ifWftfe 
 
 DEC 29 1921 
 
 BR 121 .K335 
 
 Kelman, John, 1864-1929. 
 
 The foundations of faith 
 
The Foundations of Faith 
 
THE COLE LECTURES 
 
 A New Mind For the New Age - ( 1920 ) 
 
 By Henry Churchill King, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 The Productive Beliefs - - - - ( 1919 ) 
 
 By Lynn H. Hough, D.D. 
 
 Old Truths and New Facts - - ( 1918 ) 
 
 By Charles E. Jefferson, D.D. 
 
 The North American Idea - - - ( 1917 ) 
 
 By James A. Macdonald, LL. D. 
 
 The Foundation of Modern 
 Religion - - {1916) 
 
 By Herbert B. Workman, D. D. 
 
 Winning the World for Christ - ( 1913 ) 
 
 By Bishop Walter R. Lambuth. 
 
 Personal Christianity ... - (1914) 
 
 By Bishop Francis J. McConnell. 
 
 The God We Trust -----( igj 3 ) 
 
 By G. A. Johnston Ross. 
 
 What Does Christianity Mean ? - ( 19/2 ) 
 
 By W. H. P. Faunce. 
 
 Some Great Leaders in the 
 
 World Movement ----- (19/1) 
 
 By Robert E. Speer. 
 
 In the School of Christ - - - ( igw > 
 
 By Bishop William Fraser McDowell. 
 
 Jesus the Worker (1909) 
 
 By Charles McTyeire Bishop, D. D. 
 
 The Fact of Conversion - - - ( 1908 ) 
 
 By George Jackson, B. A. 
 
 God's Message to the Human Soul ( 1907 ) 
 
 By John Watson (Ian Maclaren). 
 
 Christ and Science -----( igo6 ) 
 
 By Francis Henry Smith. 
 
 The Universal Elements of the 
 Christian Religion ----- (/goj) 
 
 By Charles Cuthbert Hall. 
 
 The Religion of the Incarnation - ( 1903 ) 
 
 By Bishop Eugene Russell Hendrix. 
 
/ 
 
 The Cole Lectures for ig2l 
 
 delivered before Vanderbilt University 
 
 ■ »' 
 
 The Foundations 
 of Faith 
 
 By 
 JOHN KELMAN, D. D., 
 
 Pastor, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church 9 
 New York 
 
 New York Chicago 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1921, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 
 
THE COLE LECTURES 
 
 THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- 
 nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum 
 of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by 
 Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con- 
 ditions of which gift are stated as follows : 
 
 " The object of this fund is to establish a foundation 
 for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the 
 School of Religion of the University, to be restricted in 
 its scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- 
 ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- 
 vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the 
 Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer 
 will be determined by the Theological Faculty. Said 
 lecture shall always be reduced to writing in full, and 
 the manuscript of the same shall be the property of 
 the University, to be published or disposed of by the 
 Board of Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising 
 therefrom to be added to the foundation fund, or 
 otherwise used for the benefit of the School of Re- 
 ligion." 
 
Preface 
 
 MANY volumes have been written 
 upon the subject of these lectures, 
 and it would be a very pleasant task 
 and by no means a difficult one to gather to- 
 gether and sum up opinions old and new upon 
 their main thesis, the relation between faith 
 and authority. The present volume, however, 
 does not offer this to its readers. It brings 
 with it a few old problems under whatever new 
 light may come from the experience of a long 
 ministry. For thirty years the writer has been 
 watching the play of religious truth upon the 
 minds of men, and his reading of theological 
 results has been revised in the light of innumer- 
 able experiences. In this way he trusts that 
 he may be able to present formal questions at 
 least from some new angles of vision and in 
 some new groupings. 
 
 Above everything else, this is a book of rec- 
 onciliations. In one sense controversy for- 
 wards the progress of thought, but no one who 
 has watched the history of recent religious de- 
 velopments can question the extraordinary 
 wastage and delay which have been occasioned 
 
 7 
 
8 PREFACE 
 
 by unnecessary controversies. Of recent years 
 theological discussions have hindered progress 
 and discovery by distracting the attention of 
 scholars and occupying the minds of the un- 
 scholarly with many subjects which are of 
 comparatively little importance, and which 
 might have been settled either one way or an- 
 other without affecting in the slightest degree 
 any religious truth. One may go further and 
 say that to a large extent it is even true that 
 apparently opposite schools mean precisely the 
 same thing. It is altogether amazing how 
 much of our divergence is simply a matter of 
 expression, and how little essential difference 
 there is between earnest men concerning the 
 deepest truths. These lectures are an attempt 
 to get below the surface of controversy to the 
 common facts of religious experience on which 
 all Christian men may meet and hold com- 
 munion. 
 
Contents 
 
 LECTURE I 
 The Foundations of Faith . „ • 1 1 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 The Basis of Authority . . . .41 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 The Character of God ... s 75 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 The Incarnate Love . . . .111 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 Means and Ends 147 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 Where the Faiths of Men Meet . . 175 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 For He hath founded it upon the seas, and es- 
 tablished it upon the floods. — Psalm 24 : 2. 
 
 THESE words are traditionally asso- 
 ciated with the story of the bringing 
 of the ark to Zion, and the establish- 
 ment of the throne of David in the conquered 
 Jebusite city of Jerusalem. It is peculiarly in- 
 teresting that Israel's creative idea should be 
 introduced in this fashion on such an occasion. 
 The object appears to have been to exhibit the 
 theocracy as the great end and aim of creation, 
 and thus to exalt alike the throne of David and 
 the God of Israel. 
 
 Yet it is not in connection with that great 
 historic conception that the text has forced 
 itself upon the beginning of these lectures. I 
 have found no other expression of the thing I 
 want to say so picturesque and arresting as 
 that which is given in these words. The 
 Psalmist, in his search for the foundations of 
 the Kingdom of Israel, has gone back to those 
 conceptions which are so charmingly described 
 in the first chapter of Genesis. In that chap- 
 
 13 
 
14 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 ter we see God entering upon the chaos and 
 the watery abyss of the beginning for the pur- 
 pose of distinctions. He separates the light 
 from the darkness, the heaven from the earth, 
 and the dry land from the sea. 
 
 The earth, as the Hebrews thought of it, 
 floats like a disc upon the surface of the seas, 
 after the manner of an iceberg. " The Great 
 Deep " is literally the waters which are under 
 the earth. To the Greek imagination the ocean 
 was a river flowing round about the world, 
 and in certain ancient maps this river is thus 
 depicted; but the Hebrew conceived of it as a 
 vast lake, not only around the disc of earth, 
 but actually underneath it. As for the disc 
 itself, in the submerged part of it there is 
 located the great hollow of Sheol. This is an 
 immense cave, the abode of the spirits of the 
 dead. Above Sheol, on the surface of the disc, 
 is the world we know, with man living his life 
 upon it. Beneath all lies the Great Deep, 
 whose waters are laid up there in the huge 
 storehouses referred to in the thirty-third 
 psalm. Into this bottomless Deep the roots of 
 the mountains pierce down like anchors, hold- 
 ing the earth stable. It is to this region that 
 the song of Jonah refers when the prophet 
 says, / went dozvn to the bottom of the moun- 
 tains, the earth with her bars closed upon me 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 1 5 
 
 forever. It is interesting to glance over the 
 older commentaries upon this passage. De- 
 litsch remarks that the earth has waters for 
 basis and would sink down into them but for 
 God's supporting power. Matthew Henry in 
 a very characteristic passage writes, "A weak 
 and unstable foundation (one would think) to 
 build the earth upon; and yet, if the Almighty 
 power please, it shall serve to bear the weight 
 of the earth. The waters, which at first cov- 
 ered it, were ordered under it, that dry land 
 might appear, and so they are as a foundation 
 to it." 
 
 There was much in the geography of Pales- 
 tine to confirm such a theory as this. All deep 
 wells and springs (and there are many of them 
 in Palestine and the neighbouring country) 
 suggested a passage connecting down to the 
 Deep. Also in certain places, like the Springs 
 of the Jordan, you have full-bodied rivers, or 
 at least considerable streams, suddenly emerg- 
 ing from the earth at some cave in a moun- 
 tainside, or even bubbling up from beneath in 
 pools that lie in the plains. Most significant 
 and striking of all are those underground wa- 
 ters of the Negeb, or south country, which are 
 heard but never seen. The traveller, putting 
 his ear to a crack in the ground in these 
 regions, may so constantly hear the sound of 
 
16 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 running waters far beneath, as to receive the 
 impression that he is walking dry-shod above a 
 vast network of river courses in the heart of 
 the earth. It is no wonder if the Hebrews 
 held this mysterious Deep in great horror, 
 calling it by strange names such as Dragon, 
 Serpent, Rahab and Leviathan. They were 
 land-dwellers who had no hereditary experi- 
 ence of the sea, and who associated with the 
 conception of great waters all that was mys- 
 terious, remote from life, and horrible. 
 
 One thing especially is to be remembered 
 about this curious cosmogony. It affords a 
 good sample of the way in which scientific 
 ideas arose in primitive times. They were not 
 speculations based upon material facts and 
 geological studies, but the reflections of the 
 mental and spiritual moods of those who 
 adopted them. It was the inner world that 
 gave its form to the outer, and not the outer 
 to the inner. All primitive physical science is 
 really constructed upon the model of man's 
 thoughts and feelings about life. When an 
 ancient man writes, He hangeth the earth upon 
 nothing, we have an excellent expression of his 
 sense of precariousness and insecurity. In 
 many difficult times that is precisely how life 
 feels — hung upon nothing, and in momentary 
 danger of falling away into the abyss. So 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 1 7 
 
 here, a man who feels the instability and un- 
 certainty of his hold upon the life of the spirit, 
 may very naturally transfer these sentiments to 
 the science which he is constructing. 
 
 And yet this earth, so precariously hung, is 
 firm enough for man's uses. He can dwell 
 upon it in safety, and walk to and fro upon his 
 various business on its platform, and looking 
 up from thence he can see the sun and moon 
 and stars. This is indeed a sufficiently exact 
 statement of our spiritual situation. In every 
 way the life of man is still felt to be a thing 
 of unstable equilibrium, insecure in the last de- 
 gree, yet it may be lived steadily and with con- 
 fidence. We swing forever over tremendous 
 mysteries, and yet we can live our ordinary 
 lives upon the platform on which we swing; 
 and, looking up, we also may see the heavens 
 and all their splendours. Thus the ancient 
 cosmogony is a kind of metaphor for our 
 spiritual life. It expresses the feel of life in 
 a manner which most of us recognize and wel- 
 come. The literal truth of it is within the 
 spirit of man, and every generation knows it. 
 The resultant ancient view of the world and of 
 the Great Deep is perhaps the finest figurative 
 expression of a spiritual truth that ever has 
 been or could be found. 
 
 As for the general truth which this concep- 
 
1 8 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 tion illustrates, I should like to view it in three 
 different applications in reference to our mod- 
 ern life and thought. 
 
 1. Natural science. One of the most in- 
 teresting facts in the thought of the past half 
 century has been the passing of that type of 
 crude materialism which was associated with 
 the name of Haeckel. The popularity of his 
 volume entitled The Riddle of the Universe, 
 and the influence which it exerted upon the 
 mind of its time, is now a rather puzzling 
 memory in the story of intellectual develop- 
 ment. Apart altogether from Christianity, 
 natural science swung back past Haeckel's po- 
 sition and incorporated more and more of 
 spiritual data, either as ascertained fact or at 
 least possibility. Sir Oliver Lodge in his 
 earlier days insisted upon the scientific possi- 
 bility of a communion with the spiritual world 
 through prayer, and still earlier Professor 
 George John Romanes, in his posthumous vol- 
 ume entitled Thoughts and Religion, told the 
 story of his soul, and in intimate personal 
 notes gave one of the most striking and sig- 
 nificant of all testimonies to the reality and 
 power of spiritual life. These great thinkers 
 had an enormous influence upon the mind of 
 their time, and along with other similar testi- 
 monies they brought it about that the or- 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 19 
 
 dinary man felt it no longer unscientific 
 to be a believer in his own soul. Yet 
 from every such period of thought as that 
 of the earlier materialism there linger 
 memories and prejudices. These remain 
 in the minds of future generations in spite 
 of the new invasion of spiritual hope and 
 faith. They remain, not so much in the form 
 of definitely stated and argued opinions, as of 
 a pervading spirit of doubt and hesitation 
 which tends to check men's advance in faith, 
 and to dull the edge of their confidence. One 
 such prejudice lingers even yet in regard to the 
 grounds of our Christian faith as contrasted 
 with those of science. It is supposed by many, 
 who cannot or will not take the pains to ex- 
 amine the supposition, that while science builds 
 its structure of opinion upon known and 
 proved facts, no such claim can be made for 
 religion. 
 
 It is this prejudice which gives permanent 
 significance to Mr. Arthur J. Balfour's book, 
 The Foundations of Belief. The first part of 
 that fascinating volume is entirely occupied 
 with carrying the war into the enemy's camp. 
 It is one long tn qnoqiie, in which the author 
 asserts and seeks to prove that, in respect of 
 ultimate foundations, natural science is in no 
 better case than religion. Materialistic scien- 
 
20 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 tists had supposed that their foundations were 
 secure down to the very bottom of things, and 
 that believers in spiritual realities had no such 
 foundations whatever. Upon examination it 
 appears that no claim could be less valid than 
 this. People speak about matter itself as if 
 they knew all about it, but when we try to de- 
 fine it our attempt is astonishingly instructive. 
 As one goes back through the many successive 
 theories which have arisen and passed within 
 a lifetime, the claim of ultimate foundations 
 very soon vanishes. The atoms have jour- 
 neyed through a longer course than the Israel- 
 ites, and have encountered more adventures 
 than Ulysses, without reaching any promised 
 land of definition. Even to-day they elude all 
 search; and indeed Bishop Berkeley, who de- 
 nied the reality of matter altogether, has never 
 yet been finally and convincingly answered. 
 Force is notoriously in no better case. 
 
 Even motion very soon lands us in amazing 
 perplexities. One remembers the ancient 
 puzzle of the Greek sophists, that a thing can- 
 not move where it is, because then it would 
 cease to be where it is, and on the other hand 
 it cannot move where it is not, because it can- 
 not be where it is not. Electricity is known 
 simply so far as the utilizing of it for practical 
 purposes; but no one knows what it is in itself; 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 21 
 
 and, for lack of understanding, the phrase 
 " the electric fluid " has long been found useful 
 to cover popular ignorance. Until recently, 
 the law of gravitation was considered as a 
 thing thoroughly understood, probed to the 
 bottom, and established forever; but Einstein 
 suddenly arose and relegated gravitation to the 
 same category of insoluble mystery as the rest. 
 We can utilize all these things but we cannot 
 know them, and we seem to be no nearer the 
 knowledge of their ultimate nature than our 
 fathers were. 
 
 The problem of life is in no better case. 
 Biology has given us wonderful accounts of the 
 facts as they present themselves to the observer, 
 and physiology has disclosed the marvels of 
 mechanism which lie behind all these phe- 
 nomena; but science, when a definition of the 
 ultimate meaning of the fact of life is de- 
 manded of it, is no nearer a solution to-day 
 than it was of old. Indeed Herbert Spencer's 
 word remains still as good as any that has 
 been spoken, defining life merely as the sum of 
 the forces that can resist death. By all these 
 ways we arrive at the same result, and men of 
 letters and of science confirm it in memorable 
 words. Lecky has gone near the heart of 
 things when he tells us that " The discovery of 
 law is not an adequate solution of the problem 
 
22 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of causes. " Hugh Benson has translated the 
 scientific confession into popular form when he 
 says that " the real searchers after truth know 
 that the further one goes in one's inquiries, it 
 only means that one gets nearer the heart of 
 some insoluble mystery; and that the highest 
 possible outcome of human knowledge, in any 
 line almost, consists in this — that one can state 
 with something like correctness, not the key to 
 the mystery, the answer to the riddle, but the 
 riddle itself. Professor J. Arthur Thompson 
 sums up the whole matter in one memorable 
 sentence : " Each new discovery only shows us 
 a wider circle of our surrounding ignorance." 
 
 Yet, in spite of all this question about foun- 
 dations, science is perfectly secure, and its con- 
 clusions are trustworthy. Our knowledge 
 cannot indeed begin at the bottom of any- 
 thing: but, beginning where our experience 
 of the thing begins, we can build up a satis- 
 factory system of real knowledge which can be 
 put to practical uses, not merely in the labora- 
 tory of the scientist but in the factory and in 
 the home. 
 
 2. Our knozvledge of ourselves and of each 
 other. This, like the former, is an ancient 
 puzzle, and it cannot be said that we are very 
 much nearer a solution of it now than in for- 
 mer days. It is pathetic to read, across well- 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 23 
 
 nigh four centuries, the lines of Sir John 
 Davies: 
 
 " Musicians think our souls are harmonies, 
 Physicians think that they complexions be, 
 Epicures make them swarms of atomies 
 Which do by chance into our bodies flee. 
 
 " Some think one gen'ral soul fills every brain 
 As the great sun sheds light in every star, 
 And others think the name of soul is vain 
 And that we only well-mixed bodies are. 
 
 " Thus these great clerks their little wisdom show 
 While with their doctrines they at hazard play, 
 Passing their light opinions to and fro 
 To mock the lewd — as learn'd in this as they." 
 
 In connection with the inquiry into the na- 
 ture of man's spirit, all sorts of questions arise 
 on every side, regarding the connection of 
 mind with matter, the dependence of thought 
 upon brain, and the identification or correlation 
 of the two. 1 It may be said without much fear 
 of contradiction that in this field also, though 
 much has been written, nothing or next to 
 nothing is known. Similarly the old contro- 
 versy between free-will and necessity has had 
 enough written upon it to upset the balance of 
 
 3 Cf. James* Human Immortality with its illuminating 
 words concerning the three-fold possibility of this con- 
 nection — creative, releasing, or expressive. 
 
24 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 the world, as it has upset the balance of a good 
 many of its inhabitants. Yet each generation 
 is puzzled again, and it is pathetic to see a new 
 crop of fresh spirits advancing each year to the 
 trodden battlefields and adopting the ancient 
 cries. The very existence of any other person 
 besides oneself comes into this category. If 
 you meet with a lunatic who denies that other 
 people exist, and considers that everybody else 
 is but a shadow while he is the only reality, I 
 shall defy you to prove him wrong by a logical 
 argument which will be thoroughly satisfactory 
 either to him or to yourself. You may in- 
 deed say to him that it is simply a matter of 
 votes, that the vast majority of people think 
 in this way and so one must believe it: but it 
 will hardly be possible for you not to remem- 
 ber that the vast majority of people have on 
 many occasions been wr©ng, while the one ap- 
 parent lunatic has been proved right. Luna- 
 tics in general are desperately difficult people 
 to argue with, not because they are unreason- 
 able, but because they are so terribly reasonable 
 along one line ; and much intercourse with them 
 leads to frequent humiliation. 
 
 Thus, so far as absolutely proved knowl- 
 edge goes, we must all confess ourselves com- 
 pletely ignorant upon many matters which are 
 commonly taken for granted, and on which we 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 25 
 
 act in the practical sphere every day. The 
 only answer that we can give to any one who 
 objects to this is just that by the very constitu- 
 tion of our human nature we must take the 
 risk. We find ourselves here under the stern 
 necessity of living, and in order to live we 
 must rest and act upon certain fundamental 
 convictions, without which human life would 
 be impossible. Further, if we take this course, 
 we soon find that life works back to knowl- 
 edge. By taking certain fundamental things 
 for granted, we attain to a practical knowl- 
 edge of their reality, which cannot be always 
 defended by abstract reasoning, but which is 
 none the less true knowledge. Among other 
 such convictions we attain to that of one an- 
 other's existence, a conviction which satisfies 
 all the real necessities of thought, although it 
 may satisfy little or nothing of its curiosity. 
 
 3. Faith is equally, but not in any greater 
 degree, founded upon insoluble mysteries. 
 
 " Oh, I would like to ken — to the beggar-wife 
 says I 
 The reason o* the cause an* the wherefore o* 
 
 the why, 
 Wi' mony anither riddle brings the tear into 
 
 my e'e. 
 ' It's gey an* easy spierin',' says the beggar-wife 
 to me." 
 
26 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 If some one challenges our belief in the ex- 
 istence of God, asserting that this is but the 
 relic of a childish fancy, or that it had its 
 origins in primitive fear, we may point out that 
 we have dropped other childish beliefs, while 
 we feel constrained to retain this one on other 
 grounds. We may admit that primitive fears 
 have intensified man's conviction of God, but 
 may still maintain that they do not create it. 
 In such ways we shall be led into long contro- 
 versy which may occupy many volumes. But 
 in all such controversies, through which men 
 have sought to establish belief in God by argu- 
 ment, it is to be noted that the main stress is 
 laid upon origins, and the center of debate al- 
 ways ranges around these. It is an endless 
 warfare, and in the great majority of minds it 
 leads to no particular result. But there comes 
 a time when the believer discovers that he is 
 not really interested in the origins of beliefs, 
 but in the actual beliefs as he holds them — 
 facts of his own religious experience. Just as 
 in former cases, so here. You may utilize 
 these facts although you cannot understand 
 them ; and in the end you will discover that if 
 any progress is to be made, the only course is 
 to leave the questions of origins alone in the 
 meantime, since we cannot now go back to 
 them with any certainty or clearness of vision. 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 2^ 
 
 The facts must be attacked at the present cross- 
 section of our actual human experience. We 
 have to work out all such questions in terms of 
 religious values, and ask, What part does God 
 play in my life as I know it now? Can I or 
 can I not meet Him within the workings of my 
 soul and discover Him in the revelations and 
 interpretations of life which my own soul pro- 
 vides ? 
 
 The same thing holds true in regard to im- 
 mortality and the life beyond death. After 
 many centuries of argument it must be frankly 
 confessed that nothing has emerged from ab- 
 stract argument which is absolutely convincing 
 to the intellect. The stock argument from the 
 analogy of nature, the hints supposed to be 
 given in consciousness concerning a previous 
 existence, the classical arguments from the na- 
 ture of the soul, are confessedly insecure and 
 disappointing. From the poetic point of view 
 they are interesting and beautiful, but to many 
 minds they lack compelling power. It is a 
 very striking fact that when Robert Browning 
 sought to argue out this question he was able 
 only to reach the dim probabilities of La 
 Saisiaz: 
 
 " So I hope — no more than hope, but hope — no 
 less than hope." 
 
28 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 But, both in earlier and in later times, he 
 reached the certainty of Prospice and of the 
 Epilogue to Asolando by employing other 
 methods. Our own experience of love, reveal- 
 ing God within the soul, may give to us the 
 Psalmist's ancient conviction that a soul once 
 loved cannot be lost, and that He who has re- 
 vealed Himself to us as Lover of the soul will 
 certainly not leave it to death. 1 The upshot 
 of the whole matter is this, that so long as you 
 face such problems on the ground of mere in- 
 tellectual debate, it will be found that there is 
 always some possible way of arguing against 
 evidence. You will never reach by logic that 
 firmness and permanence of conviction which 
 may be derived from the simple act by which * 
 the soul faces, interprets, and trusts its own ex- 
 perience. 
 
 The acutest point for the preacher is his pre- 
 sentation of the central fact of Christian faith, 
 the cross of Christ. Much has been written 
 about the atonement and many theories pro- 
 pounded, but it must be confessed that the re- 
 sults have been rather disappointing. After 
 all is said about that stupendous dogma, no 
 man who has thought deeply upon it can pro- 
 fess to understand it. It rests upon profound 
 mysteries which at the present time are wholly 
 1 Psalm 16 : 10. 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 29 
 
 insoluble. Behind it there is the long line of 
 the thoughts of ancient men, generations and 
 centuries of barbaric sacrifice and the guilt and 
 fear which inspire it; profound convictions as 
 to the justice of God and the love of God in 
 their relations to one another; unfathomable 
 mysteries of free-will and responsibility; tragic 
 facts of human sin and the curse which fol- 
 lows upon it. Altogether this doctrine is 
 founded upon the floods, the tossing sea of the 
 life of human conscience and the deeper and 
 more tremendous depths of the divine nature 
 and purpose. And yet, although it rests upon 
 such profound and unfathomable mysteries, it 
 is nevertheless founded, and it forms a firm 
 and stable platform for man's experience of 
 redemption. It is secure enough for all that 
 any man's soul will ever need. You do not re- 
 quire to begin at the foundations of the uni- 
 verse, nor at the dawn of history, nor at any 
 metaphysical theory underlying the doctrine of 
 atonement. You may begin here, at the one 
 simple question as to what religious value the 
 cross has for man, and what it can do for his 
 soul. Doubtless it is founded upon terrifying 
 floods of moral horror which register their 
 fullest tide at Calvary, and upon depths of the 
 mystery of divine operation which no man has 
 ever yet comprehended. But for us it means 
 
30 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 simply the love of God manifest in Jesus 
 Christ, satisfying all the unknown require- 
 ments of our tragic and distracted case. In 
 our acceptance of it we find the love of God 
 flooding our soul, beating back the chase of 
 enemies, making us over again in a new man- 
 hood, giving to the outraged conscience a per- 
 manent peace, and to the sick and haunted soul 
 the calm joy of the redeemed. 
 
 Thus it appears that religious faith, like the 
 other beliefs which we have mentioned, seems 
 to rest upon nothing. There are times when 
 the anxious believer discovers that his faith's 
 foundations have apparently vanished and are 
 out of sight. At such times it is not surpris- 
 ing that he should be tempted to ask, What if 
 it be not true after all? Nor will it be sur- 
 prising if, in his attempt to answer that ques- 
 tion, he should discover that he has no argu- 
 ment by which he may effectually silence 
 doubt. At such a time there is but one thing 
 for him to do. He must fall back upon his 
 own experience and find in that a sufficient 
 ground for believing. Whatever floods of 
 mystery the doctrines of Christianity are ulti- 
 mately founded on, here in actual present ex- 
 perience there is solid ground beneath them, a 
 sufficient platform for faith to stand upon. 
 Religion does not mean that we profess to 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 3* 
 
 know what God is and that we are able to de- 
 fine Him. It means that we know God as an 
 actual potent factor in our own lives. The 
 late Dr. Dale has said that it is easy to believe 
 in God so long as one is not asked to define 
 Him, and there is a far-reaching truth in the 
 words. In our faith we have to begin some- 
 where, and we simply cannot get to the ulti- 
 mate roots of things to begin there. 
 
 But the real seat of authority is not in the 
 ultimate roots of things but in a man's own 
 heart and life, and he who seeks it outside of 
 these will seek in vain. This experience- 
 knowledge will satisfy your own mind and 
 soul. You know it, although you do not 
 know how you know it. You will observe 
 that others find it in the main to be the same 
 as that which you find, so that it will verify 
 itself not only in individual dogmatic cer- 
 tainty, but in a common Christian faith. But 
 the main point for each man is not what others 
 believe but what he himself believes, and the 
 main ground of his certainty must ultimately 
 rest in the processes of his own mind ' 
 
 * It may seem to some that this is unreasonable. But 
 there is a clear distinction to be drawn between reason 
 and reasoning. We frankly admit that such certainties 
 cannot be arrived at by reasoning. Yet in the larger 
 sense they may be given in reason. Logic is not the 
 
32 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 Thus, from the purely theoretical point of 
 view, faith is, and always must be, a venture. 
 Of every earnest thinker the question is asked, 
 How much intellectual completeness are you 
 prepared to risk, or even to sacrifice, on the 
 chance of your faith proving to be true ? The 
 answer is that the venture justifies itself by 
 fitting you into an intelligible universe. This 
 answer is made, primarily, on the ground that 
 your own individual experience will back and 
 confirm your faith. It is further supported by 
 the fact that many thousands of the noblest 
 and most trustworthy voices tell you that their 
 faith also has been thus confirmed. Yet in this 
 matter the all-important question concerns our 
 own experience. Christianity always goes on 
 the principle that they who trust shall come to 
 know. It would seem that life likes to be 
 trusted, and that it rewards the trustful. Our 
 argument is that it will in a practical manner 
 convince each one who ventures it, although 
 none of us may know theoretically how that 
 conviction is achieved. 
 
 Of course there always will be some who 
 
 only method of reason. It includes much that cannot 
 be reduced to logical formulae, and, as Benjamin Kidd 
 has excellently expressed it, such " ultra-rational sanc- 
 tions" are equally valid with results of formal rea- 
 soning. 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 33 
 
 demand a complete proof, and who insist upon 
 solving the whole problem of the universe 
 before they will consent to believe. They will 
 have all or nothing, and no faith will satisfy 
 them which cannot trace its pedigree back to 
 the furthest metaphysical ancestry. Our reply 
 to such must be that we are only asking them 
 to do in their religion the thing which they 
 are actually doing — which indeed they cannot 
 help doing — in everything else. Your whole 
 world of conviction, both as regards science, 
 and even as regards personal existence itself, 
 is founded upon the floods. Its ultimate defi- 
 nitions are lost in metaphysical mystery. If 
 that be so, it is wholly unfair to deny to us 
 the right to do m our Christian faith the very 
 identical thing which you are doing in every 
 other region of belief. If it be a matter of 
 absolute proof, you have no right to believe in 
 your own personal existence, or in the data 
 of elementary natural science. We claim to 
 hold our faith on precisely the same terms. 
 
 Dr. Dale in one of his books gives an inter- 
 esting incident in connection with a certain 
 chapel which had a peculiarly noble set of 
 pillars on which the heavy weight above the 
 pulpit seemed to rest. During structural 
 alterations these pillars and the panelled spaces 
 between them had to be cut across. Then, to 
 
34 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 their astonishment, the people found that the 
 pillars were actually hanging from the very 
 structures which they were supposed to uphold. 
 So, in the last analysis, it is with faith. All 
 human faith ultimately rests on experience, 
 either direct or transmitted, and the real 
 strength of the faith is measured by the 
 directness and immediacy of its connection 
 with the believer's own experience. Instead of 
 our experience- faith depending on its meta- 
 physical explanations, the fact is that these 
 explanations depend entirely upon it. 
 
 All this is by no means so strange as it 
 seems. In these days, when M. Bergson is 
 telling us in such brilliant fashion that knowl- 
 edge is for life and not life for knowledge, we 
 can well believe that there must be within our 
 own lives some vital facts which are creditable 
 in their own right. All that concerns us most, 
 either for time or for eternity, is founded in- 
 tellectually upon floods of insoluble mystery. 
 However much we would like to do so, there 
 is no part of it which we can search to its 
 foundations and prove to the satisfaction of 
 abstract reasoning. Our wisdom, therefore, 
 and our only hope, is continually to turn back 
 from gray theory to the brilliance of actual 
 life, to cease from shouting our vain questions 
 down into the bottomless abyss, to lay hold 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 35 
 
 upon life itself and to demand that it shall tell 
 us its own meaning. 
 
 We must still face the last stand of doubt. 
 Suppose that a man has accepted the general 
 point of view which this lecture has sought to 
 express, there remains one final difficulty. 
 That is the doubt concerning experience itself, 
 which would rob us of everything if it were to 
 triumph. This doubt is sometimes due to a 
 blind habit of questioning everything, which 
 leads the mind into a condition of hopeless 
 irresolution and hesitancy. There is a story 
 of a dull pupil who was the despair of his tutor 
 in elementary mathematics. When at last, 
 after much tribulation, the tutor congratulated 
 himself upon having made him understand the 
 meaning of simple equations, his hopes were 
 dashed by a perplexed expression upon the 
 young man's face and the question, But what 
 if x should turn out not to be the unknown 
 quantity after all? But, apart from such a 
 disease of scepticism as that, there are times 
 when we seem to have reason to doubt the 
 validity of our own experience. At such 
 times we are not sure of ourselves, nor of the 
 true meaning and value of the world of 
 thoughts and feelings within us. Indeed we 
 perceive that many of the experiences upon 
 which our every-day life and thought actually 
 
36 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 rest are themselves confused and unintelligible. 
 Blunders, shames and sorrows, surprising suc- 
 cesses and glories, form the stuff of that moral 
 and emotional tragedy which is ourselves, as 
 memory and introspection reveal us. It baffles 
 any man to understand his own soul, and in 
 what has been called " the endless vagueness 
 of modern life" we are far more confused 
 than were our fathers. Beneath our actual 
 character we know that there is heredity at 
 work. Beneath all our beliefs there are hidden 
 predispositions. We are subject to changes of 
 mood, to passionate storms, to contradictory 
 impulses, and to a seething swirl of questions 
 of all sorts. It is no wonder if we are tempted 
 at times to demand some solution, final and 
 absolute, which shall reveal us authoritatively 
 to ourselves. In older days this trouble took 
 the form of spiritual despondency. Men 
 asked whether they were saved, whether they 
 were elected, whether there was any hope for 
 them beyond the fleeting hopes of earth. They 
 distrusted their religious experience, ques- 
 tioned whether it were authentic, and fell upon 
 bitterness because of a sense of chronic failure 
 which would yield neither to the most strenu- 
 ous effort nor to the most exalted visions of 
 faith. 
 The modern form is different. It consists 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 37 
 
 of a distrust of character and a rooted tend- 
 ency to question and reexamine one's prin- 
 ciples. These seem not to be fixed and stable 
 rocks, but rather things floating upon the sur- 
 face of the flood, whose location is determined 
 by the will of the tides of life. What is the 
 meaning of all this? we ask, and where can 
 we find any permanently satisfactory and 
 stable ground for belief? We have already 
 transferred the basis of faith from accepted 
 dogma to actual known experience, but if our 
 experience itself be subject to so much change, 
 what are we to do for faith? The answer is 
 that if God be founding our lives upon the 
 floods, our experience of God's grace must 
 be founded there also. The consensus of opin- 
 ion of Christian men, or at least of the vast 
 majority of them, is that the faith by which 
 they have lived and died was not given them in 
 halcyon days of calm. Generally it came in 
 certainties that were flashed upon them in the 
 midst of stormy waters. The condition of 
 mind in which we receive our faith is not 
 usually that of stable equilibrium and cool and 
 reasoned thinking, but in turbulent experience. 
 It is there that we find the characteristic 
 foundations for personal faith and assurance. 
 Man's sins and follies and desperations are a 
 true and normal platform for his faith. It 
 
38 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 was not the Psalmist alone, but many centuries 
 of earnest men following him, who might have 
 written the undying words: He drew me out 
 of great waters. 
 
 Doubtless each one of us, whether his faith 
 be of the older or of the more modern type, 
 will discover many questions about himself and 
 his spiritual condition which he cannot answer. 
 His faith will find no satisfactory basis even 
 in his own past experience. Looking back 
 through the years it will be easy for him to 
 question the validity of high spiritual moments 
 which at the time appeared to bring to him the 
 very voice of God. A disquieting suspicion 
 will come upon him that his state of grace 
 cannot be proved nor assured, either from the 
 character he is achieving or from his memory 
 of conversion in the past. All that is not sur- 
 prising. These are but the floods on which 
 faith and religious life are founded, and the 
 point of wisdom is to take it so, and to attend, 
 not to such foundations, but to the one little 
 platform of immediate present experience 
 which floats upon their surface. Begin where 
 you are, though it be between sky and water. 
 Do not trouble about the reality or the validity 
 of any past experience, whether it be conver- 
 sion or any other whatsoever. Here and now, 
 stable or floating upon the floods, choose God 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 39 
 
 for your God and trust His good faith for the 
 treatment of your soul. Choose Christ for 
 your Christ, to interpret the meaning of life 
 and the redeeming love of God to you. Then 
 shall you know most certainly that there is a 
 Father in heaven, and that Christ saves men. 
 
LECTURE II 
 THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 
 
LECTURE II 
 THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 
 
 Acts 17 : 22-32. 
 
 THE argument of the opening lecture 
 was that, in regard to its ultimate 
 foundations, religious faith is in pre- 
 cisely the same position as physical science is. 
 In neither case is it possible to build up a 
 system from the bottom rocks: in each case 
 we are forced to cut in at the cross-section of 
 our experience, and to begin our construction 
 from that platform. If this argument can be 
 made good, it will form a complete answer to 
 naturalism in its attack upon Christianity. 
 Yet every thoughtful mind must perceive that 
 the argument has raised further questions 
 which have not yet been answered. Historical 
 Christianity has not been built only from 
 metaphysical foundations. It has risen largely 
 from authority also. While some believers in 
 every generation have sought to find satis- 
 factory proof of it to the last analysis, all be- 
 lievers have had to reckon with the testimony 
 
 43 
 
44 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of the Church and the revelation of the Bible. 
 These are apparently new factors, which make 
 a difference between our acceptance of Chris- 
 tian truth and our acceptance of the results of 
 physical science. Each of them has pro- 
 fessed to provide for the believer an ulti- 
 mate authority, the Church with its traditional 
 sanctions, and the Bible with its infallible in- 
 spiration. It is our duty now to inquire into 
 these and to ask in what sense we are to 
 regard them as ultimate sources of authority. 
 
 The argument of the present lecture is that 
 we freely and with all reverence admit that 
 the tradition of the Christian Church is a most 
 valuable and real element in the discussion of 
 any article of faith. We admit also that the 
 Bible is, in a quite unique sense, the record of 
 God's revelation of truth to man. But on the 
 other hand we still maintain that no external 
 authority, however venerable and however 
 sacred, can of itself, and so long as it remains 
 external, dominate man's belief. We shall try 
 to show that all such external authorities must 
 become internal by their appeal to living ex- 
 perience, and that only when they have proved 
 themselves authoritative to the individual soul 
 can they be rightly accepted as commanding. 
 Otherwise we would have merely escaped from 
 metaphysical externality to fall back upon 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 45 
 
 traditional externality, and would be in no bet- 
 ter case than we were before. 
 
 I have associated with the present lecture 
 one of the most picturesque and remarkable 
 incidents recorded in the whole history of re- 
 ligion. Paul at Athens discussing religious 
 problems upon Mars' Hill is certainly a very 
 striking figure, and his words on that occasion 
 touch most intimately the history of Greek 
 thought. The unknown God, the temples 
 made with hands, the quotation from Aratus, 
 the broad conception of the Father that giveth 
 to all life and breath, and in Whom all live and 
 move and have their being, the declaration of 
 a God Who is not far from any one of us — all 
 this comes home with peculiar relevancy to our 
 present subject. The Athens through which 
 Paul had passed to Mars' Hill was full of the 
 ruins of a former day whose exquisite worship 
 of the Olympians had left the carved work of 
 their temples already deep in acanthus and 
 whose former strength and severe morality 
 contrasted strangely with the garlanded songs 
 of decadent revellers and the clash of wine 
 cups amid the ruins of ancient greatness. It 
 may not be at first apparent, but the fact is 
 that Paul stands there as a second Socrates, 
 and takes up the ancient message with won- 
 derful new applications. The curious and 
 
46 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 artistic Greeks had always tended to seek for 
 God, and for all that was highest in human 
 life, in external things. They found their 
 religion through nature and the outward life of 
 man, through visible beauty and harmony. 
 These are good, but God is apt to get lost 
 among them, and Paul is here doing in his own 
 way precisely what Socrates had done in the 
 same city long ago: he is leading them back 
 from the search for God among external 
 things to the inner life of the spirit. In many 
 details the parallel is curious and interesting 
 down to that touch of immortality which of- 
 fended the older audience and amused the later. 
 Two men, uncouth of body but wonderfully 
 great in spirit, sought to lead two generations 
 back from external things and accepted theories 
 to the living inspiration of their own personal 
 experience. Faith had gone wandering among 
 ideas and tales which were detached from and 
 external to the life of man. One by one this 
 externality had flung off the details of earlier 
 faith, as things disregarded by the educated 
 and left only to the ignorant and supersti- 
 tious. Meanwhile God also had been lost, and 
 there were very few thinkers in Athens, if in- 
 deed there were any, who believed in Him in 
 any personal and intimate way. It is certainly 
 a curious spectacle, this of Saint Paul as a 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 47 
 
 second Socrates, recalling disbelieving men to 
 the quiet center within their own souls in order 
 to find their lost God, telling them that that 
 quiet center is the only place which God never 
 leaves, and virtually repeating the Socratic 
 admonition, enforced now by the memory of 
 Jesus Christ, Know thyself. 
 
 There is much in this incident that brings 
 us forward into our own times. Held apart 
 by many centuries, utterly different in regard 
 to the actual content of man's thoughts about 
 nature and the supernatural, Paul's day and 
 ours have this in common, that in both of them 
 men have been externalizing their search for 
 God, and in doing so have lost their faith in 
 Him. For many among us the old divinities 
 are dead, and the days of simplicity in faith 
 are behind us. Whole cities of men and 
 women are living now among the wreckage of 
 their broken gods, and the pathos of modern 
 life arises largely from that fact. "Of infi- 
 nite sadness are the dying agonies of the gods," 
 and many of us have felt upon our spirits the 
 shadow of that great sorrow. In consequence 
 of this condition we find endless contradic- 
 tions in the attitude of men towards belief. 
 Many who hold an apparent faith in public 
 confess in private to an actual disbelief. There 
 are some who are equally annoyed by the ar-» 
 
48 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 dent faith of one and the hearty denial of an- 
 other. All acknowledge that the external 
 story of our religion is interesting and indeed 
 fascinating for all students who will examine 
 it ; but the recurring question, Is it true ? takes 
 away the glamour from their appreciation. 
 
 There are many among us who dare not 
 break their connection with old faith, but who 
 in their secret hearts wish that they had better 
 grounds for affirming it. They are seeking 
 substitutes for that faith in all directions, and 
 this explains the many varieties of religions 
 which present themselves for popularity to- 
 day. Some of these are mere rechauffes of 
 ancient speculations which pass themselves off 
 upon the ignorant as novel systems of belief. 
 Others, under the high-sounding names of 
 sestheticism or mysticism, really concern 
 themselves with such matters as the patterns 
 of wall papers and ingenious mechanisms for 
 entrapping the spirits of the dead. Many, 
 whose minds are better balanced, still fall back 
 upon Mr. Huxley's clever and honest word, 
 and call themselves agnostics. 
 
 The meaning of all this is really a cry for 
 ultimate authority. ' Tell us plainly/ they de- 
 mand of Christian faith, 'Art thou it that 
 should come or do we look for another? We 
 are tired of compromises between faith and 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 49 
 
 unbelief. If the metaphysical basis of faith 
 be gone, give us some other basis on which we 
 may rest- it. We desire a city that hath foun- 
 dations so sure and certain that we cannot 
 dispute nor doubt any more. Let Christianity 
 show itself inevitable and we will accept it. 
 We are tired of intellectual liberty and un- 
 chartered freedom of thought, and all we cry 
 for now is the assurance that faith is such that 
 we cannot possibly escape it. Like Circe in 
 Augusta Webster's great poem, we " crave that 
 one shall come " to be our master utterly — yes, 
 even our tyrant, if that be necessary. Let 
 Him recall us to some true fold where our 
 spirits can find rest/ So we have our Apolo- 
 gias and our Grammars of Assent. We con- 
 fess that in themselves they are not intellec- 
 tually justifiable, but then they are so sorely 
 needed, so eagerly desired! 
 
 There are many causes which at the present 
 time are leading men away from the inner to 
 an outer authority for their faith. There are 
 some who, like Troop in Mr. Wells' Joan and 
 Peter, are " for a simple and unquestioning 
 loyalty to any one who comes along and pro- 
 fesses to be an authority. When he mentioned 
 the king his voice dropped worshipfully." This 
 phase can hardly be said to be dangerously 
 common in America, yet it exists even here, 
 
50 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 and there are other lands in which it is com- 
 mon enough. Again there is the weariness 
 which follows upon the extreme high pressure 
 of modern life, and which makes any offered 
 resting-place very tempting. Countless men 
 and women whose ordinary life is full of ques- 
 tions which they are perpetually straining 
 themselves to solve, demand of their religion a 
 place where all that striving shall cease, and 
 they shall be able to reach the lotos-eaters' 
 afternoon after the burden and heat of their 
 busy and secular morning. 
 
 Finally, there is a growing self -distrust, and 
 a sense of perplexity regarding inner phenom- 
 ena, which is perhaps the result of the sud- 
 den expansion of the field of human knowl- 
 edge. Men acquire a habit of taking their 
 views of ordinary matters on trust, simply 
 because there is no other course left in an 
 age of experts in particular sciences. For 
 most students this does well enough, where 
 there is no great complexity in the search nor 
 importance in the answer found. It certainly 
 saves trouble, but it leads us to live in a world 
 like that of the short-sighted. In that world 
 there are few things which are exactly seen 
 or accurately known. Yet we see with suffi- 
 cient clearness to get to our appointed goal in 
 most cases, and we acquire the habit of refus- 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 5 1 
 
 ing to make long journeys for whose guidance 
 this trustful method would not suffice. 
 
 The two great offers that are made to this 
 age are those of the Church and the Bible. 
 
 1, The Church. In the case of the Roman 
 Catholic Church we protest against the abso- 
 lute claim of authority. Yet at certain times 
 the Protestant Church has made the same 
 claim in its treatment of questions of ortho- 
 doxy and heresy. The conception in both 
 cases is that of an official and authentic re- 
 pository of truth which embodies and circum- 
 scribes the world's religious knowledge. The 
 Church claims that it is given to her to be the 
 storehouse, and the only storehouse, of re- 
 ligious truth. She offers to take over from the 
 individual all responsibility for his thinking, 
 and to settle all questions for him with the 
 simple statement that the Church has fixed this 
 dogma, and all that concerns him is that he 
 shall accept it. 
 
 It must be confessed that this claim is, for 
 many minds, extremely attractive and allur- 
 ing. It explains the inevitable drift towards 
 Rome in doubting times. Some, like John 
 Henry Newman, seem to be so constituted that 
 this is the natural way for them. Their con- 
 science of truth is not so strong as their cry 
 for certainty and rest, and they justify their 
 
52 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 acceptance on the ground that this way has 
 brought them peace through believing. The 
 Protestant answer to this has too often been 
 an abrupt accusation of dishonesty; and it is 
 peculiarly interesting to read, in the light of 
 that accusation, Professor William James' 
 plea, in his Will To Believe, for the legitimacy 
 of acceptance in cases where such acceptance 
 seems to be demanded for practical efficiency 
 in life. 
 
 In considering this point of view it ought 
 to be admitted frankly at the outset that there 
 is no doubt a very real authority in the Church. 
 The mass of Christendom, the accumulated 
 wisdom and experience of the ages, is surely 
 likely to be wiser and richer in gifts of the 
 Spirit than any individual mind can be. 
 When we consider the quality, both intellec- 
 tually and morally, of many of the Church's 
 guides, we are constrained to confess that it 
 would be only the most presumptuous individ- 
 ualism which would discount the testimony of 
 so many great intellects, so many pure and 
 lofty spirits, and so many centuries of faith. 
 Surely all those high and choice souls have not 
 lived and thought in vain; and there is a kind 
 of arrogance, which is the fruit of littleness 
 rather than of greatness, in those who under- 
 rate the past. They remind us of that kind of 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 53 
 
 student who constructs for himself a new- 
 school of philosophy all his own, and is so 
 much taken up with belonging to it that he can 
 find no time for reading any other system of 
 philosophy. In the course of a lifetime dili- 
 gently spent among the intellectual movements 
 of modern days, one becomes distrustful of 
 amateur religions. 
 
 Yet while freely admitting all that, there is 
 great need for clearness in our thinking here. 
 Questions inevitably arise which must sift and 
 judge our right to believe, even upon the au- 
 thority of the choicest spirits. First of all 
 there is the question of loyalty. There are 
 those, like Wells' Troop, who are inclined to 
 overwork that excellent word. Loyalty as a 
 plea for submission to authority needs to be 
 very closely examined before it is accepted. 
 There is a difference, for instance, between the 
 loyalties of patriotism and those of belief. 
 Some are inclined to say that, just as in mat- 
 ters of patriotism the fact that this is my land 
 settles all questions, so in matters of religion 
 all questions ought to bow before my church. 
 There is, however, a difference between the 
 cases. Questions of faith on intellectual mat- 
 ters have to be tested by individual standards, 
 and no loyalty can ever supersede the ultimate 
 loyalty of the intellect to truth. There are 
 
54 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 things which we have no right to surrender, 
 out of any loyalty whatsoever. In friendship 
 and in love it is not loyalty either to ask or to 
 give these things. 
 
 " I could not love thee, Dear, so much 
 Loved I not honour more." 
 
 Of such transcendent quality ought to be our 
 loyalty to truth, and the church which seeks 
 to usurp that is in the deepest sense a traitor. 
 
 Again, in regard to patriotism, and still 
 more in regard to church authority, the ques- 
 tion is far more complicated than it seems to 
 be. My land may involve many reasons for 
 preferring one's own land to any other. Yet 
 that cannot mean that one is persuaded that 
 one's own country always thinks and acts 
 rightly. That would be simply the blind loy- 
 alty of " My country right or wrong," which 
 is picturesquely admirable as a sentiment, but 
 is wholly immoral as a principle. For indeed 
 the truest loyalty is very far from being blind 
 to the faults of its object. It is acutely aware 
 of them, and if it be wise it will always claim 
 the right of criticism as well as of apprecia- 
 tion. Thus, when we say my church, and say 
 it with the utmost pride and affection, we do 
 not mean that it is therefore infallible, but 
 only that it is the best beloved. 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 55 
 
 Further, when we say that we accept the 
 authority of the Church, the question immedi- 
 ately arises, To which church do we refer? 
 Had the Church remained one and undivided, 
 there would have been a greater show of evi- 
 dence for her claim to absolute authority. 
 But, fortunately or unfortunately, Christen- 
 dom has been split up into something like 
 seven hundred organized and recognized com- 
 munions, and the outsider coming for author- 
 ity to the Church finds himself plunged into a 
 chaos of side issues and peculiar circumstances 
 out of which every separate creed and formula 
 arose. He finds himself confronted with the 
 duty of deciding the claims of some at least of 
 these various communions; and any such deci- 
 sion must, of course, involve historical and 
 other study. But it is apparent that by that 
 fact alone the seat of authority is changed. In 
 that very study which is imposed upon him, 
 the man is obviously judging the Church. He 
 must do so if he is to decide between this or 
 that rival claim for ultimate authority. Thus, 
 then, in the very act of deciding which church 
 he shall obey, the man is appealing to a higher 
 authority than that of any church. He is, in 
 fact, judging the Church, instead of the 
 Church judging him. 
 
 This consideration alone must end all hope 
 
56 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of final authority in the testimony of the 
 Church. Its faith is not authoritative in the 
 absolute sense, if we have to find reasons for 
 holding that faith. There is in fact a vicious 
 circle here. Before the Church can be ac- 
 cepted as the highest authority, it must itself 
 pass the tribunal of a still higher, and so we 
 are thrown back again from the external to 
 the internal region. The tribunal which de- 
 termines the authority of the Church is in 
 some form or other the inner light, the reason 
 of man laid open directly to the influences of 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
 Of course this whole matter is dealt with by 
 the Church of Rome in its own fashion. She 
 perceives and pities the confusion of voices 
 and the variety of religious experience. She 
 has appointed herself the one authentic chan- 
 nel of the Spirit. Her one great fundamental 
 principle is semper, ubique, et ab omnibus. 
 This principle has been held through all her 
 generations, and it forms the basis for her 
 doctrines of tradition, of apostolic succession, 
 and finally for that of papal infallibility. 
 Protestantism challenges this claim at every 
 point. Of the ancient formula semper, ubique, 
 et ab omnibus, she asserts that this is simply 
 not so. There is no set of doctrines which 
 has been always held. There is none which 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 57 
 
 Has ever been held everywhere nor by all. To 
 use that formula is possible only by one very 
 simple process. Eliminate everything except 
 yourself, and then say that you are the only 
 one. Assert, with whatsoever pomp and cir- 
 cumstance, that "what I don't know isn't 
 knowledge," and you may arrive at a very sat- 
 isfactory intellectual complacency. Our reply 
 is that to meet an enemy by asserting that he 
 does not exist, is no doubt conclusive to one 
 in a certain mental condition, but all its com- 
 fort depends upon that mental condition. 
 
 But we need linger no longer over this as- 
 pect of the question. The battle of Protes- 
 tantism was primarily a purely rational affair. 
 Apart from its deeper religious content, the 
 Protestant Church has always contended for 
 ordinary freedom of thought and conscience. 
 The very essence of Protestantism is the deal- 
 ing of the individual for himself with God, 
 and he who has once felt the power of that 
 claim, simply cannot hand over his responsi- 
 bility for truth to any church. Every Protes- 
 tant considers himself subject to the Holy 
 Spirit's guidance, direct and independent. Of 
 course, if he be wise, he will provide the Holy 
 Spirit with material for that guidance, by 
 studying the record of the faith of other men 
 and the Church's judgment upon it. But this 
 
58 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 record will only be authoritative to him in so 
 far as it finds responsive answer in his own 
 spirit. 
 
 Apart from the question of the particular 
 church which has the right to claim ultimate 
 authority, another matter remains. The 
 Church, whatever group of opinion that may 
 mean, is a phrase which looks much bigger 
 than it is. It is indeed very impressive to be 
 told that we are to bow before the doctrines 
 held ab omnibus, but it is impossible not to 
 ask, Who are the omnesf The real authority 
 of the Church at any particular point of time 
 can only mean the opinion of a very small 
 minority at that time. The matters in dispute 
 involve profound research and thorough schol- 
 arship, and the ultimate authority must there- 
 fore be those proven authorities, scholars and 
 searchers, who are entrusted with the task. 
 But within the Church these are an extremely 
 small minority, and beyond them is the vast 
 multitude which accepts their results without 
 personal examination, and yet swells the ap- 
 parent authority of the decision. Very few 
 of these are either equipped for the task of de- 
 ciding, or indeed capable of it. Fewer still 
 are either willing or daring enough to face it. 
 Thus the authority of the Church at any par- 
 ticular time means, in the first place, the 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 59 
 
 thought-out judgment of a very few, and, in 
 the second place, the prejudices and the com- 
 pliance of the vast majority. These preju- 
 dices and that compliance are by no means 
 very respectable guides to faith. Doubtless 
 they are inevitable for the busy average man, 
 and he may justify himself for trusting wiser 
 minds and specialized labours. Yet undoubt- 
 edly this formidable array, which must neces- 
 sarily produce a strong impression upon the 
 unthinking, includes also the intellectual lazi- 
 ness of some, and the cowardice of even 
 more. 
 
 It is replied that besides all this — the scholar- 
 ship and the prejudice which combine together 
 to make up the idea of the Church's au- 
 thority — there is a continuous stream of living 
 religious experience in the Church. The his- 
 tory alike of ancient heresies and modern the- 
 ologies shows the Church rejecting from the 
 main stream, certain ways of thinking about 
 God and man which prove themselves to be 
 spiritually ineffective. We must answer that 
 that has been by no means the only criterion 
 by which heresy has been distinguished from 
 orthodoxy, and that there is an enormous 
 number and variety of spiritual manifestations 
 which have proved more or less effective in 
 the past. Great differences have appeared be- 
 
60 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 tween these effective manifestations, even upon 
 matters of faith which have usually been con- 
 sidered essential, or at least important. It 
 would therefore appear that, so far as the 
 dogmatic statement of Christian doctrine is 
 concerned, very little can be left upon which 
 the tradition of the Church is really authorita- 
 tive in any compelling sense. 
 
 Having found it impossible to rest upon the 
 Church as the final basis of authority the 
 Protestant believer has been supposed to fall 
 back upon the Bible, substituting an infal- 
 lible book for an infallible church. There 
 are two ways, however, in which the Bible 
 may be regarded as the ultimate author- 
 ity in matters of faith. It is possible so 
 to regard it as to make it as external and 
 mechanical an authority as we found the 
 Church to be. " For me my Bible was the 
 most absolute of realities, and to it I strove 
 my hardest to adapt the universe.'' These 
 words, written by a French Roman Catholic, 
 are only too true of the pathetic and impossible 
 situation in which many a Protestant also has 
 found himself. This, however, was not the 
 view of the great master minds of the Refor- 
 mation. Luther fought most valiantly for the 
 freedom of the spirit, and Calvin in his 
 Institutes shows how far he was from being 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 6l 
 
 an advocate of any mechanical rule of faith. 1 
 It is true that, when the free intelligence and 
 bold wisdom of the first reformers gave place 
 to the second rate mentality and cautious tradi- 
 tionalism of later men, there were those whose 
 attitude to the Bible was entirely mechanical. 
 Of such Protestants it would not be unfair to 
 say that they replaced the external and me- 
 chanical authority of the Church by an equally 
 external and mechanical authority of the Bible. 
 They found in it the same satisfaction of 
 absolute and unthinking obedience to authority 
 which the Roman Catholic had found in church 
 tradition. For them the Bible was a set of 
 detached oracles, to be used as proof-texts for 
 doctrines which were formulated long after 
 the canon was closed, and as clubs upon the 
 head of all free inquiry. Obviously such a 
 view of the authority of the Bible is as external 
 and as precarious as that view of the Church 
 which it discredited and superseded. It left 
 no room whatever for the inner light of the 
 Holy Spirit, and it made men prisoners of the 
 mind. Against all such views the protest of 
 Saint Paul is final, The word of God is not 
 bound. 
 
 Yet there always have been others to whom 
 the Bible is authoritative, not upon any such 
 
 •Institutes, Bk. I, Chap. VII. 
 
62 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 grounds of tradition, but because of the force 
 of its appeal to their own consciences and 
 spiritual needs. For them it represents a 
 great literature, extending over long stages of 
 time and running through many stages of a 
 nation's life. It necessarily contains many 
 different phases of faith and standards of 
 morality, for it is the record of a revelation 
 made by God to the highest spirits of succes- 
 sive generations. Its authority therefore will 
 lie in its power to interpret the dealing of God 
 with man according as man is able to receive 
 such interpretation. In it we shall see the 
 wonderful patience of our God, leading men 
 out slowly through darkness to light; not only 
 dropping by the way sufficient truth for con- 
 temporary men to live by, but leading on to 
 Him Who is the perfect and final truth, the 
 Word made flesh. In other words, the Bible 
 can never be regarded as a dead and finished 
 statement of doctrinal truths, but as a living 
 Word of God to men, quick and powerful in 
 its appeal, and certain of its response. It is a 
 record of the way in which successive genera- 
 tions were led by God's grace to apprehend 
 divine things, and as a stimulus to later gen- 
 erations similarly and still more fully to ap- 
 prehend them. 
 
 Now what does all this mean? It must 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 63 
 
 mean that there is an authority within the soul 
 which is apart from either the decree of the 
 Church or the letter of Scripture. This in- 
 ward authority convinces and legitimately 
 commands the spirit of man. It recognizes 
 and appropriates those permanent and di- 
 vinely inspired truths which are presented to 
 it by the Bible. We believe the Bible to be 
 divinely inspired, but we are apt to ignore 
 the question how we came by that belief. It 
 must have been reached either on the Church's 
 testimony external to us, or upon the Holy 
 Spirit's testimony within. The Confession of 
 Faith is quite explicit in this matter. Its 
 language is, " The supreme judge, by which 
 all controversies of religion are to be deter- 
 mined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of 
 ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private 
 spirits are to be examined, and in whose sen- 
 tence we are to rest, can be no other but the 
 Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures." * 
 
 Obviously then the ultimate seat of au- 
 thority cannot be an external but an inner one. 
 Now at last we find ourselves within the soul. 
 No external authority can possibly be final, for 
 every such authority must pass the tribunal of 
 the internal one and must prove itself by its 
 appeal to the soul itself. " Who then is our 
 1 Chapter 1 : 10. 
 
64 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 authority? I reply, It is God Himself. I am 
 accused of believing simply because men have 
 spoken: and I reply that I believe as a matter 
 of fact because God has spoken, and spoken 
 not only in the remote past to others, but in 
 the present, and to me." * This is the only 
 ultimate authority, the only one that needs no 
 further proof. Indeed there is no ultimate 
 external authority. The very words present 
 a contradiction in terms. All professed au- 
 thority must ultimately be proved by its con- 
 formity with the facts of inner experience. 
 Thus we must test both the Church's creed and 
 the Bible's claim by this final test, their appeal 
 to the soul's needs and instincts. There alone 
 shall we find the bed-rock of faith. The claim 
 of either Church or Bible regarded as ex- 
 ternal authorities is mere assertion. Such a 
 claim must indeed remain so, because any 
 proof that is offered in favour of it can only 
 be made valid by going before some other 
 tribunal and appealing to some prior authority, 
 and that ultimate authority can only be within. 
 In other words, no authority can be authorita- 
 tive to us until we are constrained to assent 
 to it. But the criterion that will regulate our 
 consent can never simply be the fact that some 
 person or some body of persons tells us so. It 
 'A. H. Gray. 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 65 
 
 must have our reason upon its side, and our 
 spiritual nature must judge and approve of it 
 within our souls. Apart from our inner ex- 
 perience and the testimony of the Holy Spirit, 
 there is no conceivable authority which is valid 
 in matters of religious faith. God has never 
 delegated His authority to any person or to 
 anything which might come between Himself 
 and the spirit of man. He still maintains His 
 great prerogative of speaking directly to the 
 souls of His children. 
 
 There are, of course, those who in the name 
 of religion have habituated themselves to dis- 
 parage human nature to such an extent as to 
 lead them to distrust any inner criterion what- 
 soever. For them the fallen and sinful soul 
 of man is nothing better than a mass of perdi- 
 tion, entirely untrustworthy in spiritual judg- 
 ment. We can only reply that, lamentable as 
 is the condition of man's soul through sin, yet 
 its capacity for God and for recognizing the 
 voice of God is integral to its very nature, and 
 can never wholly perish while the soul itself 
 survives. In this as in other matters our judg- 
 ment must depend largely upon the eye that 
 looks. There are some who see in the deep 
 earth only decay and darkness, the bones of 
 the dead and the fossils of the still more an- 
 cient dead ; while others see the roots of great 
 
66 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 trees and the germinating life of all the world. 
 Thus the earth is either the tomb or the cradle 
 of the world. So the soul is either the place 
 of hopeless catastrophe, in which all the 
 powers of life are lost, or it is the place where 
 hidden germs of faith and hope are buried for 
 the time, and which is ready for the fructify- 
 ing influences of the Spirit of God when the 
 springtime of opportunity shall come. At its 
 worst the soul of man is still capable of recog- 
 nizing the truth of moral and spiritual facts 
 when the Spirit of the Lord moves upon it. 
 Its power of responding to these is bound up 
 in the bundle of our innermost life. They in- 
 spire and they judge us. They liberate and 
 they condemn. 
 
 It may be urged that all this is nothing less 
 than mysticism; and indeed, if the word be 
 properly understood, no Christian need blush 
 to be associated with so noble a company as 
 the mystics. They have exceeded the bounds 
 within which commonplace spirits think and 
 live, and have sometimes run wild, blinded and 
 dazzled by their inner light. Let us consider 
 one or two quotations from various represent- 
 ative writers of that school. 
 
 " Turn to thy heart, and thy heart will find 
 its Saviour, its God, within itself. Thou seest, 
 hearest, and feelest nothing of God because 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 67 
 
 thou seekest for Him abroad with thine out- 
 ward eye: thou seekest for Him in books, in 
 controversies, in the Church and outward ex- 
 ercises; but there thou wilt not find Him, till 
 thou hast found Him in thy heart. Seek for 
 Him in thy heart and thou wilt never seek in 
 vain; for there He dwelleth: there is the seat 
 of His light and Holy Spirit." * 
 
 " You may do what you like, mankind will 
 believe no one but God, and he only can per- 
 suade mankind who believes that God has 
 spoken to him." 2 
 
 " The brightest light is within ourselves — 
 every soul has a Bible — our chief duty in this 
 world is to keep the windows of the soul wide 
 open. We are now face to face with a simple 
 and superb fact: the holiest place for every 
 man is within his own soul. It is more awful 
 than the holy of holies in any temple." ' 
 
 " We must silence every creature, we must 
 silence ourselves also, to hear in a profound 
 stillness of the soul this inexpressible voice of 
 Christ." ' 
 
 These are some specimens of very typical 
 mystic teaching. In a sense every Christian 
 will not only understand but assent to them. 
 
 1 William Law, The Spirit of Discipline. 
 
 2 Joubert. 8 Bradford, The Inward Light. 
 4 Fenelon. 
 
68 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 We are all mystics when we believe the Chris- 
 tian faith, in so far as we are all under the 
 influence and within the sound of the inner 
 voice of the Spirit. It is true that some 
 mystics have ignored other helps to faith. 
 They have run away from all connection with 
 the Church and its testimonies, and have even 
 treated the Bible as an unnecessary and im- 
 perfect guide to truth. This is their weakness, 
 their temptation and extravagance. When 
 they ignore and separate themselves from 
 these great external sources of authority, they 
 cut off the supplies of material upon which the 
 Spirit within them may cast His light. In the 
 absence of these they must have recourse to 
 their own imagination for such supplies, and 
 no man can forecast the wildness or the length 
 to which such procedure may lead them. But 
 there is no reason for this, and there are many 
 mystics, both ancient and modern, who have 
 reverently preserved both the best traditions 
 of the Church and the truths revealed in the 
 Bible, and have kept themselves from extrava- 
 gance. 
 
 What then is to be our attitude to those ex- 
 ternal sources of authority of which we have 
 been thinking? Shall we fling them aside and 
 trust to nothing but the inner light playing 
 upon such material as our imagination may be 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 69 
 
 able to supply? Most certainly not. We 
 bring to the criterion of the soul's experience 
 all that the Church and the Bible have to give 
 us, and our authority for our belief will appear 
 in the soul's reaction to these materials and the 
 truths it recognizes in them. Towards the 
 Church's tradition every wise man will be rev- 
 erent. " One should be fearful of being 
 wrong in poetry when one thinks differently 
 from the poets, and in religion when one 
 thinks differently from the saints." * There 
 will be in Church tradition many consecrated 
 errors which must be flung aside, for time is 
 inexorable and ultimately demands the expul- 
 sion of all that is not truth. Yet the great 
 mysteries of our faith, passing through the 
 experience of the ages, will gain much con- 
 firmation from the fact that they have proved 
 sufficient for so many. The very fact of such 
 long acceptance is in itself an argument for 
 adopting them, unless strong reason can be 
 found for their repudiation. The general and 
 catholic views of truth must surely have some 
 valid foundation if they have commended 
 themselves so as to gain the assent of the past, 
 and to stand the test of spiritual application in 
 many ages. 
 
 Yet the Bible makes a far stronger appeal 
 a Joubert. 
 
70 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 than the testimony of the Church can ever do. 
 It brings us nearer to those who first received 
 it from the Spirit of God, than the Church tra- 
 dition which has passed through the medium 
 of many human hands before it reaches us. 
 This claim for the authority of the Bible has 
 no relation to detailed questions of historicity 
 and evidence, which must be judged upon 
 their merits like all other such matters. 
 It remains sound, however, in regard to all 
 that is essentially religious in the records of 
 the Bible. It is not because we find love and 
 hope, salvation and righteousness, in the Bible, 
 that we believe in them as applicable to our- 
 selves. It is because our own hearts are cry- 
 ing out for them, because either they or the 
 need of them is in us, that we understand them 
 and recognize their meaning when we find it in 
 the Bible record. So recognized, we under- 
 stand these same things in a new way when 
 we find them in our own heart's cry. The 
 Christ of the Bible answers and interprets all 
 our deepest needs, so that these interpretations 
 become part and parcel of our very life. That 
 is Christian faith. It must be added as a pe- 
 culiarly relevant and interesting fact that all 
 these sources of supply for religious experi- 
 ence were themselves historically matters of 
 religious experience before they became part 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 7 1 
 
 either of the Church's testimony or of the 
 Bible's record. The method by which the 
 Scripture was inspired was the Spirit of God 
 moving upon the minds of men, and it is only 
 in so far as the Spirit of Cod takes of the 
 things of Christ and shows them unto us that 
 we find within ourselves the conviction of the 
 truth which was given to other spirits of old. 
 Church tradition and creed are, in a remoter 
 and more indirect way, also built out of ex- 
 perience. The ground of all historic Chris- 
 tian faith lies in the story of Christ as it was 
 accepted by the early Christians. 
 
 " That which was from the beginning, 
 which we have heard, which we have seen 
 with our eyes, which we have looked upon, 
 and our hands liave handled, of the Word of 
 life; 
 
 (For the life was manifested, and we have 
 seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you 
 that eternal life, which zvas with the Father, 
 and was manifested unto us;) 
 
 That which we have seen and heard de- 
 clare zve unto you, that ye also may have fel- 
 lowship with us: and truly our fellowship is 
 with the Father, and with his Son Jesus 
 Christ." % 
 
 It must alsD be remembered that the prin- 
 1 1 John 1. 
 
72 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 ciples on which the canon of Scripture was 
 fixed, rested equally upon the religious experi- 
 ence of the judges. It was after consultation 
 with the various churches that the votes of the 
 early Christian fathers fixed for all time the 
 canon of the New Testament, and the main 
 reason that they had for their opinion upon 
 these matters was the appeal or want of ap- 
 peal of the passages and books to their own 
 religious necessities. Thus the new cry which 
 is heard everywhere to-day for experience in- 
 stead of dogma is really a return to the old and 
 original way. Paul and John were its first 
 advocates. Jesus Christ Himself began it. 
 Of course the inner tribunal cannot decide 
 every question, nor will it give us any light 
 upon matters merely historic and scientific. It 
 will not even be uniform and infallible in its 
 detailed answers to questions of spiritual prin- 
 ciple, and there will be diversities of opinion 
 among Christian believers even upon very seri- 
 ous matters. Still, it is alive, and it will lead 
 us all in the end in the direction of the same 
 ultimate truths. Whatever misunderstand- 
 ings may at any time mar its testimony will 
 drop away as more normal Christian experi- 
 ence succeeds that which has been more or less 
 abnormal. We are not held by the dead hand 
 of any external authority whatsoever. We 
 
THE BASIS OF AUTHORITY 73 
 
 have the witness in ourselves — alive with our 
 life, and leading us forward ever into new 
 fields and aspects of truth. 
 
 Two very practical consequences emerge 
 for the conscience of all who follow these lines 
 of thought. In the first place the method of 
 Christian advance is not and cannot be the 
 laborious solution of separate doubts and 
 questions in matters of detail. Thousands of 
 such details are suggested by the Bible to 
 every one of its readers. But Christian faith 
 consists not in a uniform answer to all these 
 questions. It is not gained by satisfying the 
 manifold curiosities of the mind upon every 
 sort of ancient information. It consists only 
 in those assurances which are permanently 
 and essentially religious. The only way to 
 gain it is to trust the soul's deepest instincts 
 when they are confronted by the traditions of 
 the Church and the records of the Bible, and 
 to appropriate as our living faith those assur- 
 ances which the soul recognizes and claims as 
 truth. 
 
 It follows also that if this be true there is a 
 tremendous responsibility laid upon us all for 
 the condition of our own souls. How pure 
 and how ingenuous, how free from distracting 
 self-will and weakening self-indulgence must 
 that spirit be, which is to face the great task 
 
74 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of discerning the truth concerning God and 
 righteousness and the meaning and duty of 
 human life, as it scans the records of church 
 experience and Bible revelation! This task 
 of the spirit is indeed terrible in holiness. 
 This high trust is sacred beyond words. 
 
LECTURE III 
 THE CHARACTER OF GOD 
 
LECTURE III 
 THE CHARACTER OF GOD 
 
 The Lord is good. — Psalm ioo : 5. 
 
 H 
 
 AVING argued that the starting 
 point of faith and the ultimate seat 
 of authority must be found within 
 the soul of man, we now come to face the 
 question of the content of that discovery. 
 What truth is it that the soul of man contains, 
 and in what sense does it contain truth ? This 
 question meets us first of all in connection 
 with the idea of God, which is, of course, the 
 supreme fact in religion. The mystics, as we 
 have already seen, talk of finding God within 
 the soul, and it is of the utmost importance 
 that before going further we should face the 
 question frankly as to the meaning of this 
 claim of theirs. In what sense is God revealed 
 within the soul ? 
 
 This brings us at once back to the remem- 
 brance of an older psychology, which solved 
 all such questions by its doctrine of innate 
 ideas. This doctrine has been very crudely 
 conceived and expressed. While the clearest 
 
 77 
 
78 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 thinkers have perceived that the mind does not 
 work from ready-made ideas with which it 
 finds itself equipped, yet there is a wide-spread 
 notion that somehow or other — below the 
 limit of consciousness, it may be, and yet 
 really present — certain definite and complete 
 ideas are contained in the mind very much as 
 its contents are contained in a box, and that 
 one of the chief of these ideas is that of God. 
 It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the 
 idea of God is not a ready-made innate idea 
 at all. No baby is capable of thinking of God 
 in this fashion. 
 
 The phrase innate ideas is really a mislead- 
 ing expression. What is meant by it appears 
 to be that, as the experience of life begins to 
 make its conscious records, man discovers that 
 he must inevitably hold certain conceptions of 
 life which necessitate the existence of God and 
 postulate it. It is within the mind that we find 
 all our first hand knowledge of human life, 
 and all ideas which are presented to the mind 
 are judged by it to be either true or false to 
 life, either congruous or incongruous with it. 
 Innate ideas, therefore, are convictions with- 
 out which our whole conception of life would 
 be chaotic and unworkable. Presented to the 
 mind dispassionately, as convictions held by 
 other men or passed down to it by tradition, 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 79 
 
 they at once approve themselves as obviously 
 included in the impression which life is mak- 
 ing on us. 1 Expressed otherwise, we may say 
 that God is the first revelation of experience- 
 faith. For the moment we are thinking not of 
 the form of God but of the fact of God. The 
 form must be revealed otherwise, as we shall 
 see; but the fact is realized as a necessary 
 counterpart of all things known anywhere. 
 Without it nothing is complete and nothing is 
 intelligible. It is a necessary implication of 
 all finite experience, without which every- 
 thing loses its reality. Thus, literally, in 
 Him all things live and move and have their 
 being. 
 
 Astronomers tell us that the discovery of 
 the planet Neptune was made, not because any 
 telescope had seen it, but because astronomical 
 phenomena which had been directly observed 
 could not be explained without presupposing 
 some such planet exercising its attraction upon 
 the system which the telescopes were watch- 
 ing. In some similar fashion the human 
 mind discovers that its system is neither com- 
 
 *Thus, as one may say, God is seen by the mind of 
 man obliquely rather than directly, and it may have been 
 some sort of notion of this kind which found such in- 
 teresting expression in the words which Moses heard, 
 telling him that no one can see the face of God and live, 
 but that it was possible to see His back. 
 
80 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 plete nor intelligible until it has been supple- 
 mented by the postulate of God. 
 
 The next step in the process is to supply a 
 form for the bare fact thus demanded by the 
 mind. The form of God is supplied to the 
 Christian by the revelation of the Bible, and 
 especially by the story and the teaching of 
 Jesus Christ. To the Christian consciousness 
 the form thus presented proves convincing. 
 Viewing God under these aspects, the soul 
 recognizes that this is what has been missing 
 from life, and this is what it has been seeking. 
 The fact of God is the postulate of all human 
 experience: the form of God is the result of 
 that mysterious process which the Bible de- 
 scribes as the Holy Spirit witnessing with 
 our spirit within. 
 
 The conception which the fact of God as- 
 sumes as it thus finds form, is essentially a 
 moral conception. In the revelation of the 
 Bible, the seer to whom the revelation is made 
 receives more than he fully understands. The 
 common man, being confused by many things, 
 understands the seer only imperfectly. Yet 
 both seer and common man have a certain 
 equipment, not only for receiving the revela- 
 tion, but for so far defining it. First, there 
 is their own experience of conscience, and 
 their own adventures in morality, whether 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 8 1 
 
 good or bad. That is to say a man's char- 
 acter, such as it is, contains within it on the 
 one hand elements of condemnation and of 
 shame for bad conduct, and of approval and 
 satisfaction for good conduct of his own. Be- 
 yond these there is his imagination of what 
 manner of man he would be if he were morally 
 better than he is. Thus his moral ideas are 
 not bounded by his own achievement, but are 
 in every case further advanced than the 
 progress he has been able to make. His im- 
 agination, which thus creates for him a moral 
 ideal, is illuminated and guided by the idea of 
 Jesus Christ, Who presented to man in His 
 own person all that can be known of God on 
 earth and under earthly conditions. 
 
 That presentation was moral through and 
 through, and every aspect of God which is 
 presented to men by Christ is essentially an 
 ethical conception. Thus, to the awakening 
 soul which is already aware of the fact of 
 God from its own experience, the Bible, and 
 especially Jesus Christ, provide the ideas 
 which will determine the form of God. The 
 normal human spirit would at once recognize 
 these as true, but the deepest complication for 
 human faith lies in the fact that no soul is 
 completely normal. In this way there arise 
 many hesitations, obscurations, and perver- 
 
82 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 sions in the Christian man's idea of God. Be- 
 cause of his own moral defects he is not able 
 justly and completely to deal with the revela- 
 tion presented to him. Thus it comes to pass 
 that we know but in part, and that we are 
 capable of seeing God only in fragmentary 
 glimpses. 
 
 It will naturally be said that if man's 
 knowledge of God can at the best be so frag- 
 mentary, and must in every case be more or 
 less distorted by the weakness or the error of 
 his own moral nature and experience, a very 
 serious objection arises against the whole ar- 
 gument of the inner authority. Does it not 
 amount to this, that, since the moral experi- 
 ence of each man is different from that of 
 every other, it must follow that if each of us is 
 to be his own authority there will be as many 
 gods as there are men? Each man has had 
 his own individual moral life, and therefore 
 each man will interpret God in a different way 
 from the interpretation arrived at by any 
 other. 
 
 To this our answer as Christians must be 
 that God is not merely an idea but a living 
 fact. He is not a theory but, in the strictest 
 sense, a person. It would be impossible to lay 
 too great stress upon this point. At the pres- 
 ent time there is a very wide-spread tendency 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 83 
 
 to distrust the idea of personality in general. 
 One sees it in regard to immortality, and a 
 great many persons profess themselves willing 
 to believe in human immortality so long as you 
 do not insist that it is to be personal immor- 
 tality. This is one of those refuges from diffi- 
 culty which are entirely elusive and mislead- 
 ing. Non-personal immortality can only give 
 comfort or satisfaction to any one so long as 
 he refrains from examining the words he is 
 using. Non-personal immortality must in 
 every sense reduce itself ultimately to some- 
 thing like absorption into the general scheme 
 of things, the widely embracing universe, into 
 which the individual soul returns and with 
 which it merges itself. It may suggest a set of 
 noble ideas about joining 
 
 " the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In lives made better by their presence." 
 
 Now as a matter of fact this is to a certain 
 type of mind very pleasant and alluring. To 
 some it may even seem to be an object and 
 ambition great enough to be worth much sacri- 
 fice. It is the sort of thing about which it is 
 extremely easy to write poetry. But, with all 
 that, one fact remains — it is not immortality. 
 If you call it immortality you are using words 
 
84 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 in a false sense, and it so happens that upon a 
 subject like this, such use of words involves a 
 very serious responsibility. 
 
 The same holds in regard to the personality 
 of God. It is almost incredible that modern 
 minds should prefer a fluid to a solid concep- 
 tion of the Deity, but so it is. They delight 
 in the idea that God is immanent in all being, 
 and that we are in touch with Him while we 
 are enjoying or experiencing every phase of 
 life. But they shrink back from every direct 
 and personal contact in which spirit may meet 
 with spirit. It would be difficult to find lan- 
 guage strong enough to appeal to such persons, 
 asking them whether it is God that they are 
 seeking at all. For this diffused and formless 
 deity, in which there is no definite and personal 
 existence with whom we may talk and be un- 
 derstood, and who may impress His mind and 
 will upon our spirits, is really only a way of 
 conceiving of nature, and is not in any real 
 sense God at all. Just as it would be more 
 honest, and a great deal more useful, if the 
 advocates of what they call impersonal immor- 
 tality were to drop a word they have no right 
 to use, and advocate instead of it posthumous 
 fame, so it would be equally advantageous if 
 those who talk of God and yet insist upon 
 denying personality would leave the word 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 85 
 
 God alone, and frankly proclaim themselves 
 worshippers of nature who have no God. 
 
 Most of us, if the truth be told, care not one 
 straw what people will say of us after we are 
 dead, and care very little how long our name 
 or our influence will last ; but we do care very 
 greatly whether when we cry into the void 
 there be any to answer, whether there be any 
 will that backs our noblest struggles, and any 
 heart that can love and sympathize. So, for 
 our part, most of us retreat from abstruse dis- 
 cussions, and as we grow older find ourselves 
 reverting to the child's simplicity towards 
 which Christ led us. The long words and fine- 
 drawn distinctions about which we used to 
 argue in young days come to seem so very 
 foolish and insignificant, and so amusingly in- 
 adequate, when we are trying to deal with the 
 facts below the surface. And one by one we 
 lay down our volumes with their philosophic 
 definitions, and come home to our Father in 
 the evening-time like little children. 
 
 All this, which may seem to be a digression, 
 is really relevant to our present purpose. It 
 is quite true that various minds will conceive 
 of God in various ways, but our contention is 
 that our hope of essential unity lies not in our 
 views of Him but in the fact of God Himself. 
 We believe in the actual and direct revelation 
 
86 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of this personal God to the soul of man. 
 There may be differences of apprehension, but 
 in the living fact there is one essential unity. 
 There may be diversities of operations, but 
 after all is said there is but one Spirit. God, 
 the supreme fact of the universe, is revealed in 
 the Bible, witnessed by the Church, seen in 
 Jesus Christ. He is still out after every spirit 
 He has made, and He meets them all according 
 to their capacity for receiving Him. 
 
 The next question that faces us is the moral 
 aspects of the God in Whom we are to be- 
 lieve. When the Psalmist of the one hun- 
 dredth psalm fell back upon the assurance that 
 the Lord is good, he was taking his stand upon 
 the ultimate refuge of Christian faith. The 
 moral quality of God is the essential charac- 
 teristic of Christianity. There have been re- 
 ligions whose ultimate conception is that God 
 is great, that He is wise, or that He is in- 
 scrutable and mysterious. We insist that, 
 while all these are important, the one thing 
 necessary for us is to be sure, and to remain 
 sure, that He is good. " True religion is a 
 conviction of the character of God. ,, 
 
 This is not only a great but a fundamental 
 principle. Religion may be conceived of as a 
 device for promoting human morality, a guide 
 to conduct, a text-book of morals, or a safe- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 87 
 
 guard to public righteousness. It is indeed all 
 that, but it is far more than that. The char- 
 acter of man is important, but the character of 
 God is much more important. Our first duty 
 is not to do good, it is not even to be good; 
 it is to be sure that God is good. It is to be 
 sure that, when we worship and look up to 
 God, that to which we look is moral and not 
 immoral. The great question is, What is back 
 of the universe? What is the essential truth 
 of it ? Is there or is there not " an ultimate 
 decency in things " ? " It is true that even in 
 the interests of human character the assurance 
 of the goodness of God is of first importance. 
 Our convictions about our deity are necessa- 
 rily formative, and we consciously or uncon- 
 sciously model our own lives upon that which 
 we worship. Apart from this practical con- 
 sideration, however, there is the far more seri- 
 ous question of the ultimate value of morality, 
 which determines our choice between a moral 
 and a cynical view of human life. We 
 struggle hard for goodness, and, like John 
 Milton, — strive to " justify the ways of God 
 to men." Much depends upon whether we can 
 succeed in this justification or not. If good- 
 
 1 Readers of Dr. A. B. Brace's works will remember 
 the touching eagerness, and indeed almost passion, with 
 which he emphasizes this point of ultimate appeal. 
 
88 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 ness be simply a human convention, and the 
 laws of morality nothing more than an expe- 
 dient for the conduct of human life, our atti- 
 tude towards them and towards all things will 
 necessarily be very different from what it 
 would be if morality were our way of being in 
 tune with the universe. 
 
 The most deadly danger of our time is the 
 moral scepticism which belittles the impor- 
 tance of righteousness and sin. If all that we 
 call goodness is but an expedient for keeping 
 man and society in order, and has no ultimate 
 worth in it, then (if one may echo a famous 
 phrase) the beauty of holiness is but a matter 
 in the same class as the colours on a butterfly's 
 wings, and the majesty of law has about the 
 same ultimate importance as the protective 
 spots in a beetle's back. The certainty of the 
 ultimate worth of goodness is of the most 
 fundamental importance. It has been the 
 habit of the Church to address its God as One 
 in " knowledge of Whom standeth our eternal 
 life." It does not say " in obedience to Whom 
 standeth our eternal life/' but " in knowl- 
 edge." The Church has found its eternal life 
 in knowing that all that it taught men to 
 strive for is part of the character of the 
 eternal God. This is the greatest revelation of 
 the Bible, the supreme message of Jesus. 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 89 
 
 It has been very generally held that anthro- 
 pomorphism is the cause of wrong or inade- 
 quate conceptions of the character of God. 
 " The god of a triangle would be a triangle," 
 and the God of man will similarly be found in 
 the likeness of man. 
 
 " Man throws it up in air, it drops down 
 Earth's." 
 
 Man is supposed to deify his own attributes; 
 and, as man himself is very far from being 
 morally perfect, his God naturally shares his 
 failings. Thus the Greek gods and goddesses 
 were simply glorified men and women of like 
 passions with ourselves, and even the Chris- 
 tian conceptions are confused by the same vi- 
 cious principle. Lecky has pointed out that in 
 the religious art of the thirteenth century God 
 is always represented as a pope in Italian 
 pictures and as an emperor in German ones. 
 A famous wit has told us that " An honest 
 God's the noblest work of man." But as a 
 matter of fact many of man's gods are very 
 far from honest, and the wide variety of good 
 and evil conceptions which is covered by the 
 one word God in the history of religion, is 
 supposed to be entirely due to the similar 
 variety in the character of the men who 
 formed these ideas of God. In the words of 
 
90 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 Charles Dickens, " Verily, verily, travellers 
 have seen many monstrous idols in many 
 countries: but no human eyes have ever seen 
 more daring, gross, and shocking images of 
 the divine nature, than we poor creatures of 
 the dust, make in our own likeness of our 
 own bad passions." 
 
 In regard to this whole subject there is 
 much to say for the probability that man has 
 made his gods in his own image, and it is by 
 no means to his discredit that he has done so. 
 When one thinks of that rage for astronomical 
 divinities which characterized the middle of 
 the nineteenth century, one feels a kind of 
 wonder at the popularity with which it was 
 then received. Men fell upon the magnificent 
 Olympians of the Greek Pantheon, and seemed 
 to take a kind of truculent delight in reducing 
 them to terms of spring and winter, of dawn 
 and twilight, and of day and night. A still 
 sadder exchange from the splendours of these 
 same stories is made by those who adopt the 
 modern cult of reducing them all to vege- 
 tables. Apollo turns out to be the apple-tree; 
 Aphrodite, in sadly reduced circumstances, is 
 no better than the mandrake; and Artemis 
 herself has fallen to the low estate of a mere 
 mugwort. One understood in older times that 
 the Olympians came to Greece from the moun- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 9 1 
 
 tain and the valley of Olympus, but now it 
 would seem that they are only the latest ar- 
 rivals from a neighbouring market-garden. 
 The spirit of the present time revolts from all 
 this and loves to think of the Olympians, and 
 of noble divinities of other lands, as shadowy 
 forms of men and women dimly remembered 
 and passed on into tradition. They are not 
 abstract virtues or vices, but strong and clear 
 types of human life, bearing with them into 
 their divine estate both the good and evil 
 which entered into their human lives and 
 clung to their legends. 
 
 While, however, one repudiates the reduc- 
 tion of these very human personalities to any- 
 thing that is less than human, and admits that 
 something of the imperfect character of the 
 ancient gods must have been due to the hu- 
 manness of their origin, yet it seems to me 
 that the most reasonable explanation for the 
 defective views which men have held concern- 
 ing the character of their God or gods is not 
 anthropomorphism. It is the extraordinary 
 difficulty which confronts every seeker, in the 
 facts of human life and the ways of Provi- 
 dence. Man, even in his savage condition, is 
 not likely to attribute all that he finds in him- 
 self to his God. He tends to attribute the best 
 that he finds within himself to the Higher 
 
92 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 Power. He is intelligent enough to distin- 
 guish between his failure and his success in 
 moral life, viewed under whatever lights he 
 has. The farther he himself is from excel- 
 lence, the more naturally does he appeal to a 
 higher excellence than his own. We can see 
 this very clearly illustrated in those tales of 
 the Old Testament and of the Greek myth- 
 ology in which mortals protest against the 
 conduct of their God as they are able to see 
 it. When Abraham asks, Shall not the judge 
 of all the earth do right? he is protesting by 
 the light of his own conscience against conduct 
 on the part of God which he could not justify 
 and would not adopt for himself. The same 
 protest recurs in the book of Job, and the whole 
 attitude of the earlier chapters of that book 
 is precisely the same as Abraham's. The story 
 of the Greek Titans further confirms this 
 view, and the greatest of all the Greek stories, 
 that of Prometheus, is a profound and far- 
 seeing exposition of it. In the first of the 
 three Prometheus plays Prometheus is en- 
 tirely rebellious, and exclaims to Zeus, " Thou 
 wist what unjust things I suffer." It is true 
 that a reconciliation follows, much as in the 
 book of Job, and a fuller understanding of di- 
 vine ways leads Prometheus back from his re- 
 bellion into acquiescence. Shelley, however, 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 93 
 
 taking up the old tale, declines to follow 
 JEschylus past the first phase, and has en- 
 riched our literature with perhaps the most 
 daring protest against the ways of God that 
 was ever penned by man. 
 
 Now it is to be noted that this protest is not 
 blamed but honoured. Very patiently Job, 
 Abraham, and the psalmists are led back to a 
 higher truth, or a conviction of a deeper vir- 
 tue in the God they have misunderstood, but in 
 the meantime the bold remonstrance is not re- 
 garded as too bold. In Micah and in Isaiah 
 Jehovah calls for argument with men. The 
 attitude of protest is always treated honour- 
 ably and respectfully. Jesus, in His teaching 
 about the same problem, turns men's minds 
 away from the inscrutable mystery of Provi- 
 dence and leads them to the Father by another 
 road. He emphatically tells them that the vic- 
 tims of Pilate's massacre and of the falling 
 tower of Siloam must not be regarded as sin- 
 ners above all other sinners, whom God is 
 punishing for their sins. These are the vic- 
 tims of Providence, which is but a religious 
 way of speaking of the laws of nature ; and in 
 nature, as it has been excellently said, " there 
 are no rewards or punishments: there are con- 
 sequences." For the deeper view which, of 
 course, is absolutely ethical, Jesus points His 
 
94 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 disciples to Himself and tells them, He that 
 hath seen me hath seen the Father. 
 
 The most familiar instance of anthropo- 
 morphism in religious thought is afforded by 
 the fact that in general the first idea of God 
 entertained by a child is gained from his 
 knowledge of his parents. In so far as the 
 father and the mother fail to stand for ideals 
 which commend themselves to the child's con- 
 science, his idea of God will fail. Either he 
 will think of God as also failing in these 
 respects, or he will appeal from the failure 
 of the parents to some hoped-for nobility in 
 the God they have misrepresented. Yet as a 
 matter of fact human nature is more intelli- 
 gent than people give it credit for, and in the 
 main children will identify their thought of 
 God with those qualities for which conscience 
 and love are seeking. It is along this line that 
 we see the greatness of Christ's psychology in 
 the eternal phrase, our Father. That phrase 
 alone is a magnificent protest against our at- 
 tributing any of our human weaknesses to 
 God. We are not such fools as to pass on to 
 Him things which our own nature repudiates 
 as unworthy of it. You are not good, and I 
 am not good, but both of us would like to be 
 good. We need and we demand a God better 
 than ourselves. We look around to see if we 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 95 
 
 can find traces of Him in the world, but we 
 find only that Providence which is so often ap- 
 parently unreasonable, and which sometimes 
 seems to be utterly immoral. In a word, the 
 reason for our defective conceptions of God 
 is not mainly our attributing to Him the 
 poorer elements of our own character: it is our 
 experience of nature and of life around us, 
 which continually shock our moral sense by 
 their regardlessness and apparent injustice. 
 It appears then that the main cause of man's 
 misunderstanding of God is his experience of 
 life. 1 
 
 It is conspicuously true that all arguments 
 to the being of God from the facts of nature, 
 like those of Butler's Analogy, cut both ways, 
 
 1 " He that is unjust is also impious. For the Nature 
 of the Universe, having made all reasonable creatures 
 one for another, to the end that they should do one an- 
 other good; more or less, according to the several per- 
 sons and occasions ; but in no wise hurt one another ; it 
 is manifest that he that doth transgress against this his 
 will, is guilty of impiety towards the most ancient and 
 venerable of all the Deities." How gladly would I be- 
 lieve this ! That injustice is impiety, and indeed the 
 supreme impiety, I will hold with my last breath ; but it 
 were the merest affectation of a noble sentiment if I 
 supported my faith by such a reasoning. I see no single 
 piece of strong testimony that justice is the law of the 
 universe ; I see suggestions incalculable tending to prove 
 that it is not. — Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Giss- 
 ing). 
 
96 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 and tend quite as directly towards atheism as 
 they do towards belief. Nature and the ex- 
 ternal facts of life, moving under the un- 
 broken sweep of natural law, are certainly 
 responsible for the majority of man's defect- 
 ive conceptions of his God, and the Prome- 
 theus of the Greek tragedy is typical of man in 
 all ages protesting against the inferior morals 
 of the powers about him. 
 
 There are relics of Providence in many 
 popular conceptions of God which have sur- 
 vived even among Christians. Perhaps the 
 most striking of these is the tendency to re- 
 gard Him as jealous. While there is a sense 
 in which purest righteousness must always be 
 jealous, and must refuse to share its supreme 
 rule with any rival which stands for unright- 
 eous passion or desire, yet the idea of God 
 grudging us the choicest gifts of life, of His 
 watching with envious eyes the joy and love 
 which any life may attain, is an idea which 
 wherever it is found is nothing less than pa- 
 ganism. One sees it in the anxiety of some 
 parents about the danger of specially dear and 
 beautiful children, and in our amazing inter- 
 pretation of the death of those we love most 
 tenderly, as being due to some displeasure on 
 the part of God that we have given our hearts 
 to them. As we have said, there is nothing 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 97 
 
 that could be more obviously pagan than any 
 such idea of a rivalry between love human and 
 divine. Christ continually took our human 
 love for a symbol and vehicle of the divine 
 love, and taught men through their human af- 
 fections to realize that, back of these and 
 prompting them all, was the infinite love of 
 the Father, more tender, more passionate, and 
 more constant, than any of our human loves 
 can be. His often repeated phrase was, after 
 an appeal to their knowledge of how a human 
 father acts, " How much more will your Fa- 
 ther which is in heaven give good gifts unto 
 His children." In other words, life as we 
 know it at its best is good, but God is better 
 than life; and it is because of that that we 
 can trust Him and rejoice in Him. 
 
 Another point in which the character of 
 God has been defectively conceived is that of 
 vanity. In many of our hymns, and perhaps 
 still more of our prayers, the God Who is ad- 
 dressed seems to be concerned about His glory 
 and our praise of Him in a fashion which 
 would make us ashamed of any friend who de- 
 manded such an attitude of adulation. It is 
 probable that this is a survival of the pomps 
 of ancient kingdoms and the royal splendours 
 of barbaric states. We have taken these over 
 into our conception of a heaven which is full 
 
98 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of preraphaelite decoration, and which would 
 bore any sensible and well-conditioned young 
 man to tears after a day of it. In all this 
 meretricious splendour there is an unconscious 
 blasphemy, and there is a very injurious mis- 
 understanding of the meaning of God's glory 
 and His delight in praise. All the teaching of 
 the Bible goes to show that His glory is in the 
 well-being of His creatures, and is but another 
 fact of His love. He is glorified in His saints, 
 and their best way of praising Him is to show 
 in their lives some appreciation of His mercy 
 and some likeness to His character. 
 
 Again, nothing is commoner than a fatal- 
 istic view of the arbitrary will and power of 
 the Most High. This is no doubt connected 
 with that fatalism which must have originally 
 sprung from a sense of man's helplessness 
 among the huge powers of nature, and which 
 has sometimes corrupted the splendid basal 
 truth of Calvinism and made the human heart 
 rebel against its teachings. From this bad be- 
 ginning it is easy to pass into still further 
 lengths of misjudgment, and we frequently 
 hear God referred to as " an angry judge." 
 Has it never occurred to any of those who use 
 that phrase that the first necessity for just 
 judgment is that the judge shall be calm and 
 impartial? An angry judge is a moral con- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 99 
 
 tradiction in terms. It has led men still 
 further astray, until whole nations have taken 
 it as a first principle of religion that their God 
 regards them with an altogether unjust par- 
 tiality. The God of the Pharisees was a God 
 of the most blatant favouritism, and the 
 prophets of Israel were continually tilting 
 against the blind conviction that Jerusalem 
 and the Jewish nation, having been chosen by 
 the Most High for His own, could never 
 perish, however much they sinned. 
 
 These things are not generally expressed in 
 so crude a fashion as this, but they haunt 
 many a devout Christian soul until it regards 
 resignation as the noblest of virtues. But 
 resignation often implies an unexpressed sense 
 of unreasonableness in the divine attitude and 
 action towards men. If we believe God to be 
 unreasonable, we have no right to be resigned 
 to Him. The only decent attitude for a moral 
 being is to rebel. Prometheus, Abraham, Job, 
 and many of the psalmists take our breath 
 away by their daring refusal to comply with 
 actions which have not convinced their con- 
 science, and it is only by such straight dealing 
 that we shall ever reach the peace that comes 
 of faith. " We can trust the good God in the 
 end," says a famous Frenchman. We agree, 
 but it is only because He will turn out to be the 
 
IOO THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 good God that we have any right to trust Him. 
 Connected with this sense of arbitrariness in 
 God, is the still more widely diffused and 
 lamentable fact that the God of many people 
 is really devoid of all intelligence. The being 
 which they think of as divine is one whose 
 actions, and whose point of view generally, 
 would be regarded as sheer stupidity in any 
 mortal whom men were criticizing. This has 
 been a sad plague to popular theology since 
 the days when the prophets exclaimed against 
 it in the memorable words, " He that made the 
 eye, shall He not see ? " 
 
 All these, and other seriously defective 
 characteristics which have been attributed to 
 God by loosely expressed doctrines including 
 that of the atonement, are very serious fac- 
 tors in the religious problem of the present 
 time. They are all phases of the same great 
 curse of local gods which is the very essence 
 of idolatry. When we talk about idolatry and 
 heathenism, it is a great mistake to pass over 
 all our criticisms at once to what we call 
 heathen countries. There is idolatry in Chris- 
 tendom as well as outside it, and it is worse 
 than that which it criticizes. Idolatry may be 
 either a progress or a decline in a nation's re- 
 ligious life. In many a heathen land it is an 
 advance from some poorer form of primitive 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD IOI 
 
 worship or fear, but for us it is always and 
 only a decline and degeneration. Christianity 
 proclaims the universal God, Father of all the 
 universe, and in a special sense of all its hu- 
 man inhabitants. Man in his ignorant vanity 
 allows his provincialism and the narrowness 
 of his own interests to shrink his universe into 
 a local club in which he and a certain number 
 of his fellow mortals find their home. His 
 God shrinks with the shrinkage of his world, 
 and so you have at once, under whatever high 
 sounding names of the Lord of Hosts or the 
 Almighty God, a local deity with a narrower 
 sphere of influence than many of the tribal 
 gods of pagans. It has been admirably said of 
 the deists by Anatole France that " The deists 
 make a moral, philanthropical and prudish 
 God for their own use, with Whom they en- 
 joy the satisfaction of a perfect understand- 
 ing, akin to the government, temperate, 
 weighty, exempt from fanaticism." It is 
 much to be feared that to many Christians the 
 God Whom they worship is morally conceived 
 in a still more unworthy fashion. To some 
 He is but the head of the ecclesiastical party 
 or denomination to which they belong. To 
 others He is but the chief supporter of their 
 peculiar theological tenets. It is inconceivable 
 how much moral loss there has been to faith, 
 
102 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 and ultimately to character, through this sort 
 of thing. When the Highest Himself de- 
 scends to the role of a mere partisan leader 
 in church or state, what is there left to wor- 
 ship? 
 
 One can hear a protest from those to whom 
 such lines of thought are new, " Forbear thee 
 from meddling with God Who is with me." 
 These words are indeed taken from the Bible, 
 but they are the cry of a heathen king against 
 Josiah of Israel, who presumably might have 
 made a suitable reply. They are indeed 
 echoed by many Christian people to-day. 
 Thomas Carlyle was very indignant on hear- 
 ing Hall preach eloquently upon God that can- 
 not lie. Yet it is possible that not only Carlyle, 
 but many who profess a far fuller religious 
 faith than his, might do well to pause and see 
 whether their conception of God will stand in 
 the judgment of an ordinary man's conscience; 
 and they may be very well assured that, if 
 their God's principles and character can- 
 not bear examination, He is not much of a 
 God. 
 
 It is quite true that he who seeks to take 
 away bad gods from men must substitute a 
 God that is good. When we think of it, that 
 was precisely what Christ did for the Phari- 
 sees, and it must have been a wonderful ex- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 103 
 
 perience to those who followed Him to find 
 that the God to Whom they looked, and Who 
 held their spirits in His hand, was actually 
 One Who could be counted upon for a reason- 
 able understanding and a just judgment of 
 their lives. The principle upon which Christ 
 acted in this matter, and the principle which 
 is involved in all such protests, is that the God 
 Whom we worship must have the same moral 
 standards as those which we find within our 
 own breasts. The position is summed up ad- 
 mirably by Whittier in his famous saying, that 
 
 " Nothing can be good in Him 
 Which evil is in me." 
 
 We must refuse to admit that anything is good 
 because God does it, and substitute for that 
 error the truth that God does the thing be- 
 cause it is good. The former view has led in 
 every age to a cringing attitude towards God 
 in which conscience has disappeared. If good- 
 ness is an arbitrary matter depending upon the 
 caprice of the Highest, then His Church will 
 sooner or later model upon His morality. As 
 a matter of fact this has often happened, and 
 the result of it has been the evil doctrine of 
 the end justifying the means, and of anything 
 being legitimate which tended towards the 
 glory of God or of the Church. The one vital 
 
104 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 principle without which there is no security 
 against all manner of degeneration is that the 
 same principles of right and wrong which bind 
 us bind Him also, and apply as strictly to the 
 divine nature as to the human. 
 
 It is in this connection that we come in sight 
 of the whole matter of man's communion 
 with God. There have been many ways in 
 which communion with God has been under- 
 stood, and the religious world may be on the 
 whole divided into two sections, according to 
 its view in this matter. Worship in many 
 lands has been regarded simply as the per- 
 formance of a proper ritual. If one used the 
 right words, and performed the right cere- 
 monies punctually and carefully, a good rela- 
 tion was established between the worshipper 
 and his God, whereas any failure or delay in 
 these matters led to alienation and might be 
 visited with punishment. We cannot too 
 strongly insist that such worship presupposes 
 an impossible God. The organ for knowing 
 God is an intelligent conscience. The only 
 communion worthy of the name consists in 
 having a common thought and feeling about 
 things in general, and a common conscience 
 of good and evil, with Him. But if this be so 
 it is obvious that every possibility of commun- 
 ion depends upon common standards, without 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 105 
 
 which there is nothing left for religion but 
 mindless and conscienceless performances. 
 
 It is very wonderful how a common con- 
 science leads us, under the guidance of Christ, 
 to communion with God. Any event or ex- 
 perience of life may be taken up into this com- 
 munion, but by far the most intimate and im- 
 portant element in it will be that which is pro- 
 duced by questions connected with sin and 
 righteousness. Our very sins make us to 
 know His goodness by the sharp and blinding 
 contrast. If our God be moral along the same 
 lines and with the same standards as we are, 
 then indeed He is a consuming fire. The con- 
 science of sin takes on a new terror when we 
 realize that in transgressing our own standards 
 we have ranked ourselves against our God. 
 As the Arab in his prayer draws a circle 
 around him in the sand and feels himself 
 within that circle cut off from all the world 
 and shut in with Allah, so our sins form a 
 flaming circle around us. Nothing else in all 
 the world matters but the fact that conscience 
 turning to God exclaims, Against Thee, Thee 
 only, have I sinned. It is this that lends its 
 desperate seriousness to the situation. It 
 sweeps us past all other standards of morals, 
 and makes it impossible for any intelligent 
 man to take refuge in these, as so many pro- 
 
106 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 fessed Christians do. Nothing can be justi- 
 fied merely because others do it, however good 
 and admirable these others may be. The fire 
 of our own conscience has come between us 
 and them, shutting us in with a stricter tribu- 
 nal. No plea of propriety, no guarantee of 
 respectability counts for anything here. 
 There can be no longer any meticulous tri- 
 fling with petty sins, as if we were confronting 
 a God Who was interested in our failures in 
 the observance of ritual. 
 
 For within our fiery circle we discover love 
 in the heart of purity. The perfect goodness 
 of our God is not cold but passionate. He Js 
 not concerned with any breaches of arbitrary 
 law. He is breaking His heart over the ter- 
 rible black tragedy of real sins on the part of 
 His worshippers. He is concerned about the 
 huge calamity of man's transgressions. For 
 Him, goodness — that very same goodness 
 which judges us — is eternal and majestic. His 
 righteousness is like great mountains and His 
 judgments are deep as floods. He comes to us 
 not as a merchant to bargain with us concern- 
 ing our conduct, but as one who, seeing the 
 utter tragedy of sin, can meet us only in the 
 still more tragic redemption which we see in 
 the cross of Christ. 
 
 Further, if His standards and ours are one, 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 107 
 
 in our communion with God we find Him 
 building up our broken righteousness. God is 
 essentially creative, and the most wonderful 
 thing He makes is human character. The 
 ideal goodness for man ceases to be mere ab- 
 stinence from things forbidden, and becomes 
 positive and practical, a creative righteousness 
 in which we have fellowship with the aims of 
 the Creator and build up about us our part of 
 a righteous world. Thus His holiness and His 
 love can bring us into His communion. He is 
 separate from sinners not because His conduct 
 of life is carried out upon different moral 
 principles and standards from those which 
 they must obey; but because, the standards 
 being the same, we have failed of that identical 
 righteousness which is righteousness for Him. 
 But this separation brings us infinitely nearer 
 God than anything else could have done. The 
 bonds of common sin seem to unite men for a 
 time but they ultimately separate them beyond 
 all reunion. The bonds of a common stand- 
 ard, while they separate God and man by the 
 most tragic gulf that can be found in the uni- 
 verse, yet have in them the promise of a pos- 
 sible ultimate reunion in which our fellowship 
 with Him will be made perfect. For there is 
 no such fellowship in all the world as that of 
 forgiveness. The loneliness of the ghastly 
 
108 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 discovery that sin is vain because God is good, 
 and the impossibility of solving such a prob- 
 lem by any ritual performance or sacrificial 
 act, lead the soul towards the wonder of for- 
 giveness, the infinite comfort of reestablished 
 communion with the good God, and the eter- 
 nal confidence and trust which that restora- 
 tion brings, just because we have fellowship 
 with Him in conscience as well as in grace. 
 In all their affliction He was afflicted — most 
 of all in the grievous affliction of their sin. 
 
 Out of all this there comes to each of us the 
 rousing question of a very daring message. 
 Do not complacently content yourself with 
 your traditional God, but before all else in re- 
 ligion purify your thought of Him. Never for 
 a moment allow yourself to think of Him 
 either harshly or diplomatically. Lay hold 
 upon Him not only with your weakness but 
 with your strength: with your best of con- 
 science as well as with your worst of shame. 
 Revise also your theology. Cast out of it, 
 even out of its most sacred traditions of the 
 conduct and mind of God, all that is not good. 
 Revise each doctrine separately and refuse to 
 subscribe to any, upon whatsoever sanctions 
 or under whatsoever plea, that does not satisfy 
 your own conscience as to its rectitude. The 
 God of many excellent people is not only not 
 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 109 
 
 good, He is not even sane or decent. You 
 will make little headway in the religious life 
 until you can trust your God. And this revisal 
 must necessarily go farther, and lead to a re- 
 vising of ethics also. Our consciences are so 
 accustomed to bow in the house of Rimmon 
 that it will take years for most of us to cleanse 
 them of their moral prejudices and set them 
 free from those little trifling proprieties which 
 are so tyrannical over men. Each detail that 
 affects the conscience ought to be taken out 
 and held in the clear light of God until the con- 
 ception of righteousness has ceased to be a 
 matter of conventional proprieties, and is seen 
 on large scale in some such massive reality as 
 to satisfy your noblest aspirations. The 
 righteousness of many is but a wide field full 
 of mole-hills, but the righteousness to which 
 God calls us is indeed like the great mountains. 
 Then, when these corrections have been made, 
 a man comes to know that there is an eternal 
 backing for all his best endeavours, and finds 
 in the character of God the last refuge and 
 citadel for his faith. 
 
 Thus it is from within the soul that we 
 reach the great persuasion that God is good. 
 In the world of external experience we are 
 constantly meeting with the tragic problems of 
 Providence, and they bear us no such message 
 
IIO THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 whatsoever. From the providential order of 
 the world there must be found this escape. 
 We shall never be able to reconcile the con- 
 scienceless and non-moral sweep of things in 
 which we are carried onwards down the years 
 with our persuasion of God's goodness and 
 His love. From providential experience we 
 must appeal, and escape into that deeper moral 
 order whose evidence and certificate lies in the 
 moral persuasions of the spirit of man. From 
 that moral order, thank God, there is no es- 
 cape. All that is within us reveals a God ter- 
 rible in holiness, absolutely just, abundant in 
 mercy. The world may be crazy and upside 
 down, but God is good. I personally am lost 
 and all bewildered and abroad, but God is 
 good. My heart is broken or my heart is 
 frozen, but God is good. I have destroyed my- 
 self, but God is good. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 THE INCARNATE LOVE 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE INCARNATE LOVE 
 
 The word is nigh, even in thy mouth and in thy 
 heart. — Romans io:8. 
 
 The word was made flesh. — John i : 14. 
 
 BEFORE the coming of Jesus Christ 
 God had been revealing Himself to 
 man through all the ages with a reve- 
 lation which slowly but steadily grew clearer. 
 We are accustomed to this thought in connec- 
 tion with the divine revelation made in the 
 Old Testament. The point which I would like 
 now to emphasize is that all that revelation 
 was made within the souls of inspired men, 
 and that the record of the Bible is really a 
 record of spiritual experience rather than of 
 externally given dogma. God never could be 
 seen by man except as He revealed Himself 
 within the soul of man. The lawgivers, the 
 psalmists and the prophets received God 
 within their souls, passed through amazing 
 spiritual experiences, and sent the record of 
 
 "3 
 
114 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 these down in the written word. Thus, 
 in a sense, the word had become flesh 
 from the beginning of things. In every in- 
 spired man some word of God was incarnate. 
 Dr. Peabody in a very remarkable note upon 
 the text, The word was made flesh, helps us 
 to realize that, in every man who is impressed 
 by religious truth and who carries that truth 
 out into character and outward life, that great 
 principle of incarnation is fulfilled. 1 In all 
 such translation of spiritual experience into 
 conviction and character there is a hint that 
 whatever God may choose to reveal of Him- 
 self will probably come to man by way of in- 
 carnation. 
 
 In the world outside of Palestine the same 
 thing had been going on, although in a much 
 dimmer and less perfect fashion. Every na- 
 tion had had its own ideas of God, and in 
 many nations the historian notes a definite 
 advance in these. Beyond all other nations of 
 the western world this is true of Greece. By 
 her, God had been discovered as the great and 
 constant counterpart to life, the necessary 
 supplement without which no knowledge of 
 ours can be intelligible. We have already seen 
 how the discovery had been marred by the two 
 great enemies of faith, — on the one hand the 
 
 1 Sunday Mornings in the College Chapel. 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 115 
 
 tendency to anthropomorphism, and on the 
 other hand the crude and quite unethical facts 
 of Providence. In regard to these we took the 
 position that it was the latter which most of 
 all distorted man's conception of God; while 
 the former, although it may be responsible for 
 the attribution of certain human frailties to 
 the Divine, yet, on the whole, tended towards 
 real knowledge of God and approach to Him. 
 Yet there can be no doubt that anthropo- 
 morphism did sometimes mislead men. To 
 guard against its danger there was a tendency 
 among thinkers, both in Israel and outside of 
 it, to go to the opposite extreme, disclaiming 
 all similarity between divine and human na- 
 ture, and separating God completely from 
 man. In such a question as that of miracles 
 we can see this tendency working. It has 
 often puzzled Christian people to understand 
 why the Pharisees were not satisfied with such 
 miracles as Christ did, but were perpetually 
 demanding from Him what He called signs 
 and wonders. The explanation seems to be 
 that in His miracles He was too kindly, too 
 familiar, understanding and human. Such 
 miracles as these, which were exactly the 
 things which our human hearts would have 
 prompted us to do for those whom we love, 
 if we had had the power, never satisfied the 
 
116 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 Pharisees just because they were so much in 
 the line of human desire. The signs and won- 
 ders which would have pleased them were evi- 
 dently things which had no human nature in 
 them at all. A leap from the temple pinnacle, 
 a miraculous descent from the cross, or some 
 startling disarrangement of astronomical or 
 other laws of nature — these were what they 
 wanted. This may have been a perverted re- 
 sult of their fear of anthropomorphic views 
 of God, which they would have associated 
 with idolatry. As a matter of fact they fell 
 into a far greater danger of idolatry by empty- 
 ing God of human attributes and worship- 
 ping an unhuman conception. There can be 
 little question that the third temptation of 
 Jesus represents a suggestion that He might 
 conduct His ministry more effectively by yield- 
 ing to this desire on the part of Jewish re- 
 ligious leaders, and might exchange His deeds 
 of human kindness for others simply astonish- 
 ing, in which there was no manifestation of 
 sympathy or of love for man. 
 
 The incarnation of God in Jesus is in itself 
 an answer to all earth's deepest questions. It 
 is the final verdict which decides the question 
 of the relation between God and man. It has 
 been supposed by the Pharisaic party of all 
 nations and times to involve a limitation, a 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 117 
 
 humanizing of Cod which made Him less di- 
 vine. Christ's contention was that that limita- 
 tion and humanizing, instead of being a de- 
 fect, was really a tremendous power. He held 
 and taught that God was not less God for ap- 
 pearing in the form of a man, and that there 
 was nothing essentially unnatural in the incar- 
 nation. The proof of the divinity used to be 
 sought in making God as unlike to man as 
 possible. Christ insists that man's conception 
 of God cannot be too human, and that the 
 word divine is not the equivalent of unhuman. 
 At the period when the fourth gospel was 
 written there was one of those great and sig- 
 nificant confluences of various streams of 
 thought which have always marked an ad- 
 vance in the intellectual and spiritual life of 
 the world. The Greek and the Hebrew 
 streams then met as they had never done be- 
 fore. All the world was out for a fuller 
 knowledge of God, and was seeking in one 
 way or another for a real approach, in which 
 man would find God nearer to human nature 
 than He had been conceived to be. Plato had 
 found God along the lines of human intellect 
 and thought, and in this way had established a 
 real connection between the human and the di- 
 vine. Still that connection left man very wist- 
 ful. The eternal ideas dwelt in heaven, and 
 
Il8 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 man's thoughts were but the shadows and re- 
 flections of these. The brilliant metaphor of 
 the cave is one of the abiding masterpieces of 
 philosophic insight. Man, lying on his back 
 within the cave, across whose mouth ran a 
 low wall, could not see the procession that 
 passed the entrance. But, looking upwards 
 from the floor of the cave, he could see the 
 movement of dim forms which were the 
 shadows cast upon the cave's roof, as the pro- 
 cession passed. This was all that he could 
 share of the divine ideas. It was much but it 
 was not enough. It linked on human life with 
 the divine through the medium of thought, 
 and taught man to think magnificently of his 
 own thinking. 
 
 Yet there was no real sympathetic contact 
 between God and man. The two had not 
 really met. One sees the same defect in the 
 splendid conception of Apollo and his worship 
 and his oracles of Delphi and of Delos. In a 
 very remarkable study of this subject pub- 
 lished a few years ago by Wilamowitz the fol- 
 lowing passages occur: — "Know thyself — by 
 which was meant Know that thou art a mortal 
 man, and know it here, face to face with my 
 eternal and divine majesty." " The cult of 
 Apollo renounces the whole domain of mysti- 
 cism, for its god has no direct communion with 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 119 
 
 humanity. It renounces that disburdening of 
 the soul which takes place in all forms of 
 ecstasy when man passes beyond himself. 
 And therewith, to a great extent, it also re- 
 nounces hope." In the Alkestis it will be re- 
 membered that Apollo cannot remain in the 
 house of his friend and host Admetos when 
 death has visited the mansion. To escape de- 
 filement he disappears. He had been a 
 friendly and a welcome presence there, but 
 when life reached its point of greatest need, 
 his immortality separated him from mortals 
 and he failed them. Instead of him comes 
 Herakles, half god and half man. He has no 
 scruples about defilement, but wrestles with 
 death and brings back Alkestis to the sunshine. 
 In this we see the Greek desire of man's soul 
 for communion with his God, the baffling ne- 
 cessity which must forever separate the human 
 from the divine, and the pathetic expedient of 
 bridging that gulf by the creation of demi- 
 gods. Similarly, we have the stories of ^Escu- 
 lapius, and the famous inscription upon the 
 cupola of one of his temples, " Being come to 
 this place the Son of God loved it exceed- 
 ingly/' This goes far in its approach to the 
 idea of the incarnation, and it will be noticed 
 that both with Herakles ?nd with ^Esculapius 
 it is for the sake of restoring mortals from 
 
120 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 sickness to health and from death to life 
 that the approach is made, thus anticipating 
 in a very striking manner the ministry of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Yet all these legends were dealing with a 
 thing which obviously they did not under- 
 stand. The cult of Herakles or of ^Esculapius 
 can hardly be called a faith. Their incarna- 
 tion was a mystery rather than an active be- 
 lief. It was the beautiful and dreamy reflex 
 of man's desires, in the heart of which there 
 lay a certain hope that these desires might 
 prove to be the shadowy revelations of the 
 truth that man was nearer to his God than he 
 had dared to think. They may be called in- 
 carnation without faith. And after all, the 
 Greek demi-gods and even the gods themselves 
 had been men to begin with, and had little in 
 common with the speculations of the philoso- 
 phers concerning the divine. The result of it 
 all was this, that the mysterious deity lay on 
 his couch of stars thinking his wondrous 
 thoughts, while far down the gulf this little 
 world of mortals lived in the twilight of these 
 thoughts of God. 
 
 In the Hebrew Scriptures the most charac- 
 teristic feature is the wonderful nearness of 
 God and man. From the earliest days God 
 walks with man and speaks to him in the most 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 121 
 
 friendly and understanding fashion. Abra- 
 ham is the friend of God. Moses receives 
 overwhelming assurances of the abundance of 
 His mercy and truth and goodness which have 
 become classics of religious consolation. The 
 prophets recall man from the distance to which 
 his sins have driven him, to a God nigh at 
 hand and longing for man's love. Yet for a 
 long time these oracles had been dumb, and the 
 Jewish religion as it was in the time of Christ 
 had got separated very far from its God. 
 Jehovah still stood supreme over Israel, but 
 He was the austere Lord of righteousness and 
 command, Who had lost all the human tender- 
 ness of the God of Amos and Hosea, and 
 Whose dealing with man might be most justly 
 conceived as that of one sitting upon a judg- 
 ment seat and watching the procession of 
 mortals trooping past for doom. 
 
 At this time a new philosophy was arising, 
 associated chiefly with the name of Philo the 
 Jew, and it arose out of the need that was felt 
 by Jews and Greeks alike for getting God and 
 man nearer to one another. It took up into its 
 capacious spirit the Old Testament literature 
 and the Platonic philosophy and made a blend 
 of them. It conceived of wisdom in various 
 ways. Sometimes it was personified, and a 
 wonderful romance was woven about its 
 
122 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 career. At other times it was dreamy and in- 
 distinct, rather an attribute than a person. 
 Now it was a mere quality in man and God: 
 then it was a soul, in itself more or less divine. 
 Even this suggestion of a unity between the 
 human and the divine brought the wistfulness 
 of the world flocking to its teaching in the de- 
 sire to get nearer to its God. Zoroastrians 
 contributed to it their lore of angels and of 
 devils. From the Far East Buddhism, with 
 its sense of the infinite separation between 
 God and the world, suggested the necessity for 
 a mediating power of some sort. At last the 
 system took romantic shape in the tale of the 
 seons. These, representing the various human 
 powers of mind and soul, came trooping out 
 from God. Human wisdom, the last thing 
 that wandered forth from the Father, got so 
 far away from Him as to lose hold, and seek- 
 ing to leap back into His bosom fell down the 
 unfathomable abyss and became the light of 
 the world's dim knowledge. It is easy to 
 smile at all this and to call it a grotesque pic- 
 ture of master-truths of life, but it would be 
 well to remember that " sense of tears in 
 mortal things " to which Euripides had given 
 such wonderful expression, that cry of man 
 for some approach of God which was heard 
 in every land. 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 1 23 
 
 Into this world at some stage or other there 
 fell the marvellous words, The word zvas made 
 flesh. It was a revolutionary and also a fulfill- 
 ing word. It shattered forever the sorrow of 
 the ancient world and made its hope articu- 
 late. It accepted the fact that all that any one 
 can know of God must be known within his 
 own soul; and it interpreted that fact, not by 
 any fantastic story of aeons, but by the record 
 of a life which was known to be indisputable 
 historic fact. The only way in which any so- 
 lution for the mystery could be found was in- 
 carnation, and in Jesus Christ that incarnation 
 took place. 
 
 The doctrine of the incarnation and the 
 great words, The zvord was made flesh, have 
 presented apparently insuperable difficulties to 
 many minds. The author of Ecce Homo has 
 said, " The zvord zvas made flesh. Present the 
 saying to an ordinary man, and if he answered 
 the truth he would say that he did not under- 
 stand it. He will answer that he believes it, 
 by which he means that as the words make no 
 impression whatever upon his mind, so they 
 excite no opposition in it. Present the same 
 word to a thinker. It will overwhelm him 
 with difficulty. He will sigh, and you will 
 hear him murmur that it is a great saying, but 
 he fears he shall never believe it" These 
 
124 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 words are weighty and they are very impress- 
 ive. It is perhaps presumptuous to challenge 
 them, for they will be admitted by a very large 
 number of grave and earnest men in our gene- 
 ration. Yet one cannot but remember that 
 very many thinkers at the time when the text 
 was first spoken must have found in them no 
 new thing difficult of belief, but a solution of 
 the whole effort of the thought of the ancient 
 world. The Hebrew insisted that God had 
 made man in His own image, by which pre- 
 sumably he meant that man is capable of re- 
 ceiving and expressing God in his human na- 
 ture. The Greek admitted that all possible 
 discovery of God must be within the soul, and 
 all that had ever been known of God was in- 
 deed a word manifest in the flesh. Both He- 
 brew and Greek would have shrunk back from 
 a God that was not similar to man, with a 
 horror which no other conception could have 
 produced. There is nothing conceivable so 
 hideous as the idea of man finding himself in 
 the power of a being essentially different from 
 himself. Swift, 1 in his rough way, set us 
 shuddering at the bare imagination of a race 
 of horses having domination over human spir- 
 its, and that is but a suggestion of the hide- 
 ousness of any kind of God who is incapable 
 1 Gulliver's Travels. 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 1 25 
 
 of being manifest in the flesh. The flesh was 
 weak and its medium very obscuring, and in 
 consequence of this the word thus manifest 
 was very partially intelligible, either to the 
 Hebrew or to the Greek. Yet the dominant 
 conception of the revelation of God in the 
 flesh had set the lines for all possible revela- 
 tion. The Word must become flesh in some 
 fuller and completer form than man had ever 
 known. The incarnation was the one and only 
 way of God's manifestation to man which was 
 to be expected upon the earth. From the be- 
 ginning God had been the true light that, com- 
 ing into the world, lighteth every man. Noth- 
 ing could have been more probable, and noth- 
 ing more obviously fitting when it was mani- 
 fest, than that One should come at last saying, 
 I am the light of the zvorld. 
 
 All that has been said so far has been an 
 attempt to show the relation between the main 
 thesis of these lectures, namely the inwardness 
 of the ultimate foundations of faith, and the 
 external historic fact of the revelation of God 
 in Jesus Christ. There was something in 
 common between man and God which made it 
 natural that when He chose to reveal Himself 
 fully to man it should be in a human life 
 rather than in external oracles of any sort. It 
 remains for us to illustrate this thesis by ap- 
 
126 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 plying its principle to the three great doc- 
 trines of incarnation, atonement, and resur- 
 rection. 
 
 1. The Incarnation. The soul may be re- 
 garded in the first place as the seat of con- 
 sciousness and thought. If man is to find God 
 within himself, a certain amount of that dis- 
 covery will be made along purely intellectual 
 lines. As his mind exercises itself in knowl- 
 edge he will find himself in contact with the 
 eternal thoughts, while he is thinking his own. 
 Much of our knowledge consists of memories 
 of our past experience and other purely per- 
 sonal details, as well as of our consciousness 
 of things and events external to us and our 
 judgments concerning these. It is true that 
 even upon such matters there falls at times a 
 mysterious light which takes them into a 
 higher region and reveals God in the incidents 
 of our every-day life. But besides such di- 
 vine interpretations of common things, there 
 is more. We are visited by " thoughts sub- 
 lime that pierce the night like stars," and in 
 our thinking upon spiritual things we find 
 ourselves in a region which, in the famous 
 words of Euripides, is " divine or human or 
 both mixed." It was this consciousness of a 
 divine element mingling with common knowl- 
 edge that suggested the Daemon of Socrates, 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 127 
 
 and there never was a more impressive sug- 
 gestion than that. There are times when even 
 the most commonplace mind is smitten with a 
 light which awes, and sometimes terrifies it, 
 and a voice comes out of the fire saying, 
 Put off thy shoes from off thy feet; for the 
 place whereon thou standest is holy ground. 
 The more loftily we think, the more certain 
 we are that it is not only we but God thinking 
 in us. 
 
 When men are framing ideals for humanity 
 or seeking to plan their own lives upon the 
 highest plane, they are (and the wisest of 
 them know that they are) thinking over again 
 thoughts of God. Whenever thought rises to 
 any exaltation it discloses its secret, and men 
 know that they are in contact with that from 
 which it sprang, its eternal fountains in the 
 mind that governs the universe. It follows 
 from all this that we should expect the full 
 revelation of God not to be a revelation of 
 alien truth or beauty or goodness, but some- 
 thing essentially intelligible to man's intellect, 
 and somehow familiar to all who had realized 
 the divine meaning and presence in their own 
 thinking. The revelation of God within the 
 mind of man will be a revelation of the same 
 nature as his own intellectual persuasions, but 
 different from these in its perfect clearness, 
 
128 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 its sure confirmation, and its established per- 
 manence. 
 
 It is along such lines that we can best un- 
 derstand the meaning of the incarnation of 
 Jesus Christ. The clue to it lies within our 
 own souls. There is indeed infinitely more 
 there than there ever has been or will be in 
 mere mortal man; but unless it were intelli- 
 gible to him along the lines of his own think- 
 ing it would have no point of contact with him, 
 and would be entirely useless for the purposes 
 of faith. This contact is precisely the thing 
 which Christ accomplished. 
 
 Much has been said in recent years of the 
 originality of Christ's teaching, and much of 
 that has great interest and value. Mr. Lecky 
 has expressed this view admirably: " Nothing 
 can, as I conceive, be more erroneous or su- 
 perficial than the reasonings of those who 
 maintain that the moral element of Christian- 
 ity has in it nothing distinctive or peculiar. 
 The method of this school, of which Boling- 
 broke may be regarded as the type, is to col- 
 lect from the writings of different heathen 
 writers certain isolated passages embodying 
 precepts that were inculcated by Christianity; 
 and when the collection had become very 
 large, the task was supposed to be accom- 
 plished. But the true originality of a system 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 1 29 
 
 of moral teaching depends not so much upon 
 the elements of which it is composed, as upon 
 the manner in which they are fused into a 
 symmetrical whole, upon the proportionate 
 value that is attached to different qualities, or, 
 to state the same thing by a single word, upon 
 the type of character that is formed. Now it 
 is quite certain that the Christian type differs 
 not only in degree, but in kind, from the Pa- 
 gan one." 
 
 Yet one must be very guarded in pursuing 
 this line of argument. Suppose we were able 
 to separate the teachings of Jesus from all 
 that had been said before, that would be rather 
 an added difficulty than an aid to faith. It 
 would lead us to view the Christian religion 
 as a new religion rivalling the others by the 
 claim it makes to new discoveries and revela- 
 tions of truth. Thus it would tend to an esti- 
 mate of Christianity as but another religion 
 among the many that had already existed: 
 doubtless the best and most advanced of them 
 all, yet somehow to be judged as upon their 
 level. But Christianity is not a rival religion, 
 either to Judaism or to Buddhism or to any 
 other. Christianity is the religion of the 
 world, the only religion. It takes up into it- 
 self all that is true in all the other revelations 
 of God to man. It does not boast that it is 
 
I30 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 better than these, nor even fuller. It professes 
 to be God manifest in the flesh, and proclaims 
 that, in this manifestation, everything that 
 God has allowed man to discover concerning 
 himself in any faith, is not only included but 
 is fully and finally interpreted. 
 
 Thus it would seem that the splendour of 
 Christ's revelation is really its non-originality. 
 It is because in it one finds all that any man 
 had ever found of God that we profess to be- 
 lieve that Jesus is in a quite unique sense the 
 way and the truth; taking up into Himself, 
 glorifying and confirming, all true thoughts 
 of God which it has ever entered the mind of 
 man to conceive. The enemies of Christianity 
 have often thought that they had done it an 
 injury by offering quotations from the words 
 of Buddha or Confucius or the Old Testa- 
 ment, and pointing out that in sayings cor- 
 responding to these Jesus was not original. 
 The answer has too often been an attempt to 
 show that these quotations did not mean what 
 Jesus meant, and to discredit or belittle their 
 value. I would suggest that the real answer to 
 any such charges is to admit them all and 
 glory in them. It is surely unnecessary to 
 deny that these other teachers may have dis- 
 covered or had revealed to them many truths 
 concerning God and human life, and the more 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 131 
 
 of these that we can find, the better for our 
 faith in Christ. It is fantastic to imagine that 
 He borrowed His sayings from sources such 
 as these, but the fact that in His teaching He 
 embodied all the truth of the ancient world, 
 along with the new revelations which He 
 made, surely adds to the completeness of our 
 conception that in Him we have indeed the 
 word made flesh. 
 
 The thought of Jesus penetrated to God 
 continually, and gave to His disciples daily 
 the solution of the world's deepest problems 
 and darkest questions. He who studies the 
 thoughts and words of Jesus will find upon 
 any subject the mind of God. 
 
 " The acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
 Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
 All questions in the earth and out of it." 
 
 This was plainly the sense in which Jesus un- 
 derstood His own teaching and personality. 
 He that hath seen me hath seen the Father, 
 was His own saying, and that involves not 
 merely a vision once seen and then passed 
 away from. It involves a change upon all fu- 
 ture vision. Henceforth, in the light of 
 Christ, man will see the Father and hear Him 
 .speak in the exercise of his own intellect. 
 
132 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 2. If, however, we have rightly regarded 
 man's intellectual processes as a preparation 
 for the perfect revelation of the truth of God 
 in the human mind of Jesus, we have to face a 
 further problem in the question of man's con- 
 science as a medium of revelation. In our 
 lecture upon the Character of God we had an 
 opportunity of seeing how deeply the matter 
 of ethics enters into our religious life, and 
 how it determines the form which we give to 
 the fact of God. Now for man the medium 
 of moral faculty is conscience, so that if God 
 chooses to make final revelation of Himself to 
 man it must be through this medium also. 
 
 Conscience in man, although absolutely 
 necessary, has been singularly defective as an 
 organ of revelation. For one thing it has 
 usually been post eventum. Its highest use is 
 to warn men from evil, as the danger-signal of 
 the soul. As a matter of fact it usually re- 
 mains silent, or very mildly protesting, during 
 the period of temptation, whose glamour is left 
 to play unchecked upon man's spirit. It is 
 only after sin has been committed that con- 
 science wakens and becomes eloquent. The 
 utter unfairness of the way in which con- 
 science deals with men is certainly one of the 
 deepest mysteries of Providence. Looking 
 back upon the tragedy of sin, men feel that 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 133 
 
 tfiey have been cheated in this thing, that their 
 conscience has neither principles nor good 
 sense nor even manners. They feel that if it 
 had spoken before, as it so savagely speaks 
 afterwards, they had been saved from life's 
 tragedies. In this way conscience certainly 
 distorts the image of God and plays into the 
 hands of those false appearances of arbitrari- 
 ness or worse, which are suggested by Provi- 
 dence as we experience it. The only sem- 
 blance of escape from this that unaided man 
 has ever found lies in pain. Granted that 
 conscience has treated us unfairly, at least its 
 scourging may make us wise; and the painful 
 consequences of sins, not only in shame and 
 humiliation, but in social derangements and 
 even physical disaster, seem to give some hope 
 of a recovery. It is a very vague and faint 
 hope. Too often does its light fall back upon 
 the past rather than forward into the future, 
 showing us the foolishness and the badness 
 of the choices we have made, rather than the 
 possibilities of better things along the future 
 road. Still, in this dim and uncertain way, a 
 hint is given of how pain may possibly work 
 out purity. It is not enough, but it is all we 
 have. 
 
 ! It was natural then that, in the full revela- 
 tion of God to man, a human conscience 
 
134 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 should be exhibited, working in all that per- 
 fection which every conscience lacked. 
 Where the minds of men were dull in the hour 
 of temptation the mind of Christ was pecul- 
 iarly alert, and He discerned the meaning of 
 His temptations with an insight and a fore- 
 sight which utterly baffled them. Where the 
 conscience of men around Him was drugged 
 and stupefied by conventionality and preju- 
 dice, He saw clearly to the innermost fact of 
 things, and denounced the Pharisees with the 
 scathing power of light shining in a dark 
 place. All through His life we see the spec- 
 tacle of sins fleeing before Him, revealed and 
 naked in their sinfulness. As the enemy and 
 pursuer of human sins, He stands unique 
 among the teachers of all time. In penitent 
 hearts upon which sin has wrought its cruel 
 work, there is forever the same eager cry for 
 forgiveness; and men recognize in Him a re- 
 lation to conscience which enables Him not 
 merely to disclose the ambushes of sin and to 
 reveal its evil, but to deal with its victims also, 
 and to bring back to them beauty for the ashes 
 of sin's spent fires. Thus He boldly ap- 
 proached the penitents with the forgiveness of 
 their sins. He was not perplexed by the ques- 
 tion angrily asked by His enemies — Who can 
 forgive sins bat God only? He was conscious 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 135 
 
 of bearing to man this divine gift: The Son 
 of Man hath pozver on earth to forgive sins. 
 
 Yet all this in His life was obviously pre- 
 liminary. Enwrapped in mysteries which 
 none of us can penetrate, and on which it is 
 perhaps idle to theorize, lies the dread climax 
 of Christ's action upon the moral life of man. 
 Even in his own experience man had found 
 that the one hope for irrevocable sin was pain. 
 It was a glimmer of light as from afar, until 
 He, not content with revealing the nature of 
 sin and forgiveness to its victim, actually and 
 with the utmost deliberation proclaimed Him- 
 self as One who bore the sin of the world and 
 gave His life a ransom for many. There is no 
 need to speculate as to the precise theological 
 meaning of such words. From all such specu- 
 lations the Gospels direct our eyes to the cross 
 of Calvary and to the explanations of that 
 cross which Jesus Himself had given. There 
 we find One Who is at once just and the justi- 
 fler of them that believe in Him. There we 
 find sin confronted by love and pain, and the 
 result is not, as in the former human case, a 
 mere suggestion of some way of escape from 
 sin. It is the effective and victorious end of 
 the long human tragedy. It is the triumph of 
 righteousness over iniquity and of conscience 
 over guilt. Thus, as in the former case we 
 
136 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 saw that the word intellect had become flesh 
 in Him, so here we find that the word right- 
 eousness also became flesh. 
 
 3. Besides the intellectual and moral ele- 
 ments in human nature, which must be reck- 
 oned with when we speak of God as incarnate 
 in man's flesh, there is another element, 
 largely emotional, of which we must take ac- 
 count. No experience of the human spirit is 
 more wonderful and characteristic than its 
 spring of gladness and its sense of the worth 
 of life. In spite of all depressions, this spring 
 breaks forth in desert places continually, and 
 astonishes the spirit of man with its refresh- 
 ments. Every birth brings it to the mother- 
 heart. Every springtime awakens forgotten 
 gladness and vitality in the young. Every 
 wayside joy and natural pleasure comes, not 
 only as a surprising kindness on the part of 
 nature, but somehow also as a revelation of 
 the deepest truth of things. The view of life 
 that we have in such experiences is the most 
 convincing of all things we know. Those who 
 do not feel it may say that it is too good to be 
 true; but those who do feel it know in the 
 deep souls of them that it is too good not to 
 be true. Just as the loveless and the cynical 
 call the passion of lovers insanity, while the 
 lovers themselves know that no one is ever 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 137 
 
 sane except when he is in love, this indomi- 
 table faith in life is an indestructible element 
 in human nature. It has survived the pessi- 
 misms of all the centuries, and, still more 
 amazing, it survives the sorrows of the vast 
 majority of human spirits. It is continually 
 discouraged and baffled by the actual facts of 
 life. We fain would hope in its shout of glad 
 assurance, but we are neither brave enough 
 nor big enough to carry its torch erect and 
 steady through our darkest hours. Yet, how- 
 ever much we have failed in our courageous 
 faith in life, it has not altogether failed us. 
 After every discouraging hour when its light 
 seemed wholly quenched, it rises again and 
 shines upon us to the end. 
 
 It rises again, and in its rising we have that 
 which makes us understand the doctrine of 
 Christ's resurrection. The resurrection is not 
 to be regarded as an isolated miracle which 
 has no relation to human experience at all, ex- 
 cept merely as a promise or prophecy of a fu- 
 ture life for men who die. It is the fulfill- 
 ment of all that is wholesomest in every soul 
 of man. When He rose from the dead, Christ 
 was literally the first fruits of them that slept. 
 The triumph of life, the persistence and au- 
 thority of joy, have always been demanded by 
 the human spirit as things so obviously char- 
 
I38 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 acteristic of normal life that they bear their 
 own evidence when they come to us. Surely 
 it was natural that in any revelation of the 
 highest, these things should also have their 
 place. Their place is here. In the risen Christ 
 we see them triumphing over death, and we 
 understand the claim and the demand of all 
 bright hours upon our spirit as they pass, tell- 
 ing us that this is the life indeed, and that the 
 shadows are but futilities. And here we have 
 not merely a confirmation of our own bright- 
 est and most hopeful hours. We have also in 
 epitome the whole history of the world. Cal- 
 vary and then resurrection, these are God's 
 method in the history of nations and in the 
 souls of men. 
 
 In our facile and luxurious way, we ask for 
 our lives a smooth progress from which 
 struggle and disappointment shall be alto- 
 gether omitted. We feel aggrieved at the 
 backward swirls of history, in whose reaction 
 great promises seem to be sucked down, and 
 man's faith and hope in the destiny of his 
 race to be drowned. Taking the resurrection 
 as the culmination of the death we find that 
 such smooth progress, undisappointed and un- 
 broken, is God's way neither with His world 
 nor with its individual inhabitants. From the 
 corn of wheat that must fall into the ground 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 1 39 
 
 and die, up to the very life of the Son of God 
 Who must needs journey to Jerusalem and 
 suffer of them and be raised again, it is the 
 same story. Thus we have learned God's 
 method of leading on His world, and that 
 learning fixes our hope and faith into the solid 
 facts of history, and confirms all that belief in 
 life and acceptance of its gladness which seem 
 so convincing to the normal soul in hours of 
 health and joy. We have dreamed these 
 things, but our dreams come true when we 
 stand with Christ in Joseph's garden in the 
 morning sunshine, and look back and under- 
 stand the cross. Here then, in the resurrection 
 of Jesus, the word hope is made flesh. 
 
 The word became flesh. What word ? The 
 answer must be, Every word of God that had 
 been spoken in the soul of man. Three such 
 words we have considered to-day under the 
 categories of thought, righteousness, and 
 hope. But these are only three out of the im- 
 mense vocabulary of the language of God in 
 human nature, and the story of Jesus is the 
 fulfilling of them all. We have seen things 
 through a glass darkly. We have heard words 
 muffled and confused with the roar of life. 
 Here we see them with open face and we hear 
 them ringing clear and convincing. Incarna- 
 tion, atonement, resurrection, they are the key 
 
140 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 to all our experience. They are the very epit- 
 ome of all our human life. Everything 
 within man from the beginning has been un- 
 dergoing them, misunderstanding them, hint- 
 ing at them, crying for them. So far from 
 being incredible they are the commonest things 
 in the world, the most natural and inevitable. 
 For each of us these constitute the very truth 
 of life as we know it. Thus everything that 
 is within us points towards Christ and leads 
 back to Christ. Here is the true story of the 
 Son of Man, and, in His lowly fashion, it is 
 the true story of every son of man. 
 
 The word became flesh, — what word? 
 Love — for all the other words are summed up 
 in that. In the lecture upon the Character of 
 God we strove to find reasons for vindicating 
 that character to man, but they were reasons 
 which deal almost exclusively with the quali- 
 ties of justice and of righteousness. Yet, 
 after all, these are but minor parts of His 
 character and He is more than they. Our 
 conscience seeks primarily for these in its de- 
 mand that the Judge of all the earth shall do 
 right. But all that is within us seeks for an- 
 other thing in Him, of which we have not yet 
 heard. It has been nobly said that 
 
 " A loving worm within its clod 
 Is diviner than a loveless God." 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 141 
 
 Our own love tells us this in the same convinc- 
 ing fashion as our belief in life demands for 
 us the truth of the resurrection. All that we 
 have said may be summed up in this one word. 
 It is the discovery that there is no loveless 
 God. God is love, and all our experience is 
 just the revelation of that love. This is the 
 fundamental fact in all the universe, without 
 which all faith is futile. " Those have been 
 called geniuses and God-sent prophets who 
 once again go back to the beginning and pre- 
 sent a new question to the world. The new 
 question which Jesus presented was the word 
 directed to the God of the Jews: Art Thou 
 truly a God of wrath, and is the world truly 
 miserable only because Thy curse rests upon it ? 
 The law answers Yes to this question, but the 
 whole world answers a thousand times, No. 
 This it was that appeared to the people so sur- 
 prisingly new and comforting in His preach- 
 ing, the new word to Israel, that God was the 
 loving Father of man. ,, " 
 
 For, in the last analysis, we discover that 
 love is not only the most superb experience of 
 life, but that it is in a sense life itself. It is 
 the underlying principle which constitutes all 
 the other elements of life when they are real 
 and normal. Thought itself is no dry and 
 *New Testament Times, Hausrath. 
 
142 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 loveless faculty. All constructive thought is 
 that kind of spiritual artistry which is impelled 
 to work because it loves the ideas it creates. 
 Conscience has been supposed to be the age- 
 long rival of affection, and righteousness has 
 been contrasted to love as an opposing force. 
 Yet there is no righteousness which is com- 
 plete or effective that is not ultimately com- 
 posed of and inspired by love. Loveless 
 righteousness is not righteousness in a full or 
 comprehensive sense. In all love that is 
 worthy of the name there is the element not 
 merely of gratification but of restraint, and 
 that element of righteousness which acts as a 
 restraining force to the impetuousness of de- 
 sire is an integral part of real love. Just as 
 love without righteousness is a wild and un- 
 stable thing which swiftly runs upon suicide, 
 so righteousness without love is not even 
 righteousness. Equity it may be, or dead 
 justice insisting upon its pound of flesh, 
 but these are low forms of character 
 which need the enrichment and the eleva- 
 tion of love before they are worthy of 
 the name of righteousness. Similarly all 
 true hope has love in the heart of it. The 
 happy belief in life that claims the resurrec- 
 tion as so wonderful an expression of human 
 truth, is only parodied by the light-hearted 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 143 
 
 and shallow optimism which is a matter rather 
 of digestion than of spirituality, a butterfly 
 hopefulness founded upon nothing. Add, 
 however, to this bright and alluring toy of the 
 soul, the element of a deep-seated love, and in 
 hope you have but love's unconscious grasp of 
 its inheritance. It does not follow that be- 
 cause we cannot help hoping for something we 
 shall get it, but it does most assuredly follow 
 that no real love in the universe has ever 
 finally failed of its desire. And it is this ele- 
 ment of love in hope which is most marked in 
 the story of Christ's resurrection. It was only 
 to beloved ones that He appeared. The whole 
 doctrine, which has too often been regarded as 
 an exhibition of the mere power of God, is al- 
 ways in the Scripture narratives expressed in 
 the sweeter and deeper terms of the love of 
 God made manifest even in death. 
 
 All these are the work of love: they are the 
 ways of love. When these were seen and 
 heard and handled in the human life of Jesus, 
 the last and greatest and dearest word of all 
 the universe, the word love, became flesh. 
 This cannot be too strongly emphasized nor 
 too often repeated. It was the theme of 
 Dante's Divina Commedia. It is the perpet- 
 ual and ever-recurring note of Robert Brown- 
 ing. It is in some form or other the great dis- 
 
144 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 covery of all trustworthy explorers of human 
 nature. In every scientist and student the pas- 
 sion for learning is but an austere develop- 
 ment of love. Without love, the redemption 
 of sin, and the belief in life passing on to a 
 hope of immortality, miss their most essential 
 and vital element. It is this which is the crux 
 of the modern social conscience. When that 
 is taken up by the loveless as a mere develop- 
 ment of science to be prosecuted by such tools 
 as tables of statistics, it is one of the most 
 barren and unattractive of all the forms of 
 modern life. When it is inspired by love, its 
 students are able to press on towards further 
 knowledge of its truths, and to build up out 
 of it a science of redemption and of hope 
 which keeps them human amidst all life's 
 treachery, and indomitable in spite of its con- 
 stant failures and disappointments. It is in 
 view of this fact that one feels so strongly the 
 necessity of religion to successful social re- 
 form. To the thoughtless, the modern watch- 
 words concerning wages and housing and 
 votes may seem twenty centuries removed 
 from the old stories of the life, death and 
 resurrection of Jesus. Yet unless they are the 
 perpetuation of these ancient stories, and un- 
 less the spirit of incarnation, redemption, and 
 resurrection lives on in them, they wither be- 
 
THE INCARNATE LOVE 145 
 
 fore their time and fall from the tree of hu- 
 man development as shrivelled leaves. In a 
 word, all man's experiences are in some form 
 or other love's adventures. Dante was well 
 advised when he divided even sins by this 
 category, as love excessive, love defective, and 
 love perverted. Our scientific thinking, the 
 work of conscience, and the upward leap or 
 downward drooping of the spirit, are but 
 love's experiments, its blundering attempts at 
 expression. Thus in Jesus Christ we find the 
 perfect work of love. In that light we see 
 light clearly upon every part of our earthly 
 life; for He, being the incarnate love, hath 
 brought life as well as immortality to light. 
 
LECTURE V 
 MEANS AND ENDS 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 MEANS AND ENDS 
 
 Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have 
 seen the end of the Lord. — James 5:11. 
 
 O far we have been occupied in the first 
 place with the attempt to find the 
 foundations for our faith, and have 
 seen that these cannot be traced down to meta- 
 physical ultimates, so that the structure of 
 faith must be built from the cross-section of 
 experience. In regard to the offer of author- 
 ity made by the Church and by the Bible, we 
 have seen that these also can only be authori- 
 tative by the appeal they make to the inner 
 tribunal. Passing on to the content of relig- 
 ious knowledge we have found that the first 
 essential element in that is a God Whose moral 
 character we can know and trust, and in deal- 
 ing with Whom we may and must apply the 
 ordinary moral standards which are applied in 
 other regions. Finally, we have found that 
 this great bond of moral standard gives us 
 such a unity between God and man as to make 
 
 149 
 
ISO THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 the incarnation with its developments in the 
 crucifixion and resurrection so natural, and 
 indeed inevitable, that we find in Christ the 
 convincing revelation of God to the soul. 
 
 Looking back over the field of recent, and 
 indeed of ancient controversy, we find that a 
 great deal of the disputing has seemed to pass 
 by the questions with which we have been con- 
 cerned in these lectures. If these are the real 
 fundamentals of faith, then much of religious 
 controversy has been little better than beating 
 the air. It has been concerned with names and 
 words which refer largely to metaphysical 
 distinctions so recondite and far off from liv- 
 ing experience that it is questionable whether 
 any one, either at the time of the controversy 
 or before or since, really understood what he 
 meant by them. We are confronted by vast 
 masses of traditional detail in connection with 
 such controversies, which have been held by 
 the more conservative combatants with strenu- 
 ous tenacity against the inroad of scientific 
 ideas. If it should appear that many of these 
 controversies are entirely irrelevant, and have 
 very little or nothing to do with essential 
 Christianity at all, we may hope to find some 
 appropriate way of conceiving the situation 
 and dealing with it in a reconciling and con- 
 structive spirit. 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 151 
 
 In the present lecture I wish to throw out 
 some hints as to how this may be done. In 
 regard to detailed controversies, I am not 
 espousing either one side or the other. Most 
 of them concern matters which can only be 
 rightly decided by experts in comparatively 
 narrow fields of study, and the opinion of one 
 who is not an expert in these details must 
 count for very little. But, without being ex- 
 perts in the details of science and criticism, it 
 is possible for us to seek and find a just view 
 of the whole situation, and a calm and Chris- 
 tian tolerance, which will leave each man to 
 take the way which, on the whole, appeals to 
 him as the most reasonable and best authenti- 
 cated. There is no need to get angry and to 
 try to settle such controversy, either by un- 
 churching a man as a heretic or scorning him 
 as a fool, although his way of thinking may 
 be different from one's own. Until the 
 Church has learned that, and put it into 
 practice, she will find herself very seriously 
 handicapped in her attempt to impress 
 the mind of thinkers who are outside her 
 pale. 
 
 I have called this lecture by the name of 
 Means and Ends. In order to make this title 
 intelligible I would refer you to a quotation 
 from Matthew Arnold's Culture and An- 
 
152 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 archy: " Faith in machinery is, I said, our be- 
 setting danger; often in machinery most ab- 
 surdly disproportioned to the end Which this 
 machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to 
 serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a 
 value in and for itself. What is freedom but 
 machinery? What is population but ma- 
 chinery ? What is coal but machinery ? What 
 is wealth but machinery ? What are, even, re- 
 ligious organizations but machinery? Now 
 almost every voice in England is accustomed 
 to speak of these things as if they were pre- 
 cious ends in themselves, and therefore had 
 some of the characters of perfection indis- 
 putably joined to them. I have before now 
 noticed Mr. Roebuck's stock argument for 
 proving the greatness and happiness of Eng- 
 land as she is, and for quite stopping the 
 mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. Roebuck is 
 never weary of reiterating this argument of 
 his, so I do not know why I should be weary 
 of noticing it. ' May not every man in Eng- 
 land say what he likes ? ' — Mr. Roebuck per- 
 petually asks; and that, he thinks, is quite 
 sufficient, and when every man may say what 
 he likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. 
 But the aspirations of culture, which is the 
 study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless 
 what men say, when they may say what they 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 1 53 
 
 like, is worth saying, — has good in it, and 
 more good than bad. In the same way the 
 Times, replying to some foreign strictures on 
 the dress, looks, and behaviour of the English 
 abroad, urges that the English ideal is that 
 every one should be free to do and to look just 
 as he likes. But culture indefatigably tries, 
 not to make what each raw person may like the 
 rule by which he fashions himself; but to 
 draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed 
 beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get 
 the raw person to like that." 
 
 Readers of Arnold's very remarkable book 
 will remember the amusing and unforgettable 
 applications which the author makes to his 
 main principle of the distinction between 
 means and ends. He divides the British peo- 
 ple into three classes — barbarians, whose main 
 interests are field sports; Philistines, who con- 
 cern themselves with such machinery as that 
 which he has described in the paragraph al- 
 ready quoted, and populace, whose ends in 
 life are mainly shouting and beer. He points 
 out that however high a value any of these 
 classes may set upon those things for which 
 they live, yet culture continually reminds us 
 that these at their best can only be means to 
 the real ends of living, and that when any one 
 mistakes them for ends he has made a vital 
 
154 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 and very serious blunder. It is a principle of 
 the widest possible application, and almost all 
 our intellectual and religious futilities are due 
 to our ignoring of it. It is one of the most 
 illuminating and comprehensive applications 
 which have yet been given to Christ's own lan- 
 guage, What shall it profit a man if he gain 
 the whole world and lose his own sonl? In 
 this lecture we propose to consider it in two 
 main applications. 
 
 1. Origins or facts. In a great number of 
 the controversies that have raged about relig- 
 ious questions it will be found upon examina- 
 tion that the heart of the dispute concerns the 
 origins of the religious phenomena rather than 
 the religious phenomena themselves. In all 
 these lectures we have been dealing with re- 
 ligion as a fact of experience, and in the 
 first of them we found that in religion 
 as in science, it is absolutely impossible to 
 go beyond experience and discover the ulti- 
 mate metaphysical foundations of faith. In 
 regard to authority our point was that the soul 
 itself, in its response to the ideas presented to 
 it by the Church and the Bible, recognized 
 there facts which corresponded with its own 
 spiritual life. We further found that the con- 
 tent of this was a God Who acted under our 
 familiar moral standards, and Who revealed 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 155 
 
 Himself to the experience of man as the in- 
 carnate love in Jesus Christ. 
 
 All this gives us a clear and consistent 
 knowledge so far as our own experience of the 
 Christian ideas goes; but behind that knowl- 
 edge and around it there arise many questions 
 as to how these ideas began, and indeed as to 
 how man himself began. This intrusion of 
 the question of origins upon the living experi- 
 ence-knowledge of the soul, is the biggest red 
 herring in the world. It has been trailed 
 across the path of religious knowledge, and 
 has led vast multitudes off the scent in their 
 pursuit of truth. It was this that gave to the 
 Pharisees in Christ's time their characteristic 
 error. At one time they objected to Him on 
 the ground that they knew whence He was. 
 At another time they objected to Him because 
 they knew not whence He was. 1 But in both 
 cases they were too much interested in origins 
 to face the religious truths with which He 
 would have confronted them. A famous re- 
 ligious teacher of modern times has said in 
 regard to the earlier presentations of the doc- 
 trine of evolution: " I care not whence or how 
 I came, so long as I know whither I am go- 
 ing." He might have added: "So long also 
 as I know that I have actually arrived, and 
 1 John 17:27; John 9 : 29. 
 
156 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 that truth has come to me in my own experi- 
 
 ence." 
 
 God has revealed Himself to man and in 
 man, and the whole concern of the soul lies in 
 its response to that revelation. Theology has 
 too often concerned itself with the methods 
 which God has taken for revealing Himself: 
 but the real stress of importance lies not there, 
 but in the reality and effectiveness of the reve- 
 lation itself. If we are agreed about these, 
 which give the daily course of life's voyage 
 and its sure destination, we need not allow 
 ourselves to be set quarrelling over detailed en- 
 tries in the log. So it comes to pass that men 
 who have a genuine religious experience have 
 been perpetually engaged in unnecessary 
 strife, while they are one at the depths. They 
 have magnified these questions of origin and 
 of method until they have altogether overes- 
 timated their value. Below all such diverse 
 opinions their religious experience means the 
 same thing. 
 
 Every one who is interested in church his- 
 tory will remember endless instances in which 
 controversy about origins, while men were 
 agreed about facts, has wrought havoc. It 
 explains, for instance, much of the bitterness 
 that has entered into the evolution con- 
 troversy. There is a tale of an old lady in 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 157 
 
 the early Darwinian days, who was informed 
 in the crude and popular language of those 
 times that Mr. Darwin had discovered that we 
 were all descended from monkeys. Her reply 
 was, " Oh, let us hope that it is not true, but 
 if it should turn out to be true let us by all 
 means hush it up." But, unfortunately, there 
 is no use in trying to hush up such theories, 
 whether they be true or not. The troublesome 
 scientific people seem to have no reticence at 
 all, and they have very greatly vexed the mind 
 of Christendom by their insistence upon such 
 views as this. Surely it is evident that the 
 worst they can do with their discussions can 
 never reach further than the method of man's 
 origin upon the earth. After all that they 
 have to tell us is told, they neither kindle nor 
 do they extinguish any light whatever upon 
 the power that is behind his coming. That 
 power may work regularly and slowly as they 
 assert, or irregularly and suddenly as their op- 
 ponents hold. But the whole interest and 
 stress still lie, not on these methods, but upon 
 the power behind them. The living will of 
 God is as manifest in the faithfulness of nat- 
 ural law as it is in any fiat of creation, and the 
 whole difference between the schools does not 
 concern God at all but is only a question of 
 His methods of operation. It is a question of 
 
158 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 means and not ends. It is not a dispute about 
 what God hath wrought, but about how He 
 wrought it. The thing that concerns us as 
 men, is only What man is here and now, and 
 not the path by which he came here and be- 
 came what he is. Whichever theory be true, 
 Carlyle's words concerning Marie Antoinette 
 hold equally good, " For if thy being came to 
 thee out of old Hapsburg dynasties, came it 
 not also, like my own, out of heaven?" It 
 would seem that a legitimate and reasonable 
 course to take is to content oneself with the 
 facts of religious experience as we find them, 
 and to leave God to choose His own method 
 of bringing them about. 
 
 As regards that method, endless other con- 
 troversies open out. We are told that man's 
 belief in God originated long ago in fear of 
 natural catastrophe, in the belief of ghosts, 
 and so on. We have already stated that al- 
 though these and such like crude stimuli may 
 have been irritants which stirred up the primi- 
 tive spirit of man to seek and partly to find 
 God, yet our knowledge of God once estab- 
 lished is a knowledge of fact which is abso- 
 lutely independent of the stimuli which first 
 of all suggested it. Again, in His progress- 
 ive revelation, God may have used many 
 methods of conveying truth to the growing 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 159 
 
 mind of man. He may have used either 
 poetry or prose, either scientific or religious 
 accounts of things, either history or gospel. 
 Christ Himself chose the methods of parable 
 and poetry for the communication of most of 
 His truths, and that which He considered suf- 
 ficient for the method of revelation in the New 
 Testament is surely admissible also in the Old. 
 Every reader will see how far-reaching the 
 principle of means and ends is, when one ap- 
 plies it to one after another of the theological 
 controversies that have so unnecessarily rent 
 the Church. God's great end, so far as we are 
 concerned, is the revelation of Himself to 
 man. Any means that may serve that end is 
 appropriate and legitimate. Questions of 
 means are matters for argument, in which the 
 ordinary evidence by which we decide secular 
 things must be left to settle disputed points. 
 But our religious life does not depend upon the 
 answers which we may find to such questions. 
 Think how tragic it would be if it did so de- 
 pend. 
 
 " I have a life in Christ to live, 
 But ere I live it must I wait 
 Till learning can clear answer give 
 Of this or that book's date? " 
 
 Christianity deals both with questions of 
 
160 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 origin and with questions of fact. With 
 questions of origin it deals historically and dis- 
 passionately: with questions of fact it deals 
 vitally and passionately. " To perceive that 
 things are what they are and not what they 
 came from — in other words to make a clear 
 distinction between truth and genesis, origin 
 and value — is the first and possibly the last 
 lesson which the student of religious history 
 ought to master." * For, most assuredly, 
 things do not depend upon their beginning: 
 they are what they are. 
 
 2. A second and even more important ap- 
 plication of the principle of distinguishing 
 means from ends, is that which may be called 
 by the general designation of process and 
 event. This is indeed the most vital of all 
 such distinctions. In the course of these lec- 
 tures we have been dealing both with processes 
 and events in religion. In the lecture upon 
 the Incarnate Love we saw how the supreme 
 events recorded in the Bible intercept processes 
 in the soul, and so authenticated themselves 
 to the experience of man as fundamental 
 truths. Within our own experience we find 
 processes which we cannot understand. We 
 see the soul blindly groping and blundering in 
 
 1 Mackintosh, Originality of the Christian Religion, 
 P. 4. 
 
MEANS AND ENDS l6l 
 
 all directions, knowing that somehow or other 
 it must go questing after the real truth of 
 things, yet never finding light enough to see 
 clearly. In the Gospel record we find stupen- 
 dous events which take up into themselves 
 these blundering processes of the soul. The 
 incarnation, the atonement and the resurrec- 
 tion come to man as he is feeling his way about 
 among his needs, explain these needs to him, 
 and absolutely meet them all. They confirm 
 his hope, they interpret and intensify all his 
 best desires, and they send the whole process 
 of life on its way confident, intelligible, sure 
 of the future. 
 
 Now it so happens that according to the 
 make of a man's mind, or the education to 
 which it has been subjected, will be his pref- 
 erence for one or the other of these categories, 
 process or event. On the one hand there are 
 those who are interested only in the process, 
 and to whom the event seems unnecessary and 
 retarding. Such persons are indifferent to 
 history. They tell us that it would matter 
 nothing to them whether Christ ever lived or 
 not. They are interested only in the workings 
 of their own minds and in vague religious ex- 
 periences which often are rather in the nature 
 of emotion than of conviction. Such minds 
 tend to lose themselves in the quagmire of 
 
1 62 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 their own inner life. Their soul becomes a 
 sort of domesticated sphynx, which is con- 
 tinually asking questions to which it receives 
 no answer. Much of whatever results they 
 arrive at, is borrowed from early memories of 
 the very events that they are discarding; and 
 the whole of their religious experience, de- 
 tached from all historic conscience and inter- 
 est, falls into confusion and leaves their re- 
 ligion invertebrate and weak. They are con- 
 tent with it so long as you do not ask them to 
 examine it, but the first touch of inquiry 
 leaves them at the mercy of every passing 
 mood. 
 
 On the other hand there is a type of mind 
 which occupies itself only w 7 ith events, and 
 knows nothing of processes in its religious 
 life. Such factually-minded persons are con- 
 cerned only with historic data and theological 
 definitions. Their delight is in labels, pigeon- 
 holes, and such other methods of external ex- 
 actitude. As to the being of God they will 
 give you the Athanasian Creed, but they will 
 never realize that God has revealed Himself 
 within their own souls as Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost. With regard to Christ they will 
 be satisfied when they have defined Him in 
 some such formula as that of the two natures 
 and one person, forgetting that that very 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 163 
 
 formula began the age-long quarrel as to what 
 either nature or person meant in this connec- 
 tion. Such inquirers may indeed have a creed 
 which satisfies the cravings of their own in- 
 tellectual curiosity, but they will never know 
 that vital sense of truth-seeking and finding 
 which is the daily experience of those who 
 bring all events into the light of spiritual proc- 
 esses, who die and live again with Christ, and 
 find as the result that their life is hid with 
 Christ in God. The factually-minded, being 
 wholly dependent upon external evidence, will 
 reach but a hard and objective external the- 
 ology, and they will tend to drift away from 
 actual experience altogether. 
 
 Altogether the rivalry is an unnecessary and 
 unprofitable one, and the opposition between 
 process and event is utterly vain. We have 
 need of both, and both must be accepted in 
 order to attain certainty and completeness in 
 faith. The Bible tells us of both, and allows 
 to each its fullest scope. In regard to mir- 
 acles, for instance, there were the two views 
 confronting each other in the time of Jesus. 
 The factually-minded, whose representatives 
 were the Pharisees of His day, demanded 
 signs and wonders as mere objective facts and 
 apart from any spiritual or moral significance 
 that they might have. For them miracles 
 
164 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 were of no use unless they were obvious and 
 confessed breaches of natural law. There was 
 in them a certain anarchism, an objection to 
 law just because it is law, which has by no 
 means wholly departed from their successors. 
 Jesus took the miracles over into the region 
 of process, did them and proclaimed them as 
 the quite natural operation of a higher law of 
 love. He refused to work signs and wonders 
 at the demand of those who were interested 
 merely in facts and not in meanings. When 
 we read about the miracles of Jesus we feel 
 that these are the things which we would fain 
 do, and in a very slight degree can approach 
 towards doing, when our love is strong enough 
 and our heart sufficiently pure. There are 
 those among men who can indeed work won- 
 ders even upon the flesh by love. But suppose 
 the very God were incarnate in a man, the 
 eternal love walking about in the lazar-house 
 of the world, full of pity and affection, how 
 sure and inevitable would be the sort of mir- 
 acle which Jesus did. Miracles, seen as mere 
 external facts, are but such shows as Phari- 
 sees delight in. Miracles which carry on the 
 processes of the soul further than men can 
 send them, are indeed convincing. Jesus re- 
 fused at the Pharisees' bidding to do signs 
 and wonders, but at the bidding of the needy 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 165 
 
 round about Him He did deeds that were 
 congruous with His love. 
 
 In regard to the three great manifestations 
 of God in Christ, which as events are 
 cardinal matters of belief, each is in the clear- 
 est possible way represented in the Bible also 
 in the category of process. In answer to 
 those who would go everywhere searching for 
 the living word of God, the apostle tells them 
 to cease searching heaven and the deep, be- 
 cause " the word is nigh thee, even in thy 
 mouth and in thy heart." The atonement, 
 than which no event could be more definitely 
 historical, is also regarded as part of the great 
 scheme of life in such passages as that which 
 speaks of the Lamb slain from the foundation 
 of the world. As to the resurrection, upon 
 which as an event so much stress has been laid, 
 and around which so much controversy has 
 been waged, the words of Jesus are very 
 clear. On the day when Lazarus was dead, 
 Martha said, " I know that he shall rise again 
 in the resurrection at the last day," and Jesus 
 answered her, " I am the Resurrection and 
 the Life." These taken individually are suf- 
 ficiently explicit, but there is a well-known 
 passage in St. Paul, whose significance in this 
 respect has been rarely realized, where he 
 masses the whole three in one great combina- 
 
1 66 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 tion of event with process: " That I may know 
 Him, and the power of His resurrection, and 
 the fellowship of His sufferings, being made 
 conformable unto His death; if by any means 
 I might attain unto the resurrection of the 
 dead." * 
 
 In this chapter we have sought to distin- 
 guish means from ends in our consideration of 
 the data of our Christian faith. In the first 
 place this has led us to distinguish origins 
 from present facts. The whole study of ori- 
 gins, which has accounted for so great a part 
 of theological controversy, is only at the best 
 a study of means. After you have settled it 
 in whatever way appeals to you as true, there 
 still remains to be reckoned with all that which 
 is most significant and vital. The thing to be 
 accounted for, to be understood, and so to be 
 treated as to make life religiously successful, 
 is the present fact of faith in its widest sense. 
 The things that we most certainly believe, the 
 reason that we have for believing them in our 
 own religious experience, these are the true 
 ends of faith in every instance. It is indeed 
 interesting to speculate as to how these things 
 were achieved, to array evidence for or against 
 the various theories of their origin, but that is 
 entirely a subsidiary business. Thousands of 
 
 1 Philippians 3 : 10, II. 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 167 
 
 people who have never given the slightest at- 
 tention to these questions have yet felt the 
 power of the thing itself. Tens of thousands 
 of people who have no theory whatsoever con- 
 cerning the origins of any religious phenome- 
 non, are living daily by the faith of the Son 
 of God, and conquering life in the virtue of 
 that faith. 
 
 We passed on to consider the same distinc- 
 tion of means and ends in regard to process 
 and event. The end of religion can never be 
 a set of events which happened in Palestine or 
 anywhere else at a certain date in history. 
 These events, well-authenticated and of the 
 most critical importance although they are, yet 
 did not happen for their own sake, but for the 
 sake of their effect upon the lives of those who 
 believed in them. The most important thing 
 about them is their religious value for those 
 who take them over into the process of their 
 own life. In other words, religion is for life, 
 and not life for religion. The end of religion 
 is not that man should think exactly accurate 
 thoughts about a multitude of events which 
 happened in human history: it is that men 
 should have within them the saving processes 
 of the life of God in the soul, which are seen 
 most conspicuously in these historical events. 
 Jesus Christ became man in order that we 
 
1 68 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 through Him might attain to manhood. He 
 died upon the cross that we might be made 
 conformable to His death. He rose from the 
 dead in order that we might attain to His res- 
 urrection, not merely in some distant future 
 after we had died, but here and now. These 
 were the means Christ took to accomplish the 
 great ends of God in man. These ends may 
 be summarized in two sentences. God's great 
 end, so far as we are concerned, is to reveal 
 Himself to man and to save him. Man's 
 chief end is, in the great words of the Cate- 
 chism, " To glorify God and to enjoy Him 
 forever." 
 
 There is yet another application of the dis- 
 tinction between means and ends which de- 
 mands our attention. In the lecture upon The 
 Character of God it was argued that man's 
 blunders in regard to the moral nature of God 
 are due not so much to anthropomorphism as 
 to the experience of apparently cruel or at 
 least regardless treatment in the ordinary 
 course of life. Providence is the word which 
 man uses to denote this perplexing treatment 
 of his life by God. Apart from those rare 
 and exceptional instances of miracle which 
 have broken through the otherwise uniform 
 order of nature, we are confronted with a play 
 of natural law which we can do nothing to 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 1 69 
 
 change. Our acts of disobedience to it or 
 neglect of it are remorselessly punished. It 
 knows no pity, nor does it make allowance for 
 even the most unavoidable circumstances that 
 would extenuate the blunders that bring us 
 into conflict with it. In several passages we 
 have said things about Providence which, al- 
 though they are seldom spoken, are yet famil- 
 iar sentiments in all our hearts. Age after 
 age, man has been astonished and offended by 
 this passionless mask of uniform law, and has 
 cried out against it, or silently rebelled, or un- 
 warrantably met it with resignation. The ar- 
 gument of these lectures has been that it is our 
 duty to take our views of God, not from this 
 external play of natural law which we call 
 Providence, but from the revelations made 
 within our own consciences and hearts by the 
 great voices of the Bible and of Jesus Christ. 
 These tell us of a Father Who loves us, Who 
 understands and pities all His creatures, Who 
 shares with them in the mystery of the incar- 
 nation and the atonement all the horror of the 
 human tragedy, and Whose love is mighty to 
 save to the uttermost. 
 
 Here then we have had two sources of in- 
 formation to which men have gone for their 
 knowledge of their God. How are we to re- 
 late these one with another ? And how are we 
 
170 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 to explain their strangely diverse messages? 
 On the one hand there are apparently two 
 visions of God, one human and the other in- 
 human. Providence is the inhuman one 
 which shows a world under law whose sweep 
 is practically unbroken. Our Christian faith 
 insists upon a human vision of God Who may 
 and does reveal His love to the souls of His 
 children in countless ways. It is a very bitter 
 mystery and hopeless contradiction to many 
 men and women, and most of those who have 
 tried to solve it have given up all hope of un- 
 derstanding. Some of them have found in it 
 a reason for turning away from faith in God 
 altogether, while even the true believers have 
 as a rule confessed themselves utterly baffled. 
 
 It is vain to seek for a perfect understand- 
 ing of the ways of God in Providence. And 
 yet we may find a hint which will not only illu- 
 minate us in our search after a rational theory, 
 but may very materially assuage and comfort 
 us in our bitter personal sense of the darkest 
 elements in experience. What if Providence 
 be a matter of means, while love is the ultimate 
 end? We shall never begin to understand 
 God until we very clearly grasp the one obvi- 
 ous certainty that God is forever working, not 
 for the moment, but for the long result. See- 
 ing the end from the beginning, His purpose 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 171 
 
 works towards that far-off goal, and does not 
 swerve from its course. If we understood all, 
 it would be plain to us that this is not only the 
 better, but the only possible way, in which a 
 universe can be managed. Even for our own 
 sakes, one can see how absolutely necessary it 
 is that there should be an order upon which 
 man may count, and by which he may guide 
 his course through life. Were our human 
 history managed upon the principle of per- 
 petually recurring interferences for the sake of 
 this or that one of the countless myriads of 
 men, it would be impossible for any one to ac- 
 commodate himself to so unstable and irregu- 
 lar a world. Thus the means which God takes 
 to carry on the story of human life upon the 
 earth are not such as to satisfy the heart of 
 man; and if we mistake these means for the 
 ultimate end of God's purpose, and, as the 
 phrase is, " judge God by Providence," we 
 shall find ourselves in hopeless error. 
 
 The ends of God, His ultimate purposes, are 
 never disclosed by Providence at all. Provi- 
 dence is but the machinery which works these 
 out from age to age. We have to accommo- 
 date ourselves to it as best we may, and seek 
 by all means in our power to understand the 
 uniform play of nature, and to utilize its dan- 
 gerous forces scientifically. But the essence 
 
172 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 of all religion is a belief — well-founded in 
 spiritual experience — that man is not only in 
 contact with these means of God's purposes, 
 but that a nearer relation may be established 
 between each individual soul and the final ends 
 of God's treatment of His creatures. We 
 may commune with Him, spirit with spirit; 
 and, through the revelation of Jesus Christ 
 playing upon our own inner experience, we 
 may reach the conviction that love is the true 
 end and ultimate purpose even of the laws of 
 nature. We may pass them by and leave them 
 as the mysterious means which God has seen 
 best to employ for the process of His whole 
 creation, and with a leap of the spirit reach 
 God directly in understanding and in love. 
 This is the conclusion at which the writer of 
 the famous hymn arrived in his couplet: 
 
 " Behind a frowning providence 
 He hides a smiling face." 
 
 It is the most courageous and also the wisest 
 of all the acts of faith. 
 
 Mr. Chesterton has expressed this in a pas- 
 sage concerning nature, which is familiar to 
 many of his readers, and I may be permitted 
 to quote a few words in regard to this expres- 
 sion of his from an essay in another book: 
 " Thus it comes to pass that in the midst of a 
 
MEANS AND ENDS 1 73 
 
 time resounding with pagan voices old and 
 new, he (Mr. Chesterton) stands for an un- 
 flinching idealism. It is the mark of pagans 
 that they are children of Nature, boasting that 
 Nature is their mother: they are solemnized 
 by that still and unresponsive maternity, or 
 driven into rebellion by discovering that the 
 so-called mother is but a harsh stepmother 
 after all. Mr. Chesterton loves nature, be- 
 cause Christianity has revealed to him that she 
 is but his sister, child of the same Father. 
 ' We can be proud of her beauty, since we have 
 the same father ; but she has no authority over 
 us ; we have to admire, but not to imitate/ " 
 
 This is, I think, so far as any one can go in 
 speaking of the inscrutable mystery of life. 
 Every man and woman will at times be 
 brought up against circumstances in their own 
 experience which will make it extremely diffi- 
 cult for them to retain their confidence in the 
 good-will of God. At such times few people 
 will be able to argue matters out in cold blood 
 and persuade themselves into peace. Yet 
 there seems to be no other way than this dis- 
 tinction between the ends which God is deter- 
 mined to achieve, and the means which He in 
 His infinite wisdom sees to be the best or the 
 only ways for achieving them. Although at 
 the moment it may be impossible for the sore 
 
174 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 heart to grasp this and find in it any consola- 
 tion, yet afterwards, in most cases, life will 
 bring a larger understanding and a humbler 
 patience. In any case, it seems that in the last 
 analysis we shall find our highest wisdom in 
 distinguishing God's great and tenderly loving 
 ends, from the unintelligible means by which 
 He works them out. If we could accustom 
 ourselves to this distinction, it would be a very 
 great aid to faith as well as to courage. The 
 way of the Lord is often in great waters. 
 Blessed is he that hath seen the end of the 
 Lord. 
 
 "Against all dark thoughts engendered by 
 our experience of Providence, faith sets its 
 one assurance of a Love that is certain as life 
 itself. He who wholly believes in and trusts 
 that Love, may leave the mysterious silence 
 and the apparent indifference to wait their ex- 
 planation when Love shall find language in 
 God's good time." 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 WHERE THE FAITHS 
 OF MEN MEET 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 
 
 There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices 
 in the world, and none of them is without signifi- 
 cation. — i Cor. 14: 10. 
 
 WE have come in our final lecture to 
 consider the bearing of all this 
 upon the relation of Christianity 
 with other faiths. Two extreme positions 
 have been taken here. On the one hand every 
 heathen thing has been condemned as being in- 
 spired by devils and wholly evil. On the 
 other hand, there has been a tendency to con- 
 sider all religions practically equal in value, 
 their differences being only the casual and un- 
 important peculiarities imparted to each by 
 local colour — differences not in any way essen- 
 tial, nor even seriously important. If, as we 
 have contended in these lectures, the founda- 
 tions of man's faith are to be found in his own 
 religious experience, it might seem not unnatu- 
 ral to accept, as a consequence of that fact, the 
 position that the best thing for the world 
 would be a continuance of that faith which has 
 naturally grown up in each part of it, under 
 
 i77 
 
178 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 whatever fuller light may be thrown upon it 
 by a wider culture. This is very far from 
 being our view, although we believe that God 
 has not left any of His creatures without some 
 true revelation of Himself, and therefore that 
 it is impossible to look scornfully upon any 
 interpretation of their inner life which men 
 have found, even though it be apart from 
 Christ's interpretation. 
 
 Let us take in the first place the instance of 
 modern Oriental cults. There is an abundant 
 supply of literature concerning Buddhism and 
 the other religions of the East, and any one 
 who will visit the best shrines where Bud- 
 dhism and Shintoism are now practiced will 
 certainly be filled with wonder at the nobility 
 of the precepts, and the air of reverence and 
 beauty, that have gathered round the holy 
 places. Visit the temples in Nikko, where the 
 curtain waves alluringly in front of that secret 
 place wherein the eye catches only a glimpse 
 of mother of pearl, and you will see a gather- 
 ing of ancient and modern exquisiteness which 
 will dazzle and delight you. The sunshine, 
 broken by lattices which melt it into the most 
 exquisite patterns, comes reflected from dark 
 cryptomerias and the yellowish green of other 
 trees, until it would seem as if the whole 
 temple had been washed in molten emeralds. 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 1 79 
 
 Everything that can add to beauty and touch 
 it with the romance of very ancient life goes 
 to aid the effect upon the senses and the spirit. 
 There is a magic there that seems to have 
 power to draw out all that is wistful in the soul 
 of the worshipper, like the similar wistfulness 
 that fell upon the spirit of him who long ago 
 watched the waving of the veil in the temple of 
 Jerusalem and could not take his eyes off it 
 for his longing to see what was within. 1 It is 
 a land of dainty reticences, and religion has 
 had much to do with these. If the temple be 
 one of Shinto worship, the eye is directed upon 
 the mirror of the oratory. When you ask the 
 guardian he will tell you that God Himself 
 cannot be seen, but dwells in the holy of 
 holies: yet the Spirit of God is in the mirror, 
 and in contemplating our own lives we may 
 find Him. " When you worship, God is here." 
 " If we seek Him we become one with Him." 
 In such circumstances it is impossible not to 
 remember once more the oracle of Delphi, and 
 the most famous saying of Socrates, Know 
 thyself. Is not this but another way of stat- 
 ing the fundamental truth which we have 
 sought to express in all these lectures, viz., 
 
 1 See the Record of Pseudo-Aristseus, professing to 
 be the report of an embassy from Alexandria in con- 
 nection with the foundation of the great library. 
 
180 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 that the ultimate basis of authority, and source 
 of religious knowledge, is within the soul of 
 man? Visit, on the other hand, a Buddhist 
 temple, and as you pass through the great gate 
 you may read these words in English: 
 
 " NOTICE : KOTOKU-IN MONASTERY, KAMAKURA 
 
 Stranger, whoever thou art, and whatever 
 thy creed, when thou enterest this sanctuary 
 remember that thou treadest upon ground 
 hallowed by the worship of ages. This is 
 the temple of Buddha and the gate of the 
 Eternal, and should therefore be entered 
 with reverence. 
 
 By Order of the Prior." 
 
 Take even the temples of Kwannon, that an- 
 cient Chinese god or goddess whose enormous 
 wooden statues, in some cases carved in one 
 piece from the stem of an ancient tree, repre- 
 sent the taking over into Buddhism of various 
 Chinese idolatries. Round the main statue 
 you will find others standing in the dim light, 
 and beside one of these, in a shrine which is at 
 least five hundred years old, there is this in- 
 scription: — "Jizo, a coming Buddha, yielded 
 up His right to the eternal peace that He 
 might save the souls of men, and renounced 
 Nirvana to suffer with humanity for other 
 myriad million ages." Now this statue is not, 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET l8l 
 
 as one might think, a relic of some ancient 
 missionary enterprise of Christianity. It is 
 an integral part of certain developments of 
 Buddhist teaching, and no one can fail to see 
 how near it comes to the essential idea of self- 
 sacrifice which Christians express in the atone- 
 ment. 
 
 These instances raise the very interesting 
 question how far it may be possible to incor- 
 porate a pagan faith in the statement of the 
 Christianity w T hich is to supersede it. That 
 there are elements common to the two, it is 
 impossible to deny; but how far it is safe to 
 utilize such elements by any sort of a blend 
 between the former paganism and the new 
 Christianity, is a different question. The 
 opinion among missionaries themselves is di- 
 vided. On the one hand, such instances as 
 those which we have quoted appeal very 
 strongly to the imagination of some, who 
 would fain reinterpret the beautiful truths un- 
 derlying paganism, and even incorporate some 
 of its practice or ritual. This has been the 
 policy of the Roman Catholic Church in 
 heathen countries all along: and we cannot 
 forget how great was the influence of the 
 Eleusinian mysteries upon the earliest forms 
 of the Christian sacraments. 1 
 
 1 See Hatch's Hibbert Lecture. 
 
182 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 On the other hand, there are those who, in 
 the spirit of the early Christians of the Roman 
 Empire, consider all paganism a mere devil- 
 worship, and who go about among the antiqui- 
 ties and beauties of the East with the avowed 
 purpose of smashing Buddha. Sober opinion 
 among missionaries seems to linger between 
 the two extremes. On the one hand they are 
 not blind to the fact that there is much which 
 is precious, and which is ready for the use of 
 Christ, in the practices and thoughts of other 
 religions. On the other hand, they point to 
 the fact that the populace is entirely ignorant 
 of spiritual meanings in its own worship. To 
 the average man, who worships at a temple in 
 any of the Eastern cults, his religion consists 
 entirely in the performance of a certain ritual 
 into whose meaning he never dreams of in- 
 quiring. It seems reasonable to plead that it 
 is hardly worth while for the Christian mis- 
 sionary to double his labours, by first instruct- 
 ing such persons in the meaning of their own 
 Buddhism or Shintoism, and then afterwards 
 proceeding to relate these teachings to Christi- 
 anity. 
 
 While this and other such considerations 
 should hold us back from any cheap and igno- 
 rant praise of the heathen cults, as being equal 
 or superior to Christianity, it should certainly 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 1 83 
 
 suggest the desirability of all possible appre- 
 ciation when dealing with an ancient faith. 
 Let us remember what heathenism essentially 
 is. For us, with our long Western tradition 
 of Christian faith, it is, of course, a pitiable 
 thing, very far inferior to even such attempts 
 at Christianity as have been achieved in Chris- 
 tian lands. Yet something is to be said for 
 idolatry if we would fairly judge those who 
 have practiced it. Apart from the unlearned 
 crowd to whom it is a mere unintelligible 
 ritual, there are in every land great numbers 
 of people to whom it really means the worship 
 of ideas. Many of these ideas are indeed 
 ideals. As has been already stated, man does 
 not tend as a rule to worship that which his 
 conscience and his intellect despise, but to con- 
 struct ideals better than the powers discover- 
 able in ordinary life, and to worship these. 
 Thus idolatry may be essentially a kind of as- 
 piration, and there is no doubt that in the 
 minds of the better class of worshippers it has 
 this quality. Brodie Innes expresses this very 
 strongly: "I have never in one instance/' he 
 says, " found a man, woman, or child, who be- 
 lieved what the Comparative Religionists say 
 he ought to believe . . . who thought 
 that the physical sun in the sky was a god 
 . . . but in every case the god was the 
 
1 84 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 power behind. No man ever yet worshipped 
 an idol or a fetish-stone, but many have be- 
 lieved that some spiritual power entered into 
 the material form, changing its nature, and as 
 it were working through it. It is difficult to 
 draw any very definite line between this belief 
 and the Christian sacramental idea." " 
 
 Idolatry may be either a retrogression or an 
 advance. In the case of religions which have 
 laid great stress upon ritual as a means of 
 presenting and realizing spiritual power, there 
 will be a tendency, as there certainly has been 
 in the Roman Catholic Church, for the igno- 
 rant and vulgar to relapse from all spiritual 
 conceptions and to regard the material ele- 
 ments of the ritual in a purely fetish manner. 
 This has undoubtedly been the case in regard 
 to Buddhism and to many other Oriental re- 
 ligions. In all such cases idolatry is, of course, 
 a retrogression. But, on the other hand, if 
 one contrasts an intelligent paganism with the 
 mere brutality of very primitive races, it will 
 be seen that paganism marks the dawn of 
 ideals higher than those of the earth and of 
 the flesh, and must be regarded as in every 
 way, both intellectually and spiritually, an ad- 
 vance. 
 
 The greatest danger of the East to-day is 
 
 1 Old As The World, p. 112, Brodie Innes. 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 1 85 
 
 not idolatry but godless civilization. There 
 was a third play of Prometheus, besides the 
 two which we possess, in which even iEschylus 
 turned against Prometheus, and the very sea- 
 nymphs whom he had succoured denounced 
 his doctrine. In that conclusion of the whole 
 matter ^Eschylus proclaimed that " the con- 
 fessed evils of civilization are witness on Zeus' 
 side against Prometheus." Take the case of 
 certain ancient Eastern lands to-day, and think 
 of the extremer forms in which their impact 
 with the West has expressed itself. The new 
 life rising there has in certain quarters openly 
 summed itself up in the three demands for no 
 government, no marriage, and no God. Can 
 any one question the greater safety, not to 
 speak of sanity and beauty, of the older 
 faith? 
 
 But it is obvious that the God Who is to 
 supplant the gods of yesterday in those coun- 
 tries which are to-day in their intellectual and 
 spiritual birth-throes, must be a great God and 
 not a small one. Something has been already 
 said concerning this in the lecture upon The 
 Character of God; but here it becomes appar- 
 ent with a new force of conviction, that the 
 God of to-morrow in all such lands must be 
 divine upon the largest scale. If it be true 
 that the curse of heathendom has been local 
 
1 86 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 gods, it is incumbent upon those who would 
 proclaim the God of Christianity to heathen 
 lands to see to it that theirs is in no sense a 
 local divinity. He must be largely conceived, 
 interested not merely in individual conver- 
 sions, but in all the secular life and well-being 
 of mankind, great enough to cope with the 
 international ideals of our time, and with the 
 conception of progress which civilization in- 
 troduces. 
 
 In this connection it is a matter of the great- 
 est possible interest that at the present moment 
 we are witnessing a revival, not only of Christi- 
 anity, but of all religions, after the depressing 
 period of the war. Brahmanism, for instance, 
 is proclaiming that there are Indian people 
 who feel it to be a better approach to the Di- 
 vine, and a better fulfillment of the ends of life, 
 for men " humbly to sit upon a prayer-rug and 
 not always to be rushing about in motor-cars." 
 There is a still more curious but very active 
 attempt on the part of Buddhists in Japan and 
 elsewhere to imitate certain of the methods of 
 Christianity. Buddhist schools are being 
 founded to rival the Christian Sunday-schools, 
 and Christian hymns are being adapted to 
 Buddhist worship, so that you may hear within 
 a temple in Japan to-day the strains of 
 " Buddha, lover of my soul." The effect pro- 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 1 87 
 
 duced upon the mind by all this, is that of a 
 tendency, and indeed a systematic endeavour, 
 to blend Christianity with other faiths, and to 
 find in the composite worship something which 
 will retain the best elements in each, and cease 
 to be in any sense exclusive. 
 
 As we glance back through past periods of 
 history, we can see at times the fanatical zeal 
 with which the Christian religion repudiated 
 all other kinds of worship. The furious 
 antagonism of the crusades leads us back to 
 the fixed conviction of the early Christians 
 that all pagan deities were devils. And that 
 again reminds us of the days of Ahab, king of 
 Israel, who sought in his own way to blend the 
 worship of Israel with the Baal worship of 
 Phoenicia, and aroused the violence of Elijah, 
 who would be satisfied with nothing less than 
 the slaughter of the priests of Baal beside their 
 altar. The present-day scientific spirit, and 
 the higher developments of education gen- 
 erally, have inclined many cultured people to- 
 wards a blending of the various worships of 
 the world in one inclusive, though ill-defined 
 and somewhat nebulous faith. Yet this is by 
 no means the first of such attempts at synthe- 
 sis. Indeed, there is an undated frog-charm 
 that has been found somewhere in the East, 
 
1 88 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 which shows within the crescent of the ancient 
 moon-goddess the inscription Jesus and Maria. 
 
 Thus we are led back to the third and fourth 
 centuries of the Christian era, when syncre- 
 tism reached its fullest and most wide-spread 
 development. The Roman Empire was show- 
 ing signs of decay, and was indeed already 
 hastening to its end. With it the largest 
 promises, dreams, and hopes were perishing, 
 and leaving men in a deepening sadness of 
 spirit as they beheld, each in his own country, 
 the dying agonies of the gods. Everything at 
 that time was in an evening twilight. In some 
 cases, like those of Palmyra and Jerash, they 
 seem to have conserved only the merest exter- 
 nals as relics of a former faith now discarded. 
 Men were busy making money and building up 
 upon the earth the best establishments they 
 could, although they knew that they could en- 
 joy them but for a little time. In every land 
 it was the same. Rationality was enlisted on 
 the side of earth, and any idealism of what- 
 ever kind was relegated more and more to the 
 sphere of poetic imagination. Yet there was 
 that in the minds of all men which refused to 
 part utterly from the dream that had been so 
 wonderful. A great wistfulness characterized 
 these centuries. Evander and his wife, typ- 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 189 
 
 ical of countless thousands of others, go to the 
 oracle of Dodona to present this question, By 
 what prayer or worship they may fare best 
 now and forever ? The craving for immortal- 
 ity reaches its climax, and everywhere men 
 grudge the departure of that glamour and 
 mystic fascination which cling about the an- 
 cient pagan world. 
 
 Meanwhile the Roman soldier marches 
 through all the earth. He knows his Roman 
 gods and finds parallels to them, sometimes 
 fanciful but sometimes wonderfully exact, in 
 every land into which he is led. Everybody 
 knows that in the Great War there was a re- 
 vival of prayer in the trenches, and it was the 
 same in these ancient days. Face to face with 
 immediate danger, men cry to whatsoever 
 powers there may chance to be; even to very 
 vague and legendary powers, upon the chance 
 that there may be some realities corresponding 
 to them. They see their neighbours employing 
 different rituals and invoking gods by different 
 names, but they recognize that the meaning of 
 the cry is the same, and that the meaning of 
 the god seems to be the same also. It was 
 this that kept paganism such " an unconscion- 
 able time in dying," and it was such influences 
 as these that unified it in the minds of men. 
 Not only were the emotions of pagan worship 
 
190 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 obviously deep and sincere; sometimes they 
 contrasted favourably with those of current 
 Christianity. In one of his letters the late Dr. 
 Denny has said: " Pagan Rome impressed me 
 much more than Christian — at least much 
 more favourably. The pagans were not saints 
 but they were not habitually engaged in doing 
 infamous things in holy names, and it gives 
 them an honesty and dignity even in their bad- 
 ness to which most of the popes can make no 
 pretense." All this throws strong light upon 
 the syncretism of the time, and interprets the 
 great court and vestibule at Baalbec, where 
 men in the third century had collected a pan- 
 theon of no fewer than three hundred and 
 thirty gods. On the one hand the idea seems 
 to have been that there must be truth some- 
 where, and that although men were increas- 
 ingly sceptical about the worth and efficacy of 
 this and that divinity, yet by massing their 
 gods in sufficient quantities they must almost 
 certainly find some live potency of help. But 
 besides this mitrailleuse theory of worship, 
 whose principle was that if one barrel missed 
 there were plenty of barrels left that might 
 hit, there was another and a deeper fact about 
 the court and vestibule of Baalbec and all it 
 stood for. This is expressed in very remark- 
 
 1 Letters, p. 154. 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 191 
 
 able words by that same Pseudo-Aristaeus 
 whom we have already mentioned : " For the 
 God who sees and created all things whom 
 they worship is He whom all men worship; 
 and we too, oh king, though we address Him 
 by other names as Zeus and Dis, and by these 
 names they of old time not inappropriately 
 signified that He, through whom all things re- 
 ceive their life and being, is the director and 
 Lord of all." 
 
 Every reader must have been reminded by 
 some of these later statements, of the speech 
 of Paul to the Greeks in Athens recorded in 
 the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the 
 Apostles. In that speech we see a Christian 
 version of the endeavour to find a common 
 element in all man's attempted worship. God 
 Whom all men everywhere are ignorantly and 
 blindly seeking, shut His eyes to the mistakes 
 of ignorance, for He had made all nations to 
 dwell in all the face of the earth that they 
 should seek Him, if haply they might feel 
 after Him and find Him. He went on to 
 quote the pagan poet Aratus, who sang that 
 we are also his offspring, and he rebuked men 
 for imagining that He, in Whom we all live 
 and move and have our being, was to be found 
 locally in images of gold or silver. The sig- 
 nificance of that speech for our present pur- 
 
192 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 poses cannot be exaggerated. And it goes on 
 to lead us directly back to Christ that we may 
 find its confirmation in Him. Now it is to be 
 noted that while Jesus said nothing directly 
 along the lines of Paul's speech on Mars* Hill, 
 yet, on the other hand, He spoke no word of 
 bitterness about pagan worship. His only 
 references to the heathen are one or two casual 
 words which have no significance for our pres- 
 ent purpose, such as those parables of the last 
 judgment, in which the nations are judged 
 upon common grounds of humanity which 
 they share alike with Christians and with 
 Jews. It is to be remembered that these words 
 were spoken at a time when all the Jewish 
 world was agitated about the golden eagles 
 imported into Jerusalem, and when the wor- 
 ship of the Emperor of Rome and his gods 
 was a point of current interest and keen anxi- 
 ety. 
 
 The childhood of Jesus was spent in the 
 highland village of Nazareth. When He was 
 old enough to stray beyond the daily walk, 
 hand in hand with His mother, to the village 
 well, His first excursions must have been to a 
 little hill whose summit is but ten minutes dis- 
 tant from the well. Looking north from that 
 hilltop He saw the great road that led from 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 1 93 
 
 the sea to the furthest East by way of Safed, 
 far-flung like a gigantic rifle-sling along the 
 mountainsides. Back and forward along that 
 road there passed every day long strings of 
 camels. Those eastward-bound carried from 
 the Phoenician seaports much merchandise 
 gathered from all the shores of the Mediterra- 
 nean, to be sold in the markets of lands across 
 the desert. The west-bound caravans that 
 crossed them, swung beneath heavy bales of 
 silks and rare aromatic spices, and all manner 
 of precious products from Persia and even 
 India, to the Phoenician ships that swung at 
 their anchors in Tyre and Sidon. Far 
 thoughts must have followed them in both di- 
 rections, as the child learned His first lessons 
 about the breadth of the world of His day. 
 Turning southward upon His hilltop, in the 
 twilight of a frosty evening, He would see 
 there, far below Him, the wine-red fringes of 
 the great plain of Esdraelon, on which from 
 immemorable generations the battles of the 
 world had been fought, so that the colour of 
 the plain must necessarily suggest a land soaked 
 in ancient blood. Through the clear air a 
 sound would reach Him of the clang of iron 
 upon stone, as the sentries of Roman cohorts 
 changed guard, or the armoured bands started 
 upon the last stretch of their march to the gar- 
 
194 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 rison at Capernaum. Nazareth in those days 
 was to some extent what it still is, a crucible 
 town in which many nations fused and 
 blended; and the twofold vision of the hill- 
 top must have supplied material for much 
 thinking through His childhood and youth. 
 
 There came at last a day when, with all the 
 kaleidoscope of life turning itself in His young 
 mind, He felt that the time had come for gath- 
 ering the varied knowledge into clear decision 
 and a definite course. There had appeared 
 upon the Jordan the figure of John the Baptist, 
 who seemed to be a prophet born for leading 
 men to great decisions, and for separating the 
 chaff from the wheat, not only among men but 
 among the ideas of his time. Jesus, with 
 countless crowds of Galileans, visited the Jor- 
 dan, and came back from His interview with 
 John with the memory of divine acknowledg- 
 ment which must be the master-thought of all 
 His remaining years. But first He must 
 choose His course, and the story of the three 
 temptations seems to indicate a clear presenta- 
 tion to His mind of three alternative careers, 
 among which He might select the one which 
 would give Him scope for His divinely ap- 
 pointed mission. There was the career of 
 commerce and of industry already graphically 
 presented to His imagination by the caravans 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 195 
 
 on the Safed road — the world's way of trans- 
 forming the precious stones of every land into 
 bread for the merchant and the workman. 
 There was the possibility of imperialism and 
 military power and dominance. The vision 
 of Rome with its emperor and its armies was 
 one which must necessarily impress every act- 
 ive and virile mind of those times; and with 
 His powers it would have been easy enough 
 for Him to dominate the world by military 
 force, and create an empire such as even Rome 
 had never dreamed of. Or, if He felt an in- 
 congruity in such ambitions, if they jarred 
 upon His sensitive religious spirit, there was 
 the career of the religious teacher who by 
 some astounding wonder might at a leap set 
 Himself upon the throne of human faith. 
 Such were the careers that were obvious and 
 entirely practicable, and He rejected each of 
 them in turn. It was not that in any of them 
 there was that which He condemned as in- 
 trinsically wicked. It was enough for Him to 
 know that they were not careers for Him, and 
 that the line of the Father's purpose led Him 
 into another road. 
 
 The road into which it did lead Him was, 
 in comparison with those other careers, the 
 simplest in all the world. He went back to 
 Galilee, spoke now and again in the syna- 
 
196 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 gogues, accepted invitations to feasts, asso- 
 ciated with fishermen and peasants, and sent 
 forth His messages quite casually as the occa- 
 sion suggested. No life was ever simpler or 
 more characteristically human than the life of 
 those years in Galilee. They are, essentially, 
 the days of the Son of Man. Hither and 
 thither He wandered, by the seaside or upon 
 the mountains, with the sun and the rain in 
 His face, and the winds of God blowing upon 
 Him. He noted the ploughman at the plough. 
 He saw the life of peasants in their humble 
 dwellings. For Him the lilies clothed them- 
 selves in more than regal splendour. To Him 
 the birds of the air sang continually. On a 
 visit to Jerusalem he was interviewed by night 
 by Nicodemus, a wise old man, fettered and 
 fossilized by much learning in the schools of 
 the rabbis. His introductory words are laden 
 with all the politeness, formality, and stupidity 
 of a typical man of the schools. To all this 
 ponderous artificiality Jesus answers with a 
 word, reminding him that he had never listened 
 to the wind. 
 
 The Beatitudes, rightly understood, show 
 perhaps as strikingly as anything the bright 
 and sunny spirit of those early days. Blessed 
 are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed 
 are they that mourn — it has been supposed to 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 197 
 
 proclaim a melancholy kind of blessedness. 
 But then people who thus interpret it have for- 
 gotten the word that always follows, and which 
 gives its meaning to every text — for. The 
 hungry are not blessed because they are hun- \f 
 gry, but because they shall be filled. The 
 mourning are not blessed because they mourn 
 but because they shall be comforted. The 
 poor are not blessed because they are poor, but 
 because they are heirs of a kingdom. And 
 this exhilaration of the Beatitudes is char- 
 acteristic of the whole spirit of the teaching. 
 The wild joy of living is in it everywhere, the 
 exuberance of a heart at leisure from the 
 business of the world and eagerly rejoicing. 
 Above all, love is in it, a wonderfully gra- 
 cious and generous appreciation of man, 
 woman, and child around Him, which finds its 
 well-springs in a higher love, the love of the 
 Father in heaven. With His Father He is in 
 constant communion, and in that communion 
 there is perfect satisfaction and rest. All the 
 world is beautiful to Him, and all men and 
 women are Hi's brothers and sisters. He has 
 the freedom of land and sea and air, loving 
 them and the creatures that pass along their 
 ways, as one who is everywhere at home. For 
 certain days this brilliant ministry endured, 
 falling like a splash of sunshine upon the gray 
 
198 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 life of many a Galilean peasant, and astonish- 
 ing His followers with its amazing natural- 
 ness and sweet gladness. It was the first phase 
 of His ministry. 
 
 But there fell upon this glad path the 
 shadow of the cross. Just as upon the garden 
 of Joseph of Arimathea the shadow of the 
 cross fell upon its appointed day, and swept 
 round that garden, touching alike its flowers, 
 its luxuriant pathways, and its new-cut tomb; 
 so upon all thoughts of life and death, and 
 upon everything that grew in the whole garden 
 of the world, fell the shadow of the cross of 
 Calvary upon the way of Jesus. Gradually it 
 darkened on Him, and we see His references 
 to it becoming more and more frequent as He 
 proceeded. Incomprehensible to His follow- 
 ers, but unmistakably certain to Himself, it 
 deepened steadily until it created for Him the 
 second phase of His life and teaching. Then 
 it brought with it the sense of pain in the heart 
 of life, the sure and inevitable cross in the 
 center of every banner that man may carry, 
 either into festival or into battle. Joy that has 
 no pain in the heart of it is but the laughter of 
 fools. Success that wants that dark element 
 of sorrow and defeat is but an elusive dream. 
 Love that is all selfishness and has no sacri- 
 fice is the sorest delusion of all, and turns in- 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 199 
 
 evitably into loneliness or hatred. In a word 
 the finished product of life is composite, and 
 for the fusing of it there is necessary the bitter 
 amalgam of pain. It claimed Him with a 
 mysterious clutch. Sin was in that shadow as 
 well as pain. To Him sinners were neither 
 outcasts nor aliens as they were to the Phari- 
 sees. Their grim business concerned Him in- 
 timately and He made it His own, until at the 
 last the dark element of suffering sprang at 
 the throat of life itself, bearing with it the sin 
 of all the world in the final death-grip of the 
 cross of Calvary, whereon dying He mastered 
 sin and death forever. This was the second 
 phase of His ministry. 
 
 Let us turn our minds now to the world of 
 Jesus' time and man's search for God in it. 
 While it was various in detail, yet it grouped 
 itself into two main types which compre- 
 hended every phase of it. On the one hand 
 there was the Greek spirit and all that it rep- 
 resented in the world. To the Greek, God 
 was practically the view. He lived in a land 
 of hills deep in green acanthus. The gods 
 loved the sunlight in which their worshippers 
 built their houses, and the sunlight loved the 
 sea, so that the poet could sing of the " Num- 
 berless laughter of the waves." Nay, the sun 
 
200 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 was God to multitudes, and the worship of 
 Apollo dominates alike the bright thinking and 
 the happy emotions of the age of Pericles. In 
 every wind among the reeds there was the 
 sweet music of the pipes of Pan — that allur- 
 ing and wonderful music that always whis- 
 pered so much more than it told, and drew out 
 the hearts of men and women beyond the 
 dusty and prosaic earth into a wonderland of 
 half-expressed desire and wistfulness. Har- 
 mony too was there, and balance, and ration- 
 ality of thought, — a world not only exquisite 
 but well-ordered, a world of essential sanity, 
 and endless possibilities of delight. 
 
 Yet upon this lovely paradise of a world 
 there fell strange shadows. The Greek knew 
 nothing of the cross, and would have con- 
 sidered it foolishness if he had known. But 
 all that the cross stood for, the sorrow and the 
 darkness of mankind, fell upon his world also. 
 The pipes of Pan, with all their exquisite sug- 
 gestiveness, could yet play cruel music; and 
 nature seemed to claim man for her victim 
 when man daringly aspired to be her compan- 
 ion. And when this shadow fell upon the 
 Greek he had no refuge anywhere in which to 
 hide from it. He knew the truth that there 
 is in beauty, the essential rightness of love and 
 sunshine, yet these were not the portion of 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 201 
 
 any man beyond certain days and limits. So 
 he longed for an immortality beyond the grasp 
 of his faith, and sought with blind fingers, like 
 a groping child, for the bosom of God whereon 
 to lay his weary head and find love made per- 
 fect. But nature has no breasts of tenderness, 
 and the groping man sooner or later was 
 clasped by the lean fingers of death. Thus the 
 world of the Greek was hopelessly unintelligi- 
 ble. 
 
 Such was the religion of the West. Con- 
 trasted with it, manifest in many forms, was 
 another religion, which found sorrow and fail- 
 ure to be the most impressive facts of life. 
 Pain and death, and all their train of disap- 
 pointing experience, were accepted by the East 
 and pressed to its bleeding heart. What else 
 was there to do? The Greek, even after his 
 disillusions, persistently refused to turn his 
 eyes from beholding vanity. The Oriental 
 proclaimed that all is vanity, even in his wine 
 cups. Egypt, with its august and ancient re- 
 ligion of the dead, the whole Middle East with 
 its perpetual sacrifices offered to bloody gods 
 whom men tried to appease and yet never 
 finally succeeded in appeasing, these were the 
 immediate environment of Palestine. And in 
 the still further East, connected with Mediter- 
 ranean lands by many streams of commerce 
 
202 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 and of travel, was that great and already long- 
 established faith whose fundamental dogma 
 was the illusion of experience and the evil of 
 desire, whose hope and aim was the death of 
 these in Nirvana. 
 
 Compare these two phases of faith with the 
 two periods in the life of Jesus, and a close 
 correspondence will at once appear. He took 
 them both up into His hands, confirmed the es- 
 sential truth of each, and flung away the error 
 which bound man to despair. We have al- 
 ready said that Christianity is not a new faith 
 rivalling the old. It is the faith, interpreting 
 all the others and correcting them. Christ 
 stands not for a religion but for religion, the 
 finding of God and eternal life by men. There 
 were no wholesome elements in the best 
 thought of Greece which are not to be found in 
 the Galilean Gospel of Jesus; while the dark 
 tragedy that oppressed the eastern lands from 
 Egypt to the Ganges and beyond it, found its 
 match and its remedy in the Cross of Calvary. 
 In the Galilean Gospel, the love of the Father 
 and the promise of eternal life heartened men 
 and fortified them for the bitterest disappoint- 
 ments that beset their appreciation of the 
 world, and told them that the bright gospel of 
 the sunshine and the wind would outlive the 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 203 
 
 catastrophe that threatened it in death and dis- 
 illusion. To the Eastern He proclaimed that, 
 dark though the tragedy of life might be, yet 
 the Cross was mighty to turn it into salvation. 
 He faced the bitterness of sorrow, death, and 
 sin in His cross, as Buddha never did in his 
 law of renunciation. Yet He believed, and 
 taught men to believe, not in death as the ulti- 
 mate word, but in life — a life that at last 
 would be free from all precariousness, and 
 would stand eternally secure from the attack 
 of evil. Thus did Jesus make for the Greek 
 the passing dream into a reality, and the pass- 
 ing beauty into an eternal splendour. Thus 
 for the Oriental He faced sin and sorrow, but 
 refused to admit their tyranny. Taking upon 
 Himself that load in all its crushing sorrow, 
 He redeemed man from his bondage and gave 
 him immortal freedom. Thus did He com- 
 bine within Himself all that any man had ever 
 sought and found of God. 
 
 Here then is the true syncretism, which ac- 
 knowledges and takes up into itself every 
 worthy element in man's thought of God, and 
 yet refuses to allow men to rest in faiths that 
 had imperfectly expressed these. For this was 
 Jesus Christ, complete and perfect man, Who 
 had gone through the full circle of human ex- 
 
204 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 perience, from the laughter of the child to the 
 cry of the broken heart. He is man's brother, 
 standing beside him in every phase of human 
 life, undergoing and understanding it. He 
 descended into hell, the hell of man's guilty 
 conscience and despair, and having sounded 
 the depths of sorrow which had haunted men 
 with their evil dreams, He brought back from 
 the ultimate abyss the great human heritage of 
 an eternal hope. Complete and perfect man, 
 and yet surely how much more! He was not 
 as we are, East and West alike, the victim of 
 life: He was its Master and its Lord. He 
 brought all the power and wisdom and love of 
 eternity, and set them free in full play upon 
 the creatures and events of time. Surely this 
 is very God come in the flesh, claiming all 
 man's joy and sorrow as divine, directing men 
 to find them in the life of God where alone 
 they can dwell safely, revealing everything in 
 the light of the eternal love as the only inter- 
 pretation of any phase of human life. 
 
 There is abundant evidence that this was the 
 effect of Christ upon the early Christians. 
 Apart from the countless records of their faith 
 and its tests both in living and in dying, we 
 have a rejuvenated world rising from the 
 ashes of the spent and outworn history of 
 Greece and Rome. Pater in his Marius the 
 
WHERE THE FAITHS OF MEN MEET 205 
 
 Epicurean has given us in a few sentences such 
 a picture of that world as will send its message 
 down through many generations. " What de- 
 sire, what fulfillment of desire, had wrought 
 so pathetically on these ranks of aged men and 
 women of humble condition? Those young 
 men, bent now so discreetly on the details of 
 their sacred service had faced life and were 
 glad. . . . Some credible message from 
 beyond the flaming rampart of the world — a 
 message of hope regarding the place of men's 
 souls and their interest in the sum of things." 
 
 This then is the sum of the whole matter. 
 The foundations of our Christian faith are 
 laid, not in metaphysical abstractions, but in the 
 deep, permanent, and essential facts of human 
 nature, seen and interpreted in the light of 
 Christ. That interpretation is not only con- 
 vincing, it is inevitable. It takes up and ful- 
 fills not only the desire of man's heart but 
 every fact of his human experience, which 
 never finds itself until it finds itself in Him. 
 He is indeed for us the image of the invisible. 
 God Almighty is just like Christ, and there is 
 nothing more to learn concerning God beyond 
 Him. Christ comes to us, to take up alike the 
 joy and sorrow of our daily lives, their love 
 and pain, and to reveal them all as parts of 
 
206 THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH 
 
 that life which is the life indeed. In Him we 
 find God mighty to master sin and set us free 
 from its dominion, strong to save to the utter- 
 most because He loves to the uttermost. In 
 Him we find the eternal God meeting us in all 
 the ordinary byways of our journey through 
 the days and years, and leading us at last to 
 our places in the eternal life and love. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 

 Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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