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 . . . The unshaken kingdom 
 
The Unshaken Kingdom 
 
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Lectures delivered under the Holland Foundation 
 at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary 
 
 The Unshaken Kingdom 
 
 By \<?:^., 
 
 HENRY C. MABIE, D.D., LL. D. 
 
 Author of **The Divine Reason of the Cross" "The 
 
 Meaning and Message of the Cross y" *' Method in 
 
 Soul Winnifig," *'From Romance to Reality, 
 
 An Autobiography,^ etc. 
 
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Copyright, I9i7» ^7 
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Dedicated to the 
 
 Faculties and Students of Christian 
 
 Educatio7ial histitutions in the 
 
 Sou th land of A rnerica 
 
nr 
 
 Foreword 
 
 HIS volume by Doctor Mabie con- 
 ■ sists of the lectures delivered to the 
 students and faculty of the South- 
 western Baptist Theological Seminary on 
 The Lewis Holland Lectureship. The other 
 lecturers on this foundation were George W. 
 Truett, D. D., W. L. Poteat, LL. D., and John 
 R. Sampey, D. D. This Lectureship was es- 
 tablished by the Rev. Lewis Holland, San 
 Antonio, Texas, a consecrated and faithful 
 minister of the Gospel. He w^as deeply de- 
 voted to the plain teachings of the Word of 
 God as interpreted by the Missionary Bap- 
 tists. He desired that this Foundation 
 should contribute to the publication of that 
 body of truth. 
 
 These lectures by Doctor Mabie were 
 greatly enjoyed by the large body of Chris- 
 tians who heard them. It is confidently 
 believed that a careful reading will be most 
 profitable and inspiring. No one can fol- 
 
 7 
 
8 FOREWORD 
 
 low the thoughts of this great missionary- 
 philosopher and statesman without receiv- 
 ing permanent spiritual enrichment. 
 
 L. K. Scarborough. 
 Fort Worthy Texas, 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The Things Which Cannot Be Shaken i i 
 
 II. Providence Grounded in Redemption 33 
 
 III. The School of Christ and Other 
 
 Schools 49 
 
 IV. The Cure for Agnosticism . .71 
 
 V. The Clue to Certainty in Religion . 95 
 
 VI. The Paradoxical Element in Chris- 
 
 tianity Ill 
 
 VII. The Cosmic Import of the Cross of 
 
 Christ 133 
 
 VIII. The Ultimacy of the Missionary 
 
 Enterprise . . . i .160 
 
THE THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 
 
 THIS theme, although not explicitly 
 missionary, is one related to all mis- 
 sions that are worth while, because 
 the very dynamic in them, even their legit- 
 imacy, is all dependent on whether or not 
 there be timeless and universal principles 
 underneath the missionary movement. 
 
 The greatest war in all history is now on. 
 It is the outcome of many decades of inter- 
 national jealousy. Nearly thirty million 
 troops of all nations are facing each other on 
 battle fronts. It is accompanied with a ter- 
 rorism beyond all previous imagination, and 
 apparently the end is far distant. Incidental 
 to this war, missions have been brought under 
 peculiar strain. Note the situation in Ar- 
 menia, in our European missions, and the 
 effect immediately or remotely upon all the 
 situations in the eastern hemisphere. At 
 such a time, when all the civilizations are 
 rocking as in the throes of a world earth- 
 
 11 
 
12 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 quake, there is, therefore, peculiar relevancy 
 in the consideration of the above theme, for 
 it is evident that we must go to the depths 
 in the rediscovery of our foundations if we 
 are to find a basis on which our confidence 
 in missionary enterprises can stand. 
 
 That there are things which even accord- 
 ing to the Scripture can be shaken is patent 
 to all ; such things as are but preliminary 
 scaJBToldings to the final building. For ex- 
 ample, the whole Judaistic system was a 
 temporary and provisional order and or- 
 dained so to be from the beginning. The 
 Old Testament Jewish ritual, including the 
 Sabbatical seasons, the sacrifices, the periodic 
 festivals, and all the ceremonialism con- 
 nected therewith, were by Christ transcended 
 and set aside. All civilization, as such, an- 
 cient and modern in its forms is ever chang- 
 ing and successively vanishing. Things 
 must be turned and overturned until He 
 whose right it is shall come to reign. Be- 
 hind the present world war has lain the 
 doctrine of Nietsche's " superman," and in 
 general a materialistic philosophy. The 
 forms of international law in wide areas have 
 been outlawed and set aside. Indeed, all 
 human law, unless recognized as having its 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 13 
 
 seat in the bosom of God, must sooner or later 
 crumble. The whole present temporal order 
 must one day cease, and the heavens them- 
 selves be rolled together as a scroll. The 
 Scripture sums up all by saying there will 
 be one final shaking in which even the 
 things which are in the heavens, i. e., the 
 highest ranges of our universe will be sub- 
 jected to deeper tests than we conceive. Yet 
 we need not despair, because all this is to 
 make the more manifest certain '' things 
 which cannot be shaken," but must perma- 
 nently abide. 
 
 Thank God ! There is a kingdom with- 
 out a tremor. It is composed of the eternal 
 things of the Kingdom of God, deeper than 
 all the forms of the present order. Among 
 many things that might be named I note a 
 few of these elements which cannot be moved. 
 
 I. The first of these is the throne of God. 
 This is by no means an arbitrary throne of 
 mere powerful severity such as many imag- 
 ine. The Psalmist said, "Thy throne, O 
 God, is forever and ever.'^ This throne is 
 what is called in Hebrews " the throne of 
 Grace." This is the throne which is ulti- 
 mate in our universe. To this throne we are 
 invited to " come boldly that we may obtain 
 
14 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 mercy and find grace to help in time of 
 need.'' 
 
 I have elsewhere in a published volume, en- 
 titled " Under the Redeeming iEgis/' spoken 
 of this throne in the Scriptural term of '^ the 
 rainbow throne.'' There are three classic 
 passages which justify this title. The first 
 is in Genesis 9 :9-16 ; the second in Ezekiel 
 1 : 27-28 ; the third in Revelation 4 : 1-3. 
 The first reference is the appointment by God 
 of the rainbow thrown across the firmament 
 as the token of a covenant that the new race 
 from Noah on shall be continued under a 
 redeeming providential order — that summer 
 and winter, seed time and harvest, shall not 
 fail. The second reference is in the vision 
 shown to Ezekiel about to prophesy respect- 
 ing the national sins of Israel which are to 
 be visited with judgment. Out of these, 
 however, there will ultimately come the 
 glorious restoration of the chosen people 
 to their land and the continuance of their 
 Davidic Kingdom in some remarkable way. 
 The third reference in Revelation applies to 
 all apocalyptic eons that stretch away into 
 the eternal future. All these periods are to 
 be dominated by the ''throne with a rainbow 
 round about it." That is, under a throne in 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 15 
 
 which judgment is commingled with mercy, 
 severity with tenderness. 
 
 This grace is often thought of as a mere 
 synonym of love in the sense of benevo- 
 lence, as an easy-going toleration of evil, but 
 grace embraces all the qualities inherent in 
 divine holiness as well, hence the throne of 
 grace is a marvellous unity as truly express- 
 ive of God's merciful attitude towards hu- 
 mankind. 
 
 Now the whole universe is grounded in 
 this throne. This universe is upheld and 
 held together because that throne of grace is 
 there and has been from eternity, despite all 
 the episodal invasion of human transgression. 
 All finite creation ;^depends upon it. All 
 physical law has its energy and perpetuity 
 in it. Gravitation, electrical energy, chem- 
 ical aflSnity, and all else in the creation 
 could not exist apart from it. We live in a 
 universe on the whole friendly and gracious. 
 In particular, all created personality has its 
 root in the God of grace and the sovereignty 
 of its throne. Man is made in the very 
 image of God and though marred and biased 
 by sin, yet possesses elements of that majesty 
 seen even in its ruins. The basis of all 
 realization of the Divine Fatherhood is 
 
16 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 through submission to this kingship. The 
 realization of this Fatherhood through sur- 
 render to legitimate authority is one of the 
 greatest surprises that ever comes to us. 
 President MuUins in his notable book, " Au- 
 thority and Freedom in Religion/' has taught 
 us the beautiful harmony there is in this 
 paradox. We find our normal freedom 
 through complete submission to and the 
 enthronement of divine authority. Ac- 
 cordingly, in the moment of one's collapse 
 to self and sin, the soul rises up and " runs 
 to meet " and welcome the Divine Lordship 
 and control over the soul. Indeed all gen- 
 uine Christian experience has always as its 
 antecedent the complete surrender to author- 
 ity in God and His glorious throne. This 
 is so in the nature of things, because there is 
 but one independent being in this universe, 
 and all we finite beings are necessarily de- 
 pendent and subject. The very law of our 
 being requires that God's authority shall 
 govern us. Let us be thankful that amidst 
 the very crash of worlds such a tribunal as 
 this cannot be shaken, for it is ultimate. 
 
 The present day rival in thought to this 
 throne is evolution as naturalistically con- 
 ceived. To the type of evolution conceived 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 17 
 
 as a form or method of the divine operation 
 within large areas, yet with certain cre- 
 ative interventions, there can be no objec- 
 tion, but when evolution is conceived as in 
 lieu of Deity, or as supplanting the thought 
 of Deity, it is pure atheism or at best pan- 
 theism, and utterly repugnant to the highest 
 reason. It is one of the worst forms of pres- 
 ent day idolatry in certain intellectual circles. 
 If one cares for up-to-date discussions of the 
 absurdity of this conception, let him read 
 Professor La Conte's lectures on " Religion 
 and Science," any of the later utterances of 
 the late Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, one of 
 the apostles of the non-materialistic evolu- 
 tion, and particularly his famous reply to 
 President Schaefer of the British Association 
 for the Advancement of Science, who in his 
 opening address at Dundee, Scotland, in 
 1912, had maintained that all life can be 
 accounted for by chemistry and mechanics. 
 To this address Wallace replied with spirit, 
 and left on record, at ninety-one years of age, 
 the most emphatic testimony against the 
 materialistic origin of life. The summation 
 of this famous answer is as follows : 
 
 ** I submit that, in view of the actual facts of 
 growth and organization as here briefly out- 
 
18 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 lined, and that living protoplasm has never been 
 chemically produced, the assertion that life is due 
 to chemical and mechanical processes alone is 
 quite unjustified. Neither the probability of 
 such an origin, nor even its possibility, has been 
 supported by anything which can be termed 
 scientific fact or logical reasoning. '' 
 
 Over against all this, I submit as belonging 
 to a kingdom which is without a tremor, is 
 the throne of heavenly grace as I have de- 
 fined it. 
 
 Now this throne of grace, or the eternal 
 spirit of which it is the expression, is bent 
 on its own self-disclosure to the universe of 
 man, and hence there arises 
 
 II. A second immovable element, namely, 
 the eternal redemjptive movement as outlined 
 in divine revelation. This redemption is 
 grounded, or has its start not from the 
 simple historical event of the fall of man 
 as described in Genesis, but from the concep- 
 tion of the " Lamb foreknown (as slain) from 
 the foundation of the world." The nature 
 of this redemption is therefore timeless, 
 eternal, though it had a concrete and visual 
 expression in the Lamb of Calvary. Now 
 this redemption is more than a mere recovery 
 from the sin of Adam, more than recovery 
 from freedom's wreck. It involves the ulti- 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 19 
 
 mate new creation of man in the image of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 When God said, *' Let us make man in 
 our own image" He had in view not the 
 mere rudimental man of Eden that He knew 
 would fall into sin, but the new man in 
 Christ and as glorified with Him forever. 
 It was that consummate ideal which moved 
 God to creation as a whole and to every 
 feature embraced in it. This redemption, 
 therefore, was no after-thought, as if God 
 having tried one method of dealing with 
 man, which broke down, bethought Him of 
 another method to meet the emergency. 
 The redeeming work of God in Christ was 
 no more " emergency measure to meet the 
 surprise of a moral defection " in the first 
 man, Adam. The purpose of redemption 
 was older than the universe. It was the 
 ground purpose of the universe and therefore 
 God's forethought for mankind. But for 
 this forethought, I doubt if God ever would 
 have created man at all, or permitted him to 
 fall into sin. Much less would He have 
 continued the race as pro-created from the 
 first pair. After the sin of that primeval 
 pair in Eden the race would have perished 
 right then and there without a posterity at 
 
^0 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 all, but for the antecedent purpose to redeem 
 the race, which God unfolded to Eve in that 
 great prot-evangel, '^ thy seed shall bruise 
 the serpent's head." The very fact, there- 
 fore, that descendants have proceeded from 
 our mother Eve, is itself an assurance that 
 they have their existence on the basis of the 
 eternal redeeming purpose which was later 
 more fully outlined. Every child born into 
 the world, therefore, is born not only of the 
 fallen first Adam, but also under the segis of 
 the redemptive system. Every child is a 
 'potentially redeemed being, because of this 
 antecedent purpose and provision in God^s 
 grace, albeit it needs to be brought by in- 
 struction, persuasion, and the Divine Spirit 
 to accept for itself (by a voluntary action the 
 moment it becomes a voluntary being) that 
 provision of grace. In other words, if I may 
 so speak, God had " up His sleeve " an ante- 
 cedent purpose prior to creation, to redeem 
 the world. 
 
 The fact is our universe is redempto- centric. 
 It is not, as the early Andover School of 
 Thought interpreted it, *' Christo-centric " 
 rather than " Theo-centric," because in 
 reality those terms, when understood, mean 
 exactly the same thing. But to say that the 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 21 
 
 universe is centered in a redemptive principle 
 in God is to go to the heart of things, for the 
 redemptive purpose in God logically antedates 
 "the purpose to create. That is, the ultimate 
 expression of God in this universe is grace ; 
 as Paul puts it, " That in the ages to come 
 he might show the exceeding riches of his 
 grace in his kindness towards us through 
 Christ Jesus." In the Hebrews we read, 
 " Of the things which we have spoken, this 
 is the sum " — i. e., '* We have such an High 
 Priest who is passed into the heavens . . . 
 into the true tabernacle which the Lord 
 pitched and not man." 
 
 The expression of the Deity here referred 
 to is one of the several '' better " and eternal 
 things with which the author is dealing, 
 respecting the symbolism of the tabernacle. 
 Dr. Denney of Glasgow remarks with great 
 pertinency that the word '* eternal " through- 
 out this epistle has the significance of finality, 
 that is of something ultimate in God's uni- 
 verse. 
 
 We need to sense afresh the significance of 
 that great discussion of Anselm in the 
 eleventh century, entitled Cur Deus Homo, 
 one of the profound discussions of the ages. 
 True, this is not the last word in theology 
 
22 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 respecting the Atonement and the Incarna- 
 tion. We, however, do well to come back to 
 it repeatedly, and weigh the tremendous 
 import of the question, '' Why God was 
 manifest in the fiesh." It implied redemp- 
 tion — and this may properly be considered 
 as God's ground purpose, underlying Creation 
 and all that followed it. For further dis- 
 cussion of this subject, see my book entitled 
 *^The Divine Reason of the Cross." The 
 ultimate end of all this movement was the 
 self- manifestation of God in Christ, and our 
 own ever-increasing apprehension of that 
 manifestation and joy in it, and in its trans- 
 mission to others. Our race, therefore, in- 
 volving the very cosmic order — the heavens 
 and the earth — is a potentially redeemed 
 world, and the movement towards its re- 
 alization is one of the things that can never 
 be shaken, even amid the crash of our 
 mundane order. 
 
 III. This redemption just referred to 
 issued in a providential moral order ^ the order 
 under which our world and we all as respon- 
 sible creatures have our being. This also is 
 among the foundational things unshakable. 
 The late Professor Royce points out in the 
 last chapter of his " Spirit of Modern Philos- 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 23 
 
 ophy " that there is behind our moral order 
 a Supreme suffering Deity; that is, He suffers 
 sympathetically with all the ills that have 
 arisen under that order. No other expla- 
 nation of the problem of human suffering is 
 nearly so satisfactory as that which assumes, 
 as Scripture also reveals, that this is the 
 *' world of the suffering logos." If this is so, 
 then the moral order is grounded in redemp- 
 tion, and all that we call Providence is but a 
 corollary of redemption. 
 
 Just prior to our last Thanksgiving Day, 
 I with several others was asked by the editor 
 of the Sunday School Times of Philadelphia 
 this question : '' What one thing can you 
 suggest in few words as that for which the 
 world may be thankful in a war-stricken 
 time like this ? " After pondering some 
 time, my answer was as follows : '* We may 
 be thankful for the moral providential order, 
 a system under which the world war, with 
 all its rack and ruin, has occurred ; for under 
 this order there may be occasion for grati- 
 tude respecting three classes of events, how- 
 ever distressing they are in themselves ; we 
 may be thankful first — for the possibility 
 that dying soldiers by the million at the 
 battle front may, if they will, while dying 
 
24 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 go straight into the presence of their Re- 
 deeming God — so the most distressing battle 
 trench may become but an ante-room to the 
 Heavenly Glory for every penitent soldier 
 ;slain in whatever army. We may be thank- 
 ful, secondly, that all the afflicted relatives 
 of the dying soldiers, if they will, may have 
 their loss and bereavement sanctified to their 
 moral well-being and to a diviner comfort 
 than they ever before knew. And thirdly — 
 under our moral order every one of the bel- 
 ligerent nations may, if in the end it will 
 become filial towards God and His purposes 
 in history, have this awful cataclysm of 
 calamity sanctified to its own national well- 
 being, so as to assume a truer place in history 
 than it had previously occupied." This is a 
 matter of tremendous moment as respects 
 our thought of the universe as a whole and 
 " the moral uses of dark things." And bear 
 in mind all this is possible only — under the 
 regime of a potentially redeemed world and 
 the kind of a moral order that has come into 
 being under it. It is therefore worth while 
 to live, under whatever possible circum- 
 stances, and so we can maintain an optimistic 
 attitude, and never despair — no matter what 
 occurs. 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 25 
 
 I here speak of another mystery connected 
 with this subject, viz., the matter of that 
 solidarity of the human race which is a 
 phenomenon of our order. Many are wont to 
 complain that they are placed in this world 
 in an organic connection with all other moral 
 beings ; and people inquire, " How can it be 
 just in God to create me in such relations to 
 my ancestors, to my family relations and to 
 society as a whole that I should suffer in- 
 cidentally for their faults and wrong-doings? 
 Why should I be born with such a heredity ? " 
 It is a tremendous mystery, but there is 
 another side to this matter, which when prop- 
 erly viewed should more than satisfy us re- 
 specting all our questionings. This very 
 solidarity is also the basis of all our social 
 inspirations. If my personal act always stood 
 in complete isolation from all other people 
 and interests, the power of the self-communi- 
 cation of myself to other souls near or far 
 would also be precluded. But the fact that 
 I am organically bound up with every other 
 member of the community, the nation and the 
 world, furnishes one of the highest forms of 
 my social joy and inspiration. A tone, a 
 look may last forever in its power to impress 
 another — my moral decision may make it 
 
26 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 easier for descendants in countless genera- 
 tions to act the more truly and freely. My 
 act may affect myriads in China or India or 
 some other distant part of the earth, although 
 I may never see them in this world, and 
 although I may not know one word of their 
 language and could not speak to them in- 
 telligently if we met. Moreover, my relation 
 to Jesus Christ, the manifested Redeemer, is 
 such that I may have a new heredity in Him 
 as the new Adam of the human race ; and 
 this may, if I avail myself of it, more than 
 counteract all the damage I have derived 
 from the first Adam. This universe there- 
 fore on the whole is a friendly universe in its 
 divine intention, potency and moral possibili- 
 ties, for where sin has abounded in the forms 
 of its infection, grace has '' abounded much 
 more exceedingly." These ** much mores," 
 as expressed in Paul's thought in the fifth of 
 Romans and its context, indicate something 
 which more than counterbalances all the 
 damage derived from any solidarity of evil. 
 Such is the beneficence of our moral order. 
 
 Stand with me in a railway station on an 
 electrified line — read the warning signal, 
 ** Danger, Live Rail I " That means if you 
 step upon that live rail or grasp it with 
 
THI:N'GS which cannot be shaken 27 
 
 your hands, instant death will follow. There 
 is therefore enormous risk in that live rail 
 and the electric current that fills it with 
 deadly possibilities. Yet, were that dread 
 possibility wanting, that electric current 
 could never be utilized to bear multitudes 
 of people safely to their destination. Those 
 two polarities of evil or good, of danger or 
 safety reside in that current, and it is our 
 personal attitude towards it that makes all 
 the difference respecting its operation. So it 
 is in our kind of world. As free beings, we 
 are here for better or worse ! we are free 
 agents. It is a fearful thing to live at all, 
 but it is an all-glorious thing to live in right 
 relation to the redeemed possibilities. Now 
 thank God ! such a moral order as this cannot 
 be shaken — hence the solid grounds for our 
 abiding faith no matter what comes. 
 
 IV. Then out of this kind of a probation 
 conditioned by the providential moral order 
 under which we live issues what we call 
 Christian experience. Indeed the deepest ex- 
 periences spring out of such cataclysms as 
 we naturally deplore. The very shaking of 
 the temporal things, the removing of the 
 provisional scaffoldings of our life, but the 
 better manifest the real spiritual temple in 
 
28 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 its building. We are prone to forget that 
 our life is related to two worlds — and that 
 " the things which are seen are temporal," 
 while only the " unseen things are eternal." 
 The problem of life is to teach us how to 
 live our eternal life in the midst of time, and 
 there is therefore a moral necessity in the 
 case that we should learn to surrender the 
 lower values for the higher. This is the 
 deeper meaning of that whole realm of things 
 we call the sacrificial. Sacrifice in the Chris- 
 tian sense does not mean the waste of life, 
 but that we surrender a lower value for a 
 higher. There is here a spiritual exchange, 
 and it is only through the sacrificial expe- 
 riences that we reach the higher ranges. 
 Tennyson sings, '' We rise on stepping stones 
 of our dead selves to higher things." All 
 this is possible to what we call '' personality." 
 Personality is the one thing that can change 
 endlessly and still preserve its identity, that 
 can die- to lower forms of life and then rise 
 to higher forms. 
 
 Here we touch the realm of the paradox- 
 ical. The interior truths of Christianity are 
 the paradoxes, such as abound in Christ^s 
 teaching. These are to be considered later. 
 
 No rupture, therefore, of the natural con- 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 29 
 
 ditions under which our life starts can ever 
 render impossible these deeper experiences 
 of the soul — grounded in the paradoxes, 
 which for their very realization involve the 
 removing of things which can be shaken, 
 because this is an antecedent condition to the 
 realization and possession of " the things 
 which cannot be shaken.'^ Our religion is 
 a great deep — it goes to the foundations of 
 the universe ; it is built on adamant, 
 grounded in the Eternal. It utterly tran- 
 scends the natural. 
 
 During the year of the great exposition in 
 Chicago a train near Battle Creek, Michigan, 
 became wrecked, and the coaches took fire. 
 Pinioned beneath the shattered and burning 
 timbers was a Christian woman. She at 
 first screamed hysterically for ^' help, help I " 
 She implored the men, who were working 
 with axes and crowbars to extricate her, 
 to do their utmost amid the approaching 
 flames. This they did until it became evi- 
 dent that they could no longer stand before 
 the devouring fire, whereupon this woman 
 released them from further effort, exclaim- 
 ing : '* Now I know that I must die, I will 
 show you how a Christian can die," where- 
 upon she burst forth in a song of praise to 
 
30 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 her God and through the flames passed be- 
 yond their power. 
 
 V. Finally, all this preceding provision 
 which we have just considered in the divine 
 economy results in a new society — a new 
 social order. This has been called by that 
 great theologian of the fourth century, Au- 
 gustine, *' The City of God." This classic 
 work of Augustine's was written to find a 
 basis of comfort for the church of that period 
 which had become so harassed and dis- 
 tressed through the invasion of the Roman 
 Empire by the Goths and Huns of North 
 Europe. This City of God is a society within 
 a society. It is composed of the regenerate 
 sons of men who have come into the experi- 
 ence of new life in Christ Jesus. This new 
 life results in a unique fellowship, and soli- 
 darity of spiritual beings. It is the church 
 invisible, but a society all the more real on 
 that account. It finds its unity in the com- 
 mon divine life created by the Spirit of God, 
 and it is mystically joined together by bonds 
 invisible yet eternal. It is being gathered 
 out of all the peoples of mankind, and it will 
 finally issue in the new corporate life of what 
 the Apocalypse sets forth as the New Jerusa- 
 lem, a society of wondrous symmetry and 
 
THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SHAKEN 31 
 
 glory, for which all the imagery and glory 
 employed by St. John, the seer of Patmos, 
 stands. The essential thing in all this is 
 the eternal completeness of the divine ideal, 
 which involves more than perfected indi- 
 vidualism. It is a new social order, and 
 may be represented under many idealistic 
 forms. 
 
 The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 describes it thus : *' But ye are come unto 
 Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living 
 God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an in- 
 numerable company of angels, to the gen- 
 eral assembly and church of the first-born 
 which are written in heaven, and to God the 
 judge of all and to the spirits of just men 
 made perfect." 
 
 The essential point for our comfort in all 
 this pictorial description is that, despite all 
 the asperities between men, all the schisms 
 and conflicts between people and nations re- 
 sulting often in complete anarchy, there is 
 here an assurance of a perfect social order 
 incipient in the Church of God, but ulti- 
 mately to be actualized in the corporate life 
 of real believers. This, too, is among the 
 things that are unshakable — no matter what 
 social and hostile concussions may arise in 
 
32 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 the present world order. The very fact that 
 such hostilities, such strife, such enmity, 
 such hate as enters into present world con- 
 flict in Europe shakes our confidence in the 
 stability of so-called civilization, affords a 
 background, however dark, over against 
 which we may in faith construct this bright 
 picture of more than a millennial glory. 
 
 No wonder, then, that the Apostle con- 
 cludes in the context from which our text 
 is taken with the words, " Wherefore we, 
 receiving a kingdom which cannot be 
 moved, let us have grace, whereby we may 
 serve God acceptably with reverence and 
 godly fear/' 
 
II 
 
 PEOVIDENCE GEOUNDED IN EEDEMPTION 
 
 IN this lecture I expand one point em- 
 braced in the preceding lecture on *' The 
 Things Which Cannot Be Shaken." 
 
 For basis I take two Scripture passages : 
 " And Abraham called the name of that 
 place Jehovah-jireh " — *' the Lord will pro- 
 vide," Genesis 22 : 14 ; and a passage supple- 
 mental in thought to this, found in Romans 
 8:32: "He that spared not his own Son, 
 but delivered him up for us all, how shall 
 he not with him also freely give us all 
 things ? " Abraham primarily meant that 
 God will provide the redeeming Lamb, but 
 Paul says that the gift of this Lamb is the 
 guarantee of all things that God's people can 
 ever need. 
 
 There is nothing that so renders most peo- 
 ple unhappy as the habit of complaint re- 
 specting their circumstances. But we are to 
 find the divine freedom in our circumstances. 
 If they can be altered by any rational or jus- 
 
 33 
 
34 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 tifiable act on our own part, that is well. 
 We must not be fatalists. But such cir- 
 cumstances as are unalterable are certainly 
 providential, at least in their moral bear- 
 ing. 
 
 But a caution is to be observed : The 
 Bible doctrine of providence is not that God 
 takes care of those who take perfect care of 
 themselves. That would be no providence 
 for sinful and blundering people such as we 
 all are. The everlasting arms are under- 
 neath, with larger provisions for us despite 
 our blundering. The whole moral order 
 under which our race exists in the redemp- 
 tive economy is itself providential for all 
 men. Christian or Pagan, whether they know 
 it or not. It is of immense moment that all 
 should know it and respond to it. Hence 
 Christian missions. The most experienced 
 of us Christians cannot pass through a trial, 
 say a funeral, or a crisis in business, without 
 the comforts of this Bible teaching. But 
 relying on God's love and grace, all emer- 
 gencies and exigencies can be met, no mat- 
 ter what, and triumphed over. So my 
 message is to the most discouraged person 
 possible. 
 
 If we begin with the Old Testament, the 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 35 
 
 very name of Jehovah — not the imagined 
 Pagan Yahveh of the destructive critics — 
 implies the doctrine of providence before us. 
 This word Jehovah is the most sacred name 
 for Deity, the redeeming Deity, known to 
 the Hebrew nation, a name which the devout 
 Hebrew still thinks too sacred to be spoken. 
 Hence he substitutes the word Adonai. 
 Then providence is a corollary of redemption 
 and grounded in it. Were there no redemp- 
 tion, there could be no providence. But 
 having given in predestined purpose the 
 chief thing, viz., the timeless lamb of God, 
 that carries with it all the subordinate values 
 for us. That embraces every event and cir- 
 cumstance in the believer's life, from birth to 
 glorification. 
 
 When Moses shrank from the commission 
 given him to lead Israel out of Egypt and he 
 inquired, " Who shall I say hath sent me ? " 
 God answered, '' I am that I am " or (I am 
 that which I will be) ; " and this is my 
 memorial name forever, to all generations '' ; 
 that is, God is the eternal self-existent one 
 who would more and more reveal and unfold 
 Himself to and through His people, the 
 Gentile as well as Jew, and forevermore. 
 Such was the meaning of the very name 
 
36 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 of the eternal covenant-keeping God of 
 grace. 
 
 In the Old Testament there are seven com- 
 pound names of Jehovah that cover the 
 whole life of the redeemed people. These 
 are Jehovah-jireh (Genesis 23 : 14), meaning 
 redemption and providence, Jehovah-rapha, 
 the Lord that healeth (Exodus 15 : 26), 
 Jehovah-nissi, the Lord our banner (Exodus 
 17:8-15), Jehovah-shalom, the Lord our 
 peace (Judges 6 : 24), Jehovah-raah, the Lord 
 my shepherd (Psalm 23 : 1), Jehovah-tsid- 
 kenu, the Lord our righteousness (Jeremiah 
 26 : 6), and Jehovah-shammah, the Lord is 
 present (Ezekiel 48 : 35) ; the last referring 
 to the final city of God, the New Jerusalem, 
 when the great work of redemption will be 
 complete and God's abiding presence shall 
 be our light forever. Now this sevenfold 
 name, imbedded in the very structure of the 
 Old Testament in its various periods and 
 studied in the light of their various con- 
 texts, covers typically the chief spiritual 
 issues that can ever arise in the life of God's 
 people. They presuppose a God of love and 
 grace who has forethought everything per- 
 taining to their redeemed life. 
 
 God does not indeed ordain (or foreordain) 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 37 
 
 an unpropitious event, in itself alone con- 
 sidered, perhaps perpetrated on us with evil 
 intent as in the scourging of Paul at Philippi 
 or in the tortures inflicted on Judson at Ava, 
 for the sake of the pain, but He does ordain 
 in His grace the moral bearings and the 
 ultimate ** peaceable fruits" intended for us 
 to realize afterwards. 
 
 The doctrine of divine providence is a 
 central thing in Christianity. Christianity 
 is the only religion in the world that has 
 such a doctrine, or that can have. This for 
 two reasons : first, because the God of our 
 redemption is the only kind of a being com- 
 petent to provide providence for us ; and, 
 secondly, because our possible harmony and 
 fellowship with Him is the only condition on 
 which things on the human side can be 
 made " to work together " for our good. 
 After all that you may seek in comparative 
 religion — say, Confucianism, Mohammedan- 
 ism, Brahmanism, Buddhism or Shintoism 
 — you will find that none of them has any 
 teaching on the providence of God. Most of 
 these religions are fatalistic, or if not that, 
 they are legalistic, as Judaism was. But our 
 religion is evangelical. 
 
 In the New Testament, anxiety on the 
 
38 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDCfM 
 
 part of a disciple is absolutely forbidden 
 (Matthew 6 : 24-31). Not that we are to be 
 careless and reckless, going as we please with 
 our lives, and thus presuming on God's 
 mercy. In the eighth of Romans we are 
 assured that " All things " — not all things 
 excejpt some particular circumstances that try 
 me — '* work together for good/' how we do 
 not know, " to them that love God," i. e., to 
 those whose attitude is filial towards God's 
 manner of dealing with them. 
 
 God has a plan for every life, as Bushnell 
 has brought out in his great sermon based 
 on God's word to Cyrus : " I girded thee, 
 though thou hast not known me." But the 
 pathos and tragedy is that many people do 
 not find even the hint of such a plan for 
 them. This plan we never see complete in 
 advance, but if we live the life of faith, then 
 we shall see it progressively, step by step as 
 we move on. 
 
 Remember how Paul said : " I have 
 learned " — he had been initiated — " in what- 
 soever state I am therein to be content." 
 That was from the man who had been in 
 Roman prisons, who had been flogged until 
 his back ran down with gore, and yet who 
 ** sang songs in the night," until the earth- 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 39 
 
 quake wrecked the prison, and the jailer 
 smitten with fear and conviction came crying 
 out, '' What must I do to be saved ? " You, 
 no less than Paul, need not lie awake nights 
 worrying to think what is to become of you 
 to-morrow. Just lie down in serenity and 
 relax in your heavenly Father's arms, re- 
 membering that the forces of to-morrow will 
 be marshalling themselves to become agents 
 and ministers to your need when the morrow 
 comes. " The whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth, . . . waiting for (or waiting 
 on) the redemption " (Romans 8 : 22). " The 
 whole creation ! " even Jupiter and Neptune, 
 Mars and Venus, and the myriad suns in their 
 courses, all ministering to God's purpose 
 in you. Why then fret and chafe because 
 you cannot see beyond the present moment ? 
 God is Jehovah-jireh. He foresees, fore- 
 cares, and foreprovides. Many people have 
 asked me why I put that old Chester motto 
 across the gable of my house at Northfield. 
 '' God's providence is mine inheritance." 
 Because it is the story of the deepest crux 
 and crisis of my individual life. When I 
 was broken down and in despair, a nervous 
 wreck, purposing to abandon the ministry 
 forever, logically involving giving up the 
 
40 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Bible and God and all things connected with 
 them, trusting in second causes, imagining 
 that any cause in His material universe is as 
 deep as God Himself: it was then I collapsed 
 before God with a broken heart and felt as 
 if the crust of the earth just opened and let 
 me through and I went down and down 
 until I struck the center. And what did I 
 find there? Hell? Far from that. I fell, 
 to my surprise, full into the arms of my 
 heavenly Father, and I discovered that His 
 love is infinitely better and deeper for me 
 than mine for Him. By that breakdown in 
 health He was simply shutting me up to a 
 different life. I would have ruined my 
 ministry but for that breakdown and you 
 may, my brother, with all your promise, if 
 you do not have some similar crisis to rees- 
 tablish your trust in God. I pity the man 
 who has not had some time a thorn in the 
 flesh. It is through those infirmities and 
 so-called misfortunes that we chiefly learn 
 the deep things of God. 
 
 One would not ask a flippant person 
 about his belief in the divine providence. 
 When we want to ask that question, we go 
 to some bedridden person, to some one with 
 ^n incurable disease, — we go to such to see 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 41 
 
 their faces shine and hear their song. In my 
 pastorate in Indianapolis many years ago I 
 called one day on a young girl of seventeen, 
 who was a paralytic. I was advised to go 
 there for my own edification. I found that 
 girl with an open Bible on her lap. She 
 was unable to turn in bed or feed herself or 
 even turn the leaves of her Bible, but her 
 heart was peaceful and her face happy. She 
 so impressed me that I had her brought one 
 night in a wheel chair more than a mile to 
 my prayer-meeting, that my people might 
 hear her testimony and look upon the halo 
 on her face. 
 
 To revert to Paul. You have often ob- 
 served his use of the word '' boast" or 
 *' glory." If you ministers who have a good 
 Englishman's Greek concordance will look 
 up the Greek behind that word you will 
 find it to be naoxdoixai. This word occurs 
 fifty-six times in the New Testament, and 
 fifty-three times it is Paul who uses the word. 
 In Romans we hear him say we " glory (or 
 exult) in tribulation also " ; that is, Paul who 
 was '' in stripes above measure, in prisons 
 more frequent, in deaths oft," who " five 
 times received forty stripes save one," who 
 was " thrice beaten with rods, once was 
 
42 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 stoned, thrice suffered shipwreck/' was a 
 *' night and a day in the deep/' was '' in 
 perils manifold/' etc., still was the most 
 triumphant of all the apostles. He says : 
 ^' If I must needs glory " — that is, to vindi- 
 cate the grace of Christ in me — " I will 
 glory of the things which concern my infir- 
 mities." In other words, Paul had settled 
 in his heart that God's plan for him was the 
 very best thing possible and so, when in the 
 Roman jail, he characterized himself not as 
 a prisoner of Roman law, not of Jewish 
 bigotry, but of Jesus Christ, ** a prisoner of 
 hope." He looked clean through prison bars 
 and even over the headman's block with his 
 exultant eye on the crown. In Ephesians 
 he speaks of himself as " an embassador in 
 bonds," but he uses the verb rather than the 
 noun, and so virtually says : *' I am conduct- 
 ing an embassy," albeit in chains, " heading 
 the greatest legation the world ever knew." 
 Although bound to a soldier in the Roman 
 prsetorium, his radiance was manifest even 
 to all his guards. He was during that im- 
 prisonment, paradoxical as it seems, the freest 
 man in imperial Rome. This was Paul's 
 habitual attitude and be it remembered not 
 because he was on occasions an inspired 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 43 
 
 writer, but as a typical believer with real 
 faith in God's providence. It is the proper 
 attitude for us all. 
 
 It must not be forgotten, although it com- 
 monly is, that the alternative denial or 
 negation of this Bible doctrine of providence 
 is cold, icy fatalism — something worse even 
 than chance. For example, some religious 
 teachers have a habit of saying of an un- 
 toward event like the death of a child from 
 diphtheria : " God had nothing to do with that. 
 It is the working of mere natural law ; cause 
 and effect, bad sanitation and the like." 
 Law is there, but that is not the whole case, 
 and I challenge any minister of religion to 
 console the afflicted on the ground that God 
 has abdicated to "law and company.'^ Those 
 who thus speak seem oblivious of the fact 
 that by excluding God from any relation to 
 such an afflictive event, they do not get rid 
 of the real difficulty : they simply relegate 
 all to fatality ; and fatality is impotent to 
 procure one solitary benefit from affliction to 
 the subject thereof. Fatalism has no place 
 for the personal and paradoxical, of which 
 the personal God is master, and with which 
 Christian experience, especially of the afflicted, 
 is filled. There is no basis whatever for real 
 
44: THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 consolation in the mere outworking of 
 fatality. But if I stand by a poor mother 
 bending in grief over the casket of her dead 
 child, no matter what laws were violated in 
 her affliction, I can say to her : " Despite all 
 that has occurred, no matter who blundered, 
 and whatever laws were violated, God, the 
 all loving personality of this universe in 
 whose will alone every so-called law has its 
 coherence, yet sustains such a relation to 
 your poor broken heart as to relate the moral 
 bearing of this event to your present comfort 
 and eternal welfare. Therefore, in the last 
 analysis you are not victimized, as you 
 would be if fate only ruled." We may not 
 see how God can thus relate Himself to mis- 
 fortune and turn the tables on it, but through 
 our confidence in the supreme Authority of 
 this universe, as personal, as one who is able 
 to use the fixities of nature and law so as to 
 bring out of them some new combination 
 which no law of itself could ever effect ; we 
 should thus have a source of consolation, no 
 matter what the form of the affliction. 
 
 Even a human personality, like an aviator 
 or a submarine commander or any inventor, 
 can transcend laws, with no violence done to 
 anything ; and cannot the maker of all 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 45 
 
 things do as much ? On such grounds as 
 these the doctrine of divine providence finds 
 an unassailable basis in our universe for the 
 subjects of redemption. 
 
 During my pastorate in St. Paul some years 
 ago this incident occurred. One day three 
 cable cars coupled together, in coming down 
 a long inclined railway from St. Anthony 
 Hill to Third Street where the line takes a 
 sharp curve, the cable which controlled the 
 cars broke. The result was that the three 
 cars as they reached the curve at the base of 
 the hill overturned and were badly broken 
 up. Many passengers were injured and two 
 or three were killed, among them a well- 
 known citizen who resided on St. Anthony 
 Hill. The death was, of course, a great 
 shock to his widow, who, after the mutilated 
 body had been brought home, as she sat in 
 her chamber began to reflect upon her sor- 
 row and she thus soliloquized': " Now I can 
 nevermore go down to the spot at the foot 
 of the hill where this tragedy occurred be- 
 cause it would be a chamber of horrors to 
 me," which she feared would haunt her 
 memory forever afterwards. But as she thus 
 reasoned some one seemed to say to her, 
 " But you could go if I were to go with you." 
 
46 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 The impression was so strong she answered, 
 '' Why, certainly I could ; " and suiting the 
 action to the word, she put on her wraps 
 and walked directly down to the spot. Our 
 mistake often is in not facing our trials, and 
 we vainly try to run away from them. As 
 this brave woman reached the spot where 
 her husband had met his death, instead of 
 finding a place of horror the Lord of glory 
 disclosed Himself to her as she had never 
 seen Him before and she walked back up 
 that long hill to her home as if borne by 
 angel's wings. She thus caught a vision 
 that never left her. When I called upon 
 her two or three years succeeding the event, 
 she met me at the door and the radiance of 
 her face and the cheer in her heart told me 
 that this was not a passing illusion, but that 
 for her " The shadow of death (had been) 
 turned into the morning.'^ 
 
 Years ago a dear friend of mine and one 
 of the district secretaries of our missionary 
 society, Dr. W. S. McKenzie, lay dying of a 
 dreadful internal cancer. Towards the end 
 of his malady he became an intense suflPerer, 
 yet he used to lie on his back holding a pad 
 before him, and would write notes to the 
 clerks in our office whom he tenderly re- 
 
GROUNDED IN REDEMPTION 47 
 
 membered. He wrote this to one of them : 
 ** Should you ever be tempted as a Christian 
 to be afraid of death I beg you to dismiss it. 
 There is one who for us has tasted death in 
 its bitter reality, and its very substance. 
 Since then we, His followers, have to meet 
 only the shadow of that reality ; and a 
 shadow never hurt any one." Calling on 
 him one day and finding him very serene I 
 inquired : " Do those dreadful tortures which 
 you endured at the beginning of your dis- 
 ease still continue ? " " Oh, yes," he replied, 
 " they are worse than ever. A lady called 
 here the other day and hearing no complaint 
 from me, she remarked to my wife as she 
 left the house, ' How fortunate that your 
 husband is a Scotchman, for nothing but a 
 Scotchman's grit could endure so bravely 
 what he does.' " This being told to Mc- 
 Kenzie, he replied, '' All the * grit ' in Scot- 
 land couldn't endure what I suffer every 
 hour of the day and night. It is only pure 
 grace that can hold up a man in my case." 
 And then he added, *' Mabie, I seem to be 
 sitting away up here above the clouds on a 
 mountain range where all is peaceful, and 
 looking across the deep dark valley far be- 
 low I see another sunlit ridge opposite me, 
 
48 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 often like the forecourts of glory. Down 
 there in the valley where the clouds are 
 rolling, the lightnings flash and thunders 
 peal : there's my disease. I look down upon 
 it and say with every pang that comes, * Go 
 on, do your worst, every pang but brings me 
 nearer to those sunlit heights beyond. I 
 shall soon be there.' " That this doctrine of 
 providence is most deeply believed by the 
 greatest sufferers among the saints proves 
 its truth. Men and women are all about 
 us in this world wdiose hearts have been 
 broken. They have been disciplined and 
 chastened through awful trials that they 
 cannot understand. But they would not 
 exchange the spiritual value they have de- 
 rived from these for all the world besides. 
 Here is the conclusion of the whole matter, 
 as one has said : " Human strength alone is 
 as insufficient to support the weight of a 
 feather as of a mountain, but with that 
 strength which is ever granted to the filial 
 hearted, the mountain will not be more op- 
 pressive than the feather." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SCHOOL OP CHEIST AKD OTHEE 
 SCHOOLS 
 
 IT is characteristic of the schools of the 
 world, generally speaking, that they are 
 schools of opinion. They are the ex- 
 pression of human intellect chiefly. They 
 often presuppose historic debates. They are 
 a product of mentality and generally as 
 opposed to other forms of mentality. Such 
 a school is that of Confucius, in China, of 
 Laotse also. Such is the school of Hindu 
 Brahmanism, and of Mohammedanism. 
 True, Buddhism, as wrought out by Prince 
 Siddartha, or Gautama, introduced a more 
 serious note than his Brahman precursors 
 used, i. e., the moral note, the note of personal 
 renunciation for the good of others, and even 
 of mercy to animals. Nevertheless, even 
 this system of thought, together with all the 
 others above named, was primarily a phi- 
 losophy, rather than a religion in its true 
 sense. Buddhism, the best of all these sys- 
 tems, gathered in the half-truth of self-re- 
 
 49 
 
60 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 nunciation, even of life itself, but it had no 
 sufficient goal. While it taught that man 
 must in some deep sense lose himself, it did 
 not teach how this same man was to find 
 himself in a diviner self, that is, as Chris- 
 tianity puts it, in the Christ of God. It 
 taught death to self, but it stopped short of 
 the resurrection-life in Christ Jesus, which 
 is the goal of all true and proper self-re- 
 nunciation. *' We die to live," we "sink to 
 rise," or as Tenn3^son sings, " We rise on 
 stepping stones of our dead selves to higher 
 things." In other words, all the so-called 
 ethnic religions are, as Harnack has said, not 
 religions at all ; they are mere philosophic 
 cults and relatively to Christianity they are 
 superficial. They miss the deep realities 
 embraced in the Christian paradoxes. 
 
 The truth is, as expressions of a single 
 aspect of the human soul, as products of the 
 intellect, they are necessarily partial and 
 inadequate. A true religion must relate 
 itself to and draw upon the reverent and 
 obedient moral attitude and action of the 
 entire soul of man. This soul is a composite 
 product, made up of intellect, feeling, con- 
 science, imagination and will. As such it 
 came whole from the Creator's hand, made 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 51 
 
 in His image and reflecting entire personal 
 being. For purposes of religion, therefore, 
 the entire soul must be brought into relations 
 with its entire God. Indeed God cannot 
 reveal or authenticate Himself to the frag- 
 ment of a human being ; and mere intellect 
 is a fragment, however sublime a portion of 
 personality it is. A thoughtful friend of 
 mine is in the habit of saying that *'The 
 paradox is a necessary characteristic of a 
 divine revelation of God to man.'' This is 
 so because a paradox is a truth which, 
 apparently self-contradictory to intellect, is 
 seen to be true and simple when tested by 
 life, that is, by the combined action of the 
 whole soul of man. In divine revelation the 
 whole Deity goes out to man, and it requires 
 the whole man in order to be in reciprocal 
 relation to the God who reveals. 
 
 From this point of view it will readily be 
 seen why it is that all mere intellectualism 
 always does, and always must, result in 
 agnosticism. Those forms of religion, there- 
 fore, which are products merely or chiefly of 
 mentality, are shallow and inadequate re- 
 ligions, no matter how many millions have 
 been brought under their swa}^ It is on this 
 account also that the historic religious cults, 
 
^^ THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 as such, present impediments in the way of 
 Christianity, the one final religion, far more 
 difficult to overcome than those presented by 
 pure Fetishism, or Animism. Thus far in 
 the history of modern missions the great 
 bulk of converts that have been won from 
 paganism have come from the Animistic 
 or spirit-worshipping people, rather than from 
 those cults which represent inadequately or 
 falsely reasoned systems of thought. Mere 
 thought does not reach to God, does not 
 reach reality. This is abundantly illustrated 
 even in Christendom. The highly intellec- 
 tual sceptics are the most difficult to reach, 
 because they have drilled themselves to 
 detach their intellectual processes from 
 other and deeper activities possible to their 
 personality. It was this, we think, that 
 Christ had in view when He said, " All 
 that ever came before me are thieves and 
 robbers." That is to say, those philosophic 
 religious teachers who have not properly 
 reckoned with their own moral and volitional 
 powers have in so far despoiled themselves 
 and their disciples of those fundamental ex- 
 ercises " without which no man can see the 
 Lord.'' 
 At this point we see the fundamental 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 63 
 
 diversity of the two philosophies emphasized 
 in the Bible. The first is the Satanic type. 
 It approached the primeval man with the 
 suggestion, '' Listen to my enticements," **for 
 in the day that ye shall eat ye shall be as 
 Gods, knowing y Ah I but that was only 
 half the truth, which often turns out to be a 
 whole lie. True, the eyes of the fallen were 
 opened, but to know only their shame and 
 fall. They fell short in the fatal act of that 
 insight which is deeper than mental knowl- 
 edge which they might have had had they 
 remained true. 
 
 The second philosophy is that represented 
 by Christ at the conclusion of the Sermon on 
 the Mount. *' Be ye — be ye therefore per- 
 fect, or complete — even as your Father in 
 heaven is perfect ; exercise all the godlike 
 qualities that belong to your complete person 
 and ye shall attain something unspeakably 
 greater than mere knowledge : namely, holy, 
 godlike being." 
 
 Now despite all the wonderful attainments 
 that have been reached through the centuries, 
 the temptation of the worldly ambitious is to 
 fall into the snare, in the realm of education, 
 of what I have called the world, or Satanic 
 philosophy. It is always enticing and clever, 
 
54 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 often serpentine. On this pattern many 
 forms of university life are built, which 
 narrow their horizon to the merely intel- 
 lectual, and forget or ignore the deeper factors 
 of human well-being that need to be regarded 
 and trained. The great continental univer- 
 sities of Europe are generally on this pattern ; 
 the imperial universities of Germany, France, 
 Russia or the Scandinavian countries and, to a 
 large extent, ancient universities in Britain, 
 like Oxford or Cambridge, where the religious 
 factors have been overlooked or subordinated 
 to the proud and intellectual, are on this 
 pattern. And I regret to say, universities in 
 the new world, as they become rich and self- 
 sufficient, tend in the same direction. So sure 
 as they aim to become supremely intellectual, 
 they become, however highly equipped with 
 endowments and apparatus, but mills of 
 opinion ; they are prepared to grind any form 
 of intellectual grist that may be brought to 
 them. They select professors of the keenest 
 and cleverest powers representing every shade 
 of opinion. The question of truth as such is 
 always in danger of being overlooked or 
 ignored. Of course it is not necessarily so, 
 but the temptation is great to the worldly 
 mind thus to conceive a university. Of 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 55 
 
 course the realms and departments of legiti- 
 mate investigation are manifold ; a real uni- 
 versity must embrace within its sphere as 
 many departments of human life and action 
 as possible, such as the arts and literature, 
 law, science, medicine, surgery, engineering, 
 economics, journalism, statecraft, theology, 
 etc., to the end of the chapter. The term 
 " university " is a large word, and it must be 
 comprehensive, catholic, ecumenical, world- 
 wide and heaven-high in its aims and 
 inquiries. But when I have said " heaven- 
 high," I have in one word suggested the 
 point at which some of the most ambitious 
 universities in the world in the main fail. 
 They have not from the start kept in view 
 that their supreme function is not to attain to 
 mere opinion in any realm, even theological, 
 for its own sake, but all is to be for God's 
 sake, for heaven's sake, for the sake of the 
 whole round of personal interests of the 
 human family, and for those timeless and 
 eternal values which give to truth its mean- 
 ingo A true university must be organized 
 in the interest of truth — truth per se. And 
 truth, as such, can never be reached in its 
 highest form in any realm, apart from an 
 act of will, a moral and personal and entire 
 
56 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 committal of both teacher and pupil to the 
 God of truth who presides over a kingdom 
 of truth. 
 
 The questionable university which I have 
 in mind is the institution that is not respon- 
 sible to any proper authority. It is lawless, 
 self-centered, idolatrous, responsible it may be 
 to the Kaiser, or the state, and so sinks out 
 of sight its moral distinctions when a racial 
 or national issue arises, and war comes on ; 
 responsible it may be to the King, to Parlia- 
 ment, or other human standards not neces- 
 sarily moral or spiritual. It is this type of 
 school which I have called a " school of 
 opinion," which rarely gets beyond the habit 
 of debate or dispute, and lives in the realm 
 of theory and abstraction. Such a school 
 rarely works out in the formation of that 
 kind of character, that type of personality, 
 of which the world stands in dire need. 
 
 Over against the type of schools I have 
 been describing stands the school of Christ. 
 This school stands in no antagonism to any 
 legitimate features of the schools previously 
 considered. It would gather in all the re- 
 sults of true and sincere intellectual inquiry. 
 It aims at supplementary, or perhaps I 
 would better say complementary, values' 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 67 
 
 which other schools are tempted to ignore. 
 It may act with the largest equipment or 
 with the smallest according to circum- 
 stances. It is in no necessary conflict with 
 those necessary but fragmentary conceptions 
 of education that have prevailed in the 
 ambitious secular universities. But its 
 realm is larger, profounder, and absolutely 
 comprehensive, if true to its mission. The 
 school of Christ deals with the ultimates of 
 life and being. It has for its legitimate 
 pupil the entire soul and personality of 
 man. But it has features that are entirely 
 distinctive; and these I now proceed to 
 point out. 
 
 First of all, Christ Himself laid the foun- 
 dation stone in the declaration made 
 concerning Himself when He said, " I am 
 the truth " as well as '* the way " and " the 
 life," that is. He personally embodied or 
 incarnated every ideal that belonged to 
 training and life discipline in His own 
 being. He did not merely hold the truth as 
 a system of opinion. He certainly never 
 patronized the truth, but He Himself was 
 held and commanded at every point by the 
 truth. He was truth's real child and 
 product. And this assertion that Christ 
 
68 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 was the truth was not a mere statement of 
 fact to be kept isolated in Himself. He 
 intended that each disciple in His school 
 should in his finite measure himself also 
 progressively embody the truth : and to do 
 this required the habitual, voluntary and 
 moral action of the whole being of the 
 disciple. He was expected therefore not to 
 attempt that impossible feat of holding his 
 thought in one closed compartment of his 
 being and his morality in another compart- 
 ment. The pupil of Christ is never to 
 forget that he is psychologically and morally 
 a unitary being. Hence it is also that a 
 man cannot hold his religion in one com- 
 partment of himself and his business or 
 politics in another. They are necessarily 
 intermingled and organically one. What a 
 man is in business or in politics that he is 
 in religion and vice versa, or the man de- 
 ceives himself. None of the Dr. Jekyll or 
 Mr. Hyde duplicity can be tolerated in the 
 school of Christ although some would seem 
 to think so. Hence, the general weakening 
 in our current formalized Christianity. It 
 is said that once when one of the court 
 preachers of France, perhaps Bourdaloue, 
 was discoursing in the presence of royalty 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 59 
 
 on these tendencies of human nature to two- 
 sidedness, the King burst out, " Ah, sire, 
 there are indeed two men within us," where- 
 upon the preacher retorted, '' Even so, your 
 majesty ; but one of them must perish." 
 
 Perhaps the central passage on this whole 
 subject is in that found in the eleventh 
 chapter of Matthew. Christ had been up- 
 braiding the doomed cities of Bethsaida and 
 Capernaum because of their intolerable un- 
 belief. They had witnessed some of the 
 greatest of the Master's works : they had had 
 lesson upon lesson respecting His gospel : 
 they had received sufficient light, intellec- 
 tually speaking, to have set all western Asia 
 in a blaze of glory, but because of their 
 wicked hearts of unbelief they had spurned it 
 all, even trampled it beneath their feet as 
 swine would the costliest pearls. Hence, the 
 legitimate pronouncement of their doom 
 upon them by Christ, "Thou Capernaum, 
 thou Bethsaida, that hast been exalted to 
 heaven" (in point of privilege) " shall be cast 
 down to hell." 
 
 Then turning from this fearful denun- 
 ciation for this abuse of light, Christ burst 
 forth in this address to His heavenly Father, 
 " I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and 
 
60 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 earth, because thou hast hid these things 
 from the wise and prudent — the merely 
 speculative minds — and hast revealed them 
 unto babes ; that is, to minds ingenuous and 
 simple enough to act with their whole 
 natures towards the truth." And then He 
 adds, " All things have been delivered 
 unto me of my Father : and no man 
 knoweth the Son but the Father ; neither 
 knoweth any man the Father save the Son 
 and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal 
 him." A question respecting knowledge^ in 
 the deepest sense of the word, is here in- 
 volved. Christ is here talking about the 
 deliverance into His hands of the moral 
 secrets of the universe, which secrets also 
 underlie all forms of legitimate authority 
 and power. The knowledge of the Father 
 therefore on His own part is something far 
 deeper than intellectual cognition ; and so 
 also no man can really know God as the 
 Father save one who is in the spirit of loyal 
 subjection to Him as the Son always was, 
 and as He longs to have all His disciples to 
 be. Accordingly, at the end of this dis- 
 course all are thus invoked : " Take my yoke 
 upon you and learn of (or from) me, that is, 
 from my method of learning; through a 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 61 
 
 humble submission of my will to God's as 
 the patient ox submits to the yoke." And 
 to all such the promise is certain of fulfill- 
 ment : " Ye shall find rest to your souls/' 
 And so the yoke which was feared as irk- 
 some becomes easy and the burden light. 
 
 Now Christ Himself was the ideal pupil in 
 this school of His heavenly Father. He be- 
 came incarnate as the Son of Man that He 
 might live this life and work out this arche- 
 typal form of all discipleship. He expects 
 therefore that all His followers, in every age 
 and in every realm, will become pupils in 
 this school and on the same pattern. This 
 did not mean any narrow conception of edu- 
 cation and life training. It consists with the 
 very highest types of expert knowledge, such 
 as have been reached through the ages by the 
 expert masters of thought, such as Coperni- 
 cus, Newton, Kepler, Bacon and all really 
 educated men down to Gladstone, Lord Kel- 
 vin, Sir Oliver Lodge and every other devout 
 and masterly student of latest time. But it 
 is also a school in which the youngest and 
 most elementary disciple may be a beginner 
 in childhood. It is therefore intended to be 
 the most comprehensive and ecumenical 
 school possible. But its prime qualification 
 
62 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 for matriculation forevermore is a spirit obe- 
 dient and wholly loyal to every ideal be- 
 longing to the entire soul. 
 
 This principle has found a marvellous ex- 
 pression even in the kindergarten philosophy 
 of Friedrich Froebel. The child almost from 
 infancy is taught to make the cube, the 
 sphere, the triangle, the circle through for- 
 mations of clay and sand, in order that 
 through its volitional action and creative 
 power it may the more deeply know and 
 conceive the thought concretely expressed 
 by action. The great '' father of modern 
 philosophy, '^ Immanuel Kant, expressed the 
 same principle. It is at the bottom of the 
 profoundest discovery he made after twelve 
 consecutive years of reflective thought : that 
 in every experience of knowledge the whole 
 personality is involved. The rational soul 
 in an experience of knowledge is always active 
 rather than passive ; it goes out from itself 
 and unites its full personality with the ob- 
 ject it cognizes, so that what we really know 
 is a composite product, a " construct " of the 
 object cognized plus the grasp which the 
 active soul brings to it. And it is this fact 
 which makes our knowledge, although rel- 
 ative, a dependable knowledge. It is not 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 63 
 
 absolute knowledge like that which God has, 
 but it is godlike and in so far reliable, be- 
 cause of this activity of the whole complete 
 soul, or rational ego, of the man which enters 
 into an experience of knowledge. 
 
 The great philosopher Hegel recognized 
 the same principle when he taught that in- 
 tellect, feeling, moral sense and will all enter 
 into a real personal act. 
 
 A remarkable expression of this same 
 principle from the religious point of view is 
 found in one of the great sermons of Freder- 
 ick W. Robertson, entitled '' Obedience the 
 Key to Knowledge." The gist of the whole 
 sermon is simply this : that unless a man has 
 the will to do he will never have the wit to 
 hnow. If a man abuses present light he will 
 infallibly incur greater darkness. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle once wrote to his brother 
 John in Naples, who was floundering in 
 moral doubt : '' John, do the duty which 
 lies nearest thee ; the next step will already 
 have become plain." 
 
 It is of the very nature of the final religion 
 that it cannot be forced on any one. It al- 
 ways makes its appeal to our power of moral 
 choice on whatever remnant of light we may 
 have. To think, therefore, of any mind as 
 
64 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 even half-educated, or any school of opinion 
 as at ail in the same class with the school of 
 Christ that is characterized by indifference 
 to moral and spiritual issues, is pure char- 
 latanry in the realm of education, no matter 
 how vast may be its endowments or world- 
 stunning its equipments. 
 
 Christ indeed never wrought out into de- 
 tail any scheme or curriculum of university 
 work as such, but all the best ideals possible 
 were incipient in His teachings, and He was 
 the master of the ages, and master because 
 in the first place He was the master disciple 
 of His heavenly Father. And any university 
 which ignores or overlooks the principles of 
 Christ as its foundation stone does so at its 
 peril, and the peril of the generation of 
 pupils that is misled by it. The motto of 
 Harvard University, *' For Christ and the 
 Church," may well be pondered afresh in 
 the life of present world conditions even by 
 Harvard itself, and certainly by all its feebler 
 imitators. 
 
 The teaching of the apostles of Christ also 
 was all in line with the foregoing and in 
 further explication of it. And after all, 
 Christianity in its last and true analysis is 
 the inspired and apostolic interpretation of the 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 65 
 
 significance of Christ's person and worJc, and 
 not a mere collocation of the ethical sayings 
 of Jesus. I mention two teachings of the 
 apostles on this matter. The first is in the 
 epistle of James, the Lord's half-brother and 
 bishop of the church of Jerusalem, whose 
 verdict also was so decisive in the famous 
 council of Jerusalem respecting Jewish and 
 Gentile Christians. James, in chapter 1 : 21- 
 25, is dealing with the practical relation of 
 all hearers to the divine truth that is brought 
 to their attention and these are his words, 
 somewhat paraphrased : '' Wherefore lay 
 apart all filthiness and superfluity of naught- 
 iness and receive with meekness the engrafted 
 word which is able to save your souls." The 
 hearer, however, is cautioned lest he shall be 
 a mere " hearer of the word,'' for unless one 
 promptly obeys the word when he hears it 
 he is sure to do two things : first, to reason 
 himself astray, and secondly, instantly forget 
 the manner of man the word revealed him 
 to be. And the conclusion of the whole 
 matter is this : that unless the reader of the 
 word stoops down to humbly peer into the 
 word and search it as Mary and Peter did at 
 the grave of Jesus, and so discovered the 
 resurrection of Jesus — but only as they 
 
66 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 stooped down and peered into the sepul- 
 chre, so only can a reader of the divine word 
 gain a vital experience from a reverent obe- 
 dience to that word. 
 
 Here is one of the ultimate laws of Chris- 
 tian experience. The witnessing authority 
 of the Holy Scripture, as each point is in- 
 quired into, precedes any direct witness of 
 the Holy Spirit in the school of Christ, 
 hence the utter incongruity of thought on 
 the part of all who talk loudly of the the- 
 ology received through experience only and 
 yet who in the same breath discard the au- 
 thority of the Scriptures. Obedience to the 
 written word properly understood, its spir- 
 itual meaning once discerned as authori- 
 tative, is absolutely essential to all intelli- 
 gent and genuine Christian experience. The 
 author of Hebrews rebukes weaklings in the 
 church who still "■ need to be fed with milk," 
 as still in the infantine stage of things. The 
 author declares that by this time these Chris- 
 tians ought to be able to digest strong meat. 
 They were supposed to be adepts in the 
 school of Christ but they had grown " dull 
 of hearing '^ and so they had become " un- 
 skillful " (or literally ''without experience ") 
 in the word of righteousness. And so they 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 67 
 
 were yet babes. Their senses, by reason of use, 
 they had failed to exercise and so to discern 
 between good and evil. This was a pitiable 
 state for Christians of the early church sup- 
 posed to have been long in the school of 
 Christ. And it is just as pitiable in this 
 twentieth century that the churches and 
 schools are filled with this infantine type of 
 Christianity which is still scorning to obey 
 the authority of God's word, is often hig- 
 gling about it and even setting great por- 
 tions of it aside as worthless in the interest 
 of some imported rationalistic philosophy 
 which talks about the impossibility of many 
 things that Christ and His apostles both said 
 and did. It is often only through a sub- 
 mission to authority, whether understood 
 or not, through the yielding of intellectual 
 pride that the higher wisdom of Christ in 
 some paradox is discovered, and that the 
 human judgment becomes of any worth and 
 the apparently impossible in experience is 
 realized. 
 
 The school of Christ is final and inexo- 
 rable at this point. Again to quote Carlyle, 
 " There is no remedy for mental doubt but 
 moral action." Perhaps Christ's central law 
 concerning inward illumination is all epito- 
 
68 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 mized in His saying, " If any man willeth to 
 do his will he shall know of the doctrine." 
 When men say, '* If I only knew the will 
 of God more perfectly I would do it better," 
 they are mistaken ; they reverse the terms 
 of Christ's law. It is only by resolute action 
 on some truth already known that men's 
 minds become clarified to see further truth. 
 There is never more than one truth in sight 
 at a time. That truth acted on, obeyed, or 
 surrendered to, the form of the next truth 
 will emerge out of the mist. There is no 
 canon of criticism, no system of critical 
 philosophy that is worth the name that can 
 ever set aside this basic truth for all criticism. 
 It is the ignoring of this basic principle, 
 or the contempt of it, that has brought in 
 like a flood upon the modern world the 
 myriad errors of academic philosophizing 
 that have so destroyed confidence in the 
 Bible, New Testament and old, Christ as 
 well as Moses, the Gospel as well as the Law, 
 that has precipitated the diabolic war now 
 ravaging the nations, and which, unless 
 God's spirit and providence shall soon inter- 
 vene in a way that no modern time has 
 witnessed, threatens the well-being of every 
 mundane thing. 
 
THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST 69 
 
 The truth is the period is passed, if it 
 ever was, when the central elements in the 
 philosophy of Christ can ever be proved 
 in any adequate sense by mere deductions 
 from a syllogism or processes of mental 
 reasoning. 
 
 The man who proves Christianity is the 
 man who lives it, rather than the man who 
 thinks about it, no matter how cleverly he 
 speculates. 
 
 It is for this reason that the child, whose 
 whole composite nature responds loyally to 
 the truth he sees, walks right inside the truth 
 and incarnates it, where the proud, self-willed 
 philosopher misses it altogether. Thus is 
 the realization of God possible in the mys- 
 tical realm, a realm which not otherwise 
 yields up its secret. It is this which John's 
 first epistle so emphasizes, an epistle in 
 which the apostle thirty times over affirms 
 that *' we know," e. g.j " For we know that 
 the Son of God is come and hath given 
 us an understanding, that we might know 
 him that is true (or real), and we are 
 in him that is real, even in his Son, Jesus 
 Christ. This is the real God and eternal 
 life." 
 
 This school of Christ is the profoundest 
 
70 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 school the world ever knew or can know 
 because it is the school of real, deep and pro- 
 found, composite living of a life inwrought 
 by the Spirit of God. 
 
IV 
 
 THE CUBE FOR AGNOSTICISM 
 
 IN an address to young ministers there is 
 a peculiar pertinency in this theme. In 
 every parish with which you will ever 
 have to deal you will find a number of most 
 interesting personages who, for some reason 
 or other, have failed to connect with the 
 Christian certitudes. The reasons for this 
 may be varied, but the phenomenon you will 
 face among both men and women. Many 
 of these people are highly intellectual — often 
 esthetic and cultivated, and wielding large in- 
 fluence. You will find yourselves deploring 
 the states of mind into which they have 
 fallen, and longing for their recovery — for, 
 other things being equal, they would become 
 a large asset to the church ; and if won they 
 would immensely enhance your influence as 
 a minister of Jesus Christ. 
 
 In most parishes at least three types of 
 agnostics may be found. (1) The out and out 
 worldlings ; they have been swept off" their 
 
 71 
 
72 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 feet by the lures and fascinations of those 
 who as yet have no vision of the eternal or 
 practical sense of the future world. (2) The 
 cynics — people who have been injured, de- 
 ceived and in part soured by their contact 
 perhaps with a bad type of religionist and 
 they have reacted from all former confidence 
 in things religious, and (3) those who have 
 reached mental conclusions through some 
 process of false reasoning. Mental pride is 
 one of the greatest stumbling-blocks to the 
 realization of things divine and eternal. 
 
 I begin by saying. Never be misled into 
 the idea that any of these types can be 
 brought to vital faith and to inward spiritual 
 realization through mere argument. The 
 reasons for antipathy to God and revolt from 
 Him are far deeper than mental or intellec- 
 tual — in the end the moral reason must be 
 reached and motive awakened which will 
 constitute in them real candour, make them 
 in some degree lovers of truth. Accordingly, 
 the method employed by you must be largely 
 indirect. 
 
 The problem, as between a true conception 
 of God and what is now politely called 
 agnosticism, is to ascertain some form of ex- 
 planation of the world we live in which has 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM IS 
 
 the fewest difficulties. This is at bottom a 
 philosophical problem, and the process by 
 which it is reached is through a philosophy 
 which embraces far more than mere intel- 
 lectualism. Two philosophies are possible. 
 The one starts with the human soul, with 
 self-consciousness, and if properly pursued 
 leads straight to God, and to a theistic view 
 of the universe ; the other starts from a 
 molecule of matter — outside the soul. In 
 this latter process the soul is likely to be 
 forgotten and through a kind of naturalistic 
 evolution the soul is driven to some form of 
 materialism, and this is always agnostic. 
 
 A few years ago, Mr. Thomas A. Edison 
 proclaimed himself a materialist. But in 
 that announcement Edison forgot that his 
 own personal self-conscious ego is something 
 unspeakably greater than any machine or all 
 of the machines he ever devised, for he was 
 obliged to assume the truth of the verdict of 
 his own ego, in order to classify himself as 
 representing any department of thought or 
 science of things whatever. 
 
 Now in any process which we as finite 
 beings employ we must assume something as 
 hypothetical. This is the method of all 
 science, and we must accept this basis or 
 
U THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 nothing in all our processes of inquiry. Any 
 possible result which we shall reach, there- 
 fore, will never amount to what in mathe- 
 matics is called a demonstration. We are 
 not absolute beings. We may, however, 
 reach results relatively true always in a pro- 
 gressive measure and to be depended on for 
 all the practical issues of this life and the 
 life to come. 
 
 In my early student days I was greatly 
 helped by Dr. George W. Northrup who, in 
 discussing various views of the world and 
 systems of thought, was accustomed to say, 
 *' Gentlemen, remember that you are not 
 required as finite beings to have a view 
 which is free from intellectual difficulties. 
 All that you are required to have is a view 
 which as one of several possible ones has the 
 fewest difficulties — it is therefore always 
 philosophical to accept and proceed upon 
 the one which has the fewest." Endless 
 confusions in thought in so far as they dis- 
 turb our faith might be avoided if this great 
 utterance were kept in mind. 
 
 We must not expect absolute demonstra- 
 tion respecting things in the moral and re- 
 ligious universe, because they are problems 
 so deep, — often deeper than proof. 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM T5 
 
 This universe is best explained by pre- 
 supposing a purposeful thinker behind it all, 
 that is, a supreme subject mind has conceived 
 it and put it forth for his own manifestation 
 and for our contemplation and joy. 
 
 When in Germany three years ago, I was 
 taken one day by Professor Eucken to call 
 on Professor Earnest Haeckel, who is the 
 arch agnostic and materialist of Germany, 
 although he for reasons had become of late 
 rather discredited as a first class scientist. 
 As we entered the room, he greeted me with 
 the question, '' Aren't you rather afraid to 
 come into this den of lions ? We here have 
 the reputation of being dreadful infidels.'^ 
 
 I replied, *' I have no particular sense of 
 fear and I wished to see the lions of Jena 
 anyhow and so I am here." 
 
 Then came the leading question : " What 
 do you think of this scheme of things in our 
 universe ? " 
 
 I replied, '* Well, Professor, I am not here 
 to enter into controversy with you, but 
 rather simply to pay my respects. However, 
 you have asked me a straight question and I 
 will say at least one thing about it. I reckon 
 there is a Thinker behind it all." 
 
 " Oh," said he, '' perhaps." 
 
76 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 " No/^ I replied, " that is certain." 
 
 ** What makes you so confident? " 
 
 I replied, ^' Your own necessary basis as a 
 scientist." 
 
 '' How so? " came the answer. 
 
 I queried, *' When any man formulates a 
 science on any subject whatsoever, say chem- 
 istry, are not order, numbers, combinations 
 and various relations implied in all such 
 rational thought ? " 
 
 He was not prepared for this, but could 
 not deny it. 
 
 I further pressed my advantage : " I pre- 
 sume you believe in a science of astronomy." 
 
 '' Certainly." 
 
 *' Is astronomy based on mathematics ? " 
 and, *' Is mathematics a strictly psychological 
 phenomenon ? " 
 
 He was obliged to admit this. 
 
 '' Who is the real astronomer ? say Kepler, 
 Copernicus or Newton ? And did any of 
 these create their mathematics or simply 
 discover it in their own rational make-up 
 and in the universe, simply thinking the 
 thought and order of the universe over again, 
 after its author ? " 
 
 '' That is a very good definition of an 
 astronomer," replied Haeckel. 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 77 
 
 " Well, then, if one cannot be an astron- 
 omer without falling back on an order 
 already given in the universe, can the 
 Author of this universe, whether you de- 
 scribe Him by a * He' or an 'It,' be less than 
 a mathematician — the supreme mathemati- 
 cian? And if so, I submit, He is a thinker." 
 *' Oh," answered the Professor, instantly 
 changing the subject. " Do you believe in 
 immortality? " 
 
 The fact is he could go no further, being 
 obliged to admit the data of rationality 
 itself. In other words, the data of Theism 
 are at the bottom of everything scientific. 
 
 A moment later, observing a picture on 
 the wall of two mammoth apes, painted in 
 oil and well framed, I inquired : 
 '' Are these your ancestors ? " 
 " Yes," he replied, with a little chuckle. 
 " Where did they come from ? " 
 " Oh," he replied, '' from the egg." 
 " Indeed ; but who laid the egg ? '^ 
 Again he changed the subject ; he could 
 go no further. An experience like this was 
 assuring to me, at least, whether it was of 
 any value to Haeckel or not. 
 
 On coming away, Eucken, the idealistic 
 philosopher, assured me that I could not 
 
78 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 have contrived more wisely to have answered 
 the chief of agnostics had I pondered my 
 answer for years. 
 
 I. The agnostic may be helped by being 
 reminded that no view of the universe pos- 
 sible to finite minds is free from some intel- 
 lectual difficulties. He must not expect the 
 proof of Christianity to be forced on him. 
 Practical personal religion, that is, a personal 
 realization of God, is more than a speculative 
 question — a question for the mere mind to 
 deal with in the realm of thought. The evi- 
 dence for Christianity is always deeper than 
 any argument for it, deeper than proof. 
 It is grounded in intuitional experiences, 
 which involve the combined action of all the 
 elements in personality. There are factors 
 in this that belong to the very being of ra- 
 tionality (which is more than a deliverance 
 of the power to reason). These factors in ra- 
 tionality are born in us. Functions like con- 
 science and freedom to choose are matters of 
 consciousness. They need no proof. In fact, 
 the proof of the experiences in which their 
 employment results is an ever-growing proof. 
 A very able thinker, the late Prof. Geo. Wm. 
 Knox, of Union Theological Seminary, in his 
 most important book, entitled '' The Funda- 
 
THE CURE FOR AGISIOSTICISM 79 
 
 mental Beliefs of Christianity," has said that 
 Christianity will never be completely and 
 finally proved in the objective sense until the 
 last Christian has been brought home to God 
 and the product is glorified in the next life. 
 The proof we have, however, is a reliable 
 one and most dependable even though it is 
 relative. From this point of view, I think I 
 shall be understood when I assert that with 
 the factors born in us as intuitional and such 
 as are axiomatic, we may say that all normal 
 souls are born with the fundamental data for 
 God and spiritual things constitutional in 
 themselves. God Himself in the creation of 
 our rationality has made us for faith and not 
 for doubt. We are born to see things as they 
 are rather than as they are not. Thus we 
 are born dogmatists in this exalted sense of 
 the term, and we may be thankful — every 
 agnostic ought also to be thankful — that 
 such a bias towards truth and reality has 
 been put into our very natures by the Creator 
 from the start. There are evidences, proofs 
 deeper than logic can afford. The first thing 
 in all candour that an agnostic ought to do 
 mentally is to take an inventory of '' the 
 stock in trade " with which God has set him 
 up and endowed him in this universe, and 
 
80 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 this will go far to resolve his agnostic unbe- 
 lief. 
 
 Ex-President Patton of Princeton last 
 summer at Northfield put the matter thus : 
 
 *' Men sometimes say, ' Granted that the 
 arguments in favour of Christianity make 
 the system as a whole probably true, but is 
 it not barely possible that some other theory 
 of things will do as well ? ' Suppose that be 
 so, what are you going to do about it ? You 
 cannot remain neutral in this realm. A 
 man says to me, ' I propose a trip to Europe 
 and I want to know on what kind of a 
 vessel I had better go.' I reply, ' Well, there 
 is a vessel down at the wharf known as the 
 Mauretania. It has a splendid record, a 
 superb captain and a picked crew If you 
 embark on that ship there is every proba- 
 bility that you will have a safe voyage. But 
 there is another vessel, a sort of leaky tub 
 that has a drunken captain and a mutinous 
 crew. I think the chances are doubtful of 
 making a safe voyage on that vessel, but of 
 course, if you want to do it you can take 
 that ship.' He replies, ' Well, I will think 
 it over.' The next day he comes around and 
 inquires, ' Did I understand you that you 
 would make an affidavit proving beyond a 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 81 
 
 doubt that that Canard Steamer would gc 
 over the ocean all right, and that the other 
 vessel would surely go to the bottom ? ' ' No, 
 1 didn't exactly say that, but I did say there 
 was very great likelihood of it/ To this my 
 friend replies, ' I have been thinking this 
 over a good deal and I have concluded that 
 if you could not prove that this vessel is go- 
 ing over safely beyond a doubt, and that the 
 other is going to the bottom, I shall take the 
 leaky vessel.' ' Oh, well,' I say, 'that is for 
 you to decide. The risk is yours, not mine. 
 If you want to go to sea on a raft or an egg- 
 shell, go ; but my conscience is clear after I 
 have told you in all earnestness which is the 
 better vessel on which to embark.' " I know 
 of no better way of putting it. The common 
 sense way is always to act on the line of 
 chief probability. Butler's great work on 
 the Analogy has taught us that we live in 
 that kind of a universe which requires such 
 action of rational and moral beings. 
 
 Most agnostics of our time have been led 
 into mental confusion through their supposi- 
 tion that any datum of science external to 
 themselves can ever of itself legitimately be 
 made the basis for a philosophy. The realms 
 of science and philosophy though never con- 
 
82 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 tradictory are dififerent, and their functions 
 are different. The function of science is, as 
 Prof. Borden P. Bowne has taught, to ob- 
 serve, register, classify and name phenom- 
 ena. There is ample room for it, and no 
 artificial limits are to be set to these phenom- 
 ena as observed in the whole universe. 
 The function of philosophy, however, is to 
 account for and interpret the deep underly- 
 ing causes of these phenomena. Science as 
 such has not one word to say respecting ulti- 
 mate causes. And philosophy has no war- 
 rant for shutting out of view any least phe- 
 nomenon however microscopic or however 
 multitudinous in the whole cosmos. But 
 these lines are being trespassed upon ever- 
 more by men in confused habits of thought 
 or by prejudices and prepossessions. Un- 
 warranted dogmatism prevails in both realms. 
 There is room in philosophy for the use 
 and interpretation of every fact of science ; 
 but no science, however comprehensive, can 
 legitimately pass over into the realm of casual 
 explanation and still remain scientific. It 
 has exceeded its function. Philosophical 
 data, however, underlie the possibilities of 
 any and all science. Matter can be known 
 only through mind. The mathematical 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 83 
 
 axioms all underlie the science of astronomy, 
 of numbers, and the combinations of the ma- 
 terial elements in any science of chemistry. 
 That is to say, rational data, all given fac- 
 tors in rationality itself, are antecedent to 
 any and every process of inductive science. 
 Professor Howison in his '' Limits of Evolu- 
 tion " speaks thus : ** The break between 
 physiological and logical Genesis ; " (is en- 
 tire). " There is a self-confessed inability of 
 evolution as a philosophy to supply any final 
 explanation of the primary fact upon which 
 its own movement rests ; " that is, evolution 
 must depend upon a normal process of the 
 human mind before it can take a single step 
 in the way of causal explanation. Professor 
 Howison goes on to say : ** There is a bound- 
 less chasm between the unknow^able and the 
 explanatory," and he concludes : '' Evolu- 
 tion itself (if a science) must rest upon the 
 rational nature of every mind involving 
 mental categories or relationships to find its 
 proximate source and footing." 
 
 It will thus be seen that no evolutionary 
 philosophy, which nowadays in one form or 
 another so widely prevails and has made so 
 many agnostics, is possible as a philosophy 
 unless the most fundamental data which lead 
 
84 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 to theism are presupposed. And if this be 
 true, agnosticism has no rational foundation 
 whatever. 
 
 II. The second element in the cure of the 
 error of the agnostic is to remind him of the 
 significance of his own proper selfhood; that 
 is, of the rational ego of which Kant and all 
 other competent philosophers made so much. 
 This selfhood is a self-evident matter. Every 
 normal soul is born with the consciousness 
 of it. He never needs to prove it — indeed 
 he cannot prove it ; it is self-evidencing. 
 Like the sun it shines in its own light. It 
 is the first datum of rational being. A child 
 is as certain of it as is a philosopher, only 
 this selfhood is more than mere mentality — 
 a box of brains. It involves also other ele- 
 ments ; it has sensibility or feeling ; it has 
 moral sense or conscience. Still further it 
 has imagination, and it preeminently has 
 volitional power, or will. All this belongs 
 to personality, the one thing in the universe 
 most like God. This self-conscious, abiding 
 self is the starting point of all thought on 
 any subject. It is a composite unity, and it 
 has also remarkable power of grasping as a 
 whole and converting to its own uses every- 
 thing of which it thinks. What we call 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 85 
 
 " nature," however, as such, never has the 
 power of rethinking itself as a whole and 
 relating itself to other things — hence the 
 impassable chasm between personality and 
 physical nature. This self-conscious rational 
 self, therefore, is the very instrument with 
 which all persons work in every domain 
 of thought. It is never proved by a process 
 of logic. It is so born as to assume its 
 own existence and its orderly functions. 
 This spiritual self or ego furthermore en- 
 tirely transcends the organ of thought — the 
 physical brain. Thought uses brain and 
 among men does not exist without it. 
 Nevertheless it is unspeakably superior to 
 the mechanism of the brain. Indeed in 
 infancy that little something in the infant 
 which we call the soul within the first two 
 years of its infant life absolutely sets to work 
 to modify the very anatomy of its own brain 
 by deciding in which of the lobes of the 
 brain, whether right or left, he shall locate 
 the physical apparatus for the understanding 
 or communication of words ; accordingly 
 every right-handed child trains the left lobe 
 of his brain for speech, while the other lobe 
 is left dormant, and the left-handed child 
 trains or modifies the right lobe of his brain 
 
86 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 for this marvellous power. But who de- 
 cides whether the infant shall use most its 
 right or left hand in the first tw^o years of 
 its infancy ? — that settles the whole ques- 
 tion, and the mysterious soul, even though 
 unconsciously to itself, yet under the Cre- 
 ator's guidance, takes the whole matter in 
 hand and thus shows its superiority to the 
 brain mechanism.^ Such is the greatness 
 and the mystery of human selfhood or ra- 
 tionality. This rationality — something far 
 more than mere mentality — is the deepest 
 interpretative thing in us, and in our think- 
 ing it is to be preserved at all costs as the 
 very base line of all our thought and in- 
 quiry. The agnostic, therefore, must not 
 forget it or overlook it or minimize it if he 
 would not derationalize himself. 
 
 Moreover, this self-conscious ego when it 
 begins to act in its higher ranges discovers a 
 certain relatedness to a supreme and absolute 
 ego apart from himself and above himself in 
 the image of which he is made. In this 
 sense the soul often suddenly takes what a 
 profound writer has called '' the leap to God," 
 or as Tennyson puts it in his '' Higher Pan- 
 theism,'^ another being who is '' closer than 
 
 ^See Thomson's " Brain and Personality." 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 87 
 
 breathing, and nearer than hands and feet," 
 that is, this being so transcendent above us, 
 yet immanent within us ; we are enshrined in 
 Him. To illustrate : when a wireless teleg- 
 rapher at sea in the hour of peril communi- 
 cates with other ships or with stations upon 
 the shore, he does not, strictly speaking, send 
 a message as we send a letter, but he becomes 
 a party to something prearranged — apart 
 from his own present action. He partici- 
 pates in a correspondence which has been 
 previously set up between his transmitting 
 apparatus and the corresponding apparatus 
 in the receiving station at the distant points. 
 There is an intelligence represented at both 
 ends of the line. Through this correspond- 
 ence, therefore, the operator communicates 
 his thought to invisible minds he has never 
 seen, and the ship is rescued. There is 
 something akin to this in corresponding 
 provisions existing between the eternal 
 personal God and the soul that needs Him. 
 Moreover the experiences of millions of souls 
 through thousands of years has corroborated 
 the hypothesis that communication between 
 God and man works, and works well. 
 
 The primary theistic suggestion posits or 
 assumes a hypothetical Deity ; that He mani- 
 
88 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 fests Himself in part at least through the 
 phenomenal system, and that He ideally 
 founds that objective unity and prearrange- 
 ment of relations with which all our finite 
 knowledge of every sort is congruous. The 
 very nature of knowledge argues the corre- 
 spondence between our own ego and the 
 supreme causative ego of the universe. This 
 truth, therefore — of the appetency of the 
 human soul for God — is written in our very 
 constitution ; it is all incipient there even 
 though we had no Bible at all. The human 
 soul is made for God, as God is preadapted 
 to His creatures. Accordingly we posit God 
 as personal. Now while this does not compel 
 anybody to be a theist, it at least saves us 
 from the necessity of real agnostic doubt ; 
 it affords us a basis for a growing certainty 
 respecting God's being. It does not afford 
 us an absolute philosophy such as God has, 
 but it does give us a philosophy in which 
 man though finite is sensible of being related 
 to the absolute, and so we have at least a clue 
 to greater things, which, as we pursue it, 
 leads evermore to better and higher things — 
 thus we are not orphans in God's universe, 
 even though we are but *' children crying for 
 a light." 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 89 
 
 Now if some should say this is highly 
 metaphysical, I reply that all rational beings, 
 if rational at all, are born metaphysicians. 
 The practical question being whether our 
 metaphysics is valid or incompetent, and in 
 need of training. 
 
 III. But the most vital thing to press on 
 the attention of the agnostic is that religion 
 presupposes interrelationship between per- 
 sons. In the whole world of physical 
 sciences many are misled because they seek 
 for God, if indeed they seek for Him at all, 
 on the basis of materialism only, but God is 
 never found through material data, but 
 through personal data. 
 
 To make this concrete, I refer to two highly 
 scientific men who after years of agnostic 
 wandering were at length brought back to 
 faith when clearly realizing that religion 
 presupposes relations between persons. The 
 Reverend John T. Gulick of Honolulu, 
 Hawaii, and Prof. John Romanes were 
 peculiarly brought together on this matter. 
 Gulick has devoted a long lifetime to mission 
 work in China, Japan and the Hawaiian 
 Islands. He has attained to uncommon 
 eminence as a scientist through it all, 
 and an evolutionist of the theistic type. 
 
90 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Romanes, as all the world knows, was a close 
 follower of Darwin for twenty years and be- 
 came a thorough materialist. Yet these two 
 men were singularly brought into fellowship 
 through the appreciation on the part of 
 Romanes of certain scientific papers which 
 Gulick had written. They corresponded for 
 long, Gulick personally visited Romanes in 
 England, and they became mutual friends 
 and admirers. Gulick meanwhile urged no 
 religious claims on Romanes. 
 
 At length one Christmas Day Romanes in 
 England sat down and wrote to Gulick a 
 confidential and heartfelt inquiry in some 
 such form as this : '* I have long wanted to 
 ask you, my friend, how you and others like 
 Lord Kelvin, Professor Tait and Clerk Max- 
 well could be scientists and yet hold to your 
 Christian faith, a faith the loss of which has 
 caused me deep distress for years.'' This 
 was the question for which Gulick had long 
 waited. He replied as follows : '' There is 
 no proof of theism in the Christian religion 
 so strong as the fact of the person of Jesus 
 Christ Himself. He is Christianity, and in 
 some way brings God and man together. 
 Again consider that there is nothing more 
 certain than the personal relation between a 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 91 
 
 mother and her child ; they mutually appeal 
 and respond to each other, but the relation 
 is presupposed and constitutional. So if one 
 would find God, he will never find Him 
 through material data, that is the lotuer trail 
 which you have been long, vainly pursuing 
 for the knowledge of God, however valuable 
 it may have been in the realm of physics. 
 You need to strike the higher trail, and to 
 do this, you must presuppose the personal 
 interrelations between your own soul and 
 God, considered at first as mere hypothesis. 
 We all do this in science. All evolutionary 
 science has proceeded on a hypothesis — never 
 yet exactly proven, although we think pro- 
 gressively proven, only admitting an en- 
 abling God behind it. So, if you would find 
 God, you must presuppose Him on the gen- 
 eral testimony of your own rational being, of 
 revelation and Christian history. Put it to 
 the test, by actual experimentation and along 
 this higher trail you will find the God you 
 had lost." Romanes welcomed the sugges- 
 tion as well as other helpful hints given him 
 by eminent English friends like Canon Gore, 
 and so returned to faith, and at length passed 
 away leaning on its matchless consolations. 
 I give another testimony of similar sort. 
 
92 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Prof. Henry Deveaux of Bordeaux Univer- 
 sity, France, has been from youth a devoted 
 student of natural science, always candid, 
 morally upright and sincere. He yet for 
 long failed to find the evidence he sought 
 for the truth of God and the immortality of 
 the soul. He, too, like Romanes and many 
 another scientist, was on the lower trail. He 
 knew not yet — the higher. At length his 
 Christian father died, and as the sons bore 
 him to his burial, the son Henry more deeply 
 inquired, " Is this the end of my father — 
 shall I never more see him?" and the 
 thought became intolerable. At length he 
 sought companionship in the Young Men's 
 Christian Association of Paris. It was 
 proposed to send two French representatives 
 to one of the student conferences in Moody's 
 time at Northfield. Deveaux, although 
 without knowledge of the English language 
 and rather shrinking from the proposal, at 
 length came with the distinguished Theodore 
 Monod of Paris as his companion and inter- 
 preter. On landing in New York they were 
 made the guests in this country of a well-to- 
 do philanthropic man who sent them to 
 Northfield. They were met at the station by 
 Mr. Moody himself, and a still deeper im- 
 
THE CURE FOR AGNOSTICISM 93 
 
 pression was made on Deveaux by the strik- 
 ing personality and whole-hearted friend- 
 liness of Mr. Moody, who drove them to 
 their lodgings. Day by day they attended 
 the conference, Monod writing on cards in 
 French the gist of the addresses for Deveaux, 
 bat no change came to Deveaux until the 
 last day but one prior to the close of the con- 
 ference. Up to this time he realized that he 
 had mentally inquired after God and his 
 moral sense told him that when he found 
 God he should find Him holy, the final 
 arbiter of this universe, and he was in great 
 distress because he could get no further, 
 although he had strongly hoped in the 
 atmosphere of Moody and Northfield he 
 might find the data for God. At length in 
 shear desperation he entered his chamber, 
 sat down at the table and wrote out a brief 
 covenant in which by an act of will he gave 
 over his entire being in complete surrender 
 and abandon to the liypothetical Christ of the 
 New Testament whom the apostles and the 
 whole Church ever since have affirmed to be 
 alive. He then fell flat upon his face upon 
 the floor and read aloud this devotement of 
 himself to Christ, and he collapsed. All was 
 dark for a moment and then the light of 
 
94 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Christ instantly broke upon him, and he was 
 in a new world. He also discovered in that 
 moment the soul's immortality, and ex- 
 claimed, *'My father also is alive and I shall 
 one day see him ! '' Thus " life and immor- 
 tality ^^ in one and the same moment were 
 '' brought to light " through that surrender 
 of will. For the first time in Deveaux's life 
 the whole composite soul had acted as a 
 unity Godward. He shortly after returned 
 to France and from that day to this has been 
 the foremost interpreter of the harmony 
 between science and revelation, and has par- 
 ticipated with Dr. Reuben Saillens of Paris 
 in Christian conferences from year to year in 
 many important centers in France and 
 Switzerland. Deveaux gave an entire even- 
 ing to me while I was in Morges, Switzer- 
 land, in 1913, giving to myself and others 
 the details of his escape from materialistic 
 agnosticism into Christian faith. 
 
 In order to help the agnostic these three 
 points at which he misses the way should be 
 clearly in view. 
 
V 
 THE CLUE TO CEETAINTY IN EELIGION 
 
 THERE was a time in my religious 
 thinking when I fear I had the idea 
 that I was required to set out before 
 an unbeliever's mind practically a whole 
 system of theology in order to convert him. 
 But I long since dismissed that idea : and 
 the longer I live and labour the clearer I be- 
 come that about the best thing to do, the only 
 effective thing, is to make some one point 
 clear, which will serve as a clue to a per- 
 plexed inquirer to clearer things. It is not 
 only true that we ourselves cannot expect to 
 impart too much truth to a man at once, 
 but it is equally true that most of our hear- 
 ers or pupils can receive only a little at a 
 time. It is doubtful if most listeners to ser- 
 mons carry away with them more than some 
 one point impressed upon them. 
 
 There is also one important matter, which 
 we are prone to overlook in our endeavours 
 to help others into the light : and that is, 
 
96 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 the ever present, willing power of the Divine 
 Spirit who is far more eager to help men 
 to the truth than we are. I do not hesitate 
 to say that the Holy Spirit always stands 
 outside the soul who is pondering truth, 
 pressing more than ** fifteen pounds to the 
 square inch," to get into the human heart 
 while it is hesitating to take the single step 
 which would bring divine illumination. 
 
 It is for this reason that Christianity al- 
 ways puts a premium on the man who 
 makes the most of the very minimum of his 
 light. The world is full of people, waiting 
 for a maximum of light — a maximum 
 which no man ever finds. There is never 
 more than one truth in sight at a time ; and 
 if the human soul were loyal enough to go 
 by that light, his path would begin to shine, 
 and shine more and more till the perfect day. 
 
 The great Blaise Pascal of France, who 
 died in middle life, in addition to his many 
 writings had planned a discussion of the 
 philosophy of the Christian religion. He 
 has left us but a few pages interpretative of 
 what that philosophy would have been, but 
 the sketch is invaluable. He points out 
 that the very nature of the Christian relig- 
 ion, the final religion, is such that it needs 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGION 97 
 
 for our good to be partly hidden and partly 
 revealed. Were Christianity so plainly re- 
 vealed that it would compel acceptance, it 
 would work a moral injury to man: it 
 would injure the will and the moral nature, 
 while only accommodating the intellect. 
 But he adds, " There is always truth enough 
 in view for the truth-lover and darkness 
 enough for the non-lover of truth, while 
 leaving all such also without excuse. God 
 is therefore always a Deus Absconditus to one 
 who trifles with Him or with His truth. It 
 is well for us that this is so. God's great 
 problem in dealing with a race circum- 
 stanced like ours is to retrain the moral and 
 volitional nature. If this is to be done, man 
 must learn to take one step after another, in 
 a progressive course, and so relatively he will 
 ever rise from one degree of certainty to 
 another. 
 
 This principle also holds in other realms 
 than that of religion. No person who is not 
 loyal to a clue will ever make progress in 
 mathematics : neither will he do so in 
 science. The great scientists are those who 
 have at first caught a gleam respecting some 
 ** working hypothesis," and building on 
 that hypothesis they have gone on from the 
 
98 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 simple to the complex in verification of data 
 hitherto gained or in correction of them. 
 
 A really wise teacher proceeds upon a 
 similar basis with his pupil. What wise 
 teacher in mathematics, for example, will sit 
 down with a pupil and work out problem 
 after problem for him ? This process would 
 be to weaken the teaching gift and it would 
 do great injury to the pupil. However, on 
 occasions, after a pupil has undergone the 
 sweat of a contest with some difficult propo- 
 sition, say in algebra or trigonometry, and 
 comes to the teacher in his despair, the 
 teacher may afford a hint or give him a 
 point that has been overlooked by the pupil, 
 who goes away again perhaps to burn the 
 midnight oil or sleep over his problem. 
 The next morning he awakes with a cry 
 *' Eureka ! " and he goes to the teacher with 
 a flush of victory. He has the joy of dis- 
 covery, the exhilaration of an inventor who 
 has mastered a hitherto hidden secret. 
 Such a pupil is on the way to greatness in 
 his line. It is so in religion. For this 
 reason the merely speculative in the realm 
 of religious truth accomplishes little. The 
 clue, previously had, must be acted upon 
 before more truth can be realized. It was 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGION 99 
 
 the complaint of Jesus that men were ever 
 rejecting the light which had come into the 
 world ** because their deeds were evil." 
 Accordingly, in John 3:21, He puts the 
 profoundest of spiritual laws in a few words : 
 '' But he that doeth truth cometh to the 
 light, that his deeds may be made manifest, 
 that they have been wrought of God.'^ Ob- 
 serve that this "doing of the truth'* is a 
 very different thing from an attempt to keep 
 a law in legalistic fashion. To do the truth 
 is to carry a faith in the truth into conduct. 
 This always develops in increasing light ; 
 and as one walks in that light a divine 
 operation is mysteriously wrought in the 
 soul, generally below consciousness. The 
 whole teaching of James in his epistle re- 
 specting salvation by works is not contra- 
 dictory to Paul's emphasis on justification 
 by faith, because the works of which James 
 speaks are worJcs of faith, and not works of 
 law. Faith is therefore always in moral 
 attitude of the whole combined personality 
 towards some ideal seen ; and this pursued 
 leads to ever-increasing light. 
 
 Sometimes sceptics with whom we meet 
 expect too much of us Christians in the 
 realm of divine mysteries. So long as we 
 
100 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 are finite we shall always be facing new 
 mysteries. Every mystery cleared up 
 simply widens the area of the mysterious. 
 But it makes all difference whether we are 
 passing from one chamber of life to another 
 or whether we lose ourselves in some dark 
 labyrinth with not a gleam to comfort. 
 
 Some years ago an agnostic acquaintance 
 of mine with his wife, who was a parishioner 
 of mine, asked me to dine with them. 
 After the meal was over and we were com- 
 fortably seated in the parlour he surprised me 
 with this question : " What do you do with 
 all those mysterious things you find in the 
 Bible?'' 
 
 I replied, " I leave most of them where I 
 find them." 
 
 ** What I don't you pretend to explain all 
 of those mysterious things? " 
 
 I replied, " Far from it. The Bible, like 
 its Author, is infinitely deep ; and those 
 mysteries are there not that we are expected 
 to understand and exhaust them all, but to 
 lure us on from height to height in our 
 endless exploration. If I could exhaust all 
 of those mysteries I should cheapen my 
 future heaven. I would soon need another 
 God and a greater one, and call ' Next' I 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGION 101 
 
 should need a series of Gods, ad infinitum. 
 When a man ceases to wonder he ceases to 
 grow. His possibilities of happiness are 
 gone. He is finished. So it is no stum- 
 bling-block to me that I cannot understand 
 the whole content of divine revelation." 
 
 But turning upon him I said further, *' It 
 is now my turn to ask questions. What do 
 you do with all of those mysterious things 
 that you find in your Bible? Those ques- 
 tions are yours as well as mine. The fact 
 that I am a preacher makes no difference 
 with the case." 
 
 *' Oh," he replied, " they are all Greek to 
 me ; I can make nothing whatever out of 
 them." 
 
 I anticipated that answer. And I pro- 
 ceeded to say : " But, my friend, I have one 
 advantage over you ; I have the clue to the 
 progressive solution of those mysteries and 
 you have not ; there are many simple and 
 elementary things in the Bible. I long ago 
 began with those and I have found the path- 
 way shining more and more with celestial 
 light ; and this is exactly what the Book it- 
 self promises. The case is like this : suppose 
 you and I were on a summer expedition, 
 through a great Canadian forest. After a 
 
102 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 day or two the skies become overcast. No 
 light of the sun appears, and we, alas I are 
 without compass, and we haven't the native 
 instinct of the Indians. Suddenly you in- 
 quire, * Where are we, anyhow ? I don't 
 know north from south. We are lost' 
 
 " But I reply, * You may be lost but I am 
 not. I have been this way before. We will 
 therefore settle down, build a camp-fire and 
 make ourselves comfortable for the night, 
 and to-morrow morning if you will follow 
 me I will proceed to take you out of this 
 wilderness, if it takes a week. Three min- 
 utes ago we passed a trail which I am fa- 
 miliar with. I can easily find that, so com- 
 pose yourself.' Which of us two would be 
 better off in a case like that ? " 
 
 Of course he admitted that to know the 
 trail is unspeakably better than stark bewilder- 
 ment. 
 
 For the most part men and women all 
 about us in things spiritual are bewildered. 
 It is ours to know the trail, to afford the clue 
 and so help them to better things. 
 
 This method on our part is also akin 
 to the laboratory method in the inductive 
 sciences, for religion in the last analysis is 
 just as scientific as physics. There are facts 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN KELIGION 103 
 
 of soul as well as facts of matter and mole- 
 cules which, if given practical treatment, 
 will bring us ever-increasing results for good. 
 Why nowadays do all well-equipped colleges 
 find it important to have extensive labora- 
 tories in chemistry, physics, biology, etc.? 
 It is that the students may have the oppor- 
 tunity of passing from the abstract to the 
 concrete. Accordingly, set to work in the 
 laboratory, the pupil handles the various 
 elements to be studied. He makes his own 
 combinations. He works out his own ex- 
 perimentation, so that step by step, he pro- 
 ceeds on practical experiential lines to work 
 out the theorems of his text-book. This 
 course pursued for months or years, the 
 student becomes what is called " an expert.^^ 
 That is, he is one practiced or experienced 
 in the realm of his studies. The theorems 
 as wrought out have become a part of his 
 personal history. He comes close to nature ; 
 he catches nature in the act of her wonderful 
 alchemies ; and in the end if all of the text- 
 books of his particular department were 
 burned, he would at once rise up and create 
 new text-books out of his own personal mem- 
 ory and life history. That was what Paul 
 meant by " my gospel " — the gospel that he 
 
104 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 had experienced and practiced until he had 
 become expert in it. 
 
 Years ago my mind was attracted by a re- 
 markable passage in a Messianic portion of 
 Isaiah as recorded in chapter fifty. We 
 read : " The Lord God hath given me the 
 tongue of the learned that I should know 
 how to speak a word in season to him that 
 is weary.'^ But I inquired, " In what sense 
 could the Messiah be said to be ' learned ' f " 
 We do not think of Him as an academician 
 or a scholastic. But going down into the 
 Hebrew root of the word, I found it meant 
 ^' the practiced," " the experienced, '* and 
 hence mastery. And so when I read the 
 rest of the passage : " He wakeneth morning 
 by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as 
 the learned — the practiced," I saw a richer 
 meaning in the ancient word. If I am to 
 hear to the highest advantage I must be 
 in the habit of daily practicing in concrete 
 form the will of Christ, the word of God, 
 and so become spiritually expert. 
 
 In beginning, therefore, with any type of 
 mind, more or less sceptical or confused, it is 
 of utmost consequence that we find some 
 point of beginning, some point of contact, 
 f5ome common ground from which we caa 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGION 105 
 
 induce the soul to take one honest step for- 
 ward upon the hypothesis, really already 
 half-believed. But that step one must take 
 resolutely, firmly, even in the dark if he is 
 shut up to it. For example, there came to 
 me years ago, during my pastorate in St. 
 Paul, one night, a sincere-minded inquirer. 
 He admitted he was in the greatest spiritual 
 darkness. For the first time in five years he 
 had come to hear me preach, the Sunday 
 night before, on the Syro-Phoenician woman 
 who cried after Jesus for the healing of her 
 daughter. It impressed the man and he 
 reasoned : '^ Perhaps this man could help 
 me." Seated in my study I asked him to 
 tell me in a few words his religious history, 
 which would afford me some point of ap- 
 proach. He explained that he was reared 
 the son of a German minister in Prussia, but 
 years ago he concluded that his father's re- 
 ligion was too rigorous for him. He left 
 home and came to America ; and, said he, 
 *' I have drifted so far away that I have be- 
 come frightened at my general unbelief.'' 
 
 I inquired : '' But have you no faith what- 
 ever left ? " 
 
 " Oh," he replied, ** I still believe some 
 things." 
 
106 THE UNSHAKEN KINGCOM 
 
 " Well, please tell me some one thing. 
 No matter about the many things that you 
 do not believe. Please fix on some one 
 thing you do believe : tell me that." 
 
 He thought a moment and answered : '* I 
 still believe in God." 
 
 " What I A personal God to whom you 
 are responsible and who will be your 
 judge?" 
 
 " Yes, I believe in Him." 
 
 *' But," I inquired, " how much do you 
 believe in Him? I w^ant to test your belief. 
 Do you believe enough in God to act on 
 your belief? " 
 
 '' A man ought to," came the reply. 
 
 '' Well, then, I am going to ask you to 
 speak to your God as you talk to me." 
 
 " What, do you wish me to pray ? I can't 
 make a prayer ." 
 
 " I am not asking you to make a prayer ; 
 made prayers are empty anyhow, but just 
 talk to God ; that is, follow your clue. You 
 admit that you believe in Him." 
 
 " But I cannot pray." 
 
 "Well," I said, ''let us kneel down. I 
 will first speak to my God and then you 
 must speak to the remnant of a God you 
 have left, for you and I do not need to have 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGION 107 
 
 precisely the same mental conception of God 
 in order to reach Him. Do your own pray- 
 ing ; start from where you are and move on 
 to where you are not." 
 
 I prayed and when I had finished I said, 
 ^' Now it is your turn. Forget all about me 
 and just speak to God in your own way." 
 
 He struggled a moment and finally broke 
 forth : " Oh, my God I " and then the flood- 
 gates burst and a volume of confession of sin 
 and wandering flowed forth. Suddenly he 
 sprang to his feet and exclaimed, '^ Oh, sir, I 
 feel greatly changed. Will you lend me a 
 Bible for to-day ? I am ashamed to say that 
 I don't own one but I will buy one to- 
 morrow and bring it to you for the entry of 
 a record of what has occurred to-night." 
 
 Here was a case of a man who took one 
 step towards the light that he confessed 
 lingered in him ; and what is more here was 
 the Spirit of God waiting to break in upon 
 his soul with things unutterably glorious re- 
 specting the fullness of His grace to all such. 
 
 The principle in all of the foregoing is 
 that embodied in Tennyson's poem entitled 
 "The Gleam." That poem is believed to 
 embody the method and stages whereby the 
 great Laureate found his way out of early 
 
108 THE UXSHAKEX KINGDOM 
 
 scepticism, past early criticisms and over 
 stunning afflictions into the true light of 
 Christian faith. The principle of following 
 the gleam fits all cases. 
 
 It is amazing bow considerate the Spirit 
 of God is to the feeblest step taken in the 
 direction of the light. Years ago I heard 
 the well-known S. H. Hadley, successor to 
 Jerry McAuley in the Water Street Mission, 
 New York, tell this story of his salvation. 
 
 At the time he was about in the last ditch 
 after a long period of immoral and criminal 
 dissipation that might easily have brought 
 him to a long period in the penitentiary ; he 
 found himself one night in a low dive of a 
 saloon sitting on the top of a whiskey barrel 
 so dazed with drink that he scarcely knew 
 where he was. All at once there strangely 
 came floating into his brain the strain of an 
 old hymn that he used to hear his mother 
 sing: "In the cross of Christ I glory." As 
 it riveted his bleared attention for a moment 
 he found himself saying : '' I will go to the 
 Cross, for heaven knows I need it," and as 
 he climbed down oflf the liquor barrel to 
 start on his vague quest he stumbled and 
 fell full length upon the floor. " But," ex- 
 claimed he, *' glory be to God I fell towards 
 
CLUE TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGION 109 
 
 the Cross, and Jesus picked me up. Re- 
 gaining my feet, I went up to the counter 
 and called some witnesses around me, and 
 said : ' Men, I am done with this business of 
 the drink forever. Take me to some lockup 
 and have me confined until I sober up, and 
 then I'll come back and tell you all more 
 about it.' " That one step from the liquor 
 barrel to the Cross was the beginning of 
 days to S. H. Hadley, albeit that step took 
 the form of a fall upon the floor. It was, 
 however, a response to the gleam. It was a 
 pursuance of a clue. It was an entrance on 
 the trail that leads to the light that is 
 brighter than day. 
 
 In Bunyan's ** Pilgrim's Progress " there 
 is a very realistic picture of the meeting of 
 Pilgrim with Evangelist. Evangelist is try- 
 ing to point him to a little wicket gate on 
 the horizon-line, and Evangelist inquires, 
 paraphrasing the account somewhat : " Do 
 you see that gate away yonder?" Pilgrim 
 strains his eyes but he sees no gate. ** Do 
 you see that light which glows about it ? " 
 " No, I see no light." '' Well, look again ; 
 can't you see a difference between the sur- 
 rounding darkness and that bit of twilight 
 yonder ? " 
 
110 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Straining his eyes again Pilgrim finally 
 said, " I think I do see a difference." 
 
 *' Well (in spirit)," says Evangelist, *' you 
 go for the faint dawn you see yonder." 
 
 Pilgrim headed for it and was soon within 
 the wicket gate. 
 
 The Magi, in their typical search for the 
 particular infant of old born in Judea of old 
 about that time, had nothing to start them 
 on the humanly impossible search but star- 
 light. But loyal to that gleam, whatever 
 it was, they found their way to Bethlehem's 
 manger, found their King and Judah's, and 
 returned to their far eastern home satisfied. 
 
 There isn't an agnostic, a sceptic or a 
 darkened soul on earth but might be helped 
 out of his darkness and into the day if we 
 but had the divine skill to help him discover 
 the exact point where a gleam remains, and 
 could induce him to take one earnest, whole- 
 hearted step in faith towards the goal. 
 Tremendous is the import of those words of 
 Jesus, '' While ye have the light, believe on the 
 light — i. e.y treat the light as a reality ; act on 
 the light — that ye may become the sons of 
 light." " I am come a light into the world, 
 that he that followeth me should not walk in 
 darkness but should have the light of life." 
 
VI 
 
 THE PAEADOXICAL ELEMENT IN 
 CHEISTIANITY 
 
 A PARADOX is an apparent contra- 
 diction — a contradiction in terms, 
 but not in deep reality. Whenever 
 in Scripture we find language apparently 
 self-contradictory or in apparent conflict to 
 what is elsewhere said we may depend there 
 is some great harmony deep down below the 
 surface yearning for realization. For ex- 
 ample, when we hear Jacob after his night 
 at the Jabbok renaming the place of his in- 
 terview " Peniel " — '' face of God '' — we hear 
 him say, '^ I have called this place ^ the face 
 of God,' because I have seen God face to face 
 and my life is preserved." But the Bible 
 elsewhere says, " No man can see God face to 
 face and live." But here is a man who 
 seems to contradict that. Ah, yes ! but it is 
 the spiritually altered man after a momen- 
 tous crisis in his soul, and not the natural 
 man, who has thus looked into the face of 
 
 111 
 
112 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 God and survived. In other words the point 
 of view from which the divine writer speaks 
 has to be kept in mind. 
 
 In the paradoxical two realms are always 
 presupposed, the temporal and the eternal, 
 the natural and the spiritual. That is to 
 say, the twofold nature of man is involved 
 and hence relation to this world and the 
 next are implied. A friend of the writer of 
 ripe years and profound reflection has a way 
 of saying '' that the paradox is a necessary 
 characteristic of divine revelation." That 
 is, in all revelation there is a call to man to 
 come up higher or to go down deeper into 
 divine truths. It is for this reason that " the 
 natural man receiveth not the things of the 
 spirit, for they are foolishness unto him, 
 neither can he know them, because they are 
 spiritually discerned." 
 
 Again a process of mere intellect is un- 
 equal to the paradox for the reason that man 
 is more than intellect, and the whole soul is 
 involved in the terms used or implied. In 
 other words, it is personality only that is 
 great enough for the paradoxical. Personal- 
 ity is the one thing in the universe that can 
 change a thousand times and still preserve 
 its identity. The matter involves the rela- 
 
THE PAKADOXICAL ELEMENT 113 
 
 "^tions of things, and relations of personality 
 to the universe are manifold, and they run 
 out on higher or lower levels, as the case 
 may be. It is for this reason that the law 
 of so-called sacrifice is one of the sublimest 
 functions of personality. Sacrifice is not 
 waste. It is simply exchanging a lower 
 personal value for a higher one, as Christ 
 did in assuming the cross in behalf of the 
 race, or as a philanthropist does in behalf of 
 a cause, say of the relief of the needy, or the 
 elevation of the downtrodden. One of the 
 great books of the past twenty-five years is 
 that by Prof. J. W. Buckham, of Pacific 
 Seminary, Berkeley, Cal., entitled " Person- 
 ality and the Christian Ideal.'' The title 
 implies, and the book discusses, a contin- 
 uous process of rising from a lower to a 
 higher form of personality according to the 
 Christly type. A thoughtful writer has de- 
 scribed the German philosopher Eucken as 
 making so much of this same principle 
 which might be termed growth from indi- 
 vidualism into personality in these terms : 
 " Eucken's aim is to rescue from a self- 
 centered individualism into a God-centered 
 personality." Eucken himself in one of his 
 great essays on '' The Modern Man and 
 
114 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Religion " names as one of the first ends 
 of religion : to ^* limit the scope of the 
 individual and place him within great rela- 
 tionships and to subject him to strict princi- 
 ples." All this implies that man's relations 
 to reality in this universe stand as it were in 
 a series of hierarchical forms ; and each in 
 its place has its peculiar claims. That is to 
 say man is a composite being and himself a 
 profound paradox. 
 
 This is one of the reasons why truth as 
 such is a matter that must be tested by 
 something far deeper than intellect, that is 
 by life, life in many and ever rising forms. 
 
 Hence it will be seen that if Christ is a 
 teacher really come from God, and especially 
 if He is jpar excellence that teacher, He must 
 use paradox in tlfe forms of His teaching. 
 First of all He Himself is the supreme para- 
 dox. He is the revelation of everything in 
 God and man, ranging from the most 
 majestic to the most simple and tender. 
 For a remarkable discussion of the paradox 
 of Jesus, see an opening chapter in a recent 
 book by Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, D. D., en- 
 titled " Concerning Jesus Christ.'' 
 
 As a matter of fact, therefore, paradox 
 abounds in the teaching of Jesus as well as 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 115 
 
 in all the great prophecies concerning Him 
 and His religion. If one could see the pro- 
 found unity implied in the truly religious 
 life, let him group and read together four 
 great passages found in the Scriptures illus- 
 trating the ability of the perverse heart to 
 sense divine truth only when it acts morally, 
 as the parabolic form of teaching presup- 
 poses. The references are as follows : Isaiah 
 6 :9, 10 ; Matthew 13:14, 15; Acts 28 : 25-28 
 and Romans 11 :8, 9. The reference in Isa- 
 iah is to the year that King Uzziah died, 
 when the prophet was commissioned to go 
 and declare the divine message to recreant 
 and unbelieving Israel. It is stated in this 
 form : " Go and tell the people, Hear ye in- 
 deed, but understand not ; and see ye indeed, 
 but perceive not. Make the heart of this 
 people fat, and make their ears heavy, and 
 shut their eyes ; lest they see with their eyes, 
 and hear with their ears, and understand 
 with their heart, and convert, and be healed. '^ 
 That is to say the prophet is to utter his mes- 
 sage and give the people a chance to believe 
 and repent even though it was foreseen their 
 perverse heart would not receive the message, 
 albeit a remnant of them would, and so the 
 holy seed would be preserved. The next 
 
116 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 reference is to the words used by Christ Him- 
 self in Matthew 13:14, 15, in connection with 
 the speaking of His parables to the Pharisees 
 of His time, in which He reaffirms the same 
 identical result of blinded eyes, dulled ears, 
 and hardened hearts that was to accompany 
 the declaration of the divine message. This 
 message required a spirit of moral suscepti- 
 bility to act on a minimum of light as the one 
 key to the understanding of the whole mes- 
 sage; and hence Christ said, " Whosoever hath 
 — hath moral susceptibility implied — he shall 
 have more : but whosoever hath not — hath 
 not that moral susceptibility requisite — from 
 him shall be taken away even that he hath/' 
 There have always been those who have 
 criticized this principle in the kind of pro- 
 bation God has established for mankind. 
 One critic, e. g., says that the words of Christ 
 used by the evangelist which accompany the 
 parables " seem to say that Christ adopted 
 the parabolic method in order to hide the 
 truths of the kingdom from unspiritual 
 minds ; and such a purpose would be en- 
 tirely at variance with the whole spirit of 
 His ministry," certainly a very sweeping in- 
 ference, respecting which I shall shortly have 
 more to say. The next classic allusion re- 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 117 
 
 specting the judicial blinding of eyes is found 
 in connection with Paul's ministry at Rome 
 recorded in Acts 28 : 25-28. It marked the 
 moment when Paul turned away from longer 
 preaching to the Jews and gave himself more 
 explicitly to his ministry to the Gentiles. 
 This fateful decision for the Jews throws us 
 back to the original passage in Isaiah I just 
 quoted. The issue occurred " after that Paul 
 had spoken one tvord " — but what a word ! 
 " Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the 
 prophet unto our fathers, saying, Go unto 
 this people and say, Hearing ye shall hear 
 and shall not understand ; and seeing ye 
 shall see and not perceive ; for the heart of 
 this people is waxed gross, and their ears are 
 dull of hearing, and their eyes have been 
 closed ; lest they should see with their eyes 
 and hear with their ears and understand with 
 their heart and should be converted and I 
 should heal them. Be it known therefore 
 unto you that the salvation of God is sent 
 unto the Gentiles and that they will hear it." 
 The fourth important reference to the same 
 principle is in Paul's great discussion re- 
 specting the present casting away of Israel, 
 pending her ultimate restoration, recorded 
 in Romans 11 :8-10. The writer says, *' Ac- 
 
118 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 cording as it is written, God hath given 
 them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they 
 should not see and ears that they should not 
 hear unto this day. And David said, Let 
 their table be made a snare and a trap, and 
 a stumbling-block and a recompense unto 
 them ; let their eyes be darkened that they 
 may not see, and bow down their back 
 alway.'' 
 
 Now these four great allusions in the Bible 
 from Isaiah to Paul bring forward a matter 
 of the most momentous consequence. They 
 are all intended to show how absolutely im- 
 possible it is to understand God and the 
 moral universe except through loyalty to 
 some ideal already known. These teachings 
 are not a declaration of arbitrariness on the 
 part of God, but a statement of the law of 
 sequences in the moral order under which 
 free human beings have been created and 
 have their probation in this life. The dread- 
 ful sequence that came to Israel of old, that 
 came to the Pharisees in Christ's time, and 
 that has characterized the later apostasies of 
 the Jews and of men generally of all times, is 
 a sequence that might have been avoided, for 
 just as certainly as the sequence of the judi- 
 cial blindness came upon the obdurate, so 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 119 
 
 also the alternate sequence of possible bless- 
 ing to the believer was implied. So after 
 all, these passages all teach that the Gospel 
 once offered always proves either " a savour 
 of life unto lifeor of death unto death," from 
 the days of Cain and Abel down. The 
 preaching of every evangelical sermon in- 
 volves the possibility of both sequences. 
 Offers of grace must inevitably work out in 
 one of two directions either to melt or to 
 harden. This is not primarily an intellectual 
 or sentimental matter : it is a moral matter, 
 the only form of action that can resolve the 
 paradox. God's dealing with Pharaoh was 
 on precisely the same principles as those in 
 which He deals with all free beings under 
 the divine moral order. The matter which 
 God forced upon Pharaoh was the necessity 
 of choosing between showing mercy to Israel 
 or hardening his heart towards them. Pha- 
 raoh having refused to show mercy ^' his 
 heart became hardened," he *' hardened his 
 own heart," as the account itself declares. 
 ^' God hardened " it, only in the sense of 
 linking the law of sequences to free moral 
 action. This resulted in judicial blindness. 
 It will thus be seen how immensely impor- 
 tant is the matter of moral attitude and moral 
 
120 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 action carried out in life in order to under- 
 stand the deeper things of God, involved in 
 the paradoxes. Tliese are the deepest things 
 in Christianity, the most central, because 
 they bring a man up to the question whether 
 he will or not be godlike. If so all is well : 
 if not the second death ensues. It is a 
 serious thing to live at all, and a glorious 
 thing to live only on the same principles on 
 which the Godhead lives His life. 
 
 Now in turning to the teachings of Jesus 
 as a whole — those teachings which consti- 
 tute Him the master of all the masters — we 
 shall be amazed to find a large part of His 
 definite lessons are in the form of paradox. 
 For example, the Sermon on the Mount 
 opens with a list of ten beatitudes. The 
 most of them are paradoxes, truth stated in 
 enigmatic form. Some people think the 
 Sermon on the Mount is a matter easy of 
 performance, but how different is the case 
 when they try it. Every one of these beati- 
 tudes referred to is prefaced with the word 
 '* blessed." This blessedness is spoken on 
 the supposition that each beatitude is to be- 
 come a thing ex'perienced, and not merely 
 thought about. *' Blessed are the poor in 
 spirit " — i. e.j the destitute in their spirits — 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 121 
 
 ** for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'^ 
 *' Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall 
 see God/' But has the heart eyes ? Cer- 
 tainly ! Men see out of their moral condi- 
 tions the deeper things of God. 
 
 All those remarkable parables, to which 
 allusion has above been made, presuppose 
 the same form of moral action which alone 
 resolves the paradox. That is, they require 
 moral action in order to the clarification of 
 mental vision ; and hence Jesus said to His 
 disciples, '^ Unto you it is given to know the 
 mysteries — know as an open secret, because 
 your hearts are right — but unto them in 
 parables," or enigmas. A parable is a hinted 
 truth, a hint which only the spiritually dis- 
 cerning, the morally initiated, ever take. 
 
 The teachings of the apostles, particularly 
 of Paul, are often in paradoxical form because 
 they are so deep. Their meanings never lie 
 on the surface, but they reward inquiry and 
 especially conformity to moral conditions. 
 When Paul came to Corinth '' determined to 
 know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him 
 crucified," he was emphasizing the power 
 and the wisdom of God's coming to man- 
 kind in the form of a humiliated Messiah, 
 one dying a felon's death. This humiliated 
 
122 THE UXSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Messiah was '' a stumbling-block to the Jew, 
 and foolishness to the Greek," '' but unto us 
 which are saved the wisdom of God and the 
 power of God." Paul's characteristic ex- 
 periences were all on the paradoxical plane. 
 Hear him say : '' As dying and behold we 
 live, as poor yet making many rich, as sor- 
 rowful yet always rejoicing," as " the pris- 
 oner of Christ," " the prisoner of hope," and 
 yet the freest man in Cci?sar*s empire. His 
 thorn in the flesh he came to glory in as he 
 did also in all his stripes, his imprisonments, 
 his weaknesses and infirmities because 
 through them he found the strength of the 
 divine grace abounding unto him. No won- 
 der that Deissmann, the great New Testament 
 expounder, says in his masterly work on 
 Paul that '' Paul was a bundle of paradoxes." 
 He was the most many-sided man under all 
 the conditions that beset him, Christ only 
 excepted, that ever came in the stream of 
 time. 
 
 The great Lord Bacon, who wrote and 
 discoursed on every great subject, secular and 
 religious, moral and spiritual, must of course 
 have a chapter, as he does, upon '* The Para- 
 doxes of Christianity." The truth is there 
 is no final wisdom apart from the paradox. 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 123 
 
 It is no wonder, therefore, that the superfi- 
 cial religious critics of our time who have 
 done so much to undermine divine revela- 
 tion and to vex the Church of God eschew 
 the paradox. They have (especially in es- 
 pousing the Nietsche denial of the paradoxes 
 of Jesus) brought untold disaster on Europe ; 
 and they now threaten every precious thing 
 in our homeland ; they overturn ancient 
 foundations, prostitute great endowments and 
 falsify the testimony of the Church of God 
 the world over. They give scant attention 
 to the paradoxical teachings of the New Tes- 
 tament, if they do not fight wholly shy of 
 them; they admit they cannot mentally re- 
 solve them, and having put out their own 
 moral eyes, of course there is no vision left 
 which they can impart to others. Their 
 schools then become mainly schools of opin- 
 ion. The divine life in their own souls be- 
 ing itself suppressed, they of course produce 
 a progeny of agnostic weaklings further to 
 afflict the Church of God. 
 
 The vaunting modernist Gentile world in 
 so far as it ignores the paradoxical, or be- 
 comes in spirit or will disloyal to spiritual 
 life once received, is headed in the same di- 
 rection as ancient Israel : the veil already is 
 
124 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 covering its face; and unless it repents it will 
 pass into the same judicial darkness. '' For 
 if God spared not the natural branches, take 
 heed lest he also spare not thee.'' 
 
 I wish now to center attention upon one 
 striking instance in the New Testament, the 
 meaning of which does not lie on the sur- 
 face, but involving one of the profoundest 
 life paradoxes. It is the account of the rich 
 young ruler. This man was richly endowed ; 
 he had morality, official station in life and 
 also fortune, and he was young. He came 
 to Christ with a patronizing question : '' Good 
 Master, what good thing shall I do that I 
 may inherit eternal life ? " Christ at once 
 turned the point of his patronizing atti- 
 tude by asking, '' Why callest thou me 
 good ? " There is one good and that is God. 
 What you need is the good One; and you 
 can have Him only as Master, never as sub- 
 ject. You can never inherit eternal life by 
 doing some " good thing," for the reason 
 that you are a personal being and you need 
 the good God, the being in whom all person- 
 ality is grounded, and in subjection to whom 
 it finds its highest freedom. The ruler's 
 proposition was a large one ; he wanted eter- 
 nal life and he wanted to inherit it ; he 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 125 
 
 claimed to have kept the commandments 
 mentioned by Christ, and then proudly 
 asked, ** What lack I yet ? " Christ showed 
 him that he lacked everything that was of 
 primary importance and that could ever en- 
 title him to eternal life. The exactions 
 Christ made in His reply seem at first very 
 severe. " If thou wilt be perfect (and that 
 is your proposal) go sell all that thou hast 
 and give to the poor, and thou shalt have 
 treasure in heaven ; and come and follow 
 me." That is, Christ invited him to adopt 
 his own personal program of life and being 
 and so become truly a son of God. 
 
 But the rich young man could not endure 
 this test. We are told he had great posses- 
 sions — great acquisitions, properties he had 
 acquired by his own mastery over material 
 things, and probably over the markets of his 
 time. This habit of mind always creates in 
 men an undue arrogance ; it gives them a 
 sense of mastery, almost of sovereignty over 
 the universe, and they relatively forget God's 
 rule over them. What Christ now showed 
 him was that his fundamental life need was 
 that of the proper captain of his own soul. 
 The ruler had forgotten that he needed a 
 master, and he had become oblivious of the 
 
126 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 fact that he was ah-eady mastered by his 
 money, by material things. The truth is all 
 finite beings, whether they know it or not, 
 are always dominated by something : money, 
 pleasure, love of fame, lust, or other things. 
 All finite beings are by their very nature de- 
 pendent beings. The utmost they can have 
 is a choice of masters. There can be only 
 one independent Being in this universe. 
 Hence Christ was setting up before this ruler 
 no hard, abnormal thing. He was simply 
 asking him to become normal and to join the 
 Christ Himself in a program of life the truest 
 conceivable. But failing to respond to this 
 test, the ruler '* went away sorrowful." And 
 there the curtain falls as he passes into the 
 night. He lacked the proper master and so 
 he lost all. 
 
 Had the ruler accepted the terms of Christ 
 he would have found, as we shall shortly see 
 from what follows a little later down in the 
 narrative, that Christ was seeking to enrich 
 him rather than impoverish him. As the 
 ruler departed Jesus pathetically looked upon 
 him and said to the disciples, '' How hardly 
 shall they that have riches — any kind of 
 riches that usurps God's place in the soul — 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven." The 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 127 
 
 disciples, shortly recovering from the shock 
 of the failure of the ruler to connect with 
 Christ, replied, '' Lord, we have left all and 
 have followed thee ; what shall we have there- 
 fore ? '^ Then came the great reply of Christ : 
 " There is no man that hath left houses or 
 lands or father or mother or wife or children 
 for my sake and the gospel's but shall receive 
 an hundredfold in this time — that is an 
 enormous per cent, of increase — and in the 
 world to come life everlasting." That is to 
 say, Christ here uses in true oriental phrase 
 a round number implying indefinite returns 
 on the investment put out in His name. Such 
 a return which far and away outdoes all ordi- 
 nary investments accrued as a loss to the 
 rich ruler for his moral obtuseness. There 
 is no market in the world that pays like that 
 which Christ affords to him who accepts this 
 proper lordship. 
 
 But I hear one say : ** This is a Bible inci- 
 dent. God doesn't reward on that scale those 
 who follow Him in modern times in the way 
 He proposed to this young ruler." Well, let 
 us see ; I have an acquaintance in East Lon- 
 don by the name of Frederick Charrington 
 who has for many years been at the head of 
 the great "Mile End Mission," one of the 
 
128 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 greatest rescue homes for inebriates and the 
 *' devil's castaways " I have ever known. Four 
 years ago last summer I was invited to dine 
 one Sunday with Charrington, and in the 
 afternoon to join his party that, preceded by 
 a band of music and accompanied by a num- 
 ber of workers, goes on an afternoon march 
 of advertisement and invitation to the thou- 
 sands of wretched beings who populate East 
 London. It was a rare experience as we 
 marched along through the congested dis- 
 tricts. The band and the waving banners 
 which preceded us attracted the children and 
 the curious by thousands at every prominent 
 intersection of streets. At one of these inter- 
 sections the band stopped playing and our 
 party halted and Mr. Charrington, addressing 
 me, said : 
 
 " Do you see that sign over that promi- 
 nent saloon? That is one of my father's 
 signs — ' Charrington's Ale ' — for my father 
 has been for a lifetime one of the foremost 
 brewers in East London, and it is the prod- 
 uct of that establishment that has helped to 
 work much of this misery which you see on 
 all sides." And then he added, " Twenty- 
 five years ago (or thereabouts) I stood one 
 day where we are now standing, and I saw a 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 129 
 
 poor woman in rags, with two children tug- 
 ging at her gown and hiding behind her in 
 a frightened way, stand at the door of that 
 saloon. The woman beckoned to her besot- 
 ted husband who was inside to come out, 
 and in God's name to give her a few pence 
 that she might buy bread for those starving 
 children. The brutal man emerged, but in- 
 stead of giving money for her need, he struck 
 her a fearful blow between the eyes that 
 felled her like an ox at the shambles to 
 the earth." Said Charrington, " That blow- 
 knocked all of the liquor business out of me 
 forever, although I was not a Christian. 
 Shortly after I went home, and at the dinner 
 table I told my father the incident, and 
 added, ' I forever repudiate all my part and 
 interest in the brewing business.' My father 
 answered, ' You are a fool ; you can't afford 
 that ; there are millions in this business for 
 you.' ' I can't help it,' " replied Charrington ; 
 *' ' my mind is made up.' " He made good his 
 word, shortly after was converted and began 
 with the aid of a few friends outside his own 
 family this foremost rescue work in all Lon- 
 don. He finally built an enormous hall, and 
 established besides a great rescue home just 
 below the mouth of the Thames on an island 
 
130 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 in the open sea. And he has never lacked 
 for friends or funds. Some time ago a liter- 
 ary friend of Charrington's who had been 
 writing his life proposed that it be en- 
 titled " The Great Renunciation." To this 
 Charrington replied : ** Never I call it ' The 
 Great Acceptance/ if you are ever to publish 
 my life/' and he added, '' I did not ' go away 
 sorrowful ' in that great decision of my early 
 years." The calendar of the saints is full of 
 names in all lands and of all ages of those who, 
 unlike the rich young ruler, have accepted 
 the Lord Himself as the captain of their soul, 
 and they have received the ten thousand per 
 cent, even in this life, — houses and lands and 
 relatives and children and every other good 
 thing, — and to crown it all, the life everlast- 
 ing. But the condition of all this is that 
 men have the vision and the faith to discern 
 the reality at the basis of a paradox which 
 requires that if a man will save his life and 
 give it " a living birth," he must be content 
 to lose it in the estimation of the vain, empty 
 and Godless world. 
 
 But alas ! how many miss their golden 
 opportunity and fail of the divine exchange. 
 During my pastorate in Indianapolis years 
 ago a young, well-known man came back to 
 
THE PARADOXICAL ELEMENT 131 
 
 that city from Colorado, a victim of tubercu- 
 losis, that his body might be laid away in 
 Crown Hill Cemetery. He was a young 
 man less than thirty years of age. Shortly 
 before the end, he one day invited one of his 
 former friends, Stone by name, to take him 
 out in an easy phaeton for the air and that 
 he might ride to the spot to see the place 
 of his sepulture. As they rode along this 
 brilliant young man conversed with his 
 friend Stone as follows : '' Stone, you have 
 known me since I came to this city, almost a 
 youth, and began to speculate in real estate. 
 You recall how I prospered. Within a few 
 years I made a snug fortune of a hundred 
 thousand dollars, the securities for which are 
 on deposit now in a leading bank of this 
 city ; but, Stone, I have made a failure of 
 life. I once thought I was a great success, 
 but I was under an illusion. Stone, let me 
 tell you how I feel. I feel as if the eternal 
 God in my youth put into my hand a single 
 candle to light me along the path of life. I 
 lighted it and burned it all out for myself 
 and for myself only. I burned it all down 
 until there was nothing left but the snufF in 
 the socket of the candlestick. There is only 
 one redeeming element in the situation. 
 
132 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 Stone, the other day I took that snufF and 
 offered it to God. It's the meanest thing I 
 ever did. But, Stone, would you believe it, 
 God took it I worthless as it was, and gave 
 me instead thereof His own divine and 
 eternal Self. That's the whole story of my 
 life. Tell it to others when I am gone." 
 
 Here again was a paradox of a worthless 
 thing accompanied with a breaking heart 
 given over to and accepted by God. It is so 
 strange a thing that multitudes will say " it 
 is impossible I " And right over against that 
 paradox is another one that was possible to 
 that man in his youth, as it is possible to 
 every other youthful soul on earth. That 
 life once before him might have been sur- 
 rendered to the one only competent master 
 of the soul and of a true human career. Had 
 it been it would have been indefinitely re- 
 warded with all the highest values of earth 
 and the glories of the New Jerusalem for its 
 eternal home besides. 
 
VII 
 
 THE COSMIC IMPOET OF THE CROSS 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 THERE are three possible kinds into 
 which the nature of our universe or 
 system of things may fall : the de- 
 terministic, the legalistic and the evangelical. 
 The first implies, of course, a thorough- 
 going fatalism ; it conceives of matter as 
 eternal and self-existent, and all the appar- 
 ently personal forms in which it issues, e. g., 
 in the being of men as irresponsible, with- 
 out power of initiative or freedom in any 
 direction. Such a universe is orphaned. 
 The legalistic recognizes a proper moral 
 universe with personalities human and 
 divine, but all human attainment in it is on 
 a basis of pure merit or demerit under hard 
 and fast legal standards. Such a universe, 
 if it were composed of pure individual units 
 each created separately, as we suppose angels 
 to have been, and without a common 
 solidarity and heredity, such as mankind 
 has, might have much to commend it. But 
 
 133 
 
134 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 it is without comfort to a race that corporately 
 has fallen into sin and evil. 
 
 There remains the third possible view : 
 that our universe is evangelical. It was 
 brought into being by a Creator who would 
 have a race of beings made in His image and 
 reflecting that image. The aim of this cre- 
 ation was to find a basis for the self-manifes- 
 tation of the divine Creator. The goal of all 
 was worthy of a redeeming Creator and of 
 such vast beneficence as would in the end 
 justify all the pain and loss incurred in its 
 creation. 
 
 Although, as must always be the case to 
 mere finite understanding, mental difficulties 
 will arise respecting any one of these three 
 views, yet on the whole the evangelical view 
 has much fewer difficulties than either of the 
 other two, and so we accept it as the most 
 commendable to reason, and proceed to make 
 clear its inherent conceptions. The whole 
 matter is organically related to the New 
 Testament conception of the cross of Christ 
 truly regarded. Moreover, if the evangelical 
 view of the universe be the true one we have 
 an enormous advantage for the preaching of 
 the Gospel of the Grace of God. 
 
 In any discussion of the ways of God with 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 135 
 
 men, it is of first importance that we correctly 
 present our God. In some discussions of our 
 great question there is often a misplaced 
 emphasis representing, e. g., that God the 
 Father and Christ the Son are in complete 
 antithesis to each other — as if there were two 
 Deities, whereas these persons of the Trinity 
 coexist (together with the Holy Spirit) in 
 entire solidarity. 
 
 Sometimes the atonement has been rep- 
 resented as exclusively the work of Christ as 
 apart from the Father, whereas the Scrip- 
 tures teach that the atonement is eternal and 
 cosmic in the being of God, although it was 
 historically finished and expressed in Christ 
 late in time. There are six passages of New 
 Testament Scripture which emphatically 
 affirm this : that the atonement itself is eter- 
 nal in God and the universe, although his- 
 torically manifested in the work of Christ on 
 Calvary. I simply give the references with- 
 out quoting : Ephesians 3:5; Colossians 
 1 : 26 ; 2 Timothy 1 : 9, 10 ; Titus 1:2; 
 1 Peter 1 : 20 ; Revelation 13 : 8. 
 
 Sometimes it is represented that the pro- 
 pitiation necessary to the salvation of a sin- 
 ful world was a propitiation offered by Christ 
 to God, as if Christ was a third, outside party 
 
136 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 as related to the Deity, whereas the propiti- 
 ation was a self-propitiation of the whole 
 triune God in Christ, God on one side of His 
 being providing what on another side of that 
 same being He exacted. 
 
 Would it not help us to conceive that as 
 related to the sin question in our universe 
 there are two poles of moral action in God's 
 one and indivisible being? The one pole is 
 the moral aspect of His spotless holiness 
 which must flame with indignation against 
 sin. The other pole is the divine love which 
 morally compels Him to yearn for the sal- 
 vation of the same sinner His holiness con- 
 demns. In other words, our human sin 
 created a potential conflict (or antinomy) as 
 between these two moral poles of God's be- 
 ing. The question therefore arose. How can 
 God exercise these two morally necessary 
 qualities in His divine nature consistently 
 with each other and yet so as to save the 
 guilty sinner ? The answer to this is in one 
 word : In purpose even before creating the 
 world, God must through voluntary suffer- 
 ing have put Himself under the whole hu- 
 man race in order to justify such creation. 
 To come right to the heart of the problem : 
 this is what God did *' from the foundation 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 137 
 
 of the world." The fundamental reconcilia- 
 tion or atonement therefore was cosmic and 
 timeless; it was something wrought in the 
 being of Deity Himself, although it needed 
 to have '* in the fullness of time " such a 
 historical denouement and manifestation as 
 occurred in the Christ of Calvary's cross. 
 
 I am here not presenting a new doctrine 
 of the atonement but carrying the whole 
 matter back into the nature and activity of 
 the whole Deity, rather than leaving the 
 matter as an event isolated in time and be- 
 longing to the second person of the Trinity 
 only. The reconciliation therefore was not 
 something devised by Christ to save the sinner 
 from God, but by God in Christ to bring the 
 sinner home to God. 
 
 From this point of view it will easily be 
 inferred that our entire universe conceived 
 as a product of the self-manifestation of God 
 was and is from the beginning evangelical. 
 The final throne of this universe is a throne 
 of grace — not a throne of arbitrary power — 
 but a " throne of grace," grace being the syn- 
 thesis of the two moral polarities of God's 
 holiness and love in relation to the sin 
 question. The world therefore was created 
 through Christ Jesus and for Him ; it exists 
 
138 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 under the aegis of a grace-system. The thing 
 which is sovereign in God is not any one of 
 His so-called attributes as dominant over all 
 the others, but it is grace — that composite two- 
 fold expression of God towards sinful man. 
 The whole movement of God in human his- 
 tory was in order " that in the ages to come 
 he might show the exceeding riches of his 
 grace in his kindness towards us through 
 Christ Jesus." The whole meaning of the 
 New Testament expression of the significance 
 of Christ's coming and work was to set forth 
 what was constitutional in His Father. Deity 
 was always an atoning Deity. He was not 
 made so through the mere historical work 
 of Christ ; that was to set forth what was 
 eternal in God's nature. As St. Paul says in 
 his epistle to Titus, chapter 1, verses 2 and 3, 
 " in hope of eternal life which God who can- 
 not lie promised (and if so provided), before 
 times eternal, but m his own seasons manifested 
 in the message wherewith I was intrusted." 
 Creation itself had from the beginning re- 
 demption in reserve. 
 
 It is an old medi£eval error that God, be- 
 cause He is the Infinitely Blessed, cannot 
 suffer. Of course there is a paradox here, 
 but the holiest and most loving persons in 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 139 
 
 this universe suffer most, provided they are 
 morally sensitive and sympathetic, and God 
 is infinitely sympathetic with His creation. 
 Every being that comes into the world, there- 
 fore, is started with that advantage. Man is 
 from the start a potentially redeemed being. 
 Redemption was in God's purpose anterior to 
 creation. Then our universe is, and was ever 
 intended to be, an evangelical universe, a 
 universe indeed which sin and Satan invaded 
 but could not wrest from God. If we always 
 had this in view all our Christian work 
 would be simplified. It would be a matter 
 of mere cooperation with God in a work al- 
 ready potentially accomplished. On the con- 
 trary, we often struggle and agonize as if we 
 had to make God willing to save the world. 
 As one has said, we seem to be saying : '* Poor 
 God ! as if He had nobody to help Him but 
 me." How absolutely contrary is the real 
 situation. 
 
 Our theme leads direct to the determina- 
 tion of the meaning of '* the cross " as it is 
 used in Pauline thought. It is little short 
 of a tragedy that this term has been long 
 confused with the event of the crucifixion 
 at the hands of evil men. That crucifixion 
 was human sin at its maximum, the deepest 
 
140 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 crime of the ages. The Apostle Peter him- 
 self on the day of Pentecost charged the per- 
 petrators of that event with having *' killed 
 the Prince of Life," '' the Lord of Glory." 
 Those murderers were really guilty of dei- 
 cide, and when they realized it they cried 
 out in despair : " Men and brethren, what 
 shall we do?" They might and ought to 
 have perished on the spot but that the 
 Apostle went on to say that something in- 
 visible to them had occurred, simultaneously 
 with the crucifixion, which made it possible, 
 on condition they would repent, that they 
 might be saved from even such a crime. 
 That invisible something was that God from 
 His own voluntariness had deliberately given 
 Himself up in Christ to effect an atonement 
 for the very crucifiers. And that atonement 
 was something standing morally at the very 
 antipodes of their crime. Dr. Dale, in his 
 great book on the atonement, says that what 
 occurred in the divine action on that cross 
 represents " the sublimest moment in the 
 moral history of God." That this distinc- 
 tion should have been so much overlooked 
 has long proved one of the most serious 
 handicaps to the Christian religion. We 
 have to thank Rome for this error. Its 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 141 
 
 whole aim has been to impress the sensi- 
 bilities with the pathos and tragedy of the 
 crucifixion. There is such a pathos in it. 
 The Ober-Ammergau Passion Play, although 
 so impressive, is after all but an apotheosis 
 of the tragedy. Its effect on the conscience 
 is not normal, unless the observer reads the 
 atonement into the play. While the atone- 
 ment was accompanied by tragic phenomena 
 which God can overrule, yet the tragedy is 
 not the atonement. The atonement itself 
 when understood is always adapted to move 
 the conscience and to create reaction against 
 sin. 
 
 Among all those who stood about the cross 
 at the crucifixion — Josephus says about 200,- 
 000 people — only one person out of six classes 
 that spoke to Christ as He hung upon the 
 tree saw the atonement. 
 
 There were six classes that spoke. The 
 first was the ribald crowd that passing by 
 railed on Him, wagging their heads and say- 
 ing, " Aha, thou that destroyest the temple 
 and buildest it in three days, save thyself 
 and come down from the cross." The sec- 
 ond class was made up of the chief priests, 
 the scribes and elders ; they, mocking Him, 
 said, " He saved others, himself he cannot 
 
142 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 save. If he be the king of Israel, let him 
 now come down from the cross and we will 
 believe on him.'^ The third class were the 
 soldiers who also mocked Him and said, '* If 
 thou be the king of the Jews save thyself." 
 The fourth class were those who, when He 
 cried out, " Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," 
 thought He was calling for Elias, and they 
 said, *' Let be, let us see whether Elias will 
 come to save him.'' The fifth class was the 
 railing malefactor, who said, '' If thou be the 
 Christ, save thyself and us.'' 
 
 Now note that all these five classes united 
 in the same appeal to Jesus, ^' Save thyself; " 
 that is, " If you would prove yourself to be 
 the king of the Jews and Saviour of the 
 world." But glorious to relate, there was 
 one person that stood over against all these 
 others who did not say, " Save thyself." 
 What he really said was '' Save me, for 
 thou art in reality allowing the temple of 
 thy body to be destroyed and after three 
 days thou wilt rebuild it in resurrection 
 power. Thy cross is not finality, for a whole 
 kingdom lies away beyond it, a kingdom 
 conditioned on thine atoning death." And 
 he said in the most remarkable prayer con- 
 tained in the New Testament, " Jesus (or 
 
THE COSMIC CEOSS 143 
 
 Lord), remember me when thou comest into 
 thy kingdom.'' 
 
 He alone in that hour knew, as no apostle 
 knew, not even Mary, the Lord's mother, 
 that the crucifixion was not finality, that the 
 resurrection lay beyond it, the very corona- 
 tion of the atoning death. He alone used 
 the saving name " Jesus " (R. V.), *' re- 
 member or save me." And the adverb 
 *' when '' which he used was proof positive 
 that, as illumined from the other world, he 
 looked clear over the horrid tragedy which 
 evil men were perpetrating, and saw the king- 
 dom and the enthroned King, and begged 
 that he might become His subject when this 
 kingdom was established. The Lord gave His 
 sanction to this prayer of the model penitent 
 in His emphatic assertion, ^' Verily, verily, — 
 Amen, Amen, — I say unto thee this day shalt 
 thou be with me in Paradise." So Christ 
 took along with Him to the heavenly world 
 this first believer in the atonement after He 
 Himself had sent away his spirit to the Father. 
 He thus set His seal upon the faith of this 
 ideal penitent, because there was born in him 
 the first clear-cut conception of the atonement 
 that conditioned heaven. 
 
 The term " the cross," as characteristically 
 
IM THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 used by Paul, carries with it meanings that 
 need to be clearly discerned. Meanings 
 which were slowly acquired by the early 
 Church. When Christ died upon the cross 
 the disciples thought that was the end ; His 
 career was finished, and they despaired of 
 any posthumous power from it except as a 
 tragic memory. The very women whose in- 
 tuition was so keen went to the sepulcher 
 after His burial with anointing spices in the 
 form of embalmment. None of the apostles 
 believed in the resurrection when it occurred 
 until they were forced to it by repeated ap- 
 pearances and overwhelming proofs. They 
 then began to see that the death of Christ 
 was an event which issued in resurrection. 
 It was therefore an entirely unique form of 
 dying. It was voluntary dying and a vol- 
 untary living again. The central text on 
 the atonement as Christ Himself set it forth 
 is in John 10 : 17, 18 : -'Therefore doth the 
 Father love me because I lay down my life 
 that I might take it again; no man taketh 
 my life from me but I lay it down of myself. 
 I have the power (or right) to lay it down 
 and I have the power (or right) to take it 
 again : this commandment have I received 
 from my Father." That was the atoning 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 145 
 
 death — a composite thing — death, plus the 
 resurrection. The voluntariness in that 
 death and resurrection making it a move- 
 ment wholly divine despite the crucifiers ; 
 this was the atoning death. It was of such 
 a death as this that the illumined Peter in 
 his great sermon at Pentecost said in a burst 
 of triumphant realization, '' It was not pos- 
 sible that he — the sinless Christ, the Mes- 
 siah — should be holden of death." In other 
 words, the phrase, ** the death of Christ,'^ 
 as the Church after Pentecost became en- 
 lightened used it, took on an entirely changed 
 meaning. It was always looked at in the 
 light of the resurrection. It was therefore 
 not something merely endured as a tragic 
 calamity, but it was a moral and spiritual 
 achievement — an accomplishment — as was im- 
 plied in the conversation between Moses and 
 Elias and Jesus on the Mount of Transfig- 
 uration. How reads the account ? '* There 
 appeared Moses and Elias and spake with 
 Jesus concerning " — not His death — but His 
 " Exodus '' (the Greek word), a death that 
 while it looked like mortal dying, ended 
 rather in a victorious crossing, as of the Red 
 Sea. Accordingly it was an '' exodus which 
 he should accomplish at Jerusalem." 
 
146 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 And so in the ripe New Testament thought, 
 the death of Christ was always seen to be 
 something which eventuated in the resurrec- 
 tion of the Lord, and the resurrection was 
 always regarded as an event which presup- 
 posed an atoning death, and not merely mor- 
 tal dying. The cross of Christ, therefore, was 
 a term which stood for the voluntary self- 
 giving of Christ in death as seen in the light 
 of the resurrection ; and so the terms '' death " 
 and *' cross " in important connections came 
 to be used ironically. The cross thus was 
 not the end of Christ's career, but in an im- 
 portant sense the beginning of it. ^' And I, 
 if I be lifted up from the earth " — literally, 
 If I be uplifted out of the earth onto resurrec- 
 tion ground — " will draw all unto myself — 
 that is, I will become the new moral magnet, 
 the higher nucleating center of the new crea- 
 tion of mankind, ^' the first-fruits of them 
 that slept," " the first begotten from the 
 dead." Such was the atoning death — the 
 death implied in the cross of Christ. 
 
 The New Testament term '' cross," with its 
 newly acquired meaning in the generation 
 following the ascension of our Lord, was used 
 therefore as a watchword of the New Testa- 
 ment Church. It by no means implied 
 
THE COSMIC CEOSS 147 
 
 any such thought as that the Roman crime 
 which had been perpetrated on Jesus was for 
 one moment to be construed as the moral 
 basis for man's forgiveness and new creation 
 — a thought wholly repugnant to the moral 
 sense of mankind. But if God was to for- 
 give, He must do it on such conditions as 
 would not legitimize or license any continu- 
 ance in sin. It would have been a scandal 
 in the moral universe before all worlds if 
 God had treated lightly the matter of sin 
 itself or any movement on His part to release 
 the sinner too easily from the consequences 
 of his sin. Therefore moral cost must be en- 
 dured somewhere. 
 
 Years ago, in a notable school on Beacon 
 Street in Boston, the head master, Dr. A. 
 Bronson Alcott, although Unitarian in faith, 
 promulgated the principle that for certain 
 transgressions in the school the master rather 
 than the culprit should receive the penal 
 feruling. The sagacious Alcott thought it 
 important that fractious pupils should be 
 brought to see that " wrong-doing and pain 
 belong together." When after the first trans- 
 gression in the school the culprit pupil was 
 brought forward and commanded to strike 
 with the ferule the outstretched hand of the 
 
148 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 venerable Alcott, one blow sufficed, for the 
 whole school broke down together before the 
 benevolent-minded master. Besides, they saw 
 judgment becoming grace in the spectacle 
 before them. 
 
 In Bible thought, it was God Himself who 
 took all the cost of man^s salvation upon 
 Himself and so by virtue of the realization 
 of that fact man was so made to feel the moral 
 bearing of his transgression upon God, His 
 supreme moral authority, that that realiza- 
 tion breaks man's heart with penitence and 
 mortgages his soul and life to a new moral 
 response to God. 
 
 Such a result the cross of Christ, properly 
 understood, is adapted to secure ; and it does 
 it because that cross expresses some form of 
 holy yet loving divine action, and not the 
 mere crime of evil men, as some have falsely 
 supposed. 
 
 In a college visited last year, I was appealed 
 to by the president and faculty to bring out 
 the real dynamic contained in Christianity 
 that might prove moving to the student body 
 for higher Christian living. It was repre- 
 sented to me that certain low standards, such 
 as commonly beset student bodies, prevail ; 
 I need not particularize respecting these stu- 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 149 
 
 dent shortcomings, for they were such as beset 
 more or less most companies of undergradu- 
 ates in present day colleges. In my first lec- 
 ture next morning I began by putting three 
 questions to my student audience, not of 
 course to be answered to me but to their own 
 consciences : (1) " Were there some or many 
 of this body who were sensible of a distinct 
 lapse in spiritual living since the day of their 
 conversion ? '^ (2) '' Were there those who 
 recognized and sometimes acknowledged that 
 they were habitually dominated by some in- 
 ward principle of evil ? " (3) " Were there 
 some or many, even of intending ministers, 
 who were conscious of a great lack of real 
 power to impress their fellows with their need 
 of an experience of Christ ? " In other words, 
 had they ceased to become soul-winners ? In 
 case these phenomena characterize any of us 
 so that the standard of Christian living is let 
 down, it is because we have a religion with- 
 out dynamic. It fails at points where power 
 is most needed. I then proceeded to point 
 out that the central energy of the Christian 
 religion is in Christ*s cross truly understood 
 and applied. 
 
 At one stage in his spiritual realization, 
 the Apostle Paul came to the point where he 
 
150 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 sensed the need of this dynamic. In the 
 seventh of Romans, in which he discusses 
 the several forms of law that concerned him 
 as a moral being, he states that he had dis- 
 covered a law of sin and death — a sort of 
 downward drag — working in his '* members," 
 so that he felt like a living man bound to a 
 corpse, and he cried oat, " Oh, wretched man 
 that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
 body of this death ? " For a moment he 
 seems in despair, and then as he discovers a 
 higher law which overcomes this downward 
 pall, namely, *' the law of the spirit of life in 
 Christ Jesus," he triumphantly exclaims, " I 
 thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." 
 This helps us more clearly to see into the 
 depths of Paul's experience when he says in 
 Galatians, " God forbid that I should glory 
 save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 By this cross two things had been secured to 
 him : first, the world had been crucified 
 unto him and he had been crucified unto 
 the world. Two dynamic forces had laid 
 hold of him. We know what Paul was be- 
 fore: *' breathing out threatenings and slaugh- 
 ter " against Christ and His followers, hal- 
 ing them everywhere and casting them into 
 prison. He even held the garments of the 
 
THE COSMIC CKOSS 151 
 
 mob that stoned Stephen, Christ's first mar- 
 tyr. But when Paul awoke to realize that 
 it was a world-philosophy, a selfish, satanic 
 philosophy which moved the rejectors of 
 Christ to drive Him off the earth by a 
 felon's death, he was moved to break with 
 that philosophy forever ; he would have no 
 more to do with it. That was the first opera- 
 tion of the moral dynamic which belongs to 
 the cross which so wrought to reconstruct 
 Paul. 
 
 The second element was this : the moment 
 Paul repudiated this world-philosophy and 
 all its claims upon him, the Holy Spirit of 
 God entered into the moral vacuum thus 
 formed in his soul, and created the Christ 
 Himself within him, so that Paul, subject- 
 ively speaking, became crucified to the 
 world. There was thus a double crucifixion 
 in the experience of this persecutor of Tarsus. 
 He was fundamentally made new. He was 
 dead to the old and alive to the new. He 
 would therefore no longer '' tread under foot 
 the only begotten Son of God." He would 
 not *' count the blood of the covenant where- 
 with Christ was set apart an unholy thing " 
 — even a common thing. He repudiated 
 forever his sacrilegious type of living and he 
 
152 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 became set apart unto Christ and His service 
 in one final act. Such was the dynamic 
 Paul found in the cross. 
 
 I submit that if the sinful human race 
 was to be forgiven and renewed in character, 
 it was necessary that some tremendous and 
 vital dynamic should be brought to bear 
 upon that race " dead in trespasses and sins." 
 There were two elements needing to be em- 
 braced in that dynamic. If God was to for- 
 give He must in the first place do it on such 
 conditions as would not legitimize or license 
 continuance in sin. It w^ould have been a 
 scandal in the moral universe in all worlds 
 if God had treated lightly the matter of sin 
 itself, or in a movement on His part to re- 
 lease the sinner too easily from the conse- 
 quences of his sin, without moral cost en- 
 dured somewhere. In Bible thought it was 
 God Himself who took all this cost upon 
 Himself and so by virtue of the realization 
 of that fact man was so made to feel the 
 moral bearing of his transgression upon God, 
 His supreme moral Authority, that that 
 realization was adapted to commit his soul 
 and life to a new moral response to God and 
 service to Him. 
 
 The second element needed to enable God 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 153 
 
 wisely and righteously to forgive is this : 
 He must do it in such a way as to secure a 
 moral reaction in the soul against sin — some 
 form of absolute revolt from his previous 
 habit and life tendencies. This the cross of 
 Christ, properly understood, is adapted to 
 secure. But if so, that cross must express 
 some form of a holy, divine action, not the 
 mere crime of evil men, as some have falsely 
 supposed. But the atoning death on the 
 part of God in Christ must be a death 
 adapted to awaken the human conscience as 
 it was never before awakened and to purge 
 it from its old legal and '' dead works," so 
 that the conscience itself would become re- 
 newed and refounded in the perception of 
 God as an eternally redeeming Deity. Here 
 is a matter rarely half appreciated. 
 
 The natural conscience of man renewed is 
 grounded in the perception of God as a 
 Creator, and at most as a mere preserver, but 
 later when the soul comes to the supreme 
 crisis of its life and begins to see God in a 
 new light ; that far back of and anterior to 
 His creation God is also a redeeming God, 
 of whom Christ in history is but the mani- 
 festation, the conscience — the very seat of 
 moral being — by the aid of the divine Spirit 
 
164 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 becomes refounded or recreated ; and so it 
 comes about that the conscience which before 
 merely accused and condemned the violator 
 of God's law now excuses the penitent sinner, 
 so that he has hope at length of standing 
 unabashed before the final judgment throne, 
 a throne not of arbitrary power, but a 
 " throne of grace," of '' redeeming love," the 
 very ''judgment seat of Christ." 
 
 It will be remembered that when the 
 revered President Garfield fell a victim to 
 the assassin's bullet, the authorities of the 
 Pennsylvania Railway felt moved to mark 
 the spot in the waiting-room of their station 
 at Washington in some significant way ; they 
 removed from the floor a piece of tile which 
 had been stained with the martyred Presi- 
 dent's blood and inserted in place thereof a 
 bright brass star, and on the wall in the 
 room opposite and above it, placed a marble 
 tablet describing the significance of the star. 
 Of course, the star was a symbol of the pre- 
 cious life blood of the worthy President. 
 But that symbol had a sanctity that know- 
 ing and appreciative men always respected. 
 No loyal American citizen who appreciated 
 its import would ever tread upon that star. 
 The act would have been sacrilegious. The 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 155 
 
 coloured people used to gather at times about 
 that star until the room became impassable 
 to travellers, and so the star was removed. 
 So morbid was the veneration for the symbol. 
 
 Since the event of the coming of God's 
 only begotten Son into this world and volun- 
 tary laying down His life for it, the whole 
 earth, everything in it and all persons that 
 walk upon it, have been in the divine pur- 
 pose redeemed unto God. They are doubly 
 God's possession ; not only by rights of crea- 
 tion but especially by rights of redemption. 
 Men are not their own. 
 
 Would it be too much for us to imagine 
 that an event of so august significance would 
 only be truly symbolized if we imagined 
 every square foot of earth to be set with a 
 star in memory of the redeeming act, so that 
 every human being on earth is compelled to 
 meet that issue ? He is placed upon earth 
 thus set with stars. He can neither move 
 forward nor backward, to the right or left, 
 without treading on stars. 
 
 At what enormous advantage this places 
 every one of us for purposes of redeemed 
 living. If we perish now we do so without 
 excuse, for God has preempted all the ground 
 on which we stand, and ourselves also, by 
 
156 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 His own act through the work of His cross 
 to be His forever. Thus placed, we are shut 
 up to two alternatives of free choice. We can 
 either choose to think lightly of this stand- 
 ing ground thus set with redemptive em- 
 blems ; we can tramp about profanely, 
 ungratefully, irreverently, upon these stars. 
 But what sacrilege were that — the very worst 
 sacrilege. What man in his senses who has 
 an ounce of reverence left in his nature 
 would knowingly do this? "Father, for- 
 give them for they know not what they do.'' 
 But thank God I there is another alter- 
 native for each and every one of us. We 
 may say to ourselves, '' Inasmuch as I am 
 even without my own desire thus placed on 
 redemption ground, I can claim it with a 
 grateful heart, and I will so claim it ; so I 
 choose to respond to the intent and meaning 
 of the divine grace ; and if I must walk the 
 earth thus set with stars I will do so rever- 
 ently, gratefully, believingly, loyally, rejoic- 
 ing in the divine and saving standing ground 
 thus accorded me." That is faith, the very 
 opposite of the sacrilegious attitude and life. 
 Hence it is that the cross of Christ properly 
 understood becomes the very touchstone of 
 character ; and our attitude towards it will 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 157 
 
 determine our final destiny in the great 
 day. 
 
 We forget that the term " the cross," as it 
 appears in the New Testament, was never 
 written by an inspired writer until at least 
 an entire generation had elapsed after Christ 
 was crucified. Under the Spirit of God it 
 had come therefore to take on a new mean- 
 ing far below the surface, a meaning which 
 not one of those on Mount Calvary — not 
 even the apostles — saw in the tragic hour 
 when the heavens became darkened and the 
 Christ was dismissing His Spirit. 
 
 It is this meaning of the cross, as watch- 
 word, that the present day Church needs to 
 grasp and preach as it never has preached, 
 and must preach if we are to see a new 
 reformation profounder than that of Martin 
 Luther. Men on every hand are saying in 
 the light of the false implications of our 
 emphasis on the crucifixion event, '' I don't 
 like your God. He is an unethical God, 
 an immoral God. You represent Him first 
 of all as an impassible being, a God cold, 
 immobile, far distant, onlooking being, and 
 by a freezing edict making a victim of Jesus 
 Christ, the innocent, as if He were a third 
 outside party entirely extraneous to Himself." 
 
158 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 The real truth rather is that God tho all 
 loving, the infinitely compassionate, of whom 
 Christ is but His self-expression or revela- 
 tion, became His own victim. It is God 
 Himself the whole Deity that is vicarious, 
 that is suffering, that is redeeming. This 
 atonement is at the very heart of the uni- 
 verse. It was from before the creation of 
 the world ; the only Deity this world ever 
 had is ever an atoning Deity. In the depths 
 of His triune being there is a '* Lamb 
 slain " — in the infinite conscience of the 
 Deity itself — " from the foundation of the 
 world." He is the basis of everything and 
 of all movements in the created universe. 
 The supreme court of this universe is itself 
 vicarious and atoning. If it was concretely, 
 visually and historically manifested in Christ 
 we should be grateful for it, but there was a 
 cross set up in the universe of God from the 
 very foundation of things long before it be- 
 came visual on Calvary's mount. 
 
 Then, men also say : " You evangelicals 
 also preach a tri-theism. You even also 
 seem to represent that God and Christ are 
 two different kinds of Deity. You seem to 
 have one God to damn the world and another 
 one to save it from the God who damns it.'* 
 
THE COSMIC CROSS 159 
 
 Nay, nay, it is not one distinct, outside per- 
 son that saves the world from another per- 
 son ; it is the same triane God who dooms 
 us that also saves us ; He puts Himself under 
 us to save and bring us home to God. It 
 is the whole God in Christ in both trans- 
 actions. And it is the synthesis of these two 
 measureless things, holiness in God and also 
 His love, which constitutes that saving Grace 
 which we have so imperfectly tried to preach. 
 
 Our whole universe is evangelical. It 
 would never have existed except on that 
 basis. The atonement, therefore, like its 
 Christ, is cosmic, eternal and preexistent — 
 prevenient, if you please. 
 
 The atonement is no afterthought, no piece 
 of patchwork, no fragmentary thing, but in- 
 tegral to the universe. This does not mean 
 universalism, not even restorationalism, but 
 it lays the universal groundwork for the 
 whole race. The whole universe is poten- 
 tially redeemed, even the heaven and the 
 earth, but so far as man is concerned every- 
 thing turns in destiny for him, on whether 
 or not he penitently and believingly responds 
 to that grace or whether he repudiates it, 
 tramples it underfoot and proudly says, '' I 
 will have none of it.'^ 
 
VIII 
 
 THE XJLTIMACY OF THE MISSIONAEY 
 EHTERPEISE 
 
 THERE are many great things in the 
 world. There is one that is great- 
 est, and that is what we call the 
 Missionary Enterprise. The race of man 
 was created in order to be new-created or 
 redeemed. Oar universe is a process of the 
 self-manifestation of God to creatures made 
 in His image and who, stage by stage in 
 human history, become increasingly able to 
 take it in. By the '' Missionary Enterprise " 
 is meant the race on its way to new-creation. 
 In other words, missions are the sfelf-exten- 
 sion of the Church through the Holy Spirit 
 to the whole earth. This aim is to be su- 
 preme above all aims ; it is also timeless, 
 embracing all the dispensations. 
 
 In a time like this, however, when inter- 
 national relationships are so broken up and 
 the very foundations of international law are 
 questioned, we are compelled to think care- 
 
 160 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 161 
 
 fully and to use discriminating terms. For 
 myself whatever goes and however the proc- 
 esses change, I believe the aims and ends of 
 missions will remain. 
 
 The word '' end " is used in the New Tes- 
 tament in a variety of senses. Sometimes it 
 means a conclusion of a period or epoch 
 which implies the end of an old and the be- 
 ginning of a new period, not necessarily '' the 
 end of the world." Several dififerent uses of 
 this word may be found in Matthew 24. 
 The word, however, which has long com- 
 manded chief attention on my part, is a word 
 compounded of a noun and a preposition 
 (^(Tuvrehta) meaning consummation. Christ in 
 this chapter is not primarily affording us a 
 program that can be humanly traced. He 
 is rather discoursing on the nature or genius 
 of the kingdom. The whole discourse starts 
 with the compound word I have mentioned. 
 
 The disciples had inquired, '' Lord, when 
 shall these (last) things be ? and what shall 
 be the sign of thy coming and the consum- 
 mation of the age ? " Christ then takes up 
 the question and indicates the various forms 
 in which His kingdom will shape up in its 
 divine progress. 
 
 In the forty-ninth chapter of the prophecy 
 
162 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 of Isaiah there is a remarkable prophetic 
 unfolding of the program of missions as a 
 whole, embracing both Israel and the entire 
 Gentile world. In a pessimistic mood the 
 prophet had been saying in view of the re- 
 peated apostasies of Israel, *' I have laboured 
 in vain, I have spent my strength for nought 
 and in vain," but here he checks himself 
 with a new hope, for he has a new hope, 
 " Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I 
 be glorious in the eyes of the Lord ; " and 
 the prophet hears God further saying (v. 6), 
 *' It is too light a thing that thou shouldst 
 be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob 
 and to restore the preserved of Israel. I 
 will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles 
 that thou mayest be my salvation unto the 
 ends of the earth." There is no more com- 
 prehensive passage in the Bible respecting 
 the ultimate triumph of Christian missions, 
 no matter how many apparent interruptions 
 may occur. 
 
 I now wish to give some adequate answer 
 to the question how we may be sure amid 
 the many changes of the ages that this great 
 goal will be realized. There is often some- 
 thing gained by looking backward and trac- 
 ing past history ; such a survey predisposes 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 163 
 
 us to a new confidence in the history yet to 
 be made. 
 
 I call attention then to several distinct 
 stages in the past unfoldings of Christian 
 work in the world since Christ came which 
 will throw light on the future. 
 
 I mention first the fact that Christ's own 
 personal ministry was itself but preliminary 
 to something vastly larger. He said plainly 
 to the Syro-Phoenician woman who cried 
 after Him, " I am not sent but unto the lost 
 sheep of the house of Israel." Of course He 
 was, broadly speaking, sent unto the world 
 to be the Saviour of the whole of the world, 
 but not in His own immediate time and by 
 a ministration that was to extend itself 
 through generations that would follow Him, 
 but His program admitted of that formal 
 limitation. 
 
 There was one phenomenal event, shortly 
 before Jesus came to His cross, that estab- 
 lishes this. The event in which certain 
 Greeks or precursors of the Gentile world 
 came up to one of the feasts at Jerusalem 
 desiring to see Jesus. But Jesus entirely 
 denied Himself to these Greek inquirers. 
 Christ's program required it. A Christ in 
 the flesh, king of the Jews, could be no 
 
164 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 proper object of faith to the Gentiles for the 
 reason that at a later stage the Gentiles might 
 have Him as their risen Christ and Lord in 
 the Spirit in a dynamic form, which the Jews 
 as a whole failed to receive. When there- 
 fore this approach of the Greeks, mediated 
 through Philip and Andrew, was made, 
 Christ replied, ^' The hour is come that the 
 Son of man should be glorified. Except a 
 grain of wheat fall into the ground and die 
 it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth 
 forth much fruit." ^' I must go to the cross.'' 
 
 What could this language have meant? 
 Surely not that Christ was repellent of the 
 Gentile world, for the whole of which He 
 was to lay down His life. Nay, but the 
 atonement itself must first dispensationally 
 be completed before the Gospel itself in its 
 outward application could become Catholi- 
 cized, or made universal to the race. 
 
 What I beg you here particularly to note 
 is that a complete formal break must be 
 made in the method of Christ's application of 
 His Gospel to the world. But the break was 
 in form only and not in dynamic. The 
 verses that follow in John 12 : 25-32 indicate 
 that the ultimate purpose is that the 
 Gospel should be carried to the world through 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 165 
 
 Christ's successors according to the purpose 
 of God the Father as well as Christ the Son, 
 for when Christ a few moments later ad- 
 dressed the Father in the words, '' Father 
 glorify thy name," indicating Christ's will- 
 ingness to welcome even Calvary, then came 
 a voice from heaven saying, ** I have both 
 glorified it (in you) and will glorify it again " 
 (or repeatedly, in your disciples, who after 
 your resurrection will extend your grace to 
 all mankind) and '' this voice," Christ dis- 
 tinctly said, '' came not because of me but for 
 your sakes " — My disciples' sakes, in whom 
 I will extend Myself to the ends of the earth. 
 There was still another period distinctly 
 marked off from that of Christ's personal 
 ministry and that great era of world evan- 
 gelization which followed ; that was the 
 period of the forty days between Christ's 
 resurrection and His final ascension. It was 
 important that the early Church as well as 
 the Church of all time should be assured of 
 the resurrection. Without the resurrection 
 there would have been no atonement suffi- 
 cient to save anybody. And many other 
 elements of power would have been lacking 
 essential to the energy of a world movement. 
 If Christ had not convinced the Church that 
 
166 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 He was alive again He would have won no 
 followers after Calvary. He would have 
 failed to convince the Church that He was 
 God in the flesh. The sinlessness of His 
 career would have been shown to have taken 
 no effect on either mind or matter in so far 
 as sin had blighted and cursed both, for 
 Christ's resurrection was the evidence of a 
 positive achievement wrought by a sinless 
 atoning and divine human agent over the 
 whole empire of sin. Christ's resurrection, 
 therefore, although it resulted in an empty 
 grave, was far more than the revival of a 
 corpse. It was an absolute triumph over sin. 
 Christ's death and resurrection was a form 
 of death entirely unique. " It was not pos- 
 sible," said the Apostle Peter in his great 
 sermon at Pentecost, " that he should be 
 holden of death.^' His death plus His resur- 
 rection was a death that potentially destroyed 
 death because it was the death-blow to sin 
 for the whole believing human race. Christ 
 was " the first-begotten from the dead," '' the 
 first-fruits of them that slept," the one " that 
 liveth and was dead and behold he is alive 
 forevermore and has the keys of death and 
 of Hades." 
 
 Now the early Church had to be assured 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPEISE 167 
 
 of this. They were at first altogether averse 
 to believing it and the evidence was needed 
 to be enforced upon them. This evidence 
 was afforded in ten historic appearances of 
 the most signal sort. In one case to about 
 five hundred brethren at once and finally to 
 Saul on the way to Damascus in a vision so 
 overwhelming that it spiritually recon- 
 structed him and led to the creation of the 
 civilization of all western Christendom. 
 
 Moreover, it would seem that in order that 
 the early Church might be prepared for its 
 subsequent task of evangelizing the world, it 
 needed to discover its Christ as hovering 
 through the whole period of the forty days 
 between two worlds, now appearing and then 
 disappearing as evidence to the Church that 
 He was equally related to the two worlds 
 and the Lord of them. 
 
 And now we come to the most striking 
 fact connected with this whole period, viz., 
 that " the great commission," as we properly 
 call it, to evangelize the world, was not 
 uttered until near the end of this period. 
 Prior to this, Christ had taught all sorts of 
 duties : How to pray, how to give alms, the 
 beatitudes, all the parables, the entire Sermon 
 on the Mount and much besides, but this 
 
168 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 single, solitary command to missionize the 
 Gentile world He held in reserve. It was 
 the utterance, let us never forget, of the risen 
 Lord Jesus. He was Himself not officially 
 qualified as the New Head of the Race until 
 now ; the dispensational hour had not arrived 
 until now ; the apostles themselves could 
 not have received the commission until the 
 hour was ripe. And they would have been 
 without courage to undertake it ; but now, 
 when the climacteric hour of our Lord's 
 probation as the second Adam was reached ; 
 now that the atonement was achieved and 
 on the hill in Galilee — " Galilee of the Gen- 
 tiles *' — He could fitly speak the imperial 
 command, *' All power hath been given unto 
 me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore 
 and teach all nations, baptizing them in the 
 name of the Father and of the Son and of 
 the Holy Ghost, and teaching them to observe 
 all things whatsoever I have commanded 
 you ; and lo, I am with you alway, even 
 unto the end of the age.'^ 
 
 Because of the setting of this great com- 
 mission and as uttered by the risen Lord, 
 just when and where it was, I have been 
 wont to call this business of world missions 
 *' the resurrection errand of the Church,^* 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 169 
 
 Then came Pentecost — the day of days, 
 the day when the Church was born. What 
 a day that was I The day when the Holy 
 Spirit of God, the third person of the Holy 
 Trinity, came to His own, so far as man was 
 concerned ; the day when the holy breath of 
 the risen Lord came like a mighty rushing 
 wind and dispelled the night. The day 
 when the tongues of fire came and, distrib- 
 uting themselves, sat, a complete tongue 
 upon the head of each person of the elect 
 number of over one hundred and twenty 
 within the upper room ; the day when all the 
 jangled confusions passed into one clear har- 
 mony and '' All were with one accord in one 
 place " ; the day when the spokesman of the 
 twelve, the Apostle Peter, on one occasion at 
 least, spoke forth " the words of truth and 
 soberness," emboldened as never before, and 
 in tongues understood by all, illumining the 
 prophets whom he quoted, searching with 
 his interpretation all his listeners, carrying 
 home the doctrine of the resurrection, com- 
 forting the penitent and welcoming three 
 thousand rejoicing converts to baptism in a 
 single day. 
 
 This was the day when all Judaistic bonds 
 were broken, the swaddling bands thrown 
 
iro THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 aside, and the Church for all peoples, Par- 
 thians, Medes and Elamites, Mesopotamians 
 and Cappadocians, Phrygians and Pamphyl- 
 ians, Libyans and Cyrenians, Cretans and 
 Arabians, entered on its all-conquering and 
 universal career. This day of Pentecost was 
 the day when dispensationally the whole 
 Church of God, if not the entire world, was 
 given a status within what the electrician 
 would call *' the field of force," wherein 
 things now became possible to the Christian 
 worker never before thought of. 
 
 To make clear my meaning, imagine our- 
 selves in one of the electrical rooms of a lab- 
 oratory of physics. Here before me is a 
 plain oak table on the top of which lies a 
 mass of loose horseshoe nails. In a corner 
 of the laboratory is a powerful dynamo from 
 which two wires extend to a point under the 
 center of the table before me. So long as 
 the electrical current is not turned on, that 
 heap of nails lies lifeless and without affect- 
 ing each other. But now let me turn on the 
 current and immediately the two poles of 
 the currents underneath the table establish 
 what is known in science as the " field of 
 magnetic force." This field extends for 
 several feet in all directions about the table 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 171 
 
 so long as the current is on. I can now take 
 those nails and mould them up collectively 
 into various forms, as of a sphere, a cube or 
 an arch, and they will cling to each other 
 and stay where I put them as if they were 
 soldered together. Not one of them can es- 
 cape the magnetic power ; they appear like 
 things of life and the life is one life. All of 
 this is possible so long as *' the field of force " 
 empowered by the dynamo remains intact. 
 Let now that current of invisible but potent 
 fluid be turned off, and the figures built up 
 before me would immediately collapse into a 
 pile of lifeless, dead nails. Now what the 
 dynamo does for those nails, that the atone- 
 ment of the Lord Jesus plus His resurrection 
 power and His ascension, resulting in the 
 gift of the Holy Spirit from Pentecost on, 
 did for the Church of God, now composed of 
 both Jews and Gentiles. 
 
 At the right hand of the Father He sits, 
 the enthroned personal dynamo for the 
 whole world. Now the Church can work in 
 this '* field of force '^ what before was impos- 
 sible. Converts by multiplied thousands 
 come. No longer may peoples be classed 
 into creatures, clean and unclean. The 
 spiritually lame can be empowered, the sick 
 
172 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 be healed, even the dead be raised and whole 
 provinces and nations, beginning with pagan 
 Rome, can be reckoned in the empire of the 
 Church, for a new era has been ushered in. 
 
 Out of Pentecost another dispensational 
 event was born, the most momentous for the 
 whole non-Jewish world. That was the con- 
 version of Saul of Tarsus, the most bitter 
 and learned of all the early persecutors. He 
 fairly *' snorted out threatenings and slaugh- 
 ters " against the Christians. He held the 
 garments of them that stoned the saintly 
 Stephen, Christ's first martyr. 
 
 Armed to the teeth he starts on an extraor- 
 dinary crusade to Damascus, a northern ren- 
 dezvous of Christians, but is met by the risen 
 Lord Himself and brought to the light. In 
 a moment he is disarmed and shortly there- 
 after meets Ananias, is baptized and departs 
 into Arabia for the three constructive years 
 of high instruction in the school of Christ 
 and then returns to Jerusalem to enter on his 
 wondrous apostleship to the Gentiles, the 
 supreme apostleship. 
 
 Next to the fact of the incarnation of Jesus 
 Christ, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus and 
 his call to be the apostle to the Gentile 
 world was the most epoch-making event in 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 1Y3 
 
 modern history. There are those who super- 
 ciliously maintain that Paul perverted the 
 religion of Jesus. To hear or read them one 
 would think Paul was '' the evil genius of 
 Christianity." But they err greatly. 
 
 Paul was rather in his great epistles the 
 real interpreter and expounder of what the 
 person and work of Christ signified. His 
 message was but an extension and enforce- 
 ment of Christ's own. There is in Paul's 
 messages nothing foreign to Christ's. We 
 can find generally in Christ's teaching all 
 that Paul unfolded even on the atonement, 
 including His resurrection. Christ, however, 
 had to achieve the atonement. He was to 
 become in His own person that atonement 
 before it could be expounded and philoso- 
 phized upon, as Paul was especially commis- 
 sioned to do. 
 
 Paul, moreover, rather than the volatile 
 and effusive Peter, was set apart as the arche- 
 typal missionary and leader of the whole 
 Apostolic College in its world-wide gospel 
 propaganda. While Peter, John and James 
 each had their important parts to contribute, 
 it was Paul who was, par excellence, the in- 
 terpreter of Christ's person, work and mes- 
 sage to the heathen race. His gospel, he al- 
 
174 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 ways contended, was not his own but Christ's. 
 He declared he " received it not of man, nor 
 from man, but by revelation of Jesus Christ," 
 and he solemnly adjured that though even 
 he or an angel from heaven preached any 
 other gospel, he might expect to be accursed 
 from Christ in the great day. 
 
 One other thing must be said even of the 
 ministry of the chief of all of the apostles and 
 of those who have entered into their type of 
 ministry until the present day. That minis- 
 try is a form of " testimony " or " witness '' 
 to a great gospel rather than any general and 
 effective conquest of our modern world. I 
 am afraid that this word '* witness " has been 
 often narrowly construed to the needless 
 weakening of the cause. 
 
 Nevertheless, the equivalent of all that has 
 been achieved on gospel lines from Pentecost 
 till now must be measured in terms of the 
 concept *' witness." It was so even of Christ, 
 who in Revelation is called '' the faithful and 
 true witness." It was so of Paul, who de- 
 clared that the measure of his ministry was 
 the fulfillment of his life course and the min- 
 istry which he had received of the Lord Jesus, 
 that he " might testify the gospel of the grace 
 of God." 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 175 
 
 The human ambition is to be the whole 
 court, judge, jury, witness, sheriff and execu- 
 tioner. So ambitious are men to force the 
 kingdom, to compel what they call conquest. 
 Bat not so ; we are after all but '' witnesses.'* 
 Our " yea is to be yea and our nay, nay.'' 
 All the rest we must trust to powers above 
 and beyond. '' We have this treasure in 
 earthen vessels that the excellency of the 
 power may be of God and not of us." 
 
 In short we are now brought to the point 
 where we must recognize that there are yet 
 to be brought into play upon this problem 
 *' powers of the world to come " not yet ap- 
 plied in any such way as they must be to 
 bring in the kingdom. Here is the place for 
 the historical and dispensational cataclysms, 
 such as the present war, which cause us to 
 feel that back of all the phenomena in them- 
 selves so appalling there are forces at work, 
 which no gradual and evolutionary process 
 in the world could have brought about. 
 What may yet ensue none of us can predict 
 as to the forms things will assume. But we 
 may depend on it, the kingdom will surely 
 come. Whatever goes to the wall, missions 
 will not fail. *' He shall not fail nor be 
 
176 THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 discouraged till he hath set judgment in 
 the earth and the isles shall wait for his 
 law.'^ 
 
 But growing directly out of all that I have 
 above said respecting the historical, stage-by- 
 stage preparation for the world-wide diffu- 
 sion of the Gospel, we must prominently 
 emphasize the intrinsic nature of the work 
 of missions. This work involves first of all 
 a message — a message of the most specific 
 sort, that is, the message of an atoning God, 
 bent on redeeming the world through His 
 own suffering, vicarious relation to it. This 
 all became concrete and visual in the work 
 of Christ. This, on God's part, was a last 
 resort : if this be rejected *' there remaineth 
 no more a sacrifice for sin, but a fearful look- 
 ing for of judgment and fiery indignation 
 which shall devour the adversaries." So the 
 message of the missionary in itself is an ulti- 
 mate thing. 
 
 But more than this, the missionary him- 
 self, in the spirit and passion of his work, is 
 to be but an extended incarnation of this 
 message. True, the atoning work of Christ 
 ** is finished " by Christ Himself, but the mis- 
 sionary en rapport with his Lord is to " fill 
 up that which is behind of the sufferings 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE 171 
 
 of Christ for the body's sake, which is His 
 Church," in all lands and in all periods. 
 He is not to seek self-immolation or a life of 
 suflfering for its own sake, but he is to be so 
 given to his Master's work that he will suffer 
 anything incidental to its performance. In 
 this profound sense he is to be a cross bearer, 
 a witness — that is, a veritable ** martyr," 
 counting not his own life dear unto himself. 
 That is, no man can be a true missionary in 
 the deepest sense who does not accept this 
 ultimate contingency. In other words, the 
 missionary must live the atonement as did 
 Paul and Judson and Livingstone and Moffat, 
 John G. Paton, Chalmers of New Guinea, 
 and Horace Tracy Pitkin of China. It re- 
 quires a profound faith in the vicarious 
 atonement to hold Fmen to these types of 
 vicarious living. It is for this reason that 
 evangelicals have always been the foremost 
 missionaries, almost exclusively so. Deniers 
 of the atonement or doubters thereof find no 
 dynamic for the kind of divine heroism that 
 moved Moffat to bare his breast to some sav- 
 age Africans that they might the more con- 
 veniently drive their spears to his heart, 
 rather than turn traitor to his cause and 
 desert the field. It required atoning living 
 
ns THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 on the part of John G. Paton to face the 
 very poisoned arrows and rifles of New Heb- 
 rides cannibals, rather than leave them in 
 doubt of his quenchless, deathless love for 
 them. Nothing but the divine type of al- 
 truistic love held young Pitkin to make his 
 last stand against the Chinese boxers, wait- 
 ing outside the gate to behead him, and in 
 his last message to his wife in America to 
 express the desire that when their infant son 
 reached his majority he should come out to 
 China and succeed his father in bearing the 
 same cross in behalf of the poor ignorant and 
 blinded Chinese. Such expressions of man's 
 love for man, like that of their Lord, are an 
 ultimate in this world, and will be to the 
 end of time, simply because the cross of 
 Christ itself is ultimate : God Himself can 
 go no further. 
 
 The greatest temptation that now threatens 
 the missionary enterprise is that form of ap- 
 peal which would make it so easy as to avoid 
 the slow stages of the cross. Cheap pro- 
 grams, easy conquests, short-time periods for 
 its achievement, economic considerations, 
 pooling of issues among the societies, the 
 tendency to commercialize and secularize the 
 work after the manner of worldly business 
 
THE MISSIONARY ENTEEPRISE 179 
 
 and reduce to mere philanthropies, are most 
 seductive and likely also to mislead. Even 
 the martyrs of Christ may be enticed from 
 their high calling to lower conceptions of 
 their task. 
 
 When missions become so popular that 
 they easily divert from the ideals of the 
 atoning Christ to any form of undertaking, 
 however humanitarian it may be, it is a 
 stage of great peril. The tendency to ex- 
 ploit evangelical Christian missions in the 
 interest of any end whatever, less than that 
 which Christ proposes, and which animated 
 His spiritual-minded and self-effacing fol- 
 lowers from Paul to Carey, Morrison, Cal- 
 vert, Bingham and Hudson Taylor, will 
 simply ruin the whole precious enterprise. 
 
 Christ's resurrection errand for the Church 
 is final for it. This Church once entered on 
 its world-witnessing career from Pentecost, 
 having ** begun in the Spirit," will never " be 
 made perfect by the flesh." It is not impos- 
 sible, reckoning with our poor human nature, 
 that, even in churchly ways, the missionary 
 undertaking may yet apostatize and the 
 Church itself yield to policies that Christ in 
 His supreme temptation refused ; Christian 
 missions depend on things ultimate ; and 
 
ISO THE UNSHAKEN KINGDOM 
 
 they must " endure throughout " or they 
 collapse. *' But we are persuaded of bet- 
 ter things'' concerning Christian missions, 
 *' though we thus speak." 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
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 Best wields a facile pen, and a sudden gleam of beauty,^ a 
 difficult thought set in a perfect phrase, or an old idea in- 
 vested with new meaning and grace, meets one at every turn 
 of the page."— r/i^ Record Herald. 
 
BIBLE STUDY, PEV OTIONAU Etc> 
 
 A. T. ROBERTSON, P.P., LLP. 
 
 Studies in the New Testament 
 
 A Handbook for Bible Classes in Sunday Schools, 
 for Teacher Training Work, for use in Secondary- 
 Schools and Colleges. i2mo, cloth, net 50c. 
 
 In it are no references to books of any kind outside the 
 Bible. With the help of the maps and a New Testament one 
 can study this work with no other books in hand. 
 
 REV. JOSEPH T. GIBSON, P.P. 
 
 Jesus Chri^ : The Unique Rcvealcr of God 
 
 8vo, cloth, $1.50. 
 
 The author has sought to see, and aid others in seeing 
 Jesus Christ as He is presented in the Scriptures. He has 
 compiled a "Life" neither critical nor iconoclastic, but de- 
 signed for those who regard the Word of God as being not 
 only the infalliable gruide to faith and duty, but the authentic 
 chronicle of the earthly life of our Lord. Dr. Gibson has 
 harmonized the Gospels and from them constructed a graphic 
 narrative which, contrives, to re-limn an old picture with 
 freshness and charm. 
 
 REV. GEO. H. YOUNG, M.A.y Asn Prof. Rhetoric and PublU 
 
 ' Speakine, Colgate Univirtity 
 
 The Illustrative Teachings of Jesus 
 
 The Parables, Similies and Metaphors of Christ. 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 "A most readable and practical treatment of the methods 
 of the Master for the general Bible student and Christian 
 worker. A valuable contribution to one's conception of Jesus 
 as the 'Teacher come from God,* and revealing in life, con- 
 tent of instruction and method of presentation the will of 
 the Father." — Review and Expositor. 
 
 W. BEATTY JENNINGS, P.P. 
 
 The Social Teachings of Chri^ Jesus 
 
 A Manual for Bible Classes, Christian A.ssocia- 
 tions, Social Study Groups, etc. i6mo, cloth, net 50c. 
 
 In a series of twenty studies, the teachings of Jesus are ap- 
 plied to specific social sins and needs of to-day, such as poverty, 
 pleasure, war, the drink traffic, etc., and shown to be the sur« 
 and only solution of the problems of society. 
 
 ROBERT FREEMAN 
 
 The Hour of Prayer 
 
 Helps to Devotion When Absent from Church. 
 l2mo, cloth, net 7Sc. 
 
 "A volume of reverent purpose designed especially for 
 those who wish some form 01 Sunday observance, or who, by 
 stress of circumstances, are prevented from attending serv- 
 ices in the churches. To shut-ins, mothers with young chil- 
 dren, nurses and others who are unable to attend public wor* 
 ship, the book will particularly appeaL" — Buffalo BMpmt^ 
 
ESSAYS, SlUDIES, ADDRESSES 
 
 PROF. HUGH BLACK 
 
 The New World 
 
 i6mo, cloth, net $1.15. 
 
 _ "The old order changeth, bringing in the new.'* To a re- 
 riew of our changing world — religious, scientific, social — Hugii 
 Black brings that interpretative skill and keen insight which 
 distinguishes all his writings and thinking. Especially does he 
 face the problem of the present-day unsettlement and unr«at 
 in religious beliefs with sanity and courage, furnishing in this, 
 as in other aspects of his enquiry, a new viewpoint and clari- 
 fied outlook. 
 
 S. D. GORDON 
 
 Quiet Talks on John's Gospel 
 
 As Presented In the Gospel of John, Cloth, net 85c. 
 
 Mr. Gordon halts his reader here and there, at some pre- 
 cious text, some outstanding instance of God's tenderness, 
 much as a traveller lingers for refreshment at a wayside 
 spring, and bids us hearken as God's wooing note is heard 
 pleading for consecrated service. An enheartening book, and 
 a restful. A book of the winning Voice, of outstretched 
 Hands. 
 
 ROBERT F. HORTON, P.P. 
 
 The Springs of Joy and Other Addresses 
 
 - l2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 "Scholarlvj reverent, penetrating, human. The product of 
 a mature rnmk and of a genuine and sustained religious ex- 
 perience. Tke message of a thinker and a saint, which will 
 be found to be very helpful." — Christian Intelligencer. 
 
 BISHOP IFALTER R. LAMBUTH 
 
 Winning the World for Ghri^ 
 
 A Study of Dynamics. Cole Lectures for 1915. 
 l2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 This Lecture-Course is a spirited contribution to the dy- 
 namics of Missions. It presents a study of the sources of in- 
 spiration and power in the lives of missionaries, native and 
 foreign, who with supreme abandon gave themselves utterly 
 to the work to which they were called. 
 
 FREDERICK F. SHANNON, P.P. 
 
 The New Personality and Other Sermons 
 
 l2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 Mr. Shannon, pastor of the Reformed Church on the 
 Heights, Brooklyn, is possessed of lofty ideals, is puriwse- 
 ful, more than ordinarily eloquent and has the undoubted 
 gifts of felicitous and epigrammatic expression. This new vol- 
 ume by the popular preacher is a oontribution of distinct valut 
 to current tenuonic literature. 
 
BIBLE STUDY 
 
 REV. MARTIN ANSTEY, M.A. 
 
 How to Understand the Bible 
 
 An Exposition of the Method, a Demonstration of 
 the Power, and a Revelation of the Joy of Bible 
 Study. i2mo. cloth, net $i.oo. 
 
 A book presenting seven methods of Bible study, and fur- 
 nishing an appraisement of the respective value and spiritual 
 fruitfulness of each. The author's attitude towards questioris 
 of inspiration, historicity, criticism, etc., is that the Bible is 
 the unassailable revelation of the mind and will of God. 
 
 WILLIAM EVANS, DP. 
 
 Epochs in the Life of Chri^ 
 
 By the Associate Dean of Bible Institute, Los An- 
 geles. i2mo, cloth, net $i.oo. 
 
 A series of addresses, given on Sunday afternoon to large 
 audiences, dealing with the Birth, Baptism, Temptation. 
 Transfiguration, Death and Resurrection of our Lord, and 
 presenting cogent and concrete arguments for their inviola- 
 bility and acceptance as chief among the tenets of the Cbris- 
 tian faiths. Couched in popular language and presented in 
 popular style, 
 
 THROUGH THE BIBLE. BOOK BY BOOK 
 
 The Book of Genesis 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net soc. 
 
 The Gospel and The Acts 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $i.oo. 
 
 The Books of The Pentateuch 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 "The practical and popular expositions of the Scripture! 
 contained in this volume have been but slightly altered in 
 form from that in which they were delivered to the audiences 
 constituting the Popular Bible Classes. The aim of these ex- 
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 been realized is evident from the fact that at seven o'clock 
 each Friday night, from one thousand to fifteen hundred 
 people have met together for this form of Bible study."— 
 Preface. 
 
 REV. CLARENCE EDWARD MACARTNEY 
 
 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 ' i2mo, cloth, net 7Sc. 
 
 "A volume of rare interest, breaking comparatively new, un- 
 traversed ground. The great allegories contained in the Old 
 Testament are searchingly analyzed and given a new sig> 
 nificance and spiritual interpretation." — Christian Work, 
 
BIBLE STUDY 
 
 JAMES M. GRAY, P.P. Dean of Moody Bibl, Institute 
 
 Christian Workers' Commentary on the 
 Old and New Testaments, cioth, net, $2.25. 
 
 "At last! A truly competent commentary on the whole 
 Bible in one volume, and for a price within the reach of all. 
 These are desiderata long agreed upon, but never, in a really 
 popular sense, met before, Dr, Gray brought to the task of 
 producing such a book the powers at their maturity that have 
 made him one of the foremost Bible teachers of the English- 
 speaking world. Clearness of thought; the mastery of con- 
 densed expression without the sacrifice of lucidity; immensa 
 industry; adequate scholarship; thoroughness; a joyoug 
 trust in the truth of the Scriptures," — Dr. C. 1, ScoHeld, «4 
 S. S. Times. 
 
 ROBERT E. SPEER, P.P. 
 
 John's Gospel 
 
 The Greatest Book in the World. Leatherette, 
 net 6oc. 
 
 A «tudy of John's Gospel by a man whose far-reaching: in- 
 fluence is one of the great formative forces of religious life 
 in America. The material here brought together has already 
 been "tried-out" by Dr. Speer at some important student ooa- 
 ferences with conspicuous success, 
 
 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 
 
 Living Messages of the Books of the 
 
 "Bible, Vol. 1. Old Testament— Genesis to Malachi 
 
 Living Messages of the Books of the 
 
 Bible, Vol. II. N'ew Testament— Matthevz-Revelatioa 
 8vo, cloth, each net $1.25, 
 
 This popular four volume set is now published in two, each 
 volume containing twice the amount previously included. 
 This work is quite distinct from the author's "Analyzed 
 Bible." "Each book is treated as a unit, having a message or 
 messages for our own times." — The United Presbyterian. 
 
 MARCUS POPS^ P.P. 
 
 The Parables of Our Lord 
 
 A new edition. In one volume. International 
 Leaders' Library. Net 50c; postage extra. 
 
 "The author occupies a foremost place among evangelical 
 writers of our times. His writings, while scholarly, are at the 
 •ame time simple in statement, practical in purpose, and de- 
 vout in spirit." — Religious Telescope. 
 
 W. O. E. OESTERLEY , P.P. Warden of the Sodet, ^f 
 
 * ' the Aptcrafha 
 
 The Books of th^ Apocrypha 
 
 Thdr Origin, Teaching and Contents, Net $3-00. 
 
 The author has presented a highly satisfactory piece of 
 work. Besides what would be naturally looked for in a work 
 of this »ort — an introduction to the books of the Apocrypha, 
 ■ctiotmt of tieir contents, date of writing, etc., — this book co<«- 
 taiifa £m astonishing mass of useful and interesfrng matter of 
 
EARLIER WORKS IN DEMAND 
 
 WAYNE WHIPPLE 
 
 The Story-Life of the Son of Man 
 
 8vo, illustrated, net $2.50. 
 
 "A literary mosaic, consisting of quotations from a greaj 
 number of writers concerning all the events of the Gospels. 
 The sub-title accurately describes its contents. That sub- 
 title is 'Nearly a thousand stories from sacred and secular 
 sources in a continuous and complete chronicle of the earth 
 life of the Saviour.' The book was prepared for the general 
 reader, but will be valuable to minister, teacher and student. 
 There are many full-page engravings from historic paintings 
 and sacred originals, some reproduced for the first time."— 
 Christian Observer. 
 
 GAIUS GLENN ATKINS, P.P. 
 
 Pilgrims of the Lonely Road 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.50, 
 
 "A rare book for its style, its theme and the richness of 
 its insight. Seldom is seen a book of more exquisite grace 
 of diction — happy surprises of phrase, and lovely lengths of 
 haunting prose to delight the eye. Each of the great pil- 
 grim's studies is followed step by step along the lonely way 
 of the soul in its quest of light, toward the common goal of 
 all — union with the eternal." — Chicago Record-Herald. 
 
 S. P. GORPON r 
 
 Quiet Talks on Following The Chri^ 
 
 -"^mo, cloth, net 75c. 
 
 "Tnis volume is well calculated to aid in Christian life, tta 
 give strength, courage and light on difficult problems. It 
 grips one's very life, brings one face to face with God's 
 word, ways of understanding it and, even its every day a-p- 
 plication. It is plain, clear, direct, no confusion of dark 
 sentences." — Bapt. Observer, 
 
 G. CAMPBELL MORGAN, P.P. 
 
 The Teaching of Chri^ 
 
 A Companion Volume to *'The Crises of The 
 Christ." 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "One does not read far before he is amazed at the clear and 
 logical grasp Dr. Morgan has upon divine truths. Could a 
 copy of this book, with its marvelous insight, its straightfor- 
 wardness, its masterly appeal, be placed in the hands of our 
 church leaders, it would go far toward negativing the spir- 
 itual barrenness of destructive criticism. Here is a work 
 that may profitably occupy a prominent place in the minister's 
 library." — Augsburg Teacher. 
 
 ZEPHINE HUMPHREY 
 
 The Edge of the Woods And other Papew 
 
 '' i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 "Sane optimism, an appreciation of the beautiful and a 
 delicate humor pervades the book which is one for lover* oi 
 real literature to enjoy." — Pittsburgh Post. 
 
Princeton ThMJogiilffia 
 
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