BX 5133 .F77 G6 1883 
 Fremantle, W. H. 1831-1916 
 The gospel of the secular 
 life 
 
THE 
 
 Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 WITH A 
 
 FEE FA TOR Y ESS A V. 
 
 BY 
 
 The Hon. W. H. FREMANTLE, 
 
 Late Fellow of all Souls ; 
 Rector of St. Mary's, Bryanston Square, and Canon of Canterbury. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1S83 
 
^0 
 
 The University of Oxford, 
 
 AND ESPECIALLY TO ITS YOUNGER MEMBERS 
 
 IN WHOM LIES SO MUCH OF HOPE FOR 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 
 
 THIS WORK IS DEDICATED. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prefatory Essay « 7 
 
 I. Unity through a Moral Faith ... 33 
 
 II. Religion without a Temple 63 
 
 III. The Supremacy of Christ over the Secular 
 
 Life 91 
 
 IV. Election and Privilege in Religion 121 
 
 V. Critical Thought and Practical Ministry ... 147 
 
 VI. The Universal Priesthood of Believers ... 175 
 VII. God Immanent in Man and Nature 197 
 
 VIII. Intellectual Pursuits and the Higher Life ... 215 
 
 IX. "Progress" ^ 229 
 
These sermons are published as an attempt to direct 
 Christian thought into a new channel, its great, not to 
 say paramount, concern with the general, common, or 
 secular life of mankind. The Christian Church is a 
 great power, and nowhere more so than in this 
 country. But it appears hardly conscious of its true 
 strength. It concerns itself with public worship, with 
 pulpit instruction, and with works of beneficence of 
 various kinds, and with the extension of the range of 
 these forms of activity. But the general, common, and ' 
 secular life lies almost outside its purview. Chlirch 
 work and Church influence are commonly spoken of 
 as if they were something lying apart from the life of 
 science, or art, or politics. And the convictions of 
 men on these subjects are apt to be formed almost 
 without reference to Christianity. Those who lead 
 in these departments are consequently apt, whether 
 they are or are not professedly religious men, to 
 hold an ambiguous position towards the Church. 
 There is in the present day, among men of culture 
 in England, little that can be called scoffing at 
 Christian doctrine; and the attitude of the best minds 
 towards the Christian system generally, if it is often 
 that of hesitancy, is rarely that of denial. But 
 
8 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 meanwhile the real interests of men are apt to lie in a 
 region which Christian teaching hardly touches. Nor 
 is the phenomenon which we are observing to be 
 explained by the contrast between worldliness and 
 godliness. It is rather this — that the decisive and 
 directing power over men's consciences is not felt to 
 lie within the Church's sphere, so that, as has been 
 recently said, the great secular influences form new 
 religions. Christianity becomes a specialism and a 
 small affair in the presence of other absorbing objects 
 of interest, instead of being the supreme spiritual 
 influence which elevates and harmonises all the 
 spheres of human life. 
 
 It is not necessary to disparage the ordinary work 
 of the Church. We may rather believe that that work 
 would gain in width and in vigour from the direc- 
 tion of thought which is here proposed. If Chris- 
 tianity were felt to be intimately concerned with the 
 general, common, and secular life, its worship would 
 be much more real, as responding to the wants of all. 
 Its schemes of beneficence would gain in vigour and 
 in manliness, because they would be part of the 
 general direction of human life, and they would not 
 shrink from contact with the State. And the 
 Church's teaching especially would take a wider 
 range. Even the teaching which bears upon ritual 
 would be coloured by the conviction that the Christ 
 with whom the prayers and sacraments unite men is 
 the spiritual centre of the life of mankind and of the 
 universe. The dogmas would pass into principles ; 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 9 
 
 they would be found to be expressions for the 
 deepest feelings and convictions of the actual life 
 of men, and their significance would gain a new 
 force and colour from each fresh discovery of truth in 
 whatever department. The teaching as to the world 
 to come also would be more closely connected with 
 the moral life here ; it would be the constant back- 
 ground of the picture, a sustaining hope develop- 
 ing itself in a happy present energy. 
 
 Those who look thoughtfully into the future may 
 safely leave public worship, instruction, and bene- 
 ficence to the action of existing forces. The need for 
 them is felt very generally. They are, for the most 
 part, under the charge of competent men, and the 
 mind of Christians is set upon them ; so that the 
 further extension and the gradual changes which 
 they require, the pruning away of excesses, the 
 introduction of lay control, may be regarded as 
 ensured. There is hardly an object of this kind 
 for which some special society does not exist. But 
 that which is needed, and for lack of which Chris- 
 tianity languishes, is a wider outlook, a determina- 
 tion to look the world in the face without misgiving 
 or mistrust, to spiritualise and to harmonise, to foster 
 and to inspire, the various spheres and interests 
 which the Providence of God opens to the men 
 of our day. 
 
 It has already been pointed out that, for lack 
 of intercourse with these spheres and interests of 
 secular life, Christianity is in danger of neglect if not 
 
lo * The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 of hostility from without, and of shrivelling up into 
 littleness within. There is another phenomenon 
 which must not be neglected — the divisions among 
 Christians. It is felt, on the one hand, that the 
 divisions have no sufficient ground of conviction, that 
 they are in fact to a great extent an anachronism, 
 and that there is a real unity independent of them, 
 which is struggling to gain expression. Men are 
 a little ashamed of these divisions, and of the fact 
 that Christianity is a cause of disagreement rather 
 than of unity in the world, especially in the political 
 life. But on the other hand there is a kind of 
 impotence which makes them fall back helplessly 
 into sectarianism, at least into that modified sec- 
 tarianism which is content with outward courtesy 
 without healing the division, and which is thus liable 
 to the reproach of want of principle. Men cannot 
 frankly discuss their differences without sliding again 
 into the grooves of the old and effete controversies. 
 The surest way to get rid of this sectarianism is to 
 find new ground which is unaffected by it So long 
 as modes of worship, and the government of the 
 clergy, and the little interests of congregations, or 
 the reduction of religious ideas to abstract and dis- 
 putable propositions, are looked upon as the main 
 business of Christianity, there is no way out of sec- 
 tarianism. But when Christians find out that their 
 main business is to promote truth in all departments 
 of human knowledge, and love in all the relations 
 of human life, and that they have a concern also in 
 
Prefatory Essay, 
 
 II 
 
 all that beautifies and refines human existence, and 
 that all the energy of their faith in God and in 
 Christ is needed to sustain the progress of mankind, 
 they will find out also that the ground of their dis- 
 cord recedes into its natural littleness, and that the 
 faith by which they all are actuated is a great 
 moral power, as to the possession and use of which 
 there is no controversy. 
 
 The secular life of modern Europe in its higher 
 aspects may be divided into three great departments : 
 that of Science — chiefly though not exclusively re- 
 presented in men's present thoughts by physical 
 science — that of Art, and that of Politics. It exhibits 
 also certain ruHng ideas or tendencies, of which the 
 most prominent are Free Criticism, Democratic 
 Equality, and Progress. Each of these is apt to 
 claim entire independence, and at times to rise in 
 opposition to the received Christianity and the 
 claims of the Church ; and a conflict is thus set up, 
 which on both sides would be described somewhat as 
 follows. Natural science, it may be said, especially as 
 inspired by the doctrine of evolution, seems to leave 
 no room for miracle, no room even for a creator, in 
 the sense usually given to the word — that is, one who 
 has made the world out of nothing, and sustains it 
 ab extra; and, what is more, the pursuit of natural 
 science seems so absorbing as to fill up the whole 
 soul, and to leave no room for the common moral 
 wants, for the sense of sin, and the need of redemp- 
 tion. The votary of art, again, it may be said, claims 
 
12 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 to be free and separate. He resents the idea that he is 
 bound by moral restrictions, such as the early painters 
 and musicians acknowledged. This is specially seen 
 in the revived love of the Greek form of culture, and 
 admiration of the Renaissance. The life of art stands 
 in contrast with the moral and religious life. So 
 also the political development, which demands 
 equality, and frets against authority, has its own 
 principles of action. Religion is from above, it is said, 
 dogmatic, authoritative, unchanging ; but modern 
 political life goes its own way, each man and each 
 section claiming room for their own full develop- 
 ment, and the whole passing unfettered " down the 
 ringing grooves of change." Criticism, again, is 
 erected into a system which demands recognition 
 everywhere. No institution, no received custom or 
 opinion, can be withdrawn from its unabashed gaze. 
 *' I know nothing as holy," said Strauss ; " I know 
 only the true." In any case, the demand is that our 
 statements should be undogmatic ; but is not theo- 
 logy made up of. dogmas ? If, again, the assertion of 
 equality is to have its full issue, does not this directly 
 contravene the privilege allotted hitherto to supe- 
 riority or goodness in its various forms } And 
 yet has not the government of God, as set forth in 
 the Bible, been conducted on the principle of election 
 and of graded subjection? Lastly, if progress is to 
 go on incessantly, what goal can be fixed for it } 
 and is it not, as far as religion is concerned, a pro- 
 gress of negation 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 13 
 
 This short statement, which the reader will expand 
 from his own experience, may suffice to set before us 
 the main tendencies of the secular life, and the special 
 difficulties connected with it in our day. The remarks 
 now to be made upon them will be entirely from the 
 standpoint of a Christian teacher. 
 
 There are four different ways of dealing with the 
 subject. 
 
 First, it may be said by some men that the Church 
 and its ministers, and earnest Christians generally, 
 have nothing to do with these things. " Let us per- 
 form our duties," it may be said, " and let the world 
 go its own way. If we are to exert any influence 
 on it, it must be by the spectacle which we present 
 of earnest devotion to our own proper work of 
 prayer, teaching, and beneficence. These will in 
 due time have their effect." This view finds some 
 countenance from the fact that many of those who 
 adopt this course do often, by their simple piety, 
 win a large and beneficial influence. It is far better 
 to have no view at all about science or art or poli- 
 tics than to take a wrong view. And those who 
 are absorbed in secular interests will often feel more 
 sympathy, because they are more left in peace, in 
 the presence of men of simple unquestioning piety 
 than in the presence of those who are earnestly 
 working out the problem of Christian influence in 
 the world. But there are great dangers in such a 
 course. First, it tends to make religion a mere 
 department of life, instead of being the supreme 
 
14 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 moral power. Next, when men are ignorant of each 
 other they usually suspect and misunderstand each 
 other ; and so it is apt to happen with systems of 
 life which thus ignore each other. Thirdly, those 
 who try to ignore the secular life, however simple 
 they may be, are apt to become a prey to those 
 who do not ignore it, but take a wrong view of it ; 
 and thus it comes to pass that the Church system 
 of our day, though full of earnestness and doing much 
 good work, is drifting more and more into clericalism. 
 Lastly, the fatal contrast is thus reproduced, which, 
 except where it is taken as a convenient distinction 
 and as expressing a division of labour, is wholly un- 
 christian, between things sacred and things secular. 
 The only contrast known to Christianity is between 
 good and evil. Christ came not to condemn the 
 world, but to save it ; and " the world " which is 
 condemned by Him is not the world as secular, 
 but the world as wicked and selfish. The effort of 
 Christians must be not to condemn nor to ignore, 
 but to save. 
 
 Secondly, there are those who admit that the 
 secular life has its place and its rights, but who yet 
 dread it as a disturbing and usurping influence. They 
 would, if it were possible, wish back the time when 
 science hardly existed and art was the servant of 
 devotion. They accept the Reformation, and even 
 perhaps the English Revolution ; but the reforming 
 and liberal movements of the present day, in which 
 the spirit of the Reformation and the Revolution lives 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 15 
 
 before us again, they fly from with terror. Criticism 
 is to be accepted as dealing with ecclesiastical, but not 
 with Biblical questions. Or, again, the democratic 
 spirit is admitted in politics, but must on no account 
 be allowed to touch the organisation of the Church. 
 Newton's discoveries, though resisted as contrary to 
 Scripture in the beginning of the eighteeenth century, 
 are almost held as divine; but Darwin's theories in 
 the middle of the nineteenth are dangerous. This is 
 the attitude of compromise. It has no principle on 
 which it is based. It asserts again and again what it 
 has afterwards to give up. It yields step by step 
 what it had professed to hold as the most important 
 principles or institutions, and, like a bribe paid to 
 an invader, it invites a renewal of the attack. The 
 fault of this mode of raising the question is funda- 
 m^^ntally the same as that of the first, namely, that it 
 presumes an antagonism which is fictitious between 
 the Church and the world, the secular and the religious 
 life, and confounds the world as secular and natural 
 with the world as wicked and selfish. But it has 
 a special danger of its own, in that it constantly 
 raises needless controversy and ill-humour, and that 
 it presents the Church and Christianity as a feeble 
 and feminine being dragged hither and thither 
 against its will, rather than as one possessed with 
 the dignity of truth and the assurance of universal 
 empire. 
 
 Thirdly, we have the reconciliationists, those who 
 look upon the various secular systems and tendencies 
 
1 6 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 as independent powers, possibly as new forms of 
 religion,* which they hope may one day be shown 
 not to be antagonistic to Christianity. There is on 
 the one hand the expression of a certain alarm, and on 
 the other the hope, more or less confident and reasoned, 
 that the alarm may prove to be needless. The 
 danger of such an attitude is that it hardly presents a 
 sufficient basis for action. It hopes for such a basis 
 rather than gives it us. There is also the danger that 
 it is apt to take the two supposed antagonists as they 
 are at a given time, and to form between them a kind 
 of armistice rather than a durable peace, an armistice 
 which may fail to meet the next demand of the secular 
 life. Such an attitude can hardly be avoided in a 
 period of transition. But it does not present the resting- 
 place which we need in the presence of the changes of 
 opinion, the " shaking of the things which are made," 
 and their possible removal. Christian teachers can- 
 not help requiring a more confident position from 
 which to preach to mankind. 
 
 That more confident position, we may venture to 
 believe, is accessible to us. There is a way of dealing 
 with the problem different from the three which have 
 been described. This fourth and better way takes 
 
 * The work of the author of ** Ecce Homo " on Natural Religion has 
 done a good service in exhibiting the many points of contact between 
 Christianity as commonly held (or as slightly modified) and the secular 
 systems which he so vividly describes. But the conclusion which 
 seems to be the proper result of his work, is rather aimed at and 
 hoped for than expressed, and the work has therefore appeared to 
 many as hesitating and disappointing. 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 17 
 
 as its starting-point not the appearance of disunion, 
 but the conviction of an original and a final unity. 
 The supposed antagonism between religion and the 
 secular life is not one which those who believe in 
 God ought to recognise. It is a form of dualism, 
 with this difference — that the old dualism was of 
 good and evil, this of two forms of good. But good- 
 ness is all one, and it is all divine and Christian. 
 Why should we separate from each other the various 
 manifestations of the same spirit } No believer in 
 God can really doubt that every pure and unselfish 
 development of human energy is consonant with the 
 will and purpose of God ; nor that humanity and the 
 world are component parts of one great Unity ; nor 
 that the elevation of humanity to its noblest and best 
 estate must be the aim of every man who lives in 
 earnest. And if there are those who think that reli- 
 gion is the enemy of science or art or the political 
 life, f^- of the free exercise of criticism, or of political 
 equality, or of progress, we must endeavour to un- 
 deceive them, just as we must undeceive religious 
 men who imagine that any of these tendencies are 
 in themselves anti-religious. Whether we say that 
 God made the world as a watchmaker makes a watch, 
 or, with more humility, confine ourselves to observing 
 the unity of the world and of humanit}', and the de- 
 velopment of this unity, we cannot doubt that the 
 supreme power which we call God is Himself at 
 work in every sphere of existence. When the Posi- 
 tivist says that his Trinity is Humanity, the World, 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 and Space, he announces the same conviction which 
 is expressed in the words, " God who made the world 
 and all that is therein," so far, at least, as this unity- 
 is concerned. No doubt the metaphysical question 
 may be raised whether this implies a making or 
 ordering of the world ab extra or ab mti^a. But 
 such a question does not necessarily affect Christian 
 Theism. What, then, does this unity imply } Cer- 
 tainly the unity of the development of mankind in 
 all its relations to the universe, of which it forms 
 the crown ; the unity, therefore, of the spheres of 
 science, art, political life, under the one divine 
 principle or power, the acknowledgment of which 
 constitutes theology and religion. Using, therefore, 
 without any needless assumption, the ordinary Chris- 
 tian language, we may say that no such antagonism 
 as that between the religious and secular life ought 
 to be possible, since God made the world, and com- 
 bined its component parts in one. 
 
 Has, then, the appearance of Christ created this 
 antagonism } The Christian belief, on the contrary, 
 is expressed in the words, " All things were made by 
 Him (the Word who was made flesh in Christ)," and 
 " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, 
 . . . the true light that lighteth every man." How 
 can any one who believes this consider that any human 
 excellence is strange to Christ, or that there is any- 
 thing exclusive in Him who is One with God t We 
 must go further, and assert that wherever any human 
 excellence is to be found, there He is present as the 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 19 
 
 inspirer of it. Wherever such excellence is pursued 
 without the recognition of Him, there is an uncon- 
 scious Christianity; wherever there is such excellence 
 together with this recognition, there is a conscious 
 Christianity. But even where the spring of the ex- 
 cellence is unrecognised, or through ignorance denied, 
 there should be on the part of Christians a hearty 
 appreciation of the excellence itself This should 
 be an elementary article of belief, that all human ex- 
 cellence is essentially divine, and essentially Christian. 
 
 It follows from this that Christians should be - 
 interested in and should foster all that is excellent 
 in science or art or political life as that w^hich is 
 their proper business. They should seek first to 
 infuse the spirit of Christ into these spheres wherever 
 they have been perverted to selfishness ; and, next, 
 to include them within the recognised scope of the 
 Christian Church. It is unfortunately the case that 
 the name of the Christian Church has been ap- 
 propriated almost exclusively to the organisation 
 for worship, instruction, and beneficence. But it is 
 impossible that this narrowing of the Divine purpose 
 should be permanent. We must endeavour to include 
 in our conception of the Church all the manifestations 
 of human excellence, and treat them as far as possible 
 as functions of the Church. Nor must we expect that 
 they will in every respect conform themselves to the 
 beliefs and practices of the organisation for worship 
 which is now almost exclusively called the Church. 
 They have their own sphere, in which they must act 
 B 2 
 
20 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 freely. The demand that they should so conform 
 themselves could only be rightly made if the Church 
 organisation responded fully to the true ideal ; but 
 this cannot be the case while the great spheres of the 
 secular life are regarded as outside the Church organi- 
 sation, and the leaders of them are not looked upon 
 as ministers of Christ. The confusion which is thus 
 created prevents the Church from using its full and 
 Divine authority. It speaks with a hesitating and 
 lisping utterance. 
 
 In the light of these remarks let us glance at the 
 chief spheres and tendencies of the secular life. 
 
 I. Let us take the sphere of Science — that is, of the 
 knowledge of the physical world which is chiefly in 
 men's minds when they speak of science. Must we 
 not admit that the discoveries which have been made 
 in it have been to us real revelations or unveilings of 
 God, and that their spiritual results have been of very 
 great value } The immutability of His will is shown 
 in the reign of law, so that a lawless scepticism is ren- 
 dered all but impossible. The true position of man is 
 also made clear, so that a check is placed upon wil- 
 fulness and presumption. An end is put to mere 
 speculation, and to systems like those of the school- 
 men and some of the Encyclopaedists of the last 
 century, through the awe which is felt in the presence 
 of the inevitable, the immense, and the irresistible. 
 If some men of science are also rigid determinists (a 
 result by no means necessary), they cannot be more 
 so than Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Chalmers ; and 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 21 
 
 if the tendency of the disclosure of the greatness of 
 the physical world is to crush man, yet on the other 
 hand a reaction and fresh uplifting comes to us from 
 the spectacle which it presents of an eternal progress, 
 from looking back on the long elaboration by which 
 the dwelling of man has been prepared, and con- 
 templating his history as one of constant rising from 
 lower to higher stages. 
 
 There are indeed two difficulties which are apt to 
 result from scientific studies, and which cause good 
 men distress and perplexity ; but a solution of these 
 seems near at hand. The revelations of science make 
 us shrink from such breaches of the ordinary course of 
 nature as seem to be involved in some of the Biblical 
 histories, and to be intertwined with the historical 
 sources of our faith. It would be impossible here to 
 discuss ll.e question thus opened. But a review of 
 the long controversies which have taken place during 
 the last 200 years on the subject, seems to lead us to 
 these conclusions : first, that the main basis of Chris- 
 tian faith is not affected by it, since Christians have 
 learnt to rest much more on the spiritual nature and 
 power of Christ than on any special facts, even than 
 on the testimony of His Resurrection ; and there are 
 instances of men who hold earnestly to the name 
 and spirit of Christ who yet do not admit any 
 miraculous agency;^ and, secondly, that the Re- 
 surrection itself is to be viewed rather as a dis- 
 
 * See Dr. Abbott's "Through Nature to Christ." 
 
22 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 closure of another state of existence"^ than as be- 
 longing to the order of events with which physical 
 science is conversant. There seems to be no reason 
 why our belief in an unchangeable order and our 
 hopes of immortality should disagree with one 
 another. The other danger connected with the life 
 of science is that it is so absorbing that the moral 
 world seems to disappear from the view. It has 
 even been said that the centre of interest is being 
 shifted from men to things. But we must view this 
 merely as a transitory phase. Men and women will 
 always be much rnore important than things, and 
 historical and moral studies will retain their pre- 
 eminence, even if they should suffer a temporary 
 eclipse. But, if the votaries of natural science are 
 almost exclusively absorbed in their own pursuit, we 
 should look upon this as the exercise of their special 
 Christian gift, the special mode in which they serve 
 God and men. It is hardly possible but that those 
 who have a special function, and are fulfilling it with 
 all their heart, should at times exaggerate its im- 
 portance. . But we cannot fail to observe that there is a 
 seriousness, a purity, and a disinterestedness about the 
 pursuits of natural science which give it a very high 
 moral value. If to Aristotle it seemed the most divine 
 of pursuits, it is quite possible that it may be a neces- 
 sary antidote to the exclusive absorption in things moral 
 to which Christian seriousness has been apt to lean. 
 
 * Compare Bishop Horsley's "Four Sermons on the Resurrection," 
 and Canon Westcott's "Gospel of the Resurrection." 
 
 \ 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 23 
 
 2. We have to consider the Hfe of Art, the pursuit 
 of beauty and refinement, to which we may add the 
 Hghter pursuits — recreation and amusement. These 
 must also be viewed as a mode in which one side of 
 the Divine is made known to us, and by which 
 God is revealed and draws men to himself. It is 
 sometimes said that art has nothing to do with 
 religion. But it is in itself a part of religion. With- 
 out insisting on the fact that it often ministers power- 
 fully to the moral and religious sentiments, or that 
 the highest poetry and painting and sculpture and 
 music is commonly the reflection of the best feelings 
 of Christians and of citizens, we may reflect that art 
 merely taken as a constituent of happiness is a reve- 
 lation of one side of human and divine excellence. 
 From the beginning it has been said that rest is 
 a part of God's nature ; and rest is precisely what 
 art can give us. A life in which all art, all sense of 
 beauty, all recreation, were suppressed, would be 
 distinctly a lower life. And if there are times in 
 which art has pre-eminently flourished, leaving a 
 legacy of joy to future generations, so there are 
 men who fulfil the same position for their contempo- 
 raries. We must not, indeed, yield to the false sug- 
 gestion that such men are freed from moral restraints, 
 or are not responsible for the use of their art. They 
 are men, and man is, throughout the whole range 'of 
 his energy, an accountable being. But we must not 
 impose upon such men the terms which may justly 
 apply to moralists and religious teachers. 
 
24 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 3. But a few words need be said here in reference 
 to the place of politics in our religious system. No 
 one who reads St. Paul can doubt that the Christian 
 doctrine is that God has established the government 
 of nations, and that those who govern them are his 
 ministers. In the wide sense which we have endea- 
 voured to give to the Church, we need not scruple 
 to speak of the nation as a branch of the Church. 
 When we consider the vast interest which we have 
 in the nation, and its vast power over us, when we 
 reflect on the sacred duties of patriotism, and the 
 other virtues which circle round it, we cannot but 
 feel that there is nothing on earth nearer to God 
 than the nation with which he has bound up 
 our lives. If politics mean to us a care for the 
 interests of the great brotherhood to which we 
 belong, that is hardly distinguishable from the care 
 for the kingdom of God : we can hardly be too much 
 absorbed in it. The fault of Christian ministers is 
 not that they care too much but too little for politics. 
 We may rightly think of a statesman who directs 
 uprightly the policy of England, involving as it does 
 the welfare of all classes, the raising of the poor of 
 the people, education, sanitation, temperance, thrift, 
 justice, the maintenance of true relations between 
 men and classes at home, a great and special power 
 in ■ European affairs, and the direct influence of 
 Christian civilisation on barbarism, as in the fullest 
 sense a minister of Christ and of God. And the 
 sanctity which attaches to the supreme office ex- 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 25 
 
 tends in its measure to all subordinates in the poli- 
 tical hierarchy, and to those who, directly or in- 
 directly, contribute to their nomination. If the 
 sacred church-functions of political life have at times 
 been abused (as every church-function is apt to be) 
 and have served the purposes of ambition and parti- 
 sanship, the fault lies not alone with the individuals 
 who are guilty of such perversion, but also with the 
 false system which narrows the idea of the Church, 
 and leaves outside its pale the duties of public life, 
 which are the largest and among the noblest of its 
 functions. 
 
 It is unnecessary to touch at any great length on 
 the tendencies of the secular Hfe in modern times 
 which have been added to the enumeration of its 
 three principal spheres — the tendencies of free criti- 
 cism, democratic equality, and progress. But a few 
 words may be said upon each. Criticism is merely 
 the attempt to judge rightly. As such it is the result 
 of the spirit of truth working in us. That it may, 
 like other good things, be abused, being employed as 
 the instrument of discontent or malevolence, or that 
 it may degenerate into the mere habit of asking 
 questions when we ought to be at work by the light 
 of the truth which we possess, does not prevent our 
 considering it as a necessary manifestation of the 
 Christian spirit. We see its beneficial results on all 
 sides, and positive truth stands out all the clearer for 
 its operation. As to Democratic Equality, it is nothing 
 else than the spirit of brotherhood demanding that 
 
26 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 those members of the community who have most to 
 complain of should be in a position to get their 
 grievances redressed. It does not imply that all have 
 the same office, or that there is no difference between 
 men in point of wealth, or social position, or culture, 
 though it will constantly tend to reduce instead of 
 increasing those inequalities. It is the expression 
 under modern conditions of that demand for the care 
 of the weak and helpless which in the politics of the 
 Psalms and the Prophets of Israel was constantly 
 pressed upon all who were in power. We need not 
 hesitate to look upon the general movement which 
 is often called the Revolution, and which has resulted 
 in the substitution of constitutional government for 
 autocracy almost all through Europe in the last thirty 
 years as a great work of the Christian spirit. Lastly, 
 the idea of progress is one which must be dear to every 
 Christian, who believes that the present state of things 
 is corrupt and full of selfishness, and who has learnt to 
 pray, " Thy kingdom come." It is true that mere 
 movement is not always progress ; but one who 
 believes in the redemption of the world has an un- 
 quenchable hope that it is being led on towards a 
 goal grander than his best conceptions, but the out- 
 lines of which stand out clearly before him ; and the 
 changes of recent times, if looked at in the spirit 
 which has been suggested here, will seem to him in 
 the main calculated to stimulate this hope. 
 
 But this view, it may be said, can only be accepted 
 at the expense of large modifications in dwx theology. 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 27 
 
 The dogmas of the Church seem one by one to be 
 challenged by these secular forces. Are we to yield 
 to these ? And where will the process of concession 
 stop ? It is quite true that theology must undergo some 
 modifications ; or, rather, it has undergone consider- 
 able modifications in our own time. Such questions 
 as that of future punishment, the inspiration of 
 Scripture, the Atonement, the Fatherhood of God, 
 the state of the heathen, are almost universally treated 
 in a different way from that in which they were 
 treated even thirty years ago. The spirit in which 
 they are dealt with is larger and more hopeful. And 
 generally there is an unwillingness to use sharp 
 dogmatic language, especially when it would imply 
 a condemnation of some of the great secular ten- 
 dencies which have here been dealt with. So far as 
 this result is due to a recognition of these tendencies, 
 we need not think it any derogation from Christianity 
 or the Church to avow it, since these tendencies, as 
 we have endeavoured to show, are themselves Christian 
 tendencies ; and we modify our convictions in obedience, 
 not to ■d.fojxe majeure from without, but to the facts of 
 Divine Providence and to the Christian spirit working 
 in them. Nor need we fear the continuance of this 
 process ; in many respects its result will be to give 
 more force to Christian doctrine. If the progress of 
 scientific discovery makes us think of God less 
 as a transcendent external power than as one im- 
 manent in the world, this is but giving a larger 
 extension to the doctrine of the Spirit. If art and 
 
28 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 culture necessarily chasten the sharpness and the 
 harshness of dogmatic teaching, and introduce us 
 to a region where the direct interests of morality 
 are not so obvious and exclusive, they will make 
 the great objects of Christian thought loom out 
 larger and more impressive, and the beauty of God 
 and of holiness will take a wider expansion in our 
 views. If political progress and the tendency to 
 democratic equality demand the abolition of many 
 restrictions, and the admission of lay or secular 
 influences in departments of the Church hitherto 
 controlled by the clergy, this is to be viewed as the 
 drawing forth of new energy, an extension of the gifts 
 of the Spirit. We need only demand that the process 
 we are tracing should be conducted truthfully, and 
 without rashness. Its result, we may be sure, will be 
 not to limit or darken Christian teaching, but to give 
 it the fuller expansion which, apart from the secular 
 influences, it could never receive. 
 
 When Richard Rothe said that Christianity was 
 the most mutable of all things, and that this was its 
 special glory ,^ he did not imply any doubt of its 
 essential principles, or any indifference to its form; 
 he merely stated vividly its power of adaptation to 
 changing circumstances, and its capacity for profiting 
 by new discoveries of truth. Such a re-adaptation 
 appears to be in progress now, and the object of the 
 present publication is to help in effecting it. The 
 
 * Rothe's " Stille Stunden," p. 357> quo<ed in Hibbert Lectures 
 for 1882, p. 294. 
 
Prefatory Essay. 
 
 29 
 
 possible results of this re-adaptation are such as 
 should fill every Christian with enthusiastic hope, the 
 hope of restoring unity where now there is division 
 or mistrust, of extending the dominion of the Spirit 
 of Christ, of combining elements which now neutralise 
 each other in the task of elevating the whole life of 
 mankind ; for in that direction lies the Kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 The scope of the sermons will be seen from the 
 following epitome : — 
 
 1. Christian faith is not an adherence to a series 
 of propositions, but a living sympathy and aspiration, 
 which shows itself in many forms, and is the spring of 
 a true and healthful life. 
 
 2. The Church is not chiefly a system of public 
 worship designed to direct men's minds to another 
 world, but a social state in which the Spirit of Christ 
 reigns ; and this state appears in many ways both 
 within and without the recognised field of the 
 Church's energy. 
 
 3. The Spirit of Christ is supreme over the whole 
 range of the secular life, education, trade, literature 
 art, science, and politics, and is seen to be practically 
 vindicating this supremacy. 
 
 4. The peculiar privilege which the Church claims 
 for itself and its members is not that of exclusive 
 rights, but of leadership in a work to which all are 
 
3© The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 called ; and, as such, it is in accordance with the 
 natural order, and with a true universalism. 
 
 5. Criticism is not a foe, but a friend, to Christian 
 teaching and piety. 
 
 6. Each individual who has the Spirit of Christ is 
 to be recognised in his own sphere as exercising a 
 function or ministry of the Church, according to the 
 doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers. 
 
 7. The theological doctrine on which this depends 
 is the immanence of God — " God is a Spirit." 
 
 8. Intellectual pursuits are harmonised by Chris- 
 tianity, considered as a life. 
 
 9. The doctrine of progress, so fully recognised in 
 the spheres of industry and science, is also applicable 
 to theology, which must open itself out to new in- 
 fluences, and appropriate them. 
 
L 
 
1 
 
 L 
 
 {Preached before the U7iiversity of Oxford^ November 24, 1878.) 
 
 " He is our peace, who hath, made both one and hath broken down 
 the wall of partition between us, hav-ing abolished in His flesh the 
 enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, for 
 to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace." — 
 Ephesians ii. 14, 15. 
 
 The fact which St. Paul describes in these striking 
 words was to him the centre and marrow of Christi- 
 anity. Christ is the great reconciler. In Him God 
 and man meet together. In Him all the creation 
 is to be gathered into one. In Him all parts of 
 the human family, which before were separated, flow 
 together and are at peace. 
 
 The subsequent career of Christianity cannot be 
 said to be altogether of a piece with this experience 
 and these hopes of the Apostle. It must appear to 
 every observ'er that Christianity has very frequently 
 been, by its internal discord, and by its harsh bear- 
 ing towards mankind, the promoter of strife, not of 
 peace. It is clear, therefore, to every believer that 
 there is some foreign element which has been joined 
 with it, and which thus mars in its later career the 
 purpose so largely fulfilled in its first beginnings, 
 c 
 
34 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 We must seek to eliminate the foreign element 
 by drawing out and expanding the central truth, 
 and by promoting in men that attitude towards 
 Christ and one another which originally made faith 
 a humanising principle. 
 
 Let us first notice how vast a range of thought 
 is included in St. Paul's assertion that all are made 
 one in Christ. It is hardly too much to say that 
 this was to St. Paul the Gospel itself, the good news 
 of God's universal love. His first knowledge of 
 Christianity as a working power had probably been 
 gained from the preaching of Stephen, which plainly 
 intimated that religion was not bound up with the 
 local pecuharities of Judaism. And what he knew of 
 Christ himself must have been in conformity with 
 this. The extraordinary feature to the Jewish mind 
 in our Lord's life and teaching was its universality. 
 There is nothing in it which is merely Judaic. It is 
 not exclusively of any nation or tongue, but belongs 
 alike to all. This was what sharpened the enmity of 
 the Jewish rulers against Him, and was the real cause 
 of His death. The Pharisaism which had become 
 the religion of the Jews was exclusive ; and the atti- 
 tude of Christ towards the Publicans and other out- 
 cast classes, who symbolised to the orthodox Jews 
 the whole outside world, jarred upon the pride of the 
 dominant belief Men felt that, if this doctrine suc- 
 ceeded, their superiority was gone ; and therefore 
 they revolted from it. 
 
 The young man brought up at the feet of Gama- 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. , 35 
 
 liel had shared to the fullest extent this Judaic 
 exclusiveness ; and, when Stephen accentuated the 
 universality of Christianity, Saul became a persecutor. 
 But this very characteristic which made him hate 
 and destroy the Christian faith became eventually the 
 thing most precious to him. It haunted him, we 
 cannot doubt, in his journey to Damascus ; and it 
 was the point on which his conversion turned. The 
 Jesus who appeared to him in the way was the 
 universal Saviour ; and the apostolate which he 
 received was that of the Gentiles. This universality 
 was the point for which he contended at the Council 
 at Jerusalem and in his opposition to Peter at An- 
 tioch. This was the special object of the attacks of 
 the Judaizers upon him. The recognition of this 
 universality was the object which he sought in going 
 to Jerusalem with the offerings of the Gentiles. This 
 excited the hatred of the Jews against him, and this 
 was the cause of his imprisonment and his death. 
 
 It was not a doctrine merely but a fact. The 
 Jews turned away from the universality of the Gospel 
 but the Gentiles and the remnant embraced it ; and it 
 became the standing marvel which the infant churches 
 presented to mankind. St. Paul is never weary of 
 repeating how Jew and Gentile, barbarian and Greek, 
 slave and freeman, had all felt a new power of co- 
 hesion and became as brothers, members of one family, 
 enjoying equal rights, greeting one another with the 
 kiss of charity. This was the real power, the power 
 of social affection, the new-born enthusiasm of hu- 
 C 2 
 
36 Ihe Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 manity of which Christ was the source. And it was 
 felt like the attraction which draws lovers together. 
 The great deeps of human nature were broken up ; 
 the power of love overflowed its ancient boundaries ; 
 and men in whom difference of race and of custom 
 had begotten an alienation which seemed like a law of 
 nature, fell into each other's arms and were at peace. 
 They knelt at the same devotions, the Sacrament was 
 their common meal ; that which divided them had 
 disappeared, and a new life, unfettered by the pecu- 
 liarities which had before bred enmity, was forming 
 itself in their young societies. 
 
 This view of religious truth is developed to some 
 extent in the earlier epistle of St. Paul. It is essential 
 to the right understanding of the epistles to the 
 Romans and Galatians, in which the characteristic so 
 dear to St. Paul is expressed by the central term 
 Faith, while the Judaic pride which caused division 
 lurks in "the Law;" and in which the Apostle con- 
 stantly breaks out into expressions like these : " Is he 
 the God of the Jews only } Is he not of the Gentiles 
 also Seeing it is one God who shall justify, the 
 circumcision by faith and the uncircumcision through 
 faith." But it is in the later epistles that it assumes 
 its most marked pre-eminence. St. Paul speaks of it 
 as an experience, an acquisition. The Churches have 
 realised it : the Apostle's great conviction has been 
 lived out and has taken shape in actual society. It is 
 now the mystery which he had been specially called to 
 preach, but which had lain hid for ages and genera- 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 
 
 37 
 
 tions till it was manifested in Christ. This enables 
 St. Paul to look out over the field of the opening 
 Christian history, and to announce that God's purpose 
 is to gather all things into one in Christ. The har- 
 mony which he feels within him, and which he sees 
 reigning among his converts, is projected upon the 
 development of the world itself ; and the reconciling 
 power of Christ brings all men and all things into 
 one. 
 
 When we compare this magnificent prospect with 
 the result of eighteen centuries, we thankfully acknow- 
 ledge that, in part at least, it has been fulfilled. The 
 sense of harmony in the creation generally, and be- 
 tween its higher and low^er parts, has increased to a 
 conviction of unity which is the basis of all inquiry, 
 of all science, of all practical progress. The sense 
 of brotherhood in the human race has asserted itself 
 Slavery is all but done away with, wars are conducted 
 with an underlying sense of unity : the civilised na- 
 tions are bound together by a community of arts, of 
 knowledge, of literature, by certain acknowledged 
 principles of justice, by some similarity of institu- 
 tions, by some consensus, however feeble, of religious 
 faith. But how slowly have these come about. How 
 imperfect are they at the best. And how many an- 
 tagonisms remain unsubdued, and even seem at times 
 to grow fiercer and more irreconcilable. And how 
 often has the progress, such as it has been, towards 
 unity, been won, not by the proclamation of Christian 
 truth through its recognised channels, but in oppo- 
 
38 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 sition to them and by other means ; so that many 
 begin to doubt whether Christianity has not lost its 
 virtue, and, in the struggle which is stirred up by a 
 Church which has parted with its healing power, are 
 tempted to side with its professed antagonists. 
 
 We cannot deny that Christianity often appears 
 as a fosterer not of unity but of division ; and the 
 excuse for this which is sometimes sought in the 
 words of our Lord which speak of his sending not 
 peace but the sword is quite inapplicable. For 
 Christ's enmity was against evil alone : but we have 
 connected with evil, things which are really indif- 
 ferent ; and we war against these as if they were 
 evil in themselves. We do what was done by the 
 heathen, or by the Jews in the time of their deca- 
 dence, we erect our own peculiarities into good and 
 debase those of others into evil ; and thus we fill 
 the world with our enmities, and connect them with 
 Christ, whose name we thus take in vain and whose 
 cause we expose to contempt. The work of the 
 Christian teacher is to isolate from this false conflict 
 the good and the evil, so that men may see where 
 the issue really lies, and may take their side undoubt- 
 ingly. Our way through life is thickly beset with 
 contradictions which owe their origin to miscon- 
 ceptions of Christianity. There is the conflict of 
 Papist and Protestant, that of Churchman and Dis- 
 senter in England, that of various parties within our 
 own religious organisation, that of clerical and lay 
 interests in matters of education, of marriage, of 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. < 39 
 
 charities, of the provision for rehgious worship : 
 there is the conflict, to use the popular language, 
 between science and revelation, and again, between 
 religion and culture : and, beyond all these, perhaps 
 the greatest antagonism of all, that between spiritu- 
 ality and common life. Can it be pretended that any 
 of these is in itself the battle of faith, the conflict 
 which Christ predicted ? Can we say that the cause 
 which we ourselves espouse in any of these conflicts 
 is absolutely good and its opposite absolutely evil ? 
 Can it be maintained that those who are supposed 
 to represent the right and the Christian side are so 
 managing the conflict as to war against evil alone ? 
 Or is it not rather true that Christian things are often 
 aimed at in an unchristian way, and Christian opinion 
 upheld by unchristian methods ; and that he who tries 
 to judge truth fully must often stand in doubt on 
 which side the truth really lies, nay, sometimes per- 
 ceive that truth has passed over from the so-called 
 Christian camp to that of its opponents ; and that, 
 while men on one side are saying. Lord, Lord, it is 
 on the other that the things are done which Christ 
 said. 
 
 And the consequence of this habit of making anta- 
 gonisms instead of removing them is that those who 
 stand in doubt have their doubts confirmed, or turn 
 away from the whole scene in which such antagonisms 
 arise. It has become quite natural for men to hear it 
 said that a thing is Christian and yet tolerant, or 
 peaceful, or liberal ; or even to hear that a thing is 
 
40 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 Christian and therefore intolerant, iUiberal, and the 
 cause of constant strife. And so some who might be 
 attracted by a reHgion of love are tempted " to shun 
 the dreary, uncouth place," and to seek their rest else- 
 where. I suppose we have all known men who, from the 
 Babel of mutual condemnations with which the Church 
 is filled, have quietly, and not quite unreasonably, re- 
 solved to think no more upon religious subjects. And 
 that which is done deliberately by a few is done un- 
 consciously by a vast multitude. Love is attractive, 
 but strife is repulsive to mankind. And those who 
 thus turn away to find spiritual rest elsewhere are not 
 wholly doing wrong nor are they always disappointed. 
 The spirit which amidst the waves of controversy 
 finds no rest for the sole of its foot, flies naturally to 
 harbour on some shore which, however rugged, is at 
 least free from discord. 
 
 We have to set forth Christianity once more as 
 the great reconciling power. We cannot allow it to 
 be identified with dissension. It must not be dis- 
 honoured in the present generation of its ministers 
 by proving in their hands inadequate to the task of 
 bringing all the varieties of human life and of human 
 nature into harmony. Whatever diversities are oc- 
 casioned by genuine conviction are to be treated as 
 St. Paul treated the various gifts of the Church in his 
 day. There are diversities of gifts but the same 
 Spirit. There are differences of character, of opinion, 
 of organisation, different points of view, different 
 modes of life, differences of education ^nd of reading ; 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. ' 41 
 
 but there is one divine power which works through 
 them all unless they be selfish or insincere, and draws 
 them all into harmony. To trace out that power, to 
 bring it into relief, to eliminate from it the sources of 
 discord, is one of the most fruitful tasks which a 
 Christian preacher can set before himself and those 
 who hear him. 
 
 In order to do this, we need not go to any other 
 quarter than the grand doctrine of St. Paul which is 
 affirmed by our own Church with special emphasis, 
 the doctrine of salvation through faith only : the 
 doctrine that faith is the supreme, the central, the all- 
 sufficing principle, in comparison with which all else 
 is insignificant, the token of standing or falling in the 
 Church or in the individual. We have only to rally 
 men once more to this great battle cry of the spiritual 
 warfare, showing what it means to the thought of the 
 present day, pointing out how grand and simple a 
 thing faith is, and eliminating from it all that is not 
 essential. If we can do this and can show where in 
 the present day the chief fields for its exercise lie, 
 we may do something towards abolishing our angry 
 differences, by helping men to rise above them. 
 
 The central object of faith is God as He is re- 
 vealed in Jesus Christ. The image of Christ, the 
 ideal of His life, this it is which declares and makes 
 known to us what God really is ; and this, presented 
 to the mind and embraced by faith, has power to 
 bring all men into unity. We have been far too apt 
 to look at this as if it were an object for precise 
 
42 The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 intellectual statement ; and then faith has become a 
 matter of minute knowledge, instead of being a grand 
 and simple affection in which all our powers are 
 combined. What we' need is to realise that faith is 
 a deep moral principle, which, because it is so simple, 
 shows itself in a thousand different ways, in the child 
 and in the man, in the untaught and in the learned, 
 in those in whom faith is beginning and those in 
 whom it has reached a full development. We need 
 to get rid of its limitations, and to make all men in 
 whom it is working realise that it is theirs ; to recog- 
 nise it wherever it is found, to trace it in its direct 
 forms, and to draw the whole world within its all- 
 embracing unity. 
 
 I. Faith is trust in a person. But we are not to 
 exact that he in whom it exists should have satisfied 
 himself minutely as to every part of the object 
 towards which his faith is directed, for that object is 
 moral and infinite. In the present day it is im- 
 possible for us to have an absolute historical certainty 
 about many of the events in the life of our Lord 
 out of which grows that image which we recognise 
 as divine. This does not imply that the moral image 
 is blurred, or that the main outlines of the character 
 are objects of doubt. The existence of the Church, 
 the Christian character throughout its history, the 
 self-consistency of the ideal presented in the Gospel, 
 the far-reaching truths which encircle it, the complete 
 originality of the life and words which yet ally them- 
 selves with human nature in all ages and climes, are 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 43 
 
 so many anchors of our faith which make it certain 
 that there is a fitting and adequate object to which 
 it is directed. But faith is a spiritual, not an intel- 
 lectual act. It cannot, indeed, live if its supposed 
 object is non-existent, and it is ruined by a false 
 profession. Nevertheless, it is not so tied to facts 
 and definitions that it must halt and hesitate till 
 every question which can be asked concerning the 
 nature of God and the life of Christ is fully answered. 
 It is much more important that faith should be 
 sincere than that it should be fully informed. Faith 
 is akin to love, and love is often genuine when its 
 object is dimly seen. Nay, since we acknowledge 
 the Godhead to be immense and incomprehensible, 
 it is quite possible that the most genuine faith should 
 be that of a child's simplicity and ignorance, rather 
 than that of a man's reasoning intellect ; and, as a 
 fact of Christian history, faith has suffered much 
 more from over-definition than from indistinctness in 
 its object. Certainly the greatest quarrels among 
 Christians have arisen from the attempt to define 
 what might well have been left indefinite, what truth- 
 fulness would hav6 declared it impossible to define. 
 Let it be enough for us that we have in the Gospels 
 an image of goodness which represents to us the 
 character of God. To that our faith adheres, and 
 finds in it life and peace. 
 
 2. But, further, the faith which unites us to the 
 image of Christ is deeper as well as less definite than 
 it is commonly assumed by theologians to be. It is 
 
44 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 not a mere assent, but a living sympathy with good- 
 ness. That which made the disciples exclaim, " Thou 
 art the Christ, the Son of the living God," or, " Lord, 
 show us the Father, and it sufficeth us," was not that 
 part of His life which is strange and unintelligible to 
 us, or which historical criticism may tend to make 
 uncertain, but that which we can share with Him, 
 that which draws out the sympathy of our common 
 nature. It was the love, the truthfulness, the forbear- 
 ance, the tenderness, the resolute self-sacrifice which 
 their master displayed, and which was drawn forth 
 more distinctly when trials deepened and the shades 
 thickened round Him in the closing months of His 
 ministry. Of this image mankind can never be 
 robbed. ' However men may differ as to the precise 
 events in which this image of goodness was mani- 
 fested, the character which is expressed in the two 
 constantly-recurring words of St. Paul, " The love of 
 Christ," and " The cross of Christ," will always remain 
 to mankind as the highest expression of moral good- 
 ness, as the divine manifested in human nature. 
 
 To this it is that faith attaches itself. We are 
 conscious as we look upon the image of Christ, that 
 we have at least the capacity for feelings and deeds 
 like His. If the first result of the view of a supreme ■ 
 goodness is that which finds vent in the words 
 " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord," 
 yet there is really generated in us a sympathy with 
 the goodness which seems so distant from us. We 
 own it in our consciences as that which is best, as 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 
 
 45 
 
 that which ought to be ours. It lights up for us the 
 whole moral world, it brings out good and evil in 
 their most marked colours ; and it discloses to us the 
 true character of moral goodness, freeing it from the 
 integuments with which selfishness had bound it up. 
 We know, by that conscience which is the reflection 
 of the divine truth within us, and which the image of 
 Christ tends constantly to purge from its natural 
 dimness, that this is what the supreme mind must 
 approve, that this is the image of the invisible God. 
 
 And the sympathy which we thus feel is inde- 
 pendent of particular systems. The metaphysical 
 questions even as to the nature of God do not affect 
 it vitally. Whether the strict monotheistic tendency ' 
 be maintained, or whether that more spiritual tendency 
 prevail which tends to trace out the divine in the 
 evolving forces of nature and of mankind, the image 
 of Christ remains ever before us, chastening our 
 speculations, and bringing us back to human life as 
 the proper study of mankind, and making us feel that, 
 since man is the head of the creation, and the image 
 of God, the true entrance to theology and religion is 
 not in metaphysics but in morals, not in speculation 
 as to the origin of matter or the natural history of the 
 world, but in a right estimate of moral goodness, and 
 a heart-felt sympathy with it. It is the heart that' 
 makes the Christian ; and the heart is occupied, not 
 with the subtilties and disputation of metaphysics, but 
 with the reconciling power of love. 
 
 Moreover, the more we believe in a Christ who is 
 
46 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 the divine type, the root, the holder together of all 
 the creation and of all human nature, the more 
 certain we feel that, in holding to truth and love 
 where they are found, men are holding to Christ 
 himself By unbelievers this might be doubted ; but 
 by believers in Christ it must be held true. And this 
 enables us to embrace (whether they respond to the 
 embrace or not) all who have a sympathy with good- 
 ness, even in its simplest elements. They may 
 misconceive of the metaphysical nature of God, or 
 the relation of the Father to the Son ; they may not 
 be able to receive some of the facts relating to the life 
 of Christ as told us in the Gospel ; nay, it may be 
 that through prejudice they may deem it right to 
 combat many things which Christians hold dear, to 
 rank themselves and be ranked by us among unbe- 
 lievers, and yet there may be in them still a real and 
 deep faith, a faith far truer than that which blindly 
 assents to all the articles of our Churches ; and the 
 object of this faith, dimly seen or misconceived as 
 it may be by them, is none other than the image of 
 Christ, which is made to appear to them, not full- 
 orbed in the splendour and force of His personality, 
 but diffused through literature, and art, and history, 
 and politics, and philanthropy, and the whole human 
 society, which, once possessed of Him, can never 
 again forget Him. The faith which is strongest, and 
 which unites men together is not primarily the belief 
 in the Church or the sacraments, in the miraculous 
 birth of Christ or his bodily resurrection, nor even 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. ' 47 
 
 that which we call, perhaps with too much confidence 
 and strictness, the Personality of God. These are the 
 supports and guarantees, the external fences or the 
 outgrowths of faith. But the faith which saves and 
 which makes us true to our Lord is that which 
 welcomes truth and goodness, and treasures them 
 up ; for these are the very nature of God. Let the 
 heart be filled with the image of Christ ; and this will 
 lead you on to life and immortality, to a fuller view of 
 God, and to the filling up of the outlines of the life of 
 Christ. But the reverse process does not necessarily 
 hold good. Doctrines and facts are no substitutes for 
 faith, nor even the necessary channels through which 
 it courses. It was not the highest faith which dic- 
 tated the cry, Blessed is the womb that bare thee 
 and the paps which thou hast sucked." "Yea rather," 
 says Christ, " blessed are they which hear the Word 
 of God and keep it." 
 
 3. Faith is not only trust and sympathy but 
 aspiration. This makes it at once both deeper and 
 wider in its embrace ; deeper, because it involves a 
 personal appropriation of that divine goodness which 
 is the object of faith ; wider, because it recognises as 
 partakers of faith all who, from whatever distance, 
 are tending and aspiring towards the same spiritual 
 centre. It is a commonplace among divines and 
 preachers that a very imperfect knowledge is con- 
 sistent with true faith, and that a very little faith 
 will save a man. And every one who is conversant 
 with the deeper feelings of men must have observed 
 
48 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 how often amidst their apparent carelessness there 
 emerges a longing for good, a discontent with their 
 present condition, a longing for some ideal, dimly 
 seen, but which the heart confesses and appropriates. 
 Such 'an aspiration, such a faith, may be found in the 
 wayward longings of the heathen, Seeking the Lord 
 if haply they may feel after Him and find Him." It 
 may be found in the silent faith of men " Perplexed 
 in faith but pure in deed." It may be found in many 
 of the strange and formal expressions of those whose 
 form of belief repels us, but who sincerely follow the 
 truth as they understand it. We need never doubt 
 that, as the fuller truth appears to them, they will 
 embrace it, and we must strive to bring that fuller 
 ^ truth before them. But meanwhile we can acknow- 
 ledge each honest desire for good as the witness of 
 the presence of genuine faith. It is not the part of 
 Christians to deny or make light of such an aspira- 
 tion whenever it may be found, but to assume it to be 
 the mark of the drawing of the Divine Spirit, and by 
 their sympathy to foster it into maturity. 
 
 This faith, which we have thus tried to illustrate 
 in its simplest elements of trust, of sympathy, of 
 aspiration, St. Paul announced as a power which 
 liberated men from " the law of commandments con- 
 tained in ordinances." Those formal injunctions, 
 decrees, or dogmas (so the word stands in the Greek) 
 which have been taken to be the permanent expres- 
 sions of the Divine whether among the Jews or 
 among the heathen, were swept away by the breath 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 49 
 
 of faith. Not that they were necessarily abrogated 
 as human institutions, but that the human spirit, even 
 while obeying them, felt itself free, by soaring above 
 them into the higher atmosphere of faith and love. 
 Judaism had been a powerful means (as it is .even 
 now) of binding men together. But its bond was 
 that of a sectional union, which had become anta- 
 gonistic to the fuller union demanded by Christian 
 universality. It was a shield on one side of which 
 was inscribed Union of the chosen people," but on 
 the other, " Alienation from all mankind." And, cost 
 what it might, the Apostle proclaimed the abolition 
 of the Jewish ordinances or dogmata — their abolition, 
 that is, as a binding and divine sanction for society. 
 Christian faith and love was henceforth to be the 
 only and all-sufficient bond of union. What ! are we 
 to trust to a mere attachment to a person, a fleeting, 
 unstable sentiment, instead of the grand old institu- 
 tions of the law, which have been like the firmament 
 above us and the solid ground beneath our feet t 
 How weak ! How infatuated ! How contrary to 
 all experience ! How lawless ! How ignorant of our 
 poor human nature, which needs these dogmata for 
 its support ! Such must have been the cries of 
 Pharisees and of worldly men alike ; for to such men 
 the devices and management of clever persons, and 
 the pondtis inertice of the lower elements of human 
 life are always the basis of calculation. But faith 
 and love were stronger bonds than Jewish or Gentile 
 ordinances, and the spiritual law was more binding 
 D 
 
50 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 than the external law. And whenever Christian 
 preachers have dared to trust themselves, like St. 
 Paul, to the simple force of conviction and love^ they 
 have reaped a harvest which no support of ordinances 
 and dogmas could ever bring them. 
 
 Are we not suffering, my brethren, in the present 
 day from the bondage of the ordinances or dogmas 
 of the past? Are not these precisely the things 
 which need to be " taken out of the way," if Christi- 
 anity is to be once more a reconciler, not a divider ? 
 The controversies of the i6th and 17th centuries 
 were hardened down into institutions of worship and 
 propositions about Christian doctrine which, in their 
 rigid, unbending form, have become the perpetuators 
 of separation. They do not, when taken as absolute 
 and exclusive formularies, correspond to the convic- 
 tions of the present day, and they are, as such, quite 
 alien from the more spiritual life which our age 
 demands. It is not that these institutions or dogmata 
 require any revolutionary handling, any more than 
 St. Paul would have wished to destroy the social and 
 political customs of the Jews ; what is needed is such 
 an adaptation of Christian worship as will recognise 
 the requirements of all true worshippers, and such an 
 explanation of dogmas as will allow room for the 
 larger convictions which are the necessary growth of 
 the three most active centuries of the world and the 
 Church's history. But just as St. Paul dethroned the 
 law from its exclusive supremacy and its supposed 
 everlasting sanction which had made it the foe of 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 51 
 
 faith, so must the Christian preacher of our day fight 
 against the tendency which he sees on all sides to 
 erect the ordinances of the 4th century or the 8th, 
 of the 1 6th or the i/th, into everlasting barriers. 
 Not circumcision nor uncircumcision — not Catholic 
 nor Protestant, not Church or Dissent, not Episcopacy 
 or other forms of Church government, nor the articles 
 and theological statements of Nice or Rimini or 
 Toledo, not the decrees of the Council of Trent or 
 the Augsburg Confession, or the XXXIX. Articles, 
 or the Westminster Catechism, but faith that worketh 
 by love, and the keeping of the commandments of 
 God. 
 
 I had hoped to touch upon another portion of 
 this subject, and to show that faith must be recog 
 nised in the present day as developing itself in the 
 common relations of life quite as much as in worship 
 or in preaching ; and that a due attention to this 
 is one of the most hopeful means of furthering union 
 amongst men. But the time fails me. I may hope 
 to address you at a future time on this and similar 
 points. For the present let me urge upon the various 
 sections of opinion how the supremacy of Christian 
 faith, v/hen fully acknowledged, may help them to be 
 at one and to promote that godliness and honesty 
 for which unity is so greatly required. 
 
 Is it too much to assume that the ideal of the 
 Christian life is common to us all, acknowledged by 
 us all as morally supreme t It seems to me, at least, 
 that it has never been seriously questioned ; for those 
 D 2 
 
52 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 who attack Christian systems rarely, if ever, attack 
 the ideal of the Christian life ; nay, such men are 
 frequently the most vehement assertors of truly Chris- 
 tian principles, and not rarely appeal to Christian 
 sanctions for their enforcement. Does any one really 
 doubt that the life of self-devotion and love, of truth 
 and courage, which is the Christian ideal, is the true 
 life of man ? Or, again, that this ideal is itself "the 
 truth," the central and paramount truth to which all 
 other kinds of truth are secondary. 
 
 I. Are there, then, some among us who, by their 
 excessive value for Christian ordinances or dogmas, 
 for sacraments, and the order of the ministry, are 
 practically placing the life of Christian faith in the 
 second rank.-^ Let them consider whether, in their 
 zeal for those things which they account the fences 
 and bulwarks of Christianity, they are not letting the 
 essence escape them. It has befen said that the 
 Roman Catholic system is a vast apparatus for 
 guarantees, under which the thing guaranteed is apt 
 to disappear. And the same thing may be said of 
 that tendency which may be called Clericalism, which 
 is dominant in the Anglican Church at the present 
 day. No one can fail to see that this tendency is 
 alienating class after class of men. Where it reigns 
 unchecked, all elements of free thought are repressed, 
 lest some dogma should be shaken ; no form of 
 Protestantism except the Anglican Church is recog- 
 nised, and yet we are no nearer to union with any of 
 the forms of so-called Catholicism, the three chief 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 53 
 
 sections of which cannot kneel together at the sacra- 
 ment. And, further, rehgion is being gradually 
 eliminated from common life, and is thought of as 
 consisting only in services, and preaching, and devo- 
 tional practices ; and hence the breach between the 
 Church and the world grows wider. And, wherever 
 this is the case, the Christian ideal suffers. Elements 
 of good which thrive in the open atmosphere of the 
 common life of mankind are disowned ; and the great 
 Christian ideal is drav/n down from its commanding 
 position of universality to , become the life of the 
 cloister or the confessional, of the clique or the 
 coterie, timorous instead of manly, narrow instead of 
 expansive, suspicious of change and of discovery, the 
 foe of human progress instead of its most ardent 
 promoter. It is supposed, no doubt, that, although 
 the witness of experience is such as I have just 
 described, yet there is an obligation on us to obey 
 certain injunctions of discipline or of doctrine which 
 are presumed to have a divine authority, and to 
 uphold them in their most rigid form, whatever the 
 consequences may be. But the doctrine of the 
 supremacy of faith places these injunctions in their 
 true position. They are in any case of secondar}.', 
 not primary, importance. If we can but acknow- 
 ledge that all these ordinances or dogmas are only of 
 virtue as conducing to the Christian life, and that this 
 Christian life and the fellowship which flows from it 
 is the first thing, to which all else must be subor- 
 dinate, the evils which I have noticed as flowing from 
 
54 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 clericalism would soon be counteracted. What is 
 called for is not so much the abandonment of parti- 
 cular practices or dogmas, as that these practices or 
 dogmas should be viewed as holding the second rank, 
 as comparatively indifferent, that they should be 
 modified by the experience of their effect upon the 
 life of individuals and of the community, that facts as 
 to piety and conduct lying outside the range of our own 
 peculiar system should not only not be ignored, but 
 be sought out and compared, that the unity of the 
 spirit should be supreme, and the unity of external 
 order be secondary. 
 
 2. And are there some, again, who, repelled by 
 the dogmatism and narrowness which has been ad- 
 mitted into Christian systems, are tempted to put the 
 whole matter aside ? Since you find Christianity 
 identified by many of its teachers with a system 
 which seems to deny freedom and progress and to 
 assert as essential what is really questionable, are you 
 induced to doubt whether it is possible honestly to 
 remain Christians at all ? It is surely worth while to 
 ask whether you are not giving too great weight to 
 assertions which have no necessary authority, how- 
 ever widely they may be received, and whether you 
 are not mistaking for the essence what is really the 
 accident. If the Christian ideal is unimpeachable, and 
 if the ideal of life is really the thing of central im- 
 portance, then the fact that a system of institutions 
 or dogmas has grown up around it which is of 
 doubtful or less than doubtful good, must not be 
 
Unity through a AIoral Faith. 55 
 
 allowed to make us indifferent to the best gift of God 
 to us. I believe that there are many who, with 
 generous dispositions and a wish to do good, are 
 repelled from all the ordinary forms of Christian 
 activity by the association of these with a Church 
 system full of assumptions with which they cannot 
 agree. We cannot pronounce your shibboleths, they 
 say, and, therefore, we cannot join with you ; but is 
 it right, I ask, to shut up our sympathies because 
 there is some dogmatic hardness in others } In some 
 matters of a voluntary kind such a course no doubt is 
 justifiable. Some society which we are asked to join 
 has its management distracted by petty controversy, 
 and we may rightly refuse to join it and ma}- carry 
 our energies elsewhere. But you cannot do this with 
 the all-embracing society of the Christian Church. 
 The effort to do moral work outside of it or without 
 and reference to it can hardly ever produce more than 
 sectional and transient results ; for it implies that we 
 leave out of view the greatest of all the features of 
 the common interest. You may begin some good 
 work without any reference to Christianity ; but 
 sooner or later you come in contact with Christian 
 belief and Christian institutions. It may be, of 
 course, that the perplexity is so hopeless that you 
 must stand outside and live your life apart, and leave to 
 a future generation the task of harmonising what you 
 do with the general good. There are many such lives 
 lived now, and it is not for the Church to disown 
 them. But I urge upon those who are so living to 
 
56 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 ask themselves whether there is any valid reason for 
 their isolation. Is not the desire for good and the 
 zeal which you feel within you truly Christian, and 
 the very essence of Christianity ? Can you, and can 
 those who follow you, afford to dispense with the 
 help of the great Christian brotherhood ? And have 
 you any right to leave to those who come after you a 
 tangled web to unweave, and an occasion of fresh 
 misunderstanding ? Is it not a manlier thing to face 
 the larger problems instead of being content with 
 merely sectional action ? If the Christian doctrine is 
 cumbrous and allied to some things which are false, 
 show by your life, and by any contributions you can 
 make to the solution of our difficulties, the power of 
 a simpler faith. If thfe Church is overlaid with things 
 non-essential, take your part in reforming it on a 
 better model. But do not give up the grandest of all 
 objects to which the mind of man can apply itself, the 
 building up of the great temple of humanity in har- 
 monious conviction and united energy beneath the 
 broad canopy which the Christian ideal has raised to 
 shelter all mankind. 
 
 3. Once more, are there some of us who are 
 accustomed to speak of the supremacy of faith, and 
 who would echo the words of the Reformer that this 
 is the article of a standing or a falling Church, but 
 who hold what may be called a traditional view of 
 what faith means and what it does ? Are there some 
 to whom faith means a belief in certain propositions, 
 and justification merely a sentence of acquittal, and 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 
 
 57 
 
 the manner in which justification has been brought 
 about a compact by which it is arranged that the 
 innocent should endure a penalty instead of the 
 guilty ? I have no doubt that true faith is constantly 
 to be found under the disguise (for so it must be 
 called) of statements such as these, which are a 
 hardening down into logical form of the deep and 
 passionate expressions of divine rhetoric or poetry. 
 But I would make two requests of those who cast 
 their faith in such moulds as these : ist, That they 
 would not exact these shibboleths from all whom 
 they teach, nor judge others who cannot pronounce 
 them to be unbelievers, nor do themselves and the 
 Church the wrong of isolating themselves into a 
 party ; but that they would try to trust others and 
 would open themselves to free discussions which will 
 rob them, let them be well assured, of nothing which 
 is essential, but will give wider scope to their sympa- 
 thies and greater reality to a well-tested faith ; and 
 2ndly, I would urge them to hold fast by their own 
 principle of the supremacy of faith and not to fall 
 back into a feeble ecclesiasticism. Those who revived 
 among us the doctrines of justification by faith and 
 conversion of life in the beginning of this century 
 did not appeal to the order of the ministry or the 
 special and exclusive customs of our Church, but 
 set men face to face with God and the Christian 
 life : and if their doctrine is to be developed by 
 their spiritual heirs, it must be not by adding to 
 it conditions which mar its very essence, but by 
 
58 The Gospel of the Seculak Life. 
 
 making it more divinely simple and more divinely 
 comprehensive. 
 
 4. Can we not, my brethren, unite all lovers of 
 good, all to whom the image of Christ is dear, in 
 one great sustained effort against evil, the only real 
 foe ? Why should there be parties any more ? Why 
 cannot we all be one party, the party of good 
 against evil ? 
 
 St. Paul says that the power by which Christ 
 conquered the dogmas of his day was the cross. 
 
 He took them out of the way, nailing them to his 
 cross," The self-renunciation for the sake of universal 
 love of which the cross is the complete expression 
 was the destruction of the proud isolation of the 
 dogmatic system. And that is the power by which 
 alone we can get rid of the party-making dogmas of 
 our time. We must stoop and we must suffer, that 
 we may be at peace. Peace is not to be won by 
 easily and weakly yielding to those tendencies of our 
 day which would establish a religion of selfishness, 
 but by that humility which is willing to put aside its 
 own conceit and to confess itself a fool that it may be 
 spiritually wise : which accepts and glories in that 
 which is simplest and humblest in religion. It seems 
 at times as if men were almost unconsciously coming 
 round to this simpler faith. I have often been sur- 
 prised to find among those who have in public 
 contended most eagerly and harshly for their favourite 
 dogmas a very simple and homely Christian standard 
 accepted in their private relations. Beneath those 
 
Unity through a Moral Faith. 
 
 59 
 
 things which divide us it is not hard to perceive a 
 general acquiescence in that Christian ideal in which 
 we are at one. The image of our Lord is really at 
 the root of our religion. Let us be content with this, 
 and hold all other things subordinate to it ; and we 
 shall attract all true hearts to our side and war 
 heartily and without vacillation against selfishness in 
 all its forms. 
 
 And you, young men, who are preparing here for the 
 conflicts of the world, and by the free life and thought 
 of the University are strengthening your wills and 
 setting the edge of your moral dispositions and form- 
 ing your opinions for your future career ; I beg you, 
 do not cast away the freedom which you enjoy by 
 addicting yourselves slavishly to any of the special 
 systems between which young minds are apt to oscil- 
 late and in which older minds get unhappily fixed. 
 Lay a firm grasp by faith on that image of goodness 
 which is held out to you in Jesus Christ. Seek to 
 appropriate that goodness by prayer and aspiration ; 
 acknowledge it frankly wherever it is to be found in 
 others ; try to bring within the range of its influence 
 every part of your life, your study, your amusements, 
 your social intercourse, your intellectual conflicts ; 
 ask yourself, in reference to any plan or proposition, 
 not whether it is pleasant, nor whether it will square 
 with certain preconceived opinions of your own or 
 of others, but whether it is right and true. And 
 when }-ou have got sight of truth and goodness, work 
 steadily towards it till it is obtained. Then you will 
 
6o The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 constantly minister to the cause of Christian goodness, 
 of love, of unity ; and in your future calling, whatever 
 it may be, you will exercise upon those about you 
 that attractive and redemptive influence which will 
 ever accompany those who have within them the 
 image of Christ. 
 
II. 
 
 Religion toitftout a Cemple* 
 
11. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford, February 2nd, 1879.) 
 
 "And I saw no temple therein : for the Lord God Almighty and the 
 Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, 
 neither of the moon, to shine in it : for the glory of God did lighten 
 it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which 
 are saved shall walk in the light of it ; and the kings of the earth do 
 bring their glory and honour into it." — Revelations xxi. 22 — 24. 
 
 The secret which the Apocalypse, in common with all 
 prophecy, has disclosed to this generation, shows us 
 that the seer was representing-, for the comfort of his 
 contemporaries, the times, not far off, but near at 
 hand, the' things which he says must shortly come to 
 pass — the hour that cometh, and now is. The prin- 
 ciples which are enunciated apply to all times, but 
 the vivid descriptions which are draw^n apply 
 primarily to the events which are beginning to dawn 
 on the spiritual insight of the prophet. The new 
 Jerusalem is not the description solely, if chiefly, of 
 the state to which Christians may look forward 
 beyond the grave ; it is primarily the description of 
 Christendom, the actual Christian society, idealised, 
 no doubt, but intended in all its chief spiritual 
 features to find its realisation now and here. It 
 
64 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 presents to us an ideal towards which we are to 
 strive, as one capable of attainment ; and, while the 
 spiritual and the critical faculty alike reject the 
 piecing together of the ideal picture with its antitype, 
 they alike teach us that here, as with all earnest 
 poetry, reality lies at the base of the metaphor. John 
 meant that the Church which he longed for should be 
 what his imagery foreshadows. 
 
 The feature in this ideal to which the text gives 
 prominence is, when we consider it, ndthing less than 
 astounding ; namely, this — that the appliances of 
 worship are completely absent. This seer of the 
 primitive Church was, as the whole book shows, 
 Jewish to the backbone. He wrote, as criticism 
 tends to show, just at the time when the Roman 
 eagles were about to swoop down upon Jerusalem, 
 the Holy City. That city was identified with the 
 temple which was its centre. The capital and the 
 point of union of the Jewish nation was a place of 
 worship. Yet in St. John's ideal of the new Jerusalem, 
 which was in many things to be the counterpart of 
 the old, these words stand forth in all their naked 
 grandeur, " I saw no temple therein !" And if these 
 words imply, as they unquestionably do, that the 
 ideal of the primitive Church was one, not of worship, 
 but of a life pervaded by the Spirit of God : if we 
 accept^ as we are bound to do, this ideal as our own, 
 then we must admit that the history of the Church 
 presents something which is even more astounding 
 — namely this, that the Church has looked upon 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 65 
 
 public worship and its appliances as its main object 
 and function. During the whole of the Middle 
 Ages, that first great effort at the realisation of the 
 Christian ideal, the building of places of worship, 
 and the organising of hierarchies to serve them, 
 was almost the sole thought of Christians; so that 
 the Reformation had to set about the melancholy 
 work of pulling down the splendid abbeys and 
 chantries, the fruit of a misdirected zeal. Their 
 doom was shadowed forth in the words of William 
 Tyndale, the translator of the Scriptures, and one of 
 the most far-seeing of our Reformers, in the answer 
 he gave to the jest of Sir Thomas More about the 
 building of Tenterden steeple. The great Chan- 
 cellor's jest is widely known ; the Reformer's answer 
 deserves to be known as widely : Neither intend I 
 to prove to you that Paul's steeple is the cause why 
 the Thames is broke in about Erith, or that Ten- 
 terden steeple is the cause of the decay of Sandwich 
 Haven, as Master More jesteth. Nevertheless, this I 
 would were persuaded unto you (as it is true), that 
 the building of them and such like, through the false 
 faith that we have in them, is the decay of all the 
 havens in England, and of all the cities, towns, high- 
 ways, and shortly of the whole commonwealth. For 
 since these false monsters crope up into our con- 
 ciences, and robbed us of the knowledge of our 
 Saviour Jesus Christ, making us believe in such pope- 
 holy works, and to think that there was none other 
 way into Heaven, we have not wearied to build them 
 E 
 
66 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 abbeys, cloisters, colleges, chauntries, and cathedral 
 churches with high steeples, striving and envying one 
 another who should do most. And as for the deeds 
 which pertain to our neighbours and to the common- 
 wealth, we have not regarded at all, as things which 
 seem no holy works, or such as God would not once 
 look upon. And, therefore, we left them unseen to, until 
 they were past remedy, or past our power to remedy 
 them ; inasmuch as our slow bellies, with their false 
 blessings, had juggled away from us thatwherewith they 
 might have been holpen in due season. So that the 
 silly poor man (though he had haply no wisdom to ex- 
 press his mind, or that he durst not, or that Master 
 More fashioneth his tale, as he doth other men's, to jest 
 out the truth) saw that neither Goodwin Sands, nor any 
 other cause alleged, was the decay of Sandwich Haven, 
 so much as that the people had no heart to maintain 
 the commonwealth, for blind devotion which they had 
 to pope-holy works." {D emails' Life of Tyndale, p. 277.) 
 
 That Tyndale should have had to write this 
 1,500 years after the vision of Patmos is strange 
 enough. But if it is strange that the Church of the 
 darker ages should have needed so bitter a lesson, 
 is it not ten times stranger still that the Church of 
 the days of greater enlightenment should be found 
 again making the chief part of its business the 
 organising of the modes of worship, that the largest 
 efforts which -are owned as the efforts of the Church 
 are made for the establishment and maintenance of 
 worship — that our chief controversies relate to the 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 67 
 
 teaching and the ministry of a system designed 
 primarily, if not exclusively, for worship — that even 
 the fancies and the refinements of such a system 
 divide us — that the breach between things secular and 
 things religious grows wider instead of their being 
 made to blend into one — and that the vast and 
 fruitful spaces of the actual life of mankind lie still so 
 largely without the gates ? The old Jerusalem was 
 all temple. The mediaeval Church was all temple. 
 But the ideal of the new Jerusalem was — no temple, 
 but a God-inhabited society. Are we not reversing 
 this ideal in an age when the Church still means in so 
 many mouths the clergy, instead of meaning the Chris- 
 tian society, and when nine men are striving to get 
 men to go to church for one who is striving to make 
 men realise that they themselves are the Church } 
 
 There is no temple in the new Jerusalem. It is 
 not a system of worship that Christianity came to 
 bring to mankind ; it is not a religion, as religion 
 has usually been understood — a system of worship 
 abstracted from the common life of men. It came 
 to bind men together in just and true relations, to 
 infuse into their societies the Divine spirit, to trans- 
 figure the coarse vesture of humanity with that di- 
 vinity which is love, till it shall become a temple in 
 which He dwells. Its power is not that of a distant 
 God who must be approached by special ceremonies, 
 by special modes of life and thought, by shaping 
 humanity into some peculiar attitude, but the power of 
 a present God. The title of its Founder is Immanuel, 
 E 2 
 
68 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 God with us, God in us, God making Himself a home 
 in all the relations by which love and justice draw man 
 to man, and class to class, and nation to nation ; a 
 God who is known and realised in the tenderness of 
 fatherly and motherly and filial affection, the rapture of 
 married love, the steadiness of friendship, the honesty of 
 trade relations, the loyalty of citizenship, the righteous- 
 ness of political rule, the peace which is destined to bind 
 together all mankind. Where these exist there is God ; 
 where they are not He is absent. All worship which 
 does not aim at these is hypocrisy; that worship alone 
 is Christian worship which tends to their establishment. 
 
 It is not a quibble or a verbal criticism to observe 
 that the vision of the Apocalypse represents the 
 natio7is which are saved as walking in the light of 
 the Holy City, as drinking of its w^aters, and being 
 healed by the leaves of the Tree of Life. It is not in 
 individuals that the fulness of the Gospel power is 
 realised, but in great societies of men. The body of 
 Christ is not the individual, but the company of 
 believers. The God whom we worship is not the bare 
 individual unity which some would assert, but the God 
 whose name is Love, the Father of Jesus Christ, the 
 Spirit who breathes through all things. And the image 
 of God upon earth is not the individual soul, which 
 cannot be made perfect by itself, but the society of 
 men who dwell in faith and love. This is the body 
 of Christ, the fulness of Him who filleth all in all. 
 
 And this society is no narrow one embracing but a 
 part of human life, satisfying one only, however deep, 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 69 
 
 of the functions of humanity, but that which embraces 
 the whole range of human relations. It does not 
 embrace only the gatherings of men for worship or 
 for instruction or for beneficence, but comprehends 
 that supreme corporate union which is termed the 
 nation, which, by a Divine sanction, regulates all the 
 relations of men, and from which there is no appeal. 
 The nations, in which alone humanity can grow to 
 completeness, must themselves become churches, 
 provinces of the kingdom of God. 
 
 In the last sermon which it w^as my privilege to 
 address to this audience I dwelt on faith as the great 
 reuniter ; I pointed out how strange a spectacle was 
 presented by the enmities arising among men in the 
 name of Christianity, and showed that the reuniting 
 power was faith, which in its simplicity, its versatility, 
 its elevation, transcends or passes beyond those more 
 limited views of religion which cause dissension, and 
 holds fast as supreme the image of God presented to 
 us in the character of Jesus Christ. But if this be 
 granted, it may still be asked whether the outworking 
 of faith must not make it pass into the phase in 
 which it again becomes the subject of contention. 
 I\Iust it not work itself out into propositions, into 
 concrete facts, into institutions, into that which St. 
 Paul calls the dogmas and ordinances of men And 
 must not these again, as the Jewish law in his day, 
 become the ground of dissension and of enmity, and 
 so must not the old evil return upon us ] 
 
 The answer to this difficulty which I gave in my 
 
70 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 former sermon was that faith, the holding fast of the 
 image of God presented in the character of Christ, is 
 supreme, and that while we maintain it to be so, the 
 special modes in which it is expressed, or the institu- 
 tions in which men seek to realise it, are comparatively 
 unimportant When we see the largeness and variety 
 of faith, we are not induced to quarrel with one 
 another by those things which are secondary to it ; 
 we differ, but only as the various gifts of the Spirit 
 may differ in those who confess that it is one Lord 
 who worketh all in all. But I wish to-day to point 
 out that the enmity and contention arises from the 
 fact that the working out of faith so often takes a 
 wrong direction. Faith is not best promoted when men 
 try to realise it in a system of religious worship and 
 teaching which is kept separate from the general aims 
 of human life, instead of acknowledging as its chief 
 sphere those plain human relations which form the life 
 of mankind. Religion, as a separate thing, alien from 
 human relations, becomes, through this very enmity 
 which it produces, abhorrent to men, and the conscience 
 of mankind is being led to find rest in the working 
 out of those principles which bind men together in 
 society. Christianity is destined, by the very law of 
 its being, so to infuse itself into the societies and 
 kingdoms of men that they may become the king- 
 doms of God and of Christ ; and while this is its aim, 
 everything indicates that it will be welcomed more 
 and more by the nations which are bent on living out 
 their life in peace and justice and liberty. The 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 71 
 
 secular life lived in the Spirit of our Lord is the great 
 point of reconciliation for a world which is weary of 
 theological and ecclesiastical strife. 
 
 I pointed out in my previous discourse how 
 simple a thing faith is, how it may almost be said to 
 be independent of dogma. Wherever there is an 
 aspiration after goodness, wherever there is sympathy 
 with it, there is faith in Christ. We need not change 
 or deny any of the dogmas in which Christian 
 thought has clothed itself, but we insist that they 
 should be interpreted in connection with moral good- 
 ness ; for we may feel sure that what is most precious 
 in God's sight, what is recognised by God as the 
 truest faith, is the vital sentiment, the principle of a 
 sacred lif^, which Christ came to build up, and which 
 must underlie all that is said or done in His name. 
 This faith, which is capable of universality, allies 
 itself most readily with the secular life of man. We 
 cannot expect the mass of men to take an interest in the 
 technical parts of religion, in the details of the modes 
 of worship, or the peculiar ways of expression on which 
 most controversies turn. These are the professional 
 business of a class — the ministers of public Vv'orship, the 
 professed theologians. But every man, nay, every 
 human being,'can learn to do his duty as in God's sight, 
 and in the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ ; and the 
 more each one is earnestly engaged in this effort, the 
 more he will feel the need of the divine help, and the 
 more he will lean with manly trust on the support of 
 Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The contact of Christian 
 
72 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 faith with the secular life is good for both. The one is 
 prevented from sinking into weak refinement, the other 
 is raised from its grossnessto becomethe temple of God. 
 
 Can any one read the Gospels without preconcep- 
 tions about the organisation of the Church, and fail 
 to see that that on which our Saviour was intent was 
 the raising and purifying of the common life of men? 
 Whether we read the more directly practical accounts 
 of the synoptics or enter into the deeper tone of St. 
 John, the same truth appears. The spirituality of 
 the Sermon on the Mount is not that of meditation 
 and worship, and instruction about another world, 
 but of reality and depth of motive in all we do : the 
 direct teaching of our Lord is that of the Fatherhood 
 of God, the assurance of forgiveness, the brother- 
 hood of man, the relations of the family, our be- 
 haviour towards the weak and sinful. The teaching 
 of the parables concerns the test of true disciple- 
 ship, and the working out of great moral principles 
 in the life of men and of societies. The deeper 
 teaching of St. John proclaims that He who thus 
 taught and pledged His life to His teaching was 
 essentially divine. Nor need we make a theological 
 mystery of the expression used as to His death, and 
 the blessed consequences which have flowed from it. 
 
 The meaning of the sacrifice of the Cross is that 
 self-devoting love, the surrender of the will to truth 
 and to God, is the one thing acceptable to the Father, 
 the one thing by which God and man are brought into 
 harmony. There are in Christ's teaching no ordinances 
 
Religion without a Temple. 73 
 
 for public worship ; the intimations of another world 
 are few and distant. Even the sacraments are federal 
 acts, connected primarily with social life rather than 
 with prayer. To gather from the gospels a system which 
 is solely or chiefly a system of public worship, and of in- 
 struction concerning the life to come, would be a strange 
 infatuation. All is directed to insure a present life of 
 righteousness and of love, a life lived in the realisation 
 of a present God, whose kingdom is here within us. 
 
 And this fact becomes clearer to us when we 
 consider our Lord as the founder of a society. 
 The calling of the twelve was not for public wor- 
 ship and for instruction in the mysteries of futurity, 
 but for the foundation of a society which was to 
 embrace the whole life of its members. That their 
 first business was to teach and persuade men was a 
 matter of necessity, though with it, even in their first 
 trial mission, healing and beneficence were conjoined, 
 if they had not even the first place. And as soon as 
 the society was formed, on the Day of Pentecost, 
 its adherents threw into it their all. The community 
 of goods was a witness that they joined the Church 
 not for worship and for instruction in relation to a 
 future world, but for the whole course of the life now 
 present. All their relations to their fellow-men were to 
 be Church relations, the arrangements for the serving 
 of tables, with all the mechanism which this involved 
 (the germ of the life of a perfect society) was in the 
 hands of the Apostles. The distinction which has 
 been so constantly and so fatally maintained between 
 
74 The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 things sacred and things secular was unknown to the 
 early Church. The life of the Church was, as St. Paul 
 says, in God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. 
 
 The Church, then, was to be a society which tends 
 to embrace the whole life of mankind, to bind all 
 their relations together by a Divine sanction. As 
 such it blends naturally with the institutions of 
 common life — those institutions which because they 
 are natural and necessary are therefore Divine. It 
 asserts aqd realises itself not so much as a separate 
 society^ but rather in the institutions into which it 
 infuses itself. It joins itself with the family, and the 
 family itself becomes, for the time, the Church. It 
 may take at another time the form of a sect of the 
 Jews, or of one of the Hetaeriae of the Roman 
 Empire. But wherever it is true to its primary 
 object it presses on to embrace the larger society, 
 in which the relations of human life have the fullest 
 play ; it becomes the soul of the already-existing 
 fabric, and transforms it into a Church. The 
 Divine system of human government, of which St. 
 Paul says that its ministers are ministers of God, 
 can never be outside of its range. The Church 
 may for a time be a separate society, aloof from 
 the national life or government ; but this is an 
 abnormal state of things, and the effort of the 
 Church which is true to its Master must be not 
 to maintain its separation, but to merge itself in the 
 society which God has made, and to find itself again 
 in making that society truly and freely Christian. 
 
Religion without a TEufPLE. 75 
 
 What it aims at is not the recognition by the nation 
 of a worshipping body, governed by the ministers of 
 pubHc worship, which calls itself the Church, but that 
 the nation and all classes in it should act upon 
 Christian principle, that laws should be made in 
 Christ's spirit of justice, that the relations of the 
 powers of the state should be maintained on a basis 
 of Christian equity, that all public acts should be done 
 in Christ's spirit and with mutual forbearance, that the 
 spirit of Christian charity should be spread through 
 all ranks and orders of the people. The Church will 
 maintain public worship as one of the greatest sup- 
 ports of a Christian public life ; but it will always 
 remember that the true service, the \oyiKr] Xarpeia of 
 Christians, is a life of devotion to God and man far 
 more than the common utterance of prayer. 
 
 That this is not generally felt, even in our own 
 Christian commonwealth, although ev^ery page of our 
 public liturgy bears witness to the sacredness of 
 public life, must be attributed to the insufficient 
 scope which men accord to the belief in God and 
 in Redemption. When we believe that God is the 
 common Father, and that all men and all things 
 which he has made are dear to Him, when we think 
 that he is near to every one of us, and that in Him 
 we live and move and have our being, then we cannot 
 count any man or any thing common or unclean. 
 We believe that there is a Divine element in each 
 man and each object, and our constant effort must 
 be to draw out this Divine element. And when 
 
76 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 we realise the full scope of Redemption this truth 
 becomes more clear and more dear to the believing 
 heart. Christ is the Saviour of all men ; Christ came 
 to redeem the world in all its wide expanse. There 
 is nothing under the broad vault of heaven which is 
 not included in the all-embracing purpose which is ex- 
 pressed by St. Paul in these words, " That He might 
 gather together in one all things in Christ, both which 
 . are in heaven and which are in earth." All societies 
 of men, all occupations of men, all knowledge, all art, 
 all the intercourse of men in society or in trades, all 
 the relations of nations one to the other, are not merely 
 to be influenced from without by a body established 
 for the purpose of public worship, but to become func- 
 tions of that great body which only in the fulness of 
 its entire life is to be the home and the temple of God. 
 
 Towards this end then we must strive. And it is 
 an end which is not so distant or impossible as some 
 may think it. There never was a time or a country 
 in which it so needed to be kept in view, and in 
 which the possibilities of its incoming were so great, 
 as the present time and our own country. If the object 
 were confessed by the leaders of opinion, and set dis- 
 tinctly before the nation, the very fact of its recognition 
 would bring us half way to its accomplishment. It 
 may, no doubt, be said and felt that it is far too good 
 to be true; men will say that it is impossible to attri- 
 bute to ordinary men such faith as will thus transform 
 society. And this, no doubt, is true, if we mean by 
 faith a well-considered adherence to every article main- 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 77 
 
 tained in Christian confessions. But if faith be a moral 
 conviction, a sympathy, an aspiration towards better 
 things, it is not untrue to assert that the general convic- 
 tion is on the Christian side,and it is not untrue to speak 
 of a nation as Christian. The nucleus by which its 
 deeper life is led is thoroughly imbued with the Christian 
 spirit even now. The spirit of faith is alive and opera- 
 tive, though it does not find full expression in words. 
 
 It might almost fill us with despair, when we 
 recognise this as the true vocation of the Christian 
 Church, to find those who teach in our Christian 
 assemblies so often occupied with the inculcation 
 merely of an individual piety, which hardly takes 
 account of the social and political Ufe even of indi- 
 viduals, and shrinks from public affairs as from some 
 unhallow^ed thing. Religion is often praised for pro- 
 ducing an unearthly experience," its effect is often 
 to break up men's common life, and to send them, like 
 Arthur's knights, in ecstatic pursuit of the Holy 
 Grail, instead of staying like valiant men to bring the 
 world under the dominion of right ; and the ministers 
 of public worship are often more anxious to bind them- 
 selves together as a class and assert their separate life, 
 than to serve the community well ; their effort is often 
 to make public worship a function withdrawn from 
 the life of mankind, rather than the means of refresh- 
 ing and elevating that life ; they are often more 
 anxious to keep matters like education in their own 
 hands, than to strive that, in whosoever's hands, it 
 should be conducted so as to diffuse knowledge and 
 
78 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 righteousness among the people ; the Church con- 
 stantly means the clergy (as indeed it must until it 
 identifies itself with the nation), and this miscon- 
 ception makes the Church appear as the enemy of 
 human progress and the source instead of the assuager 
 of strife. These things might fill us with despair, 
 but for the certainty that the true kingdom of Christ 
 must come, and for the evidence of its coming which 
 we see both in history and in present society. 
 
 It was a noble effort that was made in the 
 Middle Ages by men like Hildebrand to bring all 
 Christendom into harmony. It was a brave at- 
 tempt and a true foreshadowing of that which the 
 Church is designed to do. But though the attempt 
 was a noble one, and was motived by the belief 
 that the clergy were capable of regenerating the 
 world if the world were placed under their dominion, 
 it was based on a false calculation. It still kept life 
 divided into two distinct spheres, which were only 
 harmonised by the one being absolutely subject to the 
 other. The clergy and the so-called spiritual power 
 was everything. The laity and the so-called temporal 
 power was nothing. Moreover, an order separated by 
 celibacy from the general life were altogether incompe- 
 tent to rule. The monastic ideal was quite inadequate 
 to the task of influencing and regenerating the general 
 life. And had it been possible to subject all the 
 powers of Christendom to the clergy, and had the 
 clergy been as pure as they were corrupt, the result of 
 separating off one power, one function, in the Church, 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 79 
 
 and making it supreme over all the rest^ would 
 merely have been to emasculate the other powers, to 
 deprive them of their sense of responsibility, and to 
 substitute the false notions of clerical law for the 
 demand for just rule which was slowly beginning to 
 dawn. The clergy, who rejoiced to see the head 
 of the secular power humbled before the Pope at 
 Canossa, had done nothing, when the education of 
 the young sovereign had been entrusted to them, to 
 fortify him with kingly virtues ; they presented to 
 him the spectacle of worldly men, who used the 
 privileges which they claimed to ensure their own 
 wealth and power. In the strife of the clergy and 
 the kingly power, there was indeed but little to make 
 impartial men take either side; but the secular and 
 equal justice of which the kings of England and of 
 Germany were the guardians should be quite as dear 
 to Christian hearts as the public worship and monastic 
 virtues maintained by a Hildebrand or a Becket. To 
 call the one temporal and the other spiritual, the one 
 Christian, the other worldly, is a mistake, and the 
 parent of a whole family of mistakes. For that which 
 is Christian is simply that which is just. 
 
 In the conflicts of the clergy against the secular 
 power in the present day, we find those who have the 
 conduct of the government waking up gradually to 
 the fact that they have a religious responsibility ; 
 that they, 'and not only the clergy, are ministers of 
 religion. The religion of justice in human relations 
 is taking its place side by side with the religion of 
 
8o The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 dogma and prayer ; and the task of our age is to 
 harmonise them. Take such a country as Italy, the 
 centre of the clerical system. The regeneration of 
 Italy has been accomplished by the devotion of 
 men like D'Azeglio and Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, 
 and Cadorna, in the teeth of the vehement oppo- 
 sition of the clergy. Some of these men had the 
 deepest respect even for the Roman Catholic system, 
 the excesses of which they combated ; some of them 
 were antagonistic to that system. The writings 
 of some of them, like Mazzini, cannot be read 
 without seeing that the fear of God was para- 
 mount with them. They were supported in their 
 conflict with the representatives of the clergy by a 
 religion as strong as theirs, the religion of human 
 justice. Liberty of worship, constitutional govern- 
 ment, equality before the law, the abolition of 
 shackles upon the press and public meetings, uni- 
 versal education, the sanction of civil marriages, all 
 these form a body of doctrine quite as clear to men's 
 minds, quite as Christian, and far more operative on 
 the consciences of the mass of men, than any which 
 they heard taught in the churches. These formed a 
 real religion to them, which has stood the test of every 
 conflict, and has presented an instructive contrast to 
 the religion of the clergy. Read side by side the 
 Syllabus and the Italian Constitution, or compare 
 the utterances of Pius IX. with those of Italian 
 statesmen, and you cannot doubt that the true reli- 
 gion lies on the side of the latter. There is a strange 
 
Religion without a Temple. Si 
 
 story of Garibaldi being asked on one occasion when 
 on a journey to give his blessing to an infant child 
 of an Itahan patriot. He took the child in his 
 arms, and kissed it, and sprinkled water upon it, and 
 said that he baptised it into the brotherhood of 
 Italian unity. That may have struck some as a 
 blasphemous act, as a parody of Christianity. May 
 we not rather view it as the davv-ning of a larger 
 and truer Christianity — a Christianity which knows 
 that the brotherhood of men is as sacred as the 
 Fatherhood of God, which esteems every act of 
 public and private righteousness as an act of reli- 
 gion, and, feels that the ministers of human justice 
 and liberty are, as well as the ministers of prayer and 
 preaching, the ministers of Jesus Christ our Lord } 
 
 It has been the happiness of our own country to 
 avoid to some extent the conflicts on these points 
 which have been so rife in Europe. Yet there is very 
 great fear lest through a narrow, unbending attitude 
 on the part of the clergy, a disastrous confusion and 
 conflict may be brought on. There has been among 
 us a tendency to keep under the control of the 
 m.inisters of public worship matters which quite as 
 rightly fall under the control of the ministers of civil 
 justice. It was quite right that the clergy should 
 urge their flocks to undertake such works, nay, should 
 conduct them themselves if they were not taken up by 
 others. But the danger comes when the clergy, who 
 can carry on such things at best but imperfectly, show 
 a jealousy of their being taken up by others, and 
 F 
 
82 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 raise a cry that the Church is in danger, and form a 
 Church party to support it, in opposition to that 
 which is felt as a necessity by the conscience of a 
 Christian nation. What we ought to do is to strive 
 that the nation should act in a really Christian sense. 
 As it is we are constantly setting the clergy (or, as 
 men usually but erroneously speak, the Church) in 
 opposition to the nation. We are jealous of laws 
 being made by the nation itself in Parliament for the 
 regulation of Church affairs, though these are the 
 affairs of the whole nation ; we cannot endure the 
 making of just laws concerning marriage by the 
 Legislature, because they may interfere with the 
 observance of certain ecclesiastical ideas about mar- 
 riage. We are cold in our appreciation of the 
 educational efforts of the last ten years, because they 
 may detract from the clerical hold on education in 
 the towns. And we are unwilling that our Chris- 
 tian brethren who do not worship with us should 
 lie side by side with our adherents in the grave."^ 
 We are jealously apprehensive of popular movements 
 because they may interfere with the privileges of the 
 clergy as a great conservative class. And all this we 
 do because we unduly magnify the ministry of public 
 worship, which we identify with the Church, and 
 unduly mistrust the Christian character of the com- 
 munity, which we thus in our thoughts treat, 
 and almost compel to become, unchristian. The 
 
 * This was preached some eighteen months before the passing of 
 the Burials Act. 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 83 
 
 result is that step by step the ground is, and justly, 
 won which we try in vain to defend. The adminis- 
 tration of the legal relief of the poor has been 
 taken out of clerical hands, and that of charitable 
 relief will very possibly leave them also. The 
 registrar's marriage office confronts the Church, 
 and it is very possible that marriage before the 
 registrar may become compulsory. Church schools 
 are rivalled by Board schools, and many good 
 judges believe that the Church schools must 
 eventually succumb. And all this is done not by 
 revolutionists, but with full Christian conviction 
 by the great organs of the national will. And 
 if the still greater change comes which has been 
 made in Ireland, and which some believe to be 
 imminent in England, it will be, let us take good 
 heed to it, not from any repudiation of Christianity and 
 of the Church by an apostate nation, nor because men 
 believe in a separation of things secular from things 
 sacred (a separation in the nature of things impossible, 
 and the idea of which is a heathen idea which Christi- 
 anity came to dispel), but because the Christian nation, 
 acting with full conviction as a Church in defence of 
 its Christian life, can no longer endure a clerical orga- 
 nisation which has become an unbrotherly influence 
 and a perpetual incentive to unchristian disunion. 
 
 And while the religion which finds its expression 
 only in worship and in dogrfias, and in the hopes and 
 fears of futurity, seems to divide men hopelessly from 
 each other, so that the organisations formed for these 
 
84 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 purposes follow their own way without regard to each 
 other, the general interests of man's present life, 
 which, if conducted unselfishly, are Christian and 
 eternal interests, are drawing men powerfully into 
 union. The national life in all its branches, and the 
 blessedness of the brotherhood which it imparts, the 
 pursuit of genuine knowledge, of art, of invention, 
 the work of philanthropy, are points in which those 
 can readily meet who are alienated by clerical dis- 
 cord. These things, no doubt, if conducted in a 
 selfish and worldly spirit, may become unchristian (as 
 indeed the functions of the clergy may also become) ; 
 but if they are conducted in the spirit of Christian 
 justice and love they are the genuine functions of the 
 Christian Church, genuine products of the Christian life. 
 In many of them there is little or no controversy ; in all 
 of them men can meet and discuss as brethren, main- 
 taining a higher unity beyond all their differences; while 
 in the realm administered by the clergy men are almost 
 compelled to admit that theirdifferences are irreconcil- 
 able, and that they must keep each other for ever apart. 
 
 The tendency of our argument may seem to some 
 to be to increase the antasronism between the two 
 spheres, and to raise up the so-called secular hfe at 
 the expense of the so-called Church life. But this is 
 not so. We wish to point out the sacredness of that 
 which is called the secular life, so that the whole life 
 of men, with all its functions, may be brought under 
 the dominion of Christ, that there may be no breach 
 between prayer and work, between religion and know- 
 
Religion without a Temple. 
 
 8s 
 
 ledge, between clergj^ and laity, between Church and 
 State ; that the Fatherhood of the Creator may be 
 recognised as universal in the brotherhood of His 
 children, that the Redemption of Christ may be 
 acknowledged as the saying power in all branches 
 and functions of human energ\\ ^Moreover, I am 
 persuaded that, if this be once acknowledged to the 
 full, the resuit of it will be, not an undervaluing of 
 the work which is the special function of the clergy, 
 but a fuller recognition of its importance. Those 
 who work side by side with the same motives in 
 matters of philanthropy or politics, acknowledging 
 the supremacy of our Lord, will not be content 
 without worshipping together. Those who acknow- 
 ledge that the sanction which makes their work a 
 noble service is the belief in God, will want to hear 
 more about God, and will return to theolog\^ and its 
 teachings with a new zest. Those who are constantly 
 dealing with the mysteries of human life, with a view 
 to gain fresh knowledge and to elevate mankind, will 
 not be content to be stopped by the barriers of sense 
 and time, but will long and aspire together to the 
 eternal world and to the life to come. It is not to 
 plead the cause of knowledge or secular politics 
 against piety that we preach, but to embrace in the 
 circle of piety the whole life of man. 
 
 I therefore, in conclusion, make an appeal : ist 
 to the clergy ; 2nd, to the laity. 
 
 I. I entreat the clergy not to make their minis- 
 trations exclusive, and this in two senses, both as 
 
86 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 regards the Christian bodies outside their own orga- 
 nisation, and as regards the laity generally. I do 
 not enter into the differences between Christians, but 
 I am quite sure that they are greatly exaggerated. 
 I believe that Christian hearts, if they only knew 
 more of each other, would beat more in unison. If 
 the great needs of our people are considered, we can 
 rejoice in the good done by others than ourselves, 
 and we can learn to honour men according to the 
 real amount of Christian good which they accomplish. 
 And all that this implies is that we should cease from 
 the attitude of supercilious ignorance which we are 
 apt to assume towards them, and should recognise 
 and take an interest in their good works. Look not 
 every man on his own things, but every man also on 
 the things of others. And, as to the laity, let us 
 learn to think of them as having each a ministry to 
 fulfil, according to the words of one of our prayers, 
 That every member of the whole body of the 
 Church in his vocation and ministry may truly and 
 godly serve the Lord." Let us give up utterly the 
 separation of things sacred and things secular. Let 
 our great aim be to stimulate knowledge and art and 
 political good, and all the culture which ennobles 
 human life, to urge upon all men to conduct their 
 common work as a function of the Church of God, 
 to bring the great sanctions of the invisible world to 
 bear upon the elevation of mankind. 
 
 2. I urge this also on the laity with all earnest- 
 ness. It would be impossible at the close of a 
 
Religion without a Temple. 87 
 
 sermon to show in detail the application of our 
 principles to the various branches of secular life. 
 But a few words may be said as to the actual 
 business of this University. It is said that the 
 changes of late }'ears have made the teaching-staff 
 less clerical and the whole atmosphere less theolo- 
 gical. It does not follow, I trust, that Oxford is less 
 a place of religious education. Men are no longer 
 kept under the restraint of a clerical system which 
 permitted only such a course of study as seemed 
 consonant with its own interests. But if, as testi- 
 mony seems to show, those who study here do so 
 more diligently, if truth comes with freedom, if 
 mutual toleration ensues on a frank recognition of 
 differences, the University is not less but more a 
 place of Christian learning. It is not so much the 
 subject of study as the spirit in which it is pursued 
 that makes it Christian or un-Christian. This is the 
 crucial question. About this, I pray you, let there 
 be no hesitation. Let those who follow research do 
 so with truth for their aim, and with such a regard 
 for their fellows as will make them give out freely 
 the results of their research ; then, but not other- 
 wise, their study will be Christian study. Let those 
 who teach make it their object to perfect themselv-es 
 in an art for which no previous training is provided, 
 and which is often very imperfectly acquired by 
 practice, and let them show by many kindly offices 
 their interest in the welfare of those they teach — so 
 alone will they be Christian teachers. Let those who 
 
,88 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 are learning be really in earnest to acquire knowledge, 
 and to fit themselves for their future career, and be 
 careful in their conduct and example. These things 
 will render the teachers and students of this Univer- 
 sity, though there may be among them fewer minis- 
 ters of worship than of old, real ministers of Christ 
 to pupils or to comrades on whose welfare they have 
 an influence. And if at the present it is found that 
 some ordinances of religion, like the daily prayer in 
 chapel, are less largely frequented than when they 
 were compulsory, let me urge that there is a compen- 
 satory service which all can render in the maintenance 
 of a high sense of duty, in fostering the inner life in a 
 religious spirit, in mutual care and interest. And let 
 the hope be maintained that, if the common worship 
 of God endures some suspension for a time, it may 
 be for a time only. It cannot be but that, in the 
 freedom of study and discussion, many divergent ideas 
 should arise about those things which, precious as 
 they are, must ever seem subject to much uncertainty, 
 and which are the object of faith and hope rather 
 than of exact knowledge. But do not carry these 
 divergencies on one side or the other so far as to 
 hinder sympathy and co-operation in your proper 
 work. Let the sympathy you have in one of the 
 noblest of human employments draw you together 
 into common hopes, common aspirations ; and we 
 may yet see here a better society than that which the 
 religion of worship alone would give, the society of a 
 life lived out under the spiritual dominion of Christ. 
 
III. 
 
 €l)t ^upremnrp ot Cftifet ober tin 
 
III. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford^ April 27, 1879.) 
 
 "Thou sayest that I am a King." — ^John xviii. 36. 
 "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." — 
 Matthew xxviii. 18. 
 
 It has been sometimes said of late years that Chris- 
 tianity has resigned the leadership of the world, and 
 that the friends of humanity must now step in to act 
 as a natural Providence and conduct the affairs of the 
 race. There is some truth in the complaint, whatever 
 we may think of the proposed remedy. For there 
 has been at all times a tendency among Christians to 
 abandon the claim of universal sovereignty which 
 was at first made in the name of their Lord. The 
 claim may be made in words, but left in a purely 
 ideal state ; and when no attempt is made to give 
 it a practical application, it is in effect abandoned. 
 A Christianity which embraces but a part of human 
 life, while it adjourns its fuller claim to the world 
 beyond the grave, is certainly not the religion of 
 One who says, "All power is given unto me in 
 heaven and in earth." 
 
 Jesus Christ is all in all. His followers cannot 
 
92 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 be content to claim for Him anything less than 
 sovereignty. We may dispute about the precise 
 mode in which that sovereignty is to be expressed, 
 and may not be content with the theological terms in 
 which past ages have defined it. We may admit that 
 those who have sought to enforce this sovereignty as 
 a practical thing at various times have failed. But 
 the failure has been due to the mistakes of later 
 times, not to the falsehood of the original claim. 
 Such failures cannot destroy the truth of the claim, or 
 its practical character. Christ is still the Son of God, 
 and the true King of mankind, and of the universe. 
 For us, as for St. Paul, "though there be gods many, 
 and lords many, there is but one Lord Jesus Christ, 
 by whom are all things, and we by Him." 
 
 The end towards which we look is not that all 
 men should be bound to certain rules of life, nor that 
 they should all be alike in the public worship of God, 
 nor that the anticipation of the world to come should 
 overpower the duties and interests of the present ; but 
 that all human life should be lived out under the 
 dominion of Christ. This^ which has sometimes been 
 confessed in words^ has rarely been steadily contem- 
 plated in fact The dominion of Christ has been 
 looked upon as if it were like the rule of an earthly 
 king, who guides the outer life, but cannot reach the 
 inner ; or, again, by a revulsion to the opposite 
 extreme, as if it were merely a spirit or sentiment 
 which hardly cares for the body or the general life. 
 And as to the means by which it is to be enforced, 
 
The Supremacy of Christ, 
 
 93 
 
 men have varied from the advocacy of stern com- 
 pulsion to that of simple persuasion. But, in truth, 
 the design of Christianity is this, that human life 
 should be lived out with perfect freedom, but under 
 the empire of the master motive of love, in the fear of 
 God, in the belief of His fatherly redeeming mercy. 
 And the means by which this is to be attained 
 embrace all the methods by which human life is 
 conducted. The spirit of the Gospel sets free all the 
 faculties, it inspires them with the energy of love; 
 and it accepts all the means which the free life of 
 mankind invents for reaching that development. So 
 far as man is an individual, so far Christianity is an 
 individual influence. So far as man is a social being, 
 Christianity is social. If man requires laws, the 
 Christian spirit can enter with those laws. If there 
 are parts of human life which must always lie beyond 
 the reach of law, Christianity vindicates that exemp- 
 tion from law, and furnishes men with a stimulus and 
 safeguard from a higher source than that of law. If 
 it be true that man is utilitarian, w^hat is this but that 
 the Father of Jesus Christ wishes all his children to 
 aim at each other's happiness } If idealism has a 
 place, as it must have, even in the most utilitarian 
 system, does not a follower of Christ hear the voice 
 of his Lord saying to him constantly, " I came to 
 bear witness to truth ; he that is of truth heareth my 
 voice;" or, again, *'Be perfect as your Father in 
 heaven is perfect ;" or, again, " My kingdom is not of 
 this world." 
 
94 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 It has been maintained at times that Christianity 
 is concerned with conduct, and conduct only, and its 
 vindication has been rested by a writer of striking 
 originaHty on the ground that conduct is three-fourths 
 or perhaps seven-eighths of human hfe. But do we 
 pass out from the Divine influence of our Lord, when 
 we come to the other fourth or eighth part, when we 
 , go beyond the limits of the serious and moral view of 
 life ? In the realms of art or of music, which are so 
 restful to the human spirit, has Christ nothing to say 
 to us ? In purely literary pursuits, or those of ab- 
 stract science, does the human spirit range apart from 
 His ? In recreation and in mirth are we no longer 
 His disciples ? Is the only question to be asked as 
 to any course of action, how does this bear on the 
 regulation of conduct ? Or if we get beyond that 
 question, are we wandering without a guide ? If that 
 were so, I cannot see how religion should be the supreme 
 power of life, or Christ its King. There would be a 
 double spirit, or indeed many spirits, at work within 
 us. We should have to make a distinction between 
 Christ and the Father, as Goethe did when he made 
 Werther say, Perhaps I am not one of those whom 
 the Father has given to Christ, but one of those whom 
 the Father has kept for Himself;" or we should have 
 to divide ourselves between God and no God, to con- 
 secrate parts of our time and our faculties as Theistic, 
 and acknowledge the rest as Atheistic. Can human 
 life be thus bisected } 
 
 We want a larger definition of faith, and a larger 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 95 
 
 conception of the spirit of Christ. If faith be the 
 acceptance of statements about God and Christ and 
 the future Hfe, it is true that it cannot be universal. 
 But if it be, as I have maintained on former occasions, 
 a trust in the Father of whom Christ is the image, a 
 sympathy with goodness, an aspiration towards the 
 blessed life, such a faith as this can enter into every 
 part of the soul, like the air which pervades the whole 
 surface of the globe, aaid gives life to all that breathes 
 and grows upon it. 
 
 I desire to show that Christ's spirit is the true 
 guiding power in all spheres of human activity ; that 
 it is not only an inspiring motive, but also suggests 
 the right end to aim at. It must be so if we believe 
 in a redemption for humanity ; for that redemption 
 points to and ensures a blessed state, a holy city, a 
 divine society, in which God shall dwell with men. 
 In that state can we suppose that anything which is 
 good can be left out Has the New Jerusalem 
 neither statues, nor pictures, nor stately architecture, 
 nor dramas, nor games } Is it to be, as Isl. Renan 
 says of the New Jerusalem of the Revelation, a gaudy 
 and tasteless toy } Or, as might appear from some 
 religious ideals, are its boys and girls to laugh no 
 more, or its citizens to exercise their minds in no 
 problems but those of morals and sociology } If such 
 suppositions are impossible, then all who look for a 
 complete redemption must seek to realise the Divine 
 influence in all parts of life, whether grave or gay, 
 whether so-called secular or sacred. They must 
 
96 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 begin here, and now, to build up the fabric of a 
 blessed life, which comprehends the whole organi- 
 sation of a perfect society, ruled by Christ's justice, 
 and inspired by His love. 
 
 It will be best, for the purposes of this sermon, to 
 show how this is to be worked out in detail in those, 
 spheres of life which are supposed to have least 
 connection with religion. I will take several of these 
 and point out, not mere^.y how the Spirit of Christ 
 may connect itself with them, but how it suggests the 
 object to be aimed at, and presides over the method 
 of reaching it. 
 
 I. Here in Oxford let me begin with education. 
 And this is especially appropriate, because the 
 divorce of religion and education is loudly proclaimed 
 in certain quarters, after a long and not inharmonious 
 marriage. " The school for the state, and the Church 
 for God," is the specious but misleading formula in 
 
 " which this divorce has been expressed. What is 
 really meant by this is that the ministers of public 
 worship are no longer to control education. But is 
 there anything in the Christian religion which makes 
 it necessary that the ministers of public worship 
 should control either teaching or research } Is it not 
 
 ' much truer to say that public worship is one function 
 or ministry, and the training of youth is another.-* 
 Is it not a wider and juster view of the Church, 
 which embraces the several ministries as several, than 
 that which would subject all its divers functions to a 
 single order t Let education, if so it be found con- 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 97 
 
 venient^ be conducted without clerical supervision ; 
 absolutely so if necessary. In what way does that 
 expel Christ and His Spirit from it ? May there not 
 be real conscientious religion in a lay teacher ? Even 
 if the teaching of Scripture and the use of prayers 
 were made impossible by our unfortunate differences, 
 that would not make the education unchristian. The 
 care of teachers for pupils, the reverence of pupils for 
 teachers, the common sense of duty, and the sympathy 
 which is engendered by a common work — this is the 
 religion of education. I know not what Christianity 
 demands more than this. Even where, as in America, 
 the almost total exclusion of direct religious teaching 
 from the schools has been attempted, it is found that 
 the spirit of a Christian teacher communicates itself 
 irresistibly to the pupils, and that, even as to religious 
 observances which go on outside the schools, the 
 pupils very commonly follow their teacher. But in 
 our country there is no reason why direct Christian' 
 teaching should be excluded. If the spirit of Christian' 
 liberality prevails to abate our differences, all that is 
 essential in the way of Christian knowledge can be 
 communicated to the mass* of the pupils. Nor is 
 there any reason why the ministers of public worship 
 should not bear in this a conspicuous and fruitful 
 part. But this the spirit of Christ demands, that 
 truth, unfettered by prejudices, whether of the clergy 
 or of any other class, preside over the whole process. 
 
 Does the freedom of truth and of love, then, mean 
 that there is to be no system, no guidance ? Is 
 G 
 
98 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 education and research to go on by desultory, spas- 
 modic, arbitrary impulses ? By no means. Chris- 
 tianity is a cosmic as well as a spiritual faith. It has 
 to do with the universe as well as the human spirit. 
 The power of its Lord is over all in heaven and earth. 
 The sense of harmony which love produces extends 
 itself over the whole creation. The Christian Scrip- 
 tures throughout place man as the spiritual centre of 
 a world in which all things find their place in subor- 
 dination to him. Christ is the centre of mankind, 
 and mankind is the centre of the world. If that be 
 so, w^e have a central point round which all knowledge 
 groups itself. The physical and the moral sciences 
 have each their part in the building up of the great 
 human temple in which God dwells ; and the highest 
 education is that which gives men a complete con- 
 ception of the world thus viewed, as centred in 
 humanity and in Christ, its head. Or if this be taken 
 ' on the practical side, the true education is that which 
 fits a man to bear his part aright among his fellow- 
 men, in the society of which the central principle is 
 love, and which acknowledges Christ as the supreme 
 expression of that love*. Thus the spirit of Christ 
 asserts itself as the master power in the sphere of 
 education. 
 
 2. Let us pass to a sphere which is commonly 
 dealt with as being far removed from directly 
 Christian influences, and which is hardly touched by 
 ordinary Christian teaching. I mean the sphere of 
 trade. It is said by those who speculate upon the 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 99 
 
 future, that commerce, which already is so absorbing 
 a pursuit, is destined to grow to far larger dimensions. 
 And this can hardly fail to be the case in England, 
 whether England or America bear the palm of the 
 trade of the future. It is commonly and thought- 
 lessly assumed that men sell to make their fortunes, 
 and buy to feed and clothe themselves. Is that a 
 true and sufficient account of dealings which occupy 
 a large part of every life ? Even so, the question is 
 whether this is done honestly. And it is pretty 
 certain that if there be no motive at work but the 
 pursuit of our own convenience on one side, and of gain 
 on the other, convenience and gain will be degraded into 
 greed and dishonesty. You want a constant motive 
 to raise trade from mere chaffering into dignity, and 
 this motive Christianity supplies. It is evident that 
 trade cannot exist without fair dealing. But where 
 there is fair dealing there is room for love ; and if so 
 there ought to be love. Here then is an entrance for 
 the Christian spirit into the whole system of commer- 
 cial exchanges ; and where the Christian spirit enters 
 it at once asserts its supremacy. The higher motive 
 drives out the lower ; what you are doing for love you 
 can do no longer merely for gain. 
 
 The ideal to which this motive points is this : that 
 the trader should have for his first object to supply 
 the wants of those about him, and should follow this 
 out, not merely so far as it will bring him gain, but 
 to the full extent of his ability. Does this sound 
 Utopian.'^ Is it certain that a man who should do 
 G 2 
 
loo The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 this would be ruined ? On the contrary, everything 
 tends to show that one who should set to work in this 
 way would conciliate the confidence and support of 
 all men ; for if it were once known that this was his 
 object, who would not rather deal with him than with 
 any other ? Nor is this mere speculation. The new 
 system of co-operative trading, which is known to be 
 in the interest of those who buy^ not merely in that 
 of those who sell, even when carried out to the very 
 limited extent of plain honesty guaranteed by imme- 
 diate payment, is threatening all trade which is 
 carried on on other systems, and where it goes 
 further, and gives an interest to the buyer in all 
 that he purchases, it must of necessity carry ail 
 before it. The greatest retail establishment which 
 the world has ever seen — the great store in New 
 York, the proprietor of which died some two years 
 ago — was founded on this principle, to give to the 
 public none but the best articles, and to give them 
 at the lowest rate which would ensure the carrying on 
 of the business. He who wrought upon this principle, 
 so far from being ruined, made the largest fortune 
 ever realised by a retail trader. So literally true is 
 the saying of Christ, " With what measure ye mete 
 withal, it shall be measured to you again." 
 
 And if we follow out this thought, it leads us 
 beyond what is possible now to that which may 
 become possible if the Christian spirit can fully 
 assert itself. The brotherly spirit of the Gospel 
 must favour the extension of co-operation, whether 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 lOI 
 
 in the production or the distribution of goods. And 
 beyond this, perhaps, there will dimly dawn upon 
 our view a state of things in which the Christian 
 community itself should minister to all the wants 
 of all its members, in which love and energy, 
 with a moderate assured remuneration, might supply 
 the motive power which is now supplied by eager 
 competition and the prospect of excessive gain. 
 It is a dream^ no doubt, but only such a dream as 
 it might have been to past generations, that the 
 community might one day carry its own letters, or 
 transmit its own messages, or lay up the savings or 
 conduct the insurances of its poorer members, or that 
 there might be a scheme, regarded by many with 
 favour, by which all the great iron roads might be 
 possessed by the community for the advantage of the 
 citizens. To act upon such a dream or anything like 
 it as if the Christian spirit were strong enough now 
 to realise it would be madness. To attempt to 
 enforce it, as Socialists have attempted to enforce 
 their schemes, would be not folly only, but tyranny. 
 But to work towards it by infusing into all trade the 
 spirit of beneficence and mutual confidence, of trust- 
 fulness and of unselfish generosity, is to prepare the 
 way of Christ in one vast and growing province of 
 His dominion. 
 
 3. I come now to another field, that of literature. 
 With this too it is often thought that Christ has no 
 connection. There may be literature which is about 
 Christ, it is thought, but the literature itself, the form, 
 
I02 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 the art of it, has nothing to do with Christ. And the 
 genuine Hterary man lives in the form itself : his 
 pabulum is not the substance but the form in which 
 it is clothed. 
 
 But is it possible to make this absolute severance 
 between matter and form ? May it not rather be said 
 that, apart from the matter, the form cannot maintain 
 its worth } It was a great truth which was touched 
 by Schleiermacher when he spoke of the language- 
 forming power of Christianity. The Gospels (to take 
 the first and most central instance), have a great lite- 
 rary charm in their simplicity, in their freshness and 
 naivete. But who can say that their form is indepen- 
 dent of their subject matter.? Much more truly we 
 may say that it is the fact that the writers were 
 dealing with a subject so divine and yet so simple 
 that gives the divine simplicity to their form. The 
 spirit of Christ is in the form as well as the matter, 
 in the grace, in the chasteness, in the reticence, in the 
 short uninvolved sentences like those of a child, in the 
 naturalness and directness of the style. This is con- 
 fessed by writers like M. Renan — no mean judge, 
 assuredly, of literary style, who turns with delight to 
 the synoptic gospels as breathing the fresh air of the 
 Galilean hills, and who similarly compares the im- 
 pression which we receive in reading the Acts of the 
 Apostles to that which we gain in reading the 
 Odyssey. 
 
 It is not so always, no doubt ; there may be a 
 grace which has lost all hold of reality. It is like the 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 103 
 
 resemblance we sometimes trace in the outward form 
 and manners of the degenerate child to those of his 
 nobler parents, or like gracious words and outward 
 courtesy covering a bad heart. This does not dis- 
 prove the truth that qualities are transmitted by race, 
 or that it is a loving heart that is the true parent of 
 courtesy. And, similarly, it is the love which is the 
 nature of God and of Christ which in one or other 
 of its forms is the true inspirer of literature. No 
 genuine or original style has ever been formed where 
 there was no deep human sympathy, but only a 
 playing with words. 
 
 Moreover, literature, what is. it } It is a form of 
 expression. Not only is expression dependent on the 
 thing to be expressed, but the wish to express is the 
 correlative of the wish to impress. We want to 
 express our thoughts in writing as in speech, in order 
 that they may reach home to other minds, that they 
 may evoke sympathy, and inspire noble thoughts, and 
 incite to generous action. This has been the kindling 
 spark of all the highest literary genius. 
 
 We may raise the matter to a higher point. If all 
 human nature is redeemed by Christ, then every 
 human excellence is part of the process. The very 
 fact that literature is part of this excellence in itself 
 makes it Christian. Aim at excellence, and you are 
 aiming at what Christ designed. If this is true any- 
 where, it must be doubly true where we are dealing 
 with human speech, the organ of the human spirit, 
 through which the divine breath breathes out upon 
 
I04 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 mankind. Get rid of the idea that secular literature 
 is to be enslaved to ecclesiasticism, and you have no 
 difficulty in accepting for it the sovereignty of Christ. 
 The word of man cannot but be under the control 
 and subject to the inspiring, redeeming influence of 
 Him who, because his human life expressed the divine, 
 is called the Word of God. 
 
 4. We may extend this thought to the whole 
 province of art. Who can maintain that art is not a 
 necessary part of human excellence } Would any one 
 be so mad as to wish to banish it, as Plato banished 
 the poets from his republic If art is imitative, it is 
 because man is an imitative being, and redemption 
 must redeem this quality of imitativeness, not destroy 
 it. It may be the shadow of a shadow of the true 
 idea. But, nevertheless, the true idea stands out 
 much more clearly to the apprehension of men 
 through the medium of this shadow than it would if 
 we saw the reality in its nakedness. Truth barely 
 stated is apt to become truism. The bare light 
 dazzles and kills ; its refraction and disintegration 
 show it in its true and enlightening glory. Even the 
 most direct teaching needs some medium of metaphor. 
 Our Lord Himself used parables. And so it is with 
 all the arts, with architecture, and sculpture, and 
 painting, with music or the drama. They partake of 
 the nature of sacraments ; the inward spiritual grace 
 which they express is hidden and yet revealed by 
 them. The circuit of the electric chain is long, but the 
 spark is none the less vivid, none the less quickening. 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 105 
 
 Art needs reality at every turn. Divorce it from 
 real life and it becomes but the bloom of decay. It 
 is quite possible, no doubt, that there may be ages 
 that are very real, and yet are without art ; for art is 
 an excellence, a virtue, which seems to need special 
 conditions, and these conditions are not always at 
 hand. But if in some of the noblest art periods you 
 have the germs of decay, which are developed in the 
 succeeding age, what does that prove but that the 
 reality which inspired the one was wanting to the 
 other, and that as with an effete civflisation which 
 needs re-invigorating through a process of revolution, 
 a new departure must be taken by a new recourse to 
 reality } 
 
 Art gives rest to the soul. Does that make it less 
 Christian } Because we seem to be drawn away, 
 among nymphs or landscapes, or the spectacle of 
 men of other climes and ages, from the crushing 
 sense of our responsibility, are we therefore outside 
 the sphere of His influence who said Come unto me 
 and I will give you rest 1 " could it be said that 
 recreation was no part of even the most saintly life ? 
 And if sainthness needs refreshment^ humanity in all 
 its parts needs art. It is quite impossible that this 
 element of life can be out of the range of the 
 Redeemer of mankind. And if the times in which 
 art has been most highly developed have not been 
 those in which Christianity has seemed most flourish- 
 ing, the cause of this is to be found in the swaying to 
 and fro which marks the progress of humanity. Take 
 
io6 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 for instance the period of the Renaissance. What is 
 it but a revolt against the exclusiveness of ecclesiasti- 
 cism ? We cannot look with much satisfaction on an 
 age of moral unsettlement such as the Renaissance 
 undoubtedly was. But Christian thought ranges over 
 long periods, and awaits a full development in which 
 the various elements of the complete excellence may 
 be combined ; and it is therefore prepared to see 
 without complaint periods like the Renaissance or 
 the eighteenth century which bring an infusion of a 
 wholesome naturalism into the life which has been 
 surcharged with elements like scholasticism, or the 
 excess of ecclesiastical ritual and dogma. 
 
 And Christianity, even in its stricter and more 
 limited aspect, constantly shows itself as the redeemer 
 of art. By suggesting high aims, by presenting worthy 
 characters and moving incidents, it draws out the 
 nobler side of art, and prevents it from being 
 degraded by sensualism and frivolity. Art, like 
 every other sphere of human life, must recognise the 
 great moral factors which in all departments are 
 paramount. 
 
 And it would do so much more readily were it 
 not for a certain antagonism which has been fostered 
 by the narrower clerical influences, sometimes on the 
 Cathohc, sometimes on the Puritan side. How could 
 sculpture thrive in a church like the Eastern, which 
 counts it idolatrous } or how could any art but the 
 austerest form of poetry flourish under the Puritan 
 influence ? Or how could the drama own the authority 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 107 
 
 of Christ under a system which denied Christian burial 
 to Moliere ? In these later days it is found that the 
 feeling for the drama has increased among Christian 
 people ; and it may well be hoped that to all the arts 
 a similar liberal policy may extend ; that so, while 
 remaining free, as they must ever be, they may in 
 their freedom own the beneficent influence of the 
 redeeming spirit of our Lord. 
 
 5. Is, then, the domain of the natural sciences 
 outside the pale and influence of Christianity ? Is 
 this great realm, which to some minds seems to em- 
 brace the whole circle of human interests, or at least 
 to dwarf all others, outside the dominion of Christ ? 
 Is its growth destined to obliterate those spheres in 
 which Christian morality is seen to be rightfully 
 supreme ? I maintain, on the contrary, that those 
 spheres which we most readily associate with Christi- 
 anity are paramount, while the natural sciences are 
 subservient to them ; and, also, that the sustaining 
 interest of the natural sciences is derived from those 
 spheres of human life which we more readily recognise 
 as subject to our Lord. 
 
 The various realms of knowledge and of interest 
 cannot for ever stand apart. There must be a co- 
 ordination of the sciences ; and if to some few minds 
 the natural sciences are everything, this we must 
 regard as a revolt from their former depression, and 
 as constituting only a temporary phase of thought. 
 The humanities, as they are rightly called, will in due* 
 time assert their supremacy. Every serious co-ordi- 
 
io8 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 nation of the sciences must be, with whatever minor 
 adjustments, a reflexion of that which is assumed in 
 the Scriptures; it must place man himself as the 
 centre, and the rest as dependent upon him. It will 
 always be much more important for us to know how 
 we may live justly and love one another, than how 
 material bodies are mutually attracted, or how the 
 various parts of the universe came to be what they 
 now are. We must, indeed, maintain that to neglect 
 the natural sciences is to stunt human life, and we 
 may thankfully recognise that the discoveries made in 
 those sciences have greatly conduced to moral and 
 religious good by giving us a truer understanding of 
 the world in which we live. The true moralist will 
 neglect no light which can be thrown upon human 
 nature from the physical side. But the physicist 
 must come to feel that his main interest centres in 
 man. Before embarking in any enquiry, the mind 
 almost irresistibly asks the question, to what good 
 does this tend } Will it conduce to human well-being? 
 Mere curiosity and mere abstract aimless impulses 
 will not sustain a man in the tedious pursuit of 
 knowledge. He looks for his reward in the enlighten- 
 ment, the advantage, the beauty which he may shed 
 by his discoveries upon the path of his fellow-men. 
 Would astronomy be worth pursuing were it not that 
 it reveals to us some of the primary conditions of our 
 existence in this planet } Would chemistry be the 
 absorbing pursuit which it is to its votaries with- 
 out the assurance that organic chemistry is a step 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 109 
 
 towards life and morals ? What makes us await each 
 new discovery in physiology but that it implicates 
 human nature ? Are not all these sciences so en- 
 trancing because they, from various sides, approach 
 the problem of problems, the nature and origin of 
 life ? And does not the delight which the mind 
 receives from the growing probability of the doctrine 
 of evolution, lie in the promise which it seems to give 
 of binding all, human and non-human, into one great 
 Cosmos ? If that be so, then human life is that to 
 which all has been working upwards from the be- 
 ginning ; the Word and the Spirit, to use religious 
 language, presided over the construction of the world ; 
 or, to use the language of one of the greatest of our 
 men of science, the promise and potency of human 
 life lay in the primeval elements waiting for its 
 development. Christ is the head of humanity ; and, 
 if all knowledge centres in humanity, it centres in 
 Christ. What is this but to say that Christ is its 
 king 1 
 
 6. Lastly, it might seem easy to vindicate for our 
 Lord a sovereignty over all the relations of human 
 beings, who are bound together by justice and by 
 love. But there is a strange tendency to limit his 
 empire even here ; and, stranger still, this limitation 
 often comes from his professed followers and ministers. 
 God and Caesar are set in antagonism. It is believed 
 by many that the sphere of politics can be dissevered 
 from that of religion, and this has been made the 
 ground of theories which, whether they come from 
 
no The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 the clerical or the secular side, are equally godless. 
 It cannot be that the public life, the natural home of 
 justice, should be separate from the God whose very 
 nature is righteousness. If we can but bring our- 
 selves to acknowledge that justice itself is pleasing to 
 God, and that what is most important is not the 
 naming of Christ's name, but the doing of the things 
 which embody his mind, we shall not fail to perceive 
 that the political life of mankind is even now under 
 Christ's supreme direction. 
 
 Take the three most remarkable political phe- 
 nomena of our own generation, and this will be made 
 clear. 
 
 The first of these is the triumph of constitutional 
 government throughout Europe. We who are but 
 middle-aged men can remember the time when every 
 European nation but our own was under personal rule. 
 Italy, Hungary, France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, had all 
 the same tale to tell. Now they all tell another tale ; 
 they are all self-governed. But what is constitutional 
 government 1 It is only the expression in public 
 affairs of the Christian sentiments of justice and love. 
 Is it not equitable that nations as soon as they have 
 outgrown the state of childhood should rule them- 
 selves } Can any one, starting from the Christian 
 principle of equity, fail to recognise that it is not the 
 will of a single man which ought to impose itself on 
 the whole society, but that the society itself should 
 rule } Is it not, again, exactly in accordance with 
 Christian principle that the ruler should not be one 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 Ill 
 
 who forces his own authority upon the rest, but one 
 who suggests, advises, persuades, and finally leads 
 with the consent of the rest ? Is not this the very 
 spirit of the words, "neither as lords over God's 
 heritage, but as ensamples to the flock ? " And what 
 is the impulse which has procured the gradual exten- 
 sion of the suffrage but the Christian wish to take into 
 consultation all who are affected by the policy of the 
 state, so that not even the interests of one of the little 
 ones of the flock shall be neglected ? It is often taken 
 for granted that the organisation for public worship 
 where this is not done is under Christ's direction, but 
 that secular politics in which it is done are not. The 
 contrary is the case. Christ is, and he reigns, where 
 justice and love bear rule. 
 
 The second notable progress accomplished during 
 this generation is the recognition of the principle that 
 no nation should domineer over another. Greece and 
 Italy, Hungary and Germany, are all cases in which 
 this has been acknowledged ; and now the other 
 nations comprised in European Turkey are being 
 added to the list one by one. And even England, 
 in the plenitude of its imperialism, is fain to acknow- 
 ledge that in India its power must be vindicated, not 
 as a conquest but a tutelage. Here again we have 
 Christian justice asserting itself 
 
 A third progress, which is a progress rather in 
 hope than in fulfilment, is some bond of agreement 
 and co-operation among the great Christian nations 
 of the west, which may tend to diminish wars, and 
 
112 The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 to raise the weaker members of the commonwealth 
 of nations. That there have been great wars in our 
 time is true ; but the difference between these wars 
 and those of the last century is this, that in the last 
 century men fought for territory and power, and, 
 whether they gained these or lost them, the wars 
 were simply evil ; whereas in our day, every war has 
 been for some great cause, and has resulted in good. 
 The Crimean war resulted in the destruction of a 
 tyrannical influence which weighed on all Europe, 
 the Italian war in the unity of Italy, the American 
 war in the abolition of slavery, the war of 1866 in 
 the expulsion of Austria from Italy and Germany, 
 the war of 1870 in the termination of the Napoleonic 
 regime in France and in Europe and the unification 
 of Germany, the war of 1877 in the liberation of the 
 nationalities oppressed by the Turks. But it is begin- 
 ning to be felt that war is a terrible evil of which 
 Christendom should be ashamed. We cannot con- 
 tentedly regard it, as was done in a famous sermon 
 from this pulpit, or as in the inscription on a gun of 
 Louis XIV., as ultima ratio regwn, the final argument 
 of kings. We want some method which will dispense 
 with bloodshed as the ultimate appeal of Christian 
 rulers. We have ourselves, in the Alabama Arbitra- 
 tion, made one successful essay in the better path, by 
 which war has been avoided and jealousy almost 
 eradicated between two Christian nations. And in 
 the Congress of Berlin we have again substituted 
 the arbitrament of argument for that of the svvord. 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 \Vliat do these things mean, but that Christian equity 
 and kindness are gradually coming to be acknow- 
 ledged, or in other words that Christ is asserting His 
 empire over the whole domain of political life ? 
 
 I have three remarks to make in conclusion. 
 
 I. What I have endeavoured to assert, the claim 
 of Christ to rule, nay, the actual progress of his 
 dominion, will seem to many overstrained. The 
 reason why this seems to be so is that you have 
 identified Christ with clericalism or ecclesiasticism. 
 It is not, I repeat, the rule of the clergy, nor the 
 supremacy of public worship, nor of the thought of 
 another life, nor of theology, nor of the opinions 
 which have been commonly taken as Christian, that 
 we have advocated, but the supremacy of Christ, of 
 His spirit, of His righteousness and His love. 
 
 A book was published some fourteen years ago 
 which professed to be the history of rationalism in 
 Europe. It showed how one by one various spheres 
 such as those on which I have dwelt to-day had 
 liberated themselves from certain unjust or un- 
 reasonable ideas, which had for a long time domi- 
 nated in the name of Christianity. The equivocal 
 title of the work made it seem as though the process 
 which was described was the taking away of each 
 sphere in succession from under the dominion of 
 Christ, in the interest of the dominion of human 
 reason. But there is no conflict between Christ and 
 human reason. What has been called the sweet 
 reasonableness of Christ is as applicable to all 
 H 
 
114 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 these spheres as it was to that of Judaic morals. 
 The process which was described was really the 
 winning back of each sphere in succession from 
 childishness, or ignorance, or injustice, or prejudice, 
 or from a mere belated conservatism which had 
 clothed itself w^ith the Christian name, to Christ 
 himself, who is human reason in its noblest form. 
 If Christianity is to be identified with what in a vague 
 manner is called clericalism, it must perish ; or, since 
 it is imperishable, it must clothe itself in a new form 
 more like itself But if clericalism means all that was 
 combated in the history of rationalism, it is really 
 un-Christian in the highest degree. It is the voice 
 of Christ, not that of a secular politician, which is 
 saying to Europe Clericalism — that is the enemy." 
 Over the prostrate body of such clericalism as that 
 Christ is advancing to the empire of the world. 
 
 2. The dominion which we claim for our Lord is 
 not a restraint, but a stimulus. We who are the 
 children of Christian Constitutionalism have learnt, 
 a little earlier than the other nations, that government 
 is not restraint but the free expression of the life of 
 the society. We are expecting in our rulers, and 
 finding in some few of them, a leadership in works of 
 utility which free our commerce, and facilitate the 
 expansion of industry, and promote temperance and 
 thrift and knowledge. That which we expect in our 
 rulers we find in Christ. " I am a King," He said, 
 ''because I bear witness to truth, and all truthful 
 souls follow me." When we say that Christ is King 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 in each of the spheres on which we have touched, we 
 do not mean that these spheres are to be subjected 
 to some external power, but that each of them, by 
 the free development of its proper principle of life, 
 is to become more and more a field for the exercise 
 of truth and love. St. Paul said, "Whatever gift we 
 have, let us luait upon it,'' that is, let us exercise it 
 it according to its proper development — " whether 
 ministering, let us wait on our ministering : or he 
 that teacheth, on teaching ; he that ruleth, let him do 
 it with diligence," and so with the other functions of 
 the Christian life. So we may say, whatever sphere 
 of life you move in, fill that sphere according to its 
 own need and strive after its proper virtue and excel- 
 lence, and you will make it Christ's. 
 
 And thus we do not want merely to negotiate a 
 strained concordat between Christianity and other 
 spheres of life, but to bring to bear upon even,- 
 sphere an elevating and redeeming influence. Our 
 Christianity must not be content to be found barely 
 compatible with human progress. It must take the 
 lead. It must bear the flag at the head of the 
 advancing column. It must have an appropriate 
 message for ever}- class of men. It must appreciate 
 art as art, knowledge as knowledge, literature as 
 literature, politics as politics. It must urge them 
 to excellence. It must set the highest standard 
 before them. It must welcome every new fact that 
 is laid bare, every new invention, every production 
 of art, every extension of commerce, everj^ great 
 H 2 
 
1 1 6 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 literary work, every development of political freedom. 
 It must do more; it must call for these incessantly, 
 and stimulate men in the search for them. It must 
 shew its Christ-like love for men by leading them on 
 to triumph. 
 
 3. This reign of Christ of which we have spoken^ 
 the reign about which His last injunctions were given 
 in the forty days between Easter and Pentecost, 
 must be enforced in Christian teaching. We have 
 been too long at the threshold, thinking how salva- 
 tion may be won and sin forgiven, too little in the 
 Palace itself where Christ reigns. The difficulty 
 which meets us everywhere when we seek to bring 
 the world under Christ's authority is to infuse the 
 higher motive where so much is inert, and there is 
 such a tendency to sluggishness and even to revert 
 to some former and lower type. But it is to this that 
 Christian teaching must apply itself It must treat 
 mankind as having become the subjects of Christ's 
 redemption, it must assert His reign in detail over 
 each sphere in which He is King. A former age 
 produced the Religio Medici. We must have in this 
 age the religion of art, the religion of science, the reli- 
 gion of the drama, the religion of trade. The problem 
 for the ministers of Christianity lies here, to make it 
 effective in all the walks of life in which a man 
 moves. If dogmas trouble you, let dogmas alone 
 for the time. But your life must be lived here and 
 to-day ; and if it is to be in the right it must be 
 inspired by Christ's spirit. Learn to say to your- 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 117 
 
 self, " All that I do, I do for God in gratitude for 
 His fatherly love." When your eyes open to duty in 
 the morning, bring your duty before Him in prayer, 
 and resolve with His help to do your duty well. In 
 your more speculative moments, when your thoughts 
 take a larger range, bring your conscience still to 
 Him, and consider this question chiefly, "What is 
 God showing me to be true and right?" This will 
 be to you a sustaining power to bear you above des- 
 pondency and keep your aim true and your energies 
 vigorous. And by so doing you will serve that 
 service which is perfect freedom, and further that 
 reign under which is no bondage, the reign of human 
 and Christian excellence, which is the reflexion of 
 the Divine perfection, to bring about which Christ 
 died, to ensure which he reigns for ever. 
 
1 1 6 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 literary work, every development of political freedom. 
 It must do more; it must call for these incessantly, 
 and stimulate men in the search for them. It must 
 shew its Christ-like love for men by leading them on 
 to triumph. 
 
 3. This reign of Christ of which we have spoken,, 
 the reign about which His last injunctions were given 
 in the forty days between Easter and Pentecost, 
 must be enforced in Christian teaching. We have 
 been too long at the threshold, thinking how salva- 
 tion may be won and sin forgiven, too little in the 
 Palace itself where Christ reigns. The difficulty 
 which meets us everywhere when we seek to bring 
 the world under Christ's authority is to infuse the 
 higher motive where so much is inert, and there is 
 such a tendency to sluggishness and even to revert 
 to some former and lower type. But it is to this that 
 Christian teaching must apply itself It must treat 
 mankind as having become the subjects of Christ's 
 redemption, it must assert His reign in detail over 
 each sphere in which He is King. A former age 
 produced the Religio Medici. We must have in this 
 age the religion of art, the religion of science, the reli- 
 gion of the drama, the religion of trade. The problem 
 for the ministers of Christianity lies here, to make it 
 effective in all the walks of life in which a man 
 moves. If dogmas trouble you, let dogmas alone 
 for the time. But your life must be lived here and 
 to-day ; and if it is to be in the right it must be 
 inspired by Christ's spirit. Learn to say to your- 
 
The Supremacy of Christ. 
 
 117 
 
 self, " All that I do, I do for God in gratitude for 
 His fatherly love." When your eyes open to duty in 
 the morning, bring your duty before Him in prayer, 
 and resolve with His help to do your duty well. In 
 your more speculative moments, when your thoughts 
 take a larger range, bring your conscience still to 
 Him, and consider this question chiefly, "What is 
 God showing me to be true and right.?" This will 
 be to you a sustaining power to bear you above des- 
 pondency and keep your aim true and your energies 
 vigorous. And by so doing you will serve that 
 serv^ice which is perfect freedom, and further that 
 reign under which is no bondage, the reign of human 
 and Christian excellence, which is the reflexion of 
 the Divine perfection, to bring about which Christ 
 died, to ensure which he reigns for ever. 
 
IV 
 
 ©lertton ani privilege in EeUgiou* 
 
IV. 
 
 (Skttmx anlr pn'bi'Iege in ajleligiom 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford^ November 2, 1879.) 
 
 "That we should be a kind of first-fruits of His creatures." — 
 James i. 18. 
 
 Among the antagonisms which it is the function 
 of Christianity to destroy, and which I have made it 
 the special object of my sermons here to attempt to 
 abate, there is none deeper than that which springs 
 from rehgious privilege. It is impossible to deny 
 that religious privilege exists. Men are not placed 
 on an absolute equality. There have been chosen 
 nations, and there are chosen souls, such as those 
 whose memory was celebrated in yesterday's festival 
 of All Saints. The Christian Church is chosen from 
 the rest of mankind. The clergy have a pre-emi- 
 nence within the Church. There are individuals who 
 through special advantages or special endowments 
 attain an eminence which those differently placed 
 cannot possibly attain. And the assertion of this 
 has at times had the effect of filling the possessors 
 of religious privilege with pride and contempt of 
 others, while it has aroused in those less privileged a 
 sense of injustice, a bitter resentment, and a rebellion 
 
122 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 against the Divine decree. Where is the charm 
 which will exorcise these evils and vindicate the 
 ways of God to man, and turn the galling sense of 
 inequality into that in which we can rest content — a 
 diversity of endowment for a common service ? It 
 is to be found in the belief consciously held and 
 worked out, that the purpose for which we are called 
 is not to be select and separate, but to serve others, not 
 to be a peculiar treasure in the sense in which the 
 Jews were apt to apply these words to themselves, 
 but the first-fruits of God's creatures ; that the end of 
 election is not our personal happiness, nor even our 
 personal holiness, but that we may be the channels of 
 good to mankind. 
 
 Let us set before ourselves the antagonism which 
 we desire to abate. We are Christians and believe 
 that Christianity contains the saving truth for indi- 
 viduals and mankind ; but this may so be asserted 
 as to breed mere self-complacency in us. It is said 
 that the old British Church did nothing to evangelise 
 the Saxons because the possession of Christianity was 
 the peculiar treasure which gave them the pre-eminence 
 over their adversaries. It is said that the Boers of 
 South Africa, who pride themselves in their posses- 
 sion of the Bible, have used this pre-eminence to 
 encourage in themselves a destructive and mur- 
 derous contempt for the heathen around them. A 
 similar spirit often lurks unexpressed amongst others 
 than the Boers who boast of the Christian name. 
 Again, Christianity springs from Judaism, and " Sal- 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 123 
 
 vation is of the Jews." But He who spoke these 
 words had nothing more constantly at heart than 
 to do away with the enmity founded on the rehgious 
 privilege of the Jews, an enmity so deep that to St. 
 Paul the abatement of it was the grand mystery of 
 the Gospel. And in our own day the assertion of the 
 Jewish revelation has often been used to dim the sense 
 of God's universal Fatherhood, and consequently of 
 man's universal brotherhood. The assertion, again, 
 of the divine nature of our Lord is often the cause 
 of stumbling, because it seems that it draws away 
 the divine from all else, and absorbs into itself the 
 vital sap of the Divine Spirit which should quicken 
 the rest of the race and its leaders. So, too, the 
 position and privileges of the ordained ministers of 
 Christ may be so asserted as to make them the ex- 
 clusive channels of grace, and to close up all other 
 channels of divine influence : and both at home, and 
 still more abroad, the alienation of clergy and laity 
 becomes a source of disquiet and of hatred. And in 
 the individual life, and that of religious societies, can 
 we say that Pharisaism and self-righteousness are 
 dead } Is it not rather the tendency of every 
 religious movement to separate its sincerest vota- 
 ries from their fellows, to make them into a coterie 
 in which their own privileges become exclusive, and 
 their own peculiarities the essence of religion, and 
 injustice is done to the convictions and spiritual 
 position of others? We might multiply examples; 
 but enough has been said to place the evil clearly 
 
124 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 before us. How can it be combated and eradi- 
 cated ? 
 
 It is of no use to deny religious privilege, for it 
 exists. To deny the pre-eminence of Christianity, or 
 the divinity of Christ, to make the religion of Israel 
 merely one of many religions holding an equal rank 
 in the education of the race, to deny the principle of 
 ministerial power in the Church or the eminence of 
 individual elect natures, is contrary to fact and to 
 experience. Such an attempt to introduce a levelling 
 democracy into spiritual affairs, is, in that sphere, as 
 in politics, merely the reaction from the overstrain of 
 the autocratic or hierarchical principle. It is not the 
 fact that we are all alike in capacity, or disposition, 
 or opportunity. What we have to do is to accept the 
 existence of these distinctions, to admit that religious 
 privilege is a fact, to estimate its meaning, bearing, 
 and circumference, by the guiding light of a con- 
 viction of God's love and His redemptive purpose ; 
 but on the other hand to be aware of the danger 
 and abuse to which this principle is liable, and to 
 shew that the true religious privilege is simply the 
 opportunity of doing good, the means of ensuring the 
 ingathering of the harvest of which it is the first-fruits. 
 We may then make such applications of this principle 
 as will duly test and enforce it. 
 
 I. — It may be said that religious privilege is the 
 result of man's own choice. This man chose to 
 school himself to duty, or usefulness, or the dis- 
 charge of special functions, and another did not. 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 125 
 
 The former enjoys the distinction of a pre-eminence 
 in godliness and usefulness ; and it is his own doing. 
 But this will not account for all cases. Even in the 
 case supposed, who gave this man the force of will or 
 the power of perception which enabled him to gain 
 this pre-eminence ? And in a great many cases our 
 own choice has little to do with the matter. No one 
 would maintain that by any effort of choice or will 
 a Hindoo who had never heard of Christianity could 
 become a Chnstian. All the great leaders of Israel 
 confessed that it was not to their own doing that their 
 high position was due, but to God's sovereign choice. 
 We see a man who has gained a position of extra- 
 ordinary influence, and we ask how this has come 
 about. We see others who had equal abilities, equal 
 goodness, equal energy, who yet have never taken a 
 similar position. Whatever place we allow to men's 
 power of choice and will, we must ultimately fall back 
 on the " Providence which shapes our ends, rough 
 hew them how we will." 
 
 I do not purpose, as you may well believe, to 
 embark upon the question of free will and the divine 
 sovereignty. But I may point out that it is by no 
 means necessary to embrace either term in an absolute 
 way. We should be false to our consciousness were we 
 to deny that we have a certain power over our own 
 destiny and over the formation of our own character, 
 and that for this we may be judged by the ordinary 
 rules of human responsibility. But in these rules there 
 is nothing absolute ; our free will is strictly limited in 
 
128 The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 privilege is of many kinds, that it sometimes is 
 reversed in the course of Hfe, that men must be 
 judged according to their works, that the. last are 
 first and the first last. When we have made these 
 admissions, what remains of religious privilege is a 
 certain pre-eminence, like that of the elder brother in 
 a family, where all are treated impartially, and all 
 work for each other's good. 
 
 That this pre-eminence exists it would be useless 
 to deny. Indeed, we may say more. It seems to be 
 a necessary part of the construction of human society. 
 It has analogies in every department of human life. 
 We commonly say that religion came to us through 
 the Jews, art and intellectual thought through the 
 Greeks, law through the Romans, family life through 
 the Germans. Each of these implies a position of 
 privilege or pre-eminence in the nations who have 
 thus been the channel of good to men. And, simi- 
 larly, every invention has come to us through a 
 specially gifted and privileged inventor. Every great 
 movement in social or political life may be traced to 
 some individual or some set of men, who have been 
 privileged to be its originators. The diffusion of 
 truth is not by the equal instruction of all men at the 
 same moment, but by rings and circles of influence, 
 to which the privilege is given of recognising the 
 truth, and through whom it spreads and spreads till 
 it becomes the possession of all. Why should it be 
 different with religious truth and goodness } And if 
 not, then the doctrine of election and of spiritual 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 
 
 129 
 
 privilege is only according to the general law by 
 which the existence of men in society is ruled. 
 
 But it may be asked whether this fact does not 
 militate against the justice of God in the same way 
 as the old doctrine of election and reprobation. Is it 
 not a mere modification of that doctrme when we say 
 that some enjoy a special privilege which to others is 
 denied 1 We can hardly say this, unless our idea of 
 justice demands a formal and exact equality, or even 
 uniformity, in the construction of the world. Every 
 variety implies in some sense superiority or in- 
 feriority. But who would wish for a mere uniformity, 
 which would be the destruction of all that is inte- 
 resting, of all that is beautiful, of all emulation, of all 
 excellence } Who cannot see that to receive from 
 one another and to impart to each other what we 
 mutually lack, to win our way to whatever good we 
 are capable of through conflict and aspiration, is a 
 nobler thing than, on an exact level, to be the 
 recipients of an exact equality of advantages Why 
 should we envy those who have endowments above 
 our own, or despise those who have less t From the 
 one let us gladly receive, to the others let us gladly 
 impart. 
 
 Though we cannot deny the existence of religious 
 privilege, we may take from it all that is invidious, and 
 all that causes division, by pointing out that the true 
 religious privilege is to be pre-eminent in serving 
 others. The people of Israel, who are the type of the 
 possessors of religious privilege, were chosen, not for 
 I 
 
130 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 themselves, but that they might do good to mankind. 
 Their conflicts, their very aberrations, were the means 
 whereby they fulfilled God's purpose. The servant 
 of the Lord was often blind and deaf, but he taught 
 others still. And the loudest blame of the Old 
 Testament and the New is directed against religious 
 privilege when it assumes the form of selfishness, and 
 congratulates itself on its superiority. Then it ceases 
 to be privilege, and becomes the means, first of pride, 
 and then of falling. It is possible that the analogy 
 of the arts here fails us, for the elect of sculpture or 
 of painting may, perhaps, have his satisfaction to 
 himself ; but the more nearly we approach to things 
 human and divine, the more we find that no excel- 
 lence or pre-eminence can exist except under the 
 condition of imparting its best to others. The poet 
 may be lonely, but his aliment is the sympathy of his 
 kind. The discoverer in science or in medicine is 
 fired by the benefit he may bestow on others, and the 
 value of his discovery is to be measured by the power 
 which it has of being communicated. Religious 
 privilege, we may be sure, whether in the teaching or 
 the life, is nullified by the touch and taint of selfish- 
 ness. It is valid just so far as it serves the interests, and 
 as it becomes the heritage, of mankind. So long, indeed, 
 as men think of God's redeeming mercy as princi- 
 pally occupied in saving us from a penalty and 
 giving us happiness, election will still mean to them 
 an invidious preference in the distribution of favours. 
 But once let it become the settled conviction in our 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 131 
 
 own minds and in our preaching, that its object is 
 that expressed in the words, " That we may be 
 partakers of the divine nature," and this notion of an 
 invidious preference vanishes. For tlie divine nature 
 is that of unceasing, active, self-imparting love, which 
 works and suffers to save us. And the partaking of 
 this nature, the communion v/ith God, shows itself in 
 self-sacrifice for truth and right. What is there of 
 invidious privilege in being called to be a leader in 
 love, in sacrifice, or in sufi"ering } But such leader- 
 ship is the only one known to Christianity. There 
 may have been amongst those elect natures whose 
 memory in these two days of All Saints and All Souls 
 is dear to Christian hearts, some who have had less of 
 'the practical power which draws men to right, and 
 whose life was spent in meditation. But it was 
 always acknowledged that even the lives most 
 abstracted from the world were spent for the world's 
 benefit ; and the placing of All Souls' Day after 
 All Saints' associated with the blissful servants and 
 martyrs of Christ those unperfected natures who were 
 yet, through suffering, purging away their mortal 
 taint. This was but the superstitious form of a true 
 conviction, the conviction that the very essence of 
 saintliness is to be self-imparting. We can recognise 
 more than could the men of the dark ages that the 
 truly saintly life is not one spent in an efi"ort to 
 escape from or mitigate the punishments of another 
 world, but one spent rejoicingly in the present service 
 of God and man. But in all ages of the Church the 
 I 2 
 
132 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 divine nature has been recognised as the giving up 
 of self for the good of men. We value the saintly 
 recluse so far as his mortification and absorption in 
 God are genuine, and so far as his prayers are for the 
 good of mankind. Otherwise, when we have a suspi- 
 cion that an element which is unreal and selfish is 
 present, we can hardly repress our scorn. The men 
 who have lived for their kind, who have had the least 
 consciousness of mere privilege, who have aspired 
 (and aspiration implies a humbling sense of imper- 
 fection), these are the true elect, the possessors of 
 spiritual privilege, a privilege which, in various 
 degrees, may become the possession of all. 
 
 II. — We must apply and illustrate our principle 
 so as to test and enforce it. 
 
 I. I begin with that which occupies the chief 
 place in practical life and in Christian theology, the 
 call or appointment of Christ to be the head of all — 
 "That in all things," to use the words of St. Paul, 
 " He might have the pre-eminence." He is the elect 
 of the elect. In Him all other election has its rise 
 and validity. We are not here engaged with the 
 metaphysical questions relating to His pre-existence, 
 or His relationship to the Godhead apart from 
 humanity, but with the practical doctrine of His 
 pre-eminence over all mankind, and over all created 
 things. Is it not clear that it was a pre-eminence in 
 service, in devotion to the good of mankind } St. 
 Paul speaks of his being in the form of God only to 
 heighten the sense of His voluntary self-abasement. 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 133 
 
 He thought it not robbery to be equal with God — 
 that is, He did not grasp at that position as a selfish 
 advantage; but He made Himself of no reputation. 
 He emptied Himself. These words are but an echo 
 of those in which He Himself described His pre- 
 eminence. " Let the chief be he that serves, as the 
 Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to 
 minister, and to give His life a ransom for many." 
 How can the position of one who spoke thus of 
 Himself have become the subject of contention 
 among His followers, or the occasion of stumbling to 
 those without, except by a misunderstanding of His 
 claims, a misunderstanding also of the divine nature 
 which His character revealed t Do not all confess 
 Him to be the truest servant and benefactor of 
 mankind } Is not the conception of God which He 
 presents — that, namely, of a righteous Father, who is 
 incessantly working for our good — one which irre- 
 sistibly commends itself to all who have pondered on 
 His life and death } Why should we ban those who, 
 under whatever name, accept Him as miorally and 
 practically supreme, to whom His word is law, who 
 desire only to live in the spirit of His life ? And how 
 can that claim be the subject of contention which is a 
 claim only to a supremacy of self-devotion, a leader- 
 ship in the sacrifice of self for God and truth, for 
 right, and for love to men This is the supreme 
 religious privilege. Does not its very statement 
 command the assent of mankind } 
 
 And with this is closely connected the pre- 
 
134 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 eminence of faith in Christ, or in God as revealed in 
 Christ, which is, so to speak, the elect of Christian 
 graces, the artiaihcs stantisa ut cadejttis ecclesice. If faith 
 implied, as it has often been taken to imply, an 
 assent to a whole corpus theologies, to articles such as 
 those of the Athanasian Creed, to peculiar theories of 
 the Atonement, to miraculous histories, the assertion of 
 its unique importance might well, as it has often 
 done, excite derision, or vehement repudiation. But 
 if it be, as I have tried to point out, a sympathy 
 with the divine goodness which shows itself forth in 
 our Saviour's character, a communion of service 
 rendered to mankind, an aspiration which may exist 
 (as it did exist in prophets and righteous men of 
 old) in the form of a longing for a goodness unseen, 
 unrealised ; then I can hardly conceive how any one 
 can refuse to admit it, except where the selfish film 
 is but partially removed from the spiritual eye. Even 
 in their common judgments men hardly test one 
 another by any other standard than that of a har- 
 mony with the spirit which inspired the life and 
 death of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 2. Let us take next the pre-eminence of the 
 Jewish and Christian revelations which gives so great 
 a privilege to their adherents. To this privilege the 
 same principle must be applied. We vindicate, not 
 its exclusiveness but its supremacy. It is the first- 
 fruits, the prime, confession of God, the pledge that 
 the whole harvest of the confession of God through- 
 out the world is counted genuine, that in every nation 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 135 
 
 he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is 
 accepted of Him. This is a day in which fresh dis- 
 coveries are being made in the history of reHgions, 
 and each discovery brings to light not points of 
 difference but analogies and resemblances between 
 these religions in their best form and Christianity 
 itself. We are in the presence of a new science, the 
 science of comparative religion ; and men are found, 
 strangely enough, trembling lest the comparison 
 should diminish the claims of the religion in which 
 they have found their life. But if the resemblances 
 which are traced are genuine, we must welcome them 
 as pointing to a truer and a grander claim for Christi- 
 anity than that exclusiveness which has often been 
 asserted, the claim namely of standing supreme, 
 surrounded by supports and witnesses whose sound 
 goes forth to the ends of the world. It is the claim 
 to embody and complete whatever elements of truth 
 are found in the other religions. If Greece had its 
 heroes and demigods, what was this but a witness to 
 the divine in humanity which is realised in Christ ? 
 If Eg}'pt taught the divine in animal life, and Africa 
 the divine in inanimate things, is not even this 
 recognised when Christ is declared to be the first- 
 born of all the creation If the Vedas saw God's 
 power in Indra, the giver of rain, and Rita the 
 universal law, Christ tells, only in a nobler sense, of 
 the Father who makes his rain to descend on the evil 
 and on the good, of One whose will is eternal life to 
 His creatures. The self-sacrifice of Buddha finds its 
 
136 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 counterpart of devotion, its outshining sun of redemp- 
 tive hope, in the self-sacrifice of Christ. The rigid 
 monotheism and fatahsm of Mahomet stands out 
 purified in the teaching of our Lord as the unswerving 
 will of righteous love. And if the Persian and Egyp- 
 tian religions spoke of immortality, the Christian 
 presents to us as our goal an eternal persistence of a 
 life of purity. All religions have rendered some 
 service to mankind. The claim of Christ's religion is 
 not such as to deny, but to give validity to all those 
 strivings towards truth which we find in other religions. 
 Its claim is that it has rendered the chief service and 
 is still capable of rendering it. And its adherents are 
 the first-fruits of the harvest of the earth, not because 
 of outward advantages which flow from its possession, 
 but because and on the condition that they are occupied 
 in communicating to all men the blessings of which 
 they are the first possessors. 
 
 3. Our principle of supremacy or prerogative as 
 contrary to exclusiveness must be applied to Christian 
 leadership, and especially to the position of the 
 clergy. The ideal of a Christian clergy is that the 
 natural leaders of the congregation, those who are 
 shown by a natural selection to have been chosen and 
 endowed with special gifts for guidance and edification, 
 should be set apart ; in other words, that the gifts of 
 the Spirit, their call to the work, should be recognised, 
 and full opportunity given them for the exercise of 
 those gifts. They are priests, but in a community 
 every one of whom is a priest ; and priesthood to a 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 137 
 
 Christian means, if we follow the teaching of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, self-sacrifice for the good of 
 men. To harden this down into a formal ordinance, 
 to look at those only as priests and ministers who are 
 formally ordained by the imposition of episcopal 
 hands, to make the outward position, the outward 
 rite, the chief thing on which the spiritual life depends, 
 is to ignore the very genius of Christianity. The 
 external order is, indeed, necessary ; it is the ordinary 
 channel of grace ; it is right, as a matter of discipline, 
 that it should be maintained ; and our effort must 
 always be to make the outward or<iler correspond with 
 the inward fact. But we must recognise this, that the 
 Christian Church is not established for worship alone, 
 and that therefore the ministry of worship can never 
 comprehend all Christian leadership or priesthood. 
 Whether there will ever come a time when an out- 
 ward ordination will be bestowed on others than 
 those who lead us in prayer, who preach in -the con- 
 gregation and administer the sacraments, I do not 
 know ; nor can this be a very important question to 
 those who look below the surface of things. But of 
 this I am sure, that God has, by His Spirit, appointed 
 many holy orders in His Church besides that of 
 prayer and preaching, and that, whether we use the 
 words or no, vre must recognise holy orders of edu- 
 cators, of thinkers, of investigators of nature, of 
 artists, of professional men, and of political guides. 
 The order of the clergy may still be the chief among 
 the holy orders of the Christian Commonwealth ; but 
 
^138 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 it must be the first-fruits of the rest, not the exclusive 
 depository of grace. It must hold its pre-eminence 
 on the condition of self-sacrifice, and of imbuing the 
 other orders with the spirit which it has been the first 
 to receive. And in the supreme work of prayer and 
 instruction (for it will always be supreme), our effort, 
 as clergymen, should be, not to keep as much as 
 possible in our own hands, but to diffuse the gifts of 
 edification as widely as possible. There is no likeli- 
 hopd — we may well wish that there were — of our 
 services being no longer needed through Christian 
 knowledge being universally diffused, and every 
 society of men being bound together by prayer. But 
 the ideal promise of prophecy is, " They shall not teach 
 every man his neighbour, saying know the Lord, for 
 all shall know me;" and this ideal should be aimed 
 at now by drawing out all spiritual capacities, and 
 associating with us as many as the exigencies of 
 external order will admit. And above all, we should 
 be anxious that all who lead and teach should do so 
 in the spirit of self-sacrifice, which is, let me repeat, 
 the only true priesthood — tlie spirit which refuses to 
 separate itself from mankind, and to become a spirit 
 of clique, the spirit which longs to share all the good 
 which it contains at whatever cost to itself with the 
 widest possible circle. 
 
 4. And lastly, the principle of supremacy as 
 against exclusiveness is to be applied to the position 
 of religious men. To some it seems invidious and 
 even untrue to speak of any as specially religious 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. ^39 
 
 men. But the fact that some men are specially 
 religious can hardly be denied. Indeed, this has 
 appeared to some so evident, and to involve so great 
 a distinction, that they have held that some are called 
 to be religious men, while on the rest no obligation 
 rests to think of religion, since they have no capacity 
 for it. And one distinguished writer, vexed with the 
 phases of faith through which he had passed, has 
 contended that there are some spiritual natures who 
 might be called twice born, while the rest must be 
 content with some attainment of a more earthly 
 virtue. Between these extremes lies the truth. When 
 personal religion is deeply felt, it seems at first to 
 separate a man from others. No one, he almost 
 inclines to say, has ever seen things as I see, or felt 
 as I feel. What a new view of the world is opened 
 to him ! What discoveries of the great distinction 
 of evil and good ! What a light, revealing, like a 
 flash of lightning, all the moral world which before 
 was dim in its proper colours ! What a sense of God's 
 mercy in Christ ! What a longing for holiness, like 
 the first consciousness of a deep human affection ! 
 What a sense of responsibility, and of the vast issues 
 of eternal life and death ! What is this but being 
 separated, and called by the grace of God ? And can 
 you believe that all alike are thus separated } It is 
 not so. You find some few who have felt with you. 
 You dimly suspect that there are others. But beyond 
 these the world still seems to lie in the outer darkness. 
 But neither is that quite the case. There is a spiritual 
 
I40 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 nature as well as a moral in which all the world are 
 kin. The words and deeds in which it is expressed, 
 if only they bear the impress of true love, will not fail 
 to meet with a response. Often has that occurred 
 which is related of himself by a great soldier, whose 
 rough appearance seemed very unsympathetic to a 
 lady who gave him a book of devotion : — " She evi- 
 dently imagined," so he writes in his journal, " that 
 men like me have no thought of such things. But we 
 have." And many passages in the journal of that 
 great man tell of his consciousness of the great 
 struggle, as he terms it, between the evil spirit and 
 the good all through the world, and of the paramount 
 importance of allying ourselves with the good spirit. 
 There is no absolute line of separation to be traced. 
 The religious man has a vast pre-eminence in religion ; 
 but he need not think that others are wholly destitute 
 of it. Least of all need he sit passive until by some 
 convulsion of nature the hearts of men are changed. 
 If his religion be true, it will show itself, not only or 
 chiefly in those good qualities which make him 
 different from others, but in those which are simplest, 
 most obvious, most universal. His image is not that 
 of a Galahad urged by an ecstacy of devotion to 
 pursue the Holy Grail till he is lost to human sight 
 in regions where men cannot follow, but an Arthur 
 surrounded by valiant men, redressing human 
 wrong, and leading the way into the better land of 
 righteousness. 
 
 And this is true also in reference to the diversities 
 
Election and Privilege^ in Religion. 141 
 
 of religious opinion or culture which to some men are 
 so great a stumbling-block, and which have often 
 been so dealt with that they have hindered the 
 progress of true religion. Some have viewed these 
 differences as fundamental, and, taking sides in the 
 conflict engendered by them, have made all religion 
 to turn on the points of difference ; while others have 
 regarded the points of difference as so entirely un- 
 essential that they would obliterate them, and leave 
 to us only the pale and peaceful image of a colourless 
 religion. The principle I have advocated to-day 
 solves the difficulty. Each opinion, or sect, or school, 
 or church, if we look at it impartially, has at least 
 some element of good in it. Its distinguishing 
 feature is, at least in its origin, an inspiration, a reve- 
 lation of truth in some new aspect, to be dealt with 
 not only with tenderness, but with reverence, in the 
 spirit of the words *' Quench not the Spirit." But, if 
 it is to be fruitful, it must communicate itself, and 
 that not only to the first nucleus of specially called 
 disciples ; it must show its capacity of harmonising 
 with and inspiring the life of mankind. 
 
 A great responsibility rests upon those who are 
 introducing any new aspect of truth to the notice of 
 their contemporaries. Let it be granted that the 
 truth they have before them is pure and absolute, 
 that the discovery and assertion of it is their special 
 privilege ^nd high endowment ; yet it must not be so 
 asserted as to throw blame on the whole life of the 
 generation in which it emerges, or to grow into 
 
142 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 exaggerations which make it hardly recognisable, or 
 to dwarf the proportions of all other aspects of truth, 
 or to form its adherents into a narrow coterie, speak- 
 ing a language unintelligible to their brethren. The 
 possessors of truth must hold it under this condition 
 — that they make it intelligible, communicable ; that 
 their thoughts range in sympathy with their kind. 
 They are, in respect of their own way of thinking, a 
 kind of first-fruits. They are not to enter into a 
 closed room, and take the key from the door, while 
 they sit with their friends at the banquet of truth, 
 and mock at or sigh over the vulgar herd outside. 
 The mysteries of the Gospel are free to all mankind. 
 The door must be left wide open, and those within 
 must issue forth and welcome all to share their trea- 
 sure. They must not reach their point by overbear- 
 ing others or taking from them the truths, distorted 
 though they may be, on which till then they have 
 been leaning ; nor must they expect that the task of 
 convincing the world will be performed easily and 
 quickly by a few valiant words. But they may hope 
 that after a life of toil they may have the proud 
 consciousness that they have added to the sum of 
 true conviction, that they have been helpers of the 
 angels of God's mercy and truth in gathering in 
 the harvest of the earth. 
 
 What we need is a religion which will reconcile, 
 not divide; which will introduce a divine harmony 
 where hitherto there has been separation. I quote 
 here words which are not less needed now than when 
 
Election and Privilege in Religion. 143 
 
 they were first published by one amongst us tAvent}'- 
 four years ago: — "The God of peace rest upon you, 
 is the concluding benediction of most of the Epistles. 
 How can he rest upon us, who draw so many hard 
 lines of demarcation between ourselves and other 
 men, who oppose the Church and the world, Sundays 
 and working days, revelation and science, the past 
 and the present, the life and state of which religion 
 speaks, and the life which we ordinarily lead ? . . . 
 If in the age of the Apostle it seemed to be the duty 
 of the believers to separate themselves from the world 
 ^and take up a hostile position, not less marked in the 
 present age is the duty of abolishing in a Christian 
 country what has now become an artificial distinction, 
 and seeking by every means in our power, by fairness, 
 by truthfulness, by knowledge, by love unfeigned, by 
 the absence of party and prejudice, by acknowledging 
 the good in all things, to reconcile the Church to the 
 world, the one half of our nature to the other ; 
 drawing the mind off from speculative difficulties, or 
 matters of party and opinion, to that which all 
 equally acknowledge, and almost equally fall short of 
 —the life of Christ." 
 
 I only add to these eloquent words, the aim of 
 which must be unreservedly accepted, that the con- 
 summation to which they point cannot be attained 
 merely by ignoring the differences or distinctions 
 which have divided men ; but by giving to these 
 distinctions their legitimate place. That place is not 
 to be absolute, or supreme, or enduring, but to be the 
 
144 Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 means of impressing upon the whole community some 
 aspect of truth or goodness which they would other- 
 wise be tempted to forget. The Sunday is taken as 
 the first-fruits of the week, in order that it may 
 breathe the rest of God upon the world, 
 
 '* Till all both rest day and employ, 
 Be one Lord's day of holy joy." 
 
 The Church is called as an elect body, in order 
 that through it the whole world may become the 
 kingdom of God. The priesthood or ministry is to 
 be the means by which all are to become priests 
 and ministers through the diffusion of self-sacrifice 
 throughout the whole community. Let us so use 
 whatever privilege or pre-eminence, whatever dis- 
 tinctions of character, of culture, of discernment,, of 
 faith we may possess, not so as to emphasise or 
 perpetuate such distinctions, but so that whatever 
 is good in them may become the universal inherit- 
 ance, that the Christianity of our day may be the 
 first-fruits of a world which we are fellow-workers 
 with God in bringing back to Himself, through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
V 
 
 iffn'tical Ct/ousbt ana ^practical MM^txn^ 
 
 J 
 
V 
 
 Critiral Cftougbt anii ^Srartiral iHimsitrp. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford^ May 30, 1880,) 
 
 "Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity. And more- 
 over, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people know- 
 ledge ; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many 
 proverbs. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words : and that 
 which was written was upright, even words of truth." — EcCLES. xii. 8, 
 9, 10. 
 
 I WISH in this sermon to draw a lesson from the 
 Book of Ecclesiastes which is not very commonly 
 drawn — namely, the connection between critical 
 thought and practical ministry. I need not point out 
 that the Book of Ecclesiastes is tinged with critical 
 thought in almost every sentence. It has been called, 
 not wrongly, a sceptical book. The temper of the 
 writer is not that of the man who trusts, who readily 
 gives himself, but of one who examines, who looks 
 narrowly at each idea, each project ; one whose 
 monotonous refrain borders on despair: "Vanity of 
 vanities, all is vanity." It has often been observed 
 that this despair is not final ; men have pointed to the 
 words, "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole 
 matter, Fear God and keep his commandments, for 
 
 J2 
 
148 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 this is the whole duty of man." They have, perhaps, 
 gone as far as to note the kind of approval which the 
 writer gives, still in a semi-sceptical vein, to a calm 
 and hopeful beneficence. Cast thy bread upon the 
 waters and thou shalt find it after many days." But 
 what has rarely been dwelt upon is the effort evi- 
 dently made by the preacher in this last chapter to 
 show that he is speaking neither at hazard, nor only 
 in gloomy monologue, but that he has a distinct pur- 
 pose of edification in what he says. He insists that 
 with all his sceptical thought he yet is a preacher, one 
 who seeks to do men good by the use of earnest 
 words ; he declares that all his life long he was 
 occupying himself in teaching the people knowledge, 
 and that he did this strenuously, continuously ; and, 
 moreover, that he did not fling out his doubts with a 
 view to distress men, or in a way which might alienate 
 them from the truth, but that he sought acceptable 
 words, that which was honest indeed and upright, but 
 that which, at the same time, would convey the truth 
 sympathetically and congenially to his hearers. The 
 teaching which this passage suggests to us is this — 
 that critical thought is not necessarily unsympathetic 
 or forbidding, but that it has a real affinity with 
 those purposes of edification for which the ministry of 
 souls exists. We are apt to represent to ourselves this 
 critical thought as a dangerous being without a con- 
 science.. We talk of a remorseless criticism, of cold 
 and colourless reason, of negative theology. We con- 
 jure up the chilling spectre of a system or a spirit 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 149 
 
 which, careless of the pain which it inflicts, cuts up by 
 the roots the fair, fond flowers of hope, makes senti- 
 ment ridiculous and aspiration illusory, trips up each 
 effort before it has fairly started, and stunts all gene- 
 rous enterprise. That there is such critical thought as 
 this cannot be denied ; it may be that some men even 
 feel a cruel pleasure in the pain they inflict by its 
 exercise, just as some persons delight in scenting 
 heresy in the works of conscientious and earnest men. 
 But the abuse of criticism does not hinder its legiti- 
 mate use. Every faculty may be misused or may be 
 pressed to so extreme a point as to become danger- 
 ous, destructive, and self-stultifying. But criticism has 
 its proper place. What is it but the expression of 
 reason and of truth How can it interfere with efforts 
 to do good } If there is anything false, or one-sided, 
 or impracticable in such efforts, must it not be a 
 benefit to them to be corrected t If they contain an 
 element which is illusory, is it not necessary that the 
 illusions should gradually be brought to light 1 How 
 can an army advance without danger if it has no in- 
 telligence department } When the last word of criti- 
 cism has been spoken, it still remains true that the 
 object of life is love, and that the highest duty of man 
 during the span of his existence on earth is to minis- 
 ter to his fellows, and add to the sum of truth and 
 goodness among them ; and it also remains true that, 
 in seeking these things, faith and hope are his stimulus 
 and his guide. 
 
 I purpose to discuss this first, in general, and 
 
150 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 secondly in reference to the practical wants of the 
 present day. 
 
 I. — It is sometimes accepted as an axiom, and that 
 not by one side alone, that a theology which contains 
 much of negation tends to become no theology at all ; 
 that if you begin to touch the fabric of existing 
 beliefs, and to say, this is exaggerated, this is not 
 scriptural, this is expressed too strongly, this is not 
 so certain as you imagine, you are really meaning 
 to break down the whole fabric. An uncomfortable 
 feeling of uncertainty is aroused, and men begin to 
 feel as if all that was precious was being torn from 
 them. But, you say, " All that I am telling you 
 is true. Do you not admit that my criticisms are 
 just .'^ " When men are thus driven, they are inclined 
 to reply, " We cannot be troubled with arguments ; 
 we want to do good, to enjoy our religion, to preserve 
 the fabric of our belief and our life intact." Thus we 
 have an antagonism set up between the spirit of 
 criticism and the spirit of practical good. And this 
 putting aside of pious and practical aims is often 
 accepted as necessary by men of critical minds : or, 
 if they see the value of practical good, they hold their 
 critical faculties in one hand and their piety in the 
 other, so that the two do not come near each other. 
 There is a saying of a great critic of the origins of 
 Christianity, that criticism founds nothing, that 
 fanaticism alone is creative. If that were true, we 
 might well say, as that same writer has said with 
 reference to another subject, that God and nature had 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 151 
 
 deceived us : for what deception could be so great 
 as that our deepest affection should urge us on a path 
 which truthful criticism would show to be wrong ? 
 We may be sure that Christianity, the mother of all 
 reconciliation, contains within its capacious bosom the 
 connecting principle which will allay this apparent 
 antagonism, an antagonism which, if it be not 
 allayed, can hardly prove anything short of deadly. 
 
 It is not true that a negative theology is merely 
 and simply negative. Not only do .the widest 
 negations ever made by sane men leave room still 
 for the life of love and goodness to spring up, but 
 many negations are requisite in every age in order to 
 bring into due prominence the central truth on which 
 such a life is founded. If it be the fact that some- 
 thing of fanaticism has often been mixed with the 
 founding of great institutions, it is also the fact that 
 what the fanatical element has built requires to be 
 pulled down again and rebuilt upon a more solid 
 foundation. And it may be said with truth that the 
 greatest founders have been also the greatest des- 
 troyers. You must clear away the rubbish before 
 you can begin to build. Let us draw out these 
 propositions somewhat more fully. 
 
 I. There is an impression which is very com- 
 monly countenanced in religious teaching, that there is 
 more danger from the negation' of truth than from 
 the affirmation of error ; at ieast, that to detract from 
 truth is a much more dangerous thing than to 
 exaggerate it. It is a great mistake to compare two 
 
152 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 processes equally false, and to give the preference to 
 one over the other. Yet this is what we are con- 
 stantly tempted to do. We take some extreme, 
 exaggerated system, and say, " At least in this the 
 truth is confessed, while those who resist it are 
 denying the truth altogether." But it is at least 
 doubtful whether it is worse to deny the truth 
 altogether than to affirm it in a form which by 
 exaggeration perverts it. To take an extreme case, 
 which may* bring into relief what it is here sought 
 to enforce. Suppose yourself to have been living 
 amongst the worshippers of Moloch, and suppose 
 one bold man to have arisen and maintained that 
 there is no God ; you would hardly have thought 
 it right to assert that it was better to hold with the 
 worshippers of Moloch, because they confessed a God, 
 though a monstrous one. You would feel that in all 
 probability the man who under such circumstances 
 had the courage to call himself an Atheist was a 
 better man than the votaries of a God of cruelty ; 
 and you would remain of this opinion, notwith- 
 standing that it might be pointed out that the 
 worshippers of Moloch were supported by the 
 enthusiasm of a united people, and that their 
 enthusiastic belief was accompanied by self-devotion 
 and eager convictions, and the readiness to endure 
 as well as to inflict pain, and the building of magni- 
 ficent temples, and the collection of vast multitudes 
 at their religious rites. You would say, " The 
 affirmation of a cruel God is false and hateful ; 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 153 
 
 and he that denies the divine altogether cannot be 
 more false." The most extreme negation is really 
 the correction, often the needful correction, of the 
 extreme and untruthful affirmation. 
 
 What we have to deal with is, of course, a much 
 more subtle thing than this. But the principle still 
 holds, that exaggeration mars truth as much as does 
 negation. When superstitions grow up beside a 
 truth, they are like the parasitical growths of the 
 forests of South America, which appear to be parts of 
 the trees to which they cling, but encircle them and 
 overtop them, and in the end strangle them. l£ is 
 not true that you can have an important truth mixed 
 up with superstitions, and yet unimpaired. The 
 superstitions come to be looked upon as of equal 
 value with the truth, and the result is that first the 
 truth is degraded to the level of the superstitions, 
 and then the superstitions become everything, and 
 the truth well nigh disappears. When a negative 
 criticism comes in on a scene like this, and argues or 
 laughs away the superstitions, it seems, no doubt, 
 as if nothing were left. The Anthropomorphist monk 
 of the Egyptian desert, when he was told that the 
 Church of Alexandria had affirmed that we could 
 think of God otherwise than as having hands and 
 feet, exclaimed, " You have taken away, you have 
 destroyed my God." But in truth the negation is a~ 
 liberating process, and when criticism has done its 
 work, there is room, which there was not before, lor the 
 truth to arise and grow. The greatest negations have 
 
154 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 commonly had an affirmation which they presup- 
 posed ; and movements, Hke that of Protestantism, 
 which have a negative name, have really been the 
 reassertion of great principles. The old question, 
 " Where was your Church before Luther ? " might be 
 met with another, " Where were truth, and goodness, 
 and living faith, in the Church of the i6th century, 
 till Luther arose to revive and disengage them ? " 
 
 But it is said with truth that a certain superstition, 
 or extra belief, is often a kind of natural integument 
 of faith ; that there are illusions which are really 
 educational; that the husk and the rind are necessary 
 to the growth of the fruit. We may well admit this 
 as true ; but it makes the demand for criticism all the 
 more pressing. For that which is merely educational 
 is meant to pass away, the illusion must give place to 
 the reality. Men are apt to cling to the past, and 
 make much of the form after it has ceased to be real ; 
 and the function of criticism is to point this out, to 
 help the natural process by which the reason and 
 conscience of mankind by degrees emerge from their 
 childish integuments. 
 
 And even where negation seems barest, you may 
 often see that it is really directed against the integu- 
 ment which ought to pass away, not against the truth 
 which is destined to remain. There are many who 
 seem to be Atheists, while what they are really deny- 
 ing is not the existence of God but a peculiar pre- 
 sumption as to the mode of His existence. There is 
 a kind of mechanical conception of the operation of 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 155 
 
 the Deity, on which all religion is apt to be staked, 
 the conception of a God who interferes from without 
 with the orderly evolution of nature and humanity. 
 
 I see no trace of such interference," says the man of 
 science ; such a God as this is abhorrent to all our 
 experience." He seems to be denying God. What 
 he is really doing is to clear the way for a truer and 
 more living conception of the Divine operations, the 
 conception of a God who is immanent in His crea- 
 tures, and who works, in some manner beyond the 
 measure of our thoughts, in and through nature and 
 mankind. 
 
 It is true, again, that there are accompaniments of 
 faith which are harmless, perhaps indispensable. But 
 the danger is a real one that these accompaniments 
 come to be placed on an equality with faith and 
 virtue, and that, \vhen this comes to pass, the accom- 
 paniments are apt to remain in full vigour while faith 
 and virtue take the second place, and at last are 
 ignored. Our Lord pronounced a woe upon those 
 who, by tithing mint and anise and cumin, had 
 come to neglect the weightier matters of the law. 
 ^ He did not indeed forbid these smaller observances, 
 but He denied them any place at all in comparison 
 with judgment and mercy and the love of God. And 
 the voice of God Himself is as often heard in negation 
 as in affirmation. The commandments are almost all 
 negations. Thou shalt have none other God beside 
 me. Thou shalt worship no graven image. These 
 are the great negations of God, and from under their 
 
Thl Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 indispensable protest comes forth the great affirma- 
 tion, — Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
 thy heart. 
 
 2. Now, examine for a moment the statement 
 which is supposed to be historical — that critical 
 thought founds nothing, that fanaticism is needed 
 for all construction. Contrast with it that which 
 has been said above, that what has been built by 
 fanaticism requires to be taken down and recon- 
 structed. 
 
 Take the example of Mahometanism, which has 
 been one of the most stupendous creations of a 
 fanatical impulse that the world has even seen. 
 There was indeed an original truth at its base, the 
 assertion of the one supreme God alike against 
 heathen and Christian idolatry : but side by side with 
 this grew up the fabric of the all-conquering empire 
 of the Caliphs, of a sensual paradise, of a ritual which, 
 if not so complex as those of some parts of Christen- 
 dom, is much more binding and more superstitious, 
 and of a system of laws which, though but partially 
 moral, are all incorporated into the Divine. Does 
 any one now believe that this system can last, or that it • 
 enshrines any principle of permanent benefit to man- 
 kind } If some men cherish the hope that it may be 
 reformed, the fanaticism which pushed it forward is 
 the precise thing which prevents the fulfilment of 
 their hopes ; for a system which professes itself to be 
 divine in all its details must remain irreformable. 
 And IMahometanism is becoming a curse to all who 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 157 
 
 lie under its baneful shade ; a thing which is fast 
 growing impossible, and is doomed. 
 
 Take as another example the ascetic tendency 
 which developed itself in the Christian Church from 
 the fourth century onwards. It is said that it was a 
 needful protest against the immorality of the Roman 
 world. If it had been only that, its leaders would 
 have distinguished, like St. Paul, between the present 
 distress and the natural order of God's providence. 
 But they made no such distinction. They built upon 
 the fanatical belief that family life was an evil, or at 
 least an inferior state, that the common order of the 
 world must be given over to Satan, that all the joy, and 
 beauty, and refinement of life must be under a ban ; 
 and what they built had from the first quite as much 
 in it of curse as of blessing ; it was the parent of mis- 
 understandings and corruptions from which religion 
 is, even now, but slowly emerging ; and in process of 
 time it has become almost wholly mischievous. The 
 fanatical element, so far from being the strength of 
 Christian monasticism, has been that which prevented 
 its doing good, and has ensured its destruction. 
 
 You may see the same thing in respect of the 
 fanatical exaggerations of more modern times. In 
 the revolutionary mania in France, in 1793, some- 
 thing, no doubt, was founded — a system of forced 
 equality, combined with a hatred of all that bore the 
 stamp of the ancien regime. .But the fanaticism by 
 which this system was supported was not its strength, 
 but the cause of its ruin. It urged it into cruelty, 
 
The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 into public Atheism, into the violence of the Jacobin 
 and the Sans-culotte ; and when the reaction swiftly 
 came, there was great danger lest even the more 
 valuable products of the Revolution should be lost. 
 Or take the reactionary' mania which followed the wars 
 of the Revolution, and was expressed in men like 
 ]\Ietternich. ]Metternich had a system which for some 
 fifteen years dominated Europe, and which he believed 
 to be divine and permanent. But it was a fanatical 
 travesty of that spirit of godly order which it pre- 
 tended to represent. Was this fanaticism the means 
 of building up a permanent home for that godly 
 order ? On the contrary, his system fell to pieces 
 even during the lifetime of its author, and so far as it 
 endured, was an incessant provocative to revolution, 
 in which all that he held dear was endangered. 
 
 It may be true that mankind has hitherto ad- 
 vanced by means of antagonisms and fanatical exag- 
 gerations which have clashed with each other and, 
 like forces pulling slantwise from different sides, have 
 drawn on the central mass. W'e must not be hard 
 upon the past : we may say " The times of that 
 ignorance God winked at." But the time is come 
 when we must attend to the real progress of mankind, 
 and discountenance the fanatical exaggerations which 
 the past has bequeathed to us. The place of critical 
 thought must be re-asserted. There is a power in 
 moderation, and truth, and equity, which the world is 
 only now beginning to recognise. There is a reason- 
 able religion which eschews exaggeration, and which 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 159 
 
 is none the less the parent of a sober and earnest 
 piety. There is a faculty which is certainly not the 
 least Christ-like of our powers, which looks at both 
 sides of a matter, which puts aside what is extreme 
 and absurd, and acknowledges that, beyond all dis- 
 puted questions, the purifying and ennobling of 
 human life by the Spirit of Christ remains as the 
 great object of our efforts. Will it be said that Christ 
 was a fanatic ? Will it be said that even St. Paul was 
 one It is surely astonishing to find that there are 
 critics who still look upon St. Paul as a one-sided 
 partisan. Is it not he who said " Circumcision is 
 nothing-, and uncircumcision is nothing, but faith that 
 worketh by love " Is it not he who urged " Let 
 your moderation be known unto all men ? " The 
 Christian Church is the greatest of human institu- 
 tions. What student of its origin can say that it 
 owes its birth to fanaticism ? 
 
 3. But h^e we touch the kernel of the question. 
 In our Lord Himself we may venture to say, with 
 perfect reverence, that we find in its purest form the 
 combination we are seeking of critical thought with 
 pastoral activity. He was not indifferent or over- 
 mild. He did not accept things as they were. His 
 energy was spent not on promoting a pietistic acqui- 
 escence, but in the criticism of existing institutions. 
 He came to revolutionise the world. He cast a seed 
 amongst mankind which He knew would in its growth 
 produce enormous changes. And He set about these 
 changes with what we need not scruple to call a 
 
1 60 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 destructive vehemence. The upHfted scourge in the 
 hand of the Saviour expressed a true part of His 
 character. The invectives against the Pharisees 
 swept away a whole system of life with their scathing 
 criticism. And those who from a Pharisaic point of 
 view looked upon his teaching would see in it some- 
 thing even more negative than this. In all His 
 teaching on morals and religion there was not one 
 word about the obligation of the ceremonial law, or 
 the temple services, or the meetings in the syna- 
 gogues, with which the Jewish religion was bound up. 
 All this was simply ignored, and ignoring by a 
 winning and influential teacher is the surest form of 
 condemnation. It is, to use the phrase of Roman 
 law, the antiquation of that which is put aside. It 
 was this, no doubt, more than anything else, which 
 influenced the Pharisees to destroy Him. And then 
 came St. Paul, more trenchant and pointed in his 
 negativism, saying expressly that circumcision and 
 the law in its widest sense were absolutely indifferent ; 
 and not only so, but that they might become, if more 
 adhered to them, the very source of evil : " The 
 strength of sin is the law." If we place ourselves in 
 the position of Jews of the first century, we can 
 imagine how St. Paul seemed to them a violent revo- 
 lutionist. As such he appeared to the Judaizing 
 author of the Clementines. And yet it is certain 
 that the churches of St. Paul were not founded on a 
 violent, one-sided negativism. We have but to refer 
 to the earnestness of his efforts in the cause of con- 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. i6i 
 
 ciliation as shown in the collection for the poor saints 
 at Jerusalem, or in the controversy about the eating 
 of things offered to idols, to see that the picture 
 given in the Acts is true, and that that which St. 
 Paul was aiming at throughout was the spiritual good 
 of both sections of the early Church. He threw 
 himself on the side where the weight of his influence 
 was most needed, like a rhetorician who brings into 
 prominence that side of the question which most 
 needs to be impressed. But the rhetorician may still 
 be perfectly truthful, earnest for good in every sense, 
 while yet he applies himself specially to impress one 
 side of it alone. And St. Paul, while vehement in his 
 denunciation of Judaizers, was aiming as a faithful 
 pastor at the spiritual good of all. Deeper far than 
 any denunciation is the heart-felt desire : I pray 
 God that your whole body, and soul, and spirit may 
 be preserved blameless to the coming of Christ." We 
 may safely take our Lord and His chief Apostle as 
 our example in the attempt to combine critical 
 thought with practical ministry. 
 
 n. — Let us now come more to the facts of our own 
 day, and apply what has been said to our actual 
 needs. 
 
 In the present day critical and negative thought 
 has become a factor with which every teacher must 
 count. But it need cause us no alarm if only it is 
 sincere and reasonable. We may welcome it, if it be 
 such, as an ally in our efforts for the good of men. 
 
 Take an extreme case, that of one who calls 
 K 
 
t62 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 himself an Agnostic. He says, "I do not see that 
 we have light enough to affirm anything about God 
 or immortality." He points out that the arguments 
 on such subjects are derived from sentiment rather 
 than strict reasoning. He persists in leaving all the 
 great affirmations of the Christian creeds undecided. 
 We may quite admit that such a man can hardly 
 enter the Christian ministry, where declarations of 
 his faith are required of him such as will give con- 
 fidence to the congregation to which he is to minister. 
 But he may, nevertheless, earnestly desire to act 
 rightly and also to do good to men. Moreover, the 
 Agnostic may possibly see some sides of Christian 
 work more clearly than many who seem more certain. 
 He may, from the very fact that he is unable to 
 assert anything distinct about another world, appre- 
 ciate more fully the importance of justice and 
 goodness in this world. Nay, it is possible that he 
 may be of a genuinely humble temperament, and 
 may say to himself, " If it is my misfortune to be 
 unable to lay hold of God and immortality, I will 
 bear the uncertainty without murmuring ; if it is my 
 fault, I will endeavour so to act that better light may 
 come to me. If there be indeed nothing beyond, still 
 the moral side of the Christian life is the truest 
 standard that I can follow. Let me, like Christ, go 
 about doing good." Because Christian doctrines are 
 not matters of scientific certainty, it does not follow 
 that they cannot be held as matters of faith and 
 hope ; and Agnosticism still leaves room for faith 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 163 
 
 and hope : and it is in the region of faith and hope, 
 not in that of ascertained fact, that our salvation is to 
 be found. Special attention has been called of late 
 to the Reflections of the Emperor ]\Iarcus Aurelius. 
 We find in that book many thoughts of the kind I 
 have just expressed. He makes sure of nothing ; 
 only he assumes for the most part, with a kind of 
 childlike hopefulness, that the Power which rules us 
 is just and good ; and in the patient acquiescence in 
 the dominion of that Power, whatever it may be, and 
 whatever may be his own individual destiny, he sets 
 to work to purge himself of lust and anger, to be 
 humble, brave, gentle, compassionate, and to do good, 
 — an endeavour the success of which is proved by the 
 perfect correspondence of the history of his reign 
 v.dth the motives which his book reveals, and by the 
 twenty years' happiness which his career gave to the 
 Roman world. Let us not refuse the Agnostic who 
 wishes to do good, but welcome him as a fellow- 
 worker. 
 
 And are there not many who w^orship in our 
 congregations who all their life are perplexed vWth 
 doubts, like those expressed in the book of Eccle- 
 siastes, who feel that the affirmations of our creeds go 
 far beyond their convictions, and yet are attached to 
 our worship, not by mere custom, but by a sincere 
 longing to be good and to do good Shall we ban 
 them from our communion by exacting as a pre- 
 liminary condition that they must hold as unques- 
 tionable every fact narrated in the Bible or assumed 
 K 2 
 
164 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 as true in our services ? I cannot think that our 
 Lord would have made such a demand. I think He 
 would have said, If you cannot follow me yet so as 
 to trust yourself to me in regions beyond human ex- 
 perience, yet if you love that justice and goodness 
 which are indeed the divine nature, I count you 
 amongst those who are of the truth, who know my 
 voice, and are my true subjects ; come, go in and out 
 among my brethren ; in time you shall know more 
 of me, and I will lead you into realms of fuller 
 
 light." 
 
 Or, once more, take the case of a Christian 
 minister who cannot accept the perfect certitude with 
 which supernatural things are sometimes assumed. 
 Is he to say, " Since I have some doubts from time to 
 time, and the heavenly things are overclouded to my 
 view, therefore I must give up the ministry and cease 
 to teach the people knowledge?" By no means. 
 These doubts may, if rightly dealt with, keep him 
 humble and watchful. Nay, they may be the witness 
 that he is of so truthful a disposition that he dares not 
 go a hair's-breadth in affirmation beyond his convic- 
 tions ; and he may do more by his truthfulness in 
 the instruction of the people than others by their 
 assurance. Nay more, such a man may be really 
 conceiving divine things in a truer way than those 
 who feel a fuller assurance ; for these things are not 
 matters of exact demonstration which holds good for 
 all alike : they are matters rather of faith and hope, 
 v/hich by patience and spiritual apprehension grow to 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 165 
 
 a moral, but never to a scientific, certainty. And in 
 this life of patient hopefulness there are elements 
 which may, through human sympathy, come home to 
 men's souls more than the dogmatic confidence which 
 so often meets us even in good men, and so often 
 repels us. 
 
 The ministry of the Gospel is indeed one of joyful 
 confidence, and to those who are of a hopeful dispo- 
 sition such a temperament as that of the Ecclesiast, 
 or of the Apostle Thomas, appears uncongenial. 
 But, among the many gifts, all of which have their 
 functions in the perfect Christian body, we cannot 
 deny a place to such temperaments as these. Let 
 me trace out some of the benefits which the ministry 
 may gain from them. 
 
 I. As regards efforts for the amelioration of men. 
 The enthusiasm of Christian workers sometimes out- 
 runs moderation and prudence. It is hard for us to 
 hear a plan which we have set our hearts upon 
 questioned and criticised. Yet this criticism is very 
 needful ; for prudence and circumspection are 
 Christian graces. And even if such criticism is 
 discouraging, the discouragement may send us back 
 to search into the principles on which our proposed 
 action rests, and the plans we have formed : and if 
 we resolve to go forward, the questioning process we 
 have gone through will have tended to deepen our 
 convictions and to mature our projects. The Book 
 of Ecclesiastes is full of warnings to reformers. It 
 does not say to them, the world does not need 
 
i66 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 reform ; but it bids them reflect that there are 
 many things which are crooked and can never be 
 set straight, so that they may not fret at the 
 inevitable ; that he who would reform must lay 
 his plans well and count the cost, else he will bring 
 himself and his projects to ruin : it bids him 
 remember that things are not always so bad as 
 they look ; and that they will often right themselves 
 if left alone ; above all, that, come what may, he 
 must not redress wrong by wrong, and that the 
 spirit of rebellion against authority must be resolutely 
 suppressed. Who can say that such warnings are 
 not needed, or that if listened to they will do other 
 than conduce to the efficiency of the reformer's 
 efibrts ? And who is there who knows the beneficent 
 works of Christians in the present day who does not 
 know also that they often fail for lack of the criticism 
 of which we have spoken ? This criticism "may serve 
 to enlighten those who work, and to direct and 
 concentrate efforts which wo.'^d otherwise run to 
 waste or injure those whom they are meant to benefit 
 The whole question of the relief of the poor, with the 
 fields of effort lying beside it, affords a good illustra- 
 tion of this process. The easy benevolence which 
 prompts the prodigal giving of out-door relief under 
 the poor law, the impulsive kindness which gives to 
 beggars in the streets and to the poor in their homes 
 without reflecting on the moral and social result of 
 the gift, have produced misery and degradation and 
 immorality from which no one can see the issue; and if 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 167 
 
 the feeling which prompted these gifts is to be called 
 a Christian one, much more truly must that be called 
 Christian which aims at enlightening and directing 
 relief, so that it may reach those to whom it will do 
 real permanent good, the thoughtful and critical 
 spirit which has produced a better administration 
 of the poor law and has established the societies for 
 the organisation of charity. 
 
 2. Christian teaching needs emphatically the 
 exercise of this critical spirit. In the exposition of 
 the Scriptures how vast are the advantages which 
 have been gained by the critical handling of the 
 Bible during the last 300 years ; how much more 
 complete a source of edification have the sacred books 
 become ; how much more real they have become by 
 becoming more human ; how much more clearly does 
 the character and work of Christ stand out ; how^ 
 much better is our prospect pf dispelling illusions and 
 needless controversies. In Christian teaching all the 
 fuller extension and ,application of Gospel truth lies 
 in that sphere in whicn the critical spirit can operate 
 as a regulating power. It is well to preach the 
 elejpientary truth of the forgiveness of sins ; but to 
 guide men with careful judgment into a holy life is 
 better. To fan their hopes of immortality is right ; 
 but so also is it right to show them how to live as 
 Christians here. It is a Christian thing to lead men 
 in prayer and praise, and to preach to them ; but still 
 more is it a Christian thing to induce them to conse- 
 crate their common life, day by day, to justice and 
 
]68 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 purity, to steady and unselfish labour. If a sceptical 
 and desponding temperament sometimes drives us 
 back from immortal hopes or from the joy of uplifting 
 prayer, it may serve to make us appreciate more highly 
 the sanctity of plain duties, to work out the problem 
 of life by finding the moral equivalents of those high 
 spiritual feelings to which for the time we cannot attain. 
 
 3. As regards the Christian spirit, much of the 
 religion of our day is tinged with an unreal sentiment 
 and evaporates in exaggeration ; much is tainted 
 Avith clericalism. If we feel these evils strongly, how 
 can we help longing that they may be purged out by 
 that which the prophet called " The spirit of judgment 
 and the spirit of burning." And when the unreality 
 and the clericalism are exposed and recognised as 
 evil, if men should feel for a time a certain mistrust of 
 all high spiritual effort, yet the same sober spirit may 
 come in and say, "The blessed life is still open before 
 you, and Christ is still its source and His spirit pre- 
 sides over its destinies. Love must be encouraged, 
 social good must be pursued ; the backward classes 
 must be raised, the degraded nations of mankind 
 must be instructed. Education, temperance, sanitary 
 welfare, knowledge, art, refinement, political justice, 
 must be pursued. In these also religion lies ; by 
 means of these, which are truly Christian efforts, the 
 world may be won to God." 
 
 I entreat those who love Christ not to be alarmed 
 by the critical questioning spirit that is abroad, but to 
 look upon it as at least a possible ally of the practical 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 169 
 
 ministry of the Gospel. Even when it is in the ex- 
 treme, and when we cannot join with those in whom 
 it is over-active, we may yet recognise in it a whole- 
 some antidote to the opposite extremes of exagge- 
 rated assertions, of hypocrisy and of unreality. But 
 when it is not thus extreme, and we can find a point 
 of contact with its possessors, let us welcome it as a 
 necessary element of the Christian life. Let us submit 
 ourselves, our views^ our plans to its influence. Let us 
 pray not only that our faith may be increased and our 
 zeal abound, but that, by the pruning process of criti- 
 cism, our faith may be sobered and our zeal well di- 
 rected. So the questioning spirit may help us to do 
 more good. 
 
 The present day is one in which the spirit of per- 
 secution is dormant, if not dead. No one has the in- 
 tention of provoking the persecutions for mere opinion 
 which even in recent times have agitated the Church. 
 It is not indifference that is the cause of this, but 
 rather the growing belief that differences, doubts, even 
 denials are often the expressions of the deepest con- 
 viction. The Church, I think, is unwilling to forego the 
 benefit which it may gaiii from spirits of a more criti- 
 cal or sceptical tone ; and every one now is at liberty 
 to suj^mit his thoughts to his fellow-churchmen in 
 frank exchange and without fear of blame, so long as 
 they see that this is done with sincerity, in a Christian 
 spirit, and with a wish to do good. Let us seize on 
 the happy opportunity, while the dogs of war and con- 
 troversy are asleep, to draw together those tendencies 
 
lyo The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 which ought to be friends, though they have been so 
 long parted that they are assumed to be natural 
 enemies — the spirit of patient and laborious criticism, 
 and the spirit of patient and laborious pastoral ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 And I entreat also those who are themselves 
 prone to critical inquiries, and are of a somewhat 
 sceptical temper, not to allow this to draw them away 
 from Christian usefulness and pastoral activity. It is 
 quite certain that among the practical people of Eng- 
 land to whom duty and faith are real, the more liberal 
 ideas in theology never can establish themselves unless 
 they are found to result in some distinct moral and 
 religious good. And for this we do not require to 
 invent some new system. The regular parochial 
 .system of our Church, which embraces every English- 
 man who lives within the parochial boundaries, and 
 freely invites him, without any curious inquiry into his 
 special tenets, to act as a Christian, and to join in 
 good works for the benefit of all, lends itself most 
 readily to this combination of a less dogmatic theo- 
 logy with earnest pastoral activity, if only it be ad- 
 ministered in a liberal and hearty spirit. But there is 
 in many persons who are of a critical temper a ten- 
 dency of mind which may be likened to low spirits in 
 the physical organisation, a tendency to give up hope, 
 and with hope to give up effort. You have lost your 
 illusions, you say, and do not expect all the good 
 which many excellent men in their innocence antici- 
 pate. No, not all the good ; but will you give up the 
 
Critical Thought and Practical Ministry. 171 
 
 game, and let all the evil come ? You cannot do all 
 good, but you may do some; let the sense of frequent 
 failure not make you despond, but stimulate you to 
 aim at excellence. You may never attain your ideal ; 
 but to aim at it elevates all your attempts. When you 
 have learnt that all is vanity, you may still see that 
 there are many such vanities which are well worth 
 possessing, nay, which are indispensable, though they 
 may be temporary. They are shadows, dreams, illu- 
 sions to those who seek selfish enjoyment in them ; 
 but they have a reality hid within them for all to 
 whom truth and virtue are paramount. As you lay 
 hold on them with the resolution to use them as God 
 meant them and not otherwise, they will grow more 
 firm in your grasp, for the very sacrifice and the effort 
 of seizing them makes them real ; and you will find 
 that in the discovery of truth, and in the practical 
 ministry to the wants of your fellow-men, life recovers 
 the reality of which a too-restless criticism would by 
 itself have tended to deprive it. 
 
 And if not to the critic himself, yet to the Church 
 and the world at large, the pruning and negative 
 process may liberate the truth, and intensify the zeal 
 with which it is preached. Let the thought of a 
 distant mechanical God disappear ; the immanent 
 God, the Spirit, will be all the more felt living through 
 the creation, and through our souls. Let the over- 
 weening estimate of the element of public worship dis- 
 appear ; the sober and chastened worship whose words 
 are few will be all the more a worship in spirit and in 
 
172 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 truth. We may have a shorter creed to expound, but 
 the simple doctrine of a Divine love which has saved us 
 will stand out, as it has done in all reforming periods, 
 the more brightly. We mxay theorise less about the 
 person of Christ ; but the image of His character, the 
 reality of His life and His divine self-sacrifice will 
 grow more intense and vivid. We may not distract 
 our hearers by the preaching of disputed difficulties, 
 but this will set us the more earnestly upon expound- 
 ing the life of faith and duty, and applying Christian 
 principle to the whole circle of human affairs. We 
 may assert less about the future, whether here or 
 hereafter ; but we shall see and take part in the 
 process by which the kingdoms of the world are 
 becoming the kingdom of God and of Christ, and the 
 sounder and soberer assurance will grow in us more 
 and more that the life which is spent for the good of 
 others is in itself divine and jmmortal, and that, as we 
 have some experience here of a God of love working 
 in us and making us work for others in communion 
 with Him, we and those for whom we labour shall 
 live to Him beyond the grave. 
 
VI. 
 
VI. 
 
 {PreacJud before the University of Oxford, February 19, 1882.) 
 
 "An holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices." — i Peter ii. 5. 
 
 The Apostle's doctrine of the universal priesthood of 
 believers has been commonly maintained as a nega- 
 tive rather than as a positive assertion. It has been 
 used to controvert the idea that there is in the Church 
 a sacerdotal order. The object of the present sermon 
 will be to set forth the positive meaning of it, and to 
 draw out its practical consequences. 
 
 The memorable words in which Bishop Lightfoot 
 opens his essay on the Christian ministry present a 
 good instance of the negative use of the doctrine. 
 Almost every clause of it is a negative in its bearing, 
 if not in form. " The kingdom of Christ," he says, 
 not being a kingdom of the world, is not limited by 
 the restrictions which fetter other societies, political 
 or religious. It has no sacred days or seasons, no 
 special sanctuaries, because every time and place 
 alike are holy. Above all, it has no sacerdotal 
 system. It interposes no sacrificial tribe or class 
 between God and man, by whose intervention alone 
 
The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 God is reconciled, and man forgiven." He does, 
 however, glance, before dismissing the subject of 
 universal priesthood of believers, at the positive 
 aspect of it. In the original idea of the Church, he 
 says, ''every member of the human family was 
 potentially a member of the Church, and, as such, a 
 priest of God. The influence of this idea on the 
 moral and spiritual growth of the individual believer 
 is too plain to require any comment ; but its social 
 effects may call for a passing remark. It will hardly 
 be denied, I think, by those who have studied the 
 history of modern civilisation with attention that this 
 conception of the Christian Church has been mainly 
 instrumental in the emancipation of the degraded and 
 oppressed, in the removal of artificial barriers between 
 class and class, and in the diffusion of a general 
 philanthropy, untrammelled by the fetters of party or 
 of race ; in short, that to it mainly must be attributed 
 the most important advantages which constitute the 
 superiority of modern societies over ancient. Con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, the idea of a universal 
 priesthood, of the religious equality of all men, which, 
 thourh not untaught before, was first embodied in the 
 Church of Christ, has worked, and is working, untold 
 blessings in political institutions, and in social life. 
 But the careful student will also observe that this 
 idea has been very imperfectly apprehended ; that, 
 throughout the history of the Church, it has been 
 struggling for recognition, at most times discerned in 
 some of its aspects, but at all times wholly ignored in 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 177 
 
 others ; and that, therefore, the actual results are a 
 very inadequate measure of its efficacy, if only it 
 could assume due prominence, and were allowed free 
 scope in action." This idea, which the Bishop says 
 has been imperfectly apprehended," I wish, with 
 those who hear me, to endeavour to apprehend, and 
 to see what its efficacy would be if it had the due 
 f prominence given it of which the Bishop speaks. 
 
 A few words must be said as to the application of 
 the word Priest, and of sacrificial language generally, 
 to the life and duties of Christians. The New Testa- 
 ment is the reality, the Old is the shadow. The 
 institutions of the Jewish law were special and limited 
 forms, which were assumed for the time, by great 
 principles, of which the fulness is disclosed in the 
 Christian dispensation. The names which denote 
 these special and transitory forms may be either 
 restricted to these forms themselves, or may be ap- 
 propriated to the full principles disclosed in the later 
 age. It is certain that to the writers of the New 
 Testament, the word Priest, when not applied to the 
 sacrificial functionaries of the Jews, implied a spiritual 
 function of every believer. It never once is applied 
 by them to the officers of the Christian community. 
 It did not summon up to their minds the ceremonies 
 •of public worship, but the acts of common life. And 
 this mode of speech became habitual with the early 
 fathers. These fathers, says Bishop Kaye, used a 
 language directly opposite to that which counts the 
 New Testament use of these words as merely meta- 
 L 
 
178 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 phorical. "They regarded the spiritual sacrifice as 
 the true and proper sacrifice, the external sacrificial 
 act as merely the sign and symbol." In modern 
 times, while the word sacrifice, in its true spiritual 
 sense, has passed into all the languages of Christen- 
 dom, the word Priest is no longer used as the 
 Apostles and the early fathers used it : and we might 
 be contented to discard the word, and to speak in t 
 more common language of serving God, and doing 
 good to men in God's name. But perhaps the high 
 religious sanction which we desire to vindicate for the 
 functions of common life will be best kept before our 
 mind if we use the words Priest and Priesthood ; for 
 we desire to represent the true life distinctly as a 
 life of consecration. 
 
 We have to speak first of the recognition of the 
 priesthood of all believers, secondly of the exercise of 
 this priesthood. 
 
 I. — The powers involved in the idea of priesthood 
 are to be recognised as present throughout the Chris- 
 tian community. This will appear if we take sepa- 
 rately the functions in which priesthood is shown, 
 sacrifice, absolution, and blessing our brethren. To 
 each of these we must give an entirely spiritual sense, 
 and one in which it may at once be seen that every 
 believer can take part. 
 
 I cannot doubt that the root idea of sacrifice, that 
 which was struggling for recognition throughout the 
 long development which found its culmination in the 
 sacrifice of Christ, is contained in the words, " Present 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 179 
 
 your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, 
 which is your reasonable service." This found an 
 outward expression in many forms under the old dis- 
 pensation. I\Ien gave to God in contrition or in 
 deprecation of evil, or in gratitude, or (as in the whole 
 burnt-offering) as a token of their absolute conse- 
 cration to Him. But the spiritual idea of sacrifice is 
 brought out again and again, in words such as those 
 of the 51st Psalm, The sacrifice of God is a broken 
 spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou 
 wilt not despise.'' In the new dispensation, in con- 
 formity with the whole New Testament teaching, the 
 inner principle is unveiled, and is left to work itself 
 out freely in a life consecrated to God. The priest- 
 hood of Christ and of His followers combined is 
 expressed in the fullest manner in the words of His 
 high priestly prayer, " For their sakes I sanctify 
 (dedicate, or consecrate, or offer) myself, that they 
 also may be sanctified (dedicated, consecrated, or 
 offered up) through the truth." He who thus conse- 
 crates himself is a priest in the only true sense ; and 
 of a life so consecrated ever}^ act is a sacrifice. We 
 may follow this up by showing how this principle of 
 self-sacrifice acts in various parts of human life. The 
 renunciation of gain or pleasure for God's sake, the 
 cheerful acceptance of a lower life when we see that 
 the higher is beyond our reach, the readiness to take 
 pains for others, the conscientious discharge of 
 common duties, self-denying rectitude in commerce 
 and society, the unselfish pursuit of scientific truth, 
 L 2 
 
i8o The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 frankness, generosity, patriotism, are all forms of the 
 same principle, acts of spiritual sacrifice. Prayer and 
 praise, whether private or public, are also expressions 
 of it, so far, but so far only, as they sum up the 
 sincere outgoing of the heart and life. 
 
 The second function of priesthood is absolution ; 
 and this rriust mean to us, a right moral judg- 
 ment, with the comfort and assurance which this 
 enables us to impart. Can we doubt that in this 
 power every believer shares } If we appeal to the 
 words of our Lord, " Whose sins ye remit, they are 
 remitted unto them," it is certain that these words 
 were spoken not to any class within the little 
 Christian community, but to them all, to all the 
 band, " the number of whose names together were 
 about 1 20." If we look at the two cardinal instances 
 of the exercise of the power which the New Testa- 
 ment presents, the absolving of the Gentile Christians 
 from the yoke of the .law with all the offences 
 incident to it, the absolving of the sinner at Co- 
 rinth from his excluding guilt, in each case it is 
 all the members of the Church by whom the sentence 
 is pronounced. Or if we reason upon this power, 
 and say that its meaning is to be found not in 
 any formal sentence (since no man can change the 
 facts or make the guilty innocent), but in a spiritual 
 insight which perceives and declares the guilt or the 
 pardon, we see that this is a purely spiritual act, 
 dependent not on hierarchical position but upon spiri- 
 tual capacity, and, therefore, to be exercised by all 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. i8i 
 
 according to their actual spiritual power. The sen- 
 tence or, if we so choose to call it, the sacrament of 
 absolution can be only the imparting of the assurance 
 of forgiveness ; and this assurance each believer can 
 impart according to the measure of his faith, his 
 spiritual insight, and his power of sympathy. 
 
 The last priestly function is the duty of blessing 
 our brethren in God's name. But blessing must be 
 taken by Christians as applying not to formal words 
 of blessing, but to the conveyance of spiritual peace 
 and happiness. Who will say where these may be 
 obtained .■^ We have gained them, surely, as often 
 from the humblest as from the most learned, from 
 children as from mature Christians, from laymen as 
 from clergymen, from women as from men, in the 
 family as in the place of worship, through letters and 
 printed words as through the voice and presence of 
 those we reverence. 
 
 II. — Thus far I have dealt with the first part of the 
 subject, the recognition of the universal priesthood of 
 believers. But it is of far greater importance to point 
 out how this recognition may be made practical, or, 
 to use again the words of Bishop Lightfoot, what 
 would be "its efficiency if only it could assume due 
 prominence and were allowed free scope in action." 
 
 I. The overweening importance attached to public 
 worship and to the clerical functions connected with 
 it would be reduced, and that of the other priestly 
 acts of believers would largely incr-ease. There is a 
 tendency of our thoughts, as soon as religion is spoken 
 
j82 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 of, to fly at once to the scenes of public worship. 
 And, if we observe a conversation on religious topics, 
 if not in University circles where men reason more 
 deeply, yet in ordinary society, in newspapers, and in 
 political discussion, we almost always find it eventuate 
 in questions relating to congregational worship. The 
 hollowness of this tendency has appeared to some 
 minds of great insight so fatal, that they have wished 
 or believed that public worship might cease altogether 
 in the Church. Heinrich Heine said that the one 
 thing which was detestable among Jews, Protestants, 
 and Catholics^ was public worship. Even Richard 
 Rothe, one of the most large-minded and the most 
 deeply pious of German theologians, declared his con- 
 viction that the Church as an organisation for worship 
 was destined to dwindle and pass away. It is not 
 necessary to share these gloomy views ; for, however 
 much we may recognise the work of the Spirit in 
 other departments than that of public worship, all 
 who work in those departments need a common 
 meeting-place and the maintenance of common 
 aspirations, and a constant renewal of their common 
 relations to God, and this is specially found in public 
 worship. Blessed^ thrice blessed, on these accounts, 
 will the assembling of ourselves together ever be to 
 the great majority of Christians. But where public 
 worship and its appurtenances take a place which is 
 hardly less than all-absorbing and exclusive, it is 
 necessary to point out the bad results which flow 
 from this usurpation. A great part of the Christian 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 183 
 
 instruction and energy which ought to flow forth in 
 fortifying the common Hfe of men is absorbed in the 
 details of worship and the attempt at over-minute 
 definitions of rehgious truth apart from human life. 
 Men are divided from each other on questions about 
 rites, or about the ministers of worship, instead of 
 being united in the great bond of the Christian life. 
 And the clergy, who are the ministers of public 
 worship, come then to be a supreme and exclusive 
 class w^ithin the Christian body : so that when men 
 speak of the Church they much more frequently mean 
 the clergy and the system of worship than the re- 
 deemed community and its life. The remedy for this 
 is not so much to be found, as was done to some 
 extent at the Reformation, and as has been done 
 exclusively in the revolutionary movements of this 
 century, in abasing the status of the clergy, but much 
 more in raising up the functions of the laity. It is 
 not the clergy, even according to the celebrated 
 saying of M. Gambetta, but clericalism which is the 
 enemy ; and its antidote is that the w'hole Christian 
 body should learn to say " We are the Church," and 
 that every man in his vocation should feel that he is 
 exercising a sacred ministry as truly as the man who 
 leads in prayer or speaks from the pulpit. 
 
 This view of the Christian Church may rightly be 
 called the primitive view. The ministries of the early 
 Church, as research into its origins has shown us, were 
 formed not for worship but for government. Worship 
 was left free under the shadow of the rule that all 
 
184 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 should be done decently and in order. The ruling 
 elders were not, as some of the early Presbyterians 
 supposed in the theory combated by Hooker, excep- 
 tional officers apart from the rest, but the whole body 
 of the elders, some of whom, as some of every class, 
 took part in the conduct of divine worship. If it is 
 thought by some that some of these conclusions have 
 been overdrawn, still I think no one can doubt that 
 the organisation of the early Churdies was framed 
 rather for administering the affairs of the whole com- 
 munity as a society for mutual well-doing than for 
 the conduct of common worship. 
 
 The whole community, then, in the whole range 
 of its life to which government and mutual well-doing 
 apply, is, in the Christian sense, a kingdom of priests ; 
 and every act of a faithful life is a sacrifice. And if 
 we carry this principle to its furthest consequences, 
 we cannot doubt that the ideal of the Church which 
 should be kept before our eyes is that of an all- 
 embracing community, endowed with supreme 
 sovereignty, and exercising all its functions in the' 
 name and spirit of Christ. It may be wrong to 
 suppose that we can act on this supposition as 
 though this state was already attained. But of this 
 we may be sure, that there will be unrest and dis- 
 traction in human affairs until the Church is 
 sovereign, that is, until the nation and the state 
 are distinctly pervaded by the Christian principle. 
 The attempts to bring this about which have been 
 made at various epochs, by Savonarola at Florence, 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 185 
 
 by Calvin at Geneva, by those who organised the 
 EngHsh state before and at the Reformation on 
 the assumption that it was one great spiritual whole 
 or body politic, and again the attempts of the 
 Puritans to found colonies in x\merica, where they 
 could live their whole life according to the laws of 
 God, have all met with but very partial success. 
 But they have been in the right direction, and it 
 must be the task of our age to press on in that 
 direction and to dedicate the whole life of man to 
 God. 
 
 2. But, leaving this great ideal, we may apply our 
 principle to the state of the Church as we find it now. 
 There is the inner circle of Church life, that is, the 
 organisation for worship, instruction, and beneficence, 
 which is conducted under the leadership of the paro- 
 chial clergy. The object of all who have to do with this 
 should be not to overlay the system with the sole, auto- 
 cratic, separate priesthood of the clergy, but, on the 
 contrary, to evoke, to the fullest extent, the germs of 
 priestly consecration and sacrifice, the service of the 
 individual members of the parochial Church. We 
 must train them to this service. And, where we see 
 any disposition for this service, we must recognise 
 this with the heartiest readiness, as the spontaneous 
 movement of the Holy Spirit, a sacred thing which 
 we have no right to interfere with. For order's sake, 
 we must, of course, take care that the various activi- 
 ties do not clash with one another ; and we must, 
 from time to time, guard men against movements 
 
1 86 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 which are eccentric and are found by experience to be 
 unprofitable. But to make any system of our own or 
 any traditional type the measure of God's work, to 
 insist that all that does not agree with such a system 
 shall cease or be driven out, what is this but to 
 thwart and to quench the Spirit of God ? Instead of 
 trying to live men's lives for them, we must foster 
 any original power developed in them. We must 
 gladly see them form institutions for Christian pur- 
 poses, and be prepared to let such institutions be 
 moulded according to their conceptions rather than 
 our own. It is this which gives so real a spiritual 
 force to the proposals which are made from time to 
 time to give definite constitutional power to the laity 
 in parishes. So long as such proposals are looked 
 upon merely as a drag upon the clergyman, they are 
 weak. But when they partake of the true character 
 of Christian constitutionalism, which means the com- 
 bining of the free spiritual power of each into the 
 energy of the whole, they have with them the strength 
 Avhich comes from a consciousness of the divine in- 
 dwelling. They mean the drawing forth in men's 
 souls of the powers of counsel and care for their 
 fellows, the unsealing of fountains of precious waters 
 of beneficence which have been pent up, the opening 
 of mines from which the golden store of Christian 
 service, which has hitherto lain useless, may come 
 forth to enrich mankind. 
 
 3. This suggests another aspect of our subject, the 
 respect which is due from us to those religious move- 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 187 
 
 ments and religious communities which have formed 
 themselves spontaneously amongst us. However 
 much we may have been vexed at times by extrava- 
 gance or contentiousness, or dogmatism, or the mere 
 spirit of dissidence, how infinitely precious is anything 
 of original Christian conviction ! When we sojourn 
 in France or in Italy, where a servile Church system 
 has made religion frivolous and reasonable faith all 
 but impossible ; or even in Germany, where officialism 
 has so cramped it, we are almost impelled to cry out, 
 " Oh! for one movement of dissent in any of its forms, 
 of the free convicticn with which the Christian Anglo- 
 Saxon has learnt to take his stand in the presence of 
 earth and heaven, not bowing down to an authority 
 he cannot believe in, but obeying his conscience as 
 supreme." All forms of such honest conviction,, from 
 the Roman Catholic, who bears a lifelong ban 
 amongst us rather than give up his faith, to the 
 Theist, who dares not utter more than the first 
 article of the Creed (nay, have we not said at times, in 
 our more hopeful moods, to the Agnostic, whose dumb 
 faith fears to go beyond the truth, even in affirming 
 the existence of God ?), from the sedate worship and 
 full-formed system of respectable and political non- 
 conformity to the noisy confusion of the Salvation 
 Army, have made some real contribution to the 
 spiritual life of the race, and must be respected and 
 valued by us as phases, however strange, of the 
 universal priesthood of believers. 
 
 4. We may here touch upon the sense of in- 
 
]88 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 dividual independence as intimately connected with 
 the idea of priesthood. The priest is consecrated by 
 God Himself. No man may interfere with him. It 
 is a kind of sacrilege which we commit when we 
 overbear individual conviction, or interfere beyond 
 the just limits with individual action. St. Paul 
 guarded his independence even against the supposed 
 authority of the most intimate disciples of Christ ; 
 and in this, as in his call to be a Christian, he is an 
 example to all believers. Great boldness was the 
 characteristic of the early Christian teachers ; and it 
 ought to be so with us. Will it be said that boldness 
 has run into excess in our time, and that the wildest 
 opinions are often maintained 1 I reply, first, that 
 wild assertions made by those who do not care to 
 harmonise the various parts of human life are hardly 
 worthy of notice ; but, secondly, that when we have 
 fully framed our views, in humility and with prayer, 
 the best service and sacrifice that we can render to 
 God and to man is to speak out our thoughts with 
 boldness, and to strive with energy to give them 
 effect. And the best influence we can exert upon 
 other men is that which will foster in them such 
 convictions, and win for them the opportunity of 
 expressing them. Mere recklessness of assertion 
 or impulsiveness of action is, indeed, a great danger, 
 and it is generally swayed by an unconscious 
 deference to some assumption which has not been 
 fathomed, but is taken on authority. That is not 
 true independence. But thorough and original con- 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 189 
 
 viction, evei though its expression is one-sided, is 
 always precious, and its ministry will very rarely be 
 unfruitful. Nor need this be original in the sense of 
 being strange. The most ordinary view of life, if he 
 who entertains it is sincere, is much more fruitful 
 than the most novel idea caught up at second-hand. 
 Let our effort be to realise, to appropriate ; let us act 
 because we feel and are convinced, and because we 
 see that what we are doing can be a channel for the 
 outflow of love. Let us never be ashamed of our 
 thoughts or our actions, nor of connecting them 
 distinctly with our allegiance to Christ. This will be 
 our truest sacrifice, a sacrifice which will not fail of a 
 reconciling effect upon our fellow-men. 
 
 5. With this independence we may connect the 
 sense of dignity. As the priestly consecration made 
 the commonest things holy, and rendered them the 
 channels of grace to others, so* every work that is 
 undertaken in faith becomes a holy offering and a 
 channel of good. There is nothing which gives a 
 deeper impression of the redemptive power of Christi- 
 anity than the teaching which St. Paul addressed to 
 slaves. He is not so anxious that they should obtain 
 external freedom, but much more that they should 
 view their service as rendered to God : " With good- 
 will doing ser\-ice as unto the Lord and not to men." 
 Li this way they were to show that, though outwardly 
 bondsmen, they were spiritually independent. Their 
 service became a ministry, a Christian sacrifice. And 
 it is in the same light that we are to view all our 
 
190 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 Christian life. Each of the various functions 
 which we fill is a priesthood ; the service which 
 we render in them is a holy sacrifice ; the materials 
 which we employ are sacraments and signs of the 
 spiritual act within. The student who devotes him- 
 self to the acquisition of truth, whose prayer is that his 
 mind may be sustained till he has acquired the know- 
 ledge which it is his duty to seek, is ministering in a 
 sacred office, and his writings, up from the simplest 
 college essay or analysis to the highest product of 
 genius, the outward record of the working of his spirit 
 within, are the emblems and signs of his ministry. 
 The trader who is determined to act honestly and is 
 conscious that his trade is the means of benefit to 
 others, and follows it with that object, is a minister of 
 God for their good, and the commodities with which 
 he deals are the outward sign of his honest\* and 
 his beneficence. The artist whose object is beauty is, 
 by purifying and ennobling our sense of beauty, doing 
 ser\^ice to God and man, and the works of his art are 
 the media by which his service is rendered. And if, 
 as we have been assured of late by a high priest of 
 art, we are not to measure works of art by an ex- 
 clusively moral standard, or to require that they 
 should read a religious lesson, yet the refinement and 
 the repose which they bring are part of our moral 
 nature; and the artist may justly feel that through his 
 works, as through a sacramental channel, priceless 
 blessinsrs mav flow to his fellow-men. I need not 
 point out that the same is true in the family where 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers. 191 
 
 every father is a priest by a kind of natural consecra- 
 tion, nor in the State where every ruler is a minister of 
 God for our good. The great want of our age is that 
 we should look at all these functions not as profane 
 and secular, according to t-he heathen and Jewish idea 
 which Christ came to banish, but as those in which 
 the service of God pre-eminently lies. There is the 
 true sacrifice, there the living priesthood, there is the 
 sacrament of our union, the real presence and the 
 body of Christ our Lord. 
 
 6. In our day, and especially in this University, 
 this is the aspect of Christianity on which it most 
 behoves us to dwell. It is an age of much movement 
 of opinion, and the dogmatic and sacerdotal systems 
 with which Christianity has been bound up in past 
 ages have lost much of their hold on mankind. 
 There is a demand on all sides for a religion which 
 shall be a life rathef than a system. It is true^ no 
 doubt, that all serious life inv^olves principles which 
 can be stated in a dogmatic form, and also that it 
 must have some system or polity in which to move. 
 But what is demanded is that the life should be 
 paramount, and dogma and system secondary ; that 
 is, that the free life of the spirit should not be 
 cramped either by statements or by rules ; that, so 
 far as statements are made, they should be made 
 with the recognition that they are attempts to 
 express a divine life which is beyond all expression, 
 and that they should be constantly tested by the 
 living experience of souls in contact with the divine ; 
 
192 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 and that Church systems should be sufficiently elastic 
 to give free play to the diverse action of the Spirit 
 which blows where it lists. Under these conditions 
 we may freely use the language and the institutions 
 bequeathed to us by the piety of former ages. But it 
 may well be that these may so change their form as, 
 for a time, to be hardly recognisable, or may even 
 undergo some eclipse. And what all who love Christ 
 should seek to do is to foster the religion of life and 
 duty as distinguished from a religion of acts of 
 worship ; for this is the sacrifice which all can offer. 
 And those to whom Church services have grown dim, 
 and sermons dull, may find — let us aid them in 
 finding — in conscientious research, or earnest political 
 discussion, in art, or in family and social intercourse, 
 or in the works of Christian philanthropy, a dogma of 
 the spirit, a ritual of life, through which the holy and 
 acceptable service can be rendered to God. 
 
 Education is advancing, and more and more men 
 are becoming able to instruct one another. The press 
 is a great engine which dispenses the pulpit from some 
 part, at least, of its work, and replaces the symbols of 
 Christian worship by the realities of life. The long- 
 drawn ritual of the middle ages, the many hours' 
 preachings and didactic prayers of the Puritan era, 
 found their reason, to a large extent, in the fact that 
 they were the means of popular instruction ; they did 
 the work of the school and the press as v/ell as that of 
 public worship. We all acquiesce in the change by 
 which the extra-ecclesiastical life has been enlarged, 
 
The Universal Priesthood of Believers, 193 
 
 and the intra-ecclesiastical life has been straitened. 
 How far is this process destined to go on ? That we 
 can hardly tell. But we can look at the question with 
 the utmost calmness if only the extra-ecclesiastical 
 life can become Christian and spiritual. On this 
 condition, let the process I have described go on ever 
 so far, it will only mean that the Church itself, the 
 body of believers, is rising to its true position, be- 
 coming conscious of itself and of its vocation ; that 
 worship is no longer confined to the sanctuary, but 
 spreading itself through the life of mankind ; that the 
 limited priesthood of the leaders of public prayer is 
 being exchanged for the universal priesthood of 
 believers. 
 
 Lastly, we pray for the progress of the Gospel, and 
 for the evangelisation of the masses in our towns. 
 How can we expect this to be brought about till, b)- 
 the recognition of the principle I am developing, the 
 latent powers of all believers are drawn out } The 
 great thing to be desired is, that righteousness, and 
 the fear of God, should pervade the community ; and 
 this can only be accomplished by the work of indi- 
 viduals helping one another, like the stones supporting 
 each other in the building. We should desire to see 
 centres of Christian influence multiplied on all sides, 
 sound principle and care for the spiritual welfare of 
 men working its way from heart to heart, from life to 
 life. We must teach men and women of all classes 
 that they are not to be mere hearers, nor Indiviauai 
 recipients of spiritual good, but sources of spiritual 
 M 
 
194 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 good to those who are connected with them. We 
 must say to them, "It is not the clergy alone to whom 
 the duty of religious influence is committed. You 
 yourselves are responsible for it. Take your part, 
 each as you can, in the works of Christian instruction 
 and beneficence. Let each be a priest in his family, 
 and in his trade or profession, and in the society in 
 which he moves, so that Christ may become the bond 
 of union to every company, the ultimate touchstone 
 and standard of appeal for all consciences, and for 
 every act." It is by this open system of living religion 
 which dwells in the fresh air that we shall summon 
 the breath to breathe from the four winds upon the 
 dead and the indifferent, that they may live. It is 
 certain that the co-operation of all, in all the 
 functions which they fill, is needed to effect the 
 purposes of our ministry. It is by this that the 
 promise may by degrees come to be fulfilled, that 
 all shall know the Lord from the least to the greatest. 
 The coming of Christ's kingdom in its fulness awaits 
 the recognition, and the practical exercise, of the 
 universal priesthood of his servants. 
 
VII. 
 
 ©Ob Immanent in i¥lan anir ^.ature. 
 
 M 2 
 
VII. 
 
 6oif 5mmanent in illan anir Mature* . 
 
 {Preached at Balliol College^ May 21, 1882.) 
 
 "God is a Spirit : and they that worship Him must worship Him 
 in spirit and in truth." — ^John iv. 24, 
 
 Who is there who has not at times been perplexed 
 when he has tried to think of God ? What is God ? 
 Where is He, and how shall we find Him ? When 
 philosophers speak of Him as the Great First Cause, 
 or the Infinite, and the Absolute, such words fall too 
 coldly on our ears and on our hearts to evoke any 
 earnest response. If we try to conceive Him after 
 the likeness of a man, we soon fall into unworthy 
 ideas or run counter to facts. We seize upon the 
 image of goodness presented in the human personality 
 of Christ, and say that " In Him dwelleth all the ful- 
 ness of the Godhead bodily." But that personality 
 has passed away from the earth, and a merely his- 
 torical religion becomes impossible to us. We seem 
 to be hemmed in by the difficulty of finding God. 
 Out of that difficulty a way seems to be shown us in 
 the words, " God is a Spirit." 
 
 That is the declaration which the Ascension and 
 Whitsuntide make. The form of the Son of Man 
 
198 The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 passes away, and the Spirit comes. We are no 
 longer to think of the Divine as confined within the 
 personality of a man, though that personality repre- 
 sents with the utmost vividness God in history. It 
 was expedient that that should pass away7and that 
 which was better, which was to come instead, was the 
 Spirit, the essential and final manifestation of God to 
 man — that which is the inner fountain of the Divine 
 life, that by which God makes Himself known, not to 
 the outer sense, but to the inner conviction and the 
 heart of man. This declaration is peculiarly appro- 
 priate to our own time, when much doubt is thrown 
 upon .the external mechanism of religion, whether in 
 its ancient documents or its present forms, but 
 when the spirit of religion is very far from being 
 denied, nay, is often felt and accepted far beyond the 
 limits of churches and confessions of faith. May we 
 not find that a God who is felt, and who becomes a 
 living power to us, though we can hardly express in a 
 logical statement what that power is, is more real to 
 us than a God fenced in all round by guarantees and 
 attested by historical documents t 
 
 For what is meant by saying that God is a Spirit } 
 First, God is an influence, a power which we feel 
 working upon us and upon the world generally — as it 
 has been said by a great writer of our day, A stream 
 of tendency," "A power that makes for righteousness." 
 But it would be wrong to insist upon such an expres- 
 sion as this as adequate ; for the comparison is some- 
 what dangerous which likens the chief power in the 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 
 
 199 
 
 world to a material and unconscious thing — a stream. 
 Whatever the supreme power is, He cannot be thought 
 of as destitute of mind and love. If we cannot take 
 the human mind and human love as wholly realising 
 the true conception of Him, it is because we must 
 conceive of Him as infinitely transcending these. He 
 cannot be less than our thought or our love, but in- 
 finitely more ; embracing these, but embracing a vast 
 circle of energy beyond them. We speak of man as 
 being essentially a spiritual being, and St. Paul leads 
 us to argue from the spirit of a man, which knows the 
 things of a man, to the Spirit of God, which knows the 
 things of God. But, just as we may think of a man as 
 the centre of influences which emanate from him, as 
 breathing forth upon the whole circle of his family 
 and friends an atmosphere of kindness, or refinement, 
 or knowledge, of which they all come to partake — ^just 
 as we speak of the spirit of a man's life, and the spirit 
 which he sheds around him, so we may think of God 
 as the centre of all the Divine influence v/hich quickens 
 and sustains, which comforts and encourages us, 
 which brightens the mind and gives fervour to the 
 moral affections, which combines all the forces of the 
 world so as not only to make but to work for 
 righteousness. The world is the vesture of the 
 unseen God ; its whole atmosphere is charged with 
 His presence. W^hosoever, in humble faith, and with 
 a heart which longs for truth and goodness, opens his 
 mouth and draws in his breath, that man is straight- 
 way filled, not with some vague influence only, but 
 
200 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 with all the fulness of God. The desire and the 
 power to do right which he acquires is none other 
 than the central force which animates the world. He 
 lives and moves in God. 
 
 The tendency of modern thought is to trace a 
 single power working throughout the universe ; to 
 presume that it is one force, constant, yet changing 
 its mode of action, by which man and nature alike are 
 swayed. Does not this suggest to us the mode of life 
 of the Divine Being, and of His relation to the 
 world } Is it not quite of a piece with that which is 
 meant by saying that God is a Spirit — that is, an 
 inner power, an influence, a life which penetrates all 
 things, and forms them at its will t It gives us the 
 idea of a God who is not far off, not working merely 
 from without upon His creatures, but within them, 
 the life of their life, the love of their love. The 
 writers on Christian evidences have often likened the 
 action of God upon the world to the action of a 
 mechanic or an architect on the material out of which 
 he makes a watch, or a steam-engine, or a building. 
 But this comparison fails in this point, that there is 
 no evidence of any such agent working upon the 
 world from without. Perhaps we may gain a more 
 living conception of God by speaking of Him as 
 the soul of the world, and comparing His action 
 to that of the vital power in man upon his body ; 
 or, in animated nature, to the action of the inner 
 principle of life upon the particles of matter which 
 make up the organism. That last is a constructive 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 
 
 20I 
 
 and an upholding energy, and gives us a truer view 
 of creation than the other. 
 
 Further, this thought of a Divine Spirit working 
 through us and through all things gives us a sense of 
 unity, and shows us how the discords without and 
 within us may be harmonised and all be brought 
 under the dominion of God. The love which we feel 
 to be our own true life is no longer thought of as a 
 peculiar endowment of ourselves, or of a few like our- 
 selves. It combines with the larger love, which is the 
 true life of the great family of man, and which centres 
 in Jesus Christ. And this love, again_, which is the 
 true life of mankind, has its source in the eternal 
 impulse of life which moves the whole universe ; and 
 thus we gain the assurance that that impulse also is 
 one of boundless love. The Word, which was made 
 flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, is He without Whom 
 nothing was made ; and that Word is God. Instead 
 of conceiving of the world as a series of separate 
 creations, and miracles, and interpositions, we may 
 conceive of it as a growth, or development, of which 
 God Himself forms the living and directing force. 
 
 What we are concerned with in preaching is the 
 effect of this belief in the Divine Spirit upon our lives 
 and consciences. In tracing this out, I will make use 
 of two words, both of them familiar to us, in which we 
 seem to realise the idea of a higher power, of a Holy 
 Spirit, combining with and giving energy to our own 
 — inspiration and aspiration. 
 
 I. We have been so much accustomed to think of 
 
202 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 inspiration as specially belonging to the writers of the 
 Bible that we fail to realise it as belonging to our- 
 selves. Yet St. Paul's teaching was that every 
 Christian was inspired ; and in our familiar prayers 
 and collects we ask for that inspiration w^hich makes 
 us do what is good, and may cleanse the thoughts of 
 our hearts. It is the consciousness that this inspira- 
 tion is working within us which gives us spiritual 
 power. The Christian doctrine is that the Spirit allies 
 Himself with every faculty of ours to quicken and to 
 strengthen it, and to work through it for good. Who 
 can refuse, without being false to himself, to listen to 
 the conscience by which he perceives right and wrong, 
 and is impelled to choose the one and avoid the 
 other Why is it, then, that conscience is so often 
 stripped of its due authority, that it grows languid, 
 and even perverted } Is it not because we do not 
 habitually recognise it as the chosen organ of God 
 within us If we accustomed ourselves to feel that 
 the voice which speaks to us there is His voice and 
 that the impulse towards good is His impulse, and 
 the faculty by which we discern good from evil is 
 the eye of God, must not the light by which we 
 see the truth grow constantly clearer, and the 
 sacred voice sound louder and louder, until its 
 dictates, or rather its drawings, would prove irre- 
 sistible } We imagine that, if the heav^ens could 
 open, or the ground cleave asunder, and a voice like 
 the trumpet of Mount Sinai could proclaim the moral 
 law in our hearing, we should at once and for ever be 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 203 
 
 scared from evil and impelled towards good. But 
 the true teaching bids us recognise God in none of 
 these so much as in the still small voice persuading 
 us, reasoning with us, saying, " This is the way, walk 
 ye into it," drawing out to our view the beauty of 
 goodness, humbling us because of our faults, leading 
 us to the fountain of repentance and forgiveness, con- 
 straining us by the power of love, bidding us go forth, 
 not with conviction only but with gladness, to do 
 right. And that voice we hear every moment, if we 
 will but listen to it. Let us acknowledge it as 
 supreme, as the voice of God within us. 
 
 We need not dwell on the objection that con- 
 science is often weak, sometimes perverted, and that 
 we cannot, therefore, trust it absolutely as the voice 
 of God. I do not think that any one acting with a 
 sincere wish to know truth and right, has ever gone 
 far wrong. We may easily be deceived if our 
 conscience only reflects our habitual standard of 
 duty, and we are closing our minds against fresh 
 light and truth. But the Divine inspiration of which 
 we are speaking may be tested, in distinction from 
 self-deception, by this — that it makes the conscience 
 not blind and fanatical but open-minded and progres- 
 sive. The Spirit is the spirit of truth, and guides 
 those into whom it enters into all truth. 
 
 The voice of the Spirit is spontaneous,, immediate. 
 It may, indeed, make use of many means, but none 
 of them is absolutely essential. It may speak to us 
 through historical scenes, or through the words of 
 
204 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 Christ or the Apostles, or through the prayers and 
 sacraments of the Church, or through sermons ; or it 
 may make use of things passing before our eyes, of 
 events in public or private life ; or, again, of thoughts 
 . suggested by study or by conversation. Through al) 
 these it may bring about conviction. But, by what- 
 ever means the truth may be impressed upon us, it is 
 the Divine Spirit which speaks through them ; and 
 when we are in contact with the truth itself, the 
 medium is of little importance. The influence of the 
 Spirit is like the electric current, which may pass 
 through many intricate coils, but conveys its force 
 and flashes its bright light with almost equal rapidity 
 whether the conducting medium be of the smallest or 
 the greatest length. It is not confined to any special 
 mode of operation, nor to any system, nor to any 
 class of men. It works upon all, though in different 
 ways and degrees ; and we can appeal with confidence 
 to the consciousness which all men have of its 
 quickening power, of the light which lighteth every 
 man. 
 
 It is not only as an enlightener of the conscience 
 that the Divine Spirit comes to us. His influence is 
 equally felt in our feeHngs and our actions. He 
 quickens all our powers. When once we are con- 
 vinced, and drawn towards holiness, our faculties are 
 all alive and sustained. The genial warmth makes 
 the life-blood circulate throughout our spiritual frame. 
 We gain quick affections, which fasten upon the good 
 and the noble everywhere. We have power to 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 205 
 
 deny ourselves, because our better self has been 
 aroused, and we come to feel a keener delight in 
 goodness and truth than in selfish pleasure. And 
 we are sustained in a persevering effort to reach the 
 goal of our spiritual desires. The Divine power 
 urges us across mountains and morasses, for we see 
 beyond them the light of our home. 
 
 This inspiration is also a social power. In the 
 general, it is true to say that the moral instincts of 
 mankind are right, and the people's voice is the voice 
 of God. The Church in all its branches and organisa- 
 tions is Divine. But we must not stop here. The 
 bonds of secular society are also Divine. Friendship 
 and love and marriage, family ties and those of 
 country, association in art and knowledge, the 
 organisation which exists for civil and political 
 objects, the school, the college, the city, the nation, 
 have all a Divine foundation ; for their object is that 
 which is most Divine, that union of spiritual beings 
 which constantly rises into love ; and love, says 
 St. John, is of God, for God is love. We may trace 
 inspiration yet more widely ; for human nature and 
 the material world can no longer be separated, and 
 the Divine Spirit and purpose can be seen in the 
 harmony which is made by their union. Nor need 
 we fear that we are thus tending to Pantheism, if we 
 keep firmly grasped the fact that the whole is one 
 great unity, and that the moral purpose is its essence, 
 its formal and final cause. There is nothing strange 
 in our having affinity with the brutes and the herbs, 
 
2o6 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 with the rocks and the waves, if we acknowledge one 
 Spirit which works through the whole creation till it 
 culminates in human morality and the cross of Jesus 
 Christ. The perception of this is one of the highest 
 effects of inspiration. It is nothing less than the 
 Divine thought inwrought in our minds, the Divine 
 order established in our renewed nature, the surest 
 witness that we are made in the image of God, the 
 spiritual mind by which we see each part of the 
 universe in its relation to its centre^ and evolving 
 itself under the Divine purpose towards complete 
 organisation and perfect harmony. 
 
 2. This perception, and the consciousness that our 
 nature is the special organ of the Divine Spirit, 
 begets in us a constant aspiration. Perhaps it would 
 not be an untrue statement of the doctrine of justifi- 
 cation by faith to say that we are saved by aspira- 
 tion. It is the special property of genuine Chris- 
 tianity not to be contented with the knowledge or 
 goodness which we have attained. The ideal truth, 
 the ideal goodness, lies ever beyond. If we take the 
 character of our Lord, to which alone as Christians 
 we can be pledged, we find there just enough to 
 stimulate the longing for holiness — not a law, not a 
 dogma, not a rule, but a Spirit : not detail enough to 
 make a model which we can copy, nor in the strict 
 sense an example which we can imitate, but an 
 expression of the Divine longing which uplifts and 
 redeems mankind, and which restores the broken 
 harmony of the world. By whatever means this 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 207 
 
 Spirit enters into us, it exerts an influence over all 
 our nature, which may rightly be called redemptive. 
 We learn to seek those things which are above. We 
 can perceive and express the best, the worthiest side 
 of things. Our own characters are ennobled by the 
 thought of what we may become ; our peculiarities 
 become serious bents towards special forms of good- 
 ness ; our bodily and mental powers are transfigured 
 into spiritual endowments ; our common pursuits 
 become part of the process by which we are trained 
 for the higher life beyond us ; our studies, part of the 
 culture by which a worthier state is attained ; the 
 tests and rivalries to which we are subjected, not in 
 education only, but all through life, become the 
 means of gauging our progress. And as we go on we 
 learn to take part in the redeeming process for other 
 men. We feel that it is not for ourselves alone that 
 we live and aspire, but by our sympathy we carry 
 others with us. For this, perhaps, is the highest form 
 of influence, not one man doing good to another, but 
 one holding the hand of his brother, as saying, " Let 
 us aspire together, God helping us, towards that 
 which is just and pure and true." 
 
 A second inseparable effect of this aspiration is 
 spiritual freedom. There can be no constraint where 
 there is conviction and fearless love of truth and 
 longing for goodness. So long as we are uncertain 
 which way to go, we walk in fetters, we hesitate, we 
 take a step and retrace it. You may observe this in 
 speech. Even a great orator halts when he is not 
 
2o8 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 clear as to his purpose. When you read aloud, if 
 you have not caught the drift of the writer, you read 
 slowly and doubtfully. But when the purpose is 
 clear, even a dull man becomes eloquent. So it is 
 with life generally. If your conscience is clear and 
 your resolution firm, you can think freely and act 
 boldly. And he that trusts that this world is all of a 
 piece, moving with one central impulse of which his 
 own spirit partakes, feels that he is embarked on the 
 central current, and that, whatever difficulties he en- 
 counters, they are but as the rocks which deflect the 
 stream, or, at most, but minor backwaters for which 
 he can make allowance. He can be calm, because he 
 is fearless ; and tolerant, because he knows that all 
 things make ultimately in the direction in which his 
 face is set ; and patient, for God waits long, and time 
 is generally one of the conditions of spiritual success. 
 
 A third effect of this aspiration is constant pro- 
 gress. If we know the direction in which we are 
 going, and are free from the constraint which waits 
 on ^T'lcertainty, we bend all our energies to reach the 
 goal. That goal for ourselves is holiness and the 
 image of Christ ; and the stages on the way to that 
 goal come to view one by one as intermediate objects 
 of our pursuit. We make progress, we may humbly 
 hope, in knowledge and in power as our faculties 
 become stronger ; and we make progress in ex- 
 perience and in opportunities of doing good as life 
 wears on. We can appreciate also the general pro- 
 gress of mankind, and associate ourselves with it; and 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 209 
 
 we may thus escape that melancholy condition into 
 which some of the greatest minds seem especially 
 liable to fall, which takes no pleasure in the increasing 
 mastery of man over nature b}' knowledge and inven- 
 tions and colonisation. We can feel a genuine thrill 
 at the emancipation of those who are downtrodden, 
 and the advance of education among the masses, and 
 the increase of wealth which enables the poor to gain 
 something of refinement. We can see that in 
 political progress there is involved a spiritual pro- 
 gress, the progress in the realisation of human 
 brotherhood. We can feel also that all true progress 
 is one, and that we advance in union with the whole 
 race of mankind under the impulse and direction of 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 Let us apply this, lastly, to worship. Aspiration 
 is the soul of worship, which is a constant rising 
 towards the object of our adoration. Our Lord said, 
 "They that worship the Father must worship Him in 
 spirit and in truth." St. Paul said, " We are the true 
 circumcision who worship God in the spirit." The 
 true worship is not the prostration of the body in 
 kneeling, nor even the prostration of the soul in dis- 
 tant adoration, but the yielding of our living powers 
 willingly and gladly to the Divine influence within us. 
 There is an expression of the great stoical emperor, 
 Marcus Aurelius. who perhaps came nearer than any 
 other non-Christian of the West to the Christian life 
 and spirit : " I reverence the God who is within." 
 That God has been full}' made known to us in Jesus 
 N 
 
210 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 Christ, and we can give a grander significance to this 
 expression. Our God is within us. Let us allow our 
 thoughts to be enlightened and our energies quickened 
 by the spirit of holiness — the unseen, constraining 
 power of righteousness — and we are practising the 
 true worship. As to the outward form, though it is 
 by no means unimportant, it is of far less account. 
 We must not consider that religion consists in church- 
 going, but must make a great effort to raise the whole 
 life to the dignity of worship, inspiring every part of 
 it with the aspiration towards God. There are some 
 who make much of religious services, and almost 
 seem to identify religion with them ; there are others 
 who think religious services have been overdone, and 
 Avho go so far as to tell us that there are those who 
 have begun to be real Christians from the time when 
 they left off attending Church. There are those who 
 have come from the universities to do Christian work 
 in town who have said that they felt as if in the former 
 no one had ever believed, and in the latter no one had 
 ever doubted, dwelling, no doubt, with exaggerated 
 weight on the fact that a certain number of students here 
 have thrown off the habits of public worship in which 
 they were brought up, and that the upper and middle 
 classes in London mostly attend the Churches. There 
 are those to whom the ordinary services are the very 
 nourishment of their spirits ; and there are those who 
 have felt, like our two great Christian poets, Milton and 
 Cowper, neither of whom in their later days attended 
 public worship, that tne outward form was a hin- 
 
God Immanent in Man and Nature. 211 
 
 drance to their communion with God. We have 
 again to say, " Neither in Jerusalem nor in Gerizim, 
 neither in circumcision nor in uncircumcision or, 
 rather, whether by church-going or by not going to 
 church, through old forms or new — with much ritual 
 or with little, or with none — let the true God, who is a 
 Spirit, be worshipped. Make your choice of means (for 
 some means there must be), not by caprice, nor in 
 carelessness, nor in the desperate plunge of a fretful 
 independence or of a sullen despair, but according to 
 truth and reason, the dictates of conscience, and the 
 drawings of sympathy. Be sincere ; let your heart 
 be open to God at all times ; let your service be 
 that of the conscience and the life ; and your eating 
 and drinking, your rising up and lying down, your 
 work and your recreation, your studies, your whole 
 life, will be a communion with God the Spirit, a sacri- 
 fice, a prayer, an unceasing worship in spirit and in 
 truth. 
 
 N 2 
 
VIII. 
 
 JnWIertual piirduits; anlr tfte W0)tv lift. 
 
VIIL 
 
 JnWIertual ^aurduits; anU tijt Ws^nv Sife. 
 
 {Preached at Balliol College^ Oxfoi'd^ November 1872.) 
 
 " And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and 
 this life is in His Son." — i John v. ii. 
 
 The eternal life of which St. John speaks is a Divine 
 power, a quickening spirit, which is the spring of all 
 true human life. It is the point at which the life of 
 man comes in contact with the life of God, who is 
 truth and love. This power, having once gained its 
 adequate expression in the life of our Lord, now 
 presents itself to all mankind, seeking to actuate each 
 human soul as it actuated our Lord Himself; and 
 becomes in all who do not through insincerity deny 
 it the constant stimulus to all that is true in thought — 
 to all that is good in act. It is the office of the Chris- 
 tian preacher constantly to apply this stimulus, that the 
 Divine life which was manifested in Christ maybe trans- 
 ferred into the lives of those with whom he deals. 
 
 I am addressing a company of students, and the 
 studies which find most favour in Oxford are those 
 which are specially called the Literse Humaniores, or, 
 as the Scotch term them, the "Humanities." Human 
 language, the forms of hum^an thought, the philosophy 
 of human relations or morality, the progress of these 
 
2i6 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 relations worked out in history and fixed by jurispru- 
 dence, and theology, which views men in their relation 
 to God — it is to study these mainly that you are here. 
 And if I take in the social life of a college, which 
 forms one of its chief advantages, this is but the 
 practical side of that which in its larger developments 
 you are studying. This union of life with thought is 
 what gives such a charm to the studies of this 
 University. But it also brings with it a great respon- 
 sibility, for it makes these studies infinitely serious, as 
 bearing directly on our principles and conduct. As 
 you decide in such studies as these, so you must pray, 
 and so you must live when you go out into the world. 
 There is a habit of mind which takes pleasure in the 
 mere discussion of views about life apart from any 
 solid conviction, and against this it is necessary to 
 guard ; for it is a very dangerous thing to speculate 
 lightly upon matters of human interest. Our whole 
 being must go whither our thoughts have led. To a 
 mind once awakened to the greatness of the issues 
 involved in the forty or fifty years that lie between 
 boyhood and death, every fact that bears on his own 
 destiny and that of his fellows becomes serious. 
 
 This seriousness results directly from the con- 
 sciousness which is aroused by the Spirit of Christ — 
 the consciousness of God and of immortality. The 
 eternal life is one in which God is ever present to the 
 conscience, and it is one which does not end when we 
 die. This consciousness is profoundly moral, and the 
 parent of morality. God is not mere force, nor is 
 
Intellectual Pursuits and the Higher Life. 217 
 
 eternity mere endlessness ; but God is a father who 
 loves us, and who is training us by constant dis- 
 cipline, a power of good with whom we are called to 
 co-operate. And the immortality which Christ has 
 brought to light is not a negative state of rest, but a 
 scene of active service — the exercise of our whole 
 nature in a sphere into which sin can never enter. 
 
 This eternal life it is, the life which is conscious of 
 God and of immortality, which has been lived on 
 earth by Jesus of Nazareth. And His life is not to 
 be looked on as merely a wonderful exception, but as 
 a witness that this eternal life is the heritage of all 
 mankind. It is the light that lightens every man — 
 the life which has been manifested, which has been 
 declared to us, that we may have fellowship with it. 
 It is God sending His Son in the likeness of sinful 
 flesh, and for sin, and thereby condemning sin in the 
 flesh — that is, it shows us that our selfishness is not 
 ineradicable. We are meant for love, not for self- 
 pleasing; and we have a hope not bounded by earthly 
 interests, " A new heaven and earth, wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness." It is no dream of a saint which 
 speaks of believers as incorporated into Christ. That 
 which was the source of His life, the consciousness of 
 God and eternity which made Him to be wholly 
 devoted to truth and to love, becomes also most 
 really in us the source of an imperishable longing for 
 the truth and love which are in Him. 
 
 It may be impossible for us to define with any 
 exactness this eternal life. Like physical life, or love, 
 
2i8 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 or righteousness, it is beyond our definitions. And 
 those who lay stress upon the Christian life rather 
 than upon any special system may expect, but must 
 calmly accept, a charge of vagueness. The vague- 
 ness is that of the subject itself ; and it is not in this 
 place that we ought to need to be reminded that 
 definitions are to be exacted only according to tl e 
 subject matter. The great things of the human spirit 
 and of God are even less than those of moral science 
 susceptible of the exact definitions which men have 
 unreasonably sought for. But this does not make 
 the Christian life less convinced or less resolu'te. It 
 may not feel able to pronounce upon questions be- 
 longing rather to the domain of metaphysics or of 
 historical inquiry than to what is truly spiritual. But 
 it will not say less confidently that God is light and 
 God is love, and that nothing mean or false or unkind 
 can possibly proceed from Him, or be tolerated by 
 His children. Here is the true field for the positive- 
 ness and the vehemence of the Christian Spirit. 
 
 But, again, this positiveness, which subordinates 
 all our being to the paramount demands of truth and 
 love, is no narrow feeling exalting one part of human 
 nature to the disparagement of the rest. It recog- 
 nises human nature as an organic whole, and puts 
 the head where the head should be. But it has 
 sympathy with all that is genuine and good, wher- 
 ever it may be displayed. It recognises the germ 
 and the yearning where there is -but inadequate fulfil- 
 ment. It can believe that Christ's Spirit has been at 
 
Intellectual Pursuits and the Higher Life. 219 
 
 work where Christ's name has not been known. It 
 is always sure that truth and goodness are of God 
 wherever they may be found, and that true faith is no 
 fettering thing, but the Hberator of the spirit of man 
 into the region of its fuller and most fruitful develop- 
 ment. If at times Christianity has appeared as a 
 one-sided cultivation of parts of human nature, and 
 has fostered a self-sacrifice which cared little for truth, 
 or a sense of brotherhood which was not universal, 
 this is because its adherents have belied their own 
 principles. But it cannot be doubted that the eternal 
 life — the consciousness of God and of immortality — 
 is the true support and stimulus of all human excel- 
 lence, not only in the sphere of what is technically 
 termed religion, but in the realms of thought and of 
 beauty. Even Schiller, who wished to restore the 
 graces and the gods of Greece, felt that their loss was 
 compensated to the poet by the nobleness of chivalry, 
 and that the deep thought and seriousness of Christi- 
 anity had been fruitful of the highest graces of the 
 Spirit. The ancient civilisation, no doubt, possessed 
 great treasures of science and of art ; but it was from 
 want of the spiritual conviction which Christianity 
 supplies that in the decadence of that civilisation 
 knowledge became rhetorical, sceptical, sectarian, and 
 superficial, and art frivolous and servile. It is not 
 Christian teachers only but positive philosophers who 
 have shown that it was from the lack of a spiritual 
 bond that the majestic framework of Roman power 
 became a dull and oppressive mechanism instead of 
 
2 20 The Gospel of the Secular Life, 
 
 a living and life-giving organism. The simple 
 brotherhood of the catacombs, not those who reared 
 the palaces of Diocletian, had the secret of the know- 
 ledge and art of the future, as well as of its political 
 and social life, in their hands. It is our part, as 
 Christians, under the impulse of the Divine life, to 
 blend into one the great heritage of the past, and to 
 use the appliances of the present day for the en- 
 lightenment and elevation of our brethren, whatever 
 be the sphere to which it pleases God to call us. 
 We have not to make the vain attempt to copy the 
 past in any of its phases, not even in the life of our 
 Lord ; for such an attempt is as vain as that other 
 attempt which is sometimes made in our day to ignore 
 all serious religion in the pursuit of physical science 
 or of artistic culture. But we have to bring the Spirit 
 of Christ as a stimulus to bear upon the acquisitions 
 of knowledge and the conduct of life, as directing 
 and restraining, indeed, but still more as stimulating, 
 in all the regions in which our spirits can move. 
 
 Let me endeavour to point out, aided by my own re- 
 collections, how college life may aid in this great effort. 
 
 I. Let our studies themselves be connected, as 
 they readily may be, with that higher morality which 
 is religion. It has been said that all that any uni- 
 versity can teach us is the same which our earliest in- 
 struction imparted — to read and to write — the faculty, 
 that is, of acquiring and reproducing knowledge. 
 But, while we may admit that the chief result to be 
 expected in our training is the perfecting of the 
 
Intellectual Pursuits and the Higher Life. 221 
 
 instrument by which knowledge is gained and passed 
 on to others, this can only be effectually done by 
 exercise in the subjects of knowledge. And, in the 
 great press of practical work in later life, many a 
 man looks back to college days as those in which he 
 gained the rudiments of knowledge on subjects which 
 he has afterwards been quite unable to follow out, 
 but which he still aspires to and greets from afar. 
 And where detailed information cannot be acquired, 
 yet some insight into the general principles cannot 
 fail to be obtained by study. But it is just these 
 general principles which come closest to the centre 
 of humanity, and which, therefore, can most easily be 
 brought in contact with the Divine life, which is its 
 basis. For instance, in the study of moral philosophy 
 and of ancient history, how can any man whose heart 
 has been aroused by the Spirit of God, as shown forth 
 in Christ, fail to ask himself continually this question 
 ■ — How do the teachings of Plato or Aristotle, or of 
 Kant, or of Mill harmonise with the teachings of 
 Christ and His Apostles ? How can I trace out the 
 partial disclosures of God's nature and will towards 
 mankind in other histories so as to see more clearly 
 and to estimate aright the light of life which shines 
 in Jesus Christ } It is inquiry such as this, which is in- 
 tenselypractical,that gives a keener relish to study than 
 all the honours which are its more vulgar incentives. 
 
 This leads me to another remark. The whole 
 of human knowledge hangs together, and its centre 
 is in humanity itself, and the centre of humanity 
 
2 22 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 is Christian love. Therefore, let all knowledge, even 
 to the utmost detail, group itself round the acknow- 
 ledged centre. Seize upon each piece of knowledge 
 that comes to you, and attach it to your own life- 
 Every fact has something Divine in it. It comes 
 in Code's order, and may be brought to bear in some 
 way on your knowledge of men and your own work 
 among them. It is easy to see this in history and 
 in literature, for that alone is literary w^hich has in 
 some way to do with human nature. But even in the 
 pursuit of physical science, it is evident that those 
 branches which excite the liveliest interest are those 
 which bear upon the origin and destinies of men, and 
 that the rest grow in importance the nearer they ap- 
 proach to contact with human life. Could any one 
 devote himself to chemistry if there w^ere no such thing 
 as organic chemistry } Or could any one give his life 
 to geology and physical geography if the earth were 
 not the habitation of men We want more students 
 in England who, like those of Germany, will make 
 research the object of their lives ; but the hope of 
 our producing them lies in the recognition by practical 
 men and by students themselves of this high utili- 
 tarianism which sees the connexion and harmony of the 
 Avorld, and invigorates the most abstruse studies by the 
 sustaining interest of their bearing upon human life. 
 
 2. Let the work of your future career impart a 
 steadiness to your work at college. It may be that 
 it is not possible to gain at the University much 
 of the knowledge which will be of use in professional 
 
Intellectual Pursuits and the Higher Life. 223 
 
 life. I incline to think that those educated here have 
 too great a contempt for what are called scraps and 
 smatterings of knowledge. Yet it must be admitted 
 that this is not the place for technical and professional 
 training. If we have gained the habit of deeper 
 thought, of going to the root of things, of doing 
 thoroughly what we do, it is best. But this is aided, 
 not marred, by looking on beyond college days, and 
 fixing our aim there. It is aided by an early choice 
 of a profession, which gives a reality and a meaning 
 to all that is being done here. There are distractions, 
 it is true, in the world of business; but there are also 
 dangers of dreaminess in a student's life. I remember 
 one, who had entered with zest into the Oxford 
 studies, and whose danger appeared to be a diffusion 
 of interests and an unpractical philanthropy, being 
 turned to a life of earnest effort in God's service by 
 observing how men of business concentrated their 
 energies on a single point, and how in the advertise- 
 ments which were meant to impress the minds of the 
 people two or three words alone were repeated again 
 and again. There are many similar wa}'s in which 
 keeping our minds fixed on the real work of life may 
 serve as a corrective or as a stimulant tc the work of 
 a student. 
 
 3. But this practical work and its preparation 
 here must be viewed in its highest aspect. We must 
 endeavour to purge it from selfish aims, that it may 
 be in union with the eternal life of God, and for 
 this the society of a college and university affords 
 
2 24 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 peculiar opportunities. Here the sordid interests and 
 distinctions of wealth or rank are to a great extent 
 held in abeyance by the higher interests of learning, 
 and the freshness of youth suggests hopes which 
 readily ally themselves with the noblest aims. The 
 intercourse which a college fosters is the freest, the 
 friendships which it begets the most intimate, that 
 can exist between men. And when young men 
 exchange their ideas on politics or business or 
 religion, if they are sometimes wild or impracticable, 
 they are rarely tainted by the ignoble thought of 
 worldly success. It is a golden time that you are 
 traversing. The mere pleasure of it may tempt you 
 to dissipate it in folly ; and the corruption of the best 
 may become the worst. Be better advised, and let 
 its happy moments excite you to the joy of unselfish 
 thought and action which you may never afterwards 
 lose. Is it too much to hope that, where so much 
 expansion of mind and heart is possible, the highest 
 matters of religious interest may not be left so much 
 in the background, where they become unreal and 
 generate misunderstanding, and that those who 
 unite so freely in talking of books that interest them, 
 and share so readily the aspirations they engender, 
 may at times join in the devotional study of the 
 Scriptures, and may value the opportunities of 
 common prayer, whether in public or in private } 
 These are surely among the highest incentives and 
 supports of a noble aim. 
 
 They are also among the best preservatives of 
 
Intellectual Pursuits and the Higher Life. 225 
 
 purity. With college days there are mixed up in 
 very many cases the associations of reckless folly and 
 evil communications ; and men often fail through 
 fancying that almost every one of their companions is 
 yielding, or else through a kind of pride or disdain 
 which forgets how closely every thing that is best in 
 human nature is associated with purity. Let us recal 
 ourselves constantly to the thought that we belong to 
 Christ. Let us look on into life as a life for God, as 
 a life of duty, and the thought of this will elevate u.> 
 beyond the temptations which idleness and frivolity 
 inevitably bring. We may hope that our students 
 may deserve increasingly the praise which even now 
 a great French writer gives them, who observes how 
 much less a hold impurity and moral scepticism have 
 upon the English Universities than on those of his 
 own country. 
 
 One other point I will urge, in which the associa- 
 tions of the University may greatly conduce to a true 
 Christian life : I mean the charitable judgment which 
 they induce in religious matters. Men come here 
 often from homes or schools in which a particular 
 kind of religion has been taught. But they come, for 
 the most part, with open minds. They soon learn, 
 through the close intercourse of this place, that men 
 of the most opposite views from those in which they 
 have been brought up are yet serious and religious 
 men. This is a most valuable experience, and no 
 amount of disagreement or controversy ought to 
 make us forget it. With some, no doubt, it may 
 O 
 
226 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 issue in a mere change of front, or in passing over 
 from one polemical camp to another ; but, for the 
 most part, I trust it issues in a chastening of the 
 judgment, in a more modest estimate of our own 
 advantages and a higher one of the advantages we 
 have yet to gain, in a willingness to honour real 
 goodness wherever it may be found. If, in addition, 
 it can help us in presenting to our minds a truer 
 image of Christ, and incite us to a burning love of 
 the truth and justice and kindness which were in 
 Him, while teaching us to see through the peculiar 
 tenets about which the parties are wrangling, it will 
 have yielded us the best of the fruits of righteous- 
 ness. 
 
 God has given us eternal life, and this life is in 
 His Son. Let us accustom ourselves to think of the 
 life of God as taking shape and body by contact with 
 the actual life of men ; and let our prayer be that, 
 through communion with God and with Christ, we 
 may have the eternal life dwelling in us, and may 
 show to the world that the Christian spirit is neither 
 that of eager contention for what is unreal or disput- 
 able, nor a contemptuous intellectualism, but humble 
 truthfulness and love, patiently wrought out in a 
 reverent and dutiful life. 
 
IX. 
 
IX. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford^ Whit- Sunday^ 1871.) 
 
 "Nevertheless I tell you the truth ; it is expedient for you that 1 
 go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; 
 but if I depart, I will send Him unto you." — John xvi. 7. 
 
 These words, which are so closely connected with 
 the great event of Whitsuntide, form the ground on 
 which we may claim a right to speak of the Christian 
 religion as emphatically the religion of progress. 
 They describe a progress from a state of tutelage 
 to a state of maturity — a progress which at the 
 moment was painful, but which was really beneficial 
 for the believers in our Lord. That had been a 
 blissful state which they had before enjoyed, when 
 they had their Lord present with them, and were 
 guided by His voice and eye ; and the disciples 
 naturally desired, like Peter at the Transfiguration, 
 to build a tabernacle for themselves where they were. 
 But they had to learn that that was not the best 
 state for them. It was to be broken up in a moment, 
 and they were to pass on to a better state beyond, 
 in which Christ would be with them, not in outward 
 presence, but through the Spirit. 
 
230 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 This is not an isolated fact, but a great principle 
 of the spiritual life. It is better to be led by an 
 inward influence than by any external rule or system. 
 It is better to have those feelings within us which will 
 prompt us to right thought or action than to be told 
 what to think or to do by any, even the wisest and 
 most divine. And this substitution of the inward for 
 the outward guidance is a process which constantly 
 goes on, as God reveals Himself by the Spirit more 
 and more. It is a principle which finds continually 
 new applications, fresh springing developments. For, 
 though at the day of Pentecost the believers gained a 
 glimpse into the Kingdom of Heaven, and were pos- 
 sessed by the powers of the w^orld to come, yet the 
 Church has had to live out its life amidst worldly 
 influences, and is ever reaching on by stumbling 
 steps, groping in the twilight, towards that Kingdom 
 which was then opened out to its view. As a man 
 who looks across a valley sees the mountain tops on 
 the other side as though they were very near, and yet 
 afterwards has to win his way thither through the 
 darkness of the valley, in which he often loses sight 
 of the object towards which he is advancing, so it has 
 been with development of the Church's life in its 
 progress through time. We are nearer to the full 
 salvation, even if we fail to perceive it as vividly as 
 the Apostles did. But the object which kindled in 
 them such high hopes must kindle them also in us. 
 We are making progress towards that object. We are 
 appropriating more fully the Divine life, and possess- 
 
" jPj^oghess" 
 
 231 
 
 ing more completely the spiritual blessings for which 
 the first believers hoped. At each stage of our pro- 
 gress the thought is suggested to us again, " Let us 
 rest where we are, let us make ourselves a rule of the 
 past or the present state ; for it has been at least fairly 
 good, and we cannot expect to be better than our 
 fathers." Then comes the truer voice, which says, *'No! 
 Onward lies the path. In progress alone is blessedness 
 to be found. It is expedient for you that the present 
 condition of things, the discipline which has trained 
 you, the circumstances that are familiar to you, the 
 customs into which you have grown, the persons even 
 whom you have trusted, should pass away ; for so 
 alone can your spiritual powers be fully called forth, 
 and the Kingdom of God be within you." 
 
 Let us define to ourselves what we mean by 
 progress ; for the word, it must be allowed, often 
 suggests vague, and sometimes unchristian and 
 merely negative, ideas. We must set before us as 
 plainly as we can the goal towards which we hope 
 to advance. I understand, then, that the end to 
 which God designs us to attain is the full possession 
 and exercise of our true relations both towards God 
 and towards one another. This implies, in the indi- 
 vidual, a development of every power which connects 
 him with God or men, the growth (in the language of 
 Scripture) into the measure of the stature of the 
 fulness of Christ." It implies, in the larger sphere 
 of God's purposes, a harmony of all souls and of 
 all created things, each fulfilling its own function 
 
232 
 
 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 under the inspiration of Supreme Love — a state 
 which is described in the words of St. Paul, " That 
 in the dispensation of the fulness of time He might 
 gather together in one all things in Christ, both 
 which are in heaven and which are in earth." This 
 object, though developed fully by St. Paul in the 
 Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians, yet 
 is found in germ in the earlier teaching. It is implied 
 in the words of our Lord Himself at the Ascension : 
 " All power is given Me in heaven and in earth.-" 
 It is implied in the preaching of the Apostles at 
 Pentecost, when they proclaim that Christ is exalted 
 to the supreme place in the universe. It is implied 
 in the whole teaching as to the Logos in St. John, 
 w^hich certainly is not only a formative or efficient 
 principle, but also a final cause, an object towards 
 which the whole creation tends. He in whom the 
 world is made is also its destined Lord. 
 
 Is the conception thus put before us as our final 
 goal one which can be made the practical object of 
 the efforts of finite beings } or is it too vast for our 
 realisation Vast it is, stupendous ; but not there- 
 fore vague. The true reason, God^s organ within us, 
 can conceive it and work it out. Doubtless it in- 
 volves a resolute entering into the Divine purposes, 
 a placing of ourselves, so to speak, at God's stand- 
 ing-point. But we have the right and the power 
 to do this, for we are called the friends of God. The 
 revelation is given us that we may make it our 
 own and shape our course with a view to it. It 
 
Progress " 
 
 233 
 
 is vast, it is all-embracing ; but none the less it is 
 clear to our spirits, and they know no other rest- 
 ing-place. We are mariners at sea in the evening, 
 but the coast before us bears on it the great and 
 brilliant city which is our bourne ; and if it be 
 necessary to keep our eye fixed on the lighthouse in 
 the centre, none the less the heart takes in the whole 
 scene, with its loved companies and its noble build- 
 ings, and with all that is included in the dear names 
 of country and of home. 
 
 It is the Kingdom of Christ which is our goal ; and 
 we can aim at no smaller object. Fixing our eyes 
 on this, we direct, yet we overpass, the desires for 
 personal forgiveness, for individual sanctification, the 
 bounds of sect and party, the limitations of our 
 country and our age. Looking at this, we surmount 
 the barriers which separate one Church from another, 
 the spiritual from the secular spheres, the history of 
 the Church from that of mankind, the sphere of 
 mental and physical knowledge. The great goal to 
 which we look is the goal of them all ; their limita- 
 tions are but of the moment; their harmony is assured 
 in the Kingdom of Christ and of the Spirit. 
 
 But while the goal is thus all-embracing, it is the 
 moral and spiritual principle which is the centre ; it 
 is love which is the germinal spot from which all the 
 rest is developed. The Kingdom of God spreads out on 
 all sides; but its capital, its central principle, is found 
 in these words of St. Paul : " The Kingdom of God is 
 righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." 
 
234 
 
 'I HE Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 When we define, as the goal of our practical 
 efforts, the attainment and exercise of true moral 
 relations, we must not fritter away our conception by- 
 dwelling on those relations separately, nor yet as a 
 mere inorganic aggregate, but distinguish carefully, 
 as the living centre of them, the great spiritual affec- 
 tions — towards God repentance and trust, towards 
 men justice and beneficence ; and these combined in 
 the one word love. All the relations of man, whether 
 towards God or towards his fellows, are but expres- 
 sions of love ; all our true efforts on earth are the 
 striving after those relations which love brings about 
 between spiritual beings. And, moreover, all these 
 separate relations are subject to change, while love 
 itself remains. It is true that love cannot subsist as 
 an abstraction ; he must gain a home in the unfold- 
 ing of the several relations of humanity ; but this 
 home he builds for himself The relations and insti- 
 tutions of the Christian life are begotten by love, 
 not love by them. They change from age to age, 
 but love survives. Suspend their operation for a 
 time ; nay, sweep them away, if you can ; yet love 
 will build them up again and again. 
 
 The perfect type of these relations which are the 
 object of all our progress is disclosed to us in the 
 historical life of our Lord. He declares to us the 
 love of God. He shows us what it is to live the life 
 of sonship towards God. He exemplifies the life of 
 a brother among His fellow-men. Lastly, He shows 
 us, through His Kingly leadership, the spectacle of a 
 
Progress. 
 
 ^35 
 
 society knit together in the bonds of a common 
 attachment to their head, and through Him to one 
 another. And all this He has done, not merely in 
 idea, nor in precept, but in actual fact. He has 
 shown us that the thing is possible. God sending 
 His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, has condemned 
 sin in the flesh." 
 
 Now it might at first seem as if this would lead 
 us simply to go back to the Christ once manifested in 
 history ; and, instead of moving hopefully forward, to 
 bend back our energies and cramp our ideas by the 
 circumstances of the life of our Lord. Accordingly, 
 it has been argued that the Incarnation is the very 
 doctrine of immobility, nay, of reaction ; that its 
 effect must necessarily be to fill men with a longing 
 for the past, not for the future, to make them timid 
 and sceptical as to all possibility of progress ; that 
 the believer in a Christ who has fulfilled all righteous- 
 ness is a believer in a humanity which has exhausted 
 itself ; and that all hopes for the future are thus 
 benumbed beforehand by the belief that they have all 
 been anticipated in the one career of highest excel- 
 lence, from which all subsequent life must be a 
 decline. We must admit, with sorrow, that Christians 
 have often, by their timid conduct and want of spirit, 
 given too much colour to this supposition. But 
 where they have done so, they have gone in the teeth 
 of the whole teaching of our Lord about the Com- 
 forter. Christ's historical life was not meant to be 
 the end. Christ has passed away from the outer 
 
236 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 presence that His life may no longer be a law of the 
 letter to His followers, but that the spirit of His life 
 may become the spirit of their lives in all their ever- 
 varying phases. 
 
 Christ's life, as disclosed to our hearts by the 
 Holy Spirit, is a great ideal which is always before 
 us. We have apprehended it in some sort, but we 
 are occupied all our life in growing towards it. St. 
 Paul, while he declared that Christ had become his 
 righteousness, yet described himself as ever pressing 
 on towards that righteousness. " That I may be 
 found in Him," he says, ''that I may have the 
 righteousness which is of God by faith, that I may 
 know Him and the power of His resurrection. . . . 
 Forgetting those things which are behind, and reach- 
 ing forth unto those things which are before, I press 
 towards the mark." 
 
 The life of Christ, again, as brought home to our 
 souls by the Holy Spirit, is a stimulus to our faculties. 
 This is the very meaning of the title Comforter — the 
 supporter and strengthener. The Lord," says St. 
 Paul, "is the Spirit." O Y^vpio^ roirveviJid eari. Christ 
 has, by the gift of the Spirit, become the quickener 
 of all our independent powers. It is not so much 
 some new ideal of life which is brought to us from 
 without ; but rather a gathering up of all that is 
 good and true in our nature, the constant presenta- 
 tion of this to the conscience as the object of desire, 
 and the sustaining of every noble impulse which can 
 urge us on to attain it. You cannot make use of our 
 
Progress" 
 
 237 
 
 Lord's example or precepts for any other purpose 
 than this. You cannot make Him a mere model 
 or rule to be followed without reference to cir- 
 cumstances and common sense. Those who have 
 tauntingly said that if we believe in Christ we 
 should drive out profane men from our sacred 
 buildings with a scourge, or address our adversaries 
 as serpents and a generation of vipers, have as 
 much travestied the significance of Christ's example 
 as those who choose on Maundy Thursday to wash 
 the feet of a few beggars. And those who see in 
 the words about the tribute money a demand for 
 the separation of men's moral life into two distinct 
 spheres are as mistaken as those who deduce from 
 the Sermon on the Mount the wrongfulness of 
 oaths or of self-defence. It is the spirit, not the 
 letter, of .Christ's words and deeds which has to be 
 transferred into our lives. 
 
 But when we come seriously to attempt this, who 
 is there that does not feel himself embarked in a 
 course which can only be described as one of constant 
 and illimitable progress ^ There gleams before us 
 an ideal of personal excellence, the form of a human 
 being who is wholly unselfish, utterly devoted to the 
 truth, to man, to God. What discredit this must 
 throw on our present condition, however good it may 
 have seemed to be ; nay, what longing for change, 
 for progress towards better things ! \\'e know that we 
 shall be like it one day ; but as yet we cannot even 
 conceive that likeness to the full. Yet we know that 
 
238 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 it is only by contemplating that " idea of the good " 
 that we make any real progress : by this alone we 
 are purified more and more, our spirits are " changed 
 from glory to glory, as by the Lord the Spirit." We 
 trace out an ideal of truth, a state in which we shall 
 gaze on things as they really are, freed from the mists 
 of prejudice. But He that said "I am the truth" 
 has not given us all truth ready-made, but wills that 
 we should follow Him through scenes in which we 
 " see through a glass darkly," and " know nothing 
 yet as we ought to know." We form an ideal of 
 a holy society in which each individual will take 
 his true place; but it is a kingdom which is not 
 of this world, and it must be sought, not in^ but 
 across and beyond each stage of human society which 
 inadequately strives to represent it. 
 
 The first partakers of the gift of Pentecost saw 
 all the heavens and the earth trembling around them. 
 The whole moral world was in a flux. The solid 
 fabric of Judaism, which had been like the ground 
 beneath men's feet and the firmament above their 
 heads, was giving way on all sides. " I will show 
 wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth 
 beneath, blood and fire, and vapour of smoke." 
 The first century, much more than the nineteenth, 
 was an era of revolutions. The second outburst 
 of inspired life, in the time of Stephen, went back 
 upon the Old Testament, and saw that also as a 
 scene of constant progress and change. Then came 
 St. Paul, by whose influence the infant community 
 
Progress." 
 
 239 
 
 burst its Jewish swathing bands, and grew into the 
 Catholic Church. And the Revelation of St. John 
 and the Epistle to the Hebrews look on to constant 
 changes, the shaking, not of the earth only, but also 
 of heaven, that those things alone which cannot be 
 shaken, the eternal city of God, may remain. The 
 line of progress which the Apostolic age thus in- 
 augurated has never been left, though the Church 
 has often been dragged on rather than advanced, 
 with its face towards the ever-receding past. It is 
 the part of true faith to make this progress con- 
 scious and resolute : to admit the pain which this 
 progress necessarily gives, but to cheer us on by 
 the assurance that it is expedient for us that suc- 
 cessive phases, excellent though they may have 
 seemed, should pass away, and that, if we be but 
 steadfast and sincere, the true blessedness lies before 
 us. 
 
 Let me apply this to three spheres : ist, To the 
 pursuit of truth ; 2ndly, To the constitution of the 
 Church ; 3rd]y, To our personal lives. Progress is 
 the law in each. 
 
 I. It is sometimes doubted whether in theology 
 proper there is such a thing as progress. On a recent 
 occasion, of much importance to our branch of the 
 Church, it was said, with apparent assent on all 
 sides, that "while science was progressive, and its 
 interest must go on increasing, theology was of its 
 very nature stationary, the relations of God with 
 man standing now in the same position as they did 
 
240 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 5,000 years ago."^ Is it presumptuous to traverse and 
 deny that statement, and to believe that new light 
 must constantly be coming to us so long as God 
 discloses His purposes by changing circumstances, 
 and the experience of mankind is constantly growing ? 
 The statement that theology is non-progressive is 
 only true so far as we wilfully abstract and separate 
 theology from life, and from other fields of thought ; 
 and I venture to think that the truest progress is 
 that which is being forced upon us by the constant 
 demand that we should be real, and that we should 
 show at every step a connection between the theo- 
 logical conceptions which we propound and the 
 actual life of men. 
 
 A Scotch theologian who spent his short life in 
 pursuing a higher truth than had been attained by his 
 countrymen, and died while pursuing it, said that he 
 thought we might trace in the theology of the last 
 three centuries a progress corresponding with the 
 words, the way," " the truth," and " the life." " The 
 way," which had been obscured in the middle ages, 
 was pointed out afresh by the great outburst of light 
 at the Reformation. Then came the effort to probe 
 and draw out " the truth," producing detailed and 
 often conflicting systems ; but now we are coming to 
 view religious truth more simply in its relation to 
 "life." 
 
 * These words were used by Mr. Bruce, now Lord Aberdare, in 
 the House of Commons, on the occasion of Mr. Miall's motion for 
 disestablishment. 
 
OGRESS." 
 
 241 
 
 Is not this the tendency on all hands in the 
 present day ? The criticism is often made, and 
 received with much alarm, that there never was an 
 age which more fully believed in the moral side of 
 Christianity, nor one which was less disposed to 
 accept the historical facts or dogmatic statements 
 in which it has been enshrined. I think the criticism 
 is to a large extent true ; and it represents, no doubt, 
 a state of some confusion and vacillation. But does 
 it not point us to this — that the first duty of theology 
 in our day is to show its bearing upon life, and that 
 the moral elements are being recognised as the living 
 centre round which all the rest should group them- 
 selves } We need not take sides in a supposed 
 conflict between dogmatic theology and the Christian 
 life ; but we must imperatively bring them into har- 
 mony, and subject all we say about God and Christ 
 to the constant test of a living experience. Let 
 theology begin, not with the creation, but with the 
 life of Jesus of Nazareth ; let it lay stress, not 
 primarily on such propositions as these, that God 
 is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, but rather 
 upon these, that God is love, and that Christ is the 
 manifestation of the Divine life of love to men ; and 
 then we shall cease to come into collision with the 
 great convictions of mankind ; we shall begin at 
 least with having these convictions as our allies. 
 May we not believe that one great work of the 
 Divine Comforter in the present day is to be seen in 
 the inducing of so general a consensus as we witness 
 P 
 
242 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 to the belief that a life of self-renouncing love is the 
 only true life to be lived by man on earth ? Hardly 
 a moral writer, of whatever school, nay, hardly a 
 writer of tales of fiction, and hardly a political thinker, 
 but bears witness in some way to this conviction — 
 and this, whether or not they connect this conviction 
 with its true spring in the Cross of Jesus Christ. 
 Why should we not welcome this fact as our chief 
 ally, and, from the circle of light and love which 
 is thus gained to us all in common, endeavour by a 
 united effort to clear up the mysteries which have 
 been expressed by the clashing dogmas of the past ? 
 
 I am indicating a method, not a system. And, if 
 it be a true one, it implies the most perfect freedom 
 for every form of thought — freedom, I mean, not 
 merely according to laws, but the freedom which 
 comes from mutual trustfulness. We have found a 
 sure and acknowledged standing-ground in the Chris- 
 tian life of self-renouncing love, the reflection of the 
 Cross of Christ. Grounded on this, we need not be so 
 nervously anxious about the rest. Nay, we must 
 expect new light in all departments. And yet, how 
 often do we witness the melancholy fact that one 
 who has some light to give upon some region of truth 
 is met by the question, " Do you, in the ultimate 
 result, hold by this or that received opinion " and, 
 " if not," it is added, " we will have nothing to say to 
 you." And then the man takes you at your word, 
 and comes to believe that his views inevitably clash 
 with some great received truths, and he is driven into 
 
Progress" 
 
 243 
 
 heresy, and you lose the help which you might have 
 gained from him. And, meanwhile, though it is sup- 
 posed that truth as a system has been the gainer by 
 this barren victory, truthfulness, which is the most 
 marked feature of the Spirit's work, has suffered irre- 
 trievably. We want, among educated men such as 
 those whom I now address, more tolerance of opinion^ 
 more patience of the bearing of various forms of 
 thought upon the great realities of our existence ; 
 and, at the same time, much more carefulness as to 
 our own sincerity in our dealings and our influence in 
 such matters. 
 
 Nay, more: Why should it be the case that the 
 attitude of Christians towards new discoveries should 
 almost always be that of suspicion and timidity ? and 
 that, even when impartial persons are convinced. 
 Christians should often be the last instead of the first 
 to yield to the true conviction It indicates, surely, 
 a wrong condition of mind. We smile as we read 
 that Bishop Horne and his friends in the beginning 
 of the last century formed a Society at Oxford for the 
 purpose of resisting on religious grounds the dis- 
 coveries of Xewton. But the aggregate of such 
 attempts should cost us more than a smile. I am 
 ashamed to think that, in reference to the greatest 
 triumphs in political life and in the physical sciences, 
 at almost every stage Christians have been merely 
 driven to acquiesce, and to discover as an after- 
 thought a reconciliation between the new ideas and 
 those which they had advocated. I rejoice in the 
 P 2 
 
244 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 reconciliation, but I am ashamed that there should 
 ever have been the war. The war has arisen from 
 the overvaluing of the outward integuments, the 
 undervaluing of the truth itself. It is time that we 
 should awake, by the constant teachings of experi- 
 ence, from our injurious attitude : that the Church 
 should become, not the check, but the constant and 
 trustful stimulant of the freest thought. Why should 
 we always think that the sphere in which we move 
 is so narrow that we dare not advance lest we should 
 run against the boundaries May not the boun- 
 daries be enlarged Or rather, are we sure that 
 there are any boundaries at all in the direction in 
 which we are looking 1 May it not be that what we 
 have taken for the necessary limits of our system is 
 only a certain dimness which will clear away if we 
 go boldly on 
 
 We fear lest some statement which seems to us a 
 pillar of the whole edifice of truth should be over- 
 thrown. It is not the statement, but the principle, for 
 which we ought to be jealous. We set out, perhaps, 
 like a distinguished man who has told the history of 
 religious opinions, with insisting that a certain defined 
 body of doctrine or a certain defined order of ministers 
 must somewhere exist, to be the prerequisites of 
 Christian belief and practice ; and when events bring 
 us face to face with the fact that these are the very 
 things which there is grave reason to question, we 
 turn away as from some impious suggestion. Or we 
 are afraid lest to us, as to some especially in Ger- 
 
245 
 
 many, the very centre of all, the life of our Lord on 
 earth should grow dim, and we shrink back from any 
 full inquiry into the documents which enshrine it. 
 And then, at every point, the path of truth is a 
 rugged one, each step that we make sure leading to a 
 further step, till we are weary with the pursuit. Can 
 I not make to myself a resting-place here, or here ^ 
 The answer is, that a moral and spiritual, rather than 
 an intellectual and dogmatic, certitude is that which 
 God designs for us ; that the form changes and will 
 change, while the essence of our faith remains the 
 same ; that, if the path be long and hard, that is but 
 a trial of our patience and our courage ; aye, that 
 even if it should be so that the path should lead us 
 under the shadow of the most terrible doubts, yet the 
 life of self-sacrificing love, which is the spiritual 
 centre of the Christian revelation, could never fail us, 
 and that of this sacrifice the following of truth is the 
 noblest form ; and yet (for here experience comes to 
 our aid), that the progress destined for us is one in 
 which all that is precious to us must be preserved, for 
 that on which past generations of Christian men have 
 fed their faith can never be fundamentally false. It 
 may be that, in that progress, the clear light of the 
 Saviour's presence may for a time be darkened ; but 
 a better, a more spiritual, view of Him lies beyond ; 
 and of these more gloomy parts of our progress, as of 
 that which the disciples were to make. He would 
 surely say to us : The change is still expedient ; " ye 
 now therefore have sorrow ; but I will see you again 
 
246 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man 
 taketh from you." 
 
 2. The same principles must be applied to pro- 
 gress in the Church itself — in the relations of the 
 Christian society towards its own members. Here, 
 too, w^e are striving to realise an ideal of heavenly 
 love of which the vision is seen for us by St. Paul 
 when he reveals the Church as the Bride of Christ, 
 not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; " and 
 by St. John, in the imagery of the New Jerusalem. 
 It cannot be too emphatically stated that these ideal 
 visions of the Church do not apply to anything now 
 in the world, that each successive phase of Church 
 life is but a faint striving towards them ; and, more- 
 over, that the Christians of each age are left ab- 
 solutely free to accommodate their institutions from 
 time to time to their special wants, so long as the 
 great ideal is kept practically before their eyes. 
 
 Why is it, my brethren, that the Church of Christ, 
 which of all societies in the world contains the most 
 swelling springs of life, should be marked in its 
 history by the constant tendency to lean upon the 
 past — that it has been overlaid by traditional thought 
 and practice, and has had so little of the promised 
 spirit of prophetical prevision } Why has our pro- 
 gress been marked as much or more than the pro- 
 gress of society in general by convulsive struggles 
 between the parties of order and of movement ? 
 Why, but because we have been unfaithful to the 
 presence of the Spirit amongst us ? 
 
Fkogress." 247 
 
 There are some persons, no doubt, whose critical 
 habit is so overweening that hardly any institutions 
 of worship or of government can satisfy them. But 
 ought we on this account to refuse to move forward 
 when the conditions of our hfe demand change ? 
 What is the truth about the various stages through 
 which the Church has to pass ? It is this, that each 
 ao-e, for itself, is bound to make a vio;orous effort to 
 realise the ideal of the Church, but must still be con- 
 scious that all which it can accomplish is but a faint 
 sketch of that ideal, a sketch which it must leave to 
 be filled up or modified by the mature experience of 
 after-times. Not one of the institutions of the past, 
 not even (so far as they may be traced) of the Apos- 
 tolic age, is binding in its letter upon all after ages. 
 It is, indeed, a noble attempt to which each age is 
 called, to evolve, according to its own wants, and by 
 the light of past experience, such institutions as will 
 best embody the true relations of men to each other, 
 as members of a Christian brotherhood, and their 
 relations to God in worship and in service. And it is 
 necessary to take in the experience and the traditions 
 of the past. But nothing can be more pernicious 
 than the attempt to bind our own ways or those of 
 past ages upon all future generations. The arrange- 
 ments which we make are, if looked at in view of the 
 whole career of the Church, not like solid houses to 
 remain through centuries, but temporary halting- 
 places. They embody the present convictions of 
 men ; but they must needs be altered in a hundred 
 
248 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 ways, according to the ceaseless changes of the ever- 
 working Spirit which dwells in the Church's heart. 
 
 Great respect must be paid, no doubt, to the ex- 
 perience of those who have gone before us, but only 
 so far as their experience really applies to our cir- 
 cumstances. To make quotations from the old 
 Church writers, and apply them immediately to 
 passing events, is for the most part a fallacious 
 process. To quote the decrees of ancient councils 
 on matters as to which the circumstances and the^ 
 grounds of men's thoughts have changed, is to apply 
 for the most part a misguiding standard. It is the 
 spirit and general attitude of our Christian ancestors, 
 not the letter of their decrees, that will help us in 
 the difficulties of our own time. And when, as often 
 happens, the mere customs of ancient days are 
 brought in to override what is truly expedient now, 
 we are really in danger of forgetting that we live 
 under the dispensation of the Spirit, and that " Where 
 the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." 
 
 It can hardly be doubted by those who look 
 soberly into the state of the Church at the present 
 day that great modifications, both of its external and 
 internal relations, are at hand. It is all but impos- 
 sible that the Church of England should continue 
 long in its present condition. It is a great aristo- 
 cratic institution, when all other institutions are sub- 
 ject to popular control. It is still governed, in 
 minute points, by the central power, while in all other 
 departments of life discretion is entrusted to local 
 
" Frogress.^^ 
 
 249 
 
 authorities. It is a national institution which, 
 through the helpless perpetuation of an ancient 
 wrong, excludes from its pale nearly one half of the 
 Christian people of this realm, and it is isolated from 
 nine-tenths of Christendom. Whatever form the 
 changes may take which are to remedy these evils, 
 such changes must surely come. But why should w^e 
 fear to advance boldly and accommodate ourselves to 
 the needs of our generation } Have not we, as well 
 as former ages, the Spirit of God to lead us Is 
 there anything to prevent our using the most entire 
 freedom in adapting ourselves to the altered circum- 
 stances of our day Are we bound to stigmatise for 
 ever, as schismatics, the members of Christian com- 
 munities not episcopally governed Are we to be 
 debarred from using in the pulpit the services of men 
 not episcopally ordained, because former ages have 
 seldom used them } Are we to continue to limit our 
 Churches to one particular form of service and of ad- 
 dress because it was thought necessary 200 years ago 
 to guard against abuses by laws of uniformity ? Are 
 we to apply in all Church offices a rigid test of 
 adherence to our present system Are we to refuse 
 to administer the Holy Communion at the only 
 times when poor people in towns can satisfactorily 
 come, because in past years, under different circum- 
 stances, it was thought necessary that it should be 
 received fasting } Or, again, are we to 'be hindered 
 by the memory of superstitious abuses from retaining 
 or restoring ancient usages which may be really 
 
250 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 edifying, from using ancient forms of speech which 
 may best represent the truth, or from seeking union, 
 where there is any practical meaning in it, with the 
 older as well as the newer divisions of the Christian 
 body ? It may be that, as some think, we have to 
 pass through a searching ordeal, in which all customs 
 and beliefs will be sifted. Let us enter upon that 
 ordeal in the bold yet reverent spirit of the writer of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, while he looked 
 forward to the shaking of both earth and heaven, yet 
 knew that this shaking would issue in the greater 
 stability of all that was vital. The ordeal is brought 
 to bear on us, so " That those things which cannot be 
 shaken may remain," for we receive a Kingdom 
 which cannot be moved." 
 
 Are there those here who tremble at the new 
 position made for our universities and colleges by 
 the abolition of religious tests ? Let them not look 
 back to the supposed securities which once gone are 
 gone for ever, but hopefully prepare for the time to 
 come. May it not be that greater freedom will throw 
 men more back upon conviction ; that the fact of no 
 formal profession being exacted will bring out more 
 distinctly men's real belief, and that what you lose in 
 seeming you will gain in public sincerity } May it 
 not be that the words of St. Paul, as to the effect of 
 religious differences, may here gain an application, 
 " That they which are approved may be made mani- 
 fest ;" and that some who have been backward to 
 show their belief, when to do so was to identify them- 
 
Progress." 
 
 selves with a system of religious ascendancy, may in 
 a more open field take up a positive and assured 
 position ? I cannot but believe that here, too, it will 
 in the end be found that it was expedient that the 
 change should come, and that the abandonment of 
 the old and worn-out system will prove the beginning 
 of a better state. 
 
 3. The principle of hopeful and confident pro- 
 gress by the working in us of the Holy Spirit may be 
 applied to our individual lives. 
 
 Life is necessarily a progress in the sense that we 
 constantly change. It is a progress necessarily also 
 in the sense that we gain experience as we move on. 
 To make it progress in the true sense, the faith and 
 the hope are needed which come from the conscious- 
 ness of redemption. Without this, the future is 
 dreary indeed, and no poet of Nature, no Mimnermus 
 or Anacreon, no Byron or Beranger has ever ade- 
 quately described the real horror of the inevitable 
 passage from youth to age, from vigour of intellect to 
 a second childhood, from the generous hopes of youth 
 to the churlishness of declining life. What is it that 
 can convert the complaints of mankind into a song of 
 triumph } I know of nothing but the old, old story 
 of the Death and Resurrection and Ascension of our 
 Lord impressed on us by the Holy Spirit ; the as- 
 surance that self-sacrificing love, which has sounded 
 the depths of human sin and misery and has not 
 been overcome by them, is supreme in God's universe^ 
 and destined to complete dominion. He that has 
 
252 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 thus believed has within him a never-failing spring of 
 hope and joy: and with these comes to us the assurance 
 that we ourselves shall not be overcome by the cor- 
 rupting power of selfishness. To conceive this hope 
 is the truest conversion : to abandon it, the worst 
 backsliding. To him who holds it fast, life can be 
 but a progress of many stages towards ever maturer 
 blessedness. 
 
 I engage you, I pledge and bind you over into 
 this hope, young hearts, whose fresh life is learning to 
 unfold itself amid the scenes of this University. Hope 
 is natural to youth. Take heed that your hope is 
 well grounded ; then it cannot be too fervent or en- 
 thusiastic. Look forward with joy, and count each 
 change that is coming, whatever the momentary pain 
 which it may bring, to be a passage on to better 
 things. You have passed through some such stages 
 already, and you passed into them, perhaps, un- 
 willingly at the time. But have they not been 
 fraught with true profit to you You passed from 
 a beloved home, and school seemed strange to you at 
 first. You wept, perhaps, at the exchange of the 
 home fireside and the endearments of parents and 
 sisters for the rougher scenes and companionships of 
 school. But your school soon became to you, I can 
 hardly doubt, a place of fresh interest, an arena of 
 new aspirations. You felt proud of it, and you 
 regretted it keenly when you came to leave. And 
 who that has loved his school has not felt his heart 
 turn back to it with a pang, when as a timid freshman 
 
Progress." 
 
 253 
 
 he has felt his way with doubtful steps among the 
 large and strange experiences of the University ? 
 But I should think ill of you if I suspected that you 
 still looked back, and preferred the comparatively 
 childish ways of the best of schools to the ampler 
 life, the fuller culture, to which Oxford invites her 
 sons. He that has entered into one tithe of these 
 advantages must ever cling with grateful affection to 
 the place where he hrst felt the spring of mature 
 thought and learned with independent resolve to gird 
 himself for the work of life. Keep your heart fresh, 
 and your conscience pure, young men. May Oxford 
 be to you all that it is in the idealising memory of 
 those who are now growing old. 
 
 But will you then, because the present scene is 
 happy and fruitful, linger here, and shrink from what 
 is to come } Will you contrast with your studies of 
 poetry, or histor}^, or philosophy, or with the pleasant 
 contact of youthful, expansive minds, the crabbedness 
 of law, the dulness of a curacy, dry business, the 
 society of common men and women Will you (I 
 know that it is the temptation of man\^) thus discount 
 the future, thus take the heart out of the comine 
 time, till evil, selfish forebodings almost create their 
 own fulfilment ^ Rather, with Christian hopefulness, 
 fill the future with the blessed hopes of duty, and the 
 love of your fellow-men, and the luxury of doing 
 good. Depend upon it, one half of the dangers of 
 university life, on which man}' have to look back 
 with regret, come from the thoughtless and selfish 
 
254 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 spirit which refuses to look forward. They will be 
 conjured away if you make your Oxford career, not a 
 scene of listless satisfaction, but one of serious pre- 
 paration for the work of your life. The time that 
 lies before you is full of ampler experiences, nobler 
 opportunities ; and in the practical life, if our feet are 
 more firmly planted on earth, our minds may yet be 
 nearer heaven. Pass on, young Christian, soberly, 
 but without fear. And if in the larger thoughts 
 which this free republic of the mind has given you 
 the fabric of your ideas has undergone some change, 
 do not think that the future need bring you either an 
 abandonment of aspirations for truth, or a wearing 
 away of faith into negation. Do your duty trust- 
 fully, and with prayer ; and who is he that will harm 
 you in all the days that are coming } 
 
 It is said that men, as they grow older, learn the 
 hollowness of their youth's ideals. I know not why 
 this should be so. That the mere effervescence of the 
 youthful recruit should pass away is natural ; but, if 
 the veteran should be more circumspect, he should 
 also be more daring. The first sketch was inade- 
 quate ; the newer plans should be drawn with a 
 bolder hand. The glorious thoughts that belong to 
 immortality, and the promise of Christ's return, 
 should suggest to us constantly new spheres which 
 the spirit of love may occupy ; and, like Ulysses, even 
 in old age we may cry : — 
 
 " Come, my friends, 
 Tis not too late to seek a newer world." 
 
Progress" 
 
 Perhaps the greatest hindrance to men in fulfilling 
 the work which they ought to accomplish in life is the 
 want of spiritual enterprise — I had almost said ambi- 
 tion. The man who has had some earnest moments 
 thinks he has saved his soul, and looks back to what 
 he was in the " peaceful hours he once enjoyed,'' 
 instead of embracing the opportunities of fuller 
 religious life which the coming days are unfolding. 
 The man who has had some success in literature rests 
 on his reputation or works on his old materials, 
 instead of training his genius for higher flights. The 
 man who has been forward in some good cause which 
 has triumphed, looks back to the former scenes of 
 conflict rather than to the wars which have yet to be 
 waged against evil. And those who in youth have 
 been ardent reformers, become upholders of abuses in 
 later life. " Such is the natural course," you say. 
 Natural, no doubt, so far as natural means selfish ; 
 but not the Christian course. May the Holy Spirit of 
 God take from us the lethargy and the timidity which 
 so well befit our natural selfishness, and give us the 
 great boldness and freedom which was the heritage of 
 Christ's Apostles. Let us count as among our chief 
 dangers that timorousness which is the parent both of 
 cowardice and of cruelty. Let us advance, expecting, 
 not a renewal of gifts which have passed away, but 
 new gifts suited to our age, fuller light, greater 
 breadth and tolerance as distinctly Christian virtues, 
 more power to adapt social and political circum- 
 stances to the work of the Church, fuller sympathy 
 
256 The Gospel of the Secular Life. 
 
 with the needs and aspirations of the masses of our 
 poorer fellow-countrymen, more ability to harmonise 
 the refinements of art, of literature, nay, of humour, 
 with the spiritual and eternal wants of men, and 
 greater simplicity of life, to purify our age from 
 selfish luxury. These, surely, are the gifts for which 
 our generation cries aloud, and these the Comforter is 
 waiting to bestow. Let us ask and we shall receive ; 
 and, whether we ourselves succeed or fail, we shall 
 aid the world in its course towards the promised 
 triumph of our Lord. 
 
 THE END.