BR 121 .L4 8 
 
 Lewis, Charles Smith, 1868 
 Some foundation truths of 
 the Christian faith 
 
Some Foundation Truths 
 
 of the 
 
 1 i A M 1 ‘'1 
 
 y Mi'll _ 
 
 Christian Faith 
 
 BY / 
 
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 y « L 
 
 CHARLES SMITH LEWIS, B.D. 
 
 Canon of Religious Education in the Diocese 
 of New Jersey 
 
 # 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Copyright, 1923, by 
 
 GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY 
 
 All Bights Reserved 
 
 PRINTED IN IT. S. A. 
 
 VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 
 BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 
 
To 
 
 E. L. D. L. 
 
 Whose help and inspiration 
 have been a constant en¬ 
 couragement and incentive. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/somefoundationtrOOIewi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Christian Idea of God . . . . 1 
 
 II. The Christ of the Hew Testament . . 27 
 
 III. The Creeds.. . 53 
 
 IV. The Idea of the Church.77 
 
 V. The Sacramental .System. 100 
 
 VI. The Principles of Christian Duty . . 122 
 
Some Foundation Truths 
 of the Christian Faith 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF GOD 
 
 Man, who has been described as incurably re¬ 
 ligious, has always sought an answer to the age- 
 old question; What is God. He has looked into 
 the heart of nature and tried to find out what 
 lies beneath and behind the world. He has pen¬ 
 etrated ever more and more deeply the mysteries 
 of life and being, seeking to discover the ulti¬ 
 mate truth. He has let his imagination have 
 rein, and pictured for himself divine beings, vis¬ 
 ible and invisible. He has listened to the still 
 small voice within him, and given play to the 
 religious instinct with which he was born, and 
 he has felt and seen and known God. Or he has 
 yielded himself to the unfolding of truths by 
 which men have known God better from age to 
 age as He spake by the prophets and last of all 
 by His Son. He has seen God, and worshipped 
 Him, offering sacrifices; and by prayers and 
 praises shown his dependence upon Him. In all 
 
2 
 
 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 these and countless other ways man has sought 
 to know God. 
 
 And the answers have given him philosophy 
 and theology and the outward expression of re¬ 
 ligion. But we need to remember that these are 
 not the same; that Philosophy “seeks to discover 
 and exhibit the ultimate truths of being and life 
 without recourse to supernatural revelation”; 
 that Theology “treats of God and of whatsoever 
 in any manner pertains to Him, in so far as it 
 does pertain to Him”; and that Religion is the 
 natural response of the soul of man as he recog¬ 
 nises God. Aubrey More suggests the distinc¬ 
 tion between theology and religion in his essay 
 in Lux Mundi. Man sees God and worships; 
 This is religion: Man thinks about God and 
 reasons concerning His revelation of Himself; 
 This is theology: Man tries to solve the riddle 
 of the Universe by the power of his own intel¬ 
 lect and to bring into a systematic whole all 
 that he has found in the solution; and This is 
 philosophy. 
 
 We need to remember the distinction, and to 
 be certain, further, that a man who seeks to dis¬ 
 cover the ultimate truths of life and being, nay 
 also, the man who reasons about God and the 
 things that concern Him, may be both earnest 
 and honest and yet utterly without real religion. 
 We all know people who are religious, i. e. see 
 God and worship Him, and seek to live as He 
 has taught them, and yet never think or philoso¬ 
 phize, who are utterly uninterested in the reason 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 3 
 
 for things, or the relationships between the 
 parts of God’s truth. They make no pretense at 
 either theology or philosophy. But such peo¬ 
 ple are exceptional. Most men and women 
 want to know what they believe and why; and 
 with most of us our belief shows itself in ,our 
 life. 
 
 Our problem is (1) to outline the fundamen¬ 
 tal factors in the Christian idea of God; (2) to 
 examine two or three of the questions which 
 philosophy raises about these; and (3) to see 
 very briefly what is the religious value of the 
 Christian truth about God. 
 
 i 
 
 The Christian idea of God is stated for us very 
 definitely in our Prayer Book. We shall find 
 there certain great fundamental truths formally 
 put, upon which our whole conception is built. 
 As children we learned the Apostles’ Creed, and 
 then we found that in it we had learned “to be¬ 
 lieve in God the Father, who hath made me and 
 all the world; Secondly in God the Son, who 
 hath redeemed me and all mankind; and thirdly 
 in God the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth me and 
 all the people of God.” Our formal statements 
 carry us much further for we also learned very 
 shortly, as we became familiar with the Nicene 
 Creed, that we believed in One God, and yet we 
 immediately went on to speak of the Father and 
 of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, three divine 
 
4 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Persons in that same One God. The First Arti¬ 
 cle of Religion gives us a more formal defini¬ 
 tion of God than the Creed does, for the Article 
 is put into more distinctly theological language. 
 It reads: “There is but one living and true God, 
 everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of 
 infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, 
 and Preserver of all things both visible and in¬ 
 visible. And in unity of this Godhead there be 
 three Persons, of one substance, power, and 
 eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost.” 
 
 The old saying “our prayers show our beliefs” 
 (lex orandi, lex credendi) points to another evi¬ 
 dence of the formal statements of the Christian 
 Idea of God. No one can fail to find in the 
 Prayer Book the certain belief that there is a 
 Divine Being, Almighty, Everlasting, of infinite 
 power and holiness, Who is the object of our de¬ 
 votions, and that we know Him by the Triune 
 Name of the Gospel: “The Father and the Son 
 and the Holy Ghost,” Who is addressed in the 
 Litany as “Holy Blessed and Glorious Trinity, 
 Three Persons and One God.” And further the 
 Prayer Book shows from beginning to end that 
 God Whom we worship is spirit, not matter, and 
 that our knowledge of Him comes to us 
 originally by His own unfolding of Himself. 
 
 The Christian conception of God, however, did 
 not originate in Christianity; not even in the 
 teaching of its Founder. Behind Christianity 
 lie the centuries of Judaism, and the Gospel 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 5 
 
 revelation, the teachings of Jesus Christ, are 
 built quite frankly upon that which had come 
 to men in the Law and the Prophets. St. Augus¬ 
 tine’s celebrated sentence; “The New Testament 
 lies hid in the Old, the Old is laid open in the 
 New,” is profoundly true. Our Lord Himself 
 tells us that He did not come to “destroy the Law 
 and the Prophets.” Not the least corner of them 
 was to cease until it had completely fulfilled its 
 purpose. His intention was to bring to its frui¬ 
 tion, to perfect and complete, to unfold and to 
 expand those great truths which the older gen¬ 
 erations had only partly known and still less 
 fully grasped. 
 
 The peculiar truth which the Old Testament 
 enshrines and unfolds, the great revelation of 
 the Law and the Prophets, is the Idea of God. 
 And it is particularly this idea, this revelation, 
 which our Lord took and perfected. But to un¬ 
 derstand His teaching one must never forget 
 the beginnings in the Old Testament teaching 
 which our Lord enriched. As St. John says in 
 the preface to his Gospel—and none of the 
 Apostles has 7 put the truth about God more 
 simply and more fully than he—“No man hath 
 seen God at any time. The only begotten Son 
 Who is in the bosom of the Father He hath de¬ 
 clared Him.” And the word which St. John 
 uses here means ‘to bring out in its fulness.’ 
 
 There is always, today, an element of difficulty 
 in dealing with the Old Testament record of 
 God’s revelation, because scholars, and still more 
 
6 
 
 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 the ordinary Christians, are not agreed as to 
 the yalue of that record, nor the dates when its 
 several parts were written and put into their 
 present form. I will make no attempt even to 
 touch upon this controversy more than to say 
 that we must keep clear these facts. There is no 
 question that the revelation of which the Old 
 Testament is the record was gradually given. 
 God unfolded truths as men were able to under¬ 
 stand them and to take them into their own lives 
 as a part of the motives which governed those 
 lives. The task of Criticism is, in part, to trace 
 out the steps by which God led Israel along the 
 way of the unfolding, by which they progressed 
 as they received the revelation; and, if we are to 
 understand what lies behind the full revelation 
 given by our Lord, we must try to get some idea 
 of the elements which entered into the older be¬ 
 lief. But there is a second truth quite as im¬ 
 portant as this, which men are apt to forget. 
 Even under advanced views of development and 
 of criticism, it is quite clear that, for more than 
 a century before the Lord began to teach, the 
 Old Testament record was accepted as the true 
 story of the development of Israelis life and faith, 
 and that the foundations upon which our Lord 
 Jesus Christ and His Apostles built was that 
 Law and the Prophets in its present form. 
 
 We want to find first what are the most out¬ 
 standing truths of the Old Testament record of 
 those earlier revelations. And at the same time 
 we must remember that the Apostle’s words are 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 7 
 
 true beyond all question: “God, Who in times 
 past spoke to our ancestors by the prophets in 
 many elements and in many ways, has in these 
 last days spoken to us by His Son.” The Old 
 Testament revelation cannot be understood un¬ 
 til we reach the completion of it and the balanc¬ 
 ing of it in the New Testament. We must con¬ 
 stantly turn from Moses and Isaiah and all that 
 wonderful galaxy to Him Whom they foretold, 
 and seek at His lips the fuller truths which bind 
 them all into one. 
 
 The Jewish Creed was very short and very 
 simple. It had but one article; “Hear, O Israel, 
 the Lord thy God is One God.” The foundation 
 truth about God is this: There is but One God 
 and God is but One. We are so familiar with 
 this truth that we often fail to grasp its real 
 significance to Israel. The people of Israel were 
 not a people unique and peculiar, alone in the 
 great world of men. They were kinsmen to 
 numerous other nations and tribes; and though 
 they were in time hedged about and shielded as 
 the Truth-bearers of God’s revelation they were 
 by ancestry and in association Semites. The 
 Semitic traditions, the racial answers to the 
 great problems of the Creation and the like, were 
 their inheritance. They came into Egypt, and 
 they came forth from it, not new born, full 
 grown, Minerva-like, but with a past and a herit¬ 
 age of belief and practise in which they con¬ 
 stantly showed their kindred to other nations. 
 But in spite of this their records show that these 
 
8 
 
 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 old traditions and inherited explanations were 
 purged of the Semitic polytheism with its lower 
 moral tone, and when they were put into writing 
 they were shot through and through with the be¬ 
 lief that the God of Israel was the One True God. 
 We can get glimpses of the difficulty with which 
 they learned this truth, not as a matter of fact, 
 but as a living belief. The scene on Mt. Carmel 
 tells of a very uncertain acceptance of the su¬ 
 premacy of Jehovah. Israel by no means be¬ 
 lieved, at that time, in but one God; even though 
 the prophet saw the truth as others had before 
 him. Hosea emphasizes the reality of Jehovah 
 as the only saviour and throws this back to the 
 days of the deliverance. Micah speaks of Him 
 as the Lord of the whole earth. Isaiah in his 
 vision hears the angelic chorus sing praises to 
 Him whose glory fills the whole earth. In later 
 years Isaiah—the “unknown prophet of the Cap¬ 
 tivity” some people call the writer of these chap¬ 
 ters—declares that the gods of the heathen are 
 but vanity, while it is the Lord who made the 
 heavens. The glorious supremacy of the Lord 
 over the whole creation, The Lord Who faintetli 
 not nor is weary/ is the climax of that wonder¬ 
 ful fortieth chapter with which the second part 
 of the Book of Isaiah begins. By whatever steps, 
 the truth was grasped long, long before the days 
 of our Lord, and the Jew believed that Jehovah, 
 the God of Moses and the Prophets, the God of 
 Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, was supreme, 
 one, and the only God. The monotheism of the 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 9 
 
 great eighth century prophets had, through the 
 fiery furnace of the Captivity, become the com¬ 
 mon belief of the men of Israel. And this funda¬ 
 mental truth is the beginning of the Christian 
 Faith as it finds expression in the Nicene Creed: 
 “I believe in One God.” 
 
 The Christian revelation does not stop with 
 the first article of its belief. When Pliny wrote 
 to the Emperor Trajan in the year 112 A. d. that 
 the Christians sang hymns to Christ as to God 
 he was but bearing witness to the outstanding 
 truth of Christianity. On last analysis Chris¬ 
 tianity is not a religion of a certain type of wor¬ 
 ship, of a special code of morals, nor a peculiar 
 ideal of living; and these alone. Christianity is 
 a profound vital belief in Jesus Christ as God 
 and in these other things because of that. I 
 shall not stop to prove this now; it will come up 
 in the next chapter. But the Christian idea of 
 God goes still further. Jesus Christ is not con¬ 
 tent with asserting His own Deity. He is 
 equally clear, though it is in a more condensed 
 statement, that the Holy Ghost is also God. He 
 gives no argument; He states the fact. And 
 finally after His Resurrection, when He gives 
 the final commission to the Apostles He links 
 together the Holy Ghost and Himself with the 
 Father under one Name. 
 
 How can this be? The Christian Church has 
 never failed to make this the central truth of 
 the religion which she teaches. The story of her 
 life, is, in a true sense, the story of the effort 
 
10 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 men have made to explain this truth and to re¬ 
 late it to the facts of the universe and to the life 
 of men. When we say that Jesus Christ is God 
 and that the Holy Ghost is God and that They 
 two with the Father, Who is God, are not Three 
 but One, what do we mean? Is it simply that 
 God manifests Himself now under one form and 
 later under another? But if so how could the 
 Father and the Son both exist at once? Is it 
 simply an “economic Trinity,” i. e. that the three 
 names refer to three forms of divine activity, 
 Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier, but noth¬ 
 ing more than this and with no reference to an 
 eternal relationship? Do we mean that Jehovah 
 is one thing in Himself and another as men speaE 
 of His activity? But after all the Christian 
 Name for God is not Jehovah, except in a very 
 limited sense. The true Christian Name of God 
 is that which our Lord Himself gives us; Father, 
 Son and Holy Ghost; and this Name tells us 
 of the essential Character of God, not a tempo¬ 
 rary revelation. The lesson of Moses and the 
 Prophets was to teach men that God is One, the 
 Unity of the Godhead; Jesus Christ taught in 
 what sense He is One, 1 and that the unity is not 
 solitariness but a life within the Unity which Ts 
 expressed under the Name which the Son Him¬ 
 self gave us. 
 
 i Thus whereas the Jews were only taught that God is one 
 numerically—that there is no other God but He—He has 
 revealed to Christians in addition to this what the nature of 
 His unity is—that He is three Persons in one God. Strong. 
 The Incarnation of God , p. 3 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 11 
 
 Israel not only learned that God is one. They 
 also learned that He is personal. He is no far 
 off force, not an abstraction of the intellect but 
 a living Being, with all the elements which make, 
 in us, what we call Person. He possesses, in ex- 
 tenso, those things which we find in ourselves 
 as the highest type of life, tie has power, which 
 finds ways to express Himself as He will and as 
 He chooses. He is conscious of His own Being 
 and His own characteristics, so that He can re¬ 
 veal them to others who are not He. And as 
 we shall see, deep within His mysterious life, 
 there is that thing which we call love. Bishop 
 Gore has put this in his volume “Belief in God” 
 in these words: “He is a being of deliberate will 
 and energetic action, approving and disapprov¬ 
 ing, loving and hating, judging and blessing, 
 who not only can respond to man’s advances and 
 prayers, but who from the beginning has been, 
 and always is, taking the initiative in willing 
 and acting; whose will is to be discerned behind 
 everything that happens, yet who also appears 
 as acting more intensely here than there, in the 
 execution of particular individual purpose.” 1 
 It is here that the New Testament revelation 
 goes further along the line of God’s unfolding of 
 the truth about Himself. The God on Sinai who 
 revealed Himself to Moses under the name Jeho¬ 
 vah, the God who is, the Self-existent, personal, 
 God, and showed in the vision to Isaiah that He 
 is the God of the whole earth, was not only 
 
 iP. 113 
 
12 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 deeply personal in the innermost recesses of His 
 Being but in the unity of that Godhead there was 
 not one Person but three Persons. Jesus Christ 
 revealed a personal Father, side by side with 
 Himself as a personal Son, who derived all He 
 had from that Father, and yet was side by side 
 with Him, as St. John put it, from before time 
 began; “God of God” as the Greed states it, Truly 
 God and yet deriving His Deity from the Father 
 who is with Him eternal. So in like manner He 
 showed the Holy Spirit, not in any sense as a 
 mere divine influence and power, but as in Him¬ 
 self distinctly a person thinking and acting and 
 revealing Himself to others. The problem which 
 this statement raises is the great problem on 
 the speculative and philosophical side of the 
 Christian religion. Granted that there is a God; 
 how, philosophically, can you explain the 
 Trinity? Yet there the fact stands as a primary 
 truth of the Christian idea of God. 
 
 God is not only One and the Only God, He is 
 not merely personal, He is Holy. The Old Tes¬ 
 tament revelation makes the moral character of 
 God stand out very clearly. We feel the neces¬ 
 sity for this belief, for we cannot think of a God 
 who is not at least up to our standards of morals. 
 An “imperfect” God would be no God to us. We 
 could never be content with a God who is less 
 than the best that we can imagine. It is in this 
 revelation of the moral character, the inner life 
 of God, that the New Testament outreaches the 
 Old. I cannot stop now to give the Old Testa- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 13 
 
 ment details of that revelation. Two points 
 must suffice and these are most familiar. Micah 
 gives us the first of them when he writes “What 
 doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly 
 and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy 
 God?” The whole of the Old Testament teach¬ 
 ing of righteousness is built up on the idea of 
 fulfilling what is required, and the God who de¬ 
 mands this of men shows it in His own relation¬ 
 ships with them. He is a covenant God, from 
 the beginning of the days of Abraham. This is 
 the underlying conception of the religion which 
 is based on the revelation to Moses. God makes 
 promises which they can be sure He will fulfil 
 if they will permit it. For His promises are not 
 mere soft words with no sense of right in them. 
 They are promises based upon the fulfilment, on 
 Israel’s part, of an obligation which rests on 
 them. Side by side with this teaching of God as 
 righteous, His justice we call it, is the revelation 
 of His holiness. We find this in the account of 
 the vision which Moses had at the bush, when 
 God bade him put off his shoes from off his feet 
 for the ground on which he stood was holy, holy 
 because it is there that He is revealing Himself. 
 We see the same truth in Isaiah’s experience 
 when he cries out, after seeing God in all His 
 glory in the midst of the heavenly courts; “Woe 
 is me for I am undone, because I am a man of 
 unclean lips and dwell in the midst of a people 
 of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King 
 the Lord of Hosts.” But most of all we get this 
 
14 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 truth about God’s holiness in the worship of 
 Israel. Whenever it may have come in, whether 
 from Mosaic days or later, there is no doubt that 
 the message of the Day of the Atonement was 
 well understood in Christ’s time, and the mean¬ 
 ing of that day’s worship was the holiness of 
 God and the sinfulness of man, a God so holy 
 that unless cleansed year after year even His 
 chosen people could not come to worship Him 
 according to His own commandment. 
 
 The true idea of the inner life of God is, how¬ 
 ever, not found in the Old Testament. We must 
 turn to the New Testament and find it in the 
 revelation of our Lord. No where is the truth 
 of St. John’s words made more clear than here. 
 No aspect of God is “declared” by the Son as 
 truly as this, the inner life of God. But how 
 does He do it? First and foremost in His own 
 life. “What Jesus Christ was God is and man 
 must be, and by the grace of God can be” is a 
 sentence we should never forget. If we would 
 know God we find Him best revealed in Jesus 
 Christ. And of all the Evangelists none phrases 
 it more clearly than St. John, though St. Luke in 
 the parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin 
 and the Prodigal Son gives, in the Master’s own 
 words, as clear a picture as St. John does. 
 “God so loved the word that He gave His only 
 begotten Son,” that is the phrase we find in St. 
 John, and as the old Apostle thinks back across 
 the more than half century of prayer and wor¬ 
 ship and preaching which separated him from 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 15 
 
 the earthly life of the Son he knew as perhaps 
 none other knew before him that in the deepest, 
 truest sense, if one would know God, one can¬ 
 not put it more simply nor more fully than in 
 the words “God is love.” 
 
 Modern teachers are realizing that there are 
 realms unreached, untouched by the microscope 
 and telescope, that there are great “values,” to 
 use the term of philosophy, whose expression 
 is to be found in the lives of men, in their poetry 
 and art and religion. Of these values three are 
 often spoken of as being the highest; the good, 
 the beautiful and the true. We are being again 
 reminded that the good and the beautiful and the 
 true are not merely the sum-total of the things 
 which men see and know and do and describe in 
 these terms, but that in some sense they them¬ 
 selves are the evidence, partial and incomplete 
 yet unimpeachable, that there is a good and beau¬ 
 tiful and true beyond and above the sum total 
 of which what we see are so to say its rays. But 
 is there not a still higher value, which gathers 
 into itself, not as a whole gathers its parts but 
 rather as the source and center of them all, that 
 long line of deeds of mercy and sympathy and 
 kindliness and love which have marked human 
 life and never more wonderfully than in the life 
 of Jesus Christ? Is not love itself a great 
 reality, of which all our experiences of human 
 love are but shadows or glimmerings? Is it not 
 so that, realizing this, St. John says not that 
 God loves, but that God is Love? 
 
16 SOME FOUNDATION TEUTHS 
 
 If this is true, as I believe it is, then we can 
 go a bit deeper into the mystery of God’s inner 
 life and see that if He is truly Love He must be 
 Triune. For love can only fully and perfectly 
 exist, real love I mean, between persons. 1 We 
 cannot think of it save as a feeling between two 
 persons. 
 
 I have not exhausted the Old Testament revela¬ 
 tion of God but I have gone far enough to give 
 ns a clear idea of what is made known. There 
 is, however, a special development in the idea 
 of God which is given in the New Testament 
 without which we should be in difficulty. In 
 the Old Testament record, there is no sharp un¬ 
 derstanding and statement of God’s relation to 
 the material universe, save as its Creator. Has 
 God a form? Is He imaginable? Is He pic : 
 tnrable? Is He material? They might not have 
 put it in these words, but the Jews, the best of 
 them, wanted to see God. The prophet ventured 
 to ask God to reveal Himself to him and the only 
 revelation which God would give him was the 
 quiet voice as of the evening zephyr. True He 
 showed Himself through His angels, created mes¬ 
 sengers, and through His prophets, men in whom 
 His Spirit dwelt, but this did not suffice. Men 
 wanted to see God. I think that this explains 
 somewhat the intense desire for idols which 
 marked the early life of Israel, and it was only 
 with difficulty that God made them understand 
 
 i Cf. Illingworth, Divine Immanence, pp. 186, 187. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 17 
 
 that they could not see Him nor could they pic¬ 
 ture Him in the form of anything created in 
 heaven above nor in the earth beneath nor in the 
 waters under the earth. Then our Lord came 
 and His conversation with the woman of 
 Samaria taught the truth which we accept as a 
 commonplace and do not understand; “God is 
 spirit.” It is important to remember that what 
 our Lord said is not “God is a spirit” but “God is 
 spirit.” St. John again puts it clearly for us 
 when he says: “No man hath seen God at any 
 time.” 
 
 The problem for thinking men today is largely 
 concerned with the problem of spirit and matter 
 and the relation between them. We must not 
 be led aside by that now, but we must remem¬ 
 ber and that very clearly, that God is ab¬ 
 solutely incorporeal. He has nothing like a ma¬ 
 terial body. He cannot be seen by physical eyes. 
 He is as the Article puts it “without body, parts, 
 or passions.” Neither, therefore, can He be 
 thought of as in any one particular place for He 
 is above all space and beyond space and yet He 
 does reveal Himself in space to men in particu¬ 
 lar ways, and through special persons and finally 
 in and through His Incarnate Son. 
 
 God, supreme over all, above all, is also in all 
 and through all. The question of the relation 
 between God and the created universe, I do not 
 mean as the Creator of it, but the Universe as 
 created, is one which we must not shrink from 
 
18 SOME FOUNDATION TEUTHS 
 
 considering. The truth perhaps is suggested 
 in these familiar words of Tennyson: 
 
 “ Little flower—but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 
 I should know what God and man is.” 
 
 for within the flower lies not merely the revela¬ 
 tion of God’s divine creative force, but the pres¬ 
 ence of God Himself. As Fenelon says: “I see 
 God in everything.” Both writers are but put¬ 
 ting in different words the truth of the Apostle’s 
 declaration when he wrote the words I have 
 just quoted: “Who is above all and through all 
 and in you all.” The Transcendence and the 
 Immanence of God, that He is above all, i. e. in¬ 
 dependent of the whole of the universe, and yet 
 through all, i. e. absolutely present in it, has 
 never been put more clearly than in Abelard’s 
 Ehythm of the Trinity, which should be read in 
 the original Latin to appreciate its full power. 
 
 “Above all, Under all, Outside all, and Within all; 
 
 Within, yet not shut in; Outside, yet not shut out; 
 
 Under all, yet not withdrawn; Over all, yet not up¬ 
 lifted ; 
 
 Thou art wholly over by possessing it; under by 
 holding it up; 
 
 Outside by embracing it; within by filling it. 
 
 Within, yet never art Thou restrained; without, yet 
 never dissipated; 
 
 Beneath, yet never art Thou wearied; above yet none 
 upholds Thee.” 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 19 
 
 ii 
 
 Is God Knowable? Can mere man, with his 
 finite mind, really know God? These questions 
 bring us at once not only to a matter of theology 
 but to one of the great philosophical problems. 
 Is the answer to the search for the final explana¬ 
 tion of the universe and of life the answer of the 
 atheistic agnostic, God cannot be known, we 
 cannot find Him? 
 
 We need at the very outset to keep clear in our 
 minds the distinction between a knowledge that 
 is based upon mathematical certainty and one 
 that is based upon such a cumulative body of 
 evidence that there is, in the phrase of the law, 
 “no reasonable ground for doubt.” To know 
 God as we know the exact sciences, with mathe¬ 
 matical certainty, beyond any possibility of 
 doubt, is quite impossible. This fact of religion 
 and of the philosophy which underlies religion 
 has always been recognized. Nevertheless there 
 are certain so called proofs of God’s existence 
 whose value we must recognize. They vary in 
 the impression which they make upon us, and 
 in the force with which they appeal to our rea¬ 
 son. No one of them in and of itself is con¬ 
 clusive. The world-wide belief in God which no 
 tribe or people has ever lacked, the evidence of 
 design and purpose, the witness of the moral 
 sense, to name but a few, are not positive proofs. 
 But this is true: they are cumulative; lines of 
 evidence which converge upon a focus they can- 
 
20 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 not reach. Their direction is certain and yet 
 each of them vanishes into a mist through which 
 knowledge cannot penetrate, but faith can find a 
 way. And yet, after all, this knowledge of God 
 does suffice for men to live by it. Every one does 
 not feel this sufficiency, but, for centuries, hu¬ 
 man beings have lived and worked and suffered 
 and died and on the basis of that knowledge have 
 hoped for an unending life beyond. We must 
 never forget the evidential value of this fact. 
 
 But the question comes back with renewed 
 force: How can I find out God? If He is not 
 to be reached by human reason, how can He be? 
 There is truth, let us freely admit it, in Herbert 
 Spencer’s statement that the “Power which the 
 universe manifests to us is inscrutable,” but this 
 does not involve the further conclusion which 
 Huxley draws that He is not only unknowable 
 but that He cannot reveal Himself. We must 
 face the facts of religion as honestly as we face 
 the facts of other spheres of human thought. 
 The evidence which these facts supply cannot be 
 lightly cast to the wind as impossible and there¬ 
 fore untrue. And after all there are certain 
 facts. First of them is that very universal be¬ 
 lief in a Divine Being to which we referred a 
 few minutes ago. The common consensus of hu¬ 
 man opinion gives an evidence to the existence 
 of such a Being which demands attention. But 
 how did men get it? In some people it grew out 
 of a reverence for the great men of past days; 
 among others the great powers of nature gave it 
 
21 
 
 OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 shape and form. But when we have said this 
 we have not covered the whole of human ex¬ 
 perience. On the eastern shore of the Mediter¬ 
 ranean Sea there lived a people whose influence 
 on human history, and especially human reli¬ 
 gious history, is unequalled, so far does it out¬ 
 reach all other religious influences. I need not 
 name them, but behind all their influence lies 
 this fact of their religious belief: God has re¬ 
 vealed Himself. The understanding by which, 
 in far off Ur, Abraham knew God as supreme 
 above all other gods; the burning bush which 
 showed Him to Moses as a personal, living Being; 
 the vision which revealed to Isaiah His wonder¬ 
 ful power and holiness, are but scattered ex¬ 
 amples of that which is the constant factor 
 throughout the Jewish history; God revealed 
 Himself to Moses and the Prophets. “No man 
 by searching could find out God” as Job sug¬ 
 gests, but God unveiled Himself to men. The 
 Unknown God, whom the Athenian in his igno¬ 
 rance worshipped, was made known by St. Paul 
 not by argument but by the story of the revela¬ 
 tion of Him by His own Son, Whom He raised 
 from the dead. 
 
 It is important to keep this truth very clearly 
 in our minds today. The Christian knowledge 
 of God is not something which men have worked 
 out for themselves, though they have worked out 
 the phraseology by which they would express it. 
 The facts beneath are revealed by God Himself, 
 Who whether speaking by the prophets or in the 
 
22 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Person of His Son has been teaching us. “No 
 one,” as St. John says, “has ever seen God at any 
 time. The only begotten Son, who is in the 
 bosom of the Father, He hath revealed Him.” 
 God is knowable, but only as He makes Himself 
 known. And furthermore, we must always re¬ 
 member that this knowledge of God has to be 
 through finite means. Our knowledge is all con¬ 
 ditioned by the facts of our finite existence, and 
 God’s revelation of Himself is likewise condi¬ 
 tioned. “We see through a glass darkly” as St. 
 Paul tells us. “The natural man receiveth not 
 the things of the spirit of God for they are fool¬ 
 ishness unto him, and he cannot know them be¬ 
 cause they are spiritually examined.” But be¬ 
 cause this knowledge of the infinite Spiritual Be¬ 
 ing is a meditated knowledge, given us through 
 finite means, it does not imply that He is none 
 the less real. We do not comprehend God, i. e. 
 fully understand Him, perfectly know Him; but 
 we can none the less apprehend Him, and hope 
 that the reflection we have now in the mirror of 
 His revelation, however dim and incomplete, will 
 in some future day give place to the vision of the 
 reality when we shall see Him face to face. 
 
 There is a second problem which we must 
 touch upon, because it is so greatly to the fore 
 just now, the problem of evolution and the rela¬ 
 tion of God to nature. The importance of the 
 subject demands a treatment much fuller than is 
 possible here, and I can only indicate a few of 
 the points which are involved. At the forefront 
 
OF THE CHKISTIAN FAITH 
 
 23 
 
 of these we should never forget that evolution is 
 a theory of the method by which the universe has 
 become what it is. It is a modus operandi. But 
 the moment we say this we raise the essential 
 question; Who works? What are the “Laws of 
 Nature”? Are they impersonal forces, or are 
 they human generalizations based upon man’s ob¬ 
 servance of the way things happen? In the last 
 analysis, the “Laws” are man’s own explanations 
 and they must reveal the power behind which 
 works through them, rather than a mere imper¬ 
 sonal force. Pere Didon has expressed this very 
 beautifully in these words: “The Spirit of God 
 is the soverign force. He commands the gen¬ 
 eral evolution, and presides over the ordered and 
 progressive movement of the universe. For as 
 He entered upon chaos and matter to bring into 
 existence the being which feels, into animal life 
 to produce the being who thinks, He entered into 
 the being who thinks that the earth may give 
 its fruit and that man may see the Saviour 
 arise, the Holy One, the Son of God.” 1 
 
 The great divisions between what in older 
 phraseology were called the kingdom of matter, 
 the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom 
 and the kingdom of man, are not the only ones 
 in which the Spirit of God can be said to enter. 
 Thomson, in the Gifford Lectures for 1918, 1919, 
 
 1 Bp. Henson has brought out that the very fundamental 
 assumption on which all scientific knowledge is based, the 
 presence of purpose in nature, assumes the fact, though it 
 is not always admitted, that there must he behind the pur¬ 
 pose one who purposes. 
 
24 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 lias traced out the lines of evolution in entire 
 sympathy with the best thought of modern sci¬ 
 ence, but when one has analyzed the problem as 
 he presents it, there remains still the fact that 
 the change from one great group of creatures to 
 another, e. g., to use his own case, that from rep¬ 
 tiles to birds, may show a likeness between the 
 two but it also shows the entrance of something 
 new, which was not in the lower order; and is 
 the essential mark of the new. Whence comes 
 this? It cannot evolve of itself for it is not even 
 in the simplest form in the lower order. Revela¬ 
 tion says it is the hand of God. Beneath Cre¬ 
 ation lies the Creator, and in some mysterious 
 way H'e sustains it. This is especially true in 
 the revelation of God as given in the Old Testa¬ 
 ment. The nineteenth Psalm which sings, “The 
 heavens declare the glory of God and the firma¬ 
 ment showeth His handiwork”; and the great 
 Psalm of the sea, the one hundred and seventh, 
 which ends “whoso is wise and will observe these 
 things even they shall understand the loving 
 kindness of the Lord” are but two of the count¬ 
 less passages which point out the truth of revela¬ 
 tion that God is the Creator of all things visible 
 and invisible. Nor is the New Testament less 
 explicit, though the references are not so fre¬ 
 quent. St. Paul’s speech at Athens and his 
 opening argument in the Epistle to the Romans 
 bear witness to the truth that God has made 
 Himself known by ‘the visible creation, even His 
 eternal power and deity’; while our Lord Him- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 25 
 
 self in the Sermon on the Mount emphasises the 
 continual care by God of His creatures. 1 
 
 Over against these two great philosophical 
 problems lie the difficulties which come out of 
 ignorance. God, as an invisible spiritual being, 
 behind and under, above and throughout the Uni¬ 
 verse, is hard to understand; and there are those 
 to whom this truth comes not as something help¬ 
 ful, but as a difficulty in belief. For such it is 
 sometimes hard to pray when first taught that 
 God is a spiritual and not a material Being. The 
 difficulty is a real one, and yet its answer lies 
 plainly upon the face of the Scriptures. The 
 spiritual Being, absolutely immaterial, has re¬ 
 vealed Himself not only through men’s minds, 
 but in the person of Jesus Christ, to Whom as 
 a matter of fact we owe the clear teaching of this 
 very truth; and the solution of the difficulty is 
 found in remembering that Jesus Christ is Him¬ 
 self God, and that in and through Him not only 
 do we know God but are enabled to approach 
 Him acceptably in prayer and worship. 
 
 hi 
 
 The Christian Idea of God is not a mere matter 
 of the intellect. It is pre-eminently practical. 
 It involves consequences. If it be true we can- 
 
 i It is this fact which explains the miracles, “acts depart¬ 
 ing from the ordinary processes of nature”; non contra 
 naturam sed contra qua est nota natura as St. Augustine 
 phrases it; and acts which challenge attention to some truth 
 or revelation of God. 
 
26 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 not ignore it, nor Him Whom it reveals. We 
 must believe in Him; our soill must make that 
 personal self-surrender to Him by which He rules 
 our life, which we call Faith. In the various 
 problems and trials, the difficulties and doubts, 
 as well as the joys and privileges of life, we must 
 find Him and learn to live in dependence upon 
 Him. And furthermore we are forced to feel 
 the responsibility which such certainty brings. 
 Like the Apostles “we cannot but speak the 
 things which we have seen and known.” 
 
 Too often men are content with this expression 
 of their relation to God Who has revealed Him¬ 
 self. Once more let us turn back to Isaiah or 
 forward to the Revelation. There we see the vi¬ 
 sion of the very presence of God described, “high 
 and lifted up, and His glory fills the heavens.” 
 But we see more than this; we see before Him 
 the angelic hosts praising Him and saying “Holy, 
 holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and earth 
 are full of Thy Glory.” We see, with St. John, 
 the great multitude which no man can number 
 from every nation and kingdom and people wor¬ 
 shipping before Him. The highest expression of 
 our acceptance of the Christian Idea of God is 
 not found merely in a life lived in faith and hope 
 and love; it must show itself in the worship of 
 Him Who sent His only and most dearly beloved 
 Son that we might see Him and know Him and 
 in Him give ourselves completely to fulfil God’s 
 purpose for men. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 What does the New Testament tell us about 
 Jesus Christ? What are His claims upon us? 
 These are the most vital questions man can face. 
 But, before we can answer them, we must stop 
 and ask ourselves another; What can we believe, 
 today, about the New Testament? 
 
 The real test of the claims of our Lord upon 
 us is not the New Testament. That is the rec¬ 
 ord of what the Church has believed about Him 
 and of what she has thought of sufficient perma¬ 
 nent value to preserve. The evidence to the 
 Person of Jesus of Nazareth rests upon a wider 
 foundation than the New Testament, even the 
 fact of the Church herself and her unbroken wit¬ 
 ness to Him. But after all this is admitted as 
 true—and it is true—the New Testament carries 
 us very near to His Own day, and gives us what 
 purports to be first hand evidence to His life 
 and teaching and thus to Himself. What then, 
 we ask, can we believe about the New Testament? 
 
 I 
 
 On the surface the New Testament is a collec¬ 
 tion of twenty-seven writings, commonly called 
 
28 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 books, written by different people and, as we 
 shall see, over a period of nearly half a century. 
 Four of these books purport to be portrayals of 
 the life of Jesus Christ, “memoirs of the Apos¬ 
 tles” Justin Martyr called them in the second 
 century. The fifth is a second volume of one of 
 the Gospels, known as the Acts of the Apostles. 
 There are thirteen Epistles, letters that is, which 
 claim to be written by St. Paul, one to the 
 Hebrews, seven short letters by four different 
 persons attributed ultimately to Apostles and for 
 that reason included finally in the collection, and 
 last a book called the Apocalypse, or Revelation, 
 of which St. John is the traditional author. 
 
 These twenty seven books were collected to¬ 
 gether during the first half of the second century, 
 but not all at once nor all together. The Epistles 
 of St. Paul seem to have been the earliest collec¬ 
 tion. The Gospels were grouped later. Some 
 uncertainty existed until well into the third cen¬ 
 tury about the inclusion into the collection of 
 seven of our books: Hebrews, Revelation, St. 
 James, St. Jude, II St. Peter and II and III St. 
 John. The final decision was due, not to any 
 act of councils nor to a formal decree, but to the 
 final acceptance by the Church that they were 
 writings of Apostles which had been used in the 
 Church during the past years, and so were to 
 be believed and accepted as of permanent value. 
 
 We must keep clear the distinction between 
 the formation of the books into a collection, 
 which became authoritive as the only collection 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 29 
 
 of the Sacred Books of the Church, and the writ¬ 
 ing of the books. Both elements combine to 
 give the New Testament its status in the Church, 
 but the two are quite separate. The finally de¬ 
 termining factor was the belief that the books in 
 question came from Apostles, and were there¬ 
 fore first hand evidence to what Jesus Christ 
 said and did and of what the Church of the first 
 century believed; and for this reason they were 
 put into the collection we call the New Testa¬ 
 ment. We must account for both these elements 
 in any explanation of Inspiration which may be 
 given. The books were written by men filled 
 with the Holy Spirit, and so we call them the 
 writings of inspired men; but also the men who 
 had collected them during the next two cen¬ 
 turies, i. e. the Church, were also inspired. Lid- 
 don suggests this idea in his sermon: The In¬ 
 spiration of Selection. 
 
 With possibly one exception all of these books 
 were written in the first century. The investiga¬ 
 tions of the past century have proved this con¬ 
 clusively. No scholar of reputation disputes the 
 general statement. Let us see what we can say 
 about the books in detail. The earliest collection 
 contains St. Paul's Epistles, which are, with one 
 probable exception, the oldest books. The thir¬ 
 teen epistles which claim to be by him fall at once 
 into two main groups. The earlier group is 
 made up of the ten which were written before or 
 during the Captivity in Rome with the account 
 of which the Acts closes. The other three are 
 
30 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 the so-called Pastoral Epistles, those to St. Timo¬ 
 thy and to St. Titus. There is no responsible ob¬ 
 jector to the first ten, and the sounder criticism 
 of today connects St. Paul very closely with the 
 Pastorals. Some critics hesitating to admit the 
 actual apostolic authorship, ascribe these later 
 letters to a member of St. Paul’s company, writ¬ 
 ing for the Apostle; but the balance of opinion 
 would make St. Paul the actual author of these 
 three short letters, explaining the differences in 
 vocabulary by the change in the subject, and the 
 stress upon the organization as due to the prog¬ 
 ress of Church life during the decade prior to the 
 fall of Jerusalem. 
 
 The other Epistles stand on different grounds. 
 I St. Peter is, no doubt, the work of the Apostle, 
 but the almost overwhelming opinion of even 
 conservative scholars of today is unwilling to 
 accept him as the author of the Second Epistle 
 which bears his name, and dates it, if he is not 
 its author, early in the second century. Of the 
 three Johannine Epistles we can say very cer¬ 
 tainly that they were written, all of them, by the 
 same man who wrote the fourth Gospel. The Sec¬ 
 ond and Third are very short and this probably 
 explains our failure to find them quoted during 
 the earliest ages, and their omission from the 
 lists of books of that period, so that they fall 
 among what Eusebius called the Disputed Books. 
 The Epistle by St. James is believed by many to 
 be the oldest of all the New Testament writings, 
 and its author is most probably St. James the 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 31 
 
 Lord’s brother, “bishop of Jerusalem,” and not 
 the Apostle to whom it was attributed in the 
 third century. A similar explanation tells the 
 story of the Epistle of St. Jude. The most in¬ 
 teresting problem is the authorship of the Epis¬ 
 tle to the Hebrews; which was accepted in the 
 West, where it was believed that St. Paul wrote 
 it, and rejected at first in the East where it was 
 thought he did not. The western opinion became 
 the dominant one and the Church accepted it as 
 a part of the Scriptures. No one knows who 
 wrote it, but it was written before the fall of 
 Jerusalem in the year 70 A. d. ; and an old second 
 century tradition which attributes it to St. 
 Barnabas has much to commend it. The Revela¬ 
 tion has also had a stormy history and men have 
 been divided between St. John the Divine as the 
 author and some one else, and between the days 
 of Nero and those of Domitian. The balance of 
 present day opinion would put it in the days of 
 Nero and make it the work of the Apostle. 
 
 When we turn to the Gospels we face the most 
 serious critical problems. We cannot now go 
 into details. Certain facts stand out, as gener¬ 
 ally accepted. First of all we may believe that, 
 the oldest of the Gospels is St. Mark, and that it 
 is the work of the Evangelist whose name it 
 bears, based upon the public teaching of the 
 Apostle Peter; which means that we may quite 
 properly think of St. Peter as the source of this 
 account of our Lord, with John Mark of Jerusa 1 
 lem as a sort of secretary or interpreter. The 
 
32 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Gospel was written as it stands, save that the 
 closing page was probably lost, and the present 
 ending, 16: 9-20, was added in the second cen¬ 
 tury to make up for the lost conclusion. Closely 
 related, in time, to the earliest Gospel is a collec¬ 
 tion of Christ’s teachings, together with certain 
 narratives, which is described in the celebrated 
 quotation from Papias, the second century 
 scholar, as written in Hebrew by St. Matthew 
 and translated as each one might. We have no 
 copy of this, and it is quite certain that onr Gos¬ 
 pel of St. Matthew is not that collection. Mod¬ 
 ern scholarship has constructed out of passages 
 peculiar to St. Matthew and St. Luke a document 
 which men call “Q” which is thought to repre¬ 
 sent to some degree this earlier writing of St. 
 Matthew. This is one of the widely—I had al¬ 
 most said generally—accepted “results of mod¬ 
 ern criticism.” For myself I am still uncon¬ 
 vinced of the truth of it, but it underlies the mod¬ 
 ern reconstruction and explanation of the Gos¬ 
 pel attributed to St. Luke and also that known 
 as St. Matthew’s. In the opening section of St. 
 Luke’s Gospel he tells us that, in writing his ac¬ 
 count of the Life of Jesus Christ, he has used the 
 writings and verbal evidence of men who had 
 first hand knowledge. Modern scholars say that 
 of these two were in all probability St. Mark’s 
 Gospel and Q, together with a body of additional 
 material which he used in the section beginning 
 at the end of the ninth chapter. In similar fash¬ 
 ion St. Matthew’s Gospel is believed to be a com- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 33 
 
 pilation by some unknown author built up from 
 St. Mark and Q which he uses with a freedom 
 that allows him to amend it to suit the prejudices 
 of his readers. Be this as it may—and again let 
 me register my unwillingness to accept these 
 conclusions as true—we have the three Synoptic 
 Gospels, with their common outline dealing 
 chiefly with the Galilean Ministry of our Lord 
 together with the accounts of the last week in 
 Jerusalem, and containing in addition to the 
 chief body of facts which St. Mark relates much 
 of what the Master taught, together with a num¬ 
 ber of facts which St. Mark does not relate, and 
 prefaced in both St. Matthew and St. Luke by the 
 two dissimilar but not contradictory accounts 
 of Christ’s birth and childhood. The second vol¬ 
 ume of St. Luke’s history is what we call the Acts, 
 ending abruptly with the summary of St. Paul’s 
 imprisonment, and written with such accuracy 
 of statement and reference to geographical and 
 political conditions that it is today one of the 
 most trusted of the books of the New Testament. 
 
 The final problem, the great problem, is the 
 authorship of the Fourth Gospel, attributed 
 through all the Christian centuries to St. John, 
 the son of Zebedee, the “beloved disciple” of the 
 Master, and for a century and a quarter the cen¬ 
 ter of attack. The outcome of the discussion 
 which that century has produced is first of all 
 the establishment of the approximate date. No 
 longer can any one question that it was written 
 at about the end of the first century. Traditional 
 
34 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 belief on this is right. Furthermore it is quite 
 clear that the Johannine Epistles and the Gos¬ 
 pel are by the same man, and the weight of evi¬ 
 dence to the Gospel is strengthened by that to 
 the First Epistle. The book is the product of 
 some one who actually lived through the scenes 
 it describes. The marks of the eye-witness are 
 constant, and cannot be explained away. There 
 are problems of the scene of the Ministry, which 
 is Jerusalem rather than Galilee, that need ex¬ 
 planation; and, again, the Gospel deals with a 
 different set of truths which are not so different 
 after all; and last the speeches of Jesus Christ 
 in St. John are not like those in St. Matthew. 
 Valid explanations of these discrepancies are not 
 impossible. Jerusalem, the center of religious 
 life and the headquarters of Jewish religious 
 leaders, would of necessity claim some of Christ’s 
 time. He would naturally, there, deal with 
 somewhat different problems, or at least handle 
 them in a different way from that which He used 
 in Galilee. Then too, we must admit that St. 
 John, writing more than sixty years after the 
 events, with almost a lifetime of teaching and 
 memory behind him, would assimilate the Mas¬ 
 ter’s manner of speech and perhaps even put into 
 his own words what the Lord had said. The evi¬ 
 dences for the Apostle’s authorship of the Gos¬ 
 pel are stronger than the objections; and unless 
 one has invincible prejudice against it one may 
 quite safely say, with Drummond, “In my judge¬ 
 ment it is Johannine.” The only alternative 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 35 
 
 possible is that some intimate disciple of the old 
 Apostle, writing for him and at his direction, ac¬ 
 tually phrased the words so that the witness is 
 St. John’s, though the language may be that of 
 his disciple; but of this there is no evidence 
 neither does it explain the disappearance from 
 history of such a person as the author would be, 
 and there is no need for such an explanation in 
 the facts of the Gospel itself. 
 
 The books of the New Testament, then, go back 
 into the first century, and St. James is the oldest 
 of them all, dating about 45 A. d. St. Paul’s 
 epistles were all written between 51 and 64, when 
 he was put to death under Nero. The earlier 
 Gospels fall probably between 60 and 70, or a lit¬ 
 tle later. There is some good reason for dating 
 St. Mark and St. Luke in the earlier period and 
 St. Matthew as later. St. John belongs about 
 95. The rest of the New Testament falls be¬ 
 tween 60 and 80, save II St. Peter, which if mod¬ 
 ern views prevail about that writing, belongs in 
 the first part of the second century. 
 
 We can say then, in answer to our enquiry, 
 that in the New Testament, we have a collection 
 begun in the second century and completed early 
 in the third, of first century writings, almost all 
 of which had Apostles for their authors; and 
 that all of them bear evidence to what the 
 Church knew and believed about Her Founder, 
 Jesus Christ. We can therefore go back with 
 confidence to these twenty seven books and from 
 them seek fearlessly the answer to our question: 
 
36 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 What does the New Testament tell us about 
 Jesus Christ? 
 
 ii 
 
 There are two ways to approach this question. 
 We can attempt to put ourselves in the position 
 of the Apostles before the Lord’s resurrection; 
 and, following the modern cry “Back to Jesus,” 
 seek to find in the Gospels the record of Who and 
 what Hb was. This attempt on the part of a 
 great body of people today, both of scholars and 
 the ordinary student, is in reality an attempt 
 to do the impossible. If we could approach the 
 subject as adults who never had any idea of 
 Jesus Christ, and if we were trained students 
 of history, we might do this; or at least go as far 
 as the records lead us. But we are none of these. 
 No one of us can approach this subject except 
 with the religious experience of our childhood 
 behind us. At the very beginning of that we 
 learned to know of Jesus as the Christ, a fact 
 which the disciples did not know. We were ac¬ 
 customed to worship Him and think of Him as 
 God long, long before we could dream of ap¬ 
 proaching the problem of the evidence to Him. 
 Few indeed are there who could, therefore, face 
 these questions without prejudice. As Dean J. 
 Armitage Robinson says in his “Thoughts for 
 Teachers of the Bible”: “We all of us practi¬ 
 cally began with the Creed which declares Him 
 to be ‘the only begotten Son of God’ and ‘our 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 37 
 
 Lord’: with the plain statements of His wonder¬ 
 ful Birth, His Death and Burial, His wonderful 
 Resurrection and Ascension, and His future Re¬ 
 turn to Judgment. We have seen Him whole 
 from the outset. In the light of all this we have 
 read the Gospels—read them as the Church reads 
 them and has always read them in her most sol¬ 
 emn services, as complementary the one to the 
 other, and with no attempt to distinguish be¬ 
 tween them. That has been our method of ap¬ 
 proach, and it has ruled our criticism. We have 
 never felt under an obligation to discover a 
 merely human Jesus. In the main, though not in 
 every detail, it is true to say summarily that we 
 have begun with the teaching of St. Paul with the 
 preincarnate Christ and the great redemptive 
 facts. We have come to the Gospels in the light 
 of the Epistles. And so we have found in the 
 Gospels the mystery which we had learned to ex¬ 
 pect, and our surprise has been that the Life 
 should after all be so truly and simply human as 
 it there appears.” 
 
 Furthermore the method is unhistorical in its 
 treatment of our material. The Gospels did not 
 come first, nor do they pretend to give the story 
 of Jesus as a merely human person. Even St. 
 Mark begins the statement, according to the 
 older reading, which cannot be “safely rejected” : 
 “The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ 
 the Son of God”; and St. Luke tells us quite 
 frankly that he is writing in order that Theophi- 
 lus may have a fuller knowledge about the truths 
 
38 SOME FOUNDATION TEUTHS 
 
 he had already learned at the mouth of his 
 teacher. The Gospels were written for Chris¬ 
 tians ; and they one and all presuppose the knowl¬ 
 edge of the Christ which the Christian had; and 
 it is this presupposition, which underlies all they 
 say, that makes it impossible for us to go back 
 fully into the days when men did not know who 
 Jesus of Nazareth was. 
 
 The other approach is the approach from the 
 way of the Acts and the Epistles and this is the 
 historical approach. We see what men who 
 lived in the life time of the Apostles believed 
 about Jesus Christ, what they taught about Him, 
 with what presuppositions they wrote their let¬ 
 ters, compiled their histories and recorded their 
 memories of those days when they saw and heard 
 Him and actually felt Him with their own hands. 
 Further this is the more correct method his¬ 
 torically because in the Epistles, as I have said, 
 we go back nearer to the days of our Lord’s ac¬ 
 tual life upon earth than we do in the Gospels; 
 they are actually older. I shall therefore begin 
 with them. 
 
 The most outstanding fact is the silence of the 
 Epistles concerning the details of the life of our 
 Lord. They all find in Him their inspiration, 
 and He is the very heart of the life of these 
 writers; all depends upon Him, and yet you will 
 find, in the Epistles, almost nothing about His 
 earthly life. This may be due to the fact that 
 men knew those details from the general knowl- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 39 
 
 edge. They were known in every bazaar in 
 Palestine as Streeter says. It may also be due 
 to the fact that converts were fully instructed 
 in the facts of that life, and the letters did not 
 concern themselves with these questions. The 
 importance of this latter point must not be over¬ 
 looked. The Epistles come, each of them, out of 
 an especial situation, and an actual one. They 
 are letters written by living men to living men 
 in a real situation in their own religious lives. 
 They are not, not even Romans nor Hebrews is, 
 tracts, nor theses, nor theological essays. They 
 breathe the breath of a throbbing world and of 
 men who are trying to find out in that world 
 what Jesus Christ would have them to do and 
 who He really is. But for whatever reason, the 
 Epistles are silent about the details of the Life 
 of Christ. They tell us who He is, and how He 
 came into human life; they tell us of His birth, 
 His death, and Resurrection and of His session 
 in Heaven; and in so doing they remind us of 
 the Creed. But there they stop. 
 
 Their primary question, on this side, is, Who 
 is Jesus of Nazareth? When St. Peter began to 
 preach in Jerusalem on Pentecost, he had two 
 things to explain; The descent of the Spirit 
 which had drawn the crowd to one place, and 
 Who Jesus is. Consequently we find him, in 
 that first Christian sermon, not only asserting 
 but proving that the gift of which the crowd were 
 witnesses was sent by Jesus of Nazareth, ‘a man 
 approved of God among you/ after He had been 
 
40 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 exalted by the right hand of God, and that this 
 gift was in entire accord with the prophecy of 
 Joel. But the point of St. Peter’s sermon is that 
 ‘God had declared by raising Him from the dead’ 
 that the One who had sent this gift, whom they 
 knew as Jesus of Nazareth and had crucified, 
 was the Lord and Christ. It is noteworthy that 
 the Apostle is not content with proclaiming that 
 God had made Him Christ, but, and this is the 
 emphatic word, Lord, the term which is regu¬ 
 larly used in the Greek Old Testament as the 
 translation of Jehovah. This emphasis reap¬ 
 pears over and again in the Apostle’s sermons 
 and addresses, so that we are not surprised to 
 read in his sermon to Cornelius that ‘Jesus is 
 Lord of all,’ and to find the Apostle attributing 
 to Him that which the Jew believed God alone 
 could grant, the forgiveness of sins. The same 
 assertion of belief reappears in St. Peter’s First 
 Epistle, along with the interpretation of the 
 great facts of His death and resurrection and 
 the practical consequences of belief in Him by 
 Whom we are reborn, Who is the object of the 
 worship of men and supreme over all created be¬ 
 ings, ‘angels and authorities and powers being 
 made subject unto Him.’ 
 
 The Apostles all teach the same great funda¬ 
 mental truths about Jesus Christ; although they 
 express them differently. It is not surprising, 
 therefore, to read throughout St. Paul’s epistles 
 passage after passage and to find him building 
 his whole teaching on the fact which he him- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 41 
 
 self had learned to believe in the days which fol¬ 
 lowed the Vision on the road to Damascus. He 
 then knew that Jesus was the Christ, that sin 
 and death had not conquered, but that God had 
 declared Him in raising Him from the dead. It 
 was really but a step from this to the belief that 
 Jesus was God and it is not at all surprising to 
 find St. Paul, after a few days with the disciples 
 in Damascus, immediately proclaiming in the 
 synagogues that “Jesus is the Son of God.” We 
 cannot follow in detail the story of this declara¬ 
 tion as we read it in his epistles. Certain facts 
 stand out, however, and we must not pass them 
 over. The earliest of the epistles were written 
 on the second journey, at Corinth, and in them 
 we find our Lord spoken of as God’s Son, who is 
 to come in the last days as Judge, and He is 
 coupled in the salutations with the Father as 
 equal to Him. But before St. Paul had written 
 to the Thessalonians he had been preaching 
 Jesus Crucified as the Christ, and Christ as the 
 Son of God, and had even gone so far as to prove 
 from heathen poetry that God was something far 
 more than the idols of silver and gold, and to 
 assert that He had revealed Himself to them in 
 Jesus, Whom he set before them in such a way 
 that the Athenians believed he was proclaiming 
 Him to be God. There is no real difference in 
 the truths proclaimed though there is a fuller 
 and clearer definition of it in St. Paul’s later 
 epistles. Romans leaves no possibility of doubt 
 about the Apostle’s belief, which as he told the 
 
42 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Galatians lie had received not from a man but 
 from God; and this belief he states very clearly 
 in the beginning of the epistle to the Romans 
 when he says that God had “declared His Son 
 Jesus Christ our Lord to be the Son of God with 
 power according to the spirit of holiness by the 
 resurrection of the dead.” This belief of the 
 Apostle is absolutely fundamental to his whole 
 teaching, for the value of the redemption from 
 sin and the deliverence from its power arises 
 from the fact that Hb is God’s Son, in the like¬ 
 ness of human flesh, to whom worship is due as 
 God blessed for ever, yet Who is, as he writes 
 the Galatians, “born of a woman, born under the 
 law to redeem them who were under the law.” It 
 is however in the four epistles called the “Cap¬ 
 tivity Epistles” that we get the clearest defini¬ 
 tion of the Person of Jesus Christ. Not only in 
 the celebrated passage of Philippians 2, the 
 Epistle for Palm Sunday, where the absolute 
 Deity and the true humanity are clearly pro¬ 
 claimed; but the pre-existence and supremacy 
 of Him “who is manifested in the flesh” is set 
 forth in clear terms in the opening passages of 
 the Epistle to the Colossians and reappears 
 quite definitely in Ephesians. 
 
 There can be no question that what the Apos¬ 
 tles believed, and from the Day of Pentecost 
 taught, was that Jesus of Nazareth was the 
 Christ of Prophecy and of Jewish expectation, 
 and truly divine. It is important, in view of the 
 development of the Creed to which we shall come 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 43 
 
 later, to notice very briefly the facts upon which 
 they laid stress. They are all agreed in empha¬ 
 sizing the reality of His humanity though St. 
 Paul alone in the Epistles implies directly the 
 fact of His Virgin birth. The events between 
 His birth and His death are passed over in si¬ 
 lence, save for the reference in II St. Peter to the 
 Transfiguration. But the great stress of them 
 all, upon which they base their teaching and by 
 which St. Peter and St. Paul prove the Deity is 
 the fact of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. 
 The significance of His Death is never lost to 
 sight with the Apostles. Jesus died, according to 
 their belief, not because of the hatred of the Jews, 
 nor in consequence of the antagonism raised by 
 His teaching, but in order that through it men 
 might obtain forgiveness. This stood for them 
 as the all essential fact of His Ministry, though 
 of course they never disassociated it from His 
 resurrection. To the minds of the Apostles, in 
 contradistinction to the modern view, the im¬ 
 portant things are the facts of His Being and 
 life rather than the truths which He taught. But 
 neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, still less St. John, 
 stop with the resurrection. Jesus the Christ de¬ 
 clared such by the power of the Resurrection is 
 alive today. That is the secret of the Church’s 
 life and ministry. Jesus Christ is not only alive, 
 but He is everliving to make intercession for us. 
 The Ministry are gifts from Him, in Whose 
 Name and by Whose power they act; and the 
 Church itself is none less than the Body of 
 
44 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Christ, filled with the Spirit, being gradually per¬ 
 fected and gathering into itself all the families 
 of the earth. No where do we get this belief in 
 the Ascended and active Lord more clearly de¬ 
 clared than in the Revelation. The life of the 
 churches comes from Him who stands in their 
 midst and as the object of their worship holds 
 the keys of death and of hell, and sends messages 
 of comfort and guidance, of reproof and exhorta¬ 
 tion, to the churches under the Apostle’s espe¬ 
 cial care. 
 
 The Christ of the New Testament, so far as the 
 Epistles are concerned, is the incarnate Son of 
 God of the Creeds. What do the Gospels tell 
 us about Him? We must remember what we 
 saw a while ago, that the earlier Gospels were 
 written between thirty or forty years after 
 Christ’s resurrection and while they give true, 
 trustworthy records of the “memories of the 
 Apostles” they do not pretend to give anything 
 like a history of His life, as we moderns use this 
 term. No one can approach the Gospels to study 
 their witness to Jesus Christ without facing the 
 question of miracles. Are they or are they not 
 possible? What are they? Perhaps the latter 
 question should be faced first and no one has 
 ever put the question more clearly than St. 
 Augustine: Non contra naturam sed contra 
 quam est nota natura, not against, contrary 
 to, Nature but contrary to Nature as it is known. 
 They are interwoven into the Gospel narrative 
 in such a way that you cannot take them out 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 45 
 
 of it. Either these are true or the records are 
 not true; but no one questions that they were 
 written as true and that the writers understood 
 that they were describing unusual facts. If the 
 Gospels are true then miracles are to be ex¬ 
 plained either as unusual facts or as facts of 
 which the Apostles give an interpretation which 
 modern men would phrase very differently. The 
 prejudice of the modern critics” is, as Bishop 
 Gore shows, very strongly against the belief in 
 miracles as non-ordinary events. The Gospels 
 themselves describe them as signs, evidences of a 
 presence which has this unusual power. They 
 are, as it were, “challengers of attention” to 
 some truth or revelation of God and always serv¬ 
 ing a moral purpose. Men may question today 
 the evidential value of the miracles; miracles 
 may not appeal to the modern mind as they did 
 in the days of the Apostles or of our own fathers, 
 but they are a part of the warp and woof of the 
 Gospels and can neither be taken out nor can 
 they be explained away under the guise of a dif¬ 
 ferent manner of speech. This might seem to ex¬ 
 plain the healing miracles but it will not give 
 any solution of the problem which the nature 
 miracles raise; and the evidence for one is as 
 strong as that for the other. In spite of the 
 modern prejudice we must assert the reasonable¬ 
 ness and truth of the miracles which stand out 
 as sign posts to a divine revealation which chal¬ 
 lenges men’s attention. 
 
46 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 We are all more or less familiar with the evi¬ 
 dences of the Gospels to our Lord’s Person and 
 work; hut I must not neglect to gather in a few 
 words some of the more important elements in 
 it. He stands in the pages as one who has lived 
 a unique life, with a character which the ages 
 have always recognised as the highest ideal ever 
 set before men. What first strikes one is the 
 strange contradictions in our Lord’s character. 
 There never lived a man who was so absolutely 
 humble as He was; “When He was reviled He 
 reviled not again, when He suffered He threat¬ 
 ened not,” “If I have spoken evil bear witness of 
 the evil but if well why smitest thou me?” So 
 humble was He that Nietzsche spurned his ideal 
 as belittling to the human family; and yet who 
 ever made the claims which Jesus made? He 
 asserts that His is the right to modify the funda¬ 
 mental moral law spoken by God on Sinai; He is 
 to judge the world living and dead; He is ab¬ 
 solutely without sin, and has authority to forgive 
 it. Claims such as these are not consonant with 
 humility if they are false, nor has the explana¬ 
 tion of insanity any possible ground. The old 
 alternative of the middle ages is absolutely valid: 
 Utrum Deus an non bonus, He is either God 
 or not good. If He be the most perfect model of 
 humanity and if He made these claims to su¬ 
 preme divine power there is but one possible solu¬ 
 tion to the dilemma; He is God. Christ’s char¬ 
 acter stands out in the pages of the Gospels not 
 only because of its strange contradictions but 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 47 
 
 because of its inherent qualities. There is a 
 charm and grace about Him which draws men to 
 Him, His tenderness and strength were a new 
 experience in His day as in all days. The quiet 
 dignity with which He withstood His enemies 
 or faced the charges of the Jews before Pilate 
 has always been a wonder. Artists have loved to 
 picture it, and in the “Christ before Pilate” of 
 Munkacsy and the “Christ Descending the Steps 
 of the Prsetorium” of Dore the artists have 
 caught the wonderful power that this dignity 
 gives. He comes down, in Dore’s picture, with 
 clear eyes, fearlessly facing the most terrible 
 death which the world knew, and so showing not 
 only a unique dignity but a courage which has 
 had many followers but has never been sur¬ 
 passed. The courage of our Lord must strike one 
 over and over again; the actual physical courage 
 in the face of hostility, the moral courage in the 
 face of temptations, and the courage of a firmly 
 fixed purpose which led Him on in spite of the 
 opposition of the Jews and the blindness of the 
 disciples until He stood before Pilate the object 
 of bitterest hatred which men could vent on a 
 fellow. These are but some of the outstanding 
 but less commonly emphasized traits of that 
 ideal character which draws men to Him in ad¬ 
 miration and then in love. 
 
 The Gospels set the Lord Jesus before us not 
 only as unique in character but as a teacher the 
 like of whom had never been seen. He spoke 
 with an authority which no teacher of His day 
 
48 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 ever had: “Never man spake like this man” 
 they said. His method has no equal, and mod¬ 
 ern teachers can find no example of how to teach 
 to compare to His. The striking' fact about this 
 teaching of the Lord is that it centers in Him¬ 
 self. Over and over again He draws men to 
 Himself as the revealer and teacher; or by some¬ 
 thing which He does. This is particularly true 
 of that record of Him which St. John gave us 
 so that “men might believe that Jesus is the 
 Christ the Son of God and believing might have 
 life in His name” But it is not limited to the 
 Fourth Gospel and there are no passages in it 
 that are more outstanding in this particular 
 than those in the Sermon on the Mount in St. 
 Matthew and others in both St, Mark and St. 
 Luke. And yet as He says He speaks what He 
 has been commissioned to speak and what He 
 has learned of the Father. The same motive 
 seems to lie behind Him which later lay behind 
 the Apostles when they said: “We cannot but 
 speak what we have heard and seen,” or as St, 
 John phrases it in his epistle: “What we have 
 heard and seen that declare we unto you.” The 
 teaching of Jesus Christ is His and is about 
 Himself, but it is only what His Father has 
 given Him to preach. 
 
 Of course the Gospels, equally with the Epis¬ 
 tles, though not more strongly even if more ex¬ 
 tensively, set our Lord before us as absolutely 
 human, while also truly divine. There is no 
 single element of humanity which is missing in 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 49 
 
 Him save that which is due to sin in Himself. 
 And it is striking that the Gospel which most 
 emphasizes the Deity is the most definite in evi¬ 
 dence of his true humanity. When I say this of 
 course I do not forget that the Person of Jesus 
 Christ was not human but divine. He who is set 
 forth as truly man is not a human person. 
 
 It must be familiar to you that when our Lord 
 led the apostles to confess that He was “the 
 Christ the Son of the Living God” He accepted 
 without the slightest contradiction their confes¬ 
 sion as true. He never let them lose sight of 
 His being somewhat more than a great teacher 
 or as possessed of a peculiar authority that was 
 derived from God and yet was His very own. It 
 is true that these claims are more clearly un¬ 
 folded in St. John; his assertions there are more 
 strong and striking; yet they are not only in the 
 Fourth Gospel. This is so true that if the ex- 
 tremest critics of the last century had been able 
 to prove their contentions—which they were not 
 able to do—and if the Fourth Gospel had been 
 proved to be a late second century writing, our 
 loss would have been the detail of the evidence 
 it gives to His Person and the beautiful form of 
 His teaching. The Fact of His Deity and the 
 definiteness of His claims to be divine would 
 still have remained. 
 
 One further note demands our attention before 
 I sum up, and that is the phrases by which the 
 evangelists speak of Him rather than the ac- 
 
50 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 counts they record of His actual words and 
 deeds. We have already seen how the opening 
 of St. Mark speaks of Him as “Son of God,” 
 “The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” 
 St. Luke builds up the genealogy to God by way 
 of Adam asserting a divine origin in a different 
 sense and he frequently refers to our Lord as 
 the Lord, a phrase that may have no more sig¬ 
 nificance than “Master” but is one that certainly 
 carries with it the Old Testament association 
 with the divine name. In St. Matthew’s pro¬ 
 logue itself we have evidence of no more than 
 the fact that Jesus is the Christ, yet he goes on 
 at once to speak of the virgin birth of Him who 
 is God with us. It is in the Prologue of St. 
 John, however, that we find the clearest state¬ 
 ment of the person of Jesus Christ who is there 
 called the Logos, “Who was with God and was 
 God” and yet “tabernacled with” men, who have 
 beheld “His glory, the glory of the only begotten 
 of the Father full of grace and truth.” And to 
 these very formal phrases we must add the fact 
 that the men who wrote these Gospels wrote to 
 prove, as St. John said, that Jesus of Nazareth 
 was God’s Son and that men might live by faith 
 in Him. 
 
 in 
 
 The Church has striven all through her his¬ 
 tory to make plain what this basic fact of Chris¬ 
 tian belief really is. The earlier centuries as 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 51 
 
 they faced the problems of the Person of Jesus 
 Christ in the light of the knowledge and phil¬ 
 osophy of that day, defined her belief in the 
 Nicene Creed and summed it up in the Decrees 
 of the Council of Ephesus, asserting that He is 
 truly God, not the chief of creatures; perfect 
 man, with all that makes true manhood; one 
 person, not two, i. e. God Incarnate not God 
 abiding for a while, as some heathen deities were 
 said to have done, in a human person; and that 
 this union between God and man in the Person 
 of the Son of God was such that each nature was 
 perfect, complete in itself, not mixed together 
 so that we had some strange composite, partly 
 divine and partly human. 
 
 But men are not content with the philosophy 
 of the fifth century. The new discoveries of the 
 more recent past have led men to new explana¬ 
 tions of the universe and to question again who 
 and what is Jesus Christ. Dr. Tennant in the 
 Constructive Quarterly for 1921 has summed 
 this up in two most interesting articles although, 
 his conclusions do not swing with the Nicene 
 Creed. Was Jesus Christ merely a great reli¬ 
 gious genius, one who had an insight into reli¬ 
 gion and a skill in interpreting it as Beethoven 
 and Wagner had in Music, or Titian and Rem¬ 
 brandt in Art? So some would say, but this does 
 not explain the story of eighteen centuries of 
 Christian faith nor can it justify His own 
 claims. Was He one in whom preeminently 
 there was a divine indwelling, a saint beyond 
 
52 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 all who ever lived, one who is the very acme of 
 the divine immanence which is seen in all nature 
 and so in man? If so how is it that the traits 
 of saintliness of all types, the sense of sin and 
 of humility, are so lacking in Him who by con¬ 
 trast claims to be divine and sinless? Neither 
 of these nor the old Arian demigod will solve 
 the mystery. Jesus Christ makes claims and the 
 Gospels tell us what they were, the apostles pro¬ 
 claimed Him as being what those claims as¬ 
 serted, Very God of Very God, yet truly man. 
 No other explanation will satisfy the facts nor 
 give sufficient reason for the story of the past 
 nineteen centuries of Christian history, but that 
 Christ as Bishop Gore says “Is of one substance 
 with the Father, that He was completely human, 
 that His humanity had no independent center of 
 personality in itself, but that in the unity of One 
 Divine Person both Godhead and manhood re¬ 
 main two natures in one person.” 
 
 In this belief the Christian stands before the 
 Altar at the Divine Mysteries and proclaims: 
 
 “I believe ... in one Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 only begotten Son of God; begotten of His 
 Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of 
 Light, Very God of Very God; begotten not 
 made; Being of one Substance with the Father, 
 By whom all things were made: Who for us 
 men and for our salvation came down from 
 heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of 
 the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CREEDS 
 
 No science can make progess without a body 
 of definitions, or terms, on whose meaning men 
 are agreed. No habit of life can become the com¬ 
 mon property of men unless there is similar 
 agreements to the principles on which it is based 
 and the characteristics which mark it. Chris¬ 
 tianity is a science in the broadest sense; and 
 it too must have its agreed statements or princi¬ 
 ples, its terms and definitions which are the com¬ 
 mon property of its members, and on which the 
 life is upbuilt. Further, Christianity is a habit 
 of life, a science which springs out of a group of 
 facts, which its adherents believe to be facts and 
 concerning which they must profess their faith 
 before they can be accepted as members of the 
 Christian Church. All these things point to 
 Creeds, and we find in the entire course of Chris¬ 
 tian history, that the Church has had such a 
 definition, such a statement of principle, such a 
 body of facts, of which the Creed gives a brief 
 and simple summary. In this chapter we have 
 to question what the Creeds are, and the right 
 of the Church to require them, and the history 
 of their development. 
 
54 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Christianity, Catholic Christianity at least, is 
 founded upon a body of facts, not any theory of 
 theology nor definitions of belief. There are 
 certain events which happened or are to happen, 
 there are certain Persons Who lived or live; and 
 upon the truth of the existence of these Persons 
 and events the Christian Faith and Life is built 
 up. The Creeds are the simple statements as to 
 who and what these are. We might call them 
 prior definitions which call for belief and for 
 which sufficient evidence is supplied, rather than 
 axioms which are self evidently true. The 
 axioms of mathematics are assumed by thinking 
 men to be true beyond contradiction and to be 
 evident to all intelligent persons. There are no 
 similar statements in Christianity. There is 
 nothing which is self-evidently true. The Chris¬ 
 tian Faith, because it is faith not knowledge, 
 presupposes the possibility that it may not be 
 true. There can be no faith without the possi¬ 
 bility of doubt. But the foundation facts of 
 Christian belief are buttressed so strongly, we 
 believe, by evidence, that the thinking man is 
 bound to accept them; while he who runs may 
 read their truth. These foundation facts, as 
 stated in the formularies, are the Creeds: State¬ 
 ments, in other words, of the events and Per¬ 
 sons on the basis of which the Christian lives 
 his life. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 55 
 
 II 
 
 Has the Church a right to require that men 
 must accept the Creed before they can enter the 
 Church? Is creedal requirement a survival of 
 a time of obscurantism, or is it justified? As¬ 
 sume for the moment that this is done; leave 
 aside for the present the evidential question as 
 to whether these facts are true or false; What is 
 the justification of the demand that a man must 
 believe them if he be a Christian? 
 
 In the first place the Church does no more 
 than what human societies and governments do. 
 No man can enter certain fraternal organiza¬ 
 tions unless he be a believer in God. I well re¬ 
 member how a certain man, standing in a group, 
 and outspoken in his denial of the existence of 
 God, was silenced by the quiet statement by one 
 of the men present that he would have to report 
 him to the authorities of the organization. He 
 knew that he could not continue his membership 
 without at least a profession of belief in God. 
 No one questions the right of a voluntary human 
 society to make such a demand. An alien, born 
 under a foreign flag, brought up under foreign 
 conceptions of government, wishes to become a 
 citizen of the United States. In theory at least 
 he has to subscribe to the American conception 
 of government and accept, in terms, the laws and 
 regulations of this Nation before he can secure 
 his papers of citizenship. As a mere voluntary 
 human society the Christian Church has an 
 
56 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 equal right to require that a man, before he can 
 be admitted into her membership, shall accept as 
 true those fundamental facts upon which she is 
 upbuilt. 
 
 More than that, the Christian Church believes 
 that she is the guardian of a divine revelation. 
 The truths upon which she is built are parts of a 
 sacred deposit, and she has a responsibility for 
 this that it may be passed on from generation to 
 generation unimpaired and well secured. To 
 make this sure she has again a right to demand 
 before men are admitted into her number that 
 they shall accept these things as true and agree 
 to hold them firmly so long as they are within 
 her company. This Faith “once for all delivered 
 to the saints,” as St. Jude describes it, is a sa¬ 
 cred trust, and the Apostle’s exhortation to St. 
 Timothy to “Hold it fast” and to “keep that 
 which is committed to thy trust” never loses its 
 force. Therefore it is that the Church requires 
 that men should accept and believe the Creeds. 
 
 There is a third ground which justifies the 
 Church’s demand. Christianity is not merely 
 a form of sound words; nor a body of doctrine. 
 The early term which was used to describe it was 
 “The Way.” We shall see in a later chapter 
 what this means in detail, for the present we 
 must be contented with the fact that Christianity 
 involves a definite form of life and that this life 
 depends upon the faith which men hold. We are 
 coming more and more to recognise that there 
 is a vital connection between life and belief. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 57 
 
 Thinking men have always seen this, but the 
 antagonist to definite Christian belief quite fre¬ 
 quently fails to admit it as true; but the truth is 
 not affected by this denial or neglect. The rela¬ 
 tion between belief and conduct is shown on the 
 one side in this sentence from Alexander Bain: 
 “No belief is real unless it guides our action/’ 
 and on the other side by the parallel phrase of 
 Emerson: “A man’s action is but the picture 
 book of his creed.” When our faith grows dim 
 our conduct becomes uncertain, and if it is not 
 always true it is often true that loss of faith is 
 due to, or is followed by, a loss of moral fibre 
 and a lowering of the ideal of conduct. So 
 again, in order to keep her people to the Chris¬ 
 tian ideal of living the Christian Church de¬ 
 mands, and is right in demanding, that they shall 
 accept as true her belief; and asks when they 
 come to be baptized: “Dost thou believe all the 
 Articles of the Christian Faith as contained in 
 the Apostles’ Creed?” 
 
 m 
 
 We must be very clear in our own minds as 
 to what the Church claims for the Creed, for this 
 determines to no small degree both the use of it 
 and its binding force upon us. Her first claim 
 is that the Twelve Articles of the Creed, in the 
 form in which she gives them to us, state facts 
 which are absolutely true. We shall return 
 shortly to the problem which this statement in- 
 
58 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 volves. Facts are matters of evidence, and dif¬ 
 fer from opinion in that they are not changeable. 
 The meaning of the terms in which a fact is de¬ 
 fined may vary; men’s understanding of the sig¬ 
 nificance of the fact is by no means the same for 
 all generations nor for all the men of the same 
 generation. The facts are bound to be inter¬ 
 preted. To this too we shall have to return later; 
 but for the present we are only interested in the 
 statement that the Church claims that the Creed 
 states facts which have been, or are, or will be, 
 and states belief in Persons who have done, or 
 do, or will do these things; and these facts and 
 the actions of these Persons are subject to the 
 laws of evidence. 
 
 Further the Church claims, not only that con¬ 
 duct in a general sense depends upon faith, but 
 that each of the twelve articles of her Faith 
 affects in its own special way the life men live. 
 Let me illustrate. The Creed begins with a 
 statement of belief in God; that belief is the back¬ 
 ground of life. The wide acceptance by many 
 people today of certain religious vagaries is in 
 no small degree due to the fact that the Chris¬ 
 tian Church has failed to teach the value in life 
 of the belief in God; and so men, having lost 
 sight of it in the Church, have sought for it else¬ 
 where. Man is a ‘praying animal’ and if he does 
 not believe in God he cannot pray, but since he 
 feels the need of prayer he must have a belief in 
 God of some sort. If time allowed we might 
 illustrate the conduct value of belief in Jesus 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 59 
 
 Christ, in His death and resurrection and 
 ascension and in His present session in Heaven. 
 Each article means something in life, and none 
 can be left out without real loss. Men go forth 
 to win the world to Christ because they feel con¬ 
 fident that the belief in Him is essential to a 
 right living on the best lines and they want 
 every one to have the experience of that faith and 
 to live the life it demands. And as an essential 
 to such a life they teach men to believe the Arti¬ 
 cles of the Creed. This moral value and practi¬ 
 cal use of the Creed is another sufficient reason 
 for the Church’s demanding belief in it. 
 
 The Creed has a further use. It serves as a 
 corrective against error as well as a guardian of 
 life. The History of the Creeds will show this, 
 and it is particularly evident in the story of the 
 Nicene Creed. Let me recall the chief facts that 
 lie behind that statement of the Faith. In 322 
 Arius, a Priest of Alexandria, began to teach 
 that our Lord was less than God the Father; the 
 greatest of all creatures, but still a creature. 
 He made Him semi-divine, a sort of demi-god. 
 To meet the serious situation which resulted 
 from the widespread acceptance of Arius’s 
 teaching, the Emperor Constantine called the 
 leaders of the Church in Council at Nieea, in 
 325, in order that this issue might be settled. 
 The decree of the Council met, the problem and in 
 the progress of the Church’s life has proved to 
 be correct. Jesus Christ was of “one substance 
 with the Father.” The Greek term chosen to de- 
 
60 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 fine this relationship, homoousia, had a bad as¬ 
 sociation from the last century but it alone met 
 the issue. It would seem as if Constantine had 
 succeeded in quieting the Church’s unrest. But 
 it was not long before the controversy broke out 
 again even more bitterly and for nearly fifty 
 years the Church was split into groups and 
 parties constantly changing and shifting in an 
 effort to find some solution of the question; 
 What is the relation between Jesus Christ and 
 the Father? Who is He? During this half cen¬ 
 tury, parallel with this controversy, and in fact 
 growing out of it, there arose three other prob¬ 
 lems: Shall the Kingdom of Jesus Christ be 
 eternal? Is He, if divine, truly human; or does 
 the deity take the place of His soul? Is the Holy 
 Spirit a divine Person? The answer to all these 
 questions was finally found in the so-called Con- 
 stantinopolitan Creed which was accepted at the 
 time of the second Council, that of Constanti¬ 
 nople in 381, as a satisfactory definition of the 
 Faith, though the Council itself did not take any 
 action adopting the creed. The older definition 
 of the Council of Nicea, came into its own and 
 the Church as a whole finally accepted it as a 
 true description and statement of the relation 
 of the Son to the Father. This story of the Creed 
 of Nicea is an example which can be repeated in 
 the story of the Apostle’s Creed: in the way the 
 phraseology of the Creed was expanded to cor¬ 
 rect false beliefs in the Church. 
 
 But we must remember that the question be- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 61 
 
 hind the development of the Creeds—and they 
 have developed in form, have been expanded— 
 is not one of what should be believed but of 
 what has been believed. The 318 fathers who 
 gathered at Nicea, scarred by their sufferings 
 under the persecution of Diocletian, did not ask 
 What ought we to say? What do we believe? 
 but on the contrary, What is the Faith which 
 has been entrusted to us by our fathers? And 
 the difficulty which made them hesitate so long 
 before admitting the only word which would 
 solve the problem—homoousia—was that this 
 very word had, as I have just said, a bad associa¬ 
 tion and had not been used in the New Testa¬ 
 ment, as descriptive of our Lord. The Creeds 
 are guide posts, which in the morass of human 
 vagaries mark the way that keeps the truth of 
 the Christian Faith clear and sure; that state, 
 in other words, the facts that underlie that 
 Faith in terms which are unquestionably true. 
 
 These several values of the Creed are shown 
 
 in the Church’s use of it. Before she admits 
 
 * 
 
 any one into the number of the disciples she re¬ 
 quires that they shall accept the Faith “once for 
 all delivered.” She guards the Truth from false 
 believers. She requires that the man who is to 
 be admitted to Holy Orders and so to become an 
 official and authoritative mouthpiece and witness 
 to the Faith, shall profess that same Faith in 
 its fullest form. No false teacher can find his 
 way into the company of the Church’s guides 
 unless he comes in under false pretenses, or loses 
 
62 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 his Faith in later years when again the Church 
 calls him to task upon the basis of that same 
 Creed. Finally the Church uses the Creed in 
 her regular worship as a reminder of the Faith 
 in which men have been baptized and as a con¬ 
 stant inspiration to a holy life. The Creeds are 
 no barren forms of words as used in the Church’s 
 life. They are quick with life and sharp to guide 
 the souls of men. 
 
 IV 
 
 We saw a little while ago that the Creeds state 
 facts which men are bound to interpret, and it is 
 this aspect of the problem which arouses diffi¬ 
 culty. If these things are facts in what sense 
 are they true? How can we, if we must, ac¬ 
 cept them? I must consider very briefly a few 
 of the particular problems which arise. The 
 first will be, of necessity, the meaning of the 
 First Article of the Creed: “I believe in God 
 the Father Almighty Maker of Heaven and 
 earth”; or as it reads in the Nicene Creed: “I 
 believe in one God the Father Almighty 
 Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things 
 visible and invisible.” What does this require 
 of us? 
 
 The word “Maker” in its original form both in 
 Greek and Latin carries the sense of Creator as 
 well as maker. How far is this true: or in what 
 sense is it true in the light of modern beliefs 
 about nature? There is no doubt that a century 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 63 
 
 ago it was interpreted in the light of the philoso¬ 
 phy and science of the day. All interpretation 
 of facts in reality impinge upon philosophy, and 
 our own interpretation of facts is largely in¬ 
 fluenced by our theory of things, i. e. our philoso¬ 
 phy. The old “fiat” theory of creation, which 
 said that it was by immediate acts of God in 
 six days of twenty four hours each, is untenable 
 in the light of modern science and philosophy. 
 The theory of Evolution, in whatever form or 
 modification, if it rules God out of the processes 
 by which the world is being developed, is not ten¬ 
 able by the Christian. It is contrary to the 
 Christian Faith which defines God as the 
 Creator and Maker of all things seen and unseen. 
 But there is no necessary conflict between a rea¬ 
 sonable belief in Evolution and the Creed’s state¬ 
 ment of the fact that God is the Creator. As I 
 showed in the last Chapter the laws of nature are 
 the laws of His working and no doctrine of crea¬ 
 tion which recognizes that He lies behind the pro¬ 
 cesses contradicts the Creed. Rather it is true, 
 as Bishop Henson has pointed out, that the very 
 assumption of modern science of a purpose in 
 nature requires a personal God behind it as 
 author of that purpose. 
 
 Modern teaching raises three questions about 
 the statements concerning our Lord, in addition 
 to the elemental one: Is He truly God and how. 
 These three questions are the Virgin Birth, the 
 Resurrection, and the Ascension. As to the 
 first, the Virgin Birth, we have the two questions 
 
G4 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 first of evidence and then of credibility. The 
 New Testament evidence to the Virgin Birth of 
 our Lord, i. e. that He was “conceived by the 
 Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary/’ thus hav¬ 
 ing no human father, has been stated and re¬ 
 stated many times. The evidence falls into four 
 lines. The oldest is St. Paul’s statement in Ga¬ 
 latians that “He was born of a woman/ 5 which 
 by itself would seem inconclusive. The second is 
 the account of his birth as given by St. Luke in 
 the first two chapters. It is very interesting to 
 note that in the last quarter century the histori¬ 
 cal trustworthiness of St. Luke has become more 
 and more certain. Archaeology and history 
 have proved over and again that he was a care¬ 
 ful, accurate writer, who knew what he meant to 
 say and spoke with certainty. He tells us that 
 he had searched out carefully from eyewitnesses 
 and hearers of the Lord’s life and teaching what 
 was true so that his friend might have assurance 
 of what he was taught orally. St. Luke’s evi¬ 
 dence to our Lord’s birth is full and complete. 
 He relates the announcement and the fulfilment. 
 He tells us that the Virgin was told that the 
 “Holy thing which was to be born of her was 
 the Son of God,” and he relates in detail the 
 story of that holy birth. There can be no ques¬ 
 tion that St. Luke meant us to understand that 
 Jesus of Nazareth was miraculously born with¬ 
 out human father by the power of the Holy 
 Spirit, the Virgin Mary being His mother. The 
 third strand is the witness of St. Matthew’s Gos- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 65 
 
 pel; equally distinct and equally independent, 
 giving the story from an entirely different point 
 of view, but with exactly the same implication. 
 One recalls Ramsay’s theory that St. Luke’s ac¬ 
 count came to him through “them of Herod’s 
 household,” who had learned it in turn from the 
 Blessed Virgin herself; while St. Matthew’s ver¬ 
 sion is St. Joseph’s account, explaining the mys¬ 
 terious event, given to clear the reputation of 
 his wife from the calumny of the Jews. The 
 two accounts, whatever be their origin, are quite 
 clearly utterly independent of each other and yet 
 are in absolute agreement. In no particular do 
 they contradict each other, but on the contrary 
 they supjflement one the other so that out of 
 them we get a fuller story of those early days. 
 The fourth witness is St. John, who in his pre¬ 
 face writes of the birth of our Lord, the eternal 
 Logos, in terms which well imply that it was not 
 by human generation. “He was born not of 
 blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the 
 will of man, but of God.” The evidence to the 
 Virgin Birth of our Lord is not meagre, but men 
 hesitate to accept it because they feel that the 
 thing itself is incredible. It is an “impinging of 
 God” upon human life which has no parallel and, 
 beyond all miracles save the Resurrection it¬ 
 self, is impossible. Bishop Gore, in his recent 
 book Belief in God, says of the credibility of the 
 Virgin Birth “I must confess that I cannot im¬ 
 agine how the birth of the really sinless man 
 could have occurred without some physical mir- 
 
66 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 acle, so sure do I feel that sin has somehow af¬ 
 fected the physical stock; and I once drew from 
 Huxley the admission that if he believed—what 
 he did not—that Jesus was strictly sinless he 
 wmuld suppose that that involved as well a phys¬ 
 ical as a moral miracle.” The tendency has 
 been to make our Lord’s Deity depend upon the 
 Virgin Birth and there are many who could not 
 put it in any other way than this: They believe 
 the Virgin Birth on evidence and therefore be¬ 
 lieve that Jesus is God. The order of the Creed 
 suggests another approach. We confess our be¬ 
 lief in Him as God and then we go on to state 
 that He whom we believe to be God was born 
 into the human family in a miraculous manner. 
 There are some of us who would put it in the 
 other way and say not that we believe He is God 
 because He was born of a Virgin, but we believe 
 He is God, and because of this fact that 
 He is God, we have no doubt of the Virgin 
 Birth. 
 
 The arguments for our Lord’s Resurrection 
 are familiar to most people, and they are the 
 strongest group in the whole body of evidence 
 to the Christian Faith. They, too, are many. 
 We have the evidence of the New Testament, the 
 Gospel narratives and the Epistles which assert 
 in terms which cannot be denied the belief of the 
 Apostles in the resurrection of their Lord. They 
 saw Him alive after His Passion, more than 
 three hundred persons were alive twenty live 
 years later, who actually saw Him on one spe- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 67 
 
 cial occasion. There is the evidence of the long 
 history of the Christian Church. Men have be¬ 
 lieved that Jesus was dead and is alive again 
 and on the basis of that belief have both lived 
 and died, often the death of a martyr. And the 
 Church is based upon the fact of the Resurrec¬ 
 tion, for, if Jesus did not rise again then—it is 
 true for all ages—our preaching as the Apostle 
 said is vain. We build up our belief upon a 
 falsehood, if He did not rise. Two other present 
 day facts are of equal validity in evidence to 
 this truth. The whole of modern civilization 
 dates the passing years from the time of His 
 birth. Every calendar, every newspaper and the 
 documents of many centuries have carried on 
 their face the year of Christ. The sacred day of 
 the week through the influence of a religion 
 which arose from Judaism was changed from the 
 seventh day to the first and, save for the Jews 
 and even in part by them, the witness is born to 
 the first day of the week as the memorial of some 
 event of transcendent importance which marked 
 that day. These lines, and there are others in 
 addition, all concentrate upon the truth as the 
 Creed states it that on the third day, which is the 
 first day of the week, the Lord Jesus rose again 
 from the dead. But the problem of the Resur¬ 
 rection is not merely a problem of evidence. 
 Like that of the Virgin Birth it is a problem of 
 reality. Did Jesus come back into his earthly 
 body changed or not, or did He in some way 
 make His followers believe that He was alive in 
 
68 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 the world beyond? Is the Resurrection a fact or 
 a poetical description of immortality? There 
 can be no question what those who had the best 
 chances to know believed. The New Testament 
 evidence is undoubtedly for an actual resto¬ 
 ration of the soul to its bodily tenement 
 and the presence of the Master not in spirit 
 form, ghost like, but as actually alive and 
 clothed in flesh. No attempt to explain it will 
 satisfy the evidence save the statement of the 
 Creed. 
 
 The Article which states the Ascension in¬ 
 volves a problem of interpretation which is less 
 difficult of solution when once we accept the 
 Resurrection. Granted that He rose again 
 clothed in the body of His glory in which He 
 showed Himself alive by many infallible proofs, 
 and it is not hard to believe that He is still alive, 
 clothed in that body. But what of the expres¬ 
 sion “the right hand of God the Father Al¬ 
 mighty?’ 7 We saw that God is spirit and as 
 such has neither parts nor passions. In what 
 sense can we use the term “right hand of God? 77 
 Only one is possible. It must mean the place of 
 honor and glory corresponding to that which the 
 right hand is on earth. Christ is exalted far 
 above all heavens. He is lifted up and given a 
 position before which all created things bow in 
 reverent adoration. The expression describes, 
 in terms of man’s speech, the exaltation of the 
 Ascended Lord and points out His rule over the 
 earth. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 69 
 
 II 
 
 One further point demands attention in this 
 connection, the development of the Creed. I 
 shall confine myself almost entirely to the story 
 of the western form, the Apostles’ Creed as we 
 call it. Our New Testament evidence shows but 
 little of the very beginning of the progress. The 
 Christian converts, beginning with belief in God, 
 which they shared or inherited from the Jews, 
 had to believe also in Jesus Christ as His Son 
 and in the Holy Spirit. The stories of the bap¬ 
 tism of the eunuch and of the twelve men whom 
 St. Paul confirmed in Ephesus tell us this. As 
 a matter of fact the simplest Creed form which 
 has come down to us is quoted by St. Cyril of 
 Jerusalem and reads: “I believe in the Father 
 and in the Son and in the Holy Ghost and in One 
 Baptism of repentance.” This form, while 
 quoted in the fourth century, undoubtedly rep¬ 
 resents a very early stage and warrants us in 
 thinking that the original form of Christian be¬ 
 lief was little more than a statement of belief 
 in Christ’s revelation of God as contained in the 
 baptismal formula. Our evidence prior to the 
 third century is very scanty and we can build but 
 tentatively. These facts seem to emerge: The 
 Creed itself became a sort of password or test 
 given at the time of baptism and known only to 
 believers who were thus able to identify them¬ 
 selves as Christians. There was a form gener¬ 
 ally common, but by no means identical, whose 
 
TO SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 variations were not simply local, but rather re¬ 
 gional. As we study the early forms of the 
 Creed which are quoted in Christian literature 
 we find that they trace back to two centers, to 
 Rome in the West, and to Antioch in the East. 
 How close the relationship between these two 
 centers may prove to be is a problem for future 
 study but the evidence would seem to show if 
 not a common source at least a common and 
 parallel development from the Baptismal for¬ 
 mula. It was during this period of development 
 of the simply Baptismal Creed that the Arian 
 controversy arose which brought about the fuller 
 and more elaborate Creed forms of the fourth 
 century which we associate with the Nicene 
 Creed. But we are restricting ourselves to the 
 
 o 
 
 Apostles’ Creed and that in the West, and now 
 come to the period between the fourth century 
 when it was beginning to assume its fuller form 
 and the middle of the eighth century when its 
 present form was beginning to become familiar 
 in the West. 
 
 First of all it may not be amiss to recall the 
 reason for its name. Rufinus writing in the 
 fifth century tells us the tradition of his own 
 time that the Twelve Apostles, before they sep¬ 
 arated to preach the Gospel in the world, agreed 
 to write a Creed and each one supplied a single 
 article, and the twelve were put together in the 
 form which Rufinus gives of the Apostles’ Creed. 
 The story is absurd upon the face of it and there 
 is not the slightest evidence that any such event 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 71 
 
 ever took place. But perhaps there is under¬ 
 neath a principle which is true, viz., that the 
 Apostles’ teaching was all the same and that 
 there was some common body of facts which they 
 all agreed were essential. To call this “the 
 deposit” of which St. Paul writes would be to 
 overstress a possibility. Dr. Briggs had evi¬ 
 dently some such thought in mind when he ex¬ 
 plained the Greek name of the Creed, Symbolon, 
 as derived from the verb to gather together and 
 thought of the Creed, or Symbolon, as the sum¬ 
 mary of the Apostles’ teaching. Probably the 
 safer explanation is that the form of the Creed 
 which became most familiar in the West was the 
 development which spread from Rome and was 
 known as the Creed of the Apostolic See, the only 
 See west of the Adriatic established by Apos¬ 
 tles ; and thence the formulary came to be called 
 popularly the Apostles’ Creed. 
 
 But what happened between the days of Ru- 
 \finus and the days of Pirminius in 750, for the 
 Creed which Pirminius quotes is the one we all 
 know and the Creed of Rufinus is the Creed 
 which Marcellus of Ancrya wrote in 340 to prove 
 his orthodoxy while he was in Rome. It runs as 
 follows: “I believe in God Father Almighty, 
 And in Jesus His only Son our Lord; Who was 
 born of the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary: 
 Was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was 
 buried: Rose again from the dead the third 
 day: Ascended into heaven; Sitteth on the right 
 hand of the Father: From thence He shall come 
 
72 SOME FOUNDATION TEUTHS 
 
 to judge the quick and the dead: And in the 
 Holy Ghost: The Holy Church: The For¬ 
 giveness of Sins: The Resurrection of the 
 Flesh.” 
 
 Most of the phrases which Pirminius gives us 
 and Marcellus omits were, until recently, ex¬ 
 plained as expressions added in Southern Gaul 
 to meet special Gallic heresies and have been 
 called purely western in origin. There is a very 
 different explanation. In what we commonly 
 call the Balkan peninsula in Roman imperial 
 days there was the province of Pannonia. It 
 was settled by Romans from the neighborhood of 
 Rome itself, and was always closely related to 
 the mother city. The probabilities are that its 
 inhabitants were converted to Christianity by 
 missionaries from Rome, and the type of Chris¬ 
 tianity was distinctly western and not eastern. 
 Through that territory during the later days of 
 the Empire ran the great higliro\adl between 
 Constantinople and Rome, by which the cour- 
 riers travelled and over which the caravans of 
 the traders journeyed back and forth by way of 
 Aquileia. Where the merchant went the Chris¬ 
 tian missionary followed, and into Pannonia 
 and the regions round about there came a con¬ 
 stant stream of eastern influences; and with 
 these eastern influences there came naturally 
 eastern phraseology and eastern beliefs. Not so 
 long ago a sermon of Niceta Bishop of Remesi- 
 ana was brought to the notice of scholars in 
 which he quotes a creed. This sermon is to be 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 73 
 
 dated at about 375 and in the Creed it quotes we 
 find almost all the phrases which are used by 
 Pirminius and used to be quoted as western in 
 origin. They are much more probably eastern 
 in origin, yet at the end of the fourth century are 
 thus found imbedded in a creed of western 
 origin. 
 
 Before we trace the progress of these phrases 
 in the West we must notice what they are. Some 
 are of no historic value, just a word here and 
 there to clear up or expand a phrase, such as 
 the addition of “conceived” and “suffered” and 
 “dead” and the expansion of the expression “the 
 Father” in the statement of the ascension, to our 
 familiar “God the Father Almighty.” These are 
 insignificant; but there is another group which 
 have a definite doctrinal value, concerning which 
 the Sermon of Niceta tells us much. I can men¬ 
 tion but four. In the opening article the phrase 
 “Maker of heaven and earth” does not appear 
 in the early Roman Creed and it is rarely found 
 in the West save in restricted territory until the 
 eighth century. It is an expression which St. 
 Irenaeus used against the Gnostices. But 
 Niceta quotes it in the Creed and it reappears in 
 Africa during the fifth and sixth centuries. The 
 Galilean service books of the seventh century in¬ 
 clude it and finally we find it in the fuller form 
 in the Creed of Pirminius. The story of the 
 word “catholic” as applied to the Church is very 
 similar. The history of this word is too well 
 known to be repeated here, yet there is one vari- 
 
74 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 ation in its use which we must not forget. Orig¬ 
 inally it meant universal, but by the end of the 
 second or the beginning of the third century it 
 had come to mean also orthodox as opposed to 
 heretical; and this is the meaning of the word 
 in the West from the time of St. Augustine, so 
 that from the fifth century onward it has a dou¬ 
 ble sense of exclusive, i. e. orthodox, and in¬ 
 clusive, i. e. universal, comprehending all in one. 
 Niceta gives us evidence of the wider use in the 
 Creed. The expression descended into Hell” 
 shows not only in Niceta in 375 but also in the 
 Fides Hierony^mii dated two years later and 
 within fifteen years in the Creed of Aquileia, 
 whence we can trace its presence in the creeds of 
 Gaul and Spain and on into Ireland. The 
 fourth of these special eastern phrases which 
 were formerly attributed to western origin is the 
 “Communion of Saints,” Both Niceta and Je¬ 
 rome have it and Niceta discusses at length its 
 meaning, giving it that special significance which 
 has marked it ever since in the Western Chris¬ 
 tendom as the interpretation of the previous ex¬ 
 pression the Holy Catholic Church, for says he: 
 “What is the Church but the congregation of all 
 saints? For from the beginning of the world 
 Patriarchs as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 
 Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs and all just men 
 who have been, are or shall be, are one Church 
 because sanctified by one faith and life, marked 
 by one spirit, they constitute one body of which 
 Christ is declared to be its head. . . . Believe 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 75 
 
 therefore that in this one Chnrch yon will at¬ 
 tain to the Commnnion of Saints.” 
 
 The evidence for these four phrases runs with 
 marked similarity. They all appear in the com¬ 
 mentary of Niceta, some in the Creed of Jerome, 
 they next appear in Aquileia, on the highway 
 to, but not in Rome. From Aquileia they passed 
 across northern Italy into the further West, ap¬ 
 pearing first in Spain and later in southern 
 Gaul. From Gaul they seem to have reached 
 Britain and they appear in the Bangor Antipho- 
 nal. The story is not yet told, for these same 
 phrases w r hich in the latter part of the fourth 
 century first appeared in the Creed in the near 
 East and thence passed during the next three 
 centuries by way of Spain and Gaul to Ireland 
 reappear in the northern parts of Italy and from 
 Bobbio seem to have been carried to Rome where 
 they were incorporated into the Creed of the 
 Holy City and from the middle of the eighth 
 century become a part of the Creed of the Apos¬ 
 tolic See. 
 
 What follows is surmise, but it is more than 
 possibly true. The last half of the eighth cen¬ 
 tury was a time of great importance to the West¬ 
 ern Church. It was to end with the crowning of 
 Charles the Great in Rome on Christmas Day 
 800 and through his influence was to come the 
 bringing into prominence of Roman customs and 
 rites and ceremonies, accompanied as might be 
 expected with the substitution of these services 
 for the older local form indigenous to the several 
 
76 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 churches. It was thus to see the great break¬ 
 down of Gallican rites. It is not too much to 
 imagine that the old Roman Creed, carried by 
 earlier missionaries into the near East and there 
 expanded under the influence of the eastern 
 creeds and eastern teaching into its fuller form, 
 was carried back westward across the great high¬ 
 ways of empire and Church until finally, after 
 four centuries of wandering, it reached its an¬ 
 cient home where in time it became the common 
 form and whence under the influence of Charl- 
 magne it was carried throughout the Western 
 Church and became the common baptismal creed 
 and the approved form for the Declaration of 
 Faith in the Daily Offices. 
 
 There was a custom in England which sug¬ 
 gests how greatly the Church values the Creed, 
 that formal statement of the faith upon which 
 she is built. Before the troops in older days 
 went forth to war, they were gathered in St. 
 Paul’s Cathedral in London and when the time 
 came for them to say the Creed the cavalrymen 
 drew their swords and holding them aloft pro¬ 
 fessed their belief in God, Father, Son, and Holy 
 Spirit, in whom they trusted and whose blessing 
 was invoked upon their campaign. The Creed 
 was that outward form of Faith for which in 
 older days men were ready to die, and in which 
 today they live and serve and, when the call 
 comes in their turn give up their lives here to en¬ 
 ter life hereafter. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH 
 
 No one can read modern religious books or 
 even papers nor listen to serious conversation 
 without having to face the problem: What is 
 the Kingdom of God: What is the Church; 
 What is the relation between them; are they the 
 same; If not where and what is the Church? 
 
 I 
 
 The careful reader of the New Testament at 
 once finds a distinction there in the use of the 
 two terms “Kingdom of Heaven” as St. Matthew 
 puts it, or “Kingdom of God” as the rest of the 
 writers, and “the Church.” The Gospels speak 
 of the Kingdom; the Epistles of the Church. 
 That is the general statement; we must now ex¬ 
 amine the exact usage. Of the two Greek words 
 used that translated “Kingdom” is found in the 
 New Testament 140 times of which 111 are in the 
 Gospels and of these all but four are in the Syn¬ 
 optic Gospels, leaving only 29 instances of its 
 use in the Acts (8) and the Epistles (21). The 
 word translated “Church” is used 111 times in 
 the New Testament of which only three are in 
 
78 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 the Gospels, all in St. Matthew, with 23 in¬ 
 stances in Acts and 85 in the remaining writ¬ 
 ings. It would seem therefore that Christ’s 
 word is “Kingdom” and the Apostles’ word 
 “Church”; and in this fact lies the whole signifi¬ 
 cance of the problem and also its solution. 
 
 Let us examine first what our Lord Himself 
 says about the Kingdom. Neither the word nor 
 the idea was new. When He began to use it the 
 entire Jewish nation had been stirred by the proc¬ 
 lamation of St. John Baptist that the Kingdom 
 was at hand; and the Baptist in turn had simply 
 taken over an Old Testament term about which 
 there had grown a body of associations and 
 ideas. The Old Testament prophets thought of 
 Israel as God’s people. He was their King, and 
 the Law under which they lived came from Him. 
 They were under His rule and through “Moses 
 and the Prophets” they had been taught what 
 God wanted them to do in the three great spheres 
 of life. He had given them a law to regulate the 
 social relationships of life; a law not of prin¬ 
 ciples but of precepts, and it touched virtually 
 every aspect of their common fellowship with 
 one another. He had gone further and had 
 given them minute directions as to the way in 
 which they were to approach Him in worship; 
 the minutiae of ritual were parts of the Law of 
 God. More fundamental as we see it, but less so 
 as they understood it, the Law of God finally 
 reached into their own personal life and gave 
 them rules of conduct and of individual morals. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 79 
 
 But on whatever side it touched life it came from 
 God: “Hear O Israel,” “Thus saith the Lord 
 thy God,” was the constant refrain. The Chil¬ 
 dren of Israel were a people under God’s rule, 
 owing allegiance to Him; and their kings, when 
 they had them,—during less than a third of their 
 history—were only the human agents by whom 
 God ruled the nation. This idea of the Kingdom 
 of God, as do all ideas in the Old Testament, 
 gradually unfolded and developed until we find 
 in Daniel the goal of a perfect Kingdom yet to 
 come, “which the God of Heaven shall set up,” 
 “one that shall never be destroyed”; “a Kingdom 
 which is to be an everlasting kingdom which all 
 peoples and nations and languages shall enter 
 and there serve its king.” 
 
 This great ideal was never a finished ideal in 
 Old Testament days, even under the latest dat¬ 
 ings of extreme modern criticism. There was 
 always set before Judah the expectation of a 
 “good time coming” which was generally phrased 
 by the expression “The day of the Lord.” This 
 great future event was not wholly one of glory 
 and triumph, the idea of a day of doom and of 
 punishment was constantly intermingled with 
 the note of triumph and victory. But the latter 
 prevailed as the great encouragement of the 
 Jews of later generations. And they needed the 
 encouragement. The bitter persecutions under 
 Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century b. c. 
 and the iron heel of the Romans which marked 
 the closing years of the first, produced the nat- 
 
80 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Ural depression and on the other hand made the 
 people long for the coming of the time when the 
 people of the Lord should once more be free 
 and independent of foreign domination and 
 again enter life in a great Kingdom whose glory 
 and grandeur should far outshine the golden 
 days of the past. 
 
 We must not forget that for Israel the Golden 
 Age was in the future, They looked forward not 
 backward, save as the memory of past prosper¬ 
 ity gave more brilliant color to the future which 
 was to surpass it. And it was out of this long¬ 
 ing and, in a way, to deepen and intensify it and 
 to encourage the Jew to a more and more living 
 hope, that the apocalypses came to be written. 
 Their authors saw the need of consolation and 
 encouragement; they felt that it could best be 
 given in the form of pictures of the future put 
 into the mouths of men of days long gone who 
 were honored in popular tradition. The thought 
 of any dishonesty in the method seems to have 
 had no place or to have been justified by the 
 necessity. Naturally these apocalypses are most 
 varied in form and the pictures they paint are by 
 no means always alike; but underneath them all 
 lies the common idea of a new era which would 
 be ushered in by an act of God, an era which 
 would be a “holy happy order of things’’ in which 
 “peace and plenty and prosperity” would be the 
 portion of the faithful. This idea, as was to be 
 expected, was associated with the picture of the 
 great leader under whom this Kingdom of God 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 81 
 
 would be inaugurated. There is almost as much 
 difference here as in the pictures of the Kingdom 
 itself. To some writers he was merely a Son of 
 David, that is one of his family who should de¬ 
 liver his people and establish the Kingdom. In 
 other apocalypses he is less definitely described, 
 but is spoken of as a Son of Man, a human leader 
 of great power and authority who would play his 
 part in the deliverance of his people and then 
 disappear. Occasionally the King is described 
 as more than man, divine in character and per¬ 
 son and so he was called Son of God. 
 
 It is hard to judge just how widespread or 
 universal any of these views were; we cannot be 
 sure even of the extent to which the belief in the 
 Kingdom of heaven was accepted. The Gospels 
 however tell us that “all men mused in their 
 hearts of John whether he were the Christ or 
 not,” this would imply a very wide spread belief 
 in the coming of the Kingdom and it was no 
 doubt intensified by the Baptist himself as he 
 proclaimed, herald like, in the wilderness of Ju¬ 
 dea and up the Jordan valley: “Prepare ye; the 
 Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” And it was to 
 a people expectant and with their hopes fired by 
 the ministry of the Baptist that Jesus Christ en¬ 
 tered, announcing as He did that the time of ex¬ 
 pectation was over, the Kingdom actually come. 
 
 We must never forget when we think of Jesus 
 Christ taking up something which the prophets 
 had already foretold that He was not content 
 
82 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 simply to re-echo their message. His task was 
 always to give it that fullness of interpretation, 
 that deeper meaning, which would mean the frui¬ 
 tion of their idea into the perfection of His own 
 message. This was particularly true of the un¬ 
 folding of the Kingdom. His ideal was quite 
 different from theirs, and His task was not 
 merely to correct hut to unfold and to build what 
 He came to establish on their foundations. 
 We must therefore try to see what were the 
 characteristics of the Kingdom as He gave 
 them. 
 
 At the outset we have the story of the conver¬ 
 sation with Nicodemus, This reverent and ear¬ 
 nest ruler of the Jews was attracted by our 
 Lord’s wonderful power and came to Him se¬ 
 cretly to enquire about the Kingdom. Christ’s 
 answer was that Nicodemus needed not knowl¬ 
 edge but life, and that the life, without which he 
 could not hope to see the Kingdom, could only 
 come to him by the process of a new birth. This 
 new life was to be spiritual, a moral condition, 
 based upon Divine revelation; but it was, and 
 this was always the Master’s method, a life into 
 which men enter by an outward act. The birth 
 was to be accomplished not in the natural proc¬ 
 esses of human generation, that could not be re¬ 
 peated; but by w T ater and the Spirit; and as the 
 natural fleshly birth resulted in fleshly life, so 
 this spiritual birth, evidenced by water, was to 
 result in spiritual life. But Nicodemus did not 
 understand Him. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 83 
 
 This spiritual character of the Kingdom, so 
 different from the popular Jewish belief, under¬ 
 lies all our Lord’s teaching in the parables and 
 more especially in the Sermon on the Mount. 
 The old code of precepts was to give way to a 
 new body of principles; men were to be men of 
 personal character in and of themselves, and as 
 such they were to fulfil their lives among men 
 and live in their social relationships. New 
 moral, social, and religious principles were set 
 forth by our Lord with increasing clearness as 
 He made men realize that the Kingdom of 
 Heaven was not a mere earthly monarchy. But 
 He did not let them think, as the old apocalyptic 
 writers did, that it was wholly future. There 
 was a future, the whole coming age was its fu¬ 
 ture; but it began then. He formed it. There 
 is no passage which puts this more clearly than 
 His reply to the Pharisees when they asked Him 
 when it would come. “It cometh not by obser¬ 
 vation,” He said, “it is among you.” It is al¬ 
 ready here. But though present it was not yet 
 complete in its development; He had to do many 
 things before He could send them forth to pro¬ 
 claim the good news everywhere. 
 
 The Kingdom of God, as Christ preached it, is 
 a great spiritual rule but it is not without its 
 outward rites. What He said to Nicodemus un¬ 
 derlay all His teaching; over and against the 
 spiritual, and really as an evidence of the very 
 spiritual forces themselves, He set the outward 
 rites of Baptism and the Holy Communion. He 
 
S4 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 appointed the Apostles to be the rulers of the 
 Kingdom, and the messengers of its good news; 
 and before His ascension He gave a final com¬ 
 mand that they should go everywhere and make 
 disciples by the outward sign of Baptism and 
 teach them to live the spiritual life of holiness 
 and love which He had been teaching. If out¬ 
 ward expression was required, still more was the 
 inner spirit necessary. The mere accident of hu¬ 
 man birth meant nothing; the Jew as a child of 
 Abraham had no prerogatives. God could make 
 the very stones such. What counted, as all His 
 miracles wrought on men showed, was faith and 
 humility. To build up this Kingdom, this new 
 rule of God, not over the outer lives but in the 
 deepest recesses of the soul, God’s Son came into 
 the world, and as its king He died upon the Cross 
 so that men might be won to accept Him and it. 
 
 This central teaching of the Lord was not for¬ 
 gotten by the Apostles and they, not unfre- 
 quently as they write, especially St. Paul, re¬ 
 mind the Christians of the spiritual character of 
 the Kingdom which the latter calls the ‘Kingdom 
 of the Son of God’s love.’ Under it all there lies 
 the single principle of the Rule of God. Jesus 
 Christ came to do His Father’s will, and when 
 He had lived His life He declared that He had 
 fulfilled it. His disciples are under the same 
 regimen. They, as members of His kingdom, 
 must in like manner do His Father’s will. 
 Bishop Gore describes the Kingdom of Heaven 
 as a “realm of obedient wills,” and we read of it 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 85 
 
 as a “community in which God’s will is fulfilled, 
 a religious fellowship, a theocracy, in which the 
 people who were God’s would be living the life 
 God would have them live and in return He 
 would ensure their place in His Kingdom.” 
 
 I said that “Kingdom” is the Lord’s word 
 and “Church” that of the Apostles, but the Mas* 
 ter Himself set them the example and, as we saw, 
 the word Church is found in two places in St. 
 Matthew’s Gospel. Of these the celebrated and 
 vitally important one is Chapter 16:18. Im¬ 
 mediately after St. Peter’s confession our Lord 
 replied, “Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I 
 will build my church and the gates of hell shall 
 not prevail against it.” We are only interested 
 in the single sentence “upon this rock I will 
 build my church” and for the present only in the 
 last part of it. The word which is here trans¬ 
 lated Church is in the Old Testament used as the 
 equivalent for the Hebrew word meaning the 
 Congregation of Israel, not as a people or nation 
 but as the holy people of God. They are ideally 
 the true Israel. Jesus Christ was come into the 
 world, so St. Matthew records in the Sermon on 
 the Mount, to bring to perfection the Law and 
 the Prophets, to complete, round out into its ful¬ 
 ness what they had inaugurated. But in the 
 Law and the Prophets there is more than the col¬ 
 lection of the precepts of morals and society and 
 religion which as we have seen underlie the idea 
 of the Kingdom. There was also the holy peo¬ 
 ple, a sacred society, Israel. Now our Lord, in 
 
86 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, carried out 
 this side of the Old Testament revelation as well 
 as the other. He built up a new Israel, His Con¬ 
 gregation, which the Apostle calls a “chosen gen¬ 
 eration, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a pur¬ 
 chased people,” and in speaking of this new Is¬ 
 rael Jesus Christ uses the Greek equivalent of 
 the Old Testament word, ecclesia or Church. In 
 the other passage, St. Matthew 18:17, where the 
 word occurs twice, it refers again to the congre¬ 
 gation of the faithful. 
 
 But if our Lord uses the expression but seldom 
 there is no doubt of the frequency of the apostolic 
 usage. The word appears in many contexts but 
 almost always with this same central idea of the 
 chosen people. Sometimes it is the Church in a 
 particular locality, as the Church in some one’s 
 house, or in some town; once it is the Church of 
 Christ, again it is the ‘Church of God which He 
 purchased with His own Blood’ (or the Blood 
 of His own Son) and in the Ephesians the 
 Apostle writes with a wider vision and sees the 
 chosen people, scattered over the earth, as one 
 single nation, and uses the term in the most 
 general way. 
 
 Behind this use of language lies a great body 
 of fact to which I can but allude. As our Lord 
 stood behind the apostolic company during His 
 life on earth so the Apostles stand behind the 
 chosen people after the descent of the Holy 
 Ghost. Nothing happens without them, and 
 they are the centers of life under every condition. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 87 
 
 Arclibishop Temple puts this admirably in the 
 volume Twelve Sermons Preached at the Conse¬ 
 cration of Truro Cathedral quoted by Stone in 
 The Christian Church. “The Church takes its 
 origin not in the will of man but in the will of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. He sent forth His Apos¬ 
 tles, the Apostles received their commission from 
 Him. . . . They came first and the members 
 came afterwards.” One gets it even more strik¬ 
 ingly in Rackham’s Introduction to his Com¬ 
 mentary on the Acts, where he traces the develop¬ 
 ment of the Church as given in Acts, and shows 
 how the Apostles were the very center of every¬ 
 thing. 
 
 The Christian people, this New Israel which 
 Jesus Christ built upon the Rock which St. Peter 
 disclosed, has similar characteristics to the King¬ 
 dom which our Lord preached. Like it the 
 Church has its principles of conduct, its ideals of 
 life, its rites and ceremonies, its rulers and 
 guides, and all these in the Church are practic¬ 
 ally exactly what they are in the Kingdom as 
 preached by the Lord Himself. The thing of the 
 Acts and the Epistles and the Revelation, which 
 men called the Church or the Church in special 
 places, is the same thing which Jesus Christ 
 called the Kingdom of Heaven or of God as re¬ 
 corded in the Gospels. But why the change? 
 
 One cannot but recall a suggestion of Ram¬ 
 say’s. The Apostles went forth to preach and 
 to establish the Kingdom. So far as the Acts 
 and Epistles go this work was within the confines 
 
88 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 of the Roman Empire. From what we know of 
 Roman imperial government and jealousy of its 
 own prerogatives it is not hard to imagine what 
 might have been the fate of the Christian Church 
 in its infancy if the Roman imperial authorities 
 knew of it as the developing within the empire 
 of a new kingdom whose adherents were bound 
 by ties which were stronger than those of the 
 Empire itself. The persecutions, which came 
 with terrific force two centuries later in their 
 extremest form when the Church was strong 
 enough to bear them, would have swept, hu¬ 
 manly speaking, from among men the few evan¬ 
 gelists of the middle of the first century and the 
 Gospel message would have died. The elect peo¬ 
 ple, the ecclesia, did not arouse this antagonism 
 and by the time that the Empire woke to the 
 question the danger was virtually past. The 
 Church of the Apostolic age is the same thing as 
 the Kingdom in the days when they were but 
 disciples or had been made apostles but as yet 
 without the endowment of the Spirit which made 
 them changed men. So far as New Testament 
 usage is concerned the two are but different 
 names for the one thing. 
 
 Within recent generations men have come to 
 give the Gospel phrase a larger, wider content 
 than they give to the word Church and many are 
 thinking of the Kingdom of God as the great 
 body of people who recognise the rule of God and 
 yet, in the case of many of them, never come 
 within the membership of the people of God or 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 89 
 
 the Church; and they have built up this idea 
 upon an interpretation in part at least of St. 
 Paul’s word in I Corinthians 15:24, “when the 
 Son shall have delivered up the Kingdom to the 
 Father.” We must be on our guard against two 
 possible misconceptions; (I) that there is, or 
 can be, beneath the Church as it is seen on earth, 
 desperately rent and divided, torn asunder, an 
 invisible Church which is the real Ecclesia of 
 God. There is no possible New Testament basis 
 for any such conception, and the Lord’s parables, 
 as St. Augustine showed very plainly in his con¬ 
 troversy with the Donatists, recognise the exist¬ 
 ence in the Kingdom of both good and bad, who 
 will remain, until the end of the world. (II) 
 And in addition to this mistaken conception 
 there is a second, the idea that the Kingdom is a 
 mere congeries or composite of all the multitudes 
 of people who profess a faith in Jesus Christ 
 without any outward mark or sign. I have al¬ 
 ready said enough to show that in the New Testa¬ 
 ment both Church and Kingdom have their neces¬ 
 sary outward marks. There is, however, a twi¬ 
 light zone, if I may so call it, into which the light 
 of the Gospel shines, but where it does not fully 
 penetrate; where its influence reaches but does 
 not become supreme. We see it in civilization, 
 in the environment of Christendom today. We 
 get examples of it in the so-called civilizing in¬ 
 fluences of the Church as seen in heathen lands. 
 There is then a sense in which the Kingdom of 
 God is bigger, bigger on earth, than the Chris- 
 
90 SOME FOUNDATION TEUTHS 
 
 tian Church in even its broadest sense. And in 
 this interpretation of the term, the Kingdom of 
 God and the Church are not the same; but the 
 Church is the formal medium through which the 
 Kingdom is being established and men won to it. 
 As Bishop Anderson put it once, the Church is 
 the executive agency of the Kingdom by which 
 it is spread through the world. This does not 
 belittle the Church nor make it of no impor¬ 
 tance, rather it makes its importance more 
 marked and more definite. 
 
 IV 
 
 When we turn again to the New Testament to 
 study the Church we find that there are certain 
 ideas about it which stand out. First of all we 
 are struck by the names which are used for its 
 members. Three of them are notable and at once 
 suggest special relationships to God. The Chris¬ 
 tians were called brethren, and St. Paul empha¬ 
 sized that they are children of God through 
 adoption into a relationship to Plim which justi¬ 
 fies their calling Him Father and calling each 
 other brethren. They are disciples, those who 
 are taught by Jesus Christ through the Apostles, 
 who in this way are fulfilling the Master’s com¬ 
 mand not only to make disciples but to teach 
 them, and they are thus learners at the school of 
 God’s Incarnate Son. But in the Epistles, es¬ 
 pecially those of St. Paul, though he is not alone 
 in this usage, another and strange expression ap- 
 
OF THE CHKISTIAN FAITH 
 
 91 
 
 pears, one that has come to have a special mean¬ 
 ing quite restricted from the broad use of the 
 Apostles. I mean the word Saint, which at once 
 suggests not only the ideal of a holy life but the 
 indwelling power of the Holy Spirit through 
 whom this life is possible. Bishop Matthews, 
 from whom I have taken this illustration, points 
 out that these three words imply a belief in the 
 Christian of the New Testament days in the 
 Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, and so 
 are an indirect evidence but one none the less 
 positive to the teaching of the Trinity. There is 
 a fourth word which emphasizes the part which 
 God Himself plays in the Church. Jesus Christ 
 called men to Him; He chose whom He would; 
 He appointed men of his choice. St. Peter rec¬ 
 ognised these things when he began his descrip¬ 
 tion with the words a “Chosen generation.” 
 This activity on God’s part in putting us into 
 the Kingdom is expressed in the word Elect or 
 Chosen Ones. 
 
 Over against this moving on God’s part is the 
 surrender of men of their own will to His call, 
 which we describe by the word Faith, and Faith 
 is just as important an element in the life of the 
 Church as it was in the growth of the Kingdom 
 as recorded in the Gospels. 
 
 In the Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul uses 
 a figure which no study of the Church in the 
 New Testament can omit. I speak to my friend 
 and he hears what I say. How is it possible? 
 
92 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 It is because he and I have bodies. So far as 
 we know there is no possibility of men reaching 
 each other, certainly with any confident assur¬ 
 ance of the facts, unless they have bodies* My 
 body, his body, this is that through which I make 
 myself known to him and he to me. St. Paul in 
 speaking of the Church describes it as the Body 
 of Christ. What does he mean? Is it now, in 
 part at least, the outward and visible form 
 through which Jesus Christ makes Himself 
 known to the world, reaches the world, touches 
 men in the world and by which they reach and 
 touch and know Him? It is the medium of 
 knowledge and contact and power. Apart from 
 the Church, knowledge of Jesus Christ would be 
 impossible. Some may not agree with me per¬ 
 haps, and may say that I am exaggerating the 
 facts, that they could get this knowledge through 
 the New Testament. But we must realize and 
 remember, that the New Testament comes to us 
 through the Church. It is true that in this year 
 1923 we could get the New Testament without the 
 Church, or at any rate without any consciousness 
 in us of the Church’s part in the matter; we can 
 go to a store and buy it; but let us not forget 
 that behind this printed book there lies the fact, 
 a fact which cannot be denied, that the New Tes¬ 
 tament was written by members of the Church to 
 members of the Qhurch and preserved by them 
 and others in after generations who in turn were 
 members of the Church. In fact the very evi¬ 
 dence, the only evidence we have of Jesus Christ 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 93 
 
 is through His Body the Church. We experi¬ 
 ence, through contact within our own souls, we 
 know Him in ourselves, but we get even that ex¬ 
 perience through the Church. It is for this rea¬ 
 son that St. Paul says the Church is the Body of 
 Christ, that through which we know Him and He 
 reaches us. 
 
 And this explains why St. Paul calls us His 
 members or says we are “In Christ” and speaks 
 of us as those in whom His Spirit dwells who 
 live by the power of that Spirit. We are “mem¬ 
 bers of His Body.” 
 
 v 
 
 I cannot close this chapter without calling at¬ 
 tention to the fact that the Church is marked, in 
 the Creed by the four traditional characteristics. 
 We profess our belief that the Church is One, 
 Holy, Catholic and Apostolic; and we look out 
 into Christendom and find that, as men see it, 
 the Church seems to be none of these things. 
 She is cleft and split asunder into warring, 
 jangling sects who far from ancient love, too 
 often are antagonistic to each other if they do not 
 hate one another. She is the scorn of men for 
 her worldliness, the selfishness and low moral 
 tone of her people, and has been for centuries. 
 If by Catholic we mean universal she, in her wid¬ 
 est inclusion, only reaches a part of the Chris¬ 
 tian nations and leaves untouched countless mil¬ 
 lions of people beyond them; and if we mean or- 
 
94 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 thodox the vagaries of belief are as many as the 
 teachers or almost as many as the believers. 
 While last of all, if we proclaim her Apostolic 
 we will be laughed at by many of our fel¬ 
 lows who care not the snap of their finger what 
 the Apostolic customs and practises were and 
 but little about the Apostles’ teachings. What 
 answer can we make to these objections? Must 
 we not say, in common honesty, that the out¬ 
 ward unity of the Church, so far as it is here on 
 earth, is lost? And yet, down beneath there is a 
 real unity of belief in Jesus Christ, a real ac¬ 
 ceptance of Him as Lord and Saviour, a real 
 living union with Him through the common 
 birth of Holy Baptism. It is true that this will 
 not include all who profess and cal] themselves 
 Christians, but none the less there is a real 
 unity of belief and practise which exists even 
 when not always visible; and further there is a 
 union such as we read of in the extract from 
 Niceta in the last chapter, between us and the 
 hosts who have gone before. 
 
 The Holiness of the Church has always been 
 recognised not as a thing which has no flaws, no 
 imperfections; not even, in one sense at least, 
 as a matter of life alone; but as the outcome of 
 the indwelling of the Holy Spirit Who makes men 
 able to live a holy life and leads them on from 
 less to more; while again the countless holy ones 
 who have laid down their lives are an unseen but 
 none the less real witness to the holiness of the 
 Church. 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 95 
 
 One of the oldest descriptions of the Church is 
 that she is Catholic. I stated when discussing 
 the Creed that this term originally meant “for 
 all” or universal and this meaning has come to 
 the front again in later days. In the centuries 
 between there was the narrower sense of ortho¬ 
 doxy of belief. It is quite probable that the 
 term as used in the Creed does not mean univer¬ 
 sal so much as orthodox, and that properly 
 speaking the Church is called Catholic because 
 she holds fast the Faith as it has been delivered. 
 It is impossible, however, in these days to ignore 
 the earlier meaning and we must face the ques¬ 
 tion in what degree can the Church be spoken of 
 as “for all.” Experience in Christian missions 
 is the answer to this turn of the question. No 
 race, no people, no age, neither sex, fails to find 
 in her the satisfaction of the souks need. 
 Wherever the Gospel has been carried there she 
 has brought to the people to whom she ministers 
 something which their soul craved and apart 
 from her could not get and had not found. She 
 is trulv Catholic in this sense, For all. And as 
 the catholic character of her message explains 
 its welcome so too it explains the going on the 
 errand of teaching. It is because she feels that 
 she has from her Lord this truth, these gifts 
 which the world needs, that she reaches out and 
 seeks to compass the world with the triumph of 
 the Cross. It is the secret of her missionary ac¬ 
 tivity and of her zeal for souls. And within this 
 same word lies her close grip upon the deposit, 
 
96 SOME FOUNDATION TKUTHS 
 
 that Faith once for all delivered, which we seek 
 to understand ourselves and to hand on unim¬ 
 paired to the generations to come. 
 
 Last of all there is a real recognition that the 
 life of the Church goes back to the Apostles, that 
 they are the guardians of the faith and of the 
 message and of the sacraments by which the 
 life is assured. The Church is not some new 
 organization whose beginnings are of recent 
 days. Hers is no mushroom growth springing 
 up of a night, nor like the gourd which sheltered 
 Jonah has she suddenly spread abroad. Her 
 growth has been a long one, and her life reaches 
 back across the centuries. In the beginnings, 
 when the twelve men whom Jesus Christ Him¬ 
 self had called to be Apostles had won their 
 first converts, we read that the disciples con¬ 
 tinued in the Apostles doctrine and fellowship, 
 in the breaking of the bread and the prayers. 
 The Church in those days was apostolic not only 
 because of the presence of the Apostle among 
 them but because of this continuity. The same 
 character must mark her today if she is to keep 
 her right to this name. It was not added as a 
 Note of the Church just for a name. It was 
 rather a distinction by which men might know 
 among the warring groups of Christians those 
 who had the truth and the grace which the Mas¬ 
 ter came to give, by the fact that they reached 
 back in a continuous history to the Apostles. 
 It would be impossible at this time to point out 
 in detail our own claim to this heritage. But 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 97 
 
 we must not forget nor allow ourselves to be¬ 
 little the fact that our own beloved Church does 
 reach back along the lines well known and defin¬ 
 itely recognised to the days of the Apostles. In 
 broadest terms these are that we owe our life 
 as a part of the Church Universal to our mother 
 in England, whose history goes back unbroken 
 into the second century. That she in turn de¬ 
 rived her Christian life from the Church in Gaul, 
 from whom in later years she again received a 
 new infusion of strength. The ancient Gallic 
 Church is one of the early outgrowths of second 
 century missionary activity. Its martyrs meet 
 us in the pages of the mid-second century and 
 the story of its conversion carries us back al¬ 
 most to the days when St. Paul and St. Peter 
 were in Rome. We are quite confident that 
 the impulse which carried the message to Spain, 
 did not leave the other province un-taught. The 
 line runs back over great reaches of time to 
 the days of the Apostles. Our mother has 
 handed us no stone as we have sought at her 
 hands the bread of life. Her heritage is ours 
 and with her we reach across the ages to that 
 Apostolic origin which won for the Church in 
 earlier days this note, Apostolic. It is to be 
 noted that this historic continuity is closely 
 bound up with the question of Orders. The 
 succession within the Church is a succession 
 which finds as its links the bishops. They are 
 in the Church, they are not the Church; but as 
 in the earliest days the Apostles were the links 
 
98 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 with the Lord Jesus carrying on what He gave 
 and handing it on to others, so in later days 
 the bishops in turn were the similar links hand¬ 
 ing on what they received and assuring to the 
 coming generation the possession of those things 
 which the Apostles themselves received from our 
 Lord. This explains the importance of the 
 Apostolic lineage of the ministry, and justifies 
 us in our insistence on the one hand that our own 
 orders have this inheritance and on the other 
 that this inheritance is essential not only to 
 the well being but to the very being of the Church 
 itself. 
 
 Bishop Johnson of Colorado expressed this on 
 one occasion when he pointed out that the 
 Church is marked after all by two great facts 
 of her life. On the one hand there is Continuity 
 which shows us her life in one unbroken sweep 
 from the Apostles to the present. The golden 
 thread as it were which ties us to them in this 
 long unbroken reach, which touches hand to 
 hand through nearly sixty generations, is the 
 line of those on whose heads have been laid the 
 hands of those who were in their several gen¬ 
 erations the shepherds and bishops of the soul. 
 And as Continuity is the one mark so Unity is 
 the other. And the Unity of which Bishop 
 Johnson spoke is the unity in the Sacrament 
 of the Altar, where through those same sixty 
 generations countless millions of faithful souls 
 have knelt week after week and received from 
 the hand of the priest the mysterious food of 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 99 
 
 the Body and Blood of Christ and have been thus 
 made one in Him and He in them as they were 
 partakers of the one Loaf and drank of the one 
 Cup of the Blood of the Saviour. Outward 
 unity may seem broken, many may profess and 
 call themselves Christians, but deep within is 
 that inner unity of the Water and the Blood 
 which none can break; for the Gates of Hell 
 shall not prevail against the Church which Jesus 
 Christ Himself built, and into which men are 
 called. “They do not make the Church by com¬ 
 ing. They are called into that which already 
 exists; they are recognised as members when 
 they are within; but their membership depends 
 upon their admission, and not upon their con¬ 
 stituting themselves into a body in the sight of 
 the Lord.” It is this idea of the Church which 
 we inherit and in which we believe and because 
 the portion of the Church in which we have our 
 part has this continuity and life we are sure 
 that we are partakers of the grace and believers 
 in the truth which the Lord Himself gave to the 
 world through his Apostles. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 
 
 We now come to the discussion of the topic 
 which goes to the root of the difference between 
 Catholic and Protestant, the Sacramental sys¬ 
 tem. Every one of us recognises that there are, 
 today, as there have been for four centuries, 
 two types of Christians; and that they belong, 
 broadly speaking, to the two groups which we 
 call Catholic and Protestant. Both profess to 
 believe in Jesus Christ as God, both believe that 
 men must live a godly life to attain happiness, 
 and that Jesus Christ helps men to do this. 
 But the question at issue between them is how 
 this is done. 
 
 At the forefront of our discussion we must 
 look for just a moment at the common Protes¬ 
 tant idea that Christianity is a religion of a 
 Book. In a certain very real sense this is true 
 of the Protestant conception of it. But it is 
 not true of Christianity itself. It cannot be 
 true, for Christianity had from thirty to sixty 
 years of active life behind it before a word of 
 the New Testament was written, and at least a 
 century had passed before these several writings 
 were brought together to form the collection 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 101 
 
 which we call the New Testament. That cen¬ 
 tury saw the spread of the Christian Faith from 
 Jerusalem to Spain, into Egypt and Arabia, and 
 quite probably into eastern lands of which we 
 have no record. Christianity is a religion with 
 a Book, and in this it is like all other great 
 religions; but it is not founded upon that Book. 
 
 We find that men believe that Jesus Christ 
 helps them to live the life which He revealed in 
 His own life and teaching, but the Protestant 
 believes that this is done by the inspiration of 
 example, by the incentive of a hope of heaven, 
 by some mysterious power of the Holy Spirit ; 
 while the Catholic Church tells us that the help 
 which Jesus Christ gives comes to men through 
 sacraments and makes the sacramental life the 
 heart and soul of her teaching and practise. 
 To her these sacraments are outward visible 
 signs not to warm the heart and quicken the 
 will and arouse the imagination, but means and 
 pledges by which men actually receive from our 
 Lord a divine gift of help and strength. This 
 Catholic belief the Protestant does not accept 
 and often absolutely denies and bitterly opposes. 
 
 There is a third distinction between these two 
 types of Christians which is of great importance 
 in the light of modern teaching. In all the ages 
 of the Church St. John’s words have described 
 her belief about our Lord as the one who tells 
 us about God. “No one,” says the Apostle, “has 
 ever seen God at any time, the only begotten 
 Son who is in the bosom of the Father he hath 
 
102 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 declared him.” Christianity has always until 
 recent years taught us that it is a religion based 
 upon a revelation of God in His incarnate Son, 
 and that when He revealed truth He gave us 
 what we could not find out for ourselves. Mod¬ 
 ern Protestantism, under the influence no doubt 
 of that line of teaching which Huxley put into 
 its philosophical forms and to which he gave 
 the name Evolution, has come to accept pretty 
 broadly the belief that man has been working out 
 through the ages the problem of religion and that 
 Christianity represents the development, many 
 would say the highest development, of that proc¬ 
 ess. “Man has ‘by searching found out God/ ” 
 and since the first century men, under the in¬ 
 spiration of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 have come not only to an increasingly clearer 
 knowledge of what is true, but to knowledge of 
 new truth about God. We are not surprised 
 then to find that the interest of the more ad¬ 
 vanced thinkers of Protestantism dwells more on 
 what Jesus Christ said than on what He did, 
 and that they are concerned with the signifi¬ 
 cance, in the solution of the philosophical prob¬ 
 lems of the universe, of His teaching rather 
 than of His actions. To the Catholic the es¬ 
 sential problem is not this philosophical specu¬ 
 lation, though the true Catholic is not indifferent 
 to the solution of these great questions, but the 
 significance in life, both for mankind as a whole 
 and for the individual, of God’s love as revealed 
 in the facts of Christ’s birth and death, His 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 103 
 
 resurrection and ascension. He is interested in 
 knowing primarily who Jesus of Nazareth is 
 and what He did far more than in the contribu¬ 
 tion He made to the solution of the riddle of the 
 universe. This does not mean that our Lord 
 did not give any key to that riddle, nor that this 
 key is a matter of indifference, but that the great 
 practical issue for men is how to live as He 
 taught men to live and through Him to come 
 into a living fellowship with God. Christian¬ 
 ity, as the Church sees it, is a religion which 
 not only tells us about God and life by reach¬ 
 ing back to Christ, but also and in a very real 
 sense brings Christ to us; and the method by 
 which we come to Him and He to us, in a vital 
 personal union, is that which is called the Sacra¬ 
 mental System. Because we have kept this 
 truth clearly enshrined in our Prayer Book and 
 made it an essential thing in our religious life 
 we dare to say, in spite of our divisions and fail¬ 
 ures, that we are a part of the Catholic Church. 
 We may be, as Bishop Anderson said: “A 
 Catholic Church in a Protestant atmosphere”; 
 we may seem to men to be aligned with Protes¬ 
 tant Christianity rather than Catholic because 
 of our separation from Rome; and some may 
 think that we are actually only one of the 
 Protestant bodies as men call us and we unfor¬ 
 tunately proclaim upon the title page of the 
 Prayer Book; but so long as we keep the Sacra¬ 
 mental System in its present place in our life and 
 teaching we are truly Catholic in that great es- 
 
104 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 sential matter which separates the two great 
 divisions of Western Christendom. 
 
 I 
 
 The Sacramental idea is not peculiarly a reli¬ 
 gious idea in principle. It underlies every part 
 of our life. We all recognise the existence of 
 two worlds, of which we are a part, the world 
 of material things and the world of spirit. I 
 look out across the hills upon a wonderful vista 
 of mountains; they rise roll upon roll until their 
 tops meet the heavens. Night comes on and her 
 purpling shadows fill the hollows and the val¬ 
 leys lie in darkness. Soon out of the deep blue 
 of the skies the stars begin to show and as night 
 goes on the heavens become a mass of twinkling 
 points of light. I know that all this is but the 
 material universe, rock and earth and tree and 
 the molten suns whose far off light can only 
 reach my eyes when our own sun is hid behind 
 this earth. But that scene is more to me than 
 a material thing. “The heavens declare the 
 glory of God and the firmament showeth His 
 handiwork.” That mysterious beauty of the 
 starlit night arouses in me deep longings, a sense 
 of awe and wonder, and somehow I feel my¬ 
 self in the presence of God. The outward visible 
 beauty has spoken to me of an invisible Being 
 whom I cannot see. So too, when, perhaps, I 
 sit in the quiet stillness of an evening and reach 
 out and touch my child’s hand, I feel not only 
 
OF THE CHKISTIAN FAITH 105 
 
 flesh and blood, mere material things, but there 
 is a subtle indescribable feeling, which we have 
 all in one way or another experienced, that is 
 the touch not of hand and hand but of heart and 
 heart, of soul and soul. We know nothing save 
 as we learn it through outward signs and sym¬ 
 bols. We cannot express our inner life save by 
 some bodily action, and there have been, there 
 are today, teachers who go so far as to tell 
 us that this outer life is the only real life and 
 that there is no inner life, but that what we 
 call the inner is but the reactions of our 
 neurons and the sensations of our physical 
 being. 
 
 The inward reaches us through the outward 
 not only in our personal intercourse but in the 
 larger experience of life. We know innumer¬ 
 able instances of it; our Flag, our Money, our 
 Newspapers, the Courtesies of society, are but 
 examples chosen haphazard, of the truth that in 
 every avenue of life we express the inward re¬ 
 alities, the things that count, by some outward 
 symbol which has no value in itself but finds its 
 value because of the fact that it stands for some¬ 
 thing which has real worth. This expression 
 of the inward through the outward is a common 
 place of human life, true absolutely indepen¬ 
 dently of religion, but it is none the less true in 
 the religious sphere because it is true outside 
 that sphere; and the principle which is thus ex¬ 
 pressed is the principle which lies beneath the 
 Sacramental System. God, willing to give us 
 
106 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 help, gives it to ns by outward signs which are 
 both vehicles and evidence of His grace. 
 
 ii 
 
 When God determined to give man a new start 
 and to open to him vistas of hope fulfilled and 
 of life restored; to take away the cloud which 
 had hid Him from man’s eyes; and to open the 
 gate by which man could enter once more into 
 fellowship with his Father in Heaven; God made 
 use of this universal prniciple. He sent His Son 
 into the world. But how? In the only way by 
 which men could see Him, under outward form. 
 He was made man. The great sacrament, the 
 most wonderful outward and visible form of an 
 inward and spiritual grace, is the Incarnation 
 itselL God, who is pure spirit and as such in¬ 
 visible to our physical sight, took form so that 
 men might see Him; and the form He took was 
 the form of man, not that it was only so that 
 men might see Him, but that it was so that He 
 could best reach us; and further as one of us, ac¬ 
 complish the purposes of Redemption. “God 
 was manifested in the flesh,” is St. Paul’s way 
 of stating it; God “tabernacles with us,” is St. 
 John’s expression, “He dwelt among us” in out¬ 
 ward visible form. We must remember that it 
 was in this material form that He did things 
 for men. He touched them and they saw and 
 heard and at His word walked and were cleansed, 
 they who had been blind and deaf, lame and 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 107 
 
 leprous. His voice bade the paralyzed arise and 
 take up bis bed and gave him strength to do 
 this otherwise impossible thing. The woman 
 touched the border of His garment, and the 
 misery of half her life departed but strength 
 went out from Him. The Lord Jesus accom¬ 
 plished things with men because as God incar¬ 
 nate He actually touched them, touched not only 
 their hearts by his love and sympathy but their 
 bodies by His own body. 
 
 Did His touch stop when He ascended? Was 
 it by a derived power, without actual contact 
 with the Master that the apostles wrought? And 
 if their miracles—for St. Luke tells us they 
 worked miracles—were by such delegated power, 
 was there no other power such as touched their 
 souls, that came from contact with Him and 
 made them strong against the power of evil? 
 St. John uses a word in the record of our Lord’s 
 great discourses on the night in which He was 
 betrayed that is very suggestive. Our Lord was 
 telling the Apostles of their personal dependence 
 upon and their relationship to Him, and to make 
 it clear He used the figure of the Vine and the 
 Branches. The life is in the Vine, the fruit we 
 know is borne upon the branches through the 
 life which is in the vine. He says; “Without 
 Me ye can do nothing,” or to translate the Greek 
 proposition still more literally “apart from Me,” 
 “separated from Me,” ye can do nothing. Their 
 power came from union, vital union with Him. 
 In view of this statement of our Lord it is very 
 
108 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 significant that St. Paul’s phrase of the relation¬ 
 ship between the Christian and the Lord is “in 
 Him.” We are united to Him, we are in Him. 
 
 What is this union and how can we get it? 
 Let me remind you just by reference of the figure 
 which the Apostle used when he called the 
 Church the Body of Christ and with this re¬ 
 mind you of that other expression in the Epistle 
 to the Romans where he speaks of us as members 
 of each other in the body and so interdependent. 
 Our union with Christ is the union with Him 
 through membership in His body. This member¬ 
 ship is not belonging to a society. St. Paul was 
 no modern sectary. He had no conception of 
 the Church as a company of believers, who by 
 virtue of their common belief and admission into 
 the company, form a society. They were in 
 Christ, members of His Body, and because of 
 this they were members not only of the Body but 
 “one of another.” 
 
 Membership in the Body of Christ implies, yes 
 it involves, life which is from Him. As He Him¬ 
 self told Nicodemus men enter into the King¬ 
 dom, i. e. to use the Apostle’s phrase His Body, 
 by birth and the birth is spiritual because His 
 Body is spiritual. It could have been no other 
 sort of birth because of this fact of the spiritu¬ 
 ality of the Body. But it was not some invisible 
 birth, because again the Body while spiritual 
 was visible under its outward form of the mem¬ 
 bers of the Church. The birth into the Body 
 was of necessity by some outward form. It is 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 109 
 
 however most important at this point to in¬ 
 sist that it is a real birth with all that birth in¬ 
 volves of the entering into a new relationship. 
 Let us not forget that this is in reality the whole 
 of what we call birth. The child is by birth en¬ 
 tering a new relationship with the world and 
 his family. He is what he was before, but not 
 under former conditions and so we say he begins 
 to live a new life. It is exactly this that comes 
 in the spiritual birth, by which we enter the 
 Body of Christ. We enter a new relationship 
 both to Him and to our fellows, and as such we 
 enter into a new life. The relationship is pri¬ 
 marily with God through Jesus Christ. We 
 are made members of Christ and because of that 
 we become, in a sense in which we were not be¬ 
 fore, the children of God, and we enter into the 
 privileges of the Kingdom of Heaven. Baptism 
 incorporates us into Christ’s Body, makes us 
 members of Him, gives us new life, as we are 
 grafted as branches into the Vine. 
 
 This is the meaning of the old phrase “The 
 sacraments are the extension of the Incarnation.” 
 They are means of applying the Incarnate Christ 
 to men, by which means He actually touches 
 them under outward form; and the signs which 
 are pledges of the reality beneath. And this 
 union with Himself is what Jesus Christ wanted 
 to secure to men. 
 
 We shall not enter now upon the discussion of 
 the number of the sacraments. This depends 
 upon the exact meaning of the word. If it be 
 
110 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 “ordained by Christ Himself” the answer is one 
 thing; if it be “an outward and visible sign of 
 an inward and spiritual grace” the answer may 
 well be another. But there are three aspects of 
 life which must have expression, and as mem¬ 
 bers of a living Body we must expect to find 
 them in the experience of those in the Body. If 
 we are to have real life in the body there must 
 be not only birth into it, but food and power. 
 
 I have already said enough of that Sacrament 
 which is the beginning of Christian life in the 
 soul, Holy Baptism. This must come first. 
 There can be no union with our Lord, no contact 
 with Him, no normal giving of strength until 
 this is accomplished. I am willing to admit, 
 in theory, that God is not bound by sacraments 
 and that He can, if He will, give spiritual 
 strength without them; but it is absolutely ab¬ 
 normal and exceptional, and we have no right 
 whatever, no slightest ground, for believing that 
 He will make us the exception and give us grace 
 unless we belong to His Body. Our Lord Him¬ 
 self has put this truth so plainly that one should 
 think there was no room for discussion, but 
 none the less in spite of His plainness of speech 
 men rebel against the teaching, and yet there 
 the words stand; “Except a man be born of water 
 and the spirit he cannot enter into the Kingdom 
 of Heaven.” It is further true, it seems also 
 indisputable, that where the contact with Him 
 has not been made no other gift of grace can 
 enter. The life cannot flow from the Vine to 
 
OF THE CHKISTLANT FAITH 111 
 
 the branch until the branch is grafted into the 
 Vine. This explains why an unbaptized person 
 cannot receive the Holy Communion as a spirit¬ 
 ual food, and why we ought never to think of 
 giving other sacraments to men until they have 
 been born into the sphere of the sacramental 
 gifts by the first of all the sacraments, Holy 
 Baptism. 
 
 Life cannot continue, so far as we know it in 
 the world, without food. If any of us should 
 go without food for any great period we would 
 lose strength, and sooner or later die. If a 
 child is deprived of food it also dies, but it dies 
 sooner than we would. Therefore, by parallel 
 and the parallel is the Lord’s own, we must have 
 food for our souls, and we must partake of that 
 food. Here again we have the same sacramental 
 principle. Spiritual things can only be given, 
 with certainty of reception, through material 
 things. We turn to the Gospels and we read of 
 the Lord taking bread and wine, the simplest 
 elements of food as used in His day, and making 
 them the vehicles by which men should receive 
 the food of the soul. And that food, mark you, 
 according to His own words, is Himself, under 
 the two essential elements of flesh and blood, 
 “the true food and the true drink,” as He said 
 at Capernaum. It is not something material. 
 The disciples thought it was, when He said the 
 words, as, something that was to come in the 
 future; but, when the time for the Institution 
 came, then they understood their mistake and 
 
112 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 found that they have a sacrament, i. e., the two 
 familiar elements of material food serve as the 
 media for giving them His own self for the sup¬ 
 port of their spiritual life. The outward form 
 is but the vehicle of the inner reality, and that 
 reality is not something which appeals to their 
 imagination or sentiment, it is a vital thing in 
 itself, endued with life and capable of conveying 
 life to them who receive it. And further we 
 must remember that it is food for the spirit and 
 so its reality is not material form but the living 
 presence of a spiritual reality, which has in it¬ 
 self life of the sort which the sacrament is in¬ 
 tended to convey. Furthermore, as the Lord 
 Himself taught, the living presence within the 
 sacrament is nothing less than His own pres¬ 
 ence; they who partake of the outward form 
 partake of Him, in actual real participation, but 
 as He is spiritual, reaching their souls through 
 material things, so in this sacrament He comes 
 in spiritual—but none the less real—presence to 
 reach their spirits by the vehicle of material 
 things. 
 
 There is a third necessity; life and food are 
 not enough if we are to accomplish anything. 
 We must have power. In the material life this 
 power comes largely from the strengthening 
 quality of the food which we eat, partly from our 
 training and exercise. In the spiritual world 
 the same thing is true; spiritual power in a 
 very real sense comes to us from the spiritual 
 food, but we have more than that. There is 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 113 
 
 a special gift which is the indwelling of the 
 Spirit and this is the peculiar source of power 
 to the soul of the Christian. As our Lord Him¬ 
 self said to the Eleven on the day of His Ascen¬ 
 sion the Spirit would come and they would be 
 endued with power from on high. Once more 
 the gift is of a sacramental character; it comes 
 by means of outward signs and vehicles, not in 
 this instance of Christ’s own appointed form or 
 matter so far as the scriptural records tell us, 
 but under the guidance of the Holy Spirit Him¬ 
 self. The manner of giving, as we see very 
 plainly in the Acts, is by the laying on of hands, 
 together with special directive prayers which tell 
 the purpose for which the power is given. The 
 spiritual gift of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost 
 is given by the outward physical, and so material 
 action, and as such is truly sacramental. 
 
 hi 
 
 Sacraments, then, in the broadest sense are the 
 outward means by which, through the use of 
 material things, we are joined to Christ’s Body, 
 born into it and through union with the Body 
 are made one with Him and receive from Him 
 food for our soul’s life and power to fulfil our 
 responsibilities in this life and prepare for the 
 life beyond. It may not be necessary to say 
 more than we have of what constitute sacra¬ 
 ments, but it may not be amiss to remind you 
 that in a formally exact sense there are always 
 
114 SOME FOUNDATION TEUTHS 
 
 two and sometimes three elements to be con¬ 
 sidered in connection with them. There is al¬ 
 ways the outward part, which is spoken of as 
 Form and Matter; the inward part, which is 
 the spiritual grace or power given; and then, 
 in the Eucharist especially, there is the actual 
 Spiritual presence through which the grace is 
 conferred. By Form we mean the appointed 
 words; in Holy Baptism these are those which 
 St. Matthew records as part of the Lord’s com¬ 
 mand, “The Name of the Father and the Son and 
 the Holy Ghost”; in the Holy Eucharist the 
 Form is not specified by our Lord Himself, but 
 the words which He used in the Institution have 
 always been used and with them is coupled, in al¬ 
 most all liturgies in some form or another, the 
 Invocation of the Holy Spirit. In Confirma¬ 
 tion there is no commonly accepted Form. The 
 Matter of Holy Baptism and of the Holy Eucha¬ 
 rist are of the Lord’s appointment, water in the 
 former, bread and wine in the latter; in Con¬ 
 firmation the laying on of hands is the equiva¬ 
 lent to the Matter, with which in the Eastern 
 and Eoman communions there is the use of oil 
 in annointing. In Holy Baptism the grace is 
 described in the Prayer Book in these terms, 
 “A death unto sin and a new birth unto right¬ 
 eousness; for being by nature born in sin and 
 the children of wrath we are hereby made the 
 children of grace.” In the Holy Communion 
 this is the “strengthening and refreshing of our 
 souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 115 
 
 bodies are by the Bread and Wine.” In the 
 Holy Eucharist we have, in addition, the pres¬ 
 ence of the “Body and Blood of Christ which 
 are spiritually taken and received by the faith¬ 
 ful in the Lord’s Supper,” becoming, to use His 
 term, the “true Food” and “true Drink” of our 
 souls. 
 
 This question of the constitution of a Sacra¬ 
 ment involves rather careful distinction and 
 raises controversial points between us and 
 the Churches of the East. We, make a distinc¬ 
 tion, and feel that it is a perfectly valid one, be¬ 
 tween the two “Sacraments of the Gospel” as 
 they are called, and the other commonly called 
 lesser sacraments, lesser not because of their 
 value but because they do not have form and mat¬ 
 ter appointed by our Lord Himself so far as the 
 records tell us. This distinction is not known 
 to nor recognised by the ancient churches of the 
 East. They make no difference in quality, but 
 say that all sacraments recognised as such by 
 the Church are of equal value, and in place of 
 our accurate answer; “Two only as generally 
 necessary to salvation,” to the question “How 
 many Sacraments hath Christ ordained in His 
 Church,” they count seven as all equally valid 
 sacraments. So far as the West is concerned 
 it was not until the twelfth century that the 
 question of the number of the Sacraments had 
 created enough discussion to demand an an¬ 
 swer. Peter Lombard is largely responsible for 
 the determination of the seven in the West and 
 
116 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 from his day the larger number have been recog¬ 
 nised as truly sacraments though only two of 
 them are of direct appointment by our Lord. 
 These seven are first those which give life and 
 food, Baptism and the Holy Communion, which 
 are of Christ’s appointment; then those which 
 secure the gift of the Holy Ghost as an endow¬ 
 ment of power, that general gift which all Chris¬ 
 tians should receive in Confirmation and the 
 particular gifts of Holy Orders by which men 
 are fitted for their work as Deacons, Priests and 
 Bishops. These four are of more general im¬ 
 portance than the other three by which men and 
 women are bound together in the bonds of Holy 
 Matrimony, receive forgiveness of sins in Abso¬ 
 lution or Penance, and are strengthened to face 
 sickness and death in Unction. You see at once 
 the difference of importance in the life of the 
 Church, possibly in that of the individual, be¬ 
 tween the first four and the last three, just as 
 you see the difference of importance between 
 those which our Lord instituted and those which 
 the Holy Ghost taught men to use. But what¬ 
 ever be their origin, the significant point is that 
 the Church conceives them as means of grace, 
 as outward signs by which that same spiritual 
 power which came from our Lord Himself while 
 on earth, comes to us today. 
 
 IV 
 
 We have been thinking of Sacraments in terms 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 117 
 
 of outward and inward, as media by which we 
 receive assurance of the gifts of grace which they 
 bring us through union with Jesus Christ. 
 There is another view without which we can¬ 
 not understand the practical side of the Sacra¬ 
 mental System. To some minds the Sacraments 
 are like charms, they operate in a purely mechan¬ 
 ical way. We do our part by receiving them 
 and God does the rest. To others they are 
 merely forms or rites which we perform, but 
 they are of virtually no practical value, they 
 carry no gifts. 
 
 The truth is quite contrary to both these views. 
 The Sacraments, on the one hand, as we have 
 seen, do definitely carry gifts, and on the other 
 hand we are sure that they are not charms which 
 work without us. The Church tells us very 
 plainly that there are certain prerequisites with¬ 
 out which we receive them to no good whatever. 
 We have seen that Baptism is itself a prerequi¬ 
 site for all other sacramental gifts. We should 
 see, if we had time to study the question in de¬ 
 tail, that Confirmation, under normal conditions, 
 is required before Holy Communion and both 
 before the gift of Orders, while Penance deals 
 with the cleansing of the soul and is needed 
 whenever the soul is stained with sin. These 
 conditions apply to one sacrament following on 
 another; but there is something more personal in 
 character which stands as a prerequisite for 
 even Holy Baptism. No one can receive it, nor 
 any other sacramental gift to his souPs health 
 
118 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 without Faith; and the Church tells us that Re¬ 
 pentance is a further requirement for the recep¬ 
 tion of both Holy Baptism and the Holy Com¬ 
 munion. The reason for this is not hard to find. 
 The Sacraments are the way by which we re¬ 
 ceive the gifts of Christ, by which we come into 
 union with Him, but unless we give ourselves to 
 Him, unless we submit our will to Him and are 
 ready to accept what He offers, He remains un¬ 
 able to help us. We have in the Gospels more 
 than one instance where Christ’s inability to ac¬ 
 complish results was directly due to the lack of 
 faith in those who needed His help, and the very 
 emphasis which He lays on faith implies the 
 same thing. The basis of sin is rebellion and the 
 thing. The basis of sin is rebellion and the 
 only cure for rebellion is submission and peni¬ 
 tence, or the change of view which makes us see 
 life as God means us to see it. Therefore Re¬ 
 pentance and Faith are prerequisites for re¬ 
 ceiving sacramental grace. 
 
 The sacramental life, like all life, is a prog¬ 
 ress. We go from strength to strength. Let me, 
 as I close this discussion, try to describe the 
 progress of a soul living in constant use of the 
 Sacraments. I shall confine myself to the three 
 which, with us, are of ordinary and general use, 
 Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Communion as 
 the gifts of life and power, and food, through 
 which we have union with and strength from our 
 Lord. 
 
 When we are born we enter life with innate 
 tendencies on the spiritual side as truly as on 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 119 
 
 the physical and mental. The most outstanding 
 tendency is to sin. Every human being, as 
 surely as he is born into the world, is certain 
 to sin. There is an inheritance which always 
 manifests itself in sin; the character of the mani¬ 
 festation is not the same for all, men’s sins differ 
 and the temptation wlrich I find it almost im¬ 
 possible to resist another might never feel, and 
 the reverse is equally true; but of whatever sort 
 my sin may be, it is due in no slight degree to 
 the fact of my inherited tendency to commit it. 
 This tendency is as it were a malignant germ 
 whose development is sure and under some con¬ 
 ditions is apt to be rapid. How can this germ 
 be killed? How can sin be destroyed in me? 
 Jesus Christ in His own life was absolutely free 
 from sin. Whenever He touched sin He cured 
 it. The wholeness of body which contact with 
 Him brought was often but typical of a whole¬ 
 ness of soul within. More than once He pref¬ 
 aced the physical cure by forgiving the man’s 
 sin. What contact with Him in the flesh accom¬ 
 plished while He was here on earth contact with 
 Him always does. His is the power and author¬ 
 ity to forgive sin and He does it by personal con¬ 
 tact and as we have seen this personal contact 
 is ours through the Sacraments. We get it first 
 when we are made a part of Him in our Baptism. 
 The first assault is then made upon our tendency 
 to sin. We receive Him, as it were as an anti¬ 
 dote, an anti-toxin if I may be permitted to use 
 that word in this connection. Sin, in us, re- 
 
120 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 ceives its first assault. Then—too often alas it 
 is much postponed and sin in consequence gets a 
 hold which is harder to break—at last we are 
 confirmed. We receive His promised gift of 
 power, power to do what He expects and desires, 
 power to use His gifts; the Holy Spirit enters 
 our soul and takes the things of Christ and 
 shows them unto us. Then we begin to receive 
 the Holy Communion. We have seen that this is 
 the food of life, but we must not forget that the 
 food is no less than our Lord Himself, verily 
 and indeed taken and received in the Lord’s 
 Supper. He re-enters our souls again and again, 
 He comes into personal contact with us, and, as 
 the antitoxin of certain diseases oft repeated 
 finally destroys the power of the germ and makes 
 us immune from that sickness, so the constant 
 coming of our Lord in the Holy Communion, if 
 we welcome Him by faith and repentance and 
 love, gradually destroys the power of sin, kills 
 the tendency, and the soul becomes more and 
 more as God would have it and we grow into the 
 likeness of our Lord, until when this earthly life 
 is ended we go forth into the next world as one 
 of those who have realized in themselves the 
 power of Jesus Christ, Whose sacramental pres¬ 
 ence together with the power of His Holy Spirit 
 has gradually perfected us into some semblance 
 of His own perfection. The progress is not in 
 actual experience one unbroken growth in holi¬ 
 ness. In most of us sin re-asserts itself. Our 
 faith grows dim, our will to holiness becomes 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 121 
 
 weak and we give ourselves over into a life of 
 lawlessness before God. The return is not easy. 
 Its way is the way of sorrow and penitence, of 
 confession and humiliation, the way of cleansing; 
 but when once we have again set our feet on the 
 path of peace, though the journey be harder for 
 a while because of our failure, the same sacra¬ 
 mental contact with our Lord once more deadens 
 the power of sin and we can again hope to con¬ 
 quer in the end. But the power, as the Church 
 sees it, is not ours but His working in us, and 
 the way by which He comes to us is the way 
 of those outward pledges of His inner grace 
 which we call Sacraments, the regular use of 
 which is the mark of true churchmanship. 
 
CHAPTEK VI 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN DUTY 
 
 Christianity requires us to live a certain kind 
 of life. The ideal of that life is peculiar to 
 Christianity, and the fact that it is to be lived 
 not on the basis of obedience to particular pre¬ 
 cepts but as the expression of great principles of 
 living, makes a demand upon the Christian to 
 which no other religion approaches. If we were 
 to speak in absolute accuracy we would not talk 
 of the Principles of Christian Duty, but of the 
 Principles for the guidance of a Christian in 
 right living. The distinction is the difference 
 between “I ought” as a matter of obligatory 
 precepts, and “I live, yet not I but Christ.” I, 
 who by my baptism am “in Christ,” i. e., as we 
 have seen, a part of His Body, in actual con¬ 
 tact with Him through Sacraments, must live in 
 a certain way. If I am to fulfil the conditions 
 of my relationship to Him, if I am to act, as a 
 member of that Body which is His, there is a 
 compulsion not of formal duty laid down in ex¬ 
 ternal laws and ordinances, but the compulsion 
 of an interior life that finds its truest expres¬ 
 sion in living as Christ revealed we should live. 
 This discussion would be incomplete if we did 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 123 
 
 not attempt to search out and find what is that 
 ideal of life which our Lord left behind Him in 
 the world; and what are the motives which will 
 help us to fulfil that ideal in ourselves. To 
 this then we shall now turn. 
 
 I 
 
 St. Athanasius in his treatise “The Incarna¬ 
 tion of the Word of God,” wrote these words: 
 “The Word of God came in His own Person, in 
 order that as He was the image of the Father, 
 He might be able to recreate the man made after 
 that image” . . . “for as when a portrait 
 painted on a panel has disappeared in conse¬ 
 quence of external stain, there is need again for 
 him to come whose the portrait is that the like¬ 
 ness may be renewed on the same material, be¬ 
 cause for the sake of his picture the material 
 itself on which it has been painted is not thrown 
 away but the likeness is retraced upon it; so, 
 similarly, the all Holy Son of the Father, being 
 the image of the Father, came into our sphere 
 to renew man, made after Himself, and to find 
 him as one lost, through the remission of sins, 
 the which He Himself says in the Gospel. ‘I 
 came to seek and to save that which was lost/ 
 W T herefore also He says to the Jews: ‘Except 
 a man be born anew/ not signifying as they un¬ 
 derstood Him the birth from woman, but mean¬ 
 ing the soul regenerated and recreated in the 
 image of God.” This description gives us a true 
 
124 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 account of one aspect of the life-work of our 
 Lord. He came to restore the image of God, i. e. 
 to show men what God's ideal was, and by union 
 with Himself to recreate them in that image. 
 Jesus Christ revealed to men an ideal life as 
 God meant men to live it, and the ideal we can 
 find only in His own life. We will fail if we 
 search for it in His teaching alone. Certain 
 parts of the ideal found expression in the memo¬ 
 ries of the Apostles not in the words but in the 
 deeds of their Master. If we are to understand 
 what His ideal of life was, what has been set be¬ 
 fore us as an example of Christian living, we 
 must study His life as a whole, and from the 
 sum total of that life seek to extract the im¬ 
 portant things which make up the revelation of 
 human life as it should be. 
 
 The first fact which we recognise in that study 
 is the tremendous reality of sin. The “mysteri¬ 
 ous fact,” as Ottley calls sin, is recognised by 
 men of all nations of the world. They do not 
 understand it, they often do not know the mean¬ 
 ing of that strange discontent and discomfort 
 at life. They have tried in many ways to ex¬ 
 press it, and to be free from the thing itself. 
 With imperfect knowledge of God they cannot 
 know the whole truth about it. But the Chris¬ 
 tian knows, and this “mysterious fact” of com¬ 
 mon human experience is what the Scripture 
 calls sin, the failure to do what God expects of 
 men, the deliberate refusal to obey His com¬ 
 mands and to follow the way which He points 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 125 
 
 out for men to walk. “Man everywhere and al¬ 
 ways lias felt himself called to a life of righteous¬ 
 ness and fellowship with God and has perpetu¬ 
 ally fallen short of it.” Whether we read St. 
 Paul, the Christian Apostle, or Ovid, the Roman 
 poet, we read the same thing, “We desire the 
 better things, we follow those that are worse”; 
 “The evil that I would not that I do, and the 
 good that I would that do I not.” There is no 
 question that St. John is right when he says: 
 “The whole world lieth in the wicked one.” This 
 great world embracing fact of sin was a tremen¬ 
 dous reality to Jesus Christ. More than once 
 He bears witness to it by the way He brings 
 forgiveness of sin. One of the most notable in¬ 
 stances is that in which He welcomed and for¬ 
 gave the sinful woman who had loved too much 
 and fallen; “go in peace,” He said to her. “The 
 Lord hath put away thy sin.” The paralytic 
 whose four friends let him down through the 
 roof till he lay before the Lord, heard the amaz¬ 
 ing words: “Son, thy sins have been forgiven 
 thee.” Our Lord did not confine the evidence 
 of His horror of sin and its constant presence 
 in the world to Galilee. On several occasions 
 He let the men of Jerusalem and of Peroea know 
 what He thought of it, and when He was with 
 the disciples on Easter night He breathed on 
 them and fulfilled the promise He had made be¬ 
 fore to St. Peter alone, saying the words which 
 have been constantly used in Ordination to the 
 Priesthood; “Whose soever sins ye remit they 
 
126 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 are remitted unto them and whose soever sins ye 
 retain they are retained.” The first claim to 
 power which He made in Galilee was the right 
 to forgive sin and He proved He had the power 
 by making the paralytic well; the first power He 
 granted the Eleven Apostles on the Resurrection 
 night was this power to forgive. 
 
 These cases are very plain; equally plain in its 
 witness to the fact and effect of sin are the three 
 great parables of God’s love which St. Luke re¬ 
 cords in the fifteenth chapter, the parables of the 
 Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, the Prodigal Son, to 
 give them their familiar titles, titles which so 
 completely miss the point of each story. In 
 each of these parables there is the picture of sin: 
 the sheep has gone astray, the coin has been lost, 
 the prodigal son has wilfully left the companion¬ 
 ship of father and brother and gone off into a life 
 of gross self-indulgence and dissoluteness; in 
 each there is the definite suggestion of the pos¬ 
 sibility of return and the happiness which is sure 
 to result, not curiously enough as pictured in 
 these parables, the happiness of the penitent but 
 in heaven, i. e. both among God’s companions 
 and in His own loving heart because of their 
 penitence. As Jesus Christ Himself said “He 
 came to seek and to save that which had been 
 lost.” This was His purpose, as even His name 
 signifies, “Jehovah shall save,” and as the angels 
 proclaimed at His birth He was “Born a Sav¬ 
 iour.” 
 
 Christ teaches us not only the reality of sin 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 127 
 
 but its universality. There are none free from 
 it; as St. Paul put it “Forasmuch as all have 
 sinned and come short/’ so our Lord understood 
 it. This and only this can explain the phrases 
 in St. John 3, not only the words “except a man 
 be born again he cannot enter the Kingdom of 
 Heaven” but the other verse which is sometimes 
 considered to be the Apostle’s comment rather 
 than the Master's own words: “God so loved 
 the world that He gave His only begotten Son 
 that who soever believeth in Him should not 
 perish but have everlasting life.” More than in 
 the English the Greek phrases are as general as 
 it is possible to put them. They are, in the 
 one case, the indefinite “any one.” And in the 
 other the inclusive “every one.” There is no 
 room for exception. What is true of one is, es¬ 
 sentially, true of every one. The details of its 
 form may vary, does vary, but the characteristic 
 beneath is the same in all. 
 
 There is, however, one exception in this story 
 of human sin, and it is the exception which 
 makes the fact more striking and defines the 
 Lord’s attitude toward it. He Himself is free 
 from sin and He knows it and glories in it, 
 “Which of you,” He said, “convinceth me of 
 sin?” The words were said in the face of the 
 bitterest opposition, and would have been 
 snapped up immediately if possible; but St. John 
 relates the incident to drive home the complete 
 sinlessness of the Master. This is evidenced, on 
 the other side, by the positive statements of our 
 
128 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 Lord. He did not come to do His own will, but 
 the will of Him who sent Him, to do what God 
 the Father wanted His Incarnate Son to do was 
 the purpose of His life; and as He thought of 
 it, at the end of that life as He faced death, He, 
 recalling His readiness to do this, said: “I 
 am content to do it, yea Thy law is within my 
 heart.” And further He had confidence, a con¬ 
 fidence which can have but one explanation, that 
 He actually had done all that God His Father 
 had expected of Him. “I have fulfilled thy will, 
 O my God,” He said; and St. John writing of 
 the last moments on the Cross records that our 
 Lord, wdien He knew that the whole of God’s pur¬ 
 pose and plan was accomplished, said “I thirst.” 
 It was this complete agreement of will and pur¬ 
 pose, this absolute fulfilment of the Father’s wish 
 which won for Jesus Christ the twice repeated 
 commendation from His Father “This is My be¬ 
 loved Son in whom I am well pleased.” We may 
 confidently believe then that sin had no place in 
 the life of Jesus Christ, whether it was by fail¬ 
 ure to do right or by actually committing wrong. 
 
 The Lord had a tremendous sense of the reality 
 and universality of sin; but what is sin? The 
 importance of this question cannot be over- 
 stressed; for upon the answer will depend our 
 attitude toward our Lord and His work. St. 
 John’s definition is blunt, abrupt, and to men of 
 today distasteful, but it is true. He says “sin is 
 lawlessness” or as we might paraphrase it rebel- 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 129 
 
 lion. At the center of personality lies the will. 
 However we may explain it psychologically, so 
 far as the moral values are concerned, man is 
 definitely self-determinative. He decides his 
 own conduct in the last analysis, no matter what 
 part environment may play; and the whole ques¬ 
 tion as to the true character of sin depends on 
 this fact that there is on the one side God’s will 
 and on the other man’s will; and when a man 
 sets his will against God’s and refuses to do 
 what God wishes him to do, becomes a law unto 
 himself, then he sins. This is lawlessness, re¬ 
 bellion against God is the setting man’s own 
 will in opposition to the will of God. 
 
 But we will find a number of explanations of 
 this fact of human life which take the will out 
 of sin and make our conduct “wrong doing” 
 which has no moral quality. Some people de¬ 
 scribe this as “imperfection” i. e., man is striv¬ 
 ing upward and he has not yet attained that 
 completeness and finish in life which God meant 
 him to have. There is no moral quality in con¬ 
 duct in this definition, so far as we know morals. 
 On the other hand sin is regarded as disease, in 
 which once more there is no moral quality be¬ 
 cause there is no power in the man’s will to de¬ 
 cide on the result of his own conduct. He may 
 be, like the prodigal, “beside himself” but unlike 
 him he cannot “come to” for there is nothing to 
 turn from, he has simply to overcome the disease 
 and go on to better things. Still another concep¬ 
 tion of sin makes it an “animal impulse” which 
 
130 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 is natural and normal but this too robs conduct 
 of all its finer elements and reduces man, 
 morally, to the level of the beasts. These ex¬ 
 amples—they are only some of the alternates— 
 are all alike in that they forget the place of the 
 will in man’s life, and that they ride flat against 
 the teaching of Holy Scripture from which we 
 learn that God made man in His own image, giv¬ 
 ing him a moral nature with all its possibilities, 
 and started him in a life of fellowship with Him¬ 
 self from which man departed, “fell” is the 
 proper word, by an act of rebellion or lawless¬ 
 ness ; and that in consequence and in addition he 
 passed on to his children a nature prone to evil 
 and apt to sin. 
 
 II 
 
 The second fact which the Gospels show us in 
 Christ’s life and the Epistles stress is that God 
 was not content to leave man thus shut out from 
 Him, but that He sent His only begotten Son 
 into the world to set men free from this bondage 
 of sin and restore him to the life God intended 
 him to have. He was to be the “Redeemer.” 
 This is a word of great controversies; perhaps I 
 would better leave it out, but I cannot. To at¬ 
 tempt to define it with any pretense of exactness 
 is to undertake more than my space allows. Per¬ 
 haps the simplest way will be to recall to our 
 minds that it is the word used of setting Israel 
 free from the bondage of Egypt, and that, 
 
OF THE CHKISTIAN FAITH 131 
 
 wherever you find it, the underlying idea which 
 it describes has the same sense of deliverance. 
 Man because of his sin is in bondage. He is 
 a slave. We recognise this when we say that 
 any one is a “slave to a passion” or an “addict” 
 to something which is wrong. He is in bondage. 
 The work of Jesus Christ is to set men free from 
 this bondage. They cannot free themselves, 
 there is nothing they can do to accomplish it. 
 There is no standing place from which to secure 
 deliverance. Man begins wrongly. Therefore 
 our Lord came into the world without sin, and 
 lived a sinless life even on into death, and by so 
 doing broke the power of sin and Satan. He 
 “led captivity captive” as the Psalmist puts it, 
 and made it possible for each and every man to 
 become free. In thinking of our Lord’s redemp¬ 
 tive acts we must remember that His death is a 
 means of redemption not because He died, but 
 because He was obedient to His Father’s will 
 clear through to death. As St. Bernard put it 
 “It was the willing act of one who died of his 
 own accord.” 
 
 The Cross, with what follows in our Lord’s 
 own life, made it possible for man to come again 
 into union with God. It gave an appeal to sym¬ 
 pathy. Jesus Christ was absolutely right when 
 He said if He were lifted up He would draw all 
 men to Himself. The Indian chief who heard 
 for the first time the story of God’s love in send¬ 
 ing His Son and of the death of the Son upon 
 the Cross at the hands of His enemies and said 
 
132 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 “I wish I had been there with my braves/’ felt 
 the appeal of it. The attractiveness of the Cross 
 is the secret of the message of Christianity to 
 the sinner for it tells us not of the death of a 
 sinless man,—there is no appeal save for sympa¬ 
 thy toward him in that,—but of the love of the 
 Father who gave His only Son to die and the love 
 of that Son who willingly died the death of 
 shame for us men and for our salvation. But 
 the attraction of the Cross is not simply that of 
 the revelation of the Love of God, it is also, and 
 this means much to men, the promise of deliver¬ 
 ance. He died and by His death He set men free. 
 There is a still further message in it. He not 
 only made it possible for men to become free but 
 He opens the way toward help and grace, so that 
 by His power, reaching us from Him through 
 the sacraments, we can hope to overcome 
 sins. 
 
 Jesus Christ did not simply reveal to us the 
 fact of sin, but along with that revelation He 
 made certain the equally important truth of His 
 own triumph over sin and death that we might 
 be delivered. He made a different life possible 
 for us because of His death and victory. And 
 because of this His life becomes for us an ideal 
 for our own life. He is, as the Collect puts it 
 an “ensample for us” and it is now, but only 
 now, that we can turn to see what that life may 
 tell us. I do not think we can over emphasize 
 the truth that His life can become an ideal for 
 us only if He has won for us the possibility of 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 133 
 
 our approaching that ideal. To set it before 
 sinful men without opening to them a means to 
 attain it, would be a cruelty which would utterly 
 destroy the revelation in Him of God’s love. If 
 I must try to live as He did or even as He taught 
 —there is no real difference—and do it by my 
 own power I am hopeless, as men were hopeless 
 before He came. But if His death and Resurrec¬ 
 tion broke the power of sin and Satan, and if by 
 His Sacraments I can have His grace and 
 strength to help me overcome my own sin, then 
 the Cross becomes a wonderful revelation of 
 love and I am filled with hope and have the 
 courage to attempt to reach the goal which other¬ 
 wise would be impossible. 
 
 hi 
 
 The first fact which we see in the study of our 
 Lord’s own life on earth is that it is a life of 
 sonship with God. He is constantly conscious 
 of this relationship. From the day when He 
 answered His Blessed Mother in the Temple, a 
 boy of twelve years of age, “Why did ye seek 
 Me; did ye not know that I must be in My 
 Father’s house,” even if not before that day, 
 Jesus never forgot that He was God’s Son. 
 And this must come first with us. We, too, by 
 our Baptism, are made the Children of God. We 
 come into a new relationship with Him and 
 that can never be changed. It is important to 
 emphasize this. We may forget it, we may even 
 
134 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 set ourselves to ignore it. We may live abso¬ 
 lutely without any consciousness of it, and fi¬ 
 nally be outcasts from His eternal presence for 
 ever, but none the less we are the children of 
 God by adoption, His redeemed sons. The pull, 
 if I may so phrase it, of birth, the force of no¬ 
 bless oblige, the pride, proper legitimate pride, 
 of inheritance of an honorable name is but the 
 earthly counterpart of what this spiritual rela¬ 
 tionship means or should mean in our lives in 
 creating an ideal for us. We are made the sons 
 of God, and we must live as becomes sons. And 
 no small part of our life as sons is comradeship. 
 The tie which binds children to parents, shows 
 itself, not unfrequently, thank God, in the clos¬ 
 est most delightful intimacy; the boy or girl 
 would rather, quite honestly rather, be with fa¬ 
 ther or mother than any one else. The same 
 thing is true of our relationship with our Father 
 in Heaven. We have not only the inspiration of 
 the fact but we have the comradeship that comes 
 from the fact. This comradeship with us, as 
 with our Lord, find its truest expression in 
 prayer and communion. This is really what we 
 mean by the saying that a Christian life is a life 
 with God. St. Irenaeus, writing toward the end 
 of the second century puts it in these words: 
 “Fellowship with God is life and light and the 
 enjoyment of the good things with Him. The 
 separation from God is death.” The more truly 
 and fully the Christian realizes this and makes 
 it the daily expression of his own life the more 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 135 
 
 nearly He will approach the ideal of life as Jesus 
 Christ gave it to us. 
 
 At the bottom of this fellowship with God lies 
 Faith. I have already spoken of Faith as the 
 surrender of ourselves to God. It is more than 
 that and yet it is most hard to define or even de¬ 
 scribe. No one has ever done this so well as the 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. To his 
 mind it is Faith which opens the eye to the in¬ 
 visible world and gives reality to what we can 
 never know by the senses. “Here we see through 
 a glass darkly” but we see; and it is Faith that 
 penetrates the gloom. We might almost laugh 
 at the idea of a little water in the Name of the 
 Trinity changing our whole relationship with 
 God, or a bit of bread and a sip of wine bring¬ 
 ing us food and drink for our souls; and yet the 
 man who believes knows that these things are 
 true and he has no difficulty in accepting them 
 and the many other truths of Christianity which 
 no human reasoning can ever establish beyond 
 controversy. Faith alone can make us see, and 
 when we see, we know and are sure that it is 
 Faith not credulity which gives us the certainty. 
 It is not the mere acceptance on authority of 
 something toward which reason can but carry us 
 part of the way. It is not merely a blind “yes” 
 given to the call to believe. Faith is the sur¬ 
 render of ourselves, when our own powers have 
 brought us to the brink of the chasm which man 
 by himself cannot cross. It is as it were a 
 throwing of ourselves out into the unseen and 
 
136 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 coming up on firm ground. For that is the con¬ 
 sequence of Faith. It does not spring from cer¬ 
 tainty but it produces it. It does not rise out of 
 confidence but it makes us sure. And when once 
 Faith has carried us into that state of conviction 
 we men live by it with an assurance that nothing 
 can disturb. How wonderful are the things that 
 faith has accomplished in the souls of men and 
 women. The chapter in Hebrews gives us ex¬ 
 amples. We all can recall others, for the power 
 of Faith working in the lives of people even of 
 today is nothing strange. We have ourselves ex¬ 
 perienced it, for we too may venture to say that 
 we, even we, “walk by faith and not by sight” 
 and trusting in God follow the lead of His Son’s 
 guidance. 
 
 IV 
 
 Fellowship with God through Faith is the first 
 characteristic of life which we see in our Lord. 
 The second, as I read that life, is worship. I 
 doubt if most people realize what an important 
 place worship held in our Lord’s own life. What 
 is worship? What is its central inspiration? 
 Many of us need to revise our idea of worship. 
 Too many people think of it as prayer or praise 
 or both, and are content with singing hymns 
 and the warmth of sentiment, that inspiration 
 of the crowd which comes from a goodly com¬ 
 pany of people joining in prayer and praise to 
 God. But that is not the heart of worship, 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 137 
 
 though both prayer and praise accompany it. 
 When you turn to the Old Testament you find 
 God’s revelation of what worship is. We must 
 not let the trend of modern criticism of the Old 
 Testament disturb us in this nor becloud our un¬ 
 derstanding. Remember, as we saw in an 
 earlier chapter, that we need to distinguish be¬ 
 tween processes and results. However the Jew¬ 
 ish worship may have developed, at the bottom 
 it is a revelation from God, and this revelation 
 of worship is used by the Apostle in the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews as explaining the present life 
 and activity of our Lord and corresponds to the 
 vision which St. John saw on Patmos. At the 
 center of this revelation of worship is Sacrifice. 
 So distinctive is Sacrifice that we are accustomed 
 to associate that idea only with Old Testament 
 worship and to forget the New Testament ap¬ 
 plication of the same principle. What then is 
 Sacrifice? It is surely something greatly beyond 
 the killing of a living animal and sprinkling 
 its blood upon the Altar and then burning the 
 flesh or in addition feasting upon a part of it. 
 The kernel of the teaching of Sacrifice is that a 
 life is offered in place of the life of the offerer, 
 and that that offered life represents the surren¬ 
 der of the offerer’s will. There is more even 
 than this in it. Our ordinary English expres¬ 
 sion, “self-sacrificing,” gives us the clue. It is 
 giving God something which we value. How 
 strongly Malachi brings this home when he re¬ 
 proves the Jew for offering poor and unworthy 
 
138 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 sacrifices, tlie leavings of the flock which were 
 of no value! We can carry the idea still further. 
 This giving to God of a gift, the best we can 
 give, that is offered to Him in our stead, is a 
 token of love, and underneath worship lies not 
 faith nor hope, not service as is sometimes said, 
 but the gift of what we value most to one we love 
 dearly as a token and emblem of the love we 
 bear toward him. And God when He appointed 
 sacrifice as a means of worship, on the one hand 
 gave men a chance to show their devotion to 
 Him, and on the other did so by appealing to a 
 common instinct of men. We can now see how 
 worship entered the life of Jesus Christ. It 
 was there in the divinely appointed worship of 
 the Temple in which He joined regularly. But 
 it was there still more in His own will giving 
 Himself up to fulfill the purpose of His Father 
 and finally, in order to accomplish that, offering 
 up His life on the Cross, offering it, I say, will¬ 
 ingly, for He had power to lay it down and power 
 to take it again. But the worship of Jesus 
 Christ did not end with Calvary. It has a con¬ 
 tinual existence in Heaven as the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews shows. He, in the presence of His 
 Father, is always present as the Lamb slain from 
 the foundation of the world and by that sacrifice, 
 unceasing in its effects, keeps open the door for 
 us and makes our own faulty and imperfect sac¬ 
 rifices offered “through Jesus Christ” acceptable 
 to our Heavenly Father. We need faith, we 
 must have it to know God; but once we begin to 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 139 
 
 know Him we must—it is a real necessity of our 
 being—we must offer Him the sacrifice of our 
 wills and give Him the best we have. And our 
 Lord has appointed a way by which we can make 
 the most acceptable sacrifice in ordaining the 
 Holy Eucharist, in which we not only receive the 
 Food of life but are enabled to join with the 
 heavenly worship “with Angels and Archangels 
 and all the company of heaven,” and to “present 
 ourselves, our souls and bodies a living sacrifice” 
 acceptable to the Father because they are united 
 w T ith that “one full perfect and sufficient sacri¬ 
 fice” which His Son made on Calvary and contin¬ 
 ually pleads in the very presence of the Father. 
 And with this offering of ourselves, our souls 
 and bodies, there is of necessity the yielding of 
 ourselves to Him, submitting our wills to His 
 will, and we shall find that this yielding of our 
 wills to Him is not a hardship but on the con¬ 
 trary brings us perfect freedom, the freedom of 
 the King who is not bound by formal law. It is 
 as the Prayer Book collect puts it “Whose serv¬ 
 ice is perfect freedom,” that is, “to serve God is 
 to reign.” 
 
 IV 
 
 There is a third element in our Lord’s life 
 which we must not forget as we see the way He 
 unfolds in that life the ideal for our living. 
 Faith enables us to see and know God, Love leads 
 us to worship and with worship to serve. So 
 
140 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 much has been said in recent years about service 
 that one scarcely needs to add anything and yet 
 after all what is service but the expression of 
 our Love to our Lord by bringing to a successful 
 issue His own work among men. He did not 
 finish the work. That which He alone could do 
 He did do, but there is something more, some¬ 
 thing far more in fact and that He left us to do. 
 Men had to be won. Lie would draw all men to 
 Himself but the medium by which that drawing 
 is to be accomplished is other men. He wrought 
 great works of mercy in the world, but when He 
 gave the Apostles commission He told them they 
 would do greater things than He had done. He 
 cured individuals and lifted men and women, 
 here and there, crowds no doubt, but still indi¬ 
 viduals. But He left to us the greater task of pu¬ 
 rifying society and making these things impos¬ 
 sible. And this is a sign of His love for us and 
 the opportunity He gives us of showing our love 
 for Him and in so doing quickens in us the third 
 great virtue, Christian Hope, by which we are en¬ 
 couraged to go forward in spite of disappoint¬ 
 ments. 
 
 Christ’s revelation of life carries us a step 
 still further. Down beneath everything in His 
 own life and at the forefront of the Sermon on 
 the Mount he sets Humility. When we study 
 our Lord’s life we get some idea of what Humil¬ 
 ity really is. Bishop Gore in his lectures, 
 “Christian Moral Principles,” develops the idea 
 on the basis of St. Bernard’s phrase “Humility 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 141 
 
 is the truth about ourselves,” making it the 
 spirit by which we know ourselves as we are. It 
 was this which characterized our Lord. He 
 knew, none better, just what He Himself was 
 both in relation to His Father and to us men; 
 and no false modesty, no fictitious valuations, 
 for one moment deceived Him. It is hard for us 
 to get this idea clearly in regard to ourselves, 
 but after all it is really essential, if we are to 
 make any progress in our life. The sense of 
 what God sees in us, balanced and cheered by 
 what God wants us to be and the love which 
 bridges the gap between; the certainty of what 
 we are and must be toward our fellows; these 
 truths give our life its true perspective and we 
 can hope to make some proper progress in fol¬ 
 lowing the way the Master trod and reaching 
 the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
 Christ. 
 
 v 
 
 We have been thinking of the ideal of life 
 which Our Lord set before us in His life as well 
 as His teaching as that to which we are to seek 
 to attain; but more than this ideal is needed. 
 There must be a motive. Why should we do 
 this? Let me suggest just two sides of this ques¬ 
 tion of the motive. First of all there can be no 
 happiness save in the way He points out. We 
 are familiar with the Beatitudes as beginning 
 with the word “Blessed”; but as a matter of ac- 
 
142 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 tual fact the word that is used means more lit¬ 
 erally “happy” or “to be envied.” What Jesus 
 Christ set forth was the way by which men could 
 attain to real happiness. And beyond this ex¬ 
 pectation of happiness, something which all peo¬ 
 ple desire even though they do not know how to 
 attain it, there is the second motive, the higher 
 one of which I have already spoken. It was love 
 that sent the Eternal Son into the world and that 
 made Jesus Christ suffer and die; and love be¬ 
 gets love. To be the beneficiaries of such love as 
 God’s and not to respond to it is alas not un¬ 
 thinkable for it is but too common; but it does 
 seem incredible, when once a man understands 
 what that love truly is and has done, that he 
 should reject it. The highest motive for the 
 Christian to live as the Master taught is that 
 only so can he respond to the love of God in 
 Jesus Christ and show that he truly loves Him. 
 
 VI 
 
 The fulfilling of the Christian life, the follow¬ 
 ing of our Lord’s example under the inspiration 
 of the Holy Spirit, helped by the Sacraments was 
 in the beginning called the Way. We find St. 
 Luke using the expression frequently in the early 
 chapters of the Acts. It points out that there is 
 a goal which is not here but yonder. Along the 
 side of the stone on Dean Alford’s grave in the 
 Churchyard of St. Martin’s Church in Canter¬ 
 bury runs in Latin this sentence “The resting 
 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 143 
 
 place of a traveller journeying heavenward.” 
 These words show a true comprehension of the 
 faith of those early days. Life was a Way and 
 death hut the ending of one stage and the mys¬ 
 terious entering into the next where men rest 
 ere they go onward. Life is progress, the actual 
 going which finally brings us into the visible 
 presence of God, where we shall see Him as He 
 is. And if our going has been as He taught us, 
 along the strait and narrow way but yet the Way 
 that leads to Him, we shall not only see Him as 
 He is but we shall enter into that wonderful com¬ 
 pany in which we shall see Jesus our Lord, and 
 the Saints of God, and enter into the fellowship 
 never to be broken, with those whom we have 
 “loved long since and lost awhile,” where we 
 shall know as we are known and love will rule 
 our every thought. Such a life will be no nir¬ 
 vana, no loss of personal identity which would 
 mean the power to love; but that absolute satis¬ 
 faction of which St. Augustine felt the need when 
 he said: “My soul seeks rest and finds none save 
 in Thee O God.” 
 
 My exposition is at an end. I have tried to 
 develop it on from the foundation in the idea of 
 God as revealed to us in His Son, through the 
 truths of that revelation as recorded in the Creed, 
 made vital in the Church by which His Kingdom 
 is established, brought to the individual soul in 
 the Sacraments in which a man finds power to 
 live the life which God meant him to live. One 
 
144 SOME FOUNDATION TRUTHS 
 
 brief question remains: Who is sufficient for 
 these things? No one ? save as we can say with 
 St. Paul: “I can do all things through Him 
 who strengtheneth me.”