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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON. N. J. 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of Rev. Robert Williams 
 
 BV 4832 .M26 1919 
 McNeile, A. H. 1871-1933 
 The increase of God 
 
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 U i^ 
 
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 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
Special Books for Lenten Reading 
 
 Recommended by, and with Introductions by 
 
 the Bishop of London 
 
 The Mount of Vision : Being a Study of Life in terms of 
 the Whole. By the Right Reverend Charlhs Henry Brent, Bishop 
 of the Philippine Islands. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 3s, 6d. net 
 
 Before the Morning Watch. By the Rev. F. A. 
 
 Iremonger, formerly Head of the Oxford House, Bethnal Green. 
 Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 In the Day of Battle. By the Right Rev. H. L. Paget, 
 
 D.D., Bishop of Stepney. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 The Holy Ghost— The Comforter. By the Rev, G. F. 
 
 HoLDEN, M.A., late Vicar of All Saints', Margaret Street, London, W. 
 Crown Svo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 The Wondrous Passion. By the Rev. F. W. Drake, 
 
 M.A. Rector of Kirkby Misperton. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 Prayer and Action; or, The Three Notable Duties 
 
 (Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving). By the Ven. E. E. Holmes, 
 B.D., Archdeacon of London. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d, net 
 
 Spiritual Progress : a Word of Good Cheer. By the 
 
 Rev. A. W. Robinson, D.D., Canon of Canterbury. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d. 
 net 
 
 The Life in Grace. By the Rev. Walter J. Carey, M. A., 
 
 R.N. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 Life's Journey. By the Right Rev. H. H. Montgomery, 
 
 D.D., formerly Bishop of Tasmania. With Frontispiece. Crown Svo, 
 3s. 6d. net 
 
 The Healthful Spirit. By the Rev. H. N. Bate, M.A., 
 
 Vicar of Christ Church, Lancaster Gat^-. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 Law and Love; A Study of Quomodo Dilexi (Psalm 
 
 cxix. 97-104). By the Rev. F. L. Boyd, M.A., Vicar of St Paul's, 
 Knightsbridge. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 Readings from Law's Serious Call ; Being a Selec- 
 tion for each day of Lent beglnninflr with Ash Wednesday. 
 
 Crown Svo, paper covers, is. 6d. net ; cloth, 2s. 6d. net 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
THE 
 
 INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 BY 
 
 A. H. MCNEILE, D.D. 
 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF DUBLIN ; CHANCELLOR OF ST PATRICK'S ; FELLOW 
 
 OF SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 THE BISHOP OF LONDON 
 
 "The Head, from whom all the 
 body, being supplied and knit together 
 through the joints and bands, increaseth 
 with the increase of God," — G)l. ii, 19. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET 
 
 1919 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 This is a clear, pointed, pithy, and in my 
 opinion a very delightful little book. The 
 author all through it pushes home his main 
 point that the test of life everywhere is growth, 
 that even in nature such growth is due to the 
 Energy of God, and that in human character 
 growth is due to the same Energy, but with 
 this difference, that in character the amount of 
 growth attained depends upon the co-operation 
 of the human will. 
 
 This gives us a true and very ennobling 
 idea, expressed on p. 14: '*My growth is God's 
 life straining after self -fulfilment, physically in 
 my body, spiritually in my soul." 
 
 This recalls a most inspiring picture in an 
 earlier book of the author's, which led to my 
 inviting him to write the present one, a picture 
 which, I found, greatly appealed to the troops at 
 Salonica. Man is the expression of God. 
 Just as a symphony lies in the heart and mind 
 of the composer and yet must find expression. 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 and the composer does not see of the travail of 
 his soul and is satisfied until that symphony 
 rolls out before heaven and earth, so the love 
 in the heart of God must express itself in human 
 life and human love, and did, as a matter of 
 fact, perfectly express itself in the Beloved Son. 
 To this I always added that the Church exists 
 to play to heaven and earth this symphony of 
 the love of God ! 
 
 The theme in this book is really the same 
 thought in other and equally beautiful words. 
 God is trying to fulfil Himselfi to express 
 Himself in me, and the more I grow the more 
 He sees of the travail of His soul and is 
 satisfied. 
 
 But if the book provides us with a noble 
 thought, so also it does with a searching 
 Lenten question — am I growing ? 
 
 It is easy enough to ask, as the author says, 
 Do I go to church regularly ? Do I go to the 
 Communion? Do I kneel down and say my 
 prayers ? But do I grow ? This is the real 
 test of character. All life is perpetual motion. 
 
 I think that this book will be a help to all 
 of us to try and answer that searching question 
 this Lent. 
 
 But besides the main question pressed upon 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 us by the author, light is thrown upon many 
 subsidiary difficulties, e.g., how to account for 
 people being such ''good sorts" without any 
 profession of religion. With great force the 
 author emphasises the childishness with which 
 many of us still prefer the ''bright penny" to 
 the "dull sovereign," and the positive wicked-^ 
 ness with which we foster party spirit : " I am 
 of the Church Times, I of the Guardian^ I of 
 the Challenge, I of the Record'' (p. 103). 
 
 The book concludes with a really beautiful 
 chapter on Prayer and the offering of the 
 Eucharist. 
 
 " Our prayers are not right prayers, if 
 they are not the work of the Divine Spirit 
 within us, wanting that God wants." "He often 
 waits to do what He Himself wants, until we 
 pray for it, and thereby apply His Energy for 
 the purpose." "Growth in Prayer, then, is 
 growth in the intensity with which we want 
 what God wants." "If such is the nature of 
 Prayer, man can do no greater work for God." 
 "In short, to put it as simply as possible, the 
 more holy you are, the more will your prayers 
 accomplish " (pp. 120, 121). 
 
 These are all noble thoughts, and ought to 
 make us, as a diocese, pray better ; nay ! we 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 may go further, they ought to make us come 
 to the Holy Communion regularly and ** armed 
 with a great pile of prayers and praises, offer 
 a well-prepared Eucharist, something that it is 
 a joy to offer and a joy to God to receive " 
 (p. 129). 
 
 I feel certain that, if we take in and live out 
 the teaching of this book, both as individuals 
 and corporately as a diocese we shall grow with 
 *' the increase of God." 
 
 A. F., London. 
 
 *Xmas Eve^ 19 18. 
 
THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 I. LIFE 
 
 The English word "life" has three pieces of 
 work to do : — i. We speak, for example, of the 
 "life of St Paul," and we mean roughly the 
 years during which he was on this earth as a 
 human being, and the way in which he spent 
 them, his actions and experiences. 2. All 
 plants, animals, and human beings possess, or 
 exhibit, something in common which we call 
 ''life"; and at death we say that "life is 
 extinct." 3. The Christian religion tells us of 
 something called "life," eternal life, which is 
 not extinguished at the death of the body. But 
 though we separate these three in thought — the 
 temporal, physical, and spiritual — they are not 
 really distinct ; they are inextricably bound 
 together in a complex of ideas which no words 
 can define. One thing, however, we can say 
 
2 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 about each and all of them : life involves move- 
 ment, change, growth ; always, universally, in 
 every form and grade of existence or thought, 
 to be static, still, motionless, is to be dead ; 
 when movement ceases, life is not. In the life 
 of St Paul, action and experience were con- 
 tinuously new, as the onward movement of a 
 stream of water. The most exhaustive biography 
 can only lift the veil here and there, and give 
 glimpses at successive stages of progress. The 
 life can be viewed from a distance as a single 
 whole, but within itself that whole contained — 
 or rather fulfilled itself by means of — perpetual 
 motion. And the same is true of the so-called 
 ''physical life" of plants, and animals, and 
 men. The expression is inaccurate ; it is not 
 the life that is physical. The life itself is 
 something utterly indefinable, in fact incon- 
 ceivable ; but it is a something which fulfils 
 itself, physically, by the continuous motion of 
 throwing ofT old particles and gaining new 
 ones, resulting in the mystery that we call 
 '' growth." We cannot see the movement ; it 
 is far too small for our dull eyes to see. But 
 those who are in sympathy with nature can 
 
LIFE 3 
 
 feel It, especially in the spring, when its out- 
 ward results are most manifest and appealing. 
 Climb to a hillside, undisturbed by civilization, 
 on a warm, still, moist morning In early May, 
 and your inner spirit, if it is in tune, can hear 
 the world of nature growing ; In your deepest 
 depths you know yourself to be one with it as 
 it groaneth and travaileth together in the 
 unceasing pain of upward pressure, of restless 
 strain and yearning after ever more abundant 
 life. If we could transcend time, and could view 
 the life of nature as a single whole, we should 
 yet realize, as we realize in reviewing the life 
 of St Paul, that it fulfils itself by perpetual 
 motion. 
 
 And it is a motion intense, ceaseless, uni- 
 versal, which is not retarded, or diverted from 
 its appointed course, by any adverse power. 
 The throwing off of the old, and the taking 
 on of the new, continue without failure and 
 without interruption in the life of every organ- 
 ism, and of every species in the universe. 
 It is a life in which order Is supreme, with 
 no variableness or shadow of turning- Throusrh 
 every infinitesimal moment of time we, and all 
 
4 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 other organisms in all the multitudes of worlds, 
 are physically putting off the old man and 
 putting on the new. And all that chemical, 
 biological, and physiological research can do 
 is to make increasingly clear the lines along 
 which this perpetual motion proceeds. The 
 mind grows dim and dizzy when we try to 
 grasp it as a whole, and to contemplate the 
 Mind and Will which preserve this order in 
 its unimpeded perfection through all the cycles 
 of the ages, '* upholding — carrying on — all 
 things by the utterance of His power" (Heb. 
 i. 3). The glories and beauties of nature can 
 make an immediate appeal to the emotions ; 
 but the O7'deroi its life, fulfilling itself by growth, 
 needs deeper and more concentrated medita- 
 tion if it is to be grasped vividly and on a 
 large scale. But if it is so grasped it can 
 thrill us to the core. 
 
 I hope that no reader of these pages will 
 brush this aside in the desire to get on to the 
 more devotional and scriptural chapters. If 
 w^e believe that it is God who is moment by 
 moment carrying forward nature's growth — and 
 no Christian can mean less than that when 
 
LIFE 5 
 
 he speaks of Him In the Creed as " Maker of 
 heaven and earth " — then all things that are 
 written In the book of the generations of the 
 heavens and the earth are written for our 
 learning. To leave the study of natural science 
 to non-Chrlstlans Is to omit one volume of the 
 writing of God. It Is the only volume that 
 Interests some students ; and they are learning 
 from It more about God than they have any 
 Idea of, as St Paul maintains in Romans I. 20. 
 But the Christian ought to be able to learn 
 a great deal more than they. It really Is a 
 religious duty to learn, according to our oppor- 
 tunities, as much as we can about nature's 
 growth, in order to enlarge and deepen our 
 conceptions of the God who keeps It growing. 
 
2. ENERGY 
 
 But the v/ord 'MIfe" has a third duty to 
 perform. It has to express the inexpressible, 
 a something to which only Man, the highest 
 product of nature, attains. To distinguish it 
 from the life that we have been studying we 
 call it spiritual life. And the object of this 
 little book is to make clear the truth that 
 spiritual life, no less than physical, fulfils itself 
 by growth, by perpetual motion, by an un- 
 ceasing putting off of the old and putting on of 
 the new. The order in nature is wonderful, 
 but its wonder is multiplied beyond measure- 
 ment when we contemplate the fact that the 
 upward progress of its life has resulted in Man, 
 a being in whom a new and higher kind of 
 growth exhibits itself; and he in turn groaneth 
 and travaileth in pain in the upward pressure 
 and striving after self-fulfilment of the life 
 within him. And that not only in men as 
 separate individuals, but in man as a family. 
 
ENERGY 7 
 
 a tribe, a state, a nation, and finally in the 
 human race, one unthinkably complex spiritual 
 organism striving after an ever more abundant 
 life. 
 
 It is worth a great deal to try to broaden our 
 mmds by a wide outlook, to make a practice 
 of letting our thoughts and sympathies expand 
 in the attempt to get a little nearer to a mental 
 grasp of all the kingdoms of the world in a 
 moment of time. Such a grasp may not be 
 essential in the sense that without it we cannot 
 be good Christians ; but it is certainly true 
 that without it we cannot be understanding; 
 Christians. And, it may be added, without it 
 our intercessions for the world cannot be what 
 they might be. 
 
 Dwell for a moment on the word "energy." 
 It means *' the power of doing work." We 
 can think of it in two ways — before the work 
 has begun, and while it is in process. If you 
 compress a spring, it has ''potential" energy; 
 the power is stored up ready, and the spring 
 will leap up the moment it is given the chance. 
 And when that happens, the potential energy 
 becomes ''kinetic," moving, actual. Gun- 
 
8 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 powder or petrol has stored within it the 
 power of doing work, which is released, or 
 rendered active, when a spark is applied. A 
 seed is potentially a full-grown plant, because 
 it has the power of growing into one if the 
 conditions are favourable. An infant is poten- 
 tially a man for the same reason ; he possesses 
 the stored-up power of growth. Shut your 
 eyes and try to think of the potential energy 
 stored up in the whole of nature, and inces- 
 santly becoming kinetic. It is not one energy 
 in one thing, and another energy in another. 
 It is all one and the ^ same energy, one stored- 
 up power, pressing, straining, always trying to 
 burst forth in movement, activity, growth. 
 The entire universe is alive with one life. It 
 cannot be measured ; it is never diminished, 
 it can never be increased. It is the life of God 
 at work in matter. 
 
 Now carry this thought into the spiritual 
 life. In the physical sphere the growth of a 
 rosebud and the growth of a baby proceed 
 on exactly similar lines and by similar methods ; 
 but the baby belongs not to one world but to 
 two. Matter is inferior to spirit and dependent 
 
ENERGY 9 
 
 upon It for its existence ; but It Is the same 
 God who worketh all In all. In the spiritual 
 sphere life is the same divine life as In the 
 physical, the same potential energy, the same 
 stored-up power ; but It works upon different 
 ** material " (as in the poverty of our language 
 we are obliged to call it), and fulfils Itself 
 not in physical movement and growth, but in 
 spiritual ; Its product is not increase of body, 
 but increase of personality. And as each 
 separate organism in the physical world Is a 
 point at which the working of the divine energy 
 reveals itself physically, so each individual 
 human soul is a point at which it reveals itself 
 spiritually. It is Impossible to press too strongly 
 the vast truth that all life, whether it works 
 physically or spiritually, is one. As we try 
 to grasp the unity of material nature, so we 
 must try to grasp the unity of spirit. We 
 need not climb to a hillside to feel it ; we can 
 feel it, if we will, on our knees when we have 
 entered into our closet, and shut the door, and 
 settled down to prayer. Get your thoughts 
 away from yourself and your friends, and work 
 and surroundings, and let them range over 
 
lo THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 the continents. In all the millions of the 
 human race the potential energy of the life 
 of God is striving, pressing, straining after 
 self-fulfilment by spiritual growth. If you can 
 feel and realize It as a whole, you will gain a 
 conception of what God is that nothing else 
 can give you. It will lead you a little nearer 
 to an understanding of the mysterious truth 
 that while God Is Infinitely complete and perfect 
 in Himself, He Is, in a real sense, incomplete 
 In nature and In man. The energy of His 
 life cannot be increased or diminished, but 
 since In the universe It is potential, His very 
 nature demands a gradual and progressive 
 self-fulfilment. 
 
 St Paul grasped this great truth, and probably 
 taught it explicitly in Epheslans i. 23. In our 
 English versions the words are translated, *'of 
 Him that filleth all In all." But the Greek 
 words more probably mean ^'of Him who, all 
 In all, is being fiUfilledy It is often said that 
 while we need God, He has no need of us. 
 And that is, of course, true of His Being and 
 Nature in itself; God the Father Is eternally 
 satisfied, eternally complete, in His relationship 
 
ENERGY II 
 
 with the Son througli the Holy Spirit. But 
 since He has willed to be the indwelling energy 
 of His creation, He needs the co-operation of 
 every atom of it; and most of all He needs 
 the co-operation of its highest product, Man. 
 This co-ordination of the world of nature and 
 the world of spirit, because of the one life at 
 work in both, is expressed in a single verse 
 in St John i. 4 ; (i) '' In Him was life." This 
 follows the words— ''All things were made by 
 Him, and without Him was not anything made 
 that was made," shewing that the evangelist 
 was thinking of the life as working in nature. 
 But (2), '' And the life was the light of men " ; 
 the same life, but producing in men, and men 
 alone, spiritual results which he compares with 
 light. Look also at St Paul's expression, 
 according to the best reading, in Ephesians v. 9, 
 ''the fruit of the light." He might have said, 
 ^'the fruit of the life," or, as in the Authorized 
 Version, *'the fruit of the Spirit"; they all 
 mean the same thing. Read Psalm cxlviii. 
 with this co-ordination in mind ; verses i-io are 
 an expansion of' in Him was life," and verses 
 1 1 -1 3 of "the Hfe was the light of men." The 
 
12 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 Benedicite is formed on the same lines ; and so 
 also is the Te Deum when rightly understood. 
 The first part, down to the words *' the majesty 
 of Thy glory," is an expression of the adoring 
 praise of heaven and earth, and of all things 
 visible and invisible, for the majestic life of 
 God in creation, which produces the glorious 
 results of growth. Then in the second part 
 w^e turn to Man, represented by the Christian 
 Church. Apostles, prophets, martyrs, the holy 
 Church throughout all the world, acknowledge 
 something more than nature can acknowledge, 
 because *' the light of men " has taught them 
 the glory of the eternal Trinity and the atoning 
 life and death of Christ. 
 
 The extent to which St Paul is steeped in 
 the thought of God's life as energy in the 
 spiritual world can be seen by collecting the 
 passages in which the divine energy is men- 
 tioned. He knew, for instance, that all his 
 own work — the incomparable v/ork of the 
 greatest of missionaries — was due, not to his 
 own power or holiness, but to the potential 
 energy of God striving a,fter actuality within 
 him : '^ The gift of the grace of God which 
 
ExNERGY 13 
 
 was given to me according to the energy of 
 His power" (Eph. iii. 7). "I labour, striving 
 according to His energy which energizes in 
 me in power" (Col. i. 29). " He who energized 
 in Peter . . . energized also in me " (Gal. 
 ii. 2). And the same was true of the spiritual 
 life of his readers, and of us among them : 
 " God, who also energizes in you who believe " 
 (i Thess. ii. 13). ''It is God who energizes 
 in you, both to will and to energize for His 
 pleasure" (Phil. ii. 13). *' Unto Him who hath 
 power to do exceeding abundantly above all 
 that we ask or think, according to the power 
 which energizes in us . . ." (Eph. iii. 20). 
 But it is not only in individuals, but in the 
 Church as a whole, that this energy is always 
 straining after self- fulfilment : " There are (in 
 the Church) diversities of effects of energy ; 
 but it is the same God who energizes, all in 
 all" (i Cor. xii. 6). ''All these energizes the 
 one and the same Spirit" (ver. 11). Perhaps 
 the most instructive passage is Ephesians iv. 
 16: '^Christ, through whom the whole body, 
 fitly framed together and compacted by every 
 joint in its supply, according to the energy in 
 
14 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 the measure of each single part, maketh the 
 growth of the body for the building up of itself 
 in love." Here is a vivid picture of the growth 
 which is the aim and purpose of God's life in 
 the Church as a single well-constructed body. 
 In the corresponding passage in Colosslans ii. 
 19 the apostle says (literally), " the whole Body 
 . . . groweth the growth of God," the meaning 
 of which would have been the same if he had 
 said ''llveth the life of God." 
 
 We shall never gain a true idea of the 
 spiritual life till we have grasped this funda- 
 mental truth. My growth is God's life strain- 
 ing after self- fulfilment, physically in my body, 
 spiritually in my soul. It will give a richer 
 meaning to many other passages in St Paul's 
 epistles : "Jesus Christ is In you " (2 Cor. xiil. 
 5). " It Is no longer I that live, but Christ 
 llveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20). ''That Christ may 
 dwell in your hearts through faith" (Eph. ill. 
 17). "Christ In you, the hope of glory" (Col. 
 i. 27), i.e., a potentiality which gives hope of 
 fulfilment. Similarly, " His Spirit that dwelleth 
 in you " (Rom. vlii. 11). " Know ye not that ye 
 are God's temple, and the Spirit of God dwelleth 
 
ENERGY 15 
 
 in 
 
 you?" (i Cor. iii. 16). '' Know ye not that 
 your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which 
 is in you?" (vi. 19). ''The Holy Spirit that 
 dwelleth in us " (2 Tim. i. 14). The indwelling 
 Christ, the indwelling Spirit, does not simply 
 live within me as in a ready-made building. 
 The indwelling is analogous to the indwelling 
 of the divine life in a seed or a bud ; it is for 
 the purpose of growth. St Paul's boldest ex- 
 pression of this truth is seen in his metaphor 
 in Galatians iv. 19: "My little children, of 
 whom I am again in travail until Christ be 
 formed in you." Christ wants to grow to 
 m.aturity in us ; i.e., His infinitely mature and 
 perfect life for which, in itself, growth has no 
 meaning, strains after self-fulfilment in my 
 growth and in the growth of all men. The 
 Christ fully formed in all mankind is, as Tenny- 
 son puts it, "the Christ that is to be." 
 
3. WILL 
 
 Up to this point the analogy from nature has 
 held good; but now it begins to fail us. In 
 physical nature growth proceeds in perfect 
 accord with the will of God, with the unvary- 
 ing order which is the expression of His mind. 
 Hence physical growth may be described as 
 "automatic." The word is actually used in St 
 Mark iv. 28: ''The earth bringeth forth fruit 
 automatically " (E.V., of itself). The cells 
 which compose the bodies of plants, animals, 
 and men cannot help obeying the "laws" of 
 nature, as we call them, the unvarying order 
 of the life of God. But while we think of this 
 with awe and wonder, we are met by a mystery 
 far more marvellous in the fact that spiritual 
 growth is not automatic. Human spirits can 
 and do disobey. And every transgression and 
 disobedience receives a just recompense of 
 reward in the hindering, thwarting, stunting 
 
 of the souFs growth. In the whole human 
 
 16 
 
WILL 17 
 
 race the life of God is pressing and straining 
 after self-fulfilment, but in every member of it 
 the human will can get in the way and hinder. 
 It can grieve the Holy Spirit of God by pre- 
 venting Him from exercising His energy. I 
 think that this way of regarding the spiritual 
 life shews more clearly than any other that sin 
 is something positive. It is not mere absence 
 of virtue, mere failure. It is the deliberate act 
 of the will crushing down, so to speak, and 
 keeping under the potential energy of God, 
 instead of allowing it to fulfil itself by growth. 
 St Stephen's words, " Ye do always resist the 
 Holy Spirit," describe the universal tendency 
 of the race of men ever since the first man 
 resisted for the first time. This is a great 
 mystery. That God's life, complete in itself, 
 should be potential in nature and in man, and 
 require self-fulfilment, is wonderful enough. 
 But that man should be possessed of a power 
 of will which can thwart that fulfilment sur- 
 passes the bounds of the human imagination. 
 ''How unsearchable are His judgments and 
 untraceable His ways ! " 
 
 And yet, at the same time, the possibility of 
 
i8 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 the case being otherwise surpasses equally the 
 bounds of the human imagination. For God 
 is Love, and the self- fulfilment of His life in 
 man is reached by man's growth in love. 
 And love that is not voluntary is not love. 
 Man's will must be free enoug^h to choose 
 between right and wrong — to choose, that is, 
 between furthering and hindering the energy 
 of God. If he could not choose, he would be 
 an automatic machine ; and that would please 
 God only to the extent that a turnip or a pig 
 can please Him. In other words, divine love 
 requires in man the capability of sinning. 
 
 But this is not a mere unmeaning paradox if 
 we realize that God is the sufferer from man's 
 sin. God's love is such that He longs for 
 man's answering, voluntary love ; and it is so 
 great that He is willing to sacrifice Himself — to 
 give His own self- fulfilment in man into the 
 power of man to further or hinder as he chooses, 
 in order that man's love may be voluntary. 
 This has been stated often before ; but it needs 
 constant repetition, so long as there are those 
 who think, for example, that the horrors of the 
 war are incompatible with God's love. He 
 
WILL 19 
 
 loves men enough to undergo, in them, all the 
 horrors of the war, because He will not dis- 
 honour a single human being in all the nations 
 of the earth by turning him into an automatic 
 machine through the forcing of his will. He 
 has given Himself a law which shall not be 
 broken. The order of His own Being in His 
 indwelling in man is unvarying and inviolable, 
 because He is love. To rebel against the fact 
 that He will not force a single German to do 
 what is right is to rebel against His sacrifice of 
 Himself, His own self-yielding to the will of 
 men. To measure the contradiction of sinners 
 against Himself, is to learn something of the 
 measure of His love. 
 
 Why He should have made the laws of 
 thought to be what they are, why love is of 
 such a nature that when it ceases to be volun- 
 tary it ceases to be love, is the ultimate mystery. 
 It is here that St Paul's words find their truest 
 application : '' O man, who art thou that repliest 
 against God ? " The laws of thought, the laws 
 of nature, the laws of the spiritual life, are what 
 they are because God is what He is. 
 
 The automatic growth, then, in nature affords 
 
20 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 no analogy to the voluntary growth In the 
 spiritual life of men. But the comparison fails 
 also in another respect. Every organism in 
 nature, including the human body, grows to its 
 prime, and then decays and dies. 
 
 " So careful of the type she seems , 
 So careless of the single lifer 
 
 And in the long run even types are subject 
 to the same natural law. When Tennyson 
 spoke of the ** single life" he meant the single 
 physical instruments of the one life. But with 
 human souls, the single spiritual instruments of 
 the one life, the case is very different. Their 
 possession of will gives them a permanent 
 distinctness, an eternal value, wholly indepen- 
 dent of the body. They possess the capability 
 of unending growth. No soul, except by its 
 own deliberate act, is subject to decay and 
 death. It is, indeed, possible for a man to *' lose 
 his own soul," but he does not lose it in the 
 ordinary course of nature. ''It is not the will 
 of your Father which is in heaven that one of 
 these little ones should perish." It has often 
 been pointed out, and rightly, that one of the 
 
WILL 21 
 
 principal features in our Lord's teaching, and 
 in the Christian reHgion ever since, is the value 
 that it sets upon the individual. In dealing 
 with souls God is never "careless of the single 
 life." ** There is joy in heaven over one sinner 
 that repenteth." No Christian can ever say in 
 despair, " What is my soul in the boundless 
 creation ? " Though all souls share in the one 
 life, though one and the same divine energy 
 works, strives for self- fulfilment, in them all, 
 yet each is distinct, because each is given the 
 power of furthering or hindering that fulfilment 
 voluntarily. It is not difficult to admit the 
 distinctness of St Paul's soul, for example. But 
 then, you say, St Paul was unique ; there has 
 never been anyone quite like him in the world's 
 history. And I answer, you are unique. There 
 has never been anyone quite like you in the 
 world's history. The endless fertility of God's 
 creative energy is bringing into existence 
 human beings at I don't know how many 
 hundreds a day, and no two are exactly alike. 
 If you were exactly like anyone else, God might 
 be able to do without you ; but because you are 
 unique He cannot. In writing up the list of 
 
22 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 His people He would miss you ; your contribution 
 to the fulfilment of the one life is a contribution 
 which no one else can make. ''If I were rich, if 
 I were clever, if I were strong and healthy, if I 
 had gifts and opportunities that other people 
 have, if I were exactly like some one else, and 
 not what I am, then I could do something for 
 God." All feelings of this kind would vanish 
 if we could only remember that God has no use 
 for duplicates, and therefore He doesn't make 
 them. 
 
 It is worth while to digress for a moment to 
 remind ourselves what our work for God in- 
 cludes. Every soul is a deep and hidden 
 mystery. And the influence of souls upon souls 
 is a mystery utterly beyond our power to fathom. 
 A wireless message travels equally in every 
 direction, and can be received wherever there 
 is an instrument fitted to receive it. And since 
 the souls of men are closely bound together in 
 the vast spiritual unity of the one life, in which 
 there are no bodily or physical limits, no space, 
 and no time, the influence of one soul can have 
 its effect upon the whole. You simply don't 
 know, you cannot measure, you cannot guess, 
 
WILL 23 
 
 what your soul is doing to other souls for bad 
 or for good. St Paul, in speaking of the Church, 
 says, '* If one member suffer, all the members 
 suffer with it " ; and if so, the converse must 
 be equally true — if one member be lifted nearer 
 to God, all the members are lifted with it. It 
 opens up before us vistas of unspeakable mar- 
 vel and mystery. We possess for a short time 
 physical instruments that we call bodies ; but 
 we are souls. And every soul is a centre from 
 which influence radiates with no limits of space 
 or time. Prayer for others is part of our tre- 
 mendous work. But sheer love to God and 
 men can do a work beyond our knowledge or 
 imagination. Isn't it a thought that will make 
 us pray with new earnestness, " Stir up, we 
 beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful 
 people " ? Stir them up to fresh longings, fresh 
 strivings, fresh penitence, fresh love. It is a 
 motive which makes life worth living for 
 anyone. 
 
 One more fundamental truth before we pass 
 to the thought of our own spiritual growth. 
 If we could say no more about God than that 
 His life is universal energy working for growth, 
 
24 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 we should not advance beyond what is called 
 Pantheism. It is one aspect of the Being of 
 God, and an aspect of which modern religious 
 thought in the West has tended rather to lose 
 sight. Some Christians are apt to leave it to 
 poets and other idealists, and to dismiss it as 
 somewhat unpractical and wanting in reality. 
 But provided we remember that it is one aspect 
 only, and not the whole, its importance cannot 
 be over-rated. Anyone who is trying to make 
 use of these pages with a serious purpose should 
 ask himself whether he has to any extent been 
 missing a great ' inspiration, in living his 
 Christian life without a full recognition of 
 God's immanence in nature and in man. 
 
 But the other, equally important, aspect has 
 already emerged in our study. Energy alone 
 cannot be thougljt of as will. But when we 
 know that man possesses will which can 
 voluntarily co-operate or refuse to co-operate 
 with God, we are led to the conclusion that 
 that which has endowed man with will cannot 
 itself be devoid of will. The divine will and 
 the human will stand — inconceivably but 
 certainly — over against each other. The 
 
WILL 25 
 
 technical term transcendence, as opposed to the 
 Immanence of God, expresses the truth of the 
 separateness, the distinctness, between God and 
 man, — a distinctness which makes us, Hke Faust, 
 feel ourselves '' so small, so great." In physical 
 nature there is no such personal separateness ; no 
 mineral, vegetable, or animal lower than man, is 
 a person. But by endowing man with person- 
 ality, God reveals His own personality. And this 
 supplies us with something which the other 
 aspect of God's Being, taken by itself, cannot 
 give, i.e., an understanding of the ptcrpose of 
 God. We are to grow ; but grow towards what? 
 
4. THE GOAL 
 
 We are to *' grow up unto Him in all things." 
 All mankind, as one whole, is to come, in the 
 unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the 
 Son of God unto a perfect (a mature, developed, 
 fully grown) man, unto the measure of the 
 stature of the fulness of Christ. If we ask 
 what this means the answer is threefold. 
 
 I . Selflessness. — The identification of our 
 wills with His. ''Our wills are ours to make 
 them Thine." Every human soul is in a posi- 
 tion to say, *' Lo, I am come [into existence] to 
 do Thy will." Not to annihilate my will ; that 
 would be annihilation of my personality. That 
 is not Christianity, but Buddhism. When a 
 plant or animal dies, the Individuality of its life, 
 so far as we know, is absorbed into the universal 
 life, and its place is taken by other physical 
 instruments by which that life can express 
 itself. But the spirit, the personality of man, 
 
 is not intended for death, nor to be " remerged 
 
 26 
 
THE GOAL 27 
 
 into the general soul." It is intended for 
 growth towards the perfect harmony of his will 
 with God's. "This is the will of God, even 
 your sanctification." And since we never 
 reach it in this world, we conclude that in the 
 other world the growth will continue. But if 
 we could imagine the condition of a human 
 soul which had reached, in respect of selfless 
 obedience, the perfection of growth, it would 
 not be right to suppose that it had ceased to 
 be a human, individual soul. It is a soul in 
 which God for ever takes infinite delight, 
 because the harmony of the human will and 
 the divine is for ever complete. We can form 
 no conception of the joy in heaven over one 
 sinner made perfect, and no conception of the 
 bliss of the human soul in whom God is 
 eternally well pleased. But it is an aim and a 
 goal which gives to our daily spiritual growth 
 all its meaning and inspiration. Epaphras 
 could not have prayed a better prayer for his 
 converts at Colossae than that they might 
 ''stand perfect and fulfilled in all the will of 
 God "(Col. iv. 12). 
 
 2. Knowlcdoe. — '' This is life eternal that 
 
28 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 they should know Thee the only true God, and 
 Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." This Is 
 not separate from the harmony of our will with 
 His; it is closely bound up with It. On the 
 one hand, St Paul prays for those same 
 Colossians that they might " be filled with the 
 knowledge of His will in all wisdom and 
 spiritual understanding." A knowledge of God 
 must precede obedience ; we must know what 
 He wants before we can want the same. But 
 on the other hand, the more fully we know 
 Him and harmonize with His will, the more 
 like Him we become, and therefore the more 
 able we are to know with spiritual under- 
 standing what He likes and dislikes. Selfless 
 obedience grows from knowledge, but also 
 produces It. St Paul expresses this growth 
 in knowledge very beautifully when he prays 
 for the Phllippians (I. 9), "that your love may 
 abound yet more and more in knowledge and 
 in all judgment." The last word in the Greek, 
 cBsthesis, suggests something In the spiritual 
 life which may be compared with that wonder- 
 ful sixth sense which many blind persons seem 
 to possess. We ordinary Christians, who have 
 
THE GOAL 29 
 
 not advanced very far in our growth, have 
 very little idea at present what it can be : a 
 spiritual instinct, a delicate sensitiveness of per- 
 ception, an intuitive certainty, " understanding 
 what the will of the Lord is " (Eph. v. 17). 
 
 It is easy to see how different this is from a 
 knowledge about God. I might read a whole 
 library of books about Napoleon, but I could 
 not know him because he died years before I 
 was born. Anyone who lived with him day 
 and night for a few years, or even days, knew 
 him in a way that is impossible for all the 
 subsequent historians who have studied his 
 life. Theology is not a knowledge of God, 
 but only a knowledge of facts or theories about 
 Him. Or to put it differently, it is a know- 
 ledge with the intellect alone, and not with the 
 whole being. At the same time the intellect 
 cannot be left out of account ; and we cannot 
 do without theology. A perfect knowledge of 
 God must be a knowledge in which every 
 element in our being takes part. We must 
 obviously have some intellectual scaffolding for 
 our spiritual building. But the sad thing is 
 that some theologians and Biblical students 
 
30 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 spend their whole life and energy on the 
 scaffolding ; they mistake it for the building, 
 and are content ! 
 
 3. Love. — What is love ? No one knows 
 but the lover. Others might know if he could 
 describe it in words ; but that is impossible. 
 As well might the sufferer try to answer the 
 question — What is pain ? The physiologist 
 can tell us only the bodily conditions of which 
 pain is the accompaniment. Let us see if we 
 can trace some of the spiritual conditions of 
 which love is the accompaniment. But before 
 we do that, we must again realize the poverty 
 of language. In the Greek of the New 
 Testament there are two words which we 
 translate " to love." The difference in meaning 
 must not be over-pressed, but still they may 
 be taken as expressing love from two points of 
 view. Broadly speaking, the one involves a 
 getting, and the other a giving. In the one 
 the lover gets a feeling of pleasure, delight, 
 satisfaction of some sort, from the loved ; he 
 loves because of some attractiveness which calls 
 forth his love. In the other the lover wants 
 the loved to get something, and so he gives 
 
THE GOAL 31 
 
 himself freely. Needless to say, the former 
 word, though it is employed to express the 
 Father's love for the Son (St John v. 20), is 
 never used to express His love for us. Apart 
 from what He gives us there is nothing 
 attractive in us to call forth His love. His 
 love is always a free self-giving. ** God so 
 loved the world that He gave His only- 
 begotten Son," that is Himself, because the 
 only-begotten Son is God. Nevertheless, 
 having given Himself to us, He longs to 
 receive back from us all that is divine and 
 beautiful, all that we have received from Him. 
 
 Our love, on the other hand, must be of both 
 kinds. Since He is altogether lovely, the 
 human soul must always want to get Him. 
 '* My soul is athirst for God " is the first aspect 
 of love. But it must not be only a desire to 
 get. The soul, in fact, finds that impossible. 
 The more it gets, the more it is consumed with 
 the passion of self-giving, that is, of giving back 
 to God what it has received. How wonderful 
 this is can be seen from the fact that it is 
 intended to be a reproduction of the mutual love 
 of the eternal Father and the eternal Son in the 
 
32 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 eternal Spirit of love. It is to be wholly and 
 completely mutual, wholly and completely 
 divine. Of ourselves we have nothing to give ; 
 but since we get Him, we have everything to 
 give. There is a real sense in which He is 
 incomplete without it. He is " being fulfilled " 
 according as He receives from us the divine 
 love which He gives us. Our getting and our 
 giving are each inconceivable alone. Our 
 growth and God's self-fulfilment consist in our 
 progress in the give and take of love, that finally 
 God may be all in all. And, as was said above 
 in regard to harmony with God's will, this is 
 not the annihilation of our individuality. We 
 shall for ever " ' feel God and ourselves,' as the 
 lover feels his beloved, in a perfect union which 
 depends for its joy on an invincible otherness." ^ 
 Now we can understand better the spiritual 
 conditions of which love is the accompaniment. 
 To get God is to get a knowledge of Him. 
 To give ourselves is to bring our will into 
 harmony with His. As we know Him better 
 we obey Him better; and as we obey Him 
 
 1 E. Underhill's introduction to Ruysbrock's *' The Adorn- 
 ment of the Spiritual Marriage," p. xxxi. 
 
THE GOAL 33 
 
 better we grow in likeness to Him and there- 
 fore know Him better. It is wholly mutual, 
 and wholly divine, and wholly love. Obedience, 
 knowledge, and love are a trinity in unity ; and 
 nothing less than that is the Christian life ; it is 
 the ideal towards which we are created to grow. 
 '* Many more words I should like to say here, 
 but those who possess this have no need of 
 them ; and he to whom it has been shown, and 
 who cleaves with love to love, he shall be taught 
 the whole truth by love itself." ^ 
 
 1 Ruysbrock, " The Book of Supreme Truth," p. 248 in 
 the same volume. 
 
5. THE GLORY OF MAN 
 
 Let us sum up our thoughts so far. God's life 
 is as potential energy in nature and in man, 
 striving towards self- fulfilment. But in His 
 dealings with men we learn that God is personal, 
 since He has endowed them with personality, 
 with will, with the capacity of voluntarily co- 
 operating or refusing to co-operate with God. 
 And if man co-operates it is by obedience, 
 knowledge, and love, each impossible without 
 the other two, and all together tending to growth. 
 But the ideal is so vast that it would be utterly 
 unattainable were it not for the fact that it has 
 already been attained. It has been attained in 
 manhood in the Person of Jesus Christ. That 
 is why St Paul speaks of " Christ in you, the 
 hope of glory." The great writer, Origen, said 
 many true things, but he made a mistake when 
 he declared that He who was Man on earth is 
 now no longer Man but God. Christ is eter- 
 nally God and Man ; His earthly life was an 
 
 34 
 
THE GLORY OF MAN 35 
 
 exhibition in time and space of His divine 
 humanity. It was an exhibition of perfect 
 human growth. And it Is the eternal Manhood 
 of the Son of God which on earth co-operated 
 with God by obedience, knowledge, and love, 
 that is by His Spirit the potential energy in 
 mankind. 
 
 And thereby manhood is glorified. *' The 
 glory that Thou hast given Me, I have given 
 them " — potentially. But it is in process of 
 becoming actual ** if we suffer with Him " (in 
 the sacrifice of ourselves through obedience, 
 knowledge, and love), *' that we may be also 
 glorified with Him." That will be ''the liberty 
 of the glory of the sons of God," *'the eternal 
 weight of glory," which we gradually approach 
 by being " changed into the same image (pro- 
 gressively) from glory unto glory." St Paul 
 recognized this glory in man so profoundly that 
 in speaking of two Christians who had gone on 
 some mission to the Corinthians, " our brethren 
 the emissaries of the Churches," he could state 
 quite simply, with no explanation, that '* they are 
 the glory of Christ" (2 Cor. viii. 23). It is a 
 marvellous description of the aim set before 
 
36 . THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 every Christian. We are to make actual the 
 potential glory of the indwelling Christ. Let us 
 turn to our own lives and see how we stand. 
 
 I. What opportunities does God give us of 
 growth in selfless obedience.'^ Every one knows 
 that they are too numerous to describe. Every 
 kind of trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any 
 other adversity, every secret temptation, every 
 opportunity of any sort of self-discipline, is 
 something to be grasped at and rejoiced in as 
 a fresh chance of bringing our will into harmony 
 with His, of making the great words, '' Thy will 
 be done," a living reality. But most of us feel 
 that while we are to some extent prepared to 
 meet and accept difficulties that come, so to 
 speak, straight from God, we find it a thousand 
 times harder to make a real opportunity of those 
 which come through men. To give real and 
 ready obedience to those to whom it is due, 
 to be clothed with humility towards others, to 
 accept advice, rebuke, criticism, or hints from 
 others, to put others first, to let others speak 
 while we remain silent, to rejoice — really rejoice 
 — in the promotion, or success, or happiness of 
 others, to be humble, helpful, selfless towards 
 
THE GLORY OF MAN 37 
 
 the men and women among whom we Hve, and 
 whose faults and failings we know so well, '* in 
 honour preferring one another " — is there any- 
 thing in life that is for some of us more truly 
 crucifixion than this ? It becomes possible only 
 as we grow in the realization that in men and 
 women the energy of God's life is at work, that 
 they are, potentially, "the glory of Christ," that 
 it is not they that live, but Christ liveth in them, 
 and therefore that it is to Him in thein that we 
 are to be humble, helpful, and selfless. '' Inas- 
 much as ye did it to one of the least of these 
 My brethren — the least important, the least 
 attractive, the least advanced in spiritual growth 
 — ye did it unto Me." And all the passages 
 quoted in Chapter 2 from St Paul involve the 
 same truth. The Psalmist could ask, '* What is 
 man that Thou art mindful of him } " but he 
 answered his own question by saying, *' Thou 
 madest him but little short of divine, and didst 
 crown him with glory and honour" (Ps. viii. 4, 5). 
 Nothing will help us towards growth in self- 
 lessness so surely as to recognize and rever- 
 ence this glory and honour in every man, 
 woman, and child. Moreover, we may, and 
 
38 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 must, recognize and reverence it in ourselves. 
 The great principle noblesse oblige, which is ap- 
 plicable to Christians above all other men, is 
 finely expressed by a Jewish writer : " My son, 
 glorify thy soul in meekness, and give it honour 
 according to the dignity thereof" (Ecclus. x. 28). 
 Our proud heart cries, I cannot humble myself ; 
 it would be agony I I cannot obey ; it would 
 be torture ! But *' who ever found the Cross a 
 pleasant bed ? " To be crucified with Christ, 
 who pleased not Himself, to let His mind be in 
 you which was also in Him, to manifest forth 
 His glory, His meekness, and gentleness, and 
 lowliness of heart, gives to one's own soul the 
 reverence that is its due. It is not by standing 
 on your dignity, but by self-emptying, that you 
 exalt yourself and all other men and women 
 whom the King delighteth to honour by his 
 indwelling. 
 
 2. But, as we saw before, selfless obedience 
 requires knowledge. What opportunities does 
 God give us of getting to know Him ? We can 
 learn much from the effects of His energy 
 in nature ; but we can learn far more by 
 studying the process of His spiritual self- 
 
THE GLORY OF MAN 39 
 
 fulfilment in men. If one and the same energy 
 is at work in all men, and in you, a vivid 
 realization of it will give you a growing know- 
 ledge of it through a growing sympathy. We 
 can apply to our knowledge of God dwelling 
 in men the words of St Paul that were quoted 
 above : " This I pray, that your love may 
 abound yet more and more in knowledge and 
 in all delicate perception." Christ " knew what 
 was in man," not by some superhuman magic, 
 impossible for anyone else, but by the inten- 
 sity of His sympathy, the sensitiveness of His 
 spiritual touch. His Divinity could come out 
 to meet that which is divine in all men ; deep 
 answered to deep with the perfect understanding 
 of the God-Man for men made in the image 
 of God. We cannot make the least approach 
 to such knowledge without practice and self- 
 sacrifice. It will come with growth in selfless- 
 ness. Some people find it very difficult to put 
 real meaning into St Peter's injunction, "Honour 
 all men." But the way to do it is to hold fast, 
 in spite of all appearances to the contrary, to 
 the conviction that God's life is in them, to 
 treat them accordingly, to try hard to discover 
 
40 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 it, and to pray hard and work hard for them 
 that it may grow. And this is not the duty 
 only of clergymen and religious workers, 
 though they sometimes need the reminder as 
 much as anyone. How many well - to - do 
 mistresses, who go to church regularly, are apt 
 to forget that their servants possess the in- 
 dwelling energy of God's life, the glory of Christ, 
 as truly as they do ? How many business men 
 "honour" their clerks, and assistants, and 
 labourers by the same recognition.-^ How 
 many school teachers have the spiritual cesthesis 
 to see God's life striving for growth in their 
 pupils ? Maxima reverentia debetur puerisy 
 *' the utmost reverence is due to children," 
 because of the limitless possibilities of His 
 self-fulfilment in them. To recognize the 
 divine in every one is a primary duty of the 
 Christian life ; and it will not need much self- 
 examination to shew most of us how little we have 
 grown towards this knowledge of what is in man. 
 3. But once more, it is our love that is to 
 abound yet more and more in knowledge, and 
 in all delicate perception. "We needs must 
 love the highest when we see it " in anybody. 
 
THE GLORY OF MAN 41 
 
 When we have discovered the divine, however 
 inchoate and undeveloped, in the most degraded 
 man or woman, we cannot help loving it. And 
 conversely, love is the only thing that will find 
 it — love for what we know is there because 
 we believe that God became incarnate in 
 humanity. We sometimes speak of a man or 
 woman as being ''large-hearted" enough to 
 love unlovable people. We should all be 
 large-hearted enough if we were not so blind. 
 What is needed is faith to believe that God's 
 life is in them, and selflessness. All obtrusion 
 of self — all sin, in fact — obscures our vision and 
 blots out from our sight what we want to see. 
 It is the pure in heart that see God in the men 
 and women around them. From the ordinary 
 earthly, social, human point of view they may 
 be anything but lovable. But God is lov- 
 able, and God is there. If there Is one com- 
 mand that often seems more meaningless 
 than '' Honour all men," it is "Thou shalt love 
 thy neighbour as thyself"; but it is lit with 
 a flood of light when we see that it means 
 ** Love God in thy neighbour as thou lovest 
 Him in thyself." 
 
6. TWILIGHT 
 
 Having reached this point in our meditations 
 on " what God is and man is " we are in a 
 better position to look at some of the various 
 aspects of our growth. 
 
 St Paul speaks of it as growth from child- 
 hood, or rather infancy, to manhood. He tells 
 the Corinthians that when he preached to them 
 he was obliged to confine himself to the simplest 
 teaching, because they were not grown up 
 enough for proper food; they were as ''babes 
 in Christ " who needed milk. And he blames 
 them for not having even yet advanced beyond 
 this (i Cor. iii. 1-3). And in Hebrews v. 
 11-14 the unknown author speaks in the same 
 way. In i Corinthians xiii. 11 St Paul writes 
 as having made the advance that his readers 
 had failed to make : " When I was a child (Iz^. 
 a babe), I spake as a child, I understood as 
 a child, I thought as a child ; but when I 
 became a man I put away childish things." 
 
TWILIGHT 43 
 
 (Perhaps he was only referring, by way of 
 illustration, to physical and mental growth, but 
 the words can be applied also to the spiritual 
 life.) In Galatians iv. 3 he looks back to a 
 time when he and his readers alike were in 
 the same immature, elementary condition : 
 *'We, when we were children, were enslaved 
 under the elements (i.e., the elementary ideas) 
 of the world." And in Ephesians iv. 13, 14 
 he speaks of all Christians growing up towards 
 '*the perfect (/.^., the mature, fully-grown and 
 fully-instructed) man, towards the measure of 
 the stature of the fulness of Christ ; that we 
 be no longer children . . . but may grow up 
 unto Him in all things." 
 
 If these passages are studied with their 
 context it will be seen that each of them deals 
 with a different element in Christian growth. 
 Let us look particularly at Galatians iv. 3. It 
 is impossible to exaggerate the importance of 
 the thoughts suggested by it. '' When we 
 were children" means "before we were 
 Christians." The Galatian converts were 
 mostly Gentiles, but the apostle couples them 
 with himself, because they were in imminent 
 
44 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 danger of lapsing into the Judaism in which he 
 had formerly lived; so that, for him, ''when 
 we were children" virtually meant "when we 
 were Jews," before we had grown out of the 
 elementary notions of God and goodness beyond 
 which the Hebrew race as a whole had not 
 advanced. 
 
 Now, apart from the natural tendency of the 
 human heart to surrender in paralytic weakness 
 to every onslaught of the world, the flesh, and 
 the devil, I believe that the greatest hindrance 
 to the advance of real Christianity in our land 
 is the fact that many thousands of Christians 
 have not the least idea how elementary, how 
 Jewish, some of their notions are. Dwell for 
 a moment on the words in St John i. 9 : ''The 
 true light which lighteth every man was 
 [already in existence] coming into the world." 
 Carry your mind away to some spot in the 
 country at the darkest hour of a dark night. 
 If you wait, there will come a time, long before 
 sunrise, when the world is not quite as dark 
 as it was. There are no colours, no shadows, 
 no details, but still there are dim shapes just 
 becoming visible ; and it is the light of the 
 
TWILIGHT 45 
 
 unrisen sun that makes them so. And long 
 ages before Christ came on Christmas day, 
 men's hearts were not quite dark ; they had 
 some dim, faint ideas of right and wrong,— 
 very dim and faint, but what they had came 
 from Christ, the Hght that lighteth every man, 
 because every man was made in the image of 
 God. But as we wait longer among the hills, 
 and trees, and hedges, the outlines become 
 gradually sharper and clearer; shapes slowly 
 grow into things ; and more and more things 
 emerge from the darkness, details appear, and 
 begin to mean something definite. It is again 
 a picture of human history. Men's ideas were 
 growing more distinct, and they gradually felt 
 their way to some early forms of religion. Still 
 no colours, or shadows, or beauty, but neverthe- 
 less the dawn was nearer than before. And so 
 the solemn progress of the early morning goes 
 on, till we realize that it has become, compara- 
 tively speaking, quite light; the grass begins 
 to be green, the hills blue, the sheep white, 
 though the sunrise is still to come. This 
 progress can be seen in the history of all nations, 
 but especially in that of Israel. At first 
 
46 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 primitive, wandering Arabs, they came to learn, 
 we know not how, something of God. They 
 were still fierce and untutored ; they still 
 thought it right to hate and torture their 
 enemies ; they still thought that religion con- 
 sisted in sacrificing animals, while the condition 
 of their own hearts was a matter which it did 
 not occur to them to trouble about ; they still 
 thought that God cared for no one but them 
 because they were His people, and that He 
 hated all other nations as His enemies. The 
 sunrise was still far away. And yet the world 
 was growing brighter ; a great step forward 
 was made when the prophets appeared. God's 
 revelation was given to them more fully than 
 to anyone before. They taught that He 
 wanted holiness and obedience and purity and 
 kindness and truth, more than all whole burnt- 
 offerings and sacrifices. And they taught also 
 that Israel was His chosen people — not because 
 He loved them alone, but because He was the 
 God of all men, and wanted Israel to be His 
 instrument to bring them all to love and 
 worship Him. The world was growing 
 wonderfully bright ; and it was the same light 
 
TWILIGHT 47 
 
 that lighteth every man. But the brightness 
 and the glory and the radiant colours of sky 
 and landscape still go on increasing in their 
 beauty. Israel learnt more about God ; and in 
 particular they came to perceive that the sun- 
 rise was near at hand ; the expectation of a 
 Messiah, of a perfected divine sovereignty on 
 earth, had become an intense, passionate, 
 immediate longing. And so at length we 
 are brought to the little band of holy souls 
 who looked for redemption in Jerusalem — the 
 names that we know so well— Simeon, Anna, 
 Zachariah, Elizabeth, Joseph, and the virgin 
 of the house of David, whose name was Mary. 
 They were privileged to see the first flashing 
 ray of unutterable glory straight from the very 
 face of the Sun. God said, let there be lio'ht ; 
 and there was light. The light that lighteth 
 every man all through the ages had been 
 gradually coming nearer and nearer unto the 
 perfect day. 
 
 This simile of the dawn helps us to see that 
 the Christianity of the New Testament ought 
 to be clearly perceived before we can place in 
 its true perspective the gradual and partial 
 
48 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 advance towards it in the Old. The Old 
 Testament is the record of an inspired growth 
 in the understanding of God's nature ; it is a 
 roadway leading in the direction of Christ. But 
 Christians must use it only in the light of that 
 to which it points. God does not intend us to 
 take its ideas about Him, and about goodness, 
 and simply adopt them for ourselves *' because 
 they are in the Bible." The Old Testament is 
 a living and moving picture of the gradual 
 brightening of the sky before sunrise. The 
 light was that of the same Sun of righteousness 
 that appeared upon the earth at Christmas ; 
 but that is no reason for contenting ourselves 
 with twilight, as countless Christians are still 
 doing. 
 
 In order to contrast twilight and sunrise, 
 childhood and manhood, it will be useful to look 
 at some of the Jewish ideas about God. It 
 was pointed out at the end of Chapter 3 that we 
 are compelled to think about God under two 
 seemingly opposite and contradictory aspects. 
 He is immanent in nature and in man, in that 
 His life is as potential energy straining after 
 self-fulfilment. But the fact that man is en- 
 
TWILIGHT 49 
 
 dowed with will which can oppose and hinder 
 this fulfilment constitutes a separateness be- 
 tween God and man ; He possesses personality; 
 He is from this point of view other than man. 
 Greek Pantheism was mistaken because it re- 
 presented only the former half of the truth ; 
 Hebrew Theism was mistaken because it con- 
 fined itself almost entirely to the latter half. 
 A long period of tribal life under the govern- 
 ment of chiefs, and then a few centuries under 
 the rule of kings, mosdy of the usual oriental, 
 despotic type, had given to the people of Israel 
 the idea that God was a great Chief or King. 
 Their earthly king ruled them, he led them in 
 batde against their enemies, and judged them ; 
 and m return they had to render him obedience 
 and give him tribute. If they failed to give 
 him his due, he maintained his rights by in- 
 flicting punishment. And in their atdtude 
 towards God this system was reproduced. He 
 was their Sovereign, their Leader, their Master, 
 their Judge, who would take care of them and 
 bless and help and prosper them on condition 
 that they paid Him His dues. So long as they 
 did that, they were correct, blameless, and safe, 
 4 
 
so THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 to describe which they used the term that we 
 (very inadequately) translate "righteous." If a 
 man failed in any particular, he was ** un- 
 righteous "; his failure was a *' debt," something 
 which he ought to have rendered and had not 
 rendered. God, of course, could never be 
 otherwise than "righteous," i.e., in the right. 
 He and man were as Plaintiff and defendant in 
 a law-suit, but also as Judge and criminal. 
 When He punished He was vindicating His 
 rights and recovering His debts. But when 
 a man had been sufficiently punished, or had 
 paid an equivalent in the form of a sacrifice, 
 matters were put right once more, and he was 
 now " righteous " until he failed again. Or God, 
 of His free kindness, might, if He liked, simply 
 remit the debt, i.e., restore the sinner to the 
 position of " righteousness'' without due punish- 
 ment. 
 
 This is what is meant by the legalism, or the 
 forensic nature, of the Jewish religion. And 
 anyone whose religion is of that sort is bound 
 to ask himself five questions : — i. What must I 
 do to be correct, blameless, safe, " righteous " 1 
 In other words — What is the exact amount of 
 
/ 
 
 TWILIGHT SI 
 
 my debt, my due, to God ? What is the mini- 
 mum that is necessary for the retention of His 
 favour? 2. If I render Him His due, what is 
 the reward that is due from Him to me in 
 return? 3. If I fail, what is the punishment 
 that is due from Him to me in return ? 4. If I 
 fail, what is the equivalent for punishment that 
 He will accept to put matters right ? 5. Under 
 what circumstances is He likely to remit the 
 debt altogether ? 
 
 We must remember that in passing from 
 Judaism to Christianity we pass from twilight 
 to sunrise, from childhood to manhood ; and 
 therefore we cannot simply put our pen through 
 these questions and say that for Christians they 
 have no meaning. The Jewish system is not 
 cancelled outright, but transfigured, lifted to a 
 higher plane by the fact that God is not only a 
 transcendent King, Master, and Judge, but also 
 the immanent Life in manhood, self-fulfilled 
 perfectly in Christ, and therefore potentially in 
 all mankind and in every human being. A 
 study of these five questions in the light of the 
 New Testament would help us to realize what a 
 volume of meaning is contained in St Paul's 
 
52 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 words, " When we were children we were en- 
 slaved under the elementary ideas of the world." 
 This, however, is not the place for the close 
 reasoning which such a study would involve. 
 But the first two questions alone, if treated in a 
 practical way, are enough to make us think 
 furiously about ourselves. 
 
7. BEING GOOD 
 
 There is a world of difference betv/een being 
 child-like and being childish. Our Lord bids us 
 be the former ; St Paul, with whose teaching we 
 are here concerned, warns us that we must 
 grow out of the latter. You may remember 
 the little girl in Punch, who was asked whether 
 she would rather be good or pretty ; and her 
 answer was, '' I would rather be pretty, because 
 I can always be good whenever I like to try." 
 Now why is that a genuine picture ? It is 
 because a small child thinks that to be good 
 means the same as not to be naughty ; to do 
 what she is told, and to refrain from doing what 
 she is told not to. For a small child that is 
 quite right. And St Paul says that the Israelite 
 nation was just like that. Their spiritual life 
 was confined to obeying a series of commands — 
 "Thou shalt," and ''Thou shalt not." And 
 thousands of Christians have progressed no 
 further. Here is a pleasant, well-meaning sort 
 
 53 
 
54 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 of man, who has never done anything very 
 wicked, and who goes to church with some 
 degree of regularity on Sundays. And he asks, 
 *' What more can be expected of me ? Oh, no 
 doubt I occasionally lose my temper ; sometimes 
 I can't help laughing at an unclean joke when 
 I am with other men (you don't want me to 
 set up for being a saint, do you ?) ; and of course, 
 if the chance comes my way, I am bound to do 
 a stroke of business that I shouldn't perhaps 
 explain to my daughters, for instance ; but then 
 business is business, a thing which women — 
 and parsons — never can understand. But I don't 
 break any of the Ten Commandments, and 
 I don't drink, and I should like to meet the 
 man who could say anything against my moral 
 life." The man's soul simply hasn't grown up. 
 To say that we have never done wrong to God, 
 even if it were true, would not be enough. 
 
 Here is another man, a very typical Briton. 
 He could sum up in a sentence his idea of 
 Christianity ; it means '* to be good and to get 
 to heaven." And precisely the same sentence 
 would sum up the religious ideas of any number 
 of Jews and Mohammedans ! Their notions of 
 
BEING GOOD 55 
 
 heaven may differ a little, — though I don't think 
 they differ very much ; they all expect an eternity 
 of luxury, happiness, and peace in a glorious 
 place above the skies, and they all expect to be 
 allowed in if they are good enough. The aver- 
 age British Christian thinks it scarcely within 
 the bounds of possibility that he can actually be 
 *'shut out"; it is too horrible to be possible. 
 He has led a pretty good life on the whole, and 
 that must count for something. God is so kind 
 that He simply cant shut him out ; he assumes 
 in a nebulous sort of way that he will pass in 
 the crowd, and get through the door of heaven 
 with the best of them. It is the well-worn 
 doctrine of good works. If you ask him further 
 w^hat he means by good works, and if he 
 answers in what he feels to be the proper 
 religious language, he will say that it means 
 keeping God's commandments. But that is 
 Jewish, pure and simple ! If he explained him- 
 self it would probably be somewhat as follows : 
 *' I must be truthful and moral ; I must not steal, 
 or cheat, or swear, or drink ; I must do my duty 
 to God by attending public worship ; above all, 
 I must do my duty to my neighbour by being 
 
56 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 kind — kind in word, kind in manner, kind in 
 giving money, kind in supporting social work, 
 and religious work, and especially war charities." 
 So long as a man is kind, some people seem to 
 think that nothing else matters. 
 
 A woman might express herself rather differ- 
 ently. It IS not difficult to draw a character 
 sketch of the '' worker " who depends upon her 
 good works. She too is kind, at any rate to 
 a good many people. It Is true she is not 
 always quite kind in the way she speaks about 
 other women. But they are so impossible, so 
 vulgar, so silly, so something or other, that she 
 cannot help speaking the truth about them. 
 (If it is the truth it Is worse than unnecessary, 
 ninety-nine times out of a hundred, to speak It. 
 But some women's idea of '* being good " simply 
 does not include attention to the warning, 
 '' Judge not that ye be not judged.") But beside 
 being kind, she Is ''very particular" about her 
 own habits and manner of life, and also about 
 those of her children, her servants, and anyone 
 else under her control. A little hard and 
 managing, perhaps ; but then the world would 
 never get on if there were not some people In 
 
BEING GOOD 57 
 
 It with common sense. Moreover, she Is Chari- 
 table and energetic ; she is on any number of 
 committees, and is the Hfe and soul of all of 
 them. She naturally likes power, and wants 
 things done in her own ways, because they are 
 always the best ways. Finally, she goes to 
 church, of course, every Sunday, and sometimes 
 also on a week day ; and she is a regular 
 communicant. Considering all this, she cannot 
 help feeling herself to be — and she know^s that 
 other people think her — *'a thoroughly good 
 woman." 
 
 Now what does the New Testament suggest 
 as to the attitude of mind of these three 
 persons, who are specimens of a large number 
 of Christians ? St Paul would call it childish. 
 The Idea of '' being good " Is a relic of Judaism. 
 The apostle spends a great part of his fervid 
 energy In fighting against the Jewish concep- 
 tion of works. It Is quite right and suitable for 
 children, who are In an elementary condition ; 
 but Christians ought to be mature men who 
 have put away childish things. The rich 
 young man was a typical Jew, a typical child, 
 naif 2.xidi attractive in his simplicity : " All these 
 
58 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 things have I kept from my youth up " ; I have 
 always *'been good." The prodigal's elder 
 brother, on the other hand, is pictured as the 
 reverse of attractive : ** Lo, these many years do 
 I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time 
 thy commandment." And the Pharisee in the 
 temple, thinking of the publican as the elder 
 brother thought of the prodigal, and looking at 
 life from the same point of view, had become a 
 sanctimonious prig, which is the most revolting 
 sort of child that it is possible to meet. 
 
 But St Paul's picture of the Jews as 
 children contains the further thought of slavery, 
 i.e., forced obedience : *'So long as the heir is 
 a child he differs in no way from a slave " 
 (Gal. Iv. i). It Is the slavish attitude that is 
 condemned in a parable of our Lord (St Luke 
 xvii. 7-10), which, I think, is often mis- 
 understood. ** Doth he thank the slave for 
 doing what was commanded him ? So also ye, 
 when ye have done all that was commanded 
 you, say we are unprofitable slaves ; what we 
 were bound to do we have done ! " Some people 
 think that it sounds very hard and hopeless ; 
 but that Is because they have not caught the 
 
BEING GOOD 59 
 
 true emphasis of the parable. Our Lord does 
 not mean that however much we try to do for 
 God we can never please Him ; His point lies 
 in the word ''slave." A slave does only what 
 he is bound to do ; as a slave he is as nearly 
 as possible an automaton. God receives from 
 nature all the automatic service that He needs. 
 From man He wants something higher, some- 
 thing free, voluntary, spontaneous ; not a 
 static but a growing obedience, knowledge, 
 and love. It is '' the freedom wherewith Christ 
 has made us free." And if we have once 
 begun to know what freedom means, we must 
 not "be again entangled in the -yoke of 
 bondage" (Gal. v. i). 
 
 Oh, what can be done to make people see 
 that as long as they imagine that God merely 
 wants them to "be good," their religion is 
 static, Jewish, childish, slave-like? Anyone 
 who raises his voice against it is, like Jeremiah, 
 up against the dead weight, the ponderous vis 
 inertice, of the inherited ideas of the race. 
 Although we have been largely freed from the 
 notion of a mechanical, verbal inspiration of 
 Scripture, yet we are not yet loosed from one 
 
6o THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 of its products, — the assumption that since we 
 believe in the same God as the God of the 
 Hebrews, all that pleased Him in their religion 
 must necessarily please Him in ours. We find 
 it hard to bring ourselves to realize that He 
 was suitably treating them as children, but that 
 He wants Christians to behave as adults. We 
 need a prophet, we need an army of prophets, 
 to go through the land and proclaim that 
 '' none is good but One, that Is God," and that 
 therefore //e does not expect us to be good. 
 What He does expect is that we should always 
 be growing better, which is a very different thing. 
 Look at a small child, say at ten years of age, 
 learning to play the piano, and the same child 
 at the piano four or five years later. Compare 
 him with one of the world-famed masters of 
 the art, and it would be ridiculous to speak of 
 him as a good pianist ; but if he has been 
 steadily improving, it is not the intrinsic merits 
 of his present performance, but simply the fact 
 of growth, and the future possibilities to which 
 that points, that make him the pride and 
 delight of his teacher. Most people would 
 agree that St Paul was ''a thoroughly good 
 
BEING GOOD 6i 
 
 man " ; but he knew perfectly well that that 
 did not satisfy God, and he was therefore 
 spurred on by an endless dissatisfaction with 
 himself. Growth was the one and only thing 
 that mattered. *' Not that I have already 
 received, or have been already perfected, but 
 I pursue, if haply I may grasp, that for which 
 also I was grasped by Christ Jesus. Brethren, 
 I count not myself yet to have grasped it. But 
 one thing I do — forgetting the things that are 
 behind (the successes as well as the failures), 
 and straining forward to the things that are in 
 front, I pursue after the goal for the prize of 
 the heavenly calling of God in Christ Jesus. 
 As many of us, therefore, as are mature (grown 
 out of our childhood), let us be thus minded " 
 (Phil. iii. 12-15). It is only by our perpetual 
 motion that God in us is being gradually self- 
 fulfilled. 
 
8. NATURAL GOODNESS 
 
 One striking fact about " being good " is 
 that to some people it comes quite easily and 
 naturally, with little effort or struggle ; it would 
 be distasteful to them to be anything else. 
 Look at the effect produced by our deeply 
 engrained notion that that is all that matters. 
 Some one speaking of a friend says, "He doesn't 
 pretend to be religious, but he is an awfully 
 good sort." I think that many of us might 
 be willing to describe some of our friends in 
 the same way. If we expanded a little we 
 might say ''he seldom goes to church, he 
 never goes to the Holy Communion, and so 
 far as I know he doesn't say his prayers ; but 
 for all that he is straight, and clean, and the 
 kindest-hearted man that ever stepped ; and 
 much pleasanter and nicer than some people 
 that I know who are by way of being religious." 
 Now, if "being good" is all that matters, the 
 question naturally arises, If a man can be like 
 
NATURAL GOODNESS 63 
 
 this without religion, what practical advantage 
 is there in being religious ? What, Indeed, is 
 reliction if it doesn't mean being- straiorht, and 
 clean, and kind ? 
 
 One obvious remark in passing. The man 
 who " doesn't pretend to be religious " is quite 
 certainly a better man than If he did. May 
 God preserve the reader from ever pretending 
 to be religious ! Jesus Christ never lashed 
 anyone so scathingly as He did the hypocrites. 
 He never described divine punishment in more 
 awful words than when He said, *' He shall 
 appoint him his portion with the hypocrites." 
 
 But what we want to get at is this : if that 
 friend that we are thinking of had, without any 
 pretence, been really and truly religious, what 
 would he have gained ? The question is a 
 pressing one. We constantly meet people who 
 are '' good " without being religious ; and they 
 ask, as the rich young man asked, What lack 
 I yet? 
 
 Picture a deep, narrow valley in the Alps. 
 You stand high up on one side of it, with 
 the sun behind you, and look across at the 
 opposite slope. Close to the bottom the trees, 
 
64 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 and grass, and boulders are practically hidden 
 in a dark, misty shadow. But above that the 
 greater part of the slope is distinctly visible ; 
 you can see the large mass of it clearly with 
 all its Alpine colours. And yet it is in the 
 shade ; It gets light, but no sunshine. But as 
 your eye travels upwards It comes to a narrow 
 strip along the top, in which the trees, and grass, 
 and masses of rock are bathed in the sun's 
 rays. And beyond them rise the majestic 
 solitudes of the snowy summits, glistening 
 white as no painter on earth can white them. 
 This picture can illustrate four classes of men. 
 At the bottom of the moral scale we place 
 those whom we call bad men. We cannot 
 draw a sharp line where men begin to be bad ; 
 the bottom slopes descend gradually into the 
 darkness. But when men are thoroughly bad, 
 we generally know it. For our present purpose 
 we can leave them out of account. And we 
 must leave out of account also the snowy peaks, 
 the radiant saints who have grown, and are 
 daily growing, far ahead of us, whom we are 
 lucky to meet here and there in a lifetime. 
 But the other two classes are of extreme interest 
 
NATURAL GOODNESS 65 
 
 to us. First, there is the great mass of the 
 mountain slope that is not in darkness, and 
 yet is not in sunshine. Our friend, who with- 
 out being religious is straight, and clean, and 
 kind, is one of a very large class. But what 
 makes him straight, and clean, and kind ? What 
 is the source of his virtues ? And the answer 
 is God. We can say it without the least 
 hesitation. Since God is goodness itself, any 
 sort or kind of goodness in anyone is derived 
 from Him. All the various trees on the 
 mountain slope, the birches and larches, oaks 
 and pines, all the grassy pastures and the great 
 bare rocks, are visible across the valley in their 
 several tones and tints ; and all these worketh 
 that one and the self-same sunlight, distributing 
 to each its different colour and beauty. God 
 made man in His own image. God planted 
 in man the potentiality of the divine nature. 
 All that is best in your friend comes from Him. 
 And all that is good in you recognizes and 
 admires all that is good in your friend ; he 
 would not seem to you an awfully good sort 
 unless there were something in you which 
 enabled you to appreciate him. It is, in fact, 
 5 
 
66 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 God in both of you. And the same has been 
 true in every nation under heaven through all 
 the countless ages of human history, before as 
 well as after Christ was born into the world. 
 Every good thought, or word, or deed of any 
 human being that has ever existed has come 
 from God. **The life was the light of men." 
 The divine life in every man is the divine light 
 that gives to every man any beauty that he 
 possesses. It is God that makes men straight, 
 and clean, and kind. It is God that has given 
 them the heroism of self-sacrifice in the trenches, 
 and on the ships, and in the air, and the 
 heroism of patient endurance in the hospitals 
 and the prison camps. It is God that makes 
 their mothers, and sisters, and daughters, and 
 lovers all that they have been since the war 
 began. It is all so good that it can come only 
 from the source of all goodness. 
 
 And yet all this is possible, and is found in 
 numberless cases, without religion. So that 
 the question with which we started at the open- 
 ing of this chapter seems, at first sight, harder 
 to answer than ever. If men and women, 
 without being religious, can possess to this 
 
NATURAL GOODNESS ^7 
 
 wonderful extent a natural goodness which we 
 maintain comes from God alone, what is the 
 advantage of being religious ? Look again at 
 the mountain side. It is true that the greater 
 part of the slope, though it is in the shade, Is 
 yet visible with its colours and beauties by the 
 light that comes from the sun. But there is 
 the strip at the top of the slope that is bathed 
 in sunshine. And will anyone dream of insist- 
 Iko- that that makes no difference? It has all 
 the colour and beauty of the rest of the slope, 
 but it has an added beauty because it lies in 
 the direct rays of the sun. It can see the sun. 
 It can discover with open vision the source of 
 Its own beauty. It can look away from ItseK, 
 and respond to and rejoice in the heavenly light 
 and heat. When a man says— What more can 
 be wanted than to live a strong, practical life, 
 doing our best ? he is really begging the ques- 
 tion. The whole point Is— What is our best ? 
 Does it mean simply developing as well as we 
 can, by our force of will and character, the 
 natural goodness with which we are endowed, 
 and which our training, and circumstances, and 
 environment perhaps help us without much 
 
6S THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 difficulty to preserve? Or does our best also 
 require religion ? And the Christian has learnt 
 that it does. Goodness in the sense of virtue, 
 morality, the goodness which consists in being 
 straight, and clean, and kind, is not enough by 
 itself to satisfy the heart of God. Religion is 
 not being good ; it is seeing God ; knowing, 
 realizing, feeling, rejoicing in God with a 
 continuously growing fulness. If God is per- 
 sonal. He wants the response of persons ; if He 
 is Love, He longs to receive love ; and He is 
 not getting it from the man who is not religious, 
 however naturally good-hearted he may be. 
 He can get from him, indeed, a pleasure like 
 that which He feels in any beautiful natural 
 object — ''and God saw that it was good" ; but 
 from man he wants more than that. 
 
 Can it be necessary to add that religion is 7io^ 
 saying prayers, or going to church, or reading 
 the Bible, or attending meetings, or being con- 
 firmed, or receiving the Holy Communion ? 
 Vast numbers of people think it is ; and when 
 they see some men and women doing these 
 things, and yet being obviously little better for 
 them, it is natural that they should turn their 
 
NATURAL GOODNESS 69 
 
 backs on the whole thing, and say, None of your 
 religion for me ! To think of these actions as 
 religion, as things in themselves which count 
 for something in the sight of God, is to make 
 the old Jewish, childish mistake which Christians 
 ought to have left far behind in their growth. 
 But on the other hand, anyone who wants to do 
 the real thing, to make God a reality in his life, 
 to make a personal response of love to the 
 Father who loves him, finds, as all the greatest 
 saints have found, that in practice religious acts 
 are indispensable, as methods — necessary, prac- 
 tical methods — by which man can get into touch, 
 and keep in touch with God. 
 
 The thought on which we have dwelt in this 
 chapter is beautifully summed up in Psalm 
 xxxvi. 9 : " With Thee is the fountain of life," 
 i.e.y the source of all that is beautiful and good in 
 men, " and in Thy light shall we see light " — not 
 only ^^^ light, not only possess a natural goodness 
 which comes from the Sun of Righteousness, but 
 we shall see Him, we shall eagerly open our souls 
 to be warmed in the rays of His love, and we 
 shall give Him pleasure by our glad response. 
 
9. CONSCIENCE 
 
 But still it may be urged that we have not 
 quite dealt with the whole difficulty. How is 
 it that there are some people who, without any 
 profession of religion, not only are straight, and 
 clean, and kind, but exhibit characters stronger 
 and more attractive than those of some religious 
 people ? Well, we must begin by admitting 
 at once that the failings and sins of Christians 
 do more harm to God's cause than all the 
 hostility of bad men and the arguments of un- 
 believers. A moment's consideration, of course, 
 ought to shew anyone that a bad Christian is 
 bad not because of his Christianity, but because 
 of his lack of it. But the fact remains that 
 what does the real harm is that he professes 
 religion, and then in his daily life makes it 
 appear as though religion doesn't work. And 
 that makes the observer blind to what true 
 Christianity is. And besides admitting that, 
 we can admit also that some who profess no 
 
CONSCIENCE n 
 
 religion do exhibit characters stronger and 
 more attractive than some religious people. 
 But the man who argues from that that religion 
 is useless is not being quite fair ; he is com- 
 paring the best men of one kind and the inferior 
 men of the other. Some amateurs play the 
 violin better than some professionals ; but no 
 sane person argues that if you want to play the 
 violin as well as you can, it is better to be an 
 amateur than a professional. It is quite obvious 
 that if we strike an average, professionals play 
 better than amateurs. And it is quite obvious 
 also that the greatest professionals are beyond all 
 comparison with the best amateurs. I think that 
 the same two things may be said in the matter 
 before us: — (i) Those who make a genuine 
 profession of religion — hypocrites, of course, 
 we leave out of account — are, on an average, 
 better men than those who make none. And 
 (2) the greatest Christian saints, the greatest 
 professionals, if we may so call them, reach 
 heights of spirituaHty, and holiness, and beauty, 
 and self-discipline, and humility undreamt of 
 by the most moral pagan that ever lived. I 
 think, therefore, that it may fairly be said that 
 
;^ THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 non-religious men who live more beautiful lives 
 than genuine Christians are exceptional and 
 not normal. 
 
 But there is more than that. Have you 
 ever tried to think out clearly what is meant by 
 ** conscience " ? Some people have the haziest 
 notions about it. They will tell you that it is 
 something within us, the voice of God within 
 the soul, a ''still small voice" they often call it, 
 which lets us know whether a thing is morally 
 right or wrong. It is spoken of as an infallible 
 guide to conduct ; conscience whispers this, 
 and conscience whispers that. But difficulties 
 begin when we find that conscience leads one 
 man to do something which another feels to 
 be utterly wrong. For instance, it led some 
 men to refuse military service, while it led 
 millions of others to accept it as a noble 
 duty. What is this infallible something which 
 can guide two men in diametrically opposite 
 directions ? Remember, of course, that con- 
 science is not a monopoly of the religious man ; 
 the non-religious man has it as certainly as the 
 genuine Christian. 
 
 We can put it in a single word, and say that 
 
CONSCIENCE 73 
 
 conscience is knowledge} ** Science" is one 
 kind of knowledge, ** con-science " is another 
 kind. It is a knowledge or recognition of a 
 standard by which we judge actions. All men 
 have a standard, some higher and some lower. 
 And the great question is what that standard 
 is to be. It is a mere figure of speech to say 
 that anyone is without a conscience. Every one 
 has a standard which he knows and recognizes, 
 and therefore every one has a conscience ; and 
 the man who tries to live up to his standard we 
 call conscientious. If his standard of conduct 
 is to make himself at all costs as comfortable 
 as possible, or to impose his kultur by force on 
 every one he meets, and if he does his best to 
 adhere to that standard, he is in the strict 
 sense of the word *' conscientious." The reason 
 why we don't generally use the word in such 
 cases is that our British standard on the whole 
 is higher than that. The standard of vast 
 numbers of men is the standard which happens 
 to be recognized and admitted in the particular 
 society or group of people to which they belong 
 
 1 I owe the working out of this thought to Mr Lacey's 
 useful little book, " Conscience of Sin." 
 
74 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 — school, college, profession, trade, regiment. 
 An average conscience is for most men a 
 binding limit of quite extraordinary strength. 
 Now we thankfully recognize that the average 
 Briton sets before himself a fairly decent 
 standard. This is owing partly to his posses- 
 sion of '* natural goodness," which, as we have 
 seen, comes from God, and still more to the 
 general leavening influence of Christianity, 
 which affects him through heredity, and training, 
 and surroundings, and atmosphere. And helped 
 by these things the man who, without being- 
 religious, is *'an awfully good sorl,"succeeds with 
 no great difficulty in living up to the average 
 British standard, which is to be straight, and 
 clean, and kind, and of course patriotic and brave. 
 But the average is not the top ; it is kept up, 
 and raised higher, by every one who rises above 
 it. The average standard in the hearts of men, 
 or In other words the average conscience, is 
 raised by every one who places before himself, 
 and knows and recognizes, a higher standard. 
 But that brings us again to the religious man. 
 If he is genuine, and not a hypocrite, God has 
 begun to be to some extent real to him as One 
 
CONSCIENCE 75 
 
 who is to be obeyed, known, and loved. It 
 may be only to a very small extent ; but what 
 there is, is real. And it at once gives him a 
 standard higher than that of the man who has 
 no religion, even though the latter be a much 
 nicer and pleasanter person to deal with, being- 
 more richly endowed through fortunate circum- 
 stances with the instincts of natural goodness. 
 Since God alone is ^'good," the religious man 
 can never live up to his standard ; he is never 
 satisfied, never contented. And, moreover, the 
 more he obeys, and knows, and loves God, the 
 more he learns that there is to obey, and know, 
 and love; so that he is always striving to get 
 nearer to a continually rising standard. And 
 that is only another way of describing the 
 spiritual growth, the perpetual motion, of which 
 we have thought in previous chapters. 
 
 Thus the religious man is up against a very 
 big thing — the average British standard, the 
 average British conscience — which it is his life's 
 duty to try and raise a little higher. From the 
 nature of the case his immediate efforts are 
 mosdy confined to the society or group of 
 people to which he belongs. And there comes 
 
76 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 the rub. He has to rise above the average 
 standard of those who know him best. And 
 men shrink from that, as they would never 
 shrink from German shells. *' To take," as a 
 soldier has said, ** as much pride in being 
 Christian as you do in being British. And to 
 get rid of the old idea that a man's Christianity 
 is judged by his silence about it." To preach 
 without preaching ; to let your light shine 
 before men without pride or priggishness ; to 
 live at a higher level, without any look or 
 manner which suggests ''see how good I am." 
 It is hard. It is utterly and hopelessly impos- 
 sible without the power of God. But that 
 power is just what the genuine Christian gets, 
 because he keeps himself in touch with it. 
 Every man who is "strengthened with all 
 might by His Spirit in the inner man," how- 
 ever frequent his failings, if he is always 
 trying, always pursuing, is co-operating with 
 the crucified Christ, who was lifted up from the 
 earth that He might draw all men to an ever 
 higher standard, that is to Himself 
 
lo. SACRED AND SECULAR 
 
 There was another elementary idea in 
 Judaism closely allied with their notions about 
 ''being good." Think of the words that St 
 Peter heard in his vision at Joppa : ''What 
 God hath cleansed that call not thou common." 
 It is difficult for us to realize what an upheaval 
 St Peter's ideas underwent at that moment. 
 Ingrained in the thoughts of every Jew, and 
 traceable to the most primitive past of Israel's 
 tribal history, was the conviction that the 
 contents of the whole world could be divided 
 by a hard and fast line into two groups — 
 ceremonially pure and ceremonially impure, 
 capable of being used and incapable of being 
 used in divine worship, clean and unclean, 
 religious and secular, sacred and profane. 
 The whole nation as a body was sacred, for 
 they belonged to the true God and worshipped 
 Him ; all other nations were profane, for they 
 worshipped other gods. And because every 
 
 77 
 
;8 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 Israelite was consecrated to God, certain kinds 
 of foods were permitted to him, and were called 
 " clean " ; others were for various reasons 
 forbidden, and they were '* common " and 
 "unclean," as St Peter calls them. But there 
 were grades even in the all-embracing sacred- 
 ness of the Jew. The priests were '* holy," the 
 laity were, in comparison, secular. Every 
 utensil employed in the temple services was 
 sacred, all other utensils in the world were 
 common, profane. The Sabbath was sacred, 
 the other days in the week were not. And so 
 on. I doubt if any one idea has ever struck 
 its roots more deeply into the life of a nation 
 than this age-long Semitic feeling that all the 
 world was either holy or the reverse. 
 
 The first Jew who dared to lift up his voice 
 against it was Jesus. Can we wonder that that 
 was the real cause underlying all the hostility 
 against Him ? He violated the sacred Sabbath 
 by performing acts of healing, because He 
 knew that the Sabbath was not so sacred as 
 loving-kindness, and that loving-kindness could 
 make sacred any day in the week. The pollu- 
 tion of eating and drinking with publicans and 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 79 
 
 sinners was for Him no pollution when it 
 exhibited the compassion of the Physician who 
 came to heal sick souls, and not the souls that 
 thought themselves healthy. The pollution 
 of sitting down to dinner with unwashen hands, 
 and that of eating food forbidden by Jewish 
 law, were for Him no pollution, because He 
 knew that it is not that which goeth into a man 
 that defiles him, but the evil thoughts and 
 words that come out of him ; that the ceremonial 
 cleanness of the body is as nothing compared 
 with the spiritual cleanness^of the soul. There 
 was hardly one conflict between Him and the 
 Pharisees that did not arise from this thunder- 
 bolt that He cast among them, this daring 
 rebellion against an assumption which had been 
 to every Jew as unquestionable as the air that 
 he breathed. And though St Peter had been 
 with Him for months, and had heard and seen 
 all this, the new truth took a long time to sink 
 into him ; but his vision at Joppa at last made 
 it clear to him that a Jew was not sacred 
 because he was a Jew, while all other men 
 were common and unclean. *'Of a truth I 
 perceive that God is no respecter of persons ; 
 
8o THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 but in every nation he that feareth Him and 
 worketh righteousness is accepted of Him." 
 
 Now to us this truth seems as obvious and 
 certain as the truth that the earth travels round 
 the sun, and not the sun round the earth. And 
 yet that, after all, never crossed the imaginations 
 of men until Galileo cast his thunderbolt. Men 
 to-day, who decline to call themselves Chris- 
 tians, nevertheless inherit and live by a great 
 body of truth which has come to them through 
 Christianity from Christ and His apostles. 
 We don't think that the Jewish or any other 
 nation is sacred, and all others profane. We 
 don't think that certain kinds of food may be 
 eaten, and all others are pollution. We don't 
 think it wrong for a doctor to give his patient 
 medicine, or tie a bandage for him, on one day 
 in the week, and right on all the other days. 
 We don't think that to sit down to a meal 
 without ceremonial washings is a sin against 
 God. 
 
 And yet in spite of all this we find it hard — 
 harder than we can express — to be free of the 
 old Jewish notion. It seems to be ingrained 
 not only in the Semitic mind, but in the whole 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 8i 
 
 of human nature, that Hfe is, after all, sharply- 
 divided into sacred and profane. I believe that 
 this primitive idea is one of the underlying- 
 reasons why the British nation, as a nation, 
 is not Christian. Capital and labour, commerce, 
 education, politics, and law are one and all tied 
 and bound with the chain of this mistake. The 
 nation as a whole thinks that what it does in 
 church is sacred, and what it does elsewhere 
 is secular ; that what we say on our knees to 
 God is holy, and what we say all the rest of 
 the day is non-holy. Everything that we can 
 explicitly connect with religion stands on one 
 side of the line, and everything else — the great 
 mass of our life — on the other. And so we 
 talk about religious history and secular history, 
 religious literature and secular literature, 
 religious occupations and secular occupations, 
 religious education and secular education. We 
 put our life into two water-tight compartments 
 as rigidly as any Pharisee. 
 
 But the teaching of Christ and His aposdes 
 
 declares that this is wholly and utterly wrong ; 
 
 that it is a primitive notion which must be put 
 
 away with other childish things. And to break 
 
 6 
 
82 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 away from it means an upheaval, a complete 
 transformation, of most of our dominant Ideas 
 and feelings. See what it involves. When 
 Jesus Christ, a few years before St Peter's 
 vision, had with His master hand swept away 
 the dividing line between sacred and secular. 
 He did not level down, He levelled tip. What 
 the Jew had thought clean remained clean ; the 
 sacred remained sacred. But the secular — the 
 ordinary, common, every-day, non-holy, cere- 
 monially unclean — was exalted to be secular 
 no longer. The revolution that He made in 
 Jewish thought was that all life is holy because 
 God fills all life. If you want to be Christlike, 
 all that you ever held sacred — the sacraments, 
 prayer, public and private, the study of the 
 Bible, family love, every thought of God, the 
 divine beauty of purity, the divine radiancy 
 of truth — all this will be as sacred as ever. But 
 it will only honour these things the more 
 to exalt the rest of your life to the same high 
 level. Other- worldliness is not separation from 
 this world, but an acute consciousness of the 
 other world in this one. A saint is not 
 a person who does a great many religious 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 83 
 
 things, but a person who does everything 
 religiously. 
 
 Your work — your ordinary, common, matter- 
 of-fact, humdrum, daily work — at home, in a 
 school, an office, a house of business, a work- 
 shop, or the thousand disagreeable, or painful, 
 or perilous duties expected from you if you 
 are a soldier. Are you inclined to feel that 
 all this is not religious at all ? But you can 
 fnake it religious. You are tempted to confine 
 your religion to Church services. But instead 
 of that, carry your religion into your work ; 
 raise your work to the level of your religion ; 
 make them both equally holy. Many people 
 will find, the moment that they try to do this, 
 what a wide gulf they have hitherto fixed 
 between them. You are tempted to let your 
 prayers become what has been called '' the 
 perfunctory adjunct of dressing and undressing." 
 Make them no longer an adjunct ; make them 
 the very air that you breathe throughout the 
 day. In every kind of work that man or 
 woman can do there is an element of drudgery. 
 Sometimes there seems to be nothing but 
 drudgery, nothing but mechanical routine, that 
 
84 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 eats the heart out of life. There is only one 
 cure for that. Do your mechanical routine ybr 
 God, and not merely for your daily bread. Fill 
 it with prayer ; raise it to the level of your 
 religion ; let the perfection of your diligence, 
 accuracy, punctuality, scrupulous conscientious- 
 ness, become a continuous divine service. What 
 God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. 
 Sweep away the dividing line between the 
 sacred and the secular ; try to give Him 
 pleasure in the smallest details ; and your 
 drudgery will be, radiant with the beauty of 
 holiness. 
 
 And the same is true of our daily intercourse 
 with men. It is primitive and childish to think 
 that while intercourse with God is sacred, inter- 
 course with men is secular, ordinary, non-sacred. 
 Since the life of God is straining after self- 
 fulfilment in every man and woman, call not 
 earthly friendships common ; and be not guilty 
 of making them common. There is one thing 
 that can defile a man — the evil thoughts and 
 words that come out of him. The daily con- 
 versations about what we call ordinary things, 
 keep them transparently true, keep them spot- 
 
SACRED AND SECULAR 85 
 
 lessly pure. If it were right to divide life into 
 holy and non-holy, this would be superfluous ; 
 but if you are to sweep away the dividing line 
 between sacred and secular, you must level up 
 your daily intercourse. There must be nothing 
 incongruous between your talks with your 
 friends and your talks with the one Friend 
 who is above all others. The men who mistake 
 vulgarity for manliness are not ''grown-up" 
 enough to realize that ?nanly and Christian are 
 the same, because Christ was man. 
 
 Once more, your troubles. None can measure 
 or recount the world's anguish save Him who 
 bears all its griefs and carries its sorrows. 
 People meet trouble in various ways. Some 
 are driven by it into dull and sullen revolt, in 
 which the heart's rebellion is too deep for 
 many words, but it strangles and chokes all 
 that is best in them. Some of a shallower 
 character give vent to their feelings in a peevish 
 and irritable discontent ; which makes it difficult 
 for others to be sorry for them and sympathize 
 with them ; and that adds to their grievance. 
 Others, again, profess a pious submission with 
 their lips ; they say, "God's will be done," but 
 
S6 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 they mean, " I suppose God's will must be done 
 whether I like it or not ; but it is very hard on 
 me that I should have all this trouble when I 
 haven't deserved it, and I know a good many 
 people that do deserve it and don't get it ! " 
 And so men go on, with their heart torn and 
 restless, defiant or repining, or crushed, because 
 they have not yet learnt the great lesson that 
 Christ taught the Jews ; they have not swept 
 away the dividing line between religion and the 
 rest of their lives ; they have not made their 
 troubles part of their religion. If they could 
 only put away childish things, and grow towards 
 Christian maturity, they would raise their pain 
 to the level of prayer, and their sorrows to a 
 holy service. 
 
II. VALUES 
 
 Much more might be said about the relics in 
 our Christianity of elementary Jewish ideas to 
 which our thoughts were led by St Paul's words, 
 ''When we were children." But if we turn 
 to his similar expression, '' When I was a child " 
 (i Cor. xiii. ii), we pass to a new aspect of 
 growth. He uses his own childhood and man- 
 hood as pictures of the beginning and the final 
 aim of the Christian life. There can be no 
 jump from childhood to manhood ; it is a matter 
 of growth. And in the next verse the thought 
 is continued — " Now we see by means of a 
 reflector, enigmatically, obscurely, distortedly ; 
 but then face to face." The metaphor in itself 
 does not suggest growth ; it can represent only 
 the initial and the final stage. But the second 
 half of the verse explains it — " Now I know 
 partially, but then shall I know as completely 
 and perfectly as I was all along known by God." 
 There can be no jump in spiritual sight and 
 
 87 
 
88 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 knowledge, it is a matter of growth. *' Mean- 
 time (ver. 1 3) of abiding value are — not spiritual 
 ecstasies in which men are gifted with prophesy- 
 ings, or tongues, or immediate mystical intuitions 
 of things divine (ver. 8), but — faith, hope, and 
 above all, love." In the previous chapter 
 (xii. 1-30), the apostle has dwelt on the various 
 charismata, gifts which God has distributed to 
 members of the Church for the advantage of 
 the Church; and he proceeds (ver. 31), ''You are 
 keen, and rightly keen, to possess the greater 
 charismata \ and yet (xiii. 1) 1 show you a way 
 {lit. ' road,' the word implies movement, pro- 
 gress) along which you can travel to bring still 
 more abundant glory to God and advantage to 
 the Church." Then follows his inspired chant 
 in praise of love, after which he continues (xiv. i) 
 — " Pursue after love, and then you can be as 
 keen as you like to possess the charismata, 
 especially prophecy." (The word '' pursue," 
 again, implies movement, progress.) If xii. i- 
 xiv. I is thus read as a connected whole, as it 
 ought to be read, it will be seen that its object 
 is to contrast the value of spiritual gifts with the 
 value of spiritual growth in love. 
 
VALUES 89 
 
 And this at once suggests a well-known 
 characteristic of a child's intelligence. " When 
 I was a child ... I thought as a child, I 
 calculated as a child." My notions of the 
 respective vahies of things were widely different 
 from the notions which I acquired when I 
 became a man. If, before the days when we 
 began to live on paper, you offered to a child 
 three or four years old a very bright penny and 
 a very dull sovereign, there was little doubt 
 which he would probably choose. And those 
 who are spiritually childish, whose souls are 
 not growing, display their immaturity, as 
 children do, quite openly and unconsciously. 
 It is possible to see something pretty and 
 winning in a small child's total ignorance of 
 values ; but the same ignorance in an adult is 
 grotesque and painful ; it may amount to 
 imbecility. To get earthly success with its 
 fame and power, to make money — or inherit it 
 without making it — with the bodily comforts 
 and enjoyments, and the social status which 
 money l.ings, may be all very pleasant, and in 
 no sense wrong in itself. But it is like the 
 bright penny, which is not gold though it 
 
90 THE INCREASE OF 'GOD 
 
 glitters ; and the child snatches at it as though 
 it were really worth having for its own sake. 
 We may well ask ourselves how much, in this 
 respect, we have grown up. 
 
 And this incapacity to judge of the true 
 values of things is sometimes very noticeable 
 in connection with ** gifts." I have tried else- 
 where to speak of the true meaning of 
 '* talents." Talents do not belong to a slave ; 
 they are simply the master's property handed 
 over to him to use for the master's purposes. 
 But we are now concerned with a particular 
 thought in the parable, /.^.,^the nature of the 
 use that ought to be made of them. The 
 trading with them so as to gain other five — or 
 tv/o — talents is a picture of growth. And if 
 the one talent, instead of being hidden in the 
 earth, had been deposited in a bank and had 
 produced even a minimum of interest, there 
 would at least have been some growth. But it 
 frequently happens that it is not the one talent 
 that is misused, but the five. Let us construct 
 a little parable to illustrate this point of view. 
 There was a certain mother who gave five 
 shillings to one child and one shilling to 
 
VALUES 91 
 
 another; and said, " Go and do the best that 
 you can with this money, so as to render to me 
 a present that will give me as much pleasure 
 as possible." So the child that had received 
 the five shillings boasted that she was so 
 ''gifted " and " talented," and felt a little scorn 
 for her sister who could not render to her- 
 mother a present anything like so valuable. 
 And she went to a post office and bought sixty 
 penny stamps. But the child who had received 
 the one shilling was filled with the desire to 
 give her mother as much pleasure as possible. 
 And after long thought she laid out the shilling 
 on materials, and worked a little gift. Such a 
 trumpery little affair it was ! She scarcely 
 liked to offer it when it was done ; a far better 
 article could have been bought with sixty penny 
 stamps. But for all that, she had a happy 
 feeling that her mother would like it after all ; 
 and all the time she was at work upon it she 
 was looking forward eagerly to the moment 
 when she could offer her present. Her shilling 
 had grown immeasurably in value because her 
 use of it was inspired by love, while the other 
 child gave no pleasure at all. 
 
92 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 It is a special and peculiar danger of those 
 who work for God to think that He is pleased 
 by the face-value of the visible results which 
 they render to Him. A clergyman has a 
 ''gift" for preaching. But God is not neces- 
 sarily pleased with him simply because he fills 
 his church. That may be only, so to speak, 
 the equivalent in stamps. A gift for preaching 
 will naturally fill the church. His wife, again, 
 has a wonderful ''gift" for organization, and 
 for getting people to work. And the results 
 in bazaars, or clubs, or Red Cross depots are 
 very striking. But it is quite possible that she 
 is giving little or no pleasure to God. So far 
 as outward results go, they may simply be His 
 gift doing its inevitable work ; and if her 
 activities are not inspired with love for Him, 
 she can only say to Him, " Lo, there Thou hast 
 that is Thine." Both these people, if they are 
 proud of their gifts and of the visible results, 
 are as children ; they have not grown up 
 enough to know the true value of things. 
 They have not learnt to say, " Though I have 
 the gifts of men and angels, and have not love, 
 I am nothing." We need not, after all, have 
 
VALUES 93 
 
 constructed our little parable ; we have one 
 ready to hand. The rich of their wealth cast 
 in much into the treasury, but the poor widow 
 of her penury cast in more than they all, 
 because she gave all that she had. All that 
 we have is ourselves, our obedience, and know- 
 ledge, and love, thrown, lavished upon God 
 with the sole desire of self-giving. Outward 
 results may take care of themselves ; man 
 looketh on them, but God looketh on the 
 inward results, the joy that He receives when 
 His love is met by the response of a selfless 
 love. As St Paul teaches us, pursue after 
 love, strive and pray for the inward growth, 
 and then, and then only, you will be safe in 
 being keen to possess the best gifts that God 
 sees fit to give you. 
 
 There is one group of gifts in particular 
 that ought to be mentioned. I believe that 
 large numbers of Christians do not realize that 
 there is such a thing as a natural aptitude for 
 piety, a gift of religious feeling, which they 
 have neither created nor acquired for them- 
 selves. It has come to them by temperament, 
 which is often due to heredity, not necessarily 
 
94 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 from parents, but perhaps from remoter ances- 
 tors. And then God has given favourable 
 circumstances which rendered easy the cultiva- 
 tion of the gift, such as spare time, congenial 
 surroundings, proximity to a church which 
 appeals to them, and so on. For such persons 
 it is extremely easy to be pious. They have 
 been entrusted with five talents, while others 
 have only two or one. Broadly speaking, 
 women appear to be temperamentally more 
 inclined to piety than men. 
 
 And those who have been entrusted with 
 this particular talent incur two dangers. One 
 is the ever-recurring danger of pride. " Lord, 
 I thank thee that I am not like a good many 
 other people. I fast in Lent, and go to church 
 on week days, and very frequently to the Holy 
 Communion, and regularly to confession, etc." 
 Another form of the same pride is that which 
 condemns what is called a ''fallen woman," an 
 outcast, a sinner, whom ''thoroughly good 
 people " can have nothing to do with. Think 
 of the circumstances, the surroundings, the 
 training — or want of training — the hereditary 
 instincts, the temperament, the ignorance, which 
 
VALUES 95 
 
 have contributed to produce such a woman. 
 And ask yourself, what does God expect from 
 me and from her ? To whom much is given, 
 from him (or her) shall much be required. 
 One talent is not expected to produce as much 
 as fivQ. The only question for you is, What 
 am I doing with my five ? 
 
 The other danger of those who are richly 
 dowered with the spiritual gift of temperamental 
 piety is that which has been already mentioned. 
 They are tempted to be satisfied with the out- 
 ward acts of piety as things in themselves, and 
 to imagine that God is satisfied. Fastings, 
 daily services, communions, confessions, and 
 all the rest of it — these, in themselves, may be 
 only (to use again our former metaphor) the 
 equivalent in stamps ; they are only what the 
 gift easily and inevitably produces. When the 
 pious person has done them all, he (or she) can 
 only say, " Lo, there Thou hast that is Thine ; 
 I have merely done what I was bound to do, 
 what came natural to me, what I could hardly 
 help doing, placed and constituted as I am." 
 Spiritual gifts, like any other talents, become 
 a deadly snare if they are used in any other 
 
96 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 way but as talents. To say this, of course, is 
 not to belittle the religious acts. They are, as 
 said above, necessary, indispensable means. 
 But the supreme question always remains to be 
 asked : Is the hidden, spiritual life of my soul, 
 my obedience, knowledge, and love, a growth 
 which is anything like proportionate to my 
 gifts ? And an honest answer to that is capable 
 of changing the most pious person on earth 
 from the Pharisee into the publican. 
 
12. SIZE 
 
 "When I was a child I calculated as a 
 child." This inability to recognize the relative 
 value of things often shews itself in another 
 way. We find it absurdly difficult to refrain 
 from attaching value to mere size. It is another 
 instance of the childish propensity to prefer a 
 penny to a sovereign, or let us say a big glass 
 marble to a small diamond. There are number- 
 less instances, of course, in which the true 
 principle is recognized readily enough. A 
 large army has many times in history been 
 beaten by a small one. A miniature by a great 
 master is worth more than many square yards 
 of amateur daubing. The size of a smallpox 
 bacillus is not the measure of its capacity for 
 mischief, and so on. Yet many people fail to 
 grasp this same principle in some very important 
 matters. You will find thinking men and women, 
 for example, who are disturbed by the thought 
 of the littleness of man. They contemplate the 
 
 7 97 ^ 
 
98 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 shortness of the time during which man has 
 lived on the earth in comparison with the un- 
 numbered ages that went before him. They 
 think of the unimaginable distances discovered 
 by astronomy, and point to the fact that our 
 little world is only one item in a solar system 
 which is itself only a speck in a multitude of 
 similar systems in the whirling universe of 
 worlds. And then they ask, '* Isn't it ridiculous 
 to suppose that the God who reveals Himself 
 in this vast universe, and carries it along by 
 the ceaseless force of His will, can have become 
 Incarnate In our infinitesimal pinprick of a planet, 
 for the sake of the infinitesimal group of organ- 
 Isms called men ? " But the childish conception 
 of the value of size could not find a more 
 flagrant illustration than In the idea that mere 
 bigness in space and time can have the slightest 
 bearing on the importance of man. Recall 
 apfain the words of Psalm viii. The Psalmist 
 began as though he held the childish notion : 
 ** When I consider Thy heavens, the works of 
 Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou 
 hast ordained, what Is man that Thou art mind- 
 ful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest 
 
SIZE 99 
 
 him ? " But the next moment he put it away 
 from him, and burst out with joy, " Thou madest 
 him but Httle short of divine, and didst crown 
 him with glory and honour, and didst set him 
 over the works of Thy hands, and didst put all 
 things in subjection under his feet." And when 
 God became Incarnate, it did not mean that a 
 very big God shut Himself up in a man's little 
 body. We must resolutely put away every 
 thought which attributes size to God. If He 
 can occupy space, we must be prepared to 
 maintain that love, or will, or knowledge can 
 occupy space. Our thoughts are carried back 
 to the great truths that we have already studied. 
 The energy of the life of God was potentially 
 self-fulfilled in the whole body of humanity, 
 because it was perfectly self-fulfilled in one 
 Man. And the intensity of the divine life, its 
 knowledge, and will, and love, continues to 
 fulfil itself in every individual human being in 
 proportion to his growth towards the measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ. Life 
 has no dimensions. But we need to be ''grown 
 up " to get a real and living grasp of the fact. 
 Let us close this chapter with a practical 
 
100 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 detail in which a recognition of the truth will 
 help us. It will help us to make another attack 
 on the childish fallacy that success in religious 
 work can be reckoned by figures. A parish 
 with a large roll of confirmation candidates, or 
 of Easter communicants, a large number of 
 organizations, a large number of meetings, 
 committees, and clubs, a large number of hours 
 spent on them, is almost always thought to be 
 a successful parish. It may be, of course ; but 
 it is not the largeness that makes it so. Some 
 clergymen even think that a large parish pleases 
 God better than a small one. All this, by itself, 
 is mere size. The pride of being busy is near 
 akin to the pride of being ''good." The so- 
 called successful clergyman, of whom men think 
 highly, with rush, and push, and go, and a net- 
 work of activities, is often in real danger of 
 leading few souls nearer to God. If the dis- 
 sipation of energy is a fact in the material 
 world, it is a daily glaring fact in the spiritual 
 world. The over-busy worker who has little 
 time for prayer and thought, and therefore little 
 chance of inward growth, is like a shivering 
 man who has a large grate piled up with paper. 
 
SIZE loi 
 
 wood, and coal, and no :natch with which to 
 light it. Can anything be done to persuade 
 some clergymen and their church workers to 
 ask themselves the question, which is of greater 
 value — much coal or a little warmth ? It is not 
 only because iniquity abounds, but sometimes 
 because activity abounds, that the love of many 
 waxes cold. *'A little leaven leaveneth the 
 whole lump " ; and no extra magnitude of the 
 lump will compensate for the lack of leaven. 
 A parish, whatever its size, is a successful 
 parish only if it is lightened with celestial fire. 
 And those who are to be the Holy Spirit's 
 instruments to set it alight must — even at the 
 cost of diminishing the record of their organiza- 
 tions and work — make time to keep themselves 
 hot. When Canon Body was once asked what 
 sort of line he generally took in conducting 
 Retreats for the clergy, his answer was, " 1 
 generally tell them to repent." And his words 
 still live. Repentance is the first need of all 
 who are allowing work to interfere with their 
 growth. 
 
13. PARTIES 
 
 By his metaphor of childhood St Paul has 
 led us in several ways to confess our lack -of 
 growth. But he employs it yet again in 
 I Corinthians iii. 1-4, a passage which may 
 lead us to further searchings of heart. When 
 he originally preached to the Corinthians he 
 was obliged, quite naturally and properly, to 
 speak to them as unto babes in Christ, feeding 
 them with milk, and not with strong food which 
 they were not grown up enough to digest. 
 But he sadly complains that they were not 
 grown up enough even now ; they were still 
 undeveloped children. In particular, their 
 failure to grow had shewn itself in the party 
 spirit, the factious bickerings which had gone 
 far to split the Church at Corinth into disunion, 
 and to which he devotes the first four chapters 
 of the first epistle. The parties took the 
 names of Paul, Apollos, Cephas, and Christ, as 
 their respective watchwords (i. 12). The aims 
 and tendencies of the several groups form an 
 
PARTIES 103 
 
 interesting subject of New Testament study. 
 But what concerns us here is the uncomfortable 
 fact that St Paul condemns party divisions 
 among Christians as childish, " I am of the 
 Church Times, and I of the Gitardian, and I 
 of the Challenge, and I of the^^^r^r^I" Not 
 long ago I heard one of these papers described 
 as ''sometimes very unchristian." And the 
 speaker was one whose general outlook was 
 more in line with that paper than with the 
 others. Have we grown up, in this respect, 
 much more than the Corinthians } It is not 
 the holding of different opinions that the 
 aposde condemns. I am quite sure that his 
 own mental outlook on the multitude of 
 problems and mysteries of Christianity, which 
 were looming larger as the years went on, must 
 have differed widely in many ways from that 
 of Apollos and Cephas. What stirred him to 
 the depths was the silliness, the crude childish- 
 ness, of being proud of a party label, and the 
 consequent division and weakness of the 
 Church, which needed all the strength of a 
 united front to make headway against the 
 heathenism of such a place as Corinth. Can 
 
104 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 any Christian deny that our greatest and most 
 terribly urgent need is a united front to make 
 headway against the profound depth of in- 
 difference to everything religious on which, 
 in the great mass of the population, even the 
 war has been unable to produce more than a. 
 surface ripple ? There is a world of difference 
 between diversity and division. I am certain 
 that St Paul would not have wished us to 
 " scrap our differences." The most cursory 
 study of his epistles will shew what he felt 
 about sacrificing religious convictions. The 
 adoption of reduced Christianity, undenomina- 
 tionalism, the minimum which all can accept, 
 he would have hotly repudiated. But he 
 would have exhorted us to be imitators of him 
 in his clear and fearless expression of what he 
 believed to be truth together ivitk his readiness 
 to be all things to all men, if by any means he 
 might win some ; in his steely loyalty to the 
 revelation which he had received together with 
 a love that '' is not easily provoked, thinketh 
 no evil." It was this spiritual balance and 
 equilibrium that marked him as a mature, fully- 
 grown man, who had put away the childish 
 
PARTIES 105 
 
 small-mindedness which was still producing 
 shrill cries and noisy disturbances among the 
 little Corinthians. We are so tempted to feel 
 that while other people ought to give up their 
 factiousness, and drop their labels, and stop 
 their quarrelsome shouts, our party is in the 
 right, our party has the best, the noblest, the 
 widest, the highest, the deepest, the simplest, 
 in short, the truest Christianity. And the other 
 people think the same about their party ; and 
 so it goes on. 
 
 Our unhappy divisions are open sore::, and 
 until they have been bound up and mollified 
 with ointment the Body of Christ will never be 
 in health. If we listen in deep silence to 
 hearken what He will say unto us, we may 
 hear well-known words with, perhaps, a 
 meaning in them that had not reached us 
 before : " Have I been so long with you, and 
 yet hast thou not known Me ? " Have I been 
 nineteen centuries living, striving, straining 
 after self-fulfilment in My Body, the Church, 
 and yet hast thou not known Me in every 
 single member who is striving to co-operate 
 with Me by spiritual growth ? Views as to 
 
io6 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 the best methods of growing necessarily differ ; 
 souls differ, and need different methods. But 
 if we could see Him and love Him in every 
 soul that is striving to grow by any methods 
 whatsoever, it would do more for the Body of 
 Christ, " for the building up of itself in love," 
 for its '' increase with the increase of God," 
 than any number of compromises and premature 
 schemes of intercommunion. Part of St Paul's 
 description of the Body is that " there are 
 diversities of operation (effects of energy), but 
 the same Lord." Diversity without division is 
 the condition of every living organism above 
 the protoplasm. And the more it grows in 
 articulation and complexity, the more diverse 
 its parts and functions become. And if for 
 ** parts " we say '* parties," we need not lose 
 sight of the same principle. Parties can be a 
 sign of healthy growth in the Body of Christ ; 
 they can " provoke one another to love and to 
 good works." It is when they provoke one 
 another to dislike, and sneers, and imputation 
 of wrong motives that division has set in. 
 They would not do that if every member of 
 every party were " endeavouring to keep the 
 unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." 
 
14. AN EXAMPLE 
 
 If we turn from the children to the grown 
 man we have a fine example of selflessness. 
 Think how much is contained in the verses 
 which immediately follow those that we have 
 been studying: ''What then is Apollos ? and 
 what is Paul? Ministers through whom ye 
 became believers, and to each as the Lord 
 gave. I planted, Apollos watered, but God 
 produced the growth. So that neither is he 
 that planteth anything, nor he that watereth, 
 but He that produceth the growth, (namely) 
 God. And he that planteth and he that 
 watereth are one, and each shall receive his 
 own reward according to his own labour, for 
 we are God's fellow-workers. Ye are God's 
 husbandry, ye are God's building" (i Cor. iii. 
 5.9). Here we have the quintessence of the 
 apostle's teaching about ** gifts," which he 
 afterwards expands in xii. i-xiv. i. Apollos 
 and himself were merely ministers, servants, to 
 
 107 
 
io8 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 whom God gave certain gifts to fit them for 
 certain functions. And the purpose of these 
 functions was the growth of the members of 
 the Church. It was natural, easy, inevitable, 
 that a man with St Paul's gifts should have 
 planted, and that a man with Apollos' gifts 
 should have watered. What neither of them 
 could do was to make souls grow. That was 
 done by the indwelling energy of the life of 
 God. And the same truth is then taught with 
 a different metaphor in verses 10-12, just intro- 
 duced in the last clause of verse 9. St Paul had 
 received gifts to enable him to lay a foundation ; 
 another ,z.e,, Apollos, to enable him to go on with 
 the building. But all that they could do was 
 utterly valueless without the indwelling Spirit 
 of God in His temple (ver. 16, 17), which made 
 the Corinthians what are called, in i Peter ii. 
 5, ''living stones, being built up into a spiritual 
 house." It was only because, as St Paul says 
 (ver. 9), he and Apollos were " God's fellow- 
 workers " that the result could be growth. 
 The workers, in themselves, were ''nothing" 
 (ver. 7) ; in God they were " one " (ver. 8). 
 It is a heart-searching sermon to all religious 
 
AN EXAMPLE 109 
 
 workers. See iv. 6, 7, where he shews that 
 that was what he intended it to be. The clergy, 
 and others, who plant and water, lay founda- 
 tions and build, are sometimes beset by the 
 temptation to think that because they have 
 planted, or laid a foundation, in the spiritual 
 life of some soul, the results will not be so good 
 if anyone else does the subsequent watering 
 or building. If we are not grown up, as St 
 Paul was, we find it very difticult to accept the 
 fact that after God has used us to help Him 
 to begin a good work in some one's heart. He 
 may see best to use another worker to go on 
 and finish it. We are tempted to think of 
 souls as some doctors think of their ** cases," 
 and resent the intrusion of another practitioner. 
 We like to have the credit for their whole 
 growth in grace, and we like to retain for 
 ourselves their gratitude and devotion. But 
 this attitude is simply silly, because it disregards 
 the primary fact that the work is God's work, 
 and that He chooses His instruments for each 
 little piece of it as He thinks fit. St Paul puts 
 it quite clearly in iii. 8 : " Each shall receive his 
 own reward according to his own labour, for 
 
no THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 we are God's fellow- workers." His own labour 
 is the particular portion of the work that God 
 chooses to assign to him, and to be jealous 
 of another worker who is assigned another 
 portion is childish. To give place to another, 
 or to share our work with another, may very 
 likely be humbling, but our pride and selffulness 
 are apt to make us call it ''humiliating," which 
 is quite different. 
 
 Later in this epistle St Paul shews the same 
 perfect readiness to acknowledge the labours 
 of other workers. He knew that he had, as 
 a matter of fact, laboured for the Corinthians 
 harder than any other preachers of the Gospel, 
 but he knew also that God had used other 
 labourers beside himself: '' I laboured more 
 abundantly than they all, yet not I but the 
 grace of God which was with me. Whether, 
 therefore, it were I or they, so we preach and 
 so ye believed" (xv. lo, ii). On the other 
 hand, in Romans xv. 20, he teaches us the 
 converse lesson of sympathy with the feelings 
 of other workers. We are not to intrude where 
 God has not quite clearly called us. " I have 
 fully preached the Gospel of Christ ; but my 
 
AN EXAMPLE in 
 
 ambition has been this — not to preach where 
 Christ has (already) been named, that I may 
 not build upon another (man's) foundation." 
 Truly it is the example of one who had put 
 away childish things ! 
 
 But the finest instance of all is seen in 
 Philippians i. 15-18. St Paul and Apollos 
 had been friends ; but there were some 
 preachers who were anything but friendly, 
 Judalstic Christians who thought his teaching 
 mistaken. And when he was in prison they 
 took the opportunity of preaching to the 
 Philippians, his best loved converts, according 
 to their own ideas, which he was profoundly 
 con-vinced were wrong. There were, indeed, 
 some who preached Christ to them "out of 
 love," but his opponents did it "out of party 
 spirit, not with a pure motive, thinking to 
 aggravate the affliction of my Imprisonment." 
 It was terribly galling to him, and they knew 
 it. But nevertheless his selflessness rose 
 triumphant. "In every way, whether in pre- 
 text or in truth, Christ is preached, and in this 
 I rejoice." A magnificent instance of an ardent 
 worker, with very strong views of his own, 
 
112 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit 
 in the bond of peace ! The Epistle to the 
 Philippians was one of his latest, and it reveals 
 the extent to which his soul had grown. I 
 am sure he did not find it easy. It is quite 
 easy to preach self-crucifixion ; but it is agony 
 to be crucified. It was not done without 
 unrelenting sternness towards himself: "lest 
 by any means when I have preached 
 to others I myself should prove worthless " 
 (i Cor. ix. 27). 
 
 Almighty God, grant us grace so to follow 
 Thy blessed saint in selflessness and sympathy 
 that we, like him, may not prove worthless 
 as fellow-workers with Thee. 
 
15. PRAYER 
 
 We have been yielding ourselves, for the 
 most part, to the guidance of St Paul, as he 
 led us by a variety of paths to study the thought 
 of growth from childhood, and to learn to put 
 away "the elementary things of the world," 
 childish ideas about "being good" derived 
 from Judaism, childish under-estimation of 
 things of real value, and over-estimation of mere 
 size, and the party spirit which goes so far 
 to hinder the growth of grace in the souls of 
 workers, and therefore in the souls of those for 
 whom they work. But is it not very dishearten- 
 ing to look at the manhood, the mature growth, 
 which he has depicted for us? Is it not dis- 
 heartening to a beginner struggling with his 
 pencil at a drawing lesson to be shewn a 
 masterpiece, and be told that that is the kind 
 of thing that he must aim at ? But if we feel 
 inclined to despair, we must check ourselves 
 at once by remembering that God is not going 
 
 113 
 
114 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 to wait to take pleasure in us till we have 
 reached the ideal. However elementary the 
 condition of our spiritual life may be, it is a joy 
 to Him to see u^ grow. We ought to remind 
 ourselves every day of our lives that what He 
 wants from us is perpetual motion — movement 
 in the direction of the ideal, however far off 
 it may be. If it is childish to be satisfied with 
 "being good," it is no less childish to be 
 despondent because we are not "good." Tell 
 a small child that he will be able to do some- 
 thing "when he i$ grown up," and it will seem 
 to him almost the same as "never." Years 
 seem so long, and progress so slow. E pur se 
 inuove. Life does, after all, move forward. 
 By using his present powers as well as he can, 
 he does grow in strength and ability, and 
 manhood with its maturity does arrive. He 
 must be content to do the next things next, 
 with the great end far off, but always in sight. 
 May we not read that meaning, as well as the 
 original meaning, into the Psalmist's words, " I 
 have set God always before me " } I have set 
 before me always the very character and perfec- 
 tion of God Himself — unreachable, but a greater 
 
PRAYER 115 
 
 incentive to growth than any other model. 
 That was what St Paul meant when he said 
 ** Be ye imitators of God " ; '* Let this mind be 
 in you which wsls also in Christ Jesus." The 
 child must practise — steadily, interminably 
 practise. And half our spiritual practice is to 
 pray, and the other half is to try. 
 
 But before turning to the subject of prayer, 
 let us first ask, What does every Christian feel 
 that he needs most in an elementary stage in 
 his growth ? All hearts will be ready with the 
 answer. We need to overcome, finally and 
 for ever, some one or two temptations which 
 hinder us most. We imagine that if w^e could 
 just get rid of those one or two, so that they 
 would never trouble us again, all would be 
 plain sailing. There is, of course, an element 
 of truth in this. To fail frequently in one or 
 two points weakens our will, and lowers our 
 spiritual vitality, so that we do not even begin 
 seriously to attempt progress with regard to 
 other temptations that appear less important. 
 But every Christian who is growing finds, in 
 fact, that if he has progressed, the next tempta- 
 tion that stands in his way looms larger and 
 
ii6 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 more horrible than it did before. To feel 
 increasingly the badness of "lesser" sins is a 
 sure mark of orowth. Indeed our human 
 frailty is such that growth itself brings with it 
 temptations of its own — the temptation to give 
 less strenuous care and watchfulness against the 
 old ones, with the imminent danger of relapse ; 
 and the temptation to indulge in spiritual pride 
 in some of its many subtle forms. Still, if we 
 are really growing, the Holy Spirit helps us to 
 recognize these as well as other snares which 
 lie in our path. 
 
 We are going to set to work, then, to practise. 
 But in doing so we must be carefully on our 
 guard against allowing any cleavage in thought 
 between our own life and that of others. We 
 are individuals ; we possess a will, and a 
 capacity for knowledge and for emotion, which 
 are all our own. And yet the great mystery 
 which always confronts us is that all human life 
 is one life. Our growth is unthinkable in 
 isolation ; it is inseparable from the growth of 
 others. All these worketh that one and the 
 same spirit, energizing, striving after self- 
 fulfilment in the life of the whole. 
 
PRAYER 117 
 
 And in this growth Prayer plays an im- 
 measurable part. The word "immeasurable," 
 like the word ''immense," used with its strict 
 force, means what it says. It is non-measurable. 
 It cannot be measured because it is spiritual, 
 and has to do with results which are independent 
 of space and time. Who can measure the 
 effects of love, or of knowledge, or of will ? 
 My ''little" prayers can put me into spiritual 
 touch with every soul that exists, every in- 
 dividual expression of the life of God. St 
 Chrysostom described the Church as consisting 
 of the faithful everywhere, who are, or have 
 been, or are yet to be. All time and space 
 vanish when we penetrate to the mystery of 
 their oneness. If, then, growth in the prayer- 
 fulness of one soul helps towards the self- 
 fulfilment of the life of God, it is not that of a 
 little piece of God in one human life. We are 
 not "parts of God," any more than when a 
 man loves his children he has a little piece of 
 love for each of them. In the orowth of each 
 soul the one life of God, expressed in all the 
 several souls of men, moves towards its self- 
 fulfilment. The word " vicarious," if carefully 
 
ii8 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 and thoughtfully used, can play an important 
 part in Christian doctrine. Hence, since every 
 true prayer is a movement towards God, a 
 movement of growth, prayer for our own 
 spiritual advance is a real and rightful part of 
 our work for mankind. If this is the under- 
 lying purpose of all our prayers for ourselves, 
 they form part of the great and primary duty 
 of Intejression. 
 
 But here, again, we must beware of being 
 led astray by notions of quantity, such as the 
 number of people that we pray for, or the 
 number of prayers that we offer for them. If 
 the value lay in quantity, prayer would be an 
 utterly hopeless task. Its hopelessness at once 
 becomes apparent if we imagine ourselves trying 
 to pray, individually, by name, even for the 
 people whom we know personally. And what 
 are they among the thousands of millions who 
 need our help ? The value of intercession lies 
 in the motive. A longing for the self-fulfilment 
 of the one life of God energizing in men, a real, 
 deep desire for the growth of the whole for His 
 sa!:e, is the only motive which makes prayer 
 worth while. There is no true prayer about 
 
PRAYER 119 
 
 any single person or thing in all the world 
 which is not a contribution towards the great 
 end: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, 
 in earth as it is in heaven." God in Himself, 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the blessed and 
 eternal Trinity in Unity, is complete — "in 
 heaven " — with an infinity of completeness. 
 But " in earth "He has willed, as we have said, 
 that His indwelling life should be incomplete. 
 And all our prayers, no less than our own 
 spiritual strivings, must be directed towards the 
 one universal aim, that He may "see of the 
 travail of His soul, and be satisfied," by gradually, 
 "all in all, being fulfilled." 
 
 This takes from prayer all danger of littleness, 
 or self-centredness, all unworthy notions of per- 
 suading or worrying God, by persistent reitera- 
 tion, into doing things for us that He otherwise 
 might not wish to do. In the parable of the 
 unjust judge our Lord does not compare — He 
 contrasts — God with the judge. If an unjust 
 judge could be worried into doing something 
 by an importunate widow, how much more 
 readily will the Judge of all the earth answer 
 the prayers of the elect ; for, just because they 
 
120 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 are the elect, their prayers may be assumed to 
 be petitions for things that He Himself desires 
 more earnestly than they can — things for which 
 the Spirit itself intercedes with unuttered groan- 
 ings, dwelling within them, and ** interceding 
 for them according to (the will of) God." Our 
 prayers are not right prayers if they are not the 
 work of the divine Spirit within us, wanting 
 what God wants. But if they are, it is self- 
 evident that He is longing to answer them. In 
 the mystery of his self-limitation He has (to an 
 extent which it is outside our powers to define 
 or calculate) given ' His self- fulfilment in man 
 into the power of our will, and rejoices when 
 our will and desires coincide with His. He 
 often waits to do what He Himself wants until 
 we pray for it, and thereby apply His energy 
 for the purpose. Of course, needless to say, 
 His will is not subject to our prayers in such a 
 way that He must always do everything that 
 we happen to ask. Growth in prayer, then, is 
 growth in the intensity with which we want 
 what God wants. 
 
 If such is the nature of prayer, man can do 
 no greater work for God. It is, in fact, God 
 
PRAYER 121 
 
 doing His own work in, and by means of, man. 
 It is the chiefest exhibition of the truth that *' it 
 is God who energizes in you, both to will and 
 to energize for His pleasure." But if so — and 
 here we touch a further aspect which is not 
 always sufficiently recognized — It necessarily 
 follows that God can do His work which He 
 accomplishes through man's prayers only in 
 proportion to man's spiritual growth. Our 
 growth in grace and our growth in prayer are 
 one and the same growth. In short, to put It 
 as simply as possible, the more holy you are tJie 
 more will your prayers accomplish. Look at St 
 James v. 17, translated as literally as possible: 
 '' The strenuous prayer of a righteous man has 
 great force in its energy." Not only must his 
 prayer be strenuous, but he must be *' righteous "' 
 for his prayer to gain the maximum of force. 
 The more that Christ "is formed in you," the 
 more He can do by means of you, that Is by 
 means of your prayer as well as your character 
 and influence. Every true prayer, thank God, 
 has some force in Its energy, because every true 
 prayer implies some degree, however small, of 
 divine growth. When a prodigal com.es to 
 
122 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 himself and pours out his heart in penitence, in 
 the first real prayer he has ever offered, his 
 growth has begun, and the force of his prayer 
 is such that it obtains full, lavish, royal forgive- 
 ness. The reality and strenuousness of it are 
 the reality and strenuousness of the energy of 
 God's life beginning to stir within him. But 
 the fact remains that since the growth of his 
 soul is the growth of that divine life, the more 
 abundantly that it *' increaseth with the increase 
 of God," the more force he, obviously, gains in 
 his work oi^ increasing that one and the same 
 divine life in the whole body of mankind. We 
 cannot conceive of any higher motive for holi- 
 ness than this. It transcends all lower motives 
 — all danger of wishing to be holy that we may 
 have the satisfaction of possessing a beautiful 
 character for our own sake, or of gaining ad- 
 miration and esteem from others. It rises out 
 of reach of the criticism sometimes levelled 
 against religion that all goodness and love are 
 ultimately selfishness. It takes away the faint- 
 est thought of personal expedience or advantage 
 nowj or in the life to come. O Lord, increase 
 in us true religion ; make us daily to increase in 
 
PRAYER 123 
 
 Thy Holy Spirit more and more ; grant that our 
 love may abound yet more and more ; give us 
 more grace, change us into Thine image from 
 glory unto glory ; in order that by the growth 
 of our souls, and therefore by the growth of 
 our prayers, Thou in mankind mayest move 
 towards Thy self-fulfilment. 
 
i6. OFFERINGS 
 
 All our growth In holiness, our growth in 
 prayer, and the work that we do for God by- 
 means of both, find concrete expression in the 
 sacramental life. The relation between the 
 spiritual and the sacramental cannot be theo- 
 retically defined. We cannot, for instance, be 
 content with saying that the one is individual 
 and the other is corporate ; both are individual 
 and both are corporate. The necessity for 
 adding sacramental to other means of grace 
 is a problem of which we can only say solvitur 
 auibulando. Insoluble in theory, it is solved 
 daily in practice ; and the solution Is endorsed 
 by the highest experience of the holiest souls 
 for nineteen centuries. God hath set one over 
 against the other ; or rather, God hath joined 
 them together, and man may not put them 
 asunder. If Christ is to be formed in us, we 
 must continue to receive Him into ourselves by 
 
 sacramental as well as spiritual communion. 
 
 124 
 
OFFERINGS 125 
 
 And herein is that saying true, '' To him that 
 hath shall be given." Growth in holiness 
 involves growth in the capacity for receiving. 
 A young amateur playing a sonata of Beethoven 
 does not gain from it as much as the advanced 
 musician. The music is the same, but the 
 capacity for reception grows. And the same 
 is true of the Holy Communion. Christ is 
 always the same; He offers Himself in His 
 fulness to every guest that accepts the invita- 
 tion to the feast; but "the torrent of pleasure, 
 the richness of the house of God," means more 
 to us in proportion as He is being formed in 
 us as the years go by. To the beginner in 
 the sacramental life— the earnest-minded boy 
 or girl, for instance, who has recently been 
 confirmed, or anyone who has ceased to be a 
 communicant, and after many years begins 
 again— this can be a consolation and encourage- 
 nient if he does not feel that he is. gaining as 
 much from the service as he had hoped and 
 expected. There are, of course, faults of our 
 own, want of penitence, want of desire, want of 
 preparation, which mar the benefits of the feast. 
 But apart from these, the beginner must rest 
 
126 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 upon the truth, which Is the burden of the whole 
 of this little book, that the real sign of a vigorous 
 life Is growth. He must keep on, gaining 
 always as much as he can, and he will slowly 
 but surely taste and see with increasing delight 
 that the Lord is good. 
 
 " On, on ! my Lord is dearer far 
 To-day than yesterday '' 
 
 But above everything, we must remember that 
 the give and take of love are strictly mutual. 
 '' It Is more blessed to give than to receive." 
 The growth of our power of reception In the 
 Holy Sacrament will be in exact accordance 
 with the growth of our self-offering. And 
 conversely, the more that our soul grows, the 
 more we shall have to offer, because we are 
 offering to God the Christ that Is being formed 
 in us. 
 
 I doubt if this thought plays the part that 
 It should with many Christians when they are 
 present at the Holy Communion. We are all 
 accustomed to the glorious thought that we 
 offer to God the '' full, perfect, and sufficient 
 sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins 
 
OFFERINGS 127 
 
 of the whole world," and in particular for our 
 own sins, or for the sins of some other definite 
 person or persons. (It is a great help always 
 to go to the sacred service with some special 
 intention, thought over and prayed about before- 
 hand.) But beside our pleadings for ourselves 
 or for others, God wants us, for His own sake. 
 See how this finds expression in the Communion 
 office. 
 
 When we offer our "alms and oblations," it 
 is not only the coin that we give, and the 
 bread and wine or other offerings that we 
 make in church at the moment. These are 
 only the sacramental symbols of the offering of 
 every penny we possess, everything that we 
 eat or drink, and everything that money can 
 buy — our dress and personal possessions, our 
 amusements, hobbies, interests. And if we 
 want to make our offering as good as we can, 
 it must, like all offerings, be prepared before- 
 hand. We dare not offer to the Lord our God 
 that which has cost us nothing. It gives a 
 most wonderful spur and safeguard to our 
 ordinary daily life to remember that we are, at 
 every moment, preparing our next offering. 
 
128 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 And if we have wasted or misused some of our 
 money, or any other earthly possession or gift, 
 we have so far spoilt our offering. Here is a 
 great opportunity for growth. Our offering, 
 represented by the alms and oblations, is to 
 grow in value. 
 
 Again, we pray to God : '' Receive these 
 our prayers which we offer unto Thy divine 
 Majesty." And later on we say: '' O Lord 
 and heavenly Father, we,*Thy humble servants, 
 entirely desire Thy fatherly goodness merci- 
 fully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and 
 thanksgiving." (We shall always want to say 
 this prayer for ourselves if the alternative 
 prayer is read at the service.) These sentences 
 do not mean merely that we offer the prayers, 
 and the praise and thanksgiving, which are 
 offered at the moment. They only represent 
 all the prayers, praises, and thanksgivings that 
 we have poured out day by day — hour by hour, 
 if possible — since we were last present at the 
 Holy Communion. And if any of our prayers 
 during that time have been dull and listless, 
 hurried, mechanical, selfish, despondent, un- 
 believing, or our praises and thanksgivings 
 
OFFERINGS 129 
 
 infrequent, cold, or grudging, our offering has 
 been made of less value than it might have 
 been. We want to come, so to speak, armed 
 with a great pile of prayers and praises, a well 
 prepared Eucharist, something that it is a joy- 
 to offer, and a joy to God to receive. It is like 
 the child with the shilling, making the present 
 for her mother. The offering, when it was 
 finished, was the eagerly expected climax of the 
 preparation which had kept her little hands and 
 thoughts busy for days beforehand. Is there 
 not here another great opportunity for growth ? 
 And finally, the same truth is involved on 
 the widest possible scale when we say : " Here 
 we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, 
 ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a 
 reasonable, holy, and lively [living] sacrifice 
 unto Thee." What have we been doing with 
 ourselves, our souls and bodies, that we can 
 ask God to accept them as a sacrifice ? Have 
 we been growing in obedience, knowledge, and 
 love ; in the discipline of our bodies, in the 
 spending of ourselves for God and man ? Life 
 becomes a different thing, and the sacramental 
 life becomes an overwhelming reality, if we 
 9 
 
130 THE INCREASE OF GOD 
 
 understand — and it needs deep and frequent 
 meditation to burn it in upon our minds and 
 memories — that everything that we do, and 
 say, and think, everything that we are, is to 
 make up our self-offering at the Holy Com- 
 munion. It is because we offer Christ, who 
 has died for us, that we can offer ourselves in 
 union with Him. And God accepts us because 
 of what Christ is, and because of what He sees 
 we are going to be if we grow. 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by The Darien Press, Edinburgh. 
 
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