/ 
 
 BV 4501 .S77 
 
 Spencer, Malcolm. 
 
 Work, play, and the Gospel 
 

Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/workplaygospelOOspen 
 

WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 MALCOLM SPENCER, m.a. 
 
WORK, 
 
 THE 
 
 PLAY, 
 GOSPEL 
 
 tY 
 
 MALCOLM SPENCER, M.A. 
 
 ▲UVHOR OF “ THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH,” 
 
 “ IMPASSE OR •'SFORTUNITY ? ” SIC. 
 
 NEW 
 
 YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 C\J 
 
WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL, V 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Educational Approach . . * . . i 
 
 I. The Need for a New Evangelism • • . • i 
 
 II. The Alternatives 3 
 
 III. Educational Ideals ...... 6 
 
 IV. The Present Opportunity . , , . .12 
 
 II. Those who Pass the Gospel by , ... 16 
 
 I. The Craze for Pleasure . . . . . .19 
 
 II. The Revolt against Conventionality ... 30 
 
 III. The Disavowal of the Church’s Leadership . . 34 
 
 III. Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever .... 39 
 
 I. The Fact of Christ . . . . . . • 39 
 
 II. The Fact of Deliverance ..... 43 
 
 III. The Fact of Communion with God . . . 51 
 
 IV. The Fact of the Church. . . . . . 55 
 
 IV, The Christian Conception of Work ... 61 
 
 I. The Standards of Good Work . . . .63 
 
 II. The Personal Relations Work brings ... 63 
 
 III. The Crux of the Business ..... 74 
 
 V. The Christian Conception of Leisure ... 80 
 
 I. The Obvious Uses of Leisure . . . , ,81 
 
 II. The Higher Uses of Leisure • • • * • 84 
 
 III. Comradeship in Leisure • • • • • 90 
 
 IV. Leisure and the Church ..... 94 
 
 V. The Spiritual Potentialities of Drama . . ,98 
 
 v 
 
VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 OUAPUR 
 
 VI. Beauty and the Life of the Spirit # 
 
 I. The Eternal Significance of Beauty . . 
 
 II. The Present Neglect of Beauty . . 
 
 VII. Religious Decision and Religious Growth 
 I. The Rudiments of the Religious Spirit . 
 IL The Growth of the Religious Spirit « 
 
 III. The Fostering of Growth . • • 
 
 IV. Religious Decision • • • • 
 
WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
WORK, PLAY, AND THE 
 
 GOSPEL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 
 
 I. The Need for a New Evangelism 
 
 Those whose religious experiences are deep are 
 prone to love old ways of presenting them to others, 
 and sometimes these grow shallow as the currents 
 of the world’s experience change and desert them. 
 New ways are then needed, and provocation to 
 seek them. So, to-day, new ways of approach to 
 the problem of preaching the gospel are called for— 
 and happily are being found. 
 
 That this is so means neither any slight to the 
 Gospel nor any compliment to the modern mind. 
 The Gospel, in all essentials, is unchanging; for it 
 rests upon immutable facts concerning Jesus Christ 
 His life and teaching, His death and resurrection ; 
 and there lies its power of appeal. Age cannot 
 wither its eternal message to the human spirit; 
 though custom may a little stale the forms and 
 metaphors in which it is set forth. When, then, we 
 speak of our age needing a new evangelism it is 
 
 I B 
 
2 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 not the Evangel but the “ ism ” which, we think, 
 needs to be renewed—the method of approach to 
 the hearer’s mind. A number of plain facts well 
 known to those who are studying the way in which 
 attention may be held, conviction formed, and 
 character evolved, convince us that this is so. 
 
 The primary need for some such new approach 
 arises from the fact that a wrong conception of 
 Christianity now fills the popular mind; and, 
 therefore, whilst this is so, accustomed methods 
 of presenting the Gospel must necessarily tend to 
 re-awaken the wrong as well as the right features in 
 the popular view. In a word, the Christianity of 
 the Churches is associated in the mind of the 
 ordinary person with a way of life which he frankly 
 does not believe to embody all the best things which 
 life has to offer, whilst the evangelist often appears 
 to him in the r 61 e of one who can only make the 
 choice of it seem worth while, by offering him com¬ 
 pensating interests in this world, and corresponding 
 expectations in the world to come, of a kind he does 
 not really understand or value. 
 
 Now this is all very well for those who have 
 come up against some outstanding personal problem 
 of sin from which “ religion ” has offered them 
 welcome deliverance : they then feel themselves so 
 utterly glad to be rid of the past that they are 
 prepared to sacrifice some of the good things which 
 they valued formerly—as the just price of tneir 
 new freedom. But for those who are not so 
 harassed by a particular moral need, religious 
 conversion is apt to be secured, if at all, at the cost 
 of a dangerous suppression of their real self, and 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 3 
 
 the result is evidenced in some cases by a wildly 
 fanatical and quite unreasoning zeal, but more 
 frequently by an only half-hearted attachment to 
 the new way of life. 
 
 Put very briefly, the difficulty is that Christianity 
 is associated popularly with the acceptance of an 
 unduly ascetic ideal of life, an unreasonable narrow¬ 
 ing of life’s legitimate interests, an unthoughtful 
 use of the Bible and other means of grace, and an 
 unsportsmanlike anxiety about one’s own soul. 
 Under these circumstances evangelism has to take 
 its choice between two ways. It may either try 
 to meet the situation by ignoring the existence of 
 any real problem, proceeding then to reiterate its 
 own beliefs, and taking care to create the most 
 favourable occasions possible for their acceptance 
 —as now in not a few well-advertised revivalist 
 missions ; or it may try the slower method of the 
 educational approach. 
 
 II. The Alternatives 
 
 The tendency of those who take the former 
 course is to disparage the everyday life of the 
 world, to regard enthusiasm for recreation, or art, 
 or business, or thought, or social reform, as 
 dangerous rivals to the claims of Christ, to hold to 
 reactionary views of the Bible, to repeat the doctrinal 
 shibboleths of the nineteenth century, to despair 
 of seeing Christian influences penetrate the social 
 life of the world, and to be content with this so 
 long as individual “ souls ” are saved. However 
 much good may be achieved along these lines it is 
 
4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 impossible to expect that such evangelism can ever 
 succeed in meeting more than the tiniest fraction 
 of the needs of this generation. Violence is done 
 to the instinctive and quite proper reserve of a 
 personality when the citadel of the soul is captured 
 by an assault on the emotions that does not at 
 the same time satisfy the whole mind. Moreover, 
 men and women are then rushed into positions 
 which they cannot possibly continue to hold, since 
 parts of their personalities remain unconvinced 
 and unsatisfied. 
 
 We cannot too clearly lay hold of the fact that 
 “ conversion ” is only possible for the man who has 
 in his mind two fairly well articulated systems of 
 life which are mutually exclusive, one of which he is 
 following and knows he should renounce, and the 
 other of which he is neglecting and knows he should 
 espouse, and these contrasted schemes of life are not 
 present in most minds nowadays. Indeed, they are 
 very far from being present, and their absence 
 makes the appeal to decide between them fatuous. 
 Till we have established in the hearer’s mind, as 
 truth, the idea that Christianity stands for a fully 
 satisfying life, we cannot wish him to be converted. 
 The Christian scheme of thought and way of life 
 need then to be presented as the practical way to 
 the realisation of an all-inclusive ideal of life, and 
 not merely as demanded on the authority of the 
 Bible, or of the Church, or as meeting any need of 
 salvation which has to be aroused by suggestion 
 before it is felt in any real sense. 
 
 There are, doubtless, many whose training has 
 sufficiently persuaded them that to be a Christian 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 5 
 
 is the only really right and completely satisfying 
 thing to be done, and their need is for something to 
 rush them past and over their unworthy hesitations 
 and delays. But this is not the typical case. The 
 typical case is one in which the idea of Christ and 
 Christianity is neither intellectually coherent nor 
 morally convincing. In the popular mind religion 
 stands for the disavowal of things felt to be right 
 and good, and the acceptance of a discipline felt 
 to be both irksome and arbitrary. The practical 
 obligations of Christian discipleship are vague and 
 shadowy, and not truly representative of Christ. 
 Hence the need for a clearer background of what 
 Christian living means before the appeal for Chris¬ 
 tian decision can be pressed. 
 
 We are therefore bound to recognise the 
 difficulties of the position, and to face them out ; 
 and this is the educational way of approach to 
 evangelism. Its primary difference from the alter¬ 
 native method we have so briefly described is this : 
 that it believes that the Gospel is indeed the Crown 
 and fulfilment of the natural life and not its jealous 
 rival. Through all the social life of man it sees the 
 movement of the Spirit of God toward high and 
 worthy forms of life. In the passion for gratifica¬ 
 tion in play, or in the ambition for success in 
 business, or in devotion to the claims of historic 
 truth, or the call of some great cause in politics, 
 it sees the human spirit struggling to realise its 
 divine possibilities and needing only guidance and a 
 true vision of life to bring it through to its spiritual 
 goal. It does not seek to save the soul by diverting 
 its attention from these human interests and aims, 
 
6 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 but by discovering their deeper meanings and higher 
 possibilities, and by pointing out things in them all 
 on which the stamp of God’s approval can be set. 
 Its aim is a personality in which all the native 
 energies which man possesses for enjoyment and 
 achievement wax strong, and support and harmonise 
 with one another, because all are made contributory 
 to the wholly satisfying and all-inclusive purpose 
 revealed for humanity in Jesus Christ. The tempta¬ 
 tion of the educational method is to sow to the 
 spirit more than it knows how to reap ; its strength 
 lies in its fundamental faith that man, in all the 
 variety of his social impulses, is indeed made in the 
 image of God. With this belief we shall, throughout 
 this book, try to connect the ideas for which 
 education and evangelism respectively stand. 
 
 III. Educational Ideal9 
 
 In turning, as we do turn in this book, to the 
 science of education for light on the methods of 
 evangelism, we do so, of course, with reservations. 
 We are not giving ourselves over, bound hand and 
 foot, to an empirical science. The work done by the 
 teaching profession and by those who have studied 
 the theory of teaching, sheds abundant light upon 
 the processes by which minds grow and character 
 is formed. It shows quite clearly the hollowness 
 and instability of conversions reached by certain 
 processes and of choices made under certain con¬ 
 ditions. It knows a good deal of the genesis of the 
 human mind and the laws of its elementary work¬ 
 ings, and it provides implements of criticism by 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 7 
 
 which to test the wisdom of this method and of 
 that. The value of what the educationists are 
 teaching about method can hardly be overrated by 
 those who understand the need to respect the unity 
 of human personality. At the same time there are 
 heights of personality which the educationist as 
 such has not scaled and depths which he has not 
 plumbed. Great is the mystery of the human soul, 
 and among “ the masters of those that know 55 we 
 must turn sometimes for our clues to the evidence 
 of the saints who had no educational theories to 
 help or to check them, and to the experience of 
 evangelists and revivalists of all degrees of educa¬ 
 tional competence. For as those concerned in the 
 Gospel, we want to help to fashion personalities 
 that not only love goodness, truth, and beauty, but 
 that attain through these things to a personal 
 communion with a personal God. We want to see 
 men and women converted to the God and Father 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 All this does not, however, take away one whit 
 from the value of the discoveries made by those who 
 have worked in the field of education, concerning 
 the way in which the spiritual unfolding of human 
 nature may best proceed. And we may feel fully 
 justified in looking for guidance from this quarter, 
 since we know that modem educationists, or at 
 least an important section of them, accept a view 
 of the ultimate aim and purpose of education which 
 makes it essentially spiritual, and even evangelical. 
 For it is the fact that, for many educators, the whole 
 purpose of education is to awaken the personality 
 of the pupil to the truth and beauty and goodness 
 
8 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 which God has impressed upon the world. Whether 
 they are teaching history or geography or mathe¬ 
 matics, they are trying to pass on their own sense 
 of the wonder of life, its deep worth-whileness, the 
 stores of joy to be found in entering into all its 
 manifold revelations of God’s goodwill to man, its 
 moving appeals to his better nature, and its calls 
 for his response to the purposes of creation. 
 
 The best teachers of to-day are not trying to 
 turn little boys and girls into effective little ready- 
 reckoners, each made on the same pattern, to say 
 “ please ” and “ thank you ” and be industrious in 
 making money and getting on. They are treating 
 them as God’s children, born into God’s world to 
 enjoy what is good and right in it, and to fill their 
 beings so full of its goodness and rightness that they 
 become themselves persons in the divine likeness, 
 with the power of the divine spirit working in them 
 and making them new sources of creative goodness 
 according to their several abilities. The educator 
 is thus seeking not only and not even primarily to 
 pass on what he knows of life to those whom he 
 teaches ; he is seeking primarily to help them, by 
 looking at the world through his and their own 
 eyes, to discover themselves and God. Some will 
 say quite definitely that the only adequate aim of 
 any education is a vision of God’s purpose for the 
 world which will give unity and purpose to each 
 individual life. Thus a recent great book on 
 education,* which Prof. Michael Sadler hails as a 
 permanent classic, makes the end of all education 
 the establishment in the mind of the pupil of a 
 * ** Education and World Citizenship,” by J. Maxwell Garnett. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 9 
 
 single all-embracing interest, the interest of estab¬ 
 lishing the Kingdom of God upon earth. In that 
 definition the educationist joins hands with the 
 evangelist and implicitly commits himself to the 
 need for the Gospel as the crown of his work. At 
 the same time, he binds upon the evangelist the 
 duty of showing how the principles of the Gospel 
 can be made operative over the whole of life. He 
 demands that the Christian’s experience of Christ 
 should be shown to be no mere fragment or section 
 of his total experience, but that the whole of his 
 life, with all its business and social interests, should 
 be an experience of living for and with Christ. 
 
 Those educationists who take this view have 
 seized upon an essentially Christian conception of 
 personality and built upon it. In some ways such 
 educationists are more evangelical than some 
 evangelists—they have a bigger gospel; they 
 promise a life more full of God in all its earthly 
 relationships, without waiting for death to release its 
 larger spiritual possibilities. They view the child (and 
 later the adult) as essentially a spiritual being, with 
 a wonderful power of free response to ideal impulses 
 and an instinct for expressing these in action in the 
 material world. All the child’s faculties are capable 
 of being brought into harmony with one another 
 in the service of these ideals, if they are not foolishly 
 repressed or perverted. The educator may not 
 be prepared to dogmatise about the lengths to which 
 the development of the individual may go. That 
 is the evangelist’s business. But he is prepared 
 to assure us that there is an almost universal 
 appetite among children for the finer and higher 
 
10 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 things in life, that all the child’s instincts and 
 powers can be educated into harmony and made to 
 serve a spiritual ideal, and that the unfolding in 
 him of a fine moral and spiritual life is a strictly 
 natural development. It is a tremendous fact to 
 work upon and one from which the skilful educator 
 gets full value. 
 
 See, for instance, what the educationist makes of 
 the child’s instinct for play. He recognises in it 
 an activity into which the child has a natural 
 aptitude for pouring all his energy and so building 
 himself up. Get him at play, and you get him with 
 all his senses alert and his being malleable. Then 
 guide his play, and you can mould him as by no 
 other means. You can teach him to play himself 
 right through the gateways into the Kingdom of 
 God. By play he may be taught skill and sympathy, 
 unselfishness and co-operation. Even the spirit of 
 worship may be fostered through play ; and all 
 because the natural is a fit medium for the spiritual. 
 Here, indeed, is one of the points where the evange¬ 
 list has most to learn from the educator. “ Give 
 me the child at play,” says the educator, “ I ask 
 no better opportunity for educational influence. ,, 
 “ Play,” says many an evangelist of to-day, “ is 
 my great enemy ; the dances and the tennis-courts 
 have driven me from my field, and now I am 
 threatened with their rivalry even on Sunday: 
 where will religion be found in the next decade ? ” 
 We need to learn from the educator how to utilise 
 for spiritual purposes the profusion of the modern 
 passion for play. May not these pleasure-seekers 
 in some instances also be drawn through play at 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH n 
 
 least to the portals of the Kingdom of God, just as 
 is now the case with their younger brothers and 
 sisters at school ? The issue may seem a trivial one, 
 but it is not. It is fundamental. 
 
 Behind this use of play by the modern educa¬ 
 tionist lies a truly evangelical philosophy of life 
 and personality. It is found not only in the 
 educationist’s “ good new r s 55 that the abundant 
 energies of youth can be directed naturally into the 
 furtherance of what is good, true, and desirable ; 
 it is found also in the recognition that if these 
 energies are to be so devoted with vigour and 
 enthusiasm, the spirit must be led towards its goal 
 by free and unhurried steps. You cannot drive 
 or thwack personality into the acceptance of ideals ; 
 you can only lead it thither at its own pace. You 
 can give the opportunity for the things which are 
 worthy of admiration to exert their own attraction. 
 You cannot impose your own values on the minds of 
 others. When education was regarded as a matter 
 of transmitting to children the settled habits and 
 ideas of their elders, it did seem as though the 
 process could be consummated with whips and 
 sharp injunctions ; authority always standing in the 
 background ready to enforce its rules and standards 
 with reiterations or punishments. But we know 
 now that what you procure in that way is either a 
 sullen spirit of revolt smouldering beneath an inert 
 obedience, or at the best a sterile acceptance of the 
 code imposed, lacking the energy and enthusiasm 
 of an independent conviction. You cannot produce 
 conviction by heavy insistence: you can only 
 produce conviction by convincing, and that is a 
 
iz WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 process which consists in producing evidence that 
 what is alleged to be true is true when put to the 
 test. All this will be seen to be relevant to the 
 problem of evangelism when we come to consider 
 the way in which the herald of the gospel hopes to 
 win his hold upon the modern, not too favourably 
 biased, mind. 
 
 IV. The Present Opportunity 
 
 The evangelism for which we argue is therefore 
 closely allied with the more spiritual schools of 
 educational principle which now most certainly hold 
 the field. And thus it follows that the preacher 
 can build his methods to-day upon the experience 
 of the teacher, and in practice each can play into 
 the hands of the other. This will be a tremendous 
 gain to both education and religion if lull advantage 
 be taken of it. For a long time, teacher and preacher 
 have been at cross purposes, and education has not 
 been seen by either as a partnership in a single 
 spiritual process. But if the inherence of spiritual 
 suggestions and ideals in all material facts and the 
 evidence of spiritual evolution in all human history 
 could now be recognised by teacher and preacher 
 alike, the teacher could build up his scholars in a 
 spiritual conception of the world which the preacher 
 could afterwards confirm with his crowning message 
 of the supreme personal relation declared possible 
 in the Gospel between individuals and God. 
 
 Preacher and teacher being thus seen to have a 
 common purpose, the aim of education might grow 
 clearer to both, and the methods of evangelism gain 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 13 
 
 particularly in precision by the more exact results 
 of educational study. Moreover, the gain to 
 evangelism would not merely be in the realm of 
 method. Educational thinking has, as we have 
 seen, worked out a great conception of the royal 
 freedom and divine capacity of each individual 
 mind, wonderfully interpreting and emphasising 
 the Christian conception of the value of the 
 soul. Education has thus taken up a conception 
 which it gained originally from Christianity and 
 has articulated it so clearly that the content of 
 the Gospel is permanently enriched. No one 
 who desires to preach the Gospel to modern minds 
 can afford to be negligent of the truth so clearly 
 unfolded. 
 
 Yet whilst we emphasise the spiritual unity of 
 life, the spiritual tendencies of human nature, the 
 urge of the Spirit of God toward the achievement 
 of its ideals of goodness and loveliness by many 
 means, and on every hand, we do not forget that 
 the Power and Beauty of the Spirit of God are not 
 manifested equally in every sphere of life. They 
 are manifested supremely in Jesus Christ alone, and 
 less perfectly, though still magnificently, in the lives 
 which have most utterly yielded to the inflow of 
 His divine life into themselves. So the educa¬ 
 tional process falls short of its consummation 
 unless it is completed by the evangelist who has 
 nothing to tell the world save the story of Jesus 
 and His disciples. 
 
 Moreover, though the spiritual unfolding of 
 personality may be indeed a strictly natural process, 
 toward which the education of every human 
 
i 4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 faculty may contribute, yet there is a downward 
 pull toward death and stagnation to be reckoned 
 with, and an evil will in man which resists the 
 upward climb. There is a stiff fight for goodness to 
 be fought out in every life, and no one has yet put 
 forward any claimant for the power to overcome 
 the lure of evil other than Jesus Christ. The 
 power to save men from the strong things which 
 tend toward corruption and to bind them to the 
 exacting courses which make for life is His and His 
 alone. He oniy can lift the degenerate from their 
 lethargy and worldly-mindedness, and do away 
 with our dull conventionality of soul. The Gospel 
 is not written in the book of Nature, nor in the book 
 of History, except as interpreted by Him. The 
 vision of Jesus and the story of what He has meant 
 to men are the supreme facts to which men need 
 to respondfor their salvation, and the right presenta¬ 
 tion of them, which is the work of the evangelist, is 
 therefore the supreme task of those who know the 
 secret of life in Christ. 
 
 From this the presentation of the Gospel might 
 seem to be a matter requiring no particular educa¬ 
 tional skill—as though Jesus were so supreme a 
 figure that no art of presentation could either add 
 to or diminish the direct power of His appeal. And 
 yet we know that this is not so. For since we 
 cannot easily, or without art, divest our statements 
 of any facts from our habitual interpretation of 
 them, so in preaching Christ we shall tend to 
 emphasise those aspects of His work and personality 
 which have most appealed to us, and perhaps to 
 hide or obscure what would more readily appeal to 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 15 
 
 others. Before, therefore, we attempt to state the 
 essential message of the Gospel, we turn to consider 
 the modern attitude to religion, and especially the 
 attitude of those who are young,—if so be that we 
 may find there our clue to the best method of its 
 presentation. 
 
 Footnote to Chapter I 
 
 For the view of education taken in this chapter and applied to 
 the problems of religious education, especially in my closing chapter, 
 I am very largely indebted to T. Percy Nunn, Professor of Educa¬ 
 tion in the University of London. I should like to refer particularly 
 to his book in the Modern Educator’s Library (Edward Arnold, 6j.) 
 entitled, Education ; its Data and First Principles . 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THOSE WHO PASS THE GOSPEL BY 
 
 How variously different speakers and writers 
 estimate the religious condition of our time ! To 
 some it is an age when morals are declining and the 
 faith is being put in pawn by its own adherents in 
 their eagerness to do homage to the modern mind. 
 By others it is said that never was there a time 
 when Christianity was so widely and truly under¬ 
 stood, so seriously taken as it is by those who still 
 profess and call themselves Christian. But in no 
 quarter is there found any question of the general 
 public revolt from the practice of public worship, 
 and the practical severance of the ties which held 
 many to the Church. It is quite symptomatic that 
 our streets are thronged with pleasure-seekers at 
 the time conventionally appointed for the united 
 seeking of God in prayer. 
 
 The single fact of widest bearing that underlies 
 these diverse estimates is that this is an age of 
 enfranchisement from the conventions of the past. 
 If there are fewer professing Christians than there 
 were, it is in the main because men are ceasing to 
 make profession of religion merely conventionally. 
 Whether in moral or spiritual matters, the sort of 
 authority which held the majority, weakly com¬ 
 pliant but not enthusiastically convinced, has lost 
 
 16 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 *7 
 
 its ascendancy. The world is growing up and 
 asking questions ; it is refusing to be satisfied with 
 the answers which satisfied it of old. Those who 
 persevere with their questions come through to a 
 faith which means more to them, in some ways, 
 than the faith which was more traditionally and 
 less questioningly acquired. But we cannot claim 
 that the change is all clear gain. The faith that 
 has been thus fought for is sometimes scarred and 
 maimed. Christians who ask questions of their 
 faith sometimes ask more than their experience can 
 answer, and bear about them the marks of their 
 dissatisfaction with their own solutions. There is 
 less of that easy optimism and cocksureness which 
 enabled the religious to carry the day with the 
 unthinking, and which was the basis (by suggestion) 
 of so much of the good and evil of the past. Leaving 
 aside, however, the inner ring of more or less con¬ 
 vinced believers in Christianity, to whom the change 
 has brought much benefit, we have to consider the 
 needs of the crowd which has for the moment 
 slipped away from the direct influence of expressed 
 religion. It is with this pressing problem that 
 evangelism has particularly to deal. 
 
 Before, how r ever, we enter upon our detailed 
 analysis of the problem let us be sure that the 
 present phenomena cannot mean any sudden 
 fundamental collapse in the spiritual susceptibility 
 of those with whom we have to do. Fundamentally 
 they are much the same as their forefathers. They 
 have the same emotions, the same physical and 
 psychic needs, the same susceptibility to experience, 
 the same affinities with good and evil. The 
 
 c 
 
18 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 educational sciences forbid us to believe in any such 
 sudden slump in human nature as the scaremongers 
 in the religious world would have us affirm. Funda¬ 
 mentally these men and women who on Sunday 
 shut themselves in their suburban gardens, are the 
 same as their fathers who never failed to go to 
 Church. These boys and girls who swarm along 
 the city streets are not less religiously inclined than 
 their predecessors. Their religious development is 
 arrested, and they will suffer for it ; but there is 
 nothing portentous or overwhelming in the present 
 phase of things. By those who have faith and 
 patience, there is a solution to be found, and the 
 clues to its discovery are known to those who are 
 experienced in observing the ways of the human 
 mind. 
 
 But whether this be admitted or no, it is plainly 
 futile to rail at the iniquity of a generation and 
 bemoan its evil tendencies. It is as absurd to 
 indict a whole generation as it is to indict a whole 
 nation. What is found common to them all is, 
 for each single one of them, virtually inevitable, 
 in view of the strong hold of public opinion over 
 unawakened minds ; each average individual is the 
 child of an environment whose moulding tendencies 
 all but overwhelm the puny forces which are at his 
 call. When the religious response of multitudes is 
 as deficient as it is to-day, it must be due to some 
 radical blemish in the religious influences of the 
 times. We can only meet the situation by ceasing 
 to rail at it and learning to diagnose it. Diagnosis 
 will reveal both the nature of the trouble and the 
 point at which it must be attacked ; it may also 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 19 
 
 afford at least some clue to the proper remedy. 
 We are not for a moment inclined to discharge any 
 class of individuals from their own particular share 
 of responsibility for the use they are making of 
 the light and leading God has given them ; but if 
 we would lay that responsibility as heavily upon 
 them as it should be laid, we are bound to recognise, 
 first of all, how tightly they are gripped by the 
 thought forces in their social environment. We 
 shall have to discriminate presently between what 
 is good and what is evil in these modern fashions 
 of thought. 
 
 What, then, are the characteristics of the 
 religious indifference of the hour ? What, especially, 
 is the religious outlook of those who are young 
 enough to be the representatives of the post-war 
 period ? What in the mental make-up of the young 
 people of the present day are the fundamental 
 factors which we must take for granted as the 
 undeniable data for our problem—to be met, 
 not with reproach but with understanding and 
 sympathy ? Analysis carried far enough will reveal 
 to us in every case that they are the intelligible 
 perversions of natural tendencies which might be 
 diverted or converted to good ends if only they were 
 understood. But first, what are they l Three in 
 particular claim attention. 
 
 I. The Craze for Pleasure 
 
 Let us begin with the most obvious and im¬ 
 mediately disconcerting factor of all, the modern 
 passion for pleasure— a passion which modern 
 
zo WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 business enterprise so successfully exploits. Not 
 of this generation will any prophet say, “ I have 
 piped unto you, and ye have not danced.” The 
 world is drinking in amusement like a thirsty horse 
 with its head in the river. But who can wonder, 
 whilst we are not yet ten years beyond the gloomy 
 terrors of universal war which robbed the young 
 manhood of the nation of its most irresponsible 
 years ? Who can wonder when the girlhood of the 
 nation has just passed through a total subversion 
 of its old standards of living ; when the old-time 
 notion of a stay-at-home life as the girl’s inevitable 
 portion has been swept completely aw T ay; when 
 girls have been everywhere and done everything, 
 and raised money enough to live in unaccustomed 
 luxury; who can wonder when the whole world of 
 young people has awakened up with a start to the idea 
 that it has been kept in pupilage too late and too long? 
 
 Youth has been discovering the thrill of physical 
 health and vigour, the joy of bodily grace and 
 movement : how natural, then, its repudiation of 
 the stuffy ways of a generation which so wrapped 
 its body up that it was always liable physically to 
 cold and anaemia, and morally to prudery and 
 acidity of mind! How rightly, too, is it in revolt 
 against a civilisation which has let millions live in 
 the dark and murk and dirt of city slums, which 
 has maimed and stunted millions more in occupa¬ 
 tions beyond the normal endurance of the human 
 frame, and which has made aesthetic and intellectual 
 satisfaction the prerogative of the few! How 
 natural if, instead, it is now claiming its fill of light 
 and air and fun and fitness! 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 21 
 
 Dr. Rufus Jones has said recently that we are 
 confronted by a generation of boys and girls who 
 seem to be unconcerned whether God exists or not. 
 They are not lawless ; they merely appear to have 
 no interest in religion. They have eliminated that 
 dimension of the soul which opens out into fellow¬ 
 ship with a great, invisible Companion. The 
 greater number of young people, says another wit¬ 
 ness, so fill their lives with pleasure and work, and 
 live at such a speed that they have no time for quiet 
 and reflection. It is not that they are essentially 
 more frivolous than the young men and women, for 
 example, of a hundred years ago. On the whole 
 they compare favourably with the young ladies and 
 gentlemen of the pages of Jane Austen. But the 
 Christian life seems to them dull, uneventful, and 
 inartistic, and without appeal to their abundant 
 activity. No place can be found in it for the self- 
 expression shown, for example, in their love of 
 games. The Christian ideal of life inculcates self- 
 restraint, self-denial, and effacement ; they feel that 
 it would force them into an atmosphere which would 
 stifle them. Many forms of heroism make an appeal 
 to them, but not this form. Partly because they 
 are generous-minded the offer of individual salvation 
 makes no appeal to them ; nor are they afflicted with 
 a sense of sin which might make the offer more 
 acceptable. They are not indecisive, nor yet 
 indifferent ; their strong devotion to pleasure and 
 sport proves this. They are capable of great 
 enthusiasm. But their sense of values is wrong. 
 Some day they may learn the paradox that “ He 
 that loseth his life shall find it.” But at present 
 
22 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 the call they hear is a call to take hold of the things 
 life offers them, to enjoy them, and prove their 
 worth, and so they follow their natural instincts and 
 desires to excess. The tide race of their physical 
 nature is now running fast and will not be turned 
 back by any pious indignation or highly spiced 
 variety of religious emotional appeal. A hunger for 
 the sweetness and the colour of life has been created, 
 first by years of starvation, and then by a riot of 
 opportunity for sense satisfaction. It may well be 
 a matter of sheer biological advisability that the 
 hunger should be satisfied. As the British Medical 
 Association has been saying, a certain amount of 
 conviviality is necessary at all times for the mainte¬ 
 nance of our mental stability, and what is true 
 generally must be specially true to-day. Certainly 
 it is for the educator to accept the fact of this 
 hunger and to offer ways of satisfaction that are 
 spiritually educative. 
 
 The last remark implies that there is in this 
 hunger for pleasure some hunger of the spirit, which 
 can be discriminated from the lower hunger of flesh 
 and sense, and fed with spiritual bread. And surely 
 there is. There is a hunger of the spirit for gaiety 
 and a refusal of the bread and water of affliction 
 that must be dear to the heart of Jesus when He 
 said, “ Take no anxious thought for the morrow, 
 for the morrow will take thought for itself : sufficient 
 unto the day is the evil thereof.” This generation 
 has been taught that its total energies must be 
 absorbed in eating and fighting, and producing the 
 means to eat and fight. It may be that, mixed up 
 with the pleasure hunger of the day, there is a 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 23 
 
 spiritual revolt against the dark modern philosophy 
 of a commercial age which has left too little room for 
 the cultivation of joy. Duty first, pleasure after¬ 
 wards, is an unimpeachable doctrine to many of 
 our moral guides, but it is doubtful if it is not a 
 damnable heresy from the Christian standpoint. 
 It implies that there is no pleasure in duty and no 
 duty in pleasure, and the divorce between the two 
 is a wicked indictment of the bounty of God’s 
 provision for the world. 
 
 There are many who say plainly that as it works 
 out, it means that they may break their backs and 
 starve their souls to produce wealth and ever more 
 wealth for the wealthy » and to many of those 
 who are not poor themselves, it means that they 
 must live in harness till they are blind to all values 
 but the values of getting on. This country, without 
 any shadow of doubt, has sacrificed its sense of 
 light and shade, of charm and beauty, of melody 
 and gaiety, to the gods of steel and iron, and to the 
 virtue of getting on. And we are poor in imagina¬ 
 tion, poor in artistic capacity, poor in abstract 
 thought because of this. We have cultivated a 
 dull insensibility to the appeals of the ideal world. 
 The only time we have allowed to many to dream 
 and frolic has been when they were already physi¬ 
 cally and emotionally exhausted with tending 
 machines. It is to be remembered that we are not 
 three generations away from the good folk who sent 
 children into mines and factories before they were 
 ten. And now reaction has set in—rather terribly 
 —but thank God we are not any more going to 
 spend all our lives padding our chairs, filling our 
 
24 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 bellies, and inventing machinery for making every¬ 
 thing plentiful and cheap. 
 
 Let it be clear, however, that this is not 
 an unqualified plea for the present undisciplined 
 demand for amusement. It is only a plea that we 
 recognise as an element in the modern temper and 
 revolt a vague sense of the worth of certain things 
 which are indeed worthy, and whose worth both 
 public opinion and evangelical teaching have failed 
 to recognise. And the element in it that is good 
 must be not only admitted, but made the starting 
 point for a process of spiritual education. In the 
 love of dance and drama, and the interest in pretty 
 clothes and gay companionship, the starved aesthetic 
 sense is finding its first crude expression. And the 
 aesthetic value in life, as Clutton-Brock is insisting, 
 is a fundamental thing, an absolute value, a spiritual 
 ultimate. To deny or to ignore it is to foreclose 
 the possibility of an all-round spiritual development 
 for many, and to discredit one’s own spiritual 
 authority into the bargain. Those who have 
 savoured the fundamental good in art and music 
 (even maybe in the crude arts of jazz dancing and 
 dressing for the part) are right in their instinctive 
 feeling that those who belittle these things have a 
 perverted sense of what is really good. Their 
 spiritual education must come partly through the 
 education of their aesthetic sense. Starved and 
 unsatisfied, the aesthetic hunger will continually 
 thwart the development of the spirit ; recognised 
 and guided it may be an avenue to a well-propor¬ 
 tioned spiritual development. 
 
 Grant but the worthiness of even a part of this 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 25 
 
 desire for joy and beauty, and though we may 
 regret the extent to which it cuts out other and 
 ampler ideals, we can acquit the youth of to-day 
 of any unforgivable sin. We can deal with the 
 matter once we understand and sympathise. If 
 we reflect how abruptly youth has awakened to the 
 extraordinary capacity of mankind for finding 
 enjoyment and the extraordinary fruitfulness of the 
 world in yielding means to satisfy that taste for 
 joy, we shall not wonder if it is doing so heedlessly, 
 breathlessly, without taking time for serious re¬ 
 flection. But does this indicate a fundamentally 
 selfish and materialistic outlook, a set opposition 
 to altruism or religion, an antipathy to the true 
 love of God or man ? Surely this is not the case. 
 Youth has indeed found a new dimension in its 
 capacity for enjoyment ; but youth has not com¬ 
 mitted itself to taking its enjoyment selfishly, or 
 continuing to take it superficially. If, then, we 
 are to win the enthusiasm of youth we must not 
 frown upon this present mood, but build upon it, 
 interpreting it, and showing how it may be fitted 
 in as a true part of a bigger whole. In the main, 
 I believe that the typical young folk inside the 
 Church share this sense of the goodness of the 
 material life with those outside it, and that they 
 are unable to regard it as fundamentally at enmity 
 with the best and highest life. The majority are 
 so persuaded of this that they are only capable of 
 being won to the highest by a hearty recognition 
 of the goodness, in its own order, of the life to which 
 they are already drawn. 
 
 May we not also set with this pleasure-loving 
 
26 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 characteristic of modern youth the fact that it 
 is strongly moved by the sufferings of those who 
 are shut out of their natural inheritance of joy ? 
 It is strongly sympathetic with any who are 
 treated with tyranny or cruelty. It is given to 
 indignation against wrong. It is often secretly 
 oppressed with the kink in the nature of things 
 which seems to establish so much oppression and 
 hardship in the structure of social life. Often it is 
 less indifferent than paralysed by the spectacle of 
 evil against which so little seems to be able to be 
 done. What power on earth, it thinks, can stand 
 up to the tragedy of Russian famine and Irish 
 anarchy, and the present tragically low standard 
 of earnings of the South Wales miners ? It is not 
 proved yet that the typical representatives of youth 
 to-day would not be ready to forego much of their 
 pleasure if they could thereby ensure a more decent 
 distribution of the good things of life which they 
 have themselves learned to appreciate. But they 
 are not getting a lead to do so. They are not 
 getting the motive of religion harnessed to their 
 instinctive sympathy. 
 
 The practical ideal of unselfishness that should be 
 commended to folk with such an outlook is the ideal 
 of placing a physically good life within the reach 
 of all. Its first principle, morally and spiritually, 
 must be sharing, and sharing not of spiritual goods 
 in abstraction from material goods, but of material 
 goods with all the spiritual values that inhere in 
 them when they are shared. The moral passion 
 we ought to aim at arousing in the typical repre¬ 
 sentative of this generation is a passion for realising 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 27 
 
 the social brotherhood of man, not as a mere 
 sentiment, but as an actual sharing of the world’s 
 material goods and of the control of its material 
 processes. The Spirit of God is striving with this 
 generation to find an economic expression of brother¬ 
 hood, with political arrangements making that 
 economic brotherhood secure, and, therefore, the 
 only religious movement for the day is one that is 
 closely intertwined with the attempt to realise this 
 ideal. If then we find a high value attached by 
 this generation to material things, we should not 
 spend our time lamenting it ; but should be quick 
 to turn it to advantage for the realisation of some 
 great new expression of the ideal of brotherhood, 
 some great new effort to establish the Kingdom of 
 God upon earth. 
 
 This generation is indeed unlikely to accept 
 a religion which takes a negative attitude towards 
 the material and the physical, and centres its 
 morality in the endeavour to keep the spirit of the 
 individual disentangled from the interests of the 
 flesh. It needs a religion which will enable men to 
 possess the world and use it to the full, not selfishly, 
 but with all-round good-will. It cannot take 
 seriously the ascetic ideal of those who seem more 
 bent on teaching people to be restrained and 
 thoughtful than on helping them to make each 
 other happy. If it is to be persuaded to devote 
 itself to the service of others, it must be allowed to 
 serve them first by making the world a pleasant 
 place for all. It is only a minority of mankind whose 
 altruism can or should express itself chiefly in the 
 care of other people’s minds and morals. Of course, 
 
28 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 up to a point, we are all our brother’s keepers both 
 morally and spiritually. But the proportion of 
 life is lost if we are all of us asked to exercise our¬ 
 selves primarily for each other’s mental develop¬ 
 ment and good behaviour. That is the teacher’s 
 and the parson’s speciality, and an hotmurable one. 
 But we should hardly expect that people whose 
 lives are spent for the most part in making or 
 distributing material things should develop par¬ 
 ticularly along those lines. For the majority, 
 surely, their altruism ought to express itself mainly, 
 at first, in the sharing of material happiness of a 
 well-chosen kind. 
 
 It might seem as if we were recommending a 
 course of life which involves no moral discipline 
 and no spiritual development, but is this so ? 
 Enlist the young of the world, first of all, in the 
 enterprise of sharing the good things of the world, 
 and much more will follow. The appeal to make 
 service their serious aim in life, being one that they 
 can understand, is one to which they will respond, 
 and service will presently call for its own discipline 
 to make it efficient and successful. Then, too, if 
 the business of enjoyment be taken seriously it 
 proves to be a rudimentary art which can be so 
 cultivated that it discloses spiritual values, and 
 demands a discipline of its own. Moral and 
 spiritual choices are called for, and moral and 
 spiritual growth is engendered if recreation is 
 recognised as an important segment of the whole 
 circle of life, in which there are ideals to be upheld. 
 
 If young people can be thus enlisted for ideals 
 which they can understand, and in which ultimate 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 29 
 
 values are at stake, they will be prepared to face 
 odds and difficulties when these occur. The diffi¬ 
 culties will show themselves in a thousand forms, 
 from the difficulty of teaching uncivilised hooligans 
 to play the game in sport to the difficulty of teach¬ 
 ing profiteering magnates and domineering foremen 
 to play the game in industry. And when these 
 difficulties bar the way to ideals which they have 
 made their own, they wall be ready to accept the 
 discipline that is necessary in order to overcome 
 them. They will discover that the conflicts which 
 are involved in carrying their ideal through are 
 spiritual, and will then be in a position to learn 
 from Jesus, and from the Cross, the terms on which 
 alone the battle with evil can be successfully won. 
 But they will not be launched on this voyage of 
 spiritual discovery at all if they are first required 
 to discount their sense of life’s values, because 
 religious people say they should. So, then, the 
 challenge of Christ to youth should be presented, 
 not first of all in terms of the inner discipline and 
 sacrifice that it may in the end involve, but first 
 of all as a call to unselfish service and enjoyment. 
 In the name of Christ, let us give youth a charge 
 to take up that task, and a promise of His help in 
 their endeavour. Once they embark upon it, we 
 shall find that all the energies they derive from their 
 natural self-expression in the form of play will be 
 available for the cause of the Kingdom of Christ ; 
 and in place of undue self-expression and egotism, 
 there will be that consecration of human instincts 
 which, it has been said, is the very essence of 
 Christianity. 
 
30 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 II. The Revolt against Conventionality 
 
 A second mark of the modern revolt against 
 religion can be more briefly dealt with, for it is more 
 generally understood ; viz., the revolt against con¬ 
 ventional morality. Undoubtedly, the modern mind 
 is now in open revolt against taboos of every 
 kind. If a moral precept is right, it will be able to 
 justify itself. So runs the argument ; and it avails 
 little to point out that it may need mature ex¬ 
 perience to appreciate the value of certain precepts 
 and appeals. Youth will not ever listen to its 
 mentors very readily, and still less in a day like ours, 
 when the accepted moral wisdom of the world has 
 been so seriously called in question by the failure 
 of civilisation to eliminate industrial and inter¬ 
 national strife. Youth may not estimate the 
 wisdom of its elders as highly as it would if it knew 
 more of the burden and complexity of affairs. But 
 that is not to be expected. The point of which 
 youth is quite sure at present is that age is very 
 fallible and the morality of the elders far from a 
 complete success. Having been tumbled first into 
 a world of war, and next into a world of social 
 disorganisation, youth is inclined to wonder if all 
 the morality of its monitors is not fumbling and 
 merely traditional. It is not contended that this 
 is an explicit line of argument ; the main currents 
 of the arguments which sway the judgments of a 
 generation run underground, but this is the fair 
 logic of events. So when morality says of any 
 practice nothing more than “ don’t,” youth says, 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 3 1 
 
 “ Be hanged to you, why shouldn’t I ? ” And the 
 moralists of this generation have, as we know, been 
 caught in this way without a reasoned answer to 
 the revolt against some of the most sacred of our 
 moral maxims. Not even in such fundamental 
 matters as the sanctity of marriage and the limits 
 of sex intercourse will the more venturesome take 
 rulings without reasons, and not even in these 
 fundamental matters is the wisdom of the elders 
 dear and convincing and direct. 
 
 Instinctively, youth to-day judges morality by 
 its broad social outcome, and asks of the traditional 
 morality whether or not it ministers to human good. 
 On that showing, the majority of those who are 
 morally alert give judgment against the morality 
 which underlies the organisation of modern 
 industrial and international society. The intel¬ 
 lectual leaders of the youth of the world of all 
 classes do not believe that the current organisation 
 of business or of nations is consistent either with 
 Christianity or with common sense. The estab¬ 
 lished morality seems to them to be grounded on an 
 outworn tradition. It is not a morality dictated 
 by considerations of universal kindness. It seems 
 rather to be dictated by considerations of self- 
 preservation—moral self-preservation doubtless, but 
 still self-preservation. It is of the “ touch not, 
 taste not, handle not ” order, the aim of it being to 
 save one’s own skin. For youthful idealists it is 
 too selfish, too cautious, too prone to refuse the 
 joys of the moment for the sake of more dubious 
 joys to come. We may argue that the vast majority 
 of the youth of all classes are not youthful idealists. 
 
32 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 and will not, therefore, hold or be influenced by these 
 views, so that the adverse verdict of a minority 
 does not signify. But it does : for these are the 
 natural leaders of their contemporaries, and their 
 moral judgment is of far more moment than the 
 moral judgment of the elders. 
 
 Once again, it is not pretended that the instinc¬ 
 tive moral standards of youth are more satisfactory 
 than the traditional moral standards of age. They 
 are, on the contrary, dangerously short-sighted, 
 dangerously doctrinaire, and dangerously partisan. 
 Even the ideals of those w*ho are morally serious are 
 apt to make class interests their horizon. In many 
 quarters we have to face the perverse opposition 
 of minds which have been thoroughly embittered 
 by the past. But whilst these complicate the 
 problem, they do not constitute its main feature. 
 The common attitude is one of quite dispassionate 
 aloofness, and frank but good-natured disregard of 
 all that religion has to say, due to our failure to think 
 out and proclaim a system of Christian conduct 
 w T hich will do justice to all the legitimate appetites 
 of human nature and cover all the major needs of 
 social life. This generation has not been convinced 
 by Christianity because it has come to them 
 'practically associated with a morality of taboos, 
 timidity, and fear; theoretically associated with a 
 morality of love which they have not seen courage¬ 
 ously applied to public life, and which, indeed, their 
 elders (whether they be pious or pagan) tell them 
 will not work. If this is an exaggeration, it is an 
 exaggeration which contains a profound truth. 
 Christianity seems to the more thoughtful to be 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 33 
 
 associated in practice with a morality which is 
 discredited, and in theory with a morality which 
 Christians do not consistently avow. For the less 
 thoughtful it is associated with a morality which 
 limits itself to a few phases of life and is blind to 
 many of the values of life which seem to them real 
 and of good report. The preaching of the Gospel 
 to the multitude, therefore, demands a far more 
 explicit conception of the Christian life and how it 
 is to be lived, happily and effectively, amid the 
 ordinary demands of social and industrial life. 
 
 Multitudes of Christian teachers and preachers 
 there doubtless are, whose teaching and preaching 
 is free from the blemishes which give rise to these 
 misunderstandings of Christianity. It is they who 
 are carrying on the bulk of the real and effective 
 evangelistic work of the present day. But they are 
 apt to class themselves, and to be classed, as 
 educators rather than evangelists, and to leave the 
 work of evangelism to others. They do not bring 
 this message to the street corners. Indeed, it is 
 generally true that those who have the broader 
 Christian conception of life are leaving the more 
 aggressive work of evangelism to others. There is 
 much in the nature of the modern approach to 
 account for this, but it is not satisfactory. It calls 
 for redress. The modern message needs a sharper 
 evangelistic edge. And one of the essentials for 
 this is the articulation of a much more clear-cut 
 conception of the principles on which Christian 
 people ought to conduct themselves, both with 
 regard to their work and with regard to their 
 leisure. To be a Christian a man must be 
 
 D 
 
34 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 converted to Christ’s standard of values explicitly in 
 relation to each of the great spheres of his interest 
 and action. Conversion implies the exchange of 
 one moral conception of life for another. Con¬ 
 viction of sin, repentance, consecration—all these, 
 to be really effective, need to be not vague and 
 general in their content, but quite specific. They 
 call for a more decisively Christian conception of life. 
 
 III. The Disavowal of the Church’s 
 
 Leadership 
 
 We come now to the third mark of the modern 
 revolt against religion—the disavowal of the 
 Church’s spiritual authority. The Christian con¬ 
 ception of life is of course much more than a moral 
 conception, though moral factors enter into it. It 
 must be a spiritual conception. We cannot be 
 content merely with right standards of conduct. 
 Work and play and family life have their material 
 sides and their earthly values, but they have also 
 their spiritual side and their eternal values. We 
 need to bring these out, teaching men to work and 
 play together, and to love one another in ways that 
 recognise that this world is only an episode in the 
 life of our spirits, that we are each and all denizens 
 of eternity, with immortal spirits made for spiritual 
 communion with one another and with the Father 
 from Whom came our being. But we must face 
 the fact that the testimony to the eternal values 
 of the unseen world, as it is given by the Church 
 to-day, is already partly discredited by the Church’s 
 failure to appreciate truly the values of the things 
 of time and sense. How shall we expect from the 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 35 
 
 multitude a ready credence for our teaching of the 
 joys of communion with God, and the assurance of 
 immortality when we have proved faltering and 
 unreliable guides in matters more within their 
 present knowledge and discretion ? 
 
 Were but the youth of to-day approached along 
 the lines suggested, I believe that in the main they 
 would respond eagerly to the deeper message of 
 the Church. For there is behind their superficial 
 absorption in activity and amusement a hunger for 
 a more satisfying conception of life. They are 
 driven to find sensuous satisfaction in pleasure, in 
 part because they can find so little spiritual satis¬ 
 faction in work. It is in the recoil from forms of 
 activity which have no moral attraction and no 
 spiritual purpose that they plunge into forms of 
 recreation which have so little of either spiritual or 
 moral worth. But they are not deeply satisfied 
 with their choice. They cannot rescind it because 
 it is based in deep instincts which they cannot 
 ignore ; and they cannot, therefore, turn sincerely to 
 a religious ideal which takes no real account of these. 
 At the same time they hunger for something more. 
 They want their passion to make life good inter¬ 
 preted to them in spiritual terms. They want to 
 learn the spiritual conditions by which alone they 
 can make good for themselves, and in their relations 
 with each other, boy with girl, and friend with 
 friend. Along these lines they are more than 
 ready to enter Christ’s Kingdom ; but they must 
 be taken where they stand and shown how the good 
 they already know leads on to the larger deeper 
 good for which as yet they only grope and hunger. 
 
36 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 We have to consider how much there is in the 
 Christian message which is strange and terrifying. 
 We owe it to youth to make our account of 
 it credible by first making cogent and satisfying 
 that part of it which is nearest the edge of their 
 comprehension. 
 
 We must also remember that the modern person 
 is the product of a century of tremendous absorp¬ 
 tion in practical achievement, during which a 
 scientific view of the world has come to be character¬ 
 istic of every normal citizen. He is quite sure of 
 the reality of the world of matter, and not nearly 
 so sure of the reality of the world of spirit. The 
 precision of man’s knowledge in the sphere of 
 material things, as against the fluctuation of opinion 
 in the sphere of spiritual knowledge, has given a 
 sense of truth to the one and a suspicion of super¬ 
 stition or mere sentiment to the other. Then, 
 again, though few know much about such questions 
 as Biblical criticism, what little is known of the 
 Church’s timidity towards them heightens the sense 
 of dubiety which attaches to religious propositions 
 not verifiable by experience. And with the general 
 discredit of the authority of the Church, authority 
 and the power of influence have passed to those 
 whose reputation is strong in the practical conduct 
 of life, and so the man in the street takes his cue 
 from the “ good fellow” rather than from the good 
 Churchman. His philosophy of life is one in which 
 abstract religious statements and the common 
 metaphors of religious speech mean simply nothing. 
 To the modern mind no general statements un¬ 
 supported by illustration carry much meaning, 
 
THOSE WHO PASS BY 
 
 37 
 
 whether they are on religious or other subjects. 
 When, then, we come to present the Gospel to such 
 minds we need to be careful to divest it of its 
 dependence upon systems and forms of thought 
 which are unfamiliar to modern minds, and which 
 the Church has no longer sufficient authority to 
 impose as thought forms for their religious life. 
 It is desperately important that a man should 
 receive his highest thought in the terms and cate¬ 
 gories which he understands. This point will be 
 of great importance when we come, as we do in 
 the next chapter, to outline the essential message 
 of the Gospel. 
 
 For, I would remind the reader that what 
 we have been considering so far is not the full 
 message of the Gospel, but only some of the 
 problems of relating the Gospel to the stock of 
 ideas which is present in the minds of those we wish 
 to win. Our Gospel offers to men a very much 
 fuller, deeper, and richer scheme of life than that 
 which is held by those who now so easily pass it by. 
 But if the presentation of it is to convince them, 
 it must first be just to their present state of mind. 
 It must acknowledge the good in all those good 
 things which their more restricted standards claim 
 to be good. It must not try to cry up the value of 
 the life eternal by depreciating the value of things 
 temporal. It must not decry art and beauty, nor 
 exalt self-purification above social service. It 
 must not call men to a scheme of conduct which is 
 essentially ascetic and self-regarding. All these 
 matters, however, important as they are, lie rather 
 on the circumference than at the centre of the 
 
38 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 Gospel. The Gospel is essentially a testimony to 
 certain facts of history and truths of experience 
 the recognition of which has a transforming effect 
 upon human life. These elements of historic fact 
 and eternal truth in the Gospel to which we have to 
 testify, we cannot alter or adapt to fit the changing 
 needs of the passing generations. We can only 
 describe them as matters of experience and leave 
 them to make their own impression. We shall have 
 
 X 
 
 done all we can to secure them a hearing if w r e have 
 tried, before describing them, to look at life through 
 the eyes of those to whom our witness is to be given. 
 What this eternal and changeless element in the 
 Gospel is, we shall now try to see, and to state in 
 terms which the modern mind can understand. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ) 
 
 YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 
 
 In this chapter we shall try to present the basal 
 elements of the Gospel; separating them as far 
 as we can from the metaphor and philosophy of 
 particular ages and periods in the Church’s history. 
 Doing so, we find the Gospel to consist in these four 
 sets of facts : the fact of Christ, the fact of de¬ 
 liverance from sin, the fact of communion with 
 God, and the fact of the Church. The classification 
 is not rigidly logical and watertight ; but it may 
 serve for purposes of exposition without leading to 
 practical confusion. 
 
 I. The Fact of Christ 
 
 The power of the Gospel lies to-day, as always, 
 in the attractive power of Jesus Christ. It is He, 
 and not our theories about Him, that saves men. 
 We are always saying it, but cannot too vividly 
 realise what we say. Particularly important to-day 
 is this realisation of the supremacy of the Life as 
 seen in the Gospel portrait over the subsequent 
 systems of thought in which men have interpreted 
 what Christ meant to them and to the world ; for 
 
 39 
 
40 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 to-day the theological interpretation of Christ is 
 peculiarly unconvincing to the average mind. The 
 average person has extraordinarily little capacity 
 for abstract thought of any kind. He has still 
 less capacity for assimilating thought expressed 
 in the terms of an unfamiliar race or of a bygone 
 age : and such is very much of the Church’s theology 
 of redemption. The Christian doctrine of redemp¬ 
 tion is commonly set out in metaphors which are 
 difficult except to those who are interested in the 
 history of thought. Thus, for example, the explana¬ 
 tion of redemption in terms of guilt makes use of 
 legal metaphors which are not easily understood by 
 a nation steeped for centuries in the thought of the 
 Fatherhood of God. And the explanation in terms 
 of sacrifice requires some knowledge of the history 
 of the place of sacrifice in primitive religions to 
 make it cogent. Those who are devoted Christians 
 may be glad to wrestle with the difficulties of 
 theology : yet it is not theology but Christ as a 
 living figure who draws men to Himself. Man is 
 so constituted that he can best see what it is worth 
 while to do and to be when the ideal is presented to 
 him in a life. Compared with such a presentation, 
 theology is impotent. And so we have to-day, as 
 ever, to show forth Jesus Christ, the Man of men, 
 the Man of God, as the one supreme figure with 
 whom all men have to reckon. 
 
 Some of us would like to preach Christ to men 
 with a clear word as to how He would solve the 
 public problems of the day. We would like to be 
 able to apply His teaching decisively in all direc¬ 
 tions ; and we think that if it were applied correctly 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 41 
 
 Christ Himself would stand forth more vividly 
 before men. But systems of Christian ethics are 
 no more convincing than systems of Christian 
 theology. The thought of the centrality of Jesus 
 requires that we put them all into a secondary place. 
 Christ Himself is His own evidence. His own words 
 and actions among the peasantry of Galilee and 
 among the rulers of His people in Jerusalem ; these 
 set Him forth in His essential and commanding 
 majesty. Even in His own day, He did not offer 
 solutions for all the problems of the hour—slavery, 
 for example—but He did adopt a characteristic 
 attitude to social questions and social parties, and 
 it is this above all things that men want to see 
 in Him. 
 
 It is then Jesus that we need to show forth to¬ 
 day,—Jesus in His attitude to sickness, to suffering, 
 to poverty, to riches, to cruelty, to intolerance, 
 to entrenched privilege, to hard-heartedness, to 
 hypocrisies and shams, to political parties, to 
 governments, to ecclesiastical pride and national 
 ambition. His words cannot be quoted as though 
 they apply literally to modern conditions of life, 
 but they leave no doubt as to where He stood on 
 all essential social questions. His intense sympathy 
 with suffering, His wrath against all trifling with 
 human need, His hatred of pretence and untruth. 
 His patience w r ith the institutions of His time, 
 coupled with the most fearless and radical criticism 
 of them, His complete confidence in the overthrow 
 of the evil in them, His internationalism in the face 
 of the most bigoted and religious nationalism the 
 world has ever seen ; all these things stand out 
 
42 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 with vivid clearness. They reveal His spirit and 
 nature in action : there is no need to translate them 
 into social and political maxims for the hour, that 
 would be to detract from their incisive power and 
 not to add to it. To insist on the letter of the truth 
 would be to forget the freedom of the spirit. Each 
 man must make his own application in conduct for 
 himself; for none can know his fellow or the 
 cluster of circumstances through which he has to 
 cleave his way. It is not for us to dictate to our 
 neighbours what their conduct ought to be; and 
 when we try to do so, we only induce repulsion and 
 invite debate of details. 
 
 We have, then, to preach, not duties, but Jesus 
 as a living embodiment of amazing, rousing, and 
 commanding love, in social situations utterly 
 relevant to ours to-day, challenging every kind of 
 person to awake from complacency and conven¬ 
 tionality and play the brother to men. It is not 
 necessary, nor possible, to translate Jesus into a 
 new political code : it is only and supremely essen¬ 
 tial to see Him through modern eyes. For if we 
 are insensitive to the things which the world to-day 
 values—in its best and most characteristic hours— 
 we shall not see in Jesus, and therefore shall not 
 commend to others the very things about Him 
 which would win their admiration at the outset. 
 We may relieve ourselves of the responsibility for 
 solving all the ethical problems of the day before 
 we dare to preach the Gospel; but we must be 
 sensitive to these problems or we shall seem to make 
 Jesus irrelevant to the life men have to live. 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 43 
 
 II. The Fact of Deliverance 
 
 Of those who have put on record a vivid ex¬ 
 perience of the Gospel, most have emphasised the 
 moral revolution which it wrought in them. They 
 entered into the experience of Christ through an 
 experience of their own sinfulness contrasting with 
 His holiness, or of their own incompleteness con¬ 
 trasting with His fulness. A vivid realisation of 
 the moral ideals embodied in Jesus filled them 
 with a sense of their own unworthiness and with 
 a desire to exchange it for His moral excellence 
 There followed an experience in which the burden 
 of their sinfulness and incompleteness passed away, 
 and they were left with a surpassing sense of new 
 joy and energy drawn from Him. For them, 
 undoubtedly, the Christian life began with an 
 experience of forgiveness ; but are we therefore to 
 presume that it always should begin with such an 
 experience ? Or are we to take more account of 
 the numberless, though less striking instances in 
 Christian biography, and within our own present 
 knowledge, in which the Christian experience began 
 with no such violence of recoil from the past, but 
 rather with a sense of warming attraction towards 
 the Christian offer of a more beautiful, more noble, 
 and more satisfying life ? There is at least enough 
 evidence of the variety of the types of experience in 
 which Christ is central to allow us to approach the 
 question as an open one. 
 
 The strongest argument for making the presenta¬ 
 tion of the Gospel turn on this appeal to a violent 
 repentance is a practical one. It might have been 
 
44 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 said by the evangelists of an older school that if 
 conversion to Christ is to be wrought in a revival 
 meeting and in an hour, as sometimes it must, it 
 can only be done with the aid of some strong 
 emotional excitement. What more effective from 
 this point of view than a vivid depiction of the evil 
 that is in man ? Let him see himself as he is at 
 his worst, in stark contrast with his ideal. The 
 question is not, however, to be judged from the 
 standpoint of “ the evangelist,” but from the 
 standpoint of youth. If the natural pathway from 
 the current types of paganism to Christian disciple- 
 ship lies through a strong sense of sin, w T ell and good : 
 by that route we must strive to lead them ; but not 
 because the experience of forgiveness has been 
 characteristic of the great revivals of the past. 
 For us the question is, what mental route or process 
 is the right and fitting one for the pilgrims of to-day ? 
 We must not prescribe for them an unsuitable 
 gateway into the experience of being a Christian. 
 We must rather describe that experience in terms 
 which will help them to turn their faces in the 
 direction in which they will find an open road. 
 
 The Christian experience may be variously 
 described as one of forgiveness, redemption, recon¬ 
 ciliation, or rebirth. Put in its most simple terms 
 it is an experience of inner harmony replacing a 
 state of inner strife. The precise form which the 
 experience takes will depend upon the outstanding 
 character of the condition which immediately 
 preceded it. If this has been one of moral defeat— 
 sav from an ungovernable temper or an ungovern¬ 
 able lust—or if it has been one of impotence to do 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 45 
 
 the good one would, or of helplessness in face of 
 others’ need, entrance into the Christian experience 
 will mean primarily a new access of moral energy, 
 either for defence or attack, for self-purification 
 or for service. The experience will then be thought 
 of most naturally in terms of rebirth and the gift 
 of new life. If, again, the immediate past has been 
 overshadowed by the sense of having incurred the 
 condemnation of God for moral failure, or by a 
 sense of rebellion against the conditions and obliga¬ 
 tions of life, and revolt against God as their Author, 
 the Christian experience will be felt primarily as 
 one of forgiveness and reconciliation. But if the 
 transition is from a state of aimlessness and futility, 
 and want of a co-ordinating principle to give life 
 unity and purpose, the Christian experience will 
 be rather that of adoption into the service of 
 Christ. 
 
 In each case life has been delivered from its 
 inner tension and disorder; but whether the 
 experience of deliverance is thought of primarily 
 in terms of rebirth or reconciliation or of adoption 
 into the service of Christ, it is well to realise that in 
 none of these cases does the form of the experience 
 exhaust its content. What happens, for example, 
 in the middle instance given above, is more than 
 forgiveness or reconciliation, which, after all, are 
 only the words wdiich indicate the contrast between 
 the soul’s previous sense of guiltiness or enmity 
 toward God and its new state of content and 
 satisfaction. The invariable fact in all these 
 experiences is that whereas, at the one stage, God 
 was felt to be outside our lives and we helpless, 
 
46 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 guilty, estranged, or aimless because of that, God 
 is now felt to have become a fact inside our ex¬ 
 perience. Because of that fact we are now morally 
 energised and delivered from our former fear or 
 hostility toward God, and are enriched by the gift 
 of a purpose large enough to enlist and satisfy our 
 every power. Man has opened the door and God 
 has come in to him. He is known to be one near 
 and available, friendly, and in the position of leader¬ 
 ship and control. We have the Son of God for 
 our Friend. 
 
 The Gospel consists in the blessed fact of God’s 
 will to enter, and man’s ability to receive God into 
 his inner life ; and we must state it in terms which 
 speak to the condition of our hearers. We need 
 not try to induce in them any particular condi¬ 
 tion of self-dissatisfaction of which they are not 
 conscious, still less to insist on their experiencing a 
 sense of need which, to them, seems artificial. 
 There is surely in every human life already some 
 need to which the fundamental Christian experience 
 answers. We have to discover the prevailing form 
 of it in our own day, and among whatever class of 
 people we are trying to reach. I have already tried 
 to analyse what I think to be the especial spiritual 
 sensitiveness of the hour. In the light of that 
 analysis, it does not seem possible to insist upon 
 or to expect in young people of the present day any 
 strong sense of guilt or of hostility to God. 
 
 The sense of guilt is compounded of two notions : 
 the sense of having grievously offended a binding 
 moral code, and the expectation that penalties 
 will be exacted. Neither of these notions is power- 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 47 
 
 ful in the common thought of the day. Present 
 modes of thought throw much new light on the 
 responsibility of the individual for his own action. 
 Drunkenness, lust, bad temper, lying, and the rest 
 —to-day are all regarded as being diseases as 
 much as individual faults. At least, the individual 
 is felt to share his responsibility for them rather 
 lavishly with his heredity and his environment. 
 The current analysis may exaggerate the part played 
 in each individual destiny by these other supra- 
 individual factors, but thev are real factors of which 
 too little has been made in the past. To require 
 the individual exactly to separate out his own 
 individual responsibility from the wider responsi¬ 
 bility of mankind is not desirable if it can be avoided, 
 as I think it can. By all means let us emphasise 
 a man’s share in the responsibility for the present 
 and the future, and especially for the next step ; 
 but do not let us seek to induce that sense of lonely 
 guilt which was such an outstanding mark of the 
 great Christian experience of the past. 
 
 The modern sense of divided responsibility for 
 the past has also a further result. It makes it 
 difficult for the modern person to imagine himself 
 standing as a criminal before a Judge, without 
 detracting from his conception of the kindness and 
 the justice of Almighty God. He will confess 
 himself a rotter and a weakling, but it is another 
 matter to regard himself guilty of the pains of hell. 
 He may be made to feel the terrible possibilities of 
 evil which lie in his nature if they are indulged, 
 but he cannot conceive of God as identified with the 
 principle of condemnation. Christ has taught the 
 
48 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 world too well for us to suppose that He will not be 
 for us to the very last. If we are to stress the idea 
 of redemption as deliverance from sin, we must 
 think of sin more often in Paul’s thought of it as 
 disastrous and culpable deficiency than in his 
 thought of it as legal guilt. And in so doing we 
 shall speak to the condition of our times. The 
 modern need is typified by the boy who has made 
 a sorry mess of his scoutmastership through 
 thoughtlessness, or the girl who is disabled by her 
 sense of instability and ineffectiveness, rather than 
 by the man or woman pursued by the sense of 
 guilt or of remorse. 
 
 So then the characteristic spiritual longing of the 
 world to-day is not so much a longing to be blame¬ 
 less, as a longing to “ make good.” The spirit 
 yearns less to escape the contamination of material 
 interests and pursuits than to put the impress of its 
 ideals upon the material and social w r orld. And in 
 this aspiration it is nearer the mind of Jesus than 
 it has ever been before, for the religion of Jesus was 
 far less occupied with the aim of self-purification 
 than with the aim of sympathetic service. Jesus 
 never encouraged people to dwell very much upon 
 their past faults, if only they were willing to start 
 out afresh with an adequate life aim and an adequate 
 life motive. And the aim and the motive which 
 He commended might be stated very simply, in 
 some such terms as these. “ God is your Father, 
 man is your brother, the world might be very good 
 and beautiful but at present it is very dark and sad. 
 Set about to make life good for your brother, and 
 God will take care of you all, both in this world and 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 49 
 
 in the next. Your past may have been full of 
 wickedness, yet you may leave it all behind if you 
 will choose me for your Master now. Lose your 
 wrong self in serving your brother as I shall show 
 you how.” 
 
 And here it is that Jesus touches our deepest 
 sense of need. For the heart of the world stirs to 
 His call to make life good and happy; but it wearies, 
 too, with its sense of failure to achieve its aim. 
 There is a surging passion of hope in the hearts of 
 men that this world might be made into a much 
 more happy and homely place for all men, and not 
 only for those few who are fortunate and able—but 
 the hope is turned to ashes wdien we contemplate 
 the failure of humanity to realise its dream. Men 
 need Jesus to give them such a will to use the world 
 rightly, as will be corrupted neither by selfishness 
 nor by sensuality, nor dissipated by weariness and 
 disappointment. 
 
 Thus the heart hungers for an understanding 
 of the things of the spirit which will not set the rich 
 appreciation of life at variance with the love of 
 God, and for a power to turn the dream of human 
 brotherhood into an actualised social order. Now 
 these two things have been met in Christ—in 
 Christ, though not in Christians generally. Yet, 
 for some at least, the lovely humanity of Jesus has 
 ended the war between the love of human happiness 
 and the love of God : between joy in the world, 
 beautiful with its profusion of gifts of light and 
 colour and gaiety, and joy in the perfect ordering 
 of the spiritual life. This harmonisation of the 
 various hungers of the spirit, this resolution of the 
 
 E 
 
So WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 conflict between the lure of the natural and the 
 lure of the spiritual, is part of the experience of 
 multitudes of Christian people. Those who have 
 this experience have a gospel for the present 
 age, and those who have not this experience have 
 not. 
 
 And, further, there are those who have, in their 
 own experience, an attitude to their fellows, born 
 of their fellowship with Christ, which makes them 
 sure that the problem of organising the world as a 
 social brotherhood is no vain dream. They can 
 look along the line of their own inner development 
 and see how the will to dominate and despise and 
 exploit others passes away before the desire to 
 understand and serve and equip them. And they 
 can see that the new will to love which is thus born 
 in them is more resourceful, more determined, more 
 constantly energised by deep satisfaction in success, 
 and therefore more potent against difficulties and 
 more resilient after failure, than the old will to fight 
 for one’s own hand. And knowing this in some 
 measure by experience in themselves and others, 
 they see that the Kingdom of God canot fail to 
 come, and in this respect also the stress of fear and 
 doubt is resolved in their souls. Thev are delivered, 
 reborn, released from the thraldom of any desires 
 whose satisfaction ends in themselves alone. The 
 Kingdom of God is within them. They are become 
 the sons of God in that they share the Father’s 
 purpose and freely desire to forward it, and in so 
 far as this is so, they have a gospel of redemption 
 for their day. 
 
 The witness of the Gospel to man’s deliverance 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 51 
 
 from sin thus takes a special character from the 
 special form of man’s present need and aspiration. 
 Our deliverance in Christ is not primarily to be 
 represented as a deliverance from past sins’ conse¬ 
 quences, nor as the breaking of the power of present 
 temptation to lust or excess : it is still more a 
 deliverance out of a life of loneliness and from a 
 use of the world which ministered to mere pride 
 and selfishness into a life of social service and a 
 use of the world which ministers to the satisfaction 
 of every hunger of an awakened personality. This 
 leads us on to fresh points about the nature of the 
 Christian life. 
 
 III. The Fact of Communion with God 
 
 We have now to speak of the fact of Com¬ 
 munion with God, which constitutes a large element 
 of the Christian witness, appealing as it does to 
 the sense of loneliness, impotence, and futility, 
 which haunts humanity. It is one of the change¬ 
 less facts of Christian experience that the soul can 
 enjoy such an intimate communion with God as 
 takes aw T ay the sense of spiritual loneliness and 
 gives enduring value to the whole of life. One of 
 the features of adolescence is its sense of being on 
 the edge of great experiences and of finding ex¬ 
 perience constantly dissatisfying, of being called 
 co great achievement and being doomed to feeble¬ 
 ness. Communion with God, in little things and in 
 big, is the remedy for this. 
 
 In the great classic instances, Christian com¬ 
 munion with God takes several leading forms. Now, 
 
52 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 it is a re-enforcement in fighting individual tempta¬ 
 tion ; now it is a companionship in making known 
 the Gospel; now it is a sharing of God’s Passion 
 to save the world from loss. The Christian witness 
 needs to be more full and emphatic and specific 
 in its testimony, both to the reality and to the range 
 of this experience of contact with God Himself. 
 Moreover, in witnessing to the immature, we must 
 not confine ourselves to the maturer elements 
 in this experience. To what did Jesus call His 
 followers in the first instance ? Was it to a life of 
 desperate conflict with the ranked forces of evil ? 
 Or was it not rather to a thrilling ministry of social 
 service, to a joyful companionship and a dazzling 
 prospect of signal human success ? He taught 
 them to rejoice in the flowers, to steal out into the 
 night for quiet thought, to frequent the wedding 
 feast, to taste fife’s sweetness with Him and with 
 His followers, to be care-free and adventurous. 
 Without doubt His call to them was from the first 
 a call to an arduous enterprise, but not at all a 
 recondite enterprise, not a campaign whose objects 
 and rewards were obscure, or intangible, or divorced 
 from sense experience and daily fife. Nor was 
 the note of sacrifice predominant at the first, 
 though the note of fidelity was always present in 
 His call to men. Only after a considerable experi¬ 
 ence of His companionship did He ask them to go 
 up to Jerusalem to witness His Passion, and to 
 only a few of them did He reveal the fiercest 
 conflicts of His soul in Gethsemane’s Garden. 
 Surely there are many of our younger brothers and 
 sisters to whom we should offer simply Christ’s 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 53 
 
 companionship in the enjoyment of life and the 
 fulfilling of kindly offices of service, and wait long 
 before we ask them to fight His hardest battles. 
 
 The warfare of the Kingdom of God demands 
 discipline and evokes heroism ; and we should not 
 hide the fact, but neither should we forget that 
 there are some who find the greater part of their 
 companionship with Him in art and music and the 
 search for truth, in the service of the home, or in 
 the common ministries of human life. These things 
 are by Him touched with new values, new meanings, 
 new emotions. Of course we must summon Christ’s 
 disciples always to the work of building up in 
 Christ’s name a Kingdom of God upon earth ; but 
 we must offer them communion with God, not only 
 in fighting for ideals against opponents, or in 
 fighting for deliverance from sin, but in building 
 good houses, planting delightful gardens, making 
 beautiful clothes, and in other ways ministering 
 to the joyfulness of life. These things are a part 
 of His Kingdom, and in them we have communion 
 with Him who created all things and delighted to 
 pronounce them good. We must not allow the 
 thought of communion with God to be associated 
 only with moral struggles and Church services, and 
 what is narrowly described as Christian work. We 
 must let it be known that God can be found at the 
 end of every avenue along which the human spirit 
 is impelled to seek an ideal end. The witness of 
 one type of mind cannot be universally convincing, 
 but the cumulative witness of the saints and the 
 seers, the prophets and the apostles, the servants 
 of human welfare, the artists and the truth seekers, 
 
54 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 is overwhelming testimony to the reality and range 
 of man’s possible communion with God. 
 
 Clutton-Brock has argued, in T he Ultimate 
 Belief, that the activities of the Spirit are not one, 
 nor two, but three. The Spirit is concerned for 
 goodness, for truth and for beauty, and there is an 
 ultimate good to be found in each. They are all 
 equally qualities of God, and the spirit life is incom¬ 
 plete unless it is concerned with them all. Starve 
 any one of them and the others suffer. And to-day 
 especially, because the spiritual desire of man to 
 enjoy beauty and to create beauty is discouraged 
 and denied, the spirit of man is stunted and en¬ 
 feebled. And especially youth, which needs the 
 romance of the spirit to counterbalance the excite¬ 
 ment of the romance of the flesh, is deprived of one 
 of its essential safeguards and kept back from one 
 of its essential goals. We shall return to this 
 subject in a later chapter, but it is important to 
 recognise at once how many avenues of human 
 interest lead up to man’s communion with God, and 
 to connect the name of Jesus as much with ex¬ 
 periences which move the heart by their beauty as 
 with those which commend themselves to the 
 conscience as right. Only so can we find in our 
 religion the simultaneous satisfaction of all the 
 hungers of the spirit, the fitting climax of all 
 experiences. Religious experience has sometimes 
 been thought of as a separate department of 
 experience not connected with the common ex¬ 
 periences of life. We ought rather to find ourselves 
 in communion with God at the apex of every form 
 of experience, in the exercise of every faculty when 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 55 
 
 we do our best and keenest, in the pursuit of every 
 good purpose when we let ourselves go. At each 
 turn in the road of life we may discover something 
 so good that we can only bow our heads in thankful¬ 
 ness and reverence and say, It is the Lord. If we 
 have known Jesus in His most characteristic 
 moments—in the crowd and in the temple, in the 
 Judgment Hall and on the Cross—we shall find Him 
 beside us also by hillside and lakeside and fireside, 
 and our communion with the highest will be always 
 and altogether in Him. 
 
 IV. The Fact of the Church 
 
 We pass to consider the fourth great component 
 of the evangelical witness, the fact of the Church. 
 There is offered to man in the fellowship of the 
 disciples of Christ a social experience in which it is 
 made easier for him to cherish his ideals, to fight 
 off his temptations, to strengthen his affection for 
 his fellows, to form habits of service and devotion. 
 By its ordered life of prayer and worship he is 
 helped to certify himself of things unseen, and 
 to acquaint himself with God. The credit of the 
 Church goes up and down as the generations come 
 and go. It is behindhand now in this, and now in 
 that ; and there are times, like our own, when the 
 world is out of patience with its slow-changing 
 traditions of thought and speech. And yet, 
 through all, there is preserved in it a treasury of 
 knowledge of the ways in which God speaks to 
 man and man responds to God. 
 
 The Church is, in the first place, the centre of 
 
56 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 man’s worship, his place of communion with God. 
 Incidentally, it is his place of instruction in that 
 moral philosophy of life which his faith in God 
 implies ; his school in which to study the funda¬ 
 mental nature of God’s universe, the place he holds 
 in it and the conduct befitting his divine sonship. 
 This distinction between man’s direct experience 
 of God in worship and his derived ideas of truth and 
 duty is most important at the present time. For it 
 is necessary to emphasise at once the sureness and 
 reality of the experience of God to which men give 
 expression in their public worship, and the in¬ 
 adequacy and incompleteness of the language in 
 which they express their faith. The fact of spiritual 
 energy resident in the Church, the means of grace 
 which it affords, the comfort and support of its 
 fellowship, the inspiration and help of its worship : 
 to these things we need ever to testify as part of 
 the evangelic witness. But that reality of grace 
 and inspiration does not guarantee the rightness or 
 appropriateness of all that the Churches say or do. 
 Like every other long-lived institution, the Church 
 must always tend to fall behind the times in some 
 of its official teaching, and especially in times of 
 change is it hard for the public presentation of the 
 truth to meet the needs of young and old at the same 
 time. Christian doctrine speaks the language of 
 philosophy, and that is a language which is con¬ 
 stantly changing and ceasing to carry its old 
 meanings ; and Christian morals deal with social 
 relationships which may change their character so 
 entirely in a generation as to make maxims which 
 were once true and vital, seem irrelevant and trite. 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 57 
 
 It is, therefore, part of the wisdom of those who 
 have to preach the Gospel to remember that the 
 Church is fallible in its thinking and prone in its 
 life and teaching to fall behind the times. Other¬ 
 wise they may raise expectations which they cannot 
 fulfil, and put upon youth a burden which it cannot 
 bear. Thus, for example, in bringing new recruits 
 into the Christian fellowship to-day, it is well to 
 realise that many of them may not find their 
 spiritual home at all easily in the societies and 
 services of the Church as these are at present 
 organised. It may be necessary to devise new and 
 freer forms of fellowship to meet their needs. These 
 freer forms of Church life are doubtless already 
 coming into existence in the interest of those already 
 within the Church ; but the recognition of the needs 
 of those outside might help to bring them into 
 vogue and give them shape and vigour all the 
 more speedily. 
 
 One would like to be able to say of the Church, 
 that in its fellowship every spiritual desire will be 
 satisfied and every spiritual gift will be enriched ; 
 but one must be content to discriminate between the 
 spiritual gifts which are at present fostered in the 
 life of the Church as it is, and those which only may 
 be. What we may assert without fear of exaggera¬ 
 tion is that multitudes of Christian people are 
 brought to Jesus through the worship and fellow¬ 
 ship of the Church, in such a way that their sense of 
 God is constantly refreshed; their thought of Him 
 constantlv enriched ; their desire to be like Him 
 constantly quickened; their insight into right 
 living constantly deepened ; and they themselves 
 
58 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 brought ever closer and closer into conformity with 
 His spirit. In spite of the inadequacy of the 
 specific teaching they receive, or of the form in 
 which they worship, the spirit of Jesus is for them 
 truly embodied, and to them truly communicated. 
 And of many of those to whom the formal defects 
 are fully obvious, the same is true ; the spirit 
 triumphs over the letter because it was the spirit 
 which first gave the letter life. Christ is Himself 
 effectively present for them. The divine-human 
 fellowship is experienced by them in quickening 
 power because they do indeed share God’s purpose 
 and not merely profess His name ; it is the more 
 potent exactly in proportion as they share imagina¬ 
 tively and explicitly, as well as silently and 
 symbolically, in the furtherance of His purpose, and 
 learn to know it in all its breadth and range. 
 
 So much we can emphatically claim on behalf of 
 the fellowship of the Christian Church ; but at the 
 same time we are bound to acknowledge that in 
 some respects the Churches tend to quench the 
 Spirit of Christ in those whom they influence, 
 because they fail to identify themselves fully and 
 clearly with His social programme. And so it 
 comes to pass that there is a spirit in the world 
 to-day, outside the Churches, in some ways more 
 responsive to the call of Christ than the spirit 
 embodied in our present Christian institutions. It 
 is a spirit quickened indeed by influences which 
 Christ has wielded both within and without the 
 Church, expressing itself here and there in other 
 movements while as yet it is not fully embodied in 
 the organised life of the Church. Until it finds its 
 
YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 59 
 
 adequate expression within the Church, the full 
 power of the witness of the Christian fellowship 
 cannot be felt, because the characteristic longing of 
 this generation for spiritual fellowship will remain 
 unsatisfied. In the Church, in the past, our fathers 
 in different ages strove to relate the Person of 
 Christ to their conceptions of Justice and Govern¬ 
 ment and Providence and to their hope of the 
 hereafter, because that wa 3 the direction in which 
 their spirits craved for a truer understanding of life ; 
 they succeeded, and were satisfied. So also in its 
 turn the present generation longs to relate the 
 Person of Christ to its conceptions of human 
 personality and progress, to discover in Him the 
 power and the way to transform the social life of 
 the world, and to read the whole movement of 
 history in the light He has shed on life’s ideals and 
 purposes. Youth especially is moved by this 
 aspiration, and needs help in Christian fellowship 
 in order to relate it to the Person of Christ. To 
 those who believe in the divine calling of the 
 Church, and perceive this, it is simply inevitable 
 that the Churches will presently awaken to this 
 need and meet it; but we are bound at the same 
 time to recognise that whilst their failure to do so 
 continues, it must greatly diminish the power of 
 their appeal. 
 
 This, however, raises problems which would 
 take us beyond the scope of the present chapter, 
 and are best left alone till a later point in the book. 
 It will be well, before we look any further at these 
 questions of Church organisation, that we should 
 try to envisage the Christian conception of life, 
 
60 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 endeavouring to see our ordinary social interests 
 and activities in the light which Jesus throws upon 
 them. It is probable that the point of contact 
 between the Gospel and many modern minds will 
 be the view of life for which the Gospel stands. Such 
 questions as those of the relation of business 
 standards to Christian standards, and of the place 
 and value of play in the world must be answered 
 as Jesus would be likely to answer them before the 
 upshot of the invitation to be a Christian can be 
 fairly understood. Silence regarding them can 
 but endorse the widespread, though quite errone¬ 
 ous, impression that Christianity must be kept 
 as far as possible from modern business, and the 
 Christian kept equally far from many of the amuse¬ 
 ments he would otherwise most naturally choose. 
 To these matters we now therefore turn. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 
 
 In this and the next chapter we shall attempt to 
 sketch in bare outline a Christian conception of Life, 
 the object being to bring the fundamental ideas of 
 Christianity into touch with the common problems 
 and interests of work-a-day folk. If we deal with 
 life under the two comprehensive headings of work 
 and leisure, we shall not need to leave out much 
 that matters ; though the treatment can only be 
 exceedingly summary in the space available. All 
 that is possible is a mention of some outstanding 
 points in the common conception of life that 
 raise a barrier to the understanding of the Christian 
 conception, and thus prevent the acceptance of 
 the Gospel. For example, if it be thought that 
 business life is bound to be lived on a lower plane 
 than that required by the teaching of Jesus, the 
 door of many minds is shut at once against Christi¬ 
 anity. Or, again, if play be thought of as essentially 
 a frivolous matter from the spiritual standpoint, 
 youth is set at once in opposition to the things of 
 the spirit. We shall expound the Christian con¬ 
 ception of life no more than is necessary to counter 
 views like these which inhibit the understanding 
 and acceptance of the Gospel at the outset : not 
 attempting a treatment full enough to supply working 
 
 61 
 
62 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 guidance for Christian conduct in special cases. 
 We want a view of work and play which satisfies 
 the instincts of the Christian as right and good, 
 whilst at the same time it satisfies the instincts of 
 the practical man as sound and practical. 
 
 Of the two subjects, work and leisure, leisure 
 might seem to be the more suitable to begin with, 
 as being the more interesting of the two for the 
 majority, and, therefore, the best point of contact 
 for the discussion of life’s values ; but the uses of 
 leisure are so bound up with the results of work 
 that it will be better to consider first the Christian 
 conception of work. 
 
 Let us begin by asserting roundly that Christ 
 would have the business life of every man made as 
 truly God’s business as was His own, when He said, 
 “ Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s 
 business ? ” In all his working life, a clerk or 
 artisan is to seek first the Kingdom of God, just as 
 surely and truly as is a missionary or hospital 
 nurse. The line is still drawn firmly between the 
 sacred and the secular in popular thought, in spite 
 of all the rhetoric of Christian preachers—and it 
 will continue to be so drawn until it is erased from 
 the chart of life just at the point where it is drawn 
 between business and religion. To bring this to 
 pass we must take our stand firmly on the ground 
 that those who are ministering truly to the welfare 
 of human life on its material side are doing work 
 which is as essential to the Kingdom of God upon 
 earth as that of those who are ministering directly 
 to men’s minds and spirits. This view is based 
 upon the manifest concern of Jesus Himself for the 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 63 
 
 welfare of the material life, His ministry to the 
 needs of the human body, His conjunction of 
 physical and spiritual well-being in His own action. 
 From this alone we can be confident that all work 
 which is truly adding to the fulness and wholesome¬ 
 ness of human life on its physical side is work for 
 the Kingdom, having its own intrinsic value on 
 the spiritual plane. 
 
 We are thus led on to ground where innumerable 
 questions may arise as to the particular value of 
 this or that method or product of business life to the 
 real welfare of the world—material and spiritual. 
 We can attempt no more than to lay down broad 
 principles without application except in very few 
 points by way of illustration. What we are looking 
 for is a set of standards which will judge whether a 
 given line of business action is right and good, at 
 once from a practical and from a religious stand¬ 
 point. We are trying to judge all work by the 
 standard of its intrinsic worth to human life,—not 
 separating the physical from the spiritual,—rein¬ 
 forcing our common practical standards by the 
 absolute standards of religion. Doing so we shall 
 find at least the following five points of general 
 importance, the first two relating to the work in 
 itself and the rest concerning the relations between 
 the persons involved in the work. 
 
 I. The Standards of Good Work 
 
 In the first place, the work of a Christian must 
 have real social usefulness , directly or indirectly, and 
 he must be persuaded that it has, and find inspiration 
 
64 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 for energetic and efficient effort in so thinking. 
 “ What are you doing ? ” said a visitor to a man 
 working in a stoneyard in New York. “ Earning 
 five dollars a day,” was the reply. “ What are 
 you doing ? ” said the visitor to the next man in 
 the stoneyard. “ Making these stones square,” 
 w T as the reply. “ What are you doing ? ” said the 
 visitor to the third man. “ Helping to build a 
 cathedral,” said he. Each man of the three tvas 
 doing all these things, but different things were 
 uppermost in their minds. In a Christian con¬ 
 ception of work the prominent thing will be the 
 quality of the service rendered, the value that some 
 one shall find in the thing that is being done. 
 
 Such an idea of service is easier in some trades 
 than in others. Those who grow food, make 
 clothes, build houses, should easily take hold of it. 
 In many cases processes are so divided that some 
 imagination is needed to realise the service rendered. 
 Yet a man who only tacks on the sole of a boot 
 must realise that it is to the making of boots he is 
 contributing, and there can be few processes in 
 which it would not be possible to discover the value 
 of the thing made. Workers on railways and 
 telegraph systems may and do feel the essential 
 value of their work. Rough work like that of 
 mining and scavenging inspires the same sense of 
 public service in some people. But makers of beer 
 and dispensers of spirits may have to ask themselves 
 whether the good or the evil predominates in the 
 use to which they minister. Brokers who encourage 
 their clients to trade in “ margins,” organisers of 
 public gambles and lotteries, and all procurers for 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 65 
 
 the baser passions of men will hardly attempt to 
 justify their occupations by the criterion of public 
 usefulness. 
 
 There are, of course, many things which a worker 
 may be asked to do which directly diminish the 
 value of his services to the public. It helps no one 
 to saturate skins with water before they are weighed 
 for sale. It is humiliating to be engaged in adulter¬ 
 ating useful goods or crying up the value of poor 
 ones. The tricks of trade wfill raise in manv a 
 man’s mind difficult questions as to where he should 
 draw the line or how far his responsibility runs. 
 This is not the place to propound typical cases for 
 conscientious decision. But things w r ill never be 
 rightly decided unless there is first in each man’s 
 mind a positive ideal of service, so that he will not 
 tolerate giving his life to work wffiich is not, on the 
 whole, of real and substantial public benefit. 
 
 In the second place, the work of a Christian man 
 should he a medium for his true self-expression and a 
 source of joy to him. He must put into his work as 
 much of himself as the nature of his work allows, 
 and in doing so he will find joy in it. If there is 
 in it any opening whatever for the exercise of in¬ 
 telligence, artistry, distinction of touch or creative 
 originality of any kind, he must take advantage ot 
 it. His nature being spiritual, he ought to be 
 discontented to do anvthing that does not admit 
 some real expression of his intelligence and his 
 goodwill. At the least he can work with concentra¬ 
 tion, zest, and energy ; and though the routine and 
 repetition character of much modern industry makes 
 any real originality difficult, yet there is more room 
 
 F 
 
66 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 for this than many suppose, and it is essential to 
 seize all the opportunities there are. Only by doing 
 so can the work of the world be lifted to a spiritual 
 plane. When work is done without keenness, 
 character suffers. It is deteriorating to slack ; for 
 it robs the slacker both of his own personal vigour, 
 and of his sense of doing his best for his fellows. 
 If (as is alleged) the conditions of modern industry 
 make it unsportsmanlike for some of the best 
 workers to work as fast as they easily can, lest they 
 set a pace which their fellows cannot follow, the 
 permanent remedy for it cannot be mere slacking, 
 for that redaces both the worker’s vitality and the 
 world’s material and moral wealth. 
 
 There are, of course, a host of trivial and 
 monotonous occupations in industry and business 
 into which it is not easy to put a great deal of 
 personality. But it may yet be possible to put a 
 little. We must not overlook the possibility of 
 putting skill and care and spiritual feeling into the 
 doing of the simplest acts. There is opportunity 
 enough for a real expression of character in the 
 handwriting in which ledgers are kept, in the finish 
 with which a nail is driven home, in the cleaning 
 and tidying of a home. Few people can have 
 occupations which call out their capacities to the 
 full, or duties which do not irk and cramp them at 
 some points. Few, on the other hand, can have 
 occupations to which they cannot bring some 
 standard and some finish beyond what is demanded 
 in their bond, and it is this that makes their work 
 an expression of the spirit and an offering to the 
 glory of God. 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 67 
 
 Along such lines it becomes possible to find in 
 work of the most prosaic kind a source of real joy. 
 Many have testified to the entire change which has 
 come over them when they have found a new 
 mental adjustment to their work, affecting their 
 attitude of spirit toward it. Without any change 
 in the work, some change in themselves has turned 
 it from a weariness of the flesh to a delightful game ; 
 and even when the work remains in itself uncon¬ 
 genial, it may be possible to find in it an opportunity 
 to perfect some gift of patience or perseverance 
 or ingenuity which one wishes to acquire and can 
 learn to regard as worth the pain and trouble 
 of the process by which it is gained. Certain 
 it is that a very great deal of the discomfort and 
 distress which many now feel in their work would 
 pass away if they could turn themselves about and 
 take a different view of it. Certain also is it that 
 many have found in their religion a means of so 
 turning themselves about as to find pleasure in 
 drudgery of every kind.* 
 
 It is indeed an essential quality of the Christian 
 life that it should find pleasure in all that it does. 
 The creative joy that is felt by all true craftsmen 
 in work well done, whether the work be manual or 
 mental, is easy enough to understand. In it a man 
 positively shares the joy of God the Creator : he 
 is indeed continuing the Creator’s work and his joy 
 is the sign and seal of it. There is also an imported 
 joy when uncongenial tasks are done for some one 
 else’s sake—for the service of the city or the mainte¬ 
 nance of “ weans and wife.” If there is not a way 
 
 * Cf. the well-known tract Blessed be Drudgery . 
 
68 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 of looking at a job that enables one to throw 
 oneself into it with some satisfying purpose, then 
 one should, if a Christian, take steps to get out of it. 
 For joy is the mark of the Christian life. Clear 
 witness to the possibility of enjoying humdrum 
 routine is a thing which the world needs greatly, 
 and some give it with good effect. There are many 
 who would be a long step nearer to believing in 
 Christianity if they could only have as their working 
 companions people who had learned to enjoy their 
 work. Only by the contagion of such examples 
 will the world be won for Christianity and qualified 
 to depend less upon the present hateful spur of 
 mere competition to call forth its labour. And in 
 proportion as this happens, the conditions of work 
 will themselves be changed and made more favour¬ 
 able to the expression of creative joy. 
 
 II. The Personal Relations Work brings 
 
 Turning now from the w T ork itself to the relations 
 in wdiich it places us to other people, we have to 
 notice, firstly, the opportunity work affords for 
 personal contact with individuals. The Christian 
 principle here is plain and well understood. To all 
 our fellow-workers we are bound as Christians to be 
 brotherly. We are bound to be interested in them, 
 to cultivate their society, to enter into their interests, 
 to protect them if they need protection, socially or 
 morally. We must share with them anything we 
 possess and value that can be shared, and especially 
 should we share with them an attitude to our work 
 which is invigorating, energising, inspiring, and 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 69 
 
 conducive to the religious life. In a word, we have 
 to be good fellows to our fellow workers, and that 
 in spite of all the difficulties which incompati¬ 
 bilities of temperament and ideal will produce. To 
 the non-religious this will not seem possible unless 
 they are temperamentally sociable ; but the Gospel 
 offers a new nature to those who accept it, a nature 
 full of the spirit and temper of goodwill, together 
 with a constantly renewed supply of spiritual 
 energy to restore again the frayed edges of good 
 temper when it has been ragged and torn. Con¬ 
 stancy and cheerfulness are recognised to be the 
 staple ingredients of good fellowship without which 
 it can hardly maintain its name and reputation. 
 
 In some working environments, it is something 
 to be able to bear the shocks and buffets of social 
 intercourse without loss of temper. But an active 
 goodwill would go further than that and work 
 constructively to build up a happier and more 
 healthy social life. For this end testimony is borne 
 to the value of cultivating social fellowship with 
 one ? s work-fellows in leisure hours : it humanises 
 working relationships, and engenders readier sym¬ 
 pathies. Another duty of goodwill is the protec¬ 
 tion, wherever opportunities offer, of those who 
 are morally weak against those who are morally 
 corrupting, a duty which may arise in numberless 
 instances in office and factory life, in such matters 
 as sw r eepstakes, enforced drinking, and undesirable 
 conversation. 
 
 It belongs also to the duty of Christian goodwill 
 to take a hand in trade-union activities, seeing that 
 these are the accepted constitutional means of 
 
70 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 working for better conditions in industry, and one’s 
 duty to make one’s neighbour’s life as satisfying as 
 possible cannot be fulfilled if this means of influence 
 is neglected. Each of us is called to try to improve 
 the conditions under which our fellows work, if 
 they are ill-considered or unsatisfactory; the 
 quality of the work they are expected to do, if it is 
 degrading ; the pay they receive, if it is unjust. 
 We are our brother’s keepers to see that they are 
 not put under too great a strain, either physical, 
 mental, or moral; to guard the weak and un¬ 
 developed against too great fatigue or monotony 
 in their work, or against work so mechanical that it 
 contains no educative element, or so shoddy and 
 second-rate in type that it is positively demoral¬ 
 izing ; against a social environment which is 
 morally corroding. This responsibility need not 
 turn a Christian into a busybody or a prig, though 
 sometimes it has done so. We are not, in the first 
 instance, called to press our moral and religious 
 principles upon the attention of other people, 
 though there may be times when it would be weak 
 and cowardly not to express them. Undoubtedly, 
 however, the first duty is to function happily in the 
 social life of one’s work-fellows. 
 
 In the next place, through our work, we are all 
 personally related, not only with our immediate 
 work-fellows, but with a vast unknown public who 
 benefit, or it may be suffer, from our labour. Jo 
 this wider public also we are bound as Christians 
 always to behave as good neighbours . We have a 
 duty to them which is not fulfilled by simple sub¬ 
 servience to the law of the market. We nave to 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 71 
 
 manifest our intelligent control of the blind 
 machinery of supply and demand, by a direct 
 exercise of goodwill in deciding how far we are 
 willing to benefit individually, or as a trade group, 
 by the ups and downs of commercial fortune. In 
 this both those who hold positions of control in 
 industry and commerce, and those who occupy 
 subordinate posts, will no doubt be confronted with 
 many challenging conditions. For instance, one 
 realises that there are endless complexities in the 
 finance of big businesses which make all moral 
 principles difficult to apply. But this at least can 
 be said with confidence, that the problem of the 
 right distribution of wealth will not be solved till 
 Christian men and women will always regard them¬ 
 selves as being in friendly partnership with the 
 public, from whom they will be no more desirous 
 of taking the lion’s share of the benefit of their 
 work than they would of making a corner in fruit 
 at a banquet. This refusal to regard any persons 
 whose lives we touch indirectly as other than 
 friends is essential to our acquiring the spirit which 
 will inspire the solution of our own part of the 
 social problem. The principle of service wall also 
 put a limit upon the amount that any man with 
 a social conscience will wish to take as the reward 
 for his own work. He wall look sharply at high 
 profits, and values due to the adventitious advan¬ 
 tages of monopoly. He will not wish to create a 
 situation in which his profit is secured by the ruin 
 of other men, and will do much to avoid such 
 contingencies. 
 
 And, lastly, we are bound as Christians to work 
 
72 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 towards the transformation of our present industrial 
 processes and business arrangements . We want to 
 create a more Christian system, so conducted that 
 the co-operation of man with man wffiich it entails 
 is friendly and congenial and helpful to all con¬ 
 cerned. We want methods of work and organisa¬ 
 tion that are better calculated to exercise and 
 develop the many-sided personalities which they 
 employ, more stimulating to the joy of work and 
 to the friendliness of fellow workers, and more 
 successful in distributing the wealth of the world 
 widely to all who can benefit by it. This is the last 
 and hardest part of the task of fellowship in the 
 world of work. 
 
 We are not forgetting the difficulties of realising 
 this ideal. Beyond the basal difficulty of wresting 
 all we want from nature, there is the difficulty of 
 overcoming the conflict of interests which arise 
 between man and man. These difficulties as we 
 know have given rise to traditional inequalities, 
 traditional injustices, traditional feuds between 
 rival groups in the community. There are all kinds 
 of sources of misunderstanding and conflict both in 
 the control of industry and the distribution of its 
 gains. The organisation of industry and commerce 
 cannot be exactly what it would be if every one 
 were industrious and every one as eager for the 
 rights of others as for his own. Industry would not 
 be inspired, it would only be exploded, if produc¬ 
 tivity and discipline were sacrificed to a sentimental 
 and doctrinaire view of the way in which we should 
 treat one another. An empioyer who has to con¬ 
 sider his markets has only to a very small extent 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 73 
 
 a free hand in fixing the conditions which he offers 
 to his employees, and they in their turn must be 
 governed in their dealings with him, not only by 
 the personal goodwill they may feel towards him, 
 but by the loyalties they owe to their fellow workers 
 in their own and other trades. We should not for 
 one moment minimise the difficulties of the position. 
 Few people of goodwill will be able to realise any¬ 
 thing like their ideal of fellowship in their dealings 
 with one another in the business world, or in the 
 professional world. 
 
 And yet the necessary condition of Jovalty to a 
 Christian ideal of life is a wholehearted attempt to 
 put all business relations on to a footing of real 
 goodwill, of mutual understanding, of friendly 
 give and take,—a sharing in the benefits and 
 responsibilities of the common enterprise, approxi¬ 
 mating more and more toward equality as better 
 and better means are found for developing the 
 capacities of all involved. Seek ye first the 
 Kingdom of God means in commerce and industry, 
 that fellowship is placed in the forefront of a man’s 
 practical business aims. And so far as a man is 
 responsive to this ideal, he becomes a co-worker 
 with God and a vehicle of the Spirit in the w r orld 
 process by which God is evolving a social common¬ 
 wealth upon the earth. He will have “ experience ” 
 of God in the progressive discovery of himself as 
 a means by which the Spirit of God brings increasing 
 goodness into the working world. The higher a 
 man estimates the openness of his own personality 
 to the influence of the Spirit of God, the more will 
 he be impelled to encourage and expect his fellows 
 
74 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 to respond to higher motives and appeals to their 
 better qualities. He will believe so deeply in the 
 fundamental qualities of human nature, that he 
 will reckon it a shame not to give men and women 
 everywhere a chance to develop from being merely 
 machines, kept at work by fear of starving, into free 
 persons working from interest in their work and the 
 will to do their best with the rest. He will keep 
 before him always the practical hope that both the 
 methods and the motives of the working world can 
 be made more worthy of human personality and 
 of God’s offer to inspire men to co-operate happily. 
 He will be prepared to work hard for that hope 
 and risk a great deal at times to give effect to it, 
 trusting a man sometimes for more than he has yet 
 proved himself worth, continuing to do good work 
 though some one else exploits it, sacrificing profits 
 rather than let honourable principles go by the 
 board. And in all this he will not be governed by 
 the conventional standards of the time, or worried 
 by the letter of even the Christian law, but will let 
 the Spirit of Christ lead him where it will. 
 
 III. The Crux of the Business 
 
 And here we face an almost overwhelming 
 difficulty. It is the fact that many find themselves 
 engaged in work which seems intrinsically so futile, 
 so repressive, so monotonous, so bound up with 
 malpractice, so unfriendly toward competitors, or 
 so embittered by the sense of injustice or exploita¬ 
 tion suffered by themselves, that it is difficult for 
 them to regard all this idealism as anything but 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 75 
 
 airy nonsense. We are brought here to a problem 
 which can only be resolved by Christ. We are 
 up against the inherent evil of this present life, and 
 the problem of the vexation and pain and defeat 
 which are an inevitable part of it, and we have to 
 seek the attitude of Jesus to all this evil and learn 
 to adopt it. Attempting to do so we find these two 
 principles which go down to the very heart of Christi¬ 
 anity, and which apply directly to our problem. 
 
 First of all, we have to recognise, as Jesus 
 recognised, that for the time being at least, evil 
 and suffering are here, and we have got to accept 
 them and bear them whilst at the same time we 
 lay hold of other elements in our experience wdiich 
 justify us in believing that the supreme and ultimate 
 fact of life is God’s love and Fatherhood. The 
 great life, and in the end, the happy life, is the life 
 which takes up its share, and more than its share, 
 of this pain and sorrow, refusing to be embittered 
 by it. This attitude to life is peculiarly that of 
 Christ, and it is only from Him that we can 
 acquire it. 
 
 On this view, work, even hard monotonous and 
 wearing work, with its conditions of fixity and 
 inexorable necessity, is not due entirely to the 
 selfishness of employers and possessors, or to the 
 particular cussedness of the present economic and 
 industrial system under which we work. The main 
 difficulty is at any rate partly due to the hard facts 
 of nature. When all is done that can be done to 
 prevent the oppression and exploitation of the 
 weak, there will still be much that is wearing and 
 hard and monotonous that cannot be eliminated 
 
76 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 from life. There will still be much that must be 
 borne. And apparently this is part of God’s 
 ordering. Nature is beautiful enough and generous 
 enough, but it has elements of intractability and 
 ugliness that test our wills and our ideals to the 
 uttermost. It may be that they are there in order 
 that the struggle with them shall make man finer 
 and nobler. At any rate, they are there, and it 
 would seem that Jesus quietly accepted them as 
 part of the unalterable factors of experience in 
 which we must simply acquiesce. His own acqui¬ 
 escence in these stern conditions of life led to no 
 kind of fatalism nor any steeling of the heart 
 toward sufferers, as we well know. But it remains 
 a fact that Jesus, who knew so much of the trouble 
 of the world and did so much to alleviate its suffer¬ 
 ing, never seemed oppressed by its existence. 
 
 We have an inkling here of the Christian’s 
 proper attitude to those hard facts of experience 
 which will remain while human skill and goodwill 
 are doing their best for the amelioration of the 
 conditions of working life. Are we as Christians to 
 resent these permanent irreducible hard conditions, 
 or such of them as we cannot in our own time 
 change ? Or shall we accept them as, here and now, 
 if not ultimately and ideally, God’s goodwill, in 
 which we may find our chance of peace and salva¬ 
 tion ? Is not this side of things included in Jesus’ 
 idea of the daily cross, which seems so integral a 
 thing in His experience and in the experience He 
 foretold for His disciples ? The thought can be 
 misrepresented, and misunderstood, but we ignore 
 what is true in it at our peril. Truth is truth, and 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 77 
 
 Jesus surely saw things in truer proportion than we 
 in our impatience are likely to do. Reconciliation 
 with the world, as God’s training-ground for us, 
 He seems to regard as a vital part of our reconcilia¬ 
 tion to God. As such it is tremendously important, 
 both for our peace of mind and for our effectiveness. 
 
 And, secondly, when this reconciliation with our 
 experience is effected on Jesus’ lines, the result is not, 
 as has been said, a stoical indifference to evil or 
 passive sufferance of it. If we take the attitude 
 of Jesus, we do not find ourselves inclined, as it 
 were, to take evil lying down. On the contrary, 
 we find ourselves in a position of new power over 
 our circumstances. Having escaped from the 
 captivity of our spirits, we often (though not always) 
 discover that we can escape also from the captivity 
 to circumstances which gave rise to our spiritual 
 bondage. It is probably required of many people 
 to-day that, watching patiently for opportunities, 
 and then venturing largely on their faith in God, 
 they should refuse to acquiesce in their circum¬ 
 stances. They should have faith either to change 
 the conditions of their work, or to change their work 
 itself. Few people nowadays have a really effective 
 choice of occupation in their youth, though possibly 
 there should be many more who seriously question in 
 adult life whether or not they should go on with it. 
 
 It is not a mere counsel of perfection to say that 
 unless we can serve God’s purposes in our jobs we 
 should get out of them. In many situations we 
 may not be able to work as well and serviceably as 
 we might do if we could re-make the world of industry 
 to-morrow, and yet find opportunities which it 
 
78 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 would be foolish or cowardly to abandon. We may 
 know, if we will, whether or not we can continue in 
 such situations with the sense of God’s personal 
 commission to us to do so. And if we decide that 
 we ought to continue where we are, though many 
 things in our business life may still seem incongruous 
 with the Spirit of Christ we may proceed with 
 patience to eliminate them, and even make tem¬ 
 porary concessions to circumstances without com- 
 
 5 romising our inmost souls. If this be compromise, 
 esus compromised with Roman Imperialism and 
 the institution of slavery, in that He was content 
 to work within the system of life which they 
 established without directly attacking them, doing 
 so surely because there were other knots in the 
 social and moral life of the world which it was more 
 urgent that He should cut or disentangle. But if 
 this be not compromise, it leaves our spiritual 
 energies unimpaired and our hearts whole to work 
 by collective action, along both voluntary and 
 political lines, to eliminate from industry evils 
 which our isolated individual effort cannot touch. 
 Thereby we may have the spiritual satisfaction of 
 knowing that though our lives are given to work 
 which is not ideal in all its features, we are all the 
 time exerting ourselves to keep the boat-head of 
 industry and commerce facing in the right direction, 
 and ready to seize our opportunity for gaining here 
 a foot and there a yard. 
 
 We have now sketched briefly a conception of 
 work related closely to the actual conditions of 
 daily life, but yet shot through with the great life 
 principles of Jesus. It offers to every man engaged 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 79 
 
 in the world of business, a way of life in which 
 Christ in all things sets the standard, and for which 
 He also offers the motive power. If a man would 
 set his hand to his work along these lines, he would 
 not only be living what William James called “ a 
 significant life,” however inconspicuous and sub¬ 
 ordinate its place in the whole scheme of things, he 
 might be living all the day in communion with 
 Jesus in his work ; and his failures when they 
 came, would only drive him back more resolutely 
 upon Jesus again. The watchwords for such a life 
 arc the watchwords of good service, good workman¬ 
 ship, and good fellowship. 
 
 Along these lines lives busied with material pro¬ 
 duction and bound to the wheel of organised special¬ 
 isation, in shops and offices, would yet be charged 
 w r ith spiritual ideals, and directly fruitful in the 
 service of the Kingdom of God. In detail the 
 sketch may make mistakes and leave unanswered 
 questions, but in broad outline it can hardly be 
 questioned that here is a way of life which brings the 
 appeal of Christ close home to the working life of 
 the ordinary man. It calls him to repent, if in 
 anything his life is devoted to useless purposes, if 
 it is careless of quality, if it is mainly self-seeking, 
 or if it is embittered by irritation or spite. It 
 promises him increasing satisfaction in the develop¬ 
 ment of his own personality for the service of others, 
 and an increasing share in the transformation of 
 the social machinery of the world through the 
 magic talisman of goodwill—not indeed easily or 
 without effort and failure, but assuredly and 
 blessedly, on the honour of Jesus Christ. 
 
% 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 
 
 If work needed a spiritual interpretation, much 
 more so does leisure. Work has been treated by 
 moralists at least with seriousness, though not 
 always with spiritual sensitiveness ; but leisure is 
 a no-man’s land in the world’s thinking. To many, 
 leisure seems the sporting ground of all the devils 
 that duty and religion have to fear. The great 
 devils that destroy the moral foundations of life 
 and the little devils that filch away its finer fruits— 
 they are all supposed to find their opportunity when 
 the day’s work is done. The arch-devils love the 
 black darkness of midnight, but the little devils are 
 all over us as soon as it is dark in winter and in 
 summer long before the sun has set. And the little 
 devils at least have been allowed their right of way 
 in the leisure hours of the world, because no one has 
 claimed those hours for the fairies and the sprites. 
 When religious people have made inroads upon 
 leisure and claimed it for their uses, they have been 
 apt to come with too heavy a tread and so drive 
 away the fairies. They have not always recognised 
 the spiritual value of high spirits and lighthearted¬ 
 ness, and so have asked the world to make its 
 leisure too laborious. They have come with an 
 air too solemn, a philosophy too dark for the 
 
 80 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 81 
 
 occasions of festivity, and have sometimes un- 
 wittingly disheartened the attempts of men to shake 
 off the fetters which w T ork so easily fastens upon 
 men’s spirits. They have done so because they 
 lacked a spiritual conception of the place of play in 
 life. Not having a complete philosophy of leisure 
 to offer, their philosophy of life has been prejudged 
 by this defect and disregarded, and the world has 
 gone on its way to enjoy its leisure according to its 
 own unguided judgment—letting the little devils 
 have their fling. 
 
 I. The Obvious Uses of Leisure 
 
 Some of the uses of leisure are, of course, well 
 enough understood. No one questions the need of 
 rest for minds which have been over-concentrated, 
 and for bodies which have been over-strained. The 
 value of physical exercise, relaxation, and change 
 of occupation are not doubted. On the physical 
 side, at least, we know where we are : the righteous, 
 and even the over-righteous, join with the rest of 
 the world in acclaiming these ends as necessary and 
 right. So far, so good, but it does not take us far 
 enough. It is not enough that our leisure hours 
 should be occupied in re-equipping mind and body 
 for their daily tasks. Leisure should be used for 
 wider purposes—for ends less tightly tied to the 
 wheels of work, and more delightful in themselves. 
 
 In our present social order, leisure is particularly 
 needed to provide compensation for the unsatis¬ 
 factoriness of working life, to ease faculties which 
 have been cramped and give scope to tastes which 
 
 G 
 
82 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 have been repressed in working hours. It is un¬ 
 fortunately true, as we have said already, that 
 working life does seriously cramp and starve the 
 natures of very many. Modern industrial organisa¬ 
 tion depends upon a degree of specialisation in work 
 which uses up one set of the worker’s faculties at 
 the expense of the rest. Our work is geared up to 
 the driving wheels of competition and mass pro¬ 
 duction. The pace is set for those who need to be 
 kept at it, lest they grow slack, and the standard of 
 work is set to the abilities of the less alert. Hence 
 work, as we know it, tends to dull the mind, and 
 blunt the taste, and fret the temper of those who are 
 not spiritually forearmed against these deadening 
 tendencies. We surely should not permanently 
 acquiesce in the degree of restriction which working 
 life now imposes on many, but meantime the restric¬ 
 tion exists and we have to meet its evil consequences. 
 Leisure should therefore make possible, by com¬ 
 pensation, a right recovery of the balance of human 
 nature so upset, and a right rebound from the 
 compulsion and cramping narrowness of work. 
 It should afford the opportunity for our giving free 
 expression to that creative deeper self which our 
 working conditions have repressed. 
 
 Hence the rebound of the majority, in their 
 leisure, into activities which give rein to their 
 desire for easy fellowship, excitement, colour, light, 
 and gaiety. But for certain elements in the work- 
 a-day environment of average people the rebound 
 would probably be instinctively wise, since our 
 natures know a good deal naturally of the best and 
 quickest way to the restoration of their normal 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 83 
 
 health. Under the provocation of office and factory- 
 routine human nature will, however, react some¬ 
 times into forms of play which confirm rather than 
 correct the evil bias given to it by work. The 
 rebound may then result in corrupting or weakening 
 excess. Naturally, a depraved taste may sometimes 
 crave for the wrong food, in games as well as in 
 victuals. Just as the victim of alcoholic habits 
 craves for more alcohol, so do the victims of noisy 
 factories and mind-deadening occupations crave 
 for rowdyism and mental idleness in their play. 
 But both the physical and the mental appetite can 
 be persuaded to accept well-chosen alternatives. 
 The worse the depravity, however, the better 
 chosen must be the alternative—and in this matter 
 of leisure we must, above all things, remember that 
 play to be play must be pleasurable. It must not 
 be too difficult, too much bound by rules, too much 
 like work in its demands for patience and restraint, 
 too much under authority and tutelage. If this 
 be kept in mind the rebound which must come from 
 the cramping conditions of working life may be 
 so directed that it satisfies unsatisfied cravings, 
 educates undeveloped faculties, and in every way 
 enlarges human personality and increases the joy 
 and energy of life. There are known games and 
 enjoyments adapted to most needs, and the right 
 kind of compensation may generally be found in 
 pleasurable forms. 
 
 Hence spring the need for guiding principles of 
 play and the duty of religious people to understand 
 ana apply them. Some well-meaning folk are 
 impatient because youth in general has too little 
 
84 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 taste for Bible-classes and improving lectures. They 
 would be surprised if they were told that this is a 
 pathological condition of mind needing rather to 
 be humoured than to be scolded, and due in some 
 cases to the working conditions they themselves 
 have helped to impose upon youth. But thus it 
 is, and therefore leisure must be filled, up to a 
 point at least, with truly congenial and delightful 
 play, appealing to the craving for light and colour, 
 amusement and entertainment, and the easy give 
 and take of irresponsible companionship. Forms of 
 play can be devised which will satisfy all these 
 initial requirements, and yet exercise the spirit 
 in the right directions, and it is congenial to the 
 happy spirit of Christ to devise them, and a primary 
 duty of Christians to do so. But first we need to 
 see what spiritual education and enrichment play 
 is ideally capable of achieving. We pass, then, to 
 consider some of the higher uses of leisure. 
 
 II. The Higher Uses of Leisure 
 
 Still keeping clearly in mind the idea that play 
 must be pleasurable, it is possible to suggest that 
 it may minister directly to many of the higher 
 interests of the spirit. Especially should it be of 
 use in stirring up the spiritual appetites which exist 
 in human nature for the giving of pleasure, for 
 seeing life as a whole, for wider knowledge, for the 
 appreciation of beauty, for some kind of artistic 
 self-expression, and for the enjoyment of good 
 comradeship. I will speak of all these things in 
 turn. 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 85 
 
 I. Of the giving of pleasure there is no need to 
 say very much. It is one of the disadvantages of 
 modern methods of work that they make it so hard 
 for the imagination to picture the uses to which 
 work ministers. And this deprives the workers of 
 one of the great incentives to effort, one of the 
 great natural sources of spiritual nourishment. 
 There is in every one a hunger of the spirit to 
 render personal service to others, to see the pleasure 
 it gives, and to reap the immediate reward of 
 gratitude. In so far as this hunger is starved in 
 work, it should be fed in play. The fun in all good 
 games is the fun of the whole game shared by all, 
 and not the fun which each gets out of his own 
 performance. The sense of doing other people good 
 is not in the foreground : but the joy of each 
 depends none the less upon the joy of all, and it is 
 the reaction between pleasure felt and pleasure 
 given which raises the pitch of pleasure to its proper 
 height. In young people, especially, the joy of 
 service, perhaps more often than not, should take 
 the form of pleasure shared among equals rather 
 than help given to the needy. If we want to avoid 
 self-consciousness in service, this is the form of 
 service to encourage, as through sharing games it 
 can be encouraged. The appeal of service most 
 fitted to win an entrance into the heart of youth and 
 capture a share of youth’s leisure for the expression 
 of brotherhood is surely to be found just here. If 
 it begins here lustily, it will not stop here ; for the 
 giving of pleasure begets the desire to give still 
 more, and in the end strengthens the will to give 
 when the giving is not pleasant but rather costly. 
 
86 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 And we shall not make the mistake of divorcing the 
 one kind of giving from the other. We do not of 
 course suggest that the playing of games inevitably 
 begets a generous and disinterested spirit. On 
 the contrary, we bear it in mind that the desire 
 to enjoy oneself has the other tendency also—the 
 tendency to selfishness. We all know the tennis 
 player who has no use for any opponent who cannot 
 give him an equal game ; and we have heard of golf- 
 widows and the like. The ideal of unselfishness 
 needs therefore to be made explicit whenever ideals 
 of play are presented. But this it is quite possible 
 to do. Indeed, a large ideal of unselfishness might 
 well be erected with play as the material it works 
 in, and builds with. Why may we not translate 
 the ideal of human brotherhood into terms of play ? 
 Why not give youth as part of its religious ideal the 
 aim of making good games universally possible in 
 every rank of society ? Why not attempt to break 
 down all social barriers by extending across them 
 the fraternity of good sport ? It might be that the 
 aim of obliterating all social barriers and sharing 
 the freedom of the world of play with members of 
 every rank of society would go a long way to give 
 the idea of the Kingdom of God upon earth a hold 
 upon youth’s imagination. Leagues of Nations to 
 overthrow war, and brave endeavours to eliminate 
 industrial strife are things for youth to dream about 
 and manhood to achieve, but the expression of 
 brotherhood in a League of Play—why should not 
 youth set out to achieve it to-morrow ? Here is 
 one facet at least of the Christian ideal of brother¬ 
 hood, one part of the Christian use of leisure. 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 87 
 
 2. It is sometimes doubted whether the spiritual 
 hunger for knowledge and the desire to see life as a 
 whole are universal or even general. Indeed, it is 
 commonly supposed that the taste for “ education ” 
 is a rare one, and those who most feel the praise¬ 
 worthiness of learning most often despair of making 
 it popular. And yet surely there is in most people 
 so deep and urgent a need of seeing life in perspective 
 that once it is met suitably, the need is confessed 
 and clamant. Granted that it is not generally 
 satisfied by schemes of education and systems of 
 philosophy, nevertheless it exists, and its existence 
 accounts for much of the aimlessness and restless¬ 
 ness which drive many to sensationalism in their 
 use of leisure. This need for a philosophy of life 
 is proved by the emotional satisfaction which comes 
 when it is found. Indeed, no human being can have 
 peace of mind till he can see his life aims clearly 
 envisaged and harmonised. We may grant that 
 the taste for a logical scheme of life is not universal, 
 and yet assert the existence of a real and genuine 
 craving to see life as a whole—as a thing of parts 
 and proportions, each having its values, and to¬ 
 gether satisfying an instinctive demand for unity. 
 
 Setting aside the desire for technical equipment 
 for one’s job—which is not a leisure appetite at all, 
 but only a tentacle stretched out from work to steal 
 from leisure’s golden hours—the desire for know¬ 
 ledge certainly is not popular. But then, how dull 
 is the diet of knowledge usually offered, how little 
 calculated to whet a jaded appetite ! The learned, 
 and those who offer instruction, are apt to set too 
 low a value upon facts and incidents, and much too 
 
88 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 high a value upon theories and systems of ideas. 
 There are those whose nature is satisfied with that 
 particular type of intellectual fare, but they are 
 a minority. They are a most useful section of 
 the community, for they have many of the innate 
 capacities for leadership. Moreover, their needs 
 are far too little regarded by the Churches’ bid for 
 the leisure time of their adherents. For the sake 
 of this minority there is need for systematic teaching 
 of no low grade, covering a wide field of subjects, 
 and showing how Christianity interprets and 
 unifies the whole world of living beings.* But in 
 the case of the majority, the hunger of the spirit 
 for a philosophy of life must rather be met by a 
 diet of separate stories and pictures and songs in 
 which lifers values are shown in action and not 
 described and correlated in cross-section. 
 
 If, then, leisure is to minister widely to youth’s 
 need for a true vision of life that makes its moral 
 principles attractive and sets them all aglow, and 
 if youth’s stagnant intellectual hunger is to be 
 stirred to activity, adapted means of education 
 must be found. The particular method of educa¬ 
 tion which seems to offer the greatest hope of 
 meeting the need of the moment is education 
 which includes a right appeal to the dramatic 
 sense. Along this line of approach it does seem 
 possible to open up to many the all but closed 
 world of music, literature, and art. Till they have 
 
 # See on this subject the report, entitled The Church as a 
 School of Christian Education. Price one shilling from the 
 Young People’s Department of the Congregational Union, 
 Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, E.C. 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 89 
 
 seen life as an ideal, and as a whole, dramatically, 
 the majority are hardly likely to want, or to be 
 able to profit by, the intellectual presentation of 
 its satisfying wholeness which appeals to the few. 
 
 3. And here some other of the different purposes 
 of leisure already named come into view. Among 
 these is the use of leisure to satisfy the spirit’s demand 
 for beauty, and provide it with some congenial form of 
 spiritual self-expression . In the arts of drama and 
 music, and to a lesser extent the arts of speech and 
 song, we most of us can find our opportunity for 
 spiritual self-expression and for beauty. In the 
 chapter which follows I shall deal particularly with 
 the spiritual appeal of beauty. Here I will only 
 anticipate that treatment by suggesting that 
 worship is hardly possible to those who do not 
 exercise the aesthetic side of their personalities, 
 whilst the pursuit of ideals is hardly possible to 
 those who do not first make their ideals real to 
 themselves in the realm of the imagination. We 
 can only worship if we have learned to contemplate 
 and admire. We can only live well when goodness 
 and nobility have fired our souls. And if the 
 practice of admiring goodness and discriminating 
 between better and best is to be acquired, is there 
 any more favourable medium for acquiring it than 
 through a w T ell-considered appeal to the dramatic 
 sense ? All the arts have in them the possibility 
 of educating the spirit, but the dramatic art has an 
 advantage over the others in its power to combine 
 them all. More will be said on this matter before 
 the chapter closes, meantime, one other of the uses 
 of leisure claims our notice. 
 
90 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 III. Comradeship in Leisure 
 
 4. A final feature of the value of leisure to the 
 life of the spirit is the opportunity which it affords 
 for comradeship and for education in comradeship . 
 As compared with work it brings us more into 
 association with people of temperaments congenial 
 to our own. We are thus enabled to learn, in an 
 easier medium, to exercise our faculty for friendship. 
 It is therefore important to work out the meaning 
 And demands of fellowship in terms of play . Having 
 laid it down as a principle that the acceptance of the 
 Lordship of Christ means not the repudiation of 
 play, or its fearfully guarded use, but the expression 
 in real hilarity of the spirit of joy which Christ 
 exemplified and enjoined, and having thus enlisted 
 play as an ally, instead of alienating it as a rival, 
 we may go on to lay down positive demands. 
 
 Thus we can urge that those games should be 
 cultivated which develop the team spirit, and the 
 sporting attitude to difficult tasks and personal 
 injuries,—not, for example, endorsing the Hindu 
 boy essayist’s impression of football as a bad game, 
 “ because if your opponent injures you in the game 
 you cannot sue him at law ! ” We can insist that 
 play should run into channels which will cause it, 
 whilst remaining play, to minister to the joys of 
 others. We can plead for those forms of recreation 
 which taken together will minister to every side of 
 our nature, including, for example, the intellectual 
 and artistic sides. We can ask that youth will put 
 its recreations under restraint when they tend to spoil 
 the sport of others, as in fast motor cycling, and to 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 91 
 
 forego altogether the forms of play which lead their 
 friends into temptation, as certain forms of dancing 
 tempt some to exhaust or over-stimulate themselves. 
 
 In these ways we can make the spirit of play a 
 handmaid to the spirit of human love and friend¬ 
 ship. And if we do this we can show, on a large 
 canvas and in bright colours that all comradeship, 
 even the comradeship which is engendered in the 
 byways of pleasure, is comradeship which can be 
 governed by ideals of the spirit. Our friendships 
 will always be second-rate and liable to corruption, 
 unless they are friendships in the pursuit of things 
 worth while in themselves; friendships indeed in 
 the quest of ideals. Friendship in play thus comes 
 to be an integral part of the Christian ideal of life 
 so soon as we realise that there is in Christianity a 
 spiritual ideal of hilarity and an obligation to find 
 ever more and more satisfying expressions of beauty 
 and joy. 
 
 And when the spiritual basis of play has been 
 thus affirmed we reach a conception of comradeship 
 that makes it not difficult to forearm youth against 
 the temptation to sacrifice the joys of the spirit to the 
 joys of the flesh in the wonderfully alluring relations 
 of sex. Let it be understood that all our instincts 
 for sense delight are in themselves natural, pure, 
 and capable of yielding divine beauty and satis¬ 
 faction. But let it also be made clear as the 
 condition of this that we remember always that we 
 and our friends are spiritual persons with many- 
 sided natures to satisfy, and eternity in which to 
 find our complete fulfilment, so that we must not 
 spoil the good gifts God has given us by carelessness 
 
92 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 of their proper use and limitation, or haste and 
 greediness in seizing more than is right. The full 
 fine flavour of joy is only possible to us if in our 
 pleasures we remember always God and our fellows. 
 If we do this our impulses for enjoyment will be 
 directed into channels where each will have its best 
 result, for they will have ceased to war with one 
 another. 
 
 Granted this ideal of leisure we may take the 
 instincts of young people for play and comradeship 
 as we find them, and train them to a Christian 
 expression in organised social groups. And this 
 we should do rather than set before them a picture 
 of leisure, staidly and usefully employed, which 
 we call Christian, and ask them to accept as part 
 of the yoke of Christ. The Boy Scout and Girl 
 Guide Movements illustrate the value of associating 
 boys and girls in social units which live together a 
 life of many-sided interest. This life may be made 
 so attractive in its variety of common occupations 
 that it is worth while for the individual to obey its 
 rules and live for its honour, and so the first 
 principles of self-surrender to the larger social unit 
 are acquired. The idea ought surely to be carried 
 further by the formation of many other types 
 of group, and especially those adapted to older 
 adolescents and young men and women. The aim 
 in each would be that common interests should lead 
 to common forms of happy, natural, self-expression, 
 tending always increasingly towards ideals of ser¬ 
 vice ; though the companionship would not be 
 founded exclusively upon these ideals. The move¬ 
 ments already spoken of would seem to show that 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 93 
 
 if you can associate boys and girls for the purpose 
 of doing things which it is a pleasure to do, and 
 keep uppermost all the time the idea that one must 
 play the game with one’s fellows, the life of the 
 group tends naturally to help its members to be 
 their best at work and play. With older groups 
 it should not be difficult to lead on to the idea of 
 mutual responsibility in moral struggles—and teach 
 that each must help his neighbours where he can. 
 The Regnal League has shown how strong a 
 comradeship can be based upon such loyalties as 
 these. 
 
 It is, of course, vital that all such groups should 
 have their true psychological unity. In the late 
 adolescent and junior adult periods of life, the 
 make-believe, adventure interest, which forms the 
 psychological basis of the Scout and Guide Move¬ 
 ment, has to give way to something different. 
 Perhaps the instinct for drama and dance is the key 
 to the psychological basis for the social grouping 
 of adolescence. Both these throw boys and girls 
 together and so afford the opportunity for an 
 education in a fellowship wffiich is no longer the 
 unisexual affair of earlier life. Here comes the 
 opportunity to unfold ideals of fellowship in which 
 the sense appeal of the physical is made the friend, 
 and not, as it may otherwise become, the foe, of a 
 bigger spiritual purpose. Fellowship in leisure is 
 thus associated first with the more primitive un¬ 
 moralised instincts for sense delight, and afterwards 
 with the attempt to give delightful expression (as 
 in drama) to developed moral ideals. From that it 
 w r ould be natural to lead on by stages to forms 
 
94 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 of social or political service adapted to maturer 
 groups, or to some harder educational activity 
 which they would take on for the sake of their 
 further equipment and fuller intercourse, or to some 
 sort of inter-class fellowship which would help 
 to counteract the class isolation of working life. 
 Provided the more elementary social instincts and 
 constructive energies of the group have been 
 enlisted first, this does not seem an unlikely or 
 unnatural process. 
 
 IV. Leisure and the Church 
 
 If these things are true they bear closely on the 
 work of the Church. If games and music, literature 
 and the drama, no less than Bible-classes and prayer- 
 meetings, can be made into the antechambers of 
 religion, the whole handling of leisure by some 
 Churches should undergo a change. In the main, 
 it seems, the Churches have divorced intellectual 
 culture from aesthetic culture, valuing the former 
 as “ spiritual ” and deprecating the other as 
 “ sensuous.” And while games and enjoyments 
 have been encouraged in the Church’s programme, 
 they have been valued chiefly for their indirect 
 importance—as harmless occupations for those 
 who might otherwise be worse employed ; or as a 
 means of discharging surplus energies which might 
 otherwise be hard to control; or even as baits to 
 the unwilling, or coating for the religious pill. 
 They have not been regarded as spiritual activities 
 befitting the leisure of mankind in general and 
 youth in particular, and so capable of providing the 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 95 
 
 medium for a progressive education in the things 
 of the spirit. 
 
 But if, as we think, the natural form of spiritual 
 expression, for youth especially, is in a many-sided 
 comradeship in play, it is the Church’s business in 
 some way or other to foster the comradeship of 
 good play, regarding it as one of its most important 
 points of contact with those not yet ready for all 
 that it has to teach them. By psychological and 
 spiritual necessity people make demands upon 
 religion according to their experience of life, and 
 since young people are in the main preoccupied 
 with the light side of life, the demand they make 
 upon religion is for enjoyment without alloy. 
 Granted that the deepest things in religion only 
 come home to the soul when it has tasted the bitter 
 things in life, to demand such depth of the young is 
 to ask them to be old before their time. Hence 
 the one irreplaceable point of contact of the Church 
 with youth is in the provision of facilities for the 
 natural expression of their high spirits, their 
 comradeship, and their love of beauty. 
 
 Whether the Church can use these means of 
 spiritual education and make them into real “ means 
 of grace ” will depend upon its regarding these 
 play activities as spiritual ends in themselves— 
 however partial and incomplete—and not mere 
 means to other spiritual ends from which they 
 are distinct in essence. The physical, social, and 
 aesthetic activities of young people are to be regarded 
 as an integral part, though not the whole, of their 
 true spiritual expression. Since they are a part of 
 the spiritual life, they should be claimed as such$ 
 
96 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 and since they are only a part they should not be 
 isolated from the other, deeper, and fuller expres¬ 
 sions of the spirit. And, for that to be the case, 
 Christianity needs in some way to be recognised as 
 the foster-mother of pure play. This means that 
 Christian leaders should promote and guide the 
 leisure activities of young people,—though whether 
 provision should be made separately for each in¬ 
 dividual Church, or group of Churches, or whether it 
 should be for the community of youth in general may 
 be an open question. But in either case the leader¬ 
 ship should be as far as possible in Christian hands, 
 in order to ensure that ends which are partial shall be 
 attained under the guidance of minds which see them 
 in the true perspective of human life as a whole. 
 
 Out of such true comradeship in the appropriate 
 spiritual interests of youth, there should naturally 
 spring (without any “ forcing ” and under steady 
 but unobtrusive leadership) the desire for further 
 self-fulfilment, and in particular for service and 
 abandonment to the highest. And this natural 
 awakening of deeper desires, whenever it may 
 occur, will provide the true spiritual opportunity 
 for an appeal for dedication to the fuller and more 
 inclusive ideals of life. But such development will 
 not be natural unless the leadership provided by the 
 Church is of those who are as sensitive to the 
 spiritual values of play as they are to those of 
 service, work, and worship. A good response will 
 be not only natural, but probable, if the leadership 
 in leisure is thus supplied by those who are sensitive 
 to spiritual values of all degrees. And when youth 
 does awaken in this way to the wider and deeper 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 97 
 
 purposes of life, and to the more strenuous tasks of 
 the Church, its loyalty to them will be all the 
 stronger as it reflects that the Church has all the 
 time been guiding its life and comradeship along a 
 true and satisfying line. 
 
 The question of the precise relation of the 
 Church as an institution to the recreative life of the 
 community lies outside the province of this book. 
 Some have proposed that it should be a part of the 
 united evangelistic activity of the Churches to 
 provide recreative clubs in sufficient variety and 
 numbers to meet the needs of all. Others might 
 wish to let the recreative life around them develop 
 under non-religious auspices, trusting to the in¬ 
 fluence of individuals inspired by the Churches to 
 throw in their lot with it and use it as a means of 
 moral and spiritual education. Others, again, will 
 feel unable to attempt to influence more than the 
 recreative life of their own immediate adherents. 
 The matter is one for discussion and experiment. 
 But in any case we must be prepared to allow great 
 freedom to youth—to choose and direct its own 
 course, and at the same time trust to the spiritual 
 influence of those whose religion makes them good 
 fellows, convinced sportsmen and genuine artists, 
 to see that though many things are done which 
 are inartistic and immature, an upward spiritual 
 tendency is felt through the whole. Without 
 attempting to settle this question of official relation¬ 
 ship, I return in conclusion to examine in more 
 detail the potentialities for spiritual education of a 
 form of recreation already frequently referred to, 
 namely the dramatic form. 
 
 H 
 
98 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 V. The Spiritual Potentialities of Drama 
 
 The dramatic method has recently been gaining 
 considerable prominence as a means of general 
 education. This point, among others, is of interest 
 to us, but it is not our chief point. It is with the 
 drama as a means of expressing the Christian spirit 
 and ideal and of illustrating the beauty of the 
 Christian motive and practice, and thus of stimu¬ 
 lating the Christian will and emotions that we are 
 specially concerned. In other words, we approach 
 the subject from the standpoint of the Christian 
 Gospel, and not merely from the standpoint of 
 moral culture. 
 
 Of the value of the dramatic method for kindling 
 imagination and arousing emotion, we need say 
 little. * Educators are suggesting that in some form 
 or other it is the supreme method for presenting 
 moral ideas, and that it is only by associating 
 literature and music and the arts of representation 
 with big moral ideas that you can fire the minds 
 of boys and girls with enthusiasm for goodness, 
 truth, and beauty. This point of view is argued 
 with good effect by Dr. Hayward and Arnold 
 Freeman in Fhe Spiritual Foundations of Recon¬ 
 struction. This book contains examples of the way 
 in which the principle may be applied in schools to 
 the dramatic presentation of the achievements of 
 great ideals. Thus, for example, Democracy, The 
 League of Nations, Shakespeare, and the Apostle 
 Paul, are successively made the subject of these 
 “ Celebrations,” as they are called. More of these 
 examples are given in Dr. Hayward’s volume of 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 99 
 
 School Celebrations, whilst the more general applica¬ 
 tion of the same ideas is made in Arnold Freeman’s 
 Education through Settlements . 
 
 These writers argue that the establishment of 
 such new celebrations as Empire Day (1907), St. 
 David’s Day (1915), Shakespeare Day (1916), marks 
 not only a new departure in education, but is an 
 admission that the ideas with which these celebra¬ 
 tions are concerned were not in fact being taught 
 effectively in Scripture lessons, or by other forms of 
 class instruction. The same failure is implied in 
 the demand that is made by various societies for 
 special teaching to be given regarding, for example, 
 temperance, gambling, thrift, peace, eugenics, kind¬ 
 ness to animals, etc. The writers, indeed, afhrm 
 that the right attitude to such subjects cannot be 
 taught by the ordinary school methods. It is not 
 so much to be learned as imbibed. What is needful, 
 and what is aimed at in their proposal, is that great 
 moral ideas should not be “ mere ideas,” cold, 
 verbal, and isolated, but that they should come into 
 the mind with a certain momentum or background, 
 with a certain massiveness and atmosphere. They 
 ask, therefore, that the class teaching of the Bible, 
 of literature, of music, history, and certain other 
 subjects, should be largely abolished in favour of a 
 liturgical, ceremonial, or celebrational treatment, 
 which they hold to be more emotionally effective than 
 mere instruction. Incidentally they hold that “ great 
 art ” would bridge the gap between the traditional 
 and ineffective methods of the Church when it in¬ 
 vades the School with its religious instruction, and 
 the bare and unimpressive proposals of the secularist. 
 
100 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 Dramatic work calls for consideration first 
 because of its value to the performers. For them 
 it is an exercise in memory work, in promptitude, 
 in accurate observation, in self-subordination to a 
 purpose, in good team work. This in itself is a 
 good deal. There is also training in the power to 
 put oneself in another’s place, and see things from 
 another’s point of view ; and since identification is 
 essential to true sympathy with others, drama may 
 thus have a big contribution to make to religious 
 training. But there is still more than that. There 
 is aesthetic as well as moral training—the training 
 in the beauty of the fitting phrase or gesture, the 
 telling costume, or general scenic effect; the training 
 in appreciation of emotional emphasis and restraint. 
 Emerson has declared that when the aesthetic sense 
 is debased, the moral sense is usually debased also, 
 and William McDougall also in his Social Psychology 
 asserts that the aesthetic appreciation of fine 
 character is a necessary part of its appeal. If 
 these things are so, it would seem that the religious 
 sense of many has been cut from some of its roots 
 by their lack of aesthetic education. 
 
 Moreover, a good play should have the same 
 value for intelligent and attentive spectators on 
 the one hand as for efficient and conscientious per¬ 
 formers on the other. The performers are con¬ 
 sciously, corporately, and actively striving to bring 
 out the meaning of the play. The spectators are 
 endeavouring to appreciate, though more passively, 
 that same central idea, and emotionally to share in 
 it ; and thus players and spectators are united in a 
 fellowship of thought and emotion. Christianity 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE ioi 
 
 lends itself to such dramatic treatment since it 
 appeared as a life lived before it became a set of 
 ideas preached. It is a way of life—the incarnation 
 of a divine spirit. It is, therefore, in its very quality 
 dramatic, and can only be adequately expressed in 
 the action of life, that is drama. It is best recom¬ 
 mended by being shown and seen. Undoubtedly, if 
 an idea can be expressed in dramatic form it will 
 both secure a much bigger audience and make a 
 much deeper impression than if it is presented in 
 abstract terms in lecture, book, or sermon. The 
 question is how far the specific Christian message 
 can be presented dramatically. Would it be 
 possible, for example, to hold a dramatic evangel¬ 
 istic mission ? If it would, it would incidentally 
 enable at least twice as many people as now 
 to take part in public evangelism. We have Ober- 
 ammergau and the Bethlehem Tableaux to suggest 
 possibilities. 
 
 In the Middle Ages, plays were written by 
 priests and acted by their flock in their Churches. 
 The drama was a normal and recognised vehicle of 
 Christian teaching and culture. It was used to 
 illustrate Christian character—to show sins and 
 virtues in action and consequence both in this 
 world and the next. The dramatists at length 
 resented the limitations imposed on their art by 
 the narrow range of subjects provided by the 
 Church and the Bible, and interested themselves 
 with the wider range provided by the common life 
 about them and the historical records to which 
 they had recourse. The breakaway from ecclesi¬ 
 astical control was all to the good, but that is no 
 
102 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 reason why diama should not return to those 
 themes which once it portrayed so effectively to the 
 uneducated population of Tudor and Elizabethan 
 England. At the same time there are plenty of 
 modern plays which have made a success in the 
 ordinary theatre to prove to us the possibility of 
 expressing high ideals and Christian motives through 
 the drama without its being fettered to the older 
 themes. 
 
 One great objection to the whole procedure is, 
 of course, the traditional and still, in some circles, 
 fairly widespread prejudice among the older folk 
 who carry on the work of the Church against 
 dramatic activity of every kind. They fear that 
 we may simply encourage interest in a side of life 
 which usually tends to frivolity or worse, because 
 its associations are bad and its development un-ideal. 
 There are, however, some who think that the alleged 
 prejudice against the drama in the Churches is 
 exaggerated, and that the suspicion of the old- 
 fashioned would soon be dispelled by the production 
 of a few artistic Christian plays. Meantime, all 
 over the country, churches are going in for dramatic 
 art, though, unfortunately, for want of guiding 
 principles, most of them are doing silly farces, 
 vulgar and poor in every way. Nor is the trouble 
 confined to this country alone; only this week 
 there comes to my hand a cry of distress from a 
 Christian community in Madagascar embarrassed 
 by the dramatic propensities of its young people, 
 and without a clue to their wise direction. Even 
 where the dramatic method is held to be good in 
 itself, the suspicion fingers that it may not be right 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 103 
 
 to use it for the expression of the best and deepest 
 things in life. This perhaps points to a special 
 development of the dramatic method for Church 
 purposes, and it may be that Pageantry and the 
 “ Celebrations ” already referred to show the way 
 to this. In the Celebrations, music, painting, 
 literature, recitation, and song are all made use of ; 
 but very little action is employed. Such adapta¬ 
 tions of the drama may prove, if not the goal of 
 Christian dramatics, a useful half-way house. 
 
 The chief difficulty felt at the moment by those 
 who take a positive view of the spiritual possi¬ 
 bilities of the drama, is the dearth of plays that 
 are suitable. There is not much that is at the 
 same time good enough and simple enough for 
 amateur performers. The Adult School Movement, 
 30, Bloomsbury Street, W.C., publishes a setting of 
 Tolstoy’s Where Love is , God is. There are a number 
 of missionary plays and some mediaeval mystery 
 plays available, but there are those who think that 
 it would be a pity to cramp a modern Christian 
 drama with ancient conventionalities, that the 
 Church has already suffered too much from the 
 tyranny of mediaevalism, and that there is no need 
 to revert to the crudeness of the miracle and 
 morality plays for our material, the modern theatre 
 having already presented us with a more suitable 
 instrument for the purposes of a Christian dramatic 
 art, in the work of modern serious dramatists like 
 Jerome and Drinkwater, Galsworthy and Bernard 
 Shaw. Of this material Drinkwater’s Cromwell and 
 Lincoln are highly praised by those who have used 
 them for Church purposes, but there are proprietary 
 
io 4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 rights which may not be infringed. The adaptation 
 of some standard novels is also suggested, and The 
 Passing of the Third Floor Back may possibly be 
 commended in spite of its sentimentality and 
 obtrusive preachiness. From the point of view of 
 evangelism, the most urgent need is for plays that 
 will present the great Christian ideals and demands. 
 Galsworthy, it is thought, leaves out “ Redemp¬ 
 tion.” Shaw leaves out “ The Cross.” Drink- 
 water comes nearest, but he leaves out the Church ! 
 These men can write plays that preach on “ The 
 wages of sin is death,” or “ Be sure your sin will 
 find you out,” but something is wanted that will 
 grip the soul where they leave off. Mediaeval 
 mystery plays are not satisfactory for this purpose, 
 for they leave a sense of unreality that only confirms 
 indecision; and plays in which Bible narratives are 
 presented have, as a rule, a similar defect. We 
 still await the production of plays which embody 
 the full gospel appeal. 
 
 We have, meantime, a little testimony to the 
 revolutionary spiritual effect of such plays as we 
 have, and it is probable that much more could be 
 gathered. There can be little doubt that thousands 
 of young people in this country owe their interest 
 in the missionary enterprise primarily to their part 
 in some dramatic representation. The study of 
 the life and character of Livingstone by those who 
 were asked to personate him has, for example, 
 marked a spiritual crisis in more lives than one, 
 and the same may be said of the dramatic repre¬ 
 sentation of the story of The Mayflower. In many 
 instances some piece of service rendered in such 
 
CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 105 
 
 dramatic performances has been the first intro¬ 
 duction to the wider service of the Church. The 
 work of the Guild of Missionary Players and similar 
 bodies has in like manner done much to arouse the 
 interest of still larger bodies of spectators.* In the 
 view of those who have watched this matter most 
 closely, the method could be applied more widely 
 and for the most direct and personal of religious 
 appeals. The method which has been found so 
 useful in generating interest in foreign missions 
 and church history, might also be used in wise 
 hands, as an evangelistic means of winning men 
 to a personal faith in the Gospel of Christ. | 
 
 * Information about Missionary Plays can be obtained from 
 the Missionary Societies’ Headquarters; whilst information of a 
 more general kind might be sought from The Educational Settle¬ 
 ments Association, 30, Bloomsbury Street, W.C. 
 
 t The St. Martin’s Players, of St. Martin’s Church, Trafalgar 
 Square, have produced, I am told, a Pageant of the Spirit of 
 Christ. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 In the sketch just given of the Christian conception 
 of life, we have had to keep always in view three 
 quite distinct, though closely interwoven, sets 
 of relationships. Whether it be in Work or in 
 Leisure, the Christian has to perfect his relations 
 with God, with his fellows, and with the material 
 world. The Christian religion is peculiar among 
 all religions in the close connection it maintains 
 between the first and second groups of these 
 relations : to love God and not love our neighbour 
 is for Christianity unthinkable ; to show love to 
 our neighbour is, says Jesus, to show love to Him. 
 That is a Christian commonplace no one denies ; 
 and though few do justice to it, elaboration of the 
 point w T ould serve no useful purpose. It is merely 
 necessary to reaffirm it before passing on to another 
 point, complementary to this, and not to be taken 
 as diminishing its importance, viz., the connection 
 between our relations with God and our relations 
 with the material world. This, too, is of primary 
 importance, whether for work or leisure, and our 
 neglect of it may account for a good deal of our 
 failure to perfect our other relations with God and 
 man. 
 
 106 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 107 
 
 The average Christian who takes his religion 
 seriously is apt to have not very much religious 
 enthusiasm for perfecting the relations of his 
 business life. He may take these relations quite 
 “ religiously ” as we say, meaning painstakingly, 
 and may try to fulfil them honourably ; but his 
 pulse does not beat high with the thought of what 
 he may be able to accomplish for Christ in that 
 sphere. Whilst he will be ardent about the success 
 of his favourite missionary society, or the progress 
 of his Church, or the response of his Sunday 
 scholars to his teaching, his thoughts are cold and 
 grey when they turn to business. Though there 
 may be countless exceptions, this is probably the 
 rule. But why is this ? Is it not because in 
 business the Christian thinks he is in a world of 
 material values, and it is only the spiritual values 
 which are really interesting ? He does not really 
 think you can sell tea or cotton to the glory of God. 
 
 So, too, the average Christian who is earnest 
 and self-sacrificing may enjoy good music and fine 
 pictures, but he has doubts whether, for instance, his 
 enjoyment of good music ranks equal in spirituality 
 with his enjoyment of, say, good sermons. The 
 art and play side of life are necessary to the 
 weakness of mortal flesh, which cannot sustain a 
 high note for long at a time. They refresh the 
 body and the brain, but they are more likely to 
 entangle the spirit than to edify it. Many may 
 think this statement grossly exaggerated, and yet 
 they will probably find that enjoyment and religion 
 stand in the minds of the vast multitude of their 
 fellow countrymen as either opposed or indifferent 
 
io8 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 to one another ; and that the typical attitude of the 
 spokesmen of religion to such things as artists and 
 theatres is well calculated to create this popular 
 impression. Spirit and matter are conceived as 
 being normally at war. 
 
 To me it is simply unthinkable that industry will 
 be dominated by the Spirit of Christ until Christian 
 people come to believe that the handling of material 
 things is meant to be sacramental—everywhere and 
 always—and that in every action and transaction 
 in commerce and manufacture, just as in every jest 
 and every sport, whilst there is a way of doing the 
 thing that is just soporific to the spirit, and a way 
 that may be actually poisonous, there is certainly 
 a way that is strictly and literally to the glory of 
 God. Nor is it credible that our social life will 
 become friendly till social employments and enjoy¬ 
 ments are all valued as spiritual ends in themselves. 
 44 Whether you eat or whether you drink/ 5 says the 
 Apostle, 44 or whatsoever you do, in word or deed, 
 do all to the glory of God.” And, if you please, 
 the glory of God is not to be manifested simply by a 
 wise moderation in eating and drinking, but by a 
 true appreciation. God’s glory is to be found in 
 good victuals, not only because they are useful, but 
 because they are delightful. God’s bounty is 
 declared in the enjoyment which He has added to 
 what might otherwise be the tedious occupation 
 of bodily nourishment. Some one once expressed 
 surprise to the poet Tennyson on witnessing his 
 delight in a meal of roast beef and boiled potatoes. 
 44 All fine-natured men,” was his reply, 44 know 
 what is good to eat.” 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 109 
 
 The truth is that the life of the senses is either 
 sacramental or it is sensual, and if it is sensual, it 
 is not simply indifferent from the point of view of 
 religion, but positively degrading. Unless we dis¬ 
 cern the glory of God in eating and drinking, in 
 working and playing, we eat and drink damnation 
 to ourselves. We work and play ourselves into the 
 hands of the Devil, we become the bondservants 
 of sordid and cloying sense. And men do this 
 daily, in offices and factories, and in theatres and 
 music halls, while all the time they might in the 
 same places, and in much the same occupations, be 
 scaling the ascent of heaven. 
 
 I. The Eternal Significance of Beauty 
 
 How closely intertwined are the spiritual and 
 the material we may see if we consider the imagery 
 which religion employs. Christ is the Bread of 
 Life. The Church is His Body. The Spirit comes 
 to man as water to wash away his sins, fire to burn 
 up his dross, and flame to light his candle. Much 
 also of the language of religion is the language of 
 love, which again is a language based upon physical 
 attractions and emotions, within which the things 
 of the spirit are discerned. It is not without 
 significance that the Church has been able to use 
 for its own adoration of Christ some of the sensuous 
 imagery of Solomon’s Song of Love. What is all 
 this but the recognition that all men’s sense ex¬ 
 periences are full of suggestions of an inner meaning. 
 Whilst he savours them with his physical senses, 
 his spirit is fed also with some feast of meaning 
 
IIO WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 which transcends the world of sense. The purpose 
 of life is to discern these spiritual values in the 
 material world, and in the end to lay hold of them 
 so firmly that they are known and remembered 
 when their sense origin has been forgotten. Once 
 stored in memory they can be recaptured without 
 the original sense stimulus ; but the fact that they 
 all have their roots in the material world should 
 never be forgotten. 
 
 Now what there is in things which gives them 
 this higher value, it is difficult to tell. But it is no 
 less certain that there is in scents and scenes and 
 sounds some witchery that sets the spirit afire. 
 Training is needed to perceive these finer meanings, 
 and discipline and repose are needed to appreciate 
 them ; just as restraint and insight are needed by 
 the artist or musician who produces them. The 
 name we have for this quality of spiritual appeal is 
 beauty; but what beauty is no man can sayk It 
 is a sort of overplus in the value of things, an over¬ 
 tone in the music of life, which transports the 
 spirit out of itself, and out of its immediate surround¬ 
 ings. It is the up-welling of the joy which inheres 
 in all the created works of God and the awakening 
 of a kindred joy in those who appreciate them. 
 The ultimate attitude of the spirit to beauty is 
 therefore one of self-forgetting worship. This self- 
 forgetfulness is as much as to say “ Here is some¬ 
 thing for which it is worth while letting oneself go, 
 and losing oneself. Here is something that is 
 absolutely worth whiled’ And after all that is very 
 much akin to what the spirit says when it is 
 made aware of the presence of God ; for just as the 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 111 
 
 vision of God will heighten a man’s sense of 
 natural beauty, so the sense of beauty will make 
 him sensitive to the call of God for his spirit’s 
 devotion. 
 
 How near these things lie together is illustrated 
 again by our use of the word “ grace.” When a man’s 
 physical bearing or his moral behaviour reaches a 
 certain degree of finish, of charm, of beauty ; we 
 speak of their grace. Now, grace is the word which 
 we attach pre-eminently to that quality of the life 
 of Jesus which makes us long to be like Him, and it 
 is also the word we use to express that overflowing 
 bounty of God which produces in man incalculable 
 inflows of spiritual life. We have but to awake to 
 the beauty of things, and to believe that life is 
 meant for the discovery and reproduction of beauty, 
 because God is like that, and from every corner of 
 the world where beauty lurks, spiritual life and 
 energy come flooding in to our souls. 
 
 “ If any man would compel you to go with him 
 one mile, go with him twain,” said Jesus, in one of 
 those packed sentences into which He compressed 
 a whole philosophy of life and religion. In other 
 words, live for the overplus, the overflow, the 
 superfluous. Pay twenty shillings in the pound, 
 says morality, and you shall be a respected citizen of 
 this world. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, says 
 religion, you must abandon this worldly arithmetic 
 and give back always something more than you are 
 asked or paid for ; and that overplus will somehow 
 be in the coinage of beauty. There is no joy in 
 the morality of the market-place, no joy in exchange 
 which does not over-pay both sides, no joy in making 
 
112 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 things merely to serve their mundane purpose. 
 Joy comes when a finer finish, an added touch of 
 warmth or colour is given to our speakings or to 
 our doings—for the sake of love and beauty. 
 
 What a great deal of meaning also is packed into 
 that story of the alabaster box of ointment which a 
 woman took and broke over Jesus’ feet! Why this 
 waste, said the disciples, considering how it might 
 have been used for the relief of the poor ? It was 
 Judas who said this in the narrative, because he 
 kept the bag and was a thief; but there have been 
 many another since who was not a Judas, whom 
 the incident has puzzled. Why this expenditure 
 on cathedrals and organs and flowers when there 
 is lack of bread for the poor to eat ? The answer 
 that man does not live by bread alone is meant to 
 dethrone all merely utilitarian argument. There 
 is a certain point at which luxuries become more im¬ 
 portant than necessities : what is then wanted more 
 than physical nourishment is some sort of spiritual 
 enravishment. Life needs its full supply of the 
 experiences which make its senses thrill : and youth 
 needs them in abundance. As Clutton-Brock 
 has urged,* one reason why the sex romance of 
 adolescence exerts such an overwhelming power 
 over the youth of this country is that it is the 
 only romance they know. Their experience 
 of the linking of spirit and sense in acts of 
 romantic abandonment is confined to this one 
 instance, whereas their lives should be full of the 
 rapturous spiritual enjoyment of the things of 
 sense. 
 
 * In The Ultimate Belief, 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 113 
 
 Just how the immediate experience of beauty in 
 Nature and Art is related to the conscious personal 
 experience of God is not easy to define. It is sig¬ 
 nificant that the experience of God cannot entirely 
 express itself till it has made use of beauty. It 
 needs beauty of phrase and tone to convey it to 
 others. Prayer tends naturally towards poetic 
 expression ; it seems not only to demand richness 
 of phrase, but also to create its own rhythms. It is 
 not only the Anglican priest who intones the 
 prayers he uses in the congregation ; in the Free 
 Church prayer-meeting the extempore prayer of the 
 uneducated layman often becomes a kind of 
 rhythmic chant. Strike out all the poetry and the 
 melody which religion has created for its service, 
 forbid the impassioned rhetoric of the preacher, or 
 the pregnant symbolism of the religious rite, and 
 should we not make our denuded testimony im¬ 
 potent and false ? It is hard, indeed, to convey 
 our meaning to those to whom we speak of God 
 unless they have authentic experiences whereby to 
 interpret the only language in which God can be 
 adequately described—the language of beauty. 
 
 The experience of beauty is thus at least an 
 avenue to the experience of God, and an outcome 
 of it : is it that experience itself ? Surely it is an 
 experience of God Himself. It is an apprehension 
 of the spiritual goodness which lies behind and 
 inter-penetrates the material world. Granted that 
 the beauty we acclaim is really beautiful, the 
 recognition of its beauty is as much a discernment 
 of God as is the recognition of, say, a noble act that 
 has its source in Him. 
 
 1 
 
114 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 It is God’s glory that is revealed to us whenever 
 we find in any action or any experience something 
 so good that it sends our spirits soaring. Whether 
 it be the blue of a gentian, or the sound of a breeze, 
 or the passing of light over a cornfield, or a lithe 
 human figure, or a clean stroke in tennis, a gracious 
 salutation, or an heroic act—if it carries us out of 
 ourselves in wonder, or gratitude, or the desire to 
 share our joy, we have heard God’s voice. All 
 beauty has indeed its source in Him, just as truth 
 and goodness have. They are distinct and com¬ 
 plementary revelations of the one perfection, so 
 that if we recognise any of these things for what it 
 is. we are at least entering upon an experience of 
 God. 
 
 How full and satisfying such an experience will 
 be must always depend upon the degree to which 
 the spirit has made itself familiar with God in other 
 experiences. To know God is more than to have 
 a few isolated experiences of Him. To know God 
 is to have a whole network of experiences through 
 each of which some knowledge of Him has been 
 borne in upon the spirit through the senses, and 
 whose occurrence has made us aware of a Reality, a 
 Presence, a Person from whom they come. Till 
 we have learnt to ascribe some element in all our 
 experiences to a Father, we can hardly be said to 
 know God as Christians in any of them. And 
 when we have found God present in that way in 
 life, no isolated experience of His works will satisfy 
 us unless we can consciously recognise Him in and 
 through it. 
 
 There are, indeed, some who are at present 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT n$ 
 
 sensitive only to truth, or to beauty, or to moral 
 right, and their character tends to be cold or dreamy 
 or hard accordingly. There may be some who will 
 never be sensitive to the beauty of nature till their 
 aesthetic sense has been aroused by such a moral 
 experience as the experience of forgiveness. There 
 are some, again, who are sensitive to a divine appeal 
 in beauty who yet have not related this voice of 
 the divine to the voice of God they hear in conscience 
 —and their natures are distracted and enfeebled 
 because it is so. And there are others who have 
 felt the experience of nature’s beauty as a positive 
 pain because of their lack of faith in the goodness 
 of God’s purpose for mankind. They have no 
 vision of beauty in the divine ordering of human 
 life, no glimpse of the satisfying perfection of the 
 social purpose of God, and hence their experience 
 of beauty is as the sound of a voice that mocks the 
 passion of desire which it arouses in their souls. 
 To them the experience of beauty is not as yet 
 the experience of finding God : but maybe it is 
 part of the experience of God seeking them ; the 
 foretaste of an experience of a God who is truly 
 amazing and wonderful, but still terrible because 
 still untrusted and unknown. The experience of 
 beauty as an experience of God is only fully 
 possible to those who in some way or other have 
 experienced “ the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
 Hence, and in spite of all Christian Philistines, the 
 tremendous stimulus which Christianity has given 
 in history to the appreciation of nature and to 
 every form of art. 
 
ii6 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 II. The Present Neglect of Beauty 
 
 At the present day, however, beauty is at a 
 discount in the world, and morality and religion 
 are both impoverished in consequence. Whereas 
 the aim and sum of all morality should be to bring 
 mankind to appreciate and to share whatever in 
 life is in any sense lovely, morality has usually 
 concerned itself exclusively witn that which is 
 narrowly useful. Thereby it is given two un¬ 
 related functions, one being to supply the material 
 necessities of the world, and the other to minister 
 to its moral health. Thus the moralist divorced 
 from the artist loses sight of the middle section of 
 human duty which should unite the two, the. 
 ministry to the world’s hunger for pure enjoyment 
 and delight. Now, when this supremely important 
 segment of life is forgotten, religion is reduced to a 
 hard utilitarian morality. It is so at the present 
 day, when the idea of religion is far too frequently 
 associated with the horsehair and oatmeal porridge 
 idea of morality, and consequently is rejected. 
 Indeed, most men have actually come to think that 
 it is frivolous and idle to spend more time in com¬ 
 munion with God than is strictly necessary to keep 
 them in the paths of virtue. We think that we 
 must put so much energy into being good that in 
 this wicked world we have none to spare for being 
 merely religious. From this delusion we need to 
 be delivered by a refreshment of our sense of 
 aesthetic values. W 7 e must practise art for its 
 own sake and play for the sheer joy of it, or we 
 shall lose our sense of the right of religion to 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 117 
 
 be cultivated except for its moral utility, and 
 refuse to practise communion with God unless 
 morally it pays. 
 
 I have already suggested that no unqualified 
 certificate of religious approval can be given to 
 everything which claims to be artistic. It is possible 
 to mistake the grotesque for the beautiful and 
 appreciate that which we ought rather to spurn. 
 There are true and false values in aesthetic feeling. 
 There are aesthetic experiences which are in them¬ 
 selves essentially diabolical, disintegrating to person¬ 
 ality, destructive of the soul. They interpret and 
 rejoice in that which is essentially sinister and evil. 
 They apprehend, express, and communicate not 
 the good which is at the heart of reality, but the 
 evil which is bound up with it in this mixed stage 
 of being through which our souls pass for their 
 education. And that means that Christian educa¬ 
 tion in aesthetic values is of supreme importance. 
 As we judge aesthetic values, so we are likely to 
 judge moral and spiritual values. There is a curious 
 parallelism between the spheres of goodness, truth, 
 and beauty, so that although they are distinct and 
 separate spheres there is a sort of congruity between 
 what is good and bad in each. The same terms 
 can thus be used in criticism of a picture, a song, 
 a book, a religion, a character. And it is certainly 
 true that if we tolerate ugliness or lack of discipline, 
 coarseness, heaviness, or self-indulgence in art and 
 play, these will recur in religion and conduct. If 
 we are content with what is cheap and pretty and 
 easy in art, we shall be content with what is super¬ 
 ficial and taking in conduct. If we are content 
 
118 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 with what is merely sugary in music we shall incline 
 to the sentimental in religion.* 
 
 Another conclusion may now be added to those 
 already set down regarding the Christian con¬ 
 ception of work.f Carrying the idea of the duty of 
 good workmanship only a point further we may 
 now say that all work should aim not only at finish 
 and distinction, but ultimately at some real beauty. 
 It is not worthy of men and women to whom God 
 has given the capacity for creating and enjoying 
 beauty that it should be so little exercised in their 
 work and in their working surroundings. It is not 
 realised how seriously the neglect of beauty starves 
 the spiritual nature of man, reacts unfavourably 
 upon his morality, and drains away his energy. 
 Particularly to-day, when so much human power 
 is put into manufacture, the importance of beauty 
 needs emphasis. The cult of utility at the expense 
 of beauty is a direct blow at the ideal and spiritual 
 interests in life. It is a dangerous denial of the 
 spiritual purpose of the material world. It rele¬ 
 gates the spiritual too much to leisure time, making 
 it an extra, and probably a luxury. It is therefore 
 needful that we do something to recover our 
 standards of beauty in the production of articles 
 of use of every kind—clothes, houses, furniture, 
 streets, and public buildings ; everything indeed on 
 
 * This is the motive behind the present-day attempt to reform 
 Church music and, especially, hymn music. The Church Music 
 Society and many prominent musicians are identified with it, and 
 the new standards can be discerned in such productions as The 
 English Church Hymnal, In Hoc Signo, etc., while the hymn¬ 
 singing festivals conducted in various places are attempting to 
 popularise the movement. 
 
 t In Chapter IV. 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 119 
 
 which our minds tend to rest. By beauty we do 
 not, of course, mean mere prettiness, still less mere 
 ornament. Decorative effects are often gained at 
 the expense of beauty, and there is beauty often 
 enough in things which are severely plain : the 
 absolutely fitting thing is of itself beautiful. But 
 beauty must be sought sometimes for its own sake, 
 and not obtained always and only as a by-product. 
 
 We have, therefore, deliberately to fight the 
 ugliness and the racket and clamour of much of the 
 working life of to-day, on the ground that God loves 
 quiet and beauty. And because God loves finish 
 and delicacy in work, we must try to achieve these 
 qualities in our individual efforts and make their 
 pursuit more possible in the collective life of industry 
 and commerce, to the utmost of our power. If it 
 is indeed true that we may “ experience ” God in 
 the experience of beauty and the joy of successfully 
 beautiful achievement, then as religious people we 
 are bound to do so, and to make it possible for 
 others to do so wherever we can. The thought of 
 what we may thereby achieve is brought out in 
 less prosaic language in the following poem by 
 John Drinkwater :— 
 
 If all the carts were painted gay 
 And all the streets swept clean, 
 
 And all the children came to play 
 By hollyhocks, with green 
 Grasses to grow between; 
 
 r 
 
 If all the houses looked as though 
 Some heart were in their stones, 
 
 If all the people that we know 
 Were dressed in scarlet gowns. 
 
 With feathers in their crowns; 
 
i2o WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 I think this gaiety would make 
 A spiritual land, 
 
 I think that holiness would taka 
 This laughter by the hand, 
 
 Till both should understand. 
 
 We grant fully, however, the extreme difficulty 
 of realising any high standard of beauty in the 
 modern world of manufacture and business— 
 demoralised as it is both ethically and aesthetically, 
 because it is keyed up too hard to the note of 
 utility. Hence the enormous importance of using 
 play for the establishment of right scales of aesthetic 
 value, so as to make the taste for beauty pure and 
 strong enough to tell. In some amusements we 
 may find an appeal to self-indulgence and selfishness, 
 and an expression of the spirit of vanity and 
 derision of all that is good that are nothing short of 
 diabolical. While others will embody and express 
 a spirit of hilarity wholly attuned to the clear and 
 happy harmonies of the Gospel. A lesson of the 
 greatest importance in morals and religion may 
 be taught when boys and girls are given the 
 opportunity to experience the latter. To give such 
 opportunities to-day is a magnificent service, both 
 because of the ardour and energy which the youth 
 of to-day has available for its games, and because 
 of the great variety of good games and fine shows 
 now available. 
 
 In gauging the importance of this matter, we 
 are bound to remember how little scope the living 
 conditions of so many give them either for the 
 enjoyment of beauty or for the creation of it. 
 As we have said already, throughout the vigorous 
 hours of the best of their days, a great many people 
 
BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 121 
 
 are making things which are significant of no 
 generous thought or beautiful emotion. They go 
 home to surroundings which speak of little or no 
 divine loveliness, either inside their homes or 
 outside them. Despite the morally and spiritually 
 depressing tendencies of these occupations and 
 surroundings, they do indeed manage to preserve 
 and cultivate much beauty of feeling and action 
 in their dealings with each other, and in their 
 devotion to God ; but how much more exuberant 
 and lavish would be their exercise of virtue, how 
 much more completely attuned to goodness w T ould 
 be their spirits, if they could but enter more fully 
 and deeply into the true experiences of worth and 
 goodness in their play! 
 
 At the present day there is in the world so great 
 a craving for beauty that not to satisfy it would be 
 to do an almost irreparable injury to the spiritual 
 life of the world. Particularly are the young 
 seized and shaken by it. Experienced teachers tell 
 how great a change has come over their pupils in 
 this respect within a couple of decades. It may be 
 that it is in this direction particularly that the 
 modern spirit is hungry for God : and if this be 
 so, beauty must be one of the serious pursuits of 
 the present age, or religion will wither away. For 
 the world to-day, it is strictly and soberly speaking 
 a choice between the pursuit of beauty and the 
 decay of religion, a choice between Art and Atheism. 
 We must learn better to attend to the marvels 
 which God is daily showing in the fields and in the 
 sky, and to the beauty He has printed on the faces 
 and on the deeds of men, or we shall miss some part 
 
122 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 of the essential evidence of His Presence in our 
 life, and deny ourselves some sources of peace and 
 strength and gladness upon which we might other¬ 
 wise be drawing to meet the strain and fret of our 
 days. Equally, too, must we learn to emulate our 
 God in the production and multiplication of beauty, 
 or we shall not sufficiently realise what loveliness 
 is and what it costs to produce—and lacking that 
 essential knowledge shall not be quick to discern 
 how desirable and how worshipful is the grace of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, in His life and death and in 
 His calling to us to follow Him. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 RELIGIOUS DECISION AND RELIGIOUS GROWTH 
 
 I. The Rudiments of the Religious Spirit 
 
 And now let us see what conclusions our argument 
 will carry. We have been picturing the spiritual life 
 not as a life whose ideal was to edge away as far as 
 possible from the toil and the reward of material 
 activity, but one whose ideal was to wrest its 
 spiritual treasures from these very things. The 
 essence of the Christian life is not its mental conver¬ 
 sations with God in retirement, but its personal 
 co-operation with God in everyday action. Our 
 highest moments of spiritual meditation will not be 
 the poorer, but the richer by every experience of 
 effort and enjoyment we have had in our struggle 
 to make the most of the world which God has made 
 our home. The thought is familiar enough, at 
 least on one side. Christian teaching has always 
 taught men to look upon the discipline of life as 
 the means by which they can learn what moral and 
 spiritual values are eternal, and acquire such moral 
 and spiritual characters as will outlast the world. 
 It is, perhaps, a less familiar thought that the 
 delights of the world are equally charged with 
 revelations of spiritual value and equally potent for 
 
 123 
 
I2 4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 our spiritual education, and are not more fraught 
 with temptation and danger than is the discipline 
 of work and sorrow. 
 
 This brings the whole of the natural life, and no 
 mere fraction of it, into the realm of religion. The 
 religious life is the life that is responsive to the 
 appeal of the spiritual in everything, in a sonnet as 
 much as in a sermon, in a dance as well as in a duty. 
 The Christian life is the life that perceives these 
 spiritual values as Christ would perceive them and 
 reacts toward them as He would. The Christian 
 attitude toward the varied experiences of life is 
 therefore not one of suspicion, though it is one of 
 discrimination. Experience, grave or gay, is always 
 presenting opportunities for choice ; but the choice 
 is not between refusing the world’s gifts and accept¬ 
 ing them. The choice is between accepting them 
 sottishly and accepting them with a keen palate 
 for their finest flavours ; between accepting them 
 selfishly and accepting them socially; between 
 accepting them for the passing satisfaction of the 
 flesh, and accepting them as a sacrament of God’s 
 goodness. All experiences are capable of being 
 received with purely animal passion, or merely 
 vegetable passivity ; but all are capable of being 
 received with a quickening of the spirit which can 
 see them as symbols of the speech of God to our 
 spirits. The choice we have then to make, to be 
 religious, and especially to be Christian, is not the 
 choice of refraining from doing the things which 
 the natural man desires to do, but of doing them 
 with more refinement of perception, more pro¬ 
 portion between one activity and another, more 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 125 
 
 care to promote the enjoyments of our fellows, and 
 a more insatiable passion for the best. It is 
 necessary to grasp firmly this fundamental quality 
 of the religious life if we are to think clearly and 
 truly of the stages of religious growth. 
 
 The religious spirit is, then, the spirit wooed to 
 self-forgetfulness by the experience of things really 
 good, and inspired by their goodness to want to 
 copy them and to share them. Inasmuch, then, as 
 all perfection is summed up in God and revealed in 
 Christ, the religious spirit, in its perfection, is just 
 the love and worship of God in Christ. But this 
 is the sum and total of it, its final flower. In its 
 simplest essence it is just the disinterested desire 
 for perfection, the recognition of something so 
 absolutely worth while that one can forget oneself 
 in the desire to enjoy it, to imitate it, to assimilate 
 and re-embody it, to multiply it and pass it on. 
 There is very little content in the religion of a man 
 who can appreciate nothing but his religion. Who 
 wants the praise of a man who can only praise one 
 thing ? Who wants the adulation of the narrow¬ 
 minded, inexperienced, starved and pinched souls 
 who have, as it were, been nowhere and seen nothing 
 in God’s universe ? Does God glory in such 
 praise ? Surely the most religious spirit is the 
 spirit which can find in the most of God’s w’orks 
 their own distinctive worth and goodness. It will 
 not find less in the more complex and exacting of 
 life’s experiences from having found more in those 
 which are simple and elementary. 
 
 There are, indeed, degrees of good, things higher 
 and lower, things too juvenile for the grown man to 
 
126 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 linger over, successive choices to be made in which 
 we turn aside from that, in order to make more sure 
 of this. But we shall follow a false scent from the 
 beginning if we fail to realise that in its simplest 
 essence the religious spirit is one of sheer admiration 
 for a good thing, and self-forgetfulness in seeking it. 
 And that is why the religious spirit can be manifest 
 in games and exercised by games just as it can be 
 manifest in art and exercised by art. A good game 
 is indeed a rudimentary form of art. It is an 
 attempt to do something which has no permanent 
 value except the value of the joy to which it gives 
 rise. And the joy of a game is either the joy of 
 seeing things so well done that we are carried out of 
 ourselves with appreciation, or the joy of being 
 carried out of ourselves in the attempt to do things 
 well ourselves. It is a mixture of worship and self- 
 forgetfulness, and dedication to perfection. Where 
 there is this spirit (even in its most elementary form) 
 there is, in boy or girl, a germ of the spirit life which 
 is capable of untold expansion and development. 
 Whereas, if this spirit be not present in its more 
 elemental forms, the religious spirit, when it 
 awakens later as a devotion to a moral ideal or in 
 gratitude for the offer of eternal salvation, is apt 
 to take in men and women a selfish, and even at 
 times a sour, form. The more sources of admiration 
 and springs of energetic action there are in any 
 life, the richer will be its religious spirit when it 
 matures. 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 127 
 
 II. The Growth of the Religious Spirit 
 
 There is, of course, as we have said, a proper 
 sequence of admirations and interests in an un¬ 
 folding life, and life goes astray if it falls out of 
 its proper course, whether precociously arriving too 
 soon at what should be its more advanced adjust¬ 
 ments of itself to the world, or childishly refusing 
 to grow up. The progress of the spirit is twofold— 
 ever deeper and finer in its appreciations, and ever 
 wider and wider in its sympathies. Thus growth in 
 religion is growth in appreciation of the common 
 things in life, coupled with growth in desire to make 
 their appreciation universal. Self-centred action 
 and self-consciousness are more and more replaced 
 by consciousness of the divine potentialities of 
 life, and self-devotion to the work of making those 
 potentialities universally realised. 
 
 Yet another feature of our spiritual growth is 
 the gradual concentration of our aims and interests 
 towards a goal. The pursuit, by each individual, 
 of those aims and interests for which he has some 
 innate fitness, tends to make him, in the end, a 
 person unlike any other in the particularity of his 
 development. Out of the special ingredients of his 
 life each one is capable of creating a unique person¬ 
 ality, with unique value to his friends and to the 
 world. There is in each of us a creative faculty 
 like that which in the artist expresses itself in 
 pictures. Each has a persistent striving toward 
 some particular line of development along which he 
 will find harmony and fulfilment. All personality 
 aspires towards the unity and articulation of a work 
 
128 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 of art. In some this expression comes, as I have 
 said, through the medium of the plastic arts ; 
 in others, it will be through music, or through 
 literature, through handicraft or through the 
 education of children ; or it may be by a combina¬ 
 tion of these, or along quite other lines. But none 
 of us can reach his fulfilment except along lines 
 particular to ourselves, each of us learning to live 
 and labour truly for something we can appreciate. 
 
 Now, this urge in each individual is the most 
 significant part of him from the point of view of 
 his education. It is this power to do something and 
 desire to do it vigorously and well that is the centre 
 of his life. Whatever direction it takes the wise 
 educator follows it. Growth will come strongly 
 and naturally only if this surging life force in the 
 individual is encouraged to express itself freely 
 and enjoyably. At the beginning, this gift for 
 action or perception, this creative power in each 
 individual will be exercised both blindly and 
 selfishly, for we are all utterly self-centred beings 
 in our cradles, and crude in the extreme for many a 
 year. But every such gift is capable both of refine¬ 
 ment and re-direction, and the moral and spiritual 
 education of each separate being will be successful 
 in proportion as it is able to refine and re-direct this 
 innate power, giving it increasing insight into what 
 is worth doing and worth feeling, and increasing 
 devotion to the aim of spreading abroad whatever 
 it can produce that others can enjoy. The problem 
 of growth is thus the right transition from blind 
 self-centred and purposeless living to disinterested 
 devotion to the best. It involves a progressive 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 129 
 
 understanding of the deeper, more spiritual values 
 in life, and a progressive transition from an external 
 view to a spiritual view of all things. 
 
 We have thus identified spiritual growth with 
 growth in insight into the mysterious delightfulness, 
 the all but inexpressible quality and charm which 
 are to be found here, there, and everywhere in 
 conduct and in the material world ; coupled with 
 growth in the habitual self-forgetfulness which is 
 natural to those who are obsessed with the wonder 
 of life and the opportunities of sharing its wonder. 
 And having done so we can now go on to claim that 
 such a development is in the strict sense natural. 
 We are built for it. That is what is meant by the 
 saying that man is made in the image of God. The 
 power to find and reproduce and distribute good 
 things is natural to him. There may be another 
 nature warring in him too, a natural tendency 
 to evil; but it is not more natural than the tendency 
 to good. Growth in religion thus comes naturally 
 to those who are so happily circumstanced that the 
 natural growth of goodness is not thwarted. They 
 have no need to cultivate some strange sixth sense. 
 They have but to respond successively to the 
 invitations of the spirit to see and to follow the 
 best things in the natural unfolding of their lives. 
 
 Nature, in fact, is constantly urging life along 
 a path of development which invites the unfolding 
 of an ideal and unselfish life. In many features of 
 our mental life this is evident. In the first place, 
 Nature furnished us wdth that indefinable but all- 
 powerful instinct which we call the instinct of the 
 herd, which forbids us normally to be quite happy 
 
 K 
 
130 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 when we are alone, thus driving us toward a sociable 
 life. And then she has equipped us with a whole 
 apparatus of mental powers which make it possible 
 for us rapidly to enter into and acquire for ourselves 
 the emotions, the ideas, the behaviour which we 
 see embodied around us. Given, then, a social 
 environment in which good models of action and 
 feeling are manifest, and we have every chance of 
 acquiring a right spirit and disposition. Moreover, 
 adolescence brings with it a sudden power to 
 appreciate big ideals of right and truth and beauty 
 so that the transition from selfishness to altruism, and 
 from spiritual blindness to spiritual vision is in the 
 strict sense natural to every boy and girl when that 
 great crisis of their physical growth steals over them. 
 
 These facts are the commonplaces of the 
 psychology of the social life. We are so constituted 
 that although we are born with only the most 
 primitive physical appetites, and with not the 
 smallest concern with the happiness of any life but 
 our own, life tends to build up in us, by rapid pro¬ 
 cesses, a sense of our oneness with others, a desire 
 to be at peace with them, a readiness to surrender 
 the view or the claim which thwarts the common 
 welfare and to cultivate the ways which accord 
 with the ways of others. Our behaviour, our 
 emotional reactions, our intellectual concepts, are 
 all assimilated quickly and easily from our social 
 environment, and if it be favourable we may quite 
 rapidly acquire a character which is both unselfish 
 and discriminating. The apparatus by which the 
 entail of Christianity is passed on from life to life 
 is nothing less than amazing. If, then, fine ideals 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 131 
 
 are visibly embodied for us in the social environ¬ 
 ment of home, or school, or Church, if they are 
 expressed in action and not paraded and pressed 
 upon us in words, they have an astonishing power 
 of communicating themselves by sheer contagion. 
 
 This is not, of course, to assert that they are 
 communicated inevitably. We do not forget that 
 evil embodied in the social life around us has also 
 and equally its contagious power. Nature is too 
 easily content with arrests in the development of 
 her types, with delay and frustration. A fatal 
 inertia besets all natural organisms, with their 
 limited stores of energy and knowledge. We tire 
 and are content to let the partial good we have 
 achieved become the enemy of further progress. 
 The path to the ideal life is a stiff climb upwards. 
 We must recognise the tendency of the unperfected 
 life to stagnate, to despair of perfection, to stiffen 
 itself against the claims of the ideal, to entrench 
 itself selfishly and stubbornly in the halfway house 
 to nobility and goodness which it has reached. 
 The price of progress is eternal vigilance and un¬ 
 wearying initiative. 
 
 These facts are not denied, but they do not 
 annul the point of the present argument that 
 spiritual development is strictly natural. And if 
 it be strictly natural, though not inevitable or easy, 
 it cannot be isolated from development as a whole. 
 The spirit does not grow best on any diet of beliefs 
 and experiences unrelated to its ordinary interests 
 and activities. On the contrary, the way of pro¬ 
 gress in religion is the way of faithfulness to the 
 claims and invitations of our ordinary life in the 
 
 0 
 
152 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 world. The growth of the spirit is not won in a 
 single engagement, or in any purely inward combat 
 in which good and evil confront each other in 
 disembodied shapes ; it is won in a thousand 
 successive engagements in which man is invited to 
 choose the finer and more social action, the braver 
 and more adventurous career, the truer and more 
 perfect satisfaction. Energy, decision, discrimina¬ 
 tion—won anywhere will be available everywhere. 
 It is the old story of the victory of Waterloo won 
 on the playing fields of Eton. Fineness and 
 strength of spirit are won by successive acts of 
 choice and outputs of energy in every direction and 
 equally in w T ork and in play. 
 
 III. The Fostering of Growth 
 
 To secure the fitting spiritual development of 
 any life, it is therefore necessary to assist it along 
 the road of its highest natural development. That 
 is best done by encouraging it to choose from time 
 to time the occupations and aims into which it can 
 throw itself with completest abandonment, because 
 with completest sincerity, making sure that they 
 are aims and occupations good in themselves and 
 therefore calculated to lead the spirit onward and 
 upward. There are such aims and pursuits, adapted 
 to the experience and capacity of folk of every age 
 and condition. From boyhood to manhood, from 
 girlhood to womanhood, there are things to be done 
 and things to be enjoyed exactly appropriate to the 
 spirit’s development at each stage of its journey. 
 The doing and enjoying of these things will confirm 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 133 
 
 the spirit in its hold on what is good and true, 
 educate its powers of right and true appreciation, 
 increase its capacity for further discovery, and its 
 energy for good living. The problem of religious 
 education is to find a true succession of such pursuits 
 and enjoyments, adapted to the expanding capacity 
 of growing lives. 
 
 One of the discoveries of the last few years has 
 been the proper spiritual expression of childhood. 
 We have found, at least approximately, the forms 
 of occupation into which boys and girls in their 
 pre-adolescent days can throw themselves with 
 complete zest, and the maximum of moral and 
 spiritual profit. There is more than one variation 
 of the prescription, but the type of activity is 
 sufficiently covered by the one word “ scouting.” 
 Scouting is very nearly the full and adequate 
 expression of a small boy’s free energy. Through 
 scouting he can bring into healthy and vigorous 
 being whatever capacity there is in him for dis¬ 
 covering the make of God’s world and establishing 
 himself as a willing and useful member of it. If 
 some great idea of God overarching His world 
 overarches him too, he is, under skilful leadership, 
 treading the upward spiritual path far more 
 effectively than he would be doing it if he were 
 spending his energies in cultivating spiritual states 
 or forming brave resolutions. We are past the day 
 when the ideal Christian child was thought to be 
 one who was exercised beyond his years about the 
 state of his soul, or the spiritual condition of his 
 elders. We should count as painful and disastrous 
 precocity some of the traits which our forefathers 
 
134 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 held up for admiration in the ideally pious child 
 Up to the age of adolescence, at least, we reckon 
 that the child’s spirit should grow with as little 
 as possible of self-consciousness and a maximum 
 exhibition of juvenile spirits. 
 
 When we come to the later period of childhood 
 and the early period of youth, the same principles 
 will hold true, though we have not yet been so 
 successful in applying them. For boys we have 
 team games to develop keenness, resource, and 
 esprit de corps, and for girls the same opportunities 
 are increasing. But we have not yet thought out 
 the equivalent of scouting as a real expression of 
 the part which youth might play, and might rejoice 
 to play, in the service of the world as a whole. One 
 might speculate a little on the form which such 
 activities might take. There are boys and girls 
 who have found themselves and have made good, 
 simply through giving themselves to the assistance 
 of younger children in their games. There are 
 middle-class schools which have made the idea of 
 universal brotherhood real to themselves by enter¬ 
 taining boys of other schools in holiday fashion, 
 or by building open-air swimming baths for the 
 neighbouring villagers, and by other such acts of 
 service appropriate to their own interests and 
 powers. We have already risked a generalisation 
 by suggesting* that youth might effectively learn 
 
 brotherhood if it would set seriouslv about the work 
 
 ✓ 
 
 of providing good games and proper facilities for 
 good games for everybody, and would pledge itself 
 to initiate the backward and unfortunate into the 
 
 # In Chapter IV. 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 135 
 
 playing of them. Or if this falls short of what is 
 needed to capture the growing interests of the 
 adolescent in the welfare of society, one might 
 enlist youth in clubs and coteries for cleansing and 
 beautifying the streets and squares of our 
 neglected cities and villages, and their older 
 members might pass on in due time to attempt 
 the harder task of cleansing and beautifying the 
 things that are done in their council chambers. 
 
 All this, however, is speculation, set down more 
 for the sake of illustration than as a definite pro¬ 
 posal, and also for the sake of stimulating others to 
 experiment. The point for insistence is that the 
 dedication of spirit to be asked of early youth and 
 later childhood should not be too abstract or difficult 
 for youth’s understanding, and should not exact too 
 sharp a discipline. Youth should not be too much 
 preoccupied with the dark sides of life and the short¬ 
 comings of others. Forms of activity should be 
 suggested to youth through which the pleasure of 
 helping others can be realised, and the desire to 
 serve others directed along lines pleasurable in 
 themselves. Discrimination between what is good 
 and what is better should be trained through art 
 and play, and all sense of opposition between games 
 and recreation on the one hand and religion on the 
 other should be absolutely broken down. It will 
 be through the right choice of congenial recreations 
 supporting and confirming its more abstract moral 
 choices that youth will best achieve its spiritual 
 development, learning to put life and energy into 
 the things which minister to life and to set its face 
 against those things which minister to evil. 
 
136 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 We may thus sum the matter up in two points. 
 In the first place the activities which will minister 
 to the spiritual development of youth must either 
 be activities which youth itself approves or activities 
 recommended by people whose judgment youth 
 approves. It only leads to mental and spiritual 
 regressions and the tangling of the lines of develop¬ 
 ment if any personality commits itself in action to 
 courses to which it is not committed in its own 
 heart and in its own judgment; and it complicates 
 the course of youth’s spiritual development end¬ 
 lessly if the ideal of the spiritual life is associated 
 with the negation of any activities which youth in 
 its heart of hearts believes to be W'holesome and 
 good, or with the exalting of activities for which 
 youth has no great use or aptitude. The dis¬ 
 couragement of any form of innocent amusement 
 is a case in point, and the identification of Christian 
 service exclusively or even primarily with Sunday 
 School Teaching is another. 
 
 In the second place, in view of the limits of 
 youth’s experience of life, the activities which are 
 associated with the idea of Christian service should 
 not be too exacting or ascetic. The point has been 
 made already incidentally, but it should be made to 
 stand out thus prominently by itself as a principle 
 of first-rate importance. Youth does not know how 
 strong are the forces of evil in the world and how 
 much a point of honour therefore it is with a right- 
 thinking man or woman to shoulder the burden of 
 life and enter the lists in battle for the right. It is 
 for manhood and womanhood to translate the 
 dreams and games of youth into the stuff of the 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 137 
 
 Kingdom of God in the hard business of life. The 
 business of youth is rather to fix its sense of values 
 for itself than to make them operative for the 
 world. And this it can do to a large extent by 
 exercising itself in games which give value to what 
 is excellent, honourable, and tasteful. If youth 
 will but learn to appraise highly the things that are 
 lovely in themselves, to hate whatever is cheap and 
 shoddy, and to value goodwill above all things, 
 manhood and womanhood will not go far astray. 
 Decision rightly exercised in these ways will lead 
 almost invariably to self-discipline and self-sacrifice 
 in the end. 
 
 The ethic for youth should not, then, be too 
 hard or dour, unless the times are so essentially 
 and unescapably harsh and dour that anything 
 easier would seem like shirking, as it did in war 
 time. But it is not always war time, and for the 
 more normal vears an ethic more naturally and 
 obviously joyous is appropriate. Youth’s ethic 
 should be neither narrowly utilitarian nor darkly 
 puritanical. It will not go far astray if it has 
 these two main principles as its foundations : viz., 
 to do nothing that is not deeply worth while, and 
 to keep to oneself nothing that is. Or we may put 
 the same thing in other words and say that we 
 should seek to share widely whatever we really 
 value and find something to value greatly in what¬ 
 ever we choose to do. There is a mine of morality 
 in those two precepts. They express in terms of 
 common use and plain meaning a good deal of man’s 
 duty to love his neighbour and his God. For the 
 love of God is based on the love of whatever is 
 
138 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 lovely in God’s world, and the love of man is the 
 will to pass on to him whatever we ourselves have 
 found to be good. 
 
 IV. Religious Decision 
 
 And now we have carried the argument far 
 enough to bring out the essentials of a true religious 
 decision. A religious decision should link the 
 determination to follow a particular course of 
 action with the conviction that to do so is absolutely 
 right. It should, therefore, be a decision having 
 quite clear and concrete meaning when it is made ; 
 it should appeal to a person’s own conviction and 
 experience as a thing really good in itself, and not 
 only according to an arbitrary code of actions 
 labelled religious ; the doing of it should be so 
 desirable in the eyes of the doer that the determina¬ 
 tion to do it releases new floods of energy ; and it 
 should carry with it the sense that God wills man to 
 do just such good deeds. A religious decision is thus 
 a decision to do something in the direction in which 
 life becomes fuller, richer, more deeply satisfying 
 and stirring. We have already emphasised the 
 necessity for youth that such decisions should be in 
 line with the natural joy-seeking impulses and con¬ 
 structive ambitions of all growing life, and should 
 not be concerned with artificial interests and merely 
 “ religious ” aims, that they should indeed be the 
 choice of ways that are deeply felt to be worth while 
 in work and play and comradeship. That also 
 necessitates their being specific in meaning and not 
 merely vague and abstract. 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 139 
 
 This necessity is all the greater if decision is 
 invited under conditions when religious emotion is 
 stirred, as it may be stirred, for example, in mass 
 meetings. The more the emotional life is quickened 
 on any such occasion, the more the need for securing 
 that the decision should be worked out to some clear 
 and wide-reaching change of practice, in home life, 
 or the use of leisure, or the attitude to one’s work, 
 or one’s dealings with one’s friends. The concrete 
 expression of the decision in terms of ordinary 
 secular life is needed to keep it practical and sane. 
 Moreover, such practical and concrete decisions, 
 require time for the person addressed to translate 
 the appeal which has stirred him into the terms of 
 his own life and see what actually it would involve 
 in conduct—at any rate as a next step. That 
 means that his thought needs to be quickened 
 simultaneously with his emotional life, so that his 
 critical faculties are brought to bear upon the 
 question of what he is about to do, and his judgment 
 is satisfied that it carries with it the assent of all 
 that is best in him. For this reason experienced 
 psychologists call attention to the danger of pre¬ 
 cipitating decisions that do not represent the 
 deliberate thought of the individual upon their 
 specific content. If decision be recommended at 
 a mass meeting, opportunity for such quiet re¬ 
 flection needs to be provided, before the decision 
 is consummated. 
 
 To pursue the matter further would raise 
 questions of evangelistic method outside our 
 present scope. It is, however, necessary to say a 
 little more about decision itself, and especially 
 
1 4 o WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 about the stages through which religious decision 
 ought to pass to its consummation. Decision for 
 God must be an ascending process of decision for 
 the right and the true, the good and the beautiful— 
 a process carried a step further every time some 
 fresh aspect of right or truth or goodness, with its 
 fresh demand for quality, comes home to us. The 
 challenge to more comprehensive decision may come 
 to us in special crises now and then when something 
 happens to bring our life as a whole under review, 
 and we can see more clearly if it is running off 
 after unworthy aims. It may come tragically in 
 moments of disillusionment to lives which have 
 embraced wrong courses and pursued them till they 
 have ended in degradation and disaster ; or it may 
 come in the natural crisis of adolescence, when life 
 has a way of presenting itself to consciousness as 
 a whole, and the choices between right and wrong 
 stand out more stark and clear than they are ever 
 likely to do again. In all these cases, however, 
 decision will be effectively Christian exactly in pro¬ 
 portion as the thought of God and the name of 
 Christ are linked with the thought of definite ways 
 of ministering to the joy and wholesomeness of life. 
 
 If Christ is thus identified with all the highest 
 courses, the choice of any one of them may become 
 the occasion for a life to dedicate itself to Him. 
 The opportunity to ask for decisions for Christ 
 may then be found as the natural climax of any 
 of a hundred different appeals ; if only folk are 
 taught that whenever they are fired with a passion 
 for quality in things or in behaviour, their fire is fed 
 by the flame of God Himself. God, the supreme 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 141 
 
 artist, the supreme craftsman, the supreme lover, 
 is at the heart of all the creative joy and energy 
 which well up in us and in our loves. So under¬ 
 stood, life is full of invitations to decide for God, 
 and the wise will be watchful to point them out 
 at every turn. Each particular decision can be 
 made a symbol of the total dedication of the life to 
 God—true witness to our aspiration to be His 
 entirely ; true witness also to His readiness to take 
 whatever we are fit to offer, in token of the whole. 
 
 Of all possible religious decisions, the one most 
 nearly capable of expressing the full ideal of 
 devotion to Christ is the act of joining His Church. 
 The evangelistic appeal should therefore be most 
 constantly associated with this particular choice. 
 Nothing else can so well express the will to be always 
 and in all things Christ’s disciples, ever learning 
 more of our calling in Him. But, for this to be 
 the case, the Church must be to its members not 
 only a place of Christian worship and general 
 Christian teaching, but a school of Christian work 
 and Christian play—a place where Christian ideals 
 of truth and beauty are embodied in definite forms 
 of education and amusement, and where Christian 
 ideals of life are translated from the general into 
 the particular in intimate Christian conference. 
 Such an ideal might entail a considerable enlarge¬ 
 ment of the recreative activities of many churches 
 and a criticism of the paltriness of others. It 
 might require new forms of Christian education 
 and Christian fellowship, uniting prayer with study 
 and discussion of many practical social issues. 
 But the expenditure of effort would not be too great 
 
142 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 if it succeeded in making clear to Christian people 
 how their spiritual ideals should inter-penetrate 
 their work and play. The world needs individual 
 witnesses to the meaning of Christianity quite as 
 much as it needs public missions, but the average 
 Christian is at present tongue-tied as a witness 
 because he does not clearly understand the relation 
 between the special inward experiences of the Spirit 
 which are fostered in public worship and the com¬ 
 mon outward activities of daily life; and no 
 amount of exhortation to evangelise his neighbours 
 will make him anything but a nuisance and a 
 hypocrite until he does. 
 
 At the present time, however, the appeal to 
 join the Church as an act of Christian decision is 
 hindered because the conception of life commonly 
 connected with Church membership is something 
 rather unwholesomely introspective and selfishly 
 aloof from the greater human causes, if not even 
 darkly antagonistic to the natural joy of life itself. 
 Wrong though such a view may be, it is not wholly 
 unaccountable ; and whilst it holds, extraordinary 
 measures are required. If those outside the Churches 
 knew more of the sweet charities and wholesome 
 goodness which grow up in the protection of the 
 creed and worship which to them seem so forbidding, 
 they might be more ready to throw in their lot with 
 the Churches as they are—with all their disconcert¬ 
 ing faults and puzzling features. But seeing they 
 are ignorant of these things, the Churches must 
 sometimes humble themselves and ask newcomers 
 to join the fellowship, not of the Church itself, 
 but of some more limited and welcoming group 
 
RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 143 
 
 of kindred souls within it, or in free association 
 with it. 
 
 And now one thing alone remains to be said. 
 Throughout this book the emphasis has been laid 
 upon the naturalness of the Christian life and the 
 way in which its inner growth should march with 
 its unfolding interests and powers. There is, 
 however, another side to the matter, not, indeed, 
 overlooked so far, but needing in these closing 
 paragraphs to stand out in the clearest light. The 
 experience of God is more than the experience of 
 goodness or of beauty, or of growth in the apprecia¬ 
 tion of these. The name of Christ is no mere 
 symbol for perfection. The crown of Christianity 
 is the personal relation of the Christian person to 
 the Christian God, and it is reached through 
 intimate personal communion with Jesus Christ 
 It is an experience that cannot be consummated 
 until our natures have been stirred and searched 
 by Christ to their lowest deeps. And in that 
 searching and stirring we are bound to undergo 
 the deep humiliation of self-knowledge and to be 
 called to the utter abandonment of self, with all 
 its false perspectives and mistaken aims. Thus, 
 the things which are the commonplaces of religious 
 teaching—repentance, faith, and self-surrender— 
 are still the things that matter most. But these 
 things will both mean more in themselves and seem 
 in better harmony with whatever else we know of 
 life’s true values precisely in proportion to the 
 thoroughness with which we have taken up the 
 whole of our natural life into the scope of our 
 Christian experience and purpose. 
 
144 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
 
 So the upshot of this book is not in any way 
 to discredit the evangelist’s aim of bringing indi¬ 
 viduals to a personal experience of God through 
 Jesus Christ ; it is rather to show that there are a 
 thousand avenues by which the beginnings of that 
 personal experience may be acquired. Nor does 
 it in the least belittle the Church’s constant effort, 
 by its worship and instruction, its sacraments and 
 sermons, to arouse us to the reality of God’s Personal 
 Being and the demands He makes upon us as a 
 whole ; it is rather to discriminate against a Gospel 
 which sets God in opposition to life. The choice is 
 not between life and God ; it is between life ever 
 waning and dwindling because antagonistic to its 
 own ideal, and life ever waxing and expanding 
 because yielded to the control of its true Master, 
 Christ Himself. So far as this spreads out a broader 
 view of God’s dealings with us than that generally 
 held, it makes the problem of educating the human 
 spirit in the Christian way a bigger problem, and 
 relates it more closely with human education as a 
 whole. To that wider question of spiritual training 
 we may perhaps return in another book; but 
 whether then or now the point of importance is 
 not where Christian experience begins in the life 
 of nature, but where it ends in the heart of God. 
 From first to last there is no break in the ascending 
 path; but everywhere life bears witness to the 
 love of our Father—Holy and Eternal—and calls 
 upon us to rise up and live as His whole-hearted, 
 joyous sons and daughters. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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