Ml ^ 1917 ) 
 
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FAITH'S CERTAINTIES 
 
FAITH'S * 
 CERTAINTIES 
 
 BY 
 
 J. BRIERLEY, B.A. 
 
 AUTHOR or " LIFE AND THE IDEAL," " ASPECTS OF THE SPIRITUAL," " SIDELIGHTS 
 ON RELIGION," " OURSELVES AND THE UNIVERSE," " THE LIFE OF THE 
 
 SOUL," ETC, 
 
 BOSTON : THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 LONDON : JAMES CLARKE & CO. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A PECULIAR and pathetic interest attaches to this 
 volume of collected essays by " J.B."— to use his 
 famihar signature, by which he will be affectionately 
 remembered in every quarter of the globe. They 
 include his latest writings, and the dehcate thread 
 of his hfe must have been almost at breaking-point 
 when some of them were penned. Yet there is not 
 the shghtest trace of any failure of his marvellous 
 powers. The intelligence is as clear and keen, the 
 heart as warm and sensitive, the insight as sure and 
 penetrating, as ever, while the sense of humour, the 
 genial consciousness of the ironies of Hfe, seems 
 positively to grow more vivid as the writer feels 
 himself coming close to the mystery and the revel- 
 ation we call death. In spite of infirmities, " J.B." 
 was joyous and fearless and full of hope to the end, 
 because his confidence was strong in the Goodness 
 that is the Soul of all things, in the Fatherhood that 
 controls the hves and destinies of men. Nothing 
 could daunt his faith, for he always saw so 
 clearly how much there is to fortify beHef in God. 
 That is the underlying conviction and inspiration of 
 this series of essays, which therefore fitly bears the 
 title of " Faith's Certainties." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 LIFE S MARCHING ORDERS . 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 THE NEW GENERATION 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 III. 
 
 THE GREAT FINDINGS 
 
 
 
 30 
 
 IV. 
 
 life's LOOSE ENDS 
 
 
 
 40 
 
 V. 
 
 THE HEART OF THINGS 
 
 
 
 50 
 
 VI. 
 
 LIFE AND TIME 
 
 
 
 60 
 
 VII. 
 
 WHAT IS LEFT . . . . 
 
 
 
 70 
 
 VIII. 
 
 MAN THE PROPHET 
 
 
 
 80 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE devil's toll 
 
 
 
 89 
 
 X. 
 
 THE PRICE 
 
 
 
 lOl 
 
 XI. 
 
 FACES .... 
 
 
 
 . 112 
 
 XII. 
 
 OF DEEP-ROOTED SOULS 
 
 
 
 122 
 
 XIII. 
 
 RENUNCIATION 
 
 
 
 . 133 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE CONVERSION OF POWER 
 
 
 
 . 144 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE EVANGELICAL ROOT 
 
 
 
 . 155 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THE UNREACHED PARADISE 
 
 
 
 . 165 
 
 XVII. 
 
 THE BURDEN . . . 
 
 
 
 . 174 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 ARE WE SANE ? . . . 
 
 
 
 . 184 
 
 XIX. 
 
 LINES LEFT OUT 
 
 
 
 . 194 
 
 XX. 
 
 OF SELF EXPRESSION 
 
 
 
 . 204 
 

 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XXI. 
 
 THE SOMETHING ADDED 
 
 . 213 
 
 XXII. 
 
 GRACE .... 
 
 . 223 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 OUR POSSESSIONS 
 
 . 233 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 THE SECRET OF REST 
 
 • 243 
 
 XXV. 
 
 THE CURE OF SOULS . 
 
 . 252 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 OF CHURCH UNITY 
 
 . 263 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 THE UNSEEN BUILDERS 
 
 • 273 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 THE SUCCESSOR 
 
 . 283 
 
 8 
 
FAITH'S CERTAINTIES 
 
 LIFE'S MARCHING ORDERS 
 
 There are people to-day who would dispute the 
 suggestion conveyed in this title. " Before you talk 
 of marching orders you must prove there is an 
 orderer/' We will leave that, then, for the moment, 
 to come to what is indisputable. It is certain at 
 least that we are marching. If we could imagine an 
 observer placed at some point in the sky, and watch- 
 ing from there the course of human history, what 
 would he have seen ? The spectacle might be 
 described in many ways. But there is one term that 
 would fit it with utmost exactness. He would see 
 a procession ; a procession that never for one 
 instant faltered or halted in its movements. Through 
 all those thousands of years the march goes on. 
 Through millenniums of barbarism, of savagery, 
 through the rise of empires, civilisations, religions 
 that are born and die, the line keeps step. All sorts 
 of things happen ; but one thing never happens — 
 the army never halts. The foremost files drop 
 off incessantly into the unseen. But its numbers 
 are constantly recruited from behind. Death at 
 one end, birth at the other. Here at least is a 
 marching order ; the order to move on. Every 
 individual of the host hears it and obeys. We can 
 dam up rivers and build ramparts against the sea. 
 
 9 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 But no force, visible or invisible, that we have yet 
 discovered can stay the rush of time. We can 
 measure it, calculate it, divide it into moments, 
 years, centuries ; what we can never do is to keep 
 one moment back, hinder its ceaseless flow. When 
 we have begun to live we have begun to march. 
 Every experience we know — of utmost joy, of deepest 
 pain, of weariness, of exultation, of disillusion — has 
 this common element. Whatever the moments 
 contain they will pass ; as surely as they have 
 begun they will end. Is there any other fact of life 
 so tremendous, so bewildering as this ? Carlyle puts 
 the fact, and the bewilderment of it, in one haunting 
 sentence : " We emerge from the inane ; haste 
 stormfully across the astonished earth ; then plunge 
 again into the inane. But whence ? O heaven, 
 whither ? Sense knows not ; Faith knows not ; 
 only that it is through Mystery to Mystery." 
 
 There is no doubt, then, about the march. But 
 what as to its meaning ? We have likened this 
 procession to an army. But no army we ever 
 heard of has gone without its orders. The movement 
 of a great force on the war-path is a tremendous 
 spectacle ; one which the war correspondent, the 
 modern historian, has often described. You see 
 the roads choked with the advancing battalions ; the 
 ghnt of bayonets, the hovering scouts in front, the 
 endless lines of baggage wagons behind. You hear 
 the rumble of the guns, the sharp notes of signalling 
 bugles. The air is thick with dust, with the smoke, 
 perhaps, of burning homesteads. But that formidable 
 tramp is an ordered one. Through a thousand 
 channels, from aides-de-camp to generals of divisions, 
 and down from them, through every grade, to the 
 
 10 
 
Life's Marching Orders 
 
 corporal with his file, the one idea is being worked 
 out — the idea in the single brain of the Moltke, of the 
 Napoleon, who governs all. And well for the army 
 that has a chief it can trust. Every private is then 
 twice his own size ; he is reduplicated by the sense of 
 his leader. From him he has gained the habit of 
 victory, and so has won the battle before it begins. 
 And what marching orders some of these have been ! 
 Have we ever tried to imagine what passed in the 
 minds of the officers, and through them into the 
 minds of the humblest private when the word came 
 from Wellington for the storming of a Badajoz, of a 
 Ciudad Rodrigo ? What they thought and felt, 
 these Enghsh lads, sons of loving mothers, with Hfe 
 beating in their veins just as it does in ours ; whose 
 flesh, torn by shot or steel, would hurt just as ours 
 would ; what they thought and felt as they marched 
 in the moonlight towards that deadly breach ! 
 Supposing we were summoned to that sort of business 
 to-morrow ! What stuff, after all, human nature is 
 made of ! When we think of what it has gone 
 through, and gone through so cheerfully, so heroically, 
 surely it is great stuff. One wonders whether any 
 wandering planet of the heavens can, after all, show 
 a better ? But what we want to note here is that in 
 these portentous scenes the thing that kept those men 
 steady in the ranks, that sent them on over the dead 
 bodies of their comrades to face steel and bomb in 
 their turn, was the sense that they were under 
 orders. They were there not to enjoy but to obey. 
 These simple souls become heroes by one thing — by 
 loyalty to their duty, to their trusted chief. And you 
 will get nothing out of men, whether on the battle- 
 field or any other field, without that ; without a 
 
 II 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 chief you can believe in, and a sense of duty that is 
 bound up with that faith. 
 
 Duty ; there is a word, a marching order, indeed. 
 Says Quinet, writing to a friend in what, to him, was 
 a dark hour : *' Do not talk to me of hope ; it is too 
 deceptive in its nature. It makes me ill. I like 
 better duty, the fixed line, invariable, that one can 
 follow with one's eyes shut without a mistake." 
 Yes, but what is duty ; where and how shall we 
 find it ? To the soldier with his chief there 
 visible, and his orders before him, duty is a plain 
 affair ; not simple, heaven knows, to carry out, but 
 simple enough to understand. But for us separate 
 souls, cast in this twentieth century, with no visible 
 commander before us, with a babble of confusing 
 voices around us, with every imaginable theory of 
 life offered for our choice ; for us creatures of passion 
 and of instinct, with the guides all at quarrel as to 
 the ultimate questions, how shall we find out what our 
 duty is ? What is duty, and, above all, what are its 
 credentials, its sanctions ? We are minded specially 
 to ask this question in view of a recent statement by 
 an eminent publicist. Mr. William Archer, in an 
 article which appeared recently in a daily paper, 
 discusses the question of " Eternal Verities." 
 " Eternal Verities " was a phrase he had copied, in 
 order to criticise, from a book by Dr. H. B. Gray on 
 " The Pubhc Schools and the Empire." Dr. Gray's 
 " Eternal Verities " are what he holds to be the 
 religious truths offered us in the New Testament. 
 We are not here holding a brief for Dr. Gray's views 
 either of the Old or the New Testament. Our 
 concern is with Mr. Archer's contention as to the 
 relative merits of morality and religion. He asks : 
 
 12 
 
Life's Marching Orders 
 
 "Is it quite wise, then, to rest the sanction of 
 moraUty on any individual set of theological verities, 
 seeing that morality has certainly existed before 
 them, and apart from them, and would as certainly 
 continue to exist if they proved to be no verities at 
 all ? " He adds : '' Surely the truth is that in 
 founding morality upon theology we are basing the 
 more certain upon the less certain. The evidences 
 of morality are in and around us at all times ; the 
 evidences of any particular religion are largely 
 historical, and no historical fact can, in the nature of 
 things, be as certain as a fact continually verified 
 in actual experience. . . . The most ancient 
 theological verities are imparted to the world — or 
 rather to this or that portion of it — at this or that 
 historic date. The moral verities are immeasurably 
 prehistoric." 
 
 This is all very interesting, and, to us at least, 
 very strange. Mr. Archer's indictment may be put 
 into three propositions. First, morality is superior, 
 as a guide, to religion, because it is older. Secondly, 
 religion is inferior because it is historic. Third, 
 morality is safer, because, in contrast with it, religion 
 cannot, as can morality, be continually verified in 
 experience. There is a fine, breezy assurance about 
 these statements which is in itself attractive. But 
 how far do they conform to the facts ? Mr. Archer's 
 historical researches may be very extensive. They 
 are certainly more extensive than ours if they have 
 enabled him to discover any existent morality, or 
 dawn of morahty, that is older than rehgion. All we 
 know of the prehistoric comes from the hints sug- 
 gested by the historic. And unless our reading 
 has been on entirely wrong lines, the lesson it teaches 
 
 13 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 is that the earliest races of which history offers us 
 any information, give us always religion as the basis 
 of their morality. India, Assyria, Egypt, they are all 
 alike in this. Says Boscawen : " Six thousand years 
 ago man, in Egypt and Chaldea, stands before us, 
 pure in his tastes, lofty in his ideals, and, above all, 
 keenly conscious of the relationship which exists 
 between himself and his God. It is no dread, but the 
 grateful love of a child to his father, of friend to 
 friend, that meets us in the oldest books of the world." 
 And if, setting history aside, we look for the pre- 
 historic conditions in what we find amongst the 
 existent savage races, shall we find in any of them a 
 morality which exists apart from and independent of 
 religion ? If such there be we shall be glad to have 
 news of them. 
 
 But the religions are inferior because they are all 
 historical. They came into existence at such and 
 such dates. Well, what would you have ? Is 
 there anything in the visible universe, from the spiral 
 of a nebula to spring's first cuckoo, that is not, in a 
 way, historical, that has not its date assigned ? 
 Is not morality historical ? And as to religion, how 
 do we suppose, in nature's order of things, that the 
 great religious personalities could appear before a 
 time which was equal to producing them, and equal 
 to receiving them ? The third of Mr. Archer's 
 statements seems to us, in its value as an argument, 
 equal to the other two. Morality is so superior, as a 
 marching order, to religion, because it is continuously 
 verifiable by experience. Well, we suppose experi- 
 ences vary. But to some of us at least, it is precisely 
 on the ground of an experience continuously verified 
 that we hold to religion. It is precisely because we 
 
 14 
 
Life's Marching Orders 
 
 have found nothing else that is equal to the strain oi 
 life and of temptation ; nothing else that reaches 
 where pubHc opinion and outside maxims and dry 
 counsels of prudence cannot reach, into the hidden 
 region of motive, into the secret realm where duty 
 fights its battle with desire — it is because of this 
 experience, daily tested and verified, that we think 
 so little of a morality that is not backed up by some- 
 thing behind a morality, something that gives 
 morality its life and conquering power. The New 
 Testament is the greatest book of morality, because 
 it is the greatest book of religion. It gives us a 
 supreme morality, because it gives us a supreme life. 
 It supplies so perfectly what Seneca, in that strange 
 yearning sentence of his, describes as the world's 
 great want : " We ought to choose some good man, 
 and always have him before our eyes, that we may 
 live as if he watched us, and do everything as if he 
 saw." Can we forget how exactly this answers to 
 what Mill, that other seeker, says of Christ ? Prosper 
 Merimee, Mill's contemporary in France, who called 
 himself a great atheist, " an outrageous materialist," 
 has a saying which might be put beside Mill's. 
 Speaking of the New Testament, he observes : "It 
 seems evident to me that there is no better rule ol 
 conduct to follow, whatever doubts one may enter- 
 tain as to the origin of the book." The New Testa- 
 ment contains much that belongs to its own time, a 
 time which is gone, and whose conditions have been 
 outgrown. We strip off the peel to get to the orange. 
 But beneath the temporal shines there the eternal. 
 Here still seeking souls find their marching orders. 
 Here find we life's highest, given us in its highest 
 example. Here come we in contact with spiritual 
 
 15 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 forces, whose power we can test to-day, and whose 
 action upon us is to translate the Christ Ufe of those 
 glorious passages into a Christ life written in our- 
 selves. Here we get our morality, with a driving 
 power that makes it effective. Here, too, we get 
 what morality can never give, the enthusiasm for 
 living which comes from an unquenchable hope. 
 
 Voltaire once described life as " une maiivaise 
 plaisanterie " (a bad joke). It certainly will be that 
 or worse, if we follow some of the marching orders 
 which are current to-day. In youth's hot age we are 
 apt to take our orders from the passions. The 
 passions are magnificent in their way. Let none 
 undervalue or disparage them. Milton, and after 
 him Vauvenargues, has described them as factors 
 of the noblest in us. But always when in their 
 proper place. They are forces that must never be 
 leaders. They are placed too low down in us to be 
 watchtowers. Their range of vision is so limited, 
 and of themselves they never see straight. Besides, 
 they dry up later on, and yet life has still to be lived. 
 People take orders from the oddest things. Of old 
 people sought direction in omens, in signs and 
 oracles, the flight of birds, the entrails of slain 
 victims. A witty French lady writer, describing her 
 recent experiences in England, informs her readers 
 that amongst us young ladies, anxious for their 
 matrimonial prospects, seek guidance as to their 
 future husbands by mystical incantations, by weird 
 rites at Michaelmas and New Year's Day, by chance 
 openings of the Bible, and so on. It is news to us ; 
 but she, perhaps, knows her sex better than we do. 
 There are others, and these chiefly women, who take 
 their orders from the priest, the confessor. They 
 
 i6 
 
Life's Marching Orders 
 
 would save their poor little souls by losing them — 
 the wrong way. They give up their own reason, 
 their own will — the twin pillars of character — putting 
 them under the heel of another's reason, another's will. 
 As if the creation of character — the one object for 
 which we are here in this world — were to be obtained 
 by evisceration, by annihilation ! The priest feasts 
 on souls, on their emasculation, their absorption 
 into himself, as the vulture feasts on carrion. When 
 will men learn, when will priests learn, that the 
 development of a free, nobly thinking, nobly willing 
 self, is the greatest of all creations in this world, and 
 that the man who works against that, who aims at its 
 destruction, is the most murderous of all murderers ? 
 We are here to be free, yet with an ordered free- 
 dom, free in a spiritual universe, whose laws — plainly 
 discernible to all who seek — it will be our delight to 
 obey. Deo parere lihertas est. 
 
 The marching orders of that spiritual world are 
 often stern enough, as stern sometimes, and as 
 seeming hopeless, as those for the Balaclava charge, 
 or of a forlorn hope. In your lonehness, in your 
 weakness, you wonder sometimes what you are here 
 for. Life seems too cruel. Its burdens, its dis- 
 appointments have been so crushing, its conditions so 
 merciless. Well, what are you here for ? Plainly, 
 it was not simply for enjoying yourself, forgetting all 
 you would like. Were that the main object, things 
 would have been differently arranged. You have 
 not had provision made for all that. But have 
 you observed what provision has been made, a 
 provision that has been always there ? It is the 
 provision for doing your duty ; the provision for 
 willing well, for acting well ; the provision for 
 
 17 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 character, for nobleness. There has never been one 
 single moment, one single condition of your life in 
 which all that has not been made possible for you. 
 And the greater the stress the greater the chance. 
 
 Here, again, let us turn to our New Testament. 
 We get a glimpse there of life's marching orders as 
 they were interpreted by one of its chief characters. 
 Have we grumblers, comfortably housed meanwhile, 
 with families and friends, with incomes, with all our 
 easy securities, ever tried to picture to ourselves the 
 actual state of things which Paul describes as his daily 
 condition ? " In journeyings often, in perils of 
 waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own 
 countrymen, in perils by the heathen ... in 
 weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in 
 hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and 
 nakedness ! " And this career winds up in the 
 Roman prison, and then, if report speaks truly, as 
 one of Nero's victims, going out as one of those 
 human flambeaux set alight to illuminate his gardens. 
 Plainly not much provision for the human comforts 
 here ! And yet the man was content and joyful. He 
 was a soldier on the march, God's soldier, with God's 
 orders in his mind, and God's comfort in his soul. 
 And these are the marching orders for you and for me. 
 They have been good enough for millions of souls, who 
 have been happy in the possession of them ; happy, 
 not from fancy conjunctions of prosperous circum- 
 stances, but because they felt themselves to be here 
 to become what God would have them be, and to 
 accomplish what God would have them do. 
 
 i8 
 
II 
 
 THE NEW GENERATION 
 
 The parent is your true revolutionist. The 
 family man — that quiet, easy, domesticated person- 
 age — is really a greater upheaver than a case of 
 dynamite. To bring forth children is to invite the 
 whirlwind. It is to invoke the strongest, the most 
 fateful force we know. The oldest institutions, 
 your Church and State, your hoary creeds, your 
 settled code of ethics, are powerless against the cradle. 
 You settle your constitution, you endow and 
 establish your theology, and fancy you have arranged 
 things for all time. And the tiny brain that yonder is 
 making its first attempts at thought may upset them 
 all. In the year 1760 there was in France a going 
 concern in Church and State — kinghood, priesthood, 
 feudalhood, serfhood — that had been established for 
 centuries. About that time some children were 
 coming into the world — a Mirabeau, a Robespierre, a 
 Danton, a Vergniaud ; and their advent was the 
 finger of doom pointed at all that. There has been 
 from the beginning a curious mistrust of the new 
 generation. The grown-up people know themselves, 
 and think they know their world. But what of their 
 successors ? Will they take the world as the others 
 take it ? Old Sir Thomas Browne, in the " Religio 
 Medici," recoiled from the future. He had no 
 pleasure in thinking of what men would be or do two 
 
 19 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 or three centuries hence. Before him Horace had 
 
 put this still more strongly. The world would go 
 
 from bad to worse : — 
 
 ^tas parentum pejor avis tulit 
 Nos nequiores, mox daturos 
 Progeniem vitiosiorem. 
 
 (The age of our parents, worse than that of its 
 ancestors, has borne us, worse still, who in our 
 turn are to produce a progeny yet deeper in vice.) 
 
 The most epigrammatic bit of condensed pessimism 
 this, surely, that literature has ever produced. 
 Things were indeed pretty bad in the time of the 
 Roman poet, and they got worse. 
 
 This question of the next generation, the question 
 of how to deal with this unknown power, how to curb 
 and train its energies, and to turn them to the best 
 uses, was one that profoundly exercised the ancient 
 world. And its thoughts here were by no means 
 always pessimistic. The Greek brain was especially 
 full of bold schemes. Our modern science of 
 Eugenics is really a very ancient one. Plato, in his 
 " Republic," has anticipated almost all that has been 
 said. He proposes to breed men as we breed horses — 
 on scientific principles. It is to be by a principle of 
 selection. In his ideal community he fixes the age 
 at which men and women are to produce children. 
 Women are to begin to bear children at twenty, and 
 to continue till forty ; men to begin as fathers at 
 twenty-five, and to continue till fifty-five. It is 
 throughout a State affair. And the education of the 
 children is also a State affair. The whole training 
 and preparation for life is laid down in rigid rules, 
 framed in the interests of the community. That idea 
 has been floating before the world ever since. But it 
 
 20 
 
The New Generation 
 
 has never been carried out. The Emperor GalHenus, 
 under the influence of Plotinus, proposed once to 
 rebuild a Campanian city, call it Platonopolis, and 
 to have it administered on the principles of the 
 " Republic." It would have been a vastly interest- 
 ing experiment for the world had the scheme matured, 
 which it did not. Humanity is a very queer material, 
 and has shown, so far, a decided objection to be cut 
 and carved as though it were a piece of mahogany. 
 Spite of all the schemes, it has gone on in its own 
 weird way, falling in love, marrying, or doing without 
 marrying, producing children, the results of passion, 
 of affection, of wild impulse, and then standing by, 
 wondering, admiring, or aghast at the new creation, 
 and asking, often in sore bewilderment, what is to be 
 done with it ! 
 
 So, after all these ages, we have the question still 
 before us, still an unsettled question, what to do with 
 the new generation. We are, on a multitude of its 
 issues, very much at sea ; but there are one or two 
 simple and yet fundamental matters on which there 
 is, amongst thinking men, a general agreement. The 
 difficulty is that, so far, the agreement is only a 
 mental one ; and the thinkers will have to be a good 
 deal more energetic than they have been if these 
 fundamentals are ever to be made a basis of action. 
 We are, let us hope, at one with Plato that the State, 
 as such, has an interest in the question ; an interest 
 which must govern much of its future procedure. It 
 is, for instance, imperative to its well-being that its 
 children should be born and brought up in healthy 
 conditions. But what a proposition that is ! With 
 over seventy per cent, of its newcomers born here in 
 England in big towns, where the air, our greatest 
 
 21 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 food, is often fifty per cent, under the health line ; 
 born in homes where neither good food nor good 
 clothing is possible on the wages earned ; born often 
 in slums where the moral air and light are as dense 
 and befogged as the physical ! The question here is 
 not of giving men luxuries, but of giving them bodies, 
 brains and hearts. It is not a question of poverty 
 even. Some of the best have been born poor. 
 Luther was of peasant origin. " I am a peasant's 
 son," said he ; " my father, grandfather and ancestors 
 were peasants." But it was a peasantry of good 
 air and wholesome surroundings. Do we expect a 
 slum ever to produce a prophet, a Luther ? Are we 
 not, in our present conditions in England, behind the 
 barbarian races, who, at least, breed strong men ? 
 Thucydides said of Attica that it was famous for 
 breeding men. So far, it has been about the last 
 thing we have thought of. 
 
 The State has to wake up on this subject. Well for 
 it if its politics shape more definitely and with more 
 concentration upon it. It can do great things. But 
 it can never of itself solve, or half solve, the problem. 
 The biggest half is left for us, the individuals, who 
 separately compose it. Not that we can go all the 
 way, or even very far, towards its solution. The 
 problem of heredity is a baffling one, beyond all our 
 science and all our experience. Parents stand often 
 amazed at their children. We see family after 
 family that bear apparently no resemblance to their 
 begetters. All the characteristics of their elders 
 absent, and these strange new ones in possession ! 
 Germanicus has a Caligula for his heir ; John 
 Howard's son is a rake. For all that there are lines 
 of movement, waymarks which these cross traces do 
 
 22 
 
The New Generation 
 
 hot obliterate. Blood tells ; and so still more does 
 training. A Spurgeon, a Wesley, do not come by 
 chance ; no, nor a Kaiser Wilhelm nor a Bach. You 
 go back for a generation, or two generations, and see 
 them in the making. Above all, you go back upon 
 their mothers. Woman is to-day trying to get a 
 fresh footing in the world. She is agitating for the 
 vote, and doubtless in due time she will get it. Odd 
 though, that having done comfortably without it for 
 all these thousands of years she should want to pull 
 the world about our ears if she does not secure it 
 within six months. Let us hope, when it does come, 
 it may help in the human struggle ; but assuredly 
 woman's best power does not lie there. Some of us 
 who have votes care marvellously little for them. 
 We know better where our true strength lies. 
 Ballot-boxes are something, but the influence behind 
 which fills ballot-boxes is something more. 
 
 Woman, if she will see it, has had, and may have 
 still more, an influence that will fill not only ballot 
 boxes, but all the great spheres of life, and that 
 with the finest forms of power. It is with her, for 
 one thing, to preserve religion for the future ; to 
 preserve it by making it beautiful and by making 
 it lovable. The creeds are man's affair, and they 
 are hardly a compliment to him. They have done 
 so much to make religion forbidding, to make it 
 ugly. It is not in them that men have reached 
 their faith. They got it better at their mother's 
 knee. To understand Wesley, you have first to 
 understand his mother. Bernard's hfe is written 
 first of all in the life of Aletta. Augustine derives 
 from Monica. Nothing in modern literature is more 
 beautiful than Lamartine's account of his mother. 
 
 23 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 He tells how in the garden of their country house 
 there was a walk sacred to her, where, at a given 
 hour every evening, she walked, in rapt communion 
 with her God, and getting from that fellowship a 
 light, a love, a devotion which made her to him and 
 all who knew her an incarnation of all that was 
 beautiful and holy. What a new generation should 
 we have if behind it stood mothers of that type ! 
 
 We are trying to-day to educate our new 
 generation. And what is education ? Assuredly 
 not the mere stuffing of young brains with the rules 
 of syntax or the names of dead kings. It is nothing 
 if it is not, as far as that can be done, the creation 
 of character. Says old Heraclitus : ^)do<s dvOpunro) 
 SaifjLbiv (Character is man's destiny) — a true word. 
 And character can only be created in others by 
 the^^exhibition of it in ourselves. You can only 
 teach religion by being religious ; and by being so 
 in a beautiful way. The only way of making creed 
 effective is by acting it. Make young people fall in 
 love with their teacher ; that is the surest way of 
 making them love the things he teaches. And that 
 is true whether the teacher be a mother at home, 
 or the leader of a class in day or Sunday school, or 
 the professor at a University. What were the Rugby, 
 the Uppingham school-books compared with the 
 personality of an Arnold, a Thring ? What were 
 the Balliol traditions compared with the influence 
 of a Jowett ? What a story is that of Da Feltre 
 of Mantua in the fifteenth century ! Villari says 
 of him : " His success in so immoral an age was 
 entirely owing to the nobility and generosity of his 
 mind. . . . For a long time his pupils were 
 distinguished by a loyalty of character in strong 
 
 24 
 
The New Generation 
 
 contrast with the general corruption." He beUeved 
 evidently in Joubert's maxim : " Make truth lovely 
 and do not try to arm her ; mankind will then be 
 far less inclined to contend with her." 
 
 One of the greatest problems of education is the 
 problem of work. A fondness for work, the habit 
 of it, the discipline of the mind to the encounter of 
 difficulties, to perseverance in the attack till the 
 victory has been gained ; this is one of the funda- 
 mentals of character, the sign manual of a superior 
 race. To get that into a pupil is the teacher's 
 greatest and most difficult task. Montesquieu 
 speaks of a traveller who found as the result of his 
 observations that among all the tribes of men there 
 seemed a general disposition to laziness. It is a 
 disposition that has not died out. The new gener- 
 ation in particular is strongly suspected of laziness. 
 Dean Farrar, as an old schoolmaster, gives an appal- 
 ling account of our public schools. Of the twenty- 
 five per cent, of the boys — supposedly the elite — who 
 go to the university he says : "A considerable 
 number leave school ignorant of history, ancient and 
 modern, ignorant of geography and chronology, 
 ignorant of every single modern language, ignorant 
 of their own language, and often of its mere spelling ; 
 ignorant of every single science . . . profoundly 
 ignorant of that Greek and Latin to which long m- 
 effectual years of their aimless teaching have been 
 professedly devoted." We do not know how far 
 this holds of to-day. The fact remains, however, 
 that English ignorance is still a proverb in better 
 educated countries ; and this further fatal fact that 
 industry is considered bad form in the youth of our 
 upper classes ; that a proficiency in games counts 
 
 25 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 vastly more with them than a proficiency in 
 language or in science. Are things better lower 
 down ? How is it that the English clerk, so unlike 
 the German, knows no language but his own ; that 
 the working man spends so many hours and so much 
 money at football, and nothing of one or the other 
 over books ? 
 
 How is this to be met ; how is the new generation 
 to be taught the value of work, to be infected with 
 the love of it ? There have been, at one time and 
 another, odd theories abroad on this subject. Our 
 English Locke, who in this was followed by Rousseau, 
 and later by Basedow, has the brilliant idea of 
 confounding for the child the difference between 
 play and work. Make a child, suggests Locke, whip 
 his top till he is tired and sick of it, and then give him 
 some real work as a recreation ! It is like the story of 
 the builder saying to his labourers : " Let us now 
 have a game at digging out the cellars ! " The 
 theory has been quite elaborated in some modern 
 systems. We have no belief in it. It is a dishonesty, 
 and one which in the end will be found out. There 
 is all the difference in the world between play and 
 work, and it is a crime against the young mind to 
 conceal the fact. 
 
 At the other extreme are people who preach the 
 austere doctrine of work for work's sake ; who 
 would banish the system of prizes, of rewards, as 
 encouraging the spirit of emulation, as an appeal to 
 an inferior motive. Say they : " Make work its own 
 reward ; create in the learner the love of the great 
 literatures, of the great sciences, for what they con- 
 tain in themselves." The other way, that of 
 examinations, prizes, and so forth, results in a mere 
 
 26 
 
The New Generation 
 
 cramming, which is cast aside and forgotten as soon 
 as this immediate end has been attained. We hear 
 of some Council school authorities who have been 
 following this advice, though with another motive. 
 They have abolished the system of prizes in the 
 schools as a useless cost to the ratepayer ! The 
 scholars are henceforth to nourish their ardour on 
 the text, ** Virtue is its own reward " ! Surely this 
 is playing it rather low down on the young gener- 
 ation ! It is expecting too much of the average 
 human nature, especially of young human nature. 
 It is to forget one chief thing here. The love of 
 knowledge for its own sake is one of the mind's later 
 achievements. Moreover, it is one that comes to 
 us when the hard beginnings are over ; when we have 
 already penetrated the first barriers and got into the 
 thing itself. You may enjoy the Greek dramatists 
 for themselves when you can read them with your feet 
 on the fender. That is a different one from conju- 
 gating the verbs in " mi " ! The intellectual elite, 
 the true students, come surely to the disinterested 
 love of the thing they study ; but none of us begins 
 there. The boy has not the stimulant of the man. 
 
 But the man himself, at his best and highest, 
 does he do entirely without his reward ? Does the 
 statesman, the scientist, the preacher, work with no 
 thought of the guerdon ? If he is of the true metal he 
 will keep raising his price ; working for ever nobler 
 ends, for the reward which is spiritual. But he is 
 helped every day by the other ; by recognition, by 
 the approbation of the worthy. The Greeks, who 
 knew something of education, frankly accepted the 
 reward system. The Olympian games, with their 
 prizes, garlands, statues, were their great incitement 
 
 27 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 to the athletic training of their young men. And not 
 for athletics alone. It was to Olympia the poets, 
 the dramatists, brought their highest intellectual 
 achievements for the verdict of the people. We read 
 how Herodotus, " the father of history," wrote his 
 history of the war with Persia to be recited at the 
 games. We read how, as he read to the assembled 
 thousands, the story of Thermopylae, of Marathon 
 and Salamis, the multitude, moved to its inmost soul, 
 rent the air with their applause, and then crowned 
 and magnificently rewarded the narrator. 
 
 We need to get our new generation to work. And 
 we must set it to work with a good heart. Let 
 the boy have his prizes. It is one of the purest joys 
 in many a humble home when the lad, the girl, 
 bring home the treasured volumes in their gay 
 bindings to adorn the little bookshelf ; there to be, 
 not their own only, but their father's, their mother's 
 pride. They will have bigger tasks later on, and win, 
 let us hope, bigger victories. But they cannot learn, 
 too soon, the habit of struggle, the habit of victory. 
 
 On the whole, we believe in the new generation. 
 The faith by which we live is a faith in God ; and 
 that must have, as its corollary, a faith in man. And 
 such faith, all seeming appearances to the contrary, 
 is justified by the steady march of human pro- 
 gress. The world shows that it is not going to 
 lose any of the good that has come into it. It may 
 change the form and aspect of it, but it will keep the 
 thing. The laws of the soul have all a forward, 
 upward look. We believe with the Anabaptist 
 Hiibmaier, who perished for his faith : " Truth is 
 immortal ; and though she for a long time may be 
 imprisoned, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified 
 
 28 
 
The New Generation 
 
 and buried, she will yet rise victorious on the third 
 day." Because we are in higher hands than our 
 own, in the hands of One whose pauses are prepar- 
 ations for great things, who wills our final partici- 
 pation in His own perfectness, we hail the future with 
 gladness and hope. In that spirit, tOo, we hail the 
 beginners — now in their cradles — of the new future. 
 We say with Wordsworth : — 
 
 A child more than all other gifts 
 
 That earth can offer to declining man 
 
 Brings hope with it, and forward looking thoughts. 
 
 29 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GREAT FINDINGS 
 
 Man is the eternal seeker. Life might be defined 
 as a perpetual quest. We are always in search of 
 something ; and the more we find, the more ardently 
 do we seek. We begin early. Hide-and-seek is the 
 children's greatest game. There is nothing so 
 delightful to young people as a secret, except that 
 perhaps of finding one out. It is this feeling for 
 secrets and for unravelling them that makes the 
 enormous vogue of detective stories. The prospector 
 in the wilds of Alaska, in the Californian sierras, 
 turning up the soil in the hunt for gold, is the image 
 of us all. The world is, for every man in it, a Tom 
 Tiddler's ground, which he scratches and rakes for 
 hid treasure. And what extraordinary finds there 
 have been ! Some of them of such pure luck. Was 
 there ever anything queerer in this line than the 
 discovery of glass ? We wonder now how the world 
 could ever have got on without glass. How did we 
 get it ? Not by chemical research, not by elaborate 
 scientific experiment, but by the sheer blundering 
 fortune of certain wandering b'^ilors. Some Phoenician 
 mariners, landing on the nort.^ coast of Africa, find 
 themselves in the midst of a s vndy desert. They 
 search for stones on which to place their kettles and 
 pans for cooking. Finding none, they bethink 
 them of some lumps of saltpetre which form part of 
 their cargo. They bring these along, make a fire 
 
 30 
 
The Great Findings 
 
 on them, and cook and eat their simple meal. And 
 then the wonder ! They find the saltpetre melted 
 by the fire, has become mixed with the ashes and the 
 glowing sand. As the liquid mass cools, it becomes 
 before their eyes a clear, hard, transparent substance. 
 Man has discovered glass ! 
 
 That is a happening of once in a million years. We 
 rarely get our finds so easily as that. It is not 
 nature's habit to give something for nothing. What 
 seem accidental finds are only a small part accidental. 
 Mme. Curie struck radium when looking for some- 
 thing else ; but an untrained mind would not have 
 struck it at all. Newton reached gravitation from 
 the fall of an apple ; Watt hit on steam as a propelling 
 force from the simmering of a tea-kettle. But 
 apples had been falling from trees, and kettles had 
 been simmering over kitchen fires long ages before, 
 and nobody had extracted from them either gravi- 
 tation or steam engines. Nature's secrets are, as 
 a rule, hardly won ; she demands the best and 
 strongest in us before she will yield them. To-day 
 Mont Blanc is an affair of excursion parties ; but it 
 took the trained muscle, the mountaineering instinct, 
 the quenchless valour of a Balmat to find the road. 
 We sit down at our tables, and partake of every eat- 
 able variety. Has it ever occurred to us to think of 
 the sufferings, the deaths innumerable, of those 
 human pioneers who first found out what was good to 
 eat and drink ; so often by eating and drinking the 
 wrong things and getting poisoned by them ? There 
 ought to be a monument to the man who swallowed 
 the first oyster. We all honour Columbus ; but 
 what of the man who, fashioning some queer craft, 
 trusted himself first to the remorseless sea ? We 
 
 31 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 are all on wheels to-day ; the wheel is a bigger 
 element in life than anything that all the parliaments 
 have ever enacted. But who invented the wheel ? 
 And who kindled the first fire ? 
 
 These were findings in the business of living ; and, 
 as someone has said, we must live before we can live 
 well. There are doubtless wonderful things yet to 
 be discovered in this direction. There are perhaps 
 new sauces to be invented, and better soaps. We 
 may learn to travel fifty times faster than we do 
 now. And we may find out how to live to a hundred 
 and fifty ; to become taller and stronger. One 
 doubts, however, whether improvements, however 
 vast, in this line of things will add much to the sum 
 of real living. Of what use after all, to go quicker 
 on land or through the air if our traveller is miserable, 
 or a fool, or a knave, both when he starts and when 
 he gets there ? Of what ultimate value is the swiftest 
 flashing of news from the ends of the earth if the 
 news is that of greedy schemes, of base intrigues, 
 of human littleness, crimes and follies ? The great 
 finds, after all, lie elsewhere. They are the soul's 
 finds. And we must each make them for ourselves. 
 The question for you and me is, What have we found 
 or what are we on the way to find ? We were all 
 set going, years ago, on the to us untrodden tract 
 so vast and varied, so full of dangers and yet of 
 glorious possibilities — that great country of free-will, 
 where we were turned adrift to seek a character ! 
 How have we fared ? Have we found anything 
 worth picking up, worth talking about ? The 
 chapter of our separate experience, if it could only 
 be accurately and honestly told, what reading would 
 be more fascinating than this ? 
 
 32 
 
The Great Findings 
 
 As we count over our findings, one thing is 
 remarkable. It is astonishing how few of them — 
 we are speaking here of ourselves, of the modern man 
 and woman — could be fitted into the phraseology of 
 the old theological creeds ! To do that would be to 
 drop out of reality into convention. We should 
 miss the actual flavour of life as we have lived 
 it. So much there has been in us that is not in them ; 
 so much in them that is not in us ! To take one or 
 two of the great finds. And these shall not be 
 abnormal, belonging just to an individual and to no 
 one else ; but such as are open to us all, examples and 
 lessons dug out of the great laws of life. Have we 
 lived long enough to find this out, for instance, that 
 happiness lies not in possession, but in work and the 
 rewards of work ? Do you suppose that a rich man 
 is made happy by his mere riches ? Nature has made 
 no such contract with us ; has never kept any such 
 contract, as every rich man knows. A man who 
 has waked up every morning for years to the know- 
 ledge that he is worth half a million, does not get any 
 leap of morning joy from that knowledge. Not a 
 whit. It is to him an entirely stale thought. If he 
 lost it all, he would feel that, and badly. But that 
 is another affair. The mere having, and the sense of 
 having, is a pleasure he exhausted before he can 
 even remember. It gives him no more emotion than 
 eating his breakfast. If he is bent on money as his 
 life pursuit, the enjoyment is not in having, but in 
 making it ; in seeing the pile increase. But that is an 
 activity ; not the static of the pile itself. To have 
 your brain, your work, your business in this world ; 
 what matters it whether their operations be carried 
 on in a big room or a small one ; in a palace or a 
 
 33 
 
 9 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 cottage ! Your soul is of the same size wherever 
 it is ; its dimensions, its activities, its triumphs and 
 defeats have Uttle or nothing to do with those outside 
 fittings and furnishings. The New Testament, in its 
 estimate of mere worldly possessions, is not talking 
 mere conventional theology. It is transcribing a 
 page out of the law of hfe. The old Greeks had found 
 that law. We like the story of Euripides and his 
 audience. In one of his plays he made one of his 
 characters say : " Riches are the sovereign good ; 
 it is right they should excite the admiration of men 
 and of gods." The audience, we read, was revolted, 
 and would have stopped the play had not the poet 
 announced that, in the end, the advocates of riches 
 would be punished ! 
 
 And connected with this find — of what work means 
 to life — is another, which we cannot come upon too 
 early ; and that is the value to us of difficulty. We 
 shall be good for nothing unless we set ourselves in 
 contact with difficult things, things which bring out 
 all our forces, all our reserves. If you have none in 
 your own line of things, for God's sake seek them, and 
 seek them every day. The man who has none in his 
 daily programme is a lost man. His manhood 
 can be seen ebbing out of him. All greatness is built 
 on difficulty, daily encountered, daily conquered. 
 Or even if not conquered, even if we are beaten, the 
 value of the struggle remains. Failure is a magni- 
 ficent hunting ground. If only it has taught us our 
 limitations, that is something well learned. But so 
 often it shows us, as with the flash of a searchhght, 
 where our mistake lay, and how, after, to avoid it. 
 The great men, we say, are all built on difficulties. 
 When you see a great musician, a great painter, a great 
 
 34 
 
The Great Findings 
 
 scientist, you see there a soul that has wrestled with 
 ease and indolence, and has thrown them ; that has 
 gone daily for the hard things, and would have 
 speech with nothing easier than that ; one who has 
 wedded his will to his hours, and made them yield 
 their utmost. 
 
 We should think more hopefully of England's future 
 if we could see our Englishmen of to-day more in love 
 with difficult things. Our workmen, so called, are 
 getting more and more leisure, but what are they 
 doing with it ? Who of them, for instance, ever 
 dreams of turning his free hours, as the German so 
 constantly does, to the tackling of a foreign language ? 
 If he would only try it he would find a good foreign 
 grammar the most interesting book in the world. 
 For one thing — and just think of that — it is all true. 
 It will never grow out of date for you, and will never 
 deceive you. Come to it when and where you will, 
 and it has always the right, the accurate thing to say 
 on the point you are seeking. Of how many books, 
 ancient and modern, can you say as much ? And as 
 you grapple with your difficulty — in languages or 
 any other research — you discover how all your nature 
 joins joyfully in. What puzzled you yesterday 
 comes easier to-day. How is that? Because the 
 unconscious part of you, the forces that lie beneath 
 your active will and consciousness, have come to your 
 aid and have been working for you. They approve 
 what you are doing and set their seal upon the work. 
 And if even in the end you are not a success you are at 
 least a tryer, and that is a success in itself. 
 
 Intimately Hnked with that great find is this 
 other ; that as a tryer you find yourself. You find 
 not only work, but your work ; your message to 
 
 35 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 and business in this world. We are all preachers — 
 of something or other ; all of us are speakers, in 
 public or in private ; and some of us are writers. 
 And we have all our style. How did we get it ? 
 There are innumerable books on style, which some of 
 us have labouriously perused. We have, if we are 
 ambitious, studied Quintilian and Aristotle ; we 
 have sought the secrets of Cicero's flow, of the com- 
 pression of Tacitus ; we know our Addison, our 
 Burke, our Macaulay ; we have sought the phrasing, 
 the epigrammatic sparkle, of France, from Bossuet 
 to Renan. You may do this and make a pretty 
 jumble of it in the end. It has its uses, all that, for 
 no honest work is useless. But it will be all a wander- 
 ing in the wilderness unless, by God's mercy, this 
 happens — that ultimately you find yourself. Find, 
 that is, your own soul and its meaning for this world 
 and its message to it. When you have got your 
 message you have got your style. For, as Buffon 
 has it, and it is the final word here, " Le style, c'est 
 Vhomme meme " (style is the man himself). When 
 you have, not to say something, but something 
 to say ; when God's word to you has become a 
 word in you, a word that burns to be uttered, there is 
 no more trouble about style. It will come out of 
 you, just as your breath comes out of you, as an 
 emanation of your very self. And men will taste it 
 and savour it ; for it is no longer the chopped straw 
 of dead material, but a bit of actual life. When a 
 man has found himself his fellows speedily find him. 
 For a part of the universe has taken root in him and 
 is expressing itself through him. It has entered into 
 him as deep conviction, as passionate enthusiasm. 
 Here is a ray of the eternal light, reflected through the 
 
 36 
 
The Great Findings 
 
 medium of this one soul, whose separate angle of 
 reflection returns this unique ray, needed to make the 
 human vision of God complete. And this message, 
 remember, is not that only of the professional 
 speaker or writer. You may never stand on platform, 
 or say a word in print. Not the less you have your 
 message, if you will seek it ; the gesture of your own 
 spirit, seen in the temper of your mind, in your whole 
 attitude to life — a beautiful, a significant message, if 
 only we will seek it and find it. 
 
 Assuredly everything in life hangs upon the 
 same string. What we have said as to these great 
 findings forms part of this other, the greatest find 
 oi all — to have discovered and to have appropriated 
 life's spiritual values. We are reminded here of 
 an extraordinary saying of Lamennais, a saying 
 assuredly out of his dark hours, of which he had many. 
 ** Do you know," he writes, '* what it is which 
 makes man the most suffering of all creatures ? It 
 is that he has one foot in the finite and the other in 
 the infinite, and that he is torn asunder not by four 
 horses, as in the horrible old times, but between two 
 worlds." The sombre magnificence of the utter- 
 ance does not hide from us its essential falsity. 
 There are the two worlds assuredly ; but why miser- 
 able in their midst, why torn asunder ? We are made 
 not to be torn, but to be at home in both, and to find 
 in this double possession the unspeakable richness 
 of existence. For it is precisely the fulness of the 
 spiritual realm that gives us ease and happiness amid 
 all the denials of the external. 
 
 To be perfectly at home in this world we need, 
 as chief condition, to have found a home in the other. 
 It is to carry your outfit within you ; an outfit which, 
 
 37 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 wherever you are, finds for you roof, walls and inner 
 furniture. There are, it is true, people better born 
 in this respect than others ; born with the priceless 
 gift of temperament. One thinks here of De 
 Quincey's description of Goldsmith : "He had a 
 constitutional gaiety of heart, an elastic hilarity, and 
 as he expresses it, * a knack of hoping,' a knack which 
 could not be bought with Ormus and with Ind, nor 
 hired for a day with the peacock throne of Delhi." 
 Others have found things not so easy. " With a 
 great price " have they won this freedom. But they 
 have won it. They have found content by finding 
 God. That was how the great Apostle found it. 
 Was there ever a finer text to live upon than this 
 word of his : " For I have learned in whatsoever 
 state I am therewith to be content." Heavens, 
 what states this man had been in ! But he walks the 
 world as a free, joyous man, free and joyous because 
 he had penetrated to its centre and found God there ! 
 That is a find if you like. And the story of it, the 
 human story ! When you have had your fill of 
 literature, is there anything, after all, so moving, so 
 fascinating as the history of spiritual men ; the 
 story of how they found God ; of how they found 
 their home in the unseen ? And it is there, at the 
 core of every literature. The world-story is full of 
 it ; it is the Bible of humanity. Not in the Judaean 
 books only, but before them in the Vedas, the 
 Ramayana of India, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 
 the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia, the 
 Avestaof Persia. It is the same story that we find — 
 with new notes added — in psalm and prophet ; 
 in the New Testament, and through all the 
 Christian ages. Let us say with Fichte : " An 
 
 38 
 
The Great Findings 
 
 insight into the absolute unity of human existence 
 with the Divine is certainly the profoundest know- 
 ledge that man can attain." And that blissful 
 insight has been granted to men in every age and 
 country of the world. Do not imagine we Westerns 
 have had the monopoly of it. The East has shared 
 it with us ; has had it before us. The unity of the 
 race has been, in fact, its unity in the knowledge of 
 God. We are one with each other in being one with 
 Him. 
 
 That, we say, is the greatest of finds. It is the 
 hid treasure lying beneath the world's rocky soil. 
 For discovering it, here is a good prescription, again 
 from Fichte, the bravest and devoutest of spiritual 
 prospectors : " If a man is to find a witness for the 
 soul, immortality and God at all, he must find it in 
 himself, and in the spiritual history of his fellows. 
 He must, in freedom, venture the belief in these 
 things, and find their corroboration in the contri- 
 bution which they make to the solution of the 
 mystery of life. One must venture to win them. 
 If it were not so they would not be objects of faith." 
 And with a furniture like that inside you, you can 
 afford to be a merry soul. Does the outside loom in 
 clouds and darkness ? You can use this prescription 
 for the dealing with clouds : 
 
 The inner side of every cloud 
 
 Is bright and shining ; 
 So therefore turn your clouds about, 
 And always wear them inside out 
 
 To show the hning. 
 
 39 
 
IV 
 
 LIFE'S LOOSE ENDS 
 
 Benjamin Constant relates that he met once 
 with a Piedmontese who gave him his confession 
 of faith. He beheved that the world was made by a 
 God who had died before his work was completed. 
 Only in this way could he account for the bewilder- 
 ing contradictions which he found everywhere ; on 
 the one side the evident marks of law, order and 
 beneficent design ; on the other hand, the con- 
 fusions, the evils, the ragged edges of things. Every- 
 where an aim at perfection which had stopped short, 
 a purpose uncompleted, if not frustrated. So our 
 Piedmontese ; who certainly, amid the medley of 
 cosmic theories with which philosophy has presented 
 us, has the merit of offering one as quaint as it is 
 original. His solution is the last we should think 
 of accepting, but he unquestionably had an eye for 
 certain aspects of things which call for a solution. 
 He was certainly right in regarding the world as an 
 unfinished one. The architect's plan, whatever it is, 
 has not been carried to completion. One might 
 rather say that everything seems in a state of experi- 
 mentation, as of an intelligence groping its way 
 amid difficulties, trying this plan and that, with vary- 
 ing success. All nature's handiworks show this 
 singularity. The vegetable world is full of it. The 
 flowers are inventors, with hits more or less happy. 
 
 40 
 
Life's Loose Ends 
 
 Some plants, such as the mistletoe, juniper, and 
 mountain ash, have made the birds their seed 
 carriers. Others, such as the lucerne, have invented 
 the Archimedean screw, before Archimedes, and 
 tried to apply it in flying. The plants go from simple 
 means to more complex ones. The human body 
 seems also a series of experiments. Oculists talk of 
 the eye's defects, despite the wonders of its con- 
 struction. 
 
 Man himself seems a movement towards some- 
 thing greater. He is that individually and also 
 socially. In this last aspect we may accept Tyrrell's 
 striking word : " The whole world is in labour. Man 
 is feeling after something living that is coming to 
 birth through a series of uncouth embryonic develop- 
 ments." We can never conceive of this as a perfect 
 world — with all the evils that are in it. The old 
 theology accounted for this by its doctrine of a Fall 
 and of original sin. But that was really a Platonic 
 rather than a Christian doctrine. You will find it 
 nowhere in the teaching of Christ. And at best, it 
 only removed the difficulty one step farther back. It 
 left us with the question, " Why a Fall, and why 
 evil as part of the creative scheme ? " Indeed, some 
 of the theological expedients here have been about 
 as effective for their purpose as the effort of the 
 Psyllic tribe, of whom we read that they made a 
 warlike expedition against the south wind, which had 
 brought famine upon them, and who perished in the 
 desert. 
 
 We are to-day reversing those verdicts. We have 
 nothing to do with the hypothesis of a dead God, or of 
 a defeated one. We see mind and will behind 
 phenomena ; a mind and will that are ahve and 
 
 41 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 active. But it is a mind and will that, by an eternal 
 Kenosis, stooping from its own height, is incarnate 
 in us and in the world ; lowering its intelligence to 
 bring it into touch with ours, making the world by our 
 means, and so achieving its largest ends — that of 
 making ourselves. That is why we have a world of 
 experiment — because experiment is so good for us. 
 Instead of a perfect world, where the creature would 
 have nothing to do but to look on — at best a tiresome 
 and enervating business — we have one which at every 
 point calls us to action, and by so doing creates our 
 faculties ; creates our courage, our initiative, our 
 endurance, our delight of achievement. To have 
 made a perfect world would have been to condemn 
 us to an imbecile idleness. Our God is better 
 than this. He will have none of the selfishness 
 of solitary achievement. It is His kindness which 
 calls us to His aid, which secures us the happiness 
 of the co-worker. He has filled the world with 
 difficulty that we might know the bliss of over- 
 coming it, and in so doing mount on perpetual steps 
 of rising faculty. 
 
 Assuredly, the scheme of things has left enough for 
 us to do. In no direction do we find a finished work. 
 Our very truths, so called, are full of ragged edges. 
 There is not a system of philosophy, from Plato to 
 Neo-Hegelianism, or the latest Pragmatism, that 
 you cannot knock holes in. Think of the religious 
 evidences ! Religion, to those who know its secret 
 beauty, its hidden power, is the most precious value 
 the world contains. The men who are without 
 it — so numerous to-day — are the world's real paupers, 
 the emptiest, forlornest of all God's creatures. There 
 is no destitution, for its misery and despair, com- 
 
 42 
 
Life's Loose Ends 
 
 parable to spiritual destitution. And yet this un- 
 speakably precious value — how exposed, how 
 recklessly defenceless it seems ! It is left at the 
 loosest of ends. Christianity comes into the world, 
 and its existence is left apparently to a thousand 
 chances. The four Gospels, its written witnesses, 
 have the strangest of hterary fortunes. The oldest 
 and most authoritative of them — Mark — the one 
 nearest the facts, appears to have dropped in its 
 circulation to one mutilated copy, which the 
 authors of Matthew and Luke discover, and from 
 which they have extensively borrowed. The suc- 
 cessive intellectual defences of Christianity, set up by 
 friends who have often been more dangerous to it 
 than its enemies, have continually been levelled to 
 the ground. The Church has often been its worst 
 foe. It has founded itself on everything but the 
 truth ; founded itself on a bogus donation of 
 Constantine, on a set of forged decretals ; on an 
 assumption of infallibility which has shocked the 
 world's sanity ; has built its theology on a cosmic 
 theory which has long been outgrown. We have to 
 admit with Burkitt that " the more we investigate 
 the early history of the Christian Church with open 
 and unprejudiced eyes, the more we find ourselves 
 in a strange world, dominated by fixed ideas that are 
 not our fixed ideas, and permeated by an intellectual 
 atmosphere quite different from ours." 
 
 The intellectual defences of Christianity have 
 been, from Lucian to Diderot, the scorn of the 
 world's wits. And to-day the Christian creeds and 
 orthodoxies fail in a dozen ways to fit themselves to 
 the demands of the modern mind. Such multitudes 
 of really earnest thinkers are still in the condition 
 
 43 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 represented by the pathetic confession of Herbert 
 Spencer : " Rehgious creeds which in one way or 
 another occupy the sphere which material interpre- 
 tation seeks to occupy, and fails the more it seeks, 
 I have come to regard with a sympathy based on 
 community of need ; feeling that dissent from them 
 results from inability to accept the solutions offered, 
 joined with the wish that solutions could be found." 
 And yet Christianity lives ! It not only lives, but it 
 grows and holds the field. It lives, despite all the 
 mistakes of its theology, notwithstanding all the 
 persevering efforts of the Church to misrepresent 
 and to falsify it. What is the meaning of all this ? 
 There seems only one explanation. Christianity 
 came not as a theory but as a life — a new kind of 
 life. And its fortune has been like that of a savage 
 who is indeed alive, but whose explanation of his 
 Ufe, of his body and his soul, are the most grotesque 
 misrepresentation of the reality. When he gets 
 some anatomy and physiology he will find some 
 better though still inadequate theories. Christianity 
 has persisted because men, apart from their crude 
 thinking about it, have felt the thrill of its life. It 
 has persisted because age after age it has offered to 
 the soul its hidden manna ; has ministered as nothing 
 else has done to its moral and spiritual hunger. 
 Have we not here another illustration of our doctrine 
 of loose ends ? Are not the evidences left in this 
 condition in order that we each may find our own 
 evidences, may become men of faith by taking all the 
 risks of it, the risk-taking being part of our spiritual 
 education? Coleridge, in his "Aids to Reflection," 
 has put it all in a nutshell : " Evidences of Christi- 
 anity ? I am weary of the word. Make a man 
 
 44 
 
Life's Loose Ends 
 
 feel the want of it, and you may safely trust to its 
 own evidences ! " 
 
 There are other directions to-day in which life 
 seems at the loosest of ends, and where our human 
 faculty, our communal sense, is called upon for 
 its strongest assertion. Take the question of 
 international armaments. The issue here is becom- 
 ing more and more a simple one. It is an issue 
 between the doctrine of hate and the doctrine of 
 faith. The theory on which we are ruining ourselves 
 with armies and battleships is the theory that while 
 men in their personal relations may act on principles 
 of mutual truth, honour and probity, nations, as such, 
 are robbers, assassins and cut-throats, destitute of 
 any beginning of ethics, ready to lie, to cheat, to 
 thieve and to murder on any scale, given the oppor- 
 tunity. It is on this principle that we in England 
 are invited — one may say commanded — to maintain 
 a navy which is to surpass hugely all possible combi- 
 nations of foreign fleets, because if that preponder- 
 ance be imperilled we shall be immediately over- 
 whelmed. Has it ever occurred to us to inquire 
 why, on this supposition, all the other states take 
 matters so easily ? They are increasing their 
 navies ; yet Germany, Italy, Russia, France, Den- 
 mark, in fact, every other nation on earth, is to-day 
 living under the shadow of the British preponderance. 
 Yet do they expect that we shall devour them ? Do 
 they feel that unless they surpass us, as we have 
 surpassed them, they have no security and are at our 
 mercy ? Are they contemplating budgets which 
 will be beyond our level as their only chance of life ? 
 But if they, in their manifest inferiority, can go on 
 quietly and without panic, why could not we in a 
 
 45 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 similar condition ? Is it the number of our guns 
 that keeps the peace, or is it the world's growing 
 fellowship and common-sense ? In international 
 affairs we are still in the savage period of ethics. 
 But the day is coming when nations will be as 
 ashamed of their warships as we should be of going 
 about decked with dagger and pistol. It is time we 
 set about this business ; that we set about in earnest 
 the evangelisation of our world politics. 
 
 And are we not at a loose end in our social con- 
 ditions — in the organisation of the best life for the 
 people ? We have countless anomalies here, but 
 let us look at one of them. In a following essay 
 on " Our Possessions " we speak of ownership as 
 one of the essentials of a healthy life. To realise 
 ourselves we need to have a hold on something out- 
 side ourselves. We cannot work properly without 
 tools, without food and raiment, without the stimulus 
 of returns. We want something to stand on before 
 we can stand upright. There is a joy of possession 
 which is our proper birthright. And it has been one 
 of the great arguments against Socialism that in its 
 war against private property it would destroy one 
 of the chief stimulants of individual activity, one of 
 life's acutest joys. But observe now what is happen- 
 ing. It is not Socialism, but Capitalism, as at 
 present organised, that is destroying private property. 
 That is to say, it is making it less and less possible 
 for the great mass of men to possess anything of their 
 own. The multiple shop is wiping out the small 
 tradesman ; landlordism, armed with the Enclosure 
 Acts of past generations, has dispossessed the 
 labourer of his free acres, of his rights of pasture, of 
 his secure tenure, and has driven him to the towns. 
 
 46 
 
Life's Loose Ends 
 
 The vast mass of the people have become wage- 
 earners, and that in the employ not of persons 
 whom they know, with whom they have personal 
 relations, but of corporations of shareholders for 
 whom the workman is only a creator of dividends. 
 The owners become fewer and fewer, and their 
 holdings ever more enormous. The net result is that 
 private property, the possession of which every 
 philosopher from Aristotle downwards has signalised 
 as a condition of the full development of personality, 
 one of the factors in the making of a free man, free 
 in body and soul, is becoming the monopoly of a 
 limited caste, leaving the great mass of mankind 
 without this essential of a full manhood. Is it not 
 time we woke up to the dread possibilities and 
 actualities of this development ? Is it not time we 
 learned the simple ethics of economics, of wealth and 
 of its proper distribution ? What is the first busi- 
 ness of the community if it is not the creation of 
 conditions for the healthiest, happiest Ufe for all its 
 members ? Is it a right state where one small and 
 ever-diminishing section possess wealth to the 
 extent of a disease, while the vast majority are in a 
 worse disease for the want of it ? This loose end will 
 have to be gathered up. A nation's wealth is in the 
 lives of its people, and that Hfe will never reach its 
 fulness of strength, character and enjoyment till the 
 materials of it, visible as well as invisible, are 
 brought once more within the reach of all. 
 
 There is a personal side to this topic which might 
 well have occupied all our thought, but which we can 
 now only briefly touch upon. How often do we seem, 
 in our private fortunes, to be brought to a loose 
 end ? Some source of supply has been stopped ; 
 
 47 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 some door of career has been suddenly slammed in our 
 face. The well-defined track we have followed has 
 all at once disappeared — we are faced with the 
 wilderness, wherein we must strike a road of our 
 own. Most of us who have lived any time in the 
 world have had a touch of that experience. It is 
 one of the greatest tests of character. We have 
 been good enough for routine ; what good are we for 
 this crisis of the unexpected ? It is here that strong 
 men prove their strength. How often has that 
 moment proved the starting-point of mightiest 
 things ! It was so with Wesley when he found 
 himself in hopeless conflict with the Anglican 
 authorities, and he must choose some other way. 
 And with General Booth, his true successor, when 
 on that fateful morning he left the New Connexion 
 Conference, his terms rejected, his career as one 
 of its ministers closed, and himself in face of a new, 
 untried world. Spurgeon had his moment when 
 by the strangest of accidents he missed his collegiate 
 training. But these men " made good," as the 
 Americans say, of their loose end. And their 
 example shows us how a loose end in life, encountered 
 with courage and faith, may become to us our divine 
 moment ; may prove the turning-point to our true 
 vocation. Assuredly no man, whether he be great 
 or small, should be afraid of his loose ends. They 
 are life's great possibles ; they call upon what is in 
 us. The gulf that yawns in front reveals your leap- 
 ing power. The seeming ruin may be the beginning 
 of your better fortunes. The world is full of hopes 
 for the man who has hope in himself. 
 
 The way to master the world's loose ends is to have 
 no loose ends in ourselves. Things may snap at the 
 
 48 
 
Life's Loose Ends 
 
 circumference, but there will be no catastrophe if 
 there is soundness at the centre. A man may find 
 his world tumbUng around him, as when Robertson 
 of Brighton saw the dogmatic structure of his earlier 
 creed crumbhng to ruin. He found himself with 
 nothing to believe in but God and duty. But in that 
 wild hour those central anchors held ; held till a 
 clearer, fuller, saner Gospel faith was born in 
 him, a faith which proved good for thousands of 
 other storm-tossed souls. The thing is to hold on 
 and never to give up. Believe, in the tempest's 
 fiercest hour, that the world you are in is water- 
 tight, and is not going to founder. You are in a 
 world of loose ends, and the handling of them calls 
 for every atom of strength and courage that is in 
 you. But the farthest ends of them are not loose. 
 They are gripped by a Hand that is Love and 
 Omnipotence. 
 
 49 
 
V 
 
 THE HEART OF THINGS 
 
 What a role the word " heart " plays in language 
 and in literature ! It means for us the deepest, most 
 vital thing there is. We speak of the heart of a 
 matter, as that which, when all the outside trappings 
 and concealments have been removed, lies there 
 before us, the actual, central fact. London, we say, 
 is the heart of the empire — because its greatest 
 life pulses there ; because its wealth is there concen- 
 trated ; because the influences, the power gener- 
 ated there, touch the farthest limits of the English 
 world. You find yourself on some elect spot of the 
 mountains ; on a glacier, with jagged peaks rising 
 to right and left ; where you breathe an air like wine, 
 with a sky almost black in contrast with the dazzling 
 white of the snows ; the stillness unbroken save by 
 the roar of the avalanche, the concentration of all 
 that is beautiful, sublime, terrible ; and you feel that 
 you are in the heart of the Alps. Richard Jefferies, 
 in one of his most moving books, speaks of putting 
 his ear to the ground and hearing the beating of 
 nature's heart. We talk of the heart of humanity, of 
 the heart of religion. 
 
 The word, as thus used, is well derived. The 
 physical heart, which gives us all these analogies, 
 is the centre of our bodily life. You can get on, in a 
 way, without arms and legs, without ears and eyes, 
 
 50 
 
The Heart of Things 
 
 with half a lung. But strike the heart and all is over. 
 It lies there in the centre of us ; strongly entrenched 
 behind its barrier of bony ribs, its tireless muscles 
 the very concentration of energy, doing its one 
 hundred thousand pulsations a day, its thirty-six and 
 a-half millions in the year ; while we sleep and while we 
 wake, without a thought from us, without a hand's 
 turn of our conscious help, performing its ceaseless 
 systole, diastole. Were it to strike work ; to 
 propose to itself a holiday ; to take one minute's 
 rest, it were all over with us. And what is true of 
 the physical heart is so largely true of all the appli- 
 cations of the word. The imperial city, the heart of 
 an empire, is its best-guarded spot. Its people 
 know that to strike at that is to strike at everything. 
 The heart of a warship is its enginery. It is placed 
 below, beneath the water line. A shell exploding on 
 deck may do damage enough, but it can be repaired. 
 When the engines are wrecked, the ship is helpless, 
 dead. The heart of a thing is almost always a 
 concealed affair, guarded jealously from the common 
 eye. You have to reach it by devious ways, by 
 persevering endeavour. You find that in all human 
 creations, especially mental creations. The work 
 of a dramatist, of a novelist, has always a heart inside 
 it, a heart which he carefully conceals. It was the 
 first thing that occurred to him ; it is the last which 
 he wishes shall occur to his reader. Around the 
 guarded centre he builds up all manner of outworks, 
 of approaches. He fills the ground with descriptions, 
 with character sketches, with cunningly-devised 
 bypaths which carry the inquirers off the scent. The 
 heart of the thing is one single idea, the mystery, the 
 secret, which is finally disclosed. The great sermon 
 
 5X 
 
Faith's Certainti es 
 
 of a great preacher will be the development of one 
 idea, the thrusting home of one imperious thought. 
 It was said of Newman that he would often preach 
 a sermon in order to introduce one suggestion ; a 
 suggestion contained in a single sentence. 
 
 It is, we have said, not easy to get at the heart of 
 things. It is so well concealed. You go up in your 
 train of a morning with every seat filled. If you 
 have a quick eye you can note the dress of each 
 fellow traveller and his physical peculiarities. But 
 each carries hiL secrets which you do not know. We 
 British are a reticent race. There is a saying in 
 France that not only is England an island, but every 
 Englishman is an island ; there is a lot of cold water 
 to be got through before you reach him. England 
 and France have lived all these centuries with only 
 a few miles between them, but how much do they 
 know of each other ? What ideas the French have 
 had of England, and we EngUsh of the French ! 
 And yet get behind the crust ; get into the beating 
 heart of each, as you do in their best Hterature, and 
 what do you find ? You find the same great instincts, 
 the same ideas possessing them. Their hearts beat 
 to the same tune. Go on to Germany, to Italy, you 
 find the same thing. When you know the Hterature 
 of a people, still more if you live among them, you 
 begin to love them. That is what Lowell found. 
 He, the American, had hved in London, in Paris, 
 in Madrid ; knew these peoples, their best Hteratures. 
 And he found he was in love with them all. The 
 present international distrust ; the distrust which 
 covers the sea with hateful warships ; which burdens 
 the peoples with the crushing load of armaments, 
 is born of international ignorance. When the peoples 
 
 52 
 
The Heart of Things 
 
 have come to know each other ; to know themselves 
 as having the same honest affections, the same 
 struggle, the same hopes and fears ; when they come 
 to know the vastness of their soul's common capital, 
 and the insignificance of their difference compared 
 with that, they will break from the past regime of 
 terror as a thing not only horrible but ludicrous ; an 
 artificial antagonism between those who were born 
 to be friends. There is a deeper question here, 
 which we will come to presently. 
 
 We see how everything, the rose in your garden, an 
 empire, a book, has its heart. When we take a wider, 
 the widest view, and survey nature and life, the uni- 
 verse we live in, is there a heart there, and have we 
 any means of finding it ? This vast scheme of the 
 world, does it contain such a thing as a central idea 
 controUing it ? We feel at once how strange it 
 would be, how contrary to all analogy, were it not 
 so. Is there a heart of things always in the particu- 
 lar and none in the universal ? Shall the bee, the 
 flower, the man, the artist's creation, the moving 
 story, have each its central thought, and shall this 
 be lacking in the whole ? The early world, with 
 magnificent unanimity, denied this negative. But 
 our modern world has traversed their answer and 
 begun the quest anew. Science, with a brand new 
 set of instruments, has attacked the problem, and 
 come back with some shattering conclusions. It 
 has surveyed the universe from end to end — its 
 infinitely great, its infinitely Httle— and finds nothing 
 there but matter and force, bound in an iron necessity. 
 It finds man himself only a part of the mechanism ; 
 his supposed freewill a delusion, his thought a secre- 
 tion of the brain, his God nowhere. His latest 
 
 53 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 poetry is so often a poetry of despair. Man — who 
 or what is man ? 
 
 Rather some random throw 
 
 Of heedless nature's die, 
 'Twould seem, that from so low 
 
 Has hfted him so high. 
 Through untold aeons vast 
 
 She let him lurk and cower ; 
 'Twould seem he climbed at last 
 
 In mere fortuitous hour. 
 Child of a thousand chances 'neath the indifferent sky. 
 
 We have hved through all this, through the age 
 of scientific materialism. The withering blast of 
 this stiff north-easter has hit us in the face, and 
 made us draw our cloaks a little closer. But some- 
 how, amid all the hurly-burly of the storm, we 
 have found the heart within us to go on beating 
 as steadily as before, its sturdy affirmatives 
 making mock at all this tempest of denial. The 
 scientists went out to find what assuredly is never 
 to be found by their instruments or their methods 
 of investigation. Their tools are not fine enough. 
 They can weigh and measure, but the thing they 
 sought is not to be weighed and measured. M. 
 Loisy, the French heretic, whom Catholicism has 
 found too big for its borders, has said on this theme 
 what is surely the true and final thing. " God does 
 not show Himself at the end of the astronomer's 
 telescope. Geology, in its examination of the 
 earthly crust, does not exhume Him. The chemist 
 does not extract Him from his crucible. Although 
 He is everywhere in the world, He is nowhere the 
 direct object of science. He is also everywhere in 
 the history of humanity, but He is no more a person- 
 age in history than He is an element of the physical 
 
 54 
 
The Heart of Things 
 
 world. Does the history of religion present Him 
 as an immediate and complete revelation of the 
 Divine Being ? Does it not show rather as a slow 
 progress, of which each stage supposes that which 
 preceded it, and prepares that which follows it ? 
 This history, even in the gospels, is a human history, 
 so far as it is produced in humanity." 
 
 " Humanity," " a human history." Yes, it is 
 there we get our real clue to the heart of things. Man, 
 not that part of him which physical science can reach, 
 his flesh and bones, the body that can be weighed and 
 dissected, but the invisible behind that ; the thought, 
 the mind, the instincts and affections, the veritable 
 soul. And it is in this inmost soul of man, as known 
 to ourselves, as revealed in all human history, that 
 we come nighest the heart of things, that we are in 
 contact with the universal soul. And the great 
 thing here is the unanimity of its verdict. We 
 spoke a moment ago of the human heart as beating 
 to the same tune. We return now to the deeper 
 significance of this — its significance for religion. 
 There have been writers of late, here and there, who 
 have denied this unanimity. We are told of the 
 ineradicable differences between Orient and Occident. 
 " East is East and West is West." Lafcadio Hearn 
 declares that where the Western thinks to the right 
 the Eastern thinks to the left. The missionary 
 platform of a century ago had for its main plank the 
 doctrine that Christianity stood for the one true 
 and saving faith amidst a world of false and soul- 
 destroying ones. But does the East think contrary 
 to the West ? Does its soul point in an opposite 
 direction ? Does it in material things ? Does 
 Japan, in constructing its warships, in carrying on 
 
 55 
 
Faith's Ce rtainties 
 
 its great engineering works, proceed on different 
 mathematical principles from our own ? It is our 
 rival here because its mind works on exactly the same 
 lines. And on this deeper question of the heart of 
 things, what is the finding of our later, more 
 accurate research ? Was ancient Greece all wrong ? 
 Read Plato, read Aristotle, read the great dramatists. 
 It was on Aristotle that the Catholic Church of the 
 Middle Ages founded its whole philosophy ; it was 
 his categories it used for the formulation of its 
 faith. The early Fathers got their doctrine of the 
 state, of applied morality, from the Stoics. Go 
 farther East. Read, say, the sacred literature of 
 ancient Persia. Its doctrine is of a God who is not 
 only holy and pure, but is the God essentially of 
 love, of grace, of forgiveness and redemption to 
 the uttermost. It confronts evil, concentrated in 
 Ahriman, the Persian Satan, with the conquering 
 might of Ormuzd, the spirit of the good. And 
 observe this : the God here worshipped is not only 
 conqueror of evil, but — in this so far surpassing 
 much of our mediaeval theology — he conquers to 
 forgive and to reclaim. He enters the great fight 
 with the desire, not to destroy, but to save his enemy. 
 He beseeches Ahriman to become good, to love the 
 good, to have pity on himself. In his inexhaustible 
 grace he follows him with entreaties to become con- 
 verted, to accomplish his salvation, to find his happi- 
 ness in reaching a new and better mind. Our best 
 missionary thinkers and workers of to-day, better 
 instructed than those of old, are preaching a 
 Christianity to the East, not as a contradiction 
 and condemnation of all it had known before, 
 but as a completion of that earlier divine 
 
 56 
 
The Heart of Things 
 
 education under which their fathers had felt their 
 way to God. 
 
 To-day enhghted Christians hold and proclaim 
 their gospel as showing the nearest approach to the 
 heart of things which has yet been opened to our 
 race. And of this heart of things it is the heart, and 
 not all which has surrounded and so often hidden it, 
 which they hold to. The hoary theologies which 
 have grown up around it are, much of them, quite 
 beyond our modern digestion. We wander amongst 
 them in a reverent freedom, taking out of them 
 what we can receive, what helps, and leaving the rest. 
 So it is with the Bible. We follow Luther's plan 
 here. He held its inspired part to be what inspired 
 him. We moderns have a wrong way of reading the 
 Bible. It is the worst-used book in the world. We 
 have chopped it up into verses and into chapters, 
 and our preachers complete the business of dis- 
 memberment by singling out one verse, cutting it 
 off from the rest, and making it the basis of a discourse 
 on things in general. Was ever a poor book 
 so ill-used ? It is as if a speaker should be com- 
 pelled to stop at every sentence, while somebody 
 else gets up and starts off on a separate disquisition 
 on that sentence. The sermon may be excellent in 
 other ways, but don't go to it for your study of the 
 Bible. How do you read a Pauline epistle ? You 
 will make no sense of it unless you read it — as its first 
 addressees read it or heard it read — from end to end. 
 Take it in that way, to see what the man is driving at. 
 Have you ever, reading him so, savoured the fine, 
 sardonic irony of that master of sarcasm ? He writes 
 to the self-satisfied Corinthians : *' We are fools 
 for Christ's sake, but ye are wise ; we are weak, but 
 
 S7 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 ye are strong ; ye are honourable, but we are 
 despised." " We know, of course, that we poor 
 apostles are nobodies ; it is to you Corinthians one 
 must look for the last word in wisdom ! " That is 
 the modern English of it. 
 
 That, however, is a digression. We are talking 
 of the Bible, and mainly of the New Testament, as a 
 whole. We read it to-day to find the heart of it. 
 We pass a good deal of it by, as belonging to the age 
 it was written in. We realise, as Burkitt, that 
 essentially conservative critic, realises, that *' the 
 more we investigate the early history of the Christian 
 Church with open and unprejudiced eyes, the more 
 we find ourselves in a strange world, dominated by 
 fixed ideas that are not our fixed ideas, and per- 
 meated by an intellectual atmosphere quite different 
 from ours." There is much in Paul we do not accept. 
 The modern woman is in universal revolt against 
 his doctrine of woman. We study some of his 
 rabbinisms with an amused curiosity. His idea of 
 the immediate coming of Christ, and the manner of 
 it, has been falsified by history. And of some things 
 in the Gospel the same criticism holds. But are these 
 things the heart of the matter ? 
 
 Coleridge said that he valued the Bible above all 
 other books because it found him, and found him at 
 the deepest part of his nature. The heart in it 
 spoke to the heart in him. And what is the heart in 
 it ? Read the Gospels — the story of Christ's hfe ; 
 read the Acts, the Epistles — the story of Christ's 
 Spirit ; and what is the note there all through ? 
 It is the story of holy love ; of what that love is in 
 God ; of what it can be in man. You can never 
 bring your sin there without it being reproved and 
 
 58 
 
The Heart of Things 
 
 shamed ; you can never bring your burden there 
 without it being lifted. The Cross gives us Ormuzd 
 and Ahriman, not in cloudy epic, but in actual 
 history ; goodness fighting evil, not with earthly 
 weapons, but spiritual ; fighting, by suffering, by 
 giving, by loving, by dying. And you, in your turn, 
 get the heart of this by trying it, by living it. You 
 find what loving is by loving, what forgiveness is by 
 forgiving, what the Cross of Calvary is by the cross 
 in your own soul. You become an initiate of 
 Christianity by the Christian experience, and by that 
 alone. 
 
 Though Christ in Joseph's town 
 A thousand times were born. 
 
 Till He is born in thee 
 Thy soul is still forlorn. 
 
 The Cross on Golgotha 
 Can never save thy soul ; 
 
 The cross in thine own heart 
 Alone can make thee whole. 
 
 It is here, in the cross of holy, sacrificing love in 
 God, in the cross of holy sacrificing love in your own 
 soul, that you reach the world's deepest secret, that 
 you find the heart of things. 
 
 59 
 
VI 
 
 LIFE AND TIME 
 
 There is nothing more familiar to us than the idea 
 of time, and nothing more obscure. Time ! we carry 
 it about with us in the watch that bulges our waist- 
 coat pocket ; it beams at us in the face of the 
 grandfather's clock ; it shrieks out of the siren that 
 wakes the factory worker. It is in all the dates, in 
 all the seasons ; we eat and sleep by it ; we measure 
 our age by it. The busy man says time is money ; the 
 lazy man exhausts himself in efforts to kill it. In 
 Christmas poems and pictures it figures as the old 
 man with the scythe ; the old man who, were we 
 never so fast, will overtake and finish us. And yet if 
 time catches us we never catch it. It is the most 
 elusive of entities. We can neither see it, nor hear 
 it, nor hold it. The present moment ! You can 
 never put your hand on it. As you think it, it is 
 gone. Analyse a moment, and you find it has a past, 
 a present and a future. And that middle term is 
 never there. In the fact of realising it has become a 
 past. Many of our common notions about time are 
 a great delusion. What ordinarily goes under that 
 name is really something else. And, as we propose 
 to show, the forgetting of that fact has been the cause 
 of some singular and momentous errors, errors which 
 have spread into rehgion, into theology, and into our 
 whole conduct of life. Some clearer thinking on 
 
 60 
 
Life and Time 
 
 this question should help us to a truer view of matters 
 that concern us all. 
 
 What we call time is, in many directions, simply 
 movement. It is the putting forth and the expendi- 
 ture of energy. That is what our clock-time amounts 
 to. The hands are going round because a spring has 
 been wound up, or because weights are exercising 
 their downward strain. Our earth's movement, as a 
 recorder of time, means exactly the same thing. It 
 is just so much work, the result of so much motor 
 force. It is work related to space and to movement 
 in it. It is the same thing when we talk of our age. 
 When we speak of our years, and the effect they have 
 had upon us, carrying us from youth to mid-hfe, and 
 from mid-life to old age, what is it we really mean ? 
 Time, regarded as a sort of metaphysical entity, has 
 really nothing to do with all this. The factor in the 
 business is just life ; the incessant growth, decay, 
 replacement of cells, of tissue, of bone, of muscle ; 
 the incessant work upon us of events, experiences, 
 ideas. It is an affair of movement, of biological and 
 mental movement, of the expenditure of energy in 
 these departments. And when we pass from the 
 individual to the race, to humanity as a whole, we are 
 met with the same fact. We talk of the stone age, 
 of antiquity, of the mediaeval period, of the Renais- 
 sance and so on, as though everything here, events, 
 manners, ideas, had to do with the mysterious 
 something we call time. Such habits, such Hmit- 
 ations of knowledge, such barbarisms, we aver, 
 belong to that age. We say " the stone age could not 
 have produced a Shakespeare," '' the Reformation 
 was a birth of time " ; we talk of the Zeitgeist or 
 '' time spirit." It is a way of speaking, which has its 
 
 6i 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 uses so long as we know what we mean. Only, let 
 us remember, it is not an accurate way. What was 
 going on in the stone age, or in medisevalism, or at 
 the Reformation, was not, fundamentally, an affair 
 of the clock ; it was throughout an affair of vitalism ; 
 of the condition of body and brains ; of the working 
 there of the vital processes ; of the height to which 
 the vital forces in these bodies and souls had reached ; 
 of the quality and amount of the inner energy which 
 was then being expended. That is the real bottom 
 fact. When we speak of these as " times " we 
 are simply adding to the fact an idea of our own 
 minds, an idea whose illusiveness only becomes 
 truly apparent to us when we try to analyse it. 
 
 The extent to which this idea, on some important 
 subjects, has played tricks with us, may be illus- 
 trated, as a starting point, by the way in which we 
 have been accustomed to contrast time and eternity. 
 We have thought of the two as something different — 
 profoundly, solemnly different. We speak with awe 
 of the transition from one to the other. With time 
 we are, or think we are, on familiar terms. We are 
 quite at home with it ; it is a business proposition ; 
 we can make jokes about it. Nobody jokes about 
 eternity. The thought of it strikes on the soul with 
 the force of all that is tremendous. It is religion's 
 final word, its most august appeal. And there is a 
 true instinct in all that, though the thought con- 
 nected with it is a confused one. Let us try and 
 clear it a little. Here, for instance, is a simple 
 proposition. We think of the living as in time, of 
 the dead as in eternity. But if they are there, still 
 living, that simple fact abolishes by itself the 
 distinction between the two. If the dead are living 
 
 62 
 
Life and Time 
 
 now, they are in time as much as we are ; they are 
 under our own conditions of duration. What really 
 has happened to them is not a change made of the 
 difference between time and eternity. The change 
 is one which these terms do not represent. It is 
 a change in their organism, in the conditions under 
 which that organism is acting, in the circumstances 
 by which it is surrounded. What we are really 
 talking about is, we say, no question of time and 
 eternity, but a question of life, of its possible growths, 
 its possible transformations. 
 
 Where our thinking has so often gone wrong 
 here has been in concentrating it so often on an 
 idea of duration, instead of on what really matters — 
 to wit, the quality of our life. Duration, such as 
 we ordinarily conceive it, is not at all the main point 
 here. For a Sir Isaac Newton and for a Hottentot 
 the clock may be ticking out the same number of 
 hours and minutes. They are living, we may say, 
 in the same time. But is that to say anything real 
 about them ? We see that it is the quality of their 
 life that really matters. Put these two in what you 
 call time or in what you call eternity, and still 
 it is just the quality that matters. This is where the 
 question touches religion in its highest point. When 
 the Scripture speaks to us of the divine life, of the 
 eternal life we can find in God, we are here not on 
 a matter of duration. We are on another theme 
 altogether — on that of the intensity, of the elevation, 
 of the essential quality of being. That " eternal" is 
 now, for us here just as much as in any possible future 
 state. We get to it, not by any ticking of the clock, 
 but by processes going on within us, by our entering 
 into relations with the highest that there is. 
 
 63 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 This confusion in our time-thinking, when we look 
 into it, is seen to be at the root of some of our acutest 
 theological controversies. Take, for instance, the 
 question of religion and history. It was the conten- 
 tion of Lessing, and after him of the Hegelians, that a 
 final religion could not be one based on certain alleged 
 historical facts. The facts here, given as occurring 
 in the far past, might be mis-stated, or they might 
 not have occurred at all. We have the same thing 
 to-day in the assaults on the historicity of Jesus. 
 The final religion, we are told, must have a surer 
 foundation than this ; it must rest on spiritual 
 principles, on eternal ideas, which range above the 
 mutations of time. Well, you may admit the 
 spiritual principles, and the eternal ideas, but they 
 will be no good to you by themselves. You still 
 cannot get on without the history, and for the reason 
 that the only way by which they could come to us 
 was by being lived. For us mortals facts are before 
 ideas ; you must live before you can think. 
 Religion is only possible as it exists in personalities, 
 personalities developed, not by time, but by the 
 process of life. It was not mere ideas, but the life 
 in those personalities that set religion going, and 
 it was the highest life, as exhibited in Christ, that 
 set the highest religion going. Where Lessing and 
 the idealists after him have really helped us is in 
 the view that religious history has no isolated facts ; 
 that revelation, incarnation and atonement are not 
 events and transactions that belong to one period, 
 or even to one Person, however they may be 
 culminated there, however they may receive there 
 the divinest illustration ; but that they enter into 
 the whole structure and history of humanity, eternal 
 
 64 
 
Life and Time 
 
 ideas made manifest in flesh. It is because 
 Christianity has exhibited this process in its highest 
 form, and has in Christ summed up the whole sequence, 
 that it stands as the rehgion of humanity, the eternal 
 religion. 
 
 Readers of Bergson's " Time and Free Will ** 
 will remember how he exposes the fallacy of the 
 determinists who deduce their study of the action of 
 the will always from a study of the act as finished, 
 whereas the only proper way of answering the 
 question is from studying the action while it is 
 actually in progress ; a study from which a quite 
 different conclusion is reached. But there is 
 another fallacy of the determinists in reference to 
 time which also needs exposure. It is that of their 
 doctrine of cause and effect, of antecedent and conse- 
 quent. Hume and the materialists who have 
 followed him have proceeded on the assumption 
 that all that is in the effect is already in the cause. 
 The effect was simply a following in time of what 
 already lay in the antecedent. Hence their con- 
 clusion, that matter being, in their view, the ante- 
 cedent to mind and spirit, all the spiritual was 
 contained in matter, was explainable by matter 
 and shared the fate of matter. A moment's 
 glance at the facts should be enough to dispel 
 these ideas. If things were so there would be 
 no difference between the cause and the effect. 
 But it is precisely the difference between them that 
 first strikes us. In the effect a something new has 
 emerged which was not there before. That is why 
 we call it an effect, why we separate it as a result 
 from what was there before. Something has been 
 added. The creative process, the evolutionary 
 
 65 
 
Faith*s Certainties 
 
 process proceeds always by this " something added," 
 a new draft on the hidden resources of the universe. 
 To say that when spirit is developed in matter it is 
 matter and nothing more, is one of those gratuitous 
 assumptions which a truer philosophy is already 
 learning to put finally on one side. 
 
 This time-question, on its philosophical side, is 
 then, we see, sufficiently productive. There are 
 many more sides of it bearing on doctrinal and 
 speculative matters which we might discuss. But 
 we must leave them, in order to find room for one or 
 two of those practical conclusions which, perhaps, 
 to most of us, come more closely home. Why, to 
 take one of these, is it that in reviewing our past 
 we are so apt to pass on it a disparaging judg- 
 ment ? The aged Jacob, standing before Pharaoh, 
 says of his past : " Few and evil have been the 
 days and years of my Hfe ! " It is a summary 
 which the aged in their life-re\dew are so apt to 
 make. Is it a just one ? Or does it not come 
 from the fact that our pains rather than our 
 pleasures live in our remembrance, and give to them 
 an altogether disproportionate importance ? Our 
 troubles imprint themselves on the memory more 
 deeply than our joys. You ?re so vividly conscious 
 of a toothache. But who records, for himself or 
 others, the weeks and months when he had no tooth- 
 ache ? Who takes note of the long succeeding days 
 when he slept soundly, when he awoke fit and well, 
 ate with appetite, saw with his eyes, heard with his 
 ears all the world's pleasant sights and sounds, 
 realised in a thousand ways a general sense of well- 
 being, of the deep joy of existence ? Father Jacob 
 had had more good days than ovil ones. His 
 
 66 
 
 / 
 
Life and Time 
 
 memory was at fault. That is the matter with us all. 
 Had it been otherwise, had the sum of evil for man 
 surpassed his sum of good, the race would long ago 
 have ceased to exist. 
 
 Those who want to make most of their time 
 will think of it as capital, and will use it as such. 
 Whatever else we have lacked we have had this, 
 and it is much. When this year is completed we 
 shall have had just as much of it as a Rothschild 
 or a Rockefeller. We have all been millionaires of 
 minutes. And here, as with the capital we call 
 cash, there are two ways of dealing with it, the way 
 of thriftless spending and the way of productive use. 
 There is no more searching question than this : 
 *' What have we done with our hours ? " There are 
 dozens of ways of spending them, the only return for 
 which is a sense of exhaustion, of mere wastage, 
 and of desolating vacuity. There is no poverty so 
 squalid as that of the time-spendthrift. The poverty 
 here is of body and soul. In honest labour, on the 
 contrary, you have not only the present joy it offers, 
 but the fact that it is an investment which, for all the 
 future, brings in its dividends. To learn to do things 
 is to strengthen our life, to broaden in all directions 
 its acreage of possibility. We ought to abolish the 
 idler, whether at the top or the bottom of the social 
 scale, in order to give the poor fellow a taste of life's 
 real flavour. The best training we know of, a training 
 which should become universal, is that of some of 
 the American popular universities, where the students 
 earn their bread by daily hours of manual labour — 
 in the fields, the gardens, the carpenter's shop — with 
 certain other daily hours for the mental cultures. To 
 get that training should be every man's birthright, 
 
 67 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 and every woman's. A robust physical vigour 
 put into the brain's work ; a well-stored brain direct- 
 ing the body's work — here is your combination for 
 a full and wholesome life. Your mechanical task 
 ceases to be mechanical when a full mind is behind it. 
 As the body swings axe -or hammer, the soul is 
 exulting in all its poetry, its idealism, its finest 
 emotions. In return the toughened body brings to 
 the mental discipline all the glow of its strength. 
 The two in their happy union help each other to all 
 the highest that is there. 
 
 Time's most fascinating problem for us is that of 
 its ending. As the years close in upon us we seem 
 afloat, alone in our frail bark, on a river with a 
 cataract below, whose growing roar warns us of the 
 approaching, inevitable plunge. What is to come 
 after ? Here, as we have said, the question is not 
 what time or what eternity will do with us, it is what 
 life will do with us. Has our personality that 
 within it, and that without it, which will carry it 
 through ? That the mind of man, alone of all 
 created things in this world, contemplates death, 
 foresees it, adjusts itself to it ; above all, carries to it 
 an invincible forward look, seems evidence that it 
 has deahngs with death that are quite other than 
 physical. Its instinct is with Heraclitus : " There 
 await men, after death, things other than they 
 look for or expect." The clearest minds seem here 
 to have the fullest assurance. Said Goethe in his 
 old age : '* At the age of seventy-five one must, 
 of course, think something of death. But the 
 thought never gives me the least uneasiness ; for I 
 am fully persuaded that our spirit is a being of a 
 nature quite indestructible, and that it actually 
 
 68 
 
Life and Time 
 
 continues from eternity to eternity." After all, as 
 we have said, for one end of life as for the other, the 
 main thing is not a question of mere duration, it is 
 one of the quality of being. If we are in harmony 
 with that Divine Will which is the nature of things, 
 the mere continuance question will not trouble us. 
 We fall asleep at night quite easily ; it is a pleasur- 
 able sensation. We are waked in the morning by 
 a power not our own. And we can fall asleep in that 
 greater manner with an equal composure, an equal 
 trust in that larger power. Such a nature accepts 
 Hoffding's verdict. The exhortation, " Take no 
 thought for the morrow" can be applied with far 
 greater justification to the life after death than to 
 our attitude towards the actual morrow of this actual 
 life. To know God now is eternal life. That is 
 enough for our " now." We know it is a life 
 divine, and its finest fruit is a perfect trust for all the 
 future to its source in the Eternal Love. 
 
 69 
 
VII 
 
 WHAT IS LEFT 
 
 The world is very keen to-day — keener, perhaps, 
 than ev^er it was before — on gaining, on winning, 
 on accumulating. We are all so enthusiastic about 
 growth, whether it be of our fortune, or our know- 
 ledge, or our baby. We like the movement upward, 
 the ampler air, the sense of higher powers, of widen- 
 ing influence. Growth is the parent, the feeder of 
 optimism. It is a good world so long as we are 
 " making good " in it. But life has another side, 
 to which the world has never yet learned to 
 accustom itself. It is easy to make a philosophy of 
 winning. What we are yet in want of is a proper 
 philosophy of losing. Here it is that nature seems 
 to turn cynic. She gives us our httle run, and then 
 reverses the engine and turns it the other way. 
 Side by side with her system of gifts and largess is her 
 system of denudation, of taking away. She creates 
 and fosters ; then smites and destroys. And it is of 
 that process that all our pessimism is born. For 
 this business makes a deeper impression on us than 
 the other. The early world had found this out. 
 Says Livy : Segnius homines bona quam mala 
 sentiunt (men do not feel their good things so keenly 
 as their evil ones). A cut finger will make more 
 impression on you than a sugar-plum. A loss seems 
 to go deeper into your mind than a gain. It is, we 
 
 70 
 
What is Left 
 
 say, out of their losses that men's pessimism is born. 
 Bjornson lost his belief in immortality because of 
 the apparent shrinkage in values of later life. If, he 
 says, we went on growing all the time, we might 
 believe in a progress which death did not prevent. 
 But we are worn out before we die. We are growing 
 up to fifty or sixty, and then we decay till all that 
 makes life great and valuable is taken from us. 
 
 'Tis a common complaint which every age has 
 echoed. Anacreon had uttered it years ago. Our 
 later day has been vociferous on this subject. Says 
 Benjamin Constant : " When the age of passion is 
 over, what else can one desire except to escape from 
 life with the least possible pain ? " James Mill 
 found life a poor affair after the first age of eager 
 sensation and curiosity was over. Amiel, at forty, 
 finds all his early hopes fled ; nothing before him but 
 solitude and " a death in the desert." Schopen- 
 hauer likens life to a show at a country fair. We 
 are interested and amused with the conjurer's tricks 
 when we see them for the first time. But when we 
 have seen them several times over we grow weary 
 and disgusted with the business. As we listen to 
 these wailings our wonder is not at the poverty 
 of life, but at the poverty of the conception of 
 it which is here presented. We are sure it is a 
 wrong one, if only for our inward certainty that 
 despair is a psychological mistake. '* Despair," says 
 Vauvenargues, ** is the worst of our errors." We 
 are sure of it, and sure also that a philosophy built 
 on " the worst of our errors " must be a false 
 philosophy. 
 
 Before we acquiesce in notions of this sort it is 
 worth while looking a little more closely into the 
 
 71 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 matter ; to inquire whether nature's way here is, 
 after all, simply a destructive way ; whether her 
 takings may, after all, not turn out to be a subtle way 
 of giving. It is worth while to inquire whether she 
 ever does destroy anything ; to inquire into what she 
 leaves behind ; whether we know enough of her 
 method of decay to speak of it as a confession of her 
 poverty of resource ; whether under her system our 
 losses do not leave us richer than before. 
 
 On a mere surface view we come upon some 
 interesting facts. We see, to begin with, that nature 
 has a tolerably full treasury, even of material things. 
 Man is her most wasteful child, but when he has done 
 his worst he seems a long remove from the bottom 
 of her basket. We are reminded here of what 
 Christopher North says of the harvest of the sea. 
 In the " Noctes " he makes the shepherd say : " I 
 never look at the sea without lamenting the back- 
 wardness of its agriculture. Were every eatable 
 land animal extinct, the human race could dine and 
 sup out o' the ocean till a' eternity." We denude 
 the soil of its fertile elements by a wasteful tillage 
 and the hillsides of their forests by an equal reck- 
 lessness. But is this new bareness all a taking, 
 a vacuity ? Far from it. While this is going on 
 nature drops something into the human mind ; drops 
 an idea. An idea of economy, for one thing ; to 
 take care of what is left of our forests ; to plant 
 new ones ; to repair the waste in the soil by imparting 
 new fertilising elements. Then further the idea, 
 after scratching the surface of her treasures, to look 
 deeper into them, in search of hidden powers, a 
 search which is being marvellously rewarded. 
 
 One of the surprising things which this search has 
 
 72 
 
What is Left 
 
 brought to light is the fact that actually in nature 
 nothing is destroyed. Your fire burns itself out. 
 The fuel which composed it has disappeared. It is 
 gone, you say. Yes, but it has not gone far. Not 
 one atom of it is really lost. It has simply changed 
 its form. If a search were made, all its equivalents 
 could be recovered. So when man has denuded his 
 forests, exhausted his soil, spent his resources, with 
 utmost prodigality, he has, after all, only touched 
 his revenues. His banker, nature, has taken care of 
 them. Her strong-room is crammed with securities. 
 The very things we have been spending have gone 
 there. All we have burned, or used, or misused, are 
 still in her hands. She is as rich as ever and we are 
 rich in her. The seeming losses have been gains. A 
 big catastrophe, such as a burnt-out city, as at San 
 Francisco or Chicago, has not destroyed anything 
 really, finally, but it has created something. It has 
 restarted the citizens with a new energy and a fund 
 of fresh knowledge. Disaster has sharpened wits. 
 It has set men on to the survey of causes ; of bad 
 forms of building, of bad arrangements to be hence- 
 forth avoided ; of new safeguards to be provided ; 
 of better ways of handling the raw elements, 
 of subduing their faculty of revolt, of increasing 
 their capacity of service. Here we see how 
 nature's taking away has turned out to be her subtle 
 way of giving. 
 
 Note, too, another result of these losses. They 
 bring to us, if we rightly accept them, a new and 
 keener appreciation of what is left. One of Wesley's 
 earliest experiences was that of the fire which 
 destroyed his father's vicarage at Epworth. He 
 tells how, after his own narrow escape from death, 
 
 73 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 his father, finding all his family around him un- 
 hurt, thanked God for His preserving mercies. He 
 had lost his home, but his dear ones were all there. 
 He felt rich, as he had never felt before, in the 
 treasures he had left. And, indeed, 'tis one of the 
 finest, healthiest of mental exercises, in the midst of 
 life's deprivations, to remember what is left. So 
 much is gone ; but when you go over the sum of 
 what remains, how immense the account that is left 
 to your credit ! When that touch of gout worries you 
 it is well to note that your eyesight is good and 
 your hearing perfect. You cannot walk, but you can 
 read. Says Isaak Walton : " Every misery that I 
 miss is a new mercy, and therefore let us be thank- 
 ful." That is not merely piety ; it is excellent good 
 sense. There is always a giving with the taking. 
 The Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III., 
 remarked once to Horace Walpole, whose niece he had 
 married : " I thank God that I have such bad 
 health. I was very ambitious, but I have had time 
 to reflect, and now I have no view of doing what is 
 not right." It sounds a curious confession of faith, 
 but it meant all this to the man himself. He knew 
 he had received more than he had lost ; received it 
 in losing. People find their mission, their bit of 
 genuine life-work, out of their troubles. Lamartine 
 records of Mme. Roland that the unhappiness of her 
 early married hfe led her to devote herself to works 
 of widest charity. " She revenged herself on the 
 destiny which refused her personal happiness by 
 consecrating her life to the well-being of others." 
 Would Wesley have proved the apostle he was had 
 his domestic affairs been brighter ? Was not his 
 failure in that direction part of his immense success 
 
 74 
 
What is Left 
 
 in that other ? Out of that personal void what a 
 fulness did he make for others ! 
 
 Life, we say, by its very deprivations is continu- 
 ally teaching us, and thereby enriching us. Its chief 
 lesson here is to lay up in our treasury the stock 
 which is least assailable. In times of disturbance 
 people often convert their property into easily 
 portable forms ; forms such as they can carry with 
 them. In this hurly-burly of a world we do well 
 to follow that method ; to have our chief treasure 
 with us, in us, where we can, at any time, put our hand 
 on it. When everything outside is adrift, when the 
 world of circumstance is full of menace, then is the 
 time to fall back on our inner accumulations. Well 
 for us if they are large, and of the durable sort. 
 Let us cite here an example of what we mean. 
 Have our readers, we wonder, read anything of Edgar 
 Quinet ? His *' Lettres d'Exil " are an inspiring 
 revelation of a truly noble soul. Quinet, consummate 
 scholar, profound thinker, with a soul athirst for 
 truth and righteousness, was one of the proscribed 
 of Napoleon III.'s coup d'etat. For twenty years 
 he lived the life of an exile from his beloved France, 
 refusing all the tempting offers made him to return 
 to his home and to imperial favour, at the price of 
 his conscience. During that period he was a 
 constant sufferer ; homeless, almost friendless. He 
 could get no publisher in France to dare to publish 
 his writings. After that twenty years, after Sedan 
 and the fall of the Empire, he comes back to France, 
 to find it in the grip of the enemy. He endures the 
 siege of Paris, and his last five years are spent in the 
 struggle to re-create his country, to lift it from the 
 abyss into which it had fallen. What a life ! you say. 
 
 75 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 Twenty years of exile, with such a return from exile ! 
 And yet hear his own account of his hfe. He had 
 been happy in that seeming desolate period ; happy 
 because his conscience was clear, because he had 
 cultivated to the best he knew his inner self ; 
 because he had laboured for the truth and for the 
 right. " It is certain," he says, " that we reach 
 happiness only through our reason and our will. 
 I was unhappy in my youth. But since I took 
 possession of myself all has been different. I 
 understand and I feel that the gift of hfe is a great 
 benefaction. One receives all the universe in 
 usufruct. The one thing is to know how to use it 
 and make profit of it. I have grown happier as I 
 have grown older." From this man, outwardly 
 almost everything had been taken. But in taking, 
 as he best knew, everything had been given. 
 
 Here comes in a question of education. While, 
 in nature's beneficent order, so many of our seeming 
 losses turn out to be gains, it must not be forgotten 
 that we lose a good many things we ought to have 
 retained. A once famous professor remarked in 
 our hearing to his students : " Gentlemen, if you 
 knew all the Sanscrit that I have forgotten you 
 would be very well set up there." It seemed a 
 pity that he should have learned just to forget. 
 Why do we lose so much of our schoolboy and 
 student lore ? For one thing, so much of it was 
 quite useless. Says Sydney Smith : " I beheve 
 while I was a boy at school I made above ten thousand 
 Latin verses ; and no man in his senses would dream 
 in after life of ever making another." It is certain 
 that whatever our early acquirements, whether the 
 making of Latin verses or anything else, we shall 
 
 76 
 
What is Left 
 
 infallibly lose them, unless they are kept in view, 
 and in some sort of practice, in after life. It would 
 be the biggest sum that arithmetic ever tackled to 
 calculate the time that has been lost in putting into 
 pupils' brains the things that will fall out again 
 in after years. Have we not here one of the first 
 principles of a true education, for ourselves and 
 the nation at large ? Surely what should be taught, 
 whether in the village school or in the university, 
 is what the learner can use. Latin and Greek are 
 all right for the men who will want them for their 
 life work. Nine-tenths of those who are spending 
 years over them will never use them, and will make 
 all speed to forget them. Let those years be given 
 to German and French, and they will possess in them 
 living forces of a living world. What is a real 
 education for our workers, except that which fits 
 them for their work, whether it be housewifery for 
 the girl, or the mastery of a craft for the growing 
 lad ? We keep what we use ; of the rest, what is 
 left is a debris that is hardly worth houseroom. 
 
 After all, the great education is life itself. If 
 we have been faithful learners in that school, we 
 shall find that the things that seem gone are not 
 really gone. They always leave something behind ; 
 there is never a real void. The natural process, 
 within us and without, is, in fact, a distillation of 
 essences, of more value really than the thing in bulk 
 with which we first have to do. That is why the 
 advance into life, when we have left youth and 
 the vigour of manhood behind us, has produced 
 deposits of these finer essences of themselves, that 
 have made the soul so much richer and fuller than 
 before. The true learners, as we have seen in 
 
 77 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 Quinet, in losing the material, have grasped the 
 spiritual, the one enduring, the one satisfying thing. 
 This, which happens to the separate soul, is what 
 is happening in religion, the soul's great feeder and 
 sustainer. Modern rehgion has witnessed the decay 
 and death of much that once seemed a part of it. As 
 we study that process we see the deep truth of Carlyle's 
 saying : " The old never dies till this happens, till 
 all the soul of good that was in it gets itself trans- 
 formed into the practically new." You compare the 
 theological systems of the seventeenth century with 
 the thought of to-day, and so much seems to have 
 gone that you are apt to ask, " What is left ? " With 
 educated minds the old doctrine of Biblical infalli- 
 bility has gone as completely as the doctrine of 
 Church infallibihty which, for Protestantism, it had 
 replaced. The elaborate dogmatic systems of that 
 age are all in the melting-pot. We look at all these 
 matters from a new standpoint and with new results. 
 Have we, in this process, lost anything ? The new 
 science of the world shows that to be impossible. 
 Nature holds all she has. She loses nothing. Her 
 infinite transformations are never a losing game. 
 And we may be sure that if this be so in the material 
 world it is not less so in the spiritual. The scien- 
 tific process, the critical process, the philosophic 
 process that have been at work in religion have 
 given more than they have taken. Science in offering 
 us evolution has immeasurably enriched religious 
 thought. Philosophy in its latest phase has burst 
 through materialism and shown man as a spiritual 
 being in a spiritual universe. And criticism has given 
 us a Bible which is more than ever the Book of 
 humanity, the inexhaustible store-house of the soul. 
 
 78 
 
What is Left 
 
 Christianity is being distilled to its essence, as an 
 ultimate force which you can transform but can 
 never destroy. All that has happened and is 
 happening in this sphere makes us more sure, with 
 Fichte, that " Christianity yet carries in its breast a 
 renovating power of which we have no concep- 
 tion. Hitherto it has only acted on individuals 
 and through them on the State indirectly. But 
 whoever can appreciate its power, whether he be 
 a believer or an independent thinker, will confess 
 that it is destined some day to become the inner 
 organising power of the community ; and that 
 it will reveal itself to the world in all the depths of 
 its ideas and the full richness of its blessing." 
 
 Pessimism, we have said, has built itself on 
 life's losses, its denudations. But a saner philosophy 
 revises that judgment. It discovers nature to be no 
 such cynic as has been imagined. She takes that 
 she may give. She withdraws the material to find 
 room for the spiritual. No loss but has in it a secret 
 gain. Goethe has put into Faust her final word, 
 " We bid you to hope." 
 
 79 
 
VIII 
 
 MAN THE PROPHET 
 
 Man the prophet appears to have been busy in 
 that role ever since he was man, and he is quite busy 
 in it now. There are prophets in Bond Street who 
 will read your future in your hand ; who will 
 exchange your gold for golden predictions. There 
 are loungers at tavern-bars, and " places where they 
 bet," who are prodigal of " certs " and " sure 
 things." Mr. Baxter is no longer with us, but there 
 are disciples of his school who are in all the secrets 
 of the Apocalypse, and can tell you from Daniel the 
 exact date of the world's end. The political and 
 the social prophets are all in full cry. Mr. Wells 
 sketches for us what will be going on in 1950. The 
 time is fruitful in prophets of gloom, Cassandras 
 who foresee the speedy " end of all things." Failures 
 and falsifications never damp the ardour of our fore- 
 tellers. Yet their failures, one would think, are 
 enough to damp the most ardent of them. Time 
 has from the beginning been pouring cold water, 
 pouring it in cascades and Niagaras, upon these 
 efforts. Every century has announced the coming 
 cataclysm, but it has not come yet. The early 
 Christians, the New Testament writers among them, 
 saw the Second Coming within a year or two. 
 Twenty centuries nearly have elapsed, and still our 
 planet rolls along. In mediaeval literature we have 
 predictions as vivid and precise as those of the 
 
 80 
 
Man the Prophet 
 
 Jewish Apocalyptists, and all of them wrong. It is 
 surprising how the coolest heads are all at sea in 
 their reading of the immediate future. Erasmus 
 was quite sure that Luther was done with at Worms. 
 So was Leo X. " The monk would know better 
 when he had slept off his wine." It was Leo and not 
 Luther who by and by knew better. Arthur Young, 
 one of the coolest and keenest observers of the 
 eighteenth century, was sure that after the meeting 
 of the French States General the Revolution was 
 all over. Right up to July, 1870, Edgar Quinet, one 
 of the sanest of Frenchmen, is expressing his despair 
 of ever seeing France delivered from the Napoleonic 
 despotism. It was within a few months of the time 
 when Napoleon was a prisoner and France a republic ! 
 As we think of these vaticinations, of their cock- 
 sureness and their dogmatic bitterness, we feel the 
 aptness of that appeal of Cromwell to the Scottish 
 General Assembly : "I beseech you, in the bowels 
 of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken ! " 
 
 The history of prophecy has been marked, as 
 perhaps no other history, by mistakes, by delusions, 
 by affirmations without proof ; down to drivelling 
 absurdities and criminal chicaneries. It has been one 
 of the most conspicuous outlets of human vanity. 
 Comte foretells the world-wide establishment of 
 Comtism in a given, and brief, number of years. 
 Charles Fourier names the separate dates on which 
 his phalanstery system will found itself successively 
 in France, in Europe, in the East, and throughout the 
 world, as the final form of human society. Each 
 enthusiast in turn is going to revolutionise the earth, 
 and to do it quick. The old earth smiles, gives them 
 in turn their six feet of soil, and goes rolling on. 
 
 81 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 Is there, then, no true prophecy ? There is a 
 great deal. When all is said, this title of " Man the 
 prophet " is a true title. It designates one of the 
 deepest, most vital, most significant of the human 
 functions. We can never understand man, the soul 
 and hfe of him, the history of him, without taking 
 account of the side that all this represents. The 
 excrescences, the counterfeits, the falsities, are simply 
 the irregular growths, the crude output of a genuine 
 faculty, whose dweUing and activity go down to 
 the deeps of his nature. The great prophets of 
 Palestine — Moses, EHjah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the 
 rest ; the inspired teachers of Greece — Pythagoras, 
 Socrates, Plato ; the Christian leaders of faith — Paul, 
 Augustine, Francis, Luther, Wesley ; these are peaks 
 rising to heights unreached of their fellows, yet 
 rooted in the same soil, drawing, if in larger measure 
 than the rest, from the sa'me common fund of power. 
 Our word " prophet," the Greek prophetes, means 
 literally one who speaks for, in the name of 
 another. There are other meanings, linking it with 
 the Hebrew nahi, the Greek mantis, the Latin 
 vates, suggesting seership, abnormal faculties of the 
 soul. 
 
 Both, or rather all, these meanings, how deeply 
 suggestive they are ! The great ones in this Hne have 
 always been speakers for another. The " Thus saith 
 the Lord " of the Hebrew teachers was no mere 
 formality. There was that within them — it 
 is in us, too, and asserts itself at times — which 
 was more than their own mental faculty, more 
 infinitely than their own personal assertiveness. It 
 was that august voice — in them and in us — which 
 rises at times above the din of our desires, of our 
 
 82 
 
Man the Prophet 
 
 selfish aims, proclaiming itself as something higher 
 and deeper. We listen to that voice in the seers as 
 the voice of God ; and that because we recognise the 
 same voice in ourselves. Plutarch has finely 
 expressed this feeling in his essay on the daimon of 
 Socrates. It was, he says, " the influence of a 
 superior intelligence and a divine soul operating on 
 the soul of Socrates, whose calm and holy temper 
 fitted him to hear their spiritual speech, which, 
 though filling all the air around, is heard only by 
 those whose souls are freed from passion and its 
 perturbing influence." 
 
 Connected with this human prophetism, though 
 not perhaps of its deepest essence, there are, in 
 many instances, occult and abnormal powers, which 
 science at last is beginning to recognise as one of the 
 most fruitful fields of investigation. The phenomena 
 of double or multiple personalities, of second sight, 
 of revelations of far distant and even future occur- 
 rences, have become too numerous and too well 
 authenticated to permit of being treated lightly. 
 They have taken their place as facts of human 
 experience, to be taken note of in any attempt to 
 penetrate the mysteries of life. It is — as Bergson 
 has said — in this region, the region of the 
 unconscious and of the sub-conscious mind, that 
 mental science has to seek for its deepest truths. 
 There have been in modern times flashes of vision 
 into the future which transcend all the accepted 
 canons of empirical science. What, for instance, are 
 we to make of La Harpe's story of the prophecy of 
 Cazotte, who, in the year 1788, at a fashionable 
 salon, told the fortunes of the company present ? 
 Cazotte, an oddity we are told, suddenly began to 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 prophesy. Condorcet would die self-poisoned on a 
 prison floor. Chamfort would give himself a score of 
 gashes to escape the guillotine. Vicq d'Azyr, Bailly, 
 were told of their doom. Madame de Grammont 
 would die on the scaffold. " At least," she cries, 
 " you will give me the consolation of a confessor ! " 
 "No," is the answer. " The last victim who will 
 be so attended will die before you ; it will be the King 
 of France." Within six years every word of his 
 prophecy was fulfilled. Assuredly in the depths of 
 the human soul there are powers of insight into the 
 unknown, even into the future, which are yet un- 
 plumbed, that are as full of mystery as the universe 
 by which it is surrounded. 
 
 We are apt to overlook the way in which, in our 
 commonest actions, we find ourselves linked to the 
 future ; how our everyday doings are essentially 
 proleptic. When we eat our dinner, when we go to 
 bed at night, we are acting prophetically. We eat 
 because we believe that the meal will have a 
 nourishing and strengthening effect upon us. We 
 invite sleep in the conviction that we shall thereby 
 be refreshed and restored. All the things we touch 
 and handle in the course of the day are dealt with in 
 the same prophetic faith. We act on them in a 
 given way, sure that they will react in a given way. 
 And we are easy about what they will do to-morrow 
 because we know what they do to-day. This is the 
 basis of all the predictions of science. Science holds 
 to the constancy of nature. Having once ascer- 
 tained the nature, the action of a thing, of an element, 
 it proceeds on a belief in the fidelity of that thing to 
 its nature. Heat expands, cold contracts, gravi- 
 tation pulls, and will continue doing so. Nobody 
 
Man the Prophet 
 
 has assured us of this, but it is a faith which works, 
 and the contract has, so far, never been broken. 
 
 And it is here, surely, that we finally come upon 
 the central ground and basis of all true religious 
 prophecy. The seer, what is he ? Is he not just the 
 man who sees deeper than others, more clearly than 
 others ; sees right into the heart of things, into the 
 essential equaUty of being ; one who, from an 
 accurate knowledge of the great spiritual forces at 
 work in the world, can predict how they will act, and 
 what results will come from this action ? This it is 
 which has made the prophets — the true ones — 
 the great moral authorities of the world. Whether 
 teaching in Judaea, in Greece, in Germany, in 
 England, the men of the spirit have had practically 
 one message. Uttered in all languages, in a hundred 
 different forms, it has meant always and everywhere 
 the same thing. They have stood, all of them, for a 
 Kingdom of God, for a rule of righteousnesss, for the 
 supremacy of the spirit over the flesh, for the rule of 
 love, for the redemption of our lower nature by a 
 higher nature, for the final triumph of goodness. 
 
 It did indeed require an insight deeper than the 
 common to perceive, especially in the earlier, ruder 
 days, the conquering qualities of the spiritual, to 
 predict its future from what it was. The insight, you 
 may say, was a scientific one. It was the result of a 
 true diagnosis. Just as the modern researcher, 
 probing and testing the qualities of radium, can give 
 his forecast of what it is to accomplish, so the prophet, 
 the moral genius, whether he lived three thousand 
 years ago or is among us to-day, predicts what the 
 spiritual will do from his knowledge of what it 
 contains. The latest to appear in the human 
 
 85 
 
Faith *s Certainties 
 
 development, it seems the weakest thing of all. It 
 was, for it was in its first infancy. Amid all the 
 rough, wild forces around it, man's animalism, his 
 ferocity, could it survive ? But the prophets saw its 
 quality ; saw the divinity that was in it. And so 
 they were sure of it, and of themselves its heralds and 
 spokesmen. They might die, be tortured, crucified, 
 but it would live and would conquer. 
 
 To-day we have no recognised order of prophets 
 and no outstanding personalities to whom we should 
 instinctively give that name. But the faculty, in 
 more or less developed form, is inherent in man, and 
 at no time has its secret, diffused power and working 
 being more manifest than now. Men believe, with 
 prophets and apostles, that the good is going to win. 
 They will perhaps express it as Fiske, the American, 
 expresses it : " Man is slowly passing from a primi- 
 tive social state, in which he was little better than the 
 brute, towards an ultimate social state in which 
 his character shall be so transformed that nothing 
 of the brute can be detected in it." Scepticism, 
 materialism, atheism will strive in vain against the 
 prophet element in man. It is in the sceptics them- 
 selves. Le Bon, speaking of the Paris workman, 
 says : " His raillery is never directed against 
 religion as a behef, but at the clergy, whom he con- 
 siders a branch of the Government." It was so at 
 the time of the Revolution, in all its orgy of free 
 thinking and free doing. The Jacobin Hebert told 
 the people to read the Gospels, the best of all books 
 of morality. Helvetius, while attacking the priests, 
 declared the religion of Christ to be " douce et 
 tolerante." Beneath all the questionings, the 
 confusions of the intellect, all the turbulence of 
 
 86 
 
Man the Prophet 
 
 passion, lies man's mystic element, his prophet 
 faculty, his soul ; the soul, as insistent in its message 
 to-day as when Tertullian wrote of it : " Wherever 
 the soul comes to itself, as out of a surfeit, or a sleep, 
 or a sickness, and attains something of its natural 
 soundness, it speaks of God." 
 
 We are full of prophecy to-day, and of the best 
 kind. There lies in the hearts of men everywhere 
 the portent of a mighty change, the change from 
 national enmity and suspicion to a new feeling of 
 mutual amity and trust. The war-makers, the war- 
 mongers realise it, and are ill at ease. Their craft is 
 in danger. The trade in which they have enriched 
 themselves ; the trade in hatred, suspicion and 
 fear, in the brutal instincts of men, in the false 
 glories hitherto attached to conquest and slaughter — • 
 all this is to-day shaking and trembling as though 
 an earthquake moved beneath it. A new thought 
 has entered men's minds. This colossal weight of 
 armaments, which is crushing down our civilisation ; 
 what, men are asking, has created it all ? It is a 
 thought that has created it ; just a thought and a 
 bad one. Put a good thought in its place and the 
 incubus will disappear. That good thought is now 
 in process of incubation. By and by it will emerge 
 m its full strength, and we shall see wonders. The 
 world is trying the power of faith, and already it is 
 moving mountains. One nation trusts another 
 with its money ; trusts all races and colours of 
 people with it, and finds the trust justified. Now 
 men are saying : " Why not trust a little farther, 
 credit these peoples with the common sense, with 
 the good feeling, which settles difficulties by reason 
 instead of by daggers, and which pronounces 
 
 87 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 definitely and once for all against the cut-throat, 
 robber cult of the barbarous ages ? " This faith, too, 
 will justify itself. The great prophecy will be 
 realised. That, because it is founded on a sure thing, 
 on the ever-developing nature of the good, on its 
 ultimate victory over all that opposes. 
 
 That man is formed for the future, that the very 
 structure and shape of his soul points and urges 
 him onward, is perhaps the surest of all pledges 
 about his future. Our faculties will find what they 
 seek, what they seem made for. The eye finds 
 light, the ear finds sound, the hand the thousand 
 things that match its activities. And man's 
 prophetic element, as it develops, as it clears itself 
 from the falsities which tempt its cruder efforts, 
 as it learns its true nature and its true direction, will 
 become more and more a pointer of the way. It 
 will discriminate between the sure things and the 
 things not sure. It will predict out of its estimate 
 of values. Its instinct will be more and more 
 fixed upon the eternal, the everlasting. And the 
 promise enshrined in it will not fail, for it is in itself 
 the earnest of an eternal possession. 
 
 88 
 
IX 
 
 THE DEVIL'S TOLL 
 
 We borrow the phrase from an old writer, who 
 uses it to express what he believed to be the fact, 
 that from all our transactions, from our gains, 
 from our virtues even, the devil takes a rebate, his 
 own especial discount. The aforesaid writer believed 
 in the devil ; and why should he not ? This is a 
 queer universe, with some queer people in it, as our 
 own corner of it can bear testimony. We have some 
 very bad specimens here, and there may be bad 
 specimens elsewhere. To create a moral realm of 
 free-will was a hazardous cosmic experiment ; its 
 great results have been obtained at the expense of 
 some failures, and there may be more of these than 
 we wot of. Who shall say that the invisible world, 
 like our visible one, may not have its mauvais 
 sujets, with a leader of them, pre-eminent in badness ? 
 And who shall say that, as we — by influence, 
 contagion, infection, or whatever you call it — com- 
 municate our goodness and our badness to our 
 fellows, there may not be unseen personalities who 
 act in like manner upon each other and upon us ? 
 Controversy apart, we have the " devil," at least as a 
 word in our vocabulary, a much used and a most 
 effective word. Take it as you will — for a principle 
 of evil, for the fly in our moral ointment, for the 
 inferior, the bad, as opposed to the good. Our 
 
 89 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 theme will work itself out under any of these defini- 
 tions. There is a something quite near enough to 
 us which we have to be " up against," to resist and 
 to fight, if we are to come to any good. We can 
 accept a devil, as the late William Jones used to say, 
 if only we keep our foot on his neck. Let us hope 
 that if there be a personality of that name he will, 
 as Robbie Burns has it, some day " tak' a thought 
 and mend." The fact remains — the thing we 
 have here to consider — that our adversary does take 
 his toll ; that all our good doing and good being is 
 subject to a horrible discount ; that our best, even in 
 the hour of its victory, pays tribute to our worst ; 
 that our forward movement includes those manifold 
 sHps backward ; that our success carries in it so often 
 the seeds of defeat. It seems hardly an exhilarating 
 subject, but it is a real one, and the real, in all its 
 phases, is our truest business. And the conclusion 
 of it may turn out, after all, to be anything but a 
 pessimistic one. 
 
 The illustrations of the theme are all around us. 
 Take, for instance, the recent Balkan business. How 
 exultant, how full of hope were we all, a little while 
 ago, in watching it ! These brave young peoples, who 
 had at last found themselves, their manhood, their 
 moral strength, at grips with the barbaric power that 
 had enslaved them for centuries ! How we hailed 
 the heroism which in the fight for freedom flung 
 itself on the giant foe, braving death and wounds in 
 the struggle for independence ! Here was a new 
 dawn, the opening of a glorious future ! And then 
 all this seemed spoiled and lost. These brothers-in- 
 arms, in the moment of victory, turn their arms 
 against each other. In winning against the enemy 
 
 90 
 
The Devil's Toll 
 
 they have lost themselves. The aspiration for 
 liberty has become a lust for plunder ; their hatred 
 for slavery has become a hate of each other. We call 
 back our praises ; we turn in disgust from this 
 hideous fratricide. It is the story of the French 
 Revolution over again. How glorious was the 
 beginning of that great uprising ! The events of 1789 
 sent all the noble spirits of Europe mad with joy. 
 Our Enghsh poets, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Words- 
 worth, burst into exultant paeans. Of that tim« 
 Wordsworth wrote : 
 
 Bliss were it in that dawn to be alive. 
 And to be young were very heaven. 
 
 Then came the devil's discount ; the horrors of 
 '91 and '93. The noyades, the massacres of the 
 Conciergerie, of the Abbaye, the orgies of the 
 guillotine, the fiendish atrocities of a St. Just, of 
 a Marat, of a Robespierre. The sunshine seemed 
 all gone ; the optimists became pessimists. But 
 let us remember here what followed ; remember it 
 for our comfort. The toll was indeed heavy, but it 
 did not exhaust the capital ; it left it indeed almost 
 untouched. The French Revolution remained, and 
 remains, one of the greatest events in history. The 
 atrocities are over but the good abides. After all, 
 it was a stroke for liberty, for human emancipation. 
 It was the abolition of serfdom, the creation of 
 millions of peasant proprietors, the advent into 
 the world of a new spirit, the notice to quit to a 
 thousand hateful tyrannies. And what happened 
 then, be sure, will happen again. In South Eastern 
 Europe the toll is being paid ; but it will not exhaust 
 the capital. These people are mad to-day, but they 
 will not always be mad. No good once won is 
 
 91 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 ever finally lost. For the folly, the savagery, of 
 the hour the full price will be paid. And the payment 
 will be in itself an enduring lesson. What has 
 happened shows us exactly where these people are 
 in their moral development. They have a long row 
 to hoe. We have had to abate our hopes concerning 
 them. But the world's whole history shows us how 
 absurd it would be to cease to hope. 
 
 Where humanity so far has had to pay toll arises, 
 we see, from the fact that so many of its perfections 
 have been limited ones. The win has been for a 
 class, a caste, instead of one for the whole. The 
 Athenian civilisation, with all its splendours, was 
 built on slavery. Beneath its triumphs of art and 
 literature was the groaning mass of the unenfran- 
 chised. The life of French society before '89, with its 
 salons, its circle of intellectuals, its life of cultured 
 ease, of polished epigram ; the life pictured for us in 
 the memoirs of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Mile, 
 de I'Espinasse, was almost perfect in its way. 
 Talleyrand said of it that no one could realise how 
 charming existence could be who had not known 
 it before the catastrophe of the Revolution. Ah, 
 if it could have been charming for everybody ! But 
 it was bought at too high a price ; the price of the 
 blood and tears of a nation. In England, in the 
 time of the Georges, the men of fashion, the landed 
 proprietors, had a great time and produced some 
 brilliant men. It was a time when we won half the 
 world and dominated the rest. Horace Walpole, 
 in Chatham's days, speaks of looking out each 
 morning when he got up for news of the latest victory. 
 But all England was not in those days either glorious 
 or conquering. Those were the days of the Commons 
 
 92 
 
The Devil's Toll 
 
 Enclosure Acts. If our readers would learn of them 
 let them study " The EngHsh Labourer, 1760 to 
 1830," by the Hammonds, where they will find how 
 the once prosperous workers of the countryside 
 were despoiled of their lands, of their ancient rights, 
 of their economic freedoms, and reduced to what 
 M. de Laboulaye has described as the most forlorn 
 condition of all European toilers. Here again 
 the devil's price was so abominably high, and he 
 got it all ! 
 
 To come to more intimate and personal matters. 
 Here every man of us can be seen paying his dues. 
 They are sliced off from his life-earnings as neatly and 
 as surely as though they were dividend warrants 
 mulcted of the income-tax. Our winnings in one 
 direction seem always to mean losings in another. A 
 man's gifts pay toll. The genius is notorious for his 
 onesidedness, for his grave defects in given directions. 
 We read of the genus irritahile vatum. We think of a 
 Coleridge, a De Quincey, drugging themselves with 
 opium. Du Maurier, in his picture of Svengali in 
 " Trilby," gives us a glorious musician who is a 
 scoundrel in all the rest of him. Lady Troubridge, 
 in one of her novels, declares roundly that musicians 
 are not to be trusted in matters of morality. 
 Certainly some of the greatest of them have been 
 queer moralists. And apart from open immorality, 
 what an irony it is when some high-strung nature, 
 exercised in his study with the highest themes in 
 life and religion, comes away exhausted by his 
 efforts in idealism, with nerves all ajar, and has 
 nothing but ill-temper to offer to his wife or his 
 friends ! How the infernal powers laugh when the 
 preacher, after discoursing eloquently of humility, 
 
 93 
 
Faith's Certainti es 
 
 comes away puffed up with his performance ! A 
 famous preacher, and, moreover, a very excellent 
 man, on coming down once from his pulpit was met 
 by an admiring auditor with eulogies on the grand 
 discourse he had delivered. " Ah ! " was the reply, 
 " the devil has told me all that already ! " 
 
 What a book could be written on " The Sins of the 
 Saints," on the bad side of spirituality ! It is one 
 of the most disturbing reflections, that of the evil 
 wrought by good men. They were such earnest 
 theologians, so absorbingly eager for the true faith, 
 those starters of religious persecutions, those founders 
 of the Inquisition ! In the interests of " the truth " 
 so many of them had started to tell lies ! What 
 a phase of religious human nature is that exhibited 
 by the history of pious frauds, of winking Madonnas, 
 of the wholesale manufacture of sacred relics ! 
 There has been enough wood of the true cross distri- 
 buted over Christendom to build a suburb. Writers 
 of the later Judaism and of early Christianity did 
 not hesitate to ascribe their works to the authorship 
 of Moses, of Enoch, of the Patriarchs. Their own 
 authority was not good enough ; they therefore 
 borrowed these great names without scruple and as a 
 pious act. We are amazed to find so good a man 
 as Jerome coolly writing as follows to a friend : 
 " The less the people comprehend, the more it is 
 edified. Thus our Fathers and Doctors have often 
 written not what they thought, but what circum- 
 stances and the needs of the time made them say." 
 In the supposed interests of faith men have shut 
 their eyes to the plainest evidence. They have, as 
 Hoffding says, " beheved the impossible in order to 
 save the necessary." There is a story of Keble, in an 
 
 94 
 
The Devil's Toll 
 
 argument with Buckland, maintaining that the fossils 
 found in the geologic strata were put there by the 
 special act of God. The good Melancthon stormed 
 against the Copernican theory as contrary to religion. 
 Zeal for what they thought the Gospel has led men 
 into the strangest courses. We read of a learned 
 man hke Carlstadt, in the heat of the Reformation 
 time, declaring at Wittenburg that there was no need 
 of academies and learning ; and of George Mohr, 
 rector of the grammar school, telling the people to 
 take their children from the school, for there was no 
 need of study henceforth. Had they not among 
 them the divine prophets of Zwickau, Storch, Thoma 
 and Stiibner, who were filled with the Spirit, with- 
 out any study ? And in our own day how often have 
 we seen the Church, or sections of it, arraying its 
 hosts against research, when the results of it seemed 
 to contradict some theological assumption ! Every- 
 where we see our poor humanity, even in the highest 
 exercises of its spirit, paying its toll to the inferior 
 powers ; side by side with its heroism, its sacrifices, 
 its noble devotion, exhibiting its fears, its ignorance, 
 its prejudice, its want of the highest faith of all — 
 the trust in truth as the one revelation of God. 
 
 What perversity is it in us that leads us so 
 persistently to spoil our good things ? Take the 
 question of our fellowships, of our human inter- 
 course. Our first impulses here are so genuine, so 
 wholesome. Our fellow men are dear to us. There 
 is nothing so interesting as a human face. In the 
 city we are too hurried, too crowded for the true 
 valuation of our kind. But in the country, where 
 men are scarce, we have our crack with the labourer 
 in the field, with the tramp on the road. The child's 
 
 95 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 face on the doorstep is a benediction. And where 
 friend meets friend round the table, at the fireside, 
 in some special coterie, the soul expands to its full 
 dimensions, overflows with all that is best in it. And 
 yet even here what an enormous, what a shameful 
 toll do we pay to the devil ! What unblessed tongue 
 was it that invented detraction ? Think of that 
 villainous word, backbiting ! That when a man's 
 back is turned shall be the moment when we think 
 more meanly of him and speak less cordially of him 
 than when we looked him in the face ! That all this 
 is a falsity, both to him and our true self, is evidenced 
 by the fact that in the actual presence of the man, 
 when his eye meets ours, when his hand clasps ours, 
 our feeling for him, our appreciation of him, is so 
 different, so much higher. Nowhere surely does the 
 inner training of the spirit show more carelessness, 
 more lack of honest thoroughness, than here. This 
 is a baseness we never ought to permit ourselves. 
 The thing begins in our thought, and it is our thought 
 that we need to take more thoroughly in hand. It is 
 a reptile instinct — truly a bit of the old serpent in us ; 
 and the first appearance of its ugly head in our 
 consciousness should be stamped on with iron heel. 
 What we feel towards a man when we talk to him, 
 let us have nothing baser in us when we think of 
 him. To this devil's toll, as indeed, to all the others, 
 we may apply with entire accordance the maxim of 
 Ancient Pistol — otherwise so queer a moralist — 
 " base is the slave who pays ! " 
 
 There is another department, of vital importance 
 to humanity, in which a heavy toll has gone the wrong 
 way. It is that of the exercise of spiritual influence. 
 Here is one of the great problems of the Church, and 
 
 96 
 
The Devil's Toll 
 
 especially of its appointed teachers and emissaries — 
 the problem of the evangelist, of the preacher. 
 Rightly considered, there is no higher function than 
 that ; no, and none more delicate, none where one 
 may more easily go wrong. To persuade men to the 
 acceptance of life's best ; to inspire them with the 
 sublime vision of God, the soul, and immortality ; 
 to win the drunkard from his cups, the libertine from 
 his vices ; to help in the fight against greed and 
 selfishness and base passion ; to infect a population 
 with the enthusiasm of goodness, what higher art, 
 what sublimer husbandry, than this ? But in this 
 high business comes the danger. The work is to 
 cultivate the soul ; the actual practice too often 
 has been to crush it. The business is to help men to 
 develop themselves ; the temptation is to swamp 
 them under one's own egotism. Instead of aiming to 
 strengthen the individual judgment so that it may 
 itself see truth, of strengthening the individual will 
 that it may form its own firm decisions ; behold, the 
 priest arrogating to himself all right of vision, all 
 exercise of the judgment and the will ! He must 
 swell, if the people dwindle. To increase his own 
 vision-value he must close the layman's eye. 
 Amongst a community of the lame and the blind the 
 man who can see and can walk has become all- 
 important. Ecclesiasticism has never yet been 
 able to get away from that view of things and the line 
 of procedure which it suggests. Says M. Loisy, of 
 the Roman Church : '' One cannot deny that the 
 tendency of Catholicism in the reaction against 
 Protestantism has been towards the effacement of 
 the individual, to place man under tutelage, to the 
 control of all his activities in a way which does not 
 
 97 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 help initiative. Its rock is to want too much to 
 govern men, in place of elevating souls." 
 
 Rome has undoubtedly shown this tendency in its 
 most extreme form. Of all the churches it has paid 
 the largest toll to the baser instinct of domination. 
 But Protestantism has not escaped. In its com- 
 munions it has been the ever-dodging peril of power- 
 ful personalities — preachers, theologians — to impose 
 their own personality with crushing and annihilating 
 force upon the minds, the souls, of the timid and the 
 weak. Freedom with them was to be their freedom, 
 not that of their hearers. To be eyes to the blind 
 is all very well. But so much better to heal the blind, 
 to help them to see for themselves ! A crucial 
 instance of what we mean — one of those extreme 
 cases which show in its full proportions what the 
 danger is — is given us in the life of Alice, the wife of 
 Laurence Oliphant, in her relations with Harris, 
 the American prophet of the new life. Says she, 
 describing those relations : " One only thing has been 
 a terrible pang to me, the giving over of my own 
 judgment, in questions of moral judgment, to any 
 human authority. It is so absolutely new and incon- 
 prehensible an idea to me, that any other testimony 
 should supplant, without risk to itself and me, the 
 inner test of my actions that my conscience affords." 
 *' New and incomprehensible " ! Alas, neither new 
 nor incomprehensible. It is an old, old story of the 
 triumph of the priestly instinct, first in the teacher 
 himself, and then in the pupil who became his 
 victim. Yet, what a monstrous story ! This 
 dehcate, high-strung, essentially noble nature, over- 
 crowed and overawed by the dominating egotism of 
 this masterful spirit, until her own judgment and 
 
 98 
 
The Devil's Toll 
 
 reason, all the formative forces of character, are to 
 lie crushed and broken beneath his heel. But the 
 danger here is in all of us who aspire to teach. With- 
 out a resolute repression, without a sunbright clear- 
 ness of view as to the limits of legitimate influence, 
 we, too, may become that ; may have it truly said of 
 us : " de te fahida narratur." When we are using our 
 power, not to develop but to repress it in others ; 
 when our aim is that all whom we reach shall take our 
 mould instead of their own ; when we reinforce our 
 own will by sucking the life blood of theirs ; surely 
 then to all the tolls that enrich the infernal revenues, 
 we are making the most valued contribution ! 
 
 Assuredly the human education is as yet a long 
 way from being complete. To put it otherwise, 
 we are an overtaxed race. We are paying too much 
 to the wrong custom house. Or, to put it still other- 
 wise, we are a wasteful race. In the production of 
 our perfections, of our virtues, we act too much 
 in the way ol the old, unscientific manufacturers, 
 whose processes left an enormous amount of ugly, 
 waste material — slag heaps which made the land- 
 scape hideous. Science is, in these matters, reaching 
 a better method, where nothing is regarded as waste ; 
 where the whole material is brought into useful, 
 beautiful service. And that is what, in man's 
 spiritual culture, we have to aim at, and what, in 
 the end, will be attained. We have to learn to 
 achieve success without pride ; we have to achieve 
 a civilisation where the prosperity, the joy of life, 
 shall be the privilege, not of one class, but of all. 
 We have to learn that our gifts, however brilliant, 
 are nothing in the scale against character, against 
 goodness. We have to reach a theory and practice of 
 
 99 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 social intercourse where all the freshness, the gener- 
 osity of it is to be guarded in our earnest thought, 
 as a precious mixture, to be soiled by no malign 
 admixture. Our aim must be for a spiritual 
 influence which helps but never seeks to dominate, 
 which respects the freedom of the will as God's 
 greatest gift to the soul. And all this and more will 
 yet be accomplished. This, because God is at work 
 in His world, visibly, before our eyes, moving 
 towards His great purpose. When we have fully 
 caught His spirit, been saturated with His fulness, 
 we shall pay no more toll to the devil. 
 
 h 
 
 100 
 
X 
 
 THE PRICE 
 
 " Price " is one of the best-used words in the 
 language. It is one of those, too, that reach deepest. 
 The street urchin knows it, turning over the half- 
 penny in his pocket. It meets us in every shop 
 window ; it is bawled from every huckster's stall ; 
 it rings through all the world's exchanges. Every 
 morning our newspaper has among its headlines, 
 *' Current Prices," " The Price of Gold," a long 
 following Hst of figures which means this one thing. 
 " Every man has his price," said once Sir Robert 
 Walpole, with a sinister significance. It is true in a 
 better sense than this ; and he might have added, 
 *' Everything has its price." We have never yet 
 come to any agreement as to what the price is, what 
 it should be. In some directions, it is true, we have 
 made vast advances. It was an epoch in the history 
 of man the trader when he hit upon coinage as 
 a common denominator, a recognised medium of 
 exchange. What a puzzle was business before 
 that day ! How were you to hit on an exact equiv- 
 alent of value, when the question was between 
 exchanging so many sheep for so many bullocks, or to 
 swap a slave for a suit of clothes ? Money has 
 enormously facilitated exchange ; but even here 
 we have by no means struck an absolute value 
 
 lOI 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 estimate. The production of gold makes a constant 
 variation in its price, and so in the price of other 
 things. As gold becomes cheap all else becomes dear. 
 And there are other variants. The present writer, 
 in Turkey during the war with Russia, found the 
 money-changers in the streets of Constantinople 
 busy with curious transactions. The Government 
 was easing its own financial strain by pouring out 
 from its printing-presses daily issues of paper. As a 
 consequence, the value of paper money varied 
 every morning with the amount on the market. 
 It reached finally about one-fifth that of hard 
 money — a thing one had to remember when making 
 purchases ! 
 
 To-day — and outside Turkey — our value systems 
 are full of artificialities. A rich man's wealth con- 
 sists of some bundles of paper, which he perhaps 
 never sees, lying in a bank's strong-room. Bonds, 
 shares, debentures, deeds, printed in various 
 languages, with some signatures scrawled at the 
 bottom, so much paper and ink, which a five 
 minutes' blaze would effectually destroy. If he lost 
 them he would be beggared. But is this wealth ? 
 Is the gold for which they could be exchanged 
 wealth ? For one thing, there is not gold enough 
 in the world to redeem half the paper that is afloat. 
 Neither one nor the other is the real thing. If all 
 the gold and all the paper securities in existence 
 were destroyed to-morrow, the world would be very 
 little poorer. These values are simply representative. 
 They are the signs of something behind. Your 
 railway shares are not wealth. The wealth is the 
 railway. Your Chinese bonds are worth what they 
 are because they stand for China ; its labourers' 
 
 102 
 
The Price 
 
 toil, its harvests, its resources above and beneath 
 the ground. 
 
 And your solidest values, when you have got them 
 there in hand, how they vary ! To a man dying of 
 thirst in the Sahara Desert you offer a bag of 
 diamonds, or a flask of water and a lift in your 
 caravan. Which will he prefer ? Diamonds are 
 cheap for him at that moment. The multi- 
 millionaire going down in the Titanic would offer 
 most of his wealth for a boat. Would he give it for 
 a place in a boat if that meant the displacement of 
 another, of a woman ? Ah, there comes another 
 question of value, another matter of price ! Here 
 we are getting deeper. Here we are asking whether 
 life itself is worth the price of honour ; whether a 
 continued consciousness on this earth, dogged for 
 ever with a sense of failure in life's highest, is as good 
 as that one great moment of losing it in the interest of 
 the highest ? Can we ever despair of humanity 
 when we remember in what innumerable instances, 
 amongst its commonest specimens — colliers throwing 
 themselves away in the effort to save a comrade, 
 rough fishermen manning the lifeboat in the teeth 
 of the gale, Atkins, with bullets raining round him, 
 carrjdng his wounded officer back to the line of 
 safety — how the common man has risen to this 
 height of sacrifice, preferring, as Aristotle puts it, " to 
 accomplish one great and noble deed rather than 
 many small ones " ! 
 
 To pay the price. It is one of the deepest laws of 
 life. All nature's transactions with us are on this 
 basis. Do ut des, the maxim which Bismarck was so 
 fond of quoting, " I give that you may give," is the 
 cosmic motto. Up to a point we seem to have 
 
 103 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 things gratis ; nature is so boundless in her 
 generosities. We pay no toll for her sunshine, 
 her fresh air, the splendid pictures she paints 
 on the skies, that she composes out of her valleys, 
 her mountains. 
 
 She presents us with life itself ; with our bodies and 
 minds ; with all the wonder of bone and muscle, of 
 eye and ear, of memory, imagination, the whole 
 faculty of thought. She has given us the world in 
 fee. And yet observe the limit. Before any of 
 these things become useful to us we have to put in 
 something of our own. The ancients worshipped 
 Ceres, the fertiliser, the goddess of harvests. But 
 they got no harvests ready made. To air and sun, 
 to the rich qualities of the soil, they must yoke their 
 own wit and toil ; must plough and sow, must thresh 
 and reap, must grind and bake and brew before they 
 ate and drank. All the gifts were half gifts ; never 
 a something for nothing. 
 
 For our human life we must pay — ourselves and 
 others. To come into the world cost our mother 
 her birth pangs. For long years our growth and 
 maintenance meant the toil and care of our parents. 
 And this great heritage we have come into — of 
 civilisation, of knowledge, of religion, of freedom — 
 have we thought of all that has cost ? Not an in- 
 vention but someone has given his best, often his life, 
 for it ; our freedom is blood-bought. The right to 
 think for ourselves, to worship according to our 
 conscience, has meant the heretic's obloquy, the 
 martyr's fires, all endured by the brave genera- 
 tions before us. Our very eating and drinking 
 is at the price of human beginners who ventured 
 deadly experiments in the discovery of what was 
 
 104 
 
The Price 
 
 good to eat and drink. Here is a debt to start with ; 
 a debt we can never pay off ; which no one worth his 
 salt will carry comfortably except as he manfully 
 does his stroke for the general weal ; adds something 
 of value to the heritage of his successors. The 
 doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, of the doing and 
 suffering of one for another, is writ in the heart of the 
 universe, in letters of blood and fire. Christianity 
 has that blood-red cosmic signature upon it ; it 
 builds itself upon a Cross. 
 
 But observe that this law of vicarious sacrifice, 
 which we find everywhere in life, while it goes a 
 certain way, never goes the whole way. The so much 
 done, so much borne for us, leaves always the final, 
 decisive thing to be done, to be borne by ourselves. 
 To be human on the present scale of the human, has 
 meant, we have said, the paying of so big a price by 
 others. But there is also the price we pay. To be 
 human, on our scale, has meant first the lodging of 
 our spirit in a bodily structure, the most wonderful 
 instrument in the world. Have you ever studied 
 it ? Everyone should read carefully some good 
 book on human physiology — there is no finer than 
 Huxley's — if only to know this part of what it means 
 to be alive. Study the mechanism of the eye, 
 of the ear, of the digestive apparatus, of one hair of 
 your head. Study, above all, the brain and the 
 nervous system. Was there ever such a machine ? 
 It is computed that there are some 20,000 billion 
 cells in the whole organism ; every one of them a 
 unit, and all working together in a perfect co-ordina- 
 tion. Was there ever such an exquisite fineness of 
 texture, a lacework so delicately woven ! And the 
 result is to give us such a range of sensations, such a 
 
 105 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 play of feeling and sensibility as nothing else in the 
 animal world can touch. And behind that is the 
 mind itself, with all its infinite sweep of thought, 
 of knowledge, of affection, and aspiration. But 
 all this at a price. Against this higher apparatus 
 of noble feeling, the possibility of the acuter pains. 
 The animal, which knows nothing of our joys, 
 knows nothing also of our sorrows. The sluggish 
 brute nerve, which is incapable of our exquisite 
 thrills, is also insensible to the acuter agonies we may 
 know. The animal has some pangs of separation ; 
 it has its moment of death. But how faint and 
 feeble its sense of bereavement compared with ours ! 
 And death to it is nothing throughout its life, a 
 consideration that never enters. To us death, in our 
 later years, is the inseparable companion, the ever 
 haunting shadow. Our height of being pays its price. 
 But we pay it willingly, do we not ? Would one of 
 us exchange our human status, with all its cost, for 
 the lower one ? A thousand times, no ! We would 
 go higher yet, with all the risks that entails. And 
 this because we are learning that other lesson of 
 the price ; the lesson that what we pay is into 
 a good exchequer ; that our trial and suffering is 
 no waste product, but comes back in the grandest 
 of returns. 
 
 A giving which is always a half-gift ; a vicarious 
 sacrifice which goes half the way ; a payment on one 
 side which always demands a payment on your side. 
 This, we see, is nature's lesson, her law of life. She 
 has made this so unmistakably plain to us ; has 
 printed it in so clear a type, that it is a perversity 
 which amounts to wickedness if we fail to use the 
 lesson in our interpretation of religion, in our inter- 
 
 10 6 
 
The Price 
 
 pretation of the religious deeps of the Christian 
 Gospel. For the grace of -God in Christ Jesus is 
 always on the line of the grace revealed in nature. 
 Here again it is do ut des. It is so in Christ's great 
 gift of Himself, in His suffering love for us, in His 
 atonement. Antinomianism, in all its forms, is 
 Christ's Gospel with the devil as interpreter ; the 
 lie which arose in Paul's time, and which drew from 
 him the indignant exclamation, " What, shall we sin 
 that grace may abound ? " What a perversity has 
 been that use of the doctrine of imputed righteousness 
 which makes God regard us as other than we are, and 
 treat us as though we were somebody else, because 
 of what some other has done for us ; a doctrine of 
 simulation and make believe ! On this we may 
 well remember Coleridge's remarks in his " Aids to 
 Reflection." He imagines a bad, loveless son who 
 has repaid his mother's affection by a total neglect. 
 Another steps in and performs all those duties of love 
 and service instead of the son. " Would that," he 
 asks, " be a reason for the mother's loving that son ? " 
 Says she : " Must not the sense of the other's good- 
 ness teach me more vividly to feel the evil in my 
 son ? " Redemption, be sure, means no obliquity, 
 no round-the-corner business of this sort. God deals 
 with us at first hand, not at second hand. Christ's 
 work for us and in us is to help our personaHty, not 
 to obliterate it ; to get us back to our true self, not 
 to substitute another for it. Vicarious, yes ; it all 
 begins there. The beginning is all grace, as the 
 sun's shining is all grace. But it is a grace which 
 does not insult us. It will not save us by ignoring 
 what we are and what we have been. It says 
 to us : " Yes, you are the object of vicarious 
 
 107 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 sacrifice. Others have suffered for you. Christ has 
 suffered for you. But that is not to spare you 
 your own suffering ; you will bear all that, for 
 only thus could you become the person you are to be. 
 You, too, must pay your price, and Christ has shown 
 you how to do it." 
 
 Notwithstanding all that has been done for us, we 
 go on pajang the price. And the eternal question 
 presses us, *' Is the price too high ? Is what we are 
 getting worth what we are paying for it ? " The 
 biggest prices here are such as are not quoted in the 
 market. There is no visible transaction. It is all an 
 exchange in the soul. Take the price of pride. The 
 main form of it to-day is purse pride. A man accumu- 
 lates houses, lands, broad possessions, and swells 
 inwardly to the dimensions of all that. He is, he 
 thinks, as big as his holding. A clearer view sees 
 otherwise ; finds the best part of him to be dwindling, 
 dwindling. About this a writer of ages ago, when 
 the world was mad with the same fever, has a word 
 on it which we moderns might well study. Says 
 Longinus : "I try to reckon up, but I cannot dis- 
 cover how it is possible that we, who so greatly 
 honour boundless wealth ; who, to speak more 
 truly, make it a god, can fail to receive into our 
 souls the kindred evils which enter with it. . . . 
 Men will no longer take any account of good repu- 
 tations. Little by little the ruin of their whole life 
 is affected ; all greatness of soul dwindles and 
 withers, and ceases to be emulated, while men 
 admire their own mortal parts, and neglect to 
 improve the immortal." The market price here seems 
 to have been very little affected by the course of the 
 ages. Men buy now, as in the days of Longinus, the 
 
 io8 
 
The Price 
 
 same thing at the same figure. And what is it they 
 buy ? Is pride a good value ? It reduces a man to 
 beggary — that, amid all his show, his riches. Your 
 proud man is a mendicant all the time. You can see 
 his soul going in hand to every onlooker, to 
 every dependant, to every passer-by, asking for its 
 daily, hourly aliment. It asks for, implores, the ad- 
 miring look, the flattering word, the tribute of these 
 outsiders to its own imperious hunger of vanity. 
 Without that tribute constantly administered it 
 starves. And what is this beggar soul doing with its 
 fellows ? Sowing amongst them crops of envy, of 
 base subservience, of all the mean and miserable 
 emotions. With its own territory a wilderness, it is 
 making a spiritual wilderness all round. If only 
 these people had a glimpse of imagination, to see 
 what they were doing, for themselves and for all the 
 others ! If only they had one touch of humour — 
 th^t saving grace ! We are not saying that all rich 
 men are proud, are of this sort. Far from it. There 
 are who have won their wealth by pluck and enter- 
 prise, and who are doing their best with it. But the 
 thing itself is so horrible a temptation to mean spirits 
 and there are so many mean rich men. What we 
 want here to say is, that the things really worth the 
 price, worth any price we can offer, are not the 
 things we have spoken of ; not envies and sub- 
 serviencies and vulgar admirations ; not the lifting 
 of ourselves on the abasement of others. To gain 
 the honest love of our fellows, by our own honest 
 love for them ; a love which shows in our frank, 
 humble recognition of their worth — the worth of 
 the meanest of them — which shows in genuine service 
 for their betterment ; a love which is not satisfied till 
 
 109 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 we have shared with our fellows the best in us, and 
 which leaves behind it an example to be followed, a 
 memory to be revered — these, and these only, are the 
 values that are worth their price. 
 
 To have grasped this law of the price is to have 
 grasped the meaning of Christ, of His living and His 
 dying. It is the heart of Christianity. To be a 
 Christian, in the only real sense, is to live in the 
 the daily consciousness of all that is involved in this 
 question of price. It will make us so eager for the 
 true values, so indifferent to all else. When we 
 remember that all we have is at the cost of some 
 others, of their labour, often of their pain, how deep 
 will be our gratitude to them ; how eager our desire 
 to repay ! This feeling will make us angry with 
 much of our civilisation. So many of our fellows are 
 paying too much. When our newspapers tell us, 
 as they did the other day, of a poor girl in London 
 dying of starvation, and of her room mate, called as a 
 witness, telHng how she herself had for months been 
 out of employment, living on dry bread and tea, 
 dismissed from her work because — made ill by the 
 stifling atmosphere of the underground room she 
 was working in — she had asked for a brief respite 
 and a breath of air, we find ourselves in deadly 
 revolt against the system which permits it. Have we 
 any business, any of us, to be happy in an England 
 which, steeped in the luxury of its comfortable classes, 
 permits such conditions at our doors ; conditions 
 compared with which the savagedom of Central 
 Africa is a paradise ? The revolution we are waiting 
 for, the revolution which will come when we have 
 become Christian, will break out among the rich, in 
 their fierce revolt against their own luxury while their 
 
 no 
 
The Price 
 
 brethren can thus die of starvation and nakedness. 
 When we have become Christian we shall want to 
 pay the price, the old redemption price, the price 
 He paid, " who being rich for our sakes became 
 poor, that we through His poverty might become 
 rich." 
 
 Ill 
 
XI 
 
 FACES 
 
 Lamb thought faces the finest scenery. He writes 
 to Wordsworth that " separate from the pleasure 
 of your company, I don't much care if I never see a 
 mountain in my Hfe." He speaks elsewhere of 
 the ** human faces without which the finest scenery 
 failed to satisfy his sense of beauty." Assuredly, 
 nowhere else in the heavens or the earth have we so 
 vivid a picture as is offered us in the human face. In 
 those few inches of surface what a concentration 
 of power, what a mingling of matter and of mind ! 
 The face is the soul's window through which it looks 
 out on the world ; through which the world in its turn 
 reads the soul's own secret. Think of the collection 
 of faculty massed in that tiny oval ! Underneath, in 
 chest and limbs, is the machinery of life ; here, on the 
 countenance, is life itself. Its flesh is charged with 
 spirit. The eye, which gives us the universe to 
 farthest worlds ; the ear, with all that music means, 
 with all that spoken language means ; the mouth, 
 the gateway of our food and drink, of the air we 
 breathe, the organ of speech ; our sense of smell, 
 and the whole world of scents and perfumes ; all this 
 and so much more, built into that one tiny bit 
 of space ! Every inch of it a revelation. What 
 volumes the eye tells ! The nose, the mouth, the 
 
 112 
 
Faces 
 
 chin, all deciders of destiny. You will see a nose that 
 tells everything ; a conquering nose, that of a 
 Caesar, a Wellington, that will crash through a world ; 
 the weak, boneless one, sign of the nothing the man is. 
 And so with a mouth, a chin. All we are, all we have 
 been, and all we have done, carries itself here in 
 a thousand subtle lines, a myriad touches of the 
 artist who is painting us. Odd, is it not, that while 
 we so carefully shield the rest of our body, by a 
 whole strata of clothing, from the cold and damp, 
 that this part of us, infinitely the most delicate 
 and sensitive of all, with nerves so immeasurably 
 finer, nerves whose exquisite texture record every 
 minutest change and shade of expression ; that this, 
 the body's supreme nerve centre, should be left open 
 by us to every wind that blows. Clothing, after all, 
 is largely a convention. The best bit of us does 
 without it. 
 
 There is one feature in the face, considered 
 as a piece of nature's artistry, which, as we think of 
 it, makes us doubtful of one at least of Ruskin's 
 dicta in the matter of architecture. We remember 
 his abhorrence of stucco. He denounces it as a 
 hypocrisy. He will have his surfaces represent 
 the actual material of the structure. Away with all 
 falsities, with all that hides and misrepresents the 
 thing beneath ! But, after all, is he following nature 
 here ? Is that her way ? What would happen to 
 our beauty if we peeled off from the face its surface 
 covering ? The thought is not a pleasant one. 
 Nature is not Ruskinian here. Is she, indeed, 
 anywhere ? She has no scruples about her surfaces. 
 Her Matterhorn is the same thing through and 
 through, except where snow and ice cover it, but the 
 
 113 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 mass of her landscape effects are thin coverings, that 
 hide something far less beautiful beneath. Strip that 
 surface layer, and we should have a very ugly world 
 to look upon. But that is an aside. 
 
 We have spoken of the human face as the greatest 
 of pictures. Some great artists are constantly 
 engaged upon it. Let us define. There are pro- 
 fessional ladies and gentlemen in Bond Street and 
 elsewhere who lay claim to this title, but we are not 
 thinking of them. Certainly they are in a way 
 proficients in face architecture. With their paints 
 and powders, their dyes and pincers, their nose 
 machines, and other instruments of the outfit, they 
 achieve miracles, masterpieces ; annihilate the years, 
 and offer cBtat. fifty the suggestion of twenty-five. It 
 is an old art, one of the oldest in the world. Baby- 
 lon and Egypt were proficient in it. There is a 
 curious chapter in Clement of Alexandria where he 
 describes the manner of *' making up " amongst the 
 Alexandrian ladies of his time. Evidently the second 
 century could, in these mysteries, give points to the 
 twentieth. But, alas ! nature does not smile on 
 these methods ; or, if she does, her smile has too 
 much sarcasm in it. She regards them as a peddling 
 trade. What worth they are, how far they go, is 
 known to the lady's maid, who visits her mistress in 
 the morning. 
 
 Nature has a face architecture of another kind — 
 august, venerable, sometimes terrible. Her instru- 
 ments are time and the will ; the events that happen 
 to a man ; the million million volitions which spring 
 from and react on the character. The great graving 
 tool is the soul itself. The other day it fell to the 
 writer to meet some friends of his boyhood ; once 
 
 114 
 
Faces 
 
 familiar figures whom he had not seen for fifty years. 
 Here, indeed, was genuine work, fateful work. What 
 a product of time and the hours ; the once lithe forms 
 bowed and stiffened ; the once smooth, eager faces 
 covered with wrinkles ; eyes, speech, expression, how 
 changed, transformed ! All the varied scenes of life, 
 all the experiences gone through ; the lifting joys, the 
 poignant sorrow ; all the secret thoughts of the heart, 
 had left here each their mark ; all had wrought on 
 the plastic material and made this new, strange, 
 unrecognisable picture. " I should not have known 
 you," was on each side the startled expression. One 
 felt here the solemnity, the tragedy of living ; how 
 each of us is adrift on the current that carries us 
 all away. 
 
 Yet the study of the face is not wholly a sombre 
 one. It offers one of the greatest of revelations. 
 It shows us the profound spirituality of nature. We 
 see here how it conquers and refines matter, how it 
 transfuses it with the highest things of the soul. 
 Look into the face of some noble character, some 
 inspired leader of men. Observe its strength, its 
 beauty, its sweetness. It was not always like that. 
 The new born child was a mere pulpy mass, from 
 which you could divine nothing. But through the 
 years, since the soul awoke, since character began 
 to form, and to make its great decisions, the inner 
 wealth of the spirit has been flowing out upon the 
 features, moulding, transforming them, pouring into 
 their flesh and blood all the beauty of its secret 
 life. Here thought has materialised and matter has 
 been spiritualised. In this action of the soul upon 
 the face, do we not catch a glimpse of what is going 
 on in the universe ? Have we not here in this 
 
 115 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 selected bit of matter an image, a prophecy, of 
 what the whole world, nature's utmost realm, is yet 
 to become ? The cosmos is also being spiritualised ; 
 its rude chaotic mass is being wrought on from within, 
 and is yet to be the triumph of thought, through 
 its utmost borders to be made beautiful, by the soul 
 that is within it ! 
 
 There has been in our world one face where, we 
 may well believe, the spiritualisation of matter 
 reached its height. We have had innumerable 
 pictures of the face of Christ. The masters have 
 filled with it the art galleries of the world. It 
 decorates the palaces of kings, the rude walls of the 
 peasant's home. And yet we have no authentic 
 knowledge of it. The early Christian writers, the 
 Church Fathers, are all abroad in their accounts. 
 Justin Martyr says, " He appeared without beauty; " 
 Clement of Alexandria, " He passed through the 
 world unlovely in the flesh and without form, 
 thereby teaching us to look at the unseen and the 
 incorporate ; " and that " He used a commonplace 
 form of body," and " was base in aspect." Tertullian 
 has it that " His body was devoid not only of heavenly 
 lustre, but also of human nobleness, and that He 
 was not even pleasing in appearance." Jerome, on 
 the contrary, declares that " there was something 
 starry in His appearance " ; while Augustine speaks 
 of Him as " beautiful as an infant ; beautiful on 
 earth, beautiful in heaven." It is evident we can 
 attach no authority to any of these utterances. 
 They are dictated by theological considerations. 
 The first cited conform to the prophetic word that 
 He should be " a root out of a dry ground, without 
 form or comeliness." The latter view is also 
 
 ii6 
 
Faces 
 
 theological, and not less un historical. It is better 
 here to found ourselves on nature and her processes. 
 We know not what the features were. One thing we 
 may be sure of ; that great soul could not fail to 
 impress itself, its nobleness, its purity, on the fleshy 
 envelope. The Transfiguration story is the story of a 
 life, as well as of a moment. That face — the face 
 which, as Browning has it, " far from vanish, 
 grows. . . . becomes our universe that feels and 
 knows " ; the face in which, as men looked on it, 
 they found their rest-giver, their burden-bearer, 
 whose smile drew them from the tax-gatherer's 
 custom-house, from the fisherman's boat — carried 
 its own revelation. The peace, the power, the love- 
 liness within, mirrored themselves there. 
 
 The painters, ancient and modern, have concen- 
 trated their powers on the human face. Nothing 
 elsewhere so subtle, so difficult, so wonderful. The 
 face of nature at her sublimest, her weirdest, in all 
 the variety of her moods, has no such power of hne. 
 Yet there is a greater art than that of portrait paint- 
 ing, one to which the best mind of the world is 
 learning to devote itself. It is that of a new face- 
 creation. So long the human countenance has been, 
 in the mass of examples, only a parody of what it 
 might be. Such a host of malign artists have been 
 at work there. Fear, anguish, remorse, lust, 
 cunning, despair have, through ages and ages, written 
 themselves on its features. So many canvases, 
 ready for beauty to imprint itself on them, and now 
 all ugly with the wreck of character, with the marks of 
 bestial passion ! Think of what that base animal 
 painter, drink, is doing in our land. The other day, 
 sitting in a country house in rural England, we 
 
 117 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 heard the story of some immediate neighbours. A 
 couple of hundred yards off was a noble mansion, 
 deserted, falling into decay. Its owner, a Ceylon 
 planter, had died there two years ago — of drink. He 
 left the house and adjoining property to his brother. 
 In a few months he, too, had passed away, also a 
 drink victim. In the village street, which we saw 
 from the window, stood a large red-brick house. It 
 was the property, we were told, of a wealthy woman 
 who lived alone there, drinking herself to death. 
 It had been left her by her brother, who in mid-Hfe 
 had died of drink. Their father was a drunkard. 
 Here was the history of an acre or two of ground. Is it 
 an exceptional history ? Such stories are every- 
 where ; the stories of every village, of every town, 
 of every street. Here is the python that is 
 strangling us ; here is the demon artist that is smear- 
 ing human faces with its fiery hue, the hue of death. 
 Are we fatalists, that we submit to it so easily ? 
 
 There is no fatalism here, but only want of will and 
 an organisation of the nation's common goodness, 
 united to its common sense. Let us not talk of the 
 fatalism of heredity ; of the face's fatalism. At 
 first sight it would seem as though everything were 
 fixed there ; that the face was a finality. When you 
 see the puffed cheek, the hanging jaw, the sensuous 
 mouth, you say, " Here is destiny ; there is no escape 
 from such features. This man is and will be what 
 he is ; and he will transmit his ugly self to his 
 children." Assuredly, it looks almost a finality ; but 
 it is not. The bottom fact to remember here is that 
 it is not feature that creates character, but character 
 that creates feature. Change a man's heart and you 
 will begin to change his face. There are creative 
 
 ii8 
 
Faces 
 
 forces here, which we may call to our aid, that are 
 stronger than heredity. You need not read 
 Weissmann to be assured of that. The history of 
 slum children, the offspring of vice and degradation, 
 taken out of these surroundings and put in a whole- 
 some physical and moral environment, is a proof of 
 it. That history is one of marvels, one of the most 
 hopeful things in the world. You get eighty per 
 cent, of them, who have begun so badly, turning out 
 well. The human character is the most plastic thing. 
 We know, alas ! what evil can make of it. But we 
 know, also, thank heaven, what good can make of it, 
 and we have powers of good around us that we will 
 wager against all the powers of evil. With that 
 power scientifically organised we can fight drink and 
 all the seven devils that afflict us, and fight to win. 
 What a manufacture is here before us ; the manu- 
 facture of good, beautiful faces, index of beautiful 
 souls ! Faces from which have been banished the 
 dread lineaments which guilt and fear and base 
 passion have written there, and which, as we look 
 upon them, shall make us exclaim with Miranda in 
 The Tempest : — 
 
 " O wonder ! 
 How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
 How beauteous mankind is ! O brave new world 
 That has such people in't ! " 
 
 An artistry this for us all to work in; which will 
 surpass assuredly all that brush or pencil can 
 produce ! 
 
 Have we ever thought of the theology of the laugh- 
 ing face ? Man is the animal who laughs. There 
 is no other creature that knows how to do it. When 
 you hear children laugh, still more when you hear a 
 
 Z19 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 man laugh, you are listening to the best music the 
 world offers. That we have muscles formed for this, 
 and the soul formed with this in it, what a refutation 
 is it of all the bad theologies ; of all the notions 
 of a morose, man-hating destiny ! A good, honest 
 laugh blows all that to the winds. The God who 
 made laughter is, be sure, a good and a loving God. 
 Laughter would never have been heard on earth 
 had it not been first heard in heaven. To hear it 
 is to be assured that we are in a good, honest world, 
 a world with a merry heart in it, that means well 
 with us. When I hear a child's laugh, when I look 
 on its joyous countenance I see a revelation of 
 the divdne thought about us, of its intentions towards 
 us, which all the gloomy creeds of a dyspeptic 
 theology can never persuade me out of. Who can 
 believe in a cursed, a damned world, while the sound 
 carries this in it ? The world's laughter, and what 
 it means, should be among the first articles of our 
 creed. 
 
 And have you ever, in your theological quests, 
 studied the face of the dead? Is there not also a 
 revelation there ? We have looked upon many — 
 faces of poor, insignificant people, faces of indifferent 
 livers ; also upon great faces. And what do we find 
 there ? For one thing, the deep religiousness of 
 death. All religion is there ; its mystery, its 
 sublimity. No one can pass irreverently into a 
 death-chamber. The face there, in its grand, calm 
 immobility, with everything of littleness wiped 
 out, speaks of the essential greatness of man, of 
 the soul. And is there not here something more ? 
 Is there not here nature's seal of uttermost forgive- 
 ness, her seal of the goodness, the love that is above 
 
 120 
 
Faces 
 
 all ? That rugged, worn face, furrowed in life with 
 so many lines of care and struggle — she has wiped out 
 all that as though it were nothing, and brought to it 
 the sweetness, the freshness of a little child. A 
 child we come into this world, with loving faces 
 all around us. And this dead, beautiful face — is it 
 not that also of a child, born into another world, 
 and again with loving faces all around it ? 
 
 There are great sights yet in front of us. The 
 world's face is to be made beautiful, more beautiful 
 than it is. And the Spirit of Holiness which has 
 worked through all the ages, and now works, will 
 recreate the human face. It is for us to join in that 
 noble artistry, inspired to our task by that greatest 
 of all words on this theme : " Blessed are the pure 
 in heart, for they shall see God." The face of God : 
 we are to see that. 
 
 121 
 
XII 
 
 OF DEEP-ROOTED SOULS 
 
 In a sense we are all deep-rooted, rooted as deep 
 as the universe itself. We are part of a system of 
 things of which no beginning is discernible, and no 
 end. Our bodies are, in their essence, as old as the 
 seas and the everlasting hills. They draw from 
 them and will go back to them. There never was a 
 time in which they were not ; there will be never a 
 time in which they cease to be. Our present sense of 
 weakness, of decay, is only a temporary sense. Our 
 ultimate being is in strength — the strength of eter- 
 nity. When our bodies die it is for them to begin a 
 new life, under new forms, but always a being, 
 a life. While we tenant them, the process is ever 
 going on. And every moment the universe is 
 passing into them, they into the universe. And 
 mind is as old as matter. There has never been one 
 without the other. There could never have been 
 matter without a mind to know it as matter. Our 
 mind, be sure, has this same quality of everlasting- 
 ness. In what anterior forms, in what posterior 
 forms, who knows ? We remember the curious 
 speculation of Leibnitz that all souls are perfected in 
 a sort of organised body, which at the time of 
 generation has undergone a certain transformation 
 and augmentation. We prefer here what Emerson 
 
 122 
 
of Deep-rooted Souls 
 
 has to say : "I cannot tell if the wonderful qualities 
 which house to-day in this mortal frame shall ever 
 reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or 
 whether they have had before a natural history. 
 But this one thing I know, that these qualities did 
 not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sick- 
 ness, nor buried in my grave, but that they circulate 
 throughout the universe. Before the world was, 
 they were." 
 
 In one form or another we are, then, and shall 
 continue to be, old inhabitants of this universe, 
 rooted, we say, in its everlastingness. But all that 
 is a somewhat far cry. What we want to deal 
 with here is not so much our fortunes in the far 
 past or in the far future, but those of to-day and 
 to-morrow. We are thinking of the sort of souls we 
 are producing, and are likely to produce under the 
 influences of our present civilisation. It is so much a 
 question of the soil they are growing in ; of its depth 
 and richness. Souls are here very much like trees. 
 Like them they depend on two things — their inward 
 nature and their environment. You cannot make a 
 kidney bean into an oak by any manuring process. 
 On the other hand, you cannot grow oaks in Lap- 
 land, or in the sand of the Sahara desert. Give your 
 acorn the right soil, a soil with depth in it and rich- 
 ness of quality, and you have promise of your oak, 
 that tree of centuries. And do you notice, given its 
 chance, what a wonderful individuality, one may say, 
 what a force of character, your tree develops ! With 
 an infallible instinct, its roots, searching amid all the 
 varieties the underlying earth contains, accept what 
 is good for it, what feeds its life, and rejects all else. 
 It knows what it wants, and keeps to that ; absorbs 
 
 123 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 it into its very self. To those other things it presents 
 a relation only of contact and of quiet rejection. 
 
 It is here that oakhood offers so potent a lesson 
 to manhood. The deep-rooted oak has so much 
 to say concerning the deep-rooted soul. We are 
 thronged to-day with schemes of education ; we are 
 on the quest for the method, the scientific method, 
 of producing the best men and the best women. 
 Everybody sees that it is largely an affair of soil, 
 of the kind of underground earth we are preparing 
 on which the soul-germ shall root itself and find its 
 nourishment. We are all agreed, too, that the 
 soil shall be such as shall feed the right kind of 
 character ; shall help the growth of the right 
 affections, of the high and noble ideals. And for 
 this we all say that it must be rooted in truth, the 
 essential truth of life. But what, and where, is that 
 truth ; how is it to be found ? Here we are at 
 issue. The twentieth century is at a vital point ; a 
 point where there is deadly disagreement. How 
 critical the issue is, and how ominous the disagree- 
 ment, is brought vividly before us in a small work 
 issued by Messrs. Williams & Norgate in their 
 Home University Library, entitled, " A History of 
 Freedom of Thought." The author is Professor 
 J. B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at 
 Cambridge University. Speaking from that authori- 
 tative vantage ground, the Professor offers us what 
 he conceives to be a true history of human progress 
 up to the present day, and an indication of the path 
 it is to pursue in the future. Let us see the kind of 
 soil in which, according to the Professor, the future 
 generations are to grow. The book is, from begin- 
 ning to end, frankly materialistic. Our first feehng 
 
 124 
 
of Deep-rooted Souls 
 
 about it is the oddity of the title. It is called a 
 history of the freedom of thought ; its entire subject 
 is the non-freedom of thought, the complete slavery 
 of the human spirit. We are chained beings in a 
 chained universe, the controlling powers of which are 
 matter and force. The religious view, which offers 
 us a universe beginning with mind and resting on 
 love, with man as an offspring of that mind, endowed 
 with freedom, and responsible for his actions to that 
 mind ; in short, the whole idea of God, freedom 
 and immortality, is dismissed as illusion, with no 
 scientific basis. 
 
 There is no such thing as a creative intelligence, 
 a divine purpose in the world. As a specimen of the 
 kind of argument by which this hopeful conclusion 
 is sustained, we may cite the Professor's treatment 
 of the design argument. He thinks it sufficient for 
 the exploding of this argument to point to the 
 imperfections that appear in nature, in structures 
 such as the human body. He quotes Helmholtz 
 as saying of the eye that "if an optician sent it to 
 me as an instrument, I should send it back with 
 reproaches for the carelessness of his work, and 
 demand the return of my money." So we are to 
 believe that because the thing may be bettered, 
 there is no design ! It is curious reasoning. Would 
 any man conclude of a watch, because it was possible 
 to produce a better, that there was no design in it ? 
 Would a Helmholtz hold that because the watch was 
 imperfect, it was the work, not of an optician, but 
 of the mindless operation of a nebulous mist ? If 
 he did say that, would it suggest to us anything 
 beyond the enormous faith of philosophers in search 
 of an atheistic conclusion ? Has it occurred to 
 
 125 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 these philosophers that in creating an imperfect 
 world, the mind behind it — supposing a mind — 
 may have reasons of its own for a temporary im- 
 perfection ? That there were reasons for starting us 
 in an imperfect world, as a scene of education for us, 
 as a condition of our own education in working with 
 that mind, as co-operators in improving it, and by 
 that means of improving ourselves ? Has it occurred 
 to them that if this mind was one which contem- 
 plated as a final end the development of human 
 spirits, in strength and happiness, that the end 
 would be better secured by putting us in a world 
 where there was something for us to do, rather than 
 in one where everything was done, and ourselves 
 placed there, with our hands in our pockets, simply 
 as idle lookers on ? 
 
 And we say that this is not a true history of 
 freedom of thought, but an entirely partisan and one- 
 sided one. It gives us the supposed triumph of 
 materialism. It leaves out the free thought, the 
 conclusions of equally free and cultivated minds 
 that have arrived at a different conclusion. It 
 attacks Christianity for its supposed opposition to 
 freedom. It leaves out all it has done for the 
 deepening and enriching of the human spirit. It 
 mentions Hegel as an opponent of Christianity. It 
 has nothing to say of the Hegelian Caird of Balliol, 
 of how he shows what a Christian a Hegelian can 
 be. It has no mention of Fichte, or of what he 
 thought of the Christianity of Christ. The history 
 is supposed to be up to date, but we find in it nothing 
 of Martineau, with his magnificent vindication of the 
 spirituality of th^ cosmos, no word of Dr. Ward's 
 " Realm of Ends," nothing of Romanes, nothing of 
 
 126 
 
of Deep-rooted Souls 
 
 Eucken, who is revolutionising German thought ; 
 and not a word of Bergson, of the great argument 
 by which he shows how the necessitarians have been 
 all along attacking the problem of free will from the 
 wrong end with a wrong conclusion ; nothing of 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, of Sir William Crookes — nothing, 
 in fact, of that whole intellectual process by which 
 minds of the first eminence in science and philosophy 
 have been delivering us from the slough of fatalism, 
 from the nightmare of a chance-begotten world, and 
 giving our poor humanity renewed reasons for hope, 
 for aspirations, for noble living ! 
 
 A fine soil this, surely, which our professor is 
 preparing for young Cambridge and young England 
 to grow in ! What room, what nourishment in it 
 for the spiritual life of man ? What room for the 
 soul's highest exercises ; for reverence, for love, for 
 purity, for self-sacrifice ; what room for all this in 
 a world which has, back of it, no object of reverence, 
 no love, no purity ; but only soulless atoms, with 
 chance as their governor ; and with nothing in front 
 of it but blank annihilation ? What room for 
 courage, except the courage of despair ? The " free- 
 dom " it offers us is the Horatian freedom, to 
 " pluck the day, for there is no to-morrow " ; a 
 freedom to eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. 
 Against reasonings of this kind — very poor reason- 
 ing at best — we prefer with Pascal to rely on the 
 heart's reasonings, the soul's deepest instincts. The 
 heart's instinct tells us that our noblest thought, 
 instead of being above the actuality of the universe, 
 is immeasurably below it. And the verdict of the 
 truest feeling is ever a religious verdict. We 
 remember here brave Dr. Johnson's remark on 
 
 127 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 Hume's nihilism, " All that Hume has advanced had 
 passed through my own mind long before." In 
 spite of Hume the Doctor would trust his heart's 
 verdict. All the great souls have rooted themselves 
 deeper than in matter and force. Our twentieth 
 century will have to find some better soil than 
 this if, in its turn, it is to produce great souls. It 
 has no large harvest of them just now. It is funny 
 to note the condescending air with which our 
 modern chatterers talk of " the Victorian age," as if 
 any of them can compare for a moment with the 
 voices of that age ; with Tennyson and Browning, 
 with Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot. 
 And all these were deeply religious spirits. In the 
 age of Darwin and evolution, and the most revo- 
 lutionary discoveries in the realm of matter, they had 
 struck deep into a realm beyond it. We mention 
 George Eliot. She had broken loose from the 
 dogmatic creeds. She had translated Feuerbach 
 and Strauss ; was the companion of Lewes, the 
 intimate of Herbert Spencer, the admirer of Comte. 
 But to the end her heart was in religion. Daily her 
 reading was in the Bible which she loved. She writes 
 to D'Albert : " I have not returned to dogmatic 
 Christianity, to the acceptance of any set of doctrines 
 as a creed ; but I see in it the highest expression of 
 the religious sentiment that has yet found its place 
 in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest 
 interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all 
 ages." And where her heart lay — the heart which 
 is man's surest guide— is evident in all her works. 
 In " Adam Bcde," the freshest fruit of her genius, the 
 heroine is Dinah Morris, the woman preacher. It is 
 she who exhibits the finest fruits of character, the 
 
 128 
 
of Deep-rooted Souls 
 
 highest devotion, the most all-enduring love. It is 
 she to whom all the neighbours go in their hour of 
 need, to whom they turn as the best they know. It 
 is she to whom, alone of all others, poor Hetty Sorrel, 
 in her condemned cell, finally turns for confession, 
 and for the heahng of her broken heart. The deepest 
 in George EHot is there, the deepest expression of that 
 centre of truth, the truth of feeling. 
 
 A piece of literature we are much in want of is 
 a natural history of great souls. It should be a 
 scientific history, a world history. Some important 
 chapters in it on the negative side would be the 
 natural history of small ones. We want a clear 
 view of the conditions which make for the two 
 products. We should get a truer view of million- 
 airism, luxury, materialistic pursuits and negative 
 ideas when we learn what they have done towards 
 growing men ; and a truer, a more optimistic view of 
 the world's pain and suffering, its toil and difficulty, 
 when we perceive the spiritual product of all that. 
 Assuredly, we shall find one thing, that materiaHsm 
 has never provided a soil deep enough and rich 
 enough for high natures to reach their strength and 
 stature. How luminous is the world history here ! 
 Socrates dies for his heresy, his " irreHgion." But 
 what is his heresy ? Read the " Apology," read the 
 *' Phaedo." These souls are aU rooted in the 
 spiritual ; they have a leaping-off place from the 
 seen to the unseen. Cicero, in his final hour, 
 knowing his fate under the Roman triumvirate, 
 shows us where his roots are. " I do not repent of 
 having lived, because I have lived so as not to have 
 been born in vain ; but I go from this life as from an 
 inn and not an abiding place. Nature has given to 
 
 129 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 man the terrestrial world to stay in it awhile, not to 
 remain there. O great day, which shall liberate 
 me from this sordid scene to rejoin the celestial 
 assembly, the divine congress of souls ! " 
 
 These great souls of antiquity struck their roots 
 deep. They sought the best, wherever they could 
 find it. But since then the soil has become in- 
 comparably richer. Philosophy had already found 
 that love was the greatest thing in the world. It had 
 said it magnificently in the formula of the Stoic 
 Cleanthes : " Love begins with father and mother. 
 From the family it goes to the district, to the city, 
 to the multitude. It goes on and becomes the holy 
 love of all the world." But with Christianity, with 
 Christ, a new warmth reached the soul. The 
 Divine love, the sense of love, holy, self-sacrificing 
 love, as the centre of things, which the heart of man 
 everywhere yearned for, became realised, actualised ; 
 spoke, breathed, lived, in the Man of Nazareth. In 
 seeing, hearing Him, the fainting heart of humanity 
 found what God was, and in that knowledge lived 
 again. The secret of the Church's strength, as 
 Matthew Arnold has it, was in its new, overflowing 
 joy. Here was a new sphere for the soul, a new soil 
 in which to push its roots. Here was the element in 
 which all its faculty of veneration, of affection, of 
 loyalty, of service, could bloom into flower and fruit. 
 As Eucken says : " Christianity meant an immense 
 deepening of the human spirit." Science is apt to 
 reproach the after Christian ages, as a period of 
 arrest in the progress of knowledge. But it was not 
 the arrest of humanity. Do we suppose, we who 
 believe in an ordered evolution, that any one age 
 of that evolution could be a mistake ? There is 
 
 130 
 
of Deep-rooted Souls 
 
 no blunder in evolution. There may have been a 
 stay in the development of one side of faculty. But 
 it was that another backward side might catch up. 
 Admit there was a pause in the matter of world- 
 knowledge. About that we may say with Hoffding, 
 " The pauses in the world course may last very long, 
 but only he who is able to weave them into their 
 inner connection with what went before and what 
 follows after can understand their value, and rest 
 assured they are something more than mere inter- 
 ruptions." What Christianity has meant for 
 character, for the opening out of the finer qualities 
 of spirit ; what it has meant as a stay in trouble, a 
 gladness in hardest poverty, a hope in life and death, 
 only those can understand who have first tried to live 
 without it, and since have lived with and in it. 
 
 To-day we have the richest of all soils for man to 
 root in. We have all the glorious wealth of the 
 Christian deposit, and mingled with it all that 
 knowledge of the universe which modern science has 
 opened. The two are, in the best minds, working 
 together to a larger synthesis, to a vaster life. The 
 thought of to-day is following the path opened by 
 Schelling, who, in his later period, became mainly 
 occupied by bringing about the rebirth of religion 
 through the operation of science in its supremest 
 form. And science in its supremest form will be 
 occupied by the mystery of the soul as much as with 
 the mystery of matter. It will not rest with the 
 something to know ; it must have also someone to 
 love. It will have learned that goodness is higher 
 than knowledge, and that the conditions of human 
 goodness are given not in revelations of matter, but 
 in revelations of the spirit. 
 
 131 
 
Faith*s Certainties 
 
 This theme is a personal one for us all. To make 
 any success of life we must get our roots deep into it. 
 If we are only deep enough rooted we can grow tall 
 without fear. We must have a self developed in us 
 which, like the oak, knows, amid all the elements it 
 meets, what to choose and assimilate, what to reject. 
 With that in us we can move amid all the experiences, 
 all the clash of opposition, knowing what elixirs they 
 contain. Welcome every new experience, the new 
 burden, even the new sorrow. Let them perform 
 their dreadest function ! Is it not to enrich the soil, 
 to drive its roots deeper into the things everlasting ? 
 Blessed difficulties of life, which compel us to find our 
 roots in God ! 
 
 132 
 
XIII 
 
 RENUNCIATION 
 
 Says Goethe, " Renunciation once for all, in view 
 of the eternal." But though Goethe said it, the 
 subject to-day is not popular. Since Goethe we 
 have had Nietzsche, with his doctrine of self- 
 assertion at all costs. Christianity is with him so 
 poor an affair because it makes so much of self-denial, 
 of humility, of giving up ; the morality, he affirms, 
 of a subject, defeated race. We are to be all for our- 
 selves, with small regard for the other man. The 
 superman, the man of strength, mighty in will and in 
 faculty, is to rise upon the shoulders of the less 
 inclined. " Be hard " is the watchword. Let the 
 weak find their place — at the bottom. The spoils to 
 the victors, and vcb victis ! The doctrine is popular 
 because it fits in with the modern temper, with its 
 materialism, its lust of pleasure, its scepticism about 
 the spiritual values. Even woman, up to now the 
 refuge of idealism, has caught the infection. Her 
 new role is to assert herself, to fight for all her rights, 
 a role she is carrying out with some vigour just now. 
 And so we find ourselves in a scrambling world, where 
 " beggar my neighbour " is the favourite game. 
 Renunciation ! Tis an ugly word. It smells 
 of the middle ages, of the monk's cell, of a starved 
 life. It is like that other disagreeable word" hell/' 
 
 133 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 " not to be mentioned to ears polite." Why bring it 
 up to disturb our gaiety, to arouse in us all these 
 morose reflections ? 
 
 And yet, somehow, it has got into the language, 
 into all languages, and is hkely to remain. It will 
 be hard to dislodge, for it is one of nature's words, a 
 word built out of actual experiences, a word framed 
 in the very structure of the soul. And the thing, 
 whether we like it or not, will be one of the great facts 
 of our life — if we live long enough. Our attitude 
 towards it will make all the difference to us, 
 all the difference between a life-success or a life-failure. 
 And we need not be frightened away from it by any 
 fear of a pessimistic conclusion. For nature, while 
 teaching us to renounce, while compelhng us to it, 
 does not teach us to grieve over it — far otherwise, if 
 we will only look deep enough. 
 
 For nature, we say, compels us to renounce. She 
 begins the process early, and she carries it on to our 
 last moment. There is a certain humour in her 
 method. She is an inveterate joker, and in all her 
 processes will have her laugh. She dangles her 
 dainties before us, gives us our bite, and in the 
 moment of enjoyment whisks them away. She 
 begins early, we say. Observe her dealing with 
 babyhood. The child comes in, lord of all. The 
 babe, the peasant's babe, is above any emperor. His 
 majesty's majesty does not affect it in the least. It 
 will offer him no homage, but exact it. No cringing, 
 no stooping, no adulation on its side. Unless 
 emperor pays his respects let him look out for snubs ! 
 It is a glorious sovereignty, this of the beginner. 
 But it does not last. A year or so, and our baby is 
 fallen from its throne. It takes its rank, a low one, 
 
 134 
 
Renunciation 
 
 to know itself henceforth as a poor struggler in a 
 struggHng world. And the king, on his side, is he 
 better off ? Kinghood, what a renunciation is 
 there ! So much that is a free gift to his fellows is 
 denied to him. Not for him the boons of privacy, 
 the nobody's freedom ; not for him the joys of 
 chmbing. Think of the monotony of being always 
 at the top ! After an hour amid all those biting 
 winds, all that bleakness, we want to get down again 
 to the peace of the lowlands. But he must always 
 stop there. 
 
 Do we note how, in nature's scheme for us, every 
 act of ours, every volition is a renunciation ? To 
 get something we have always to give up something. 
 If you do this you cannot do that. The man who 
 elects to be a musician, a specialist of any sort, turns 
 his back on a thousand pleasant things. The student 
 who buries himself in his books is losing all the joy 
 of the open air. To be abstemious you forgo 
 the drinker's delight. There must be some fine 
 sensations there, at least for certain throats, or the 
 world's drink bill had been less. We feel the pang 
 which drew from poor Lamb the cry : " Must I then 
 leave you, gin, rum, brandy, aqua vitae, pleasant, 
 jolly fellows ! " All the nations have been topers. 
 Over a tavern in old Athens there was this Greek 
 inscription : " He who drinks well sleeps well ; he 
 who sleeps well has a pure conscience ; he who has a 
 pure conscience is dear to the gods ; therefore, he 
 who drinks well is dear to the gods." Assuredly, if 
 the stories of them be true, the gods had a fellow 
 feeling here. And if the logic was bad, doubtless 
 the jovial Athenians found the liquor good, which 
 was the main thing. 
 
 135 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 This law of giving up one thing to get another is, 
 we say, written all over Hfe. We empty the soul 
 to find room for something else. The man of 
 industry forswears idleness. Industrialism, as we 
 have it to-day — there is a renunciation if you Hke ! 
 Nothing seems to have been dearer to primitive 
 man than his laziness. And it survives still with a 
 monstrous tenacity. Fichte has an anecdote of a 
 sailor who preferred to take the risks of hell to 
 exerting himself to self-improvement in this life. 
 " There he would only have to suffer, whereas the 
 other line of things would compel him to do some- 
 thing ! " Quite numberless are the ways in which 
 nature pursues us with her forced renunciations. 
 A man marries, and gives up the freedom of his 
 bachelorhood. What the woman gives up — she 
 herself best knows. In our very pleasure-seeking 
 we are compelled to renounce. Nature follows here 
 what the economists call " the law of diminishing 
 returns." The first sip is always the best. As we 
 drink the quality of the liquor deteriorates. When 
 a man comes into a fortune his first sensation is 
 ecstatic. It does not taste so well in a year, and 
 the time comes when the experience has quite ceased 
 to be a joy-bringer. The holiday is glorious at the 
 beginning. It will be odd if the man is not bored 
 before it is over. And then, as life advances, there 
 comes a great stripping process. " Old age," 
 said Bishop Warburton, " is a losing game " — a 
 truer thing than the majority of that bishop's dicta. 
 In this period a multitude of the old delights lose 
 their zest. The senses become less keen, labour 
 becomes more difficult. One retires from the old 
 employments, the old glories. The leaves fall in 
 
 136 
 
Renunciation 
 
 showers from the tree. And the last moment is a 
 final giving up. The world he has loved, and in 
 which he has lived, finally closes its door on him. 
 Vixit. 
 
 This seems a mournfnl recital. And it would be 
 if all were here said. But it is only half, and the least 
 significant half. For now let us observe nature's 
 way of renunciation, with what glimpses it affords 
 of her meaning in it. Do you note, to begin with, 
 how gently she does this work, and what healing balm 
 she applies to the wounds she makes ? She takes 
 away from our life, but always so as to leave us 
 reconciled with life. And what she takes away is 
 generally replaced with something better. We 
 find, somehow, a home in our lot, spite of its negations. 
 The proof of that is in the vast disinclination we find 
 to the idea of changing it for that of another. Even 
 kings find their uneasy summit tolerable, and, as a 
 rule, abdicate only on compulsion. Temperance 
 knows nothing of the elect moments of debauch ; but 
 it would be sorry to go back to them. Its renun- 
 ciation has come so heavily weighted with gifts, 
 that it blesses the day of it. Having been drummed 
 out of our idleness into industry, we find its forbidding 
 frontier the opening to a land of delights. If we have 
 lived long enough we shall have reached Voltaire's 
 view : " The further I advance in life's career the 
 more I find work to be a necessity. It becomes 
 finally the greatest of pleasures, and takes the place 
 of all the illusions one has lost." We renounce when, 
 at the beginning, we take to life ; we renounce when, 
 in old age, we give up so much of it. But old 
 age, with well-nourished souls, is no unhappiness. 
 Channing found it in his most blessed period ; and 
 
 ^37 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 we remember that fine saying of Seneca, writing to 
 his young friend Lucihus : " My soul is full of 
 vigour, and rejoices in no longer having so much to 
 do with the body. It leaps with joy and holds with 
 me all sorts of discourses on old age ; it says that 
 it is its flower." As to the final renunciation which 
 death brings, nature makes it for us a very easy 
 affair ; so easy that the stupidest of us, as well as 
 the wisest, bring it off with perfect success. She 
 takes the whole business of it on her own hands. It 
 is a falling asleep, one of the pleasantest of processes. 
 Sir James Paget, the eminent surgeon, held that there 
 was a certain physical enjoyment in dying. 
 
 But all this, real and vital though it be, is on the 
 surface. We see that nature compels us to renounce. 
 We have yet to ask, why that stern compulsion ? 
 We have a right to ask that, for nature seems full of 
 purpose. She does nothing indifferently. All her 
 vast processes, so far as we can discern them, are 
 means to ends. From the spiral wheel of a nebula to 
 the civilisation of the twentieth century she has been 
 working towards life ; towards more life and fuller. 
 From the inorganic to the organic ; from vegetable 
 to animal ; from animal to man ; the movement is 
 upwards. And in man the movement is still up- 
 wards ; it is from the animal to the spiritual. Man, 
 in this world, is the one organ of that, and the organ 
 which she is now incessantly engaged upon, with 
 the design of developing and perfecting it. Her 
 problem is, in a world of matter, to create a world of 
 spirit. And man, compounded of the two, with a 
 body which relates him to the one, and a soul that 
 relates him to the other, is her instrument for solving 
 it. And here comes in Goethe's mighty word, 
 
 138 
 
Renunciation 
 
 " Renunciation, once for all, in view of the eternal." 
 Yes, it is renunciation that becomes now nature's 
 working tool. It is for this that she compels us 
 upon her discipline ; for this it is that she has 
 stamped upon every earthly sensation, every 
 pleasure, every experience, the mark of the transi- 
 tory. By her relentless time movement she teaches 
 us eternity. What a mark she has put on all fleshly 
 delights ! It is the mark of disesteem. How true 
 here is that saying of Fichte : *' We may love, seek, 
 and desire the pleasures of sensuality, and may feel 
 delight in experiencing them, but we can never hold 
 them in esteem ; esteem does not apply to them at 
 all." And as her kingdom of the spirit grows — and 
 it does grow — the soul becomes ever stronger and 
 clearer in its renunciations. We now cease to 
 grumble at nature's discipline. We take sides with 
 her, discerning her high purpose. We make war 
 upon the flesh. We clear out, one after another, the 
 clogging, inferior elements to make room in us for 
 higher things. This movement, mark you, is not 
 merely an individual one, though it begins there. 
 It is a human, a universal one. Our modern 
 materialism is only a transitory thing. The whole 
 world is upon this path of renouncement. It is 
 steadily giving up the lower animal moods. 
 
 Observe, for instance, the modern movement 
 against war. In the war spirit all the animalisms are 
 concentrated. The old bloodthirstiness, the old lust 
 of killing, the lust of power, of dominating your 
 neighbour, the lust of possession, the getting things 
 at all costs, the lust of pride and vainglory, the lust 
 of rape, violation and lubricity — they are all here, 
 blood relations, the compact organisms of the brute 
 
 139 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 in us. Good men have seen this in every age. Says 
 Erasmus : "I often wonder that human beings, 
 especially Christian human beings, can be so mad 
 as to go fighting one another." Horace Walpole, 
 writing of the wonderful year, 1759, when England 
 was conquering in East and West, says : " Our bells 
 are worn threadbare with ringing of victories." He 
 quotes Voltaire's " Universal History," in which is a 
 chapter with the title " The English Victorious in 
 the Four Quarters of the World," and says : '* Yet, 
 tasting its honours and elated with them, I heartily, 
 seriously wish they had their quietus. What is the 
 fame of men compared with their happiness ? Who 
 gives a nation peace gives tranquillity to all. How 
 many must be wretched before one can be 
 renowned ? " Well, we have reached a point where 
 this view is no longer the property of a few illu- 
 minated minds, but where it has entered as a new 
 development of the universal soul. Humanity is 
 getting ready to turn out of itself, as something 
 inferior, the desire for domination ; it is beginning 
 to see the absurdity of hate and the common-sense of 
 love ; it is longing to cut its connection with violence 
 and thievery as, from beginning to end, a bad, 
 unprofitable business. What is coming is a human 
 renunciation, the finest, the most portentous, the 
 world has yet seen. 
 
 So moves in our midst the kingdom of the spirit. 
 Christianity is proving itself mightier than Nietzsche. 
 Even its seeming defeats are victories. The German 
 Socialists repudiate the Christian faith, and are at the 
 same time exhibiting its fruits. Their proclamation 
 of universal brotherhood and of the abolition of war 
 has more Christianity in it than aU the orthodoxies. 
 
 140 
 
Renunciation 
 
 Christ would smile at these deniers, Christ, who 
 believed in hearts and acts so much more than in 
 dogmas. It is from Him we have learned the 
 meaning of nature's law. He is mighty because 
 He is finally her chief exponent. He taught 
 renunciation, taught by practising it. He taught 
 how to win the world by losing it ; how to achieve 
 the vaster life by clearing out of the soul the rubbish 
 that choked. At every point His way demon- 
 strates itself as the only way. As we follow it we 
 are astonished at our stupidity in not seeing all 
 this before. His renunciation, as we practise it, 
 shows as a perpetual deliverance. When we have 
 renounced hatred, jealousy, pride, envy, vicious 
 pleasures, we find we are ridding ourselves of diseases, 
 and entering on the true health. We give up, and 
 give up, but the soul has no vacant places. The 
 disorderly crew that has gone is replaced by " shining 
 ones." We discard the transitory for the permanent. 
 We find with Boehme that " he for whom time 
 is as eternity and eternity as time is freed from all 
 struggle." We see, with Caird, that " the Christian, 
 in giving away everything which he has for him- 
 self as against another, in surrendering every exclusive 
 good, is widening, not narrowing his life. In ceasing 
 to contend for his rights against others he has made 
 all their rights his own." We see that life's finest 
 investment, the most profitable investment of our 
 wealth, our time, our powers, is the investing of 
 them in the good, the happiness of others. Here are 
 dividends whose value alone the soul can estimate. 
 Wonderful is the calm, the interior peace, that 
 comes to the man who has learned how to renounce. 
 It is this alone which can reconcile us to life, which 
 
 141 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 enables us even to understand it. It is peace, 
 whatever happens. When one desirable thing 
 after another is taken away, the instructed soul falls 
 back upon its infinite reserve in God. He is in 
 the business, knows it all, and that is enough. The 
 sense of this is the treasure of humble souls. George 
 Eliot voices the faith of millions of them — a faith 
 which contains the wisdom of all the ages — when 
 she makes Dolly Winthrop, the blacksmith's wife, 
 say to Silas Marner, when he lost his little fortune, 
 " Eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things 
 as we can never make out the rights on. And all 
 as we've got to do is to trusten, Mr. Marner — to do 
 the right thing as far as we know, and to trusten. 
 For if us, as knows so little, can see a bit o' good and 
 rights, we may be sure there's a good and a rights 
 bigger nor what we can know. I feel it i' my own 
 inside as it must be so." 
 
 Renunciation, once for all, in view of the eternal. 
 It seems a good doctrine after all. Only let us not 
 misunderstand it. It offers no commission to 
 idleness, to apathy, to indifference. It means any- 
 thing but an empty world, or an empty soul. On the 
 contrary, it gives us a full-blooded vigour because it 
 gives us a full-blooded hope. It is a doctrine of 
 values, of what are the higher and what the 
 lower. The man who embraces it must beware of 
 one thing. He must not seek to impose his renun- 
 ciation upon other people. The beauty of it is that it 
 is each man's own secret. You cannot make your 
 growth that of your neighbour. You cannot impose 
 it on your neighbour. Try it, and you will 
 assuredly fail. Your only success will be in becom- 
 ing a nuisance. It is, we say, each man's own secret, 
 
 142 
 
Renunciation 
 
 the secret won out of his experience, his traffic with 
 life, with time, with eternity. But oh ! it is a great 
 secret. It is the secret of accepting the universe, 
 with all its infinity, its depth of meaning ; of the 
 universe with its apparatus of sense in front, and 
 with its spiritual behind ; with its fleeting moment 
 and its timeless underneath ; the secret which, 
 when the world seems most vacant, makes it for us 
 most filled with God ; which opens to us the meaning 
 of the apostolic word of " having nothing, and yet 
 possessing all things." 
 
 M3 
 
XIV 
 
 THE CONVERSION OF POWER 
 
 The conversion of power, the changing of it, that 
 is, from one form into another, has been going on from 
 the beginning of the world. It is only of late, how- 
 ever, that we have begun to understand it and to 
 see its possibilities. Science is full of it, and thrusts 
 the thing upon us at every turn. You go into an 
 electrical power-house, and listen to the hum of those 
 mighty revolving cylinders. What are they doing ? 
 They are turning motion, friction, into electricity. 
 But what is turning them ? You visit the engine- 
 room, the boilers, the furnaces. There you find coal 
 passing into heat, which, in its turn, is converting 
 water into steam, whose pressure, cunningly applied, 
 makes the cylinders move. And when you ask 
 where the coal obtained its reserves of heat, you go 
 back across ages, across millions of miles of space to 
 where the sun, aeons ago, pouring its energy upon 
 the earth, created on its surface a vegetable hfe, that 
 died, was buried, crushed under succeeding rock 
 formations, holding in the compressed coal-form 
 all this sun heat, to be dug out finally and to yield 
 its hoarded energy under our steam boiler. And at 
 the other end you find the electricity, thus created, 
 resolving itself once again into motion, urging rail- 
 way trains, turning the wheels of factories, or passing 
 into light and illuminating a myriad homes. 
 
 144 
 
Conversion of Power 
 
 The transmutation of energy ! It is a new book 
 of revelation here opened to us, and no one can say 
 what treasures are yet to be drawn from it. Up to 
 now science has been its most enthusiastic and most 
 proficient pupil. Every day it offers us a new chapter 
 of discovery. Out of pitchblende it has produced 
 radium and thorium, the wonder-workers. It 
 shows us the world as just a storehouse of power, of 
 power immense, inexhaustible ; powers stored in 
 vegetation, in stones, in metals ; powers so 
 tremendous that to liberate them is to endow us 
 with a thousandfold potency. It has been said that 
 the atomic force contained in a centime piece, if liber- 
 ated, would drive a railway train twice round the 
 circumference of the earth. We can scarcely imagine 
 what man will be when he has mastered more of these 
 secrets, clothed himself with all these potencies. 
 But the scope of science is within material things, 
 and these, after all, are the smallest part of the hfe 
 of man. There is a spiritual side of this conversion of 
 power, which as yet we have only begun to con- 
 sider, but which is going to be indeed a new revelation, 
 full of momentous results. It is on what we have to 
 learn on this aspect of the new knowledge that we 
 want here principally to concentrate attention. 
 
 It is worth noting, in the first place, that in her con- 
 version of power, nature's movement is a consistently 
 upward one. Our planet's history begins with a 
 chaos of lifeless matter, in a state of prodigious 
 confusion. For countless ages, as the flaming mass 
 cools and hardens, there is nothing but what, to us, 
 would be a reign of horror. Gaseous explosions 
 which hurl their fiery tongues far into space ; volcanic 
 upheavals which rend and twist the earth crust into 
 
 145 
 
 10 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 weirdest shapes ; incessant roar and crash as the 
 contending forces hurl themselves upon each other. 
 But the long war comes to an end. A solid surface 
 appears, edged everywhere by encircling, carefully- 
 balanced seas. Out of confusion, order ; out of 
 ghastly ugliness, the beginnings of beauty. Then the 
 miracle of organic life. The plains are covered with 
 vegetation. Immense growths cover the steaming 
 earth, growths which are to fill the world's store- 
 houses with fuel. From vegetable the lift is to 
 animal, and from animal finally to man. Man 
 begins as animal, to go on to the reasonable, and 
 finally to the spiritual. If, with our present intelli- 
 gence, we could have watched those first processes, 
 so seemingly interminable in their endurance, we 
 should have been filled with dread and despair. It 
 would have seemed to us only an eternal war of 
 malignant powers. But we should have been wrong. 
 The worst enemy to our faith then, as it is now, 
 would have been our impatience, our shortsighted- 
 ness. Could we have had a vision of the future, 
 could we have seen even what we have before us 
 to-day, the order that has been reached, the beauty 
 revealed, how different our conclusion ! 
 
 We know the other side of this argument. We are 
 told that the upward movement of our planet is to 
 be succeeded by a downward one ; that our whole 
 solar system may be annihilated by the clash of some 
 opposing sun ; or, failing that, that the sun's heat 
 will exhaust itself, and that then our earth, from the 
 ever increasing cold, will cease to be habitable and 
 become as lifeless as the moon. Everything that 
 grows decays and dies ; and that is as true of the 
 world as of every blade of grass that grows upon it. 
 
 146 
 
Conversion of Power 
 
 To all of which there is an easy answer. Supposing 
 the outward facts to be as here stated, is there any 
 reason in them for the conclusion ? True, the 
 world's previous history has been one of decays. 
 Each generation of vegetable and animal life has 
 decayed. Many of the old vegetable types, many of 
 the old animal types, have disappeared. But those 
 very decays have ever been part of a progress, a 
 progress towards a larger, fuller life. There has been 
 a steady conversion of power here, the advance of 
 which has ever been towards the development of 
 the spiritual. Man is the supreme organ of that. 
 And the spiritual in him is curiously above and 
 defiant of the material. The spiritual is in the 
 material, but not of it, using it as an instrument, but 
 always with its own development, acquainted with 
 other forces, following other laws. And who shall 
 say that any crash or crumbling of the material 
 will be to that spiritual aught else but a new conver- 
 sion of its power, the union of itself with a higher 
 spiritual that is in the universe ? That we have been 
 going upward, and have been for ages, is an argument — 
 the force of which nothing that has yet appeared is 
 able to destroy — that the movement is to continue, 
 and in the same direction. 
 
 This law of the conversion of power is an entirely 
 hopeful one, and nowhere more so than in its refu- 
 tation of the materialist and pessimistic theories 
 which rule so much of the thinking of to-day. 
 M. Gustave le Bon, in his " Psychologic du 
 Socialisme " — one of the most depressing books 
 we have read for many a day — gives us his view of 
 the modern reign of force. We notice it here, not 
 merely for the scientific eminence of the author 
 
 147 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 and the power and eloquence with which he presents 
 his view, but because he stands as the representative 
 of so widespread and influential a school of Conti- 
 nental thought. He urges that in the modern, as in 
 the ancient, world material and intellectual force are 
 the only things that count. It has been so from 
 the beginning, and will be so to the end. Altruism, 
 the moral sense, religion, are only dreams ; phrases 
 with which men deceive themselves. They are 
 not in nature. Nature has no moral sense, no 
 altruism, no distinction of good and bad. Her law 
 is the law of the strongest, of their survival, and the 
 subjection or destruction of the weak. That is how 
 evolution works. That is how nations and indi- 
 viduals always act, and always will act. As con- 
 firmation he points to the modern world, and to 
 recent history. No one has followed this law more 
 ruthlessly than the so-called Christian nations. The 
 strong States beat down the weaker. The Anglo- 
 Saxon in America has exterminated the Indian. The 
 European is pursuing to-day the same role in Africa. 
 In Europe Germany has swallowed Schleswig- 
 Holstein, has beaten Austria, has defeated France, 
 and is preparing further conquests. The United 
 States has driven Spain from Cuba, from the 
 Phihppines, and is waiting to absorb South America. 
 England, which won India by blood and fire, has 
 since crushed the Boers in South Africa, and has 
 seized Egypt. All the great nations are armed to the 
 teeth and wait for their rivals' weak moment to 
 attack and destroy. The only law is strength, and 
 woe to the weak ! 
 
 The historical facts here are very much as he 
 states, and they make sombre reading. But has he 
 
 148 
 
Conversion of Power 
 
 drawn from them the right conclusion ? We know 
 the deceptiveness of the half-truth, and M. le Bon 
 has kept out here the biggest half. Indeed, his 
 initial statement about nature is completely and 
 entirely wrong. When he speaks of nature as 
 ruthless, without conscience, without care for justice 
 and right, he is forgetting that man, according to his 
 own showing, is a product of nature, her highest on 
 this earth. It is through him she is striving to 
 express herself. He is the chosen interpreter of her 
 whole meaning. And this product of hers is becom- 
 ing ever fuller and fuller of that moral and spiritual 
 sense which he denies to her. If nature is without 
 conscience, how came conscience into being ? If 
 it is not in her scheme, how comes it there ? With 
 this in mind we can go a step further. Let us admit 
 the predominance of force ; admit that the stronger 
 everywhere wins. Let us admit that, so far, force 
 has too often been used ruthlessly, and without 
 mercy. But what our author has completely for- 
 gotten is the fact that force, in nations and 
 individuals, is itself becoming converted, raised from 
 a lower to a higher form. Appearing in man, first as 
 physical, then as mental, and selfishly mental, it is 
 visibly on our earth becoming transmuted into 
 another form, a form in which love and service and 
 sacrifice become increasingly predominant. If 
 history shows anything it shows that. Where are 
 now the ancient barbarisms, the atrocities of Attila, 
 of Timour, of Genghis Khan ? What general 
 would now act as Titus did at the conquest of 
 Jerusalem ? Where is the old slavery, the old serf- 
 dom ? Where the old criminal codes with their 
 tortures and wholesale executions ? Conquests are 
 
 149 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 no longer what they were. England won against the 
 Boers and granted them a free constitution. A new 
 conscience has arisen as to the treatment of the 
 weaker races. We have already got so far, and the 
 movement is all in one direction. Force is becoming 
 spiritual, and nothing can resist the onward march. 
 And it is nature which is doing that ; only a higher 
 nature than M. le Bon wots of. It is a nature which 
 includes love and righteousness and God. 
 
 But this doctrine is not meant merely for the 
 historian ; it is not meant to leave us as spectators 
 of what has been going on. It is a doctrine for 
 action, for our action. The business of the Church 
 to-day, of all believing men, is that of the conversion 
 of power. And observe here, that just as in the 
 natural, so in the spiritual world, the ultimate 
 source of the power is beyond and above ourselves. 
 In the physical system we owe everything to the sun. 
 The earth is just a receiver of its Hght and heat, 
 and by receiving and transmuting it has become what 
 it is. All its power comes from above. And we 
 expect to get more and more out of the sun by better 
 uses of it. We hear of receivers in tropical countries 
 which by collecting and concentrating its rays, are 
 being used as creators of mechanical energy. All 
 the forces indeed that are stored in the earth are sun 
 forces ; and we have only begun to tap them as yet. 
 We are clear about this in the physical realm. We 
 are dubious about it in that other, and yet there is 
 nothing more sure. Man has no more made himself 
 spiritually than he has made himself bodily. His 
 soul owes itself ultimately to the flowing in upon 
 him of ethereal powers from beyond, and the growth 
 in him of a capacity to receive and assimilate them. 
 
 150 
 
Conversion of Power 
 
 And the problem of religion, of the Church to-day, 
 is the problem of a larger receptive area, of a 
 better use of what it gathers there. The New 
 Testament is here in a strict line with science. " But 
 ye shall receive power."" In the far future we may 
 anticipate that man will have so grown on this side 
 that he will move mountains where we cannot shift 
 molehills. But even now we could receive so much 
 more than we have. To get these sun forces we must 
 put ourselves in the way of them, and open wide the 
 windows to let them in. If we follow the right 
 way, they are as certain to come to us as electricity 
 comes when you have the right apparatus and the 
 right connection. Those old ways of obedience, of 
 pureness, of spiritual desire, of the daily, hourly 
 uplift of the soul to God ; here always the sunbeams 
 strike ; here their heat may be felt. Receiving them 
 we give over doubting ; we begin working, and soon 
 we begin reaping. 
 
 One of the results here is the steady conversion of 
 the lower powers in us into something of a higher 
 grade. An immense mistake, fallen into by religious 
 people of all ages, has been to suppose that emotion, 
 carried to a sufficient height, was the real spirituahty, 
 and rendered all other gifts unnecessary. We find 
 it in the Montanism of the second century ; in the 
 Gospellers of Germany in Luther's time ; it has been 
 a familiar feature in the English and American 
 revivals. To be filled with the Spirit — which with 
 these people meant a certain emotional exaltation — 
 was everything and a substitute for everything. In 
 comparison with it, the fruits of study, of learning, of 
 all intellectual achievement, were matters of no 
 account : to be avoided, indeed, as temptations of 
 
 151 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 the evil one. If these people had had a little 
 more learning, they would have despised it less. It 
 would have shown them that the great religious 
 leaders, the Wesleys, the Luthers, the Calvins, the 
 Augustines, the great Greek Fathers, were always men 
 of brains — of brains well packed and hard worked. 
 In order to convert your powers you must have some 
 powers to convert ! The rule we are under puts no 
 premium on idleness, and is perfectly aware of the 
 difference between stupidity and strength. But the 
 point is here, that to become a spiritual force, all 
 our inheritance of faculty needs to be converted. It 
 requires a transmutation as real and actual as that of 
 vegetable into animal, as that of coal into electricity. 
 Of itself it is just a force, which may be, and often is, 
 the most ruthless in the world. There wait upon 
 it, eager for alliance, all the devil's legionaries — 
 pride, selfishness, ambition, the lust of applause, 
 the lust of conquest ; and the Church's hope — and 
 let us say the world's hope — lies in the conversion of 
 this power, the lifting of it into a realm where it will 
 work free from those lower influences, the trans- 
 muting of it all into the hfe of love, into the sacrifice 
 of God as seen in the light of the Cross. 
 
 The light of the Cross. That is the sun-ray which 
 is to do for the soul what the solar heat has done for 
 the earth. And it is not only heat, but light. In its 
 beam we see the solution of the world's enigma, 
 above all of its enigma of suffering. All the pessim- 
 isms that have been bred of pain disappear when we 
 see in the Cross what suffering really means. If it 
 were there as an end, as a thing to be endured, with 
 nothing to follow, a huge mass of distressfulness into 
 which a waste world has blundered, we might well 
 
 152 
 
Conversion of Power 
 
 be pessimists. But in the Cross we see it as never an 
 end, but always a means. In all its forms, the 
 lowest, the most appalling, it is a means, a force which 
 turns itself, and other things, into a final good. We 
 see it in ourselves, turning itself into courage, into 
 hardihood, into pity, into sympathy, into invention, 
 into remedies. And in the Cross we see how God 
 takes suffering, how He willingly enters into its worst 
 forms ; and shows us, not only in the hours on 
 Calvary, but in all the world history since, what 
 triumphs lie hidden there. There have we in its 
 highest exercise the will to suffer for others, and by 
 it to bring them redemption. For as St. Bernard 
 has it, " Non mors sed voluntas placuit spoftte 
 morientis" (Not the death but the will of Him who 
 willingly died is its essence of satisfaction). And 
 the sufferer conquers by enduring. As Augustine 
 has it, " Victor quia victima " (He is the conqueror 
 by being the victim). And as we ourselves enter 
 into that death, feel in ourselves the prick of the 
 thorny crown, and the piercing of the spear, we, too, 
 find ourselves conquerors. Our powers, too, have 
 become converted. We know ourselves as among 
 the spiritual forces of the world. 
 
 In this new life we realise how nature herself is 
 holy ; how her laws have the Cross for their centre. 
 When we have reached this stage we see how all her 
 universe is for that life and ministers to it. Her 
 native healings are spiritual healings. In times of 
 exhaustion, when overworn by our task, overworn till 
 we feel incapable of a noble thought or a loving deed, 
 how often have we, in such an hour, yielded ourselves 
 joyfully to her loving ministrations ! We have 
 gone out to breathe her air, to inhale her quiet, her 
 
 153 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 sunshine, to find by and by how these voiceless 
 powers, steaUng into the body and into the mind, 
 there become transformed into peace and love and the 
 eagerness for service ! The divine without us has 
 become the divine within us. The God in the 
 breeze was the God in the thought. And if God 
 be for us, with us, who shall be against us ? 
 
 154 
 
XV 
 THE EVANGELICAL ROOT 
 
 Protestantism, looking at it on the world scale, 
 seems just now in a somewhat bad way. On the 
 Continent it is at the lowest ebb. In France, where 
 it was once a power, St. Bartholomew dealt it a blow 
 from which it never recovered, and the revocation 
 of the Edict of Nantes was a stroke hardly less 
 crushing. It drained the country's veins of some of 
 its most precious life-blood. The work of the 
 Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century, and the 
 Revolution which followed, completed the business. 
 Amongst masses of the French people the very 
 instinct of religion seems to have been extinguished. 
 Says M. Fouillee : " The religion of the French 
 peasant is a disguised paganism, or religious in- 
 difference." In Germany, the land of Luther, 
 Lutheranism is a confessed failure. It offers the 
 spectacle of empty churches, of an ever decreasing 
 supply of candidates for the ministry, of an appalHng 
 growth of materialism and sensuality. People are 
 tumbling over each other in their eagerness to cut 
 every visible connection with the Church. Those 
 who remain as its professed adherents treat its 
 ceremonies and obligations with contemptuous 
 indifference. Everywhere on the Continent, one may 
 say, the movement is backward rather than forward. 
 In England, as compared with these other lands, we 
 
 155 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 note one enormous difference. In the eighteenth 
 century, so disastrous spiritually to the Continent, 
 we had the vast movement of the Evangelical Revival. 
 What that meant in its saving power — saving, not 
 only in the religious sense, but socially and politically, 
 to the whole English-speaking race— no statistics can 
 compute, no, and no imagination can well exaggerate. 
 One wonders what had been the difference to Europe 
 if France and Germany had seen their Wesley and 
 their Whitefield ; had seen their masses stirred as 
 ours were, by that mighty Gospel ? But in England 
 we have to ask. Where does the movement stand 
 to-day ? Here, too, are signs of decadence. Here, 
 too, we have the spectacle of emptying churches, of 
 growing indifference, of disheartened workers. The 
 great missionary effort, full of fight at the front, 
 finds weakness at its base ; a lack of enthusiasm, 
 a lack of supplies. It is time for us all to take stock of 
 this position, to note what is lacking. 
 
 What we want, above all things, to get at now is 
 the secret of that old Evangelic movement — what 
 gave it its conquering power. About it, as an 
 historical fact, there is, of course, one thing to be 
 recognised. There are things in it that are no longer 
 alive, and that can by no process be resuscitated. 
 History does not repeat itself. When a thing is dead, 
 it is dead, and there is no raising it from the grave. 
 But there is this to be remembered here. We may 
 put it in Carlyle's words : " The old never dies till 
 this happens, till all the soul of good that was in it 
 gets itself transformed into the practical new." 
 The old Evangelism has, we say, some things in it that 
 are dead ; but its soul, what and where is that ? Can 
 we catch that, and transform it into the effectively 
 
 156 
 
The Evangelical Root 
 
 new ? We have to recognise that its views of 
 creation, of human origin, of inspiration and 
 revelation, of the universe as a whole, were pre- 
 scientific, and will never again recover their hold. 
 What we have learned there is not to be unlearned. 
 We cannot go back upon ascertained truth. What 
 the men of the past proclaimed on these points they 
 proclaimed with perfect honesty. They had received 
 these views and had no evidence to the contrary. 
 We have received that contrary evidence, and the 
 mind, by its very constitution, cannot go against 
 evidence. Moreover, the larger realm of knowledge 
 into which we have entered has radically changed the 
 form of some of the great Evangelic doctrines. We 
 now see creation, revelation, atonement and salvation 
 as processes rather than as separate facts, though 
 there are great outstanding facts as parts of the 
 process, as distinct registers of a given advance. 
 But what most of us need now to see is that none of 
 these changes touches the essence, the soul, the root 
 of the Evangelic Gospel. The things, the powers, 
 by which our fathers won back England to religion, 
 are there, intact, arid need only to be used to win 
 a new victory. Let us try and find out what these 
 things, these forces, were. 
 
 The first thing we find there is an overwhelming 
 sense of the reality, the nearness, the supreme 
 importance of the spiritual world. Is it not a 
 noteworthy thing that in Germany to-day, where 
 Protestantism is retreating all along the line, the 
 one religious system that is holding its own, and 
 gaining ground, is the Roman Church ? Surely it is 
 not difficult to guess the reason ! Romanism, with all 
 its monstrous assumptions, has nevertheless some- 
 
 ^57 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 thing solid to offer. It has body and blood in it. 
 In place of negatives, which never yet fed a starving 
 man, it offers affirmatives. It tells a man he has a 
 soul which needs saving, and that it can save him. 
 It makes the spiritual world real to him, as real as 
 his hat or his hand ; and tells him it is the biggest 
 thing in life. And the poor fellow, feeling he has a 
 soul, which he would fain keep warmed and fed, 
 faced with the deathly cold of the State Church, 
 faced with the brutal denials of Social Democracy, 
 turns shivering to the only warm hearth that is 
 in sight, to the cupboard which offers something 
 to eat. 
 
 The actively spiritual which Rome offers 
 Germany to-day was in essence what Wesley and 
 his coadjutors offered the English proletariat in the 
 eighteenth century. They did not begin, let it be 
 observed, with social reform, though there was more 
 desperate need of it then than there is now. They 
 did not discuss political questions, though if ever 
 there were big political questions it was surely then. 
 Think of what was happening in that century ! 
 England had lost the United States. In return she 
 had wrested Canada from the French, and had 
 conquered India. Then had come the French 
 Revolution, which shook every throne in Europe. 
 For its tremendous reaction on England you need 
 to read the debates, the newspapers, the memoirs 
 of the time. Yet, as you study the inner life of 
 the great revival, the astonishing thing is that you 
 find so little reference there to all this hurly-burly 
 outside. Read the journals of Wesley, the lives 
 of the Methodist preachers, the letters and memoirs 
 of Berridge, of Fletcher of Madeley, of Grimshaw 
 
 158 
 
The Evangelical Root 
 
 and others of the Evangelical clergy. These 
 people are all full of something else ; they make 
 their people full of it. It was not outside things 
 but inside things they were busy about. They 
 were sure that was the proper order. They had 
 caught the meaning of that traditional saying of 
 Jesus which Origen reports : ** Pray for the great 
 things, and the small shall be added unto you ; pray 
 for the heavenly, and the earthly shall be added 
 unto you." To get a man's soul right with God ; 
 to get society's soul right with God, that was 
 the way of getting everything else right in this 
 world. It looks sensible ; it was sensible. Have 
 we in our day found any better order of procedure ? 
 Is our present method of busying ourselves about 
 everything else than the centre doing as well, from 
 the Christian point of view, and from the material 
 point of view, as did theirs ? When we, as they did, 
 put first things first ; when we put the spiritual 
 world at the top of life ; when we believe, as they 
 did, in the spiritual values as the supreme values, 
 we shall get other people to believe in them — not 
 till then. 
 
 There is another thing to be noted in that early 
 movement. To-day philosophy, with science 
 following it, is occupied supremely with the question 
 of personality. We find personality to be the final, 
 ultimate thing in the universe. It is to its com- 
 pleter expression that nature incessantly works. 
 It is back of her as the explanation of her move- 
 ment ; it is front of her as her constant goal. It is 
 the key of history ; all its great eras hinge on 
 personalities ; begin with them, end with them. 
 The early Evangelicals had no particular philosophy 
 
 159 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 on this subject. They were not great in philosophy. 
 But their instinct, and still more their experience, 
 had struck on the truth, and they used it with 
 glorious results. They found their religion in 
 personality ; in a supreme Person. In an age 
 which had dissipated doctrine into a vague and 
 far off Deism, a God remote from the world, they 
 electrified the masses with the preaching of Jesus 
 Christ. They preached Him as making God near, 
 actual, almost visible. They saw in Him all that 
 God means ; and all that man means. It was 
 just what the weary world had so long been search- 
 ing after. What a yearning of the old world is 
 expressed in that word of Seneca : " We ought 
 to choose some good man, and always have him 
 before our eyes, that we may live as if he watched 
 us, and do everything as if he saw." The Evangelical 
 strength was that it had re-found Christ ; it had 
 re-found that rapture of the early Christians in the 
 discovery of a Life divine, brought in visible form to 
 their own lives, a Life divine which was also human, 
 in whose unsearchable riches, accordingly, all 
 humanity could share. Here we say the Evangelic 
 fathers had struck the true philosophy and the 
 true religion. The world to-day has nothing to 
 compare with it. These men did good business, 
 for they brought to the market what they knew 
 to be the pearl of price. 
 
 They drew men's attention to the highest point 
 which had been reached in human life, and bid 
 them attach themselves on to that, realise its up- 
 lifting, saving power. They could not lift themselves 
 without a help from what was beyond themselves. 
 No man can lift himself by tugging at his own braces. 
 
 i6o 
 
The Evangelical Root 
 
 So they showed the way up by pointing to One 
 who could Hft them, because His own hold was in 
 God. In Him they were in contact with " the 
 hoUest among the mighty ; the mightiest among 
 the holy." They put into practical operation the 
 truth which Goethe preaches in " Wilhelm Meister," 
 where, speaking of a broken crucifix, he says : 
 " I cannot help recognising in this crucifix the 
 fortunes of the Christian religion, which, often 
 enough dismembered and scattered abroad, will 
 ever in the end gather itself together at the foot 
 of the Cross." 
 
 Another thing which distinguished this movement, 
 and made for its success, was its note of urgency. 
 A man's own salvation was for him the chief thing ; 
 to be settled here and now. In this matter they 
 did not hesitate to bring in the motive of fear. 
 Have we not been, in our day, a little too squeamish, 
 more squeamish than the facts of life warrant ? 
 These men had a doctrine of hell which was crude 
 enough. William Law, the High Church saint 
 who was John Wesley's first inspirer, found it too 
 crude to his later reflection, and came to Boehme's 
 view, who regarded heaven and hell as states 
 actually deciding all our thoughts and actions, not 
 a mere future palace and prison. However they 
 phrased it, what they meant by hell, by " the wrath 
 of God," was the plain, incontestable fact that the 
 universe turns a very ugly face towards sin, towards 
 wrong being and wrong doing. The state of things 
 brought always the worst consequences, now and 
 always. To get a man out of that was worth some 
 strong language. When a man is in a wrong and 
 dangerous position a thorough shaking up, even 
 
 i6i 
 
 u 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 by wholesome terror, may be the best thing for 
 him. He will do things then that surprise himself. 
 Tell a man who says he cannot move a step farther 
 that within six yards of him lies a mine of dynamite 
 that will explode in five minutes and he will run like 
 a deer. Well that he can! There is a moral con- 
 dition, that of millions to-day, where nothing but 
 a good fright will rouse. And if you put " hell 
 and damnation " for all that system of things which 
 punishes guilt and the abandonment of the good, 
 are the words too strong ? It is hell and damnation, 
 and those early Evangelicals knew it and said it. 
 And the medicine griped and worked. 
 
 But the main point of this urgency was in the 
 business of saving ; the damning was part of the 
 saving. These men believed the worst about sin. 
 They believed the best about sinners. They were 
 glorious optimists. They told the roughs they 
 preached to that heaven was close at hand and 
 they could enter it there and then. God, so far 
 from having a grudge against them, was ready not 
 only to forgive them but to treat them to His best. 
 And numbers took them at their word and found 
 it all true. These Evangelicals were evolutionists 
 without knowing it. They believed in the next 
 step. They believed in variation, and that its finest 
 possibilities were in the human family. They 
 believed in a divine root in man, which, given its 
 chance, would show itself and change and glorify 
 its whole nature. And as soon as the people got 
 hold of that they began to sing. The Methodist 
 hymns were the outburst of a new joy that 
 had come to English hearts. They sang in their 
 meeting-houses, in their workshops, in tis o".. loonies. 
 
 162 
 
The Evangelical Root 
 
 And when people are singing over their work you 
 may leave off pitying them. 
 
 And we say that this movement, purely religious, 
 purely spiritual, was, within the range of its influence, 
 the best solution of the social question that has 
 yet been offered. The little communities that 
 were formed under this influence offer us the secret 
 of the true social life. Here was the ideal community, 
 a band of men and women united by a spiritual 
 tie, by a common interest of faith, hope, and love — 
 of the deepest things of the heart. If there is any 
 other way of creating a true social life we should 
 be glad to hear of it. It has not appeared so far. 
 The social reformer, who proposes to put everything 
 right by a redistribution of property, must be a 
 very na'ive sort of person. So is the educationist, 
 who thinks that the social problem, the art of living 
 together, will be solved by a better brain-drill. 
 When you have got everybody well housed, well 
 clothed, well fed, and well equipped mentally, what 
 have you done ? The biggest scoundrels abroad 
 to-day are people who have got all this. You may 
 endow a man with all the powers that modern 
 civilisation, its wealth, its culture, can offer, and 
 you have absolutely no guarantee that he will not 
 use them as weapons with which to arm his wicked- 
 ness. Social reform of this sort is beginning from 
 the wrong end. It is to build without having 
 prepared your materials. It is as if you should use 
 clay before making it into bricks ; timber that has 
 never been seasoned. That is why all the Socialisms 
 of yesterday and to-day have failed and will fail. 
 Nothing can be done with men communally until 
 they have been effectively dealt with individually. 
 
 163 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 It is when men's hearts have been set to the right 
 tune ; when they have been brought into a right 
 relation with hfe's highest and hohest, and sworn 
 allegiance to that ; when they have learned religion's 
 secret of faith and love — it is only out of such 
 materials that you can build an enduring, a happy 
 world. Napoleon even, when he came to rule France, 
 had found that out. Said he to Roederer : " How 
 shall we get morality ? There is only one way — it is 
 to re-establish religion." 
 
 If the Church is to flourish, and if the nation is to 
 flourish — in the best sense — we shall have to get back 
 to the old Evangelical root. We shall have to get 
 back its conquering faith in God, its conquering faith 
 in men ; get back its hardihood, its simplicity, its 
 sense of urgency in dealing with souls, its belief that 
 men, properly met with the spiritual claim, will 
 yield to it and start on the way upward. What is 
 the use of sermons that mean nothing, and that do 
 nothing ? When we think of some of them we call 
 to mind the words Victor Hugo puts into the mouth 
 of Satan : 
 
 Quand plus tard, dans I'enfer vengeur, nous assommons 
 Tous ces lourds sermonneurs, c'est avec leurs sermons. 
 
 It will not be as bad as that, we hope, but some of 
 them need to wake up. Surely, by this time we have 
 learned what the work of the Church really is ? Its 
 social work is spiritual work. Its duty in the 
 social fabric is, above and beyond all else, to prepare 
 the material to be built into it. Not by pottering at 
 this or that architectural idea ; not by fancy essays 
 at social town planning, but by turning the clay into 
 bricks. It is only when you have got souls into 
 shape that you can build them into the City of God. 
 
 164 
 
XVI 
 
 THE UNREACHED PARADISE 
 
 The story of Moses dying in view of Canaan 
 without entering on it, is not just a piece of indi- 
 vidual biography. It is our story, the story of the 
 human heart. We are all of us marching forward 
 towards a paradise more or less in view, a paradise 
 we do not enter. What we look for we do not get. 
 We attain the object of our desires to find it is not 
 what we desired. Our moment of possession — if we 
 do possess — is the moment of our disillusion. A 
 strange world, we say, which offers us this for its 
 result ! It seems an indictment of life altogether. 
 Schopenhauer and others have built on it an elaborate 
 dogma of pessimism. We may look into this later 
 on, and offer some reasons for a different conclusion. 
 But let us look first at the facts themselves, the 
 strange, the singular facts of the situation. It is 
 told how in the eleventh century, when the fervent 
 hosts of the Crusaders tramped across Europe, the 
 wearied children, as they espied each new town, cried 
 out with joyful expectancy, " Is not this, then, 
 Jerusalem ? " Alas ! Jerusalem was still a long way 
 off. Man has always been uttering that cry and 
 always his Jerusalem lies further on. Man is the 
 eternal seeker ; what he finds, instead of satisfying, 
 makes him ever more eager in his quest. His 
 terminus ad quern, as soon as reached, becomes a 
 
 165 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 terminus a quo. Whether in his business or his 
 pleasure, the process is always the same. Notice 
 your holiday excursionist as he arrives at his sea- 
 side watering place. Will he stay there when he has 
 reached it ? The next morning he is scanning the 
 list of trips that will take him away from it. For 
 years your homebound Englishman has treasured in 
 his heart the thought of Grindelwald or Chamonix 
 as places to see before he dies. He gets there — 
 and then ? Compel him to sit there for a single day 
 in front of his hotel ! Impossible. His end has 
 become a starting point. Ever for the new, 
 the fresh sensation ; the goal is nothing, the march 
 is all. 
 
 And this, which happened to you yesterday, has 
 been the story of humanity in all the conditions, 
 in all the ages. The ancients had a jest about 
 Thales, who fell into a well while looking up at the 
 stars. Man has been habitually falling into wells 
 while looking up at the stars. He is so incorrigible 
 a dreamer. His eyesight carries so much further 
 than his feet. The stars are there, sure enough, 
 but they are far off. The well is close by, and 
 so often he fails to see the two together. Nothing, 
 so far, has been more pitiful than the magnificence 
 of man's vision and the poverty of its outcome. 
 Think of the Utopias in which people have lived ! 
 That golden age which has gleamed before the 
 eye of the seer, with seemingly only a step between him 
 audit! We turn the pages of Plato's " Republic," 
 of the perfect state which he constructed for his 
 fellow citizens. It never came. Instead, in a few 
 generations Greece had lost its liberties, had sunk 
 under the foreign yoke, become swamped finally in 
 
 i66 
 
The Unreached Paradise 
 
 the barbarism which rolled over the world. Israel 
 for centuries dreams of its kingdom, was never more 
 sure of it than at the hour when Rome stepped in, 
 trod down the sacred city and wiped out the nation. 
 The early Christians had their vision of the Messianic 
 appearances ; we know what came of that. All 
 through the middle ages man, the dreamer, was 
 gloriously busy. The darker the actual the more 
 splendid the ideal. Some, like Bernard, put it in the 
 after life, in the celestial city, gleaming beyond the 
 river of death. Others, more daring, predicted a 
 speedy, miraculous upturn of existing conditions. 
 In " The Eternal Gospel," a work of the thirteenth 
 century, supposed to have been written by Joachim 
 di Flor, we have a revolutionary religious programme 
 full of a profound discontent and of an enormous hope. 
 The Greek Church is declared to be Sodom and the 
 Latin Church Gomorrah. In 1260 is to commence 
 the reign of the Eternal Spirit, who is to redress all 
 wrongs and bring in the perfected state. The weary 
 ages as they rolled saw always their Jerusalem in 
 front. The Reformation time was full of prophets 
 of the new age. Germany has its Miinzers, its 
 Miillers, its Carlstadts, its Metzlers, who, starting 
 from Luther's programme, proclaim the age of 
 universal emancipation. It all ends in the peasants' 
 war, in which the movement is trampled out in blood 
 and fire. In England More writes his glorious 
 Utopia, and goes himself soon after to the block. 
 What dreams those Fifth Monarchy men had in 
 Cromwell's time ! And Cromwell, too, what dreams 
 he had ! He himself reaches the top, seems in a 
 condition to realise them. The result ? Let us 
 hear him. " Would to God that I had remained by 
 
 167 
 
Fa ith's Certainties 
 
 my woodside to tend a flock of sheep rather than to 
 have been thrust on such a government as this ! " 
 
 Think of the French Revolution — the dream of it 
 and the reahty ! Never such an event before or 
 since in human history. The mass of us outsiders 
 have never begun to understand it. We have read 
 our Carlyle, our Burke, perhaps ; have a sense of 
 tremendous happenings, of Bastille stormings, of the 
 reign of terror, of wholesale drownings, wholesale 
 guillotinings. We think of the leaders, of Saint 
 Just, Danton, Robespierre as monsters, drunk with 
 blood. To get to know the thing itself you must go 
 behind all that to the men themselves. Read their 
 speeches, their writings, their personal memoirs. 
 These men are all idealists ! They thirst for per- 
 fection and fancy they see it coming. Surely there 
 was never, since man began to be, so weird a contrast 
 between the vision and the fact. Condorcet was 
 writing his glowing chapters on human perfectibility 
 when he was arrested for the guillotine — the guillo- 
 tine which he escaped by poison. Robespierre 
 began as the most ardent of humanitarians, with a 
 horror of bloodshed. The blood that he and the 
 others waded in afterwards was the Jordan they were 
 crossing on the way to humanity's promised land. 
 Amid all the orgies of the Terror what ideas are 
 being given to the nation, what hopes kindled in it ! 
 We read this, in one of the decrees on public in- 
 struction, passed by the Convention in the terrible 
 '93 : " Finally, free from the old prejudices, and 
 worthy to represent the French nation, you will be 
 able to found on the debris of dethroned superstitions 
 the one universal religion, the religion which brings 
 peace and not war, which makes free citizens, no 
 
 168 
 
The Unreached Paradise 
 
 longer kings or subjects ; a religion of brothers, no 
 longer of enemies ; which has neither sects nor 
 mysteries, whose sole dogma is equality, whose 
 oracles are the law, whose pontiffs are the magis- 
 trates, and whose altar is our country." An orator 
 of the Convention, Thuriot, in view of the approach- 
 ing *' Festival of Reason " to be celebrated in Notre 
 Dame, urged that a memorial stone should be 
 engraved " which should commemorate the glorious 
 hour, and announce to posterity that it ^yas on this 
 day the last chain was broken which had held the 
 human reason captive." These men were going to 
 do away with war, they were going to do away with 
 popes and priests. And in a few years Napoleon had 
 signed the Concordat with Rome — Napoleon, who 
 had turned the revolution into his own terrific engine 
 of war ! 
 
 The astonishing thing is that, with all this 
 experience behind him, man is still full of his Utopias, 
 and some of them so primitive, so naive. Bebel is 
 just dead, a prophet without a religion. This Moses 
 of the German proletariat had for his unreached 
 Canaan a Socialism which should inaugurate the 
 human felicity by such a distribution of the world's 
 goods as should secure to everyone his share, his 
 mouthful. It is wonderful that so able, so sincere a 
 man should be content with so limited an outlook. 
 Did he never turn his eyes to the people who have 
 this share, and so much more, to ask whether it had 
 contented them ? We think here of Mill's melan- 
 choly when he put to himself the question : '' What 
 if all that the people are contending for be finally 
 secured to them, will that make them happy, will it 
 make me happy ? " He could answer it only in one 
 
 169 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 way. Will a community of goods make men free, 
 will it make them good, will it soften the anguish of 
 bereavement, will it resolve the mystery of life, will 
 it make death any easier ? It seems as if man will 
 have to be led through all the byways, and into all the 
 quagmires, in order to learn — by that disillusioning 
 experience which seems the only way of reaching 
 his stupidity — where happiness, where life's real 
 things do lie, and where they do not lie. 
 
 And as with the world at large, so with ourselves. 
 We are all cherishers of our private Utopias, all 
 hunters after a paradise we do not reach. Mme. de 
 Chantal is speaking for us all in her saying : " There 
 is something in me that has never been satisfied." 
 A prosperous manufacturer was once describing to 
 me the progress of his fortunes. " I began with 
 nothing. I thought how happy I should be if I ever 
 reached five thousand. I got it, and then put the 
 figure at ten thousand. I have made that, and more, 
 but do you think I am content ? " And he shook 
 his head. You meet men who look forward to 
 retiring from business as the crown and reward of 
 their career. They retire, and find what an empti- 
 ness that is. Happy if they discover some work — 
 be it the cultivation of cabbages — some new interest, 
 however humble, that gives their body and soul a 
 chance of survival. 
 
 All this seems — at first sight at least — an 
 astonishing, a confounding state of things. Why 
 this eternal disillusion, this perpetual disappointment, 
 this endless round of experiences, all with " vanity of 
 vanities " as their summing up? Is there any sense 
 or reason in it, anything but a mockery of human 
 hopes, a denial of human happiness ? Searching 
 
 170 
 
The Unreached Paradise 
 
 questions, which remind us it is time now to look 
 into the matter a Httle deeper. And the first 
 glance must be a psychological one, a look into our 
 make-up as personalities. It is a very simple 
 reflection, and yet one which covers so much of the 
 ground, that we are for ever unsatisfied, because 
 that is part of our constitution. We are made to be 
 that. Our make-up contains desire as one of its 
 elements, and the one business of desiring is to be 
 desiring. That is what it is there for, and it carries 
 on its function just as the heart or the lungs carry on 
 theirs. And the desire feeds on the unrealised, just 
 as the lungs feed on air. Give it everything, and it 
 will at once — for that is how it is made — ask for 
 something outside everything. What is, is not its 
 affair ; that lies always in the thing that is not, that 
 is yet to be. You can conceive of personalities 
 without this element, but we are not in that cate- 
 gory. We might be at some future time, but we are 
 not that now. And so we have the paradox, that our 
 very happiness requires, as part of its completeness, 
 the desire to be happier still ; our good has ever in 
 it a craving for higher good. We are not a static 
 but a dynamic ; we are not a resting-place, but 
 always a bridge, a transition to something more. 
 Some day, in some other sphere, we may find an end, 
 but for the present we are not the end but the 
 journey. Our good is not in finding, but in seeking. 
 
 Note another thing here. Are we to commiserate 
 the optimists, the prophets of the race, because they 
 dreamed dreams that were not realised ? But they 
 were happy in their dreams. Those splendid visions, 
 would they have been without them ? Would 
 Thales have missed his view of the stars, even at the 
 
 171 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 price of tumbling into the well ? Is it a calamity 
 to think of something better than we find ? Is it 
 not, on the contrary, our joy, our inspiration, the 
 spur to our best energies ? We tug cheerily at our 
 tasks, yes, amid seeming hopeless conditions, glad 
 in our turn to be numbered with those 
 
 Who, rowing hard against the stream. 
 Saw distant gates of Eden gleam. 
 And did not dream it was a dream. 
 
 And note this further. We do not enter our 
 paradise because, as we advance, it becomes, by this 
 splendid law of our being, always a better, a higher 
 than the one we set out to secure. We remain un- 
 satisfied with the earlier consummation because we 
 find that the universe contains still better things. 
 We reach our Jerusalem, as some of the Crusaders 
 did, and find it not good enough. That dusty, 
 evil-smelling city on its stony height, will this do ? 
 No ; and were it a city of golden streets, of marble 
 palaces, still it would not do. The soul leaps at 
 once from the material to the immaterial, to a 
 Jerusalem which is from above, which descends to 
 us out of heaven from God. It is from the 
 infinite expansibility of the human soul, its capacity 
 for the highest there is, that springs its present 
 non-content. And no promise of good that could 
 have been written for us on the heavens were surely 
 comparable, both for its largeness and its sureness, 
 to the sublime hope that our non-content kindles 
 within us. 
 
 Meanwhile, as we are thus drawn onward, drawn 
 by the immense demand of the soul, let us not 
 despise or undervalue the paradise we have already 
 
 172 
 
The Unreached Paradise 
 
 reached. Let us be happy in the happiness we 
 have — the happiness that has this desire in it. Let 
 us enjoy our incompleteness, and that because it is 
 incomplete. Do not trouble about the sordidness of 
 your conditions if the soul is not sordid. It is said 
 of Heraclitus that strangers coming to visit him 
 expected to find him in most imposing surroundings. 
 Instead he was engaged in preparing his food with 
 his own hands. To them in their amazement at 
 seeing him in so menial an occupation, he remarked : 
 " Here, too, gods are to be found ! " Noble 
 souls ennoble their surroundings, make them into 
 their paradise. Said Perpetua, the North African 
 martyr, describing the prison into which she was 
 thrown, to be delivered afterwards to the lions, 
 " The gaol became to me suddenly a palace, so that 
 I liked better to be there than anywhere else." 
 
 Perpetua' s palace was her own soul. And for 
 ourselves, whether our present dwelling-place be a 
 prison, a hovel, or a mansion, our real habitation is 
 always that inner one ; and whether it be noble or 
 sordid is always an affair of its spiritual quality. 
 Why trouble about our bricks and mortar ? Our 
 habitation, whatever its size, is an inn, not an 
 abiding place. The great thing is that we are on a 
 journey, the most wonderful journey that ever was. 
 What is behind us is astonishing enough, but that is 
 only a preparation for what is before us. " Here we 
 have no continuing city, but we seek one to come." 
 For ever do we seek and seek ; for ever does our 
 paradise recede as we advance. And for the reason 
 that we are the children of the infinite, and nothing 
 less than the infinite, in its height and depth and 
 fulness, can be our home. 
 
 173 
 
XVII 
 
 THE BURDEN 
 
 BuNYAN makes his pilgrim start out on his journey 
 with a heavy burden on his back. What the burden 
 consisted of was a something vastly more real to the 
 Bedford dreamer than to the mass of people to-day. 
 Yet the picture, if we say nothing of its religious 
 aspect, is true for us all. Let our theology be 
 what it may, or be non-existent, we are each on a 
 pilgrim way, and each with a burden on his back. 
 If we had a better eyesight than this poor physical 
 one ; if we could see the actual inward life of our 
 neighbour, this burden of his would perhaps be 
 the first thing to catch our view. It would be the 
 strangest and most incongruous compound ; but what 
 would most strike us, in many, at least, of our fellows, 
 would be its size and its weight. The coal-heaver, 
 staggering under his loaded sack, is carrying a 
 feather-weight compared with that which presses 
 on many a slender enough looking passer-by. We 
 have no weighing-machine that can give us these 
 pressures. If there were, what a tonnage it would 
 reveal ! We get glimpses at times at what is going 
 on. A look, a gesture, reveals it. You watch a 
 merry party at its break-up. There has been an 
 hour of hearty fellowship — at a dinner-table, round 
 a club-room fire ; for that brief hour everything else 
 has been forgotten in the flow of a common, joyous 
 
 174 
 
The Burden 
 
 life. But watch one of those faces as they separate. 
 A new look comes. The lines have become rigid, the 
 smile has vanished. The man has remembered his 
 load ; he has once more shouldered his burden. 
 
 Unhappy is he with it ? Not at all necessarily. 
 It is more than likely he would be less happy without 
 it. The change in him means that he has felt the 
 tug, and is caUing on his strength to meet it. It 
 would be absurd to exclaim against burdens in them- 
 selves. You are built to carry them, just as ships 
 are. And if you have ever been in a cargo-boat in 
 ballast, with a high sea running, you will have realised 
 amid all that rolHng and tossing, the value of being 
 weighted, if only as a condition of steadiness. That 
 nature intended us to be weight-carriers, and to find 
 our strength there, is evident from her whole scheme. 
 She puts it on us a Httle at a time, but with a steady 
 increase, until finally we are astonished at what we 
 are carrying ; astonished often, too, at the ease 
 with which we are managing it. A man, arrived at 
 his strength, burns to exercise it. It is not enough 
 to fend for himself alone. He must marry, take on 
 a household, a family ; feed, clothe and house half a 
 dozen others than himself. His business, whether 
 big or Httle — sometimes because it is too big and 
 sometimes because it is too httle — is a constant 
 pressure. And to-day people of sensitive minds 
 are feeling, as never before, the weight of the world's 
 burden. We are getting to know all that the world is 
 suffering, and we suffer with it. We are at the pit 
 mouth, with the entombed miners ; at sea, watching 
 the burning ship, the agony cooped up in it ; in the 
 crash of the railway accident ; amid the starving 
 women and children of the latest strike. We are 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 paying the price of the world's new, intimate know- 
 ledge of itself, and it is a heavy one. It is good for us 
 and the world we should carry it, but it is distinctly 
 a drain upon our strength. Every age and position of 
 life carries its load, from which there is no escape. 
 Childhood has its own, often a strangely piteous one ; 
 middle age is an incessant tugging and panting ; and 
 the last years need a new apprenticeship to their 
 difficulties. 
 
 What are we doing with our burdens ? How are 
 we taking them ? It is one of the fundamental 
 questions in the answer to which lies so much of life's 
 secret. There needs here a great discrimination. 
 There are burdens we have no business with at all ; 
 there are burdens we ought to carry, and do not ; 
 there are burdens to carry in order to get rid of 
 them ; there are so many burdens we are carrying the 
 wrong way. It may be well to sort out some of these 
 categories and see what they contain. 
 
 There are loads, and some of these of the heaviest, 
 which people have no business with. In the days of 
 the first rush to the Klondyke, when men had to 
 face the terrors of the Chilcoot Pass, and of the rush- 
 ing waters of the great canyon, many of the " tender- 
 foot" pioneers started with vast loads of superfluous 
 baggage. The way up that terrific ascent was soon 
 after strewn with heaps of these superfluities, cast 
 aside in the toil of the climb. It is a picture of the 
 way people load themselves for the longer journey 
 of life. As if the actual burden imposed by nature 
 were not enough, they construct a monstrous pile 
 of self-created additions. They lend their imagin- 
 ation to the service of fear, and the two give them 
 enough to carry. They fear the coming event, 
 
 176 
 
The Burden 
 
 twisting it into shapes of terror which do not belong 
 to it ; blow it up into twice its size, and then cower 
 shuddering under the phantom they have created. 
 The greatest part of what they fear does not happen 
 at all, and the thing that does happen is quite 
 different from what they imagined. The blow falls, 
 but the anguish you expected with it, where is that ? 
 The crash, the loss, the bouleversement of conditions, 
 is there, sure enough ; and often enough, you are 
 laughing instead of crying at it. Life, after all, is an 
 affair of feeling, and is it not true that some of our 
 finest feehngs — the confidence, the exhilaration, the 
 up-leap of triumphant faith — have come just when 
 the outside seemed darkest, when the thing we had 
 dreaded has actually arrived ? The astonishing, 
 the really unpardonable thing is that, after so many 
 of these experiences and what they have shown us, 
 we should ever dread another. 
 
 That is not the only useless burden. With numbers 
 of people half their load will have fallen away when 
 they have realised for themselves the supreme folly 
 of pride, and of that slavery to convention which is 
 born of pride. Take a present-day instance. The 
 existing domestic difficulty, which is the despair of 
 the modern household, will have disappeared when 
 the middle classes have learned this lesson. The new 
 insurgence of the servant class is surely a providential 
 arrangement to teach us simplicity ! " You have 
 twenty servants," said Dr. Parker once in one of his 
 Thursday addresses ; " then you have nineteen 
 plagues ! " He might have made it a score and 
 have been nearer the truth. When well-to-do 
 people have learned to do for themselves the things 
 they have left to others, and to take a pride in doing 
 
 177 
 
 12 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 them, they will have found how much better it is to 
 deal with things themselves, those things of the 
 household — things which never talk back, which 
 are always good-humoured, which always yield their 
 return for honest labour — than to deal with stubborn 
 wills, with laziness, incompetence, and the deter- 
 mination to get the most for doing the least. What 
 is the matter, for your cultured woman — or your 
 cultured man, for that matter — with handling a broom 
 or with kindling a fire ? You are at least in contact 
 with realities. Here is a gymnastic as good as any 
 other. Old Heraclitus, cooking his own dinner, said to 
 some visitors, astonished at his occupation, " Here also 
 there are gods ! " Louis Philippe once asked what 
 was the prime accomplishment needed in a king of 
 France, replied, " That he should be able to black 
 his own boots." It was a skit on the uncertainties 
 of the position, but it is not a bad accomplishment 
 for others than kings. We read of old Wilhelm of 
 Prussia, the father of Frederick the Great, that in 
 his constant journeys through the kingdom " he 
 liked to sleep in a clean barn, and dine under a tree." 
 He started each day's journey at three in the 
 morning. Let a man, indoors or out, try simplicity, 
 and we will wager he will get more out of it, in the 
 sheer enjoyment of life, in mental stimulus, in a 
 sense of glorious freedom, than out of all the luxuries 
 and subserviences that pride and a corrupt taste 
 have ever invented. Let those who think other- 
 wise go their way ; only do not lose your self-respect 
 and your joy of liberty by being imprisoned in their 
 foolish ways and thinkings. 
 
 There are millionaires who complain of their 
 wealth as a burden, though none of them seem over- 
 
 178 
 
The Burden 
 
 anxious to get rid of it. Assuredly, it will be a 
 burden to a right-minded man ; a good burden or a 
 bad one, yet a burden. There are distinct depri- 
 vations in it. It removes him from so much of the 
 simpler realities out of which life's finest emotions are 
 extracted. And Cicero's word on accumulation for 
 its own sake has surely sense in it : " Can anything 
 be more absurd than in proportion as less of our 
 journey remains to seek a greater supply of pro- 
 visions ? " Sense, too, in Seneca's word : " Non 
 qui farum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper est " 
 (Not he who has little, but he who covets more, is the 
 poor man). In the present state of the world ; of 
 its poverty-stricken masses, to live at one's ease in 
 Capuan luxury, argues a habit of mind only one 
 remove from that of the mediaeval baron who found 
 an added zest in his barbarian banquets from the 
 thought of the wretches groaning in his dungeons 
 underground. But it is another story when we hear 
 of men using their wealth as a trust, carrying it as a 
 burden for others. There is a possibility, as Mr. 
 Gerald Lee has taught us, of " inspired millionaires," 
 men who have a genius not only for getting wealth, 
 but also for using it the right way. Is it not better 
 in their hands than in those of blockheads ? And 
 so many of us are blockheads. The mass of men are 
 quite incapable of improving their condition. Their 
 need is to have at their head leaders who have the 
 genius and the power to think out and to solve the 
 problem of these ungifted ones. Wealth in the 
 hands of brains and of love is the happiest con- 
 junction. The man who by honest and legitimate 
 methods creates a great industry, giving thereby 
 healthful employment to hundreds of workers, 
 
 179 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 creating for them happy homes, caring for them as 
 father of a vast household, is assuredly one of the 
 noblest of our burden bearers. It is one of the 
 happiest of auguries that their number is increasing. 
 It will be by a combination of the world's best 
 brains, its accumulated capital, and the spirit of 
 service that we shall get rid of one of the world's 
 cruellest and most shameful burdens — that of the 
 poverty of the poor. While multitudes of us are on 
 firm ground, high up, with nature's beauties all 
 around us, and a clear sky above us, another multi- 
 tude is down in the pit, shut out from all that, their 
 feet sinking in the mire, involved in a desperate 
 struggle to prevent being engulfed by it. Have we 
 any idea what this poverty is ? We turn to the 
 United States, the land of boundless wealth, of 
 enormous possibilities. In this Eldorado Mr. Robert 
 Hunter, an American statistician, tells us that there 
 are four million persons dependent on public relief; 
 that an equal number are destitute but bear their 
 misery in silence ; and that ten millions have an 
 income insufficient to maintain them in physical 
 efficiency. We are told that in Boston, in 1903, over 
 136,000 people, or 20 per cent, of the population, were 
 aided by the public authorities. One in every ten who 
 die in New York is buried a pauper. That is wealthy 
 America. In England the investigations of Mr. 
 Booth and Mr. Rowntree have shown us the condition 
 of things. And yet in England, to say nothing of 
 the States, a modern economist assures us that with 
 the science we now command, we can produce far 
 more food, houses, clothing, furniture and other 
 commodities than we actually need, and this while 
 affording ample leisure for the workers. What is 
 
 180 
 
The Burden 
 
 lacking ? Brains and a good will. When we have 
 ceased to be internationally mad, we shall give over 
 spending over half our national revenue in destruc- 
 tion and the preparation for it. The sum saved 
 would provide all the needed capital. But capital 
 is of no use ; is a mere mischief unless we have 
 intellect and the right will behind it. To put the 
 power and the wealth indiscriminately into the hands 
 of the mob — the dream of the modern Socialist — 
 would be the biggest insanity of all. It would be a 
 useful experiment to try it on a ship, with a com- 
 mittee of the crew and of the stokehole as navi- 
 gators ! The world, fortunately for itself here, has 
 had some similar experiments, and we know their 
 results. During the French Revolution there were 
 established State workshops, which, in Paris, 
 occupied 31,000 workmen. A State control of 
 industry ! The men, under this regime, arrived, we 
 are told, at ten o'clock, and left at three. They spent 
 their time in drinking and card playing. Quite 
 recently, a few years ago, France furnished another 
 experiment. Roubaix, one of its great manu- 
 facturing centres, was captured by the Socialists. 
 The municipal authorities were composed largely 
 of saloon keepers and newsvendors. They began by 
 creating remunerative places for all their relatives. 
 After a very brief period of power the electors of 
 Roubaix realised that it required other qualifications 
 than these to administer a great city, and there was 
 an end of the Socialist municipality. It ended, as 
 all such experiments must end, because they are 
 against human nature and the laws of life. Human 
 affairs can never succeed unless there is power and 
 capacity at the head and obedience behind. To 
 
 181 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 get through the desert and into Canaan, seek first 
 
 your Moses and your Joshua. 
 
 The burden — the world's burden and our own — 
 
 is, we see, a strangely assorted compound. A vast 
 
 deal of it is to be got rid of, and we can get rid of it. 
 
 When all is done, however, in this direction, we shall 
 
 still be burden-bearers. Nature has taken care of 
 
 that. It is part of our life's inheritance. As 
 
 Matthew Arnold has it, " And we feel, day and night, 
 
 the burden of ourselves." The spiritual conflict, the 
 
 sense of sin and un worthiness, our failures, " the little 
 
 done, the undone vast," the growing infirmities, the 
 
 mystery of death and of the future, all this does not 
 
 cease its pressure. From one point of view it is our 
 
 tragedy ; from another it is our hope and our 
 
 inspiration. It is all the difference of having faith 
 
 or being without it. To faith it spells simply the 
 
 glory of our incompleteness ; of the want that drives 
 
 us out of ourselves to find our refuge in God. Victor 
 
 Hugo, in his " Religions et Religion," paints the 
 
 despair of his time : 
 
 Est-ce tout ? A quoi bon ? Quel choix dans la nuit noire ? 
 Le hasard de nier, ou le hasard de croire ? 
 
 Ah ! if it were only a hazard ! But faith's venture, 
 
 resolutely pursued, gets beyond that stage. The 
 
 seeker finds. The pilgrim, toiling with his load, 
 
 bemired with the Slough of Despond, reaches his 
 
 place of deliverance, reaches a Helper who bears 
 
 for him and with him. In that strength he goes on 
 
 with new courage, with a joyous heart. He finds 
 
 Hope for his companion, combats valiantly with 
 
 Apollyon and Giant Despair, reaches his Delectable 
 
 Mountains, is guest in Interpreter's house, traverses 
 
 his Valley of Humiliation and finds it sweet, knows 
 
 182 
 
The Burden 
 
 his Beulah, is not afraid of the river of Death, for he 
 sees behind it the gleaming pinnacles of the Celestial 
 City. He has heard the great "Come unto Me;" 
 he has " cast his burden on the Lord " ! Happy 
 they who, with their burden, have found the way to 
 carry it, and the road to travel with it. 
 
 183 
 
XVIII 
 
 ARE WE SANE ? 
 
 It seems an entirely disagreeable, perhaps even an 
 impudent question. Its suggestion of Bedlam as 
 the proper place for us all : may not that be evidence 
 that Bedlam is the appropriate place for the writer ? 
 Maybe, but he will take that risk. The proposition 
 may be extravagant, but extravagances have their 
 use. They are sometimes the only way of getting 
 sense into people. We are so apt to think well of 
 ourselves, to praise up our pretty little world and our 
 precious selves as part of it, that it is good for our 
 health to remember that a quite other view is at least 
 conceivable. Let us imagine, for instance, that a 
 complete outsider — a messenger, say, from Mars or 
 some other extraneous planet — should pay us a visit 
 and examine our civilisation as it exists to-day. We 
 may suppose him as entirely intelligent, entirely 
 reasonable ; acquainted, moreover, with our accepted 
 canons of reason ; knowing what we accept as good 
 and as evil ; knowing what our best thought tells us, 
 what it accepts as sanity ; and observing, at the same 
 time, the things we actually do. What, we ask, 
 would his verdict be, and what would be the grounds 
 for his verdict ? That, at any rate, seems a sane 
 proposition. He would find a goodly number of 
 lunatic asylums — their number and population 
 are largely increasing. Might he not conceivably go 
 
 184 
 
Are We Sane ? 
 
 away with the impression, and transmit it to his 
 wondering trans-spatial audience, that our earth 
 itself is a lunatic asylum ; that 'tis indeed " a mad 
 world, my masters ! " 
 
 What would he find amongst us ? He studies, 
 for instance, one of our modern wars and its sequel. 
 One people has a quarrel with another ; it is perhaps 
 over territory, or business, or some racial bitterness. 
 They rush to arms; there is battle after battle, and 
 scenes of inconceivable horror and devilry. Whole 
 tracts are desolated, towns and villages are burned, 
 women and children slaughtered, animals subjected 
 to horrible tortures. Commerce and industry are 
 stopped ; everything that makes for life and happi- 
 ness put back. Then, when each side is exhausted, 
 bled to the white, a halt is called. Representatives 
 of each meet round a board, discuss their quarrel, 
 argue the matter out on terms of reason, of mutual 
 give and take, come to an understanding, and take 
 up again with peace and industry under these terribly 
 reduced terms. But, he asks, if the matter is finally 
 settled by reason, the only conceivable way, why did 
 they not recognise this before ? If reason is the only 
 way now, was it not the only way then ? Did it 
 take all these rivers of blood to show them that fact ? 
 In the course of the war he notices a curious thing. 
 Following the camps are hospitals with elaborate 
 equipments, an array of people wearing red crosses. 
 Their business, he finds, is to heal and save. The 
 guns and rifles in front are busy maiming and destroy- 
 ing ; and when that business is over these others 
 are equally busy trying to undo the deadly work. 
 The one set, in overwhelming proportions, are smash- 
 ing up everything ; the other are trying their hardest 
 
 185 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 to undo what the others have done. What is he to 
 make of it all ? Is it Bedlam ? 
 
 From the fighters he comes to the people who are 
 not fighting. He finds them all, the highest, the most 
 civilised nations, engaged, at enormous, devastating 
 cost, in preparing to fight. The money spent on 
 these preparations, if used for agriculture, for manu- 
 facture, would abolish poverty and turn the earth 
 into a paradise. He is told that these armaments 
 are built and maintained to ensure the world's peace. 
 He is surprised. He sees that unarmed people are 
 the people of peace ; that in communities where 
 every man carries a revolver or a dagger there the 
 most murders are committed. Is not that a truth for 
 nations as well as men ? And when you have 
 brought your armies and fleets into play, will not 
 the trouble have to be settled in the end, not by 
 cannons and bayonets, but by that council board and 
 the calling in of reason ? Does the cannon ever 
 settle anything or ever bring peace ? He finds in 
 actual existence a singular thing. Two great nations, 
 who have fought each other of old, England and 
 America, have now for a century tried the principle 
 of unarmed peace and found it work perfectly. 
 Between Canada and the United States there exists 
 thousands of miles of boundary line. On the great 
 lakes, which form part of the boundary, not a war- 
 ship ; along the vast stretches of mainland, not a 
 regiment, not a sentry-box. And all goes well ; no 
 thought of aggression on either side. Here in 
 England there were once seven kingdoms, all armed 
 against each other. Now Wessex never dreams of 
 arming against Northumbria. They can settle their 
 affairs in a better way. And yet, as if all this did not 
 
 i86 
 
Are We Sane ? 
 
 exist, as if it had taught no lesson, the nations go on 
 arming, and ruining themselves in the process. They 
 have not seen yet, with such plain object-lessons 
 before their eyes, that if every ugly warship were 
 at the bottom of the sea and all the swords done into 
 ploughshares, the world in five years would double its 
 wealth and double its happiness. Instead, they build 
 more warships. Is it not a queer world ? 
 
 He looks a little closer into our industries. Here 
 he finds the workmen massed into one army, the 
 capitalists into another. They are full of the notion 
 that their interests are hostile ; their camps are full 
 of war-cries. Every now and then the hostilities 
 break out into open war, and we have the strike. 
 Vhe mills are closed, the mines emptied of the coal 
 winners, the trains cease to run. Everywhere 
 confusion, enormous losses, starvation in the workers' 
 homes. Then when everybody has reached the limit 
 of wretchedness, a conference is called. Again the 
 council board, where the opposing parties meet and 
 talk matters over. After fighting, then reason. Of 
 course, there was only one way of settling matters, by 
 this process of reasoning. But, our inquirer asks, 
 did they not know that before ? Do these people 
 never reason till their bellies are empty ? Their 
 reason was there, in them, at the beginning. Why 
 had it to wait for its innings till all these other stupid, 
 impossible ways had been tried ? Surely this is a 
 people with whom reason comes in last, where it 
 appears spasmodically, at rare intervals. But is not 
 that the way of things in Bedlam ? 
 
 The odd thing, our observer would reflect, is 
 that these people knew all these commonplaces ages 
 ago. All their great reHgions had taught them. He 
 
 187 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 turns up an old book of the East, the creed of miUions 
 there. He reads in the " Dhamanapada" : *'For 
 hatred does not cease by hatred at any time ; hatred 
 ceases by love, the old rule. Let a man overcome 
 anger by love, let him overcome evil by good, let him 
 overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth." 
 Christianity, he finds, has taught the same thing for 
 ages. The watchword its Founder gave His disciples 
 was, " But I say unto you. Love your enemies, bless 
 them that curse you, do good to them that hate you 
 and despitefully use you." In this. He said, they 
 would be doing the will of their Father in heaven, 
 who caused His sun to shine on the evil and on the 
 good, who sent His rain upon the just and the unjust. 
 This watchword is printed in all the Bibles, is read 
 out constantly in all the churches, is known by heart 
 to all the millions of Christian adherents. The 
 Teacher Himself showed His certainty of this doctrine 
 by His own conduct. He repudiated wrath as 
 belonging either to Himself or to Him who had sent 
 Him. When on the cross, suffering from the worst 
 crime ever committed. He had nothing but love 
 towards His assassins. The wrong done, He said, 
 was not so much badness as stupidity. These poor 
 people did not know what they were doing. The 
 only thing was to forgive them. Their evil was to 
 be warred on by love, the only way. This was 
 nineteen centuries ago, and the world is still acting 
 as though its persistent blood and murder system 
 were the only sanity, and as though it were Christ 
 who was insane. When Jean Mesler, the blasphe- 
 mous French priest, declared t'hat Jesus was Don 
 Quixote and St. Peter Sancho 'Panza ti\e orthodox 
 world was deeply shocked. The reflection, oi our 
 
 i88 
 
Are We Sane ? 
 
 Mars messenger would probably be, that the French 
 ecclesiastic had put into words the actual belief 
 on which Christendom had ever since been acting. 
 It is only now really dawning upon us, and that in 
 a faint and far off way, that Jesus, after all, may have 
 been sane, and that it is the rest of us who lack 
 sanity. 
 
 We have here introduced the question of religion, 
 of Christianity. On this subject our visiting critic 
 would make some curious discoveries. He would 
 find what Christians had made of their religion, had 
 made of its doctrine and of its practice. The 
 Founder's doctrine, as taught and practised, had 
 been that of forgiveness and love, good, by its sheer 
 goodness, overcoming evil. It was what God did in 
 heaven, what He did on earth. His followers, in a 
 few centuries, had twisted this into an elaborate 
 system of metaphysical assertions which had nothing 
 to do with goodness or love, assertions, the belief 
 in which was made necessary to salvation. Our 
 Martian would be ready to say with the writer of 
 " The New Word " : " Falsehood is found in every 
 religion, but only in Catholic Christianity is it the 
 foundation of religion. The first word in Buddhism 
 is ' Know,' the first word of Catholicism is * Believe.' 
 And the merit lies not in believing what is true, but 
 in believing what is false." And through deluded 
 centuries the notion has actually prevailed that this 
 saving belief could be wrought in men by authority, 
 by fear and violence. If the people who acted thus, 
 the persecutors, the dogmatists, had had the faintest 
 inkling in them of psychology, of the way the soul 
 acts, such an attitude would have been impossible. 
 They would have seen that you can no more make 
 
 189 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 a man believe by compulsion, in any of its forms, than 
 you can by compulsion make him ten feet tall or give 
 him a third eye. Belief is a result of evidence and 
 of nothing else in this world. You can by authority 
 make a man fear, and submit, and subscribe ; you 
 can only make him believe by giving him facts. 
 Luther, in his best days, had clearly seen that. In 
 his " Concerning the Bonds of Obedience " he says : 
 " Therefore it is vain and impossible to compel by 
 force this belief or that belief. Force does not do 
 it. It is a free work in faith to which no one can be 
 forced." As Schopenhauer puts it : " Der Glaube 
 ist wie die Liebe; er lasst sich nicht erzwingen" (faith 
 is like love ; it cannot be forced). 
 
 But we are not, most of us, sane enough yet to 
 see that. Our critic might go further in his in- 
 vestigation of doctrine, discovering, to his astonish- 
 ment, that its further developments contradicted, 
 in the most ghastly manner, the whole teaching of the 
 Founder. In place of His doctrine of a loving God, 
 who sent His rain on the just and the unjust, who 
 overcame badness only by goodness, he finds a system 
 dominating the Church for fifteen centuries, still 
 extant in articles and catechisms, which makes God 
 a hypocrite, whose goodness is simulated, is extended 
 only to this life ; who has, for the life to come, a 
 horrible procedure in which a chosen few are elected 
 to a life of bUss, while the mass, upon whom His sun 
 has shone, are relegated to an eternity of hopeless 
 torture. The most infernal system of ideas, surely, 
 that ever entered the human brain ! And this 
 of the God whom Jesus proclaimed as overcoming 
 evil only by good ! We say with Voltaire : " Ce 
 n est pas ton Dieu ; c est ton Diable." 
 
 190 
 
Are Wc Sane ? 
 
 From the thing we have made of Christ's doctrine 
 our investigator turns to what we have made of His 
 example, and here, too, his findings would be equally 
 remarkable. He reads in the Gospels that Jesus 
 was born into a carpenter's family, and was Himself a 
 carpenter. He would suppose that those who, in 
 all ranks of society, pay to Him religious devotion in 
 the churches would regard this as giving to honest 
 labour, in its humblest forms, a special dignity. 
 Honour surely in this society, if nowhere else, to the 
 man who earns his living by the sweat of his brow ! 
 To his astonishment, he would find that this rule in 
 Christendom is observed in exactly the inverse order. 
 The " best people," in the universally accepted 
 phrase, are the people who do nothing. In these 
 circles people are not received who soil their hands 
 with work. To belong here you must be at least 
 three or four degrees removed from the vulgarity of 
 trade. Our visitor might go to a cathedral town 
 and find there the residences of canons, of deans, 
 perhaps of a bishop. They are the well-paid 
 representatives of Jesus the carpenter. Are any of 
 them on visiting terms with carpenters ? Nowhere 
 will he find the social demarcations more rigidly 
 marked out. H Jesus came to these precincts with 
 mallet and adze He would be shown the back door. 
 You may, in the cathedral, hear orisons intoned, 
 with correct clerical accent, to Jesus as a meta- 
 physical idea ; but presume that the actual life of 
 Jesus has any hints upon social values or the social 
 order, and you will find out your mistake. Was there 
 ever a queerer world ? 
 
 On the whole, we fear that our friend's report of 
 us would be the reverse of complimentary. If we 
 
 191 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 are ever in our right mind it is only by fits and starts, 
 with quick reversions to the old unreason. The 
 Latin poet, he might say, in describing himself has 
 described the race : Videor meliora proboque, sed 
 deteriora sequor (I see and admire the better, but I 
 follow the worse). Still, would his report be a correct 
 one ? We have imagined him here as on a cursory 
 visit, in which he has had time to record only his 
 first impressions. We who are of the race, and know 
 it from inside, could add some elucidations and 
 corrections. We might agree with him that we are 
 not entirely sane, but we could add that we are on 
 the way to sanity. A mind better than our own is 
 evidently in charge of us, and leading us on towards 
 its own level. It is constructing a kingdom of 
 rationality in a being who began with faintest dawns 
 of reason — a rude animal, dominated by brute 
 instincts, derived from a still lower ancestry. Man as 
 he is to-day is only half himself ; still struggling with 
 a coil of old insanities. History shows us his long 
 struggle with them, his slow emergence from them. 
 Perhaps the vividest idea of it in the old world is 
 given us in the Greek drama. ^Eschylus, in the 
 " Choephori," represents the triumph of the law of 
 the lex talionis : " O great Parcae, may Jupiter cause 
 the triumph of the law that outrage shall be punished 
 by outrage, that murder avenge murder, evil for 
 evil." It is the law of the ancient time. So we see 
 Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, Clytemnestra 
 her mother kills Agamemnon, the son of Agamemnon 
 kills Clytemnestra, and the Furies pursue him for 
 this murder. Then the poet, on whom the new 
 spirit has dawned, in the " Eumenides " proclaims 
 the aboUtion of this law. At the temple of Delphi, 
 
 192 
 
Are We Sane ? 
 
 whither Orestes has fled, Minerva dissuades the 
 Furies from their vengeance. They now cry : 
 " Let discord, insatiable of crimes, no longer make 
 its voice heard ; may the blood of citizens no longer 
 dye the ground ; may never again men become 
 murderers to avenge a murder ; may the interest of 
 the state reign henceforth in all hearts. Be united, 
 O Athenians, in a common love, in a common hate 
 against the enemy." 
 
 That was a step towards sanity, but only a step. 
 Man was still fumbUng after the true formula of his 
 humanity. That was reached when Jesus told His 
 disciples to love not only their own race but all races, 
 their enemies even, because God loved and cared for 
 them all. The astonishing thing is now dawning 
 upon us that not in the Church with its blood- 
 stained history ; not in theologies with their brutal 
 affirmations about God and man; not in modern 
 society with its hypocrisies, its make-believes ; not 
 in ourselves with our vanities, our jealousies, our 
 constant lapses ; but in Christ, in that life, teaching 
 and example, is the only human sanity. That is why 
 with a quite new accent and fervour of belief, we say 
 that in Him the eternal came to birth, that in Him 
 the Mind that was from the beginning, that through 
 the ages wrought in our race to bring it from animal 
 to man, discloses here its clearest, highest mani- 
 festation. And only do we approximate to sanity 
 as, in word, and thought, and deed, we follow Him. 
 
 193 
 
 13 
 
XIX 
 
 LINES LEFT OUT 
 
 There is a well-known child's book on religion 
 with this title. Its purpose was to fill up what, in a 
 previous publication, had been omitted. It is a 
 suggestive title, which may carry us a good deal 
 further than this first use of it. Left out ! One 
 could build a mountain range with what, in the 
 world of print, has been left out. Think of all the 
 letters to newspaper editors that never see the hght ! 
 Think of the devastations daily wrought by the 
 editor's blue pencil ! Printing presses are roaring 
 all the year with new publications. They would have 
 to be multiplied a hundred fold if all the written 
 manuscripts reached them, instead of the intervening 
 waste-paper basket. And the unpubhshed is only a 
 part of the matter. Your most voluminous author 
 gives only a fraction of what he has thought and 
 dreamed and begun at. Gibbon essayed a dozen 
 subjects, and spent no inconsiderable time over them, 
 before he settled down finally to the " DecUne and 
 Fall." Balzac was a terror to the compositors. 
 His proofs were returned to them one mass of cor- 
 rections, of fines left out, of new matter interleaved. 
 Cries Stevenson : " Oh, if I knew how to omit ! " 
 Now he is gone we are glad he did not omit more. 
 How we have all wondered over those lines left out 
 
 194 
 
Lines Left Out 
 
 in " Edwin Drood," cancelled by the grim editor, 
 Death ! Sir Robertson NicoU has given us an excellent 
 study on the problem. But how we wish we had 
 Dickens's own solution ! 
 
 There is a vast deal more printed matter in the 
 world than any of us can properly manage. On the 
 whole, we may be glad of what has been left out. 
 So much of it is superfluous, a mere copying, " a 
 damnable iteration." Yet, despite this super- 
 abundance, it remains that one of the outstanding 
 defects of the current literature and of our public 
 life to-day is in the lines left out, in the things that 
 are not said and that should be said. Take our 
 journalism. Of late we have been afraid to open our 
 newspaper. Day after day the breakfast hour has 
 been spoiled by its recital of horrors ; horrors of 
 the air, of the road, of the mine, of the sea. The 
 latest catastrophe, the newest villainy ; these are the 
 first things that strike the eye. Heavens, what a 
 world to live in ! Yes, if that were the only news of 
 it. It is the curse of the Press that this is the kind of 
 thing it has chiefly to print. And yet what a 
 fractional part all this of the world's real life ! For 
 fifty years yonder street has led its quiet, comfortless 
 existence, with its homely traffics, its good cheer, its 
 social joys, nothing of which has ever crept into your 
 journal. Let a murder be committed there, and this, 
 for the listening outside world, is the one history of 
 that street. And so it is that in the Press, and in a 
 more enduring manner, in history and literature, the 
 world, without deserving it, gets a bad name. The 
 solid happinesses of it are not good enough copy 
 for your reporter, your dramatist. Some day we 
 may get an inspired literature which shall make the 
 
 195 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 common life, with its enormous balance of good, so 
 vivid, so interesting, as to outcharm the present 
 vogue for the sordid and the horrible. 
 
 And when, in the world of politics, shall we get 
 the '* hues left out " ? Our party system, as at 
 present conducted, is immoral to this extent — that 
 neither side will give us the whole truth of the matter. 
 What a way of dealing with a nation's well-being, 
 this of abusing and ridiculing your opponent, of 
 omitting all the strong points of his case, and fixing 
 the limehght on his weak ones ! Who in his senses 
 would go to the ordinary party leading article for the 
 actual facts of a disputed question ? Some day, one 
 hopes, politics will cease to be a cockpit of fighting 
 passions and personal ambitions ; will become 
 instead a real science, and proceed on the methods of 
 science ; the patient investigation, that is, of all that 
 belongs to a subject, with nothing left out ; leading 
 to conclusions that fit the facts. But we are a long 
 way off from that. We may have to wait still 
 longer for an international pohtics that proceeds by 
 the same rule. The old hatreds, still so rife, are so 
 largely due to the lines left out. Englishmen used 
 to hate Frenchmen, and Frenchmen Englishmen, 
 because neither side knew each other. When we 
 get on speaking terms ; when we read each other's 
 literature, we find our hearts are beating to the same 
 tune. For generations American lads were brought 
 up on school book histories which painted England 
 as the enemy. It is only just recently that a better 
 understanding has produced a better school book ; 
 one where the left out hues have been put in. The 
 American is beginning to learn that it was not the 
 EngHsh people, but the crass EngHsh Government, 
 
 196 
 
Lines Left Out 
 
 a Government with a foreign and half-crazy king at 
 its head, that was against their hberties ; that the 
 real England, represented by its noblest sons, by 
 Chatham, and Burke, and Fox, and Conway, and 
 Walpole, was on their side, all against the policy 
 which brought on the final rebellion. To-day we 
 are learning yet another lesson, a line left out of all 
 the old political calculations ; the lesson that the 
 prosperity of one nation helps the prosperity of all, 
 and that, consequently, the war that ruins one people 
 is the surest way of ruining their conquerors. We 
 are getting on by degrees, but how slowly ! Future 
 generations will assuredly see us all as on the dunce's 
 form of the political school. 
 
 The world is progressing, with infinite slowness 
 it is true, yet progressing towards a higher moral 
 state. If we investigate the causes of that, we come 
 upon some deep things. We have heard of manu- 
 scripts written with invisible ink ; ink which only 
 shows itself in certain conditions, when treated in a 
 certain way. You heat it, or treat it with chemicals, 
 and then the hidden writing appears. As we study 
 human nature we find the soul of it written all over 
 with invisible ink, with messages subtly wrapped up 
 in its texture, which by degrees are becoming legible. 
 Comte, in his " Positivism," argues that man's 
 rehgion, in so far as it looked beyond earth, was 
 only a phase, which would in the end yield to 
 science, as he understood science. There are few 
 scientists satisfied with Comte to-day. We see too 
 clearly that were there not underlying all things, and 
 before all things, a universal Reason, there could be 
 no science ; for science, in its every process and 
 deduction, supposes that Reason, and leans upon it. 
 
 197 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 We think, because the universe thinks, has a mind at 
 work. Science is the perpetual questioning of that 
 mind and the reception of its answers. The answers 
 are always coherent ; if they were not we should 
 indeed be in a fool-universe. Those lines, printed 
 in us, of an inherent rationality, holding all things 
 together, as they showed more clearly in the human 
 consciousness, became the groundwork of science, its 
 apparatus of proof. 
 
 But other lines have come into view. The soul 
 which finds in itself those imprints of the rational, finds 
 also imprints of something more intimate and more 
 beautiful ; imprints of a Personality that is loving 
 and holy, and that seeks to form in us a likeness of 
 itself. Whence come our ideals ; our sense of the 
 good and our yearning for it ; the disgust at our 
 moral failures, our thirst of perfection ? They are 
 the stuff of which we are made, and they point as 
 surely to a fulfilment as the structure of the eye 
 points to the vision which light brings to it. This 
 consciousness, in vast numbers of our fellows, is a 
 feeble enough affair ; seems in many almost non- 
 existent. It is well, on these matters, to think 
 geologically, if only as a curb on our impatience. 
 Could we have seen our earth in some of its early 
 stages, when it was a chaotic, unformed mass, its 
 atmosphere laden with mephitic vapours, its surface 
 rent with hideous explosions, we could hardly have 
 conceived of it as a place of quiet valleys, of running 
 streams, the dream of beauty that it is. But the lines 
 of all that were there, hidden deep down, and ready 
 to appear in their time. Man is as yet in his un- 
 formed, volcanic period ; his greater age is yet to 
 come. The great thing is that God, who was in the 
 
 198 
 
Lines Left Out 
 
 earth, forming it, is in the soul, and will work His 
 will there. He is in those who do not yet recognise 
 the fact. We are so much more than we know, and 
 we cannot escape from God. 
 
 The wonderful thing about the spiritual life, 
 so far as we know it, is the lines that are left out. 
 There is enough in it for faith and hope ; but the 
 silences with which it is encompassed ! We have 
 spiritual instincts, impulses, suggestions, hints, and 
 all around them this vast, uncanny reticence ! The 
 star-strewn heavens look down upon our catas- 
 trophes, our disappointments, our deaths, as it 
 seems, all unheeding. We ask our questions, and 
 they yield no answer. Man, impatient, urges his 
 doubts, propagates his infidelities, falls into moody 
 pessimisms, and still no answer. His conversation 
 with the sky seems entirely onesided. His passionate 
 appeal is without response. So we say — in our bad 
 moments. When we are better inspired we discover 
 we have been looking in the wrong direction. 
 Augustine, after passing through that agony, found 
 this out. " I was looking for Thee without, and lo ! 
 Thou wast within." For it is in man himself that 
 God is working towards His fuller expression, that 
 He is planting the clearer knowledge of Himself. 
 And in man the lines are coming more and more 
 plainly into view. When we have reached the true 
 knowledge of ourselves, we shall have reached the 
 true knowledge of the universe. When our sight 
 and our hearing are purged, have reached their 
 higher powers, we shall see and hear Him there in 
 a new fashion. 
 
 This is the lesson which Christianity offers us, 
 the lesson that God is, above all things, to be found 
 
 199 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 in man. It shows us, in the earlier human history, 
 the God-consciousness coming to itself in patriarchs 
 and prophets, souls spiritually sensitive, awake 
 to the whispers of the hidden voice. Then comes 
 a Son of Man, in whom the voice is clear and positive, 
 the vision unclouded, whom the race, by a sure 
 instinct, is learning to follow, as exhibiting in His 
 life and teaching the surest image of what God is, 
 and of what He means to our race. 
 
 But here, as in nature, the marvellous thing is, 
 with the new hope, the reticence which surrounds it. 
 The lines that appear, bright with a glory truly divine, 
 are what first strike us, filling responsive hearts with 
 faith and gladness. But immediately we are set 
 pondering over the lines left out. We know so much 
 of Jesus and yet so little ! We have His history in 
 four little pamphlets which came into the world 
 almost anyhow. Justin Martyr, the philosopher 
 whom they converted, calls them " barbarian 
 writings." Two of them, Matthew and Luke, are 
 largely borrowed from the third, Mark. The 
 borrowings are from a mutilated copy which seems 
 at the time to have been about the only one in 
 existence. Of the 400 days to which the ministry, 
 at the shortest estimate, must have extended, we 
 have in these pamphlets, at the most, a narrative of 
 not more than forty separate days. And, as 
 Professor Caird says, we owe those records to the 
 narrow Jewish Church, a debt, he adds, greater than 
 that we owe even to St. Paul. " For it did not pass 
 away till it had gathered together those records of the 
 early life of Jesus according to the flesh, in the absence 
 of which even the teaching of St. Paul would have 
 become little better than an abstract dogma." 
 
 200 
 
Lines Left Out 
 
 As we study the writings that have come to us 
 in this strange fashion — that have, as it were, 
 fortuitously dribbled into the world — we are con- 
 tinually fronted with this mystery of the lines left 
 out. Jesus has thrown upon certain questions a 
 dazzling light. Upon a thousand others there is no 
 illumination. It is brought up against Him that 
 He knows nothing, apparently, of modern science, 
 of modern philosophy, of modern economics. No 
 one goes to the New Testament for mathematics, or 
 chemistry, or biology, or painting or music. There 
 is no exposition here of international law, of the 
 government of states, of monarchism, or repub- 
 licanism, of capital and labour, of a hundred things 
 that agitate the modern mind. On whole ranges of 
 theology, which our later scribes have filled with 
 their propositions, on human origins, on Biblical 
 inspiration, on Church orders and governments, 
 there is no decisive word. What you have is just 
 Himself, His life. His conversations. His death, 
 and the wondrous things that followed His death. 
 So much, and then the blank. 
 
 Does this blank stagger us ? It need not. The 
 economy here is exactly the economy we find in 
 nature. So much given, and the rest left. The 
 helps given to us have always these wide unfilled 
 margins. They are the exercise grounds where we 
 are to help ourselves. " Here," says the Word to us, 
 " is your hint ; now grow by following it out." 
 What would have happened had Jesus filled out 
 these other programmes ? Supposing He had talked 
 science ? If it were modern science, it would to His 
 auditors have been as incomprehensible as though 
 He had talked Chinese. If it were level to their 
 
 201 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 existing notions it would all have been outgrown. 
 All this was not His business ; and for the reason 
 that it is our own. For the human progress is not 
 so much through the thing learned as by the effort 
 of learning it ; the effort, and all that effort brings 
 to us. His work is other and deeper. It is not at the 
 circumference but at the centre. He is not in life's 
 details, but in life itself. He gives you no technique 
 of science or art or industry, but He gives you the 
 spirit in which all these should be pursued, the end 
 for which they should be followed. He shows us 
 just what nature means, what life means, the Mind 
 that is behind it, how that Mind works, what its 
 disposition is, the spirit it is of. We see all that in 
 Himself, and as we see it we feel the truth of the 
 presentation. Our soul says this is what God must 
 be, for it responds to all our deepest soul feels as 
 best ; the qualities of being and doing which draw 
 our w^orship. In Him we discover the secret of God ; 
 the secret that God is love, and that His love is of the 
 quality that suffers, sacrifices, pardons, serves, and 
 will be content with naught less than saving and 
 perfecting. Jesus, you say, has not taught the world 
 this or that ? No, but He has done so much more. 
 He has inspired the whole business of learning and 
 the whole business of doing ; inspired it so that every 
 art and every industry under that influence becomes 
 holy, and secretes a joy which, without Him, it could 
 never yield. 
 
 Some of us, who have fared far in the journey of 
 life, who have busied ourselves with its varied 
 cultures, who have tested its chief experiences and 
 appraised their values, have come as a result to one 
 assured conviction. Christ is the heart of the 
 
 202 
 
Lines Left Out 
 
 mystery, the key to it all. And life's best business, 
 in the Church or out of it, is to work in this heady, 
 tempestuous civilisation of ours for the restoring of 
 that line, now so largely left out, the line of the 
 Christ character, the Christ life ; to work for that, 
 knowing it is the world's only health, its true 
 sanity. And how shall we do that ? How else 
 than by having the lines of that glorious portraiture 
 all reproduced and showing in ourselves ? For so 
 essentially divine is that portraiture, that wherever, 
 and however feebly, men see it reflected in their 
 neighbour, they see in it some hint of the heart of 
 God. 
 
 203 
 
XX 
 
 OF SELF-EXPRESSION 
 
 The modern cry for self-expression is a puzzling, 
 even a confounding phenomenon. There are such 
 confused, such contradictory elements mixed up in 
 it. Almost the whole gamut of sentiment is repre- 
 sented there, from the highest to the lowest. You 
 may find in it tragedy, comedy, and even farce. The 
 cry in itself seems simple. " I want to be myself ; 
 to have liberty and opportunity for all that is in me 
 to grow up and show itself ; to be rid of the thousand 
 things that now hamper and repress my develop- 
 ment." What can be more reasonable than that ? 
 Whether it be the cry of Nora in Ibsen's " Doll's 
 House ; " or that of the underfed, underpaid worker, 
 slave to his machine ; or that of the independent 
 thinker, born into a repressive, unsympathetic 
 milieu, how reasonable, how even pathetic it seems ! 
 As we hear the cry, we realise how, in what are called 
 the freest countries, the problem of liberty is as yet 
 so largely unsolved ; how supremely difficult it still 
 is for men and women to be themselves ! And the 
 question is infinitely complicated by the false cries 
 that are abroad. Before we can make progress here 
 there has to be cleared away an enormous confusion 
 of issues. We want first to know what is the 
 true self-expression, and, on the way to that, the 
 
 204 
 
of Self-Expression 
 
 specious counterfeits of it that are continually being 
 offered. 
 
 The age we have been born into shows, in this 
 matter, a queer condition of things. It is a condition 
 seemingly dead against independence. We are, we 
 discover, in a very old world, a world which has 
 apparently been occupied for its past thousands of 
 years in deciding beforehand for us what we shall do 
 and be. The world is not an open country, but one 
 crowded with boundary walls, with trespass notices, 
 with restrictions here, and prohibitions there ; with 
 law, religion, custom, fashion, all issuing their 
 separate ukases ; all, as it seems, frowning down 
 upon that daring imp of our own personality, and 
 defying it to assert itself. Rousseau, whose cry 
 of protest shook his world to its foundations, 
 compared the modern man, ensnared in these 
 conventions, to a child who from his birth is 
 trussed, bound, fettered and unable to use his own 
 limbs. He called for a return to nature, without, 
 however, leaving us with any clear idea of what 
 that means. A century and a half have rolled 
 away since, and we are still groaning. Indeed, 
 for multitudes the economic and industrial conditions 
 of to-day have placed a still more effectual bar 
 against any considerable self-expression. What 
 chance is there of that for a man whose bread 
 depends on performing thousands of times a day one 
 single mechanical operation, perhaps the tenth part 
 of the manufacture of a pin or of a shoe ! How 
 is he going to be anything but a machine, or the part 
 of a machine, himself ? 
 
 The vast unrest among modern workers, where 
 it originates in a desire to give their better self a 
 
 205 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 chance, despite the menace it brings with it, is a 
 hopeful symptom. It will work out into some 
 changes in our social and economic system which 
 will be of an all-round and helpful kind. But the 
 search for independence, for a freer self-expression, 
 not in one class only, but in all, which is characteristic 
 of our time, is, of all quests, the one where we may 
 make the most mistakes and go farthest astray. The 
 road is full of pitfalls, of bypaths that lead to preci- 
 pices. Before starting out here we need to ask 
 ourselves some questions. What self in us is it that 
 we want to give a chance to ? by what means do we 
 propose to give it that chance ? and what are we 
 expecting from it as the goal of our hopes ? It is 
 supremely interesting to watch the answer that men 
 to-day are giving to these questions, giving them, 
 generally, not so much in words as in their actions, 
 in the directions they are following. In studying 
 them we get a view of the amazing complexity of the 
 human soul, of its contradictions, its illusions, its 
 range of self-deception ; of the enormous difficulty, 
 in some natures especially, of reaching the depths 
 where the true self resides. 
 
 An illustration of the wild aberrations possible 
 on this question is furnished by a school of writers, 
 largely Continental, which still has its vogue, who 
 argue that for a proper exposition of life, in the 
 drama and in fiction, a man must have gone through 
 all the experiences which he seeks to depict. To 
 paint vice accurately — and so much of their painting 
 is of that genre— he must know it intimately. One of 
 this school declares that Shakespeare could never 
 have written his dramas if he had been respectable. 
 To understand gutter life you must first lie down in 
 
 206 
 
of Self-Expression 
 
 the gutter. Most of these teachers have followed 
 their prescription. It would, perhaps, be more 
 correct to say that they began with their passions 
 and then sought a philosophy which would fit them. 
 And assuredly they have here succeeded in giving a 
 true expression of themselves. Their writings exhale 
 the corruption of diseased souls. But is their defini- 
 tion of experience here a true one ? Can we only 
 know the world's evil by wallowing in it ? Teachers 
 who afhrm this, if they are not obfuscated by their 
 own way of living, would see the absurdity of the 
 contention. You might just as well say that a man 
 could never become an Alpine guide, an experienced 
 mountaineer, except by the process of tumbling down 
 every precipice he came to. But is that the way ? 
 Or has he not become what he is, not by breaking his 
 bones, but by learning how, in the face of all the 
 dangers, to keep them unbroken ? If this were a 
 true philosophy our physicians would gain their 
 knowledge by catching all the diseases they deal 
 with ; would learn the dangers of alcohol by getting 
 drunk every night ! And yet this is the talk that 
 passes current to-day in some art critic and literary 
 circles, amongst people who speak patronisingly 
 of " conventional morality," of " bourgeois ethics," 
 as of something that, with superior people, went 
 out of date with the Victorian era. When you ask 
 what these " bourgeois ethics " are, you find they are 
 the ethics of clean living, which these people have 
 long since forsaken. All this, of course, is a kind of 
 self-expression. But the expression is that of the 
 satyr, whose bestial leer shows through the works 
 of these latest worshippers, a leer whose essential 
 ugliness no literary device can hide. 
 
 207 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 A more subtle question arises when, in this matter 
 of self-expression, we come upon the problem of the 
 different personalities that at times seem to inhabit 
 us. You survey a man's career and at varying 
 periods of it you might be in contact with different 
 men. Or at the same period you shall have two 
 opposites at war with each other. Renan declared 
 that of himself. One part of him was always con- 
 tradicting the other. Walt Whitman met the 
 accusation of inconsistency in a characteristic 
 manner. " I am large," said he ; "I contain 
 multitudes." Sainte Beuve in his later days 
 declared that half a dozen people had successively 
 lived and died in him. Meredith has been 
 quoted as making the same assertion about himself. 
 And he adduced this, curiously enough, as a reason 
 for disbelief of any survival after death ! " Which 
 of these personalities is to survive ? " he is reported 
 to have asked. If this is meant for an argument it 
 is a singularly weak one. The obvious reply was : 
 " But here are you who have actually survived them ; 
 and are you not the same * you ' all the time ? " 
 The feeling of identity is in these cases always 
 stronger than the feeling of change. Do we not, 
 in old age, feel our youth ; live in it more intensely 
 even than when we are young ? And may we not 
 conceive an after state, when all we have passed 
 through, all the changes that have passed in us, 
 shall subsist, in their essence, as part of the 
 one life? Myers, in his "Human Personality," 
 raises here some fascinating problems ; questions 
 of dual or triple personalities, existing and 
 expressing themselves in the same ego ; the 
 question as to whether the being who thinks, 
 
 208 
 
of Self-Expression 
 
 feels and wills in each of us, is not the survival 
 of one out of many personalities that have 
 struggled in us for supremacy. 
 
 In the search, then, for the self to which we are to 
 give a chance ; which we are to strive with all our 
 might to develop ; which we are at all costs to try 
 and express, it is clear we are in face of some diffi- 
 culties. Of all the complexities in this universe, we 
 are the greatest complex ; the greatest, at least, 
 that we know. In this business there are such 
 qualities of material, of diverse, heterogeneous 
 material, that we can use. What of it shall we use ? 
 Amid the confusion one thing emerges with clearness. 
 We can none of us come to good so long as we stand 
 only for our separate self. The man who fights for 
 his individual ego — whether you call his motive 
 ambition, or greed, or vanity, or passion, or self- 
 interest — however brilliant his powers, however 
 indomitable his industry, will never count for much 
 in the world's history, or for much as an exponent 
 of life's blessedness. It was said of Napoleon, one of 
 the biggest of this kind of experimenters, *' No great 
 principle stood by him." It is a damning indictment 
 wherever applied — an indictment which, while it 
 condemns, reveals. It shows, as with the flash of a 
 searchlight, the futility of attempting to express a 
 self which goes no farther, no deeper than our surface 
 egotism. 
 
 And here come we to the central point, down to 
 the real secret of life. The one and only self we 
 can afford to express is that higher self, found in 
 the holy place of the temple buried in us ; which is 
 of us, and yet so much more than ourselves ; the 
 principle of unity between us and our fellow, between 
 
 209 
 
 u 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 us and the universe outside ; the self which shows 
 in us as principle, as conscience, as ultimate moral 
 authority ; the self whose voice is ever the highest 
 authority, recognised by us as the whisper of God. 
 It is when we have recognised this " categorical 
 imperative," this law which is in us, but is also 
 beyond and above us, this duality in unity which 
 makes the true man ; it is then we find our place in 
 the world, our work in it, our liberty and joy. We 
 learn the liberty that is in obedience, the only liberty 
 worth the name. " We are servants of all the laws 
 that we may be free," says Cicero. Yes, when the 
 law rests on this deepest foundation. To get God's 
 will done in us and by us ; for this end to cultivate 
 all our powers to finest use ; to get it done by 
 our action, by our influence, by our suffering, by all 
 that belongs to our life — this is the self-expression 
 of the Christian. It was the self-expression of 
 Christ, an expression so clear in its revelation of an 
 infinite within that men ever since have been reading 
 in it the character of God. 
 
 What is the man of this type going to do with all 
 the laws, institutions, codes and conventions with 
 which he finds himself surrounded ? He will obey 
 a great many of them, even seeming trivial ones, not 
 simply because society has commanded them, but 
 because they are good. When our feminine mili- 
 tants strike against laws because they have had no 
 hand in making them, they should remember that the 
 mass of laws which both the men and women of 
 to-day are under were not made by any of us, men 
 or women, now living ; they were there long before 
 we were born. They might remember, also, that 
 these laws, for both sexes, are not so much coercive 
 
 210 
 
of Self-Expression 
 
 as protective. Women, as well as men, would have 
 had small chance to-day had they come into a world 
 without them. 
 
 And yet the world's greatest spirits have figured 
 often enough as opponents of human law ! Again 
 and again we see them setting the might of their 
 personaHty against a whole system of regulations, 
 of customs, of authorities. Socrates attacks the 
 Athenian orthodoxy, and drinks the hemlock ; 
 Jesus puts His " I say unto you " against the old 
 religion and is condemned by the Church authorities ; 
 Luther, with his ** Here stand I ; I can no other," 
 fronts the whole might of the empire and of the 
 hierarchy ; Bunyan breaks the Conventicle Act and 
 finds himself in Bedford Gaol ; Wesley, contrary 
 to episcopal authority, takes to field preaching, and 
 is cast out of the Establishment. Here, you may say, 
 is disobedience, here is a defiance of the established 
 order ; here is a tremendous self-assertion, a pitting 
 of the single ego against the whole system held as 
 authoritative and sacred. And this is a self- 
 assertion held to-day everywhere in honour ; the 
 rebels have become consecrate. Why, then, shall we 
 not rebel, break laws, or windows, if we want to ? 
 
 In all this we need to see the one thing that 
 matters. The great deeds, the great lives we have 
 cited, meant always one thing. And that one 
 thing was not disobedience, but obedience. The 
 great spirits of the past were law-breakers because 
 in a higher sense they were law-keepers. They acted 
 and suffered not in self-will, but under the imperative 
 of a higher will. Servants were they of a new law, 
 whose light had flamed into their souls, whose 
 august voice they felt they must obey. They obeyed, 
 
 211 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 too, not by violence, not by acts of paltry mischief, 
 but by the proclamation of the truth that had 
 reached them ; by words and deeds which that 
 truth inspired. Humanity, in its movement towards 
 the highest law, will, it would seem, need still its 
 rebels and outcasts of that type. But for all of us, 
 heroes of achievement and sacrifice, or humble 
 toilers of the common way, there is, we say again 
 and finally, one only true way of self-expression — it 
 is that of being rooted in God ; or making our daily 
 life the outcome of the divine that is within. John 
 Smith, the old Cambridge Platonist, pictures for us 
 the blessedness of the man who has thus found 
 himself. " He moves in a larger sphere than his 
 own being ; and cannot be content to enjoy himself, 
 except he may enjoy God, too, and himself in 
 God." 
 
 212 
 
XXI 
 
 THE SOMETHING ADDED 
 
 It is notorious that the presence or absence of 
 some one element, quite insignificant it may be, in 
 itself, will make or mar the most elaborate combi- 
 nation. The chef knows that the pinch of salt, more 
 or less, is vital to his sauce or ragout. It has been 
 said that it is to the presence of dust in the atmo- 
 sphere that we owe our blue sky. Without it the 
 heavens would be black at noon. The physiologists 
 tell us that in the 2,000 atoms in a molecule of 
 haemoglobin, the colouring matter of the blood, there 
 is one atom of iron. Without that one atom our 
 life could not go on, for it is its presence that gives 
 the body the power to oxygenate the blood. There 
 is a piquant remark of Mile, de Scudery which, in 
 another sphere of things, illustrates the same point. 
 " There is," says she, " a something, I know not how 
 to express it, which causes the presence of a gentle- 
 man to divert a company of ladies more than the 
 most amiable woman in the world can." The 
 solitary male, in view of the French lady, appears 
 to be the dust in the air that reveals the blue sky, 
 the iron atom that makes the feminine blood 
 circulate. 
 
 One could multiply these examples. They meet 
 us everywhere. There are so many failures that 
 
 213 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 are so near success. We say of them, " a little more, 
 and how much it is ; a little less, and what worlds 
 away ! " We see men dowered with many gifts, 
 yet who somehow miss the mark. There is just that 
 pinch of salt lacking in their temperament which 
 would have made the whole thing go. Why are 
 there not more happy people in the world ? There 
 is such a vast apparatus of happiness around us. 
 Every natural act has its own pleasures wrapped 
 up in it. Eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, 
 washing and bathing, walking, riding, sitting and lying 
 down, hearing and seeing, talking and thinking, 
 reading, working, resting, solitude, society, all 
 these are in themselves enjoyments, or may be made 
 such. The late Sir James Paget, from his vast 
 surgical experience, averred that even dying, as a 
 natural act, had its own quiet pleasure. Wealth 
 is supposed to contain a vast sum of delights, and 
 there are more wealthy people in the world than 
 ever before. And with it all, and amid the well-to-do 
 classes not less than among the ill-to-do, there seems 
 never to have been so many discontented people. 
 Are they asking too much of life ; more than it has 
 to offer ; or is there the pinch of salt lacking in 
 themselves ? 
 
 Assuredly, the nature of things has a good will 
 towards us. If it were not so, how comes it that 
 pleasure is so deeply inwrought into all we are and 
 do ? But nature does everything by halves ; she 
 never offers the complete thing. And that for an 
 evident reason. Her whole attitude is a call upon 
 ourselves. She is here, as apparently her chief 
 object, to create our personaHty. And thus it is that 
 she has placed life, its success or failure, so largely 
 
 214 
 
The Something Added 
 
 in our own hands. If anything is to come of it, 
 there must be our own contribution. As Mme. 
 Swetchine has it : " Life means mainly what we 
 put into it." Our own day is Hving largely on a 
 mistake. It looks for its well-being in a something 
 added, but it is the wrong something, a something 
 from the wrong direction. What people seem 
 everywhere after is an addition from the outside, 
 a "more" in the shape of money, of society, of 
 excitement, amusement, of pleasures so called, 
 pleasures elaborately manufactured. The additions 
 from this quarter of late have been, and are, 
 increasingly abundant. Every week brings its new 
 sport, its new fashion. There is an unparalleled 
 cult of luxury. Our hotels, our steamships, our 
 railway carriages are full of new inventions in 
 comfort. The world was never so well off. Would 
 anyone say that with all this there has been a 
 commensurate increase in joyousness ? Never since 
 man began has the croak of the pessimist, the wail 
 of the discontented, been so insistent. And the 
 reason is not far to seek. For all this is simply to 
 begin at the wrong end. The something added, 
 that is of real consequence here, is a something added 
 to ourselves, a something that comes not from 
 without, but from within ; or where it is from 
 without, is from above us, and not in the things 
 around us. It is in the development of character, 
 in an increasing clarity of vision, in an insight that 
 goes through the apparent down to life's bottom, 
 fundamental values, that we reach the general 
 satisfactions ; that we learn to say, " How good life 
 is ! " To have cultivated in yourself the faculties 
 of faith, of hope and of charity ; to have discovered 
 
 215 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 the enduring joy of ordered industry ; to have found 
 the beauty of things simple and common ; to have 
 struck on the magnificent ideas that lurk behind the 
 everyday facts ; all this may have made no great 
 difference to your banking account. It will have 
 made all the difference to your appreciation of 
 hfe. 
 
 These things are not to be obtained or exchanged 
 for currency. If they were, and if a jaded world 
 knew what they brought to their possessors, there 
 would be a rush for them, with quotations beyond all 
 that the Stock Exchange has experience of. What 
 their value would be is happily expressed by De 
 Quincey in his estimate of Goldsmith : " He had a 
 constitutional gaiety of heart ... a knack of 
 hoping, which knack could not be bought with Ormus 
 and with Ind, nor hired for a day with the peacock 
 throne of Delhi." It is the change in ourselves that 
 changes the world. Every outside thing takes shape 
 and colour from the idea you put into it. You make 
 it by what you think it. It is a fact which every 
 cross section of life you cut into reveals. John 
 Nelson, the Yorkshire Methodist, shut into a stinking 
 dungeon for preaching the gospel, declared that 
 he enjoyed himself there more than had he been in a 
 palace. His religious faith had created his palace 
 for him. Woolman, the American Quaker, on one 
 of his mission journeys, lost at night in a wood, with 
 no fire and with rain falling, says he sat under a tree, 
 '* and had a very sweet meditation on the love of 
 God." His soul furnishes his fire and light. The 
 other day the newspapers had the account of a 
 royal princess who, forsaking the splendour of a 
 Court, had chosen the career of a hospital nurse. 
 
 216 
 
The Something Added 
 
 And she would have no exemptions. She would 
 scrub floors with the rest. Is there anything bizarre 
 or quixotic in that ? We find nothing quixotic in it. 
 It shows an entirely sane measurement of values in 
 one who had tried both kinds. The princess had 
 found what luxury and pomp and artificiality had 
 to offer the soul, and she had tried what simplicity 
 and comradeship and honest toil in the service of 
 others had to offer ; and she had no doubt as to the 
 verdict. 
 
 A single idea of this sort, if we can get it well into 
 our heads — and nature tries so hard to get it into us — 
 is enough to turn a bad world into a good one. 
 Christ's " I have overcome the world " is the word 
 not for Himself only, but for every one of us. The 
 world, in its hardness, its roughness, its million 
 difficulties, is there just for us to conquer. 
 
 . . . Life's just the thing 
 
 To try the soul's strength on ; educe the man. 
 
 Professor Marshall, in his " Political Economy," 
 says : " One new idea, such as Bessemer's chief 
 invention, adds as much to England's productive 
 power as the labour of a hundred thousand men." 
 Wonderful, indeed, are ideas in that region of things. 
 But whether Bessemer's idea could make either 
 himself or his hundred thousand men happier is 
 another question. It is ideas in a different direction, 
 native to another side of the soul, that are needed for 
 that. There are such ideas, and they are not less 
 mighty in their action than that of Bessemer. 
 
 Take, for instance, the position of multitudes 
 of people among us to-day, who find themselves 
 irked and depressed by an uncongenial society. 
 They find in themselves an innate superiority to the 
 
 217 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 people they associate with. They have ideals their 
 companions have no use for ; a refinement which is 
 perpetually wounded by their coarseness. Their 
 soul's deepest note finds no echo. They are alone 
 in the midst of numbers. Perhaps you are there in 
 that position. How are you taking it ? There 
 are two ways. You may take it as an evil fate which 
 has cast you, so delicate a plant, into this uncongenial 
 soil. But suppose, instead, that for an experiment 
 you took on the idea of life as a sphere for service 
 where, both in heaven and on earth, the higher give 
 themselves to the lower ; a service in which minister- 
 ing spirits from the heavens occupy themselves here 
 below with humble souls ; in which the Christ 
 " pleases not Himself," but lives on this earth, the 
 friend of publicans and sinners. Suppose you see 
 in every gift you possess the Christ claim on you to 
 use it in His way ; suppose that in the hours when 
 the world's rebuffs, its unkindness, its ingratitude 
 strike hardest on you, you find in the midst of it all 
 the way of retreat into His spirit, the peace of that 
 sure refuge ! In this choice of ideas the outward 
 positions are exactly the same. But the difference 
 to you, how vast ! The spiritual idea, if you choose 
 that, will be, so far as you are concerned, a bigger 
 one than Bessemer's. The one turns iron into steel ; 
 this other turns the world from a prison house to the 
 glorious kingdom of God. 
 
 In every region of things life's call is ever the same 
 — always for the something added, the something 
 you can add. And it insists on your adding it on the 
 peril of dead failure ; insists because its whole object 
 is to get your personality in motion, to develop it 
 by using it. Take, for instance, the question of later 
 
 218 
 
The Something Added 
 
 age, the time when youth and passion are gone. 
 There are men who find what remains a mere vacuity, 
 a dreary realm of prose. James Mill found it so. 
 Benjamin Constant puts it explicitly : " When 
 the age of passion is over, what else can you desire 
 except to escape from life with the least possible 
 pain ? " The Frenchman is repeating here, almost 
 in the same language, what Anacreon had said long 
 ages before. One wonders what a man like Wesley 
 would have said to talk of this kind ; or Channing, 
 who found in old age life growing ever fuller, ever 
 happier ! Walter Pater, in " Marcus the Epicurean," 
 suggests the true order here, where in Cornelius 
 Fronto he pictures an old man who constantly 
 makes up for the decay of the physical "by an 
 added grace of culture." Only, one needs more 
 than culture, in the common sense of that term. 
 For it is precisely when the heats of youth are over 
 that the soul finds the opening for its own greater 
 activities. Life's business there is like gold mining 
 in the Klondike. At the beginning the ore is found 
 on the surface ; it is there almost for the picking 
 up ; later that easy processs serves no longer. The 
 treasure lies deeper down. It is buried out of sight, 
 and only those who are prepared with mining 
 apparatus, who can bore and drill into the depths, 
 can hope to find it. But there is more there, under- 
 neath, than ever lay on the surface. The men of 
 mid age or old age who exclaim against the poverty 
 of life are simply exhibiting the poverty of their own 
 souls. They are on the top of a gold reef, but too lazy 
 to develop in themselves the means of reaching it. 
 
 Religion is always a call for the something added ; 
 its speciality is that it is always a venture. People 
 
 219 
 
Faith ' s Certainties 
 
 wonder sometimes that it offers no more positive 
 proofs ; that it leaves such monstrous wide openings 
 for doubt ; that its evidences are not more com- 
 manding. Have we not here the reason, that the 
 soul's vitality, its courage, demands a risk ; that it 
 can only find itself in dangers, in leaps in the dark ? 
 Fichte has finely put this aspect of it. " If," he says, 
 " a man is to find the witness for the soul, immor- 
 tality, and God at all, he must find it in himself, 
 and in the spiritual history of his fellows. He must 
 venture in freedom the belief in these things, and 
 find their corroboration in the contribution which 
 they make to the solution of the mystery of life. 
 One must venture to win them. One must continue 
 to venture in order to keep them. If it were not so 
 they would not be objects of faith." And the 
 freedom here demanded is a free action of the will. 
 It is interesting on this point to note how J. S. Mill, 
 brought up amongst the necessitarians, is compelled 
 by the logic of life towards the same conclusion. 
 Says he : " The doctrine of free will, by insisting 
 on a truth which the necessitarian neglects, the 
 power of the mind to co-operate in the formation 
 of its own character, has given to its adherents a 
 practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has 
 generally (I believe) existed in the minds of 
 necessitarians." The possessions of faith are not 
 for the man who sits down and waits to be convinced. 
 They are rather a kingdom that " suffereth violence," 
 where " the violent take it by force." 
 
 In every direction it is the something added that 
 makes the difference. Scenery is one thing or 
 another, according to the soul you carry to it. Have 
 you never seen the Alps in England ? You can 
 
 220 
 
The Something Added 
 
 see them, if you will, in all their glory— in the clouds. 
 You can see in turn Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, the 
 lovely Weisshorn, the stupendous Matterhorn. Only 
 a little imagination, and the picture is there, not 
 even to be improved on by the reality. It is in the 
 idea that your health largely lies. You can frighten 
 yourself into illness ; you can dare yourself into 
 health. Often in overwrought moments you say, 
 " I must give way." And faith says, '' Courage, 
 go on ! " The vital force in you hears that note, 
 welcomes it, allies itself with it, and the two 
 together win out. Napoleon walked through the 
 plague-stricken wards at Acre to show there was no 
 infection for the man who did not fear it. Hospital 
 nurses know that there is their greatest safeguard. 
 To mean to win is always half the victory. 
 
 One can never say how much, here on earth, is yet 
 to be added to the soul's life. Henri Perreyve, that 
 French priest of the beautiful soul, speaking from 
 his experience, held that five or six pure men, living 
 and working together, of one heart and one soul, 
 with one object in view, could develop a common 
 force of thought and feeling which reinforced each 
 separate member with the united power of the others. 
 Strindberg relates of a French nobleman and his wife 
 whom he knew that their union was so intimate and so 
 perfect that, when at a distance, anything happening 
 to the one became known to the other. Were it a 
 pain or a joy, it was immediately shared. There are 
 magnetisms, currents of force vibrating in the ether 
 of the spiritual world, deeper and more subtle than 
 the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy. Who 
 shall say, as souls develop and become more perfect 
 receivers and transmitters, what new deeps of 
 
 221 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 thought and feeling will here be opened ? And all 
 that is coming to man here makes us turn with a new 
 ardour of wonder and of hope towards the vast 
 possibilities of death ; makes us ask with a new 
 eagerness Browning's question : 
 
 When earth breaks up, and heaven expands, 
 How will the change strike me and you 
 
 In the house not made with hands ? 
 
 222 
 
XXII 
 
 GRACE 
 
 In the history, one may say the romance of words, 
 there has surely been no more singular fortune than 
 that which has befallen the word " grace." In its 
 origin it stands for beauty, sheer beauty, beauty in 
 all its forms. But who now, in religion, in theology, 
 in the common pulpit use, thinks of it in that sense ? 
 For long ages past theology has appropriated this 
 word, and in the handling has warped, disfigured and 
 degraded it. One may say that it is the most ill-used 
 word in the language. And the misuse of it has been not 
 only a treason to the word, but a treason to religion, 
 and to humanity. From the original and only true 
 meaning of it as expressing all that is bright, winsome 
 and lovely, it has, in ecclesiastical hands, come to 
 stand for all that is hard, narrow, terrifying, and 
 hideously sectarian. Ask a Scotchman, brought up on 
 the Westminster Catechism, what is meant by " the 
 doctrines of grace," and his mind goes back to decrees 
 of predestination, of election, of reprobation, of 
 final perseverance ; to a system of belief which makes 
 humanity the subject of a fate which, before they 
 were born, secured for a favoured number of them 
 an everlasting salvation, and condemned the rest to 
 a certain damnation. Ask the Catholic, Roman or 
 Anglican, what is meant by grace, and he tells 
 you of something which reaches you through a 
 
 223 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 rigidly protected and exclusive system of sacraments. 
 You are saved from wrath by baptism, by the 
 Communion, administered to you by a priest. The 
 priest is thus empowered by his ordination. This 
 ordination has become valid by being received at 
 the hands of a bishop, and the bishop's power is 
 derived from an unbroken apostolic succession. 
 Grace, in this view, is a something whose communi- 
 cation suggests a system of pipes, as though it were 
 Standard oil — the strict monopoly of a caste. On 
 all sides of the Church grace has been construed in 
 terms of exclusion, with a menace behind it, like a 
 flash of light on a thundercloud. As we think of the 
 way in which this high-born word has been mis- 
 handled, tossed about as the war-cry of theologic 
 controversy, mouthed as the cant of a vulgar religious 
 phraseology in a way which savours of Stiggins and 
 Chadband, we are reminded of the career of a 
 racehorse which, from the first position in the equine 
 world, has come down to the drawing of a mudcart, 
 and finally to an end in the knacker's yard. 
 
 Theology owes to this word a great reparation. And 
 this can only be given by a cleansing of it from all the 
 soilures that ignorance, narrowness and party passion 
 have brought upon it, and by a restoration of it to 
 its own original and noble meaning. We get it from 
 the Latin gratia, the French grace. And these are 
 translations of the Greek charts. When, in the New 
 Testament, the Apostle gives the solemn benediction, 
 *i The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you," 
 he uses this word charts. And what is charts ? It 
 stands, we say, in classic Greek, just for beauty, 
 beauty in all its forms. It is for one thing external 
 beauty, and that specially which is expressed in the 
 
 224 
 
Grace 
 
 human body. The Greeks had a worship of this 
 embodied beauty in the three graces, the Charites, 
 Aglaia, Euphrosyne, Thaha, the symbols of human 
 lovehness. From the body they transferred it to 
 the mind and soul. In Plato's " Phaedrus," Socrates 
 addresses a prayer to the gods : " Grant me," he says, 
 " beauty in the inward soul and may the outward and 
 inward man be at one." In the " Laches," grace is 
 conceived as a harmony, the soul's music. " And 
 such an one I deem to be the true musician, attuned 
 to a fairer harmony than that of the lyre, or any 
 pleasant instrument of music." And the way in 
 which this grace of beauty mounts from the lower 
 to the higher, from the external to the innermost 
 and noblest expression, is given us in that magnificent 
 passage of the ** Symposium," where love, as the 
 following of the true beauty, passes from stage to 
 stage till it reaches it divinest height. " And the 
 true order of going or being led by the things of 
 love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along 
 which he mounts upwards, for the sake of that other 
 .beauty . . . passing from fair forms to fair 
 actions, and from fair actions to fair ideas, until 
 from fair ideas he arrives at the idea of absolute 
 beauty, and at last knows what the essence of 
 beauty is." 
 
 This, then, was the Greek conception of grace. 
 It was beauty, showing itself in loveliness of form, 
 reaching its highest physical ideal in the human form, 
 and moulded there, in its truest examples, by an 
 inner nobleness of soul. And this beauty was divine ; 
 in its essence it was life's highest expression ; its true 
 home was the nature and beauty of God. Has 
 religion bettered it ? Grace is the beauty of God ; 
 
 225 
 
 16 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 the beauty of His character. And its action upon us 
 is the outgoing of that beauty. Grace in ourselves, 
 reHgious grace, is just the reflection of that beauty 
 in our own heart and life. And if we take our doctrine 
 of grace from the New Testament, instead of from 
 the systems into which its words have been tortured, 
 we shall find nothing there that is contrary to this, 
 its first high meaning. It is there the nature of God, 
 flowing out upon us, freely giving itself, winning us 
 by the exhibition of its beauty, and producing in us, 
 so far as we receive it, a growing approximation to 
 its own perfectness. 
 
 How is it that we have got this fatal schism 
 between the idea of grace of form, of motion, of the 
 amenities of life ; the grace we find in a flower, in 
 a rhythmic movement, in the courtesy of gentilesse ; 
 and the grace we read of in theologic manuals ? 
 Passing from one to the other we seem to have gone 
 to a new, a foreign region ; a region where every 
 meaning of the one is reversed in the other. Should 
 there be this schism ? The more we look at the 
 nature of things, as we find them in the actuality 
 of life, the more we are convinced of the unnatural- 
 ness, of the artificiality, that has caused this 
 separation. God does not work in different ways 
 in different spheres. His nature, one and the same 
 in itself, is one and the same in all the regions where 
 His action is revealed. The grace of beauty we 
 find in a flower, the grace of free lavish giving we 
 discover in the sunshine, the grace of cleansing and 
 refreshing in the running stream ; the grace we find 
 here has no exclusivencss about it. It is, if we may 
 so say, democratic all through ; free to every one who 
 will see, who will use, who will enjoy. The flower 
 
 226 
 
Grace 
 
 gives its beauty, the sweetness of its perfume, to the 
 beggar child as to the throned prince. It gives it 
 perpetually as long as it is a flower. It can do no 
 other, because it is a flower. And all the operations 
 of nature are on the same footing. Gravitation treats 
 us all in one way, with no respect of persons. We 
 trust it, in building a house, in climbing a hill, in our 
 downsitting and in our uprising. If we insult it by 
 our neglect of its laws, we shall pay the penalty. 
 But its main operation is all for our security, for the 
 stability of the system in which we live and move. 
 
 This grace, this free giving in nature — God's action 
 in the world — is, however, we always find, while 
 free in itself, boundless in its generosity, in a certain 
 way conditioned. It comes as an appeal to our- 
 selves, an appeal we may reject. Its appeal is in the 
 sense of Bismarck's motto. Do ut des, " I give that 
 you may give." The value of the gift is conditioned 
 by the value in ourselves. For it to be of use to us 
 depends on our power and willingness of response. 
 It meets us half-way ; we have to come the other 
 half. Your flower has no beauty for a stone. Its 
 beauty is only for those who can perceive beauty. 
 The treasures of the earth, of its forests, its harvests, 
 its mines, come to us in a half-formed condition ; the 
 other half, which makes them available, which 
 transforms them into actual wealth, must be our 
 own contribution. The heavens do not rain baker's 
 loaves upon us. The mines do not present us with 
 minted sovereigns. Nature's grace is a call to work. 
 She first enriches our manhood and then calls upon 
 it to assert itself. 
 
 And here, in her appeal, and in the way man has 
 responded to it, comes in nature's doctrine of election, 
 
 227 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 that doctrine which theology has so profoundly 
 misjudged. Her elect are the men of higher endow- 
 ment, of a keener faculty of response, who have 
 seen further and deeper than their fellows into her 
 meaning, who first have learned her lesson. Thus it 
 is the poet, the artist, who has discovered the soul 
 of the flower ; the scientist who has caught the secret 
 of her movement, of her chemistry, her biology ; 
 the philosopher who has penetrated to the unity that 
 underlies her diversity ; the saint who has entered 
 into the grandeur of her moral and spiritual law. 
 Here, in the rise of her great souls, is her selection, 
 if you will, her fore-ordination. But observe there 
 is no exclusiveness, no preterition, no reprobation. 
 These elect are nowhere elected for themselves. 
 They are chosen as banders on of the good gifts to 
 their fellows. No man invents, discovers a thing 
 for his profit alone. He cannot do it if he would. 
 The laws of his own nature and of the world outside 
 him compel him to be a purveyor. His discovery 
 becomes at once the property of mankind. A 
 Newton, a Kepler, explore the heavens, and the new 
 light they draw thence enlightens the world. Watt 
 and Stephenson find the uses of steam as a force 
 generator, and all the continents are covered with 
 railways. Marconi wins the secret of wireless 
 telegraphy, and ships at sea are rescued by it from 
 the devouring fire and the engulfing wave. And 
 the saint, finding in his soul a new experience of God, 
 a glorious access of spiritual power, can keep no 
 movement of it to himself. He becomes to his 
 fellows a centre of warmth and hght ; the hungry 
 multitude rushes to feed upon the divine bread he 
 dispenses. 
 
 228 
 
Grace 
 
 Do we suppose that this rule, which obtains every- 
 where in time, takes on another aspect in eternity ? 
 God is the nature of things, and this is the nature 
 of things. And the grace that nature reveals is a 
 grace that is free to all, that embraces all in its 
 bounty, that gives more largely to some that they 
 may pass on the glorious boon, and in so doing add 
 immeasurably to the stock of the common human 
 fellowship, to its gratitude, its personal devotion, 
 its sense of the blessedness of giving and receiving. 
 This is nature's theology, something different from 
 that of the schools. Diderot said that superstition 
 has been a greater enemy to God than atheism. And 
 when we think of the way in which ecclesiasticism 
 has misrepresented His way of things — has made 
 His grace an affair of cliques and castes, has shut it 
 up into an iron mechanism, has interpreted it as an 
 arbitrary choice of some and the wholesale damnation 
 of others, we are inclined to admit the encyclopaedist's 
 contention. We may learn more of God from a 
 flower than from whole libraries of this kind of 
 theology. 
 
 But, it may be asked, is there not another, a 
 darker side to all this ? What of the evil in the 
 world, what of man's selfishness and sin ? God 
 forbid we should minimise that, or paint it in any 
 colours than its own. We know the soundings that 
 have been made into the deeps of that mystery; 
 what theology has to say, what evolution has to 
 say. Let each take his own view of that matter. 
 We are not here discussing it. We are not discussing 
 causes, but something else. What we want now to 
 point out is that, just as in those other aspects of 
 life we have been dealing with, so in this of evil and 
 
 229 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 of sin, we have a revelation in things, in nature, 
 which we may take as the surest revelation of the 
 Personality behind them. Is there not a grace of 
 nature here, which may be taken as the grace of God ? 
 Nature in the presence of man's evil knows no 
 revenges, harbours no ill-will. How does she deal 
 with his blindness, his stupidity ? For ages her great 
 truths have lain before him, waiting for recognition ; 
 truths shown in the rocks, in the elements, in plant 
 and animal life, in man's own history. For ages he 
 passes them by ; having eyes and seeing not, and ears 
 and hearing not. Does she complain ; dismiss the 
 scholar as a dunce ? She goes on in her own way, 
 just patiently day by day setting the lesson again 
 before his eyes, until at last he sees. One can then 
 almost hear her whisper : *' Ah ! have you under- 
 stood me at last ? " And for man's folly and 
 wickedness she has no other way. Her sun rises 
 on the just and the unjust ; her rains descend not only 
 on the good but on the unthankful and the evil. 
 And in proportion as men catch this secret and 
 become themselves good, they act in precisely the 
 same way towards ungoodness. Towards selfishness, 
 ingratitude, the deepest and darkest sins, they have 
 no other way of action than that of being good and 
 doing good. To be or do anything else than that 
 would be to deny their own nature. And they 
 know there is no way of winning to goodness but by 
 goodness. It is a law in all spaces in the universe, 
 in all ages of its eternity. And till God changes 
 His nature there is and can be no other way for 
 Him in His dealing with sinners. 
 
 When we have restored this word to its true and 
 pristine meaning ; when we have carried that 
 
 30 
 
Grace 
 
 meaning into our personal experience ; in a word, 
 when we have tasted and felt the beauty of 
 God, we shall find here a faith that will carry 
 us the whole length of the journey. We shall 
 put this interpretation upon the whole range of 
 circumstance, of the things that happen to us. It 
 will be our explanation of suffering ; of the sorrows 
 that at times tear our hearts. It is the business 
 of goodness to suffer ; we could not reach the 
 eternal beauty — no, nor express it — without suffering. 
 In that dark recess are hid treasures of the spirit 
 not otherwise to be come at. Christ would not have 
 been Christ without it ; it was His Cross that showed 
 us God's heart. And it is precisely when we feel 
 most desolate and forsaken that He is nearest to us. 
 The pang we feel has hidden in it His most intimate 
 message. 
 
 The survey we have made, if it is not a mistaken 
 one, shows us how all the shades of meaning to which 
 this word, in its passage through time, has linked 
 itself, point to one and the same thing. Grace, 
 at its fountain-head, is the beauty of God, the 
 beauty of His character. Grace in us, so far as it 
 shows there, is the reflection of that beauty, its 
 implantation and growth in us. And the beauty 
 spreads into all the spheres of Hfe. There are no 
 really fine manners that do not come from a beautiful 
 soul. The peasant who has that is a truer gentleman 
 than the man who, without it, has all the pohsh 
 of the schools. This inner beauty flows into the 
 face, chisels its features into refinement, gives 
 melody to the voice. Have you noticed how a deed 
 of heroism has the same effect on you as the glory 
 of a sunset, or a strain of noble music ? What is 
 
 - 231 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 the glow of feeling there, common to them all, but a 
 revelation of their unity of origin ? It will be the 
 sense of this unity that, in the coming years, will 
 bring art, music, science, industry, and the whole 
 conduct of life into one great synthesis. It will be 
 this unity that will build for us beautiful cities, that 
 will create beautiful bodies for beautiful souls ; that 
 will subdue coarseness to refinement ; that will 
 raise the common action of humanity from its present 
 discords and dissonances into its predestined 
 harmony. With all this men will reach to new 
 perceptions of beauty ; a finer vision will disclose finer 
 forms of it. In the end, man will be satisfied with 
 nothing less than its highest form. From all the 
 infinite charms of earth, the soul, athirst for per- 
 fection, will still lift its eyes to the heavens ; will 
 whisper its aspiration : " Whom have I in heaven 
 but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire 
 beside Thee ! " For it perceives that the one 
 beauty that alone can satisfy it is the beauty of 
 hohness — the grace, the beauty of God. 
 
 232 
 
XXIII 
 
 OUR POSSESSIONS 
 
 We are all possessors. The sense of ownership 
 might easily be added to the original five. To each 
 one of us, as we have passed through life, there has 
 floated up, out of the sum of things, a certain number 
 of objects, more or less tangible, that have entered 
 into our intimate selves, that are nearer to us than 
 to anybody else, and which we call our own. Ever 
 since there were two men in the world there has been 
 the difference — an acute one — between meum and 
 tuum. The primitive man who had found for 
 himself a comfortable cave, felt it when the next 
 man came along and looked in. But the huge 
 question has since arisen, and has been agitating the 
 world ever since, as to what sort of things we should 
 possess, and how we should possess them. There 
 has been in this field every conceivable kind of 
 experiment. Our own age has produced the funniest 
 experiments of all. It has produced the multi- 
 millionaire, who, at the age of sixty or seventy, when 
 his days are visibly numbered, goes on feverishly 
 piling up his millions. At the end of his journey 
 he is carrying all this luggage ! His possessions 
 mean that he, with perhaps five years to live, has 
 food resources enough to secure him four meals a 
 day for thousands of years ; that he can buy 
 thousands of suits of clothes he can never wear, 
 
 233 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 thousands of chairs he can never sit on, and thousands 
 of beds he can never lie on. He can cover the country 
 with houses and palaces, and yet can only occupy 
 some six feet of space in a corner of one of them. 
 And yet with all these impossibles around him; with 
 the nature of things openly laughing at him, he 
 strives after ever more impossibles; his one object 
 apparently being to make this joke against him the 
 more palpable, the more risible. It does seem rather 
 absurd I 
 
 In the same world, breathing the same air, and 
 assuredly with a not less equipment of brains, have 
 been people whose ideas of possession were so vastly 
 different. They had as vivid a sense of ownership as 
 these others and, moreover, had quite as many 
 things to own ; only they were not the same things, 
 nor held in the same way. How large the question 
 is, is shown by this largeness of difference. Diogenes 
 in his tub, accosted by Alexander, the biggest owner 
 of the millionaire sort then extant, and asked by 
 him how he could oblige him, replies, " By getting 
 out of my sunshine ! " Which of the two, we ask, 
 was the saner, the philosopher or the conqueror ; 
 which of them was the true possessor ? Or were 
 they both a Httle mad ? Certainly the world's 
 biggest men, so far, have inclined to the Diogenes 
 side of the argument. One wonders what was 
 possible to St. Paul, had he gone into politics, or 
 business, or high finance ? He had about as fine a 
 brain and as magnificent a will as has ever appeared 
 in this world. But the idea of accumulation for 
 its own sake seems never to have entered his head. 
 John Wesley was one of the most commanding 
 figures of the eighteenth century. Macaulay said of 
 
 234 
 
Our Possessions 
 
 him that he had the administrative qualities of a 
 RicheHeu. What he left behind him in personal 
 property was a Bible, some oddments of furniture, 
 and a few silver spoons. In our day practical 
 chemistry, in the hands of first-class minds, is one of 
 the surest ways to enormous wealth. Faraday, 
 with his £300 a year at the Royal Institution, when 
 invited to enter on this lucrative road, replied that 
 he could not afford to spend time in money-making. 
 And there is another story in history of a wealthy 
 young man meeting another young man who had 
 not a roof of his own to put his head under. But 
 the rich man bowed before the poor one, sought 
 direction of him, knowing all the time what poverty 
 his own riches were, as compared with the possessions 
 of this other ! 
 
 Here, then, amongst eminently capable men, 
 on both sides men of the highest ability, amongst 
 them the very chiefs of our race, are grave and 
 singular differences. On the one side the modern 
 men who have made and are making millions. On 
 the other side, numbering also some moderns among 
 them, are these others, equally eager about posses- 
 sions and counting themselves rich in them, who have 
 such other, such quite contrary notions ! And note 
 that the difference here is not, as a hasty judgment 
 might suppose, one between visible and invisible 
 holdings. The one side, not less than the other, 
 beheves in the visible. The difference Hes rather 
 in their relation to it, and in what hes behind it, and 
 in their way of holding on to both. We have to-day 
 both ideals before us ; we have in addition the long 
 experience of the race to go upon ; all the growing 
 knowledge of the world and hfe which is coming to 
 
 235 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 us. In the light of these things we are called on to 
 take our own line, to make our own choice. 
 
 All men, including those of the most opposite 
 schools, are agreed as to the primary value, the 
 absolute necessity, in fact, of material possessions. 
 We all, saints and ascetics as well as millionaires, 
 must live before we can live well. We must eat and 
 drink, be clothed and housed, have our furniture, 
 our tools and working instruments. People in the 
 north, in the colder latitudes, need more of these 
 than the southerners, those for whom the sun does 
 so much. The northern races by this sheer necessity 
 have been driven into a larger acquisitiveness than 
 those easier circumstanced folk of the south and 
 east. They went for more because they needed 
 more. And their faculties in this direction grew 
 from a constant exercise. Transport the Pacific 
 islander, living where the sun is the one heating 
 apparatus, where a cocoanut feeds him and a loin 
 cloth clothes him, to the region of long winters and 
 keen frosts, and he will soon change his habits, and 
 with them some parts of his moral outlook. In 
 these later days the question of material possessions 
 has, from the sheer facts of the case, assumed an 
 aspect undreamt of in Palestine and the year i. 
 The world has become peopled with hundreds more 
 of hungry millions. We are awakening to the fact 
 that we have been using up our common possessions 
 in an altogether too lavish and ruinous way. We 
 are cutting down our forests, exhausting our soils, 
 burning up our coal. We can empty a coal bed 
 in a few years ; has it occurred to us to ask how 
 long it would take to grow a new one ? We have 
 in other ways come closer to famine than most of 
 
 236 
 
Our Possessions 
 
 us are aware of. Through the manufacture from 
 the atmosphere of nitrates and nitrites by newly 
 discovered processes we have just staved off a very 
 menacing scarcity by the near exhaustion of the 
 nitre beds of ChiH. We are slowly waking up to 
 the necessity, if our millions are to go with full 
 stomachs, of a new treatment of the soil. Prince 
 Kropotkin, in his " Fields, Factories and Work- 
 shops," has shown us how we may stave off a food 
 famine by the new farming, a farming which experi- 
 ment has shown possible, and which, instead of 
 yielding six tons of grass on the acre, will yield from 
 fifty to a hundred tons of various vegetables on the 
 same space. In the future we shall live largely 
 on the earth's hitherto untapped resources, on those 
 secrets of fertility, of new forces which science has 
 yet to wring from nature's hidden reserves. In 
 all this there is no clash of the moralities, of the 
 life ideals. The earth is the human estate — the 
 only thing, so far as at present appears, it has to 
 live on. 
 
 These are ownership questions of the whole race, 
 in which we all have our share. But granting their 
 demand, and starting from them as common ground, 
 we have now to consider some of the problems, so 
 manifold, so intricate, which affect our position 
 and conduct as individuals. To begin with, what 
 do we, millionaires or wage-earners, really possess ? 
 How much can any of us really call our own ! The 
 question speedily resolves itself into this other : 
 " How much do we possess of what we possess ? " 
 Narrowly observed, the quantity seems to diminish 
 the more we look at it. If there is one thing we 
 seem to own, and be master of, it is our own bodies. 
 
 237 
 
Faith s Certainties 
 
 And yet our own bodies go on as if we — that is to 
 say, our own consciousness, our own will — were 
 not there, or at least, were of very small account. 
 The billions of cells which compose them carry on 
 their own life, are born, grow, die, wage, some of 
 them, their internecine wars, with smallest thought 
 of you and me. Have you anything to do with 
 the growth of your own hair ? Does your heart 
 or lung or cerebellum ever consult you as to how 
 it shall do its work ? Does sleep come to us of our 
 will or of its own ? Did you wake this morning 
 because you willed to, or because something else 
 willed to ? Does your will have any clearly discerned 
 hand in the process by which one thought succeeds 
 another, or by which thought emerges from the 
 hinterland of the sub-conscious ? Do you deter- 
 mine how long you are going to live, or when your 
 heart will close up and cease its beating ? The body 
 seems our nearest possession, and how little do we 
 seem to possess it ! 
 
 We come from that to our outside holdings. We 
 stood once with a landed proprietor on an elevated 
 position on his estate. Around us was a great 
 stretch of country, fields, moorlands with swelling 
 hills bounding the horizon. " It is something," 
 said our friend, with a laugh, " to look round on all 
 this, as far as your eye can see, and to feel that it 
 is all one's own ! " We could not repress the reply : 
 " When nature sketched out this outline, these 
 valleys and hills, millions of years ago, do you think 
 she had you particularly in mind ; or will you 
 be particularly in her account in the other milhons 
 of years that this is going to last ? " This kind of 
 ownership, the most coveted so far amongst men, 
 
 238 
 
Our Possessions 
 
 what is it ? An affair of inheritance or purchase, 
 which, under present conditions, gives a man the 
 power to say " Mine," to put up notice boards, to 
 exclude his fellows, to make changes and alterations, 
 to create solitudes if he so wills, to coerce to a more 
 or less degree the people who rent or till the soil 
 under him. He can lord it for a while in this fashion. 
 Then he passes ; and the hills and the fields continue, 
 quite unconscious of his coming and his going. And 
 all the time of his possession, his ownership, reduced 
 to the actual fact, what is it — his sensations about 
 these things ; his thoughts about them ? And often 
 enough these have been of a very poor, meagre, 
 unwholesome sort, of no good to himself or any- 
 body else. They have been often enough a mere 
 lust of power, a love of mean tyrannies, hurtful to 
 society ; and which society, coming rapidly to a 
 sense of its own earlier rights here, will soon sweep 
 away. 
 
 It is, after all, a superficial ownership, and even 
 under the present constitution of things there are 
 such deeper ones going. " I possess the estate," 
 says the man of the purse. " And I possess the 
 landscape," says the poet. He, and the artist with 
 him, own its beauty, draw its revenue of high 
 raptures and noble inspirations, in a degree 
 impossible to the mere purse. Compare the owning 
 of a rare edition of Homer by a wealthy but ignorant 
 book collector, with that of the scholar who knows 
 it by heart. We enter into this, the truest ownership, 
 by the love and labour of the mind. We take away 
 from earth's treasures according to what we bring 
 to them. A fresh, beautiful soul possessing nothing 
 in the capitalist sense, will take out of the earth, on 
 
 239 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 any summer morning, things which the financial 
 magnate never stumbles on. He will see worms 
 where the other will pick up diamonds. Here is old 
 Traherne, the penniless parson of the seventeenth 
 century, with not an acre of his own, and yet enjoying 
 the earth in this fashion : — 
 
 Long time before 
 I in my mother's womb was born, 
 A God, preparing, did this glorious store 
 The world for me adorne. 
 Into this Eden, so divine and fair, 
 So wide and bright, I come. His son and heir. 
 
 Renan felt like that, when, associating himself with 
 Francis of Assisi, with no invested capital in the 
 earth, he reaHsed, with the saint, that he " enjoyed 
 the usufruct of the whole, having nothing and yet 
 possessing all things." And there are others of us, 
 thank God, to-day, who are possessors of this wealth, 
 and would not part with it for any other. 
 
 All possession, when you dig down to its final form, 
 is an innermost thing, an affair of our thought and 
 feeling. It is strange that, amid all the hurry of 
 getting, men have so Httle considered that fact. If 
 they had, they would have worked harder than they 
 have for the best sort. It is here where the Pauls, 
 the Wesleys, the Faradays, following that Other we 
 spoke of, have proved their sanity. Take the 
 different sorts of possession, looked at from this 
 inner side. On the one hand, here is the million 
 maker, who has won his havings by relentless 
 methods, trampling his way over the bodies of 
 weaker men, broken by his keener intellect, his 
 ruthless will. What has he gained ? Numberless 
 things to look at of which he soon tires ; all those 
 
 240 
 
Our Possessions 
 
 possibilities we mentioned, of eating and drinking, 
 and clothing and housing, of which he can avail 
 himself so little — unless he over-eats and over-drinks, 
 for which nature will speedily send in her bill of costs. 
 " But he has power! " And what is that as an 
 inward possession ? What are these victories 
 yielding him for his private thoughts ? Is his 
 knowledge of what those men he has defeated and 
 crushed feel towards him : their envy, their hatred, 
 their thought of revenge, their mere despair, a 
 wholesome, satisfying food for the mind ? Is the 
 knowledge of other men's envy a good thing to live 
 on ? Is the flattery which waits on success, the 
 insincerity of which an acute intellect like this cannot 
 help penetrating, a wholesome food ? Is this sort 
 of inner revenue worth what has been paid for it ? 
 On a mere calculation of profit and loss, does the 
 account come out on the right side ? The fact that 
 nature has taken care that it comes out on the wrong 
 side, remains, if every other proof were lacking, the 
 surest evidence that we are in quite another sort 
 of universe, under quite another order of govern- 
 ment from that which the materialist tries to believe 
 in. And the evidence for that becomes irresistible 
 when we look into those possessions which the other, 
 the Christ order of life, brings with it. Let a man 
 in that spirit give himself to duty, devote his powers 
 to the service of others, not for dominion over them, 
 but as a helper of their joy; going among them, like 
 his Lord, " as one that serveth." He, too. as Hfe 
 goes on, is accumulating his possessions. He finds 
 them in the glad faces that he meets ; in the know- 
 ledge that his influence is everywhere an uphfting, 
 sorrow-Hghtening influence. And with this there 
 
 241 
 
 16 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 has been going on in him a process of refining, of the 
 enriching of his faculties, a culture which fills him 
 with a sense of all that is beautiful, of all that is holy, 
 a sense which makes him sure of the spiritual and 
 sure of God. 
 
 At present this view of things seems under a cloud. 
 The capitahst is thought more of than the spiritual 
 leader. The voices of the great ones of the past 
 who have stood for the inner values are drowned 
 under the cHnk of dollars. M. Faguet, the eminent 
 French critic, is of opinion that under the existing 
 reign of capitalism the world, so rich in its material 
 treasures, in its scientific triumphs, is losing far 
 more than it has gained — is on the way to lose all the 
 most precious treasures of the spirit ; its religion, 
 its truest art, its deepest thought. We cannot think 
 so. This frenzied rush for the vulgarities of life 
 will not last. The sanity of the human intellect 
 must, in the end, reassert itself. Man cannot 
 permanently feed on ashes, or on the bread that 
 perisheth. The prodigal will tire of his swine 
 trough. His finer part will awake ; will know 
 that this is not his rest ; and from that far country, 
 and from those ignoble surroundings, will strike 
 again the track that leads homeward. 
 
 242 
 
XXIV 
 THE SECRET OF REST 
 
 Is there room anywhere in our crowded, fevered 
 Hfe, for such a thing as rest ? It is worth talking 
 about, even if we can get no further. There are 
 times when it seems the most beautiful thing in the 
 world, if only we could reach it. " Quiet resting- 
 places," " peace," " rest," " quiet," " holy stillness," 
 what lovely words are these ; how, at times, they fall 
 upon the soul as melodies from heaven ! How 
 often have we echoed the Psalmist's cry, " Oh, that 
 I had wings like a dove ! for then would I fly away 
 and be at rest." Only we ask, almost despairingly, 
 ''Would the wings of a dove, how far soever they 
 might fly, land us where rest is ? " Lecky tells of 
 a German graveyard where he found a tomb with 
 this inscription : " I will arise, O Christ, when Thou 
 callest me ; but, oh, let me rest awhile, for I am 
 very weary ! " Have we not sometimes felt like 
 that ? We meditate at times, like Hervey, among 
 the tombs, and feel the peace of them. What once 
 fevered brows, hearts torn with cares and troubles, 
 he there ! But the fight is over ; the troubles 
 somehow adjusted themselves. The faces of these 
 dead lost all their wrinkles when the last moment 
 came. It was as if nature said, in that final touch 
 of hers : " Come, you are not hurt, after all ! " 
 
 But we are alive. Is there any rest for us ? It 
 is certainly not always to be found where it is 
 
 243 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 commonly sought. We hear to-day of " rest cures," 
 where they put you to bed, and forbid you letters 
 and the newspaper, and feed you up like the Strass- 
 burg geese for the pate de foie gras. We will not 
 disparage the regime, but are they all at peace, 
 think you, who are undergoing it ? The country 
 village, remote from trains, far from the madding 
 crowd, where nothing happens, is often pictured 
 for us as a blessed antithesis from the rush of cities. 
 And you shall find there, often enough, the most 
 restless, discontented souls the land contains. And 
 there are sorts of rest we are none of us eager for. 
 Do we want the peace of that Oxford professor, who 
 
 Sought refuge from the brute 
 
 In the blessed Absolute ! 
 
 It does not seem very satisfying. We know, 
 too, of what has been called " the peace of defeat," 
 the apathy of the man who has tried and failed ; 
 who says, * ' I have done my best, and I can do no more. ' ' 
 We have even looked wonderingly at the alligators 
 at the Zoo, who lie there, hour after hour, without 
 sign or sound or motion. It seems, at best, existence 
 on rather a low scale. Then there is that sluggishness 
 of which old Pycroft speaks ; of people " who are less 
 likely to go wrong, because there is no go in them " ; 
 and we do not feel drawn to it. The rest, too, of 
 thinkers who have reached " the centre of indiffer- 
 ence " ; who, as Leslie Stephen says, " have reached 
 a point when, as at the pole, the compass points 
 indifferently to every quarter." That also has 
 little attraction for us. Nor that even of so many 
 modern Catholics who have given up thinking for 
 themselves as too dangerous, and instead acquiesce 
 in an outside and a mediaeval thinking. 
 
 244 
 
The Secret of Rest 
 
 Where, then, is rest to be found, the rest we are 
 seeking after ? We are apt to draw our images here 
 from physical conditions. But they are enormously 
 delusive. You recline in your easy chair, with your 
 feet on the fender ; or are stretched comfortably in 
 your bed at night, and apparently have reached the 
 thing as near as may be. And yet at that moment 
 you are careering round with the earth in its 
 prodigious spin on its axis ; are racing with it on its 
 many millioned journey round its orbit ; and again 
 are joining in that tremendous voyage through space 
 in which it is accompanying the sun in its move 
 towards some unknown bourne of the heavens. It 
 is enough to keep one awake to think of it. We think 
 of the majestic rest of a mountain ; of Mont Blanc 
 slumbering there through the centuries while the 
 generations of men come and go at its feet. But 
 Mont Blanc is never at rest. On its surface the 
 freezing ice is perpetually cracking its rocks ; working 
 ruin at its summit. And did you ever think of the 
 sort of rest it has down at the base ? Every moment 
 those broad foundations carry and bear the thrust 
 of the hundreds of millions of tons that are reared 
 upon them. It is the rest of a giant who bears, 
 without respite, a world on his shoulders. And then 
 the atoms of which it is composed. The latest 
 investigations show us the atom, in the words of 
 a modern scientist, as a kind of " planetary system, 
 consisting of a nucleus and an immense host of 
 particles or electrons revolving round it at vast 
 speed." The visible universe is clearly the wrong 
 place to go for the rest of quiescence. As Herbert 
 Spencer, in one of his latest works, puts it : " The 
 conception to which the exploration of nature 
 
 245 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 everywhere tends is much less that of a universe 
 of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere 
 ahve." '* Panta rei " (everything in flux) said old 
 Heraclitus. " Keep moving," seems the cosmic 
 order. 
 
 If our rest is not there, where then ? It is plainly, 
 if anywhere, to be found within, in a condition of the 
 soul. And we doubt if the thing, as realised, can be 
 put into words. It requires an instrument more 
 delicate, less illusive, than language. The most we 
 can do is to circle round it, in illustrations and 
 approximations. And the best of us can hardly 
 speak of it as a permanent possession. We get it, 
 and lose it, and light on it again. But there is a 
 secret of it, or rather secrets, which we ought to know 
 of. That man is nearest it who finds himself most 
 at home in the universe, in harmony with life and with 
 all its laws. One likes to have a home of one's own, 
 but the domestic hearth is by no means always — in 
 these days less than ever — a rest producer. On the 
 other hand, there have been men whose condition 
 could be described almost, in Homer's words, as 
 " aphretor, athemistos, anestios" (without kin, without 
 the law, without a hearth) ; men prescribed, with 
 no certain dwelling place, far from family and from 
 friends, hunted and persecuted, adrift on the world's 
 highway, pushed on to a bourne they could not see, 
 who, nevertheless, in their wanderings have found 
 themselves intensely at home ; who in the midst of 
 incessant conflicts have found their centre of peace. 
 It is, of course, a secret of faith, a spiritual achieve- 
 ment. But do not let us suppose that it has been 
 confined to any one faith. Confucius, surely, was 
 near it when he said : " With coarse rice to eat, with 
 
 246 
 
The Secret of Rest 
 
 water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow, I 
 still have joy in the midst of these things." And 
 that other pagan, Antoninus Pius, who, on the last 
 night of his life, when the tribune came for the watch- 
 word of the night, said : " Mquanimitas." Socrates, 
 too, calmly discoursing of the soul before drinking 
 the fatal hemlock, is of the order ; the order of those 
 children of the spirit, who, outside our own com- 
 munions, belonged to the same kingdom ; who 
 penetrated the same mystery, taught of the same 
 Eternal Word. 
 
 It is beautiful to notice how, apart from the inward 
 and spiritual teaching, nature, in her order, her 
 arrangements, her adaptations, strives to open to us 
 this secret. It is there in her divine ordinance of 
 work. To a wholesomely constituted mind, there is 
 never a more complete sense of rest than when one is 
 in the fulness of activity. The picture which George 
 Eliot draws of Adam Bede, with his feet in dry 
 shavings, his window open to the green fields, 
 singing his Methodist hymn as he drives his plane, 
 is the picture of a soul at rest — at rest in toil. The 
 worker here is like a great fly-wheel, which, with all 
 its whirl of movement at the circumference, has a 
 centre of complete repose. And nature's adaptations, 
 her laws of use and wont, work to the same result. 
 The young medical student who faints over the 
 first operation he witnesses, finds afterwards the 
 artist's joy in the skilled use of knife and scalpel. In 
 the moment of great catastrophes, too, nature comes 
 in with her anodynes. Whymper has recounted how, 
 after his slip on the Matterhorn, when he expected 
 each moment to be his last, he found himself calmly 
 guessing as to how many more bumps would finish 
 
 247 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 him. A correspondent of ours, whose home in South 
 America had been wrecked by an earthquake, and 
 himself and his family flung out for the night on the 
 mountain side, averred that he had never in his life 
 had more peaceful, restful thoughts, a more vivid 
 sense of God's protecting nearness than in the watches 
 of that night. Men in prison, with the scaffold 
 waiting for them in the morning, have slept soundly. 
 Between them and the fact before them their soul 
 had found its accord ; often a completer accord than 
 they had ever known before. If we could interrogate 
 the minds of men faced by life's grimmest adventures, 
 we should find a vast testimony to the friendliness 
 they found there. 
 
 The inward peace of the instructed soul is, one may 
 say, never one of inertia, of the absence of burdens, 
 of difficulties. It is rather that of the mountain 
 which placidly bears its load ; of the keystone of the 
 arch, which rests in its place under the thrust of 
 opposing forces. Equilibrium, indeed, which is, 
 in the material world, a balance of forces, follows, 
 it would seem, a similar law in the mental and moral 
 region. Thus, our health is a balance between the 
 income and the outflow of energy. They are 
 opposites, and were either to cease their interplay, 
 we should speedily be on the wrong side. And if we 
 are taking life sanely, we shall be learning to educate 
 the will to maintain a similar balance. When external 
 circumstances are pressing us hardly, we bring up, as 
 against them, our reserves of the internal. Well 
 for us if they are strong and in good order ! You 
 have had heavy losses on the market ; on that side 
 you are suddenly poorer. How fine, how strengthen- 
 ing it is, in such an hour, to remember all you have 
 
 248 
 
The Secret of Rest 
 
 left, and especially what is left of life's true wealth ! 
 Are you firmly planted in that region ? It is the 
 spiritualisation of your attitude to nature and the 
 world. Have you entered fully, for instance, into 
 her laws of riches and poverty ? They are quite 
 independent of the market. There is a minor one 
 worth noticing, a time law. Her year by its mere 
 procession fills us and empties us. It is her calendar 
 of vicissitudes. In November and December we are 
 poor. Like the trees we have been stripped and 
 bared. We are nipped in light and sunshine, in 
 warmth and colour. At the shortest day we have 
 reached our nadir. But then, with our fortunes at 
 the lowest, our pockets begin to fill. We have 
 touched bottom and find ourselves on the upgrade. 
 January is hopeful ; February is glorious with, 
 promise. Spring comes and trade is flourishing all 
 round. New life, new hopes, new energies every- 
 where without us and within us. In the summer 
 we are millionaires. Autumn overflows, but with 
 signs that the boom is slackening. We must 
 economise. We are once more facing the dark. 
 But the dark has ceased to frighten us, for we know 
 its range and term, and the glories that are to follow. 
 This is a profit and loss experience which comes to all 
 of us, and is more real than anything on the Stock 
 Exchange. It is nature's own comment on our 
 rush for mere money gains ; a comment which has 
 some sarcasm in it ! 'Tis an elementary lesson, 
 but the man who has understood even this has won 
 a great freedom. He can weigh his spring and his 
 summer against all the adversities which may happen 
 in them, and be sure of his balance. 
 
 We win our rest, we say, by the balancing of 
 
 249 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 opposites. In the illustration just given, we have 
 the opposition between artificial wealth and the 
 real wealth — nature's wealth. But the law holds 
 everywhere. So much of our unrest comes from our 
 social collisions. People quarrel, and are miserable 
 in their quarrels. Join two fractious humours and 
 you have a conflagration. But you may live happy 
 with the hottest tempered companion if you have 
 become yourself versed in that sweetest of 
 oppositions — the spirit of peace. We remember a 
 conversation with a working man who had an 
 excellent wife, who had, however, some fire in her 
 composition. They got on famously. Asked for 
 his recipe, his reply was : " When missus is up, I 
 just keep on saying nowt ! " He was a happy man. 
 The noblest of all oppositions to a frowning world — 
 the all conquering one — is the spirit of faith. Bring 
 it to bear on all the dread possibilities of the future, 
 and it will keep you in good cheer. It is a good 
 saying of Edgar Quinet, born of much trying 
 experience, " The unknown very often saves us. 
 It is probable that what one fears will not happen, 
 and that we find blessings we never thought of." 
 But that is only a fragment of that vaster faith 
 which saintly souls have reached, souls that have 
 penetrated life to its centre and found God there. 
 Has any finer prescription for inner rest been given 
 than this ? It is from the Imitatio, " When a man 
 Cometh to that estate that he seeketh not his comfort 
 from any creature, then first doth God begin to be 
 altogether sweet to him. Then shall he be con- 
 tented with whatsoever doth befall him in this 
 world. Then shall he neither rejoice in great 
 matters, nor be sorrowful in small, but entirely 
 
 250 
 
The Secret of Rest 
 
 and confidently committeth himself to God, who is 
 unto him all in all." 
 
 Assuredly there is the secret and the centre of 
 rest. At home with God, we are at home in His 
 world, in His universe. No part in it, no realities 
 of it, will be to us strange or terrifying. Under all 
 circumstances we shall discern His laws, which are 
 His holy will. And they are all our friends. This 
 central rest, which He invites us to, is the ground 
 and condition of all fine achievement. We are never 
 at our best if we permit fear or ignoble depression to 
 drain away our force. We have really none to spare 
 in that direction. Goethe has a true saying here. 
 Speaking of the story of Christ's walking on the 
 water and of Peter's failure there, he says : "It 
 expresses the noble doctrine that man, through faith 
 and hearty courage, will come off victor in the most 
 difficult enterprises ; while he may be ruined by the 
 least paroxysm of doubt." St. Paul had this secret. 
 He wrought out his wonderful apostolate because he 
 had " learned in whatsoever state he was therewith to 
 be content." Why not ? He was full of the Divine 
 presence, and his universe was full of it too. The 
 wilderness he found there, the prisons, the hungers 
 and thirsts, the bloody death at the end, could not 
 hide from him, or dim the glorious vision. When 
 that fight shines on us and in us, we shall meet 
 whatever befalls as cheerily as he. 
 
 251 
 
XXV 
 
 THE CURE OF SOULS 
 
 It is an ecclesiastical phrase, half Latin, meaning, 
 of course, in modern English, " the care of souls." 
 Caring may be said to involve curing ; but it goes a 
 great deal further. There has, perhaps, been too 
 much soul " curing " and too little caring ; too 
 much drugging and too little feeding. We are 
 reminded here of Mrs. Poyser's famous dictum 
 concerning the two clergymen she had sat under. 
 " Mr. Irvine was like a good meal o' victual, you 
 were the better for him without thinking on it ; 
 and Mr. Ryde was like a dose of physic, he gripped 
 you and worrited you, and, after all, he left you 
 much the same." Bishop Creighton seems to have 
 had the same idea in that terrible witticism which 
 he perpetrated at the expense of his ritualistic clergy. 
 In an interview about incense, one of them said, 
 ** But, my lord, you must remember we have a cure 
 of souls." To which he replied, " And you think 
 that souls, like herrings, cannot be cured without 
 smoke ? " 
 
 Our readers, we fear, will accuse us of tumbhng 
 into a great theme in a rather haphazard and 
 irreverent way. Assuredly it is a great theme, 
 worthy of all our seriousness. That the care of 
 
 252 
 
The Cure of Souls 
 
 souls should, amongst practically all sections of the 
 human race, have been made a special vocation, for 
 which men, withdrawn from all other industries, 
 specially equipped, prepared by long training, and 
 supposed to be possessed of more than ordinary 
 gift and character, should devote their whole hfe, 
 maintained meanwhile by the labours and offerings 
 of their fellows, is, when one comes to think of it, 
 a wonderful and deeply suggestive thing. That there 
 should be men gaining their living by looking after 
 our bodies — seeing what ailing bodies they are — is 
 not in itself remarkable. But that every nation and 
 every age should have had its professional soul 
 carers, fed and housed at the general expense, this in 
 itself is surely noteworthy. Whether we think of 
 the Pope in Rome, living in a palace of some four 
 thousand rooms, and with the revenues of a world 
 flowing daily into its exchequer ; or of those weavers 
 in the " Auld Licht Idylls," who straitened their 
 eating and added to their work-hours in order to 
 weave a maintenance for the minister of their choice, 
 the theme is sufficiently wonderful. That, in spite 
 of all that has been said to the contrary, all the 
 indictments against this view of things, all the 
 ridicule of it, man continues so obstinately religious ; 
 persists in the idea that he has a soul in him worth 
 looking after, in need of being cured, cared for, and 
 saved — have you not here a matter to ponder over ? 
 Yes, spite of all, the spiritual world presses upon 
 man. Let him sink himself deep as he may in 
 material things, it reaches him there. Let him cry 
 out at it, beheve its forms to be grotesque, impossible. 
 No matter. It may change its forms, but it is always 
 there; mysterious, fascinating, maddening some- 
 
 253 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 times in the bewilderment of its questions, but there 
 as his closest affinity, the formative force of his life. 
 The cure, or care of souls, considered as a separate 
 vocation, seems to have been as old as humanity 
 itself. In earliest times, amid savage races, it was 
 combined generally with the care of bodies. The 
 medicine-man, who stood as mediator between the 
 tribe and the unseen powers, had to protect it against 
 bodily as well as spiritual evils. His " magic " was 
 held to be good against liver complaints as well as 
 against the deeper troubles of the mind. He held 
 the place of those quack doctors of the eighteenth 
 century, on whom Lady Mary Montagu has this 
 biting comment : " The same money which, three 
 hundred years ago, was given for the health of the 
 soul is now given for the health of the body, and by 
 the same sort of people — women and half-witted 
 men." There is much of that going on to-day as 
 well as in the eighteenth century. Brahminism, 
 Buddhism, Mohammedanism, have all their separated 
 caste, their clergy. Christianity, from its beginning, 
 has had its ordained ministry. The greatest of the 
 apostles worked for his Hving ; but his noble pride 
 in that matter did not prevent him from maintaining 
 in principle that the Gospel minister should live of 
 the Gospel. Deeply interesting is it to watch the 
 evolution there. The Didache, that precious docu- 
 ment discovered in our own day, gives us a picture of 
 the ministry which, at the beginning of the second 
 century, had succeeded to the apostolic order. We 
 see there the evangelists or missioners, inspired 
 messengers of the faith, going from place to place, 
 forbidden to remain for other than the briefest space 
 at any one abode, under strictest rules as to receiving 
 
 254 
 
The Cure of Souls 
 
 money or gifts — a body of travelling preachers, 
 teaching, baptizing, administering the sacrament, a 
 veritable order of spirit and fire. But the churches 
 grew in number, and these wandering prophets died 
 off, with no successors. The work of preaching and 
 administering fell, consequently, on the local leaders. 
 The duties fell upon the leading elder, the 
 " episcopus " or " overseer." Originally a layman, 
 the ever increasing duties compel his definite separa- 
 tion to the work. So get we our Christian ministry, 
 more and more carefully ranked in position and 
 function. 
 
 It was a fateful development, full of good and full 
 of evil. The clerical order has produced some of 
 the noblest spirits that have ever blessed the world. 
 But the devil has taken a monstrous toll of it. So 
 vast are its temptations, and so queer a thing is 
 human nature. Wherever men climb the heights 
 we have a percentage of catastrophes. What the 
 temptations have been, and how men have succumbed 
 to them, is shown to us as early as Jerome's time, 
 where he describes the Roman clergy as " flattering 
 rich matrons, spending the day in calls at grand 
 houses, admiring a cushion or a handkerchief by way 
 of obtaining it as a present, walking abroad with hair 
 fashionably arranged and rings glittering on their 
 fingers ; also of monks worming their way into 
 favour with the rich, and pretending to fast, while 
 they repaid themselves with nightly revelry." Right 
 through the Middle Ages the game goes on, with 
 unspeakable stories of popes and prelates. In the 
 tenth century we read of priests offering mock 
 masses in which they sang obscene songs, and 
 possessing a blank infidelity, till at the Renaissance 
 
 255 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 the pitch is reached which Villari describes, " when 
 it seemed as though the Papacy desired to extirpate 
 all religious feeling from the mind of man, and to 
 overthrow for ever every basis of morality." 
 
 The Reformation wrought a sweeping change in 
 this order of things, a change, let us remember, not 
 less potent in Romanism than in Protestantism itself. 
 Yet in Protestantism, our own English brand of it, 
 what queer things stand in the clerical record ! We 
 read of a Bishop of Durham, in Charles the Second's 
 time, obtaining his see by a present of £5,000 to Nell 
 Gwynne. Closer to our own day we read, in the 
 Life of Bentham, of Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, 
 whom Bentham met at Bowood, the seat of Lord 
 Lansdowne. He says of the Bishop : " He did not 
 believe in revealed religion ; was very tolerant of 
 the judgment of others, &c. The revenue of the 
 bishopric was £7,200, with the patronage of forty- 
 three advowsons, none less than £250 a year. They 
 paid their curates £50, and were non-resident." A 
 singular picture this of a bishop who believed 
 nothing, and who administered a diocese of well-paid 
 clergy who did nothing ! 
 
 Certainly the cure of souls in this sense of it has 
 produced some queer curators. The clerical spirit 
 has often been dangerous to liberty. We remember 
 Gambetta's " le clericalisme : voild I'ennemi." And 
 yet on this soil what noble spirits have grown ! 
 Against the bad, the ignorant, the fanatical, what 
 flaming souls of light and holiness ; what interpreters 
 of God and man ; what martyr spirits, what 
 forwarders of all goodness ; what incarnations of all 
 that is beautiful in hving ! Against Jerome's 
 degenerates we put Ignatius and Polycarp ; we think 
 
 256 
 
The Cure of Souls 
 
 of an Origen, a Cyprian, a Basil, a Chrysostom. 
 Mediaevalism, side by side with its evil livers, offers 
 us an Alcuin, a Bernard ; gives us those Irish 
 priests who evangehsed Germany ; gives us St. 
 Francis, of whom Renan said that his Ufe made the 
 historic Jesus possible to him. Over against the 
 Renaissance priestly infidels stand a Luther, a 
 Melanchthon, a John Knox. What a treasury of 
 holy service has reformed Romanism offered in a 
 Fenelon, a Vincent de Paul, in a Vianney, that 
 marvellous priest of the French Second Empire. 
 Against an Anghcan Crewe and Bristol stand an 
 Anglican Ken, an Andrewes, a Jeremy Taylor. What 
 has been the worth to England of a Richard Baxter, 
 whose " Reformed Pastor," a book that ministers 
 should read every year, is the transcript of his own 
 pastoral life ; of a Wesley, with the world as his 
 parish ! What does America owe to Edwards, to 
 Beecher ! And in our modern civilisation is there, 
 with all its defects, any solider force for goodness 
 than the ministry of to-day ? The cure of souls, 
 taken as a vocation, may witness enormous changes 
 in the future. Tyrrell, after his long experience of the 
 priesthood, augurs " the final disappearance of the 
 priest class, and the adoption of a system of unpaid 
 ministration." Possibly. What we are sure of 
 is that, amid all changes, all progress of the future, 
 there will never be wanting elect souls, men with a 
 genius for hoHness as other men have a genius for 
 science or music, lives dedicated to the spiritual, to 
 whom the world will look for its best examples, its 
 highest inspiration. 
 
 But surely " the cure of souls " has a wider signifi- 
 cance than any that can be appHed to a select 
 
 257 
 
 17 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 separated class. Are we not all in the business ? 
 The fact is we none of us can do anything that does 
 not tell upon it. Never was there a time in which 
 there was such intimacy, such close interaction of 
 spirit as to-day. Never was the heart, the mind of 
 man so exposed, so open to the winds and waves of 
 varied influence. Our souls crowd each other. 
 The railway, the telegraph, the newspaper, the 
 incesssant movement of men, the rise and spread of 
 new ideas— all this is upon each of us a constant 
 pressure. Every man of us is a target for all the 
 rest. We cannot stir or speak but we set things 
 going that thrill through the world. We are all 
 at work on each other, curing or killing. To-day 
 the Government is a Church. Its schemes for 
 housing, for education, for the extirpation of poverty, 
 have a spiritual potency wider in effect than the 
 decrees of popes and councils. What a day will 
 that be when government shall be consciously a 
 religious act, and not a scramble for votes and oflice, 
 when our legislators shall beheve with Pym that 
 " a man's religion should show itself in having the 
 country well governed " ; when our militarists shall 
 believe, with Ruskin, that " we should bring up our 
 peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet 
 exercise ; organise, drill, maintain with pay, armies 
 of thinkers instead of armies of stabbers " ; when 
 Government shall make itself a veritable cure of souls, 
 and, as essential to that, a cure of bodies, a cure of 
 conditions ! 
 
 Certainly, in these directions, Government, the 
 common action of the community, the thinking and 
 acting of its best minds, can do much, how much we 
 are only just beginning to understand. But it cannot 
 
 258 
 
The Cure of Souls 
 
 do all, no, nor half. The real cure of souls rests finally 
 with ourselves. And nature, so far as we can see, 
 has put us here mainly for that business. Her 
 seeming indifference to our outward fortunes, the 
 sufferings, the deaths she inflicts ; her permission of 
 every kind of disaster, of misfortune, surely point 
 mainly to this. We are here to be knocked, battered, 
 bruised, into something greater than we are. We 
 are here to be made as radium is made. We begin, 
 as radium does, as a mere rock formation, a rock that 
 contains something precious. We are put through 
 process after process. The rock may cry out under 
 that cruel machinery, but it pounds and pounds away 
 until something emerges greater than rock, something 
 whose exquisite fineness and force of quality accom- 
 plish the miracles we see. Ah ! if those struggles 
 and sorrows we have had lift us to some new 
 quality of being ! For it is the soul's quality that 
 is everything. Operari sequilur esse, doing follows 
 being, is according to being. When we have reached 
 that better stage we are constantly doing things, 
 good things, by simply being what we are. A good 
 nature carries in it a glorious contagion of goodness. 
 It flows out upon others as a healing power. 
 
 One wonders whether this cure of the soul, as an 
 individual matter, is flourishing to-day ? Whether, 
 in our absorption in affairs, we are putting them to 
 their chief purpose, the distillation from them of the 
 higher spiritual products ? Is prayer going out of 
 fashion ? There is not so much of it as there used 
 to be. And what of self-examination, that steady, 
 clear eyed, unrelenting scrutiny of ourselves, as we 
 lie in our beds when the day is over ; the passing of 
 our life before the clear light of the ideal, to see how 
 
 259 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 our words, deeds and inmost thoughts look in that 
 penetrating radiance ? There is no getting on 
 without that. It should be as regular, as daily a 
 habit as that of washing and dressing. It is as 
 essential to the higher harmony as is the practice of 
 the artist on piano or violin. It is thus that we 
 keep up the fight with ourselves, that we detect and 
 take note of those new, silent growths within that, 
 unwatched, may become a hideous, enslaving power. 
 It is only thus that we can keep in tune with the 
 infinite. This does not mean a timid morbidity, as 
 of malades imaginaires with their finger perpetually 
 on the pulse. It is the gardener's care, who weeds his 
 plot, who keeps his soil ready for the choicest cultures. 
 This cure of the soul for ourselves will react 
 happily on our cure of the soul for others. Our 
 intercourse with our fellows will be everywhere a 
 wholesome healing intercourse. When we have 
 abolished the war with swords and bullets, another 
 abolition awaits us, that of the war with poisoned 
 swords, with those subtler, deadlier weapons of 
 offence, the weapons of haughtiness, of indifference, 
 of the mind's cruelty, with which untutored spirits 
 maim and sting and crush the dehcate natures around 
 them. Are there not sorrows enough, and wounds 
 enough, that we should fling arrows and bombs 
 into the bleeding mass, that we should make any 
 burdened brother sorrier for our presence beside 
 him ? We can gather no religious statistics on this 
 head ; but the growth of real religion has no surer 
 mark than the development among us of that care 
 of our own soul and of others which seeks our own 
 good everywhere in the good of our fellows. 
 
 The cure of souls. Where, after all and above all, 
 
 260 
 
The Cure of Souls 
 
 does that lie ? It is finally God's business, His chief 
 business with us. It is a hopeful, a mind-enlarging 
 study, to note how He manages it. When we spoke 
 of nature's seeming indifference to bodily suffering 
 we were thinking really of God's way here. Plainly, 
 He thinks more of the soul than of the body. He 
 pursues all ways and dares all risks in producing, 
 in developing that. Seneca, in his De Providentia, 
 argues that suffering is the divine method of 
 perfecting character. It is well to remember that 
 when we do suffer. And be sure that God's 
 cure of souls is no sectarian, no partisan 
 affair. The coming of Christ meant no bar 
 of exclusion to the non-Christian races. His 
 unsearchable riches were no declaration of the outer 
 world's bankruptcy. The early Fathers, Justin 
 Martyr, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, delighted to 
 think of Him as the " Light that hghteth every man 
 that cometh into the world." One finds the most 
 deeply Christian minds at one here. In that finest 
 fruit of mediaeval mysticism, the " Book of the 
 Nine Rocks," we read : " When God finds a good 
 Jew, a Mohammedan of pure life, He feels a thrill of 
 love and infinite pity for him, no matter in what part 
 of the earth he Hves, and God will find some way of 
 saving him unknown to us." And John Smyth. 
 that noble early Baptist, says in his " Long 
 Confession " : " As no man begetteth his child to 
 the gallows, and no potter maketh a pot to break 
 it ; so God does not predestinate any man to 
 destruction." Truly, in ways unknown to us, does 
 God care for souls ; in ways unknown to us, through 
 the vast processes of life and history, does His work 
 go on, do the signs of His spiritual kingdom visibly 
 
 261 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 appear. We, too, in our poor brief lives are His care. 
 Soon to pass away and be forgotten of our fellows, 
 we shall not be forgotten of Him. His infinity is 
 too great for such a lapse. The All-knowing is the 
 All-Loving. Here is a Love that will not let us go. 
 The Cross is the assurance of it. In that Divine 
 Passion and Death we learn what God's care means, 
 to what length of sacrifice it reache*s. 
 
 262 
 
XXVI 
 
 OF CHURCH UNITY 
 
 The question of the religious reunion of 
 Christendom, one of the greatest of all conceivable 
 questions, has come upon us in a new and startling way. 
 It has had no such opening for many generations. 
 The possibilities of it on the one side, and on the 
 other the supreme difficulties of it, have been blazed 
 in upon the world's notice as by a circle of flame. 
 On the one hand there is the new, powerful movement 
 towards it. It is a movement largely of the new 
 countries of Anglo-Saxondom. These peoples, remote 
 from the traditions, free from the shackles of the old 
 world, have turned upon the subject the initiative, 
 the untramelled force of their own fresh minds. 
 So we see in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, 
 all over the newer world of the Empire, a develop- 
 ment, proceeding with all the breathless rapidity 
 of our electric age, towards the fusion of Christian 
 bodies which hitherto have lived and grown apart. 
 Simultaneously with the work in the British Colonies 
 there has been going on a precisely similar activity 
 in that other great branch of the family in the 
 United States. We recently had in our midst an 
 important deputation, representative of the leading 
 Protestant Churches in the Republic, who were here 
 to discuss with the authorities of English Christianity 
 
 263 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 the possibility and terms of a common religious 
 fellowship. Out on the mission field, where the forces 
 of the Cross are engaged in the fight with heathenism, 
 and in the business of world evangelisation, the 
 question has become urgent, crucial, and insists upon 
 a solution. All that in the spheres of politics, of 
 commerce, and of industry has been accomplished 
 by co-operation, by the elimination of competition 
 and rivalry, has thrust itself upon the notice of 
 the Church, has become an irresistible argument 
 for a similar procedure within its own borders. 
 
 That, on one side. But along with events of this 
 order, all working towards amalgamation, we have, 
 at the same time another set, e^^ually prominent, 
 equally urgent, which exhibit to us, in an almost 
 lurid way, the tremendous obstacles that lie in the 
 path. The storm in the Church of England over the 
 Kikuyu affair was the counterblast to the spirit of the 
 American Mission. It revealed, as in a flash, the bulk 
 and the outline of that foe to Christian unity which 
 has disfigured Christianity for centuries, which has 
 rent it in twain, and which, until it is exorcised and 
 finally slain, will reduce to nullity every effort towards 
 corporate fellowship. What happened ? Away in 
 heathen Africa a body of missionaries, of different 
 denominations, met together to consult as to the 
 practicability of offering a common front and a 
 common action, as Christian teachers, in presenting 
 the Gospel to the pagan world around them. They 
 arrived at a working concordat, and crowned their 
 conference by a Communion service in which two 
 AngHcan bishops took part. For this a fellow 
 African bishop accuses them of heresy, of treachery 
 to Anglican principles, and his action is vehemently 
 
 264 
 
Of church Unity 
 
 supported by the Anglo-Catholic party in England. 
 This party, which embraces in it some of the ablest 
 and most influential of the Anghcan clergy, including 
 the majority of its higher dignitaries, holds, as vital 
 to the Church, to its esse, its very being, the principle 
 of the historic episcopate, derived by unbroken 
 succession from the Apostles ; a succession without 
 which there can be no vahd sacraments, no absolu- 
 tion, no communication of the Church's saving 
 grace. This position (a position, by the way, which 
 modern scholarship has absolutely disproved), on 
 the one hand, places an impassable gulf between 
 it and all non-episcopal communions, whom it 
 absolutely unchurches ; while, on the other, it allies 
 it in principle and sympathy with Rome, whose 
 orders it recognises, though the recognition is not 
 reciprocated. 
 
 The quarrel arising out of the Kikuyu conference 
 is for the moment confined to the contending parties 
 within the Church of England. The idea that it 
 is likely to lead to a speedy disruption there, is, we 
 imagine, not well founded. It is a saying of Froude 
 that " the Church of England was a latitudinarian 
 experiment, a contrivance to enable men of opposing 
 creeds to live together without shedding each other's 
 blood." The contrivance has proved an excellent 
 one, and has lasted through the storms of centuries. 
 It founded the Church not simply on religion — of 
 which there is plenty in both camps — but on some 
 other very solid things ; on the temporalities, on 
 wealth, on political influence, on social prestige. 
 And these have proved enduring holdfasts. They 
 bore the strain of the expulsion of the Puritan clergy, 
 of the Evangelical Revival, of the Hampden and 
 
 265 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 the Gorham controversies, of the Tractarian move- 
 ment, of the secession of Newman. When we think 
 of the tumult and the shouting over these later 
 battles, of the prophecies of the inevitable break- 
 up which accompanied them, and of the way in 
 which the solid arguments of endowment and privi- 
 lege prevailed, and brought back the waverers to 
 the status quo, we are left with doubtings deep and 
 wide whether these arguments will not to-day 
 prove as efficacious as in those older quarrels. And 
 yet how strange, how tragic the position is ! In 
 the words of Green, the historian, one of its own 
 most distinguished clergy, " the Church of England 
 stood from that moment alone among all the Churches 
 of the Christian world. The Reformation had 
 severed it irretrievably from the Papacy. By its 
 rejection of all but Episcopal Orders the Act of 
 Uniformity severed it as irretrievably from the 
 general body of the Protestant Churches, whether 
 Lutheran or Reformed. . . . From that time 
 to this, the Episcopal Church has been unable to 
 meet the varying spiritual needs of its adherents 
 by any modifications of its government or its worship. 
 It stands alone among all the great rehgious bodies 
 of Western Christendom." 
 
 The next-door neighbour to the Anglo-Catholic 
 party is the Roman Church. Their principles are 
 practically identical. Our High AngHcans have 
 only to continue on the road they have entered 
 and Rome will be their terminus. Their idea of 
 the reunion of Christendom is a reunion with the 
 Roman and the Eastern or Greek Churches. Is 
 there any possibility of the non-episcopal Churches, 
 under present circumstances, joining in that move- 
 
 266 
 
Of Church Unity 
 
 ment ? With all the good will in the world, and 
 with all our appreciation — and it is great — of the 
 piety, the moral and spiritual excellence that are 
 to be found in the Roman Church, we have never- 
 theless to face the facts. It is not the personal 
 character of CathoHcs that is here in question. It 
 is the principles and the claims of the Roman Church 
 as an organised body. Her later developments 
 and pronouncements, not to go beyond those, 
 leave us in no doubt. Under those developments 
 even the old liberties of thought and action which 
 were once to be found in her pale have ceased to 
 exist. Where are the ancient freedoms of the old 
 English Catholicism ? Where those of the Galilean 
 Church in France — the Church of Bossuet, of Fenelon, 
 of Pascal ? They are gone, swallowed up in the 
 Ultramontanism which has placed all power, all 
 authority, in the Roman Curia. The Vatican Council 
 proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope, declared 
 him always right while all the world was wrong. 
 It has turned its back upon all science, all progress, 
 all modern civilisation. Here are the express words 
 of the Syllabus : " Those are plunged in a gross 
 error who pretend that the Pope can and ought 
 to reconcile himself to, and to treat with, progress, 
 liberalism, and modern civilisation " {cum progresso, 
 cum liheralismo, et cum recenti civilitate se reconciliare 
 et componere). As to liberty of conscience, Pope 
 Gregory XVI. speaks of " that absurd and erroneous 
 opinion, or rather that form of madness, which 
 declares that liberty of conscience should be asserted 
 and maintained for everyone." And still more 
 recently, in our own day, we have the Jesuit, 
 Lehmkiihl, maintaining that " the CathoHc Church 
 
 267 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 insists that it is an erroneous, perverse, and absurd 
 assertion . . . that hberty of conscience is the 
 individual right of every person." 
 
 The basic principle of Rome is a simple one. The 
 Church is of supernatural origin, supernaturally 
 endowed with knowledge, truth, and authority. Its 
 power is supreme because it is from above, while all 
 other powers, of civil governments, of human 
 movements and institutions, are from beneath. And 
 the poHcy which it pursues, relentlessly, unfalteringly, 
 in every land where it has a footing, is to maintain, 
 or where it has been lost, to regain that power ; 
 to rule absolutely, not simply in the direct matters of 
 religion, but in those of politics, of research, of the 
 social and of the domestic life. Open to any chapter 
 of earlier or of later history and the threads of that 
 policy are clearly discerned. M. Anatole France, 
 in his " L'Eghse et la Republique," gives the story 
 of its dealings with his country from the time of the 
 Concordat to the final rupture with the State. It 
 is an instructive study. And what is the Church 
 which is thus to rule the world ? It is not simply 
 the priesthood, to the exclusion of all lay-knowledge 
 and faculty, but it is the ultramontane, the Itahan 
 priesthood, which predominates and is all-powerful 
 in the Curia. As Tyrrell said, speaking for the 
 EngHsh CathoHcs : " We are not even allowed to 
 know England and the EngHsh as well as Italians 
 and Spaniards do." The infallible authority to which 
 all the world is to bow ; which is to put its arresting 
 hand on all research, all science, all the age's best 
 thinking, is, then, the authority of a group of Italians, 
 ignorant, for the most part, of the universe they live 
 in, of all the methods by which truth and discovery 
 
 268 
 
Of Church Unity 
 
 are pushed forward, and, because ignorant, hostile 
 to them. To accept this claim is to give up our 
 dearest inner possessions, the truth we have won, 
 and the Hberty by which it has been won. Rome 
 offers us unity on these terms and on no others. We 
 are not takers at the price. 
 
 The Cathohc party, in this contention, talks much 
 of the sin of schism. In breaking away from its 
 authority Protestants have torn the seamless robe 
 of Christ. In dividing the one fellowship they have 
 committed the deadliest of offences against Him 
 whose prayer was " that they may all be one." It 
 is a telHng argument — for weak and uninstructed 
 minds. The moment we begin to think we see its 
 fallacy. There is a Christian unity, precious to all 
 devout souls, and to be sought for with all our 
 hearts, but it is not this unity. Has it ever occurred 
 to the preachers of this doctrine that Christianity 
 itself represents the most daring defiance of it ? 
 Christianity began with a decisive breach in external 
 Church continuity. It was a schism, if ever there 
 was one, a schism with the old established Jewish 
 Church, a schism which that Church has never 
 forgiven. To accept this dogma and to be logical 
 in our acceptance, it behoves us all to renounce our 
 separatism and to become good Jews. 
 
 A unity of this sort is, in fact, contrary to the 
 nature of things, contrary to that divine law of 
 progress, of the cosmic and the human movement by 
 which the world has reached its present position. 
 Nature, in the plant world and in the human world, 
 proceeds by splits, by divisions, by swarmings off, by 
 the creation of diversities. It is her method of 
 securing that variety, that newness of environment 
 
 269 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 and of opportunity by which she nurtures her 
 fresh creations and brings her new worlds to birth. 
 That is her way, manifest in every department, and 
 we may be tolerably safe in following it. And in her 
 development of man she has, contrary to the 
 Roman doctrine, insisted on the absolute freedom 
 of the mind as the one condition of his discovery 
 of truth. In the use of that freedom we are dis- 
 covering where, in the region of the mind, the one 
 unity hes. It is in the harmony which is increasingly 
 revealing itself in every department of research, 
 between one truth and another. Beneath all nature's 
 endless varieties we see the working of one law, of one 
 intelligence, of one primal force. Here, indeed, we 
 find one of the great factors of that religious unity for 
 which all good men are striving. It is the unity 
 we are learning to see between the facts of the external 
 universe and the facts of the spirit. That is where 
 science and religion are meeting. It is a reunion 
 better and deeper than anything our Church 
 conferences can devise. 
 
 It is along this line that the only Church unity 
 worth the name will eventually come about. It will 
 be a slow process, slow as the evolution of the human 
 spirit. The hope of it hes in this : that the best men 
 everywhere, of every Church and denomination, are 
 learning the same things, and by the teaching of 
 facts are thinking along the same hues. They are 
 coming together under the guidance of the same 
 light. That light has already, under the workings 
 of spiritual freedom, reached the leading Churches 
 of Protestant Christendom. The effect of it is seen 
 in the rapprochements which are the religious 
 feature of to-day. And it will eventually reach the 
 
 270 
 
Of Church Unity 
 
 Catholic world, and produce there its inevitable 
 effect. But Catholicism will only have become fully 
 Christian, will only have reached the first condition 
 of union, when it has purged itself utterly of the lust 
 of domination, of the pretensions, the falsities upon 
 which its system of priestcraft has been erected. 
 It will have to come down from its pride of the 
 infallible teacher to that humbler place, where all the 
 triumphs of science have been won, the place of 
 the learner. Its officers will have to learn that 
 their business is not that of ruling men's souls, but 
 of helping and edifying. It will have to learn that 
 God's truth is dispensed, not at the Vatican, but by 
 that all-informing, all-enlightening Spirit who is 
 working everywhere in the human consciousness, 
 slowly correcting its errors, adding to its knowledge, 
 enriching and strengthening its faculties. 
 
 That will be a long process, but it will come and 
 is coming. Nothing can resist the steady maturing 
 of the human mind. Till Ca-tholicism has learned 
 that lesson it will be left out of the great movement. 
 The freer Churches of Christendom are already within 
 reach of the great consummation. Those Churches 
 will, by and by, present the spectacle of a nobler, 
 healthier union than Christian history has ever 
 before known. What will be its form ? May we 
 venture a prediction ? It will, if we mistake not, 
 be on the hues of that Anglo-Saxon fellowship in 
 which this movement has taken its rise. England, 
 her great ring of colonies, the sister State of America, 
 what are they ? Great free communities, each 
 self-governing, each guarding zealously its own 
 liberties, developing its own individaahty, but united 
 in one sentiment, full of profitable interchanges, of 
 
 271 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 gracious reciprocities, realising in the midst of 
 diversity their essential oneness. So the Churches 
 of Christ, rooted in their own history, cherishing their 
 special traditions, exercising their special aptitudes, 
 will dwell and work together ; at home amid their 
 own populations, and abroad in front of the heathen 
 races, exhibiting the unity of one Spirit, that union 
 of freedom and of love which is the hall-mark of 
 Christ ; that secret of Jesus, which is yet to win 
 and redeem the world. 
 
 272 
 
XXVII 
 
 THE UNSEEN BUILDERS 
 
 When you come first upon a great city you have 
 borne in upon you the impression of man as, above 
 all things, the builder. If he had done nothing else, 
 you see him here as wonderful. In New York — in 
 some ways his most colossal achievement — he has 
 reared stone mountains. In those towering 
 structures, which seem as though they would tear 
 down the sky, he has surpassed the ancient Babel, 
 surpassed it also in the confusion of tongues in the 
 streets below. London holds you, not with its height, 
 but with its vastness. As you traverse its leagues 
 of surface, you have a feeling as of the ocean, of a 
 human something that is shoreless, boundless, infinite. 
 The city of cities, for a first view, is Constantinople, 
 seen at least as we once saw it. As we moved up 
 the Dardanelles in the early morning, everything 
 was hidden by a dense mist. Then suddenly, as 
 though a curtain had been drawn, the mist rolled 
 away, and what a scene ! To our left Europe, to 
 our right Asia, the miles of shore on each side lined 
 with palaces, glorious creations of dazzling white, 
 some of them centuries old ; but in that clear, smoke- 
 less air, looking as though they had been built 
 yesterday. No wonder men have fought for 
 Constantinople, the place of incomparable situation, 
 commanding at once two seas and two continents. 
 
 273 
 
 18 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 Every great city, in what it offers to the eye, in what 
 its buildings say, has its own soul, its own character. 
 You feel that in Paris, in Vienna ; you feel it intensely 
 in Rome. 
 
 But as you traverse Broadway, or climb the 
 Palatine, or walk up Ludgate-hill, another thought 
 will sometimes come. Amid all these miles of stone 
 that smite the senses, amid all this roar of traffic, 
 this bewildering movement, there comes a sense of 
 that other world around you, all silent, with no sign 
 of its presence, yet all so real, so intense, so unutter- 
 ably mighty — the world of the city's thought. These 
 buildings themselves are all thoughts, gone into 
 form and structure, the thoughts of men dead, many 
 of them long ago, but living here, incorporate in 
 wood and stone. St. Paul's is firstly and lastly an 
 idea, so is St. Sophia, so is New York's Metropohtan 
 Tower. But these buildings are not the main thing. 
 The city itself, these hurrying crowds, each man full 
 of his affairs — what a realm is here, a realm without 
 statistics, without any instruments that can gauge 
 its quality, its proportions ; a realm which contains 
 all of good and evil ; a realm that holds all the 
 possibilities of to-day, and of the endless to-morrows ! 
 It is here that — in the deepest, the one true sense — 
 we meet with man the builder. Each one of these 
 myriads is a creator, hard at work at this moment 
 creating himself, creating his neighbour, creating 
 his world. Here is the real city, its maker, its soul — 
 the crowd, the bodily visible crowd — and filling 
 it, flowing through it, that silent river of thought. 
 Let us stand by its shore a little and look at its 
 depths. It is a realm populous with wonders, where 
 he all life's mysteries and also all its lessons. 
 
 274 
 
The Unseen Builders 
 
 This thought- world, unseen, Hketheair or the ether, 
 is enclosed mainly, by no means entirely, in these 
 moving bodies of men. It is in them, but not of 
 them. You can never, by any process, extract one 
 from the other. The brain is an organ of mind, just 
 as a piano is an organ of music. But the brain's 
 white and grey matter is no more mind than the 
 piano strings are a Beethoven sonata. Tyndall, 
 whose conception of the possibilities of matter led 
 some misguided people to hail him as a materialist, 
 knew too well its limitations. He comes back to 
 the confession : " The passage from the physics of 
 the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness 
 is inconceivable as the result of mechanism." And 
 this farther : " The problem of the connection of 
 body and soul is as insoluble in its modern form as 
 it was in the prescientific ages." The mind seems 
 to come into the body at birth, to grow with it, to 
 mature with it, to decline, decay and die with it. 
 Lucretius, far back in the old world, founded an 
 argument for materialism on this . seeming corre- 
 spondence. To-day we see a little farther than 
 Lucretius, a little farther into the meaning of what 
 we call life and death. The body's death is no death ; 
 it is only a change. Its substance is immortal, not 
 one atom of it destructible. And no fact emerges 
 which tells us that mind-stuff — whatever it is — has 
 any less lastingness. There is so much simulated 
 death, death which suddenly starts back into hfe. 
 Has it ever occurred to you the queer thing that 
 happens when you open a book ? It was written, 
 perhaps, centuries ago. All that while back a man 
 put his thoughts there. The man himself, as a 
 bodily presence, vanished, so long ago. You turn 
 
 275 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 the page, bring your thought to those dead curves 
 and strokes of printer's ink, and lo ! the dead man's 
 thought leaps up at you, ahve, arguing, persuading, 
 convincing, or perhaps amusing, or annoying you. 
 Here is a soul still talking, the soul of a Shakespeare 
 or of a Cagliostro, of a Voltaire or of a St. Paul. 
 You can never get rid of bodies, finally ; no, nor can 
 you get rid of souls. Your visible is immortal, and 
 your invisible is immortal. Both life and death 
 are forms of the same thing — they are of the stuff 
 of eternity. 
 
 Man is, for us, the highest organised expression of 
 thought. His body matter, and especially his brain 
 matter, contain more of it than anything else we 
 see. But the outside world also is full of it, as full 
 of it as it can hold. A stone is congested thought. 
 Its weight, its colour, its cohesion, all its qualities, 
 are really, when you come to think of it, mental 
 things. They can have no reality apart from a mind 
 — yours or someone else's — that knows them as 
 quahties, and deals with them as such. When 
 you come higher, to a flower, a bird, you have mind 
 visible moving towards self-expression, beginning to 
 know itself. Is not Schelling right in his philosophy 
 of nature, where he exhibits her, in all her processes, 
 as an intelligence struggling towards consciousness, 
 towards personality ? The truth is we are in a 
 world crammed with soul, alert with deathless mind. 
 The vase on your table has in it the soul of the artist 
 who fashioned it, and behind that, in the very 
 substance of which it is made you are peering into a 
 mind vaster than human. 
 
 But we started this theme with the excellent 
 intention of being entirely practical, and we are 
 
 276 
 
The Unseen Builders 
 
 wandering off into every kind of speculation. Let 
 us quit that and get to the things we want most of 
 all to say. The thing that holds us, as we watch 
 the surging city crowd, is that every single member 
 of it is a builder. He is building himself. Inside 
 each passing figure is a something at work — invisible, 
 no one of its parts ever showing to mortal eye, a 
 something not to be described by any physical 
 analogy, something we call now the thought, now the 
 feeling, now the will — and this complex immaterial 
 something is at every moment creating, building. 
 Building what ? You may say, for one thing, it is 
 building the outside world. Certainly it is doing 
 that. The whole outside world is simply the clothing 
 of ideas. Cathedrals, gaols, armies, fleets, railways, 
 are just thoughts projected outwards, housing them- 
 selves in these visible things. As men's thoughts 
 grow the world will grow. Ever as the thought 
 becomes clearer, wider, bolder, will the world 
 become a bigger, bolder, more beautiful world. 
 But that outside world is not, after all, the 
 main thing. The chief matter is that the man, 
 inwardly, is building himself. In the religious books 
 of ancient Persia we have a striking picture of what 
 happens to a good man after death. In his journey 
 beyond the river he meets a radiant figure, glowing 
 with ethereal beauty. Fascinated, he asks its name. 
 Smihngly the figure repHes : " I am your true, your 
 best self ; I am the sum of your ideals, of your best 
 thoughts, of your struggles for the good, of your 
 strong resolves. I am you ; you are I ; we join now 
 together in the glorious harmony of the celestial life." 
 A wonderful enough picture this, from that far-off 
 age. It is a parable, of course, sprung from the 
 
 277 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 imagination of the vivid East. But let us not miss 
 its central truth. This is, that of all possible 
 structures this hidden one, of our own character, 
 our final being, is the chief, meant to be the finest, 
 the most lasting. We are building it day by day. 
 And it is here that Christianity strikes its most 
 insistent note. For it is above all things a religion 
 of the innermost thought. The present writer, 
 discussing once the religious question with a 
 travelled fellow-countryman whom he met on the 
 Continent, found, to his astonishment, that this very 
 thing, the control of the thoughts, was, to his 
 companion, the leading objection against Christianity. 
 " An impossible religion," he exclaimed, " which 
 presumes to tell you not only what you are to do, 
 but what you are to think ! " It reminded one of 
 Lord Melbourne, after listening to a searching 
 sermon : " I have always been a consistent defender 
 of Church and State, but I am not going to stand 
 a religion which proposes an inquisition on one's 
 private life." It is the very complaint of Caecilius 
 against the early Christians : " What monstrous, 
 what portentous notions do they fabricate ! That 
 that God of theirs, whom they can neither show 
 nor see, should be inquiring diligently into the 
 characters, the acts, nay, the very words and secret 
 thoughts of all men ! " Surely there was never a 
 funnier objection. For if reHgion does not live there, 
 in our inmost thought ; if it does not habitually work 
 there, it lives and works nowhere. Do we not see that 
 our thought is everything, our whole being ? When 
 we have got our thought right, everything is right ; 
 when that is wrong, everything is wrong. We know 
 how true that is about a bridge. If the thought in it 
 
 278 
 
The Unseen Builders 
 
 is wrong we do not want to cross that bridge. And 
 what is true of the bridge is true of all the rest. To 
 cleanse our thought-world of all the vasty wrongness 
 that gets into it ; to cleanse it of envy, jealousy, 
 pride, despondency ; to get our thought resolutely 
 into the right habits, into the right way of regarding 
 ourselves, our world, our neighbour, our duty ; 
 to habituate it to lovingness, to nobleness, to self- 
 sacrifice, to all that approves itself as the best, what 
 else is it that we are in this world for, what else than 
 this is success, and what else can make life worth 
 Hving ? More than that, when we are on this road, 
 and following it diligently, what seeming misfortunes, 
 what hardships, what endurances can take from us the 
 consciousness of inner blessedness, the feeling that 
 it is good to be here ? 
 
 And this silent, potent working on ourselves means 
 a silent, hardly less potent working on others. We 
 are building their structure also. And this, if we 
 fairly grasp it, becomes one of life's finest features, 
 one of its surest avenues into happiness. The 
 builder anywhere, if he is good for anything, enjoys 
 himself. His work-area, to outsiders, may seem a 
 confused, desolate affair. It is a collection of imper- 
 fections, of rubbish-heaps, of half-finished things. 
 He, with his plan in his head, with the results that are 
 coming, sees otherwise, and comes to his task with 
 joyous heart. And we are all builders, if we knew 
 it. Wives with their husbands, parents with their 
 children, teachers with their pupils, ourselves in 
 relation to all the social intimacies, we are there 
 in a set of unfinished structures. How are we taking 
 them ? It is fatally easy to take them the wrong 
 way. What is the meaning of passing judgment 
 
 279 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 on people ? Why are we, on the highest authority, 
 warned off from it ? Because that is to make the 
 tremendous mistake of regarding them as finished 
 structures, with nothing left for us but to appraise, 
 and, as the almost assured consequence — to condemn. 
 And so, in a thousand homes, criticisms, dissensions, 
 quarrels, despairs. And all this such waste of force, 
 such waste of happiness ! Whereas, if instead of 
 standing as critics amid the mortar heaps, bewailing 
 their ugliness, we took ourselves as builders, eager 
 for construction, would there not be a difference ? 
 
 These evolving characters, with all their roughness 
 of outline, their uncomeliness of feature, what if you 
 take them as your builder's sites, where noble struc- 
 tures may be reared ? The sheer difference of attitude 
 is immense. Where the critic is all dissatisfaction, 
 the builder is all enthusiasm. Only, for heaven's 
 sake, take care how you do the building ! It is so 
 rarely by words. Save us from the people who pose 
 as examples, who on every occasion deliver their 
 little moral lectures, their Pecksniffian maxims, 
 who talk from their own height of virtue down to 
 the inferiors they patronise ! These are no builders. 
 They lack that first principle of moral architecture, 
 the knowledge of themselves. The work we are 
 thinking of is hardly an affair of words at all ; 
 certainly not of lecture words. It is a work of insight 
 and of sympathy ; of faith in our brother and of the 
 attitude towards him which faith begets. We see 
 in him, behind all his faults, the possible structure, 
 and the materials for it that lie in him. And with 
 these materials we deal, letting all others severely 
 alone. We perceive his own daily inner struggle, of 
 his good with his evil, and we put all our strength 
 
 280 
 
The Unseen Builders 
 
 into his fight. Does his evil, his passion, his temper 
 , overflow upon us ? Shall we reinforce that bad 
 side of him by adding fuel to the flame ? The essence 
 of a quarrel is that each is meeting the other's evil 
 by his own evil. Here are two bads uniting for a 
 common defeat of the good. At such moments the 
 thing is, not to talk, least of all to talk back, but to 
 dive down to the depths of our being, down to our 
 innermost reserves of faith, hope and love. There, 
 where in silent wrestling we have won the victory 
 over ourselves, we have won it for our brother. For 
 wrath cannot contend for ever against love. A soul 
 of that temper in a household, in a workroom, yes, in 
 a senate, in a world, is accomplishing the finest 
 artistry, is rearing structures with which no 
 Parthenons or Taj Mahals can compare. They are 
 spiritual buildings with heaven's own beauty, its own 
 eternity upon them, palaces to adorn the City of 
 God. 
 
 Everything, in the long run, comes back upon 
 this inner building. Says Carlyle : " The spiritual 
 everywhere originates the practical, models it, 
 makes it ; so that the saddest external condition 
 of affairs among men is but evidence of a still sadder 
 internal one." When will the world find common 
 sense enough to see that ? All the external ugHnesses 
 of our national life ; its city slums, its prisons, its 
 hideous warships, its embattled armies ; all the 
 scowls on human faces ; all the slouching, decrepit, 
 rag-clad human forms, are the outcome, the material 
 expression of a primal inward ugliness. And every 
 improvement here begins from within. As our 
 souls grow cleaner, so all our bodies, so all our streets. 
 As the soul reaches towards beauty, our architecture 
 
 281 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 will grow beautiful ; a new beauty will come to our 
 countryside. Man cannot get away from his 
 spiritual destiny. His whole problem is spiritual. 
 The New Testament doctrine of heaven and hell 
 means finally this, that inner beauty makes out- 
 ward beauty, that inner ugliness makes outward 
 ugliness. But heaven is going to conquer hell. If 
 we took our world to-day as a finished business we 
 all ought to be pessimists. But so long as we are 
 builders we shall never be pessimists. When we see 
 what can be done, is being done, in ourselves, we are 
 full of hope for the world. The mere scientific 
 thought of the last half century has transformed the 
 earth, and we are going to have still better thoughts. 
 Science is, after all, the mere surface of the soul. It 
 handles matter and force, but humanity means 
 something deeper. As, in its incessant probing, it 
 reaches towards the centre, it will discover that 
 cleverness is not comparable with holiness ; that 
 matter and force are ever misused except as the 
 instruments of purity and love. To these humanity 
 will finally go as the quarries for its building. From 
 these stores of inner beauty will come our New 
 Jerusalem, our new earth and heaven. 
 
 iSt 
 
XXVIII 
 THE SUCCESSOR 
 
 We dismiss the old year and hail the new. Le 
 roi est mort ; vive le roi I There is a clanging of 
 midnight bells ; in the streets the roar of excited 
 crowds. In various fashions, from the solemn to 
 the grotesque, the world speeds the parting, hails the 
 coming guest. The old year is played out. It has 
 no secrets for us. We can tell its fortunes better 
 than could Old Moore ; for we know them. Its 
 successor, the new one, brings with it the fascination 
 of the unknown. Its page is all to be written ; its 
 wealth of life all to be unfolded. Succession, the 
 passing of one thing into another, is the most constant 
 of facts ; the one thing ever before our eyes, and yet 
 the one thing which is beyond the reach of the human 
 intellect to understand. Have you ever tried to 
 penetrate the mystery of becoming; to see what is 
 really contained in it ? It seems a combination of 
 impossibles. It is at once a being and a not being ; 
 a moment when the thing is not and a moment when 
 it is ; and yet by what process of rational thought, 
 by what canon of sane reasoning, can you deduce 
 a something from a nothing ? Thus is it that nature's 
 cunning mocks us ; that her seeming simplest 
 things, displayed without disguise every day before 
 us, leave our understanding bewildered, beggared. 
 
 283 
 
Faith^s Certainties 
 
 Succession is, we say, in this sense, a mystery, but 
 it is a mystery that is ever with us. There is no 
 interlude, no half-time called in the game. It is 
 almost terrifying, this never-ending movement. One 
 is inclined at times to scream out a protest ; to 
 beseech the universe to take a rest. No use. It is 
 the everlasting flux, and we are in it, a part of it. 
 The same law which sends the earth swinging cease- 
 lessly on its orbit keeps your blood circulating, creates 
 in you the new cell and discharges the old one ; sends 
 you from each moment to the next and towards 
 the final one. The actual is pressed hard by the 
 potential ; pressed till it is dislodged by it. The one 
 permanent thing seems to be the law of eternal change. 
 
 Every single thing has, waiting for it, its successor ; 
 and every single person. It is well for all of us to 
 take note of that fact, and to accommodate ourselves 
 to it. An old man should have learned better by 
 this time than to begrudge the young. Yet the heir 
 is apt to be an unpopular person ; at times he has 
 sinister glances bestowed on him. He is too constant 
 a reminder of what is coming ! Age yields its pre- 
 rogatives hardly. Brienne tells of Cardinal Mazarin 
 that he saw him, in his last days, tottering in a 
 gallery of his splendid palace, looking round on its 
 treasures, and heard him mutter, " // fant quitter 
 tout cela ! " And yet it is a beneficent law this, 
 which brings to an end the tenure of the old. 
 Martineau, in a noble passage, written in his own old 
 age, shows how evil for the world would be the unduly 
 prolonged continuance of one generation. It would 
 mean the continued dominance of one set of ideas ; 
 would check and hamper the development of the 
 younger minds and activities ; would become a 
 
 384 
 
The Successor 
 
 tyranny fatal to progress. In any case it is better 
 to accept cheerfully the world's order, to accept it 
 as a sound one. Is it, indeed, any use kicking against 
 it, when the only result will be the bruising of our 
 own shins ? 
 
 The law of succession, as we trace it back through 
 the ages, seems too subtle for our comprehension. 
 It baffles us with its inconsistencies. Viewing 
 it from one aspect we are astonished at its 
 conservatism, at the fidehty with which the old is 
 reproduced in the new. " Plus qu change," says 
 the French proverb, " plus c est la meme chose." 
 The latest fashion, whether of customs or of thoughts, 
 if we look a second time, reveals itself as an old 
 acquaintance. A moderate acquaintance with the 
 Greek Fathers would enable you to reproduce from 
 them almost every modern Church heresy. Our 
 Christmas customs. Yule logs, holly, feastings, 
 singings, mummings, go back thousands of years 
 before a.d. i. Newman, in his essay on " Develop- 
 ment," showed how nearly every Catholic custom 
 and ceremony had its counterpart in pagan times. 
 The stream of tradition as it rolls along leaves its 
 deposit deep on the souls of men. Where everything 
 in the way of ideas seems to have been revolutionised, 
 down beneath, in the realm of feehng, the old has 
 left its mark. Its action is well represented by the 
 remark attributed to Fontenelle : " I do not beheve 
 in ghosts, but I am afraid of them." We can never 
 get rid of the past if we want to. Our ancestors 
 live in us and work in us, most of all when we least 
 realise the fact. 
 
 So much for the conservatism in succession. 
 But take now the other side. Before we reach the 
 
 285 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 human story, in evolution's humblest forms, we are 
 met with a staggering radicaHsm. In animal and 
 plant life Darwin taught us how evolution proceeds 
 by the development of varieties. Nature has her 
 own slow and roundabout way of developing them ; 
 man can enormously help the process by artificial 
 means. But neither Darwin nor any of his successors 
 has been able to tell us how the variation came in 
 the first place. It is the greatest question to-day in 
 biology. It is the standing miracle, and not the 
 less so in the smaller variations which escape the 
 common eye than in those vast apparent leaps in 
 which nature seems to have crossed all the boundary 
 lines ; when she passed from the inorganic to the 
 organic, from matter to life, from animal to man. 
 It is when we watch her daring in these directions 
 that we find it less difficult to beheve in that great 
 leap of history, the birth of Jesus of GaHlee ; that 
 birth where man, after reaching the human, starts 
 afresh on his path to the Divine. 
 
 There is a law of succession in the thought world 
 as much as in the outer world. And the outer 
 changes with the change in the inner. Could you 
 compare, on any standard of comparison, the universe 
 in which a Bergson or a Eucken fives, with that in 
 which an African savage lives ? And this evolution 
 of ideas is as inevitable, one may say as pre-ordained, 
 as the evolution of plants and animals. The 
 succession here has reached the deepest things. 
 Have we quite realised the change which the ages 
 have brought into our idea of God ? Could we act 
 now as Cromwell and his Ironsides acted when he shut 
 up some of the papist Irish and burned them in the 
 church at Drogheda, beficving he was acting under 
 
 286 
 
The Successor 
 
 a divine commission, a commission like that of the 
 prophet when he " hewed Agag in pieces before the 
 Lord "7 Do we accept now the logic of Queen Mary 
 when she burned heretics, declaring she was only 
 doing what God would do to them in hell ? That 
 is no longer the God we worship. The spiritual move- 
 ment has gone past that stage, and will never return 
 to it. 
 
 The successor ; how it crowds in upon us at every 
 point, sometimes in a very awful way ! In our 
 personal doings, for instance. We can will the thing 
 we are going to do ; we cannot will the thing that 
 follows. That is out of our hands ; it will work on us 
 henceforth according to the iron law of consequence. 
 Men make their decisions so often in the spirit of 
 M. Ollivier, the French Minister, when he entered on 
 the war with Germany " with a light heart." As he 
 found, there is no lightness in what follows. And 
 yet even here, in these grim chains of sequence, there 
 is a freedom and room for the soul to move. We 
 are never, at any moment of our lives, the victims of 
 a mere necessity. Upon each event, as it follows, 
 our personality can play. We can create it, as it 
 were, after our own image. Let the image be a pure 
 one, illumined, strengthened by faith and love, and 
 it shall be, amid the crude elements of the outward, as 
 the philosopher's stone, which turns the iron into gold. 
 
 What is coming in the immediate succession of 
 the years ? Many sincere men take a pessimistic 
 view. They foresee a slump in religion and morals 
 as inevitable as the slump in trade, and perhaps, 
 with a less chance of recovery. Certainly the times 
 are difficult and some of the omens menacing. What, 
 for instance, are our youth thinking about ? We look 
 
 287 
 
Faith's Certainties 
 
 into the eyes of so many to find there no reflex of 
 " the vision splendid." Are materiahsm and 
 scepticism, the struggle for existence, the lust of 
 luxury and pleasure, to bring us, if we are not there 
 , already, to the decadent Roman world which 
 Arnold pictures ? 
 
 On that hard pagan world disgust 
 
 And secret loathing fell, 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 That picture is Rembrandtesque in its darkness, 
 but it has also, after Rembrandt, its wonderful 
 light effect. It shows us the pit, but also the way 
 out. Is it not certain that man never lives on sated 
 lust, that nought but deadly weariness and a sense 
 of hell must follow these courses ? And if we have 
 multitudes who to-day follow them, there is, we 
 believe, a growing host, on the other hand, of varied 
 creeds but of one belief, the belief in goodness, in 
 what it consists, in what its successors are, and its 
 consummation. The community may be sick, but 
 we know the laws of health, and we know that the 
 health is possible. Let us be sure of this, the world, 
 in the next or in any following year, is never going to 
 lose its best. It is going to get more of it. And for 
 you and me to-day there is no best better than to 
 link ourselves with renewed fealty to that cause. 
 Empires may dissolve and fall around us. We go 
 on building the City of God. 
 
 lUiadlcy Brothers, Printert, Ui«hop«gs(e, E.C.; and Aihford, Kent 
 
Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 01130 
 
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