<iKlU l.i^ 
 
 BR 121 .C78 1918 
 
 Cross, George, 1862-1929 
 
 What is Christianity? 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 
 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
 THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
 
 NEW V'iKK 
 
 THE J. K. GILL COMPANY 
 
 PORTLAND, OREUON 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 
 THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISnA 
 
 TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKDOKA, SENDAI 
 
 THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY 
 
 SHANOnAI 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 
 
 A STUDY OF 
 RIVAL INTERPRETATION- ^ 
 
 BY 
 
 IV 
 
 GEORGE CROSS 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
Copyright 1918 By 
 The University of Chicago 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Published April 1918 
 
 Composed and Trlnted By 
 
 The University of Chicago Press 
 
 Chicago. Illinois, U.S.A. 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The aim of this work is to assist the intelligent Chris- 
 tian layman and the minister of the gospel who have felt 
 the need of revising their doctrinal inheritance to reach 
 a more satisfactory interpretation of the Christian faith. 
 Everyone who has taken the pains to acquaint himself 
 in any tolerable degree with the effects which the adop- 
 tion of the methods of modern science in many fields of 
 theological investigation has produced in the minds of 
 great numbers of students for the ministry must be aware 
 of the imperativeness of thinking through afresh the 
 essential problems of theology. In no department of 
 Christian thought is this imperativeness more evident 
 than in the subject of apologetics. The older works on 
 this subject, notwithstanding the splendid philosophic 
 ability exhibited in many of them, demonstrably fail to 
 meet the most insistent questions of our times. The 
 discussions presented in this volume are, in the mind of 
 the author, preparatory to a statement and vindication 
 of the truth of the Christian religion. They do not con- 
 stitute a formal introduction to such a task, as anyone 
 can easily see. But it is hoped that a survey of the best- 
 known types of the Christian faith will assist the inquir- 
 ing reader to reach at least a point of view from which his 
 work of formulating a theology for himself may begin. 
 
 What is here written is the fruit of a great many years 
 of reading and reflection combined with the searching 
 experiences of the classroom. In order that the work 
 
 vii 
 
viii Preface 
 
 might be reasonably brief there has been a general avoid- 
 ance of digression, however great the temptation at 
 times, and the statements made are very condensed, on 
 the whole. But I trust that the style is sufficiently 
 popular to enable the reader who is unskilled in the 
 technique of formal theology to read the book with some 
 satisfaction. 
 
 The contents of the volume, excepting the last 
 chapter and such slight revisions as seemed necessary, 
 have already appeared as a series of articles in the 
 Biblical World. My thanks are due to the publishers 
 of this journal for their consent to the publication of 
 them in book form. 
 
 George Cross 
 
 Rochester, New York 
 December 21, 191 7 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction i 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Apocalypticism 3 
 
 i. The Origin of Jewish Apocalypticism .... 10 
 
 2. Principal Features of Jewish Apocalypticism . 17 
 
 3. Apocalypticism in Early Christianity .... 22 
 
 4. Apocalypticism in Catholic and Protestant Creeds 30 
 
 5. Value of Apocalypticism 33 
 
 II. Catholicism 38 
 
 1. Catholicism as a Type of Religious Life .... 41 
 
 2. Catholicism as a Type of Morality or a Form of 
 
 Conduct 47 
 
 3. Catholicism as an Institutional System or a Church 53 
 
 4. Catholicism as a Philosophy or Body of Doctrines 57 
 
 III. Mysticism 60 
 
 1. The Appearing of Mysticism in Historical Chris- 
 
 tianity .... 68 
 
 2. Outstanding Characteristics of Christian Mysticism 75 
 
 3. The Method of Christian Mysticism .... 79 
 
 4. The Strength and the Weakness of Mysticism in 
 
 Christianity 8$ 
 
 IV. Protestantism 87 
 
 1. Historical Sources of Protestantism 91 
 
 2. The Protestant Religious Spirit 97 
 
 3. The Protestant Estimate of Human Life — Its Moral 
 
 Outlook 103 
 
 4. Protestantism as a Theory of Truth — Its Doctrinal 
 
 Standards no 
 
 5. Protestantism on Its Institutional Side . . . . 113 
 
 ix 
 
x Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 V. Rationalism 115 
 
 1. Rationalism in Historical Christianity . . . . 122 
 
 2. The Principles and Dogmas of Rationalism . . 131 
 
 3. A Brief Estimate of Christian Rationalism . . . 140 
 
 VI. EVANGEL1CISM OR MODERNIZED PROTESTANT CHRIS- 
 TIANITY 144 
 
 1. Some Constructive Religious Forces in Modern 
 
 Christianity 144 
 
 2. Some Secular Forces Contributing to the Formation 
 
 of a New Type of Christianity 151 
 
 3. The Influence of Recent Attempts to Understand 
 
 Christianity 158 
 
 4. A Characterization of Evangelicism 166 
 
 VII. What, Then, Is Christianity ? 172 
 
 Bibliography 205 
 
 Index 211 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Christianity is the name commonly given to the 
 religion that came into existence through the career of 
 Jesus of Nazareth and professedly preserves his char- 
 acter to this day. Christianity is a religion; that is, the 
 name stands for a way in which men seek unitedly to 
 come into communion with the eternal and invisible, a 
 way in which they attempt to enter into happy relations 
 with the Supreme Being. It is a historical religion; that 
 is, it had its beginnings at a definite period of human life 
 in this world and the course of its progress from age to 
 age is traceable. It is a religion whose votaries aim at 
 honoring the worth of him from whom it sprang by call- 
 ing themselves by a name that designates his supreme 
 place among men — Christ, Anointed of God, Sent of 
 Heaven, King of their Hearts — Christians, Christ-ones. 
 
 When the historian unfolds before our eyes the man- 
 ner in which this mighty spiritual movement has spread 
 throughout the world and continued through the cen- 
 turies, our attention is transfixed and our thought is 
 challenged. What is it? What does it mean? Its 
 phenomena are so vast and so varied and its followers 
 have differed so much among themselves that at times 
 one is tempted to say that there is often little or nothing 
 more than the name in common. Yet even the posses- 
 sion of a common name is significant. The name may 
 supply the clue to the true interpretation of its character. 
 At any rate, for the intelligent man the attempt to inter- 
 pret it is inevitable. 
 
2 What Is Christianity ? 
 
 The interpretation of Christianity is not exclusively 
 the work of the scholar and philosopher. For the home 
 of this religion has not been mainly in the high places of 
 human life but more especially in the lives of the common 
 people. They have given the most abundant inter- 
 pretation. The conscious interpretation of it by the 
 professional thinker is dependent on the popular, half- 
 involuntary, half-conscious interpretation that is offered 
 in the ways of the masses of believers — their spontaneous 
 religious speech, acts of worship, songs, prayers, modes of 
 conduct, customs of assembly, and methods of organiza- 
 tion. The thinker must try to account for these things. 
 
 The interpretations of Christianity that have ap- 
 peared are numerous. In our survey it will be neces- 
 sary to pass by many that are of only minor interest 
 and limit our study to the great outstanding types. We 
 shall select six — Apocalypticism, Catholicism, Mysticism, 
 Protestantism, Rationalism, and Evangelicism. These 
 overlap and mingle, of course, but they are sufficiently 
 distinct to stand apart in our study. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 APOCALYPTICISM 
 
 It is related in the Gospel of Mark that at a critical 
 point in his career "Jesus asked his disciples, saying unto 
 them, Who do men say that I am ? And they told him, 
 saying, John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but others, 
 One of the prophets. And he asked them, But who say 
 ye that I am? Peter answereth and saith unto him, 
 Thou art the Messiah" (Greek, Christ). 
 
 These are momentous words, for they record the first 
 historic confession of the Christian faith. It seems to 
 have risen spontaneously to the lips of the disciple when 
 the Master's great question was asked and he spoke with 
 the evident assurance that he was uttering the convic- 
 tion that bound him and his companions together in a 
 common allegiance and a common hope. Here, there- 
 fore, we date the beginning of the Christian religion. 
 Here, for the first time, the followers of the Nazarene 
 were consciously differentiated from the rest of men by 
 their unanimous trust in his mission. Here, too, for the 
 first time, Jesus was placed outside the category of com- 
 mon men, even of the highest and best of them, and 
 assigned a unique place in the world. What, more 
 precisely, that place should be was as yet vaguely 
 conceived in the minds of his followers. The colloquy 
 that follows Peter's confession reflects a clash of ideas 
 on the subject among his disciples from the outset. 
 The controversy about him that has continued for 
 
4 What Is Christianity? 
 
 centuries was then at its beginning, and the end of it 
 is not even yet in sight. 
 
 Among the many Christian confessions that rise up 
 as way-marks along the road of Christian history, Peter's 
 confession enjoys a pre-eminence, and that for a better 
 reason than its priority in time. For it has always been 
 and still remains the most popular of them all. In this 
 stock confession of Christendom subject and predicate 
 have become so closely united that the two words, Jesus 
 and Christ, regularly stand together as a single personal 
 name. Moreover, this confession is the parent of all the 
 others. For they are all enlargements or modifications 
 of it, and they indicate the manner in which faith in the 
 messiahship of Jesus has infused a new meaning into 
 beliefs that arose at first independently of it. We can 
 say — for we see it now as it was impossible for those 
 early disciples to see it — that the Petrine confession 
 marked the rise of a new religion among men. It did 
 not seem so, I say, at the time. For to say that Jesus 
 was the Christ seemed at first simply to say that through 
 him was to come the realization of the Jewish hope. 
 But the actual outcome was vastly different from what 
 anyone could have anticipated. For it was only a little 
 while before the new faith found itself in violent conflict 
 with the Judaism out of whose bosom it sprang. A 
 dramatic account of that conflict appears in the early 
 chapters of the Acts and is reflected by anticipation, as 
 it were, upon the accounts of Jesus' career. The root 
 of the controversy lay in the question whether the 
 faith in Jesus did not represent the true Judaism. And 
 now, after the lapse of all the intervening centuries, it is 
 still an open question whether, after all, it was not mis- 
 
Apocalypticism 5 
 
 leading to call Jesus the Christ. Did not Peter's con- 
 fession introduce into the minds of Jesus' followers a 
 misconception of the character and purpose of Jesus? 
 In assigning to him the character and the purpose of the 
 Jewish Messiah did it not pervert his true aim and theirs ? 
 And has not the Christian faith been burdened with 
 beliefs in consequence from which it still seeks relief? 
 This is in part the subject of our present discussion. 
 
 The significance of the primitive confession that 
 Jesus was the Messiah is to be perceived only by refer- 
 ence to the whole circle of ideas to which the term 
 belongs. For the story of the origin and development 
 of Jewish Messianism the reader must be referred to 
 the works of specialists, to whom of late we owe a great 
 increment of knowledge on the subject. It is not 
 possible in the present connection to do more than indi- 
 cate in a general manner the conditions and conceptions 
 out of which it sprang. Jewish Messianism is a promi- 
 nent feature of a specifically Jewish philosophy which 
 men have called Apocalypticism. Jewish Apocalyp- 
 ticism is a modification, under the influence of the Jewish 
 religious spirit, of a widespread, if not universal, oriental 
 philosophy of the universe and of human life. The 
 character of this philosophy we shall expound more fully 
 presently. The thing we wish to point out just now is 
 that the effect of the adoption by Jesus' followers of 
 Peter's confession was to carry Jewish Messianism over 
 into the new Christian community and thereby bring 
 the minds of Christians so directly under the power of 
 Jewish Apocalypticism that it became naturalized in 
 their interpretation of their new faith. That is to say, 
 Christians found, first of all, in the formulas of Jewish 
 
6 What Is Christianity? 
 
 Apocalypticism a body of ideas by which they were 
 enabled to express to themselves and to others the sig- 
 nificance and worth of the personality and career of 
 Jesus. Christian Apocalypticism is a Jewish heritage. 
 The conceptions by which the religious Jew was wont 
 to set forth his hopes for the future were transferred 
 to the Christian mind and became the instruments of 
 its self-expression. This was quite natural at a time 
 when the great body of believers in Jesus came of Jewish 
 stock. But the union of Christian faith and Jewish 
 philosophy, which was so natural to men of the pharisaic 
 type of mind, has continued to the present day when the 
 naturalness of it is no longer clear. We shall see that, 
 like so many other marriages, it has been both for better 
 and for worse. Its fruit is mingled evil and good. 
 
 On the other hand, the fact that conceptions that 
 were formerly distinctively Jewish have obtained a 
 powerful hold on many other peoples and races and 
 have maintained their hold on them for long centuries 
 creates a presumption that these conceptions must have 
 belonged originally to mankind at large or, at least, have 
 borne such a likeness to prevailing conceptions among 
 other peoples that the transition from one to the other 
 must have been easy and natural. The comparative 
 study of religions has confirmed the presumption. We 
 were formerly trained so thoroughly in the belief that 
 the Jews were most especially a people separate from all 
 others that we forgot they were the natural heirs of 
 ecumenical traditions. The Jews were but a single 
 branch of the Israelitish people, the Israelites of the 
 Hebrews, the Hebrews of the Semites, and the Semites 
 of the stock of that ancient humanity whose story has 
 
Apocalypticism 7 
 
 been mostly lost to us. The Jews were, therefore, the 
 natural heirs of the traditions of many races, whatever 
 traditions they may have had that were peculiarly their 
 own. Their likeness to the common Semitic stock, at 
 least, was much more marked than their unlikeness. 
 Then, too, their geographical location in Palestine, that 
 ancient battle-ground of many mighty peoples, brought 
 them into close contact with the great complex of experi- 
 ences and ideas that constituted the culture of the 
 ancient world. Their acquisitiveness as a people, com- 
 bined with their individuality, enabled them to stamp the 
 traditions that had flowed down to them from many 
 sources with their own distinctive characteristics. This 
 inheritance of theirs became woven through and through 
 with their monotheism and their highly moral concep- 
 tions of the nature of the Deity and of man's relation to 
 him and then, through the dispersion of the Jews, was 
 given to the world. This position is thoroughly con- 
 firmed by the critical study of the Jewish Scriptures and 
 the recovery of the knowledge of ancient mythology. 
 It may not be possible to disentangle completely the 
 different strands that have been woven into the Jewish 
 Scriptures, yet it is perfectly plain to the discriminating 
 student that much of the folklore and mythology that 
 belonged to other nations recurs in the Old Testament, 
 but has been transformed there by the higher spirit that 
 was given to the Jews. 
 
 Now the striking thing about the traditions of primi- 
 tive culture is the similarity of the main strands of their 
 folklore and their myths even when the various peoples 
 concerned were far separated in time and distance and 
 without apparent contact with one another. The peoples 
 
8 What Is Christianity? 
 
 that were able to establish stable governments over 
 large territories and to secure the safety essential to the 
 growth of the higher forms of culture wrought up these 
 primitive stories into literary and philosophic forms, but 
 did not obliterate their original features, so that the 
 link of connection between the cruder and the finer cul- 
 ture of antiquity has been preserved. Their underlying 
 unity is discernible. The general themes of these ancient 
 constructive efforts of the human mind are the same 
 everywhere. They all reflect in highly dramatic and 
 realistic form the effect produced upon the spirits of men 
 by the constant struggle with the powers of material 
 existence. They tell the story of the destructive fury 
 of malignant forces that assail men and also the story 
 of deliverance from these foes. Their interest was not 
 so very different from the interest with which we today 
 pursue our study of the world and of man, namely, the 
 aim to realize the highest well-being. But the place 
 which is taken by abstract ideas in our present philoso- 
 phies was occupied by realistic, semi-personal creations 
 of the ancient mind. In what we are pleased to call — 
 in less marked anthropomorphic form — the impersonal 
 forces of nature, men of old saw the operations of living 
 beings. What we figuratively describe as the battle of 
 the elements they regarded as the actual encounters of 
 real animate existences possessed of passions like ours. 
 Whether we turn to the mythology of the Egyptians, 
 Chaldeans, Assyrians, Iranians, Indians, or Greeks, the 
 interest is the same, namely, the framing of an account 
 of the origin of the woes and the blessings of men through 
 the operations of what we call, somewhat blankly, 
 "nature," but what they, in part, personalized. 
 
Apocalypticism g 
 
 These mythologies present three outstanding features 
 in common: First of all, prominence is given to the 
 material forces against which men seem to have struggled 
 so often in vain — stormy seas, raging floods, torrential 
 rains, earthquakes, and fires. These forces working 
 harm to hapless men are viewed as great monsters of 
 transcendent might, say, a great dragon or a serpent 
 in the deep or in the sky. Sometimes by a fusion of 
 traditions these monsters were multiplied. Secondly, 
 human experiences of deliverance from these baneful 
 forces are pictured as the beneficent deeds of some great 
 hero, generally more distinctly human in form than were 
 these dangerous beings, but still superhuman. These 
 saviors of men throttle and subdue the evil powers and 
 rescue men from sufferings and calamities by a higher 
 control of cosmic forces. Thirdly, there was a repre- 
 sentation of a Golden Age in the distant past when men 
 were without their present trials, and for the return of 
 that age they fondly hoped. Perhaps we should say 
 that this was not so much a memory of the past as an 
 anticipation of the future reflected upon the past and 
 held as a ground of encouragement for the future. 
 
 Here is a pictorial philosophy so widespread among 
 the ancients that it seems to be native to men. It consti- 
 tutes a view of things that is both a cosmic philosophy 
 and a philosophy of salvation. It sets forth the three 
 main forms of experience in which men become aware of 
 their universal kinship. First, their sufferings and mis- 
 fortunes are due to forces too mighty for them to master 
 or control unaided. Secondly, there is deliverance from 
 these trials through intervention from on high, and with 
 this goes the sense of dependence on a Savior-friend. 
 
io What Is Christianity? 
 
 Finally, there is the hope of an ideal state to come, but 
 founded from the beginning of human life — a heaven, a 
 paradise. These three features are found, indeed, in all 
 religions, and they remind us that there never has been, 
 as there never can be, a religion that does not embrace 
 in the end a philosophy of all being. 
 
 What has all this to do with Peter's confession that 
 Jesus was the Messiah ? Much in every way, but prin- 
 cipally because in effect the confession connected the 
 career of Jesus hopefully with those universal human 
 feelings of need and longing for deliverance of which we 
 have spoken, and because it made him personally the 
 bearer of that deliverance. It placed Jesus, in effect, 
 at the very heart of all the distracting problems that 
 press for human solution and declared that he could 
 supply the answer to them. To be sure, Peter could 
 scarcely have been even dimly aware of this at that time. 
 The confession was purely Jewish in its conscious pur- 
 port. It pronounced Jesus a purely Jewish deliverer, 
 and the disciples were very slow to perceive afterward a 
 larger meaning in their faith, but none the less it pre- 
 pared the way for the universalization of the Christian 
 faith, because the Jewish messianic hope was the uni- 
 versal human hope intensified, purified, and exalted 
 through the peculiar experiences of the Jewish people. 
 A few words must now be said in further explanation and 
 justification of this statement. 
 
 I. THE ORIGIN OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM 
 
 It was suggested above that in earlier stages of 
 their life as a people the Israelites were so much like to 
 the surrounding peoples in character that it would be 
 
A pocalypticism 1 1 
 
 difficult to distinguish the qualities that made them 
 excel. But in course of time, under the leadership of 
 those men of deep moral insight and moral vision we call 
 the prophets, they grew to be a nation enjoying as their 
 distinctive dignity the consciousness of a relation to their 
 God fundamentally different from that relation which 
 other peoples conceived they bore to their gods. For 
 while the popular view of the relation between the 
 peoples and their gods was that of consanguinity or phys- 
 ical kinship, and while this inevitably involved the god 
 in each case in the fate of his people, in the view of the 
 prophets the national existence of Israel was based upon 
 a mutual covenant between him and them to which, in 
 the end, every individual Israelite was a partner. Thus 
 the basis of their national life was moral rather than 
 physical, because the covenant-relation is established by 
 an act of choice rather than by physical necessity. This 
 also made the continuance of their God Jahwe's protec- 
 tion of them dependent on their obedience to the terms 
 of that covenant. Out of this relation arises the idea of 
 law. It is quite in keeping with this whole conception 
 that the prophets should constantly insist that the test 
 of all action, both national and personal, was found in 
 the law of their God, and that their well-being depended 
 on their obedience to it. To attempt to trace the effects 
 of this belief upon the spiritual life of the whole nation 
 would carry us too far afield for our present purposes, 
 but it is easy to understand how from this point of view 
 there grew up in the minds of the people the conviction 
 of the superiority of their God to all other gods and at 
 the same time the sense of their own superiority to other 
 peoples. The corollary of such a conviction is the 
 
12 What Is Christianity? 
 
 persuasion of their own indestructibility as a people. 
 Other peoples might perish, but they could not because 
 their God was above all gods. It was this belief that bore 
 them up in their times of fearful struggle with nations or 
 empires of far greater material power than they, and that 
 gave them confidence that they should survive all defeats 
 and be more than conquerors in the end. It was in sup- 
 port of this confidence that the prophets reinterpreted the 
 popular lore of the race from the earliest ages with a view 
 to showing that the course of all the peoples and of the 
 material world from the beginning was directed in con- 
 formity with the purpose of God to select Israel as a 
 people for himself and to give them ultimate supremacy 
 over all others. With this object in mind they continu- 
 ally offered forecasts of a day of deliverance and triumph 
 to come. 
 
 The eyes of the prophets were therefore upon the 
 future. For them the true Golden Age, even if at times 
 they did idealize the past, was yet to come. It seems 
 that the people were fond of speaking of the coming 
 " Day of Jahwe" when he should triumph for them over 
 their enemies and his. The prophets were able to 
 impart a profoundly moral character to this prospect. 
 Their predictions of blessing for Israel in that day 
 were interspersed with warnings; for while, as the 
 people thought, it was to be a day of judgment on all 
 nations, it was not less to be a day of judgment for 
 Israel as well. It would bring retribution for the 
 wicked as well as reward for the righteous. And that 
 meant that there was to be a distinction made within 
 Israel as truly as a distinction between Israel and 
 other peoples. Indeed, in some prophetic utterances 
 
A pocalypticism 1 3 
 
 the principle of righteous judgment seems to be applied 
 indiscriminately as respects the different nations. Thus 
 there rose up in the prophetic mind the overpowering 
 conception of a great Judgment Day for the vindication 
 of righteousness among all men — one of the great spirit- 
 ual gifts of Israel to the world. 
 
 It might be expected that the successive overthrow 
 of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of the Israelitish 
 people, their captivity in foreign lands, their pitiable 
 weakness on the economic side, and their political hope- 
 lessness would strain this fundamental conviction to the 
 breaking-point. That they survived their downfall, 
 that in the minds of many of the people of Judah their 
 sense of moral superiority remained unimpaired, and 
 their confidence in the ultimate salvation of the righteous 
 stood firm, is one of the miracles of history. The effect 
 of their bitter experiences was to intensify the confidence 
 of the pious Jew in the power of his God. The darker 
 their material and political outlook, the more fervent 
 became their religious faith and hope. The Day of 
 Jahwe would most surely come, but the deliverance it 
 would bring should not be accomplished by the sword 
 of Judah, but by the irresistible intervention of their 
 God from on high. The day of judgment upon man- 
 kind should be a day of salvation for the suffering 
 righteous. 
 
 It is evident that the misfortunes of these people 
 occasioned a vast revolution in their religion. The 
 destruction of the monarchy upon which the prophets 
 had devoted so much of their energy in an attempt to 
 keep the kings true to the higher faith, the obliteration 
 of the political state, the exile from the land that they 
 
14 What Is Christianity? 
 
 called the land of Jahwe, the ruination of their sanctu- 
 aries and of the worship there, led to a spiritualization of 
 their religious belief; the contact with Babylonian and 
 Persian civilization broadened their horizon. A new 
 world on high was opened to the eye of their imagination, 
 and a vaster world on the earth spread before them. 
 And consequently a new destiny lay beyond. Their 
 God no longer dwelt in the temple made with hands or 
 even in the land of Palestine but in the high heaven above 
 them. They learned from Babylon and Persia to people 
 that heaven with exalted beings whose nature was suited 
 to the invisible better world, and whose business it was 
 to act as the messengers of the unseen God and carry out 
 his decrees on earth. All the so-called gods were no 
 gods at all. The evident hopelessness of a struggle with 
 the mighty empires whose power was made manifest to 
 them every day, and the fading character of all material 
 prosperity, turned their minds to the heaven. There 
 the pious Jew fixed his gaze, and while the hope of a 
 restoration of the earthly kingdom of Israel still lingered, 
 the progress of events tended to give to this earthly 
 kingdom more and more a miraculous character while it 
 should last; but it came to be conceived by many a Jew 
 as having only a limited duration and as destined to 
 give place to a kingdom in the heaven that should last 
 forever. 
 
 A new interest was henceforth taken in the present 
 and future state of the dead. The old view that all men 
 went to one place and met the same fate and that the 
 present life was the scene of all punishment and reward 
 passed with the passing of confidence in the perpetuity 
 and worth of a political kingdom on earth and the rise 
 
Apocalypticism 15 
 
 into prominence of the distinction of righteous and 
 unrighteous within the nation. The righteous must 
 have a place in the new kingdom. If that kingdom was 
 to be ushered in by a judgment, then there must be a 
 judgment for the 'dead as well as for the living. The 
 idea of a resurrection of the dead came as a consolation 
 to those who contended for the supremacy of righteous- 
 ness; and with this the old idea of Sheol, as the final 
 abode of all indiscriminately, gave way. Sheol could 
 no longer be a place of hopelessness for all, or if Sheol 
 was the place of the wicked there must be another abode 
 for the righteous, though it was difficult to say where 
 it should be before the resurrection. With this new 
 interest in the dead arose many speculations and guesses 
 about the unseen regions. There was no unanimity of 
 opinion. But new regions began to appear — Heaven, 
 Paradise, Sheol, Gehenna, were distinguished, but their 
 relations were obscure. Whether there was to be a 
 resurrection of all the dead for judgment or a resurrec- 
 tion of the righteous only was uncertain. With the 
 incoming of Greek influence came a doubt of the reality 
 or value of any resurrection or of any material kingdom. 
 There was a tendency to spiritualize everything and to 
 fix attention upon the hope of a life eternal in a purely 
 spiritual world; but this view was probably that of the 
 few. Yet amid all the differences of speculation there 
 stood out clearly the firm belief in a coming universal 
 judgment and end of the world. The latter was usually 
 conceived as ushered in by a fire which should destroy 
 the present order of things and the wicked with it. 
 
 There is one feature in this development of the Jewish 
 religious spirit that claims our special interest, namely, 
 
1 6 What Is Christianity? 
 
 the expectation of the coming of a King-Messiah. In 
 the earlier prophetic delineation of the glory of the com- 
 ing kingdom there appeared from time to time pictures 
 of an ideal king through whom their God would establish 
 the power and prosperity of his people. The destruction 
 of the two kingdoms and the subsequent exile rendered 
 the fulfilment of the prophetic hope a physical impos- 
 sibility. The nationalism of which the prophets were 
 the spokesmen gradually faded away with the experi- 
 ences of the captivity. It became to a large extent 
 unnecessary. For the nationalism of the prophets was 
 too narrow for those who gained the universalistic out- 
 look upon the world and the spiritual interpretation of 
 things that came through contact with the larger gentile 
 views of existence. A great modification of the mes- 
 sianic expectation became necessary if it was to survive 
 and minister to the religious life of men. The Messiah 
 must take on a character in keeping with the new views 
 of the world and of salvation. A mere son of David 
 could never fulfil the functions of a Judge of all mankind 
 and of the Ruler of a kingdom that came from heaven. 
 He must be a heavenly being and, like the kingdom, must 
 also descend from heaven to earth. Would he not live 
 and reign forever ? But here again there was much con- 
 fusion. The old and the new mingled as the new seers 
 sought to connect their new views with the old prophetic 
 declarations. Sometimes the temporal kingdom receives 
 no recognition whatever, but all is heavenly. The 
 Messiah of such a kingdom would be a heavenly and 
 eternal being. At one time (in Second Enoch) it is 
 said that the kingdom will last a thousand years, or 
 again (in Fourth Esdras) that it will last four hundred 
 
Apocalypticism 17 
 
 years — corresponding to the four hundred years in 
 Egypt — but the Messiah was to die at the close. Some- 
 times the expectation of a Messiah is entirely wanting, 
 and Jahwe himself is the immediate deliverer of his 
 people and Judge of the world. The Messiah is at one 
 time a mighty monarch ruling all nations in righteous- 
 ness, and again he is a co-sufferer with his people. Thus 
 nationalism and universalism, materialism and spiritual- 
 ism, were mingled in the post-exilian life of the Jews, and 
 the minds of the people were divided. 
 
 In this rude survey of the spiritual development of 
 the Jewish people we have covered many centuries and 
 reached the times of Jesus himself. The advent of Jesus 
 and his message to the world, directly or through his 
 disciples, were contemporary with the later phases of 
 this evolution. While, therefore, Peter's confession that 
 Jesus was Messiah connects Jesus with the ideas out- 
 lined above, it does not determine which of these various 
 and conflicting views of the character of the coming 
 kingdom, of the manner of its establishment, and of the 
 end of the world were uppermost or even present in the 
 minds of his followers. This much, however, is plain — 
 that the new faith obtained the formulas of its expression 
 through the conceptions whose development we have 
 sought to outline. We shall now attempt to state why 
 we have described this view of things by the term 
 Apocalypticism. 
 
 2. PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM 
 
 The contact with Babylonian and Persian culture in 
 the earlier period following upon the destruction of the 
 Jewish state and the contact with Greek culture in the 
 
x 8 What Is Christianity ? 
 
 later period — to mention only the most important for- 
 eign influences — gave a powerful stimulus to the Jewish 
 intellect and vastly widened its horizon. Babylonian 
 astrology and Persian dualism gave to the Jews a new 
 knowledge of the world, and Grecian thought gave them 
 a new view of its meaning. This intellectual expansion 
 was accompanied by a deepening of their moral and 
 religious life. This came to them as a consolation for 
 their terrible losses. Two real worlds, the heaven and 
 the earth, besides the shadowy realm of Sheol, or the 
 underworld, now came into view. Man is of the earth, 
 and his days are few. But Jahwe God is in the high 
 heaven above all earthly things and free from all earthly 
 contingencies. There he lives and reigns eternally. 
 Superhuman beings serve him there. He rules also on 
 the earth, and the angels of his power go forth from his 
 presence bearing his decrees and effecting his purposes 
 on the earth. All events that occur on the earth are 
 determined in advance in heaven. So to say, that which 
 took place on earth was first enacted in heaven and must 
 inevitably come to pass. If men could but enter heaven, 
 or if the veil that separates heaven from earth could 
 be withdrawn for a time, men would be able to see 
 beforehand the things which are to come to pass. 
 What is true of the earth is also true of the under- 
 world, for Jahwe is lord there also and predetermines 
 the fate of its denizens. Thus there lies before men 
 the possibility of obtaining a knowledge of the distant 
 future. 
 
 The possibility becomes an actuality. The new 
 world becomes the basis of a new view of human knowl- 
 edge. Men have actually witnessed the lifting of the 
 
Apocalypticism 19 
 
 veil between heaven and earth. There have been apoca- 
 lypses, revelations, of those things that happen in heaven. 
 Men have had visions of that realm and they have heard 
 voices speaking to them from it. The disclosures that 
 came to men in this way are not to be classed with things 
 that they learn in the ordinary manner. The sight and 
 the hearing they enjoyed were special gifts bestowed 
 upon the few. They were the seers, the prophets of 
 their God. This knowledge was not merely natural but, 
 as we are accustomed to say, supernatural, miraculous. 
 It was certain that they who obeyed the heavenly vision 
 should infallibly be blessed. The word that came from 
 heaven could not fail. 
 
 Moreover, the apocalypses disclosed the secret causes 
 of the events for whose coming believers were to look so 
 hopefully. They belonged to the same order as the 
 knowledge concerning them. They were not brought 
 about through the normal working of those things we see 
 about us, but by the special act, the determining will, of 
 God. Apart from this they could not happen. If God 
 thus intervened by his mighty power to bring to pass 
 things that would be otherwise impossible, then the 
 tremendous events which the seers were now foretelling 
 and which seemed so contrary to expectation — the 
 descent of the Messiah from heaven, the resurrection 
 from the dead, the assembling of all mankind for judg- 
 ment, the burning of the world and the wicked with it, 
 and the creation of a new world for the righteous or the 
 taking of them up into heaven — would surely occur. 
 Here, then, their religious faith found its firm support. 
 With such a basis of confidence an oppressed and impov- 
 erished people could bid defiance to all the powers of this 
 
20 What Is Christianity? 
 
 world or the world beneath. These are the themes of 
 the Jewish apocalyptic. 
 
 It is a very striking feature of those Jewish apoca- 
 lypses which have been committed to writing that they 
 are all pseudonymous. The writers conceal their per- 
 sonal authorship under the name of some accredited 
 prophet or worthy of the past. Such names as Enoch, 
 the Twelve Patriarchs, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 Daniel, Ezra, are attached to the apocalypses. What is 
 the secret of this self-effacement? It could not have 
 been simply a means of avoiding the danger of identifica- 
 tion which is often so real to the writers among an 
 oppressed people. It must have been mainly for the 
 sake of securing for their messages the credence that 
 attached to the utterances of men who were commonly 
 regarded as special messengers of their God — men who 
 had seen the heavenly things and spoke by the spirit of 
 Jahwe. That is to say, the authors of the Jewish apoca- 
 lyptic firmly believed that their own utterances were 
 revelations from heaven, visions given by God, and they 
 sought to persuade their readers of the same by attribut- 
 ing their works to men in whom the people already 
 believed. This brings out another very interesting 
 fact related to the production of Jewish apocalyptic. 
 We shall indicate it. 
 
 The apocalyptic writings cover, roughly speaking, 
 a period of time stretching from the second century 
 before Christ to the end of the first Christian century. 
 The events of the times before the captivity were now 
 far back in the past. The common tendency among men 
 to idealize the past was accentuated among the Jews of 
 these later days through the contrast with their former 
 
A pocalypticism 2 1 
 
 condition. Those patriotic statesmen of the former 
 days who gave a moral interpretation of Israel's history 
 and attempted to direct the policy of the state by their 
 forecasts of coming changes were now among the national 
 heroes. They had foretold the things that had come to 
 pass. They were inspired of Jahwe. They had had 
 visions of the heavenly things. The things which eye 
 saw not and ear heard not and which entered not into 
 the heart of the common man had been revealed to them. 
 If the prophets had foretold the things which had already 
 come to pass, why should they not also have foretold the 
 things which were even yet to come ? And so the new 
 seers, believing that they too had visions given them by 
 God, disclaimed all honor for themselves and ascribed 
 their experiences to the acknowledged sages of the past 
 in order to establish the hearts of the people in the con- 
 fidence that the things which they had seen in vision 
 were really about to occur. This use of the works of the 
 ancient prophets was possible through the collection of 
 their writings by the learned and devout scribes of the 
 people. They had not hesitated to attach the names of 
 known prophets to writings whose authorship was un- 
 known in order to preserve those works and secure for the 
 whole body of the collected writings the veneration that 
 would insure the loyal obedience of the people. That 
 is to say, the scribes had already made a virtual canon of 
 scripture, a collection of the utterances of men whose word 
 was the word of God, the words of men who were given a 
 knowledge inaccessible to others. Jewish Apocalypticism 
 leans for support upon a canon of inspired scripture. 
 
 We may now briefly summarize the results of our 
 study to this point. First, Jewish Apocalypticism is an 
 
22 What Is Christianity? 
 
 outcome of the doctrine of a dual world, the earth and 
 the heaven above the earth. There was also a shadowy 
 underworld obscurely related to the heaven, but like it 
 in that it was ordinarily invisible. Secondly, it was a 
 doctrine of the predetermination of all events by the 
 irresistible decretive will of God, a doctrine of divine 
 predestination. Thirdly, it was a doctrine of human 
 knowledge of future events by means of supernatural 
 vision, a theory of the knowledge of the invisible. 
 Fourthly, it was a universalistic interpretation of human 
 history in contrast with the narrower nationalism of the 
 ancient prophets, and it thereby carried with it the 
 enfranchisement of the individual. Finally, Apoca- 
 lypticism offered a moral interpretation of all human 
 history. Everything was viewed from the standpoint 
 of a universal and final day of judgment (the idea of a 
 canon of inspired scripture is intimately associated with 
 Apocalypticism, but is not essential to it). If these 
 things are so, Apocalypticism, so far from being a degen- 
 erate offspring of prophetism, was the very flower of 
 prophetism and brings the era of Jewish prophecy to a 
 close. 
 
 3. APOCALYPTICISM IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 
 
 We turn once more to the Pe trine confession. The 
 pronouncement that Jesus was the Messiah, while it did 
 not determine which of the many different views that 
 were current in Jewish apocalyptic was to become the 
 Christian view, did finally interpret the mission of Jesus 
 through the general apocalyptical view of the world and 
 of human life. Apocalyptic became the native air in 
 which early Christianity lived and breathed. It pro- 
 
Apocalypticism 23 
 
 vided for the new age the answer to the question of the 
 meaning of the career of Jesus, his relation to the all- 
 determining will of God, and his relation to the destiny 
 of mankind universally. Apocalyptic became for Jewish 
 believers, and to a large extent for generations of gentile 
 believers after them, the determinate mode of expressing 
 the Christian faith. So closely do the cast of thought 
 in the Jewish apocalyptic and the prevailing thought in 
 the New Testament coincide that to the reader who is 
 unacquainted with the Jewish Apocrypha, and whose 
 knowledge of these ancient people is drawn wholly from 
 the Old and the New Testament, it must have seemed, 
 as he read the foregoing account of the character of 
 Jewish Apocalypticism, that it was derived directly from 
 the New Testament. 
 
 The books of our New Testament came almost 
 entirely, if not altogether, from the hands of Jewish 
 believers in the messiahship of Jesus, and they are 
 addressed to readers most of whom are presupposed to 
 be familiar with Jewish thought. So far as the general 
 type of thought is concerned, nothing stands out more 
 prominently than the fact of our having before us there 
 a Christian recast of the Jewish apocalyptic. This is a 
 matter that claims our attention somewhat in detail. 
 
 First of all, the New Testament is thoroughly charged 
 with the consciousness of the contrast between two 
 worlds, heaven and earth (with also a vague recognition 
 of a real lower world different from both) . The contrast 
 turns in favor of the heaven. The interest and hope of 
 believers are concentrated there. The presence and 
 activity of God on earth and among men do not alter 
 the fact that he is pre-eminently in heaven. The words 
 
24 What Is Christianity? 
 
 of the invocation so dear to all Christendom make it 
 indisputable: "Our father which art in heaven, hal- 
 lowed be thy name." From thence came the Christ to 
 earth and thither he has returned, to come a second time. 
 Whether it be Matthew or Paul or John who speaks, it is 
 the same. The conception is more or less realistic in all, 
 and the very foundation of the Christian hope seems at 
 times to lie there. Believers' expectations of future 
 blessedness are made to depend on the reality of that 
 heaven, for they hope to be raised from their graves or 
 to ascend from the surface of the earth at the coming of 
 Christ to be with him— though this is not the invariable 
 way of putting it, and sometimes the language seems to 
 be symbolic rather than literally descriptive. 
 
 The denizens of these worlds are clearly distinguished, 
 and for the most part easily recognized. Angels of God 
 from heaven frequently appeared to the sight of believ- 
 ing men, speaking to them, assisting them in their tasks 
 or ministering to their comfort and well-being. Demons 
 from the lower world were also banefully active every- 
 where, afflicting men with ills or deceiving and beguiling 
 them into sin — though there are no references to their 
 visibility. Life is sometimes represented as a constant 
 battle with these hidden foes, for while their home was 
 in the underworld their operations were on the earth or 
 even in the heights above where the good angels are. 
 Hence the moral conflicts in which men were engaged 
 might appear as pitched battles with monstrous spiritual 
 forces in the higher regions. As Paul puts it— "Our 
 wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the 
 principalities, against the powers, against the world- 
 rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of 
 
A pocalypticism 2 5 
 
 wickedness in the heavenly places." What a dignity 
 and grandeur was thereby attached to our human, moral 
 struggles ! Jesus had the angels of God at his command, 
 and to him and his followers they rendered service. It 
 will not do to call this mere religious rhetoric, for in those 
 times it all seemed very real. 
 
 So profoundly impressed were these first-century 
 believers with the reality of their heritage in that higher 
 world that the hope of the messianic kingdom, which 
 they had inherited from the Jews, was conceived no 
 longer, after the manner of the prophets, as growing up 
 out of better moral conditions on the earth, but as the 
 expectation of a city-state that should descend to earth 
 out of the skies after the evil world had been destroyed. 
 The imagery of the New Testament, when these themes 
 are discussed, is most impressive. For vividness and 
 magnificence these portrayals have never been excelled. 
 And no wonder, because the stake was the most momen- 
 tous possible. No effort was spared to excite and sustain 
 the expectation of a speedy apocalypse of the Redeemer 
 from on high. Striking references to this hope are found 
 almost everywhere. We quote a single passage from 
 one of the letters of Paul: "For our citizenship is in 
 heaven: from whence also we look for a Saviour, the 
 Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of 
 our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body 
 of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able 
 even to subject all things to himself." 
 
 When we turn to the accounts of the manner in which 
 the gospel was proclaimed from the first the apocalypti- 
 cal cast of thought is equally manifest. Visions, dreams, 
 voices, and visitants from the heavenly realm are 
 
26 What Is Christianity ? 
 
 frequent accompaniments of the early preaching. These 
 were the seals of the divine authority of the message. 
 Thus it is no cause of surprise if the conceptions, convic- 
 tions, and reasonings of the speakers and writers were 
 often viewed by them as direct impartations from heaven 
 and incomparably higher in worth than the natural 
 thoughts of men. In what other way was it open to 
 them to affirm that they believed that the new life they 
 were living was itself the life divine? The question 
 which would trouble us today — how such things were 
 psychologically possible — seems never to have occurred 
 to them. The nearest they came to it was by referring 
 their higher thoughts to the inner working of the Spirit 
 of God on their minds. Many pages might be filled with 
 quotations illustrative of the Apocalypticism of the New 
 Testament writers. A few references must suffice. 
 
 If we turn to the accounts of the birth of Jesus, we 
 find the occurrences connected with it represented as the 
 outcome of action from a higher divine world and not 
 from the human will itself. For example, Matthew says : 
 "Now the birth of Jesus was on this wise: when his 
 mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they 
 came together, she was found with child of the Holy 
 Spirit." Then passing to Joseph's situation he adds: 
 "But when he thought on these things, behold an angel 
 of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, . . . ." 
 And so the account continues. Magi from the East are 
 guided to the young child by a moving star, and they 
 return to their country by a different route because of a 
 warning from God by a dream. By a dream Joseph is 
 directed to take the child to Egypt, by a dream he is told 
 by an angel to return, and by a dream he is warned to go 
 
A pocalypticism 2 7 
 
 to Galilee. This is the manner in which the early Chris- 
 tians expressed their confidence that Jesus had come to 
 the world by the predetermining will of God, and that 
 the earthly events pertaining thereto had been similarly 
 ordered by God. In Luke's account the representations 
 of heavenly intervention are even more vivid. Angelic 
 messengers, divine inspirations, voices from the sky, 
 signalize the advent of the expected Messiah. Or if we 
 turn to the accounts of the death and resurrection of 
 Jesus, we are equally impressed with the vigor of the 
 apocalypses. Earthquakes, appearings of the dead to the 
 living, the deeds and words of heavenly angels, startling 
 appearings of Jesus himself, attest the truth of the faith 
 in him and prove the supernatural character of his mis- 
 sion. Or, again, if we take the accounts of his ministry, 
 they are studded with occurrences of intervention from 
 another world. A notable instance' is the transfigura- 
 tion. We quote from Mark: 
 
 And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter and James 
 and John and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart by 
 themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his gar- 
 ments became glistering, exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth 
 can whiten them. And there appeared unto them Elijah and 
 Moses; and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter answereth 
 
 and saith unto Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here 
 
 And there came a cloud overshadowing them; and there came a 
 voice out of the cloud: This is my beloved Son: hear ye him. 
 And suddenly looking round about, they saw no one any more, 
 save Jesus only with themselves. 
 
 This manner of narration is quite generally characteristic 
 of the whole of the accounts of Jesus' career. They are 
 cast in the mold of a belief in heavenly apocalypses. 
 Everything is conceived miraculously. Now, to remove 
 
28 What Is Christianity? 
 
 the miraculous elements from the story is to rob it of its 
 peculiar power. It is not for us to seek to modernize 
 these narratives by excising the overt interventions. 
 That would be an act of violence destructive of the 
 peculiar merits of the gospel records. While these 
 accounts would sound very artificial if produced in our 
 times, they were entirely natural to the minds of religious 
 men in those times. 
 
 It is, therefore, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of 
 those times that Jesus should commonly express his mind 
 in the forms of apocalyptic. There is scarcely an utter- 
 ance of his of any length which does not embrace apoc- 
 alyptical elements, and it is just what we might expect 
 when we find him offering his disciples startling and 
 impressive apocalyptical discourses before he suffered. 
 As elsewhere, wars, pestilences, cleaving heavens, falling 
 stars, visible descent of the Son of Man from heaven, and 
 the judgment of the world are outstanding features. 
 The great Apocalypse of John which stands at the end 
 of our canon is, in its general spirit and mode of utter- 
 ance, quite in harmony with the remainder of the Jewish 
 material in our New Testament. It is a paean of coming 
 triumph for Christians over their oppressive foes and the 
 unseen forces of the regions of Evil. This concatena- 
 tion of visions demonstrates the unconquerableness of 
 the primitive faith. Taking for granted the dualistic 
 cosmology, the belief that happenings on earth were pre- 
 determined by heavenly enactments, the belief that dis- 
 closures of the future outworking of the divine will are 
 made to men through supernatural means, and the assur- 
 ance that Jesus was the appointed King of the ages bound 
 to overthrow the power of evil in the world, it is difficult 
 
Apocalypticism 29 
 
 to conceive a more effective vindication of the early 
 Christian faith than this book offers. 
 
 It would not be well to pass to later periods of Chris- 
 tian history without pointing out that the New Testa- 
 ment contains many elements of a different character 
 from the Jewish apocalyptic. As the Christian gospel 
 was carried into distant portions of the Roman Empire 
 and beyond, it met types of spirituality very different 
 from the Jewish. The spirit of the Graeco-Roman phi- 
 losophy of religion, especially in Gnosticism, and the 
 Roman conception of world-government were mighty 
 forces to be reckoned with by any propaganda that 
 sought to become world-wide. The Christian gospel 
 had to adjust itself to the new demands these made upon 
 it and proved its world-dominating power by so doing. 
 We shall speak later of the manner in which this was 
 accomplished. It is sufficient at this point simply to 
 state that already with New Testament times this work 
 of assimilating ethnic spirituality had begun. The 
 writings of Paul and John and the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 are evidences. But it should be noted that even in those 
 portions where the ethnic spirit is manifest the spirit of 
 the apocalyptic survives and mingles with the other. 
 We see it in the Pauline letters to the Colossians and the 
 Ephesians. The writer, with all his ideas of the imma- 
 nence of the divine and with his readiness to make use of 
 the Gnostic cosmology, still thinks very largely in the 
 terms of the Jewish apocalyptic. We see it in the Gospel 
 of John, where the high mysticism and spirituality of the 
 writer have not yet led him to abandon Apocalypticism. 
 We see it also in Hebrews, where Alexandrian philosophy 
 with all its allegorism has not succeeded in doing away 
 
30 What Is Christianity? 
 
 with a literal heaven above the earth, the actual ascent 
 of Jesus into it, and his future real descent. We con- 
 clude, therefore, our study of the early Christain inter- 
 pretation of Christianity by saying that, so far as the 
 books of the New Testament disclose it to us, that inter- 
 pretation is throughout prevailingly apocalyptical. 
 
 4. APOCALYPTICISM IN CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT CREEDS 
 
 An account of the influence of this interpretation of 
 Christianity upon the life and thought of the ancient 
 Greek church, the mediaeval Roman church, and modern 
 Protestant churches, together with the controversies and 
 divisions connected with the struggle between it and 
 successive modernizations of it, would fill a volume. We 
 must content ourselves with little more than a bare men- 
 tion of those features of it which have persisted among 
 the majority of Christians. 
 
 It was not possible that the peoples of the Near East 
 with their native spirit of piety of the metaphysical or 
 mystical sort should, on becoming Christians, immedi- 
 ately abandon that which had been sewn into their 
 natures for centuries so as to become the warp and woof 
 of their inner life and that Jewish Apocalypticism should 
 be substituted for it. That would be an act of violence. 
 Neither was it possible for the great church which was 
 growing up and seeking to justify its claim to be the true 
 and sole heir to the Christian tradition either to repudiate 
 the early apocalyptic or rewrite it. The only thing that 
 was possible if the church was to maintain its claims and 
 retain all classes of believers within its bosom was that 
 the traditional apocalyptic and the new philosophy 
 should be written down together without an attempt to 
 
A pocalypticism 3 1 
 
 reconcile them or an acknowledgment that a reconcilia- 
 tion was needed. The retention of the primitive apoca- 
 lyptic was all the more imperative since there was a 
 growing belief that the writings of apostolic men were 
 new "scriptures" and therefore an authoritative declara- 
 tion of truth, a law of faith for all time. Thus it came 
 about that when the church drew up her creed the new 
 philosophy and the old interpretation of the apocalyp- 
 ticists were placed side by side. In all the successive 
 developments of the Nicene Creed of the ancient Catholic 
 church there is reiterated the confession of the expecta- 
 tion that Jesus Christ who had " ascended into heaven 
 and sitteth on the right hand of the Father" was to 
 "come again with glory, to judge both the quick and the 
 dead; whose kingdom shall have no end." It is also 
 affirmed: "I look for the resurrection of the dead," 
 which is presently interpreted to mean, "the resurrection 
 of the body," so as to set aside positively all spiritualiza- 
 tions of that portion of the creed. 
 
 When the Western church became Roman it was still 
 farther from possibility that the apocalyptical interpre- 
 tation should suffice. For the church had now con- 
 sciously assumed the burden of responsibility for the task 
 of renovating by normal means the very world of whose 
 future Apocalypticism had despaired. Yet the Roman 
 church was compelled, equally with the Greek church, 
 to retain the ancient apocalyptical confession. But this 
 Apocalypticism was no dead letter of the law of faith in 
 this instance. On the contrary, it became a powerful 
 instrument for impressing the popular mind with the 
 transcendent worth of the moral implications of the 
 Christian faith. The approach of the day of universal 
 
32 What Is Christianity? 
 
 judgment, the resurrection of the dead in the body, the 
 irrevocable sentence to heaven or hell, became the 
 ground of those mighty appeals to the imagination and 
 the conscience which have enabled the Roman church 
 to hold its millions in leash. At the same time, also, 
 the idea of a spiritual, miraculous, and exclusive com- 
 munication of truth to chosen men became an instru- 
 ment for fastening upon the people the claims of the 
 church to obedience. 
 
 Protestantism, with its biblicism and its insistence 
 upon the restoration of the primitive faith in its purity, 
 opened the door to a fuller restoration of Apocalypticism 
 than Romanism permitted. It is true that the Prot- 
 estant insistence upon the sole authority of the Scrip- 
 tures has prevented a recrudescence among Protestants, 
 to any appreciable extent, of the visions and trances that 
 were so deeply cherished by Catholic pietists, but it 
 logically demanded the restoration of the whole primitive 
 view of things. That it did not commonly go so far 
 among Protestants was owing to the strength of their 
 moral convictions and their practical good sense. Never- 
 theless it did pave the way for a repeated recrudescence 
 of millenarianism with its pessimistic view of the world. 
 From this Protestantism still suffers in many quarters, 
 but, on the whole, it is to be said that Protestants have 
 been content to use only those portions of ancient apoc- 
 alyptic which were the main basis of the Catholic appeal 
 to the minds of the people, namely, the factual represen- 
 tation of the coming, the ascent, and the return of Jesus 
 (in the distant future), the day of judgment, the resur- 
 rection, the end of the world, and a literal heaven and hell. 
 In one other respect Apocalypticism persists among 
 
Apocalypticism 33 
 
 Protestants. Their repudiation of an immanent author- 
 ity in the church in favor of the plenary inspiration of 
 the Scriptures tended to establish in the Protestant 
 churches the view that the saving truth of religion is 
 communicated to men through supranatural channels of 
 transmission which are not to be subjected to the canons 
 of our ordinary thinking. It is only in recent times that 
 this feature of Apocalypticism has been giving way. 
 
 5. VALUE OF APOCALYPTICISM 
 
 We shall conclude the discussion of our subject with 
 an estimate. Apocalypticism as an interpretation of 
 Christianity has a fourfold merit: First, it affirms the 
 reality of an unseen world. In this it makes response to 
 a profound longing of the human heart. For among all 
 enlightened peoples who have reflected deeply on the 
 meaning of life, the transitory nature of the goods of this 
 present world and their failure to satisfy the deepest 
 longings of the heart have become proverbial. The 
 spirit of man longs for the eternal and unchangeable, the 
 city which has foundations, the things that cannot be 
 shaken, whose goods, once attained, are ours forever. 
 Such a world, if destined to be ours, would not only 
 secure for us release from the pangs of failure and dis- 
 appointment here, but the expectation of it would impart 
 a spirit of resignation in the midst of present distresses. 
 The records of Christian piety abound in proofs of this 
 ministry of Apocalypticism. The persecuted in all the 
 Christian centuries have borne unequivocal testimony to 
 the sustaining power of the confidence in the reality of 
 that better world. The belief in the reality of the visions 
 men have had of that world has aided the minds of the 
 
34 What Is Christianity? 
 
 unreflecting to reach an experience of peace, in striking 
 contrast to the restlessness that springs from unaided 
 speculation. 
 
 But this has not proved to be an unmixed good. The 
 low estimate of this present world by contrast has often 
 led to a disparagement of the common tasks of life, a lack 
 of sympathy for those whose lot is inextricably bound to 
 material things, and a generally pessimistic and censori- 
 ous spirit. Earth is too often regarded only in its con- 
 trast with a heaven, and man only in his contrast with 
 God. In its theory of the higher knowledge Apocalypti- 
 cism exhibits another weakness. For by its depreciation 
 of our ordinary thinking on religious subjects and its 
 reference of all divine truth to supranatural means of 
 communication open, as a matter of fact, to the favored 
 few only, it has tended to the creation of a religious 
 aristocracy and to a depreciation of scientific investiga- 
 tion and philosophic inquiry. Where Apocalypticism 
 has flourished there has been almost invariably a cor- 
 responding low estimate of the value of the native work- 
 ing of our minds and a shrinking from the severer tasks 
 of learning. In short, by its predication of two separate 
 worlds and its claims to a supranatural knowledge Apoc- 
 alypticism tends to bisect our human life, to destroy its 
 unity, and to make a free natural communion between 
 God and man impossible. 
 
 Secondly, Apocalypticism has the merit of affirming 
 a purposive, divine government of the world. It lifts 
 the whole of human life above the realm of chance. It 
 leaves no room for fatalism or the idea that the course of 
 the world is a meaningless round of happenings. More- 
 over, it attaches a dignity to human affairs by holding 
 
Apocalypticism 35 
 
 that in the midst of all complexity and seeming con- 
 fusion there is an end toward which all moves, and there- 
 fore there is order. Hence also the power of foresight 
 and predetermination so characteristic of men is recog- 
 nized as of like nature with the supreme power in the 
 universe. There is therefore a dignity attached to 
 human actions both good and bad. 
 
 But this merit of Apocalypticism is seriously com- 
 promised by its conception of the manner in which this 
 divine end is attained. The world is supposed to be 
 controlled from without, and its history has too arbitrary 
 a character to permit us a reasoned view of its course. 
 If the natural course of things is to be subjected, without 
 warning, to interference from without, and nature's laws 
 either do not exist as laws or they may be set aside at 
 any time by fiat from on high, then the mode of the 
 divine government of the world is contrary to that which 
 now commends itself to us in political circles as worthy 
 of our allegiance today. 
 
 Thirdly, Apocalypticism by its picture of a great judg- 
 ment day stands for the supremacy and finality of right- 
 eousness in the affairs of men. The expectation of such 
 an event imparts a necessary sternness in the presence 
 of crime. It tends to support the affirmations of the 
 human conscience and to raise the moral powers of our 
 nature to their rightful supremacy. It sets aside as 
 frivolous every theory that tends to belittle the human 
 personality, and it stamps as damnable every attempt to 
 rob men of their moral initiative and responsibility. It 
 tends, therefore, to confirm and to purify the efforts of 
 civic communities to establish methods of unswerving 
 justice in the government of the people. 
 
36 What Is Christianity? 
 
 On the other hand, it may be doubted whether the 
 postponement of the day of judgment to the distant 
 future does not tend to a legalistic view of our relations 
 to God and to an obscuration of the truth that the execu- 
 tion of divine justice is immanent in human life, that 
 the judgment day is now. It has thus indirectly sup- 
 ported conceptions of salvation that represent it as an 
 unnatural resort to special provisions for escaping at last 
 the consequences of sins. Its views of life are serious, 
 indeed, but not serious enough. 
 
 Fourthly, Christian Apocalypticism has the merit of 
 standing for the supreme worth of the personality of 
 Jesus Christ as interpretative of the worth of our human 
 personality and as the divine ideal which is to conquer 
 the world. But by regarding him as coming into our 
 world in unnatural ways from without, as accepting our 
 earthly condition only for an interval and as now occupy- 
 ing a realm altogether different from ours, it is open to 
 the charge of making him appear like an accident in 
 human history, and in the end as having only a partial 
 kinship with us. The outcome must be a loss of con- 
 fidence in the value of the hope of being like him 
 here. 
 
 It becomes a question for the modern Christian how 
 far he may hold to those eternal realities set forth in 
 Apocalypticism, how far he can be Christian and yet 
 decline to be bound by the modes of thought and utter- 
 ance so largely characteristic of the early Christian 
 believers. Are we not more loyal to Jesus Christ and 
 the faith he gave to men if we set aside as temporary the 
 forms of that faith which cannot commend themselves 
 to our best judgment and sincerest trust and at the same 
 
Apocalypticism 37 
 
 time seek to retain and fulfil the spirit of his life than if 
 we regard the spirit as bound to the letter ? Apocalyp- 
 ticism was a natural mode of thought in early Christian 
 days, but has it not become unnatural for our days? 
 Do we not prove false to the inner spirit of Christianity 
 if we continue to retain it ? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CATHOLICISM 
 
 It is always hazardous for one who does not accept a 
 place within a given religious communion to attempt a 
 characterization of it. He seems to be at a disadvan- 
 tage compared with a member of that communion. In 
 the case of Catholicism the disadvantage is negligible, 
 because the complex of forces and events comprised 
 within it covers a period of eighteen centuries and affects 
 vast areas of the earth and countless millions of people. 
 On the other hand, the interpreter who has personally 
 felt the impact of the religious power that is resident in 
 Catholicism but does not feel any compulsion to justify 
 its claims has a distinct advantage. 
 
 The word " catholic" is from the Greek and means 
 universal. Its employment as a designation of a Chris- 
 tian communion seems to have occurred for the first time 
 in the second century of the Christian era. The Chris- 
 tian gospel had been preached widely in the Roman 
 Empire and beyond, with the result that many local 
 religious associations had been formed under the Chris- 
 tian name but differing so widely in the traditions, cus- 
 toms, and doctrines they held that there was danger lest 
 the new faith be shipwrecked in the storm of general 
 religious confusion. Many there were who strove to 
 hold to the original, simple, but picturesque message of 
 the early Jewish preachers. Others welcomed the new 
 faith as furnishing older popular faiths with a higher 
 
 38 
 
Catholicism 39 
 
 meaning and sought for a philosophic comprehension 
 of it. Others, again, tried a middle way. Controversy 
 and division multiplied. There was danger lest the 
 gospel be lost in a medley of realities, speculations, 
 fancies, and superstitions. It was amid these circum- 
 stances that, under the leadership of such men as Ignatius 
 of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, an effort was put 
 forth to stem the tendency toward disintegration by 
 laying down a few broad statements purporting to be 
 the invariable tradition held by the true churches the 
 world over and constituting the apostolic standard of 
 truth. In this respect, they said, the churches were all 
 at one; in fact, they were one church. This one church 
 — the church catholic — was alone the true church. Dif- 
 ferences, therefore, came from without. Universalism 
 was set up against individualism, authority against 
 speculation and discovery, law against freedom. This 
 is the beginning of Catholicism. 
 
 During these eighteen centuries Catholicism has 
 passed through three main stages of development. In 
 those early times, when its main strength lay in the 
 regions adjacent to the Eastern Mediterranean, where 
 the Greek language was the principal medium for the 
 exchange of ideas and Greek-speaking Christians were 
 the principal leaders in the thought and action of Chris- 
 tendom, there grew up the Eastern, or Greek, church, 
 so called, with its cultivation of " mysteries," its pro- 
 found metaphysical speculations, its great creeds, and 
 its episcopal organization. Later, when the faith spread 
 through Western Europe, and its center of gravity was 
 found at Rome, the custom of the Roman church became 
 the standard for the West, and in the work of reducing 
 
40 What Is Christianity? 
 
 the new threatening chaos to order there grew up the 
 great mediaeval system of ecclesiastical administration 
 with its headquarters in the " Eternal City" and its 
 agents in every political center and every public place. 
 Here stood the Western, or Roman, church over against 
 the Eastern, or Greek, church, with a deep cleavage 
 between them. Finally, when the free national, indus- 
 trial, commercial, intellectual, moral, and religious forces 
 that had been kept for a time in subjection by the Roman 
 church got beyond control and in Protestantism found 
 a larger life outside the Church of Rome, she found her- 
 self mainly occupied in retaining the allegiance of those 
 who still remained within her communion and in resisting 
 Protestant attacks. Then appeared the reactionary, 
 conservative, anti-modernist papal church of the present. 
 Thus Catholicism has passed through three great stages. 
 The schism between East and West made two mutually 
 antagonistic churches, both of which, nevertheless, 
 claimed to be Catholic. Then the Protestant revolution 
 brought into existence many anti-Catholic Christian 
 bodies that have disputed successfully with her the 
 sovereignty of the Western world. Catholicism and 
 universality have long since ceased to be synonyms. 
 Catholicism is now a name designating a sect. 
 
 Notwithstanding the wide differences that have 
 appeared within Catholicism during these many cen- 
 turies, there still remains a link of identity uniting the 
 past and the present, and the most striking character- 
 istics of Catholicism from the beginning remain. In 
 discovering these we must remember that, while there 
 is much of keen invention in Catholicism, the system is 
 not so much an invention as a growth. For convenience 
 
Catholicism 4 1 
 
 let us consider it in its four main aspects — as a type of 
 piety or religious life, as a form of morality or conduct, 
 as an institutional system or church, and as a philosophy 
 or body of doctrine. 
 
 I. CATHOLICISM AS A TYPE OF RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 In this study we shall beware of drawing our infer- 
 ences mainly from official acts and pronouncements, but 
 we shall remember that the heart of Catholicism, like 
 every other kind of religion, is found in the minds of the 
 multitudes of its common people. Its rites and ceremo- 
 nies, its rules and regulations for action, its great institu- 
 tions, and its doctrines have come into being in response 
 to real or imagined popular needs or demands. What, 
 then, is the kind of piety that is cultivated among the 
 Catholic masses ? 
 
 Observe, at the outset, the attention that is paid to 
 worship. There are its places of worship, all con- 
 structed, as far as possible, with a view to arousing and 
 cultivating certain emotions — its churches, basilicas, 
 and cathedrals erected on eminences or other conspicu- 
 ous sites, with lofty towers and spires pointing heaven- 
 ward, with massive walls and lordly pillars, with spacious 
 assembly rooms, long-drawn aisles, high ceilings, and 
 softly dimmed light, with their far-off, railed-in altars, 
 burning candles, and floating incense. All these have a 
 meaning that cannot be set forth in mathematics or the 
 formulas of science or in the terms of common utilitarian 
 purposes, for they tell of movements of the secret soul 
 within the man. 
 
 There are its objects of worship. They are many, 
 as in polytheism and idolatry, but with a difference. 
 
42 What Is Christianity? 
 
 Foremost and above all they worship God as one God 
 but in three persons — whatever those words may mean — 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the highest kind 
 of worship, known as latria, which we may translate 
 ''adoration," and is offered to God alone. In this wor- 
 ship there is no familiarity, but that deep submission and 
 silence of the spirit as it views as from afar the Incom- 
 prehensible and Infinite who cannot be known in himself 
 but only in his persons or the manifestations of his 
 essence. Lower than this worship is dulia, or the service 
 and veneration which may be rendered to those lower 
 beings whom God has signally honored and through 
 whom he manifests a portion of his glories. First of 
 these is the Virgin Mary, who receives hyper dulia, or the 
 higher veneration given to those who are only less than 
 the divine. Saints, or holy men and women, in great 
 number are objects of this lower worship and through 
 them both prayer and praise are offered to God. When 
 the heart, depressed with its sense of sin, fears to enter 
 into the divine presence, it turns to those who have 
 sinned as we have and yet have been purified and impor- 
 tunes their intercessions with God. The demand for 
 these mediators is constant in Catholicism, for it seems 
 that without them there is a lack of the sense of the 
 mercy of God. New saints are being canonized from 
 time to time, altars and shrines are being erected to 
 them where their votaries may find the blessing of fellow- 
 ship with them and their help. From this step easily 
 follows the consecration of holy places, holy articles, 
 and holy relics which tend to awaken the pious feelings 
 of the Catholic votary and to assure him of the divine 
 favor. 
 
Catholicism 43 
 
 In keeping with these are the modes of worship. In 
 order to excite the appropriate emotions, statues or 
 shrines are erected in honor of the Savior and great saints, 
 and before these the devotee prostrates himself or pre- 
 sents his offerings in order to find favor and peace. Pic- 
 tures are suspended in places of devotion, representing 
 the deeds or sufferings of Jesus or Mary or other hallowed 
 persons, and by gazing upon these the desired benefit is 
 obtained. A similar effect is produced by looking upon 
 or touching the relics of saints and martyrs. Or, with- 
 out the use of a material image, the soul may be excited 
 to high impulse by meditating on the happiness of the 
 blest in paradise or the miseries of the wicked in hell or 
 of those whose crimes are to be expiated in purgatory. 
 Again, a series of devotional acts may be prescribed, such 
 as the repetition of a prayer many times in succession, 
 perhaps with the help of beads to keep the count. But 
 chief of all the methods of arousing the spirit of devotion 
 is the performance of sacraments. These cannot be 
 spoken of here in detail, but mention may be made par- 
 ticularly of the sacrament of the Eucharist with its cul- 
 mination in the Mass. The supreme miracle is witnessed 
 by the beholder when he sees the Host elevated before 
 God as the sublimest act of self-sacrifice and devotion 
 and feels that in it Christ is being still offered to God and 
 the offering is accepted. So long as the sacrifice of the 
 Mass is continued, so long is the soul for whom it is 
 offered in the way of salvation. It is quite in keeping 
 with this practice that crucifixes are distributed among 
 the people in order that the remembrance of the suffering 
 of Christ for them may stir their hearts to love and 
 gratitude. 
 
44 What Is Christianity? 
 
 It is characteristic of the Catholic worship that the 
 human and the divine are conceived as brought together, 
 not in a natural way — for they are not conceived as 
 naturally one — but in a supernatural way. The phi- 
 losophy which underlies and supports this view will be 
 referred to later. Meanwhile this outstanding feature 
 of Catholicism is to be kept in mind. In keeping with 
 this the emotions characteristic of Catholic piety fall 
 into two main classes, namely, those connected with the 
 idea of the divine and those connected with the idea of 
 the human. When the human and the divine are con- 
 ceived as united, as in Christ, there is excited the feeling 
 of tender sympathy and compassion. The human career 
 of Jesus abounds in events that invite the worshiper to 
 try to imitate his deeds and repeat in himself the very 
 emotions that Jesus felt, even in his agonies connected 
 with the crucifixion. Here, however, the divine in the 
 human is what gives sanctity to the experiences of the 
 sufferer and makes them valuable for men. The wor- 
 shiper is willing to go the way of the cross with Jesus and 
 share his sufferings. Thus the suffering Redeemer God 
 becomes the center of devotion : 
 
 O sacred Head now wounded, with grief and shame weighed 
 
 down, 
 Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, thy only crown! 
 O sacred Head, what glory, what bliss till now was thine! 
 Yet, though despised and gory, I joy to call thee mine. 
 
 The unity with Jesus which the Catholic seeks is an 
 emotional unity. 
 
 When the divine is regarded as separated from the 
 human, it creates the feeling of awe or fear and forebod- 
 ing. Thus even Jesus Christ becomes a dread judge 
 
Catholicism 45 
 
 whose sentence is feared and whom the worshiper seeks 
 to placate through the intercessions of Mary and the 
 saints. If God is adored as Father, he is not so much 
 the Father of men as the First Person of the Holy Trinity, 
 the Father of the Son, unknown to any but through the 
 Son, and too far away for comfort to flow from the 
 thought of him. The Holy Spirit is not so much a joyful 
 presence in the soul as the mysterious inspirer and 
 renewer, also beyond and away. 
 
 The contemplation of human nature apart from the 
 divine excites emotions of unhappiness, self-contempt, 
 or revulsion. It is the opposite of the divine, whether, 
 as in the Eastern church, it be viewed as the finite, igno- 
 rant, erring, and perishable over against the infinitude, 
 omniscience, holiness, and immortality of God; or 
 whether, as in the Western church, it be viewed more 
 particularly as the disobedient, selfish, impure, and guilty 
 transgressor of the divine law. Consequently the Cath- 
 olic feels that human nature is to be repressed and humil- 
 iated, and he may resort to the wearing of filthy garments 
 and the neglect or the affliction of his body so as to reduce 
 it to subjection to the spirit. Whatever human nature 
 may have been at the creation, it is now fallen and cor- 
 rupt, and ought to be despised in the presence of the 
 divine. 
 
 Thus the Catholic emotional experience oscillates 
 between two poles, the sublime contemplation of Deity 
 far removed from men and their ways, producing both a 
 longing after God and a shrinking from his presence, and 
 the dissatisfaction and disgust produced by the con- 
 sciousness of human weakness and sin — fitting anticipa- 
 tions of the vision of heaven and hell in a world to come. 
 
46 What Is Christianity? 
 
 This emotional contrast is both the strength and the 
 weakness of Catholicism — its strength, because it begets 
 in some those all-consuming aspirations which enable 
 them to endure the greatest privations and to reach the 
 highest achievements in the way of mental concentra- 
 tion; its weakness, in that the constant uncertainty and 
 vacillation prevent the power of initiative from making 
 itself supreme in the life, but leave men ready tools for 
 the purposes of others. 
 
 What, then, is the character of Catholic hopes and 
 aspirations? The deep sense of the reality of another 
 world, unseen by man and separated from this world by 
 a veil that no natural power of human vision can pierce — 
 a world whose reality is the opposite of this world, whose 
 worth is infinite and eternal in contrast with the fleeting 
 and delusive character of the things in this present world 
 — issues in the desire and hope of receiving here and now 
 some token or sign from that world, some gift of good 
 that more than makes up for the loss of all things here. 
 Hence the cherishing of belief in voices, visions, dreams, 
 apparitions, signs, and omens coming from the better 
 world into ours. But the inevitable disappointments 
 that must weaken these aspirations lead to a seeking for 
 some tangible or visible instrument or vehicle for the 
 transmission of the heavenly gifts, and, consequently, 
 there arises a superstitious regard for certain places, 
 articles, outward acts, days, or seasons that carry with 
 them some secret and mysterious blessing. High spirit- 
 uality and a low materialism are ill-matched compan- 
 ions, but they are commonly found side by side in the 
 Catholic type of religion. 
 
Catholicism 47 
 
 2. CATHOLICISM AS A TYPE OF MORALITY OR A 
 FORM OF CONDUCT 
 
 The dualism that is characteristic of the religious 
 spirit of Catholicism reappears in its morality, and natu- 
 rally so, since morality at its highest is true religion. As 
 in Catholic piety there is seen the union of high spiritual- 
 istic devotion and a crass materialistic worship, so also 
 in its morality, alongside of exclusive devotion to the 
 aims that spring out of the sense of the supreme worth 
 of the invisible world, there is a place for a low compro- 
 mise with sordidness and sensuality. There is room 
 both for the ascetic and for the worldling. 
 
 In order to understand Catholic morality we must 
 first apprehend its ideal of life. It is suggested by such 
 scriptures as the following: "Lay not up for yourselves 
 treasures on earth .... but lay up for yourselves treas- 
 ures in heaven." "Be not anxious for your life, what ye 
 shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body 
 what ye shall put on." "Seek ye first the kingdom of 
 God and his righteousness." "If any man would come 
 after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and 
 follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose 
 it and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find 
 it." "And every one that hath left houses, or brethren, 
 or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands for 
 my sake shall receive a hundred fold and shall inherit 
 eternal life." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the 
 kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incor- 
 
 ruption For this corruptible must put on incor- 
 
 ruption and this mortal must put on immortality. But 
 when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption and 
 
48 What Is Christianity? 
 
 this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be 
 brought to pass the saying, Death is swallowed up in vic- 
 tory." "If ye live after the flesh ye must die, but if 
 by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body ye 
 shall live.' , "Set your mind on things above, not on 
 things on the earth." Ever before the high Catholic 
 imagination there floats the image of " the city that hath 
 the foundations whose builder and maker is God," the 
 city that is lightened by the glory of God and into which 
 "there shall in no wise enter anything unclean." The 
 Catholic "saints" are the men and women who have 
 abandoned everything for this higher state into which 
 they hope to come. 
 
 There can be little doubt that it was the sufferings, 
 and especially the martyrdoms, of the early generations 
 of Christians that gave this ideal its pre-eminence. Great 
 was the exercise of soul through which those devoted 
 people succeeded in holding fast to their faith in the pres- 
 ence of some awful form of death. The highest exercise 
 of faith seemed to appear in the act of renouncing life 
 itself. Thus the martyr became the ideal Christian. 
 The strain and excitement of those days led to the 
 semi-worship of martyrs and the veneration of their 
 relics. Paganism and Christianity were fused. Other- 
 worldliness became the characteristic Christian virtue, 
 and it was especially manifested in the grace of renuncia- 
 tion. When times of great prosperity came to the Chris- 
 tian community and the growth of worldliness became a 
 source of alarm to the purer spirits, there was in conse- 
 quence an artificial attempt to preserve the martyr ideal 
 and to fulfil it even when there was no persecution of 
 men to the death. Where suffering was not compulsorily 
 
Catholicism 49 
 
 forced upon them from without, it might nevertheless be 
 enforced from within. The value of voluntary suffer- 
 ing was exalted and salvation was made dependent 
 upon it. 
 
 Naturally, therefore, the suffering Savior became the 
 example of the highest morality. His renunciation of 
 his heavenly glory, his renunciation of the goods of earth, 
 his want even of a place to lay his head, his renunciation 
 of natural kinships, and, finally, his renunciation, on the 
 cross of shame, of his own pure life involved a demand 
 upon all his followers that they also should suffer volun- 
 tarily — for so did he. The mediaeval Christ was the 
 Divine Sufferer and the mediaeval Christian was he who 
 suffered with him and for him. Suffering was glorified. 
 The meritoriousness of voluntary suffering and the 
 cleansing power of penitential suffering became axioms 
 of mediaeval ethics. 
 
 The life of the ancient hermit became the real model. 
 Retirement from the world, abandonment of its pleas- 
 ures and sins, were marks of the highest morality. To 
 attain to them human society itself might have to be 
 discarded on account of its contaminating influences. 
 The monk (the one who lives alone) became the typical 
 Christian. Hence the clergy, as holy men, were obliged 
 to adopt the monastic ideal. The regular clergy laid 
 down the law for the secular clergy. But the secular 
 clergy met a double temptation, for while they had to 
 contend with the inner impulse that wars against the 
 soul, they had the additional inducements to evil that 
 come from without. Hence the sternness of the discip- 
 line to which they were subjected. A large part of the 
 history of the internal affairs of the mediaeval church is 
 
50 What Is Christianity? 
 
 the story of the effort to carry this policy into effect 
 despite the pleadings or recalcitrancy of human nature 
 in the priests. They were compelled formally to 
 renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil. In the 
 course of the long and bitter struggle that the imposition 
 of this injunction involved, the emphasis naturally fell 
 upon the negative side, and from the eyes of busy men 
 whose hands were full of ecclesiastical politics the vision 
 of the heavenly world almost disappeared. 
 
 Renunciation, therefore, is the pre-eminent Catholic 
 virtue. It has three principal forms, according as the 
 natural world, human flesh, or the lordship of Satan may 
 be in mind — poverty, chastity, and obedience. This 
 trinity of virtues is one and inseparable. They are all 
 incumbent on both sexes — for alongside the monk had 
 long since appeared the nun, a competitor with him for 
 the heavenly reward. They are incumbent on all, but 
 not in equal degree, for there are some frail members of 
 humanity who can adopt the ideal only in part. Those 
 who come short of the full requirement shall have a lower 
 place at the time of the heavenly reward. 
 
 The vow of poverty is a judgment passed on the 
 striving for earthly wealth and power and the clamor for 
 worldly honor. Personal possessions are renounced and, 
 like the birds of the sky, man's dependence is placed on 
 the gifts of providence and human charity. The monk, 
 with his shoeless feet and his begging-bowl, is the emblem 
 of this virtue. Poverty of dress and dwelling reveals his 
 poverty of spirit. His is the Kingdom of Heaven. The 
 mediaeval church had the good sense to perceive that 
 this could not be demanded of all and met the weak half- 
 way by accepting a partial renunciation of goods in the 
 
Catholicism 5 1 
 
 form of gifts to the church, or a limited asceticism in the 
 observance of fasts and holy seasons, or a performance 
 of penances for errors and misdeeds, or some worthy 
 deed in support of the church's enterprises. Those 
 things would put them in partial possession of the monk's 
 virtues. At times a great wave of popular feeling carried 
 multitudes toward a fuller compliance with these de- 
 mands. The mediaeval crusades, on their better side, 
 were a magnificent tribute to the power which the idea 
 of the value of renunciation of earthly good exercised on 
 the minds of multitudes in a hard and brutal age. It was 
 a time of unparalleled renunciation of external goods for 
 the sake of an ideal — though, alas! the ideal was a per- 
 version of the true. 
 
 The vow of chastity is a judgment of condemnation 
 passed upon the natural appetites and passions. It was 
 supported by the Augustinian theory that original sin 
 is propagated through concupiscence, which is thereby 
 made out to be the root of all sinning. This vow brought 
 the ascetic into conflict with his inner nature. The 
 battle had to be fought alone. The fight against nature 
 was a bitter one, indeed, and was often fought under the 
 depressing weight of a soiled conscience. The very 
 struggle against the passions seemed to intensify them, 
 for passion is strongest when the thoughts are turned 
 toward it. Moreover, the struggle against the proclivi- 
 ties of the flesh brought men into conflict with the habits 
 and feelings that gather around the life of the home and 
 find their nourishment within the family circle. But the 
 renunciation of the delights and the loves of the home 
 was made into a virtue. The home life was put on a 
 lower level than the life of the celibate, and marriage 
 
52 What Is Christianity? 
 
 itself was put under the ban to the extent that it was 
 regarded as a sinful relation apart from the sacrament 
 which removed the evil of it. Even so, the married man 
 and woman were made inferior to the celibates. Mar- 
 riage was rather tolerated than honored. The highest 
 sanctity could be found only in the state of celibacy. 
 The long struggle of the papacy to enforce the law of 
 celibacy on the clergy is well known to historians and need 
 not detain us here. The excruciating agonies of many 
 celibates — their fastings, their flagellations, their tor- 
 ments of their bodies by the wearing of such garments as 
 hair shirts, perhaps with iron barbs pointing inward, and 
 other artificial methods of diverting the thoughts from evil 
 imaginations — are familiar; and so also is their failure. 
 
 The human heart must have its recompenses. It 
 found them in those days and does so still. Priests, 
 deprived of the solace of natural affection, found in the 
 Virgin Mary a substitute for a human bride. Nuns, 
 robbed of the opportunity to lavish their affections on 
 a real human lover or children of their own, pictured 
 themselves as the brides of the Lord Jesus and in ministry 
 to destitute children found an outflow of tenderness. 
 Even so, the natural craving for mutual love remained 
 unsatisfied and often broke through its bonds, as the 
 story of Abelard and Heloise so forcibly reminds us. 
 Moreover, it must be said that the charms of motherhood 
 triumphed over the hectic glow of virginity, for the graces 
 of Mary that attract the admiration and longing of the 
 masses of Catholics do not turn out, when analyzed, to be 
 the virtues of celibacy but the graces of motherhood. 
 Mary stands for pure motherhood after all, and not for 
 a desolate^ virginity. 
 
Catholicism 53 
 
 The vow of obedience is of even higher rank than the 
 vows of poverty and chastity, for as soon as Christianity 
 is identified with an ecclesiastical order obedience em- 
 braces them both. It stands for the renunciation of 
 both intellect and will. It involves assent to the church's 
 teachings, compliance with her ritual, and conformity 
 with her rules of life. It is the prostration of the whole 
 personality before its superior. Its fulfilment would, 
 presumably, remove all disorder and rebellion and make 
 all revolution impossible. It canonizes the principle 
 of order. 
 
 3. CATHOLICISM AS AN INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM OR 
 A CHURCH 
 
 The early days of Christianity were characterized by 
 the spontaneity and sense of inspiration which accom- 
 pany all great religious revivals. The hazards which 
 invariably associate themselves with freedom were 
 rapidly multiplied as the new faith spread. The sense 
 of inner unity which was sufficient to secure a fair degree 
 of coherency among all Christians at first soon became 
 an inadequate protection against the tendencies to 
 spiritual disintegration and confusion. Some kind of 
 government was needed in order that some kind of 
 order might be preserved. This need was intensified 
 by the sufferings of Christians at the hands of the 
 populace and the civil authorities. Leaders competent 
 for the task appeared and in time welded together the 
 majority of the members of the religious communion into 
 a compact organization which succeeded in drawing to 
 itself the loyalty of the Christian multitudes and in with- 
 standing the grinding persecutions to which from time 
 
54 What Is Christianity? 
 
 to time believers were subjected. It won the respect of 
 the Roman authorities, and finally the farseeing Emperor 
 Constantine succeeded in virtually incorporating it with 
 the other instruments of the imperial government. 
 
 The churches had now become the church — if we do 
 not count the numerous heretics that remained outside 
 the new corporation and maintained for a long time a 
 vigorous polemic against it. It embodied the Roman 
 imperial spirit and naturally took on more and more the 
 forms of the Roman administration, though with dif- 
 ferent names. When the church divided into an Eastern 
 and a Western church, with territorial boundaries follow- 
 ing pretty closely the lines of division between the East- 
 ern and Western empires, the government of the two 
 churches became differentiated according to the types 
 of political authority prevailing in the East and the West 
 respectively. The Eastern church became an ecclesias- 
 tical hierarchy after the aristocratical pattern, with its 
 heads in the many metropolitan cities. The Western 
 church, with only one great metropolitan center, carried 
 the tendency to centralization of authority farther and 
 became an ecclesiastical hierarchy after the monarchical 
 pattern. There were many fathers, or popes, in the East, 
 but only one Father, or Pope, ultimately in the West. 
 To us Western people he is known simply as the Pope. 
 
 The course of events through which this development 
 was brought about or the study of the actual position of 
 the Roman Pope today need not occupy our time now. 
 The fact of the evolution and its dependence on the exi- 
 gencies which arose with time are the significant things 
 which first attract attention, but it is important to 
 remember that to the thorough Catholic neither of these 
 is of special account or, perhaps, even true. For him the 
 
Catholicism 55 
 
 church as an organization is essential to Christianity — 
 indeed the church and the Kingdom of God, or Chris- 
 tianity, are identical. The whole order is of divine 
 institution. The works of (pseudo) Dionysius the Areop- 
 agite, with their supposed revelation of the heavenly 
 hierarchy upon which the earthly hierarchy was pre- 
 sumably modeled, succeeded in impressing on the minds 
 of the credulous the belief that the church as an institu- 
 tion, in the form in which it now exists, is the divine 
 institute of salvation. Outside of it there is no Chris- 
 tianity. It is an axiom of Catholicism, " Without the 
 church is no salvation." 
 
 Christianity is, therefore, in the end a matter of gov- 
 ernment. Everything else in it must be interpreted from 
 that point of view. The monastic vow of obedience is 
 characteristic of the entire system. The whole complex 
 of ascetical practices gets its value thence. The peni- 
 tential system of the church is a method of administra- 
 tion. The ritual is observed as an "office" and its 
 features have official validity when observed with a view 
 to doing what the church does. That is, official author- 
 ity alone can give validity to any act of worship or serv- 
 ice. The very virtues and graces which appear in the 
 lives of men are real only when they issue from the 
 church's administrative acts in sacraments. The doc- 
 trines of the church are all essential to salvation because 
 assent to them is the condition of participation in the 
 church. They are viewed by the Catholics, not as utter- 
 ances of truth in itself and for its own sake, but as 
 authoritative enactments to which the sacrifice of our 
 intellect must be made. In short, the church is an insti- 
 tution, divinely ordered in all its forms, to which is com- 
 mitted the charge to bring men into the Kingdom of God 
 
56 What Is Christianity? 
 
 by her sacraments, so that her sovereignty over the souls 
 of men is exercised over the whole of their natural life 
 and continues in the case of her members even into the 
 world beyond, terminating only at the Judgment Day. 
 The great "notes" of the true church — unity, uni- 
 versality, apostolicity, holiness — find their true inter- 
 pretation here. Unity: the church is one, not because 
 of a spiritual experience common to all the members, but 
 because she has one sole authority, speaks with one voice, 
 and conforms all to one end. Her unity is really uni- 
 formity, formal rather than vital. Universality (catho- 
 licity) : the church embraces all the saved, not in the 
 inclusive sense which we might give to the words by 
 saying that wherever there is a saved man there is the 
 church, but in the exclusive sense that none is saved ex- 
 cept those within the church. Apostolicity: the church 
 is formally constituted by divine legislation, in that 
 Jesus Christ, true God, committed his power and right 
 of government to his apostles and they have transmitted 
 it to their successors in the apostolic office without defile- 
 ment and without break in continuity to the present, 
 and forever. Her rule is unquestionable and absolute. 
 Holiness: the church stands apart from, and on a differ- 
 ent level from, all other institutions, in that all saving 
 grace is deposited in her as an institution. This is not 
 to be understood as meaning that all her members are 
 actually morally pure, for many are notoriously impure. 
 It means that in her sacraments and all her official acts 
 there is a mysterious, heavenly quality which effects the 
 redemption of all who receive them. Her pope and all 
 her priesthood are holy, not in the sense that they are 
 truly good men, but as officials. A man might be a bad 
 
Catholicism 57 
 
 man and be a good priest or a good pope. The efficacy 
 of the office in no sense depends on the character of the 
 man who officiates in it. Salvation is wholly a matter 
 of church. 
 
 4. CATHOLICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OR BODY OF DOCTRINES 
 
 Catholicism is not so much a philosophy as it is an 
 order of life. Its interest in philosophy is secondary. 
 For the spirit that governs philosophy is the love of 
 truth, and its characteristic activity is inquiry, investi- 
 gation, speculation. By contrast, Catholicism is fear- 
 some in regard to inquiry and seeks to regulate it in the 
 interest of an established order. Its characteristic atti- 
 tude of mind is receptiveness, and of will, submission. 
 
 Yet it has a use for philosophy and has never hesi- 
 tated to avail itself of the help philosophy can give. It 
 resorts to philosophy as a means of vindication rather 
 than as a weapon of attack. Its philosophy is apologeti- 
 cal in aim, conservative in temper, and suspicious of 
 every new movement of thought. Its theology, in con- 
 sequence, is opportunist in principle and refrains from 
 setting forth an entire system of doctrines (dogmas). 
 While it professes to have come into possession of a com- 
 plete body of dogmas by tradition, these are held partly 
 in reserve, and particular dogmas are announced only as 
 occasion calls for them. If one examines the Catholic 
 creeds, canons, and decrees, beginning with the Apostles' 
 Creed and ending with the encyclical Pascendi Gregis, he 
 will find that they seek not so much to furnish the people 
 with positive doctrines as to warn them against current 
 heresy. The declarations of councils and popes on these 
 matters commonly conclude with anathemas. 
 
58 What Is Christianity ? 
 
 While the attitude of Catholicism toward contem- 
 porary philosophy has varied from age to age, we may 
 say that the relations of early Catholicism with secular 
 philosophy were much more intimate than those of later 
 Catholicism, when Catholic Christianity had become 
 strictly institutional. Early Catholic thought absorbed 
 the mystical and metaphysical spirit of the times, while 
 later Catholic thought turned to the practical necessities 
 of church government. The former sought to vindicate 
 the idea of salvation by mysteries (sacraments) and issued 
 in a theory of the universe. The latter sought to vindi- 
 cate the idea of salvation through the mediating action of 
 the church and issued in a theory of the government of the 
 world. The two are mingled in Catholic orthodoxy. 
 
 The Catholic theory of the universe is, in brief, that 
 there are two worlds, disparate, separate, and distinct. 
 They may be variously named — the natural and the 
 supernatural, the physical and the spiritual, the earthly 
 and the heavenly, the secular and the holy, the temporal 
 and the eternal, the human and the divine — according 
 to the point of view from which they are considered. In 
 the lower of these two worlds darkness, error, sin, and 
 death are found; in the higher, light, truth, purity, and 
 immortality. Man belongs to the lower, but has long- 
 ings for the higher and by redemption may attain to it. 
 He is unable of himself to rise to it. For while his facul- 
 ties fit him to know the lower world and even to infer 
 from it the existence of the Supreme Being in the higher 
 world to whom this lower world owes its existence, he is 
 unable to know the character of that higher world by 
 the exercise of natural powers and, for this, he is depend- 
 ent on a supernatural communication. 
 
Catholicism 59 
 
 At this point the theory of the world becomes a theory 
 of revelation and redemption. There come from time 
 to time, in ways altogether beyond our finite compre- 
 hension, supernatural communications, miraculously 
 attested, from this higher world, and with them also 
 supernatural bestowments of ineffable power. The 
 instruments of these communications are holy, inspired 
 men, and particularly selected portions or articles of the 
 natural world containing in themselves the mysterious 
 potencies which purify and immortalize our souls. He 
 who subjects himself to these holy instruments will be 
 saved. 
 
 When these mysterious powers became concentrated 
 in the hands of a hierarchy possessing the sole right 
 to administer them, this early metaphysic became inter- 
 twined with a philosophy of human history. This is 
 virtually given above in the theory of Catholicism as 
 church. It is a theory of government, divine and human. 
 The government of the heavenly world is immediately 
 by God and his angels, but the government of the earthly 
 world is mediate and is ministered through divinely 
 ordained and consecrated agencies. These instruments 
 of the heavenly government are given authority over 
 all natural forms of government and carry out through 
 them indirectly the will of heaven, while in the distinc- 
 tively supernatural activities on earth the church alone 
 has a right to rule. A system of rewards for merit and 
 of punishment for sins, valid for this world and the 
 heavenly world as well, thereby comes to light and is put 
 into execution. This has now come to be the Catholic 
 interpretation of Christianity. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 The transition from Catholicism to mysticism seems 
 at first so sharp that it is almost as if one had entered 
 into a different world. Catholicism stands out against 
 the sky-line of life in such massive form that it commands 
 the attention and anxious regard even of those who are 
 without serious interest in religion. It seeks to lay its 
 hand on the helm of human life and to direct all affairs 
 down to the smallest details, in order that humanity may 
 reach the eternal harbor. It glories in the outward 
 marks of greatness and symbols of authority — vast build- 
 ings, powerful organizations of men, priests robed in 
 splendor, pompous processions, mysterious pantomimes, 
 and gorgeous liturgies — all calculated to impress and 
 subdue even the most rebellious. It shrinks not from 
 calling upon armies and navies to do battle for its cause 
 and to destroy its foes. It has gone so far as to seek to 
 divide the territories of the earth among its faithful 
 servants. 
 
 Mysticism, on the contrary, loves retirement. It 
 seeks to dwell within the secret recesses of the soul. It 
 cherishes secluded and lonely places where it may give 
 itself to meditation and aspiration undisturbed. It stig- 
 matizes worldly ambition and worldly power as vain, 
 and cherishes instead the inner contemplation and vision 
 of the heavenly. It scorns material and fleshly things 
 while it revels in the unseen and worships in the spirit. 
 
 60 
 
Mysticism 61 
 
 Catholicism and mysticism seem to be in direct antith- 
 esis. On closer analysis, however, it may turn out 
 that there comes into view such a close affinity between 
 them that we are unable any longer to regard mysticism 
 merely as a reaction against Catholicism, but to see in it 
 one of the chief est supports of that great system. At any 
 rate, many famous mystics have found their home in the 
 Catholic church. 
 
 The word "mystic" is connected with the Greek word 
 which is transliterated " mystery" in English and, like 
 it, is derived from a root meaning " to close or shut." A 
 mystery is something hidden or secret. Among the 
 Greeks there were secret religious orders whose members 
 were initiated by submitting to ceremonies unknown to 
 outsiders and by which they were supposed to become 
 the recipients of a species of higher enlightenment and 
 thus to enter into oneness of life with the divinity in 
 whose name these ceremonies were observed. The door 
 to this higher light was closed to the uninitiated. In 
 the course of time the term mysticism has become 
 detached from any necessary connection with the observ- 
 ance of secret ceremonies. Anyone may now be called 
 a mystic who claims to have received into the secrecy of 
 his spirit a higher knowledge than can be imparted by 
 the ordinary methods of intelligence. The term mysti- 
 cism may be used as descriptive of this attitude of mind, 
 or, more properly, of the theory that supports it. 
 
 One might ask, Does mysticism as a state of mind 
 spring from the ancient Mysteries ? It may be that the 
 theory of insight which bears the name of mysticism 
 among Christians is one of the consequences of introdu- 
 cing the practices of the Mysteries into early Christian 
 
62 What Is Christianity? 
 
 communities ; but these Mysteries themselves are rooted 
 deeply in that sense of awe and ignorance that comes 
 over men everywhere, in crude civilizations and in the 
 most refined, when they face the baffling problem of the 
 meaning of the world. The Inexplicable stares at man 
 on every hand, and the deep depression which he feels 
 in the face of it begets a reaction in his soul. He struggles 
 to gain by one grand leap into the unknown the possession 
 of those eternities which he seeks in vain by the slow and 
 laborious processes of piecemeal study. 
 
 Does mysticism, then, stand for a religious view of 
 things ? Not in the narrow sense of religion as faith in a 
 higher person. But in that looser sense of religion which 
 denotes the soul's commitment to the highest meaning 
 of all reality it is descriptive of a type of religion. Indeed, 
 the thoroughgoing mystic would hold that mysticism is 
 the essence of all religion and contains the hidden truth 
 in all religions. All else is incidental or secondary for 
 him. Christian mysticism claims to be the true and 
 final interpretation of Christianity. 
 
 The true mystic devotes himself supremely to the 
 cultivation of what he calls the inner life. Now, inas- 
 much as every kind of religion is rooted ultimately in 
 some quality of the human spirit, mysticism is very 
 intimately related to religion universally and may be 
 affiliated with any and every kind. Mystics everywhere 
 have an inner likeness to one another, but they are likely 
 to differ as the religions with which they are connected 
 differ from one another. The Christian mystic and the 
 Mohammedan mystic will be mutually sympathetic, but 
 each of them will bear some of the special characteristics 
 of his religious connections. Similarly with regard to 
 
Mysticism 63 
 
 the mystics of other faiths. Mysticism may suffer modi- 
 fication according to the kind of positive religion with 
 which it may be associated, but it seeks to find the ulti- 
 mate in all religions. It tries to penetrate to that which 
 underlies all the different religions and also to transcend 
 them and melt their many colors in the pure, white light 
 of perfect truth. Their worship, their social customs, 
 their organizations, their creeds, are only symbols of that 
 which is higher than they, only temporary resting-places 
 for the human spirit as it rises to the height of that 
 supreme experience when it is one with the ultimate 
 reality — whatever these words may mean. If, then, 
 mysticism is religion, it is also more than religion, in the 
 common sense of that term. It is that out of which 
 religion rises and that in which religion culminates. So, 
 at least, its advocates in substance affirm. 
 
 This is not the same as to reduce all religions to the 
 one level. All religions have their symbols by which 
 they seek to express the ultimate truth to which they 
 strive to attain, but some of them reach up vastly higher 
 than others and minister more effectually to the soul's 
 progress. Mysticism does not reject the supremacy of 
 Christianity among religions unless it find some other 
 faith that brings the soul nearer to its goal. Mysticism 
 may profess to be the true interpretation of Christianity 
 and therewith the final interpretation of all religions. 
 
 It is possible to distinguish different types of mysti- 
 cism according as they accentuate this or that function 
 of the human spirit. Their interpretations of Chris- 
 tianity will differ correspondingly. There is what we may 
 call an aesthetic mysticism, which exalts the worth of the 
 feeling experience. As the material world around us 
 
64 What Is Christianity? 
 
 communicates itself to us through our physical senses, so 
 also through the higher sensibility the world of higher 
 being registers itself upon our receptive spirituality and 
 emancipates us from bondage to the things of physical 
 sense. As the painter looking upon a scene in nature 
 finds that it reflects itself upon his soul in a manner 
 unknown to the mere physicist or biologist, and as he 
 tries to reveal his secret to his fellows by the magic 
 strokes of his brush; as the musician catches rhythms 
 and detects harmonies in the universe which remain 
 unrecorded by the toes t and most sensitive instruments 
 known to science because they belong to a different order 
 of sensation, so the spirit of the mystic as it lies open to 
 the impress of the spiritual world feels floating into itself 
 that Reality of all existence which eye hath not seen and 
 ear hath not heard but which the Infinite Spirit conveys 
 to our higher sensibility. In this "absolute sensation," 
 as it has been called, that whole of reality of which only 
 fragments are disclosed to the artist and the musician 
 comes to us in an instant. Then are we at rest. Then 
 are we satisfied. Such a mysticism, if professedly Chris- 
 tian, would interpret Christianity as the religion of pure, 
 simple, unalloyed, perfect feeling, the religion of perfect 
 peace. 
 
 There is a speculative mysticism, a mysticism based 
 on the primacy of thought. "I think," said the great 
 Descartes, "therefore I am." Thought possessed, for 
 him, the solution of the riddle of the universe. The 
 great speculative and psychological movements of the 
 last three centuries are a modern tribute to the greatness 
 of thought. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle virtually 
 said the same of old when they sought to disclose its 
 
Mysticism 65 
 
 mysterious powers to their hearers. Logicians have 
 sought to unfold the immanent order in it. Idealist 
 philosophers have sought to construct a universe for our 
 human intelligence under its sole imperial authority. 
 " My God, I think thy thoughts after thee," said a votary 
 of thought. There is an Absolute Thought which is the 
 truth of all our individual thinking and the guaranty 
 of its trustworthiness, say many. Who has not felt a 
 mighty inspiration as he discovers that he can enter into 
 this thought-universe and make it his own? Yet the 
 processes of our actual thinking are often slow and falter- 
 ing. Our best reasoning is precarious at times. The 
 axioms of an earlier generation may be a source of 
 skepticism in a later. Science proceeds by means of 
 regular processes, but she splits up the world of our 
 thinking into sections and places an interrogation point 
 after everything. Nothing is settled hereby. Even 
 idealistic philosophy proceeds to the discovery of its 
 Absolute by the slow and involved method of construing 
 it through its self -revelation in the relative and manifold. 
 But mysticism professes to know the Absolute from 
 within and by immediate communion with the Totality 
 of all things. 
 
 There is also an ethical mysticism, a mysticism that 
 professes identity with the Absolute Will. The theory 
 reposes on the consciousness of moral compulsion which 
 is felt so mightily by some people. In all ages and among 
 all peoples there have been persons who took a path in 
 life all their own, defying, perchance, hoary traditions 
 and sacred customs and even setting their own will 
 against the weight of the world, because they felt they 
 could do no other. These people say that a voice 
 
66 What Is Christianity? 
 
 within, like the daemon of Socrates, speaks to them in 
 great crises of their lives, saying, "This is the way; walk 
 thou in it." They are found in the greatest numbers at 
 turning-points of human history and they prove to be 
 rallying-centers for men of less firm conviction; or they 
 bring terror to their friends and wrath upon themselves 
 by a stubborn adherence to a sense of duty that often 
 seems unreasonable to others and of which they can give 
 no reasoned account to themselves. They have heard 
 the Voice and that is enough for them. When such an 
 attitude of mind is treated as a philosophic principle 
 grounding an ethical interpretation of the world, we 
 have ethical mysticism. Kant's great doctrine of the 
 Categorical Imperative, the absolute dictum of the self- 
 legislative practical reason, the moral law which demands 
 its own fulfilment and refuses to be identified with any 
 particular or empirical act, is an instance of this ethical 
 mysticism. 
 
 Summing up the results of our study thus far we can 
 say: There is a tendency to mysticism in all men, but 
 the strength of it varies in different peoples and different 
 individuals. Men commonly experience uprisings of 
 feeling that carry them on irresistibly toward some end 
 which they would never have deliberately chosen; or 
 they have intuitions of unseen things, visions of higher 
 worlds, anticipations of coming events, which hold their 
 minds enchained and with which they would not part, 
 though there may seem no way of proving the truth of 
 these foregleams; or they experience the constraining 
 power of some greater personality or higher will, and the 
 bondage to it is dearer to them than liberty itself. When 
 the attempt is made to unfold a philosophy on such a 
 
Mysticism 67 
 
 basis we have genuine mysticism. Mysticism, then, 
 is a philosophy. It is a philosophy that aspires to be a 
 religion by securing for men the high results that religion 
 seeks. If, in the narrower view of it, we may call it a 
 philosophy of religion, it is a philosophy of religion that 
 takes the mystical element in religion and attempts to 
 treat that as the essence of all religions. 
 
 As a philosophy mysticism has a threefold aspect: 
 first, it is a theory of knowledge; secondly, it is a theory 
 of existence; thirdly, it is a theory of life. In each of 
 these it has a positive and a negative side. (1) As a 
 theory of knowledge, negatively, it points out the limita- 
 tions of the methods of logic and of science. Neither an 
 analysis of the processes of thought nor a synthesis of 
 particulars can lead us beyond the partial and incom- 
 plete. The All, the Totality, the Infinite, lie beyond 
 and cannot be approached by the dissection of present 
 knowledge or by adding portion to portion. Agnosticism 
 and despair can be avoided only by renouncing the pride 
 of intellect and laying one's soul open to the Infinite. 
 Then, positively, we know the All because it has become 
 our very self. (2) As a theory of existence it denies 
 the reality of things perceived by sense, because these are 
 only transient. Only that which forever is, truly is. 
 The particular objects we know are only the notes in an 
 eternal harmony. The separate notes are nothing in 
 themselves, and as long as we think of them we never 
 catch the tune. The notes are lost in the tune. That 
 alone remains. (3) As a theory of life, mysticism seeks to 
 raise men above legalism and tradition with their atten- 
 tion to specific acts, by which no man can be saved, and 
 to lead them to the absolute surrender which puts one in 
 
68 What Is Christianity? 
 
 possession of the power of the Infinite Will. Then only 
 have we attained. Then only are we saved from the love 
 of the changing and temporary. Then only are we 
 delivered from the passions and aims that feed on the 
 things which pass away. 
 
 Without pursuing the general study of mysticism 
 farther we may now point out more specifically the inter- 
 pretation it puts upon Christianity. We shall begin 
 the examination of Christian mysticism by indicating 
 the degree of prominence it obtains in the whole Chris- 
 tian movement and then proceed to indicate its out- 
 standing characteristics, its method, and, finally, its 
 strength and its weakness as a spiritual movement. 
 
 I. THE APPEARING OF MYSTICISM IN HISTORICAL 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Mysticism as a philosophy of the Christian religion 
 finds ample footing in the faith of the early communities 
 of believers. The earliest believers, being mostly Jews 
 or proselytes, naturally carried with them into the new 
 faith the deep regard for dreams, trances, visions, and 
 apparitions which remained over in Judaism after divina- 
 tion, soothsaying, and witchcraft had been put under 
 the ban. Through these abnormal experiences messages 
 came to them, sometimes from the mouths of angel visi- 
 tants and sometimes directly from their God, conveying 
 an intelligence of things in a higher realm than could 
 be reached by the common mind of men. There were 
 ecstatic experiences when the subject was carried into the 
 heavenly world and heard and saw unspeakable things. 
 The Jewish prophetic inspiration — the sense of being the 
 instrument of the Spirit of the Lord, the consciousness 
 
Mysticism 69 
 
 of an inward burden of the Lord and of the possession 
 of a foresight of things to come^-was cherished and inten- 
 sified in Christians. The range of this gift was greatly 
 widened so as to be enjoyed by multitudes of common 
 believers if not by all of them. These things and the 
 extraordinary powers that accompanied them were 
 looked upon as marks of the special favor of God. Mys- 
 tical utterances of a profound order occur not infre- 
 quently in the Hebrew and Jewish Scriptures, especially 
 in the later pre-Christian days: "As the hart panteth 
 after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 
 
 God." "Cast me not away from thy presence and 
 take not thy Holy Spirit from me." "My soul waiteth 
 in silence for God only." "He that dwelleth in the 
 secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow 
 of the Almighty." "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit 
 and whither shall I flee from thy presence?" "When 
 
 1 awake, I am still with thee." These sayings relate to 
 spiritual states that do not seem capable of being placed 
 under the action of the logical intelligence. 
 
 The New Testament abounds in mystical utterances. 
 The Synoptic Gospels ascribe some of them to Jesus: 
 "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God." 
 "Blessed art thou .... for flesh and blood hath not 
 revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven." 
 "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth 
 any know the Father, save the Son and he to whom the 
 Son willeth to reveal him." Jesus himself is said to have 
 assured his disciples that he would be a mystical presence 
 with them: "Where two or three are gathered together 
 in my name, there am I in the midst of them." The 
 tendency to emphasize these experiences grew with the 
 
70 What Is Christianity? 
 
 accession of converts from the Graeco-Roman peoples, 
 who brought with them into the Christian communion a 
 vague yearning and reverence for the secret and ineffable 
 in life, and they naturally viewed the Christian message 
 and the accompanying rites as bringing these to men in a 
 fuller sense than had ever been known before. Paul has 
 much to say to his Greek readers on the theme of the 
 higher knowledge obtained through the Spirit of Christ, 
 which was to him the same as the Spirit of God. One 
 or two quotations here must suffice: "We speak a wisdom 
 not of this world, God's wisdom in a mystery, even the 
 wisdom that hath been hidden. Things which eye saw 
 not and ear heard not, God hath revealed unto us through 
 the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the 
 deep things of God." This inward illumination of Paul's 
 became the very presence of the Son of God within him: 
 "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me I con- 
 ferred not with flesh and blood." The experience was 
 one that transformed his very being. "We all with 
 unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the 
 Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory 
 to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." These 
 experiences were to him revelations of abiding realities 
 in contrast with the passing things of this world: "We 
 look not at the things that are seen but at the things 
 that are not seen; for the things that are seen are tem- 
 poral, but the things that are not seen are eternal." 
 
 The mystical tendency is greatly accentuated in the 
 Johannine writings and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 The heavenly and the earthly stand apart; the latter at 
 best is only a symbol of the former. Similarly also as 
 respects flesh and spirit, God and man or the world: 
 
Mysticism 7 1 
 
 "That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which 
 is born of the spirit is spirit." "Men loved the darkness 
 rather than the light." "He that is of the earth is of the 
 earth and of the earth he speaketh : he that cometh from 
 heaven is above all." "Ye are of this world; I am not of 
 this world." The things of the earth are only "copies of 
 the things in the heavens" at best, and not the heavenly- 
 things themselves. The former are the " things that are 
 shaken" and will be removed, while the latter cannot be 
 shaken, but remain forever. Correspondingly, there is a 
 higher enlightenment, even an enlightenment that makes 
 men one with God: By faith men "endure as seeing him 
 who is invisible." They come to the heavenly city and to 
 God himself. "Ye have an unction from the Holy One 
 
 and ye know all things Ye need not that any one 
 
 teach you." "We are of God: he that knoweth God 
 heareth us." Here is the life of supreme love. "He 
 that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth God." The 
 new birth, the new knowledge, the love of God, are all 
 one. In this believers are made one with God and Christ: 
 "If a man love me he will keep my word; and my father 
 will love him, and we will come unto him and make our 
 abode with him." There is a penetration of their being 
 with Christ and God. "I in them and thou in me, that 
 they may be perfected into one." Here appears, at 
 least on first glance, the realization of the mystical long- 
 ing. Passages of such import as the foregoing might be 
 indefinitely multiplied. Mysticism sees in them the 
 utterance of the very essence of the Christian religion. 
 While the mystical expressions of the New Testament 
 retain the strong moral coloring of the Jewish faith, the 
 ethical spirit is much less manifest in the mysticism of 
 
72 What Is Christianity? 
 
 the ancient Catholic church and at times seems to fall 
 entirely away. When the Christian communion became 
 gentile and began to naturalize itself in the world, the 
 sluices by which the mingling types of spiritual life in the 
 Graeco-Roman world flowed into it were thrown wide 
 open, with the result that the mystical tendencies in 
 early Christianity asserted themselves with increasing 
 strength and took on more and more the character of the 
 non-ethical spiritual yearnings of the age. Then, too, 
 the more the church found itself in organized opposition 
 to the secular power of Rome the more deeply her com- 
 municants felt that their ideal must be the purely spirit- 
 ual and the more it needed a mystical interpretation of 
 the universe as a support. Several types of mysticism 
 became prominent. 
 
 In Montanism the heated and florid Phrygian imagi- 
 nation was fired by the idea that in the bestowal of the 
 Paraclete by Christ the summit of spiritual possibility 
 lay open to all those who would obey the law of its impar- 
 tation. By ecstatic experience, furthered by the ascetic 
 life, the human spirit could become identical with the 
 Holy Spirit and able to utter truth that transcended the 
 teachings of the Christian tradition as much as these 
 transcended the Jewish law. These utterances could 
 be subjected to no outer test, but carried their authority 
 in themselves. Absolute prophetic inspiration was ob- 
 tained. 
 
 In the movement known as Gnosticism, that threat- 
 ened to make the Christian gospel a revealed philosophy 
 and the Christian church a pagan mystery-society, there 
 was an effort to unite the faith in the divine saviorhood 
 of Christ with a speculative cosmology and systems of 
 
Mysticism 73 
 
 secret initiations that introduced men to the ultimate 
 knowledge that would redeem them from the delusions 
 of materiality and the sins that issued from error, and 
 would impart to them the bliss of becoming an organ of 
 divinity. On account of the immoral pagan practices 
 associated with it and on account of its nullification of 
 the real character of many Christian traditions, it was 
 rejected by the church, but its power was not overthrown. 
 In the revived Platonism represented by such great 
 thinkers as Plotinus and Porphyry the inner spirit of 
 Gnosticism was restored and became the very nerve of 
 the Christian dogma. In the neo-Platonic system there 
 was a theory of the origin of the material world through a 
 descending series of emanations from the One (God) that 
 is above all existence, and a theory of the re-ascent of the 
 human soul to that supreme region from which it origi- 
 nated, till it is again one with God, "the alone with the 
 Alone." This is made out to be the Christian redemp- 
 tion. This is the theory that, in its essence, underlies 
 the dogma of the two natures of Christ and the Trinity. 
 Hence we may say that in the ancient creeds and the 
 ritual that was inseparable from them mysticism received 
 its christening and became established in the right of 
 Christian citizenship. 
 
 The great Augustine in his speculations and medi- 
 tations took up the parable of mysticism. By inter- 
 weaving it into his own profound spiritual experiences, 
 the activities of the Catholic church, the Christian Scrip- 
 tures of the Old and New Testaments, and the great 
 conception of history as unfolding the fulfilment of a 
 universal divine government, he secured for mysticism a 
 dominating influence in the church of the West. In the 
 
74 What Is Christianity? 
 
 mediaeval Western church the mystical tendency became 
 prolific in producing great spiritual struggles and enter- 
 prises. It fostered the spirit of protest against the 
 worldliness and corruption of the Roman church and 
 stirred up rebellion against her authority. It awoke into 
 speculative inquiry great theologians, like Hugo and 
 Richard de St. Victor, Bonaventura, and Thomas 
 Aquinas, and laid the foundation of modern Catholic 
 orthodoxy. It created free religious associations of men 
 in various countries for the cultivation of an independent 
 piety. It helped to arouse the zeal of preachers like 
 St. Bernard, ecclesiastics like Hildebrand, saints like 
 Francis. It helped pave the way for the Protestant 
 Reformation. The quietism of Madame Guyon and 
 the warm piety of Catholic Modernists are evidences of 
 its survival in Catholicism. 
 
 Mysticism has had a large place in Protestantism. 
 The " inner word" of the Anabaptists, outranking and 
 interpreting the written or outer word, the all-sufficient 
 " faith" of Luther, the "secret witness of the Spirit" of 
 Calvin and his followers, the " spiritual universe" of 
 Boehme, the " inner light" that George Fox and the 
 Quakers recognized in the soul of every man, the "soul 
 liberty" of the Baptists, the "heart-religion" of the 
 Pietists and Moravians, the "perfect love" of the 
 Wesleyans, the "visions" of Swedenborg, and the zeal 
 of the numerous present-day religious bodies profess- 
 ing a higher knowledge, all bear testimony to the 
 continuance of the mystical temper in great force 
 among Protestants. It is reflected in not a few of 
 the hymns in popular use among the Protestant 
 churches. The neo-Platonic character of two familiar 
 
Mysticism 75 
 
 modern hymns may be exhibited by quoting a stanza 
 from each: 
 
 Eternal Light! eternal Light! 
 
 How pure the soul must be, 
 When, placed within thy searching sight, 
 It shrinks not, but with calm delight 
 
 Can live and look on thee! 
 
 And 
 
 Breathe on me, breath of God! 
 
 Until my heart is pure, 
 Until with thee I will one will 
 
 To do or to endure. 
 
 2. OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTICS OF CHRISTIAN 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 a) The spirit of Christian mysticism is both critical 
 and speculative. It is critical because it aims at sim- 
 plicity and directness in religion. Feeling that in the 
 Christian faith religion comes to perfection, it finds that 
 perfection in the immediacy of the soul's relation to God. 
 The Christian soul finds itself in God and God in itself. 
 God is nearer than all else to the soul, the life of its life, 
 and hence there can be no need of mediation between the 
 soul and God. Whatever may come between them brings 
 darkness and not light. All that lies beyond this inward 
 union is secondary, and if it tend to obscure or interfere 
 with the soul's consciousness of its God it is of no account 
 or worse than useless. Hence the indifference which 
 thoroughgoing Christian mystics commonly feel toward 
 the mere externals of religion. Hence the attempt to pen- 
 etrate through the traditions, the customs, the ceremonies, 
 the forms of organization, and all the other drapery of 
 historical Christianity and to discover the eternal essence 
 
76 What Is Christianity? 
 
 that lies concealed behind it all It seeks to realize here 
 on earth the religious experience which men hope for in 
 heaven. But in discovering the essence of Christianity 
 it becomes necessarily speculative. For if it is in Jesus 
 Christ that men find their final salvation, then it is in 
 him that this immediacy with God is found. It then 
 becomes impossible to escape the task of relating this 
 experience Christward with the experience Godward in 
 such a way that the two become one. This calls for the 
 profoundest religious speculation and creates the very 
 dogmas whose interpolation into the relation between 
 the soul and God obscures the immediacy of the divine 
 enlightenment. Yet against these very dogmas mys- 
 ticism voices a protest. 
 
 b) The spirit of Christian mysticism is both individ- 
 ualistic and universalistic. The mystic is interested in 
 the movements of his own soul. The ancient Christian 
 mystics were the fathers of the modern psychology of 
 religion. They it was who taught us to analyze and 
 estimate the worth of our inner experiences of conflict, 
 defeat, and victory and to perceive in those battlefields 
 hidden from the view of the mere outsider the greatest 
 tragedies and triumphs in the story of all the worlds. It 
 was they who discovered in the inner recesses of man's 
 soul the highest working of those mighty forces that 
 constitute the universe. Is it any wonder that a Bernard 
 of Clairvaux should traverse the passes of the Alps sur- 
 rounded by scenes of the most marvelous beauty and 
 grandeur without uttering a single word that would indi- 
 cate that these things made any lasting impression on his 
 mind ? For his eye was turned inward to contemplate 
 
Mysticism TJ 
 
 those vaster scenes, of which the grandest natural 
 scenery could be only a sensuous reflection, in which he 
 stood nearer to the ultimate Sublime and Beautiful in 
 the presence of which all the things of sense shrank away 
 abashed. 
 
 In the life of the soul the Christian mystic sees the 
 final word of the Christian revelation. Without it the 
 Christian Scriptures would be only childish prattle. In 
 the living soul he has found the pearl of great price. The 
 gospel stories of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the 
 Lost Son are parables of the wanderings of the soul from 
 its true self and its coming to itself again. The mystic's 
 Christ is not a historic human individual, but the 
 Indwelling One. For him the essence of the distinctive 
 Christian revelation is found to be, " Christ in me. " For 
 him the essence of the Christian redemption is expressed 
 in the words, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it 
 is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me." For 
 him the essence of all Christian activity is expressed in 
 the consciousness, "Not I, but the grace of Christ which 
 was with me." In other words, he is persuaded that in 
 examining his own spirit-life he is using a plumb line that 
 reaches down to the depths of Christ, of God. 
 
 Here we are reminded that the ultimate secret of the 
 mystic's interest in the individual soul lies in his hope of 
 finding there a Something More than himself, the Soul 
 of all souls, in which or in whom all souls are first lost to 
 themselves and afterward find themselves again. What 
 better lot, he asks, can fall to a man than that he should 
 lose his own narrow, empirical self in the Infinite Self ? 
 Thus it is true that he who loses his soul in this world 
 
78 What Is Christianity? 
 
 shall keep it to life eternal. Why should anyone wish 
 to preserve to himself a self-existence which is after all 
 only a selfish existence? The worth of the individual 
 lies, not in the fact that he is an individual, but in the 
 truth that when he truly finds himself the Universal is 
 all the Self he desires. 
 
 c) Christian mysticism seeks the attainment of pure 
 spirituality, but is inseparably united with materiality. 
 In common with all other mystics, the Christian mystic 
 is powerfully conscious of the opposition between the 
 spirit and the flesh in man and between spirituality 
 and materiality in the universe that reflects the soul 
 of man. He seeks the transformation of his whole 
 being into spiritual existence and the transmutation 
 of the whole of existence into a spiritual world. The 
 Christian mystic's heaven is a condition of existence that 
 may be defined as " the spirits of just men made perfect." 
 It will be a condition of pure spiritual love. If he loves 
 others, if he loves himself, it is for the sake of the love of 
 God, that is, for a purely spiritual love, a love which is 
 unconnected with physical relations. The holy city for 
 which he looks is a heavenly city, which is lighted and 
 filled with God. He sings of that city alone and is 
 interested in no other. He pines for that city and is 
 willing to forego all earthly joys and comforts for its dear 
 sake. How vain and worthless are all earthly cities and 
 their wealth! Bernard's great hymn, "Hora Novissima," 
 done into English by J. M. Neale under the title, "The 
 Celestial Country," is a sustained, unwearied (however 
 wearying to modern people) recital of the glories of 
 that spiritual state in contrast with the deep pessimism 
 it exhibits in regard to this world. The verse most 
 
Mysticism 79 
 
 familiar to Protestants may be inserted here to represent 
 the mystical contemplation of heaven: 
 Jerusalem the golden, 
 
 With milk and honey blest, 
 Beneath thy contemplation 
 
 Sink heart and voice oppressed; 
 I know not, O, I know not, 
 
 What social joys are there; 
 What radiancy of glory! 
 
 What light beyond compare! 
 
 As we follow the course of the poet's contemplation we 
 are impressed with his failure to shake off the pressure 
 of materiality. For almost the whole of his imagery is 
 drawn from scenes of natural, physical life and material 
 prosperity. It is the same with those women mystics 
 of the Middle Ages who believed that they had cast off all 
 other love for the sake of the love of Christ, the Bride- 
 groom of their souls. The saints whom they picture to 
 themselves in glory are bedecked in the very millinery 
 whose earthly counterpart they had presumably driven 
 from their hearts. The simple truth of the matter is that 
 Christian mysticism has never succeeded in shaking off 
 the wholesome Christian appreciation of the worth of 
 material reality. If mysticism only recognizes spiritual 
 good, it is, nevertheless, unable to represent it except in 
 terms of material good. 
 
 3. THE METHOD OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 
 
 It would seem at first that it must be quite out of 
 place to speak of a method of mysticism. For the mys- 
 tical experience, being ineffable, cannot be brought under 
 a consistent mode of expression; since it bears its author- 
 ity within itself it cannot be made to rest upon a law of 
 
80 What Is Christianity? 
 
 action or occurrence; since it wells up from the secret 
 depths of the subliminal self or comes down from a higher 
 self no attempt to secure it by human efforts can hope 
 for steady success. As soon as it is brought under an 
 order of things it loses its distinctive excellence. Never- 
 theless, mystics have been insistent that the experience 
 is obtainable and have sought carefully to offer guidance 
 to the seeking soul. This is inevitable as soon as it is 
 admitted that the experience is desirable and satisfying. 
 There is a method in mysticism. The method of Chris- 
 tian mysticism does not differ from the method of mys- 
 ticism in general except in so far as the virtues cherished 
 in Christianity take on a character of their own and in so 
 far as the object of Christian adoration is distinctive. 
 
 First of all, the would-be participant in the mystical 
 experience must submit to a discipline of the will. This 
 is twofold, having a negative side and a positive side. 
 On the negative side there must be a withdrawal of the 
 will from aims that divert it from obtaining unity with 
 the ultimate Reality; there must be a withdrawal of the 
 attention of the intellect from the mere becoming of 
 things in order to the attainment of the vision of God; 
 there must be an alienation of the emotions from things 
 that belong to the artificial world of common life. In 
 other words, the true mystic must be an ascetic. As 
 Peter Damiani said, "Whoever would reach the summit 
 of perfection should keep within the cloister of his seclu- 
 sion, cherish spiritual leisure, and shudder at traversing 
 the world, as if he were about to plunge into a sea of 
 blood. For the world is so filthy with vices that any 
 holy mind is befouled even by thinking about it." This 
 is the extreme Catholic view of the matter. The differ- 
 
Mysticism 81 
 
 ence between the Catholic mystic and the Protestant 
 mystic is, at this point, one of degree. Evelyn Under- 
 hill says: "As the purified sense, cleansed of prejudice 
 and self-interest, can give us fleeting communications 
 from the actual broken-up world of duration at our 
 gates: so the purified and educated will can wholly with- 
 draw the self's attention from its usual concentration on 
 small useful aspects of the time- world, refuse to react to 
 its perpetually incoming messages, retreat to the unity 
 of its spirit, and there make itself ready for messages from 
 another plane." This also is asceticism. 
 
 The positive side of the discipline is the more impor- 
 tant. The Nay is only a passageway to the Yea. After 
 the will, by withdrawal, renunciation, and mortification, 
 has received its purgation, there begins its concentration 
 upon the sole end of its exercise. "Tension, ardor, are 
 of its essence; it demands the perpetual exercise of indus- 
 try and courage." Beginning with meditation, the soul 
 presses upward through successive stages of contempla- 
 tion till at last it beholds with unblenched eye the Light 
 Eternal. In this "naked contemplation" the poem of 
 existence is read at last. The heart dwells in the eternal 
 Love, selfhood is lost in the divine Quiet, and God is All 
 in all. The strenuousness of the demands of mysticism 
 is excelled by no type of religion or morality. 
 
 In Christian mysticism Jesus frequently becomes the 
 center of the mystical striving. He is the soul's Bride- 
 groom and the highest bliss is found in the ecstatic union 
 with him. His cross, particularly, becomes the focal 
 point of the contemplation of his glory until the worshiper 
 becomes emotionally one with him, until "with him we 
 will one will to do or to endure" and die to self in him. 
 
82 What Is Christianity? 
 
 Secondly, the discipline of the will is supported by a 
 method of interpretation. It may be called symbolism. 
 It has been shown that for mysticism the world of sense- 
 perception is not the truly real world. Its value, how- 
 ever, is not merely negative. It has the value of the 
 stamp on the gold coin. It tells of the Reality, or 
 that which is beyond itself. It symbolizes the truth 
 and only so far has it truth. The universe is a song, 
 a psalm. The world of perception is the musical scale. 
 It is not enough to know the notes. We most catch 
 the music by the inner ear. The notation mediates 
 it to us. The Maker of the world is an Artist. 
 Science is worthful only as it leads to the cultivation 
 of the Art divine. 
 
 A special application of this. theory occurs in the 
 mystical use of the Christian Scriptures. Allegorism 
 is the true method of their interpretation. Behind the 
 grammatical sense of the Scriptures lies the hidden sense. 
 Consequently, questions of literary criticism or historical 
 fact have a very subordinate interest, if any interest 
 whatsoever. Often the mystical interpretation has been 
 carried to the greatest extravagance. The Song of 
 Solomon is one of the favorite hunting-grounds of 
 allegorical interpreters. We are all familiar with the 
 play of fancy in the use of apocalyptical works for pur- 
 poses of "spiritual edification." Especially significant 
 is the attitude assumed toward the historical Jesus — the 
 outer events of his life, or his actual teachings, matter 
 little. The heavenly Christ alone concerns the mystic. 
 With this Christ he holds communion. This Christ 
 reveals himself still to believers, and this Christ alone can 
 save — he is God. 
 
Mysticism 83 
 
 Thirdly, mystical piety is nourished by a method of 
 emotional cultivation. The search for symbols mediat- 
 ing the longed-for experience issues in the selection or 
 creation of them. Mysticism always develops a ritual. 
 Mystics are the most at home in the ritualistic churches. 
 For the attempt to sustain the high elevation of soul 
 which is called union with God is bound to slacken and 
 fall back unless means be taken to revive the sagging ex- 
 perience as frequently as may be. Otherwise indifference 
 or despair must follow. Hence the ritual, hence the 
 sacraments, hence the elaborate system of symbols which 
 have gradually grown up in the Catholic church. Mys- 
 ticism frequently eventuates in what seemed at first its 
 opposite — Catholicism. 
 
 4. THE STRENGTH AND THE WEAKNESS OF MYSTICISM 
 IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 This can be discerned by recalling the circumstances 
 under which the phenomena of mysticism have been 
 most in evidence. Mysticism has been frequently the 
 resort of the physically weak and oppressed. When 
 governments have become despotic and have crushed 
 weaker states to the ground or have deprived their sub- 
 jects of their liberties; when worldly power has been put 
 into the hands of the rich and the common people have 
 been subjected to impoverishment and cruelty, then the 
 hopelessness of their material condition has turned the 
 minds of men to the better hope of a higher enrichment 
 by participation in the realities of a spiritual world over 
 which material forces have no control and for the posses- 
 sion of which a man is not dependent on the suffrages of 
 his fellows. Here mysticism appears as an affirmation 
 
84 What Is Christianity ? 
 
 of the reality and worth of the spiritual over against the 
 vanity of the material, and, at the same time, as a vindi- 
 cation of the indefeasible prerogative of the individual 
 human spirit. Thus it was when the power of ancient 
 Rome threatened the liberties and life of the weaker 
 peoples. The mysticism of ancient Catholicism is in 
 part an answer to the claims of the Empire. 
 
 Mysticism has been not infrequently the support of 
 dissenters against ecclesiastical despotism. In times 
 of organized religious aggrandizement, when priestly 
 authorities, with apparent success, have sought to 
 usurp the control of spiritual functions; when a stately 
 or attractive ritual has emerged as a means of satisfying 
 spiritual wants; when, in consequence, formalism and 
 pomp have been substituted for the gentle graces of true 
 religion; and when the pride of sacerdotalism has been 
 flanked by dependence, ignorance, and grossness in the 
 masses, then mysticism has arisen as a mighty reaction. 
 It has called men back to the simplicity of the truly 
 spiritual life, its freedom from external control, its inde- 
 pendence of material support, its supremacy over all 
 outer authority, its immediacy of access to the individual 
 man. Religion is affirmed to be an inward life and not 
 a system of worship or an order of society. Thus it was 
 when the mediaeval dissenters rose in revolt against the 
 claims of the mighty mediaeval Catholic church. 
 
 Mysticism, again, has sprung up in protest against 
 the pretensions of intellectual despotism in the life of 
 religion. When the truth of religious faith has been 
 subjected to intellectual analysis or theoretical specula- 
 tion ; when the possession of this faith has been identified 
 with acquiescence in the truth of formal propositions or 
 
Mysticism 85 
 
 dogmatical declarations; when an intellectual sacer- 
 dotalism, as aggressive and despotic as ecclesiastical 
 or political dignitaries ever were, subjects the hearts of 
 the common people to the authority of the professional 
 thinker and the simple faith of the untrained smolders 
 low, loses confidence and initiative; and when unbelief, 
 fostered by undue regard for the power of logic, becomes 
 proud and boastful, then mysticism has arisen to do 
 battle on behalf of the spiritual privileges of the unintel- 
 ligent and untrained, with the affirmation that the heart 
 hath reasons that Reason knoweth not, that the religious 
 life is irreducible to the terms of mere thought, and that 
 the believer is greater than the thinker. Thus it was 
 with the Anabaptists of the Reformation, with the 
 Quakers of the later Reformation days, with the Pietists 
 of Germany, and with the revivalism of Wesley and 
 Whitefield. 
 
 The strength of mysticism lies in its originality, its 
 simplicity, its power of defense, its conservation of funda- 
 mental realities. Its power of resistance against oppres- 
 sion is unconquerable. It protects the liberties of the 
 weak. It vindicates the divinity of the human spirit and 
 its supremacy over material being. 
 
 But it has exhibited the faults that accompany such 
 virtues. Strong in defense, it has not had signal success 
 as a progressive Christian propaganda. Deeply rooted 
 in the self-consciousness of the individual, it has not 
 shown a capacity for social construction or reconstruc- 
 tion. Mysticism cannot be identified with a continuous 
 historical communion of faith. Its love of the unseen and 
 ineffable has left little room for a bold quest of nature's 
 secret by scientific methods, and it has manifested a 
 
86 What Is Christianity? 
 
 constant tendency to retire from the vast arenas of life 
 where men do battle with the weapons of material 
 nature or struggle to build up political structures for the 
 maintenance of the acquisitions of human labor in the 
 past. At times tremendously brave, on the whole it is 
 timid in regard to public issues and is prone to leave 
 these to the care of the "worldling." Finally, unable 
 after all to subsist long on pure contemplation, or, with 
 aristocratic spirit, despairing of the spirituality of the 
 masses, it resorts too frequently to those very externals 
 in worship that it has sought to discard. Mysticism is 
 not Christianity, but only a factor in the making of it. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 PROTESTANTISM 
 
 In the year of grace 1529, at a meeting of the motley 
 and cumbersome collection of secular and ecclesiastical 
 potentates that constituted the Diet of the mediaeval 
 German Empire, a minority of these rulers offered a 
 joint protest to the emperor and the majority against 
 a contemplated attack upon their rights. So far as con- 
 cerned the deepest interests of men in general, the occa- 
 sion was comparatively trivial, for it mattered little to 
 the world then, as it does now, if some ecclesiast or prince- 
 ling were to lose his special privileges. The mightiest 
 influences in human affairs derive but little of their power 
 from the will of officials or hereditary rulers. Notwith- 
 standing, the occurrence was very significant inasmuch 
 as the empire enjoyed a great traditional prestige even 
 in those later days of its decadent power, and because 
 this protest announced to all the peoples within the 
 empire, and to all the other European nations that still 
 professed a nominal connection with it, that a new 
 political combination had arisen in support of a religious 
 principle or profession. It was a sign of the times. 
 
 It may be that few of these men were deeply or intel- 
 ligently in sympathy with religion for its own sake or 
 cared very much for the liberties of the multitudes whose 
 destinies were to be affected by their act. It may be that 
 their act was prompted by selfish political considerations, 
 but their protest was in support of a religious faith, and 
 
 87 
 
88 What Is Christianity? 
 
 it helped to force upon the attention of Europe the sig- 
 nificance of the challenge which the brave monk, Martin 
 Luther, had hurled into the face of the Roman papacy 
 a few years before. It was the act of these protesters 
 that gave to all who associated themselves thereafter 
 with the opposition to Roman Catholicism the name they 
 were to bear for all time to come — Protestants. As time 
 passed, great companies of men rose up in many lands 
 to join in further protests — no longer mainly against the 
 claims of the heads of a great political system with its 
 heritage of authority based upon its doings in the past, 
 but against a greater and more dreaded system with its 
 claims to a higher authority — the Roman Catholic 
 church. The whole revolutionary movement that swept 
 so swiftly over a large portion of Europe may be properly 
 denoted by the term Protestantism. Our attention will 
 be mostly confined to the religious side of it. 
 
 At the outset of this study it is to be granted that 
 Protestantism cannot be understood apart from its 
 relation to the Catholicism against which it projected 
 itself. The name is not on that account, however, sig- 
 nificant of a merely negative attitude. Catholic con- 
 troversialists have continued to this day to reiterate this 
 old charge against it. In those early days of Protestant 
 history, when the bitter struggles in defense of the new 
 profession naturally called forth a determined polemic 
 against Catholicism, there was some plausibility in the 
 accusation; but when the story of the rise and progress 
 of Protestantism is told, when its powerful creations in 
 many spheres of life are exhibited to the student, the 
 absurdity of the view that Protestantism is simply a 
 negation of Catholicism becomes evident. It is one of 
 
Protestantism 89 
 
 the greatest positive constructive forces that have 
 appeared in human life. 
 
 It is true that the outburst of this new power brought 
 about for a time a degree of turmoil and confusion that 
 was fairly appalling to lovers of peace and quiet. To 
 such people it must have seemed at times that Protes- 
 tantism was just destruction let loose. For accepted 
 maxims of life were contradicted, society in many places 
 was disintegrated, economic conditions were turned up- 
 side down, revolutions were started, wars broke out in 
 many lands, blood was shed like water, thrones toppled, 
 and the great church was rent in pieces. "Prophets" 
 at times went hither and thither proclaiming that the 
 end of the world was at hand, and attempts were actually 
 made to set up a visible kingdom of Christ on the earth. 
 The storm began to calm down after a while. From the 
 time that Calvin's theocracy was firmly established at 
 Geneva till the Westminster Confession of Faith and the 
 treaty of Westphalia were signed Protestantism was 
 progressively organizing itself in stable forms of political 
 and ecclesiastical government in close affiliation with 
 each other, and the Protestant nations displayed a solid- 
 ity and vigor that gave them promise of the domination 
 of the world. Their grip has slackened at times, but has 
 never been let go. Protestantism has become an abiding 
 force in the life of men. 
 
 It is not strange that the men who became leaders 
 and spokesmen of the Reformation only half understood 
 the real character of the powerful undercurrent of spirit- 
 ual life that brought them to the surface. It was natural 
 that the inner conservatism of many of these reasserted 
 tself powerfully against the views of radicals. It was 
 
go What Is Christianity? 
 
 natural that they should seek to keep the new spirit under 
 restraint by bringing it under the authority of existing 
 conditions, partly remodeled, and by binding it to the 
 terms of doctrine established by law. Looking back 
 from the distance of the present, we can recognize the 
 influence of several conservative interests upon the new 
 movement. First of all, there was the Catholic church 
 itself with its succession of priests, its sacraments, its 
 methods of government, and its insistence on unity. 
 Secondly, there were the political states which had arisen 
 in Europe as feudalism began to fail. These strong 
 governments attracted to them the firm allegiance of 
 their subjects, so much so that even the church had to 
 take the second place in the affections of many. Thirdly, 
 there was the reverence for the past and the hesitation 
 to part with its treasures of custom and tradition. 
 Fourthly, there was the instinct for order with which 
 every new movement must reckon. The Protestant 
 leaders found it practically necessary to adjust them- 
 selves to these conditions. The general outcome was a 
 partial compromise. There was a checking of the reli- 
 gious insurrection on the one hand and an alteration of 
 the terms and forms of the old faith in a modern direc- 
 tion on the other hand. Protestantism was not alto- 
 gether a revolution. In the life of Christendom it was 
 truly a reformation rather than a revolution. 
 
 But was the Protestantism that came to expression 
 in the institutions that bear its name in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries truly and fundamentally religious ? 
 Was it not rather a watering down of religion, a pruning 
 of the true Christianity in order to adjust it to the 
 demands of the rational intelligence and of the secular 
 
Protestantism 9 1 
 
 life and its institutions ? I am firmly convinced that it 
 was the former. The very fact that the men who have 
 been designated by the popular mind as its greatest 
 representatives were the religious teachers and reformers 
 and the fact that the Protestant states that arose invari- 
 ably issued a confession of faith uphold this view. The 
 history of the creation of Protestantism and of the devel- 
 opment of its life proves it. Protestantism is a type of 
 religious faith. It was really in its beginnings a religious 
 revival. That the religious leaders should be the men to 
 speak the word that released upon the world the forces 
 that had been held in leash by the Catholic church for a 
 long time was natural, for it was through the awakened 
 religious consciousness of the age that men became aware 
 of the depth of the changes that had been working out 
 in other spheres of life. It was the Christian messages 
 of the leaders that made the retention of so many of the 
 traditional beliefs and practices impossible. It was the 
 Christian verities that men felt called upon to vindicate 
 when they strove for the larger liberty that was coming 
 to them. The Protestants believed themselves to be, 
 in contrast with Catholics, the true Christians. Prot- 
 estantism is a specific interpretation of Christianity. 
 
 I. HISTORICAL SOURCES OF PROTESTANTISM 
 
 Protestantism was fed by far-off fountains that sprang 
 up in those mountain recesses of human life where lowly 
 people, mostly unobserved by statesmen or high ecclesi- 
 astics, cultivated a simpler and purer faith than that 
 which held the high places of the earth. It is now pretty 
 certain that a non-churchly and non-sacramental type 
 of Christian faith lived on through the Dark Ages before 
 
92 What Is Christianity? 
 
 mediaeval Europe was born. Albert H. Newman says: 
 "That there were hosts of true believers during the 
 darkest ages of Christian history can by no means be 
 doubted." 1 When the Clugniac revival of religion in the 
 Catholic church produced a purification and great exten- 
 sion of monastic orders until the monastic ideal of life 
 was accepted as the Catholic Christian ideal, this lay- 
 man's faith also grew and flourished. The story of Peter 
 de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, and Arnold of Brescia 
 proves that they who maintained this other type of faith 
 were by no means ignorant people. Their success in 
 France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy created 
 alarm in the ranks of the orthodox. For they under- 
 mined the very foundations of the Catholic system. 
 Infant baptism, intercessions for the dead, sacrifices, 
 prayers to saints, consecration of holy days and places, 
 veneration of relics, and similar practices were power- 
 fully attacked, and that not merely on rational grounds, 
 but on the ground that these things violate the spiritual- 
 ity and moral purity of the Christian faith. Their ideal 
 was likeness to Jesus in the common relations of life. 
 
 The great work of the Waldenses in translating the 
 Scriptures into the vernacular and circulating them far 
 and wide drew upon these devoted people the persecuting 
 zeal of the monks. The deadly inquisition for heresy 
 was set to work. The story of its horrors cannot be told 
 here, nor the story of the splendid resistance of these 
 evangelicals. Suffice it to say that, while these people 
 were forced to do most of their work in secret, the faith 
 they held could not be extirpated. When the church 
 became more and more entangled in politics and forgot 
 
 1 History of Antipaedobaptism, p. 28. 
 
Protestantism 93 
 
 the needs of the masses, increasing multitudes got more 
 and more out of hand and followed their own inclination. 
 The result was the appearance of two popular types of re- 
 ligion side by side. The one was the priestly, sacramental 
 religion that multiplied its rites and its intercessors, that 
 went on great pilgrimages to holy shrines, that prayed to 
 Mary and a host of departed "saints," that paid for 
 prayers and masses, that frequented the confessional, 
 that purchased indulgences, that trembled at the pros- 
 pect of the Judgment Day and hell, and shrank in terror 
 from Christ, the awful Judge. The other was a religion 
 that revered the words of Jesus, that tried to follow his 
 steps, that nurtured love and a tender conscience, whose 
 priests were the whole communion of believers, whose 
 invisible altars were on the common highways of life — a 
 religion that sought the favor neither of princes nor of 
 ecclesiastics, and that appeared at its best in the family 
 circle and not in the monastery or the nunnery. It was 
 intelligent because it was particularly a Bible-reading 
 religion. 
 
 This was the main religious source of Protestantism. 
 But for its antecedent operations throughout Europe, 
 Luther would probably never have been heard from or 
 would have spoken to deaf ears. If Protestantism was 
 characterized by its emphasis on the authority of the 
 Bible, the explanation lies here. It was not simply 
 because of the exigencies of controversy. It was not 
 simply because it was found that the weapon which the 
 Catholic church had forged for its own defense when it 
 made a canon of sacred Scripture could be used to smite 
 its maker to the ground. But it was mainly because 
 the spirit that inspired Protestant religion and enabled it 
 
94 What Is Christianity? 
 
 to endure the storms of the times had been, and con- 
 tinued to be, nourished on the Bible. 
 
 Tributary to this powerful current was the growing 
 demand for a morality that would be personal and pure. 
 If it is true that the penitential system of the church 
 grew out of the effort to train the rude masses in a knowl- 
 edge of the obligations of the Christian life, it is also true 
 that the necessity of securing large funds for its pur- 
 poses led the church to turn its penitential system into 
 a method of evading direct responsibility and of bargain- 
 ing for absolution from guilt. The moral reforms which 
 the monks sought tended to arouse sluggish consciences 
 for a time, but the monastic institutions tended in a 
 double way to aggravate the evils of the times. For 
 the ascetic ideal tends to the disparagement of the com- 
 mon things of life and, consequently, to the minimizing 
 of moral failure in common things. Also, the very suc- 
 cess of monasticism and its admission to a high place in 
 the church's system led to a corruption of monastic 
 morals to such an extent that the common people in 
 many places looked upon the cassock of the priest and 
 the begging-bowl of the friar with unconcealed scorn. 
 Neither of them could be trusted at large. Lay morality 
 was higher than the morality of the priest and the monk. 
 
 Another tributary influence sprang from the growing 
 sense of personal worth. The gradual breakdown of the 
 older feudalism and the reduction of the serf or villein 
 who was bound to the soil to the level of the chattels of 
 a distant master were matched by the development of 
 commerce in connection with the crusades, the growth 
 of large cities, the increasing demands for artisans in 
 these cities, the substitution of the money-wage for pay- 
 
Protestantism 95 
 
 ment in kind, the organization of workingmen's guilds 
 for mutual advantage and the higher exaltation of the 
 individual. The new industrial and social conditions 
 in the cities aroused new hopes in the minds of the coun- 
 try peasantry. Organizations of the peasantry became 
 numerous and powerful. They began to insist on the 
 recognition of rights hitherto denied them. The rising 
 wave of peasant feeling was deeply imbued with the 
 spirit of religion. Intrepid leaders appeared. The 
 Lollards in England, the Hussites in Bohemia, the leagues 
 of the Bundschuh in Germany, were all inspired with a 
 similar spirit. The attempt of the Empire, on the one 
 hand, and of the Church, on the other hand, to impose 
 upon the people an imperial system that would reduce 
 them all to virtual serfdom only stimulated the risings 
 the more. The Swiss peasants won a great victory and 
 their independence from their imperial masters. The 
 hope of like conquests spread like wildfire throughout 
 Central Europe. Democracy raised its head. The 
 man, kept down by ages of ignorance and oppression, 
 was coming to himself. 
 
 There was also the influence of the growing national- 
 ism of Europe. The national spirit was abroad. It 
 supervened upon feudalism. Both emperors and popes 
 feared it, for it contested their claims, and ultimately 
 thwarted the ambitions of both. The affirmation of 
 national rights became a rallying-cry for those who pro- 
 tested against the pecuniary exactions of the papacy 
 and the draining away of the country's revenues to fill 
 the coffers of a foreign prelate. The English, the Scotch, 
 the French, and the Spaniards were rapidly realizing 
 their national ambitions. The Wycliffian Reformation 
 
96 What Is Christianity? 
 
 in England and the Hussite Reformation in Bohemia 
 owed their success in no small degree to their intimate 
 connection with the national aspirations in both coun- 
 tries. National aspirations were rising among the Ger- 
 mans, the Dutch, the Italians, and elsewhere. The 
 papacy first and the Empire next were the chief outer 
 obstacles to the realization of these hopes. Religion 
 took on a national character. The aim of bringing the 
 church in each country under the control of the govern- 
 ment of the country gained backing steadily. Protes- 
 tantism gave the signal to make the religion of the land 
 a function of the state. The state was no longer to be 
 viewed as merely secular, no longer of merely earthly 
 origin. It was founded by heaven and its rights were 
 divine. The natural had become the holy. 
 
 A single word only need be said about the Renais- 
 sance. The revival of learning affected directly at first 
 only the intellectuals, but its influence was bound to 
 permeate whole communities in course of time. It 
 liberated the mind from bondage to authority in the 
 realm of knowledge and thereby gave support to the 
 growing religious freedom. It revived the interest in 
 the distant past and stimulated a search for the true 
 Christian beginnings. It opened the way to new inter- 
 pretations of the Christian Scriptures. It reaffirmed 
 the competency of the human reason to discover truth 
 in any realm. It brought the pretensions of many of the 
 accredited church leaders into contempt by exposing 
 their ignorance. It strengthened confidence in the 
 worth of the natural as against a narrow supranatural- 
 ism. It gave new strength to the scientific impulse and 
 the desire for discovery and invention in all realms of 
 
Protestantism 97 
 
 knowledge. It threw broadcast the invitation to come 
 to nature and learn her secret from herself. 
 
 Protestantism was an outcome of the union of these 
 forces and the penetration of them all by the spirit of 
 religious revival. The manner in which they were com- 
 bined varied greatly in different countries and in different 
 groups in the same countries, but it is not difficult to 
 discover one prevailing trend amid their differences. 
 This, I trust, will become manifest by an analysis of 
 Protestantism from various points of view. 
 
 2. THE PROTESTANT RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 
 
 A classic expression of the inner religious life of Prot- 
 estantism is found in the answer to the first question in 
 the Heidelberg Catechism: "What is thy only comfort 
 in life and in death ? ' ' Answer : 
 
 That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not 
 my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with 
 his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed 
 me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that with- 
 out the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my 
 head; yea, all things must work together for my salvation. Where- 
 fore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and 
 makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him. 
 
 In this popular statement the three great mountain 
 peaks of the Protestant religious consciousness stand out 
 clearly: loyalty to a personal God, confidence in the orderly 
 course of the universe, the sense of inner worth. The dif- 
 ferent Protestant communions vary in the intelligence 
 and firmness with which they hold to these fundamentals 
 and in the emphasis they place upon them, respectively, 
 but these convictions are characteristic of them all. 
 
98 What Is Christianity? 
 
 First: The religion of the Protestant consists primarily 
 in the consciousness of the immediate personal relation with 
 God. In the answer to the first question of the West- 
 minster Shorter Catechism it is stated theologically: 
 "What is the chief end of man?" Answer: "Man's 
 chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." 
 Here there is no blind or confused groping after an 
 unknowable essence of deity or divinity, no vague sur- 
 mise of the presence of an ineffable Somewhat, of a 
 Silence or Abyss beyond all the range of human intel- 
 ligence, but the affirmation of a direct contact with a 
 personality as real and as definite in his existence as we 
 are. Protestant theology may not have lived up to this 
 standard always, but this is the Protestant faith. There 
 can be no toleration of an effort to interpose anything 
 between God and the soul, for this would be an insult 
 to the divine prerogative and an injury to the human 
 spirit. God reveals himself to man and confers good 
 gifts upon him according to his own will. Man prays 
 to God directly and obeys or disobeys on his own behalf. 
 Hence the Protestant love for simplicity in worship. 
 Hence the sternness with which the Protestants repudi- 
 ated the mediatorial system of the Catholic church- 
 its spurious sacraments, its prescribed devotions, its 
 priestly intercessions and absolutions, its saints, its 
 holy seasons of fasts and feasts, and its legalistic regula- 
 tions — not merely because they were absurd and vain, 
 but because they were profane and wicked, a violation 
 of the rights of man and a usurpation of the authority 
 of God. Hence the determination of Protestants to 
 reduce the tangled mass of teachings and usages that 
 had held the multitudes so long in spiritual bondage, to 
 
Protestantism 99 
 
 the simplicity that they believed to have existed in the 
 original faith of Christians. Hence also their repudia- 
 tion of ecclesiastical authority in favor of the real author- 
 ity of those Scriptures that came directly from God. 
 
 The religious view of God carried with it a religious 
 view of the Bible. The demand for certainty in our 
 relations with God implied a need for a pure expression 
 of his will. This the Protestants found in the Christian 
 (and Jewish) Scriptures. Whatever we may now say 
 as to the value of the presuppositions with which they 
 approached the study of the Bible or as to the value of 
 their methods of interpretation, there can be no doubt 
 that they made an honest attempt to understand its 
 true and original meaning, and that, not in the interest 
 of historical or literary knowledge, but in the interest 
 of their religious faith. They revered it as the "pure 
 word of God" and sought to obey its instructions as the 
 commands of God. The Catholic church had utilized 
 the Bible in the interest of a system, but the Protestants 
 sought to find in it the disclosure of the mutual approach 
 of God and man, and to them largely we owe the exalta- 
 tion of its religious value, even if, as we must confess, 
 they often subordinated it to a system of doctrines partly 
 derived from another source. 
 
 The Protestant religious spirit moved between a 
 negative and a positive pole. The negative pole was a 
 sense of ill-desert. The catechumen who studied the 
 Heidelberg Confession learned to speak of "my sins" 
 in the very first sentence he uttered. The sense of sin 
 lay heavily on the conscience of those believers. The 
 language of the Fifty-first Psalm was spontaneous to 
 them and it was often on their lips. They accepted from 
 
ioo What Is Christianity? 
 
 Catholicism and Augustine the doctrine of original sin 
 because it seemed to utter the truth of their experience, 
 and they intensified its meaning and tried to take it in 
 its most fearful sense. When they spoke of sin it was 
 not a metaphysical defect or want of true knowledge 
 they had particularly in mind, but the contrast of the 
 human character when they contemplated the holiness 
 of God. Sin was moral, it was rebellion, it was spiritual 
 turpitude, it was ill-desert; and they could find no better 
 expression of its unworthiness than the Catholic doctrine 
 of an endless hell of torment. Nevertheless, when they 
 thought of God, the principal emphasis was not upon sin. 
 The positive pole of the Protestant religious spirit 
 was a consciousness of being the recipient of grace. Here 
 these believers followed Augustine and, like him, they 
 emphasized the greatness of their sin all the more because 
 they believed that thereby they exalted the divine grace. 
 The sense of sin was only the dark background of the 
 picture of their inner life. Their spirit was not gloomy 
 in the end, but it was filled with a joyful confidence. 
 This is what made their tremendous achievements pos- 
 sible. They were filled with the feeling of dependence 
 on God, but it was not the dependence of the mere sup- 
 pliant or beggar, or of the hopeless criminal on his way 
 to the gallows. It was the dependence of one who was 
 aware that the divine love had flowed out upon him and 
 made him a being of the higher order. It was the 
 dependence of the loved one upon the lover, such a 
 dependence as finds its best expression in a loyal and 
 hearty self-surrender. "I, with body and soul, both in life 
 and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful 
 Saviour Jesus Christ." This is one of the things that 
 
Protestantism 101 
 
 made the doctrine of election and predestination so 
 dear to them; it confirmed the assurance of the divine 
 favor. 
 
 This union of the sense of sin and the assurance of 
 grace rested on a vision of the cross of Christ. It was 
 not that they contemplated the picture of his suffering 
 as valuable for its own sake. It was not that they were 
 trying, after the Catholic fashion, to repeat in their own 
 souls the agonies of Jesus on the cross as the perfection 
 of asceticism, but it was because they believed that 
 "where sin abounded grace did abound the more exceed- 
 ingly," and in the suffering of Christ they saw this prin- 
 ciple in operation as an act of God himself. It was not 
 the suffering of the cross so much as its moral signifi- 
 cance that made it the center of their faith. They could 
 live henceforth confidently and trustfully because this 
 supreme gift assured all other good. 
 
 Secondly: The faith of Protestantism appears in its 
 attitude of assured confidence rather than trembling anxiety 
 toward the course of the world. While mysticism sought 
 to scorn the world, while Catholicism viewed it mostly 
 with mingled fear and contempt, Protestantism takes 
 a positive religious interest in it. Notwithstanding the 
 occasional lapses of Calvinists, and notwithstanding the 
 perpetuation of their Catholic inheritance of the view 
 that nature had been corrupted and that the ills of this 
 life are made great in order that our hearts might be 
 weaned from it and prepared for the world to come, the 
 Protestants drew great spiritual comfort and inspiration 
 from the contemplation of the world of nature and of 
 man. Lacking the modern scientific view of the con- 
 stancy of nature, they enjoyed a religious anticipation 
 
102 What Is Christianity? 
 
 of it in the conviction that events in the material 
 world— from the movements of a planet to the stirrings 
 of a blade of grass— and events of human history, even 
 of the most trifling and seemingly fortuitous kind — from 
 the bad deeds of wicked men to the sublimest sacrifices 
 of good men — came under the direct control of an unerr- 
 ing and kind Providence. It was in no spirit of cold 
 speculation or fatalism that the Westminster Con- 
 fession asserted that "God from all eternity did, by the 
 most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and 
 unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass," but 
 because it was, as Calvin held, the essential postulate 
 of "the inestimable felicity of a pious mind." It was 
 not that these people had consciously worked out a spec- 
 ulative view of the universe or fancied that they could 
 demonstrate the truth of such a hypothesis, but because 
 they had a consciousness of the indispensability of the 
 divine presence at all times. They must see God every- 
 where in order to be at peace in the midst of the turmoils 
 of their time. What seemed inexplicable in a world 
 that he made they felt must be governed "by the secret 
 counsel of God." Everything in the world had a reli- 
 gious significance to them. Even inanimate objects 
 " exert their force only in so far as directed by the imme- 
 diate hand of God." They were not unaware of the 
 danger to faith and to morality in such a view, but they 
 were willing to endure those risks for the sake of the 
 assurance it gave that "all things must work together 
 for my salvation." This abiding sense of subjection, 
 with all things, to God's will was quite in keeping with 
 the Protestant conviction that there was free access to 
 him in every place and all the world was a sanctuary. 
 
Protestantism 103 
 
 Thirdly: Protestant religious faith embraced a con- 
 sciousness of holy inspiration, purification of heart, and 
 strength of will. The Protestants felt themselves superior 
 to Catholics because the latter fell back on a belief in the 
 mysterious gifts supposedly communicated in symbols, 
 and lacked that "secret testimony of the Spirit" that 
 gave the light of noonday to the human soul. It is true 
 that utterances of Protestant piety abound in confessions 
 of utter unworthiness and even worthlessness, but that 
 was meant to refer to men apart from the grace of God — 
 which was not their true self. It was this that enabled 
 the Protestants to dispense with the absolutions of 
 priests, the mediation of saints, and the voice of the 
 church to certify the truth to them, because they had 
 the truth within them, because they felt that a pure 
 heart could never receive punishment from God, and 
 because he who receives the divine assurance of blessed- 
 ness in his soul can accept no other. Hence it was that 
 they so often — extravagantly, it seems to us — regarded 
 those who opposed their convictions as ipso facto enemies 
 of God. Their doctrine of the Scriptures became a pro- 
 tection to them against the dangers of fanaticism to 
 which such a faith made them subject. Indeed, it must 
 be pointed out that they went so far as to persecute with 
 extreme severity those who carried this sense of the 
 indwelling of the divine Spirit to the whole length, and it 
 sometimes became a very weak factor in Protestant life. 
 
 3. THE PROTESTANT ESTIMATE OF HUMAN LIFE — ITS 
 MORAL OUTLOOK 
 
 It will hardly be contended that people who were 
 ready to put men into prisons or send them to death 
 because of a refusal to accept their beliefs on the highest 
 
104 What Is Christianity? 
 
 and most difficult of all questions, or who regarded a 
 large portion of the human race as heirs of the misdeeds 
 of another and the inevitable consequences of those 
 misdeeds by eternal divine decree and without their con- 
 sent in advance, or who sentenced men to everlasting 
 suffering for the glory of God, could have possessed the 
 most exalted conception of the worth and sacredness 
 of human life. Yet it is true that Protestantism 
 maintained a high estimate of the human personality 
 notwithstanding these shocking facts. Indeed, one 
 might almost say that these very defects bear par- 
 tial testimony to the dignity of the Protestant view 
 of man. 
 
 In the bloody persecution of Catholics and other 
 " heretics" the Protestants proved that they had learned 
 only too well the lesson that Catholicism had taught 
 them. Human life appears of comparatively small 
 account when it may be destroyed for a difference of 
 opinion. On the continent of Europe in those days men 
 generally felt small compunction on account of killing 
 men for these differences. In England it was otherwise. 
 Queen Mary was nicknamed "the Bloody," though she 
 had executed for their faith only two hundred and odd 
 people. On the Continent she would have been regarded 
 as rather merciful. The Protestant statesmen of Eliza- 
 beth's reign declared that they had put none to death 
 for their religious beliefs. But this was exceptional 
 among Protestants. How it harmonized with the Prot- 
 estant contention for the right of individual interpre- 
 tation of Scripture cannot be shown. At the same time 
 it does bear testimony to their view that men can be held 
 responsible for their opinions. 
 
Protestantism 105 
 
 It is somewhat the same with the Protestant view of 
 an endless hell. That Christian men should be able to 
 face with comparative complacency the prospect of such 
 a fate awaiting the majority of mankind seems now 
 incredible, or at least inexplicable. How can it be said 
 that the human personality is sacred if it be true that 
 "by the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, 
 some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting 
 life, and others foreordained to everlasting death" that 
 "their number is so certain and definite that it cannot 
 be either increased or diminished," and that the second 
 class "shall be cast into eternal torments"? And yet 
 it must be said that this terrible doctrine can be taken, 
 not so much as an essential view of Protestantism, but 
 rather as a perversion of the profound conviction that 
 the moral issues of a human life are so solemn that by 
 nothing short of their eternal outcome can we estimate 
 their meaning. 
 
 Taking such statements, then, not as adequate or 
 correct expressions of the fundamental Protestant esti- 
 mate of the worth of human life, we may see in them a 
 clue to the Protestant conviction in this regard. That 
 is to say, the value of the human personality is based 
 not so much upon its aesthetic or its intellectual powers 
 as upon its ethical quality and its moral possibilities. 
 Human destiny is twofold because there are just two 
 alternatives before men, and these are morally deter- 
 mined. 
 
 First: Human conduct must always be interpreted in 
 its relation to a holy, commanding will. This will has been 
 revealed to men in an inviolable law — the everlasting 
 "thou shalt" and its answer, "I ought." This law, 
 
106 What Is Christianity? 
 
 though manifold in its injunctions, is one in principle. 
 A transgression of it in any one particular is a violation 
 of the whole. It covers every relation in life and there- 
 fore it can be satisfied with nothing short of absolute 
 holiness, unexceptional obedience. Its majesty is inef- 
 fable, its validity eternal! 
 
 There can be no compromise with its demands. There 
 can be no neutrality toward it, there can be no division 
 of loyalty to it. There can be no middle ground between 
 obedience and disobedience. Therefore there can be no 
 trifling with it, no exceptions to the moral imperative, 
 no slackening of its claims, no compounding of felonies. 
 As every crime is a sin and every sin a crime, punishment 
 must be without compunction or reserve. The sanctions 
 of the law are inevitable. The dual destiny is essential 
 to its authority. This it was, more than anything else, 
 that led to the severity with which the demoralizing 
 practices of the Catholic church were repressed in Prot- 
 estant countries. The sale of indulgences and other 
 modes of bargaining with the moral law were not simply 
 foolish and vain in the eyes of the Reformers, but they 
 were wicked and deserving of punishment. Unfortu- 
 nately, we must add, this same sternness of moral judg- 
 ment had something to do with the extravagant penalties 
 that were visited by the courts on delinquents in Protes- 
 tant countries. The grandeur of the Protestant con- 
 science was sometimes turned into a spectacle of horror. 
 
 Secondly: While Catholicism accentuated the negative 
 side of morality, Protestantism laid its emphasis on the 
 positive side. It was not the qualities of renunciation, 
 resignation, or self-obliteration that charmed the Prot- 
 estant soul, but the exercise of the positive qualities of 
 
Protestantism 107 
 
 industry, courage, and determination. The Kingdom of 
 God was to be won, not by retirement from the tasks 
 of common life, but in the vigorous prosecution of them. 
 Among the saints of Protestantism were the men of 
 affairs. So insistent were the Reformers on the highest 
 standards for all that they repudiated the idea of a grada- 
 tion among Christians according to the degree to which 
 they severally conformed to an ideal. The demands of 
 the standard of life were absolute. 
 
 In this way the new form of Christian faith inculcated 
 in its adherents a deep self-respect, a self-affirmation that 
 threatened at times to degenerate into self-assertion. 
 The man was elevated consciously above the organiza- 
 tions or the society in which he found himself. Against 
 the very institutions that had nurtured him he rose up 
 in protest because of their defects. He judged and 
 denounced the society that had conserved the very moral 
 interests that he held dear, because it fell short of its own 
 ideals. He went even farther. He challenged the very 
 ideals to which he had been bred and called men to the 
 higher. The Protestant was essentially a moral pro- 
 gressive, a reformer. He found no resting-place for his 
 feet; he must ever go forward. Pure conservatism was 
 stagnation and stagnation was death, the very negation 
 of the moral. It was natural, then, that division should 
 occur in the Protestant ranks as they sought the higher 
 ideals. It was healthful, too. For it was not conform- 
 ity to type — much as some Protestants sought it — that 
 gave Protestantism its solidity, but in the inner impera- 
 tive to transcend all types it found its firmness and 
 stability. For the soul of Protestantism was in the 
 man and not in the system. "Here I stand, I can no 
 
108 What Is Christianity? 
 
 otherwise," said Luther before the Diet of Worms — 
 the man confronting the system and in those very words 
 placing beneath the system a bomb that blew it into 
 fragments ! 
 
 Protestant morality is constructive. It builds from 
 within rather than from without. It has more con- 
 fidence in the power of personal initiative to work the 
 good of humanity than in external restraint or constraint. 
 It seeks unity, but the unity that dreads uniformity; 
 a unity into which men grow and not a union that forbids 
 growth. Thus, notwithstanding its oft-repeated theo- 
 logical dogma of human depravity, its confidence reposed 
 in that very human nature which Catholicism had taught 
 its leaders to describe as fallen and destitute of good. 
 Hence the Protestant churches, while insisting that good 
 works — such "good works" as the Catholic church 
 required as the condition of salvation — were in no sense 
 saving, demanded, nevertheless, that the fruits of sal- 
 vation should be manifested by everyone in good works. 
 The Calvinistic churches, in particular, exercised a severe 
 discipline over their members and even found in good 
 works the assurance of their divine election. 
 
 Thirdly: The ethics of Protestantism stands for the 
 wholesomeness and sanctity of the natural. Catholicism 
 has put the stigma of uncleanness upon the natural. 
 Natural modes of life and natural institutions were 
 unholy until they had been brought under the cleansing 
 power of the church's sacraments. Even the wedded 
 life and the propagation of the race are traced to evil, 
 that is, fleshly concupiscence, until by subjection to the 
 sacrament of marriage the evil character of it is purged. 
 But notwithstanding the use of the sacrament of mar- 
 
Protestantism 109 
 
 riage, the highest life, true Christian perfection, is found 
 in celibacy. The wedded life, parenthood, are placed 
 on a lower grade. The orthodox Catholic view of the 
 natural institution of marriage seemed to the Protes- 
 tants to carry with it a derogatory view of many other 
 natural modes of life and the forms of their develop- 
 ment, such as industry, trades, commerce, and the duties 
 of civil and political life in general. 
 
 From the first stages of its progress Protestantism 
 consciously joined issue with Catholicism at this point. 
 The Augsburg Confession argues: 
 
 The commandments of God and the true worship of God are 
 obscured when men hear that monks alone are in that state of 
 perfection; because that Christian perfection is this, to fear God 
 sincerely, and, again, to conceive great faith and to trust as- 
 suredly that God is pacified toward us for Christ's sake: to ask, 
 and certainly to look for, help from God in all our affairs, accord- 
 ing to our calling; and outwardly to do good works diligently and 
 to attend to our vocation. In these things doth true perfection 
 and the true worship of God consist : it doth not consist in single- 
 ness of life, in beggary, or in vile apparel. [All italics are mine.] 
 
 The Protestants held that in the purity of the natural 
 family relation the basis was laid for the purity of all 
 those forms of industry and civil life which guard the 
 family interest and supply the family's needs. Here 
 was the foundation of the view that the whole of human- 
 ity may be regarded as one great family founded in 
 nature and therefore divine. 
 
 The Protestant sees the ideal of womanhood, not in 
 the pale face and upturned eyes of her that wears the 
 garb of the nun, but rather in the mother heart and busy 
 life of her who stands with uprolled sleeves before the 
 washtub or rocks her baby to sleep in her arms or cares 
 
no What Is Christianity? 
 
 for the food and clothing of the inmates of the home. 
 He sees the ideal of manhood, not in him of the shaven 
 head or priestly gown who has scorned the love of the 
 sexes, the affections and the trials of the home, the bar- 
 gaining at the market-place, the administration of a city, 
 or the execution of law and justice in the state; but 
 he sees the truly Christian man in him of the brawny 
 arm and busy brain who plunges into the common things 
 of life as his Father's business and finds the fulfilment 
 of his heart's ambitions in the secular task of every day. 
 When one finds that it is the Protestant peoples who are 
 progressive in morals, in knowledge, in industry, and in 
 politics, it is only what one should expect. 
 
 4. PROTESTANTISM AS A THEORY OF TRUTH — ITS 
 DOCTRINAL STANDARDS 
 
 On this involved and weighty subject it is not pos- 
 sible to say more than a few words in the present con- 
 nection. 
 
 It is to be remembered from the outset that while 
 Catholicism is fundamentally institutional, Protestant- 
 ism is fundamentally personal. Catholicism has its 
 sacraments; Protestantism has its truth. Catholicism 
 insists on assent; Protestantism on faith. Catholicism 
 inculcates submission; Protestantism inculcates knowl- 
 edge. Catholicism, accordingly, regards its doctrines 
 as legal requirements, as preconditions of receiving the 
 church's benefits; Protestantism regards its doctrines 
 as the very life of the soul, as the knowledge of the way 
 of God to the heart of the man and the way of the man to 
 the heart of God. Protestantism, therefore, takes its 
 doctrines more seriously than Catholicism and takes 
 
Protestantism 
 
 in 
 
 special pains to inculcate them. Thus, while the ritual 
 is central to Catholic worship, the preaching or instruc- 
 tion is central to Protestant worship. The priest 
 gives place to the teacher and the sacraments to the 
 doctrine. 
 
 The doctrines which Protestantism inherited from 
 the Catholic church take on new vigor. For example, 
 the Protestant orthodox creeds accept, and renew 
 allegiance to, the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the 
 two natures of Christ. With the Catholic church these 
 had become mysteries to be received without insight 
 into their worth and they had lost their original meaning 
 for the masses (and probably for the priests), having a 
 sort of legal value only. The Protestant theologians 
 renewed the vigor of these beliefs by impressing on the 
 minds of men the need of a mediatorial sufferer to bear 
 the guilt of sinful men, the actual enjoyment of the favor 
 of God, and the certainty of an inner conscious renewal 
 and fellowship with God in the Spirit. The old doctrines 
 lived again, though in a very different sense from that 
 which they had in the earlier times. The doctrine of 
 the Trinity and the doctrine of the God-man expressed 
 the Protestant experience. There was a reconstruction, 
 but from a different point of view. 
 
 If the heart of ancient Catholic piety lay in the long- 
 ing for infinitude and immortality, the longing of the 
 Protestant heart was for righteousness, the deliverance 
 from guilt, and the peace and power of mind which right- 
 eousness produces. The redemption which Protestant- 
 ism sought was not escape from materiality and death, 
 but escape from condemnation. Its great doctrines be- 
 gin really with its conception of justification. That is, 
 
ii2 What Is Christianity? 
 
 God was first of all the Lord and Judge of mankind. 
 The solemn scene of the court room is the best symbol 
 of his relations with us. The redemption of the sinner 
 takes the form of a process at law. It can occur only 
 through the satisfaction of offended justice, and this can 
 be only on condition of someone's bearing the penalty. 
 The hopelessness of man is relieved by the appearing of 
 a God-sent, divine-human sufferer who bears the eternal 
 penalty and frees the sinner. The whole is an act of the 
 unmerited and infinite grace of God. 
 
 It was natural that, when assurance of this great gift 
 was sought, the answer to the inquiring heart should be 
 first given in the affirmation that men are justified 
 through faith and not by their works. Then, when it 
 became necessary to assure men that the basis of such 
 an estimate of faith was safe, the answer took the form 
 of a doctrine of atonement. The center of gravity was 
 transferred from an inward experience to an objective, 
 divinely constituted reality. But there was incomplete 
 satisfaction in this view till it was determined whether 
 / and you are among those who are thus actually 
 redeemed, whether there is absolute certainty of our 
 redemption. The answer now takes the form of a doc- 
 trine of divine election and foreordination. And thus, 
 at length, at the hands of the Calvinistic theologians, 
 the whole career of mankind from the eternity of the 
 past to the eternity of the future was construed as the 
 outworking of an absolutely irresistible and sure divine 
 purpose that involves the everlasting and unchangeable 
 destiny of each and all according as the inscrutable will 
 of God determined from eternity. Thus Protestant 
 theology became a theory of God's government of the 
 
Protestantism 
 
 113 
 
 universe. The glory of God is everything and the 
 desires and rights of the individual man pass out of 
 sight. 
 
 It is plain that the theoretical basis of Protestant 
 doctrine was Paulinism interpreted through Augustine. 
 More exactly, the Pauline experience and the Pauline 
 exposition of sin and grace, narrowed to the Augustinian 
 experience and theory of world-government, were treated 
 as the heart of the gospel and the clue to the Scriptures. 
 Everything else was brought to the test of this touch- 
 stone. Reformation theology was largely in substance 
 a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. The 
 methods of the Protestant theologians were those of the 
 Roman Catholic theologians purged of extravagances 
 and ecclesiastical claims. Natural theology is accepted 
 as far as it goes. It is supplemented and corrected by 
 the Bible, which is the full and final revelation of God's 
 plan of salvation. The teachings of the Scriptures were 
 a unit. There was little attention to their historical 
 setting, and more and more they tended to become a law 
 for thinking as well as for life. Speculations and queries 
 tending to bring theological dogmas into question were 
 dismissed as impertinent and profane. 
 
 5. PROTESTANTISM ON ITS INSTITUTIONAL SIDE 
 
 Here Protestantism stood rather between Catholicism 
 and mysticism. It had not the Catholic realistic idea 
 of the church. Christianity was greater than church. 
 The invisible and spiritual " church" was greater than 
 the visible and temporal church. Salvation was found 
 only in the former, but was not dependent truly on the 
 latter. And yet Protestantism was not clear on this 
 
ii4 What Is Christianity? 
 
 point. It shrank from a full abandonment of the Catho- 
 lic view of the efficacy of sacraments. 
 
 Sometimes, especially among Calvinists, there was 
 held a legalistic view of the church. The Bible was the 
 lawbook prescribing its forms and its activities. Others, 
 like some Anglicans and Lutherans, held to a looser 
 view of the church and were more concerned to secure 
 the independence of the state than the freedom of the 
 church. Others, again, like the Anabaptists and the 
 (later) Baptists, held firmly to the freedom of the church 
 and had little to say positively of the state. On the 
 whole, it is to be said that the Protestants found in their 
 Christian faith a purifying and strengthening influence 
 working upon the natural institutions of human life and 
 raising the common to the level of the holy. Thus, 
 instead of the divine origin of the ecclesiastical order, 
 Protestantism tended to exalt the divine sanction of the 
 civil order. In place of the divine right of popes there 
 was the divine right of kings or princes or parliaments. 
 Instead of the supremacy of the priest in the life of the 
 household there was the supremacy of the parent. 
 Protestantism, therefore, on the whole, interpreted 
 Christianity not as institutional but as a supernatural 
 transforming energy working through the natural insti- 
 tutions of men and exalting them to be the natural 
 instruments of God's grace as it works out a heavenly, 
 beneficent purpose. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 RATIONALISM 
 
 The term "rationalism," like so many other hybrids, 
 is commonly used by controversialists in a somewhat 
 derogatory sense. No such implication is intended in 
 the present discussion. To some readers, however, it 
 may occasion surprise to find rationalism treated as one 
 of the typical interpretations of Christianity, for people 
 have been accustomed to hearing it characterized as a foe 
 to Christianity and, indeed, to all religion. For they will 
 say, perhaps, "Does it not seek to discredit the authority 
 of the Bible ? Does it not repudiate the essential Chris- 
 tian doctrines ? Does it not deny the need or the reality 
 of any revelation whatsoever? Does it not, in fact, 
 ignore the supernatural altogether ?" 
 
 That there have been forms of rationalism that, to 
 the minds of their advocates, were synonymous with 
 religious unbelief is not to be disputed. There have 
 been not a few thinkers who, in the name of what they 
 call reason, have undertaken to show the absurdity of 
 religious hopes and beliefs. Such a type of rationalism 
 is pretty sure to misinterpret the religion it seeks to com- 
 bat. But in history there has appeared also another 
 type of rationalism that has sought to be friendly to 
 religion, and particularly to Christianity, a rationalism 
 that professes, not to destroy, but to fulfil faith by freeing 
 it from the influence of ideas that seemed to confuse and 
 corrupt it. There has been and there is a rationalism 
 
 us 
 
n6 What Is Christianity? 
 
 that seeks to minister to faith by insisting that the 
 utterances of religion shall harmonize with the canons 
 of thought. 
 
 It is not easy to define rationalism. It lacks the 
 concreteness of Catholicism and Protestantism. We 
 cannot point to any institution or mode of religious life 
 that professes to embody it. It lacks the distinctness of 
 mysticism, for it does not seek retirement from the 
 world, but professes an intimate relation to everything 
 we do or say. Moreover, all men claim to be rational, 
 though, according to Carlyle, there are comparatively 
 few who can make good the claim! To be rational is 
 to be possessed of reason, that is, the power of orderly, 
 consistent thinking. But in addition to the power of 
 thought there are other functions of nature or forms of 
 experience, such as feeling and volition, which seem 
 very different and almost, if not quite, independent of 
 thought. Unthinking emotions seem to spring up from 
 some unfathomed depth of our nature and to carry us 
 on by the force of their impulse to unthought-of and 
 unintended results. Many people seem to be governed 
 by unreflecting feeling. Others, again, lack both thought 
 and feeling, it would seem. For by the mere force and 
 doggedness of will they do things which set both human 
 feelings and human thinking at naught. A rationalist 
 in general is one who, while recognizing a place for the 
 play of feeling and of will in our nature, seeks to sub- 
 ordinate both to the controlling force of thought. He 
 stands for the rightful supremacy of intellect in men. 
 Emotion and will are wayward and fitful in themselves 
 and they may become wanton and harmful. Mere 
 animalism lies in that direction. The distinctive dig- 
 
Rationalism 117 
 
 nity of man consists in that intelligent discernment or 
 judgment which makes him superior to all the fluctua- 
 tions of feeling and volition and gives his life an order 
 and steadiness like that of the ordered cosmos around 
 him. Thought is legislative in relation to emotion 
 and will. Man understands, man reasons, he is logical. 
 That is what makes him man. A rationalist in reli- 
 gion is one who stands for the absolute supremacy 
 of the logical understanding in the determination of 
 the true and the false in religion as in everything 
 else. 
 
 It is held, then, that a direct contradiction in any- 
 thing is intolerable. The illogical is the false. Men 
 cannot permanently believe anything but the truth, 
 whether it be in matters of fact or of conduct or of faith. 
 Science is concerned with matters of fact, ethics with 
 matters of conduct, and theology with matters of faith 
 or religion. The principle that determines ultimately 
 what is to be held for truth is the same in all three 
 realms. This means, then, that as little as, for example, 
 science can endure a contradiction in fact, so also it is 
 impossible to admit a contradiction between science and 
 ethics or theology. Anything that would destroy the 
 harmony between these is to be rejected. Nothing can 
 be held to be theologically true that is scientifically 
 false. A true religion is one whose doctrines are true 
 and a false religion is one whose doctrines are false. 
 Religion must stand the logical test. 
 
 Now, in assigning this primacy to the logical under- 
 standing we are assigning to it at the same time priority. 
 It is the first in the field. Apart from it nothing what- 
 ever is known. It discovers truth. All supposed truth 
 
n8 What Is Christianity? 
 
 that is communicated to us through extraordinary chan- 
 nels, whether it be by revelation or by mystical or sub- 
 conscious processes, is to be compelled to make good its 
 claim by being built upon the prior truth of the reason. 
 Reason is the true organ of all knowledge in all realms. 
 The true religion is, in the end, the religion of reason. 
 There can be no other. If we hold that Christianity 
 is the one true religion, it is because in it reason comes to 
 her highest utterance or self-expression. This, it seems 
 to me, is the position of a thoroughgoing " Christian 
 rationalism." 
 
 It will be admitted that religious people commonly 
 shrink from applying this rigid test to their own faith, 
 even if they do apply it to the faith of others. There 
 seems to be something dearer to them than logic. They 
 will persist in believing things which seem to others 
 illogical and impossible. In fact, all the historical reli- 
 gions have had traditions of occurrences that seem to 
 defy the power of reason to explain or justify. They 
 have been characterized by explosions of emotion or 
 daring acts of will that offend the sober sense of conven- 
 tional humanity and boldly challenge reason to do its 
 worst — and apparently with success. A stalemate often 
 arises. Reason, it seems, cannot abandon its prerogative, 
 and religion will not. One shrinks from disorder. The 
 other shrinks from the commonplace, the conventional, 
 the uninspiring. It is no uncommon thing to find men 
 even of great intellectual power and willing to accord 
 to reason a directive relation to external things at the 
 same time scorning its claims to dictate the terms of 
 religious belief. The great Tertullian, with all his con- 
 fidence that the soul was naturally Christian, neverthe- 
 
Rationalism 1 19 
 
 less shrank not from flouting reason in the realm of faith: 
 " I believe, because it is absurd." Luther, while granting 
 the value of reason in morals and even while inferring 
 on rational grounds the existence of an eternal divine 
 being, called reason a harlot when it claimed to discern 
 and judge the higher " things of the Spirit." Reason 
 has only a negative place in religion. It comprehends 
 what God is not, but cannot comprehend what God is. 
 Therefore Luther could still believe in the saving efiicacy 
 of sacraments, though reason denied it. Nothing is 
 more common in great popular revivals of religion than 
 to find people under the power of torrents of emotion 
 scouting all appeals to consistent reflection because they 
 feel themselves carried into a realm that reason cannot 
 reach. 
 
 It is when people attempt to explain their religion 
 or to justify it by bringing it into relation to the common 
 conditions of life that they get into trouble. For to 
 explain it is to rationalize it. This is precisely what is 
 attempted in theology. The effort to interpret one's 
 religion is an effort to assign to it an orderly and constant 
 place in the spiritual world to which we belong. The 
 attempt to prove the occurrence of a miracle or explain 
 the significance of a miracle is, in effect, an attempt to 
 show that, so far from its being an inexplicable or wanton 
 occurrence, it conveys an intelligible meaning to us; 
 that is, the belief in it is rational. The same is true of 
 the attempt to establish or expound the truth of a revela- 
 tion. Indeed, all theorizing in support of religion is of 
 the nature of an attempt to naturalize the supernatural 
 in our thinking, to make the sway of reason coextensive 
 with the experience of the highest realities. No wonder, 
 
120 What Is Christianity? 
 
 therefore, that this should result in testing religion by 
 the canons of thought and in tracing its origin, in part 
 at least, to thought. 
 
 It has come about somewhat naturally that in the 
 histories of rationalism, its critical— particularly nega- 
 tively critical — side has received the emphasis. In the 
 progress of Christianity rationalism has attacked the 
 superstitions and immoralities of paganism and prepared 
 the way for the higher faith. It has appeared as a 
 protest against the dim, dreamy, and indescribable self- 
 contemplation of the mystics or as a reaction against 
 the hallucinations, visions, trances, or absurdities of a 
 crude and enthusiastic revivalism. It has attacked the 
 sacerdotalism and sacramentalism that constitute the 
 Catholic system and prepared the way for a Protestant- 
 ism that dissolved that system. It has turned upon the 
 Protestantism that it helped to create and has under- 
 mined its professions of a supernatural authority for its 
 doctrines. Or, again, it has pricked the bubbles of a 
 soaring speculation and exposed its vacuity. One might 
 almost say that the rationalist is he who claims to be the 
 exponent of "common sense," were it not that in seeking 
 so persistently to explain he ends so often by explaining 
 away. Rationalism seems to feed on other systems. 
 
 If we seek to reduce the contentions of rationalism 
 to their ultimate basis we may say that they repose on 
 three pillars: first, the constancy and value of the 
 natural order of the universe; second, the competency 
 of the human mind to discover that order; third, the 
 adequacy of this discovery for our practical needs. The 
 first of these is commonly admitted to be an assumption 
 underlying science and philosophy in their final sweep. 
 
Rationalism 121 
 
 There is a universe; two universes are an impossibility. 
 This universe embraces all objects of possible knowledge, 
 whether they be presented to us by external perception 
 or by introspection. It is a universe in which change is 
 observed, but the changes are continuous and regular. 
 It is a universe of a developing order. If we distinguish 
 the spiritual order from the material order, nevertheless, 
 in the end, both are reducible to one, which we may call 
 the order of nature. But when it comes to the question 
 of the method of procedure in discovering that order, the 
 question remains open whether we shall proceed from a 
 knowledge of the spiritual to the material, or the reverse. 
 The second assumption flows from the first, since an 
 order of nature undiscoverable by us has no meaning for 
 us. If the world has a meaning for us we must be com- 
 petent to discover it. The mind knows only that which 
 it discovers. The third assumption is the logical infer- 
 ence from the other two. We live in the universe and 
 our practice must accord with its character if life is not 
 to be futile. Rationalism, therefore, reposes on a con- 
 fidence in the capacity of the human mind, in the exer- 
 cise of its native powers of knowledge, to supply safe 
 and adequate direction to life. Religious rationalism, 
 as a theory, is that interpretation of the material and 
 spiritual worlds which regards them as expressing in the 
 inner soul or consciousness of man the realities of the 
 religious life; that is to say, the universe discloses to 
 man the essential relations in which he stands to the 
 Supreme Being — whatever these words may mean. 
 Christian rationalism regards this rational interpretation 
 of the universe as the same in content with the essential 
 doctrines of Christianity. 
 
122 What Is Christianity? 
 
 I. RATIONALISM IN HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 In tracing the growth of the historical forms of the 
 Christian faith one cannot avoid the recognition of the 
 fact that the rationalistic attitude has always been a 
 powerful factor. Even if many of the historic expres- 
 sions of the faith have been seemingly without any marks 
 of regard for the common reason of men, in the end 
 they have always been obliged to give an account of 
 themselves at its bar. For example, Christians have 
 always believed that they were in possession of a revela- 
 tion from God, and in times of spontaneous utterance 
 of the deepest feelings that men can experience multi- 
 tudes will claim that they have received a personal revela- 
 tion. It was so in the first century of our era. But at 
 such times there has always been some Paul to come 
 forward bringing along with his acknowledgment that 
 the revelation was real the demand that it be expressed 
 in an orderly manner: "When ye come together, each 
 one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation, 
 hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things 
 
 be done unto edifying If there be no interpreter, 
 
 let him keep silence in the church The spirits 
 
 of the prophets are subject to the prophets; for God is 
 not a God of confusion." "In the church I had rather 
 speak five words with my understanding than ten thou- 
 sand words in a tongue." Christians usually have felt 
 bound in the end to justify their belief in a revelation 
 by showing that it is in keeping with the nature of all 
 knowledge and to that extent, at least, is rational. 
 Christians have always believed also in miracles, but 
 they have felt compelled to justify the belief in the reality 
 of miracles by showing that there is credible testimony 
 
Rationalism 1 23 
 
 to their occurrence and that they meet a true need. 
 This is just a way of saying that the belief is in accord 
 with rational knowledge. To many this seems equiva- 
 lent to the substitution of reason for revelation and 
 miracle, or else an acknowledgment that the true revela- 
 tion and the true miracle is reason. Let us glance 
 rapidly down through the ages in which our present 
 faith was in the making and see if it be so. 
 
 Judaism supplied the soil for the original planting of 
 the Christian gospel. How variegated were the forms 
 of Jewish religious life — the prophetic fire, the priestly 
 love for the form of worship, the seer's forecast of terrible 
 judgments! But the rhapsody of the prophet, the ritual 
 of the priest, and the apocalypses of the seer were toned 
 down by the sober sense of the sage. The Wisdom books 
 are monumental of the tardy recognition of the truth 
 that men can arrive at the happiness for which they seek 
 in no other way than by an intelligent acquaintance with 
 the laws of the orderly life and a hearty obedience to 
 them. To be sure, with the Jews all the laws of life were 
 regarded as the commandments of their God, and they 
 never descended to mere moralism. At times their reli- 
 gious rationalism takes on a tone of sublime contempla- 
 tion, as when the sage turns his gaze upon the wonders 
 of the heavens or, again, upon the equal wonders of the 
 human heart: "The heavens declare the glory of God, 
 and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto 
 day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth 
 knowledge The law of the Lord is perfect, restor- 
 ing the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making 
 wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, 
 rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is 
 
124 What Is Christianity? 
 
 pure, enlightening the eyes." To such men as this 
 psalmist the world without and the world within answer 
 to each other and together they utter the will of their 
 God. Sometimes, as in portions of the Proverbs, this 
 religious rationalism assumes a lower tone. The wise 
 man may be wise only in the sense of having a shrewd 
 appreciation of the laws of the orderly life because he 
 can make them serve his self-interest. Does this mark 
 an inherent defect in rationalism — a tendency to a 
 narrow moralism ? 
 
 The traces of rationalism in the New Testament are 
 few and of minor importance. The appeal to the natural 
 human judgment is not wanting. James extols the 
 worth of genuine morality and Paul has a touch of natural 
 theology: "That which is known of God is manifest in 
 men; for God manifested it unto them. For the invis- 
 ible things of him from the creation of the world are 
 clearly seen, being perceived through the things that 
 are made." But the overpowering impression of the 
 personality of Jesus, the tragedy of his death, the triumph 
 of his resurrection, and the new consciousness of power 
 and of enlightenment in the hearts of his followers over- 
 shadowed all else. They were too much occupied with 
 the impending cataclysm in human affairs and the uni- 
 verse to give themselves to the problems of the systematic 
 thinker. 
 
 It was not long, however, before the attempt was 
 made to construe in a rationalistic manner the Christian 
 revelation itself and the miracles that accompanied it. 
 As the gospel spread among the Graeco-Roman peoples, 
 it attracted to it men of sobriety and learning, who hailed 
 the Christian message with joy because it seemed to them 
 
Rationalism 125 
 
 to bring back to life and vigor again those fundamental 
 principles of morality that had been obscured or lost 
 amid the social confusion of those times. The old philos- 
 ophies had failed to give men the saving truth. Here 
 was a new philosophy which was also the most ancient, 
 for the Scriptures that contained it came from the earliest 
 ages, by which confidence in the eternal distinction of 
 right from wrong and in the eternal consequences of 
 obedience and disobedience might be restored. They 
 accepted Christianity as the revelation of the true 
 morality. It was the affirmation of the true morality 
 because it was the announcement of the knowledge of the 
 true God by him who came from God. Holding to the 
 philosophic principle of the Logos (the principle of 
 reason immanent in God and active in man and the 
 world), they said that the teaching of Jesus was one in 
 substance and purport with the expression of the Logos. 
 In truth, he it is who was originally the Logos of God, 
 who became personal before the creation, who himself 
 framed the world and the rational beings in it, and who 
 at length "took shape, became a man, and was called 
 Jesus Christ." The prophecies that foretold his coming 
 and his acts and the miracles which he and his followers 
 performed attest the truth of his teachings. Chris- 
 tianity, then, is essentially the true teaching, the divine 
 doctrine, the inculcation of " the excellences which reside 
 in him [God], temperance, and justice, and philanthropy, 
 and as many virtues as are peculiar to a God who is 
 called by no proper name" — in a word, moralism. By 
 our concrete rationality we are able to receive a knowl- 
 edge of his will: "In order that we may follow those 
 things that please him, choosing them by means of the 
 
126 What Is Christianity? 
 
 rational faculties he has himself endowed us with, he 
 both persuades us and leads us to faith." And, accord- 
 ingly, "each man goes to everlasting punishment or 
 salvation according to the value of his actions." 
 
 These apologists were really the founders of formal 
 Christian theology. They tried to show that Christian 
 faith was the belief and practice of those eternal prin- 
 ciples of conduct which are identical in character and 
 aim with that rational nature which is found in man 
 and the universe. It may be fairly said, therefore, that 
 the formal traditional theology began with a type of 
 rationalism. 
 
 This early rationalism was soon overshadowed by 
 the mystical and metaphysical interpretation of the 
 ancient Catholic theologians — not without a struggle, 
 however. For the growing orthodoxy found itself con- 
 fronted by powerful opponents, conspicuous among 
 whom were Arius and Pelagius. It is not possible here 
 to exhibit the debate or expound the positions at length. 
 Arianism, in short, stood for a conservative Logos doc- 
 trine. Its logic demanded the eternal validity of the 
 distinction between the one true and only God and all 
 else, including the Logos, the only begotten Son. If the 
 Son was begotten, he had a beginning and was a creation 
 of God. In the incarnate Christ the Logos takes the 
 place of the rational human spirit. He mediated the 
 revelation of God to men. Arian rationalism attempted 
 to maintain a logical view of the relation of monotheism 
 to belief in the revelation given to men in Christ. 
 
 Pelagianism was a protest against the Augustinian 
 view of sin and grace which was adopted in part by 
 Catholicism. It opposed the doctrine of original sin, 
 
Rationalism 127 
 
 bondage of the will, universal human depravity, and 
 absolute dependence on grace ministered in the sacra- 
 ments. God is good and so also is man fundamentally. 
 Man is free by nature and remains so. If he sins, it is 
 always by choice and not by necessity. As he is capable 
 of evil, so is he also capable of good. As he chooses evil 
 by free choice, so also he chooses good freely. God's 
 grace assists and does not compel. The revelation of 
 Christ enlightens our minds as truth and aids our will 
 by love. Life is a discipline and its outcome is self- 
 determined and deserved. As Arianism attempted a 
 rational view of the relation of God to men with respect 
 to positive religion, Pelagianism attempted a rational 
 view of the relation of God to men with respect to positive 
 righteousness or goodness. 
 
 The darkness that fell upon Europe in the ages 
 between the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise 
 of the mediaeval empire began to pass away with the 
 institution of the schools of Charlemagne and the monks 
 and the awakening of interest in the ancient life of the 
 East through the Crusades. The founding of the great 
 European universities dates back to this time. The 
 rescue of the precious documents of ancient Greek and 
 Christian lore from the hand of the marauding Turk and 
 the translation of them into the vernacular gave to the 
 ecclesiastical scholars of the West a new vision. They 
 became acquainted with the philosophy of Aristotle. 
 The scientific and philosophic interest was aroused. 
 Heretofore the saving dogmas of the Christian faith had 
 been received with the same docile spirit with which 
 men had received the ritual of the church — on authority. 
 Why not strengthen the hold of the dogmas on men's 
 
128 What Is Christianity? 
 
 minds by giving them the support of reason ? Why not 
 prove that what is true by the authority of the church 
 is also true by the authority of reason ? If the church 
 and reason speak with one voice, who can dispute their 
 dogmas ? The circumstances of the time threw out the 
 challenge and there was at least a show of accepting it. 
 Scholasticism, the philosophy of the church schools, was 
 an attempt to rationalize the traditional faith by the 
 aid of Greek philosophy. 
 
 In a preceding chapter reference was made to a 
 powerful religious movement of the Middle Ages that 
 flourished outside the church and threatened its power. 
 Here is a parallel movement that began mainly under 
 ecclesiastical control. But who could be sure that it 
 would remain there? What if human reason and a 
 supposed divine authority could not be made to concur ? 
 What if they should turn out to be two steeds that tend 
 to run apart? Then the rider must make his choice. 
 So it was with the scholastic in the end. The enterprise 
 was undertaken with boldness and acclaim. The famous 
 Anselm offered his demonstration of the necessary 
 existence of God and proceeded to justify also the dogma 
 of the incarnation, the central dogma of Catholicism, 
 on the ground of rational necessity. Others followed in 
 his footsteps until the great Thomas Aquinas outlined 
 a whole system of dogmas rationally grounded. But 
 doubt was also stimulated. The keen wit of Abelard 
 exhibited in his Sic et Non ("Yes and No") the hopeless 
 contradictions in the Fathers to whose authority the 
 church had deferred. John Duns Scotus showed that 
 reason could not be made to give its free assent to the 
 dogmas. Gradually the failure became patent. The 
 
Rationalism 1 29 
 
 church had to place its dogmas on a height inaccessible 
 to reason in order to save them. The situation in the 
 Catholic church is virtually the same at this present time. 
 Modernism has been trying in vain to restore to human 
 thinking its right, but without success. Roman Catholic 
 Christianity is the Christianity of authoritative dogmas 
 that defy reason. Rationalism can only be sporadic in 
 Catholicism. 
 
 In Protestantism conditions are quite different. For 
 the Reformation owed its birth, in part, to the new learn- 
 ing. It was unable to live without a recognition of the 
 inexpugnable rights of human reason. Its friends were 
 able to defend it successfully by affirming the right of 
 the individual intelligence to interpret the will of God 
 for itself and by virtue of its inherent worth. The right 
 to interpret the will of God embraced the right to deter- 
 mine what is the will of God. The principle of rational 
 criticism in its whole range was thereby secured. No 
 matter if the Reformation theologians sought to limit 
 the trustworthiness of reason in the religious realm by 
 means of the doctrine of original sin, they had spoken 
 the word that could not be withdrawn. The Reforma- 
 tion was a struggle for intellectual freedom as well as 
 for moral purity and religious assurance. Personal faith 
 and personal intelligence were wedded in the soul of the 
 Protestant and could never be divorced without damage 
 to one or both of them. 
 
 On its intellectual side the Reformation was more 
 than a declaration of the right to freedom. It also issued 
 a challenge to the human mind to carry its right into 
 execution. The whole world of knowledge was thrown 
 open for exploration. A mighty stimulus was given to 
 
130 What Is Christianity? 
 
 investigation in all directions. Many there were who 
 gladly accepted the challenge. All truth was to be 
 man's. But there was little preparation or mental 
 equipment for the great task. It was one thing to 
 declare that we can know and quite another thing to 
 explain the steps by which we get possession of the facts 
 of the universe or to vindicate the trustworthiness of 
 the knowing process by exhibiting its constituent factors. 
 As soon as the vastness of the regions waiting to be 
 explored began to dawn on men's minds it was inevitable 
 that a period of uncertainty and skepticism should 
 supervene upon the glorious feeling of exaltation and 
 relief that came with the Reformation. 
 
 The coming of a period of doubt was hastened and its 
 character aggravated by the hastiness of the Protestant 
 theologians in laying down statements of the essential 
 doctrines of the Christian faith. Driven by the exi- 
 gencies of ecclesiastical and political strife, they took 
 a short cut to a settlement of questions of religious con- 
 troversy. Answers to the profoundest questions that 
 the human soul can ask were prescribed and enforced. 
 Their doctrines were not meant to be provisional hypoth- 
 eses or temporary aids to conduct, but authoritative 
 declarations of divine truth. To the question, How 
 were these truths communicated to man ? the answer 
 was, By revelation. To the question, Where is this 
 revelation to be found ? the answer was, In the Bible. 
 And to the question, How do we know that the professed 
 revelation is real ? the answer of the ancient apologists 
 was given, By the evidence of miracles, including proph- 
 ecy. The last answer directed attention to a rational 
 test, namely, the discovery, sifting, and weighing of 
 
Rationalism 131 
 
 evidence, and it prepared the way for the undermining 
 of the whole structure. 
 
 It was not possible for Protestants to follow the 
 Catholic example by falling back on institutional author- 
 ity. That door they had closed to themselves. The 
 problem of knowledge, when once accepted, had to be 
 worked out. The repeated efforts to define and redefine 
 their doctrines so as to remove stumblingblocks to 
 reason prove that the insistence of the demands of reason 
 was felt. The failure of Protestant persecution to sup- 
 press doubt showed that there was no escaping the issues. 
 Reason must be satisfied if faith is to live and triumph. 
 This is a categorical imperative of the Protestant reli- 
 gious mind. Consequently we find, as we might have 
 expected to find, in Protestant history the continual 
 reappearing of rationalistic movements that sought, 
 when faith and reason could not be made to speak in 
 unison or in harmony, to subordinate faith to reason 
 and to limit religion to the domain prescribed for her 
 by the logical understanding. It is not possible to 
 sketch in the present connection the various types of 
 rationalism that have appeared in the history of Prot- 
 estantism. Our references will be confined to those 
 forms of rationalism that serve best to exhibit its general 
 character. 
 
 2. THE PRINCIPLES AND DOGMAS OF RATIONALISM 
 
 The vast range of the rationalistic movement and 
 the great number of the works of its noted representatives 
 have given rationalism an exceedingly respectable place 
 in the constitution of the modern Protestant religious 
 mind. We shall now attempt to present an analysis 
 
132 What Is Christianity? 
 
 and brief exposition of its fundamental views by review- 
 ing the positions of some of its representative thinkers. 
 We shall consider first the Socinians. Laelius and 
 Faustus Socinus, uncle and nephew, came directly under 
 the influence of Calvin, the first of the two being an 
 intimate friend of the great theologian. Intellectually 
 they were of the same type as he, as keen and relentless 
 as he in their logic. They followed him in his idea of a 
 revelation of God given to the reason of man through 
 nature and also in his rational demonstration of the 
 authority of Scripture, but significantly passed by that 
 "secret testimony of the Spirit" to which he finally 
 appealed. Like him, they viewed the Scriptures as a 
 divinely given lawbook, but, unlike him, they distin- 
 guished thoroughly the New Testament from the Old 
 Testament as the authority for Christian doctrine and, 
 unlike him again, they found no place in the Scriptures 
 for the great pillars of orthodox theology, the Trinity, 
 the absolute deity of Christ, original sin, bondage of the 
 will, foreordination, or atonement by penal substitution. 
 To them the Christian religion was "the way of attain- 
 ing to eternal life," that is, "the method of serving God 
 which he has himself delivered through Jesus Christ." 
 In short, Christianity was the revelation of the supreme 
 law of life by obeying which men should be saved, a 
 system of morality. The significant thing in Socinian- 
 ism was not, however, the specific doctrines they held, 
 but the ultimate basis for believing these doctrines. 
 This, in short, they called "right reason." They said, 
 "Without it we could neither perceive with certainty the 
 authority of the sacred writings, understand their con- 
 tents, discriminate one thing from another, nor apply 
 
Rationalism 133 
 
 them to any practical purpose." Nothing was to be 
 received " which is repugnant to the written word of 
 God, or to sound reason." In the end, the Scriptures are 
 to be believed because of their rationality. It mattered 
 little, then, what particular doctrines they accepted or 
 rejected, and it mattered little that their exegesis was 
 often more accurate than the orthodox exegesis or that 
 sometimes it was warped by their preferences, so long 
 as the determinative factor in all religion was just this: 
 that which it is rational to believe. Christianity was 
 true because it was rational. Its teachings commended 
 themselves to the human judgment and produced the 
 " proper effects," that is, "a suitable and exemplary 
 conduct." Christianity was practically a system of 
 morality based on right reason. 
 
 The Socinians might be put down by force, but the 
 leaven was working. When Hugo Grotius, the great 
 Dutch jurist, attempted to vindicate the Protestant 
 view of the atonement against them, he failed to hold to 
 the strict orthodox teaching and himself fell back on a 
 system of natural human law found in the laws of nations; 
 he made that the basis of a theory of atonement, which 
 he represented as a manifestation of rectoral or govern- 
 mental justice, that is, such a kind of justice as appeals 
 to the moral reason of humanity. Almost a generation 
 before him, James Arminius, the famous theologian of 
 Amsterdam, made his plea for a milder view of predes- 
 tination in order to secure recognition of the worth of 
 the human will and its freedom. The spirit was infec- 
 tious. Other Dutch thinkers tried to mediate between 
 opposing schools of theology by seeking to formulate 
 the views held by Christians in common as the essential 
 
134 What Is Christianity? 
 
 Christian doctrines, all else being secondary. But how 
 was this to be settled unless by the judgment of man ? 
 And this amounted to only an inkling of what was com- 
 ing. Orthodoxy soon found itself fighting for its life, 
 not against protests here or there, but against a great 
 body of thought that seemed, at least, to be scientifically 
 and philosophically grounded. 
 
 There were two great parallel movements of thought 
 that held the attention of Europe for the greater part 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The one 
 was inaugurated in England by Bacon and Locke and 
 culminated in the philosophic skepticism of Hume on 
 the one hand and the philosophic faith of Butler on the 
 other hand. The other movement was inaugurated on 
 the Continent by Descartes and, passing through the 
 crucible of Kant's Critique, issued in the Hegelian logic. 
 The one was animated by the spirit of critical inquiry, 
 the other by the spirit of speculation. Both were 
 grounded in the Protestant confidence in the power of 
 the human mind to know reality. 
 
 Bacon and Locke were most deeply concerned with 
 moral and religious aims, and attempted the discovery 
 of the relations between God, man, and nature, in order 
 to the fulfilment of the duties of life. With this end in 
 view both sought to formulate a method of knowledge 
 — the one by allowing external nature to speak to the 
 human mind through her facts independently of all 
 philosophical presuppositions or personal preferences, 
 the other by a similar observation of the facts of inner 
 experience. Both inaugurated movements that have 
 continued to the present, and both arrived at a natural 
 theology and sought to retain their traditional respect 
 
Rationalism 135 
 
 for revealed Christianity by maintaining a distinction 
 between natural theology and supernatural theology, 
 or revelation. But the followers of both carried their 
 principles to conclusions that would have alarmed them. 
 Men ever seek a unitary foundation for their faith and 
 choose that which impresses them the most. 
 
 The great achievements of Sir Isaac Newton in his 
 scientific study of the laws of nature gave an immense 
 impetus to the desire to wrest from the objective uni- 
 verse a disclosure of the character of that Being from 
 whose hand she came and of the relation in which he has 
 willed that man should stand to himself. Such a doc- 
 trine would constitute a religion trustworthy, dignified, 
 and permanent, in contrast with the vagaries, super- 
 stitions, and absurdities so characteristic of traditional 
 faiths. Such a religion could not be dependent on those 
 external and extraordinary occurrences which men call 
 miracles or special revelations, or, if men still held to 
 such special revelations, these must be brought into 
 conformity with nature's universal " revelation. " This 
 religion of nature comes to noble utterance in Addison's 
 great hymn, the first and last stanzas of which are here 
 
 quoted : 
 
 The spacious firmament on high 
 With all the blue ethereal sky 
 And spangled heavens, a shining frame, 
 Their great Original proclaim. 
 
 In reason's ear they all rejoice 
 And utter forth a glorious voice, 
 Forever singing, as they shine, 
 "The hand that made us is divine." 
 
 Locke made out by his method of psychical intro- 
 spection that the whole body of our knowledge arises 
 
136 What Is Christianity? 
 
 from sensation and reflection and by the combinations 
 we make of the ideas received in this way, and that it is 
 not in any degree dependent on the falsely imagined 
 " innate ideas " that are not subject to test or proof. The 
 result is on the one hand the dependence of the mind 
 for its ideas of God upon the impressions which the 
 external world makes on our senses, and on the other 
 hand a logical repudiation of miracles and reputed special 
 revelations. The canons of the rational intelligence 
 again become the touchstone of all professed revelations. 
 Like Bacon, he sought to guard his followers against a 
 rejection of Christianity by distinguishing between 
 reason and faith. The former gives rational, funda- 
 mental truths; the latter supplies super-rational truths 
 to be received by faith. He regarded Christianity as 
 embracing truths of the latter kind and wrote a work 
 entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered 
 in the Scriptures; but his " Christianity" was an original, 
 simple, rational faith whose revelations stood the test 
 of reason. I quote his own words setting forth his views 
 of the relation of this revelation to reason: 
 
 Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of 
 light and Fountain of all knowledge communicates to all mankind 
 that portion of truth which he has laid within reach of their 
 natural faculties; revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new 
 set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason 
 vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that 
 they come from God. 
 
 The principles of Bacon and Locke carried the major- 
 ity of religious thinkers along with them. But a cleavage 
 soon appeared. On the one side were those who sought 
 to carry these principles to the logical conclusion by a 
 rejection of all special revelation, and on the other side 
 
Rationalism 137 
 
 were those whose affection for the traditional faith led 
 them to try to maintain, with Bacon and Locke, a faith 
 in special revelation as seen in certain Christian doctrines. 
 Both believed in the primacy of natural theology or 
 rational religion, and both, for a time at least, claimed 
 to be Christian; but they differed as to the quantum 
 of doctrine that is to be regarded as fundamentally 
 Christian. The one side naturally attacked the miracles 
 and the other side defended them as the stronghold of 
 orthodoxy. The story of the progress of the criticism 
 of the Christian Scripture need not delay us here. The 
 stress of controversy drove the first class (who came to 
 be known as Deists) toward a rejection of all belief in a 
 religion of fellowship with God, while it drove the others 
 to acknowledge, as Butler did, that Christianity is "a 
 republication of the religion of nature," necessitated 
 through the darkness caused by sin, plus certain other 
 doctrines which were necessary in order to meet the 
 needs of sinners. Both were rationalists at heart. 
 
 The parallel movement on the Continent began with 
 Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum. Proceeding by eliminating, 
 first of all, everything that could be doubted, he found 
 at last a limit to the possibility of doubt in the very laws 
 of thought. Then he proceeded to find in thought the 
 determination of the laws of real existence. That which 
 is necessary to thought necessarily is. Arguing from 
 the necessary connection between cause and effect, he 
 posited God as the ultimate and only real cause or sub- 
 stance. From this substance flow the secondary sub- 
 stances of mind and body or thought and matter, whose 
 phenomena correspond to each other. This makes our 
 knowledge real Spinoza carried Descartes' position 
 
138 What Is Christianity? 
 
 farther and by the same necessity of thought predicated 
 the one only, infinite, self-existent substance, which is 
 God. By immanent necessity it expresses itself in two 
 secondary substances, thought and extension, which are 
 only two out of the infinite number of the divine attri- 
 butes. Finite things are only temporary modes of the 
 divine self-expression, and by the same necessity by 
 which they flow from God they return to God again. 
 The whole world becomes the expression of the divine 
 perfection or goodness. When Hegel at a much later 
 date sought to unfold a philosophy of religion, of his- 
 tory, and of all existence by the immanent necessity of 
 thought, he was repeating Spinoza's achievement, though 
 in a different way. He was developing the premises of 
 rationalism to their inevitable conclusion. The whole 
 of religion is dominated by the authority of the Idea. 
 The Christian verities are transmuted into a system of 
 logical concepts evolved by the inner necessity of 
 thought. 
 
 Between these two great thinkers there occurred a 
 large number of less pretentious efforts to reduce the 
 truths of the Christian religion to the terms of clear 
 thinking. It was hoped to vindicate belief in the chief 
 Christian doctrines by expounding them in the terms 
 of the popular philosophy. It was the age of the En- 
 lightenment. Clearness is the test and certificate of 
 truth. Obscurity, confusion, is falsehood or error. All 
 in Christianity that did not correspond with the current 
 doctrine of the world was explained away or regarded 
 as not essentially Christian. The Scriptures were sub- 
 jected to a criticism like that which was in vogue in 
 England, Revelation was identical in its essence with the 
 
Rationalism 139 
 
 impartation of true knowledge. The language of Lessing 
 in his Education of the Human Race is pertinent here: 
 
 That which is education as respects the individual is revela- 
 tion as respects the race. Education is revelation imparted to 
 the individual and revelation is education which has been and is 
 still being imparted to the human race. Education gives the man 
 nothing which he could not also have of himself; only it gives more 
 quickly and more easily that which he could have of himself. 
 Similarly, revelation gives the human race nothing whereunto 
 human reason, if left to itself, could not also attain, but gave and 
 gives to it the most important of these things, only earlier. 
 
 The rationalism of the Continent agreed with the 
 rationalism of England in reducing the essential doctrines 
 of Christianity to the outlines of a " natural religion" or 
 "rational theology." As the Deists of England made 
 Christianity equivalent to a belief in the existence of a 
 supreme rational Being whose will man must obey, the 
 terms of a moral law in accord with " nature," with its 
 rewards and punishments, and the certainty of a future 
 life, so Kant enunciated for Continental rationalism the 
 doctrines of essential religion (Christianity) to which all 
 other doctrines of religion are reducible. They are the 
 three great postulates of the practical reason: God, 
 freedom, and immortality. 
 
 Briefly, then, the position of modern Christian 
 rationalism may be stated as follows: It is built upon 
 the foundations of the orthodox Protestant apologetics. 
 Christianity is to be believed because it is true. Its 
 truth is its doctrines. Doctrines are products of thought. 
 All true thinking corresponds with the laws of the uni- 
 verse, which have the same source. Those doctrines of 
 religion are alone true that are consistent with the truths 
 of reason or right thinking. The illogical is the false. 
 
140 What Is Christianity? 
 
 True Christianity, then, is identical with a rational faith. 
 All those features of traditional Christianity which con- 
 flict with nature's laws are only adventitious and are 
 to be set aside as nonessential. All the duties which a 
 true Christianity enjoins are such duties as arise from a 
 rational interpretation of man's relation to the laws of 
 nature which are the laws of God — Christianity is 
 natural morality. The great edifice of traditional dog- 
 mas, sacraments, and institutions crumbles, and instead 
 we have the simple faith that holds the existence of an 
 infinite God, the eternal validity of the moral law, reward 
 and punishment for obedience, and a life beyond the 
 grave where these are given. 
 
 3. A BRIEF ESTIMATE OF CHRISTIAN RATIONALISM 
 
 We shall first estimate it in relation to the rival inter- 
 pretations of Christianity already expounded. 
 
 1. As against Apocalypticism: While Apocalyp- 
 ticism is highly emotional and appeals strongly to the 
 imagination of the common man with its preference for 
 the picturesque and the tragical, rationalism is reflective, 
 eschews the extraordinary and the inexplicable, and tends 
 to reduce everything to the level of the common and the 
 orderly. Apocalypticism makes much of inspiration and 
 revelation, while rationalism holds to the superior value 
 of the normal action of intelligence and "reason." 
 Apocalypticism appeals to the supernatural as the extra- 
 and even the contra-natural; rationalism regards the 
 natural as the fundamental and the true. Apocalyp- 
 ticism is pessimistic as to the physical universe and the 
 ordinary course of human affairs, but rationalism is 
 optimistic in regard to nature and exalts the value of 
 
Rationalism 141 
 
 natural morality as against a derogatory view of the 
 natural man. Apocalypticism represents the faith of 
 the downtrodden, the suffering, the baffled and beaten 
 ones of our world whose only hope for victory over 
 opposing powers lies in the intervention of almighty 
 God; it is an application of this hope to the Christian 
 faith in Jesus ; but rationalism is the faith of those who 
 have found the world a comfortable place to live in. 
 
 2. As against Catholicism: While Catholicism is 
 institutional, proclaims a universal external order, and 
 rests its faith on official authority, rationalism is indi- 
 vidualistic, tends to liberate men from institutional 
 control, and is wanting in the power to create a firm 
 bond of community life. While Catholicism, as re- 
 spects its inner life, is emotional, loves the sensuous, 
 the mysterious, and the symbolical, but is intellec- 
 tually indifferent, rationalism is intellectual, plain, and 
 matter-of-fact, and loves knowledge for its own sake. 
 While the morality of Catholicism is ascetical, the moral- 
 ity of rationalism consists in loyalty to the dictates of 
 the common conscience — the morality of "common 
 sense." In short, while Catholic Christianity is a reli- 
 gion of devotion to visions of another world beyond the 
 present, rationalistic Christianity is devoted to the task 
 of making the present world better. 
 
 3. As against mysticism: While both mysticism and 
 rationalism seek for the simple essence of the Christian 
 faith and endeavor to eliminate all adventitious forms 
 or foreign accretions from whatever source, they are to 
 be contrasted in that mysticism seeks its end in the realm 
 of feeling, but rationalism in the realm of thought. 
 Mysticism is receptive, almost passive, finds its good 
 
142 What Is Christianity? 
 
 by the way of contemplation, and discovers the One and 
 All by abandonment of the many; rationalism is intel- 
 lectually active, inquisitive, analytical in temper, and 
 finds the solution of its problems in a scientific study of 
 the many. Mysticism is an aristocratic faith, while 
 rationalism is, professedly at least, democratic. Mys- 
 ticism tends toward a pessimistic view of the prospects 
 of the human multitudes, rationalism toward an opti- 
 mistic view. 
 
 4. As against Protestantism: Rationalism is Prot- 
 estantism disrobed of its confidence in the accuracy of 
 those marvelous traditions in which it trusted to have 
 found its life. It is Protestantism shorn of its elaborate 
 scheme of doctrines in exposition of a theory of divine 
 government. It is Protestant intelligence, self-conscious, 
 clear, and acute, disconnected with the yearning of 
 Protestantism for a deeper sense of what it loved to call 
 the grace of God and its sense of the value of a human 
 soul. It is Protestant doctrinalism without the Prot- 
 estant devout feeling of being the subject of a divine 
 revelation. At the same time rationalism is Protestant- 
 ism become intensely conscientious as respects its intel- 
 lectual processes, made more sympathetic toward all 
 seekers of truth, and made more fully aware that the 
 world in which it lives here and now is a well-ordered 
 and beneficent world. It is Protestantism freed from 
 that dread of science which was the baneful inheritance 
 received from Catholicism. 
 
 In the next place, rationalism is to be judged in its 
 own right apart from these other types of professed 
 Christianity. A few suggestions only can be offered in 
 this article. Rationalism has the merit of insisting that 
 
Rationalism 143 
 
 the universe is a unit — this world and the next, earth and 
 heaven, are inseparable and are governed by the same 
 laws. The truly moral life is truly natural to man, and 
 the most truly natural is the only supernatural. The 
 whole universe is as sacred as any part of it. Religion 
 and morality are ultimately one. The universe is a 
 field of moral discipline, and science is a product of the 
 moral imperative. If Christianity is true, it must be 
 true to the universe. 
 
 But rationalism as a type of Christian theory is 
 dependent on those historical forms of Christianity 
 which it criticizes. It is critical rather than creative. 
 It bases its interpretation of Christianity on assumptions 
 derived from speculation and not from the Christian 
 traditions. Hence these traditions are a problem rather 
 than a source of comfort. Rationalism is accurate in 
 aim, but is cold and forbidding to the tempted and tried. 
 It may be free from hallucinations, but it lacks inspira- 
 tion. It may be free from fanaticism, but it is lacking 
 in the spirit of religious enterprise. While it seeks to 
 satisfy the demands of intelligence it cannot arouse deep 
 emotion or enthusiasm in the masses. It is ultimately 
 aristocratic. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 EVANGELICISM OR MODERNIZED PROTESTANT 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The term " evangelicism " is here used to designate 
 the character of a development of the Christian religion 
 which is distinctly modern but which has roots reaching 
 far back into the past. It is not meant thereby that a 
 new religious denomination has arisen or that even a 
 new school of thought deserves a name for itself. We 
 do not seem to be suffering particularly from a dearth of 
 organizations or new theories. But recent times have 
 witnessed the emergence of a new type of Christian life 
 and thought which seems to be so charged with a message 
 of good to the world that a term which carries with it the 
 idea of loyalty to such a message may be fitly applied 
 to it. The aim of the present article is to trace the influ- 
 ences formative of it and to indicate its main features. 
 
 I. SOME CONSTRUCTIVE RELIGIOUS FORCES IN MODERN 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The period of the ecclesiastico-political revolution we 
 call the Protestant Reformation virtually came to a close 
 with the execution of King Charles the First of England 
 and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia about two 
 hundred and seventy years ago. With the cessation 
 of the "wars of religion" and the reaction against 
 intolerance and violence, there ensued a period of indiffer- 
 ence and general skepticism lasting about a century 
 
 144 
 
Evangelicism 145 
 
 more. Notwithstanding the fact that there were fertile 
 oases here and there amid the general dearth, religious 
 faith suffered from widespread sterility. Then, suddenly 
 and unexpectedly, there came a change. The principal 
 factors contributing to it are worthy of special mention. 
 First in the order of merit is the eighteenth-century 
 religious revival in America and Britain. In those try- 
 ing days, when men were shaking themselves clear of 
 the external forms of ritual or order or doctrine which 
 earlier ages had supposed to be necessary to salvation, 
 there were many faithful men who labored in quiet and 
 obscurity to keep the smoldering fire of faith from going 
 out. To them must be traced the revival of the con- 
 sciousness of an indisputable personal participation in 
 the higher moral and religious life apart from outward 
 forms, but it was not until men like Jonathan Edwards, 
 George Whitefield, and John Wesley brought to it the 
 needed zeal, intelligence, and skill united that it burst 
 into a fiery flame. There came an outbreak of religious 
 feeling that defied the intellectual canons of rationalism 
 and of orthodoxy alike and swept on through the whole 
 Anglo-Saxon world with irresistible force. As all great 
 revivals, it gained its first impetus by winning the hearts 
 of the working people, the poor, the neglected, and the 
 defeated, but, despite scoffing and ridicule, it gradually 
 conquered the respect of the prosperous and intelligent. 
 Instead of wasting away in emotionalism, the revival, 
 under the statesmanlike leadership of Wesley and his 
 faithful coadjutors in various communions, kept adding 
 to its initial impulse and became a permanent force of 
 great importance in modern Protestantism. Since those 
 earlier days of revivalism there have been considerable 
 
146 What Is Christianity? 
 
 intervals of dearth, and sometimes it has degenerated 
 into selfish professionalism or hypocritical sentimental- 
 ism, but the yearning for the conversion of men from 
 their sins and the effort to better their whole condition 
 by the ministries of religion continue unabated. 
 
 The revival was characterized by the union of deep 
 feeling with moral resolution. There was a return of 
 Puritanism on its moral side. The danger of fanaticism 
 was balanced by the insistence on inner and outer purity 
 of life. For the " judicial righteousness" of earlier 
 Calvinism was substituted the actual righteousness of 
 positive personal goodness. If the preachers in their 
 denunciation of sins condemned sometimes the innocent 
 with the guilty, they succeeded at least in rousing the 
 consciences of men to action and doomed to death the 
 antinomianism that had been eating out the heart of 
 orthodoxy. Personal purity was a demand for the 
 present life and was not to be postponed to the day of 
 the soul's separation from the body. This is probably 
 the import of John Wesley's doctrine of Christian per- 
 fection or perfect love in this life. The Christian salva- 
 tion was to be a present reality, the conscious possession 
 of an enlightened heart. 
 
 The spirit of philanthropy was quickened and 
 broadened. The great public wrongs under which men 
 were suffering began to call loudly for remedy. John 
 Howard's crusade on behalf of the prisoners in the jails 
 of Europe, efforts for the improvement of the criminal 
 law in the direction of equity and humanity in penalties, 
 the extinction of the slave trade, intervention on behalf 
 of the " factory hands," the fight against the evils of 
 strong drink, were all in part fruits of the revival. Not- 
 
Evangelicism 147 
 
 withstanding the emphasis placed on the hope of heaven, 
 men were evidently learning the worth of the earthly 
 life as the sphere for the realization of the heavenly. A 
 Protestant principle that had been half forgotten in the 
 controversies and persecutions of earlier days was com- 
 ing to vigorous renewal, namely, the unspeakable worth 
 of the man. 
 
 The progress of the revival was sustained throughout 
 by the conviction that religion has its home in the soul of 
 the individual. Its value and its truth are self-attesting, 
 for God speaks to man directly. This was but a renewal 
 of the Protestant view expressed in the oft-quoted 
 affirmation of Calvin that the truth of God's word was 
 certified to men by "the secret testimony of the Spirit." 
 Only it was universalized. Every man was competent 
 to enjoy this immediate certainty. The center of 
 gravity in religion was shifted from objective facts, 
 doctrines, or rites to the inner life — faith. Experience is 
 the ultimate fact in the life of religion. Men who had 
 "the witness of the Spirit" that they were forgiven, 
 renewed, saved, possessed a basis of certainty that made 
 the Calvinist doctrines of election and predestination 
 unnecessary for many people and even a stumbling-block 
 to the free personal faith of others. For when the com- 
 mon man gains a "heart conviction" of the favor of 
 God, he becomes independent of the artificial supports of 
 fixed systems of any kind and resents their interference 
 with his liberty. 
 
 The tide of feeling swept over ecclesiastical and 
 doctrinal bounds. In the long run it mattered little 
 that John Wesley, a faithful priest of the Church of 
 England, strove to keep his "societies" within the order 
 
148 What Is Christianity? 
 
 established by law. His followers swung loose and 
 organized the various Methodist " churches." It mat- 
 tered little that he and Whitefield, with their followers, 
 split on issues between Calvinists and Arminians. For 
 both sides shared alike in the movement of grace, and 
 after a time it became plain that the controversies 
 between them were mostly side issues. All existing 
 Protestant bodies shared the blessing, and new denom- 
 inations of Christians were constantly arising as the 
 movement spread. Many of these bodies have had a 
 fairly fabulous growth. Hence, while the leaders and 
 their followers professed conservative views, on the 
 whole, in matters of theology, an era of ecclesiastical 
 and theological freedom was being unconsciously ushered 
 in and a stimulus given to reconstruction along all lines of 
 life and thought. 
 
 Equally significant of the new freedom was the spon- 
 taneous outburst of Christian song. The Christian 
 church has reason to be proud of its hymnody in almost 
 all the periods of its history, despite much doggerel. 
 There were noble Protestant hymnists in the days pre- 
 ceding the revival. But the ritual of the Church of 
 England, being stereotyped, was a sedative rather than 
 an inspiration of religious action, and the public services 
 of Nonconformists and Presbyterians both in America 
 and in Britain were rather barren on the liturgical side. 
 There was even controversy over the propriety of using 
 " uninspired" productions in worship. Now all was 
 changed. The new faith was sung into the hearts of the 
 multitudes. The era of modern hymnody and religious 
 music was ushered in. Charles Wesley alone composed 
 over six thousand hymns. There were many other sweet 
 
Evangelicism 149 
 
 singers in those days, though none so prolific as he. 
 Most of these hymns have disappeared, but many remain 
 as a permanent asset of the Christian faith. The reli- 
 gious fruitage remains even after the hymns perish. 
 Revivals of religion are always marked now by the 
 presence of the singing evangelist. The new faith is 
 strongly emotional everywhere. The range of emotions 
 has widened, while the expression is more restrained. 
 The main point in this connection is that the emphasis 
 has been shifted from the forms of order or of doctrines 
 to the feelings, and the theology that would expound 
 the new faith must take cognizance of the change. 
 
 The reawakening of the spirit of love for all men 
 issued in the birth of the modern Protestant foreign 
 missionary movement. When the far vision of William 
 Carey gave to the churches the inspiration for ambitions 
 and undertakings undreamed of before, the pent-up 
 energies of Protestant religion, hitherto confined to 
 narrow bits of territory, comparatively speaking, and 
 barely holding its own against Catholicism in the long 
 struggle for existence, were released from their bonds 
 and developed enterprises whose story reads like a fairy 
 tale, so wonderful was their success. Christianity has 
 truly become a world-religion. Its frontiers are now 
 in every land. The work was urged at first as a means of 
 rescuing men universally from guilt and condemnation, 
 but it has now become an attempt to build the Christian 
 faith into the social, industrial, and civil fabric of the 
 life of the peoples. The variety and magnitude of the 
 labors involved, the new acquaintance with the multi- 
 tudinous faiths of mankind, the necessity of interpreting 
 the Christian faith in the presence of these faiths, the 
 
150 What Is Christianity? 
 
 inevitable co-operation of Christians who in the home- 
 land belonged to rival churches, and the association of 
 the missionary with the work of the statesman and the 
 man of commerce have produced a reaction upon the 
 quality of the religious life of the churches at home and 
 have forced upon them the task of reinterpreting their 
 faith to themselves. A new consciousness of the inherent 
 universality of the Christian faith and a new sense of 
 the reality of the inner communion of all Christians are 
 among the beneficent results. The doctrinal outcome 
 will be referred to later. 
 
 The increase of general intelligence in Protestant 
 Christendom is equally noteworthy. The astounding 
 educational advance of modern times is directly trace- 
 able to religious impulses. The evangelist is followed 
 by the teacher. The missionary becomes an educa- 
 tionalist. The great systems of public schools, high 
 schools, colleges, and universities, of which modern 
 states are so justly proud, have mostly grown up from 
 the voluntary schools founded by religious men and 
 maintained by private funds in pursuance of the purpose 
 to promote the spiritual good of the young. Although 
 it may be true that in many cases the original founders 
 of these schools were seeking particularly to guard the 
 young believing mind from the assaults of a secularized 
 intellect, nevertheless the evidence remains clear that 
 with the modern Protestant the religious life cannot be 
 truly fostered except by the increase of intelligence. 
 Moreover, in addition to the schools of Christendom 
 there is the tremendous educational influence of the 
 press. The unlimited circulation of newspapers and 
 periodicals of all kinds and the prodigious output of 
 
Evangelicism 151 
 
 books, taken in conjunction with the free intermingling 
 of millions of men by means of wide travel and the 
 use of the telegraph and telephone, have produced a 
 sense of the dignity and power of the human spirit and 
 a consciousness of human solidarity scarcely dreamed 
 of before. The religious life of such a people must be 
 vastly different in its content and utterance from any 
 earlier type. There is a modernized Protestant Chris- 
 tianity. The modern evangel has obtained a wider range 
 of appeal and an increase of power to impress its convic- 
 tions on men. It has appropriated the language of 
 modern culture and has gained a broader outlook. All 
 the pursuits of intelligence are now reckoned within 
 the pale of the religious life. Christians are conscious 
 of a larger vocation. In order that this vocation may be 
 fulfilled a reinterpretation of Christianity is demanded. 
 
 2. SOME SECULAR FORCES CONTRIBUTING TO THE 
 FORMATION OF A NEW TYPE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 It is not to be supposed for a moment that the reli- 
 gious life of our times takes its character wholly from 
 those influences which are ordinarily acknowledged as 
 religious. For the religious life of any people at any 
 period of time is constituted by the whole complex of 
 forces which, in their unity, go to make up the character 
 of the people in question. Everything about them heads 
 up in their religion. This is seen particularly in Prot- 
 estant life. For Protestantism, by breaking away from 
 the ideals of the cloister and sallying forth to the task of 
 mastering and sanctifying the natural, exposed itself from 
 the very first to the molding influence of industry and 
 trade as well as to the currents of social and political life. 
 
152 What Is Christianity? 
 
 It is surely a significant thing that the intensification 
 and expansion of the religious life of Protestantism in 
 the last century and a half is fairly paralleled by a similar 
 growth in the production and exchange of material 
 wealth. The spirit of enterprise inherent in Prot- 
 estantism, which had suffered a check through the 
 internal strifes of Europe, reawoke at the very time when 
 "the Spirit of the Lord began to move mightily" upon 
 John Wesley and George Whitefield. Beginning in the 
 eighteenth century and continuing through the nine- 
 teenth, there was an economic awakening like that which 
 occurred when mediaeval Europe was roused from her 
 intellectual sloth, her moral coarseness, and her religious 
 passivity. Only, the new change was on a tremendous 
 scale. Mechanical invention has produced a revolution 
 in nearly all human industries. Production, manu- 
 facture, and transportation proceed on a scale impossible 
 to imagine one hundred and fifty years ago. The factory 
 and not the home is now the seat of industry. The town 
 has been robbing the country of its peasantry. New 
 vast centers of population have been created. Cities 
 number their inhabitants by the hundreds of thousands 
 and by the millions. New sources of wealth have been 
 sought out and forces long concealed from human ken 
 have been recruited for man's service. Lands far 
 separated geographically have realized a close commun- 
 ity of interest. Railroads have made them neighbors. 
 Great ships of high speed in ever-growing numbers plow 
 the seas. The production of wealth has become fabulous, 
 and its exchange is now so complicated that only the 
 few understand its processes. Geographical boundaries 
 and national distinctions have been mostly overcome 
 
Evangelicism 153 
 
 for the purposes of trade. Steam, steel, and electricity 
 have belted far-separated communities together as one 
 vast industrial body. The problems of adjustment 
 which in consequence confront the economist, the states- 
 man, and the moralist are simply appalling. Not less 
 serious are the problems which confront the religious 
 thinker, as we shall see. 
 
 Be it noted that the Protestant nations have been 
 the leaders in these enterprises. Where Protestant reli- 
 gion enters, there too comes material prosperity and 
 comfort. It is surely a far cry from the natural poverty 
 of the primitive Christian and his longing for the Lord's 
 return, as well as from the voluntary poverty of the 
 mediaeval saint and his longing for heaven, to the acquisi- 
 tion of incalculable wealth by modern Protestant Chris- 
 tians and their devotion of it to the enterprises of religious 
 faith. There seems to be a natural association between 
 Protestant religion and Protestant industry. The con- 
 currence of the two revivals in time and space implies 
 their dependence upon a common impulse. Surely some 
 new sense of freedom, of initiative, of creative power, 
 had come to men and was manifesting its character in 
 the parallel conquests of things material and things 
 spiritual. That it was so in the spiritual realm we have 
 already seen. It was the same in the realm of physical 
 industry, we must conclude, if we rely on the enunciation 
 of its controlling principle by Adam Smith in his famous 
 Wealth of Nations. He says : " The patrimony of a poor 
 man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and 
 to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity 
 in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his 
 neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. 
 
154 What Is Christianity? 
 
 It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of 
 both the workman and of those who might be disposed 
 to employ him." If we change the reference in these 
 words from man's outer powers to his inner powers and 
 the application from external acts to inward acts, we 
 detect the inner harmony between Protestant industrial- 
 ism and Protestant religion. We shall see, however, that 
 neither is an instance of pure individualism. 
 
 Far more significant than the mere creation and 
 accumulation of wealth or the new distribution and 
 grouping of population, with the accompanying social 
 changes, is the manner (alluded to above) in which the 
 activities and interests of all the peoples concerned have 
 become interlocked. An economic disturbance in one 
 quarter of the world is rapidly transmitted to almost 
 every part of it. A feeling of economic interdependence 
 pervades the world, overriding hostile tariffs and other 
 artificial restrictions. Economic insularity is becoming a 
 thing of the past. The industries of the world are more 
 than competitive; they are complementary. There is 
 an increasing sensitiveness with regard to business 
 happenings everywhere. The time seems near when 
 the many economic kingdoms of the world shall become 
 one kingdom. 
 
 Changes in the political realm during the period 
 under review have been equally startling, and their 
 bearing on the religious life of men is important. It has 
 been a time of political revolution, partly peaceful and 
 partly violent. In this the Anglo-Saxon and French 
 peoples have been the leaders. The democratic self- 
 affirmation that broke out in the American Revolution 
 and culminated in the founding of the republic of the 
 
Evangelicism 155 
 
 United States was just the revival and reinforcement of 
 the ancient British contention that the people must be 
 self-governing. It reawoke in the mother-country the 
 conviction of the supreme worth of this principle and the 
 determination to enforce it. The loss of a portion of 
 the British Empire was followed by a wonderful exten- 
 sion of it in other directions, and with this extension of 
 political power went a gradual extension of democratic 
 self-government to more than four hundred millions of 
 people. The revolutionary spirit that wrought success- 
 fully in America spread to France and roused that 
 magnificent though long-suffering people to the con- 
 sciousness of powers and rights that had smoldered for 
 generations. With the watchwords " Liberty, equality, 
 fraternity" upon their lips the French people pressed on 
 toward the fondly cherished task of bringing all nations 
 to share in their own newly discovered destiny. The 
 outcome was seen in the turmoils that came to a climax 
 in the Napoleonic wars. Though a powerful reaction 
 followed, it was not permanent except in a few quarters. 
 The nineteenth century was pre-eminently revolutionary 
 in politics. There were repeated revolutions in France, 
 culminating in the firm establishment of the Republic. 
 Spanish and Portuguese colonies revolted and succeeded 
 in forming independent governments, mostly republican. 
 Revolution in the Italian peninsula issued in a truly 
 national government. A peaceable revolution was 
 accomplished in Britain by the passing of electoral 
 reform bills, emancipation acts, and the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws. Minor revolutions occurred elsewhere. 
 Attempted revolutions in Spain, Poland, Prussia, and 
 Russia mostly failed because of the want of deep popular 
 
156 What Is Christianity? 
 
 conviction or because of the supremacy of the military 
 power. Almost with the turn of the twentieth century 
 the ancient Manchu dynasty was overthrown and a 
 republic was formed in China. At the very moment of 
 my writing there comes over the wires and through the 
 air the news of an internal struggle in mighty Russia 
 that may pave the way for democracy. Similar changes 
 elsewhere seem impending. 
 
 A profound spiritual significance in these changes 
 is further suggested by the intimacy of their connection 
 with the achievements of scientific investigation. Were 
 one to confine his attention to the progress of " natural 
 science" alone, the result would be sufficiently impressive. 
 The man of science, armed with a splendid technique, 
 has been reconquering old realms and conquering realms 
 hitherto unknown. Scientific research has been prolific 
 not only in discovery but also in the creation of new 
 problems for the thinker. Consider a single pertinent 
 fact in this connection — the dependence of modern indus- 
 trialism and modern civil government upon the labors of 
 science. Agriculture, manufacture, building, and trans- 
 portation look for guidance to the scientific laboratory 
 where, unseen by the great world around him, the 
 explorer of nature's secrets makes his discoveries of the 
 dark continents of reality which others are to exploit 
 for human good. In that same quiet chamber also are 
 being forged implements of government by which the 
 citizens of a nation are enabled to live and move 
 together and the different nations to work out their 
 fearful problems in alliance or opposition. In the 
 present war the issues are as much determined by the 
 man who holds the weapons of scientific experiment as 
 
Evangelicism 157 
 
 by the soldier who wields the weapons which these other 
 weapons have made. 
 
 When the religious thinker contemplates these recent 
 developments, he is likely to be impressed with the 
 following: 
 
 In the first place, these different tides of influence 
 have been synchronous, concurrent, and operative upon 
 the life of about the same peoples. The awakening of 
 the religious consciousness, the commitment to new 
 religious and ecclesiastical enterprise, the uprising of the 
 Christian intelligence, the growing mastery of the secrets 
 of nature and the control and utilization of her forces 
 for man's purposes, the progress of democratic revolution 
 in political and civil life, the weaving of the web of 
 international relations from which no civilized nation 
 can extricate itself— these constitute a great mass move- 
 ment that seems to operate in obedience to a new con- 
 sciousness of the meaning of human life and to a new 
 interpretation of its destiny. 
 
 In the second place, there is manifest in all this the 
 power of individual personal initiative. Conventional 
 beliefs, social customs, industrial methods, political 
 establishments, have all been challenged by daring 
 reformers and innovators. The experimenter, the specu- 
 lator, the discoverer, the inventor, and the creator have 
 done new things, and the world has been following, some- 
 times "afar off," and trying to appropriate the results. 
 No matter how fast society seeks to institutionalize and 
 force the individual's activity into regular grooves, he 
 breaks away and pushes on still faster. He cannot 
 perish. There never was such another age of individual- 
 ism as the present. 
 
158 What Is Christianity? 
 
 In the third place, by this very development of the 
 free individual personality the true universality of man 
 has come to light. The breaking of the old bonds of 
 union among men has led the way to a higher unity. 
 This is attained by the normal unfolding of his powers in 
 their unity and not by the method of artificial restraint. 
 The consciousness of the essential inner unity of all man- 
 kind, of the facts and forces of nature, and of man and 
 nature — even though the character of this latter unity 
 may be indefinable as yet — is gradually forcing itself upon 
 the human spirit. Thus by the common progress of men 
 under a guidance, higher, let us believe, than the human, 
 a fundamental principle of the Reformation is finding 
 recognition : namely, life is a unit, the separation of the 
 secular activity of man from the holy is being annulled, 
 heaven and earth are coming together, the world in which 
 we live is our Father's house of "many mansions." 
 
 If, therefore, all these various regions of human 
 experience belong to one another and if in their unity 
 they constitute the proper sphere of religion; then, if the 
 Christian faith is to permeate them all with its spirit, if 
 it is destined to become the universal faith, this must 
 be because it reveals the ultimate meaning of them all. 
 A new attempt at an interpretation of its meaning 
 becomes indispensable to the believer. 
 
 3. THE INFLUENCE OF RECENT ATTEMPTS TO 
 UNDERSTAND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Of late the Christian spirit has been diligently work- 
 ing upon a new interpretation of itself. If the positions 
 assumed in the foregoing statements be tenable, then 
 the imperativeness of restating the Christian faith can 
 
Evangelicism 159 
 
 be escaped only by him who abandons its hope of uni- 
 versal dominion. For, indeed, it is in obedience to the 
 high demands of the faith itself that men have been 
 exploring and mapping out afresh the territory it has 
 covered in its course. 
 
 A reinterpretation of the faith has been sought 
 through a historical recapitulation of its progress in 
 time and space. The birth of the historical spirit came 
 late in Christian circles. Until quite recently the his- 
 tory of Christianity was studied mainly for apologetical 
 or polemical purposes. Catholics supported the claims 
 of their church by referring to an unbroken historical 
 succession. Protestants sought to prove that Catholi- 
 cism was a pagan corruption of the true faith by com- 
 paring it with the early Christianity. Later on, the 
 Deists sought to establish a similar charge against 
 orthodox Protestantism. Orthodox apologists like Lard- 
 ner replied with evidence corroborative of the historicity 
 of biblical accounts. The work of the historical criticism 
 of biblical documents was soon under way. At last a 
 direct interest in the history of Christianity was aroused. 
 It shared in the spirit of scientific exploration referred 
 to above. The Christian historian came under the sway 
 of the scientific conscience for facts. The apologetical 
 and polemical interest began to give place to the love 
 of truth. By unmeasured diligence and patience the 
 long story has been gradually unfolded. The perspec- 
 tive of nineteen centuries and the broad horizon of 
 present world-knowledge have combined to produce 
 certain overwhelming convictions. 
 
 To begin with, the Christian religion, whatever be 
 its source or its ultimate explanation, is a distinctive 
 
160 What Is Christianity? 
 
 spiritual force in the world of men, increasing in momen- 
 tum from age to age, permeating more and more the 
 self-conscious life, the social relations, the political insti- 
 tutions, and the industrial enterprises of the people who 
 come under its influence. It seems destined to dominate 
 the world. In the successive stages of its career it has 
 produced or assumed many forms of expression — dis- 
 courses, prophecies, hymns, churches, schools, types of 
 architecture, forms of ritual or liturgy, and bodies of 
 doctrine. Each one of these seemed at some time essen- 
 tial to it, but they have all been under constant process 
 of change. They pass, but it survives. It is greater 
 than any or all of its creations — greater than the Bible, 
 the churches, and the creeds. Its value lies in itself 
 and not in something that is a means to its progress. 
 Its truth lies in its own inherent power and not in its 
 conformity to some standard outside of it. Not less 
 wonderful than its many changing forms is the constancy 
 of its character. For, notwithstanding the disharmonies 
 and perversions that have arisen in its course, it has 
 ever tended to turn the minds of men trustfully to an 
 Unseen from whom they came and to whom they go, a 
 heavenly Father; it has spurred them on hopefully to 
 a personal ideal that ever beckons them on to the better 
 life and, though itself always in advance of them, is 
 very real to them because it fulfils itself daily in them; 
 it has inspired them with undying courage and strength 
 because it has made them conscious of a Power dwelling 
 in their hearts and ever rilling their lives with greater 
 worth. It has therefore thrown itself freely into the 
 great enterprises of men and has stimulated them con- 
 stantly to new enterprise. It has thereby pushed the 
 race on to higher achievement. 
 
Evangelicism 161 
 
 In all this it has borne a distinctive character. It 
 has made men aware that the greatest thing about them 
 is their inner life — in this lies the clue to all that is worth- 
 ful, the bond that unites men to one another and that 
 brings them to fellowship with God. It has always 
 purified that life, removing the selfishness, the cowardice, 
 the malice, and the lust. It is communion-forming. 
 It has united men in mutual love and esteem, it has 
 purified their intercourse from immorality, it has bound 
 their wills together in the pursuit of ends which could 
 never be attained without this pure love. It has filled 
 them with the determination to unite all men finally in 
 a common holy destiny, and teaches them never to give 
 one another up, never to despair of men. None can be 
 spared. Hence the labors expended so freely in behalf 
 of the ignorant and the fallen. Its course is marked by 
 works of mercy. 
 
 The historical view of Christianity has had a liberat- 
 ing and elevating influence on those who have partici- 
 pated in it. While it inculcates reverence for churches 
 and creeds as forms in which the Christian spirit clothes 
 itself, it teaches men to regard all these as only tempo- 
 rary. They are helps for a time but not authorities, 
 good servants but bad masters. By looking backward 
 men learn that their ideal is before, and not behind, 
 them. Historical study has helped to create what I 
 have here called evangelicism, the gospel of history, the 
 message of the ultimate attainment of the Christian 
 good. 
 
 Or, in the next place, we may turn to the recent 
 study of the character and career of Jesus Christ. This 
 is a special instance, in part, of the influence of historical 
 study, but on account of its cardinal relation to our faith 
 
1 62 What Is Christianity? 
 
 it is deserving of a separate consideration. It is not 
 very long since the cry, "Back to Christ," began to be 
 heard in Protestant circles after a long silence. It arose 
 partly out of the feeling that traditional Christianity had 
 wandered far from the spirit of its founder, and out of 
 the desire to recover its original purity and simplicity. 
 The motive was practical rather than theoretical — the 
 desire to live the true Christian life rather than the wish 
 to construct a new Christian dogma. The hope was 
 to find in the story of Jesus and in the record of his 
 teachings the needed guidance and strength for the 
 moral and religious life. Ecclesiastical strifes, doc- 
 trinal differences, metaphysical problems, were to be 
 left aside and the character of his personality recovered. 
 Men were to have a direct view of his way of life, his 
 aims and hopes and ambitions, his estimate of men and 
 his treatment of them, his outlook upon the world, 
 and his heart-relation to God. They were even to live 
 through his inner experiences. The motive was pure. 
 
 The outcome is rich in every way, but also surprising. 
 For the religious purpose has been strengthened by the 
 same scientific interest that operated so powerfully in 
 the historical study of the Christian religion. The task 
 has proved unexpectedly difficult. The labor expended 
 has been prodigious, and the spirit and method of the 
 study, on the whole, worthy of the subject. It became 
 evident soon that there was much more to do than to 
 construct a new " harmony of the Gospels," or to arrange 
 Jesus' teachings in an orderly manner. The world of 
 men and things in which he lived, the concrete circum- 
 stances that called forth his deeds and words, the tradi- 
 tions and other influences from the distant past that 
 
Evangelicism 163 
 
 entered into his soul, had to be restored. Above all, 
 the student could not solve his problem without seeking 
 to reproduce in his own soul the very heart-life of Jesus. 
 Even this was insufficient. For it was as truly impos- 
 sible to know him apart from the impressions he made 
 on other people as it is impossible to estimate the char- 
 acter of any other man apart from the reflection of it 
 in those who came under his influence. Indeed, we 
 have no representation of his words and deeds that was 
 given independently of the manner in which others felt 
 about him. 
 
 We are here concerned particularly with the results 
 for the Christian life. What are the most important of 
 them ? Summarily, first of all is the assurance that a 
 human life possessed of the beauty and the strength, the 
 meekness and the majesty, the tenderness and the stern- 
 ness, the patience and determination, and all the other 
 qualities that stand out in the picture of the evangelists 
 was really lived in such a world and at such a time as 
 that. The unspeakable comfort is ours that such a 
 life can be lived, it is thoroughly human, it may be ours. 
 An immense inspiration comes to make that life our own 
 and to live it by faith in the same God. Then, too, we 
 see that this life of his in its inner qualities is transmis- 
 sible and has really been transmitted to others. It has 
 flowed out into human life at large. It has become a 
 permanent asset of the race. The more men familiarize 
 themselves with the image of his personality reflected 
 in the narratives and in the religious life that has been 
 propagated from him as its source the more his name 
 comes to stand for the whole content of what is good for 
 men and for the whole aim of their being. He has 
 
164 What Is Christianity? 
 
 become the great companion of men. They feel that he 
 is living with them all the time. His spirit goes out 
 conquering and to conquer. This is the faith he has 
 produced in them, and this is his great achievement. 
 Him, therefore, they follow. With him they live, with 
 him they die, and with him they reign. This may not 
 be formal logic, but it is faith, and he has given it to them 
 as their inalienable possession. The emancipating out- 
 come of the study has also been very great. Men who 
 cannot understand the creeds, who feel that the profound 
 metaphysical subtleties that have been draped about him 
 are beyond their power to comprehend, and who have 
 believed that their faith can be only second hand and 
 dependent on authority have laid hold once more on the 
 confidence that he is the friend of those who labor and 
 are heavy laden and the meek and lowly may learn of 
 him. A divine personality has triumphed once more 
 over institutions and theories. 
 
 A third line of reflection that has powerfully con- 
 tributed to the modernized Protestant Christianity is 
 traceable in the renewed study of the inner life of the 
 Christian soul. Until recently the subjective side of the 
 Christian religion was scarcely regarded as affording 
 the true basis for an understanding of its nature. The 
 warmth of religious feeling in men has always tended to 
 express itself with great freedom and confidence. Piety 
 has often reveled in the joy and power of a new life in the 
 soul. Mystics in all ages, like the born psychologists 
 they are, have sought to trace in an orderly manner the 
 working of the divine Spirit upon their own spirit in the 
 hope of communicating, if possible, the great secret to 
 others. But the very subjectivity of their represen- 
 
Evangelicism 165 
 
 tations, the extraordinary character of them, the com- 
 mon opinion that these men were the favored few — 
 "saints" to whom were vouchsafed experiences denied 
 to the common people— confirmed the tendency to repose 
 the truth of Christianity on the external authority of 
 miraculous events, or of the church, or of the Scriptures, 
 or of the creeds, or of sacraments. The subjective ex- 
 perience of the Christian was conceived to be the result 
 of receiving the objective realities. 
 
 But when the great revival referred to in the fore- 
 going pages led to a reaffirmation of the worth of the 
 religious experience, the way was opened to the work of 
 reinterpreting the meaning of the Christian faith on the 
 basis of that very subjective experience which had been 
 so often disparaged. The great Schleiermacher led the 
 way. The movement has grown to vast proportions. 
 The psychology of the Christian religion has become a 
 regular discipline in theological studies. Passing by the 
 scientific product, the outcome for the Christian faith 
 has been impressive. 
 
 For one thing, it has led Christians to perceive that 
 their greatest possession is just the faith itself that has 
 arisen in the soul. It is the man's inalienable wealth, 
 and its power is inextinguishable. Even the inability 
 to trace its source or to justify it intellectually is not 
 fatal to it. It moves on in the soul and seems to have 
 a logic of its own. Moreover, we have found that the 
 experience is not merely subjective or purely individual- 
 istic. Its power of self-communication to others and 
 its unifying power in communities of men are as impres- 
 sive as its inner personal force. Then, too, it is dis- 
 covered that religion of some kind is universal. Men 
 
1 66 What Is Christianity? 
 
 are not men without it. The way of approach to the 
 votaries of other faiths is open. The Christian religion 
 has points of contact with all other religions, and if it 
 is destined to displace them, as we believe, that is because 
 all that is truly worthful in them finds fulfilment in the 
 Christian faith. This view carries with it everywhere a 
 profound respect for religion. For the study of religions 
 tends to confirm the Christian's confidence that his 
 religious faith is that which more than anything else 
 constitutes the character and the excellency of man's 
 nature. The story of man becomes the history of his 
 religion, or, putting it in another way, the religious faith 
 of man is the wellspring of all his activities. 
 
 4. A CHARACTERIZATION OF EVANGELICISM 
 
 The quality of the modernized Protestantism which 
 I have chosen to designate by this name can be easily 
 anticipated from the foregoing description of the influ- 
 ences which have combined to produce it. 
 
 First of all, there is the point of its religious emphasis : 
 The worth of personality is supreme. In every being 
 that has the capacity to know that "this is I," whether 
 it be the child whose self-consciousness is only inchoate 
 or the perfect man whose soul is aware of its dignity 
 in such a masterly manner that it proposes to subjugate 
 a world to its authority; whether it be the crude and 
 coarse savage barely able to defeat the animal within 
 or without him in the battle of life, or the man whose 
 soul is clean and tender and aware of its kinship with the 
 Unseen, there is in every personality a sanctuary that 
 may not be profaned by the foot of another without 
 coming under a curse, a citadel from which he may repel 
 
Evangelicism 167 
 
 all invaders because in his inmost being he is united with 
 the Father of all. Hence exist the reverence for child- 
 hood and the respect for its rights, the sacredness of 
 human life and the effort to make the most of its potencies 
 in all, the horror at the sight of cruelty and wanton 
 slaughter of men, and the leaping of millions of men to 
 arms to guard the community of men from danger. 
 This is modern religion. 
 
 Thereby the tasks of life take on a new meaning. 
 None of them is worthless and none of them is tried in 
 vain. Whether it be the lowly toil of him who handles 
 the pick and shovel, or the delicate and recondite search 
 of the highly trained physicist, or the appalling issues 
 confronting the statesman and the soldier, makes no 
 difference. These tasks are religious. In the midst 
 of them, and not by separation from them, will the man 
 find his salvation. All men are equally called by the 
 Most High, and all are to be estimated in terms of his 
 worth. 
 
 The very material universe loses its hostile or indiffer- 
 ent character and becomes the sphere in which self- 
 conscious personality may find fulfilment of its powers. 
 The universe is friendly and will not crush us. From it 
 there come to us constantly messages of hope and inspira- 
 tion. There is an infinite Good Will at the heart of 
 things and nothing shall by any means hurt us. For 
 in it and through it there is a personality that answers 
 to us when we cry, a Spirit in whom our spirit becomes 
 aware of its destiny, a God whose fatherly purpose is 
 revealed to us, his children. He will never leave us. 
 Neither life nor death is a barrier to his fellowship 
 with us. His very judgments draw us to him in lowly, 
 
1 68 What Is Christianity? 
 
 loving assurance of safety. For his purpose toward men 
 is not double but single, and he will not be discouraged 
 in its pursuit. If the God of the early Protestant was 
 conceived mostly as the Judge-Ruler, the God of the 
 modernized Protestant is mainly the Father-Ruler. 
 
 Not less striking is the religious estimate of Jesus 
 Christ. He is more than a remote figure for whose 
 physical return men long and wait in vain, more than a 
 mysterious union of two incommensurable natures to be 
 reverenced in a mystery, more than the sorrowful sufferer 
 who has renounced all earthly goods, more than the penal 
 sufferer who awakens our gratitude by his death but 
 reserves his high prerogative to himself. He is that 
 perfect personality who has sown himself into the life 
 of our humanity in such a way that he can never be 
 separated from the weakest or the worst of us, the great 
 companion who carries us gladly into the very secret 
 of his vicariousness and imparts it to us as our high 
 privilege. No solitary grandeur is his. The prayer is 
 never in vain: 
 
 O Master, let me walk with thee 
 
 In lowly paths of service free; 
 
 Tell me thy secret. 
 
 In the answer to this prayer the modern man finds his 
 salvation. 
 
 In the next place, the moral ideal is correspondingly 
 elevated. In place of the attainment of an abstract 
 righteousness or freedom from judicial guilt and the 
 passive peace that was formerly supposed to issue from it 
 there is the overmastering desire to attain to the life of 
 ministry to men as the highest privilege of life. Personal 
 worth is to be secured by unstinted self-giving to 
 
Evangelicism 169 
 
 others. The true renunciation is made by achievement. 
 The true heaven of rest is found in perfect action. 
 The truly unselfish life is found, not in retirement 
 from the world, but in the free commitment of one's self 
 to the work of making the material and spiritual forces of 
 the universe instrumental to the purposes of personality 
 and to the work of permeating the affairs of men in all 
 the realms of action with a sense of the infinite worth of 
 every person, so that men may be bound together in a 
 communion of good-will. The man who smites with 
 terrible blows the forces that rise in opposition to this 
 ideal and who upholds with might the forces working 
 in its favor is the true modern saint. 
 
 The whole man is involved in the pursuit of the ideal. 
 Physical well-being and intellectual vigor have moral 
 value. The material goods which serve the purpose of 
 realizing the spiritual ideal are to be cherished and not 
 despised. Intellectual pursuits are not a luxury, but a 
 necessity of the moral career. The whole man in his 
 unity must be saved, and that not by submission to a 
 mysterious force from without, but by means of his own 
 hearty self-commitment to his task. This concentrated 
 activity is not in order to rest, but in order to the attain- 
 ment of more perfect action. 
 
 As the whole man is sanctified, so the whole of the 
 natural order of society is sanctified. Institutions, such 
 as the family, the school, the business corporation, the 
 state, are no longer purely secular, but take on the same 
 holy character which has been ascribed to the church. 
 They are modes of the progressive realization of that 
 supreme moral ideal for which Jesus Christ gave himself 
 — the Kingdom of God, 
 
170 What Is Christianity? 
 
 In the third place, there is an institutional interest 
 in evangelicism. The interest of institutions lies in their 
 instrumental value. Institutions of all kinds are to be 
 tested by serviceability to human needs. Churches and 
 their priests or ministers, their forms of organization 
 and their liturgies, their sacred writings and their creeds, 
 fall under the same rule as schools with their educational 
 methods, civil states with their laws, and industrial 
 orders with their processes of production and exchange — 
 namely, the imperious demand that they minister to the 
 creation of a community life in which the Christian ideal 
 of perfect personality may find fulfilment. Without 
 this, no matter how hoary their traditions or lofty their 
 claims, they are nehushtan. Sanctity lies not in insti- 
 tutions or offices, but in the character of the man 
 whose higher life they serve. These things do not come 
 to us with authority from without, but they are created 
 from within the man and have their authority there. 
 Evangelicism is institutionally free. And thus, with 
 its broad and deep interpretation of the relation of the 
 Christian religion to the forms in which the spirit of the 
 man has clothed itself in the past or may clothe itself 
 in the future, it prepares us for the realization of the 
 longed-for unity of all Christians and at last of all men. 
 
 Finally, there is the theological trend. The theology 
 of evangelicism is yet to be written, for the most part. 
 It would be impossible within our available space to 
 indicate even in barest outline the contents of this 
 theology. Only a word or two may be said about its 
 general character. To begin with, the theological 
 interest will be deep because theology is a part of that 
 same spiritual life in men which is active in faith. As 
 
Evangelicism 171 
 
 this faith grows theology must advance. Then, too, the 
 theology of evangelicism will be sensitive to all those 
 other world-forces which we have enumerated as uniting 
 to produce it, and it will attempt to give a religious 
 explanation of them all. Moreover, it will have a 
 distinctly practical aim. It will strive consciously to 
 give to the believer the guidance he needs in performing 
 his duty in the midst of those currents of power by which 
 he finds himself surrounded. It will be the theology, 
 not of the monk, but of the man of affairs. For this 
 reason it will be free from bondage to all or any past 
 forms of doctrine or to its own forms of doctrine, because 
 all doctrine is ultimately dependent for its value on the 
 faith it seeks to expound, and as faith grows doctrine 
 must develop also. At the same time it will have a 
 profound respect for the theology of the past because 
 that theology was the expression of the religious faith 
 of those times from which our own faith has been derived. 
 Most of all, it will seek to be true to the Christian spirit 
 by keeping in sympathy with the purpose of Jesus Christ 
 and the purpose of God revealed in him, for therein it 
 finds its inspiration and its support. The particular 
 manner in which it will go to work to reconstruct the 
 expression of the eternal realities of the Christian faith 
 must be left for discussion in a future work. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 WHAT, THEN, IS CHRISTIANITY? 
 
 The reader who has followed sympathetically the 
 foregoing exposition of the various systems purporting 
 to be the true interpretation of the Christian religion 
 may now be prepared to share the impressive and com- 
 forting experience of the writer as he has sought to under- 
 stand the great forces that have operated in the making 
 of Christian history. It is fitting that we should now 
 attempt to set forth some of the convictions which have 
 arisen in this connection. It may be that the statements 
 to be made will seem but commonplaces, but even so, they 
 take on added force by reason of our survey of historic 
 views and our attempt to enter as fully as possible into 
 the soul of each of them. For we may rest assured that 
 none of these types of Christian thought could possibly 
 have won the devoted allegiance of the numberless 
 multitudes that followed them had they not contained 
 elements of great spiritual power in all instances. 
 
 Our answer to the question that lies at the head of 
 this chapter will not take the form of an attempted 
 definition of Christianity in a single formula, nor will 
 it be just one more attempt to reduce our religion to its 
 ultimate and irreducible essence. It will aim, rather, 
 at comprehensiveness and at suggesting lines of further 
 development of the successive theses here to be offered. 
 At the same time we shall proceed on the whole from 
 the more general to the more specific. 
 
 172 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 173 
 
 1. To begin with, the Christian religion coincides in 
 some degree with all these historic interpretations; 
 it includes them all and yet at the same time it cannot 
 be fully identified now with any one of them or with 
 all of them united. Let us suppose for a moment that 
 by some great cataclysm all those forms in which the 
 Christian religion has been outwardly set forth in the 
 past — the spontaneous words and acts of devotion, 
 the creeds of the thinkers, the liturgies of public worship, 
 the regular customs, the moral codes, the types of organi- 
 zation, and the methods of work popularly accepted— 
 were suddenly to pass away today. What then ? The 
 Christian religion would be with us none the less tomor- 
 row. There might be some confusion and perplexity 
 for a time, but that great power which we are habituated 
 to call the Spirit of Christ would remain in men's hearts 
 and would soon begin to adjust itself to the new con- 
 ditions and demands that must arise. Christianity is 
 nothing if it be not ceaselessly creative of the new. 
 Hence, under the circumstances, it would surely begin 
 at once to forge for itself new forms for utterance, as 
 surely as active children will discover new ways for 
 playing with one another if there be no person to teach 
 them the old. It would clothe its life in these forms and 
 through them it would be effectively propagated in the 
 world again. These new forms would probably resemble 
 some of those that had passed away, but they would be 
 very different because the people using them would be 
 very different from the Christians of the past in respect 
 both to inward life and to outer conditions. For, as a 
 matter of fact, most of our conventional religious forms 
 have come down to us from a time when they meant 
 
174 What Is Christianity? 
 
 something very different to those who used them from 
 what they mean to us who use them now. They can 
 be prevented from having a benumbing effect on our 
 souls only by continual reinterpretations of them, and 
 these reinterpretations would be very confusing to the 
 first users of these forms if they were brought suddenly 
 face to face with them. 
 
 Then, too, the forms that would arise in one part of 
 the world and in one grade of society would differ from 
 those that would arise in another part of the world and 
 another grade of society. If these different peoples 
 began to mingle, there would be a repetition of some 
 familiar past experiences. Conferences, controversies, 
 amalgamations, reconciliations, divisions, and excom- 
 munications would take place, and yet none of them 
 would take the same course as was taken under similar 
 circumstances in the past. Perhaps all of the many 
 sects among which Christians are now divided would 
 be lost sight of, but new sects would inevitably arise. 
 Of course no such thing will ever happen suddenly — 
 though it is happening all the time, but gradually — and 
 were it to occur we should be both worse off and better 
 off than we are now. It would be a deliverance from 
 slavery to the past. Old theological and ecclesiastical 
 quarrels with their intolerances would be heard no more. 
 Our worship, as well as our creed, would have about it a 
 sincerity and a naturalness most refreshing to anyone 
 who is aware of the purely artificial character of much 
 of our formal worship and of our formal reasonings. 
 For example, there would be no bowings before the 
 image of a virgin and there would be no arguments about 
 miracles. We should save a great deal of time that is 
 
What, Then , Is Christianity? 175 
 
 now wasted and a great deal of bitterness would be lost. 
 For a while, at least, we should experience the joyous 
 elasticity of a truly religious life and our faith would be 
 spread abroad with something of the ardor and speed 
 of its earliest achievements. The spirit of inquiry would 
 be freed from the benumbing influence of ecclesiastical 
 office, always jealous of its authority, and would make 
 surer progress. Many stumbling-blocks in the way of 
 would-be believers would disappear. What burdens 
 would be lifted from our souls! 
 
 But at the same time it must be confessed that we 
 should be worse off than we are now in some respects 
 if all traditional forms of the regular interpretation of 
 our faith were suddenly taken away. Some kind of 
 external expression is necessary to all religion if men 
 are to hold it firmly or share it with their fellow-men. 
 A faith destitute of all recognizable outer form would 
 probably perish with the death of the man whose faith 
 it was. A recluse might hold it, but it would not become 
 naturalized in the world of men. It would lack historical 
 continuity and would suffer abuse through the whims 
 and vagaries of individuals. If we dropped all tradi- 
 tional religious forms we should need new forms, and 
 these would be of uncertain meaning and value to other 
 people because of never having been subjected to the 
 tests which time applies to everything we do. It is 
 certain that there would be much wavering and uncer- 
 tainty as to what we meant until long experience had 
 given some settled mode of expression to our inner life. 
 We might enjoy the freshness and spontaneity and free- 
 dom of a new faith, but we should be subjected to its 
 temptations and dangers. If we are to believe the 
 
176 What Is Christianity? 
 
 historians, the primitive Christian faith that shook off 
 so many burdens of the past was, relative to the extent 
 of territory and number of people affected, as much 
 troubled by uncertainty and confusion as to its real 
 meaning as is the Christian faith of this restless and 
 confusing time. How long it took those early Christians 
 to find a thought-world and an action-world in which 
 they as believers could find themselves at home! The 
 radical who tosses overboard with impatience all the 
 inherited forms by which Christianity has been helped 
 or hindered makes a bad sailor and may soon be ship- 
 wrecked. 
 
 We can see, therefore, that past interpretations of 
 Christianity are of great service to us, though they do 
 often impose unnatural burdens on us, though they 
 restrain our freedom of spirit, and though they cannot 
 become ours fully, but must be changed. The liturgies, 
 the moral regulations, the ecclesiastical organizations, 
 and the creeds of the past have a steadying and pre- 
 servative value. Were it not for them we may well 
 doubt that Christianity as a persistent and definite 
 force in the lives of men would be with us today. Our 
 duty, therefore, is not to cast them rudely away, but to 
 use them as stepping-stones to an interpretation more 
 natural to us and more adequate to our needs. They 
 are guides and also points of departure for something 
 better. We shall exercise our right to set them aside 
 as we gradually grow out of and away from them, just 
 as people gradually change their habits of dress and 
 social customs as one generation gives place to another. 
 The birch tree clothes itself with new bark continually 
 from within and lives on healthily when the old falls 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 177 
 
 away. We shall reverently and carefully push our in- 
 herited religious forms to the periphery of our actual 
 world and clothe our minds and our lives with something 
 that lies nearer to our hearts. For our forms of worship, 
 doctrine, order, and conduct are not truly our religion. 
 They are the outer of which our real religion is the inner. 
 
 2. By this means we obtain a method of dealing with 
 claims that certain historic forms are necessary to per- 
 sonal salvation, or, to say the same thing from the Chris- 
 tian point of view, that without them we cannot be 
 Christian. For the sake of convenience we may divide 
 these historic forms into four classes — liturgical, eccle- 
 siastical, social, and doctrinal. These relate respectively 
 to the spirit of worship, the spirit of evangelism, the 
 spirit of action, and the spirit of truth, all of which are 
 found in Christianity. We may assert that all these 
 are essential to the Christian religion and the salvation 
 that it brings. That is to say, a man cannot be Chris- 
 tian unless he worship truly the Christian God, seek to 
 communicate the Christian life to others, practice the 
 Christian morality, and hold the Christian truth. 
 
 But while these claims are almost universally allowed 
 among Christians they have only a vague meaning to 
 most people. Something more concrete, more specific, 
 is wanted when people ask for the true marks of the 
 Christian. Some recognizable act of worship or rever- 
 ence, some visible order, some definite prohibition or 
 command to be obeyed, some formal confession of belief, 
 or all of these put together, are made the prerequisite 
 to bearing the Christian name. As a matter of fact, 
 Christians the world over have always required con- 
 formity to one or more of these standards before they 
 
178 What Is Christianity? 
 
 will admit anyone to the rank of Christian. How far 
 is this justifiable ? Are such standards admissible ? 
 
 a) Let us begin with liturgies. Evidently the primi- 
 tive Christians after a time made but little use of them. 
 It is doubtless true that the early Jewish believers in 
 the messiahship of Jesus adhered in a general way to 
 the practice of observing the Jewish times for prayer, 
 followed the conventional postures in public worship, 
 and used the traditional formulas for the utterance of 
 religious emotion. It may be that for a time they were 
 particularly zealous in the worship of God in the way 
 of the Fathers. But the breach with the Jews who dis- 
 believed in the messiahship of Jesus tended to cause 
 these things to fall away. On the other hand, both the 
 Jewish and the Greek religious custom of baptizing the 
 catechumens in water and of uniting in a sacred feast 
 to their deities gave strength to the Christian practice 
 of baptizing believers with the pronunciation of the 
 name of Jesus over them and their feast in memory of 
 Jesus. For these acts set forth with vividness their 
 sense of union with him in his life's purpose and his 
 death and sealed their confidence in a fuller union to 
 come. Would any man be accepted as a Christian 
 who refused to participate in these acts? We can 
 answer unhesitatingly, No. For such refusal would be 
 tantamount to disowning the specific marks of the 
 Christian. Such a man would be regarded as separating 
 himself from Christ, and inasmuch as the deliverance 
 which Christ would bring when he came again would 
 be only for those who bore his name, the man would 
 be rejected at the last day. It is just what we should 
 expect, therefore, if we find these liturgical acts presently 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 179 
 
 viewed by Christians everywhere as necessary to salva- 
 tion for everyone. 
 
 Out of this grew the entire sacramental system of 
 the Catholic church. With both priests and people the 
 sacraments became the divinely prescribed means of 
 receiving the saving grace of God. When the radical 
 reformers of Protestantism fought against this substitu- 
 tion of an outer act for an inward state, some of them 
 went so far as to repudiate the idea that any definite 
 outward act had a necessary or even a natural place in 
 the Christian religion. Others sought to restore the 
 primitive practice without attributing any necessary 
 relation between these forms and the procurement of 
 salvation. Yet, while theoretically the necessity has 
 been increasingly denied, it has been found practically 
 necessary, if the Christian community is to live on in 
 the world— and that means if the Christian gospel is to 
 save the world — that these early liturgical forms be 
 continued. The churches that have eschewed them 
 have not been markedly successful in evangelism. Are 
 liturgical forms essential, then, for each man, if he would 
 be saved ? An enlightened modern Christianity answers, 
 Certainly not, for that would be heathenism. Multi- 
 tudes of true Christians pay little or no attention to them 
 without perceivable spiritual loss. Protestant pulpits 
 make but scanty mention of them in these days. On 
 the other hand, it would seem that some form of liturgy 
 is necessary to the propagation and sustenance of the 
 Christian faith. For without some outer form of expres- 
 sion that has become familiar by use and significant 
 of the Christian faith the Christian spirit would be 
 lacking many of its most effective modes of utterance 
 
180 What Is Christianity? 
 
 and would measurably fail to catch the imagination or 
 stir the fervor of multitudes. From the practical point 
 of view, therefore, some kind of liturgy is necessary, but 
 there is no form that is permanently necessary. A 
 liturgy of some sort, be it simple or elaborate, is indis- 
 pensable, but a fixed or statutory liturgy, whether simple 
 or complex, is a detriment to the Christian spirit and 
 may eventuate in heathenism. 
 
 b) If we consider the ecclesiastical forms that have 
 arisen as regularly established modes of Christian activ- 
 ity or as the outcome of efforts to institutionalize the 
 Christian faith, a similar conclusion is reached. Early 
 Christians constituted a fellowship. They met regu- 
 larly in assembly. They recognized one another as 
 members of a common order or body. They were 
 organized for mutual encouragement and protection 
 and for the purpose of spreading the faith. They chose 
 leaders and submitted to regular guidance. All this 
 was natural, inevitable, and necessary if they were to 
 enjoy a continuous existence as a people. Without this 
 continuance their gospel would fail of perpetuation and 
 amid the many theories claiming divine origin believers 
 would fall into confusion and disappear by dispersion. 
 So, then, it was perfectly natural that membership in 
 the Christian community should be made a condition 
 of sharing in the benefits of the new spiritual com- 
 munion. It only required time and favorable circum- 
 stances to bring about the well-known transition from 
 this natural point of view to the view that member- 
 ship in an established external order was necessary 
 in order to participation in the salvation of the last 
 great day. 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity ? 181 
 
 In all ages there have been Christians who held them- 
 selves aloof from allegiance to any institutionalized form 
 of Christianity whatsoever and without apparent loss — 
 but perhaps real gain — to their souls. Yet in the end 
 most people will fail to hold steadfastly to their faith 
 without some such support. Some form of church has 
 been found practically necessary to the maintenance of 
 the Christian faith — that is, to the salvation of the world. 
 But this is a very different thing from saying that any 
 fixed form of church organization or order is necessary. 
 Fixity in this realm is as dangerous as fixity of ritual. 
 The outcome must be some kind of hierarchical despot- 
 ism. All the great church systems furnish illustrations 
 of it. 
 
 c) When we come to forms of conduct this mode of 
 reasoning may seem questionable. Yet the principle 
 is not different. For there is nothing more common in 
 the world than "the form of godliness without the 
 power." True morality is in the inner quality of soul. 
 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom 
 of heaven." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
 shall see God." Yet it is quite possible, and alas! a by 
 no means infrequent occurrence, that the feeling of 
 humility and the sense of purity may cloak the most 
 heartless arrogance and the most selfish indulgence. The 
 external conduct must be there, or there is no morality— 
 so say men the world over, and they say it truly. 
 
 On the other hand, when one asks, What in particular 
 are the forms of conduct essential to the Christian life ? 
 it is startling to find how many of the forms of one day 
 would become detrimental to a true morality if main- 
 tained as essential for a later day. What are the moral 
 
182 What Is Christianity? 
 
 deeds a man must do if he is to be truly Christian ? The 
 day must declare it. Let us take one or two instances 
 of a simple kind and very pertinent to our discussion. 
 It was said to them of old time: "If a man shall smite 
 thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also." 
 Such a mode of action was essential to the successful 
 living of the Christian life at a time when their faith was 
 under the ban of public scorn or legal prohibition. Men 
 won their way and preserved the Christian salvation 
 for future generations by bearing violence without 
 attempting to bring their assailants to judgment. Only 
 by so enduring could the higher type of life gain recog- 
 nition in the community. To fail at this point would 
 be to renounce Christ. But when a time comes when 
 violence offered to a man on account of his faith is 
 recognized as unjust, and when the Christian allows 
 his assailant at all times to go unscathed in reputation 
 and unpunished in body, he may be doing the com- 
 munity, the assailant, and himself a great wrong. It 
 is well that all men be allowed to live their lives decently 
 without disturbance, and it may cost much less sacrifice 
 or suffering to one's self to let a miscreant go scot free 
 than to bring him to justice and to his senses and thereby 
 to protect decent people against his cruelty. The same 
 line of remark is pertinent to the saying, "My kingdom 
 is not of this world, else would my servants fight." 
 When Christians are placed by their fellow-men in posi- 
 tions of great responsibility in the government of their 
 country, the rule of conduct suited to a time when their 
 most effective means of promoting peace was by throw- 
 ing aside all the weapons of war must give way to a truer 
 embodiment, for a later time, of the Christian spirit. 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 183 
 
 Morality is essential and abiding, but its forms inces- 
 santly change within the same faith. 
 
 d) A similar result is obtained from a study of the 
 successive doctrinal forms in which Christianity has 
 found expression. The earliest Christian faith may 
 have been in many instances an instinctive drawing to 
 an attractive personality, an affection for him, a feeling 
 of rest and security in his presence, a confidence in his 
 power to meet one's deepest need, without any clear 
 analysis of what is meant by such a faith. But this 
 was more than the unthinking, dumb loyalty of an ani- 
 mal. It was more than a mere feeling. It had mean- 
 ing because it was the movement of a self-conscious 
 spirit. In order to take a regular place in a man's 
 life and affect all his movements, this new faith must 
 needs be defined, it must receive interpretation by and 
 to the man's thought. Almost from the very beginning 
 this began to be done. Faith in Jesus found its first 
 intellectual expression in the confession, Jesus is the 
 Christ. Without raising the question how much of 
 truth and how much of error there was involved in the 
 identification of Jesus with the Jewish Messiah, we can 
 see that this confession placed the faith in him in line 
 with the spiritual growth of the Jewish people and with 
 the spiritual longings of other peoples and tended to 
 give the faith a clearness and a stability that enabled 
 it to battle successfully for its life in a time of great 
 danger. The demand arose naturally that everyone 
 that professed to be a disciple of his should make this 
 confession. A denial of it would bar the entrance to the 
 new community. In barring him from the community 
 it would shut him off from many of the sanctifying 
 
184 What Is Christianity? 
 
 influences which flowed out from that community to 
 the world. To that extent the confession was necessary 
 to his salvation. Thus the gospel of Jesus became the 
 gospel of the Christ. "Who is the liar but he that 
 denieth that Jesus is the Christ ?" It was an easy tran- 
 sition from the view that he who denied the messiahship 
 of Jesus should be kept out of the Christian community 
 to the practice of accepting all those who were willing 
 to make the confession as true participants in the spir- 
 itual benefits of the Christian communion. A similar 
 thing occurred when it was affirmed that Jesus was the 
 Logos of God, and the same thing again when he was 
 declared to be the second person in the Trinity. In 
 fact this has been the history of the making and enforce- 
 ment of the creeds of Christendom generally. The 
 acceptance of the creed is viewed as necessary to Chris- 
 tian salvation; Christianity and creed are identified. 
 
 Now it is true that the formation of a creed is an 
 inner necessity of the Christian human spirit for the 
 simple reason that it is the faith of a human spirit, and 
 it cannot be held as an incentive and guide to a human 
 life unless it be conceived in intellectual forms, inasmuch 
 as a life that is lived apart from these is less than human. 
 If, then, we take the term salvation in a comprehensive 
 sense as embracing the whole course of human better- 
 ment, a creed is necessary to salvation. Then, if we 
 widen our view so as to take in the fact that the faith 
 necessarily creates for itself a community in which it 
 is the sustaining force, it is plain that this community 
 must construe for itself an intelligible conception of its 
 faith or it will not be able to continue as a conscious 
 unity. If salvation is a movement toward the creation 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 185 
 
 of a perfect community, then a creed is necessary to 
 salvation, that is, to such a salvation as the Christian 
 religion brings to mankind at large. 
 
 But when we ask, Which of the many historic creeds 
 is necessary to our salvation, that is, to the better life 
 which Christianity brings to us today ? the answer must 
 be, Not one of them in the exact sense in which it was 
 originally meant. Those creeds were a support and a 
 strength to the men of other days whose needs and 
 powers were somewhat differently developed from ours, 
 whose aims, we may be permitted to affirm, were in 
 some respects inferior to ours, who could be satisfied 
 with that which would come short of satisfying us; so 
 that even when we seek to utilize for our purposes the 
 language of those creeds we are obliged to put a some- 
 what different meaning into the words. Otherwise 
 they would become an external law foisted upon a 
 free spirit, limiting its normal course, preventing its 
 true progress, and thereby become damning in their 
 influence. Creeds are necessary to salvation; but a 
 stereotyped creed? Never. Creeds, moral customs, 
 churches, liturgies, belong together. The same kind 
 of necessity that calls for their creation calls again for 
 their transformation. 
 
 3. We may now proceed to indicate, in the briefest 
 possible manner, the lines of an interpretation of the 
 Christian faith as it lives and reigns in our hearts today. 
 I must warn the reader that our statements will be 
 commonplace in form, but it is hoped that they will be 
 found to carry with them some new meaning and force 
 as a result of preceding discussions. We shall proceed, 
 as before, from the more general to the more specific. 
 
186 What Is Christianity? 
 
 a) Our first affirmation is: Christianity is to be under- 
 stood primarily as a quality of spiritual life. We are not 
 speaking here of life in the biological sense, that is, as 
 the principle of physical animation that men have in 
 common with lower orders of existence; but we are 
 using the term as descriptive of the action of a mind, 
 an intelligence, a thinking being, a being that is self- 
 conscious in all of the many modes of its consciousness, 
 whose activities are free because they are primarily 
 directed from within itself and whose feelings are such 
 as only such a free self-conscious being could have. 
 Such a being has its life in the realm of the spiritual. 
 Such an existence is spiritually alive. If it has physical 
 or material connections, if it moves also in the realm 
 of material things which other beings with a physical 
 frame move in, nevertheless all these things have a 
 peculiar meaning to it because they are taken up, 
 understood, and used as if they belonged to itself. 
 If man is a spiritual being, then his home is in this 
 realm. Whatever we may say about his body, whatever 
 dependence he has upon a material environment, what- 
 ever connection of necessity may exist between his 
 physical life and his spirit, his true life still remains 
 spiritual. You only know the man when you find that 
 all these other things are the externals of his life, and they 
 have no importance for him as a man except in so far 
 as he can take them up into the movements of his self- 
 conscious spirit, in so far as he can think them and use 
 his will upon them. 
 
 When we say that Christianity is a quality of spiritual 
 life we mean that the Christian man is one who is aware 
 that his interests are finally of the spiritual kind. These 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 187 
 
 are the things that make the most effective appeal to his 
 emotions, that most powerfully awaken his thoughts, 
 and that call forth the finest exercise, the whole exercise, 
 of his will. He will define the meaning of his life in 
 spiritual terms. We mean to say also that spiritual life 
 among men is of many grades and descriptions. Its 
 progress varies among different groups of people and 
 these become different types of spirituality. Each 
 of these has some distinguishing quality that runs 
 through its whole frame. Christianity is the name of 
 a type of spirituality that gets its character from a 
 peculiar worthfulness that belongs to it. What that 
 distinctive quality is we shall try to state more fully in 
 a moment. 
 
 This is, of course, another way of saying that a 
 definition of Christianity cannot be obtained from with- 
 out. The story of its historical origin and progress is 
 valuable for purposes of interpretation; so also are the 
 monuments to its character which time has set up or 
 the descriptions which men have offered of it. But the 
 starting-point as well as the essential thing in the inter- 
 pretation is an understanding of what is meant by the 
 actual experience of the spiritual. For this interpre- 
 tation the whole of the activities of our human spirit 
 becomes material to be used. That is to say, all that 
 pertains to the processes that go on within our spirits 
 must be taken account of. When the Christian thinker 
 tries to expound his faith he must make use of the 
 materials, methods, and conclusions of the spiritual 
 sciences at their best. Psychology, logic, aesthetics, 
 ethics, metaphysics, are in part an exposition of Chris- 
 tianity. In every one of these and the other sciences 
 
1 88 What Is Christianity? 
 
 associated with them there is a record of the movement 
 of the human spirit in its effort to fulfil itself by becom- 
 ing master of the world of action, thought, and feeling 
 that belongs to it. Each one of these indicates the line 
 of action the human spirit must take if it would be fully 
 Christian. Every step forward made by these sciences 
 must be taken account of in our interpretation of 
 Christianity, if Christianity belongs to the realm of the 
 spiritual life. The sensitiveness of Christian thinkers to 
 all the developments which take place in these sciences 
 is perfectly natural, since each of them opens up more 
 fully the spiritual world in which the Christian finds 
 his home. For surely we cannot be content in the end 
 to claim anything less than that in the Christian religion 
 the free activity of our spirit comes to its highest pinnacle 
 of attainment. And in saying this for the spiritual 
 sciences we have prepared the way to say the same of 
 the so-called physical sciences, since these too consti- 
 tute the methods by which the human spirit turns the 
 facts of the physical world into forces of the spiritual 
 order. 
 
 In all this we seem to be saying that Christianity is 
 a natural religion. And this is exactly so, if the natural 
 be set over against the unnatural — which is the proper 
 antithesis. If we then proceed to add that it is also 
 supernatural, this is not to be taken to mean that it 
 is extra-natural in the sense that something which per- 
 tains to a different world or sphere of being from that 
 in which we men naturally move is brought to us when 
 we become Christian. For the spiritual world is our 
 human world, the world that is natural to us. As regards 
 our spirit we men are supernatural, and the idea of the 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 189 
 
 supernatural gets its whole content from our inner con- 
 sciousness of superiority to the material and our ability 
 to use it for our purposes. The supernatural is the 
 higher natural, the natural come to its true purpose 
 and its true meaning. If in the so-called Christianity 
 there is found something that contradicts the natural, 
 this, so far from being a source of satisfaction to us or 
 a confirmation of the superiority of our faith, only tends 
 to beget doubts of its value. There is no violence done 
 to our spirit in our becoming Christian, nor is there some 
 other nature added to our human nature in some inex- 
 plicable way, so making man a dual being. But when 
 the human spirit is naturally unfolded, when its life is 
 normally developed, it becomes Christian. In fact that 
 is just what Christianity is for. The truly spiritual 
 man — he is the Christian man. 
 
 Spiritual life is not merely given to us; it is gained. 
 Men attain to the spiritual gradually and by great effort. 
 The poet, the moral man, the philosopher, fulfils the 
 powers of his genius through long-sustained endeavor. 
 The first of these works indefatigably to make the uni- 
 verse expressive of the deep harmony and unity of the 
 human spirit in the realm of feeling; the second seeks 
 to make it instrumental to the fulfilment of the potencies 
 of the human spirit in the realm of will; the third con- 
 strues it as the embodiment of those concepts which in 
 their organic unity constitute the perfection of our spirit 
 in the realm of thought. Progress in all these becomes 
 ultimately progress in Christianity. On the other hand, 
 the man whose aesthetic nature, or whose moral action, 
 or whose thinking is wanton or confused or hurtful is 
 for this very reason defectively Christian. The whole 
 
190 What Is Christianity? 
 
 round of our spiritual life is implicated in our Christi- 
 anity. When I say, therefore, that Christianity is a 
 quality of spiritual life, I refer to the wholeness of spirit 
 it has in it for men. The Christian man is the man that 
 is whole in his spirit. 
 
 It follows that any purported form of Christianity 
 that cramps or benumbs the emotional nature of men 
 by crushing its native feeling or by opening no field for 
 its normal action is to that extent unspiritual and 
 un-Christian. Any purported form of Christianity that 
 erects or tolerates a barrier to the free movement of the 
 human spirit in its thought, or that offers to a person 
 some act or symbol or sacrament that he is to receive 
 without seeking to understand the why or the wherefore 
 of it, is to that extent unspiritual and un-Christian. 
 And any purported form of Christianity that seeks to 
 limit the normal action of the human will by robbing 
 it of its initiative or freedom or by setting up fixed 
 external standards of conformity is to that extent un- 
 spiritual and un-Christian. 
 
 Further, it follows that the ideally true Christianity, 
 the Christianity that can actually be the religion of all 
 men and bring all men to the perfect man, lies yet in the 
 future. It does not follow that we are to disparage or 
 forget the past. It is to be kept in mind and cherished 
 — not as that to which we are to return but as our point 
 of departure for the better. The Christianity of any 
 people or period of the past was true in so far as it pre- 
 pared men to transcend it and themselves. The Chris- 
 tianity of the past is still true, to our minds, in so far 
 as it assists us in the realization of the potentialities 
 of our faith by maintaining continuity of movement 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 191 
 
 and by supplying the impetus to life that comes from 
 contemplation of a long experience. There is a sense 
 in which our inherited Christian forms become norms 
 for the future. By exhibiting to our minds the opera- 
 tions of the Christian spirit under conditions that 
 have partly passed away and partly remain, these earlier 
 forms help us to divine the direction in which the same 
 spirit of faith will fulfil itself under conditions partly 
 similar to, and partly different from, the present. They 
 assist the prophetic spirit in us to make out the way we 
 ought to take. Thus they become true only in so far 
 as they show the way to a better than themselves. We 
 are never to forget that, if our Christianity is to make 
 good its claim to be the truly spiritual religion, it can do 
 so only by bringing to perfection the spirituality that 
 lives in men now. The true religion is that which can 
 finally be the religion of all men in that it possesses the 
 power to bring all mankind at last to that unity of life 
 in which each member of our race will find himself ful- 
 filled and satisfied in every other. This is precisely 
 what our Christianity professes to be. 
 
 b) Christianity is a distinctive type of religion. This 
 is not a mere repetition of the preceding affirmation. 
 For we may speak of pure spirituality without includ- 
 ing religion. One may say that in the perfection of 
 the aesthetic, the moral, and the intellectual quality of 
 human nature we have perfect spirituality. But this 
 in itself is not religion. Neither is the unity of these 
 several qualities religion. For religion exists when the 
 qualities of our human nature are held together in a 
 consciousness of relation to a higher being than our- 
 selves. Christianity pertains to our spiritual life as a 
 
192 What Is Christianity? 
 
 consciousness of relation to this Higher Beyond. In 
 this regard it is a normal activity of our human mind. 
 Everywhere men feel the drawing of this Beyond. They 
 feel themselves constrained to think about it, to do 
 something about it, and their hearts are often suffused 
 with a deep feeling of happiness about it. They feel 
 themselves dependent for the things they prize upon 
 this Higher Being and they yield themselves in devo- 
 tion to him. They vary greatly in the degree to which 
 they are affected in this manner, for there are degrees 
 of religiousness among men. But we may say that that 
 man is the most truly religious who, in the midst of the 
 most intense activities of mind and heart and will, in 
 the moment when they are all concentrated in a single 
 aim, is the most fully aware that he is subject to the 
 action of a Higher than himself. This Higher Being 
 may be conceived in thought as mightier, or more en- 
 during, or more intelligent, or better than himself, or 
 as including all these in the superlative degree. This 
 is God. And we all feel his pressure upon us and his 
 attractiveness. 
 
 Christianity in its unity is one of the many different 
 ways in which men exercise this consciousness of God. 
 The manner in which the whole emotional, intellectual, 
 and volitional life of the Christian is stamped with this 
 God-consciousness is distinctive and belongs to no other 
 class of men. It is like to all other religions and yet 
 unlike them all. Men are aware of God in all religions. 
 In Christianity they are aware of God in a peculiar 
 manner. But, inasmuch as it does have kinship with 
 all other religions, a knowledge of these other faiths is 
 essential to a satisfactory knowledge of Christianity. 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 193 
 
 If, then, we believe, as we truly do, that our religion 
 is destined to become the religion of all mankind, this 
 must be understood to mean that the transition from 
 any other faith to the Christian faith is not purely 
 revolutionary or an act of mere violence to the earlier 
 faith of the convert. His conversion is just what is to 
 be expected, it is the natural thing to happen, when 
 the two are brought face to face. This is another way 
 of saying that Christianity, my Christianity, has within 
 it the power to bring all men eventually into a single 
 communion of faith because all these others have that 
 in them which may be regarded as Christianity in its 
 beginnings or its lower stages. Hence we must say that 
 any interpretation of Christianity that comes short of 
 this, or that makes it out to be a religion that seeks to 
 gather out of the world only a portion of our human 
 family, either falsifies the character of the Christian 
 faith or declares in substance that it is a temporary 
 faith destined to give place to a better. Christianity 
 is committed to the conquest of the world. Surely 
 we do not mean anything less than this when we say 
 that the Christian God is the only God. 
 
 c) Christianity is the religion whose whole character 
 is determined by the personality of Jesus Christ. Many 
 religions have their Christ, though, of course, he is not 
 called by that name. The most distinguishing mark of 
 Christianity is that its Christ is Jesus. He dominates 
 the history of Christianity and becomes the touchstone 
 of all that professes to be Christian. Now the chief 
 tests of all religions are their conception of God and 
 their conception of man. When the Christian affirms 
 that his God is the only true God, he not only means 
 
194 What Is Christianity? 
 
 that his God is the only one the thought of whom can 
 satisfy the universal longing of the human heart for the 
 fellowship of the perfect life, but he says it because he 
 has found in the contemplation of the personality of 
 Jesus Christ, in the full significance of that personality 
 as he now sees it, the assurance that in him lies the 
 realization of that longing. This is what Christians have 
 always found. Christianity is Jesus Christ's gift to the 
 world. It originated through his advent into the world 
 of men and it is constituted and maintained by the per- 
 petuation and development of his personal character in 
 them. It is his life in men. Christianity exists nowhere 
 but in Christians. They are Christianity. It is as in 
 them that Christ can be said to be Christianity. Thereby 
 we have found the God we seek. Through him God 
 has come to be the life of our life. We finally set forth 
 the character of our God by setting forth Jesus' char- 
 acter as we feel it and see it now after the passing of so 
 many centuries. In that sense he is Lord and God to us. 
 But our description of the Christian is also given in terms 
 of the character of Jesus Christ. He is the true man of 
 us, the man we all would be. To the believer God and 
 man are one in Christ Jesus. 
 
 Because it is so easy to use such words as these in a 
 vague and senseless way we must go a little farther and 
 ask, What is the meaning of the presence of Jesus Christ 
 in our world? The answer may be obtained in the 
 popular twofold manner — it is discovered in the meaning 
 of his teachings and in the meaning of his example. 
 The first of these requires much more than a summary 
 of his teachings and an explanation of what they meant 
 to his mind when he gave them. To know their mean- 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 195 
 
 ing we must trace out their influence on the world of 
 men from the first to the present and mark their con- 
 tribution to the solution of the problems of our lives. 
 The second requires that we go far beyond an attempt 
 to find a rule of conduct, as if to follow his example were 
 to be Christian. We must find how the knowledge of 
 his career has affected the character of human living. 
 This carries us on to an estimate of the worth of the 
 fellowship his first followers enjoyed with him and trans- 
 mitted to succeeding generations. In short, by the 
 meaning of the impact of his personality upon the world 
 we refer to the light which such a personality as he was 
 throws on the character and purpose of all living. As 
 I have already remarked, the liturgies and organizations 
 and creeds of Christendom were the outcome in past 
 times of efforts to set this forth, but there is only a com- 
 paratively small modicum of his influence reflected in 
 these. The great majority of Christians for the greater 
 part of their lives have little to do with these traditional 
 forms. After all, there is only an occasional reference 
 to them, for most of us are so busy in the common tasks 
 of life that there is little time or opportunity for think- 
 ing about religious forms. The power of Jesus Christ 
 is mostly felt through the subtle influence of the lives 
 of Christians about us. There is an inner movement 
 of our spirits toward the aim of life that comes to us 
 through association with them. This, in truth, is what 
 we mean by the Holy Spirit in men's hearts. And this 
 was the great gift of Jesus to the world when he gave 
 himself. Christianity is no mere reproduction of his 
 views and practices under altered conditions. It is 
 something a thousand times more powerful. It is the 
 
196 What Is Christianity? 
 
 onward urge of life he has given to men; it is the self- 
 commitment of men to the highest of which they are 
 capable; it is the devotion of men to their fellow-men 
 in the endeavor to come into perfect unity of will and 
 thought and feeling with them. Christianity is the 
 religion of perfect consecration to the good of the world 
 of men, and this is the same as to say that it is the 
 religion of consecration to the one true God. And in 
 all this the figure of Jesus Christ stands before the eye 
 of the Christian. He does so, however, not in the merely 
 empirical form in which some matter-of-fact statement 
 of what he said or did would bring him before us, but 
 through the empirical facts of his career we are enabled 
 to discern in prophetic vision the perfect, eternal per- 
 sonality ever beckoning us on toward himself with the 
 longing in our hearts to become like him. And we 
 naturally call the holy figure standing at the end of the 
 way by the name of him who presented it to our sancti- 
 fied imagination when he gave himself to the world in 
 life and death — Jesus Christ. 
 
 The particular modes by which we shall severally 
 arrive at this perfect life are important indeed, but they 
 are of secondary importance. They will differ from one 
 another indefinitely as men in their freedom and initia- 
 tive select or create for themselves the symbols and 
 instruments of their faith. Wherefore, since we must 
 see our Christ with our own eyes, we must all make our 
 own interpretation of the Christian faith as we seek to 
 fulfil the meaning of life. For us there can be no set 
 rules or fixtures for faith, for Christianity is the free 
 realization, by the self-conscious spirit, of the kind of 
 life Jesus Christ brought into the world. 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 197 
 
 d) Christianity is the practice of the most perfect human 
 fellowship. Long ago Schleiermacher pointed out that 
 religions are communion-forming. This is pre-eminently 
 true of the Christian religion in its historical course. 
 The ecclesiastical maxim of Catholicism, " Without the 
 Church is no salvation," has not been treated by Prot- 
 estants as a falsehood pure and simple but as a per- 
 version of the truth. They have sought to preserve the 
 recognition of this truth through a distinction between 
 the " visible church" and the "invisible church." Both 
 parties bear testimony to the common conviction that 
 Christianity in its very self brings men together in a 
 spiritual unity and that where this does not exist Chris- 
 tianity cannot be found. 
 
 This is not to be understood as meaning that Chris- 
 tianity brings men together in a single organization as 
 though the Christian fellowship had to be identified with 
 an institution. For the complete institutionalization 
 of a religious faith becomes destructive of the freedom 
 and initiative of the individual — which is not to save 
 him but to damn him. Under such circumstances there 
 can be no real fellowship, but only a reduction of fellow- 
 ship to the level of mechanical conformity to a fixed 
 rule. True fellowship exists only where individual men 
 in all their distinctiveness maintain that full self-respect 
 without which mutual respect must disappear. For 
 this reason also it is impossible to identify the Christian 
 religion with the religion of the recluse or the thorough- 
 going mystic. The one falls into the egoism that utters 
 itself in censoriousness and comtempt of others. The 
 other, if it do not the same, falls into vagueness and 
 meaningless self-obliteration and a loss of interest in 
 
198 What Is Christianity? 
 
 other men. Christianity is the religion of the most per- 
 fect fellowship because it magnifies every human life 
 and enhances the worth of every factor that goes into 
 the exaltation of it. Thus it teaches men to bring all 
 the good things of the world into their service, and it 
 makes of the whole order of things a regular medium of 
 the communion of men with one another. 
 
 A word or two must be said about the practice of this 
 fellowship. It is built up by a reciprocal activity and 
 receptivity. It is best expressed in those words of 
 Jesus which set forth the moral unity he sought with 
 his disciples: " Whosoever would become great among 
 you all shall be your minister; and whosoever would be 
 first among you shall be servant of all. For the Son of 
 Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister 
 and to give his life a ransom for many." Christian 
 fellowship does not consist merely in an emotional unity 
 or intellectual agreement, but it is fundamentally con- 
 stituted by moral action. On the one hand, it is the 
 effort to bestow one's self with all one's powers upon 
 others and to find in their willing reception of the gift 
 the satisfaction of one's desires. On the other hand, it 
 is the willingness to become receptive to the efforts of 
 others to bestow their good on us. Thus everyone 
 receives and everyone gives. None is exalted to supe- 
 riority and none is degraded to inferiority. As the Chris- 
 tian looks upon the world of men he sees in every man 
 the potentiality to become possessed of all the good that 
 is in himself and he also sees in every other man qualities 
 by participation in which he may himself be enriched 
 in turn. All class divisions pass away. All exclusive- 
 ness disappears. Everyone sees his own best self in 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 199 
 
 others and makes himself their servant. The extension 
 of the Christian communion in the world is co-extensive 
 with this practice. It is in this sense we are to under- 
 stand the prayer of Christ that all his disciples might 
 become one in him. 
 
 e) Christianity is the religion which is one and the same 
 with true morality. There is space here for only a word 
 or two on this great theme. The truth of this statement 
 can be seen even in that attitude of mind in which our 
 relations to our fellow-men and the moral obligations 
 these involve seem farthest from our minds, to wit, in 
 the attitude of Christian worship. Some would say 
 that in the act of worshiping God our experience is 
 religious and not moral, since in that holy moment we 
 are conscious, not of our relations with men, but of our 
 relations with God. He alone is said to be in mind. 
 Men are excluded from the worshiper's thought. And, 
 again, when we are engaged in those enterprises in which 
 our dealings with other men absorb for the time the 
 whole of our energies and we are seeking to conduct these 
 enterprises with due regard to the interests and rights 
 of other men, the experience is ethical and not religious, 
 since it is man and not God whose relations to us 
 are in mind. The attitude is anything but religious. 
 It is about as far as we can imagine anything to be 
 from the spirit of worship. However, a deeper appre- 
 hension of both these attitudes will issue in a different 
 conclusion. 
 
 Take the Christian act of worship first. It is seen 
 at its best when in an assembly of believers the heart 
 of the worshiper is conscious of the presence and power 
 of a spirit that embraces in its working the hearts of all 
 
200 What Is Christianity? 
 
 who are present. To that spirit they all offer them- 
 selves. It is an act of communion with God which is 
 at the same instant communion with men. The prayer 
 and the praise are common to all. It is not the time 
 or place for private petitions or thanks for private favors. 
 The unseemliness of such a thing would be instantly felt. 
 What a purification of motives in prayer takes place! 
 For each feels that he may ask on behalf of himself 
 nothing that he may not request on behalf of all. How 
 readily at such a time the heart is led to embrace in its 
 cry to God the needs of all men and how near they may 
 come to him! Through the personal exaltation that 
 comes to the worshiper in the consciousness of his unity 
 with God they too are exalted in his mind; and their lives 
 take on an ideal character, a worth that can be described 
 fittingly in no other terms than those which describe 
 the worth of God to the heart of the believer. To his 
 mind they are sanctified, his heart goes out in love and 
 devotion to them, disharmonies and antagonisms among 
 the worshipers are laid aside, and all become absorbed 
 in the single aim to exalt and bless one another. They 
 go from that assembly with a deeper realization of the 
 meaning of the life they are living in common and with 
 greater strength to meet one another's claim for good-will 
 and service than they ever had before. In the act of 
 worship together their entire lives are moralized. 
 
 The same is true in the end even of the experience 
 of "private" worship. There are specific needs and 
 longings of each which cannot be uttered fittingly in 
 public. In order to utter these we seek to be alone in 
 our devotion. It may seem that here especially the 
 world of men is excluded from our minds and the soul 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 201 
 
 is engaged in the purest worship because it is alone with 
 God. But this is a very defective view of private wor- 
 ship. For the worship of prayer and praise which the 
 man offers on his own behalf in the secret chamber can 
 never be solely for himself. He is guided throughout 
 by the consciousness that the interpretation of his needs 
 flows from the fact that there are illegitimate as well as 
 legitimate petitions. In every petition he is constrained 
 to ask for those things alone which may be asked in 
 similar circumstances for all men equally, and in every 
 utterance of praise or thanksgiving he really gives thanks 
 only for those things which may be no exclusive posses- 
 sion of his but the possession of all. Though physically 
 isolated, he is far from being alone. Indeed, one of the 
 special advantages of occasional physical isolation in 
 worship lies in the greater facility of conceiving the 
 universal character of his wants when no single material 
 figure is in his sight. The whole world is ideally present 
 in the sublime moments of his personal adoration, and 
 he lifts it all Godward when he lifts himself. Thereby 
 his worship partakes of the highest moral quality and 
 therein lies its value for the Christian. Our time and 
 energies are not to be divided between God and men. 
 He and they are not rivals for our love and loyalty. 
 And, accordingly, when we pass out from the place of 
 worship to the common drudgery of life it is with a 
 profounder sense of the meaning of it all because it 
 has been bathed with the consciousness that God is in 
 it all. The performance of the common task becomes 
 to the Christian an act of worship. "Inasmuch as 
 ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it 
 unto me." 
 
202 What Is Christianity? 
 
 f) Christianity is the religion of moral redemption. 
 It is not without reason that the crucifixion of Jesus has 
 been the focal point of interest in his personality and 
 career throughout all the Christian centuries. It 
 signalizes the fact that Christian faith expresses itself 
 in the man's moral struggle and eventuates in an abso- 
 lute devotion to an idealized humanity; the fact that 
 human life everywhere has a deep cleavage running 
 through it and a bitter struggle within goes on unceas- 
 ingly; the fact that the victory for those who are being 
 worsted in the struggle can come in no other way than 
 by the vicarious suffering and labor of those who occupy 
 the higher plane on behalf of those who dwell on the 
 lower. Sin and salvation are ever present to our minds 
 — not as formal theological terms merely, but as sig- 
 nificant of the ineradicable longing to escape from the 
 worse to the better. Thus the figure of the Savior 
 dominates the horizon of the Christian life. Repentance, 
 forgiveness, reconciliation, atonement, are inseparably 
 connected in the Christian experience. 
 
 That which the individual experiences for himself 
 becomes indicative of what must come to all mankind 
 if life is not to lose its meaning and value. Hence, to 
 the Christian philosopher, the whole story of humanity 
 becomes the story of the deliverance of men from the 
 dominion of the evil and entrance into the kingdom 
 of good. The glory of Jesus Christ is that it is he who has 
 bestowed that historical redemption on mankind. This 
 it is that has made him Lord of our hearts and King of 
 the world. He has imparted to men the redemptive 
 power that lay originally in himself and made it a human 
 possession for all time. "I have been crucified with 
 
What, Then, Is Christianity? 203 
 
 Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth 
 in me. And that life which I now live in the flesh I live 
 in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved 
 me and gave himself up for me." 
 
 g) Finally, Christianity is the religion of perfect 
 peace. " Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto 
 you," said the Redeemer. He is represented as saying 
 these words when the supreme conflict was impending 
 and he knew it. They were uttered in view also of the 
 struggles into which his followers were warned that 
 they were about to enter. The peace, therefore, which 
 is here spoken of cannot be the same as ease or freedom 
 from trial. Christianity does not deliver men from the 
 obligation to enter into the conflicts of life. It does 
 not save them from trial. On the contrary, it impels 
 them to take upon themselves growing burdens and 
 to share in the battle of life on an ever-increasing scale. 
 What it does in this regard is to equip men with the 
 power to endure the trials of lite and discharge its respon- 
 sibilities with a balanced mind, with calmness and con- 
 fidence, and with a trust in God that nothing in the way 
 of suffering can destroy. The Christian spirit adjusts 
 itself to all the untoward conditions that confront it 
 and lives in freedom, security, and strength. 
 
 At the same time the Christian faces the material 
 world with all its mysteries and tragedies, without 
 quailing or fear. The universe has ceased to be evil to 
 him. It is the arena in which he finds the necessary 
 field for the action of a redeemed spirit. It is the instru- 
 ment of God for the effectuation of his saving will. He 
 has no dread of the discoveries of science or philoso- 
 phy, but eagerly anticipates them. The thought of the 
 
204 What Is Christianity? 
 
 unknown future cannot terrify him. "All things work 
 together for good to them that love God, to them that 
 are the called according to his purpose." He sees the 
 evil world passing away and "the city which hath the 
 foundations, whose builder and maker is God," coming 
 down from heaven. And he is at peace. 
 
 These, it seems to me, are the fundamental char- 
 acteristics of the Christian religion. The order in which 
 they have been stated above is not intended to represent 
 the order in which we always experience its meaning. 
 The order differs, if there be order at all, in different 
 persons and conditions. But these are its permanent 
 features, and all further interpretation of it consists in 
 the unfolding of these according to the varying needs 
 of men. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The following works, arranged according to the respective 
 chapters of this book, are recommended: 
 
 APOCALYPTICISM 
 
 Burkitt, Francis C. Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. London, 
 
 1914. 
 Case, Shirley J. The Millennial Hope. Chicago, 191 8. 
 Charles, Robert H. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the 
 
 Old Testament in English. 2 vols. Oxford, 19 13. 
 . Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish and Christian. London, 
 
 1913- 
 
 . Religious Development between the Old and New Testa- 
 
 ments. New York, 1914. 
 Clarke, John C. C. The Making of Christianity. New York, 1914. 
 Mathews, Shailer. The Messianic Hope in the New Testament. 
 
 Chicago, 1905. 
 Oesterley, William O. E. The Evolution of the Messianic Idea. 
 
 London, 1908. 
 Porter, Fv C. The Messages of the Apocalypticists. New York, 
 
 1909. 
 
 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Harnack, Adolph. History of Dogma, translation, I-VII. Bos- 
 ton, 1910. 
 
 Hatch, Edwin. Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the 
 Christian Church. London, 1890. 
 
 Lea, Henry C. History of Confessions and Indulgences. 3 vols. 
 Philadelphia, 1896. 
 
 . History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. Boston, 1884. 
 
 Rainey, Robert. The Ancient Catholic Church. New York, 1902. 
 
 Schaff, Philip. Creeds of Christendom. Vols. 1 and 2. New 
 York, 1890. 
 
 Taylor, Henry R. The Mediaeval Mind. 2 vols. New York, 
 1914. 
 
 205 
 
206 What Is Christianity? 
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 Buckham, John W. Mysticism and Modem Life. New York, 
 
 IQI5- 
 Inge, William R. Christian Mysticism. New York, 1899. 
 Jones, Rufus M. Studies in Mystical Religion. London, 1909. 
 Tuckwell, J. H. Religion and Reality. London, 191 5. 
 Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and 
 
 Development of Man 's Spiritual Consciousness . London ,1911. 
 Vaughan, Robert A. Hours with the Mystics. 2 vols. London, 
 
 1879. 
 
 PROTESTANTISM 
 
 Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, translation by 
 Beveridge. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1845. 
 
 Dorner, I. A. History of Protestant Theology, translation by 
 Taylor. Edinburgh, 187 1. 
 
 Hastie, William. Theology of the Reformed Church. Edinburgh, 
 1904. 
 
 Lindsay, Thomas M. History of the Reformation. 2 vols. New 
 York, 1907. 
 
 McGiffert, Arthur C. Protestant Thought before Kant. New 
 York, 191 1. 
 
 Wace, Henry. Luther, First Principles of the Reformation, trans- 
 lation. 1883. 
 
 RATIONALISM 
 
 Benn, Alfred W. The History of English Rationalism in the 
 
 Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York, 1906. 
 Hagenbach, K. R. German Rationalism in Its Rise, Progress, and 
 
 Decline. Edinburgh, 1865. 
 Hoffding, Harold. History of Modern Philosophy, translation by 
 
 Meyer. 2 vols. New York, 1900. 
 Lecky, William E. H. History of the Rise and Influence of 
 
 the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. London, 1866. 
 Oman, John. The Problem of Faith and Freedom. London, 
 
 1906. 
 Stephen, Leslie. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth 
 
 Century. London, 1876. 
 
Bibliography 207 
 
 EVANGELICISM 
 
 Clarke, William N. An Outline of Christian Theology. New 
 
 York, 1899. 
 King, Henry C. Reconstruction in Theology. New York, 1901. 
 McGiffert, Arthur C. The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas. New 
 
 York, 191 5. 
 Merz, John T. A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
 
 Century. 4 vols. London, 1907. 
 Streeter, B. H., et al. Foundations. New York, 1913. 
 
 WHAT, THEN, IS CHRISTIANITY? 
 
 Clarke, William N. The Ideal of Jesus. New York, 191 1. 
 Fairbairn, A. M. The Philosophy of the Christian Religion. 
 
 London, 1902. 
 Pringle-Pattison, Andrew S. The Idea of God. Gifford Lectures, 
 
 Aberdeen, 191 2-13. 
 Royce, Josiah. The Problem of Christianity. 2 vols. New York, 
 
 1914. 
 Sabatier, Auguste. Religions of Authority and the Religion of the 
 
 Spirit, translation by Houghton. New York, 1904. 
 Smith, Gerald B. A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion. 
 
 Chicago, 191 7. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abelard, 52, 128 
 "Absolute sensation," 64 
 Absolute, the, 64, 65 
 Addison, 135 
 Agnosticism, 67 
 Alexandrian philosophy, 29 f. 
 Allegorism, 29, 30 
 Anabaptists, 74, 85 
 Anglicans, 114 
 Anselm, 128 
 Apocalypse of John, 28 
 Apocalypticism 2-37, 140 
 Apocrypha, Jewish, 20-23 
 Apologists, 159 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 74, 128 
 Arius, Arianism, 1 26 
 Arminius, Arminianism, 133, 148 
 Atonement, 112 
 Augsburg Confession, 109 
 Augustine, 51, 73, 100, 113 
 Authority, 32 f., 93, 99, 115, 120, 
 132, 170 
 
 Babylon, 14, 17, 18 
 "Back to Christ," 162 
 Bacon, Francis, 134 ff. 
 Baptism, 92, 178 
 Baptists, 74, 114 
 Bernard's hymn, 78 f. 
 Boehme, 74 
 Bonaventura, 74 
 Butler, Bishop, 134, 137 
 
 Calvin, Calvinism, 74, 89, 101, 
 
 102, 148 
 Captivity, Jewish, 13 f., 16 
 Carey, William, 149 
 
 Cataclysm, 173 
 Catechumenate, 178 
 Catholicism, 38-59, 141 
 Celibacy, 51 f. 
 Charlemagne, 127 
 Chastity, 51 f. 
 Christian perfection, 146 
 Church: Catholic, 38, 73; Earlier 
 
 or Greek, 30 f., 39, 45, 54; 
 
 invisible, 113; "notes" of, 56; 
 
 of England, 148; Western or 
 
 Roman, 30 f., 39, 45 
 Clergy, 49 f . 
 Clugniac revival, 92 
 Colossians, Epistle to, 29 
 Commerce, modern, 152 f. 
 Communion, 38, 84, 150, 161, 184 
 Community life, 165 ff., 197 
 Comparative religion, 166, 192 
 Confessions of faith and creeds, 
 
 31, 183 ff., 195 
 Crusades, 94, 127 
 
 Damiani, Peter, 80 
 Daniel, Book of, 20 
 Day of Jahwe, 12 f. 
 Deists, Deism, 137 ff. 
 Democracy, 95 
 Descartes, 64, 134, 137 
 Diet of Worms, 108 
 Dionysius the Areopagite, 55 
 Doctrine, forms of, 183 f. 
 Dualism, 18, 23 f., 46, 58, 121 
 Dulia, 42 
 Duns Scotus, John, 128 
 
 Ecclesiasticism, 39, 59, 175-80, 197 
 Ecstasy, 72 
 
212 
 
 What Is Christianity? 
 
 Education, modern, 150 f. 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 145 
 End of the world, 15, 19 
 Enlightenment, the, 138 
 Ephesians, Epistle to, 29 
 Essence of Christianity, 71 
 Eucharist, 43, 178 
 Evangelicism, 144-71 
 Ezra, 20 
 
 Faith, 171, 175 
 Feudalism, 90 
 Foreign missions, 149 
 Foreordination, 112 
 Fox, George, 74 
 France, 92, 154 f. 
 
 German Empire, mediaeval, 87 
 Germany, 92 
 Gnosticism, 29, 72 
 God-consciousness, 75, 191 ff., 
 
 200 f. 
 Golden Age, 9,12 
 Graeco-Roman world, 29, 70, 71 f., 
 
 124 
 Great Britain, 148, 155 
 Greek philosophy 8, 15 
 Greeks, 17 f., 39 
 Guyon, Mme, 74 
 
 Heaven, 15, 20, 23, 28, 30, 50, 58, 
 78 
 
 Hebrews, Epistle to, 29, 70 
 
 Hegel, Hegelianism, 134, 138 
 
 Heidelberg: Catechism, 97; Con- 
 fession, 99 
 
 Hildebrand, 74 
 
 Howard, John, 146 
 
 Hugo Grotius, 133 
 
 Hugo de St. Victor, 74 
 
 Hume, David, 134 
 
 Hussites, 95, 96 
 
 Hymnody, Christian, 148 
 
 Hymns quoted, 44, 75, 79, 135 
 Hyperdulia, 42 
 
 Ignatius of Antioch, 39 
 Individualism, 107, 154, 157 ff. 
 Industry, modern, 152 ff. 
 Inspiration, 21, 33, 68 
 Inventions, modern, 152 ff. 
 Irenaeus of Lyons, 39 
 Isaiah, 20 
 
 Jahwe: 11 ff., 17 f., 21; spirit of, 
 20 
 
 Jeremiah, 20 
 
 Jesus Christ: 1 f., 22-28, 31 f., 36, 
 48 f., 52, 56, 69, 71 f., 76, 79, 81, 
 89, 92, 97, 100 f.; deity of, 57; 
 heavenly, 82; kingdom of, 89; 
 judge of men, 43, 93; nature of, 
 3, 44 f., in, 164, 194; person- 
 ality of, 124, 169, 193 f.; second 
 coming of, 25, 31; sufferings of, 
 44,49 
 
 John: Gospel of, 24, 28 f.; 
 writings, 70 
 
 Judaism, 4 ff., 123 
 
 Judgment Day, 12 f., 22, 32, 35 f., 
 56,93 
 
 Justification, in ff. 
 
 Kant, 134, 139 
 
 Lardner, 159 
 Latvia, 42 
 Lessing, 139 
 Liturgies, 178 ff. 
 Locke, John, 134 ff. 
 Logos, 125 *-, 184 
 Lollards, 95 
 Luke, Gospel of, 27 
 Luther, 74, 88, 93, 108, 119 
 
 Mark, Gospel of, 3, 27 
 Martyrs, 48 f. 
 
 Mary, Virgin: 21,42 £.,45, 52,93; 
 worship of, 174 
 
Index 
 
 213 
 
 Mass, the, 43 
 Material world, 167 
 Matthew, Gospel of, 24, 26 
 Messiah, Messianism, 5, 12, 16, 17, 
 
 19, 22, 25, 27, 183 f. 
 Methodists, 148 
 Millenarianism, 32 
 Miracles, 19, 59, 119, 122 f., 125, 
 
 i74 
 Modernists, 74, 129 
 Monks, Monasticism, 49 f., 50, 
 
 55, 92, 94 
 Montanism, 72 
 
 Morality, 49, 181 ff., 189, 199 f. 
 Moravians, 74 
 "Mysteries," 39, 61 f., 72 f. 
 Mystery, 70, 168 
 Mystics, mysticism, 60-86, 120, 
 
 147 
 Mythology, 6-10, 24 f., 68 
 
 Napoleon, 155 
 
 Nationalism, 16, 22, 95 
 
 Natural world, 167 
 
 Neale, J. M., 78 
 
 Neo-Platonism, 73 f. 
 
 New Testament, 23, 25, 26, 28 ff., 
 
 69, 7i, 73 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 135 
 Nicene Creed, 31, 11 1; see also 
 
 Creeds 
 Nonconformists, 148 
 Nuns, 52 
 
 Obedience, 53, 55 
 Original sin, 51 
 
 Paganism, 48 
 
 Palestine, 7, 12 
 
 Paradise, 15 
 
 Paul, Paulinism, 24 f., 29, 70, 113, 
 
 124 
 Peace of Westphalia, 89, 144 
 
 Pelagius, Pelagianism, 126 f. 
 
 Penitential system, 94 
 
 Persecution, 104, 131 
 
 Persia, 14, 17 f. 
 
 Personal ideal, 160 
 
 Personality: its worth, 166, 168; 
 
 its sphere, 167; its fulfilment, 
 
 158, 170, 194 f. 
 Peter's confession, 3 ff., 10, 22, 
 
 183; see also Confessions 
 Philosophy, 57 ff., 189; of religion, 
 
 67, 76 
 Plato, Platonism, 64, 73 
 Plotinus, 73 
 Pope, the, 54, 56, 88 
 Porphyry, 73 
 Poverty, 50 f . 
 Prayer, 199 ff. 
 
 Predestination, 147, 101, 105 
 Presbyterianism, 148 
 Press, modern, 150 f. 
 Primitive Christianity, 176, 180 
 Primitive culture, 6-8 
 Prophets, 11 ff., 21 
 Protestantism, 87-113, 142 
 Psychology of religion, 164 f. 
 Puritanism, 146 
 
 Quakers, 74, 85 
 Queen Elizabeth, 104 
 Queen Mary, 104 
 
 Rationalism, 114-43 
 Redemption, 59, 73, 77, 111, 
 
 182 ff., 202 f. 
 Relation of theology to science, 
 
 187 ff. 
 Religion, 84, 151, 177, 191 f. 
 Religious communion, 193, 198, 
 
 200 
 Religious experience, 187 f., 202 
 Religious forms, 2, 160, 177 ff. 
 Renaissance, 96 
 Renunciation, 47 ff., 81, 106, 169 
 
2 14 
 
 What Is Christianity? 
 
 Resurrection, 19, 31 f. 
 Revelation, 19 ft*., 59, 118, 122 f., 
 
 125, 130 
 Revivals, 145 f., 149 
 Revolutions, political, 154 f. 
 Richard de St. Victor, 74 
 Ritual, 55, 83 f., in, 148 
 Roman Empire, 29, 84, 95 
 Russia, 155 
 
 Sacraments, 52, 55, 82, 93, 98, 119, 
 
 140, 179, 190 
 St. Bernard, 74, 76, 78 
 St. Francis, 74 
 "Saints," 165 
 Salvation, 167 
 Schleiermacher, 165, 197 
 Scholasticism, 128 
 Science, modern, 156 f. 
 Scripture, canon of, 21 
 Sects, 174 
 Sheol, 15, 18 
 Skepticism, 144 
 Smith, Adam, 153 
 Socinus, Socinians, 132 f. 
 Socrates, 64, 66 
 Son of Man, 28 
 Spinoza, 137 f. 
 Spirit, Holy: 72, 195; testimony 
 
 of, 94, 132, 147 
 Spiritual life, 180 f. 
 Subliminal self, 80 
 
 Substance, 138 
 
 Supernatural, the, 19, 59, 119, 
 
 188 f. 
 Supreme Being, 1, 58, 121 
 Swedenborg, 74 
 Swiss, the, 95 
 Symbolism, 82 
 
 Tertullian, 118 
 
 Theology, natural and supernatu- 
 ral, 135 
 
 Trinity, the, 42, 45, 73, in, 132, 
 184 
 
 Underhill, Evelyn, 81 
 
 United States, 154 f- 
 
 Unity: of mankind, 150; of 
 
 nature, 150 
 Universality, 150 
 
 Waldenses, 92 
 
 "Wealth of Nations," 153 
 
 Wesley, Charles, 148 
 
 Wesley, John, and Wesleyans, 
 74, 85, 146, 152 
 
 Western Church, 31, 40, 45, 54, 
 73 f- 
 
 Westminster: Confession of Faith, 
 89, 102; Shorter Catechism, 98 
 
 Whitefield, 85, 148, 152 
 
 Worship, 41 ff. 
 
 Wycliffe and Wycliffian Reforma- 
 tion, 95 f. 
 
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