^; 
 
 The 
 
 »# ETERNAL >j^ 
 SS CHRIST SJ 
 
 JOSEPH 
 
 FORT 
 NEWTON 
 
 
 ;-^^~ 
 
 m. 
 
 's.' 
 
 
tihxavy of Che trheolo^ical ^eminarjo 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B. Wiedinger 
 
 BR 123 .N47 1912 ^ 
 
 Newton, Joseph Fort, 1876- 
 
 1950. 
 The eternal Christ 
 
The Eternal Christ 
 
^"i Of nm^ 
 
 The Eternal Chtisi 
 
 ^ 
 
 JN 2 1948 
 
 ^/CAL iV^ 
 
 Studies in the Life of 
 Vision and Service 
 
 By 
 JOSEPH FORT 'NEWTON, Lit. D. 
 
 Author of** David Swing : Poet-Preacher y^ 
 ** Lincoln and Herndon,''^ etc. 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 19 12, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
To My Mother 
 Sue Green Newton 
 
 A sweet Christian Mystic 
 
 Who first taught me of 
 
 The Eteriial Christ 
 
Foreword 
 
 THESE studies speak for themselves, 
 dealing as they do with great themes 
 in a popular manner, and, it is hoped, 
 with some glow and colour. They are meant to 
 aid those who are bewildered by the voices of 
 the age, and its whirling eddies, by showing that 
 the realities of faith are still real, abiding, and 
 may be trusted. Each man has his point of 
 view, his vision and his dream, but these great 
 truths are ours in common, though we may see 
 them from varying angles. They unite us, and 
 should draw us into one vast communion of 
 vision of service, that each may share the faith 
 of all. 
 
 What is truly religious is ultimately reason- 
 able, but reason alone is not enough. Those 
 who have had an overwhelming sense of spiritual 
 reality did not have any other faculties or any 
 other facts than those may be aware of who have 
 no such assurance. It is as a man thinks, and 
 unless we think of religious truth religiously, from 
 the inside, it must ever seem dim. One grave 
 defect of our age is a lack of definite purpose and 
 method in the culture of the inner life, which of 
 itself is quite enough to account for our penury of 
 
 7 
 
8 FOREWORD 
 
 faith, without resort to intellectual doubt. If 
 these little essays induce a sweeter mood, or a 
 deeper habit of heart, they will be of aid to those 
 who would live the life of faith. 
 
 All through there is a recurring emphasis on 
 the Hves and teachings of the great mystics, in 
 the belief that, as those mighty spirits kept our 
 faith aflame in other and darker ages, so they 
 may help to renew and make more victorious the 
 faith of our day. For the rest, once assured that 
 what the prophets see is there, we may rejoice 
 in the Unity of Faith and speak its melodious lan- 
 guage, and by the Culture of the Soul attain, it 
 may be, to fellowship with the Eternal Christ, 
 whose we are, and whom we should serve while 
 it is day, ere the night cometh. 
 
 J. F. N. 
 Cedar Rapids y Iowa. 
 

 Contents 
 
 
 
 The Prophetic Vision 
 
 
 I. 
 
 What Prophets Sff. 
 
 . 13 
 
 II. 
 
 Is It There? . . • . 
 
 22 
 
 III. 
 
 Eyes That See Not . , 
 
 . 29 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Basis of Faith 
 
 . 36 
 
 V. 
 
 The Path to Reality 
 
 The Unity of Faith 
 
 . 51 
 
 I. 
 
 Things Which Differ . 
 
 . 63 
 
 II. 
 
 The Deeper Unities 
 
 . 71 
 
 III. 
 
 The Higher Harmony . 
 
 . 80 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Prose of Faith 
 
 . 91 
 
 V. 
 
 Truth For To-day . 
 
 The Culture of the Soul 
 
 . 100 
 
 I. 
 
 The Secret of Power 
 
 . Ill 
 
 II. 
 
 What Is Personality? . 
 
 . 119 
 
 III. 
 
 The Abysmal Depths 
 
 . 129 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Winged Victory 
 
 . 137 
 
 V. 
 
 The Lines of Life . 
 
 The Living Word of Truth 
 
 . 148 
 
 I. 
 
 Foreshadowings 
 
 • 157 
 
 II. 
 
 The Word Made Flesh . 
 
 . 167 
 
 III. 
 
 The Living Presence 
 
 . 179 
 
 IV. 
 
 The New Advent . 
 
 . 187 
 
The Prophetic Vision 
 
 Is what the poet, the seer, the prophet 
 sees there ? If so, why do not all see it ? 
 If not, what does he make it out of ? 
 
I 
 
 WHAT PROPHETS SEE 
 
 IS what the prophet sees there ? Soon or 
 late every thinker must come to terms with 
 this question, else it will confront him at 
 every turn of the road. He must face it squarely 
 and answer it, if he can, without taking anything 
 for granted ; for when we assume what most 
 needs evidence we have always a feeling of in- 
 security and a hollow sound beneath our foot- 
 steps. As all must see, such an inquiry goes 
 down to the roots of faith, and if the answer here 
 suggested does not satisfy all, let it be kept in 
 mind that the final answer lies beyond words, 
 and is a victory which every man must win for 
 himself. 
 
 Our argument for and against in such matters 
 is but the echo of a deeper debate, and the rea- 
 sons for faith, ample as they are, persuade, when 
 they persuade at all, by the aid of processes pro- 
 founder than logic and unshakable by it. When 
 a man loses faith and wields the logic of denial, 
 some acid in his soul, distilled of we know not 
 how many ingredients, has dissolved the pearl of 
 great price, and he speaks to a deaf ear who 
 
 13 
 
14 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 hopes by logic to win him to faith again. No 
 more could Newman follow the path whereby, 
 midway in life, intellectual difficulties ceased to 
 be spiritual doubts, and he arrived at an assur- 
 ance of faith never afterwards disturbed.* The 
 process which alters the inner life of a man, melts 
 his bias, and disposes him to faith, is complex, 
 and we can no more analyze it than we can 
 fathom the deep heart of man. 
 
 Hence the exceeding delicacy and difficulty 
 attaching to a study of this nature, and the error 
 of regarding it as merely an adventure in phi- 
 losophy. Faith has nothing to fear in the open 
 court of philosophy, and perhaps as little to hope 
 for, unless it be to show that the path to reahty 
 lies elsewhere. One need not shrink from the 
 most searching criticism, though one may well 
 despair of putting the highest reasons for faith 
 into the form of a syllogism. All that is asked 
 is that the critic come to the inquiry with a mind 
 fine enough to feel the issues involved, which 
 include not only the faiths of religion, but the 
 vision of the poet and the value of science as 
 well. 
 
 But let us first ask, What is it that poets, seers 
 and prophets see ? To them it is given to be- 
 hold, with varying degrees of lucidity, an unseen 
 world of spiritual reality, a realm of light and 
 
 » " Apologia Fro Vita Sua," by J. H. Newman, Chap, V 
 (1865). 
 
WHAT PROPHETS SEE 15 
 
 truth and beauty whence come all compelling 
 inspirations, all inward renewals, all intimations 
 of things to be. The reahty of God, the sov- 
 ereign authority of the moral law, the worth of 
 the soul and its citizenship in the unseen, the 
 spiritual basis of Hfe and society, the beauty of 
 holiness and the holiness of beauty — these are 
 the things of which they bear witness. With 
 one accord they proclaim that life is spiritual 
 activity and intelligence ; that the underlying 
 and almighty reality is the living God ; that the 
 visible and tangible world is but a shadow, or a 
 symbol, of the real ; that the human spirit is 
 akin to the Eternal Spirit, and may participate 
 in the absolutely real life of the universe. They 
 hold, or rather they know, that man is a citizen 
 of two worlds, using the scenery of one to make 
 vivid the ineffable truths of the other ; and this 
 insight, if valid, is the supreme gift of man. 
 Listen and behold : 
 
 " In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the 
 Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, 
 and His train filled the temple. About it stood 
 the seraphims ; each one had six wings ; with 
 twain He did cover His face, and with twain He 
 covered His feet, and with twain He did fly. 
 And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, 
 holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts ; the whole 
 earth is full of His glory. And posts of the 
 door moved at the voice of him that cried, and 
 
l6 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, 
 Woe is me ! for I am undone ; because I am a 
 man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of 
 a people of unclean lips ; for mine eyes have seen 
 the King, the Lord of hosts. . . . Also I 
 heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall 
 I send, and who will go for us ? Then said I, 
 Here am I ; send me." * 
 
 " But Stephen, being full of the Holy Ghost, 
 looked steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory 
 of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of 
 God. And he said, Behold, I see the heavens 
 opened, and the Son of Man standing on the 
 right hand of God. . . . And they stoned 
 Stephen, calling upon God, and saying. Lord 
 Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, 
 and cried with a loud voice. Lord, lay not this 
 sin to their charge. And when he had said this, 
 he fell asleep." ^ 
 
 " Then Paul stretched forth his hand and an- 
 swered for himself: At midday, O King, I saw 
 in the way a light from heaven, above the bright- 
 ness of the sun, shining round about me and 
 them that journeyed with me. And when we 
 were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speak- 
 ing unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, 
 Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? it is hard 
 for thee to kick against the pricks. And I said, 
 Who art Thou, Lord ? And He said, I am Jesus 
 
 * Isaiah vi. 1-8. ^Acts vii. 55-60. 
 
WHAT PROPHETS SEE 1 7 
 
 whom thou persecutest. But rise, and stand upon 
 thy feet : for I have appeared unto thee for this 
 purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness 
 both of these things which thou hast seen, and of 
 those things in which I will appear unto thee, 
 delivering thee from the people, and from the 
 Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee. . . . 
 Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not dis- 
 obedient unto the heavenly vision." * 
 
 Add that exalted day in the life of St. Paul, 
 when he was caught up into the third heaven, 
 knowing not whether he was in the body or not, 
 and heard things of which it is not lawful to 
 speak. Add the strange and stately visions of 
 the prisoner of Patmos, adumbrating in vague 
 apocalyptic forms the shadows of things yet to 
 come, to an accompaniment of majestic music. 
 Add, also, the whole array of Christian saints and 
 heresiarchs, including the greatest — Bernard, 
 Loyola, St. Francis, Santa Teresa, Joan of Arc, 
 Luther, Wesley, Fox — to all of whom came vi- 
 sions, voices, and open windows of divine sur- 
 prise. Recall how, as with St. Paul, words 
 sounded in their inner ears — sometimes new and 
 commanding words, sometimes words old and 
 familiar, but with new and dynamic meanings, 
 Augustine, in a garden at Milan, heard, " Take 
 up and read " ; Francis of Assisi, " Get you no 
 gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, no wallet 
 
 1 Acts xxvi. I, 1 3- 1 9. 
 
l8 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, 
 nor staff" ; Suso, " My son, if thou wilt hear My 
 words " ; Luther, " The just shall live by faith " ; 
 Tauler, " Stand fast in peace and trust in God " ; 
 and Jutta received her call from familiar verses 
 in the Psalter. When one remembers these men 
 and women, and others like them, the lives they 
 lived and the wonders they wrought, their spirit- 
 ual discernment and magnetic speech, one can 
 agree with Thomas Carlyle : 
 
 *' These are properly our Men, the guides of 
 the dull host which follow them by an irrevocable 
 decree. They are the chosen of the world ; they 
 had the rare faculty not only of * supposing ' and 
 * inclining to think,' but of knowing and believ- 
 ing : the nature of their being was that they 
 lived not by hearsay, but by clear Vision : while 
 others hovered and swam along, in the grand 
 Vanity Fair of the World, blinded by the mere 
 Show of things, these saw into the Things them- 
 selves, and could walk as men having an eternal 
 lode-star and with their feet on sure paths. . . . 
 Such knowledge of the transceiidental, immeas- 
 urable character of Duty w^e call the basis of all 
 the Gospels, the essence of all Religions : he who 
 with his soul knows not this as yet knows noth- 
 ing, as yet is properly nothing." 
 
 What is true of the prophets and seers is true, 
 in less degree, of their kinsmen the poets, though 
 in this study attention is naturally fixed on the 
 
WHAT PROPHETS SEE I9 
 
 former. The witness, for example, of the genius 
 of Shakespeare * to the spiritual meaning of life 
 is overwhelming ; which is the more remarkable 
 from the fact that he is not professedly, perhaps 
 not consciously, a teacher of faith, but an artist 
 portraying with glorious vision the pageant of 
 our human hfe. When, therefore, his insight, 
 by its very depth and veracity, becomes a testi- 
 mony in behalf of spiritual reality and the moral 
 order of the world, all men must listen. Truly 
 did Henry Morley say that his dramas form A Lay 
 
 * All Drama has to do with Divinity. In the early plays of 
 Shakespeare the Divinity actively intervenes all through the 
 play, as, for instance, in Romeo and yuliet, where the action is 
 everywhere visibly decided by an Unseen Power behind, less 
 than by the human agents. Often things are within a very 
 little of going right, when they are upset and turned awry. 
 That is the first stage : visible interference of Divinity, and ab- 
 solute conclusion of the action within the play. The second 
 stage is seen in Much Ado About Nothing, and other plays, 
 where human purposefulness is more evident, though not so as 
 to prevent the action being wound up within the play. There 
 the Divinity appears, as in Greek drama, at the end, adjusting 
 judgment for an action with which it had more or less to do. 
 But by the time we reach the great tragedies the scene has be- 
 come too involved to be thus neatly adjusted and closed, and 
 the Divinity is pushed to a position in the Beyond ; as in 
 Hamlet, and esoecially in Othello and King Lear. If the play 
 were all we sho'-tld have to take sides with lago against Desde- 
 mona. But th<i play is not all ; it shapes for something Be- 
 yond, and we £^re purged and exalted by the outlook, assured 
 that in the hands of that Divinity all will be well. Here is 
 authentic prophecyof eternal things. (•« Shakespeare : A Study," 
 by Darrell Figgis, 19 12.) 
 
20 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 Bible, adding, *' of dogmatism he is free — of the 
 true spirit of religion he is full." As Goethe 
 said, while we cannot put our finger on the word 
 of the solution, he does seem to solve all our 
 riddles and fulfill all the dreams we have ever 
 had about the destiny of man. Read any of the 
 great tragedies and testify if the final impression 
 be not a mood of chastened wonder, of serene 
 confidence, of death-defying hope. Here, of a 
 truth, is deep and wise insight : 
 
 " Such incense as of right belongs 
 To the true shrine, 
 Where stands the Healer of all wrongs 
 In light divine." 
 
 But our chief concern here is with the prophets, 
 who are the real leaders and lawgivers of human- 
 ity — those winged minds who, by their longer 
 flights, hft their fellows out of the low vales of 
 doubt and fear to larger outlooks. They influ- 
 ence the race profoundly, genetically, creatively, 
 touching it as with a wand to finer issues and 
 nobler endeavour. They admit us to a commun- 
 ion of vision and a fellowship of the truth, mak- 
 ing us sure of God, sure of the moral order, and 
 surer of " that newer fashion yet of immortality," 
 which flashes in all their visions. Our highest 
 life, to be of worth, must be thus related to real- 
 ity ; and if the human soul is untrustworthy in 
 its loftiest hours, all the music of life falls to a 
 
WHAT PROPHETS SEE 21 
 
 lower octave, and faith and hope alike decline. 
 Either what the prophets see is there, or they 
 are the dupes of splendid, but none the less pa- 
 thetic, dreams. So, without further preliminary, 
 let us proceed to our inquiry — taking the ques- 
 tions in reverse order. 
 
II 
 
 IS IT THERE ? 
 
 ITH these shining names before us we 
 hardly dare ask : If what the poet and 
 the prophet see is not there, what do 
 they make it out of? It impHes that, so far from 
 reaching the highest truth, the insight of genius 
 and the vision of the saints are as futile as the 
 flicker of a firefly in the night, and that all faiths 
 are only Guesses at the Riddle Existetice. Such 
 seems to have been the position of Goldwin 
 Smith in his later years, though he recalled ten- 
 derly and gratefully the beauty and nobility with 
 which faith, in all elevating and benign religions, 
 had dignified and embellished the life of man. 
 
 Here agnosticism becomes pensive, grave, and 
 sad. It ponders regretfully over the fact that the 
 visions of poets and mystics are only delicate net- 
 works of dream, woven of the sweetest things in 
 human thought and aspiration — wistful outlooks 
 of spiritual longing ; shapes of our high desires 
 projected by the soul into its sky : as travellers in 
 the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain 
 atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shad- 
 owy figure — a giant image of themselves, thrown 
 on the horizon by the dawn. Some gentle soul 
 muses until, in a fevered mood, the fire of imagi- 
 
 22 
 
IS IT THERE? 23 
 
 nation burns, and there is a light kindled of the 
 fusing of the powers into an ecstasy. Then fol- 
 lows the regret, paralyzing enough, that it is only 
 a flickering human flame after all, and that we 
 are left in the dark. One has a right to be sad 
 at the thought that our highest and purest vi- 
 sions come to naught, and that the longest pil- 
 grimage of the soul sends it back baffled and 
 empty-handed. Surely, if we are defeated here, 
 few other battles are worth the winning. 
 
 To George Eliot, after her maturity, Christian- 
 ity was a thing of ineffable loveliness, but only a 
 fable — a tale told by dreamers, full of beauty and 
 pity, but signifying only the vain hope of man. 
 Nor is it a matter of doubt that " the vacuum at 
 the heart of her faith," as a most sympathetic 
 friend and critic has described it,' marred her 
 
 "' ^ '• Nineteenth Century Teachers," by Juha Wedgwood ( 1909). 
 Nor does this in any way belittle the stately, grave, and beauti- 
 ful genius of George Eliot. As Watts-Dunton has said, she 
 was the only imaginative writer of her time who saw life 
 through the lens of the new cosmogony, and fearlessly told 
 what she saw ; and her place in English literature is secure. 
 Besides, in her delineations of character, in her profound div- 
 ings into " the abysmal depths of Personality," such as resulted 
 in portraits like those of Donnithorne, Dinah Morris, Romola, 
 Maggie Tulliver, Tessa, she displayed her strength of hand — a 
 strength which only the great masters display. While in the 
 painting of Bulstrode, in " Middlemarch," she entered into 
 worthy competition with those few masters of tragedy who have 
 ventured to use passive murder as the tragic mischief of drama. 
 (Introduction to " Silas Marner," by Theodore Watts-Dunton.) 
 
24 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 outlook upon life, and especially her portrayal of 
 human love ; for if the hfe of man be a thing 
 apart from the highest reality, love is wingless. 
 When love looks downward, whether for good or 
 evil, her power is high and sure, though not so 
 sure, perhaps, as in what Watts-Dunton called 
 her probings into the deep sophisms by which 
 the soul of man shelters itself from the assaults of 
 conscience. But when it looks upward, with few 
 exceptions her power ebbs, and sometimes seems 
 to depart. Mark, too, how her idealists fail, not 
 in combat with dragons, but amidst the triviali- 
 ties and mishaps of every day. Her knights of 
 holy causes do not fall by the thrust of a spear ; 
 they break their necks by the stumbling of a 
 horse. Even Savonarola, in " Romola," failed, 
 self-deceived by that ** shadowy region where hu- 
 man souls seek wisdom apart from the human 
 sympathies which are the very life and substance 
 of our wisdom." As a result, the Black Friar, 
 whose protrait should have been the focus of her 
 artistic power, is dim and almost lifeless ; but even 
 he is more vivid and rememberable than the im- 
 possibly ideal hero of " Daniel Deronda." There 
 is here no desire to use George Eliot to point a 
 moral or adorn a tale, but the inference from her 
 life is obvious and impressive ; all the more so 
 when we recall her assurance of the trustworthi- 
 ness of the moral instincts. Despite her loss of 
 faith, perhaps because of it, she was attractive to 
 
IS IT THERE? 25 
 
 the men of the Hamlet age in which her lot was 
 cast, as she must always be even to those who 
 detect the vacuum in her faith. When, in " The 
 Lifted Veil," she holds that the uncertainties of 
 faith are a part of our moral discipline, her in- 
 sight is sound ; but we need not therefore doubt 
 the vision of those who behold what is dark to 
 us. 
 
 As a fact, nothing is more certain from a study 
 of the lives of the prophets than that they do not 
 make their visions, but are made by them. 
 When we see effects, similar to those ordinarily 
 produced by habits, springing from a single ra- 
 diant hour, a solitary text, or a sermon aglow 
 with white light, and continuing through long 
 years, amidst trials by land and by sea, against 
 odds unreckonable and obstacles the most for- 
 midable, we seem to hear the sound that bloweth 
 where He listeth. Often this wonder is wrought 
 amid dazzling light ; sometimes in awe, solitude 
 and quiet ; but from it, as from some hidden 
 source unguessed before, issue rare powers of in- 
 sight, action, and endurance. From timid, care- 
 less, or even wayward men they are changed into 
 champions of truth and right, rebukers of kings, 
 and justifiers of the ways of God to man. As 
 certain trees of the wood with tremulous leaf an- 
 nounce the coming breeze before others give sign 
 of movement, so these prophetic souls are pre- 
 sentient of events far distant, and of the remote 
 
26 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 triumph of justice. They do not make their rev- 
 elations ; they are seers of the divine in history 
 who, while divining the trend of the curve of 
 destiny, interpret the dumb indignations and 
 vague forebodings in the general conscience.* 
 Or they are mystics, whose crowning grace is a 
 gentle and solitary air that seems too mild to give 
 forth such vivifying energy, but whose hves mark 
 new dates. These have an inward stillness which 
 makes them victors in any plight, since they can 
 at any time return to their quiet or, better still, 
 abide in their quiet through the tumult of war. 
 Withal, they have a strange strength both to do 
 and to bear, and joy and peace rise from their 
 hearts like fragrance from a rose, like music from 
 running water. 
 
 When, therefore, a glib rationalism implies, if 
 indeed it does not assert, that all this is moon- 
 shine, it is permitted us to ask what better seeds 
 have been opened by its bright and sunny logic ? 
 It can inspire self-culture, but not self-sacrifice, 
 and as such it can never purify the mixed heart 
 of man and move it to high, heroic endeavour. 
 About all it can do, apart from balancing prob- 
 abilities, is to produce dainty minor poetry, 
 which is but mingled query and protest, and at- 
 tempt to satisfy the longing for the eternal in 
 a sad joy in the things which are ephemeral. 
 
 1" Bases of Religious Belief," by C. M. Tyler, Chap. V 
 (1897). 
 
IS IT THERE? 27 
 
 Marcus Aurelius was a saint of rationalism — a 
 lonely, lofty, lovely soul, pure and piteous, but 
 pensive and forlorn of heart. The power that 
 rejuvenated the world came not from his " pale 
 stream of philosophic pity," but from the Man- 
 ger and Cross of One whose followers sang 
 hymns in the catacombs, over which the chariot 
 of AureHus rumbled. If, according to that same 
 rationahsm, every effect must have an adequate 
 cause, is it not akin to the absurd to intimate 
 that the force — a burning and shining force it 
 was, though housed in a frail little man — that 
 planted Christianity in Europe, and altered the 
 map of the world, came of a fit of fanaticism on 
 the Damascus road ? Enthusiasm there was — a 
 Winding light and a melting voice — but when we 
 recall that scene, and others of like kind, some- 
 how the words of Henry More, the Cambridge 
 Platonist, come to mind. In a remarkable dis- 
 course on Enthusiasm, he said : 
 
 "The devotional enthusiasm of holy and 
 sincere souls has not at all been taxed in all this 
 discourse. There has not one word, all this 
 time, been spoken against that true and war- 
 rantable enthusiasm of devout and holy souls, 
 who are so strongly transported in that vehe- 
 ment love they bear towards God, and that inex- 
 haustible joy and peace they find in Him. For 
 they are modest enough and sober in all this, 
 they witnessing no other thing to the world than 
 
28 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 what others may experience in themselves, and 
 what is plainly set down in Holy Scriptures, 
 that the kingdom of God is righteousness, and 
 peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost — to such 
 enthusiasm as this, which is but the triumph of 
 the soul of man inebriated, as it were, with that 
 delicious sense of the divine life, I must declare 
 myself as much a friend as I am to the vulgar, 
 fanatical enthusiasm a profound enemy." 
 
 If it be said that this lofty and calm certainty 
 is merely a feeling, the evanescent dream of rapt 
 and solitary thinkers, there is the strange fact 
 that the dream has come regularly to all sorts 
 and conditions of men in all ages, and that the 
 dreamers have been, for the most part, gifted 
 with the m.ost subtle and searching intellects. 
 With a great cost obtained they this citizenship 
 in the kingdom of vision, as we learn from the 
 story of their heroic and dedicated lives, to read 
 which is to recall the words of Conington, 
 uttered just before he passed away : " Now is 
 the vision complete — this is how they see in 
 heaven." 
 
Ill 
 
 EYES THAT SEE NOT 
 
 OF like kind also is the second question : 
 If what the poets and prophets see is 
 there, why do not all see it ? As a dis- 
 closure of the low level of religious experience 
 this is melancholy enough, but in so far as it is 
 used to discredit the highest life of the spirit it is 
 futile. All the highest achievements of man 
 may be discredited by the same arrogant and 
 blind judgment. No doubt the majority prefer 
 ragtime music to the sonatas of Beethoven, but 
 that does not invalidate the vision of the su- 
 preme musician. When Darwin, as he con- 
 fessed, lost his interest in Shakespeare, by 
 reason of too much grinding at physical facts, he 
 did not thereupon conclude that Shakespeare is 
 a valueless book. As a wise and frank man he 
 admitted the atrophy of his artistic sense as a 
 defect to be regretted, a penalty of specialism, 
 which assuredly was too costly a price to pay. 
 
 If we do not appreciate great music, we may 
 honestly admit the fact ; but we need not do so 
 with complacency, or with conscious superiority. 
 Such a confession, however honest, is no occa- 
 sion for vanity. Instead, the fact that music is 
 
 29 
 
30 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 loved and enjoyed by so many fine minds ought 
 to be evidence to a reflective mind that there is 
 a whole world of beauty from which, for some 
 reason, he is shut out. By the same token, the 
 experience of power and joy, healing comfort 
 and victorious Hving, derived by so many from 
 communion with God — extending over all ages, 
 among all peoples, and in all rehgions — ought to 
 induce in any man, not smitten with irredeem- 
 able vanity, a sense of wonder, if not of regret, 
 that he knows too little of what it all means. 
 Instead of regarding the saints as celestially 
 entranced dreamers, and the prophets as pilgrims 
 of a visionary realm, he may well be urged to 
 aspire to some glimpse, however dim, of their 
 all-conquering vision. All men are aware, 
 vaguely though it may be, of a serene and upper 
 world whence come airs and floating echoes 
 which " convey a melancholy into all our day " • 
 and surely we should be willing to listen to those 
 who explore that enchanted land, though they 
 speak, as they must often speak, in language 
 cryptic and symbolic. 
 
 Of course, there are in this sphere, as every- 
 where else, Gradgrinds and Peter Bells. Dickens 
 has etched Gradgrind in " Hard Times " — perhaps 
 because to such a man life must be a hard time 
 — and we know the lot of that unfortunate little 
 Gradgrind who was so often forbidden to wonder. 
 But Peter Bell, in the Wordsworth poem, stands 
 
EYES THAT SEE NOT 3 1 
 
 as an ideal of the prosaic, visionless man in a 
 world full of poetry. Of him we read : 
 
 '* A primrose by the river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more." 
 
 Why was not Peter Bell right ? What more did 
 the poet see in the flower ? If we were poets we 
 should be the better able to say; but for one 
 thing, the poet must have seen that the primrose 
 did not stand by itself, but was an expression of 
 the heart of nature, and that the universal life 
 bloomed in it. It may have been a symbol to 
 him of we know not what gracious and graceful 
 things, something akin to himself, only far more 
 simple and pure. At any rate, all this, or nearly 
 all, was as real as what Peter Bell saw, and far 
 more beautiful. To Peter Bell a flower bed would 
 have meant only so many plants, and nothing 
 more ; while to Tennyson a single flower in a 
 crannied wall brought near the awful mystery of 
 God and man, suggesting the indefinable and 
 haunting beauty which hallows the earth and 
 transforms it from a lumber-yard into a temple. 
 Nor does the horn-eyed stupidity of Peter Bell 
 render invalid the authentic and revealing vision 
 of the poet. 
 
 Space does not permit an inquiry, profitable 
 though it might be, into the clouds which befog 
 spiritual insight. How far physical states mar the 
 
32 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 vision of the soul ; in what ways sundry miscon- 
 ceptions of religion interfere ; why so man}^ fail for 
 that they do not fulfill the conditions of faith ; the 
 inevitable limitations and fluctuations of our nature 
 — these and kindred questions would take us far 
 afield.' The wonder is not that men have mis- 
 givings, but that they have any faith at all, so 
 little care do they take to keep alive in them- 
 selves those experiences out of which faith grows, 
 and without which it is so easily and so often im- 
 perilled by doubt. As in the Holman Hunt 
 painting, TJie Light of the World, when the Liv- 
 ing Truth knocks at our doors, weeds are there, 
 the cumber of neglect, and the accumulated 
 hindrances of sloth. If a musician who wished 
 to know Beethoven studied him as little as we 
 study the masters of the spiritual life, he would 
 never touch the hem of that singing robe. One 
 does not find in the early days of Phillips Brooks 
 the same mighty faith that swayed his later 
 years, when it seemed that Christ lived in him, 
 moving in dignity, pathos, and beauty. That 
 faith came slowly, amid sorrows and trials like 
 our own, with temptations and misgivings. But 
 the great assurance came at length, and he knew 
 what he was talking about when he spoke of God 
 and the soul, and their eternal life together ; he 
 knew the deep things and the strange paths and 
 
 * " The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life," by H. C. 
 King (1908). 
 
EYES THAT SEE NOT 33 
 
 the floods of great waters. No; it is not the 
 absence of reahty that underhes the doubts of 
 men, but the absence of that venture of faith, 
 that culture of the soul, which makes the reality 
 vivid and persuasive. 
 
 What a fund of instruction and inspiration 
 there is for us in the lives of the saints — or in the 
 Letters of Fenelon and Francis de Sales, to name 
 two manuals of the spiritual life — yet how little 
 use we make of it. Too often we regard the 
 saints as eccentric psychics, or else think of them 
 after the manner of Cotter Morison who, in " The 
 Service of Man," admitted that saintliness is the 
 one marvel of this mortal world, but held it to be 
 a distant and inaccessible glory baffling us by a 
 beauty impossible of attainment. The saints are 
 indeed men and women of genius, whose lives, 
 marked by experiences of splendour and terror, 
 fill us with wonder and awe. Not more so, how- 
 ever, than the great poets, who set to music those 
 dim dreams, those vague yearnings, which well 
 up in every human heart, but which so few can 
 ever express. And the very fact that they find 
 response in us, though it be only a sweet sadness 
 of wistful longing, shows that they do but lay 
 hold upon forces common to us all, and walk at 
 high levels the same path which we may follow 
 in the valley. Where the saints have genius, we 
 have each a little buried talent, some greater, 
 some less ; and while we may not follow their grand 
 
34 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 stride along the Mystic Way, the path to a more 
 vivid insight, and a more joyous reaUzation, is 
 assuredly open to us. 
 
 " We are, then, one and all the kindred of the 
 mystics ; and it is by dwelling upon this kinship, 
 by interpreting — so far as we may — their great 
 declarations, in the light of our own little experi- 
 ence, that we shall learn to understand them best. 
 Strange and far away though they seem, they are 
 not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. 
 They belong to us. They are our brethren ; the 
 giants, the heroes of our race. As the achieve- 
 ment of genius belongs not to itself only, but 
 also to the society that brought it forth ; as the- 
 ology declares that the merits of the saints avail 
 for all ; so, because of the solidarity of the hu- 
 man family, the supernal accomplishment of the 
 mystics is ours also. To be a mystic is simply 
 to participate here and now in that real and 
 eternal life ; in the fullest, deepest sense which is 
 possible to man. It is to share, as a free and 
 conscious agent — not a servant, but as a son — in 
 the joyous travail of the universe : its mighty on- 
 ward sweep through pain and glory towards its 
 home in God." ^ 
 
 1 " Mysticism," by Evelyn Underbill, p. 534 (1911). This noble 
 book does what has long needed to be done — it sifts and digests 
 the whole literature of Christian mysticism with sympathy, 
 discrimination, and sanity ; and the witness of that shining 
 tradition to the reality of unseen things is as impressive as its 
 
EYES THAT SEE NOT 35 
 
 To be sure, the ordinary sensualist cares for 
 none of these things ; he eats and drinks, for to- 
 morrow he will die ; he has not reached the level 
 of serious concern about ultimate reality. With 
 such it is hard to reason ; they must be left to 
 the tragedies of life in which even the most 
 careless and frivolous are involved. But there 
 is a host who really yearn for a higher and truer 
 life, some of whom are always seeking without 
 finding, and all of whom live in shadows and in 
 shallows, far below their privilege and duty. We 
 are all inspired, said Fenelon, but our mode of 
 life stifles it ; and the strange thing is that we 
 think our mode of hfe of more value than the 
 vision. We hear afar the murmur of those voices 
 which would tell us the meaning of life, but rarely 
 do we shape them into mortal speech — and thus 
 we die, with the sweetest song within us left un- 
 sung. 
 
 disclosure of the methods of the spiritual life is practical and 
 vitally suggestive. The author finds in the mystic experience 
 the key to all the higher life of man, whether it be that of the 
 artist or musician, striving to catch and fix some aspect of light 
 or melody, or of the man of science, purging his intellect that 
 he may look upon the secrets of life with innocent eye. The 
 appendix, giving a historical sketch of European mysticism from 
 the beginning of the Christian era to the death of Blake, is a 
 roll-call of names that shine like stars to light a heavenly path- 
 way. 
 
IV 
 THE BASIS OF FAITH 
 
 AT last we may at least approach the real 
 question before us : Is what the poet, the 
 seer, the prophet see there ? And on 
 the very threshold we are met with a flat denial 
 of the possibility in man of spiritual insight, or 
 of any knowledge of reality at all. Such a de- 
 nial, of course, is not new, and it is less radical 
 and thoroughgoing in our day than it was in 
 earlier times when men dared to go to the length 
 of their logic. Nor is it altogether an evil, but 
 may conceivably be needful as a prod to the ad- 
 vance of thought and the broadening of faith, as 
 the criticism of the sophists opened the door to 
 Socrates, as a barren deism prepared the way 
 for Methodism, which " fell on the dry heart like 
 rain." Had it not been for the negation of 
 Hume, there would have been no opportunity 
 for the fruitful philosophic recovery which we 
 owe to Germany. Never, it would seem, does 
 the new and deeper emotion shed its fertilizing 
 waters to any renewing purpose until the east 
 wind of doubt has swept over the soul. 
 
 Hence the recurrent world-phenomenon of 
 
 36 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 37 
 
 doubt in our day, when, as Clough said, " it 
 seems His newer will we should not think of 
 Him at all," unless we can arrive at some pro- 
 founder insight. The older thought which it 
 questions and criticizes may seem to go down 
 utterly, but it 
 
 ** Decomposes but to recompose, 
 Becomes my universe that thinks and knows." 
 
 How confidently the old denial is now put forth, 
 with what irony and disdain, may be heard on all 
 sides, though it has lost much of its former au- 
 dacity. After this fashion it tosses the spiritual 
 world aside as not only unknowable, but indeed 
 quite useless : 
 
 " The universe upon this view (whether it 
 understands itself or not) falls apart into two 
 regions ; we may call them two hemispheres. 
 We have on one side phenomena; in other 
 words, things as they are to us, and ourselves so 
 far as we are anything to ourselves ; while on the 
 other side are things as they are in themselves 
 and as they do not appear ; or, if we please, we 
 may call this side the Unknowable. Our atti- 
 tude towards such a divided universe varies a 
 good deal. We may be thankful to be rid of 
 that which is not relative to our affairs, and 
 which cannot in any way concern us ; and we 
 may be glad that the worthless is thrown over 
 the wall. Or we may regret that reality is too 
 
38 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 good to be known, and from the midst of our 
 confusion may revere the other side of its inac- 
 cessible grandeur. We may even naively feUci- 
 tate ourselves on total estrangement, and rejoice 
 that at last utter ignorance has removed every 
 scruple which impeded religion. Where we 
 know nothing we can have no possible objection 
 to worship." * 
 
 While this statement is somewhat extreme, for 
 sake of emphasis, it exhibits all the more vividly 
 the basic contention of agnosticism ; which is, 
 that we can know only the shimmering appear- 
 ances of reality as reported by the senses, behind 
 which " things in themselves " lurk beyond our 
 ken. It may be admitted that these recurrent 
 waves of scepticism are caused by the failure of 
 
 ' " Appearance and Reality," by F. H. Bradley, Second 
 Edition (1903). Those who wish to follow the various aspects 
 of agnosticism, which takes almost as many shapes as Social- 
 ism, may find them duly set forth and examined in an essay by 
 the late Prof. Robert Flint, entitled Ag7tosticis7n (1903). 
 It is not the province of this essay to follow the difficult mazes 
 of epistemological criticism, and indeed there is little need to 
 do so after the work of Dr. James Ward in his lectures on 
 «' Naturalism and Agnosticism " (1899). As a philosophy, ag- 
 nosticism is simply intellectual bankruptcy, and therefore at 
 odds with " right reason " ; but as a fact it is more often only 
 a mood of spiritual adversity, useful in preparing the way for a 
 restatement of theology ; though sometimes it is only a labour- 
 saving device to escape the toil of thought. In any case, it is 
 a house built upon the sand, unable to endure ordinary weather, 
 much less a Pentecost with its rushing mighty winds. 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 39 
 
 theology to express the common spiritual ex- 
 perience, and as such are not without value. 
 Whether this be true or not, we have here a 
 definite dogma which closes the doors upon those 
 dark ways of thought in which the fact that we 
 are men and not animals mysteriously compels 
 us to tread ; and it closes more doors than one. 
 Despite the repeated warning of Mr. Balfour, * 
 which seems not to have been heeded, the agnos- 
 tic thus renders not only religion, but all science 
 of every kind, illegitimate and illusory. Less 
 consistent and ingenuous than the agnostic of 
 old, he endeavours to pass off his dogmatic nega- 
 tive inferences as, forsooth, scientific ; whereas, 
 in the parlance of the countryside, he is all the 
 while sawing off the limb on which he is perched. 
 Though he may wish, for this reason, to grant 
 immunity to science, it is of no avail. Having 
 doomed religion to hopeless ignorance, he must, 
 by the same logic, honestly applied, send science 
 to the same limbo ; for, if we cannot know reality, 
 the man of science can only busy himself in ar- 
 ranging, systematically, a series of kaleidoscopic 
 appearances, which may be, for aught he knows, 
 elusive and lying dreams. To such lengths does 
 this dogma go, carrying good men with it, and 
 involving all at last in absurdity. 
 
 But why, it may fairly be asked, attach to ap- 
 pearances the delusive sense of concealing, rather 
 
 1 " The Foundations of Belief," by Arthur Balfour (1897). 
 
40 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 than the honest sense of revealing, reality ? How 
 did these men learn, and by what reason do they 
 infer, that reality has a habit of wearing masks 
 with intent to deceive ? Does not the very idea 
 of appearance, in order to be intelligible, imply, 
 as Lotze pointed out, not only a being or thing 
 which appears, but also, and quite as indispen- 
 sably, a second being by whom the appearance 
 is perceived ? Do we not in all cognitive expe- 
 rience, whether sensuous or intellectual, come 
 into immediate contact with objective reality, of 
 the existence of which we have in experience an 
 irrefutable witness ? * Why should appearances 
 not be reality ? Nay, what else can they be, un- 
 less, after all, nothing really appears, and we are 
 spectators of an empty show? How can reality 
 appear, shine forth, and yet remain unknown and 
 uncapturable by those to whom it appears? How 
 do we know that it is an appearance of reality, 
 and if we can recognize the appearance of reality, 
 why can we not know reality itself? Or, must 
 man stare at the universe in dumb and perpetual 
 bewilderment, as at a book of hieroglyphics the 
 lexicon of which has not been found ? Is not 
 the very statement of such a thesis its sufficient 
 and final answer, requiring no argument to refute 
 its failure ? 
 
 It need hardly be said that this question, 
 
 ^ " The Presentation of Reality," by Helen Wodehouse 
 (1910). 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 4I 
 
 raised by Kant, has been answered since his day ; 
 but it is worth while to point out the path 
 whereby man finds his way to reahty, both seen 
 and unseen. The poet sees, or thinks he sees, a 
 spirit of beauty in nature, and communes with 
 the invisible Artist revealed there ; but he is pow- 
 erless to prove his vision because he does not see 
 the flower or the sunset from the inside. There 
 may be spirit in all things — in the flower spirit 
 dreaming, and in the animal spirit waking — but 
 the poet could not convince a sceptic, though he 
 might pity him as a blind man in an art gallery. 
 While physical science may come upon forms of 
 matter of almost ethereal delicacy, fine almost to 
 spirit-fineness, it can only walk in the outer court 
 of reality. Unless we have a key to the inner 
 temple we cannot open, cannot enter, cannot know 
 what lies behind. One thing, however, man does 
 certainly know as a reality from the inside, and 
 that is himself — that he is a living, conscious, 
 thinking, loving, hoping spirit — and that is his 
 key to the reality of the world in which he lives. 
 We have, thus, in our own being, authentic knowl- 
 edge of reality, and may be assured that the 
 poet is not " an idle dreamer of an empty day," 
 nor the saint a follower of a wandering marsh- 
 light in a bog. 
 
 Without this knowledge of the reality of our 
 own mind, all knowledge, of anything within the 
 mind, or of other minds, or of the external 
 
42 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 world, is impossible, and intelligence is a blank 
 and science a dream. In all self-knowledge the 
 mind faces its own reality as both subject and ob- 
 ject, as the knower and the known, and is in di- 
 rect contact with reality. Lotze accounted it 
 the strangest of all feats that the mind should 
 deny its own existence, at the behest of some- 
 thing which it can know only by means of the 
 knowledge of itself; but from such denial it is 
 estopped, if in no other way, by the laws of its 
 own being. To deny the existence of mind we 
 must first possess a mind, and in order to destroy 
 the validity of thought we must assume that the 
 laws of thought are valid : must use reason to 
 disprove the truth of reason. In the same man- 
 ner, those who reduce the mind to a series of 
 flitting images fall into a deeper absurdity — a 
 stream of thought without a thinker, which is 
 even more amazing than a thinker without 
 thought. No ; it is a fact that we have a mind 
 and can think, and though the world be only a 
 phantasmagoria, none the less we exist. From 
 that fact there is no escape, and its meaning, if 
 we attend to it, not only gives us a glimpse, but 
 opens the way to the deepest reality. 
 
 Long ago St. Augustine urged this contention, 
 both in his " City of God " and in his essay on 
 the Trinity^ as did Descartes in his famous epi- 
 
 ^*' Yet whoever doubts that he himself lives, and remem- 
 bers, and understands, and wills, and thinks, and knows, and 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 43 
 
 gram, Cogito, ergo sum; but its implications, in 
 view of the natural history of man, have not been 
 emphasized, and they are as authentic as they 
 are profound. If man be the child of nature, as 
 science insists, then the spiritual evidence of his 
 being is all the more impressive, since there must 
 be in nature not only life, but consciousness, in- 
 telligence, thought, love, hope — a delicate, 
 dreaming, beauty-loving spirit — else she could 
 not have bequeathed such qualities to her child. 
 Admit that man evolved from abysmal depths, 
 *' mounting through the spires of form," — through 
 mud, mist, and fungi, through long reptilian 
 aeons, through the wild war and play of the ani- 
 mal world, " red in tooth and claw " ; follow the 
 ascent of life, from its lowest depths up the long 
 path to the summit of heroic achievement and 
 saintly devotion — and the cumulative disclosure 
 is simply overwhelming. No wonder Lord Ten- 
 nyson, standing beside the cradle of a child, and 
 seeing as in a vision whence that little life had 
 come, and what it means, burst into triumphant 
 song. If one would see the history of the soul 
 in a flash of white light, let him read " De Pro- 
 fimdisy and he will either join in the great hal- 
 
 judges ? Seeing that even if he doubts, he lives : if he doubts, 
 he remembers why he doubts : if he doubts, he understands 
 that he doubts : if he doubts, he wishes to be certain : if he 
 doubts, he thinks " (" Trinity," Book X). «« « What if you are 
 deceived ? ' For if I am deceived, I am." (" City of God," 
 Vol. I, p. 468.) 
 
44 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 leluiah chorus at the close, wherein faith has 
 wedded fact, or sit in dumb wonder at the mys- 
 tery of his own being. 
 
 In the same way, he who studies the moral 
 Hfe of man will emerge from his inquiry with a 
 new sense of " these awful souls that dwell in 
 clay." Men are distinguished from brutes, as 
 Coleridge said, chiefly by a power which discerns 
 good and evil, and even the most frivolous man 
 must be smitten mute by a voice speaking within 
 his own soul urging him to follow a moral ideal. 
 Like music, it seems to deal directly with the 
 reality of which it speaks,' at once a prophet and 
 a priest, and still more a hint of the origin of the 
 soul. The facts described by the word Con- 
 science, which, as its etymology signifies, means 
 ** knowing together with," are very wonderful, 
 and they have a far-reaching meaning. Man 
 is aware not only of an outer world and of a 
 world within, but also of another world which 
 
 1 " The cognitions we gain through the ordinary exercise of 
 the Senses are perfectly analogous, in their mode of origin, to 
 those which come to us through the moral faculty. In the act 
 of Perception we are immediately introduced to another than 
 ourselves that gives us what we feel ; in the act of Conscience, 
 we are immediately introduced to a Higher than ourselves that 
 gives us what we feel ; the externality in the one case, the 
 authority in the other, the causality in both, are known upon 
 exactly the same terms, and carry the same guarantee of their 
 validity." ( *« Study of Religion," by James Martineau, Vol. I, 
 p. 27, 1888.) 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 45 
 
 appears to have no tangible existence — an Ideal 
 World. He cannot reduce that higher, invisible 
 world to definition, but it is so real in its power 
 over him that, in comparison with it, he is always 
 condemning the world in which he lives. That 
 is to say, he is able to conceive of a world better 
 than this world ; and while the action of that ideal 
 world is not felt in the same degree by all men, 
 traces of its influence are at work in all. When 
 a man complains against the injustice and pain 
 of this world, he must have in mind some other 
 world with which he compares it, else he would 
 not complain at all. When he is conscious of sin 
 he feels himself falling short of some ideal of 
 being to which, however, he has never yet at- 
 tained. These facts, known to all men, make our 
 human life a wonderful mystery, showing, as they 
 do, that we are^ linked to a transcendent realm 
 which surpasses the things we see and reahze. 
 
 Whence came this Moral Ideal which sits in 
 judgment upon us, and will not let us rest ? If it 
 be said that man created it, we have still the 
 inquiry not only as to what he made it out 
 of, but whence came the suggestion of it ? 
 Those who try to explain the moral sense as 
 being simply a deposit of habit, a legacy of 
 ancestral fear, or the persistence of old dreams 
 of ghosts, defeat themselves. Instead of explain- 
 ing it, they are only tracing its history from dim 
 beginnings, leaving its origin and meaning a 
 
46 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 mystery ; and the further back we push it the 
 more impressive becomes its witness to the moral 
 order which it proclaims. As Maeterlink said in 
 his " Life of the Bee " : " If the bee is indeed to be 
 credited with none of the feelings or ideas which 
 we have ascribed to it, shall we not very wiUingly 
 shift the ground of our wonder ? If we must not 
 admire the bee, we will then admire nature ; the 
 moment must always come when admiration can 
 be no longer denied us, nor shall there be loss to 
 us through our having retreated, or waited." 
 Just so it is with those who seek to discredit the 
 evidence of the moral sense by reciting its natural 
 history, and its apparent variability in different 
 stages of moral culture. So far from weakening 
 its force, they make plain the fact that the moral 
 law is woven into the fibre of the universe, and 
 the time comes, as with the bee, when we can 
 withhold our admiration no longer. 
 
 Other things may be open to debate, but the 
 moral sense of man is so unmistakable, so per- 
 emptory, that there have been few to deny it. 
 Man did not create his moral world ; he cannot 
 destroy it. Nor can he by any ruse escape it. 
 It is the law of the world written in his heart, 
 and that is why the great masters of tragedy, 
 from Sophocles to Shakespeare, have shown how 
 the very stars fight against the evil doer. Be- 
 sides a general sense of something better, man is 
 aware of a particular and persistent obligation 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 47 
 
 that he ought to be something better than he is. 
 Debate the matter how he will, when the argument 
 is over and he is quiet, back comes that haunting 
 feehng ; and he has learned that to resist that 
 prompting is to break up in a most painful way 
 the inner unity of his life. So exquisitely delicate 
 in its poise is the moral nature of man. Trifled 
 with, it is capable of indefinite stultification. 
 Properly guarded and obeyed, it gives authentic 
 tidings of a life that is beyond the stars. For, 
 when a man puts all excuses aside and asks his 
 own soul what kind of goodness is required of 
 him, the answer that comes back is an amazing 
 one. He learns that there is no limit to the 
 goodness demanded — that, in fact, the moral 
 sense is the pressure upon him of the Infinite, 
 and that it widens out to an angle which, if 
 followed, points always to something better, 
 always to something higher up. At first glance 
 this seems discouraging, but when he reflects that 
 after this plan his life is ordered, it is permitted 
 him to interpret it as the will of the Eternal : 
 
 " By all that He requires of me 
 I know what He Himself must be." 
 
 With this witness of Duty, " strong daughter 
 of the voice of God," must be joined the revela- 
 tion of human love, the more properly so when 
 we recall the great Shakespeare line : 
 
 " Conscience is born of love. ^* 
 
48 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 Human love may seem to begin in passion, as a 
 flood in the brain and a fire in the blood ; but it 
 does not end there. Instead, it rises from the 
 dust, spreads its wings, and becomes an inspired 
 sylph prophesying of *' a Love divine all love 
 excelling." More than an idealization of the 
 woman by the man, of the child by the parent, 
 of friend by friend, it is an insight into the awful 
 beauty, worth, and meaning of the soul. There 
 is the discovery in the beloved life of an ideal 
 embodied, yet unembodied, and a disclosure to 
 the lover of an ideal within himself, giving to his 
 being exaltation, refinement, and dignity. Then 
 follows the discovery of the ideal in humanity, 
 who are in one degree or another lovers like 
 himself; and the logic of it is that the universe is 
 the home of the Ideal — that somewhere, every- 
 where, a soul of Love lives in it. When we ask 
 the genesis of all the love that softens, sanctifies 
 and glorifies the life of man, that spirit which, 
 one with the human spirit where it dwells, bears 
 authentic witness of an Eternal Love whence all 
 human love comes, and whither, at last, it re- 
 turns. 
 
 Consider what this means — the transfiguration 
 of Hfe into a scene grand beyond all power of 
 poet-thinking to conceive ; delicate beyond all 
 human tenderness ; lovely beyond all human 
 dream. It suggests that we are in the hands of 
 One who is ever uttering Himself in the profu- 
 
THE BASIS OF FAITH 49 
 
 sions of nature ; who welcomes the simplest 
 thought of truth or beauty as the return for the 
 seed He has sown upon " the old fallows of 
 eternity " ; who rejoices at every faltering re- 
 sponse to the age-old cry of wisdom in the 
 streets — the Lord of hosts, the God of mountains 
 and seas, and the Friend of httle children. 
 Surely this is holy ground on which we tread, an 
 enchanted world in which no one should hve an 
 unlovely life, and none need fear to die. When 
 Love hath told its story, we have assurance, 
 doubly sure, that those who walked with us and 
 have vanished from our side have gone into the 
 keeping of a Love greater than we can know — a 
 Love that hath within it the secret of unknown 
 redemptions. This it was that moved Emerson 
 to write that entry in the Journal of his sorrow : 
 
 '• When I think of you, sweet friend, wife, 
 angel Ellen, on whom the spirit of knowledge 
 and the spirit of hope were poured in equal full- 
 ness, when I think of you, I am sure we have 
 not said everlasting farewells." 
 
 Thus, the principles of thought, the prompt- 
 ings of conscience, and the prophecies of love 
 unite to confirm the ancient, high, heroic faith 
 of humanity. That faith, never wholly over- 
 borne, facing the mystery and the dark, un- 
 daunted by disaster, undismayed by death, un- 
 affrighted, unbreakable, dreaming dreams and 
 pursuing visions, sets its star as high as thought 
 
50 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 can fly. Life tries it, death tests it, sin be- 
 shadows it, and yet it is victorious. When doubt 
 deepens faith becomes more profound, and out 
 of the blackest tragedies of Hfe it rises with a 
 song of triumph. So it has been from the time 
 the oldest book in the world was written, and so 
 it will be until whatever is to be the end of 
 things. 
 
V 
 
 THE PATH TO REALITY 
 
 O, without taking anything for granted 
 beyond the fact that we exist, we have 
 abundant assurance of the reality of a 
 moral and spiritual order, and of our citizenship 
 in it. We are a part of reality, and that reality, 
 as we find it in our own being, is spiritual 
 activity and intelligence, in which we may par- 
 ticipate to the utmost of our capacity. Though 
 we know only in part, and that a tiny part, yet 
 our knowledge is real as far as it goes, and not a 
 mere guess at an inscrutable riddle. 
 
 No man, not Sophocles himself, ever saw the 
 whole of life, though Matthew Arnold affirmed 
 that the great Greek " saw life steadily and saw 
 it whole." Of even Shakespeare, near as he 
 seemed to come to it, that was not true. Nor 
 was it true of the greatest of the saints, who 
 confessed their limits with all humility, as, for ex- 
 ample, in the exordium to the " Confessions " of St. 
 Augustine, which is indeed, as Mallock called it, 
 " a Magnificat of contradictions " : but his words 
 are alive and aglow with a sense of the divine 
 reality. Agnostics we must all be, by the very 
 conditions of our thought, if by that is meant 
 
 51 
 
52 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 that we do not know the whole of reality ; but 
 absolute nescience is an absurdity. As Cole- 
 ridge sang : 
 
 ** 'Tis the sublime in man, 
 Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves 
 Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole ! 
 This fraternizes man, this constitutes 
 Our charities and bearings." 
 
 No doubt this has seemed a long and difficult 
 way of arriving at the^questidn before us, but it 
 is the way we must travel in this troubled age. 
 So profound has been the unsettlement of faith 
 in the last fifty years, that one must make sure 
 of each step he takes, intellectually, or the men 
 of our time will not follow. Unless it is shown 
 that man is capable of spiritual knowledge, he 
 cannot receive any revelation, nor will he listen 
 to any. Since, then, we have this witness that 
 the world of spiritual reality is there, because it 
 is also here within ourselves, we are prepared to 
 listen to the poets, prophets, and saints, who 
 point to higher realities and lead the way. Our 
 thesis has to do with the art of spiritual culture, 
 which Morley has described on a stately page as 
 something more than mere belief, more than a 
 correct theology — an inner grace and habit of 
 soul, an achievement of experience, by which, 
 though still toiling amid earthly appetites, the 
 spirit, purifying itself of these, learns to dwdl in 
 
THE PATH TO REALITY 53 
 
 living and confident communion with the seen 
 and unseen good. Of that fine art the saints 
 are the masters, beckoning us to follow on to 
 where " the melodies abide of the everlasting 
 chime," whose sweet tones are drowned for us 
 in the din and hum and confusion of our hurry- 
 ing life. 
 
 After a long, patient, discriminating, loving 
 study of the lives of the saints and prophets, 
 and especially of the great mystics — after making 
 due allowance for human frailty, eccentricity of 
 temperament, historical environment, and per- 
 sonal equation — three things must impress them- 
 selves upon the student. And the first is the 
 fine and lofty sanity, the delicate and divining 
 sagacity, of these friends and helpers of those who 
 would live in the spirit. Of a truth Carlyle may 
 say that, if any one is beside himself, it is we, 
 not they: we who are tossed on reef-strewn, 
 mirage-haunted seas, trying to accomplish a 
 " circumnavigation of hope," whereas they have 
 entered the haven of Truth. When we would 
 know what the human soul may become, while 
 yet on this bank and shoal of Time, we have 
 only to look into their lives, where the baser 
 passions of our nature are subdued to the service 
 of the spirit, resulting in a vision of God which 
 nothing can dim, an indifference to earthly lot 
 which makes them master of it, and a still depth 
 of power which gives to their simple words a 
 
54 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 Strange and compelling charm. They have, 
 besides, an inner grace of soul, a secret of 
 strength and quietness which the learned and 
 worldly wise know not, and withal a joy as of 
 those who see life from the inside and speak 
 from the centre. Thus : 
 
 " Ruysbroeck was a humble Flemish priest of 
 the fifteenth century. None the less, in the 
 order of genius the uncultured Ruysbroeck, as a 
 theologian, and consequently as a philosopher 
 and a poet, is as far above Bossuet as Dante, for 
 instance, is above Boileau. Face to face with 
 the mysteries that shroud God and man, Bossuet 
 seeks, argues, and, so to speak, gropes ; Ruys- 
 broeck knows, describes, or rather sings, and 
 contemplates. This illiterate mystic of an ob- 
 scure age finds himself at home in the sublime as 
 in his own sphere ; he speaks of what is familiar to 
 him ; the wise doctor of the world remains with- 
 out. Bossuet does not enter, he does not open, 
 he does not see. Bossuet spins words, Ruys- 
 broeck pours out streams of light. It seems as 
 if Bossuet were that mighty wind which was 
 heard in the Upper Chamber ; the brief words of 
 Ruysbroeck are the tongues of fire, living and 
 enlightening flame." ^ 
 
 One who reads for the first time the visions, 
 locutions, and revelations of Santa Teresa, with- 
 out knowing her and the story of her life, might 
 »« A Mediaeval Mystic," by D. V. Scully (1910). 
 
THE PATH TO REALITY 55 
 
 well be staggered. But when one comes to know 
 what manner of person she really was — a woman 
 of purest Castilian blood, of brilliant intellect, 
 of rare literary genius, of humour as delicious 
 as that of Cervantes ; a cool-headed business 
 woman ; a psychologist of amazing lucidity ; an 
 organizer and leader — one begins to see that she 
 was not, as so many think a saint must somehow 
 be, an inflamed enthusiast who retreated from the 
 world to follow a visionary life. No ; she was a 
 truly noble, sweet and sane soul, prodigal in her 
 gifts, prodigious in her activities — a woman wear- 
 ing upon her forehead the final consecration of 
 great genius, in worldly not less than in spiritual 
 affairs, dowered with that exaltation of personal- 
 ity which catches up the pedestrian qualities into 
 a white light and conquers by heavenly beauty 
 and practical capacity — out of whose profound 
 life of prayer came answering visions and voices. 
 One who studies her life, character, and spiritual 
 accomplishments is almost sure, if not hopelessly 
 biased, to imitate her severest critics in her own 
 day, who began by doubting and ended by be- 
 lieving and following her. 
 
 And the next thing that strikes the student, as 
 he recalls those shining lives, is their scrupulous, 
 sleepless vigilance against anything resembling 
 illusion or unreahty. All of us know, for ex- 
 ample, how Augustine suspected the witchery of 
 music, for fear its sensuous appeal might in some 
 
56 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 fashion becloud the clear vision of the soul, and 
 lead him to mistake feelings for the divine facts 
 of the Gospel. In a memorable passage* he tells 
 of " that one moment of knowledge " which he 
 sighed after so earnestly, when the tumult of the 
 flesh is silenced — hushed the phantasies of earth, 
 and the fancies of the imagination ; every tongue, 
 every sign, and whatsoever exists by passing 
 away ; only the inner ear open to Him who cre- 
 ated it, that He alone may speak, not by it, but 
 by Himself; that he might hear the impalpable 
 murmur of His voice, not by fleshly tongue, nor 
 angelic voice, nor sound of thunder, nor the ob- 
 scurity of a similitude ; but " might hear Hiin — 
 Him whom in these we love — without these, like 
 as we two," — mother and son at the Ostia win- 
 dow. How startling are his words when, after 
 submitting his experience to the most terrible of 
 critical tests, he cried, " O Lord, if I am deceived, 
 it is Thou who hast deceived me ! " So, too, in 
 the " Life of Santa Teresa," written by herself — 
 a book " perfumed by the winds and flowers of 
 heavenly places," — we see, again and again, how 
 careful, how relentless, she was in her self-criti- 
 cism, lest her imagination betray her. Catherine 
 of Siena — gay and loving as well as austere ; pit- 
 iless to herself, while full of reproach for de- 
 manding too much, spiritually, of others ; a mys- 
 tic with a genius of common sense — has left us a 
 > " Confessions," Book IX, Chap. X. 
 
THE PATH TO REALITY 57 
 
 code^ by which she tested the authenticity of 
 her visions, and Newman himself could not have 
 been more merciless in analyzing his soul than 
 was she. This is the constant and characteristic 
 attitude of all the great mystics, who were not 
 visionaries but men and women of vision, who 
 had no wish to found their faith in unreality. 
 
 Nor should we forget — how can we forget ? — 
 that they were, all of them, practitioners of " the 
 presence of God," men and women who pursued 
 spiritual culture with a passionate and persistent 
 intensity; and they were granted a rich reward. 
 Love of God, though the most commanded vir- 
 tue, is, apparently, the rarest among men, who 
 usually mistake for it a kind of solemn awe in 
 the presence of Infinity. At least it often seems 
 to be so in our debonaire and complacent age, 
 despite its exaltation of sociology into a sort of 
 religion. But when we turn the pages of the 
 mystics we meet a different air, like the vernal 
 wind which Dante felt touching his temples when 
 he entered the middle Paradise, bringing perfume 
 and bird-song from the forest of Chiassi. 
 Through their writings is wafted a lyric joy of 
 happy fellowship with God, an exalted delight in 
 communion with Him, subdued, always, to a 
 
 1 " Catherine of Siena," by E. G. Gardner (1909). Also 
 «« St. Catherine of Siena and Her Times," by the author of 
 ** Mademoiselle Mori " (1910), than which it would be difficult to 
 find a historical biography better done. 
 
58 THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 cleansing and healing humility in His presence. 
 Their voices are of many keys and tones, and 
 their visions are of different degrees of vividness 
 and value, but with one accord they report the 
 same ineffable reality. As Jacob Behmen said of 
 himself, they claimed no special gift or grace 
 which may not be enjoyed by all who will devote 
 themselves to it, and follow on to know the 
 Truth in its beauty. If it be said that there are 
 sane and reasoned philosophies whose content 
 differs in no wise from what the mystics behold, 
 the reply is that what the philosopher discerns 
 afar off, in a series of apparently contradictory 
 definitions, the mystic knows as an intimate real- 
 ity, by realizing and transmuting it into a radiant 
 life. Even when judged pragmatically, as is the 
 fashion of the hour, their vision is attested as au- 
 thentic by its fruits in moral purity, intellectual 
 beauty, and spiritual character, as well as in the 
 arts of benign service to man which so busily en- 
 gage their hands. 
 
 If the old saints seem far off, hidden in dim 
 mist, and associated with ecclesiastical orders 
 aHen to our own, then let us study the prophetic 
 experience of Lord Tennyson — how, at the end 
 of long vigils of thought, there came lucid, lumi- 
 nous, triumphant visions of God and the fashion 
 of things to be. It must always be a matter of 
 wonder, if nothing more, that, in a poem written 
 in 1840, that poet-seer foresaw the approaching 
 
THE PATH TO REALITY 59 
 
 clouds of doubt, forefelt the agony and travail of 
 faith, and fought out in advance the battles of the 
 next sixty years. Moreover, the persistence of 
 his poetic gift in all its glory — a marvel scarcely 
 rivalled since Sophocles — made possible the 
 emergence in him of forces which must always 
 have lain deep in his nature, but which the luxu- 
 riance of his early fancy obscured ; and in his later 
 years he became a forthspeaker of " those great- 
 est, those undiscoverable things which can never be 
 wholly known but must still less be wholly ignored 
 or forgotten." * The secret of it lay in his gift of 
 sincere, still, almost trance-like vision, which he 
 himself has described in a passage in the *' Ancient 
 Sage," so far as it can be told in words, and in 
 which many of his greatest lines seemed to flash 
 into his mind perfect. Here was a man of the 
 world — though assuredly not a worldly man — to 
 whom the unseen order was more real than the solid 
 earth, and who was more a citizen of the kingdom 
 of heaven than a subject of his own queen. 
 
 As to the nature of those heavenly visions and 
 voices, to which the saints were so sweetly obe- 
 dient, it is enough to say, with Archbishop Alex- 
 ander, that all things awful, wondrous and beau- 
 tiful, that are according to the analogy of faith, 
 we may receive with grateful hearts. Questions 
 
 1 See the remarkable study of '« Tennyson as Prophet," by 
 F. W. H, Myers, in his volume entitled, " Science and a Future 
 Life" (1893J. 
 
6o THE PROPHETIC VISION 
 
 as to the objective and subjective have, in this 
 sphere, no meaning whatsoever. What becomes 
 of this distinction in presence of the fact that in 
 God we Hve and move and have our being — Pie 
 in us, we in Him — we ourselves a part of the 
 very reahty which, in these lofty spirits, becomes 
 incandescent with light and beauty ? If the vi- 
 sions of saints were shaped and coloured by the 
 forms of faith and thought current in their age, so 
 is all religious experience of whatever kind. When 
 wise and sane men, and women of bright-eyed 
 sagacity, inebriated with the strong wine of no fa- 
 natical contagion, but calmly reading or quietly 
 meditating, tell us that they see angelic forms and 
 hear voices of comfort and command, we must as- 
 cribe their experiences to the unsealed eye of the 
 pure heart. If there be any virtue in prayer, any 
 vision in purity of heart, any power in the prom- 
 ises of the Bible or of our own nature, then their 
 visions are among the sweetest verities of life. 
 
 Yes ; what the poet, the seer and the prophet 
 see is there ; for they were there and knew for 
 themselves and not for another. Either all the 
 apostles, martyrs, saints, and mystics were mad, 
 " with an incredible coincidence and collaboration 
 of delusion," or — the thing is simply true. With 
 some of us the pressing question is not as to the 
 objective reality of the visions of St. Paul or of 
 Santa Teresa, but why there is in our own lives 
 so little of like vividness and victory ! 
 
The Unity of Faith 
 
 Is the difference of phraseology in the 
 expression of teaching the principal 
 difference between the Christian ages? 
 
THINGS WHICH DIFFER 
 
 SO intricate a question, if rightly pursued, 
 would require not only a survey of the 
 whole history of dogma and the church, 
 but a depth and delicacy of insight to which few 
 can lay claim. No such high task is here at- 
 tempted, but the more modest one of following, 
 so far as it can be traced, a unity of religious 
 experience underlying the multi-coloured dialects 
 of faith. Since religion is a life, that fact 
 promises variety of form, colour, and expression 
 — its varied shapes emphasizing a fundamental 
 unity, while adding infinitely to its picturesque- 
 ness and beauty. 
 
 Any study of this kind touches, of necessity, 
 upon many things about which men hold vary- 
 ing and perhaps conflicting opinions ; but as it is 
 an inquiry into the nature of our differences, not 
 into their vaHdity, it may be discussed quite 
 frankly. Some may take issue, at the outset, 
 with the answer given to the question, as tend- 
 ing to blur what should be kept clearly distinct ; 
 and others will chide because it does not go far 
 enough. In any case, should the reader disagree 
 
 63 
 
64 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 it is open to him to adopt the attitude of the 
 Turkish cadi towards an inquisitive EngHsh 
 traveller : " Oh, my Lamb ! seek not after the 
 things that concern thee not, and be not over- 
 exercised about them. Thou camest to us, and 
 WQ welcomed thee : go now in peace. Of a 
 truth thou hast spoken many words, but there is 
 no harm done, for the speaker is one, and the 
 listener is another." 
 
 The question, as stated, has to do with the 
 language of religion. It asks us if it is not true 
 that the Christian ages of the past — and, by the 
 same token, the Christian churches of the present 
 — have not all along been trying, each in its own 
 tongue, to say the same things ? To this question 
 we may give, without hesitation, an affirmative 
 answer, despite much that seems to cry out 
 against it. If on the surface we, like our fathers 
 before us, are divided, often to all appearances 
 hopelessly divided, in the depths we are one. 
 Debate and argument, views and opinions drive 
 and keep us apart, but when we bow in prayer, 
 or climb the stairway of song, we find not only 
 ourselves, but the great household of faith in all 
 ages — men breathing the same aspirations and 
 needs, the same passion for God, the same loyalty 
 to truth, the same joy in one Eternal Hope. It 
 is true of religion, even in its intellectual aspect 
 and expression, that those who go deep enough 
 discover harmonies underlying seeming discord ; 
 
THINGS WHICH DIFFER 65 
 
 but it is more vividly true of our fellowship in 
 the hfe of the spirit. 
 
 Those who have met that bright, unencum- 
 bered little book, *' Recent British Philosophy," 
 by the late David Masson, will recall a striking 
 passage containing an illustration as homely as 
 it is pertinent to the matter in hand. *' It will be 
 a dreary day for the world," he remarks, " when 
 disagreements cease, when there are not even 
 fundamental differences. There is an old Wilt- 
 shire song which had this remarkable stanza : 
 
 *' * If all the world were of one religion 
 Many a living thing should die; 
 But I will never forget my true love, 
 Nor in any way His name deny ! ' 
 
 Now if there is any man among us who has pre- 
 eminently helped to keep Britain from that 
 danger of intellectual death to many which 
 would arise from her being of one religion in 
 philosophy, it is John Stuart Mill." 
 
 Against an unnatural or enforced uniformity 
 of opinion, or an equally unnatural indifference, 
 such a warning is certainly valid. Even the 
 scepticism of Mill, so Masson thought, had a 
 place and value in religion, as the party of the 
 opposition has its value in politics — useful as a 
 critic but disastrous when it comes into power. 
 In a slightly different shape the same principle 
 
66 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 applies to our various creeds and sects, which 
 some good men are so eager to unite. There 
 have already been some amalgamations, and 
 there will be more, but we are not likely to see 
 all our churches fused into one body. Nor do 
 we desire it. There was unity of that kind for 
 twelve long centuries, and there has never been 
 anything worse. Whenever attempts have been 
 made to make the world of one theology, there 
 have been serious losses, and the common faith 
 has suffered. In every case freedom, tolerance, 
 charity, the confidence that truth will triumph, 
 and many other precious things, have died ; and 
 that is too heavy a price to pay for what is after 
 all a misfortune and a folly. Our different modes 
 of thought and worship, in so far as they meet 
 the varied interests, temperaments and needs 
 of men, are among the •' living things " which 
 should never die. They have indeed an essence 
 of unity, but it shows itself not less in their va- 
 riety than in their service to the soul of man. 
 
 Arnold of Rugby proposed to unite the sects 
 by law, forgetting, apparently, that our historic 
 religious|fellowships rest not simply upon creeds, 
 and are not held together by logic. They are, 
 instead, great communions, united by powerful 
 sentiments of affection and loyalty, and by vital 
 religious ideals embodied in their leaders and 
 imbedded in their institutional hfe. They are 
 set deep not only in the habits and customs of 
 
THINGS WHICH DIFFER 67 
 
 centuries, but in the spiritual experience of gen- 
 erations of devout men. If their roots did not 
 go deeper than logic they might be more amena- 
 ble to opposition, criticism and appeal, but they 
 would also be less significant. Calvinism, which 
 at first glance seems to be a very simple and defi- 
 nite thing, is in fact highly complex. It stands 
 indeed for a certain doctrine of God centrally, 
 but with that doctrine is interwoven a whole 
 system of thought, and, what is more, a certain 
 related attitude of mind towards religion and 
 life. It has, besides, a long history, and through 
 the years there has been formed a psychological 
 and atmospheric deposit, so to speak, which is 
 much harder to alter than any mere creed. So 
 that, while there was point to the thrust of the 
 saucy wit when he said that the trouble with our 
 differing sects is that no one of them is large 
 enough to contain more than one idea, it did 
 not pierce to the deeper reality below. 
 
 Of a truth it would be a dreary day should all 
 differences be melted into what Emerson called 
 " a mush of concession," and all churches merged. 
 There are yet fundamental differences which can- 
 not be thus erased. Theology is not a science 
 of shadows, nor did Athanasius stand out against 
 the world in behalf of a phantom. Though he 
 seemed to be contending for a tiny Greek letter, 
 he was in reality fighting for a profound and 
 precious truth, which it were a sin to surrender. 
 
68 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 One of the great attributes of man, it has been 
 said, is his willingness to abandon his warm fire- 
 side and throw himself on a filmy, intangible 
 principle, even though that principle may seem 
 to others thin, unimportant, and largely unin- 
 telligible. As between Athanasius and that 
 liberalism which holds nothing worth fighting 
 for, on the ground, as Renan said, that inasmuch 
 as no one can know anything, there is room in 
 the infinite for each to fashion his own romance, 
 there is but one choice. Perhaps this was what 
 Newman meant when he said that it would be 
 better for England were it vastly *' more bigoted, 
 more fierce in its religion than at present it shows 
 itself to be." The day will doubtless come, and 
 it may be close at hand, when a truly catholic 
 creed will be wrought out and a real unity of 
 faith achieved. But if convictions are laid aside, 
 if the hard-won trophies of the past are sacrificed 
 for the sake of union, we shall have not the unity 
 of the Church, but the unity of the churchyard. 
 There is much to regret in our theological dis- 
 putes, but how many a hving thing would die 
 were those debates hushed until, by legitimate 
 discussion, we arrive at some worthy agreement 
 that shall be lasting. 
 
 Our different churches represent, most pictur- 
 esquely, the great debates of Christian history. 
 Arius and Athanasius are with us still, as are 
 Calvin and Arminius, Channing and Ballon, in 
 
THINGS WHICH DIFFER 69 
 
 monuments of brick and stone — if not in" frozen 
 music," as Goethe described architecture, then in 
 petrified discord. Yet each sect has its own 
 phase and expression of truth, without which it 
 could not be a hving thing ; for, as Carlyle has 
 reminded us, religions live not by their false- 
 hood, but by their truth. No one can doubt 
 that the Quaker, the Calvinist, the Arminian, the 
 Catholic, indeed every form ^of faith, has helped 
 to widen the skirts of light, despite their feuds. 
 If then it be true that the chief differences 
 between the Christian ages are differences of 
 phraseology, it holds true, equally, of our various 
 sects, which, as a fact, embody and perpetuate 
 the controversies of vanished times. So far as 
 our divisions are due to local accent and provin- 
 cial outlook, they may be removed ; but the his- 
 toric Christian communions will abide. Our 
 study has thus not only an intellectual interest in 
 old systems and debates, whereof the din is now 
 almost hushed, but also an immediate and prac- 
 tical appeal in behalf of a more sympathetic 
 interpretation of differing tongues. 
 
 What we really need is not a surrender of our 
 separate loyalties, still less an* abandonment of 
 principle, but a unity of spirit in the bonds of 
 peace. Such a comity of sects is now approach- 
 ing ; and it will come when the churches cease 
 to exaggerate their peculiarities, after the manner 
 of certain characters in the Dickens stories — 
 
70 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 " Mr. Carker " and his teeth, " Captain Cuttle " 
 and his hook, and " Pleasant Riderhood " and 
 his black hair — and set themselves to their 
 common task, each with a sanctified ambition to 
 live better and do more good than its neighbour. 
 This is more than mere tolerance, more than a 
 dilettante curiosity to know the faith of our 
 fellows. It is a recognition of a deeper unity of 
 things which differ, which should enable all who 
 stand dedicated to religion to know religion 
 when it happens to appear in a guise different 
 from their own,' and to work as friendly but 
 earnest rivals for a supreme end. 
 
II 
 
 THE DEEPER UNITIES 
 
 IF this seems to be a digression at the be- 
 ginning, it is but to emphasize the essential 
 unity of the life of the spirit realizing itself 
 in diversity of form. Just because religion is a 
 living thing — "-the life of God in the soul of 
 man," as Henry Scougali ' described it — renewing 
 itself in each personahty, and in each epoch, 
 there can be no such thing as uniformity of 
 thought or experience. But there is, and always 
 has been, an underlying unity of faith and hope. 
 So it is that each age, like each individual, 
 gives an account of what it has apprehended in 
 its own dialect ; hence the variegated history of 
 theology. Wesley saw this, and in the latter 
 part of his hfe reposed more and more in a feel- 
 ing of cathoHc charity, to which his nature 
 always inclined him, adopting as his own the 
 words of William Law : " Perhaps what the best 
 heathens called Reason, and Solomon Wisdom, 
 St. Paul Grace in general, St. John Righteous- 
 ness or Love, Luther Faith, Fenelon Virtue, may 
 be only different expressions for one and the 
 
 1 " The Life of God in the Soul of Man," by Henry Scougali 
 (1868). 
 
 71 
 
72 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 same blessing, the light of Christ shining in dif- 
 ferent degrees under different dispensations. 
 Why then so many words, and so little charity 
 exercised among Christians, about the particular 
 term of a blessing experienced more or less by 
 all righteous men ! " * 
 
 Here is an answer to our question, all the 
 more satisfying because it sees that there are 
 many gates to the City uf God, though we can 
 never forget the gate by which we entered. It 
 implies, what St. Augustine affirmed in words 
 too often used polemically, that what is now 
 called the Christian religion has existed among 
 the ancients, and was not absent from the begin- 
 ning of the human race ; and what Channing 
 meant when he said that Zoroaster, Buddha, 
 Plato, and Epictetus had led him up the white 
 marble steps to the Cross in the Christian chan- 
 cel, giving him their whispered benediction. 
 Not only in the reverent and devout minds of 
 the pagan world, but in others not nominally 
 Christian, it should be easy to discern the Christ- 
 spirit, which we are all endeavouring, each in his 
 own way, to realize in our lives : something 
 which attracts, as nothing else does, with the 
 promise of peace and security of heart amid the 
 dark confusions of time. Surely it should not be 
 hard to recognize that under the categories of an 
 alien philosophy Spinoza was striving to fathom 
 1" Life of Wesley," by Robert Soutlicy, Vol. I, p. i6o (1858). 
 
THE DEEPER UNITIES 73 
 
 the facts of a profound religious experience, 
 which meant Hfe to him in time of trial. He 
 was, as Novalis said, a God-intoxicated man, and 
 though his system, even when expounded by so 
 able a thinker as Picton, ^ reads like a foreign 
 tongue, it is akin to the hallowing truth that God 
 is near and not far ; within as well as without ; 
 in the very heart of His creation ; the substance 
 of things hoped for, and the underlying reality 
 of things seen and unseen. Nor can any one 
 deny that the Emerson essay on The Over-Soul 
 is but another version of the truth of the over- 
 brooding, indwelling Spirit, which has been the 
 life of the Christian Church and the altar-fire of 
 its pulpit in all ages. 
 
 Within the sphere of Christian experience 
 there is the same unity of essence in variety of 
 form, though we may easily go too far, as 
 Schleiermacher and Ritschl seemed to go, in is- 
 olating Christian experience from other forms of 
 the religious life. For example: nothing is more 
 certain than that it has been a sense of personal 
 fellowship with Christ which has kept Christian- 
 ity alive upon the earth, amid errors the most 
 prosaic, the most irrational, and the most im- 
 moral. Such a fellowship was the secret splen- 
 dour of the life of St. Paul, without whose magnif- 
 icent and ceaseless evangel Christianity might 
 have been slow in making its advent in Europe. 
 1 " The Religion of the Universe," by J. A. Picton (1904). 
 
74 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 So it has been all down the ages, through a suc- 
 cession of luminous souls, from the midday vision 
 on the Damascus road to Horace Bushnell, who 
 said that he knew Jesus better, far better, than he 
 knew any man in his city. But they err who 
 mistake this experience, unique and wonderful as 
 it is, for the only authentic form of the Christian 
 life. Some of the most deeply, genuinely, ten- 
 derly rehgious souls have not enjoyed such an 
 experience of companionship with the Living 
 Christ, though His spirit was revealed in their 
 lives as the tints are in a rose. Emerson did 
 not,* nor Channing, nor Martineau whose prayers, 
 with their blend of love and awe, are heavenly 
 visions where the light of sense goes out and a 
 Presence ineffable blurs the outlines of meditation. 
 Surely all must see that the devout life is the 
 same, however the outlook of the intellect may 
 differ; that Emerson and Newman were akin in 
 soul, and that Wesley and Channing were moved 
 
 ^ See, particularly, the " Divinity School Address." Here is, 
 perhaps, the real point of divergence between Evangelicals and 
 Unitarians, their theological differences being only so many shad- 
 ows of it. Compare the words of Henry Ward Beecher; 
 •' Could Theodore Parker worship my God ? — Christ Jesus is 
 His name. All that there is of God to me is bound up in that 
 name. A dim and shadowy effluence rises from Christ, and 
 that I am taught to call the Father. A yet more tenuous and 
 invisible film of thought arises, and that is the Holy Spirit. 
 But neither are to me aught tangible, restful, accessible." 
 ("New Star Papers," pp. 197-198, 1859). 
 
THE DEEPER UNITIES 75 
 
 by a common and high religious motive. Not 
 only is it the same in essence, but all the richer 
 for its variety of outlook and expression ; for, as 
 has been well said, if Emerson were forced to be 
 a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, 
 the total vision of the divine would suffer. 
 
 If Christ be a cosmic and world-redeeming 
 reality. His appeal must be wide enough to in- 
 clude the totality of human life in all its diver- 
 sity of temperament, aptitude, and aspiration, and 
 not simply one type of mind. As a fact, the life 
 of Christ in the souls of men reveals itself in 
 many forms, through the prism of differing minds 
 — in Wesley a burning white light ; in Brown- 
 ing, a series of dazzling visions ; in Bushnell, 
 logic tipped with mystical fire; in Brooks, a 
 passionate humanism — but the reality behind all 
 of them is the same " yesterday, to-day, and for- 
 ever." Happily, the error, so frequent in the past, 
 of making one type of emotional experience 
 the test of Christian hfe, is not so common now 
 — thanks to the study of the psychology of relig- 
 ion. By such a test St. Augustine was a Chris- 
 tian indeed, as no one can doubt who reads the 
 eight books of his " Confession," but Phillips 
 Brooks was not ; whereas the hope of the world 
 lies in its being filled up with men like Phillips 
 Brooks. Solemn, awful and joyous as the fact of 
 conversion is, it takes many forms, nor is it, in 
 any one form at least, the only way to the blessed 
 
76 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 life. As Henry Drummoiid once said, it is the 
 penalty a man pays for the failure to grow spir- 
 itually as he ought ; and while most men have 
 failed in just that manner, we have to remember 
 that the ways of the Spirit are many. In a mat- 
 ter so indefinite we have no power of analysis, 
 and it were blasphemy to follow with a note-book 
 the delicate motions of the Spirit, who, imaged 
 as a dove, flies unseen in a path of its own. To 
 one man the sense of the presence of Christ 
 comes suddenly, to another slowly, to another 
 dimly, it may be ; but all are partakers of a like 
 precious reality — Martineau not less than Maur- 
 ice — their differing temperaments and casts of 
 intellect forming " a dome of many-coloured 
 glass, which stains the bright radiance of eter- 
 nity." 
 
 Spiritual experience is thus the highest unify- 
 ing influence, as it is the most liberalizing and 
 satisfying. It gives one the power to understand 
 and interpret many religious dialects, and to dis- 
 cern in the past, not less than in the present, 
 beneath diversities of temperament and training, 
 creed and cult, the foundations of the Church of 
 God — meaning by the Church no sect, hierarchy, 
 or polity, but the communion of saints, the his- 
 toric fellowship of the seekers and finders of God : 
 " the congregation," to quote old Bishop Pear- 
 son, " of those faithful souls here on earth, who 
 shall hereafter meet in heaven." Such a man is 
 
THE DEEPER UNITIES 77 
 
 more catholic than the CathoHc church itself, 
 open of mind, hospitable of heart, and spiritually 
 fraternal with all who love God and seek to do 
 His will. All churches belong to him, so far as 
 they have any portion of divine grace in their 
 keeping, or any evidence of divine grace in their 
 Avork ; and all books in aid of faith, whether by 
 Augustine or Emerson, Butler or Behmen, IVIo- 
 linos or Maurice. He is at home in every place 
 where men foregather to pray, knowing that the 
 visible Church of Christ is everywhere ; in the 
 plain chapel of Martineau or in St. Paul's cathe- 
 dral ; in the tabernacle of Spurgeon and in the 
 Greek church at Moscow ; in St. Peter's at Rome, 
 but also in the Quaker meeting house where 
 Whittier and Woolman sat in silence, awaiting 
 the promptings of the Spirit. He does not find 
 it hard to keep an open mind and a kind heart 
 towards all his fellow workers, assured, with Rus- 
 kin, that " there is a true Church wherever one 
 hand meets another helpfully — the only holy or 
 Mother* church which ever was or ever shall be." 
 
 * Not even Cardinal Newman, with all his literary magic, 
 has convinced some of us — his admiring students — that the 
 Catholic church is the only church of Christ. There is, as Dr. 
 Denney somewhere remarks, a type of genius which seems 
 made for this task — a daring, paradoxical genius, with some- 
 thing dazzling both in its thought and style to carry through the 
 necessary tours de force. It is seen in various forms in Pascal 
 and De Maistre, and in Newman ; but how empty their con- 
 tention is, when that peculiar quality of genius is absent, may be 
 
78 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 Socrates made the discovery — perhaps the 
 greatest ever made — that human nature is uni- 
 versal. By his searching questions he found that 
 when men think round a problem they disclose a 
 common nature and a common system of truth. 
 So there dawned upon him, from this fact, the truth 
 of the kinship of mankind and the unity of mind. 
 His insight is confirmed when we set the teachings 
 of the sages side by side, and find, after compar- 
 ison, that the final conclusions of the wisest minds 
 regarding the meaning and duty of life are har- 
 monious, if not identical. Though shallow minds 
 may wrangle, the deepest minds always concur 
 at the end in the same great truths. The great 
 historic religions have been variations on one 
 motif, differing less in essentials than in point of 
 emphasis, depth of insight, and method of ap- 
 peal. They used different instruments, with vary- 
 ing tones and keys, but they played the same 
 high music, expressing, each in its own tongue, 
 
 seen in " Divine Transcendence and its Reflection in Religious 
 Authority," by J. R. Illingworth (191 1). With their doctrine 
 of a visible, God-guided church, we are in fullest accord ; but 
 where they are misled, as it seems to us, is not in identifying 
 that church with the Catholic church, but in so far as they 
 identify it with that church to the exclusion of all others. For 
 the same reason the Presbyterian Assembly blundered when it 
 declared the Catholic church to be Anti-Christ, and a syna- 
 gogue of Satan. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton, made vigorous and 
 able protest against such action, and his arguments are as valid 
 to-day as they were half a century ago. («* Life of Charles 
 Hodge," by A. A. Hodge.) 
 
THE DEEPER UNITIES 79 
 
 the one great human experience of fellowship 
 with the Father of our spirits. ReHgions are 
 many, but Religion is one — to do justly, to love 
 mercy, and to walk humbly with God. 
 
 Towards this great and simple religion — greater 
 than all sects, yet the basis of each — the world is 
 now moving. Forms of faith build and unbuild 
 themselves like summer clouds, but the substance 
 of faith abides. Theologies are but sky-tents 
 where the soul of man rests for a day or an age 
 in its journey from faith to faith. That religion 
 which is the fellowship of man with God is to 
 the passing forms of faith as the sunlight to the 
 clouds, as the sea to the ships that float upon its 
 bosom. Beyond the clouds is the sky. Below 
 the ships is the sea. The clouds will turn to rain 
 and then to mist again, and the ships will pass on 
 out of sight. But the sky remains, and the sea 
 ebbs and flows, symbols of those deeps which 
 call to deeps in our fellowship with Him who in- 
 habiteth Eternity. In the primal sanctuary of 
 the soul, where man is alone with God, faith 
 abides in unity and power. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE HIGHER HARMONY 
 
 I 
 
 AS in the depths, so in the heights of vision 
 and service, men who are sundered far 
 meet in one fellowship of joy. In times 
 of uplift and insight, when the tides of the divine 
 life run high, the dividing barriers, which move 
 with us like the horizon, disappear, and the unity- 
 hidden in diversity stands fully revealed. It was 
 so in the morning of Christianity, when the 
 Church was a centre of radiant and radiating life 
 — rich, warm, dynamic, abundant — before its 
 glowing ideals had crystallized into dogmas ; 
 when men of many tribes and nations heard the 
 Gospel, each in the tongue wherein he was born. 
 This higher harmony is not open to debate, 
 though as regards the early church it has been 
 denied. The effort of the Tubingen scholars to 
 show that our New Testament was the result of 
 rival schools in the apostolic church failed. 
 While it is true that the early church was far 
 from being a scene of uniformity, such differen- 
 ces as appeared were not speculative at all, but 
 largely matters of temperament, method, and 
 personal equation of insight and outlook. With 
 
 80 
 
THE HIGHER HARMONY 8 1 
 
 the voice of the Master still echoing, and the air 
 alive and palpitating with His Presence, no one 
 cared to define a dogma or to formulate a sys- 
 tem. When St. Paul attempted such discussions 
 his logic caught fire, his language jarred in the 
 narrow ways of human imagery, and his argu- 
 ment almost invariably ended in a blaze of ec- 
 stasy. The victorious might of the infant church 
 lay not in its dogmas, but in its fellowship with 
 the Living Christ, its heroic motives, its quiet and 
 glad enthusiasm, and its all-transfiguring heavenly 
 vision. Any student of that church must be 
 impressed with its freedom from metaphysical 
 dogma, its unity of spirit, and its abounding vi- 
 tality, which grasped the crumbling classic world 
 and reshaped it. 
 
 Also, every renewal of Christianity has meant 
 a rediscovery of those profound realities in which 
 the power of religion lies, as over against the 
 ideas which divide men. If we study the historic 
 revivals we always find in them a more vivid 
 sense of the Love of God in Christ, an unveiling 
 of the might of prayer as the most vital and 
 practical force among men, and a deepening of 
 the moral life bearing fruit in heroic and beautiful 
 philanthropies. Of the revivals of the early 
 church Harnack said truly that they " operated 
 v/ith such purity and power that they bore pal- 
 pably the stamp of their divine origin," as any 
 one can believe who reads the story of" Fabiola," 
 
82 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 by Cardinal Wiseman, which brings from afar a 
 whiff of the air of sanctity and service which 
 pervaded those morning years. The same was 
 true in the days of Francis of Assisi, who, climb- 
 ing Mount Subasio, and watching the shafts of 
 sunlight strike the snow-drifts, " felt a dehcious 
 thrill, all his being was calmed and uplifted, the 
 soul of things caressed him gently and shed upon 
 him peace." Out of that radiant hour was born 
 a movement, led by " God's Troubadour," which, 
 with its blend of poetry, piety, and pity, redeemed 
 Europe from dead formalism and languorous 
 luxury. Who can forget the foresight and soHci- 
 tude of Francis for the outcasts, and those smitten 
 with terrible malady — how, with his brethren, 
 he established schools for the leper children, and 
 hospitals for those far gone in the disease ? 
 
 So, too, in the great revival in the Rhineland, 
 whether in its first stage under Eckhart, or in its 
 second stage under the wonderful ministry of 
 Tauler — a man of divine pity, in whose hands 
 the vestments of an ecclesiastic became " bandages 
 for the bleeding wounds of humanity," and the 
 ropes of the belfry tower cords of sympathy 
 between God and man. Recall the " Black 
 Death " scourge — which drove Boccaccio and 
 his friends to a Florentine villa to tell salacious 
 tales — when the secular clergy fled in panic from 
 the sorely smitten city of Strasburg, leaving 
 Tauler and his converts to nurse the sick, minister 
 
THE HIGHER HARMONY 83 
 
 to the dying, and bury the dead. No one need 
 be told what the Wesleyan revival did for 
 England, rescuing it, as Macaulay said, from 
 something like a French Revolution, cleansing 
 its literature and elevating its moral and social 
 tone. Again, the Oxford Movement within the 
 church, despite its later unfortunate emphasis 
 upon things sacerdotal, was a renewed sense of 
 the awfulness of the Unseen ; often austere, some- 
 times extravagant, but true, enduring, and far- 
 reaching.' As Mozley said of Keble and Newman, 
 " they seemed to come forth from a different and 
 holier sphere," and their words, spoken with " an 
 intense stillness," stirred men with longings for a 
 different and holier life. Such tides of the Spirit 
 overflow all dividing walls, like a heavenly Nile, 
 and lift men into an awful yet gracious mystery, 
 where debate is lost in devout wonder. 
 
 Ever fresh surprise at the vastness and triumph 
 of Love has been the wonder of such times, and 
 it has found centre in an overwhelming vision of 
 the Cross of Christ. When Bernard of Clairvaux 
 preached from the hilltop at Vezelia, there arose 
 from the sea of faces, it is said, a shout, " Crosses, 
 crosses ! " — and the crusade was made. When 
 Daniel Rowlands made his pulpit a smoking and 
 thundering Sinai, he was warned by his friend, 
 Philip Pugh, that terror begets terror, whereas 
 
 1 " The Oxford Movement," by R. W. Church (1902). Also 
 " The Mystery of Newman," by Henri Bremond (1907). 
 
84 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 only love inspires love. Not until he learned to 
 preach the sovereign grace of the Gospel did the 
 eighteenth century revival in Wales work its 
 wonder. Then the debtor remembered his debt, 
 the drunkard returned to his hearth in his right 
 mind, the prodigal received welcome at home, 
 and those grown gray in sin saw a light at even- 
 tide — all because one morning a dark Cross stood 
 on a little hill, and the One who died upon it was 
 found to be a Friend and a Redeemer. So in the 
 ministry of Oberlin, further back, there arrived a 
 day when he wrote, " I preached no more the 
 pains of hell," and the restored Gospel of Love 
 won its way as summer through a waiting wood, 
 changing the wintry valleys of the Vosges into 
 sanctuaries of piety and gladness. Small wonder 
 that such awakenings have been attended by out- 
 bursts of song, for *• the people of God are a sing- 
 ing people, and their way is a singing way." 
 
 Nor should we forget the influence of the great 
 revivals on Christian theology, modifying it, as 
 they do, in the only way it can ever be truly 
 modified — that is, by a deeper, more vivid, more 
 victorious experience of things immortal. Ever- 
 more our pressing need is for a vital theology 
 that springs from life and, returning quickly to 
 the life from which it springs, gives form and 
 clarity to experience ; for if we are to think about 
 religion in any great and conclusive wa}^, we 
 must think religiously from the inside. St. 
 
THE HIGHER HARMONY 85 
 
 Francis with his passion for the imitation of 
 Christ ; Tauler with his mystical union with the 
 Master ; Luther with his gospel of faith ; Wesley 
 with his good news of free grace; Moody with 
 his vision of Love divine all love excelling — 
 each seized the truth most needful for his age, 
 and without deliberate intention modified the 
 current theology : just as we are beginning to see 
 in what ways rehgious thought may be influenced 
 by the social activity of the Church. If we are 
 to have a great revival in our day, it must be by 
 *' the good-will of Him who dwelt in the Burning 
 Bush," whose Voice from the midst will give the 
 accent of truth for our vexed and nois}^ age to 
 those who approach, with reverent and earnest 
 hearts, the Place of Hearing. 
 
 n 
 
 Add now the witness of the great mystics,* 
 who have been the living bonds of union between 
 the differing sects, and the redeemers of the 
 
 1 Readers who may wish to study the mystics will find an ad- 
 mirable introduction in an essay on Christian mysticism, with 
 examples of mystical exposition of truth, entitled " The Garden 
 of Nuts," by W. R. Nicoll (1905). Then there are Dr. Alex- 
 ander Whyte's charming "Appreciations" of Rehmen, Santa 
 Teresa, Sir Thomas Browne, and Father John of the Greek 
 church — biographical studies with selections from their writ- 
 ings. Other books, among a number too great to name, are 
 the " Works of St. John of the Cross," with preface by Cardinal 
 Wiseman (1864) ; " Life of St. John," by David Lewis (1897) '> 
 " Life of Madame Guyon," by T. C. Upham (1905) ; " Life of 
 
86 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 Church in times of arid materialism, spiritual 
 apathy, and dismal half-belief. Amid the shifting 
 scenes of theological thought they sit undisturbed 
 by the permanent fountains of religious grace and 
 power, having a " sincere, sweet and still view of 
 the Eternal Truth," — to use the words of Molinos, 
 whose gospel of quietness and confidence, distilled 
 into his " Spiritual Guide," though suppressed by 
 the Church, flowed on, now flooding the soul of 
 Guyon and Fenelon, now running into channels 
 already formed by the early Quakers, now de- 
 scending deeply, like the fabled river of Arabia, 
 out of sight, but never lost. Just so we trace 
 through the ages a shining tradition of spiritual 
 light, a glorious communion of the " friends and 
 aiders of those who live in the spirit," whose 
 teachings underlie all sects and overarch all 
 creeds — prophets of the Universal Spiritual 
 Church of God, to whose service our institutions 
 are but instrumental and from which they derive 
 their meaning and beauty. 
 
 Tauler," with twenty-five of his sermons, preface by Charles 
 Kingsley (1905) ; •* Life of St. Teresa," written by herself — a 
 memorable book ; also her •' Way of Perfection," translated by 
 David Lewis (191 1); "A Mediceval Mystic," by Earle 
 Baillie, being the life of John Ruysbroeck, whose writings are 
 best translated by Maeterlink. Also " Christian Mysticism," 
 by W. R. Inge, an excellent essay, though too much emphasis is 
 laid upon the shortcomings of the mystics. Hereof are a few 
 cups from a well of pure water ; it is free water of life — taste 
 and see. 
 
THE HIGHER HARMONY 87 
 
 They have been fertilizing spirits, openers of 
 sleeping seeds, and those who study them look 
 up from the page with faces aglow, as William 
 Law studied Behmen, as Alexander MacLaren 
 lived with Tauler. So much so, that it may be 
 truly said that no man, from Augustine to Luther, 
 from Wesley to Phillips Brooks, has ever been a 
 great prophetic preacher without being a mystic, 
 or the disciple of a mystic. Time fails me to tell 
 how the mystical theology — driven from the 
 pulpit, and finding refuge in hymns, prayers, and 
 fireside meditations — was the living faith of the 
 burghers of Germany for nearly two centuries ; 
 how it kept alive experimental religion of a pure 
 kind, how it inspired the early German and 
 Flemish artists — like Van Eyck, whose famous 
 painting, The Adoration of the Lainby is the 
 reduction to colour of the vision of a mystic ; 
 and how it taught Luther himself what heart 
 religion really was. So also Wesley, whose 
 strange " warming of the heart," which set Eng- 
 land on fire, was kindled by fellowship with a 
 band of Moravian mystics ; as the sweet pietism 
 of Francke and Spener rescued the Swedish 
 church from a barren, stony orthodoxy, and a 
 dead polemical dogmatism. In our own age 
 — encumbered as it is with so many "blank 
 misgivings," so many cloudy sunsets and so few 
 glad confident dawns — the sign of most promise 
 among us is the renewed and wide- spread in- 
 
88 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 terest in the mystics, which, despite a too fre- 
 quent quest after fantastic occultisms, and pseudo- 
 psychisms, betrays a deep hunger of the soul for 
 a more satisfying experience of Unseen Realities. 
 Here, in the mystic tradition, is the true 
 apostolic succession of the spiritual life, unbroken 
 by the transitions of theology or the conflicts of 
 sects, confident and forward-looking amid the 
 mysteries of life. It is authentic, not because of 
 any hierarchy, but because it comes to us through 
 a succession of apostolic souls. Otherwise it 
 would be hardly more than a legend, though 
 every church could boast an unbroken line of 
 teachers whose heads had been blessed by the 
 men before them. Just as the poet-laureates of 
 England are made poets, when they are poets at 
 all, not by edict of state, but by the divine gift of 
 genius ; so the teachers of faith have power not 
 by virtue of rank or office, but by experience of 
 things eternal. Such an experience, when il- 
 lumined by great genius — whether in St. Francis 
 or Fenelon, Chalmers or Channing — places a man 
 in the true hierarchy of the light-bringers and 
 way-showers of the race. For, by its very nature, 
 authority in matters of faith and morals rests in 
 God, and so far as it is entrusted to men is not 
 official or arbitrary, but spiritual and persuasive. 
 To some of us the Catholic church appeals with 
 overwhelming authority, not through its hierarchy, 
 nor yet through its pontiff, but through the 
 
THE HIGHER HARMONY 89 
 
 voices of its seiints, who are among our dearest 
 teachers. Its thnikers must fight their way up 
 ill . the arena of philosophy ; but when Santa 
 Teresa tells us of her hfe of prayer, we hsten in a 
 different mood, if so be that we may learn the 
 path to the Mount of Vision. 
 
 Saints, poets, seers, mystics all — a strange and 
 radiant fellowship they make, of many races, 
 traditions, and creeds, held in the unity of the 
 Life of the Spirit. They speak in various 
 tongues, but with a unison of tone which each 
 understands, a language neither ancient nor 
 modern, but timeless, eternal, one. Across the 
 ages we hear Philo saying, •* God hath breathed 
 into man from heaven a portion of His own 
 divinity." Years pass, and St. Paul speaks of 
 Christ formed within us, a continuing glory both 
 of character and of hope, whom to know aright 
 is life everlasting. Other years pass and Plotinus 
 bears witness : *' The wise man recognizes the 
 good within him ; this he develops by withdrawal 
 into the holy place of the soul." Bernard of 
 Clairvaux, administrator and saint, takes up the 
 strain, assuring us that •' It is in the spirit that 
 union with God occurs " ; while Tauler pauses in 
 his humane labours, having found the same 
 secret : " This revelation must take place in 
 the spirit, for God is Spirit." Again we hear 
 Madame Guyon testify, confirming the word of 
 Santa Teresa : " Accustom yourself to seek 
 
90 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 God in your own heart, and you will find Him." 
 So the witness runs through the years, through 
 Huss, Luther, Wesley, Fox, and Bushnell, as be- 
 fore it had come down through Augustine, St. 
 Francis, and Savonarola. At last the voice of 
 Emerson is heard speaking in our own land : 
 " Within man is the soul of the holy, the wise 
 silence, the universal beauty " ; and Phillips 
 Brooks, standing beside the pillar in Trinity 
 Church, sums it up : 
 
 " Religion instantly becomes irreligious if you 
 carry it away from its great enveloping truth of 
 the mystic union of God and man. Mysticism 
 is the heart of religion, without whose ever-beat- 
 ing hfe the hands of religion, which do the 
 work, and the mind of religion which studies 
 and thinks, fall dead. . . . It is a blessed 
 thing that in all times there have always been 
 men to whom religion has not presented itself as 
 a system of doctrine, but as an elemental life 
 in which the soul of man came into very di- 
 rect and close communion with the soul of God. 
 It is the mystics of every age who have done 
 most to blend the love of truth and the love of 
 man within the love of God, and so to keep alive 
 or restore a healthy tolerance." * 
 
 >" Essays and Addresses," by Phillips Brooks ( 1895). 
 
IV 
 
 THE PROSE OF FAITH 
 
 IN the " Life of Dante," by Boccalos, we are 
 told that " theology is God's poetry." It 
 may be so ; but when one studies the his- 
 tory of dogma, its hidden and unnoted factors, 
 and the materials of which it is composed, one 
 feels like modifying the saying of the great poet. 
 Religion is indeed divine poetry — •• poetry be- 
 lieved in," as Dean Everett used to say — but 
 theology, for the most part, is very human prose, 
 or at least an imperfect translation of the divine 
 music. Though they bore the same name, held 
 the same faith, and used the same vocabulary, 
 what a gulf divided the second Christian century 
 from the days of Jesus ! No sooner did Chris- 
 tianity step upon Greek soil than it was taken 
 up by alert and eager minds, mixed with the 
 fag-ends of decaying philosophy, and changed 
 into something seemingly utterly alien to the 
 mind of the Master. One familiar with the the- 
 ologic outlook at the middle of the second 
 century, as we have it reflected later in the pages 
 of Irenseus and TertuUian, knows that it was a 
 
 91 
 
92 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 bewildering maze, in which the poetry of Jesus 
 had become an uneven and jangling prose. 
 
 No good purpose would be served by an at- 
 tempt to tread that labyrinth here, least of all 
 without a torch and a guide. All along the 
 error has been a failure to realize that our dog- 
 mas, at best, are but picture-conceptions of reali- 
 ties so great that all men are one in their little- 
 ness — an error due, perhaps, to our intellectual 
 conceit which tends to assume that its analy- 
 sis, and therefore its explanation, is complete. 
 Whereas, if we could once be made aware that 
 the truth includes what all of us perceive, and 
 much more unguessed by any of us — that our 
 dogmas, as Matthew Arnold said, are only so 
 many words thrown out rtt a vast reality — each 
 would seek, humbly and eagerly, to know what 
 truth the other has discovered, in the hope of 
 attaining to a larger faith. It has been said 
 that the supreme gift of Cardinal Newman — who 
 was a miracle of intellectual delicacy joined with 
 an austere and unearthly spirituality — was an in- 
 tellect which discerned the inadequacy of words, 
 ideas, or systems when confronted with the real- 
 ities which they seek to body forth. His insight 
 is best exhibited, perhaps, in a passage from his 
 " Apologia^ remarkable alike for its style and for 
 its sweep and grasp. Thus : 
 
 " The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen 
 carried me away. Some portions of their teach- 
 
THE PROSE OF FAITH 93 
 
 ing, magnificent in themselves, came like music 
 to my inward ear. These were based on the 
 mystical or sacramental principle. Nature was 
 a parable : Scripture was an allegory : pagan 
 literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly 
 understood, were but a preparation for the Gos- 
 pel. The Greek poets and sages were in a 
 certain sense prophets ; for ' thoughts beyond 
 their thoughts to those high bards were given.' 
 In the fullness of time both Judaism and pagan- 
 ism came to nought. And thus room Wcis made 
 for the anticipation of further and deeper disclo- 
 sures, of truths still under the veil of the letter, 
 and in their season to be revealed. The visible 
 world still remains without its divine interpreta- 
 tion ; Holy Church, in her sacraments and her 
 hierarchical appointments, will remain, even to 
 the end of the world, after all but a symbol of 
 those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her 
 mysteries are but the expression in human lan- 
 guage of truths to which the human mind is 
 unequal." * 
 
 So luminous a passage persuades while it ex- 
 emplifies the doctrine which it recommends — the 
 doctrine, that is, that doctrines themselves are 
 but symbols ; that theology is at once an alle- 
 gory and an act of faith ; that it is figurative be- 
 cause it seizes on a hidden reality, not otherwise 
 
 "^ ^* Apologia Pro Vita Sua," by J. H. Newman, Chap. I 
 (1865). 
 
94 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 to be detained. It was an illuminating insight, 
 particularly so in the midst of what Dean Church 
 called the enormous irruption into the world of 
 modern thought of the unknown and the un- 
 knowable. Also, it helps to account for the em- 
 barrassment which has always beset Christian 
 apologists, when they have been challenged to 
 give a reason for their faith in the court of logic. 
 As Newman pointed out, such reasons as may be 
 formally adduced are rather specimens and sym- 
 bols of the real reasons than those reasons them- 
 selves. Defenders of the faith select, of neces- 
 sity, not the truest, the highest, the most sacred 
 reasons for belief, but such as best admit of being 
 exhibited in argument ; and these are rarely, per- 
 haps never, the real reasons in the case of a re- 
 ligious man/ Nor does this hand the case over 
 to the agnostic, who hastens to agree that dog- 
 mas are but words, the Bible a book of meta- 
 phors, and religion an echo of our own voice in 
 *' the dark night of the soul." For a sense of 
 humour, if nothing else, should protect a man 
 from the dogma that the human mind, finite in 
 all things, is infinite in its ignorance. To that 
 dogma Newman opposed, and rightly so, the in- 
 ner fact too deep for speech, which, confirmed 
 by the Mystic Vision and the devout life of ages, 
 is the surest possession of the race. 
 
 If we allow so much, consequences of an inter- 
 1" Cardinal Newman," by "William Barry, Chap. V (I904), 
 
THE PROSE OF FAITH 95 
 
 esting kind seem to follow. At first glance the- 
 ology is apparently removed from among the 
 sciences and placed in the domain of the arts ; 
 but that need not be regretted. This at least is 
 true : we are here given a key to the deeper unity 
 of experience and life beneath diversities of tem- 
 perament and every variety of intellectual sym- 
 bolism. If we take the dogmas of Christian 
 theology as symbolic pictures, they are seen to 
 be efforts of the Church at various periods, and 
 of certain types of mind in every period, to ex- 
 press spiritual truth in such imaginative intellec- 
 tual forms as were best suited to their needs. 
 Thus a truth may find expression in different 
 dogmas, just as any thought may be uttered in 
 different languages by phrases that sound very 
 unlike, and yet mean the same thing. Even the 
 same truth, as Lowell shows in his poem on Am- 
 brosBy may in different garb have power over 
 other minds, who actually deny that truth as we 
 state it in our words. Some dogmas seem irra- 
 tional and crude, and we are prone to deny not 
 only their clumsy form, but also the spiritual 
 truths which they are trying to utter, because 
 we think of the surface intellectual meaning only, 
 and do not apprehend the truths underlying or 
 feel their power. What we have always to re- 
 member is that the Truth is greater than all sym- 
 bols, deeper than all dogmas, and that, as George 
 Eliot said, " the divine life moves underneath the 
 
96 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 thickest ice of theory." And, after all, it is that 
 deep inner life of the soul, flowing with strong 
 current in its hidden bed, which at last " winds 
 somewhere safe to sea." 
 
 No better example of the difference between 
 religion and theology ^ can be found than in the 
 successive dogmas of the Cross which have fol- 
 lowed each other through the Christian years. 
 To-day men are sometimes accused of tampering 
 with the doctrine of the atonement, and it is held 
 to be a vital offense, but one may well ask, 
 *• Which doctrine ? " It has been truly said that 
 if men are saved or lost by their correct or incor- 
 rect views of this truth, then whole ages of the 
 Church are clearly past praying for. One view, 
 wliich held the ground for almost a thousand 
 years, was that the death of Christ was a ransom 
 
 ^ It need hardly be said that this is not meant to depreciate, in 
 any way, the definitions and distinctions of historic Christian 
 theology. \Ve must liiink and define; we must interpret and 
 justify to the intellect the convictions of the heart, and put our 
 religious persuasions into the best intellectual shape we can. 
 The mystics err in this respect, perhaps through a sense of the 
 incffableness of truth and the inadequacy of language (''Mys- 
 ticism," by Evelyn Underhill, 1911). As Thomas Erskine of 
 Linlathen remarked: " I feel self-condemned in occupying my 
 mind in the labour of constructing the intellectual shape of re- 
 ligion when I could be more profitably employed in actually 
 walking with God." On the other hand, as Kant said of 
 philosophy, theology does not discover truth, but simi)ly ar- 
 ranges the truth explored by experience ; and is thus of second- 
 ary importance. 
 
THE PROSE OF FAITH 97 
 
 paid to the devil, and that His resurrection was 
 a kind of trick by which Satan was finally de- 
 frauded. Think of a man like Ambrose of Milan, 
 one of the noblest and sweetest souls of the 
 fourth century and the spiritual father of Augus- 
 tine, beinof able to write a sentence hke this : 
 *' It was necessary in order that this fraud should 
 be carried out upon the devil that the Lord Jesus 
 should take a body ! " We can hardly imagine 
 a theology of the Cross more grotesque and un- 
 thinkable , yet no one amongst us knows more 
 effectually than did that ancient saint the religion 
 of the Cross, as felt in the soul and realized in 
 life. One cannot read his works without feeling 
 that the root of the matter was in him, despite 
 the crude intellectual imagery of his day. 
 
 So it is with the theory of Anslem, in his 
 "Cur Deus Homo'' — a theory which, strangely 
 enough, was in its main features adopted and 
 taught by the Reformation leaders. He re- 
 garded Christ as having, by His passion and 
 death, paid in suffering the exact equivalent of 
 human guilt, and thereby satisfying the claims of 
 divine justice : which, as Augustine had pointed 
 out before, was not a doctrine of grace, but a 
 negation of grace. No one now attacks this 
 dogma with laboured argument, and few are left 
 to defend it. Like other clumsy ideas, it has 
 suffered the most terrible of all refutations — the 
 moral sense of mankind has outgrown it : a 
 
98 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 benign change having come over the race render- 
 ing obsolete much both of the faiths and fears of 
 former times. Yet he is a poor interpreter, and 
 no poet at all, who does not see that those crude 
 dogmas, modified by the forms of Roman law 
 and the feudal system, were striving to give intel- 
 lectual shape to the same ineffable truth which 
 we feel to-day, and cannot utter. It towers 
 above all theory, from Anslem to Bushnell, and 
 we may well be dumb before it, smitten mute 
 where speech is vain, yet softened, thrilled, and 
 redeemed by a reality which we feel and know, 
 but can in nowise define or explain. 
 
 So of all our dogmas. They are but picture- 
 conceptions of spiritual truth, useful and often 
 beautiful, but they ought not to be made tests of 
 fellowship, much less occasions for marring that 
 charity without which the most perfect theology 
 is nothing. In the olden time one man formu- 
 lated his faith into a series of dogmas, and called 
 it the truth. Another man did the same thing ; 
 then the two began to hate each other with an 
 unholy hatred, and there is an epitome of some 
 of the blackest chapters in history. All of which 
 admonishes us, once more, that in every form of 
 faith there is some truth which can be seen, 
 perhaps, from no other angle, and that the Truth 
 is greater than all dogmas. We, who have such 
 a rich inheritance of duty and hope in common, 
 have enough to do to live kindly among our- 
 
THE PROSE OF FAITH 99 
 
 selves, without quarrelling about the prose of 
 faith, least of all when its lofty and sustaining 
 poetry is the treasure of each. 
 
 One theology goeth and another theology 
 Cometh, each speaking the language of its day, 
 but the faith abides and the divine life in the 
 soul of man moves on. Forever the human race 
 reaches out its hands and shapes some system, 
 some creed, and declares it to be final, and be- 
 hold ! something flowing and eternal in the race 
 itself presently splits that creed to pieces. Other 
 and nobler systems are built, each shutting us 
 from heaven " with a dome more vast," but they 
 in their turn suffer a like fate, as man learns to 
 read here a hne and there a stanza of " that flow- 
 ing music which is life." Always the gain of 
 truth is richer ; always the outlook is larger, and 
 the vista longer. Thus the living faith by which 
 men live grows from more to more, and more of 
 reverence and charity within us dwell, as mind 
 and soul, ^according well, make one music as 
 before, but vaster. 
 
 *' Our little systems have their day, 
 
 They have their day and cease to be : 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 
 
1 
 
 V 
 
 TRUTH FOR TO-DAY 
 
 "^RUTH is a marvellous thing. It can 
 fill our eyes with tears and our hearts 
 with joy ; it can make us die for it ; but 
 once we attempt to imprison it in a system, it 
 eludes us. Where men fail is not in seeking to 
 formulate truth, as they must do if they are to 
 think at all, but in striving for finality ; * either 
 mistaking a segment for the whole, or else trying 
 to close the circle. As Flaubert said, the great- 
 est geniuses never conclude : God alone may do 
 that. Whether from the limits of human think- 
 ing or from the profundity of divine things, the 
 great difficulties remain, and our solutions of 
 them are not final. Faith in " the gospel of 
 
 1 " The Final Faith," by W. D. Mackensie (1910). Surely the 
 final faith, if it ever appears, will be less intricate than the 
 system of dogma here set forth, which involves elaborate ex- 
 plication, theory, and argument. Not content with faith as a 
 g-frai perception, — a consensus of the insight, experience and 
 aspiration of all devout men, — the author gives us a system, 
 noble indeed but still a system, much of which is still in debate. 
 A final faith must be able to live in new and changed times, 
 must be compatible with vast and unimagined developments of 
 thought and life, and the " final faith " here proposed does not 
 seem to meet the test. 
 
 100 
 
TRUTH FOR TO-DAY lOI 
 
 going on," too reverent of God and too proud 
 of the spirit of man to settle everything, is our 
 true attitude, with no ambition but to know- 
 more truth, and richer. 
 
 In his ** Foundations of Behef," Arthur Bal- 
 four discusses the question as to whether there 
 can be such a thing as a synthetic theology. He 
 concludes that no man can live long enough to 
 acquire, even if he could manipulate, the intel- 
 lectual apparatus necessary for such an under- 
 taking. Nor do we yet need such a Messiah of 
 theology, though the reconstruction of religious 
 thought is now perhaps sufficiently advanced to 
 permit a consensus of positive and united em- 
 phasis upon the great realities of faith about 
 which we seem able, at last, to agree. While 
 there is always a demand for fresh, original in- 
 sight, it seems clear that the chief gain in the 
 near future will come, rather, through the larger 
 fellowship towards which we are tending. The 
 profound change of heart now taking place 
 everywhere, in all sects, through interchange of 
 thought, courtesy, and personal touch, will mean 
 the bringing together of truths long held apart, 
 and must result, it would seem, in a more inclu- 
 sive vision. 
 
 An example in point is the old contention, so 
 bitterly debated, as to the person of Christ and 
 His place in the thought and faith of the race. 
 Carlyle said truly that if Arius had won, Chris- 
 
I02 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 tianity would have dwindled into a legend ; for 
 when Athanasius stood against the world he was 
 fighting for that which is most distinctive and 
 vital in Christian faith. The religious interest of 
 that day centred, not in the dogma of the trinity, 
 but in the question of the future life of the soul ; 
 and if the debate found focus about the person of 
 Christ, it was because all saw that the fate of our 
 race is bound up with Him. Athanasius stood 
 for the whole truth — that Christ was real God 
 and real man joined, a revelation of what God is, 
 of what man is, and of what their life together 
 may be. Mankind, he held, is perfected in 
 Christ and restored, as it was made in the begin- 
 ning, with greater grace. Since in Christ hu- 
 manity was joined with deity, man must be akin 
 to God, and his hope of a life beyond the grave 
 is not in vain. 
 
 The Church has fought valiantly for its faith in 
 the deity of Christ, and rightly so, but that was 
 only one-half of the truth as Athanasius saw it. 
 The other half was neglected, if not forgotten, 
 along with the Arian dogma that God and man 
 are so utterly apart and distinct that a plastic 
 medium is needed to bridge the chasm between 
 them — a conception which, banished from the 
 creeds, took refuge in the institutions of the 
 mediaeval church. Channing, Emerson and Mar- 
 tineau brought forward the truth of the divinity 
 of man, so long overlooked, and for so doing we 
 
TRUTH FOR TO-DAY 103 
 
 owe them honour. What should follow from 
 this reunion of truths so sadly estranged is a vi- 
 sion of a race consubstantial with God, issuing 
 in a sincere confession of the deity of Christ and 
 the deity of man. These two truths are not con- 
 tradictory, but one. They stand or fall together, 
 and if we are to have a complete Christianity we 
 must hold both. 
 
 Of course, such a vision of truth must be 
 more than an achievement of the intellect, more 
 than an adventure in theory, else it will result in 
 a discipHne in confusion. It must be a fruit of 
 experience in the moral process of living, a real- 
 ity authenticating itself in the final test amid the 
 trial, tears, and triumph of righteous and devout 
 souls. Faith of any kind is valid only in so far 
 as it resolves itself into character and the ideal 
 forces that shape character, making us such men 
 as without it we could not be. So tested, faith 
 in Christ is more than faith in His deity, more 
 than the faith that He once lived, died and rose 
 again, and that He still lives among men. One 
 may believe all that as a theory and remain a 
 slave to greed and passion. No ; it is actually to 
 trust and follow the awful yet gracious and ever- 
 living God who is in Christ and in ourselves, to 
 love and obey whom, at whatever cost, is the 
 way of life. With such an experience we read 
 the story of Jesus in the days of His flesh in a 
 new light and with a new sense of reality. In- 
 
I04 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 Stead of being a record of long ago, we become 
 wayfarers with Him in the beauty and sorrow, 
 the joy and awe of His hfe, and the Gospels seem 
 but " the broken memories of days He walked 
 with us." Then we serve our fellow souls with a 
 new zest, knowing that there is something divine 
 in every man, no matter how sodden or sin-be- 
 spattered he may be, if we can but reach it. Nor 
 can we ever reach it save through the divine 
 within ourselves, mediated through a tender, tact- 
 ful human ministry. 
 
 After this manner faith may be not only unified, 
 but greatly enriched, when it is studied as it 
 stands in the service of life. Some would have 
 us think that religious truth is thus growing out 
 of all recognition, like the letters cut in the 
 bark of a young tree. Others wonder how, if this 
 be true, there can be any fixed standard or crite- 
 rion of that growth. A building may grow, but 
 if the building materials also grow, the results 
 would seem to be like those of the croquet-party 
 in " Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." On 
 the other side, it may be said that the wonder- 
 land has been here a long time, and that the 
 ancients bequeathed to us some very profound 
 and revealing insights. No doubt we know more 
 than our fathers knew about the world, its laws 
 and forces ; but few will affirm that we surpass, 
 if indeed we equal, Dante, Fenelon or St. Francis 
 in our acquaintance with divine realities. One 
 
TRUTH FOR TO-DAY I05 
 
 reads the ** Confessions " of St. Augustine and 
 finds there not only a splendour of genius, and 
 an exquisite literary grace, but a profound and 
 passionate religious life not easy to discover in our 
 laughing and logical age. Even Newman, who 
 was a citizen of eternity, lived as a pilgrim and a 
 stranger among us.* 
 
 Ages differ, and the chief difference between 
 our age and that of St. Francis would seem to be 
 that \Ve have more light from without than the an- 
 cient m3^stic, and less from within. Surely no man 
 ever brought together two things more unlike 
 than Masterman did when he wrote his essay on 
 *' Chicago and Francis,^' — the smoky city, with 
 its medley of races and its babel of voices, and 
 the gentle saint who preached poverty and talked 
 to the doves.^ It is a far cry from State Street, 
 with its din and jam, to the unclouded days and 
 hot nights of Umbria, when St. Francis lived his 
 life of beauty and pity. That was an age of art, 
 of poetry, of beautiful and strange personalities, 
 over whose long, still days hung an air of 
 mystery : an age, also, of rough brutality, vocal 
 with violence and misery, when, in the Salimbene 
 picture of the scene, wolves howled under the 
 
 1 A stranger, it now seems, even in the church in which he 
 sought his home, as we learn from the new " Life of Newman," 
 by Wilfred Ward (1911), two rich volumes made up, for the 
 most part, of letters and diaries of the Roman period. 
 
 2" In Peril of Change," by C. F. G. Masterman (1905). 
 
I06 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 walls of Italian towns and at night entered 
 and devoured men. There was a blithe beauty 
 in those sons of St. Francis who, though pilgrims 
 seeking a country, went singing through the 
 world, cheered by an abiding vision of the Un- 
 seen. All now is changed, and how different the 
 picture of the world as a factory, with its gray 
 smoke-cloud of puffing industrialism, from the 
 world as a cloister. 
 
 " There will never be any saints in America," 
 said the heroine of a recent novel who visited 
 Assisi, and whose only wonder was that St. Francis 
 and St. Claire never married. 
 
 " No, no ! " was the reply, " instead of St. 
 Francis preaching poverty, we shall, maybe, 
 have men who will lessen poverty, and make the 
 world a more comfortable place." 
 
 Not simply a more comfortable place, let us 
 hope, but a theatre for the working out of great 
 human ideals of liberty, justice and fraternity ; a 
 world filling up with those " large, eternal 
 fellows " who do the thing that needs to be done 
 for the joy of doing it. To-day men beheve — 
 and, verily, they do well — that poverty, disease, 
 crime, war, ennui, and numberless other evils, 
 spawn of ignorance, need not and must not be. 
 They are building for utility — taming forces, 
 cleansing swamps, moving mountains, mobilizing 
 the men of good-will, driving the piles for a new 
 and better order of society ; and when this work 
 
TRUTH FOR TO-DAY 107 
 
 is done, or rather in the doing of it, there will be 
 born a new art, a new humanism, and a larger 
 faith. When we leave the Bunyan allegory and 
 come to the Hawthorne story of the *• Celestial 
 Railway," we find a bridge spanning the Slough 
 of Despond, and Vanity Fair is a salubrious 
 village in which passengers stop off for a few 
 days. Not only is the whole tone of our social 
 life higher and purer, but great social wrongs, 
 overlooked in the age of Bunyan, rise up before 
 us in all their horror. As soon as the forces of 
 the New Reformation have grown strong enough, 
 it is believed that Christian faith and modern 
 science will unite to quicken the heart and mind 
 of humanity, and lift it, on a wave of common 
 joy and hope, into a nobler life. 
 
 Still, all must feel that something fine and 
 precious has gone out of our hfe, as though a 
 sweet note had '< trembled away into silence." 
 We have come to a kinder knowledge of man, 
 and, alas ! to what can only be described as a 
 kinder ignorance of God. There was something 
 in the soul of St. Francis — a fellowship with God, 
 a sense of the Unseen, issuing in a vision of the 
 world as love and comradeship — more precious 
 by far than all the gold in all the marble hills. 
 We need to unite the passionate religious faith of 
 a Tauler, or a Wesley, with the practical activity 
 of our day — a blend of the " holy stillness " of 
 Christina Rossetti and the ardent humanitarian- 
 
Io8 THE UNITY OF FAITH 
 
 ism which made EHzabeth Browning a prophetess 
 of purity, piety, and pity. There is need of a 
 new •' Iinitatio ChrisH," such, perhaps, as Ben- 
 jamin Jowett projected, whereof we read in his 
 " Life and Letters " — a •' new Thomas a Kempis, 
 going as deeply into the foundations of hfe, 
 and yet not revolting the common sense of the 
 twentieth century," combining, '* in a manual of 
 piety, religious fervour with perfect good sense 
 and knowledge of the world." It is not a new 
 religion that we need, but religion renewed ; the 
 old faith with larger realizations and wider appli- 
 cations to these new and changed times — but still 
 the same Gospel that stirred the soul of Luther, 
 and the same Spirit that whispered about the 
 heart of St. Francis when he bowed in prayer. 
 
 Life must come before theology, now as at the 
 beginning, as Rudolf Eucken is telling us with 
 so much insight and eloquence. When Edward 
 Irving began his ministry in Glasgow, well-nigh 
 ninety years ago, he resolved to <• demonstrate a 
 higher style of Christianity — something more 
 magnanimous, more heroical than this age is 
 accustomed to." This lesson is for us — a higher 
 style of Christianity is more than ever our need. 
 Let us give ourselves to it, nor think it too great 
 an achievement, interpreting that we do know in 
 the language of our age, as the teachers of the 
 past spoke for God to their vanished times. 
 
The Culture of the Soul 
 
 What is personality ? How is it con- 
 stituted ? "What power have we to 
 modify, enlarge, elevate and expand it ? 
 
THE SECRET OF POWER 
 
 I 
 
 ONE charm of the hfe of Jesus, as we 
 read it in the Gospels, is its graphic 
 though meagre detail, its exquisite brief 
 touches of sidelight and colour. Few scenes in 
 that life are more vivid, for example, than the 
 account of His first return to Nazareth, as given 
 by the evangelist Luke. On a Sabbath day, 
 when He wends His way to the synagogue, the 
 fact is recalled that this was His custom. News 
 of His works in other places had been noised 
 abroad, and those who had known Him as a 
 youth were gathered to see and hear Him. 
 When He stands up to read, and the Book is 
 given to Him, we see Him unrolling the page 
 until He *• finds the place " ; and when He has 
 finished, again we see Him close the roll, stretch- 
 ing out His hand to give it to an attendant, and 
 sitting down. We feel the breathless expecta- 
 tion, when " the eyes of all that were in the 
 synagogue were fastened on Him." 
 
 Whether the writer himself was present, or it 
 was told him by some one else who was present, 
 the narrative bears all the marks of the recollec- 
 
 III 
 
112 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 tion of an eye-witness. Not otherwise could it 
 have reproduced the very atmosphere of the scene, 
 the Teacher with His grave dignity of intense 
 stiUness, and the mingled curiosity and criticism 
 of His hearers. The incident suggests many 
 things, and among them that, in the simple act 
 of opening and closing a book, the manner of 
 the Master had about it something personal, 
 unique, and unforgettable. Here, evidently, was 
 one man who, in recalling that Sabbath morning 
 scene— it may have been twenty or thirty years 
 after — could not blot out of memory the appear- 
 ance and bearing of Jesus as He opened, and 
 again as He closed, the book of prophecy. 
 Something in His manner, it may have been 
 only the simple majesty and grace of His move- 
 ment — or it may have been the air of finality with 
 which He closed the scroll of prophecy of which 
 He was the fulfillment — left an unfading image. 
 
 It is the privilege of personality to make the 
 smallest things memorable, and the life of Jesus 
 is rich in examples of this kind. In the greatest 
 history in the world the writers pause to say that 
 He who made that history stooped to take a 
 little child in His arms ; that He turned when 
 held by violent hands, and looked at Peter ; that 
 He made as though He would have gone further 
 one solemn eventide. These are not intrusions 
 on an otherwise exquisite narrative, nor do they 
 impair the majesty of that incomparable record. 
 
THE SECRET OF POWER II3 
 
 Rather do they partake of its essential dignity 
 and beauty, as cloudlets gather and are transfig- 
 ured by the sunset splendour. No wonder 
 Robert Browning saw in these little touches, at 
 once so graceful and so artless — wherein a great 
 soul made the commonplace unique, because He 
 was unique — so many signatures of the authen- 
 ticity of the record. Such strokes, so deft and 
 so revealing, and withal so natural, are beyond 
 the skill of art, much less of artifice. 
 
 The personality of Jesus impressed itself indel- 
 ibly upon every act of His life, and He did all 
 things, whether great or small, with a certain 
 calm and grave completeness. When He called 
 back the daughter of Jairus from the dead, and 
 felt her hand grow warm in His palm, He did 
 not forget, while all around amazement reigned, 
 to remind her mother that a child, a-journeying 
 so, is hungry, and that she must be a mother 
 still. His smallest act, which in any other biog- 
 raphy would have dropped out of the history, is 
 .clothed with a nameless beauty, as elusive and 
 uncapturable as it is arresting and irresistible. 
 If He plucked a lily of the field, it became an 
 emblem of the loving care of God ; and if He 
 closed a Book, He closed it as never man had 
 closed it before. And by a strange literary mys- 
 tery, His words, coming to us afar, have about 
 them the very quality of Him who uttered tliem, 
 as though the fragrance of His spirit clung to 
 
114 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 them ; and that is why they unlock in us secret 
 chambers accessible to no other speech. The 
 same words, if uttered by another, have not that 
 power, lacking that indefinable charm. 
 
 II 
 
 What is true of the words of Jesus is equally 
 true of the great and simple truths they tell, 
 whereof we need so often to be minded. It is 
 not by logic, nor by dogmas — " truths packed 
 for transportation," as Phillips Brooks used to 
 say — that our faith is kept ahve and aglow ; but 
 by the touch of spirit upon spirit, the contact of 
 soul with soul. Persons influence us, voices 
 melt us, looks subdue us, and it is only when 
 Truth is made flesh and dwells among us that its 
 presence is a power. Because this is so, only 
 when the man of the pulpit forgets that he has a 
 name and an isolated soul, and becomes the 
 embodiment alike of human need and divine 
 grace, does he stir us deeply, tenderly, vitally, 
 awakening memories of the time when the heart 
 was pure, while beckoning us to become that 
 which we have so often dreamed. This is more 
 than eloquence ; it is life. At such times the 
 Unseen seems to drop its veil, and the Life of 
 the Spirit invites us with the lure of its own 
 beauty, putting to shame the neglect which eats 
 away our hidden riches. 
 
 One of the great sermons of Newman at Ox- 
 
THE SECRET OF POWER II5 
 
 ford had this for its thesis : that the influence of 
 personality has from the first been the chief 
 means of bearing spiritual truth to the human 
 soul, and a sermon more fundamentally true 
 and beautiful does not exist.* How else can 
 this apparently incommunicable thing called 
 religious faith be taught ? Is it true, as William 
 James held, that a mystical experience is of 
 authority and value only to him who possesses 
 it, a dark lantern of the spirit which none can 
 see by but the man who carries it ? Far from it ; 
 and it is here that we come upon the truth of 
 which Newman — like Phillips Brooks, and every 
 great leader of the souls of men — was at once a 
 teacher and a shining example. The personal 
 equation in faith — the " illative sense," as he 
 called it — by its very nature mystical, can be 
 altered only by personality which is also mys- 
 tical. Hence the priceless value of a man like 
 Newman himself, whose genius, full of " that 
 within us not ourselves which makes for right- 
 eousness " and faith, was a " kindly light " in a 
 beshadowed age. Few have ever equalled him 
 as a teacher of the soul of man, as a follower of 
 the subtle motions of the spirit, and the sudden 
 starts of conscience, in moments 
 
 '* When the light of sense goes out. 
 But with a flash that has revealed 
 The invisible world." 
 
 ^" University Sermons," by J. H. Newman, Sermon V(i87i). 
 
Il6 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 With what impressiveness it comes home to 
 even the humblest teacher of faith, that it is not 
 so much what we do or say that wins men to the 
 higher hfe, but what we are ; our characters 
 more than our tenets. George Ehot has de- 
 scribed this blessed influence of one loving soul 
 over another — •' not calculable by algebra, not 
 deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, 
 mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny 
 seed is quickened and bursts forth into tall stem 
 and broad leaf and glowing tasselled flower." 
 Ideas, she tells us — remembering, no doubt, the 
 life of her aunt, who lives again in Dinah Morris 
 — are poor, pale ghosts which pass athwart us in 
 their vapour and cannot make themselves felt. 
 But " sometimes they are made flesh ; they 
 breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch 
 us with soft, responsive hands, they look at us 
 with sad, sincere eyes, and speak to us in appeal- 
 ing tones ; they are clothed in a living soul, with 
 all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then 
 their presence is a power, then they shake us 
 like a passion, and we are drawn after them with 
 gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn after 
 flame." 
 
 Not in the pulpit alone, but through all the 
 ramifications of human fellowship, it is person- 
 ality that tells ; as, for instance, in the influence of 
 a great teacher on " Tom Brown's School Days " 
 — a book which, despite its " muscular Christian- 
 
THE SECRET OF POWER II7 
 
 ity " which would prove its faith by fisticuffs, 
 after the manner of boy rehgion, remains a 
 classic in its way. Who can forget the visit of 
 Tom to the Rugby Chapel after the death of Dr. 
 Arnold, his honoured and dear teacher : how he 
 walked humbly down to the lowest bench and 
 sat once more in the very seat which he had oc- 
 cupied in his first Sunday at the famous school. 
 Old memories rushed over him, form after form 
 of boys, nobler and braver than he, returned, 
 and seemed to rebuke him. But above all rose 
 the image of that stately, firm and noble man, 
 sleeping now beneath the altar, by whom his 
 young soul had been awakened and led to a 
 vision of what it is to be a man. Walking up 
 the altar steps, his eyes dim with tears, he knelt 
 hopefully, and laid down there his share of a 
 burden which had proved itself too heavy for 
 him to bear in his own strength. 
 
 ** Here let us leave him," says his historian — 
 " where better could we leave him, than at the 
 altar, before which he had first caught a glimpse 
 of the glory of his birthright, and felt the draw- 
 ing of the bond which links all living souls to- 
 gether into one brotherhood — at the grave 
 beneath the altar of him, who had opened his 
 eyes to see that glory, and softened his heart till 
 it could feel that bond. Let us not be too hard 
 on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the 
 tomb and him who lies there than of the altar 
 
Il8 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have 
 to be gone through, I beheve, by all young and 
 brave souls, who must win their way through 
 hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the 
 King and Lord of heroes." 
 
 There are souls who, worn thin and penurious, 
 make even great things dwindle at their touch, 
 while others, throbbing with gracious power, 
 transform ordinary tasks into something rich and 
 strange. Some men and women are gifted with a 
 peculiar and persuasive fascination, which their 
 fellows can neither resist nor define ; they are 
 made to be loved, made to lead and command. 
 
 *♦ All familiar things they touch, 
 
 All common words they speak, become 
 Like forms and sounds of a diviner world ; " 
 
 every word a revelation, every gesture an event. 
 None can tell of what that mystic power con- 
 sists, least of all those who are so fortunate as to 
 possess it. It is an indefinable quality, a kind of 
 " ethereal fifth essence " which, like magic, gives 
 some men and women an unexplained influence 
 and ascendency over us. This is what we ordi- 
 narily mean — a something too fine and subtle, in- 
 deed, to be put into words — when we say that a 
 man has personality, or that he has it not. And 
 this is the secret of power, for good or ill, in hu- 
 man life. 
 
II 
 
 WHAT IS PERSONALITY? 
 
 I 
 
 THAT personality is a matter of birth or 
 accident, like fair features or dark blue 
 eyes, is a prevailing impression with 
 many. That it is most marked in the less sanc- 
 tified types of humanity has, strangely enough, 
 been the claim of more. That it is lost utterly 
 in the upper airs of being, where the infinite 
 woos the finite into its mystery, has apparently 
 been the teaching all along the mystic ranks 
 of philosophy and religion, from the " sacred 
 seven " down. All of these views would seem 
 to be equally removed from the truth, which 
 assuredly does not render what Rudolf Eucken 
 calls the " redemptive making of personal- 
 ity " * either impossible, undesirable, or useless. 
 One of these views leaves us in the clutch of fate, 
 as clay in the hand of the potter ; another ends 
 in pantheism, which dissolves the pearl of great 
 value ; while the second, though widely held, is 
 at war with the facts and nothing short of absurd. 
 All of which may justify an inquiry as to what 
 
 ^ " Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy," by Royce Gibson (1909). 
 
 119 
 
I20 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 personality really is, how it is constituted, and 
 what power we have to modify, enlarge and 
 ennoble it. 
 
 Words, when turned from their original import 
 and perverted by loose usage, exert a fatal influ- 
 ence on thought and belief. The word persona, 
 from which our English word person is derived, 
 meant, originally, the mask worn by actors on the 
 classic stage, all the parts in Greek and Roman 
 drama being performed in masks. The mask 
 was called in Latin persona, {xom.persono, meaning 
 ** I sound through," hence very naturally it came to 
 signify the part performed, the character person- 
 ated. From the stage of the theatre the word 
 passed to the scenes of life, and person denoted 
 the character which a man presented to the world, 
 the part he enacted in life. For whether in guise 
 or disguise, every man is an actor and plays a 
 part, and all that we really know of a man is the 
 part he plays ; the real man is never seen. Per- 
 haps we are justified in using the words person 
 and individual the one for the other, since all we 
 know of individuals is their persons. Only, we 
 must keep it ever \x\. mind that there is something 
 deeper in a man than his person, and that though 
 the person is the outbirth of the individual, and 
 is constituted by the individual, it nevertheless is 
 not the individual; is not identical with the in- 
 nermost being, but something exterior and dis- 
 tinct. We live in a world where each one is a 
 
WHAT IS PERSONALITY? 121 
 
 veiled mystery to his fellows, and even our best 
 friend is like Eros whose face Psyche sought to 
 behold, with what tragedy we know. 
 
 Three things must be kept apart in our thought, 
 if we would think clearly in this matter : the un- 
 known something which lies below all else as the 
 ground of our being ; the conscious individual 
 self; and the person.^ Happily it is with the 
 last of these that we have to do here, else this 
 inquiry would soon lose itself in waveless depths 
 which no man may fathom. The person, as has 
 been said, is the image a man presents to the 
 world, his character as shown in word and act as 
 he moves in the scenes of life. Using the word 
 in this sense, we may ask what relation does the 
 person bear to the individual — that is, how much 
 of the individual goes into the person ? All, it 
 may be answered, that given conditions — by 
 which is meant native endowment, temperament, 
 education, habit, social fellowship and fortune — 
 will allow. No one can say absolutely, even 
 with regard to himself, that the individual is 
 expressed in the person. In some men we feel 
 — perhaps also in ourselves — that there are capa- 
 bilities which are never brought out in their lives, 
 which find no scope in their environment, and 
 which remain unused. Yet the very feeling 
 
 ^ See a paper on " Personality," by Dr. F. H. Hedge, found 
 in a volume of his essays entitled, " Martin Luther and Other 
 Essays" (i8S8), to which the present paper is richly indebted. 
 
122 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 which such men inspire in us is a part of their 
 personahty, since it belongs to them to create in 
 us an impression of reserved or unused power. 
 So, if we may not say that the person is all there 
 is in a man, we can say that it is all there is of 
 him. At least it is all that we know of him, and 
 all that the world knows. 
 
 So that personahty is a matter of expression, 
 and in nothing do men differ more than in their 
 ability to put themselves into their words and 
 deeds. It may be true, as Emerson held, that all 
 souls are equally rich — that what Plato thought 
 all may think, what the saints have felt all may 
 feel — but by a fine art of life Plato and St. Francis 
 gave lovely and abiding shape to the beauty 
 that was in them. Emerson argued that such 
 beauty is in all of us, potentially at least, else we 
 would not recognize it when it is revealed in others. 
 If this be so, many men are like the dear old 
 woman in the George Eliot story who died un- 
 happy for fear her husband would not find the 
 keys to the blue closet up-stairs. They live with 
 many closets locked, and take the keys with them 
 when they die. Those closets may be full of treas- 
 ure ; they may be empty and bare ; all we know 
 is that they are closed. Some natures seem 
 almost transparent, but while each may have a 
 unique and precious beauty in his own soul, it is 
 too often but dimly seen. Nor is this strange. 
 Our human lot is nowhere better described than 
 
WHAT IS PERSONALITY? 1 23 
 
 by Robert Browning in " Paracelsus," when he 
 says that there is an inmost centre of truth in us 
 all — \h.Q fuiikleiji of the German mystics, perhaps 
 — but around. 
 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in ; 
 A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
 Binds it, and makes all error." 
 
 Not only all error, but all ugliness as well ; for 
 the art of life consists in opening out a way 
 whence what is deepest within us may escape 
 into our words and acts. Whether the ^f^gy of 
 ourselves which men see — our personality — is a 
 true likeness or a cartoon, depends not only upon 
 our sincerity but also upon our lucidity of life. 
 Whether a man write a poem or hve one, he must 
 have " a heart in the business," as Gil Bias cried 
 on the road to Merida, but he must also have a 
 certain grace of art. By as much as he puts 
 himself into his work, transfers his spirit into it — 
 just as, it is said, the Arab sage, in practicing 
 with gems, looses their spirit in his cruce — by so 
 much does he win personality, which is the plot 
 alike of literature, philosophy, and hfe. But the 
 culture of personality is of all arts the most 
 difficult, for the raw material of human nature 
 is obstinate and resists the impress of the ideal 
 in a thousand v/ays. Hence the most beautiful 
 thing on earth is a pure and noble soul express- 
 
124 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 ing itself ia a form befitting its nobility and 
 beauty. 
 
 II 
 
 What amazed Robert Louis Stevenson, as it 
 must amaze any thinking man, is that men pay 
 more attention to the making of a fortune than 
 to the making of a personality. For our per- 
 sonality — the image of ourselves among men — is 
 all that remains of us on earth when our bodily 
 form has fallen into dust. We cast ourselves into 
 our action, and the cast remains ; all else vanishes. 
 To live on the earth is thus not to live while the 
 body lasts, and then no more ; it is to live forever. 
 From this kind of personal immortality, vague as 
 it may seem, there is no escape. In this sense, if 
 in no other, the words of Jesus, uttered when He 
 was about to vanish out of sight — " Lo, I am 
 with you always, even unto the end of the world" 
 — are eternally true. He is with us still — richly 
 and divinely with us in the image of Himself 
 which He stamped on the world ; with us, subtly 
 colouring the life of mankind, as the Friar said of 
 the supposedly dead hero in " Much Ado About 
 Nothing " : " The idea of his life shall sweetly 
 creep into the current of our imagination." So, 
 in less degree, are all the prophets, teachers and 
 saints who have stretched a spiritual firmament 
 over our workaday world, and set their names 
 in it for suns and stars. 
 
 All who were once here are still here : their 
 
WHAT IS PERSONALITY? 1 25 
 
 words are they, their acts are they ; and though 
 both be forgotten, their influence survives ; their 
 person is immortal. What other men dreamed 
 and said and did in the past makes a network 
 about us, which we cannot escape. When we 
 try to annul a contract, the thoughts of the dead 
 jurists of England, living though their ashes have 
 long been cold, forbid us. If we would over- 
 reach a fellow man, the words of an old Roman 
 lawyer, who died before Justinian, estop us. 
 This act, Moses commands ; that, King Alfred. 
 Thus the dead rule and the living obey, as, for 
 weal or woe, the men of the future will obey us 
 when our lives have been added to the momentum 
 of the great body of influence and law. No 
 wonder the pioneers of our race have found 
 comfort in this fact, as in the shadow of a great 
 rock in a weary land, taking thence the courage 
 to labour for the right in face of obloquy or 
 apathy, assured that by so doing they make it 
 easier for the men of to-morrow to see the truth 
 and do the right. 
 
 The men of Islam say that after death the soul 
 is made to cross a narrow bridge over a gulf of 
 fire, on its way to its fate. On that bridge it is 
 met by a spectre, which being questioned as to 
 what it is, answers, " I am the spirit of thy life." 
 In the case of every soul that has worn the 
 burden of flesh this is a fact — the spirit of its life 
 survives. Our earth teems with such. They are 
 
126 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 all about us — not as swarming entities in the air, 
 but as influences, ideas, forces derived from all 
 the shadowy past. Every soul that has lived on 
 the earth has by its hfe added something, though 
 it may have been only a mite, to make the world 
 what it is. The strong man added his labour 
 and sorrow, the httle child its smile and song ; for, 
 as George Ehot said, " that things are not so ill 
 with you and me as they might have been is half 
 owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden 
 life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Many of the 
 noblest minds of the race have wished for no 
 other immortality; and, as some one has well 
 said, for him who is careless of this, no other 
 immortality can yield much joy. 
 
 If the soul sees, after death, what passes on 
 this earth, and watches over the welfare of those 
 it loves, then must its keenest joy consist in seeing 
 its good influences widen out, as rivulets widen 
 into rivers ; and its sharpest pang in seeing its 
 evil influences causing mischief and misery. 
 Lofty and noble, albeit touched with plaintive 
 wistfulness, was the prayer of George Eliot, in 
 which all of us may devoutly unite — though we 
 may not hope to have it answered for us in the 
 same far-reaching manner that it has been an- 
 swered for her — when she asked that she might 
 join " the choir invisible of those immortal dead 
 who live again in minds made better by their 
 presence," and 
 
WHAT IS PERSONALITY? I27 
 
 **Be toother souls 
 A cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love, 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffuse 
 And in diffusion ever more intense." 
 
 Yet, even so, it is a dim destiny for which we 
 thus ask, and far below what we have reason to 
 hope. Vague indeed is the dream of living again 
 in the lives of others, as influences urging them to 
 vaster thoughts, or else as our inherited tendencies 
 are the pale immortality in us of those who went 
 before us. If this be all, even if our prayer were 
 answered, it could only mean that at last, after 
 myriads of dusty deaths, in some distant time a 
 few men would be utterly good and utterly wise ; 
 but only for a brief time, for they too would soon 
 vanish. No ; the far off divine event, hinted to 
 us in the finale of " In Memoriam," stirs us only 
 when we feel that we are to see that victory. 
 What is immortahty, if to attain it our souls here 
 and now be lost or so changed that we have no 
 memory^of the people and things we loved, of the 
 suffering we bore or inflicted, of even the sins that 
 made us glad only to make us, later, sad ? Though 
 Theocritus and his songs be remembered, does 
 he remember the island of which he sang, its soft 
 skies and its violet seas ? What to him is an 
 eternity of fame in his long-echoing song, if he 
 remember not ? 
 
 That there is another kind of immortality, a 
 
128 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 contiiiLiing life of the individual self, some of us 
 are confident; just as we are sure that Jesus is 
 with us in ways more dynamic than as an image 
 of ideal beauty, " a sovereign legend of pity," 
 and an influence for good. That the soul, the 
 innermost being, is immortal needs no proof, 
 since it belongs to the nature of an entity, if such 
 it be, or to a force, as it certainly is, to persist. 
 That it will exist as a conscious individual self, 
 retaining love, memory, and fellowship, we can- 
 not prove. Yet of this, too, some of us are in- 
 creasingly assured, having, as we think, ample 
 basis for a just and victorious hope. While we 
 do not know the future, whether far or near, a 
 vision of the fathomless depths out of which the 
 soul has come, and the unfulfilled powers with 
 which it is endowed, give intimation of its power 
 of going on. Think of it how we will, the only 
 way out of unworthy views of both God and man 
 is the faith that He who made us what we are 
 will lead us to what we ought to be. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE ABYSMAL DEPTHS 
 
 OF the nature of the deeper self, which hes 
 below personality, much has been said 
 of late years. Many lights have been 
 thrown upon it, many plummets dropped 
 into it, but it is not clear that we know 
 much more about what lies in that abys- 
 mal depth than Plato knew. Like him, we must 
 still speak of these things in myths, parables, 
 and symbols, in what he called " lies by approx- 
 imation," — and lies they must needs be, since we 
 cannot tell the truth about these veiled mysteries. 
 Those who talk so wisely of the Platonic idea of 
 the soul ought, in all fairness, to specify which 
 one of his ideas they have in mind. For he had 
 many and various thoughts about the nature of 
 the soul and its wayfaring in the future, and ap- 
 parently none of them were such as are so often 
 ascribed to him, which are often only exigeses 
 of his misunderstood metaphors into dogmat- 
 ically asserted metaphysical entities. As was 
 said of another, Plato was too wise to be wholly 
 a poet, yet too truly a poet to be implacably wise. 
 Only a word can be said about what is called 
 the modern " science of the subconscious," and 
 
 129 
 
I30 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 it must be a word of grave caution, lest we find 
 ourselves in a bog. * It is true that a part of our 
 nature, perhaps its largest part, lies below the 
 level of conscious feeling, thought, and will, and 
 that our surface self is indeed small in compari- 
 son with what is hidden beneath it in " the centre, 
 the fund, the bottom, of the soul," as William 
 Law would say. It may be that the real ma- 
 chinery of our being, like that of an ocean liner, 
 is far below, but the captain and the pilot must 
 be on deck and at their posts, or the ship will 
 come to grief. Nor must we forget that much 
 else is hidden in those mysterious recesses be- 
 sides the automatic activities of our nature, such 
 as our hereditary tendencies and the like. There, 
 side by side with the least known powers of man, 
 are also his most animal instincts, his ugly Mr. 
 Hyde, the remains of his savage ancestry ; all 
 that the soul either casts off or transmutes in its 
 
 • It has been said that William James and F. W. H. Myers are 
 to blame, if blame there be, for the present emphasis on the 
 subconscious as applied to religious experience. However 
 that may be, each knew what he was about, and neither should 
 be held to account for the deluge of pseudo-science and fantas- 
 tic nonsense which now threatens us. So potent is this charm 
 of the subliminal that even teachers of accredited acumen have 
 been enticed thereby into strange ways. When the subliminal 
 is hailed as " the Mesopotamia of Liberal Christianity " ; 
 •when the telepathic hypothesis is evoked to support the mys- 
 ticism of St. Paul (" Paul the Mystic," by J. M. Campbell, 
 1907) or to settle the question of inspiration, as though prophets 
 were inspired from below and not from above ('< The Rational 
 Basis of Orthodoxy," by A. W. Moore, 1901); when spiritism 
 
THE ABYSMAL DEPTHS I31 
 
 ascent. At least we should be careful to avoid 
 the blunder of making it appear that the subcon- 
 scious, whether as a mental or moral factor, is 
 superior to the conscious ; a view which, if fol- 
 lowed out, means fatalism and the end of moral- 
 ity. Too often, one fears, the advocates of the 
 subconscious forget the " ape and tiger" in their 
 effort to rescue an imprisoned angel. 
 
 Whether this vague region lies above, as 
 Ebrard thought, or below, as is now held, it is 
 less a region than a name, when it is not simply 
 a convenient receptacle for inconvenient facts. 
 No doubt Noah was aware of the fact that there is 
 more in the depth of the soul than he himself 
 knew — unguessed powers which crises evoke; 
 reserved strengths near at hand, glimpses of 
 hitherto unimagined beauties and horrors — but 
 
 serves to confirm ** the post mortem " life of Jesus (" Religion 
 and Experience," by J. Brierly, 1906) ; when the subconscious 
 is apparently made the basis of theology (" The New Theol- 
 ogy," by R. J, Campbell, 1907), if not the explanation of the 
 divinity of Christ, in lieu of the Kenotic theories of Germany 
 (" Personality in Christ and in Ourselves," by Wm. Sanday 
 191 1); with quaint revivals of antique superstitions wearing 
 the name of New Thought (" The Power of Silence," by 
 H. W. Dresser, pp. 59, 84ff, 1899), it is time to pause. All this 
 despite the warning of science and without its sanction. ("A 
 Symposium, Journal of Abnormal Psychology," April-May and 
 June- July, 1907; "The Subconscious," by Joseph Jastrow, 
 1906; " Personalism," by B. P. Bowne, 1908.) Why this is so, 
 and by what exigency wise men were driven or led into a blind 
 alley, Prof. G. A. Coe has pointed out, and his satire is not 
 amiss. ("American Journal of Theology, July, 1909.) 
 
132 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 he did not betake himself to that realm, imply- 
 ing, if not confessing, the defeat of thought in 
 its higher reaches. Nor did he, so far as we 
 know, exhort men to abandon the watch-tower 
 of the soul and look for God amid the shadows 
 in the basement of the mind. Character would 
 seem to be formed by conscious self-determina- 
 tions ; and the way to God, if He is to be found 
 at all, is by raising all our powers, rational and 
 moral, to their height ; not by wandering through 
 the dim passages of the subconscious, seeking 
 tne still darker relations with the under world by 
 which the subconscious has been formed, or is 
 being influenced through inarticulate memories 
 and impressions, only to fall into the abyss of the 
 unknowable. No ; we are bidden to seek those 
 things which are above, climbing out of the dark 
 caves towards a star of happy light. 
 
 Our conscious life may be only a flowing 
 mirror on the surface of the soul, reflecting the 
 stars above and the wonders below, but it is our 
 chief point of interest. Though it be only a 
 tiny plot, it is none the less our field, and about 
 it as a centre a man must unify himself, bringing 
 out of the hiddenness of his nature what treas- 
 ures * soever may be there, remaking, transmut- 
 
 ^ But Dr. Sanday, in his lectures on " Personality in Christ 
 and in Ourselves " (1911), will have it that the subconscious is 
 not only a storeroom, but a workshop ; " none the less a work- 
 shop because the work is done in the dark " (p. 38). To 
 
THE ABYSMAL DEPTHS 1 33 
 
 ing, and enriching it, and thus •' putting on the 
 divine humanity." One man has done well 
 when he has brought to the surface ore which 
 another man — like Emerson or Newman — whose 
 moral mining seems to have been done for him 
 before he was born, with less effort works into 
 shapes of beauty. Our task is to widen, deepen, 
 and heighten the area of conscious life and 
 activity, opening up the paths which permit the 
 inflow of larger life, and the fellowship of higher 
 reality. We are, as Plato said, not so much a 
 being as a becoming ; and it is only by an unrest- 
 
 which all agree — but he does not raise the question as to 
 whether there is anything in the subconscious that did not 
 originally enter through the gate of consciousness, though he 
 seems to imply that there may be a dark back door to the mind. 
 But, admit that the subconscious is a workshop : who is the 
 workman, or is the work done automatically ? If our moral life 
 is wrought out largely in this way, is it moral at all ? If our 
 communion with God, as he tells us, is also in large part of this 
 kind, is it communion ? It was the thesis of George Eliot, in 
 " Romola," that sin consists primarily not so much in the 
 motive as in the making of the motive ; that is, in the intent 
 involved in attention ; the will as applied to the choice of ideas 
 that shall frequent the mental life, and, by playing round it 
 and through it, make it after their own fashion. This thesis 
 she works out with rare insight and impressiveness ; but she 
 leaves us in no doubt as to Tito Malema's deliberate choice of 
 the ideas that poisoned his soul and wrought his downfall. 
 The work may have been done in the dark, but he initiated it 
 and furnished the pattern. It is not otherwise in the life of 
 faith, and prayer, and hope, which, however dim and half-con- 
 scious its beginnings, becomes more and more a conscious quest 
 and achievement. 
 
134 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 ing process of advance along " the inward way," 
 involving the death in us of low-born and base 
 desires, that we may attain to a personality of 
 a superior type, and begin at last fully to be. 
 Life should thus be a perpetual disclosure of a 
 beautiful soul, if we make it so, ever remember- 
 ing, as we are told in the noble passage in 
 OthellOy which, on the lips of lago, is so out of 
 character, that it may be taken to be the poet 
 himself speaking : 
 
 " 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. 
 Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our 
 wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant 
 nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up 
 thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or 
 distract it with many, either to have it sterile 
 with idleness or manured with industry, why, the 
 power and corrigible authority of this lies in our 
 wills. If the balance of our lives had not one 
 scale of reason to poise another of sensuaHty, the 
 blood and baseness of our natures would conduct 
 us to most preposterous conclusions ; but we 
 have reason to cool our raging motions, our 
 carnal stings," and so on, in several sentences 
 more of Elizabethan bluntness. 
 
 Nor is it true that the soul, in its higher 
 ranges of culture and achievement, tends to fade 
 away into the mist of impersonality. No stu- 
 dent of biography can accept that dogma. It 
 may have seemed to be true under the shadow 
 
THE ABYSMAL DEPTHS 135 
 
 of eastern pantheism, where men were appar- 
 ently lost and drowned while voyaging in divine 
 seas, but it was only seeming. If we may judge 
 by the men who have attained to the highest life, 
 it is not so. The two men in recent time of 
 whom this was most often suggested were Emer- 
 son and Wordsworth, yet no two minds stand 
 out with more vividness and beauty. Nor is it 
 so in the lives of the great mystics who assure 
 us, over and over again, that personality is not 
 lost, but becomes more real as they approach the 
 divine. As St. Augustine exclaimed, " My life 
 shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee, " * 
 and the nearer St. Paul came to Christ the more 
 vividly aware he became of his own soul. Our 
 ideals, in the deepest sense, are foregleams of 
 future possible reality, and our upward strivings 
 are prophetic of One in whom they find fulfill- 
 ment and end. 2 
 
 Of the laws of the innermost life this is not the 
 place to speak in detail, except to say that great 
 truths, when sincerely and habitually held in the 
 mind, find their way into the deepest life, and 
 shape it. Finally and at bottom every man is 
 what his thinking is. If foolish notions preside 
 over the whole sordid and tragical procession of 
 
 1 " Confessions of St. Augustine," Book X, Chap. XXVIII. 
 
 2 " The Nature of Personality," by William Temple (1911). 
 As only the saints look up references, one is tempted to tran- 
 scribe the passage (pp. 62-64), but space forbids. 
 
136 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 human vice, that fact should only serve to em- 
 phasize the power over man of great and valid 
 ideas. Since it is true that life answers to the 
 kind of ideas held in the mind, it behooves us to 
 fix authentic and abiding truths in our hearts, and 
 hold them there until they lay hold of us and 
 make us after their design. Here is the strategic 
 position in the moral life. There is no evil we 
 may not overcome, no crisis we may not face, if 
 the mind be thus armoured and the heart ruled 
 by just, sane, and lofty truths. As a man 
 thinketh in his heart, so is he, so is God near or 
 far, and so are the abysmal depths clear or dark. 
 
IV 
 
 THE WINGED VICTORY 
 
 I 
 
 WHAT is more to the purpose of these 
 studies is the inquiry as to whether 
 we can modify personaHty, and what 
 power we have to enlarge, elevate and expand it. 
 Here we meet the dogma of the unchangeableness 
 of innate tendencies in men, and the consequent 
 invariability of the primitive disposition. There 
 are those who refuse to believe in the new man, 
 or in any positive improvement in a human be- 
 ing. Only the appearances, they tell us, are re- 
 fined ; there is no change below the surface. 
 The man we knew ten years ago and know now 
 is the man we shall know ten years hence, if we 
 are both alive. He may make a fortune or lose 
 one. He may succeed or fail. His wealth or 
 poverty may take him into new society or into 
 new surroundings ; it may give him a new man- 
 ner ; but it will not make him a new man. He 
 may go away to where his scampishness does 
 not obtrusively show, but a scamp he remains. 
 
 Just so a man may grow stronger or feebler 
 in health, he must grow older, he may grow 
 wiser, but his nature does not change. Life may 
 
 137 
 
138 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 indeed modify the proportions of his character. 
 Trouble may sharpen his sympathies or luck in- 
 crease his native buoyancy. But these changes 
 are, so to speak, functional, nor organic and 
 fundamental. The impulsive man will not be- 
 come cautious, or the cautious man rash, though 
 education may refine both and religion make 
 them more reverent. All the tears in the world 
 cannot quench the naturally hopeful, nor all the 
 happiness inspirit the naturally depressed. If it 
 were not so, say the wise ; if changes of charac- 
 ter were really common, life would be no drama 
 at all, but a horrible medley of half-seen acts and 
 broken dialogue. It is the " strict limitation 
 which the changelessness of character puts upon 
 the mutability of things which makes life both 
 dear and entertaining," and which mitigates the 
 terrible sense of chance and instability which oc- 
 casionally makes the heart of even the strongest 
 man stand still within him. 
 
 So argue the worldly wise; and while they 
 may seem at first to hold the field, yet their in- 
 sight does not go beneath the skin of things, and 
 whole regiments of deeper facts rise up to put 
 their fatalism and pessimism to flight. If what 
 they say were true, life would indeed be a play — 
 a poor puppet show in which wooden figures are 
 pulled to and fro on wires until the master of the 
 stage grows aweary of the farce. To meet a man 
 after ten years of life in such a world as this and 
 
THE WINGED VICTORY I39 
 
 find him no deeper of soul, no larger of heart, no 
 more a friend of God, is neither " dear nor enter- 
 taining"; it is dismal tragedy. What tragedy, 
 then, if he were doomed to such a fate— doomed 
 to be always the same, exhibiting, like some of 
 the figures in the Dickens stories, the same tricks 
 and traits of nature, with never any variation, nor 
 any hope of freedom or change ! Then would 
 our humanity be an assembly of wax figures, 
 and our human voyage " a painted ship upon a 
 painted ocean." No, what makes life dear and 
 worth the hving is the touch of soul upon soul, 
 evoking new powers and making us other and 
 better than we were ; and the play upon us of di- 
 vine influences, wooing us to higher life and richer, 
 with a vision of the man we ought to be ever on 
 before — the sense, born in each of us, of a per- 
 fection ever about to be attained, a joy and vic- 
 tory ever about to be realized. 
 
 It is true, as Goethe said, that underneath 
 every human life lies a divinely laid ground-plan, 
 upon which the character must rest. Whether a 
 man build with gold, silver and precious jewels, 
 or with wood, hay and stubble, he can build on 
 no other foundation. That is to say, no man can 
 develop powers he does not possess or overleap 
 the limits of his being. Individuality is primi- 
 tive and fatal. Temperament, no doubt, goes far 
 back and deep down, but it is alterable to some 
 extent, while personality is susceptible to modifi- 
 
I40 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 cation almost without end. So that Tolstoi, 
 looking back down the years, might have seen 
 many effigies of himself, many personalities — the 
 gay, sin-bespattered young nobleman, the gloom- 
 crowned atheist, the tender, suffering humanist, 
 and the saint waiting at the beautiful gate. It 
 may be admitted that man, toiling unaided and 
 alone, makes slow progress towards the ideal, but 
 man does not toil alone. Of old it was written, 
 *' He hath made us, and not we ourselves," and 
 nothing is more certain than that He is still ma- 
 king and remaking us. Not that the soul is in- 
 active, or the heart passive under His touch, but 
 in Him we live and move and have our being, and 
 no man, though he flee to the ends of the earth, 
 is secure from His sweet surprises. 
 
 Truly the wind bloweth where it listeth, and 
 we cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it 
 goeth. Ignatius Loyola was a gay Spanish 
 gallant until a cannon-ball broke his leg and he 
 opened the " Lives of the Saints " to beguile the 
 weary hours. When, behold ! by some mysteri- 
 ous chemistry, the play of a new influence upon 
 the old qualities produced not only a revolution 
 of life, but a new quality of character — a new per- 
 sonality. The colliers of Kingswood, like their 
 fathers before them, were big, rough, begrimed 
 men, hard workers and hard drinkers, until 
 Wesley stood among them. Upon them fell the 
 white fire from the soul of the great evangelist, 
 
THE WINGED VICTORY I4I 
 
 and the result was a type of life so unlike what 
 they had been as scarcely to be recognizable 
 either by themselves or by their neighbours. 
 Even the lowest of the low — Dead Souls, as 
 Gogol would say, Ex-Men, as Gorky described 
 them — are thus transformed and raised, as from 
 the grave, into lives of purity, usefulness and 
 joy ; not only saved, but filled with an ardent, 
 tender, joyous passion to rescue others of their 
 kind/ So read the records of the Christian 
 ages, disclosing a power working in us and 
 through us, renewing a right spirit within man 
 and establishing a new order of life. 
 
 Here is a fact — as old as Pascal, St. Francis 
 and St. Paul, known to Augustine and Cardinal 
 Newman — which puts fatalism and pessimism, 
 with all their wise and witty lore, to shame. The 
 discovery of a new element in the air, or of a new 
 star out on some dim margin of the heavens, 
 thrilling as each may be, is only the wonder of a 
 day compared with this marvel. Deny it as men 
 
 1 Examples in point are the volumes by Harold Begbie, 
 " Twice-Born Men " and " Souls in Action," — which the author 
 modestly describes as foot-notes to Professor James' " Varieties 
 of Religious Experience " — sketches, from real life, of human 
 wrecks in the East and West Ends of London lifted out of the 
 mire into usefulness and honour by the Gospel of Christ, when 
 that Gospel was manifested through tender, tactful, loving hu- 
 man ministry. "William James does not explain this wonder; 
 nor does Harold Begbie. They are filled with awe by the 
 simple facts, which make a rare assortment of human documents 
 and two remarkable volumes of Christian evidences. 
 
142 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 will, this rebirth of the soul is the master fact of 
 our human world. Not only does religion rest 
 upon it, but all our higher human life is made 
 possible by this self-transcendence, whereby the 
 soul, many times reborn, mounts upward through 
 its dead selves towards the ideal. For we need 
 not stop with one or two births, since life must be 
 a continual death to what is old and a new birth 
 into that spiritual environment which is always 
 and everywhere present. Hence those ghmpses, 
 intimations, and strange visitings of beauty, and 
 the wisdom of the great teachers who bid us 
 drop all and follow them. 
 
 II 
 
 No palace of enchantment was ever half so 
 wonderful as the world in which we live, where 
 the most incredible things are every-day facts. 
 From one angle our earth is a vast orb of dirt 
 moving through the air, driven by force ; but from 
 another point of view the chief fact about it is 
 the elusive spiritual atmosphere in which it is 
 embosomed. God is in it, and many are the 
 ways, and delicate the heavenly strategy, whereby 
 He surprises the soul of man and captures it. 
 Common things are touched, at times, with an 
 eerie strangeness, and familiar realities become 
 illuminated messages of warning and of hope. 
 The day, whose coming in beauty fills us with 
 nameless longings, departs with a glory that 
 
THE WINGED VICTORY 143 
 
 makes the heart ache with a wild, sad joy, we 
 know not why. What though a man build him 
 a castle of unbeHef, with thick walls and frowning 
 towers, he is not safe ; for, 
 
 "Just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus ending from Euripides — 
 And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears, 
 As old and new at once as nature's self." 
 
 Thus are we lured, half unawares, into com- 
 munion with Him to whom St. Anslem prayed 
 as the Absolute Beauty. Often a forest vista 
 seems to open, of a sudden, into heaven, as when 
 Louisa Alcott, running over the hills, saw through 
 an arch of trees the sun rise over river and meadow, 
 and a great, God-given peace came into her heart, 
 *' never to change through forty years of life's 
 vicissitudes." There are, indeed, the darker 
 aspects of nature, what the Bible called " the 
 wrath of God " ; but the eternal beauty is far 
 more constant and more persuasive. Not less 
 true is it of our human world, in whose fellow- 
 ships, as in a divine net, we are caught and held 
 by the Fisher of men. Let a man look into his 
 heart and he will see in how many ways the needs 
 and aptitudes of our nature link us to the divine, 
 and invite us to a life becoming to immortal 
 souls. Love of persons and places, ties of blood 
 and friendship, tender strokes of sorrow, the 
 ministry of music, memory, hope, and a sense 
 
144 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 of duty, with much else of a sort similar, make 
 up in large part not only our life, but also our 
 religion — not all of it, but much of it ; for, " what 
 we cannot but worship, that we should." ^ No 
 wonder that from the earliest times man has been 
 thinking beautiful and solemn thoughts about the 
 world, about human life, and about his fellow 
 souls, and out of this response to the mystery 
 and beauty of Hfe grew his faiths and his fine arts. 
 Yet there is something finer than the fine arts, 
 something to which all art and faith alike may 
 minister : " the art to livel' which Mark Pattison 
 said is the highest of all arts — but his " Memoirs" 
 show, what all of us find out, how hard it is to 
 master an art which is also an incarnation. 
 Hence the wise life of Socrates, who did nothing, 
 he tells us in his " Apology," but go about per- 
 suading men, old and young alike, not to take 
 thought of fame or fortune, but first and chiefly 
 to care about " the greatest improvement of the 
 soul." When summoned up, all the high wisdom 
 of the world agrees that we are here upon the 
 earth to grow a rich, tender, valiant, refined soul, 
 and that it is in pressing on from what we are to 
 something higher that goodness exists. Apart 
 from this ascending effort towards spiritual grace 
 and beauty, our life has no real meaning, and 
 when this quest is abandoned it loses its rhythm 
 
 » " The Religion of All Good Men," by H. W. Garrod, Chap. 
 II (1906). 
 
THE WINGED VICTORY I45 
 
 and its soul of fire. For it is the growing of a 
 soul which makes our life, to its last day, full of 
 zest and earnestness, of the joy of self-conquest 
 and the strange peace of self-forgetting. To him 
 with whom courage is continual and culture a 
 habit, old age will be only " the last of life for 
 which the first was made," glorified with what 
 Carlyle saw in Chalmers, a kind of luminous se- 
 renity, as of an " oncoming evening and the star- 
 crowned night." 
 
 Living in a world of beauty, wonder and 
 power, the one art worth trying for is the art of 
 cultivating a rich inner life, and of giving it ex- 
 pression in the colour, tone, and form of our 
 souls, — in the atmosphere and image of ourselves 
 among men. All that is about us turns, by some 
 mysterious alchemy, into something inside, be- 
 coming a part of our inmost self. This deposit 
 of experience, with whatever else may be hidden 
 in the depth of our nature, is, so to speak, the 
 raw material and energy which we are to trans- 
 mute until it becomes an inwrought grace in 
 our words and acts. So then it is, in this world 
 of nature and society, of labour and sport, of sor- 
 row to some of us, of temptation to all, and yet 
 more of high incentive and appeal, we are all set 
 to the task of " working out our own salvation," 
 as the wise old Bible puts it. To this end, all 
 good things are ours to be used in the making of 
 a life of grace, beauty, and power, " nor soul helps 
 
146 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul," as Brown- 
 ing said with a sure insight and candour. One 
 also of our own poets has shown, in a book of 
 beauty, in what ways the body, so long held to 
 be a clog to the soul, may be made an instrument 
 for the expression of personality. 
 
 "Grace and beauty are necessities of personality 
 and revelations of power, not to be affected nor 
 compelled, but to be cultivated lawfully and re- 
 vered as puissant oracles of the divine. A well- 
 poised body, while expressing a well-poised char- 
 acter, reacts, in turn, on that character to help 
 and enrich the whole personality. The soul is at 
 ease in the body only when it is using it as a 
 means of expression or action. So when art 
 would embody in beauty the idea of triumph 
 without weariness, of glad elation untouched by 
 envious defeat, of high intelligence overcoming 
 the barbarous and base — when it would add to 
 the fairest human loveliness some hint of super- 
 human power and dominion over a region more 
 vast than earth — it created the Victory of the 
 WingSy to be a lasting signal before our wonder- 
 ing eyes, and an incentive to that dignity of bear- 
 ing which we behold only in the rarest personal- 
 ities." 1 
 
 ^ '* The Making of Personality," by Bliss Carmen (1908). A 
 book of beauty it is, aglow with colour, vibrancy, and the joy of 
 living, as if some old Greek had stepped out of the world of an- 
 cient dream. 
 
THE WINGED VICTORY I47 
 
 When shall we become that which we are ! 
 cried Maeterlink, who knows that our life should 
 be, through all its unfoldings, a Victory of the 
 Wings. To be sure, it was only a fancy when 
 Plato said that the soul, in a former state, was 
 winged, and that thus it comes to pass, in this life, 
 when it is stirred by the power of music or po- 
 etry, or the sight of beauty, its memory is quick- 
 ened, and forthwith there is a struggling and 
 pricking pain, as of wings trying to come forth. 
 Yet was it a parable of what we may become, as 
 shown us in those skyey souls who reveal " to 
 what fine issues our mortal life ascends." These 
 sought the highest things, subdued passions, mas- 
 tered moods, harnassed wayward wills, wrought 
 in brave sincerity, following the angel of their 
 better nature, until they attained to a dignity and 
 poise of soul, a sense of glad elation without van- 
 ity, like that embodied in the Vision of the 
 Wings. So may we, frail though we are, attain 
 to such grace and refinement of soul as becomes 
 men who live in a world where there is truth to 
 seek, loving service to render, and where, at sun- 
 set, the clouds are touched as if by magic into 
 something, it would seem, other and diviner than 
 themselves. 
 
V 
 
 THE LINES OF LIFE 
 
 AS has been said, chief among the influ- 
 ences that incite to noble Hving, evoking 
 and giving shape to what is best within 
 us, is personaUty itself. No other power on 
 earth is so constant, so penetrating, so gracious, 
 so irresistible ; no other so charged with poten- 
 cies whose range we cannot limit. Only contact 
 is needed, and it becomes a haunting, heahng, 
 fructifying power, entering when the doors are 
 closed. 
 
 Much knowledge we can learn from books, 
 but, as John Morley reminds us, " the detail, the 
 colour, the tone which make it live in us all, 
 these you catch from those in whom it already 
 lives." Under the spell of the Truth made flesh, 
 buds open seemingly of themselves, and men are 
 changed as if by miracle ; as in the life of Jesus 
 the impulsive and unstable Peter became a man 
 of massive nobiHty and solidity of character, and 
 the fiery Son of Thunder became a meditative 
 mystic who read for us the heart of the Master. 
 So it is, though in less degree, all through our 
 human life. There are men to know whom is 
 
 148 
 
THE LINES OF LIFE I49 
 
 a kind of religion, who are to us what Edmund 
 Spencer in his " Faerie Queen " said of the true 
 teacher — one who is " with unwearied fingers 
 drawing out the lines of lifey from living knowl- 
 edge hid." In the strange and tangled business 
 of the world no other influence so steadily does 
 its work as the silent, unobtrusive power of a 
 good life, which reaches to 
 
 " The depths of human souls — 
 Souls that appear to have no depth at all 
 To careless eyes." 
 
 All great souls are founders of spiritual fam- 
 ilies, centres wherefrom radiates a new light, as 
 though '* the flowing light of God " were focused 
 in them, as in a lens, only that it may shine 
 through them upon the human pathway. Within 
 the area of the influence of a Paul, a Francis, a 
 Wesley, an Emerson, a new atmosphere is felt, 
 and new personalities appear. The path of St. 
 Paul, the " wandering Ulysses of our Christian 
 Odyssey," was marked by a train of churches along 
 the way of his journeyings. Where Francis 
 went, he left bands of men, " fragrant with a 
 wondrous aspect," where only idle, frivolous or 
 filthy life had been before. A whole race of 
 poets and idealists may be traced to Emerson, 
 while the influence of Lincoln is a stream of 
 sweetness, earnestness and fine sagacity in our 
 national life. Which thing is also a parable writ 
 
I50 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 in large letters of what is true of the humblest 
 life when it has done with self-seeking, and has 
 learned to give forth in a worthy form the beauty 
 that is in it. 
 
 Much of the power of great men is due, no 
 doubt, to the ideas they advocate and the causes 
 they espouse, and more, perhaps, to an overmas- 
 tering, unifying purpose which, both philosoph- 
 ically ' and practically, is needed to draw out and 
 give direction to the powers. There is, indeed, 
 a noble kind of narrowness, w^ithout which the 
 life of a man, however rich and rare his gifts, is 
 apt to be, as Jeremy Taylor said, " soft, loose, 
 and wandering " ; but one must be broad before 
 he can be nobly, usefully narrow. Wendell 
 Phillips was a man of broad culture and fine 
 powers who condensed his information and en- 
 thusiasm and poured them into one channelp 
 with the rapidity of a mountain torrent. So, 
 after a manner, did Ruskin, who was moved by 
 the Spirit of Beauty as Wesley was by the Spirit 
 of Jesus ; the impetus of whose passionate evan- 
 gelism we feel to-day in our desire that all men 
 should have access to beauty, as to a sacrament, 
 as well as in our efforts to live beautifully and 
 reverently. These men, and others of their kind, 
 by bringing all their powers to a focus upon a 
 
 *"The Nature of Personality," by William Temple (1911), 
 where the power of purpose, as a constitutive element in per- 
 sonality, is emphasized most impressively and suggestively. 
 
THE LINES OF LIFE 151 
 
 high purpose, impressed their purpose, and with 
 it themselves, upon the Hfe of the world. Their 
 purpose gave definiteness to their lives while 
 saving them from the self-consciousness which 
 mars so many forms of culture. * Here is a hint 
 which we may follow to our saving. Noble 
 causes are ever beseeching our aid, and while we 
 may not do great things, the path is the same 
 though it wind through humble scenes unnoted 
 of the world. 
 
 And, finally, there is an '* inward way of hfe " 
 which, if followed, leads through the dark night 
 of Time to such a union with the divine as lifts 
 man to the height of vision, while helping him 
 the better to serve his fellows in the humblest 
 
 1 Not alone such self-culture as Goethe proclaimed, but in 
 much of the modern quest for personal power. Followers of 
 what is called New Thought set little store, apparently, by 
 charity, pity and renunciation — the great fruits of religion. 
 Too often it seems to be all for their own personal health or 
 luck or peace of mind or success, and the optimism they em- 
 phasize is seldom compatible with humility of heart. It is a 
 self-centred optimism, which, when it does not blink the hard 
 facts of life, asks men to think too much about themselves, as 
 an actor keeps his mind fixed on his face. The deep difference 
 between it and religion is, that one wants to get, while the 
 other wants to give ; for in these high matters we get by losing, 
 and can only keep what we give away. One almost feels that 
 the New Thought, while it may have its value, is a subtle self- 
 ishness trying to wear the robes of a mystical faith. Our day 
 of hurry and unrest, when men take up with almost anything 
 and make a religion out of it, gives it a vogue. 
 
152 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 tasks and duties of the common lot. As we see 
 it from afar in the Hves of the great mystics, it 
 seems to mean not only a new personality of 
 amazing beauty and power, but a new order of 
 life, requiring, it has been said, " a special psy- 
 chological system" whereof we know little; a 
 new centre of being and a new method of feeling 
 and action. To them it is given to know that 
 death is nothing to the soul, and that our hfe is 
 hid from the vanishings of Time in the Sanctuary 
 of the Eternal. They are not left, as we are, to 
 build a frail hope out of the fragments of three 
 score years and ten. They are lifted to where 
 the star of their inborn destiny Hes below their 
 feet, mastered and outsped. Yet do they sit by 
 our side, without insignia of wisdom or power, 
 humble as a little child : for of such is the king- 
 dom of heaven. Of them and the life they fol- 
 low, a student has written ; * 
 
 " It ends with the coming forth of divine hu- 
 manity, never again to leave us : living in us and 
 with us, a pilgrim, a worker, a guest at our table, 
 a sharer at all hazards in life. The mystics wit- 
 ness to this story : waking very early they have 
 run on before us, urged by the greatness of their 
 love. We, incapable as yet of this subhme 
 encounter, looking in their magic mirror, listen- 
 ing to their stammered tidings, may see far off 
 the consummation of the race. They have con- 
 
 1 " Mysticism," by Evelyn Underbill (1911). 
 
THE LINES OF LIFE 1 53 
 
 formed here and now to the utmost tests of divine 
 sonship, the final demands of Hfe. They have 
 not shrunk from the suffering of the cross. They 
 have faced the darkness of the tomb. Beauty and 
 agony alike have called them : alike have awa- 
 kened a heroic response. For them the winter is 
 over : the time of the singing of birds is come." 
 
 All these elements met in St. Paul — the mystic 
 spell of a person, the noble narrowness of a pur- 
 pose, and the inward quest of spiritual reality as 
 it disclosed itself to him in prayer and brooding 
 meditation which kindled his spirit and set his 
 words afire. If one asks for the meaning of his 
 life, the secret of its splendour and power, it is 
 found in the words : " For me to live is Christ ! " 
 His sovereign ambition, that about which his 
 great powers gathered and grew, was so to put 
 on Christ, so to partake of the fellowship of His 
 sufferings and the sacrament of His death, as to 
 reproduce His personality on earth. It was 
 therefore that he fought a good fight, kept the 
 faith, and was ready to be offered up, knowing 
 the power of an endless life. 
 
 Weak though we are, followers of the Master 
 afar off, with many sorrows and misgivings, this 
 is also our mission and our destiny. And at 
 last, having " tried a little and failed much," 
 though the scroll of our life be torn and soiled, 
 as alas it certainly is, we need not fear to leave 
 it in the hands of Him who, on that Sabbath 
 
154 THE CULTURE OF THE SOUL 
 
 morning, closed the book of prophecy, assured, 
 by His Hfe here below, that He will know what 
 we tried to write, and will impute to us somewhat 
 of that which we are to be. Perchance He is 
 with us even now, " with unwearied fingers 
 drawing out the hues of hfe," and we, slow of 
 heart and dull of eye, know not that it is He 
 whose Presence touches us to wisefulness : 
 
 *' Lord Christ, if Thou art with us and these eyes 
 Are holden, while we go sadly and say 
 * We hoped it had been He, and now to-day 
 Is the third day, and hope within us dies.' 
 Bear with us, oh, our Master, Thou art wise 
 And knoweth our foolishness ; we do not pray 
 ' Declare Thyself, since weary grows the way 
 And faith's new burden hard upon us lies.' 
 Nay, choose Thy time ; but ah ! Whoe'er Thou art 
 Leave us not ; where have we heard any voice 
 Like Thine ? Our hearts burn in us as we go ; 
 Stay with us ; break our bread ; so, for our part 
 Ere darkness falls haply we may rejoice. 
 Haply when day has been far spent may know." 
 
The Living Word of Truth 
 
 In what sense is Christ eternal ? Is He 
 a living, abiding Presence among men ? 
 If so, how may He become real to us ? 
 
FORESHADOWINGS 
 
 LL of us recall when the news came, 
 some years ago, of awful disaster in the 
 East. For those who knew its story, 
 Sicily, even in its sorrow, was the country of 
 glorious legends of love, of war, and of a happy 
 age of gold ; and the tidings had an added 
 poignance of pathos, as of sadness in remem- 
 bered gladness. Memories of the classics rose 
 up before us — gods and goddesses, heroes, lovers 
 in idyllic fields, came to mind and lived again 
 with an immortality which the people of yester- 
 year could hardly hope for. Sicily recalled 
 Theocritus, who sang the songs of simple folk by 
 ** the light and laughing sea," and whose poems 
 are among the enduring possessions of that 
 storied island which not flood nor fire could 
 destroy. 
 
 But in the life of Jesus we have something 
 more than the survival of the intangible beauty 
 of art over the impermanence of material things. 
 Surely there is no fact upon the earth more 
 amazing, from every point of view, than the fact 
 of Christ — His Hfe, His person, and His in- 
 
 157 
 
158 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 fluence upon the race. History makes Him real 
 to us as a personality, as visible as Tacitus or 
 Tiberius ; but the record of His few short years, 
 on that narrow strip of land, is only one chapter 
 of "an unfinished life which shapes the world." 
 Such a study, therefore, has to do not simply 
 with One who lived in the dim past, although 
 His life divided the story of man into before and 
 after ; but with a Living Reality in the present, 
 which is slowly changing the winter of the world 
 into summer. Not only did Jesus bring man 
 and God into a new relation in a distant time, 
 when He moved among the fisherfolk, and His 
 words flashed their glory upon men from the 
 facets of Oriental parable and paradox. More 
 wonderful is the fact, and fact it surely is, that 
 He does so still, and that He is thus, as a grave 
 historian has said, " the personal concern of every 
 one of us." ' 
 
 Renan somewhere remarks that the great 
 achievement of Christ was that He made Himself 
 as much beloved after His death as He had been 
 during His lifetime. The marvel was that One 
 who slept in '• a lone Syrian grave " could grasp 
 the future in His nerveless hand, and touch, as 
 with a wand, the lives of men on distant shores. 
 It is indeed a marvel, more strange than the 
 miracles of the gospel story which the facile 
 
 1 •* Conflict of Religions Within the Roman Empire," by T. 
 R. Glover. 
 
FORESHADOWINGS 159 
 
 stylist tossed aside as being so many tales told 
 by those who mistook myths for facts. In imagi- 
 nation one can see Plato walking to and fro in 
 the porch of philosophy, and the young Greeks 
 listening to his sublime discourse. The scene is 
 remote, veiled somewhat in mist, and touched 
 with the glamour of the antique. But it is not so 
 of Him who walked and taught in Galilee, albeit 
 Tacitus dismissed Him with a sentence and Lucian 
 with a sneer.* Somehow, though twenty ages 
 have passed, men do not think of Him as dead, 
 nor yet as belonging to a time long gone by. 
 Unlike the great Greek, He was not detained in 
 the outer porch of the human soul, but entered, 
 as a dear familiar friend, into its most hidden 
 and sacred chambers. To-day He is a Living 
 Presence walking up and down in the hearts of 
 men, a thousand times more alive than when He 
 journeyed here below. 
 
 Nor was the life of Jesus, whereof we read in 
 " the book of white samite, mystical and wonder- 
 ful," without its remote genealogy. The note of 
 reminiscence recurs in it, again and again, like an 
 undertone of refrain. About Him there hung 
 always the suggestion, the memory, of a nameless 
 and ineffable beauty, or pity, which had long 
 been haunting the world. Foregleams of the 
 Christ-spirit, foretokens of the Christ-idea, were 
 
 » Tacitus, ** Annales,'' Chap. I, pp. 15, 44; Lucian, ** De 
 Morte Peregrini" Chap. XI. 
 
l6o THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 seen in many lands, equally in the dreams of in- 
 carnations and in the lives of men of His spirit — 
 sons of light and mercy who were as oases in the 
 desert. The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy states * 
 that Zoroaster had foretold the coming of Christ, 
 to whom the " Hymn of Zarathushtra," recently 
 translated, may be taken as a greeting to " an 
 expected champion." Plato divined, dimly, the 
 humanity of God out of which our humanity was 
 born, and longed to see that eternal tenderness 
 take human shape. It may be that the mysteri- 
 ous infant foreshadowed by Virgil, in the 
 '♦ Pollio Eclogue," was only a poetic dream of 
 a returning golden age ; but it is a striking 
 passage none the less,^ as if, indeed, " thoughts 
 beyond their thoughts to those high bards were 
 given." This dream took many forms in the 
 poetry, faith and aspiration of men, as though 
 to show that the vague, formless Absolute did 
 not satisfy the human heart, which craved 
 some embodiment, some visible shape of the 
 Eternal, about which its love and reverence 
 might gather. 
 
 Time out of mind there had been legends of 
 god-men, of divine incarnations, of wonder-work- 
 ers and redeemers ; and so intense was the long- 
 ing for such a teacher that it has been conjectured 
 that, had not Jesus come, it would have gathered 
 
 ; » Chap. VII : " As Zerdusht had predicted." 
 
 a« Eclogue;' Chap. V, translated by C. S. Calverley (1868). 
 
FORESHADOWINGS l6l 
 
 about some one else.^ Examples are many, as in 
 the inscriptions of Priene, Halicarnassus, Apemeia 
 and Eumeneia, lately come to light, proclaiming 
 the introduction of the Julian calendar and as- 
 cribing divine honours to Augustus. So also 
 Tiridates, the Mithraist king of Parthia, of whom 
 Pliny the Elder tells us,^ who, having heard that 
 the prosperity of the Roman Empire was due to 
 the appearance of a divine incarnation, an august 
 personality, who reigned under the name and 
 title of Caesar, paid Nero a visit, in order to wor- 
 ship the god-man and to surrender to him the 
 kingdom of Parthia. How little did he know 
 Nero, although he addressed him, so Dion Cas- 
 sius reports,^ with the words : " I came to thee, as 
 
 1 Of course it is idle to guess at what would have happened 
 had not something else occurred ; as idle as it is to say that 
 Christ did not create Christianity, but was created by it : that 
 by a mere chance, as it were, an humble teacher of spiritual and 
 magnetic attraction became the point of coalescence and crystal- 
 lization of a consensus of expectation, and the centre of a dream 
 edifice. Here is Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark omitted 
 — yet this thin theory has lately been put forth in the grave 
 name of scholarship ; whereas, a sense of humour, to say nothing 
 of a sense of history and its forces, should have hushed it. But 
 so potent is a bias that it will not only belittle Jesus to fit its 
 scheme, but will proceed to magnify the various would-be Christs, 
 including the Philostratus romance of " Apollonius of Tyana," 
 into rivals. Even on that basis, the law of " the survival of the 
 fittest " would seem to have settled the question, if there were 
 a limit to absurdity when once it is set going. 
 
 9 " Natural History," Chap. XXX, p. i6. 
 
 s«* History of Rome," Chap. XLIII, p. 5. 
 
l62 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 to my God, in order to worship thee as the 
 Mithras." Nor was Nero less unworthy than 
 some others who were clothed with divine attri- 
 butes by this flitting dream, seeking, pathetically, 
 " a local habitation and a name." Weary of 
 legend, cultured beyond the credulity that be- 
 lieves without evidence, the best classic minds, as 
 Dr. Arnold said of Aurelius, were *' sad and 
 agitated," stretching out their arms for something 
 beyond. Hence a yearning pensiveness, often 
 sinking into a piercing pathos, which Browning 
 interpreted in Cleon, as of a long winter with no 
 hope of summer. 
 
 Among Hebrew seers there was the same look- 
 ing forward, but with less wistfulness and more 
 promise. Nor is this strange, for the Messianic 
 hope had long been the key-note both of their 
 religion and of their national hfe. Heard in faint 
 hints from earliest times, it echoed through " the 
 forest of the Psalms," gathering to its bosom 
 many wandering tones until, at last, it rose to 
 sublime music in the closing chapters of Isaiah. 
 Those chapters, by whomsoever written, are 
 among the greatest prophetic pages known among 
 men, wherein the soul of a race, refined by suffer- 
 ing, became incandescent with ineffable beauty. 
 There we behold a stately Figure walking the 
 dreamy ways of prophecy — majestic and sorrow- 
 ful, scourged and imprisoned, His beauty marred 
 by the rude way of the world, yet full of grace 
 
FORESHADOWINGS 163 
 
 and pity. From afar the lonely watcher seemed 
 to see, as through a glass darkly, the slowly com- 
 ing Christ, and in striving to hail Him the seer 
 himself became a man of sorrow and acquainted 
 with grief, as it were the first miracle of His 
 spirit. In the stress and agony of his day, in the 
 solitude of his sorrow, his own creative love be- 
 came prophetic, and he sought to be the Messiah 
 of whom he prophesied. Lifted into the shadow 
 of a mighty vision, he was " the Almost Christ, 
 the Christ of the Night — the Shadow Christ." * 
 
 Here, manifestly, was a spiritual experience, a 
 prophetic vision, as far removed from the wistful 
 dreams of classic poets — who saw no Suffering 
 Servant, tortured and disfigured, but a royal ruler 
 in a robe of purple — as it was from the crass 
 political Messiah of apostate Jewish statesmen 
 like Josephus, who, forgetting the great spiritual 
 tradition of his people, gave his allegiance to 
 Vespasian as the Messiah. And it was in that 
 noble spiritual tradition that Jesus stood, as if 
 the faiths and hopes and high prophetic longings 
 of His race had woven the seamless robe in which 
 His divine beauty was clad. How unlike all 
 others was the Teacher who swayed men by " that 
 strange power called weakness," while proclaim- 
 
 i"The Shadow Christ," by Gerald Stanley Lee (1905). A 
 book of singular beauty, vividness, and insight, interpreting the 
 foregleams of Christ in the Old Testament, as only a poet can 
 do. 
 
l64 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 ing Love as the one sweet energy whereby the 
 world is to be redeemed. This it was — a divine 
 love which had hovered over man as a holy dream, 
 a flitting vision, an echoing voice — that Jesus in- 
 carnated in a form dross-drained and perfect, ful- 
 filling the radiant intimations of the highest 
 minds and satisfying the God-lonesomeness of the 
 race. The dim became vivid, the awful became 
 lovely, and a new light and power and hope came 
 upon man in the midst of the years. 
 
 So sublime a reality would naturally be adum- 
 brated in the highest and best souls ages before 
 its advent in history ; and it may well have been 
 forefelt not only by the prophets and singers of 
 the Bible, but also, for aught we know, in the 
 Buddha and Krishna legends, as well as in the 
 dreams of Plato. All the great ideals are largely 
 mysterious, and the words, even of the wisest, are 
 as often as not " wiser than those that use them." 
 The fact that Jesus, when He did come, absorbed 
 into Himself the devotion formerly given to 
 mythical beings, would seem to show that He 
 was a fulfillment of a universal prophecy. 
 Strange, indeed, is the suggestion that these 
 foregleams of the Christ-idea, from whatever 
 source, make the historical Jesus unnecessary 
 and unreal ; whereas they add enormously to the 
 impressiveness of His life as an answer to human 
 seeking. What had hitherto been a dream, or at 
 most a hypostasis of aspiration, found embodiment 
 
FORESHADOWINGS 165 
 
 in a historic personality who was equal to an ex- 
 pression of " the human life of God " upon earth. 
 As a result, there came into the world a spiritual 
 power which overthrew the Roman Pantheon, 
 and established upon the ruins of old philosophies 
 and decaying cults a new order of life. No 
 mere dream, made to clothe a peasant teacher, 
 could thus have grasped the crumbling classic 
 world and revived, reshaped and rescued it from 
 the mire of its own rot. 
 
 As to that other and higher genealogy of Jesus 
 — His heredity from God, and His sense of a 
 fellowship with His Father before His advent in 
 the flesh — it is not within the scope or wish of 
 this paper to inquire. So far as His own sayings 
 were reported, He Himself spoke of these things 
 in words cryptic and dim, and where He was so 
 reserved it ill becomes others to be talkative. 
 The dogma of the Kenosis has been appealed to, 
 but even when it is most vividly set forth * it emits 
 
 1 « The Person and Place of Christ," by P. T. Forsyth (1909). 
 A book of great power, aglow with divine fii"e and deeply sug- 
 gestive, though its epigrams often dazzle us. As of the dogma 
 of the Kenosis, or self-emptying, of Christ, so with the effort of 
 Dr. Sanday to locate His divinity in His subconscious nature, 
 whence it slowly emerged into His conscious life ('* Personality 
 in Christ and in Ourselves," 1911). They are alike dark and 
 difficult, if not doubtful. Nor is there much light in the sug- 
 gestion of Dr. Temple that " the form of His consciousness is 
 human, the content divine " (" The Nature of Personality," 
 191 1). The limitation of the knowledge of Jesus Himself is 
 indubitable — even about Himself. 
 
1 66 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 a feeble light, and leaves much that is dark. 
 There is, indeed, a mystery about even the most 
 ordinary person, while above the spiritually great 
 brood clouds and darkness which none may 
 penetrate. If we cannot fathom our own nature, 
 there is httle hope that we can measure One who 
 was, as all admit, the most majestic of all the 
 masters and deliverers of hfe that ever came forth 
 *' out of the bosom of humanity." It is enough 
 to say with Carlyle — who, though he truncated 
 his faith, had always something of the genius and 
 passion of the prophets, joined with the insight 
 of a historian — that the sphere melody of Jesus, 
 " flowing in wild, native tones, took captive the 
 souls of men, and, being of a truth sphere melody, 
 still flows and sounds, though now with thou- 
 sand-fold accompaniments and rich symphonies, 
 through all our hearts, and modulates and divinely 
 leads them." 
 
II 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESH 
 
 I 
 
 ALL along there have been those who 
 denied that such a person as Jesus ever 
 existed, though they are now almost an 
 extinct race. Some held that He was an accu- 
 mulation of abstract attributes, fortuitously as- 
 sembled by the enchantment of a worshipful 
 imagination ; a figure woven of the wistful 
 longings of men and clothed in the robe of 
 myth. Others saw Him as an achievement of 
 romance — a mouthpiece for the spiritual refine- 
 ments and ethical maxims of certain great un- 
 known geniuses whose teachings had long pre- 
 vailed as an esoteric cult. Either theory, frail at 
 best, falls flat by its own weight, as being not 
 only without basis in fact, but too great a tax on 
 our credulity. History aside, on literary grounds 
 they ask us to believe an incredible thing — that 
 the lowly hands of fisherfolk, more familiar with 
 nets than with words, created a Figure more 
 majestic, more winsome, more appealing, than 
 the greatest literary geniuses have ever been 
 able to achieve, and made Him speak " as never 
 man spake." Or that a few unknown cultists in- 
 
 167 
 
1 68 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 vented a Being so real, so living, so captivating, 
 that for ages He was mistaken for a reality, 
 equally by the most devout saints and the most 
 critical intellects — surely that were a supreme 
 miracle. 
 
 Yet, strangely enough, some such theory has 
 been revamped of late and set forth as the key 
 to the religious life, with this difference, however, 
 between its old form and the new.* It now 
 affirms that there is a living, Eternal Christ — a 
 personalized aspect of the human life of God — 
 unfolding in all mankind, and that this Eternal 
 Christ is the life of Christianity. So far forth, the 
 theory is true ; but it is a strange inversion of 
 realities to go on and argue that, because there 
 is an eternal Christ-ideal, Jesus never existed as a 
 historical person, or that if He did it does not 
 
 i"The Christ Myth," by Arthur Drews (1910). Back of 
 this book is a dogma to establish which the author is willing, 
 apparently, to go to any length. He writes as an almost 
 fanatical monist, and in bitter opposition to what he calls " the 
 poor and soulless faith in a personal God, in freedom and im- 
 mortality." His reason for wishing to get rid of the historical 
 Christ is that He is " the chief obstacle to a monistic religion." 
 Judged by this bias, the book is a hodge-podge, taking familiar 
 facts which every one knows and mixing them with much that 
 nobody knows except the author, and stirring the whole into a 
 syllabub, in which anything may mean anything else. The 
 author has read " a frightful lot," as Goethe would say, but his 
 book is valuable chiefly as an example of how far a dogma will 
 lead a man. His vision of the Eternal Christ is marred by a 
 100 ardent zeal for monism. 
 
THE WORD MADE FLESH 1 69 
 
 matter to faith — that, as a fact, He is a myth, an 
 ideal, or an imaginative symbol, like Mithras, 
 Osiris, Krishna, Agni, and the rest. Such jug- 
 glery would be unworthy of notice but for its 
 vogue with bewildered but essentially believing 
 minds who are taken captive by it, lured by its 
 emphasis on the Eternal Christ. That from the 
 time-form of Jesus there emerged a Christ-ideal 
 that is eternal, is true ; but Jesus was and is more 
 than an ideal. Even the ideal which He set up 
 for our guiding would long ago have grown dim, 
 or else faded altogether, without a living reality 
 to recreate and revivify it. Whether Jesus was a 
 fact or a myth does matter for our faith — matters 
 vitally, and in a manner not to be overcome by 
 devotion to a vague, dream-woven, mystic Christ 
 who never walked among men. 
 
 In point of fact, it is no longer an open ques- 
 tion, among historians, as to whether such a 
 person as Jesus ever Hved. That is an historic 
 certainty, attested in so many ways that to deny 
 it verges on the ridiculous. Put aside the gospel 
 records as a tissue of legends, rule out the wit- 
 ness of Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, and there 
 remains the fact of Christianity, by its very 
 genius the religion of a Person, bearing perpetual 
 witness to Him from whom it derived. As 
 Keim, in his *^ Jesu vo7i Nazaral' after saying 
 that the religion of Christ goes always mysteri- 
 ously back to His person, adds, " This funda- 
 
lyo THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 mental fact alone enables us to understand the 
 religion which sprang from it." Criticism may 
 busy itself with the question as to whether the 
 picture of Jesus in the gospel records is a por- 
 traiture or an idealization — whether the writers 
 exhibit Him as He really was, or as He appeared 
 to a subsequent age, transfigured by reverence or 
 distorted by superstition — but to deny that He 
 ever lived is at once futile and belated folly. " It 
 is no use," said the sane and acute J. S. Mill — and 
 no fact has leaped to light to render his words less 
 true than they were when he wrote them years 
 ago — " it is no use to say that Christ as exhibited 
 in the Gospels is not historical and that we know 
 not how much of what is admirable has been 
 superadded by the tradition of His followers. 
 The tradition of followers suffices to insert any 
 number of marvels, and may have inserted all the 
 miracles which He is reputed to have wrought. 
 But who among His disciples or among their 
 prosalytes was capable of inventing the sayings 
 ascribed to Jesus or of imagining the life and 
 character revealed in the Gospels ? Certainly 
 not the fishermen of Galilee ; as certainly not 
 St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were 
 of a totally different sort ; still less the early 
 Christian writers in whom nothing is more evi- 
 dent than that the good which was in them was 
 all derived, as they always professed that it was 
 derived, from the higher source. . . . About 
 
THE WORD MADE FLESH 171 
 
 the life and saying of Jesus there is a stamp of 
 personal originality combined with profundity of 
 insight, which . . . must place the Prophet 
 of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who 
 have no beUef in His inspiration, in the very 
 first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom 
 our species can boast." ^ 
 
 Such a study as this cannot do more than 
 glance at the intricate problems with which crit- 
 icism of the evangelic narrative has to deal, but 
 it may at least emphasize the vital reality which 
 is so often and so easily obscured. There are, as 
 every student of comparative faiths knows, strik- 
 ing resemblances between the gospel record and 
 the lives of other religious teachers of the East, 
 particularly in what the critics call " the mythical 
 elements." Dreams, heavenly voices, signs and 
 wonders, legends of virgin births, of the mysteri- 
 ous visits of sages, and the like, were common 
 and wide-spread in the East long before the time 
 of Jesus, and were freely told of both real and 
 imaginary characters. So striking, indeed, were 
 some of these resemblances that at one time 
 the Church was tempted to give the name of 
 Buddha honour in its calendar of saints — ^just as 
 Seneca was often cited like a Church Father as a 
 Christian authority, until he was reclaimed for 
 paganism by Erasmus and the humanists. No 
 one worthy of notice charges the gospel writers 
 
 ' " Three Essays on Religion," by J. S. Mill (1884). 
 
172 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 with plagiarism, but the likenesses are too re- 
 markable to be overlooked. If then we admit, 
 as some seem willing to do,^ that in trying to in- 
 terpret and convey the overwhelming impression 
 made upon them by the personality of Jesus, the 
 writers made use of ideas current in their day, 
 the better to reach the popular mind, it was only 
 natural that they did so, and it leaves the essen- 
 tial fact undimmed. What we have to do is to 
 get behind the form to the vital reality, which is 
 a sure and redeeming possession of our race. 
 
 It is not otherwise with the eschatology of the 
 Gospels, now so much emphasized,^ which is dis- 
 
 1 " Christ : The Beginnings of Dogma," by Johannes Weiss 
 (1910). But, though the author is willing to go to such 
 lengths, he does not forget the essential fact, which is that " the 
 less we are able to understand the Christology . . . the 
 more decisively we are referred back to Jesus in His own per- 
 sonality. To understand Him, to suffer ourselves to be drawn 
 by Him into His life with the Father, must mean more to us 
 than the finding of a formula of faith, with which we might be 
 at once dogmatically correct and true to history," 
 
 s By such a student as Schweitzer, to name but a single ex- 
 ample, whose " Quest of the Historical Jesus " (19 10), though 
 accounted blasphemous by some, is a book of great value and 
 charm. He follows the apocalyptic current too far, perhaps, as 
 does Mr. Garrod in his essay on Christ the Forerunner (1906) 
 — where it is ingeniously argued that Jesus did not claim to be the 
 Teacher long foretold, but only a Forerunner — but Schweitzer 
 does not forget the essential thing, as witness his exquisite 
 closing paragraph. We are willing to listen to a critic who is 
 a lover of the Christ whom he is seeking amid the changing 
 shadows of apocalyptic vision. On the other side see " The 
 Eschatological Question of the Gospels," by Cyril W. Emmet 
 (191 1), a scholarly and convincing book. 
 
THE WORD MADE FLESH 1 73 
 
 tinctively Jewish, and whose influence on Chris- 
 tian thought is out of all proportion to the worth 
 of its forms. Scientific conceptions of the world 
 have replaced the panorama of Jewish apoca- 
 lypse in our imaginative forecasts, but the spir- 
 itual truth thus adumbrated to us is the same. 
 While we may admit that the details of an eth- 
 ical system, framed for a world momentarily about 
 to perish, can have to-day but a partial validity, 
 yet its insight was sure and its principles are en- 
 during. It is plain, as has been well said,* that 
 the real interest of Jesus lay always in the moral 
 and spiritual experiences which gather round the 
 filial relation of man to God, and we are justified 
 in putting aside the eschatological element, if we 
 cannot interpret it, in order to attend the more 
 closely to what has been and is of permanent 
 
 significance. 
 
 II 
 
 What, then, is the Reality which is thus our 
 chief concern and the object of our quest ? It is 
 the Fact of Christ — the pervasive, overmastering, 
 transfiguring power of His unique personality. 
 This the gospel writers felt, and this, with a 
 skill of insight that is beyond the reach of con- 
 scious art, they convey to us in such-wise that 
 it works in us the same wonder of faith and joy 
 that it wrought in them. There is much of Plato 
 
 i"The Christian Doctrine of Man," by H. W. Robinson 
 (1911). 
 
174 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 in the Socratic dialogues — more of the disciple, 
 it often seems, than of the master — but the great 
 soul of Socrates was the inspiration of those gos- 
 pels of the intellect. Just so, whatever part may 
 have been played in the development and inter- 
 pretation of Christian faith by St. Paul, with his 
 emphasis upon the atoning sacrifice of the death 
 on the Cross ; by St. John with his Religion of 
 Revealing, which is the supreme treasure of his 
 piety ; or by St. James with his salutary insistence 
 that faith alone, without works, is empty and 
 dead — Jesus is the power behind the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 " Not, to the modern mind, so much visibly in 
 it as behind it. Just as science finds in all phe- 
 nomena the manifestation of an unseen, ever-pres- 
 ent Force, so the investigator to-day, turning 
 over the Christian records, feels himself at every 
 point in contact with the mystery that made 
 them possible. Here, to the scientific mind, is 
 the real question. For to whatever extent the 
 inaccurate or the legendary may have crept into 
 the New Testament, there is one thing in which 
 its absolute reliability can never be questioned. 
 It represents, with the accuracy of a hair balance, 
 the impression made upon its writers by Christ's 
 personality. The Fourth Gospel is the echo from 
 the soul of its writer of the heavenly voice that 
 had spoken to it. The Pauline Epistles show us 
 what one of the deepest minds the world ever 
 
THE WORD MADE FLESH 1 75 
 
 produced felt about Jesus. The different reports 
 of these manifold collaborateurs vary with all 
 manner of individual idiosyncrasy and standpoint. 
 But not one of them fails to make us under- 
 stand that the One whom he wrote about had 
 made on the writer the impression of something 
 heavenly, mighty, beautiful beyond all that was 
 human, of One who had opened new powers in, 
 and disclosed new horizons to, his own soul." * 
 
 Not only was this true of a few men who 
 recorded the story of His life, but it became true, 
 increasingly, of the great, sad, decaying age that 
 followed. If one would realize the magnitude of 
 the Fact of Christ, and the wonder and bloom it 
 brought to the wintry life of the world, let him 
 go back and read the musings of the men who 
 lived before Him. Rich indeed was the life of 
 ancient Greece, whose treasures of philosophy, 
 literature and art are now, and must ever be, an 
 enduring part of the wealth of the world, which 
 neither moth nor rust can corrupt nor thieves 
 break through and steal. Yet, much as we love 
 the beauty and ordered charm of life in classic 
 times — with its love of reason, its worship of the 
 holiness of beauty, and its hope not hopeless but 
 unhopeful — when we stand, a few years later, on 
 this side of Jesus, we are in a different atmosphere. 
 Signs of spring are on all sides — a strange new 
 
 1 " Ourselves and the Universe," by J. Brierley (1903). Essay 
 on « The Christ of To-day." 
 
176 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 hope welling up in the hearts of men, opening 
 buds of joy and sunburst song. No wonder Rome 
 was amazed by the advent, in her decaying 
 cities, of a people whom torture could not affright 
 nor death terrify. Those men singing songs in 
 the catacombs must have recalled her old time 
 hardihood, only that it was not so much manly 
 as godlike. They had a cheerfulness and hope, 
 a power and patience, a fearless and glad enthu- 
 siasm, a heavenly valour new among men, attest- 
 ing the power of a new faith to still the voice of 
 passion and the sob of grief. Something had 
 happened since Socrates taught his religion of 
 " fair hopes," and Plato had reasoned in Athens, 
 and the classic poets had mused so pensively of 
 the evanescence of mortal life and the vanishing 
 of beauty. Some new Fact had entered the 
 world, lighting up its dark night, making men 
 free from the tyranny of the grave and joyously 
 assured of a life beyond. 
 
 Of one thing we are sure : Christianity would 
 not now be in the world had it not been for the 
 assurance of a living Christ ruling men from the 
 Unseen. When Jesus went to the Cross, His 
 cause was smitten with ruin and His followers 
 disheartened and scattered, having seen Him die 
 in cruel tortures, conquered by the hate of His 
 foes. When malice had done its worst and hope 
 was utterly gone, all at once they found Him who 
 had hung on that cross by their side again, alive. 
 
THE WORD MADE FLESH 1 77 
 
 Within a few days all was changed, and men who 
 had been timid, fearful and hopeless reassembled 
 in great joy, courageous, hurling rebuke into the 
 faces of those who had put their Master to death, 
 and proclaiming that He was alive. That was all 
 they knew ; and that convinced them that death 
 is nothing to the soul ; and He became the centre 
 of their faith, the master light of all their seeing, 
 and the burden of their message to the ends of 
 the earth. Through long years and trials un- 
 speakable, and persecutions the most cruel, they 
 went up and down the Roman Empire telling 
 the story of Him, counting it a joy to suffer in 
 His behalf and an honour to die in His sweet name. 
 Some have thought to explain this marvel by 
 saying that an ideal, pointed by a splendid recol- 
 lection, may concentrate itself into something 
 which, in the vague language of poetry, may be 
 called a Person. To what absurd lengths will not 
 men go rather than accept a great, unmistakable, 
 unshakable fact ! Illusions may sway men for a 
 time, but that the stream of sweetness, light and 
 redeeming power poured into history by Christ 
 flowed from a filmy, flitting illusion is more in- 
 credible than the gospel Fact. But, if we admit 
 — as we need not do — that such was the case 
 with the men who knew and loved Jesus in the 
 body — that the image of Him was woven of their 
 worshipful love and memory — this cannot be 
 said of St. Paul. Save " in the spirit " St. Paul 
 
1 78 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 never saw Jesus, never heard His voice, yet the 
 sense of companionship with the Living Christ 
 was the ruhng passion of his wonderful hfe. No 
 matter what acids may be used to dissolve that 
 vision on the Damascus road, the Hfe of St. Paul 
 is a witness, irrefragable, to the reality and power 
 of the unseen Christ, who left the stony paths of 
 Judea to become a perpetual force in the world. 
 
 But it is now the fashion to say that it was not 
 Christ, but St. Paul, who created Christianity, 
 and that Paul was an evangelist of a mystical. 
 Eternal Christ. Far otherwise is the fact. St. ^ 
 Paul was indeed an apostle of the living. Eternal 
 Christ, but his great hfe had its inspiration in the 
 historical Jesus who suffered under Pontius Pilate, 
 died, and rose again from the dead. To him the 
 Eternal Christ and the historical Jesus were one 
 and inseparable ; and what was mystically true in 
 the unseen Christ had first been historically true 
 in Jesus, as it must always be or both will evap- 
 orate and melt into thin mist. Never once did 
 the mysticism of St. Paul, lofty and revealing as 
 it was, float away into the cloudland of an un- 
 historical idealism, which is the resort of so many 
 thinkers in our day. While he did not preach 
 Christ after the flesh, the personality to whom he 
 owed his spiritual quickening, his illumination, 
 and his invincible confidence was Jesus of Naza- 
 reth. No fact could be plainer, and not to see it 
 is to miss the key to his life and faith. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE LIVING PRESENCE 
 
 IF Christ were only a Figure in the past, 
 having a place in history and a date in 
 time, He would be interesting indeed, but 
 not in the same vital way that He now is. What 
 is more wonderful, and none the less a well-at- 
 tested fact, is that through all these ages He has 
 been an eternal contemporary with mankind, at 
 once an inner colleague of human souls and an 
 unseen world-power purifying and exalting our 
 life upon the earth. Not Moses so lives, nor the 
 prophets ; not Plato, nor Buddha, nor any other 
 torch-bearer or teacher of men. Here, in truth, 
 is the fact of the Eternal Christ — that there is a 
 Living Reality behind the Christ-ideal, and 
 hence, however often defiled or defamed, that 
 ideal is recreated by His abiding inspiration* — 
 who otherwise would be only a memory, an aspi- 
 ration, or a vague and beautiful dream. A Living 
 Christ, hallowing all the years with His humane 
 and heavenly Presence — that is a wonder more 
 
 1 " The Historic Christ in the Faith of To-day," by W. A. 
 Grist (191 1). 
 
 179 
 
l8o THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 amazing than all those recorded of Him in the 
 gospel story. 
 
 One reads history to litttle account who does 
 not detect the footprints of the journeying Christ 
 all down the years, His steps marked by many 
 beauties and sorrows. It was no mere sally of 
 rhetoric, but a calm statement of fact, when 
 Richter said that He has lifted the gates of em- 
 pires off their hinges and turned the stream of 
 Time into other channels. Though this earth 
 has been made, at times, a hell in His name, no 
 one else has so restrained the brute in man, 
 quickened the heart-beats of his better nature, 
 elevated his ideals and glorified his thought. He 
 has touched all the ages since His advent, pene- 
 trating them with a purer, loftier spirit, slowly 
 softening an immemorial hardness of heart, in- 
 spiring men to faith in God and in their fellows, 
 and refining the fellowships, aspirations, and 
 activities of the race. Music, art, poetry, law, 
 religion, the amenities of life, its modesties, its 
 courtesies, its home love and friendships, its tone, 
 temper and the spirit of its dream — all that makes 
 us men has felt the touch of the Living Christ. 
 No one can follow all His footsteps, no pen can 
 tell in what ways He has wrought upon the inner 
 life of the race, evoking the God-spirit in man, 
 and, though often seemingly defeated, and always 
 tragically delayed, leading our humanity towards 
 its goal. Of all world-forces making for the 
 
THE LIVING PRESENCE l8l 
 
 higher life of man, He is at once the most 
 powerful and the most gentle. 
 
 What glimpses of Him are seen in the mirror 
 of art, and poetry, and song, and in those lives 
 of rare beauty in whom He almost seemed to 
 wear our flesh once more. On the Roman road- 
 side by the Domine Quo Vadis, on that spring 
 morning at Assisi, in the hall of the Round Table 
 at Winchester, in the clearing in a woodland 
 where the Merciful Knight drew rein before the 
 crucifix, we follow Him. He was in the life of 
 St. Francis, in the cell of Thomas a Kempis, in 
 the art of Giotto, in the " Divine Comedy "of 
 Dante, in the thunder of Savonarola, and in the 
 songs of Luther. He was in " Les Miserablesl' 
 and in the Dickens stories of the love of little 
 children ; He gave shape to the troubled marbles of 
 Angelo, and beauty to the stained glass of Burne- 
 Jones ; He was with Lincoln in the White House. 
 Wherever there has been a note of pity in art, a 
 white flower of purity in life, a song of hope in 
 the night, a voice pleading for the poor, the 
 lowly, and the world-broken, a champion of those 
 that fail, there, somehow, in some form, is Christ, 
 or the soul of Christ. Ever the Mystic Spinner 
 plies His shuttle ; ever the Weaver of hope sends 
 His rainbows adrift across the hearts of men. 
 More than an Influence, more than a Principle, 
 He returns again and yet again, a vision and 
 a voice, to such as have eyes to see and ears to 
 
l82 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 hear.* No other is thus reflected, if only as a 
 passer-by, in the vision and dream and faith of 
 the race. 
 
 How vivid, how deep and many-toned is the 
 witness of historic Christian experience, as we 
 have it in the lives of the saints and mystics, to 
 the fact of the Living Christ. What a shining 
 company rise up and give testimony — from St. 
 Paul to Wesley, from St. Augustine to Edwards, 
 from St. Bernard to Phillips Brooks, from John 
 Huss to Horace Bushnell — how their hearts 
 burned within them as He walked with them 
 along the way.^ In every age and land, those 
 who have followed Him — by unfolding His divin- 
 ity in their humanity — have shown in the atmos- 
 phere of their thought and action a quality of 
 life like His own. Others may think Him only 
 an Influence, but they know Him to be a Living 
 
 1 « The Oriental Christ," by P. C. Mozoondar (1883). " Sud- 
 denly, it seemed to me that close to me there was a holier, a 
 more blessed, a more loving personality, upon whom I might 
 repose my troubled head. Jesus lay discovered in my heart as 
 a strange, human, kindred Love, as a response, a sympathetic 
 consolation, an unpurchased treasure to which I was freely in- 
 vited. Jesus, from that day, to me became a reality." See the 
 entire preface, which is a rich page in the literature of the 
 human soul. 
 
 2 With what beauty and lucidity this evidence of Christian 
 experience may be set forth may be seen, for example, in the 
 lectures of Dr. R. W. Dale, " The Living Christ and the Four 
 Gospels" (1890), and, indeed, in a whole library of literature, 
 including the great devotional classics of the Church. 
 
THE LIVING PRESENCE 183 
 
 Presence — a beauty forming within, a continuing 
 glory both of character and of hope — raising them 
 from tombs of selfishness, weariness and despair, 
 until the eternal life began to be an impalpable 
 murmur in their hearts. Said Santa Teresa: 
 
 " I was in prayer one day, when I saw Christ 
 close by me, or, to speak more correctly, felt 
 Him ; for I saw nothing with the eyes of the 
 body, nothing with the eyes of the soul. He 
 seemed to me to be close beside me ; and I saw, 
 too, that it was He who was speaking to me. I 
 was extremely afraid at first, and did nothing but 
 weep ; however, when He spoke to me but one 
 word to reassure me, I recovered myself, and 
 was, as usual, calm and comforted, without any 
 fear whatever. Jesus Christ seemed to be by 
 my side continually, and, as the vision was not 
 imaginary, I saw no form ; but I had a most 
 distinct feeling that He was always on my right 
 hand, a witness of all I did ; and never at any 
 time, if I was but slightly recollected, could I 
 be ignorant of His near presence." * 
 
 Such love is not inspired by an ideal, however 
 lofty, nor by a figure in history, nor yet by a 
 person living but remote, but only by One who 
 is real, living, and near. Think of St. Francis 
 and his transfiguring vision, of which it is written 
 that " from that hour his heart was wounded and 
 melted at the remembrance of his Lord." Those 
 1" Life of Santa Teresa," by herself, Chap. XXVII, pp. 2-5. 
 
1 84 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 who say that we cannot know Christ as the 
 Middle Ages, with their vigour of faith and defect 
 of history, thought to know Him, confess thereby 
 that in trying to make up a defect of history we 
 have fallen into a sadder defect. For many men 
 in our day Christ has, indeed, ceased to be a 
 Person and a Friend, and has become only an 
 impulse or an ideal, upon which we can never, 
 as we fain would, lavish the devotion of an inti- 
 mate love. Hence the penury of much of our 
 religious life, and our groping to know, ideally, 
 what can only be known vividly by an experience 
 which abolishes distance and finds in friendship 
 what is lost in philosophy. Yet such an experi- 
 ence is no less native to our time than it was to 
 the past, as witness Phillips Brooks whose epic 
 life is memorialized for us, with true insight, by 
 Saint-Gaudens, who shows him in marble, with 
 Christ standing just behind as if whispering a 
 message into his ear. Nor was that beauty 
 unique in the great preacher of Trinity Temple, 
 but is a reality known to a host whom the world 
 knows not. For Christ is timeless, and those 
 who follow on may know Him as truly, as 
 vividly, in our age as ever He was known and 
 loved in times agone. 
 
 When we turn from the saints to those who 
 from the mire and the clay of sin have been 
 rescued and redeemed by Him, with what joyous 
 reality does the Living Christ stand forth. To 
 
THE LIVING PRESENCE 1 85 
 
 Oscar Wilde there was something incredible in 
 the idea of a young Galilean imagining that He 
 could bear upon His shoulders the burden of the 
 world — the sins of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of 
 him who was emperor of Rome and priest of 
 the sun; the sufferings of those whose name is 
 legion ; slaves, thieves, outcasts, people in prison, 
 and the dumb dwellers of the abyss whose silence 
 is heard only of God. But when he himself fell 
 into the depths of sin, and found himself an 
 exile from man and the sunUght, in a prison cell 
 under the shadow of colossal shame, he learned 
 that the incredible thing was true: that the 
 Living Christ can heal the deep hurt of the 
 heart and cleanse the soul of sin : so that, at this 
 present time, in this far-off age and land, all who 
 come in contact with Him in some way find 
 that the horror of their sin is taken away and the 
 beauty of their sorrow is revealed. Multitudes 
 bear witness, with songs of praise and hearts 
 made white, to this ineffable wonder. What 
 though He enter our hearts clad in tunic and 
 turban, walking with sandalled feet. Now, as of 
 old, He stills the storms of passion, casts out the 
 demons of envy, fear, and hate, cleanses the lep- 
 rous thoughts that hide in the caves of the 
 mind, and raises from their tombs our dead 
 dreams and our long-buried hopes. 
 
 Nor must we forget that vast multitude who 
 in meekness and loyalty follow His footprints 
 
l86 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 over the hills and valleys of the years, as their 
 fathers followed Him before them. They are as 
 the sands of the sea for number, though the 
 virorld knows them not and takes little note of 
 their humble lives. But to them Christ is a 
 sheltering Rock in a weary land, a wayside 
 Spring, a Companion and a Friend, a Teacher of 
 faith and a Saviour of the soul, and their last 
 whispers are burdened with His name. To them 
 His voice is music, His words are the philosophy 
 of hfe, and His story is the one everlasting 
 romance in a prosaic world. They cannot think 
 of Him without thinking of God instead ; and 
 when they think of God and wonder what is in 
 His heart, it always comes back to their trying 
 to conceive of Jesus infinitely enlarged in every 
 way. When that vision is before them they can 
 hear the splash of great soft tears, falling from 
 the kind heavens, and they know, for a brief 
 moment, that at the heart of things there is an 
 infinite Pity. To Him they owe their souls, 
 their peace in the midst of peril, what faith they 
 have for to-day and what hope for the morrow. 
 To them it is given to know of a truth that 
 
 " God may have other words for other worlds, 
 But for this world the Word of God is Christ." 
 
H 
 
 IV 
 
 THE NEW ADVENT 
 
 I 
 
 ERE, then, is the vast, indescribable, 
 unspeakable Fact of Christ — the fact of 
 " One who stood nearer by some space 
 to us immeasurable to that which is infinitely far " 
 — to explain which we have no adequate theory. 
 When theologians try to measure and fathom 
 this Living Reality, at once historical and experi- 
 mental, we are made to realize that even the 
 noblest intellects have no plummet wherewith to 
 find its bottom. Nor do we need any theory of 
 Christ, but rather to dispense with all theories 
 and get back to the living Fact, which can only 
 be imperfectly described, and which no theory 
 can compass. In the Fact itself, towering above 
 all our dogmas, the meaning and value of life are 
 unveiled to us, and that is all we need to know. 
 It has been said that " a Christ who is a mere 
 anomaly, a riddle to the mind, can never be the 
 true Lord of our hearts." * Yet, even so, with- 
 out reducing Him to an anomaly or a puzzle, it 
 is open to reverent minds to confess the futility 
 of all explanations of Him. 
 
 i« The Servant of God," by W. B. Selbie (191 1). 
 187 
 
1 88 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 Among all those who have written about Jesus, 
 only Renan leaves one with a vivid sense of Him 
 as a living human Being. His " Life of Jesus " 
 — written on the mud floor of a Syrian hut in the 
 Holy Land — does show us the Teacher in habit 
 as He hved/ with the warmth and colour of real- 
 ity, reproducing the vibrating air of the East in 
 which He moved. There we are shown a real 
 historical personage, a teacher of great prophetic 
 endowment, a spiritual genius with an insight and 
 loftiness of nature above his fellows. He is more 
 human, more lovable than the older prophets — 
 a lover of birds and flowers and little children, 
 with glints of humour in his stories, a seer, a 
 poet to whose mind, as to a magnet, the great 
 and simple truths were attracted — so much so, 
 that he holds the foremost place among the 
 epoch-making religious masters of the race. 
 Renan held with Turgenev that Jesus had a face 
 " that looked like the face of all other men, just a 
 common human face " ; and he did make vivid the 
 human Christ without which the divine Christ 
 must ever be vague, dreamy, and remote. All of 
 which, apart from his glib theories, is true as far 
 as it goes, but as a final estimate of Jesus it is 
 pitifully poor. If this be all, then His words, 
 liowever full of beauty, are only so many guesses 
 
 * For a recent study of the human Christ, exquisite in its 
 beauty and grace, see " The Poet of Galilee," by W. E. Leonard 
 (1909). 
 
THE NEW ADVENT 1 89 
 
 at the same old riddle, and His life the story of 
 one more brave seeker after a truth which, after 
 all, eludes us. Nor does it account for the Christ 
 who is still with us, not as a sweet, pathetic mem- 
 ory, but as a Living Presence melting the hearts 
 of men. 
 
 Others are not content to stop by saying that 
 Jesus was simply a God-inspired man, and noth- 
 ing more ; a man of the same order and quality as 
 the great prophets who preceded and followed 
 Him, and that neither He nor they could possess 
 the status of divinity. They go further and say 
 that the supposed distinction between God and 
 man does not exist ; that humanity, being the off- 
 spring of God, is essentially divine ; and, therefore, 
 that Jesus was a divine being and spiritually " the 
 first born among many brethren." This, too, is 
 true and inspiring as far as it goes; but surely 
 Channing, Parker and Martineau, noble as they 
 were, did not fathom the Fact of Christ. They did 
 not explain ail the facts with regard to Him as 
 those facts are revealed, for instance, in the ex- 
 perience of St. Augustine and Wesley. Many 
 things taught by Calvin, Wesley and Newman 
 are unthinkable to some of us, while nearly all 
 that Channing, Emefson and Martineau taught 
 seems reasonable and true. But if it were a 
 choice between the two — as surely it need not be 
 — some of us would go with Wesley and New- 
 man. Their experience of a rich, warm, personal 
 
IQO THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 fellowship with a Living Master is ours, even if 
 their theology is not. Whole areas of reality 
 were left out of account by Emerson and Marti- 
 neau, and we have always the feeling that if so 
 much is true, more is true. 
 
 Some years ago there arose a cry of " Back to 
 Christ," and it evoked a stir of enthusiasm remind- 
 ing one of the old crusades, only it was an effort to 
 rescue the real Jesus from the tomb of dogma. 
 Men felt that if they could only get back to Jesus 
 as He really was, as He lived and taught in Judea, 
 they would find some One whom they could love 
 and follow — " the lowly Man of Galilee," more real 
 and more winsome than the august and distant 
 Christ of dogma. They wanted the sweet-voiced 
 Teacher of the Fatherhood of God and the 
 Brotherhood of Man, in whom truth had wedded 
 beauty, and they firmly beheved that He was 
 there to be found. All that was needed was to 
 throw off the mass of dogmatic accretions that 
 had been imposed upon Him, and then, they 
 were sure. He would stand forth. For a time 
 this quest seemed to sweep everything before it. 
 There were many lives of Jesus, after the manner 
 of Renan and Seeley, and various studies of Him 
 by Harnack, Sabatier, Bossuet and others. All 
 this as a protest, no doubt, against a too formal 
 dogma which had long made Christ too stately 
 and stern, if not almost forbidding, like the 
 strange, mystical figure carved by Saint-Gaudens 
 
THE NEW ADVENT I9I 
 
 on the Adams monument — a Sphinx figure 
 which one knows not whether to call Grief, Pa- 
 tience, or Power. 
 
 Then it was that the historical criticism began 
 to do its work, and little by little, step by step, 
 as it made its way back through the years, it 
 found all that these seekers after Jesus had 
 dreamed, but much else besides. The Christ 
 who emerged from these patient and industrious 
 searchings seemed to be a blend of the picture 
 painted by Renan and by the dogmas of the 
 creeds. He was not simply a mild and gentle 
 Teacher, too great for His age, who essayed to 
 make men know the meaning of the word Love, 
 going at last to His death as a martyr. He was 
 all that, indeed, but much more — a Being of light 
 and flame and power, a wielder of thunderbolts 
 as well as a wooer of souls, not only a Teacher 
 but a Lord of men. He spoke of Himself not so 
 much as a man among men, but as a Man from 
 heaven, a divine instrument long expected, long 
 foretold, through whom man was to be brought 
 into right relations with God ; that He had come, 
 indeed, to teach a higher truth, but also to die a 
 death of mysterious efficacy, and that this, more 
 than His words, was of principal benefit to the 
 race. While this was not the Christ whom the crit- 
 ics themselves wished to find, none the less we 
 may be grateful for the outcome, because it made 
 men realize that Christ is greater than we know. 
 
192 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 Hence a certain vagueness in the thought of 
 our age in regard to Jesus, which means that we 
 are more than ever aware of how vast and inde- 
 finable a ReaHty He is. No longer do we follow 
 a Christ who is only one of ourselves, guessing 
 at the riddle of life as we have to do, knowing 
 nothing certainly either of His own destiny or 
 ours ; but a Master in other worlds than this, a 
 revealer of the heart of things. Yet this Being 
 who towers so far above us is still so close to us, 
 and His whole life so entwined with ours, that 
 we somehow feel that what is true of Him is in 
 some degree true, potentially, of ourselves. How 
 these two things can be united may be hard to 
 know, but they are equally vivid and equally 
 blessed in the faith of to-day. What shapes 
 faith may take in times to come no man can tell, 
 but it is safe to predict that its chief adventures 
 will be yet further discoveries of the Eternal 
 Christ who came among men, and is daily com- 
 ing in beauty and power, to bring humanity to 
 its goal. While all this may seem vague and of 
 little import, if it leaves us with a new sense of 
 wonder at the mystery of Christ it will have made 
 us wise, perhaps, to the saving of faith and the 
 enrichment of hfe. 
 
 n 
 
 How can the Eternal Christ become more real, 
 not only as an Influence but as a Living Presence 
 
THE NEW ADVENT 1 93 
 
 to men like ourselves in a far-off acje? Too 
 many of us are like those two young Romans in 
 the days of Marcus Aurelius, who did not know 
 that Jesus still lived, though they felt the spell of 
 His legend ; like Vinicius and Mariiis the Epiat- 
 rea7t. We read the record of His life with a 
 mingled sense of wonder and regret, as a story 
 beautiful, indeed, but too fair and frail ever to 
 have been true. There it is — the tragedy of One 
 dying for untold myriads who reject, and will re- 
 ject, the grace of His sacrifice, and for other 
 myriads who, mistaking blindly the meaning of it 
 all, work evil in His name. Looking out over the 
 rough world, that Biography of Pity seems, at 
 times, as vain as all the vain things proclaimed of 
 Solomon, or else as unreal as a dream. We do 
 not deny His words, which are like great music, but 
 His voice " comes strange over years of change," 
 faint, dreamy, and far away from our noisy age. 
 Yet are we haunted by Him, who shapes even 
 the literature of doubt, as though by some fatal- 
 ity of thought men who do not find Him must 
 still seek Him, as Isis sought for the body of 
 Osiris.* Often enough He does seem far away, 
 
 J May we not say that " the Messianic hope " in the writings 
 of Emerson, noted by every student, is an example ? Of our 
 Yankee Plato it must be said — with the utmost reverence for a 
 great soul, with gratitude for his revealing, if sometimes va- 
 grant, insights, and with an honourable pride in his character 
 and genius — that he did not see Jesus as He was and is ; and, 
 
194 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 but there are moments when He is subtly with 
 us as an ally of that within us, our higher Self, 
 akin to the divine — that seed which sleepeth until 
 we have watered and nourished the ground upon 
 which it lies ; that voice of God which we will one 
 day no longer den}^ — though we are slow of heart 
 and dull of eyes, and know not who it is that wakes 
 to life the man we ought to be. Almost without 
 our knowing it, by a gentle strategy, a delicate 
 adroitness. Something brings us to a knowledge of 
 our better self, like a good teacher trying to 
 evoke what is in a shy, wayward child. Far 
 away though He may seem. His simple words, as 
 those of no other, do uplift and fortify the soul 
 against the Shadow that waits for every man. 
 Nor can any deny that the only things worth 
 while are the things thought and felt and done in 
 accord with His spirit and example, in sympathy 
 with His life, sweet, appealing, and serene. 
 What man does not know what the poet meant 
 when, looking into the face of a little child, 
 touched by the memory of his own stainless days, 
 he wrote : 
 
 not seeing Him, he remained, in a way, always a seeker. As 
 Holmes said, Emerson went about peeping into every cradle 
 looking for a Messiali. So Nietzsche, who taught atheism with 
 the passion of a devotee and the mystical, alluring style of a 
 poet, proclaimed a Stipcnnan who is to redeem us from the 
 slavery of morality and the weakness of pity. Thus, while 
 denying Jesus, he was actually setting up an ugly and distorted 
 effigy of Him. 
 
THE NEW ADVENT I95 
 
 ''So I hid my face in the grass, 
 AVhispered, * Listen to my despair; 
 I repent me of all 1 did — 
 Speak a little!'" 
 
 No other theme stirs us so deeply, so tenderly, 
 and withal so wistfully, with a kind of melancholy 
 in joy, as the story of His pilgrimage and the 
 wonder of His life. When we see a Christ-man 
 on the stage — whether as " The Servant in the 
 House," * wearing the robes of the East, with a 
 wise, half-humorous sagacity putting the Church 
 to rights, or as a " Passer-by " ^ clad in the garb of 
 to-day, visiting a dingy boarding-house, restoring 
 sincerity of life, smiling away the shams which 
 make men and women petty and mean, and 
 revealing to all, as if a gulf had opened at their 
 feet, the utter folly and shame of selfishness — we 
 go away from the playhouse subdued, musing 
 of what life may be when attuned to His spirit of 
 Love, which sees the good beneath the evil, and, 
 by believing in it, evokes it. Not less so when 
 we engage in works of social betterment, the 
 logic of which involves faith in the worth of the 
 human soul, in the possibility of reclaiming it 
 from evil, and the suggestion of a Fellow-worker 
 at our task ; and the nobler our endeavour the less 
 able are we to dispense with Him to maintain its 
 enthusiasm and support its faith. At every turn 
 
 i"The Servant in the House," by C. R. Kennedy (1908). 
 2 « The Passing of the Third Floor Back," by J. K. Jerome 
 (1909). 
 
196 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 of the road towards a higher, juster, more merci- 
 ful hfe a Figure is seen moving on before beckon- 
 ing us towards the Ideal. 
 
 How may He become real to us as a Living 
 Presence? Judging by the lives of those who 
 have found Him to be such, it is by following in 
 His footsteps, by obeying the promptings of our 
 own souls urging us to a life of purity and self- 
 giving service, as He lived it and taught it. No 
 man has a right to deny this fact unless he has put 
 it to the test, and those who have tried it do not 
 question it. Until we have thus made trial of the 
 teaching of Jesus, our doubts, of whatever kind, 
 are invalid and open to doubt. Only as we 
 identify ourselves with our fellow souls in their 
 dire need, sit where they sit, hope for those who 
 have no hope, and love for those who cannot love, 
 do we know Christ and the eternal quality of His 
 life. He comes to us as One unknown, as of old, by 
 the lakeside. He came to those who knew Him not. 
 He speaks to us the same words, " Follow thou 
 Me ! " and sets us the task which He has to fulfill in 
 our time. He commands, and to those who obey 
 Him, whether they be simple or wise, He reveals 
 Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings 
 they pass through in His fellowship, and, as an inef- 
 fable mystery, they learn in their own experience 
 vjho He is,^ — that He is a Living Friend and Saviour. 
 
 ^ " The Quest of the Historical Jesus," by Dr. Schweitzer 
 (1910.) 
 
THE NEW ADVENT 197 
 
 III 
 
 Let him doubt who will, it is still true that 
 Christ does live in the hearts of men, some of 
 them all unawares, in deeds of Love and Pity and 
 Beauty the world over. Those who go back to 
 the far past and prove, by sifting documents and 
 marshalling evidence, that Jesus rose from the 
 dead, render service to faith. But, were it ever 
 so well attested that He did so rise and make 
 Himself known in gardens or shut chambers or 
 by the shore of a lake at dawn, it would still be a 
 fact in a distant time unlike our own. More vital 
 is the fact that He is now a Living Reality, a 
 hallowing Presence, touching us this day to finer 
 issues, and with His mild persistence urging and 
 lifting us to the highest life. Men may deny this 
 as a fact, they may fight against it, but they can- 
 not always resist the gentle and persuasive appeal 
 of a Reality that is at once a rebuke and an in- 
 vitation to their souls. 
 
 Amid the thin fancies of sceptical minds, Christ 
 stands forth in our troubled and hurrying age as 
 a supreme Reality, an invisible world-power ma- 
 king for beauty, pity and friendship upon earth. 
 Led by Him, men are slowly learning that God 
 is everywhere, seeing all, hearing all, loving all, 
 and forgetting none — a God in whom all may 
 trust, whose character is boundless benevolence, 
 and whose mercy is as abundant as the light and 
 as impartial as the air that belts the earth. 
 
198 THE LIVING WORD OF TRUTH 
 
 Subtle bonds of sympathy and friendship stretch 
 out from us, and to us, all around the world — 
 bonds woven by Him ; a larger brotherhood, a 
 broader tolerance, and a keener divination of the 
 good in men. He is a part of the life of us all, 
 whether we admit it or not— a sweet Charity soft- 
 ening the hard ways of the world, a delicate 
 Purity shaming our uncleanness, a beautiful 
 Justice pleading for the poor and the forlorn — 
 and He will be a legacy to our descendants, with 
 whatsoever else of the good and the true we may 
 bequeath to them, in the very fibre of their 
 being. Long after we have vanished. He will be 
 giving beneficent tendency to all the piteous, 
 passionate and pathetic life that shall flourish in 
 times to come. The impetus given by Him to 
 the latent nobilities of the race shall never end, 
 and the men of the future will inevitably realize 
 some of the beauty of the dreams He has taught 
 us to dream. Here is the message of the 
 Church — to make the Eternal Christ real and 
 eloquent to men — and by this sign it will con- 
 quer. 
 
 Nature, we know, is inevitable in her laws, in 
 her movements, in her high manner. The 
 tides ebb and flow and no man can stay, or 
 hasten, them. Season follows season, with no 
 break in the immemorial sequence, like some 
 stately ritual with " woven hymns of night and 
 day." Over field and factory, over palace and 
 
THE NEW ADVENT I99 
 
 hut, spring pours its flood of light and joy, 
 melting the snow and waking up the seeds 
 sleeping in the earth. All things respond to the 
 magic of its noiseless touch, to the might of its 
 gentleness. There is something like that in the 
 ministry of the Living Christ. He sways men, 
 even in their innermost thought, by a sweet and 
 beautiful fatalism. His influence is as irresistible 
 as the flow of the tides and the march of the 
 seasons, because it is gentle. 
 
 The victory of Christ is inevitable. He will 
 yet have His way with this hard old world to 
 the confounding of all unkindness, all unclean- 
 ness. Ultimately every tyranny shall fall, every 
 Bastile crumble. One Spirit commands the 
 scene, explaining while it prophesies the triumph 
 of Love — the Spirit of the Eternal Christ. In 
 the great, noisy, murky foundry of the world a 
 Bell is somehow being cast that shall ring His 
 praise alone — 
 
 " Ring in the valiant man, the free, 
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 
 Ring out the darkness of the land, 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be." 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
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