0 
 
 MAP °.5 1935 
 
 Division 
 
 '• i i 
 
 BT 1101 .G67 1921 
 
 Gore,^Charles, 1853-1932. 
 
 Belief in God 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE EPISTEES OP ST. JOHN 
 , THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 
 THE EPISTEE TO THE EPHESIANS. 
 
 THE EPISTEE TO THE ROMANS. 2 Vols. 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OP GOD 
 (Bampton Eectures for 1891). 
 
 THE BODY OF CHRIST. 
 
 dissertations ON subjects connected 
 
 WITH THE INCARNATION. 
 
 THE NEW THEOEOGY AND THE OED 
 reeigion. 
 
 THE MISSION OP THE CHURCH. 
 
 ORDERS AND UNITY. 
 
 SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY. 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED AND THE 
 CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE. 
 
 Edited by 
 
 EUX MUNDI. A series of Studies in the Religion 
 of the Incarnation. By Various Writers. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BELIEF 
 
 BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 BY CHARLES GORE, D.D. 
 
 HON. D.D. EDIN. AND DURHAM, HON. D.O.L. OXFORD, HON. LL.D. CAMBRIDGE 
 AND BIRMINGHAM, HON. FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, 
 FORMERLY BISHOP OF OXFORD 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 1921 
 
First Edition 
 
 Reprinted 
 
 Reprinted 
 
 November 1921 
 November 1921 
 December 1921 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
PREFACE 
 
 1. Homme propose: Dieu dispose. But anyway I 
 propose to issue an ordered and reasoned statement 
 of my faith as a Christian, as far as may be without 
 assumptions, or, as I call it, a “ Reconstruction of 
 Belief,” in three volumes, of which this is the first, 
 dealing respectively with Belief in God, Belief in 
 Jesus Christ, and Belief in the Holy Spirit and in the 
 Church. There will be no reference to ecclesiastical 
 authority in the two first volumes, but it will be seri¬ 
 ously considered in the last. If the critics take notice 
 of me and argue against my conclusions, I propose 
 to issue a fourth supplementary volume of disserta¬ 
 tions and discussions, in order to expand, buttress, 
 or modify arguments or conclusions. 
 
 I endeavour to appeal to the ordinary educated 
 reader. If any such finds the book stiff, I think he 
 would be assisted by reading first the analysis of the 
 argument which begins the last chapter, pp. 283-8. 
 
 2. My argument is positive. It is a statement of 
 the reasons which seem to me convincing on behalf 
 of a certain type of belief. It is not concerned, except 
 incidentally, in describing, or arguing against, rival 
 beliefs. Thus I offer no survey of the rival beliefs of 
 current philosophers, such as is offered by Mr. W. R. 
 Matthews in his admirable Studies in Christian 
 
 IX 
 
X 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Philosophy (Macmillan, 1921), but I hope I have 
 indicated sufficiently both where I rely upon them 
 and where they do not satisfy me. 
 
 My statement is also individual. It presents the 
 arguments which finally, after long thinking, have 
 seemed to satisfy my own mind. But I confess that 
 the form of ordered argument, starting without pre¬ 
 suppositions and proceeding from point to point, 
 does not represent the way in which my convictions 
 have been actually reached. I am conscious of certain 
 strong predispositions towards certain beliefs, which 
 seem to be inherent in me, and I will venture to be so 
 far autobiographical as^ to enumerate them, so far as 
 they are relevant. 
 
 (a) I have, ever since I was an undergraduate, been 
 certain that I must be in the true sense a free thinker, 
 and that either not to think freely about a disturbing 
 subject, or to accept ecclesiastical authority in place 
 of the best judgement of my own reason, would be for 
 me an impossible treason against the light. I must 
 go remorselessly where the argument leads me. Thus 
 when in the early seventies I was preparing for 
 ordination, and Ewald had seriously convinced me 
 that the old-fashioned view of the Old Testament was 
 impossible to hold, it never presented itself to me 
 as possible that I could substitute the traditional 
 view in place of the scientific in my own mind on the 
 ground of authority or agree to teach it. There was 
 nothing for it but to make what seemed to me fairly 
 certain as evident as possible to my examiners for 
 orders, and also to show how reconcilable I thought 
 it with the Creeds. But at the same time a cordial 
 agreement with Ruskin against the dominant Political 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 Economists, and other causes, prevented my ever 
 confusing my duty to reason with any attribution of 
 infallibility to the intellectuals of the day. 
 
 (b) I have always felt deeply, being by disposition 
 pessimistic, the arguments against the love of God. 
 I have always thought that the only very difficult 
 dogma of the Church was the dogma that God is Love. 
 But deeper than any difficulty has been the feeling 
 that at the roots of my being I am confronted with 
 God, from whom I cannot get away, and that the God 
 who confronts me there is the Living God of the 
 prophets and of Jesus Christ. Equally deep was 
 the feeling that the Christian life was certainly “ the 
 Way,” and that it was foolish to suppose that it could 
 flourish except on its own intellectual roots and in 
 its own proper mental soil. Also I have never been 
 able to feel that any of the various humanitarian 
 estimates of Christ was in any degree satisfying. 
 
 (c) Finally, though this has no bearing on the 
 present volume or its next projected successor, I 
 have since my childhood been what I may call a 
 Catholic by mental constitution. I remember very 
 well, when I was eight or nine—sixty years ago— 
 reading a book by a Protestant author—a Presby¬ 
 terian, I think—entitled Father Clement , about the 
 conversion of a Catholic priest to Protestantism. I 
 have never read it since. I had been brought up in 
 ordinary old-fashioned English Church ways. I had 
 only attended very Low Church services. I had 
 never heard of the Oxford movement. I knew 
 nothing about Catholicism, except as a strange 
 superstition, called Popery. But the book described 
 confession and absolution, fasting, the Real Presence, 
 
PREFACE 
 
 • e 
 
 XU 
 
 the devotion of the Three Hours, the use of incense, 
 etc., and I felt instinctively and at once that 
 this sort of sacramental religion was the religion 
 for me. From that day most of the people who 
 influenced my intellect, when I was young, were 
 agnostics or Protestants or “ outsiders ” to the 
 Catholic faith—Carlyle, Ruskin, Edward Bowen, 
 T. H. Green—but this predisposition remained quite 
 unaltered. My mental life has consisted in the 
 process of confronting such predispositions with the 
 results, so far as I have been able to see them, of 
 philosophy and science and criticism (with a native 
 tendency always to anticipate the worst), and to 
 seek a unity or synthesis in which all the light I could 
 get would be allowed its full force, without my inner¬ 
 most self being quenched or blinded. What I am 
 daring to present to the public is the result of this 
 sort of process, continued over forty and more years. 
 
 3. Like others, as I view the world and the Church— 
 especially the Church of England—at the present day, 
 I cannot feel hopeful about the immediate prospect. 
 The prophets and experience alike convince me that 
 there can be no real social recovery except through 
 a general return to God. And of such a return I see 
 no signs. God has smitten ; but in general we have 
 not sought Him. Thus, taught by the prophets, I 
 am ready to anticipate scathing judgements. But the 
 prophets also teach us to hold with unquenchable 
 faith to the divine purpose of progress, through all 
 the catastrophes and judgements which widespread 
 apostasy from God brings with it. The purpose 
 remains, and the end is sure. No right effort is going 
 to be lost. And the instrument through which God 
 
PREFACE 
 
 • • • 
 XUl 
 
 works is the “ faithful remnant ” of those who 
 believe Him and obey Him at all costs. Of such, I 
 feel persuaded, there is among us as large a body, 
 and as genuine, as at any previous period of history. 
 What is needful for them is to think out their prin¬ 
 ciples, individually and collectively : so that they shall 
 know what they believe and why they believe. And 
 these volumes, which I offer to God with a prayer for 
 His blessing, are intended to help them in the task. 
 
 CHARLES GORE. 
 
 Michaelmas 1921. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The Breakdown of Tradition . 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Conditions of Hopeful Reconstruction 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Grounds of Belief in God 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Question of Revelation 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Contents of the Prophetic Faith 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Revelation and Reason 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 29 
 
 45 
 
 74 
 
 110 
 
 133 
 
 XV 
 
XVI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Historical Religion .... 171 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Historical Worth of the New Testa- 
 
 MENT .... 
 
 * 
 
 • 
 
 . 184 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 The Prejudice of Criticism 
 
 IX 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 215 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 The Prejudice Examined . 
 
 X 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 280 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 The Historical Evidence . 
 
 XI 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 252 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 XII 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 283 
 
 Table of Subjects 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 295 
 
 Index of Names . 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 299 
 
BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 The world in which we live to-day can only be 
 described as chaotic in the matter of religious beliefs. 
 Of course there are very many persons whom lack 
 of seriousness or lack of education renders indifferent 
 to religious problems. And there are some intelligent 
 and serious people who more or less deliberately and 
 successfully seclude themselves from the strife of 
 tongues and live unmoved in the light of their own 
 religious traditions ; and others again who, in despair 
 of attaining the religious peace which they need by 
 any other means, take refuge under the shelter of 
 some religious authority which admits of no question¬ 
 ing, whether it be the Roman Catholic Church or 
 Christian Science. But wherever men and women 
 are to be found who care about religion and feel its 
 value, and who at the same time feel bound, as they 
 say, 44 to think for themselves,” there we are apt to 
 discover the prevailing note—not the only note, but 
 the prevailing note—to be that of uncertainty and 
 even bewilderment, coupled very often with a feeling 
 of resentment against the Church or against organized 
 religion on account of what is called its 44 failure.” 
 
 Now, there are no doubt some speculative or curious 
 people who find the sceptical temper with its attendant 
 
 l 
 
 2 
 
2 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 uncertainties tolerable or even enjoyable enough. 
 They are content to “ spend their time in nothing 
 else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” 
 It is enough for them that each new view is “ interest¬ 
 ing ” ; they pass their life “ ever learning and never 
 coming to the knowledge of the truth.” But it is 
 not so with most men. The feeling of hopeless 
 uncertainty breeds in them a distaste for positive 
 creeds, and they drift away from religion altogether. 
 
 But it is ignoble to acquiesce in this sort of scepti¬ 
 cism without at least a serious effort. It is my belief 
 that a great deal of scepticism is due, not really to the 
 absence of adequate grounds for conviction, but to 
 confusion of mind, to an excessive deference to current 
 intellectual fashions, and to the fact that a man 
 has never thoroughly and systematically faced the 
 problems. It seems to me that the right course for 
 anyone who cannot accept the mere voice of authority, 
 but feels the imperative obligation to “ face the 
 arguments ” and to think freely, is to begin at the 
 beginning and to see how far he can reconstruct his 
 religious beliefs stage by stage on a secure foundation, 
 as far as possible without any preliminary assumptions 
 and with a resolute determination “ to know the 
 worst.” This at least is the only course which the 
 present writer has found himself able either to 
 adopt in his own case or to recommend to others in 
 a like case. It means of course an equally frank 
 cross-questioning of traditional religious beliefs and 
 of the current dogmas of the contemporary intellectual 
 world. This is too often forgotten. There is a very 
 large number of people who reject traditional religious 
 authority with contempt, and go on even naively 
 to accept, without any serious questioning, the oracles 
 of the day. 
 
3 
 
 NEED OF RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 But this is manifestly foolish. If we refuse to be 
 frightened by one kind of authority, we must not be 
 frightened by another. New views have frequently 
 proved at least as misleading as old traditions . 1 The 
 only satisfactory way for a man to save his own soul, 
 or to become capable of helping others, is freely to use 
 his own real judgement and accept the responsibility 
 of decision in the fullest light that he can come by. 
 
 Deliberately to enter upon this process of recon¬ 
 struction from the beginning does not, of course, 
 mean the abandonment during the process of the 
 religious beliefs and practices which a man holds 
 already in use. Quite the contrary. He will make 
 the most of the precious gift of faith, even while he is 
 enquiring into its basis. It is part of the experience 
 which he is to interpret. It gives him his under¬ 
 standing of the questions at issue. Moreover, though 
 the process of reconstruction will be more or less 
 different in the case of each person, according as the 
 intellectual equipment and opportunity of individuals 
 are different, yet it is and ought to be possible for all 
 who have to face life for themselves and use their 
 powers of thought. All that is really essential is 
 sincerity and the readiness to make the necessary 
 effort of mind . 2 And it is the aim of this volume to 
 help especially the ordinary educated man and woman. 
 
 But I would add that there is no class for whom 
 
 1 See additional note at end of the chapter. 
 
 2 See Bernard Bosanquet, What Religion Is (Macmillan, 1920), 
 
 p. viii. “ ‘ As a little child . . ; that has been the motto, as of 
 
 the saints, so of the wisest among mankind. Your mind is a 
 good instrument; only keep it free and sincere ; keep away from 
 selfishness, self-conceit, from the vanity of learning, and from the 
 vanity of resentment against learning. Open it to experience, and 
 take that as largely as you can. We know the type of man who 
 on the whole gets nearest to truth. It is not tlio cleverest. It is, I 
 think, the sincerest.” 
 
4 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 this process of fundamental reconstruction of their 
 religious beliefs is so necessary as for those who are, 
 or are preparing to become, ministers of the Christian 
 Church. They are often enthusiasts for religion, who 
 have no personal doubts, but are eagerly interested 
 in a great many questions, doctrinal and ceremonial 
 and social; and their temptation is to take up the 
 questions that interest them, which are secondary and 
 derivative, and not really to study and test their 
 foundations. Very likely they will themselves 
 experience reactions and fall into fundamental doubts 
 later in life. Certainly, if they are to be true to their 
 high vocation, they will be constantly occupied in 
 helping others who are in doubt. In either case they 
 will find themselves paralysed if they have never 
 explored their foundations. It is only those who 
 know, from the ground upwards, what they believe 
 and why they believe, who can help either themselves 
 or others in the time of stress. It is only those who 
 are felt to have a real ground for their beliefs and a 
 real sympathy with free enquiry whose help will be 
 sought by those who need it. And it is pitiful to see 
 how many there are among the professed ministers of 
 Christ who, in an hour of popular discussion of some 
 vital truth, are proved, by their perplexity and 
 dismay, or by their uninstructed denunciations, never 
 to have thought at all seriously or deeply about the 
 most momentous questions. 
 
 It is, then, the aim of this book to rehearse the 
 process of reconstruction which has been slowly and 
 laboriously and again and again enacted in the writer’s 
 own soul and mind, with as single an eye for the 
 truth—from whatever source, new or old, it may 
 come—as he has been able to win for himself. But 
 before making a beginning it is necessary to examine 
 
5 
 
 THE OLD ORTHODOXY 
 
 the existing situation in order that we may understand 
 what are the causes of the profound unsettlement of 
 religious beliefs in our present society. Such an 
 analysis must precede reconstruction by enabling us 
 to interpret aright the breadth and the profundity of 
 the gulf which has to be filled. 
 
 It may be said with substantial truth that in the 
 earlier part of the nineteenth century, however much 
 scepticism existed in special intellectual circles—and 
 there was a great deal of it—yet on the whole popular 
 religion in England, for all its divisions, had a sub¬ 
 stantial basis of agreement, a common doctrine which 
 was accepted as a matter of course ; and this accepted 
 religion, intellectually considered, had two main 
 pillars of support. For its “ Natural Religion,” or 
 belief in God, the “ argument from design ” was the 
 sufficient foundation, and that in the form given it by 
 the established scientific doctrine of the fixity of 
 species, or “ special creations.” This was trium¬ 
 phantly used as against all atheists. “ Can you look 
 at the different orders and species which nature 
 presents to you, each elaborately designed to fulfil 
 certain functions, and each fixed, as science tells us, 
 in its essential characteristics from the beginning, and 
 doubt that they must have been created for the pur¬ 
 poses which they fulfil by a designing mind—the 
 almighty Creator of the universe ? ” This was the 
 argument of Paley’s brilliant book on Natural 
 Theology . Then for Revealed Religion—Christianity 
 —the pillar of support was the authority of Holy 
 Scripture, considered not merely as containing the 
 record of the word of God, but as being in all its parts 
 the word of God, and therefore in all its affirmations 
 on all subjects of infallible authority. Though the 
 
6 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 teaching of the leaders of the Reformation in Germany 
 about the authority of the Bible had been in some 
 cases much more discriminating, 1 yet in England, at 
 any rate, after the weakening of the authority of the 
 Church at the Reformation, the accepted appeal had 
 come to be simply to the infallible book. “ The Bible 
 and the Bible only ” was “ the religion 55 of Protestant 
 Englishmen. 
 
 Now it is not too much to say that, in their existing 
 forms , both those great supports of popular religion 
 were destroyed in the estimation both of men of 
 science and of the mass of educated people in the 
 middle of the last century. We will take first the 
 argument from design. 
 
 1. The fixity of species from the beginningof creation 
 might seem to be naturally deducible from the story 
 of the creation in Genesis, taken literally, as for 
 example it is presented by Milton in Paradise Lost . 
 But as a matter of fact the idea appears first not in 
 Christian fathers or schoolmen, but as a scientific 
 conclusion of the seventeenth century 2 —a conclusion 
 drawn especially from the limits within which inter¬ 
 breeding is possible. Francis Bacon plainly knows 
 nothing of it. It is to be found first, I believe, in the 
 writings of John Ray (1628-1705), who is called “ the 
 founder of modern zoology ” ; it was affirmed by 
 Linnaeus in his Philosophia Botanica (1751) as a sort 
 of dogma : “ There are as many different species as 
 the Infinite Being originally created different forms.” 3 
 
 1 See T. M. Lindsay’s Hist, of the Reformation (Clarke, 1907), vol. i, 
 pp. 453 ff. 
 
 2 See Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith (Kegan Paul, 1889), 
 p. 173. 
 
 3 He suggests elsewhere, however, an extension of view according 
 to which all the different species of a genus were originally one 
 species. 
 
SPECIAL CREATIONS 7 
 
 In spite of occasional doubts or protests or positive 
 theories of evolution expressed by Buffon, Goethe, 
 Erasmus Darwin, Treviranus, and Lamarck, this 
 doctrine held the field in the scientific world, till 
 Charles Darwin and Wallace destroyed it. It was 
 then not primarily a theological, but a scientific 
 doctrine, based on observation, no doubt incomplete ; 
 and when Darwin speaks of its being “ like confessing 
 a murder ” 1 to confess to the opinion that species are 
 not immutable, the solid body of hostile opinion that 
 he is thinking of is not that of the theologians, but of 
 the scientific world. 2 But this scientific doctrine had 
 naturally been made use of in the interests of “ natural 
 religion,” and made the basis of the argument from 
 design. It was an argument (as it appears in Paley) 
 compact, intelligible, and incontrovertible. “ Each 
 of these kinds of plants and animals is obviously 
 designed to fulfil its functions. Science on its own 
 ground teaches you that each kind (i.e. each group of 
 living things which are fertile inter se ) has been sub- 
 
 1 Life, ii, 23. 
 
 2 In Paley’s Natural Theology, chap, v {Works, vol. iv, p. 50). 
 The theory of the appearance of design in nature being due to 
 “natural selection” (as Darwin afterwards called it) acting upon 
 the profusion of nature, which produces every kind of variation and 
 every conceivable form—eliminating those forms which “ by the 
 defect of their constitution [were] incapable of preservation and of 
 continuance by generation ” and suffering only the fit to survive— 
 is considered by Paley and rather contemptuously rejected. The 
 theory was, in fact, first given reasonable consistency and plausibility 
 by Darwin. Darwin himself denies that before he published his 
 Origin of Species “the subject was in the air” or “that men’s 
 minds were prepared for it.” In his intercourse with naturalists 
 he says he “ never happened to come across a single one who seemed 
 to doubt about the permanence of species ” {Life, i, 87). It is not 
 necessary, however, here to review the controversy raised by 
 Samuel Butler and renewed by Bernard Shaw as to the precise 
 nature of the achievement of Darwin in the history of the doctrine 
 of evolution. 
 
8 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 stantially what it is, apart from superficial variations, 
 from the beginning. You cannot reasonably doubt, 
 therefore, that it was created by an original designer, 
 the author and maker of all that is.” 1 But in this 
 form Darwin—it is not too much to say—seemed com¬ 
 pletely to overthrow the argument from design. 
 Nature was now presented under a new aspect. Granted 
 force and matter and law, including living matter, with 
 its constant tendency to variation in all sorts of direc¬ 
 tions, and the whole world, with all its infinite forms, 
 appeared as having through countless ages grown 
 of itself, or automatically. The exact specific form 
 of each kind of plant and animal was now repre¬ 
 sented as being due, not to the Creator having origin¬ 
 ally so made it, but to the fact that, among the 
 infinite varieties of forms which the profusion of 
 nature poured forth, one form at each stage proved 
 itself the best adapted to survive, and in the struggle 
 for existence—which is due to nature producing at 
 each moment far more specimens of each kind than 
 can survive—natural selection had cleared the spaces 
 of nature by killing off all the innumerable specimens 
 less suited to survive, and leaving the field to the 
 one which had the best survival value. The appear¬ 
 ance of design is thus due, not to any original creative 
 act, but to the fact that out of innumerable hosts of 
 things produced those only survived the struggle and 
 successfully propagated their kind which were the 
 best adapted to their surroundings. Of course, in 
 the pages of Darwin the doctrine is stated with 
 cautions and reservations and limitations which 
 
 1 Kant’s famous criticism of the argument from design hardly 
 touched its popular use. Moreover, his chief concern is to show that 
 the argument, if valid, would prove only a designer of great power 
 and wisdom, not an absolute creator, almighty and all-wise. 
 
CHARLES DARWIN 9 
 
 “ popular science ” ignored. It is also the case that 
 Darwin’s positions and suggestions have not in all cases 
 proved scientifically acceptable. Rut what we are now 
 concerned with is only the original effect on the popular 
 imagination of Darwin’s theory. There it presented 
 itself as a doctrine of nature making itself—a process 
 which, granted the initial materials and laws, 1 seemed 
 to explain itself without requiring any God to design 
 it or “ make it up.” Man, moreover, appeared as, in 
 his physical structure, only one form of animal life, 
 perfected in the struggle for existence, especially in 
 virtue of pre-eminent mental qualities, which yet (it 
 was suggested) were only developments of the mental 
 qualities which had progressively appeared in the 
 animal world generally. And instead of a being 
 created perfect, in the full glory of intellectual and 
 moral power, as Milton and South, interpreting or 
 misinterpreting the Bible, had represented him, who 
 fell from his first glory and only after long ages could 
 be restored to it by a divine act of redemption— 
 man now appeared as starting from the lowest depth 
 among the anthropoid apes, and only slowly climbing 
 up from among his animal ancestry, by his own 
 efforts through long ages, to a dignity such as he now 
 enjoys. So the acceptance of Darwinism seemed in 
 the popular imagination to destroy not only the 
 argument from design, in its shortest and most 
 
 1 All the Darwinians agreed with Clifford that “ of the beginning 
 of the universe we know nothing at all.” There is in Adolphe 
 Rette’s account of his conversion to Catholicism, Du diable d Dieu, 
 an amusing account of how, in his agnostic days, his intellectual 
 conscience was scandalized by the joy expressed by some working 
 men, after listening to a lecture of his, that nowadays science was 
 able to explain the origin of things without the doctrines of religion 
 or the assistance of priests. This, he uneasily felt, was precisely 
 what science cannot do. It is concerned with process, not origin. 
 I am trusting to my memory for the reference. 
 
10 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 effective form, but also the Bible doctrine of the origin 
 of man and of his fall, which, in its turn, lay at the 
 root of Christianity. 
 
 Very likely if the Darwinian doctrine of develop¬ 
 ment had been formulated much earlier—let us say 
 in the fourth century, in the atmosphere generated 
 by Greek philosophical Christianity—it would have 
 produced no such shock. The idea that the early 
 chapters of Genesis are “ allegory 55 and not history 
 had been widely held in the early Church, and not 
 only in the Alexandrian school. Augustine himself, 
 as is well known, following St. Gregory of Nyssa, had 
 propounded the view that God in the beginning 
 created only germs or causes of the forms of life, 
 which were afterwards to be developed in gradual 
 course. 1 And it had been repeatedly asserted by the 
 leaders of the Church that the first man was not 
 created perfect—for it is God’s method to do things 
 gradually—but only in a fit state to advance towards 
 perfection. 2 Accommodation, then, between the 
 points of view of science and religion would probably 
 have been much easier then than it was in the nine¬ 
 teenth century. But it is in the nineteenth century 
 and not in the fourth that we are now interested. 
 
 We are not yet concerned with balancing and 
 estimating evidences and probabilities, or with dis¬ 
 tinguishing what was the real religious outcome of 
 the new science from its popular effect, or what was 
 essential Christianity from its current form. We are 
 simply concerned to estimate the shock to the 
 religious imagination which the speedy and world- 
 
 1 Aug. de Gen. ad lit, v, 5 and 23, and St. Gregory of Nyssa in 
 Hexaem, P.G. xliv, 72, etc. 
 
 2 See Lux Mundi, p. 393, n. 2 ; also that man from his creation 
 was naturally mortal or subject to death, p. 395. 
 
THE BLOWS OF SCIENCE II 
 
 wide acceptance of Darwin’s conclusions, with what¬ 
 ever modifications, inevitably produced. 
 
 And this, it must be noticed, was only the last of 
 many shocks. When Milton wrote his Paradise Lost , 
 he could still—though with hesitation—present the 
 old and comfortable view of the universe which made 
 this world the centre of the whole system of creation. 
 I call it comfortable, because it made mankind so 
 obviously the central object in the divine purpose. 
 In a few days the universe had been prepared by God 
 for the dwelling-place of man, with the world, his 
 home, as its centre, and the sun and the moon to give 
 him light, and the stars to give glory to his sky and 
 perhaps to portray his destiny ; and man had been 
 introduced in perfection and glory into his dwelling- 
 place, to be its earthly sovereign, all within the space 
 of a few days a few thousand years ago. But science 
 had aimed a series of blows at this comfortable and 
 compact scheme. Astronomy first had shattered the 
 geocentric theory, by disclosing the world as only a 
 minor planet revolving round its central sun, while 
 our whole solar system was only one of innumerable 
 systems which stretch through infinite space . . . till 
 the brain reels beneath the attempt to realize them ; 
 and, on this showing, man and his dwelling become 
 a mere speck in an unimaginable infinitude of 
 systems. And geology had taken up the tale where 
 astronomy left it, and rolled out its almost infinite 
 ages while the world was in making, till man, a speck 
 in space, became no more than a moment in time. 
 And now, once again, biology, taking up the tale from 
 astronomy and geology, seemed to make mankind 
 only one phase (why more than a passing phase ?) 
 in the evolution of life—a bubble, as it were, on the 
 changing, flowing river. The effect of all those 
 
12 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 disclosures upon the religious imagination can hardly 
 be exaggerated. They seemed, as represented in 
 popular literature, almost to obliterate God behind a 
 self-developing universe, and to reduce the position 
 of man to insignificance, and to contradict all that 
 view of his history which the Bible had enforced or 
 suggested. 
 
 And before we leave this particular “ shock to 
 religion,” it must not be overlooked that the imagina¬ 
 tion of each age is affected chiefly by the most 
 successful and progressive form of intellectual work 
 current at the time. The leading representatives of 
 effective intellect in earlier ages had been philosophers 
 or theologians or poets or artists. Now, beyond all 
 question, the popular representatives of effective 
 intelligence were the scientific men and the practical 
 men who were using science to develop the resources 
 of civilization. And the age—I speak of the Victorian 
 age — was optimistic. Science and “secular” 
 education were to be the instruments of unlimited 
 progress and universal peace. Nothing was needed 
 but to educate men and make them free to compete. 
 Then universal competition would bring the best to 
 the front, and mankind would go ahead to a glorious 
 future. The universe was the scene of what appeared 
 to be regarded as a necessary law of progress, of which 
 science was the chief minister and instrument. 
 Darwin and Huxley might shake their heads and 
 declare that science could utter no optimistic pro¬ 
 phesies. But the spirit of the age was not to be 
 quenched by their warnings. And within a restricted 
 region science responded magnificently to the task 
 assigned to her. Material progress, of a kind, was 
 manifest in all directions. No wonder the popular 
 imagination worshipped “ science ” and 44 progress,” 
 
HISTORICAL CRITICISM 13 
 
 and discarded the old-fashioned arguments for 
 religion, and was disposed to take reprisals on the 
 Church as an enfeebled tyrant which has unsuccess¬ 
 fully set itself to resist each advance of scientific 
 discovery, and which was, moreover, discredited by 
 its manifest abuses, so repellent to the Liberal 
 spirit. No wonder materialism or agnosticism pre¬ 
 vailed, and Herbert Spencer became the prophet of 
 enlightenment. 1 
 
 2. And contemporaneously with the great scientific 
 movement, of which Darwin is the central figure, 
 there emerged within the horizon of the religious 
 world, which had been building its spiritual fabric 
 upon the infallibility of Scripture, the startling con¬ 
 clusions of literary and historical criticism. To an 
 extent that we do not to-day easily realize, this was 
 a new science 2 ; and it was a real science which was 
 to open out vast regions of human knowledge, 
 especially of the earlier stages of civilization. It had 
 
 1 For the present scientific position of the theory of evolution, 
 after seventy years of criticism, see the excellent sketch of J. A. 
 Thomson and P. Geddes, Evolution (Home University Library: 
 Williams & Norgate) ; and for human origins, see Prof. Wood Jones, 
 The Problem of Man's Ancestry (S.P.C.K.). For an estimate of the 
 real spiritual effect of the newer biological theories, reference may 
 still be made to Aubrey Moore’s Science and the Faith, as well as to 
 a multitude of more recent books. But to such considerations we 
 shall have to return when we are occupied in reconstruction. 
 
 2 See Gooch’s History and Historians in the XIXth Century 
 (Longmans), pp. 10 ff. I think it is really suggestive to notice 
 Samuel Johnson’s estimate of history and historians as reported by 
 Boswell. “ Great abilities,” he said, “ are not requisite for an 
 historian ; for in historical composition all the greatest powers of 
 the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand ; 
 so that there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not 
 required in any high degree ; only about as much as is used in the 
 lower kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring 
 will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is 
 necessary ” (see under the year 1763 in Boswell’s Life , chap. vii). 
 
14 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 applied itself in the person of Wolf to show that 
 Homer’s epics were not the work of one man at one 
 time, but the slowly growing product of a whole 
 epoch, however great the genius of the man or men 
 who fixed the tradition in its final form. And it had 
 applied itself in the person of Niebuhr to the history 
 of Rome. In that region it had traced the emergence 
 of history, as a trustworthy record of the facts as 
 they occurred, out of the mythical stories and 
 traditional lore which lie behind history ; which in 
 varying degrees contain historical material of a 
 very important kind, but which are certainly not 
 historical in the form in which they were handed 
 down. 
 
 This same critical science then applied itself to the 
 Bible records. Thus De Wette (1780-1843) and 
 Ewald (1803-1875) and their successors led students 
 to perceive that in the early chapters of Genesis what 
 we are dealing with is not an historical record of 
 human origins, revealed by God and accurately 
 handed down from father to son in human tradition. 
 What supplied the material of these early stories 
 were the first efforts of the human imagination seek¬ 
 ing, without materials to work upon, to construct a 
 picture of the origins of the world and of man, and 
 of sin and suffering and death. Similar stories of the 
 Creation and the Flood existed, it appeared, among the 
 Babylonians. No doubt what was characteristic of 
 the Hebrew narrative was its astonishing dignity and 
 purity of spiritual truth. That certainly suggested 
 divine inspiration ; but its subject-matter was the 
 early product of the human imagination “ making up 
 a picture ” of human origins. It was not history— 
 neither the story of Creation, nor of the Fall, nor of 
 the Flood, nor of the Tower of Babel ; moreover, 
 
15 
 
 CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE 
 
 there were easily to be detected different and incom¬ 
 patible narratives of the Creation and the Flood 
 interwoven in our present Book of Genesis. 
 
 Later, it appeared, we had to do with tradition in 
 which the names of races akin to Israel appeared as 
 individuals, and their mutual qualities and relations 
 were reflected back into the histories of their supposed 
 founders. Gradually from traditional history we get 
 out upon the solid ground of real chronicle. It is the 
 task of criticism to discriminate the character of the 
 different portions of the Bible, whether they be like 
 the legends of the Arthurian cycle, or like the legend 
 of Charlemagne—a legend woven round a solidly 
 historical person—or like the tradition of a saint 
 among his monastic brethren, or the precise chronicle. 
 
 One special feature of ancient literature is the 
 tendency to heap upon great founders all the gradually 
 successive outcomes of their foundation. Thus the 
 various codifications of the Law of Israel were 
 traditionally ascribed to the first founder of their 
 polity, Moses. But Moses certainly did not write the 
 Pentateuch, nor did he do all that is there ascribed 
 to him. Again, the Psalms as a whole were ascribed 
 to David, but only a very small portion of them can 
 have been actually of his authorship. Once more, 
 a great unknown prophet at the end of the Captivity 
 carried on the work of Isaiah in a new moment of 
 history, and his work is incorporated with Isaiah’s 
 and called by his name. 
 
 Moreover, even in later times, the function of history 
 is not strictly distinguished from that of edification. 
 Thus the books of Chronicles were history written 
 not as it was, but as in the judgement of the scribe it 
 ought to have been and must have been. And 
 stories with a moral, not strictly historical, like the 
 
16 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 narrative part of Daniel or the story of Esther, appear 
 also among the sacred books. 
 
 Apart from questions of detail, or of more or less, 
 all this account of the Hebrew literature appeared to 
 be very convincing in the light of what we know of 
 human history everywhere. It rapidly converted the 
 scholars; but it was very revolutionary. And it 
 presented itself to the ordinary man as the discovery 
 that the Bible is not true—woman was not really 
 made of a rib taken from the side of man ; the Garden 
 of Eden was a myth ; mankind was not saved from a 
 universal deluge in the persons of Noah’s family in an 
 ark ; the Tower of Babel was not a true account of the 
 origin of languages ; many things written in the Bible 
 did not actually happen—could not indeed have hap¬ 
 pened as is described : the Bible had been proved not 
 to be true. All this was very crude. People did not 
 ask themselves whether poetry and drama and legend 
 and myth have not in other nations proved to be 
 as potent vehicles of truth as historical fact. But we, 
 in England especially, are a prosaic and unimaginative 
 people. The credit of the Bible and with it the 
 credit of religion was fundamentally shaken. 
 
 Meanwhile David Strauss had, in the most radical 
 spirit, and with the most virulent animus against 
 44 priests ” and churches, applied the mythical theory 
 to the Gospels in his famous Life of Christ (1833); and 
 shortly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of 
 Species , Renan (1863) published his much more 
 attractive, but hardly less destructive, Life of Jesus. 
 And Ferdinand Baur, the contemporary of Strauss 
 between 1831 and 1860, elaborated the deeply de¬ 
 structive view of the New Testament literature which, 
 as developed by 44 the school of Tubingen,” became 
 the main subject of intellectual controversy in 
 
COMPARATIVE RELIGION 17 
 
 theological circles for many years. But it is notice¬ 
 able that in England certainly the work of Strauss and 
 Renan never produced as much effect on the popular 
 imagination as the criticism of the Old Testament. 
 This was no doubt partly due to the fact that our great 
 English scholars appeared to win a decisive victory 
 over the destructive critics of the New Testament, 
 whose theories they seemed to show to be uncritical 
 and unconvincing. But whatever the cause, it is 
 worth noticing that though the traditional view of 
 the Old Testament and of the New was subject at 
 the same time to attacks equally thorough, equally 
 brilliant, and equally radical, it was mainly on the 
 field of the Old Testament that the credit of the 
 Bible suffered in popular imagination. The Old 
 Testament had been the stronghold of Puritan religion. 
 It was there especially that the Bible was supposed 
 to have been proved to be untrue. It is only recently 
 that 44 Modernist ” views of the New Testament have 
 come to dominate popular and journalistic literature, 
 and have given us the kind of view of Christian 
 origins which may be seen in Mr. Wells’s Outline oj 
 History . 
 
 3. To these two great shocks to established religious 
 beliefs must be added a third—less destructive, no 
 doubt, but still seriously imperilling the popular view 
 of divine revelation. I refer to the rise of the science 
 of Comparative Religion. The cause of the evangeliza¬ 
 tion of the heathen had not been a popular cause in 
 the early nineteenth century, except in the circle of 
 the strict Evangelicals. The popular distaste for it is 
 expressed, in ways we are familiar with, by Thackeray 
 and Dickens. But when it told how 44 the heathen in 
 their blindness bow down to wood and stone,” it 
 expressed the current view of the non-Christian 
 3 
 
18 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 religions. No doubt Judaism and Mohammedanism 
 stood on a different basis, though Judaism had 
 decisively missed its way and Mohammed was dis¬ 
 tinctively the False Prophet. But for the rest the 
 religions of heathenism were supposed to be rationally 
 beneath contempt. Macaulay, though he was very 
 far from being an evangelical Christian, expressed 
 with his usual force the common contemptuous 
 estimate alike of the philosophy and the religions of 
 India. But a quite different attitude of mind was 
 represented by the new science of Comparative Re¬ 
 ligions, of which Max Muller was in England the most 
 prominent representative. They were now studied as 
 examples of the various forms which had been taken 
 in different races by the fundamental instinct of religion 
 in man. Behind their grosser popular forms Hinduism, 
 Buddhism, Confucianism, and even the religion 
 of savages became the subject of a respectful study, 
 resulting sometimes in a positive enthusiasm for 
 what had formerly seemed a repulsive superstition. 
 Again I say, it is not my present business to seek to 
 estimate the exact truth of the newer views now 
 dominant. I only note the change and the effect of 
 the change on the common belief in Revealed Religion. 
 Though in fact the attitude of Britons in India and 
 Africa, whether Government officials or traders, 
 towards the natives and their religions remained very 
 much as it was and very far below what was to be 
 desired in the way of sympathy, 1 the world of educated 
 people at home began to profess an even profound 
 respect for the non-Christian faiths. It was agreed 
 that religion was a universal need and characteristic 
 
 1 1 ought, I think, to except Mohammedanism. The Mohammedan 
 religion has apparently always obtained the instinctive sympathy 
 of Englishmen. 
 
REVOLT AGAINST CALVINISM 19 
 
 of man, and that it had taken various forms according 
 to the psychologies of various races and to their vary¬ 
 ing levels of culture. All religions, it would appear, 
 were more or less inspired by the spirit of truth and 
 more or less involved in error. The conclusion 
 commonly suggested was that the distinctive and 
 absolute claim made for the religion of the Bible 
 would need to be very much toned down ; and that, 
 if there were to be a universal religion for our day or 
 for the future, it must be one which would negate the 
 exclusive claim of any one historical creed, but in 
 which all alike could, in their real spirit, find them¬ 
 selves at home. “ Religion,” it has been recently 
 said, “ lives through the death of religions.” 1 Thus 
 the claim of the historical Christian creed to be the 
 one divinely authorized religion which was to convert 
 the world—being as light to darkness and knowledge 
 to ignorance—came to be regarded as an old-fashioned 
 claim which educated people could treat with 
 contempt. 
 
 4. The shocks to established beliefs which I have 
 been enumerating arose from new discoveries or new 
 sciences. But hardly less important among the 
 causes of religious unsettlement was the revolt of the 
 moral conscience—which in the middle of the last 
 century, if it was singularly insensitive on some 
 points, as for instance on the cruelties and injustices 
 still involved in our industrial system, was acutely 
 sensitive and insistent on others—against certain 
 current doctrines of Christianity which are commonly, 
 if not quite accurately, described as Calvinistic. The 
 idea of absolute divine decrees condemning to eternal 
 misery masses of men even before their birth—the 
 
 L Kirsopp Lake’s Landmarks oj Early Christianity (Macmillan, 
 1920), p.M. 
 
20 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 teaching about the Atonement which represented 
 God as content to punish the innocent in place of the 
 guilty—the doctrine of an endless hell which was to 
 be the lot of all who had not accepted a message which 
 some of them had not even heard—such doctrines, 
 which had no doubt been commonly preached from 
 Christian pulpits for a long period, more or less 
 suddenly began to produce a violent reaction. John 
 Stuart Mill’s famous protest, “ I will call no being 
 good, who is not what I mean when I apply that 
 epithet to my fellow-creatures, and if such a being 
 can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell 
 I will go,” 1 represented a very widespread rebellion 
 of conscience against everything in the current 
 religious tradition which described the action of 
 God as tyrannical, arbitrary and cruel. Of course 
 it was largely an uninstructed protest. It did not 
 recognize how much in the real Christian tradition 
 was wholly on its side. 8 Of course also it was an 
 unbalanced protest, and ran to foolish excesses, so that 
 it became fashionable to represent God as if He were 
 a merely good-natured being, and the moral law had 
 no severity and no eternal and necessary sanction. 
 Nevertheless it must be recognized that the current 
 tradition of orthodox Protestantism had offended, 
 at certain points even violently, the real conscience 
 of men, and the revolt of outraged conscience rein¬ 
 forced the rebellion against orthodox tradition which 
 had its source in the new sciences. 
 
 I have been seeking to explain the causes which, 
 now more than two generations ago, brought about 
 
 1 J. S. Mill’s Examination ojSir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, 4th ed. 
 p 129. 
 
 a John Wesley’s famous protest against Calvinism was not less 
 impassioned than J. S. Mill’s. 
 
PRESENT-DAY UNSETTLEMENT 21 
 
 the breakdown of the religious tradition in Protestant 
 England. Since that time many things have 
 happened. New currents of thought and feeling 
 have arisen and altered the general temper and 
 opinion of our society on many subjects, so that the 
 opinions of the Victorian Age have become almost a 
 synonym for something old-fashioned and abandoned. 
 Meanwhile, on the field of religion and theology a 
 vast amount of work has been done on critical lines, 
 in great part sane, illuminating, and reconstructive, 
 so that on the whole—if scattered individuals could 
 be taken together—there would be found to be a 
 very strong body amongst us of rationally convinced 
 believers in the Christian Creed. Popular religious 
 movements, again, have been vigorously at work and 
 have gathered and maintained in allegiance great 
 groups of believers and worshippers. There is a 
 widespread feeling in the country that nothing can 
 take the place of the Christian religion and that we 
 cannot do without it; and there has arisen recently a 
 widespread desire for religious unity, generally, how¬ 
 ever, accompanied by a great unwillingness to face 
 the question of its intellectual basis. All these things 
 have happened and have deeply altered the intellectual 
 atmosphere. But one thing has not occurred. There 
 has not been any restoration of the authority of 
 religious tradition—that is, any restoration on a 
 broad scale of the sense of security of belief or 
 agreement in believing. Still, if you take any casual 
 collection of twenty men and women, and have the 
 opportunity of ascertaining their religious beliefs, you 
 will find an extraordinary diversity and uncertainty 
 among them. 
 
 It is worth while noticing some of the characteristic 
 features or causes of this present-day unsettlement, 
 
22 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 so far as it can be distinguished from what prevailed 
 a generation or two ago. 
 
 1. The atmosphere of democracy possesses the 
 intellectual world and takes the form of an almost 
 unlimited assertion and recognition of the right of 
 private judgement. For reasons only too evident 
 within the Church, w T hether we are thinking of the 
 Church of England or of the wider world of Christian 
 belief, authority is discredited. “There is nothing,” 
 it is said with some reason, “ which you may not hear 
 denied or affirmed in the pulpits of the Church.” 
 Even the Catholic movement in the Church of England, 
 which makes its special appeal to authority, has in 
 fact maintained itself and spread largely by an appeal 
 to the rights of congregations to worship and believe 
 as they please. Now, the claim to an unlimited right 
 to believe as one pleases is indisputable as a maxim 
 of civil society ; but there is an extraordinary lack 
 of any balancing perception that morally the right of 
 private judgment depends on the pains that have 
 been taken to form the judgement by adequate and 
 conscientious enquiry. Nevertheless, the claim pre¬ 
 vails almost unchallenged. 
 
 2. Fifty years ago it used to be commonly held 
 that, though there was great doubt about many 
 established doctrines of the faith, there was, and would 
 continue to be, almost complete agreement on the 
 standard of Christian morality; but any such 
 unreasonable expectation has been indeed rudely 
 shattered. It must have been expressed originally in 
 sublime unconsciousness that the whole industrial 
 system, then in its glory, had been built up on a 
 basis of profound revolt against the central law of 
 Christian morality, “ Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself.” There are few things in history more 
 
INDIVIDUALISM 23 
 
 astonishing than the silent acquiescence of the 
 Christian world in the radical betrayal of its ethical 
 foundation. But it is not only in the industrial 
 world that there has been a rebellion against Christian 
 moral principles. The same rebellion is evident to-day 
 in every section of our society against the Christian 
 standard of sexual morality, alike among the single 
 and the married, and it is open and deliberate. Thus 
 masses of men and women to-day are as much without 
 any sense of a definite standard having divine 
 authority in matters of conduct as in matters of creed. 
 
 3. This tendency to unlimited individualism, or to 
 organized revolt from the long-accepted standards of 
 religious and moral authority, has been accentuated 
 by popular literature. Most people read little but 
 novels and newspapers. Now, novels in England of 
 recent years have been largely occupied with glorifying 
 the revolt. Authority is represented as stupid. 
 Passionate feeling is to have its own way. And the 
 newspapers advertise every startling 44 new view,” 
 however intellectually worthless or unbalanced, simply 
 because it is exciting and sells the newspaper, while 
 the careful utterance of the sober thinker is passed 
 by unreported. 
 
 4. Even the new and popular science of psychology, 
 especially 44 the psychology of religious belief”— 
 its intentions being, no doubt, misunderstood—is 
 made to minister to the prevalent religious individual¬ 
 ism or subjectivism. Experience, I suppose, may 
 be properly defined to be reality as felt. The value 
 of the feeling will thus be constantly estimated to 
 depend upon its relation to objective reality. But 
 psychology studies the feelings and movements of the 
 soul without any regard to objective standards. Thus 
 44 experience ” is taken to mean simply feeling, and 
 
24 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 is valued in proportion as it is intense—often in 
 proportion as it is abnormal and therefore specially 
 interesting. Thus, the popular cry 44 Let us be our 
 real selves ” is taken to mean let us “ remove inhibi¬ 
 tions ” and be our unrestrained selves. This is no 
 doubt a parody of scientific psychology; but it 
 appears to be a very popular parody, and I will quote, 
 in confirmation of what I have said, the serious words 
 of a well-known American psychologist, Professor J. B. 
 Pratt : 1 44 Psychology studies the idea of God and the 
 idea of the solar system, and stops there. But 
 neither astronomy nor theology means to limit our 
 study to our ideas. They both mean to be objective 
 —and it is hard to see why one should be denied this 
 privilege, if it be granted to the other. And if 
 objectivity be denied to theology, the dangers that 
 inevitably result are evident. Theology becomes 
 purely subjective—a description of the way w r e feel ; 
 the idea of God is substituted for God . . . and the 
 psychology of religion, having absorbed all that was 
 objective in religion, finds it has nothing left to study, 
 or at best becomes a branch of abnormal psychology. 
 
 4 This method,’ writes Boutroux, 4 if it succeed, will 
 lead sooner or later to the abolition of the fact itself, 
 while the dogmatic criticism of religions has striven 
 in vain for centuries to obtain this result. . . . Con¬ 
 trary, then, to the other sciences which leave standing 
 the things that they explain, the one just mentioned 
 has this remarkable property of destroying its object 
 in the act of describing it, and of substituting itself 
 for the facts in proportion as it analyses them.’ ” 
 
 I think the language of both the above quotations 
 
 1 The author of The Psychology of Religious Belief and The Religious 
 Consciousness (Macmillan: New York). My quotation is from the 
 latter work, p. 41. 
 
NEW RELIGIONS 25 
 
 is open to criticism. But their substantial meaning 
 is plain and true. 
 
 5. In this confused world, thirsting alike for novelty 
 and for assurance, there emerge 44 new religions,” for 
 instance, Christian Science, Theosophy, and (only so 
 far as it has a special religious doctrine of its own) 
 Spiritualism. 1 In their substance or basis they are 
 not by any means new, but revivals of very old forms 
 of religious belief, the first two strikingly recalling the 
 features of ancient Gnosticism. If we examine the 
 actual basis of their special propaganda, it appears 
 to be extraordinarily untrustworthy and to make an 
 inordinate claim on credulity. None the less they 
 push their way widely amongst those who are rebels 
 against the old-fashioned kinds of authority ; they 
 make converts, numerous, zealous, and proselytizing, 
 and constitute a very distinctive feature in the mixed 
 present-day world of religious opinions. 
 
 6. Finally, we must take note that the hope, widely 
 entertained, that the trials, sacrifices, and agonies of 
 the Great War would recall men to God—to a more 
 vivid sense of His judgements and of their need of 
 His mercy and protection, and so rally them to the 
 faith of their fathers, to the old Christian Gospel, as 
 the only really trustworthy basis for life—this hope 
 has not apparently been fulfilled on any wide scale. 
 On the contrary, the war and its experiences appear 
 to have done a great deal to deepen doubts of the 
 reality of divine love or the moral government of the 
 world. It has weakened the Liberal faith in Progress 
 without strengthening the faith in God. In the case 
 of the most serious, it has left them perplexed ; in 
 
 1 I desire to distinguish spiritualism as a religious propaganda 
 from spiritualism so far as it moans a scientific enquiry into psychical 
 phenomena. 
 
26 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 the mass, it has weakened idealism and deepened a 
 cynical materialism—“ Let us eat and drink, for 
 to-morrow we die.” Certainly, on the whole, it has 
 left the youth of the country widely and deeply 
 alienated from the Church and from organized religion. 
 • • • » • 
 
 It has seemed to me necessary, at starting, to 
 attempt this sort of analysis of the causes which lie 
 behind our present religious discontents and dis¬ 
 organization. Granted that the facts are, more or 
 less, as I have represented them, and the causes such 
 as I have described, the question arises—What is the 
 remedy ? When we speak of the remedy, we are apt 
 to imagine a remedy on a large scale. But I do not 
 think that anything like religious recovery on a large 
 scale is likely to occur at present. I agree with Dr. 
 Tennant, who says, “ As I have repeatedly emphasized, 
 it looks as if for the present any universally [I would 
 say “generally”] acceptable reconstruction of funda¬ 
 mental Christian doctrines is not feasible. We feel 
 the need of it doubtless with some natural impatience ; 
 but perhaps all we can now do in that direction is to 
 prepare for it.” 1 And the best way to prepare for 
 it is to clarify one’s own mind. It is out of a 
 reconstruction of belief in this or that man's own mind, 
 or in the minds of small groups of men and women, that 
 the larger reconstruction must be based. 
 
 I ask again then, What is the remedy for religious 
 unsettlement and intellectual dissatisfaction in the 
 individual ? I leave for the present out of account 
 those men and women who find it consistent with 
 their conscience to refuse full intellectual enquiry into 
 the difficult questions which haunt their imagination, 
 
 1 F. R. Tennant, “The Present Condition of Some Fundamental 
 Christian Doctrines” in the Constructive Quarterly, Sept. 1920, p. 483. 
 
THE DUTY OF JUDGEMENT 27 
 
 and who consult what appear to be the interests and 
 peace of their souls by accepting passively the authority 
 of the Church. I do not wish to criticize this procedure. 
 But my conscience, and that of many others, will by 
 no means admit of it. Granted the truth of the 
 foundation doctrines of Christianity about God and 
 about Christ and about His Spirit, and we see clearly 
 enough that the question of authority—that is, the 
 question of the truest or best form of the Christian 
 religion—will become the most important question. 
 But for me it is the foundation of all claims of Christian 
 authority which is at stake. There is the first 
 question. Till these foundation questions are settled, 
 the claim of authority, especially as it actually presents 
 itself in a divided Christendom, cannot suffice—cannot 
 even explicitly enter. In the court of pure reason, 
 where nothing is more sacred than free enquiry, we 
 have heard the doubt, or more than the doubt, ex¬ 
 pressed by a long succession of serious and deep¬ 
 thinking men, whether our foundations will bear 
 investigation. We cannot put aside that claim for 
 free enquiry, and to the limit of our power we must, 
 for our own satisfaction, pursue it with the utmost 
 impartiality possible. 
 
 Moreover, this is not, as has already been said, 
 only a matter for specialized experts or professional 
 scholars. The discussion has been left in the past 
 too much to them. Religion, after all, is for common 
 men. It is in the region of the common reason, at 
 least as much as in the circles of specialized study, 
 that it must be judged. This is, most noticeably, 
 the assumption of the New Testament. It appeals 
 to the common judgement. It summons each man to 
 judge for himself. “ Why even of yourselves judge 
 ye not what is right ? ” “ Prove all things ; hold 
 
28 THE BREAKDOWN OF TRADITION 
 
 fast that which is good.” “ He that is spiritual 
 judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no 
 man.” 1 These words of our Lord and of St. Paul 
 are a challenge to common men. We must brace 
 ourselves individually and deliberately to the task 
 of facing the intellectual questions and seeing if we 
 cannot reach decisions, at least provisional decisions 
 such as can be the reasonable basis, when put to 
 account in life, of practical certainties. 
 
 And it is a quite unsatisfactory method to attack 
 each particular problem, which happens to present 
 itself or to be urged upon us, in isolation and at 
 haphazard. We must train ourselves to thinking 
 systematically. 
 
 I appeal, therefore, in this book to men and 
 women of ordinary intelligence and education, dis¬ 
 carding prejudices and arming themselves with 
 nothing but the resolute determination to know and 
 follow the truth, to begin with me at the beginning, 
 and seek to build the fabric of a belief which they 
 can feel in their conscience to be reasonable and 
 convincing. 
 
 1 Luke xii. 57 ; 1 Thess. v. 21 ; 1 Cor. ii. 15. 
 
 Additional note, see p. 3. Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Preface to his 
 Back to Methuselah shows in striking and characteristic fashion how 
 the triumphant Darwinism of the Mid-Victorian days misled the 
 public, and how fallacious was the kind of belief in progress which 
 it generated. The “orthodox” and highly dogmatic political 
 economy was equally deceptive. Such provoking critics of the 
 dominant intellectuals as Samuel Butler and John Ruskin have been 
 justified. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 If a seriously minded person is determined to emerge 
 from the confused condition of mind on matters of 
 religion, the causes of which I have sought to describe, 
 he does well, for the time at least, to forget all past 
 controversies and, like Rene Descartes, “ the father 
 of modern philosophy,” to begin at the beginning, 
 and freeing himself, as far as may be, from prejudices 
 and presuppositions, to lay the foundation of reason¬ 
 able certitude and build upon it stage by stage. 
 
 No doubt this is not the way in which our con¬ 
 victions on religion or on most other subjects actually 
 grow upon us. The genesis of convictions appears 
 commonly to be as little as possible the result of 
 rational processes. And there is often no order in 
 them. There are people who believe passionately in 
 the Church and the Sacraments, but appear to have 
 a very slender and meagre belief in God. 1 This lack 
 of order or proportion in our religious convictions is, 
 in part, the reason why they are so easily thrown 
 into confusion. But if we are seeking to reconstruct 
 a rational fabric of beliefs, we must begin at the 
 
 1 I remember A. H. Mackonochio, that much-miscalled “ Ritual¬ 
 ist,” saying in a sermon, somewhere about 1870, “ There are people 
 who belieye in the blessed Sacraments, but do not seem to believe 
 in Almighty God,” 
 
 29 
 
30 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 beginning ; and there are certain qualities of mind 
 which are, I think, essential. 
 
 1. We must make ourselves as free as possible from 
 the passions bred of antagonism and disappointment. 
 
 For instance, if a man has been brought up in the 
 Church, and, as so frequently happens, has become 
 “ offended ” with the Church, because he has found 
 it, in this or that clergyman under whose ministry 
 he has been, or whose words have been reported, or 
 through the records of history, obscurantist in temper, 
 and narrow and intolerant in spirit, or if he has seen 
 it bearing no such witness as it ought to have borne 
 against injustice and oppression, but leaguing itself 
 with the forces of wealth and class selfishness—if 
 something of this kind has happened, the “ offended ” 
 person is commonly embittered and quite incapable 
 of an unprejudiced judgement. Bishop Butler, in 
 famous words, speaks of the attitude of the fashion¬ 
 able world in his day towards religion. 66 It is come, 
 I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many 
 persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject 
 for enquiry ; but that it is, now at length, discovered 
 to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as 
 if, in the present age, this were an agreed point 
 among all persons of discernment; and nothing 
 remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of 
 mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, 
 for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the 
 world.” 1 This demand for reprisals describes the 
 attitude of a vast number of people in our own age. 
 Their attitude towards the Church or towards 
 orthodoxy is the attitude of those who would take 
 reprisals on a weakened tyrant. In many cases it is, 
 
 % From the Advertizement to The Analogy. 
 
RIDDANCE FROM BIAS 81 
 
 as in Butler’s day, the Church as claiming of them a 
 moral restraint which they have resolved to repudiate, 
 w T hich is chiefly in their mind. With the nobler sort 
 the restraint they are repudiating is the claim laid 
 upon free thought and democratic aspiration. But in 
 either case the bitter desire to take reprisals on the 
 Church is totally destructive of a calm and reason¬ 
 able judgement. Everything that makes against the 
 creed or moral standard of the Church is eagerly 
 welcomed. What makes for it is ignored or despised. 
 This is not reason, but the most deceptive of passions. 
 Must we be for ever in reactions ? Can we not at 
 least recognize, as one of the most certain conclusions 
 of history, that the best things, liberty and equality, 
 no less than authority and inherited experience, are 
 the most capable of dangerous abuse ; but that the 
 excesses and follies, whether of authority or liberty, 
 are no evidence that there is not, behind the excesses 
 and follies, a wisdom necessary for man ? “ La 
 
 verite,” said Renan, “ consiste dans les nuances.” 
 The method of “ all or nothing ” is of no account in 
 the court of reason. There is no chance of finding 
 truth, unless we seek calmly to estimate what is the 
 solid rational strength which lies behind all that 
 gives point and passion to the cry, “ Tantum relligio 
 potuit suadere malorum.” Those who are plainly 
 “ out to score off ” orthodoxy or, on the other hand, 
 eager to show up 16 the bankruptcy ” of science or 
 criticism, can always do it easily enough, but the gain 
 for truth or for real intellectual liberty is not con¬ 
 siderable. 
 
 2. Secondly, we ought to begin our search with a 
 real determination, if possible, to reach at least a 
 provisional decision. There are a vast number of 
 questions on which this is rationally impossible, and 
 
82 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 such questions no doubt abound in theology and 
 philosophy. For there really are no sufficient grounds 
 for a decision. But it is impossible to doubt that 
 the merely “ critical ” temper of our day, or at a 
 lower stage the temper of mere intellectual curiosity, 
 is sceptical in the sense that it loves the process of 
 enquiry for its own sake and has no real desire to 
 draw a conclusion. 1 It does not see the practical 
 importance of decision nor feel the responsibility of 
 making up its mind. It finds each new view interest¬ 
 ing. It never can say a decisive “ no.” It miscalls 
 its state of mental indecision openmindedness. No 
 doubt there are a vast number of questions, besides 
 those which, owing to the limitations of human 
 faculty, no man can decide, on which we as individuals 
 are without the materials for forming a judgement. 
 They are questions for specialists. We can but read 
 the record of this learned man’s opinion and that 
 learned man’s rebutter with a certain degree of 
 interest. We are and must be only spectators of a 
 conflict in which we cannot share. But with regard 
 to moral and religious matters in the deepest sense, 
 this cannot be so. They concern us vitally. Our 
 manhood calls out for assurance, if we can reasonably 
 have it. The popular suggestion that “ it does not 
 really matter so much what exactly a man believes ” 
 is a fallacy. However many instances we may find 
 of beliefs that have no influence on conduct, of 
 atheists who live as Christians and Christians who 
 live as atheists, yet on a broad view of human nature, 
 in the long reaches of human life, we cannot but see 
 
 1 There are famous instances of protests by great thinkers that 
 the search for truth was to be preferred to the finding of it, but I 
 believe that, at bottom, this state of mind represents a disease of the 
 intellect. 
 
33 
 
 THE DUTY OF DECISION 
 
 that how men and women behave depends on what 
 they really believe about the unseen foundations of 
 life, about God and duty, about heaven and hell. 
 
 It does not seem to me rational to doubt that the 
 marked differences between the various civilizations 
 or types of human society, which have been formed 
 under the influence of the Jewish or the Christian 
 or the Mohammedan or the Buddhist or the Brahman 
 religion, have been due in very large measure to the 
 differences in the beliefs about God and human 
 destiny which underlie them. And what is true of 
 nations or “ crowds ” is true also of individuals or 
 the smaller and more consciously formed groups. I 
 cannot imagine a man doubting this about himself, 
 if he will be at pains to distinguish his real from his 
 conventional creed. And what we are seeking for 
 is a real creed—a real intellectual decision such as is 
 formed to be acted upon. 
 
 Of course it is a betrayal of my rational nature to 
 make premature decisions on inadequate grounds. 
 But with regard to what really matters for human 
 life, I must accept the challenge of the great masters 
 of human life and determine to seek decisions, where 
 decisions are rationally possible, and to test their 
 validity by putting them to account in life. It is 
 only in this way that decisions of a provisional nature 
 can become permanent convictions. 
 
 No doubt we may form wrong decisions, and 
 growing experience or growing knowledge may con¬ 
 vince us of our mistake. Then we must go through 
 the process which James Hinton used to describe as 
 “ correcting our premises.” Nevertheless, it is better 
 to make an intellectual decision or accept a creed on 
 what seems to be the weight of the evidence on the 
 whole, and to use it for all it is worth, and then, if 
 
34 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 need arise, revise it or even abandon it—if all this be 
 done carefully and with all due consideration—than 
 to remain for ever uncommitted and in suspense. 
 
 Nor must we suffer ourselves to be deluded or dis¬ 
 couraged from thinking by what I may call the 
 “ pragmatist ” argument—that it is only the “ moral 
 values ” that really matter—that we can be certain 
 about our moral duty and the conception of life 
 which is involved in it, and that beyond this we may 
 be indifferent to “ metaphysics.” For we cannot 
 thus separate the moral from the intellectual or meta¬ 
 physical question. As has already been said, the 
 strain to-day for multitudes of men and women is 
 especially upon the moral standard. Because it 
 lacks the support of a clear faith, the moral standard 
 either breaks down or becomes lowered to the level 
 of popular opinion. To this extent certainly the 
 mass of men are rational, that they want to know 
 why they should pursue a difficult and, as it often 
 appears, a solitary course of action, inconsistent 
 equally with their apparent interests and the common 
 opinion of their fellows. And in effect this means that 
 they must have some sort of theology. No doubt 
 their reason for assenting to their creed may be 
 mainly the moral reason—the kind of reason which 
 can be best expressed as the conviction that a belief 
 which is necessary for a good life must be true or, as 
 people say, “ practically ” true. This is an argu¬ 
 ment which we shall have to estimate later. 1 But 
 whatever the reason which in their minds substan¬ 
 tiates their personal creed, some sort of creed about 
 God and their own soul individual men and women 
 must have if they are to live by any standard better 
 than that of public opinion ; and, we may add, 
 
 1 See pp. 111-12. 
 
SPIRITUAL INTUITION 85 
 
 without a creed commonly accepted or at least held 
 in reverence about God and the soul, the level of 
 public moral opinion will be constantly degrading. 
 
 3. Thirdly, this capacity for reaching decision 
 will need a frank recognition of the manifold grounds 
 and methods of certainty. The methods of arriving 
 at conclusions which is specially characteristic of 
 science—what Darwin called “ the grinding of general 
 laws out of observed instances ” 1 —is a part of the 
 operations of the human mind in gaining truth which 
 it would be impossible to ignore and difficult to over¬ 
 estimate, but we cannot recognize in it the whole of 
 our resources. Consider the great artists. They 
 convey to us truth about the universe which we are 
 maimed beings if we do not recognize, but which is 
 apprehended and conveyed and appreciated through 
 methods wholly different from the methods of scientific 
 reasoning, and which scientific reasoning can neither 
 reach nor communicate. William de Morgan 2 de¬ 
 scribes in a wonderful passage the effect of a sonata 
 of Beethoven on a man without special musical gifts 
 or knowledge in an hour of desolation and despair. 
 It reasoned with him, after its manner. It conveyed 
 to him reassurance which nothing else could convey. 
 “ I have ever since regarded the latter [Beethoven] 
 as not so much a Composer as a Revelation.” “ How 
 often have I said to myself after some perfectly 
 convincing phrase of Beethoven, 4 Of course, if that 
 is so, there can be no occasion to worry.’ It could not 
 be translated, of course, into vulgar grammar or 
 syntax ; but it left no doubt on the point, for all 
 that.” Those who have any appreciation of music, 
 
 i Of course, even the physical sciences owe very much to 
 prophetic intuitions. 
 
 a Joseph Vance, pp. 404-7. 
 
86 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 however deficient in musical science, must feel after 
 long listening to Beethoven what this means. He 
 conveys to us a temper of mind, almost a philosophy 
 —though not such as can be made directly articulate 
 in intellectual propositions. It is by feeling or 
 intuition that this supreme artist gains his profound 
 vision of experience and of God. But it seems to me 
 quite impossible to deny that it is insight into reality, 
 the sort of insight which at bottom involves a philo¬ 
 sophy of rational meaning or purpose in the universe. 
 
 44 The rest may reason—and welcome : it is we 
 musicians who know.” 
 
 The same claim must be made on behalf of the 
 intuitions of the poets, the prophets, and the mystics 
 in the most general sense—I mean the religious souls 
 who have a clear intuition of God and live in com¬ 
 munion with Him. All these classes of persons, 
 w T ho have played so vast a part in the history of man¬ 
 kind, are convinced of some kind of reality—some 
 law or aspect or controlling spirit of the universe 
 which is to them the most certain of realities ; and 
 this conviction of theirs has been reached often in 
 utter scorn of reasoning, or at any rate not by its 
 methods . 1 
 
 1 Cf. The Sadhu , by Canon B. H. Streeter and Mr. A. I. Appasamy. 
 This account of a still living Indian Christian mystic is of deep 
 interest. We may doubt his particular conclusions. I am not now 
 concerned with these. All that I am concerned to insist is that 
 the method of intuition is, as much as the method of scientific 
 induction, a method of arriving at truth about the universe. We 
 should note that the mystics differ from the prophets in this respect: 
 that the latter tell us about God—they have a definite message 
 about His will or character to deliver to men, of the truth of which 
 we must judge; but the former, for the most part, are impressive 
 not for what they tell us about God, but simply by the intensity 
 with which they feel and see God in all things and all things in 
 God. 
 
THE TESTS OF INTUITIONS 37 
 
 Now it is quite obvious that such “ intuitions ” and 
 “experiences” may be really quite unworthy of the 
 names they claim. And the message of the prophets 
 or seers may be quite contradictory. In fact they 
 often are. We say, “ They cannot all be true.” For 
 intuition means insight into reality, and experience 
 properly means reality as felt. But the most master¬ 
 ful convictions reached by the power of emotion in 
 the human soul may be pure delusions—they may 
 correspond to nothing in the realities of the world. 
 It would be only too easy to prove this proposition. 
 And in these days, when every one talks about 
 psychology, there is, as has been already said, a 
 seriously dangerous tendency to attach so much 
 importance to states of mind as to forget that the 
 value of the subjective depends wholly at the last 
 resort upon its correspondence with the objective. 
 
 It is very difficult to state precisely the tests which 
 are to enable us to discriminate between intuition of 
 reality and delusive imagination. Two of the most 
 important of such tests are, no doubt, (1) that the 
 spiritual intuition of the prophet or mystic or poet 
 should be found in experience to give to those who 
 accept it, and that over long periods of time and a 
 wide range of humanity, a new power in life, as, for 
 example, Mohammed’s intuition of the One God and 
 His will brought a startling degree of new life into 
 the Arab races. This we believe can only have been 
 because he had perceived some vital truth of fact, 
 however much fanaticism or error may have been 
 mixed up with his message. And (2) that the spiritual 
 intuitions of the mystic, when translated, as they 
 must be, into propositions for the intellect, should 
 show themselves either capable of harmonization 
 with all that, by other faculties, men have discovered 
 
88 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 about the universe in a consistent unity, or at 
 least, if complete synthesis is beyond us, should not 
 be in plain discrepancy with our knowledge as a 
 whole. 
 
 I am aware that this demand for agreement, or 
 at least absence of plain discrepancy, between the 
 conclusions which, on different grounds, we are led 
 to form needs to be pressed with much caution. 
 I gather that Sir William Bragg, in his recent Boyle 
 Lecture, has called attention within the region of 
 physics to the discrepancy between the apparent 
 intellectual postulate of the explosive action of 
 electrons, suggesting something like Newton’s corpus¬ 
 cular theory, and the “firmly established” wave theory 
 of the transference of energy, and added these sug¬ 
 gestive words, “We are obliged to use each theory 
 as occasion demands and wait for further knowledge 
 as to how it may be possible that both should be true 
 at the same time. Toleration of opinion is a recog¬ 
 nized virtue. The curiosity of the present situation 
 is that opposite opinions have to be held or used by 
 the same individual in the faith that some day the 
 combined truth may be made plain.” 1 If this is a 
 rational attitude, as I think it is, towards discrepant 
 theories within the region of the same science, much 
 more may it be rational within the wide compass of 
 the whole of our knowledge. The “ doctrine of rela¬ 
 tivity,” of which we hear so much to-day—the recog¬ 
 nition that our best theories or explanations of the 
 universe cannot express absolute truth, but only the 
 best measure of truth attainable by us with our 
 limited vision—makes us no doubt tolerant of apparent 
 discrepancies between our conclusions in one depart- 
 
 1 See The Times report of Sir William Bragg’s recent Robert 
 Boyle Lecture, Friday, May 13, 1921. 
 
TOLERATION OF CONTRADICTIONS 89 
 
 ment of knowledge and experience and our conclusions 
 in another. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is a tendency in philosophy 
 to-day, and not only among pragmatists, 1 to carry the 
 toleration of contradictory theories to a point which 
 seems to me to subvert rationality altogether. It is 
 surely of the essence of reason to demand synthesis. 
 It may be necessary to entertain contradictory 
 theories simultaneously, at least for a time, where 
 different classes of fact seem to force them upon 
 us, but at least this should cause in our minds 44 a 
 pressing uneasiness ” and not be allowed to subvert 
 the essential rational demand for a consistent universe. 
 
 But I am not now attempting to devise tests to 
 discriminate the real from the delusive either in the 
 reasonings or intuitions of mankind. All that I am 
 now contending for is what artists and prophets and 
 mystics have always insisted upon, and what the rising 
 science of psychology is pressing upon us, not without 
 perilous excess—viz. that if we want to reach the 
 whole truth, so far as we can, concerning the world we 
 live in, we must trust the whole of our faculties—not 
 our powers of abstract reasoning only, or only our 
 powers of scientific discovery higher or lower, but also 
 the more emotional and active powers of our nature— 
 its capacities for intuition and feeling and willing. 
 Anyone, in fact, who examines himself must almost 
 certainly reach the conclusion that a great proportion 
 of the convictions of his own mind, such as he would 
 find it impossible to repudiate without repudiating his 
 humanity, and impossible even to doubt without 
 
 1 The language of Dr. Bradley, for instance, surely is somewhat 
 reckless, e.g. “ Is there any need for our attempt to avoid self- 
 contradiction ? ” (Essays on Truth and Reality , p. 430, cf. index under 
 hoadin g “ Consistency ”). 
 
40 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 being self-convicted of treason against the good, have 
 been arrived at by feeling ; whether it be by a moral or 
 religious tradition being verified and approved in 
 his own conscience and experience, or by some feeling 
 being aroused in himself individually and acted upon, 
 and not by any process of reasoning. This means, 
 on the broadest scale, that feeling, generating an inward 
 vision of reality, or intuition—which is faith of a sort, 
 because it runs ahead of all reasoning and even resents 
 its interference—is a large part in our human equip¬ 
 ment as searchers after truth and reality. It is quite 
 compatible with such a fundamental respect for 
 feeling and conscience to admit that the conclusions 
 of science must be allowed to correct the rashness 
 or crudeness of the convictions which conscience and 
 feeling suggest, just as, on the other hand, conscience 
 and feeling must be allowed to enlarge the narrowness 
 of the outlook of science or ratiocination. The point 
 is that the whole of our mental or spiritual capacities 
 must be trained and brought into exercise if we are 
 to be true to the whole of reality. 
 
 The co-operation and interaction of our different 
 capacities may be made clearer by two illustrations. 
 
 (1) The Confession of Leo Tolstoy, 1 surely among 
 the most moving of modern documents, though 
 neither our feeling nor our reason may accept all 
 his conclusions, yet suggests convincingly one thing 
 at least—how reasoning and feeling combine and 
 intertwine in all genuine search for the truth, feeling 
 insisting on reopening questions which reasoning had 
 sought to close, sometimes gaining the victory over 
 reasoning, sometimes corrected by reasoning, but 
 always, so to speak, intervening, if reasoning is to be 
 kept from losing itself in vacancy or self-despair. 
 
 1 A Confession, trans. by Aylmer Maude (Oxford Univ. Press). 
 
SCIENCE AND FAITH 41 
 
 Finally, it appears, the ground of all sane theory 
 seemed to Tolstoy to be the feeling for the good life, 
 the recognition of it when we see it, and the 
 assurance that it must be worth while to live it, and 
 that it must turn out to be in accordance with right 
 reason. 
 
 (2) My point could also be happily illustrated by 
 many of us from intimacy with scientific men who 
 are also unashamedly religious men. We must 
 acknowledge that almost exclusive preoccupation 
 with scientific enquiries tends to generate a disinclina¬ 
 tion for, or a distrust of, the methods of the mystic 
 or the poet or the ordinary religious man—the 
 methods by which religious convictions are usually 
 arrived at and exercised. Thus it is not surprising 
 that many scientific men are agnostics and some pro¬ 
 claim their agnosticism. All exclusive preoccupation 
 with one kind of mental activity, whatever it be, is a 
 specializing of the mind which tends to narrowness. 
 Instances would be easy to give from many quarters. 
 But this narrowness is not characteristic of all scien¬ 
 tific men. Thus George Romanes bore witness that 
 of the brilliant galaxy of mathematicians who were 
 the glory of Cambridge about 1870-80 the majority 
 were orthodox in religion 1 —doubtless neither because 
 of, nor in spite of, their scientific insight, but because 
 they were something else besides scientific men. 
 In a somewhat later generation Pasteur, though 
 perhaps the most eminent among scientific men 
 who were also professing Christians, would by no 
 means stand alone with his frank declaration of a 
 childlike faith in the Catholic religion, again doubtless 
 neither because of his science nor in spite of it, but 
 by the exercise of faculties which science barely uses 
 1 Romanes, Thoughts on Religion (Longmans), pp. 137-8. 
 
42 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 or for its own specific purposes excludes. Once in 
 my life I have been privileged to know an able young 
 scientific man who went almost at a bound from 
 somewhat polemical agnosticism to a whole-hearted 
 faith, through an experience of mental agony which 
 seemed to open to him new windows to reality. 
 He did not find his new faith interfere with his 
 science or restrain it. He was free as ever to pursue 
 his special career. But he w r as more of a man. His 
 humanity was fuller, because he had learned that man 
 does not know by scientific investigation only. 
 
 In all this plea for breadth in the consideration of 
 the grounds of certitude I have used language about 
 “ faculties ” or “ capacities ”—reason and feeling and 
 will—in every man, such as experience, I think, 
 suggests or requires. We are intensely conscious of 
 such distinct faculties and of their conflict within us. 
 In one department of our life there is more claim upon 
 our will, in another upon our good feeling or con¬ 
 science, in another upon our powers of reasoning. 
 Again, one person is distinguished by a vigorous will but 
 deficient in feeling or intelligence, and another appears 
 to be all intellect, and another “ all heart and no 
 head.” And in each of us heart and head, or conscience 
 and will, are apt to be in violent discord. Nevertheless 
 any deep view of personality or any sound psychology 
 suffices to convince us that, however mysterious the 
 interaction of our faculties, or however intense at times 
 the consciousness of distraction and conflict, yet in fact 
 they are but movements of the same self. 1 The 
 
 1 It was the merit of Tertullian (dt Anima, 18), at a time when 
 Christianity was emphasizing the unity of human personality, that 
 he made a strong protest against the tendency of the philosophers 
 to distinguish human faculties as if they were different entities— 
 ‘ Non enim et sentire intelligere est et intelhgere sentire est ? ” etc. 
 
PREJUDICES 48 
 
 root of all is the common vital movement of self- 
 realization—the conative movement—which in man 
 expresses itself as will and emotion and rational 
 concept: “ will ” and “ emotion ” being distinguished 
 from animal instinct just in proportion as they either 
 pass into or presuppose rational concepts and theories 
 and convictions, and thereby gain consistency and 
 power. Our rational or argumentative powers only 
 emerge as an element in the whole conative movement 
 of our personality asserting itself. Thus no theory of 
 the world can claim to be the truth for a man which 
 either ultimately tends to paralyse his will or quench 
 his feeling or baffle his reason. For these qualities, 
 taken altogether and not apart, are the expression of 
 his fundamental self. 
 
 I know that some who read this will be disposed 
 to feel that, having begun by asking for a temper of 
 mind freed from disturbing prejudices, I am now 
 allowing the calm reason to be flooded with prejudices 
 bred of will or emotion. But in fact we are bound to 
 discriminate between “ prejudice ” in its etymological 
 sense and in its popular sense. In the latter sense it 
 means a condition of our judgement or intelligence in 
 which we refuse to open our minds to disagreeable 
 facts or to allow them to have weight with us. It 
 is a fixed, unprogressive and narrow condition of 
 mind, and it must be got rid of. But there is another 
 sense in which we are normally born with “ pre¬ 
 judgements ” implicit in us—as that right is better 
 than wrong or beauty than ugliness. These implicit 
 prejudgements appear to belong to our unconscious self 
 in a measure, and they are strengthened by our train¬ 
 ing and our experience. It is idle to demand that we 
 should be free of them. They are behind our coldest 
 reasonings as evidently as behind our most emotional 
 
44 CONDITIONS OF HOPEFUL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 or wilful movements. What we can do is faithfully 
 to bring our prejudices into the clearest light and 
 subject them to all the corrective discipline of ex¬ 
 perience. So we can get rid of disturbing prejudices 
 and come into the fullest possible correspondence with 
 the large truth of tilings, as it appears to be. But we 
 cannot get out of ourselves, and certain prejudgements 
 are implicit in human personality . 1 
 
 t> • • • * 
 
 Now with this amount of preface as to the temper 
 and method which our attempt to reconstruct belief 
 from its foundations demands of us, let us enter upon 
 our enquiry at its most fundamental stage—let us 
 investigate the grounds of a belief in God. 
 
 1 There is an admirable account of the function of education in 
 relation to prejudice in Plato’s Republic, book iii, 401. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 We approach the fundamental question of belief in 
 God. It will speedily appear, I think, that the most 
 pressing question is not whether we can believe in 
 God, but of what sort the God is in whom we can or 
 must believe. Atheism is very rare, and agnosticism 
 is a question of degree . 1 In some sense we must all 
 be agnostics, inasmuch as, on all showing, God passes 
 our understanding. The important question is : how 
 much can we know or rationally believe about God ? 
 Nevertheless we must not hurry forward, but ask first 
 whether belief in God at all is reasonable, and, if so, 
 why. 
 
 Fundamentally to disbelieve in God—to be an 
 atheist—means, I suppose, that we see in the world 
 of which we form a part no signs of anything corre¬ 
 sponding to the mind or spirit or purpose which 
 indisputably exists in man—no signs of a universal 
 spirit or reason with which we can hold communion, 
 nothing but blind and unconscious force. And 
 conversely what we mean by Theism or belief in God 
 in its most general form is the recognition about us, 
 within us and above us, of a universal and eternal 
 
 1 See Pringle Pattison, Idea of God, p. 160. 
 
 45 
 
46 
 
 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 reason or purpose, with which we can and ought to 
 correspond. 
 
 This fundamental alternative was stated by the 
 Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, long ago in words 
 of which we still feel the momentous seriousness : 
 
 “ The world is either a welter of alternate combination 
 and dispersion, or a unity of order and providence. If the 
 former, why do I care about anything else than how I shall 
 at last become earth ? But on the other alternative I feel 
 reverence, I stand steadfast, I find heart in the power that 
 disposes all.” 1 
 
 Now, in earlier ages mankind has been found 
 believing in many gods, or in two original spiritual 
 principles or gods, the one good and the other evil, 
 which are at conflict in the universe. This latter 
 belief, which we call dualism, is so congruous with 
 part of our experience, both within ourselves and 
 without ourselves, that it is always reviving. Never¬ 
 theless I think that, like polytheism properly so-called, 
 it is rationally impossible for us to-day. The science 
 of nature has demonstrated the absolute unity of 
 nature. Good and evil, as we know them in experi¬ 
 ence, mind and matter, the world of moral purpose 
 and the world of material things, are not the product 
 of two separate original forces. They are knit into one 
 another as phases in one whole, results of one force, one 
 system of interconnected law. The universe, material 
 and spiritual, is, as Spinoza said, one and (in some 
 sense) of one substance ; and God, if there be a God, 
 in part manifest and in part concealed in nature, is 
 one only. Long before the days of modern science 
 
 1 Meditations , vi. 10. I take the translation, which gives the 
 sense clearly, almost unchanged from Pringle Pattison. 
 
ONLY ONE GOD 47 
 
 in fact, and quite apart from Jewish or Christian 
 influences, the brooding mind of man had felt the unity 
 in things, and behind the “gods many” of popular 
 belief, had been feeling its way to the oneness of God . 1 
 
 Again, to-day a new dualism or pluralism is raising 
 its head. Mr. H. G. Wells and other prophets of the 
 day are calling us to believe in a God who is very far 
 indeed from being the Creator of the universe or the 
 Spirit of the universe. The Power behind the world is 
 inscrutable. It may be cruel or merely unconscious. 
 But we can believe in a good God who has some power, 
 though He is very far from being almighty, and whom 
 we, by co-operating with Him, can help to become 
 
 1 It was, however, hampered by the prevailing dualism. In this 
 connexion, I think, Irenaeus, the Christian Father of the second 
 century, is an often disparaged man. If I am not mistaken, he saw 
 deep into current controversies, and successfully emancipated the 
 Christian mind from some of the clinging misconceptions which 
 haunted the philosophy inherited from Greece. Thus to him we owe 
 the first clear affirmation, as far as I know, of three important 
 principles. 
 
 1. That no fundamental antagonism exists, or can be tolerated 
 in idea, between spirit and matter, for the whole universe is “ of 
 one substance,” as coming from one God, and “ the Word has been 
 made flesh.” This principle of Christian faith and philosophy is 
 constantly reasserted by Irenaeus, and it is one of the central 
 certainties of modern science. It is our deliverance from Greek 
 dualism. 
 
 2. That the method of God in creation and redemption is a method 
 of gradual and progressive advance. Here also Irenaeus asserted 
 again and again an important principle. He substituted the idea of 
 progressive development from lower to higher, from the material to 
 the spiritual, for the later Hellenic idea of emanations from the 
 Absolute and the divine, each lower than that which preceded it. 
 
 3. He also borrowed from someone whom he does not name the 
 assertion that the reason why all things in God’s world are in measure, 
 order, and number is because God Himself is not infinite in the sense 
 of being indeterminate or capable of anything ; measure or order 
 lies in the eternal being of God—the relationship of the Father to 
 the Son—immonsus Pater in Filio monsuratus : mensura enim Patris 
 Filius (iv. 4 2 ). 
 
48 
 
 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 more powerful. Now, if this God, who is not the 
 power behind nature, is anything more than a name 
 for the aspirations of men—if He is declared to be a 
 real Being, with mind and purpose—the idea seems to 
 me to be purely mythological. The only power which 
 holds me and all things in its grasp is the one all- 
 pervading force of universal nature. There is no 
 room for any other, unless it be for dependent spirits, 
 dependent upon it. There can be no rivalry with the 
 one and the ultimate and the all-embracing. All 
 comes from it and must end in it. If this Power be 
 the good God, I can have a rational religion. But any 
 suggestion of a Being independent of it seems to me 
 to be the language of a dream. The early Christian 
 poet invoked God as “the persistent energy of things’* 
 —“Deus rerum tenax vigor.” If this persistent energy 
 of things be indeed God, all is well. But in any case, 
 it is that alone in whom we live and move and have 
 our being. 
 
 What grounds are there, for us men to-day, for 
 believing that the Universal Power is God ? Perhaps 
 the grounds of such belief cannot be better expressed 
 in summary than in the verses—in this case, it 
 must be admitted, the very blank verses—of Words¬ 
 worth’s Preface to the “ Excursion ” : 
 
 “ My voice proclaims 
 How exquisitely the individual mind 
 (And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
 Of the whole species) to the external world 
 Is fitted :—and how exquisitely too— 
 
 Theme this but little heard of among men— 
 
 The external world is fitted to the mind ; 
 
 And the creation (by no lower name 
 
 Can it be called) which they with blended might 
 
 Accomplish.” 
 
 Let us pursue this line of thinking. 
 
THE UNIVERSAL REASON 49 
 
 1. Reason is that in us which demands sequence, 
 regularity, and order in things. It resents mere 
 accident and chance occurrence. 1 It could, in fact, 
 only exist in a cosmos , i.e. an orderly world. And 
 such a cosmos it finds from the first in sun and moon, 
 in plant and animal, but mixed as it appears with 
 what is incalculable and purely capricious—that is, 
 irrational. But the more it knows, the more ground 
 it finds for confidence that the appearance of capricious¬ 
 ness is due only to its ignorance. Nature, it grows 
 to believe, is, in this sense, rational through and 
 through, that it corresponds to this fundamental 
 demand of reason for law and order in all things. This 
 faith in a universal order—a faith continually more 
 and more fully justified—is what makes science 
 possible ; and philosophy accompanying or antici¬ 
 pating science finds in this response of nature to the 
 demand of reason the irresistible evidence of a 
 universal reason or mind, ensouling nature, of which 
 the reason or mind in us is the offspring or outcome, 
 participating in and co-operating with the universal 
 reason. This belief in the universal reason, with 
 which our reason holds communion, was the Theism 
 or belief in God of the educated world into which 
 Christianity came. This, it was recognized, is the 
 divine Being in which 44 we live and move and are.” 
 Of this divine Being we, as rational beings, are in a 
 special sense 44 the offspring.” 2 * * 5 
 
 1 Originally, no doubt, it was the apparently arbitrary element in 
 experience which suggested belief in gods—powerful but capricious 
 beings. Nevertheless some law or principle of dealing with these 
 fearful beings must be discovered. And the sense of order and 
 law gains upon the sense of arbitrariness. 
 
 2 Acts xvii. 28. This is what St. Paul in his argument with the 
 
 men of Athens can take for granted. So contemporary literature 
 
 abundantly witnesses. 
 
 5 
 
50 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 This argument (if it is to be called an argument, or 
 this almost irresistible impression made upon us by 
 the world) is the more popular form of what is called 
 the epistemological argument—the argument, that 
 is, from the analysis of knowledge. If we are at pains 
 to analyse the most elementary kind of knowledge, 
 our knowledge of external objects, trees and houses, 
 chairs and tables, we discover, to our surprise and 
 perhaps annoyance, that it is not the case, as we had 
 supposed, that the world of objects is presented to 
 us through our senses of touch and taste and sight 
 and hearing, as it were, ready made. To constitute 
 an object in a world of objects there is needed a mind 
 to hold together in permanent relation the materials 
 of colour, pressure, sound, and smell which come to 
 us through our senses. Only for such a perceiving, 
 relating, remembering mind can a concrete object or 
 world of objects exist. Mind, it appears, is necessary 
 for its constitution. What sort of world a dog or a 
 dragon-fly sees we cannot tell. But whatever it sees 
 is, we must suppose, what its special soul or mind 
 constitutes for it out of the materials which its senses 
 supply to it. 
 
 This fact (for such it appears to be) has sometimes 
 been represented by “ subjective idealists ” as if it 
 meant that my mind is the maker of my world. But 
 this is plainly contradictory to the ultimate certainty 
 of common sense, which assures me that the world is 
 presented to me, not made by me. The very 
 suggestion of the opposite has made philosophy 
 ridiculous. Also it is not what the analysis of the 
 rudimentary act of knowledge would really suggest. 
 Whatever the mind in me does, it does in absolute 
 dependence upon and subordination to what is supplied 
 to it in sensations—not only the sensations as isolated 
 
SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM 51 
 
 facts, but their impact upon us in a certain regularity 
 of succession or simultaneity. The constructive work 
 of my mind is absolutely dependent upon what it 
 receives—the subjective process upon the data 
 supplied. Thus I need have no fear that philosophy 
 is so absurd as to suggest a doubt that the external 
 world is independent of me or the myriad other 
 individual minds. But what it does suggest to me, 
 or even force upon me, is that the reality of an ordered 
 world can exist only for mind and in terms of mind. 
 There seems to be no way of escaping this conclusion. 
 The real world of a fly or a dog—whatever it may be— 
 requires the mind of a fly or a dog for its existence. 
 The man’s world of fuller reality requires the man’s 
 mind. The whole of the world-reality in all its 
 fullness and complexity postulates a universal and 
 perfect mind, which (whether it is to be represented 
 as its Creator or as its soul) would be instinctively 
 called divine. And it is this divine mind which 
 is communicating with me through all the process 
 of sensitive experience. In knowing more about the 
 world I am learning about God. 
 
 At least since the great days of Greece the philo¬ 
 sophers and the poets of the human race have been, on 
 the whole, constantly engaged in reinforcing this con¬ 
 viction, that you must interpret the material world in 
 terms of mind or spirit, and not mind or spirit in terms 
 of matter or physical force. Mind has the making of 
 things, and without creative mind they could not be. 
 
 In reasserting this old idealist argument, I know 
 that I am challenging the New Realists. Thus Dr. 
 Alexander says in his Gifford Lectures 1 : 
 
 “ The effort of the empirical method in metaphysics is 
 1 Space, Time, and Deity (Macmillan, 1920), vol. i, p. 0. 
 
52 
 
 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 seriously and persistently to treat finite minds as one among 
 the many forms of finite existence, having no privilege 
 among them except such as it claims from its greater 
 perfection of development. Should enquiry prove that 
 the cognitive faculty is unique, improbable as such a 
 result might seem, it would have to be accepted faithfully 
 and harmonized with the remainder of the scheme. But 
 prima facie there is no warrant for the assumption, still 
 less for the dogma, that because all experience implies a 
 mind, that which is experienced owes its being and its 
 qualities to mind. Minds are but the most gifted 
 members known to us in a democracy of things.” 
 
 This “ effort ” to treat minds as simply things seems 
 to me blankly impossible. It is not, I think, an 
 assumption or a dogma that 44 things,” that is, an 
 ordered world, involve and presuppose mind. It is the 
 inevitable conclusion of the first analysis of common 
 experience. 1 I must profess that the epistemological 
 argument does seem to me irresistible, when it claims 
 our recognition of Mind as necessary for a world ; and 
 when it bids us feel ourselves in the mere act of 
 perceiving a world of ordered objects brought into 
 some sort of communion with this Mind which is 
 in all things. 
 
 2. To some of us the form in which this kind of 
 argument presents itself with the greatest force is 
 what we may call the argument from beauty. 
 Evolutionists have attempted to show that beauty 
 in animals can be accounted for without the assump¬ 
 tion of any 44 intention ” of being beautiful in nature 
 simply by the fact that beautiful beings—especially 
 the males—have an advantage in the struggle for 
 existence, and that beauty has thus a survival value, 
 
 1 The new realists are involved, I think, in a further difficulty 
 when they postulate the existence of universals independently of 
 minds : see Haldane, Reign of Relativity (Murray), pp. 133, 265, etc. 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM BEAUTY 58 
 
 because the qualities which give beauty to males 
 attract the other sex. Among all the occurring 
 varieties the more beautiful would, therefore, without 
 any intention on the part of nature, tend to propagate 
 their species, and the less beautiful to perish. I 
 believe that the biologists are using this argument 
 to-day with much more hesitation than Charles 
 Darwin. Sexual selection on account of beauty has 
 a measure of truth, it seems, but there is fair certainty 
 that Darwin gave it far too great an extension. 
 Moreover, how are we to account for the basis of this 
 theory, viz. the existence in the universal female of 
 a consistent aesthetic standard ? But I do not want 
 to pause over an argument with which I have not 
 the exact knowledge to deal. Because, in any case, 
 it has no application to inorganic nature, and that is 
 enough for me. How shall we account for the beauty 
 of inorganic nature—for the glory of the sea, for the 
 majesty of mountains, for the exquisite beauty of 
 nature’s lines, for the splendour and delicacy of sunsets, 
 for the loveliness of clouds, for the music of sounds, 
 for the fascination of motions and colours and shapes ? 
 On the largest scale we must confess that 44 nature all 
 the time that it is working as a machine is also 
 sleeping as a picture.” 1 All this has no connexion 
 with utility or survival value. And certainly, if any 
 other quality in things is objective—in whatever sense 
 the reality and qualities of natural objects are prior 
 to the perceiving mind in man—beauty is so. It 
 forces itself and impresses itself upon us. And we 
 cannot conceive it to be accidental. Our reason 
 insists that there is in nature an intention of being 
 beautiful—we cannot call it anything else—long prior 
 
 1 From Mozley’s University Sermons —the wonderful sermon on 
 nature which everyone ought to read. 
 
54 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 to the existence of man in the world, which man 
 first had the faculty to appreciate ; or, in other words, 
 that there is a spirit of beauty in the universe which 
 communicates with and corresponds with the faculty 
 of beauty in man. And if this argument is irresistible 
 in inorganic nature, then it extends itself inevitably 
 over the field of vegetable and animal life, whatever 
 the methods by which beauty there develops. This 
 argument also, in one form or another, seems to me 
 overwhelming. I cannot resist this— 
 
 “ sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 
 And the round ocean and the living air 
 And the blue skies, and in the minds of men— 
 A motion and a spirit which impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
 And roils through all things.” 1 
 
 3. In the conception of beauty we are introduced 
 to something which not merely exists, but indicates a 
 special purpose in the material world and has a 
 special “ value.” All things are not beautifuJ. Ugly 
 things exist, and in part must exist as the accompany¬ 
 ing condition of the beautiful things, as the glacier 
 could not exist without its disfiguring moraine. But 
 beautiful things are “ worth ” more than others. 
 And in some degree beauty lays on us, as free agents 
 who have to do with the making of nature, a sense 
 of duty. We ought to cultivate beauty. To deface 
 nature is, we feel, an outrage. But this sense of 
 absolute value and the accompanying sense of purpose 
 and duty are conveyed far more strongly by our moral 
 experiences. For most of us the strongest argument 
 
 1 Wordsworth’s “ Tintem Abbey.” 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIENCE 55 
 
 for God is the argument from conscience to a 
 righteousness which is absolute and divine. 
 
 The moral sense, individual and social, in mankind 
 —the sense of right or wrong—exhibits as varied and 
 in many respects as obscure a history as any element 
 in civilization or any mental or spiritual quality in 
 man. But the rudeness of early beginnings, the gross 
 misdirections, the strange perversions, the extra¬ 
 ordinary variations, observable in the moral sense, 
 as it appears in history, are equally observable in 
 the faculty of reasoning and the sense of beauty. 
 Whether the selfish instinct of self-preservation, 
 coupled with the group instinct, which is altruistic, 
 in the animals no less than in man, can account for 
 the beginnings of morality is a question which at 
 present we may pass by. For we are absolutely 
 certain that in the highest specimens of our race, and 
 under their leadership in the average good man of 
 our experience, the sense of right or wrong has grown 
 distinct from the sense of individual interest or social 
 pressure, and has become what finds classical expression 
 in the Antigone of Sophocles, or in the meditations of 
 the Stoics, or in the minds of the Jewish prophets, or 
 in the philosophy of Kant, or in Wordsworth’s Hymn 
 to Duty—the consciousness of being in the presence 
 of a something not ourselves, a greater than ourselves, 
 something of absolute value, an authoritative and 
 superhuman law of righteousness, a categorical im¬ 
 perative— 44 thou shalt ” or 44 thou shalt not ”—laid 
 upon man, which makes a peremptory claim upon his 
 obedience, whatever be the pleasure or pain conse¬ 
 quent to him upon the performance of his obligation. 
 It is, I claim, an irresistible conclusion that here, 
 where this is recognized, that is, in the higher regions 
 of human experience, whatever may have been the 
 
56 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 dark animal or tribal origins of this majestic faculty, 
 lies its real meaning and interpretation. It is 
 incontestable that the glory and dignity of humanity 
 depend upon, and are bound up with, the recognition 
 of the supremacy of the moral ideal or law at a point 
 where it has risen above, or distinguished itself from, 
 social exigencies or personal advantages. Here, 
 first, and here alone, where conscience recognizes its 
 spiritual subordination to an eternal righteousness, 
 claiming its glad obedience and co-operation, is the 
 home of the moral freedom in which we recognize our 
 true being. Such a belief in an Absolute Right is 
 consistent, history shows us, with a very inadequate 
 recognition (or none at all) of a personal God. It 
 may, and sometimes does in fact consist (illogically 
 as it would appear) with explicit atheism. But it 
 cannot be given fair expression except by the recog¬ 
 nition that right and wrong is no mere outgrowth of 
 human interests or the necessities of human society. 
 If it emerges out of these, it gains its true character 
 only so far as it transcends them. It involves the 
 recognition of the morally right as a quality of 
 absolute value, which imposes itself on man absolutely 
 because he is rational and spiritual. It cannot be 
 interpreted as a merely human quality. Thus we 
 are bound to conclude that the ordered world, of 
 which man is only a part, contains or involves this 
 quality of eternal righteousness. Like reason itself, 
 of which it is an aspect, like beauty, so righteousness 
 belongs to the universal and eternal Being, and, 
 because this is so, men have called this Being God, 
 and worshipped it. 1 
 
 1 The above argument, in its three divisions, here very summarily 
 treated, may be found, underlying their many differences, in most of 
 
THE VALE OF SOUL-MAKING 57 
 
 Here, in the moral region, very much more than 
 in the region of beauty, we are encompassed with 
 the sense of what ought to be. Moral goodness 
 exists, but under conditions of continual and some¬ 
 times desperate struggle, and in each individual with 
 more or less of manifest imperfection. But whatever 
 its struggles and imperfections, goodness, we are 
 convinced, is what ought to be. It represents the 
 purpose of the world for free personalities. Whatever 
 else the world may be, it is, in the region covered by 
 the existence of persons, a 44 vale of soul-making,” 
 as Keats called it, a scene for the making of character 
 and goodness under conditions of severest trial. 
 And we find ourselves, in spite of appearances, impelled 
 to believe that the moral purpose of the world, in 
 general and in particular persons, is intended to gain 
 the victory. This is the ground of the strong con¬ 
 viction of our moral consciousness that our best 
 aspirations are not kindled in us only to be baffled 
 and defeated. The great world-force, which over vast 
 areas of the universe appears so wholly indifferent to 
 moral considerations, here seems unmistakably to 
 disclose a mind and purpose making for righteousness, 
 though it must be admitted that the disclosure seems 
 often in experience painfully ambiguous and 
 embarrassed. 
 
 So far we are taken by the general trend of con¬ 
 temporary philosophy, and we feel the ground secure 
 under our feet. But of course it will be said, we 
 have reached here no more than 4 4 the higher pan- 
 
 our recent philosophers. Perhaps the best recent books to which 
 to refer a would-be student are Dr. Pringle Pattison’s Idea of God 
 (Oxford, 1917), and Dr. Sorley’s Moral Values and the Idea of God 
 (Cambridge, 1918)—an extraordinarily impressive book—also Lord 
 Haldane’s Reign of Relativity (Murray, 1921). 
 
58 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 theism ” 1 —the recognition in the world, of which we 
 are a part, of spiritual qualities and values, and what 
 we cannot but call spiritual purpose, with which as 
 spiritual beings, rational, beauty-loving, and moral, we 
 are called to co-operate, and which as eternal and 
 universal spirit we are moved to worship. This is 
 the immanent God—God in all things and in us. 
 
 Well, if this belief and accompanying worship is no 
 more than pantheism, let us be at least pantheists. 
 And let us recognize that, to this spiritual interpre¬ 
 tation of nature, the scientific view of the world, 
 which since the days of Darwin has become approxi¬ 
 mately universal, offers no sort of hindrance. Science 
 bids us contemplate an age-long process by which, 
 out of some original elements and conditions, to us 
 but dimly imaginable, there was evolved a universal 
 order, and out of the inorganic order life and the 
 forms of life, vegetable and animal, and out of the 
 animal creation rational man. We shall not, if 
 we are wise, lay stress on the gaps in the scientific 
 story of creation, or build on the conviction that 
 living matter could not have been evolved out of 
 what had no life, or rationality out of animal mind. 
 But what we shall claim is that the fact that living 
 beings and spiritual beings emerged in an age-long 
 process out of a world which was lifeless and without 
 any spiritual consciousness in itself, does not mean 
 
 1 Dr. Inge (Personal Idealism , p. 43) would restrict the name 
 Pantheist to “those who hold that God is present equally in every part 
 of His creation,” equally in rational man and in the clods, and thereby 
 abolish all sense of “ values ”—all sense of higher and lower, or of an 
 ascending scale in nature as God is more fully revealed. But it is 
 more in accordance with general usage and with the facts of the 
 case to speak of Pantheism higher and lower, and to reckon as Pan¬ 
 theists all who recognize a spirit immanent and operative in nature, 
 but not, as far as they can see, independent of it or transcending it. 
 
MIND AND MATTER 59 
 
 that life and spirit can be interpreted in terms of 
 material force and chemical change, as if they were 
 nothing more. The opposite is the case. Rather it 
 is the flower and fruit of nature which interpret the 
 seed from which it springs. When mind in man 
 emerges in the process of creative evolution, then, 
 and only then, does the secret of nature begin to 
 be recognized. “ Man is organic to nature.” 1 The 
 reason in man discovers the rational in nature ; the 
 sense of beauty in man finds itself in presence of the 
 universal beauty ; the conscience in man finds itself 
 in presence of an eternal righteousness. The con¬ 
 clusion is forced upon us that instead of interpreting 
 mind in terms of matter, you must interpret the 
 whole process of physical evolution in terms of that 
 in which it culminates, that is, mind. Here first we 
 see what it all meant and whither it was all tending. 
 Thus are we led to see the quality of spirit, that is, 
 mind and purpose, in the first beginnings of the 
 material world. That is, in some sense, we are led 
 to believe in God. 
 
 M. Henri Bergson is no doubt at many points open 
 to criticism. But he seems to me to have given 
 effective expression to a set of ideas which are des¬ 
 tined to dominate. “ I see in the whole evolution 
 of life on our planet a crossing of matter by a creative 
 consciousness, an effort to set free, by force of 
 ingenuity and invention, something which in the 
 animal still remains imprisoned, and is only finally 
 released when we reach man.” 2 
 
 I think it must be said that in the fundamental 
 
 1 The argument will be found in Pringle Pattison’s book just 
 referred to, cap. viii, and in many other recent thinkers. 
 
 2 See Mind Energy {UEnergie Spirituelle), by H. Bergson, trans. 
 by Prof. H. Wildon Carr (Macmillan, 1920), p. 18, cf. p. 25. 
 
 
60 
 
 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 conflict between materialism—which would explain 
 spirit in terms of matter, because the material appears 
 before the spiritual and the spiritual emerges out of 
 it—and the spiritual interpretation of nature—which 
 insists that the orderly evolution which ends in 
 spiritual beings also presupposes spirit and spiritual 
 purpose—in that philosophical conflict materialism 
 has been shown to be untenable. I think it is true 
 to say further that in the two generations full of 
 constant discussion which have now passed since 
 Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared, the idea that the 
 world of organized life can be accounted for by 
 nothing but “ natural selection ” and “ sexual 
 selection ” acting upon the material supplied by 
 chance variations has become less and less probable . 1 
 Grant to these agencies all the force they can be 
 allowed to have had, it seems impossible to account 
 for progressive evolution of living forms unless some 
 sort of direction, some sort of organic tendency to 
 become this or that, is assumed in nature—which 
 suggests irresistibly a progressive purpose in the 
 world of living things, which has found for the 
 present its culmination and interpretation in man. 
 In fact, we are driven back for our interpretation of 
 nature upon the principle first clearly enunciated by 
 Aristotle that the essence of anything, or its real 
 meaning, is only manifest when it has reached its full 
 growth. We are to interpret the beginning in the 
 light of the end ; not the end in the light of the 
 beginning . 2 
 
 1 For an account of the present standing of the doctrine of evolu¬ 
 tion, see Thomson and Geddes’s admirable little volume Evolution 
 in the Home University Library. 
 
 2 Cf. Haldane’s Reign oj Relativity , p. 254. “The higher is the 
 explanation of the lower, and not the lower of the higher.” He is 
 speaking of the Greek philosophers. 
 
THE SUPREMACY OF MAN 61 
 
 Moreover, it does not appear to be at all the case 
 that the scientific doctrine of the world—for all the 
 length of its vast epochs and all the extension of its 
 infinite spaces in which man appears but as a moment 
 and a speck—has in any way really dethroned man 
 from his position of supremacy in the visible order as 
 the climax and consummation (so far) of creation. 1 
 What intelligent beings there may be in other worlds 
 or spheres of being, into which we cannot penetrate, 
 and how much superior to man—“ thrones, domina¬ 
 tions, virtues, princedoms, powers ”—our science 
 cannot tell. It must frame its conceptions on what 
 it knows. And within that sphere of possible know¬ 
 ledge it is in man first and in man only that vast 
 nature finds its interpretation, because here only can 
 its large meaning and content be understood, here 
 only can its general law and tendency be appreciated, 
 here only is one who can co-operate with it by 
 intelligence and will, and by co-operation fashion it 
 in a measure to his purpose. 
 
 But this “ natural religion ”—the vision of God in 
 nature to which the poets and philosophers and 
 artists and moralists open our eyes, and which, with 
 their help, we can make our own—is to most of us a 
 very unsatisfying religion. It suggests to those who 
 have lived in the Christian tradition some urgent 
 questions. Thus, (1) this God who is “ the wisdom 
 and spirit of the universe,” the Truth and Beauty and 
 Righteousness which I can contemplate and with 
 which I can, in a measure, enter into communion, is 
 
 1 Cf. Pringle Pattison, The Idea of God, pp. 28, 82-3, 110-11. He 
 points out that if Kant depreciated the old argument from design 
 in the sphere of physical nature, he also restored the argument from 
 design by his recognition of moral values as supreme, and his 
 theory of the universe as “ a realm of ends.” 
 
62 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 He (if I may speak of “ He ” and “ Him ”) personal ? 
 While I seek to know Him, does He know me and 
 love me and respond to me ? Ought I to tremble 
 before Him as my personal Sovereign and Judge, 
 awful in His righteousness ? And through such fear 
 of the Lord can I learn to love Him and trust Him as 
 my Father ? 
 
 Can He hear my prayers and help me in my 
 troubles ? Can He take specific and positive action 
 on my behalf and on behalf of humanity ? Or is 
 it really only certain gracious aspects of nature which 
 I am abstracting from the whole and calling God, 
 while all the time the Absolute, the whole, the 
 ultimate force and energy of all things, remains 
 inscrutable and ambiguous ? 
 
 Again, (2) I call God “ the wisdom and spirit of 
 the universe,” but does He only gradually realize 
 Himself in the world and (if the words have any 
 meaning) come to the knowledge of Himself in man ? 
 Is He thus as dependent on the world for expression 
 of Himself as the world is on Him ? Is He simply 
 the world, as it were, viewed from within ? Or, on 
 the other hand, does He transcend the world, free 
 and perfect in Himself, before ever the world was, 
 its Creator and its Lord ? 
 
 Once again, (3) if He is the ground and source of 
 all things, evil as well as good, the ground and source 
 of the whole universe which in its main bulk seems 
 so morally indifferent, can He be Himself pure 
 goodness ? Is it possible to believe that the spirit of 
 the whole is righteousness and love ? 
 
 Then when we turn from God to ourselves, other 
 urgent questions arise. We find ourselves intensely 
 conscious of moral freedom only in part realized, but 
 conscious also of being bound as links in endless 
 
INADEQUACY OF PHILOSOPHY 68 
 
 chains of cause and effect, in soul as well as in body, 
 with the whole of nature. Thus (4) is my sense of 
 freedom a reality, or is it at the last analysis an 
 illusion ? And is the God whom I seek and seem 
 to find in nature, a really free creative spirit, or simply 
 a name for certain aspects of an endless necessary 
 process ? Again, (5) I am conscious of personality 
 and freedom in myself, such as the experience of my 
 present life stimulates but also oppresses. Is this 
 spiritual consciousness, so thwarted here, the pledge 
 and assurance of an immortal life in God and with 
 God where it can find its realization ? 
 
 These are momentous questions indeed. We know 
 in a measure the answer which the Christian Faith 
 gives to them, on the ground of a personal revelation 
 of Himself believed to have been given by God 
 through His prophets and His Son. But apart from 
 any postulate of divine self-revelation, what answer 
 can the brooding mind of man, by its eager search, 
 discover to such questions ? Now, it must be 
 admitted that the answers of our philosophers and 
 wise men and poets—apart from those who have 
 believed the Christian revelation and built boldly 
 upon it—have been extraordinarily vacillating and 
 ambiguous. For instance, the great Greek masters 
 seem hardly to have asked themselves the question 
 about divine personality which seems to us so impor¬ 
 tant. It was indeed the spirit of Christianity which 
 first made the question of personality in God and in 
 man real and urgent 1 ; and it was Christian philo- 
 
 1 Cf. Haldane, Reign of Relativity, p. 260, “ Where Hellenistic 
 reflection remained least complete, etc. ... It did not take sufficient 
 account of the infinite value belonging to human personality, humble 
 as well as great. That was where it laid itself open to the criticism 
 of Christianity, a criticism which subsequent reflection by degrees 
 assimilated and found justified.” 
 
64 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 sophy which first found it necessary to devise a 
 special word to signify it. The greatest philosophers, 
 on the whole, are content to think of God as an 
 object of intellectual contemplation rather than as 
 a person who knows us, loves us, and helps us. 
 Certainly, again, we shall find no satisfaction, but 
 rather definite discouragement, if we address such 
 urgent questions as our religious needs suggest to 
 the wisdom of the remoter East. In Europe, after 
 the decadence of Greek philosophy, there is a period 
 of a thousand years when the philosophers of the 
 Catholic world accepted among their premises the 
 doctrines of the Christian faith and philosophized on 
 the assumption of their truth. But since modern 
 philosophy began its course with Descartes and 
 Spinoza, on a basis of free thinking without regard to 
 the authority of any Church, there has been indeed 
 an intense application of the deepest thinking to 
 these problems, but, so far as the answer to these 
 questions of ours is concerned, with singularly 
 vacillating and ambiguous result. Thus Descartes 
 still, like a scholastic, “ proves ” the existence of God 
 as the eternal, perfect, and personal Creator, distinct 
 from all His creatures ; but for his greater successor, 
 Spinoza, God is simply the one eternal substance, 
 indistinguishable from nature, whom indeed it is 
 our highest intellectual joy to love, but whom we 
 cannot conceive of as loving us, or as willing and 
 doing particular things, or as in any respect what 
 we call personal, without His ceasing to be God, the 
 universal substance. Thus while Spinoza has been 
 called the God-intoxicated thinker, he was excom¬ 
 municated by the Jewish community to which he 
 belonged, and, not without some excuse, spoken of as 
 an atheist. Indeed indecision about questions, which 
 
THE GOD OF PHILOSOPHY 65 
 
 to minds coloured by the Christian tradition seem 
 vital, haunts modern philosophy. Mr. Clement 
 Webb, who himself argues strongly for personality in 
 God, admits 1 the general reluctance of philosophers 
 to affirm it. They seem always falling back to a 
 position akin to that of the Greeks. Even so strong 
 a contemporary theist as Dr. Pringle Pattison, 
 though he labours to assert the divine transcendence, 
 does not really succeed in doing so , 2 and he seems to 
 think, with Spinoza, that divine perfection excludes 
 all choice of particular things or persons . 3 
 
 Then, as regards the character of God, philosophy 
 seems to leave us with a perpetual and insoluble con¬ 
 tradiction between the postulate of a perfect good 
 God, made by the healthy moral consciousness of 
 mankind, and the sort of conception which this 
 mixed world of good and evil seems to suggest of 
 a spirit in whom (or in which) good and evil can lie 
 together as simply necessary modes of being ; which 
 line of thought again suggests or coincides with the 
 philosophy which, at the last resort, makes human 
 freedom and responsibility an illusion. Nor again 
 do our philosophers give us any clear answer to the 
 question of personal immortality. 
 
 No doubt this or that man of vigorous and confident 
 intellect may seem to see his way through these 
 tremendous questions to a solution. He may be 
 able to proclaim the verdict of reason in favour of 
 divine personality, divine goodness, and human 
 freedom and immortality. But for most of us, if 
 we rigorously try to shut out from our minds all 
 
 1 Webb’s Ood and Personality, p. 110. 
 
 2 Seo appendix at the end of the chapter. 
 
 3 See his essay on “ Transcendence and Immanence,” p. 14 in the 
 volume entitled The Spirit (Macmillan, 1919). 
 
 6 
 
66 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 the light which can only be ours as believers in 
 the divine revelation of which the Bible is the 
 record, it must be confessed that great nature, 
 for all its divine qualities, remains an impenetrable 
 mystery—a sphinx who gives no answers to im¬ 
 portunate questions which we cannot but continue 
 to ask. 
 
 We shall have to return later from another point of 
 view upon these momentous questions and consider them 
 more at leisure. But it is concerning this other point 
 of view—that is, the point of view of divine revelation 
 —that I want now to speak. St. Paul assures us 
 that the nations of men were put into the world 44 that 
 they should seek God, if haply they might feel after 
 him, and find him,” 1 and that 44 the living God left 
 not himself without witness,” 2 and that His 
 invisible attributes, 44 His everlasting power and 
 divinity,” are since the creation of the world 44 clearly 
 seen, being perceived through the things that are 
 made.” 3 This is substantiated in experience. The 
 universe warrants or compels, as we have seen, belief 
 in God, in some sort. But St. Paul also assures us 
 that 44 in the wise providence of God, the world 
 through its philosophy was not able to know God,” 
 and that it was God’s good pleasure, in consequence, 
 to disclose His real mind and purpose through the 
 message of the preacher which the philosophers 
 ridicule 4 —that is, by a real and effective self¬ 
 revelation. Elsewhere the Bible tells us, in memor¬ 
 able phrases which haunt our memory when we are 
 wearied with philosophical argument, that we 44 can¬ 
 not by searching find out God.” 6 These two kinds 
 
 1 Acts xvii. 27. 2 Acts xiv. 17. 3 Romans i. 20. 
 
 4 This is, I think, a fair paraphrase of 1 Cor. i. 21. 
 
 5 Job xi. 7. 
 
REVELATION AND REASON 67 
 
 of statements seem to me to correspond with the 
 facts. We are bound to search for God with all the 
 energy of our reason, and in a measure we find Him ; 
 but at the same time He baffles our search. It carries 
 us a certain way, and then leaves us, disappointed and 
 disheartened. We discover that God is, but not what 
 He is. But both the eager search and the discovery, 
 and, on the other hand, the disappointment and the 
 failure, may, we feel, both be parts of a movement 
 of God in us which is to be met by a corresponding 
 movement of God, if I may so speak, from without 
 or from above, to reveal Himself in much more 
 satisfying fullness. 
 
 Now, no doubt this idea of positive divine revelation 
 has often been so presented, both in its relation to 
 reason and in its relation to natural religions, as to 
 be very difficult of acceptance. Faith in divine 
 revelation has been set in opposition to reason. The 
 merit of faith has been represented as if it lay in 
 triumphing over reason. But this kind of represen¬ 
 tation may be simply a misrepresentation. It may 
 be the case that revelation supplements but in no 
 way contradicts the conclusions and intimations of 
 “ unassisted ” reason. Perhaps there is no real 
 justification for setting revelation and reason in 
 opposition at all. What I think is amazing is how 
 little the modern intellectual world, which claims to 
 be, and appears to be, seeking God with all seriousness 
 —how little it faces the question of the reality of 
 positive divine self-revelation. We are bound to 
 think of a self-revealing God in some sense—self- 
 revealing in nature as a whole—in its law, in its 
 order, in its beauty—self-revealing with extraordinary 
 intensity in conscience, and moreover with extra¬ 
 ordinarily different degrees of intensity. It is face 
 
68 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 to face with this universal self-revelation of God that 
 there has arisen that general consciousness of God 
 which we have been considering, with all its occasional 
 clearness of vision and also with all its profound and 
 disturbing uncertainties. Why, then, should not 
 this process of self-disclosure on God’s part have been 
 along one particular line intensified and clarified so 
 as to become a real illumination ? Why, moreover, 
 should not one race of men have been the channel 
 of this fuller self-disclosure of God to the whole 
 world, as other races have been of other good things 
 which, when matured, have become universal in 
 application ? 1 Of course all this involves a conscious 
 providence in history—a real personality in God. 
 But we do not, for the most part, feel that we have 
 any a priori reason justifying the exclusion of the 
 possibility of a particular providence and a personal 
 God. Is it not our duty at least to examine the 
 question of the reality of a divine revelation which 
 certain religions press upon us ? Our memories are 
 haunted by Plato’s pathetic words, put into the 
 mouth of Simmias in the Phaedo, where the question 
 of the immortality of the soul is under discussion. 
 “ It seems to me, Socrates, as to you also, I fancy, 
 that it is very difficult, if not impossible, in this present 
 life to have clear knowledge concerning such subjects ; 
 but that, on the other hand, it is the mark of a faint¬ 
 hearted spirit to desist from examining all that 
 is said about them in every way, or to abandon 
 
 1 More is said later on the point, and on the whole relation of 
 special revelation to the general reason. See also Dr. William 
 Temple’s Mens Creatrix (Macmillan), the prologue. The con¬ 
 trasted ideas of struggling reason and illuminating revelation is put 
 with extraordinary impressiveness at the end of James Mozley’s 
 essay on Blanco White: see his collected Essays (Rivingtons), vol. ii. 
 
69 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 
 
 the search so long as there is any chance of 
 light anywhere. For on such subjects one ought 
 to secure one of two things, either to learn or 
 discover the truth, or, if this is impossible, at least 
 to get the best of human argument (words) and 
 the hardest to refute, and relying on this as on a 
 raft, to sail the perilous sea of life, unless one were 
 able, more securely and less perilously, to make 
 one’s journey upon a safer vessel—upon some divine 
 word.” 1 
 
 Let us, then, at least contemplate the possibility 
 of a particular divine self-disclosure, gradually 
 maturing, and finally becoming universal. Let us 
 consent at least to face the evidence and “to go 
 where the argument leads us.” 
 
 Appendix on Dr. A. Seth Pringle Pattison’s article 
 entitled “ Immanence or Transcendence,” in The Spirit —a 
 volume of essays edited by Canon Streeter (Macmillan, 
 1919). 
 
 It is a very interesting question whether—quite apart 
 from the acceptance of a positive self-disclosure of God, 
 such as the Christian Church believes to have been given 
 through the prophets and by Christ the Son of God—it is 
 possible to arrive at any secure intellectual hold upon a 
 transcendent God—upon a God, that is, who, in some 
 sense prior to the slowly developing universe, existed and 
 exists eternally, self-conscious and self-determined, 
 holding in His eternal being and mind the law and 
 purpose and power of all the slow development. It is 
 quite plain that this is the God whom the Christian 
 Church has believed in. It has believed in God the 
 eternal, who before the world was, was alive, 4 the living 
 God,’ self-complete and perfect, and who freely of His 
 goodwill created all that is. 
 
 There is, of course, profound intellectual difficulty— 
 
 1 Plato, Phaedo , 85 C.D. 
 
70 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 amounting, I think, to impossibility—in conceiving of 
 such an eternal, living, personal God as a solitary monad, 
 seeing that all the elements of conscious life, whether will 
 or knowledge or love, involve relationship—an object of 
 will, an object of knowledge, an object of love—and an 
 eternal and perfect Spirit therefore involves an eternal 
 and perfect object. But when, long after Biblical times, the 
 Church became conscious of this intellectual problem, it 
 had already been long familiar with the idea of the trinity 
 of persons in the unity of God and found in this belief the 
 solution of the intellectual difficulty. We must be 
 careful to note that the idea or doctrine of the Trinity had 
 not been originally formulated with any reference to the 
 intellectual problem. It had been formulated as an 
 attempt to put into words the Church’s new experience of 
 the Son, Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit as persons 
 in some sense to be ranked with God, the Father, without 
 violation of His unity. But later it found in this trini¬ 
 tarian creed the solution of the intellectual problem in 
 this manner—God could be conceived of as eternally 
 alive, with the full life of will and knowledge and love, 
 prior to and apart from creation, because His own eternal 
 being contained in itself the necessary relationships—the 
 fellowship of the Father with the Eternal Word or Son and 
 with the Holy Spirit. In this eternal fellowship the full 
 activity of life was possible. All that was to be created in 
 time—“ whatever has come into being ”—already existed 
 in eternal counterpart in the Word or Son 1 ; and whatever 
 life there be in the world was already active and conscious 
 in the Eternal Spirit. 
 
 But all this conception which is due to the belief in a 
 positive revelation must at present be ignored, whether 
 we hold it for true or no. At any rate its grounds are not 
 yet within our purview in this enquiry. The question 
 now is : Can the unassisted intellect of man attain by 
 speculation on the universe or out of its own resources any 
 secure hold upon the transcendent God ? Let it be granted 
 
 1 This is the interpretation given in early days to St. John i. 3-4, 
 R.V. marg., “ Without him was not anything made. That which 
 hath been made was life in him.” But I doubt the punctuation and 
 interpretation of the particular passage. 
 
PRINGLE PATTISON 71 
 
 that it can attain to the secure conviction that in some real 
 sense God exists as “ the spirit of the universe ” or “ the 
 soul of the world.” But the world, as we know, is not 
 static. It is a world of gradual process and evolution. In 
 it we see first force, then life, then, first fully in man, self- 
 conscious mind and will. This suggests to us the con¬ 
 ception of Henri Bergson (apparently lying in his mind 
 side by side with another conception) of an unconscious 
 spirit of life striving to express itself in the material world 
 and finally becoming conscious of itself in man. Is this the 
 only idea of God which nature suggests—an uncon¬ 
 scious mind or purpose (if the words have any intelligible 
 meaning), gradually gaining consciousness and self-ex¬ 
 pression in man ? But the difficulty of such a con¬ 
 ception is enormous. 1 The unity of the world is so 
 close-knit that there is no room for two principles, matter 
 and life, such as Bergson’s language might sometimes 
 suggest. It is one force (or God), and one only, which there 
 expresses itself alike in things material and spiritual. 
 And order, which presupposes mind, belongs to the 
 material universe prior to the emergence there of life or 
 mind. Can we then conceive of a cosmic Mind or Spirit, 
 which is unconscious or semi-conscious till it becomes 
 conscious of itself in man ? I cannot give reality to the con¬ 
 ception. And the question I am now asking is, Does Dr. 
 Pringle Pattison help us in this difficulty ? Does he suc¬ 
 ceed in giving reality to the idea of the transcendent God ? 
 
 1. No doubt he seeks to affirm the transcendence of 
 God. He is plainly not satisfied with the idea, appearing 
 first in Spinoza, of a God ( natura naturans) who has no 
 will or consciousness in Himself but only in the finite 
 spirits who are parts of created nature (natura naturata): 
 see Idea of God, p. 255, and the Essay on which we are 
 commenting. 
 
 2. Yet he plainly and constantly denies any such idea 
 of personal self-completence in God as would present Him 
 as independent of His creation, or prior to creation, as 
 He is presented in the Christian view. On the con¬ 
 trary, he insists that the creation is necessary to God and 
 co-eternal. It is only in creation that God realizes 
 Himself (Essay, p. 13 ; Idea of God, lect. xvi). 
 
 1 See further, pp. 148-53. 
 
72 GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 3. Moreover he quite clearly can attach no meaning to 
 the existence of material things apart from conscious 
 beings (Essay, p. 16). Consequently “ there is in strictness 
 no creation—no finite universe at all—till spirits are 
 created ” (or “ begotten ”) (p. 17). It is only, therefore, 
 in finite spirits that God can realize Himself. This, again, 
 he makes quite clear. 
 
 4. But finite spirits appear first, in the world as we know 
 it, in man and as the last stage of an age-long develop¬ 
 ment. How then does Dr. Pringle Pattison escape the con¬ 
 clusion that first in man does God become conscious of 
 Himself or alive with the life of will and knowledge and 
 love ? In what sense can he talk of an eternal or 
 transcendent life or consciousness of God ? In no sense, 
 so far as I can see. I suppose it is because he feels the 
 difficulty that he thrown out the suggestion of finite spirits 
 other than man; “ multitudes of self-conscious spirits may 
 exist ” in other worlds (p. 21), and they “ may vastly 
 surpass mankind as we know it.” Well, the Christian, 
 through the assurance of Christ, may have grounds for 
 believing this to be true, and may reasonably take it 
 as a fact into his calculations. But—apart from the 
 belief in a positive and supernatural disclosure through 
 Christ of spiritual facts which would be otherwise 
 unknown to man, which Dr. Pringle Pattison does 
 not, I gather, find an acceptable idea, and which at 
 any rate is not at present in question—this suggestion 
 of unseen hosts of spirits is purely mythological and 
 hypothetical. Certainly it cannot be relied upon. The 
 eternal must somehow, he tells us, find room for the 
 time series. It must include it. Does it not, in Dr. 
 Pringle Pattison’s philosophy, depend upon it ? Is his 
 eternal anything more than the idea of creation viewed 
 as completed ? I do not see how he can substantiate 
 his transcendent God. I think he remains in effect 
 with Spinoza. 
 
 Moreover, if his hypothesis be granted, these hosts of 
 conscious spirits either emerged, like men, at a certain 
 stage in a long development—in w r hich case the problem 
 is simply duplicated and not solved—or they are co¬ 
 eternal with God and co-essential—in which case we 
 appear to have the foundation of a pluralism or 
 
WHERE HE FAILS 73 
 
 polytheism capable of strange developments and utterly 
 alien to Dr. Pringle Pattison’s monotheism. 
 
 Apart then from this speculation in the unknowable, 
 where for Dr. Pringle Pattison is there ground for belief 
 in any transcendent God eternally conscious and alive ? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 This, then, is the question : Has the Divine Mind or 
 Spirit whom we discern by the light of reason hidden 
 in the world—hidden in that its nature and character 
 are involved in such obscurity—has it, or has He, 
 taken action, like a person, on His side to disclose or 
 reveal Himself to those “ who are seeking after God, 
 if haply they may feel after Him and find Him ” ? 
 No doubt the basal assumption or fundamental 
 faith on which alone any scientific or philosophical or 
 religious view of the universe can be built up is the 
 assumption that our reason can be trusted ; and there¬ 
 fore any alleged self-revelation of God which should 
 prove to be inconsistent with the requirements of 
 reason could only increase the bewilderment of mind 
 in which we already find ourselves in view of the 
 obscurity of nature. But on all showing the human 
 reason is partial and imperfect; and a self-disclosure 
 of God is easily conceived which should not violate 
 but augment the light of reason—should supplement 
 it and supply some satisfaction and response to its 
 urgent questions and ignorant prayers. There is 
 to-day in most men’s minds a profound and easily 
 justified scepticism on all abstract dogmas of philo¬ 
 sophers as to what is or is not possible or believable. 
 
 74 
 
THE POSSIBILITY OF REVELATION 75 
 
 In this our temper contrasts markedly with the temper 
 of the scholastic period or the period of Descartes and 
 Spinoza. Science has proved so many things true 
 which in the abstract appeared inconceivable, and the 
 abstract dogmatists have proved themselves singu¬ 
 larly fallible. Thus we may peremptorily refuse to 
 decide a priori that the supreme reason or God cannot 
 directly communicate His mind and purpose to the 
 reason and conscience of men. The opposite antici¬ 
 pation is at least as tenable. Moreover, the facts of 
 the moral conscience among men—to which the 
 Right appears regularly, especially in the noblest of 
 our race, as the divine will and purpose, enjoining 
 obedience and correspondence on our part, and in a 
 measure self-revealing—and the nearly universal 
 popular belief that certain individuals are in a special 
 sense inspired by God or by a God—these facts of 
 common experience show us human nature in the 
 broad ready to recognize divine self-revelation. 
 
 Unhindered therefore by any prohibitory dogma 
 of the reason, we may approach the real question, which 
 is one of fact. The religion of Israel, on which 
 Christianity and, in a different degree, Mohammedan¬ 
 ism are based, claims that such a revelation has been 
 given. It has persuaded the whole Western, and in 
 a sense the Mohammedan, world over long centuries 
 of the truth of its claim. And, what is much more 
 important, the strength of our morality has been 
 drawn from the belief in a self-revealing God. The 
 belief has obvious power. It has apparently put man 
 in touch with reality. Thus the claim deserves at 
 least the attention of every rational man. What the 
 admission of this claim involves will be matter for 
 further consideration. Let us first of all, as simply 
 and objectively as possible, consider the claim of 
 
76 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 positive revelation made by the Hebrew religion, 
 and the grounds on which its rests for us to-day. 
 
 What, then, precisely is the point to be considered ? 
 To restrict the area of enquiry, and to remove it from 
 the region of doubtful questions, let us take the period 
 of the prophets of Israel whose writings remain to us, 
 beginning with Amos, about 760 b.c. or earlier, and 
 ending some three hundred years or more later with 
 Malachi. 
 
 A word must be said in explanation of these limits. 
 No one can read the earliest prophet whose writings 
 remain to us, Amos, without seeing that the founda¬ 
 tion of the prophetic teaching had already been laid 
 before his day. He can apparently take for granted 
 that the God of Israel—Jahweh—is the one and only 
 God, the Creator of heaven and earth, 1 the just Judge 
 of all mankind, perfect in righteousness. He and all 
 the prophets would repudiate the idea that they were 
 innovators. They would no doubt refer themselves 
 back to the time of God’s first redemption of His 
 people from Egypt, and to the covenant given through 
 Moses, or to an earlier period still. I believe that we 
 must take it to be true that the essential features of 
 the prophetic doctrine do date from Moses, and that 
 the popular Jahweh-worship, against which the pro¬ 
 phets of our period protest, was really a corruption 
 and degradation—a falling away from what had been 
 delivered to the fathers of Israel. Nevertheless the 
 question of what exactly the religion of Abraham was, 
 or what the original Mosaic deposit was, is a very com¬ 
 plicated question involved in all the uncertainties 
 which surround documents whose date cannot be put 
 near to the events which they describe. Whereas 
 
 1 Amos v. 8-9. 
 
SETTING THE QUESTION 77 
 
 from Amos to Malachi we are on the clear ground of 
 history, and we shall be assuming nothing that is 
 doubtful in considering the plain facts of their doc¬ 
 trine. Also the date when the supposed divine 
 communications began makes no real difference to the 
 argument. Whether it began with Moses or whether 
 with Amos, the question of its source remains sub¬ 
 stantially the same. 
 
 As to the later limit which I have chosen, it is 
 probable that some written prophecies, such as Joel 
 and the later part of Zechariah, date some hundred 
 years later than Malachi, and it is certain (in my 
 judgement) that the book of Daniel dates some three 
 centuries later than Malachi. And the prophetic 
 spirit is conspicuously to be found not only in the 
 Prophets, but in Psalms and Wisdom literature and 
 later apocalypses. These again contain fresh elements 
 of teaching, which are incorporated in the Jewish 
 authoritative tradition as it was received and per¬ 
 petuated in the primitive Christian Church, e.g. the 
 doctrine of the Wisdom of God immanent in nature, 
 the fuller doctrine of the angels, and the clear 
 assertion of the resurrection. But I am not prepared 
 to argue that these elements of the Jewish tradition 
 cannot be accounted for partly as inevitable develop¬ 
 ments and partly as incorporations from Greek and 
 Persian sources, once granted the fundamental basis 
 of prophetic doctrine. 
 
 These considerations have led to the choice of the 
 limits Amos to Malachi. All that I want is to be 
 found there and nothing that is fairly disputable. 
 
 During these 300 years, then, there was a continuous 
 succession of prophets whose writings are preserved 
 to us. There are obscure passages in these books 
 which for our present purpose we can wholly ignore, 
 
78 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 and there are passages assigned, perhaps rightly, to 
 a later date with which we are not concerned. What 
 is important is undisputed and is plain, so that he 
 that runs may read. It makes its impression only if 
 we read it continuously. 1 
 
 Here, then, we find a succession of wonderful men, 
 mostly conscious of profound unpopularity in their 
 contemporary world, who nevertheless, even in the 
 face of the most determined hostility of courts and 
 people, delivered a message which we feel to be self- 
 consistent and to involve the same great principles 
 throughout, about God—His nature, His will, His 
 purposes—and about human nature—its dignity, its 
 responsibility, and its sin ; a message which they 
 declare, with the fullest conviction, to be derived not 
 from their own reasoning or speculation, nor from 
 tradition 2 (though they would have indignantly 
 repudiated the idea that they were its first recipients), 
 nor from any external source at all, but from God, 
 the God of Israel, speaking in their own souls, so 
 intensely and clearly that there could be no mistake 
 about it. Let us listen to some typical utterances : 
 
 “ I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son ; 
 but I was an herdman, and a dresser of sycomore 
 trees : and the Lord took me from following the flock, 
 and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my 
 people Israel. Now therefore hear the word of the 
 Lord.” 3 
 
 1 The best assistance in doing this is The Hebrew Prophets, by 
 Woods and Powell (Oxford Press)—four handy little volumes with 
 introduction, text, and very brief but sufficient notes. 
 
 2 Their relation to earlier revelation may be compared to that of 
 St. Paul. St. Paul was not the first recipient of “ the truth as it is in 
 Jesus,” but he held it, and his commission to teach it, “neither 
 from men nor through men.” 
 
 3 Amos vii. 14. 
 
79 
 
 THE PROPHETS 
 
 44 But I truly am full of power by the spirit of the 
 Lord, and of judgement, and of might, to declare unto 
 Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin.” 1 
 
 “ Mine heart within me is broken, all my bones 
 shake ; I am like a drunken man, and like a man 
 whom wine hath overcome ; because of the Lord, and 
 because of His holy words. ... Is not my word like 
 as fire ? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that 
 breaketh the rock in pieces ? ” 2 
 
 We notice that they are acutely conscious of the 
 contrast between their own feelings and ideas on the 
 one hand, and on the other the purpose and mind of 
 God who constrains them. This is vividly presented 
 where the prophet holds conversations with God, 
 represents to God his own feelings, questions and 
 complains, and is answered. 3 These prophets are 
 clearly conscious of two distinct currents or forces 
 within them—the current of their own feelings, and 
 the overmastering pressure of God who possesses 
 
 them, making His mind and will articulate to them. 
 
 Such passages recur constantly. The prophets, 
 
 then, because they are conscious of being thus even 
 violently dealt with and possessed, claimed to utter 
 with supreme authority a word or message from God 
 to man. The content of this message is, on the whole, 
 quite clear in its final outcome. It is a message 
 which proclaims God as intensely personal and moral, 
 as the one and only God, the absolute creator and 
 sustainer and judge of all that is, almighty in the sense 
 that no other God or external power exists to restrain 
 Him. It proclaims Him in unmistakable terms for 
 
 1 Micah iii. 8. 2 Jer. xxiii. 9-29. 
 
 8 See Amos vii. 2-9 and 15, viii. 1-2 ; Isa. vi. 5-12, xxi. 2-10, 
 xxii. 4-14 ; Jer. i. 6-14, iv. 10, xiv. 7 to end, xv. 10-21, etc. Cf. 
 Sanday, Inspiration (Longmans, 1893), p. 148. 
 
80 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 a practical purpose, not, that is, with a view to the 
 satisfaction of metaphysical enquiries, but for the 
 sole purpose of making His people understand that 
 there is no manner of fellowship with Him possible 
 except by conformity to His character, that is, by 
 goodness, social and individual, by “ doing justly, 
 and loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. 5 ’ 1 
 It proclaims the responsibility of man as a free being 
 and his awful power to thwart God by his pride and 
 wilfulness, and to throw His world into confusion, in 
 Isaiah’s tremendous phrase, “ to make God serve with 
 his sins.” 2 It assumes that God does not over the 
 long course of this world’s history intend to remove 
 man’s liberty thus to thwart His purpose ; but it 
 declares God’s intention to judge and overthrow one 
 by one every structure and device of human pride 
 and wilfulness, and finally to vindicate Himself in 
 His whole creation. That is “ the day of the Lord.” 
 Meanwhile, His prophets are His mouthpiece to make 
 His character and will and purpose known, and to 
 call on those who have ears to hear to correspond 
 and co-operate with Him, that is, to stand for 
 righteousness and truth in evil days. 
 
 And it was upon this revelation of God, given through 
 the prophets, that in later days Jesus unmistakably 
 took His stand. After a long period of what in one 
 sense was the victory of the prophetic teaching since 
 the Captivity, and in other sense turned out to be its 
 eclipse 3 —after a long period during which there were 
 
 1 Micah vi. 8. 2 Isa. xliii. 24. 
 
 3 By the victory of the prophets after the Captivity I mean that 
 their whole teaching was formally accepted. There was no more 
 idolatry or tendency to idolatry on the part of the people. And 
 the whole ceremonial cultus was reorganized—following the teaching 
 of Ezekiel—so as to express the ethical principles of the prophets. 
 This was a great victory as the result of a divine judgement. On the 
 
JESUS CHRIST 81 
 
 no prophets—Jesus of Nazareth, following on John 
 the Baptist, renewed the prophetic message, infinitely 
 deepening and broadening it, but in no respect 
 altering its fundamental character. About the relation 
 of Jesus to the prophets, however, more will have to 
 be said later. Here it is enough to call attention to 
 what is indisputable, that no representation of the 
 teaching of Jesus Christ can make any pretence to 
 truth which fails to recognize that He stood upon 
 the foundation of the prophets, and that the civiliza¬ 
 tion of Christendom, in its whole moral and religious 
 fabric, stands with Jesus Christ upon that basis. 
 
 The message of the prophets made, and still makes, 
 a profound difference to mankind. It impinged upon 
 the human soul and conscience in a quite new way, 
 with new motives, new fears, new hopes, new aspira¬ 
 tions, new possibilities. This monotheism of the 
 prophets created a new type of character. Judged 
 by its effect, it is markedly different from the religion 
 of the philosophers, whether ancient or modern. And 
 that because its ideas are different. It claims, in 
 fact, to introduce into human experience a new source 
 of information about God of the most important kind, 
 such as never could have been derived from the 
 consideration of nature. If the claim of the prophets 
 to speak the word of the Lord is a true claim, the 
 philosopher (as well as the ordinary man) has got 
 
 other hand, prophecy gave way to law, and law tended to formalism. 
 So the later Judaism tended to “ make the word of God of none 
 effect by its tradition.” Any one of the old prophets who had been 
 “ raised up ” to visit earth again when John the Baptist began his 
 mission would have been profoundly disappointed with the results 
 of the victory of the prophetic teaching four hundred years before. 
 He would have joined John in his denunciation of “ the offspring 
 of vipers.” He would have seen a new idolatry in their misunder¬ 
 standing of the character of God. 
 
 7 
 
82 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 the material with which he has to deal immensely 
 enlarged. Athanasius, in a striking phrase, described 
 the Hebrew prophets as “ the sacred school of the 
 knowledge of God and of the spiritual life for all 
 mankind.” 1 If there really was such a divine educa¬ 
 tion of mankind of which the Hebrew prophets were 
 the instruments, we must put them, with regard to 
 religion, in a position analogous to that which we 
 commonly assign to the Greeks in philosophy or art, 
 and to the Romans in administration and law, but 
 profoundly different in respect of the source of their 
 authority and the method by which they gained their 
 assurance—the method of positive revelation, given 
 and received. 
 
 It seems to me that the intellectual world of to-day 
 is studiously refusing to face exactly this question. 
 But the peremptory form in which the question 
 presents itself can be realized by any man who likes 
 to read the prophets—to read and to ponder the vivid 
 accounts which the prophets give us of their commis¬ 
 sions, 8 and in general their intense experiences of 
 the dealings of God with them—experiences from 
 which it is not too much to say the world gained a 
 new spiritual life and a wholly new moral power. 
 W ere these real experiences—that is, experiences 
 which brought them into contact with reality, external 
 to and independent of themselves, experiences of God 
 forcing Himself upon them with a message which could 
 be made articulate in human words and intelligible 
 to human hearts and minds ? 
 
 Some of the ways in which an attempt is made to 
 explain or explain away the prophetic experiences so 
 
 1 De Incarnatione, 12 ; cf. the noble preface to Ewald’s History of 
 Israel. 
 
 a Isa. vi.; Jerem. i. ; Ezek. ii.-iii. ; Amos vii. 14. 
 
THE RISE OF PROPHECY 88 
 
 that they shall not bear the conclusions which they 
 appear to bear, if taken as veridical, we must with 
 all anxious impartiality seek to examine. But to 
 obviate in advance certain current misconceptions, 
 we must first take special note of some facts concern* 3 
 ing the origin, nature, and progressive character of 
 the prophetic teaching. 
 
 1. It had its origin amidst phenomena familiar to 
 all religions and especially to the Semitic religions 
 around it. St. Chrysostom 1 boldly declared that all 
 the elements of the Jewish ceremonial law— 44 the 
 sacrifices and the cleansings and the new moons and 
 the ark and the temple itself had their origin from 
 heathen grossness.” The same thing is true about 
 prophecy in its external aspects. Almost all nations, 
 and in particular the nations with whom the Hebrews 
 were acquainted and to whom they were akin, had a 
 special class of 44 professionals,” priests or seers or 
 diviners, whose supposed science enabled them, by 
 various methods, to ascertain the will of the god of 
 the nation and to claim his guidance. A certain 
 ethical effect may be found in some of these religious 
 institutions, as, for instance, in the Greek oracles, 
 and we need not stay to discuss whether there was 
 by their means a really divine influence at work. 
 Let us grant it. But in the main the influence of 
 these 44 natural religions ” was not ethical. Es¬ 
 pecially the religions which surrounded Israel, whether 
 the religion of the local Canaanite Baalim and Ashto- 
 reths, or the religions of the national gods, such as 
 Chemosh the Moabite god, were not ethical. They 
 
 1 St. Chrys., Horn, in Matt. vi. 3, P.O. lvii. col. 66. The patristic 
 recognition of the earthly origin of the religion of the Jews in ita 
 material elements has been generally ignored in the orthodox 
 tradition. 
 
84 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 were at their root nature worships, and often worships 
 of the productive and reproductive powers of nature. 
 Thus as nature seems to be indifferent to morality, so 
 nature worships are non-moral or immoral. It is 
 surprising to most of us to discover to how great an 
 extent we of the Western w T orld owe the intimate 
 association of religion with morality to the direct or 
 indirect influence of the special class of Hebrew pro¬ 
 phets whom we are considering. Among the people 
 great and small with whom Israel was brought in 
 contact, religion was profoundly popular. The gods 
 were taken for granted. The god belonged to his 
 people and the people to their god. He was not 
 conceived of as asking of them anything contrary to 
 their customs. They were to give him his proper 
 cultus —his sacrifices and rites—and to avoid all that 
 annoyed and irritated him. But character and 
 morality were not among his attributes or his claims. 
 On the other hand, he belonged to his people and 
 could be expected to help them, and there existed the 
 class of professionals who knew how to find out his 
 will and disclose it, and who could more or less foretell 
 what was to happen. So they were to be consulted 
 by the peoples and their rulers in their difficulties. 
 Doubtless in some such way by the help of the 
 priests Mesha King of Moab, contemporary with 
 Omri King of Israel, whose inscription remains for 
 us, ascertained the will of Chemosh, 
 
 “ I am Mesha King of Moab. ... I made this high 
 place to Chemosh because he has helped me against all 
 them that attacked me, and has caused me to see my 
 desire upon all my enemies. Omri King of Israel 
 oppressed Moab long, because Chemosh was angry against 
 his land. . . . And the King of Israel had built Ataroth. 
 I attacked the town and took it, and I exterminated all 
 
SEMITIC RELIGIONS 85 
 
 the men of the town—a pleasing spectacle for Chemosh 
 and Moab, . . . and I dragged [some others] before the 
 face of Chemosh. And Chemosh said to me : Go and take 
 Nebo from Israel. And I set out by night, and I besieged 
 that town . . . and I took it and killed all things . . . 
 for I had vowed them to Ashtar Chemosh. And there 
 I took the altar hearths [?] of Jehovah and dragged them 
 before the face of Chemosh. The King of Israel built 
 Jahash and fortified himself there against me, and 
 Chemosh drove him before his face . . . and Chemosh 
 said to me : Go down and fight against Haronaim.” 1 
 
 Obviously this narrative and its religious tone recall 
 familiar features in the Hebrew books. In fact it is 
 impossible to read attentively some of the narratives 
 of the book of Judges, or the books of Samuel, or the 
 denunciations of the popular religion from the lips of 
 the prophets, as they saw it in being, and not to own 
 that the popular religion of Israel was much the 
 same as the religion of the people round about them. 
 This religion, the religion of Jahweh, as the people 
 understood it, was popular and universal. The 
 people trampled Jahweh’s courts in crowds ; they 
 spent lavishly on the worship, the sacrifices, and the 
 incense ; they loved the festivals ; but plainly they 
 entertained no idea of any connexion between their re¬ 
 ligion and what we call morality, individual and social. 
 Religion in their sense was quite compatible both with 
 sexual immorality and drunkenness and with social 
 oppression and fraud and cruelty. It is on this ground 
 only that the earlier prophets denounce so utterly 
 the ceremonial cultus as worthless in the sight of 
 God. 2 Also the people of Israel, through prophets 
 
 1 See Hastings’s D. of B., art. Moabite Stone, vol. iii, p. 407. 
 
 2 It is hardly necessary to refor to the famous passages Isa. i. 10- 
 17, Hos. vi. 6, Amos iv. 4-G, v. 21-7, Micah vi. 6-8, Ps. 1. 8-15, 
 etc. Such denunciations cease with the Captivity. The tone of 
 the prophets after the Captivity is quite different. 
 
86 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 and seers, by Urim and Thummim, by sacred pillars, 
 by ephods, and by the sacred ark, ascertained the 
 word of Jahweh, much as Mesha, the king of Moab, 
 ascertained the will of Chemosh—that is to 
 directions which He was believed to give His peopfir^ 
 in their practical concerns, military and personal. 
 The existence of this sort of Jahweh-religion in Israel 
 is unmistakable through the period of the Judges and 
 the early kingdom. It is the religion and the re¬ 
 ligious worship which the later prophets denounce . 1 In 
 the main it was Jahweh-worship, for the Hebrews had 
 on the whole no desire to forsake their national God, 
 as they understood the matter, either in Israel or in 
 Judah. They did indeed lapse into the worship of 
 other gods, and more and more as the fierce teaching 
 of the prophets identified the name of Jahweh with a 
 tremendous moral claim which they were not prepared 
 to accede to. This idolatry the prophets alternately 
 denounce and ridicule. But in the earlier days, 
 before the continuous succession of the prophets, the 
 people in general probably felt very little essential 
 difference between Chemosh and Jahweh, or the 
 religions of Chemosh and Jahweh, or between one Baal 
 
 1 See, for a conception of Jahweh as in some sense limited to His 
 own land and peoples, like Chemosh to Moab, Judg. xi. 23-4, 
 
 1 Sam. xxvi. 19. For seers and prophets as paid professionals see 
 1 Sam. ix. 7-8. For music and violent motion and mental disturb¬ 
 ance as the accompaniment of prophecy see 1 Sam. x. 5-6, 10-13, 
 xix. 24, Num. xxiv. 4, 2 Kings iii. 15. For divination by Urim 
 and Thummim, 1 Sam. xiv. 41, [restoring the text according to 
 the indication of the LXX: “If on me and my son, Jehovah 
 give Urim, but, if on the people, give Thummim,] 1 Sam. xxviii. 6. 
 
 By teraphim and ephod and ark, Judg. xvii. 5, 6, 1 Sam. xxiii. 9-12, 
 xxx. 7-8, 2 Sam. v. 19-23, Josh, xviii. 6-10, Hos. iv. 12 (by stock and 
 staff), Zech. x. 2. Cf. among the heathen Gen. xliv. 5 (by goblet), 
 Ezek. xxi. 21 (by arrows and teraphim and liver). By dreams, 1 Sam. 
 xxviii. 6, Jer. xxiii. 25; by wizards, Lev. xix. 31, Isa. viii. 19. See 
 list of prohibited methods in Deut. xviii. 10-12, with Driver’s notes. 
 
PROPHETS TRUE AND FALSE 87 
 
 and another. Such, as we read the earlier records and 
 the sweeping denunciations of the prophets, we dis¬ 
 cern to have been the popular religion of Israel. 
 IpJfSvas in this kind of atmosphere and out of this 
 Tradition that the great moral prophets, whose writ¬ 
 ings remain to us, emerged. They were few among 
 many. The mass of the prophets all along, until after 
 the Captivity the whole prophetic office fell into dis¬ 
 repute , 1 retained the old low idea of religion, mixed 
 with mere fraud and avarice. The 44 true ” prophets 
 habitually denounce them as a corrupt class, mis¬ 
 leading the people . 2 They themselves retain some of 
 the characteristics of the 44 natural ” prophets—they 
 perform symbolic acts for a sign, they see visions, and 
 one of them (Ezekiel) is notable for going into condi¬ 
 tions of trance . 3 Nevertheless, as compared with the 
 
 1 See Zech. xiii. 3-6. 
 
 2 Elijah’s adversaries appear clearly as prophets of a false and rival 
 God (1 Kings xviii. 19). But Micaiah’s adversaries claim apparently 
 to be prophets of Jehovah : 1 Kings xxii., see ver. 24. For denuncia¬ 
 tions of the prophets as a class see Hos. ix. 7-8, Micah iii. 5-11, 
 Zeph. iii. 4, Isa. xxviii. 7, xxix. 10, Jer. ii. 26, v. 31, xxiii. 15-40 (a 
 very illuminating passage), Ezek. xiii. 15-16. All these passages 
 imply that the prophets as a class were abandoned men. 
 
 3 I feel that I have not the qualifications for writing on the psychical 
 condition of the prophets. I do not see signs of trance conditions 
 in any of the prophets whom we reckon as the true prophets except 
 Ezekiel. Job iv. 12-17 and Dan. viii. 18 perhaps suggest that in 
 the later period of Jewish literature a trance condition was regarded 
 as the natural condition for the prophet. All that I would insist 
 upon is that, whatever the physical condition of the prophets when 
 they received their communications, their minds were intensely 
 alert and conscious and rational. What possessed them did not 
 annihilate or override their own mental faculties. No one can 
 read their prophecies and fail to see this. The early Christian 
 Church (in the Montanist controversy) was clearly right in asserting 
 that in the true succession of prophets the inspiring Spirit did not 
 destroy but intensified the natural rational faculty of its human 
 organs. They retain their full personality with its individual char¬ 
 acteristics. See The Church and the Ministry, Appendix H and I, 
 and references to Bonwotsch there given. 
 
88 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 popular prophets, they are something wholly different. 
 Their aim is wholly different. Their message is 
 associated with the clearest mental vision and fullest 
 consciousness. It speaks out of the moral reason of 
 the prophet to the moral reason of the people. If the 
 prophets were what they claimed to be, it must be 
 recognized that God was doing through them a new 
 thing, but that the new thing sprang out of what was 
 natural and racial. And it is, as we have already 
 recognized, a most false method to imagine that, 
 because some new thing emerged out of something 
 lower, therefore the lower thing explains the new 
 birth. It does this in the case of prophecy no more 
 than physics can explain life or irrational nature 
 reason. Rather in the new thing we see the explana¬ 
 tion of that lower thing out of which it had its origin, 
 as man explains nature rather than nature man. 
 
 2. In what sense is it the special function of the 
 prophets to foretell the future ? In a sense this had 
 been the characteristic function of the Semitic pro¬ 
 phets. They were the men who were believed to 
 be able, by vision or dream or mechanical instrument, 
 to declare the will of God not yet evident—to say for 
 instance, like Ahab’s prophets, whether a certain 
 expedition was going to be successful. “ Shall I go 
 against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I forbear ? ” 
 “ If I pursue after this troop, shall I overtake them ? ” 1 
 was the kind of question they were expected to 
 answer. But this was not the special characteristic 
 of the prophets whom we call the true prophets, few 
 among many, whose writings remain to us. Their 
 special characteristic was that they knew the 
 character and purpose of Jehovah and His moral 
 claim on their contemporaries. But for this very 
 
 1 1 Kings xxii. 6; 1 Sam. xxx. 8. 
 
PROPHETS AS FORETELLERS 89 
 
 reason, because they saw so clearly into the nature 
 and will and purpose of God, so they saw in large 
 measure what He would do. “ Surely the Lord God 
 will do nothing,” cries Amos, “ but He revealeth His 
 secret unto His servants the prophets.” 1 Thus Amos 
 proclaims with certainty the imminent doom of the 
 Northern Kingdom, and, less distinctly, the judgement 
 on Judah. Later Micah is found announcing the 
 doom of Jerusalem, as certainly as Jeremiah a hundred 
 years later, or our Lord again seven hundred years 
 later, under circumstances of renewed apostasy. 
 
 Again, the instrument of these dooms or judge¬ 
 ments is sometimes, but not always, clear to the 
 prophet’s mind. Thus it is clear to Jeremiah that 
 Babylon is to be the instrument of divine chastisement 
 on Jerusalem; but it appears that Hosea had, in an 
 earlier age, no certainty whether the instrument of 
 chastisement on the Northern Kingdom was to be 
 Egypt or Assyria. On the other hand, in the days of 
 the righteous King ILezekiah, Isaiah foresees distinctly 
 that the apparently resistless might of the Assyrian 
 monarch is to be baffled and Jerusalem is to be saved ; 
 and all the prophets, those most clearly who were 
 occupied in proclaiming immediate doom on God’s 
 people, proclaimed also that His purpose in calling 
 Israel would not ultimately fail, but that through chas¬ 
 tisement would come restoration and a vast enhance¬ 
 ment of spiritual glory—the Kingdom of the Messiah. 
 
 But the divine instruments of chastisement, whether 
 Assyria or Babylon, though they are used by God 
 for the purposes of divine justice, are not them¬ 
 selves just. They are cruel and monstrous tyrannies. 
 Thus on them in turn judgement must come, as it is 
 certain to come on all the institutions which represent 
 
 1 Amos iii. 7. 
 
90 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 human insolence and cruelty and lust. Thus a large 
 part of the prophetic message consists in the announce¬ 
 ment of “ oracles of Jehovah ” upon contemporary 
 kingdoms or empires or civilizations. It cannot be 
 said that these forecasts are infallible in detail. 
 Ezekiel pronounced distinctly a doom on Tyre at the 
 hand of Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon which 
 was not by that hand or at that time fulfilled. 1 But on 
 the whole these prophecies were remarkably fulfilled. 
 For instance, one of the miracles of history is the fact 
 that Israel, the divinely appointed instrument of the 
 true religion (as it is contended), though it was again 
 and again apparently absorbed, or on the way to be 
 absorbed, in the great nations which trampled it down, 
 such as Babylon or the empire of Alexander, was in 
 fact preserved to fulfil its separate function. There 
 is force in the famous answer which is said to have 
 been given to Frederick the Great’s question, “ What 
 is the best argument for the truth of the Christian 
 religion ? ” “ The Jews, your Majesty.” But all 
 
 these announcements of what was to happen were 
 forecasts—mainly of the immediate future—uttered 
 by the prophets for the warning or encouragement of 
 their contemporaries, forecasts arising out of the 
 circumstances of the present and (this is the most 
 important point) involved in the proclamation of the 
 righteousness and righteous government of God. This 
 -—and not future events, except so far as they were 
 bound up with this—it was the prophet’s business to 
 declare. It is true that, inasmuch as the reign of the 
 righteous God is declared to be universal, it is neces¬ 
 sary that God should vindicate Himself finally in the 
 whole universe: thus we have the magnificent pro¬ 
 phecies of the day of the Lord—-that is, the world-wide 
 
 1 Ezek. xxvi. 7-14; cf. xxix. 18. 
 
NO “HISTORY WRITTEN BEFOREHAND” 91 
 
 judgement upon all that resist God, and the world-wide 
 establishment of the kingdom or reign of God. And 
 the definite prophecies of particular judgements upon 
 particular nations are thrown upon the background of 
 this vast and vague vision of final and cosmic catas¬ 
 trophe and salvation by the prophets of the Old 
 Testament, as later by our Lord, when He announced 
 the coming doom upon Jerusalem. But such fore¬ 
 casts—though, if God be God, they must be fulfilled— 
 though the “ end of the world ” must lie in God com¬ 
 ing into His own in the whole of His own creation— 
 involve no detailed knowledge of the future outside 
 the horizon of the prophet’s own time. 1 There is 
 no map of the future spread before his eyes. Pro¬ 
 phecy is not in any such sense “ history written 
 beforehand.” 2 
 
 The foretelling of the future was, then, a real function 
 of the prophets of Israel, and it was part of the 
 Semitic tradition that they should foretell. In the 
 case of the true prophets their anticipations of the 
 future were intimately bound up with their moral 
 message : they foretold what God must do because 
 He is just. On the whole their anticipations have 
 been indeed wonderfully fulfilled. But it is not in 
 predictions fulfilled that their chief function is to be 
 sought; it is in their message about God and His 
 nature, His character, and His purpose—-and about 
 
 1 Thus Micah (v. 6) anticipates the Messiah in time to deliver 
 Judah from the Assyrian. And Haggai and Zechariah in like manner 
 anticipate immediately the glory for recovered Israel. And in the 
 book of Daniel there is a detailed sketch of the actual history, but 
 only up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (when the author 
 certainly lived), and after that only the quite vaguely conceived 
 picture of the immediate glory of the holy nation. 
 
 2 Butler’s most unfortunate phrase did mischief proportioned 
 to his extraordinary merits and greatness. 
 
92 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 man’s capacity, responsibility, and true hope. I am 
 going to argue that their claim to speak the word of 
 the Lord was a true claim ; and it was necessary, 
 therefore, that I should describe and more or less limit 
 their function, because the conception of it has, no 
 doubt, been distorted in tradition. 
 
 3. In this age we like to place all history in the 
 category of development. We receive great encour¬ 
 agement to do this in the Bible. But we are slowly 
 learning that the dogma of development must be 
 moulded to the facts, frankly observed and fairly 
 interpreted ; and that historical development has been 
 something quite different from orderly and necessary 
 progress. Now, when the author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews contends for a progressive revelation “ in 
 many parts and many manners 5 5 through the line of 
 prophets culminating in Jesus Christ, he is so far at 
 least justified that there was an undoubted advance, 
 as all are agreed, in the conception of God and of 
 human life, say from the Judges downward to the New 
 Testament. 1 Certain steps in advance, from which 
 there was no withdrawal, are easily noted. It was a 
 step forward when Jahweh, the God of Israel, was 
 realized to be the one and only God, the Creator of all 
 that is, in such sense that there could be no other god. 
 It was a step when Amos proclaimed that God, because 
 He is God, must deal impartial judgement upon all 
 
 1 The Christian Fathers are full of this conception of gradualness 
 in God’s creation and in the education of man. They solve in this 
 manner the moral difficulties of the Old Testament. The sign of 
 the success of the divine method, they argue, is that commands which 
 could be given to Abraham or Samuel could not be given to Chris¬ 
 tians. See passages cited in Lux Muncli, pp. 240-2. An interest¬ 
 ing instance of advance is Hosea’s judgement on Jehu’s massacres 
 at Jezreel: see Hos. i. 4, compared to the judgement of the book of 
 Kings. 
 
93 
 
 PROGRESS IN PROPHECY 
 
 nations, including Israel and Judah. 1 It was another 
 step when Ezekiel first clearly proclaimed the great 
 principle that God does not merely deal with nations 
 or mankind in social groups, but deals in His absolute 
 justice with each individual. 2 It was again a step when 
 the same Ezekiel overcame the crude antagonism 
 which appears in the earlier prophets between the 
 cultus or external and traditional worship on the one 
 hand, and the moral spirit of prophecy on the other, 
 and proceeded to outline a synthesis of spirit and 
 cultus by remodelling the traditional worship to 
 be the centre of the social life of the new Israel 
 which he foresaw. 8 
 
 On the other hand, there is retrogression. Thus 
 the visions of Isaiah and of others of a converted 
 world in which Egypt and Assyria shall be included 
 in God’s people, 4 gave way on the whole to the visions 
 of apocalyptic judgement in which the adversaries of 
 Israel were to be not converted but overwhelmed in 
 final ruin. And on the whole it has to be said that 
 the prophets who stand at the head of our succession 
 in point of time, Amos and Hosea, Micah and Isaiah, 
 show the prophetic spirit at the full. No presentation 
 of the one God, creator of all that is and righteous 
 judge of all the world, can exceed that of Amos in 
 startling clearness. No picture of the passionate love 
 of God for His people can exceed in fullness and 
 poignancy the teaching of Hosea. And though later 
 prophets show much more clearly the influence of 
 their predecessors—though they “borrow” more 
 plainly—yet none of them show such dependence 
 as to weaken their personal consciousness of divine 
 commission and direct inspiration. But especially 
 
 1 Amos ii. 4, 6, iii. 2. 3 Ezek. xl. ff. 
 
 2 Ezok. xviii. 4 Isa. xix. 19 ff. 
 
94 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 is this true of all the prophets down to the restoration. 
 Though now and again they may quote an earlier 
 prophecy, yet unmistakably on the whole each one 
 speaks no borrowed or inherited message, but one 
 which he is entirely convinced is given to him 
 personally by the supreme God. 
 
 Thus we have in these prophets of Israel something 
 which is not correctly described as a “ development ” 
 or “ evolution ” of spiritual truth, if, as is commonly 
 the case, we mean by these words the natural expan¬ 
 sion or unfolding of truth, by its own force, from 
 thinker to thinker. What we see is much more 
 accurately described, supposing that the prophets 
 gave a trustworthy account of their experiences, as a 
 process of divine education, which is more or less 
 progressive, but by way of successive lessons or 
 disclosures from above, adapted to the circumstances 
 and capacities of the pupil, not by way of gradual 
 discovery from below. 
 
 4. I must insist—and with somewhat more precise 
 definition of the point—that Jesus Christ, whom we 
 consider now without any reference to the question 
 of supernatural personality, simply as a prophet 
 following on John the Baptist, unmistakably took 
 his stand on the prophetic message, both as delivered 
 by the prophets and as embodied in the law, as being 
 truly the word of God. Thus He corrected in its light 
 the tradition of scribes and Pharisees as being “ the 
 commandments of men ” by contrast to 44 the word 
 of God ”—that is to say, He appealed back behind 
 the ecclesiastical traditions to its fount in the divine 
 revelation of the Old Testament. 1 Not, of course, that 
 He was merely dependent on the Law and the prophets. 
 No: He claimed the right to supersede, on His own 
 
 1 Mark vii. 1-14. 
 
95 
 
 CHRIST AND THE PROPHETS 
 
 authority, the teaching of the Law. “ It was said to 
 them of old time . . . but I say unto you.” 1 Again, 
 He recognizes elements of higher and lower in the 
 Mosaic Law, appealing in the case of the Sabbath to 
 its moral purpose behind specific enactments, 2 and in 
 the case of marriage recognizing the moral imperfection 
 of the Mosaic provisions and appealing back to a 
 word of God more original and fundamental. 3 More¬ 
 over, in regard to the prophetic teaching about God, 
 He infinitely intensified the idea of God which it 
 conveyed on the side of Llis personal love to indivi¬ 
 duals, and He universalized it so that it should apply 
 to man as man and not only to Israel. But when we 
 have given full weight to all these considerations and 
 recognized to the full the personal authority of Jesus 
 as derived from no tradition (“ No man knoweth the 
 Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son 
 willeth to reveal Him”), there can be no question 
 that He took His stand on the Old Testament revela¬ 
 tion as the real utterance of God, and preserved it. 
 In respect of God’s personality and His righteousness, 
 His almightiness, His omnipresence, His claim on 
 man—in respect of the responsibility of man and 
 his sinfulness—in respect of the divine purpose of 
 redemption—in respect of the day of judgement 
 and the final reign of God, Jesus Christ takes 
 the Old Testament revelation for granted as God- 
 given. 
 
 And it must be noted that our Lord lays no stress 
 upon one important element in the later Jewish 
 tradition—which was perhaps a reflection of Greek 
 philosophy—the doctrine of the divine wisdom or 
 
 3 Mark ii. 23 f¥., iii. 1-6. 
 
 3 Mark x. 1-12. 
 
 1 Matt. v. 21-2. 
 
96 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 word immanent in nature. 1 This was already estab¬ 
 lished in a measure in the Jewish tradition, and it is 
 welcomed, as by Philo, so also by St. Paul and St. 
 John and the whole Christian Church. But in our 
 Lord’s teaching all the stress is on the transcendence 
 and absoluteness of God the Father. And God’s 
 relations to the world and to men are described in 
 the most naively personal terms. 
 
 I have thought it necessary to enter into these 
 preliminary explanations in order, if possible, to 
 prevent a “ red herring ” being drawn across the path 
 of our argument at a subsequent stage (1) by the 
 suggestion that the very earthly origins of Hebrew 
 prophecy discredit it; or (2) by a mistaken estimate of 
 the prophets as primarily foretellers of the future ; or 
 (3) by the inspiration of the prophets being assimilated 
 in a way the facts will not warrant to the natural 
 development of thought from thinker to thinker ; 
 or (4) by forgetfulness that in the succession of the 
 Hebrew prophets we must reckon not only John the 
 Baptist but also Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 Now, having so far cleared the ground, we find our¬ 
 selves again confronting the main question : Are these 
 prophetic conceptions of God and man on which our 
 Christian life is founded—the conception of God as 
 intensely personal, the creator and sustainer of all 
 that exists, the Father and the judge of all created 
 spirits, eternal and unchangeable in His power, His 
 righteousness, and His love, and the accompanying 
 conception of man—his spiritual capacity, his 
 freedom and responsibility, his appalling sinfulness, 
 his opportunity for recovery through the redemptive 
 
 1 He does, however, fully accept the later tradition concerning 
 spirits good and bad, and concerning personal survival of death, which 
 He declares to be implied in God’s relation with the patriarchs. 
 
THE PROPHETS NOT PHILOSOPHERS 97 
 
 action of God, his outlook into an immortal life and 
 a reign of God to come,—are these allied conceptions 
 true ? Is it true that the prophets, and Jesus Christ 
 the successor of the prophets, were, as they claimed to 
 be, in such close contact with the eternal Reality that 
 they could, in speaking as they did of God and com¬ 
 municating His word to men, 44 speak that they did 
 know and testify that they had seen ” or 44 heard 5 5 ? 
 For my own part, having studied the prophets and 
 the Gospels all my life long and asked myself this 
 crucial question more times than I could enumerate, 
 I can give but one answer. I believe their claim is 
 true. It is a momentous decision morally, and it is 
 momentous no less intellectually, because, if I mistake 
 not, it dominates the intellectual situation. What 
 precisely it involves, intellectually considered, and 
 whether it brings us into any real conflict with the 
 fairly certain conclusions of the philosophical reason 
 or of science, we shall be considering shortly with all 
 seriousness. But first of all we have to ask ourselves 
 what other estimates of the prophetic message can be 
 suggested and whether they ought to satisfy us. 1 
 
 1. It cannot be even plausibly suggested that we 
 are dealing in the prophets’ utterances with intellec¬ 
 tual conclusions reached, like the conclusions of the 
 Greek philosophers, by process of reasoning or obser¬ 
 vation of nature, and liable, like the conclusions of 
 philosophers, to revision by themselves and their 
 successors in the light of subsequent reflection. The 
 Hebrews showed almost no tendency towards philo¬ 
 sophical speculation, and the prophets are not like 
 philosophers. They assume the reality of God, the 
 
 1 In what follows I am following Hamilton’s People of God (Oxford 
 Press), or rather I am conscious of the impression the argument 
 of his first volume made upon me when he first issued the book. 
 
 8 
 
98 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 God of Israel, and that He can communicate with 
 them if He will, and they are convinced that He has 
 done so—in such a manner as leaves quite unsolved 
 a number of questions which profoundly interest 
 philosophers, but apparently have no interest for 
 the prophets ; but also in such a manner as supplies 
 them with all the knowledge of God required for 
 practical life, and in such a manner as admits of being 
 rendered into clear propositions about God and His 
 will such as men can understand and must accept or 
 reject. No doubt God may reveal more to those who 
 come after. But they know that what has been 
 given to them so far must be true as God is true. 
 
 2. It is also plain that their dominant conviction 
 that God governs the world in justice cannot be what 
 we should call a deduction from experience—the 
 experience of Israel as a nation or of the individual. 
 It is quite true that the Bible is full of assurances, 
 given on divine authority to Israel, that if they 
 will be obedient to God they will be prosperous, 
 and that, on the other hand, disaster will follow 
 disobedience. And we commonly forget how true 
 it is that any nation which as a whole should set 
 itself to obey a lofty moral and social law like 
 that of the Hebrews would indeed be prosperous. 
 But it is the constant testimony of the prophets 
 that Israel has been since the days of the Exodus 
 almost uniformly rebellious, and that the crowning 
 mercies of Jehovah have been bestowed on them 
 not in accordance with their deserts but in spite 
 of them. According to the prophets, at nq period 
 has God had a chance of showing what He would 
 do for an obedient people. 1 There are indeed in the 
 
 1 This is the tone of the prophetic history as a whole : cf. Hos. i., 
 iii., Isa v., Ezek. xvi., xx. 6 ff., xxxvi. 17 f., cf. Ps. lxxviii. 17 2. 
 
NOR TAUGHT BY EXPERIENCE 99 
 
 prophets a few appeals to happier experiences like that 
 of Jeremiah to “ Shallum the son of Josiah King of 
 Judah ”—■“ Did not thy father eat and drink, and 
 do judgement and justice ? then it was well with 
 him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy ; 
 then it was well.” 1 But on the other hand the earlier 
 prophets who were contemporary with Jeroboam II 
 witnessed the highest point of Israel’s prosperity 
 coinciding with the gross moral degradation which 
 they denounce ; and Jeremiah, just before the Cap¬ 
 tivity, heard the lamentations of those who attributed 
 their disaster to their desertion of the Queen of 
 Heaven, and looked back on their past prosperity as 
 due to her favour when they were faithful to her. 2 
 And the prophets show no signs of being taken in by 
 evidences of prosperity accompanying moral faithless¬ 
 ness to Jehovah. The fact is that their conviction that 
 national prosperity would always follow obedience to 
 God, and disaster always follow rebellion, is not a 
 conclusion based upon experience, but a conviction 
 that so it must be, if God is God, or a conviction that 
 God has so promised to order national life. And as 
 regards individuals, it was the frequent experience of 
 the righteous man in undeserved affliction, which in 
 part forced the Hebrews forward to the vision of a 
 future life in which God’s justice should have room to 
 vindicate itself. Certainly their doctrine of God’s 
 justice, though in part it can appeal to experiences, 
 does not vary with their experiences and is not based 
 upon them. It is a conviction established in their 
 souls by what they believed to be the voice of God 
 bearing witness concerning Himself. 
 
 3. It used to be more the fashion than it is to-day 
 
 1 Jer. xxii. 15 
 
 2 Jer. xliv. 17-18—a vivid passage. 
 
100 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 to talk about 44 the Semitic genius for monotheism, 5 5 
 and to treat the Hebrew monotheism as if it were the 
 natural development of the religious tendencies of a 
 certain large group of the human family to which 
 the Israelites belonged. But we know, or can 
 conjecture with a certain measure of certainty, what 
 the religion of Canaan and Moab and Ammon and 
 Edom was. We know how much there was in the 
 instincts and the tradition of Israel inclining them 
 to assimilate and to retain this type of religion, and 
 that the religion of the prophets—their ethical mono¬ 
 theism—only established itself by violent conflict 
 with this 44 Semitic genius.” On a wide view of 
 Semitic religions, a great scholar 1 has described their 
 characteristic on the whole as not 44 monotheism,” 
 but 44 sexual dualism.” Certainly there is nothing 
 in the religion of the races which touched Israel 
 between the Exodus and the Captivity which could 
 in any way account for the prophetic teaching. Again, 
 it is as far as possible from being a reflection, through 
 Moses, of the Egyptian religion. It is markedly 
 contrary to it in all its chief features—its polytheism, 
 its idolatry, its preoccupation with the dead and the 
 world of the dead. Attention has recently been 
 directed to the heretical Egyptian King Akhnaton, and 
 the noble expression which, in his psalm to the Sun’s 
 Disk, the only god whom he worshipped, he gives to 
 the idea of the One Lord and Giver of Life. This is 
 indeed a noble utterance, worthy to be set beside 
 the 104th Psalm in the Bible ; and it may rightly 
 be used as evidence that divine inspiration was not 
 limited to Israel. But the religion of Akhnaton was 
 killed almost at its birth, and was buried, and so 
 
 1 Noldeke ; see Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the Hist, oj Israel 
 (English trans., Black, 1885), p. 440. 
 
NOR BY FOREIGN TEACHERS 101 
 
 remained till quite recently it was disinterred. It 
 did not affect the Egyptian tradition at all, and no 
 one has supposed that it affected Israel. Once more, 
 there were noble Babylonian hymns in which a 
 certain unique majesty and high moral attributes 
 are ascribed to one God, considered for the time 
 apart from all others. 1 But these, again, were probably 
 individual utterances which did not affect the popular 
 polytheism and idolatry, and also no one would 
 suggest that Hebrew prophets before the Exile had 
 any knowledge of them. 2 What elements in their 
 tradition the Jews shared with their neighbours, 
 like the stories of creation and the flood, which were 
 at their root common to them with the Babylonians, 
 were wholly transmuted, in their religious or theo¬ 
 logical meaning, in the process of being adopted. 
 Of course, in this paragraph I cannot attempt to 
 argue the matter at any length, nor have I the 
 requisite knowledge or authority. But I seem to see 
 a growing disinclination in scholars to question the 
 complete originality of the distinctive prophetic 
 religion, and there is no source which can be plausibly 
 suggested before the Exile from which it could have 
 been either consciously borrowed or unconsciously 
 derived. 
 
 It must, then, be admitted, I think, that the 
 ethical monotheism of the prophets neither was 
 derived from any foreign source nor was anything 
 
 1 This is called “ henotheism,” as distinct from “ monotheism,” 
 i.e. exclusive concentration on one God, without denial of the 
 existence of others. 
 
 2 For the Babylonian hymns see Hastings’s Diet, of the Bible, 
 vol. v, pp. 563 ff. For Akhnaton see Weigall’s Akhnaton , Pharaoh 
 of Egypt (Blackwood); see also on both subjects, Sanday, Divine 
 Overruling (Clarke), pp. 36 ff. 
 
102 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 which the natural genius of the Semitic peoples would 
 be likely to generate. 
 
 4. But there is one other “ explanation ” of the 
 voice of God to the prophets, which is more likely to 
 commend itself to our generation—it is the psycho¬ 
 logical. “ Does the experience of controlling force 
 which the prophet feels really come from some 
 external influence, or is it merely his consciousness of 
 ordinarily unknown depths in his own nature ? It 
 is obvious that a theory of prophecy could be made 
 on lines rendered familiar by psychologists, by 
 suggesting that what happens in a prophetic experi¬ 
 ence is the sudden ‘ coming up ’ of what is ordinarily 
 subliminal.” 1 Something of this sort is constantly 
 being suggested to us in the name of psychology— 
 that what prophets and seers and religious people have 
 taken for divine voices or influences are really only 
 the occasional “ uprushes,” whether in a state of 
 trance or without any such suppression of normal 
 consciousness, of what is ordinarily kept outside 
 consciousness, buried in the region of the unconscious 
 mind—a vaster region than that of our consciousness 
 —assuming the form of an independent consciousness 
 or a different person from ourselves communicating 
 with us. 
 
 Now, there can be no doubt that this unconscious 
 or subconscious or subliminal region of mind is a 
 very important fact, which psychology to-day is 
 fulfilling an exceedingly important function in 
 investigating. My mind is, it appears, much wider 
 than my present consciousness. Thus it is quite 
 certain that we retain the record of much more of 
 our experiences than we consciously remember at any 
 
 1 Kirsopp Lake, Landmarks of the Early Church (Macmillan, 1920), 
 p. 43. 
 
NOR FROM SUBLIMINAL SOURCES 103 
 
 moment, whether we interpret this fact in physio¬ 
 logical terms (as in Dr. Carpenter’s theory of “ un¬ 
 conscious cerebration ”) or more purely pyschologic- 
 ally. Perhaps everything that has happened to us, 
 or been willed or imagined or done by us, is some¬ 
 where unconsciously remembered and may be one 
 day consciously disclosed. Uprushes from the 
 unconscious memory occur to all of us. 1 And besides 
 being a storing-place for our personal experiences, it 
 appears to be certain that the unconscious mind is 
 also what Bergson terms a “ racial memory ”—that 
 therein are stored hereditary instincts, tendencies, 
 and capacities, such as are not merely individual, 
 and yet constitute the background, the deeply 
 influential background, of our individual and conscious 
 life. So it must be that there subsist in us, with 
 varying degrees of force, ancient savage and animal 
 tendencies and instincts, such as conscious reason has 
 tended to submerge and exclude (more and more 
 completely the more rational and self-conscious our 
 life becomes), but which are never quite extinguished. 
 Here may lie normally disused faculties of telepathy 
 and intuition into natural forces, which some animals 
 
 1 I suppose that the two forms in which the existence of the un¬ 
 conscious mind is most vividly brought to our notice are: (1) the 
 uprushes of memory from a region outside one’s present conscious¬ 
 ness, which in part we can and in part we cannot control. Thus, if 
 I struggle to remember a name and fail to do so, I am powerless. 
 But when I have ceased to struggle, it often presents itself un¬ 
 expectedly after a time, as from a hidden field of memory. (2) When 
 I have struggled with some intellectual problem and brought my 
 mind to a state where the solution seems to be appearing and yet 
 disappears in confusion, if I can get a night’s rest, the chances are 
 that the tangle disappears in a measure, and order appears with the 
 morning. In such ways we become conscious that our mind is 
 larger than our field of consciousness. But there is no tendency 
 in these normal experiences for the subliminal mind to appear as a 
 co-consciousness or another person. 
 
104 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 and savages appear to possess, and which certain 
 individuals among us appear to recover or exercise 
 in normal or abnormal states. It is also the case that 
 in certain abnormal individuals the uprushes from the 
 unconscious take the form of a 44 co-consciousness,” 
 that is, the appearance of being another person 
 different from ourselves, though 44 the co-conscious, 
 so far as the evidence goes, is either non-existent or 
 practically negligible in normal persons ; while in 
 pathological subjects, though sometimes, indeed, 
 the source of valuable ideas and useful actions, 
 it is always limited and inferior to the waking 
 self, and likely to be very far from beautiful or 
 sublime.” 1 
 
 Now, granted all this, it is obvious how much in 
 spiritism, and in the lower forms of prophecy and 
 divination, such as those familiar in and around 
 early Israel, may be explained in terms of the sub¬ 
 conscious. 2 It is obvious also how vast an influence 
 the subconscious exercises upon all our religious 
 tendencies. 3 But so far the subconscious or uncon¬ 
 scious region appears as containing only what our 
 personal experiences or the age-long experiences of 
 our race or its animal progenitors have stored within 
 it. But when I set myself to consider the message 
 
 1 Pratt’s The Religious Consciousness (Macmillan Co., New York, 
 1920), pp. 59-60. 
 
 a I think, for instance, that the “ word of the Lord ” commanding 
 Israel to destroy Amalek, and Jehu to destroy the whole house of 
 Ahab, would, if the supposed divine communications had reached 
 no higher level, have been of a piece with the “ word of Chemosh ” 
 to Mesha King of Moab, and would have admitted of a very natural 
 “ explanation.” It is only because of what Israel’s religion was to 
 become under the leadership of the great prophets that we are 
 naturally disposed to see a higher meaning and purpose even in its 
 lower stages. 
 
 8 Pratt, op. cit.y pp. 61-3, 
 
105 
 
 THE VOICE OF GOD 
 
 of the Biblical prophets, which they believe to have 
 been directly inspired into them by God, it seems to ^ 
 me absurd to seek to interpret this as the echo of 
 tradition or instinct stored in the unconscious. We 
 need not discuss whether the new voice was first 
 heard by Moses or by Amos, at any rate the racial 
 tradition knew it not, and it never succeeded in 
 becoming the tradition till after the Captivity, when 
 the succession of the prophets ceased. And the 
 message of each prophet in the succession of prophets, 
 such as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, or 
 Ezekiel, gains its power not only from its intense 
 individuality, but also from the obvious elements of 
 novelty in each. In each case the voice was intensely 
 individual, and the message in some respects markedly 
 new—something which the human race had not heard 
 before. Moreover, the communication between the 
 prophet’s consciousness and the mysterious Power 
 which addresses itself to him is carried on in the highest 
 region of clear consciousness and will. Thus, as the 
 communication claims to be, so also on close enquiry 
 it appears to be, from above—from what is higher 
 than the personal consciousness of the prophets, not 
 from what is lower. A great deal too much is made 
 of the fact that Ezekiel 1 and St. Paul—the one more 
 often than the other—fell into trances, during which, 
 in some manner, their spirits were awake while their 
 bodies were not. This did not apparently occur in 
 the case of most of the prophets ; and the message 
 which Ezekiel and St. Paul delivered was a message 
 addressed to their will and conscious intelligence, and 
 by their will and conscious intelligence received and 
 
 1 In Ezekiel we appear to have extraordinarily interesting 
 instances of telepathy—perception in the remote region by the 
 river Chebar of scenes occurring in Jerusalem. 
 
106 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 delivered. I see, therefore, no evidence at all making 
 it plausible to suggest that what presented itself to 
 them was really—though they mistook its nature— 
 their unconscious mind. Whence did the unconscious 
 mind get this astonishing series of messages ? It 
 does not lie within the compass of the materials out 
 of which, as far as we can judge, it is and must be 
 formed. 1 In other words, it seems infinitelv more 
 probable that it was “ a downrush from the super¬ 
 conscious ”—the voice of the Spirit of God, as the 
 prophets themselves so imperiously insist. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Every man must draw his own conclusion as to the 
 nature or source of the prophets’ inspiration. It can 
 be done only by a reverent and continuous reading of 
 at least some large portions of their writings, passing 
 lightly over the obscure passages and paying the 
 deepest attention to what we can easily understand, 
 which is incomparably the most important and largest 
 part of their message. We have to take note both 
 of the individuality and distinctiveness of the message 
 of each of the prophets and of the continuity of the 
 teaching through their whole succession. We have to 
 pay regard to the resumption of the prophetic message 
 by John the Baptist and its consummation in Jesus 
 
 1 See Pratt, p. 64. What is highest “ in the religious genius is 
 to be sought in his conscious states rather than in some form of 
 insensibility. ... It is difficult to see why God should chgose to 
 communicate with a split-off complex . . . rather than with the 
 man himself.” . . . “ Hence the emphasis I have put on the 
 absurdity of looking to the subconscious as nobler and purer than 
 the conscious self.” Of course we must recognize that the forms or 
 scenery of the prophet’s vision come from their traditions and their 
 experiences. What I am speaking of is not the form of the visions, 
 but their moral and spiritual content. 
 
POWER THE TEST OF TRUTH 107 
 
 Christ. Then we have to ask ourselves the great 
 question: Can we ascribe the message to any lower 
 source than that to which the prophets themselves 
 ascribe it ? 1 do not think we can. 
 
 As to the psychological method of the divine 
 communication, we may be as ignorant as we generally 
 are of the psychological conditions under which artists 
 and poets and mystics attain their intuitions. But of 
 the source of the communications, as coming really 
 and directly from God, I dare to feel certain. And 
 I am bound to go on to consider the intellectual 
 consequences of this momentous conclusion. For the 
 communications to the prophets had the sort of vivid 
 reality which required them to state what they 
 “ heard ” in the form of propositions or messages 
 appealing to the intellect as well as to the will. That 
 is to say, they carry inevitably intellectual con¬ 
 clusions. 
 
 And I am sure that in the consideration of the truth 
 of the prophetic testimony we mu«t not leave out of 
 account the effect of their teaching on those who 
 accepted it, and that on the widest and most permanent 
 field. It is impossible not to feel that men who 
 exhibit a quite new power in life are thereby proved 
 to have got into closer touch with reality. And if 
 this new power appears as a direct consequence of 
 a theological belief, the new power so far accredits 
 the belief. Buddhism and Mohammedanism and 
 Stoicism liberated new human power to deal with 
 life, and doubtless in proportion to the truth which 
 was in them. But I believe that the spirit of Jewish 
 prophecy and that towards which it led—the spirit 
 of Christianity in its most genuine form all down the 
 ages, the spirit of sonship in Christ—exhibits human 
 nature at its best and richest. Something has 
 
108 THE QUESTION OF REVELATION 
 
 occurred for which only the experience of the prophets 
 and the witness of Christ can account, and without 
 which the moral treasures of human nature would be 
 vastly impoverished. This was especially evident in 
 the first days when Christianity stood in marked 
 contrast to the world which surrounded it; but the 
 impression is not much less vivid wherever we see 
 genuine Christianity in a group or a family or an 
 individual. The Christian impresses us as pre¬ 
 eminently capable in virtue of his faith of dealing 
 with the circumstances and sufferings and tasks of 
 life in a spirit of liberty—with the courage, hope, and 
 joy of a son in his father’s household—unperplexed 
 and undismayed. And he draws this power from 
 what is distinctive about his faith in God. Thus it 
 was that when the Christian Church came out into 
 the Graeco-Roman world, it proved itself so combative, 
 not merely for some belief in God, but for its own 
 distinctive belief. It would not be content with 
 the philosophic belief in God as the soul or reason in 
 all things. It demanded the belief, which the prophets 
 and Christ had taught it, in God the absolute Creator, 
 who is also the absolute Love—in the God and 
 Father of the Lord Jesus Christ—in the God of whom 
 Jesus Christ is the living image in human form. 
 Christian humility, Christian enterprise, Christian 
 love, the Christian sense of supremacy over all evil 
 influences and powers, the Christian hope, the assur¬ 
 ance of the Kingdom, all depended upon—not any 
 form of theism, but the specific Hebrew belief. And 
 it is still so dependent. The God which current 
 philosophy to-day on the whole offers us would never 
 of itself supply the motive and the vision which the 
 distinctive Christian character peremptorily needs ; 
 and this is specially obvious if we consider the moral 
 
THE RELIGION OF COMMON MEN 109 
 
 needs and capacities of ordinary men and women. 
 It is chiefly among them that the Christian faith— 
 which is the Hebrew faith perfected—where it is 
 genuine, vindicates the truth of its premises by the 
 fruits which it shows in life. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 We find ourselves now in this position—that we have 
 deliberately, even if still provisionally , 1 accepted the 
 reality of God’s disclosure of Himself through the 
 Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ. Thus we assent 
 (so far) to the statement with which the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews begins, that “ God in many parts and 
 many manners spake in old times unto the fathers by 
 the prophets and in these last times by His Son,” 
 though no question concerning the person of Jesus 
 Christ—as to whether He differs from the prophets 
 in being the Divine Son—has yet been raised. 
 
 This self-disclosure of God was given, through the 
 prophets and Jesus Christ, for a practical purpose—as 
 a “ word of life,” that men might know how to live 
 if they would be in fellowship with God. Thus there 
 are many questions which have always troubled 
 speculative philosophers of which the prophets appear 
 to be quite unconscious. But life and thought cannot 
 be separated in a rational being, such as man is. If 
 he must live in a certain way in order to please God 
 or be at peace with Him, that must be, he feels, 
 because God Himself has a certain character or nature, 
 
 1 Because we have still to consider whether any irreconcilable 
 conflict, such as would throw into confusion our whole conception 
 of truth, is going to appear between the substance of the professed 
 self-disclosure of God and the rest of our rational knowledge. 
 
 no 
 
PRACTICAL TRUTHS 111 
 
 And, in fact, the divine self-disclosure assumes 
 constantly this form—“ Be thou holy, for I am holy.” 
 There may be many things concerning God which are 
 not disclosed because they have no practical bearing 
 on life, or because they pass human comprehension. 
 This is what St. Paul suggests when he says, “ We 
 know in part.” Again, the expression given of the 
 being and nature of God may be naively given and 
 not in the way of precise intellectual definition, or it 
 may be presented in figure and metaphor, because it 
 can be so more effectively presented as guidance to 
 the plain man. And this involves perplexities from 
 the point of view of the speculative understanding. 
 This is what St. Paul means when he says 44 we see 
 through a glass darkly,” that is 44 like a reflection in 
 a mirror, in dark sayings.” Nevertheless, in St. 
 Paul’s view, all is not dark. Far from it. Our life 
 is to be lived in the light. It is to be based on the 
 luminous convictions that God is one ; that every¬ 
 thing that exists He made and controls ; that He is 
 awfully and inexorably righteous, but nevertheless 
 ungrudging, self-sacrificing, love; that He takes 
 constant care of each man and loves each with an 
 individual love ; that His purpose at the last resort 
 for each and all is redemption and salvation ; that 
 there is a Kingdom of God already in being and still 
 to come in full perfection. These are practical truths, 
 but they are only practical—that is, practically 
 effective—so long as they are believed to be true ; 
 and they can only be believed to be true if they can 
 be taken as propositions for the intellect, propositions 
 dealing with reality, like the propositions we frame 
 about nature, of course with due regard to their 
 limits in each particular case. 
 
 In recognizing this we are deliberately traversing 
 
112 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 certain tendencies in contemporary philosophy. There 
 are schools of philosophy 1 which bid religion take all 
 it needs in the way of truths about God for granted. 
 They are “ facts for faith.” They are the presuppo¬ 
 sitions of religious experience. They can be assumed 
 as true. But they must not be translated into 
 philosophical or historical or scientific propositions. 
 There is to be no connexion between the truths of 
 religious faith on the one hand and historical science 
 or physical science or metaphysical philosophy on the 
 other. But this is impossible. Religious experience, 
 like every kind of experience, if it is not a delusion, is 
 experience of reality, it is reality as felt. 2 If what 
 religion feels it does not at the same time know to 
 belong to the world of reality, with which the man of 
 science and the historian and the philosopher are also 
 dealing, it must cease to feel it. It is only the con¬ 
 sciousness of objective reality which can keep the 
 feeling in being. And our religious nature cannot 
 be secluded in a water-tight compartment from our 
 scientific or rational nature. Thus our present task 
 is twofold. We must first (1) discover what are the 
 
 1 I am referring of course to the Ritschlian school of theologians 
 and the philosophical pragmatists : no doubt they have done good 
 service in vindicating the right of religion and morality to make the 
 postulates necessary for their maintenance and development. Cf. 
 Dr. Bradley : “ The ideas which best express our highest religious 
 needs and their satisfaction, must certainly be true” (Essays on 
 Truth and Reality, p. 431). But it is idle to tell us to make the 
 necessary postulates if we are told that these necessary assumptions 
 are destitute of reality from the point of view of science or history 
 or metaphysics. It cannot, we feel, be done. I should like to refer 
 my readers to Faith and Facts, a Study of Ritschlianism, by Ernest 
 Edghill (Macmillan, 1910), a young scholar whose loss we have every 
 reason to deplore. 
 
 2 As to the question of grades of reality something is said below 
 (pp. 176, 292). I am here thinking, not of Dr. Bradley or Lord 
 Haldane, but of the pragmatists. 
 
THE PERSONALITY OF GOD 113 
 
 intellectual propositions about God and man which 
 the prophetic revelation plainly and unmistakably 
 postulates as real and valid. And secondly (2) we 
 must consider whether these propositions are in 
 harmony with the conclusions of philosophy and 
 science, that is to say, whether there is a synthesis 
 either attained or attainable between faith and 
 knowledge. The former of these enquiries will occupy 
 this chapter. 
 
 1. The Personality of God .—What we mean by this 
 term lies at the very heart of all that the prophets 
 taught. Their God is not an abstract quality to 
 contemplate, such as beauty, justice, truth ; but a 
 being of deliberate will and energetic action, approv¬ 
 ing and disapproving, loving and hating, judging and 
 blessing ; who not only can respond to man’s advances 
 and prayers, but who from the beginning has been, 
 and always is, taking the initiative in willing and 
 acting ; whose will is to be discerned behind every¬ 
 thing that happens and working through everything 
 that happens, yet who also appears as acting more 
 intensely here than there, in the execution of particular, 
 individual purposes. There can be no question about 
 the truth of this conception of God if, in any real 
 sense, the experience of the prophets is an experience 
 of reality. For it is its very heart and substance. 
 
 Of course we may say—nay, we must say—that 
 the human personality is an inadequate image of the 
 divine personality. We may prefer to call Him supra- 
 personal. We may lay stress upon the necessary 
 element of metaphor in all human language about 
 Him. But we are bound to recognize the funda¬ 
 mental intellectual implication of the whole experience 
 of the prophets—that God is, in some supreme and 
 transcendent sense, all that we mean when we speak 
 
 9 
 
114 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 of a person. The Old Testament, as is well known, 
 used 44 anthropomorphic ” terms about God freely— 
 that is, it runs the risk of lowering the conception of 
 God sooner than suffer Him to be thought of as an 
 abstraction or an idea. 
 
 There was a tendency, no doubt, in later Judaism, 
 from an excessive sense of the transcendence of God, 
 to shrink from the use of the personal name Jahweh, 
 and to speak rather of 44 the heavens ” or 44 the 
 Blessed One ” ; but it is noticeable that our Lord, 
 by His habitual use of the term 44 Father ” for God, 
 and the associations He attached to it, brought back 
 the emphasis upon His personality. The Father is 
 one who wills and does, not merely all things in 
 general, but particular things, who goes out to seek 
 and save individual souls—in short, who is a person. 
 
 Mr. Clement Webb has recently said that “ it was 
 in connexion with the doctrine of the Trinity that 
 the words 4 person ’ and 4 personality ’ came to be 
 used of the Divine Being,” and that though person¬ 
 ality in God is the orthodox Christian doctrine, to 
 speak of the personality of God has a suggestion of 
 the Unitarian heresy. 1 Now, it is true that the terms 
 for personality, whether in Greek or Latin, were only 
 elaborated in this connexion. But Christianity felt 
 the importance of personality, both in man and in 
 God, before it found a term to express the idea. 
 And the personality of the one God was surely a 
 central idea of the prophetic religion which Chris¬ 
 tianity inherited long before any question was raised 
 about personal distinction in the Godhead. 2 
 
 2. God ( Jehovah) as the Absolute Being. —Whatever 
 
 1 God and Personality (Allen & Unwin, 1918), p. 61, etc. 
 
 2 Indeed, Mr. Webb admits this (p. 85): “ Few would hesitate to 
 describe Judaism as a religion with a personal God.” 
 
115 
 
 THE ABSOLUTE BEING 
 
 exists, according to the message of the prophets, is 
 from God as its author, and in Him as its sustainer, 
 and in some sense expresses Him. Everything 
 depends on God so that ultimately there is no 
 power but God’s power. There is no rival power, 
 external to Him. In some sense He is the doer of 
 all that is done. “ I am Jehovah and there is none 
 else ; beside me there is no god ; I will gird thee 
 [King Cyrus], though thou hast not known me ; that 
 they may know from the rising of the sun, and from 
 the west, that there is none beside me ; I am the 
 Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and 
 create darkness ; I make peace and create evil 1 ; I 
 am the Lord that doeth all these things.” 2 “ The 
 
 whole earth is full of his glory.” “ Whither shall I 
 go then from thy spirit ? Or whither shall I flee 
 from thy presence ? ” * This absoluteness of God is 
 the jubilant proclamation of all the prophets ; and 
 the New Testament reiterates it. “ Without him (the 
 Word who is God) was not anything made.” “ All 
 things have been created through him and unto him, 
 and in him all things consist.” 4 “ In him we live 
 
 and move and have our being.” 6 It is only to say 
 this in other words to say that the constant assump¬ 
 tion of the prophets of the Old and New Testaments 
 is the divine omnipotence—that is, the summary 
 power of God over and in all things that exist. 
 
 But to this teaching of the divine absoluteness 
 there are two qualifications, (a) The first, which 
 will be dealt with later from another point of view, 
 but must be referred to here, is that, in willing to 
 create hosts of free beings, God has willed to submit 
 
 1 I.e. cause calamity; see below. 3 Isa. vi. 3 ; Ps. cxxxix. 7. 
 
 2 Isa. xlv. 5-7. 4 John i. 3; Col. i. 16-17, 
 
 8 Acts xvii. 28. 
 
116 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 Himself to a most important limitation of Plis omnipo¬ 
 tence. The free beings may rebel, and in fact have 
 rebelled, against God, and ignored God, and their 
 wilfulness and insolence and consequent ignorance of 
 God have on the vastest scale disordered God’s world, 
 in which they were appointed His vicegerents. And 
 God has not overruled their liberty because it was 
 misused, but submits Himself to their misuse of 
 their powers, which are at bottom His, so that 
 in Isaiah’s tremendous phrase already referred to, 
 He is made to serve by their sins. 1 Thus He 
 appears in the world’s history as one weak and 
 defeated : 44 He delivers his strength into captivity, 
 and his glory into the enemies’ hand.” 2 He appears 
 as contending for His own cause under every kind 
 of disadvantage, and suffering in the sufferings 
 of His faithful people—a 44 limited ” God indeed, 
 though self-limited by His own choice in creating 
 free beings, not limited by any external power; 
 a suffering God even in the Old Testament. 44 In 
 all the afflictions of his people, he was afflicted.” 3 
 Also He is represented as a God who, because He has 
 made men His vicegerents, must appeal to His 
 people for their help: 44 Whom shall I send, and who 
 will go for us ? ” 4 No doubt the conception through¬ 
 out the Bible is that there can be no final failure of 
 God or of His cause. Because God is God, He must 
 44 come into His own ” in the whole of His universe ; 
 and each insolent power in turn must be over¬ 
 whelmed. These epiphanies of divine power are the 
 44 days of the Lord,” and there is to be a final 44 day.” 
 
 1 Isa. xliii. 24. 
 
 2 Ps. lxxviii. 61. The words in the Prayer Book version, “ their 
 power . . . their beauty,” are a mere mistake. 
 
 3 Isa. lxiii. 9. 4 Isa. vi. 8. 
 
THE SELF-LIMITED GOD 117 
 
 The Bible never allows us to forget that. Neverthe¬ 
 less God’s long-continued meekness, or self-submission 
 to be defeated and to suffer at the hands of His 
 own creatures, constitutes an even startling limita¬ 
 tion upon the conception of His absoluteness. And 
 it ought to be remarked that increasingly after 
 the Captivity and in the New Testament the universe 
 is conceived of as the dwelling-place of hosts of free 
 spirits other than men, some of whom have misused 
 their freedom at least as fully and disastrously as 
 men ; so that the struggle for right must be regarded 
 as universal—far beyond the limits of human activity. 
 “We wrestle [and God wrestles in us] against the 
 principalities, against the powers, against the world- 
 rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of 
 wickedness in the heavenly places.” 1 
 
 (b) And there is another limitation of the divine 
 absoluteness as represented in the Old Testament 
 to which we need to give careful attention. Abso¬ 
 luteness, involving omnipotence, may be represented 
 as arbitrariness. If God is personally the doer 
 of everything at every moment, there might be 
 imagined to be no limit to what might happen— 
 nothing that we could calculate upon. But that 
 God’s will is the law of nature, and God’s will is 
 constant and covenanted, was affirmed in the prophetic 
 religion throughout. “ He has made a decree [for 
 
 1 Eph. vi. 12. The conception of Satan and his angels as rebels, 
 like men but before men, misusing their legitimate powers, becomes 
 dominant in later Judaism. It is the assumption of the New Testa¬ 
 ment, it being inconceivable that God could have created spirits 
 to be evil. If the devils are what they are, that must be because 
 they, like man, are sinners (1 John iii. 8, John viii. 44). In the 
 Biblical view there can be no essentially evil nature. The morally 
 evil things can be only good things misused; and the morally evil 
 spirits only good spirits become rebellious. 
 
118 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 nature] which shall not pass away.” 1 This sense of 
 the inherent order of nature—“ laws of nature ” 
 in the modern sense—grew in the later period of 
 Israel’s history, perhaps under Greek influence. 
 Thus in the Wisdom literature, 2 the order of nature 
 is represented as the influence of the Divine Wisdom 
 (personified) “ reaching from one end of all things 
 unto the other, mightily and sweetly ordering all 
 things.” The idea suggested is that the principle 
 of order lies in the Divine Being Himself, and inas¬ 
 much as “ the being of God is a kind of law to His 
 working,” 3 so God can do nothing arbitrarily or 
 foolishly, any more than ITe could “ deny Himself ” 
 by doing wrongly. Thus the sense of the divine 
 absoluteness and omnipotence is conditioned by the 
 sense that God is self-limited by His own being, and 
 that we can know for certain that neither unrighteous¬ 
 ness nor disorder is possible to Him. 4 
 
 Thus man, as made in God’s image, both rational 
 and moral, has within himself a certain standard by 
 which to judge of God. In magnificent passages of 
 the prophets God is represented as appealing to man 
 to recognize and vindicate the justice of His actions. 8 
 The Bible, we may say, justifies John Stuart Mill 
 in his famous refusal to call God righteous if His 
 action did not respond to the ultimate demand of the 
 human conscience. It is true that at moments the 
 awful sense of the divine greatness and the pettiness 
 and short-sightedness of man overwhelms the feelings 
 
 1 Ps. cxlviii. 6; cf. Gen. viii. 22, ix. 16. 
 
 2 See, e.g., Prov. viii. 22-30, Wisdom vii. 17-viii. 1. 
 
 8 Hooker, E. P., bk. i, ii, 2. 
 
 4 In Isa. xxviii. 23-4 there is a very subtle appreciation of the 
 divine wisdom, both in its unity of purpose and variety of appli¬ 
 cation, as illustrated in the parable of the husbandman. 
 
 6 Isa. v. 3-4, Micah vi. 2 ff., Ezek. xviii. 25; cf. Ps, li. 4. 
 
GOD NOT ARBITRARY 119 
 
 of the Biblical writers, so as to make all human 
 criticism seem foolish and blasphemous. Thus the 
 great answer of God out of the whirlwind to Job 
 seems to be a mere appeal to His transcendent power. 
 But this is not the only or the chief impression the 
 book of Job leaves on us. The chief impression is 
 of the unconquerable strength of the appeal for 
 justice on the part of the innocent and helpless 
 sufferer ; and even after the overwhelming appeal to 
 the divine omnipotence, the great dramatist cannot 
 draw to his conclusion without making God satisfy 
 the requirement of human justice, in the most naive 
 fashion, by restoring to Job more than his former 
 prosperity. 
 
 Or, again, we find St. Paul in the New Testament 
 sharply rebuking the Jew who dared to criticize the 
 justice of God, if He really had, as St. Paul said He 
 had, disinherited in its main bulk His own chosen 
 race—“ Who art thou that repliest against God ? . . . 
 Hath not the potter a right over the clay ? ” But 
 we must pay attention to the main point of St. Paul’s 
 argument. What St. Paul is refuting is a claim on 
 the part of the Jew really destructive of all morality, 
 viz. that God had so tied Himself to one race as to 
 be bound to show it preference, however it might 
 behave. St. Paul, then, is asserting God’s absolute 
 liberty, not to override moral distinctions, but to 
 ignore a merely racial claim ; and the end of his 
 argument is a vindication of the justice and gracious¬ 
 ness of God’s world-wide purpose. 1 
 
 On the whole we must recognize that the omnipo¬ 
 tence of God is in the prophetic teaching the opposite of 
 arbitrary. It must correspond with certain principles 
 
 1 See Rom. ix.-xi. I have worked this point out in an Exposi¬ 
 tion of the Romans (Murray), vol. ii. pp. 1-14. 
 
120 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 of order and justice which have their seat in the 
 being of God Himself, 
 
 3. The Moral Perfection of God. —In the pagan 
 religions it was common to represent a God as 
 formidable in an arbitrary or irrational sense : so 
 that he should be carefully provided with all that he 
 is accustomed to require, without asking why, and be 
 hedged about with tabus lest he should 44 break out 
 upon his worshipping people, like a physical plague. 
 It cannot be denied that this sort of conception appears 
 in the earlier stages of Israel’s religion. 1 But in the 
 prophetic religion the sense of the divine holiness is 
 purged from such unworthy physical associations and 
 has become absolutely spiritual. The fear of the 
 Lord is no irrational fear of something unaccount¬ 
 able, but a rational awe in the presence of one whose 
 character is known. God is absolutely righteous— 
 of purer eyes than to behold iniquity : inexorably and 
 impartially just. If clouds and darkness are still 
 round about Him, yet there is no doubt about the 
 quality of His will, 44 righteousness and judgement 
 are the habitation of his seat.” And there is with 
 Him no respect of persons, no favouritism of His own 
 people such as could lead Plim to ignore their sins ; 
 and no possibility of error in His judgements, for 
 He sees men’s hearts and knows their most secret 
 thoughts. But though He is thus awful in His holi¬ 
 ness, there is an equal emphasis upon His love. This 
 appears in the intensest form in the manner in which 
 Hosea is bidden to symbolize the love of God for His 
 own people, 2 and there is no need to dwell long on 
 what everyone would admit, that at the climax of the 
 self-disclosure of God, Jesus Christ represents Him—• 
 
 1 See Exod. xix. 22, 24 ; 2 Sam. vi. 8. 
 
 2 In his relations to his adulterous wife; see Hos. i., ii. 
 
121 
 
 THE GOOD GOD 
 
 not less than before as unalterably righteous and 
 tremendous in His holiness, for the Gospels are very 
 severe books, but as unquestionably love—self- 
 sacrificing love—love that goes out to every individual 
 to seek him and to save him. 1 The limitations and 
 the imperfections of the Old Testament conception of 
 divine love, which are conspicuous in its earlier stages, 
 are here quite obliterated. The love of God is active 
 and universal. Its 44 jealousy 55 remains, because 
 God cannot endure to see men wasting themselves 
 on things that cannot profit, but it has in it no element 
 of grudging, and covers with its sanction and blessing 
 all uses of life which are within the wide purpose of 
 God. The final summary expression of the character 
 of God is St. John’s phrase, “ God is love.” Where 
 God is, love is : and where love is, God is : and the 
 end of all things is to be the victory of love. 
 
 There are profound difficulties in the way of re¬ 
 ceiving this comforting doctrine of the goodness of 
 God which some of us in our day feel acutely. Some 
 of these modern difficulties—such as that which arises 
 from the vast amount of animal pain in the world— 
 the believers of the Old and New Testaments hardly 
 seem to have felt at all. With others—such as the 
 sufferings of innocent men—they obviously wrestled. 
 When we are considering 2 whether the doctrine of 
 divine love can be accepted without violence to 
 
 1 Not long before our Lord’s time the love of God for every indi¬ 
 vidual was beautifully expressed in the Book of Wisdom xi. 23: 
 “ For thou hast mercy on all men, because thou hast power to do all 
 things, and thou overlookest the sins of men to the end they may 
 repent. For thou lovest all things that are, and abhorrest none of the 
 things that thou didst make ; for never wouldest thou have formed 
 anything if thou didst hate it. . . . But thou sparest all things 
 because they aro thine, O sovereign Lord, thou lover of souls.” 
 
 2 See below, pp. 15Glf. 
 
122 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 reason, we shall naturally ask whether the Bible, Old 
 Testament and New, assists us to a solution of our 
 difficulties. But for the present we are only con¬ 
 sidering what the Biblical doctrine of God affirms. 
 Certainly, then, it affirms that the absolute and supreme 
 Being is perfect righteousness and ungrudging love. 
 And certainly this doctrine is presented not as an 
 argument to convince us, but as a word of God Himself 
 to be believed and realized in the responsive experience 
 of faith. 
 
 4. God the Creator. —As has been already noticed, 
 the prophetic conception of God insisted upon His 
 presence everywhere, as the spirit of life and order in 
 all things. Hence it coalesced easily with the philo¬ 
 sophic doctrine of the divine reason immanent in the 
 world, which occupied the minds of thinking men 
 when the Christian religion began its course. But 
 this popular philosophy got no farther than this 
 recognition of a rational soul or spirit of the world ; 
 or if it did conceive of God as transcendent, He was 
 so transcendent as to be inaccessible, abstract, and 
 indifferent to men. But the God who reveals Himself 
 to the prophets is indeed intimately concerned in all 
 things that are, but in Himself is absolutely distinct 
 from them as their Creator. 
 
 Indeed, the intensely personal and moral conception 
 of God which possessed the prophets made impossible 
 to them any confusion of God with nature. It lifted 
 Him into absolute distinctness or transcendence. 
 
 This idea is vividly expressed in the prophetic horror 
 of idolatry. The prophets almost weary us by their 
 alternate denunciation and ridicule of idolatry. 
 Philosophy has been generally able to make terms with 
 idolatry. God is in all things—that is the farthest 
 point to which it can get. Therefore, though the 
 
THE CREATOR 123 
 
 popular myths about the gods are childish and foolish, 
 it can sympathize with the tendency to see God in 
 this and that. Only in this and that can the vulgar 
 worship the All in all. This philosophic tendency 
 to tolerate idolatry is familiar in ancient times, and 
 it is obvious in the sympathetic attitude towards 
 idolatry of a great many moderns. 1 
 
 They show themselves restive under the denuncia¬ 
 tions of idolatry alike of the ancient prophets and 
 the modern missionaries. But such denunciations 
 are inseparable from the prophetic belief which will 
 tolerate no confusion of the creature with the 
 Creator, of nature with God. However true it be ' 
 that God is everywhere, yet the first thought of Him 
 must be as absolutely distinct from everything. 
 Whatever be the grades of creation, yet these dis¬ 
 tinctions of higher and lower are as nothing compared 
 with the absolute distinction between the Creator and 
 the works of His hands. What inspires the prophetic 
 denunciation of idolatry is the feeling that it involves 
 a senseless insult to the Creator by confusing Him 
 with His creatures. 
 
 So also the idea of God as Creator lies at the heart 
 of their claim for humility in man, and their denuncia¬ 
 tion of pride. If, as pantheistic philosophy conceived, 
 a man, in respect of his reason, is a part of the univer¬ 
 sal reason or God, destined ultimately, after all the 
 defilements and hindrances due to his temporary in¬ 
 carceration in the body, to return to the Divine Being, 
 humility might seem a grovelling quality unworthy 
 
 1 See Pratt’s Religious Consciousness, p. 276: “ Much more may 
 thus be said in defence of the practice of ‘ idolatry ’ than most of 
 us have been brought up to suppose. It is based upon a perfectly 
 sound psychological principle, and it appeals to a widely felt human 
 need.” 
 
124 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 of a rational being, and pride a legitimate expression 
 of his true nature, God and man being essentially one 
 interdependent being. But all this mode of con¬ 
 ceiving the relation of man to God is by the prophets 
 rendered impossible. Man is not a part of God, but 
 the creature of God. His relation to God is one of 
 absolute dependence, as for the beginning of his 
 existence so moment by moment for its continuance. 
 This is the ground of humility. This is what makes 
 all pride or boasting preposterous. And if humility 
 is in effect nothing less than a servile spirit, that is 
 because God has been pleased to make man in His 
 own image and likeness, to admit him to His friend¬ 
 ship, and to make him His vicegerent in the world 
 which he inhabits. 1 
 
 Once more, the transcendence of God the Creator 
 involves His unconditional spirituality. He is 
 present in all things but unconfused. Implicated 
 in no conditions of time and space, and essentially tied 
 to no requirements of any special sanctuary, “ God 
 is spirit; and they that worship him must worship in 
 spirit and truth.” 2 And again we must notice that 
 if the Jewish thought of God is gradually lifted to this 
 highest level, it is not by the process of reasoned 
 reflection, but by the way of inspired utterances. 
 “ Thus saith the high and holy one that inhabiteth 
 eternity.” 3 
 
 5. The Freedom of Man .—But how, then, if God is 
 the Creator, responsible for the existence of all that 
 is, is His character for goodness to be maintained in 
 view of the evil and misery of the world ? The 
 answer of the prophets to this portentous question 
 
 1 Cf. the mixture of humility with exultation in Ps. viii. or in the 
 Magnificat of Mary. 
 
 2 John iv. 24. 
 
 3 Isa. lvii. 15. 
 
THE FREEDOM OF MAN 125 
 
 is, if not complete, yet simple, and, as has been said, 
 it is expressed or implied everywhere. It attributes 
 the mass of evil in the world to the lawlessness of 
 rebel wills—to pride, greediness, ambition, cruelty, 
 selfishness, jealousy, lust; and to the judgements 
 which those things bring upon individuals and upon 
 the world, whether as their natural results or (what 
 is perhaps only their natural results viewed from a 
 different angle) as the punishment for sin which God 
 inflicts. 
 
 There can be no question that this is the general 
 account which the prophetic scriptures give of the 
 presence of evil in the world. St. James, who speaks 
 in the New Testament in the prophetic spirit, de¬ 
 scribes how the ungoverned human tongue, though it 
 be a little member, yet can disorder a whole world, 
 setting on fire the divinely-ordered course of nature. 1 
 The sins which inspire the tongue are jealousy and 
 rivalry. But what James says so truly of these 
 particular sins acting through human speech, 
 generalized so as to apply to all sin, expresses the 
 common mind of the prophets. And when St. James 
 further speaks of the fire of the tongue as kindled 
 from hell or “ devilish he is, again, representing the 
 common belief of later Judaism which, as confirmed 
 by Jesus Christ, the New Testament writers share, 
 that the source and home of evil is to be found beyond 
 the circle of human nature in an unseen world of free 
 spirits. 
 
 We should note that the insistence of the prophets, 
 and of the scriptures inspired by their teaching, upon 
 the reality of human freedom is unhesitating, and 
 is allowed to condition their doctrine, not only of 
 
 1 James iii. 6; see Hort’s suggestive notes. 
 
126 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 God’s omnipotence (as already pointed out), but in a 
 measure also of His omniscience. 
 
 Everyone who thinks at all feels the acuteness of 
 the question: If God knows to-day, and indeed 
 from all eternity, what I am going to do to-morrow, 
 how can I be really free ? To me it seems that in 
 this sense belief in divine foreknowledge really is 
 incompatible, according to any standard of thinking 
 possible to us in our present state, with belief in 
 human freedom. I can recognize that the whole 
 conception of absolute and eternal knowledge is totally 
 outside our present faculties. But within the region 
 of our present capacities for thinking, the two beliefs 
 are incompatible, and it is to our present thinking that 
 the word of God in the Bible is directed. The Bible, 
 then, does not concern itself with the metaphysical 
 question. It contents itself with saying, 44 At any 
 rate, you are free and responsible.” That God is 
 powerful over all and in all, and does not for a moment 
 allow the world or any single man to escape out of His 
 control, that He knows everything that is or can be, 
 and discerns infallibly the thoughts of men’s hearts 
 and their tendencies—all this it would be easy to 
 44 prove from Scripture.” Also that individual men 
 like Judas, or classes of men, may have so fundamen¬ 
 tally chosen evil that they have no longer ears to hear 
 or wills to choose freely, and that their actions are fore¬ 
 known and predetermined—this also appears as true 
 but as abnormal. On the whole God is represented 
 as waiting on man, pleading with man, being dis¬ 
 appointed in man ( 4t I looked that my vineyard should 
 bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes ”); 
 and it is impossible to 44 prove from Scripture ” that 
 God knows generally how the individual man is going 
 to choose on each particular occasion. I repeat, the 
 
THE DAY OF THE LORD 127 
 
 overruling of God is always maintained. No will or 
 action passes out of His hands. All the disorder that 
 wilful men or spirits can cause is, as we may say, 
 superficial. Under it and over it and beyond it is 
 the everlasting power and wisdom. Nevertheless, 
 within the scope of the universal providence room is 
 left for free spirits to act. And God, so to speak, 
 keeps far enough aloof to let them act freely. And at 
 least His word never lets them suppose that He 
 knows beforehand what they will do. 
 
 Whether philosophy or science can raise any valid 
 objection to the doctrine of real human freedom is 
 another question which we shall shortly have to face. 
 Here our sole object is to ask what is the intellectual 
 presentation involved in the Bible. 1 
 
 6. The Day of the Lord and the World to Come .—As 
 has been said already, though the prophets recognize 
 so frankly the lawless liberty of men to thwart God’s 
 purpose and disorder His world, there is no doubt 
 of the sovereignty of God—that He allows no fragment 
 of His world to pass out of His control ; and, because 
 He is God, He must vindicate Himself at last. Thus 
 the prophets contemplate unmoved the vast struc¬ 
 tures raised by human insolence—“ the giant forms 
 of empires ”—and speak against them, and against 
 every rebellious individual, the oracles of God which 
 announce their inevitable doom. And in the later 
 stages of prophecy, as on the lips of Christ and in the 
 New Testament as a whole, the whole vista of history 
 is represented as closing in the Day of the Lord when 
 God is to come into His own in Ilis whole universe. 
 This is a Day of judgment and doom on all that has 
 refused God, and a day of realization—the perfect 
 
 1 On St. Paul’s doctrine of divine “ foreknowledge,” see my 
 Ephesians, p. G6. 
 
128 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 kingdom or reign of God—for all that responds to Him. 
 In the earlier stages of Israel’s history, they were 
 taught to look for the vindication of God’s purpose 
 here and now in this world. There was no glimpse of 
 a life beyond. But as the sense of individuality and 
 of the worth of the individual soul developed in Israel, 
 and the accompanying sense of personal fellowship 
 with God, such as appears in so intense a form in the 
 Psalms, a wider horizon than this world became a 
 necessity. If God was just, then there must be a 
 life beyond in which He would vindicate the justice 
 which was plainly not vindicated in “ the wild and 
 irregular scene ” of this world. Again, if the soul of 
 man was admitted here and now to the fellowship of 
 God, then this divine fellowship, in part gained here, 
 must be realized hereafter. So before the close of 
 the Jewish canon the doctrine of the resurrection and 
 of the world to come has taken possession of the 
 Jewish conscience, and it gains consistency and 
 definiteness in the New Testament. We shall have 
 to return to the matter at a later stage, when we come 
 to consider the full Christian faith. Here all that is 
 needed is the recognition that the message of the 
 prophets about divine justice and “ the day of the 
 Lord ” was found to involve the belief in a resurrection 
 of the dead and of a world to come, and that Jesus 
 Christ in His teaching gave to these already established 
 doctrines His explicit and solemn confirmation. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Let it be said again, the whole teaching of the 
 prophets was given for a practical and not a specula¬ 
 tive purpose. It was a “word of life,” a message as 
 to how men must live. So also Christianity came out 
 into the world as “ the way.” It was a life before it 
 was a doctrine. But it was a life which involved a 
 
PROPOSITIONS FOR THE INTELLECT 129 
 
 whole body of truths about God and man : and though 
 these are affirmed for a practical purpose, they are 
 none the less affirmed as true. They must be true 
 in fact—and therefore truths for the intellect—or the 
 life proposed becomes impossible. 
 
 Now, we have been asking what are the intellectual 
 propositions which the prophets insist upon as the 
 word of God, and we have found them to be especially 
 these : that Jehovah, the God of Israel, is personal; 
 that He is the absolute Being, beside whom there 
 can be none other; that He is in character perfect 
 holiness and love ; that He is absolutely distinct from 
 all His creatures as their Creator; that He has given 
 to His creature man, and to other orders of spirits 
 dimly perceived, such moral freedom and responsibility 
 as admit of their co-operation with God or of their 
 resisting and thwarting Llim on the widest scale ; but 
 that as God is God He must fully vindicate Himself 
 over and in all His creation, if not in this world, then 
 in the world to come. 
 
 Now, it cannot be denied that if these propositions, 
 which the prophets reiterate as being the word of 
 God, are really the legitimate expression in human 
 language of God’s own self-disclosure—that is, of 
 impressions, convictions, images, and communications 
 really wrought by God into the prophets’ souls and 
 minds—a whole new body of facts and data is added to 
 the material on which philosophy must work. The 
 “ word of God ” must plainly be received in faith. 
 It is not the product of human reasoning. But so 
 accepted as true, it can be and must be the basis of 
 a fresh philosophy. So the Christian Church—which 
 inherited the prophetic teaching, as it was renewed 
 and deepened in Christ—showed itself at home in the 
 highly intellectual and philosophical world of the 
 10 
 
130 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 Graeco-Roman Empire. It showed itself a body as well 
 able to think philosophically as to live and die nobly. 
 Among its men of greater intellect it had no one 
 equal to the greatest of the Greeks—Plato or Aristotle 
 or, perhaps, Plotinus—but it had, especially among 
 its Greek Fathers, men capable of acute intellectual 
 and philosophical discrimination. If was able to 
 assimilate and also to revise, add to and correct the 
 ideas of current philosophy. Thus out of the treasures 
 of its faith it enriched philosophy with a deeply 
 enhanced sense of personality as the most ultimate 
 and important of categories; it assimilated the 
 conception of divine immanence in nature, but also 
 it contended strenuously for the conception of 
 the transcendent Creator independent and complete 
 in Himself; it used the conception of the Trinity in 
 God to make rational and intelligible the thought of 
 a God eternally alive and complete in Himself without 
 dependence upon His creation for self-expression ; it 
 emphasized the idea of human freedom ; it firmly 
 fixed in the will and not in the flesh the source and 
 ground of sin ; it introduced among men the pregnant 
 thought of the world as a scene in which a divine 
 purpose is slowly and progressively realized; it 
 showed Greek philosophy a way of escape from the 
 embarrassing dualism of matter and spirit. Thus it 
 enriched and stimulated philosophy while it used it 
 to gain intellectual coherence and expression for its 
 faith. And if it made mistakes which proved dangers 
 and hindrances to the later Church, that was largely 
 because at times it was more subservient to Greek 
 philosophy than to the conceptions of the prophets 
 and of Christ. 1 I must not now stop to dwell on these 
 
 1 Thus I feel sure that it was a false subservience to Greek philo¬ 
 sophy which caused the Greek theologians to emphasize the im- 
 
181 
 
 FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 
 
 points. All that I want now to suggest is that 
 Christianity showed itself from the first conscious that 
 the materials of its faith, simply because its faith was 
 true, required of it to enter into the field of human 
 philosophy, as well as of human life, and there, too, 
 to test all things and to show that it believed in human 
 reason as the gift of God. 
 
 Once again, in the thirteenth century, in the dawn 
 of the renaissance of humanity after the really dark 
 ages, the schoolmen, headed by the great Thomas 
 Aquinas, showed the Christian faith to be capable of 
 supplying a synthesis in which all available know¬ 
 ledge could find a place. Never since then has such 
 a complete synthesis, nor anything approaching to 
 it, been accomplished. For any such synthesis to be 
 again accomplished and accepted by a whole civiliza¬ 
 tion, as the scholastic synthesis, taken as a whole, 
 was accepted, would be only possible if mankind or 
 Christendom were again to realize such an ordered 
 unity of life and faith as that common ideas or doctrines 
 could really prevail and become the current coin of 
 life. 1 From any such state of things we are far indeed. 
 But what cannot at present be done for a whole society 
 
 passibility of God in a sense which evacuates in great measure the 
 meaning of the Bible. Also it derived surely from Greek philosophy, 
 and not from the Bible, the idea of the essential indestructibility 
 of the human soul or consciousness. 
 
 1 Since the Renaissance there has been in certain regions, and 
 within our own country more than once, such a degree of unity as 
 has rendered possible the wide and common acceptance of con¬ 
 structive intellectual work—expressing some sort of intellectual 
 synthesis. Thus Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity , Butler’s Analogy 
 of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of 
 Nature, and on a lower plane Archdeacon Paley’s Natural Theology 
 and Evidences of Christianity, became classics, i.e. adequate expressions 
 in a book of the best common mind of a whole community. But it 
 would bo impossible to-day to conceive such a book appearing. The 
 “ common mind ” is lacking, except in groups. 
 
132 CONTENTS OF THE PROPHETIC FAITH 
 
 or civilization can be done for individuals and groups. 
 That is the only possible preparation for something 
 wider. Any individual or group of to-day, which 
 accepts the revelation of the prophets as a true dis¬ 
 closure of the ultimate realities of the universe, must 
 ask himself how, on the basis of his faith, he can face 
 the whole sum of scientific and philosophic knowledge 
 of his time, and whether he can see his own way to 
 an adequate synthesis. Perhaps, as was suggested 
 earlier, the greatest reassurance that this is possible 
 is to be found in the fact that great scientific men and 
 capable philosophers, if they are also believers in God, 
 as Christendom has believed in Him, are not in 
 experience found to be hampered in their scientific 
 or philosophical thinking. They bear witness that 
 in their faith they have retained or found their 
 intellectual freedom. But this is not enough. We 
 cannot be content with the witness of others. We 
 need to be able to realize our intellectual freedom in 
 some sort of intellectual synthesis, or at least to see 
 the way opening towards such a synthesis. Thus we 
 must approach the task of relating what we have 
 gained from the prophets and Christ to the whole of 
 our knowledge. 1 
 
 1 The Italian philosopher Croce gives an interesting appreciation 
 of the mediaeval historians, to whom he gives the preference over 
 their Graeco-Roman predecessors, in spite of their immense inferior¬ 
 ity to them in culture and ability, in this respect—that they first 
 viewed history as progress towards a goal, and that their pessimism 
 was thus irradiated with hope. They saw a divine purpose working 
 through scathing judgements to an assured end : see Teoria e storia 
 della storiagraphia (Bari, 1917), p. 188. But, in fact, it is the 
 Hebrew prophets, especially Ezekiel, who should have the credit of 
 having been pioneers. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 Now we come back to the field in which we made our 
 first efforts in the reconstruction of belief, unassisted 
 by any idea of positive revelation—that is, to the 
 world of natural knowledge, of the sciences and of 
 philosophy. In this field we had found ourselves up 
 to a certain point enlightened and reassured. We 
 had found that reason and beauty and goodness 
 cannot be regarded as merely qualities of our minds. 
 They belong to the universe of things. There is an 
 “ eternal, not ourselves,” which is at once reason and 
 beauty and goodness, with which we can hold com¬ 
 munion and co-operate. And this eternal being we 
 can call God and in a sense worship. And a belief 
 of this kind has at different periods and in different 
 countries been the basis of what may be called a 
 natural religion for educated men. But we had also 
 found ourselves speedily dissatisfied and baffled. This 
 God of nature could be so dimly descried. His 
 personality, His character, His purpose, on the whole 
 appeared to be so ambiguous that the question was 
 forced upon us—If there is a God, is it not at least con¬ 
 ceivable that He may have (so to speak) taken action 
 on His side, and disclosed Himself in a more satisfy¬ 
 ing manner in response to the anxious quests and 
 prayers of our groping and thirsty minds and spirits ? 
 
 133 
 
134 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 After all, there is in the common tradition of Judaism 
 and Christianity, and indeed of Mohammedanism 
 also, a perfectly definite assurance that He has done 
 so, and that the primary channel of this self-disclosure 
 of God was the Hebrew prophets, whose teaching was 
 the foundation on which Jesus Christ certainly built. 
 It has been on the assurance of this word of God that 
 the civilization of Christendom has in great part 
 reposed. It was incumbent upon us, therefore, at 
 least to investigate the great claim. We have done 
 so with the greatest care we could devote to it, and 
 we have found ourselves profoundly impressed. 
 Provisionally, but confidently, we were led to the 
 conclusion that the claim is true and justified, and 
 the prophetic message really a word of God. 
 
 Then we proceeded to analyse the intellectual con¬ 
 tents of this divine self-disclosure, and we found them, 
 beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt, to be as 
 follows : 
 
 (1) That God is a personal being—“super-personal,’’ 
 if we like to say so, but at least personal—as a person 
 making His will known to us, and demanding of us 
 that we should deal with Him as with a person, at 
 once our unerring judge and our loving Father. 
 
 (2) That He is, at the root of things, the sole, 
 absolute, or omnipotent 1 being, though certain impor¬ 
 tant qualifications of His absoluteness are also clearly 
 indicated, as by His creation of free spirits who can¬ 
 not, consistently with their nature, be coerced into 
 obedience, and also by the essential perfection of His 
 nature. 
 
 (3) That He is the absolute creator of all that is : 
 perfect in Himself “ before the world was.” 
 
 1 The root meaning of omnipotent or almighty is not “ able to do 
 anything,” but “powerful in and over ail things.” 
 
THE PROPHETIC CREED 135 
 
 (4) That He is perfect moral goodness—that God 
 is love. 
 
 (5) That man is purely a creature, but endowed with 
 reason and a real, though limited, freedom, qualifying 
 him for free co-operation with God, but necessarily 
 capable also of perversion ; and that it has in fact 
 been perverted on the widest scale, and the moral 
 disorder of the world is due to this sin—that is, the 
 lawlessness of man, and of other free beings dimly 
 discerned in the background. 
 
 (6) Finally, that the purpose of God is to redeem 
 the sinful and disordered world ; that His kingdom— 
 the realm of obedient wills—already exists and is 
 discoverable here and now ; that it is the business of 
 good men to behave as its faithful citizens ; and that 
 they have a sure goal in view, for in the end God is to 
 come into His own perfectly in the whole creation. 
 This is the final kingdom or reign of God, and mankind 
 is destined to immortal fellowship with God in this 
 world to come, if he has not by his wilfulness lost his 
 soul and excluded himself from the divine fellowship. 
 
 This is a singularly fresh and illuminating conception 
 of God and His purposes. Over long ages it has proved 
 itself capable not only of satisfying the moral needs 
 of the best of mankind, but of inspiring and main¬ 
 taining his noblest efforts. In the past it has also 
 given him intellectual satisfaction. But our know¬ 
 ledge of the universe has grown enormously under the 
 illumination of the physical sciences ; philosophy has 
 been very busy with its speculation and its criticism ; 
 historical criticism and anthropology have rewritten 
 our human records ; and comparative religion has 
 made it impossible for us to be satisfied with any 
 restricted view of revelation. These new sciences 
 have, as we began by recognizing, upset the pre- 
 
186 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 viously current presentations of the revealed religion 
 on a very wide scale. And we are bound to claim 
 the fullest liberty for science, and for reason in 
 all its legitimate activities, because reason is at the 
 last resort our only instrument of truth. Thus we 
 cannot play false to our reason, or be content with any 
 crude antithesis between faith and reason, faith, we 
 find, being only reason in the making. If then, on a 
 fresh review, we find the data of revelation, as they 
 stand out so clearly before our minds, bringing us into 
 positive and apparently irreconcilable conflict with 
 what seems to be solidly grounded knowledge, we shall 
 be indeed bewildered and thrown back baffled again. 
 Can we find a synthesis, or a way towards a synthesis, 
 between these data to faith and the conclusions—more 
 or less definitive—of the sciences or of philosophy ? 
 Or where such conclusions are precisely what is lacking, 
 can our faith contribute to the solving of otherwise 
 insoluble questions ? 
 
 Probably the greatest difficulty which will emerge 
 for most of us will concern the belief in the absolute 
 goodness of God, if He is also to be believed to be the 
 Creator of all that is. This problem we will face 
 under the head of philosophy. But first of all we will 
 enquire whether, with our recently won faith in the 
 God of revelation, we stand free in the world of the 
 physical sciences. 
 
 I 
 
 It has already been pointed out that exclusive 
 preoccupation with the methods of the sciences has 
 tended inevitably to a materialistic interpretation of 
 the world. But such an interpretation we have 
 claimed, with the encouragement of most of our 
 
CONFLICT OF FAITH AND SCIENCE? 137 
 
 contemporary philosophers, to set aside as quite one¬ 
 sided and untenable. It is our reason which compels 
 us to see spiritual meaning and purpose in the world. 
 It is our reason which forces us to interpret the material 
 in terms of mind and not mind in terms of the material. 
 But the current spiritual interpretation of the world 
 by the philosophers is a sort of pantheism. The 
 question now is whether the distinctively Christian 
 theism—the religion of the prophets and of Christ 
 —raises any fresh difficulty from the point of view 
 of the sciences. 
 
 On the whole, the answer is in the negative. 
 Science is increasingly disposed to recognize its 
 abstract character—which means that for its own 
 purposes it makes abstraction from the world as a 
 whole of certain departments or functions or aspects 
 of the world, and studies them apart from the residue 
 which is irrelevant to the purpose in hand. 1 In 
 particular it is not concerned with origins. It neither 
 affirms nor denies anything about the source of being 
 and life. As far as I can see, there are only two points 
 at which conflict threatens between the claims of 
 science and the postulates of revealed religion—(l)as 
 to whether the Biblical account of creation is not in 
 such marked conflict with the scientific account of the 
 origin of the universe as to discredit itself ; and (2) as 
 to whether the universe scientifically viewed can 
 make room for free will. 2 
 
 1. Science, then, presents us with the universe, and 
 
 1 See Haldane’s Relativity, p. 40, and passim. 
 
 2 Perhaps the appearance of conflict between Religion and Science 
 to-day is most serious on the question of the Fall of Man. But we 
 had better postpone that question till we are in a position to consider 
 it in connexion with St. Paul’s doctrine of Christ and His functions 
 —that is in the next volume. 
 
138 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 particularly that part of it which we know more or 
 less intimately, as the scene of an age-long evolution 
 of matter and life, out of which, only at its last stage 
 and through infinite struggles, emerges rational and 
 spiritual life in man ; which again only through long 
 ages, and that very imperfectly and intermittently, 
 has succeeded in asserting itself and realizing itself 
 in the world. But as regards material nature con¬ 
 fessedly the revelation contained in the Bible gives 
 no hint of such an age-long process. It gives a 
 picture only of sudden creations. 44 God spake, and 
 they were made : he commanded, and they were 
 created.” What are we to say of this broad contrast ? 
 I think a believer in the reality of Biblical inspiration 
 must admit in the widest sense that this inspiration of 
 certain men by the Spirit of God does not appear to 
 have carried with it any special enlightenment on 
 those subjects on which man has proved able, though 
 with infinite labour, to enlighten himself. In the 
 broadest sense 44 the Bible was not given to teach us 
 science,” and does in fact speak only in terms of the 
 science of its times. Its only concern with nature is 
 to affirm that all that exists is the creation of the one 
 God, and that His will is its law. But in the region 
 of human nature, with which, the revelation is par¬ 
 ticularly concerned, it does present us with a picture 
 of evolution—that is, of a divine purpose only very 
 slowly and gradually, and after vast catastrophes and 
 infinite struggles, and as yet very imperfectly, realized 
 —nay, only beginning to be realized, though thou¬ 
 sands of years have intervened between Abraham 
 and us. 1 Plainly, then, though the revelation did not 
 
 1 The Biblical expression “ the ages of the ages ” or “all the 
 generations of the age of the ages” (Eph. iii. 21) represents pro¬ 
 foundly the idea of slow process towards a conclusion. 
 
ROOM FOR HUMAN FREEDOM 139 
 
 do anything to teach men about an age-long process 
 of physical creation, yet it did give them a conception 
 of God's method in dealing with man which is in 
 agreement with the method which science now 
 discloses to us in nature as a whole. Science, we 
 may say with truth, has only brought our notion 
 of the creation of nature broadly into harmony 
 with the conception of the making and remaking 
 of man which we find in the Bible. 1 
 
 To put this in other words—the Bible in its account 
 of God’s dealings with man—and this is the only 
 field of its professed inspiration—suggests a God as 
 unlike as possible to the 44 Great Emperor enthroned 
 somewhere outside the world, ordering it by absolute 
 fiats to be accomplished in a moment.” 
 
 2. But can science make room in its universe for 
 the Biblical emphasis on human freedom, which means 
 that, wherever human wills occur, there are points of 
 spontaneity and contingency ; and which also involves 
 the actual occurrence in the world on the largest scale 
 of much that ought not to have been and need not 
 have been, for this the prophetic religion plainlj 
 requires ? Or can it claim the right to declare free 
 will at the last analysis an illusion ? 
 
 Now, it may well be the case that neither our science 
 nor our philosophy nor our theology will ever arrive 
 at an adequate theory of the relation of the elements 
 of determination from beyond and spontaneity from 
 within in human conduct. But for the sake of 
 simplifying theory we must not deny facts. And I 
 contend that freedom of will is a fact and reality. 
 It is a fact of which we have direct consciousness 
 
 1 We must remind ourselves that the Miltonic idea that man was 
 created perfect and in full development is not suggested by Scripture 
 and is repudiated by the Fathers. See above, p. 10. 
 
140 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 that within the world of physical sequences there are 
 points—viz. human wills—where the direction in 
 which the energy accumulated in the human organism 
 is liberated, as in this or that kind of action, is in 
 part determined by free choice. 
 
 We need not pause to ask how widely this element 
 of freedom exists in the universe. Among our more 
 imaginative philosophers and men of science there 
 are those who treat it as highly improbable that men 
 should be the only free spirits, and postulate a uni¬ 
 verse full of them. But we need not concern our¬ 
 selves with what at this stage is purely hypothetical. 
 Nor need we seek to determine how much truth lies 
 in Henri Bergson's view that only in dead matter do 
 we find the dominion of physical necessity, and that 
 wdierever life is, from its earliest stages, there also is 
 something indeterminate and free. We must, I think, 
 at anv rate confess that the theory of determination 
 
 •J V 
 
 gained its strength when the characteristic sciences 
 were mathematics and physics; and that, since 
 biology became dominant, it has never proved ade¬ 
 quate to express the movements of life. Also, seeing 
 that life develops so gradually and, as it seems, 
 continuously into conscious mind and freedom, it is 
 hard to resist the impression that mind and freedom 
 belong to it in a measure from the beginning. 
 
 But leaving all these questions concerning the range 
 of free will in the universe aside, let us concentrate 
 our attention on the point in nature where moral 
 freedom becomes part of direct human experience. 
 At least in man there is something which the 
 sequence of physical determination cannot account 
 for, something totally different in kind to physical 
 determination. 
 
 The action of any mechanically determined object is 
 
ITS REALITY TO CONSCIOUSNESS 141 
 
 the resultgwftt of the forces acting upon it in combina¬ 
 tion, as a billiard-ball touched by two cues moves in a 
 line representing the combination of the two forces. 
 Obviously such mechanical formulas do not avail to 
 interpret vital movements. Yet though the move¬ 
 ments perhaps of plants and certainly of animals 
 appear to involve selection and choice, we cannot 
 know what happens as from within. But in the region 
 of the human consciousness the process of that portion 
 of our activities which is deliberate and voluntary 
 discloses its nature quite clearly, and especially 
 clearly in the worthiest and noblest of our race. 
 There we have a scene in which what we call (by the 
 use of a physical metaphor) motives appear as appeal¬ 
 ing to the sovereign will, and the will by choosing 
 between motives gives preponderance to one, and the 
 others are neutralized, and the resultant action is 
 what it would have been if they had been exercising 
 no pressure. Nay, as we often know, the fact that 
 we were under strong temptation to yield to some 
 lust or appetite, but rejected the suggestion as un¬ 
 worthy, seems to give increased energy to the action 
 which contradicts the unworthy impulses, or, on the 
 other hand, if we yield to temptation, the remem¬ 
 brance of duty deserted causes us to plunge all the 
 more violently into the unworthy course we have 
 chosen. Here, then, in the region of human choice 
 we claim to know that the energy stored in the human 
 organism is liberated in movements the direction of 
 which is determined by the choice of the will—the 
 movements involved in doing right or doing wrong 
 respectively. Of the conviction that this is so we 
 may say what Zeno the Stoic said of sense impressions, 
 that it “ takes hold of us by the hair and drags us to 
 assent.” If I am not certain of free choice, I am cer- 
 
142 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 tain of nothing; and I mean by this that if I have done 
 wrong, if I have given my consent to the “ lower 55 
 motive against the “ higher,” I have done what need 
 not have been done and ought not to have been 
 done. We may restrict as anxiously as we can the 
 limit of freedom ; we may point out that whatever 
 we do we can only surrender ourselves to some 
 impulse from beyond—either, in religious language, 
 to the Spirit of God, whose service is perfect freedom, 
 or to the lusts of the flesh, to obey which is to become 
 the slaves of sin—but that in neither case is there 
 pure initiative in the will. We may make the most 
 of all the influences of heredity and character. 
 Nevertheless at the last analysis you cannot rob the 
 will of the sane man of responsibility for the choice 
 by which it surrenders to one motive or another, and 
 thereby determines action in this direction or that, 
 so as either to promote the divine order or to add 
 to the moral confusion and lawlessness of the world. 
 And God Himself, in the disclosure of Himself which 
 we have been considering, does not bid us think that 
 even He foreknows which way we are going to choose. 
 
 This conviction I could not surrender under any 
 pressure from science. For if I know anything, I 
 know it is true. But, in fact, it does not really 
 affect science. Science can only take account of the 
 fact that the energy first stored in the human 
 organism is then liberated in action. That it might 
 have been liberated in some other kind of action it is 
 not its business to affirm and it cannot deny. It 
 cannot pretend, whether in man or in an animal, to 
 answer the question, What is the place of the will in 
 the liberation of the energy ? That can be known 
 only from within by direct experience in the soul of 
 man. 
 
THE MAKING OF MY SOUL 148 
 
 Without fear of discord, then, with legitimate 
 science, we must hold to the conviction that God has 
 created beings with the responsibility of freedom— 
 that within the scope of His universal presence and 
 energy Fie has so far limited Himself as to leave room 
 for their free activity, with all its disordering effects 
 upon His creation, when it is misused; and in 
 each act of our moral choice, however largely deter¬ 
 mined by conditions over which we have no control, 
 such as circumstances, heredity, and the character 
 generated by our whole past, we must recognize that 
 the determination is not complete—there remains a 
 spontaneous element in each choice which constitutes, 
 according as it is exercised, our moral worth or our 
 sin, our moral liberty or our moral servitude. 
 
 This doctrine of freedom and responsibility rests 
 on an assurance than which nothing can be more 
 sure, because there is nothing I know so surely as 
 what I myself am. Objects I can only know as they 
 are presented to me from outside. The definition of 
 them for me must be in terms of such external 
 knowledge. But I know myself from within. It is 
 from inside that I discover the definition of self-hood, 
 though, of course, what I seem to know for certain 
 of myself is confirmed by the consent of other selves. 
 I know that amidst all the forces, physical and social, 
 acting upon me, I am a largely self-determining 
 being, responsible for the making of my own soul. 
 I am therefore constrained to believe that the power 
 which brought me into being, brought me into being 
 that I might freely realize the ideal of human life 
 which presents itself to my conscience. Here, in its 
 freedom and its duty, lies the worth of personality. 
 The more I trust this consciousness the more it proves 
 itself by my moral progress. If I doubt or ignore it, 
 
144 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 I sink in the scale of being. It is nothing less than 
 intellectual blindness to prefer to this direct con¬ 
 sciousness of myself from within, the conclusions 
 which I might draw, if per impossibile I could view 
 the world and form my estimate of it, without any 
 such knowledge from within. 1 
 
 II 
 
 But how do we find ourselves when, with our re¬ 
 covered confidence in God’s real disclosure of Himself 
 through the Hebrew prophets and in Christ, we start 
 again face to face with contemporary philosophy ? 
 We have found philosophy on the whole affirming the 
 spiritual interpretation of the universe, and in some 
 sense the existence of God, but very much divided in 
 judgement and doubtful in mind as to (1) whether 
 we are justified in speaking of God as personal; (2) 
 whether we are entitled to think of God as an eternal 
 and perfect consciousness, or only as gaining self- 
 consciousness in man and other rational beings, if such 
 exist; (3) whether He can be thought of as the 
 
 Absolute Being or as only one element or aspect of a 
 whole that is more than He ; (4) whether we can 
 entertain the thought of God as the Creator, prior to, 
 independent of, and the absolute author of all that 
 
 1 It appears as if philosophical intellectualism was always at work 
 to depersonalize the universe : see Pratt’s Religious Consciousness, 
 p. 17, quoting Von Hiigel: “ The intellectual and speculative faculty 
 seems habitually, instinctively to labour at depersonalizing all it 
 touches.” Cf. an interesting article by F. C. S. Schiller on William 
 James (Quarterly Review, July 1921, pp. 31, 35) : “ Ever since Plato 
 the treatment of personality has been involved in inextricable 
 difficulties, because the accepted theory of knowledge has found no 
 room for it.” . . . “ The academic attempts at dehumanizing 
 personality.” Cf. also an interesting article by Dr. Relton in 
 Theology (S.P.C.K.), August 1921, on “ The Meaning and Value of 
 Finite Individuality.” See also note p. 170. 
 
THE GOD OF PHILOSOPHY 145 
 
 exists in the universe of things. We found it 
 again (5) giving a very uncertain sound, not only on 
 the question of the reality of human freedom, with 
 which we are not going to deal further at present, 
 but also on the question of the personal immortality 
 of human souls. Finally, though not so much on the 
 ground of philosophy, perhaps, as of common sense, 
 we find ourselves confronted with (6) a deep and 
 widespread protest against the doctrine that the God 
 who made the universe of our experience can be a 
 God of love. 
 
 Now, confessedly, the religion of the prophets 
 claims to assure to us the solution of all these diffi¬ 
 culties. It brings down the balancing scales certainly 
 on the side of the personal God, who is the only 
 absolute being and the Creator of all that is, who 
 has made man a free being, destined for personal 
 immortality, and who, in spite of all appearances to 
 the contrary, is perfect goodness, perfect love. What 
 we have to do now is to seek in all sincerity to see 
 how our provisional faith in the revealed religion 
 stands towards the conclusions which our reasoning 
 powers, working on the basis of our experience, 
 suggest to us. And we must be honest with 
 ourselves—that is to say, if we must decline to 
 yield our reason into the keeping of ecclesiastical 
 authority, we must equally decline to be terrorized 
 by the authority of the intellectuals. History is 
 full of the record of their profound mistakes. We 
 have already declined to be satisfied with their 
 apparent refusal a priori even to consider the 
 evidences of God’s positive self-revelation of Himself 
 in an historical process, of which the Bible gives the 
 record. As a result of this refusal, we have been 
 profoundly impressed with the grounds for believing 
 
 11 
 
146 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 in the reality of this revelation. Now again we 
 must claim to use our reason to the full with regard 
 to their a priori determination of what kind of God 
 is rationally conceivable; and history seems to 
 warrant in many directions a profound scepticism as 
 to the power of a priori determination which the 
 human reason possesses. 
 
 1. It is not, however, in any distrust of abstract 
 reason, but by making the fullest use of it that I am 
 capable of, that I, for my part, declare that I find the 
 conception of an impersonal God—an impersonal 
 mind or righteousness in nature—which is the con¬ 
 ception of the higher pantheism, really far less 
 intelligible and far less rational than the conception 
 of a personal God. I cannot hold the conception of 
 mind or of truth or of purpose or of righteousness 
 except on the background of personality. In experi¬ 
 ence I only know these things as functions or qualities 
 of persons. No doubt the personality of God must 
 be something much greater and more comprehensive 
 than human personality. We may prefer to call God 
 super-personal. No doubt also, if at a later stage of 
 enquiry I find reason to believe that the divine 
 personality is complex and social, as the doctrine of 
 the Trinity represents it, I shall experience a certain 
 intellectual relief and enlightenment. But at least 
 my reason welcomes the assurance that God is what 
 the human person is—conscious of Himself and of His 
 relationship to all things that in any sense exist, 
 capable of determinate will and judgement and action, 
 and self-determined by essential spiritual character ; 
 in other words, that the human personality is at least 
 a better image of God than mechanical force or 
 merely vital movement or merely abstract idea. 
 This, I suppose, is the substance of the Psalmist’s 
 
GOD PERSONAL 147 
 
 argument—“ He that made the eye, shall He not 
 see ? ” If personality is the highest known thing, 
 must not God be at least that highest thing ? 
 
 2. Again, I must profess that I cannot attach any 
 meaning to the idea, presented to us by so many 
 philosophers, of a God who is eternal reason, order, 
 and purpose in the universe, but who only attains to 
 self-consciousness after long ages in man. I can 
 understand, on the one hand, the idea of a slowly 
 realized purpose in the world, and of a world in 
 which finite persons, endowed with the rational 
 power to correspond freely with this purpose, appear 
 only late in its history, if behind the world and 
 prior to it there is the conscious mind of God. I can 
 understand, on the other hand, what is meant by a 
 universe which, through all its main bulk, shows no 
 signs of mind or purpose, though I find decisive 
 reasons for rejecting this opinion. But this idea of 
 unconscious mind and purpose I find very difficult. 
 If I see in the whole universe a rational order, if I 
 see a purpose of beauty in the world prior in time 
 to man’s appearance, and a purpose of fellowship 
 and love becoming dominant in the animal world 
 before man, the conclusion which my reason welcomes 
 coincides with what the prophets proclaim as God’s 
 word—that His conscious purpose is behind all, the 
 background of all development and all progress, and 
 the security of their final goal. 
 
 8. The revealed religion undoubtedly postulates 
 a God who is the absolute ; not, of course, that the 
 universe is identical with God its Creator, but that 
 the God of the prophets, or the Father of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, is the one and only ultimate source 
 of whatsoever force, power, quality, or kind of being 
 exists in the universe, and that He contains and 
 
148 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 sustains in being all that is, and guides it to its goal, 
 and shall finally be “ all things in all.” This abso¬ 
 luteness of God must, as we have seen, be qualified 
 so as to admit of the existence, by the creative will 
 of God, within the scope of His universal activity, 
 of free spirits who, though they draw all they are 
 from God, yet are granted such spontaneity of choice 
 as involves the power of disordering over long ages, 
 though not in the final issue, the world as God would 
 have had it be—God, so to speak, standing far 
 enough aloof from such free spirits to allow for their 
 dependent but spontaneous action. Rut the revealed 
 religion strenuously contradicts the idea of any 
 ultimate dualism or pluralism in the universe—the 
 idea of any original 66 matter ” 1 or force or will 
 outside God or other than God. And in this it seems 
 to me to be in harmony with reason. I think that 
 in the fullest sense it is the postulate of both philo¬ 
 sophy and science that the ultimate reality is one ; and 
 that the only difficulty suggested by either experience 
 or reflection on experience is—what we must be 
 considering directly—the profound difficulty of 
 believing that the one ultimate force and law behind 
 the world and in the world of our experience is 
 absolute goodness and love. 
 
 4. There is no doubt a revolt among philosophers 
 against the Biblical doctrine of God the Creator, and 
 a demand that we shall recognize that God and 
 nature are correlative in such sense that we must 
 hold “ creation ” to be co-eternal with God, inas¬ 
 much as God only realizes Himself in nature, 
 and cannot be conceived of as existing prior to and 
 independently of nature. 
 
 1 See further below, p. 150. 
 
149 
 
 GOD THE CREATOR 
 
 Thus Dr. Pringle Pattison 1 states the conception 
 which must be rejected in these words : 
 
 “ According to this conception, God existed in all His 
 perfection and blessedness before the creation of the world. 
 He chose to create a world, but He might equally have 
 foreborne to create, and this abstention would have made 
 no difference to His self-sufficient being. The world, in 
 other words, is in no way organic to the divine life. . . . 
 It cannot be deduced from the essential nature of God.” 
 
 This position is rejected, and the ground of the 
 rejection is stated thus : 
 
 “ To perfect knowledge and perfect goodness there can 
 be no choice, in our sense of the word, as dubiety 
 between alternatives and a making up of our minds 
 for one or the other . . . His action is simply the 
 realization of His nature.” 
 
 Now, we must be profoundly conscious that in this 
 discussion of what might conceivably have been, or, 
 in other words, of the nature of divine choice, we are 
 moving in worlds too high for us. But we have seen 
 reason to believe that a self-disclosure of God has 
 been granted to us “ from above,” not as a conclusion 
 of human reasoning, but yet through human minds, 
 and in such a manner as has necessitated its expres¬ 
 sion in intellectual propositions ; and these proposi¬ 
 tions, if they are necessarily inadequate to eternal 
 realities, must be the best image of the truth possible 
 under our present conditions of knowledge. And 
 there is no doubt that this revelation has both by its 
 first recipients, the prophets, and by its exponents, 
 both Jewish and Christian, been held to involve the 
 self-complete and independent existence of God 
 “ before the world was.” 
 
 1 In the volume entitled Spirit, edited by Canon Streeter, 
 pp. 13-14. 
 
150 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 As has been said before, when Christianity makes 
 its historical appearance in the world of the Roman 
 Empire, it is found contending vigorously for its own 
 specific theism against the current philosophic 
 pantheism, and especially contending for the concep¬ 
 tion of God the absolute Creator, perfect and self- 
 complete and free. On this it clearly felt that its 
 whole moral attitude to God reposed. 
 
 The formulas for which the Church contended were 
 
 (a) that God created all that came into being “ out 
 of nothing,” as against the current Greek idea that 
 God was eternally confronted with a co-eternal 
 “ matter ” upon which all He could do was to super¬ 
 induce “ form.” Now that matter appears to be 
 resolvable into force, and force for a believer in God 
 appears to be simply the putting out of Ilis will, it 
 is perhaps true to say that the danger from the idea 
 of a formless matter co-eternal with God no longer 
 exists. The limitations on the omnipotence of God 
 in creation which we are now called upon to recognize 
 are not those of an external and more or less intractable 
 material, but those which appear to inhere necessarily 
 in the production of a gradually evolving universe, the 
 very idea of which involves imperfection at each stage 
 and mutual limitation by its parts or elements. But 
 
 (b) the Church also contended for a distinction between 
 the being of God on the one hand, which alone is 
 absolutely necessary and could not have been other¬ 
 wise, and on the other hand everything which belongs 
 to the created universe, which is not eternal nor 
 necessary but contingent upon the divine will. It 
 exists (so the formula ran) “ not by nature, but by 
 will.” Philosophically it was soon found that such 
 a conception of God as self-sufficient, prior to and apart 
 from all creation, was facilitated by the doctrine of 
 
PERFECT IN HIMSELF 151 
 
 the Trinity, which had been already accepted by the 
 Church on quite other than philosophical grounds. 
 This doctrine enabled the Church to think of God as 
 containing within Himself the full conditions of life 
 and self-realization—the Father eternally expressing 
 Himself in His Word or Son and Spirit, and in that 
 eternal fellowship realizing the full life of will and 
 knowledge and love ; and enabled it also to think of 
 creation as the expression on a lower plane of what 
 existed already in eternal counterpart in God. 1 But 
 this doctrine we cannot yet entertain. Its grounds 
 are quite beyond us. All that can be urged at this 
 stage is that no idea of God can be satisfactory to 
 our reason which at the last resort makes God depen¬ 
 dent for self-expression upon creation—that is, 
 represents God as immanent in nature and not 
 transcendent. And He cannot be spoken of as 
 transcendent unless He can be conceived of truly as 
 “ living His own life ” prior to and apart from creation. 
 Otherwise He becomes wholly dependent upon nature, 
 the soul of nature, and can only be said to become 
 conscious, in the sense that nature contains self- 
 conscious spirits in whose consciousness God may be 
 said to be conscious and in whose moral goodness 
 God may be said to be good. 1 Here we are back in 
 
 1 This idea found support in John i. 3, according to the ancient 
 punctuation. “ Without him [the eternal Word] was not anything 
 made. That which hath been made was life in Him,” see R.V. 
 marg. and Westcott’s Commentary. “ That which was created . . . 
 represents to us what was beyond time in the divine mind.” 
 
 The idea is expressed in Emily Bronte’s lines : 
 
 “ Though earth and man were gone, 
 
 And suns and universe ceased to be, 
 
 And Thou wert left alone, 
 
 Every existence would exist in Thee.” 
 
 2 See above, pp. G9 fl. 
 
152 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 pantheism with all its fatal moral and intellectual 
 weaknesses. For if God is only the soul of nature, we 
 seem to have no security as to which tendency in 
 nature—the morally purposeful or the morally in¬ 
 different, which seems far the vaster—is going to 
 prevail. God must be all that nature is. If we are to 
 vindicate, what ourmoral consciousness so imperatively 
 requires, the existence of right and of a supreme 
 moral will over the whole creation, personally 
 willing the right and condemning the wrong, we must 
 be able to believe in a God who prior to creation and 
 apart from creation has will and character—that is, 
 is transcendent—a God who has His life and being in 
 Himself. I am persuaded that the only refuge from 
 pantheism—which of course takes us back behind 
 Christianity, and all that it has won for the world, 
 upon the old Pagan ground—is to maintain that in 
 some real sense—which we at least can only express 
 in temporal language—God is prior to creation, and 
 exists eternally complete in Himself in the full 
 blessedness of self-realizing being “ before the world 
 was.” I acknowledge that human reason could never, 
 by its unassisted efforts, have arrived at this concep¬ 
 tion of God the Creator 1 ; but granted, what we 
 cannot doubt, that it is involved in the revelation 
 of God, given through the prophets and in Christ, and 
 lies indeed at its very heart, I should contend that 
 reason must welcome it as its only refuge from the 
 pantheism which reason itself, in that department 
 especially which is called moral philosophy, is bound 
 to declare unsatisfying and to seek to transcend. 
 
 I acknowledge indeed, with all competent theo¬ 
 logians, that all human thought and language which 
 
 1 So St. Thomas Aquinas. 
 
PERSONAL IMMORTALITY 153 
 
 ascribe to God priority in time to His creation 1 and 
 distinctive acts of choice between alternatives, is 
 inadequate thought and language, inadequate to the 
 eternal reality. The doctrine of the relativity of 
 knowledge in this sense we must heartily welcome. 
 The absolute truth we cannot know. But I suggest 
 that all this sort of language for which the Church 
 has contended, which is indeed the language of 
 revelation, is the only language which we can use 
 to express the transcendent truth, and the opposite 
 kind of language is fundamentally misleading and 
 false. 
 
 5. The idea of the immortalitv of human souls, 
 which was the outcome among the Jews of the 
 prophetic teaching, and which Jesus Christ so 
 solemnly confirmed, 2 has marked characteristics. 
 First, it was reached wholly under the pressure of their 
 belief in God. 3 There was first the belief in His 
 justice, which as regards individuals was plainly not 
 fulfilled in this world, and must needs have a larger 
 world for its exercise. The school of the Sadducees, 
 it is true, still clung to this w r orld as the only known 
 scene of God’s government, and sought to find satis¬ 
 faction for their sense of justice in the idea of the 
 immortality of a good name handed down and an 
 
 1 I suppose the best phrase is St. Augustine’s—not that creation 
 was in time, but that it involved time. Time and creation are 
 correlative. 
 
 2 Mark xii. 24 and parallel passages. 
 
 3 As is well known, the Jews were sedulously prohibited by their 
 prophets from any attempt to get into direct touch with the spirits 
 of the dead. In our day we need not question the legitimacy of 
 enquiry by trained investigators into “ spiritualistic ” phenomena. 
 But we need continually to protest that no doctrine of survival 
 which has moral value can be based upon anything else except faith 
 in the justice and goodness of God—of which faith it seems to be 
 an inevitable consequence. 
 
154 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 honourable family perpetuated. 1 But the conscience 
 and heart of Israel as a whole demanded a real and 
 personal immortality. Secondly, it was the sense of 
 personal communion with God, into which the soul 
 of man was admitted, which made it at last impossible 
 to doubt that this communion begun here would 
 be perpetuated and fulfilled beyond death. Such was 
 the belief that Jesus Christ confirmed. It was a 
 belief in immortality of so fully personal a kind that 
 it took shape in a doctrine not merely of the immortality 
 of the soul, but of the resurrection of the body. This 
 particular form of the belief as it was perpetuated 
 in Christendom is so bound up with the belief in the 
 resurrection of Christ that we will defer its considera¬ 
 tion till a later stage of our enquiry.* Now we will 
 only ask whether philosophy has any valid objection 
 to urge against the belief in personal immortality. 
 
 No doubt philosophy is shy of it. As has been 
 already noticed, speculative thought tends to de¬ 
 personalize what it touches. And the belief in personal 
 immortality is bound up with the emphasis on person¬ 
 ality as a far more important category than any 
 abstraction such as thought or knowledge. These 
 we believe to be functions or qualities of persons. 
 Fully rational being is only known to us as the being 
 of a person who feels and wills and thinks. Philo¬ 
 sophers like Dr. Bradley and Dr. Bosanquet are fond 
 of speaking of personality as “ transcended,” 44 dis¬ 
 solved in a higher unity,” 44 merged,” 44 blended,” 
 44 fused,” 44 absorbed.” I fear I must understand 
 Lord Haldane in a similar sense. But I believe this 
 
 1 See Ecclus. xl. 9-11, xliv. 10-15. 
 
 2 The grounds of belief in Christ’s resurrection are considered in 
 this volume in connexion with the discussion of miracles. But 
 its full import as a part of the whole meaning of Christ’s person and 
 work is reserved for the second volume. 
 
UNION NOT ABSORPTION 155 
 
 tendency to depreciate the distinctive personal self, 
 as if it were a merely temporary limitation on the 
 large life of reason or spirit, to be wholly a mistaken 
 tendency. I think the emphasis on personality both 
 in God and in man as the highest category, an 
 emphasis which we owe to Christianity, is one of the 
 chief glories of that religion, and one chief clue to 
 its power of being the religion of common men and 
 not merely of an intellectual class. In fact, the 
 deepening of the spiritual life, and spiritual vision 
 in the best of men, tends on the whole conspicuously 
 to make their personality more intense and more 
 markedly individual. He that loseth his soul by 
 utter unselfishness shall “ save ” it and “ keep ” it and 
 “ win ” it. Personal character is a greater and deeper 
 thing than any quality of a person such as the power 
 of abstract thought. Moreover, the communion of 
 souls in its most intimate form of friendship and love, 
 though it proves that personalities can in wonderful 
 ways interpenetrate one another, does not even tend 
 to reduce the distinction of persons. It is, indeed, 
 between those most different that personal intimacy 
 is often most real and permanent. Finally, in their 
 relation to God the souls of men whom we should 
 describe as most absorbed in God are not so absorbed 
 as to lose their proper and distinctive being. Paul 
 and John the son of Zebedee and Augustine and 
 Theresa of Avila do not in this life show any signs of 
 becoming less individual by being united to God, nor 
 do they ever lead us to suppose that when they pass 
 the barrier of death it will be otherwise. They will 
 see God, they believe—not become God. 1 In a sense, 
 
 i I know that some mystics have used language which suggests 
 becoming God, but the conscience of Christendom has always been 
 shocked. 
 
156 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 the personality of God embraces all the world and all 
 finite personalities, but He has created finite person¬ 
 alities and given them the freedom to realize them¬ 
 selves in Him without losing themselves—to work 
 out their own salvation—surely not that the distinctive 
 personality so gradually and painfully won may lose 
 the supreme joy of offering to God its distinctive 
 contribution—its self. I think that our deepest moral 
 and spiritual experience—all the experience which 
 makes the belief that the spirit does not perish with 
 the death of the body a rational belief—leads us to 
 believe also that what survives death must be our 
 personal self, purified and deepened and enlarged, 
 but not merged or lost. 
 
 6. We remain now face to face with the only one 
 of the difficulties raised by philosophical or specula¬ 
 tive enquiry which, to my mind, is really formidable 
 —that is, the question whether, in view of the vast 
 area of seeming moral indifference which the universe 
 in its enormous spaces of time and extent presents, 
 and in view of the seeming cruelty of nature and of 
 the mysterious powers which control human destiny, 
 it is really reasonable to believe in a God who is both 
 the Creator and Sustainer of all that is, whose being in 
 some sort nature’s laws must express, and who is at 
 the same time Perfect Goodness—Eternal Love. 
 
 This is a tremendous question indeed. I suppose 
 that in regard to it men in all ages have been differ¬ 
 ently disposed—some inclined towards optimism, 
 some towards pessimism. Seneca says in his day 
 that “ the greater part of mankind complains of the 
 malignity of nature ” ; and certainly in our day the 
 effect of the war and its consequences has been to 
 strengthen the forces of pessimism among us. There 
 are very many among us who certainly have “ the 
 
CAN GOD BE LOVE? 157 
 
 will to believe,” but who find the belief that God is 
 love very difficult. The days seem to them far off 
 when it was possible with any plausibility to contrast 
 the 44 simple doctrine” that God is love with the 
 44 elaborate and difficult dogmas ” of the Church. 
 For they feel that it is only the dogmas that Jesus 
 Christ is God, and His mind God’s mind, and that 
 God, the God of nature, really vindicated Him by 
 raising Him from the dead, that do in fact sustain 
 their tottering faith and hope in God. 1 With these 
 dogmas, however, we are not yet concerned—only 
 with the positive content of the prophetic revelation 
 reaching its culmination in Jesus Christ; and as to 
 the content of this there is no question. 
 
 These prophets and this Jesus, 44 the prophet mighty 
 in word and in deed,” proclaim with unhesitating 
 assurance and emphasis the goodness of the one God 
 who made and rules all things. And further, there 
 will be no question that this assurance is conveyed 
 to us—quite without arguments about apparently 
 adverse facts, but at least in full view of all the facts 
 in nature and in the world of man which appear to 
 contradict it. It was not the sort of truth which 
 their experience would have suggested to the prophets 
 when the world was being trampled by remorseless 
 and blood-stained powers, or to the rejected and 
 crucified Christ. If they believed it and affirmed it 
 as they did, it was as an assurance imparted to them 
 by God Himself in spite of experience. 
 
 It is not then an 44 easy ” doctrine. But is it really 
 consistent with candid reflection upon experience, or 
 as we say, consistent with the facts ? 
 
 First, we must open our eyes wide to take in all 
 that is implied in the belief that God has created 
 
 * Cf. 1 Pet. i. 21. 
 
158 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 hosts of free beings and made them his vicegerents 
 in the world, in spite of the fact that their freedom 
 involved the possibility of their rebellion, and that, 
 in fact, such rebellion or sin on the widest scale has 
 disordered the world and distorted its history. 
 That is, we are bound to say, a fact, and a fact the 
 full meaning of which we do not readily realize. It 
 carries the vastest consequences. It is only with 
 great difficulty that we can represent to our imagina¬ 
 tion what the world would have been as God meant 
 it to be —that is, if sin and rebellion had not been, 
 or had been but a rare and intermittent tendency. 
 Even to-day, if the mass of men would repent or 
 change their minds, and would set themselves to 
 serve God and do His will, in a very few years we 
 should have even in the dark places of the earth a 
 paradise instead of a hell. And it is not only over 
 human life that the influence of human perversity or 
 ignorance extends. A distinguished professor of 
 biology, who is not an apologist for Christian doctrine, 
 Sir E. Ray Lankester, assures us that not only the 
 mass of human diseases is due to sin, but that 
 “ every disease to which animals (and probably 
 plants also) are liable, excepting as a transient and 
 very exceptional occurrence, is due to man’s inter¬ 
 ference.” 1 Certainly thoughtless piety has con¬ 
 stantly misused the phrase “ it pleased God to 
 order,” or 44 to do ” so and so, with regard to orderings 
 and doings which we have the best reason to know are 
 flat contrary to His will—of which we can only say, 
 
 1 The Kingdom of Man (Constable, 1907), pp. 33 f. : “ It is a re¬ 
 markable thing—which possibly may be less generally true than 
 our present knowledge seems to suggest—that the adjustment of 
 organisms to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature 
 apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and normal 
 phenomena under these conditions ” 
 
THE WORLD AS GOD WOULD HAVE IT 159 
 
 with our Lord, 44 An enemy—some hostile will or 
 other—hath done this.” 1 Now, we certainly have no 
 faculties adequate to answer the question whether 
 the gift of freedom might not have been given with 
 less disastrous results. It is a merely foolish question. 
 All we can do is to recognize that correlative with 
 freedom is the possibility of sin, and that the world 
 as God made it and would have had it be would 
 have been, as we can see, a wholly different world 
 from the world as it has in fact been. Also we must 
 note that the deeply impressive voices that have so 
 continuously assured us that God is good, in face 
 of all their torturing experience of the world as it 
 is, have finally assured us also that His love has 
 eternity to work in, and is bound in the long issue of 
 things to do the utmost that love can do for every 
 single conscious human soul. At the last, we can 
 easily conceive, every still conscious human soul 
 may be found saying, There is nothing that I 
 have experienced, however bitter and unjust and 
 humiliating at the time, which has not been for 
 good. 2 We are never entitled to forget the warning 
 
 1 Cf. Jas. iv. 1 : “ Whence come wars and fightings among 
 
 you ? Come they not hence, even of your pleasures that war in 
 your members ? ” There is nothing in Shakespeare’s presentation of 
 human nature more impressive than the sense which he gives us in 
 his groat tragedies of the almost boundless havoc in human societies 
 which a single will, obsessed with some violent passion or wilfulness, 
 can work. 
 
 a Finally lost souls—only so by their own persistence in refusing 
 the known good and choosing the evil—I feel bound to believe there 
 may be. To believe that it may be so is, I think, bound up with 
 accepting the reality of moral freedom. But I conceive that the 
 lost also will recognize that the mind of God towards them was only 
 good. And though their awakening must be awful indeed, and the 
 figures under which it is described are so, I do not think an orthodox 
 Christian is precluded from hoping that the issue of hell, which is 
 the state of the lost, will be extinction of personal consciousness or 
 dissolution of personality. 
 
160 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 of Bishop Butler—that from the point of view of 
 our present experience the world presents to us, at 
 the best, 44 a scheme imperfectly comprehended.” 
 
 Next, we must steadily contemplate how much of 
 the progress of the world—not only the moral progress 
 of the individual soul, but also the progress of the 
 race, where progress has been—has been due to 
 suffering and to vicarious suffering. We have no 
 faculties capable of answering the question, What 
 place would suffering have held in the world if there 
 had been no sin ? But in the world as it is there 
 is almost nothing worth having which can be won or 
 maintained except at the cost of pain. As Pamela’s 
 parents said to her : “O, my child ! Trials are sore 
 things ; and yet without them, we know not our¬ 
 selves, nor what we are able to do.” 
 
 I think that the rational result of these considera¬ 
 tions, faithfully and thoughtfully entertained, is to 
 remove a great part of the 44 weary and the heavy 
 weight.” 
 
 But there remains the oppressive feeling due to 
 the inconceivably vast spaces of nature which seem 
 to have no moral meaning or significance, and to 
 the awful consideration of the pain of animals. But 
 we need to restrain our imagination by attending to 
 our almost boundless ignorance in these directions. 
 For all we know there may be no fact or force in the 
 vast universe which has not some attendant spirit 
 whose destiny is as much conditioned by it as ours 
 is by the world we inhabit. Truly we have not in 
 our possible knowledge any, even the slightest, 
 reason to deny rather than to affirm sr h a 
 suggestion. We know nothing whatever a , ,uc it. 
 With regard, again, to the conscious pain of .nimals, 
 though it remains to my mind that pa; L of 1 hv 
 
THE SUFFERINGS OF ANIMALS 161 
 
 whole “ burden of the mystery ” which is hardest to 
 bear, we cannot really estimate their joys or pains, 
 or the proportion of one to the other. The great 
 naturalists appear to have been mostly, like Darwin, 
 optimists in their estimate of the happiness of 
 animals. And so far as animals attain to conscious¬ 
 ness, have we any real grounds for denying that 
 their painful contribution to the process of nature 
 may have some recompense in some kind of life 
 beyond ? We have indeed, here again, nothing 
 approaching to knowledge. But I confess that the 
 glint of pain in an animal’s eye remains, if not a 
 valid argument against belief in God’s goodness, 
 yet, as often as my mind dwells on it, a source of 
 unrelieved discomfort. Of course, in regard to natural 
 processes as a whole, we are bound to take note that 
 the estimate of nature as a “ gladiator’s show,” 
 which was fashionable in Huxley’s day, has been 
 greatly modified, and almost reversed, by the 
 emphasis which recent biology lays on the capacity 
 for sociality, co-operation, and 44 unselfishness,” as 
 chief among the conditions which throughout the 
 animal kingdom make for success. Indeed, Thomson 
 and Geddes, in their recent manual, 1 dare to conclude 
 their brief summary of scientific reflection on the 
 subject with the words : 44 It is much for our pure 
 natural history to see no longer struggle, but love, 
 
 4 as creation’s final law.’ ” 
 
 On the whole, I seem to myself to stand in this 
 position. What I am conscious of is not a struggle 
 between faith and reason. No ; it is reason in me 
 which demands goodness in God. If I am rationally 
 sure of anything, it is that I find impressed upon my 
 inmost conscious being the obligation of goodness— 
 
 1 Evolution , pp. 246-7. 
 
 12 
 
162 
 
 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 the sense that I exist in order to be good. And I am 
 wholly unable to interpret this purpose of goodness, 
 which I cannot doubt to be real, except in terms of 
 the goodness of God. Thus it is reason in men which 
 makes them cry out for some sign of divine justice 
 and mercy. It is reason in Prometheus which, beyond 
 the cruelty of Zeus, cries out to some fundamental 
 justice at the roots of being. It is reason in Hecuba 
 which, above the vain gods of Olympus and deeper 
 than the powers of Hades, invokes some eternal 
 justice, by whatever name called, which punishes the 
 wrongdoer. 1 It is reason in Antigone which, behind 
 and above the state law, adores a moral law which 
 is divine, and in obedience to which she is prepared 
 to die. Reason, then, welcomes the revelation 
 which proclaims with such assurance the only word 
 which can make sense of the universe. And within 
 the region of human experience the truth of this 
 word of God, verified as it has been in the consciences 
 of thousands of the best of men, for whom it has 
 passed from faith into knowledge or assured convic¬ 
 tion, presents on reflection no real difficulty. In the 
 remaining region of the non-human universe I am 
 rationally bound to lay great stress on my inevitable 
 ignorance. I have no faculties enabling me to 
 judge how much suffering is inevitably incident to 
 physical evolution, or whether any system less full 
 of pain could have been created. There remain, 
 however, in this region of the world, certain elements 
 in reality which it is certainly hard to reconcile with 
 
 1 Euripides, Troades , 1. 884. “ O foundation of the earth and on 
 
 the earth having thy seat, whosoever thou art, hard for knowledge 
 to find, Zeus or Necessity of nature or Mind of men—thee I addressed 
 in prayer : for moving in thy silent path thou guidest mortal 
 destinies according to justice.” 
 
COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS 163 
 
 divine goodness ; but I am sure they cannot reason¬ 
 ably be held to justify rejection of the assurance, 
 which so convinces me of its divine origin, as to the 
 goodness of God, and which, on the ground of 
 human nature, where alone anything like adequate 
 knowledge is possible for me, has justified itself so 
 fundamentally to the best men. If I stand before 
 Christ and listen to His assurance and reject it, I 
 seem to be self-convicted of wilfulness. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Comparative Religion .—Among the comparatively 
 new sciences which have disturbed old-standing 
 religious positions, we reckoned the science of com¬ 
 parative religions. As against the crude, old-fashioned 
 view of heathen religions as simply false, this new 
 science has been sympathetically investigating the 
 various forms which the religious faculty or instinct 
 has taken among various races and in various periods ; 
 it has sought to observe religion as a whole among 
 men, to study its origins, its processes of development, 
 its moments of special illumination, its deteriorations, 
 its similarities and differences, and all its apparatus 
 of priesthoods, sacraments, mana t tabus, rituals, 
 and sacred books—all with an impartial mind as so 
 many manifestations of one common spirit and 
 tendency. Then the question arises : Is this sort of 
 impartial study and appreciation of the various 
 religions of the world compatible with the belief that 
 one race, Israel, was chosen by God to be the organ 
 of His special self-disclosure—a self-disclosure which 
 had its culmination in Jesus Christ, and through 
 Him was destined to become the catholic and universal 
 religion—the one all-embracing faith for mankind ? 
 
164 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 We may answer, surely, that there is no incompati¬ 
 bility. I cannot understand why this belief should 
 make us in any way desire to minimize or regard with 
 grudging eyes the truth and excellence which appear 
 in other religions. When Christianity came out 
 into the world of Greek culture, though it combated 
 vigorously what it regarded as the errors and corrup¬ 
 tions of Hellenism, yet, at least through many of its 
 greatest teachers, it acknowledged its large element 
 of truth and it assimilated its treasures, appreciating 
 it as having been, in some sense like the religion of 
 Israel, a preparation for Christ. It did this because 
 it believed that God left not Himself without witness 
 in any nation, and that the divine Word or Reason 
 and the Divine Spirit were everywhere in the world 
 at work. This is the temper in which we would 
 approach all forms of religion. If we find high 
 thoughts in Babylonian psalms, or in the psalm of 
 the Egyptian heretic king Akhnaton, or in the sacred 
 books of Persia, if we find a wonderful ethical beauty 
 in the wisdom of the Buddha or of Laotze or of 
 Confucius, or again a divine power in the dramatists 
 and philosophers of Greece, we ought not to be in any 
 kind of way scandalized. If marked similarities 
 to the ideas and institutions of Judaism and 
 Christianity present themselves in the sacramental 
 cults and rituals of many nations, we should be 
 delighted to note and appreciate them. All this will 
 be no more bar to our believing that Israel had a 
 special vocation to be “ the sacred school of the know¬ 
 ledge of God and of the spiritual life for all mankind,” 
 than a sympathetic interest in the art of all the 
 world will hinder a perception of the special vocation 
 of Greece. We have already examined our reasons 
 for believing that Israel had this special vocation. 
 
BUDDHISM 165 
 
 We contend that no religion can, as a school of 
 spiritual truth, be set alongside of Israel’s. That is 
 a matter of evidence. At a later stage of our enquiry 
 we shall seek to estimate the claim of Christianity 
 to be the catholic and final religion, and its ethical 
 standard the perfect standard. That, again, will 
 be a matter for candid consideration. But granted 
 that those claims are true, they should generate 
 in our minds no kind of grudging jealousy towards 
 other religions. If Christianity is destined in the 
 providence of God to supersede them all, this, 
 we conceive, would be not by excluding, but by 
 including and assimilating to the fuller truth, all 
 the elements of value which each religion is found 
 to contain. 
 
 It is, of course, quite as possible to over-esti¬ 
 mate the merits of a non-Christian religion as 
 to depreciate them unduly—to under-estimate the 
 corruptions which it has nourished as to magnify 
 them. 
 
 For instance, it has become the fashion in many 
 quarters even ludicrously to assimilate Buddhism 
 to Christianity. But, as a matter of fact, they 
 embody radically different principles. Thus the 
 root principle of Christianity is that life in all its 
 forms is good as the gift of the good God, and that, 
 the closer our union with God, the more intense and 
 full will our personal life become : as our Lord said, 
 
 “ I am come that they might have life, and have it 
 abundantly ” ; 44 1 am the Life ” ; while the root 
 
 principle of Buddhism is 44 that life is the greatest of 
 evils,” and Sakya Muni 44 devoted all the strength 
 of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others ; 
 and to do this so that, even after death, life shall not 
 be renewed any more, but be completely destroyed at 
 
166 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 its very roots. So speaks all the wisdom of India.” 1 2 
 It is certain that a root principle so fundamentally 
 different from the root principle of Christianity must 
 produce essentially different fruits. To take another 
 example, it is easy for a scholar in his study to 
 frame an ideal picture of Indian religions ; but the 
 missionaries see it and know it as it practically is : 
 they see its fundamental moral impotences and 
 pollutions. And to ignore the missionary’s estimate, 
 and to accept the idealist’s as true, is not either 
 scientific or just. In this as in all other matters 
 we want a balanced mind. Nevertheless, if China 
 and Japan and India were to acknowledge the 
 JLordship of Christ, we should hope that they would 
 never cease to reverence their own sages of earlier 
 days or depreciate their debt to them.* 
 
 IV 
 
 Biblical Criticism .—Finally, we have to ask our¬ 
 selves how our faith in the inspiration of the prophets 
 of Israel, and in the reality of the revelation of God 
 communicated through them to Israel and through 
 Israel to the world, agrees with the results of the 
 newer science of historical criticism as applied to the 
 Old Testament.* Of course the answer to this 
 
 1 I quote these words from the sympathetic account of the 
 Buddha and Buddhism from Tolstoy’s Confession (Aylmer Maude’s 
 trans., Oxford Univ. Press), pp. 42-4; cf. Lowes Dickinson’s moving 
 estimate of Buddhism in The Magic Flute (George Allen & Unwin), 
 pp. 100-9. 
 
 2 To-day we have no dearth of books which seek to give a fair 
 estimate of non-Christian religions. I may refer to J. L. Johnston’s 
 Some Alternatives to Jesus Christ (Longmans). 
 
 8 Of course historical criticism must apply itself equally freely 
 to the New Testament as to the Old. But we have hitherto been 
 concerned only with its results as applied to the Old Testament. 
 
BIBLICAL CRITICISM 167 
 
 question depends in great measure on whether this 
 newer science is believed to have yielded secure 
 results largely destructive of traditional views about 
 the Old Testament literature. This great matter 
 cannot be argued here. But I feel so certain in giving 
 an affirmative answer, as the judgement of my own 
 reason, that no weight of ecclesiastical authority to 
 the contrary could move me. There is, I think, no 
 reason to believe that the Church is qualified by its 
 legitimate authority to pronounce judgement on any 
 literary problem. That is a matter for free criticism. 
 I think such criticism has made it certain that (for 
 instance) the Law of Moses as it stands in the Penta¬ 
 teuch presents to us successive codes of law of 
 different dates, and none of them due directly as it 
 stands to Moses, though he was the prophetic 
 initiator of the historical movement through which 
 they came into being; and the materials which 
 these successive codes embody are materials for the 
 most part having a long traditional history before 
 they were embodied in codes. Thus to take only 
 one example : it is, I think, impossible to maintain 
 that the developed law of the priesthood—with high 
 priest, priests, and Levites—as the law of the one 
 exclusive tabernacle or temple, dates back to Mosaic 
 times, or applies to the times of the judges or the 
 early monarchy. 
 
 Again, it is certain, in my judgement, that the early 
 chapters of Genesis—the accounts of Creation, Eden, 
 the Fall, the Flood—are not historical records, but 
 inspired folklore ; and the subsequent records of the 
 beginnings of Israel are tradition, and not strict 
 history, actual memories of fact modified in tradition. 
 Later, beside the historical records of Samuel and 
 Kings, of Ezra and Nehemiah, you have in the books 
 
168 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 of Chronicles a partly imaginative history—history 
 written, not as it was, but as it should have been 
 from the point of view of the later priests and scribes. 
 And besides this, we have in the Old Testament all 
 kinds of literature: devotional poetry, as in the 
 Psalms; moral stories, like Esther and Jonah, and 
 the stories of Daniel, written on a rather remote 
 historical basis; dramas, like the book of Job and 
 the Canticles; philosophy of a special kind, as in 
 the Wisdom literature and Ecclesiastes, and (what is 
 peculiar to Judaism) the later Apocalypses—much of 
 this literature being pseudonymous, as the latter 
 part of the book of Daniel, dating from the second 
 century, is written as in the person of Daniel, who 
 lived four centuries before, or Ecclesiastes in the 
 person of Solomon. And in some of the Prophets 
 there is, besides their genuine work, the work of 
 later prophets, such as 44 the second Isaiah ” 
 (chapter xl. and onward), incorporated with it. 
 
 When such results are pressed upon believers in 
 the Old Testament, they are apt angrily to ask, 
 44 Then what remains of our faith ? 55 and I have tried 
 to convey the answer in chapters iii and iv. We 
 must start from the solid historical ground of the 
 period of the written prophets. We must reassure 
 ourselves, on this solid ground, of the reality of God’s 
 self-revelation. Then we shall find ourselves be¬ 
 lievers of a surety that God did “ in many parts and in 
 many manners speak in old times unto the fathers 
 by the prophets ”—that the Spirit, who is God, really 
 44 spake by the prophets.” That is the essential 
 thing. Then we shall recognize how the prophetic 
 spirit gradually purged and reinterpreted the folk¬ 
 lore and traditions of Israel to express moral and 
 religious truth instead of empty falsehood, and how 
 
THE CONCLUSION 169 
 
 there were different grades and kinds of inspiration, 
 as in psalmists and wise men and codifiers of law and 
 compilers of stories for moral edification, all in differ¬ 
 ent degrees inspired by the Divine Spirit. So viewed, 
 the Old Testament not only becomes much more 
 interesting, but also holds its unique spiritual value 
 not in opposition to, but in harmony with, historical 
 criticism. It is in recognition of the legitimacy of 
 such considerations that our Anglican Convocations 
 have remodelled the question and answer which, in the 
 Anglican service for the Ordination of Deacons, is to 
 be put to those entering the ministry and is by them 
 solemnly to be answered. The question used to run 
 simply, “ Do you unfeignedly believe all the canonical 
 scriptures of the Old and New Testament?” This 
 question remains, but the sense in which it is asked is 
 defined by additional words, “ as conveying to us in 
 divers manners the Revelation of God which is 
 consummated in Jesus Christ.” And the answer, 
 which hitherto has been “ I do believe them,” becomes 
 “ I do so believe them.” 
 
 Now, I have tried to set out very briefly the result 
 in my own mind of bringing the intellectual contents 
 of the Biblical revelation to the bar of the various 
 sciences and of philosophy, acknowledging the juris¬ 
 diction of the courts in one sense and denying it in 
 another—denying their right to exclude a priori the 
 possibility or credibility of divine self-disclosure, but 
 acknowledging their right to test its contents by their 
 own sciences, seeing that, at bottom, the acknow¬ 
 ledgement of the validity of our reason is the only 
 basis of any kind of certitude. But we have not 
 found that the sciences or philosophy provide any 
 
170 
 
 REVELATION AND REASON 
 
 valid bar to the belief in the divine revelation, the 
 reality of which impressed us so deeply. Accepting 
 the revelation whole-heartedly as of God, we find 
 ourselves still free men with free minds in the worlds 
 of philosophy and science, more free, we dare to say, 
 than the unbeliever and the sceptic. 
 
 Additional note to p. 144. I cannot understand how Dr. Rashdall 
 {Theory of Good and Evil, p. 317) can contend that to accept determin¬ 
 ism, as he finally does, which certainly at the last analysis makes 
 the sense of freedom, responsibility and guilt an illusion, makes no 
 serious difference to morality and religion. He admits that this is 
 “ the most important question.” He admits that “ our knowledge 
 of the empirical facts is far too small to enable us to say that . . . 
 the hypothesis [of indeterminism] would be indefensible ” if 
 ‘ ‘ any demand of the moral or religious consciousness really necessi¬ 
 tates, or even strongly recommends ” it. But he proceeds to argue 
 that it does not. This, I say, I find amazing. It is to me quite 
 certain that if I had believed myself at the last resort necessarily 
 determined to do whatever I do, the spring of moral effort would 
 have been quenched in me. It is only the conviction of real freedom 
 and real reponsibility which makes resistance to evil imperative and 
 possible. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 It is true in a sense of the Old Testament religion that 
 it is an historical religion—in the sense, that is, that 
 it depends upon the belief that God revealed Himself, 
 not merely in the order of the world as a whole, but 
 particularly and more fully in an historical process 
 in a particular race and period, extending from Moses 
 to Christ. But this conviction rests upon no single 
 event or group of events which is open in any degree 
 to reasonable doubt. We have been able to study 
 its grounds without having to discuss whether any¬ 
 thing actually happened which critics deny or any 
 document is authentic which critics doubt. But the 
 case is quite different when we advance upon the 
 ground of the New Testament. The faith which is 
 presented to us in the New Testament indisputably 
 centres upon a single person, in a sense in which it 
 would not be true of any other great religion. Thus 
 Buddhism centres upon Sakya Muni, in that it regards 
 him as the discoverer of a method of escape from the 
 will to live with all its desires and illusions—that was 
 “ the way ” or “ the path.” The Buddha is a very 
 moving historical character about whom we know a 
 good deal. But nothing depends upon the verdict 
 which criticism may pass upon the recorded incidents 
 of the life of the Buddha. “ The way ” remains none 
 the less to be followed by disciples all the world over, 
 
 171 
 
172 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 who accept the principle that life and the desire for life 
 is an evil and the root of all evil. “ The way ” would 
 remain if the personal leader were proved a myth. 
 Mohammed, again, is believed in as a prophet, but no 
 more. His existence and substantially the character 
 of his teaching no one can doubt. I think myself 
 that no believer in the reality of the inspiration of 
 the prophets will be likely to doubt that he was ori¬ 
 ginally really inspired to restore, as he professed to do, 
 the religion of Abraham, that is the basis of the true 
 religion ; and that his rejection of Christianity, so far 
 as he rejected it, is to be attributed in great measure 
 to the exceedingly debased form in which it was 
 presented to him. But there was nothing original or 
 unique in his teaching about God or man ; and what¬ 
 ever the estimate we form of this wonderful man, 
 at the beginning of his career or in its subsequent 
 stages, nothing much depends on any particular 
 incident which criticism is concerned to doubt or 
 deny. 
 
 But it is quite different when we come to consider 
 the religion of Jesus Christ as it appears in the New 
 Testament, and (let us say) in the Apostles’ Creed, which 
 expresses its doctrine about God in a summary form. 
 Everything there centres upon the person of Jesus, 
 and the functions and aspects of His person, and (in the 
 Creed almost exclusively) upon particular incidents 
 of His life—His birth, His death, His resurrection, His 
 ascension into Heaven, His mission of the Spirit with 
 its consequences. These events enter into the sub¬ 
 stance of the belief. It is a belief that God has taken 
 action for man’s redemption in such and such historical 
 events. 
 
 Not, of course, that the Christian Church has ever 
 been content with a merely historical witness. Christ 
 
ITS MEANING 173 
 
 Himself was plainly aware that not the most miracu¬ 
 lous external events by themselves would change the 
 heart of man. “ If they hear not Moses and the 
 prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one 
 rose from the dead.” Thus the Christian appeal to 
 certain events in history has always been balanced 
 by the appeal to a continuous spiritual experience of 
 need and satisfaction. It has expected the Spirit of 
 God, working in the hearts of men, to generate such 
 an inward disposition and experience as to make the 
 testimony to past events credible and certain to their 
 minds. And it has, in fact, been the witness of the 
 corporate life of the Church, or of the lives of genuine 
 Christians—the saints, which has made, as it was in¬ 
 tended to make, the message of their creed intelligible 
 and credible to others. Thus no one can reasonably 
 accuse Christianity of merely appealing to past 
 events. Nevertheless the whole continuous spiritual 
 appeal of Christianity to the hearts and consciences 
 of men rests upon, or is bound up with, a specific 
 witness borne by certain original eye-witnesses to 
 certain events. The inward assurance is made to 
 rest upon facts—as St. Paul said at Athens, “ God 
 has given assurance to us (concerning his purpose in 
 Christ) in that he hath raised him from the dead.” 
 
 It is because the asserted facts are largely super¬ 
 natural or miraculous, and because so much of spiritual 
 consequence is made to turn upon them—the whole 
 question, in fact, of God’s redemptive purpose—that 
 the Christian records have been, especially in recent 
 times, the subjects of sharply critical examination and 
 many very radical and very different reconstructions, 
 through at least two generations of critics. No 
 doubt the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a teacher, 
 and certain ideas as to the character of His teaching, 
 
174 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 may be said to be undisputed by any sane critic. 
 Nevertheless, the positive residuum left by the 
 criticism of, let us say, Harnack, or Schweitzer, or 
 Kirsopp Lake, is in each case disputed by other 
 critics ; and the residuum which can be even ap¬ 
 proximately called undisputed seems to most of us 
 very meagre. In any case, it stands in very marked 
 contrast to the robust and confident religion of the 
 New Testament or the Creeds. 
 
 Its dependence on historical events, or events 
 declared to have actually happened, is constantly 
 spoken of as the disadvantage of Christianity, because 
 it is thereby rendered constantly liable to attack by 
 that singularly nervous and subtle and solvent in¬ 
 fluence, modern criticism. And thus many people, 
 from Ritschl to Inge, have been anxious to dis¬ 
 embarrass Christianity from the elements which make 
 it obnoxious to this sort of attack. But the question 
 is whether they do not thereby disembarrass it of its 
 essential worth ; or even whether anything is gained 
 by calling the residuum Christianity. The strength of 
 Christianity—its power of appeal to men of different 
 ages and classes and educations—lies, as seems to 
 me indisputable, in its being rooted in a person of 
 whom we have adequate, trustworthy knowledge, or, 
 in other words, upon the substantial historical truth 
 of the Gospels—not their critical infallibility, but their 
 substantial trustworthiness. If this is a position 
 impossible to maintain, or if the destructive criticism 
 which has been so long prevalent in the intellectual 
 world has its way, I do not doubt that “ something 
 will remain,” but it will be a residuum so intellectually 
 uncertain in outline that it will result in diverse 
 “ schools of thought ” for studious men—which will 
 not make much appeal to the common man, hard 
 
CURRENT DOUBTS 175 
 
 pressed by life, and not inclined to subtle thought— 
 side by side with different sorts of superstitions for 
 the vulgar, or blankly dogmatic creeds for those who 
 at all costs must have a definite religion and are 
 prepared not to think for themselves. No one can 
 contemplate such a return to the conditions which 
 preceded the advent of Christianity into the world 
 without a sense of disaster. 
 
 The Christianity, then, of the New Testament or 
 of the Creeds, the Christianity which at its best has 
 proved itself a power of such incomparable force for 
 the redemption of common human life, is a distinc¬ 
 tively historical religion—rooted in an historical person 
 presumed to be adequately known, and in particular 
 crucial incidents concerning Him, notably His death 
 upon the Cross and His resurrection the third day from 
 the dead. And, because we are determined to give 
 our reason its full claim of unrestricted freedom, we 
 will not be guilty of the folly of ascribing too much 
 authority, or final authority, to the intellectuals of a 
 particular epoch. The “ intellectuals ” in history, 
 even when they seemed to wield in their generation an 
 almost incontestable authority, have too often proved 
 mistaken, and their confident positions have too 
 often been abandoned. Thus at least their authority 
 must not restrain us from thinking and judging for 
 ourselves. So we will, with all the openmindedness 
 of which we are capable, examine the claims made on 
 behalf of the Christ of tradition to be the Christ of 
 legitimate history, to see whether they fall, or per¬ 
 chance can stand. 
 
 That this enquiry may be freely made we need to 
 have in mind three considerations. 
 
 1. The first concerns the nature of God. Many 
 of our philosophers, like Dr. Pringle Pattison, appear 
 
176 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 to deprecate any attribution to God of particular 
 action along particular channels, as if that derogated 
 from His universal presence and action in the world. 
 This plainly prejudices their minds against the 
 44 particularity ” of the Christian religion. But our 
 newly recovered or newly acquired belief in the 
 self-disclosure of God through the Hebrew prophets 
 will not admit of our entertaining this abstract 
 philosophical scruple. Here, we are convinced, is an 
 instance of God’s acting along a particular line by 
 way of inspiration, much more continuously and 
 intensely than in the world at large. His universal 
 action is found not to exclude particular intention 
 and particular action. And surely this is the verdict 
 of nature as a whole. God acts more intensely in 
 man’s mind and personality than in rocks or beasts. 
 He shows more of Himself in the free moral conscience 
 than in the automatic action of plants. Again, the 
 spirit of beauty—which is God in one aspect—was 
 more intensely present in the Greeks than in the 
 Romans or the rest of the races. It is a fact to which 
 all belief in God must accommodate itself, that God’s 
 general presence and action is compatible with His 
 fuller and intenser presence and action here and there. 
 And there is no a priori reason why His fuller and 
 intenser self-revelation of Himself through the 
 Hebrew prophets should not have had its culmination 
 in the particular historical person of Jesus. 
 
 2. We shall not for a moment be so foolish as to 
 entertain the idea of exempting the sacred documents 
 of Christianity from the severest and freest criticism. 
 Reason essentially demands that historical criticism 
 shall apply itself with equal and full freedom to every 
 document. But obviously historical criticism reaches 
 different results when it applies itself to different 
 
FREE CRITICISM 177 
 
 epochs and to different kinds of documents. It 
 reaches different results when it applies itself to the 
 legend of Arthur, the story of Alfred and the history 
 of Henry VIII, or when it applies itself in the Old 
 Testament to Adam, to Abraham, to Elijah, and to 
 Isaiah. We must apply criticism to all records with 
 the varying results which the records warrant. But 
 we must be very careful in each case that what we 
 are applying is really historical criticism, and not 
 what may be more properly called intellectual 
 prejudice. No doubt all historical criticism implies, 
 more or less, intellectual presuppositions—it must 
 come to its examination of documents with certain 
 canons of probability. But these canons of probability 
 must be very carefully examined and themselves 
 criticized. All good historical criticism must be very 
 submissive to the real evidence in each particular 
 case; and while it cannot do without praejudicia — 
 that is, general presuppositions, based upon its 
 general philosophy of experience—it must be very 
 careful that these praejudicia are not arbitrary 
 44 prejudices ”—whether ecclesiastical prejudices or 
 rationalistic. And to secure this, it is necessary that 
 the praejudicia of any current school of critics should 
 be exposed to the light and carefully scrutinized, so 
 that nothing should intervene between our judgement 
 and the evidence, which prevents the latter from 
 having its due force. 
 
 3. Thirdly, we had better seek to estimate, in the 
 light of the general experience of mankind, the relative 
 value for religion of myths or symbols on the one 
 hand—that is, statements or stories which cannot make 
 any serious claims to be literally true—and serious 
 statements of fact on the other. It is necessary to 
 consider this question, because recent 44 modernists ” 
 13 
 
178 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 in religion, convinced that the miraculous narratives 
 of the New Testament cannot be historically true, 
 have been consoling themselves, and seeking to console 
 others, with the reflection that the creed and scriptures 
 contain confessedly many apparent statements of 
 fact which are only symbolic and not literally true 
 statements, and that no serious harm to religion will 
 occur if we are compelled to go a little further and to 
 recognize that such phrases as “he was born of the 
 Virgin,” “ he was raised the third day from the dead,” 
 “ he ascended into heaven,” are not literally historical, 
 but have symbolical value, symbolizing the spiritual 
 truths that the birth of Jesus was providential and 
 His nature pure, that the apostles were convinced by 
 spiritual visions that death had not triumphed over 
 Him, and that His moral Lordship is a spiritual reality. 
 
 Now, we cannot doubt that “symbols ” or “myths” 
 (as Plato conceived them) have played a great and 
 beneficent part in religion and must continue to do so. 
 Thus (i) the Fathers of the Christian Church, following 
 St. Paul, have always been forward to assert that all 
 our statements about the being of God as He is in 
 Himself—the transcendental reality—are symbolical, 
 in the sense that they are the expression in human 
 language of a reality which we cannot really grasp 
 with our present faculties or expound in human 
 terms. “ Man has no celestial language,” and can 
 only express eternal things in the best phrases that 
 experience has provided him with, confessing their 
 inadequacy. What they have contended is that 
 such phrases as “ Three persons in one substance ” 
 are the best phrases which human language can 
 supply; that they have divine authorization 
 behind them ; and that to decline to use such phrases 
 because they are inadequate would be to open the 
 
MYTHS AND SYMBOLS 179 
 
 door to positively misleading denials or misconcep¬ 
 tions. 
 
 (ii) There is a whole group of subjects which lie 
 at present outside possible human experience—the 
 beginnings of the world, the end of the world, heaven 
 and hell and the state of the dead—with regard to 
 which there would be to-day very general agreement 
 to recognize that we know nothing except in symbols 
 or myths, such as the stories of creation in Genesis— 
 which there is every reason to believe inspired of 
 God, but are none the less not historical—or the 
 visions of the end of the world and the day of judgement 
 and heaven and hell. It is commonly said that in 
 early Christian days these stories or pictures were 
 believed to be literally true, and that it is a great 
 change to accept them as symbolic. Now, it is 
 certainly the case that in the middle ages and under 
 the Protestant Reformation an undue literalism 
 prevailed ; but in the first four Christian centuries 
 the principle of symbolic representation of all that 
 lies outside present human experience was at least 
 widely accepted, and applied to the story of creation 
 and the visions of the end. About heaven and hell it is 
 commonly said that till recent days everyone believed 
 that heaven was a place above our heads and hell a 
 pit beneath our feet. If, however, we consider how 
 Platonism had influenced the educated world, with 
 its doctrine of myths or symbolic stories about 
 creation and heaven and hell, and how deep its in¬ 
 fluence was on the Christian Church, or at least on its 
 educated members and especially the Greeks, we shall 
 be inclined to doubt this. Certainly Church teachers 
 frankly recognized that “ he sitteth on the right 
 hand of God” was a symbolic statement and not a 
 literal truth. Certainly St. Paul, in his language 
 
180 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 about “ the heavenly places,” and how we men on 
 earth are already in Christ in them, or in his language 
 about the dead who sleep “ in Jesus,” does not suggest 
 a vault above the sky or a deep pit underground. I 
 fancy Paul and Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and 
 multitudes of others knew that statements about the 
 other world were symbolic—necessarily symbolic, but 
 none the less vehicles for spiritual truth of the utmost 
 importance. 
 
 Anyway, we admit to-day that there is in Christian 
 scriptures and creeds a great deal of language, about 
 things which lie outside our possible experience, which 
 is necessarily symbolic, though the symbolism may 
 be divinely inspired and should, where it is merely of 
 human origin, be the language best adapted to 
 represent the truth of any which we can use. 
 
 But the justification for all this symbolism is that 
 the things symbolized lie outside possible human 
 experience in the present world. And the distinctive 
 boast of Christianity has been that by a personal 
 incarnation God has in a quite new way passed inside 
 the region of human experience; that He has taken 
 fresh action in the world of men and nature ; that 
 the Word, who is God, has been made flesh, and lived 
 and taught and manifested Himself to men, and was 
 by men rejected, and suffered and died; and that 
 God has vindicated Him by a resurrection from the 
 dead the third day after His death ; so that his faint¬ 
 hearted disciples came to know for certain, on the 
 evidence of their own eyes, that the power which made 
 and rules the world—the Almighty God—is on the 
 side of Jesus, and that He is sovereign Lord. Now, all 
 this may be true or not. But it seems to me ridiculous 
 to doubt that it is in the appeal to facts that the 
 specific strength of Christianity has lain. There is 
 
181 
 
 SYMBOLS AND FACTS 
 
 a strength in the symbolism which merely expresses 
 human ideas and aspirations, and it may be an instru¬ 
 ment used by the Divine Spirit, but it is of a quite 
 different value to the strength of experienced fact. 
 And because a statement about what cannot possibly 
 lie within present human experience can be recognized 
 as symbolic without losing what strength it can have, 
 it is illogical and absurd to say that a statement which 
 professes to be a statement of what has actually 
 happened does not lose all its special force, if you are 
 bound to recognize that it did not happen as asserted. 
 It appears to me that in ignoring, as some of our 
 “critics” do, the distinction between the value of 
 idea and symbol in religion and the value of fact, they 
 are violating common sense. If Christ was not born 
 of a virgin, but only providentially born in the ordinary 
 way, the narratives of Matthew and Luke cannot with 
 any fairness be described as the best expression in 
 human language of something which human language 
 cannot properly express; for the manner of the birth 
 of Jesus could have been just as truly expressed in 
 accordance with the fact as the birth of John the 
 Baptist, which is side by side with it in St. Luke. 
 As it stands, the story represents on this showing a 
 needless falsification of the facts. So it is with the 
 Resurrection. If the dead body of Jesus did really 
 see corruption like the bodies of other men, the narra¬ 
 tive which lays so much stress on this not having 
 occurred, and makes so urgent a claim to be a narrative 
 of things as they happened, is (intentionally or other¬ 
 wise) very seriously misleading; because what 
 actually happened could have been quite truly de¬ 
 scribed in human language. A virgin birth and a 
 corporal resurrection recorded as facts cannot be 
 harmless and necessary symbols of actual occurrences 
 
182 THE HISTORICAL RELIGION 
 
 which were in reality quite different, and which might 
 quite as well have been described as they were. 1 
 
 We must approach, then, this question : Did the 
 historical self-disclosure of God through the Hebrew 
 prophets really culminate in the way which the New 
 Testament represents—that is, in a person who 
 passed the measure of mere humanity, and in a series 
 of events connected with Him, some of which at least 
 are conspicuously supernatural and miraculous ? All 
 questions, however, concerning the person of Christ 
 are deferred to another volume. But the circle of 
 ideas about Christ’s person and functions in the New 
 Testament is so closely bound up with the specific 
 Old Testament doctrine of God, with which this 
 volume is concerned, that w T e will devote ourselves at 
 once to two questions, which must receive solution 
 before questions about Christ’s person can be pro¬ 
 fitably asked or answered. (1) Can we rely upon the 
 New Testament documents as historical, when we 
 treat them critically ? (2) Can we regard the miracu¬ 
 
 lous incidents recorded as credible, supposing the 
 evidence appears to us to be cogent ? Or in other 
 words, is it fair to say that, if we believe the prophetic 
 teaching about God, which Jesus Christ so certainly 
 confirmed, to be really true, we shall find that no a 
 'priori reason remains in our minds constraining us to 
 disbelieve the witness of the New Testament to 
 miraculous occurrences ; and conversely that what 
 makes that witness incredible to so many intellectuals 
 of our day is that in fact they do not believe in 
 the God of the prophets and Christ, but have re- 
 
 1 Mr. Clement Webb has dealt admirably, as it seems to me, with 
 the relation of myth to history, both for Plato and for us (see Qod 
 and Personality, pp. 168, 175, 177, 179), and has spoken true words on 
 the value of a distinctively historical religion ( Studies in the History 
 of Natural Theology , p. 30). 
 
THE QUESTION OF THE DOCUMENTS 188 
 
 verted to a conception of the purely immanent God, 
 which does not essentially differ from the conception 
 of God current in the Greek world which Christianity 
 superseded ? 
 
 Let us seek, then, first of all, to obtain an estimate 
 of the historical value of the New Testament 
 documents in general and especially of those most 
 important for our purpose. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE HISTORICAL WORTH OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 I 
 
 Christianity presents itself, then, to mankind as, in a 
 special sense, an historical religion, that is as a Gospel 
 and a life centred in and based upon a certain group 
 of historical events—the life, death, resurrection, 
 ascension of Jesus of Nazareth and the mission of His 
 Spirit to perpetuate His activity in His Church. 
 History has proved the manifest advantages of a 
 religion which thus makes its appeal to facts cf 
 actual occurrence, and we have recognized also its 
 equally manifest peril, supposing it should appear 
 that historical criticism of a legitimate kind can 
 invalidate the supposed facts. It is necessary, 
 therefore, at this stage to look to our New Testament 
 documents and to ascertain whether we can trust 
 both the direct record of the Gospels and Acts as 
 properly historical, and the rest of the documents as 
 being in the main what they profess to be, and as 
 supplying therefore abundant evidence of what the 
 first generation of Christians believed and practised, 
 and of their general outlook over the world. 
 
 Now, in respect of the documents of the New Testa¬ 
 ments, the advanced critics of the Tubingen school, 
 dominant half a century ago, and their followers, were 
 accustomed to assign most of them to comparatively 
 late dates and to unknown authors. This was the 
 view which called itself critical a generation ago. 
 
 184 
 
REACTION TOWARDS TRADITION 185 
 
 But of recent years there has been, on these questions 
 of date and authorship, a marked reaction, of which 
 Adolph Harnack—the greatest, I suppose, of con¬ 
 temporary scholars in the Christian literature of the 
 first century—is representative. When he published in 
 1897 his Chronology of Ancient Christian Literature , the 
 following passage produced a sensation: 
 
 “ There was a time,” he wrote, “ and the general 
 public is still at that date, when it was considered necessary 
 to hold the most ancient Christian literature, including the 
 New Testament, as a tissue of deception and falsehood. 
 That time has now passed. For science it was an episode 
 during which she learned much, and after which she has 
 much to forget. The results of my investigations go 
 in a reactionary sense far beyond what one might call 
 the moderate position in the criticism of to-day. The 
 most ancient literature of the Church is, on all chief 
 points, and in the majority of details, veracious and worthy 
 of belief from the point of view of literary history. In 
 the whole New Testament there is probably only one 
 work which can, in the strictest sense of the word, be 
 called pseudonymous, it is II Peter. ... I do not 
 hesitate to use the word retrogression, for things should 
 be called by their right names. In our criticism of the 
 most ancient sources of Christianity, we are, without any 
 doubt, in course of returning to tradition. The problems 
 arising from the criticism of the sources ... as well as 
 the difficulties in the way of constructing true history 
 will probably present themselves, in a few years, under 
 an aspect essentially different from that they bear to-day, 
 to the majority of competent critics.” 
 
 This declaration is accompanied with a good deal 
 of vituperation of critics as men 44 fixing their 
 attention on all kinds of details in order to argue 
 against clear and decisive conclusions.” 1 This lan- 
 
 1 Harnack, Chronologie (Leipzig, 1897), vol. i, pp. viii-x. This 
 was followed by Harnack’s works on St. Luke and the Acts, entirely 
 reversing his previous opinions. See Sanday’s Life of Christ 
 
186 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 guage, I say, created a sensation as coming from one 
 who had shared the more destructive opinions, and 
 who still in his beliefs about Christ remained as far 
 removed from orthodoxy as ever. We in England 
 who had watched the struggle between the destruc¬ 
 tive German school of critics and our own conserva¬ 
 tive scholars, amongst whom Dr. Lightfoot was the 
 greatest, saw in such language the recognition of the 
 fact that, on the main questions of date and author¬ 
 ship, the conservatives had gained a solid victory—not 
 a victory over criticism, but a victory of sane criti¬ 
 cism against those who were really misusing it for 
 ulterior purposes. 
 
 1. Let us then see how matters stand about our 
 Gospels. The canonization of four Gospels—that is, 
 their selection by the Church as the four authoritative 
 records of the Master’s life—goes back to the middle 
 of the second century. 1 Let us now proceed to examine 
 their credentials, or at least the credentials of two of 
 them—St. Mark and St. Luke. 
 
 As to St. Mark we have the famous statement 
 contained in one of the fragments from the lost work 
 of Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia— 
 ‘‘ Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord ”—written 
 not later than about a.d. 130. This Papias, we 
 ought to say, gloried in not depending upon written 
 documents, but upon competent witnesses, and re¬ 
 lates how he had taken his opportunities of inter¬ 
 course with those who had been companions of 
 the first disciples of Jesus, or “ the elders,” as he 
 
 in Recent Research, p. 76, note 1. Sir William Ramsay, the dis¬ 
 tinguished traveller, scholar, and historian of New Testament times, 
 is another example of a man who began with the Tubingen view, and 
 was converted by the evidence of facts and documents. 
 
 1 See Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission (Clarke, 
 p. 257. 
 
ST. MARK’S GOSPEL 1ST 
 
 calls them. 44 If ever anyone came who had been 
 a follower of the elders, I would enquire as to the 
 discourses of the elders, what was said by Andrew, 
 or what by Peter, or what by Philip, or what by 
 Thomas or James, or what by John or Matthew 
 or any other of the disciples of the Lord ; and the 
 things which Aristion and the elder John say. 1 For 
 I did not think that I could get so much profit from 
 the contents of books as from the utterances of a 
 living and abiding voice.” This, then, is his state¬ 
 ment about Mark and his Gospel. 
 
 44 This also the elder said : Mark, having become the 
 interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately everything 
 that he remembered of the things that were either said 
 or done by Christ; but, however, not in order. For he 
 neither heard the Lord, nor had been a follower of His ; 
 but afterwards, as I said, he was a follower of Peter, who 
 framed his teaching according to the needs [of his hearers], 
 but not with the design of giving a connected account of 
 the Lord’s words. Thus Mark committed no error in 
 thus writing down some things as he remembered them. 
 For he took heed to one thing : not to omit any of the 
 things he had heard, or to set down anything falsely 
 therein.” 2 
 
 This account of the origin of St. Mark’s Gospel we 
 can accept as historical, unless it were so rigorously 
 interpreted as to mean that there is nothing in 
 St. Mark’s Gospel which is not derived from Peter’s 
 teaching. Anyone who reads the Gospel, and notes how 
 much of it consists of scenes in which St. Peter figures, 
 will feel its probability. 5 Taking it, as is now generally 
 done, for true, we have to consider who this John 
 
 1 Aristion and John are regarded as still living at the time of his 
 enquiries. 
 
 a Salmon’s trans. (in the main), Diet, of Chr. Biog., iv, p. 186. 
 
 8 See Batiffol’s Credibility of the Gospels (Longmans), p. 126. 
 
188 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Mark who wrote the Gospel was. We find him in 
 the Acts, 1 about fifteen years after Pentecost, in his 
 mother’s house at Jerusalem, and this house we find 
 a place of resort for the first Christians. It must 
 have been a fairly large house, to hold the 44 many ” 
 who were gathered together and praying. It had an 
 outer gate and a portress, like the gate and portress 
 at the high priest’s house (John xviii. 16). There 
 Mark must have enjoyed the fullest opportunities of 
 seeing and hearing the apostles and first disciples, 
 both men and women. He drank constantly at the 
 fountain head of that oral tradition which lies behind 
 all the written Gospels, that witness of the apostolic 
 company to what they had seen and heard 44 all the 
 time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among 
 us, beginning from the baptism of John unto the day 
 that He was received up from us.” 2 He was among 
 the men (and women) whose special privilege it was 
 to treasure this witness. In his Gospel 3 there is intro¬ 
 duced the incident of the young man in a linen cloth 
 who was a spectator of our Lord’s arrest. It is so 
 singular, and so irrelevant to what goes before and 
 after, that I do not think it can have any meaning 
 but one. It is like an irrelevant figure in a sacred 
 picture of the Renaissance which has in its mouth the 
 label with the words Iste perfecit opus . The young 
 man must have been the author of the Gospel. So 
 we should suppose that his familiarity with the 
 apostolic company was of long standing. Thus when 
 Barnabas and Paul returned to Antioch from their 
 visit to Jerusalem, which had been undertaken to 
 
 1 xii. 12, 25. 2 Acts i. 21-2. 
 
 8 xiv. 51-2. Whether his mother’s house contained the cenaculum 
 is matter of pure conjecture. That St. Mark was the “ young 
 man ” is something near to certainty : see Salmon’s Human Element 
 in Gospels (Murray), pp. 499-500. 
 
ST. MARK 189 
 
 carry assistance to the Church of Judaea under the 
 threat of famine, John Mark, Barnabas’s cousin, was a 
 natural person for them to take back with them to 
 help in their work. He was closely associated with 
 them in the early stages of the first missionary journey. 1 
 But he left them before they went inland from Perga 
 to the Pisidian Antioch—it is conjectured because his 
 training at Jerusalem left him still unwilling to com¬ 
 mit himself to St. Paul’s “ liberal ” platform in respect 
 of the welcome to be given to the Gentiles. A few 
 years later he is still at Antioch, when Paul and 
 Barnabas had their sharp contention as to whether 
 he was a fit person to be a second time their com¬ 
 panion. As it was, Paul and Barnabas separated in 
 consequence of the dispute, and Mark went with his 
 cousin Barnabas alone. There follows a gap in our 
 knowledge about Mark of some ten or twelve years. 
 Then we find him with St. Paul in his prison at Rome, 2 
 a trusted friend, but apparently just about to start for 
 Asia. Then later again in St. Paul’s second captivity, 8 
 we find him writing to Timothy in Ephesus and 
 begging him to take Mark and bring him with him 
 (to Rome), for “ he is profitable to me for ministry.” 4 
 This was no doubt Mark’s function—not originality, 
 but ministry to those greater than himself. A 
 year or so later, after St. Paul’s death, Peter writes 
 from Rome, in his first epistle, 6 of Sylvanus, “ a faith- 
 
 1 Acts xiii. 5. 2 Col. iv. 10. 
 
 3 That St. Paul was liberated from his first captivity in Rome, 
 which is described in the Acts, is rendered certain by the fact that 
 Clement of Rome, writing towards the end of the first century, 
 asserts (cap. v) that St. Paul went to “the limit of the West” 
 before he was put to death. No one writing in Rome could mean 
 by this phrase anything but Spain : see Lightfoot’s note. Granted 
 this, it seems to me that it is unreasonable to doubt the historical 
 data of 2 Timothy. 
 
 4 2 Tim. iv. 11. 
 
 6 1 Pet. v. 13. 
 
190 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 ful brother,” who is to carry his letter, and of 44 Mark 
 my son,” who is with him. This reminds us of the 
 statement of Papias’s elder—that he was 44 Peter’s 
 interpreter.” The relationship indicated suggests a 
 prolonged connexion between the two men; and 
 presumably we may fill up the ten or twelve years’ 
 blank space in Mark’s life with the picture of him as 
 Peter’s companion, wherever he may have been, hear¬ 
 ing his often-repeated teaching about the earlier 
 experiences of the twelve with their Lord, and either 
 noting it down at the time or preparing to write by 
 storing it in his memory. 
 
 Well, now, after all these experiences, who—outside 
 the twelve apostles—could be better qualified than 
 Mark to write an account of the ministry of Jesus ? 
 He had lived so long in the atmosphere of the apostolic 
 witness. And when, without overburdening ourselves 
 with commentaries, we set ourselves to the study of 
 his Gospel—how does it strike us ? I speak for myself: 
 it produces upon me an irresistible impression that 
 I am in the presence of reality. I do not know how 
 often, after reading some 44 critical ” work having for 
 its aim to prove that even Mark’s account is two or 
 three removes off the original facts, I have gone back 
 to read the little book itself without note or comment, 
 and received afresh this irresistible impression. I am 
 sure that I am here, again and again, listening to one 
 who records what he himself saw and heard—the 
 look of the face of Jesus, the tones of His voice, His 
 gestures, the movement and feelings of the crowd. 
 No doubt you have that feeling sometimes when you 
 read the best novelists. But this sort of realistic 
 power did not exist in the literary circles out of which 
 the Gospels came. And this particular Gospel is 
 singularly destitute of literary skill or grace. Besides, 
 
HIS SOURCE PETER 191 
 
 the modern novelists describe for us ordinary human 
 nature. It may be safely conjectured that even 
 they would not have succeeded in producing out of 
 their imagination a life-like image of so supernaturally 
 conceived a person as Jesus. The Gospel, we feel 
 assured, is not the work of either the crude popular 
 imagination which fashions a legend, such as we get 
 in the apocryphal Gospels, or the individual imagina¬ 
 tion which produces an historical romance or adorns 
 a tradition. Here is the real Man in his real surround¬ 
 ings, as one saw and heard and bare witness. 1 And 
 this one, on internal indications, we believe to be, 
 as tradition tells us he was, Simon Peter. 
 
 I do not mean that it is all Peter. Suppose that 
 beside Peter’s story of the feeding of the five thousand, 
 Mark heard another story of a miraculous feeding, in 
 which the numbers were four thousand instead of five 
 thousand, and seven loaves instead of five, and mistook 
 it for a different incident, and so gave us an account 
 of two events where really there was but one, this 
 would make no material difference to us. We are 
 asking not for infallibility, but for quite trustworthy 
 history. 
 
 It cannot be pleaded that Mark, even if he often 
 heard Peter teli the same incident, could not have 
 remembered his words so minutely. On the contrary, 
 that was the special faculty of the Jewish disciple. 
 
 1 See Hawkins, Horae Synopticae, pp. 95-105. He quotes from 
 A. B. Bruce on this Gospel: “ These marks [in the Gospel] are such 
 as to suggest an eye and ear witness as the source of many narratives, 
 and a narrator unembarrassed by reverence. This feeling, we know, 
 does come into play in biographical delineations of men whose 
 characters have become invested with sacredness, and its influence 
 grows with time. The high esteem in which they are held more or 
 less controls biographers, and begets a tendency to leave out humble 
 facts, etc.” 
 
192 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Mark had been trained in Jerusalem presumably, in the 
 Jewish schools, where exact verbal memory was the 
 very faculty especially cultivated. He would have 
 been trained to be an adept in this very thing. “ The 
 good disciple,” said the Jews, “ is like a cistern built 
 of concrete, which does not lose one drop.” 1 Our 
 modern education is on quite different lines. Also 
 the Synoptic records are even for us singularly easy 
 to remember, not only our Lord’s words, but the 
 records as a whole. What we should suppose is that 
 Peter gave regular instructions, in whatever church 
 he was temporarily abiding, and selected a group of 
 incidents and sayings such as he considered best 
 adapted to his hearers, and that these were frequently 
 repeated, so that St. Mark could well reproduce them 
 quite accurately. This is exactly what Papias’s 
 “ elder ” suggests to us. 
 
 It is often asked how it can be that there is no 
 indication, or so little indication, in Mark of a Jerusa¬ 
 lem ministry such as the Fourth Gospel records, if 
 this were really historical. But I think this question 
 is based upon a mistake. What gives the scope to 
 Mark’s narrative is mainly the selection of incidents 
 for the first instruction of converts made by Peter. 
 There was no intention of making a complete 
 record. 
 
 We take note that, though St. Mark must have been 
 very familiar with Paul’s mind and Peter’s mind as 
 we find it reflected in their epistles, the narrative of 
 his Gospel is extraordinarily free from any influence 
 of a doctrinal kind derived from such experience. 
 All the atmosphere of the record is the atmosphere of 
 the first discipleship with its ignorance and slowness 
 of spiritual perception; and the phraseology and 
 
 ?• See Batiffol, pp. 162 f. 
 
198 
 
 ST. LUKE 
 
 manner of teaching is that of Jesus and no one else— 
 even when, as in the case of the title “ Son of Man ” 
 or the method of teaching by parables, the phraseology 
 and manner had been quite abandoned in the churches 
 of apostolic foundation. 
 
 On the exact date of Mark’s Gospel, and on the 
 question of there having been more than one edition, 
 we need not dwell. The elder’s information suggests 
 certainly that Mark wrote when he was no longer a 
 hearer of Peter, that is, when Peter was dead, and so 
 Irenaeus tells us. We may suppose the Gospel to 
 have been written, as it now stands, just after Peter’s 
 death, say in a.d. 65-7. The suggestions which were 
 abundantly made in Tubingen days of a second-century 
 date have now been abandoned. 
 
 My contention is, then, that in John Mark you 
 have a man admirably qualified to give us an exact 
 account of the story of the apostles about their 
 experiences with our Lord, and especially of St. Peter’s 
 story, and that we have every reason to believe that 
 he has reproduced it with the most faithful and simple 
 diligence. St. Mark’s Gospel, then, has every claim 
 to count for good history. 
 
 2. Now let us pass from St. Mark to St. Luke and 
 the two books ascribed to him—the third Gospel and 
 the Acts of the Apostles. There does not appear to 
 have been any question raised in early days as to the 
 authorship of either of these books. In the preface to 
 what is (I am not alone in thinking) one of the best 
 and most interesting commentaries on any book of 
 the Bible, Mr. Rackham’s Commentary on the Acts, 1 
 will be found a summary of the reasons for believing 
 the tradition to be true as regards the Acts and 
 incidentally as regards the Gospel. The following 
 1 In the Westminster Commentaries (Methuen). 
 
 14 
 
194 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 points may be regarded as certain, in my opinion. 
 (1) That the Acts is the work of one author, that is, 
 that St. Paul’s travelling companion, who often 
 implies his presence at the scenes he records by the 
 use of the pronoun “ we,” was the author of the whole 
 book. 1 (2) That the Gospel and the Acts are by the 
 same author. (3) That no one of St. Paul’s travelling 
 companions can be put in plausible rivalry with 
 St. Luke “the beloved physician,” to whom tradition 
 ascribes the books. (4) That the language of the 
 books themselves supplies the evidence that the author 
 was a well-educated man and most probably a phy¬ 
 sician, owing to his use of careful medical language. 8 
 Granted the authorship, a very interesting question 
 arises as to the date. The Acts takes us up to the 
 end of the second year of St. Paul’s imprisonment at 
 Rome. Then it closes, as we feel abruptly, with an 
 adverb. Is it conceivable that if, as has been com¬ 
 monly supposed, the Acts was written some fifteen 
 years or more later, the author could have given no 
 indication of the result of St. Paul’s trial or of the 
 manner of his death ; or that he could have given so 
 favourable an impression of the policy of the Empire 
 towards the Church, without the least hint that it was 
 so soon to pass into a policy of deliberate persecution, 
 under which Peter and Paul would be martyred with 
 many others ? Is it likely that no hint would have 
 been given that Paul was mistaken when he assured 
 the sorrowing Ephesians that he would “ see their 
 
 1 This was proved by Sir John Hawkins, Horae Synopticae, pp. 
 148 ff. Harnack has not recently added much to the cogency of the 
 proofs : see Headlam’s Miracles , p. 166 n. 
 
 2 This was the argument of Hobart, Medical Language of St. 
 
 Luke. He overpressed his argument. But I think that, after all 
 deductions, enough solid ground remains for his argument to stand 
 upon firmly. <pr 
 
195 
 
 DATE OF GOSPEL 
 
 face no more ” ? 1 Are not all the probabilities of 
 the case met by the theory that the Acts was written 
 up to date, i.e. about a.d. 63, while St. Paul was still 
 awaiting his trial, and that if the author had intended 
 to continue his narrative, his intention was frustrated, 
 perhaps by his own death ? This has been very 
 ably argued by Rackham—not for the first time. 
 When he wrote (1901) he had to reckon among his 
 opponents the famous Professor Harnack. But since 
 then Harnack has changed his mind and, reproducing 
 and reinforcing the arguments of Hawkins, Hobart, 
 and Rackham as to authorship, has finally claimed 
 it as almost certain s that St. Luke wrote the Acts 
 up to date, and that the Gospel, the first of St. Luke’s 
 two volumes, must therefore have been written earlier, 
 and as the Gospel is based upon Mark’s Gospel, that 
 again must have been accessible in a.d. 60 at the latest.* 
 On the whole, I think those who argue for this 
 position have the best of the argument. But I do not 
 want to lay stress on anything that is disputable. 
 Sir William Ramsay—who is unrivalled as an inde¬ 
 pendent investigator of the history and conditions of 
 the early Christian Church, by means not only of 
 the study of all available documents, but by con¬ 
 stant travelling, especially in Asia Minor, where he 
 has had great success as a discover of inscriptions— 
 prefers a later date for the Acts ; but he has been the 
 most eager and strenuous advocate both for St. Luke’s 
 authorship of Gospel and Acts and for his character 
 as an entirely trustworthy historian. 
 
 1 Acts xx. 25 and 33. In fact St. Paul returned to Asia and to 
 Miletus, where this scene took place, if not actually to Ephesus 
 (2 Tim. iv. 20). 
 
 2 Date oj the Acts and Synoptic Gospels (Williams & Norgate). 
 
 * But St. Luke had intercourse with St. Mark at Rome, and may 
 very well have seen his material before it was published. 
 
196 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Indeed, the vindication, by inscriptions and other¬ 
 wise, of St. Luke’s trustworthiness on all that touches 
 the Roman Empire has been startling. 
 
 “ The ground covered by St. Luke,” writes Mr. 
 Rackham, “ reached from Jerusalem to Rome, taking in 
 Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. In that field were 
 comprised all manner of populations, civilizations, adminis¬ 
 trations—Jewish and Oriental life, Western civilization, 
 great capitals like Antioch and Ephesus, Roman colonies, 
 independent towns, Greek cities, ‘ barbarous ’ country 
 districts. The history covers a period of thirty years, which 
 witnessed in many parts great political changes. Provinces 
 like Cyprus and Antioch were being exchanged between 
 the Emperor and the Senate ; parts of Asia Minor, e.g. 
 Pisidia and Lycaonia, were undergoing a process of 
 annexation and latinization ; Judaea itself was now a 
 Roman province under a procurator, now an independent 
 state under an Herodian king. Yet in ail this intricacy of 
 political arrangement St. Luke is never found tripping. . . . 
 St. Luke is equally at home with the Sanhedrin and its 
 parties, the priests and temple guard, and the Herodian 
 princes at Jerusalem, with the proconsul of Cyprus and 
 Achaia, the rulers of the Synagogue and first men of Antioch 
 in Pisidia, the priest of Zeus at Lystra, the praetors, lictors, 
 and jailer of Philippi, the politarchs of Thessalonica, the 
 Areopagus of Athens, the Asiarchs with the people , 
 assembly , and secretary of Ephesus, the centurions, tribune , 
 and procurator of Judaea, the first man of Malta, and the 
 captain of the camp at Rome. Such accuracy would have 
 been almost impossible for a writer compiling the history 
 fifty years later. In some cases where his statements had 
 been impugned, St. Luke has been signally vindicated by 
 the discovery of inscriptions, as in the case of the politarch 
 of Thessalonica and the proconsul of Cyprus.” 1 
 
 The chief stumbling-block in the way of a high 
 estimate of St. Luke’s accuracy as regards the secular 
 details of his story used to be his statement about the 
 first enrolment under Quirinius . 2 But Ramsay has 
 
 1 Rackham, Acts, p. xlv. 2 Lxike ii. 1. 
 
HIS TRUSTWORTHINESS 19? 
 
 made the reality of such an enrolment remarkably 
 probable; and inscriptions tend to connect it with 
 Quirinius. At the worst, if Tertullian is right in put¬ 
 ting it under Saturninus and not under Quirinius, the 
 mistake is only a slight misdating, and Ramsay does 
 not admit even this. The method of enrolment by 
 “ every man going up to his own city,” which St. 
 Luke affirms, was derided as absurd forty years ago, 
 but has been amazingly supported by the discovery 
 of an Egyptian papyrus on which is a census order 
 of a Roman governor (of a.d. 104) which precisely 
 orders everyone to go for enrolment to his own city. 
 And this is now recognized as a method of the imperial 
 administration in the provinces. 1 
 
 Granted, then, St. Luke’s authorship, and bearing in 
 mind the vindication of his accuracy as an historian 
 in general, let us read his Preface to the Gospel. It 
 is in St. Luke’s own Greek, the Greek of a cultivated 
 man, quite unlike the Hebraic style of the first part 
 of his narrative, where he is obviously relying on some 
 already-existing Aramaic narrative. Well, this 
 preface gives us a singularly convincing account of 
 St. Luke’s intentions and qualifications. He notes 
 that the Roman gentleman, for whose benefit he 
 writes, had received instruction , 2 presumably such 
 as was imparted to all Christians orally, in the matters 
 of his story ; he notes that there had been already 
 
 1 The whole matter can be seen summarized in Box’s Virgin 
 Birth of Jesus (Pitman), pp. 51-G6, and in Ramsay, Was Christ born 
 in Bethlehem ? (1898) and Bearings of Recent Discovery on the Trust¬ 
 worthiness of the N.T. (1915), ch. xix-xxi. Ramsay, I admit, often 
 gives the impression of pressing his points a little further than they 
 will legitimately carry. In Pelham’s Outlines of Roman History , 
 p. 385, “ Luke ii. 1 ” is cited as historical evidence. 
 
 2 gee “ Those things whereon thou wast instructed .” The instruc¬ 
 tion was presumably oral. But the word used does not imply this. 
 
198 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 many attempts to put the narrative of the first apos¬ 
 tolic witnesses into writing, but he is not apparently 
 satisfied with these attempts. He has had the oppor¬ 
 tunity of tracing the events of our Lord’s history 
 accurately from the beginning, and he is determined 
 to give an orderly and trustworthy account of them, 
 for Theophilus’s benefit, and doubtless for the general 
 benefit also, as writers do to-day when they write 
 an 44 open letter ” addressed to an individual, but 
 intended for the general public. There is no claim 
 made by Luke to special inspiration, but only a claim 
 to have had the fullest opportunity of gathering 
 information and to have taken advantage of it so as 
 to be able to produce an accurate narrative. Not 
 that he is careful about verbal or minute accuracy, 
 as is shown by the apparent difference between the 
 summary narrative of our Lord’s last appearance and 
 disappearance at the end of his Gospel and the more 
 exact account given in the beginning of the Acts, or 
 by the three accounts which he gives, differing in 
 detail, of St. Paul’s conversion : plainly it satisfies 
 him to give a truthful account without troubling 
 about minute accuracy. 
 
 And we can discern in great measure his sources of 
 information. He was St. Paul’s constant companion 
 from the time of his second or (perhaps) his first mis¬ 
 sionary journey. In his captivity at Rome, St. 
 Paul bore witness that 44 Luke the beloved physician ” 
 was with him, and under these circumstances he must 
 have had intercourse with St. Mark, from whom he 
 took the main substance of his Petrine narrative to 
 incorporate in his own book . 1 Besides this, there is 
 
 1 It is very likely that when Papias or his informant described St. 
 Mark as not having written what he wrote about our Lord “ in 
 order ” (see above, p. 187), he meant that St. Mark’s Gospel was un- 
 
199 
 
 HIS SOURCES 
 
 a large part of St. Luke’s narrative, consisting 
 especially, but not exclusively, of our Lord’s sayings, 
 which is common to him with St. Matthew. Here, 
 also, it is commonly supposed they were drawing 
 upon a document or documents consisting in the 
 main of our Lord’s discourses, which is commonly 
 known among critics as Q . 1 That there was such a 
 document or documents I do not think we can 
 doubt, and criticism ascribes to it a very early date ; 
 but the scope of the document remains quite un¬ 
 certain. Besides St. Mark and Q, St. Luke gives us 
 probable indications of other sources of information. 
 He mentions two individuals connected with Herod’s 
 court — 44 Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward ” 
 and 44 Menaen the foster-brother of Herod the 
 Tetrarch”—and these persons probably account for 
 the special information which he obviously had about 
 matters connected with the Herods. Besides, he 
 mentions repeatedly a group of women who accom¬ 
 panied our Lord and ministered of their substance to 
 Him and His disciples, who were present in Jerusalem 
 at the Passion, and who were in the apostolic company 
 after the Ascension, Mary the mother of Jesus being 
 amongst them . 2 From this group we should suppose 
 Luke to have derived the narrative with which his 
 Gospel opens, after his preface—a narrative which 
 shows evident marks of coming from the mouth or 
 hand of a woman. The special mention of Rhoda 
 in the household of Mark’s mother probably indicates 
 whence he got his account of Peter’s release; Philip 
 
 systematic and incomplete, and was contrasting it with the more 
 systematic and complete narrative of St. Luke. But we have lost 
 the context. 
 
 1 The first letter of the German word Quelle , “ the source.” 
 
 2 See viii. 2-3, xxiii. 49, 55, xxiv. 10, 22; Acts i. 14. 
 
200 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 the Evangelist, with whom “ we” stayed at Caesarea , 1 
 and Mnason, the 44 original disciple,’’ who accom- ' 
 panied Paul and his company, including Luke, to 
 Jerusalem, and was to give them lodging there,* 
 would be good sources for all the earlier narratives of 
 the Acts. On the whole, it is obvious that St. Luke 
 had very good opportunities of 44 tracing accurately 
 from the first ” the incidents of our Lord’s life from 
 His birth to His Ascension, and the beginnings of 
 the Church before he himself became an eye-witness 
 of its expansion. We do not claim infallibility for 
 him in detail. But we have the best reason to 
 claim for him that he is a careful and well-informed 
 historian in direct access to those 44 who from the 
 first were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word ” 
 — which is the claim of his preface. 
 
 His narrative is coloured by his disposition, which 
 is apparent. He loves to emphasize the humility and 
 poverty of Christ and His companions, and our 
 Lord’s insistence on the blessing of poverty and the 
 danger of wealth; he loves to bring out the mercy 
 of Jesus and the readiness of the divine forgiveness, 
 which He proclaimed and ministered ; he loves to 
 recall all that dignifies womanhood ; he hates con¬ 
 troversy, we should suppose, and loves peace ; and 
 probably he minimizes the amount of division of 
 opinion, as between Judaizers and Paulinists, that 
 there was in the first Church. But after all it was 
 the peace party which prevailed. And an historian 
 like Tacitus is not supposed to be a better historian 
 because he retails the scandals of an earlier genera¬ 
 tion. In fact, the special characteristics of our Lord 
 which he brings to the front were, we have reason to 
 
 1 Acts xxi. 8. 
 
 2 Acts xxi. 16. 
 
HIS CHARACTERISTICS 201 
 
 believe, 1 really His characteristics—humility, meek¬ 
 ness, and gentleness. It is James the Lord’s brother, 
 who would have been claimed by the Judaizers as their 
 leader, who speaks of “ the wisdom that is from 
 above ” as “ first pure, then peaceable, concessive, 
 easy to be entreated, without partiality, and without 
 hypocrisy,” and declares that 44 the fruit of righteous¬ 
 ness is sown in peace by them that make peace.” 
 He suggests that the peaceable spirit in the early 
 Church was the prevailing spirit, and would win the 
 day, and that the violence of party, which he con¬ 
 trasts with it, was destined to fail. Thus we shall 
 not call St. Luke a less good historian because he 
 preferred to stress this spirit of peace at work, and 
 to throw somewhat into the shade the acrimony of 
 partisans. 
 
 There is one other matter, which concerns the 
 Gospels generally, to which attention must be called. 
 The destruction of Jerusalem, like, for instance, the 
 French Revolution, created a chasm in national 
 history between what went before and what came 
 after. All the whole apparatus of the national life 
 of Israel—its parties, its proceedings, its temple- 
 worship, its interests, its centralization—was destroyed 
 with the destruction of the city and temple by the 
 Romans in a.d. 70. A later writer who had not 
 lived in the old order would never have recovered 
 its atmosphere. But all the Gospels reflect that 
 atmosphere faithfully. The conclusion, emphasized 
 by Sanday, Harnack, and many others, is that the 
 materials of the Gospels were practically all in being 
 before the destruction of Jerusalem, and that the 
 after-time had no serious effect upon them. This 
 conclusion we may, I think, take for certain, 
 
 1 See 2 Cor. x. 1. 
 
202 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 I should advise a student to proceed at this point 
 to review the status of the Epistles, and to leave the 
 question of the First and Last Gospels. But a word 
 may be said in explanation of this course. 
 
 As to our St. Matthew, it appears to have been 
 taken by the Church from the first as the premier 
 Gospel, and there is no sign of disparagement. The 
 well-known fragment of Papias tells us that “ Matthew 
 compiled the Logia in the Hebrew speech, and each 
 man interpreted them according to his ability.” I 
 think Lightfoot proved that the word Logia (oracles) 1 
 might refer to a Gospel containing incidents and 
 discourses alike, like our First Gospel. Also Papias 
 appears to mean by his use of the past tense “ inter¬ 
 preted ”—that by his time there was an authoritative 
 Greek version. But our version does not seem to be 
 a translation from a Hebrew original; nor does it 
 seem to be likely that one of the Apostles would 
 have been content to rely for the scheme and inci¬ 
 dents of his Gospel upon St. Mark’s confessedly 
 very imperfect selection of incidents, as fully as our 
 First Gospel does. What appears to be most probable, 
 on the whole, is that St. Matthew really composed in 
 Aramaic a collection of our Lord’s discourses with 
 some connecting narrative, and that someone 
 unknown, not long after a.d. 70, used this collection, 
 in combination with St. Mark’s narrative, and some 
 other material which came to him, to produce our 
 first Gospel 44 according to Matthew.” We can rely 
 with great confidence on the bulk of the discourses 
 of our Lord in St. Matthew; but where there are 
 
 1 There is another interpretation of this word which would make 
 St. Matthew’s work a compilation of O.T. “oracles” which were 
 believed to have been fulfilled in Christ. But I think it more 
 probable that Eusebius’s interpretation was correct. 
 
ST. MATTHEW AND ST. JOHN 203 
 
 important differences in discourse or narrative 
 between St. Matthew and St. Mark on the one 
 hand, and St. Matthew and St. Luke on the other, 
 and where we have independent narratives in 44 St. 
 Matthew ” without other support, we want to know, 
 and can find no answer to our question, whether we 
 are dealing with the Apostle or with some unknown 
 Palestinian disciple. 1 In some three cases we have 
 to admit that prophecies from the Old Testament 
 have been allowed to modify the details of the narra¬ 
 tive of the First Gospel, 2 and in connexion with our 
 Lord’s death and burial the author introduces material 
 which it is difficult to believe to be historical. On the 
 whole, it must be admitted that our St. Matthew 
 presents in some aspects an unknown factor and an 
 unsolved question, and (though it affects a very 
 small area of the whole) we had better rest content 
 at starting with St. Mark and St. Luke; though even 
 so it must be said that the whole of the Sermon on 
 the Mount and the parables in chapter xiii and 
 elsewhere, and the famous ending of chapter xi, 
 44 Come unto me,” even though they are unsupported 
 in the other Gospels, are self-evidencing and un¬ 
 questionable. 
 
 I have recently elsewhere expressed my reasons for 
 believing that St. John, the son of Zebedee, is really 
 the author of the Fourth Gospel, and that his scheme 
 of the history must be taken as true and used to 
 supplement the account given in the Synoptic narra¬ 
 tives, with which he was plainly acquainted, and 
 
 1 In the case of the story of the Birth of our Lord (Matt, i., ii.) and 
 of His reported sayings about the Church (Matt, xvi.) we shall have 
 occasion to examine the trustworthiness of our first Gospel later on. 
 
 3 Matt. xxi. 2 (the introduction of the ass beside the colt) ; Matt. 
 xxvi.15, cf. xxvii. 3-10 (the specification of thirty pieces of silver); 
 Matt, xxvii. 34 (the gall). 
 
204 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 which he intended to supplement and occasionally 
 correct, and that the discourses of the Fourth 
 Gospel must be taken as recovering from oblivion 
 very real and important features in our Lord’s 
 teaching. To this last point we shall have to return 
 later, when we are considering the nature of our 
 Lord’s person. Nevertheless, inasmuch as a student 
 would find himself 14 up against ” the great mass of 
 critical opinion in holding this position, I should 
 advise him to defer the question till he has felt the 
 ground secure under him on the basis of the two 
 Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke. 
 
 Thus, then, we may take it for granted that in 
 these two Gospels we have narratives by known men, 
 whose opportunities for knowing what the 44 eye¬ 
 witnesses ” recorded were as good as could be desired, 
 and whose narratives as we read them are, in the 
 highest degree, convincing. We do well to saturate 
 our minds in these two documents. We shall find 
 ourselves on the most solid historical ground. Nothing, 
 I think, could resist this conviction, except a dog¬ 
 matic presupposition that the supernatural things 
 there recorded cannot have actually happened. 
 This dogmatic presupposition we shall have to 
 investigate carefully. For the present let us leave it 
 out of account, and let the Gospels make their full 
 impression upon us. 
 
 From time to time we may meet people who are 
 moved by the consideration that if the astonishing 
 things recorded in the Gospels and Acts had really 
 happened, we should have heard more about it in 
 contemporary secular historians, especially the 
 Jewish historian Josephus. But in fact this 
 argument, so far as concerns the historians of the 
 Empire, has no force. 44 Miracles,” such as are com- 
 
SECULAR HISTORIANS 205 
 
 monly recorded in the Gospels and Acts, were also 
 reported in the Roman Empire in connexion with 
 sacred shrines and persons. 1 And though, as will 
 appear, the miracles connected with our Lord have 
 a very distinctive character, the mere report of them 
 would not have stirred the sort of excitement which 
 it would excite in the modern world. The common 
 people of the pagan world would have said that such 
 things had often happened, and the intellectual 
 sceptics that such things had always been believed 
 by the vulgar. Moreover, it was not the habit oi 
 the literary classes to pay any attention to popular 
 religions. We are led to believe that the mystery 
 religions, with their rituals and sacraments, were 
 among the most important features of the society 
 of the Empire in the period coinciding with the spread 
 of Christianity, but the allusions to them in general 
 literature are very meagre. 2 
 
 Thus what Tacitus, the only serious historian of the 
 early Empire who remains to us (writing a.d. 115-17), 
 tells us about the origin of Christianity is as much as 
 we should expect. The name Christian, he says 3 — 
 he is writing to account for Nero’s treatment of them 
 —comes from Christ, who was sent to execution, 
 
 1 E.g. The miracles of Vespasian recorded by Tacitus and 
 Suetonius, see below, p. 258. 
 
 2 “ No Roman historian, from Tacitus to the scandal-mongers of 
 
 the third and fourth centuries, ever wrote imperially. Their outlook 
 was strictly confined within the walls of Rome” (Platnauer, 
 Septimus Severus, Oxford, 1918, p. 25). “ Of the manner in which 
 
 the Empire was ruled, of the condition of the provinces, they [the 
 Roman aristocratic wuiters] tell us little, and probably did not care 
 to know much” (Pelham, Outline of Roman History, Rivington, 
 p. 436). 
 
 3 Annals, xv. 44. It is possible that. Tacitus borrowed what he 
 said about Christianity, as well as what he said about the Jews, 
 from the Historiae of Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23-79). See Batiffol, 
 The Credibility oj the Gospel (Eng. trans., Longmans), p. 36. 
 
206 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 under Tiberius, by the procurator Pontius Pilate ; 
 “ but the execrable superstition, repressed for the 
 moment, broke out again not only in Judaea, the home 
 of this plague, but also in Rome, where all horrible 
 and shameful things flow together and maintain 
 themselves.” But more, no doubt, might be expected 
 from the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in 
 the last quarter of the first century. He gives ns a 
 brief but interesting account of John the Baptist and 
 of Herod’s reason for putting him to death. He also 
 gives an account of the putting to death by the 
 high priest of James “ the brother of Jesus who is 
 called Christ.” As the text stands, there is also 
 some account of Jesus Christ Himself. As it stands, 
 however, it bears obvious marks of a Christian hand. 1 * 3 
 It is disputed whether it is merely interpolated by a 
 Christian or whether it is a forgery. Whichever be 
 the case, we have evidence enough that Josephus 
 knew something about Christ. But when he wrote, 
 Christianity was dreaded by the imperial authorities. 
 Josephus wrote to make them favourable to the Jews. 
 His motive for silence about Christianity was obvious 
 enough. And if he was almost wholly silent, it cannot 
 reasonably be suggested that it was from ignorance. 8 
 
 II 
 
 The Second and Third Gospels, then, and the Acts 
 of the Apostles are by known men—John Mark, a 
 member of the original apostolic company in Jeru¬ 
 salem, where he lived in his mother’s home, and then 
 the trusted companion of Barnabas, Paul, and Peter, 
 
 1 Dr. W. E. Barnes, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, 
 
 denies this : see Testimony of Josephus to J. C. (S.P.C.K.). 
 
 3 The whole matter is discussed by Batiffol, op. cit lect. i. 
 
THE FIRST TRADITION 207 
 
 and Luke 44 the beloved physician,” the companion 
 of St. Paul; and these men had the best opportunities 
 of intercourse with those 44 who from the beginning 
 were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,” and 
 their narratives are found extraordinarily convincing. 
 We have, then, here documents which, judged by the 
 standards of history, are fully trustworthy, and they 
 would have been, no doubt, unhesitatingly received 
 were it not for the supernatural features of which 
 they are full and the tremendous claim upon men’s 
 lives and thought which they involve. Whether these 
 features and this claim constitute any good reason for 
 disputing their trustworthiness we shall have very 
 carefully to consider. We leave the matter now and 
 proceed to consider the rest of the documents of the 
 New Testament—especially the Epistles. 
 
 But first something must be said about the pre¬ 
 suppositions of the Epistles and about their relation to 
 the Gospels. 
 
 The Epistles, like St. Luke’s Gospel, 1 were not 
 written to convey to the converts their first instruction. 
 This they presuppose. And it is very instructive to 
 observe exactly what is presupposed. Thus (i) there is 
 constant mention of the holy names of the Father, the 
 Son—the Lord Jesus, the Christ—and the Holy Spirit, 
 as of familiar persons, and of our Lord’s atoning and 
 saving work, and of angels and evil spirits. On these 
 subjects instruction is plainly presupposed, (ii) The 
 disorders arising in the Church at Corinth at the Lord’s 
 Supper and a particular phase of opinion about 
 resurrection lead St. Paul to restate precisely what 
 
 1 Luke i. 4, “ That thou mightest know the certainty (or accuracy) 
 concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed ”—doubtless when 
 Theophilus became a Christian. The instruction was oral, j doubt. 
 But the word is quite general. 
 
208 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 he had delivered to them at his first coming in the 
 form of a narrative about the institution of the 
 Eucharist and the death, burial, resurrection, and 
 appearances after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 1 
 In the latter case he specifies that what he communi¬ 
 cated to them was the same message as the other 
 apostles delivered. St. Paul elsewhere alludes to our 
 Lord’s being of the seed of David, and to the moral 
 characteristics of his life, 44 * meekness and gentleness ” 
 and humility, and to specific words of the Lord, 8 
 as to familiar things. How much teaching about the 
 life of Jesus on earth was given to St. Paul’s converts 
 we cannot exactly say. But the apparently quite 
 accidental disclosures of his first teaching about the 
 Eucharist and the Resurrection lead us to feel that 
 the amount may have been considerable. St. Peter’s 
 converts received, no doubt, the substance of St. Mark’s 
 Gospel, so far as that comes from St. Peter, (iii) There 
 was definite instruction in moral duties and in the 
 Day of the Lord and the judgement to come.* (iv) The 
 Epistles presuppose rudimentary instruction in the 
 meaning of the sacraments. 4 * (v) An acquaintance 
 with and acceptance of the Old Testament as inspired 
 of God is always assumed. All these elements con¬ 
 stituted the tradition (paradosis)—the teaching which 
 was first delivered by the Apostles and which it was 
 the primary business of the Church to hand on 8 —this 
 was the 44 sound doctrine,” the 44 faith once for all 
 delivered.” This oral instruction, then, given to 
 the first converts, was the basis on which the super- 
 
 1 1 Cor. xi. 23 ff., xv. 1 ff. 
 
 2 Rom. i. 3; 2 Cor. x. 1; Phil. ii. 8; 1 Cor. vii. 10; 1 Thess. iv. 15. 
 
 8 1 Thess. iv. 1-3 ; 2 Thess. iii. 6; 1 Cor. xi. 2; Heb. vi. 2. 
 
 4 Rom. vi. 3 ; 1 Cor. xi. 23; Heb. vi. 2. 
 
 8 1 Tim. vi. 20; 2 Tim. i. 13, 14, ii. 2 ; Jude 2. 
 
EPISTLES BEFORE GOSPELS 209 
 
 structure of all the written documents of the New 
 Testament was reared. 
 
 Next to this in order of time came, not the written 
 Gospels as we have them, but the Epistles or most of 
 them. St. Paul’s Epistles disclose how manifold and 
 diverse were the special difficulties and dangers of 
 his different Churches, at Thessalonica, in Galatia, at 
 Corinth, at Colossae :—hence different occasional 
 letters dealing with these difficulties, and emphasizing 
 and expounding the meaning of the Gospel in differ¬ 
 ent aspects according to local needs. Some of the 
 Epistles, indeed, have more of the nature of formal 
 treatises, e.g. the Epistles to the Romans, Ephesians, 
 and Hebrews; but most of them are markedly 
 occasional, and need to be read in the light of their 
 circumstances. 
 
 Then, as time went on, the need of written accounts 
 of the Lord’s life, of the most authoritative character 
 obtainable, became evident, and the Synoptic Gospels 
 were written, all, I think, before or just after the date 
 of the destruction of Jerusalem. The wonderful thing 
 about them is that, though St. Mark and St. Luke, at 
 least, had been living in the atmosphere of St. Paul’s 
 preaching, yet their record of the Lord’s life is almost 
 wholly free from anything which suggests later 
 controversies or developments. They have been 
 microscopically examined for “ Paulinisms,” but al¬ 
 most nothing suggestive of perversion, in the interests 
 of later controversies or tendencies, is to be discovered 
 —in spite of the fact that the tendencies of the time 
 were full of danger, and that “ words of the Lord ” 
 adapted to the needs of the Church would have been 
 found very useful. Nevertheless, these two Gospels 
 remain, as far as we can see, strictly within the 
 limits of the history as it was, though the authors 
 15 
 
210 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 knew so well how the Gospel and the Church had 
 developed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Now we proceed to review the material presented 
 to us by the Epistles, and to ask how they stand as 
 regards authenticity. 
 
 As regards St. Paul’s Epistles, I will content myself 
 with citing the conclusions of an English scholar who 
 has more confidence than I can profess in the methods 
 of German critics and their English followers, and who 
 has published an able survey of the present condition 
 of the historical criticism of the New Testament. 
 
 “ The main result of our discussion has been to 
 establish the fact that out of thirteen Epistles 
 traditionally attributed to St. Paul we may accept 
 eight (i.e. 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans, 1 and 
 2 Corinthians, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians) 
 as being genuine beyond any serious dispute. Of 
 the remaining five, there is still an appreciable 
 hesitation felt with regard to 2 Thessalonians and 
 Ephesians—a hesitation for which we failed to dis¬ 
 cover adequate grounds. The authorship of the 
 Pastoral Epistles must still be regarded as a problem 
 which has not yet been satisfactorily solved. The 
 position of the Pauline Epistles in the critical world of 
 to-day is one which affords the deepest gratification, 
 and is a fact of far-reaching importance. . . . 
 Twentieth-century criticism has thus restored to the 
 Christian Church an inheritance which is priceless in 
 value.” 1 I do not propose to stop here over the 
 question of the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles, 
 though I do not myself doubt that in their whole 
 
 1 Maurice Jones, The New Testament in the Twentieth Century 
 (Macmillan, 1914), p. 293. 
 
AUTHENTICITY 211 
 
 substance they are St. Paul’s. 1 It will suffice at this 
 stage that we should be able to study the other ten 
 Epistles as his genuine writings and reserve the 
 question of the Pastorals. The anonymous Epistle 
 to the Hebrews is certainly not St. Paul’s, nor have 
 we adequate grounds for attempting to determine its 
 authorship. But it is a document of great importance, 
 because it is the only document of the New Testament 
 which deals at length with the High Priesthood of 
 Christ. The writer does not claim to be among “ those 
 who heard ” the Lord, but among their first disciples.* 
 The most probable opinion is that the little treatise 
 or epistle was written to a Jewish group in Rome or 
 Italy. It was used by Clement of Rome towards the 
 end of the century. And it appears to me quite 
 certain that it was written before the destruction of 
 Jerusalem. It is true that the sanctuary which the 
 author describes is rather, in its details, the tabernacle 
 than any of the later temples. Nevertheless, I think 
 the author could not have referred so frequently to 
 the sacrificial system of the Jews as still in being, 3 or 
 have refrained from pointing the moral of its complete 
 destruction, if he had written after a.d. 70. St. 
 Peter’s First Epistle can be confidently taken for 
 genuine, 4 and there is no sufficient reason why we 
 should doubt the authenticity of the beautiful 
 Epistle of St. James, who was put to death by the 
 Jews in a.d. 62, or the later Epistle of his brother 
 Jude. The three Epistles ascribed to St. John 
 undoubtedly cohere with one another and with the 
 Fourth Gospel. 6 The only book of the New Testament 
 
 1 See appended note, p. 213. 2 Hob. ii. 3. 
 
 * Heb. viii. 4 f., ix. 0, 9, x. 1 ff., xiii. 10 fi. See Westcott’s 
 Hebrews, p. xlii. 
 
 4 See Jones, op. cit., cap. vi. 
 
 6 See my Exposition ojSt. John's Epistles (Murray, 1920), Preface. 
 
212 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 which it seems to me the evidence shows to be 
 pseudonymous is the Second Epistle of Peter. That, 
 indeed, claims to have been written by an apostle ; 
 and it was as being Peter’s that it was at last and 
 after much hesitation accepted by the Church into 
 the canon. But we have no reason to claim 
 infallibility for the literary judgment of the Church, 
 and the evidence against it seems to me to be cogent. 
 Nothing remains to consider but the Apocalypse. 
 Whether this book belongs to the period following 
 the persecution of Nero, i.e. whether it was written 
 just before a.d. 70, or whether it belongs to the 
 persecution of Domitian at the end of the century, or 
 whether different parts of it must be assigned to each 
 period, is a very difficult question. Whether, again, 
 it can be ascribed to the same author as the Fourth 
 Gospel and the three Epistles is also an open question. 
 The external evidence is exceedingly strong for 
 ascribing it to St. John the Apostle. But, at any 
 rate, it was written at one of the two dates named 
 above, by a prophet called John, who claims both 
 direct inspiration and authority such as seems apos¬ 
 tolic, and it discloses how he interpreted the conflict 
 between the Church and the now persecuting Empire, 
 and what issue of the conflict he foresaw, with a 
 passion and a power which belong to no other 
 Apocalypse. 
 
 Enough has, I hope, been said to satisfy one who 
 is beginning the study of the origins of the Christian 
 Church and its real character and claim that he could 
 use the documents of the New Testament as a whole 
 with confidence in their authenticity and trust¬ 
 worthiness, if they were records of ordinary events 
 or of an ordinary human person. It is, as we shall 
 see reason to believe, not historical criticism properly 
 
THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 213 
 
 so called, but something quite different which has 
 led to their being disputed. 
 
 APPENDED NOTE 
 
 ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 
 
 The following facts seem to me to constitute a valid 
 ground for accepting their authenticity. 
 
 1. St. Paul’s deliverance from his first captivity must 
 be accepted as a fact, on the ground that Clement indis¬ 
 putably implies that he fulfilled his intention of going to 
 Spain (see above, p. 189 n. 3). This leaves room for the 
 movements of the apostle referred to in the Pastorals. 
 
 2. The ecclesiastical situation disclosed in the Pastorals 
 
 harmonizes with that described by Clement as arising 
 before the death of the apostles —and by the apostles he 
 means especially St. Peter and St. Paul. He is writing 
 to the Corinthians about the authority of the presbyters or 
 “ bishops.” He describes their origin: how Christ was sent 
 forth from God and the Apostles from Christ—how they 
 preached in country and towns and “ appointed their 
 first fruits, then they had tested them in the Spirit, 
 for bishops and deacons ” of the future converts. Later 
 he describes how “ the Apostles knew through our Lord 
 Jesus Christ that there would be strife about the title of 
 the bishop. Therefore for this reason, having received 
 perfect foreknowledge, they appointed the aforesaid, and 
 afterwards they gave an additional injunction that, if 
 they (the aforesaid presbyter-bishops and deacons) 
 should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed 
 to their ministry.” What this additional injunction was 
 is implied in the following sentence: “ Those then 
 
 appointed by them [the apostles] or afterwards by other 
 distinguished men, with the consent of the whole Church, 
 etc.” 1 Here it appears that the additional provision 
 made by the apostles was that there should be, after 
 they were gone, “ distinguished men ” with an authority 
 like theirs to appoint presbyter-bishops and deacons. 
 This provision for the future was made, Clement asserts, 
 
 1 Clement, cc. 42 and 44. 
 
214 HISTORICAL WORTH OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 while the apostles were alive, but doubtless in view 
 of their death. And I think this assertion exactly cor¬ 
 responds with the situation of the Pastoral Epistles. 
 Timothy and Titus were such distinguished men, clothed 
 with an authority like that of the apostles, and especially 
 to appoint presbyters. 
 
 3. The personal relations of St. Paul to Timothy and 
 Titus and other persons, but especially to Timothy, dis¬ 
 closed in the Epistles, and the accurate delineations of 
 character involved, constitute an unmistakable evidence 
 of authenticity. The Second Epistle to Timothy is from 
 this point of view especially marked as authentic, but 
 there are similar marks in the other Epistles, and they are 
 all unmistakably bound together by unity of style and 
 subject. 
 
 4. The special features of these Epistles are such as 
 belong to their purpose or circumstances. For instance, 
 the moment is just such as would bring to the fore the 
 conservative and disciplinary side of St. Paul’s mind. No 
 one can read the First Epistle to the Corinthians without 
 seeing that this side of his character was always there 
 and often in evidence. 
 
 5. The only real difficulty is in the phraseology. That 
 is in certain respects markedly different from the other 
 Epistles of St. Paul. I should be disposed to find the 
 best explanation of this in the supposition that St. Paul 
 used for these Epistles an amanuensis, to whom (perhaps 
 because he did not write shorthand) he left much dis¬ 
 cretion in wording the sentences—content that they should 
 express the idea which he had no doubt carefully made 
 plain : on this, I would refer to Jones, op, cit., pp. 280-91. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 Our survey of the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke— 
 for we left the First and Fourth Gospels aside for the 
 moment—has disposed us to believe them. We 
 found that the writers must have had the freest access 
 to original witnesses of the events which they describe. 
 Their intentions were conspicuously simple and honest. 
 They appear to have no design except to record things 
 as they happened. It is true that in their narratives 
 we are presented with a person and with events quite 
 unparalleled in the history of the world. But we 
 have found ourselves, as we have read and re-read 
 these records, quite unable to believe that we have 
 here a work of imagination. The portrait is con¬ 
 vincing. The elements in the narrative—the things 
 done and the things said—cohere in a wonderful 
 unity. Moreover, when we read the Epistles, while 
 we were struck with the vivid picture which they give 
 us of the life and interests of the earliest Christian 
 Churches, we made this note : that these interests 
 and controversies of the apostolic Churches, though 
 St. Mark and St. Luke must have been intimately 
 acquainted with them, do not appear to have dis¬ 
 coloured the narratives of the first experiences of the 
 apostles while our Lord was still on earth. Neither 
 in the phraseology nor in the substance of the books 
 
216 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 could we discover any appreciable trace of these later 
 interests. Thus we find ourselves disposed to take 
 the Gospels for what they profess to be, and to give 
 them an open-minded hearing. 
 
 But we find that this is exactly what the intellect 
 of Europe for the last seventy years has, as a whole— 
 so far as it has paid attention to the origins of 
 Christianity—been steadily refusing to do. It has 
 been occupied in substantially rewriting the Gospels. 
 It has been producing an “ historical Jesus,” markedly 
 unlike the original in the Gospels, or rather several 
 discordant pictures all unlike the original in many 
 most important respects. Now, when we set ourselves 
 to examine the cause of this undoubted fact, I think 
 we shall find it to be that the intellect of Europe has 
 been in rebellion against the miraculous and generally 
 the supernatural, of which the Gospels are confessedly 
 full. This presupposition, which is strictly philoso¬ 
 phical rather than historical—that miraculous and 
 supernatural events cannot really have occurred—has 
 made necessary that radical reconstruction of “ the 
 Jesus of history,” which presents Him in a form so un¬ 
 like that which the Gospels present in so many ways. 
 
 The grounds of this rebellion against the Gospels 
 as they stand is very vividly presented in Renan’s 
 Souvenirs d’enfance etde jeunesse, in which he discloses 
 to us the intellectual motives which led to his 
 repudiation of the principles of his education in Catho¬ 
 lic seminaries, and account for the version of the 
 history of Christ which he gave the world in his 
 Vie de JSsus . He speaks contemptuously of historical 
 criticism as a science. It can claim no real authority. 
 It can never really reconstruct the past. “ The 
 regret of my life is to have chosen for my studies a 
 class of researches which can never become authori- 
 
RENAN 217 
 
 tative [qui ne s'imposera jamais], and which will 
 remain always in the stage of interesting considera¬ 
 tions about a reality which has for ever vanished.” 1 
 What really came to control his imagination and his 
 mind was the majestic certitude of the physical 
 sciences. The spirit of the physical sciences repu¬ 
 diates the miraculous, and can find no such evidence 
 of miracles having ever occurred as its canons of proof 
 would require; and with the miraculous it repudiates 
 the whole category of the supernatural. “ The 
 affirmation that everything in the world is of the same 
 colour, that there is no particular supernatural nor 
 special revelation [ revelation momentanSe) presented 
 itself as authoritative in an absolute manner over our 
 spirit. The clear scientific view of a universe, where 
 no free will superior to that of man is at work in any 
 appreciable manner, became since the beginning of 
 1846 the immovable anchor whence we have never 
 departed.” 2 “ People who are in accord with 
 
 positive science do not admit the special supernatural, 
 the miracle,” though they are capable of idealism. 3 
 So far the brilliant Frenchman. The prejudice with 
 which he reapproached the Gospel story is made 
 quite plain. But the Frenchman had already got his 
 inspiration from Germany. 4 
 
 Of German Biblical criticism in its application to 
 the New Testament, and especially to the Gospels, 
 we have recently had a brilliant survey by Albert 
 Schweitzer in a book which he called Von Reimarus 
 zu Wrede , s which means the history of the criticism of 
 the Gospels since Lessing published (in 1774-9) the 
 famous Woljenbuttel fragments (the fragments of his 
 
 1 Souvenirs, p. 263. 3 Vie de Jesus, Prof. 
 
 2 pp. 337-8, 282. 4 Souvenirs, p. 291. 
 
 6 In the English trnns., The Quest of the Historical Jesus. 
 
218 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 friend Reimarns, issued by him after Reimarus’s 
 death from Wolfenbiittel in Brunswick, where he was 
 librarian), down to Wrede’s publication of The Messi¬ 
 anic Secret in the Gospels in 1901. It is a brilliantly 
 written history of a process which, as far as the study 
 of documents is concerned, can be said to tend towards 
 agreement in results, but as far as concerns the 
 picture presented of the “ Jesus of history/’ shows an 
 astonishing divergence, which remains unreconciled. 
 There is the “ Jesus of Liberal Theology,” who 
 preaches the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood 
 of man—all that is most attractive to the modern 
 humanitarian spirit. This is the theology repre¬ 
 sented in Harnack’s famous lectures, What is Chris¬ 
 tianity ? and it is familiar enough in this country ; 
 and there is the less familiar “ Jesus ” of the apocalyp¬ 
 tic school, represented by Schweitzer himself, who is 
 an apocalyptic prophet or visionary enthusiast, of 
 a fanatical type, deluded by the conviction of the 
 immediate arrival of the world catastrophe and the 
 Kingdom of God, hi which he himself is to be the 
 predestined Messiah or Son of Man. The differences 
 between these two presentations of the “ historical 
 Jesus ” is sufficiently startling. It is not now the 
 time to dwell on them. But any student of Schweit¬ 
 zer’s pages can perceive that what enables critics to 
 form such strangely different estimates of an historical 
 figure is that both schools are agreed in repudiating 
 such large elements in the records as they stand—not 
 on grounds of criticism, but on grounds of a priori 
 assumption—that the question of what is to be 
 allowed to remain becomes largely a question to be 
 decided by arbitrary choice. The fundamental 
 assumption of all the critics whom Schweitzer takes 
 seriously is the assumption that the miraculous did 
 
STRAUSS 219 
 
 not occur, and that the theological beliefs associated 
 with the acceptance of miracles have vanished with 
 them. Jesus, as Reimarus said, must have remained 
 64 within the limits of humanity.” That He did certain 
 cures which seemed to the people miraculous is not to 
 be denied, and is quite explicable. But other miracles, 
 such as must really involve a supernatural power, 
 have no basis in fact. 1 Reimarus’s thorough-going 
 denials were not immediately acceptable. But they 
 were revived by David Strauss, the first edition of 
 whose Life of Jesus appeared to shock Europe in 1835. 
 From him Schweitzer dates the final abandonment of 
 the miraculous by German theology. Many things 
 remain quite unsettled. “ What has been gained is 
 only that the exclusion of miracle from our view of 
 history has been universally recognized as a principle 
 of criticism, so that miracle no longer concerns the 
 theologians either positively or negatively.” * 
 
 According to Schweitzer, there have been three 
 great alternatives concerning Christ presented to 
 criticism, of which the first was finally decided by 
 Strauss, “ either purely historical or purely super¬ 
 natural.” 3 The historical and the supernatural are to 
 be regarded, we observe, as incompatible alternatives. 
 
 So it still appears to Harnack. If, as we have said, 
 he now dates the documents very early, he is only the 
 more sure that myths, such as the ascension of Jesus 
 or His birth of a virgin, can form themselves very 
 quickly. 4 
 
 1 Schweitzer, pp. 17 ff. * P- 111. 
 
 * The second alternative was “ either Synoptic or Johannine.” 
 This was decided by Tubingen and Holtzmann. The third, clearly 
 propounded afresh by Johann Weiss, is “ either eschatological or non- 
 eschatological.” This remains still undecided. 
 
 4 See Harnack, Acts of the Apostles , pp. 158 f.; The Date of the 
 Synoptic Gospels, p. 161. 
 
220 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 Now, Schweitzer makes game of the “ Liberal ” 
 Jesus and of that of Renan the Frenchman. “ This 
 professedly historical Jesus is not a purely historical 
 figure, but one which has been artificially transplanted 
 into history. . . . What is admitted as historical is 
 just what the spirit of our time can take out of the 
 records in order to assimilate it to itself.” But we 
 seem to see the same arbitrariness in the apocalyptic 
 Jesus of Schweitzer. All these schools of critics start 
 with an invincible, dominant prejudice. It may not 
 indeed be so boldly expressed as with Strauss, whose 
 (almost) sole consideration is declared to be that “ in 
 the person and acts of Jesus no supernaturalism shall 
 be suffered to remain.” 1 “ He who would banish 
 
 priests from the Church, must first banish miracles 
 from religion.” “ Christianity is so living a power, 
 and the problem as to its origin so rife in important 
 consequences to the immediate present, that the 
 student must be literally stupid whose interest in the 
 determination of such a question can be strictly 
 confined to the historical.” The bias here is plain 
 indeed ! But though the bias is not so gross and 
 palpable in other leaders of criticism as in Strauss, yet 
 they have all of them in their minds a dominant pre¬ 
 supposition, derived not really from historical science 
 properly so-called, but from a certain philosophy 
 of the universe, which we shall have to examine 
 carefully—the presupposition that miracles are in¬ 
 credible, and are the expression of a supernaturalism 
 which they reject. What this impossible supernatur- 
 
 1 New Life of Jesus , i, p. xii. “ This negation is for our object, 
 which is prospective, and not merely retrospective and historical, 
 a principal, if not the sole consideration. It consists in this: that 
 in the person and acts of Jesus no supernaturalism shall be suffered to 
 remain; nothing that can press upon the souls of men with the 
 leaden weight of arbitrary, inscrutable authority.” Cf. p. x. 
 
ENGLISH SCHOLARS 221 
 
 alism exactly is, differs from critic to critic no doubt. 
 Thus the limits of what can be rationally believed 
 differ in different cases, but, as will be indicated 
 directly, not only miracles, but the real incarnation 
 of the Divine Son in human nature falls apparently 
 for all these schools of critics outside the limits of the 
 rationally credible . 1 
 
 This spirit of continental criticism—which for want 
 of a better name we call rationalistic—is, I believe, 
 logical in thus recognizing that what it is rejecting is 
 not merely miraculous facts, but the whole conception 
 of a supernatural incoming of God into human life 
 which had sought to extrude Him, and into nature 
 where men had sought to forget Him. And this 
 spirit of continental criticism has had not a few 
 representatives in England. It found expression in 
 that strange anonymous book Supernatural Religion , 
 which forty-six years ago began its meteoric and 
 short-lived career, hailed triumphantly as the very ex¬ 
 pression of the best mind of the age, but passing rapidly 
 under a cloud, owing chiefly to the critical exposure 
 to which it was subjected at the hands of Lightfoot. 
 To-day, a much better scholar and more competent 
 thinker, Dr. Kirsopp Lake, is giving it powerful 
 expression, in a much less malevolent but in a not 
 much less trenchant form than was given it by 
 Strauss. 
 
 But in England—perhaps only in England or the 
 British Isles—we also find a group of scholars who 
 are prepared to declare, or who strongly suspect, that 
 
 1 As to miracles, the healings of the sick are admitted to have 
 occurred in some sense, i.e. the recorded healings are not more than 
 exaggerations of what actually occurred. But what are excluded are 
 the “ nature miracles ”—e.g. the raisings of the dead, or the feeding 
 of the five thousand, or the walking on the water, or the birth of the 
 Virgin, or the corporal resurrection of Christ. 
 
222 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 miracles are, if not strictly impossible, yet in fact 
 incredible, but who at the same time themselves hold 
 the full supernatural faith in the incarnation of God 
 the Son in the person of Jesus Christ, and who even 
 profess some indignation that the orthodox faith of 
 those who cannot accept the miraculous should be 
 impugned. Of this group Dr. Sanday was the most 
 conspicuous example. As is well known, that eminent 
 scholar in the last years of his life, if he did not 
 certainly deny the real occurrence of miracles, did 
 at least seriously doubt it. But he was strenuous 
 in maintaining that such doubt or positive rejection 
 was quite compatible with Christian orthodoxy. He 
 was indignant that anyone should question the right of 
 those who repudiate miracles still to recite in good faith 
 the Catholic creeds, because the essence of those creeds 
 lies not in certain specific miraculous facts, but in a 
 certain specific and supernatural faith. We are not at 
 the moment concerned to discuss questions connected 
 with the person of Christ. We are only concerned to 
 get clearly into our minds Dr. Sanday’s opinion. He 
 wrote 1 : “ The central truth which it is most 
 
 important to guarantee is the true Godhead of Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost; that our Lord Jesus Christ is 
 truly God and truly Lord, very God and at the same 
 time very man. I imagine that, if we were to cross¬ 
 question ourselves as to what we mean when we recite 
 the Creeds, it would be something like that in its 
 simplest form. . . . We should all agree that anything 
 really less than this would be hypocritical. The man 
 who, in his heart of hearts, really believed less ought 
 not to stay where he is ” (i.e. a minister of the Church 
 
 1 Bishop Gore’s Challenge to Criticism, (Longmans, 1914), p. 9. 
 Some later words of Dr. Sanday lead me to doubt if he held to the 
 position so clearly defined above. 
 
SANDAY AND LOOFS 228 
 
 of England). I read these words when they were first 
 published with not a little astonishment—as for other 
 reasons with which we are now not concerned, so 
 because they imply so naive a confidence that 
 miracles can be discarded and the old conviction of 
 faith about the person of Christ retained in all its sim¬ 
 plicity. I was the more surprised because in the same 
 pamphlet 1 Dr. Sanday speaks in highly complimentary 
 terms of Dr. Loofs “ as one of the best and most 
 cautious of the Germans, 5 ’ and refers us to his little 
 book What is the Truth about Jesus Christ ? 8 For what 
 is the point of this book ? It is to declare that the 
 ancient orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and the 
 Incarnation is out of the question for the modern 
 critical scholar. Dr. Loofs holds what in technical 
 terminology would be called an Adoptionist doctrine 
 of Christ and a Sabellian view of God—that is, he 
 holds that Christ w r as a man possessed in some 
 undefinable and unique manner with the Divine 
 Spirit so as to make Him the revealer of God and the 
 beginning of a new manhood. But that “ the historical 
 Jesus is the pre-existent Son of God ” he not only 
 repudiates, but declares that all learned theologians 
 repudiate and must repudiate. “ Those who are 
 impartial enough,” he writes, to see certain points 
 of his argument, “ are thereby convinced that the 
 orthodox Christology cannot give us the correct 
 interpretation of the historical person of Jesus. And 
 there is hardly a single learned theologian—I know of 
 none in Germany—who defends the orthodox Christ¬ 
 ology in its unaltered form.” 
 
 But we need not go to Germany in order to convince 
 ourselves that the repudiation of miracles is based on 
 a state of mind which will have much wider effect 
 i p. 29. 2 English trans. (Scribners), 1913. 
 
224 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 than the repudiation of certain supposed events. 
 How indeed should it be otherwise ? For the repudia¬ 
 tion of miracles cuts very deep into the Gospel 
 narratives. Thus Dr. Sanday thinks that the miracles 
 of feeding had a basis in fact. Our Lord did really 
 organize and preside at a quasi-sacramental meal. 
 Some small portion of food, such as was available, was 
 distributed so that, as at a sacramental table, all 
 should feel they had been sharing together. The 
 narrative, he says, is all true except that they were 
 not “ filled.” It was not a case of a satisfying meal. 
 Afterwards the tendency among the disciples to fashion 
 miracles for their master on the analogy of the Old 
 Testament miracles brought it about that the reputed 
 miracle of Elisha, when he fed the hundred men with 
 the twenty loaves of barley and the fresh ears of corn, 1 
 was reproduced on a much larger scale and attached 
 to our Lord, on the basis of what has really been not a 
 satisfying of their appetites with food but a piece of 
 sacramental symbolism. But this manipulation of 
 the narrative cuts very deep. Not only the word 
 “ filled,” and (it should be added) the collection of the 
 fragments after the meal, must vanish, but the whole 
 motive and setting of the story is altered. For in the 
 story there is not the suggestion of anything else, 
 except that Jesus was determined to “ satisfy ” a 
 crowd with food, when His resources were manifestly 
 much too small. It is only His compassion for men’s 
 physical needs that is in view (Mark vi. 24), and then 
 the miraculous power that was in His pity. There 
 
 1 2 Kings iv. 42. This interpretation of our Lord’s miracle as an 
 imaginative exaggeration of Elisha’s is due first to Reimarus. It is 
 curious that the miracle of Elisha as recorded in the book of Kings 
 appears to be hardly miraculous. Twenty loaves and an undefined 
 quantity of ears of corn could really supply something worthy to be 
 called a meal to a hundred men. 
 
RECONSTRUCTION OF GOSPELS 225 
 
 is also no suggestion of any incident in the Old 
 Testament as a modifying force. If what really 
 happened was only the sacramental distribution of 
 minute fragments, then plainly our narrative in Mark, 
 although the context indicates that Peter must have 
 been present, is not Peter’s story, nor the story of 
 any eye-witness, but only a reflection several degrees 
 removed, upon which so much imagination has been 
 expended that its original character is quite obliter¬ 
 ated. An eye-witness might be wrong in the 
 figures. The seven loaves might become five or the 
 four thousand persons five thousand. But the whole 
 character of the incident could not be altered in his 
 memory. 
 
 To take another instance from the critical recon¬ 
 struction of the Gospel story—if the tomb of Jesus 
 was not really found empty on the morning of the 
 Sunday after the crucifixion, the story in the Gospel 
 of Mark must be far removed from the original experi¬ 
 ence. Once more, if the “ naturalists’ ” prejudice is 
 to prevail, the miracles of healing must in most cases 
 have been at least greatly exaggerated before they 
 reached their Gospel form. No one could give a 
 naturalistic interpretation of twelve lepers (in popular 
 estimation) ail simultaneously suddenly healed, 1 or 
 even of one. How then, if the story has been so 
 fundamentally transformed, can it be plausibly 
 pleaded that the words of Jesus Christ (on which the 
 theological creed is built) have escaped similar distor¬ 
 tion and exaggeration ? Do men exaggerate the 
 actions, or do they in fact become exaggerated, more 
 than the words of great leaders and heroes ? 
 
 It will not, then, surprise us to discover that English 
 critics, like those of France and Germany, plainly 
 1 See Luke xvii. 14 and v. 12; cf. Mark i. 40. 
 
 16 
 
226 
 
 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 regard the record of the teaching of our Lord as open 
 to as much suspicion and requiring as much revision, 
 before it can be accepted as historical, as the record of 
 the miracles. Thus we are assured by Dr. Glover that 
 Jesus did not call Himself the Son of God, 1 though 
 there is no fact better certified in our foundation 
 documents than that Fie did ; and by Dr. Rashdall 
 that He probably did not proclaim Himself the final 
 judge of all men, 2 * and that He never spoke of His death 
 as to have an atoning or ransoming value for the souls 
 of men *—again in spite of the fundamental records ; 
 and by Dr. Inge and others that He founded no Church 
 and instituted no sacraments. 4 5 Dr. Kirsopp Lake 
 will not allow it to be probable that He even called 
 Himself the Christ (in the specific sense) or the Son 
 of Man, or was so called during His lifetime, 6 though 
 here, I think, most of the other critics whom I have 
 named would dissent from him. Rut Dr. Glover, 
 again, assures us that St. Paul was the first to call 
 Him “ the Lord.” 1 More than this, though He is 
 represented so plainly as speaking with infallible 
 authority, we are constantly warned that Fie was 
 plainly under a delusion about the immediate coming 
 of the kingdom, and shared the popular superstition 
 about devils and their possession of men 7 ; and others 
 
 1 Conflict of Religions, p. 138: “ terras which Jesus did not use.” 
 
 s Conscience and Christ, p. 48. 
 
 * Idea of Atonement, pp. 27 ff. 
 
 4 Outspoken Essays, pp. 227, 249, and elsewhere. 
 
 5 Landmarks, pp. 48-52. 
 
 8 Conflict, p. 156. 
 
 1 All these points enumerated above will come up for discussion 
 in due course in the next volume. It is worth noting that the 
 popular rejection of the belief in the devil, as a mere superstition, is 
 not so modern as people suppose. Fielding’s landlady in Tom 
 Jones cries, “ But as the parson told us last Sunday, nobody believes 
 in the devil nowadays.” 
 
AFFECTS IDEAS AS MUCH AS FACTS 227 
 
 of the left wing warn us that we cannot rely upon His 
 sinlessness in any strict sense. 
 
 Now, the noticeable thing about these multiplied 
 denials is that they are based on no critical grounds— 
 that is, they all contradict our foundation documents 
 —St. Mark and Q. Thus in these documents our Lord 
 again and again calls Himself Son of God, and is so 
 called, in a sense clearly not applicable to other men. 1 
 In the Sermon on the Mount 2 * 4 and in several—surely 
 indisputable—parables His position as final judge, even 
 of men’s secret motives, is clearly implied. In two 
 passages of St. Mark the atoning or ransoming value of 
 His death is apparent, and His identification of Him¬ 
 self with the suffering servant of Isaiah is elsewhere 
 evident.* That He founded a Church and instituted 
 sacraments intended to be permanent is not only 
 asserted or implied in the Gospels, but is necessary 
 to explain the action of the Church as recorded in 
 the opening of the Acts, and presupposed in the 
 Epistles; and so far as concerns the Eucharist, it is 
 declared by St. Paul as part of the tradition which he 
 delivered. 1 So, again, Jesus is called Lord in the 
 Acts 0 in the supreme sense some time before St. 
 Paul was converted ; and the title must have been 
 so familiar to the Aramaic-speaking Church of Judaea 
 that it passed into St. Paul’s Greek Churches in its 
 Aramaic form, Maranatha , “ Come, O Lord ! ’? But 
 over this ground we shall have to go again when we 
 face the question, What think ye of Christ ? All that 
 
 1 See Mark xiii. 32 and xii. 6, xiv. 61-2; Matt, xi 27=Luke x. 22. 
 If these words can be eliminated, anything can. 
 
 2 Matt. vii. 22-3. 
 
 8 This will be argued later. 
 
 4 1 Cor. xi. 24-5. 
 
 • Acts ii. 36; cf. x. 36. 
 
228 THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 I want now to indicate, and what I have, I think, 
 made evident, is (1) that neither in the case of our 
 scholars nor in that of the Germans is it anything 
 that can be legitimately called criticism of the 
 documents which is at the root of the denials which 
 I have been enumerating: it is a certain intellectual 
 presupposition about the miraculous and generally 
 the supernatural; and (2) that Dr. Sanday’s assump¬ 
 tion, that the miraculous could be dropped out of the 
 record without affecting the traditional belief in the 
 teaching and person of Jesus, is not only wholly 
 improbable in itself, but also contradicted by our 
 experience at home as well as among continental 
 scholars. 
 
 We must take it for granted, then, that the elimina¬ 
 tion of the miraculous cuts so deep into our documents 
 as to render the whole foundation of fact insecure. 
 The interval between the facts as they are assumed to 
 have occurred without miracle and our earliest records, 
 so full of miracle and the assumption of miracle, 
 becomes so great that the historical Figure as He must 
 have been becomes dim. How He is to be represented 
 seems to depend on the arbitrary judgement of the 
 particular critic, who may be of the Liberal Humani¬ 
 tarian school or of the Apocalyptic school or of some 
 other. But, though some of the critics who repudiate 
 the miraculous are more conservative than others, 
 I cannot myself doubt that there is among such critics 
 an inevitable trend towards a purely humanitarian 
 estimate of the personality of Christ, that is, a 
 repudiation of the conception of Jesus Christ, as 
 the eternal Son of God for us men and for our 
 salvation made flesh, which has possessed Christen¬ 
 dom. It is quite plain, then, that what has to 
 be freely and deeply scrutinized is the intellectual 
 
THE ENQUIRY INTO PRESUPPOSITIONS 229 
 
 ground for the repudiation of the miraculous and the 
 supernatural a priori . If this should turn out to 
 be invalid, then, and only then, shall we have a 
 chance of being able to apply real or free historical 
 criticism to the Gospels. 1 
 
 1 I wish to recall to mind some remarkable words of Bp. Creighton 
 in a letter to Mrs. J. R. Green : see his Life, p. 330-1 : “ Historical 
 criticism is not a science : it is only an investigation of the value of 
 evidence. It rests on presuppositions which are derived from 
 experience. I am disposed to believe what is analogous to my 
 experience : my criticism is awakened by what is not analogous. 
 The destructive criticism of the N.T. rests on the presupposition that 
 miracles do not happen. As the writers of the N.T. record miracles, 
 it is necessary to explain how these records came into being. 
 A number of ingenious and plausible theories about their nature and 
 authorship and gradual growth have consequently been formed. 
 Their number and persistency seem to add to their force. You 
 say, ‘ Why are they not refuted ? ’ The only possible refutation of 
 them is to show that, apart from the presuppositions on which they 
 rest, their conclusions are not capable of positive proof. . . . The 
 miracles connected with the person of Jesus are analogous to the 
 spiritual experience of the believing Christian. Therefore he is not 
 moved by the presupposition that they are contrary to nature. 
 The real question in dispute is the conception of nature. Biblical 
 criticism will not solve that question.” 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 The Synoptic Gospels, on grounds of external and 
 internal evidence, claim acceptance as trustworthy 
 historical documents. But the picture they present 
 of the Christ is that of a “ supernatural ” person, and 
 they are full of miraculous incidents. Any exclusion 
 of the supernatural and miraculous from the narra¬ 
 tives cuts so deep into their substance as to leave the 
 residue incoherent, and the person described so dim and 
 uncertain that the most diverse representations of 
 Him have been given. Take the Gospels as they stand, 
 on the other hand, and the picture has been felt over 
 long ages to be in a high degree coherent and impres¬ 
 sive. Nothing, it would seem, can justify the 
 elimination of the elements objected to, except an 
 a priori conviction that miracles either absolutely 
 cannot have happened or at least are in fact incre¬ 
 dible. The actual evidence, however, we shall have to 
 consider very carefully. But undoubtedly the mind 
 of the critical world for two generations has been that 
 miracles, however apparently well certified, cannot in 
 fact have happened, or at least that even very good 
 evidence cannot persuade us to believe that they 
 have happened. And inasmuch as historical evidence 
 never can be really compulsory, there is an unreality 
 about a good deal of the recent discussion of it. We 
 
 230 
 
THE MEANING OF MIRACLE 231 
 
 must go back upon the presupposition. Is this 
 presupposition that 44 nature ” is a system closed and 
 complete in itself, so that the idea of an 44 intrusion ” 
 into it of anything 44 from beyond,” or the idea of any 
 interruption * 5 of its regular law or order, is unthink¬ 
 able—is this presupposition rational and tenable ? 
 
 To justify this way of putting the question, we 
 must seek to define with sufficient exactness what is 
 meant by the supernatural and the miraculous. Let 
 it be granted, then, that there is a cosmos, or world 
 of order and law, with which experience familiarizes 
 men, and which science investigates with ever- 
 increasing confidence that nothing will be found 
 there disconnected or arbitrary. Let it be granted 
 also that (say) the physical resurrection of Christ 
 from the dead, or His feeding of the five thousand 
 with the five barley loaves and the two fishes (or 
 further the personality of Christ as a whole) does 
 present itself in this cosmos as something which it 
 cannot account for—postulating some power at work 
 of which it knows nothing. Let it be granted, finally, 
 that these events are supposed to occur for this very 
 reason—because instinctively and inevitably men 
 cannot attribute them to 44 nature,” but will be 
 driven to see in them signs that the power behind 
 nature, the power of God the Creator, is through 
 them giving signs to men of a special purpose to 
 which their attention is thereby effectively called. 
 Then we seem to have got a sort of definition of a 
 miracle. It is an occurrence in the process of nature 
 of something which nature, that is, the experienced 
 order, cannot account for, and which constrains men 
 to recognize a special or extraordinary action of God 
 calling attention to a special purpose. And the 
 supernatural is all that constrains men to believe 
 
232 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 that nature with its customary order is not closed or 
 complete in itself, but part of a larger and higher 
 world of existence from which it is not separated by 
 any unsurmountable barrier. 
 
 That will suffice for the moment. Obviously the 
 word supernatural is a word which raises scruples in 
 the mind of the believer in God. It suggests a nature 
 which goes of itself and seems to relegate God to 
 a sphere beyond, from which He 44 intervenes ” in 
 nature, as if He were not there all along, the doer of 
 all that is done. The believer in God would feel, 
 quite truly, that the enlightened imagination always 
 sees the visible order on the background of the 
 invisible—sees God in all things and all things in 
 God. The word 4 4 nature,” he would say, should 
 suggest the whole 1 ; and should not ascribe a sort 
 of completeness to what is only a dependent portion. 
 This must be granted. Nevertheless, the visible 
 world and its order and law has so impressed itself 
 on the imagination of men, and moulded their 
 language as a thing in itself, that we need the word 
 nature to describe it, and the word supernatural to 
 suggest whatever may lie in the unknown beyond. 
 In the same way the idea of miracle may be objected 
 to as suggesting that God is there most evident when 
 something happens which is disconnected and dis¬ 
 orderly. This impression we shall seek to remove. 
 But to start with, I think we may accept the account 
 of the miraculous and the supernatural given above 
 as, even if roughly, giving the right impression and 
 raising the right question—Is 44 nature ” such a 
 system, so self-complete and closed, whether demon- 
 
 1 Cf. a famous passage in Bp. Butler’s Analogy, Part I, cap. i: 
 ** Persons’ notions of what is natural will be enlarged in proportion 
 to their greater knowledge,” etc. 
 
IS NATURE A CLOSED SYSTEM? 233 
 
 strably so or so found in experience, as that we 
 may pronounce incredible events in nature which its 
 observed order cannot account for, and which can 
 only be interpreted as special acts of God forcibly 
 calling attention to a special purpose ? Is there 
 such a closed system ? Is it the postulate of science ? 
 Or is it the impression so strongly conveyed by 
 experience that we cannot get beyond it ? 
 
 I 
 
 The conception of nature as a closed system appears 
 first, I believe, formulated with sufficient distinctness 
 by the Stoics. 
 
 “ Everything that happens is followed by something 
 else, which is necessarily linked to it as to its cause, and 
 is preceded by something to which it is linked as its cause. 
 For nothing in the world exists or happens without a 
 cause, since there is nothing in it which is detached and 
 separated from the whole sum of preceding events. For 
 if any uncaused movement were introduced, the world 
 would be pulled asunder and dissevered, and would no 
 longer remain for ever one, ruled according to a single 
 order and arrangement.” 1 
 
 But the idea was reintroduced into the modern 
 world by Spinoza. His God—the object of his 
 intense intellectual passion—was simply great nature 
 with its invariable laws, existing under the double 
 mode of mind and extension or matter. This awful, 
 impersonal being is the only substance which the 
 intellect in man can legitimately recognize and 
 legitimately worship. And the sway of its law is 
 absolute. It excludes all possibility of any such 
 
 1 This is from Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. a.d. 200), called “ the 
 exegete of Aristotle,” but giving the Stoic idea of nature; cf. Ueber- 
 weg’s History of Philosophy, i. 184, and Wendland, Miracles and 
 Christianity (Hodder & Stoughton), p. 252. 
 
234 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 freedom of wills as would admit of the occurrence of 
 anything contingent—anything which full knowledge 
 could not have certainly predicted—in the universe. 
 Freedom in this sense belongs neither to man nor to 
 God. And there is nothing knowable beyond nature 
 or above its laws . 1 
 
 It is this kind of conception of a self-complete and 
 closed system of nature which appears as lying 
 behind the denials of the miraculous in Strauss and 
 Renan and in the German rationalists. And the 
 question is—is it valid ? It is no doubt the postu¬ 
 late of the physicist and the chemist. But is it 
 simply a working postulate, which is found true and 
 necessary in a group of sciences which take certain 
 aspects or parts of nature in abstraction from the 
 whole, but which cannot be taken as valid for the 
 whole of experienced reality ? 
 
 Let us test it by its applicability to the freedom 
 of the will — the moral freedom of man — which, 
 we contend, is a fact in experienced “ nature.” I 
 think we shall find that the question of the reality 
 of moral freedom, which has been already discussed, 
 and the question of the credibility of miracles are at 
 bottom one and the same question. 
 
 The idea of moral freedom is not in itself antagon¬ 
 istic to the idea of perfect law. A world of free 
 beings can be conceived whose willing obedience to 
 divine law would have resulted in a free world as 
 completely dominated by or expressive of law as 
 inanimate or irrational nature could be. So Dante 
 magnificently conceives Paradise. There “God’s 
 will is our peace,” and the slightest desire of departure 
 
 1 There are no doubt expressions in Spinoza’s writings which 
 suggest a more personal conception of God. But the above repre¬ 
 sents, I think, his final mind as he quite clearly expresses it. 
 
IT CONTAINS FREE WILLS 285 
 
 from His will has become inconceivable. Law, as a 
 burden, is transcended, but it is not abolished in a 
 world where perfectly free love expresses itself as 
 perfect order. But freedom of choice, though it 
 need not involve any actual departure from order, 
 involves the possibility of it, and has, in fact, resulted 
 in world-wide lawlessness. Here, I say, we get to 
 the crux of the whole question. No doubt the free 
 will of men has been absurdly exaggerated. As a 
 fact, it is strictly limited. There is no such thing 
 as human independence. All the forces which any 
 man employs, in choosing or carrying out his choice, 
 are drawn from beyond himself. It need not be 
 claimed that he can add to the sum of energy. His 
 conditions again determine the channels along which 
 he must use the powers which are available. Never¬ 
 theless, in the heart of this world of determinate and 
 determined forces and laws there lies this mysterious 
 and unique thing—free choice. As has been already 
 argued, the choice of the will at the last analysis 
 decides in which direction—in the form of which kind 
 of action—the energy stored in the human organism 
 is liberated. Something has happened which 
 mechanism cannot explain. Nothing can explain it 
 except the frank recognition of moral will as here 
 directive of physical force. 
 
 Moreover, here, in the region of moral choice, we 
 are conscious of what Kant has called the categorical 
 imperative of duty. This again has been argued 
 already. The soul of man is conscious of a moral 
 purpose above him claiming to control his action. 
 The purpose of nature, or the God of nature, appears 
 to be that he should be 44 good,” as he can be only 
 by the free choice of his will. We are thus bound to 
 think of the great power, within the grasp of which 
 
236 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 we live and move and are, as not mere unconscious 
 force, but also as conscious moral will and purpose— 
 as willing righteousness. Here we feel ourselves 
 planted on ground from which our reason cannot 
 suffer us to be dislodged. Nature has behind it 
 and within it a Being of whom the moral will in us 
 and the moral personality is a better image than 
 either mechanical force or unconscious life. Thus 
 to think of God is not 44 anthropomorphism ”—that 
 is, the reducing of God into the image of man. It is 
 more truly described as 46 theomorphism ”—that is, 
 the recognition that the human personality, which is 
 the highest form of life known in nature, is a better 
 “ image of God ” than physical forces or chemical 
 combinations. Call God, if you will, superpersonal, 
 but at any rate you must think of Him as not 
 inferior to man—as at least rationally willing and 
 choosing in accordance with a purpose of righteous¬ 
 ness in the whole universe of things. This tentative 
 conclusion, to which our reason pointed us, receives 
 the strongest possible confirmation in the self¬ 
 disclosure of God given through the prophets and 
 Christ, which we have decided to accept as real. 
 
 Now, then, we have a conception of God which is 
 in no way antagonistic to the 44 universal reign of 
 law ” in nature, but which gives it a new meaning. 
 The very being of God is law and order. Nothing 
 arbitrary or disorderly or disconnected in action can 
 be conceived in connexion with Him. The 44 uni¬ 
 formity of nature 55 is the exhibition of His 
 perfect orderliness . 1 But the principle of the order 
 
 1 It is only as the exhibition of God’s will that the word “ law ” 
 was first applied to nature: “ Thou hast given it a law which shall not 
 be broken ” ; and it is only in this sense that the use of the word 
 is really legitimate. It always suggests something more than mere 
 regularity. It suggests some authority behind the regularity. 
 
THE FREEDOM OF GOD 237 
 
 of nature is now seen to be not blind mechanism, but 
 the perfect reason and perfectly free will of the 
 supreme God the Creator. 
 
 This sort of conception of God no doubt received its 
 most forceful expression within the race of Israel. 
 The Jehovah of the Old Testament is, as we have 
 seen, presented as most intensely personal, holy and 
 free, the Creator and Governor of all that is. He is 
 represented as having made man his vicegerent in 
 the government of the world. Man is to “ have 
 dominion ” over all the lower orders of creation. But 
 on the vastest scale he has misused this stewardship, 
 and his misuse of it has disordered not only his own 
 nature and life, but the whole superficial order of the 
 world. It has raised huge structures of insolence 
 and cruelty and lust. And the blindness and wilful¬ 
 ness of sin have obliterated or monstrously perverted 
 man’s thought of God on the vastest scale. This is 
 the burden of the Old Testament. And God has not 
 seen fit to annihilate either man or his freedom, tie 
 tolerates the vast disorder. But He counterworks it. 
 He enters into the struggle. He sets redemptive 
 forces to work. He chooses His human instruments 
 in the race of Israel, which are, if they will consent, 
 to fulfil His special purpose. He bears with their 
 obstinacy and wilfulness and ignorance. He perse¬ 
 veres. Through infinite difficulties and seeming 
 failures He brings His redemptive purpose to its 
 climax or critical moment. It is the coming of the 
 Christ. And it is in this critical moment that God is 
 specially—not then only, but then specially—repre¬ 
 sented as “ baring His arm ” in miraculous—that is, 
 abnormal—action. And the point is : Is not the 
 credibility of such action, at such a crisis, bound up 
 with the belief in a God who is personal, rational, and 
 
238 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 free—in the world, but also beyond it and over it ? 
 The point of a divine miracle, as the Bible conceives 
 it, is not to be a mere portent, but a sure indication to 
 men’s minds that the moral will of God is supreme in 
 the world. It is just this sense that the wide and age¬ 
 long prevalence of sin has dissolved. The very order 
 of nature with its apparent moral indifference—God 
 “ making His sun to shine on the evil and on the good 
 [indiscriminately], and sending rain upon the just and 
 on the unjust ”—has helped this moral blindness. 
 The mind of mankind has utterly misconceived God. 
 “ Thou thoughtest wickedly that I am even such a 
 one as thyself.” Man’s pride has left Him out of 
 account, and despised Him. The rejection and 
 crucifixion of Christ is, of course, the supreme example 
 of such moral blindness. The “ weakness of God ” is 
 there shown at its supreme point. 1 Is it not at least 
 conceivable that at such a supreme crisis—and indeed 
 at the like crises—God should have “ bared His arm ” 
 and given mankind, or such portion of mankind as 
 have “ eyes to see,” assurance—such assurance as is 
 given by Christ’s resurrection from the dead—that 
 at the last issue the power which rules in the physical 
 world is on the side of righteousness—that it is the 
 same God who commands in conscience and speaks 
 through prophets ? It is true that the testing of faith 
 lies in enduring and seeing Him who is invisible. This 
 is the normal task of faith. But surely the Father 
 of spirits may see that this testing ordeal must be 
 tempered. Frequent miracles would destroy the 
 reality of this probation, as they would destroy the 
 sense of the divine order. But on the supreme 
 occasions, can the human reason have the audacity 
 
 1 Cf. Ps. lxxviii. 61 : “ He [God] delivered his strength into 
 captivity, and his glory into the adversary’s hand.” 
 
AUGUSTINE’S DEFINITION 239 
 
 to say they may not be necessary ? Can it have the 
 audacity to say that, on practically no evidence such 
 as will leave to the will of man any responsibility for 
 choice or faith, will it accept the fact of their occur¬ 
 rence ? Certainly my reason cannot approach this 
 point. Can I conceive that the reinforcement of the 
 moral conscience, the sense of the supremacy of right, 
 which we identify with Christianity, could have oc¬ 
 curred without the resurrection ? There is great 
 reserve in the exhibition of the miraculous in the 
 Bible, Old Testament and New ; there is great limita¬ 
 tion in the evidential function assigned to it. To this 
 attention will be called. The Bible records are no en¬ 
 couragement to any childish love of the marvellous. 
 But is it not to deny reason to God to deny the possi¬ 
 bility or credibility of miracle ? Is it not the very 
 mark of rational power, as compared to blind force or 
 animal instinct (which may be intelligence in a sense, 
 but is petrified or dead), that, under exceptional cir¬ 
 cumstances, it is not tied to the uniformity of custom ? 
 It can act exceptionally under exceptional circum¬ 
 stances. What God is doing from this point of 
 view when He works a miracle is not to violate 
 the order of the world in the deeper sense. He 
 innovates, it is true, upon the normal physical 
 order, but solely in the interest of the deeper moral 
 order and purpose of the world. Miracle is, from this 
 point of view, God’s protest against the monstrous 
 disorder of sin. It is God the Creator recreating 
 what man has defaced. At the last God is to come 
 into His own—that is the day of the Lord. But 
 He from time to time gives some foretastes of this 
 final self-vindication, and they are “ miracles.” This 
 is in effect Augustine’s famous vindication of the 
 miraculous. 
 
240 
 
 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 “ Not unreasonably we say that God does something 
 contrary to nature which He does contrary to what we 
 know in nature. For this is what we call nature—the 
 customary course of nature as known to us, against which, 
 when God does anything, they are called marvels or 
 miracles. But as to that supreme law of nature, which 
 is hidden from our knowledge either because we are impious 
 or because we are still deficient in power to understand, 
 God can no more act contrary to it than He can act 
 contrary to Himself. . . 1 
 
 And to admit the credibility or the actual occur¬ 
 rence of miracles in effect lays no fresh burden upon 
 science. The sciences of physics and chemistry— 
 and we may include biology—cannot account for all 
 that is in nature. They cannot account for the action 
 of free wills or for the consequent disorder of sin, any 
 more than they can account for miracles. But 
 neither the actions of free wills, nor the very rarely 
 occurring miracles, hinder their effective investigation 
 of nature on the level that lies below freedom. When 
 a materialist philosophy has attempted to ignore 
 freedom and still to take all human life into its 
 province—as the old political economy attempted to 
 deal with industrial life on the basis of a mechanistic 
 philosophy of human motives—it has always con¬ 
 spicuously failed. Mechanism can give no account of 
 
 1 This passage, which has been quoted in all modern treatises on 
 the subject, beginning with Trench, is from Con. Faust, xxvi. 3, 
 cf. also : “ God, the maker of all natures, does nothing contrary to 
 nature, for what is natural to anything is what He does, from whom 
 is all the law and number and order of nature.” When Lord Haldane 
 (Reign oj Relativity, p. 414) defines the miraculous as “ what violates 
 the principles of the order to which it belongs,” he seems to be postu¬ 
 lating in nature a complete separation of its “ orders ” which does 
 not really exist. The intellectual demoralization which a too facile 
 belief in miracles might occasion (see Pratt’s Consciousness of Qod, 
 pp. 27, 446) is not a temptation to which we are very liable to-day. 
 
ANOTHER EXPLANATION 241 
 
 miracles. But also it can give no account of freedom 
 or sin—that is, of human nature. 
 
 II 
 
 The above argument views miracles on the back¬ 
 ground of sin—as God’s protest against the false 
 imagination or moral blindness which sin begets in 
 the minds of men. This is, on the whole, the Bible 
 view of miracles. And, different as their basis in 
 evidence is, it applies to the Old Testament miracles 
 as well as those of the New. But there is another line 
 of argument which applies only to the miracles of 
 Jesus Christ, and it starts from the belief that in 
 Christ we see something new to human experience— 
 a new level reached in creation—such as it may be 
 supposed would have occurred in any case, even if sin 
 had never been. The argument runs thus : If Christ 
 truly was, what His disciples came to believe Him to 
 be, the eternal Word or Son of God, Himself very God, 
 made man or “ flesh,” there was thereby constituted 
 a new thing in nature, a new relation of the Creator 
 Spirit, the Spirit of Life, to matter, a new level in the 
 evolution of life, such as would naturally exhibit new 
 phenomena. From this point of view “the works” 
 of Christ are natural in His case—the natural out- 
 flowings of the power which He alone, or He first, 
 possessed. It was “ natural ” that He, being what 
 He was, should so heal the sick, should so control 
 nature, should so be raised from the dead, as is related 
 in the Gospels. In a phrase of Athanasius’s, it is all 
 “ in rational sequence ”—it is what would be expected 
 in the case of such a person. 
 
 There are signs in the New Testament of this sort 
 of conception of Christ’s miracles as His natural 
 “ works,” the natural expression of a hitherto un- 
 
 17 
 
242 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 exampled nature. So the centurion, whose faith Jesus 
 so strongly commended , 1 sees in Him one doubtless 
 subordinate to God, but nevertheless, within God’s 
 world, holding so lofty a position that nature must 
 obey His commands, even as in the world of the 
 Roman Empire he himself, as centurion, though he 
 was a man “ under authority,” the authority of his 
 imperator, was yet able to command—to say to this 
 man Go, and he goeth, and to that man Come, and he 
 cometh. Such a command over the forces of nature 
 he instinctively feels to belong to Christ. Miracles of 
 control over nature are what he would expect in the 
 case of such a person. So elsewhere in the Gospel 
 there is attributed to Christ a certain kind of inherent 
 “ power ” which, apparently like a natural force, 
 faith in the sick can draw out to heal them, and only 
 faith can draw out. When the woman with an issue 
 of blood touched the garment of Jesus, He perceived 
 that virtue or healing power—the “ power that was 
 in Him ”—had gone forth . 2 And on another occasion, 
 where faith was lacking, it is said that He could do no 
 mighty works . 3 Such phrases suggest a 44 natural ” 
 faculty which could heal the sick and raise the dead— 
 a 44 natural ” outpouring of inherent life-giving power, 
 which a certain lack of response could restrain or 
 inhibit. So in the case of our Lord’s own death, 
 Peter, after he has recovered from his moral blindness, 
 sees in the resurrection of Jesus nothing astonishing. 
 As the prophet had foreseen, in the case of such an 
 one, the very idea of the corruption of death was 
 impossible to entertain — 44 it was not possible that 
 he should be holden of death.” 4 
 
 In the face of the actual evolution of the universe, 
 
 1 Matt. viii. 9. 2 Mark v. 30. 3 Mark vi. 5. 
 
 4 Acts ii. 24; cf. John 18. 
 
CHRIST A NEW LEVEL 
 
 243 
 
 such an argument is quite legitimate. For from the 
 point of view of evolution it is untrue that the future 
 must always resemble or has always resembled the 
 past. Nature has not been in this sense uniform. 
 We are bound to think of it as disclosing successive 
 layers or stages, each successive layer or stage 
 exhibiting laws or phenomena of its own, which from 
 the point of view of the lower level would appear 
 miraculous . 1 
 
 Thus, however life emerged out of a merely 
 mechanical universe, it emerged as a new thing with 
 new laws. Plants growing and beasts moving are 
 miraculous from the point of view of inanimate nature. 
 Inanimate nature and its laws cannot explain these 
 growths and motions. So human, rational beings, 
 when first they builded and planted, however they 
 emerged upon the world’s surface, were doing a new 
 thing, exhibiting a quite new power of moulding 
 nature to their purposes. Their mastery of nature 
 was miraculous from the point of view of merely 
 animal life. A new level had been attained, and it 
 exhibited new marks of activity. The future, in 
 which they were the prominent feature, did not 
 resemble the past. In the same way, when Christ 
 came, in His person was a new relation of life and 
 mind to matter, and He would naturally, as a “ new 
 creation,” exhibit a new kind of control over nature. 
 
 It must be recognized that the old objection to 
 miracles as urged by Spinoza, and still by Renan and 
 
 1 Cf. Pringle Pattison, Idea of Ood, pp. 97, 104-5 : “a new plane 
 or level of existence, qualitatively different, and, through that 
 difference, opening up a new range of possibilities”; ‘‘actual 
 ‘ increments ’ or ‘ lifts ’ in the process, where quantity may be said 
 to pass into quality, differences of degree into differences of kind.” 
 “ Each new fact in turn must be sheerly unintelligible if we take 
 our stand at the stage below.” Cf. Haldane, op. cit ., pp. 125 ff. 
 
244 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 his contemporaries, represented the dominance in 
 the domain of science of the mathematical sciences. 
 The norm of science was physical mechanism. Re¬ 
 cently the normative influence of biology has become 
 dominant. And biology demands new categories 
 which physics and chemistry cannot supply. They 
 cannot account for the behaviour of living things. 
 Thus the argument is quite valid that—granted 
 (what in fact we are not considering in this volume) 
 that Christ cannot be reasonably accounted merely 
 as man, but must be interpreted as God incarnate— 
 He must be expected to exhibit actions natural to 
 Him, which would be “ miraculous ” from the point 
 of view of the nature which lies below Him. 
 
 Some apologists 1 for miracles have laid their main 
 stress on this kind of argument. They have insisted 
 that Christ’s miracles are natural to His person. 
 Nevertheless, it must be admitted that this separation 
 of the miracles of Christ from all other miracles is 
 not what the New Testament as a whole suggests. 
 It seems to demand an explanation of the miracles 
 of Christ which (apart from all question of evidence 2 ) 
 would assimilate them to those of the Old Testament 
 as acts of God. In the Old Testament they are 
 represented as acts of God wrought to show His 
 purpose for Israel and to ensure that purpose. So in 
 the New Testament the miracles done by Christ, or in 
 His case, are represented as the acts of God who sent 
 Him bearing witness to Him.’ They are attributed 
 to the Divine Spirit who indwelt Him , 4 and (often) are 
 pictured as done by God in answer to the prayer of 
 
 1 Including myself in Bampton Lectures, lect. ii. 
 
 2 See later, p. 248. 
 
 3 E.g. Acts ii. 22, 24, x. 38, 40, xvii. 31. This is the constant 
 mode of expression. 
 
 4 Matt. xii. 28; Acts x. 38. 
 
MIRACLES NOT ARBITRARY 245 
 
 Jesus. 1 In a word, they are abnormal acts of God 
 done to call attention to His Christ. So specially the 
 resurrection is the act of God marking out and finally 
 designating Jesus as His Son and as His authorized 
 representative through whom He is to judge the world. 
 That is to say, our thoughts are in the main directed by 
 the miracles not to the special nature of Christ but to 
 the nature of God as transcendent Creator, under whose 
 hands nature is plastic and must fulfil all His will. 
 
 Thus we come back to the sole question which 
 really occupies us in this chapter. There can be no 
 doubt that one who holds the prophetic doctrine of 
 God the Creator can find no a 'priori difficulty about 
 the miracles of the Bible. They are not unworthy 
 of God. They are not arbitrary acts. They are 
 the exhibition from time to time of His special purpose 
 in the world in connexion with Israel or with Christ, 
 an exhibition given as it were in protest against the 
 blindness of a sin-perverted world. They are not 
 perversions of the real order of the world, but acts 
 done to wrench back a sin-perverted world into its 
 proper order. They are part of a redemptive process 
 which seeks the restoration of the divine order in 
 nature, not its overthrow. Thus we come back at 
 last to our original question—Is the invincible re¬ 
 pugnance to entertaining the reality of miracles, 
 bred in the mind by physical science, a legitimate 
 repugnance ? Is the practically prohibitive prejudice 
 against miracles which it generates really rational ? 
 Or, in other words, is the scientific view of nature 
 legitimately exclusive of any other view ? 
 
 There can be no question—as has been already 
 noticed—that any study exclusively pursued tends 
 to narrow the mind. “ No man having drunk old 
 
 1 Matt. xxvi. 53 ; John xi. 42. 
 
246 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 wine desireth new. He saith the old is good.” No 
 man having become through long years exclusively 
 absorbed in the scientific conception of nature as 
 the scene of invariable law can fail to resent the 
 occurrence of miracles. But we contend science is 
 not the only legitimate avenue to reality. The 
 moralistic approach is at least as real. From that 
 point of view the moral will of God and the fact 
 of moral freedom in man and the vast portent of 
 universal sin become the prominent facts, and the 
 philosophy of divine redemption, and with it of 
 miracles, becomes intelligible and acceptable. 
 
 The two points of view are practically not the least 
 incompatible. Miracles, it must be remembered, are 
 on all showing very rare occurrences. That is of 
 
 O v 
 
 their essence. Thev do not occur as a hindrance in 
 the path of the scientific investigator. His postulated 
 world of fixed laws is before him all the same, whether 
 personally he believes in certain miracles or no. All 
 that is asked of him as a scientific man is that he 
 should recognize the abstraction of his sciences, and 
 seek to impose no dogmatic or a priori barrier against 
 the conception of the possibility or credibility of 
 miracles—a possibility and credibility which are, as 
 has been shown, really bound up with faith in the 
 God of the prophets and of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But there are manv—historians and students of 
 
 a/ 
 
 history—who might read this sort of argument which 
 we have been advancing and feel that it does not in 
 anv sense meet their case ; but who at the same time 
 would be unaffected by anv exhibition of the strength 
 of the historical evidence for (let us say) the corporal 
 resurrection of Christ from the dead. What closes 
 
THE HISTORICAL OBJECTION 247 
 
 their minds a priori to evidence is not any abstract 
 conception of nature, but what they would describe 
 as a general deduction from history. 44 Religious 
 history,” they would say, 44 is full of reported miracles, 
 some of them reported by eye-witnesses or on what 
 appears to be very strong evidence. But we have 
 ceased to believe them. We either regard them as 
 the influence of certain powerful personalities upon 
 other men’s minds and bodies, which is a fact of 
 nature such as is described under the general head 
 of 4 suggestion,’ or of 4 auto-suggestion,’ which is 
 akin to it. Or we believe that under certain con¬ 
 ditions men’s minds are so obsessed with the demand 
 for miracle that they 4 see ’ what they desire to 
 see and their reports have no objective value. We 
 notice that the more reasonable apologists for Bible 
 miracles have given up the attempt to maintain 
 almost all the nature-miracles of the Bible, i.e. those 
 that defy any naturalistic interpretation—for the 
 miracles of healing as recorded can be interpreted 
 as not more than exaggerations of actual facts. No 
 one now maintains that Balaam’s ass really spoke 
 or that the sun really 4 stood still ’ at Joshua’s 
 behest. Nor is any claim put in for the ecclesiastical 
 miracles. They only claim the real occurrence of the 
 nature miracles of the New Testament or some of 
 them, especially the miraculous birth and corporal 
 resurrection of Jesus Christ. By this process of 
 gradual withdrawal they show that they are fighting 
 a losing battle. And the sooner they cease to fight 
 it, the better in the interests of religion.” 1 
 
 But such an argument is full of misrepresentation. 
 For my own part, though I am not disposed to think 
 
 i Such an argument I have seen proceeding from Dr. Sanday’s pen, 
 but unpublished. 
 
248 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 that the ass on which Balaam rode really uttered 
 human words or that the poetry of the book of 
 Jasher can assure us of a real alteration having taken 
 place in the normal motions of the bodies of our 
 solar system, yet I am not at all disposed to “ give 
 up 55 the claim for miracle in Old Testament history. 
 The miracles of the Old Testament are mostly to 
 be found either in connexion with the redemption of 
 Israel from Egypt, and the foundation of their polity 
 under Moses, or with the prophetic ministry of 
 Elijah and Elisha. I think it is highly likely that 
 these great moments in the history of redemption 
 had really miraculous accompaniments. But the 
 conditions of evidence make the vindication of this 
 belief impossible. The written records of Exodus 
 and Joshua cannot be proved to date within three 
 centuries of the events recorded. The memory of 
 them appears to have lived in popular songs. What 
 exactly occurred cannot be defined. In the same 
 way the written record of Elijah’s and Elisha’s 
 activities appears to date from some 150 years after 
 their lives. 44 They read like a transcript of a vivid 
 oral tradition,” which had Jived in the schools of the 
 prophets and in the mouths of the people for genera¬ 
 tions. Upon such a tradition no reliance can be placed 
 in estimating what exactly occurred. As to the 
 “ ecclesiastical miracles,” some of them rest upon 
 very good evidence, and a few of them I should feel 
 it was unreasonable scepticism to doubt. But it 
 must be recognized that from the fourth century 
 onwards, with increasing force, there was in the 
 Christian Church such a demand for miracles in con¬ 
 nexion with saints as appears to have led to their 
 manufacture on the largest scale. Shortly 1 I shall 
 
 1 See below, p. 261. 
 
THERE IS NO LIKE CASE 249 
 
 have reason to cite in this sense the unimpeachable 
 evidence of the great Bollandist—the Pere Delehaye. 
 Moreover, nothing in ecclesiastical history turns upon 
 any particular miracle. And in arguing about any 
 one of them you are arguing about supposed events 
 which belong to a deeply discredited type. So it is 
 reasonable, I think, that the argument concerning 
 the real occurrence of miracles should be specially 
 conducted upon the ground where their significance is 
 obvious, where the discrediting atmosphere is, as will 
 appear, absent on the whole, and where the evidence 
 can be, as again will appear, very precisely estimated. 
 
 Further, I shall have occasion to demur to the idea 
 that the miracles of healing in the New Testament 
 admit of a naturalistic interpretation. They only 
 admit of this if they are so reduced in magnitude as 
 really to cease to be the events recorded. The 
 untrustworthiness of the actual narrative as compared 
 to what would result, if the necessary reduction is 
 allowed, is so great that it can hardly be relied upon 
 at all for any purpose. 
 
 Thus I entirely deny that the historians can plead 
 their general distrust of miracles in religious history 
 as an excuse for refusing to give serious consideration 
 to a particular group of recorded miracles, which, I 
 think it will appear, have no parallel elsewhere in the 
 known history of the world in respect of the con¬ 
 ditions under which they are recorded to have 
 occurred. Again, all I ask of historians is the absence 
 of the a priori dogmatic prejudice : granted this, let 
 them exercise the freedom of criticism to the full. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is one not unimportant element of present-day 
 thought which must be noted—that is, the wide- 
 
250 THE PREJUDICE EXAMINED 
 
 spread tendency among not unintelligent people to 
 believe that miracles are even to-day of fairly frequent 
 occurrence—such, I mean, as are reported from 
 Lourdes, or are ascribed to spiritual healers or to the 
 contemporary Christian Sadhu , 1 or are said to be 
 worked under the influence of “ Christian science,” 
 or, what may perhaps turn out to be very important, 
 such as are recorded by spiritists—that is, the move¬ 
 ments of furniture or other material objects, which 
 apparently, if they are truly reported, must be 
 ascribed to the action of beings—discarnate spirits— 
 from another world . 3 If, as a distinguished man of 
 science asserts , 3 a table in a modern drawing-room 
 “ made most caressing movements to and fro, and 
 seemed as if it could not get close enough ” to his 
 wife, with motions expressive of affection, because 
 moving at the will of his departed son, and expressing 
 his feelings—then certainly our physical world is 
 not a closed world, but is open to influences from 
 the beyond which can materially affect its phenomena. 
 The intrusion of unseen forces (the wills of spirits) 
 can cause that to occur which “ in the course of 
 nature ” could not have occurred at all. I imagine 
 that if intelligent people in general come to believe 
 such events really to occur, they will not be likely 
 to disbelieve the miracles of the Gospel to have really 
 occurred. I express no opinion, and indeed I am not 
 qualified to express an opinion, on the reality of such 
 occurrences. I confess an intense mental repugnance 
 to the admission of their reality. But I seem to 
 
 1 The Sadhu, Streeter and Appasamy: cf. above, p. 36. 
 
 2 These would come under the head of miracles or signs, as the 
 words are used in the N.T. to describe events in nature due, not to 
 the will and action of God or of Christ, but of other spirits (Mark xiii. 
 22 ; 2 Thess. ii. 9). 
 
 3 Sir Oliver Lodge: see Raymond , pp. 216 and 263. 
 
251 
 
 SUMMARY OF REPLY 
 
 myself to be becoming more and more merely old- 
 fashioned with regard to them. It seems to me quite 
 likely that the next generation will find themselves 
 in an intellectual world the attitude of which 
 towards miracles will be not unlike the attitude of 
 the Roman Empire, but quite unlike the attitude of 
 the educated world of the last generation ; and by the 
 attitude of the Roman Empire, I mean a disposition 
 to accept such occurrences, without generally attri¬ 
 buting very much importance to them. 
 
 • • • • ♦ 
 
 However, enough has perhaps been said on the 
 a priori credibility of miracles. My contention is 
 threefold. First , that the evidence of the strictly 
 miraculous in the New Testament is such that, as 
 will appear, nothing can resist it but a predetermined 
 mind possessed with the conviction that it is, if not 
 impossible, yet incredible. Secondly , that it is neither 
 impossible nor incredible, if the God of the prophets 
 and of Jesus is the real God, if the world is what the 
 Bible represents it as being, disturbed and distorted 
 by the rebellion of free wills, and if the redemptive 
 or recreative purpose of God needs such a manifes¬ 
 tation of His power in the physical world to make 
 it effective. Thirdly , that there is no ground for the 
 assumption—the only assumption which can really 
 arm our minds against the evidence—that the physical 
 world which science investigates, the world of con¬ 
 stant physical sequence and invariable law, is a self- 
 complete and closed world, which can admit no 
 influence from any other world. The evidence is 
 against this theory of a self-complete enclosure, which 
 cannot account for the action of human wills. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 We have sought to set aside the a priori prejudice 
 against miracles which, regarding them as impossible, 
 or at least incredible, is bound to find some way of 
 disposing of the historical evidence, however cogent. 
 This a priori dogmatism, we have argued, both is in 
 itself unjustifiable, as being based upon an untenable 
 view of nature and natural laws, and also, in eliminat¬ 
 ing the large miraculous element from the Gospel 
 narrative, leaves the whole residual picture presented 
 by the Gospels incoherent, unconvincing, and so 
 uncertain as to be capable of any kind of arbitrary 
 interpretation. If our imaginations are purged of 
 this prejudice and we approach the Gospels with 
 open minds, we find ourselves presented in the 
 Synoptists with a picture of Jesus of extraordinary 
 impressiveness, such as we cannot conceive to have 
 been an imaginative invention. 
 
 Let us consider, first of all, the Gospel of St. Mark. 
 We have already taken note of its characteristics, and 
 have seen reason to believe that in its main bulk it 
 represents, as the subapostolic tradition tells us, the 
 teaching of Peter written down, after repeated 
 hearing, by the perfectly simple-minded disciple 
 John Mark. It bears all the marks of the eye¬ 
 witness’s story. It is extraordinarily lifelike. Also 
 it is full of miracles. Of these the most are miracles 
 of healing which, as they are recorded, go quite beyond 
 
 252 
 
MIRACLES AND WORDS 258 
 
 anything which admits of naturalistic interpretation. 1 
 But amongst them are “ nature miracles ”—the 
 stilling of the storm and the feeding of the multitude 
 with the few loaves and fishes. 2 This last, as we 
 have already observed, is quite plainly an account of 
 a miracle wrought to appease natural appetite ; and 
 to transform it into a quasi-sacramental communion, 
 as Dr. Sanday would have us do, in which each par¬ 
 ticipant received but a tiny fragment, does violence 
 to the whole context. 
 
 We note again and again how the miracles give 
 occasion for unmistakably genuine sayings or gestures 
 of Christ, such as : “ That ye may know that the Son 
 of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” * “Go 
 thy way, show thyself to the priest . . . for a testimony 
 unto them.” 4 “ Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to 
 
 do good or to do harm ? To save a life or to kill ? . . . 
 And he looked round about on them with anger, 
 being grieved at the hardening of their hearts.” 5 
 “ How can Satan cast out Satan ? ” 8 “ And he 
 
 himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. . . . 
 Why are ye fearful ? Have ye not yet faith ? ” 7 
 “ And straightway Jesus, perceiving in himself that 
 the power proceeding from him had gone forth, 
 turned about. . . . Thy faith hath made thee whole ; 
 go in peace.” 8 “ Talitha cumi ” 9 (the actual Aramaic 
 
 1 See Dr. Reginald Ryle in Hibbert Journal, April 1907, “The 
 Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing.” 
 
 2 As has been explained, it is not at all unlikely that the “ feeding 
 
 of the four thousand ” is really an account of the same incident as 
 the “ feeding of the five thousand ”—an independent account, which 
 St. Mark received from some other source than St. Peter, and mis¬ 
 took for a separate event. The two accounts differ in nothing except 
 the figures. 6 Mark iii. 23. 
 
 3 Mark ii. 10. 7 Mark iv. 38-40. 
 
 * Mark i. 44. 8 Mark v. 30-4. 
 
 6 Mark iii. 4-5. 9 Mark v. 41. 
 
254 
 
 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 words given). “ Give ye them to eat.” 1 “ Be of 
 
 good cheer: it is I; be not afraid.” 8 “ It is not 
 
 meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it 
 to dogs.” 8 “ If thou canst ! All things are 
 
 possible to him that believeth.” 4 We note how 
 lack of faith in the people limits the power of the 
 Healer, 8 and how the blind man at Bethsaida is 
 gradually healed. 3 In a word, the whole picture, 
 full as it is of miracles, overwhelms us with the sense 
 of reality. 
 
 Next let us turn to the material in the Synoptic 
 Gospels which is common to St. Matthew and St. 
 Luke, and not derived from St. Mark. This is gene¬ 
 rally supposed to represent the earliest of the 
 written “ Gospels,” which is regarded as having 
 consisted mainly, though not exclusively, of an 
 account of our Lord’s teaching, and is commonly 
 designated as “the Source,” or Q. About the nature 
 and scope of such a document it is not possible to 
 speak with any certainty, but at least there lies 
 behind the First and Third Gospels a mass of common 
 material which is probably the earliest record we have 
 of Jesus, earlier than the Gospel of Mark. Though 
 it seems to have been in the main a record of His 
 teaching, yet the implications of miracle are both 
 abundant and exceptionally convincing. First we 
 should note the account of the Temptation of our 
 Lord, which we cannot hesitate to ascribe to our 
 
 1 Mark vi. 37. 2 Mark vi. 50. 8 Mark vii. 27. 
 
 4 Mark ix. 23. I may add that in one of the miracles recorded 
 only by St. Luke—the healing of the ten lepers—we notice the same 
 convincing association with the miracle of a self-evidencing saying : 
 
 “ Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine ? ” etc. 
 (Luke xvii. 12-19). See also the characteristic action and speech 
 of Peter given only by St. Luke in the story of the miraculous 
 draught of fishes (Luke v. 8). 
 
 6 Mark vi. 5. 
 
 6 Mark viii. 22 ff. 
 
THE GROUND-DOCUMENTS 255 
 
 Lord Himself. It is the account of a spiritual temp¬ 
 tation given in material forms—a temptation, or 
 series of temptations, strikingly unlike those of 
 ordinary men, but profoundly suggestive of genuine¬ 
 ness in connexion with the person of Jesus. The 
 temptations are plainly those of a man starting on a 
 great spiritual enterprise—the bringing in of the 
 Kingdom of God—and fully conscious of extraordinary 
 powers over nature. They have no meaning save 
 for one who could, if He would, turn stones into 
 bread, and amaze the people by alighting in the 
 midst of them from the temple pinnacle. But He 
 refuses to exercise His miraculous power for the 
 satisfaction of His physical appetite or the astonish¬ 
 ment of the people. 1 Then we have the healing of 
 the centurion’s servant, 2 where this observant 
 Gentile recognizes in Jesus one—doubtless not 
 supreme in nature, for He is under God—but holding 
 in the economy of the world of nature a power like 
 that which an officer holds in the Roman army over 
 the men subject to him. He can surely command 
 the services of nature with an unquestioned authority. 
 And our Lord blesses the discerning faith of the 
 Roman officer with the strongest commendation, and 
 proves the truth of his discernment by exhibiting 
 His power. Again, the habitual miraculousness of 
 Christ’s action is disclosed in His answer to the 
 messengers of John the Baptist, who bring the 
 question of his doubting spirit. 3 He bade them report 
 to John the wonderful works which they had seen; 
 “ The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, 
 the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the 
 
 1 Matt. iv. 1 ff.; Luke iv. 1 ff. 
 
 2 Matt. viii. 5-10; Luke vii. 1-10. 
 
 3 Matt. xi. 2 ff. ; Luke vii. 18 ff. 
 
256 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 dead are raised up ” ; and the saying is noteworthy 
 because among the wonderful works insisted upon is 
 “ the preaching the good tidings to the poor,” and 
 the insufficiency of miracles to generate faith is 
 suggested by the warning, “ Blessed is he whosoever 
 shall not be offended in me.” Once more, we have 
 the denunciation by Jesus of Chorazin and Bethsaida 
 and Capernaum for not giving heed to the powers 
 He had wrought among them, which implies a great 
 multitude of unrecorded miracles. 1 
 
 Occasionally we seem to note a greater courage in 
 St. Mark (or in St. Peter) in recording things exactly 
 as they were, e.g. the limitation on the power of 
 Jesus to heal where faith was lacking in those around 
 Him—“ He could do no mighty works, because of 
 their unbelief”—which is not reproduced by St. 
 Matthew or St. Luke. Again, in one passage of 
 St. Matthew, where Jesus is represented, as in the 
 other Synoptists, as transmitting to his disciples the 
 power to work miracles of healing, we notice a 
 heightening of the picture : 44 Heal the sick, raise the 
 dead, cleanse the leper, cast out devils. Freely ye 
 have received, freely give ” 2 ; where Mark refers only 
 to healing generally and mentions particularly the 
 method of anointing. 3 But this heightening of the 
 miraculous colouring is not discoverable generally or 
 to any considerable extent. The picture is sub¬ 
 stantially identical in all the Synoptic Gospels. Owing 
 indeed to the fewness of the discourses of Jesus recorded 
 by Mark, the picture of the miraculous worker is in 
 higher relief in his narrative than in any of the other 
 Gospels. But in all of them the authority to work 
 
 1 Matt. xi. 21 ff.; Luke x. 13 ff. On all these elements in Q, see 
 Headlam, The Miracles of the Gospels, p. 182. 
 
 2 Matt. x. 8. 
 
 3 Mark vi. 13. 
 
EVIDENCE OF MIRACLES 257 
 
 miracles and the spiritual authority to teach and to 
 forgive are represented as inseparable the one from 
 the other. Here is a real man, but a real man endowed 
 with the authority of God morally and physically. 
 This is the irresistible impression. 
 
 In all the Gospels we note the relatively subordinate 
 evidential position assigned to the wonderful works 
 of Jesus. He was no mere wonder-worker, though 
 He worked wonders. This is made evident in the 
 account of His temptation. He would not obtain 
 belief by dazzling men. He knew the worthlessness 
 of such belief. “ If they hear not Moses and the 
 prophets, neither will they be persuaded,” 1 in any 
 really spiritual sense, by a supernatural occurrence. 
 This appears to be the interpretation of our Lord’s 
 stern refusal to meet the demand of the scribes and 
 Pharisees for a 44 sign” or a 44 sign from heaven.” 2 
 This appears to mean some public demonstration of 
 miraculous power on a great scale wrought to prove 
 demonstratively His divine authority. And this He 
 would not give. His miracles were incidental. They 
 issued from a pity which knew that it had power 
 to heal men’s sicknesses and supply their physical 
 needs, and could not refrain from using it; but they 
 were rather concealed than advertised ; or they were 
 elements in the training of the disciples to trust Him 
 utterly ; or if occasionally they were intended to 
 serve, like the healing of the paralytic man, as proofs 
 to the eye of the spiritual authority which He claimed, 
 they were still incidental or unpremeditated, and in 
 presence of a relatively small company. It is difficult 
 to state with any accuracy exactly what function our 
 
 1 Luke xvi. 31. 
 
 2 Mark viii. 11; Matt. xvi. 1 ; cf. Matt. xii. 38-42, Luke xi. 1G, 
 29 ff.; cf. also 1 Cor. i. 22, “ The Jews ask for signs.” 
 
 18 
 
258 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 Lord seems to desire His miracles to fulfil, but at least 
 it is quite clear that he absolutely refused to astonish 
 men into belief, knowing that such a belief would be 
 of no spiritual value. 44 There shall no sign be given 
 them but the sign of the prophet Jonah 55 —that is, 
 the sign of the w r ord of righteousness. 1 
 
 There was in the Roman Empire at this date a 
 widespread curiosity for the mere 44 wonder ” divorced 
 from any moral associations. This is very well 
 exemplified in the account which Tacitus 2 gives us of 
 the public “miracles” of healing wrought by Vespasian 
 at Alexandria upon a blind man and a man with a 
 dislocated hand, which he records as evidences of 
 divine favour towards the Emperor. At the instiga¬ 
 tion of the god Serapis—that is, doubtless, the priests 
 in his temple—these men urgently demand to be 
 respectively touched by the Emperor’s spittle and 
 trodden upon by his foot. Vespasian’s first impulse 
 is to treat the idea as ridiculous. Then his vanity 
 contends with his fear of ridicule. He becomes more 
 and more impressed with the opportunity, as the 
 men are urgent and flatterers encourage him. He 
 seeks medical advice. The doctors’ answers are 
 various, but they declare that the blind man’s faculty 
 of sight is not extinguished and could be recovered 
 44 if obstacles were removed,” and that the maimed 
 man’s dislocated joints could be restored to their 
 proper functions if health-giving force were applied. 
 They encourage Vespasian to believe that he has 
 
 1 It is notable that the Greek word for “ miracle ” or “ wonder ” 
 is never used in the Gospels, except for miracles of evil origin 
 (Markxiii. 22; Matt. xxiv. 24). “ Powers” is the characteristic word 
 in the Synoptists (cf. Mark vi. 5), and “signs” or “works” in 
 St. John. These words carry moral and spiritual associations, as 
 distinct from the mere marvel. 
 
 2 Hist. iv. 81. 
 
CONTRAST TO PAGAN MIRACLES 259 
 
 been chosen by the gods for this divine ministry. 
 They add that if he succeeds, it will be to the glory 
 of Caesar, and, if he fails, that the ridicule will 
 fall upon the two unfortunate men. So Vespasian, 
 in a burst of confidence in his fortunes, with a joyful 
 countenance makes the attempt, in presence of a 
 multitude watching intently, and with immediate 
 success. The one man got back the use of his hand, 
 the other the sight of his eyes. And surviving 
 witnesses still, Tacitus says, speak of the event, 
 though by his day lying could bring them no ad¬ 
 vantage. 
 
 Now, whatever interpretation we put upon this 
 narrative, we must recognize in it a very marked 
 contrast to the spirit of the Gospel narratives—in the 
 total absence of moral associations or conditions or 
 results attached to the working of the miracles. That 
 is the point insisted upon by Origen in his book 
 against Celsus. 1 He does not seem to deny the 
 occurrence of miracles in the pagan world, but he 
 points to the fact that the miracles of the Gospels 
 were wrought to make men morally better, and as 
 part of a great divine act of moral redemption for 
 mankind. 
 
 It is in accordance with this Christian tendency to 
 value miracles only as instruments of moral instruction 
 that, among the miracles of Jesus and his disciples, 
 those which made most impression—apart from the 
 central and all-important miracle of the resurrection— 
 were the castings-out of evil spirits of which we get 
 such graphic descriptions in the Gospels. They were 
 found specially impressive because the greater part 
 of the world lived in a terror of evil spirits, which was 
 paralysing and degrading, and these acts of redemp- 
 
 1 See Origen, c. Celsum, iii. 28, 29. 
 
260 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 tion manifested the power of Jesus to emancipate 
 men from the slavery of this terror and enable them 
 to lift up their heads as free men, sons of an Almighty 
 Father. 
 
 Of the mere desire for the marvellous or the fear of 
 it, we have examples in the Gospels in the desire of 
 Herod Antipas to 44 see Jesus, for he hoped to have 
 seen some miracle done by him ” ; and in his earlier 
 belief (if it was serious) that Jesus was John the 
 Baptist risen again. Perhaps there are passages in 
 the Acts which seem to suggest in the earliest Church 
 a demand for miracles not unlike that of the mediaeval 
 Church. 1 But this is not the temper of the disciples 
 in the Gospels. They accept miracles readily enough. 
 They create no difficulty in the mind of any New 
 Testament writer. But there is no such demand for 
 them as would imagine them and ascribe reality to 
 the imagination. A sign of this is the fact that no 
 miracles were ascribed to one who came 44 in the 
 spirit and power of Elijah ” and whom all reverenced 
 as a great prophet— 44 John did no miracle.” 2 In fact, 
 the disciples appear in the Synoptic Gospels as very 
 unimaginative men, and the miracle-hunger is not 
 in them. Indeed, for the first three centuries of 
 Christianity there was comparatively little stress 
 laid upon miracles as 44 evidences,” except on the 
 great crucial miracle of the resurrection; and though 
 there is occasional mention of contemporary miracles, 3 
 yet Chrysostom speaks plainly of 44 signs ” or miracles 
 as no longer occurring, and explains that they were 
 needed as guarantees of the divine intention when 
 the new religion or manner of life had to be first 
 
 1 Acts v. 15, xix. 11 ff. 3 2 John x. 41. 
 
 8 See Origen on the “ traces ” of the old power still found in the 
 Church, c. Cels. i. 2, iii. 24. Irenaeus uses more unequivocal language. 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL SPIRIT 261 
 
 established among men, but are not needed now. 1 
 Similar language occurs in other early writers. 
 
 After that—in the fourth century—the temper 
 begins to prevail which found it necessary to attach 
 miracles to saints, in the same way as later painters 
 attached a halo to the saint’s head. This temper 
 has been admirably and courageously described in 
 its monotonous consequences by the Dean of the 
 Jesuit company of Bollandists, who have produced 
 and are producing the gigantic work of the Acta 
 Sanctorum . No one interested in mediaeval credulity 
 should fail to read Fr. Delehaye’s LSgendes Hagio- 
 graphiques. 1 It is the almost universal prevalence 
 of this temper in the mediaeval Churches which makes 
 one justly sceptical about the records of miracles, 
 even when they appear to rest on very good evidence, 
 though it is very far from justifying universal dis¬ 
 belief.* 
 
 There are, in fact, two opposite tempers in men 
 which are destructive of the kind of appeal which 
 the Gospel miracles make to reasonable men. One 
 is the temper of pure credulity, which demands 
 miracles and invents them in accordance with its 
 desire. The other is the temper of a priori disbelief, 
 
 i See Horn, in Matt. xiv. 3, Horn in Epist. ad Col. viii. 5. In 
 Ep. i. ad Cor. vi. 2, “ Do not make the fact that signs do not occur 
 now an argument that they did not occur then [in New Testament 
 times]. They were useful then, but not now,” 
 
 a Brussels, 1905; English trans. (Longmans), Legends of the 
 Saints : an Introduction to Hagiography. 
 
 3 Thus when we read (Suspicius Severus, Dial. iii. 13) of St. Martin’s 
 anguish of conscience over his consent to communicate with those 
 who had promoted the execution of Priscillian for heresy, and learn 
 how he knew himself weakened through this sin, if it was a sin, in 
 his power of healing the sick, we feel sure that Martin believed him¬ 
 self to have, as his contemporaries undoubtedly believed him to have, 
 such power. Some mediaeval miracles rest on evidence that seems 
 to be conclusive. 
 
262 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 which is bred of the modern spirit of physical science, 
 when it is misapplied, demanding for events claimed 
 to be historical the sort of demonstration which history 
 does not often supply. If there is anything certain, 
 it is certain that Jesus Christ did not intend to compel 
 men to believe in Him. Certainly, for instance, He 
 did not “ prove 55 His resurrection from the dead 
 except to those who had already faith in Him, though a 
 faith which had suffered eclipse. It would have been 
 wholly contrary to His principles of action to have 
 confuted His adversaries by physical demonstrations. 
 
 Now we will turn our attention away from the 
 “ powers ” wrought by Jesus or His disciples which it 
 is impossible to disbelieve, to the “ powers ” unhesita¬ 
 tingly believed by the first Christians to have been 
 wrought by God upon Him or in His case—notably 
 His resurrection the third day from the dead, His 
 ascension, and His birth of a virgin mother. 1 With 
 regard to these three miracles it will be necessary to 
 go into detail. 
 
 I. The Resurrection 
 
 The denial of the real occurrence of the corporal 
 resurrection of Jesus is surely, from the point of view 
 of historical criticism, a desperate paradox. The 
 Gospels show us the disciples after the death of Jesus 
 as a dispirited band of men, who had been gradually 
 disheartened by the seeming failure of Jesus, and 
 
 1 This distinction, however, between the miracles of Jesus and those 
 wrought by God in His case must not be pressed too far. The 
 miracles wrought by Jesus are in the New Testament commonly 
 regarded as acts of God wrought through Him by the power of God’s 
 Spirit given to Him (see above, p. 244) ; and, on the other hand, in 
 John x. 18 (perhaps only there) Jesus speaks of Himself as rising by 
 His own inherent authority, though that authority comes from the 
 Father. 
 
THE RESURRECTION 263 
 
 finally utterly discouraged by His rejection and 
 execution. “ We hoped that it was he which should 
 redeem Israel ” 1 describes their state of mind. It 
 plainly appears that this sense of disappointment and 
 failure so possessed them and dominated them that 
 they could hardly be aroused from their lethargy. 
 Then the early chapters of the Acts present to us this 
 same body of men confident and courageous—with a 
 courage which no hostility could shake. They had 
 plainly been suddenly driven round a sharp corner 
 by the sort of impact which only some strong external 
 force can exercise. And though they were not 
 emotional men, but prosaic and slow of spiritual 
 apprehension, and men, it would appear, liable to 
 jealousies and misunderstandings among themselves, 
 they had been transformed all together. It was a 
 corporate transformation, which again suggests the 
 impact of some startling fact of common experience. 
 And to such a fact they manifestly appeal. Their 
 outlook has been changed by the grave of Jesus having 
 been found empty on “ the third day ” after His cruci¬ 
 fixion and burial, and afterwards by repeated appear¬ 
 ances of the risen Jesus to individuals among them 
 and to the assembled group, by which their doubts had 
 been at last wholly dispelled, and a new and glorious 
 conviction of the divinely certificated lordship of 
 Jesus had come to possess them all in common. 
 
 The fact of the empty tomb seems to me as indis¬ 
 putable as any fact of history. If we find it now 
 impossible to suggest a deliberate fraud on the part 
 of the apostles 2 —and such a suggestion is negatived 
 
 1 Luke xxiv. 21. 
 
 2 I suppose the currency among the Jews of the report of such 
 fraudulent action on their part must be assumed to account for 
 Matt, xxviii. 13, 15. “His disciples came by night and stole him 
 
264 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 alike by their character and by the state of despond¬ 
 ency and hopelessness in which they were—there is 
 no plausible explanation of the empty tomb. As to 
 their experiences of the risen Christ, our earliest written 
 witness is that of St. Paul, which we must examine. 
 
 But we must remark that there can be no reason¬ 
 able doubt that what the apostles understood on the 
 evidence of the empty tomb and the appearances was 
 a corporal resurrection—viz. that the body of Jesus had 
 been rescued from corruption and raised to a new 
 kind of life. Peter and Paul in the Acts are alike 
 represented as expressing the conviction that “ he 
 saw no corruption.” 1 Now we turn to St. Paul’s 
 witness. 
 
 He wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians in the 
 spring of a.d. 55. A current doubt among the 
 Corinthian Christians, not about the resurrection of 
 Jesus, but about the destiny of those of their number 
 who had passed away since they believed, leads 
 St. Paul to repeat with much precision what he had 
 taught them on his first visit to them in a.d. 50 or 
 51. But what he then taught them was nothing of 
 his own. It was the common matter of the apostolic 
 testimony (“ Therefore whether it be I or they [the 
 other apostles], so we preach and so ye believed ” 2 )— 
 it was what he had “ received ” when he first became 
 a Christian—probably in precise form at his first 
 return to Jerusalem to “ visit Cephas,” that is Peter, 
 three years after his conversion, which had occurred 
 at some date soon after a.d. 30. What he taught them 
 then was, as we see, a sort of formulated record of 
 
 away. . . . This saying was spread abroad among the Jews until 
 this day.” But we cannot feel complete confidence in the story of 
 the military guard. 
 
 1 Acts ii. 31, xiii. 37, 
 
 2 1 Cor. xv. 11. 
 
ST. PAUL’S EVIDENCE 
 
 265 
 
 the appearances, to which obviously he adds the 
 personal record of what he had himself seen on his 
 conversion. 
 
 “ Now I make known unto you, brethren, the 
 gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye re¬ 
 ceived. ... I make known, I say, in what words 1 I 
 preached it unto you. . . . For I delivered unto you 
 first of all that which also I received, how that Christ 
 died for our sins according to the Scriptures ; and 
 that he was buried ; and that he hath been raised on 
 the third day according to the Scriptures ; and that 
 he appeared to Cephas ; then to the twelve ; then he 
 appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of 
 whom the greater part remain until now, but some 
 are fallen asleep; then he appeared to James ; then 
 to all the apostles ; and last of all, as unto one 
 born out of due time [an abortion], he appeared to 
 me also.” 
 
 This enumeration squares very well with the 
 appearances recorded in the Gospels, save that it is 
 a record of appearances to the “ chosen witnesses ” 
 and omits the appearances to the disciples on the way 
 to Emmaus and, notably, those to the women. This 
 is very natural in a formal record drawn up by 
 Jews. Also no note is taken of some appearances, 
 recorded in the Fourth Gospel only. This again is 
 not surprising. The object of the Fourth Gospel was 
 largely to supply real (or as some would say, imagined) 
 incidents which the common traditions had left 
 unnoticed. Granted these omissions, the summary 
 record in St. Paul squares well with the records or 
 intimations in the Gospels and Acts. There the appear¬ 
 ance to Peter alone is mentioned as occurring first, 2 
 
 1 Or “ with what purpose,” “ in what sense ” ; cf. Acts x. 29. 
 
 2 Luke xxiv. 34. 
 
266 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 followed by the appearance to the twelve. 1 The 
 appearance to the five hundred is necessarily an appear¬ 
 ance in Galilee, where alone there were so many 
 persons who in some sense could be called disciples, 
 and it can be identified with the appearance recorded 
 in St. Matthew. 2 The appearance to James is suggested 
 by the position which James is found occupying in 
 the primitive community in the record of Acts. The 
 later appearance to all the Apostles is naturally 
 identified with that specified in Acts i. 4, where the 
 summary which concludes the author’s earlier book, 
 the Gospel of Luke, is developed in more explicit 
 form. All this is very satisfying if the documents are 
 treated naturally as historical documents. 
 
 The attempts to evade the evidence of St. Paul 
 appear to me extraordinarily forced. Thus (1) 
 St. Paul’s assertion that Christ both died and was 
 raised the third day “ according to the Scriptures ” is 
 supposed to carry with it the suspicion that the belief 
 in the resurrection the third day was due to the felt 
 necessity for interpreting Scripture prophecy. But 
 this is most improbable. There is no prophecy 
 which compelled any such belief. The particular 
 text of Hosea suggested (“ After three days he will 
 raise us up and we shall live in his sight ”) has no 
 natural reference to Christ and cannot be shown to 
 have carried any influence. It is most true, as our 
 Lord is recorded to have insisted, that there are pas¬ 
 sages in the Old Testament which present us with a 
 suffering servant of Jehovah who fails and dies and 
 yet is divinely vindicated, passages which suggest 
 the idea of a vindication of the Christ through or 
 in spite of failure and death. But there was nothing, 
 except the occurrences recorded in the Gospels, to 
 
 1 Luke xxiv. 36 ft 3 Matt, xxviii. 16 f£. 
 
ST. PAUL’S EVIDENCE 267 
 
 account for the definite assertion “ The third day he 
 was raised from the dead.” 
 
 Nor, again, (2) is there any plausibility in the con¬ 
 stantly made suggestion that as St. Paul’s own experi¬ 
 ence on the road to Damascus was a vision of Christ 
 in glory, and as from heaven, so presumably he 
 imagined the earlier visions of the apostolic company, 
 not at all as they are recorded in the Gospels. On 
 the contrary, St. Paul treats his own appearance as 
 abnormal in time—he uses the rather startling ex¬ 
 pression “ an abortion ”—and there is not the slightest 
 reason to suppose that he thought of the earlier 
 appearances as given under the same conditions. 
 
 (3) Nor, again, is there any plausibility in the sugges¬ 
 tion that inasmuch as St. Paul contemplates a resur¬ 
 rection of the departed members of the Church, which 
 is consistent with their having suffered dissolution 
 of their physical bodies, and declares that “ flesh and 
 blood [i.e. humanity under the physical conditions 
 of the present] shall not inherit the kingdom of God,” 
 so we may suppose that he can have laid no stress 
 upon the resurrection of Christ’s body , but only upon 
 His appearance in another “ spiritual ” body. If 
 we read the whole passage we see that St. Paul has 
 in mind three different kinds of resurrection : (i) the 
 resurrection of Christ on the third day after His 
 death and burial; (ii) the resurrection of the since 
 departed Christians, whose bodies had been presum¬ 
 ably subject to the natural process of dissolution, 
 but who were to receive at the final coming of the 
 Christ in glory spiritual bodies, which would be 
 both different from the bodies which had seen corrup¬ 
 tion and yet in physical continuity with them, in the 
 way suggested by the grains sowed in the ground 
 and rotting there, but yet living again in the ears 
 
268 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 which spring from their dissolution; and (iii) the 
 sudden transformation of those who shall be actually 
 alive at the second coming, who “in a moment, 55 
 “ in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump,” shall 
 be transformed from the state of present-day physical 
 life to the condition of the spiritual and glorified 
 bodies wherewith they shall be associated with those 
 who were dead and are now raised and with Christ. 
 In all these three classes of cases St. Paul conceives 
 a transformation more or less gradual or sudden of 
 the natural body into the spiritual—“ we shall all 
 be changed ”—and quite plainly he finds the norm 
 or pattern in the resurrection of Christ, in whose case 
 he plainly conceives in the simplest manner that in 
 respect of that body in which He died and was 
 buried —in respect of that same body He was raised. 
 
 As to the condition of Christ’s resurrection body, 
 he says nothing. We can only presume that he 
 modelled his conception of the resurrection body of 
 those who are in Christ upon what he believed about 
 Christ the first-fruits. On this hypothesis he would 
 have conceived of Christ’s resurrection body as what 
 he calls spiritual; and I think that the ideas suggested 
 in the Gospels agree very well with this conception. 
 The risen Christ is represented as having passed out 
 of the grave clothes, leaving them to collapse, 1 and 
 as having left the tomb empty before the stone was 
 rolled away. 2 Henceforth He is not represented as 
 living here or there—in Jerusalem or in Galilee, at 
 this house or that, or moving hither or thither on foot. 
 He is translated apparently into a higher sphere of 
 being, out of which he manifests himself in one form 
 
 1 John xx. 6,7 ; cf. Latham’s Risen Master (Cambridge Press, 1901), 
 p. 29. 3 Mark xvi. 6. 
 
269 
 
 ST. PAUL’S EVIDENCE 
 
 or another as suits His spiritual purpose, appearing 
 in a room “ when the doors were shut ” as one who 
 no longer felt physical obstacles, but who could still 
 submit, if His purpose so demanded, to physical 
 conditions ; as showing His wounded side and hands, 
 and even eating and drinking with His disciples. 
 His condition is one of which hitherto men had never 
 had experience. His spiritual body was material 
 indeed, but it was one in which matter was wholly 
 subservient to spiritual purpose, and no longer 
 in any way an impediment or a restraint. To me it 
 appears incredible that the evangelists could have 
 derived from any other source than the actual 
 experiences of the first disciples the subtle details 
 which suggest the complex picture of the “ spiritual 
 body ” of Jesus after the resurrection. 
 
 My contention is, then, that we must accept St. 
 Paul’s record in the only sense that it legitimately 
 bears, and read in the light of it the fragmentary 
 records of the evangelists. The apostles had a serious 
 sense of what it meant to be witnesses before the world 
 of a fact of quite transcendent and crucial importance. 
 They drew up their record in such a form as that in 
 which St. Paul gives it as the unanimous witness of 
 the apostles. Then the evangelists, according to their 
 special purposes in writing and their special sources 
 of information, give us particular stories of this or 
 that appearance which can be woven into a continuous 
 and harmonious narrative, as is successfully done by 
 Dr. Swete, 1 but with regard to which I do not feel the 
 least anxiety to deny discrepancies of detail, such as 
 occur always in the unstudied narrative, of first-hand 
 witnesses. Certainly the evangelist St. Luke had no 
 very rigid conception of the accuracy required of a 
 1 Appearances of our Lord after His Passion (Macmillan). 
 
270 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 faithful recorder, as we see if we compare the three 
 accounts he gives us of St. Paul’s conversion—one by 
 himself and the two others in reported speeches of 
 St. Paul, which differ in details ; or, again, if we com¬ 
 pare his earlier account of our Lord’s dealings with 
 His disciples after the resurrection, given in his 
 Gospel, where all appears as one single interview, 
 with the account by the same author at the beginning 
 of the Acts, where the sequence of events is made 
 much more explicit and clear. This unconstrained 
 naturalness of narrative is more convincing than 
 scrupulous accuracy. 
 
 There is only one serious apparent discrepancy in 
 the Synoptic narratives of the manifestations of Jesus 
 to His disciples after the resurrection. In St. Mark 
 and St. Matthew our Lord is represented as telling His 
 disciples on the eve of His passion that after He is 
 raised up He will go before them into Galilee. 1 And 
 accordingly the message sent to them after the 
 resurrection through the women is that He is going 
 before them into Galilee, and that there they shall 
 see Him, as He said to them 2 ; and in St. Matthew 
 the only recorded appearance is in Galilee.’ But the 
 appearances recorded by St. Luke are all at Jerusalem, 
 and there is nothing to suggest any injunction to go 
 into Galilee or any appearance there. This apparent 
 discrepancy disappears, however, if we suppose that 
 our Lord intended His disciples, as St. Mark tells us, 
 to go at once into Galilee, but that delay occurred 
 
 1 Mark xiv. 28 ; Matt. xxvi. 32. 
 
 2 Mark xvi. 7; Matt, xxviii. 7. 
 
 3 As is well known, the conclusion of St. Mark’s Gospel, as we are 
 familiar with it (xvi. 9-20), appears to be a later addition by one 
 familiar with the First, Third, and Fourth Gospels. We can only 
 conjecture that St. Matthew follows the course of St. Mark as it 
 originally stood. 
 
THE EVIDENCE OF THE GOSPELS 271 
 
 owing to their unbelief and slowness of heart. 1 They 
 needed to be reassured and convinced in Jerusalem, 
 and, according to the Fourth Gospel, it was eight days 
 before this conviction was gained by all of them. 2 
 This accounts for the earlier manifestations in Jerusa¬ 
 lem. St. Luke had special information about these 
 which he gives us, and does not seem to have under¬ 
 stood the original intention of Jesus or its tardy fulfil¬ 
 ment. If this was so, we understand the relation of 
 the two sets of appearances, both of which, as we have 
 seen, are implied in St. Paul’s earlier summary. 
 Then after the appearance recorded by St. Matthew 
 they must have returned to Jerusalem and received 
 the injunction to tarry there till they were endued 
 with power from on high. 8 The forty days specified 
 by St. Luke 4 gives time for this sequence of events. 
 
 My contention is, then, that the historical evidence 
 for the resurrection of our Lord the third day from the 
 dead and His subsequent manifestations of Himself to 
 His apostles is in the highest degree cogent. Nothing 
 can resist it, except the sort of treatment of the narra¬ 
 tives which can render insecure almost any historical 
 evidence. No doubt what makes it convincing is the 
 sense that this act of God in vindication of His Christ 
 is no mere portent, but something which our reason 
 needs and welcomes. The Bible records a long-drawn- 
 out process of divine redemption culminating in Jesus 
 Christ. His rejection and execution upon the Cross 
 would, taken by itself, have laid upon human faith an 
 impossible strain. There is no reason to believe that 
 anything at all resembling what the Acts records could 
 
 1 Luke xxiv. 11, 25. 
 
 2 Even when they reached Galilee, the narrative of St. John xxi. 
 1-14 would suggest that they were still bewildered and did not 
 fully understand their mission. 
 
 3 Luke xxiv. 49; Acts i. 4. 4 Acts i. 3. 
 
272 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 have happened except on the basis of a conviction 
 which the resurrection alone could have generated 
 in the minds of the disciples. What they needed and 
 received in His corporal resurrection was the assurance 
 that the power of God—the Creator and ruler of the 
 whole world, material and moral—was, in spite of the 
 seeming failure of the Cross, on the side of Jesus. In 
 this supreme crisis nothing could reassure them but 
 such an evidence of divine purpose undefeated—such 
 a foretaste of the day of the Lord, the day when God 
 is to come into His own. And for us still to-day the 
 ultimate trial of faith lies in the seeming weakness of 
 good in the conflict with evil. It is supremely hard 
 to believe that the whole power of the universe really 
 and ultimately serves a moral purpose. It is only a 
 corporal miracle such as the resurrection of Jesus 
 which gives us the needed reassurance that there is 
 only one sovereignty in the universe, the sovereignty 
 of the righteous God, the Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and that in the full meaning of the term 
 41 Jesus is Lord.” 
 
 II. The Ascension oe Christ 
 
 The New Testament as a whole is full of the con¬ 
 viction that Christ who was crucified was not only 
 raised from the dead, but also by the right hand of God 
 exalted to the seat of supreme sovereignty in the 
 heavens. 1 His 44 session at the right hand of God ” is, 
 as has always been recognized, a symbolical state¬ 
 ment, for, on all showing, God has no right hand. But 
 the language used implies that the assumption into 
 glory was an historical event, something that happened 
 
 1 See Acts ii. 33-4; Bom. viii. 34; Eph. iv. 9, 10; 1 Tim. iii. 18; 
 Heb. i. 3, iv. 14, etc.; 1 Pet. iii. 22; John vi. 62. 
 
THE ASCENSION 278 
 
 at a particular date, and St. Luke gives us the story 
 of what occurred at the beginning of the Acts. This 
 story of the ascension, as it presented itself to the 
 apostles’ eyes, involved no fresh miracle. It was 
 simply the last of a series of “ manifestations,” all of 
 which postulate in the risen body of Christ superiority 
 to the conditions of material bodies as we know them. 
 This has been pointed out. All the appearances were, 
 it seems, condescensions to conditions of space and 
 material life to which the risen Christ was no longer 
 subject. Each was a purposive “ manifestation.” 
 The last, the ascension, as St. Luke records it, was 
 of the same kind. It taught the lesson of Christ’s 
 exaltation under the material symbol of a physical 
 rising. Very likely those whose minds were first 
 impressed by this ascension believed, as we no longer 
 believe, that there is a place called heaven above our 
 heads, and that the path of the ascending Jesus was 
 the way thither. But still to-day, with our superior 
 knowledge of the cosmic system, there is no other 
 symbolic action which can be imagined which could 
 convey the desired impression. Nor can we imagine 
 how, without some such impressive occurrence, bring¬ 
 ing the appearances of Christ to a decisive end, the 
 disciples could have reached the state of mind in 
 which we find them in the opening of the Acts, in 
 which they are wholly without expectation of any 
 more “ manifestations ” of Christ and wholly set 
 on what is promised them—spiritual equipment for a 
 task of unknown magnitude . 1 
 
 i Heavenly spirits appear as messengers both to convey the first 
 information of Christ’s resurrection and on the occasion of the 
 ascension, appearing apparently as men, not with wings. If such 
 spirits exist normally unseen, I do not see why their occasional 
 materialization should be incredible. 
 
 19 
 
274 
 
 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 III. The Virgin Birth of Jesus 
 
 A flood of controversy—both by way of attack 
 and rejoinder—has been poured over this question 
 within the last fifty years, and it has a bewildering 
 effect upon a student. But it seems to me that 
 certain points emerge sufficiently clearly, which I will 
 endeavour to point out. 1 
 
 1. Great stress was laid at the beginning of the 
 apostolic mission upon personal witness. The 
 personal witness of the apostles had extended “ from 
 the baptism of John unto the day that he [Jesus] was 
 received up from us,” and their preaching about Jesus 
 did not accordingly go farther back than the beginning 
 of the Lord’s public ministry ; and it was solely on the 
 ground of this witness, and especially on the ground of 
 the resurrection, that faith in Jesus was demanded. 
 Consequently nothing concerning His birth—except 
 His descent from David, which was apparently un¬ 
 disputed, 2 and that He belonged to the family of 
 Joseph the carpenter of Nazareth, who apparently 
 died before the public ministry began, and of Mary, 
 who certainly survived into the early days of the 
 Church—entered into the first preaching of the 
 gospel or the first knowledge of the Church. Certainly 
 nothing concerning the birth of Christ was part of 
 that assurance on the basis of which faith in Jesus 
 was claimed. I may add that it ought not to this day 
 to form part of the basis of the claim. This limitation 
 of the apostolic witness accounts for the silence of St. 
 
 1 Accurate and full information will be found in Dr. Box’s Virgin 
 Birth of Christ (Pitman, 1916), and I may refer to my Dissertations 
 (John Murray), Diss. i. 
 
 2 Mark x. 47 ; Rom. i. 3; Heb. vii. 14. 
 
275 
 
 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 
 
 Mark, 1 who gives us in the main the cycle of Peter’s 
 preaching, and the silence of St. Paul. If, however, 
 Luke was Paul’s companion, and had gathered the 
 materials of his Gospel before Paul’s first captivity 
 was over, he must surely have known all that Luke 
 knew and therefore the secret of the virgin birth. He 
 may very well have known it earlier. His faith in the 
 radical sinlessness of Christ—sinlessness, I mean, not 
 in fact only but in principle, inasmuch as Christ was 
 the new man, the sinless source of the new manhood—- 
 would have made the idea very agreeable to him. 
 But in any case, that lie does not mention it seems to 
 me nothing more strange than that he does not men¬ 
 tion other crucial events of our Lord’s life, as the 
 bestowal of the Holy Spirit at His baptism, or His trans¬ 
 figuration. This limitation of the apostolic preaching 
 accounts also for there being no narrative of the birth 
 in St. John’s Gospel, which is essentially a record of per¬ 
 sonal experience, but in fact St. John’s Gospel, written 
 at the end of the first century, shows evident signs 
 that the writer knew and believed the virgin birth. 2 
 
 1 We note, however, that St. Mark apparently shrinks from the 
 phrase “the carpenter’s son” : see Mark vi. 3, compared to Matt. xiii. 
 55. It is probable that the latter phrase was original. Phrases 
 attributing paternity to Joseph recur in the other Evangelists, where 
 their meaning is guarded by the opening narratives. 
 
 2 There is a reading of John i. 13 witnessed to by a number of 
 fathers beginning from the second century—“ who was born not of 
 bloods [i.e. not of the mixture of human seeds] nor of the will of the 
 flesh, nor of the will of a man [a husband], but of God”—which 
 directly describes our Lord’s birth of a virgin, and not a few moderns, 
 like Dean Inge, find it convincing. For myself, I am disposed to 
 prefer the reading of the MSS. But I have no doubt that this com¬ 
 mon reading clearly presupposes the fact of the virgin birth. See 
 my St. John's Epistles , p. 139. Also I think Dr. Chase {Belief and 
 Creed, Macmillan, p. 67 ff.) has made quite evident that St. John’s 
 irony is apparent in vii. 42, and that the fact that Jesus was born at 
 Bethlehem is in his mind. Also I think Rev. xii. 4 has the narrative 
 of Matthew behind it. 
 
276 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 2. But when the first disciples had settled down to 
 their faith in Jesus, on the basis of His resurrection and 
 Ilis life and teaching and the mission of His Spirit, 
 they must have enquired about His birth and early 
 years and must have wanted to know everything that 
 could be known—all the more that even during our 
 Lord’s ministry it would appear as if scandal about 
 His birth was not unknown. This appears to be 
 suggested in the taunt of the Jews. 1 Anyway, they 
 must have wanted to know. It may very well have 
 been that during Mary’s life nothing was said in public. 
 But Joseph must have taken steps before his death 
 to guard Mary’s reputation, and Mary could not have 
 failed to leave her experience on record. So we look 
 at the two accounts we have got. The effect is some¬ 
 what overwhelming. The account in Matthew is 
 wholly from the side of Joseph—his perplexities—the 
 divine guidance vouchsafed to him in dreams—how 
 he became the guardian of the new-born child through 
 strange perils—the further guidance which brought 
 him back from Egypt 2 and to Nazareth. This early 
 narrative of Matthew exhibits the author’s zeal to 
 find fulfilments of prophecy, but it very strongly 
 suggests a statement by Joseph underlying it. On the 
 other hand, the narrative in Luke i. and ii.—so plainly 
 a woman’s story—if it is true, must be Mary’s story. 
 
 3. Now let us take Luke’s narrative apart. He 
 claims in his preface accurate knowledge of the course 
 of all things from the first, and then promptly begins 
 with the narrative of the birth. Luke is a very honest 
 man and good historian. (The historical statement of 
 
 1 John viii. 41. 
 
 2 That Jesus was taken to Egypt was the basis of a Jewish or 
 heathen accusation that He had learned sorcery there: see Box, The 
 Virgin Birth of Christ (Pitman), p. 205. 
 
277 
 
 LUKE’S NARRATIVE 
 
 Luke ii. 1-2, so long supposed by its falsity to dis¬ 
 credit these early chapters, is now no longer regarded 
 as false, but is found erected into a “ proof text ” in 
 learned works about the Roman method of provincial 
 administration. 1 ) It is obvious that when you pass 
 from Luke’s preface to his narrative you pass from 
 very good literary Greek to a Greek which is Greek 
 only in the words used. The spirit and method is 
 quite Aramaic. St. Luke, then, is quoting an Aramaic 
 document or story. It is a woman’s narrative. It is 
 intensely intimate. It is primeval—that is to say, 
 it suggests, if read attentively, no idea of an Incarna¬ 
 tion, only of the coming of the promised Christ, 2 and, 
 though it gives a hint of a searching crisis and anxious 
 trials to come, 3 it could not have had its origin after 
 His rejection by the Jews. The new-born Child is 
 to be the promised son of David to restore the position 
 of His house. He is to 44 have the throne of his father 
 David,” and to “reign over the house of Jacob for 
 ever.” 4 
 
 We may take it for certain that (to quote Harnack’s 
 words) “ the conjecture . . . that the idea of a birth 
 from a virgin is a heathen myth, which was received 
 by Christians, contradicts the entire earliest develop¬ 
 ments of Christian tradition.” The early chapters 
 both of Matthew and Luke are profoundly and 
 thoroughly Jewish : Jewish anticipation never in¬ 
 cluded a birth from a virgin mother for the Messiah ; 
 and the whole atmosphere of pagan legend was alien 
 from the home of these narratives. 6 
 
 1 See above, p. 197. 
 
 2 See my Dissertation , pp. 17-18. 
 
 5 Luke ii. 34-5. 4 Luke i. 32-3. 
 
 6 See Box, chap. viii. and my Dissertation , pp. 55 ff.; also Harnack, 
 History of Dogma (E. T.), vol. i. 100 n., and Luke the Physician, 
 pp. 102 £f. 
 
278 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 I do not see why appearances of angelic spirits 
 should be put aside as obviously false. 1 But I am 
 not concerned to deny any influence of pious imagina¬ 
 tion upon the story—only that it rests upon a real 
 experience of Mary, as to which she could not be 
 mistaken, viz. that Jesus was not born of a human 
 father, though He was truly conceived in her womb 
 and nourished and born in normal fashion. 
 
 4. When we take St. Matthew’s narrative we have 
 to deal with a Gospel the history of which is obscure. 
 It is almost certain, I think, that it rests upon the 
 work of Matthew the apostle and the Gospel of 
 Mark, but whether the first two chapters were con¬ 
 tained in Matthew’s Aramaic work or come from 
 the unknown Jewish editor of the book as we have 
 it, we cannot tell. Plainly the author, whoever he 
 was, is deeply interested to find fulfilment of prophecy, 
 but whatever is thought about some of these suggested 
 fulfilments, it is improbable that the “ prophecies ” 
 brought forward in evidence in these chapters 
 suggested the “ events ” to the imagination of the 
 writer. The two last are notoriously difficult to 
 treat as prophecies. The prophecy from Micah 
 might have suggested, and did suggest, Bethlehem 
 as the place of Christ’s birth, but in the light of recent 
 vindication of St. Luke’s statements, the fact that 
 Jesus was born there cannot reasonably be impugned. 
 There remains the Greek version of Isaiah’s prophecy, 
 “ The virgin shall be with child,” of which it must 
 be said that it had not suggested to the Jews the 
 idea that the Messiah was destined to be born of one 
 still a virgin. It would appear as if it was only after 
 the Christians had come to believe the facts as recorded 
 by St. Luke that they discovered this proof text. 
 
 1 See above, p. 273. 
 
ST. LUKE AND ST. MATTHEW 279 
 
 The strongest grounds for believing in its actual 
 occurrence are the evidence of St. Luke, and the 
 overwhelming indications afforded by the narrative 
 of St. Matthew that it has underlying it the experi¬ 
 ences of Joseph. 
 
 5. If we take the two narratives together, we find 
 them utterly independent, and the author of each 
 one appears to be ignorant of the narrative of the 
 other. They are not strictly discrepant, but inde¬ 
 pendent. The events of each can be fitted into those 
 of the other, but Luke plainly does not know of the 
 event of St. Matthew ii., nor Matthew apparently of 
 the previous residence at Nazareth. But this inde¬ 
 pendence of course emphasizes their point of agree¬ 
 ment, viz. that Jesus was born at Bethlehem of a 
 virgin mother. 
 
 6. That two discrepant genealogies should have 
 been admitted into the Gospels (which was felt as 
 a grave difficulty from the earliest times) is an amaz¬ 
 ingly clear sign that the Church was not at all given 
 to manipulate documents in order to produce 
 harmony. I think we may be quite content here, 
 without seeking explanations of the discrepancy, to 
 recognize that the Jewish families of pure descent 
 were given to constructing genealogies ; that these 
 genealogieswould have affiliated Jesus to His “father ” 
 in whatever sense he was His father; and that all 
 we are concerned to ask is that these two genealogies 
 should be taken to represent two independent attempts 
 to construct a genealogy for Jesus. 1 
 
 7. Criticism of the destructive kind has for long 
 years fastened on these early chapters of Matthew 
 and Luke as upon the weakest point in the citadel of 
 the Creeds. I think that those who believe that the 
 
 1 See Box, pp. 12 £f. and 38 £L, and Dissertations , p. 38. 
 
280 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 historical citadel can be maintained should insist 
 that the question of the birth is secondary and not 
 primary, viz. that the question of faith in Jesus must 
 rest still, where it was made to rest from the begin¬ 
 ning, on the life, teaching, death, and resurrection 
 of Jesus. On these, quite apart from any questions 
 concerning His birth, the faith stood and still could 
 stand. Nevertheless, when that standing-ground 
 has been gained, and the question of the birth, 
 blackened as it has been with controversy, is 
 approached, the honest student must not confuse 
 the raising of every conceivable objection to the 
 stories with evidence that they are really insecure. 
 Many of the objections have been fundamentally 
 refuted. In result I claim that the fair student 
 cannot resist the conviction that Luke’s story shows 
 every sign of coming from a trustworthy source— 
 one of the only two trustworthy sources—and 
 Matthew’s narrative from the other; and their 
 agreement is emphasized by their exceedingly 
 obvious independence. He must also admit that in 
 these two narratives there is no later dogmatic 
 motive at work. The idea of Christ is simply the 
 Jewish idea of the Messiah. Nevertheless, when the 
 story of the birth of Jesus became known—I suppose 
 before the destruction of Jerusalem—it was eagerly 
 welcomed, no doubt because of its harmony with 
 the belief about Christ’s person as more than human. 
 The fact of the virgin birth became at once, it would 
 appear, by the beginning of the second century, an 
 element of the creed of the Church, now being formu¬ 
 lated. 1 This was in part no doubt because of its 
 
 1 See Dissertations , p. 41. The evidence of The Odes of Solomon 
 should now be added. 
 
FACT AND DOCTRINE 281 
 
 felt congruity both with the idea of the divine 
 incarnation and with the idea of Christ as the sinless 
 source of the new humanity, the second Adam. 
 Already I think in St. John i. 13 the connexion of the 
 virgin birth with the sinless source of the regenerated 
 life is apparent. For myself, I confess I feel this 
 connexion to be most intimate. I think we are 
 generally right to resent any attempt to base upon 
 supposed logical necessity the claim that such and 
 such an event did actually happen. We doubt the 
 power of man’s reason to say how things must have 
 happened. 1 Thus we may be thankful that it is 
 demonstrable that neither the idea of the incarnation, 
 nor that of the second Adam, lies behind the narra¬ 
 tives of the birth in Matthew and Luke. Moreover, 
 the course of our argument has not yet taken us to 
 the point where the doctrine of Christ’s person comes 
 in question, nor the doctrine of original or racial 
 sin. Nevertheless, I must confess that I cannot 
 imagine how the birth of the really sinless man could 
 have occurred without some physical miracle, so sure 
 do I feel that sin has somehow affected the physical 
 stock ; and I once drew from Huxley the admission 
 that if he believed—what he did not—that Jesus 
 was strictly sinless, he would suppose that that 
 involved as well a physical as a moral miracle. Nor 
 can I conceive how the birth in the flesh of the divine 
 person of the Son could have been mediated by 
 
 1 Historical Christianity owes a deep debt of ingratitude to the 
 Roman Church for having allowed the sense of what would be fitting 
 in the case of the Blessed Virgin to become the basis for affirming, 
 with different degrees of dogmatic assurance, as two facts of 
 history, the immaculate conception and the corporal assumption 
 into heaven of the Blessed Virgin, for which there is no historical 
 evidence worth any consideration. 
 
282 THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE 
 
 purely natural means. But these are questions 
 which we are not yet in a position to entertain. 
 
 What I have desired to do in this chapter is to let 
 it appear that, if a person will approach the Gospels 
 without a dogmatic prejudice that miracles are 
 incredible, he will find himself convinced that they 
 actually occurred, and in particular that Jesus Christ 
 was really raised from the dead the third day, really 
 gave to His disciples the symbolical assurance of an 
 ascension heavenward, and was reallv born of a 
 virgin mother. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Let us review the course of our argument. After 
 analysing the causes of the existing collapse in the 
 religious tradition among Englishmen (chapter i), 
 we sought to make a fresh start and rebuild from its 
 foundation the fabric of a rational belief, laying 
 stress on the importance for everyone of seeking to 
 form decisions—at least such provisional decisions, 
 based on the balance of probabilities, as can be 
 “ put to account ” by faith, and being verified in 
 experience can become convictions, or what St. 
 John calls knowledge. 1 
 
 Thus, after some consideration of the varied means 
 and methods of apprehending truth (chapter ii), 
 we examined the grounds which seem to make faith 
 in God in some sense a rational necessity. But this 
 sort of philosophical faith (what is called “ the higher 
 Pantheism ”) we found intellectually unsatisfactory 
 because of the seriousness and magnitude of the ques¬ 
 tions to which it supplies either no answer or a very 
 vacillating answer. The immanent God of philosophy, 
 whose transcendence the reason seems unable to 
 establish, appears on being cross-questioned to be no 
 more than nature in one of its aspects. His (or its) 
 personality and character seems uncertain, and the 
 
 1 1 John v. 18, 19, 20. 
 
 283 
 
284 CONCLUSION 
 
 grounds for belief or disbelief in the ultimate 
 supremacy of moral purpose in the world deeply 
 conflicting. Thus the higher Pantheism is always 
 in danger of lapsing into the lower Pantheism, and 
 in result seems to leave us practically where the 
 Greeks were before the vast moral uplift of Jewish 
 and Christian Theism came into our world. Especi¬ 
 ally from the religious point of view this immanent 
 God who is to be found in all things, but cannot be 
 conceived of as entertaining any particular purpose, 
 or answering particular prayers, or loving or judging 
 individual men, is utterly unsatisfying. Our minds 
 turned longingly to the God of the Hebrew prophets 
 and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 (chapter iii). 
 
 We satisfied ourselves that reason has no right to 
 decide a priori that the old idea of a divine revelation 
 is rationally untenable, and very carefully we sought 
 to examine the grounds of this belief. Critically 
 scrutinized, we found them in a high degree convincing. 
 We found that it is verv hard to resist the conviction 
 that the prophets and Jesus Christ (regarded at present 
 as simply one of the prophets) were in touch—as other 
 men were not—with Reality, with the real God ; and 
 that in a long and continuous process, more or less 
 gradual, He was really communicating to them the 
 truth by which men could live, both about the divine 
 nature and purpose and about human nature. The 
 indisputable access of moral power and capacity to 
 deal with life, which the faithful recipients of this 
 word of God are seen to have received of old and still 
 receive, appears to certificate the truth of the message 
 which is the source of this new power ; for the com¬ 
 municated power depends wholly on the revelation 
 being regarded as true, that is, as true for the intellect 
 
ARGUMENT SUMMARIZED 285 
 
 —postulating propositions about God and man and 
 the universe which must be truths for philosophy as 
 well as “ practical truths ” (chapter iv). 
 
 Then we analysed the intellectual content of the 
 Revelation and found that, while it needs and can 
 assimilate, as it did in fact assimilate, the philosophical 
 belief in the divine immanence in nature, yet it lays 
 its stress on the Personality of God, His absoluteness, 
 His transcendence as the creator of all that is, prior 
 to the world and independent of it, and His essential 
 goodness and love. And with regard to man, we 
 found it emphasizing his freedom, created as he is 
 for free correspondence with God and for immortal 
 sonship, and also his sins and his sinfulness. This 
 universal human sin has introduced into the world the 
 most widespread havoc, and has made necessary a 
 divine process of judgement and also of redemption, 
 which, beginning through the Jews, shows itself 
 universal in Jesus Christ, and expresses itself in a 
 divine kingdom here and now at work in the world, 
 and destined for final victory in the Day of the Lord, 
 when God shall come into His own in His whole 
 universe (chapter v). 
 
 These new data for philosophy we then brought 
 back to the area of intellectual criticism. We did 
 not find that (a) science, legitimately so called, could 
 offer any valid objection to their acceptance, the reality 
 of freedom in man with all its intellectual implications 
 being a fact of experience which science cannot ignore. 
 Then ( b) in the region of philosophy, when we are 
 frank with ourselves and candidly open-minded, we 
 discover that the idea of God which Hebrew religion 
 supplied to the world is infinitely more intelligible 
 than the idea of the philosophers, inasmuch as 
 personality rather than abstract intellect is its 
 
286 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 dominant category, both in its estimate of God and 
 of man. In particular we seemed to see the intellectual 
 necessity for the belief in God the Creator. There 
 remained, we found, a very real and serious difficulty 
 in interpreting the whole experience of the universe— 
 including the seemingly purely material and animal 
 world—in terms of divine goodness and love. Never¬ 
 theless, in the region of human life, the doctrine of 
 God’s goodness has been undoubtedly verified in the 
 deepest experience of the best of men, not least in 
 the greatest sufferers, and we could not feel justified 
 in refusing the act of faith which assents to it as true 
 for the whole universe in its final outcome. Also we 
 satisfied ourselves that (c) neither the science of 
 comparative religion nor (d) that of historical criticism 
 offers, so far, any bar to the acceptance of the religion 
 of the prophets and of Christ as true in fact and for 
 all men. 
 
 Thus our acceptance of the reality of divine 
 revelation leaves us free men, intellectually, in the 
 regions of philosophy and the sciences (chapter vi). 
 
 This faith postulates God as entertaining and 
 carrying out a particular purpose of redemption, 
 which begins with the race of Israel and discloses 
 itself as universal in Jesus Christ. As proceeding 
 through a particular race and expressing itself in its 
 history, the religion of the Old Testament is an historical 
 religion, but it depends upon no particular incident 
 which critical science is tempted to deny. But when 
 we advance upon the New Testament, the situation 
 is quite different. There the divine self-disclosure 
 culminates in a particular person, Jesus Christ, who 
 comes to be believed in as the personal incarnation 
 of God (though with this special belief about the 
 person of Christ we are not concerned in this volume), 
 
ARGUMENT SUMMARIZED 287 
 
 and whose recorded life is full of miraculous incidents, 
 some of which—as His birth of a virgin, His resurrec¬ 
 tion, His ascension—appear as articles in the Christian 
 Creed—essential elements of the self-disclosure of 
 God. But criticism has been exhibiting now for 
 some three generations an even violent aversion to 
 miracle. Thus the attempt is made to disembarrass 
 Christianity from the supposed disadvantages of the 
 miraculous and (generally) of the supernatural. 
 That an 44 historical religion ” in the Christian sense 
 has grave disadvantages in a critical age is obvious. 
 On the other hand, we were forced to see how the 
 strength of Christianity, especially as appealing to 
 the common man, lay in its being a creed of facts. 
 In particular we were led to stress the value of facts 
 for religion by contrast to symbolic stories or Platonic 
 myths (chapter vii). 
 
 Thus, to put the 44 historical religion 55 to the test, we 
 took a preliminary survey of the Gospels and the 
 rest of the New Testament documents, and we found 
 ourselves on very sure grounds of history. The 
 historicity of the New Testament on the whole appeared 
 to be singularly convincing (chapter viii). We went 
 back accordingly and examined the underlying spirit 
 and motive of the destructive criticism of the last 
 century, and we found that there could be no mistake 
 about its strong, dogmatic prejudice against the 
 miraculous and in great part the supernatural, such 
 as has made the critics most arbitrary and uncritical 
 in their treatment of the evidence. We examined 
 the confident assertion of a few English scholars that 
 the miracles could be eliminated from the Creed 
 without touching the doctrinal foundation and found 
 it singularly groundless (chapter ix). Then we 
 sought to analyse the intellectual bases of this critical 
 
288 CONCLUSION 
 
 prejudice against miracles and against the super¬ 
 natural, and seemed to find in its bases a view of 
 nature, as both mechanical and self-complete, which is 
 without justification. It seemed to us that the fact 
 of freedom in nature, which inevitably extends itself 
 from man to God from whom it comes, opens the 
 door to the possibility of miraculous action, the 
 postulate of miracles being the real freedom of God 
 to “ use means ” for the redemption of a world that 
 sin has destroyed. We observed that miracles rightly 
 conceived, or as they are presented to us in the New 
 Testament, are not arbitrary violations of the world 
 order, but rather divine acts done for the restoration 
 of an order which sin had too grossly violated. Other 
 aspects of the miraculous were considered, and we 
 were left determined to investigate the question of 
 evidence without any obstinate and blinding prejudice 
 (chapter x). Thus we sought to estimate the evidence 
 for the reality of our Lord’s miracles as a whole, both 
 “ nature miracles ” and miracles of healing, and then 
 in particular the evidence for the great miraculous 
 events in our Lord’s story, which have been taken up 
 as elements in the Christian Creed, the resurrection 
 the third day from the dead, the ascension, and the 
 birth of Mary the Virgin. It appeared to us that 
 the evidence of actual occurrence was so cogent that 
 nothing short of dogmatic a priori assertion of their 
 impossibility, or at least incredibility—an assertion 
 which we cannot make—could justify the refusal of it. 
 And accordingly we are bound to accept these 
 miracles as real occurrences (chapter xi). 
 
 Three points shall be made in conclusion : 
 
 1. My aim in this volume has been simply the 
 reconstruction of belief in God, and particularly of 
 such belief in God as is the background and pre- 
 
289 
 
 BIBLICAL IDEA OF GOD 
 
 supposition of the distinctively Christian beliefs, and 
 such as is specially due to the prophets of Israel. 
 But we have been driven upon the field of the New 
 Testament for two reasons. Though we have con¬ 
 sidered Jesus of Nazareth only as a prophet, we 
 cannot ignore the fact that, while He bases Himself 
 upon the religion of the prophets, He yet advances 
 upon it, and claims to have more to say with an 
 authority which is altogether His own. Thus the 
 prophetic doctrine of God is not complete except 
 with the doctrine of Jesus included. But I have 
 been driven more directly upon the ground of New 
 Testament criticism by the question of miracles, and 
 this because it is directly bound up with the funda¬ 
 mental question of the nature of God ; and before you 
 can have satisfactory discussion of the specifically 
 Christian questions—about Christ’s person—about 
 the atonement—about the Holy Trinity—you must 
 have reached a stable position about this doctrine of 
 God. Now if, as has been contended in this book, 
 the prophets of Israel were the organs of a real 
 self-disclosure of God, intended for the whole world 
 but given in the first instance through them, then 
 there can be to my mind no question at all but that 
 miracles of God’s working are possible and credible 
 on adequate evidence. The evidence is there, cogent 
 and, as it would seem, unanswerable. What hinders 
 acceptance of the miraculous is the absence of belief 
 that the God of the prophets is the real God. There 
 will be no revival of specifically Christian belief 
 except on the basis of, or accompanied with, a revived 
 belief in the God of the prophets, and, conversely, 
 granted the God of the prophets to be real, the claim 
 for miracles will be at least no obstacle to belief in 
 the Creeds. I go further and say that miracles, i.e. 
 
 20 
 
290 CONCLUSION 
 
 actions of God in nature marking His special intention 
 for the redemption of mankind, will seem, at the 
 crucial moment of religious history, so natural as to 
 be almost inevitable accompaniments of the revelation. 
 On the other hand, the disbelief in miracles is not 
 really based on historical criticism, but on a belief 
 about God which is at bottom a rejection of the 
 prophetic claim to reveal the real God, and a return 
 to what is substantially the Greek philosophic theory 
 of God, which Christianity in part assimilated, but 
 in more important respects displaced. This higher 
 Pantheism, both of the ancient Greeks and of the 
 majority of modern philosophers, has so feeble a hold 
 on the divine transcendence, and even personality, 
 and at bottom is so deeply inclined to an identification 
 of God and nature, like Spinoza’s, that it can find no 
 place for miracles and is bound to explain them away. 
 But also the faithof the higher Pantheism is so uncertain 
 of the moral character of the Ultimate Reality—so 
 uncertain whether goodness is more than one element 
 in a universe which is much greater than it—as to 
 weaken profoundly, especially in the conscience of 
 the 64 ordinary man,” the sense of the final supremacy 
 of moral purpose in the world. This is to say, in other 
 words, that the higher Pantheism tends inevitably 
 in common opinion to become the lower Pantheism, 
 which merges God in nature and takes for inevitable 
 all that is. I do not think it is open to doubt that 
 the belief in the real occurrence of miracles and the 
 belief in the God of the prophets are bound up with 
 one another in an inevitable coherence. And, on the 
 other hand, by a like inevitable coherence, the denial 
 of the credibility of miracles is bound up with a 
 disbelief in the prophetic God and a relapse upon a 
 kind of Pantheism which substantially is that of the 
 
THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM CRUCIAL 291 
 
 Greek philosophers, especially in its effect or lack of 
 effect upon the common conscience. 
 
 2. Secondly, I want to make this point. I think 
 the decision in the great alternative, to which I have 
 just called attention, turns, to an extent which it is 
 hard to exaggerate, upon the question of the reality 
 of freewill in man, not in any exaggerated sense, but in 
 the restricted yet real sense which I have endeavoured 
 to define above. 1 If man is really free, there is a 
 real element of creativeness and spontaneity and 
 contingency in the heart of nature, the conception of 
 which may be extended indefinitely, but which is, at 
 least, there where man is. The time process, the 
 true meaning of which becomes first apparent in man, 
 is then shown to have real meaning. God may, 
 nay, as I have contended, must, be conceived of as 
 prior to creation or nature, complete in Himself. 
 But creation, or the process of nature, is a continuous 
 process in which it is the purpose of God to reproduce 
 in a gradual order, and finally, at least, by the co¬ 
 operation of free spirits, an expression of His being 
 and will. This is what we may reverently call an 
 enterprise or an adventure on the part of God, because 
 the element of freedom—freedom which may prove 
 lawless—is something which God Himself will not 
 overrule. The time series represents, with all its 
 elements of contingency and uncertainty, a real and 
 long-continued effort of God, though its end is certain. 
 And this freedom allowed to man postulates a like 
 and much deeper freedom in God, and supplies, as has 
 been pointed out, the rationale for God’s miraculous 
 actions—that is, His occasional innovations upon 
 normal method. On the other hand, if freedom is 
 denied to man, it becomes natural to think of real 
 
 1 Soe above, pp. 139 ff., 234 ff. 
 
292 CONCLUSION 
 
 freedom as a vain imagination in the case of God also. 
 Nature becomes simply the necessary self-expression 
 of God. Whatever is, could not have been otherwise. 
 The whole time series becomes inevitable, and, more 
 than inevitable, illusory. All that, at the bottom, is 
 really there for the purified intellect to contemplate 
 is the absolute nature, the eternal and inevitable 
 44 must have been.” 
 
 3. Finally, I want to point out the modification 
 which belief in the reality of the self-disclosure of 
 God through the Hebrew prophets introduces into the 
 current doctrine of Relativity, of which Lord Haldane 
 has recently been the prophet. No one, I think, 
 can dispute the truth of this doctrine, though whether 
 Einstein’s discoveries and theories do more than show 
 it in a novel light I do not feel sure. Anyway, the 
 postulates of each branch of human science are not 
 final and necessary truths, but are relative to the 
 particular science ; and the absolute point of view, 
 from which all must be harmonized, is hard to come 
 by, and may be unattainable for ever by the finite 
 minds of men. Certainly the mind of man is not 
 capable of discovering absolute truth. This applies 
 to moral truth as much as to any other department 
 of reality. The judgements of the conscience are not, 
 and never can be, absolutely the judgements of God. 
 It applies also (even on the postulate of revelation) 
 to theology. The theologians have always emphasized 
 this. “ We see through a glass darkly ” in our thought 
 about the ultimate things. Nevertheless, this neces¬ 
 sary doctrine of relativity does not supply any valid 
 ground for excluding the idea that behind the veil of 
 creation lies the Personal God. Creation, as Dr. 
 Pringle Pattison and Lord Haldane say, appears in 
 “ layers ” : upon the merely physical or material 
 
293 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF RELATIVITY 
 
 supervenes the vital, and upon the vital the rational 
 and the personal. And the personal is, at least, a 
 better image of God than the merely vital or merely 
 mechanical. God, be it said, is superpersonal, but 
 at least personal. Then also the supremely personal 
 can act as a person. He can reveal Himself more 
 intensely here than there. There is no legitimate 
 ground for a dogmatic exclusion of this possibility. 
 And on the surest grounds, as it seems to us, we have 
 found this to be not only possible as a theory but 
 actual as a fact. For those who accept revelation 
 as a fact, in a particular line of history, mediated 
 through the prophets of Israel and culminating in 
 Christ, the doctrine of relativity is certainly not 
 obliterated or negatived. The revelation of God in 
 Christ may be spoken of as establishing “ the absolute 
 religion,” in the sense that it is, for this world, final 
 and universal, but it does not mean that “ the absolute 
 truth ” is there unveiled. At least Christianity has 
 never made any such claim. It has never claimed 
 for us in our present condition the power to see God 
 as He is. But, granted this, it does, none the less, 
 introduce a limiting element into the doctrine of 
 relativity. For here, given through the prophets 
 and in Christ, we have not merely a judgement of 
 human reason or conscience liable to all the 
 uncertainties and relativities of such a judgement, but 
 a real word of God. Such word of God is given through 
 men and for men, as they now are, and must therefore 
 be, as compared to absolute truth, relative and 
 imperfect. But the truth which the self-disclosure 
 of God enables us and requires us to put into human 
 words is, as compared to all other human proposi¬ 
 tions about God, necessarily of a higher quality and 
 infinitely more trustworthy. Any real belief in a 
 
294 CONCLUSION 
 
 divine self-disclosure carries with it the belief that 
 the word of God is trustworthy and has an infinitely 
 higher measure of truth than any merely human 
 judgement. Granted that it is gradually given, yet 
 it must be at each stage as close an expression of 
 absolute truth as human thought and words admit of. 
 It is for practical purposes absolute truth, because 
 it can be relied on utterly. This gradual revelation 
 in its earlier stages was always invested with divine 
 authority as far as it went. But in Christ it is 
 postulated for it that it attains completeness and 
 finality. That claim we have not yet sought to 
 estimate. Without assuming finality for Christ, let us 
 be content to recognize that if we believe the authority 
 behind the prophets and Jesus Christ really to be 
 the will of the Personal God revealing Himself to 
 man, the “ word of God ” proclaimed by them must 
 be admitted to be in such real sense absolutely true, 
 that it is true for all men and the highest kind of 
 truth about God which man can attain. It is abso¬ 
 lutely true in the sense that any human propositions 
 which really ignore it or contradict it are misleading 
 and false. 
 
TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 Chapter I. The Breakdown of Tradition (about 1850). The 
 causes : (1) the effects of Darwinism in popular thought, 
 pp. 6-13 ; (2) the effect of Biblical criticism, 13-17 ; 
 
 (3) the comparative study of religions, 17-19 ; (4) the 
 revolt of conscience against Calvinism, 19-20. More 
 recent causes of unsettlement : (1) Democracy in thought, 
 (2) revolt against moral standard, (3) individualism, 
 
 (4) modern psychology, (5) new religions, (6) the Great 
 War, 21-6 ; need to begin reconstruction from the 
 foundations, 26-8. 
 
 Chapter II. The Conditions of Hopeful Reconstruction. 
 (1) Freedom from bitterness, pp. 30-1 ; (2) intellectual 
 decision, 31-5 ; (3) recognition of manifold basis of 
 
 certitude ; intuition and mysticism, 35-43 ; legitimate 
 and illegitimate praejudicia, 43-4. 
 
 Chapter III. Grounds of Belief in God. Monotheism alone 
 possible, pp. 46-8. The grounds of belief: (1) Reason 
 or mind in the universe corresponding to mind in man, 
 the epistemological argument, 49-52 ; (2) the argument 
 from beauty, 52-4 ; (3) the argument from the moral 
 conscience, 54-7 ; the higher pantheism, 57-8 ; science 
 no obstacle, 58-61; but the inadequacy of this philosophic 
 creed ; momentous questions raised and not answered, 
 61-6 ; the idea of revelation not to be excluded a priori , 
 66-9 ; Dr. Pringle Pattison on the transcendent God, 
 69-73. 
 
 295 
 
296 
 
 TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 Chapter IV. The Question of Revelation . The claim of 
 Israel’s prophets. The precise question limited, pp. 74-8 ; 
 the nature and grounds of the claim, 78-82 ; misconcep¬ 
 tions to be obviated : (1) the lowly natural origin of the 
 prophets, 83-8 ; (2) the prophets in that sense foretellers, 
 88-92 ; (3) the question of natural evolution, 92-4 ; 
 
 (4) the prophetic succession culminating in Jesus, 94-6. 
 Proposed “explanations” of the prophetic message. It 
 is not: (1) a set of philosophical conclusions, 97-8 ; 
 nor (2) the results of “ experience,” 98-9 ; nor (3) the 
 outcome of any “ Semitic genius for monotheism,” 
 99-102 ; nor (4) an “ uprush from the unconscious mind,” 
 102-6. The moral results of accepting the prophetic 
 message as divine, 106-9. 
 
 Chapter V. The Contents of the Prophetic Faith. Given as 
 practical guidance, but involving intellectual propositions, 
 pp. 110-13 : (1) the personality of God, 113-14 ; (2) 
 Jehovah the absolute being, 114-15—with qualifications 
 involved in ( a ) creation of free beings, 115-17, ( b) the 
 divine perfection, 117-20 ; (3) the moral perfection of 
 God, 120-2 ; (4) God the absolute creator, 122-24; 
 
 (5) the freedom of man, 124-7 ; (6) the day of the Lord 
 and the world to come, 127-8. New data for philosophy, 
 129 ; the Greek philosophical synthesis in early days, 
 129-31 ; synthesis in the middle ages, 131 ; needed 
 to-day—and the way thereto, 131-2. 
 
 Chapter VI. Revelation and Reason. The data of revelation 
 at the bar of reason and the sciences, pp. 134-6. (1) The 
 physical sciences , slow evolution, 137-9 ; real freedom of 
 wills, 139-44 (see also p. 170 n. and pp. 234-6); (2) philosophy 
 —personality of God, 146 ; God eternally self-conscious, 
 147 ; the absolute, 147-8 ; the absolute creator, 148-53 ; 
 personal immortality, 153-6 ; God is love—the real 
 difficulty, 156-63 ; (3) comparative religions , 163-6; 
 
 (4) Biblical criticism , 166-9. 
 
297 
 
 TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 Chapter VII. The Historical Religion. Term applicable to 
 Old Testament but specially to New Testament religion— 
 pp. 171-3 ; intellectual revolt against idea of the 
 miraculous; the peril of historical religion, and its manifest 
 advantage, 173-5; its implications: (1) idea of God, 
 175-6 ; (2) free criticism of documents, 176-7 ; (3) the 
 religion of fact against the religion of symbolism, 177-82. 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Historical Worth of the New Testament. 
 Recent reactions in critical opinion—Harnack, pp. 184-6. 
 (1) The trustworthiness of the Gospels : St. Mark, 186-93 ; 
 St. Luke and Acts, 193-201 ; the material of the Synoptist’s 
 data before a.d. 70, 201 ; St. Matthew’s Gospel and 
 St. John’s, 202-4 ; silence of contemporary historians, 
 204-6. (2) The presupposition of the Epistles , 207-9 ; 
 
 Epistles before Gospels, 209-10. (3) The Epistles , 210-13 ; 
 
 the Pastoral Epistles, 213-14. 
 
 Chapter IX. The Prejudice of Criticism against the miraculous 
 and generally the supernatural. Renan, pp. 216-17; 
 Schweitzer’s survey of German criticism, 217-21; Super¬ 
 natural Religion , 221 ; Dr. Sanday, 221-2 ; untenable 
 position, 223-8 ; Bishop Creighton, 229 n. 
 
 Chapter X. The Prejudice Examined. Definition of “ miracle ” 
 and “ supernatural,” pp. 231-3. (1) The conception of a 
 
 closed system of nature : Stoics ; Spinoza; inconsistent with 
 fact of freedom in man; the freedom of God; Augustine 
 on miracles, 233-41. (2) Miracles of Christ the “ natural ” 
 
 acts of His new nature as God in manhood : argument 
 not to be pressed, 241-5 ; scientific prejudice against 
 miracle, 245-6. (3) The historical argument , 246-9. 
 
 (4) Current acceptance of miracles, as by spiritism, 
 249-51 ; miracles not impossible nor incredible, 251. 
 
 Chapter XI. The Historical Evidence for Miracles. “ The 
 neurotic theory ” pp. 252-3 ; St. Mark’s Gospel, 253-4 ; 
 
298 
 
 TABLE OF SUBJECTS 
 
 “ Q,” 254-6 ; tendency to accretion, 256-7 ; the place of 
 miracle in the New Testament, 257-8; in the contemporary 
 empire, 258-9; miracle and morality, 259-60; miracle in the 
 early church, 260-1 ; in the middle ages, 261. (1) Evidence 
 
 of the resurrection , 262-72 ; (2) of the ascension , 272-3 ; 
 (3) of the virgin birth of Jesus , 274-82. 
 
 Chapter XII. Conclusion. Summary of the argument of the 
 book, pp. 283-8 : (1) The real question—Do we believe 
 in the God of the prophets and the Father of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ ? 288-91. (2) The crucial question the 
 
 question of free will, 291-2. (3) The doctrine of 
 
 relativity, and its modification by belief in divine 
 self-revelation, 292-4. 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Akhnaton, 100 
 
 Alexander (of Aphrodisias), 233 
 Alexander (S.), 51 
 Athanasius (St.), 82 
 Augustine (St.), 10, 153 n., 239 f. 
 
 Bacon (Francis), 6 
 Batiffol (Monseigneur), 192 n., 
 205 n., 206 n. 
 
 Baur (Ferdinand), 16 
 Beethoven, 35 
 Bergson (H.), 59, 71, 140 
 Bosanquet (Bernard), 3 n., 154 
 Box (I)r.), 197 n., 274 n., 276 n., 
 277 n. 
 
 Bradley (F. H.),39 n., 112 n., 154 
 Bragg (Sir W.), 38 
 Bronte (Emily), 151 n. 
 
 Bruce (A. B.), 191 n. 
 
 Buddha (The), 165, 171 
 Buffon, 7 
 
 Butler (Bp.), 30, 91, 131 n., 160, 
 232 n. 
 
 Butler (Samuel), 7 n. 
 
 Carpenter (W. B.), 103 
 Chrysostom (St.), 83, 260 f. 
 Clement (of Rome), 213 
 Clifford (W. K.), 9 
 Creighton (Bp.), 229 n. 
 
 Croce (Bened.) . 132 n. 
 
 Dante, 234 
 
 Darwin (Charles). 7, 8, 9, 12, 35, 
 53, 60, 161 
 Darwin (Erasmus), 7 
 Delehaye (Fere), 249, 261 
 De Morgan (W.), 35 
 Descartes, 29, 64, 75 
 De Wette, 14 
 
 Dickinson (G. Lowes), 166 n. 
 
 Euripides, 162 n. 
 
 Ewald, 14 
 
 Glover (Dr.), 226 
 Goethe, 7 
 
 Gooch (G. P.), 13 n. 
 
 Gregory (St., of Nyssa), 10 
 
 Haldane (Lord),52 n.,57 n.,60n.; 
 63 n., 137 n., 240 n., 243 n. 
 292 
 
 Hamilton (H. F.), 97 n. 
 
 Harnack (Adolph), 185, 195, 218 
 Hawkins (Sir J.), 194 n. 
 
 Hinton (James), 33 
 Hobart, 194 n. 
 
 Hooker (Richard), 118 n.,131 n. 
 Huxley, 12, 161, 281 
 
 Inge (Dean), 58 n., 174, 226 
 Irenaeus (St.), 47 n. 
 
 James (St.), 125 
 Jesus Christ, 80-1, 94-6 
 John (St.), 203 
 Johnson (Samuel), 13 n. 
 Johnston (J. L.), 166 n. 
 
 Jones (Wood), 13 n. 
 
 Josephus, 204, 206 
 
 Kant, 8 n., 55, 235 
 
 Lake (Kirsopp), 19 n., 102 n., 
 221, 226 
 Lamarck, 7 
 
 Lankester (Sir E. R.), 158 
 Latham (Dr.), 268 n. 
 
 Lindsay (T. M.), 6 n. 
 
 Linnaeus, 6 
 Lodge (Sir O.), 250 
 
 299 
 
800 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Loofs (Dr.), 223 
 
 Luke (St.), 193 ff., 207, 254 n., 
 270 f., 276 ff. 
 
 Mackonochie (A. H.), 29 n. 
 Marcus Aurelius, 46 
 Mark (St.), 186 ff., 252 f., 270 f. 
 Matthew (St.), 202 f., 256, 278 f. 
 Mesha (King of Moab), 84, 86 
 Milton, 6, 9, 11 
 Mohammed, 37, 172 
 Moore (Aubrey), 6 n., 13 n. 
 Mozley (J. B.), 53 
 
 Niebuhr, 14 
 Noldeke, 100 n. 
 
 Origen, 259, 260 n. 
 
 Paley (Archd.), 5, 7 n., 131 n. 
 Papias, 186, 190 n., 202 
 Pasteur, 41 
 
 Paul (St.), 49 n., 66, 78 n., Ill, 
 119, 127 n., 173, 178, 179, 
 189 n., 207 ff., 213 f., 264 ff. 
 Plato, 44 n., 68 
 
 Pratt (J. B.), 24, 104 n., 106 n., 
 123 n , 240 n. 
 
 Pringle-Pattison, 45 n., 57 n., 
 
 59 n., 61 n., 65, 69 ff., 149, 
 175, 243 n. 
 
 Prophets (of Israel), 76-106 
 
 “ Q,” 199, 254 f. 
 
 Rackham (R. B.), 193, 195 f. 
 Ramsay (Sir W.), 186 n., 195, 
 197 
 
 Rashdall (Dean), 170 n., 226 
 Ray (John), 6 
 Relton (Dr.), 144 
 
 j Renan, 16, 31, 216 f. 
 
 Rette (Adolphe), 9 n. 
 
 Ritschl (Alb.), 112, 174 
 Romanes (G.), 41 
 Ryle (Dr. R.), 253 n. 
 
 Sadhu {The), 36 n., 250 
 Sanday (Dr.), 79 n., 101 n., 222, 
 224, 228, 247, 253 
 Schiller (F. C. S.), 144 n. 
 Schweitzer (Alb.), 217 
 Shakespeare, 159 n. 
 
 Shaw (Bernard), 7 n. 
 
 Sophocles, 55 
 Sorley (W. R.), 57 n. 
 
 South (Dr.), 9 
 
 Spinoza, 64, 65, 71, 72, 75, 233 f. 
 Spencer (Herbert), 13 
 Strauss, 16, 219 f. 
 
 Supernatural Religion , 221 
 Swete (Dr.), 269 
 
 Tacitus, 205, 258 
 Temple (Bp.), 68 
 Tennant (F. R.), 26 
 Tertullian, 42 n. 
 
 Thomson (J. A.) and Geddes (P.), 
 13 n., 161 
 Tolstoy, 40, 166 n. 
 
 Treviranus, 7 
 
 Vespasian, 258 f. 
 
 Von Hiigel (Fr.), 144 n. 
 
 Wallace, 7 
 
 Webb (Clem.), 65, 114, 182 n. 
 Wells (H. G.), 17, 47 
 Wolf, 14 
 
 Wordsworth, 48, 54, 55 
 Zeno, 141 
 
 > 
 
 Printed, by Hazell , Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury , England. 
 
# 
 
 3 f 
 
 
 CATALOGUE OF 
 
 THEOLOGICAL 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 JOHN MURRAY 
 
 50* ALBEMARLE 
 
 STREET, LONDON, W 
 
 1921 
 
 # 
 
 r ~ — ~ If 
 
 -rj" . . p 
 
 —-———zz-— —rzzz: i 
 
MR. MURRAY issues the following 
 Catalogues and Lists which will be 
 posted free on request: 
 
 COMPLETE GENERAL CATALOGUE 
 
 QUARTERLY LIST OF NEW BOOKS 
 
 EDUCATIONAL CATALOGUE 
 
 THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 
 
 LIST OF BOOKS ON AGRICULTURE. 
 HORTICULTURE, etc. 
 
 STANDARD WORKS ON SCIENCE 
 
 STANDARD MEDICAL WORKS 
 
 WORKS ON ARCH/EOLOGY 
 
 BOOKS FOR SCHOOL PRIZES 
 
NEW AND RECENT BOOKS 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN 
 
 By CHARLES GORE, D.D. 
 
 Hon. Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford ; formerly Bishop of Oxford 
 2nd Impression. Crown 8vo, 6s. net. 
 
 “ Students of the New Testament may count themselves fortunate to 
 have a commentary on the Epistles of St. John from the pen of Bishop 
 Gore to set side by side with his studies of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 the Ephesians and the Romans. . . . The whole book is worth careful 
 reading and re-reading, and will form a real contribution to Christian 
 thought .”—Church Times. 
 
 “ A new book, written with the simplicity, sincerity, and devotion 
 which we have learnt to expect from the author ... a valuable little 
 book, written out of a mature experience, and with an earnestness 
 intense beyond that of most scholars .”—The Guardian. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH 
 AND CHRISTIAN REUNION 
 
 THE BAMPTON LECTURES, 1920 
 
 By the Rev. A. G. HEADLAM, M.A., D.D. 
 
 Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford 
 2 nd Edition, with a new Preface. Demy 8vo. 12 s. net. 
 
 “ Professor Headlam’s Bampton Lectures will receive the attention 
 that is due both to the high reputation of the author and the great 
 importance of the subject with which they deal. As a teacher and 
 writer, Dr. Headlam has always been distinguished for clearness of 
 thought and logical consistency, and his latest work possesses in a 
 marked degree both these characteristics .”—Church Family Newspaper. 
 
 “Alike in their comprehensive grasp of different aspects of the 
 subject, in their clearness of arrangement and exposition . . . these 
 lectures are plainly the work of a master.”— Commonwealth. 
 
NEW AND RECENT BOOKS 
 
 HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND 
 
 Hon. D.D. Aberdeen ; Hon. D.Litt ., Oxford; Regius Professor of 
 Divinity in Oxford ; Canon of St. Paul's. 
 
 Memoir and Letters, Edited by STEPHEN PAGET 
 
 With Illustrations. 2nd Edition. Demy 8vo. 16s. net. 
 
 “ It is a book from which the reader will rise glad and refreshed, 
 because it fulfils the purpose of making known to those who never 
 knew him, or knew him only slightly here, a great man, a great teacher, 
 a great prophet who was also a great Christian, and a Catholic Christian, 
 to the finest fibre of his being .”—Church Times. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF FAITH ; and 
 THE FOURTH GOSPEL 
 
 By the Rev. HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, D.D. 
 
 Late Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford 
 
 Edited by the Rev. WILFRID J. RICHMOND 
 
 Hon. Canon of Winchester 
 
 Demy 8vo, 12 t. net. 
 
 ‘•There is underlying all much real and independent thought about 
 the relation of modern theories to truth. . . . We cannot but be grate¬ 
 ful to Canon Richmond for his labour of love .”—The Record. 
 
 JOHN SMITH MOFFAT, C.M.G. 
 
 Missionary and Administrator 
 
 . A Memoir by bis Son, ROBERT U. MOFFAT 
 
 . .. With Illustrations. Demy 8vo. 
 
 John Smith Moffat, son of Dr. Livingstone’s distinguished companion 
 and father-in-law, was, like his father, a missionary who spent all his 
 ,life in Africa, living among the natives, speaking their language and 
 working for their welfare. He had the unique distinction of inter. 
 • changing missionary work with government service, and his life, which 
 'is full of incident and adventure, describes‘the transition state from 
 savagery to civilisation, 'and throws an interesting light on the history 
 of the Boer War. 
 
NEW AND RECENT BOOKS 5 
 
 THE PSALMS IN HUMAN LIFE 
 
 By ROWLAND E. PROTHERO, M.V.O. 
 
 (LORD ERNLE) 
 
 New Pocket Edition. F’cap 8vo. 2 s. 6 d. net. 
 
 Those who take up this volume will find in it a rich store of 
 pleasure. It is in reality the ‘ Romance of the Psalms,’ and is full of 
 entertainment (in the highest sense of the word) and abounds in pure 
 and lofty thought.”— Daily Telegraph. 
 
 THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 By the Rev. J. R. GOHU, M.A. 
 
 Rector of Aston Clinton, Bucks; Author of “ The Evolution of the 
 
 Christian Ministry f etc. 
 
 Demy 8vo. i6.r. net. 
 
 “He has achieved a real success. It is the result of painstaking 
 study of the best authorities set out by a man who is always able to 
 put his own points vividly and with that touch of humanity which 
 attracts while it instructs the unlearned.”— The Times. 
 
 PERSONAL RELIGION AND POLITICS 
 
 By W. H. CARNEGIE, M.A. 
 
 Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey, Rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, 
 and Speaker's Chaplain of the House of Commons. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6 s. net. 
 
 “The superiority of Christianity over ‘mundane morality’ is well 
 set forth by Canon Carnegie, and his observations on that subject are 
 worthy of wide attention. There is ‘quiet strength’ in this book 
 which is much needed.”— English Churchman. 
 
 “ As a contribution to the ethical aspect of Christian teaching this 
 book deserves a hearty welcome.”— Church Family Newspaper. 
 
NEW AND RECENT BOOKS 
 
 6 
 
 LIFE OF 
 
 BISHOP MOORHOUSE, 
 
 OF MELBOURNE AND MANCHESTER 
 
 By Miss E. C. RICKARDS 
 
 Author of “ Zoe Thomson of Bishopthorpe ” 
 
 With Illustrations. Demy 8vo, 14A net. 
 
 “ The biography is an almost perfect one. It is a real portrait of a 
 striking personality, painted with restraint and with power.”— Man¬ 
 chester Guardian. 
 
 “ Miss Rickards has written the story of his life with excellent 
 judgment, and has achieved a brevity which is tooirare in clerical as in 
 other biographies.”— The Observer. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF PURITANISM ON 
 THE POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 THOUGHT OF THE ENGLISH 
 
 By the Rev. JOHN STEPHEN FLYNN, M.A., 
 
 B.D. (T.C.D.) 
 
 Hon. Canon of Truro 
 Demy 8vo. 12 s. net. 
 
 “ Canon J. S. Flynn is well known as an attractive and powerful 
 preacher. . . . He has also made contributions to Evangelical Litera¬ 
 ture, of which the work before us is the latest and probably the most 
 important. ... It is brimlul of matter calculated to interest and 
 instruct multitudes in the British Empire and the United States . . . 
 the theme of our author is the enduring effect of Puritan doctrine and 
 practice upon character and life.”— English Churchman. 
 
 THE FRINGE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 By MARY E. MONTIETH 
 
 Square Crown 8vo. 6 a net. 
 
 “ Miss Monteith has an equipment uncommon among writers upon 
 psychical phenomena. She is by nature a sceptic, and it is perfectly 
 clear that she has never believed in any of the ‘ experiences ’ which 
 have come her way until the accumulation of evidence has given her 
 no choice.”— The Athenceum. 
 
 “ Miss Mary Monteith gives a lucid and deeply impressive account 
 of her experiences in spirit communication.”— Light. 
 
$ 
 
 CATALOGUE OF 
 
 THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
 
 ALEXANDER, the Rev. S. A., 
 
 Canon and Treasurer of St. Paul's. 
 
 THE MIND OF CHRIST. Addresses given in the Temple 
 Church, illustrating the supreme need of a deeper realisation by the 
 Church of what her Founder taught and was. Demy 8vo, 6.S - . net. 
 
 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. Lectures dealing with the 
 Bible, and some of the great movements of religious history, modern 
 science, and Biblical criticism. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 ALLEN, the Venble. Willoughby^C., M. A., 
 
 Archdeacon of Blackburn. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN HOPE. Addresses, Sermons, and Popular 
 Lectures. Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 ARNOLD, Matthew. 
 
 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. An Essay towards a better 
 apprehension of the Bible. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 GOD AND THE BIBLE. A sequel to “Literature and 
 Dogma.” Crown 8vo, 35-. 6d. net. 
 
 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. With Other Essays. 
 Crown 8vo, 3s. &d. net. 
 
 LAST ESSAYS ON CHURCH AND RELIGION. Crown 
 8vo, 3J - . 6d. net. 
 
 BARNETT, the Rev. Canon S. A. 
 
 HIS LIFE, WORK AND FRIENDS. By his Wife, Mrs. S. A. 
 Barnett, C.B.E. With a Preface by the Archbishop of York. 
 2nd Edition. In 2 volumes. Demy 8vo, 28 j-. net. 
 
 BEECHING, the Very Rev. H. C.^ M.A.^ D.Litt., 
 
 Late Dean of Norwich. 
 
 THE BIBLE DOCTRINE OF THE SACRAMENTS. Six 
 
 Lectures given in Westminster Abbey. Crown Svo, 3s. 6 d. net. 
 
 THE APOSTLES’ CREED. Six Lectures delivered in West¬ 
 minster Abbey. Large Crown 8vo, 3^. 6d. net. 
 
8 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 BENSON, the late Rev. Robert Hugh. 
 
 HUGH : MEMOIRS OF A BROTHER. By A. C. Benson 
 With Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo, gs. net. 
 
 BIBLE COMMENTARY. 
 
 A COMMENTARY ON THE HOLY BIBLE, Explanatory 
 and Critical, with a Revision of the Translation. By Bishops and 
 Clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by F. C. Cook, M.A., 
 late Canon of Exeter. 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT. 6 vols. Medium.8vo. 
 
 Vol. I, 305. net. Vol. II, 20s. net. Vol. Ill, i6j. net. Vol. 
 IV, 24s. net. Vol. V, 20^. net. Vol. VI, 2$s. net. 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT. 4 vols. Medium 8vo. Vol. I, 18 s. 
 net. Vol. II, 20s. net. Vol. Ill, 285. net. Vol. IV, 28s. net. 
 
 THE APOCRYPHA. By various writers. Edited by the Rev. H. 
 Wace, D.D., Dean of Canterbury. 2 vols. Medium 8vo, 50L net. 
 
 STUDENT’S COMMENTARY ON THE HOLY BIBLE. 
 
 Abridged from the above Work. Edited by John M. Fuller, 
 M.A., Vicar of Bexley, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History, 
 King’s College, London. 6 vols. Crown 8vo, 7 s. 6d. net each. 
 
 *** Arrangements have been made with the booksellers enabling 
 them to offer special terms for the above two works complete. 
 
 BIGKERSTETH, the Right Rev. Edward, D.D., 
 
 Late Bishop of South Tokyo, Japan. 
 
 OUR HERITAGE IN THE CHURCH. Papers Written for 
 Divinity Students in Japan. With a Preface by the late Right 
 Rev. B. F. Westcott, D.D. Large Crown 8vo, 55. net. 
 
 LIFE AND LETTERS OF EDWARD BICKERSTETH, 
 
 late Bishop of South Tokyo. With Map and Illustrations. Cheap 
 Edition. Cr. 8vo, 3J. 6 d. net. Also an Ed., Demy 8vo, iol 6 d. net. 
 
 BOYD-CARPENTER, the Right Rev. William, D.D., 
 
 Late Bishop of Ripon. 
 
 A POPULAR HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENG- 
 LAND, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. With Illus¬ 
 trations. Cheap Edition. Large Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 BRODRIGK, M. 
 
 THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 OF NAZARETH. 5*. net. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 9 
 
 BROOKE, Rev. Stopford A. 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF THE REV. STOPFORD 
 A. BROOKE. By Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, M.A., Hon. 
 LL.D., D.D., Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. With 
 Portraits. 2 vols. Large Post 8vo, 15^. net. 
 
 BU RKITT, F. Crawfor d, 
 
 Lecturer in Palaeography in the University of Cambridge. 
 
 EARLY EASTERN CHRISTIANITY. St. Margaret’s Lec¬ 
 tures, 1904, on the Syriac-speaking Church. With Illustrations. 
 Large Crown 8vo, 7 s. 6d. net. 
 
 GAILLARD, Miss E. M. 
 
 A LIVING CHRISTIANITY. Crown 8vo, 3L 6 d. net. 
 
 CARNEGIE, the Rev. W. H., 
 
 Canon of Westminster. 
 
 CHURCHMANSHIP AND CHARACTER. Three Years’ 
 Teaching in Birmingham Cathedral. Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 CLARKE, Sir Edward, the Right Hon., P.C. 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT. Thei Authorised Version Cor¬ 
 rected. The Text prepared by Sir Edward Clarke. Demy 8vo, 
 5-r. net. 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. The Authorised Version 
 Amended. The Text prepared by Sir Edward Clarke. Demy 
 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 THE BOOK OF PSALMS. The Prayer Book Version 
 Corrected. The Text prepared by Sir Edward Clarke. F’cap 
 8vo, 2 s. 6d. net. 
 
 CLARKE, t he Rev. J. Langton, D.D . 
 
 THE ETERNAL SAVIOUR-JUDGE. Fresh Light and 
 Comfort from the Holy Scriptures. With an Introduction by the 
 Rev. J. R. Illingworth, D.D. Demy 8vo, 4L net. Simplified 
 Edition, Crown 8vo, 2 s. net. 
 
 COLLINS, the Right Rev. William Edward, D.D., 
 
 Late Bishop of Gibraltar . 
 
 HOURS OF INSIGHT and other Sermons. Crown 8vo, 
 5 s. net. 
 
10 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 GONTENTIO VERITATIS. 
 
 CONTENTIO VERITATIS. Essays in Constructive Theology. 
 By Six Oxford Tutors : the Rev. H. Rashdall, D.Litt., the 
 Very Rev. W. R. Inge, the Rev. H. L. Wild, the Rev. C. F. 
 Burney, the Rev. W. C. Allen, the Rev. A. J. Carlyle. A Re¬ 
 vised Edition. Demy 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 CUNNINGHAM, the Venble. W., D.D., F.B.A., 
 
 Late Fellow of Trinity College , Cambridge , and Archdeacon of Ely. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS. The Substance of the 
 Lowell Lectures delivered at Boston, Mass., 1914. Demy 8vo, 
 6 s. net. 
 
 EFFICIENCY IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Some 
 Remarks Occasioned by the Report of the Archbishops’ Com¬ 
 mittee on Church Finance. Crown 8vo, 3^. 6 d. net. 
 
 DANNATT, William, 
 
 Of Great Waltham. 
 
 THE FAITH OF A FARMER. Extracts from his Diary, 
 edited, with an Introduction, by J. 'G. Montmorency, M.A., 
 LL.B. Crown 8vo, $s. net. 
 
 DEARMER, the Rev. Percy, D.D. 
 
 PATRIOTISM AND FELLOWSHIP. Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net 
 
 DIB DIN, Sir Lewis, D.C.L., and HEALEY, Sir 
 
 Charles Ghadwyck, K.G.B., K.G. 
 
 ENGLISH CHURCH LAW AND DIVORCE. Part I, 
 Notes on the Reformatio Legium Ecclesiasticanem. Part II, 
 
 . Notes on the Divorce and Re-marriage of Sir John Stawell. 
 Demy 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 DIFFICULTIES IN CHRISTIANITY . 
 
 A Letter to a Layman. In Paper Covers. Demy 8vo, ij\ net. 
 
 DIGBY, Mother Mabel. 
 
 MOTHER MABEL DIGBY, 1835 — 1911 , Superior General of 
 the Society of the Sacred Heart. * By Anne Pollen. With a 
 Preface by Cardinal Bourne. Fourth Impression. With Illustra¬ 
 tions. Demy 8vo, i6.r. net. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE II 
 
 DUC HES NE, Monsignor L„ 
 
 De V Academie Francaise; Hon. D.Litt. Oxford, and Litt.D. 
 Cambridge. 
 
 THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CHURCH. From its 
 Foundation to the End of the Fifth Century. Rendered into 
 English from the Fourth Edition. 
 
 Vol. I. To End of Third Century. Demy 8vo, 12 s. net. 
 
 Vol. II. Demy 8vo, 12 s. net. 
 
 E RNL E, Lord . 
 
 THE PSALMS IN HUMAN LIFE. Enlarged Edition. 
 Large Crown 8vo, 6s. net. New Pocket Edition. 2 s. 6d. net. 
 
 EYRE, I)ouglas—Edited by, 
 
 Of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister-at-Law 
 
 REFORM IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. A Re¬ 
 vised Edition of “ Essays in Aid of the Reform of the Church.” 
 Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 FAWKES, Rev. Alfred, M.A., 
 
 Vicar of Ashby St. Ledgers. 
 
 STUDIES IN MODERNISM. Demy 8vo, ioj. 6d. net. 
 
 THE THINGS THAT ARE C/ESAR’S. Thoughts on Church 
 Reform. In Paper Covers. Demy 8vo, is. net. 
 
 CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND. With a Preface 
 by the Bishop of Hereford. In Paper Covers. Demy 8vo, is. net. 
 
 FOX. Selina Fitzherbert, M.D., B.S. 
 
 A CHAIN OF PRAYER ACROSS THE AGES. Forty 
 
 Centuries of Prayer— 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1920. Arranged for Daily 
 Use, with Index of'Subjects and Authors. F’cap 8vo, $s. net. 
 
 FRERE, the R ev. W. H„ D. D., 
 
 [Of the Community of the Resurrection. 
 
 ENGLISH CHURCH WAYS. Described to Russian Friends 
 in Four Lectures delivered at St. Petersburg in March 1914. 
 Crown 8vo, $s. net. 
 
 FR ERE. th e Rev. W. H„ D.D. , 
 
 Of the Community of the Resurrection. 
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF LITURGICAL REFORM. A 
 
 Contribution towards the Revision of the Book of Common 
 Prayer. Crown 8vo, 6s. net. 
 
12 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 GLADSTONE, William Ewart. 
 
 CORRESPONDENCE ON CHURCH AND RELIGION 
 
 OF. Selected and Arranged by D. C. Lathbury. With 
 Portraits. 2 vols. Demy 8vo, 24 s. net. 
 
 GLAZEBROOK, M. G., D.D., 
 
 Canon of Ely 
 
 THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT. A Reply to the Bishop of 
 Ely’s Criticisms on “The Faith of a Modern Churchman.” 
 Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 GORE, the Right Rev. Charles, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., 
 
 Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford; formerly Bishop of 
 Oxford. 
 
 THE BODY OF CHRIST. An Inquiry into the Institution 
 and Doctrine of the Holy Communion. Crown 8vo, 5 s. net. 
 
 • ORDERS AND UNITY. The case for ‘the episcopate con¬ 
 sidered as a necessary and divinely given link of continuity and 
 cohesion in the Church universal.’ Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE OLD RELIGION. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 5-r. net. 
 
 THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH. Four Lectures de¬ 
 livered in the Cathedral of St. Asaph. Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD. Bampton 
 Lectures for 1891. Large Crown 8vo, 55-. net. 
 
 DISSERTATIONS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH 
 
 THE INCARNATION. Large Crown 8vo, 5-y. net. 
 
 THE PERMANENT CREED AND THE CHRISTIAN 
 IDEA OF SIN. Two Sermons preached before the University 
 of Oxford. Large Crown 8vo, paper covers, 6 d. net. 
 
 SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY. The Primary Charge delivered 
 at his Visitation to the Clergy and Churchwardens of his Diocese 
 of Birmingham, October 1904. Demy 8vo, paper covers, lx. net. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE. Crown 8vo, is. net. 
 
 Simple Expositions of Portions of the New Testament 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 Crown 8vo, $s. net each 
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. Paper covers, is. net. 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 2 vols. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
 
 13 
 
 GORE, th e Right Rev. Charles—Edited by. 
 
 LUX MUNDI. A Series of Studies in the Religion of the 
 Incarnation. Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 GREEN, the Rev. E. Tyrrell, 
 
 St. David's College, Lampeter. 
 
 THE EUCHARIST. Devotional Addresses on its Chief Aspects. 
 Crown 8vo, 5^. net. 
 
 HARDWICH, the Rev. J. M., M.A., and 
 
 Assistant Master at Rugby School. 
 
 COSTLEY-WHITE, the Rev. H., M.A., 
 
 Headmaster of Liverpool College. 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY In Five Periods. Crown 
 8vo, 3 J. 6d. each Volume. 
 
 HARRIS, Rev. Charles, D.D., 
 
 Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Llandaff. 
 
 PRO FIDE. A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion. A 
 Textbook of Modern Apologetics for Students and Others. 
 Second Edition. Large Crown 8vo, 10^. 6 d. net. 
 
 HEADLAM, the Rev. A. C., M.A., D.D., 
 
 Regius Professor of Divinity in the,Unive sity of Oxford. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH AND CHRISTIAN 
 REUNION. The Bampton Lectures, 1920. 2nd Edition. Demy 
 8vo, 12 s. net. 
 
 HISTORY, AUTHORITY, AND THEOLOGY. Large 
 
 Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 ST. PAUL AND CHRISTIANITY. Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Being 
 the Moorhouse Lectures for 1914, delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral, 
 Melbourne. Large Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 THE REVENUES OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 2 s. 6 d. net. 
 
14 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 HENSON, the Right Rev. H. Hensley, D.D., 
 
 Bishop of Hereford. 
 
 STUDIES ON ENGLISH RELIGION IN THE SEVEN¬ 
 
 TEENTH CENTURY. Large Crown 8vo, Js. 6 d. net. 
 
 (Si. Margarets Lectures. 2nd Series,) 
 
 HISTORICAL SERIES FOR BIBLE STUDENTS. 
 
 t " . . 
 
 Edited by Prof. Charles Foster Kent, Ph.D., Yale University, 
 and Prof. Frank K. Sanders, Ph.D., Yale University. Non¬ 
 technical yet scholarly and reliable guides to the study of the 
 history, .literature, and teaching of the Old and New Testaments, 
 and of contemporary history. Crown 8vo, 9 s. net each. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE. From the 
 Settlement in Canaan to the Division of the Kingdom. By Prof. 
 Charles Foster Kent. With Maps and Plans. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE. From the 
 Division of the Kingdom to the Fall of Jerusalem in 566 B.c. By 
 Prof. Charles Foster Kent. With Maps and a Chart. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. The Babylonian, 
 Persian, and Greek Periods. By Prof. Charles Foster Kent. 
 With Maps. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. The Maccabean 
 and Roman Periods. By Prof. J. S. Riggs. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS. By Prof. 
 
 James Henry Breasted. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS. 
 
 By Prof. George S. Goodspeed. 
 
 THE LIFE OF JESUS OF NAZARETH. By Prof. Rush 
 Rhees. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE. By Prof. 
 George T. Purves. 
 
 OUTLINES FOR THE STUDY OF BIBLICAL HISTORY 
 AND LITERATURE. By Prof. Frank Knight Sanders, and 
 Henry Thatcher Fowler. 
 
 BIBLE GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY By Prof. Charles 
 Foster Kent. With 16 Maps. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
 
 15 
 
 HOARE, H. W. Hamilton, 
 
 Late of Balliol College , Oxford. 
 
 OUR ENGLISH BIBLE. The Story of its Origin and Growth, 
 giving, in narrative form, a history of our English translations, and 
 exhibiting them in close connection with the story of the national 
 life. With Specimen Pages of Old Bibles. Crown 8vo, 2s. net. 
 
 HORAN, the R ev. F. S„ 
 
 Late Chaplain Royal Navy. 
 
 A CALL TO SEAMEN and other Sermons Preached to Naval 
 Cadets at the Royal Naval College, Osborne. With a Preface by 
 the Very Rev. Bishop Ryle, Dean of Westminster. Second 
 Edition. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 HOWORTH, Sir Henry H„ K.C.I.E. 
 
 SAINT GREGORY THE GREAT. With Illustrations. 
 Demy 8vo, i8r. net. 
 
 SAINT AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY. With Illus¬ 
 trations. Demy 8vo, i8r. net. 
 
 THE GOLDEN DAYS OF THE EARLY ENGLISH 
 
 CHURCH. With Illustrations. 3.vols., i8r. net. each. 
 
 IL LINGW O RTH, the Rev. J. R., D. D., 
 
 Sometime Fellow of Jesus and Tutor of Keble Colleges. 
 
 THE LIFE AND WORK OF THE REV. J. R. ILLING¬ 
 WORTH, D.D. As portrayed by his Letters. Illustrated with 
 Photographs. Edited by his Wife, with a Preface by the Right 
 Rev. Charles Gore, D.D., and a Chapter by the Rev. Canon 
 Wilfrid J. Richmond. Demy 8vo, 12 s. net. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF PAIN : Its Bearing on Faith in God. 
 In Paper Covers, 6 d. net. 
 
 INGE, the Very Rev. William Ralph, D.D., 
 
 Dean St. Paul's. 
 
 TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD IN RELIGION. Six Lec¬ 
 tures delivered at Cambridge to Undergraduates in he Lent 
 Term, 1906. Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 STUDIES OF ENGLISH MYSTICS. The St. Margaret’s 
 Lectures. Fourth Series, 1905. Large Crown 8vo, 7s. 6d. net. 
 
16 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 JOURDAN, G. V. , 
 
 Rector of Rathbarry, Castlefreke. 
 
 THE MOVEMENT TOWARDS CATHOLIC REFORM 
 IN THE EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Large Crown 8vo, 
 7 s. 6d. net. 
 
 JO WETT, B enjamin, M.A. , 
 
 Late Master of Balliol College. 
 
 SERMONS. Edited by the Very Rev. the Hon. W. H. Fre¬ 
 mantle, D.D., Dean of Ripon. 3 vols. Crown 8vo, Js. 6 d. net 
 each. Vol. I— College Sermons. Vol. II— Biographical 
 and Miscellaneous. Vol. Ill— On Faith and Doctrine. 
 
 SELECT PASSAGES FROM THE THEOLOGICAL 
 WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN JOWETT. Edited by Lewis Camp¬ 
 bell, M.A., LL.D. With Photogravure Frontispiece. F’cap 
 
 8vo, 2s. 6d. net. With Portrait. F’cap 8vo, is. net. 
 
 / 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF BENJAMIN JOWETT, 
 
 M.A., Master of Balliol College, Oxford. By Evelyn Abbott, 
 M.A., LL.D., and Prof. Lewis Campbell, M.A., LL.D. With 
 Portrait and other Illustrations. 2 vols. Demy 8vo, 36s. 
 
 THE LETTERS OF BENJAMIN JOWETT, M.A. A 
 
 Selection supplementary to the above. Edited by Evelyn 
 Abbott and Prof. Lewis Campbell. With Portrait. Demy 8vo, 
 16s. net. 
 
 JULIAN, the Rev. John, D.D., 
 
 Late Vicar of Topclijfe, Prebendary of Fenton, Canon of York. 
 
 A DICTIONARY OF HYMNOLOGY. Setting forth the 
 Origin and History of Christian Hymns of all Ages and Nations. 
 Second Edition with New Supplement. Medium 8vo, 32s. net. 
 
 “The student of hymnology will find the work, as it always 
 has been, a rare mine of information, and the additions and 
 alterations which have now been made to it make it more valuable 
 than ever.”— Westminster Gazette. 
 
 KING, Edward, 
 
 60 th Bishop of Lincoln. 
 
 A MEMOIR OF EDWARD KING, BISHOP OF LIN¬ 
 COLN. By the Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell. With a Portrait. 
 Demy 8vo, 9 s. net; Crown 8vo, with a new Portrait, 5L net. 
 
 _ ____________ 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
 
 17 
 
 LUSHINGTON, the Rev. F. de W, 
 
 Sometime Headmaster of Dover College. 
 
 SERMONS TO YOUNG BOYS. Delivered at Elstree School. 
 
 Part I—Soldiers of Christ. Part II—Signs of Spiritual Life. 
 
 Part III—Two Lessons from the Home Life. Part IV—Two 
 Lessons from the Life and Death of Queen Victoria. Third 
 Edition. Crown 8vo, 35. 6 d. net. 
 
 LYTTELTON, the Right Rev. the Hon. A. T., D.D., 
 
 Late Bishop of Southampton. 
 
 THE PLACE OF MIRACLES IN RELIGION. The 
 
 Plulsean Lectures for 1891. Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 MENZIES, the Rev. Allan, D.D., 
 
 Late Professor of Biblical Criticism, University of St. Andrews. 
 
 HISTORY OF RELIGION. A Sketch of Primitive Beliefs 
 and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great 
 Systems. Third Edition. Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 MILMAN, the Very Rev. Henry Hart, D.D., 
 
 Late Dean of St. Paul's. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS. From the Earliest Period • 
 down to Modern Times. Vol. Ill, 6 s. net. 
 
 Vols. I and II out of Print. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY. From the 
 Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman 
 Empire. 3 vols. Post 8vo, 6 s. net each. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF LATIN CHRISTIANITY, including 
 that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V. 9 vols. 
 
 Post 8vo, 6 s. net each. 
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF HENRY HART 
 MILMAN, D.D., late Dean of St. Paul’s. With Selections from 
 his Correspondence. By his Son, Arthur Milman. With 
 Portrait. Demy 8vo, i6.f. net. 
 
 MOBERLY, Miss G. A. E„ 
 
 Late Principal of St. Hugh's College, Oxford 
 
 THE FAITH OF THE PROPHETS. Short Essays on 
 Certain Aspects of the Prophetical Literature of the Old Testa¬ 
 ment. Crown 8vo, 4 s. 6d. net. 
 
18 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 MOBERLY, the Right Rev. George, D.G.L., 
 
 Late Bishop of Salisbury. 
 
 DULCE DOMUM : BISHOP MOBERLY, HIS FAMILY AND 
 FRIENDS. By Miss C. A. E. Moberly, his Daughter. With 
 Illustrations. Demy 8vo, js. 6d. net. 
 
 MOBERLY, the Rev. R. C„ D.D., 
 
 Late Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology in the University of 
 Oxford, Canon of Christ Church. 
 
 PROBLEMS AND PRINCIPLES. Being Papers Theological 
 and Ecclesiastical. Edited by the Rev. R. B. Rackham, M.A. 
 Demy 8vo, 7 s. 6 d. net. 
 
 CHRIST OUR LIFE. Sermons chiefly preached in Oxford. 
 Demy 8vo, Js. 6 d. net. 
 
 ATONEMENT & PERSONALITY. Demy 8vo, 7 s. 6d. net. 
 
 MINISTERIAL PRIESTHOOD. Six Chapters preliminary 
 to a Study of the Ordinal. With an Inquiry into the Truth of 
 Christian Priesthood and an Appendix on the recent Roman 
 Controversy. Demy 8vo, 7s. 6 d. net. 
 
 SORROW, SIN, AND BEAUTY. Three Short Series of 
 Addresses. Crown 8vo, 55. net. 
 
 UNDENOMINATIONALISM as a Principle of Primary 
 Education. Demy 8vo, is. net. 
 
 MODER N CHU RCHMA N'S LIB RARY, THE. 
 
 Edited by the Rev. H. D. A. Major, B.D. 3s. 6 d. net each 
 volume. In Paper Covers, 2s. net each. 
 
 I. THE FAITH OF A MODERN CHURCHMAN. By 
 
 M. G. Glazebrook, D.D., Canon of Ely. Second Edition. 
 
 II. THE GENIUS OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. By 
 
 the Rev. Alfred Fawkes, M.A., Vicar of Ashby St. Ledgers. 
 
 III. THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 MINISTRY. By the Rev. J. R. Cohu, M.A., Rector of Aston 
 Clinton. 
 
 IV. BAPTISM, CONFIRMATION, AND THE 
 EUCHARIST. By the Rev. John Gamble, B.D., Vicar of 
 St. Mary’s, Leigh Woods. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
 
 19 
 
 MUNTZ, the Rev. W. Stephens, D.D., 
 
 Vicar of St. John's, Upper Holloway. 
 
 ROME,ST. PAUL, AND THE EARLY CHURCH. Show¬ 
 ing the Influence of Roman Law on St. Paul’s Teaching, and on 
 the Development of the Church. Large Crown 8vo, "js. 6d. net. 
 
 MURRA Y'S DICTIONARY OF C HRISTIAN 
 BIOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE. 
 
 To the end of the Sixth Century, with an account of the Principal 
 Sects and Heresies. Edited by the Very Rev. Henry Wace, 
 D.D., and the Rev. Wm. C. Piercy. Complete in OneiV°l um e. 
 Medium 8vo, 255-. net. 
 
 MU RRAY'S I LLUSTRATED 
 BIBLE DICTIONARY. 
 
 Combining Modern Research with Ancient Faith. Editor : The 
 Rev. William C. Piercy, M.A. In One Volume. Special 
 Features: 1. A Volume of 1,000 pages. 2. Profusely 
 Illustrated. 3. Special attention has been paid to Biblio¬ 
 graphy. 4. Signed Articles by Leading Scholars. 2 is. net. 
 
 NIELS EN, Dr. Fre drik, 
 
 Bishop of Aarhus, and formerly Professor of Ecclesiastical 
 History in the University of Copenhagen. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE PAPACY IN THE NINE¬ 
 TEENTH CENTURY. Translated, with the help of others, by 
 Arthur James Mason, D.D., Master of Pembroke College, 
 Cambridge. Demy 8vo, 2 vols., 30.?. net. 
 
 Arra?igements have been made with Booksellers enabling them to 
 offer special terms for the above work. 
 
 QESTERL EY, the Rej^ W. O. E^ D.D., 
 
 Jesus College, Cambridge. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF THE LAST THINGS—JEWISH 
 AND CHRISTIAN. The Old Testament, the Apocalyptic litera¬ 
 ture, the Rabbinical writings, and the New Testament most 
 carefully analysed and the results presented in a simple form. 
 Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY. Studies in the 
 Psalms. Crown 8vo, 5-r. net. 
 
20 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 OGLE, the Rev. Arthur, M.A., 
 
 Rector of Otham, Maidstone. 
 
 THE CANON LAW IN MEDI/EVAL ENGLAND. An 
 
 Examination of William Lyndwood’s “ Provincial,” in reply to 
 the late Professor F. W. Maitland. Large Crown 8vo, gs. net. 
 
 PARTRIDGE, the Rev. Frank, 
 
 Canon and Prebendary of Sidlesham in Chichester Cathedral. 
 
 THE SOUL OF WEALTH. The Opportunity of the Church 
 of England. Crown 8vo, 2 s. 6d. net. In Paper Covers, ix. net. 
 
 PETRIE, W L M. Flinders, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE GOSPELS. As Shown by 
 Structural Criticism. Crown 8vo, 4s. 6d. net. 
 
 PICTON-TURBERVILL, Edith, O.B.E. 
 
 MUSINGS OF A LAYWOMAN ON THE LIFE OF 
 THE CHURCHES. F’cap 8vo, 3*. 6d. net. 
 
 POLLOCK^the Right Rev. Bertram, D.D., G.V.O., 
 
 Bishop of Norwich. 
 
 THE VIRGIN’S SON. Crown 8vo, 2.-. 6 d. net. 
 
 MARRIAGE. A Defence of the Christian Laws of Marriage. 
 With Forewords by the Bishops of London and Durham. In 
 White Linen, 2 s. 6d. net. Paper Covers, ij. 6d. net. 
 
 THE INCREASE OF THE EPISCOPATE Demy 8vo. 
 
 In Paper Covers, 6 d. net. 
 
 HOLY COMMUNION AND RESERVATION. Four 
 
 Articles. Crown 8vo, is. 6d. net. 
 
 FELLOWSHIP WITH THE DEPARTED. A Sermon 
 Preached on the occasion of the Dedication of the Memorial to 
 his late Majesty King Edward VII. In Paper Covers, 6d. net. 
 
 PRAYER BOOK. 
 
 THE CONVOCATION PRAYER BOOK. Being the Book 
 of Common Prayer, according to the use of the Church of 
 England, with altered Rubrics, showing what would be the 
 condition of the Book if amended in conformity with the re¬ 
 commendations of the Convocations of Canterbury and York in 
 the year 1879. Post 8vo, 7 s. 6d. net. 
 
 PR OTHER O, R owl and E„ M.V.O. 
 
 THE PSALMS IN HUMAN LIFE. See Ernle, Lord. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
 
 21 
 
 QUICK, Oliver Chas e. 
 
 THE TESTING OF CHURCH PRINCIPLES. # Crown 8vo 
 5-y. net. 
 
 ROBERTSON, the Rev. James Craigie, 
 
 Late Canon of Canterbury. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, from the 
 Apostolic Age to the Reformation. 8 vols. Post 8vo, £2 8t. net. 
 
 ROWDEN, Aldred W., ICC. 
 
 THE PRIMATES OF THE FOUR GEORGES : William 
 Wake, John Potter, Thomas Herring, Matthew Hutton, 
 Thomas Lecker, Frederick Cornwallis, John Moore, 
 Charles Manners Sutton. With Portraits. Demy 8vo, 
 15L net. 
 
 ST. MAR G ARET’S LECTU RES. 
 
 First Series , 1902. (Out of Print.) Second Series, 1903. See 
 Henson, the Right Rev. H. H. Third Series, 1904. See Burkitt, 
 F. C. Fourth Series . 1905. See Inge, the Very Rev. W. R. 
 
 SALMON, the Rev. George, D.D., 
 
 Late Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 
 THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE CHURCH. Lectures 
 Delivered in the University of Dublin. Crown 8vo, 35-. 6 d. net. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE NEW 
 
 TESTAMENT. Crown 8vo, 95-. net. Appendix, it. net. 
 
 THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS. A 
 
 Commentary on the Synoptic Narrative. Edited by the Rev. 
 Newport J. D. White, D.D. Demy 8vo, i6t. net. 
 
 SCO TT, the Rev. Jo seph John, M.A., 
 
 Canon of Manchester. 
 
 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. A Continuous Narrative in the 
 Words of the Authorised Version of the four Gospels. With 
 Introduction, Commentary, and Notes. With 2 Maps. Large 
 Crown 8vo, 7 t. 6 d. net. 
 
 THE MAKING OF THE GOSPELS. Six Lectures de¬ 
 livered during Lent, 1905, in Manchester Cathedral, it. net. 
 
 THE APOCALYPSE; or, Revelation of St. John the Divine. 
 Crown 8vo, 3T. 6 d. net. 
 
22 
 
 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE OF 
 
 SCOTT, the Rev. W. Ma jor, M .A. 
 
 ASPECTS OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. A brief statement 
 
 of the elements of mystical teaching, with illustrative extracts from 
 the principal mystics’ writings. Large Crown 8vo, 5r. net. 
 
 SELWYN, Edward Carus, D.D., 
 
 Hon. Canon of Peterborough Cathedral. 
 
 FIRST CHRISTIAN IDEAS. Edited, with an Introductory 
 Memoir, by his Eldest Son. Demy 8vo, ()s. net. 
 
 SMIT H, Preserved , Pli.D. 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF MARTIN LUTHER. 
 
 With Portraits and Illustrations. Demy 8vo, 15.L net. - 
 
 SMITH , Sir William, D.C.L., LL.D . 
 
 A DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE. Its Antiquities, Bio¬ 
 graphy, Geography, and Natural History. By various writers. 
 Edited by Sir Wm. Smith, D.C.L. and LL.D., and the Rev. 
 
 J. M. Fuller, M.A. With numerous Illustrations and Maps. 
 
 3 vols. Medium 8vo, £4 4^. net. 
 
 A SMALLER BIBLE DICTIONARY. For Schools and 
 Young Persons. .Maps and Woodcuts. Large Crown 8vo. 
 Cheap Edition, 6s. net. 
 
 A DICTIONARY OF CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITIES. The j 
 
 History, Institutions, and Antiquities of the Christian Church. 
 
 By various writers. Edited by Sir Wm. Smith, D.C.L., and 
 Archdeacon Cheetham, D.D.. With Illustrations. 2 vols. 
 Medium 8vo, £3 135. 6 d. net. 
 
 STANLEY, the Very Rev. Arthur Penrhyn, D.D., 
 
 Late Dean of Westminster. 
 
 LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH 
 
 CHURCH, from Abraham to the Christian Era. With Por¬ 
 trait, Maps, and Plans. 3 vols. 185. net. 
 
 LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE EASTERN 
 CHURCH. With an Introduction on the Study of Ecclesiastical 
 History. With Map. Crown 8vo, 6s. net. 
 
 HISTORICAL MEMORIALS OF CANTERBURY 
 
 Popular Edition. With 24 Full-page Illustrations and 2 Plans. 
 Crown 8vo, 6s. net; F’cap 8vo, 2 s. 6d. net. 
 
 CHRISTIAN INSTITUTIONS. Crown Svo, 6 s. net. 
 
THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE 23 
 
 SINAI AND PALESTINE IN CONNECTION WITH 
 THEIR HISTORY. With Coloured Maps. Demy 8vo, 5^. net. 
 Maps and Plans, 4J. net. 
 
 THE BIBLE IN THE HOLY LAND, being Extracts from 
 the above work for Young Persons. With Illustrations. 
 Crown 8vo, lx. 6 d. net. 
 
 STANLEY, the Ve ry Re v . Arthur Penrhyn, D .D., 
 
 Late Dean of Westminster. 
 
 LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF 
 SCOTLAND. Demy 8vo, ys. 6d. net. 
 
 ESSAYS CHIEFLY ON QUESTIONS OF CHURCH 
 
 AND STATE FROM 1850 TO 1870 . Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS 
 ARNOLD, D.D. With Portrait. Crown 8vo, 2 vols., 15.1. net. 
 Cheap Edition. With Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 LETTERS AND VERSES OF ARTHUR PENRHYN 
 STANLEY. Edited by R. E. Prothero. Demy 8vo, 16 s. net. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF ARTHUR PENRHYN 
 STANLEY. Three Lectures delivered in Edinburgh, in 
 November 1882. By Dean Bradley. Crown 8vo, 3.1. 6 d. net. 
 
 HISTORICAL MEMORIALS OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY 
 From its Foundation to the Year 1876. With Illustrations. 
 Demy 8 vo, 15^ net. 
 
 S TO RR, Vernon F., M .A., 
 
 Canon of Westminster. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE CROSS. Crown 8vo, 5 s. net. 
 
 S TURGE. M. Carta, 
 
 Moral Science Tripos ( Cambridge ). 
 
 THE TRUTH AND ERROR OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 
 
 A New and Cheap ^Edition (Fourth Impression). Large Crown 
 8vo, 6 s. net. 
 
 TRA ININ G OF THE CLERGY, The, 
 
 A Report presented to the Council of the Churchman’s Union by 
 the Very Rev. Hastings Rashdall, D.Litt., the Rev. Canon 
 Glazebrook, D.D., and the Rev. H. D. A. Major, B.D. In 
 Paper Covers. Demy 8vo, 6 d. net. 
 
24 MR. MURRAY’S CATALOGUE 
 
 TRENCH, G. II. 
 
 THE CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION OF 
 CHRIST BY THE LIGHT OF TRADITION. Crown 8vo, 
 3-r. 6 d. net. 
 
 A STUDY OF ST. JOHN’S GOSPEL. Demy 8vo, 7 s. 6d. net. 
 
 WACE, the Very Rev. Henry, D.D., 
 
 Dean of Canterbury. 
 
 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH : Being the Bampton 
 Lectures for 1879. Demy 8vo, Js. 6 d. net. 
 
 PROPHECY, Jewish and Christian. Considered in a Series of 
 Warburton Lectures at Lincoln’s Inn. Crown 8vo, 3^. 6d. net. 
 
 THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST : its Vital Reality and Efficacy. 
 Reissue with New Introduction. F’cap 8vo, ij-. net. 
 
 WAGGETT, the Rev. P. N., 
 
 Of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Cowley. 
 
 THE HOLY EUCHARIST, with other Papers. 5.1. net. 
 
 WALES, Archbishop of (Rt. Rev. A. G. Edwards, D.D.) 
 
 Formerly Bishop of St. Asaph. 
 
 LANDMARKS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WELSH 
 CHURCH. With Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. 7 s. 6 d. net. 
 
 WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY. 
 
 A Study in Spiritual Forces. By W. IT. Fitchett, LL.D. With 
 Illustrations. Large Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. net. 
 
 WESTCOTT, the Right Rev. B. F., D.D., D.C.L., 
 
 Late Bishop of Durham. 
 
 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN. With 
 Notes and Introduction. Medium 8vo, 12 s. net. 
 
 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN. The 
 Greek Text Revised, with a Revised English Version. 2 vols. 
 Demy 8vo, 28s. net. 
 
 W ILBERFO RCE, the Ven ble. Basil, D.D ., 
 
 Late Archdeacon of Westminster. 
 
 BASIL WILBERFORCE, D.D. A Memoir. By the Rt. Hon. 
 G. W. E. Russell. With a Portrait. Demy 8vo, ioj 1 . 6 d. net. 
 
 WOL S ELEY-LEW IS, M . 
 
 THE SEVENFOLD GIFTS. Instructions and Prayers for 
 the use of Candidates for Confirmation. i6mo, 3s. 6 d. net. 
 
 Printed, by Maxell, Watson & Viney, LdLondon and Aylesbury, England,