BR 121 .M26 1912 
 McConnell, S. D. 1845-1939 
 Christianity 
 
CHRISTIANITY 
 
 AN INTERPRETATION 
 
CHEISTIANITY 
 
 AN INTERPRETATION 
 
 By 
 
 s/ 
 
 S. D. McCONNELL,D.D. 
 
 LL.D.. D.C.L. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1912 
 
Copyright, 1912, bt 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 
 
 THE QUINN A BODEN CO. PRESS 
 HAHWAV, N. i. 
 
TO MY GOOD FRIEND 
 
 SIR WILLIAM MATHER 
 
 DOCTOR OF LAWS; PRIVY COUNCILLOR 
 
 WITH GRATEFUL AFFECTION 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Are We Still Christian? . 
 
 PAOB 
 
 3 
 
 II. 
 
 Immoral Salvation 
 
 . 21 
 
 III. 
 
 The Christ of the Gospels 
 
 49 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Primitive Christ . 
 
 71 
 
 V. 
 
 Body and Soul .... 
 
 87 
 
 YI. 
 
 The Basis of Immortality . 
 
 . 103 
 
 VII. 
 
 Immortability 
 
 119 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Jesus' Teaching 
 
 131 
 
 IX. 
 
 The First to Cross 
 
 145 
 
 X. 
 
 Bodies Celestial .... 
 
 163 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Moral Effect 
 
 177 
 
 XII. 
 
 The New Creation . . . . 
 
 185 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Christian Church 
 
 203 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The Sum of the Whole Matter 
 
 229 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 
 
" The highest duty is to determine what is of per- 
 manent value; not to cleave to words, but to find out 
 what is essential. The ' whole ' Christ, the * whole * 
 Gospel, if we mean by this the external image taken in 
 all its details and set up for imitation, is just as bad and 
 deceptive a shibboleth as the * whole ' Luther and the 
 like. It is bad because it enslaves us, and it is deceptive 
 because the people who proclaim it do not take it seri- 
 ously, and could not do so if they tried. They cannot 
 do so because they cannot cease to feel, understand, and 
 judge as children of their age ". — Harnack. 
 
I 
 
 ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 
 
 More than fifty years ago Dr. Strauss asked this 
 question in a volume which aroused in the rehgious 
 world much interest and more indignation. The mere 
 suggestion was an insult. It was to accuse the Chris- 
 tian world of hypocrisy or stupidity. The writer 
 was denounced as would be one who had aspersed the 
 chastity of his mother. 
 
 To-day the question is being asked by multitudes. 
 But not in the same spirit. Professor Harnack's 
 " What is Christianity ? " is the fifty years belated 
 response to Strauss. For if " Christianity " be what 
 Strauss and his denouncers conceived it to be, it has 
 already to a great extent disappeared and bids fair 
 to be left behind, a stupendous but pathetic ruin, like 
 many an ancient city in which men one time dwelt. 
 
 As I look out to sea from where I write my eye 
 rests upon the massive walls of a mediaeval monastery, 
 standing in the middle of an island. The island was 
 once of many times its present area, but little by 
 little the sea has reduced its compass. Sometimes 
 by a long period of gnawing and nibbling about its 
 edges, sometimes by mighty storms engulfing huge 
 segments. The castle stands in the midst of an ever- 
 
 3 
 
4 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 lessening area. I speculate as to whether it will be ever 
 overwhelmed? and when? And are the same mighty- 
 forces which are obliterating it building up islands 
 elsewhere upon which generations of men still to 
 come will erect other structures of like purpose? And 
 will they in their turn pass in the endless succession 
 of the ages? 
 
 75 Christianity founded upon a rock? If so, what 
 ground do its walls really enclose? And what out- 
 buildings may be washed away before the impregna- 
 ble wall be reached? 
 
 During many ages the Church busied herself in 
 what " safe " men love to call constructive work. To 
 the very small and simple body of religious belief with 
 which it started it added first one, then another, and 
 another: — The Resurrection of the Body ; the Descent 
 into Hell ; the Trinity ; Sacramental Grace ; the Real 
 Presence; the Virgin Birth; the Doctrine of the 
 Atonement; the Fall of Man; — ^then, after a long 
 interval, the Inspiration of Scripture; Justification 
 by Faith ; and finally, the Infallibility of the Pope, — 
 all of which, it has been maintained, " except a man 
 believe faithfully he cannot be saved ". It is now 
 nearly a century since this process of dogma-making 
 ceased. Since then only two new ones have pos- 
 sessed sufficient vitality to organize a body about 
 them, — Mormonism and Christian Science. So far 
 as the world to-day has any interest in religious 
 doctrines, it is not to propound or maintain them 
 but to examine and dismiss them. This process has 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 5 
 
 already gone far, much farther than is generally 
 realized. Dogmas which fifty years ago were as- 
 serted and generally believed to be essential to the 
 Christian faith have been so completely dismissed 
 and forgotten that the average man finds it dif- 
 ficult to believe that men were ever willing to fight, 
 much less to suffer for them. Yet within the memory 
 of many of us Mr. Gladstone was battling for the lit- 
 eral truth of the story of creation in Genesis ; Bishop 
 Colenso was excommunicated for questioning the de- 
 tails of the exodus from Egypt; the Dean of St. 
 Paul's was maintaining that " if every book, every 
 Word, every syllable " of Holy Scripture were not 
 inspired and inerrant, the foundation was gone from 
 under the Christian religion; one of the greatest 
 scholars of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland was 
 deposed for teaching that the " Mosaic System " was 
 not in effect until after the Exile; and an equally 
 eminent and godly minister of the same Church in 
 America was dismissed for asserting that the book 
 of Isaiah was a composite, and not the work of one 
 inspired man. All this, really so recent, seems as 
 remote as the dark ages. Now, even the Westminster 
 Confession and the Thirty-nine Articles are never 
 heard of and never cared about save when at an ec- 
 clesiastical council the question of their formal re- 
 tention or rejection is mooted. The newspapers no 
 longer report such matters. The Reviews no longer 
 open their pages to such discussions. They are no 
 longer interesting. Would the editor of the Ni/ne- 
 
6 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 teenth Century to-day give space to Mr. Gladstone 
 and Mr. Huxley to debate about the Gaderene 
 swine.? — allowing that men equally gifted were will- 
 ing to spend their time upon such a controversy. 
 
 This disintegration of dogmas is going steadily 
 on. They have not been disproved or formally re- 
 jected, but simply w^orn away, as the rising tide dis- 
 solves the edges of a sandy shore. The question 
 which now interests us is. How far will this process 
 go? and when will it be stayed? The world will never 
 be without a religion. That syncretism of historic 
 reality, pagan cult, Roman jurisprudence, Greek 
 speculation, Teutonic gloom, and ethnic emotion 
 which we call " Christianity " has long satisfied the 
 needs of men. It cannot go on doing so without 
 modifications so fundamental that one hesitates to 
 even suggest them. * 
 
 It is a condition for existence of a religion that 
 it must satisfy the moral, intellectual, social needs 
 of its time. This Christianity as it has long been 
 presented has largely ceased to do. The ethical sense 
 of the modern world reached a point a good while 
 ago at which it began to condemn large portions of 
 the Old Testament story. Actions there represented 
 as having been done by the command or with the 
 approval of God are now pronounced immoral. 
 Miriam's song of triumph is the gloating of a savage 
 chieftainess over her enemies dead. Jael beguiles 
 Sisera by the proffer of hospitality, lies to him, 
 treacherously murders him, and bursts into a paean 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 7 
 
 of praise to God. By his command the Canaanites are 
 massacred, men, women, and innocent babes ; Agag 
 is hewn to pieces ; the priests of Baal are slaughtered 
 by the prophet; Jacob robs his brother, deceives his 
 father, and therefore wins the divine benediction, — 
 and so on. The imprecatory Psalms cannot be read 
 now without a shudder. The old defence, " may not 
 God do what he will with his own.f^ " no longer serves. 
 Men cannot worship a god who is not better than they 
 are themselves. It is true that we have come to see 
 that the Old Testament story is the more true for its 
 record of these things. It represents men and times 
 as controlled by the ethical standards which had been 
 reached at that stage of moral evolution. But it 
 must be seen that in proportion as it does so it dis- 
 places the Bible from the position of universal au- 
 thority which it has occupied for so long. 
 
 In the same way the moral demand of the modern 
 world begins to show uneasiness in presence of the 
 New Testament as well. It is seriously questioned 
 whether the " other worldliness " so exalted there is 
 compatible with the maintenance of good citizenship, 
 or indeed with any social order whatever. The in- 
 junction to " resist not evil ", to " hate father and 
 mother ", to " take no thought for the morrow ", to 
 " sell all you have and give to the poor ", and the 
 like, are regarded with serious doubt. Were they 
 meant as practical rules of conduct for a stable so- 
 ciety, or were they the exhortations of those who 
 believed themselves part of the company of a ship- 
 
8 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 wrecked world soon to be broken up and engulfed? 
 It cannot be denied that the practical code of the 
 earliest Christian age was moulded with reference to 
 the world view then prevalent. 
 
 "Not only is no recognition given to art and letters, 
 but even the relations of domestic life are discour- 
 aged. The slave is dissuaded from care about his 
 liberty, on the express ground that it is not worth 
 while on the brink of a great catastrophe to assume 
 any new position, or commit the heart by new ties. 
 The time is too short, the crisis too near for the 
 career of a free life or the building of a human 
 home. It is better for every one to continue as he 
 is; and instead of waiting to have the world perish 
 from him to regard himself as already dead to the 
 world. As seen from their point of view all tem- 
 poral claims sink into negation. The constitutions, 
 the arts, the culture of civilized nations were about 
 to be superseded and the Christian needed only such 
 provisional arrangements as might serve during the 
 world's brief respite. Equally natural and suitable 
 to their conceived position was the non-resistance 
 principles of the early disciples. What right could 
 be worth contending for on the dawn of a great day 
 of redress when every wrong would be brought to its 
 account? Who would carry a cause before Dikast or 
 Proconsul when Eternal Justice was pledged to hear 
 it to-morrow ? When the great assizes of the universe 
 are about to be opened it were a poor thing for the 
 suitors to begin fighting In the vestibule." 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 9 
 
 Here, again, a more enlightened and just study of 
 history has turned the point of the objection. The 
 fact has come to be recognized that the early Chris- 
 tians as well as Jesus himself did expect the speedy 
 if not immediate " restitution of all things ", and did 
 square their living and teaching by that belief. This 
 does undoubtedly bring relief from a sense of obliga- 
 tion to observe injunctions which are at the same 
 time felt to be both impracticable and dangerous. 
 But it must be seen once more that it breaks down 
 that absolute and universal authority once allowed 
 to the New Testament. 
 
 Thus the ethical needs of the stage at which we 
 are has brought its powerful reinforcement to the 
 spirit of scientific investigation in examining the 
 origins of Christianity. It is true that the mass of 
 believers go on believing and of preachers go on 
 preaching and of teachers go on teaching as though 
 nothing had occurred. This will always be so. Mis- 
 taken beliefs, beliefs which have grown and spread 
 until their branches fill the air, die always at the 
 root. The branches may appear green and vigorous 
 for many a day after the nourishing juices have 
 ceased to rise. The dogma of " Inspiration ", whose 
 place among Christian doctrines was always illegiti- 
 mate, — ^together with its attendant obscurantism, 
 superstition, and bibliolatry, must be regarded as 
 among the structures of sandy foundation which the 
 tides of time have already disintegrated. 
 
 Again, the conscience and the intelligence of our 
 
10 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 time have joined together to push from its place a 
 dogma far more ancient than that of Inspiration, viz., 
 the " Fall of Man ". Indeed it may be said that this 
 doctrine is the substructure of every " system " of 
 theology formulated within the last fifteen centuries. 
 It is assumed even now that it accounts for the fact 
 that " the word was made flesh ". Nevertheless con- 
 science repudiates it; science shows its impossibility. 
 
 The existence of moral evil is a melancholy fact, 
 and there are many theories to account for its pres- 
 ence. According to the one before us, there was, 
 long ago, a primeval world which was a paradise. 
 It had a genial climate and a fertile soil. No ice- 
 bound oceans or burning deserts, no thorns or bram- 
 bles, no predacious beast or pestilential wind was 
 there. The world was young and wholesome. No 
 nerve had ever thrilled with pain nor any living crea- 
 ture seen the face of Death. In this paradise God 
 walked and was lonely. In it he set the newly fash- 
 ioned Adam, the first individual of his race. Into his 
 arms he graciously gave the maiden mother of us 
 all. He created them immortal. Their wisdom was 
 transcendent, their goodness absolute. 
 
 With Adam God made a " covenant ". The matter 
 of agreement was that perfect obedience and un- 
 broken righteousness would be rewarded by continual 
 bliss and warranty against pain and death, and that 
 for disobedience the penalty should be capital. In 
 this covenant, moreover, Adam did not act for him- 
 self alone, but as the legal representative of all his 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 11 
 
 race yet unbegotten. They were to have their chance 
 in him, and to stand forfeit if he failed.^ The simple 
 test for the first man's power of moral endurance 
 was to be his abstention from a certain attractive 
 fruit in the garden where he dwelt. An insidious 
 tempter appeared from some unknown and unsus- 
 pected quarter, enlisted the more pliable nature of 
 Eve on the side of disobedience, and through her 
 broke down the moral resistance of man. He failed 
 in the test, and catastrophe unspeakable was let 
 loose. Smitten suddenly with shame and fear, the 
 offenders crept away, already moribund. The voice 
 of God rolling in thunder revealed his hiding place. 
 The flashing lightning of an offended heaven burned 
 between them and their bower. The indignant earth 
 shot up from her bosom the upas and the deadly 
 nightshade among the forest, and choked the wheat 
 with thorns and brambles. The wild beasts, filled 
 for the first time with rage and hunger, rent and de- 
 voured one another. The natures of the offenders 
 underwent a sudden ferment which left them trans- 
 formed and totally depraved. Their unborn children 
 not only inherited the taint, but were subject to all 
 the penalties appended to the original contract broken 
 by their father and representative.^ 
 
 ^ Whether the covenant were to remain in force forever, or 
 whether after a certain period of obedience man was to be 
 confirmed in an indefeasible right of immortality, has never 
 been agreed. 
 
 2 At this point " Augustinians " and " Pelagians " part com- 
 pany. 
 
12 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Thus, death, physical and moral, the depravity of 
 every son of Adam, and all the thousand ills that 
 flesh is heir to, both in this world and in any world 
 to come, are accounted for by that event which in 
 popular religion and in technical theology is called 
 the " Fall ". The Prayer Book, in its wedding serv- 
 ice, makes it the foundation of its philosophy of 
 marriage. In the Larger Catechism appended to the 
 Confession of Faith it is stated baldly : — " The Fall 
 brought upon mankind the loss of communion with 
 God, his displeasure and curse, so that we are by 
 nature children of wrath, bond slaves of Satan, and 
 justly liable to all punishment in this world and the 
 world to come ". It is equally present, explicitly 
 or implicitly, in all theological systems. 
 
 Now, whence came this notion which has so power- 
 fully affected the religious life of the Christian 
 world? In the Old Testament there is no after refer- 
 ence to it whatever. Throughout its whole record 
 every instance of moral obliquity is referred to the 
 deliberate and wanton choice of the person offending. 
 His fault is never modified or the guilty quality of 
 his nature deemed to be affected by his relation to 
 Adam. He is in every case accounted worthy or 
 blameworthy, not on account of what his nature is 
 qua man, but for what he does of his own choice. 
 It is also noteworthy that it is entirely unknown to 
 Rabbinical Judaism. 
 
 It is never referred to in any form by Jesus. If 
 what is called Christianity contained nothing but 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 13 
 
 what could be referred to liis authority, its doctrinal 
 compass would shrink amazingly. The dogma in 
 question would never have been heard of. 
 
 What then will account for the importance allowed 
 to a doctrine which science declares to be untrue, 
 and against which the moral sense revolts.'^ Its his- 
 tory, in rough lines, can easily be traced. When the 
 doctrine of Vicarious Redemption had been elaborated 
 as an interpretation of Jesus' work, logic required 
 as its substructure a vicarious condemnation. The 
 two arose and will disappear together. The moral 
 progress of the race has already left them behind 
 it. Historically it was elaborated by that great sys- 
 tem builder, Augustine. It passed, together with the 
 rest of his theology, into general acceptance in the 
 Western Church. It was developed in curious detail 
 during the busy idleness of the scholastic period. 
 Dante popularized for the Latin peoples the story 
 of the Edenic paradise. Milton did the same for the 
 English-speaking race. Luther, the Augustinian 
 monk, brought the theory with him from his cloister. 
 Calvin, the very incarnation of legalism, made it the 
 starting point of his system. Through these various 
 channels it has come, since the Reformation, to be 
 popularly accepted as the Christian belief concerning 
 the moral nature and status of man. But while it still 
 holds its place in doctrinal standards it has ceased 
 to be a conviction to which one may appeal to influ- 
 ence conduct. What preacher would dare to assert 
 baldly, " You deserve to be damned for your share 
 
14 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in Adam's disobedience " ? The dogma is no longer 
 held on the authority of Augustine, or rejected with 
 Pelagius ; it has simply fallen out of sight in conse- 
 quence of its intrinsic unworthiness and essential im- 
 morality. 
 
 But if the Edenic legend does not serve as a founda- 
 tion for dogma, has it then any serious significance? 
 Is it anything more than one of the fond imaginings 
 of a childish world? I reply, it is a compendium of 
 that story which is writ large in the whole Hebrew- 
 Christian scriptures, — the story of the origin and de- 
 velopment of the moral life of man, and of God's deal- 
 ing therewith. Whether it originated in Babylon or 
 Egypt, whether from Moses or Manes, is of little 
 consequence. The marvellous thing is the story itself. 
 This second chapter of Genesis, like the first, moves 
 with majestic strides, an seon in a paragraph, with 
 space for a year of God's days between verses. It is 
 couched in a language so oriental and so poetic that 
 even Augustine warned against dangerous literalness 
 in its interpretation. It first traces creation from 
 nebulous, chaotic fire mist to the introduction of the 
 creature fashioned in the image and likeness of the 
 gods. This creature is called Adam, " the Man ". 
 This having been done, it recapitulates the history of 
 creation with reference to the being in which it cul- 
 minated. It refers, most briefly, to the preparation 
 of the earth to his uses, connects him as to his 
 physical side with matter, and then enters upon the 
 history of the development and progress of man's 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 15 
 
 moral and religious life. This is the theme of the 
 entire Scripture. But this progress is conceived 
 throughout as having been by a series of continuously 
 recurring selections. The first of these is in the story 
 before us. There is no intimation that " Adam " 
 and " Eve " were the first of the race. The Scrip- 
 tural interest begins at that point in its evolution at 
 which the moral sense appeared, the capacity " to 
 know good and evil ". Man the animal, the crown 
 of the animals, had no doubt dwelt upon the earth for 
 ages before. In the Edenic poem — allegory — what 
 you will, — the spiritual history of the race commences 
 with the first individuals in whom the moral faculty 
 had shown itself. Who, or when, or where, is of 
 little account. It must have been at some time, — or 
 many times. It is a selection of the fit. In the sequel 
 Genesis occupies itself only with those in whom this 
 moral progression moves. Seth and his line are fol- 
 lowed, while the other sons and daughters of Adam 
 remain in sight only for a little way, to where they 
 founded nations, passed through the stage of pas- 
 toral life, concentrated in cities, blossomed into art, 
 burst into music, and then pass forever out of sight 
 and hearing. Afterward, Abraham is selected from 
 among the Acadians, while they are left to complete 
 the cycle of a civilization untouched by any divine 
 spirit, and then sink into decay. Isaac is taken and 
 his brethren left aside. Jacob is chosen and Esau 
 left. The Bible is as remorseless as science itself. 
 For its purpose moral fitness is the test. The calling 
 
16 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of " Adam " seems therefore to be but the first of 
 many such selections, the first of many of its kind. 
 
 The story does indeed sound far away and strange. 
 Surely nothing could be more unsuitable upon which 
 to build a system of formal dogma. But as a piece 
 of profound ethnic wisdom it shows an insight mar- 
 vellous enough. It rests morality upon those broad 
 foundations where the communis sensus of the normal 
 man looks for it. It presents (1) a personal God 
 who can speak; (2) a human faculty which can ap- 
 prehend; (3) a power of will which can choose; (4) 
 that the essence of wrong-doing consists not in dam- 
 age to the community, but in disobedience to the 
 Eternal Law. 
 
 Therefore the Lord-God said, " Behold the man is 
 become as one of us to know good and evil ". 
 
 "And so I live, you see, 
 Go through the world, try, prove, reject, 
 Prefer, still struggling to eifect 
 My warfare; happy that I can 
 Be crossed and thwarted as a man. 
 Not left, in God's contempt, apart, 
 With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart. 
 Tame in earth's paddock as her prize". 
 
 Make what allowance one will for the obscurity of 
 the story, the fact remains that the moral progress 
 of the race has been but the completion of the pic- 
 ture there sketched in broad outline. The evolution- 
 ist comprehends it best; the systematic theologian 
 least. We find ourselves following the sweep of a 
 majestic movement, similar in kind to that from the 
 
ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? IT 
 
 monad to the man. Here again, as at other points, 
 the progress halted, helpless or at fault, and God 
 vouchsafed the gift of a new impulse. Here it is 
 nothing less than the inbreathing of his own spirit. 
 It endows the recipient with that divine quality in 
 virtue of which he is capable, under suitable condi- 
 tions, of being " born again ". It accounts for the 
 complex and contradictory impulses which contend 
 in the arena of the human soul. It accounts for the 
 old man as well as the new. It recognizes the sur- 
 viving ape and tiger which chatter and growl among 
 the human affections. It brings man in sight of " the 
 tree of life " and bids him long mightily for its fruits. 
 It bids him work among thorns and briars, but when 
 he lifts up his face he learns that he has " become as 
 one of us ". It gives him sanction for conduct and 
 hope of endless progression. It accounts for the 
 faults of the patriarch, the faith of the apostle, and 
 the faultlessness of the Perfect Man. 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 
 
" In an inscription from the Egyptian monuments, 
 which dates back to the early days of Moses, there is 
 reference to a then ancient legend of a rebellion of man- 
 kind against the gods ; of an edict of destruction against 
 the human race; and of a divine interposition for the 
 rescue of the doomed people. In that legend a promi- 
 nent place is given to human blood, which was mingled 
 with the juice of mandrakes and offered as a drink to 
 the gods, and afterward poured out to overflow and 
 revivify the earth ". — Trumbull, " Blood Covenant ". 
 
n 
 
 IMMORAL SALVATION 
 
 I WISH to emphasize still more strongly that the 
 revolt of a large portion of the modem world from 
 Christianity as it has been presented is due not to 
 intellectual but to moral causes. It is true that the 
 extension of knowledge has rendered impossible the 
 acceptance of a multitude of fond beliefs, easy for 
 former times. The six natural days of creation, the 
 universality of the Deluge, the divine sanction of the 
 Levitical system, and the like, have been rendered un- 
 tenable simply by increasing knowledge. But no one 
 is seriously disturbed thereby. It is so plain that 
 there is no necessary connection between these things 
 and Christ that they may disappear without hurt, so 
 soon as misguided orthodoxy shall cease to see in 
 them things which are not there. If farther increase 
 of knowledge should re-establish them, well and good. 
 The Intelligence can listen to arguments, and is al- 
 ways open to proofs. But the Conscience is another 
 thing. Its judgments are final and it resents any 
 attempt at argument. 
 
 Now, the common moral sense has reached a stage 
 at which it turns away from that dogma which has 
 long been exhibited as the very foundation of Chris- 
 
 21 
 
22 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tianity, and as the true and evident interpretation of 
 the person and work of Christ, — the dogma of Vicari- 
 ous Atonement. Around this theory has gathered so 
 much of the doctrine and the emotion of religion 
 that to challenge it must seem to many as a for- 
 bidden deed. Nevertheless it must be done, in the 
 interest of truth and of Christianity itself. 
 
 The historical fact is that Jesus was put to death 
 as a malefactor. The times were cruel, and it so 
 happened that the mode of his death was by cruci- 
 fixion. It took place on the common execution 
 ground outside the city of Jerusalem. To a western 
 visitor to the capital the sight had little noteworthy 
 about it. He scarcely singled it out for notice from 
 among the hundreds of crosses in every province 
 upon which he had seen men writhing during his 
 travels in the East. If he had made any special 
 inquiry about this offender he was told that he had 
 been a rather interesting, and probably quite harm- 
 less man, a dreaming Jew, who had promulgated 
 vague notions about a new social and political or- 
 der, and had gathered about him a considerable fol- 
 lowing. It was a pity that he had to be taken seri- 
 ously, indeed the Governor had tried to save him 
 from the consequences of his own indiscretion, but 
 then, you know, the laws concerning sedition are very 
 stringent, and none of these laws take much account 
 of persons or motives, and so the poor man blundered 
 to his fate. It is a pity. So the official world would 
 have answered. The religious world explained that 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 23 
 
 this was a very pestilent and dangerous fellow. He 
 was utterly without reverence, jested about our most 
 hallowed and long established institutions, spoke scur- 
 rilous abuse of priests and dignitaries, held and 
 taught loose and dangerous notions about God and 
 religion, broke the holy sabbath day, told the rabble, 
 for instance, that harlots and tax farmers were more 
 worthy people than even magistrates and clerics. He 
 was a dangerous demagogue, all the more dangerous 
 because of his strangely attractive personality and 
 the diabolic charm of his eloquence. Something had 
 to be done with him. Even though no specific charge 
 could well be brought against him, it was better that 
 he should be put out of the way than that the whole 
 people should be jeopardized. He was leading them 
 inevitably to anarchy, atheism, and rebellion. He 
 has simply come to the end that such men always 
 reach. 
 
 The crowd that seethed around the spear points 
 which ringed the bloody square, and mocked at the 
 man upon the middle cross, explained that he was 
 an exposed fraud and imposter, that he had deluded 
 them with glittering promises about a new Kingdom 
 he was to inaugurate, a kingdom in which there 
 should have been no rich and no poor, where all 
 should have share and share alike, a kingdom the 
 least of whose citizens should sit on thrones judging 
 the peoples, a kingdom in which all should be priests 
 and kings, in which every sick and ailing one would 
 have his ills cured by magic, where would be no op- 
 
^4 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 pression, toil, or poverty. All these things he prom- 
 ised, and now he has shown himself unable to save 
 his own back from the scourge or his own body from 
 the cross. We are delighted that he has been found 
 out. 
 
 A few timid and terrified friends who knew him 
 best looked on from a safe distance, broken-hearted. 
 Here was the truest and noblest man they had ever 
 known or imagined. He had steadfastly set his face 
 toward righteousness, he had told the truth to priest 
 and publican ahke, he had led his friends near to 
 God, his speech had been as the speech of an angel; 
 he had been pure and sweet and lovable beyond tell- 
 ing; they had even hoped that it was he who should 
 redeem Israel. But somehow he had managed to 
 excite the hostility of all the powers, he had been 
 injudicious and careless about offending, he had said 
 things about himself which when misinterpreted had 
 the color of blasphemy. Now all these hateful forces 
 had closed about him and brought him to an ig- 
 nominious and horrible death. And they looked him a 
 despairing and final farewell. 
 
 A single mercenary of the legion, leaning indif- 
 ferently with arms folded about the shaft of his 
 spear, heard the broken sentences which fell from 
 the dying man's bloody lips, marked his bearing, dig- 
 nified even in his extremity, and muttered to himself 
 that this time at any rate the law had miscarried, 
 this man was surely innocent. 
 
 This is what the spectators saw, — and this is all 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 25 
 
 they saw, — a middle-aged man was being crucified. 
 When he was dead thej went their ways, having seen 
 all there was to see. 
 
 But for many centuries myriads of Christian eyes 
 have converged upon the same scene, and have dis- 
 cerned in it, or believe that they have seen in it, a 
 thing which was not visible to the lookers. To their 
 eyes the Cross has been transformed into an Altar; 
 the Man has been transmuted to a Lamb ; the crucified 
 Galilean has become a Great High Priest; the 
 soldier with stained spear has become an unsuspect- 
 ing Levite; the gushing blood has become ethereal- 
 ized into smoke ascending to the gratified nostrils of 
 an angry God; the turbid crowd have become, all 
 unconscious, the beneficiaries of a Sacrifice offered 
 under the dome of heaven for all the inhabitants of 
 earth. 
 
 May the event in history be thus construed? Is 
 this the true interpretation of that great tragedy .f* 
 If not, what will explain the rise and vogue of the 
 strange and ghastly fiction? We cannot disguise the 
 situation. If this interpretation be not true to real- 
 ity we must deny one of the most widely current and 
 generally accepted notions about Christ and his place 
 in the scheme of things. I say accepted rather than 
 believed, for when the notion is plainly stated in 
 terms with which the understanding can deal, its 
 intrinsic incoherence and its ethical monstrosity must 
 compel its rejection. Nevertheless, it remains as an 
 idol of the imagination before which generations have 
 
26 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 prostrated themselves, and whose grim hideousness 
 is hid from the devotees by the smoke of their own 
 incense. Of all the conceptions actually existent 
 within Christendom this is probably the most widely 
 diffused. Most Christians indeed would be likely to 
 aver that underlying all their doctrinal and ecclesi- 
 astical disagreements they are at one in what they 
 would call the fundamental belief that Christ was a 
 Sacrifice offered to appease the anger of an outraged 
 God, and that it has been so far efficacious that it 
 has left God with no valid claim against any man who 
 will take the proper steps to interpose this safe- 
 guard between God's judgments and himself. 
 
 " O tree of glory, tree most fair, 
 Ordained those holy limbs to bear, 
 How bright in purple robe it stood. 
 The purple of a Saviour's blood. 
 
 " Upon its arms, like balance true, 
 He weighed the price from sinners due. 
 The price which none but he could pay. 
 And spoiled the spoiler of his prey ". 
 
 It is the burden of the Roman Mass and the Halle- 
 lujah lassie's exhortation, of the revivalist's hymns 
 and the cultus of the Sacred Heart. It is the gloomy 
 theme of mediaeval art, hangs darkly about the 
 stained glass of cathedral windows, is enshrined in a 
 myriad pyxes, is what the wayfaring man takes to be 
 the central article of the Christian creed. 
 
 The Greek Church says, " He has done and suf- 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 27 
 
 fered in our stead all that was necessary for the re- 
 mission of our sins ". 
 
 The Roman Church says, " It was a sacrifice most 
 acceptable unto God, offered by his Son on the altar 
 of the cross, which entirely appeased the wrath and 
 indignation of the Father ". 
 
 The Westminster Confession says, " The Lord 
 Jesus by his perfect sacrifice of himself hath fully 
 satisfied the justice of his Father, and hath purchased 
 reconciliation and entrance into the Kingdom of 
 Heaven for all whom his Father hath given him ". 
 
 The two conceptions upon which the dogma rests 
 are, appeasement of an angry God by pain ; and sub- 
 stitution of a victim in the room and stead of an 
 offender. We must hold the dogma to its real and 
 intended meaning. For a notable tendency is evident 
 in contemporary orthodoxy to retain the terms of 
 the doctrine while throwing overboard its contents. 
 It has begun to be realized in many quarters that both 
 its ethical conception of God and its moral estimate 
 of man are unworthy. But the attempt is being made 
 to save that sacrosanct thing called " sacrifice " by 
 giving it an exalted and unnatural meaning. This 
 must not be allowed. It has been held before the 
 world for ages as the true interpretation and present- 
 ment of the essential meaning of Christ. If it be 
 not true it ought to be cast out as an intruder within 
 the holy place. Propitiation of God by sacrifice, and 
 the transference of righteousness from the innocent 
 to the guilty, are of the very essence of it. These 
 
28 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 are both survivals from ancient paganism. To up- 
 root them was the purpose of Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity. Judaism failed, and perished through being 
 itself slowly transformed into idolatry. Christianity 
 has been saved thus far from a like failure only be- 
 cause it has within it the living Christ. But the time 
 must come, and ought not to be far distant, when his 
 work among men will be represented in terms and 
 images freed from the taint of an outgrown sav- 
 agery. 
 
 Propitiatory sacrifice belongs at a stage of devel- 
 opment through which all peoples pass. At that 
 stage God and the devil for them are one. They 
 suspect themselves to be in the presence of unseen 
 powers which are able to help or hurt. Their gods 
 are even such as they themselves are. If they are 
 unwilling they can be bribed; if they are angry they 
 can be appeased by presents. The African savage 
 offers his demon a goat, the South Sea Islander 
 placates his god with a plantain or a fish, the Phoe- 
 nician mother bums her babe to appease Moloch, the 
 Mexican priest tears the heart from a comely youth 
 and holds it dripping toward the heavens. It is to 
 avert the anger or to bribe the good offices of a god. 
 At a later point the " scapegoat " idea enters. 
 Every year at the Thurgelia the Athenians dragged 
 a man and a maid to the brink of the Acropolis and 
 hurled them to death that they might bear away a 
 year's sins from the city of the Violet Crown. Ro- 
 mans threw their victims from the Tarpeian Rock to 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 29 
 
 the same end. In Babylon a young man was crucified 
 at the summer solstice to bear away the sins of the 
 people. 
 
 It has been a fond device of theology to interpret 
 all these cruel customs as unconscious prophecies of 
 the Great Sacrifice to be made at the right time for 
 the sins of the whole world, — as but fragmentary 
 shadows of the Cross flung backward along the dim 
 pathway of human history. Especially has this 
 sanction been claimed for the bloody rites of Israel. 
 This claim is utterly without support. The whole 
 weight of evolutionary science and ordered history 
 is against it. These phenomena are coming to be 
 more and more intelligible, and indeed to have a worth 
 of their own, but this is because they are seen to be 
 the natural and spontaneous expression of religion 
 at a stage of evolution where men are otherwise ig- 
 norant and brutal. They bear the same relation to 
 the religion of Christ as do the crude moral judg- 
 ments of savage man to the morality of Jesus. But 
 the attempt to interpret him in terms of primitive 
 cult is to shut up the sun of righteousness in tro- 
 glodytic caves. 
 
 Nor ought we to be any longer misled to believe 
 that the institutes of Moses and the Levitical Sys- 
 tem bear any different relation to Christ. The Sacri- 
 ficial System was no institute of Moses, either with 
 or without divine sanction. What that great re- 
 ligious master did in the region of worship was the 
 counterpart of what he effected in the sphere of law. 
 
30 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 When, for example, he fixed the law of retaliation at 
 " an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ", he was 
 not establishing a code of vengeance. On the con- 
 trary, he was confining within the narrowest compass 
 possible a custom of vengeance universally prevalent. 
 It was an immeasurable gain over what went before 
 to limit the thirst of revenge within the bounds of 
 a rough-and-ready equity. The avenger must not 
 hurt the victim more than he himself had been 
 wronged. The whole Mosaic code was, moreover, 
 wonderfully designated to eliminate those " wild jus- 
 tices " which at the time it could do no more than 
 restrain. So with Sacrifice. It was an ethnic custom, 
 universal, extravagant, cruel. The backward people 
 whom Moses led knew no other mode in which to 
 express their piety. What he did was to limit the 
 custom within the narrowest bounds possible at the 
 time and place. He did not pronounce it good, nor 
 did he contemplate its perpetuity. His successors, 
 the prophets, ceaselessly strove to give the every-day 
 devotion of the people a higher and more reasonable 
 direction. Their ideal was never the culmination 
 and crowning of the custom in a victim whose value 
 would be absolute and pain infinite. They looked for 
 the custom, and the conception of God upon which 
 it rested, to perish and be left behind. 
 
 They declare again and again that it was a wor- 
 ship distasteful to the Almighty. The history of 
 Israel is as simple as it is melancholy. The Prophets 
 and the Hierarchy strove together throughout its 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 31 
 
 course. Finally the voice of the prophet ceased and 
 the priest remained in possession. Five centuries be- 
 fore Christ that System which was not of Moses, but 
 elaborated in pagan Babylon, was set up in all its 
 gorgeous barbarity, and from that time on the moral 
 declension of the Hebrews was steady and inexorable. 
 Religion was for them the placation of God by gifts ; 
 holiness was a ceremonial cleanliness with no moral 
 quality. The prophet cried in vain his " thus saith 
 the Lord, to what purpose is the multitude of your 
 sacrifices to me? I am surfeited with the burnt of- 
 ferings of rams and the fat of fed beasts, and I de- 
 light not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs or of 
 he goats. Who hath required this at your hands 
 when you come to tread my courts " ? It was a re- 
 ligion of the shambles and the medicine-man, and 
 broke itself to pieces against the Son of Man. 
 
 And yet within three centuries of his crucifixion we 
 find this ancient idol enthroned upon the altar of 
 the Christian Church. What will explain or account 
 for this hideous changeling in the holy cradle? How 
 comes it that the God of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ became identified with Moloch, and the Babe 
 of Bethlehem with the child of a Philistine woman? 
 That the cross was interpreted to the conscience in 
 terms intelligible only to Levites and Shamans? It 
 is alas, only too easy to account for it. But before 
 entering upon the task to explain the presence of 
 this misconception of Christ's work it would be well, 
 if possible, to estimate the mischief it has wrought. 
 
S2 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Probably most Christian ministers will agree that it 
 is growing increasingly difficult for them to gain a 
 hearing for their Gospel. They will agree also that 
 those most difficult to win are the good men rather 
 than the bad ones. The late Professor Bruce, whose 
 orthodoxy none will question, has left on record these 
 strange words, " I am disposed to think that a great 
 and increasing portion of the moral worth of society 
 hes outside the Christian Church, separated from it 
 not by godlessness, but rather by exceptionally in- 
 tense moral earnestness. Many, in fact, have left 
 the Church in order to be Christians ". 
 
 ' The reasons commonly assigned for this arrest in 
 the progress of Christianity are no doubt real rea- 
 sons. They are such as, the enormous increase in 
 material progress and luxury; the bewildering ad- 
 vance in human knowledge; the restless commercial 
 activity which marks the epoch; the domination of 
 the physical sciences ; the stubborn moral obtuseness 
 of the masses, and such like. But over against these 
 stand the facts that the intellectual activity and 
 scepticism of the Western world of to-day is proba- 
 bly far less than that of the Greek world to which 
 the Apostles preached ; that the luxury and self-indul- 
 gence which encompass the Church to-day is not a 
 circumstance compared with that of the Roman 
 world of the Csesars; that the moral darkness of 
 society in our time is light itself by contrast with 
 the world in which primitive Christianity won its 
 triumphs. 
 
iMMORAL SALVATION 33 
 
 But there is this difference: the religion which 
 the Apostles preached was one whose moral ideas 
 commanded the homage of all whose souls it touched. 
 This remained true for centuries, even after the 
 bleeding Christ became its symbol. Low and un- 
 worthy as was the plan of salvation oifered to the 
 Gauls and Franks, the Lombards and Northmen, it 
 was still immeasurably above the ethical standards 
 of their own religions. It is a commonplace of his- 
 torical reflection that during late centuries mission- 
 ary zeal has accomplished smaller triumphs than 
 during the first centuries or in the Middle Ages. No 
 people has been converted to Christianity for a thou- 
 sand years. There are, no doubt, many explanations 
 of this. But there is one which the Christian man 
 cannot contemplate without pain. It is that the 
 moral ideals of men have overtaken and passed above 
 and beyond those contained in the popular presenta- 
 tions of Christianity. Endless labor has been ex- 
 pended to remove the intellectual obstacles in the 
 way. Is it time to remind ourselves that the real 
 difficulties are moral ones ? Not unworthy Christians 
 alone, but an unworthy Christ is the stumbling-block. 
 It is the bald fact that the dogma of the propitiatory 
 sacrifice of Christ, which has for so long been ex- 
 hibited as the central truth of Christianity, is now 
 rejected by a society whose moral sense has outgrown 
 it. The whole scheme of which it forms the base is 
 felt to be immoral as well as untrue. 
 
 The average man of to-day does not believe that 
 
34 . CHRISTIANITY 
 
 human nature is but the moral wreck and debris of 
 an Edenic man. He refuses to believe that guilt is 
 hereditary in any sense, though he knows well that 
 sin is. He believes that the law against the attainder 
 of blood is written in the constitution of the uni- 
 verse. He will not believe that a course of action 
 which would be wrong for a man can be right for 
 God. The human idea of justice demands that the 
 penalty shall fall upon the person who offends and 
 not upon some one in his stead, even though the 
 sovereign furnish the victim and the substitute be ever 
 so willing. At a certain stage of moral advancement 
 Zaleucus, king of the Locrians, could be admired and 
 revered. His law required that the adulterer should 
 lose his eyes. When his own son was convicted of 
 the offence, his father, to save the sanctity of the 
 law and at the same time allow his love to act, com- 
 manded that one of his son's eyes and one of his own 
 should be pulled out. The world of that day looked 
 upon Zaleucus as a miracle of goodness ; the world 
 of to-day can see in him only a fond and foolish 
 tyrant. 
 
 Religious thought no longer moves among govern- 
 mental ideas and legal fictions. It has become bio- 
 logical. In the processes of the spirit the watchwords 
 are not justification, but development; not salvation, 
 but character; its antitheses are not acquittal and 
 condemnation, but living and perishing. It is known 
 that hereditary evil is a force which works within 
 the life, and not a penal inheritance passed down 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 35 
 
 from an ancestor. It believes that righteousness is 
 salvation, and that nothing else can be. It believes 
 that righteousness in men is the wish of God, and 
 that it always was his wish, and they do not believe 
 that there is now or ever was in the nature or statutes 
 of God any obstacle which had first to be overcome 
 before men could be permitted to begin to be good, 
 or in order that God might think their goodness 
 good. To a world at this stage " vicarious " re- 
 demption cannot be preached. They will not accept 
 it at any price. If they be still assured that this is 
 really God's method, they will answer with John 
 Stuart Mill, " I will call no being good who is not 
 what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow- 
 man; and if such a being can sentence me to hell 
 for not so calling him, to hell I will go ". 
 
 The well-meant attempts to find analogies to the 
 doctrine in the experiences of life are rejected by 
 the intelligence and the conscience alike. Every one 
 knows that the good and innocent are always suffer- 
 ing for the faults of the bad. But every one knows 
 also that this suffering does not lessen but increases 
 the blame for the one who takes advantage from the 
 pain. Every martyr of a holy cause sacrifices him- 
 self deliberately, but that does not render innocent 
 the multitude who stone him. The mother starves 
 herself that her children may eat; the engineer goes 
 down to death with his hand on the reverse lever that 
 the passengers may be saved; the merchant pays his 
 friend's debts to save his friend's good name. But 
 
36 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 none of these have anything in common with that 
 interpretation of Christ's sufferings which we de- 
 nounce. In none of these things is there anything 
 like a transference of moral status or an " imputa- 
 tion " of righteousness. They are all, indeed, gath- 
 ered up within that eternal cross-bearing which is 
 the concomitant of loving. In the heart of their 
 blessed company is indeed the eternal Soldier, Martyr, 
 Mother-soul, who was crucified in God before the 
 world was. But they have nothing in common with 
 a victim bound upon an altar and immolated by a 
 priest. 
 
 Could any two conceptions be more utterly contra- 
 dictory than the classic sayings of Jesus, " If any man 
 would be my disciple let him deny himself and take 
 up his cross and follow me. Not every man who 
 sayeth unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the king- 
 dom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my 
 Father who is in heaven ", and the classic hymn, 
 
 " Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in thee; 
 Let the water and the blood 
 From thy side, a healing flood. 
 Be of sin the double cure. 
 Save from guilt and make me pure. 
 
 " Should my tears forever flow. 
 Should my zeal no languor know, 
 All for sin could not atone, 
 Thou must save and thou alone; 
 In my hand no price I bring, 
 Simply to thy cross I cling"? 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION SI 
 
 In popular speech the content of the dogma in 
 question is expressed by the term " Redemption ". 
 The word means to buy off or to buy back. It is a 
 commercial term. The captive held by Barbary 
 pirates or Sicilian brigands is bought and set free. 
 The Order of Redemptorists took its name from this. 
 They were redeemers. In Teutonic custom the con- 
 victed felon could compound for a price, so much for 
 a limb, so much for an eye, so much for a life. But 
 in what do these resemble the action of Bishop Bien- 
 venue which warranted him in saying to Jean Valjean, 
 " You are mine ; I have bought you " ? or that on 
 account of which the Apostle could say, " Ye are 
 not your own ; ye are bought with a price " ? Christ's 
 blood a ransom paid to the devil, as was for long 
 maintained? A price to an angry God to allay his 
 fury? The satisfaction of a bond held by an al- 
 mighty Shylock? Each and every one of these con- 
 tentions has been maintained by grave and respecta- 
 ble systemizers. Augustine, Anselm, Luther, Calvin. 
 These are great names. They have laid their hands 
 upon the souls of millions, dead and living. Sin- 
 cerely believing that they were preaching Christ, they 
 have propagated a gloomy paganism which has gone 
 far to render the cross of Christ of none effect. 
 
 It avails not to be told that these gross concep- 
 tions are misrepresentations and caricatures of the 
 doctrine of the Atonement as actually held and 
 taught by intelligent and well-informed Christians. 
 They are not caricatures; they are photographs. 
 
38 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Nor will it serve to say, with the late Archbishop 
 Magee, that, " so far as they have any color of 
 plausibility they rest upon the impassioned rhetoric 
 of the pulpit and the hymn-book ". Even if this 
 were so it must be remembered that the pulpit and 
 the hymn-book are the accredited vehicles upon which 
 religious teaching is bonie to the people. If their 
 burden is a false one it will be rightly taken for the 
 real one. No ; what the Archbishop truly calls " this 
 reversion to the worst ideas of pagan sacrifice, savor- 
 ing of the heathen temple and reeking of blood ", is 
 woven into the very fabric of Confessions, Articles, 
 and Liturgies. It is seriously defended by scientific 
 theology and has the imprimatur of the organized 
 Church. 
 
 We return now to the question of how to account 
 for the existence and persistence of a presentation of 
 Christ which the moral sense rejects. I have said 
 that it is only too easy to account for, and so it is, so 
 far as concerns the historic law which operates in such 
 a case. As in commerce a debased currency always 
 tends to drive a precious one out of circulation, so in 
 philosophy and religion a low conception can hold 
 the field long against a noble one. This is what has 
 occurred in the Christian kingdom. But this brings 
 us to the place where we should discover when, and 
 where, and how, the spiritual cuiTency of Christ be- 
 came thus debased; when and how his coin came to 
 be stamped on one side with a sacrificial bull, and 
 on the other with a mitred priest. 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 39 
 
 To begin with, let us ask the plain question, — Did 
 Jesus conceive of himself as a propitiatory sacrifice, 
 or of his work as an expiation? The only answer 
 possible is, Clearly he did not. With the exception of 
 two phrases attributed to him, and which we will 
 look at more carefully after a little, there is not the 
 shadow of a suggestion that such an idea ever en- 
 tered his mind. And there is everything in his life 
 to show that the whole circle of ideas in which this 
 conception is imbedded was abhorrent to him. It is 
 true that the record of his teaching is fragmentary 
 and incomplete, but there is quite enough in the Gos- 
 pels to show what he believed himself to be, and to 
 be doing. If the primal and controlling purpose of 
 his existence had been to propitiate the wrath of God 
 by means of ct painful life and death, surely he would 
 somewhere have said so. But it is the one thing 
 which he does not say. He has much to say about 
 himself and his mission. He calls himself a Light, 
 to reveal God and illuminate the dark places of life. 
 He is a Shepherd, leading a flock, guarding it against 
 rapacious beasts, feeding it, seeking the mavericks, 
 carrying the lambs in his bosom. He is a Physician, 
 diagnosing the ills of men, precribing medicaments 
 for their cure, laying balm upon their sores. He is 
 a Tribune of the people, disturbing the world's dull 
 and ignoble peace, setting a man at variance against 
 his father, and the daughter against the mother. He 
 is Bread, wholesome for the soul's food, and needful 
 to sustain the soul's life. He is Water, to assuage 
 
40 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the soul's thirst and lave the heart's fever. He is 
 Leaven, to stir the ferment in the world's sodden 
 lump which shall save it from decay. He is Salt, 
 to keep the world wholesome. He is the Vine, the 
 Door, the Strong Man, the Bridegroom, the Judge. 
 But he does not call himself the Victim or the Priest. 
 
 That he expected and intended to die, is plain 
 enough. But he nowhere placed upon his suffering 
 and death the interpretation which it afterward 
 came to bear. In all his sayings which have been 
 preserved, he gives the clear impression that he took 
 his privation and pain and death as being " in the 
 day's work ", incidental and unavoidable necessities 
 of the task which he had undertaken, but not as the 
 task itself. They were the price which he had to pay 
 for being what he was. But there is no intimation 
 that he attributed to them any sacrificial or propi- 
 tiatory value. 
 
 To the above statement there are just two ex- 
 ceptions. What we have to say about them may 
 best be introduced by showing them in their context. 
 
 "Then came to him. the mother of Zebedee's children with 
 her sons, worshipping, and desiring a certain thing of him. 
 And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith. Grant 
 that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right, and 
 the other on thy left in thy kingdom. But Jesus answered 
 and said unto her. Ye know not what ye ask. . . . The 
 princes of the gentiles exercise dominion, and they that are 
 great exercise authority. But it shall not be so among you; 
 but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your 
 minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 41 
 
 be your servant; even as the Son of man came, not to be 
 ministered to but to minister; and to give his life a ransom 
 for many "j 
 
 and 
 
 " And as they were eating Jesus took bread and blessed it 
 and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, saying. Take; eat; this 
 is my body. And he took the cup and gave thanks, and gave it 
 to them saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of 
 the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission 
 of sins "» 
 
 The significant phrases are those in italics, " to 
 give his life a ransom ", and " blood shed for the 
 remission of sins ". Now, let it be well kept in mind 
 that these are the only sayings attributed to Jesus 
 which give any color to the contention that he re- 
 garded himself in the light of a propitiatory sacri- 
 fice. And let it be further remembered that they 
 are not only foreign to but directly opposed to the 
 whole tenor of his teachings. But they are quite 
 in keeping with a theory concerning Christ which grew 
 up during the fifty years between his death and the 
 time when the Gospels were written. Within that 
 period arose the Gospel of the Infancy; the circum- 
 stantial but contradictory accounts of the Resur- 
 rection ; the twisting of the events of his hfe to fit the 
 requirements of Hebrew prophecy. All these later 
 ideas were antedated in the written Gospels. In the 
 phrases before us it would seem that we have an in- 
 stance of the same thing done in the interest of theol- 
 ogy. In each case the context shows plainly that the 
 phrases are foreign to the matter in hand. Jesus' 
 
42 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 argument is in each case complete without them. 
 One cannot but feel that they do not belong there. 
 The Gospels are conversations and traditions com- 
 mitted to writing fifty years after the event. If 
 during that time a theory concerning the Master's 
 life and work gained currency we may expect that 
 it would show itself in shaping the written story. 
 That such a theory did become elaborated during that 
 period we shall see. It appears more reasonable, 
 therefore, to believe that the two phrases " ransom " 
 and " remission " are placed in Jesus' mouth by a 
 later tradition than that they were used by him, and 
 intended to present a conception of himself which 
 is irreconcilable with his own plain words. 
 
 The Acts of the Apostles contain the only record 
 we have of the terms in which the earliest ambassadors 
 of Jesus presented his Gospel. The book gives a 
 brief but coherent resume of four speeches by St. 
 Peter at Jerusalem and one at Cseserea ; a conversa- 
 tion of St. Philip; a long speech of Stephen; the 
 proceedings and discussions of a Council; and a 
 dozen speeches of St. Paul, delivered at various 
 places, and to all sorts and conditions of people. In 
 it we have Christ interpreted by his earliest inter- 
 preters. Here, if anywhere, we ought to be able to 
 discern what the men commissioned by himself to 
 present him actually thought about him. Now the 
 significant fact is that not until we meet the very 
 latest speeches of St. Paul do we meet the intimation 
 that his suflPering and death had any sacrificial value. 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 4.3 
 
 It is true that phrases occur upon which that inter- 
 pretation has been put, but it is equally plain that the 
 interpretation is a shadow thrown backward from a 
 later time. By the evangelic and catholic theologian 
 their discourses must needs be pronounced lacking in 
 the vital and essential element of the Gospel of Christ. 
 It is to the wonderful man Paul that the world owes 
 the first coherent rationale of Jesus' career. The 
 group of immediate personal friends who survived 
 the Master were neither in the mood, nor were they 
 the type of men, to set down in reasoned form the 
 experience which had transformed their lives. They 
 were still under the spell of his compelling person- 
 ality, and they were overwhelmed by the new-found 
 hope of immortality brought to them by his appear- 
 ance after his death. The hope made new men of them 
 and they were confident it would do the same for all 
 who should hear of it. They preached the " Gospel 
 of the Resurrection ". And so did Paul, more force- 
 fully than they all. For a time he preached nothing 
 else. But presently he began to reason upon what 
 lay behind the new-bom hope. He therefore found 
 in the " Expiation " a ground cleared for the Resur- 
 rection. Little by little the emphasis is transferred 
 from the Resurrection to the Crucifixion. Then more 
 and more the Crucifixion is Identified with the Hebrew 
 and ethnic conception of Sacrifice. Finally the Resur- 
 rection falls into the background, and his thoughts 
 take on a crimson hue. Three interpretations of 
 Christ lie superimposed in his system, biological, 
 
U CHRISTIANITY 
 
 legal, sacrificial, but in the end the last comes to 
 dominate. 
 
 It is not surprising that this interpretation gained 
 currency. The early Christians, whether Roman, 
 Greek, or Jew, came to the new religion with precon- 
 ceptions and habits of thought already formed. It is 
 not possible for any one anywhere to disentangle 
 himself from old beliefs while he takes in new truth. 
 The most he can do is to readjust such of his old 
 convictions as lie in immediate contact with the new 
 one. But underneath these there is the whole con- 
 tents of his mind. The new truth sinks down among 
 these, and is colored by them while it transforms 
 them. When he attempts to utter new truth he can 
 only do it in language and imagery which he already 
 possesses. It requires long time for the new idea 
 either to work over the old ideas to its uses, or to 
 escape from them altogether by building up a new 
 imagery about itself. The truth of Christ could not 
 escape these inevitable conditions. He lived and died 
 in Judea, under Roman law, and his life was construed 
 by Roman Jews. In being transmitted through their 
 minds it received a coloring which it still retains. 
 The Great Surrender was pictured in Levitical terms. 
 The Light of the world shone out through the stained 
 window of the temple at Jerusalem. This refraction 
 and discoloration must be allowed for by a world 
 which would see the Sun in his glory. Paul, a Roman 
 citizen as well as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, min- 
 gled his pigments in colors borne from Roman law 
 
IMMORAL SALVATION 45 
 
 and Hebrew sacrifice. One could as well construct 
 a zoology as a gospel in these terms. Christian 
 thought has been bewildered and Christian instinct 
 wellnigh defeated by this logically coherent but empty 
 scheme. Christ's terms are biological ; this one's are 
 legal. And Christianity is essentially a life process 
 and not a commercial transaction. 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 
 
" It is indeed a strange and significant thing: so much 
 speculation about Christ, so little earnest inquiry into 
 his actual mind; so much knowledge of what the creeds 
 or confessions, the liturgies or psalmodies of the Church 
 said; so little knowledge of the historical person or con- 
 struction of the original documents. It is still more sig- 
 nificant that the men most intent on the revival of reli- 
 gion through the revival of the Church were the very- 
 men who seemed least to conceive the need of the return 
 to Christ. They were possessed to find and restore the 
 Church of the Fathers, and to the Fathers they ap- 
 pealed; but there is no suggestion that Christ as the 
 founder supplied the determinative idea of his own 
 Church ". — Fairbairn. 
 
in 
 
 THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 
 
 If, then, the interpretation of Jesus which we have 
 just examined be dismissed as an offence at once to 
 the intelligence and the conscience, what then is his 
 real role in the drama of humanity? To this, I reply 
 as follows: — Christianity takes its rise not from the 
 life or the death of Jesus, but from his " resurrec- 
 tion ". It was not until after that event that his 
 personality assumed any world-wide significance. If 
 that had not taken place, his life, assuming it to have 
 been otherwise exactly as recorded, would not have 
 been of significance. It would have been strange and 
 that is all. He would no doubt have held place in 
 human memory only as a greater Confucius or Soc- 
 rates. It was the " man risen from the dead " who 
 arrested the world's attention, and it noticed him 
 solely on that account. 
 
 Let me say here that if any one chooses to take the 
 position that the alleged occurrence is so inherently 
 incredible and impossible that even to consider it is 
 folly, I have nothing to say to him, except something 
 like this: — ^We realize as fully as you do that it is 
 contrary to all human experience, and that probably 
 
 49 
 
50 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 no amount of evidence would establish it at the bar 
 of science. But we realize also that human experi- 
 ence is not final. What you and we alike call the 
 " order of Nature " is^ after all, no more or less than 
 God's routine way of doing things. It has no dynamic 
 in itself. It can neither cause nor hinder. It is at 
 least possible that in the experience of a race a 
 critical point may be reached where something out 
 of the common ought to happen. If so we may be 
 sure it will happen. All that can be said against 
 the event in question is that it stands alone and iso- 
 lated among phenomena. What then? Cannot a 
 fact be a fact until there be another like it.f^ As to 
 this fact we contend there is abundant reason for its 
 being. There is also reason to believe that it does 
 not stand alone. 
 
 The essential nature of the fact has been long 
 obscured by a crowd of pious imaginations which 
 have overlaid it. Let it be plainly stated that there 
 is here no question of the resuscitation of a man who 
 was dead. It is not a question of a body but of a 
 spirit. The body which hung upon the cross was 
 laid in the tomb, and no doubt stayed there. The 
 late stories in the Gospels of the empty tomb, the 
 earthquake, the great stone, the angelic appearances, 
 and so on, are so contradictory as to be in-econcila- 
 ble. They were not written, in any case, until fifty 
 years after the occurrence, after every contemporary 
 was dead. Like the prodigies of the Infancy, they ap- 
 pear to be the product of a naive piety which thought 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 51 
 
 to make the birth, life, death, and resurrection of their 
 dear Lord more credible by gathering about them 
 the marvels which were to that age the kind of evi- 
 dence which told most. For our time such " evi- 
 dence " is only an embarrassment. And there is no 
 need for it. To prove that Jesus appeared to sundry 
 persons after his death it is of no consequence 
 whether his tomb was empty or filled. The affair 
 does not concern the body, but that, whatever it is, 
 which survives the body. No police examination of 
 a grave can affect the case. It is reported that the 
 late Professor James promised that he would, if pos- 
 sible, show himself after his death to certain of his 
 friends. Suppose his promise to have been fulfilled, 
 is it conceivable that they would have thought of 
 testing the reality of his appearance by an inspec- 
 tion of his grave? They would not look for a body. 
 All that they would demand would be to be able to 
 identify the thing which should appear with their 
 friend who had died. 
 
 What it was that St. Paul saw on the Damascus 
 road, that Mary Magdalene saw in the garden, that 
 the two disciples saw on the road to Emmaus, that 
 sundry friends of the dead Jesus saw at different 
 times, who can say? The grosser accretions to their 
 story which have crept later into the Gospels, only 
 becloud the reality. The heart of the matter is that 
 they saw something which transformed their despair 
 into confidence, their grief into rejoicing, and 
 through them brought into humanity a conception 
 
5^ CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of human life which has transformed the world. This 
 something is the Resurrection. 
 
 The point in Jesus' career at which he comes into 
 relation with all human life is after he had died and 
 was alive again. Even his disciples who had known 
 him most intimately were obliged to make his ac- 
 quaintance anew. He whom we seek to know is not 
 the historical personage localized in a Roman prov- 
 ince in the time of any Caesar, but the transcendental 
 personage, of infinitely " wide discourse, looking be- 
 fore and after ". The cry " back to Jesus " which 
 has arisen sporadically at so many places in Chris- 
 tendom of late years, voices a real and justifiable 
 longing. It expresses the impatient feeling that 
 Christ has in some way been lost in Christianity ; that 
 he has been overlaid and hidden within theological 
 definitions, thrust out of sight behind ecclesiastical 
 organizations, silenced amid the strife of tongues. It 
 is certainly true that something has interposed be- 
 tween Christ and the great world. A religion that 
 he meant to be so plain that the wayfaring man might 
 not err therein, has come to be regarded as complex, 
 abstruse, obscure. 
 
 But while this longing is intelligible and praise- 
 worthy, one is bound to acknowledge that it is miss- 
 ing its aim. The fact is, the pilgrims have gone 
 back in search of the wrong Christ. During the last 
 half century a wealth of learning, labor, and even 
 genius have been expended in the attempt to repro- 
 duce the historic personage and make him real. The 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 53 
 
 Holy Land has been explored, studied, photographed, 
 in its minutest detail. The naive story in the Gospels 
 has been drawn out into " Lives of Christ " by the 
 score. His antecedents have been traced in Jewish 
 heredity. His dress, food, manners, speech, sur- 
 roundings, have been reconstructed with infinite de- 
 votion, and no doubt, with substantial accuracy. 
 More information concerning the setting of his life 
 is taught every day in mission Sunday schools than 
 Athanasius or Paul possessed. But when all is done 
 the earnest man is not much less bewildered and 
 hopeless among these antiquaries than was his an- 
 cestors among fine-spun theologies. They cannot see 
 the forest for the trees. 
 
 The life of the man Jesus does become of absorb- 
 ing interest, but only in its proper order and for its 
 proper purpose. Not until the " risen " Christ en- 
 gaged the world's attention did it even try to re- 
 member, much less to record the story, of his life. 
 Then the devotion of a too creative memory recorded 
 too much. But the belief in it has. In sober verity, 
 wrought the most momentous result in human his- 
 tory. It transformed man's estimate of himself and 
 of God. The fact was the essential content of the 
 Apostle's evangel. Their message was not atonement, 
 or redemption, or heaven or hell, but the announce- 
 ment that a good man had been identified by them 
 alive, after they had seen him dead and burled, and 
 that he had assured them that the same possibility was 
 open to any man who would seek it in the right way. 
 
54 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Those who could comprehend the " good news " wel- 
 comed it with the same kind of awed enthusiasm as 
 would one to-day who should be offered a means of 
 adding fifty, a hundred, a thousand years to his nat- 
 ural life. Their argument was that Jesus had made 
 an experiment in human living, and had demonstrated 
 in his own person that death need not defeat life, 
 and that he had become a kind of first-fruits of an 
 immortal harvest which might be abundant if men 
 so chose. It is no doubt quite impossible for us to 
 whom this is no longer news to understand with 
 what eagerness this message was hailed, or how over- 
 whelmingly it took possession of the minds and im- 
 aginations of men who before had no expectation of 
 future life of any kind. Indeed the fear of death 
 and hopelessness in its presence is a characteristic 
 of the ancient world. Lucretius and Cicero in vain 
 wrote labored treatises to reason its terrors away. 
 The epitaphs on a thousand tombs register the flip- 
 pant melancholy or the profound hopelessness of 
 their grief for their dead. 
 
 The original appeal of the Gospel was to the su- 
 preme aspiration of all living beings, the " lust of 
 living ". It is little wonder that the first title ap- 
 plied to Christ was the " Lord and Giver of Life ". 
 And it is as little wonder that the appeal was so im- 
 measurably more successful than the sordid one to 
 the fear of damnation which has been made for now 
 these so many centuries! 
 
 But having come so far we must now face the ques- 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 55 
 
 tion : — What and who was and is the Christ whom we 
 believe to be superhuman? The first converts appar- 
 ently made little or no effort to estimate his nature. 
 They were content to take the Gospel as it was prof- 
 fered. They believed that if they lived according to 
 the " Way " announced they would, like him, survive 
 their own deaths. The common notion now current 
 that men are naturally immortal in any case was 
 unknown to them. They were convinced that by his 
 " way " only could they outlast death, and that by 
 any other way they would perish out of being. The 
 steadfastness of the early Christians in the face of 
 obloquy, persecution, and torture has long been a 
 gratuitous puzzle to historians. Of all the ingenious 
 explanations, marshalled by Gibbon and his like, for 
 the marvellous spread of Christianity in the first two 
 centuries, this sufficient one is about the only one 
 omitted. One may believe that they were mistaken 
 in their conviction — ^but wherever one did hold it it 
 rendered him proof against all assault. For what 
 signified a few days' hunger, or a few hours on the 
 cross, or a few moments in the fangs of the lions, so 
 long as endurance meant endless existence, and sur- 
 render meant falling back into a few years longer of 
 life, at best, with annihilation at the end of it ? Life 
 is not at any time so well worth the living, that one 
 could easily be frightened back into it when he had 
 the chance to exchange it for one which he believed 
 to be far better, and which could not well be worse. 
 The scanty allusions to the movement in secular 
 
56 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 history make it plain that the outside world looked 
 upon it as a pitiful delusion. Alternately they ad- 
 mired the Christians' fortitude, and were incensed 
 at their stubbornness. Meanwhile the belief spread, 
 and all weapons against it were impotent. But it was 
 not until from forty to sixty years after Jesus' dis- 
 appearance that any rationale of this new life for men 
 was attempted. Then, first of all, St. Paul under- 
 takes the task. He explains however in terms which 
 are most difficult to construe. Never was a more 
 exasperating expounder than he. He passes from 
 scientific precision to vivid metaphor, and thence to 
 emotional rhapsody, and round again through the 
 same circle, so that one is hard put to it to follow. 
 His favorite formulae are something hke these: — ^the 
 Christian " is in Christ ", or Christ " is in him " ; or 
 both are " bound up together in his dying and rising 
 again " ; or " his life is hid with Christ in God " ; and 
 such like. Strictly speaking, it is not a rationale 
 of the phenomena at all, but endless ways of saying 
 that Christ, by his steadfast persistence in his 
 " way ", attained to the resurrection of the dead, and 
 that any other through the same " way " may attain 
 the same goal. 
 
 It is quite plain, however, that the matter could 
 not remain in that shape. Human nature always 
 craves the reason of things. The Church was now 
 numerous and widespread, but it was almost entirely 
 of people who knew Jesus only at second hand. The 
 spell of his immediate presence had lifted. Who, and 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 57 
 
 what, is this person into whose hands we have com- 
 mitted our existence? It is patent that the Gospels 
 were written in answer to this demand. To see the 
 Christ of the Gospels it is not needful to inquire 
 minutely into their date or authorship, or about their 
 accuracy in details. These are questions for scholar- 
 ship, and are in their place important. But the 
 main thing has been settled long ago. Every one 
 admits that they are memorabilia, collected generally 
 from his contemporaries and sympathetic friends. If 
 their portrait of him does not show up his features 
 in its bold outlines we might better lay it aside. We 
 may also, if we choose, disregard for the present the 
 stories of the Infancy. All his followers made his 
 acquaintance at first as a grown man. Their opinion 
 of him was formed before they thought to inquire con- 
 cerning his birth and parentage. 
 
 In the Synoptic Gospels we have the story as it 
 was told at the demand of a people who already ac- 
 cepted and lived by the fact of the Resurrection. 
 Without that belief it would not have been written, 
 and without that belief brought to it it would have 
 been incredible and unintelligible. All four Gospels 
 really begin the story at the same point. They date 
 its commencement from the time of a religious 
 awakening which had place in Palestine in the 
 fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius, while Pontius 
 Pilate was Procurator of Judea, Annas and Caiaphas 
 being High Priests at Jerusalem. The stage was held 
 at first by the stern and picturesque prophet, John 
 
58 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the " Baptizer ". Then a Jewish carpenter steps to 
 the centre, and John makes his exit. The biog- 
 raphers thereafter confine themselves to his move- 
 ments. This is the original story, and in Mark, the 
 oldest, it stands thus. But in each of the other Gos- 
 pels to the drama is prefixed a diff*erent prologue. 
 By Matthew the genealogy of the central character, 
 from Abraham down, is hung up against the scenes, 
 together with an account of his parentage and birth. 
 By Luke a diff'erent genealogy is posted, along with 
 a different story of the Infancy. John prefixes a 
 divine Prologue, after the manner of the Greek 
 tragedies. 
 
 When we study it the problem may be stated thus : 
 — What did Jesus conceive himself to be? What did 
 he conceive himself to be doing? What did his biog- 
 raphers believe him to be? Let us take this last in- 
 quiry first. It is plain that before they wrote the 
 first word they held him to be a man in some way 
 apart from common humanity. In this opinion those 
 for whom they wrote shared. But just what they did 
 hold him to be is not plain. The strong impression 
 given is that they did not know. That dogmatic 
 certitude, that assumption that everything can be ex- 
 haustively stated, is absent from the first three Gos- 
 pels, and is only present in the Fourth, which is not 
 a biography, but a theological treatise. A certain 
 tender hesitation, a reverent doubtfulness, if one may 
 say so, marks the attitude of the disciples. That 
 feeling is itself, perhaps, the best indication of what 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 59 
 
 they thought about him. Two things manifestly im- 
 pressed them chiefly — the marvellous spiritual il- 
 lumination of his words, and the marvellous power 
 he exhibited in dealing with certain natural forces. 
 The first of these is but illy defined as " sinlessness ". 
 Faultlessness is but a tame and negative quality, and 
 they make but little of it. They represent him as not 
 only impeccably good, but dynamically good. The 
 wisdom which they remembered in him was not at all 
 the wisdom of the sage or the philosopher, but that 
 deeper wisdom to which the heart responds. To this 
 end they preserve his fugitive sayings, his more 
 formal sermons, his parables, his apothegms, his pro- 
 found and tender talks with his intimates, his answers 
 to inquirers, his retorts to challengers. 
 
 They recount his healing sick persons, restoring 
 sight to the blind, strengthening the impotent, cleans- 
 ing lepers, and, in one instance, bringing the dead to 
 life. The surprising thing is that they were not sur- 
 prised. They make no vaunt of these marvels, or of 
 him for their sakes. They are frank, on the contrary, 
 to record that he thought of these powers but slightly, 
 never used them to his own advantage, used them 
 at all reluctantly, and always held them subordinate 
 to his main purpose. Nothing could be presented 
 more unlike the vulgar wonder-worker, an Abognotus 
 or a Cagliostro. To them he was plainly not a 
 wonder-worker, but a person from whom on other ac- 
 counts one might expect marvels. The miracles and 
 mighty works do not interrupt the narrative, nor 
 
60 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 encumber it. Tliej are of the substance of it and 
 render it coherent. To the biographers he was at 
 least superhuman. But when they were challenged, 
 as they were more than once, to speak out what they 
 thought of him, they hesitated. Either they were not 
 certain, or they had no terms in which to express 
 it. Most of them were content to say that he was 
 a " prophet ". 
 
 Now, the prophet was a character with whose idea 
 they were at home. He was one who, in addition to 
 his qualities as a man, possessed certain other en- 
 dowments in virtue of which he was able, within lim- 
 its, to produce phenomena impossible to other men. 
 For a while this formula seemed to be sufficient for 
 the case; but before long it was seen to be so mani- 
 festly inadequate that it was abandoned. A few 
 thought of him as " that Prophet ", i.e., the legendary 
 seer and wonder-worker of tradition and religious 
 folk-lore. But this notion gained little acceptance. 
 It fitted him so illy that it could not cling. There 
 was, indeed, extant a character which would describe 
 him, but for a long time they hesitated to use it. It 
 was that of the Jewish " Messiah ". This was the 
 title of a personage held by the Jews in supremest 
 reverence, but whose nature and qualities were most 
 vague and confused. It is not possible to this day 
 to find out with certainty what the Jew means or 
 meant by the Messiah. Rabbi gainsays Rabbi, and 
 historian disagrees with historian. One thing can be 
 said, however, about every presentation of the char- 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 61 
 
 acter. He was to be a person higher than man, and 
 lower than God. He possessed some of the attributes 
 of both and not all of either, and had immediate 
 relations with both. It is not surprising that this 
 title was fixed upon Jesus, or that it is the name by 
 which, in its Greek form, the Christ, he is known 
 to this day. It satisfied better than any other term 
 could the immediate craving for a definition. For 
 that purpose it is indeed inadequate, but it was the 
 best and truest available. Nor is damage wrought 
 by its use save when ill-informed piety attempts to 
 shrink the Son of God within the compass of an old 
 Jewish conception. This is the highest point reached 
 by the three first Gospels in their interpretation of 
 Jesus. He was a " prophet " ; or he was " Elijah " ; 
 or he was the " Messiah " ; and beyond this they do 
 not go. 
 
 We now ask. What did Jesus think himself to be? 
 and to be doing? No one reading the Gospels can 
 miss seeing that he regarded himself as one who had 
 a definite and distinct purpose to accomplish. There 
 is no feeling about or waiting upon circumstances. 
 Whatever his task was, it is evident that he believed 
 that if he did not accomplish it it would never be 
 done. 
 
 There are two paths generally open to the great 
 and sympathetic soul touched by the world's wrongs. 
 One is to teach righteousness, the other is to 
 organize righteousness ; to be either a preacher or 
 a reformer. Jesus chose neither. He added little or 
 
62 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 nothing to the world's stock of theoretical morality. 
 Probably all liis noblest sayings may be matched from 
 Socrates or Moses, from Seneca or Gautama. The 
 great company of preachers has served the world well, 
 but Jesus is not among them. No more did he con- 
 ceive his task to be to reform society. God knows, 
 the social, political, and economic order among which 
 he lived was rotten enough. It was a drunken, lust- 
 ful, cruel, and unjust world. The field for a reformer 
 vv'as ripe to the harvest. There were laborers ready, 
 — not many, but very willing. A crusade might have 
 been organized against the palpable wrongs, evils, and 
 oppressions of hfe. Had he put himself at the head 
 of it, with his unparalleled powers, inspired it with 
 his indomitable courage, inflamed it with his divine 
 enthusiasm, one might suppose it would have swept 
 east and west from Galilee and cleansed the world. 
 Indeed the thought did come to him, and tempted him 
 mightily. All the kingdoms of the earth lay open to 
 him, but he deliberately turned away from that path. 
 If, then, his metier was neither to teach men good- 
 ness nor to change their environment, what was \i? 
 
 Two words dominate all his speech, — " life " and 
 " death ". With these two phenomena, which are 
 really one, he concerned himself entirely. His prob- 
 lem was. What can be done with the individual exist- 
 ence.? Can it be happily extended beyond the term 
 which we call " natural ".? If so, how.?' The eternal 
 absurdity is that men die. The higher the individual 
 rises in the scale of being the more he revolts from 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 63 
 
 the necessity. It puzzles his understanding ; it stulti- 
 fies his consciousness. What he really shrinks from 
 is not the act of dying nor the fear of anytliing be- 
 yond, but the instinctive horror of being dead, — 
 
 "That sense of ruin which is worse than pain. 
 That masterful negation and collapse 
 Of all that makes me man; as though I bent 
 Over the dizzy brink 
 Of some sheer, infinite descent. 
 Or worse, as though 
 
 Down, down, forever I was falling through 
 The solid framework of created things. 
 And needs must sink 
 Into the vast abyss ". 
 
 This inescapable horror is the unique experience 
 of man. He can disguise it, accept it, jest at it, ig- 
 nore it, damn it, according to his mood, but it is, after 
 all, the determining force in his action. It increases 
 just in proportion as his nature climbs and expands. 
 The brute knows it not. The brute-like man is 
 touched by it little if at all. But in measure as the 
 individual consciousness deepens and expands and en- 
 tangles itself with ever extending relationships, it is 
 the more oppressed by this brutal surd. 
 
 To this primal instinct of being Jesus addresses 
 himself. Whatever he accomplished he effected here. 
 His problem and his task were biological. But he 
 takes it up at the point where the human biologist 
 lays it down. Is the individual life composed of 
 such stuff, or does it contain within it such qualities. 
 
64 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 or can it be moulded to such potencies that it can 
 win through the barrier called Death? This is the 
 question he asked; and the answer is Cliristianity ; 
 and nothing else is. 
 
 At this point a strenuous and sustained effort is 
 necessary to empty our thought of some persistent 
 misconceptions. It is indeed most difficult for us 
 at this day to attach the same meaning which he did 
 to the words which he used. In religious phraseology 
 the antithesis " living and dying ", " surviving and 
 perishing ", " salvation and destruction ", have been 
 for so long time used in secondary and metaphorical 
 senses that it is hard to realize that in his mouth they 
 had their plain and literal significance. His theme 
 was not the happiness of two contrasted kinds of 
 future existence, but existence itself. Can a man in 
 any wise overcome death, and if so, how.^^ Of course 
 such an inquiry must lead at times to a point where 
 the quality of the new existence comes into considera- 
 tion, but this never engages his attention long, and is 
 always subordinate to the main theme. 
 
 He pronounces at the outset that the thing is pos- 
 sible, but difficult. He introduces it under the cate- 
 gory of a " Kingdom ". But the moment that word 
 is pronounced we have to be on our guard lest we 
 miss its meaning. He uses the term in its biological 
 and not its political sense. In other connections we 
 are familiar with that use. We speak of the mineral 
 Kingdom, the animal Kingdom, the vegetable King- 
 dom. In no other sense does he use the word for 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 65 
 
 the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a 
 biological classification. Had naturalists and men of 
 science formulated Christian theology, instead of 
 metaphysicians and jurists, the world would have 
 been spared an incalculable confusion. For it is the 
 naturalist's legitimate field. But ages ago the truth 
 of Christ was interpreted in terms of law instead 
 of biology. The result has been that the very words 
 of the Master have had fixed upon them an unnatural 
 meaning from which it will be long before they re- 
 cover. His language, however, is more intelligible 
 than it has been at any time in the past. In the 
 great cycle of human thought the physical sciences 
 have brought into common use the mental forms into 
 which his words fit. 
 
 " Except ye be born again ye cannot enter into 
 the Kingdom ". This is the heart of Jesus' message. 
 But this " being reborn " is, to his view, not a 
 metaphor but a scientific statement. Birth is a 
 strange thing; it is an epoch in the progress of an 
 individual life. It is not the commencement of it. 
 The subject of it has reached the end of a stage of 
 development before he can be born. The higher in 
 the scale of being, the longer and more complete is 
 this preliminary stage. Birth is only the entrance 
 upon a new phase of being. Jesus does not present 
 the new birth as the beginning of the soul, but as 
 a radical change in its relationships. It cannot be 
 born again until it has been born once. Nor does 
 either the first or the second birth guarantee the 
 
66 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 continuance in life of the thing born; it only gives 
 it opportunity. His dictum is that there is a Way 
 whereby the natural life of an individual creature can 
 be so modified as to become endowed with immortal 
 quality. The new creatures thus produced — their 
 origin, their laws, their phenomena, their fortunes, 
 he includes in a new Kingdom. He points out that, 
 as might be expected, the entrance into this new 
 kingdom differs in essential features from that into 
 the kingdom next below. It is difficult to achieve, 
 cannot be achieved at all without strenuous effort. 
 In this Kingdom the pangs of parturition are borne 
 by the child for himself. The gate is strait and the 
 path narrow that leadeth into life, and relatively few 
 find it. He asserts that the purpose of his presence 
 has to do with this process, — that men might have 
 life, life more abounding and persistent than they 
 now possess. 
 
 It is a threadbare dictum of the great Synthetic 
 Philosopher that life is conditioned upon adaptation 
 to environment. Eternal life is conditioned upon 
 the discovery of the environing God. This is the 
 open secret of Jesus. The individual is mortal; but 
 he may reach to immortality for himself, and pre- 
 sumably for his offspring, if he follow the law for 
 that case made and provided. This process he calls 
 the Way of Life. To exhibit the truth of all this 
 would be to quote substantially the larger part of 
 the New Testament. It all revolves about the new 
 life of the individual man. It widens out into the 
 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 67 
 
 thought of a society composed of such twice-born 
 souls. It contemplates the action and interaction be- 
 tween such a society and the natural world. It 
 anticipates the ultimate dominion of such a type of 
 man. It is the Novum Organon for the Human Race. 
 All his sayings, arguments, metaphors, parables, 
 aphorisms, are dominated by this controlling princi- 
 ple. His imagery is drawn almost exclusively from 
 the processes and phenomena of life. " God so loved 
 the world that whosoever believeth on him should not 
 perish but have aeonian life ". " That which is bom 
 of the flesh is flesh, but that which is bom of the 
 spirit is spirit ". " Except a man be born again 
 he cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven ". " He that 
 hearkeneth unto me and hath confidence in him that 
 sent me hath aeonian life in himself, and moves not 
 to destruction, but hath passed from death into 
 living ". 
 
 The world was never so ready to comprehend Christ 
 as it is to-day. One might say reverently that Jesus 
 was the first Evolutionist. The question before us 
 is not a " theological " one at all. It is the matter 
 of the origin and phenomena of the highest life 
 extant. It differs from the naturalist's ordinary 
 problem in that the study of this form leads the 
 student toward the future and not back toward the 
 past. It is the stage of evolutionary progress at 
 which the highest extant being now is. From the 
 primordial slime life is built upward, each form being 
 the scaffolding to support a farther advance, until 
 
68 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 is reached the final product which we call Man. Evo- 
 lution at every stage requires fit material upon which 
 to work. Jesus finds the material for the New Man 
 in the nature of the one which now is. His estimate 
 of the quality of human nature is shown by the use 
 to which he puts it. He conceives of it, not as 
 " fallen ", but as undeveloped. He called himself the 
 Son of Man because he wished no mistake to be made 
 in the mMter. If his Way should prove successful 
 for himself and reach its goal, it would be made 
 plain that the path would be open to any man who 
 would follow him. Later on we will have to face 
 the question as to how the individual being of this 
 new Order is produced. But before doing so we must 
 look farther at the personality whom St. Paul calls 
 " the Second Man, the Lord from Heaven ". 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 
 
" Conjecture of the worker by the work; 
 Is there strength there? Enough; Intelligence? 
 Ample; but goodness in a like degree? 
 
 Not to the human eye in the present state. 
 An isoscele deficient in the base. 
 What lacks then of perfection fit for God 
 But just the instance which this tale supplies 
 Of love without a limit? So is strength, 
 So is intelligence; let love be so. 
 Unlimited in its self-sacrifice, 
 Then is the tale true, and God shows complete. 
 
 Beyond the tale I reach into the dark, 
 Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands ". 
 Browning, " The Ring and the Book ", 
 
IV 
 THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 
 
 There is something strangely repellent in the con- 
 ventional formularies which express the Christian 
 doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. The so-called 
 Athanasian Creed may well be taken for an example. 
 It is true that it has never been officially accepted by 
 the Church, but it may be said that it is the habit of 
 orthodoxy to esteem it the most complete statement 
 of the doctrine extant. If the Christian multitude 
 balk at it it is on account of the hardness of their 
 hearts. 
 
 " For the right faith is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son 
 
 of God, is God and man; 
 God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before all worlds; 
 
 and Man, of the substance of his Mother, born in the world; 
 Perfect God, and perfect Man; of a reasonable soul and 
 
 human flesh subsisting; equal to his Father as touching his 
 
 Godhead ; 
 And inferior to his Father as touching his Manhood. 
 Who, although he be God and Man, yet he is not two but 
 
 one Christ; 
 One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by 
 
 taking the Manhood into God; 
 One altogether; not by confusion of substance; but by unity 
 
 of person; 
 For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and 
 
 Man is one Christ," &c., &c. 
 
 71 
 
72 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The secret of this repulsion is not hard to discover. 
 It is not because the propositions are not true. They 
 may be true enough, if they have any meaning. But 
 lying behind them one feels a temper from wliich he 
 will turn away if he can. If he has just been reading 
 the Gospels, and comes from under their gracious 
 spell to confront this simulacrum, he feels as one 
 would to find himself unexpectedly in a room where 
 a company of surgeons were dissecting the body of 
 his brother. It deals with a dead Christ. The spirit 
 which finds satisfaction in such work is akin to that 
 which would " peep and botanize upon a mother's 
 grave ". It is as though the lover should make an 
 inventory of his mistress' charms, as though one in- 
 scribed a Bertillon description for an epitaph on 
 a brother's grave. It offends by its sheer cold-blood- 
 edness. Nor is that all. One's intelligence shares 
 in the offence to his reverence. For the terms of the 
 formulary are really not presentable to the under- 
 standing. The mind which attempts to grasp them 
 is eluded and irritated. One moment it sees and the 
 next moment it does not see. Opposed and incom- 
 patible concepts are presented alternately and sim- 
 ultaneously, until thought, beaten back and forth like 
 a shuttlecock, drops exhausted. The soul is offered 
 an analysis when it wants a synthesis, a metaphysical 
 formula when it wants a living Person. The Chris to- 
 logical literature of the Church is of vast extent, and 
 ranges from the most exalted speculation to the veri- 
 est trifling. But one rises from its study with a sense 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 7S 
 
 of depression. He has been seeking the living among 
 the dead; he is not there. 
 
 The purpose of this writing is sometliing altogether 
 different. I would, if possible, take the reasonable 
 man by the hand, and lead him into the Presence. 
 If he find there mystery, and reality passing under- 
 standing, it is only needful for him to recognize in 
 it the same kind of mystery which he must always 
 confront when he explores the arcana of Nature, or 
 strives to know God. Men have no quarrel with 
 mystery as such. The naturalist and the psycholo- 
 gist, as well as the man of affairs and the woman 
 who loves, have learned long ago that every advancing 
 step of knowledge or experience brings them into 
 the presence of ever-widening mystery. But what 
 they demand is to know that the mysterious things 
 are real things, and not figments. 
 
 We have seen that one moiety of Jesus' work was 
 to exhibit the capacity of the nature of man. To 
 this end he was born, passed through the whole orbit 
 of movement of a man, from the womb, through 
 growth, through temptation, through death, through 
 hell, into the new humanity. The other half of his 
 task was to exhibit God. But according to him, the 
 two processes coalesced and became one. Whoever 
 sees man in his completeness finds in him something 
 divine; whoever sees God finds in him something hu- 
 mane. This rapprochement of God and man is the 
 note of Christianity. Unless we assume that human 
 nature and divine nature possess a quality in com- 
 
74 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 mon, it is useless to enter the field of religion at all. 
 For only beings of the same kind can hold intercourse. 
 A man can have no commerce with a stone; a fish 
 cannot speak with a bird; only a god can hold con- 
 verse with God. The Gospels assume this with a 
 strange simplicity. The genealogy in Luke places 
 Adam in the direct Hne of descent between God and 
 Jesus ; " Jesus, which was the son of . . . David, 
 which was the son of . . . Abraham, which was 
 the son of . . . Noah, which was the son of . . . 
 Adam, which was the son of God ". The stirps is the 
 same throughout. 
 
 •Christ regards men, not as manikins created by 
 divine fiat, but as the fruit of God's loins. The Fa- 
 ther's love for them is inescapable by himself. His 
 own contentment and completeness are bound up with 
 them. There is current a strange reluctance to think 
 or speak of God as enduring pain. He is thought 
 to be fitly conceived only as serene, impassable, un- 
 perturbed in his self-centred felicity. But the God 
 of Jesus is one who has borne the cross in his heart 
 since before the world was. Pain is the eternal con- 
 comitant of loving. Whosoever loves places himself 
 within the power of the object of his love. His 
 happiness is no longer in his own keeping. , If the 
 loved one suffer, he suffers ; if the love be unrequited 
 it becomes his torment. Its purest possible form 
 is that of a parent for a child. The higher the nature 
 of the parent, the more inextinguishable the love. 
 If the parent be absolutely good, as God, the love 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 75 
 
 will be deathless. No wa3rv^ardness of the child, no 
 deformity, no folly, no crime can beat it off. The 
 suggestion that the Parent would slay the child in 
 order to regain his own peace or to safeguard his 
 own justice, is one so wildly irrational that one can 
 only stand amazed when he confronts it in theological 
 guise. Suppose the All-Father, by one sentence of 
 doom, to condemn and execute all his rebellious chil- 
 dren, what then? Has God no memory .? Is the 
 blessed power to forget one of his attributes? And 
 is love not made of the same stuff in all spheres of 
 being? The eternal Father may not execute his 
 children, nor can he un-get them. There remains 
 therefore only to win their affection and bring them 
 home. But love has no power to compel. It can 
 only open its arms, entreat, solicit, and wait. 
 
 Jesus defines himself as at once the Son of Man 
 and the Son of God. That is, the Ideal Man recog- 
 nizes both his parents. He opens his arms to both. 
 How did he conceive himself to be related to his 
 Father? In the first place, he boldly claimed the 
 family likeness. " He that seeth me seeth him that 
 sent me ". " He that seeth me seeth the Father ". 
 He claimed to have a direct and immediate commis- 
 sion to do certain things. " I know him, for I am 
 from him, and he hath sent me ; the Father hath not 
 left me alone; for I do always the things which 
 please him. I came forth from the Father, and am 
 come into the world ; again I leave the world and go 
 to the Father ". Many a man has been " conscious 
 
76 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of a mission " in the world, but no enthusiast uses 
 language like this. It is but the simple truth that his 
 speech does not give in any way the impression of 
 an enthusiast. There is a certain serene sanity about 
 him which is not easy to define, but which is irre- 
 sistible. 
 
 Now, if it be true that he held a special commis- 
 sion from God to do a specific thing, when did he 
 receive it, and where, and how? He himself does not 
 say. He contents himself with asserting the fact. 
 He says that he " came down from heaven " ; that he 
 is " doing the work which his Father gave him to 
 finish " ; that he " seeks not his own will, but the will 
 of him that sent him ". He claims to have a dele- 
 gated power on earth to forgive sins. Once in a 
 cryptic utterance he seems to assert for himself a 
 pre-existence, " before Abraham was I am ". This 
 is as far as we can go, depending upon his authentic 
 statements concerning himself. He believed himself 
 to have a peculiar commission from God; he knew 
 his Father's will beyond the possibility of mistake ; he 
 came out from the Father; he expected to return to 
 the Father; and he acted as no mere man has either 
 the power or the right to act. 
 
 We may acknowledge that this seems a meagre 
 way for a divine personality to show himself withal. 
 " If thou be the Christ, why not tell us plainly " ? It 
 would seem to have been so easy for him to exhibit 
 himself in some less questionable shape. But this 
 objection cannot stand against a very little sober 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 77 
 
 reflection. Why does not God always show himself? 
 Why does he leave men to grope, and hesitate, and 
 speculate, lost in the mazes of the universe? The 
 answer is plain. Revelation is but the obverse of 
 discovery. No truth is ever revealed to an intelli- 
 gence except as it is discovered. The function of any 
 reality is only to he; it is the task of intelligence to 
 see it. In the nature of things God, at any time or 
 place, can only be found of them that seek. 
 
 "Oh! where is the sea," the fishes cried. 
 As they swam the crystal clearness through: 
 
 "We've heard of old of the ocean's tide. 
 And we long to look on the waters blue. 
 The wise ones speak of an infinite sea; 
 
 who can tell us if such there be?" 
 
 The lark flew up in the morning bright. 
 And sung and balanced on sunny wings; 
 And this was its song; " I see the light; 
 
 1 look on a world of beautiful things. 
 But flying and singing everywhere, 
 
 In vain have I searched to find the air". 
 
 The task of the disciples was to see divinity, being 
 in its presence. Did they see? And what did they 
 aee? The most exalted term used by any of them 
 during Jesus' lifetime was, " Thou art the Christ, the 
 Son of the living God ". This definition, if it be a 
 definition, he expressly approved. Now, what did 
 they mean by it? I do not ask what the words con- 
 note when we use them, but what did Peter at 
 Caeserea mean by them? The reply is, He did not 
 
78 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 know clearly what he meant. It is the language of 
 emotion, reverence, adoration. In that mood the 
 mind does not attempt to define. The term used 
 served well enough to express a feeling. And after 
 all, the fact that Christ was able to arouse that 
 feeling is a better proof of his divine quality than 
 it would be to extract from his followers the most 
 scientific definition. 
 
 The terms used, " Christ ", and " the Son of God ", 
 were common in Jewish speech. But they were not 
 used with any scientific precision. They were simply 
 titles for an exalted personage. In a way, " Mes- 
 siah " was to Jews very much the same thing that 
 " Christ " is to the unthinking multitude among 
 Christians, a high and divine personage, somewhere 
 between God and man. 
 
 At that stage the Christian conception of Jesus 
 stood for thirty years after his disappearance. His 
 first ambassadors had no defined Christology. They 
 were immediately concerned with his resurrection and 
 its practical consequences. As to the Person who had 
 risen, they presented him under a variety of terms, 
 with the idea that he was a divinely exalted person, 
 but they did not identify him with God. Six weeks 
 after the resurrection, Peter, as the delegate of the 
 apostolic band, for the first time preached Christ to 
 the crowd. He introduces him as " a man approved 
 of God unto you by mighty works and wonders which 
 God did by him " ; as " the Holy One " ; as " the 
 Messiah ". A little later, in his next address, he calls 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 79 
 
 him " the Righteous One " ; the " Prince of Life " ; 
 the " Servant Jesus whom God anointed " ; a 
 " Prince and Saviour ". Stephen used words of like 
 import. Paul in his speech at Athens, spoke only of 
 " Jesus and the Resurrection ". It is noteworthy 
 also that in the same address, when he was arguing 
 with the Greeks about the real God as contrasted 
 with their idols, he makes no mention of Christ at 
 all. At this point they stood for many years. The 
 fact was, they felt no need for any more precise defini- 
 tion of the Christ. He possessed their worship wholly, 
 and they were under a driving enthusiasm. More- 
 over, Christianity was at the first deemed both by 
 its friends and enemies to be a movement within 
 Judaism. The Christians were still Jews, and they 
 had no thought of becoming anything else. Their 
 aim was " to redeem Israel ". They did not realize 
 at all that Christ's relations were with the universal 
 world. For the purpose in hand, the terms in which 
 they presented him were quite sufficient. 
 
 But when Christianity was driven to see that Juda- 
 ism was too narrow for it, and was led to confront 
 the pagan world, the necessity for some more coherent 
 and portable conception of Christ became evident. 
 So long as they preached the " Messiah " to Jews 
 they did not need to define the term ; but when they 
 undertook to preach Christ to pagans, the first ques- 
 tion which they must hear and answer was, " What 
 is this Christ " ? At this point we meet St. Paul. We 
 may say that we owe to him the Christ of Christen- 
 
80 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dom. His first step was to disentangle Christ from 
 the Jewish Messiah. That conception, as we have 
 seen, was both too narrow and too incoherent to fit 
 it. He makes httle of the actual life of Jesus, in 
 fact seldom refers to it at all. Indeed it may well 
 be doubted whether he was familiar with anything 
 more than its chief incidents. Of all writers who 
 have influenced the world's thought and life, Paul is 
 perhaps the most difficult to construe. He mingles 
 dialectics, poetry, exhortation, and rhapsody, as only 
 untrained genius could do. He nowhere sets out in 
 formal propositions his conception of Christ. But 
 it is not difficult to gather from his undisputed Epis- 
 tles his main idea. He refers not at all to the teach- 
 ings or acts of Jesus. The only saying of his which 
 he quotes at all is one which is not recorded in any 
 of the Gospels. He concerns himself exclusively with 
 the resurrection, and with the death, which he re- 
 gards as practically a part of the same event. The 
 Christ of Paul is a being of a quite different kind 
 from the Jesus of the Gospels. It is a transcendent 
 being whose orbit only intersects that of the historic 
 personage at the point of his death. He depicts 
 Christ as " the image and likeness of God " ; as one 
 in whom is reflected " the light of the knowledge of 
 the glory of God " ; the " Man from Heaven " ; the 
 " Life-giving Spirit " ; the '' one without sin " ; the 
 " One sent from God " ; but he always stops short of 
 identifying him with God himself. Indeed in one 
 crucial passage he shows that he conceives him to be 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 81 
 
 still, in the scale of being, separate from and sub- 
 ordinate to God : — " I would have you to know that 
 as the head of the woman is the man ; the head of 
 every man is Christ ; and the head of Christ is God ". 
 In substance, he took the Hebrew-Christian " Mes- 
 siah ", broke it up, set free the Christ which they 
 had concluded in it, and set him in the place of su- 
 preme honor, over all things in the universe, but 
 beneath God. 
 
 Thus far we have taken account only of those 
 religious ideas and things which had place within 
 the narrow circle of Judaism. But that complex 
 thing which we call Christianity has drawn and woven 
 into its fabric material from very many and very 
 different sources. " The world ", says Dill, " was 
 in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly 
 in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from 
 whatever quarter it might come ". From the Stoics 
 had already spread the brotherhood and equality of 
 men, an active pity for the miserable and succor for 
 the helpless, the notion of moral equality of the 
 sexes, and a gentler consideration for the slave. 
 From the religions of Egypt and the East had come 
 the idea of sacramental grace, and crude adumbra- 
 tions of immortality. The cults of Mithra, Isis, and 
 the Great Mother had made familiar the ideas of 
 baptismal regeneration, the blood bath for the mys- 
 tical washing away of sins, the mystic meal of bread 
 and consecrated wine, the recovery of the Great 
 Mother from the dead at the time of the spring 
 
82 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 equinox, and the great Festival of the sacred year 
 on the 25th of December. Pagan theology had al- 
 ready elaborated a celestial hierarchy, in which the 
 Deity, while in essence remote and inaccessible, was 
 linked to humanity by a graduated scale of inferior 
 spiritual beings, the equivalent of angels, archangels, 
 thrones, dominions, and powers. Philo and the 
 Alexandrians had developed the Platonic idea of the 
 " Logos ", — the Word. All these forms of thought, 
 empty of any real spiritual contents, lay ready at 
 hand for the new Religion, empty bottles to be filled 
 with the new wine. 
 
 The author of the Fourth Gospel, whoever he was, 
 and whenever he wrote, took the incomplete Christol- 
 ogy of Paul, together with the highest there was in 
 paganism, and carried them both up boldly above 
 Judaism and heathen Philosophy, into cosmology. 
 The writer had before him the facts of the Gospels, 
 and the interpretation of Paul. He takes the facts 
 and lifts them into the category of the divine. At 
 the very beginning of his Gospel he applies a new 
 term to Christ, the term which the world's highest 
 thought had prepared for this use. " In the begin- 
 ning was the ' Word ', and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God ". The term Logos, which 
 in the New Testament is rendered " Word ", is one 
 which cannot be expressed in English except by a 
 difficult and clumsy circumlocution. It is enough 
 to say that the purpose of the writer was, by means 
 of it, to identify Christ with the essence of God. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 83 
 
 The later conception of two or more persons in the 
 Godhead, and the essential relations of these per- 
 sons to one another, does not seem to have been in 
 his mind. He saw in the very nature of God a 
 " Father " and a " Son ". He saw the Son going out 
 into the universe upon an errand of God, and there 
 are intimations that he saw a third spiritual person- 
 ality concerned in the transaction, but beyond this he 
 does not go. For any farther development of the 
 Doctrine of Christ we must go to the Church and 
 not to the New Testament.^ And now, what is the 
 substance of it all? What but this? — In the career 
 of Jesus is exhibited in actual experience both the 
 ideal life and possibility of man ; and also all of God 
 which is expressible in terms of humanity. The mo- 
 tive compelling the amazing phenomenon is that God 
 is Love ; that he has begotten children ; that the 
 children, being but children, are wandering with aim- 
 less feet and perishing; that the Son, first-born 
 among many brethren, comes with his Father's bene- 
 diction to lead them home ; that his way leads through 
 pain and death; that in the radiance of his risen life 
 some of the children at least — the Magdalen first of 
 all — recognize him and cry, Rabboni, which is to say. 
 Master ! 
 
 The two foci of the whole orbit of Christianity 
 are these, — Did the man Jesus pass through death, 
 
 ^ It seems proper, for certain reasons, to say that I stop 
 in the argument before reaching the Doctrine of the " Trinity." 
 I have stopped where the Catholic Creeds stop. 
 
84 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and still remain alive? and, What reason is there 
 to believe that other men will, or can, do the 
 same? Is the matter of personal immortality in 
 any way connected with Jesus who is called the 
 Christ? 
 
BODY AND SOUL 
 
" It may be that these things are all vain; and that 
 our own spiral of lights no less than that of the bees, 
 has been kindled for no other purpose save that of 
 amusing the darkness. But also it is possible that some 
 stupendous incident may surge from another worlds 
 from new jDhenomena, and either inform this effort with 
 definite meaning, or definitely destroy it. Still our 
 wisest plan will be to remain faithful to the destiny 
 imposed on us, which is to subdue, and to some extent 
 raise within and around us the obscure forces of 
 life " — Maeterlinck. 
 
V 
 BODY AND SOUL 
 
 Since men have known anything they have known 
 that there is some connection between the soul and 
 the body. The first savage who was knocked sense- 
 less by the blow of another savage's club must have 
 learned by that rude experiment that a broken head 
 interrupted or confused his thought. One of the 
 most amazing things, however, in the history of the 
 race is the way in which the significance of this gen- 
 eral fact failed to be recognized. There was here 
 one of those vicious circles within which human 
 thought remained confined for ages. It was assumed 
 that mind and body were two separate and inde- 
 pendent things, living together, but each with a life 
 of its own. The falsity of this could not be seen 
 until the true relation between them should be dis- 
 covered ; and the true relation could not be seen until 
 the false assumption was abandoned. So the matter 
 remained until our own time. The soul was believed 
 to inhabit the body as a tenant dwells in a house 
 upon an uncertain lease. That the two should inter- 
 act upon each other was no more thought than that 
 a house could affect the character of a tenant. The 
 sum of knowledge was that when the house fell into 
 
 87 
 
88 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 decay or was broken up by catastrophe, the tenant 
 moved away. Aberrations or confusions of the mind 
 were accounted for by the operations of other spirits. 
 Possession, obsession, demoniacal influences, ac- 
 counted for insanity, and free and independent exist- 
 ence of the mind accounted for sanity. It is hardly 
 more than a century since the nexus of mind and 
 body began to be studied. When Hartley announced 
 his theory that mental action was dependent upon 
 definite functions of the brain he met with almost 
 universal incredulity. When Cabanis, half a century 
 later, delivered his brutal dictum that " the brain 
 secretes thought as the liver secretes bile ", he 
 shocked society, not because he said a thing grossly, 
 but because he said it at all. Now it has become 
 part of everyday knowledge that mind and body are 
 so essentially interrelated that the diverse faculties 
 of the mind are bound up with certain specific por- 
 tions of the brain and nervous system. Whatever 
 may be said of the overfanciful .refinement of the 
 anatomist in trying to locate too minutely the nervous 
 areas which are concerned with definite psychic ac- 
 tivities, the general fact is accepted. We do not 
 now send our insane to be exorcised. We do not hold 
 a sick man morally responsible for his mental or 
 moral vagaries. The whole world allows that physical 
 lesion produces a state of mind. But the implications 
 of this admission are incalculable. Dr. Keene re- 
 ports this case to me. A lad of fifteen is brought to 
 him suff*ering from epilepsy. He is a partial im- 
 
BODY AND SOUL 89 
 
 becile, slavering, violent, obscene, untruthful, thiev- 
 ish, a foul travesty of humanity, — a youthful 
 Caliban. Certain symptoms point to a pressure upon 
 a certain spot of his brain. An unnoticed and for- 
 gotten scar confirms the diagnosis. The skull is 
 trephined, the pressure removed, and the epilepsy is 
 cured. But that is the least of it. His obscenity, 
 deceit, and dishonesty are cured also. Not seven 
 devils have been cast out of his soul, but a little point 
 of bone has been lifted out of his brain. The result 
 is the same. But the barest recognition of this fact 
 renders necessary a new definition of the soul. The 
 " soul " has seemingly been convicted of false pre- 
 tences. Instead of being an independent entity, living 
 in the body and dominating it, it appears to be but 
 a convenient word to designate the complex sum total 
 of the highest output of the organized body. As 
 Haeckel puts it^ " all the phenomena of the psychic 
 life are without exception bound up with certain ma- 
 terial changes in the living substance of the body. We 
 do not attribute any peculiar ' essence ' to its soul. 
 We consider the psyche to be merely a collective idea 
 of all the psychic functions of protoplasm ". 
 
 This is the last word of science upon the soul. Nor 
 can we dismiss it or disregard it as only the ipse dixit 
 of an extreme scientific dogmatist. No doubt Pro- 
 fessor Haeckel can be fairly so called. But then all 
 biologists, chemists, physicians agree with him up to 
 this point. Whatever we may find the soul to be 
 over and above, this fact we must reckon with, that it 
 
90 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 is as dependent upon matter for its being as matter 
 is dependent upon it for its organization. And this 
 interdependence of mind and matter exists through 
 every step in the range of living things. In the 
 lowest forms of living creatures the whole proto- 
 plasmic cellular mass is all body and all mind. With- 
 out organs or differentiated faculties, any portion 
 of it responds to any stimulus which may touch it. 
 In the next higher stage the mind begins to be local- 
 ized. Rudimentary sense organs begin to appear, 
 little protoplasmic filaments and pigment spots be- 
 come the forerunners of organs of perception. In 
 another stage the nervous system becomes sufficiently 
 organized to show phenomena which cannot be dis- 
 tinguished from intelligence. Finally the highest of 
 all psychic action shows itself by converging all 
 sensation upon a certain specific spot of the nervous 
 substance of the brain, and being reflected back in 
 self-consciousness. There is no break or gap or 
 interruption in the long series of evolution. From 
 the beginning to the end physical progress and psy- 
 chical progress are bound up together. They do not 
 seem to move always in parallel lines or with an 
 equal pace, but to be interrelated parts of one living, 
 creeping, climbing life. Mind, or at least something 
 so much like mind that their phenomena cannot be 
 distinguished, seems to belong to organized matter 
 down to its very lowest fonn. Indeed the highest 
 intellectual faculties seem to be but aggregations and 
 correlations of innumerable primary sensations, and 
 
BODY AND SOUL 91 
 
 to be dependent upon the action of remote centres, 
 so that " memory " and " volition " may fairly be 
 said to be functions of each and every microscopic 
 body-cell. The ancient chasm between animal and 
 vegetable life has been long filled up. The micro- 
 scope furnished the tool. Now it has been estab- 
 lished that the animal and the vegetable are but 
 bifurcated branches of a tree whose stem and roots 
 are in common. Nor does inexorable science stop 
 there. The genealogy of the protoplasmic cell itself 
 has been traced. Every multicellular organism be- 
 gins its life as a stem-cell, an impregnated ovum. 
 Even at the beginning the cell has a psychic life of 
 its own. And underneath this lies a region wherein 
 the chemical processes of the not living and the psy- 
 chic action of the living meet and mingle. 
 
 It seems probable that that mysterious and in- 
 scrutable thing which we call " life " is being always 
 secreted, as it were, from inorganic matter, in the 
 secret places of the earth and sea. It looks as though 
 the old dictum, " ex ovum ovo ", would have to be 
 qualified at least. Spontaneous Generation may be 
 a fact after all. The chemist and the biologist have 
 done many marvellous things. If they have not been 
 able to transform any atom of dead matter into 
 living, Dr. Loeb and others have done something so 
 much like it that it is best not to deny the possibility 
 longer. Moreover, it is hasty to conclude that be- 
 cause men have never done it, it is never being done. 
 It is hard to believe that the sum total of life has 
 
92 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 remained a constant quantity since the creation of 
 the world. God's laboratory of nature is constructed 
 upon an enormously complex scale. Because the 
 chemist with his vials and retorts cannot produce life 
 from lifeless matter establishes no presumption that 
 it is not being done continually in ocean's depth or 
 in that boundless region of the infinitely little beyond 
 the ken of the microscope. Above all it is perilous 
 to build a philosophy or a religious faith upon a 
 foundation which would be destroyed if the generatio 
 equivoca should turn out to be a fact. Through the 
 efforts of chemist and biologists, the gap between the 
 inorganic and the organic worlds which once seemed 
 to be infinite, has been constantly narrowed. No 
 student of the physical sciences would be surprised 
 to learn any day that the bridge which spans it had 
 been discovered. 
 
 Now the whole line of thought briefly sketched 
 above is absolutely new. Not only were St. Paul and 
 Augustine and Thomas Aquinas utterly unaware of 
 the facts, but so were Calvin and Jonathan Edwards 
 and Bishop Butler. No doctrine of the resurrection 
 of the dead, or of the life to come, formulated even 
 fifty years ago, can be satisfactory to the man of 
 to-day. The actual amount of knowledge accumu- 
 lated during these years concerning the nature and 
 laws of life and death, of generation and decay, of 
 force and energy, and their transfoiTnations, is 
 greater by an immeasurable increment than the sum 
 of all that preceded. To refuse to take account of it 
 
BODY AND SOUL 95 
 
 would not only be futile, but would write us down 
 as less intelligent than the Fathers, who availed them- 
 selves of all the science they possessed to elucidate 
 and fortify their beliefs. 
 
 But we cannot deny or evade the fact that the new 
 biology and physics have overclouded the common 
 hope of life in the world to come. The simple dual- 
 ism upon which that hope has heretofore been based 
 is no longer believable. The phenomenon of a hu- 
 man personality can no longer be accounted for by 
 the assumption of a temporary union of an immortal 
 soul and a perishable body. The nexus has been 
 seen to be, not arbitrary and artificial, but organic. 
 This conviction, which cannot be resisted, has over- 
 weighted and sunk in many their belief in the life 
 everlasting. To many this has been a burden more 
 heavy than would be a judge's doom to death. They 
 see that what they call the body and what they call 
 the soul are so identified in their whole career, from 
 the germ cell to the grave, that they cannot any 
 longer think of the psychic personality surviving the 
 break-up of the physical organism. When they at- 
 tempt to do so, they find the same intellectual help- 
 lessness they would if bidden to think of shadow with- 
 out substance or extension without form. For them 
 not only has the hope of immortality faded, but the 
 very existence of such a present fact as soul has 
 become difficult to believe. So correlated are psychic 
 and physical energy that the soul of man threatens 
 to disappear as an objective reality. 
 
94 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 At this point the attempt has often been made to 
 find relief by drawing a line through psj^chic phe- 
 nomena, and labelling those nearest to the physical 
 basis " Instinct ", and those higher up " Reason ". 
 This latter, it is contended, together with the Con- 
 science or ethical faculty, constitute the soul proper 
 and are peculiar to man. Grant, it is said, all that 
 biology claims concerning the mental life of animals, 
 still man is marked off by the possession of psychic 
 qualities so different in kind from those of the lower 
 creatures that he still stands unique in the possession 
 of a soul. This has proven, however, to be but a 
 frail dike set against the incoming of the tide. So 
 long as psychologists confined their researches to 
 the human mind, this position remained tenable. As 
 early as 1T60 Remeirus called in question the validity 
 of the distinction between Instinct and Reason. The 
 time, however, was not ripe, and his discoveries at- 
 tracted little notice. But during the last half-cen- 
 tury Darwin and Romanes, Sir John Lubbock, Wundt 
 and Buchner, Ladd, Moulton and James, and their 
 co-laborers have conducted experiments so many and 
 so careful that the former classification of psychic 
 action into Reason and Instinct has been definitely 
 abandoned. Perhaps it would be more accurate to 
 say that psychic actions may be thus distinguished, 
 but that reason is not confined to man nor instinct 
 to beasts. For example, among Indians and other 
 savages the sense of direction is, so far as one sees, 
 just as much an instinct as it is in the homing pigeon. 
 
BODY AND SOUL 95 
 
 The faculty, moreover, seems to be the same in kind, 
 and not differing greatly in degree. Nor is this the 
 only " instinct " of man. The newborn babe knows 
 how to suck. The young mother knows how to hold 
 the babe to the breast. Sex desires know the way to 
 their gratification, and the like. 
 
 But the important fact for our purpose is that 
 those higher faculties, such as reason, choice, number, 
 shame, and duty show themselves in creatures far 
 below man in the graduated scale of being. We need 
 not stop to notice the strange wisdom of the ant and 
 the bee, whose lilliputian commonwealths might in 
 many ways be models for human cities. The " rea- 
 son ", however, which they display shows such strik- 
 ing limitations and peculiarities that it may be set 
 aside, if we choose, as automatic or purely reflex. A 
 characteristic of Reason is to discern an object de- 
 sired, and to use rational and suitable means to attain 
 it. A very few instances, chosen at random from 
 the mass of experiment and observation recorded, will 
 suffice. I begin with an experiment made by myself. 
 During a hunting trip I was in camp with a friend 
 in the wilderness of the far Northwest. A mile above 
 the camp was a beavers' dam. We visited or passed 
 it almost every day, and every day saw the marks 
 of the beavers' nocturnal handiwork. One day, to 
 see what the inhabitants of the aquatic village would 
 do, we broke a chasm two feet wide in their dam. 
 Next day the gap was mended. In the night the ani- 
 mals had gone ashore, cut down a tree eight inches 
 
96 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in diameter which stood more than a hundred feet 
 from the stream. The trunk of the tree was of no 
 use for their purposes. They felled it to procure the 
 small limbs which grew twenty feet from the ground. 
 The chips showed that they had cut the limbs where 
 they lay into pieces of the proper length to mend 
 the hole in their dam thirty yards distant. Each 
 stick was just long enough to reach across the break 
 and allow enough to lap over and hold at either end. 
 These they had conveyed to the place, inserted, inter- 
 laced with small twigs, and tamped with earth and 
 leaves so that the dam was good as new. Now, note 
 what they had done. First they had surveyed the 
 breach, and seen how, and how alone, it could be 
 mended. Then they sought the suitable material for 
 the repairs. For this they felled a tree to secure 
 the limbs which were in sight, but not within the 
 reach of animals who could not climb. Then they 
 ascertained the length required for the pieces to be 
 used. Then they cut them off in situ and carried 
 them to where they were needed. The ultimate pur- 
 pose of it all was to save the doors of their houses 
 from being exposed by the threatened lowering of 
 the water. In what way, then, does this action differ 
 in kind from the reason of a man who builds a 
 house. P 
 
 Take another instance quoted by Romanes from 
 Thompson. In his camp in the jungle he had a 
 monkey tied to a long upright bamboo pole by a 
 chain running on a ring, which allowed the monkey to 
 
BODY AND SOUL 97 
 
 climb to the top, where was a seat upon which he 
 passed most of his time. While he sat there, the 
 thievish crows which swarmed about stole the food 
 which was placed every morning at the foot of his 
 pole. To this he vainly expressed his objection by 
 chattering and slipping down in vain effort to catch 
 them. " One morning, however, he appeared to be 
 seriously ill; he closed his eyes, dropped his head, 
 and exhibited other evidence of severe suffering. No 
 sooner were his ordinary rations placed at the foot of 
 his pole than the crows, watching their opportunity, 
 descended in numbers, and as usual began to demol- 
 ish his provisions. The monkey now began to de- 
 scend the pole by slow degrees as though the effort 
 overpowered him, and as if so overcome by illness 
 that his remaining strength was hardly equal to the 
 exertion. When he reached the ground he rolled 
 about for some time, seeming in great agony, until he 
 found himself close to the vessel where the crows had 
 by this time wellnigh devoured his food. Then he 
 lay apparently in a state of complete insensibility. 
 After a little a crow plucked up courage to approach 
 and stretch his neck toward the food. As quick as 
 thought the monkey seized it and secured it from 
 doing farther mischief. He now began to chatter 
 and grin with every expression of gratified triumph, 
 while the crows flew about cawing, as if deprecating 
 the chastisement about to be inflicted upon their 
 brother. The monkey continued for a while to chat- 
 ter and grin in triumph ; he then deliberately placed 
 
98 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the crow between his knees, and began to pluck it 
 with the most humorous gravity. When he had com- 
 pletely stripped it, except of the larger feathers in 
 the wings and tail, he flung it in the air, from where 
 it fell to the ground with a stunning shock. He then 
 ascended his pole, and the next time his food was 
 brought, not a single crow approached it." Now, 
 in what essential quality was the mental action of 
 this monkey diff'erent from that of a farmer, with 
 a sense of humor, who sets a trap for the crows de- 
 vouring his corn? 
 
 Once again, selecting from that treasure house of 
 facts gathered by Darwin. " A troop of baboons 
 were observed crossing a valley in Abyssinia. Some 
 had already ascended the opposite mountain, and 
 some were still in the valley, when the latter were 
 attacked by dogs, but the old males immediately hur- 
 ried down from the rocks, with mouths open, roaring 
 so fearfully that the dogs quickly drew back. They 
 were again encouraged to the attack, but by this 
 time all the baboons had reascended the heights ex- 
 cepting a young child of about six months, who, 
 loudly calling for aid, climbed upon a block of rock, 
 and was surrounded. Thereupon, one of the largest 
 males came down again from the mountain, slowly 
 went to the young one, coaxed him down and carried 
 him away, the dogs being too much astonished to 
 make an attack ". What does this action of the 
 baboon show different from that supreme moral sense 
 
BODY AND SOUL 99 
 
 which moves its possessor to imperil his hfe for his 
 brother? 
 
 Such facts as the above might be quoted to fill vol- 
 umes from the mass of literature upon the subject 
 accumulated within a generation. One of them, how- 
 ever, is as good as a thousand. The effect of them 
 all has been to establish the truth of the generalization 
 made by Darwin fifty years ago. " The difference 
 in mind between man and the higher animals, great 
 as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. 
 The senses and instincts, the various emotions and 
 faculties, of which man boasts, may be found in an 
 incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed, con- 
 dition in the lower animals ". And Darwin lies, with- 
 out protest, in Westminster Abbey ! 
 
 We have reached the point where the old phrases, 
 " the immortality of the soul ", and " the resurrec- 
 tion of the body " must take on new meanings if 
 they are to be comprehended, and must deal with 
 new difficulties if they are to be retained. If the truth 
 which these phrases have heretofore expressed suf- 
 ficiently well is to be kept alive among men, its roots 
 must be traced to a reason immeasurably deeper down 
 in the nature of things thi^n is generally realized. If 
 it be the fact, as it appears to be, that belief in a 
 future life is being given up by intelligent men, we 
 may be assured that it is not because the " instinct 
 of living " is any less strong in them than in their 
 forefathers. It is not that they desire life less, or 
 because they are more willing to be resolved into 
 
100 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 nothingness. It is because their hope has met defeat 
 at the hands of other truth which has slowly shown 
 itself. There are multitudes for whom neither the 
 old phrases nor the old arguments will any longer 
 suffice. To clear these away is an ungracious and 
 distasteful task. They are so intertwined with re- 
 ligious sentiment and human affection that to disturb 
 them seems to some little short of a wanton outrage. 
 They are formulated in creeds, enshrined in poetry, 
 hymns, liturgies. They are ingrained in the very 
 fibre of religious faith and are powerful sanctions for 
 conduct. Why disturb them? The only answer is, it 
 is always best in the long run to know the truth. It 
 is better that the simple Christian within the Church 
 should have his beliefs disturbed than that his brother 
 should be kept out of the Kingdom by these beliefs. 
 It is not only better intrinsically, but it is also the 
 way of Christ. The little ones whom he warned 
 against offending were those who were kept out of the 
 Kingdom by the inconsiderate action of those within. 
 We need have no fear that belief in " the resurrec- 
 tion of the dead and the life of the world to come " 
 will be abandoned, provided only it be conceived of 
 in such a way as will allow it to be correlated with 
 all else which we know to be true. 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
" In progress toward the goal^ nature will have to 
 be consulted continuously. Already^ in the case of the 
 ephemerids, nature has produced a complete cycle of 
 normal life ending in natural death. In the problem 
 of his own fate, man must not be content with the 
 gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own effort. 
 Just as he has been able to modify the nature of 
 animals and plants, he must attempt to modify his 
 own constitution so as to readjust its disharmonies ". 
 
 Metchnikoff. 
 
VI 
 THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Two things are usually taken for granted in all 
 discussions concerning future life. One is the essen- 
 tial immortality of the soul; the other is that the 
 same kind and quality of soul is common to all men. 
 Are these assumptions warranted? To merely raise 
 the question will seem preposterous to some. Never- 
 theless the question must be asked. For the present 
 I postpone any attempt to define sharply the term 
 soul, and use it in its popular sense, which is for 
 this stage of the argument sufficiently definite. 
 
 It is commonly assumed that each individual soul 
 had a beginning, but is so constituted and com- 
 pounded of such stufF that it is intrinsically imper- 
 ishable. This belief lies at the bottom of the current 
 conceptions of Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. To 
 many it will be a surprise to be assured that this is 
 not a Christian belief at all, but a pagan one. 
 Neither is it now, nor has it ever been, the general 
 belief even in paganism. The great mass of savage 
 and semi-civilized men have never had any clear 
 opinion upon the matter either way. Indeed, they 
 do not think of " the soul " at all in the way we do. 
 They often have a sort of vague notion of a shadowy 
 
 103 
 
104 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 double of the individual, which may for a time flit 
 about his tomb or roam in happy hunting grounds ; 
 but they do not possess any such abstract concep- 
 tions as " eternal ", " immortal ", or " self-existent ". 
 When they advance farther in the path of thought 
 they either think of the personality maintaining a 
 kind of family, corporate perpetuity, as throughout 
 Eastern Asia generally ; or else they think of the 
 individual as seeking to lose his identity, and finally 
 losing it in Nirvana, which, for the individual con- 
 sciousness at any rate, is the end of being. The 
 general thought of intelligent paganism can hardly 
 be better stated or by a more competent witness 
 than Wu Ting Fang, sometime Chinese Ambassador 
 to the United States : — 
 
 " What I understand by religion is a system of doctrine 
 and worship. As such it recognizes the existence of a divine 
 supreme being and of spirits having control of human des- 
 tinies, who want to bring men back from the error of their 
 ways by holding up the fear of everlasting punishment and 
 offering everlasting happiness for goodness. One of its car- 
 dinal doctrines is that there is such a thing as life after 
 death. I must confess that the thought of the immortality 
 of the soul is pleasant. I wish it were true; but all the 
 reasoning of Plato cannot make it anything more than a strong 
 probability. I am not aware that in the advance of modern 
 science we have advanced one step more from uncertainty than 
 did Plato. It must not be said that Confucius denies the 
 existence of these things, but regards all speculation upon 
 them as useless and impracticable. He would be called an 
 agnostic in these days. *What is death '.'^ asked a disciple 
 of him, and he replied, 'You don't know life yet; how can 
 you know about death'? Such are the guarded words of 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 105 
 
 Confucius on this subject. Life itself is full of mysteries too 
 deep for human thought to fathom. There is no use in trying 
 to tear apart the veil of death to take a peep at the place 
 beyond. No one has ever been able to add one tittle of evi- 
 dence concerning the future of man after death, and of the 
 world of spirits ". 
 
 The fact is that only within Christendom and Islam 
 is the immortality of the individual soul assumed. 
 To the contention that belief in future life has been 
 held always and everywhere and by all men, the only- 
 reply is, the facts are not so. It is as far as possible 
 from being true to-day. The overwhelming majority 
 of men are now, as always, at too low a stage of 
 intellectual development to comprehend the thought. 
 The most that can be said is that among most people 
 is a rather vague and incoherent notion that the 
 individual will retain a kind of tenuous existence for 
 a longer or shorter time after death. But it is, at 
 its clearest, only a phantom-like being, and they do 
 not conceive it as eternal, nor does the term eternal 
 convey any meaning to them. Moreover, the testi- 
 mony of the most trustworthy observer is that from 
 among many peoples this whole set of ideas is 
 entirely absent. The Bushmen of South Africa, the 
 Veddahs of Ceylon, the Blacks of Australia, the 
 Diggers of Utah, and such like do not seem to have 
 any more idea of a post-obituary existence than do 
 the beasts of the field. Indeed, the history of thought 
 witnesses, as clearly as it can witness to anything, 
 that it is not until a really high state of intellectual 
 
106 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 development is reached that any idea of future life 
 emerges, and that belief in the soul as a self-existent 
 entity is not reached until intellection has well-nigh 
 reached its summit. Not until Democritus and 
 Empedocles and Plato and Socrates, and Epicurus 
 and Seneca become possible does the idea of immor- 
 tality appear. At a date much earlier the Egyptians 
 had wrought out scientifically their scheme of the 
 future life; but they by no means predicated it of 
 all men, but only of the " good " and of these only 
 after they had been rendered immortal by union 
 with Osisiris. Among the early Hebrews the idea 
 was scarcely present at all. Says the Grand Rabbi 
 Stein : " What causes most surprise in reading the 
 Pentateuch is the silence it seems to keep respecting 
 the most fundamental and consoling truths. The 
 doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the 
 resurrection of the body are able powerfully to for- 
 tify man against passion and vice, and to strengthen 
 his steps in the rugged paths of virtue. But one 
 searches in vain for these truths which he desires 
 so ardently. He does not find either them or the 
 resurrection of the dead ". 
 
 Among the later Jews, the contemporaries of 
 Jesus, the notions concerning the soul and its destiny 
 were so incoherent and contradictory that it appears 
 hopeless to attempt their reconstruction. Speaking 
 broadly, they did not conceive of the soul as an 
 entity separate and independent of the body. The 
 dream of a corporate or tribal immortality which 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 107 
 
 they had held before their eyes for ages had 
 for the most part rendered them careless of the des- 
 tiny of the individual. If " Israel " were to abide 
 to the ages of ages, it mattered little what became 
 of his children one by one. The most intelligent 
 and influential section, the Sadducees, were frank 
 materialists. They believed " neither in angels nor 
 demons nor in the resurrection of the dead ". The 
 Pharisees were divided into paltry schools, and were 
 busy debating such trivial puzzles as whether or not 
 one should rise with his clothes or naked, whether 
 he would burrow like a mole underneath the earth 
 so as to rise in the sacred soil of Judea, or rise in 
 pagan soil and be instantly rapt through the air 
 to the holy land. But none of them believed in or 
 expected resurrection or immortality for any but 
 members of the chosen race. An immortality be- 
 longing to man as such, and based upon the essential 
 deathlessness of the soul, was utterly foreign to their 
 thought. Dr. Piepenbring states their belief 
 thus : — 
 
 " Along with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead 
 which arose and was developed among the Palestinian Jews, 
 we see the doctrine of the immortality of the soul take shape 
 among the Jews of Alexandria. It appears for the first time 
 in the apochryphal book of Wisdom. According to this book 
 souls pre-exist, and are confined to the body as in a prison. 
 The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God; after 
 they have passed through the crucible of trial they shine, they 
 judge the nations, they govern peoples; thus the righteous live 
 forever. The wicked seem to be fated to annihilation. These 
 
108 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ideas are still farther developed by Philo, by whom it clearly 
 appears they were borrowed from Plato ". 
 
 I pass over for the present the teaching of Jesus 
 and the New Testament. That must form the basis 
 of the truth we seek later on, and must be examined 
 more at leisure. Awaiting that I ask, — What did 
 the people of the early Christian Church, say during 
 the first four centuries, believe generally concerning 
 the soul and its possible destiny? We need not be 
 surprised to find that their beliefs were confused 
 and contradictory. No matter what the teaching 
 of Jesus in the premises may or may not have been, 
 the early Christians came to it with presuppositions 
 and habits of thought already formed. As has been 
 already pointed out, it is never possible for a man 
 to disentangle himself at once from his old beliefs 
 in taking in new truth. Both Greek and Roman 
 preconceptions were present, as well as Hebrew ones. 
 Indeed they were far more potent; for even in the 
 first century the Church had moved completely away 
 from its Hebrew entourage, and was thereafter re- 
 cruited from heathens. A careful study of the ante- 
 Nicene " Fathers " can but convince one that in 
 and among them a number of ethnic notions were 
 striving to express, each in its own terms, the truth 
 which Christ had left among them. The early Chris- 
 tians had all been reared in the religions either of 
 Judea or Greece or Rome. Those among them who 
 had been reared Jews unconsciously transferred their 
 idea of a corporate or tribal immortality from their 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 109 
 
 old faith to the new, and their imaginations were 
 filled with the vision of a " Second Coming " and a 
 " New " Jerusalem. Those who were Greeks brought 
 to the new religion the Platonic idea that the in- 
 dividual soul is imperishable, being in fact an articu- 
 late portion of the substance of the mind of God. 
 Those of Roman antecedents, having no inherited 
 belief in a future life of any kind, were better pre- 
 pared to understand the truth of Christ. The inter- 
 action of all these fragments of previous philosophy 
 produced a confusion and uncertainty of mind which 
 was not clarified for five centuries. Then the mas- 
 terful Augustine, the man who fixed the lines in which 
 the thought of the civilized world ran from the sixth 
 century to the nineteenth, took Plato's doctrine of 
 the immortality of the soul, disengaged it from 
 metempsychosis and transmigration, and gained for 
 that general acceptance which it has held to this day. 
 Clement (/. Epis., xxvi) teaches the resurrection 
 of the good, and proves it by an appeal to the well- 
 known phenomenon of the phoenix rising from his 
 ashes, but has no expectation of future life for the 
 wicked. Justin Martyr in one place (7. Apol., xvii) 
 expects the resurrection both of the just and the 
 unjust, and proves it by appealing to the recognized 
 fact that departed human souls are even now in a 
 state of sensation, as is shown by their being invoked 
 by magi and dream-senders, as well as at the oracles 
 of Dodona and Pytho. In another place, however 
 {Dialog, Try ph., v.), he expressly denounces and 
 
110 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is im- 
 mortal. Athenagoras {De Resurec.) takes for 
 granted unqualifiedly the native immortality of the 
 soul, and makes a striking argument for the resur- 
 rection of the body. Tertullian in his treatises On 
 the Soul and On the Resurrection of the Flesh gives 
 by far the fullest presentation of what was com- 
 monly believed in liis circles, but it is quite impossible 
 to make him consistent with himself or with other 
 Christian writers of the same period. Upon the 
 whole, however, he leaves the impression, afterward 
 confirmed and fixed by Augustine, that he believes 
 the soul to have an independent existence of its own, 
 and to be by its own nature indestructible. The 
 truth seems to be that just as the Greek influence 
 gained domination in the early Church the Platonic 
 doctrine of a natural immortality which it brought 
 with it came to be accepted. The notion was with- 
 stood from the first as being subversive of the very 
 essence of Christianity. Theophilus, Irenjeus, Cle- 
 ment of Alexandria, Arnobius, and, most weighty 
 of all, Athanasius in his treatise on the Incarnation 
 of the Word of God, all strenuously fought against 
 it as a pagan error which brought to naught the 
 work of Christ. They were defeated, however, and 
 the conception prevailed which is vulgarly common 
 to-day, of an immortal soul and a mortal body, tem- 
 porarily joined, then sundered, then reunited in 
 an imperishable personality. Its currency has prob- 
 ably confused and obstructed the work of Christ 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 111 
 
 among men more than all other obstacles combined. 
 A pagan speculation has masqueraded so long as 
 an elemental Christian truth that now, when the 
 intelligent world is well disposed to receive and com- 
 prehend Jesus' revelation of the life to come, Plato 
 stands across the path and is commonly mistaken 
 for Christ. 
 
 Thus it has been taken for granted during many- 
 centuries that " Man " occupies a unique and sol- 
 itary place at the head of the ranks of living things, 
 with an impassable chasm between him and them, 
 and this in virtue of his possession of psychic quali- 
 ties which they lack. For the purpose of the natu- 
 ralist this classification is satisfactory. But for 
 the psychologist it is quite misleading. It rests upon 
 physical data only. There are races of existing 
 " men " whose powers of language, for example, seem 
 still in the transition stage between articulate and 
 inarticulate speech. The vocal utterances of the 
 Bushmen of Africa consisted largely of a series of 
 peculiar clicks that were certainly not articulate 
 speech, though on the road to it. The Pygmies of 
 Central Africa seem similarly to occupy an inter- 
 mediate position in the development of language. 
 Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak 
 of their utterance as being inarticulate sound. In 
 short, the great abyss which was of old thought to 
 lie between the language of man and that of the 
 lower animals, has largely vanished, and through the 
 
112 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 labors of philologists we can trace the stepping stones 
 over every portion of the wide gap. 
 
 The same thing is true concerning reason, memory, 
 sj^mpathy, and love. The simple fact is that in the 
 attempt to trace the origin, development, and destiny 
 of the soul, the naturalist's classification of " man " 
 and " animal " must be disregarded. In advance 
 one cannot say where the line between mortal and 
 immortal creatures will be found. It may conceiv- 
 ably coincide with the one which marks off Genus 
 Homo, Class Mammalia, Order Prknates; or it may 
 be found to run below that so as to include some 
 of man's humble kinsmen; or it may be found neces- 
 sary to settle upon a line running irregularly 
 through and amidst the ranks of men. The soul has 
 its own laws and announces its own requirements. 
 It may turn out that all whom we call men are not 
 Man. For natural science it is true that " God hath 
 made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell 
 upon the earth ". They breed together, and that 
 settles the question of physical relationship. But 
 there are psychic relationships between man and 
 animal quite as intimate and as real as the physical 
 relationship between man and man. Measured by 
 psychic standards, the interval between the lowest 
 man and the highest is a hundredfold greater than 
 that between the lowest man and the highest brute. 
 It may be humiliating, but it is true, nevertheless, 
 that we are far more closely related to the animals 
 on the spiritual than we are on the bodily side. A 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 113 
 
 comparative anatomist would distinguish at sight 
 between the fossil bone of a man and of an ape. 
 But let a certain action involving mind be described 
 to him, and he may be quite unable to say whether 
 the actors are men or beasts. For example, here 
 is one related by James Forbes in his " Oriental 
 Memoirs " : — 
 
 *' One of the females had been killed and her body carried 
 to our tent. Forty or fifty of the tribe soon gathered around 
 the tent, chattering furiously and threatening an attack, from 
 which they were diverted only by the display of the guns, 
 whose effects they perfectly understood. But while the others 
 retreated the leader stood his ground, continuing his threaten- 
 ing. Finding this of no avail, he came to the door of the tent 
 alone, moaning sadly, and by his gestures seemed to beg for 
 the dead body. When it was given him he took it up in his 
 arms and carried it away to his companions." 
 
 What we are seeking is a spiritual organism 
 sufficiently developed to cohere through the shock 
 of physical dissolution. If we must predicate immor- 
 tality of every sentient being which possesses reason, 
 affection, and ethical faculty, then we must enlarge 
 the borders of Hades to receive innumerable animals. 
 If we demand a higher psychic basis to make con- 
 tinued existence possible, then we may well be forced 
 to deny it to multitudes of beings which we call men. 
 There has seemed to be no deliverance from this 
 dilemma, because we have assumed that the natural- 
 ist's classification of man and animal, which is real 
 in the physical, is also valid in the psychic realm. 
 
114 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 While it was believed that all mankind were the 
 children of a single pair, specially created, only a 
 few thousand years ago, the difficulty was insuper- 
 able. But now we know better. Geology has un- 
 folded the rocky leaves of earth's history and found 
 man's mark inscribed aeons ago. His descent from 
 pre-human and semi-human ancestry is as well es- 
 tablished as any human belief can ever be. To say 
 that " Evolution is not proven " is simply trifling 
 with truth. Nothing is ever proven or can be in 
 the sense that objection demands. But it is so well 
 established that the world of thought and knowledge 
 has ceased to defend it. To determine in the case 
 of any individual being whether or not it has attained 
 to the possession of a soul capable of continuance 
 is difficult indeed. But it is no more and no less 
 difficult than to decide at what point of its em- 
 bryonic growth it becomes human. The ovum of a 
 man and of a dog are absolutely indistinguishable. 
 The human embryo runs through and recapitulates 
 in a marvellous way the line of ascent from the 
 low order of life, through which the race has climbed. 
 It has been generally taken for granted that it 
 becomes possessed of a " soul " at some point be- 
 tween the fertilization of the ovum and the issue 
 from the womb. But for this there is not the slight- 
 est evidence. It has been seen that the very germs 
 themselves have an antecedent history as strange 
 and complex as that of the embryo. They also 
 move, choose, select, repel, show preferences, in a 
 
THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 115 
 
 word they appear to have personalities of their own 
 as really as does the new-born babe. The biogenesis 
 of the soul cannot any longer be concluded between 
 conception and birth. It is already clear that the 
 psychic life which we call mind in man, instinct in 
 the beast, and affinity in the germ cell is the same 
 thing; that it develops according to laws of its 
 own; that it is from first to last correlated with 
 an organized material structure; that at certain 
 stages in its upward movement it takes on new and 
 strange forms which could not at all be predicated 
 from any study of it at a previous stage. But the 
 thing of supreme importance for our purpose is 
 that the upward steps or stages of physical evolu- 
 tion do not at all coincide with the steps or stages 
 of psychic evolution. Reason, of a high order, for 
 example, is found among the coelentera, seems to lie 
 dormant through the reptile stage, and shows itself 
 at unexpected and incalculable places among the 
 mamalia. Does reason in man take on any new 
 quality, in virtue of which every individual becomes 
 immortal? The secret which we long to discover 
 is this: — Does the psychic life of an individual at 
 any stage of evolution attain to such a high, stable, 
 and independent existence of its own that it will be 
 able to subsist in spite of the disintegration of the 
 physical organism with which it is correlated? What 
 are the conditions upon which a survival must de- 
 pend? Are these conditions satisfied in the psychic 
 life to be found in the lower animals? Are the 
 
116 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 conditions present in the case of every individual 
 of the race which we call Man? Or is the possibility 
 of individual immortality only reached at a point 
 more or less defined in the progress of man him- 
 self? In fine, is man immortal, or is he only im- 
 mortable? 
 
IMMORTABILITY 
 
" For man is^ according to nature^ mortal^ as a being 
 who has been made out of things which are perishable. 
 But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety 
 ward off and escape from his natural mortality and 
 remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, 
 or can lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God ". 
 — Athanasius. 
 
VII 
 
 IMMORTABILITY 
 
 The problem of immortability, that is, of poten- 
 tial immortality, has been hopelessly confused by 
 the traditional assumption that all those living 
 creatures who are classed as Man on physical 
 grounds are also Man on psychical grounds. This 
 being assumed, the question of a future life has 
 been one concerning a race rather than concerning 
 individuals. This explains why all arguments for 
 immortality have been so unconvincing. They have 
 tried to prove too much. The considerations which 
 would establish immortality for all men, in virtue 
 of the qualities which they possess as men, are 
 equally valid for many of the lower animals. The 
 point at which we will probably have to look for 
 immortability is not at that which separates man 
 from the brute, but at that which separates between 
 one kind of man and all the rest. The story is told 
 of a distinguished Frenchman, who, to the long argu- 
 ment of a friend against the possibility of a future 
 life, replied, " You say you are not immortal? 
 Very probably you are not ; but I am ". This is 
 much more than a smart repartee. It is the solution 
 of a problem otherwise insoluble. Whatever may 
 
 119 
 
120 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 be the difficulty in drawing such a line among men 
 does not concern us at this point in the argument. 
 It is enough for the present to point out that it 
 is far less difficult to draw the line this way than 
 any other way. We but faintly realize how low 
 in the scale of being the lowest man is, or how high 
 the highest is. Beings are living upon the earth 
 to-day at every conceivable stage between that of 
 the semi-human Akka, who has no religion, no super- 
 stitions, no developed moral sense, and the enlight- 
 ened American or European Christian whose sense 
 of moral personality is far stronger than is his 
 sense of physical being. It appears to be most 
 reasonable that at some point, yet to be defined, 
 but between these extremes, the " power of an endless 
 life " is reached. 
 
 We have now reached the point where the crucial 
 question must be faced. If we are driven to believe 
 that immortality may be predicated of some mem- 
 bers of the race, or of one kind of man, then we 
 must ask. Where is the line to be drawn? At what 
 point in the upward movement does the individual 
 personality take on those qualities which may enable 
 it to survive the death of the body? Upon what 
 does immortality depend? What are its conditions? 
 How can those conditions be fulfilled? Are they 
 at all under the control of the individual will? Or 
 is the individual on entering into the eternal life 
 as passive and helpless as he is in being ushered into 
 this world from the womb? 
 
IMMORTABILITY 121 
 
 Before attempting any reply to these questions 
 it will be well to stop long enough to make one or 
 two needful distinctions. In the first place, there 
 have been not a few, both in ancient and modern 
 times, who have maintained the truth of a " Con- 
 ditional Immortality ". But they have in every case 
 assumed that all human beings are by nature pos- 
 sessed of the same endowments. If some become im- 
 mortal and others do not, it is only because immor- 
 tality is, as it were, impressed upon some from the 
 outside. It is a gift arbitrarily bestowed. It is 
 because one has been born of the Holy Spirit in 
 Baptism, and another has not ; or because one has 
 partaken of the imperishable body and blood of 
 Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and another has not; 
 or it is because one has by a deliberate act of will 
 " accepted Christ ", and on the instant been " born 
 again " or such like. The " condition " which the 
 advocates of conditional immortality have always 
 propounded have been extraneous, arbitrary, arti- 
 ficial. What we maintain is something radically 
 different. No doubt the conditions named above may 
 be found to be concerned, but the distinction itself 
 is far deeper, more natural and reasonable, even 
 though it be far more difficult to state. It is a 
 biological process we are seeking to trace, and a 
 biological classification we attempt to discover. It 
 may be that the biological classification we are in 
 search of may turn out to be also a religious one. 
 We believe it will. But it will be religious because 
 
122 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 it corresponds to an actual reality already existent, 
 and not because of an arbitrary divine arrangement. 
 What we maintain is that if any human life becomes 
 capable of passing on into another with personality 
 intact, it will be because such a life has already 
 reached to a stage of spiritual fixedness and stability 
 which will make survival " natural " to it, and de- 
 struction " unnatural ", and that such an achieve- 
 ment, if it be reached at all, must be along the ex- 
 tension of the same path by which the soul has 
 climbed up from the primordial slime. 
 
 Again, it is of the first importance that we should 
 realize the limitations of the problem before us. I 
 have throughout used the term immortality as equiv- 
 alent to survival after death. It is necessary, how- 
 ever, from this point on, either to avoid the word 
 altogether or to reach an understanding as to the 
 sense in which it is used. Speaking accurately, im- 
 mortality is a quality which can never be predicated 
 of any soul, either here or hereafter. " God alone 
 hath immortality " is not only a scriptural, but a 
 scientific datum. Eternity is a category of the un- 
 conditioned. But the soul is an organism; and the 
 condition of every organism continuing in being is 
 that it shall be able to function, and that it shall 
 correspond with its environment. In this sense we 
 do not look for immortality. Our quest is an humbler 
 yet sufficiently momentous one. We simply try to 
 ascertain from the data available whether we can 
 find a means of transit for any human personality 
 
IMMORTABILITY 123 
 
 from this life to the next one. Whether, if that 
 prove possible, its life there shall be brief or long is 
 a question not now before us. 
 
 The world teems with hfe. The sea swarms with 
 fishes, the land is carpeted with plants. Living 
 things populate the surface, creep and burrow be- 
 neath the soil. Life is everywhere, in every drop 
 of water, in every grain of dust, filling the still 
 summer air with its multitudinous drone, roaring in 
 the streets of men's great cities, crowding and chok- 
 ing in the forests of the tropics. Try as we may, 
 we cannot adequately realize its abundance, its mul- 
 titude, its myriad forms and ways. It emerges silent 
 and unseen from inorganic matter, and crowds every 
 step of the long, strange, tortuous path upward to 
 its supreme manifestation in human self-conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 When we look at it steadily we are arrested by 
 the significant fact that the ultimate goal of each 
 individual is to pass on to another the life which 
 it possesses. If it can only reproduce, it is ready 
 to die. Its organs of reproduction are the ones to 
 which all others are ministrant. Its provisions for 
 locomotion and digestion are but means to this end. 
 Countless millions only exist long enough to copulate, 
 and give up their lives in the act. In the vegetable 
 world this is the universal rule. To the same end 
 the instincts and appetites are subsidized. The 
 " imperious instinct of propagation " dominates all 
 desires, is stronger than pain or even the fear of 
 
IM CHRISTIANITY 
 
 death. In all except the highest forms it is not 
 even left to choice. Reproduce they must, even if 
 it cost life. In the whole organic world every other 
 consideration is subordinated to the single purpose 
 of keeping the stream of life flowing. This deter- 
 mination is so inexorable that, lest it may be defeated, 
 a thousand individuals are brought into life only 
 to perish, in order to make sure that from among 
 them all one may reproduce. Even in man the pro- 
 vision for reproduction determines the whole plan 
 of his being. His term of life is adjusted to the 
 length of time required to reach puberty. When his 
 power to reproduce declines, he begins to die. His 
 intellectual habits are correlated to this function. 
 His social habits are ultimately fixed with reference 
 to this need. " Be fruitful and multiply " is the 
 primordial command stamped upon the very con- 
 stitution of animate nature. 
 
 But once this truth has been realized, it leads us 
 to confront the supreme difficulty. Life seems to 
 be everything, and the individual nothing. If only 
 the species can win its way forward and upward, 
 the unit appears to be of no value. We appear to 
 be caught in the current of a mighty moving stream 
 of life which will assimilate our juices and sink us 
 in the slime or fling us dead upon the shore, without 
 ruth, even as without anger. The life is everything ; 
 the organism in which the life is for the moment 
 conserved seems to be nothing. Now, if an indi- 
 vidual immortality is to become possible, nothing less 
 
IMMORTABILITY 125 
 
 is necessary than a reversal of this elemental law. 
 It is clear that that can only be achieved if an 
 individual be found who is stronger than his species. 
 Up to this point life sweeps round everlastingly in 
 a closed circle, from seed through plant or animal 
 to seed again, and so about continually. If escape 
 from it be ever possible it must be at a tangent and 
 by some kind of individual whose life orbit sweeps 
 far enough away from its material centre to be 
 caught in some mighty attraction from beyond. And, 
 to continue the figure, the difference between the 
 individual who passes on and the one who remains 
 enchained within the circle of nature need be only 
 infinitesimal, provided it occur at the right point. 
 An illustration which may serve to make the matter 
 plainer may be drawn from mathematical physics. 
 Take the case of two bodies moving through space. 
 One of them has for its path the extremest conic 
 section, a curve with the greatest possible eccen- 
 tricity. The path of the other is a parabola. The 
 difference between the two curves is literally infin- 
 itesimal; yet moving in the one the body must 
 ultimately return to the point from which it started, 
 while the other will move out into infinite space. 
 May we not similarly expect that a difference cor- 
 respondingly slight in the psychic movement of an 
 organism may produce a result equally important ? 
 
 In the lowest order of life there are really no 
 individuals at all. It is simply a speck of pro- 
 toplasmic jelly, uniform and slightly sensitive. It 
 
126 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 has no limbs, organs, or members. To multiply it 
 merely breaks in two. Each part is as much or 
 as little offspring as it is parent or self. Each 
 half, in turn, divides again, and so the propagation 
 goes on. It cannot be said that individuality belongs 
 to any of its units, for each unit is divisible, and 
 it is the essence of personality to be indivisible. 
 In a higher stage of being a sort of compound or 
 communistic individuality begins to show. Not until 
 a comparatively high stage of evolution does the 
 real individual appear " whose life is in itself ". 
 Then he appears, only to live his little life, beget 
 a child if he can, and perish. The multitude of 
 living forms merge as it were into a mighty river 
 flowing through the seons and dropping over the 
 precipice to death, more numerous than all the 
 drops at Niagara. Nor does the spectacle cause 
 moral distress or revolt until the individual atoms 
 come to be of such consequence that we rebel at 
 the aimlessness of it all. No beast has been de- 
 frauded of any due because it has to die. Mere ex- 
 istence and sensation have been for it a boon, whether 
 its life be short or long. This is also true of the 
 brute-like man, and, what is of more consequence, 
 it is his own judgment in the case. He clings to 
 life for its own sake, and the lower in the scale he 
 is the less tenacious he is. Even Laertes can face 
 the end with a light heart because he has had his 
 life. Not till a Hamlet arrives does he begin to 
 question whether it is better to be or not to be. 
 
IMMORTABILITY 127 
 
 Considering the whole human race, from its primeval 
 brutishness until now, it is probable that the over- 
 whelming majority have no unliquidated claim upon 
 existence. They have had the gift of living, have 
 made of it all that could be made, and there is nothing 
 more due them. But there are many, surely, of 
 which more can be said. Their psychical life is 
 stronger than their physical; their affections are 
 stronger than their appetites ; their spirits have es- 
 tablished so many relations with other personalities, 
 with nature as a whole, with ideals which are more 
 real to their apprehension than is matter itself, with 
 the Infinite Person whom they feel enfolding them- 
 selves and nature in his arms, that to think of them- 
 selves coming to naught because the foundation of 
 a material body is cut from under them by death, 
 brings to our feeling a sense of distress and un- 
 reasonableness which is intolerable. Such an one 
 has already learned the secret of going beyond 
 himself by his sympathies. He is an individual, as 
 the inorganic crystal is, as the germ cell is, as 
 the brute is, as the animal man is, — ^but he is some- 
 thing more. In common with all these he is under 
 the law which subordinates the individual to the 
 species, and disregards it when it has once served 
 its use of reproduction. But he has, to some de- 
 gree at least, and in some portion of his being, 
 escaped from this law by having come into the 
 possession of certain qualities which cannot be prop- 
 agated by reproduction. He did not reach these 
 
128 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 qualities at the point where he became man by bodily 
 structure, or by the possession of mind, but at an 
 uncertain point high above that of primitive man. 
 But wherever and whenever this new faculty is 
 reached, we may fairly expect that it will be pre- 
 served in being. This conviction does not come 
 alone, or in the first place, from religious faith, 
 but from watching nature's ways. One thing science 
 knows quite well; that is, that nature does not hesi- 
 tate a moment to change or to reverse methods 
 which she has used through long stretches of time 
 whenever she has something to gain by such reversal. 
 If it shall appear at any stage in the upward move- 
 ment that more is gained by keeping an individual 
 in a continued life than by breaking him up for 
 sake of the species, we may expect that nature will 
 find some way to do so. The inexorable forces of 
 gravitation and chemical affinity had their own way 
 in the universe for an eternity, until they were 
 arrested and turned about in the interest of life. 
 Overproduction, and the survival of the fittest held 
 their ruthless sway until they were reversed in the 
 interest of aff'ection. The supremacy of the race 
 at the expense of the individual we may expect to 
 continue just until something in the individual comes 
 to be of more importance than that law, and no 
 longer. 
 
JESUS' TEACHING 
 
" The most common of those feelings which present 
 obstacles to the pursuit of truth are aversion to doubt; 
 desire of a safe medium; the love of system; the dread 
 of the character of inconstancy; the dread of innova- 
 tion; undue deference to human authority; the fear of 
 criticism; regard to seeming consistency". — Whately, 
 " On Bacon's Essays ". 
 
VIII 
 JESUS' TEACHING 
 
 The idea of " eternal life " has always been asso- 
 ciated with that of moral goodness. Evil and death 
 are cause and effect. Righteousness and long life; 
 sin and degradation; this is what men have always 
 believed to be in some way a fundamental truth. 
 But it is greatly to be doubted whether they have 
 realized how true it is. 
 
 In a very real sense a race or a people or a nation 
 is an individual, with a personality of its ow^n. The 
 long history of the past is strewn with the dust of 
 dead peoples. In a few instances their rise, climax, 
 decline, and decay lie within the historic period. 
 No doubt these arose from among the ruins of 
 innumerable earlier peoples. Why have some sur- 
 vived while others perished? Why do one or two 
 peoples, or families of peoples to-day feel and show 
 the sense of secure being, while others are slowly 
 decaying under our eyes? The reason is, a people's 
 length of healthy life depends upon its goodness ; 
 not, finally upon its physical vigor, or its mental 
 advance, but its moral worth. Mr. Gladstone main- 
 tained that the physical and intellectual equipment 
 of the average Greek of the time of Pericles, was 
 
 131 
 
132 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 considerably higher than that of the average Eng- 
 lishman or American of to-day. It is very possible 
 that the Babylonians and Egyptians more than 
 equalled us in these regards. The phallic symbols 
 strewing the ruins by the Euphrates, and the abom- 
 inations sketched upon the walls of Pompeii give the 
 clue to their decay. What prevented the American 
 Indian, in possession since the dawn of time of the 
 most abundant region of the earth, with his great 
 physical development and mental force, from de- 
 veloping a civilization which would have been abid- 
 ing? What explains the ruin of Rome and Con- 
 stantinople, and the states of Asia Minor and North 
 Africa .f^ The answer is in every case the same; they 
 perished from lack of goodness. No other quality 
 could procure for them continuance in existence. 
 The Teutons have endured, and promise to endure, 
 in virtue of certain racial moral qualities which they 
 developed ages ago, and which have saved them from 
 being brutalized by their own strength, or from 
 sinking in their stupidity. Goodness can thus arrest 
 and turn back for nations the primal law of gi^ow^th, 
 vigor, and decline. Is it too much to believe that 
 it may do the same for the individual? 
 
 But if anything like this be true, it is clear that 
 the chance of future life turns upon a question of 
 present fact. Does one, or does he not, in any 
 instance, possess a moral energy sufficiently strong 
 and coherent to dominate his life? The mere pos- 
 session of a potential faculty for goodness, or the 
 
JESUS' TEACHING 133 
 
 actual manifestation of a rudimentary ethical sense 
 will not suffice. Brutes have that much. The races 
 which perished had the same. Only a moral nature 
 developed far enough to take command over the 
 turbulent appetites and errant mind will serve the 
 end. Now, it is clear that some possess this quality, 
 and some do not. It Is a quality correlated in some 
 degree, though not very closely, with intellectual 
 forwardness. A simple hind may be very good, and 
 an undevout astronomer may be morally an imbecile. 
 We have seen above that there are now living 
 whole tribes of undeveloped savages, who have no 
 more moral energy than the brute, — for it must be 
 remembered that the brutes have some. To raise 
 the question of immortality concerning them would 
 be Irrelevant or premature. They have not yet en- 
 tered really into the human life which now is, to 
 say nothing of that which is to come. At every 
 other plane of biologic advance, an individual here 
 and there, no doubt, rises far above either his 
 fathers or his children, and wins for himself the 
 power of infinite progression. But the place of 
 escape from the closed ring of what we call nature 
 is not at the body or the mind, but the conscience. 
 If that gate be not found, or If it be too narrow 
 for egress, there cannot, in the nature of the case, 
 be any thoroughfare. Nor is it easy to expect 
 immortality for multitudes far closer to us than the 
 Pygmies or the Bushmen. As one wanders observ- 
 antly and thoughtfully amongst the crowds which 
 
134 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 teem in the purlieus of a great Christian city, as he 
 watches their faces, listens to their meagre speech, 
 penetrates to the interior of their shallow lives, 
 realizes their brutishness and mischievousness, be- 
 comes familiar with their desires and ideals of life, 
 above all, as he sees their look of blank insensibility 
 to any moral appeal, he is hard put to it not to 
 ask himself, — are these really men? I confess 
 frankly that when I have tried to speak to certain 
 kinds of men of " righteousness, temperance, and 
 judgment to come ", I have felt that the effort was 
 little less vain than would have been the same ex- 
 hortation to my good dog. One can, it is true, make 
 his appeal to the fear of death, and can thus evoke 
 a response in the form of terror. But one can do 
 the same by pointing his gun at a predatory crow. 
 The fear of death and the belief in a future life 
 are two entirely different things, and have no neces- 
 sary relation to each other. So far as one can see, 
 the fear of death, as an emotion, does not differ 
 either in degree or kind between the natural man 
 and the natural beast. The natural man's life may 
 be Edenic or it may be barren and squalid, but he 
 does not come in sight of the tree of life until he 
 leaves it. Myriads still dwell in it, being yet as 
 " Adam " was. While at that stage the questions 
 which concern them are those which are asked by 
 zoology, comparative anatomy, and psychology. Re- 
 ligion simply cannot speak to them at all until they 
 become as gods, knowing good and evil. When that 
 
JESUS' TEACHING 135 
 
 stage is reached, and not till then, does eternal life 
 come within the possibilities. " This is eternal life, 
 to know God " ; and God is apprehended only through 
 the moral sense. 
 
 We may admit without hesitation, that it is not 
 possible to define the point at which the capacity 
 of eternal life is reached in the development of the 
 individual. This does not touch the central truth. 
 No physicist can draw a line and say, here inorganic 
 matter becomes organic; no botanist can say, here 
 vegetable life becomes animal; no naturalist can say, 
 here the invertebrate ends and the vertebrate begins ; 
 no psychologist can say, here instinct ceases and 
 reason begins. No anthropologist can draw a line 
 below man, or through men, or in the life of the 
 individual man, and say, here, now, is conscience. 
 But facts do not cease to be facts because their 
 classification is impossible. We may rest this phase 
 of the argument at this point, having in its defence 
 all the broad analogies of nature and the history of 
 peoples. It ought not to be a surprise, and it ought 
 to be a relief, if we find it to be also the teaching 
 of the Scriptures. 
 
 For many it would be of inestimable value to have 
 some definite deliverance of Jesus Christ upon the 
 question before us. Are all men immortal, or are 
 only some.f^ Is a universal resurrection a thing 
 which he takes for granted, or is it not? An ex- 
 plicit dictum of his upon the subject would be to 
 many of us an end of controversy. But it comes 
 
136 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 as a sort of shock to be reminded, not only that 
 he does not say, but that he avows, at the time when 
 he spoke upon the general subject, that his informa- 
 tion was limited. " Of that day and hour no man 
 knoweth, not even the Son ". It is not impossible, 
 however, to ascertain at least in general, what his 
 belief was. In the first place we have a sufficiently 
 full report in the Gospels of what he actually said. 
 It is true that the report is incomplete and fragmen- 
 tary, but it is coherent. Then we have in the other 
 portions of the New Testament the interpretation 
 and expansion of his teaching by very intelligent and 
 sympathetic contemporaries. Finally, and chiefly, 
 we have his own extraordinary career. This last will 
 constitute a portion by itself; for the present we 
 ask the limited question, — ^What did Jesus, during 
 the period before his " resurrection ", believe and 
 teach touching the future life? 
 
 The fact that liis language was intelligible to those 
 who heard him is proof that his general presump- 
 tions were the same as theirs. But it is the simple 
 fact that they were not believers in " the immortality 
 of the soul ". If a previous belief in inherent im- 
 mortality had been needful to enable them to under- 
 stand his farther teaching in the premises, then he 
 would have been obliged to say so. The point is 
 that he took for his premises the beliefs which his 
 hearers actually entertained. It is at once most 
 necessary and most difficult to bring ourselves to 
 realize that his hearers did not have at all the be- 
 
JESUS' TEACHING 137 
 
 liefs which are taken for granted now. Some of them 
 did not believe in any future Hfe at all. Some of 
 them believed in corporate immortality for the people 
 Israel, with which individual continuance had nothing 
 to do. Some of them believed in the resurrection 
 of those of the race of Abraham alone. Some looked 
 for the immortality of only the righteous of that 
 race. But nobody believed in the immortality of 
 every human being as such. It is clear, therefore, 
 that when he faces a company of this sort, if what 
 he was about to teach was dependent for its validity, 
 upon that belief which is now common, the presump- 
 tion of universal future life, he must have said so. 
 But he did not say so. Moreover, the assumptions 
 now current would not have availed him at all. One 
 of the most difficult things is to read the true mean- 
 ing into a word or phrase to which one has long been 
 in the habit of attaching a mistaken or secondary 
 meaning. When we find Jesus using such antitheses 
 as " life and death ", " eternal life and destruction ", 
 " living and perishing ", it is at least probable that 
 he used the words in their natural and obvious sense. 
 But we have for so long been accustomed to think 
 of eternal life as being equivalent to eternal happi- 
 ness, and the converse, that it will require a strenuous 
 and continued eifort to see in Jesus' words what they 
 meant and what alone they could have meant to those 
 who heard them. Another thing to bear in mind is 
 that he never deals in abstractions. He has nothing 
 to say about " man," but only about men. He never 
 
138 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 refers to " the soul " or " the human soul ". He 
 never discusses the question of immortality in the 
 abstract, but only the possibilities and destinies of 
 individuals. He never assumes that man is mortal, 
 or immortal, he only points out to the individual 
 which way life lies, and which way destruction. And 
 what is possibly more important for our purpose 
 than anything else, he plainly declares that many will 
 be constitutionally incapable of understanding him 
 at all. In other words, he announces that he speaks 
 to those whose spiritual faculties are sufficiently de- 
 veloped to respond to the stimulus of the truth. 
 " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear ". 
 
 Bearing these preliminary considerations in mind 
 we may now ask, — What did he say.? His teaching 
 may be divided into two portions which differ greatly 
 in form, if not in contents. The most prominent, 
 but least clear, is that extended address in apocalyp- 
 tic form, suggested by his disciples' inquiry concern- 
 ing the fate of Jerusalem. The great difficulty in 
 the way of determining his precise meaning here is 
 the fact that the form of the address is evidently 
 not his own. It is framed in that cryptic manner 
 common to all the later apocalypses, and is derived 
 from the earlier prophetic style.^ Dr. Gould in 
 his " Theology of the New Testament " well says of 
 it, " Simple as are these teachings, Jesus has been 
 the subject of the most serious misunderstandings 
 
 ^Cf. Is. 13:9,10; 24:21-23; Ezek. 32:7-10; Joel 2:10; 
 Dan. 7:13. 
 
JESUS' TEACHING 139 
 
 from the beginning. The last things of which he 
 speaks are not the end of the world, but of the age. 
 Whatever was predicted here by our Lord was to 
 take place within the generation succeeding his death. 
 There is a consensus of scholars about this, the only 
 question being whether or not he made a mistake. 
 And it is strongly against the assumption that he 
 did make a mistake, that he sets forth in the parables 
 a statement of the slow growth of the Kingdom 
 which clearly contradicts the idea of an early com- 
 ing ". In any case, and whatever it may purport, 
 the last apocalypse of Jesus is so dramatic in form 
 and imagery that not much can be learned from it 
 as to the essential nature and possibilities of the 
 individual man. This must be sought from his more 
 definite teaching. 
 
 When one weaves together the words of Jesus 
 as they are scattered through the Gospels, he finds 
 that he has before him a biological treatise. 
 He finds the conditions set forth upon which con- 
 tinuance in being is possible, the perils to which 
 being is exposed, the means to counteract these 
 perils, and the ultimate issues of living. But he 
 finds also that the theme throughout is the life itself. 
 The alternatives set forth are not future pleasure 
 and future pain, but living or ceasing to live. The 
 Gospels are biological altogether. They speak a 
 language more intelligible to-day than It ever was 
 before. The imagery is drawn almost exclusively 
 from the processes and phenomena of life. The 
 
140 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 reason is evident; the illustrations are determined 
 bj the theme. The question is not of rewards and 
 penalties, but of living or perishing. Whatever of 
 pleasure or pain is implicated is incidental. He be- 
 gins by stating the case in terms which every biolo- 
 gist knows to be true of life at every stage, " Enter 
 ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate and 
 broad is the way which leadeth to destruction, and 
 many there be which go in there; because strait is 
 the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth into 
 life, and few there be that find it ". Of fifty seeds 
 oft nature brings but one to bear. " He that hear- 
 eth my word and believeth on him that sent me hath 
 everlasting life and shall not pass on to destruc- 
 tion, but hath passed out of death into life. That 
 which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which 
 is born of the spirit is spirit. Marvel not, there- 
 fore, that I say unto you that except a man be 
 born from above he cannot enter into the kingdom 
 of God ". The place of any creature is determined 
 by its actions, for " every plant is classified by the 
 fruits it bears. Men do not gather grapes from the 
 acanthus nor figs from brambles. A good plant 
 cannot produce bad fruit, nor an evil plant good 
 fruit. But every plant that does not bring forth 
 good fruit is cut to pieces and thrown in the fire ". 
 The spiritual life follows the analogy of the natural 
 life both in origin and method. " For as the Fatlier 
 quickencth the dead and maketh them living, so the 
 Son quickeneth whom he will. He that hearkeneth 
 
JESUS' TEACHING J41 
 
 unto my word, and hath confidence m him that sent 
 me, hath aeonian life and moveth not to destruction, 
 but hath passed out of the dead into the living. 
 I declare unto you that if a man keep my saying 
 he shall never see death. Leave the dead to bury 
 their dead, and follow after me ". He insists that 
 this higher and more enduring life ought to be 
 achieved at any cost. " For what will it profit a man 
 if he gain the whole world and fall short (Irjfuoo)) 
 of his soul? Or what shall a man get in exchange 
 for his soul? If thy right eye or thy right hand 
 should be in the way, pluck it out, cut it off, for 
 it is better that one of thy members should perish 
 than that thy whole body should be thrown away ". 
 These quotations should suffice to show his teach- 
 ing. All the others are variations upon the same 
 theme. He makes his appeal to the instinct of liv- 
 ing. If you do thus and thus, following in my steps, 
 you can secure for yourself a life so prepotent that 
 what you call death cannot ruin it. Blessed are the 
 meek, the pure in heart, the unselfish, for the new 
 kingdom belongs to them. If you devote your ener- 
 gies to building up your lower life, you will lose 
 everything, because it comes to an end, but if you 
 disregard it in the interest of my eternal gospel of 
 goodness, you will find an aeonian life. What is all 
 this but the annunciation of the last term in the 
 long series of organic evolution. And is it not 
 supremely trustworthy as being the dictum of " the 
 Man most man " ? 
 
142 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 No doubt the question will arise, If this is actu- 
 ally the teaching of Jesus, how comes it that he has 
 been so long and so persistently misconceived? If 
 the teaching of Jesus was biological, how has it come 
 to be thought of as legal? If his distinction was 
 between a perishable and an abiding life under con- 
 ditions now existing, why has it been construed to 
 refer to the contrast between happiness and agony 
 in a future life, to which all men are destined in any 
 case. It may be replied that, at any rate, he was 
 not misunderstood by his Apostles and earliest in- 
 terpreters. 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 
 
" Sleep'st thou indeed? or is Thy spirit fled 
 At large among the dead? 
 Whether in Eden's bowers Thy welcome voice 
 Wake Abraham to rejoice. 
 Or in some drearier scene Thine eye controls 
 The thronging band of souls; 
 That, as Thy blood won earth, Thine agony 
 Might set the shadowy realm from sorrow free ". 
 
 — Keble. 
 
IX 
 
 THE FIRST TO CROSS 
 
 The earliest writings in which the name of Jesus 
 appears were written from thirty to fifty years after 
 his death. None of these are reasoned and formu- 
 lated statements of belief. They consist chiefly of 
 certain letters which have survived from the cor- 
 respondence carried on between some of his followers. 
 This correspondence is often of an intimate and 
 personal character, sometimes it is letters written 
 by a prominent man to a club or group of Chris- 
 tians, to be read by them and passed on to other 
 groups. In such composition we cannot expect to 
 find any very definite or precise statements of doc- 
 trine. They bear much the same relation to Chris- 
 tianity as do, for example, the familiar correspond- 
 ence of Huxley and Gray and Darwin to the doctrine 
 of Evolution. In such a case it is not so much 
 what the writers say as what they take for granted 
 that enables one to see their real position. With 
 the exception of the Fourth Gospel and the Apoca- 
 lypse it may be assumed that the whole New Testa- 
 ment was written within fifty years after the death 
 of Jesus. Now, the question is, do these writings 
 take for granted the indestructibility of the soul, and 
 
 145 
 
146 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the natural immortality of all men? There is no 
 doubt of the answer; they do not. Moreover, such 
 an assumption makes their arguments in many cases 
 unintelligible, and in not a few renders them worth- 
 less. 
 
 In general, it may be said without hesitation, the 
 New Testament continues the same biological theme 
 around which the teaching of Jesus revolved. Their 
 arguments do not start, however, as his do, from 
 the facts of being, but from the fact of his resurrec- 
 tion. But their assumptions are the same as his. 
 The earliest of the books of the New Testament 
 are two letters written by St. Paul to a little group 
 of converts which he had made some years pre- 
 viously at Thessalonica. At the time when he wrote 
 it was generally expected by the Christians that 
 Jesus' plan was to reappear while his friends still 
 lived, gather them out of the world, and then make 
 an end of all things, to reconstruct the earth and 
 open a new regime. They believed the fact of his 
 resurrection, but they had not come to see the place 
 of that fact in the economy of life. This expecta- 
 tion of the early end of the world colors all the 
 earlier New Testament writings. It was a naive 
 error which only death and the passing of the years 
 could correct. They felt that they had come in- 
 dividually into the possession of a life of such quality 
 that it would endure, but they saw at the same time 
 that they were growing old physically. It came to 
 the knowledge of Paul that his Thessalonian con- 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 147 
 
 verts, whose expectation was the same as his own, 
 were disturbed and perplexed because some of their 
 number who w^ith them had been waiting for the 
 Lord's coming, had fallen asleep. Had they, in 
 consequence, missed the immortality which they ex- 
 pected? Paul thereupon writes to reassure them. 
 What he says and what he does not say are equally 
 noteworthy. He has nothing to say to them about 
 universal resurrection and immortality. He writes: 
 " I would not have you to doubt concerning them 
 that have fallen asleep, or that you should sorrow 
 as do other people, who have no hope for the dead. 
 For as w^e believe that Jesus died and rose again, 
 so also we believe that God will bring back with him 
 them that have fallen asleep in him. I assure you, 
 in God's truth, that we who may be alive at the 
 Lord's coming, will not have any advantage over 
 them that have fallen asleep. For the Lord shall 
 descend from heaven with the voice of the archangel 
 and with the trump of God ; and first the dead in 
 Christ shall rise ; and then we that are alive, together 
 with them, shall be caught up in the clouds to meet 
 the Lord in the air ". Lie was still of the same 
 opinion when he wrote the Thessalonians his second 
 letter ; but as the years went on, and the real sig- 
 nificance of Jesus' resurrection came to be better com- 
 prehended, he came to think of the new life less and 
 less in connection with any great cosmic cataclysm, 
 and more and more as the manifestation of a supreme 
 vital force which would continue to operate accord- 
 
148 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ing to its own laws to the end of the ages. His 
 matured behef is expressed in that divine classic 
 which for twenty centuries has been read by Christian 
 charity over the dead bodies of saints and sinners 
 alike, the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the 
 Corinthians. It is a marvellous construction of 
 faith, science, poetry, and high aspiration. But it 
 concerns itself solely with the " dead in Christ ". 
 The " natural man " is left outside its conclusions 
 in express terms. If any one question this, let him 
 read it; but let him read it all. When he has read 
 that " as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall be 
 made alive ", let him read on, " but each in his own 
 order, Christ the first fruits, then they that are 
 Christ's ; and that is the end ". The drama is closed 
 and the stage cleared before the " natural " man 
 has any standing upon it. 
 
 " That which is natural comes first, then that which is 
 spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthen; the second 
 man is of heaven. As is the earthen, such are they also that 
 are earthen; and as is the heavenly, such are they that are 
 heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthly, we 
 shall also bear the image of the heavenly. For I declare 
 this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom 
 of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption ". 
 
 I am well aware that all this may seem to some 
 to be an unwarrantable attempt to read into St. 
 Paul's words a meaning which they will not bear. 
 I can only urge that this seems to me to be the 
 obvious and natural meaning, and the only meaning 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 149 
 
 which those to whom the letter was written could 
 have found in it. And this conviction is established 
 by the fact that this meaning squares with the fun- 
 damental biological purpose of the Gospel of Christ. 
 The quintessence of the matter is that life in its 
 supreme phrase conforms to the law of life in all 
 its stages. It is a thing to be achieved. At every 
 step there are a thousand candidates who fail for 
 every one who attains. Those who do attain remain 
 in possession while they fulfil the conditions in the 
 order where they are. Except a molecule of matter 
 be born from above it cannot enter into life. Except 
 the living animal be born from above it cannot be- 
 come man. Except a man be born from above he 
 cannot enter into the new kingdom. That is not 
 first which is natural, but that which is spiritual. 
 
 The later books of the New Testament, such as the 
 Revelation of St. John and the apocalyptic portion 
 of the Gospel of Matthew, throw little direct light 
 upon the subject. While it is true that they con- 
 cern themselves with the " last things ", it is also 
 true that they wrote in a manner which was not 
 intended to be taken for the face of it. The Apoca- 
 l3^pse is obscure because it was meant to be obscure. 
 The writers put in cryptogram things which it was 
 not safe for Christians to discuss openly. No doubt 
 it was intelligible to those to whom it was addressed, 
 but the key has long since been lost. But it is prob- 
 able that the book of Revelation, colored by the 
 gorgeous but fine frenzied imaginations of Dante 
 
150 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and Milton, have done more than anything else to 
 fix the popular notions concerning resurrection and 
 the future life. The misfortune is that poetry has 
 been mistaken for revelation and imagery for reality. 
 But however firmly these Oriental pictures may be 
 fixed in the popular mind, their reality has never 
 been accepted as a part of the Christian faith. The 
 Creed is content with saying that we " believe in the 
 resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world 
 to come ". No public creed earlier than the fourth 
 century contains the clause, " the resurrection of the 
 body ". 
 
 The dramatic framework in which all this is set 
 in apocalyptic scripture may be helpful or may be 
 confusing just in proportion as one is or is not 
 able to discriminate between the truth and the 
 imagery. No end of error has been caused by con- 
 fusing the one with the other. From this has come 
 that series of mental pictures of universal death; 
 an underworld wherein all souls as phantoms wait 
 through the ages ; a spectacular Judgment ; a pro- 
 cession of redeemed to Elysium, and of condemned 
 to Tartarus. Unless one's thought can escape from 
 out this Dore gallery altogether, it will seek in vain 
 for a reasonable as well as rehgious and holy hope 
 of life beyond. 
 
 If, however, this " way to immortality " be but 
 the extension of the path of life which we may trace 
 upward through nature, what specific and essential 
 connection has it with Jesus of Nazareth? 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 151 
 
 Birds which are born and bred in subarctic regions 
 must perish unless they become able, at the proper 
 time, to cross land and sea to a summer clime. 
 Whether one of them shall be able to do this, de- 
 pends upon its growth of wing, its instinct of direc- 
 tion, and its strength to sustain flight. Between 
 the one who can and the one who cannot is a differ- 
 ence of a few millimeters' length of pinion and a few 
 grains, more or less, of nourishment. The transit 
 for the individual man from the present stage of 
 being to the one which lies beyond we believe to be 
 a question of the vigor of moral personality. Is 
 there any reason to believe that the passage has 
 ever been effected ? A single instance would be worth 
 volumes of argument. It would bring the whole 
 matter out of the abstract into the concrete. More- 
 over, it would transform the lives of all those to 
 whom such information might come. If we could 
 find one single case of a man having passed through 
 corporeal death, and having thereafter shown to liv- 
 ing man by word or sight or speech that he is the 
 same one who died, it would revolutionize human life. 
 Above all, if he should give an intelligible account, 
 not of where he has gone to, but of how he got 
 there, the riddle of the universe would be read. It 
 would be as though some one had found a practica- 
 ble ford across an encompassing river which had al- 
 ways been thought impassable. It would change the 
 whole temper and manner of life of those who live 
 this side. It would bring hope concerning the fate 
 
152 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of that multitude who had essayed the same crossing, 
 and had seemed to have been drowned. 
 
 There are now living several hundred millions of 
 people who believe such a crossing to have been made. 
 They believe that it occurred two thousand years 
 ago, sometime between a Friday evening and a Sun- 
 day morning, in the city of Jerusalem, and that the 
 man's name was Jesus. I understand quite well how 
 the scientific man and the student of evidences may 
 feel like turning away with impatience at the mere 
 suggestion. The event is so remote, the direct evi- 
 dence so scanty, the event so incredible, that busy 
 men cannot be expected to take it seriously. Maybe 
 so. It is more than likely that a very moderate 
 cross-examination would break down every witness, 
 and would show contradiction in the testimony. But 
 still the fact remains that millions of people have 
 believed and do believe it to have been a real occur- 
 rence. These are also people whose average intelli- 
 gence is, upon the whole, higher than that of any 
 equal number of people in the world. No like num- 
 ber approach them in moral earnestness or in gen- 
 eral truthfulness. If it be objected that their be- 
 lief in the alleged reappearance of Jesus after his 
 death is only an article of faith which they receive 
 after they have on other grounds become Christians, 
 then the question arises, What accounts for Chris- 
 tianity.'' The world in Jesus' time did not look for 
 a future life of the individual; to-day it looks for 
 it even more universally than the facts warrant. 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 153 
 
 What has caused the change? The cause is so evi- 
 dent that no student of history questions it. It is 
 due to the assured conviction of friends of Jesus 
 that they saw him in his own person after his death. 
 It is conceivable that they were mistaken. But in 
 that case we have that stupendous fabric which we 
 call Christianity, that complex structure of morals, 
 social order, political energy, and religious power, 
 resting upon nothing. Now, there is such a thing 
 as a credulity of scepticism as well as a credulity of 
 faith. The sensible man tries to avoid both, to look 
 at things as they are, and in any case to accept 
 the explanation which best explains. 
 
 Let it be well understood right here that the 
 question involved is not of the " supernatural " as 
 opposed to the " natural ". If Jesus survived his 
 own death it was because it was natural for him 
 and such as he to do so. The antithesis of natural 
 and supernatural is a mere imagination. The only 
 true classification is the real and the unreal. What- 
 ever is real is natural, for whenever its reality is 
 established the definition of nature must be extended 
 to include it. 
 
 Assuming the story of the Gospels to be honest — 
 and no one doubts the honesty — it is clear that be- 
 tween five hundred and a thousand of Jesus' friends 
 who knew him in life believed that they had seen 
 him again after his death. It must be acknowledged 
 that the accounts are confused and in details con- 
 tradictory, but in essentials they are clear enough. 
 
154 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The disciples were not looking for his reappearance, 
 and were very slow to believe it when it occurred. 
 They had thought this was he who should redeem 
 Israel, but he had died, and their dream was at an 
 end. Then something happened, suddenly, which 
 changed the whole situation for them and in con- 
 sequence changed their whole lives. What was it 
 that did happen? The vulgar answer is, — the dead 
 body of Jesus came to life again, and their senses 
 convinced them of the fact. But this is not the 
 impression which the story gives when it is candidly 
 examined. It is very curious that in every case 
 the person to whom Jesus reappeared failed at first 
 to recognize him. This was true of the two Marys, 
 of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the com- 
 pany in the upper room, and of all. " When they 
 saw him they worshipped, but some were sceptical ". 
 It is plain, however, that they had an experience 
 of some kind which convinced them of his identity. 
 Now, assuming, as we must, that the story is an 
 honest one, it is a passing strange one. If it were 
 told of an ordinary man, we could only look at it 
 a little for its curiosity, and then dismiss it. Two 
 considerations, however, preclude us from dealing 
 with it after tliis rough and ready fashion. The 
 first is that it is related to the previous life of a 
 personality which is altogether remarkable. The 
 second is that it has wrought such momentous results 
 in the course of human history. The story is the 
 essential element of the Christian Gospel. Remov- 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 155 
 
 ing this eviscerates it. St Paul says plainly that 
 if his Gospel should break down at this point it 
 would be worthless. Even though Jesus might have 
 lived and taught and suffered and died as he did, 
 " if he be not risen again your faith is vain ". His 
 argument was that the man Jesus had definitely 
 realized the process whereby a human being might 
 attain to the possession of a psychical life so exalted 
 in quality and so tenacious in substance that cor- 
 poreal death could not break it down ; that he had 
 achieved this for himself at an incalculable cost ; that 
 he had passed through death and conquered it, " hav- 
 ing shown himself alive by many infallible proofs " ; 
 and that he had become a kind of first fruits of a 
 human harvest, which might be great or scanty as 
 the event should prove. The primitive appeal of 
 the Gospel was to the supreme aspiration of all 
 organized creatures, the " lust of living ". This 
 appeal is incalculably more potent than the one now 
 commonly addressed to the love of happiness or the 
 fear of misery. It explains at once the eager wel- 
 come given to the Gospel in the early ages and the 
 languid acceptance accorded to it now. No wonder 
 Paul accounted all things " but dung that he might 
 know Christ and the power of his resurrection and 
 attain unto the resurrection of the dead ". And 
 little wonder that men to-day who have fallen into 
 the way of thinking that they are immortal anyway, 
 will snatch at the pleasures of the life that now 
 is, and trust to good fortune to escape any very 
 
156 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 intolerable misery in that which is to come. But if 
 it be true that the stake at issue is not either the 
 pleasure or the pain of life, but life itself, the situa- 
 tion becomes more tragic. 
 
 At this point we come to face a very obstinate diffi- 
 culty. In the continent of human history Christian- 
 ity occupies but an insignificant space. It covers 
 but two score out of the centuries of human progres- 
 sion. Those who ever did or ever could have heard 
 of our Master are but an infinitesimal fraction of 
 that mighty host of human beings who have ap- 
 peared upon and passed off the world's stage. A 
 means of attaining immortality, therefore, which 
 could only be available after a certain date A. U. C, 
 and within a certain geographical area, could be 
 only a mockery. It would be like a zoology whose 
 laws would only hold within a thiergarten and be 
 inapplicable to the beasts of the field. It would be 
 little to call such a doctrine absurd, when we might 
 justly characterize it as profoundly immoral. We 
 are in search of a bridge by which it may be possible 
 for individuals to pass from this present life to 
 another. Common equity demands that the hither 
 end of the bridge should be placed within the reach 
 of the first man who could walk and who wished to 
 cross. We cannot worthily imagine that the great 
 Architect should either have postponed its construc- 
 tion until countless generations should have perished 
 on this side the flood, or that he should have placed 
 it where it would be only available for an elect few. 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 157 
 
 Let the conditions of eternal life be as inexorable as 
 they may prove to be. We are familiar with that 
 necessity at every stage of the organic movement. 
 No one will gainsay a rigid selection of the individuals 
 who live out of the multitudes who perish. But the 
 one thing which the moral sense demands is that this 
 selection shall be a natural and not an arbitrary 
 one. Time was when devout men denounced the 
 phrase " natural selection " because they fancied it 
 circumscribed the action of God's intelligence. They 
 did not realize the unspeakable relief it brings to a 
 belief in God's righteousness. Even the gift of eter- 
 nal life might scarcely be accepted at his hands if 
 it came tainted with favoritism. " Whom he would 
 he slew, and whom he would he kept alive ", may 
 serve as the conception of God's character current 
 at the court of Belshazzar, but the moral sense of 
 to-day can only conceive thus of Baal. 
 
 But are we not bound to hold that " there is 
 none other name given under heaven among men 
 whereby they may be saved but the name of the 
 anointed Jesus " ? No doubt ; but this fact has wide 
 implications which are seldom realized. If eternal 
 life be in any actual way correlated with the Divine 
 Man whom we adore, it must be in some way superior 
 to times and dates and missionaries. If the Christ 
 be the Son of Man to any effectual purpose, it can 
 only be because he represents some force which is 
 available under the same conditions to all men at 
 all times. The " Life of the World " must be able 
 
158 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and ready to flow at any time and place where a 
 physical organism is ready to receive it. The Divin- 
 ity of Christ is an infinitely larger thing than the 
 theologians know. Their schemes of " atonement " 
 give us little or no help. They are all hopelessly 
 artificial and unreal. They all attempt to state the 
 function of the Christ in terms of Hebrew sacrifice 
 and Roman law. One could as well construct a 
 zoology in the same terms. Christian thought has 
 been bewildered and Christian instinct wellnigh de- 
 feated by the centuries of logically coherent but 
 empty systems of doctrine concerning the work of 
 Christ. His terms are biological; theirs are legal. 
 It may be ages yet before we recover from the mis- 
 fortune of having had the truth of Christ interpreted 
 and fixed by jurists and logicians instead of by 
 naturalists and men of science. It is much as 
 though the rationale of the circulation of the blood 
 had been described by Sir Matthew Hale, or the 
 germ theory of disease interpreted by Blackstone, 
 or the doctrine of evolution formulated by a legisla- 
 tive council. Religious thought is everywhere striv- 
 ing to escape from the dreary fortress of law to the 
 open world of nature. I venture to think that Dar- 
 win and the martyrs of science have done more to 
 make the words of Christ intelligible than have 
 Athanasius and the theologians. It is little less than 
 marvellous, the way in which the words of Jesus fit 
 in with the forms of thought which are to-day cur- 
 rent. They are life, generation, survival of the fit, 
 
THE FIRST TO CROSS 159 
 
 tree and fruit, multiplication by cell growth as 
 leaven, operation by chemical contact as salt, dying 
 of the lonely seed to produce much fruit, imposition 
 of a higher form of life upon a lower by being born 
 from above, grafting a new scion upon a wild stock, 
 the phenomena of plant growth from the seed through 
 the blade and the ear to the matured grain, and, 
 finally, the attainment of an individual life which 
 is eternal. The claim made for the Son of Man 
 is that he has to do with this vital process in a vital 
 fashion from the beginning of the ages to the end 
 of them. This claim may or may not be more 
 difficult for thoughtful men to admit than the claim 
 that he wrought out a means of legal escape for a 
 chosen few from a judicial sentence. But whatever 
 difficulty does attach to it is an intellectual and not 
 an ethical one. 
 
BODIES CELESTIAL 
 
" The great significance of the individual man fairly 
 raises the presumption that his place in Nature has a 
 meaning that is not to be measured by the length of his 
 life in the body. Looking, as we must do, for a purpose 
 that justifies to our understanding all this doing of Na- 
 ture, is it not reasonable to suppose that one at least 
 of these purposes is attained in the creation of these 
 personalities? And may we not fairly regard these 
 persons as containing and preserving the permanent 
 gain which comes from the work of the visible uni- 
 verse " ? — Shaler, " The Individual ". 
 
X 
 
 BODIES CELESTIAL 
 
 So far as we can see, a living personality without 
 a body is impossible ; a " disembodied spirit " is un- 
 thinkable. This is why the question of the " resur- 
 rection of the dead " becomes of such supreme im- 
 portance. The contribution which Christianity has 
 made to belief in a future life is bound up with 
 material quite as much as spiritual phenomena. 
 People had for ages before Christ a notion of some 
 kind of a nebulous and phantasmal survival of the 
 personality, but the belief was at its best practically 
 inoperative. A spirit with no material organ for 
 expressing itself puts to confusion all our concep- 
 tions of what a human being is. The body is just 
 as essential a component part of our idea of a man 
 as the soul is. It is just as easy to think of the 
 body becoming immortal without a soul as of the 
 soul being immortal without a body. This is why 
 the physiologist finds it so difficult to believe in 
 the immortality of the soul. It is only because he 
 sees more clearly than other men do the constant 
 and essential interdependence of soul and body. The 
 ground of his scepticism is sound. There is no 
 known form of energy separate from matter. The 
 
 163 
 
164. CHRISTIANITY 
 
 soul cannot flit across the river naked. Nor is it 
 any relief to think of it as existing even temporarily 
 in a quiescent state while waiting for a resurrected 
 body. It cannot wait. An individual life must be 
 continuous or else not be at all. It cannot stop and 
 go on again. The Easter images of the egg and the 
 butterfly will not bear examination. The caterpillar, 
 the imago, and the butterfly are all included in one 
 cycle, to be sure, but the continuity of the individual 
 is broken at each stage of the progression, and the 
 cycle when completed returns upon itself. It goes 
 nowhere. What we are in search of is a continuous 
 life of the individual. To this end St. Paul affirms 
 that there is a natural body and there is a spiritual 
 body. If so, where is it. ^ How does it grow .^^ What 
 are its qualities.^ What is its relation to what we 
 call matter.? What reason has the Apostle for mak- 
 ing his assertion.? His reason is obvious; he asserts 
 that there is a " spiritual " body because he has 
 seen one. 
 
 The nature of Jesus' reappearance may be exam- 
 ined without irreverence because we are so deeply 
 concerned to know the facts and their significance. 
 The Gospels represent the risen Christ as a living 
 man like other men, and at the same time strangely 
 unlike, and they make no attempt to adjust the con- 
 tradiction. He is independent of the laws of mat- 
 ter, and at the same time he conforms to some of 
 them. He suddenly appears in a lighted room whose 
 doors remain locked, but at the same time they think 
 
BODIES CELESTIAL 165 
 
 they see him eat and drink. Again, he communi- 
 cates with them by means of some kind of spoken 
 language, but at the same time is invisible. They 
 see him and take him for a stranger, but the next 
 moment they recognize him. We seem, in a word, 
 to be in the presence of something which is both 
 material and immaterial, something which is cogniza- 
 ble by the senses, and which at the same time plays 
 fast and loose with sense perceptions. There would 
 seem to be only two reasonable attitudes toward the 
 story open to us. Either we may dismiss it as an 
 Oriental fantasy, or we must extend our definitions 
 of nature to include its phenomena. Of course one 
 may, if he so please, look at it from a distance as 
 a sacred region into which curiosity dare not enter 
 and where faith alone is admissible. But there is 
 such a thing as sitting down at the entrance of a 
 holy ground under pretence of putting off one's 
 shoes, while the real motive is indolence or fear. If 
 the phenomena under consideration are facts at all, 
 they are facts which are meant for use. We may 
 rightly " have boldness to enter into the holiest, 
 by a new and living way which he hath consecrated 
 for us through the veil, that is to say his flesh ". 
 
 The most significant feat which modern science has 
 accomplished has been to establish the existence of 
 that strange substance known as interstellar ether. 
 Its existence had long been suspected, now it is 
 known. Sir Isaac Newton closes his " Principia " 
 with this prophetic paragraph: — 
 
166 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 "And now we might add something concerning a most 
 subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; 
 by the force and attraction of which spirit the particles of 
 bodies mutually attract one another, and electric bodies sepa- 
 rate, and light is emitted, and all sensation is excited, and 
 the members of animal bodies move at the command of the 
 will by vibrations of this spirit propagated along the solid 
 filaments of the nerves. But these things cannot be explained 
 in a few words, nor are we furnished with that sufficiency 
 of experiments necessary to an accurate determination and 
 demonstration of the laws by which this subtle spirit operates ". 
 
 Now, this " subtle spirit " of Sir Isaac has been 
 shown to be not spirit at all, but a material medium 
 which fills all space and interpenetrates all matter. 
 The result has rendered necessary a new definition 
 of Matter. Extension, ponderability, form, dimen- 
 sion, and such qualities are no longer sufficient to 
 define it. " Empty " space can no longer be spoken 
 of, for no portion of space is empty. It can no 
 longer be said that " no two portions of matter can 
 occupy the same space at the same time ". Indeed, 
 it seems to be the very condition of existence of the 
 matter which we see that it should lie bathed in a 
 matter which we do not see. For this universal 
 ether is matter. It shows some of the properties 
 of a most tenuous fluid, in other respects it acts as 
 an infinitely dense solid, and in still others as jelly. 
 It is the material medium through which light, elec- 
 tricity, and radiant energy are conducted by waves 
 of differing length, and probably what we call grav- 
 itation also. Its waves flow throucjh the densest 
 
BODIES CELESTIAL 167 
 
 material known like water through a sieve. It ap- 
 pears, indeed, to be the instrument in and through 
 which all the elemental forces, light, heat, electricity, 
 chemical energy, do their work. May not vital 
 energy be concerned with it as well? 
 
 It is not easy to understand why the physicists 
 are so reluctant to admit the objective existence of 
 such a force as " Vital Energy ". Surely there are 
 abundant phenomena which cannot be classified under 
 any other form of energy known. Allowing that the 
 phrase is only a name for a set of phenomena whose 
 essential nature is not understood, that much may 
 also be said of all the other categories of energy. 
 
 Each thought we think, each emotion we feel, is 
 associated with molecular changes and rearrange- 
 ments in the brain. But this material fabric of 
 thought is every moment disintegrating, and at death 
 falls into ruin. Now, suppose that before that ruin 
 befalls, the soul shall have been able to build up 
 of some more enduring substance, as it were, a brain 
 within the brain, a body within the body, something 
 like that which the Orientals have for ages spoken 
 of as the Astral Body. Then, when the body of 
 flesh shall be laid aside, there would remain a body, 
 material to be sure, but compacted of a kind of 
 matter which behaves quite differently from that 
 which our sense perceptions deal with. It is a 
 material which, so far as science has anything to 
 say, is essentially indestructible. It moves freely 
 amongst and through ordinary matter without let 
 
168 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 or hindrance. One can at any rate picture to him- 
 self a life of this Ethereal sort. From the individual 
 spirits of just men made perfect this present 
 " muddy vesture of decay " has fallen away, leaving 
 them " not unclothed but clothed upon ". They are 
 stiU men. They have rational souls with material 
 bodies fit to sustain and to express their psychical 
 life. The matter of their bodies is obedient to the 
 laws of matter and life, but to the laws of that kind 
 of life and matter. There are celestial bodies, and 
 there are bodies terrestrial, and each has its own 
 mode of action. Such Ethereal bodies compacted 
 with living souls would of necessity inhabit a uni- 
 verse of their own, even though that universe should 
 occupy the same space that this one does. Neither 
 earth nor fire nor water could impede their move- 
 ment. In frost and flame they would be equally at 
 home. With the swiftness of light or gravitation 
 they would speed from where old Bootes leads his 
 leash to where Sagitarius draws his bow in the 
 south. With bodies of such fine stuff compounded, 
 and so plastic to the uses of the spirit, their knowl- 
 edge would expand until Nature's secrets should lie 
 open to their eyes. Their senses would be so acute 
 and so delicately balanced as to be capable of thrills 
 of pleasure so transcendent and of pain so poignant, 
 that the experiences of this life give no measure 
 to estimate them by. Love could have its perfect 
 way where there would be perfect comprehension. 
 In this present stage no personality ever knows very 
 
BODIES CELESTIAL 169 
 
 much of any other. Each is shut within a body 
 which at best can only partially reveal it. And the 
 mind is continually weighed down and retarded by 
 the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. No doubt 
 the Ethereal body is subject to its own ills. But 
 with it as the vehicle for their expression, love and 
 knowledge must have opened to them possibilities, 
 not infinite indeed, but so extended that we may not 
 even try to guess their limits. 
 
 All this is based upon two premises, first, that 
 any possible future life must be an embodied life; 
 and, second, that there exists such a material stuff 
 as may serve the uses and needs of such a life. It 
 is an hypothesis. But every advancing step of 
 knowledge is gained by an hypothesis. If the theory 
 be found to bring into coherence facts which are 
 known to be facts, and make them coherent and 
 intelligible, and lead to the discovery of still other 
 facts, it slowly changes from an hypothesis to a 
 conviction. Will this one bear that test? 
 
 Let us see first to what extent it fits the language 
 of the New Testament. 
 
 " For we know that if the earthen fabric of our tent be 
 dissolved, we have a building from God, a fabric not made 
 with hands, eternal, in the heavens. For truly in this we 
 groan being burdened, not for that we would be unclothed, 
 but clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up 
 in life. We faint not, but though our outward man is decay- 
 ing, yet our inward man is renewed day by day. All flesh 
 is not the same flesh, there is one flesh of men, another of 
 beasts, another of birds, so there are celestial bodies and 
 
170 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 bodies terrestrial, but the glory of the celestial is one, and 
 the glory of the terrestrial is another. So also is the resurrec- 
 tion of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in 
 incorruption; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual 
 body. There is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 
 The first man is of the earth, earthen, the second man is of 
 heaven. As we have borne the image of the earthy we shall 
 also bear the image of the heavenly. For the earnest expecta- 
 tion of the creature waiteth for the revealing of the sons of 
 God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain with us until now. And not only so, but 
 we ourselves which have the first fruit of the spirit groan 
 within ourselves waiting for the adoption, that is to say, 
 the setting free of the body ". " And Jesus was transfigured 
 before them, and his face did shine as the sun, ajid his 
 raiment was white as light, and behold, there appeaifed unto 
 them Moses and Elias talking with him". "And it came to 
 pass as he sat at meat with them he took bread and blessed 
 and brake it, and their eyes were opened and they knew him, 
 and he slowly disappeared from their sight ". " I know a man 
 in Christ, whether in the body or out of the body I know 
 not, caught up into paradise, and he heard things of which it 
 is not possible for a man to speak ". " From henceforth let 
 no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of 
 Jesus Christ ". 
 
 Such quotations might be extended indefinitely, 
 but these are enough to show that the companions 
 and survivors of Jesus looked with confidence for a 
 future life of such sort that their spirits would not 
 be left naked, but clothed upon with some kind of 
 material substance which was even then being woven 
 for them in the secret place of their own being. 
 Whether or not the Ethereal stuff which science now 
 knows does or does not prove to be that which may 
 serve as the physical basis of a continued personal 
 
BODIES CELESTIAL 171 
 
 life, it may fairly be said that it enables us to 
 conceive of such a life, and that is much. The late 
 Professor Cope in his " Origin of the Fittest " asks, 
 " Is there any generalized form of matter diffused 
 through the universe which could then sustain con- 
 sciousness ? " and answers, " The presumption is that 
 such a form of matter may well exist." 
 
 According to this view the putting on of immor- 
 tality is in no wise the passage from a material to 
 a spiritual state. It is the passage from one kind 
 of a materially conditioned state to another. In this 
 is where its strength lies. It turns away from that 
 unthinkable region of disembodied spirit. We shrink 
 from disembodied being with a repugnance which 
 cannot be overcome by any argument. Much as we 
 may yearn for immortality, we would rather miss it 
 than possess it under conditions of which we can 
 form no conception and which terrify by their 
 strangeness. 
 
 The late Professor Shaler, Dean of the Scientific 
 Facultj^ of Harvard, says, " A number of men of 
 no mean authority as naturalists, some of them well 
 trained in experimental science, have after long and 
 apparently careful inquiry, become convinced that 
 there is evidence of the survival of some after death ". 
 This is a conclusion which sensible men will reach very 
 hesitatingly. The evidence, if evidence it can be 
 called, is found by an analysis of that enormous but 
 unsavory mass of Spiritism, Occultism, Telepathy, 
 Hypnotism, and such like. It is a material with which 
 
172 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 sane men are reluctant to deal. It is so contaminated 
 with fraud, charlatanism, credulity, and hysterics 
 that one's natural inclination is to pass by it as far 
 on the other side of the way as the width of the road 
 will allow. But at the same time it must be allowed 
 that there is a growing willingness to admit that 
 there is " something in it ". It is not easy to find 
 even an educated man who will categorically deny 
 that there are instances wherein one personality com- 
 municates with another without physical media of 
 intercourse. At any rate the belief in hypnotic sug- 
 gestion and telepathic communication has come to 
 be quite general. The proof is very difficult to come 
 at. When one arises from reading the reports of 
 the Society for Psychical Research or the experi- 
 ments of the physical psychologists he is apt to find 
 himself in a very exasperating mental state. He has 
 the feeling that he is here in the presence of some 
 kind of natural phenomena which are real but which 
 are being exploited by the wrong people. He is 
 not much better satisfied when he finishes the report 
 of a Seybert Commission of lawyers and scientists ap- 
 pointed by a great university to investigate the 
 alleged facts. If the one set is too credulous, the 
 other is too dogmatic. 
 
 The truth would seem to be that we are beginning 
 to take serious account of a set of unclassified 
 psychical phenomena which correspond very closely 
 with a newly described set of physical phenomena. 
 The unthinking person is prone to regard such things 
 
BODIES CELESTIAL 173 
 
 as the X-Ray and wireless telegraphy and radiant 
 energy as only inventions or discoveries which are 
 only a little more wonderful, but not differing in 
 kind from a thousand others which have gone before. 
 This misapprehends their significance. They are 
 phenomena in an entirely new region; doors opened 
 into a new universe. It is a material universe, to 
 be sure, and one which we see now to have been 
 always about us. Its existence had long been sus- 
 pected, but there was no proof, and there did not 
 seem to be any organ or faculty by which proof could 
 be made. It is a universe where the ordinary laws 
 of matter are inoperative, indeed appear to be non- 
 existent, but of its reality no one thinks of doubting. 
 Now, coinciding with these new and strange discov- 
 eries in the physical sphere there appear to be equally 
 strange phenomena in the psychical sphere. Is it 
 unreasonable to believe that the two are in some way 
 correlated? That living mind can and does, under 
 certain conditions, act upon other living minds with- 
 out the medium of matter can hardly any longer 
 be doubted. Whether it be a " departed " spirit 
 touching a living one, or one living one touching 
 another, seems to me to be of very little consequence. 
 The one is antecedently just as probable or as im- 
 probable as the other. But so far all indications 
 point to the belief that such equivocal phenomena 
 have their place in a region which is not spiritual 
 in the sense in which that term is generally used, 
 but in one which is material, though not in the sense 
 
174 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 which that word ordinarily connotes. In a word, 
 the last discovery in physics and the last experiment 
 in psychology appear to function in the same region. 
 The way in which all this concerns our theory of 
 another life ought now to be evident. If that life 
 be one which involves and requires a material basis, 
 and demands it at a time when the matter which 
 ordinarily serves the spirit for its expression shall 
 not be available, it is much to be even thus tenta- 
 tively convinced that spirit can function under other 
 conditions than those w^hich belong to the ordinary 
 life of man. It gives point and direction to ancient 
 and widespread, but vague and unfruitful, hopes and 
 beliefs. As Professor Shaler judiciously says: — 
 
 " Notwithstanding this disinclination to meddle or be muddled 
 by the problems of spiritism, the men of science have a 
 natural interest in the inquiries of the few true observers 
 who are dredging in that dirty sea. Trusting to the evident 
 scientific faithfulness of these hardy explorers, it appears 
 evident that they have brought up from that deep certain facts 
 which, though still shadowed by doubt, indicate the persistence 
 of the individual consciousness after death. It has, more- 
 over, to be confessed that these few as yet imperfect ob- 
 servations are fortified by the fact that through all the ages 
 of his contact with nature man has firmly held to the notion 
 that the world was peopled with disembodied individualities 
 which could appeal to his own intelligence. Such a conviction 
 is worth something, though it be little. Supported by any 
 critical evidence it becomes of much value. Thus we may 
 fairly conjecture that we may be on the verge of something 
 like a demonstration that the individual consciousness does 
 survive the death of the body by which it was nurtured ".^ 
 
 ' " The Individual ". 
 
THE MORAL EFFECT 
 
" It is certainly hard to see how hope can be based 
 on an external power brought to bear on man's nature, 
 forcing it into a line of action with which it has no 
 affinity. This conception of compulsory goodness has 
 nothing in common with the Biblical view of man's re- 
 lation to divine influence. The power of Christianity 
 lies not in the fear of hell, or even in the hope of any 
 heaven ".—Bruce, " The Moral Order of the World ". 
 
XI 
 
 THE MORAL EFFECT 
 
 There is a practical question which we may con- 
 sider now. No moral or religious belief can be 
 adopted or rejected without some regard to the effect 
 which it may reasonably be expected to produce upon 
 the conduct of those who entertain it. How will the 
 doctrine of immortability as distinguished from im- 
 mortality affect men's moral life? If we say to 
 them, — " You are not naturally immortal, but you 
 may become so if you set about it properly ", and 
 if they believe us, will they be the better or the worse 
 for it? Of course the intrinsic truth of the doctrine 
 does not depend upon such a consideration. That 
 must stand or fall on other grounds. If it be true 
 men must adjust themselves to it as best they may. 
 Truth is neither made or unmade by an estimate of 
 its consequences. But at the same time, when one 
 is endeavoring to determine whether or not such a 
 proposition be true, he cannot but be influenced by 
 his judgment of its practical result. 
 
 It is quite commonly taken for granted that a gen- 
 eral belief in the necessary immortality of all men, 
 with the proffer of an eternal heaven and the threat 
 of an eternal hell, is essential to the moral order of 
 
 177 
 
178 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 society. It is unquestionable that this common be- 
 lief has been a powerful deterrent from evil at some 
 times and within certain limited areas. It operated 
 thus in Europe during the Middle Ages, and it does 
 so to some extent in the territory of Islam to-day. 
 But all will agree that the righteousness thus evoked 
 is of a very unsatisfactory quality. 
 
 " The fear o' hell's a hangman's whip 
 To haud the wretch in order ". 
 
 It has never succeeded in being more than that. 
 Reward and penalty have been exploited to the 
 utmost for moral purposes. The joys of heaven have 
 been painted in forms most alluring and colors most 
 ravishing ; the picture of hell with its lurid torments 
 has been drawn by the hands of the world's most 
 transcendent geniuses. But the result has always 
 been amazingly meagre in its effect upon men's con- 
 duct. While it has fired a few with an ecstatic long- 
 ing and overwhelmed a few in a deadly terror, the 
 great multitude, even while they assent to the truth 
 of the doctrine, live as though it were non-existent. 
 In our time it may well be doubted whether its 
 effect is appreciable. It is generally allowed even 
 by the most orthodox that the exploitation of a 
 " material " hell and a " material " heaven has been 
 a mistake. But they do not appear to notice that 
 when the " material " element is eliminated from the 
 idea nothing is left of it. If it is not material it 
 is nothing. Its practical effect, where it has had 
 
THE MORAL EFFECT 179 
 
 any, has been due to the way in which it allured or 
 frightened the imagination. But to do this it must 
 be presented in forms with which the imagination can 
 deal. If its form be lacking its substance is gone. 
 The attempt to substitute purely spiritual pleasures 
 and spiritual pains for the crude glories of heaven 
 and horrors of hell must always be unsuccessful. In 
 point of fact the whole presentation of future reward 
 and penalty has ceased to move. The awards and 
 the sentences are felt to be irrelevant. The whole 
 scheme is mechanical and artificial. It rests upon 
 presumptions which are so unreasonable and inequit- 
 able that advance in intelligence and moral clarity 
 renders them intolerable. The classification of 
 " righteous " and " wicked " is the merest figment — 
 no objective fact corresponds to it. If it be as- 
 sumed that every man, without regard to his stage 
 of moral development, passes on into another life 
 which is endless by its very nature, the sense of fair 
 dealing demands that he should be left unclassified 
 and undoomed until he has reached the end of his line 
 of moral progress. This is indeed the explicit teach- 
 ing of Jesus as to those who are capable of passing 
 on at all. The wheat and the tares grow together 
 until the end of the ason. But this natural process 
 of life, growth, and development culminating in stable 
 being or in disintegration, has nothing in common 
 with the scheme of probation, trial, judgment, ac- 
 quittal, and sentence. It is the plain fact that when- 
 ever the belief becomes current that a future life of 
 
180 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 some sort is assured for all in any event, men will 
 conclude to wait till that life is reached before be- 
 ginning any very strenuous effort to determine its 
 character. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we follow the teaching of 
 Christ and of Nature, we find a moral dynamic which 
 is quite incalculable, and from which there is no 
 escape. Compared with its dire exhibition of de- 
 struction following in the path of moral offence, the 
 threat of hell is but the rattling of a medicine man's 
 gourd. Let a man once see that the alternative 
 which confronts him at every step of his moral pro- 
 gression is life or death, that his task is, as Christ 
 says, to " win for himself a soul ", or at a farther 
 stage, to " save his soul alive ", and he will realize 
 that he is face to face with reahties and not with 
 an extraneous arrangement arbitrarily established. 
 The appeal is to that deepest, strongest, most per- 
 sistent of all desires, the love of life. " Skin for 
 skin, yea all that a man hath will he give for his 
 life ". Once moral self-consciousness has been 
 reached by the individual, his instinct of self-preser- 
 vation may confidently be depended upon to induce 
 strenuous action to protect himself from death, un- 
 less he be misled by some outside assurance that death 
 is not for him a possible issue. 
 
 It may well be that suicide is possible for a human 
 soul at every stage of its history, here or yonder. 
 Indeed, it is not easy to conceive the possibility of a 
 conscious personality being kept alive against its 
 
THE MORAL EFFECT 181 
 
 own determination to make an end of itself. Such 
 a condition of existence would seem to contradict the 
 very idea of personality. It may be that God is no 
 more able to force a man to live than to force him 
 to love. There are places where coercion defeats 
 itself. Certainly it is true now that every man holds 
 in his hand the power to slay himself if he will. 
 One wonders sometimes why the power is not more 
 frequently used. Hamlet was mistaken in his ex- 
 planation, — 'tis not " the dread of something after 
 death which makes us rather bear the ills we have 
 than fly to others we know not of ". 'Tis not be- 
 cause " resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast 
 of thought ". The resolve upon self-destruction is 
 reached more reluctantly by the brutal savage who 
 has no thought of anything beyond than it is by 
 the educated man whose imagination is crowded with 
 pictures of post-obituary horrors. The elemental 
 instinct of living may be trusted to keep one from 
 making his own quietus, wherever he may be. The 
 horror of ceasing to be is a far more powerful emo- 
 tion than the fear of damnation. If fear be needed 
 at all, or be efficacious at all, to the evocation of 
 goodness, here is a form of disaster compared to 
 which the fear of hell is but a bogie to frighten 
 children. 
 
 The continuance of any individual in being is 
 dependent upon his conforming to the conditions of 
 life at the stage where he is. St. Paul has set out 
 in a most precise statement what are the laws for 
 
182 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the kind of beings which most of us at any rate 
 have come to be. When one has reached that point 
 of moral progress which he describes by the phrase, 
 " being in Christ Jesus ", he has passed out from 
 under the lower law binding upon creatures who 
 have not reached so far. " For they that are after 
 the flesh do mind the tilings of the flesh, but they 
 that are after the spirit the things of the spirit. 
 For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of 
 the spirit is life. The mind of the flesh is not sub- 
 ject to this higher law of God, indeed it cannot be. 
 But ye are not in the flesh but in the spirit, pro- 
 vided that the spirit of God inhabiteth you. If the 
 spirit of him that raised up Christ from the dead 
 be in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the 
 dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through 
 the spirit that dwelleth in you. So then, brethren, 
 we are under obligation not to the flesh to live after 
 the flesh; for if ye live after the flesh ye are bound 
 to die; but if by the spirit ye mortify the flesh ye 
 shall live ". 
 
 This is the key to the marvellous welcome with 
 which the world hailed the " Good news of the Gospel 
 of the resurrection " ; to the languid indifference with 
 which the gospel of escape from hell is received to- 
 day; to the new enthusiasm for righteousness which 
 might be expected to burst forth once more if men 
 were brought to see that holiness is the very path 
 to abiding life. 
 
THE NEW CREATION 
 
" Thyself and thy belongings 
 Are not thine own so proper as to waste 
 Thyself upon thy virtues^ they on thee. 
 Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
 Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues 
 Do not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
 As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched 
 But to fine issues ". 
 
 — "Measure for Measure ". 
 
XII 
 
 THE NEW CREATION 
 
 The word " Christian " is really one of the most 
 vague and ill-defined terms in common use. The 
 definitions of it which have been made are as a rule 
 either so confused as to be valueless, or so precise 
 as to be untrue. Is the " Christian " simply one 
 who is " better " than his neighbors ? Or is he one 
 who has been admitted to membership in the Or- 
 ganization by the initiatory sacrament.? Or is he 
 one who has passed through some special phase of 
 emotional experience? The reply is, All these defi- 
 nitions are irrelevant. They are like attempts to 
 express a chemical compound in feet and inches, to 
 describe a polyp or a marsupial in musical notation, 
 to measure a mother's grief by a chemical analysis 
 of her tears, to define a human child in terms of 
 geometry. The fact exists in one realm; the defini- 
 tions are drawn from another. If, however, we re- 
 place the whole matter in the region where it be- 
 longs, the perplexity disappears. 
 
 The practical evil of this confusion is incalculable. 
 With the best will possible, men do not know how 
 to set about the matter. Their conduct in the 
 sphere of religion shows a strange lack of purpose 
 
 185 
 
186 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and plan. In other things men know what they 
 want, what they are trying to do; here they are 
 vague and, as a consequence, ineffective. Many 
 leave it alone altogether on this very account. It is 
 probably the case that religion occupies a far smaller 
 space in everyday life within Christendom than it 
 does in heathen men's Hves. The Mohammedan or 
 the Hindoo allows to it a far larger measure of 
 activity. This is not because he is more religious 
 than we, but because religion is for him far more 
 clearly defined. His course of action is clear, and 
 is followed because it is clear. Among us it is not 
 so. Multitudes are kept away from Christianity a 
 thousand times more by its apparent elusiveness 
 than by its moral exactions or its mystery. " What 
 shall I do to inherit eternal life ".^^ is the eternal 
 cry of the earnest soul. But to this eager inquiry 
 there is no answer forthcoming which he sees how 
 to act upon. Jesus' answer seems to have been 
 strangely lost sight of. What that is we will 
 have to examine again. But in its absence what we 
 see all about us is a curious indefiniteness of aim 
 in religious movement. It is not at all " inconsist- 
 ency ", that is, failure of correspondence between 
 profession and practice. It is action which is with- 
 out definite purpose, movement which goes nowhere. 
 The practical man either leaves it aside altogether, 
 or he commits himself to a mechanical ecclesiasticism, 
 or he trusts to an unethical revivalism. He thinks 
 of religion as submission to a code, or as subscrip- 
 
THE NEW CREATION 187 
 
 tion to a creed, or as an emotional experience, or 
 as some combination of all three. 
 
 Jesus presents it as the life which is characteristic 
 of a " Kingdom ". Now, a kingdom, in nature, is a 
 very complex and mysterious thing, but its phe- 
 nomena are unmistakable. Let us take, for exam- 
 ple, the Animal Kingdom. Its frontiers are not 
 sharply defined. Between it and the Vegetable King- 
 dom next below there is a debatable land, how ex- 
 tended no man knows. There are a myriad forms 
 of life, as yet too little developed to allow one to 
 say which kingdom contains them. This kingdom 
 contains within its borders forms as widely unlike 
 in manner and experience as the Amoeba and the 
 Man, together with all forms between. The quality 
 which all the forms possess in common is that thing 
 which we call animal life. It has a thousand methods 
 of generation, but the thing generated is always of 
 the same kind, — a living, animal form. Its most 
 highly organized product is Man. But within that 
 form there is also immeasurable diversity, — from 
 the individual hardly distinguishable from the brute, 
 to the man a little lower than the angels. The 
 Christian Principia is that the germs of a higher 
 type of life lie latent in Humanity; they develop 
 after a law of their own; that Christ is organically 
 connected with this process of development; and 
 that the new creature is the Christian. Is it pos- 
 sible then to recognize this new creature when he 
 appears ? 
 
188 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 There is one significant fact which the naturalist 
 has learned in studying the evolution of species. 
 That is, a new form does not take its start from the 
 summit of the form next below it. The divergent 
 path which issues in a higher being takes its de- 
 parture at a point far below that place. The line! 
 of evolution, for example, which culminates in Man, 
 when traced backward is found to intersect the trunk 
 of the tree of life at a place much below that where 
 the Simian lives. By analogy, therefore, we may 
 not look for the beginnings of the " new life " at 
 the top of human attainment. It must be sought 
 for among meek and lowly beginnings. We may 
 expect it to be present at a stage where the intelli- 
 gence is but little developed, where all human powers 
 and faculties are relatively low. " For not many 
 wise, not many noble, not many mighty are chosen, 
 but God hath chosen the foolish and the weak things 
 of the world to put to shame the things which are 
 strong ". And Jesus announces that " God hath hid 
 these things from the wise and understanding, and 
 hath revealed them unto babes ". 
 
 Whatever " that manner of life which was also in 
 Jesus Christ " may prove to be, we may expect to 
 find it compatible with a modest degree of intellectual 
 development. To identify the " Christian " we must 
 look not only for a higher life than that which 
 Humanity has already exhibited, but for a different 
 tj^pe of life. The disciples of Jesus were not " bet- 
 ter " men than their contemporaries ; they had be- 
 
THE NEW CREATION 189 
 
 come a different kind of men. They probably com- 
 pared but illy with Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or 
 " the sweet Gallio ". They were men of limited in- 
 telligence and faulty character. This feature is 
 strikingly true of Christianity so far as its history 
 is contained within the New Testament. St. Paul 
 addresses his converts as " saints ", " new creatures ", 
 and in the same breath rebukes them for flagrant 
 moral lapses. He regrets that they are but new- 
 born babes of the new order, and can only be fed 
 with milk and not strong meat. All that the new 
 life demands is a human personality developed far 
 enough to make its beginning possible. 
 
 The New Life attaches itself to human nature 
 at the point where the moral sense emerges into 
 self-consciousness. In its essence it is un-self-ish^ 
 ness. In the natural man the soul is divided between 
 the " will to live " and the " will to love ". Led by 
 the one he strives continually to conquer all things 
 to his own ends. He looks toward himself, and 
 must ultimately be defeated and perish because the 
 universe is hostile, and is too strong for him. Led 
 by the other he emerges from himself, becomes at 
 home in the universe, and akin to God. The first 
 self-consciousness of this kinship is the " new birth ". 
 Like all new-born things it is feeble, and its motions 
 are reflexive rather than voluntary, but it has been 
 born. It feels outward with hesitating fingers, not 
 to clutch the universe, but to caress it. But, it will 
 be asked. Is not this true of every one? I reply, no, 
 
190 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not every man. Until this stage is reached love is 
 lust, the power to possess and enjoy. If it be 
 asked, Does any man do it, I reply, Yes, the New 
 Man does, and this is the test by which he is identi- 
 fied. The classic statement of the doctrine is in the 
 First Epistle of St. John. No more profound utter- 
 ance is extant in philosophy or biology: — 
 
 " The Word of life was manifested, and we have seen and 
 bear witness unto you the eternal life which was with the 
 Father and was manifested unto us. That which ye have seen 
 and heard we declare unto you, that ye also may have 
 fellowship with the Father and with his son Jesus the Christ. 
 For Love is of God, and every one that loveth is begotten 
 of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not 
 God. And the witness is this, that God gave unto us the 
 eternal life, and this life is in his son. He that hath the son 
 hath life and he that hath not the son hath not life. These 
 things have I written that ye may know that ye have eternal 
 life ". 
 
 The " Christian ", then, is the human being who 
 is identified by his peculiar habit, viz., his will to 
 live being subordinated to his will to love. This sets 
 him in a new relation to both the spiritual and the 
 physical universe. 
 
 But if this is the case, were there not Christians 
 long before Christ, and in regions where no word of 
 him has ever reached? Undoubtedly. The place 
 of Christ in the New Order is not the beginning of 
 a series but the centre of a circle. From Galilee 
 he moves outward in every direction, not only in 
 space, but in time as well. The " Divinity of 
 
THE NEW CREATION 19J 
 
 Christ " is a far larger thing than even Orthodoxy 
 reahzes. If eternal life be correlated organically 
 with the Son of Man whom we adore, it must be in 
 some way which is superior to times and dates, and 
 which is not contingent upon missionaries. We may 
 not present him as eternal, and at the same time as 
 fixed within history and geography. The New Man 
 must have appeared in the upward progress of 
 humanity at a date long before God's experiment 
 with human living in the time of Tiberius Caesar. 
 We may not allow the need of theological coherence 
 to shut the doors of the Kingdom against " Noah, 
 Daniel, and Job ", or their kind of any kin. The 
 God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God 
 of the dead but the living. Christianity means that 
 whoever, anywhere, or at any time, has attained to a 
 spiritual life which manifests certain qualities has 
 attained onto that life whose laws and phenomena 
 are exemplified in him " of whom the whole family 
 in heaven and earth is called ". 
 
 There is another and a perplexing aspect of our 
 theme which we may not evade. The New Man, 
 whom we have been trying to identify and describe, 
 exists actually in such rudimentary and incomplete 
 shape, and passes out of life so far from complete. 
 " Some are weak and sickly among you, and some 
 are asleep ". What of them? What of the unde- 
 veloped child, the feeble-minded and the feeble- 
 souled, that great multitude who, so far as we can 
 see, have been born from above, have the will to love. 
 
192 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 but have been so let and hindered in the race set 
 before them that they must needs pass on, if they 
 pass at all, like Richard the hunchback complained 
 that he had been sent into this life, " scarce half 
 made up "? Frankly speaking, I do not believe this 
 difficulty would ever have been felt except for the 
 presence of a meagre and poverty-stricken concep- 
 tion of existence to which an unworthy theology has 
 given currency. Without any warrant of God or of 
 Scripture or the reasonableness of things, it shuts 
 up the whole movement of man within the compass 
 of two stadia, " this life " and " the next ". Then 
 it assumes that this one is the period of " probation ", 
 within which the final destiny of every living thing 
 is wrought out and fixed. No conceivable interest 
 is served by this narrow and artificial scheme of 
 things except that of logical definition. The New 
 Testament has no such constricted outlook. It deals 
 with realities and has little thought of consistency. 
 Existence is far too large a thing to be seen con- 
 sistently. The general conception of the New Testa- 
 ment is that the new life of the individual is begun 
 here, and that he passes on, incomplete, into an ex- 
 istence where the same laws of being operate as do 
 through time and space. 
 
 Life cannot subsist anywhere without movement, 
 progress. Arrest means disintegration. By what 
 warrant may we confine the successive phases of 
 being to two, or to any number? We are concerned 
 now only with the transit from this one to the next, 
 
THE NEW CREATION 193 
 
 but we can only think of the individual as passing 
 on into actual development and real vicissitude. 
 Jesus is bold to make Dives develop morally under 
 the scorching discipline of hell. He becomes there 
 a better man. He reaches the point where he can 
 take thought of his brethren, about whom he had 
 not concerned himself in this life. Even the souls 
 of the " saints under the altar " are morally lacking 
 the while they call upon God for vengeance on their 
 persecutors. The next life must either be a real 
 life, for real persons, with real experience, or else 
 be dismissed as the work of a fever and the delirium 
 of a dream. Human life without moral movement 
 is inconceivable at any stage. It is the law of its 
 being. Where in any case the new life is vigorous 
 and stable enough to persist at all, its rudimentary, 
 feeble, and incomplete forms cannot but move in 
 that direction which is determined by their nature 
 and their choice. 
 
 The practical question is a narrower, though 
 maybe not less difficult one. 
 
 What is the essential note or mark of the Christian 
 in the world in which we actually live? The oppro- 
 brium of Christianity has always been the Christians. 
 May it not be that something has been looked for 
 in them which by their nature is not theirs? The 
 function of the individual Christian in human society 
 has been variously conceived. Is it his task to be 
 a model for conduct? Or to be an active reformer 
 of manners? Or to be an administrator of alms? 
 
194 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Or to be a herald of new truth? He has been praised 
 and blamed equally for taking and for refusing any 
 or all of these roles. Shall we follow the ascetic 
 and say that the " religious " are they who separate 
 themselves from men and live by rule? Shall we 
 listen to Tolstoi and strip ourselves of property, 
 resent no injury, abjure courts of justice, refuse 
 to bear a sword? Shall we follow the beckoning 
 finger of the sociologist into the study of life with 
 a view of bettering its conditions? Shall we join 
 the philanthropists to distribute bread and provide 
 games? The answer is, — ^AU these things we may 
 or may not do, as the case may be. Christianity is 
 compatible with the doing or the not doing of any of 
 them, but these things are not Christianity. 
 
 The Christian is the soul that wills to love. But 
 Love is an affection strong as well as tender. It 
 may be well for the Christian to " sell all that he 
 hath and give to the poor " ; or it may be well for 
 him to trade with his ten talents and gain ten other 
 talents. It depends. He may not allow his love to 
 lead him to do mischief. Here, for example, may 
 be a community of poor, living squalidly, lacking 
 bread, crowded together and half sheltered, naked, 
 sick, and cold. In their midst lives one of Christ's 
 family who is rich. But suppose that community 
 has no right to be there at all? Allow that it is 
 collected, held together, by lust, greed, indolence, 
 selfish thrif tlessness ? Grant that nothing less than 
 
THE NEW CREATION 195 
 
 the hard stress of hunger and the discipline of cold 
 will serve to bring it to a better life. What course 
 of action will love point out to the Christian? I 
 mean real love, the love that is solicitous, that wills 
 for its object good rather than pleasure, the love 
 that is strong enough to bear its own anguish 
 of sympathy rather than find relief by opening its 
 hand in largesse. And in what does this situation 
 differ from that of the Son of Man, richly endowed 
 with the power to heal and relieve, surrounded by a 
 world full of sick, palsied, suffering, naked? Ought 
 he to have expended his capital of divine power in 
 indiscriminate healing? Love finds a way; but it 
 must be the way which love illuminates. For Chris- 
 tianity to follow the feeble and essentially selfish 
 way of Tolstoi and his kind would be to transform 
 it from a world force to a transient makeshift. It 
 may well be that the peril most imminent to Chris- 
 tianity to-day is to submit itself to the domination 
 of a soft affection, like that of a soft and foolish 
 mother for a spoiled and exacting child. The law 
 of the Christian's being is indeed to love, even his 
 enemies ; to bless even his persecutors ; but it must 
 be with a good which works good and not harm to 
 the enemy, a blessing which blesses rather than that 
 works him evil. It must not be forgotten that the 
 whole vocabulary of stern denunciation and judgment 
 current in religious speech was coined by Jesus, and 
 that it sprung from his unbounded love. His " woe 
 
196 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 unto you " is as much a part of his message as his 
 " blessed are you ". 
 
 Nor may the Christian man or state put aside 
 the sword when that is the weapon to which love 
 points. The Puritans had a fine phrase for the 
 character which they held in honor ; he was " faithful 
 even unto slaying ". The angelic message was 
 " peace to men of good will " ; not a soft and un- 
 discriminating peace to men who deliberately do ill. 
 Here again, the peril to Christianity may be not 
 from those who too eagerly thrust the sword into 
 its hand so much as from them who cry peace, peace, 
 when there is no peace. There is evil in the world 
 which is to be conquered and exorcised by gentle- 
 ness ; but there is also evil which is to be driven 
 down a steep place and choked. The Christian 
 law is to love his neighbor as himself; neither 
 less nor more. But is one at liberty to love him- 
 self so that he may not discipline himself, with 
 stripes if need be? If it be better for him to cut 
 off his right hand or pluck out his right eye if it 
 cause him to offend, shall love for himself hinder.? 
 And shall love forbid him to do so much for his 
 neighbor .f^ The widespread delusion which prevails 
 in our time, the distress which many are suffering 
 who would do the Master's will but cannot see the 
 way, arises from a confusion of thought. The policy 
 of the new Kingdom is for them that are within the 
 Kingdom. There it can operate safely, and with 
 incalculable potency. But it is not the law of " the 
 
THE NEW CREATION 197 
 
 kingdoms of this earth ". If it be attempted to 
 apply it prematurely, or in a region where its spirit 
 which is its dynamic is absent, it becomes the feeble 
 and mischievous rule of doctrinaires. The New 
 Order comes up, lives, multiplies like the old. That 
 one made its appearance amid " the dragons welter- 
 ing in the prime ". It struggled for existence ac- 
 cording to the laws of its own nature ; but it did not 
 essay to bring the dragons under its law. The king- 
 doms of this earth are not yet the kingdoms of the 
 Lord and of his Christ. His method was the suc- 
 cessive winning of separate souls, now an Andrew, 
 now a Peter, now a Philip, until he had discovered 
 and won to himself a few men and women fitted to 
 herald and inaugurate a higher and more perfect 
 social life. 
 
 It is no doubt true, as is often urged, that good 
 men will not necessarily produce a good society. 
 But it is not true of the kind of men which Christ 
 begets. But they can only produce it in his way. 
 The regime of the Kingdom is not to be promulgated 
 prematurely, nor is it to be expected to function 
 where the conditions are not present. His folk are 
 counselled to be wise as serpents as well as harmless 
 as doves. If they are wise they will not attempt 
 to " restore the kingdom to Israel " at this or any 
 other time. They will live their own immortal lives 
 and quicken ever new lives into their own by contact 
 of life with life. They are to be the salt of the 
 earth. The use of salt is not for shining and arid 
 
198 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 blocks to build temples and state houses withal. It 
 does its work by disappearing in the lump to sweeten 
 it. It is leaven, a single cell of which starts a fer- 
 mentation where it touches. Its manner of life is 
 not that of the mass within which it Hves, but its 
 own. When its function is accomplished it finds 
 that it has done its work by dying. 
 
 This is also the judgment of the great, wise 
 world in the case. The Christian Church has never 
 undertaken to administer charity without working 
 mischief, or entered the arena of politics without 
 doing evil. When the impatient minister who would 
 hasten the Kingdom enters the region of political 
 action, or social order, or economic arrangement, 
 the world looks after him with a smile or a frown 
 or a shrug or a malediction, as the case may be. Its 
 true instinct tells it that this is not his sphere of 
 action. Its hoarded experience moreover tells it 
 •that mischief will come of it. A Christian Social- 
 ism, Christian Education, Christian Economics, are 
 phrases which will not bear examination. If one 
 should speak of " Christian " Chemistry, or " Chris- 
 tian " Mathematics, the confusion involved would 
 be obvious, but it exists in the other phrases none the 
 less. Christian men have indeed to do with the activ- 
 ities of life, and must needs go into every region of 
 it. But they do not go for the purpose of overturn- 
 ing the laws which obtain in those regions. Wherever 
 they go they meet beings of their own order, and 
 they transform others into their own likeness bj^ 
 
THE NEW CREATION 199 
 
 vital conduct. There is a freemasonry of the spirit 
 which does not exhibit the work of its lodge in the 
 market-place or the legislature. When liis friends 
 would have " taken Jesus by force and compelled 
 him to be a king " he departed and hid himself. He 
 continues to do so. 
 
 The first and typical Christian is Christ. If one 
 can get free from misconception he will see the mar- 
 vellous simplicity of that life. He set out neither 
 to seek a cross for himself nor to readjust the world's 
 confusion. He went not a single step out of his path 
 to find a pang of body or soul. Such hurts as might 
 be avoided without missing his purpose were avoided. 
 He met the cross because it stood in his path. He 
 neither sought nor shunned it. Nor did he meddle 
 in any way with institutions or collective terms of 
 evil. Intemperance, cruelty, slavery, injustice, in- 
 fanticide, divorce, were all around him. They flour- 
 ish as vigorously yet in heathenesse. Within Chris- 
 tendom he and his kind have wonderfully reduced 
 them, and expect to eradicate them. But what of 
 success has been achieved has been by his method. 
 The organizers of reforms and secretaries of socie- 
 ties have their work to do, and their work is most 
 efficient where the personnel is most Christian, but 
 after all it remains true that the " kingdom of 
 heaven cometh not with observation ". The regener- 
 ating force in human society has been and is that 
 innumerable company of unknown men and women 
 who have been transformed in the image and likeness 
 
200 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of Christ, who do not cry nor lift up their voices 
 in the street, but quicken the world by simply liv- 
 ing their new life. Outwardly they look and act 
 much as other men; but essentially they are new 
 creatures. ? 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
" The idea of One Holy Catholic Church was not 
 early developed in the consciousness of Christendom. 
 In the East this article of the Church does not occur in 
 the creed of Ignatius, a.d. 107, nor in that of Origen in 
 the middle of the third century, nor in the creed of 
 Lucian of Antioch at the beginning of the fourth cen- 
 tury. It first appears in the private creed of Arius, 328. 
 The Nicene creed has no article of the Church, but in 
 the Nicene-Constantinopolitan form it appears in its 
 fulness, ' One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.' 
 This point was reached toward the close of four hundred 
 years of Christian thought ". — Wood, " Survivals in 
 Christianity ". 
 
xni 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
 It is plain that Jesus had in mind a church; it 
 is equally plain that the thing which we call the 
 Church is not the thing he had in mind. The diffi- 
 culty which one confronts at the outset is to find 
 the thing at all. There is no objective reality to 
 which the title " Christian Church " can be applied. 
 There are churches a plenty ; but there is no Church. 
 If any one fancy there is, let him ask himself, where 
 is it? Let him point to it, define it, locate it, delimit 
 it. If he urge that the hundreds of organizations 
 called churches are actually the component parts of 
 some great, all-embracing Kingdom, we can only say 
 that he has not stopped to examine the content of 
 his thought. What he has in mind is the picture 
 of an empire which includes within it separate and 
 partially independent states. That conception is a 
 perfectly coherent and legitimate one. It is possible 
 for an empire to be thus constituted ; but only on the 
 condition that the constitutive states act harmoni- 
 ously toward a common end, and that the empire 
 have a conscious will and purpose of its own. But 
 this is precisely what the churches do not do. They 
 
 203 
 
^04 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 do not act together harmoniously ; they confront and 
 oppose each other ; they do not work toward a com- 
 mon end, for they do not conceive the purpose the 
 same way; and the universal Church thus imagined 
 has neither a conscious will and purpose of its own 
 nor any organ by which to express it. " The One 
 Holy Catholic Church " is a phrase to which no 
 objective reality corresponds. 
 
 In the political sphere we observe a steady move- 
 ment toward unification, and this movement has been 
 visible for a long time. There are not one-half as 
 many separate governments in the world to-day as 
 there were even a century ago. So far as one can 
 see there is much more immediate prospect of a Uni- 
 versal State than there is of a Universal Church. 
 It is a startling fact that the most potent divisive 
 force at work in Christendom is the churches. All 
 other barriers are easier to overcome, all other 
 schisms easier to heal. This is all the more amaz- 
 ing when we reflect that the dying prayer of its 
 Founder was " that they all may be one ". The 
 actual facts are indeed so monstrous that Christians 
 habitually try to disguise them. They fondly 
 imagine an ideal Church at some undefined date or 
 place in the past, whose unity has been broken, but 
 which we may hope to see restored ; or that the rival- 
 ries are not real rivalries but emulations ; or that 
 the Church is essentially an invisible, transcendental 
 thing, not meant to show concretely on earth. But 
 these are only fond imaginings. However they may 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 205 
 
 satisfy those who nurse them, the great open-eyed 
 world knows better. 
 
 Let us examine the situation as it actually is. 
 There is no Christian Church, that is, there is no 
 such world-organization with a conscious mind and 
 will, and organs to give them expression, and there 
 never has been. Instead, we find the ecclesiastical 
 world divided into three great sections, with in- 
 numerable subdivisions. Each of these acts not only 
 apart from the others, but acts habitually with a 
 view to thwart, restrain, and overthrow the others. 
 More important still, each has a separate spirit, 
 a different organizing principle The Oriental 
 churches are organized around the principle of 
 Dogma. The object which they place above all 
 others is to hand down through the ages certain 
 formularies which they conceive to express finally 
 the truth concerning Christ. To this end all else 
 is subordinated. They call themselves the " Ortho- 
 dox " Church. The outcome of this spirit has been 
 what might have been expected, intellectual stagna- 
 tion and moral impotence. The Eastern Church sits 
 to-day in its tawdry Basilica an embalmed corpse, 
 robed in stiffly embroidered vestments, with a creed 
 in its dead hand, while its people bow before it 
 with the forehead, and hear from its lips no voice 
 which reaches their souls. Its people are devout, 
 ignorant, superstitious ; its rulers are orthodox, 
 cruel, punctilious of ecclesiastical form, and lacking 
 in truth and ruth. A keen observer who has had 
 
206 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 great opportunity to know has said that " the Rus- 
 sian Empire is really not an empire at all; it is a 
 church, and its qualities are those which the Church 
 has produced." This Church has had a longer con- 
 tinuous life than any other, and so far as one can 
 see, it has in the main missed the spirit and purpose 
 of the Master. In any case it stands remote from 
 the rest of the Christian world, understanding it 
 little, and little affected by it. 
 
 The second in order, both historically and geo- 
 graphically, is the Church of Rome. As the Russian 
 Empire is, strictly speaking, not an empire but a 
 church, so this, to be accurate, is not a church but 
 an empire. Its organizing principle is Dominion. 
 Its cardinal claim is Authority; its cardinal virtue 
 is Obedience. Its claim is in no way disguised or miti- 
 gated. It asserts itself to be the true and only 
 Church of Christ on earth. Its Pope is God's vice- 
 gerent, and is infallible. Within it there is eternal 
 safety ; outside it there is no safety. Because Christ 
 has ordained it so, it has authority over every region 
 of human life and action, its only limit being its 
 own judgment not to enter upon any given area. 
 If it does not regulate political or domestic arrange- 
 ments, it is only because it decides in its own wisdom 
 not to do so, and not because it is without right 
 to do so. Its one aim is domination. To this it 
 adjusts all its power and machinery. Its informa- 
 tion is drawn from every quarter of the world. Its 
 ministers and officials are loose-footed janizaries, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 207 
 
 who may not take root anywhere in family life, or 
 form human affections which may weaken or hamper 
 their absolute devotion to the organization which 
 they serve. Its characteristic title is " Catholic " ; 
 it claims authority over all. It is the old Roman 
 Imperium baptized. It believes that in this fashion 
 it represents Christ's will, and best carries out his 
 intention. Is it right in its claim? Is it likely to 
 succeed? 
 
 The first of these inquiries I need hardly stay to 
 answer. But the second is one about which well 
 informed men are slow to form an opinion. Per- 
 sonally I do not believe that any one is warranted 
 in either hoping or fearing that the Roman idea 
 of the Church will prevail. It has within it elements 
 of great potency, as all must see, but has within it 
 also the seeds of its own necessary decay. Looking 
 over its history during the centuries, one is struck 
 by the fact that at the very times and places where 
 its success has been most complete its overthrow has 
 been most imminent. It ought to be borne in mind 
 that this idea of universal dominion was not always 
 held by the Roman Church. It took possession of 
 the organization slowly, but in the end controlled 
 it entirely. Nowhere else in history, probably, has 
 equal patience and sagacity been displayed in work- 
 ing toward the realization of an ideal, and nowhere 
 else more complete and reiterated failure. From the 
 sixth century onward for nearly a thousand years 
 this organization dreamed, planned, prayed, and 
 
^08 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fought for dominion over Western Europe. Finally 
 it gained its end. At the opening of the sixteenth 
 century there was none to gainsay its will. King 
 and artisan, scholar and peasant alike were docile 
 subjects of this ecclesiastical empire. But its suc- 
 cess was its undoing. Within a century it lost the 
 British Islands, Scandinavia, the most of Germany, 
 with local insurrections throughout its whole domain. 
 Then, with the same infinite patience and skill, it 
 set about the task of reconstruction. Once again 
 it succeeded within a more restricted area in Europe, 
 but replaced the lost territory with a wider empire 
 in Mexico and South America. Three centuries 
 more have gone by, and during them it has lost 
 its rule in Mexico, the South and Central American 
 states, in France, Italy, and Portugal, and with 
 Spain in insurrection. In all these cases, wherever 
 the people have had opportunity to express their 
 will by vote, they have turned against the Church, 
 refused to do her will, restrained her pretensions, 
 secularized her accumulated wealth, expelled her 
 agents, in a word, repudiated her principle of do- 
 minion. These things have happened too often and 
 too uniformly to be attributed to accident or to the 
 unruly wills and passions of men or times. They 
 can well be accounted for as the operation of a law 
 which may always be counted upon to show itself 
 when the time is full. Will the same cycle be run 
 in these United States, where the immediate destiny 
 of the world is lodged .'^ One must needs fear it or 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 209 
 
 hope it, according to his wish. Here is the same 
 ancient claim of dominion, — nothing abated, nothing 
 disguised. Here is the same patience, skill, and de- 
 votion in upbuilding. Here is the same semblance 
 of success. Will there be the same revolt and over- 
 throw.? And when.? 
 
 The third segment of the ecclesiastical circle is 
 that ill-defined aggregation which we call Protestant- 
 ism. The spirit and temper which differentiates it 
 has been in the world always ; but in so far as it is 
 organized it dates from the revolt against the Roman 
 claim to domination in the sixteenth century. With 
 it we are more immediately concerned. How nearly 
 does it present Christ's ideal of a Church? What 
 is its outlook? When one studies its history he is 
 impressed by the fact that as an ecclesiastical force 
 it has lost much of its initial energy. It reminds 
 one of the course of a mighty shell fired by an 
 enormous charge. While it held together its mo- 
 mentum was terrific, but as it broke into fragments 
 each fragment possessed less energy. When these 
 in succession subdivided its potential energy became 
 still feebler. The explosive power which impelled 
 it originally was the sense of individual liberty, — 
 liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and speech, 
 liberty of action. When these are restrained or re- 
 pressed, they gather an ever increasing fulminating 
 energy. But when they are set free, maybe with 
 noise and commotion, they do not always quite know 
 what to do with themselves. This is the condition 
 
210 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of the Protestant churches. Thej are free, and they 
 do not know what next. Liberty is a dangerous 
 spirit to raise. The only power to control it is 
 Truth. But here they hesitate and fumble. A cen- 
 tury ago each one had a Confession or a System 
 of truth which satisfied it. It had a message wliich, 
 whether true or faulty, it could deliver when chal- 
 lenged. But now the very spirit of intellectual free- 
 dom which they invoked has examined these doctrinal 
 structures, and in the name of Truth has rejected 
 them. The result has been to produce a hesitation 
 and sense of uncertainty which bodes ill for Protest- 
 antism. It lacks a clear and definite message to 
 heathen and Christian alike. Once it could go to 
 the heathen with a heart full of pity for a man 
 who, it believed, would be consigned to eternal tor- 
 ment in hell if the missionary failed to reach him 
 in time to save. It does not believe that now; but 
 it has not found clearly what motive will take its 
 place and do its work. It would be difficult to find 
 a place where greater disingenuousness prevails than 
 here. Congregations of Christian people are ex- 
 horted to labor and give " to carry the Gospel to 
 them that are perishing ". With their gifts the 
 missionary macliinery of the denomination plants new 
 churches in communities where the Gospel has been 
 proclaimed for years, and where are too many 
 churches alread}^ The motive which is urged is 
 not really the motive which controls. The desire 
 is not really to " carry the Gospel ", it is to extend 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 211 
 
 and aggrandize the ecclesiastical organization. If 
 any Church actually believes that outside itself sal- 
 vation is not to be found, this appeal is morally 
 worthy, whatever may be said of its reasonableness. 
 But if it does not believe that one shrinks from 
 giving its " missionary " activity a name. 
 
 It at least looks as though organized Protestantism 
 were a spent force. It is uncertain and hesitating 
 in its message ; its rivalries and consequent wasteful- 
 ness render it impotent; it has lost the controlling 
 position it once held in colleges and universities ; the 
 laboring classes have largely drifted beyond the 
 sound of its voice ; the middle classes are less and 
 less attending its services ; the great gifts of money 
 which it once received are now being turned in other 
 directions. Its Revival machinery has to a large 
 extent been abandoned. General Booth declares that 
 the Salvation Army as well as other companies 
 which set out with the single aim " to save souls ", 
 tend irresistibly to become instruments for the dis- 
 tribution of secular charity. An ever increasing 
 number who have been counted within the churches 
 are dropping away. It is not because they have 
 been seduced from their old allegiance by a rival, 
 or have become hostile, it is simply because they do 
 not find anything there which satisfies their religious 
 need. In a word, it is not powerful enough as an 
 organization, as Rome is, to be reckoned with in 
 political life. It is too incoherent to speak or act 
 efficiently in the social sphere. It does not, as it 
 
212 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 once did, command the enthusiastic service of the 
 religious individual. 
 
 From all these things, which are commonplace 
 facts, within the ken of all observant men, it would 
 seem that there is something fundamentally faulty 
 in all the attempts which have been made to realize 
 concretely Christ's ideal of a Church. Where the 
 exhibition of Doctrine is the controlling motive, it 
 ends in Oriental stagnation. Where Dominion is its 
 aim, it runs round within the closed circle of Rome, 
 through growth, power, tyranny, to revolt, and 
 around again. Where Individual Liberty is the goal, 
 it issues in confusion and weakness. Neither Ortho- 
 doxy, nor Catholicity, nor Liberty, nor any nice 
 balance and combination of them, can be the notes 
 or tests of the Society wliich Jesus contemplated. 
 
 Against this whole view two objections are likely 
 to be opposed. In the first place, it will be said, 
 the churches are actually strong and vigorous, and 
 are striving mightily to conquer the world for 
 Christ. Their statistics of growth can always be 
 marshalled in such a way as to spell success. Never- 
 theless, their general course through a long period 
 of time has been as I have set forth. In calculating 
 the line of movement of any body one can only study 
 that portion of its orbit which has been under 
 observation. From that the equation of its curve 
 is calculated, and its destination predicted. 
 
 The second objection is, that it is inconceivable 
 that the Divine Founder of the New Kingdom should 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 213 
 
 have permitted its line of movement to be thus de- 
 flected to barren issues. Could he have allowed so 
 long time to be wasted while his people made their 
 mistakes and discovered them? We can only reply 
 by pointing to what is God's actual way of doing 
 things. He permitted nature to run out a myriad 
 of aimless lines before she discovered the one which 
 culminated in Man. How many more asons were 
 seemingly wasted before the New Man was reached.^ 
 One thing v/e may be sure of^ in the New Kingdom 
 as well as in the old, the members thereof will be 
 allowed to find out and retrace their missteps, let 
 the time be long or short. 
 
 For many ages the minds of Christians have 
 turned backward with a sort of helpless yearning 
 toward the " primitive Church ". It has been felt 
 that it possessed a secret of power which has in some 
 way fallen out of sight. Probably no equally brief 
 period of time has ever been studied so exhaustively 
 as has the century which followed the disappearance 
 of Jesus. During that time his Society spread with 
 such amazing rapidity, exhibited such a unique life, 
 was so sure of itself, moved toward its purpose with 
 such inexplicable courage, arrested and held the 
 attention of the encompassing world in such a way 
 as to compel the conviction that it knew something 
 which we do not know and wielded some power which 
 the Church to-day does not possess. But the at- 
 tempt to recover the lost secret has not been satis- 
 factory. May it be possible that we have looked 
 
214 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 for the wrong thing? Theologians have scrutinized 
 the records of the Early Church to find out what 
 was its creed. Ecclesiastics have interrogated it 
 to find out its form of organization, — ^whether it was 
 Presbyterian, Episcopal, or Congregational, whether 
 it recognized this official or that, and which was 
 superior and which subordinate. Liturgists have 
 studied to ascertain whether its rites were performed 
 in this way or that way. Antiquarians have asked 
 it curious questions about its manners and customs. 
 To all these questionings it vouchsafes but a meagre 
 answer. And, what is of more consequence, it an- 
 swers in a tone which shows that it deemed all these 
 things of small moment. It refuses to say what its 
 doctrine was, or what its policy. Any, or all, or 
 none, of the interpretations put upon it may be 
 correct. But its secret was in none of these things. 
 There are two conceptions of a church. One is 
 that it is an Organization, in form analogous to a 
 political State, but in spirit and purpose religious. 
 It is a State which includes in it all sorts of citizens, 
 a few who are intelligently loyal and devoted, and 
 many who accept its citizenship and share its benefits 
 and protection passively, without thought, by force 
 of habit. It includes good citizens and bad. Its 
 terms of naturalization are intentionally adjusted to 
 admit and to include all save those who have shown 
 themselves dangerous to the body politic. Most of 
 its members are such by the accident of birth within 
 its frontiers. It is simply human society ordered 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 215 
 
 in one way for religious life, as it is ordered in a 
 different way for secular life. According to this 
 view, the ideal Church in any country would be one 
 which is exactly conterminous with the State, and of 
 which every inhabitant is eoo-offlcio a member. In 
 its perfect form the Christian Church and the Chris- 
 tian State would be identical. The distinction be- 
 tween sacred and secular would disappear. This is 
 in fact the conception of the Church which holds 
 the field. It is true that its ideal is not realized, 
 the Church is broken and divided, but each separate 
 portion acts after the manner of a state; fixes the 
 terms of citizenship ; counts all born within it as 
 members ; admits, rejects, expels, as it judges proper. 
 It makes or unmakes citizens according to its own 
 rules. But the goal toward which all these petty 
 religious states look is a time when they shall have 
 negotiated terms of consolidation, and shall be fused 
 together in one great Christian Church which will 
 include all the people. Was this the consummation 
 which Jesus had in mind when he projected his 
 Church? Would such a religious commonwealth be 
 the Church of Christ? 
 
 There is another conception which is drawn from 
 quite a different sphere of human life and action. 
 According to it the Church is not a state but a 
 family. It is constituted of individuals whose bond 
 of union is altogether unlike that which binds together 
 citizens in a commonwealth. Its members are related 
 by blood, bound together by a common kinship, 
 
SI 6 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 cemented bj an affection. This affection springs 
 from their antecedent kinship. This Family is in 
 the world, but not of it. It increases and multiplies 
 by its own methods. As such, it has no concern 
 with the secular life in the midst of which it hves. 
 It has its own ideals, its own activities, and finds its 
 own satisfactions. It is not an organization, but 
 an organism ; not an aggregation, but a brotherhood. 
 
 Now, it is commonly assumed that these two con- 
 ceptions of the Church can live and act at the same 
 time ; that it can be at once a state and a family ; 
 that it can expand according to the ways of a state, 
 and at the same time grow according to the ways 
 of a biological kingdom. This cannot be. A thing 
 cannot at the same time grow like a plant and be 
 built like a house. The two modes of being are 
 incompatible. To merely recognize this confusion 
 of thought would go far toward setting the Church 
 in the way to correct its practical confusions. 
 
 The first Christians thought little about a church, 
 one way or the other. They thought of themselves 
 as a family, each member of which felt within him- 
 self the thrill of a new life. They were " alive in 
 Christ " ; they had been " born again " ; made " new 
 creatures " ; " old things had passed away and all 
 things had become new " for them. They were 
 bound together in this new spiritual kinship. It 
 constituted a relationship closer than friendship or 
 even common blood. So completely did it take pos- 
 session of them that they had all things in common; 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 217 
 
 neither did any count anything his own. They sold 
 all their possessions and brought the proceeds to the 
 Apostles' feet for distribution among " the breth- 
 ren ". Their motive had nothing in common with 
 that which produces " Socialism ". Nor was it any- 
 thing like " love of mankind ", or " realization of a 
 common humanity ". They took no account of man- 
 kind as such. As a fact they were denounced by 
 their contemporaries as haters of mankind. When 
 they spoke of " the brethren ", " the faithful ", " the 
 saints ", they meant those individuals, many or few, 
 who shared with them the new life. When they 
 preached their message was " the resurrection and 
 the new life ". They imparted this life by personal 
 contact. When the divine spark was kindled in 
 any one he was baptized and numbered with the 
 disciples. He was baptized because, as St. Peter 
 said of Cornelius and his friends, " they have re- 
 ceived the Holy Spirit even as we ". There was no 
 doctrinal test at all, in our sense of the word. There 
 was no moral test save the evidence of the new life. 
 Nor by that did they mean any superior morality, 
 but only the new spirit, which they confidently ex- 
 pected to produce Christlike conduct. They met 
 together in affectionate family groups for the break- 
 ing of bread. Such rites as they had were simple 
 and natural. Such officials as they had were not 
 sharply distinguished from the rest of the brethren. 
 Their aim was to spread a new kind of life, not 
 to organize and extend an institution. Their im- 
 
£18 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 mediate success was the most wonderful thing in 
 human history. Under the same conditions the mis- 
 sionary machinery and the missionary motive of 
 to-day would have been as impotent as the attempt 
 to create a man by steam power. 
 
 This " Brotherhood of the New Life " in that form 
 passed out of sight with the end of the first century, 
 like a western river disappears in the sand. For 
 nearly two centuries thereafter almost nothing is 
 known concerning it. When it emerges again in the 
 light of history, its Gospel had become " Christi- 
 anity ". The upper room where the family group 
 had broken bread together had been expanded into 
 the gorgeous Basilica; the elder had become the 
 Pontiff; the simple Communion meal had become a 
 mysterious sacramental Function; instead of little 
 companies bound together in affection we find great 
 congregations, strangers to one another; instead of 
 " the brethren " it now embraces the population of 
 the empire, from the Emperor down; instead of a 
 band of brothers sharing their possessions with each 
 other we find a Church with imperial endowments. 
 It has a hierarchy, liturgies, canons, creeds, disci- 
 plines. In a word, the society which passed out of 
 sight a spiritual brotherhood reappears a religious 
 empire. Was this a development or transforma- 
 tion ? 
 
 For a brief period the Ecclesiastical State pre- 
 served a pohtical unity, identified with the unity of 
 the empire. But presently the empire fell to 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 219 
 
 pieces, and the Church broke up with it. From that 
 time to this the political conception of the Church 
 continued ; notwithstanding there has been no time — 
 not even a single day — when one could point to any 
 organization and say, this, or this, is the Church. 
 Now, at the beginning of this twentieth century since 
 Christ, multitudes of good men are profoundly dis- 
 satisfied with the situation. Their quarrel is not 
 with this church or that one, with this dogma or 
 that one ; they hold aloof from them all. They hold 
 Christ in unfeigned reverence. They are not sure 
 whether or not they accept the definitions of him set 
 forth in the formularies. They do not feel sure 
 that they could define him any better, but they are 
 sure they would define less. They possess the same 
 spirit which was In him, some of them to a pre- 
 eminent degree. But they have no use for a church. 
 In Catholic countries they firmly refuse to yield it 
 the personal submission which it demands. There 
 are indications, moreover, that the attitude of pas- 
 sive aloofness which they have maintained for a long 
 time Is changing into active impatience and hostility. 
 In Protestant communities they refuse to acknowl- 
 edge the divine sanction of any church. To speak 
 frankly, the things about which they see the churches 
 busying themselves appear to them to be paltry and 
 unreal. Their rites seem archaic and conventional, 
 their teaching either unintelligible or disingenuous. 
 They gauge accurately the real Influence of the 
 churches in practical affairs, and they hold the 
 
£20 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 opinion that the controlling motive of each one is 
 to exploit society in its own interest. This is the 
 class with which the churches must reckon. It is 
 one which has never before been confronted on a 
 large scale. Now it is increasing with enormous 
 rapidity. One may say that its presence is the 
 characteristic feature of the religious situation. 
 Among it is a very large proportion of the leaders 
 in every region of life, managers of affairs, admin- 
 istrators of charities, educators, governors of states, 
 college professors, editors of newspapers, judges, 
 legislators, farmers, teachers, mechanics. The rate 
 of increase of this class is many times greater than 
 the churches' increase. 
 
 The primitive conception of the Church has never 
 perished. It has been oversloughed by the political 
 imagery employed, but it has always persisted. 
 Christians still speak of each other as " brethren ", 
 even in circumstances where the epithet is less than 
 appropriate. They still have a definition of the real 
 Church which they never apply to any actual one, 
 the " Blessed Company of all Faithful People ". 
 The language which they spontaneously use at the 
 times of deepest devotion always echoes the original 
 thought. At Baptism the terms used to indicate 
 the meaning of the transaction are biological terms : 
 " regenerated ", " grafted into the body of Christ's 
 Church ". They are terms which would be mean- 
 ingless in any political sense. They throw back to 
 a time when the Church thought in those terms. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 221 
 
 They speak of " being received as God's Child by 
 adoption ", " dying unto sin ", " living unto right- 
 eousness ", and such like. In the other Sacrament 
 the same ideas lie at bottom. Its terms and symbols 
 are vital, not political ones. And for this reason, 
 that, as things are, at that Table and there only the 
 real Church is encountered. It speaks its own 
 mother-tongue because there are no strangers pres- 
 ent. Was it wise for it ever to attempt to speak 
 a universal language? 
 
 Here, then, would seem to be the key to the whole 
 perplexing situation. The Church of Jesus Christ 
 began as a new Family in the world. It was meant 
 to grow according to its own laws of reproduction. 
 For a time it did so. Eventually, even if slowly, it 
 would have absorbed and assimilated all from among 
 men who are ready to " be born again ". But the 
 process was slow, costly, painful. When the pain 
 was at the heaviest the Emperor of the world offered 
 it " all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of 
 them ". The wearied Church accepted. Instead of 
 transforming the world, the world transformed it. 
 Thus did " the fatal gift of Constantine " seduce and 
 mislead the Bride of Christ. 
 
 But if this be true in any real sense, what is there 
 for the Church to do ? Can she retrace her stumbling 
 steps back to the fourth century, find the place where 
 the path branched, and start anew along the other 
 road? We may be quite sure she will not do this 
 except as a last resort. The dream of being a world 
 
222 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 power has been too long entertained for that. The 
 habit of reckoning success by numbers has become 
 a second nature. So long as by any means the 
 figures may be made to show increase of numbers 
 the habit will continue. But there are indications 
 from every quarter that she will be compelled to 
 retrace her steps and resume her old ideal. 
 
 Few realize how profound is the revolution which 
 has occurred during late times in the relation be- 
 tween the Church and organized society. In Con- 
 stantine's time Christianity was made the official re- 
 ligion of the State. From that time onward, for 
 fifteen hundred years, the State built churches, main- 
 tained them, constrained the people to attend them. 
 This came to be everywhere regarded as the natural 
 as well as the divine order of things. The force 
 of statutes, the resources of taxation, the power of 
 the common law, could all be appealed to in the 
 interest of the Church. Tliis condition remained 
 until the United States, the first government in the 
 world to do so, decreed in her constitution that " no 
 law should be made concerning religion ". The far- 
 reaching consequences of that provision were proba- 
 bly not dreamed of by any man then living. It 
 started that movement now almost complete, to take 
 from the Church's hand the staff upon which she 
 has leaned throughout almost the whole of her jour- 
 ney. When the Church asked for liberty, for " the 
 separation of Church and State ", she little realized 
 what effect it would have upon her own fortunes. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 223 
 
 That effect has been long in showing itself. Long 
 after the State withdrew its support, society from 
 use and wont continued to do through pressure of 
 custom and public opinion that which law had for- 
 merly compelled. We have now about reached the 
 point where public opinion follows the constitution. 
 We are in spite of ourselves being pushed, or led, 
 back to the position of the primitive Church. That 
 asked nothing of the powers of this world except 
 to be let alone. It was a voluntary association of 
 the men of the new life, living and acting in the 
 midst of a society which took no account of it or its 
 rules, except as they were won, one at a time, to 
 submit themselves to the new Way. But when the 
 State offered its powerful aid they gratefully fell 
 into its arms. Now the Emperor has abandoned the 
 Church which he seduced. 
 
 In proportion as the churches realize and accept 
 the situation will they find the path clear, though 
 no doubt painful. But if the path is to be found 
 it must be by those who have become free from the 
 dogmatic and imperial spirit of Constantine's age. 
 Indeed it is most unlikely that the churches, acting 
 officially, will ever escape from the evil case into 
 which they are rapidly falling. So far as one can see, 
 the Roman Church has so completely identified her- 
 self with the idea of dominion that to abandon it 
 would be suicide. It may even be probable that 
 for a time her gain may be great by reason of the 
 migration to her of those who have felt after the 
 
224 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 same ideal in Protestantism without finding satis- 
 faction. But even so, the obstacles in the way of 
 her realizing her dream are multiplying as time goes 
 on. Her ultimate failure is inevitable from the na- 
 ture of things. For the same reason the Anglican 
 churches which affect to maintain a nice balance 
 between two incompatible conceptions of what the 
 Church is, must dwindle by the dropping away of 
 those who find no satisfaction in either of them. So 
 also, the separate Protestant churches appear to be 
 each one so compactly organized around its particu- 
 lar confession and so bound to its own Church by 
 sentiment that no fonnal action is likely to be taken. 
 But is it still too much to expect that the disjecta 
 membra of the Christian fraternity may draw to- 
 gether and become a Church such as Jesus had in 
 mind? Such a Church, pretending to be nothing 
 but what it is, with the sad experience of the cen- 
 turies to enlighten it, would find Church Unity a 
 thing already achieved. Its creed, discipline, and 
 ministry would arrange themselves, for they would 
 be, as they were originall}^, the natural and spon- 
 taneous expression of its life. No doubt they would 
 be much the same as they have always been, but 
 they would occupy a different and far less conspicu- 
 ous place than is now accorded them. Its creed 
 would, maybe, be less precise, but more alive; its 
 ministry less prominent and more serviceable; its 
 discipline not that of rules and canons, but that in- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 225 
 
 exorable law by which living things choose and re- 
 ject among the things they touch. 
 
 Such a Church would be undisturbed by the exodus 
 now going on. It would see it for what it actually 
 is, namely the automatic correction of a census main- 
 tained long upon a false basis. It would not be 
 disturbed by the withdrawal of that great multitude 
 who have gone out from it because they were really 
 not of it. For such a Church many souls are wait- 
 ing. Good men, like those I have instanced above, 
 do not stand aloof from the Church as it is now 
 because it is too religious, but because it is not 
 religious enough. They would greet with sober ardor 
 a Church which offered them a share in the new and 
 abiding life in Christ, and which took no thought for 
 itself at all. For Jesus' dictum is as true for a 
 Church as for a man, " whoso humbleth himself shall 
 be exalted, and he that exalteth himself shall be 
 abased ". 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 
 
"Later on, — My creed has melted away, but I be- 
 lieve in good, in the moral order, and in salvation; reli- 
 gion for me is to live and die in God, in complete aban- 
 donment to the holy will which is at the root of nature 
 and destiny. I believe in the Gospel, the Good News — 
 that is to say, faith in the love of a pardoning Father ". 
 — ^Amiel, Journal. 
 
XIV 
 THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 
 
 A LARGE portion, and by no means the worst, of 
 the world to-day is dissatisfied with its religion. It 
 is not less but more anxious to find some outlet for 
 its devotion, some guide for its life, some answer to 
 its obstinate questionings, than at any previous 
 time. Parents stand hesitatingly before their chil- 
 dren, and do not know what they ought to teach 
 them. They are more and more reluctant to confide 
 them to the Sunday school, for there, they believe, 
 they will be taught a host of things which are not 
 true, and they dread the time when the children 
 shall discover, as they themselves have, that they 
 are not true. Tens of thousands of men and women 
 who used to attend church habitually no longer do 
 so. Every Christian minister sees and deplores this 
 falling away. No statistics or census reports will 
 disguise the fact. Church statistics are worth less 
 than nothing. One, for example, reports simply 
 " Catholic Population ", that is, the number who, 
 in its judgment, ought to belong to it. Others re- 
 port by name and number the additions, and only 
 guess at the lapses and losses. It is probably speak- 
 ing within bounds to say that not one parish in ten 
 
 229 
 
230 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 could find and locate one-half the number of mem- 
 bers it reports. Even with this method of enumera- 
 tion one of the most vigorous of churches, the Prot- 
 estant Episcopal, reports ^ for 1910 a net gain of 
 only two per cent, in members ; an increase of 51 
 in Confirmations for a communicant list of 800,000 ; 
 an actual decrease in Baptisms and Marriages. No 
 doubt other churches would make a similar show- 
 ing. 
 
 It would be an error to refer this falling away to 
 increasing luxury, or dissipation, or satisfaction 
 with secular life. In the first place, the loss is 
 greater among the working classes than among the 
 well to do. Beside that, the religious interest of 
 the masses is shown by the eager way in which they 
 snatch at any other answer offered to the riddle of 
 life. When Professor Haeckel's " Riddle of the Uni- 
 verse " appeared a few years ago, two hundred thou- 
 sand copies were sold in a single year. It and books 
 like it, are welcomed and read, not because they 
 fortify unbelievers in their denials, but because they 
 provide some answer, poor, thin, and disheartening 
 as it is, to the demands which Christianity as pre- 
 sented does not satisfy. What, then, is it which 
 Christianity, when stripped of all extraneous and 
 superfluous matter, has to say to the soul which 
 seeks to know? The substance of the reply may be 
 stated somewhat as follows: 
 
 The controlling principle of Jesus' teaching and 
 
 * "Whittaker's Almanac. 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER ^31 
 
 living is that the essential quality of the being whom 
 he calls " Father " is love. He presents him, not as 
 a great king conducting the complex affairs of a 
 great empire, nor as a creator constructing and 
 regulating the complicated movement of the uni- 
 verse, but rather as some venerable and benignant 
 Oriental sheik. He has children and descendants 
 beyond count, and in their veins his own blood flows. 
 But as they have multiplied they have moved away 
 from and become unmindful of their father and of 
 their kinship with each other. This fact weighs, an 
 eternal burden, on the patriarch's heart. They are 
 indiff'erent to him, and they quarrel with one an- 
 other. No machinery, no law or threat of penalty 
 can reach the situation. The one thing, and the 
 only thing which can bring harmony out of the con- 
 fusion of existence is the restoration of the family 
 affection. 
 
 But it is plain tliat this cannot be brought about 
 by compulsion. The verb to love has no imperative 
 mood. God can no more compel a man to love him 
 than can a man compel the affection of his wife or 
 neighbor. Nor are arguments of any more avail. 
 Love laughs at reasons. This is why both Theology 
 and Ethics are impotent. Theology addresses itself 
 to the intelligence, and Ethics to the conscience, 
 whereas it is the affections which are primarily con- 
 cerned. " My son, give me thine heart " is the bur- 
 den of God's speech. The very most that Theology 
 as a science can do is to make it appear probable 
 
2S2 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 that the nature and action of God in the universe is 
 thus and so. But the crucial point at which it sig- 
 nally breaks down is in the attempt to convince that 
 the God of thought has a heart. A candid survey of 
 the actual facts of life leaves one in doubt as to 
 whether the world is controlled by a Power who 
 wishes well, or wishes ill, or is utterly indifferent to 
 the fortunes of men. Looking at the course of his- 
 tory in the large it is possible, no doubt, to discern 
 in its movement " a power, not ourselves, which 
 makes for righteousness ". It is possible, but it is 
 not inevitable. For, while it is true that a steady 
 progress in goodness and gentleness can be seen 
 from time to time in this or that people, or race, 
 or epoch, still, even these appear to be arrested at 
 last by the stronger force of age and decline. 
 
 Even were it possible to establish the fact that 
 the race is being steadily led forward in goodness, 
 there is nothing to show that the Power which leads 
 it has either hate or ruth for the individual. The 
 old ditty has in it the concentrated experience of the 
 ages,— 
 
 "As I walked by myself, I talked to myself, 
 And thus myself did say to me; 
 
 * Look to thyself, and take care of thyself. 
 For nobody cares for thee '. 
 
 " Then I turned to myself, and I answered myself 
 In the selfsame reverie; 
 
 * Look to thyself, or look not to thyself. 
 
 The selfsame thing will be'". . 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 233 
 
 The most that any Ethical system can do, on the 
 other hand, is to express an opinion, more or less 
 weighty, that men ought to act toward each other 
 thus and so. It may well be doubted whether men 
 have ever been appreciably influenced by any scien- 
 tific presentation of Morals. From Confucius and 
 Aristotle down to Bernard Shaw, the moralist has 
 been a speculator in abstractions. His achievement 
 is only to take a certain number of " oughts " and 
 " ought nots " already present in human society, ar- 
 range them in the symmetrical way which he fancies, 
 expound their relationships, and — with scant success 
 — try to trace their origin, and get them put in prac- 
 tise. There is no motive power in ethics, whether as 
 a judgment formed by the individual, or as a com- 
 pulsion imposed from without. 
 
 Not that Theology and Ethics are useless. The 
 intelligence which craves knowledge, even of the un- 
 knowable, both will and ought to seek its satisfac- 
 tions. The moral conduct of men needs regulation 
 from day to day, and society must control it, with 
 what knowledge it can gather from any quarter. But 
 neither of these have to do, except indirectly, with 
 Christ's scheme of things. They do not function in 
 that area of life in which he moves. 
 
 It is commonly assumed that the disturbing ele- 
 ment in life is that thing which we call Sin. But 
 this is not Christ's view. It is most significant that 
 while he lived he offended the moralist and the con- 
 ventionally religious by what they thought to be 
 
^34 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the laxity of his moral judgments. Publicans and 
 sinners were his daily companions. The woman sur- 
 prised in the very act of the capital crime against 
 social morals was rescued by him from her accusers, 
 and dismissed with a kindly warning. The leman of 
 Simon the Pharisee received from him no harsher 
 judgment than " she sinned much because she loved 
 much ". On the other hand, Dives, whom he con- 
 signed to the torments of hell, had not actively sinned 
 at all. The Scribes and Pharisees whom he de- 
 nounced unsparingly were probably men of exem- 
 plary life. 
 
 His contention from first to last is that the evil 
 in life is not sin but Selfishness. It would probably 
 be more true to say that he reached down to the 
 fundamental truth that all sin is at bottom selfish- 
 ness. There is really no other sin. All offences are, 
 when analyzed, seen to be but allotropic forms of 
 this one. Lust, for example, is but the desire to 
 possess, without regard to the good of the thing 
 possessed. Hate is but the cold determination to 
 rid oneself of the person whose existence disturbs 
 his sense of well being. Its final expression is mur- 
 der, for, as Shylock says, " hateth any man the thing 
 he would not kill " ? Theft is selfishness pure and 
 simple. So of all other immorahties whatsoever, they 
 are but expressions of love of self. Christianity, on 
 the other hand, is Altruism. But it is altruism made 
 dynamic. The amazing thing is that it should have 
 ever been presented as self-seeking raised to its 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 235 
 
 highest power, and given the sanction of religious 
 obligation. For what else is the exhortation to the 
 individual to " seek salvation ", to " save his soul "? 
 And what other motive impels the monk and the re- 
 cluse to withdraw from the world of affections in the 
 hope of finding his own highest good? Jesus' dictum 
 — ^which is not a paradox — is " he that saveth his 
 life shall lose it ". It is the fundamental law of the 
 Kingdom. 
 
 Filled with his Father's spirit, — and it is little 
 wonder that with this well beloved son he was well 
 pleased, — he enters human society. As he moves up 
 and down among men, he finds them that are spirit- 
 ually akin to him and to each other. Of these his 
 Kingdom forms itself. It is a relationship not only 
 deeper, but more real than that of race, or blood, or 
 any other tie whatsoever. " Then came his mother 
 and his brothers, and standing outside the throng 
 they called for him. And when they told him. Be- 
 hold thy mother and thy brothers are outside seek- 
 ing for you, he answered and said, Behold my mother 
 and my brethren. For whosoever will do the will 
 of my Father, he is my brother and my sister ". 
 What the will is of which he spoke is plain from 
 the whole story. The Parable of the prodigal son is 
 his portrait of his Father. The Sermon on the 
 Mount is the pronunciamento of his Kingdom. It 
 is " love ", " Love, even your enemies ; do good ; do 
 good even to them that persecute you ". His King- 
 
236 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dom therefore has its place, not in the realm of 
 knowledge, or morals, but in the affections. 
 
 Now, it will probably not be gainsaid that this is 
 the primary article in Christ's religion, — in theory. 
 But there are two obstinate difficulties which must 
 be overcome before one can consent to subscribe to 
 it and enroll himself. The first is : " All this is fair 
 and gracious ; it is no doubt true in that region which 
 you call the eternal realities, but our lives are to be 
 lived on the surface of the world as we find it. In 
 human life, as it actually exists, to adopt this atti- 
 tude toward one's fellows is neither practicable nor 
 safe; practically it could only issue in the disorgan- 
 ization of society and the obliteration of the indi- 
 vidual who orders his life thus ". What can be an- 
 swered to this.? 
 
 Jesus' answer is : " It is practicable, for I have 
 done it; it may or may not be safe, as the case may 
 be ". When it is once admitted that sincere good 
 will on the part of each man toward every other 
 man would transform this world from a bad place 
 to live in to a good one, the question of its practica- 
 bility will of necessity take a subordinate place. The 
 thing which is good, and which men know to be 
 good, will in the long run prevail. But the run is 
 a very long one indeed. At the stage of the race 
 where we now are it seems as though the goal would 
 not be reached within any measurable time. 
 
 Let us say, then, that our word " love " is, maybe, 
 too strong a term to use for that temper toward 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 237 
 
 one's fellows wliich Christ prescribes. As a rule, we 
 reserve that word for one supreme and imperious 
 affection. " Well-disposed " is a more accurate ex- 
 pression. The benediction is to " men well-willed ". 
 The affectional attitude of the Christifin toward all 
 men does not in any wise preclude him from those 
 personal and intimate affections which constitute his 
 own life. Every man is not called upon, for exam- 
 ple, to love his neighbor's wife as his own. Nor is 
 he at liberty to ignore moral differences, and be 
 pleased with the saint and the harlot alike. What is 
 demanded is that he shall recognize his kinship with 
 all his Father's children, and do for each what is 
 the real best, not, maybe, the thing which his brother 
 wants, but the thing which is best for him. To love 
 one's neighbor as himself does not mean to love him 
 in ways in which one has no business to love him- 
 self. That this is practicable has been proven ex- 
 perimentally ever since the first starving cave-dweller 
 shared his bone with a hungry neighbor, or drove 
 away with his club the marauding vagabond who 
 would snatch his children's food. 
 
 If one shall say, then, " Is this all? Is Christian- 
 ity simply to do good to one's fellows "? the an- 
 swer is, " Yes ; this is all ". " For I was hungry, 
 and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me 
 drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; sick, 
 and ye visited me; I w^as in prison, and ye came 
 unto me. Verily I say unto you that inasmuch as 
 
S38 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 je did it to one of tlie least of these my brethren, 
 ye did it unto me ". 
 
 But let no one mislead himself. Because this way 
 of life is simple it is not easy. The most abstruse 
 creeds and the most exacting codes are far easier. 
 The person one is called upon to feed may be dis- 
 agreeable in his manners ; the stranger who asks to 
 be taken in may be just the man who has done one 
 grievous wrong; the sick man's sickness may be in- 
 fectious; the man one is called to visit in jail may 
 be the very one who defrauded him before he was 
 sentenced. The difficulty is very great indeed. If 
 I love my enemy, I put myself at his mercy. If 
 I disarm wliile my opponent holds his sword in 
 hand, he may run me through. If I allow my- 
 self to be solicitous about the food and shelter 
 of my neighbors, I must withdraw just so much 
 time and energy from my own affairs. If all men, 
 even within a limited area, could be brought to 
 begin this manner of life simultaneously, it might be 
 possible, but how am I to begin alone .^ 
 
 Christ's answer is, the way to begin is to begin. 
 He does not pretend to disguise the possible cost. 
 Indeed it would seem as though he had pointed to 
 every conceivable peril which might daunt the cour- 
 age of disciples. He forewarned them that they 
 should be hated and persecuted; that men would say 
 all manner of evil concerning them ; that they would 
 be cast out of the world's synagogues, and maybe 
 killed. And they were. And so was he. But he as- 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 239 
 
 sured them that not a hair of their heads would be 
 wasted. There is no such thing as ultimate waste in 
 any of God's Kingdoms. But all the same, the goal 
 toward which any kingdom moves is reached without 
 any regard to seeming prodigality. This is to be 
 said, however, the Kingdom is now so well estab- 
 lished, and comprehends so many individuals, that its 
 law of life has to a large extent been welcomed by 
 the environing world. There is little danger now 
 and here of the lions or the stake. Few men now 
 adopt the law of Selfishness as their guiding prin- 
 ciple. Competition is surely disappearing even from 
 regions where it controlled for ages. Indeed the 
 extraordinary phenomenon is now being seen, — the 
 principle of competition invoking the aid of national 
 law to guarantee for it its old place in commerce! 
 
 Still, it is true and will for ages be true, that 
 Christ's Way is so arduous that it will not be adopted 
 without some imperious sanction. This sanction he 
 provides when he makes it the way of Life, — not of 
 happiness, but of existence. Sin is Selfishness ; but 
 selfishness, when complete, ends in the extinction of 
 its subject. As the circle of a selfish life contracts 
 into an ever smaller circumference, it tends to become 
 at last only a point, and finally to vanish. This is 
 the process through which a soul is destroyed. It 
 perishes of self-seeking. Infinite selfishness is soul 
 suicide. " For he that loveth not abideth in death. 
 Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer, and ye 
 know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in 
 
240 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 him ". Because such a soul will not help, and is 
 therefore useless for the eternal Father's purpose, it 
 is allowed to follow its own chosen way to extinc- 
 tion, where it can no longer hinder. Allowed to do 
 so? There is no power in the universe which can 
 prevent it except itself. 
 
 Over against this the same force operates in the 
 opposite direction. He that spendeth findeth. The 
 outgoing of the soul in love and good will, so far 
 from dissipating and weakening its own energies, en- 
 hances and fortifies them. The affections are the 
 only human faculty incapable of exhaustion. Every 
 other has its breaking strain. Thought grows weary 
 with work ; the emotions when stimulated too far be- 
 come obtunded; but love never tires. Many a man 
 has found, to his surprise, and maybe to his con- 
 sternation, that when he begins a task of charity he 
 becomes entangled in it. It ovemiasters him. It 
 draws him out and on to issues larger than he had 
 contemplated; and it does so because through it his 
 own being grows larger and stronger. " For every 
 one that loveth is begotten of God. He that abideth 
 in love abideth in God. And what shall it profit a 
 man if he shall gain even the whole world, and lose 
 himself in the doing of it".'^ In other words, only 
 he that loves lives. 
 
 This automatic force is the " Fan in the hand " 
 of the Son of Man, winnowing forever, separating 
 the chaff from the grain on the world's threshing 
 floor. Thus the Kingdom is being builded. Who 
 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 241 
 
 belong to it? They who will well to their fellows. 
 Where is it to be seen? Ideally it ought to be con- 
 terminous with the Church. Actually it is not so. 
 Some time, we may hope, it will be so, as the Master 
 contemplated. But candor compels the sad confes- 
 sion that before that time the Church must learn to 
 love. Organizations learn that far more slowly than 
 persons do. There is a great multitude whom no 
 man could number within those societies which we 
 call churches, who would gladly walk together in 
 unity and live as brethren in one house, but who are 
 let and hindered in doing so because their organiza- 
 tions, as such, have not the mind of Christ. Instead 
 of humbling, they exalt themselves. Instead of con- 
 sidering each the things of another, each seeks the 
 things of its own. It could not be otherwise, since 
 for these many centuries they have thought of the 
 Kingdom as resting upon a Creed or a Code. These 
 are regarded as completing the essential equipment 
 of a church. The stuff of which that is built is 
 not supplied by the understanding or the conscience, 
 but the heart. So comes the paradox that a church 
 whose members generally are " children of the King- 
 dom " may as an organization exhibit precisely those 
 phenomena which the law of the Kingdom condemns. 
 It may act toward other churches as no Christian 
 would think of acting toward another Christian. In 
 a word, it is loveless. Whether it be true or not 
 that " corporations have no souls ", it is approx- 
 imately true that churches have no hearts. They act