DEC 16 1918 
 
 BR 121 .F6 1918 
 
 Fiske, Charles, 1868-1942 
 
 The experiment of faith 
 
The Experiment of Faith 
 
DEC 
 
 The Experiment 
 Faith 
 
 A Plea for Reality in Religion 
 
 By the Right Reverend 
 CHARLES FISKE, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Bishop Coadjutor of Central New York 
 
 Author of "Back to Christ" "Sacrifice and 
 
 Service" "The Religion of the 
 
 Incarnation" etc. 
 
 New York Chicago 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 191 8, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 
 
Foreword 
 
 THE writer was university preacher 
 recently in a great collegiate town. 
 He was feeling his way towards 
 the message he was to give the young men 
 and women who would hear him the fol- 
 lowing week. He spoke to several of the 
 students about it and to one member of the 
 faculties. 
 
 One of the students, with the frankness 
 of youth, replied : " Preach on anything ex- 
 cept the war; we have been ' fed up ' on 
 that." Another, a rather serious-minded 
 young Churchman, said : " Suppose for a 
 change you give us some straight Chris- 
 tianity; we get mighty little of it from the 
 ordinary college preacher." 
 
 The enquirer took these suggestions to 
 his faculty friend and asked what he made 
 of the criticisms that lay beneath the sug- 
 gestions. As he interpreted the thought of 
 the men, it would appear that many people 
 in these days are thinking about spiritual 
 things more seriously than ever before. 
 They want to find their way to some definite 
 5 
 
6 FOEEWOED 
 
 Christian belief. They ought to be shown 
 some definite Christian work. " It is true/' 
 said the speaker, " that we have had a pretty 
 steady stream of preaching about the Great 
 War. One after another the clergy of every 
 faith have come and philosophized about it; 
 one after another they have moralized over 
 its lessons and made appeals to patriotism 
 or religion. Of course we cannot get away 
 from the subject. It colours all our think- 
 ing. But what we need is not so much 
 direct preaching about the war as preaching 
 which shows that the man who speaks is 
 conscious of our thoughts and longs, with 
 all his soul, to give us some light on faith's 
 pathway in these dark and troublous days. 
 The war brings many spiritual problems to 
 the front. They are the same old problems 
 we have always had with us, only now they 
 stand out more sharply defined. Why 
 should we not be told something of the an- 
 swer of Christian faith to such questions — 
 always with the war in mind, but never with 
 the war dragged in? Try it" And then 
 he added: "And if you can show us how 
 faith is possible and what can be said to 
 help the man who gropes towards it falter- 
 ingly, so much the better." 
 
 The substance of these chapters was 
 
FOEEWOED 7 
 
 given in the addresses which followed 
 during that week of preaching. Some of 
 them have been twice repeated since, very 
 informally, in conferences for college men. 
 Their apparent helpfulness, in such in- 
 formal use, is the excuse for their publica- 
 tion in somewhat fuller form. They could 
 not, of course, deal with all the questions 
 suggested by our college friend; they only 
 drive home one moral. They are, it will be 
 seen, an appeal to men now outside the 
 Church to seek to find their way in — both 
 for their own sakes and for the Church's 
 sake. 
 
 The pathway of faith to which they point 
 is no new road; but so many have failed to 
 walk it! This essay is a plea for reality in 
 religion. Its theme is this: that faith is 
 not mere intellectual assent to a creed, it is 
 the consent of the whole man, mind, con- 
 science, heart, will, to the will of God as 
 revealed in Jesus Christ. Because faith, 
 essentially, is receptivity of soul, to know 
 the truth we must strive to live the truth. 
 The vital requirement of religion, there- 
 fore, is fidelity to present faith, obedience 
 to accepted truth. As we live true to the 
 truth we know, we pass on to larger truth 
 and richer belief. Faith is "the seeking 
 
8 FOEEWOED 
 
 spirit of desire " — the spirit that obeys, ap- 
 propriates and uses and so comes to trust 
 and believe. 
 
 That being the case, the believer in Jesus 
 Christ comes to his faith only through 
 genuineness and sincerity of life. He who 
 would believe must be absolutely real in 
 following. The book attempts to deal 
 frankly and sympathetically with the diffi- 
 culties of faith which keep many men out- 
 side the Christian fellowship, but it harks 
 back constantly to the demand for sincerity 
 of discipleship as the one pathway to belief. 
 If, in doing this, the obligations of religion 
 are pressed home somewhat insistently for 
 the " unattached followers " of Christ, they 
 will not complain when they discover that 
 the shortcomings of Churchmen are dealt 
 with no less frankly and with equally plain 
 speaking. 
 
 C. F. 
 
 Syracuse, N. F.i 
 
Contents 
 
 I. 
 
 Unattached Followers 
 
 ii 
 
 II. 
 
 The Ultimate Test 
 
 20 
 
 III. 
 
 The Average Man's Religion 
 
 30 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Other Half . 
 
 42 
 
 V. 
 
 Letting Oneself Go . 
 
 * 49 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Forgotten God 
 
 58 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Joyous Yea . 
 
 69 
 
 VIII. 
 
 A Radiating Gospel . 
 
 78 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Essence of Prayer 
 
 92 
 
 X. 
 
 The Unveiling of Deity 
 
 107 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Fact of Immortality . 
 
 123 
 
 XII. 
 
 Where the Sky Begins 
 
 136 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Communicated Character . 
 
 . 146 
 
 XIV; 
 
 Judgment Days of God 
 
 . 156 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Demand for Reality . 
 
 . 169 
 
The Experiment of Faith 
 
 UNATTACHED FOLLOWERS 
 
 JESUS CHRIST has many unattached 
 followers, men of strong religious feel- 
 ings and convictions who are not en- 
 rolled anywhere as Christian believers and 
 feel that they cannot honestly identify 
 themselves with any church. Such men 
 are found in every class of society. We 
 run across them often among working men, 
 who are more and more growing away 
 from institutional Christianity. We meet 
 them, with greater frequency, in the busi- 
 ness and professional world, where minds 
 are keenest and thinking clearest. Their 
 presence is specially forced upon our atten- 
 tion in these days of war. All around us are 
 men who are consecrating their lives to the 
 service of humanity, who are doing Christ's 
 work and yet have not the stimulus of fel- 
 lowship in Christ's army. That is our loss 
 ii 
 
12 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 as well as theirs, and it is hard to say for 
 which of us the loss is the more tragic. 
 
 One of the big problems of the Church 
 to-day is the man outside. So often he is 
 the very man we need inside. What keeps 
 him out? How shall we get him in? What 
 shall be the terms of admission? He is 
 asking these questions as seriously as we 
 are. The very fact that he does ask is proof 
 that he wants to come — if he can. 
 
 We are concerned now particularly with 
 the man who does want to come. There 
 are other men outside who have little or 
 no interest in the matter. Some are quite 
 satisfied to stay outside because they have 
 drifted into a sort of " phariseeism of the 
 publican." No; they do not belong any- 
 where — why should they? There are so 
 many hypocrites in the churches already — 
 they say. Others again (so we are ex- 
 pected to believe) are so faithful to their 
 ideals that they consider it a sufficient ex- 
 cuse for not belonging to any church to 
 state somewhat violently that they dis- 
 approve (as who does not?) of there being 
 so many churches to choose from. Still 
 others cannot see the need of a church at all. 
 In a time of war, when millions of men are 
 massed on many battle fronts, they believe, 
 
UNATTACHED FOLLOWEKS 13 
 
 apparently, that the real way to prosecute 
 the Christian warfare successfully is to fight 
 a guerilla campaign and so they refuse to 
 serve in any division of the already pathet- 
 ically divided army of Christ! These hope- 
 lessly antiquated folk may be left out of 
 reckoning for the present. They are not 
 really thinking men. They think they are 
 thinking, when actually they are only " re- 
 arranging their prejudices." 
 
 We have another type of men in mind 
 now — that large body of men, keen of con- 
 science and deeply religious at heart, who 
 are not able to accept the formulated 
 standards of faith as set forth in the creeds. 
 They are usually very quiet about it. They 
 say little, unless some one else starts the 
 discussion. They speak, then, less in de- 
 fense and protest than in sincere regret. 
 They would like to believe more if they 
 could. They feel that there ought to be a 
 place for them, even if they cannot believe. 
 Some of them have a very mistaken notion 
 of the faith they cannot accept. They are 
 really rejecting something which is not 
 Christianity. For there is a wide difference 
 between doctrinal Christianity as popularly 
 understood and actual Christian orthodoxy. 
 We rightly ask that he who denies Chris- 
 
14 THE EXPEBIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 tianity shall be at pains to discover what it 
 is he is denying. 
 
 Yet there are multitudes of other men 
 who have more or less carefully studied the 
 Christian creeds and for one reason or 
 another cannot honestly and without equiv- 
 ocation accept their definitions. To find a 
 message for such men has always been a 
 challenge to Christian thought. It is more 
 than that — it is a call to sympathetic and 
 appreciative effort. If we could bring them 
 to kneel with us at the Lord's Table, we 
 should both gain by their coming. It is our 
 shame that we have not realized before how 
 much we need them. It is their loss that 
 they have not sought with more patience 
 and humility to find their way to Christian 
 fellowship. 
 
 There are, of course, difficulties on both 
 sides. Believers have failed, possibly, to 
 understand the real longing, sometimes a 
 very hunger of the heart for faith, in men 
 who have not found in any Christian com- 
 munion a sufficiently simple test of fellow- 
 ship. There is no church, giving them the 
 warm, living faith they long for, whose 
 standards they can fully accept. There is 
 none where they can believe more than half 
 that is taught and preached — and when they 
 
UNATTACHED FOLLOWEES 15 
 
 say this they say it more in sorrow than in 
 criticism. 
 
 There was a time when the Church gave 
 such men small sympathy. Their lack of 
 faith was ascribed to the wiles of Satan ; the 
 test of orthodoxy was rigidly applied; the 
 doubter was kept out, or cast out, with 
 scorn. 
 
 The fault was not all on the side of 
 the conservative and the orthodox. The 
 heterodox were just as proficient in passion- 
 ate denunciation, certainly were as dogmatic 
 in their denials as the convinced theologian 
 was dogmatic in his assertions. That tone 
 and temper of mind has not altogether 
 passed. Witness Mr. Wells's theological 
 acrimony in his God the Invisible King. 
 The entertaining author thinks he has 
 discovered God. Like Mr. Chesterton's 
 yachtsman (who slightly miscalculated his 
 course and landed on what he supposed to 
 be an uncharted island of the South Seas, 
 only to learn in the morning that he had 
 beached his boat near Brighton), Mr. Wells 
 has really discovered nothing. He has 
 simply been groping after truths which have 
 long been taught in Christian pulpits, had 
 he but known it. The new and strange 
 thing, however, in all the discussion his 
 
16 THE EXPEEIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 theme has aroused, is the appreciative sym- 
 pathy and kindliness with which Christian 
 critics have received his philosophizing, con- 
 trasted with the irritating irreverence of the 
 philosopher's own lively attacks upon be- 
 liefs which these same Christians hold most 
 sacred. It is just as unquestionably true 
 that in other days all the theologians were 
 not black-hearted heresy hunters and all the 
 heterodox disputants saints with souls as 
 white as angels' wings. Bitterness was not 
 all in the camp of the orthodox. 
 
 Nevertheless, undeniably, the conscien- 
 tious objector to current theological belief 
 usually found little sympathy or understand- 
 ing. His questionings were received in 
 horrified silence ; his denials met with indig- 
 nant denunciations. Later, though the 
 tests of orthodoxy were not applied so 
 promptly nor so rigidly, there was slight 
 appreciation of the position of the perplexed 
 enquirer and less honest effort to face his 
 difficulties. Naturally, therefore, he be- 
 came hardened in doubt. We are learning 
 now to understand something of the real 
 goodness of many a modern Thomas. 
 
 Yet, what are we to do with him? Sup- 
 pose we abandon all credal requirements, 
 including in the Church all who express a 
 
UNATTACHED FOLLOWEKS 17 
 
 desire to follow the Lord Jesus, without 
 enquiring what they believe about Him. 
 It might be conceivable that we should so 
 admit men to church fellowship on the 
 simplest possible profession of discipleship. 
 Some Christian communions are already- 
 doing it. They are not growing any more 
 rapidly than other Christian bodies. Cer- 
 tainly they are not manifesting a more vital 
 Christian activity, with a largeness of 
 vision and a world-wide mission such as 
 attracts men of the great heart. 
 
 The Church rightly feels that its very life 
 depends upon its setting forth fully and 
 convincingly the deposit of faith which it 
 believes it has received. And not its life 
 only — that gives the wrong emphasis — but 
 the life it lives to give. Surely it is not 
 unreasonable so to regard its obligation. 
 This conception of duty arises out of the 
 profound conviction that the ideal which we 
 call the Christian life sprang out of the 
 Christian faith. "We cannot unravel the 
 threads which knit the character which we 
 know in its developed form as Christian, 
 from the creed which appears, at every 
 single point of the character, as its inherent 
 and vital background." Dogma is not 
 merely preached as dogma. We believe it 
 
18 THE EXPEEIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 to be practically impossible to maintain for 
 long the moral beauty of the Christian char- 
 acter without its doctrinal basis. Is not 
 militant Prussia the natural fruit of a hybrid 
 Christianity, with a dash of Nietzsche 
 thrown in? "The thing committed to us 
 is the whole mind of Christ; and Christ can- 
 not be divided." Men may be unconscious 
 of the influence, but the Christian life they 
 are trying to live has survived only in a 
 Christian atmosphere of faith. Their 
 strength is partly an inheritance; partly it 
 has been imbibed from the " diffused Chris- 
 tianity " which has silently moulded their 
 thoughts and quickened their consciences 
 from youth on. 
 
 Faith is not mere intellectual assent; 
 it is the consent of the whole man (mind, 
 conscience, heart, will) to the will of God as 
 revealed in Jesus Christ. The end of faith 
 and worship is life. If this is so, the Chris- 
 tian faith is vitally necessary. Its presenta- 
 tion should be as simple as possible, reduced 
 to real essentials; but in these essential 
 elements it must be consistently presented 
 and fully preserved, because out of it springs 
 the Christian character. In it also is ex- 
 pressed a definite loyalty to Christianity's 
 Founder. The essence of the creed is this 
 
UNATTACHED FOLLOWEKS 19 
 
 expression of allegiance to Christ. He is 
 its center and core. Once this is recognized, 
 he who would follow Christ will at least 
 approach humbly and prayerfully, patiently 
 and sympathetically, to the examination of 
 its simple fundamental statements about 
 the Master for whom they profess reverent 
 loyalty and to whom they would give faith- 
 ful service. 
 
 When this has been said, we have at least 
 reached a new point of departure. The 
 realization of our common purpose may, 
 perhaps, lead those who would consecrate 
 their lives to the work of Christ to examine 
 afresh the faith of Christians. The doc- 
 trines of Christianity are the logical ex- 
 ponents of its facts, and the facts are the 
 basis of its life. We accept the doctrines, 
 not as mere items of information, but as 
 interpretations of that life — the life to which 
 we would re-dedicate ourselves in these 
 days of splendid service; the life we must 
 try to understand if we would also strive to 
 imitate it. 
 
II 
 
 THE ULTIMATE TEST 
 
 WHAT is religion's essential re- 
 quirement, its ultimate test? If 
 we say that doctrinally it cannot 
 be more than the simplest Christian creed — 
 the short, unelaborated, apostolic statement 
 of Christian truths as the logical exponents 
 of Christian facts — may it be less than that? 
 Shall we gladly allow the freest possible 
 interpretation of the creed? Even though 
 the Church maintain " the deposit " as its 
 own standard, must it always be required, 
 at the outset, of all who would come into 
 the fold? 
 
 We cannot dismiss with a flat denial those 
 who would so simplify the requirements for 
 lay membership. They would still urge 
 that doubtful believers be received into 
 membership and communion, in order that 
 they may grow into fuller understanding 
 and acceptance of the Church's doctrine, 
 just as we receive disciples whose ethical 
 standards are unformed and whose exhibi- 
 20 
 
THE ULTIMATE TEST 21 
 
 tion of Christian virtues is very imperfect, 
 meanwhile training them to become more 
 consistent Christians. 
 
 The purpose of this essay is not to bal- 
 ance arguments over conflicting views as to 
 doctrinal requirements for Christian fellow- 
 ship ; but to insist that there is one essential 
 requirement which must be pressed home, 
 whether a man believes much or little. 
 Essentially faith is receptivity of soul. It 
 is the spirit which trusts, believes, obeys, 
 appropriates. The first enquiry, therefore, 
 which we address to the troubled questioner 
 has to do not with the quantity of his faith, 
 but with its quality. If he is to be received 
 into Christian fellowship, is he at least in the 
 mood to desire larger and richer belief? 
 
 Something like that we ask, or should ask, 
 of morally imperfect converts. We must 
 not practically make it possible for anybody, 
 with an easy conscience or a fat pocket- 
 book, to become a church member some- 
 where — though the rivalry of sectarian 
 Christianity has so broken down moral dis- 
 cipline, that often it would appear that this 
 has become the actual situation. What we 
 ask of the man of imperfect Christian 
 practice is this: Do you want to do better? 
 What we must ask of the man of incomplete 
 
22 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 Christian faith is phrased in similar lan- 
 guage: Do you want to believe more? If 
 you desire faith, you must have receptivity 
 of soul. Are you sure, then, that you want 
 to believe? Have you a mind — no, have 
 you a heart — open to the light? Tennyson 
 puts it in some stanzas of In Memoriam, two 
 lines of which are often quoted out of their 
 context : 
 
 Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
 
 At last he beat his music out. 
 
 There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds. 
 
 He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
 He would not make his judgment blind, 
 He faced the spectres of the mind 
 
 And laid them : thus he came at length 
 
 To find a stronger faith his own. 
 
 When Lincoln was accused of being an 
 infidel, he answered with simple directness 
 and gave some account of his earlier strug- 
 gles towards faith. " I do not claim/' he 
 added, " that all my doubts have been swept 
 away. It may be my lot to go on in a 
 twilight, feeling my way as doubting 
 Thomas did; but in my poor effort I bear 
 with me, as I go on, that seeking spirit of 
 desire for faith which was with the man of 
 
THE ULTIMATE TEST 23 
 
 olden time who cried, ' Lord, I believe ; help 
 Thou mine unbelief.' " 
 
 Here is real faith, even though it be not 
 the fully formulated faith of a professed 
 Christian. What we need is to accept it, in 
 full appreciation of its vitality, as a step to- 
 wards " the faith " — that is, towards the 
 point where the seeker finds in the formu- 
 lated doctrine the answer to all his long- 
 ings. If the way can be made easy by any 
 free interpretation of the creed which does 
 not deny the historic sense outright, so 
 much the better; but what is most needed, 
 and what he most has the right to ask, is a 
 full appreciation of the vitality of his present 
 faith, a glad acceptance of it as that which 
 lies at the core of Christian experience, a 
 ready confidence that if it is genuine he will 
 be guided into other truth. 
 
 Is it genuine? That is the point. Has 
 he, indeed, the spirit which trusts, appro- 
 priates, obeys? May it not be that his fail- 
 ure to go on to fuller truth is due to a flaw 
 in his present self-surrender? The child- 
 like spirit is of the very essence of faith. 
 The modern Nicodemus must be born again. 
 He is a good man who cannot perceive the 
 Christ because too well satisfied with him- 
 self. 
 
24 THE EXPEKIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 Once more: receptive faith means not 
 simply the spirit of desire, but the spirit of 
 obedience. Nicodemus must try to live 
 the truth he knows — and try hard enough to 
 lose some of his self-confidence. " I do not 
 vex myself any more with questions I can- 
 not answer," says J. R. Green; "I am not 
 impatient, as I used to be, with vagueness 
 and dimness. I see that we must live, to 
 know ; to know the right, we must live the 
 right." 
 
 Here we have a test that cuts, too, across 
 the path of the man whose statement of his 
 belief is letter perfect, while yet he has 
 never, apparently, made his intellectual ac- 
 ceptance of " the faith " lead him on to 
 " faith " in its more vital sense. Has he 
 been putting the chief emphasis on a form 
 of sound words, instead of stressing the 
 spiritual values of the great truths which 
 the creeds declare? 
 
 That, after all, is the main thing — to find, 
 not merely the contents, but the content 
 of the creed. We must make it clear be- 
 yond peradventure that this ethical and 
 spiritual content of Christian truth is its 
 raison d'etre. There must be no insistence 
 on doctrinal tests without making plain the 
 reason for safeguarding doctrine. That 
 
THE ULTIMATE TEST 25 
 
 reason has ever been the same : belief is not 
 a bare acceptance of facts, it is an atmos- 
 phere to be breathed, a life to be lived; it 
 becomes real faith only when it colours all 
 our conduct. 
 
 It makes a vast difference the moment we 
 begin to put the creed that way. It means 
 that we take it as a working hypothesis and 
 try it out in life by putting it to the test of 
 practical experiment. Anything that meets 
 this test is vital. 
 
 I believe in God — what does it mean but 
 that I start with the assumption that there 
 is a Moral Governor over the universe and 
 that I mean to acknowledge His will as the 
 moral law of conduct? That is something 
 vital. Try it out and see whether it does 
 not give life a new colouring. Hard to 
 believe in a divine moral government in 
 these days? Yes, of course. But give it a 
 trial. Let your thought play around it and 
 your imagination take hold of it. Before 
 long you will discover within yourself, in 
 the white light of this truth you are testing, 
 the explanation of the problem of evil with- 
 out. In your own lifelong disobedience you 
 will find the root and source of the world's 
 moral disaster; and knowing so positively 
 the still insistent demand of the moral law 
 
26 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 you will grow steadily more sure of the 
 Moral Governor. If we love justice and 
 hate evil, is it not God's own spirit that has 
 taught us? 
 
 Then, next, you will need God the 
 Father — Some One who knows and cares 
 and loves and pardons. Well, you try out 
 that article of faith. You begin to act to- 
 wards God with an understanding that 
 Fatherhood implies sonship and that love 
 desires a return of love. And next: Jesus 
 Christ. Before you deny His divinity, try 
 to find out the ethical significance of such a 
 faith. What does it mean but the realiza- 
 tion of the divine in us; else how could God 
 and humanity come together in the Person 
 of the Christ? What does it mean but a 
 new appreciation of the brotherhood of men 
 in Christ, an understanding of the inefface- 
 able relation between man and man? Try 
 that out in all human relations. Sink your 
 differences and look for the fundamental 
 virtues common to all men. Finding them, 
 trace them up to Christ and see how they 
 reach their perfection in Him, the manliest 
 of men, who embodies and fulfills all your 
 ideals. There is no article of the creed 
 which cannot be tried out that way, with the 
 possible exception of the Virgin Birth, and 
 
THE ULTIMATE TEST 27 
 
 even there the difficulty disappears when we 
 take the fact in its right order. But of 
 that later. 
 
 Enough has been said to indicate our be- 
 lief that the Christian creed is really the 
 foundation of the Christian character. The 
 one is built upon the other. When one 
 goes, the other, sooner or later, will surely 
 go with it. And enough has been said, 
 also, to point out faith's open gateway. 
 What is the essential religious requirement? 
 It is very simple : just this, that each bit of 
 faith, however small, be used; each accepted 
 truth thoroughly tried out. That means 
 that we go from " faith to faith," step by 
 step. It is the pragmatic test: does it 
 work? But it is more than that, it is the 
 way of further knowledge. Each truth 
 translated into life will lead to larger truth. 
 " He that willeth to do His will shall know 
 of the teaching whether it be of God." 
 
 It does seem that this is the real appeal 
 to be made to the men we have had in mind, 
 men naturally better by far than some of us 
 who have been admitted to church member- 
 ship, men who stay out just because their 
 consciences are tender and they will not 
 come in unless they can be quite sure of 
 coming honestly, without professing more 
 
28 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 than they believe; men whom the Church 
 sorely needs because they are men of 
 splendid intellect, large ability and conse- 
 crated purpose who could bring to the 
 Church's problems breadth of vision and 
 greatness of achievement. We need them. 
 We want them to come to us if they possibly 
 can. Conscious that they have, possibly, 
 capacities for a larger and finer Christianity 
 than our own, we yet humbly believe that 
 we have for them a simple recipe for faith. 
 We have not always taken our own pre- 
 scription; alas, that we must confess it! 
 But whenever we have followed the advice, 
 effect has always followed cause. We pass 
 on the prescription the more confidently, 
 because we are quite sure that it is in the 
 line of a good man's thinking. He wants 
 to live true to truth. Why not try out his 
 faith, with the definite trust that here is the 
 pathway to sure belief? We see through a 
 glass darkly; but we can see enough to 
 guide us. Why wait for the full light before 
 taking the first step? Every man has some 
 light. Why not follow it at once? 
 
 What, then, is the honest doubter doing 
 with his half creed? Never mind, for the 
 time being, the half he cannot accept — what 
 about the rest? What is he making of it? 
 
THE ULTIMATE TEST 29 
 
 How is he using it? The ultimate test of 
 religion is fidelity to known facts, obedience 
 to accepted truth, use of present faith. 
 Faith as a theory, however correct, is of 
 little worth ; faith as an incentive is the only 
 faith that really counts. It may be the 
 simplest, smallest measure of faith; but if 
 we use it, it starts us on the way; it begins 
 for us the divine adventure ; it pushes us on 
 towards experiment, and experiment is the 
 road to discovery. 
 
 The ultimate test of religion is found in 
 the question : Are you living true to all the 
 truth you already know? Are you acting 
 it out? "He that willeth to do His will 
 shall know of the teaching." These are the 
 words of Christ and they are His definition 
 of religion's vital requirement. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE AVERAGE MAN'S RELIGION 
 
 THESE chapters are not in any way- 
 pretentious of purpose. Because 
 they are addressed primarily to 
 thoughtful men who are unable as yet to 
 accept whole-heartedly the simplest state- 
 ment of the formulated faith of the Church, 
 they are not written for mere " intel- 
 lectuals." Not half the honest doubt in the 
 world is the result of intellectual perplexity. 
 Doubt springs rather out of the practical 
 difficulties of plain people who give more or 
 less thought to religious questions, at least 
 occasionally, but are not specially skilled in 
 balancing probabilities and making fine dis- 
 tinctions. 
 
 If it can be done without weakening the 
 general argument — and I think it can — I 
 should like to make this an essay towards 
 faith that will appeal particularly to the 
 average man — and the average woman. I 
 think I understand them because I am 
 just an average man myself. It is time 
 that we average people came to our own; 
 3° 
 
THEAVEKAGE MAN'S KELIGION 31 
 
 time we had religious books written for us, 
 and sermons preached for us, and churches 
 made places in which we can worship, 
 where everything is human and natural and 
 nothing stilted and unreal. 
 
 Most books of religion have been written 
 for intellectuals who are sorely troubled by 
 difficulties of faith that plain common sense 
 brushes aside as hardly needing explanation, 
 or for trained Christians who have thought 
 much about religious problems and are 
 deeply interested in fine theological dis- 
 tinctions. Most churches have a cultural 
 worship in highly developed devotional 
 form and robbed of reality through the per- 
 fection of its performance by trained choirs, 
 or else free and easy evangelistic services 
 devoid of reverence and making no appeal 
 to the deeper instincts of hearts hungry for 
 the divine. Most sermons are either con- 
 ventionally pious discourses preached for 
 the edification of practiced saints who un- 
 derstand and love the vocabulary of homi- 
 letics, or exhortations to confirmed sin- 
 ners — who usually are not there to hear 
 the appeal. 
 
 The average man seems to have been left 
 out of reckoning. He is not a hardened 
 sinner. Of course he does sin, but he is 
 
32 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 sincerely ashamed of his shortcomings and 
 has not yet learned to silence his conscience. 
 He certainly wants to please God, even 
 though he is rather uncertain in the expres- 
 sion of his desire. Neither is he very re- 
 ligious. Religious people seem to him 
 solemn and serious folk who lack any hu- 
 mour or light-heartedness and would make 
 this a very sad sort of a world if they suc- 
 ceeded in denaturing the rest of men and 
 settling them safely and sanely on their own 
 dull level of respectability. 
 
 The average man has very simple ideas 
 of religion. To him it means unselfishness, 
 generosity, sincerity, cleanliness of soul, a 
 genuineness and straightforward honesty 
 that despises cant and is chary of anything 
 in the way of religious profession, an abid- 
 ing faith in goodness as he has seen it in 
 his own wife or mother, a very real humility 
 because of his own defects — a humility 
 which we are quite justified in calling peni- 
 tence — and a readiness, therefore, to forgive 
 defects (or, as we should say, sins) in 
 others; with it all, a general consciousness 
 of God, of whom he is rather vaguely aware 
 and about whom he finds it almost impossi- 
 ble to speak easily and naturally. Often 
 the average man seems to have forgotten 
 
THE AVEEAGE MAN'S EELIGION 33 
 
 God — and yet somehow we understand that 
 he really is conscious of Him, as the child 
 is conscious of the mother in another part 
 of the house and would miss her if he knew 
 she had gone away. 
 
 The really vital books of the war are the 
 books which have made us see something of 
 the average man's heart; books like A 
 Student in Arms and The War and the Soul, 
 which give us a fresh appreciation of the 
 essential goodness of common men, just as 
 what we have seen of the service of many 
 strong men and women at home has brought 
 its revelation of the real religion of such 
 unattached followers of Christ. 
 
 The one passion of my own ministry has 
 been to try to interpret the average man 
 to himself. I want to make him see that all 
 the ideals of goodness which he ever had are 
 to be found in Jesus Christ. I want to have 
 him feel that Christ is not the kind of a 
 person the painters have made Him, but a 
 likeable, loveable, strong, manly Friend and 
 Brother, who walked the path of human 
 helpfulness wherever it led, who came to 
 face our difficulties with our strength, who, 
 never compromised and never slipped back 
 into the easy path, but espoused the cause 
 of truth against every error and took the 
 
34 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 field in behalf of every virtue and kept 
 straight on and never faltered and never 
 failed, though the issue of courageous adher- 
 ence to truth and right was Calvary and the 
 cross. 
 
 I want to do more than that — I want to 
 make men see that everything that Jesus 
 Christ was God is, and I want them to un- 
 derstand that belief in the divinity of Christ 
 means this. I want them to know that if 
 there is a God He must be like Christ and I 
 want them to believe that He is just that 
 sort of a God, in spite of difficulties and in 
 the face of all appearances to the contrary. 
 I want them, when life is hard, to know 
 that if Christ is God then it is evident that 
 God is less concerned about making life 
 easy than about making men strong and 
 brave and great. I want them to feel, 
 whenever the world looks dark, that God is 
 behind the cloud, even if we cannot under- 
 stand why He does not reveal Himself. I 
 want them, in these troubled days, to know 
 that belief in Christ means the certainty that 
 an Easter always follows a Gethsemane and 
 Good Friday. I want them through Christ 
 to become so certain of God that they will 
 gladly give Him the undivided allegiance of 
 their lives. 
 
THE AVERAGE MAN'S RELIGION 36 
 
 After all, this is what religion is. Some- 
 how we generally confuse it with knowledge 
 about God and His world. We fancy that 
 it means knowing what God is and having 
 clear and definite arguments to prove His 
 existence. Somehow we usually identify 
 faith with complete understanding and rea- 
 soned belief. 
 
 Is it not true, on the contrary, that those 
 who are most conscious of God are often 
 least able to tell why they believe in Him? 
 And is not this due to the fact that, after all, 
 the greatest argument for God's existence 
 is the instinctive belief of the race that He 
 does exist? Men are naturally predisposed 
 to belief. Instinctively they trust con- 
 science and listen to the voice of the heart. 
 Instinctively they put God and immortality 
 among the indisputable facts of life. To 
 them it is unthinkable that God is not or 
 that this life ends everything, and knowing 
 that the mass of men feel just as they do 
 about it, they need no further arguments. 
 
 What they do need, is to act on their 
 belief. That is the only way in which the 
 roots of faith can spring up and bear flowers 
 and fruit. The real venture of faith is to 
 understand that God, if there is a God, is 
 the one thing that counts. The great ad- 
 
36 THE EXPEKIMEOT OF FAITH 
 
 venture is to let the soul make its leap to 
 God. Religion, says Donald Hankey, is 
 just " betting your life that there is a God " : 
 acting on the probability, staking something 
 on the truth of your decision. 
 
 We need knowledge, of course. It is 
 good for us to reason out our faith, espe- 
 cially if we have any desire or expectation 
 of passing it on to others. We need to have 
 a reason for the hope that is in us. But 
 religion is not knowledge; it is friendship, 
 relationship, companionship with God. 
 
 Well, then, if we believe there is a God, 
 the one essential thing is to try to establish 
 intercourse with Him. That is really what 
 prayer is, as we shall see later on. We 
 need to get into the spirit of prayer even 
 though we do not pray much in words — 
 and the spirit of prayer is to have such a 
 conviction of God and His righteousness 
 that we find our real peace in the sure 
 knowledge that we are following His will. 
 That is the reason some men are finding 
 God through the war. " Don't think for a 
 moment," says one of the English chap- 
 lains, " that the Tommies are coming out of 
 the trenches as converts by the thousands. 
 They are not. But they are beginning to 
 think of things seriously, even though they 
 
THE AVEEAGE MAN'S EELIGION 37 
 
 will not talk of what they think, and they are 
 finding the peace that comes from the con- 
 sciousness that they are fighting on God's 
 side." 
 
 Private Peat bears similar testimony. 
 " We don't pray much in words/' he says, 
 " but every mother's son of us is honestly 
 at peace with God because we believe that 
 God understands and it makes us plain com- 
 fortable in our hearts. I have been two 
 years in hell," he continues, " and have come 
 back with a smile. People ask me how it 
 is possible to come back smiling. If you 
 had taken the biggest opportunity life ever 
 held out to a man, wouldn't you smile? If 
 you had gone down into hell for the sake of 
 the people who were there already, to help 
 them out if you could, wouldn't you come 
 back, if you came back at all, smiling? For 
 us the issue is as simple as black and white 
 and we smile because we know we are doing 
 what God wants us to do." 
 
 We need that conviction of duty faithfully 
 done in all of life, through the courage of 
 the commonplace as well as in the courage 
 of the crisis. The average man is a little 
 afraid of getting by himself and quietly 
 thinking this out; but when he forces him- 
 self to do it, he knows by his sense of ease 
 
38 THE EXPEEIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 and security, when he is really striving to do 
 Christ's will, that he is on the right road. 
 
 The first step towards fixed reality in 
 religion is to try to say all this to God. For 
 that reason we have to pray in words, even 
 though we find it a hard thing to do. We 
 are helped to a firm faith as we give definite 
 expression to our faltering faith. It makes 
 our own convictions more certain. And it 
 certainly must be pleasing to God, in the 
 same way that it warms a parent's heart to 
 have his boy tell him what he knows al- 
 ready that the boy feels. Hankey has 
 shown us something of the religion of the 
 inarticulate. If we are to get a real grip 
 on God and make our religion more vital, 
 it is our business to try to make it articulate, 
 and this is what prayer is. 
 
 But all the prayer in the world can do no 
 good save as it is the honest effort in this 
 way to pledge the best that we have to the 
 best that we know; or the expression, how- 
 ever confused and awkward, of sincere re- 
 gret that we have failed in moral achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 What the average man needs to learn is 
 that religion grows deeper and stronger as 
 he tries to give expression to his thoughts 
 about God. He shrinks from this expres- 
 
THE AVERAGE MAN'S RELIGION 39 
 
 sion of his thoughts even to himself; or 
 more probably, he draws back and refuses 
 to make the effort to express them. That 
 is just where he fails to get a firm hold on 
 faith. If there is a God, and if God is a 
 Person, the essence of religion is to estab- 
 lish intercourse with Him. Out of that 
 comes strength. Through that we become 
 conscious of our own souls. 
 
 Through that also we become conscious 
 of sin. The tendency has been to ignore it. 
 Practically, the average man's philosophy 
 has been that of Sir Oliver Lodge, who tells 
 us that the best men are not worrying about 
 their sins; they have let the dead bury their 
 dead; what is past and gone had best be 
 forgotten, they say, and real religion de- 
 mands that we be up and doing; action, not 
 introspection, must mark our path to God. 
 
 In a way they are right. The best method 
 of getting rid of sin is to put something in 
 its place. We cannot pull sins out of the 
 heart, we must push them out by putting 
 something else in. The best thing to do 
 with an evil past is to make a fresh start and 
 try to fashion out of it a splendid future. 
 Yet, as Canon McComb points out, "we 
 cannot drift into goodness without thought 
 or effort "; we must learn the cause of past 
 
40 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 blunders and discover the best means of 
 destroying bad habits. Growth comes by 
 moral decisions and decisions of the will 
 presuppose serious reflection. " Sin is not 
 an accidental scar, a wart or wen, but a deep- 
 seated moral disorder." If we are to get 
 rid of it, therefore, we must get back to the 
 very heart of things; we must, in the very 
 center of our being, keep a place sacred to 
 God. "There is nothing absolutely good 
 except a good will," and to make the will 
 right we must get alone with God and in 
 passive receptivity permit Him to show us 
 what we ought to be and how He wants to 
 use us. 
 
 This, surely, is where the average man 
 fails and his failure arises out of the neglect 
 to live true to his belief that there is a God. 
 He does believe in God, and his common 
 sense teaches him that God is a Person; but 
 he does not follow out his belief by taking 
 time to cultivate friendship with this divine 
 Person. He forgets that we do not find the 
 deep things of life; they find us. Our part 
 is to incline the ear and open the heart. If 
 we permit ourselves to live through this 
 mysterious life on this mysterious earth 
 with no outlook on the unseen and the 
 eternal, God must withhold from us His 
 
THE AVEBAGE MAN'S RELIGION 41 
 
 secrets. This is the simple thought that I 
 am trying to drive home. A Christian is not 
 a man who declares his belief in God and has 
 accepted the facts of Christ's life, but a man 
 who is striving with all his heart to get to 
 know God and to establish friendship with 
 Him through Christ. 
 
 Speak to Him, thou, for He hears ; and 
 
 spirit with spirit can meet. 
 Closer is He than breathing and nearer 
 
 than hands and feet. 
 
IV 
 THE OTHER HALF 
 
 IN summoning others to make the 
 venture of faith, we start, as we have 
 already acknowledged, with a confes- 
 sion and self-accusation. 
 
 It is said of Sir Oliver Lodge that when 
 Dr. Gore was Bishop of Birmingham the 
 great scientist rarely failed to attend serv- 
 ices or meetings at which the Bishop 
 preached. Once he was asked for an ex- 
 planation. " Why do you always go to hear 
 Bishop Gore," said the questioner; "surely 
 you do not believe what he preaches?" 
 " No," was the reply ; " I don't ; but he does." 
 It was an inspiration to listen to a man who 
 was all on fire with faith. Honest conviction 
 is always respected. Evident sincerity has 
 tremendous drawing power. 
 
 Most of us must confess that our own 
 lives have too often belied our creed. In- 
 tellectually we take ourselves to be con- 
 vinced Christians; but the world would 
 never guess it. There is no sharp line of 
 cleavage between our lives and the lives of 
 4* 
 
THE OTHER HALF 43 
 
 others who deny what we believe. We 
 declare the Christian faith to be the spring 
 and fountain source of Christian living; but 
 we fail to show that our statement is more 
 than a fine-spun theory. 
 
 So we must start on faith's experiment 
 ourselves. For ourselves and for others, 
 we must press our Lord's injunction: He 
 that doeth the will shall know. That is the 
 point. Not how much faith, but how in- 
 tensive a faith; how deep, how active? 
 Faith as a grain of mustard seed can do 
 great things, if it only be given the chance to 
 germinate. St. Paul had the heavenly 
 vision : the great fact of his subsequent life 
 was that he was obedient to the vision. 
 
 The ultimate measure of faith is obedi- 
 ence : we must live true to the truth. Who- 
 ever is convinced of a truth, whoever ac- 
 cepts any set of views or statement of facts, 
 whoever approves any particular course of 
 action, must live in obedience to it. Whether 
 we have much light or little, we must walk 
 in the light. Some have an abundance of 
 faith, others very little, just faint glimmer- 
 ings of light as to some things and hardly 
 any light as to many things. But whether 
 we have much light or little, the supreme 
 question is always this : What are you doing 
 
44 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 with the faith you have? How are you fol- 
 lowing the light already received? Are you 
 living true to the truth? Or is that truth 
 just a theory that you have never really put 
 to the test? Never mind the half that you 
 cannot understand ; what are you doing with 
 the other half that you do understand? 
 
 A group of earnest men were pouring out 
 of a convention hall where representatives 
 of a national church had been deliberating 
 on present tasks and opportunities, when 
 one of them turned to a great leader, a 
 whole-hearted, devoted bishop, and asked 
 him what he felt was the real note of the 
 gathering. Was it to be found in the in- 
 spiring conferences, in the quickened mis- 
 sionary spirit, in the splendid leadership 
 manifested in some of the debates, in the 
 harmony of spirit that appeared where sharp 
 differences of opinion had been expected to 
 result in serious clashes among men of dif- 
 ferent schools of thought? All these were 
 enough, apparently, to call forth enthusiasm. 
 But, with an expression so serious as to 
 seem a little akin to dread, the bishop asked : 
 " Were you not a little afraid of our drifting 
 into corporate insincerity? This has been 
 called a revolutionary convention; I wonder 
 if it has not really been resolutionary?" 
 
THE OTHEE HALF 45 
 
 Vital subjects of present day moment had 
 been considered; crying needs had sounded 
 their claims; social questions had been given 
 a hearing; industrial problems had been 
 pressed for solution. In every case report 
 and discussion had ended in counsels of 
 safety and sanity. Admirable resolutions 
 had been passed. The danger was that it 
 would all end there. Having passed pre- 
 ambles and resolutions, would we forget 
 them? Would we fail to see that resolu- 
 tions are embodied truth packed into con- 
 venient form for subsequent action? When 
 the time for the next convention came, 
 would it be discovered that in the mean- 
 while all had been relegated to the minute 
 book, beautifully engrossed and then 
 neglected? 
 
 Is it not our personal peril? We recog- 
 nize the truth and accept it; but we do not 
 try hard enough to live it. In religion we 
 are more apt to argue about what we believe 
 or disbelieve than to set to work seriously 
 to embody belief in action. 
 
 Because we so frankly admit the incon- 
 sistency in ourselves, we may be forgiven if 
 we point out to others the value of the lesson 
 our own experience has taught. The first 
 step towards faith is very simple. It means 
 
46 THE EXPEKIMEOT OF FAITH 
 
 a readiness for the moment to let go all dis- 
 cussion of our beliefs and unbeliefs and to 
 try to put aside for the time the things we 
 cannot accept, that we may concentrate on 
 the things we do accept. There is no one 
 who does not know that with all his doubts 
 there are for him certain well-established 
 verities. At least he has a half creed. 
 There are some things which for him are 
 true. What is he doing with them? To 
 start with the half creed and try to live it 
 will be to make a beginning towards a fuller 
 creed and a richer life. To obey, says 
 Lacordaire, is like opening the eyes to the 
 light. tWe see only as we look carefully; 
 we believe only as we live prayerfully. De- 
 sire faith and it will come. Act out your 
 creed and you will have a larger creed. 
 
 It is worth while to notice that those who 
 first received the Christian revelation were 
 the men and women who were faithful to 
 the light they had ; those who had long been 
 in the habit of obeying the call of conscience 
 carefully and so were ready for the fuller 
 revelation. Think over the list: Zacharias 
 and Elizabeth, both " righteous before God, 
 walking in all the commandments and or- 
 dinances of the law blameless "; Joseph, a 
 "just man"; Simeon, "just and devout, wait- 
 
THE OTHEE HALF 47 
 
 ing for the consolation of Israel "; Joseph of 
 Arimathea, "a good man and just"; 
 Nathanael, " an Israelite indeed, in whom 
 was no guile " ; the company of the apos- 
 tles — they were penitents called from among 
 the crowds gathered by the Baptist's preach- 
 ing on the banks of the Jordan. When, 
 afterwards, these apostles went out to 
 preach Christ, the chief conversions were 
 of those who were living true to the truth 
 they had. Cornelius, the first Gentile con- 
 vert, was " a devout man who feared God, 
 and gave much alms to the people, and 
 prayed to God always." At Perga Paul 
 addressed " the devout Jews and those who 
 feared God." At Thessalonica "a multi- 
 tude of the religious Greeks " believed. At 
 Athens and elsewhere those who were en- 
 deavouring, however imperfectly, to live up 
 to the light they had were the ones who 
 saw the truth of the new message, not the 
 mere thoughtless heathen. The first Chris- 
 tian disciples were a picked company of 
 conscientious, right-minded, God-fearing 
 folk who were already in the pathway of 
 faith; had started, long before, on the divine 
 quest. 
 
 It has always been true; it always will be 
 true. Here, indeed, is one exhibition, at 
 
48 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 any rate, of the truth of the Master's saying, 
 " To him that hath shall be given." The 
 one vital requirement of religion (I am 
 using another's words) is fidelity to known 
 truth. Knowing the truth; admiring the 
 truth ; sighing after the truth ; even making 
 dashes towards the truth — this is not 
 enough. We must live true to the truth. 
 
 What is the trouble with most men? Is 
 it that they do not know enough about God 
 and themselves; or is it that, in spite of 
 knowledge and in the very face of facts, they 
 are content to drift along as they are? 
 What good would new truth do us, if we 
 have made nothing of the old truth? Be- 
 lief is not a matter of interesting dialectics; 
 it is a gift for life. Live true to the faith 
 you have, and it will grow; hold it in disuse 
 and it will go. 
 
 For faith can survive anything except 
 neglect. It will live through many trials; 
 it will hold firm through many disappoint- 
 ments; it will withstand many shocks. The 
 one thing it cannot survive is being ignored. 
 It is given us as a rule to live by. If we 
 try to hold it simply as an intellectual sys- 
 tem, it will bring about a complete moral 
 paralysis. If translated into action, it is in- 
 exhaustible power. 
 
V 
 
 LETTING ONESELF GO 
 
 THE trouble with most of us is that 
 we will not let ourselves go in 
 religion. We make our belief in 
 God a cautious consent to a logical proposi- 
 tion. 
 
 For of course most men believe in God; 
 that is, they believe in His existence. The 
 real difficulty is, that they assent to the 
 statement of belief and then think no more 
 about it. This simply means that God does 
 not by any possibility count in their lives. 
 
 There are two things necessary to make 
 our belief in God an energetic faith. The 
 first is, to make the faith an affair of the 
 heart and not simply of the head. The sec- 
 ond is to understand that here, as in other 
 matters, we are not to demand absolute 
 certitude before we shall be willing to take 
 the first step. There is such a thing as 
 missing the romance of religion because we 
 will not make ventures. Nothing venture, 
 nothing have. 
 
 49 
 
50 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 To begin with the first: Let us give the 
 heart its due. Indeed, even intellectual 
 consent to the first article of belief requires 
 that. Faith cannot rest upon logical 
 processes. The failure to take account of 
 this is the first cause of unbelief. There is 
 no clear, clean-cut proof of the existence of 
 God. There is, of course, probable proof, 
 moral certainty; but there is no demon- 
 strative proof. That, however, need not 
 trouble us. 
 
 The night has a thousand eyes, 
 
 And the day but one ; 
 Yet the light of the bright world dies 
 
 With the dying sun. 
 
 The mind has a thousand eyes, 
 
 And the heart but one ; 
 Yet the light of the whole life dies 
 
 When love is done. 
 
 The heart, therefore, has something to 
 say as to God's existence. We cannot arrive 
 at a knowledge of Him by purely logical 
 deductions. We must trust the instincts 
 and affections. And we must accept their 
 report as being just as worthy of credence 
 as any mathematical formula. Some men 
 have lost their faith in God because they 
 have tried to buttress belief after the same 
 fashion that they would draw up a legal con- 
 
LETTING ONESELF GO 51 
 
 tract God is not found that way. He is 
 more than the end of a syllogism. 
 
 On the whole, most of us are certain that 
 God is; though when we come to balance 
 the arguments, there is something to be 
 said on the other side. For myself, I should 
 say that the biggest argument against God 
 is the presence of evil in the world. I can- 
 not understand why God did not make men 
 good and keep them good. Or, if that would 
 mean not moral goodness, but mere mechan- 
 ical perfection, I cannot understand why, if 
 there is a God, He permits evil to go so 
 long unpunished. 
 
 It would seem that my difficulty is the 
 difficulty of most men. How many times, 
 since the great war began, have we asked 
 where God was when the Huns swept over 
 Belgium ? Where was God, when the Lusi- 
 tania sank with the women and children? 
 Where was God, when the Turks swept over 
 Armenia and left it an abomination of deso- 
 lation? Did He not care? Did He look on 
 unconcerned when Edith Cavell was mur- 
 dered, when Germans were cutting out the 
 breasts of women and chopping off the 
 hands of little children, when sanctuaries 
 were defiled and dead cats nailed upon altar 
 crosses? The literature of the war has 
 
62 THE EXPERIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 been full of this passionate protest against 
 the presence of evil in the world. From 
 Mr, Britling's confused and tortured wres- 
 tling with the problem, on to the latest novel 
 of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, we have thrust 
 upon us the same question of faith. In 
 Missing the young lieutenant, just married 
 and leaving to-morrow for the front, tries to 
 think it out. He was one of my " average " 
 men, yet he had his troubled perplexities 
 over the general scheme of things in this 
 strange universe that we must believe came 
 from God. " He thought of all those 
 mangled men — out there — in France. Who 
 is responsible — God or man? Man, of 
 course. But man's will is — must be — some- 
 thing included in God's will. So his young- 
 mind raced through the old puzzles in the 
 old way." 
 
 His difficulty is mine — yours. I know that 
 I am not alone in crying out in these days for 
 God to show His hand and stretch forth His 
 mighty arm. I do not see how His good- 
 ness can be reconciled with suffering and 
 sorrow and sin and pain. My difficulty is 
 not a new one. I have never understood 
 why the wicked should prosper; the ungodly 
 flourish like a green bay tree. I go by, and 
 lo, in contradiction to the psalmist, he is 
 
LETTING ONESELF GO 53 
 
 not gone; he is very much in evidence. 
 Things continue to go well with him. The 
 righteous, meanwhile, have a hard time of 
 it, only too often. The very best of men 
 come to the saddest times, and God seems 
 indifferent. 
 
 All this would make me lose my faith in 
 God completely if I did not wait for the 
 heart to speak. That tells me that I need 
 God, and that He must exist to satisfy my 
 hunger. It reminds me of the mysterious 
 voice of conscience, the thing within me that 
 sets up the standard of right and wrong — 
 that very standard by which I have de- 
 manded divine intervention — and I feel that 
 the moral law of necessity presupposes a 
 Lawgiver. When I listen to the heart 
 speak, I remember the unchangeable rule of 
 happiness: I know that there is some real 
 connection between joy and goodness, some 
 real connection between sin and unhappi- 
 ness. The moment I stop and let that sink 
 in, the law begins to work. I cannot be 
 happy and contented apart from obedience 
 to what I call the good and right. 
 
 Above all, I remember many experiences 
 since I came to believe in God through 
 Christ which deepen my faith. Through 
 Jesus I learn of a God who once entered into 
 
54 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 the tragedy of human life to show that He 
 understands and sympathizes. In the study 
 of His life I find my ideas of God and good- 
 ness wonderfully enlarged. In the story of 
 His death I gain " a perennial experience of 
 renewal and renovation.' , All these things 
 make me believe in God far more truly than 
 cosmological or teleological or any other 
 logical argument. After all, they tell me 
 what I want to know about God. It does 
 not much matter to me that God is omnis- 
 cient or omnipotent or omnipresent; what 
 I want to know is whether He cares for me 
 and cares that I care for Him. And, when 
 I listen to the voice of the heart, I am as 
 sure of that as I can possibly be of anything 
 in the world — I am more sure of it than I 
 am of anything but my own existence. 
 
 Well, now, what am I going to do about 
 it, once I am sure? Just stop, content that 
 a difficult question has been settled and that 
 I have answered it correctly? Just declare 
 that God is and let it rest at that? It does 
 seem sometimes as if this were what most 
 people do, and because this is what they do 
 their faith in God is never firm and unfalter- 
 ing. Faith was not given us, to be labelled 
 and laid aside among an assortment of 
 mental concepts. It was given us to use. • 
 
LETTING ONESELF GO 55 
 
 So, once I have come to believe that there 
 is a God, it is my business to try to know 
 Him. I take it that is what prayer is. We 
 start out with the assumption that there is 
 a personal God who knows us and cares for 
 us, and so we go to Him and speak to Him 
 just as we would to an earthly father. 
 Prayer does not mean that we shall be con- 
 stantly asking God to do something for us, 
 always begging Him for some favour; it 
 means that because we believe that God is, 
 we are going to try to establish a warm, 
 living relationship with Him. 
 
 For that matter, we do not even need to 
 be certain that God is, before we make this 
 venture of faith. Bishop Butler was wise 
 in his generation and we have not yet out- 
 grown his wisdom. He taught us that 
 probability is the very guide of life; and we 
 know that it is so, in business, in govern- 
 ment, in moral conduct with its numerous 
 choices of conflicting duties, in the sanctities 
 of human life, even in exact mathematics. 
 Why not let it be our guide in religion ? On 
 the whole there are reasons enough for be- 
 lieving that there is a God. Why not take 
 a chance at it and try to establish relations 
 with Him? Unless we do chance it, the 
 fact of His existence or non-existence is a 
 
56 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 thing of utter indifference. What does it 
 matter to us whether He is or is not, if we 
 are not trying to know Him? 
 
 Now the actual fact in the case of many 
 men is, that they will not take this step into 
 the region of probability. They accept God, 
 but they stop there. They make no effort 
 to know Him. t They spend no time in 
 thinking about Him. They let Him 
 severely alone. iThen, by and by, they 
 marvel that their faith fails. Or they argue 
 with some one else whose faith is gone and 
 wonder that the unbeliever is not convinced. 
 " Prayer," says Carey, " transmutes an in- 
 tellectual conviction or probability into 
 something personal and passionate by lead- 
 ing the soul into the presence of God and 
 leaving God and the soul together. Yet 
 there are people who have the face to argue 
 and dispute about religion from a religious 
 standpoint, when they themselves do not 
 pray." Why, the most they could gain by 
 further proof would be some increase or 
 decrease of intellectual probability; and 
 what good would that do them? The very 
 purpose for which their faith was given 
 them was that they might put it to work; 
 and they have kept it laid up in a napkin. 
 The value of belief, however imperfect, is 
 
LETTING ONESELF GO 57 
 
 that it shall be the incentive to sonship. 
 Men must know God as a Father if they are 
 to keep on believing in Him at all. And 
 they cannot realize their sonship if they hold 
 no relations with Him. 
 
 We often fancy that belief comes some- 
 how out of hard thought, that it is the re- 
 sult of logical processes, the outcome of 
 philosophical enquiry. Not at all. What 
 really happens, in most cases, is that the 
 practical attempt to live as if there were a 
 Divine Father turns out to be the way in 
 which we come to know Him. Faith is the 
 corollary of conduct. In practical ways we 
 try out a theory and then we come to know 
 it as fact. We act on the germ of faith, 
 and it grows and expands. The seed be- 
 comes a tree. The truth we have acted on 
 becomes a larger truth. We walk in the 
 light while it is yet dim, and lo! it begins 
 to shine to the perfect day. 
 
 The ventures of faith! And the first 
 venture is to learn to let oneself go! All 
 this, and this, and this, I believe to be true, 
 it sounds very probable; but its truth or 
 falsity is going to be a matter of no moment 
 whatever unless I try it out. I must make 
 the experiment, and act on the chance, if I 
 am to find God. 
 
VI 
 
 THE FORGOTTEN GOD 
 
 LET us start with a man who has the 
 dimmest possible faith in God. We 
 pin him down to his actual belief, 
 and he confesses that its content hardly goes 
 beyond the fact of God's being. He cannot, 
 on the whole, say more than that he believes 
 there is a God. He does not know anything 
 about God: he merely acknowledges His 
 probable existence. What can be said to 
 such a man? Has he enough faith to make 
 a start on? 
 
 Of course. Indeed, it is a good start that 
 he is honest enough to state his creed in the 
 smallest and most restricted form. It in- 
 dicates that he has really tried to think 
 things out. The one thing of which he 
 needs to make certain is this : for what pur- 
 pose has he done his thinking? Why does 
 he want to know whether there is a God or 
 not? What change will it make in his life 
 if his certainty deepens? Does he expect 
 to put his knowledge to the practical test? 
 58 
 
THE FOKGOTTEN GOD 59 
 
 In other words, if we believe in God at 
 all, we must begin to live as if we believed in 
 Him. Most of us, let me repeat, do not. 
 Practically speaking, we banish Him as soon 
 as we have a hint that it is possible to make 
 His fuller acquaintance. Whereas, if there 
 really is a God, we should above all things 
 desire to be in conscious, felt, sustained 
 relationship with Him. 
 
 One of England's great preachers, in an 
 address on the search for God, pictures a 
 group of young men standing together in 
 the smoking room of their club discussing 
 religion. They are tossing about, pell-mell, 
 all the difficulties about God and the Bible : 
 the creation stories of Genesis, the mistakes 
 of Scriptures, the miracles, the doctrinal 
 definitions of the creeds, the divisions in the 
 Church, the failure of Christians, the variety 
 of religions, unanswered prayer, eternal 
 punishment, and a score of other objections. 
 Suddenly some one interrupts with a ques- 
 tion: "Yes, gentlemen, and yet you want 
 God, do you not?" As the question is 
 asked, there is supposed to appear in the 
 room a face and figure, a vision of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 Had such a figure really appeared before 
 such a group, we know what would happen. 
 
60 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 In a moment every chair in the smoking 
 room would be vacant, cigarettes and cigars 
 would be thrown away and every man would 
 spring to his feet and then fall to his knees, 
 white, tense, breathless. When the vision 
 departed, his one desire would be to get 
 away from the crowd, to be by himself and 
 think. Something corresponding to that 
 ought to happen to every man who has be- 
 come convinced of God, however slight his 
 faith. Only as something like that does 
 happen, will his faith grow. If God does 
 exist, surely the first thing to do is to put 
 oneself in His presence and bend before 
 Him in reverence. 
 
 That can be done best alone. We must 
 go apart and force ourselves to think and 
 think hard. In the old days men wrestled 
 with God. Through agonizing struggle 
 they made their way to Him. Nor were 
 they satisfied until they had done something 
 corresponding to the action of kneeling in 
 the smoking room before that crowd, with 
 all the others looking on or kneeling them- 
 selves. Men made their way to the 
 mourners' bench or the confessional. In 
 some way they openly confessed God. 
 Whether we press this upon a man at once 
 or not, at least we can say this, that he must 
 
THE FOKGOTTEN GOD 61 
 
 begin to take his small belief seriously, he 
 must do something to toughen his faith and 
 tighten his will. 
 
 The man who believes there is a God, but 
 knows nothing more, will find usually that 
 his failure runs back into this, that he has 
 never started on the divine quest. If it 
 were a matter of business he had to thrash 
 out, or a legal tangle he had to straighten, 
 or an engineering problem he had to solve, 
 he would tackle the matter in the only 
 sensible way; go off and shut himself in his 
 room ; pull himself together into an attitude 
 of sharp attention, and concentrate his 
 whole mind upon the thing till he had 
 thought it out. Why will not the same man 
 go aside and spend some time in trying to 
 put himself into vital union with God — al- 
 ways assuming that he has accepted the 
 probability of God's existence? 
 
 A mystic once wrote on practicing the 
 presence of God, and wrote about it as 
 sensibly and practically as if he were a 
 modern business man. Only he did not 
 have half the intellect or half the practical 
 ability of the modern business man, and he 
 had to practice God's presence among the 
 pots and pans of the monastery scullery in- 
 stead of doing it in the comparative quiet of 
 
62 THE EXPEBIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 the limousine on his way to the office. At 
 any rate, wherever and however we do it, 
 we must stop once in a while to remember 
 that God is near — around and about us. 
 
 It will be a matter of surprise how the 
 sense of God's presence, thus occasionally 
 recalled, will grow into a continued habit of 
 mind. The involuntary consciousness of 
 the divine comes as the result of occasional 
 voluntary recollection. I would not dare 
 write this, if I did not know it not simply 
 out of my own experience but on the 
 authority of far better men than myself. 
 Nor would I write it if I did not have it on 
 the authority of men who are not merely 
 religious, but are sane, sensible, practical, 
 level-headed men, of every-day common 
 sense. They will tell you — ask one of them, 
 if you will — how, in the morning, before 
 they go out to work, they kneel and con- 
 sider quietly that God goes with them. 
 They could tell you — but they will not, for 
 they have a modest reticence — how they 
 rise from such prayer with the sunshine in 
 their souls. In every case, if you can get 
 them to talk of it, they will tell you that the 
 consciousness of the divine did not come to 
 them all at once. It grew with practice. 
 They made up their minds not to forget 
 
THE FOKGOTTEN GOD 63 
 
 God, and they found that God did not for- 
 get them. 
 
 Actually, have not most of us forgotten 
 God most of the time? That seems to be 
 the fact that has pressed itself home to the 
 finest minds in this time of war; indeed, has 
 pressed itself home upon every type of mind 
 in the nations who are feeling most keenly 
 the agony of the struggle. It has suddenly 
 dawned on men that while they declared 
 their belief in God they had practically left 
 Him wholly out of consideration in the rush 
 of life. " Neither was God in all their 
 thoughts." Face to face now with the great 
 realities, they are finding God again where 
 normally they might least expect Him — in 
 the pain and horror of trench and battle- 
 field and hospital. 
 
 We had forgotten You, or very nearly — 
 You did not seem to touch us very nearly — 
 Of course we thought about You now and then ; 
 Especially in any time of trouble — 
 We knew that You were good in time of 
 
 trouble — 
 But we are very ordinary men. 
 
 And there were always other things to think 
 
 of— 
 There's lots of things a man has got to think 
 
 of— 
 His work, his home, his pleasure, and his wife; 
 
64 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 And so we only thought of You on Sunday — 
 Sometimes, perhaps, not even on a Sunday — 
 Because there's always lots to fill one's life. 
 
 Now we remember ; over here in Flanders — 
 (It isn't strange to think of You in Flanders) 
 This hideous warfare seems to make things 
 
 clear. 
 We never thought about You much in Eng- 
 land ; 
 But now that we are far away from England 
 We have no doubts, we know that You are 
 here. 
 
 That is where Jesus Christ comes in. 
 The war, at the start, was a great trial to 
 most men's faith. They could not under- 
 stand a God who withheld His hand. Nor 
 could they quite accept the Old Testament 
 view that even in bloodshed and agony God 
 is working His purpose out. Much less 
 could they accept the thought that the 
 nations were passing through the furnace 
 of affliction because they had forsaken God 
 and that He was using the barbarian as a 
 scourge in His hand to bring men back to 
 Him. " In the hand of the Lord there is a 
 cup and the wine is red; it is full mixed, and 
 He poureth out of the same." That seems 
 too much like the figure of a slave driver. 
 
 Personally, I am quite sure that there is 
 more in the thought than we have been 
 
THE FOKGOTTEN GOD 65 
 
 penitent enough to admit. I do not like the 
 way it is put, any more than I like the 
 language of some of the old evangelical 
 hymns of the atonement; but I am sure that 
 it stands for a great truth, and I believe that 
 a good many men whose consciences are 
 better than mine feel about it as I do. I 
 see in the world agony not God's visitation, 
 but the awful result of man's violation of 
 His laws. The very spirit which makes 
 me hate this evil is proof of the God of 
 righteousness from whom my own moral 
 standards come. And I wonder, trembling, 
 what God's feeling about evil must be, if my 
 hatred of it is so intense. Other men, I 
 know, feel as I do. It was such a man, in 
 the days when the American nation entered 
 the war, who said : " Some of us have been 
 impatient for action ; we have cried out from 
 time to time ' How long, O Lord, how 
 long?' But we must now confess that it 
 was wiser to endure for a season until the 
 uprising of a patient nation had become 
 akin to the wrath of GodP 
 
 The wrath of God! How naturally we 
 fall back upon the expression, when our 
 own spirit is stirred within us. However, 
 let that pass. There are many other good 
 men who cannot see it my way, and are not 
 
66 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 able to find any possible form of expression 
 in which it can be embodied as an acceptable 
 truth for them. 
 
 The man who starts to make the most of 
 his half creed will force himself to put aside 
 these troubled questionings for a while, and 
 simply act on the faith he has. In spite of 
 it all, he believes in God. Let him act as if 
 God were and his belief will grow. Espe- 
 cially let him assume for the moment that 
 God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. 
 Never mind (for the present) who or what 
 Christ is — at least we owe Him the supreme 
 revelation of God, or (if you wish to put it 
 that way) the highest conception of jGod. 
 To me He is more than that: He is the very 
 unveiling of deity. I can hardly wait to put 
 this down later in its logical place, because 
 I believe so deeply that this is just where 
 Jesus Christ comes in. He assures us of a 
 God who is like Himself, and His assurance 
 helps, however difficult it may be to under- 
 stand, however seemingly impossible to look 
 for any clear light on life's mystery. At any 
 rate, God or man, Jesus Christ does make 
 the tragedy easier to endure. A man of 
 sorrows and acquainted with grief, He at 
 least takes His stand at our side to help us 
 
THE FORGOTTEN GOD 67 
 
 bear the burden ; He does not offer any ex- 
 planation of suffering and sorrow; He does 
 something better, He shares it. Somehow 
 I feel that if we stop to think about that — if 
 we take time to assimilate it — we shall be 
 well on the way to larger thoughts about 
 Him and deeper faith in the meaning of His 
 life. Well, that (to repeat) is where Christ 
 comes in — the " Christ in Flanders," who is 
 the Christ of Calvary. 
 
 We think about You kneeling in the Garden — 
 Ah, God ! the agony of that dread Garden — 
 We know You prayed for us upon the Cross. 
 If anything could make us glad to bear it, 
 'Twould be the knowledge that You willed to 
 
 bear it — 
 Pain — death — the uttermost of human loss. 
 
 Though we forgot You, You will not forget 
 
 us — 
 We feel so sure that You will not forget us — 
 But stay with us until this dream is past. 
 And so we ask for courage, strength, and par- 
 don — 
 Especially, I think, we ask for pardon — 
 And that You'll stand beside us to the last. 
 
 The point I have been trying to make 
 clear is again the argument of the last 
 chapter: Probability is enough to give you 
 a start towards God. Here, as elsewhere, 
 it is the guide of life. On the strength of 
 
^8 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 it, make a beginning. If God really is, we 
 dare not forget Him. Do not be guilty of 
 the absurdity of such reasoning as this: I 
 have thought it all out, and on the whole, 
 and in spite of the difficulties, I believe there 
 is a God. Therefore — (look at it in black 
 and white and see how absurd it is !) — there- 
 fore, I am going to act as if He were not. 
 Rather, on the mere chance that God is, I 
 am going to try never to forget that He is. 
 I am going to work hard to realize His 
 presence. I am going to put myself into 
 this work at least as conscientiously as I 
 put myself into my business or professional 
 work. If there is a God, I want to know 
 Him. At any rate, I don't mean to forget 
 Him, if I can help it. Whether I under- 
 stand all or not, I am not going to forget 
 Him any longer. Take my word for it, 
 that way lies the light. 
 
VII 
 THE JOYOUS YEA 
 
 WE make a mistake, says Canon 
 Adderley, when we contrast be- 
 lief with atheism or agnosticism. 
 The real contrast is between faith and 
 worldliness, between remembering God and 
 forgetting Him. 
 
 Truly the fact of God ought to change 
 one's whole attitude towards life; for to 
 believe is to say that God is and that this 
 is the one thing that matters. Real faith 
 is not an occasional recollection of the 
 existence of God and the mystery of life; 
 it is a constant remembrance of God. It 
 is a vivid realization of the spiritual order. 
 It is to feel that back of the material world 
 is a spiritual world which now and then 
 breaks through the material and gives the 
 attentive observer manifestations of its 
 presence and activity. It is to cease being 
 content with the life that is near at hand 
 and always evident and to stretch out to- 
 wards the life that is invisible. It is to take 
 this invisible life for granted and to try hard 
 69 
 
70 THE EXPEBIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 to realize it. Not to believe is simply to 
 omit the spiritual from our thinking. That 
 is what Adderley means when he defines 
 unbelief as humanity organizing itself apart 
 from God. It is what Eucken means when 
 he speaks of faith as a sharp nay and a joy- 
 ous yea. 
 
 Now the trouble with the ordinary 
 doubter — whether he is an intellectual 
 agnostic who does not think that God can 
 be proved, or a practical agnostic who 
 ignores God and omits Him from his calcu- 
 lations — is that there is nothing at all sharp 
 about his nay and yea. And the trouble 
 with the ordinary believer is, at bottom, the 
 same; he has simply fallen into the easy 
 habit of a nonchalant acceptance of truth. 
 To him faith is merely a formal acquiescence 
 in certain statements out of which he does 
 not expect any new experiences for life. 
 He is a believer but not a seeker. He does 
 not understand that the first effect of faith 
 should be to drive him out in a determined 
 effort to learn and assimilate truth. Faith 
 merely starts with acquiescence; it must 
 move on to hope and expectation and aspira- 
 tion, or else it becomes merely " a dried up 
 acceptance of formularies." 
 
 There is a good deal of raw agnosticism 
 
THE JOYOUS YEA 71 
 
 in the world, but the real tragedy is not in 
 this; it is in the unthinking practical agnos- 
 ticism that labels itself faith, but is really 
 the most hopeless kind of unbelief — the 
 thoughtless indifference of apathy. 
 
 Drummond reminds us that the soul, in 
 its highest sense, is a vast capacity for God. 
 " It is like a curious chamber added on to 
 being — a chamber with elastic and con- 
 tractile walls — which, with God as its guest, 
 can be expanded inimitably, without God 
 shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of 
 the divine is gone." 
 
 This will show that faith means not 
 merely to assent to " the joyous yea," but to 
 pursue it. If muscles that are not used be- 
 come flabby, if the limb that is bound up 
 loses its power, if the eye shut in continual 
 darkness would soon be no better than the 
 eye of a mole, if the language no longer read 
 is forgotten, the spiritual analogy ought to 
 be perfectly plain. The disuse of any 
 faculties, physical or mental, is followed by 
 their atrophy. The failure to use spiritual 
 faculties results in the same way in spiritual 
 paralysis. That is the history of many a 
 man in his loss of faith. He ceases to use 
 his spiritual faculties, neglects prayer, gives 
 no time to the apprehension of the divine, 
 
72 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 leaves God out of his thoughts, and after a 
 time he tries to use the faculties of the soul 
 and finds that they are dead. Because he 
 has allowed himself to become immersed in 
 business or professional work, or scientific 
 pursuits, to the exclusion of everything else, 
 and has ceased to exercise the functions of 
 the spirit, a progressive paralysis begins, 
 which, unless checked, will end in loss of 
 faith for himself and doubts as to its reality 
 for others. 
 
 The peril stands out more plainly if we re- 
 member that religion is the endeavour to 
 establish intercourse with God. To know 
 any friend intimately makes demands on us. 
 " Only now and then, under the pressure of 
 interest and affection, do we pass through 
 partial manifestations of personality to the 
 character behind them, ,, says Illingworth, 
 " and then in proportion to the depth and 
 greatness of the character is the difficulty of 
 really coming to know the person." If it 
 is dangerous to trifle with a human friend- 
 ship, how much more dangerous to trifle 
 with the divine ! Faith is bound to go if we 
 will not make the effort to have it grow. 
 With God we cannot take a non-committal, 
 half-way attitude. " God is everything — or 
 nothing." That is what so many of us for- 
 
THE JOYOUS YEA 73 
 
 get In one of Chesterton's amusing satires 
 an atheist and a Christian become warm 
 friends because they are both dead in 
 earnest. In a world of indifferent people 
 they two seem to be the only ones who 
 really care whether there is a God or not, 
 the only ones who see how much it matters. 
 
 A sharp nay and a joyous yea ! It means, 
 again, that in an age when men are mildly 
 indifferent, the man who has really given in 
 his " yea " to the fact of God will be eager 
 for truth and service. In a day when re- 
 ligion is often merely a matter of lazy half- 
 interest, he will be keenly in earnest. 
 When so many others have no convictions 
 and are expert in balancing on the fence, he 
 will set his ideals high. Christianity's real 
 foe is not active unbelief, but the mild indif- 
 ference and harmlessness that expends itself 
 in the effort to live on terms of peace with 
 the world and thinks of religion as the last 
 thing on earth to be excited about. The 
 trouble with a good many men is that they 
 haven't enough faith even to disbelieve. 
 Let us have anything, therefore — anything 
 in the world — but good-natured toleration. 
 Let it be a sharp nay if it must. If we do 
 believe, even a little bit, let it be a joyous 
 
74 THE EXPEKIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 yea; a yea so sure of the truth to which it 
 gives its glad assent that it expects out of it 
 new experience and fuller life. 
 
 Jesus Christ came that men might have 
 this life and have it more abundantly. Yet 
 He seems to have been willing that it 
 should come to them slowly and by degrees. 
 One of the striking things about His minis- 
 try is the gladness with which He welcomed 
 the most rudimentary faith, if only it were 
 genuine, and His perfect satisfaction if only 
 He had awakened the desire for God. 
 
 That comes out strongly in His teaching 
 of the apostles. Surely with them at least 
 we should not expect Him to be satisfied 
 until He had led them all the way along the 
 path of faith. They were His close friends 
 and we should expect Him at once to tell 
 them everything. Yet, even with them, He 
 seems content if only He can be sure that 
 He has made for them the great suggestion. 
 His task was to make them feel their need 
 of God, until one by one they gave in to 
 Him, capitulated, fell under His spell. He 
 spent His ministry in planting in their hearts 
 the love of God and the life of godliness, 
 out of which all later knowledge should 
 grow. To put it in another way, the great 
 
THE JOYOUS YEA 75 
 
 work of His ministry was to sensitize their 
 souls. 
 
 How strange it is, for example, that as 
 He sees the time of His departure draw 
 near there is no oppressive sense that His 
 ministry has come to an end too soon. The 
 apostles felt it keenly. There were so many 
 things He had not said and so many things 
 He had not done; they could not bear to 
 lose Him, especially they could not bear to 
 think of it until He had said all and accom- 
 plished all. But with Christ Himself there 
 is no sense of prematureness or incomplete- 
 ness in His mission. He can leave these 
 followers of His, sure that they are secure, 
 because He has given them a susceptibility 
 to God. It was expedient for them that He 
 go away, because it was best for them that 
 His ministry should not be localized and 
 limited, and once having given them a habit 
 of mind that made them responsive to God, 
 He could go away, without anxiety, in abso- 
 lute certainty that they would be led and 
 guided. The Spirit could work easily on 
 souls that were sensitized. The fruit of 
 faith would grow quickly out of the soil of 
 such an honest and good heart. Their faith, 
 He knew, was the faith of receptivity. It 
 gave them the " expanded soul." 
 
76 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 We need this thought to balance and com- 
 plete our statement of the first test of 
 religion; namely, to live true to the truth 
 we know. That, it was said, is all God asks. 
 Whatever you believe, be it much or little, 
 live it. Well, then, does that mean that it 
 makes little difference how much we be- 
 lieve I If all that is asked of us is obedience 
 to known truth, does it not follow that the 
 less truth we have the easier life will be? 
 Does it not amount, after all, to saying that 
 in the long run truth matters very little? 
 
 Ah, but we know it does matter. As a 
 man thinks, so is he. The very value of the 
 truth is that it " assists life, makes life, in- 
 duces life." Instead of fancying that those 
 who have little truth to live up to may be 
 left happily alone in their blissful and 
 irresponsible ignorance, we thank God that 
 there is more truth to give them. We our- 
 selves would not be content to be pagan 
 and heathen, just because as civilized men 
 more is asked of us. We would not want 
 to be mere clods — crude, ill-bred, un- 
 polished — just because, if we have had the 
 advantages of culture, we shall be required 
 to remember that we are gentlemen. No- 
 body wants to live in a back alley because if 
 he lives on a pleasant street his neighbours 
 
THE JOYOUS YEA 77 
 
 will expect of him the good behaviour and 
 moral decencies of avenue life. So in re- 
 ligion, larger truth means larger apprecia- 
 tion, richer life, fuller experience, deeper 
 delights. We breathe a purer atmosphere, 
 receive richer inflowings of grace, have more 
 strength to attain and more power to serve. 
 " Oh, do not pray for easy lives " — that 
 is the way Phillips Brooks put it — "pray to 
 be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks 
 equal to your powers; pray for powers 
 equal to your tasks. Then the doing of 
 your work shall be no miracle; you shall be 
 the miracle. Every day you will wonder at 
 yourself. Every day you will wonder at 
 the richness of life that has come to you as 
 God has led you on from faith to faith." 
 
VIII 
 A RADIATING GOSPEL 
 
 JESUS CHRIST'S first great contribu- 
 tion to faith was His unwavering be- 
 lief in God as Father. His proclama- 
 tion of that truth took new form. God was 
 " Our Father " : the divine fatherhood and 
 human brotherhood went together. And 
 there was no limit to the Father's family: 
 all men, everywhere, were His children, 
 brethren in different rooms of the Father's 
 house. 
 
 Nothing could make Christ's faith in the 
 Father falter. We are troubled, for ex- 
 ample, over the problem of evil. The world 
 seems sometimes " a great orphanage " 
 rather than the home of a Heavenly 
 Father's children. Surely Jesus Christ 
 must have felt this more keenly than we. 
 His soul was like a delicately adjusted in- 
 strument which recorded every human 
 doubt and difficulty, all human suffering or 
 sin; yet He still proclaimed God as Father 
 and acted on the belief, and though a man 
 78 
 
A KADIATING GOSPEL 79 
 
 of sorrows and acquainted with grief He 
 proclaimed His faith to the end. All the 
 world now is fighting to vindicate this idea — 
 the thing which Germany repudiated. It 
 troubles us that Christians should be forced 
 to fight; but it makes a world of difference 
 when we fight because it is the only means 
 we know to be effective, things being as they 
 are, to stop a war of deliberate aggression. 
 And what is it we fight for? Something 
 some of us had forgotten we believed in — 
 the common rights and mutual duties of all 
 mankind, based on the Fatherhood of God 
 and the brotherhood of the race ; something 
 which the world never even thought of as 
 an actuality until Jesus Christ made it the 
 constitution of His kingdom. 
 
 The idea of the fatherhood of God and 
 the consequent brotherhood of men was a 
 new conception — new, not because it had 
 never been uttered before, but because never 
 before had it been set at work. It was a 
 truth that had been lying dormant. The 
 Jews had wonderful passages in their 
 prophetic writings which told of the father- 
 hood of God, but they never dreamed that 
 His care extended alike over all the nations 
 of the earth; they were born to national 
 isolation and reared in race exclusiveness. 
 
80 THE EXPEBIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 In the Greek and Roman world also the idea 
 had found expression. Terence had a fine 
 phrase in one of his plays about human 
 brotherhood which won loud applause in the 
 theatre, and Cicero wrote charmingly about 
 love for all mankind; but both Cicero and 
 Terence merely played with the thought as 
 a pretty fancy and the gladiatorial contests 
 continued to draw crowds to the arena. 
 Then Jesus Christ took the idea which up 
 to that time had been a pretty fancy or a 
 racial boast, and made it the basis of His 
 world kingdom. The wonderful thing is 
 that when men begin to live true to the 
 truth which Christ made vital they catch 
 something of Christ's faith. Just the 
 moment we cease to allow the thought of 
 human brotherhood to remain a cant ex- 
 pression and try to translate it into warm 
 reality, we rise through the realization of 
 our common brotherhood into a firmer faith 
 in the Divine Father. 
 
 The great world war could never have 
 broken upon us had men been making any 
 real effort to live this elemental truth. 
 Everywhere we were content, rather, to 
 talk about it eloquently without actually 
 trying to get down below the surface differ- 
 
A EADIATING GOSPEL 81 
 
 ences of race and dialect and to learn the 
 mother tongue of the human heart. 
 
 Just now, I know, we need especially to 
 pray hard for deliverance from national 
 self-righteousness, and so there is a certain 
 danger in using Germany too frequently as 
 an " awful example " ; yet Germany has been 
 so glaring an instance of the tragic conse- 
 quences of a self-centered development, 
 that it is hardly possible to leave the moral 
 undrawn. For forty years its people had 
 learned and repeated " Prussian incanta- 
 tions " until there was built about the nation 
 a " wall of moral isolation." At home and 
 in church, in every social class, as the 
 first lessons of school and the last in the 
 university, Germany's people were drilled, 
 with painstaking efficiency, into a colossal 
 national self-glorification and self-adoration 
 and a boundless contempt for the rest of the 
 world. German needs, German hopes, Ger- 
 man ambitions, German aspirations filled all 
 their thoughts ; and they ignorantly followed 
 rulers who exercised lordship over them and 
 desired to use them to extend this lordship 
 over all the earth. 
 
 When that is said, however, we must have 
 a care lest we be carrying a " moral um- 
 brella " that shields us from criticism and 
 
82 THE EXPERIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 permits it to fall the more copiously on all 
 around us! How absurd to point to Ger- 
 many's amazing tribal arrogance, so un- 
 restrained and unashamed, when the root 
 of the sin is found in every nation. Look 
 at England. Her insularity was more than 
 physical. How little pains she had taken to 
 understand the rest of the world; how often 
 the supercilious superiority of the English 
 traveller had fanned the flames of national 
 hatred. The average Englishman lived in 
 utter indifference, if not in utter ignorance 
 of other peoples. Even with a world em- 
 pire to be governed, his political leaders 
 often gloried in their own intellectual isola- 
 tion. And here in America, "the melting 
 pot of the nations," we were deaf to the 
 opportunity which cried at our doors. 
 With multitudes coming here of many 
 kindreds and tongues, we had made little 
 effort to fashion these millions of foreign 
 born into one loyal and happy people. Not 
 till war revealed the national peril did we 
 begin to labour for a deeper unity. We 
 were content to live side by side in race 
 isolation and often in race antagonism, even 
 as we were living in class exclusiveness and 
 class antipathy. 
 
 Class exclusiveness and class antipathy! 
 
A KADIATING GOSPEL 83 
 
 Ah ! how recreant we had been to the great 
 cause of brotherhood for which men of other 
 days willingly gave their lives ! A striking 
 war poem pictures the martyred men of the 
 first British armies calling on the men of 
 to-day to " take up their quarrel with the 
 foe." 
 
 In Flanders fields the poppies grow 
 Between the crosses, row on row, 
 That mark our place ; and in the sky 
 The larks still bravely singing fly. 
 
 We are the dead. Short days ago 
 We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow, 
 Loved and were loved, and now we lie 
 In Flanders fields. 
 
 Take up our quarrel with the foe ; 
 To you from falling hands we throw 
 The torch ; be yours to bear it high ; 
 If ye break faith with us who die 
 We shall not sleep, though poppies blow 
 In Flanders fields. 
 
 So the noble army of Christian martyrs 
 calls on us — not " to take up a quarrel," but 
 to bear the torch of truth and not to break 
 faith. How we had forgotten that faith ! 
 We shudder as we read of the thousands of 
 lives lost in war; but we had been resting 
 in complacent content while thousands of 
 
84 THE EXPEEIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 lives were sacrificed in times of peace, 
 through ignorance, drudgery, poverty and 
 disease. They were our brothers and sis- 
 ters, yet we did not feel their heartache. 
 " You care a lot about me " — so the poor, 
 murdered factory girl of Georgia is made 
 to say in Mary Phagan Passes Judgment — 
 " You care a lot about me, now that I am 
 dead; you have spent thousands of dollars 
 trying to learn who mutilated my body; 
 you have broken into prison and murdered 
 a man, that I might be avenged. But why 
 did you not care for me when I was alive? 
 I was but a child, but you shut me out of the 
 sunlight. You held me within four walls, 
 watching a machine that crashed through 
 the air, endlessly watching a knife as it cut 
 a piece of wood. Noise filled the place — 
 noise, dust, the smell of oil and bad air. 
 Why did you despise me living, and yet love 
 me so now? I think I know. It is like 
 what the preacher told me about Christ: 
 people hated Him when He was alive, but 
 when He was dead they killed man after 
 man for His sake." 
 
 So in the world of nations and in the 
 world of industry we had alike forgotten of 
 what spirit we are ! 
 
 " The nation is only the larger individual.** 
 
A BADIATING GOSPEL 85 
 
 All the while there had been the call to each 
 one of us to break down the barriers of class 
 and bring all, high and low, rich and poor, 
 head-workers and hand-workers, people of 
 leisure and people of toil, into a closer unity 
 where each could be interpreted to the other 
 and all could live and work together with 
 mutual understanding and mutual respect, 
 and few of us were heeding the call. Per- 
 haps in the Christian Church as nowhere 
 else there was a real attempt to mediate 
 between classes. Despite the Church's 
 natural conservatism, and despite its seem- 
 ing lethargy, there have always been 
 prophets to interpret it to itself. Chris- 
 tianity has shown a miraculous power of 
 reform and resuscitation, and in the present 
 era of social regeneration that power is 
 manifest as never before. Whatever criti- 
 cism may rightly be made against institu- 
 tional Christianity, none has been more 
 acute than that which its own sons have 
 uttered, and among all who are preaching 
 the new religion of sacrifice and service no- 
 where has the message been delivered with 
 greater fervour and power than in Christian 
 pulpits. In every church there are brave 
 souls recalling Christianity to its Lord and 
 voicing, for others without, their vague 
 
86 THE EXPERIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 longings for a deeper brotherhood. Not 
 long since one such called on well-to-do 
 Christians to convince the world that they 
 had indeed " broken through into reality " 
 by making sacrifices on a large scale and 
 becoming chief agents in destroying all 
 undue privilege by which they and their 
 class could profit. 
 
 Miss Vida Scudder is one of a group of 
 women who combine in a remarkable way a 
 passion for social reform and an abiding 
 faith in the power of Christianity to give to 
 the coming social, industrial and economic 
 readjustment a deeply religious note. She 
 reminds us that many of our present diffi- 
 culties in the prosecution of the war are due 
 to past failure to realize the obligations of 
 brotherhood. To take an outstanding illus- 
 tration, "it is worth remembering," she 
 tells us, " that had American cities been 
 nearer to our own ideals Russia might have 
 been held to firm fellowship with us and our 
 allies. We always meant to clean up those 
 New York slums — some day. We always 
 meant to give that last man his chance, to 
 lift that appalling per cent, of our working 
 population above the starvation line — some 
 day. But we were not in the least of a 
 hurry. History was in a hurry, however; 
 
A EADIATING GOSPEL 87 
 
 and word reached Russia that American 
 democracy was a sham." 
 
 Who shall say that we may not, even now, 
 hear the call? Are there not signs that at 
 last the challenge has been measurably ac- 
 cepted in these days of war, when many 
 who had ruled men, industrially and politic- 
 ally, have become true servants of democ- 
 racy and are revealing potentialities of 
 patriotism long unsuspected, as well as 
 demonstrating literally their desire to give 
 rather than to possess? War has not been 
 without its compensations, and not the least 
 of them has been a new understanding of 
 the privilege of power and a new apprecia- 
 tion of the debt it owes to the community. 
 
 Has the man outside quite realized all 
 that this means? Has he quite appreciated 
 how much of this inspiration for service has 
 come from the churches? As he takes his 
 own place in the ranks of the new brother- 
 hood, has he quite understood that it is all 
 a rebirth of the spirit of Christ? Does he 
 find in it no call to consider with himself the 
 significance of that fact? 
 
 Once more : is not the new spirit of public 
 service a call to all of us, within the Church 
 and without, to try out the fact of human 
 brotherhood in our private relationship? 
 
88 THE EXPEBIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 " Be a part of some other man's life," says 
 one whose words had the lifting quality of a 
 true prophet of God — "be a part of some 
 other man's life, his hopes and fears, his 
 joys and pains. Do not be satisfied with 
 seeing men divided off into sets and parties 
 and stations. Get down below these things 
 and become simply human. Dream the 
 most wonderful of all dreams, that men are 
 brothers all and sharers of one another's 
 destinies." 
 
 It seems a far cry from all this to the 
 Church's missionary service, but is it not 
 essentially the same thing? For what are 
 Christian missions but Christian brother- 
 hood on a large scale? And what was 
 Christ's message but a radiating Gospel? 
 That is the reason we preach Christianity 
 everywhere: not because we question 
 whether any of our fellow men can be saved 
 without Christianity ; but because we know, 
 apart from any questions of their eternal 
 welfare, that they need it now. It means 
 so much to us, that we are unwilling to keep 
 it to ourselves. 
 
 It would be daring, perhaps, to say that 
 the man outside will be won only when the 
 Church realizes its world-wide missionary 
 
A KADIATING GOSPEL 89 
 
 call; but is it too much to say, when we 
 remember that missionary enthusiasm is 
 really but the expression of the Church's 
 belief in its world-wide mission, and when 
 the fulfillment of that mission means that 
 the Church has at last begun to live true to 
 the truth of human brotherhood, at last has 
 risen above parochialism and nationalism 
 and has attempted the larger task of making 
 of one blood all the peoples of the earth? 
 
 Now and then we are reminded of a cloud 
 rising in the East which possibly may grow 
 till a storm breaks as terrible as the present 
 world war. The danger is again and again 
 denied, of course; but we know that many 
 of the men who will be the future leaders of 
 Japan have cast off their old religion, as 
 have the leaders of China. Suppose, when 
 they come into their power, they have no 
 new religion, no new moral standards, no 
 sure moral guide — shall we not have a peril 
 worse than Prussianism, with its practical 
 repudiation of Christianity? And then sup- 
 pose, on the other hand, they have been 
 taught the radiating Gospel of the Christ 
 who first made brotherhood a living truth 
 and proclaimed it as the basis of His king- 
 dom — would not that help to make the 
 world u safe for democracy " ? Not with- 
 
90 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 out reason did Jesus Christ leave to His 
 Church a world commission. 
 
 Only through Me! The clear, high call comes 
 pealing 
 Above the thunders of the battle-plain — 
 Only through Me can Life's red wounds find 
 healing ; 
 Only through Me shall earth have peace again. 
 
 Only through Me! Love's might, all might 
 transcending, 
 
 Alone can draw the poison fangs of hate. 
 Yours the beginning! Mine a nobler ending — 
 
 Peace upon earth, and man regenerate ! 
 
 Only through Me can come the great awakening ! 
 
 Wrong cannot right the wrongs that Wrong 
 hath done; 
 Only through Me, all other gods forsaking, 
 
 Can ye attain the heights that must be won. 
 
 Can we not rise to such great height of glory? 
 
 Shall this vast sorrow spend itself in vain? 
 Shall future ages tell the woeful story — 
 
 Christ by His own was crucified again ? 
 
 And so to the Church and to the un- 
 attached Christian the challenge is the same. 
 Only as the Church realizes its mission, will 
 its appeal to the man outside become an 
 insistent and ringing challenge, for it will 
 show him a call at home more fully realized 
 and a world call merging into it. It would 
 
A KADIATING GOSPEL 91 
 
 seem to be the one challenge that cannot be 
 evaded. Tell a man that he must be indi- 
 vidually converted and come into the 
 Church to keep his personal salvation secure, 
 and you have at most a selfish summons ; it 
 does not challenge faith. But tell him what 
 the kingdom of God means; tell him that 
 the Church is the nucleus of the kingdom; 
 tell him that its business is the establish- 
 ment of human brotherhood; tell him that 
 this will mean a new social order; tell him 
 that many men in the Church are trying to 
 interpret for it this radiating Gospel; tell 
 him that they want his help in establishing 
 God's rule over every department of human 
 life ; tell him that the simplest belief in the 
 Fatherhood of God is a summons to join the 
 ranks of a world army; tell him that this 
 army is to " war against war " by giving the 
 coming nations of the earth a spirit other 
 than " tribal allegiance " and " national self- 
 glorification " — and to that call he may give 
 his joyous yea; in that he sees a splendid 
 vision. 
 
IX 
 
 THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER 
 
 IN Jesus Christ's teaching of the divine 
 Fatherhood is the only faith in God 
 worth having. " Better no God," says 
 Canon McComb, " than a God other or less 
 than the God of Jesus." 
 
 The reason is plain : because faith in God 
 as Father assumes that He is a Person with 
 whom we may have conscious relationship 
 and intercourse. Few men have not some 
 realization, more or less intense, of a 
 Supreme Power bearing some sort of rela- 
 tion to the world. Whether they have read 
 his philosophy or not, they agree with 
 Herbert Spencer that " it is absolutely cer- 
 tain that we are ever in the presence of an 
 Infinite and Eternal Energy out of which all 
 things proceed." Sometimes the thought 
 is borne in upon us with special force, 
 burdening us with the sense of an Awful 
 Presence. We think about God, when we 
 do think about Him, with momentary awe 
 and oppression, much as the child thinks of 
 the darkness or the thunder. But Jesus 
 92 
 
THE ESSENCE OP PEAYEE 93 
 
 tells us of a God who is a Person, not merely 
 a Power or a Principle, and if a Person then 
 one who can be known and loved and 
 served; one with whom we may have com- 
 munion and companionship. That is vital; 
 it is of personal interest and importance; it 
 means something to me — and to others like 
 me. Nothing else that I may come to ac- 
 cept about God matters in comparison with 
 it ; nothing matters at all, if this is not true. 
 " A God to whom we cannot pray is no God 
 at all/' 
 
 There can be no developed personal life 
 without companionship. The full life de- 
 mands close and intimate relationship. The 
 man who has no friend is but half a man. 
 
 And the man who does not pray is at- 
 tempting to live his life in isolation. 
 
 In the narrower life of the village or coun- 
 try community we see often the peril of 
 isolation. Removed from the centers of 
 thought and activity, the man of the small 
 town is likely to live a contracted life, alone 
 and aloof, thinking only of the things which 
 concern himself. It need not be so. There 
 are fine things to be done if he can be made 
 to see them. Master minds of literature 
 open to him inspiring conceptions of duty, 
 
94 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 if only some one will introduce him to them. 
 In the quiet life of the small community, 
 freed from the excitements and distractions 
 of the restless city, there is splendid oppor- 
 tunity for the rich growth of personality. 
 No one who has read David Grayson's 
 charming essays can have failed to discover 
 that it is possible to see truth more clearly, 
 and in seeing to enrich life more fully, in 
 the quiet of nature and among a few real 
 friends, than in the strain and stress of the 
 crowded city. Yet the fact is, that without 
 close contact with the larger world the 
 provincial dweller generally grows steadily 
 more provincial. His outlook on life con- 
 tracts; his personality shrinks and shrivels. 
 In the first centuries of Christianity the 
 pagan was simply the countryman — the 
 isolated man of the distant places, whose 
 life was unrelated to the larger civilized 
 order. 
 
 Now what we need to understand is that, 
 religiously speaking, the man who does not 
 pray is a " pagan " ; that is, a solitary man, 
 living apart from God, unrelated to the 
 Source of Life. 
 
 Here, however, is some one who freely 
 admits all this and yet cannot pray because 
 
THE ESSENCE OP PEAYEE 95 
 
 he cannot be sure he believes in the reality 
 of prayer. All the difficulties of prayer 
 thrust themselves into his mind against his 
 will. Why should a loving God withhold 
 any gift from His children until they ask 
 for it? Why does God, seemingly, leave 
 unanswered the prayers of good men? 
 What value is there in intercessory prayer — 
 prayer for others who may be making no 
 move themselves? How can he believe any 
 longer in what we used to call Providence ; 
 much less, how can he believe in a special 
 Providence that shapes particular lives? 
 He is unable to reconcile prayer with the 
 reign of law and the uniformity of nature's 
 processes. 
 
 That is the great difficulty we have been 
 obliged to face in these days of war when 
 prayer has seemed so unavailing. Probably 
 more prayers have been offered than for 
 many years. Men and women who had 
 long since ceased to pray or had done so in 
 perfunctory obedience to custom have now 
 been driven to pray often and anxiously and 
 earnestly. Yet with their prayers have 
 come new doubts and difficulties. And for 
 the many who have prayed as never before, 
 there are almost as many others who have 
 ceased to pray, because they are determined 
 
96 THE EXPEKIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 to be honest with themselves. Face to face 
 with the great realities of sin, sorrow, suffer- 
 ing and death, they have felt the demand for 
 utter reality in religion and they will not do 
 what seems unreal. The old ideas of Provi- 
 dence are gone, and they are not blinding 
 themselves to the fact. Many a man who 
 has, with deeper seriousness, laid hold on 
 great elemental truths and faced life with 
 more resolute earnestness, will confess 
 nevertheless that he is not a praying man. 
 
 For we cannot put ourselves into any- 
 thing if we are not really convinced that it 
 is worth while; and prayer as he knows it 
 has not been worth while, he thinks. In 
 times of great danger he and his friends have 
 prayed and the danger did not pass. In 
 times of impending sorrow they prayed but 
 death came none the less certainly. In 
 times of distress he himself has agonized in 
 prayer and the heavens were closed and God 
 did not answer. Why expect that He 
 would? There are laws of health and they 
 work with inevitable regularity; there are 
 laws of economics and ruin follows their 
 violation; there are larger laws of nature 
 and though slow of operation they are al- 
 ways sure. 
 
 Suppose we ask such a doubting ques- 
 
THE ESSENCE OF PEAYEE 97 
 
 tioner to apply religion's ultimate test. Is 
 there nothing he accepts about prayer? If 
 he has some small grain of belief, what is it? 
 How far can he go? 
 
 In nine cases out of ten the answer will 
 be the same : Yes, after a fashion I believe 
 in what you call prayer; but I explain its 
 effect psychologically. Prayer is a sub- 
 jective influence. Those five or ten minutes 
 now and then help ; they soothe, calm, uplift, 
 enlighten. But beyond that I know noth- 
 ing. Whether the strength comes from 
 God, or whether it is my own mental re- 
 action, I cannot say. All that I know is 
 that the attempt at divine communion brings 
 something of peace and strength. 
 
 Well, is not that a fair start? Pray just 
 that way. On the whole, you believe there 
 is a God, though you are not quite sure 
 what we mean by calling Him a Person. 
 Assume that He is and speak to Him. 
 With all your doubt and uncertainty, with- 
 out philosophical assurance, pray neverthe- 
 less. The wonderful thing is, that the man 
 who begins prayer in that spirit invariably 
 gains a fuller faith. The reason so many of 
 us do not believe in prayer more confidently 
 is because we have not practiced it more 
 faithfully. 
 
98 THE EXPEEIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 And then there is this to be said, that pos- 
 sibly the man's very doubt is indeed a hint 
 towards the correction of a false conception. 
 After all, has it not really thrown him back 
 upon the primary purpose of prayer? It is 
 a distorted idea of prayer, which regards it 
 principally as petition. In fact, one's assur- 
 ance of the subjective power of prayer is a 
 suggestion that he actually has the germ of 
 right faith. It may draw him into an effort 
 towards the kind of devotion God wants. 
 
 For, indeed, the more he thinks of it the 
 more he will come to feel that the effect of 
 prayer is a far greater thing than his own 
 subjective reaction. He will begin to feel 
 that in reality it is intercourse with a Per- 
 son. Sometimes the religion of Christ 
 seems hard to grasp because it is so pro- 
 found; but really it is easy to grasp because 
 it is so absolutely human. We ourselves 
 are persons, and we know how one person 
 understands and absorbs another, how one 
 man's heart feeds on the heart of another. 
 We know men who by their mere presence 
 make us strong. There are men in whose 
 friendship courage and faith and large- 
 heartedness feed and grow. In their 
 presence we cannot be weak or petty or 
 unbelieving. 
 
THE ESSENCE OP PRAYER 99 
 
 Now what is prayer in its essence but 
 placing oneself in the presence of the divine 
 Friend and absorbing His life? It means 
 not the changing of God's mind towards us, 
 but the changing of our whole frame of 
 mind towards Him. It means spending 
 some time with Him, a long time if need be, 
 because it takes a long time to change the 
 whole tone and temper of a man's soul and 
 free it from everything that cannot be 
 countenanced in one of God's children. 
 
 Even if we cannot see this at first we go 
 on with the experiment of prayer; for, 
 taking it at its lowest estimate, the experi- 
 ence means at least a development of one's 
 inner life and without that personality 
 evaporates. " The man who has no refuge 
 within himself," writes Amiel, "who lives, 
 so to speak, in his front rooms, is not a 
 personality at all." 
 
 Yet surely the man who prays will dis- 
 cover that his prayer is more than personal 
 self-development. The very fact that leads 
 us to believe there is a God compels us to 
 believe He is a personal God. From Him 
 come all things and He is more than the 
 sum of all things created. The greatest 
 thing about me is my personality, and there 
 must be something in God akin to that, an 
 
100 THE EXPERIMENT OP PAITH 
 
 infinite Something of which my human per- 
 sonality is the finite reflection. God is a 
 person, not a principle. And all that we 
 know of personal growth and development 
 suggests, as has just been pointed out, that 
 it comes not merely from self-introspection 
 but from contact with personalities stronger 
 than our own. It is but a step from our 
 subjective experience of the power of soli- 
 tude to the discovery that when we are 
 most alone we are really not alone. We 
 begin to be conscious that we are in a divine 
 presence and that the strength which we 
 receive is not a reflex of our own will but 
 an inflowing of personal power from with- 
 out. 
 
 Is not all this leading us to understand 
 better what prayer is? It is the opening of 
 the soul to the breeze of heaven. Or, better 
 (for we must not phrase it in anything but 
 the language of personality) it is the up- 
 lifted heart. That is the way the psalmist 
 defined it. " Show Thou me the way that 
 I should walk in ; for I lift up my soul unto 
 Thee." It is the effort of the human spirit 
 to place itself in conscious relationship with 
 the divine Spirit. It is the soul looking 
 Godward. It means " bringing God and the 
 soul together and leaving them alone." If 
 
THE ESSENCE OF PEAYEE 101 
 
 it does nothing else for us, we may well be 
 content if it brings us some new conscious- 
 ness of the supernatural, the eternal, the 
 divine. " The man who rises from his knees 
 and goes out to his daily task unable to dis- 
 cern any answer to those moments of suppli- 
 cation save a new assurance that God is with 
 him has answer enough," says Bishop 
 McLaren; "he has put out his hand in the 
 darkness and even though it be for the 
 briefest second he has touched the Divine 
 Hand." 
 
 Now we see why the prayerless man is a 
 pagan. He has been living apart and un- 
 related — out of touch with God. Then he 
 begins to pray, in the simplest possible way, 
 without much more in his mind than that he 
 means to relate himself to God, and at once 
 something happens. He finds that he sees 
 life more as God must see it; he does his 
 work more in God's way; he lives his life 
 more as a member of the Father's family. 
 
 We cannot go before God in that way 
 without unconsciously taking His point of 
 view. Companionship produces resem- 
 blance. Association with men of the large 
 heart makes us grow into the likeness of our 
 associates; and companionship with God 
 makes us more like God. It gives incentive 
 
102 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 to do one's best in the things known only to 
 self and hidden from all others. 
 
 Now the wonder of Christ's teaching 
 about God is that it just takes all this for 
 granted. God is Father; then, of course, it 
 follows that we are to live with Him ; then, 
 of course, we are to speak with Him ; then 
 the essence of faith is to keep the soul recep- 
 tive to His influence. 
 
 So the man who acts on his small bit of 
 faith moves on to larger faith. As he prays 
 he learns that essentially prayer is conversa- 
 tion with God. If that is true, then there is 
 nothing about which he may not speak with 
 God, and speak simply and naturally. 
 
 If he thinks more about the prayers of 
 Jesus, however, he will learn that his prayer 
 must take account of some of the difficulties 
 which troubled him in the beginning. 
 These difficulties, even when viewed in the 
 light of his new experience, will not dis- 
 appear, but they will lead to an adjustment 
 of his petitionary prayer — an adjustment 
 which will rob it of much that he has been 
 accustomed to regard as precious, it is true, 
 but a change which will give it new values 
 and make it a finer and manlier act than it 
 was before. 
 
THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER 103 
 
 In the first place, he will find that while 
 his prayer horizon has become wider, the 
 range of petition has somewhat narrowed. 
 If God rules the world by law, and to grant 
 some prayers would mean breaking a link 
 in the chain of cause and effect and throw- 
 ing the universe into tmgoverned disorder, 
 then he will not expect immediate and direct 
 answer to prayer where the laws of nature 
 are perfectly plain. Though, of course, he 
 will remember as well that there may be 
 laws of the spiritual realm, as yet unper- 
 ceived, and that his prayer may possibly set 
 in motion forces which counterbalance 
 physical forces, just as by mechanics he can 
 overcome the law of gravitation. Especially 
 with regard to prayer in time of sickness, he 
 will remember that through psychotherapy 
 we are beginning to see that more things are 
 wrought by prayer than this world dreams 
 of. At least he will see that he has much to 
 learn, and he will have an open mind instead 
 of a doubting spirit. 
 
 Once more, he will learn to be modest in 
 petition. The Lord's Prayer teaches him 
 that. It warns him to ask for few things 
 for self, many things for others and much 
 for the increase of God's honour and glory 
 and the advancement of His kingdom. 
 
104 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 Therefore he will be most concerned in 
 bringing to God the world's sorrow and the 
 world's sin and asking His help in restoring 
 the world to the moral harmony and ordered 
 beauty which must be in the mind of the 
 divine Creator. 
 
 Again, he will discover that the answer to 
 prayer may often come through the quick- 
 ened mental and moral life of the one who 
 prays. That will fit in with his original 
 feeling about the subjective influence of 
 prayer. God answers many prayers through 
 human agents and in human work. The 
 skill and understanding of the physician, the 
 new health laws which medical science is 
 constantly discovering, the deeper sympathy 
 with the world's pain and the keen desire to 
 help which at length must so lighten the 
 world's burden — who knows what part 
 prayer has had in all these? The new sense 
 of corporate responsibility, with its educa- 
 tion towards a better industrial order, and 
 the new spirit of social service which has 
 brought light into so many dark places and 
 made human life so much less unendur- 
 able — who can say what prayer has done in 
 this enlightenment? There is, indeed, "in- 
 tercession which is cooperation with God," 
 producing as a late fruit of Christianity a 
 
THE ESSENCE OP PEAYEE 105 
 
 growth of the social spirit which makes pos- 
 sible the rebirth of a Christian community 
 and the releasing of its activities until it be- 
 comes the strongest force in the world. 
 
 Finally, he will learn that every prayer 
 must be made with a reservation : Thy will 
 be done. This does not mean simply the 
 spirit of submission, although that is a part 
 of the thought. It means earnest purpose 
 to work for the things which God wills. It 
 means keenness of vision to perceive and 
 know the things we ought to do and per- 
 sistent purpose to seek grace and power to 
 do them. It means that we desire spiritual 
 insight to judge our work and make our 
 decisions as God would have us. It means 
 living our life as a gift from Him. Because 
 this ought to be the background behind 
 every prayer, to pray is no easy work. We 
 have to take time, and shut the world out, 
 and learn to concentrate the mind on God, 
 and subdue our impatience and fill ourselves 
 with the spirit of obedience, until we can 
 think temperately and accurately, judge 
 calmly and become masters of ourselves and 
 loyal servants of Him whose will we would 
 accomplish. 
 
 Let the man who wants strong faith in 
 prayer try to pray seriously. His own 
 
106 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 ^. 
 
 reasoning shows him that prayer, to amount 
 
 to anything, must mean real effort; it can- 
 not be casual or perfunctory. Let him act 
 on what his reason makes so clear — act and 
 act and act again. 
 
 So the seed faith of the questioner has in 
 it the condensed essentials of the finest 
 things that prayer can mean. At first the 
 larger view seems to rob prayer of its power 
 by destroying belief in its mechanical 
 efficacy; but this is not really the fact. 
 What we have lost is the certainty of getting 
 our own desire; we have gained, instead, 
 the knowledge of God's will. 
 
 He asked for strength, that he might achieve; 
 he was made weak, that he might endure. 
 
 He asked for help, that he might do larger 
 things; he was given infirmity, that he might do 
 better things. 
 
 He asked for riches, that he might be free from 
 care ; he was given poverty that he might be wise 
 rather than care-free. 
 
 He asked for power, that he might impress 
 men ; he was given weakness, that he might seek 
 God. 
 
 He asked for all things, that he might enjoy 
 life; he was given Life, that he might enjoy all 
 things. 
 
 He has received nothing that he asked for ; he 
 has received more than he ever hoped for. 
 
 His prayer is answered — he is blest indeed. 
 
X 
 
 THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 
 
 IF God is not the God of Christianity, 
 He ought to be ; we can never, now, be 
 content with any other. Men in gen- 
 eral do not realize how little they know, 
 apart from the Christian faith, of the kind 
 of God in whom they can believe. Now 
 and then some daring philosopher attempts 
 to elaborate a new idea of God, only to suc- 
 ceed, by contrast, in revealing the perfection 
 of the New Testament conception. Even 
 the most casual study of comparative re- 
 ligion leads to a similar discovery. The 
 worlds best thoughts of God are found in 
 Christianity; all that is weak or unworthy 
 has been eliminated from it. In God the 
 Father, as revealed in Jesus Christ His Son, 
 we have the last possible word in religion. 
 Generation succeeds generation and each 
 finds its highest ideal realized in Chris- 
 tianity, each sees in it new spiritual appre- 
 ciations, but none has ever added to the 
 actual content of its faith. All we can ever 
 107 
 
108 THE EXPEKIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 ask for, it has had all the while to give. 
 Were we to catalogue all the qualities we 
 desire in God, we should find them all in the 
 God of Jesus — and much more beside. 
 
 But is Jesus Christ's idea of God a revela- 
 tion — a literal unveiling of deity — or is it 
 only the last effort, the truest and best con- 
 ception, of the highest and best of men? 
 Has He given us merely a splendid " inter- 
 pretation" of God, or has He really drawn 
 aside the curtain of the sanctuary so that 
 we can see the Father's face? 
 
 " And man created God in his own image, 
 after his own likeness ; in the image of man 
 created he God." So has been expressed 
 the thought that God has never specially 
 revealed Himself, that our idea of Him is 
 but the result of our own reasoning, so that 
 " the best God is the God of the best men." 
 Man wants a divinity and therefore works 
 out the idea of divinity for himself. The 
 Kaiser's idea of God is quite different from 
 the God of Phillips Brooks, for example! 
 The Prussians find the war spirit in their 
 own hearts. Then they set it up in the 
 heavens and call it God. So, again, the 
 New Testament conception of God is a 
 tremendous advance on the Old Testament 
 conception; but we will be told that this is 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 109 
 
 because men's moral conceptions had won- 
 derfully enlarged during the centuries from 
 Moses to Christ. With man's moral growth 
 comes a growing appreciation of what God 
 should be. He keeps on working, enlarg- 
 ing upon his ideals of deity until they be- 
 come reasonably perfect and satisfying. 
 
 Is, then, the God of Jesus a real revela- 
 tion? 
 
 It helps us in answering the question if 
 we take note of the fact which gives to 
 Christianity its real significance. It is not 
 simply that Jesus Christ has given us the 
 " last word " about God. The marvel does 
 not end there. The perpetual miracle is 
 this : that we find in the life of Jesus the 
 God of Jesus. That is the wonder of the 
 Gospel story. We cannot separate the 
 divine character which Christ portrayed 
 from the human character which He made 
 so attractive. Our ideas of God as they 
 have come to us out of the diffused Chris- 
 tianity which colours all our thinking are 
 inextricably interwoven with our knowledge 
 of what Christ was. 
 
 To put it in a very simple way: were we 
 to ask any man to think long and carefully 
 of all that he wants God to be, and then 
 describe all that his hungry soul longs for, 
 
110 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 the description would hardly be other than 
 a picture of what Jesus Christ was in His 
 earthly life — not merely a picture of what 
 He tells us that God is, but a picture of what 
 He Himself was. We could not ask for a 
 God other or better than Jesus Himself. 
 We cannot think of any attribute of deity 
 of which we have not the human counterpart 
 in His life. He was all that He taught. 
 
 Then there is this further fact: Jesus 
 claimed to be of divine origin. If His claim 
 be true, then all that He asserted of God we 
 know to be fact; for we know what God is 
 in knowing what Christ is. If His claim of 
 divinity be disallowed, or explained away, 
 then we are once more in the dark. We 
 have had a wonderfully beautiful conception 
 of God as the thought of the Best of men; 
 but — He may have been mistaken. He rose 
 to the heights of human aspiration ; but He 
 could not have been sure, any more than we 
 are sure. 
 
 So we come to the man who does not 
 know what to believe about Jesus. 
 
 " What think you of Christ? " we ask, and 
 he cannot tell. " I am not quite sure what 
 I believe. Indeed, I have not troubled over- 
 much, it may be, to find out; because to me 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 111 
 
 the essential thing is my belief in Christ, not 
 my belief about Him. I cannot honestly 
 answer your question in words of no un- 
 certain sound. I only know what the life 
 of Jesus stands for. I admire and revere 
 its supreme beauty. I appreciate to the full 
 the splendour of His teaching. I bow in 
 adoration before Him ; I worship the Father 
 of whom He taught. But beyond this I 
 cannot go — I simply do not know. Is it not 
 enough to follow Christ, without troubling 
 ourselves to understand Him?" 
 
 There is something so fine about such an 
 answer that it warms the heart of the be- 
 liever. And yet — and yet — the question is 
 the question of our Lord Himself: "What 
 think ye of Christ? " Its importance, we 
 have just said, lies in the fact that only 
 through our right answer to it can we be 
 sure of the God of Jesus. If Christ were 
 only a good man, then we should have but 
 one more instance of such a man, serving 
 faithfully and deserted at the last. But if 
 He is the Son of God, then we have light on 
 life's dark mystery. What we want is to 
 know of a surety whether God is the God of 
 love we have been told He is — oh, how we 
 do want to know that in these days that 
 try men's souls ! If Jesus is divine, then we 
 
112 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 can be certain. He is the assurance that 
 God Himself has entered into the tragedy 
 of human life, that He has experienced our 
 sorrow. and suffering and that He sympa- 
 thizes. What Christ was, God is. What 
 Christ said, God says. What Christ did, 
 God does. What Christ felt, God feels. 
 Does God love? He gave His only begotten 
 Son. 
 
 Having said that, we ask our friend to 
 start as before on the path towards faith. 
 Our appeal to the man who reveres the 
 beauty of Christ's life is again the same: 
 Live true to your truth. You accept Christ 
 as the embodiment of humanity's ideal; 
 very well, then, try to be all that you admire. 
 Of course I know you are conscientious and 
 sincere — this is no questioning of your 
 moral character. You more than meet the 
 standards of ordinary present day religion. 
 Your life is highly respectable and eminently 
 useful; it fulfills all the ethical requirements 
 of your class. But you know, do you not, 
 that you have not actually and literally 
 taken Christ as your model. You know 
 you have not been striving, with serious 
 and steadfast purpose, to embody His every 
 ideal in your daily life. You know that you 
 have been satisfied with standards lower 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 113 
 
 than His. Your circumstances are different, 
 of course, but you know that you have not 
 steadily sought to translate Him into terms 
 of to-day. You know that you have never 
 fully and frankly faced the task of applying 
 to the very different conditions of your life 
 the principles which guided Him in the life 
 of Palestine two thousand years ago. You 
 know, indeed, that you have hardly more 
 than surface impressions of His teaching; 
 you have never dug down deep to discover 
 the principles of conduct which ruled His 
 life and should rule ours. 
 
 Suppose you try it. Begin to live with 
 Christ, to live with Him long and closely. 
 Just go on, quietly measuring your life 
 against His. Try to live exactly as Christ 
 would were He in your position; do exactly 
 what He would do; say only the things He 
 would say ; banish every thought that could 
 not by any possibility find place in His 
 mind; put aside every ambition and give up 
 every plan and every cherished desire that 
 you could not imagine His considering 
 worth your chief effort. You have had the 
 vision of goodness — try to follow it faith- 
 fully, exactly and persistently. 
 
 Ah ! if we tried to do that, how soon our 
 doubts would dissolve and our difficulties 
 
114 THE EXPEKIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 vanish and the truth be made plain. Be- 
 cause we ourselves had made an honest 
 effort towards a lofty ideal, had tried and 
 failed, we should begin to understand the 
 significance of the Gospel story. The days 
 of Christ's life on earth, we should see, were 
 days of tremendous import — a time when 
 the spiritual, the supernatural, the divine 
 manifested itself in an undeniable way. It 
 would become our conviction, as it has been 
 the conviction of the ages, that Jesus Christ 
 cannot be explained in human terms alone. 
 He is something more than the highest 
 product of the human race. We set His 
 life over against our lives, and it seems 
 natural to apply to Him the words of the 
 ancient prophecy, " My thoughts are not 
 your thoughts, neither are my ways your 
 ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens 
 are higher than the earth, so are my ways 
 higher than your ways and my thoughts 
 than your thoughts." 
 
 Back in the minds of many who cannot 
 accept the fuller faith in Christ is the feel- 
 ing that if we admit that He is God we are 
 taking away what is most precious in His 
 life, His "real, genuine, flesh -and -blood 
 humanity," and are substituting a majestic 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 115 
 
 and unapproachable figure for the human; 
 toiling, loving Man we revere. If it were 
 true that orthodox theology robs us of a 
 Christ who is wholly and genuinely one 
 with ourselves, men would be quite right 
 in their insistence on a restatement of the 
 Church's teaching; but as a matter of fact, 
 it was the constant effort of Christian 
 thinkers to safeguard the true and full 
 humanity of Christ while proclaiming also 
 His real divinity. The Chalcedonian de- 
 crees, for one who will take the trouble to 
 study them, prove this. The Christ of the 
 creed is the human Christ who emptied 
 Himself and restrained His divine powers 
 and lived His life in human strength alone, 
 subject to human weakness while perfectly 
 responsive to divine grace. Only so much 
 of His Godhead appears through the 
 humanity as is consistent with a natural 
 human development. He never called upon 
 His divine resources and powers, He never 
 summoned His divine wisdom and strength ; 
 He was what He was as man, with man's 
 powers, through man's prayers, in man's 
 communion with God. Sanday suggests 
 that the divine in Him was like the sub- 
 conscious in us; that is, not to press the 
 analogy too far, only so much of it came to 
 
116 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 the surface as could be expressed in a truly 
 human life. His humanity was not an un- 
 real thing, as if He were merely acting or 
 playing a part. 
 
 Nor must we forget that humanity itself 
 has sparks of the divine. " The only idea 
 we can form of a God whom we should de- 
 sire to worship," says one of the authors of 
 Faith or Fear, " is one who exhibits, while 
 He transcends, the characteristics of the 
 best men and women we know. He must 
 be a Person who manifests the love and 
 courage, the strength and beauty, the 
 patience and self-sacrifice, the justice and 
 wisdom, which we find scattered in little 
 patches here and there in the lives of some 
 whom we have met. It is because Christ 
 did so completely embody the essentials of 
 the perfect life, which are seen and known 
 to us in glimpses here and there in human 
 history, that we can say that the character 
 which we believe to be divine has actually 
 been manifested in the world." 
 
 Only as we understand what humanity 
 was meant to be can the idea of Incarnation 
 be possible. There is something essentially 
 so splendid about our human nature that 
 God can really enter into that nature with- 
 out ceasing to be God. So clearly was this 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 117 
 
 seen by some of the early Christian fathers 
 that they regarded the Incarnation as 
 inevitable and appropriate even apart from 
 its redemptive purpose. It was " God's 
 natural and eternal and inevitable destiny 
 to manifest Himself as man." 
 
 To give full force to such thoughts as 
 these is not to empty the Incarnation of all 
 meaning through the assertion that Jesus 
 Christ is divine as we all are, only " more 
 so." It is simply to recognize the natural 
 kinship of the human and the divine through 
 an appreciation of all that is finest and best 
 in humanity; to see, therefore, the possibil- 
 ity of its use in the self-revelation of deity. 
 It is to think of God in terms of humanity 
 carried to infinite perfection. It is to see 
 how the varied rays of human goodness 
 meet in Christ in the absolute unity of per- 
 fect light. It is to see that a character 
 manifesting all that is fine and high and true 
 and noble in all the best men of all the ages, 
 and manifesting it in such surpassing 
 measure, is a Character which can be defined 
 only in terms commensurate with divine 
 perfection. It is to think of God in Christ 
 not in terms of immensity and almightiness, 
 but of identity of spiritual qualities — that is, 
 identity of spiritual Life. We are dis- 
 
IIS TEE EXPERIMENT OF FAITff 
 
 eouraged in our thoughts of God if we fix 
 our minds chiefly on the greatness of the 
 Universal Mind. To think of God in Christ 
 is to bring Him near, to remove the abstract- 
 .ness and loftiness which keep the soul from 
 warm and living contact with Him. It is to 
 remember that He is not far removed from 
 the world or wholly unlike men. 
 
 This makes the Incarnation, as Donald 
 Hankey puts it, agreeable to common sense. 
 " We cannot understand or perceive the 
 spiritual unless we can establish contact 
 with it through the medium of our physical 
 senses. Just as we see electricity revealed 
 in its effects on matter, though the stuff 
 itself eludes our senses, so we can under- 
 stand and perceive the divine Spirit in so far 
 as He is revealed in His effects on physical 
 beings/' The Incarnation is such a revela- 
 tion through a perfect medium. It is the 
 self-identification of God with humanity, so 
 that in Christ God is laying bare His heart 
 for all to see. 
 
 All this we are on the way to realize the 
 moment we begin literally to live true to 
 the truth we know about Jesus. Christ 
 never came among men, saying, " I am God; 
 you must accept it and believe. " He would 
 have us know by experience rather than 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 119 
 
 prove by argument. So it was that the 
 first disciples came to know Him. They did 
 not reason from the divinity downward, but 
 from the humanity upward. They believed 
 in the divinity through their experience of 
 the perfect humanity and so believing they 
 handed on their faith as an inheritance 
 which the perpetual experience of the 
 power of Christ in those who really be- 
 lieve has made continually more credible. 
 Unique in character, they came to under- 
 stand that their Master was unique in nature 
 also. 
 
 This method of approach may help us in 
 some of the special difficulties of the present 
 day. Take, for example, the question of 
 the Virgin Birth. We have seen, as we 
 took our road towards faith, that belief in 
 the divinity of Christ is in no way dependent 
 on belief in His miraculous birth. We learn 
 that Jesus is the Son of God exactly as the 
 first disciples discovered it, by living with 
 Him long enough and closely enough to see 
 that the real miracle is the continuous 
 miracle of His life. Nothing could be more 
 wonder-compelling than that. It is at once 
 our shame and our inspiration. It is so 
 .absolutely unique that the only worthy ex- 
 
120 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 planation of it is found in the creed : " I be- 
 lieve in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only- 
 begotten Son of God . . . Who for us 
 men and for our salvation came down from 
 heaven." 
 
 But if Jesus Christ is divine, if at His 
 birth an Eternal and Divine Personality 
 entered into a new mode of existence, and 
 manifested Himself in human form, then it 
 would hardly be strange or unreasonable 
 if His birth were unlike other births. The 
 fact of Jesus Himself is so unique and 
 miraculous that we may rightly expect the 
 method of His entrance into the earthly life 
 to be unique and miraculous also. Face to 
 face with a life that cannot be explained save 
 as the unveiling of deity, we ask how it 
 would be possible for an Eternal, Divine 
 Personality to clothe Himself in human flesh 
 after the ordinary mode of human concep- 
 tion. When a child is born of human 
 parents, a new personality enters upon its 
 life. When Jesus Christ was born, it was 
 no new personality that appeared, but He 
 who is from Everlasting. 
 
 We must start at the right point. As- 
 suming that Christ is God (and we have 
 barely touched the fringe of the argument 
 for that fact), here is something which has 
 
THE UNVEILING OF DEITY 121 
 
 no equal or likeness in the annals of earth. 
 It is not the case of a new man coming into 
 life, but of the Creator of all things mani- 
 festing Himself in a particular life. " If a 
 divine life was entering into our weakened 
 humanity," said a former Dean of West- 
 minster in Some Thoughts on the Incarnation, 
 " can we think it inappropriate that from 
 the outset this life should manifest its 
 power to transcend the natural order by 
 which we are limited? If miracle is ever 
 in place as a witness to the intervention of 
 a new power, challenging our attention and 
 manifesting the ' finger of God/ was not the 
 coming of the Son of God in human flesh a 
 fit occasion for miracle ?" 
 
 Once we separate in thought the fact of 
 the Incarnation from the mode of its accom- 
 plishment, we have stated the two truths in 
 the right order and can approach them with 
 a due sense of their right proportion. Then 
 we are not making the mistake of resting 
 our belief in Christ's divine life on the frail 
 foundation of an acceptance of the Gospel 
 accounts of His birth. On the contrary, we 
 are ready to adopt a less antagonistic atti- 
 tude in our consideration of the evidence of 
 the miracle of the birth, because it is sec- 
 ondary to the greater miracle of the Life, 
 
122 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 secondary to it, but singularly consistent 
 with it. 
 
 Then, too, we see the importance of the 
 emphasis the creeds have always placed on 
 the Virgin Birth. It safeguards both the 
 truths we have been considering. The fact 
 of the birth guarantees the actual humanity 
 of Christ as against the tendency to make 
 it humanly unreal; the uniqueness of the 
 birth is the guarantee that the One born is 
 unique in His Personality — the very Son 
 of God. 
 
 And the fact of this unique Personality 
 baffles any other explanation than that of 
 the creed. Does that explanation seem too 
 great to be true? In fact, it is too fine and 
 splendid not to be true. " The very God ! 
 think, Ahib " — so Browning makes Kar- 
 shish the Arab physician write to his 
 friend— " think, Ahib; then the All-Great 
 were the All-Loving too." 
 
XI 
 
 THE FACT OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 EVERY preacher who has given care- 
 ful thought to the preparation of 
 an Easter sermon knows that his 
 words are but an echo of the hopes and 
 longings of his congregation. The value 
 of the sermon lies in this, that it is the 
 assurance of things hoped for. It is like 
 an obligato which repeats and lifts higher 
 the chorus of their own hearts* song. 
 There is, in all men, a deep and passionate 
 yearning for a life beyond this life of which 
 the creed of the Christian is the positive 
 satisfaction and assurance. 
 
 It is from this ground of common hope 
 and faith that we must begin any discussion 
 of the resurrection. We start, therefore, 
 with the simplest possible belief in a future 
 life. When we declare our faith in " the 
 resurrection of the body and the life ever- 
 lasting " we mean — if, for a moment, we 
 may brush aside all technicalities — simply 
 what we commonly call immortality; we 
 J 23 
 
124 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 mean the conviction that, after death here, 
 personality survives in another life beyond. 
 
 The power of the apostles' preaching lay 
 in their assertion of positive knowledge of 
 facts which gave assurance of this common 
 hope. Their faith was grounded in the 
 absolute certainty that their crucified Mas- 
 ter was still alive. If there is anything on 
 earth beyond controversy it is that the 
 disciples of the Lord believed with all their 
 hearts that Jesus Christ had risen. They 
 were as sure of it as they were of their own 
 existence. And they were just as sure that 
 His resurrection was a pledge of their own. 
 Therein lay the wonder of their message. 
 The empty tomb opened the grave and gate 
 of death for all. It satisfied the one great 
 hunger of the human heart — the desire to 
 know of a surety whether there is another 
 life and whether those we have loved long 
 since and lost are lost only for a while. We 
 want to be sure that love shall never end. 
 
 Ah ! how men had hungered to have this 
 longing of their heart satisfied; how they 
 had reasoned, and weighed probabilities, 
 and wrung hints from nature, and forced 
 hopes into opinions, and tried to turn 
 opinions into convictions — and yet had 
 never really known. 
 
THE FACT OP IMMOETALITY 125 
 
 Always there had been the hope. It is 
 the all-but-universal instinct of the race and 
 it has real ground of reasonable conviction. 
 The form of matter changes, but the essen- 
 tial substance of the universe neither in- 
 creases nor diminishes. Surely senseless 
 atoms shall not endure and conscious spirits 
 perish. Life is always passing on, through 
 the death of old forms, to continued and 
 fuller life. It cannot be different with the 
 human life. In man the Creator has per- 
 sonal and intelligent connection with the 
 world and it is inconceivable that He could 
 be "perpetually destroying this sensitive 
 bond by the perpetual destruction of the 
 souls through which the bond was estab- 
 lished." 
 
 It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well — 
 Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond 
 
 desire, 
 This longing after immortality? 
 
 This hope was made certain by Christ. 
 He did not argue about it — argument is a 
 terrible trifling to human hearts sick with 
 their loss. He did not explain difficulties — 
 how could they be explained when there is 
 no language of human experience in which 
 to phrase the explanation? He did not give 
 details — when all is said, of what importance 
 
126 THE~EXP:EBIMENT 'OF FAITH 
 
 are these by comparison with the great fact 
 itself? He simply took for granted that 
 death is a mere turn in the road to life 
 eternal, because God being what He is, and 
 man being God's child, it could not be other- 
 wise. He filled men's hearts with trust in 
 a heavenly Father. He made them under- 
 stand the real value of human life. 
 
 His teaching, therefore, fits with singular 
 ease and aptness into our modern ways of 
 thinking. With us any belief in immortality 
 must rest back upon God's moral character. 
 Once we accept that, life beyond life is 
 undeniable. 
 
 For the man who would have his hope 
 pass into certainty, there is no surer path to 
 faith than that which starts from the full 
 recognition of this teaching of Jesus. It is 
 not proof, of course ; it is the foundation for 
 faith. Indeed, the best things of life are 
 felt rather than proved, and this best of all 
 things is no exception to the rule. Against 
 the background of Christ's teaching, how- 
 ever, the argument is thrown into sharper 
 relief, and we see more clearly the force of 
 all our reasoning. 
 
 The resurrection of Jesus made assurance 
 doubly sure. All that He taught of im- 
 
THE FACT OF IMMOBTALITY 127 
 
 mortality was confirmed when He Himself 
 was shown to be alive. Death did not end 
 all for Him; He did live beyond the grave. 
 We, too, therefore, are immortal; for us 
 also there is another life. It was this that 
 the apostles proclaimed with triumphant 
 boldness. Their words rang as a challenge, 
 clear, sharp, direct, decisive. 
 
 St. Paul, after a concentrated experience 
 which crowded into a short space all that 
 the apostles had passed through in the last 
 days of Christ's earthly life and especially 
 in the dark hours between Good Friday and 
 Easter, staked all on the truth of the resur- 
 rection. " If Christ be not raised your 
 faith is vain." " If in this life only we have 
 hope in Christ, we are of all men most 
 miserable." He would have no compromise, 
 no half-way assurance, no ecstatic but empty 
 rapture. A risen and triumphant Christ 
 was the pledge of a risen and triumphant 
 humanity, and because he was so certain of 
 both he ventured everything and risked 
 what men ordinarily count most precious 
 for the hope of the eternal. 
 
 Neither he nor the apostles were the vic- 
 tims of an hysterical enthusiasm. The nar- 
 rative shows us a group of men who had 
 followed Christ faithfully though falteringly, 
 
128 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 who at first understood Him very dimly, 
 who were dazed and stunned by His death, 
 who hid behind closed doors, with shaken 
 hearts, in trembling expectancy, fearing lest 
 their turn should come next, who were in 
 utter despair at the shattering of all their 
 hopes and full of painful penitence at their 
 own cowardice in the crisis that removed 
 their Master. 
 
 The story of the change which came over 
 this panic-stricken company has been re- 
 hearsed so often that it may be condensed 
 into a paragraph. The brief telling of it 
 is a concentrated proof of the resurrection. 
 Men weak, cowardly and despairing sud- 
 denly became strong, confident, bold and 
 unafraid. Neither bonds nor imprisonment 
 could make them waver in their testimony. 
 They rejoiced that they were counted 
 worthy to suffer for the truth. Their wit- 
 ness compelled belief, and in their new 
 strength they established a Church and con- 
 verted the world. In the Church the core 
 of faith was belief in the risen Lord. The 
 very sacrament of admission was a symbolic 
 burial with Christ, that the disciple might 
 rise with Him into newness of life. The 
 chief act of worship was a memorial of His 
 death which would have been pointless and 
 
THE FACT OF IMMOETALITY 129 
 
 inane did it not imply participation in His 
 risen life and sharing in the triumph of His 
 victory. Finally, the day which became 
 fixed as the special Christian day of devotion 
 was in itself a weekly proclamation of faith 
 in Him as conqueror of death. 
 
 These things cannot be explained save on 
 the ground that the new life of the new 
 society was rooted in reality. No ghost 
 story spiritualized into a gospel of the 
 resurrection can adequately account for the 
 upspringing of Christendom. 
 
 It is enough if we rest here on this simple 
 statement of fact. Half the doubts of men 
 begin beyond this point. A whole range of 
 questions arise as to the relation between 
 the natural and the spiritual body of the 
 Lord, the body which hung on the cross and 
 the body which appeared to the disciples be- 
 hind the closed doors of the upper chamber. 
 It is inevitable, of course, that there should 
 be further enquiry and speculation; only we 
 must remember that it is speculation. I 
 may hold one hypothesis; you may hold 
 another; both are only theories. The one 
 essential thing is that no hypothesis shall 
 forget the fact of the empty tomb. Jesus 
 was crucified, dead and buried. He died 
 
130 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 after a public execution, was buried in a 
 well-known grave, His disciples asserted 
 positively that He had risen, and, had not 
 the tomb been empty, it would have been 
 the simplest thing in the world to produce 
 the body and dissipate the faith of His fol- 
 lowers. One glance at it would have 
 pricked like a bubble the emotional frenzy 
 of the apostles. It is not enough, therefore, 
 to declare our faith in the resurrection by 
 stating our acceptance of the fact that 
 Jesus survived death, as we all hope to do. 
 Whatever it was, an actual bodily resurrec- 
 tion occurred. 
 
 When we come to explanations of what 
 it was, there is nothing we can say and it 
 seems hopeless to pursue the enquiry. The 
 question was one which did not present 
 itself to the minds of the 'evangelists. As 
 Professor Drown reminds us, their problem 
 was different from ours. " They expected 
 the speedy return of the Lord and the com- 
 ing of the Messianic kingdom, which was to 
 bring in a new world order that was to be 
 eternal. Therefore no sharp distinction 
 was in mind between the forms of existence 
 of this life and those of the life to come. 
 We are to-day in a different position. We 
 can no longer think of this earth as destined 
 
THE FACT OF IMMOETALITY 131 
 
 to last forever, and we can no longer think 
 of the life beyond in such clear and definite 
 form as when the world to come was con- 
 ceived of as so close at hand. We can no 
 longer conceive of our own resurrection in 
 forms that belong directly to this life. We 
 cannot think of the body that is sown as 
 identical with the body that shall be. 
 Rather we believe that God will give us a 
 body as shall please Him, in such a form 
 of existence as we do not know, but which 
 will become clear to us when we no longer 
 see through a glass darkly, but face to face." 
 
 Why should not faith rest on the primary 
 conviction and be content without light on 
 all questions that are secondary and sub- 
 sidiary? Enough for us that in the other 
 life we shall have some sort of an instrument 
 through which the soul can express itself — 
 for that is the real purpose of a body, is it 
 not? We shall need, therefore, not a 
 natural body, but a spiritual body fitted for 
 a spiritual world. 
 
 An illustration — a favourite one with the 
 late Dr. Shipman — may help. You watch 
 a waterspout. There is an eddy, a spin of 
 wind that passes over the sea. As it sweeps 
 along it catches up water and whirls it like 
 a pillar towards the sky. There it stands — 
 
132 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 an opaque column, like the trunk of a huge 
 palm tree, between the ocean and the clouds. 
 It passes on till it reaches the land. Then 
 there is no more supply of water to feed it 
 and at once it discharges itself in a torrent 
 of rain and dies away to the eye. Is it gone 
 altogether? No, it moves on; but it is in- 
 visible. Then the windy spiral sweeps 
 further inland and by and by crosses a sandy 
 desert. At once it draws in the light par- 
 ticles and is again visible, now as a red 
 brown pillar stalking over the dusty waste. 
 Then it travels beyond the verge of the 
 desert and vanishes again. 
 
 So with ourselves. Our bodily life here 
 is but the catching up of elements, the 
 assimilating and sifting out of the earthly 
 atoms which give us a visible existence. 
 When all that is left of the body is a little 
 heap of dust in the cemetery, are we no 
 more? Certainly not. The spiritual body 
 lives, though it passes over the realm of 
 immaterialism. As the whirlwind takes up 
 now sand and now water, and again is felt 
 only in the spin of the invisible air, so the 
 soul passes into the purely spiritual realm 
 and yet finds that which enables it to ex- 
 press itself and make its presence known. 
 
 According to the Gospel accounts, the 
 
THE FACT OF IMMOETALITY 133 
 
 risen body of Christ was similar to the body 
 the disciples had seen before the crucifixion, 
 and yet dissimilar. All the former sub- 
 stance was present, but in another form; 
 just as water, if we may be allowed another 
 rather crude illustration, may exist in the 
 form of vapour. 
 
 The disciples were untroubled about all 
 such problems, not only because their situa- 
 tion was so different from ours, but because 
 they had such confident conviction of the 
 fact of the resurrection that subsidiary ques- 
 tions had no place in their thought. If we 
 could see the risen Christ to-day, as they 
 saw Him, there would be for us such joy in 
 believing that all problems of the " how" of 
 the glorious fact would vanish in the glad- 
 ness of the fact itself. 
 
 Shall we not gain our assurance, then, by 
 concentrating on the simple fact of immor- 
 tality? Is it not enough to begin on? That 
 brings us back to our first text, that the way 
 of faith is fidelity to truth. Just as the 
 background of Christ's resurrection is 
 found in His view of God and human life, 
 so the root and spring of our faith must be 
 sought in a ready willingness to live true 
 to all that belief in immortality implies. 
 
134 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 Are we doing that? We accept the bare 
 fact of immortality. Our hope is that we 
 shall survive death. We are reasonably 
 sure that life goes on and on, beyond the 
 grave. Are we acting as we should expect 
 men to act who believe that, even with 
 feeble and faltering faith? 
 
 Here, then, is the remedy for doubt. 
 Practice the fact of immortality. Ask how 
 any one should live who honestly felt that 
 death is not the end of all things. We shall 
 never have certainty of conviction save as 
 we try to make our life story answer St. 
 Paul's challenge : " If in this life only we 
 have hope in Christ, we are of all men most 
 miserable." The early Christian believers 
 staked all on the truth of their conviction. 
 If by any chance they had proved mistaken, 
 they were as fools and blind ; they had given 
 up all that men prize here in hope of greater 
 treasures hereafter, and after losing all were 
 only foolish visionaries robbed of their 
 reward. 
 
 Have we made any such sacrifice? As 
 plain matter of fact, are we acting as if we 
 believed in a future life? Newman has a 
 sermon on The Ventures of Faith which will 
 always live in the hearts of those who have 
 read it. If by any chance Christianity 
 
THE FACT OP IMMOETALITY 135 
 
 should prove a false hope, its promises of 
 life an iridescent dream, what should we 
 have lost irretrievably? Imagine the whole 
 Christian structure of truth and practice 
 tottering to its fall, the whole beautiful 
 scheme laid in ruins, and we ourselves stand- 
 ing amid the wreck and overthrow, how 
 much the worse off would it leave us? 
 Have we risked so much, ventured so far, 
 committed ourselves so deeply, that we 
 should be engulfed in the ruin? If Chris- 
 tianity were proved a woeful mistake, we 
 should be disappointed, of course, but should 
 we be of all men most miserable, with every- 
 thing gone, because everything had been 
 invested in the enterprise, with all lost, be- 
 cause all had been given up for this hope? 
 
 The apostles made this venture of faith, 
 because they believed that they were treas- 
 uring a secret so rich that the world had not 
 a price big enough to buy it away. We 
 shall have the same secret in sure posses- 
 sion, only as we are ready to make the same 
 sacrifices. 
 
XII 
 WHERE THE SKY BEGINS 
 
 WHERE does the sky begin? 
 Washington Gladden points out 
 that an illusion similar to that 
 which makes us think of the sky as touching 
 the earth somewhere beyond the mountain 
 tops makes us also conceive of the spiritual 
 world as a distant and future fact instead of 
 a present and immediate reality. Yet we 
 know that the sky is not an arch or vault of 
 blue far up beyond the earth. It is every- 
 thing above the ground. As we walk in 
 the streets we are as much in the sky as the 
 driver of an aeroplane who circles above the 
 clouds. And the heavenly realm also is 
 around and near us. The spiritual and the 
 natural penetrate and interpenetrate each 
 other. 
 
 A spiritual consciousness is necessary if 
 
 we are to have any real religious faith or 
 
 life. Not that religion is mere " devotion " 
 
 simply in the sense of pious meditation. 
 
 136 
 
WHERE THE SKY BEGINS 137 
 
 The heart and soul of religion lie not so 
 much in the contemplation of future blessed- 
 ness in another life as in the faithful per- 
 formance of present duties in this life. The 
 work of the Christian must be like that of 
 his Master, who announced to the enquiring 
 disciples of John the Baptist that His 
 credentials were to be seen in His works: 
 " The blind receive their sight, and the lame 
 walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf 
 hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor 
 have the gospel preached to them." In- 
 stead of ceaseless longings for a heaven yet 
 to be, we are to make this earth itself more 
 heavenly and give men a taste of happiness 
 here rather than a promise of bliss hereafter. 
 Our religion must be healthy, sane, pro- 
 ductive, useful and helpful, cheery, brave 
 and active, the Christianity of the Christ 
 who came down from the mountain and 
 then led His disciples in the way of service 
 as He went about doing good. 
 
 But — we must go up to the mountain, too. 
 If there is a spiritual world, it is the height 
 of folly to live without any thought of it. 
 If the earthly life is but a part of the life 
 eternal, it is absurdly stupid to live the part 
 as if it were the whole. Our Lord, who 
 gave such homely counsel and so practical 
 
138 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 an example for present duties, was always 
 going apart from the multitude; it is char- 
 acteristic of Him that He "lifted up His 
 eyes to lleaven. ,, 
 
 So the first essential of faith is the effort 
 to enlarge the capacities that make for 
 faith. The loss of faith ordinarily comes 
 through neglect of the faculties by which 
 it is kept alive. Belief does not go down 
 in some sharp and sudden struggle with 
 doubt; it just evaporates. Men allow 
 themselves to become so immersed in the 
 material that the channels of the spiritual 
 are clogged and the religious functions cease 
 to operate. 
 
 The classic illustration of this is found in 
 Darwin's famous autobiographical confes- 
 sion, in which he tells how he lost his 
 original taste for music, poetry and art. 
 " My mind," he adds, " seems to have be- 
 come a kind of machine for grinding general 
 laws out of large collections of facts, but 
 why this should have caused the atrophy of 
 that part of the brain alone on which the 
 higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. If 
 I had my life to live again, however, I 
 should make it a rule to read some poetry 
 and listen to some music at least once a 
 week; for perhaps the part of my brain now 
 
WHEEE THE SKY BEGINS 139 
 
 atrophied would thus have been kept active 
 through use." 
 
 We have generally assumed that thoughts 
 of heaven are for the sick, the weak, the 
 aged and the handicapped, not for active 
 youth and strong manhood; and we have 
 forgotten how great an incentive to high 
 ideals and fine deeds is the constant recol- 
 lection that all the virtue we build into our 
 characters here lasts for an endless eternity. 
 Of course men can be keenly conscientious, 
 splendidly unselfish and morally strong, 
 without the thought of heaven, just as a 
 soldier can fight on when there is small 
 hope of victory; but if we are to work, not 
 with dogged persistence but with abounding 
 exultation and zealous enthusiasm, we need 
 the incentive of victory just beyond. The 
 hope of heaven is for " bright youth " as 
 well as "snow crowned age," for " strong 
 men " as well as " maidens meek." 
 
 Now it helps to recollectedness of the 
 supernatural and the eternal if we think of 
 the spiritual realm as present, not future, 
 immediate, not distant — not a region far 
 away in space, but a higher and finer sphere 
 of being, which permeates the natural 
 sphere. We are in the condition of a man 
 born blind and deaf and living in two worlds 
 
140 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 of which he knows next to nothing, the 
 world of colour and the world of sound. 
 What he needs, in order to know the 
 beauties of nature, is not a change in his 
 surroundings but a change in himself. 
 Open his eyes and his ears, and at once he 
 is introduced into a new world. So we are 
 living already in the spiritual world as 
 really as we ever shall; only the spiritual 
 faculties are undeveloped through which we 
 can perceive its sights and hear its sounds. 
 If we would have a conviction of immortal 
 life that is real and abiding, we can reach 
 it only by patient cultivation of the faintest 
 stirrings of spiritual life within us here and 
 now. 
 
 The natural world itself helps us to make 
 a beginning. It has been said of the study 
 of nature that " it is hardly profane to 
 characterize it as a means of grace to man." 
 Here are depths of mystery which defy our 
 search. We go out into the fields or the 
 woods. Everything seems so solid and sub- 
 stantial that we hardly think of the invisible 
 movement which is ceaselessly going on be- 
 neath the visible and tangible. Yet there is 
 activity everywhere — not a blade of grass 
 or a leaf on the trees but palpitates with 
 abounding life. If we had eyes that could 
 
WHEEE THE SKY BEGINS 141 
 
 penetrate through leaf and stem, we should 
 be aware that all was in restless motion. 
 Had we ears to hear we should turn mad 
 almost at " the unceasing roar which goes 
 on always just the other side of silence." 
 Nor is that all. There are a hundred 
 thoughts which come to us with their ques- 
 tions about nature's mystery — whence this 
 world came, when and why it was made, 
 how it became " subject to vanity," whether 
 it is more than fancy which seems to link it 
 in sympathy with man's moods, what dim 
 and mysterious presence gives it its beauty 
 and power. Does not all this necessarily 
 suggest that there is a world of spirit be- 
 neath the world of sense, penetrating and 
 vivifying it, so that what we see is but the 
 outward and visible covering of hidden and 
 unseen realities? 
 
 Possibly the thought may help us to un- 
 derstand better the idea of sacramental 
 grace. Amid all the controversy in the 
 churches over the Holy Communion, for 
 example, it is worthy of note that disputants 
 have all agreed that the Lord's Supper is in 
 some way a means for the reception of the 
 divine life. And why should not grace come 
 by such a sacrament? Is not man himself a 
 
142 THE EXPERIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 sacrament: his body the outward and 
 visible sign of the invisible spirit within? 
 Is not the world, for that matter, the great- 
 est of all sacraments, suggesting through 
 the physical senses a spiritual life that lies 
 behind its material manifestations? Is it 
 altogether incongruous to suppose that the 
 body is of such worth and dignity that it 
 may be a sharer with the soul in redemption 
 and in some way may survive and develop 
 in a future state? And in that case, is it 
 surprising that the material world should be 
 drawn upon as an instrumental means for 
 spiritual help? May it not be that nature 
 itself has some interest and direct concern, 
 if it may be put thus boldly, in the restora- 
 tion of the human race? The divine plan 
 may, indeed, have larger reaches than we 
 have ever imagined. At any rate, it is the 
 part of wise humility to be over-careful and 
 modest in denial and to accept as a working 
 hypothesis what has apparently proved its 
 practical power in the experience of be- 
 lievers from the beginning. 
 
 Yet, suppose none of these thoughts ap- 
 peal to you, does not the experiment of 
 faith still urge you to come to the Lord's 
 Table? Empty the sacrament of all mys- 
 tery, if you will, and yet it is the dying 
 
WHERE THE SKY BEGINS 143 
 
 request of a loving Friend. Jesus Christ 
 was so thoroughly human. He had all our 
 human longing not to be forgotten, though 
 He would be remembered for our sakes 
 rather than His own. Suppose you go to 
 His memorial feast, just because He asked 
 it — not carelessly but in thoughtful remem- 
 brance, with the image of all that He was 
 in your mind, with His words in your heart, 
 His life quietly and devoutly recollected, 
 with sincere desire to be like Him and some- 
 thing of earnest purpose to be what you 
 desire. Explain it as you will, sooner or 
 later your faith will grow. There are those 
 who declare that it will know no limits. 
 For they believe that the living Christ is 
 here among us, powerful to bless and help. 
 They are not troubled by any difficulties of 
 interpretation as to His resurrection and 
 ascension. They know He is here — the 
 living Christ who was dead, but is alive 
 forevermore. 
 
 To be sure, we say that He has ascended 
 into heaven. But that does not mean that 
 He has gone away from earth. Up and 
 down, ascending and descending, are 
 figures of speech. Heaven is a higher order 
 of life, a higher sphere of being; and Christ 
 is here, though He transcends the power of 
 
144 THE EXPEBIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 mortal eyes to see Him. It is significant 
 that the evangelist who records the ascen- 
 sion simply says that " a cloud received Him 
 out of their sight." 
 
 His presence is a hidden presence. All 
 the resurrection appearances had prepared 
 the disciples for this. One moment they 
 were alone in the upper chamber; the next 
 moment, He came and stood in the midst. 
 Again, they were fishing by the Sea of 
 Galilee and they looked up, to find Him 
 standing on the shore. The disciples met 
 Him on the road to Emmaus and then just 
 as they recognized Him He vanished. Was 
 it not that they might understand that He 
 was always at hand, whether they saw Him 
 or not? Only, His presence is a veiled 
 presence. When He has revealed Himself 
 so often that they are convinced beyond the 
 possibility of error that He is alive and is 
 always near them, then comes what we call 
 the Ascension — the veil drops, the cloud re- 
 ceives Him and He is seen no more. But 
 He is behind the veil, above the cloud, and 
 they are not alone. " Lo, I am with you 
 always, even unto the end of the world." 
 
 If to any of us it seems incredible, may it 
 not be that the weakness of our faith is due 
 to our manner of life ? We are so immersed 
 
WHERE THE SKY BEGINS 145 
 
 in the things of " this " world that we have 
 paralyzed the senses by which we could 
 become conscious of the " other " world. 
 We need something more than an annual 
 Easter service to revive our dormant facul- 
 ties and make it possible for us to believe in 
 the life which is unseen. Our faith is 
 largely in our own hands. It rests with 
 ourselves whether we shall strengthen or 
 dissipate it. 
 
 Where does our sky begin? 
 
XIII 
 COMMUNICATED CHARACTER 
 
 GOODNESS is the one thing you 
 cannot keep to yourself. If it is 
 real goodness, it is always going 
 out from your heart and feeding some other 
 man's heart. Whenever you do something 
 fine and courageous, brave and true, you 
 make truth and courage easier for other 
 men. Your character is that on which some 
 other man draws, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously. The wonderful thing about a hu- 
 man personality is this, that it is always 
 outflowing; it cannot be bound in or 
 dammed up; it is a reservoir of strength, 
 always fed by streams from without and 
 always sending out its own streams of re- 
 freshment. " A man's courage, a man's in- 
 sight, a man's experience, a man's form of 
 character, these things flow down to weaker 
 souls as surely as water flows down from a 
 height above." 
 
 That would seem to be the method of 
 
 approach in thinking of the sacraments of 
 
 Christ. He wants us to " eat of His flesh 
 
 and drink of His blood " ; that is, He wants 
 
 146 
 
COMMUNICATED CHARACTER 147 
 
 us to absorb His life and grow in His 
 strength. And we can do it, because 
 character is communicable and life is always 
 being infused with other life. 
 
 That " contemptible little army " of Eng- 
 land which withstood the first terrific as- 
 saults of the German war machine has long 
 since ceased to exist. Its hundred and 
 fifty thousand men gave their lives that 
 France might be saved. They are dead 
 now — and yet they live. They lived in the 
 brave hearts of the millions of other men 
 who fought inch by inch for the battle- 
 scarred fields of the Somme and the bruised 
 hills of Arras when Germany's great drive 
 began more than three years afterwards. 
 And the sturdy, dogged, hard-holding sol- 
 diers of the new army are still fed with food 
 of the spirit as well as with food of the 
 body. The personal weight of many a 
 leader is felt in all the armies of France and 
 England. The fine spirit of the Belgian 
 king has touched every man in his kingdom. 
 " What have you left now? " is the question 
 the cartoonist makes the Kaiser ask of 
 Albert, and the reply, " I have my soul," 
 has exercised a subtle magnetism that 
 nerves and invigorates every brave defender 
 of hearth and home. There are men in 
 
US THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 whose presence we cannot be weak or 
 cowardly, just because character cannot be 
 confined and personality cannot be pushed 
 within close limits. The mind gets its 
 power as the body gets its strength, from 
 what it feeds on; and such men are always 
 feeding other men. You cannot be wise, or 
 experienced, or magnanimous, or coura- 
 geous; you cannot have the soul of honour 
 and truth and virtue ; you cannot have great 
 ideals or work splendid achievements, with- 
 out moulding other lives who get their 
 strength from yours. 
 
 All this, however, sounds mystical and 
 unreal to the average man. He does admire 
 and revere moral greatness, but because the 
 spirit is tied down to earth, he does not 
 understand that what he sees in the ideas 
 and enthusiasms of others is the thing that 
 keeps his own soul from starving. 
 
 And so Jesus Christ tied the spiritual and 
 the material together and made men feed 
 on His life through things tangible and 
 visible. It is not that He needed the sacra- 
 ments and ordinances for the conveying of 
 His grace ; it is not a question of what He 
 needs, but of what we need. Because we 
 are dull and earth bound He must take of 
 
COMMUNICATED CHAEACTEE 149 
 
 the things of earth, and through them help 
 us towards the glory of heaven. 
 
 It is not so hard to understand the sacra- 
 ments of Christianity if we remember that 
 the natural and the supernatural are always 
 penetrating and interpenetrating each other 
 and that the sky begins at our dust-covered 
 feet and not far beyond the distant hilltops. 
 
 The plain man who is troubled by the 
 difficulties of theology need only remember 
 that the language of imagery often conveys 
 truths and enforces realities, where the 
 language of scientific prose would break 
 down in the effort to give them expression. 
 It is commonly said that when the Lord 
 Christ declared, "This is My Body; this is 
 My Blood," He was speaking figuratively. 
 Of course He was, in a sense. When He 
 used the words, His body stood before the 
 disciples unimpaired and He surely was not 
 speaking in humdrum prose. The diffi- 
 culty is, that when men say that His lan- 
 guage is figurative they seem to think that 
 to call it so is to empty it of all meaning. 
 Whereas nearly all religious language is 
 necessarily figurative. Its figurative char- 
 acter, however, warns us that the meaning 
 to be conveyed is not less, but more; the 
 very need of a figure of speech shows that 
 
150 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 the idea calls for a heavier burden of mean- 
 ing than ordinary speech can bear. The 
 inner conception must be at least as great 
 as the metaphor which seeks to give it ex- 
 pression. We must let the imagination take 
 in all that the figurative language stands 
 for. We must try to conceive how great 
 a reality it is which needs such speech to 
 express its richness and grandeur. The 
 language is mysterious because it deals with 
 the most mysterious thing in the world, the 
 touch of one personality upon another. The 
 figure chosen to convey its meaning puts the 
 mystery in the simplest form so that the 
 plainest man can understand it. 
 
 One thing is certain : only actual expe- 
 rience of sacramental grace can make us 
 sure of its reality. However much we may 
 know by experience of the touch of living 
 personalities upon our own, it is not easy for 
 us to explain the undying influence of per- 
 sonalities of the past. If we still do feel 
 their power in our lives, it is because we 
 are sure that personalities never die and 
 that these, though unseen, are still alive and 
 active. We keep our hearts open to their 
 activity because we will not let ourselves 
 forget them. 
 
 Perhaps we shall best begin thinking 
 
COMMUNICATED CHARACTER 151 
 
 about Holy Communion by reminding our- 
 selves that even if it were nothing more, 
 it is a devout act of remembrance. I am 
 writing for commonplace people; just plain, 
 average, humdrum, unpoetical folk, whose 
 souls rarely take flight from the edges of 
 this busy buying and selling world. To 
 them we say : Jesus Christ, the world's Best 
 Friend, did not want to be forgotten. He 
 left a dying request, that we should do a 
 certain thing for Him " lest we forget." 
 Go to your communion — whether you 
 understand or not; whether you are quite 
 sure of your faith or not — just because He 
 asked it. Go in that way, and you will soon 
 move on to deeper convictions — not by 
 adding one truth to another truth, but by 
 " living through truth to other truth." 
 Feed on Christ in conscious remembrance, 
 as the son feeds on the father's experience, 
 the scholar on the teacher's wisdom, the 
 soldier on the officer's courage. 
 
 Only, you will understand, of course, that 
 this means that you must receive the 
 sacred elements in the spirit of Him who 
 offers them as the medium by which He 
 would pass to you His strength. This in- 
 volves two things : 
 
152 THE EXPEBIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 You must come in prayer and penitence. 
 The churches have made a terrible mistake 
 in talking about the virtue of Holy Com- 
 munion in mere mechanical terms. " Prayer 
 is necessary, because it generates and pro- 
 duces the condition of soul which Christ 
 requires. He cannot touch us or impart 
 His personality to our souls unless we are 
 receptive. Prayer breaks up the ground 
 of the soul, so that the Sower can sow the 
 seed of His own personality in it." 
 
 Again, we must come in the spirit of 
 sacrifice. The hidden life of Christ, which 
 He imparts by sacramental grace, is the life 
 of sacrifice. How, then, can we come, ex- 
 pecting to receive a gift, disappointed if we 
 do not feel its power, tempted to depart in 
 unbelief because " nothing happens " — when 
 all the while we have come without the 
 least intention of presenting ourselves a 
 holy, living sacrifice, acceptable to Him? 
 
 One of the compensations of war is that 
 its wealth of self-giving has shed upon life 
 a new glory. Its awful cloud is tinged with 
 the silver lining of splendid sacrifice. Men 
 are now giving of themselves, of all they 
 possess and all they hold dear, simply for 
 the sake of humanity. 
 
 " Tell the vicar that Jim Smith died for 
 
COMMUNICATED CHAEACTEE 153 
 
 old England with a good heart/' said one of 
 Kitchener's First Hundred Thousand — and 
 all the more had he caught the very spirit 
 of the Master because then (though it is 
 not true now) it seemed more than doubt- 
 ful whether England was worth dying for. 
 One of the chaplains tells of a scene in a 
 hospital back of the front in which he 
 played a r6le that made him ashamed of 
 his own stupidity. The chaplains are never 
 to add to the pain of the wounded by speak- 
 ing unnecessarily of their wounds. This 
 chaplain was going from cot to cot, here 
 saying a word of cheer, there writing a 
 letter back home, again kneeling for a 
 prayer, when he came to the bedside of a 
 lad who had been sorely hurt. The man's 
 arm was gone and he was so terribly man- 
 gled that the clergyman turned his face 
 aside for a moment and then in his embar- 
 rassment asked an unfortunate question. 
 
 "How did you lose your arm, my lad? " 
 he said. 
 
 The boy's face — he was hardly more than 
 a boy — was aglow with a brave light and 
 his tired eyes shone as he answered: 
 
 " Padre, I didn't lose it. I gave it." 
 
 The lad had made a sacrament of his suf- 
 fering. Tens of thousands like him are 
 
154 THE EXPEBIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 entering in the same way into the sacrifice 
 of Christ, " filling up what is behind of His 
 sufferings," to use St. Paul's bold words. 
 The pity is, that so many of them have the 
 spirit of Christ and are wholly unconscious 
 of their own Christianity. They have iden- 
 tified Christianity with something other 
 than this simple following of the Master. 
 They are His, without knowing it. 
 
 And the greater pity is, that so many who 
 profess to be His have failed to catch His 
 spirit. One looks at those who are coming 
 forward for Holy Communion in one of our 
 churches. They have just said, " And here 
 we offer and present unto Thee ourselves, 
 our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, 
 holy and living sacrifice unto Thee," and 
 one fails to see that the words have meant 
 anything. Sometimes, with distress, one 
 suspects a certain smugness and self-satis- 
 faction that not only makes their hearts un- 
 receptive but repels others from coming to 
 the sacred feast. There is nothing magical 
 about Holy Communion. We get Christ's 
 spirit only as we come in His spirit. Let 
 us demand reality in religion; set ourselves 
 a test by which we try our own sincerity. 
 
 And then — if you hesitate about becom- 
 ing communicants because of the uncer- 
 
COMMUNICATED CHARACTER 155 
 
 tainty of your present faith, remember that 
 whether you are sure or not you can at 
 least live true to all that Holy Communion 
 stands for. You do believe in the Christ 
 life. You have learned from Him that the 
 greatest thing about life is not the mere 
 living. You know that self-dedication, self- 
 offering, is the very essence of the Christ 
 life. Live true to that conviction. Offer 
 yourself; consecrate yourself; give yourself; 
 and then come, just asking God to accept 
 you. The wonderful thing is, that you will 
 hardly have begun to come in that way be- 
 fore you will know of a certainty that the 
 gift you have received far surpasses the 
 gift you have offered. You will know that 
 you have received of Christ's fullness, grace 
 for grace. Uniting yourself with His sacri- 
 fice, you will find yourself united in His life. 
 
XIV 
 JUDGMENT DAYS OF GOD 
 
 NOWHERE, in matters of credal 
 interpretation, do we find a 
 sharper contrast than that be- 
 tween the apostolic expectation of a sudden 
 and immediate return of the Lord in judg- 
 ment and modern belief in the second com- 
 ing as a continued process rather than a 
 single event. 
 
 There is room for large liberty of inter- 
 pretation of the creeds. No one would de- 
 mand a bald literalism, for example, in our 
 understanding of such clauses as the one 
 which declares that our Lord ascended into 
 heaven and sitteth on the right hand of the 
 Father. It is generally recognized as a 
 perfectly legitimate interpretation if we re- 
 gard the statement as a declaration of belief 
 in the fact that the incarnate Son has re- 
 sumed the dignity and glory of His first 
 estate. No one asserts that heaven must 
 necessarily be a place " above the bright 
 blue sky " and that somewhere within its 
 precincts there is a great throne, with two 
 156 
 
JUDGMENT DAYS OF GOD 157 
 
 others on either side, and three divine Per- 
 sons, in the sense in which we understand 
 personality and individuality, seated thereon 
 in glory! 
 
 Again, in our interpretation of belief in a 
 resurrection body we are not bound to the 
 old idea that the various particles of our 
 own bodies are gathered somehow from the 
 four winds of heaven and collected once 
 more into a bodily structure in form similar 
 to that which we now know. There is room 
 for endless speculation as to what the body 
 of the resurrection was in the case of our 
 Lord and as to what it will be in our own 
 case. 
 
 In this sense, therefore, the declaration 
 that "fixity of interpretation is of the es- 
 sence of the creeds " is the very opposite of 
 the facts. We ought to avail ourselves of 
 all the light which may be thrown upon a 
 subject by modern science. We must aim 
 at unfolding elements of the truth by using 
 all the aids which criticism and research 
 have placed at our command. 
 
 It is quite possible to do this while re- 
 maining perfectly loyal to the record. There 
 is a plain line to be drawn somewhere be- 
 tween the extreme of literal interpretation 
 of any article of faith and the other extreme 
 
158 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 of an " interpretation " which is really de- 
 nial. We may not substitute for a state- 
 ment of fact some so-called spiritualization 
 which actually empties the statement of 
 any historical meaning. We may not con- 
 strue the declared facts in such way as 
 actually to reject them. 
 
 The point we have been trying to empha- 
 size in these studies is that there is a middle 
 position between the baldly literal and the 
 wildly liberal. This via media is not so 
 much a matter of position as of spirit. It 
 sees in the insistence upon a freer interpre- 
 tation, in revulsion against the mechanical 
 delimitations of over-orthodoxy, a real at- 
 tempt to discover the spiritual content of 
 faith. 
 
 After all, most religious discussion is 
 largely a question of view-point. If oppos- 
 ing disputants could only rid themselves of 
 the controversial spirit and seek each to 
 understand the other, there would often be 
 found a middle ground of agreement. What 
 we most need is that the conservative be- 
 liever shall honestly try to see the difficulties 
 of the man who moves towards faith 
 stumblingly; especially that he shall try to 
 give him credit for putting faith to the test 
 of actual, every-day worth and demanding 
 
JUDGMENT DAYS OF GOD 159 
 
 in each case to know what it means and 
 how it works and whether it is of practical 
 importance. We must try, also, to under- 
 stand the spirit which requires that the 
 Church shall be truth-seeking as well as 
 truth-bearing and truth-teaching. 
 
 Equally we have a right to ask that all 
 honest enquiry shall be undertaken with 
 due modesty and reverent humility. It 
 must not start with the unavowed assump- 
 tion that " former things have passed 
 away " and that everything must necessarily 
 be new to be true. 
 
 We may illustrate this point in the at- 
 tempt to reconcile the old truth and the new 
 as to the judgment. Where a simpler age 
 looked for some sudden and sublime inter- 
 ruption of the natural order, ending in tre- 
 mendous collapse, we see the unchanging 
 operation of law. The world did not come 
 into being suddenly, but by gradual evolu- 
 tion, and we have not expected it to end 
 instantly in unparallelled catastrophe. 
 Through centuries and ages, it has pursued 
 its accustomed course; human history has 
 moved on slowly from cause to effect; 
 human life proceeds usually along ordered 
 prosaic lines, and we find it hard to picture 
 
160 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 a terrific interruption and cessation of the 
 universal order coming with sublime unex- 
 pectancy. 
 
 Here, perhaps, the newer thought helps 
 us to correct the excessive realism of the 
 earlier. That vivid sense of the nearness of 
 Christ's coming which was characteristic of 
 the apostolic Church was not altogether a 
 mistaken expectation. Centuries rolled by 
 and the end came not. The world lived on. 
 Yet the judgment came, nevertheless. To 
 the man of that day the destruction of 
 Jerusalem seemed literally the end of the 
 world. The judgment was the death throe 
 of an old era and the birth-pang of a new. 
 
 The prophecies of the judgment, as they 
 are recorded in the Gospel narratives, paint 
 a picture without perspective. In the fore- 
 ground, in detail, is the immediate future, 
 with the prophecy of the destruction of Jeru- 
 salem; in the background the outlines of 
 the distant event. The " values," however, 
 are not well defined and foreground and 
 background are not clearly distinguishable. 
 What should be in dimmer light is placed 
 in sharp relief. Probably it was best that it 
 should be so, if for that age there was to 
 be any vivid appreciation of the divine fact. 
 
 That simple faith was never a delusion. 
 
JUDGMENT DAYS OF GOD 161 
 
 Again and again the hosts have gathered at 
 Armageddon. The destruction of Jerusa- 
 lem, the fall of Rome, the Reformation in 
 the Church, the French Revolution, now 
 the Great War, have registered judgment. 
 There were prophets of the Reformation, 
 for example — Huss, Wickliffe, Catherine of 
 Sienna — as there were prophets of the first 
 coming, and when the judgment had laid its 
 heavy hand upon the Church men saw that 
 the faith and expectation of believers had 
 not been disappointed. 
 
 I pray for peace ; peace yet is but a prayer. 
 
 How many wars have been in my brief years ! 
 yet do I not despair 
 
 Of peace, that slowly through far ages nears. 
 
 Though not to me the golden morn appears, 
 My faith is perfect in time's issue fair. 
 
 For man doth build on an eternal scale, 
 
 And his ideals are framed of hope deferred ; 
 The millennium came not: yet Christ did not 
 
 fail, 
 Though ever unaccomplished is His Word ; 
 Him Prince of Peace, though unenthroned, we 
 hail, 
 Supreme when in all bosoms He be heard. 
 
 This aspect of Christ's coming — what 
 Westcott calls " the truthful and reverent 
 recognition of God's manifestations in his- 
 
162 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 tory and in society " — is of vital practical 
 importance. It takes faith to see it; but 
 faith is always needed for the recognition of 
 spiritual realities. " None but believers 
 saw the risen Christ during the great forty 
 days; none but believers see Christ now in 
 the great changes of human affairs." 
 
 The thought was urged by Dr. Figgis in 
 a book issued before the war, which seems 
 now to have been written with almost 
 prophetic insight. In his Civilization at the 
 Crossroads he pictured ours as an age of 
 transition. All things around us were 
 crumbling. Old ideas in ethics and politics, 
 in society and government, were losing their 
 force. Men were plunging into new and 
 hitherto untried experiments. It was a day 
 of new departures. We were in the midst 
 of a process not unlike that of western 
 Europe in the fifth century, when the world 
 organization was on its death-bed. 
 
 Hardly had he drawn his picture when 
 the Great War broke upon us. That surely 
 has taught us that we are living in an awful 
 judgment day of God. All things are being 
 put to the test of fire. Men are wondering 
 what the end shall be. To those who come 
 after, this will be seen as the close of an 
 aeon. What new life shall spring up, 
 
JUDGMENT DAYS OP GOD 163 
 
 phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the old, we 
 do not know; where we shall find ourselves 
 and how our very manner of life shall 
 change we are yet to see. But for society, 
 for nations, for the Church, for individuals, 
 the judgment has come. Sentence is passing 
 on institutions and men. Prophets are al- 
 ready seeking to turn the judgment to its 
 divinely appointed use. Always and every- 
 where we begin to see God as the Judge. 
 He putteth down one and setteth up an- 
 other. Everywhere the judgment moves 
 continuously. Our own nation; our prop- 
 erty and prosperity; the methods by which 
 we gained the one, the use to which we 
 have put the other; society and the stand- 
 ards with which it is content; the Church 
 to which we belong, its failure in rich ex- 
 perience, its fear of freedom, its pathetic 
 weakness as a social force; Christendom, 
 with its unhappy divisions; the common 
 motives of life; the principles by which our 
 own lives have been governed — all are be- 
 ing brought to the test of divine approval or 
 disapproval. Over against all stands Christ 
 our Judge, crying as He cried over Jeru- 
 salem, " If they had known — if they had 
 only, only known — the things which belong 
 to their peace." 
 
164 THE EXPEEIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 Once to every man and nation 
 
 Comes the moment to decide, 
 In the strife of truth with falsehood, 
 
 For the good or evil side ; 
 Some great cause, God's new Messiah, 
 
 Offering each the bloom or blight — 
 And the choice goes on forever 
 
 'Twixt that darkness and that light. 
 
 Though the cause of evil prosper, 
 
 Yet 'tis truth alone is strong ; 
 Though her portion be the scaffold, 
 
 And upon the throne be wrong — 
 Yet that scaffold sways the future, 
 
 And, behind the dim unknown, 
 Standeth God within the shadow, 
 
 Keeping watch above His own. 
 
 Now all this gives a starting point for 
 faith. In the first place, it makes it less 
 difficult to conceive of the final judgment, 
 a judgment which shall be the consumma- 
 tion of all lesser visitations, a last manifesta- 
 tion of the justice and holiness of God. 
 Nor will it be so difficult to accept the 
 apostolic belief in the suddenness of the 
 judgment. The early expectation of its im- 
 mediacy was not an essential part of the 
 belief and was to some extent an accommo- 
 dation to the Jewish eschatology. Its sud- 
 denness and finality, however, seem to be 
 elements of permanent value. They are not 
 hard to accept now. Consider the situation 
 
JUDGMENT DAYS OF GOD 165 
 
 at the outbreak of the war. The mass of 
 people could not realize it even when it had 
 come. In England men like Earl Roberts 
 had predicted that the conflict was inevi- 
 table, had told of Germany's long and care- 
 ful preparation, had pointed out the peril of 
 her ambition for world-power, but none 
 would hear. When at length the Serbian 
 assassination, like a torch, set all Europe 
 ablaze, it still could not be realized to what 
 gigantic proportions the horror would grow. 
 Here in America especially, in our national 
 isolation, few could be made to see that 
 there was any likelihood of our being drawn 
 into the struggle. There was a week in 
 July, 1914, when the nations rested in 
 tranquil security and in another week we 
 were involved in a world catastrophe so 
 terrible that it paralyzes thought. It was a 
 startling and inconceivably sudden turn of 
 events, which makes it easier to understand 
 how there may be a like sudden manifesta- 
 tion in the end of time. It gives vivid reality 
 to descriptions of that judgment which once 
 seemed childish in their crude simplicity of 
 picturesque metaphor. 
 
 In that great day of the Lord all hidden 
 things will be made clear, all riddles solved, 
 all mysteries revealed, all untruth exposed, 
 
166 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 all injustice overthrown, all wrongs righted 
 and every person and everything seem 
 absolutely as they are before God. Whether 
 the manifestation come suddenly or not, it 
 will be sudden for us. Underneath the ac- 
 customed order, all the while, the slow 
 process of preparation is going on, though 
 we see it not, just as events were moving 
 steadily towards this world disaster, though 
 we were wholly unaware of the impending 
 evil. For long years the molten masses of 
 the volcano gather in turbulent power be- 
 fore the sudden eruption hurls them forth 
 to blight and destroy. 
 
 And ourselves — what does all this mean 
 for us? Surely, we see that we, too, are 
 always living in a judgment day of God and 
 that the judgments passed upon us now, day 
 by day, shall at last be summed up forever 
 in a final verdict. There will then be no 
 loose standard of public opinion to give a 
 false sense of security, no absorbing occu- 
 pation to distract our thought, but only 
 solitude and awful silence, in which we shall 
 see ourselves (for the first time) in reveal- 
 ing light and know how we appear in the 
 sight of God. 
 
 Nothing has been said in this essay to- 
 
JUDGMENT DAYS OF GOD 167 
 
 wards faith of any theory of the atonement. 
 It has not seemed necessary that anything 
 should be said. The time is long past when 
 men are concerned with the old controver- 
 sies. All that could shed light on the 
 mystery of redemption has been written 
 long ago. 
 
 It is enough now to add that the thought 
 of judgment does of necessity bring in its 
 train the thought of the need of some aton- 
 ing and redeeming power. It makes us see 
 that sin is more than an unfortunate slip, 
 a foolish mistake, a grave misfortune. Sin 
 is the deliberate setting of our wills against 
 the will of God. There is need of some 
 unmistakable disclosure of the heart of God 
 before we can see this. Such a revelation, 
 surpassingly great, we have in the cross of 
 Christ. 
 
 So atonement and redemption must be 
 viewed together. Just as any serious at- 
 tempt to measure our lives over against the 
 life of Jesus Christ convinces us that He is 
 a direct gift of God, so any such comparison 
 forces upon us a sense of the awfulness of 
 sin and of the need of deliverance. In the 
 death of Christ, and nowhere else, we see 
 the shame and the pain of sin. There its 
 full horror is realized. Just as " human for- 
 
168 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 giveness in its best forms is saved from 
 being demoralizing when the forgiven child 
 is made to see the pain its fault has brought 
 to the forgiving parent," so do we discover, 
 as the cross reveals to us sin's exceeding 
 hatefulness, the awful analogue of such hu- 
 man forgiveness in that divine forgiveness 
 which comes indeed freely, but comes by 
 divine Love itself bearing, before our eyes, 
 our sins or their results. In the supreme 
 moment of pardon we see that pardon is 
 made possible because at last we see sin as 
 God sees it. 
 
 " Come down from the cross, O Thou 
 Holy One of God " — so cried the African 
 saint in the fervour of adoring gratitude 
 and with a passionate warmth of which our 
 calmer and colder spirits seem incapable — 
 " come down from the cross ; it is I that 
 should be there, not Thou." 
 
XV 
 
 THE DEMAND FOR REALITY 
 
 JESUS CHRIST and His religion come 
 to us charged with reality. One thing 
 He always asked of those who would 
 follow Him: they must be absolutely sin- 
 cere. 
 
 A rich young man, asking the way of life, 
 began his question with a complimentary 
 salutation, " Good Master." Jesus brings 
 him up with a sharp turn. Just what does 
 the young man mean? Is he sure that he 
 knows himself? "Why callest thou Me 
 good? " The Master wants no mere polite 
 phraseology, no vague and empty compli- 
 ment, no speech that is not perfectly genu- 
 ine. He wants reality. He rigidly tests 
 every expression of devotion. He is im- 
 patient — divinely impatient — of anything 
 that savours in the least of conventional and 
 careless acceptance of Him or His claims. 
 He wants only love and loyalty that are 
 beyond question. 
 
 An emotional woman in the crowd, on 
 one occasion, cried out, " Blessed is the 
 womb that bare Thee." She was thinking 
 169 
 
170 THE EXPERIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 how wonderful it was to have such a son, 
 how enviable was the lot of the mother who 
 had held Him as a child to her bosom. She 
 was day-dreaming, instead of facing actual- 
 ities, and her dream broke out in emotional 
 sentimentality, in a longing for a relation 
 that could never be hers. The Master 
 brought her back to solid realities: "Yea, 
 rather, blessed are they that hear the word 
 of God and keep it." 
 
 The man out of whom Christ had cast 
 the demons, in a fervid burst of emotion, 
 asked to join the apostolic company. It was 
 an impossible place for him, and Jesus 
 pointed him to a plain, humdrum, every-day 
 duty : " Go back home to your family and 
 your friends and tell them what great things 
 I have done for you." Another said, "Lord, 
 I would follow Thee whithersoever Thou 
 goest." The Master brought him back to 
 earth by telling him of the hardships of such 
 a service (" Foxes have holes and birds of 
 the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath 
 not where to lay His head ") and we hear 
 no more of the proffered discipleship. 
 
 In every case there is a sharp reminder 
 of homely practicalities and a warning 
 against any expression of religious feeling 
 that has not the note of absolute genuine- 
 
THE DEMAND FOR REALITY 171 
 
 ness. He wants us to be perfectly honest 
 with ourselves and perfectly straightfor- 
 ward and unaffected in our words. In His 
 presence anything like cant or unreality 
 stands out in the white light of truth and 
 shames us into sincerity. 
 
 One wonders how some of us are standing 
 the test now. The man outside probably 
 sees something of unreality among pro- 
 fessed believers. Possibly, without his even 
 being aware of the thought in the back of 
 his mind, this is one of the things that keeps 
 him outside. Press him hard and he would 
 probably confess that there is a certain 
 smug professionalism about some of the 
 clergy that irritates him. Their immunity 
 from friendly criticism has been disastrous 
 and they have dropped into a habit of ready 
 moralizing that seems to him wholly per- 
 functory. Their words do not always ring 
 true. The one thing we clergy need most 
 to pray against is the special ecclesiastical 
 sin of insincerity. Our wills may be weak 
 and our lives faulty, but at least let us be 
 sure that we speak only when we actually 
 believe and feel all we say. There is a 
 glibness of spiritual speech that verges close 
 to sacrilege and no one is more keenly 
 
172 THE EXPERIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 sensitive to it than the man who is outside 
 the Christian fellowship. He looks in with 
 critical eyes, not because he wants to 
 criticize or is even aware that he does 
 criticize, but because he is unconsciously 
 " sizing up " those who are in a different 
 position from himself. It may be that he is 
 longing for contact with somebody who can 
 understand his difficulties and help him to- 
 wards faith, and he is disappointed at miss- 
 ing what he so sorely needs to help him on 
 his way. He wants the clergyman to be a 
 real man, big-minded and big-hearted, free 
 from pettiness of spirit or lack of charity 
 and generosity towards those who cannot 
 see with him eye to eye. He wants a min- 
 ister to be " straight as a string," frank, 
 sincere, genuine, true; and when he meets 
 such a man he greets him with great joy. 
 The suspicion that some are different is the 
 true source of much of his doubt. His diffi- 
 culties would dissolve if more often he could 
 see in the fruit of Christian experience the 
 assurance of the Christian hope. He is 
 quietly observing not the clergyman alone, 
 but his congregation, and as quietly making 
 up his mind about the genuineness of their 
 faith. 
 
 And we also may demand the same down- 
 
THE DEMAND FOE BEAUTY 173 
 
 right sincerity of the man or woman out- 
 side. We, too, are human enough to be 
 irritated by cant and unreality. Personally, 
 my own pet aversion is the woman who has 
 read some lovely little book about a pious 
 fisherman or a godly village shoemaker and 
 complacently informs me, as if she had made 
 a great spiritual discovery, that this is her 
 ideal of religion, when she knows and I 
 know (and she ought to know that I know) 
 that she has not the faintest notion of 
 putting the ideal into practice. I get almost 
 as impatient with the man who tells me 
 that he likes to worship God out under the 
 blue sky, and then loses his temper when I 
 ask how much of his outdoor time is actually 
 given to heavenly aspirations. Next after 
 him I rank the broad-minded people who 
 like all churches and love none, who see 
 good in all and go nowhere. 
 
 These chapters have been written for 
 men who are trying to be real. Yet is there 
 not a possibility that even with the best of 
 intentions they too have not always faced 
 facts squarely? That is one reason for 
 pressing home the duty of living true to 
 truth. We all of us need to do some heart 
 searching every now and then. A very 
 little self-examination will show that pos- 
 
174 THE EXPEKIMEOT OF FAITH 
 
 sibly we are content with an ideal without 
 making any real effort to follow it. Per- 
 haps the war will shame out of us our 
 selfishness and self-satisfaction and narrow 
 class prejudice, and make us think of some- 
 thing other than our own comfort or our 
 own opinions, our position and our reputa- 
 tion. God knows some of us need a moral 
 earthquake to shake us out of our self- 
 esteem. In all charity, are there not many 
 who, like the rich young man, have been 
 paying compliments to a Master who would 
 be worshipped? Have they been using 
 reverential language about the character of 
 Jesus Christ, without giving the subject 
 very serious thought, and consequently 
 without well weighing the implications of 
 their words? It would be worth while for 
 them to put their admiration for Christ to 
 the test of reality and ask conscientiously 
 whether their reverence is genuine enough 
 to make them translate admiration into 
 action. It has already been shown that this 
 is the path to faith. 
 
 As with our conduct, so with our in- 
 tellectual conceptions. The effort to be 
 real in all one says about Christ brings one 
 back inevitably to St. Augustine's dilemma, 
 
THE DEMAND FOR REALITY 175 
 
 " Christ, if He is not God, is not a good 
 man." The point has never been pressed 
 more sharply than by Canon Liddon. " It 
 is easier," he puts it, " to believe that in a 
 world where we are encompassed by mys- 
 teries, where our own being is itself a con- 
 summate mystery, the Moral Author of the 
 wonders about us should, for great moral 
 purposes, have taken to Himself a created 
 form, than that the one Human Life which 
 realizes the ideal of humanity, the one Man 
 who is at once perfect strength and perfect 
 tenderness, the one Pattern of our race in 
 whom its virtues are combined and from 
 whom its vices are eliminated, should have 
 been guilty, when speaking of Himself, of 
 an arrogance, of a self-seeking, of an in- 
 sincerity, which if admitted must justly 
 degrade Him far below the moral level 
 of millions among His unhonoured wor- 
 shippers." Does not our Lord's human 
 glory fade before our eyes when we at- 
 tempt to conceive of it apart from His 
 divinity? He is perfect as Man only be- 
 cause He is truly God. If He is not God, 
 He is not a humble and an unselfish man. 
 When we call Him " Good Master," or use 
 some modern equivalent for the rich young 
 man's word of reverent esteem, reality de- 
 
176 THE EXPEBIMENT OP FAITH 
 
 mands that we follow our thought about 
 Christ into all its logical meaning, or at least 
 make sure in our own minds that we know 
 what we mean by it ourselves. 
 
 The whole purpose of the creed is to give 
 expression to the faith of the Church about 
 Christ. It is the accredited language 
 through which, for centuries, Christ's fol- 
 lowers have sought to voice their loyalty to 
 His Person. All of its clauses are to be in- 
 terpreted in subordination to this main pur- 
 pose. Viewed as explanatory of this, or as 
 guarding the truth about Jesus, their diffi- 
 culties are more readily resolved. One can 
 hardly conceive of a society pledging itself 
 to His service on any smaller foundation of 
 faith. The creed is more than creed. It 
 is at once creed and character, dogma and 
 devotion, logic and life. 
 
 Nor is it merely a personal declaration, it 
 is a corporate confession of belief. It is the 
 expression of the best thought of the best 
 minds of all the ages, as they have sought 
 to make Christ known, with all that He 
 means to them. Wisdom was not born with 
 ourselves. The simple-hearted, loyal souls 
 who long ago, in troublous times, forged 
 out the words of the creed in stress and 
 
THE DEMAND FOE EEALITY 177 
 
 strain, as they tried to understand Christ 
 better, were but seeking for language in 
 which to explain their own certain experi- 
 ence and in which also to " set forth in order 
 a declaration of those things which are most 
 surely believed among us, even as they de- 
 livered them unto us, who were eye-wit- 
 nesses and ministers of the word." If we 
 can accept this central truth and try to make 
 it a core of tremendous purpose, may we not 
 honestly use the creed, even though we have 
 not yet entered fully into all its richness of 
 meaning? 
 
 This is not, as Professor Drown has so 
 well pointed out, an arbitrary acceptance of 
 statements on the mere basis of an external 
 authority. It is, rather, to suggest that " in 
 religious and Christian matters, as well as 
 in scientific and political matters, the indi- 
 vidual may well take account of an experi- 
 ence that is wider than his own. In scien- 
 tific and in political matters we constantly 
 live in reliance on such wider experience. 
 May not the individual Christian, expressing 
 his loyalty to Christ and to the fellowship 
 that comes from Him, naturally expect to 
 find in the creed which is the outcome of 
 that fellowship, elements that go beyond his 
 own experience? " 
 
178 THE EXPERIMENT OP PAITH 
 
 That means, in other words, to adopt the 
 childlike attitude of true discipleship. That, 
 again, means full recognition of the fact 
 that " spiritual things are spiritually dis- 
 cerned " — and the essence of spiritual dis- 
 cernment is reverent humility in the pres- 
 ence of divine mystery. 
 
 The same spirit should influence one's 
 attitude towards the Church. The man 
 who honestly desires to help his brother 
 man will hesitate long and meditate care- 
 fully before allowing anything but really 
 insurmountable difficulties to hold him back 
 from fellowship with the good men of all 
 ages who have found in the Christian faith 
 their incentive and strength for service. 
 
 After all, with its many glaring faults and 
 patent inconsistencies, the Church has al- 
 ways numbered in its membership the real 
 righting strength of the Christian army. 
 What sort of a soldier is he who falls out 
 of the ranks now and never answers roll 
 call? On the whole, the people who want 
 to do right are to be found within the Chris- 
 tian society. Here, then, though their 
 faults be fully recognized, is material to 
 work with, or (if you will) to work upon. 
 Where can better material be found? 
 
THE DEMAND FOE EEALITY 179 
 
 Despite the dead load of respectability 
 which upon occasion hinders the advance of 
 the kingdom, in the main the God-fearing 
 remnant has always been found in " the 
 communion of the saints," the fellowship of 
 the faithful. Here at least are followers at 
 hand for any one who has a genius for 
 leadership. 
 
 You men to whom we appeal are men 
 from whom we have a right to look for such 
 leadership. Your responsibility for service 
 is positive. It may be doubted whether you 
 have always recognized this. We ask of 
 you not merely clear thinking, but helpful 
 action; not criticism only, but constructive 
 work. Some years since, Senator Lodge 
 pointed out that the chief defect of modern 
 culture was its tendency to arouse unduly 
 the critical spirit, manifesting itself in a 
 censoriousness and dissatisfaction with 
 things in general coupled with an incapacity 
 for " team work." There are plenty of in- 
 tellectual " mugwumps " in the world, and 
 no less plentiful are the spiritual " mug- 
 wumps," who pass criticism on evils which 
 they make no practical effort to correct, and 
 because of minor difficulties and objections 
 hesitate to join in common effort to remedy 
 what they deplore. Men who are content 
 
180 THE EXPEKIMENT OF FAITH 
 
 to be mere negatives in a world of action sin 
 against the light. If those who by reason 
 of large opportunity are better fitted for 
 leadership leave others at the wheel they 
 have no right to complain about the course 
 over which they are driven. We are debtors 
 to the community. We ought also to be 
 faithful citizens of the kingdom. In both 
 spheres we shall have to work with imper- 
 fect material and inefficient assistance; but 
 it is our business to overcome obstacles. 
 Men glory in difficulties that test their 
 strength in the affairs of every-day work; 
 why run away from like difficulties in their 
 work for God? 
 
 It all resolves itself into the question 
 whether a man is dead in earnest. And 
 that shall be our last question as we urge 
 men to make the experiment of faith. 
 Jesus Christ demands reality. Do we " ring 
 true"? 
 
 Printtd in the United States of America 
 
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 definite faith in the Book of Books. The work will confirm 
 faith, cure skepticism and convert the honest enquirer. 
 
QUESTIONS OF THE FAITH 
 
 JAMES H. SNOJVPEN, P.P. 
 
 The Psychology of Religion 
 
 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 Psychology is one of the most rapidly advancing of modern 
 sciences, and Dr. Snowden's book will find a ready welcome. 
 While especially adapted for the use of ministers and teach- 
 ers, it is not in any sense an ultra-academic work. Thi3 ia 
 evidenced by the fact that the material forming it has been 
 delivered not only as a successful Summer School course, but 
 in the form of popular lectures, open to the general public. 
 
 WILLIAM HALLOCK JOHNSON, PL P., P.P. 
 
 Professor of Greek and New Testament Literature in Lincoln University, P* 
 
 The Christian Faith under Modern 
 Searchlight 
 
 The L. P. Stone Lectures, Princeton. Intro- 
 duction by Francis L. Patton, D.D. Cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 The faith which is to survive must -not only be a traditional 
 but an intelligent faith which has its roots in reason and ex- 
 perience and its blossom and fruit in character and good 
 works. To this end, the author examines the fundamentals 
 of the Christian belief in the light of to-day and reaches the 
 conclusion that every advance in knowledge establishes its 
 sovereign claim to* be from heaven and not from men. 
 
 ANPREW W. ARCHIBALP, P.P. 
 
 Author of The Bible Verified," "The Trend of the Centuries," etc. 
 
 The Modern Man Facing the Old 
 Problems 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 A thoughtful, ably-conducted study in which those prob- 
 lems of human life, experience and destiny, which, in one 
 form or another, seem recurrent in every age, are examined 
 from what may be called a Biblical viewpoint. That is to say, 
 the author by its illuminating rays, endeavors to find eluci- 
 dation and solution for the difficulties, which in more or leffl 
 degree, perplex believer and unbeliever alike. 
 
 NOLAN RICE BEST Editor of « Th. Ccntin**?* 
 
 Applied Religion for Everyman 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 Nolan Rice Best has earned a well-deserved reputation ffl 
 the religious press of America, as a writer of virile, trench- 
 antly-phrased editorials. The selection here brought together 
 represent his best efforts, and contains an experienced edi- 
 tor's suggestions for the ever-recurrent problems confronting 
 Churchmembers as a body, and as individual Christians. Mr, 
 Best wields a facile pen, and a sudden gleam of beauty, a 
 difficult thought set in a perfect phrase, »r an old idea in- 
 vested with new meaning and gr?ce, meets one at every turn 
 of the page." — The Record Herald. 
 
BOOKS FOR MEN 
 
 RO BERT E. S PEER , P.P . Merrick Lectures, 1917, 
 
 — Ohio Wesleyan University 
 
 The Stuff of Manhood 
 
 Some Needed Notes in American Character, 
 net $1.00. 
 
 Dr. Speer holds that the moral elements o£ individual char- 
 acter are inevitably social and that one service which each 
 man must render the nation is to illustrate in his own life 
 and character the moral qualities which ought to character- 
 ize the State. To a discussion of these ideals and some sug- 
 gested methods of their attainment, Dr. Speer devotes this 
 Stirring, uplifting book. 
 
 CORTLANP MYERS, P.P. m Minister of 
 
 » " Tremont Temple, Boston 
 
 Money Mad 
 
 l2mo, cloth, net 50c. 
 
 The fearlessly-expressed views of a popular pastor and 
 preacher on the all-important question of Money. Dr. 
 Myers shows how a man may make, save, spend, and give 
 money without doing violence to his conscience, or his stand- 
 ing as a member of the Church of Christ. 
 
 CHARLES REYNOLPS BROWN, P.P. Yale University 
 
 Five Young Men 
 
 Messages of Yesterday for the Young Men of To- 
 day. l2mo, cloth, 75c. 
 
 Dean Brown's literary output is always assured of wel- 
 come and a large reading. His new work is specially suitable 
 to students in college, or young men in business or in the 
 home. But the general reader of almost any type, will be 
 able to find something of value in this latest volume from the 
 pen of a recognized writer of light and leading. 
 
 DEWITT McMURRAY of the Dallas Daily News 
 
 The Religion of a Newspaper Man 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "Every one of the chapters sparkles with a thousand gems 
 that Mr. McMurray has dug out of obscure as well as better- 
 known hiding-places and sprinkled in among his own thoughts 
 His quotations — and there are literally thousands of them— 
 are exquisitely timed and placed."— -Springfield Republican. 
 
 BURRIS A. JENKINS, P.P. 
 
 The Man in the Street and Religion 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 "In a convincing and inspiring way and in a graceful 
 style, the author presses home this truth, the result of years 
 of trained study of human nature. The book is the Uip^i 
 that 'the man in the street' well enjoy." — Boston Globe. 
 
Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 
 
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