast forth His world from Himself, but in creating it takes it and all that is therein into such living relationship to Himself as that all its being and possibilities are fed from the infinite source of His Divine Perfection. The greatest failure of Christian theology has been its inability to interpret the transcendent sovereignty of God in the light of His immanent self-giving, which became fully manifest in the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ. Hence we are to seek for the revelation of God above all in the personality of man. This is the explanation of God’s command to Ezekiel, lying prostrate before Him—‘“ Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.’’ Not in the suppression of human powers is God found, but in their complete and highest activity. To the same effect is the vision of Elijah. Baal might be found in the wind, the earthquake and the fire, which terrify men into subjection. Jehovah is found in the ‘‘ still, small voice,” which awakens reason and i, 299 THE MASTER KEY conscience, trust and loyalty, and through them brings man into intelligent and active partnership with God. Hence, the highest revelation of God is found in the Personality of Jesus Christ, and Christ reigns because He so dwelt in love, so recreated the very conception of love, and so manifested its © true self-giving in His Sacrifice as to give the material for this great statement of St. John. The text is as serious in its teaching and solemn in its warning as it is comforting in the gospel that it proclaims. If God be really and truly Love, then the world can only be made right through the universal sovereignty of Love. Mankind is passing through an unexampled crisis. International, econo- mic and social relations have all been brought into disorder by the Great War. In attempting to put them right all the leaders who were hailed as super- men have in turn become discredited. Every possible shift and expedient has been used to set things right. Yet, if God be Love the inmost law of His world must needs be Love, and every method of reconstruction will fail unless it be the expression not of the self-seeking but of the self-giving of men. Hence, directly this better spirit has begun to make itself felt the triumph of Locarno has been achieved, with the promise of yet better things to come. God is a great chess player, and He will cry “ Check ! i to every solution that contradicts both His own nature and that of man. So far from the Sermon on the Mount being Utopian, the world will come to see that it is the only practical politics so long 280 REV. JOHN SCOTT LIDGETT as God is God—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Church must respond to this master truth. It must not entrench “ our unhappy divisions,” but must transcend and transform them till our distinctive contributions to the interpretation and service of Christ are used, not for purposes of separation but for common fellowship and enrich- ment in Love. So, then, for all the concerns of life, whether of Church or State, whether inter- national, economic or social, the message of St. John is the watchword for all ages, and especially for this present time—‘‘ God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.” 281 So Oo ease ae \ 5 A i ; TC! Ta ver eae me par Pe i : j : : eel ert, | ASgR 4) | acer’, ROM ARTS (AY Fe : ‘ . ‘ % . ae ae \ . : ef ae iif 2s eee = PA they bod id + af “ (> MARR UREA REDE EES ASIC a t ; oe ‘ i be : 4 et F) tic begets ae he iy eGR io ae cae he ate R were y tha iee SxeR oe » 8 Uy ‘ ‘ Lee Ore { CO toe era age AEs SEEN A fet, we 1. By ts < ee Pet rite; ah ‘S 7 ry ae) : mi at pot ‘ este bay ns it > > A ee ! ; i ‘ ' 4 i ‘eos » a | t x { o r ; ety { i ea J , : { » J ; G d : - 1 i { , ‘ wt \ f q ; ; 1 : ie \ i - : : # 1 ‘ 1 ‘ ' ‘ r | » ‘ 4 } rT Y j " ) f bie Fi , ‘ t , i wy : rn J ‘ hi ) , iat i ' yi ; f 7 Y My * gtd wh ; F : Te Tutt 2 i y ws . i bal ' ‘ ; bo ut bm é é j 5 4} ‘ } : ad , j ’ : § ‘ : , 4 } a fis v) if r 4 if i " pk Wh) | hy) ‘ie i gis i ‘ ves : iit ML De Tay F py, 4 Ot i ‘ wy i > ot, Tw tf ove eer Rev. ARTHUR J. GOSSIP, M.A. REV. ARTHUR JOHN GOSSIP, M.A. Youncest son of the late Robert Gossip, news- paper editor in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and of the late Margaret Mundell, his wife. He was born in Glasgow, and educated at George Watson’s College, Edinburgh University, and New College. Became Licentiate of the United Free Church of Scotland, 1899; and was ordained the same year to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church of England. Was minister successively at St. Columba’s, Liverpool; West United Free Church, Forfar; and St. Matthew’s, Glasgow. Was Chaplain at the front, 1917-1918. Now Minister of Beechgrove, Aberdeen. Publications: “‘ From the Edge of the Crowd,” in Scholar as Preacher Series ; and ‘‘ In Christ’s Stead,” being the Warrack Lectures for 1925, etc. A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS Rev. Arruur J. Gossip, M.A. “Tf the vision tarry, wait for it, for wt will come: and it will not be late.’ (Last phrase, Moffatt.) Habakkuk i, 3. THERE, to begin with, is a claim on you and me, a warning that if we wish to be really helpful to God and our fellows we must cultivate a certain calm and equanimity of mind, a certain valour and imperturbability of spirit, that believes in right- -eousness and the success of its cause much too stoutheartedly to grow afraid even if things do drag a bit, that knows God far too well to think of doubting Him even if His promises seem slow of foot, and our dreams lag, and the time grows longer than we hoped. The function of religious people, so this tired man heard God saying to his heart in dark and trying days when there was not much to encourage, what is it? What do I set them in the world to do? What is it that I ask of them? Is it not largely this—to keep cool and unfidgetty when other folk are growing flustered about things ; to look out upon this confusing life with steady eyes, when those around them, badly scared, have taken to glancing back across their shoulders, and there is that ominous feeling of panic in the air; to trust Me, 285 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYs not only when that is easy and the sun is shining, but when there is most need for faith, yes, and some valour in the offer of it. Suppose the times are disappointing and disquieting, that I seem to have forgotten, appear not to care; that in spite of all your efforts nothing, so you judge, is happening. Still don’t get nervy and irritable, fussy and on edge. Don’t toss your dream impatiently away, as something that evidently can never come to pass in this dusty work-a-day world of drab realities. Still hold to it, work for it, believe in it, expect it. If the vision tarry, wait for it: grant Me some loyalty, and some tenacity of purpose, and some common courage. Give Me that—long enough— — and we win. | It must, surely, be a little daunting to ardent spirits to note how often in the Scriptures that is God’s message to His people. Age after age, apparently, earnest souls feel hotly that the world is out of joint, that something must be done to mend things ; yes, and they see what that is, and start up eagerly to set about it, sure that they can put it through. And, age after age, in a little they are standing puzzled, and daunted, and confused, with their resolution oozing from them, tired and dispirited. For, do what they will and can, so little seems to come of it. And it is like that last wild tumult of a fight in Lyonnesse when even the king felt, or half felt, that all that he had done, and all that he had tried, had been in vain; and men fought blindly with that horrible fog not only in the air 280 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP but stealing chokingly into their very souls, and fell, too many of them, and, as they fell, ‘looked up to heaven, and only saw the mist.” And, age after age, God has to call to them not to allow themselves to be tamed and broken, not to grow acquiescent in things as they are, not to abandon their audacious hopes, but to keep daring and expectant. Ifthe vision tarry, wait for it. Hold on a little longer, though your very souls are growing so numbed that they can hardly keep their grip. Wait, He keeps urging, wait! That is a very common message to God's folk. And yet to wait can be the hardest thing in the whole world. ‘“Wecan do nothing more,” the doctor says, “we must just wait.” But that is dreadful. If we could help in any way it would not be nearly so hard. But to sit still, with empty, useless, idle hands, while that dear life hangs in suspense, the thing is mad- dening. Or, when an attack was ordered, much the worst time was those awful moments lined up in the trench, while the officer, his eyes upon his watch, waited for the appointed second, with one’s every tense nerve strained and twittering, with one’s mind running, on and on, with queerly quick short, breathless, steps, till one could have screamed : “Blow that whistle and let us get over, and be done with it, one way or the other. Better that than this long agony of waiting.” Yet God often asks His folk to wait. Not that they are to dawdle about until something turns up, or even to stand with their eyes fastened 287 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS greedily on the horizon. If anything much is to happen for God in our time, then we must do it for Him, must throw in wholeheartedly all that we have into His service, must be eager and zealous over it. That is, indeed, where we too often fail; and why, not seldom, things move so exasperatingly slowly. We are listless, apathetic, only half in earnest. And then, with cool effrontery, we throw the blame on God. We can’t understand, we say loftily, why One who is Almighty does not do far more for this desperate world. Why? answers God, because you failed Me; because, at the pinch, the faith and courage and zeal on which I counted were not there. But even if we are in deadly earnest, we must add | something more to our equipment or inevitably we shall break down under the strain of things before the end; must be not only enthusiastic and on fire, but at the same time cool and patient ; working as tirelessly as if this were the one and only time that what we see could ever come to pass, and yet not peevish and discouraged if there prove to be delay; doing our duty loyally, yet, with a quiet and unflurried mind, leaving the times and seasons to God’s choosing. That last is not easy; and the more in earnest that we are, the harder does it grow. Kingsley, quoting the Scripture, “He that believeth will not make haste,” flamed out in his hot way, “‘ And yet I think that he that believeth can do nothing except haste; look at the world!’ And, indeed, it is extraordinarily difficult not at times to lose patience with God, 288 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP not to be filled with what Hilary of Poitiers called ‘an irreligious solicitude for Him,” not to have the feeling that He is not managing well, and that surely He might do vastly more if only He would really try, not to keep running on ahead of Him like an excited child and back time after time to tug impatiently at His hand, seeking to hasten His slow steps, and always crying “ Hurry, hurry,” not to grow fussy and hot and out of breath, even to sulk, declaring with a whimper, like a petted bairn, that we won’t play unless our hands are to haul down the enemies’ flag, and our eyes are allowed to see the final wild exhilarating rush of victory, sweeping all before it! But it is not that God is slow, or less in earnest than we are. Ah! who of us can doubt Him now? For who of us has gone the length of Calvary? Shall we compare our futile little bits of earnestness with that? It is that human nature is much more crabbed and stubborn than we with our superficial diagnoses realise, that evils have far deeper roots than we imagine, and won’t come up, as we hope, with one sharp tug; that the road to our ideals is much longer than it looks when we set out on it. Don’t you remember Masefield ? “Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind, For we go seeking a city that we shall never find. Only the road, and the dawn, the sun, and the wind, and the rain, 289 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS And the watch fire under the stars, and sleep, and the road again. We travel the dusty road, till the ee of the day is dim, And the sunset shows us spires, away on the world’s rim.” Yes, says God, this may prove a longer and much slower business than you estimate. I have had gallant servants who gave Me their whole life, everything that they had, and yet they died in faith, not having received the promises, but with their faces still turned doggedly in their direction, and still certain they would come. And if you have been set down in a difficult day, can you too give Me a like steadfastness, dare you too work on unafraid without much to encourage you, but still infecting those around you with your unconcerned and quiet faith, a faith that never dreams of doubting Me? “Love, love that once for me did agonise Will conquer all things to itself. If late, Or soon it be, I ask not, nor advise. But, since my God is waiting, I can wait.” Faith, hope, love, these are great gifts. And yet not faith, not hope, not love, not even all of them together, will of themselves bring you through with honour. For that, something even more is needed. Remember, says St. Anthony, of all the virtues, perseverance alone wins the crown. Have 290 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP you the cold dour courage that, checked and beaten back, can set its teeth, and hold its ground, and have never a thought of giving way? For that is often what I need in those who would serve Me, says God. If it tarry, wait. And so in our own lives. “We all thought,” said Baxter, speaking of the Civil War, “ that one battle would end it, but we were all very much mistaken.’ And so, I suppose, most of us expected that our spiritual life would move on, in some ways, much faster than it has. We knew we had certain temptations, but we were going to knock them on the head, and so an end of that ; and yet perhaps some of them visit us to this day with the old hateful cunning. We were aware that we were prone to this and that humbling sin and weakness. But Christ would break them for us. Yet, perhaps, some of them still stubbornly persist. We saw the glory of life as Christ led it, and our hearts ran out to that eagerly. But it has proved more difficult to weave our matted character into His likeness than we thought! We, too, have need of that prayer that Paul tells us he kept urging on behalf of certain of his friends, that our “ faith may become a thing of power.’’ For, as things are, it seems sometimes curiously ineffective, does it not, in our particular case? Even a grain of it will remove mountains, we are promised; and indeed we too, like Bunyan, have seen men tumbling about the hills with it, seen natures that seemed set rebuilt from their foundations upon a new plan, and men 291 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS and women who had sunk very low transformed and glorified beyond belief. But our own records somehow seem far tamer and much duller. Ananda, Buddha’s favourite disciple, saw comrade after comrade reach Nirvana. Yet, though he loved as few among them loved, year after year slipped past, and for him it seemed far away as ever, and the marvellous chance, for all his longing, in his case would not work out. And we, too, do have faith in Christ, and we, too, do look toward Him; and yet, and yet, our faith is not the thing of power it manifestly is for many another. Yes, says God, sometimes it is very slow. But don’t you throw away your hope, hold to it, wait. And to teach you that hard lesson, look at Jesus Christ, who, though plans broke, and friends deserted Him, and God Himself seemed strangely callous to it all, held on unflinchingly and waited, though the crowds were plainly leaving Him, and a huge storm was obviously blowing up, and it did break on Him at last, and in the end they nailed Him to a cross ; waited even then, unafraid even there, for the vision that had tarried, ah! how long, still certain it would come! ‘ The patience of Christ,’ says Paul, laying his hand on what most struck him in the Master, may God direct your fretful hearts to that. If you would face life bravely and big-heartedly, keep close to Him. For to a certainty you, too, will need to learn to wait if you would really serve God and the Cause, and not break down at times into a whimper of disloyalty, nor be guilty of an insolence 292 i REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP so gross that it can seek to hector God, to instruct the All-Wise, and that, not without a certain peremptory sharpness at His dulness. Steady, there! Steady! Wait ! But further, there is here a promise that may well rally the most dispirited. ‘‘It will come,” so God tells us; you can count upon that; “it will come.” It is no futile fancy, no mere dream, maddeningly impossible, as when out in the trenches, sick of the mud and the shelling and the war, one sat and fancied himself off on leave, saw with vividness, the landing in England, and the happy journey north, and the arrival in one’s own familiar town, the coming up the street, your street, the pulling at the bell, the opening door, the little cry and outleaping arms, and—home. And with that someone spoke or jostled you, and it was gone, was far away as ever, and with a jolt you were back in the mud and the shelling and the war. Blessedly, it is not like that. ‘‘ All we have hoped or dreamed of good,” says our brave poet, ‘‘ shall exist, not its semblance but itself. The hard that proved too hard, the heroic for earth too high,” will all come true—will surely all come true. I promise it, says God. If you will play your part, you can depend on Me. It is upon the road, though you see nothing ; the seed is living, and is springing up, and it will flower. Winter turns spring, and spring grows summer every year. Is it not well to be reminded of that sometimes, For there is much in history to daunt, and not 293 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS a little to make one cynical. Here are we, for example, all agog over the League of Nations. And yet experts, who presumably are cognisant of the facts, assure us that since the days of Henry VI this is the twenty-sixth attempt to eliminate war by some kind of international agree- ment that has been started with high hopes ! Twenty- five times others have seen the vision that we see ; twenty-five times have they pursued it eagerly ; and five and twenty times it dimmed, flickered, and went out. And now once more we are out on the old quest, that has for so long baffled so many others. Yes, say many, it is demonstrably useless, and a wild foolish chase of what is unattainable, that can only leave us hot and breathless, and ruffled in our tempers, and depressed. | But no, says the prophet, “it will come.” The Reformation, too, before Luther’s day, was broken more than twenty times. Again and again the flames were fiercely stamped out, quenched in blood. Yet it did come at last. Over and over, the embers that seemed cold grew red again, until there dawned a day when the winds of God were abroad in the earth; and, almost suddenly, these fanned the uncertain flames into a roaring fire that rushed, free and untamable, across the world. No effort in the cause of truth is ever useless, even when, mathematically, the result appears to be exactly nothing, except withered hopes, and wasted energies. Each new attempt revives the idea in men’s minds, keeps it alive, sends some remembrance of it down 294 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP the ages, hands on a high tradition. It is like those sham attacks out at the front, that seemed to end only in cruel ruin and inexplicable bungling with men’s lives. I have spoken to a Divisional Commander, before whom as a rule one walked in fear and trembling, forgetful of all seemliness, and swept away by a hot anger. ‘‘ Look at my boys,” I cried, standing there among the ghastly wreckage, “ look at my boys!’’ And the man answered, with tears in his eyes, “‘ God knows, padre, I did not wish this. But, because of this, the enemy’s line is broken milesaway!’’ And all these efforts after some great truth or high ideal that were baulked or driven back were not for nothing. Always we can be absolutely sure, even if we are disappointed, and our eyes see only tired men who have given much and gained nothing at all, that because of this somewhere down the coming years the enemy’s line will break. Indeed, history makes heartening reading. There were once horrible diseases rampant in our land, leprosy for one of them. It was not only Edinburgh that had its Liberton, its lepers’ town: and many a country church still shows the old lepers’ window, through which these poor outcasts won some share in that from which they were excluded. Everywhere, here and there, one came upon that horror, on maimed broken lives shut in to a huge, ugly, awful misery. And it is gone, gone utterly, like a hideous nightmare from which one awakes, and in a little while forgets about it. And moral evils that had seemed engrained in the make-up of things have U 295 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS vanished no less thoroughly. For years, for cen- turies, leal hearts strained toward these achieve- ments and they seemed no nearer; and yet they are here. ‘It will come,” says the prophet ; in God's name I promise it, if only we keep valiant. True, at the best it is not easy to unravel the tangled web of things. The enemy rallies so surpris- ingly, and has such uncanny skill in snatching a new victory out of crushing defeat. 1 once lived in a little town which had in older days a most unenviable reputation for consumption. The doctors started a crusade; and, slowly, surely, at a gradually quick- ening pace, the thing died down ; but, as it died, almost with equal steps cancer increased, and the last state appeared to be more evil than the first. And Morley gives a sombre reading of not a little of our confident activities. We see some evil, evolve a solution of it, push that through with long effort and sacrifice; and straightway the new situation may engender some new evil which may prove even more intractable and difficult to meet! We have won liberty, for instance, and what are we doing with that glorious thing, now it is ours ? Filling the land with raucous cries, pushing and jostling one another in a wild selfish stampede, each after our class interest, or personal gain! Aye, it is slow, and often disappointing! And yet would you have us serfs again? What can be done except give us our liberty, and let us learn to use it seemlily in time. Believe me, said the Romanist in Reform- ation days, if your mad scheme grows real, there 296 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP can be nothing but disaster. For the people are not fit for the responsibilities and powers you are conceding them. Your churches will be empty, your Scriptures mishandled, your land filled with half-baked theories of half ignorant minds; you need authority to guide and to control, and you are wantonly destroying it. Well, the churches ave half empty, the Bible is not reverenced as once it was, and an amazing mass of confident nonsense is being talked with truculent assurance by people with small right to an opinion, who do not even know how ignorant they are! There may be difficult times before us, granted, but would you have us back at the old subservience again? Surely a child must be set down upon its feet, if it is ever to learn to walk! That must cause many a stumble, may mean many a sore fall; but only so can it develop the powers it is meant to use. And though much may seem irritating, vexing, disappointing, still if we keep our faces toward the light, and push on as we can, it will come in the end. For it is not for nothing that the popular mode of thought sees an advance, a progress, a slow painful evolution in the trend of things. There may be, there is, many a slip back, and fall, and blunder. Still, “it does move!”’ And “it will come.” In our time? that may be. But certainly if we are faithful, some time. And is it not enough for us to play our part, and let who may be destined for that reap the glory? Even Jesus Christ saw little. Once by a glorious feat of heroism the battalion 297 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS saved the line. And three days later as the tired boys lay about a barn, speaking with small voices almost inaudible through weariness, the papers came. By an inexplicable slip the credit of the feat was given to a battalion who were miles away, and ours was never mentioned. There fell a sombre silence, and the Colonel’s face flushed red. And then his head went up. ‘‘Gentlemen,”’ he said proudly, ‘what does it matter who gets the credit of it. We know we did it.” Enough for us that we be faithful. It will come. : And in our own lives also. Perhaps you are depressed, dissatisfied with things, haunted by an uneasy feeling that after all your faith and efforts you are painfully little changed from your original uncouthness; that not enough is coming of it, that if the real Christ were really in your life surely there would be greatly more to show. Look, your heart cries, how it was in His time! How everywhere He went there were extraordinary happenings, things glorious, undeniable and there for all to see. But I, what can I show? Towards the end, Marcus Dods, whom Robertson Nicoll called the most Christlike man that he had ever seen, felt that about himself with gnawing acuteness, but used to fortify his heart with a chemical metaphor. Into a liquid is dropped one drop of a second, and there is no result: another, and another, many others, one by one, apparently in vain: and then one more, precisely like the rest, and of a sudden, not as the outcome of that last alone, but as the culmination 298 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP of the whole seemingly useless process, everything is changed! And day by day doggedly we pray, and hope, and toil, and believe. And what is there to show for it? Not much, to outward seeming, it may be; and yet is far more going on than our eyes see? And one day may one other prayer, one other ordinary act of common faith, one more looking toward Jesus Christ bring the long process to its culmination, and we waken satisfied, because in His likeness—at last ? Sudden or slow, dramatic or invisible, “it will come ”’—it will come! After all, says Samuel Rutherford, the end is sure: a long steep road, a tired footsore traveller, and a warm welcome home, that is the worst of it. For, says the prophet, ‘“‘it will not be late.”’ That is the fear that often haunts us. It is too late, men say, of the old land. She has heeled so far over in the gale that she can’t right herself—is doomed! Such talk, one fancies, is the way to bring disaster on us. If only we will pay our taxes cheerfully, and face a more pinched way of life than we would naturally choose, and think, not only of our own, but other people’s interests, please God, we will come through it yet. But that “ too late” is a grievous reality: a grim and fearsome fact of life. The other day I was taking the service at a baby’s funeral; and, among others, read the passage, “‘ There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, for the former things are passed away.” And then I looked across at the mother, wondering if that was helping her, or only wounding 299 A MESSAGE FOR GREY DAYS her poor heart? It is a bonnie promise! Ah, if only it had come in time! But in one sense at least, its fulfilment is too late for her. Her boy is dead! And often that is what we feel about ourselves. Once, not a doubt, it might have been. We might have really closed with Christ, and really taken what He offers us. But now, our character is fixed, our habits are settled, the channels cut in which the rivers must run to the end. It is too late. And there is dreadful truth in that. ‘Sleep on now,” said the Master sadly, the glorious office He had offered His friends left unaccepted and refused, sleep on, it does not matter now. The chance is lost, the opportunity is past, sleep on. The boy who in the afternoon repented of his surliness and went, could only offer a few hours of work at most, not a full day. That had become impossible for ever. And every failure in a way is irremediable. Always our record must be to the end by that amount less than it might and should and could have been. The crooked can’t be made straight; what is lacking can’t be numbered. And you and I look wistfully across at Christ, and then sadly enough at what we are. That is what I might have been, and this is what I am: that is what I was offered, and this is what I chose! Fool that I was, but now—it is too late. But the whole point of the Gospel is that, in one glorious way, it is not yet too late for anyone. If you have not seen that in Christ, have you seen Christ at all? Always He faced the poorest, the 300 REV. ARTHUR FOHN GOSSIP most soiled and tangled life, with the sure confidence that even yet it could be righted ; yes, and He would do it now. And how often and how strangely He was justified in cases that looked just impossible ! Aye, and why should He not be so in you and me? It is to us, remember, to plain ordinary folk like youand me, that He gives His bewildering promises ; it is on us He makes His staggering claims; it is for us He prays those astounding prayers of His with their tremendous hopes! To that, then, He feels, even yet we can attain! “ Death closes all: but something e’er the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks : The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs : the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” No, it is not too late, even for you and me, to throw ourselves on Jesus Christ ; really to take, really to use, that strange power that He offers, and so really grow, yes you and I, into His blessed likeness: not too late for God’s dream of us to come really true. Up! up! and back into the thick of things with steady hearts and quiet eyes. And, even “if it tarry, wait for it! For it will come, and it will not be late.” 301 veh SAMS Rar ar pa PATA FAS ROMA Gf fae 3 RU ¥; Ue ts : AS EAL RU War ah ah 23 4) Teter, 5 etsy AS ; be ti. Luk oh eas . 1 ‘ , Pate : sy heey is Ag rr ; ny en ye barn : . a f Pa ae be ‘ 7 i Wi! "4 Rs q . ‘ ii A ‘ yA j j ‘1 \ " 1 ; ey LE aR RES . ity pared) ase tt % iri. 9 a aie “ade oH ee WE hy AS Te ERR Lo Rey. W. E. ORCHARD, D.D. REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD, D.D. MrnisTeER of the King’s Weigh House Church, Duke Street, W., since 1914. Dr. Orchard received private tuition, and later went to West- minster College, Cambridge. He was ordained at Enfield in 1904. In the following year he became B.D., and D.D.in 1909. His publications include “ Evolution of Old Testament Religion,” “Modern Theories of Sin,’? ‘‘ Problems and Perplexities,”’ ‘‘ The Temple : A Book of Prayers,” “The Outlook for Religion,’ ‘‘ Divine Service : Order of Service for Public Worship,” “‘ The BERS Companion,” and ‘‘ Foundations of aith.” GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS By tHe Rev. W. E. Orcuarp, D.D. “Tf ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But uf ye forgive not men their trespasses, neiher will your Father forgive your trespasses.”’ Matthew vi, 14, 15. Our Lord’s teaching is very full and frequent on the subject of forgiveness ; not, as in the Epistles, so much on why we can rely upon the forgiveness of God, but on why we must forgive our fellow-men. This differing emphasis between the Epistles and the Gospels is not to be pressed to a false contrast, or to be explained as due to the false development of theological concern. While St. Paul is concerned to show how it is possible for God to forgive at all, and how we may be assured of His forgiveness, he is equally emphatic that we must forgive as we are forgiven: ‘even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye.” It is true that to Christ the possibility of God’s forgiveness seems to present no problem, and He can command us to forgive, even to seventy times seven, as if it were perfectly easy. Never- theless the Apostolic writings have not invented a difficulty here. It was no difficulty to the mind of 305 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS Christ simply because He Himself was divine; and despite His belief that men could carry out the command to forgive, the frequency of the exhortation, the sternness of the condition laid down, and his parable of the ‘“ Unforgiving Servant ”’ show that He knew very often men would not forgive. Those who say Christ assumes the Father’s forgiveness and.so therefore can we; Christ taught that men should forgive and therefore nothing else is needed but to carry out His teaching; forget the place of the Teacher in His teaching, and the ransom which He taught He had come to effect, It has been said Christ did not so much come to preach the Gospel as that there should be a Gospel to preach. Christ’s teaching was preparatory to the work He wrought by His death, and is meant to show how necessary it was that He should die, both to convince men of the Father’s forgiveness and to enable them in turn to forgive. The very perfection that He commands is intended to make us aware of what a change must take place in us before we can carry it out. Those who take the teaching of Christ, and find no necessity of asking who the Teacher was, and whether He can help us to obey His teaching, surely cannot seriously have attempted it. We cannot fail to notice that many who appeal to the teaching of Christ in order to dismiss all else in Christianity, also mainly use it for the purpose of condemning others; which shows they have never so much as begun to under- stand it, and cannot themselves have tried it. On 306 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD the subject of forgiveness its very difficulty prevents an easy explanation. It is important to notice that our Lord often connects this subject of forgiveness with the practice of prayer. ‘‘ When ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against anyone; that your Father which is in heaven may also forgive you.” This saying implies that we ought not to begin our prayers without first seeing that we do not cherish unforgiving feelings against anyone; for the in- ference is that we shall get no further if we do; God will not forgive us, and we shall therefore not so much as get in touch with Him. Here may be the reason why some of us never advance far along the path of prayer. The importance of this is emphasised by our Lord in a very strange way. He actually inserts a reminder on this subject into the very centre of the Lord’s prayer: “as we forgive them that trespass against us.”’ That must often have caused us a certain amount of per- plexity, for it is difficult to turn that part of the petition into real prayer. It looks like a somewhat Pharisaic statement that we ourselves forgive, and a somewhat irreverent reminder that, therefore, God ought to forgive us. If we make the words actually part of our prayer, it seems to necessitate our asking for forgiveness only in the measure in which we forgive others: “forgive us our trespasses as much as we forgive.” The only solution of the difficulty seems to regard this phrase as a reminder to ourselves: and that gives a certain sanction to 397 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS the use of prayer, not only as objective worship and petition, but for its subjective effect. In another place, our Lord seems to assume that we should allow our worship to be broken into by the remembrance that other people may not be forgiving us, and that we should try to put that right before we can look upon our worship as perfect, or the purpose of our offering fulfilled. However difficult these conditions may seem, they obviously insist that the forgiveness of others enters into the most intimate concerns of our religion and has a most important effect upon the reality of our communion with God. Any deliberate with- holding of forgiveness must entirely negative the action of grace, makes our prayer ineffective and destroys all possibility of coming into close contact with God. YET SO MANY PEOPLE FIND IT HARD TO FORGIVE. (x1) This is a frequent confession with the frank, (a) They declare that they feel resentment when wrong is done to them; when people are unjust, unkind, cruel or false they are deeply wounded, and their wounds beget in them thoughts of dislike, hostility or vengeance. They declare they have the greatest difficulty in overcoming these feelings; they tend to persist and recur even after a long period, and when they have really tried to forgive. Such, therefore, are often doubtful whether they have really forgiven. Others go 308 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD further; they declare positively they cannot for- give; it demands from them a quite impossible attitude, and they are bewildered that Christ should ever have asked anything so impossible, or have made the divine forgiveness dependent upon something so difficult to attain. (b) People often say they can forgive, but they cannot forget. They wish the person who has done them wrong no harm, they do not actually feel hostile; but very often they do not want to have anything further to do with that person. Their attitude is entirely negative if only they keep out of his way ; but his presence, or even the very thought of him always brings back the memory of what has hap- pened, and their conception of him is coloured, or even dominated by the wrong he once did. They may profess that this is nothing more than the inability to forget a historic fact; but when a person who seeks forgiveness is met by the declara- tion, ‘‘ I can forgive, but I cannot forget,” it is not strange if he suspects that the forgiveness is not real, or at any rate that it appears to him worthless. (c) Some people declare they can forgive wrongs done to themselves, but not to others. This attitude has about it less apparent danger ; it is not motived by our own personal suffering ; it looks like an impersonal hatred of injustice, on which we are surely dependent for the healthy condition of society. Nevertheless, this attitude often shows that the nature of forgiveness is not 399 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS understood, and the violent feeling which can be worked up against national enemies in time of war, and even remain long after it, or the execration spent upon some person who has committed a public crime, are sufficient indications that the duty of forgiveness is not accepted. Moreover, this dis- tinction between wrongs done to oneself and wrongs done to others.is generally made in reference to someone who is connected with us. It is because of his injury and what he has suffered that we cannot forgive the wrongdoer. But it is obvious that now we are touched because we feel the injury of someone closely bound up with ourselves to be an injury to ourselves. We may see the operation of this in national refusals to forgive ; nations who are not at all moved when a wrong is done by one foreigner to another will be set ablaze with a demand for vengeance when the wrong has been done by a foreigner against one of their own nation. The distinction is therefore not altogether to be trusted. (2) The very difficulty of forgiveness brings to light its nature. (a) There is more hope that forgiveness will be understood where difficulty is felt than where it is not. Some people appear to be of a naturally forgiving temperament. But this is often due to reasons that make it quite worthless. Such people some- times are very insensitive, or they are too proud to take any notice of the words or actions of people they despise. To some the profession of forgiveness comes easily, because they have never really been 310 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD faced with a concrete example of any serious wrong done to themselves. And such people may be loud in demanding the forgiveness of national or social enemies, because they have had no real experience of what forgiveness entails, yet when they are faced with a demand that touches them personally they hopelessly fail. There are people also who declare that forgiveness is easy simply because they believe that there is never really anything to forgive: they believe in forgiveness because they do not believe in sin. If anyone ever does wrong it is unavoid- able, or it is due to ignorance, or it is from bondage to causes beyond control. It is unnecessary to point out that in all these cases we have not even come within sight of the real problem. (b) The difficulty felt is however sometimes imaginary. It sometimes seems to be thought that to forgive entails ignoring the wrong done, either by not feeling the injury or by refusing to believe that anyone could really be so wicked as to wish us evil; all wrong being done by inadvertence or lack of thought. It will be seen that this arises from the idea that forgiveness means there is nothing to forgive. For some people imagine that forgiveness simply means shutting your eyes to evil everywhere, refusing to take any notice, and blurring over people’s faults either by reminding ourselves that we have just the same faults, or by concentrating upon their good points. But it is quite obvious that this is not what the Scriptures assume to be the basis of the x 311 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS Divine forgiveness. In some circumstances a person may be heard to say: “I hope he will never know the injury he has done, or how he has made me suffer.” This seems very noble and generous, indeed it appears to outstrip anything that the Divine forgiveness embraces, for we have all been taught that God may forgive our sins without necessarily remitting their penalty. It is the example of such generosity that some people feel they cannot rise to, if that is what is meant by forgiveness. And if it means desiring that the person who has done wrong should remain in ignorance, it is not wishing that person good but real evil: for we cannot rise higher until we recognise the wrong we have done, and repent of it; and that can hardly be accomplished without some knowledge of how the injury has affected the other person and without our feeling what he has suffered. (c) The human difficulty of forgiveness illustrates the divine. Forgiveness is much more than the passing over of sin, or refusing to take any notice of it. It is not even, as has sometimes been declared, that God does not allow our sin to make any difference in His attitude towards us. For all this would leave us in our sins and let them have their effect upon us; and that literally means refusing to forgive at all. Forgiveness entails even more than wishing the person good, it means so wishing his good that every effort is made to save the sinner from the most serious consequence of his sin, namely, the 312 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD moral deterioration that must accompany the deliberate commission of any evil. We may believe that the Divine attitude is unchanged; or rather that man’s sin calls out from God a still more solicitous love, because the sinner is in a more dangerous condition ; forgiving God may always be, and there is no need for theology to discern a problem in God remaining changeless, however we may change; the problem is, how is forgiveness to be made effective? It is here where the Cross of Christ has to come in, His sacrifice is foreseen to be necessary, is accepted by Him and is a satisfaction to the Father’s heart; not because it enables God to remain forgiving despite the offence done against His law and majesty, but because it enables Him to apply His forgiveness to the hearts of men. Christ’s sacrifice assures men that God remains forgiving, even though they try to pain or destroy Him. Christ’s sacrifice is the one perfect oblation and satisfaction, because He is willing to let men’s sin fall upon Himself, and does so in such wise as to open their hearts to the grace of repentance, because then they see what their sin has done to Him ; and to the grace of sanctification, in gratitude for what He was willing to bear for them. This shows that the difficulty of forgiveness is elsewhere than where most people feel it. 313 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS It 1s CLEAR WuHy THE DIVINE FORGIVENESS DEPENDS ON OURS. (1) This condition might appear to limit the Divine forgiveness. (a) It seems to cut across the Evangelical inter- pretation of forgiveness. Evangelicalism appears to make the Divine forgiveness unlimited, save that the Divine arrangement for it must be accepted. The sole difficulty about this arrangement is that men are often too proud to accept forgiveness. They will not believe they have wronged God, or if they have, then they refuse to accept forgiveness at His hands. They feel the resentment which, by a curious perversion of conscience, we often feel against those we have wronged. They would prefer to do something in expiation of their sin, and not simply have to admit that there is nothing they can do, save to receive a forgiveness which owes nothing to them and of which they are not worthy. The mistake of Evangelicalism was in regarding God as having to be moved to be forgiving towards us, instead of seeing that the difficulty is in making His forgiving attitude effective. There is no limit to God’s forgiving feeling and intention; but we ourselves can limit forgiveness by refusing to let it work effectually in us; and that 1s done when we ourselves refuse to forgive. (b) This seems to make forgiveness depend upon human merit. This is one of the grave outstanding issues between Evangelicalism and Catholicism. 314 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD The one seems to stand for justification by faith only, to trace everything to grace, and to give no meritorious significance to anything that man can do: and this seems to be the teaching of the Epistles. Catholicism seems to teach that while God is of course the ultimate and spontaneous source of grace and forgiveness, man can, and must do something to earn fresh grace, and to make it effective. And this is what the Gospels seem over and over again torecognise. Have wenota sufficient example of it in our text? If you forgive, you will be forgiven ; the one is the reward for the other. We shall not here attempt to reconcile two points of view that have been driven to extremes, and stay to point out how an unbalanced emphasis has ended in a repulsion from the central truth which unites them both. That would take too long and demand a perfection of theological thought for which we are hardly yet ready. (c) But it is admitted by all that the Divine forgiveness is limited by the unforgivable sin. The Gospels are perfectly clear that all sins are forgivable, save blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. The unforgivable sin is so difficult to determine that it is generally shelved and regarded as some very unusual, extreme and almost impossible sin. But does not the unwillingness to forgive come under this very category? God’s forgiveness, as our own Anglo-Saxon word wonderfully brings out, is nothing else than the further giving of Himself. To forgive means simply to give intensively. When men sin, 315 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS God seeks to give Himself to them only the more. Now if that is what is happening to us when we are forgiven, if we do not pass this on to others we pervert its very nature; we take the holy grace that has come to us and we hinder its further operation and change its character. It is really worse than speaking evil of the Holy Ghost, it is turning a holy ~power to an unholy use, receiving forgiveness, sending forth unforgiveness. (2) The principle involved can only be understood when we understand what forgiveness is. (a) Forgiveness is an activity which seeks to reclaim the sinner. Forgiveness is nothing else but love, persisting unchanged in its nature and pertinacious in its purpose when the object of its love is threatened by the disaster which sin involves, Forgiveness, therefore, is simply love, but love refusing to be altered; it goes on loving despite the fact that its object has wronged the lover and made itself unloving. It is love calling up all its powers to meet a desperate need ; it is love deter- mined that no suffering on its part, and no suffering on the part of the sinner, shall turn aside its purpose. This is what God’s forgiveness is in action towards us; our forgiveness of others must be similar, though, of course, in human degree. It is made possible for us only when we take God’s view of things, and we see that it is the person who does wrong, and not the person wronged, who is the more harmed and is in greater danger. It does not mean that we must not feel the injury done, 316 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD any more than Christ did not feel the pain and shame of the Cross; neither does it mean that the other person must not feel it ; he must; though not in mere transference of pain, but in the far deeper pain that comes in penitence for the wrong he has done. To forgive anyone, therefore, does not mean that we take no notice of their wrong, or that we must try to save them from suffering. If we care for them very much we shall do our best to see that they understand and feel what they have done. But what we must not do is to wish them to suffer that consequence of sin which is deteriora- tion of character and, ultimately, damnation. These considerations should enable us to rise more easily to forgiveness, because we can lift our own injured feelings into communion with the sufferings of Christ upon the Cross, knowing that there must be suffering if the effect of sin shall be turned back. This attitude sublimates the natural feeling of vengeance: we can still desire that the person who has wronged us shall suffer; but in penitence, not in penalty. (b) If we do not pass on God’s forgiveness it becomes inoperative in us. God continues to us the offer of His grace, and indeed His very presence with us, whatever we do, until it is useless because we are at last for ever dead to His presence. But His presence everywhere is a forthgoing activity ; it cannot therefore be confined in us without our making ourselves dead to it. His forgiveness is the intense activity of grace, which must not only act 317 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS upon, but act through us; indeed, if it does not pass through us, it cannot even enter into us. If God’s forgiveness is to be made effective through the Cross, it is because the Cross makes us not only assured of forgiveness, but ourselves actually for- giving. If we do not forgive, we have misunderstood what forgiveness is, we have failed to understand the Cross, and it must remain to us of none effect. If, therefore, we are unforgiving, by that very act we prove that God’s forgiveness has never yet taken effect in us; so that, while God remains forgiving, we remain unforgiven. To refuse deliberately to forgive someone else, in the same way as we are | forgiven through the Cross, would mean to refuse the forgiveness of God for ourselves. Therefore, the law is perfectly simple and automatic. Our being forgiving does not condition God’s being forgiving, but it does condition our being forgiven. (c) The importance of our being forgiving is therefore clear. Anything like a real refusal to forgive excludes us at once from the operation of God’s forgiveness, and until that mood passes and that temptation is resisted we are in extreme spiritual danger. We must distinguish, however, between the danger in all temptation and the real disaster which follows our yielding. We are often tempted to think hostile or vengeful thoughts, but they must enter our will and be deliberately wel- comed and adopted before we have really sinned, and the sin must become finally determined before we have utterly killed the grace of God within us. 318 REV. WILLIAM EDWIN ORCHARD The feeling of an injury is no sin, though, if long brooded over and not lifted up to the Cross, it will bring the temptation to vengeance, and that may lead to such hostile feelings and diabolical desires as seek nothing less than the wrong-doer’s damnation. Therefore we should turn all our thoughts about those who have wronged us into prayer; prayer for their salvation, which will demand penitence and repentance. That desire for retaliation which is so natural to us, if we let the Divine love have its way in us, will be sublimated to return good for evil, and will seek the sinner out, not to condemn him for what he has done, but to convince him of it ; and that not to relieve our feelings, but to save his soul, That is why there is more hope for the deeply sensitive person who feels injury than for the slothful person who does not feel, and does not care enough even to tell people the wrong they have done. If all this still seems very hard, we shall find help if we consider very often how God has forgiven us; if we spend a great deal of time before the Cross, seeking there to realise what Christ’s forgiveness cost, and to let it have its full effect upon us. It will be still easier if we recognise that all we have to do is not to rise to some superhuman height of virtue by ourselves, but to let the love of God flow through us in its redeeming power out towards others: to forgive, because only thus can we give expression to the action of God’s forgiveness within ourselves; and by expressing it thus, we shall come to feel more assured of it for ourselves. 319 GOD’S FORGIVENESS DEPENDENT UPON OURS So let us not only kneel at the Cross and let the blood of Christ fall on us to cleanse us from our sins, but let us seek union with Christ crucified so that His blood may flow through us unhindered till we are utterly forgiven, because wholly forgiving. 320 Rey. J. D. JONES, D.D. REV. JOHN DANIEL JONES M.A. of Victoria University, D.D. of St. Andrew’s University. Born April 13th, 1865. Son of J. D. Jones of Ruthin, schoolmaster and musician. Educated at Towyn Academy, Chorley Grammar School, Owens College, Manchester, and Lanca- shire Independent College. Married Emily Cun- liffe of Rookwood, Chorley, who passed away in 1917. Minister at Lincoln, 1889-1898; Bourne- mouth, 1898. Chairman of Lincolnshire Congre- gational Union, 1898; Chairman of Hampshire Congregational Union, 1903. Honorary Secretary of Congregational Union of England and Wales since 1919. Twice Chairman of Congregational Union of England and Wales, first 1909-1910; second, 1925-1926. Moderator of the Federal Council of Free Churches, 1921-1923. Author of the following books amongst others: ‘‘ The Gospel of the Sovereignty,”’ ‘‘ The Hope of the Gospel,”’ “The King of Love,” ‘‘ If a Man Die,’’ ‘‘ The Lord of Life and Death,”’ ‘‘Commentary on St. Mark,”’ four vols., ‘‘Model Prayer,’’ ‘‘The Glorious Company of the Apostles,” ‘‘ Things most surely believed,’’ ‘‘ The Greatest of These.’’ HOW JESUS CLOSES THE BOOK Rev. J. D. Jonzs, D.D. ‘And he closed the book.’ St. Luke iv, 20. I supPOsE every preacher gets now and again this kind of experience while he is studying a passage, some sentence or phrase in it will leap out of it and lay hold of his mind. This little phrase I have quoted as my text did that for me as I studied this passage in the course of my regular Scripture study. In and of itself it seems a perfectly simple statement of fact. On that particular Sabbath day Jesus, either of His own impulse or at the invitation of the ruler of the synagogue, had stood up in that congregation of his fellow townsmen to read the second lesson. He chose as His lesson—or it was chosen for him—the opening verses of the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah. ‘“ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable fear of the Lord.” And _ having read these verses He folded up the roll again and handed it to the attendant. “‘ He closed the book.”’ He had come to the end of the lesson or, at any rate, He had read all the verses which for His purpose 323 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK He wanted to read. And in thus closing the book when the lesson was read, He only did what everyone else did who was called upon to discharge a similar duty—what, indeed, we do still; for still when the lesson is finished we close the Book. And yet somehow I felt that while it was true that every reader on previous Sabbaths had closed the book when the lesson. was done, no one had ever closed it as Jesus had done. There was a finality about the act of Jesus which did not belong to any other closing. The phrase suggested things to me beyond itself. It wasn’t the mere mechanical folding of the roll it suggested, but that in a unique and spiritual sense Jesus ‘“‘ closed the book.’ He closed it in the sense of finishing it, completing it. The book He held in His hand from which He read was an “unfinished ’’ book. It still wanted the final chapter that explains all and straightens all out. Jesus supplied it. “‘ He closed the book.”’ And that is the first truth to which I wish to call your attention. Jesus is thecompletion and fulfilment of the book of the prophet Isaiah, and every other prophetic book and of the whole Old Testament. ‘‘ This day,” said Jesus about the wonderful prophecy He had read out, “ hath this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears.’’ The prophet who penned it thought it was all going to be fulfilled in the Return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem. But it wasn't. JI do not know whether the great prophet who first saw this gleaming vision lived to see the Return actually take place. I rather imagine he 324 REV. JOHN DANIEL FONES did, for Cyrus had already begun his career of conquest when he wrote, and it was the final victory of Cyrus over Babylon that made the Return possible. But if he did live to see it, he must soon have dis- covered that it was not going to fulfil his dream. The first years of the history of the returned exiles make humbling and disappointing reading. But the prophet did not, because of this disappointment, expunge this vision from his book. He left it there, he knew someone would one day arise to fulfil it. It remained there an unfulfilled prophecy for centuries—like some great symphony waiting for the final triumphant chords, like some painting wanting the final touch that was to make it a thing of beauty, like some building waiting for its corner stone—unfinished, incomplete, expectant, until Jesus came. He was the one anointed to preach good tidings to the poor and proclaim release to the captives. “ This day,’”’ He cried, ‘‘ hath this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears.’ He supplied the final, completing touch. “‘ He closed the book.” And all this is true not only of the book of the prophet Isaiah, it is true of the whole Old Testament. That was all the Scripture in existence at the time of this visit to Nazareth. And the Old Testament was an unfinished book. It was confessedly incom- plete. The Old Testament from its first page to its last is an anticipatory book. It tells not of some- thing completed and done. It tells of something expected, something future, something yet to 325 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK come. Its gaze is always forward. Throughout its pages you can hear the tramp of the Coming One. The tramp gets louder as you follow the book through the dim aisles of the centuries. But to the last He remains the Coming One. He is still the expected One, but He has not arrived. The Old Testament is like those stories that are published by instalments.in our magazines, every instalment having these words written at the close, “to be continued in our next.’’ That is the Old Testament. It is an unfinished story. That is what you get written at the close of the prophet Malachi, “to be continued in our next.” And then Jesus came, and all the expectations of the Old Testament found their fulfilment in Him, all its sacrificial system found its explanation in Him, the unfinished story found its completion in Him. “He closed the book.” Somehow this phrase reminded me of the story of Cologne Cathedral. According to all accounts, the cathedral is easily the most beautiful and commanding edifice in the city, indeed, according to one authority I consulted, it is one of the noblest specimens of Gothic architecture in Europe. But what a history it has had! They began to build it almost seven hundred years ago, in the thirteenth century, about the year 1250. The plans for the finished building were drawn by some unknown genius of an architect as far back as that. But for long the cathedral was a mere hint of what its architect meant it to be: The choir was finished © 320 REV. FOHN DANIEL FONES and dedicated in 1322, and building went on more or less spasmodically until the beginning of the sixteenth century. Then for three centuries the cathedral remained truncated, fragmentary, incom- plete. Not till the nineteenth century did building recommence. Naves, aisles and transepts were opened in 1848. But still the spires which were to complete the design were wanting. But at length, in 1880, these too were finished and the great design was at length complete. When those two spires were dedicated the book of Cologne Cathedral, begun six centuries before, was at length “closed.”” And the Old Testament was like Cologne Cathedral. It spoke of a great Deliverer and Redeemer to come. It drew His picture. For century after century it kept adding new details to the picture. And at length, in the fulness of time, but long centuries after the first vague hint of a Redeemer, long centuries after the first beginnings of the Messianic expectation, Jesus came! And in Him all the expectations and anticipations of the Old Testament found their fulfilment. The great redemption scheme it had sketched found its completion. The Book reached its climax and its end. ‘‘This day hath this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears.” ‘“ He closed the book.” And, generally, it may be said that Jesus ‘‘ closed ”’ the great book of Divine Revelation. All through man’s history on earth God has been busy disclosing to him His Nature, as he was able to bear it. The revelation was given line upon line, precept Y 327 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK upon precept, here a little and there a little. No age or race was left wholly without witness. For God revealed Himself to men in the wonders of Nature and in the events of history, and in the yearnings and aspirations of their own souls. All down the centuries God has been writing a book, a book the object of which is to explain Himself to men. By divers portions and in divers manners He unfolded Himself. And yet in spite of Nature, and in spite of history, and in spite of conscience, the highest altar the Greeks could raise was an altar to “ the unknown God,” while not even the favoured Jews could find out the Almighty unto perfection. And then, in the fulness of time, God sent His Son—the effulgence of His glory and the express image of His Person—and in Jesus God has revealed everything about Himself that we need to know. In Jesus we see God as He really is. In Jesus we get not broken glimpses of Him but we see His heart. ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead in bodily fashion. Nature speaks of God’s. power, and human history speaks of His wisdom, and the Hebrew Seers and Prophets speak of His holiness: but it is only Jesus who can speak to us of His Jove. ‘‘ Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” And love is the ultimate truth about God. The final secret has been revealed when His love has been declared. There is nothing more to be said about God. That volume of Revelation which had been growing through the centuries was 328 REV. JOHN DANIEL FONES finished when Jesus came. He “‘closed’’ the book. What I mean to suggest to you is that Jesus is God’s final word. He is the consummation of Revelation. When Jesus came to John at the Baptism, the Baptist saluted Him as the Lamb of God. He saw in Him the fulfilment of prophecy and the answer to the eager expectations of long centuries. But later, when he was a prisoner in the dungeons of Machaerus, lonely and depressed, doubts assailed his soul. Jesus was so different from the Messiah he had been taught to expect. So he sent two of his disciples to put this question to Jesus: ‘‘ Art Thou the coming One or are we to look for another? ’’ Art Thou He, John asked in effect, in whom God is to come near to us and our souls are to find rest, or art Thou, like myself, merely a forerunner of that Great One? What John wanted to know was whether Jesus was just another prophet in the long succession or whether He was the Messiah of whom all the prophets spoke ; whether He was part of the process of revelation or whether He was its goal and end. It was a vital and critical question which the Baptist asked, and it has been asked many a time since his day. What are we to make of Jesus? Is He just a good man helping us to a fuller knowledge of God, but liable in the course of the centuries to be super- seded by one who will give us larger knowledge still or is He God’s final word ? Is He part of the process or is He the goal? In our own days many people 329 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK seem to think He is merely part of the process. They think He can be superseded and indeed already is. Hasn’t Mrs. Besant, for example, said that a new star will arise from the East and that the greater Messiah who is to displace Jesus is to come from India? Are not all these new cults that spring up like mushrooms in our midst—new thought, theosophy, spiritualism with its so-called revela- tions—are not all of them supposed “‘ improvements ” upon the revelation given by Jesus? What are they but challenges to the finality of Jesus? And what are we Christian people to do or say in face of these challenges? Are we to become nervous and — panicky and trepidant ? Are we to give up our beliet that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and that in Him God has finally and fully revealed Himself? By no manner of means. I find evidence of the finality of Jesus in facts like these. First this tremendously significant fact, that in the twenty centuries that have elapsed since He came to earth He has ot been superseded. Attempts have been made again and again to displace Him. Many so-called Messiahs have arisen in the course of the centuries, and for a short time drew a certain number of men after them. But they have all had their day and ceased to be, but Jesus remains, the supreme authority upon God. Substitutes for Christianity have again and again made their appearance, but they have perished. Nietzsche, with his doctrine of the superman, has been the last to disappear—but Jesus remains the one 339 REV. JOHN DANIEL JONES adequate Revelation of that God for whom the human soul hungers and thirsts. This fact of our Lord’s abiding supremacy is significant. He has not been superseded because He cannot be super- seded. He is God’s final word. There is nothing more to be said. He has “ closed the book.” And secondly, that as a matter of fact and ex- perience the revelation of God given in Christ exactly meets the needs of the human soul—tits them as the key fits the lock. All souls are athirst for God. Human hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him. Men may have some real knowledge of God and yet not be. at rest because that knowledge is so imperfect. The primitive and half savage people of Africa, worshipping their fetishes, have some groping knowledge of God, but it isn’t a knowledge that brings them peace. The people of India and China have higher conceptions of Him, but in their case again what they know does not bring them real rest of heart. But when they see God in Christ, the African, the Chinaman, the Hindoo are satisfied. They find rest unto their souls. They say, “ Thou, O Christ, art all I want.” But isn’t that very satisfaction and peace which men get when they find God in Christ proof that His revelation is complete? Men could never rest content with a partial and incomplete revelation, but they do rest in Christ. And the reason for that is that He is not painfully spelling out some syllable of God’s name as the prophets did. He is God’s complete and final 331 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK word, In Him the age-long volume of Revelation reached its completion. He “closed the book.” There is a tremendous word at the end of the book of Revelation in which the writer warns men against attempting to add to or take from the words of the prophecy of that Book. The Seer’s words would apply with even greater force to that volume which tells the story of God’s disclosing of Himself, which took centuries to write and which culminated in Christ. No one must dare to take away from that record. And no one can add to it. In Christ the Revelation is complete. He is God's final word. He “ closed the book.” : And what a blessed and beautiful ending to the Book our Lord supplies! I think most of us like to have a ‘“‘ happy ending” to the books we read, Modern writers do not often give it to us. They seem to think that it is more “ realistic’? to make their stories end in tragedy. But in spite of their so-called realism we love the ‘‘ happy ending.” But for no volume was a “happy ending” so essential as for the volume of the unveiling of God’s Nature. For in the long run our happiness depends not so much on what we are as on what God is. If God were harsh and stern, what chance of blessedness would there be for any one of us? If God should mark iniquity, asks an Old Testament saint, which of us would stand? I take the volume in my hand and in the early pages there are con- ceptions of God to shake the soul with terror, and even when I get far on with it, when I get to those 334 REV. JOHN DANIEL FONES pages in which Jewish seers and prophets tell what they knew of God, there are things to make one solemn and afraid. ‘‘The Law was given by Moses,” and the law is not a thing to make a transgressor cheerful, for it speaks of pain and penalty. But I pass to the last chapter, the chapter which Jesus wrote, and | find the happy ending there. The story of Revelation is like the story of a day opening in storm and tempest, clearing as it got towards noon and afternoon, though menacing clouds still hang in the heavens, but ending in cloudless and peaceful skies and a setting sun of undimmed splendour. With this book of the Revelation of God it is all glory and splendour at the finish. “ Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” ‘‘ Grace > is the final word Rhoneh Gods weAnd Avhate isi grace’ 2. Grace us just stooping, forgiving, redeeming love—love that stoops to the unlovely, love that lavishes itself on the lost, love that forgives unto seventy times seven. The Book ends with a Cross, and on that Cross we see uttermost love—love bearing our sins, love preparing a way for man to rise to God’s sublime abode. God is Love—that is the last word of the Book. What a blessed ending! It brings hope to a world of sinning men! It speaks to us of the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation and eternal life. It sets before us the hope of glory. ‘By grace are we saved! O, blessed ending ! I am glad the book did not end with Moses or with Jeremiah or with Isaiah. The last words in it were 333 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK written by a Man with pierced hands, and He wrote them with His own blood. ‘‘ God is Love,” said Jesus. It is the happy ending. He only could have written it. But after that there was nothing more to be said. He closed the Book. But some one may object that by making Jesus final I am reducing the Christian religion to a stagnant, stationary, unprogressive religion. No! I do not—for this reason, that Christianity is not a religion of a book, it is a religion of a person. Mahommedanism may centre in the Koran, but Christianity centres in Jesus. It is He Himself that closed the Book. He Himself was the last word. The love and grace which complete the Revelation are not simply or even chiefly in His words, they are in Himself, in what He was and did. A religion of a book may become rigid and stereotyped—but the religion which centres in Jesus never can—for this simple reason, that we never get beyond Him. He becomes the more wonderful, the more we study Him and the more we get to know of Him. He is always revealing fresh aspects of His nature to us. “ The sea grows ever greater.’”’ The ages have not left Jesus behind. We have left many a sage, many a leader, many a philosopher behind in the course of the centuries, but Jesus marches still in front. We have never caught up to Him, we never shall catch up to Him. We shall be always like that greatest of His Apostles, pressing upwards to the prize of the calling of God 334 | : | | | | REV. JOHN DANIEL ONES in Christ Jesus. And as we press on towards Christ Jesus we shall be all the while growing in an under- standing of God—we shall be following on to know the Lord. There is a certain exhaustlessness about Jesus. There is no risk of our becoming stagnant. Our Christian faith—if we are sincere and earnest—is bound to be a growing and expanding thing, for while the final Revelation was given in Christ, while He ‘closed the book,’ Christ Himself is to be learned and understood, and as for Christ, there will be no end to learning. For of Him we can say what Sir Isaac Newton said about truth—that we are but children picking up a few pebbles on the beach, while the great ocean of love and grace lies before us waiting to be traversed and explored. He closed the Book—but we shall never come to the end of Him. And so Christian people will be kept aspiring and progressing as they grow in grace and the knowledge of their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And at this point I might well end, for in so far as Revelation is concerned I have said all that I wish to say. But the little phrase which I have quoted as my text has suggested two other things to me, and though they are not strictly in line with the rest of my sermon, perhaps you will allow me in this closing minute just to mention them. The first is this: there is another book than the book of the Revelation of God which our Lord is destined to close, and that is the book of our world’s 335 HOW ¥ESUS CLOSES THE BOOK history. ‘Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God even the Father, when He shall have abolished all rule and all authority and power, for He must reign till He hath put all His enemies under His feet.’”’ It is Jesus who is to write “‘finis’’ at the end of our world’s troubled and chequered history. It is He who is to “close the book.’”’ This is a truth calcu- lated greatly to cheer and hearten us in troublous and distressful times such as these in which we live—it is Jesus who is to close the Book. Sometimes we wonder what is to become of this world of ours. We wonder in these days, for we see passions and | suspicions at work which may well reduce our world to ruins. Some people indeed tell us that the world is to go down and go out in hideous calamity and disaster and that evil is to prove itself supreme. I cannot subscribe to that pessimism. I am not sure that it doesn’t deserve a worse name than pessimism. I am not sure it isn’t blank atheistic unbelief. It is not evil, it is not sin, it is not wickedness, it is not Satan who is to close the book. It is Jesus who is to close the Book. ‘‘ Then cometh the end when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father.” I am not certain about the course of the world’s history, but I am quite sure about its finish, There have been many pages in the world’s history, and there may be many yet written by the hand of Violence, written by the hand of Injustice, written by the hand of Oppression, written by the hand of Tyranny, 330 REV. JOHN DANIEL FONES written by the hand of Wickedness—but the last page is going to be written by Him who made the world His own by the purchase of His blood. He is to put down all rule and all authority and power. He is to have His enemies beneath His feet. The volume which tells the broken and often tragic story of our world’s life is to have a “ happy ending,” for its last pages will tell of the kingdom of this world having become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ. Swrsum Corda! The last word is not with the devil. It is He, our loving and redeeming Lord, who is to “close the book.”’ And the other word I want to say is this. Every one of us has a volume of his own. There is not only the world’s story, there is also your story and mine. I dare say there is many a sad and sorrowful page in the volume. I dare say there is many a page in it we would gladly expunge. And yet these volumes of ours too may have a happy ending, if He closes the book. ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth, yea, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours and their works do follow them.” That is the only way to have a happy and triumphant end—to let Jesus close the book. ‘‘ Lord Jesus,” said Stephen as the stones came crashing down upon him, “ receive my spirit.” And when he had said this he fell asleep. It was a peaceful passing—he fell asleep ; Jesus closed the Book. And so | pray it may be with us. But then to make sure of having Jesus with us we ought to have Him with us all the way. 337 HOW FESUS CLOSES THE BOOK So let us lay hold of Him now, and walk with Him all the days of our pilgrimage. Then shall we too have the “happy ending,’ for He will close the Book, only it will not be an ending at all but a new beginning in the larger liberty and the ampler air of the Father’s house. 338 nanan UES nee Wieetetion, Sasa Raataest pit tai oh aes : Tite Ratna RUN ae aN anh SERENA Be ‘ a ny Dig ny " any years? 5 Y Ty at wits , 1: Sanaa i 7 bi Aa i) ne ns i His " an aan ate ; que Gata i at y ie i af ) i al ia S ary-Speer Library Princeton Theological Seminary Sp a; | 934 Be, PSop FEST 5 = etre, SR tri zizi ieee pales ae Bud tee oe =