2^,3,/U 
 
 ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^J 
 
 Presented byT?<S\f. S^.TYAcC^Wn^C^Vl CA^O 
 
 BR 121 .S55 1913 
 
 Simpson, Patrick Carnegie, 
 
 1865- 
 The facts of life in 
 
 relation to faith 
 
THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
V 
 
 
 FEB 3 1914 
 
 THE 
 
 A 
 
 FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 IN RELATION TO FAITH 
 
 BY 
 
 P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON, D. D 
 
 AUTHOR OF ' THE FACT OF CHRIST ' 
 
 
 HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1913, by 
 GEORGE H. DORAN & COMPANY 
 
©0 mg Ptfe 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 This book is practically a sequel to The Fact 
 of Christ (published in 1900), inasmuch as the 
 topics discussed in these chapters — especially 
 the later chapters — and many points raised in 
 their treatment have been suggested mainly 
 through the correspondence which his earlier 
 work brought to the author from varied quar- 
 ters. He can hardly expect that this volume, 
 dealing as it does with questions chosen just on 
 account of the difficulties they present to many 
 perplexed or inquiring minds, will receive the 
 measure of acceptance so kindly accorded to its 
 predecessor; but if in some degree it helps, it 
 will not altogether fail of its end. The two 
 books are written for persons at somewhat 
 different stages. The writer of the very ad- 
 mirable French translation of The Fact of 
 Christ — Dr. Maurice Dusolier — says in his 
 introduction that in that volume is 'a faith 
 gushing out of the heart' ('une foi jaillie du 
 vii 
 
viii PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 cceur'). The present discussions, it is to be 
 feared, are more laboured in their faith. But 
 they are written at a spot further inland on 
 the 'isthmus' of life, to which reference is made 
 in the opening chapter; and travellers at that 
 stage will make allowance for the difficulty of 
 the road. Perhaps the march becomes lighter 
 again further on. 
 
 A few sentences in Chapter VI. are repro- 
 duced, with little modification, from a contri- 
 bution by the present writer to a series of lec- 
 tures on the Creed, published in 1904 under 
 the title of Questions of Faith, but now out of 
 print. The stanzas quoted opposite the begin- 
 ning of Chapter ill. are taken from a small 
 book, privately printed, entitled, 'Verses by 
 M. T.'; they are by Lady Thomson, and the 
 book is that mentioned in the Life of Lord 
 Kelvin, vol. i. p. 533. For several other quo- 
 tations and references, the writer is indebted 
 to his friend and late assistant the Rev. J. D. 
 M. Rorke, M.A., who further has given him 
 more than one useful suggestion. P. C. S. 
 
 !9i3- 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE .... 3 
 
 I 
 THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 27 
 
 II 
 THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 55 
 
 III 
 THE ATHEISTIC FACT 89 
 
 IV 
 
 THE REALITY OF CHRIST 121 
 
 ix 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 V 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 167 
 
 VI 
 THE VETO OF DEATH 207 
 
 VII 
 THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 249 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE 
 
'The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can 
 use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements 
 of our demands on ourselves and on one another. Re- 
 ligions have approved themselves; they ministered to 
 sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When 
 they violated other needs too strongly, or when other 
 faiths came which served the same needs better, the 
 first religions were supplanted.' william james. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 A notable and interesting feature of much of 
 modern thinking on the deeper problems of the 
 mind and soul is that, more and more, the truth 
 about these is sought and tested not abstractly, 
 but in experience. The philosophy of William 
 James exemplified this in what he called prag- 
 matism; and Dr. Rudolf Eucken has developed 
 it more generally in what he calls activism. 
 These are new words, but what they essentially 
 mean is not so new. Just as Moliere's Bour- 
 geois Gentilhomme had talked prose for forty 
 years without knowing he had been literary, so 
 most men who, in any real sense, are living life 
 and who bring their experience and their minds 
 together, are something of pragmatists or vital- 
 ists without any consciousness of being philo- 
 sophical. 
 
 3 
 
4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Here, indeed, is the third stage in any intelli- 
 gent man's relation to his faith. The first stage 
 is that of childhood, when we believe what we 
 are told to believe, whether it be God or fairies. 
 When we outgrow this — most of us do — we be- 
 gin to scrutinise with our reason what we have 
 been told, and to refuse further credence to 
 what can not satisfy us with rational proof. At 
 this point the battle between faith and unbelief 
 is often sharply waged. Yet it is not here that 
 it is finally lost or won. There awaits us an- 
 other transition — less assertive than that from 
 credulity to criticism, but more profound and 
 conclusive. It is the transition from criticism 
 to experience, from the mere dialectics of rea- 
 soning to the actualities of life. Here — for the 
 really living man — is faith's grand climacteric. 
 And our final creed is what we have not merely 
 thought through, but lived through. 
 
 This is a change not easy to analyse, be- 
 cause it is gradual, unobtrusive, and indeed, for 
 the most part, subconscious. We may fail not 
 merely to recognise it in others, but even to 
 realise it in ourselves. It goes on, however, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 inevitably within every man who (as I have 
 just put it) is bringing his mind and his ex- 
 perience together; and its conclusions are final 
 in a sense in which the opinions of the critical 
 reason — confident as these generally are — can 
 not maintain themselves to be. As men grow 
 older their actual and operative faith or un- 
 faith — which may be something very different 
 from that which, from custom or prudence, they 
 profess — comes more and more to be based on 
 and limited by what in their lives has proved 
 itself to be real and adequate. This modifies 
 what even their logic may think it can prove or 
 disprove. Indeed, one great part of intelli- 
 gence in life is just to recognise that, in all 
 human, and especially spiritual, affairs, logic 
 must be kept amenable to experience. As a 
 man goes on in life he finds that there is a 
 realm of truth and good at once larger and 
 surer than the one of logical argument — larger, 
 for there is much he comes to know in life 
 which the merely critical reason could never 
 discover or demonstrate, and also surer, be- 
 cause this kind of experience is more a fact of 
 
6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 his life than is the sun. This does not mean 
 any discrediting of reason. But it means that 
 reason, in its full and true sense, is not merely 
 an instrument of logical or historical or critical 
 ratiocination. Reason in its full and true sense 
 is the intelligent relation between man and his 
 whole world. To give it another name, it is 
 not mere reasoning, mere science, but wisdom. 
 And to this wisdom, life contributes more even 
 than logic. 
 
 An actual example of what I mean, and one 
 from the mental career of a distinguished man, 
 may be found in the writings of that sincere 
 thinker and eminent biologist, George John 
 Romanes. In early life Romanes published a 
 treatise entitled A Candid Examination of 
 Theism, in which he maintained what may be 
 described as materialistic or agnostic conclu- 
 sions. In a later work, however, he greatly 
 modified and in part retracted these views, and 
 his explanation of this change is interesting. It 
 was not that he had discovered his reasoning 
 to have been at fault; on the contrary, he says, 
 'as a matter of mere ratiocination, I am not 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 likely to detect any serious flaws.' But he 
 found that his earlier book was written with 
 what he calls 'undue confidence in syllogistic 
 conclusions' ; and he confessed the modification 
 of his views to be 'due not so much to logical 
 processes of the intellect' as to the ripening 
 'experience of life.' 1 Here is exactly the tran- 
 sition of which I am speaking. 
 
 We all make it if we are living life in the 
 world at all. And we must live life in the 
 world. There is no other place for us in which 
 to live it. A man is neither truly a saint nor 
 truly a philosopher — and he may very probably 
 be a prig or a fool to boot — who thinks this 
 world is not the place for him to live, and 
 whose experience of life round about him is 
 not a great and a welcome part of his education 
 in truth. Therefore our life, as we live it, 
 should influence our faith, as it influences every- 
 thing else. Religious belief should become, if 
 not less and less a thing arguable in logic, cer- 
 tainly more and more a thing tested in experi- 
 ence. And, as a matter of fact, as men grow 
 
 1 Romanes' Thoughts on Religion, p. ioo. 
 2 
 
8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 older they care comparatively little for the pros 
 and cons of mere apologetic debate. Mr. 
 Lecky has put it thus: — 
 
 'Young men discuss religious questions simply as 
 questions of truth and falsehood. In later life they 
 more frequently accept their creed as a working 
 hypothesis of life: as a consolation in innumerable 
 calamities: as the one supposition under which life 
 is not a melancholy anticlimax : as the indispensable 
 sanction of moral obligations: as the gratification 
 and reflection of needs, instincts, longings which are 
 placed in the deepest recesses of human nature: as 
 one of the chief pillars on which society rests.' x 
 
 It is more simply expressed in Tolstoy's master- 
 piece, where, in a discussion about immortality, 
 Prince Audrey says: 'Yes, that's Herder's 
 theory, but it 's not that, my dear boy, convinces 
 me; life and death have convinced me.' 2 So it 
 is with all of us who are living life at all. It is 
 'life and death' that make us believers — or un- 
 believers. 
 
 This is true, of course, of many forms of 
 
 1 Lecky 's Map of Life, p. 212. 
 
 2 War and Peace, Pt. v. chap. xii. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 thought or belief. It is true of all aspects of 
 what, in contradistinction from such operations 
 of abstract thought as pure mathematics, may 
 be called humane truth. It is particularly true 
 of ethical, spiritual, and religious. In ethics, 
 for example, Aristotle's definition of virtue 
 recognises this amenableness of theory to prac- 
 tical life when it says virtue is to be determined 
 not only 'by reason,' but also 'in the way the 
 man of practical reason would determine it.' 1 
 Of such a spiritual thing as love we all say with 
 Browning: 'And live be a proof of this.' 2 But 
 nowhere is this appeal to experience more im- 
 portant than in religion, and above all in the 
 Christian religion. Certainly any intelligent 
 Christian faith should be ready to meet the 
 challenge of the reason, and not afraid to meet 
 its criticisms on their own ground. Still, the 
 crucial evidence is found in the experience of 
 the life lived in fellowship with Christ. The 
 man who has this can indeed believe, and as 
 he does he says with St. Paul: 'I know' — not 
 merely I know about — 'in whom I have be- 
 
 1 Nic. Eth., ii. 6, 15. 2 By the Fireside, xxxix. 
 
io THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 lieved.' He is Bernard's Expertus potest cre- 
 dere. No doubt, all this may be assumed 
 unwarrantably and even falsely. A shallow 
 man and, still worse, a hypocrite may profess 
 an experience which he does not really know. 
 Men may plagiarise in religion as well as in 
 literature. Still, beyond all question, what is 
 called Christian experience — in repentance, 
 faith, prayer, obedience, and the peace and joy 
 and strength of a new life — is a real document 
 humain, and it rightly gives an assurance which 
 nothing merely external can do. The Chris- 
 tian's is essentially a creed of experience. 
 
 This has been often said, and need not here 
 be reiterated at length. Yet — and here is the 
 subject of these chapters — is there not another 
 side to this? 
 
 Experience is a large word. If you appeal to 
 life for confirmation of your faith, to life you 
 must go. And you must go to it as a whole, 
 not to some selected portion of it. You must 
 go to it open-eyed, wearing no theological or 
 ecclesiastical blinkers which shut off large areas 
 of unwelcome facts, but viewing the world as 
 
INTRODUCTORY n 
 
 it is, and all of it. Nothing short of this is 
 fully and fairly to appeal to experience. But 
 when we do this, does it not give us pause? 
 Does it not chill rather than confirm our faith? 
 Can it be fairly said that the facts of life — 
 not of some secluded section of it within the 
 cloister of the pious soul's experience but of 
 the world, 'which is the world of all of us' — 
 plainly support the assertions, the assurances, 
 the hopes and the ideals of faith? When the 
 receptive and candid mind goes forth to all the 
 data of history and life, it is often hard for 
 such faith to maintain its position. Yet this is 
 not a going out to what is false, still less to 
 what is sinful. It is a going out simply to the 
 complete world of experience, outward and in- 
 ward. There, to many a man, much of what 
 Christian thought and feeling have found and 
 nurtured in their concentration upon the area 
 of religion becomes remote, foreign, out of 
 place. It is like something which we read 
 about in the life, say, of Tibet. It may be true 
 in its world, but it seems hardly real in the 
 world. At most it is something which, as a 
 
12 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 modern play phrases it, 'one meets with no- 
 where except in Judaea.' l 
 
 Here is a problem for faith which deserves 
 far more attention than the more open assaults 
 upon belief which come from unbelieving think- 
 ers and writers. Such men rise up periodically, 
 and have done so from the days of Celsus on- 
 ward. Hardly any of these attacks have long 
 survived — though sometimes they have inter- 
 estingly revived — but they produce a sensation 
 and, perhaps, a panic for a while. Young men 
 alarm their mothers by airing the latest ra- 
 tionalism, and worthy divines prepare sermons 
 to refute it. After a little it dies away, and 
 the world waits for the next clever man to 
 arise to show it a better faith than that of 
 the apostles. Christianity has had many such 
 'crises' of faith, and will have many more. But 
 the most real and the permanent problem of 
 faith is not here. It is not created by some 
 clever critic. It arises out of life itself. It is 
 that, as has been already indicated, the facts 
 of life, looked at broadly and candidly, seem 
 
 1 Maeterlinck's Mary Magdalene, Act i. sc. iv. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 to discredit faith or, at least, do not support 
 its message. The gospel, in a word, does not 
 echo in the actual world. This is a genuine 
 problem. It is, in a peculiar degree, the danger 
 which assails faith in what is really its most 
 trying period — that of mid-life. Preachers 
 and others often speak as if youth were the 
 dangerous time of life. This is a mistake. 
 There is a saving idealism about even the 
 errors of youth — except in abnormal cases — 
 which preserves it from the worst dangers. 
 The 'middle watch' is the most trying time. 
 To change the figure, human life is an isthmus 
 between two eternal seas. It is when we are 
 in the valley midway, 'inland far,' — having lost 
 
 'sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither,' 1 
 
 and not yet having borne in upon our ears the 
 solemn boom of the great ocean whither we 
 go — that faith, and character too, are most 
 surely tested. And one great element in this 
 trial is just, as I have been saying, that all 
 
 1 Wordsworth, Ode on the Intimation of Immortality, ix. 
 
i 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 around us seems to respond so little to the 
 message of the gospel with which the whole 
 world seemed to be so thrillingly alive as we 
 first stepped out upon the way of life. 
 
 Now it will at once be said by at least some 
 readers that all this arises from a poor religious 
 life lived at a low and Sadducean temperature. 
 It is easy to say that. And it has in it the 
 reminder of a grave truth. Nothing is more 
 true than that a man's life reacts on his belief. 
 In particular, a man who is deliberately and 
 habitually so living that he does not want the 
 law and the gospel of Christ to become too 
 plain and authoritative to him, will succeed in 
 making much of faith at least disputable and 
 so dismissable. He may talk much about his 
 'honest doubts,' but the root of that man's 
 unfaith is his dishonest sins. In all wilful 
 sinning there is an element of the morally dis- 
 honest. Sin is never the result of really faith- 
 ful thinking and faithful living. And this 
 affects all our belief. Certainly it is not pos- 
 sible for one who is deliberately living a bad 
 life, and means to go on living it, to be even 
 
INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 intellectually sincere towards the truth that is in 
 Jesus Christ. All this is gravely true, and we 
 cannot be too gravely reminded of it. At the 
 same time, it were, I think, quite an unjust 
 thing to ascribe the problem for faith of which 
 I have been speaking only to sinful or Saddu- 
 cean character and life. It may arise, and 
 often does arise, from very different reasons, 
 of which I shall mention two. It may arise 
 from not any kind of dishonesty, but, on the 
 contrary, the very desire to know just the truth 
 of things. Or it may arise from not any 
 Sadducean indifference, but, on the contrary, a 
 deepening earnestness about the questions of 
 faith, and the feeling that these grow more 
 difficult as they grow more real. Let us look 
 for a moment at each of these. 
 
 I say first, the problem may arise from the 
 desire to know the truth. The one thing a man 
 of character and seriousness wants in religion 
 is just the truth. Here again there is a differ- 
 ence as compared with youth. When youth 
 first comes in contact with the world, what it 
 desires and even needs is less the actual than 
 
1 6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 the ideal. Our mother, Nature, means that 
 we should be educated first by the generous 
 illusions of life, and a premature wisdom about 
 life's realities is alien to her wise and gentle 
 leading. This applies to many things and, 
 among them, even to faith. When we are 
 young, then, Browning's way of putting Chris- 
 tianity is the right way: 'Has it your vote to 
 be true?' 1 But with the grown man it is differ- 
 ent. He will vote only for what experience 
 shows to be solid. He is interested not in a 
 mere ideal but in the actual. The most helpful 
 thing that can be said or done to many a youth 
 of twenty is just to slap him on the back and 
 tell him life is a splendid thing; but you can 
 neither do the one nor merely say the other 
 to a man of forty, whose experience has told 
 him a chequered tale not easily harmonised 
 with the simpler ideals of faith. This some- 
 times develops in men a hardened and worldly 
 cynicism — a deadly mental and moral sin which 
 has the virtue neither of youth nor of age. 
 
 1 I recall how effectively Professor Henry Drummond used 
 to ask this in his famous addresses to students. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 But, on its good side, it develops rather the 
 temper which knows nothing is of real use that 
 is not really true. Goethe says that 'error may 
 be quite right so long as we are young, but we 
 must not carry it on with us into age,' 1 And 
 it is because of what seems the truth of the 
 actual facts of the world and of life that a 
 problem for faith is raised in the mind of so 
 many who have got to the stage of this maxim 
 and whom it were most unjust to denounce as 
 either Sadducean or of dubious morals. This 
 is one reason why people in middle life do 
 not talk of religion as readily as the young 
 or the old do. 
 
 But further: faith, I said, becomes more 
 difficult as life grows more real. So long as 
 a man's faith is something still merely on the 
 surface of his life — by which I mean not that 
 it is therefore insincere, but that it has not 
 yet had occasion to be wrought, through trial 
 and discipline, into the deeper parts of his 
 nature — he may believe facilely. But it is not 
 a facile thing to believe when a man is face 
 
 1 Maximen und Reflexionen, 72. 
 
i8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 to face with the real issues of life and death. 
 Faith then, too, becomes a matter of life or 
 death for the soul. There is a whole world 
 of difference between the question as it presents 
 itself to the budding student of philosophy who 
 sits with his books about him and begins to 
 write an essay on the credibility of something 
 in the Christian faith, and to whom to give 
 up this or that is merely to revise an opinion; 
 and, on the other hand, the question present- 
 ing itself to a man who sits with his ruined life 
 about him or his dearest lying cold in the coffin, 
 and to whom the message of Christ is the only 
 alternative to desperation and despair. As the 
 lines of Clough — a man typical of much that 
 has been said in this chapter — truly put it: — 
 
 1 'Tis not the calm and peaceful breast 
 That sees or reads the problem true, 
 They only know on whom 't has prest 
 Too hard to hope to solve it too.' 1 
 
 This is what I mean when I say that belief 
 
 becomes not easier as life becomes more real. 
 
 Thus, while admitting a grave element of 
 
 1 Miscellaneous Poems: 'In the Depths.' 
 
INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 truth in the connection between unbelief and 
 sinful or Sadducean life, we cannot, I think, 
 accept this as wholly meeting our problem, 
 which I therefore restate. Is faith valid in 
 face of all the facts of experience? Granted 
 that a case, even a sincere and strong case, can 
 be made for what is described as the fact of 
 Christ, and for the great intellectual, moral, 
 and spiritual meanings which it contains, yet 
 the thought will occur to the experienced and 
 critical mind that this is specialisation and is ex- 
 posed to the dangers of specialisation. There 
 are other facts which must be taken into ac- 
 count. And just as the scientific materialist 
 should take more account than he usually does 
 of what Christ is, so the Christian believer 
 must not fail to reckon with the facts in nature 
 and in the world, which are very different from 
 and apparently alien to the religious data on 
 which he is apt so largely to dwell. In short, 
 the danger of all specialisation — religious or 
 non-religious — is to mistake the thing we are 
 working at for everything; and the cure for it 
 is to remember that experience is a unity and 
 
20 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 truth a seamless garment, and the only way 
 rightly to see life is (in Matthew Arnold's 
 phrase on Sophocles) to see it steadily and see 
 it whole. It is when they thus bring their faith 
 out into life and face to face with all life's 
 facts that many minds feel the shock of a great 
 contradiction. There are many others, no 
 doubt, who do not feel it; perhaps because in 
 some cases they know God too deeply, and in 
 others they do not know life deeply enough. 
 Yet other minds, again, neither saintly nor 
 shallow, seem able, when confronted with 
 things that withstand faith, to slip past them 
 as running water by a stone in its course, or to 
 hop from a realm of faith to a realm of facts 
 as occasion requires. But, as Plato says, phi- 
 losophy 'thinks things together.' And, in this 
 sense, all people are truly philosophers who 
 are really living life and really applying their 
 life to their religion and their religion to their 
 life — especially the darker and more difficult 
 parts of their experience. Maxim Gorky in 
 one of his books says that 'every one who has 
 a struggle to sustain in life' is a philosopher; 
 
INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 indeed, 'more of a philosopher than Schopen- 
 hauer himself, for abstract thought can never 
 be cast into such a correct and vivid plastic 
 form as that in which is expressed the thought 
 born directly out of suffering.' 1 It is those 
 whose thoughts are born in this fashion who, 
 when they bring the great assertions and prom- 
 ises of Christian faith face to face with what 
 life has meant for them, feel the shock. It is 
 not that they adopt or profess positive un- 
 belief; but faith seems to come to a stop. 
 What such persons would say is, I think, some- 
 thing such as this : 'We do not — or at least we 
 would not — deny Christ; but it is impossible 
 to ask us to deny the facts of life. We even 
 desire a religious synthesis of the world, but 
 it must be one not of some selected phenomena 
 in it, but of the world as it actually is and — 
 so far as we may use the expression — the 
 world as a whole. We seek to have life 
 illumined by faith, but it must really be life 
 as we experience it which is so illumined, not 
 some mere section of it seen under artificial 
 
 1 Varenka Olesowa, i. si. 
 
22 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 light. We want to learn how to live and die, 
 but not in a way which shuts its eyes to what 
 life and death really are for men.' In words 
 such as these might those of whom I am think- 
 ing speak for themselves. Their attitude of 
 mind is surely a most honest one. It is — at 
 least for many — not only an honest but the 
 inevitable attitude. Wordsworth speaks of 
 
 'this very world which is the world 
 Of all of us — the place where, in the end, 
 We find our happiness, or not at all.' 1 
 
 What these lines say of happiness may be said, 
 and not less truly, of faith. It is in 'this very 
 world,' with the experience of it we have in 
 our life, that we must find our faith. It is 
 here 'or not at all.' 
 
 This then is what we shall discuss in the 
 following chapters — namely, Christian faith, 
 not as considered by itself, but as standing 
 amid and apparently against the facts of life 
 and of the world. It is, of course, an almost 
 limitless subject, for the facts of life and of 
 the world are vast, and experience of them 
 
 1 French Revolution. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 23 
 
 covers everything. Therefore we can deal with 
 only a few questions which the general problem 
 raises. But this really is no loss. I think many 
 will agree that one thing about life as it goes 
 on is that the questions in it that really matter 
 are found, after all, to be comparatively few. 
 A great many things which used to seem to us 
 to matter tremendously now are seen to be 
 unimportant, or about them one is content to 
 be agnostic, as in many things even the Chris- 
 tian must be; the real questions are now more 
 real, but they are few. If in these pages we 
 can touch only a few questions, I shall try to 
 select those few which are the most real. We 
 need not select them in any too formal plan. 
 The most natural way to begin is, I think, to 
 consider generally what questions are raised 
 in the mind in this connection when we look 
 round the face of the world; thereafter we 
 shall as far as possible let each subject suggest 
 to us the next. This is the way in which we 
 think about the problems of life in the actual 
 business of living, and I hope one may keep 
 in touch with the living of life even in the 
 
 writing of a book. 
 3 
 
I 
 
 THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 
 
'The keener insight of the New Age and a more 
 accurate acquaintance with the laws which govern 
 alike our human life and Nature, make it quite clear 
 that neither in the way of love nor in that of justice 
 does Reality endorse our ethical demands. Nature's 
 indifference to man's welfare is appalling, yet un- 
 mistakable; and it is becoming increasingly plain that 
 every attempt to shape our human world into a king- 
 dom of justice and love proves lamentably inadequate 
 and meets with restrictions at every turn.' 
 
 RUDOLF EUCKEN. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 
 
 The first and most general problem which 
 arises out of the facts of experience to con- 
 front and seemingly contradict faith is just that 
 this world on the face of it, is such a strange 
 and difficult place in which to believe the gos- 
 pel. Nature and life seem to tell a very differ- 
 ent tale about their Author than that which 
 we are told in church about our Father in 
 heaven. 
 
 There is, of course, a prior question as to 
 whether they tell of any Author at all. But 
 life is short and books should not be long; so 
 I must be allowed here to postulate the exist- 
 ence of God. The idea that evolution has 
 made this postulate no longer tenable or neces- 
 sary is now seen to be an entire fallacy. Not 
 many decades ago orthodox religion was in 
 
 27 
 
28 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 something of a panic about this. Bishops could 
 hardly go to bed for fear of the apparition 
 (as somebody's humorous pen put it) of 'an 
 extraordinarily intelligent ape or an unusually 
 hairy man,' and divines could not pass a chem- 
 ist's shop without the apprehensive thought of 
 some atheistically potent atom which might dis- 
 pense with the Creator. Such alarms do not 
 now perturb the slumbers even of a curate 
 nor the perambulations of the humblest local 
 preacher. We all see now that 'God is not 
 less God, nor the creative energy less creative, 
 because we are led to suppose that a lengthy 
 instead of a sudden method was employed in 
 the production of the Cosmos.' 1 Evolution, 
 that is to say — and it is a commonplace to say 
 it — is a process, not a cause; it is a 'history,' 2 
 which needs an Author as much as does the 
 story described in the first chapter of the Book 
 of Genesis. For that this cosmos of reason 
 and beauty has been evolved through the 
 chances of an infinite series of molecular vari- 
 
 1 J. A. Symonds's Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, p. 10. 
 
 2 Huxley's own word for it. 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 29 
 
 ations is exactly as credible as that if a box 
 of printer's type were shaken about in the dark 
 for a very long time there might result a Ham- 
 let or a Paradise Lost. The difficulty for faith 
 about the facts of this world is not of this 
 kind — not, at any rate, with straight and sen- 
 sible minds. 
 
 It is a moral rather than a merely logical 
 problem, and may be stated thus. Here is 
 religion, professing to come to us in God's 
 name and telling us what are the things of 
 transcendent importance in faith and life. And 
 here is the world — God's world, surely — which 
 seems utterly indifferent to these things. Na- 
 ture takes simply no notice of the spiritual and 
 ethical interests which, according to religion, 
 are the supreme things in God and for man. 
 It does not seem to exist in any connection 
 with them. Yet this is the world in which man 
 lives, and this nature he to at least some degree 
 shares. There is an interesting problem here, 
 and one which, in some respects, is a very diffi- 
 cult one. This chapter will merely touch on 
 its more general aspects; its features of special 
 
30 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 difficulty must be treated more fully in sub- 
 sequent chapters. 
 
 It is well to begin from the beginning, so I 
 shall first state this topic as it arises out of the 
 mere existence of things in the natural world. 
 This is expressed in lively fashion in the fol- 
 lowing passage from one of Walter Bagehot's 
 stimulating essays: — 
 
 'Every one who has religious ideas must have 
 been puzzled by what we may call the irrelevance 
 of creation to his religion. We find ourselves 
 lodged in a vast theatre, in which a ceaseless action, 
 a perpetual shifting of scenes, an unresting life, is 
 going forward; and that life seems physical, im- 
 moral, having no relation to what our souls tell us 
 to be great and good, to what religion says is the 
 design of all things. Especially when we see any 
 new objects or scenes or countries we feel this. 
 Look at a great tropical plant, with large leaves 
 stretching everywhere, and great stalks branching 
 out on all sides; with a big beetle on a leaf and a 
 humming-bird on a branch, and an ugly lizard just 
 below. What has such an object to do with us, 
 with anything we can conceive or hope or imagine ? 
 What could it be created for, if creation has a moral 
 end and object? Or go into a gravel-pit or stone- 
 quarry; you see there a vast accumulation of dull 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 31 
 
 matter, yellow or grey, and you ask, involuntarily 
 and of necessity, why is all this waste, and irrele- 
 vant production, as it would seem, of material? 
 Can anything seem more stupid than a big stone as 
 a big stone, than gravel for gravel's sake? What 
 is the use of such cumbrous, inexpressive objects in 
 a world where there are minds to be filled, imagi- 
 nations to be aroused, and souls to be saved?' 1 
 
 I have quoted this at length because it would 
 be a pity to break in on Bagehot's vivacious 
 sentences; but the problem it presents is one 
 we need not feel too gravely. After all, where 
 is this 'irrelevant world' of 'inexpressive ob- 
 jects' which has nothing to do 'with us' or 'with 
 anything we can conceive or hope or imagine' ? 
 It exists only in the mind of the doctrinaire. 
 The real world has everything to do with us 
 and with what we can conceive and hope and 
 imagine. What but this is the meaning of 
 science and of art? Surely things are shot 
 through with reason, and often with beauty 
 too. 'How exquisitely,' as Wordsworth says, 
 
 'the external world is fitted to the mind." 2 
 
 1 Literary Studies, iii. (essay on 'The Ignorance of Man'). 
 
 2 The Excursion: preface. 
 
32 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 In short, there is no such thing as 'dull matter.' 
 There may be dull men. There is something 
 'more stupid than a big stone as a big stone/ 
 and that is the mind of Peter Bell, to whom a 
 big stone exists only as a big stone and 'nothing 
 more.' Tennyson's lines, addressed to not 
 anything so important as 'a great tropical 
 plant' but merely to a 'little flower,' are nearer 
 to the truth of things: — 
 
 'Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is.' 
 
 There is more philosophy here than in asking 
 'What has such an object to do with us? I do 
 not think that I need to dwell on this. I trust 
 that, despite tropical plants, however great 
 their stalks, despite humming-birds and even 
 beetles, despite pits and quarries, yea, despite 
 gravel itself, we may yet hold fast the faith. 
 The problem, however, is more real, and 
 must be treated more seriously when we look 
 at the operations of the natural world. It is 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 33 
 
 indeed not easy to perceive there any law or 
 order which proceeds from the God of whose 
 character Christian faith tells us in Christ. 
 This is a rational world, but it is not plainly 
 a moral world — still less a world illustrating 
 the high ethical and spiritual laws of the gos- 
 pel. The processes of nature seem to have 
 nothing to do with considerations of morality, 
 while its whole dominating principle of evolu- 
 tion through a struggle for existence is ap- 
 parently the very negation of the great spiritual 
 principle of self-sacrifice. It is well known 
 how emphatically Huxley asserted this in a 
 notable Romanes lecture. 'It is impossible,' 
 he said, 'to look the world in the face, and 
 bring the course of nature into harmony with 
 even the elementary requirements of the ethical 
 ideal of the just and the good.' Indeed, 'the 
 cosmic process,' he goes on to declare, 'has no 
 kind of relation to moral ends.' 1 There is a 
 problem here which must be patent to every 
 observant mind. 
 
 1 Evolution and Ethics (in Collected Essays by T. H. Hux- 
 ley, ix. ii.). 
 
34 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 It is generally admitted that Huxley's state- 
 ment of it is too one-sided, i There is even in 
 the struggle for existence another side, in which 
 are developed the altruistic qualities of 'the 
 love of mates, parental sacrifice, filial affection, 
 the kindliness of kindred, gregariousness, so- 
 ciality, co-operation, mutual aid, and altruism 
 generally.' 1 The business of evolution is love 
 as well as hunger, and calls out self-sacrifice as 
 well as self-preservation. The exaggeration 
 of such a statement as that 'the cosmic process 
 has no kind of relation to moral ends' is further 
 apparent from the very fact that we are con- 
 sidering this problem at all. For who or what 
 is it that thus condemns the morality of nature? 
 It is man, who is himself a product of nature 
 and the crown of its evolution. Surely we 
 cannot call that process altogether immoral 
 which culminates in a protest in the name of 
 morality. How does a non-moral system 
 evolve a moral product? How — to put it 
 more personally — did a non-ethical cosmic 
 process develop so ethically sensitive a Ro- 
 manes lecturer? 
 
 1 Darwinism and Human Life, by J. Arthur Thomson, p. 88. 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 35 
 
 So this sweeping arraignment of nature must 
 be taken with some qualification. It is really 
 an arraignment of nature with part left out, 
 and that part, in the end, its full and final 
 development in man. But if nature is to be 
 judged it must be judged as a whole, and 
 further, its lower stages interpreted in terms 
 of the later and higher. The whole of nature 
 includes morality in germ from an early stage, 
 and certainly, in its later stage, includes human 
 morality as really as the law of gravitation or 
 the positively immoral struggle for existence. 
 Viewing thus nature as a whole, we find not 
 simply that it is non-moral, and certainly not 
 that it has 'no kind of relation to moral ends,' 
 which is palpably not the fact, but that it is 
 in part non-moral and in part moral. This, 
 of course, Huxley admits — though he calls 
 only the non-moral part 'nature' and, for no 
 apparent reason, calls morality 'an artificial 
 world' which man has built up within the other 
 — and it is the opposition between them which 
 is his problem, in which he finds 'the roots of 
 pessimism.' Now certainly if the non-moral 
 part of nature which we see so largely in the 
 
36 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 physical world and the moral part of it which 
 wc see in man are merely set against one an- 
 other, and the one part held to have no re- 
 lation to the other, a dualism is declared which 
 it is hard for faith to meet — not merely Chris- 
 tian faith, but faith of any kind in a rational 
 and moral cosmos; moreover, since man's re- 
 sistance to the physical powers of the universe 
 is futile, it would seem the only creed is an 
 unhoping stoicism. But are we driven to this 
 dualism and this pessimism? Is it not possible 
 to discern a deeper unity which reconciles the 
 difference and relieves the despair? 
 
 Let us try to answer this question not so 
 much by abstract philosophy about the world — 
 really one can philosophise in an abstract way 
 about the world to any conclusion — as by that 
 appeal to experience of which so much was 
 said in the opening chapter. Each of us finds 
 the problem in miniature in the area of his 
 own life. We are all denizens of this dual 
 world — a world, on the one hand, of moral 
 principles and ideals, and, on the other, of 
 conditions and forces about us which are in- 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD ^7 
 
 different and hostile to these spiritual elements. 
 Is this, in actual experience, merely a dualism, 
 the one part of which has no relation to the 
 other but that of indifference or alienation? 
 I think we have only to look at the making 
 of human character to see an answer to that 
 question. The moral character of man is the 
 unity which is deeper than this difference, and 
 to it both aspects of this dual world contribute. 
 For such character is the fruit not simply of 
 spiritual instincts and ideals, or of these oper- 
 ating in an ethical vacuum; it is the fruit of 
 these rising up out of and maintaining them- 
 selves against the neutrality and even the an- 
 tagonism of a non-moral world. Whatever 
 morality may mean for other beings and in 
 other spheres, of which we know nothing, cer- 
 tainly 'for beings such as we are and in such 
 a world as this' (to use Butler's phraseology) 
 the moral life means a moral choice and a 
 moral conflict. And a moral choice means a 
 morally neutral world in which to choose, and 
 a moral conflict means even a hostile element 
 in the world against which the moral ideal is 
 
38 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 to be asserted. So the ethical indifference of 
 the natural world and even its unethical proc- 
 esses simply mean that nature will not bribe 
 or coerce man's moral choice, and further, will 
 test it. Consider how moral character would 
 be practically meaningless if it were otherwise. 
 If nature were insistently and immediately 
 moral, we should not be. Let us imagine a 
 world whose natural laws and processes were 
 made palpably and invariably subject to moral 
 canons, and observe the result. If the rain fell 
 on the land only of the virtuous farmer, if 
 calamity should depend on character, if gravi- 
 tation should involve the sinner but exempt 
 the saint from injury, then virtue would be 
 prudential rather than moral, and goodness 
 the saving less of the soul than of the skin. 
 Morality, I repeat, is morality for man, only 
 if it be a choice and a conflict; and the func- 
 tion of the non-moral and, in places, anti-moral 
 processes of nature is just that, in face of 
 these, the moral consciousness may choose and 
 may contend even against odds, and so be 
 worthy of the name of moral. 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 39 
 
 Thus if we view nature as a whole, includ- 
 ing therein the moral life of man, and interpret 
 its lower stages in the light of its higher, we 
 find we must revise our characterisation, of it 
 as having no relation to moral ends. And to 
 interpret the lower in connection with the 
 higher is surely the only right way. Life — 
 the life of nature as a whole or of any or- 
 ganism in nature — is a unity. Its meaning is 
 to be found in a synthesis, not merely in the 
 analysis of sections taken separately. And th« 
 synthesis is not found in the incomplete but in 
 the more complete — in the flower, not in the 
 seed. Therefore it is no fond anthropocentric 
 egotism but a true principle for either science 
 or philosophy to find the key to all the prob- 
 lems of nature — and certainly its deeper and 
 more spiritual enigmas, such as this now be- 
 fore us — in the moral self-consciousness of 
 man which is the crown of nature. When we 
 do this we find 'nature' even in its limited 
 physical sense to be part of the stuff from 
 which man's moral life is made. The cosmic 
 process is not ethical, but it is used for ethical 
 
4 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 ends. It is not the theatre only but also the 
 needful, though unconscious, minister of the 
 making of the moral life. 
 
 All this is not merely of speculative interest; 
 it is also of practical concern. If our doctrine 
 of the world be that nature is hopelessly and 
 finally non-ethical, and that it has 'no kind of 
 relation' to man's moral life, then it is im- 
 possible not to be chilled in all our moral out- 
 look and endeavour. We must feel that man 
 has been placed in the wrong world for his 
 spiritual ideals. Even when this does not lead 
 us to give up the moral ideal altogether — as, 
 , perhaps, logically it should — certainly it dis- 
 courages anything like a vigorous and victori- 
 ous moral faith. We fall into the view of life 
 in relation to nature pictured in Matthew Ar- 
 nold's Empedocles in Etna, where man's aims 
 and efforts are met at every turn by an indiffer- 
 ent and ever opposing world which goes 
 straight on with its life regardless of his, and 
 the conclusion is that we must not seek too 
 much, though, since some 'moderate bliss' is 
 attainable, we need not wholly despair. It is 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 41 
 
 of happiness the poet is speaking, but the con- 
 clusion is still more easily reached as regards 
 the spiritual ambition and endeavour. But this 
 is not the wrong world for man's highest life. 
 Just because it is a difficult world for his spir- 
 itual ideals, it is the very world for moral choice 
 and moral conflict and moral character. Poets 
 more virile than Arnold — who seemed to be 
 able to get good from nature only in certain 
 kinds of weather — know this; Browning and 
 still more George Meredith know it is through 
 this antagonism that 'flesh unto spirit must 
 grow.' And so I say again man is not in the 
 wrong world for his spiritual ideals. He is in a 
 world demanding moral choice and moral con- 
 flict, and that is the very world for moral char- 
 acter. 'Rephan' — the sphere void of effort and 
 antagonism — is a poorer home for us than 
 earth with all its struggles. 1 To sum it up in 
 a word, the moral life for us must be what- 
 ought-to-be differentiated from and maintained 
 against the what-is; and thus nature — the great 
 what-is — has its place, and its necessary place, 
 
 1 Vide Browning's poem with this title in Asolando. 
 
42 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 in the ethical scheme of the life which is moral 
 just because it is something more than natural. 
 Let us then not see in the contradiction between 
 the moral ideal within and the non-moral actual 
 without merely (as Huxley does in the lecture 
 already mentioned) 'the roots of pessimism;' 
 let us find rather the conditions of morality 
 itself. 
 
 Hitherto I have been speaking only of the 
 physical world of nature. But there is also 
 round about us a spiritual world r by which I 
 do not in the least mean here anything which 
 theology may mean by that (or the Psychical 
 Society may mean), but only that we live amid 
 a system of forces operating upon life and 
 character and destiny other than merely the 
 play of winds and waves. There are powers 
 round about human life environing man with 
 circumstance, meeting him with hap, following 
 up his acts with consequences, in the end seal- 
 ing his character and fate. What are we to 
 think of this world in which our lives work out 
 their lot? Is it, too, not a non-moral system 
 in which it is impossible to read anything but 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 43 
 
 chance and fate — a chance and fate far re- 
 moved indeed from the moral providence and 
 fatherhood of the God revealed in Jesus 
 Christ? This subject we shall discuss in the 
 subsequent chapters of the book; and — for 
 reasons I shall give presently before closing 
 this chapter — I propose to discuss it not gen- 
 erally but rather by taking up specific aspects 
 of life where the problem is most distinct and 
 acute. Meanwhile I shall make one general 
 remark, and illustrate it with a brief reference 
 to the witness of the greatest name in literature. 
 The general remark is that, just as we have 
 seen that nature must not in every phenomenon 
 remind us of moral laws and insist upon our 
 obedience of them, so life must not do so in 
 every incident. Therefore it is not any valid 
 argument against the moral order of life if 
 we find when we look at isolated incidents 
 (as most works of fiction do) that there is 
 little moral purpose to be seen, but only hap 
 and fate. It is, however, different when we 
 look at long stretches of life and at experience 
 as a whole. This difference is apparent even 
 
44 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 in literature. Nothing is more noticeable in 
 modern literature than that it is the greatest 
 writers, and those who treat life at length and 
 on the grand scale, who most of all at least 
 leave room in their presentation for deeper 
 thoughts than that of our existence as mean- 
 ingless and vain. As an example of this I name 
 Tolstoy, not in his hortatory tracts — which, to 
 me at least, are unconvincing and tiresome — 
 but in such complete and superb canvases as 
 Anna Karenina or War and Peace. But let us, 
 without discussing modern writers, turn to the 
 only greatest. 
 
 The unique and incomparable authority of 
 Shakespere for our present purpose arises not 
 merely from his supreme pre-eminence on any 
 matter of human life and character (except, it 
 must be said, the life and character which are 
 distinctively Christian), but also and particu- 
 larly because he is so absolutely free from any 
 preconceived moral or theological theory of 
 life. He is the perfect secularist, simply seeing 
 what men do and are, and setting down the 
 facts of life. It is not for nothing that we 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 45 
 
 cannot tell what Shakespere's religion was, or 
 if he had any; 1 if we could, 'the less Shake- 
 spere he.' As has been said of him by the most 
 critically just and the most morally discerning 
 of his modern interpreters : — 
 
 'He looked at this "secular" world most intently 
 and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but 
 conclude, with entire fidelity, without the wish to 
 enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essential, 
 without regard to any one's hopes, fears, or beliefs. 
 His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a 
 mind of extraordinary power; and if, as a private 
 person, he had a religious faith, his tragic view can 
 hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, 
 but must have been included in it, and supple- 
 mented, not abolished, by additional ideas.' 2 
 
 What then is Shakespere's 'tragic view' — 
 his view, that is to say, of human hap and fate 
 in especially the darker aspects of life? No 
 more carefully weighed and yet also more pro- 
 foundly sympathetic answer to this question 
 has been given than in the book from which 
 
 1 Nothing can be more futile than the attempt to build up 
 a theory of Shakespere's personal faith from sayings of the 
 characters of his plays. 
 
 2 A. C. Bradley's Shakesperian Tragedy, p. 25. 
 
46' THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 I have just quoted. I shall do better to quote 
 from it further than attempt any statement of 
 my own. Mr. Bradley finds Shakespere's 
 tragic world to be, on the one hand, 'some- 
 thing piteous, fearful, and mysterious;' yet, on 
 the other, 'it does not leave us crushed, re- 
 bellious, or desperate.' From this it seems 
 that the ultimate power revealed therein is not 
 a moral power in the sense of one always just 
 or benevolent; yet neither is it 'a face, whether 
 malicious or cruel, or blind or indifferent to 
 human happiness or goodness,' and it is cer- 
 tainly not a fate in the sense of 'a blank ne- 
 cessity, totally regardless alike of human weal 
 and of the difference between right and wrong.' 
 It shows other characteristics 'which would 
 lead us to describe it as a moral order and its 
 necessity as a moral necessity.' It shows itself 
 'akin to good and alien from evil.' It traces 
 suffering and death to sin. It makes evil to 
 work out everywhere 'as something negative, 
 barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of 
 death.' And when there comes tragic calamity, 
 'the suffering: and death arise from collision, 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 47 
 
 not with a fate or blank power, but with a 
 moral power.' With all this there is — what 
 Shakespere again and again impresses on us, 
 but not more often or more deeply than life 
 itself does — an appalling 'waste' of good. Of 
 this, which is the very essence of the tragic 
 view of life, no solution is offered, unless by 
 the suggestion, undefined but irresistible, at the 
 close of the greatest tragedies — Hamlet and 
 King Lear — that this tragic world is no final 
 or complete reality, and that even its victims 
 vanish (as Mr. Bradley finely puts it) 'not into 
 nothingness but into freedom.' 1 
 
 Such then, in the fewest words, is the 'tragic' 
 world of human life as seen by the sanest, 
 surest, and most searching eyes ever bent upon 
 its multiplex mystery. Some readers of the 
 foregoing paragraph may wonder that I have 
 made so much of this. But any one who has 
 not merely read Shakespere's plays or ana- 
 lysed his dramatis persona, but tried, in some 
 degree, to grasp as a whole the hardly less 
 
 1 Shakesperian Tragedy, pp. 25, 26, 30, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38. 
 Also, on the last point, pp. 322-7, which are pages worthy of 
 their topic. 
 
48 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 than infallibly just vision of life in the drama- 
 tist's mind which is so remarkably detached 
 from all its dramatic work yet surely also so 
 deeply in it all, will understand that it is by 
 no means an unimportant or irrelevant thing 
 to consider what Shakespere found in the world 
 of life to be — the world in which we are asked 
 to believe the gospel. Certainly he did not 
 find it a world which declared the gospel; the 
 world is not meant to do that. But he did 
 not find it a world so morally dead and mean- 
 ingless as practically to make a gospel impos- 
 sible. This, I repeat, is not an irrelevant thing 
 for faith to know. It permits us at least to 
 listen whether there be not a gospel. 
 
 This so-called 'indifferent world' then belies 
 its title. It is not so indifferent as it seems. 
 Its physical phenomena are shot through with 
 reason; its moral neutrality is the school of 
 human character; its life-order adumbrates a 
 moral order even in its tragedy. 
 
 I do not propose to discuss further the gen- 
 eral question of the relation to faith of the 
 world we live in; not that what has been said 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 49 
 
 is a complete argument, but because I believe 
 that the real difficulties which most people feel 
 on this subject are not about life and nature 
 in general but arise out of certain things in 
 the world. To these particular things, then, 
 I shall now turn. They are old problems, and 
 perhaps there is little or nothing new to say 
 upon them. But they present themselves afresh 
 to every thinking mind and call always for re- 
 consideration. It is true that the way of 
 modern thinkers is to pass over these definite 
 questions and to give us disquisitions at large 
 about life and a principle of the universe. I 
 know that exponents of such modern thinkers 
 as Dr. Eucken and M. Bergson regard the dis- 
 cussion of 'the time-worn problems of destiny, 
 freedom, and the mystery of pain and evil' as 
 an out-of-date survival of that 'intellectualism' 
 from which the conceptions of activism and 
 creative evolution have liberated the mind. 1 
 Well, we have all been stimulated by these 
 attractive and invigorating writers, and par- 
 ticularly with the brilliant suggestiveness of the 
 
 1 Eucken and Bergson, by E. Hermann, p. 142. 
 
50 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 idea of revolution creatrice (the value of which 
 as a reaction against a mechanical and ma- 
 terialistic evolutionary doctrine is very highly 
 to be estimated even by those who find some 
 difficulty in M. Bergson's writings in knowing 
 where seductive metaphor ends and solid data 
 begin) ; but, for my humble part, I find, after 
 reading these general philosophical systems, 
 that the difficulties which seem to contradict 
 my faith in the gospel — the real and nameable 
 and concrete difficulties of life — are exactly 
 where they were. Indeed, I often feel that 
 the systematic philosopher knows little of doubt 
 in the real and deadly sense. The truth is — 
 though in saying this I mean no kind of dis- 
 respect to the works of philosophical system — 
 it is so easy to generalise. And there is noth- 
 ing about which to generalise is so easy as just 
 the universe. It is easier to philosophise about 
 the universe than to face this or that difficult 
 thing in it, jut as it is easier to make sapient 
 observations about human nature than justly 
 to judge the character of this or that man or 
 woman. Therefore in these pages I am going 
 
THE INDIFFERENT WORLD 51 
 
 to turn again to these definite 'time-worn prob- 
 lems,' because I am sure it is in these, and not in 
 the world at large, that most men find their 
 faith most really challenged. I give notice of 
 this in order that the reader who prefers to 
 discuss the general philosophy of the universe 
 may at this point — if indeed he has not done 
 it already — throw this book away. 
 
II 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 
 
'If God I sought where He has wrought 
 
 Works lovely and sublime, 
 With eyes of doubt, Pain pointed out 
 
 Earth's misery and crime. 
 
 From summer skies and sunset dyes 
 
 He takes the glory quite, 
 Nor lets me see (so cruel he) 
 
 The splendours of the night. 
 
 Now where is rest, when such a guest 
 
 Me ever followeth, 
 Nor lets me clasp with desperate grasp 
 
 The outstretched hand of Death?' 
 
 M. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 
 
 The two features of the world which at once 
 and palpably seem in conflict with faith in God 
 are suffering, which is in apparent contradic- 
 tion to Divine Love, and sin, which is out of 
 harmony with Divine Righteousness. These 
 are indubitably connected; yet each presents 
 its own problem. That of suffering lies, I be- 
 lieve, more deeply on many minds than they 
 ever tell; it is not the whimperers who feel it 
 most, but patient and quiet souls. It oppressed 
 the grave and reverent mind of Darwin, and 
 seemed to him 'a strong argument against the 
 existence of an intelligent First Cause.' 1 With 
 Darwin the problem was largely that of the 
 meaning of suffering in the animal world; but 
 into that question I do not propose to enter 
 here, not that I do not feel there is a mystery 
 
 1 Life and Letters, ii. 311. 
 
 6 55 
 
56 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 there (which, if by some exaggerated beyond 
 the facts, is by others too easily dismissed), 
 but because it hardly comes within the com- 
 ment of personal experience which is our topic 
 in these pages. The problem of human suffer- 
 ing calls for our consideration as a part of 
 that experience, and it may be enough to deal 
 here only with it. 
 
 Surely it is unnecessary to awaken the mind 
 to realise how real the problem is, and I shall 
 not here indulge in any pictorial description of 
 the spectacle of suffering. A comfortable op- 
 timism may minimise it, pointing out — what 
 doubtless is true — that there are in the world 
 a far greater number of persons happy than 
 there are afflicted; while another type of tem- 
 perament will find all life lying in the dark 
 shadow of suffering, and build up a philosophy 
 of pessimism. It is enough for our present 
 purpose to say, without accepting either ex- 
 treme, that indubitably there is in the world 
 an amount of sorrow and pain and wrong suffi- 
 cient to challenge any facile faith. We hardly 
 dare, indeed, to think how great and how 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 57 
 
 poignant it is. Our imaginations simply skate 
 over the surface ice of human woe. To plumb 
 its nether deeps would break the heart. To 
 pursue the investigation in some cases only a 
 little way is to feel faith becoming chilled to 
 the marrow. Instinctively we shut our eyes 
 to much of this side of life; but when we really 
 look at it, the problem of faith is indisputable. 
 
 It is a problem to discuss which abstractly 
 is of little use. Pain is essentially a personal 
 thing — a thing in the personal experience of 
 individuals. It is not, therefore, the place of 
 pain in the scheme of the universe we must 
 consider, but the place of pain in men's and 
 women's lives. To this, then, I turn at once. 
 I think we shall find things here which, if they 
 do not solve the problem — for that, as I shall 
 say before the chapter closes, something more 
 must be added — at least illuminate it. 
 
 In the first place, we find that suffering in 
 human lives is, in the most real sense, part of 
 these lives. What I mean is this. When a 
 child first encounters the fact of pain he resents 
 it as external, intrusive, unnecessary, alien. He 
 
58 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 does not accept it as any necessary part of life. 
 It is something simply to be avoided. But, 
 gradually as we grow older, we come to see 
 that the element of suffering is more than this. 
 It is not something obstructive among the fac- 
 tors of human life, but is itself one of the very 
 greatest of these factors — an integral element 
 of both physical and moral existence. In phys- 
 ical evolution a painful struggle is the very law 
 of existence; and, in higher forms of life, pain 
 — as I shall say more particularly immediately 
 — plays an even more important part. To ob- 
 ject to pain, therefore, is not to object to some 
 alien thing which has got into life, as a needle 
 gets into the finger; it is to object to the very 
 fibre and tissue of life itself. This may not 
 seem very important; but it is important, for 
 it suggests that our true attitude to this ele- 
 ment in life is not to try to deny it or eliminate 
 it (as the Christian Scientist would do), but 
 to understand what is its function. 
 
 A second thing about pain which experience 
 teaches us to observe makes this clearer. We 
 cannot but discover from life that pain in- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 59 
 
 creases as life becomes higher. This is not 
 what we should expect, and it is certainly not 
 what we should have chosen; but it is so. 
 Nature evolves physically, and highly organ- 
 ised creatures feel more pain than do the lower. 
 It evolves to consciousness and to reason, and 
 man has sufferings to which the brute is a 
 stranger. 1 It evolves spiritually, and the artist 
 and still more the saint can know agonies of 
 soul which the low-minded and worldly man 
 is spared. And one must with reverence add 
 that He whom we call the Perfect Man was 
 the Man of Sorrows, and His crown was a 
 crown of thorns. I do not forget in saying 
 this that, as human life becomes higher, its 
 joy also increases. Still, it is not otherwise 
 than through suffering that these higher joys 
 are reached. And they involve, too, keener 
 pains; if the purest joy of purest souls is love, 
 nothing suffers as love can suffer. This, then, 
 is a second thing which experience shows us 
 about this difficult element in life — it is not 
 
 1 This is one of the facts often forgotten in statements of the 
 problem of suffering in the animal world. 
 
6o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 merely an integral part of life but a part which, 
 far from being discarded, is, on the contrary, 
 developed as life attains to higher things. 
 
 These two things, however true, do not help 
 us much in the problem for faith till they are 
 linked to a third thing about the fact of suffer- 
 ing which experience teaches us even more 
 clearly. Here I must be allowed to start from 
 the premiss — which surely it is not necessary 
 to argue in these pages — that man's true life 
 and destiny are in character. Whenever we 
 accept this — which, one may remark, at once 
 puts out of court all the criticism of pain which 
 is simply the chagrin of a thwarted hedonism 
 — experience at once comes forward to tell us 
 that no one other thing in life carves and 
 chastens the moral character in man as suffer- 
 ing does. This must not be said in any spirit 
 of forced and false asceticism. The idea that 
 pain is a good is a dogma of medievalism or 
 heathenism, and is neither supported by a sane 
 philosophy nor corroborated by experience. 
 What experience tells us is not any theory of 
 pain as good, but the fact of life that. char- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 61 
 
 acter reaches its crown and completion only 
 through the tests of this discipline. No earnest 
 and candid mind can look carefully at life with- 
 out perceiving this, and without recognising 
 that there is nothing which deepens the mind, 
 cleanses the heart, and chastens the whole spir- 
 itual being of man as suffering does — either 
 his own suffering or that of others which he 
 makes his own by sympathy./ Indeed, does not 
 human character seem to need this element in 
 experience if it is to attain its highest? 1 Is 
 it not true that a life — other than a child's — 
 which knew only happiness and sunshine would 
 almost inevitably become an ignoble life? Nie- 
 mand wird ohne Leiden geadelt — without sor- 
 rows no one becomes noble. This is true not 
 only of the more distinctively moral or re- 
 ligious side of character, but also of art and 
 of love. I do not say that suffering always 
 makes the mind or heart or character noble. 
 There are many facts in life which disprove 
 
 1 I recall the late Pastor von Bodelschwink — the founder of 
 the great Colome Bethel (for epileptics and other sufferers) at 
 Bielefeld, Germany, once saying to me in the face of that 
 spectacle of affliction: 'But there is not more than we need.' 
 
62 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 that. In generalising about life one must never 
 let oneself forget that humanity is not an ab- 
 stract generalisation, but is composed of indi- 
 viduals, and that individuals differ. In many 
 cases suffering deadens rather than illumines 
 the mind, and embitters rather than purifies 
 the heart, and even demeans rather than en- 
 nobles the character. Still, this does not alter 
 the broad fact of the great work which this 
 dark element in experience does, as is witnessed 
 to alike by some of the greatest things in lit- 
 erature and some of the deepest things in life. 
 Into the witness of literature on this subject 
 I cannot possibly enter, and shall say of it here 
 only one thing, that it is not by any means con- 
 fined to Christian or even specifically religious 
 writers, but, on the contrary, finds its most 
 notable illustrations in classics written purely 
 from the human and secular standpoint. Look 
 — for but a moment — at the great Greek dram- 
 atists. The problem of suffering is continually 
 before iEschylus and Sophocles and Euripides. 
 They offer no solution of it, but all of them 
 find it — in at least some aspects — both mean- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 63 
 
 ingful and moral. For iEschylus it is pri- 
 marily retributive, but, in addition, it is edu- 
 cative too, and he preaches 'the sure ordinance 
 that by suffering shalt thou learn.' 1 Sophocles 
 — 'who saw life steadily and saw it whole' — 
 is too reasonable to maintain the retribution 
 theory at the expense of facts, and dwells 
 rather on the way in which the mind is en- 
 lightened and the character chastened through 
 discipline and pain; thus, in what is the most 
 appalling case of unmerited suffering in litera- 
 ture, CEdipus is purged of his earlier faults, 
 and is made (in the later play bearing his 
 name) a new man because of all the unspeak- 
 able agony he has had to bear. But Sophocles 
 sees more than this. He sees how human suf- 
 fering is working out wide and great purposes, 
 beyond the sufferer, in history and for hu- 
 manity; thus the martyrdom of Philoctetes is 
 ordained for great ends in Troy, and the sacri- 
 fice of Antigone, whose dying word is that she 
 suffers because she 'feared to cast away the fear 
 of Heaven,' 2 is for the exhibition and vindi- 
 
 1 Agamemnon, 188 sqq. 2 Antigone, 942. 
 
64 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 eating of the law of the higher life. And even 
 Euripides — ( most tragic of poets,' in whose 
 dramas the contending forces of existence are 
 least reconciled — feels the same truth, and in 
 his most tragic pages; even Hecuba, who, 
 amid the dire fate of the Trojan women, can 
 see at first 'nothing, nothing but the rod of 
 mine affliction,' discerns presently how God has 
 'turned us in His hand' and 'all is well' and 
 'our wrong an everlasting splendour.' 2 Thus 
 — though I have insulted so fine a theme by 
 so momentary a glance — do these supreme 
 writers of the old pre-Christian time all find 
 the morality and the meaning that are some- 
 where in the fact of suffering. 
 
 And what literature thus so greatly teaches, 
 how deeply and surely does life confirm, show- 
 ing us one by one that the discipline of sorrow 
 and suffering is just the very thing our moral 
 and spiritual character simply could not have 
 done without. This is not a mere pietism; it 
 is a fact of experience if anything is. The 
 present writer — if he may be pardoned the 
 
 2 Troades, 1240 sqq. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 65 
 
 personal reference— has had it said to him not 
 once or twice but many times, in almost these 
 very words, by persons of widely different 
 characters; and his experience in this is only 
 what any one could give who has had any 
 occasion to come into more intimate contact 
 with human lives. And again and again we 
 may observe it for ourselves. We see how 
 some loss or pain is not a mere negation in 
 our own or other's lives, but is really 
 
 'a part, 
 And that a needful part, in making up 
 The calm existence which is mine when I 
 Am worthy of myself.' 1 
 
 Or we say of it more simply — and the more 
 simply this kind of thing is said the better 2 — 
 with the old psalmist: Tt is good for me that 
 I have been afflicted.' As life goes on, a great 
 many people come to see this in at least their 
 own lives. To see it in the lives of others is 
 
 1 Wordsworth's Prelude, bk. i. 
 
 2 When it is said at length and self-consciously (as in Mr. 
 A. C. Benson's Rod and Staff) it produces a dubious effect on 
 the reader. 
 
66 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 often not so clear; but we may be not meant 
 to hold the key of any life but our own. 
 
 Now, if this be true, what does it mean? It 
 means this at least, that the element of pain 
 and loss in human life is not a meaningless 
 thing, and that, indeed, it is essentially a moral 
 thing. This is really a great position, if we 
 can attain it. The bitterest thing in pain and 
 loss is that it is all mere chance — mere un- 
 meaning accident. It is this, for example, which 
 adds the last bitter drop to the confirmed 
 pessimism of one of the most powerful of liv- 
 ing English novelists. Mr. Hardy is constantly 
 making us feel how by some little trifle — the 
 merest chance or accident — happiness is baffled 
 and the souls and lives of men and women 
 doomed. In some of his outspoken poems he 
 expresses this as a definite view of pain in 
 the world, as in the following lines, entitled 
 'Hap': 
 
 'If but some vengeful god would call to me 
 From out the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing, 
 Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, 
 That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!" 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 67 
 
 Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die, 
 Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; 
 Half eased in that a Powerfuller than I 
 Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. 
 But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, 
 And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? 
 — Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, 
 And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. 
 These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown 
 Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.' 1 
 
 Mr. Hardy is an author whose darkest pages 
 are to be read with a certain respect, for his 
 is not a cheap cynicism but a sincere, if a 
 mordant, unfaith. But I do not think a sonnet 
 such as the above is the true account of the 
 element of suffering in life, when life is looked 
 over in some long stretch — and life cannot be 
 truly seen except in long stretches — or the true 
 echo of what most men feel about their greatest 
 sorrows. The smaller pains and losses of life 
 suggest this thought of mere bad hap. But 
 life's great sorrows and afflictions suggest 
 otherwise. As has been finely said, 'les don- 
 leurs passageres blasphement et accusent le del; 
 
 1 JVessex Poems, p. 7. 
 
68 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 les grandes douleurs n y accusent ni ne blasphe- 
 ment; elles ecoutent.' 1 
 
 This, then, I think is the great comment of 
 experience on the problem of pain — that suf- 
 fering is a meaningful thing, accomplishing 
 moral ends. And this, therefore, is the 
 changed attitude to the problem into which 
 experience leads us — it bids us, instead of criti- 
 cising and complaining, rather listen and learn. 
 
 But our problem is far from solved; indeed 
 it is, at its most crucial point, not yet touched. 
 For there is another broad comment of ex- 
 perience upon pain, and this intensifies instead 
 of relieving the enigma. 
 
 Nothing is more apparent to the observant 
 and sympathetic mind in connection with human 
 suffering than its often sheer injustice. Here 
 is the real crux of the challenge to faith in this 
 matter, and the more we see of life the more 
 keenly is this felt. A man, truly taught by 
 experience, will not say his own sufferings are 
 unjust; on the contrary, he will say that God 
 has not dealt with him according to his sins 
 
 1 A. de Musset, Confession d'un enfant du Steele, III. ii. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 69 
 
 nor rewarded him according to his iniquities. 
 But as he looks at the suffering world his heart 
 is often pierced with the appalling wrong in it. 
 Think of but a single aspect of it. Think of 
 the sufferings of thousands of helpless and in- 
 nocent little children, whose lives from their 
 birth are a daily appeal for a justice which 
 seems to have no ear in earth or heaven. Con- 
 siderations about moral development do not 
 apply here. A child's character needs happi- 
 ness, not anguish. And the child does not 
 deserve it. A bad man deserves it, but not 
 his innocent child. Yet a man is vicious, and 
 his child bears the penalty. The thing is un- 
 just. We say of it as the people of Israel 
 said of it in the days of Ezekiel; 'The way 
 of the Lord is not equal.' It is not irreverence 
 that says this; it is the finest ethical instinct 
 of our nature. Here the Christian thought of 
 God's love and righteousness seems to meet a 
 shriek of contradiction — or, in the pleading 
 eyes and wan faces of the little children of 
 whom I spoke, a silent condemnation severer 
 still. We recall a happy little child whom 
 
70 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Jesus once placed in the midst of His disciples 
 to teach them a lesson of faith. There are 
 in this world other little children, and when 
 we place them in our midst our faith is simply 
 struck dumb. 
 
 This, I say again, is the acutest part of the 
 whole problem — a part which experience seems 
 to do nothing to ameliorate. It is a difficulty 
 which sinks very deep into the mind of many 
 people — especially, I believe, many women. 
 Sometimes it is said that women have not a 
 good capacity for justice: that may or may 
 not be. But they certainly have a keen sense 
 of injustice. It is a woman's pen which, faced 
 with this problem, wrote, as with a flame: 
 'There is no justice.' 1 
 
 Well, but we must look into it, not with the. 
 flame of anger but with the light of reason. 
 There is a mental habit which is always salu- 
 tary and is never more useful than when one 
 is shut up to a difficulty — namely, to think out 
 what is involved in the alternative. Let us 
 employ that method here. The problem is 
 
 1 Olive Schreiner's Times and Seasons, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 71 
 
 that, when a man does evil, not only he but 
 others who are innocent are involved in suffer- 
 ing. But think what it would mean if this 
 were not so. That would mean that the man's 
 life is something isolated from all other lives, 
 terminating in itself. It would mean, in short, 
 that each man lives to himself, and that we are 
 not members one of another. Does any think- 
 ing person desire that this should be the law 
 of human life? It would not only impoverish 
 life; it would extinguish it in any real and rich 
 sense. It would make impossible the whole 
 progress of humanity from age to age and 
 race to race and man to man. What is it 
 which makes the riches and reality, even the 
 very meaning, of life? It is not what each 
 man has merited, earned, achieved. It is, far 
 more, what he has inherited and received from 
 others. Without this solidarity in the life of 
 humanity our life would be unthinkable. We 
 must remember this great law or fact of soli- 
 darity when we are questioning the justice of 
 God in the problem before us. 
 
 John Stuart Mill in his essay on Nature (one 
 
7 2 
 
 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 of his three famous Essays on Religion) lays 
 down the extraordinary proposition that, if 
 God were omnipotent, the just law for Him 
 to enforce would be that 'each person's share 
 of suffering and happiness would be exactly 
 proportioned to that person's good or evil 
 deeds, and no human being would have a worse 
 lot than another without worse deserts.' Well, 
 this is a strange and difficult world in which 
 we live; but, after all, I am thankful to live 
 in the world I do rather than in the world 
 Mill would thus organise in the name of justice. 
 He would indeed, as Charlotte Bronte once 
 said of him, 'make a hard, dry, dismal world 
 of it' My lot in life reduced to what is ex- 
 actly proportioned to my individual deeds 
 would leave me morally and intellectually in 
 absolute starvation. It is others' great and 
 good deeds — others' moral triumphs, others' 
 intellectual conquests — which have made my 
 life a life at all. And if no human being should 
 have a worse lot than another without worse 
 desert, then no human being should have a 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 73 
 
 better lot without better desert. What desert 
 then had Mill to the advantage of culture and 
 civilisation which a poor prehistoric savage 
 was denied, though his claim, 'exactly propor- 
 tioned to that person's good or evil deeds,' may 
 have been quite as good as that of a modern 
 philosopher's? We cannot run the idea of 
 justice on the lines of this false individualism. 
 Mill would be quite right if man were an iso- 
 lated unit. But man is not an isolated unit: 
 science, philosophy, religion, and experience 
 all combine to repudiate that figment of the 
 doctrinaire. 1 'We are members one of an- 
 other.' We live together and progress to- 
 gether and sin together and suffer together. 
 Our life is personal because it is not only in- 
 
 1 That science (in its doctrine of heredity) and also religion 
 and experience attest the idea of solidarity in the conception 
 of humanity is clear; but it is not so clear as regards philoso- 
 phy, which may seem — in, for example, such typical thinkers 
 as Augustine in the Middle Ages and Descartes, the 'father 
 of modern philosophy' — to emphasise rather the relatedness of 
 personality to itself or what we call self-consciousness. But 
 the greatest philosophical masters have realised that self- 
 consciousness is more than individual. Aristotle, who de- 
 
74 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 dividual but also organic. It is the greatest 
 law of humanity, and without it the very word 
 humanity would have no meaning. To repeal 
 it would not be justice; it would be an end to 
 life in any human sense of the word. And 
 surely no thinking person will suggest that it 
 might be repealed as regards evil, while re- 
 tained as regards good. This will not bear 
 any scrutiny. We saw, in the last chapter, how 
 disadvantageous for morality would be a world 
 with one set of neutral laws for virtue and 
 another for vice. Nature metes out its re- 
 wards to men impartially — that is to say, 
 justly. When evil consequences follow, it is not 
 because the law — or the law-giver — is unjust; 
 
 scribed man as a being 'essentially social' (Pol. i. 2), kept 
 hold of the idea all through his system, especially in the 
 intimate connection he established between ethics and politics. 
 Similarly Plato, writing really on human nature and 'how to 
 live best,' called his work The Republic because the best life 
 is essentially social. Again, Kant in the third — the most 
 difficult and least known — of his Critiques, emphasises that 
 existence is an organism, the parts of which can be understood 
 not as existing by themselves or for their own sake, but as a 
 whole, each part of which is also part of the rest. This is an 
 important element in Kant's doctrine of personality, which has 
 been neglected by expositors. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 75 
 
 it is because men's deeds have been evil. 1 Eze- 
 kiel's reply in the name of God to the people 
 who murmured that 'the way of the Lord is 
 not equal' is true: 'Is not my way equal? are 
 not your ways unequal?' 2 There are, as I 
 admitted at the outset, aspects of the problem 
 of suffering which are distinguishable from the 
 problem of sin; but in the end to this deeper 
 and darker mystery we are thrown back. 
 
 And yet can we leave the question of suffer- 
 ing and pass to that of sin with merely such a 
 cold philosophic word as solidarity? That 
 word does illumine the problem to some ex- 
 tent; but, after all, human suffering is not a 
 problem of philosophy; it is a problem of 
 persons — of lives rather than of life. When 
 you have said all that your wise philosophy 
 can say about suffering, still the sufferers re- 
 main. Sit in a darkened room beside some one 
 
 1 1 admit this does not meet the problem of the unmerited 
 suffering occasioned by great natural calamities. But the un- 
 swerving operation of the great forces of nature can be chal- 
 lenged only by a wisdom which can judge a universe or a 
 folly which forgets it cannot. 
 
 2 Ezekiel xviii. 25. The whole chapter shows how old are 
 our 'modern' problems. 
 
76 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 who is racked with pain, and your doctrine of 
 solidarity is a poor support to your faith in a 
 good God. We have not faced the real chal- 
 lenge of pain to the soul till we have faced 
 this — faced it in the cruellest concrete of the 
 actual agony of a personal life. I have said 
 (at the close of the previous chapter) that it 
 is always easy to generalise. It is easy to gen- 
 eralise even about the problem of pain. It is 
 not easy to repeat your fine moral generalisa- 
 tions before a living soul — man or woman or 
 child — who is being riven with helpless anguish. 
 That no one may say I am slipping through this 
 topic on generalisations, I shall quote the fol- 
 lowing picture of what pain really is from a 
 modern novel of exceptional truthfulness : — 
 
 'When he returned to the sick-room, the child 
 was in convulsions. He stood and watched it, as 
 though he would kill himself with the sight; these 
 small clenched hands, white with bluish nails ; these 
 staring eyes, almost rolling out of their sockets ; this 
 distorted mouth, and the little teeth grinding like 
 iron against a stone — oh, it was terrible, and yet 
 this was not the worst. No, when the convulsions 
 ceased and the little body, growing soft and flexible 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 77 
 
 again, abandoned itself to the joy of the lesser pain 
 — the fear that came into the child's eyes when it 
 dimly perceived that the pain was returning, the 
 beseeching appeals for help as the torture came 
 nearer and nearer ; oh, to see all this and be power- 
 less to help, help even with his heart's blood, with 
 everything that he possessed ! He raised his clenched 
 fist threatingly to heaven, he seized the child with 
 an insane idea of flight, and then, flinging himself 
 upon his knees, he prayed to the God in heaven, who 
 holds the earth in subjection by means of trials and 
 discipline, who sends need and sickness, suffering 
 and death, who wills that every knee be bent in fear 
 and trembling, from whom no flight is possible — 
 either to the uttermost seas or the nethermost depths 
 — to Him, the God, who, if it pleases Him, tram- 
 ples upon the heart we love best in the world and 
 tortures it beneath His foot until it is once more 
 the dust of which He created it. 
 
 'With such thoughts did Niels Lyhne pray to 
 God, and, casting himself helplessly before the 
 throne of heaven, acknowledge that His was the 
 power and His alone. 
 
 'But the child's sufferings continued.' 1 
 
 1 Niels Lyhne, by J. P. Jacobsen, ch. xiii. (E. T., Siren 
 Voices, p. 261). Jacobsen was a Danish writer of remarkable 
 genius who died of consumption in 1885 at tne a g e °f thirty- 
 six, leaving to literature only a fragment of what he might 
 have done. 
 
78 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 This is from a novel, but it is not fiction. 
 There is our problem of pain in the concrete, 
 and before it our line talk about the moral 
 character of suffering and about the great law 
 of human solidarity are a kind of blasphemy. 
 The cruelty — and to a child — is so undeniable 
 that the problem is unendurable. The mind 
 which is sincere is simply silent before it. The 
 philosopher's generalisations falter, and only 
 the professional pietist, babbling about all be- 
 ing for the best, keeps on talking. His ob- 
 servations are highly admirable. But even 
 faith is almost ashamed of them. It is better 
 to say nothing. There is simply nothing to 
 be said. 
 
 No, there is absolutely nothing more to be 
 said about the facts — these brutal and des- 
 perate facts. And it is no help to believe that 
 in the end it will all be made clear — to think 
 of God as holding, as it were in an envelope, 
 the explanation of the mystery to be given to 
 us some future day. That may and does suf- 
 fice for some of the pains and problems of life; 
 but it does not suffice when the sword pierces 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 79 
 
 the heart and twists itself therein. A God 
 who is to be the explanation of things is not 
 enough here. The poor father's heart, torn 
 with suffering with his tortured child, has some- 
 thing in it greater than this coldly wise and 
 watching Deity with His final reason for every- 
 thing. There is no light whatever to be shed 
 on such a problem as this along lines such as 
 these. The solution is not any attempted in- 
 tellectual construction of the facts, and not 
 even a faith that God holds their intellectual 
 solution. It is deeper than that. It is a new 
 thought of God — of God as love. 
 
 How shall love act in face of facts or suffer- 
 ing such as have just been described? Nothing 
 is sorer to watch than to see a little child suffer. 
 All the love in the human heart is moved to 
 suffer too. If this be nowhere in God, then 
 the impassibility of the Almighty Creator is 
 a less noble thing than the sympathy of the 
 impotent creature. But if, on the other hand, 
 God is not One who stands apart from human 
 suffering, even though holding the explanation 
 of it in His hand, but One who Himself comes 
 
8o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 into it and shares it, that were a thought of 
 God upon which faith could stand in any 
 anguish. That character in God, that passion 
 in God would be faith's deliverance. It would 
 not, I repeat, intellectually answer the question 
 of suffering. But you cannot arraign a God 
 who Himself suffers too. 
 
 Such a thought of God as this — is it more 
 than a vain and indeed inappropriate phan- 
 tasy? It is spurned by great thinkers of old 
 and of to-day. We all know those lines of 
 Lucretius, which have never ceased to resound 
 within the human mind, which picture Deity 
 as in its very essence unmoved, untouched, 
 untroubled — 'privata dolore omni,' removed 
 from human grief — 'semota a rebus nostris,' 
 remote from our concerns. 1 In our own day, 
 Dr. Eucken bids us reject all idea of a God 
 who takes our misery upon Himself as 'a de- 
 cidedly wrong note.' 2 Well, there is little use 
 discussing this as an idea of poetry or philos- 
 ophy, ancient or modern. It is something 
 
 1 De Rerum Natura, ii. 648-9. 
 
 2 Truth of Religion, p. 433. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 81 
 
 quite beyond the power of the mind to project 
 for itself. It simply stands or falls with the 
 thought of God which is revealed in the fact 
 of Jesus Christ. If in some most real sense 
 God was in Christ — the Christ who was ac- 
 quainted with grief, who bore our sufferings 
 and carried our sorrows — then and then only 
 does that thought of God of which I have 
 spoken take real shape and strength in the 
 mind. I desire to remember it must be said 
 with care and reverence that God thus suffers 
 too, and not so much because it borders on an 
 ancient heresy — some heresies become ortho- 
 dox in time — but because we must never forget 
 how infinitely God transcends our nature. Yet 
 it is no unworthy thought of the Father of 
 our spirits that He can suffer as also rejoice 
 with His children. But, assuredly, mere think- 
 ing about life cannot say it; if it be said at all, 
 it is only in Christ. 
 
 In a later chapter I shall discuss whether 
 the view of Christ involved in this be real and 
 credible. Meanwhile let us ask, in closing this 
 chapter, how, even if such a thought of God 
 
82 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 be true, does it help? Certainly it does not 
 alter the poignant facts. Despite even this 
 thought of God, 'the child's sufferings con- 
 tinued.' Yet such a thought of God makes all 
 the difference. The difference is not merely 
 the negative one that it quiets our murmuring 
 to see that supreme One in the same case. 
 This aspect of it has been sympathetically ex- 
 pressed by the pen of Mr. Balfour: — 
 
 'If they suffer, did not He, on their account, 
 suffer also? If suffering falls not always on the 
 most guilty, was not He innocent? Shall they 
 cry aloud that the world is ill-arranged, when He, 
 for their sakes, subjected Himself to their condr 
 tions?' 1 
 
 This is true, yet it is but a little of the truth. 
 Something far deeper and tenderer and more 
 experimental is needed when the soul is really 
 in straits. It is not merely that Christ, too, 
 had His pains to endure; it is that He bears 
 our pains with us. And thus the sufferer dis- 
 traught with his own agonies or those of his 
 loved ones (which are harder to bear and far 
 harder to understand than his own) is, to 
 
 1 A. J. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, p. 352. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN S3 
 
 quote the fine words of the spiritual mind of 
 Dora Greenwell, 'met from the eyes and brows 
 of Him who was indeed acquainted with grief, 
 by a look of solemn recognition such as may 
 pass between friends who have endured be- 
 tween them some strange and sacred sorrow 
 and are through it united in a bond that cannot 
 he broken' 1 I shall not multiply words about 
 this. It is not by eloquent writing upon it that 
 it is brought home to the soul as spiritual truth. 
 It is only as you take your cross of agony to 
 His Cross, who means for us the very heart 
 of God, and there learn — even with the sword 
 piercing your life or the life of your dearest — 
 to know God nearer than ever before. This 
 is what makes all the difference for faith. It 
 does not explain the mystery. It does not re- 
 move the facts. But it makes all the difference 
 if we hear in the darkness — and speaking with 
 that peculiar tenderness which a loving voice 
 takes into its tone in the darkness — a voice 
 saying: 
 
 'O heart I made, a heart beats here.' 
 1 Colloquia Cruris, p. 14. 
 
84 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Then — not till then — can we accept God's will 
 even at the worst. Indeed, we would not have, 
 for ourselves or for others, anything else than 
 the will of that God who feels and suiters too. 
 His will is indeed — even when it is uttered pain 
 — our peace. 
 
 Some one will say that people often imagine 
 in the dark that they hear voices. That is 
 true, and I repeat we must discuss in a future 
 chapter whether such a faith can be verified 
 in the cold daylight of historical criticism. 
 Meanwhile on this I shall say but one word. 
 Does not every one of us practically regard 
 the suffering love of Jesus Christ as indeed 
 the love and sympathy of God Himself? For 
 why is it that we do not find here the final 
 arraignment of the divine goodness? Why is 
 it that this unparalleled suffering, unjustly in- 
 flicted on the most innocent, does not make us 
 more than ever unbelievers? Why does it not 
 awaken tears of pity and a torrent of protest 
 against God? Because — this is the one reason 
 — dimly we all discern in this passion more than 
 a human tragedy. Because we feel, however 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 85 
 
 falteringly, that here, in a way we cannot de- 
 fine but cannot dismiss, is the love of God 
 suffering for and with men. That is the final 
 word on the problem of pain : it is enough 
 for faith. 
 
 And so to conclude we may, I think, say this 
 about it all. We may say that the mystery of 
 suffering, while difficult and, to many minds, 
 oppressive, still is not a problem which in the 
 end silences faith, and for this reason, that the 
 more deeply we look into pain in human life 
 the more we can find God in it. We find in 
 it God's moral purpose and work in character; 
 we find God's great and just laws of life be- 
 tween man and man; we find, at the last and 
 worst, God suffering too. We cannot explain 
 pain, but if we thus find God within it, then 
 faith is not put to shame. 
 
 But, behind this problem, is a darker one of 
 which we cannot speak thus. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE ATHEISTIC FACT 
 
'What you are now saying,' I suggested, 'seems to 
 imply the existence of two original and almost equal 
 powers. It sounds very like Manichaeism.' 
 
 'So,' returned he quietly, 'I have been sometimes told, 
 but the days for me are long past (if indeed for me 
 they ever existed) when a word or a name could alarm 
 me. I have learned to hold with Newman that one of 
 the surest marks of a living faith is its disregard of 
 consequences, and among all Butler's deep sayings there 
 are no words which I endorse more fully than those in 
 which he bids us know that, if a truth be once estab- 
 lished, objections are nothing — the one being founded 
 on our knoweldge, the other on our ignorance.' 
 
 DORA GREEN WELL. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ATHEISTIC FACT 
 
 This age, which is sensitive to the spectacle of 
 suffering, is one which, in many respects, hardly 
 realises sin as a problem at all. Sir Oliver 
 Lodge tells us that 'the higher man of to-day 
 is not worrying' about it. Well, if this be the 
 right point of view it must be remarked, in the 
 first place, that a good deal both of the teach- 
 ing and also of the life of One whom we have 
 been accustomed to think of as the Highest 
 Man of any day was a mistake or at least an 
 exaggeration, and it seems a pity that Jesus 
 should have died for sin instead of simply dis- 
 missing it. 
 
 There is, however, nothing particularly high 
 in dealing with things other than as they really 
 are. The question is whether sin is a fact of 
 life, and a fact so great as rightly to trouble 
 the conscience and the mind. If it is, we ought 
 
 8 9 
 
9 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 to 'worry' about it; to say of it, with Renan, 
 je le supprime is not high but only shallow. 
 Now it is an easy thing to regard sin as a not 
 very difficult or deadly problem for either life 
 or faith so long as we deal with it in an ab- 
 stract way. Nothing, indeed, is easier than to 
 make a number of facile observations about 
 the 'negative' element in existence and so on, 
 and to disguise what sin is under these semi- 
 philosophical generalities. Here, again, it is 
 so easy to generalise. But no man who looks 
 straight at the facts of life — his own life or 
 the life of the world of men — can be content 
 to treat the matter thus. Think for a little 
 what sin is and what it does. There are times 
 when not to worry over sin seems the counsel of 
 everything about us. On some fine morning, 
 when the sun is bright and the air is fresh and 
 the world is beautiful, it seems morbid even to 
 name sin. But, as a matter of actual fact, on 
 what falsenesses and foulnesses in human 
 hearts and lives has the glorious sun dawned, 
 what base and bad lives will breathe its divine 
 air, what scenes of shame and unkindness and 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 91 
 
 cruelty and wickedness will be enacted even on 
 this day of beauty. This is not morbid imagin- 
 ing; it is the barest fact. Not to worry over it 
 is no sign of height of mind; certainly to feel 
 the burden of it is no sign of a low mind. 
 Every man with a heart and a conscience knows 
 that the problem here is the darkest problem 
 of the world's history and also the final issue 
 within his own being. 
 
 Moreover, to faith it presents a problem 
 which is peculiarly acute — one much more acute 
 than any problem of pain. It is not for noth- 
 ing that the facts of sin are so little faced and 
 that the topic is so often dealt with in evasive 
 generalities. For to any faith — philosophic as 
 well as religious — it is unwelcome to a degree 
 which makes the mind want to do anything 
 rather than face it as it really is. Why this is 
 so can be stated in a sentence. In the problem 
 of pain, despite many and great perplexities, 
 we found that the more we pressed into it the 
 more was it possible to discern God in it. But 
 the more we look into sin the more impossible 
 do we find it to associate it with God. Its very 
 
92 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 definition in the conscience is something 'against 
 Thee.' In short, suffering, while a difficult fact, 
 is yet a divine fact; but sin is not less than the 
 one atheistic fact in the world. 
 
 One is well aware how hopelessly orthodox 
 this sounds to the philosophic ear. A philos- 
 ophy of evil to-day hardly calls itself such 
 unless it treats sin as a phase in the moral 
 evolution, and as thus a part — an intelligible 
 and necessary part — of the scheme of things. 
 I think I may claim to be not insensible to the 
 attraction of this as a system of thought. But 
 the reason why I, for one, remain hopelessly 
 orthodox on this topic is simply that I have 
 never been able to find in this way of thinking 
 any real statements of the facts about sin as 
 these actually exist in the world without or 
 within. I read Spinoza on evil. 1 As a struc- 
 ture of philosophy his system is infinitely more 
 attractive to the mind of any one at all in- 
 fluenced by the idea of the philosophic demand 
 for synthesis than is, say, Augustine's. But in 
 Spinoza are hardly any of the facts about sin 
 
 1 Ethics, pt. iv. passim. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 93 
 
 as I know them in life, while in Augustine these 
 are there in all their intractable truth. Spinoza 
 and Augustine, discussing the topic, are like 
 men not only of differing views but inhabiting 
 different planets. The question is which view 
 is truer to the facts of this planet, not which 
 is more acceptable to the philosophic temper. 
 It is from this point of view I shall consider 
 the matter in this chapter, which must be, I am 
 afraid, not such a light one as some modern 
 theologians are able to produce even on this 
 dark topic. 
 
 Philosophers of moral evil such as I have 
 indicated vary in method and in terminology, 
 but all agree in one essential feature. Whether 
 metaphysical or dialectical or materialistic, they 
 agree in treating sin as a phenomenon of the 
 natural world. Nature is the supreme category 
 of the modern mind. Man is part of this na- 
 ture. Everything in man, including the moral 
 phenomena of what is called sin, is regarded 
 as in and of the system and order of the natural 
 sphere. Sin, in other words, is and must be 
 natural. That is not to say it is not to be 
 
94 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 resisted and transcended; but it is to say it is 
 a fact of natural existence and not absurd or 
 an anomaly. Thus the eminent English scien- 
 tific philosopher whom I have named — and for 
 whose work in imbuing a thoroughly scientific 
 outlook on the universe with profoundly spir- 
 itual conceptions I wish to speak in terms of 
 sincere and respectful appreciation — says sin 
 is 'akin to dirt, to disease and weeds;' and 
 again, that 'the contrast between good and evil 
 can be well illustrated by the contrast between 
 heat and cold,' adding 'there is nothing evil 
 about cold itself.' 1 
 
 Let us examine this by the standard not of 
 orthodoxy but of experience. Has it any kind 
 of support in what in our own lives we find 
 sin to be? Let a man with a clear mind and 
 a candid conscience examine some sin in his 
 life. He has, for example, told a base lie, or 
 committed an act of sensuality, or has been 
 unkind and selfish. To tell this man that his 
 bad conscience for his having been untrue or 
 
 1 Sir Oliver Lodge's Man and the Universe, p. 242 ; Sub- 
 stance of Faith allied with Science, p. 48. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 95 
 
 impure or unloving may be 'well illustrated' by 
 his feeling cold on some winter day is just to 
 trifle with and even mock everything real in 
 his moral being. The comparison is absolutely 
 irrelevant. You might just as well compare 
 his sin to the Differential Calculus or the Battle 
 of Waterloo or Tariff Reform or any other 
 thing your fancy fixes on. These many natural 
 facts have simply no point of contact with the 
 moral facts of experience in a man who has 
 sinned. Indeed, if we take them to the test of 
 some classical example of the sense of sin their 
 irrelevance reaches the point of indecency. I 
 shall not take any strained or morbid cases of 
 what the author of the Varieties of Religious 
 Experience 1 calls 'the sick soul.' I shall take 
 two of the shortest and simplest and sanest 
 confessions of sin possible — utterances which 
 can be echoed in any honest experience. Take 
 the psalmist's 'Against Thee, Thee only, have 
 I sinned;' then say (if you can get your lips 
 
 1 The fault of James's interesting and valuable book is that 
 it deals too much with extreme cases and does not build 
 enough on the data of normal religious experience. Truth is 
 best found on the highways of life. 
 
96 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 to say it) that a good illustration of this and 
 similar utterances in the fifty-first Psalm would 
 be when a man, in the heats and chills of a 
 fever, says his temperature sank last night 
 below normal. Take the apostle who bowed 
 his head in shame before Jesus with the words: 
 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 
 
 Lord;' then say (again if you can) that this 
 is, so to speak, as if some one who had fallen 
 into a filthy bog should tell a lady in a white 
 dress that she must not come too near to him. 
 
 1 am not going to waste space in arguing about 
 this. A man's experience needs no arguments 
 to show that the kind of 'sin' which is illustrated 
 by the thermometer or akin to dirt is not in the 
 remotest degree like, is not in the same world 
 with, the sin he knows in his heart and con- 
 science. It is purely a fancy article of a phi- 
 losophy which has forgotten the facts of life. 
 
 This, then, is the first thing which experience 
 tells us about sin, that it is a phenomenon not 
 of what we call the natural, but of another 
 class and order which we call the moral. Now, 
 certainly, the natural world and the moral are 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 97 
 
 not to be isolated from one another. They are 
 related to one another and touch one another. 
 Particularly do they meet in man, who is a 
 member of both. But they must not be con- 
 fused with one another, nor are the categories 
 of the one to be applied to the other. The 
 moral realm possesses — or rather, one should 
 say, is constituted by — one fundamental cate- 
 gory, of which nature simply knows nothing. 
 The difference between right and wrong, which 
 is the constituent category of morals, is a differ- 
 ence, which is destroyed when it is classed with 
 the difference, say, between 30 and 90 Fah- 
 renheit. It is a distinction absolute within itself, 
 not variable with terms and seasons. It is to 
 this absolute moral realm that the phenomenon 
 of sin belongs, and any discussion of it which 
 treats it as a phenomenon of a relative and 
 neutral world is simply not a discussion of sin 
 at all. 
 
 One other way of treating the topic on the 
 part of those whom I am inclined to call the 
 fanciful theologians — by whom I mean those 
 who are out of touch with the facts or the 
 
9 8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 subject— I may more briefly mention. They 
 tell us that sin is not so much that which ought 
 not to be as that which is not. It is a mere 
 'negative,' a 'not being,' while good is positive 
 being. What is, or was, called 'the New 
 Theology' is fond of such phrases, and one 
 exponent of it — a preacher not without genius 
 in his spirit if only he could be delivered from 
 the misapprehension of thinking it a genius for 
 metaphysics — seems inclined to adopt the 
 aphorism that 'the Devil is a vacuum.' 1 Well, 
 I am not competent to describe the devil, of 
 whose being I know as little as even a neo- 
 theologian does. But I know something of 
 myself. And to tell me then sin within me is 
 a 'non-existent' is a kind of sorry jest. The 
 bad in me is as real as the good. I apply to 
 it every available test of reality, and find it 
 existent in everything which is most real in my 
 being — thought, affection, will, habit, character. 
 Indeed, if I do not take care, it will become 
 my most essential self, and I may be a bad 
 man in every sense in which I am a man at all. 
 
 1 The New Theology, by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, pp. 43-4. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 99 
 
 And around me in the world I see — not that 
 I judge them, but I see them — bad men as 
 distinctly as good men, and badness possessing 
 all the reality which any kind of life does. If 
 any philosophy says sin is a 'non-existent,' that 
 is a saying illuminative not of sin but only of 
 the philosophy which is so far out of touch 
 with life as to say it. 
 
 On this and things like this I cannot longer 
 dwell. We must pass to the problem which 
 confronts us if we reject such facile theories 
 of evil and face it as it really is — the atheistic 
 fact in the world. 
 
 Do not these very words proclaim the hope- 
 lessness of the problem? What can faith say 
 when confronted with a fact the very definition 
 of which is that it is 'against God' — a fact, 
 therefore, which cannot be made harmonious 
 with God? This is why there cannot be a 
 rational philosophy of sin. All attempts to 
 explain sin end in something quite different — 
 the explaining of it away into something else. 
 There is a distinction between these two results 
 which many people who write on this subject 
 
ioo THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 seem not able to appreciate. But while a final 
 philosophy of sin, from its very terms, is im- 
 possible, a theodicy in face of sin may be pos- 
 sible; and it is this which faith is entitled to 
 require. It may seem worse than useless to 
 touch on so profound a question within the 
 limits of what is left of this chapter; but, after 
 all, it is of the greatest themes that it is true 
 that many words cannot say more than few. 
 I do not wish to get involved in speculative 
 coils on the subject; it is available facts about 
 sin which most demand attention. For this 
 reason I shall deal briefly with the highly 
 speculative problem of what is called the divine 
 permission of moral evil. The main positions 
 of a philosophic theodicy as to this may be 
 stated thus. If we assume God as not the 
 Infinite Thing but as Supreme Moral Person- 
 ality — and this is at this point legitimately 
 assumed, for only on this assumption does any 
 need for a theodicy about evil arise — then the 
 only world really worthy of Him and really 
 expressive of His true Being and Character 
 would be a world which is more than a vast 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 101 
 
 mechanical toy but is a world of moral persons. 
 The point is stated thus in Professor Ward's 
 notable Giftord Lecture: 'God is Love. And 
 what must that world be that is worthy of 
 such love? The only worthy object of love is 
 just love. It must then be a world that can 
 love God.' 1 It is in the light of this considera- 
 tion that philosophy considers this problem of 
 the permission of sin. Would it not have been 
 to destroy such a world if the possibility of 
 not loving God had been shut out by the pre- 
 determination of the Creator? Would not that 
 have been the reducing of creation to (as Sir 
 Thomas Browne, I think, phrases it) 'what it 
 was on the sixth day' — to a world, that is, 
 emptied of moral agents whose history is not 
 merely mechanical and physical but is a history 
 of ethical and spiritual freedom? Certainly 
 this would have been to prevent sin; but would 
 it not also have prevented love and all mo- 
 rality? For, to quote Professor Ward again — 
 I quote him because he does not discuss the 
 theme in the merely theological interest — 'love 
 
 1 The Realm of Ends, ch. xx. p. 453. 
 
102 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 is free : in a ready-made world, then, it could 
 have no place.' Here I know the Pilate in the 
 reader's mind will say: 'What is freedom?' and 
 will not stay for an answer. I will not attempt 
 the answer. What moral freedom is can 
 hardly be analysed or even defined, because it 
 is one of those ultimate and final categories 
 which are not reducible to simple elements, and 
 of which we can only say — as we say of right 
 and, perhaps, beauty — Si non rogas, intelligo. 
 But of these ultimate and final categories we 
 can say some things, even to Pilate, which they 
 are not. And of moral freedom we can cer- 
 tainly say that it does not mean a character 
 which is good because it is deprived of the 
 possibility of being other than good. So if 
 God's world were to be a world of moral per- 
 sons, it would seem that must not mean a world 
 deprived of the possibility of their being other 
 than good. To have prevented this would have 
 been to prevent a moral world at all — at least 
 in any sense in which the word morality has 
 ethical content for an experience. And that 
 would be to prevent a world expressive of God 
 Himself. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 103 
 
 This reasoning and suggestion I merely out- 
 line, and do not press it far. One should not 
 seek to develop a logical demonstration on such 
 a topic. And I pass from these abstract con- 
 siderations to the more definitely historical 
 questions about sin. 
 
 The first historical question about sin ob- 
 viously is the circumstances of its appearance 
 in the world, but to this it is impossible to give 
 a historical answer. There is no available evi- 
 dence to enable us to do so. I do not suppose 
 we shall be asked to-day in any seriously edu- 
 cated quarter to take the stories in the opening 
 chapters of Genesis as literal history, pro- 
 foundly and permanently meaningful as they 
 are; and, apart from that, there is no professed 
 source of information on the subject anywhere. 
 One observes a tendency in some modern 
 writers on this question to seek evidence from 
 the story of evolution. Thus a recent Hulsean 
 lecturer thinks we have the 'empirical' source 
 of sin, and even necessity for it, in man's diffi- 
 culty 'of enforcing his inherited organic nature 
 to obey a moral law which he has only gradu- 
 
104 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 ally been enabled to discern.' 1 But while some 
 relevant observations about evil are suggested 
 from the point of view of evolution, it seems to 
 me that evolution is the channel of temptation 
 rather than the source of sin. That this is 
 true is visible in our own lives. We to-day have 
 just the difficulty referred to above of enforcing 
 an inherited organic nature to obey a law we 
 have gradually discerned. Every man who — 
 to take no higher an instance — feels he ought 
 to get up earlier in the morning, but finds his 
 'inherited organic nature' unwilling to begin 
 doing it, knows this 'difficulty.' Yet surely we 
 know it is 'one thing to be tempted' from old 
 habits of the body and 'another thing to fall' 
 (or, in the case suggested, not to rise!). 
 Moreover, as bearing even on temptation, this 
 association of the origination of evil with the 
 organic nature which man has inherited is in- 
 adequate and indeed inappropriate, because 
 man's most characteristic sins do not arise out 
 of the animal at all. Such sins as ambition or 
 
 1 Tennant's Origin and Propagation of Sin (Hulsean Lec- 
 ture for 1901-2), p. 81. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 105 
 
 pride or fraud (which Dante calls 'man's pe- 
 culiar vice 1 ) are not, so to speak, a servile 
 uprising in human nature, but are the crimes 
 of the royalty of reason itself. For these and 
 other considerations, I feel that the pursuit of 
 this line by which the origin of sin is sought 
 under suggestions from the story of evolution 
 does not help us very much. The real origin 
 of sin lies in something deeper than the clinging 
 garment of our physical descent. 
 
 If, then, in the records neither of sacred 
 narrative nor of physical evolution we find the 
 clue we need, where shall we seek it? The 
 answer is in the grande profundum of person- 
 ality. Let us here avoid all darkening with 
 verbiage, for here certainly the remark made 
 a moment ago is true, that many words cannot 
 say more than few. The one thing to say is 
 this. Man is an ego; sin is the ego become 
 the egoist. A beast cannot be an egoist; it may 
 seek the satisfaction of this or that desire, but 
 it cannot seek itself. A personal being, know- 
 ing itself as an end, seeks, in the gratification 
 
 1 Inferno, xi. 26. 
 
106 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 of its desires, not merely their satisfaction but 
 the satisfaction of the self. Thus a dog drinks 
 merely to slake the physical sense of thirst; a 
 man often does more than that, and drinks on, 
 long past the satisfaction of mere thirst, to 
 attain some further satisfaction of himself in 
 enjoyment or, it may be, drunkenness. It is 
 this false self which is the author of sin. Thus 
 to specify it is, of course, not to explain it. 
 If we ask what thus perverts the idea of the 
 self there is no answer. We have simply no 
 data from which to construct an answer. To 
 speculate about it is indeed, in Goethe's phrase, 
 to be led about a barren heath by an evil spirit. 
 We simply do not know the deeps of the 
 mystery of our being. We call ourselves self- 
 conscious — that is, self-knowing — but we are 
 only superficially so. There are in human 
 personality great subterranean areas into which 
 we have never penetrated. There is nothing 
 to be ashamed of intellectually in saying this: 
 does the most confident scientist know any 
 better the mystery of the atom? There are 
 places where it is philosophical to confess 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 107 
 
 ignorance and where the true religion is an 
 agnosticism. And it is a part of true knowl- 
 edge to know w r here knowledge stops. 1 
 
 Now, however, it will be asked where is any 
 theodicy? Is it simply given up at the crucial 
 point under the plea of the mystery of person- 
 ality? Not so. For, while personality is an 
 abysmal deep which we cannot fathom, there 
 arise out of it at least two clear and conclusive 
 things about sin in relation to God and in re- 
 lation to ourselves, and these are sufficient, if 
 not to complete a theodicy — they are, I shall 
 say presently, not sufficient for that — at least 
 to make the arraignment of God for sin untrue 
 to the facts. 
 
 1 The theological student who wishes to ponder further over 
 this matter should assimilate (which is more than merely 
 read) the fundamental position of Augustine, which is that 
 man's whole nature is made for God — Fecisti nos ad Te — and 
 in its right state only in continued relatedness to Him. This 
 applies to the self-conscious being's idea of itself as well as to 
 anything else. Sin originates in the self-conscious personality, 
 which can say, 'I am I,' saying it 'as though it were of him- 
 self.' It is thus a defectio — arising not out of the flesh but 
 from pride — or, as Augustine says of the fallen angels, a 'not 
 sticking fast unto God.' The value of this idea of the sinful 
 will as 'deficient' appears when Augustine comes to describe 
 grace, which is thus a restoring of man, including the will, 
 
108 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 One is this. It is something so intimately 
 associated with the moral personality that it 
 may be best stated in personal terms and even 
 in the first person. The surest fact about sin 
 in my life is just that my sin is my sin. It may 
 have circumstances and conditions which are 
 not mine, but it becomes sin in my conscience 
 because and when it is mine. Of course, one 
 is aware that the sense of this is dimmed and 
 even denied for the modern mind by the con- 
 sciousness of such forces in life as that of 
 heredity, which apparently mortgage life, even 
 moral life, so heavily and sum it up as nothing 
 more than a resultant of determined conditions. 
 Now this 'given' element in life is not only 
 indisputably true but is also an invaluable 
 
 to its right and native state of relatedness to God. It does not 
 thereby abrogate freedom but, on the contrary, renews it, and 
 leads it not to a mere non-moral neutrality of choice but to 
 its true 'law of liberty,' which says not 'I can do what I like' 
 but 'I love Thy law.' This idea of rational and moral, as 
 opposed to a merely indifferent, freedom is seen in a man of 
 long-stablished nobility of character, of whom we say he 
 'could not' do some base deed, and yet not meaning that by 
 his character he has forfeited moral freedom. I write this 
 note to invite a deeper study of the greatest of all doctors on 
 this high topic. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 109 
 
 truth; I asserted it and built upon it in the 
 previous chapter when showing the bearing of 
 solidarity on the problem of the injustice of 
 human suffering. But it is not the whole truth. 
 Man's life, which certainly has its roots in 
 nature, has thus an inheritance, physical, men- 
 tal, moral, for which he is not responsible ; but 
 when you have summed up all the elements in 
 that you have not yet summed up the life of 
 man. In life, as indeed in everything which is 
 organic, the whole is more than the sum of the 
 parts; two and two are here more than four. 
 And no man can sum up his moral being by 
 piecing together various given parts; after this 
 is done, he confronts the result with something 
 more, which is just himself. Responsibility is 
 the assertion that our moral acts are the acts 
 of this self, and not simply of an addition sum 
 of figures dictated by this and that in the con- 
 ditions of life. It is here, then, that my sin 
 is my sin. This is the confession of the heart 
 of man before sin in all ages. The writer of 
 the fifty-first Psalm did not know the doctrine 
 of heredity in its modern scientific form, but he 
 
no THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 knew the essential fact of it when he wrote: 
 'Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin 
 did my mother conceive me;' yet because he 
 knew also, if not philosophically at least mor- 
 ally and practically, a self deeper than all that, 
 he said too: 'I acknowledge my transgressions: 
 and my sin is ever before me.' And so says 
 the conscience of every honest man. Here we 
 have, indeed, the clearest and most authentic 
 facts about moral life and moral responsibility 
 — that our life is something more than a sum 
 of innumerable constituent conditions, and that 
 in that something more, which is our self, sin 
 becomes ours. No man gets past the one fact 
 with permission of true philosophy, or past the 
 other without violence to his conscience. 
 
 But this hardly ends the matter. For it may 
 be admitted that sin is our sin, and yet the real 
 responsibility for it still lies on the Author of 
 our being, who has made us what we are, and 
 we are not to be blamed for following our 
 nature. Here emerges to contravene this an- 
 other fact of life — that sin is not our true 
 nature. It is difficult to see this in the general. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT in 
 
 The universality of moral evil in humanity — 
 One excepted — leads our minds to accept sin as 
 the normal thing and the sinless One as ab- 
 normal. But, on the contrary, it is Wr life' 
 which is, as Byron cried, 
 
 'a false nature — 'tis not in 
 The harmony of things.' 1 
 
 And that this is true appears, I think, when- 
 ever the honest and healthy soul puts it to the 
 practical test of life. Let us not look at it as 
 a general and abstract proposition; there it 
 sounds unreal. But take not life at large but 
 some place in our own life where are opposing 
 each other, on the one hand, the call of some 
 evil lust and, on the other, the call of the sinless 
 Christ. Where, within that area, does the 
 honest and healthy soul see its truer nature? 
 Not in sin. Well, if that sin is not my true life 
 in that particular place, neither is it the true 
 life of humanity at large. Sin is not our nature. 
 Mr. Chesterton's answer to the question of 
 the meaning of the Fall is exactly correct, 'that 
 
 1 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, iv. 126. 
 
ii2 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 whatever I am, I am not myself.' 1 Sin is — 
 and here is a most important point not for 
 practical life only but for our whole philos- 
 ophy of religion — the anti-natural. This is 
 one reason why — to anticipate for a moment 
 the topic of the next chapter — there is need for 
 and reason in a supernatural to meet it. 
 
 Here then are two things which emerge clear 
 out of the unplumbed depth of personality, that 
 our sin is our sin and that it is not our true 
 nature. This does not mean that we can al- 
 ways fix guilt on the individual. No one can 
 look at life, no one can enter into the story of 
 a sinning soul, no one can read such a play as 
 Mr. Galsworthy's Silver Box and much else in 
 modern literature, without feeling poignantly 
 how sin is more than individual and how 
 ravelled is the web of human responsibility. 
 What has been said in the immediately fore- 
 going paragraphs certainly does not mean that 
 we are to judge one another. What it means 
 is that we are not cheaply and untruly to ar- 
 raign God. Such arraignment has sometimes 
 
 1 Orthodoxy, p. 292. 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 113 
 
 a plausibility of a superficial kind which easily 
 lends itself to a would-be bold blasphemy. A 
 well-known quatrain says: — 
 
 'Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, 
 And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake; 
 
 For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man 
 Is blackened, Man's forgiveness give — and take!' 1 
 
 I have heard this described as 'tremendous. 1 
 But nothing is tremendous which is not true. 
 
 If then these be the facts emerging out of 
 the abyss of personality, we may return to the 
 general position that they do not drive faith 
 from its hold on God despite the insoluble 
 elements in the problem of evil. Facts remain 
 facts even though they are surrounded by an 
 impenetrable darkness; we may therefore not 
 unjustifiably maintain that the available data 
 of our moral being do not deny but rather up- 
 hold the divine character even in face of the 
 enigma of sin in the world. I think we can 
 adhere to this. But it is impossible to find it 
 very convincing. It is impossible not to feel 
 
 1 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, lxxxi. 
 
ii 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 how inadequate it is when it is offered as all 
 that can be said in God's name in face of the 
 actual realities of the appalling mess (if I may 
 call it so) which sin has made in the world, 
 and before the degradation and disgrace and 
 despair of the lives of men because of it. As 
 in the case of pain, we were in the end brought 
 up against the cruel concrete facts of what pain 
 actually is and does, and realised that, after all 
 our philosophical comments on the subject, the 
 sufferers remain, so here, when we have talked 
 at large about a philosophy of evil, sinners re- 
 main — souls soaked through with lusts, doing 
 the deeds of iniquity daily, living for sin and 
 dying in it. I took a page from a novel to 
 help us realise how cruel pain is, but no novel 
 ever painted the badness of sin. Here let men 
 look steadily into their own hearts and upon 
 their own lives; I do not think they will write 
 down the result verbatim on the page of any 
 book. This is the real problem of sin, and it 
 comes home to the conscience as really as some 
 physical agony may come home to the flesh. 
 To offer to a world or a soul that cries out 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 115 
 
 'What must I do to be saved?' the thesis of 
 a theodicy about a world of free and moral 
 persons is no better than to prate to a man in 
 agony of body or mind that all is for the best. 
 Honestly, when one begins to think what sin 
 really is in life — in my life and yours and 
 that of the whole world — were it not better 
 to have left the subject alone unless there is 
 more to say than this? 
 
 Here we are precisely at the same point as 
 that to which we were led up at the close of 
 the previous chapter. When we found there 
 that no more was to be said by philosophy 
 about the facts of pain, we turned towards a 
 new thought about God as — that is, if the 
 'acknowledgment of God in Christ' be true — 
 Himself entering into the problem and suffer- 
 ing too. It is in the same direction that we 
 must turn now when our philosophy has said its 
 say about sin. Is there a new thought of God 
 in relation to sin to be found in Christ — espe- 
 cially in the Cross of Christ — if, again, that 
 'acknowledgment' be true? Certainly we 
 cannot say here that God sins too. But we 
 
n6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 discern here the thought of God entering into 
 the situation which sin has created and saving 
 us who are sinners. This is something far 
 more convincing than a philosophical disquisi- 
 tion about how a world of free moral persons 
 might sin and did sin and yet the Creator be 
 justified. What if God be not merely self- 
 justification; what if God may be love? He 
 is not careful, if one may so say, to prove to 
 us how He is not liable for the world's sin; 
 but it seems He sends His Son to seek and to 
 save the lost. And this is the unanswerable 
 theodicy. Whether or not a world of free 
 moral persons who have sinned, or a world 
 emptied of free moral persons and thus pre- 
 served from sin, were the creation more worthy 
 of God, certainly nothing is or can be more 
 worthy of God than to redeem a world of sin- 
 ners. 'Nothing,' as a father says (I think Ter- 
 tullian), 'can be more worthy of God than 
 man's salvation.' Than the Cross of Christ 
 and the forgiveness in it, those who have seen 
 God in it have never seen or imagined a divine 
 which is or can be diviner. Do not let us mis- 
 
THE ATHEISTIC FACT 117 
 
 take this. Here is no explanation of the exist- 
 ence of moral evil. I certainly cannot say with 
 a modern writer that the Cross 'makes sense 
 of sin' 1 — a phrase than which it would be diffi- 
 cult to invent one with less of the animus of 
 the New Testament on this subject. Could 
 any one imagine the Saviour saying at the Last 
 Supper: 'This is my blood shed for the ra- 
 tionalisation of sin?' No, redemption does not 
 make 'sense of sin;' it does not and cannot 
 make sin to be other than what it is. But it 
 makes the character of God glorious as we 
 had never seen it before. The Cross is not 
 a philosophy of evil, but it is, I say again, the 
 unanswerable theodicy. It is the theodicy of 
 heaven as the apostolic seer depicts it breaking 
 out even into exultant doxology: — 
 
 'I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels 
 round about the throne and the living creatures and 
 the elders: and the number of them was ten thou- 
 sand times ten thousand, and thousands of thou- 
 sands ; 
 
 'Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb 
 that was slain to receive power, and riches, and 
 
 1 Rev. William Temple in Foundation, p. 221. 
 
n8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and 
 blessing. 
 
 'And every creature which is in heaven, and on 
 the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in 
 the sea, and all that are therein, heard I saying, 
 Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto 
 him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the 
 Lamb for ever and ever.' 1 
 
 Every creature which is . . . on the earth. 
 Well, we are 'on the earth;' how shall we join 
 in such a chorus? Is it not a rhapsody from 
 some higher sphere, of which we can only say 
 in Faust's words when he heard the angels' 
 choir : — 
 
 'Zu jenen Spharen wag' ich nicht zu streben 
 Woher die holde Nachricht tont' ; 
 
 or is it fact and reality in this world in which 
 we live and where — to repeat the adaptation 
 made in the first chapter of Wordsworth's line 
 — 'we find our faith — or not at all' ? 
 
 Twice have we been led up to this question. 
 It is time now to face it. 
 1 Revelation, v. 11-13. 
 
IV 
 THE REALITY OF CHRIST 
 
'A Personality which men could not have imagined, 
 a Personality which must be historical and which must 
 be divine.' william Robertson smith. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE REALITY OF CHRIST 
 
 The question now before us is this: we have 
 found that the discussion of two aspects of the 
 facts of life which most evidently challenge 
 faith — namely, suffering and sin — leads us in 
 each case to the conclusion that the answer to 
 the problems which they present is in the end 
 only to be found if God Himself can be thought 
 of as personally loving and saving suffering 
 and sinful man. Now is such a thought based 
 on reality? Has such a faith any fact to stand 
 upon which can stand against the indubitable 
 realities of suffering and sin? This is our 
 question. It has already been indicated, or 
 rather assumed, that the only fact upon which 
 this faith can stand is the fact of Jesus Christ; 
 but perhaps this should not be at once taken 
 for granted, and therefore I shall begin by 
 
 121 
 
122 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 inquiring whether in nature or human nature 
 there is anything which will satisfy our quest. 
 I think it does not need a long argument to 
 show that a gospel of a personally loving and 
 saving God cannot be based on the general 
 phenomena of nature. This most certainly is 
 not for one moment to say that nature — all 
 nature — is not of God. We are now quite 
 beyond that stage of religious (or irreligious) 
 thought which found God only in selected 
 supernatural events. Assuredly 'Deus in Ma- 
 china' is the true God, and science which insists 
 on this is witnessing truly for Him. A man 
 who cannot say this is not a believer. And yet 
 it is true and is, indeed, plain that the per- 
 sonally loving and personally saving God and 
 Father we seek must be found in something 
 more personal than the phenomena of nature. 
 For the relation of the Creator to us in nature 
 is all on impersonal lines. There are in nature 
 laws, processes, order and evolution; and it is 
 true that these suggest an Author and Director. 
 Yet they do not lead us to know Him as in 
 any individual way caring for us. They may 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 123 
 
 lead us to acknowledge the idea of a Power 
 or Principle we call God; they cannot teach us 
 to say 'Our Father.' This, surely, requires no 
 argument. 
 
 Moreover, this is not because our knowledge 
 of nature is as yet incomplete. It is equally 
 true even were our scientific knowledge perfect. 
 Let us imagine science to have done its perfect 
 work. Let us imagine the dream of Laplace 
 realised and all the processes of the natural 
 world — physical, vital, mental — reduced to a 
 single common denominator. In short, let the 
 molecule be found which is the egg from which 
 the whole cosmos has come. This would be 
 to know the world. But would it be, in any 
 religious sense, to know God? Would it bring 
 man, who is spirit and capable of intercourse 
 with the Father of his spirit, and who seeks 
 a divine love and a divine salvation, any 
 further in the insatiable quest of the soul: 'O 
 that I might find Him' ? Would it do anything 
 to answer the apostle's prayer: 'Show us the 
 Father and it sufficeth us' ? It would not. 
 There is nothing more utterly futile than the 
 
i2 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 idea — cherished by some schools of science and 
 feared by some schools of religion — that the 
 advance of scientific knowledge of the world 
 means the retrocession and, in the end, the 
 supersession of religion. The place for re- 
 ligion remains untouched by scientific knowl- 
 edge. That place is not a few still outstanding 
 phenomenal problems, such as the origin of 
 life or of consciousness. It may be that such 
 phenomenal problems will ever baffle the scien- 
 tific synthesis; on the other hand, science is 
 thoroughly entitled to say that this result is not 
 what is suggested either from the past progress 
 of knowledge or from the conviction of the 
 unity of the world. But however this may be, 
 the place and need of religion remain exactly 
 what they were. For science never finds more 
 than impersonal law, and religion never seeks 
 less than personal love. We must not assume 
 the latter search is satisfied; but we certainly 
 can say it is not and it never can be satisfied 
 by even a complete knowledge of the phe- 
 nomena of nature. Felix qui potuit rerum 
 cognoscere cans as ; yet this is not even the be- 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 125 
 
 ginning of his blessedness who knows the love 
 and the salvation of His Father in heaven. 
 
 But it will be said that here I am doing what 
 in a former chapter I criticised Huxley for 
 doing — namely, treating nature with man left 
 out. Within the human soul are more than 
 impersonal impressions of God. Inward in- 
 tuitions are there, 
 
 'which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing.' 1 
 
 And in these feelings — which in souls of higher 
 spiritual capacity attain to be clear and com- 
 manding convictions of a faith in God's per- 
 sonal character and personal love, and in His 
 speaking individually to His children and hear- 
 ing and answering their prayers — must we not 
 recognise a revelation of God intimate and 
 personal, and such as our souls seek? On this 
 many things may be said, but I shall here touch 
 on only two points. 
 
 One is that, as a matter of fact and experi- 
 
 1 Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, ix. 
 
126 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 ence, inward intuitions and emotions of this 
 kind do not and cannot generally maintain 
 themselves as assured knowledge against the 
 contradiction of outward facts in nature and 
 life. There are, no doubt, minds of which this 
 cannot be said — minds which, happily or other- 
 wise, are so uncritically constituted that they can 
 persuade themselves that what they find within 
 is also fact without, and that their ideals are 
 a valid standard of reality. But not many of 
 us are so easily satisfied. And surely to take 
 such great and definite propositions of faith as 
 that God shares our sufferings and sacrifices 
 Himself for our sins as securely guaranteed 
 by any merely inward sentiments is to build on 
 foundations palpably unable to support such a 
 superstructure. The truth is that all inward 
 feelings on such topics, even though we may 
 feel them strongly and call them convictions, 
 are so mixed up with our personal predilections 
 and desires and imaginings that it is simply 
 impossible to surmount the sceptical suspicions 
 that they are, or at least may be, but a sub- 
 jective conceiving of our own generalising 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 127 
 
 minds. There is no guarantee other than our- 
 selves that they represent more than what is 
 in and of ourselves. A faith of this kind is 
 (if I may here repeat a phrase I have written 
 .elsewhere) 'a mere edifice of conceptions in- 
 securely founded on the bed-rock of fact.' 1 At 
 best, it will be a wistful rather than a stablished 
 faith. Moreover, it is not a faith which can 
 be presented by one to another from any 
 ground common to both; if a man tells me he 
 is sure in his experience of God's love, that 
 does not help me to be sure, for he is built 
 that way and I am not. A faith with this 
 merely experimental basis may exist in its own 
 retreat in souls of a certain type. It cannot 
 face encounter with the facts of life, nor can 
 it take possession, in the name of the gospel, 
 of the public territory of truth. 
 
 But a second thing is to be said about this 
 appeal within to find the assurance about God 
 which faith seeks. When we thus turn inward 
 we discover a new need for more than nature 
 without and even human nature in our own 
 
 1 The Fact of Christ, p. 105. 
 
128 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 hearts can supply. We find the need of some- 
 thing in addition to knowledge. We find not 
 only an intellectual darkness or dimness but 
 also a moral defilement. We find that anti- 
 natural of which so much — by which is meant 
 so little — was said in the previous chapter. To 
 this new element and its need, nature and even 
 human nature have nothing, or nothing ade- 
 quate, to say. That outward nature has noth- 
 ing to offer as a salving and saving message for 
 a bad conscience is plain. But has even human 
 nature within what really and sufficiently will 
 meet this? Within the soul are, indeed, high 
 moral ideas and ideals. But the crux of the 
 whole matter is that we have these high moral 
 ideas and ideals but do not obey them. The 
 word is so trite that we forget it is also true : — 
 
 ' Video meliora proboque; 
 Deteriora sequor/ 1 
 
 There is here — indisputably so — no strong sal- 
 vation any more than any sure revelation. 
 Much more might easily be said on these 
 
 1 Ovid's Metam., vii. 20. 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 
 
 129 
 
 points and on others touching on this aspect 
 of our subject, but perhaps enough has been 
 said for our present purpose. That purpose 
 is certainly not to deny God in nature and 
 human nature. But it is to show — what in- 
 deed is indisputable fact — that in the general 
 phenomena of nature there is not manifested 
 the personal love of God, and in the ideals of 
 human nature there is not salvation. It is, 
 therefore, in something more than nature and 
 human nature that we must look for a basis 
 for a faith in God personally loving and sav- 
 ing suffering and sinful men. It is in what is 
 commonly called the 'supernatural.' One has 
 scruples in using the word, not in the least 
 because of any desire to evade or minimise the 
 truth it is meant to represent, but simply be- 
 cause it is so misused and misunderstood. If 
 we use it, let us be clear as to what it means. 
 It does not mean the splitting of the universe 
 as with a hatchet into two sections, in one of 
 which is natural law and in the other a God 
 who is exlex. There is but one universe, and 
 God who is in it all is ever reason and cannot 
 
1 3 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 deny Himself. What it means may be most 
 simply stated by saying that the antithesis is 
 not between nature and miracle, or between 
 law and non-law, but between the impersonal 
 and the personal action of God. In the gen- 
 eral processes of nature God expresses Himself 
 impersonally, just as a king does in the laws 
 of his realm. But it need be no irrational 
 contradiction of this that God, for adequate 
 reason, should express Himself further on 
 personal lines, manifesting His love to indi- 
 vidual souls and saving individual lives. This 
 is the only supernatural in which religion has 
 interest. A mere thaumaturgical display or a 
 mere unexplained wonder is of no value for 
 religion; it is the personally living and saving 
 God which is the one thing of value in the 
 supernatural. It is astonishing how little this 
 is perceived by even the most eminent oppo- 
 nents of Christian faith on this subject. If 
 ever there was an intelligent man it was Hux- 
 ley; if ever there was a cultured man it was 
 Matthew Arnold. Yet the test case of the 
 supernatural which the former desiderated was 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 131 
 
 a centaur trotting about, while the latter's 
 example would be his pen turned into a pen- 
 wiper. It is a cheap thing to speak disrespect- 
 fully of distinguished men, and I hope not to 
 fall into the way of doing it; but I shall take 
 leave to say of these suggestions that they 
 stand as a signal illustration of how even the 
 most intelligent men are capable of lapsing at 
 times into unintelligence. The Christian super- 
 natural has nothing to do with silliness of this 
 kind. It is God Himself showing — as is not 
 shown on the plane of nature — that He per- 
 sonally shares my life and saves me from my 
 sin. The thought may be unestablished or 
 untrue; but it is at least great enough not to 
 be classed with the performances of a glorified 
 circus or with conjuring tricks with pens. 
 
 The question before us is now sufficiently 
 clear. It is this, whether there is ground for 
 the faith that God, who is the Author of all 
 nature but who there manifests Himself only 
 on impersonal lines, has, in a way consistent 
 with His reason and worthy of Himself, also 
 and further manifested Himself as the Father 
 
1 32 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 of souls which seek to know Him and the 
 Saviour of lives which are enslaved in sin. If 
 we do not find an adequate and assured answer 
 to this question in the facts of nature and 
 human nature, we may now turn to test the 
 reality of that answer to it which is proposed 
 to us in the fact of Jesus Christ. 
 
 In the first place, it will be well to make 
 clear to our minds what kind of test of reality 
 we desiderate and should find sufficient. Well, 
 real facts are of two kinds. There is such a 
 thing as objective reality. The subtleties of 
 philosophy can, of course, refine it away and 
 show us that everything objective may be a 
 deception; but, speaking practically, we all 
 recognise such a thing as the reality of, say, a 
 historical event. The battle of Waterloo, for 
 example, really happened, and nothing can 
 alter its reality as a fact. But there is another 
 kind of reality, very different from the other, 
 yet most essential and conclusive. This is the 
 reality of experience. We do not say of love 
 or happiness or hope or fear within us that 
 it happens as the battle of Waterloo happened, 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 133 
 
 and yet these are real facts which we know 
 and of which we are sure. These then are the 
 two kinds of reality within our cognisance. 
 Now neither alone is quite perfect as knowl- 
 edge of reality; for objective history may be 
 inaccurately recorded for us, and subjective 
 experience may be merely temperamental. But 
 an exceptional degree of certainty in the test 
 of reality is reached when these two — the his- 
 torical or objective and the experimental or 
 subjective — corroborate each other and inter- 
 lock. A man who not only reads of a battle 
 but has been through it, a woman who not only 
 'feels happy' in her husband's love but has the 
 tangible tokens of it every day in her life — 
 these persons have the fullest possible cer- 
 tainty of the reality of these things. Now it 
 is exactly this kind of certainty which I wish 
 to apply as the test of the reality of the fact 
 of Jesus Christ. No less security is sufficient 
 for an issue so great as the truth of the gospel. 
 
 First, then, let us take what I shall call the 
 plain print of history. 
 
 To many the page of history on which the 
 
i 3 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 name of Jesus Christ is written may seem to 
 be anything but plain print. Indeed, in our 
 day, there are those — such as Professor Drews 
 in his Die Christusmythe and Mr. J. M. 
 Robertson in his Christianity and Mythology 
 — who tell us it is a blank page, for Jesus never 
 existed at all. I really cannot here turn aside 
 to discuss this perverse and incoherent reductio 
 ad absurdum of criticism. It must suffice to 
 say, in a word, that it is more than nineteen 
 centuries too late to be true. If it were true, 
 the opponents of Christian faith in the first 
 century, who must have known that Jesus was 
 but the name of a myth, would have met the 
 new religion with something far more con- 
 clusive than disputing whether it was true that 
 He rose or arguing that it is inconceivable to 
 think of a divine being suffering. They could 
 have exploded the whole thing if Jesus never 
 rose because He never died, and never died 
 because He never lived, and there was no Jesus 
 either to die or rise. This mythical idea is 
 really a fooling with history; and I pass from 
 it by quoting the verdict of an unequalled 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 135 
 
 authority on the subject of religious mythology, 
 Dr. J. G. Frazer, that it would be just as 
 reasonable to question the historic existence of 
 Alexander the Great or Charlemagne. 1 Still, 
 this extravagance apart, that there is to-day a 
 real and pressing problem with regard to the 
 page of print with which we are dealing is in- 
 disputable. Criticism is continually deciphering 
 it, and seems to find the text often corrupt and 
 almost illegible. A celebrated scholar — Dr. 
 Schmiedel — leaves us with some ten lines 2 upon 
 which to build a life of Jesus. It is this critical 
 uncertainty which invites so many persons to- 
 day to find a Christianity independent of the 
 historical Jesus. It befogs and bewilders many 
 a mind to-day that used to read securely about 
 Christ in the gospels, and causes it to say: 
 'They have taken away my Lord, and I know 
 not where they have laid Him.' I have known 
 persons who read the gospels through, as it 
 were for the last time, feeling that henceforth 
 they could never be sure that the Jesus therein 
 
 1 Attis, Adonis, Osiris {The Golden Bough, pt. iv.), P- 202, n. 
 
 2 Encyclopedia Biblica, art. 'Gospels,' § 139. 
 
1 36 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 described is really true. This difficulty and 
 danger are far too real to be evaded, in the 
 pulpit or anywhere else. There is no use pre- 
 tending that criticism has not profoundly al- 
 tered our attitude to the evangelical narrative 
 (as to the Bible generally), and it is not pos- 
 sible for the educated modern reader, at all 
 conversant with critical methods and results, 
 to take it as the uncritical believing mind used 
 to do. And it is affectation and worse to deny 
 that many perturbing questions thus are forced 
 upon the honest mind. But it is an entire mis- 
 take to conclude that, because of all this, what 
 it is essential for us to know about the Jesus 
 of history in order to read the gospel in Him 
 is therefore lost in haze. Jesus Himself is 
 that gospel. The essential thing is that we 
 have sure knowledge of Him. It is not essen- 
 tial — essential, I mean, for the assurance that 
 here is God's word of personal love and sal- 
 vation for men — that we must have sure and 
 indisputable knowledge of everything about 
 Him. I repeat it: Jesus Himself as reality is 
 what we need to know. And it is this which 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 137 
 
 in the gospels has an even historical reality 
 which is indisputable and indestructible. But 
 this must be said more distinctly and justified. 
 What, then, more distinctly is meant by 
 speaking of Jesus 'Himself as essential, and 
 distinguishing from this 'everything about 
 Him'? I think we can answer if we look at 
 our own selves. What is my self, as distin- 
 quishable from the special incidents of my life? 
 We do not seek here, in reply to this question, 
 any philosophical definition; we wish to know 
 where this self is to be found. Well, a man's 
 self is found in his relations to things, and 
 more specifically in these three vital relation- 
 ships : to God, to his own consciousness, and 
 to others and the world. The incidents of his 
 life express the man's self in these three rela- 
 tions, which are the lines along which his self 
 comes into actual being. To know Jesus 
 'Himself,' therefore, is not to construct Christo- 
 logical formulas about His Person; it is to in- 
 quire what, as a matter of historical fact, was 
 His relation to God, what His self-conscious- 
 ness, and what His attitude towards man. 
 
i 3 8 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Now it is Jesus in these vital relations of life 
 who is indisputable and indestructible. 
 
 I surely do not need to attempt once more 
 to do what has been done in innumerable ways 
 by students of the Person of Jesus Christ — 
 namely, set forth what the Figure in the gospels 
 is in these respects. The fewest possible words 
 must suffice here. First, then, as regards His 
 relation to God, we find one whose filial con- 
 sciousness towards Him was absolutely un- 
 broken and perfect, who never needed even 
 once, as the saintliest among us need continu- 
 ally, to return to the Father by the road of 
 repentance and reformation, and who, further, 
 knew the things of God, not spelling them out 
 from below in much dimness and doubt, and 
 making many mistakes, as the wisest of us do, 
 but as one speaking from the region where 
 these are seen and sure, and announcing them 
 with an authority which is final as the law of 
 God itself. Then, as regards what we call the 
 self-consciousness of Jesus, we find one who 
 had nothing of that dualism between the ideal 
 and the actual — 'les deux homines en moi' — 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 139 
 
 which is the very first datum within our moral 
 consciousness (and, according to the experience 
 of all the saints, it is those who live nearest 
 God who feel this dualism most and confess 
 their failure and sin because of it) ; and one, 
 moreover, who, without any sense either of 
 presumption or incongruity, regarded Himself 
 and offered Himself as one in whom all hu- 
 manity's spiritual needs could be met. Lastly, 
 as regards Jesus' relation to others, we find 
 one who took up an attitude which no one of 
 us has the right to take up towards any fellow- 
 man — calling for a surrender of the very self 
 to Him, claiming to be the final judge of their 
 lives as of their destinies, and, above all, not 
 merely preaching to them about the forgive- 
 ness of God, but Himself, most personally, 
 forgiving their sins, so that, most naturally, 
 the onlookers called it blasphemy. This — 
 stated in the baldest possible terms — is what 
 the Jesus of the gospels was in His relation 
 to God, in His own self-consciousness, in His 
 attitude to men. It is not single incidents or 
 sayings which exhibit this; it is the whole 
 picture. 
 
i 4 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 But, it is asked, is the picture authentic? 
 I desire to answer this question distinctly and 
 unevasively. Upon the mare magnum of the 
 purely critical discussion of the New Testament 
 documents I cannot be expected here to em- 
 bark; but the general argument I shall adduce 
 is sufficient, if it be valid, to meet the crux of 
 the question. 
 
 The answer of negative criticism to what 
 has just been said about Jesus is that all this 
 is to be accounted for as a later development 
 of the thought of the Christian community, 
 which, persuaded that Jesus was the Messiah 
 and anxious to promote that conviction, more 
 and more exaggerated the accounts of His life 
 and personality to suit the case, and so, as a 
 noteworthy English writer puts it, 'the testi- 
 mony even of eye-witnesses rose unconsciously 
 to meet the high demand for a fit account of 
 the Messiah's work.' 1 Now a good deal might 
 be fairly said upon this on strictly critical 
 grounds — that, for example, it takes time and 
 could hardly be done with success immediately 
 
 1 J. Estlin Carpenter's First Three Gospels, p. 83. 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 141 
 
 upon Christ's death and in face of those who 
 knew Him in life, and yet that this picture is 
 not a portrait of later as distinguished from 
 the earlier and primitive tradition. 1 But, not 
 to enter upon any discussion as to this (which 
 would necessarily be a detailed discussion), 
 I shall rather submit the impossibility involved 
 in such a theory as that just indicated — an im- 
 possibility which is at once more intelligible 
 and more final than any merely critical ob- 
 jection. 
 
 In the first place, let it be admitted that this 
 kind of thing — this exaggeration of the por- 
 trait under the stimulus of a desire to prove 
 Jesus to have been the Messiah — could be done 
 in the reporting of various details of His life. 
 It is clearly possible, in some such personal or 
 doctrinal party-interest, to work up an incident 
 into a miracle and to make a story fit nicely 
 
 1 Dr. Denney's Jesus and the Gospel is an exhaustive and 
 really conclusive argument for the last statement. What is 
 said of Jesus in the text above is practically all contained 
 "within Professor Flinders Petrie's 'Nucleus' of the primitive 
 record, and the essentials of it are in the early speeches in 
 the Book of Acts, which even Dr. Schmiedel says give a pic- 
 ture that 'must have come from a primitive source.' 
 
1 42 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 into a prophecy. But, as has already been 
 indicated, the challenging thing about Jesus 
 Christ is not this or that detail in the gospels, 
 but is the whole personality in and behind all 
 incidents aand stories. It is a personality — a 
 character, a consciousness — than which I ven- 
 ture to say there is nothing in the whole range 
 of literature less like the invention of men. 
 After all, we know pretty well by this time 
 what the human mind, even in men of great 
 genius, can create in literature; and when we 
 compare these figures with the Figure in the 
 gospel, the mot juste is Rousseau's — Ce n'est 
 pas ainsi qu'on invente. When critics in this 
 enlightened and educated and cultured twen- 
 tieth-century England tell us this incomparable 
 character and consciousness — the 'divinity' of 
 which, not in the dogmatic or ecclesiastical 
 sense but in the moral and spiritual sense, has 
 impressed itself on the noblest thought of the 
 world for two thousand years and is undimmed 
 to-day — were originally created and then con- 
 sistently carried through by some obscure 
 Jewish pamphleteers of the second century in 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 143 
 
 the party-interest of an ecclesiastical propa- 
 ganda, I am inclined to make reply thus : 'And 
 shall we — we "who speak the tongue that 
 Shakespere spoke" [here I should certainly 
 work in Shakespere for all he is worth] — shall 
 we be put to shame by Jewish second-century 
 pamphleteers? Let us do it. You, then, do 
 it, or something like it. Create — and, at some 
 length, fill in — the portrait of a man who lives 
 in perfect unison with God, who often talks 
 to others about their bad self but is never 
 conscious of his own, and who, with no sense 
 of impropriety, claims absolute dominion over 
 men's life, judges their souls, and takes it on 
 Him to forgive their sins. You do it, I say — 
 as these second-century Jewish fellows did — 
 and get the world to call it divine; thus will 
 you at once glorify our literature, immortalise 
 your names, and prove the case.' This is said 
 in the form of a jest, and perhaps one should 
 apologise for assuming, even momentarily, a 
 jesting tone on such a question. But it is said 
 seriously too. The truth is that, far from being 
 able to produce such a personality as Jesus 
 
i 4 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Christ in the original, the finest minds feel how 
 unable they are ever to reproduce Him. Why 
 will an adequate life of Jesus never be written? 
 Why, if not because, as Matthew Arnold said, 
 'we cannot explain Him, cannot get behind 
 Him and above Him, cannot command Him'? 1 
 We do not speak thus even of Shakespere's 
 characters; and assuredly the last man to speak 
 thus of the literary creation of second-century 
 Jews was Matthew Arnold. No, verily — and 
 to sum it all up — various are the relationships 
 men may hold towards Jesus Christ, but one 
 they cannot hold. They may be His oppo- 
 nents or His disciples; they may be critics or 
 worshippers ; they may be doubters or believers. 
 But they cannot — never could and never can — 
 be His creators. 
 
 It is impossible, without unduly extending 
 this chapter, to develop this argument further, 
 here. It is not, let me say, the argument of 
 orthodoxy; no one has stated it more explicitly 
 than John Stuart Mill, who declares 'it is no 
 use to say that Christ as exhibited in the gospels 
 
 1 Literature and Dogma (Preface to Popular Edition). 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 145 
 
 is not historical,' for, while 'the tradition of 
 His followers suffices to insert any number of 
 marvels' and suchlike, who, either of His dis- 
 ciples or of the early Christian writers, 'was 
 capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to 
 Jesus or of imagining the life and character 
 revealed in the gospels'? 1 It is the argument 
 neither of orthodoxy nor of heterodoxy; it is 
 the argument of plain critical reason. Let the 
 reader, who would pursue and test it further, 
 take the gospels in his hand and read them 
 with the mind and conscience which are ready 
 to recognise and receive spiritual life and truth. 
 He will find many incidents which, frankly, he 
 hardly knows what to do with. But he will 
 find also, as Dr. Denney has put it, 'there is 
 a person before his eyes in the gospels whose 
 spiritual reality (to express it thus) is so in- 
 disputable that it carries his historical reality 
 along with it.' 2 He may say that the evangel- 
 ists may have made this or that story about 
 
 1 Three Essays on Religion: Theism, v. The whole passage 
 should be read. 
 
 2 Jesus and * u " Gospel, p. 167. 
 
146 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Jesus; he will not say they made Jesus Himself, 
 whom it is as far beyond the most enthusiastic 
 belief to have created as it is beyond the most 
 critical unbelief to destroy. 
 
 Here we have already touched our second 
 line of witness to the reality of Christ — that 
 of experience — and to this I now pass. 
 
 There is more need to be critical about the 
 script of experience than even the print of 
 history. It is so easy here to talk largely and 
 loosely, to be unscientific and inaccurate, to 
 make experience say more than, as a matter of 
 fact, it can say. We must criticise our experi- 
 ence if it is to teach us safely. This is the 
 case with even human emotions; the best and 
 most interpretative love-poetry, for example, 
 is not that of mere youthful sentimentalists, 
 but is given us by those who — not coldly, in- 
 deed, but truly — read what their passion means. 
 And certainly it is the case with religious ex- 
 perience. If then we are going to call in this 
 witness to corroborate the testimony to the 
 reality of Christ, let us not give the rein to 
 vague emotions and impressions, but keep 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 147 
 
 strictly to what, in a real and sure sense, are 
 facts of moral and spiritual experience. 
 
 It is obvious, to begin with, that experience 
 cannot be asked to corroborate the mere ex- 
 ternal incidents of the life of Christ; but we 
 have seen that the essential thing for us is 
 not this or that incident but is Jesus Himself. 
 Even as regards Jesus Himself, however, it is 
 obvious that our experience cannot witness to 
 everything; we cannot, for example, reproduce 
 within our consciousness that unique self-con- 
 sciousness which is depicted, with such con- 
 vincing historic reality, in the gospels. The 
 crucial aspect of the personality of Jesus which 
 may be tested in our experience is His relation 
 to man. What, then, we must ask, is Jesus — 
 this historical Jesus of the gospels — to us in 
 the experience of mind and heart and con- 
 science and life? To this question I believe 
 and submit that experience gives an answer 
 which is clear and indisputable. 
 
 When our minds and hearts and consciences 
 and lives directly and honestly face Jesus Christ 
 — the historical Jesus Christ, I say again, of 
 
148 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 the gospels — what we are met with may, I 
 think, be characterised thus: it is a call, leading 
 when obeyed into a companionship, and this, 
 in turn, the source of a new life. Other words 
 may, of course, be used to describe this, but 
 that these are real elements in the experience 
 of a man really turned towards Christ and 
 faithfully trying to be true to Him can hardly, 
 I think, be questioned. Now, what is it which 
 is the crucial characteristic of the experience 
 of this call, companionship, and life? In order 
 to answer this we need not make claim to be 
 profoundly experienced Christians. The thing 
 I am going to name will be recognised as true 
 even by those of us whose obedience to the 
 call, faithfulness to the fellowship, and realisa- 
 tion of the life lived with Christ are of the 
 poorest. But the one thing we do know about 
 this relationship to Him, if we know anything 
 about it at all, is this, that this call of, com- 
 panionship with, and power from Christ are 
 simply identical with the call, companionship, 
 and power of God Himself. This is really the 
 most clear and indisputable thing in any Chris- 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 149 
 
 tian man's relationship with Christ. He makes 
 and can make no kind of distinction within his 
 experience between 'knowing God' and 'know- 
 ing Him whom He hath sent' — that is, Jesus 
 Christ. Indeed, as Dr. Harnack puts it, 'every 
 relationship to God' — that is, of course, in the 
 things of the gospel — 'is at the same time a 
 relationship to Jesus Christ.' 1 In all this I 
 do not mean anything dogmatic — any doctrine 
 of God and Christ. I am speaking solely of 
 what is found fact in experience; and nothing 
 in Christian experience is so clearly or really 
 fact as this, that to hear Christ's call is to 
 hear God, to know Christ's companionship is 
 to have fellowship with God, to live life under 
 the influence of Christ is to live it with God. 
 If Christianity means anything at all in the 
 soul, it means this. As this is the most surely 
 attested, so is it also the most widely attested 
 fact in what we call Christian experience. The 
 Christian beginner at least recognises that his 
 response to Christ has been just his response 
 to God; while the most experienced saint never 
 
 3 Dogmengcschlchte, iii. 69. 
 
i 5 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 finds that he gets past this relationship to 
 Christ to another and deeper relationship with 
 God beyond. Here, then, is a fact of life about 
 Jesus Christ which we can take as solid and 
 can verify as sure. 
 
 Let us now place together the central and 
 indestructible thing in the history and this 
 crucial and indisputable thing in our experience. 
 
 Do they not indeed interlock? There, in 
 history, is One whose personality is assuredly 
 not that merely of one man of the world's 
 population — One, in particular, whose relation- 
 ship to man was that which no man can take to 
 another, but is indeed the relationship which 
 only God can assume to any of us. And here, 
 in our moral and spiritual experience — no 
 vague emotion in it but its surest fact — is the 
 same person meaning for us not simply one 
 more of the world's population or even a great 
 teacher of long ago, but what only God Him- 
 self can mean and be. Let us, for the present, 
 disregard any kind of theological synthesis of 
 all this. Let us look solely and simply at the 
 facts — the two facts which come to be one fact, 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 151 
 
 for each is the complement and corroboration 
 of the other. Do they not, I ask again, inter- 
 lock? If so, the fact of Christ has surely the 
 highest possible kind of reality, and the search 
 of our faith for a sure word which should mean 
 God personally speaking to us, caring for us, 
 saving us has been not in vain. 
 
 At the risk of reiteration, let me still further 
 emphasise this combination of both these ele- 
 ments as that which makes faith fast. We are 
 constantly being told that history is unnecessary 
 and irrelevant here, and also that the two to- 
 gether — the historical and the experiential — 
 are incongruous and incompatible. I shall say 
 a word on each of these contentions. The 
 former takes high philosophical ground. 'Ac- 
 cidental truths of history,' it declares in oft- 
 quoted words of Lessing, 'can never be proof 
 of necessary truths of reason.' My answer is 
 very simple. I am not seeking any necessary 
 truth of reason. I want to know this — whether 
 or not God personally speaks to me lovingly 
 and savingly. It is quite consistent with eternal 
 reason that He does not. But if He does — 
 u 
 
1 52 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 let this be clear — it will be shown, not in some 
 category of Divine Immanence, for immanence 
 conceals rather than reveals character, but by 
 individual deeds done in life even as a man's 
 character is thus revealed. It is not in a phi- 
 losophy of ideas necessarily true in reason, but 
 by seeing what God has done for us in Jesus 
 Christ, who lived in the theatre of this world, 
 that we shall ever find the data for the gospel 
 of God's personal love which we seek. The 
 other contention — that the historical and the 
 experiential in faith are incongruous and in- 
 compatible — raises a question of simple fact. 
 The antithesis between these is statable on 
 paper; but it simply is not a fact in the Chris- 
 tian life. On the contrary, it is just as we deal 
 in mind and conscience with the historic person 
 of the evangelical records that our religious 
 experience of the knowledge of God and com- 
 munion with Him grows rich and strong and 
 meaningful and sure; and, correspondingly, 
 these experiences are delivered from that fatal 
 subjectivity of which I have already spoken in 
 an earlier page of this chapter, only when 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 153 
 
 they are experiences which Christ creates and 
 countenances. To put this in theological ter- 
 minology, Jesus Christ (the historical) gives 
 to us His Spirit (the experiential) ; and, on the 
 other hand, the Spirit speaks not of Himself, 
 but takes of the things of Christ and shows 
 them to us. The alleged incompatibility is 
 simply not a fact, and any merely logical state- 
 ment of it solvttur ambulando. Further, when 
 it is maintained that these two elements — the 
 historical and the spiritual — are of different 
 worlds and move in different orbits, I reply 
 that Jesus Christ, who is the gospel, is of both 
 these worlds and in both these orbits. He is a 
 fact of history as fully as Julius Caesar is. He 
 is a spiritual fact as really as human love is. 
 The Christian gospel, then, is neither a mere 
 history, for that would make it a tradition, and 
 tradition cannot save, nor a mere experience, 
 for that would make it subjective, and what is 
 subjective is never secure; it is both. The 
 two, I repeat, interlock. They countersign 
 each other's witness. And this is the unique 
 test of the reality of the faith of the gospel. 
 
i 5 4 THE FiVCTS OF LIFE 
 
 'That which God hath joined together, let no 
 man put asunder.' 1 
 
 This chapter must not be much longer ex- 
 tended, but, having said so much as has been 
 said as to the reality of this fact of Christ as 
 a fact more than anything in nature or human 
 nature, we must, at least briefly, recognise what 
 is involved in this both intellectually and re- 
 ligiously. 
 
 That the intellectual consequences of such a 
 faith are deep and far-reaching is evident. A 
 Christ who thus transcends nature and human 
 nature means not less than that the boundaries 
 
 1 1 may add in a note that here is an illustration of two 
 things which have often struck my mind about many ques- 
 tions. One is the danger of false antithesis in reasoning, 
 where we are told to accept one or other of two categories 
 when truth is found by holding on to both. False antithesis 
 and loose terminology are the two greatest pitfalls of the 
 mind. The other thing rises out of this, and is that in a 
 number of questions the truth lies in a balance of apparent 
 contraries. To use a mathematical figure, it is an ellipse with 
 two foci, rather than a circle with one centre. In many sub- 
 jects I feel with Joubert when he said he 'liked to see two 
 truths at once.' This applies to conduct also, where it is not 
 enough to have a principle and run amok with it, but where 
 (as Principal Rainy once phrased it) 'you must let one prin- 
 ciple play upon another.' A dissertation might be written on 
 'The Equipoise of Truth,' but this is not the place to attempt it. 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 155 
 
 of cognisable reality in the world and in history 
 are enlarged; and this means a revised estimate 
 both of nature and history. Now here I simply 
 decline to get into a discussion of the possibility 
 of 'miracle.' Really, I do not know exactly 
 what a miracle is, and have never read a defi- 
 nition which was much better than a begging of 
 the question from one side or the other. But 
 I think I know what a fact is. And if anything 
 is a fact — indelible in history and indisputable 
 in life — it is that in Jesus Christ is that which 
 is not either in nature or human nature. In- 
 stead of discussing the supernatural a priori, 
 what we have to do is to make room in our 
 mind for that fact. On this I wish to make 
 two remarks. On the one hand, it is not to 
 be misstated; on the other, it is not to be 
 minimised or evaded. It is misstated when it 
 is represented as meaning the destruction of 
 the idea of the unity of the order of the world. 
 The unity of the order of the world was a 
 Christian thought long before it was articulated 
 by science. Never did it find more explicit 
 assertion than in these words: 'All things were 
 
1 5 6 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 made by Him; and apart from Him not a 
 thing was made that has been made.' 1 What 
 this fact of Christ, as more than nature, does 
 mean is that the category of unity is not what 
 we call 'natural law,' but is that living and 
 loving God who is in Him. But it is even 
 more incumbent to say this fact of Christ must 
 not be minimised or evaded, and on this I wish 
 to speak more particularly. 
 
 If you say you accept the reality of this 
 Christ, then you must take the intellectual 
 consequences of saying so unevasively. It is 
 neither fair nor frank to say it in one sense 
 and unsay it in another. Yet there is nothing 
 commoner in a great deal of modern literature 
 on Jesus Christ than this very speaking with 
 two voices. As an example of this I take an 
 eminent name, and one of a man we all regard 
 with admiration and indebtedness. On this 
 question Dr. Harnack distinguishes in a most 
 curious way between what may be accepted as 
 a fact in history and what must be received as 
 a fact in religion. 'The historian,' he says, 
 1 St. John l 6. 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 157 
 
 'cannot regard the supernatural as a sure his- 
 torical event;' for, the writer continues, 'by 
 doing so he is destroying the very method of 
 interpreting things upon which all historical 
 investigation depends.' This seems quite clear 
 and final; 'but' — and it is a most notable aber — 
 Dr. Harnack immediately goes on, if this same 
 historian be convinced that Jesus did what is 
 'in the strict sense miraculous,' he 'infers' from 
 this 'a supernatural person,' which inference, 
 however, 'belongs to the province of religious 
 faith.' 1 Now I pass over comment on this 
 reference to historical 'method' with the single 
 observation that the 'only method' upon which 
 any historical investigation has any right to 
 depend is to be open to recognise whatever can 
 establish a case to be recognised as a fact; and 
 surely I am speaking within reason and with 
 studied moderation when I say that Jesus 
 Christ as a fact not to be accounted for in 
 terms of nature has, after twenty centuries of 
 scrutiny, a case not to be peremptorily non- 
 
 1 Dogmengescldchte, ii. 50 n. (E. T., History of Dogma, i. 
 65 n.). 
 
158 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 suited at the bar of history by any 'method.' 
 But, passing from that, I wish to ask if this 
 separation between what a man qua historian 
 must deny and qua believer may infer is tenable. 
 Man is not an intellectual amphibian. He has 
 only one mind, and he lives in one world of 
 truth; it is not possible to split either the mind 
 or the world into two parts, each with its own 
 allegiance. I venture to put this, with entire 
 respect, more personally. Dr. Harnack, a 
 prominent and influential teacher, is asked 
 whether the supernatural personality of Jesus 
 Christ is a credible fact. He answers — I do 
 not think this is unfair or caricature — that first 
 he must know whether he is to reply in the 
 capacity of historian or that of a man of re- 
 ligious faith. Surely we may retort that we 
 desire Dr. Adolf Harnack to reply, and we 
 were not aware there is more than one Dr. 
 Harnack. Some men have greater minds than 
 the rest of us, but they have not more minds. 
 And thus, I conclude, if we are going to accept 
 at all the reality of this Christ of whom we 
 have been speaking, we must do it with our 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 159 
 
 one mind and with the whole of it, whatever 
 be the intellectual consequences. 
 
 But it is with the consequences of Jesus 
 Christ for religion that here we are more con- 
 cerned. It means such a faith as that which 
 we found such problems as suffering and sin 
 forced us to seek — a faith in God as personally 
 loving and saving us and indeed our God and 
 our Father. 'He that hath seen me,' said Jesus, 
 'hath seen the Father; how sayest thou then, 
 Show us the Father?' Is this then the answer 
 to that profound cry of the human soul that 
 stretches past the impersonal laws and processes 
 of nature for the living God and cries : 'O that 
 I might find Him'? There are many minds 
 which so unquestioningly accept Christian faith 
 that they have never doubted this answer is 
 entirely true; there are others which are so 
 confirmedly agnostic that they have never given 
 it even a moment's credence. There is a cer- 
 tain want of realisation of the issue at stake 
 in both of these attitudes of mind. I think it 
 is when a man realises what it means not to 
 believe thus about God that he is driven again 
 
i6o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 to Christ with the words : 'Lord, I believe, help 
 Thou mine unbelief;' and, on the other hand, 
 it is when he in some degree realises what a 
 stupendous thing it is to think of God as thus 
 loving and saving him that it seems really im- 
 possible to be true, and he is thrown back again 
 into doubt. I do not understand either a satis- 
 fied unbelief or a facile faith. 
 
 Let us, then as a poet who knew both un- 
 belief and faith 1 bids us, 'consider it again.' 
 Is it surely true — this gospel, familiarity with 
 the sound of which has dulled our minds to the 
 magnitude of its amazingness? We know, of 
 course, that many noble teachers have preached 
 to men the love of God. In particular, Jesus 
 did so. But if these were just human opinions, 
 and if even Jesus was no more than a pure- 
 minded and guileless Galilean peasant who has 
 been dead now these many hundred years — 
 such a 'faithful, tormented, questioning, bat- 
 tling man' who 'died with broken hopes,' as 
 that of Gustav Frenssen's popular story 2 — 
 
 *A. H. Clough. 
 
 2 The Story of Jesus: Retold by a Modern Disciple. Trans- 
 lated from the German of G. Frenssen by Dr. Archibald Duff. 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 161 
 
 why shall I build my faith on their ideas when 
 there is nothing to show of fact which may be 
 guarantee that what they say corresponds with 
 reality? Speaking is easy work — even speak- 
 ing about the love of God. It is data that the 
 gospel needs. If then there be no such basis 
 of fact for this gospel, let us not talk as if 
 there were. To ask me to believe it from 
 these lofty teachers, without any data, is futile; 
 the facts against it are too strong. We need 
 not become aggressive unbelievers, but let us 
 be quiet at least. We must probably give up 
 many fine thoughts and fond hopes — not, cer- 
 tainly, all fine thoughts about life or fond 
 hopes, but the deepest of them and the dearest 
 — and we may as well give up, except in the 
 sense of soliloquy, our prayers. The world be- 
 comes chillier, darker, emptier. But we must 
 just live a little in it and love a little in it and 
 work a little in it and then die out of it as 
 every one else has to do. So do we, at times, 
 tell ourselves that, if there be no assured gospel 
 of a Father's love, it does not matter so much, 
 and we can get on well enough with an agnostic 
 
1 62 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 mind and a stoic heart. But this mood is a 
 mask which may at any moment fall off. 'Just 
 when we 're safest' (as Browning says in lines 
 too familiar for quotation) something wakens, 
 now a hope and now a fear, which makes us 
 feel that it matters even infinitely whether there 
 be not more to be said of the great mysteries 
 of God and the soul, of sin and salvation, of 
 life and death, than the stars and the hills and 
 the seas can ever say or even than we can say 
 to ourselves in our dim-lit minds and defiled 
 hearts. We stretch once more the hand and 
 strain the ear. It is in vain: — 
 
 'Dextrae jungere dextram 
 Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces/ 1 
 
 Why, then, may not Christ, offered as 'the 
 Word of God,' be accepted as the word we 
 seek and need? Because, it is replied, what 
 is supernatural is inadmissible. Well, as a 
 theorem, as an abstract idea in a conception of 
 the world, the supernatural may well seem in- 
 
 1 Virgil's JEne'id, i. 408. ('To clasp hand with hand is not 
 given, nor to hear or utter reliable speech.') 
 
THE REALITY OF CHRIST 163 
 
 admissible. But this gospel comes to us here 
 not as a bare abstract theorem; it comes in a 
 person. Look, then, straight into the eyes of 
 Jesus Christ. Examine Him, with an earnest 
 and a fair mind, in history; face Him, with an 
 awakened and frank conscience, in moral and 
 spiritual life. What the result may be for any 
 other is not for me to say, but I will say what 
 for me is the result. It — a theorem about a 
 divine, supernatural word — is incredible; it is 
 too remote from reality to be convincing or 
 even interesting, and is far too unlikely to be 
 true. But He is indisputable; He is too real 
 to be denied and far 'too good' not 'to be true.' 
 I ended the last chapter with an angels' 
 chorus. We may be very unfit to join in that. 
 But we may — indeed, must we not? — join in 
 the confession of those first disciples, men on 
 earth like ourselves, who said to Jesus: 'Lord, 
 to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words 
 of eternal life. And we believe and are sure 
 that Thou art that Christ, the Son of the living 
 God/ 
 
V 
 THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 
 
'There are two happinesses, that of nature and that 
 of conquest — two equilibria, that of Greece and that of 
 Nazareth — two kingdoms, that of the natural man and 
 that of the regenerate man.' 
 
 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 
 
 The topic discussed in the last chapter is the 
 crucial question about Jesus Christ, and yet it 
 does not end the challenge which life presents 
 to faith. We must now go on to consider the 
 facts of life, or some typical aspects of them, 
 with a further question in our minds — the 
 question, namely, of whether the view of things 
 expressed in what we associate with Jesus 
 Christ is sufficient and adequate for life, or 
 whether other points of view are not larger 
 and richer. I shall, in this chapter, consider 
 this in the light of what may be called the 
 positive of human life — the claim of humanism 
 to be the real and rich way of living; in the 
 chapter following we must consider the nega- 
 tive side. 
 
 What is meant by the former of these issues 
 may be stated thus. Let it be admitted that 
 much of what has been said about Christ is or 
 12 167 
 
1 68 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 may be true. Let it be admitted that He is, 
 in a very real sense, a supreme and even super- 
 natural Figure, and also that He is truly the 
 source of an immediate knowledge of and 
 communion with God. Still — here is the ques- 
 tion now before us — is not this, after all, but 
 one element in life? Is not human experience 
 in this great and interesting world a far 
 broader and more manifold thing than is cov- 
 ered by this internal colloquy between Jesus 
 Christ and the soul about repentance and for- 
 giveness and the like? Can you then put life 
 under the single domination of even this 
 Master and under the one law even of His 
 authority? In short — and even where it is 
 admitted that Jesus Christ is, in a real sense, 
 true for religion — is He and is His gospel 
 adequate for all that this wonderful life of 
 ours contains, and especially for its great 
 human aspects which give to it so much of its 
 interest and richness and sweetness and, despite 
 all its sorrows, joy? 
 
 These questions of to-day are not in them- 
 selves new, but they are finding new and very 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 169 
 
 distinct expressions in our age. The modern 
 mind has not only a larger conception of the 
 physical universe than was known in the times 
 when the gospel was first preached, but also 
 a larger sense of human life than at least the 
 Jews of those days knew. And its motto cer- 
 tainly is im Ganzen — whether or not always 
 im Gut en or im Schonen — resolut zu leben. 
 It is ready and waiting to say 'Yes' to life. 
 Now it is easy to perceive how impatient a 
 mood like this becomes to anything which is 
 of the nature of a cordon round any part of 
 life, or seems to lay any limiting law upon 
 ideas and aims in life which it is formulating 
 for itself. And it is just this which much in 
 the mind of to-day finds in religion and not 
 least in Christianity. Thus arises a new chal- 
 lenge to the standards and sanctions of an older 
 view of life. No one has appreciated this 
 phase of modern feeling better than Dr. 
 Eucken, and I shall quote one of his many 
 statements of it: — 
 
 'In its rich unfolding of life, the modern world 
 has brought an untold wealth of things new and 
 
i 7 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 great whose Influence no one can escape and whose 
 fruits we all enjoy. But with this incontestable 
 gain there is closely interwoven a characteristic 
 tendency which is deeply involved in doubt and 
 conflict. Since the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century, the modern world has wrought out a new 
 type of life, which departs widely from the Chris- 
 tian. . . . The greater the strength and self-con- 
 sciousness which this new t)^pe acquires, the more 
 evident it becomes that it is incompatible with 
 Christianity; in fact, the fundamental tendencies 
 of the two run directly counter to each other. 
 Their peaceable and friendly co-operation, such as 
 existed in earlier times, becomes impossible ; a clear 
 understanding is increasingly necessary ; continually 
 harsher is the rejection of Christianity by those who 
 follow the specifically modern tendency.' x 
 
 Thus is it that we have in the present day 
 non-Christian ideals of life held up to us which 
 not only do not accept the Christian ideal but 
 vigorously oppose it as — to use a phrase of 
 Eucken's in some other place — 'the enemy of 
 the energy and truth of life.' These last words 
 express a feeling towards the law and gospel 
 of Christ which to-day finds many forms of 
 expression and which demands examination. 
 
 1 The Problem of Human Life, p. 297. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 171 
 
 Probably the two most notable exponents of 
 this are Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. 
 The former has rightly seen that the only way 
 finally to 'smash' Christianity is to dethrone its 
 ethical ideal. 'So long as men go on admiring 
 Jesus and making Him their ideal, no good will 
 come from disproving the gospel history.' 1 So 
 Nietzsche preaches a 'noble morality' which 
 exults in a spirit the reverse of that of Christ, 
 and declares humility and sacrifice to be the 
 principles only of the weaklings of humanity. 2 
 Nearer home, Mr. Shaw holds forth a gospel 
 of freedom through the rejection of all kinds of 
 moral sanctions or restraints, whether they be 
 Christian or any other, and the refusal to allow 
 any consideration of ethical differentiation to 
 stand in the way of whatever impulse is able to 
 command. From this freedom many people 
 would turn back when they see how it works out 
 in life; but not so Mr. Shaw, who writes: — 
 
 'If a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction 
 against the preaching of duty or self-sacrifice and 
 
 1 Figgis's Civilisation at the Cross-Roads, p. 59. 
 
 2 I shall refer to Nietzsche's 'noble morality' in the closing 
 chapter. 
 
172 
 
 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 the rest of it, were to tell me that she was deter- 
 mined not to murder her own instincts and throw 
 away her life in obedience to a mouthful of empty 
 phrases, I should say to her: "By all means, do 
 as you propose. Try how wicked you can be. It 
 is precisely the same experiment as trying how 
 good you can be." ' 1 
 
 These instances (on the latter of which I shall 
 say a few words later in this chapter) may be 
 extreme. But their point of view is deep in 
 the mind of the modern man, and I am inclined 
 to think even deeper in the mind of the modern 
 woman — the view, namely, that there are re- 
 gions in life which are a law to themselves, and 
 in which any other authority, even in the name 
 of religion or of Christ Himself, is (to use 
 again Eucken's phrase) 'an enemy to the energy 
 and truth of life.' Do not many persons — 
 neither Nietzscheans nor Shavians, but morally 
 clothed and rationally in their right mind — feel 
 something of this in relation, for example, to 
 art or to science? These are realms where the 
 whole interest of the gospel seems not so much 
 
 1 The Sanity of Art, p. 44. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 173 
 
 untrue as irrelevant. If a man will put this 
 to the test he may be surprised to find how far 
 it will lead him. Let him, to name one case, 
 really steep his soul in the beauty and the pas- 
 sion that are in Greek literature — and if we 
 are going to claim an autonomy from even 
 Christian authority for certain spheres of life, 
 let it be done for the sake of the balanced and 
 serene spirit that breathes and burns in Sopho- 
 cles or Sappho rather than at the instance of 
 any neurotic and noisy moderns — and he will 
 find himself in a world where the questions and 
 calls of the gospel simply lose interest and 
 almost meaning. Nor is it only in connection 
 with such matters of the higher intellectual life, 
 as art or science, that this autonomy asserts 
 itself. It is not less strong in the emotional 
 life. Thus do not many persons — though they 
 may defend their minds from formulating it — 
 feel in the same way about human love, which 
 comes, when it does come, as an absolute which 
 is its own lord? It is not always easy to recon- 
 cile with thoughts such as these the supremacy 
 and sufficiency of the gospel which would crown 
 
174 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Christ as the law of life and 'Lord of all.' The 
 result of this, even when it does not go the 
 length of positively anti-Christian assertions 
 of moral independence of the principles of the 
 gospel, is, as I have already indicated, a feeling 
 that there is a larger life to be lived than the 
 Christian, and that the wise man will be (to use 
 Mr. Edmund Gosse's phrase about Walter 
 Pater) 'not all for Apollo nor all for Christ.' 1 
 Here is a far more insidious question for faith 
 than anything said by a blatant materialism. 
 The suggestion finds perfect expression in a 
 sentence or two from the pen of one of the 
 most refinedly sceptical minds in contemporary 
 European literature. In one of M. Anatole 
 France's books a convert to the Christian life 
 says of her spiritual instructor that she be- 
 lieves him 'car il possede la verite! To which 
 Nicias, the typical cultured second-century 
 Greek, smilingly replies: 'Et mot, je possede 
 les verites. II vl en a qn'une; je les at tontes. 
 Je suis plus riche que lui.' 2 This is a thought 
 
 1 Critical Kitcats, by E. Gosse, p. 270. 
 
 2 Thais, 2*8. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 175 
 
 of life which insinuates itself deep into the 
 mind of to-day — the thought of life as some- 
 thing larger, richer, more manifold than the 
 Christian view of it. Here is something we 
 must adjust to the claim of Him we call Mas- 
 ter and 'Lord of all.' 
 
 It is obvious that the ascetic solution, which 
 is the official answer of a large section of 
 Christendom, does not meet the case. Apart 
 altogether from its being really not true to the 
 spirit of Jesus Christ, who came eating and 
 drinking, or to the practice of the apostles who, 
 amid the splendid sacrifices they made for the 
 gospel, did not proscribe or renounce the world 
 of human life, it is plain that if the ascetic 
 principle were completely and universally ap- 
 plied it would result not in the salvation but 
 merely in the suicide of the race. 1 Asceticism 
 may be justified in certain individuals or even 
 
 1 The Roman Catholic way of escape from this is by di- 
 viding Christian life into two grades — the higher saintly rule 
 of asceticism (including abstinence from marriage), which is 
 the 'religious' life, and a lower 'secular' Christian life which 
 is 'sufficient' for those in the world. This is an utterly non- 
 Christian distinction, alien to the whole New Testament, 
 which knows no distinction between a saint and a Christian. 
 
176 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 periods, and it reminds the world that Christ 
 demands surrender and sacrifice, but it is not 
 in itself either a possible or a Christian general 
 principle of life. On the other hand, it must 
 be said that the modern treatment of this ques- 
 tion is apt to be slight and easy, and often 
 amounts to little more than the making of Jesus 
 Christ a kind of Honorary President of art 
 and letters and romance and other humane in- 
 terests. This is but to play with the problem. 
 Jesus Christ is nothing if He be not the Lord. 
 His is not faintly to colour things with a Chris- 
 tian or semi-Christian tinge; His is to com- 
 mand — to be the supreme and final authority. 
 'Where He comes,' as a hymn puts it, 'He 
 comes to reign.' To speak of another Christ 
 than this is indeed not so much to play with as 
 rather to insult the gospel. The problem is to 
 relate this Christ — the Lord — to the varied 
 humanistic aspects of life which so loudly assert 
 their own autonomy and which, it must be ad- 
 mitted, are not easily annexed to the gospel. 
 It is a problem to be dealt with certainly in a 
 broader spirit than that which relegates God's 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 177 
 
 beautiful world and the human nature God has 
 given us to the territory of the Evil One; but 
 not less certainly must it be dealt with in a more 
 unmistakably and distinctively Christian way 
 than that which assigns to Jesus Christ in any 
 region of life a merely complimentary position. 
 
 The few examples already given of the ques- 
 tion before us divide into two classes, and these 
 are entitled to be distinguished and separately 
 discussed. The claim for an extra-Christian 
 autonomy for individual and subjective ends 
 such as love or freedom (in the personal sense) 
 or happiness is one thing; another is when that 
 is claimed for such general objective ends as 
 artistic beauty or scientific truth. I shall con- 
 sider first the one and then the other of these; 
 in both cases let us try to deal with the matter 
 not as an academic argument about an abstrac- 
 tion called life, but as it is proved in living ex- 
 perience. 
 
 When we look in this way at cases of the 
 former class the answer is not far to seek, for 
 life itself supplies it with unmistakable clear- 
 ness. Nothing is in life more certain than this, 
 
178 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 that for the individual to reject all Christian 
 or other authority in order to give such things 
 as happiness or freedom or love their uncon- 
 trolled and absolute autonomy is the direct and 
 certain road to failure and disaster. I propose 
 to look at this more particularly in connection 
 with the last named — a topic on which it is 
 easy to write foolishly and falsely, but a thing 
 of profound influence in human lives and per- 
 haps the best illustration for our discussion. 
 
 Love — the word being used here in its popu- 
 lar sense — is the theme of much literature, 
 including nearly all novels. Well, if we read 
 almost any batch of representative modern 
 novels — not excluding even morally unprofit- 
 able ones, if they are true — which deal power- 
 fully and seriously with the story of lives which 
 have made this an absolute directing law of 
 conduct, what do we find? I think we find that 
 hardly a book of genuine authority and con- 
 vincingness does not in the end make this lead 
 to disaster. That disaster, be it noted, may 
 not be always an immediate unhappiness. But 
 it will mean — as so surely it does in life — a 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 179 
 
 soul that dwindles away from nobleness and 
 gets smaller and meaner with the years. This 
 is the moral not only of one kind of writer or 
 one type of character but of all really worth 
 counting. It is the moral of the career of a 
 distinguished being like Anna Karenina as 
 much as — I apologise to her most humbly for 
 placing her even for a moment in such low 
 company — that of any of Mr. Hitchen's de- 
 generates. Now it is certainly no theological 
 or moral orthodoxy which makes such books 
 end thus. It is just life. For life says two 
 main things about this human passion. One is 
 — and let poets and novelists to the end of 
 time celebrate it with all their powers — that 
 here is Das irdische Gliick, concerning which 
 the heart that knows it says, as of nothing else 
 that is human: T have lived.' The other thing 
 is that therefore to isolate this in an autonomy 
 for life and make it a sole law unto itself is 
 inevitably to ruin it. Indeed, love can be itself 
 and its highest only when it is related to and 
 regulated by other parts of the organism of 
 life. Mr. Stephen Phillips in his Paolo and 
 
i8o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Francesca — by no means a proround treatment 
 of an immortal theme — makes the lover in the 
 climax of his passion say: — 
 
 'Now all the bonds 
 Which held me I cast off — honour, esteem, 
 All ties, all friendships, peace and life itself: 
 You only in this universe I want.' 1 
 
 A cavalier poet 2 knew something truer than 
 this who wrote what I will call the finest couplet 
 that chivalry ever inspired: — 
 
 'I could not love thee, dear, so much 
 Loved I not honour more.' 
 
 If Anna Karenina, with all her intelligence of 
 understanding and all her capacity of feeling 
 and sensitiveness to life, could have but known 
 this too, her bright spirit would not have gone 
 out in the darkness of that tragedy at the rail- 
 way station in Moscow, which we still read with 
 a pain and horror as if it had happened — as, 
 indeed, did it not? — to a personal friend. 
 This, then, is a plain fact of life and of the 
 
 1 Paolo and Francesca, Act iv. 
 
 2 Richard Lovelace. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 181 
 
 best literature about life — that to make such 
 things as those which have been named abso- 
 lute and autonomous is to defeat and destroy 
 them. And the reason of this fact is also plain, 
 and indeed has been already given. It is that 
 life is an organic unity, and no part of it can 
 be made absolute in it without confusion and 
 contradiction. If we make one thing the whole 
 thing, then the whole will assert itself in re- 
 action. This is precisely what life does to the 
 man or woman who makes individual freedom 
 or happiness or love a thing by itself, separate 
 from life as a whole, and a single and absolute 
 law: life reacts on any one who does that and 
 defeats these very ends. Here, one may take 
 the occasion to remark, is the ruinous untruth 
 in that specious justification for yielding to 
 what is called carnal temptation, which tells 
 people that to do so is only to obey the nature 
 which has been given them. This kind of sug- 
 gestion — which perhaps few avow but more 
 than a few feel and some find difficult to an- 
 swer — has its element of truth as all dangerous 
 lies have. Its truth is that these instincts have 
 
1 82 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 their natural basis in the body, which is part — 
 and a most important part — of human nature. 
 But the untruth lies in treating the part as if 
 it were a whole. These instincts are not in 
 human nature by themselves, that they may be 
 allowed to roam and rage and reign as if re- 
 sponsible only to themselves and isolated from 
 the rest of what makes man. The body, there- 
 fore, is not to be obeyed when it speaks alone; 
 what is to be obeyed is the whole man. And 
 man, while a carnal (the word is used with 
 no theological animus but simply in its gram- 
 matical sense), is also a rational and moral 
 and social being. If he is to listen to the call 
 of his flesh he must listen to it along with the 
 reason and conscience and also his responsi- 
 bilities to other persons. Obey yourself cer- 
 tainly; but your whole self. Else, as I have 
 said, life, which is a whole, will react on you 
 to your ruin. 
 
 What is the next point for us to examine is 
 now clear. It obviously is to gain some direct- 
 ing idea as to what or where is our real as 
 distinguished from our false or partial self. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 183 
 
 Here may come in the comment which I said 
 I would make on the quotation given a few 
 pages back from Mr. Shaw, about a young 
 woman 'determined not to murder her own 
 instincts,' to whom Mr. Shaw has nothing bet- 
 ter to say than that by all means she should be 
 as wicked as she can, for it is 'precisely the 
 same experiment' as being as good as one can. 
 Now it would be an unjust and unintelligent 
 criticism to read this as a direct invitation to 
 go — if the colloquialism be pardonable — to the 
 bad. It reads like that, and — what is much 
 worse — many persons will read it thus; and in 
 this respect it is an illustration of how Mr. 
 Shaw, himself a moralist, seems to think it 
 amusing to recommend his message of morality 
 by means of a vocabulary of vice. But the 
 author's point, I take it, is that the girl should 
 get free of all merely external moral con- 
 straints and that her morality must be her own. 
 This is not only a true but even a Christian 
 idea, though, I must add, somewhat success- 
 fully disguised. Certainly all really moral 
 conduct is from within. But Mr. Shaw seems 
 
1 84 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 to think this is enough, and he stops here. He 
 considers that if conduct be thus inward in its 
 spring and motive, it does not matter about its 
 ethical quality. One man's nature has a pas- 
 sion for goodness : let him be good. Another's 
 has the passion for badness: let him be bad. 
 'It is precisely the same experiment.' The 
 mere freedom is everything. Now this is in 
 practice to give a general licence to pande- 
 monium, but I do not emphasise that at present. 
 What I want to say of it here is that it is no 
 true theory of life. For life is direction as well 
 as freedom. Without the former, the latter is 
 not only dangerous but meaningless. It is 
 telling a man to drive fast and not telling him 
 where to drive. Humanity is not simply a right 
 to realise yourself but also a right self to be re- 
 alised. Augustine knew that as Mr. Shaw does 
 not, and the old doctor said a greater and wiser 
 and more complete word than the modern 
 dramatist when he said : 'Dilige et quod vis fac. y 
 Here is the 'do as you propose' just as in Mr. 
 Shaw; but here is also, and first, the end and 
 object — and, of course, Augustine means that 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 185 
 
 the love of God and good is the end. This is 
 freedom with direction in it — with meaning in 
 it. Any counsel which omits this is counsel 
 only for beings less than man, for man is a 
 being with an end, a self, which he is to find, 
 create, achieve. Mr. Shaw's counsel might be 
 quite suitable for creatures who have neither 
 ideal nor aspiration, but who are just what they 
 are. Yes, I think I know the kind of creatures 
 he should have addressed his words to — the 
 trolls! In one of Ibsen's plays, these are a 
 tribe of beings that live a semi-brutish life, 
 with gusty passions and capricious impulses; 
 and this life is all their ideal, for they have no 
 wish to live the lives of men. As one of them 
 puts it: — 
 
 'Among men the saying goes, "Man, be thyself!" 
 At home here with us, 'mid the tribe of the trolls, 
 The saying goes, "Troll, to thyself be — enough."' 1 
 
 'Never mind,' says Mr. Shaw to the young 
 woman, 'about being your true self; "be" to 
 your dominant gust of instinct, whatever it is: 
 
 1 Peer Gynt, Act n. sc. vi. 
 
1 86 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 that is enough.' This is mere trollism. It is 
 'enough' for that tribe; it is not enough for 
 human beings. It is philistine to offer men and 
 women this crudity in the great and sacred 
 name of freedom. But, as I sought to be just 
 to the quotation, I would also not be unjust 
 to the author. It may be that Mr. Shaw needs 
 to be encouraged to think of himself more 
 highly than apparently he does. Let him, then, 
 be assured that he is not without talents which 
 make him entitled to be an instructor of human 
 beings; for it were to be regretted if any one 
 of whom this can be said is satisfied, through 
 any excess of modesty — beautiful to behold as 
 that is in a writer in this age when so many 
 trumpet themselves — with the poor post of be- 
 ing a teacher merely of the tribe of the trolls. 
 With this word of cheer I leave Mr. Shaw 
 and pass on to our question of what is our true 
 and complete as distinguished from a false self, 
 and I shall say at once what is the main and 
 indeed the only thing I have to say. There is 
 absolutely no one with whom this question can 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 187 
 
 be considered comparable to Jesus Christ. He 
 is no teacher of the tribe of the trolls. 'In Him 
 was life, and the life was the light of men.' 
 Many and many a calamitous conception of 
 human life has been theirs who have formed 
 their idea of it apart from Him; never, never 
 have regrets gathered in f he end in the mind 
 of any one who learned the thought of his true 
 self from Jesus Christ. This is not something 
 generally true of human life at large. It is 
 most personally verifiable and verified in the 
 individual mind and conscience. When any one 
 of us really will bring his life into the presence 
 of Christ, he gets not merely a new thought of 
 God but also, and perhaps more indisputably, 
 a new thought of himself. And this is not only 
 — though frequently it is this to begin with — 
 a realisation of his bad self in a sense of failure 
 and sin; it is also a vision of his truer nature 
 and of what his life should be and is in the 
 worthier thought of it. Jesus Christ is in a 
 marvellous way identical with a man's best self. 
 This is as real a fact of moral experience as it 
 
1 88 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 is a real fact of religious experience, that when 
 we have fellowship with Christ we have fellow- 
 ship with even God too. What a wonderful 
 Person is this, whom to know is to know God, 
 and to whom to come is to come to one's very 
 self! 
 
 Here then we seem to be finding the answer 
 to the question we set out to investigate, of 
 how the great humanities of life, such as hap- 
 piness and freedom and love, are to be related 
 to Him who is called 'Lord of all.' In a word, 
 the answer is this, these have to be related to 
 this unity of the true self, and this true self 
 finds itself in Christ. How this may work out 
 with such things as those which have been 
 named cannot, of course, be set down in general 
 terms; for human life is nothing if not indi- 
 vidual, and Jesus Christ is essentially a teacher 
 and saviour of persons. But certainly it does 
 work out in a way which justifies Christ's own 
 assertion, that He comes not to destroy life 
 but to give it more abundantly. A modern 
 poet, in a remarkable poem, has expressed the 
 fear it will turn out otherwise, and that a self 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 189 
 
 given to Christ means a negation of the sweet 
 humanities of life: — 
 
 'Though I knew His love who followed, 
 
 Yet was I sore afraid 
 Lest having Him, I must have naught beside.' 1 
 
 But an apostle says all things are ours when 
 we are Christ's. Well, in life it must be tested. 
 Test freedom thus or happiness — on the one 
 hand, the doing whatever we 'propose' and the 
 gratifying indiscriminately of our 'instincts,' or, 
 on the other, 'the faith, which experience will 
 ratify in due time, that our desires are less the 
 ministers than the destroyers of life until they 
 are subdued into glad obedience to His holy 
 and hallowing will.' 2 Take even love and test 
 it thus, and see if this be not true in life — that 
 the more room two hearts make for the loving 
 and following of Jesus Christ, the more room 
 they also make for the deepest and most lasting 
 love of one another. I neither deny nor disguise 
 another side to this — namely, that there are 
 places in life where Christ may mean that some 
 
 1 Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven. 
 
 2 Hort's The Way, the Truth, the Life, p. 148. 
 
i 9 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 human claim is to be denied. And is there one 
 of us who does not know in his heart that this 
 must be, and that a Christ who found in us noth- 
 ing to curb and even cut away is not any true 
 Master or Saviour? But neither is even this 
 a mere negation of life. Where it lays claim 
 on some natural liberty or enjoyment, it leads 
 — when Christ is in it — to a nobler freedom 
 and a higher happiness; and even where it de- 
 nies some demand of the heart, it can find, 
 better than the poet, a love 'all breathing 
 human passion far above.' x Here is something 
 which may sound unreal and mystical. It is, 
 however, the surest thing in the experience of 
 many a Christian man or woman: of this one 
 who has cast away many prospects to give his 
 young life to some hard task for Christ's sake, 
 and found thus an incomparable liberty and 
 joy; or of that one walking at Christ's call a 
 lonely road, and never feeling except in dream 
 the touch of the child that might have been 
 hers, yet with a heart rich with love's deepest 
 meanings and full of thankfulness for life. 
 
 1 Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, iii. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 191 
 
 { Les renoncements d'tin cceur consacre a Dien 
 sont pen de chose a cote des benedictions et des 
 enrichissements dont toute dine pieuse fait la 
 journaliere experience.' x But this is something 
 not too much to be talked about. It is con- 
 vincingly to be read not on any page of a book 
 but in the lives — even in the very faces — of 
 the bond-slaves of Christ. 
 
 I now pass on to the second part of our 
 question, and this must be dealt with more 
 briefly. It is plain, in the first place, that the 
 relation of the law and gospel of Christ to such 
 universal and objective ideals as scientific truth 
 or artistic beauty is a wider one than that of 
 such individual and subjective aims as those 
 we have been considering. These general 
 ideals are truly of God, and the promotion of 
 them is a part of His praise and service. They 
 are fundamentally religious, and it is not in- 
 conceivable how they even may seem worthy 
 
 1 Qu'est-ce que le Christianisme? Reflexions d'un pasteur 
 la'ique, par Louis Goumaz, p. 138. (This book contains a 
 critical examination of The Fact of Christ; and it is a pleas- 
 ure to quote from a critic who is always courteous and ap- 
 preciative to a writer with whom he is not always in agree- 
 ment.) 
 
1 92 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 rivals to a religion of personal piety. It is 
 indeed important to remember that religion is 
 of wider scope than merely human good or 
 human need — though out of these human 
 things it may have arisen in history — and that 
 not merely the soul of the Christian but 'the 
 whole earth' is 'full of the glory of God.' So 
 when science is investigating and art depicting 
 and interpreting the world, it is indeed declar- 
 ing God's glory which is in it, and His Name 
 who is, in the words of the first article of the 
 Creed, God the Father Almighty, maker of 
 heaven and earth.' Certainly in this is some- 
 thing much more than an individualistic pursuit 
 of selfish freedom, happiness, or passion. The 
 relation to religion of servants of the Creator 
 like Darwin or Watts must not be mixed up 
 with the claims of neurotics and anarchists who 
 know neither the true God nor the true man. 
 I shall endeavour to consider this second part 
 of our problem (as we did also the first part) 
 practically; but one remark of a speculative 
 character may be made at this point, as we 
 begin to ask what is the relation of such things 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM i 
 
 93 
 
 as science and art to religion. We may natu- 
 rally think that these may be related to religion 
 in a general theistic sense since God is the 
 Creator, but that they are not immediately or 
 essentially to be related to the specifically 
 Christian gospel of Jesus Christ. Now cer- 
 tainly Christianity is characteristically a human 
 salvation. But the boldest and loftiest Chris- 
 tian thinking has not therefore been content 
 to say that it is no more than this, but has 
 claimed for Christ a cosmical as well as a 
 soteriological meaning. In St. Paul, Christ is, 
 as well as the saviour of men, at once the apxq 
 (or first principle) and the re'Aos (or final end) 
 of the created universe. 'All things were cre- 
 ated unto Him' — that is, with a view to Him 
 — and all things are 'summed up in Him;' 1 and 
 this high doctrine has its place in the Creed 
 of Nicaea, which asserts the cosmical Christ, 
 'by whom all things were made, both things in 
 heaven and things in earth,' prior to its asser- 
 tion of the soteriological Christ 'who for us 
 men and for our salvation came down' and so 
 
 1 Colossians i. 20; Ephesians i. 10. 
 
i 9 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 on. It is true that Christian thought — espe- 
 cially in the West, where the Church has been 
 occupied mainly with the thought of God in 
 His saving relation to man — has not kept very 
 firm hold of this conception nor fruitfully de- 
 veloped it. On this Lightfoot's words are not 
 irrelevant to our present discussion: — 
 
 'How much our theological conceptions suffer in 
 breadth and fulness by this neglect, a moment's 
 reflection will show. How much more hearty 
 would be the sympathy of theologians with the rev- 
 elations of science and the developments of history, 
 if they habitually connected them with the opera- 
 tion of the same Divine Word who is the centre 
 of all their religious aspirations, it is needless to 
 say. Through the recognition of this idea, with all 
 the consequences which flow from it as a living 
 influence, more than in any other way, may we 
 hope to strike the chords of that "vaster music" 
 which results only from the harmony of knowledge 
 and faith, of reverence and research.' 1 
 
 On the other hand, one must observe that it 
 is easier to write in a general and rhapsodical 
 way of a doctrine of this speculative character 
 than to state the data of reason, history, or 
 
 1 Ou Ctlossians, p. 116. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 195 
 
 experience on which it can be based; and if 
 theology wishes to retain its status as a science, 
 it must always have data for its dogmas. Dr. 
 Denney says of such words as those of St. Paul 
 which have been quoted, that when they assert 
 Christ as the key of creation it is 'not science 
 but wisdom.' 1 I am inclined — since wisdom 
 suggests something experiential — rather to 
 speak of it in the way Plato speaks of poetry, 
 which he says is written 'not by wisdom but by 
 a kind of genius or inspiration.' 2 And the 
 genius or inspiration at the root of this superb 
 thesis of faith is of the right 'kind,' for it is 
 this — that we cannot err in the direction of 
 thinking too magnificently of Jesus Christ and 
 His place in the universe. Perhaps, then, of 
 this article of the Creed one may say, improv- 
 ing on Tertullian, Credo quia nagnificentissi- 
 mum! At any rate — and not to dwell longer 
 on what is speculative — we may here apply this 
 thought practically. Let us, therefore, in our 
 discussion, consider the relation of such things 
 
 1 The Way Everlasting, p. 24. 
 
 2 Apology, 22. 
 
196 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 as science or art to, not religion in some general 
 theistic sense, but specifically to the law and 
 gospel of Jesus Christ, and ask what He means 
 for these great areas of human interest. To 
 this I now turn, though, as I have said, to 
 touch on it in the briefest way. 
 
 For the sake of brevity, and also clearness, 
 I shall again treat chiefly of one example. As 
 in the former section I took love, let me here 
 take art. 1 We are all familiar with the dictum, 
 'Art for art's sake.' It is or was a kind of 
 flag for those who would fight against attempts 
 on the part of morals — especially conventional 
 or puritanical morals — to lay down limiting 
 rules about the subjects art should deal with 
 or the way in which it should deal with them. 
 And in that sense it was legitimate enough. 
 Art has a perfect right to object to be made 
 the handmaid of the moralist. Yet this phrase, 
 'Art for art's sake,' is a very inadequate one. 
 The truth rather is that both art and morals 
 are means — not either a mean to the other but 
 
 1 Art is a large subject, and what follows may seem to some 
 readers not equally applicable to all phases of it. All that can 
 be attempted here is a general indication of a position. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 197 
 
 both ministers to a greater common end. This 
 end is simply life itself. The work of art (in, 
 that is, its higher forms) is not something 
 merely self-related but is to express life. It 
 expresses it not in the dull, didactic way of 
 the scientist or the philosopher or the preacher, 
 but by making us see it and feel it as the living 
 thing it really is. We say of a great artist's 
 works that they are 'living,' and through these 
 we live too with a quickened perception and 
 a heightened emotion. Instead, therefore, of 
 the narrow and party formula that 'art is for 
 art's sake,' we must use the larger and only 
 true formula, that art is for life's sake. 1 
 
 Now whenever we say this we are already, 
 without more preliminary words, at the heart 
 of the answer to our question of the connection 
 between art and the gospel. This connection 
 is not that of a restrictive moral censorship. 
 It is something far more fundamental. Art, 
 we say, is for life's sake. Well, life is a new 
 
 1 It is since writing the above that I have noticed that this 
 last phrase is used as the title of one of the essays in Mr. 
 Arthur Ransome's recent volume, entitled Portraits and Specu- 
 lations. 
 
198 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 thing since Jesus Christ. Humanity has gained 
 a new vision of what human life is — and even 
 what the life of nature is — from Him. And 
 so art, whose business is to express life, has 
 everything to do with what is Christian. This 
 is not a merely theoretical proposition; one of 
 the great pivot facts in the history of the 
 human mind is how a deeper view of life and 
 of nature has been given by Christianity to the 
 whole spirit of man. That is a shallow and 
 biassed reading of the subject which fastens 
 only or even chiefly on the iconoclastic hostility 
 to art characteristic of some periods of early 
 Church history. Such hostility existed; and 
 much of it was justifiable as an act of war — 
 and in war many violent things are necessary — 
 against vice, with which the art of those days 
 was in open and systematic and intimate alli- 
 ance. But every intelligent and unprejudiced 
 student either of art or of history knows these 
 iconoclastic acts were mere incidents, and that 
 the really great influence which Christianity 
 had towards art was to make it new because, 
 as has just been said, it made life new. It is 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 199 
 
 enough on this to quote a few words from an 
 eminent writer on art who is free from any 
 Christian bias. Says John Addington Sym- 
 monds : — 
 
 'At the same time, humanity acquired new facul- 
 ties and wider sensibilities. A profounder and more 
 vital feeling of the mysteries of the universe arose. 
 Our life on earth was seen to be a thing by no 
 means rounded in itself and perfect, but only one 
 term of an infinite and unknown series. It was 
 henceforth impossible to translate the world into the 
 language of purely aesthetic form. The striving of 
 the spirit marks the transition from the ancient to 
 the modern world.' 1 
 
 Here is the whole world of difference between 
 us and that art of ancient Greece which, in its 
 sphere, is so incomparable that even its secon- 
 dary achievements have no rival to-day. In 
 a sense, we can never wonder enough at Hellas; 
 and there are invaluable things which the 
 human mind — not in relation to art only but 
 for life — must ever learn and relearn at that 
 source. Yet this world — to which Christ has 
 come — can never again be only Greek, and the 
 
 1 The Greek Poets, i. 434. 
 
 14 
 
200 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 art which truly expresses our life must be more 
 than any pre-Christian art, however, consum- 
 mate its genius. 1 Thus is it that the Sistine 
 Madonna has something which is in no statue 
 of a Greek goddess, and in a picture of Millet 
 is a meaning that is not in the pastoral on the 
 urn of Keats's superb ode. Nothing would be 
 more interesting than to illustrate this in fur- 
 ther detail, but I must not allow my pen this 
 pleasure now. 
 
 Out of this, one thing arises which may be 
 mentioned in a word before this chapter closes. 
 I think it now appears that the protest against 
 what is merely sensual and immoral in art has 
 more philosophical justification than at first 
 sight appears. For it is a protest in the name 
 of that 'life' which art is made to serve. Life 
 in the truest and deepest sense is not merely 
 not expressed, but is actually defaced and de- 
 nied by an art which appeals only or mainly 
 
 1 This is essentially what the finest modern spirits who have 
 been under the spell of the Greek genius find true. We see 
 this, for example, in the development of Keats's mind or, in 
 a later day, in Pater. An example of a man who refused to 
 admit this is Oscar Wilde; and his work is absolutely un- 
 Greek, while of his life I will not speak. 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 201 
 
 to the grossness of fleshly appetite. And no 
 plea of beauty can atone for this, for 'beauty 
 is truth' — truth not merely of line and colour 
 and form, but of deeper things too. Nor is 
 it enough to say that some genius has done it, 
 and therefore 'the light that led astray was 
 light from heaven;' for, as is most justly re- 
 marked by a writer whom I have already 
 quoted in this chapter and elsewhere, 'it is not 
 genius which is made in the divine image, but 
 man,' 1 and genius is rather something man is 
 to control and make his servant. I cannot here 
 enter into the many undoubtedly difficult ques- 
 tions which are thus raised in practical life, 
 and I state merely this general position. On 
 the one hand, I repudiate Mrs. Grundy and 
 her ways. On the other, I say art is responsible 
 to life, and therefore an art which degrades life 
 by expressing only its sensuality — or similarly, 
 a science which does so by hardening the spir- 
 itual sense into a materialistic contempt for 
 man — has about it something radically false. 
 It is indeed a treachery against life. And the 
 
 1 Denney's The Way Everlasting, p. 97. 
 
202 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 protest against it which arises instinctively in 
 every healthy mind is, even if often wrongly 
 expressed or based on untenable grounds, es- 
 sentially a true protest in the name of life, of 
 which art is a minister and of which the rightful 
 Lord is Christ. 
 
 This whole subject of Christ and humanism 
 opens out in manifold directions rather than 
 converges towards a conclusion the longer one 
 discusses it, and I shall therefore bring this 
 chapter to a close abruptly. I close it by re- 
 calling a remark from, I believe, a French 
 writer (but I am sorry I am unable to give the 
 reference), to the effect that a man needs to 
 be twice converted — first from nature to grace 
 and then back again to nature. There is in 
 this both philosophy and Christianity. The 
 reason why so many of even the greatest men 
 are not complete in their greatness is that they 
 lack one or other of these two experiences. 
 Goethe was a great man — indeed, he often is 
 instanced as the complete man; but, just because 
 he never was converted from nature to grace, 
 there are great tracts of human experience, and 
 
THE CLAIM OF HUMANISM 203 
 
 these the highest and deepest the soul of man 
 has known, which he neither represents nor 
 indeed could appreciate. Pascal was a great 
 man, a man of dominating intellect and of 
 eminent soul; but, while he certainly passed 
 through the first of these conversions, it was 
 hardly so in his case ?s regards the second, and 
 his Christianity — magnificently conquering as it 
 was for himself — would have been more con- 
 vincing and adequate for others if it had had 
 more unity with what is true in reason and 
 natural in life. Is not the sum of the matter 
 this? God has given man two great gifts. 
 One is life, with all its interest and sweetness 
 and worth. The other is His 'unspeakable 
 gift,' Jesus Christ. These gifts are from God. 
 They are for man. Let man take both from 
 Him. There is the complete man. That and 
 that only is { Im Ganzen zu leben.' I know 
 there is danger in saying this; truth and love 
 are always things which we can abuse if we 
 will. But there is no danger if we take life 
 from God and if we take Christ as fully as 
 we take life. 
 
VI 
 THE VETO OF DEATH 
 
'The Oriental fable of the traveller surprised in the 
 desert by a wild beast is very old. 
 
 'Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the 
 traveller jumps into a well with no water in it; but at 
 the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with 
 open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not 
 daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, 
 not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be de- 
 voured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild 
 bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. 
 His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give 
 way to certain fate; but still he clings, and sees two 
 mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round 
 the bush to which he hangs and gnawing off its roots. 
 
 'The traveller sees this and knows he must inevitably 
 perish ; but, while thus hanging, he looks about him 
 and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. 
 These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off 
 with rapture. 
 
 'Thus I hang upon the boughs of life.' 
 
 LEO TOLSTOY. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE VETO OF DEATH 
 
 The chapter just concluded dealt with the 
 positive of human life; this chapter must deal 
 with life's great and final negative. The theme 
 may be less attractive than the other, but it is 
 inevitable. No philosophy of life is adequate 
 or even honest which speaks only of life's 
 fruition and which shuts its eyes to the other 
 side of it. This warm, living world, with its 
 sweetness and interest, is true ; but true also — 
 a simply undeniable fact of experience — is the 
 cold, dead grave with all that declines thereto 
 as life goes on. A true philosophy must look 
 both these truths full in the face. We have 
 been looking at life; we must now look at 
 death. It is not morbid to do this; it is only 
 truthful. 
 
 But if this, then, be an inevitable chapter in 
 any frank discussion of the facts of experience, 
 207 
 
208 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 it may and should be not an involved one. The 
 crucial question is a perfectly plain question 
 which awaits a simple answer. There is indeed 
 something not merely utterly futile, but also 
 palpably false, in multiplying words about 
 death. The act of death is nature's almost 
 simplest deed. When the human mind sets 
 itself to express what death is, it strains itself 
 almost to exhaustion. In literature, Newman's 
 Dream of Gerontius makes it a most elaborate 
 business. But we do not take so long to die 
 as that. In music, Strauss's Tod und Verkl'd- 
 ritng builds up and up and up a stupendous 
 structure of sound to utter the tremendous word 
 of dissolution. But this tremendous word, 
 nature utters every hour without even raising 
 her breath. Even when a great man dies, 
 is it so. Here is the record from Mr. Glad- 
 stone's biography: — 
 
 'On the early morning of the 19th, his family all 
 kneeling round the bed on which he lay in the 
 stupor of coming death, without a struggle he 
 ceased to breathe. Nature without — wood and 
 wide lawn and far-off sky — shone at her fairest.' 1 
 
 1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, iii. 528. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 209 
 
 When one thinks of all the elements — intellec- 
 tual, moral, spiritual — that combined to make 
 a personality such as Gladstone's, is there not 
 something silencing in the almost triviality of 
 that negative which ends it all and the casual- 
 ness of it in the order of things? 
 
 'Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta 
 pulveris exigui iactu compressa quiescent.' x 
 
 High-sounding words, then, are in this chap- 
 ter out of place. Fine writing would be a trans- 
 parent folly. Sometimes an inflated orator 
 thinks death a grand theme for the exercise of 
 his powers; but there is in that last silence what 
 makes him seem to be speaking in a dumb 
 show. What does it avail what eloquent per- 
 sons say about death? Has any one anything 
 to say to it? Who will answer it? Who or 
 what will take from it the right of having the 
 last word? This is the one thing that matters, 
 and, if it can be met at all, it can be met with 
 plain and few words. 
 
 1 Virgil's Georgics, iv. 86-7. ('These tempests of the soul, 
 these Titanic struggles, are quelled and laid to rest by a little 
 handful of scattered dust.') 
 
210 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Something, however, seems called for on the 
 prior point of whether and how far this veto, 
 or apparent veto, of death is a challenge to 
 faith which presses on the mind — even the 
 earnest and Christian mind — of to-day. Is it 
 not the case that men's thoughts, even within 
 the areas of belief, are hardly at all occupied 
 with any question of what is beyond death, but 
 are engrossed — one may say exclusively — with 
 questions of the life that now is and how this 
 is to be elevated and saved? Indeed, is not 
 this intent interest in the bettering of this 
 present world felt as really a higher and nobler 
 aim than the concern about personal immor- 
 tality? That the modern mind, even within 
 the Church, is bent as these queries suggest, is 
 plain; and it may therefore seem that the con- 
 sequence is that the question of this chapter 
 is not so inevitable as has been said, but has 
 indeed even lost much of its interest in face 
 of more immediate and practical interests of 
 the Kingdom of God on earth. This is a tend- 
 ency which deserves a few moments' examina- 
 tion. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 211 
 
 In the first place, it is to be said that in the 
 modern engrossment of heart and mind with 
 this world there is much that is true and even 
 noble, and it is a deserved rebuke to any spuri- 
 ous and selfish 'other-worldliness' which cared 
 only about its own soul's future. Of course 
 this engrossment may most easily serve a sheer, 
 shallow worldliness — an absorption of body, 
 mind, and soul with ephemeral pleasure or 
 gain, which leaves neither the desire nor the 
 capacity to think seriously of life's real issues 
 and final destinies. Of this, I do not speak 
 here. But, on its better side, this modern 
 tendency of thought is often a noble engross- 
 ment with this world — a desire to make re- 
 ligion practical and a devotion to the service 
 of humanity. Perhaps never than in our age 
 were such desire and devotion stronger in many 
 hearts. That this spirit should feel so keenly 
 how much there is in the conditions of human 
 life in this world which demands the attention 
 of conscience and mind and heart and life, as 
 to make it disregard any thought of another 
 life is not unintelligible, and is something which 
 
212 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 even religion has not always the right to cen- 
 sure. Yet, intelligible and, in some sense, even 
 pardonable as this point of view is before the 
 calls and claims of the world around us, I ven- 
 ture to suggest there lies in this tendency a 
 grave danger even to this very passion to pro- 
 mote the Kingdom of God on earth. Let me 
 try to show how this is so. 
 
 The social redemption of humanity in this 
 world is a mighty task. It is a task which will 
 never be accomplished without immense energy 
 and devoted service from man for man. This 
 energy and service will not be given except 
 under the constraining power of a profound 
 and permanent motive adequate for these ends. 
 And what I want to suggest is that one of the 
 deepest and even indispensable elements in a 
 motive adequate for the energy and service 
 necessary for the redemption of humanity is 
 this — the sense of the infinite value of man. 
 This, and not less than this, is why humanity 
 is worth saving, should be saved, must be saved 
 at any cost. Motives less than this — human- 
 ism, kindness, altruism — will do a good deal 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 213 
 
 for humanity; but they will not do everything. 
 Those impulses will begin plans for humanity's 
 betterment; but — this, I think, is often to be 
 observed in life — they somehow rarely have in 
 them to carry their service out even to the end. 
 Now, I do not assert that there will be found 
 this constraining conviction of the infinite value 
 of man only along with the conscious belief in 
 personal immortality. But that where there is 
 a consert to forego or ignore the latter, the 
 former will retain its force is impossible. This 
 is not the forecast of prejudiced orthodoxy: 
 it is not denied by the most serious negative 
 thought. The distinguished author of Ecce 
 Homo puts it undisguisedly in these words : — 
 
 'The more our thoughts widen and deepen as the 
 universe grows upon us, and we become accustomed 
 to boundless space and time, the more petrifying is 
 the contrast of our own insignificance, the more 
 contemptible becomes the pettiness, shortness, fra- 
 gility of the individual life. A moral paralysis 
 creeps upon us. In a while we comfort ourselves 
 with the notion of self-sacrifice; we say, What 
 matter if I pass, let me think of others. But the 
 other has become contemptible in less than the self: 
 
2i 4 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, 
 human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth 
 increasing.' 1 
 
 These are sombre words. I do not wish to 
 overstrain them or press the argument too far. 
 I believe much service of man will always re- 
 main despite any loss of faith in immortality. 
 But the service which will give and save to the 
 uttermost because it is serving and saving 
 something of infinite value will hardly remain. 
 And after all, this world will only be redeemed 
 by men who believe — believe in man if not in 
 God. It will only be redeemed by those who 
 are convinced man is worth saving, because 
 there is about even the humblest and about 
 even the worst something which outweighs and 
 eternally will outweigh any sacrifice made on 
 his behalf. I do not identify this conviction 
 with a positive faith in personal immortality, 
 but I believe that experience, alike in the his- 
 tory of peoples and in individual life, witnesses 
 to their vital interrelation. 
 
 One other remark may be made on the 
 
 1 Seeley's Natural Religion, p. 251. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 215 
 
 modern tendency to ignore or minimise the 
 importance of this question. It is notably 
 ignored in much of modern literature even of 
 the more serious kind, and in philosophy we 
 find a writer of such a non-materialistic temper 
 as the late Professor James admitting, in the 
 act of writing upon immortality, that his feel- 
 ing about it has never been of the keenest 
 order,' and that it is 'a secondary point.' 1 
 Even in the religious teaching of to-day little 
 is said of any other world but this. In a sense, 
 such reticence is not altogether a loss, for this 
 great theme should not be the subject of facile 
 talk, and that it should become a topic for the 
 'popular preacher' would be a kind of pro- 
 fanity. Yet, despite all this avoidance of the 
 question, I wonder if it really is ignored in 
 men's and women's hearts. I do not believe 
 it is. The pressure and poignancy of such a 
 question as this are not a matter merely of 
 the literary or philosophical or homiletical 
 mood of the day. It rests on something far 
 
 1 Human Immortality (Ingersole Lecture), p. n; Varieties 
 of Religious Experience, p. 524. 
 
 15 
 
216 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 deeper and more permanent than that. In 
 lines which I think in a previous chapter I said 
 are too familiar for quotation, but which I 
 quote here as they are so obviously apt, Brown- 
 ing has said, 
 
 'Just when we 're safest, there 's a sunset touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides — 
 And that 's enough for fifty hopes and fears.' x 
 
 This — whether thus or otherwise expressed — 
 is permanently true in human nature. To shut 
 down this great question is to gag something 
 in the human heart itself. And especially is 
 this true of the heart which really knows what 
 it is to love. It is impossible to love without 
 thinking about death and what may be after. 
 I am persuaded that here more than anywhere 
 else does the whole question of immortality 
 begin with many people to be a real question. 
 What first awakens their minds to it is not 
 some principle of philosophy or tenet of re- 
 ligion: it is not any inability to conceive our 
 
 1 Bishop Blotvgram's dpology, 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 217 
 
 •wn extinction, nor is it a fear of future judg- 
 ment. Very often it is first awakened when 
 they look on the face of their dear ones — 
 either in life and realise how it is fleeting, or 
 in death and protest against it that their love 
 and fellowship are over for ever. This is as 
 old as Plato: 'Many a man,' he says (or Soc- 
 rates says) , 'has been willing to go to the world 
 below animated by the hope of seeing there an 
 earthly love or wife or son, and conversing 
 with them.' 1 It is as new as the father's heart 
 or the lover's or the widow's to-day. Under 
 this compulsion were the two great English 
 poets of the later Victorian age called to face 
 the question — Tennyson in In Memoriam, 
 written after Arthur Hallam's death, and 
 Browning in La Saisiaz, evoked by the sudden 
 summoning of his 'companion dear and true,' 
 just as she 'talked and laughed.' Love cannot 
 bury this problem. An old song has the title, 
 'True till death.' Only till death? It is such 
 a little while for love ! For this reason count- 
 
 1 Phaedo, 68. It is indeed as old as Homer; Iliad, xxii. 
 586 et sqq. 
 
218 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 less hearts are not ignoring the great idea of 
 immortality. 
 
 But, however it may or may not be with 
 regard to human nature in connection with an 
 indifference to this topic — on which we cannot 
 longer stay to say more — surely Christian faith, 
 whenever it realises itself, cannot be indifferent 
 to it, but must feel in death a direct and un- 
 avoidable challenge. A single witness may suf- 
 fice to show this. So strongly does St. Paul 
 feel the challenge of death, that he actually 
 declares that, without immortality, Christianity 
 would be less a gospel than a misfortune, and 
 that Christians would be 'of all men most to 
 be pitied.' 1 This may seem an extreme saying, 
 for surely, whatever the future may have or 
 may not have, it is better to be a good man 
 here than a bad, and live a Christian life than 
 not. To which, I think, the great Apostle 
 would answer somewhat in this wise. Better 
 to be a good man than a bad even here — cer- 
 tainly; that is a matter merely of morality, and 
 morality is always its own sufficient justifica- 
 
 1 I Corinthians xv. 19. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 219 
 
 tion. But do you mean only a morality when 
 you speak of Christianity and even of a Chris- 
 tian life? To be a Christian is something a 
 great deal more than to be a man who tries to 
 be good even according to the Christian ethical 
 standard. To be a Christian is also — and in- 
 deed first, for the ethical follows from this — 
 that you can, through Christ, know and love 
 your Father in heaven, and that He, in Christ, 
 gives His love to you and bids you call Him 
 'Father,' and promises to take up your life, 
 even its sorrows and sins, and save you. Now 
 all this is something far deeper, vaster, more 
 than can be realised within the brief terms of 
 a mortal life. Here it is but begun, as well as 
 continually impeded. If then — so the apostle 
 would conclude — all this is cut off by death 
 after a few hampered years, that would leave 
 the Christian indeed more pitiable than the 
 pagan who had cherished no such passionate 
 hope and therefore meets no such bitter defeat. 
 I have put the above into St. Paul's lips less 
 because it is his argument than because I do 
 not dare to call myself a Christian in a sense 
 
220 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 spiritual enough to appreciate it at its fullness; 
 but if we were really Christians — persons to 
 whom to love and be loved by God in Christ 
 is a passion and a possession — we should ap- 
 preciate it and should feel that a gospel in- 
 different about immortality was a kind of out- 
 rage. That God shall call us 'friends' — and 
 leave His friends to die ! 
 
 And yet how dim it all seems! The Greek 
 tragedian's words sound sometimes more real 
 than the apostle's: 
 
 'But if any far-off state there be 
 Dearer than life to mortality, 
 The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof, 
 And mist is under and mist above ; 
 And so we are sick for life, and cling 
 On earth to this nameless and shining thing; 
 The other life is a fountain sealed 
 And the deeps below us are unrevealed, 
 And we drift on legends for ever.' 1 
 
 'Legends !' Well, at least, we can deliver 
 ourselves from that. Let us try to face the 
 facts about death whatever they be. 
 
 1 Euripides, Uyppolitus, i. 189-97 (Gilbert Murray's trans- 
 lation). 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 221 
 
 When, then, we turn to do this, we see at 
 once the palpable and hideous fact of dissolu- 
 tion, and our minds are met with the plain 
 assertion — so often maintained to be an em- 
 pirical truth of science — that indisputably and 
 indeed obviously, when the material organism 
 of the body is dissolved, conscious life, which 
 is a function or at least a concomitant of or- 
 ganic structure, must cease. If this be fact, 
 cadit quaestio. Whether or not it be fact de- 
 pends upon a single and simple issue — the issue 
 namely whether the conscious life of man is so 
 related to the perishable physical organism 
 that, if the latter be destroyed, the former 
 must thereupon cease to be. This is a question 
 which we must meet before we have the right 
 to go further. 
 
 It is obvious that the answer to this question 
 depends on the kind of relation existing be- 
 tween body and spirit, brain and mind. 1 That 
 there is a relationship between the two elements 
 is indisputable, and it is, moreover, marvel- 
 
 1 The substance of the argument of this paragraph is more 
 fully developed in James's Human Immortality. 
 
222 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 lously subtle and Intricate — so much so that a 
 physical movement is associated with every 
 mental one. But things may be related to each 
 other in more ways than one. Thus steam is 
 related to a locomotive engine. It is so related 
 to it that if you destroy the engine, there is an 
 end to the steam. Why? Because the rela- 
 tionship here is a causal one — the engine causes 
 the steam to be produced. But take, say, a ray 
 of light in a prism. The refraction and colori- 
 sation of the ray of light are in manifest re- 
 lation to the prism, and any movement of the 
 latter is accompanied by a movement in the 
 former. But if you destroy the prism you do 
 not extinguish the light. Why not? Because 
 the relationship here is not that of a cause — 
 the prism does not cause the light to come into 
 existence — but is rather that of a medium of 
 one form of its manifestation. Well, then, 
 the whole question of the possibility of the 
 continuance of conscious life after the destruc- 
 tion of the body is simply this — is the relation- 
 ship of matter to spirit that of a cause as an 
 engine's is to steam, or that of a medium as a 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 223 
 
 prism's is to light? Now, the moment it is 
 perceived that this is the true statement of the 
 question, then it is also clear that no science 
 has any mandate from known physical facts 
 to declare immortality impossible. For no 
 science has even the slightest inkling of how 
 matter and spirit are related. Why and how 
 a movement of the molecules of the brain 
 should accompany consciousness (or vice versa) 
 is a thing of which no kind of explanation is 
 available or even imaginable. The nexus is — 
 to use Tyndall's oft-quoted word for it — 'un- 
 thinkable.' How then can you dogmatically 
 assert that it is a causal nexus? But unless it 
 be shown to be a causal nexus, unless it be 
 shown not to be such a connection as, for ex- 
 ample, that of a prism to light — supplying the 
 medium for one form of its manifestation — 
 then to proscribe the possibility of immortality 
 is to exceed any warrant from scientific facts. 
 In contrast therefore to the unjustified dog- 
 matism of writers such as Haeckel on this sub- 
 ject, I shall quote one of the justest and sanest 
 unbelievers since David Hume. 'There is,' 
 
224 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 says John Stuart Mill, 'no evidence in science 
 against the immortality of the soul but that 
 negative evidence which consists in the absence 
 of evidence in its favour.' 1 Science, then, has 
 the right to be altogether agnostic on the ques- 
 tion, even utterly sceptical, for there is nothing 
 in the realm of physical science which suggests 
 an answer in the affirmative. But there is cer- 
 tainly nothing to authorise a dogmatic decision 
 in the negative. 
 
 This then clears the way for us to look at 
 another aspect of man's being than the physical. 
 For there are two aspects under which man's 
 nature may be contemplated, and if one — the 
 physical — suggests the limitation of finite and 
 temporal existence, the other — the spiritual — 
 certainly suggests what transcends it. Take 
 the two things in the life of a human being 
 which essentially differentiate it from the life of 
 any other creature in the animal world. These 
 are reason and morality. Both of these things 
 are of more than sense and time. The rational 
 life is. The intelligence that knows things in 
 
 1 Three Essays on Religion: Theism, pt. iii. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 225 
 
 time is not and cannot be itself merely of time, 
 and indeed there could not be for us such a 
 conception as that of time unless we, who con- 
 ceive it, stood above it. The moral life is. 
 The conscience neither seeks its authority from 
 the things of this world nor binds itself to 
 justify its laws by them. Moreover, the aims 
 which these rational and moral principles of 
 his being set before man are aims which he 
 knows are quite out of his reach of attainment 
 within this finite life; the task of reason, which 
 is to know the truth, and the task of morality, 
 which is to realise the ethical ideal, are alike 
 incumbent upon us as men and impossible for 
 us as mortals. This, then, is man in his spiritual 
 aspect — a being who, if he will live the life 
 which essentially and distinctively is man's, must 
 use categories of thought and obey principles 
 of conduct which have alike their source and 
 their satisfaction beyond the 'bourne of Time 
 and Place.' In a word, man is a being who, 
 whether or not he actually is immortal, is called 
 on to live as if he were. 
 
 It is when we consider this essentially eternal 
 
226 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 element in human nature that we find that man 
 is a being at least fit for more than this little 
 span of life. As Dr. Martineau has said, 'were 
 it the will of the Creator to change His arrange- 
 ment for mankind, and to determine that they 
 should henceforth live in this world ten or a 
 hundred times as long as they do at present, 
 no one would feel that new souls would be re- 
 quired for the execution of the design.' 1 Con- 
 sider what this means. This soul of man — 
 domiciled in time, but bid to live and fit to live 
 for a reason and a morality which are of more 
 than time — is the supreme achievement of the 
 whole process of nature. By a development, 
 slow, stupendous, often terrible, evolution has 
 worked unhastingly, unrestingly towards this 
 supreme achievement, man, the law of whose 
 being is that he does not only live for the de- 
 mands of the finite — such as eating and drink- 
 ing, self-defence, propagation of species, and 
 so on — but also and above all by principles and 
 for ends that are eternal. Now 'God and 
 nature,' said Aristotle, 'do nothing in vain.' 
 
 1 Martineau's Endeavours after the Christian Life, p. 126. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 227 
 
 That the whole process of life is rational, all 
 science as well as all faith must hold as its first 
 hypothesis. Is it, then, rational to evolve a 
 being which is eternal in principle and yet 
 doomed in fact to what is temporal? Is it rea- 
 sonable to demand of man that he live as if 
 he were immortal when, in reality, he is not? 
 Such questions involve far more than any mere 
 desire on our part for another life. It is not 
 that we desire it: rather is it that nature re- 
 quires it if her work is not to be in vain. It 
 is an argument from the rationality of things, 
 and the reason which is in all the work of 
 nature. 'And thus,' says a well-known writer 
 on evolution, 'I believe in the immortality of 
 the soul not in the sense in which I accept 
 demonstrable truths of science, but as a su- 
 preme act of faith in the reasonableness of 
 God's work.' 1 
 
 This is the highest argument for human im- 
 mortality, which can be adduced by reason 
 looking at the question, as it were, from be- 
 low upwards. We feel it most not when we 
 
 1 Fiske's Destiny of Man, p. 6z. 
 
228 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 think of it abstractly as true of 'man,' but when 
 we consider the passing of some great soul. 
 It is this which gives its perennial impressive- 
 ness to the incomparable scenes of the Phaedo, 
 the great argument of which after all is not 
 any of Plato's speculations about the soul's 
 connection with eternal 'ideas,' but is Socrates 
 himself. In modern literature, Browning's 
 confident convictions and Tennyson's more 
 wistful and yet unquenchable faith have the 
 same basis. We all feel it. We all feel the 
 irony of the contrast between the body's decay 
 and dissolution into nothingness, and the 
 growth and maturity of the soul and character 
 within. Physical life is a peau de chagrin — 
 to use the figure of Balzac's famous tale — 
 which shrinks and becomes smaller and finally 
 vanishes; but moral life is not a peau de cha- 
 grin, and it is at its greatest often when the 
 other ends. There is an irony here which is 
 even an irrationality, and it makes a strong 
 plea in moral reason for immortality. 
 
 And yet, when all is said, can our faith really 
 stand on this in face of the great world? For 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 229 
 
 myself, I find it hard to think so. When we 
 bring this out from the chamber of the mind, 
 where it sounds full and strong, and repeat it 
 in the vast halls of the universe, it seems to 
 fall faint and flat upon the ear. Now, by this, 
 I most distinctly do not mean that this or any 
 other great spiritual conviction of the soul is 
 to be bullied into timorous silence by the mere 
 dead immensities of time and space. After all, 
 man, as Pascal says, n'est qu'un roseau, le plus 
 faible de la nature mats c' est un roseau pen- 
 sant. 1 After all, mind will be found to be more 
 than matter in the day of judgment. I abhor 
 the materialism which would terrorise faith 
 with vulgar immensities of matter. It is not 
 the dead immensities before which this thought 
 of immortality dwindles. It is the vastness of 
 the reason of the universe. You tell me to 
 believe in my personal continuance after death 
 as an act of faith in the reason in nature's 
 work. But what a large word that is ! We 
 see the fringes of it in the story of the evolu- 
 tion of man, of species, of worlds. Surely there 
 
 1 Pensees, II. x. 
 
230 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 may well be a reason for and in all that, and 
 yet that reason hardly needs my eternal con- 
 scious existence for its justification. Surely it 
 is conceivable that the universe is rational even 
 though 
 
 'Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after 
 many a vanished face, 
 
 Many a planet by many a sun may roll with 
 
 the dust of a vanished race.' 1 
 
 Again let me make clear that it is not the mere 
 immensity of the universe I am speaking of, 
 but the immensity of the plan — the reason — of 
 the universe. That world-reason evolved me 
 and uses me, but not therefore does it need me 
 eternally. It may use me, and be done with 
 me, and pass on to wider ends. That were 
 entirely rational; and, as we look at the facts 
 
 1 Tennyson's Fastness, I. Having named both Tennyson 
 and Browning on this subject, I may observe that the latter 
 looks at the problem of immortality only in view of the indi- 
 vidual, but the former feels the pressure upon it of the sense 
 of the universe. For this reason Browning is the more as- 
 sertive, and one might almost say 'cock-sure' ; while Tennyson 
 has another note in his faith, and one which is really deeper. 
 Browning says things about immortality more strikingly than 
 Tennyson ever does; but I am not sure but that the latter 
 saw more about it. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 231 
 
 of life, is it not almost palpably the case? For 
 if it be replied that this means the waste of 
 what, after all, is the greatest thing — personal 
 spirit and character — I admit it. But is not 
 this waste just one of the most appalling yet 
 undeniable things in life? In an earlier chap- 
 ter I mentioned this as one of the leading im- 
 pressions which Shakespere's view of existence 
 shows us; but the thoughtful mind does not 
 need to go to Shakespere to feel it, for it is 
 apparent every day, whatever may be said of 
 it, that the order of this world is consistent 
 with constant waste of resources and frustra- 
 tion of capacity. There are arrested organisms 
 everywhere, and indeed their very failure is the 
 contribution they pay to nature's evolution to 
 her further ends. In face of all this — all this 
 sense of the universe and these facts of life — 
 can we really lean our faith in personal immor- 
 tality upon its necessity in the rationality of the 
 cosmic order, or even what, speaking more re- 
 ligiously, we call 'the reasonableness of God's 
 work'? I cannot find that anchor hold when 
 one gets out to deeper waters and feels the 
 
232 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 surges of the mighty seas. And yet, as Plato 
 said long ago — all the fundamental and needful 
 things about this question were said long ago — 
 this is 'the best and most irrefragable of human 
 theories,' and 'the raft upon which man sails 
 through life, not without risk, as I admit, if he 
 cannot find some word of God which will more 
 surely and safely carry him.' 1 
 
 What more then is to be said? Whither 
 shall we turn our minds for that 'word' which 
 may 'more surely and safely carry' us? Well, 
 here we find ourselves once more in the position 
 we reached in more than one of our previous 
 discussions. In discussing, for example, pain, 
 we found that many things were to be said 
 about it which did cast a measure of illumina- 
 tion upon it for faith; but that in the end, and 
 when there was no more to be said about it, 
 we saw that a complete faith could be reached 
 only if we could say something more, not about 
 pain, but about God. It is so in this question 
 also. We have been saying things about man 
 — about, especially, that element in man which 
 
 1 Phaedo, 85. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 
 
 ^33 
 
 is of more than time — and this does at least 
 suggest the immortal hope ; but in the end what 
 we must again seek is not so much something 
 more about man as something more about God. 
 What this is it is not difficult to say. For what 
 is it which is inadequate for the assurance of 
 faith in our personal immortality when we 
 speak, as we have been doing, of the reason 
 of God's work? It is just that, as has been 
 indicated, this universal reason is a vast and 
 general purpose to which I am not — at least 
 necessarily — of personal and permanent value. 
 What is lacking is the thought of God as not 
 merely Reason related to some ultimate pur- 
 pose 'to which the whole creation moves,' but 
 as a Father related in eternal love and care 
 to us His children — One who cares for us far 
 too deeply and individually to lose hold of us 
 in the darkness of the night. It is thus just 
 the thought of God which is brought to us in 
 the experience of religion, and is made sure 
 to us in Jesus Christ. 
 
 This is the one firm basis for a faith in 
 immortality. It is not an argument from a 
 
234 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 philosophy of human nature, but an implicate 
 in the religion which knows God as our Father. 
 It is upon this experience of God, and not 
 simply upon an analysis of the soul, that those 
 great saints of past ages have taken their stand, 
 who have been able to pass from the wistful- 
 ness of hope on this matter to the certitude of 
 faith. Here lies the quite unmistakable differ- 
 ence between the reasonings, even at their high- 
 water mark, of the Phaedo, and the amazing 
 sureness of the supreme utterances about im- 
 mortality in the Book of Job or in the Psalms. 
 What made Job say, 'I know that . . . after 
 my frame is destroyed ... I shall, even dis- 
 embodied, see God'? 1 What made the writer 
 of the seventy-third Psalm write so calmly, 
 'Thou shalt afterwards take me to glory'? 2 It 
 was not that these men were philosophers. It 
 was not that they knew a great deal about the 
 soul of man. It was that they knew that God 
 was their own God — their Friend who had 
 made Himself known to them — and they were 
 safer in His hands than any child is in the 
 
 1 Job xix. 25, 26. 2 Psalm lxxiii, 24. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 
 
 235 
 
 hands of its father. I shall express this further 
 — for it is important though it is simple — in 
 the words of a great Old Testament scholar : — 
 
 'This was the anchor of the Old Testament 
 saints. They knew God, they had found Him. 
 In His grace He had come near to them, and re- 
 moved their transgressions from them. They had 
 His fellowship. They walked with Him. They 
 were His friends. They were even His children. 
 He loved them — and He was life and He gave 
 them life — and they felt it to be impossible that 
 He should cease to love them, and therefore im- 
 possible that He could let them die. Here was 
 then hope of eternal life — to know God. He 
 could not break this tie of love between Him and 
 them, for He loveth with an everlasting love. He 
 could not let them ever go from His heart any 
 more than a father could let go his child. "Can 
 a woman forget her sucking child that she should 
 not have compassion on the son of her womb? 
 Yet these may forget, yet will not I forget thee." '* 
 
 Here, I say again, is the real and sure basis 
 of a faith in personal immortality. That God 
 loves me has as its corollary that I shall not 
 die in the dust. If the fellowship with God 
 
 1 A. B. Davidson's Waiting upon God, p. 102. 
 
236 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 into which we are called through the gospel 
 which is in Jesus Christ be true and real, then 
 God pledges His love to us in a way which 
 means more than a few years here can fulfil. 
 There is thus no such thing as an argument for 
 immortality in the sense of some logical propo- 
 sition of physical fact which proves it. The 
 argument for immortality is just the gospel. 
 
 It might seem that one may stop here, and, 
 indeed, that to seek more is to seek lower. The 
 late Dr. Edward Caird, Master of Balliol, 
 often insisted on this. To him 'the spiritual 
 life is or ought to be its own evidence,' and to 
 connect it or in any way rest it on 'the believed 
 fact of the Resurrection of Christ,' as the first 
 apostles and even St. Paul (who 'more than 
 any other penetrated to the spiritual meaning 
 of Christianity') did, is to sink to the attitude 
 of the Jews 'who demanded of Christ signs and 
 wonders that they might believe on Him.' x It 
 seems to me there is here both a truth and a 
 confusion. The truth is what has already been 
 said more than once — that the basis of faith in 
 
 1 Evolution of Religion, ii. 239, sqq. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 237 
 
 immortality is the spiritual life with God, and 
 certainly for an unbelief which has not that 
 basis to ask as its substitute a physical demon- 
 stration would be open to the charge of seeking 
 a mere sign or wonder. But it is not the same 
 thing to say that this faith — its basis still the 
 life lived with God — finds its fulfilment in Jesus 
 Christ, who is come to be not merely a prophet 
 but the end of prophecy. It is the latter which 
 is the Christian position as regards the Resur- 
 rection on Easter-day. This was not a sign 
 given to unbelief to turn it into faith, but the 
 completed word of God to a faith to which the 
 victory over death was still but a promise, — a 
 word given by Him 'in whom the promises of 
 God are yea and amen.' That God, revealing 
 Himself in Christ, should make good that 
 promise may or may not be incredible, but has 
 certainly nothing in it which is unspiritual, un- 
 less indeed the whole idea of an historical reve- 
 lation be unspiritual. It is easy for philoso- 
 phers to take the attitude of being superior to 
 the need for anything of this kind. They for- 
 get they are living to-day after eighteen cen- 
 
238 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 turies of the Easter tradition. I will go so 
 far as to say this — that but for Easter, faith 
 in immortality would be only a rare and a 
 sickly plant in the human mind. Certainly it 
 would never have rung through the world as 
 it did in the first Christian preaching. Con- 
 sider what the Easter fact meant to faith in this 
 respect. 'Surely,' said this one and that among 
 great Old Testament saints before Christ, 
 'surely God who loves us, and has called us 
 into fellowship with Himself, does not and 
 cannot leave us to die in the dust.' But against 
 this — to which after all only high souls like 
 the author of the seventy-third Psalm attained 
 — remained the persistent and unshaken witness 
 of death. The fathers, where are they? and 
 the prophets, have they lived for ever?' The 
 only answer is mors ultima line a rerum. 
 Death simply went on, as it goes on with us. 
 They buried their dead, as we bury them: 
 The rest is silence.' Now faith might and did 
 live through all this, for, in our imperfect lives, 
 God does not yet fully reveal His love and 
 power. But then came One whom these be- 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 239 
 
 lievers found — and we too find — reason to re- 
 gard as indeed the true and full and final reve- 
 lation. Well, does even He fulfil this hope, 
 so faithfully clung to despite such uninterrupted 
 denial, that not death but life is God's last 
 word with the children of His love? Or here 
 too, with even the 'well-beloved Son of the 
 Father/ is death still the ultima linea and the 
 'rest' still 'silence'? If so, faith must just go 
 back to the yet uncontradicted deed of death, 
 with its great hope, not merely still unverified 
 but discouraged as it never was before. 
 
 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: 
 
 As of the unjust, also of the just — 
 Yea of that Just One too! 
 
 This is the one sad gospel that is true.' 1 
 
 I repeat I do not see much reason to think 
 that if the last available fact about Jesus Christ 
 had been the common terminus of the grave, 
 the religious mind would — except, perhaps, in 
 a few instances — have got over that. Cer- 
 tainly faith would never have triumphed over 
 it if the Church had had no Easter message, 
 
 A. H. Clough, Easter Day, i. 
 
2 4 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 and if the New Testament were not, as it so 
 conspicuously is, the Book of the Resurrection 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Here I wish to say that it is to fail not only 
 in charity but in justice to speak peremptorily 
 to those whose minds are inhospitable to the 
 story of the Resurrection, and are perplexed by 
 obvious difficulties. I can quite understand a 
 man saying that here is something to which it 
 is impossible to apply the tests of fact, and 
 which has yet to be explained, or to find true 
 forms of historical expression. I can sympa- 
 thise with that. What I cannot sympathise 
 with, and what I find it difficult to treat with 
 any intellectual respect, is the flimsy account 
 of the matter which is sometimes offered to us 
 in the name of rational criticism. Here is a 
 most interesting and a unique historical prob- 
 lem — namely to give some rationale of the 
 exultant gospel of the early Church. This is 
 a fact, and — it should be remembered — a fact 
 far older than any document of the Resurrec- 
 tion story. Now do not tell me that men, who 
 watched their Master's pallid head sink in 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 241 
 
 death, and who laid His lifeless form in the 
 grave, got over the impression of the reality 
 and finality of that in a few days on the strength 
 of this kind of thing: — 
 
 1 "He must come again!" The men whispered 
 it and looked longingly at each other. "He must 
 come again:" the lake whispered it, and the trees 
 and the wind in the night about them in that region 
 where He had been moving about only two weeks 
 before. "I must see Him again," said Peter, who 
 had denied that he had known Him. "If not, then 
 I cannot live." 
 
 '"Hark, didst thou not see something, Peter?" 
 'The next day, the first rumour started.' 1 
 
 And so on. This, we are told (in the preface 
 of the work from which the above is taken), 
 is the start of the story 'as it has been investi- 
 gated by German scientific study.' A highly 
 touched-up picture like this is the last thing 
 that has the right to call itself scientific history. 
 It is neither science nor history: it is fancy from 
 its first line to its last. To begin with, the only 
 glimpse we have of the state of mind of the 
 followers of Jesus after His death is not any- 
 
 Gustav Frenssen's Story of Jesus, E. T., pp. 75-6. 
 
242 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 thing the least like this 'He must come again,' 
 but is a quiet acceptance of it that all was over. 
 'We trusted that it had been He who should 
 have redeemed Israel;' we thought it would 
 be, but it is not to be. I cannot call it anything 
 else than an historical impertinence, calmly and 
 without one scrap of evidence, to substitute for 
 this convincingly genuine glimpse of the dis- 
 ciples' mind, a purely fancy sketch of men 
 whispering 'He must come again.' Further, 
 even if Peter was in this pathetic, not to say 
 neurotic, mood, is he the first man or the last 
 who has yearned to see again a dead friend 
 whom in life he had wronged? And would 
 the love of those who thus yearned to see their 
 dear Master be content to build on 'rumour;' 
 would it not — just because it was love — make 
 sure about it, exactly as you would if you heard 
 a rumour that some one very dear to you, 
 whom you thought had been dead, was yet 
 alive? 1 And if there was a Peter (or a Mary 
 
 1 In St. Luke xxiv. 22-4 we find disciples actually doing 
 this; the result, since 'Him they saw not,' left them only 'sad' 
 (v. 17) and in anything but the mood Frenssen depicts. 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 243 
 
 Magdalene) to start these rumours, was there 
 not a Thomas to test them? Above all, were 
 there not bitter and influential enemies of the 
 news, who, the moment it was proclaimed, as 
 it indubitably was at once, could prick the 
 bubble in a day, not by arguing with or making 
 martyrs of the apostles, but simply by exhuming 
 the corpse? I do not here argue these points; 
 they and many more have been argued many 
 a time. The inadequacy of the whole theory 
 is admitted by criticism itself in the fact that 
 it must be buttressed up by desperate aids such 
 as Keim's of a 'telegram from heaven' telling 
 the disciples Jesus lived. 1 I repeat that I have 
 sympathy with those who find in the Easter 
 story something still to be told in adequate 
 forms of historical expression; but I find noth- 
 ing either to help to this or to respect historic- 
 ally in the attempt (as a modern writer aptly 
 put it) 'to discredit supernatural stories which 
 have some foundation simply by telling natural 
 stories which have no foundation.' 2 This is 
 
 1 Jesus of Nazareth, vi. 364. 
 
 2 G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, p. 75. 
 
244 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 indeed to make history, as Carlyle calls it, 'a 
 distillation of Rumour.' For my part, I prefer 
 my history neat. 
 
 This has been somewhat of a digression; yet 
 the Resurrection of Christ is historically so 
 great a factor in Christian faith that a refer- 
 ence to it here was essential. At the same time, 
 I would not even seem to make this the basis 
 of the Christian belief in a life greater than 
 death. It is, as I have indicated, the fulfilment 
 of a great hope as to that — 'Christ the first- 
 fruits;' but the basis of Christian faith in im- 
 mortality remains the love of God Who has 
 called us unto His eternal fellowship. Socii 
 Dei sumus. And even this is not the basis of 
 the fact of immortality, for if so only believers 
 and saints would be immortal, and that, as a 
 phrase of Plato's puts it, 'would be to give 
 the bad too good a bargain.' Napoleon said 
 on his deathbed, N'est pas athee qui vent; and 
 similarly may it be said not every one is mortal 
 that would like to be. But it may seem that 
 to base even faith in immortality — as distin- 
 guishable from the fact of it — on the experi- 
 
THE VETO OF DEATH 245 
 
 ence of fellowship with God means that only 
 the saints can have a really sure hope as to 
 the life eternal. How many of us can claim 
 so deep a religious experience as to enable us 
 to say we know God has pledged His love to 
 us in a way which makes it impossible for us 
 to be left in the grave? Well, it is true that 
 immortality is not to be believed in lightly: in- 
 deed, when it is believed in lightly, it is not 
 believed in at all. Yet, we need not therefore 
 say that only the saints can know it. For it 
 is not only the saints whom the love of God 
 has called into fellowship with Himself. That 
 God loves us, speaks to us, redeems us, keeps 
 hold of us — all this may be not less surely 
 brought home to us sinners. It is in the ex- 
 perience of many who are far indeed from pre- 
 suming to regard themselves as advanced in 
 spiritual things. Therefore we too may dare 
 to learn this sublime faith in the life greater 
 than death which is pledged to us by God our 
 Father. We may learn it as regards others — 
 our dear dead whom we think of, perhaps, 
 every day — and shall then, even when also sad, 
 
246 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 be expectant and even elate. We may learn it 
 as regards even ourselves, learning it here, it 
 may be, with something of that incredulous 
 surprise with which once a thief on a cross, 
 dying the bitter death and the blackness of 
 night settling down upon his soul, heard the 
 amazing assurance that he — he! — would enter 
 Paradise. 
 
VII 
 THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 
 
'The action of Christ, who is risen upon the world 
 which He has redeemed, fails not but increases.' 
 
 LORD ACTON. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 
 
 The discussions in the foregoing chapters have 
 obviously not covered all 'facts of life' — no 
 one in reason could expect that they should — 
 but I trust that it has been found by the reader 
 that the aspects of the problem raised for faith 
 in life which have been dealt with are typical 
 and also crucial aspects; and further, that these 
 have been dealt with, while certainly not ex- 
 haustively, at least not evasively. Other di- 
 rections along which similar discussions might 
 be pursued at once suggest themselves. But 
 I desire to bring this book — which, since the 
 majority of things in the world of utterance 
 are too long, shall avoid that fault to atone 
 for whatever others it may exhibit — to a close, 
 and I think this last chapter may more usefully 
 be turned in a different direction. Christianity 
 is not merely a fact of personal life; it is also 
 249 
 
250 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 a fact of the life of the world. It is what the 
 Germans call welt-historisch. It may therefore 
 be tested in the light of history, which is the 
 most impartial of intellectual tribunals, and in 
 relation to facts larger than the facts of the 
 merely individual life. This more compre- 
 hensive consideration of the problem of faith 
 demands some attention before we close. 
 
 Let us, however, particularise the issue 
 within reasonable limits. I have no intention 
 here — and it would be manifestly absurd to 
 attempt it within a single chapter — to delineate 
 the Christian philosophy of history or even to 
 describe the witness of the Christian centuries 
 to faith in any general way. Nor shall I dis- 
 cuss the general relations between Christianity 
 and the great civilisation into which it entered, 
 nor even the historic theme of how it was the 
 faith of Christ which saved civilisation from a 
 despairing dissolution at that unparalleled and 
 indeed appalling hour when the Roman Em- 
 pire, sole trustee of the order of the world, was 
 foundering in the shoals of time, not from any 
 remediable breakdown of its constitutional 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 251 
 
 machinery, nor from any lack of knowledge of 
 essential political or even moral principles, but 
 simply and literally because men, being without 
 God and without hope in the world, were im- 
 potent to carry on the greatness or goodness, 
 and were preserving only the degradation and 
 corruption of the past. Here are subjects 
 which never lose their grandeur of interest for 
 the student of the human drama — subjects, 
 however, not to be attempted within the limits 
 of this chapter. Our aim here must be some- 
 thing very much simpler and also something 
 nearer to hand. 
 
 Let us, as in our previous discussions, take 
 a few typical and crucial test points which may 
 illustrate the verdict or comment of the cen- 
 turies on the claim of Christian faith, and which 
 may be answered without elaborate historical 
 research. Especially let us take points which 
 may be tested in the light of the present day. 
 We are starting from the position that time 
 tests things. It places men and movements as 
 hardly anything else does; it adjusts their valu- 
 ation. Especially does it reduce any exagger- 
 
252 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 ated estimates to their due proportions. Thus, 
 as Bacon says, 'truth has been rightly named 
 the daughter of time.' From this point of 
 view, then, let us ask this question, what does 
 to-day say of the estimate which faith has put 
 alike upon the Master and upon the message 
 of Christianity? Has the view that Jesus 
 Christ is not merely one man in the world's 
 population but the Lord and Saviour of all men 
 been found out, by the test of nearly twenty 
 centuries, to be an untenable exaggeration? 
 Does the idea that the Christian gospel is in- 
 deed the Word of God which endureth for 
 ever and the absolute and final religion hold 
 good in our modern world with its essentially 
 modern problems? These are important ques- 
 tions for faith; in dealing with them I shall 
 try to take, as has been said, typical and crucial 
 points which will test the issue. 
 
 First, then, we shall ask what is the comment 
 of time as regards the estimate of Jesus Him- 
 self. This is primary, for Christianity is not 
 a system but an attachment to a Person. Here 
 we are concerned not with ecclesiastical dogma 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 253 
 
 but with facts of life and of the world. Now, 
 amidst all the doctrinal dubiety prevalent in 
 the modern theological mind, there are facts 
 about Jesus which are clearer to-day than ever 
 they have been. From these I take one of most 
 relevant interest for our question. 
 
 It is this. When Jesus lived on earth His 
 followers declared of Him that 'He did no sin/ 
 He Himself, indeed, is reported to have chal- 
 lenged any one to convict Him of sin, and not 
 even His enemies could take up the challenge. 
 So 'the sinlessness of Jesus' has always been a 
 theme which has found a place in religious and 
 theological thought. But there is something 
 not very satisfying about such an expression. 
 It is negative, and emphasises what Jesus was 
 not rather than conveys any rich and living idea 
 of what He was. But the richness of what He 
 was could not be perceived at once. It could 
 not be fully apprehended by His contempora- 
 ries. It is only as the ages have gone on, and 
 as men of different epochs and different types 
 have been brought into contact with Jesus, that 
 the content of His personality has been made 
 
254 
 
 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 apparent. The result is something far richer 
 and most positive than anything which is ex- 
 pressed by the mere negative of the word 'sin- 
 less.' It is better expressed if we say that Jesus 
 has proved to be the complete, the perfect 
 humanity. Sinlessness excludes, and it excludes 
 one element — that which is bad. But the com- 
 plete or perfect humanity of Jesus includes 
 everything which is good. He is not merely 
 the supreme saint; He is the Son of Man. The 
 ages, which in the case of every other great 
 figure of the past discovers his limitations, in 
 this case disclose a humanity which has no limi- 
 tations but is an ideal and inspiration for man- 
 kind in every age. Here is not a great Jew 
 of the first century. Here is more even than 
 a man: here is Man. 
 
 All this may seem somewhat general, and 
 the reader will ask that this completeness or 
 perfection said to be in Jesus Christ should be 
 stated in plainer terms as a fact in life and 
 history. Well, it is a fact in life and history 
 wherever Christianity has been genuinely ex- 
 emplified that not one age only nor one type 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 255 
 
 of character only, but every type (that is, of 
 course, which is not morally evil) in every age 
 has learned its highest in the school of Christ. 
 There is not in the whole range of human 
 nature anything which is good which is not 
 strengthened, deepened, purified by contact 
 with Him. His personality reaches past the 
 dividing lines which separate humankind into 
 classes and schools and sects. That this is so 
 of merely social or educational or ecclesiastical 
 divisions is not wonderful; but He overreaches 
 divisions far deeper than these. The deepest 
 and most ineffaceable dividing lines that cross 
 the area of human life are, I take it, race and 
 sex. As to the former, is it not true that Jesus 
 Christ is as much to the Christian in England 
 to-day as He was to the Jews in Palestine who 
 first called Him Master — so much so that we 
 in England practically never think of Him as 
 having been a Jew; and further, that He is 
 nothing more to the Christian in England than 
 He is to the Christian in the far Orient or in 
 the heart of Africa? As to the latter of these 
 dividing lines, is it not enough to say that 
 
256 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 womanhood no less than manhood, as manhood 
 no less than womanhood, has found in Him its 
 inspiration and ideal? These are plain facts 
 of life and history which the centuries have 
 proved to every candid mind. They mean a 
 character to be described by some far more 
 positive and opulent term than 'sinless.' Even 
 'perfect' seems too vague and general a word. 
 They mean a personality of which we must say 
 this, that it is adequate for all humanity as its 
 inspiration and ideal. There is no other who 
 has been born of woman of whom anything 
 even approaching to this may be said. There 
 have been great men; there has been but One 
 who is Man. 
 
 About this a further thing is to be said which 
 it is of importance to say in view of modern 
 philosophies which vehemently turn away from 
 Christ for at least some ideals of character. 
 What has been urged may seem to suggest that 
 Jesus is a little of every one because not very 
 pronouncedly any one thing in particular — that 
 He is what, in Aristotelian phrase, may be 
 called a 'mean,' rather than the ideal of any 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 257 
 
 specific type of life, especially of the stronger 
 kind. Nothing could be further from the truth 
 than this. On the contrary, in Him and in 
 contact with Him the varying elements in 
 human nature — again, of course, which are not 
 evil — come to their height. There is no abase- 
 ment like the shame He evokes and no noble- 
 ness like the honour He confers; none are so 
 submissive as the Christian, none so inflexible; 
 the worldling has no such sorrow and no such 
 joy; nowhere are greater sympathy and tender- 
 ness and love, but nowhere a judgment so 
 searching, a severity so terrible, so awful a 
 hate. The gospel does not take all the aspects 
 of human nature and boil them down into one 
 tasteless and colourless jelly; it takes each one 
 and purifies it till it is tenfold itself. That is 
 why the Christian is — has proved himself in 
 history — at once the weakest and the strongest 
 man in the world. 
 
 It is on this last point I wish to say a word 
 in view of current philosophies, and especially 
 the philosophy of one remarkable, if also un- 
 hinged, writer of modern days. Finding in 
 
258 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Christ such characteristics as gentleness, meek- 
 ness, forgiveness, Nietzsche rejects Him as 
 'decadent' 1 and His morality as the 'morality 
 of slaves,' preaching to us instead the ideal of 
 the 'super-man' who shall exemplify a 'morality 
 of mastery' in a life which above all else — 
 above even distinctions of good and evil — is 
 'power.' I shall not stay to repel this de- 
 scription of Jesus, which, coming from poor 
 Nietzsche, is pitiable even more than profane. 
 Let us at once test the two prophets and their 
 gospels in life and history. And this I will 
 say confidently — in countless lives Christ has 
 created the heroic, while Nietzsche evokes only 
 the hectic. This so-called 'powerful' morality 
 appeals not to genuine virility, but rather to 
 that kind of femininity which is mastered by 
 mere egotism. 2 And it is no contribution to 
 power to declare 'I preach the over-man;' the 
 thing is to produce him. When Nietzsche calls 
 
 1 The Anti-Christ: An Attempt at a Criticism of Chris- 
 tianity, § 31. 
 
 2 This is an echo of a remark made somewhere by Eucken. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 259 
 
 for 'masters,' we remember the immortal re- 
 tort : — 
 
 'Why so can I and so can any man : 
 
 But will they come when you do call for them?'i 
 
 What we want from the prophet is the source 
 of strength. That is not merely shouting; a 
 really strong man does not go about announcing 
 (as Henley does) an 'unconquerable soul' and 
 that the years will 'find me unafraid.' 2 Nor is 
 the source of strength a spirit that scoffs at 
 love and pity and tenderness; a man is never 
 at his strongest when he is only strength. Here 
 is the source of it. The strongest thing in all 
 human history has been not a sword but a 
 Cross. 'When I am weak then am I strong' — 
 that is the secret. The gospel has it, and that 
 is why the Christianity of the Cross has been 
 an anvil which has broken many hammers. 
 This combination of apparent contradictories 
 
 1 Shakespere's King Henry IV., Pt. I. iii. i. 
 
 2 From Henley's poem entitled Invictus — a striking poem, 
 no doubt, in some respects. 
 
2 6o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 is unique in Christianity. Mr. Chesterton 
 states it in his characteristic style : — 
 
 'It is constantly assumed, especially in our Tol- 
 stoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down 
 with the lamb, the lion becomes lamb-like. But 
 that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the 
 part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorb- 
 ing the lion instead of the lion absorbing the lamb. 
 The real problem is: Can the lion lie down with 
 the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That 
 is the problem the Church attempted; that is the 
 miracle she achieved.' 1 
 
 It was not the Church that did it but Christ; 
 but, that aside, the statement is not more epi- 
 grammatical than historical. 
 
 All this, of course, does not mean that the 
 centuries are the basis of faith in Christ. He 
 
 1 Orthodoxy, p. 177. The superabundant cleverness of this 
 book is really its fatal defect as a plea for Christianity. For 
 the one thing which cleverness never does is to touch the con- 
 science, and this is the spot which Christianity cannot leave 
 untouched. Thus Orthodoxy is an example of a brilliant 
 religious apologia which leaves behind it hardly anything of 
 a religious impression. However, it takes all kinds of people 
 to convert the world, and this feature of Mr. Chesterton's 
 work should not prevent the reader from perceiving the sound- 
 ness of many positions in it regarding Christianity, which the 
 book lights up, if not with apostolic fire, certainly with 
 astonishing fireworks. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 261 
 
 is that to Himself as One whose fellowship 
 and forgiveness are for us of God. But the 
 ages are a corollary to faith because they have 
 not reduced the Figure who claims to be more 
 than merely one other man among men. Time 
 has tested Jesus, who presented Himself as 
 a Lord and Saviour of men, and it has not 
 found Him wanting as new epochs arose, new 
 races were discovered, new types of life and 
 character were brought into contact with Him. 
 Time has placed Jesus, not as merely a Jewish 
 peasant of a now long-past day, but as adequate 
 to be the ideal and the inspiration of all time 
 and of the whole humankind. The best and 
 last proof of this is personal. My best self is 
 recognised and realised before and with Him: 
 yours, too. This is indeed the Son of Man 
 and Saviour of us all. 
 
 Amplifications and illustrations of how Jesus 
 Christ has thus proved adequate to history sug- 
 gest themselves, and are indeed obvious; but we 
 must pass on to the other part of our theme, 
 and inquire what comment time has made on 
 the Christian message. Here one crucial test 
 
262 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 may suffice. If Christianity be the supreme 
 Word of God it claims to be, then it must 
 have the element of finality. That, of course, 
 does not mean that its content is discovered 
 once and for all. On the contrary, the content 
 of Christianity is only gradually being dis- 
 covered; we have yet to learn what, for ex- 
 ample, the Oriental mind will find in it in ad- 
 dition to what the Greek or Latin or Teutonic 
 mind has found. Finality, in this connection, 
 means that the gospel never becomes obsolete, 
 or something which, whatever value it may 
 have had for circumstances of another day, is 
 of no essential value for the new conditions of 
 the world, and may therefore be superseded 
 and discarded. This is a crucial test of the 
 message of Christianity as the supreme and 
 absolute religion, and it is one which may well 
 be applied after twenty centuries and in view 
 of the facts and problems of to-day. It is, 
 moreover, a test of peculiar significance for an 
 age such as ours, which is so conscious of the 
 immense advance which recent years have wit- 
 nessed in every department of thought that to 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 263 
 
 be even 'early Victorian' is to be little better 
 than a dodo. Whatever the present age is, for 
 good or evil, certainly it is a new age. The 
 result of this is that, in a great deal of modern 
 thinking or writing, there is almost the assump- 
 tion that Christian faith and Christian ethics 
 cannot be looked to for the solving of modern 
 questions. Indeed, the very idea of finality, in 
 religion as in anything else, is to the present- 
 day mind unacceptable and intolerable. The 
 truth is that the strong wine of evolution 'has 
 rather gone to the head of the modern philos- 
 opher, and he lays down its principles a priori 
 as applying to Christ and to Christianity with- 
 out any special examination of the facts. It is 
 true and indeed notable that there is to-day no 
 very serious attempt to produce or predict a 
 better religion — the new teacher whose coming 
 is, I understand, anticipated in theosophical 
 circles, need not be discussed till he arrives — 
 but there is the wide acceptance, on general 
 evolutionary grounds, of the idea that 're- 
 ligions, like all things that are ours and human, 
 have their day of declension; nor can Chris- 
 is 
 
264 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 tianity form an exception to the universal 
 rule.' 1 Well, this last remark says something 
 which is not to be settled simply by laying down 
 a priori a supposed 'universal rule,' but only 
 by a fair examination of the facts about what 
 Christianity is and can do to-day. This is what 
 we propose to test. 
 
 I wish to test this in as precise and practical 
 a way as possible; what that way is I shall 
 state presently. First, however, one word may 
 be said of a general character about this 'rule' 
 that religions decline and are superseded. 
 What sets this in operation is visible in history. 
 As a matter of fact, the force which most surely 
 has caused religions of the past to be discarded 
 is when their ideas — and especially their ideas 
 of God — have been felt to be inadequate and 
 unworthy by the growing moral sense of the 
 people. A notable and interesting example is 
 the ethical criticism which undermined the an- 
 cient Greek religion. In that religion, the lives 
 of the gods were a story of constant amours 
 and intrigues and crimes. But the ethical sense 
 
 1 J. A. Symonds's Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, p. 5. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 265 
 
 of the best minds in Greece began to criticise 
 this. Euripides, for example, reproaches the 
 god Apollo (who had seduced and then de- 
 serted Creusa) just as a right-minded man 
 to-day might denounce a betrayer of woman. 
 Plato refuses to take as true of God Homer's 
 story that Zeus sends to men lying dreams. It 
 was this kind of ethical criticism that simply 
 killed the old paganism of Greek legend, 
 though it thus served morality. Now I hardly 
 need to argue that faith in the God revealed in 
 Jesus Christ — I do not say the God described 
 in theologies — is in no danger of being super- 
 seded in this way. No one can demand in the 
 name of conscience a purer or more moral and 
 spiritual idea of God than is in the face of 
 Jesus. That idea may be too high and good 
 to be true; but certainly the most ethically sen- 
 sitive mind cannot say it is not high or good 
 enough to be worthy of God. 'What we mean 
 by God,' says Goethe, 'is just the best we know.' 
 Do we know or can we even conceive what is 
 better than Christ? Along this line, then, of 
 ethical criticism — which has been in the past the 
 
266 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 surest solvent of religious beliefs — Christian 
 faith is in no danger of being superseded. But 
 I shall not develop this, nor make any further 
 general remark on the declension of historical 
 religions; let us come to those precise and prac- 
 tical tests of the question before us of which 
 I spoke. 
 
 The line I suggest we should take is this. 
 There are in the present day questions pecul- 
 iarly characteristic of our times — what, indeed, 
 we call 'questions of the day.' They have 
 arisen in history long after Christianity arose. 
 I think it will be recognised that it is a precise 
 and practical test of whether the gospel is a 
 message only for its own epoch, now long 
 passed, or whether it has continuous and ever 
 new truth in it for every age, if we inquire 
 how far it has got it in it to touch and even 
 to be indispensable in the solution of problems 
 such as these — problems characteristic of the 
 modern world and problems which were not 
 even in the horizon of the mind of the genera- 
 tion to which Christianity first came. There 
 are two such 'questions of the day' which sup- 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 267 
 
 ply — as again will, I think, be recognised — 
 adequate and appropriate tests of these. One 
 is what is called the social problem; the other 
 what is called the woman's movement. The 
 names are somewhat vague, but are sufficient. 
 The bearing of these two matters on the issue 
 before us I propose briefly to consider. 
 
 In the first place, a reflection suggests itself 
 about the existence or rather the rise of prob- 
 lems such as these. They have more immedi- 
 ately emerged in our time from education — 
 from, in the one case, popular education, and, 
 in the other, the higher education of women. 
 But their ultimate source is far further back 
 than that. It is, as a matter of fact, within 
 the area of Christianity, and within this area 
 only, that any such questions have originated. 
 They have not arisen within other religions, 
 even within a religion so humane as Buddhism; 
 they have not been originated by secular phi- 
 losophies, even a philosophy so enlightened as 
 that of Aristotle. And it is not difficult to per- 
 ceive how this is so. Both of these questions 
 are at bottom questions of personality. The 
 
268 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 social question, in its demands for higher wages 
 and better conditions and restricted hours of 
 labour, is not merely an attempt — whether just 
 or otherwise — on the part of the 'have-nots' 
 to dispossess the 'haves;' deeper than that, it 
 is the effort of the suppressed personality of 
 masses of the people who are awaking to feel 
 they have the right to the life not of machines 
 but of beings with a soul to be called their own. 
 The woman's question is not merely an agita- 
 tion — justifiable or otherwise — for a political 
 franchise; deeper than that, it is essentially a 
 demand that women shall not any more be re- 
 garded as a subordinate means towards the 
 life of the other sex, but shall be recognised 
 as, in the full sense of the word, human persons 
 possessing, as truly as man does, that person- 
 ality which is not a means but an end. I think 
 I am not wrong in saying that here is the root- 
 thought common to both these movements. 
 Now there can be no question whence this 
 thought of the respect due to the personality of 
 the worker or of woman took its birth — in, at 
 least, any practical and effective sense. It was 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 269 
 
 in this way the gospel spoke to the worker and 
 to woman. Most truly has Guizot said: 'Ce 
 n'est pas Montesquieu, c'est Jesus-Christ qui a 
 rendu au genre hum am ses titres.' 1 To this, 
 indeed, must be added the humiliating admis- 
 sion that this thought of the Christian gospel 
 about the personality of the worker or of 
 woman has not been carried out in the practice 
 of the so-called Christian state, nor has it 
 always been even in the Church that its most 
 faithful advocates have been found. This 're- 
 proach of the gospel' 2 — as Mr. Peile has en- 
 titled his recent Bampton Lecture — is undeni- 
 able. It has its effect not only in alienating 
 masses at home from Christianity because of 
 social wrongs done or tolerated under its name, 
 but also in counteracting the appeal of Jesus 
 Christ to heathen peoples, who, seeing the 
 slums and the streets of any city in modern 
 Christendom, are repelled rather than attracted 
 to a religion of which these are the fruits. But 
 all this — which arises out of the fact that Jesus 
 
 1 L'Eglise, p. 153. 
 
 2 The Bampton Lecture for 1907, by the Rev. James W. F. 
 Peile, M.A. 
 
2 ;o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 Christ has linked His gospel and even His 
 reputation with a human stewardship which has 
 proved so unfaithful as to be in danger of 
 being suffered to be steward no longer — does 
 not alter the historical circumstances in which 
 such questions as those that have been named 
 have taken their rise. We semi-Christian na- 
 tions have not done right by the worker or by 
 woman; but we know there is the right to be 
 done. And where did we first learn that? 
 There is, I repeat, no question as to the an- 
 swer. We first learned it, or rather heard it — 
 for learned it have we hardly yet — not from 
 any socialists or feminists, but from Him who 
 died for the slave as for the free, and who 
 spoke to the soul of a woman on the same level 
 as to the soul of a man. 
 
 But I turn to the questions themselves, and 
 first to the social problem. The phrase is in- 
 effably vague, yet its meaning is very real to 
 every awakened mind and conscience. The 
 seemingly hopeless disorder and distress and 
 degradation of the conditions of life of masses 
 of men and women and children in this twenti- 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 271 
 
 eth Christian century begets a profound pessi- 
 mism within the heart of any one who even 
 looks over the edge of the social abyss; but it 
 is to-day what I will call an ethical pessmism. 
 It is not the feeling which we perceive at the 
 close of the Middle Ages, when men found the 
 world so hopelessly bad that they could do 
 nothing but wait for the coming judge : — 
 
 'Hora noviss'una, tempora pess'ima sunt; vigilemus! 
 Ecce minaciter imminet Arbiter, llle Supremus/' 1 
 
 The pessimism of to-day in face of social facts 
 is deep; but why is it deep? It is deep because 
 it has, with new resolution, set itself not to 
 'watch' but to work. Therefore it realises the 
 difficulty and desperateness of the problem as 
 the world never did w r hen it simply left it alone 
 or even simply left it to the judgment of God. 
 This is a new kind of pessimism, and there is 
 something at least like a hope at the heart of 
 
 1 Bernard of Clugny's De Contemptu Mundi. Translated 
 by Neale in the well-known lines: — 
 
 'The world is very evil, 
 
 The times are waxing late; 
 Be sober and keep vigil, 
 The Judge is at the gate.' 
 
272 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 it. To say it proves the dawn must follow is 
 to say too much; but, certainly, this is the kind 
 of darkness which must precede the dawn. 
 
 Not, however, to dwell on this, I pass to our 
 particular point, which is how far the Christian 
 gospel is vitally related to this problem and 
 essential in the solution of it. Now, on the 
 surface, social reform is a question of political 
 administration which shall effect a just re- 
 organisation of the material conditions of life. 
 As such it may appear to be a purely civil and 
 secular concern, with which the gospel, even 
 though touching all that is human, can hardly 
 be said to be essentially connected. But in the 
 whole trend of modern thinking on the subject, 
 it is becoming more and more clear that the 
 solution of the social problem is not merely a 
 matter of political administration nor of merely 
 the adjustment of the outward conditions of 
 life. Let us look at this and whither it leads. 
 
 That the problem is to-day being worked out 
 on administrative and legislative lines is itself 
 a development from the days of the classic so- 
 cialism of Karl Marx, who predicted an even 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 273 
 
 keener class war between capital and labour 
 till at last, when the intermediate class had 
 been crushed out of existence, there would be 
 a decisive conflict by which, he believed, the 
 forces of labour would wrest the supremacy 
 from the enemy and establish a new order. 
 That this has not actually come true, and (in 
 this country, at least) is not likely to come true, 
 is only because this conflict — which, Marx 
 seemed to forget, is not between two abstract 
 forces which go blindly to their fate, but among 
 men who can foresee and to some extent divert 
 disasters — has been evaded by the mediation 
 of various kinds of legislative and administra- 
 tive concessions, which have at least provision- 
 ally and at the acutest points taken the edge 
 off the antagonism. In this way has a con- 
 stitutional socialism largely taken the place of 
 a revolutionary one. 1 Instead of smashing the 
 machine, social reformers now capture it. 
 They got into Parliament, as the Labour Party 
 do, to promote their ends; or they set them- 
 
 1 I say 'largely,' not entirely, for the revolutionary principle 
 still lives, and was recently revived in what is known as 
 syndicalism. 
 
274 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 selves, as so notably Mr. and Mrs. Sidney 
 Webb have done, to educate expert opinion on 
 the subject. This administrative and legis- 
 lative social reform is going on more and more, 
 and in this sense we are, as a statesman of the 
 last generation 1 said, 'all socialists to-day.' 
 And so we should be and must be. The single 
 fact that there are millions of our people — to 
 speak only of England — who are compelled to 
 live in conditions which give the life neither 
 of body nor soul hardly a chance, and 'who, if 
 they spent every farthing they possessed on 
 the bare necessities of life, would still be under- 
 fed and inadequately clothed,' 2 makes a de- 
 mand for economic adjustment which must be 
 met by legislative and administrative reform. 
 But the interesting feature of much of the 
 best modern thinking on the question of how 
 it is to be done is this. It is those most ad- 
 vanced in their convictions about social reform 
 in the political sense who see most clearly that 
 
 1 Sir William Harcourt, I think it was. 
 2 'The Industrial Unrest,' by B. Seebohm Rowntree, in The 
 Contemporary Review, October 1911. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 275 
 
 the solution of this most complicated problem 
 is going to involve far more than a mere po- 
 litical programme. The truth is the world 
 cannot be saved by either its parliamentary 
 legislators or its social experts. It must be 
 saved by itself. This is the thought which is 
 becoming more and more clear. It means that 
 the deepest need towards the attainment of a 
 new earth is what the distinguished social edu- 
 cationalists whom I named a moment ago — 
 and who make up, if I may say so, perhaps 
 the most intelligent intellectual partnership at 
 present working in England — called recently 
 'a change of heart.' 1 There must be this alike 
 in those by whom the problem is to be solved 
 and those for whom, more immediately, it is 
 to be solved. With the former, there must be 
 the development of a new idea and principle — 
 a moral and social motive in place of a material 
 and selfish one; with the latter, there must be — 
 along with better houses, higher wages, more 
 time free from labour — also character and a 
 
 1 'What is Socialism? A Change of Heart,' by Sidney and 
 Beatrice Webb, in The New Statesman, 19th April 1913. 
 
276 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 new ideal of life. Without this 'change of 
 heart' — which obviously is not legislative but 
 personal — neither will men be constrained to 
 do what is right to the down-trodden sections 
 of society, nor, if it were done, would it effect 
 a permanent good. Thus is it that social re- 
 generation is a moral and personal even more 
 than — or, at the lowest, as well as — a political 
 problem. It will be accomplished, says Mr. 
 Philip Snowden, not by a revolution, but by 
 a co-operation of 'men and women of all classes 
 whose moral senses have been developed.' 1 
 Till something of this kind permeates heart and 
 mind and conscience, the promised land is still 
 afar off. No one sees this more clearly than 
 Mr. H. G. Wells, who, whatever one may think 
 of his influence or of his qualifications to be 
 a guide of the moral life either of individuals 
 or of society, is certainly a man who can think. 
 He too speaks of 'the great Change;' and this 
 is 'no mere change in conditions and institu- 
 tions' but 'a change of heart and mind.' 2 And 
 
 1 In The Christian Commonwealth, 20th September 191 1. 
 
 2 In the Comet's Tail, p. 303. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 277 
 
 he twits the programmists who have schemes 
 for socialistic regeneration by asking if their 
 'aunts' or the 'grocer' or the 'family solicitor' 
 can be counted upon for support. 1 That is to 
 say, he sees the problem is not in programmes 
 but in persons — is, in a word, in ourselves. 
 This, of course, does not mean that it has 
 ceased to be political — a matter of laws and 
 administrative reforms, of houses and wages 
 and material improvement generally. But it 
 has ceased to be only that. It is personal as 
 well as political, moral as well as material, an 
 affair of the 'changed heart' as well as the 
 amended statute. 
 
 Now — and to come at length to our point, 
 which needs but a word more to be clear — what 
 is all this but just a coming back to the word 
 of Christ, who said: 'The kingdom of God is 
 within you'? What, then, is going to put it 
 within us — is going to give men this changed 
 heart, this moral sense, this new self? I find 
 the thinkers I have named throw little or no 
 light on this. The authors of the article to 
 
 1 New W or Ids for Old, p. 225. 
 
278 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 which I referred on 'The Changed Heart' sug- 
 gest merely the 'ever-widening adoption of the 
 socialistic motive' through the preaching of the 
 new Political Economy. Mr. Wells has really 
 nothing to offer; sometimes he thinks the 'good 
 will' is to come a long time hence, or (in the 
 romance named a moment ago) lets his fancy 
 picture the 'great Change' accomplished magic- 
 ally by the swish of a comet's tail, which shall 
 introduce a life where war and falseness and 
 selfishness and ugliness shall be no more and 
 there will be everywhere 'a new world.' Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw on one occasion, speaking with 
 unwonted seriousness, told the Labourists that 
 'it is only by religion in the real sense of the 
 word that you can get at people' — something, 
 that is, which 'gets a man out of his own 
 miserable fears and causes him to identify 
 himself with the Life-force of the Universe so 
 that he feels his complete union with the 
 human race;' but the gospel of this religion is 
 apparently 'to popularize the ideal of equality' 
 — by which Mr. Shaw says he means to 'dis- 
 tribute money equally' — which 'does respond,' 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 279 
 
 he somewhat strangely thinks, 'to a genuine 
 want in human nature' and 'is next to all our 
 hearts.' 1 It does not become the believer in 
 Christianity to mock at the inadequacy of ap- 
 peals such as these to change the human heart; 
 these are the best appeals men can make since, 
 as it seems to them as they look at the Chris- 
 tian world and the Church, the appeal of the 
 gospel is practically inoperative. Socialists 
 would not have turned to comets if Christians 
 had been true to Christ. But it is permissible 
 to say that any one, convinced about the ne- 
 cessity of this inward and personal renewal as 
 a factor in social reform, has only to throw 
 off his prejudice — unorthodox persons can be 
 prejudiced quite as much as orthodox — in order 
 to be led, even if it be past centuries of the 
 selfishness and sinfulness of so-called Chris- 
 tians, straight to Jesus Christ. I shall not here 
 reopen an argument about Christ: I shall only 
 say to look at Him and learn of Him, and 
 above all live with Him, mean a new heart and 
 
 1 Reported in The Labour Leader, 28th April 191 1. This is 
 a worthier Shaw than that referred to in Chapter VI. 
 19 
 
2 8o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 a new motive and a new self as nothing else in 
 the world does. And this means that the Chris- 
 tian gospel — while it does not offer the solution 
 of the social problem, which will still demand 
 all the energies of political reason — is yet in- 
 dispensable to the solution of it; and that Jesus 
 Christ, from whom (as I said on an earlier 
 page) the whole question really took its origin, 
 is still the essential living factor in it. 
 
 The bearing of this on the often debated 
 question of the duty of the Church towards the 
 social problem is immediate ; but it is not within 
 the purpose of our present discussions to exhort 
 upon that, and, moreover, I must now pass on. 
 
 I pass to the second specific question which 
 was named — the woman's movement. If I 
 touch on this more briefly and only at one point, 
 it is from considerations of space, and certainly 
 not from any want of the due sense of the im- 
 portance of the issues involved; on the con- 
 trary, I believe that here is something at once 
 deeper in its principles and more far-reaching 
 in its consequences than any other movement 
 (except the gospel itself) before the civilised 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 281 
 
 world. Of course, when I say this I am not 
 thinking of the agitation for the suffrage; that 
 is an arguable implicate of the wider idea, upon 
 which the political reason will adjudicate ac- 
 cording to whether it is or is not convinced that 
 it will be for the welfare of the state. These 
 pages are certainly not the place for the writer 
 to inflict his views on this question upon the 
 reader. By the woman's movement I mean 
 something far greater than any mere franchise. 
 I meant the idea — which indubitably is perme- 
 ating the mental, moral, and social atmosphere 
 of the times in which we are living — of the new 
 sense of equality between men and women. 
 The term 'sex-equality' is capable of misuse, but 
 I mean it here in its true sense. It does not, 
 of course, mean that there are not natural 
 differences between men and women which will 
 always be, and which, moreover, will always 
 involve differences in political and also in per- 
 sonal relations. And it does not mean anything 
 so foolish as that men and women are equal in 
 everything; there are some things men will 
 always do better than women, just as there are 
 
282 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 others women will always do better than men. 
 Nor does it mean anything so abhorrent as a 
 sex-rivalry or sex-war. It means, on the con- 
 trary, something common to both — the human- 
 ity common to both; and therefore that a 
 woman, equally with a man, has the full rights 
 and also responsibilities of that humanity. 
 Thus, woman's life at its best is complementary 
 to man's just as man's at its best is comple- 
 mentary to woman's; but also, in her case as 
 in his, life is more than this, and she has the 
 right to be herself as he has to be himself. 
 Again, the contribution which women can make 
 to the common work and welfare of the world 
 will be most successful when it is in co-operation 
 with that of man, just as man's will be when 
 it is in co-operation with that of women (and 
 has often failed from lack of this) ; but she, 
 as well as he, has a responsibility which is direct 
 and is not limited by what may be appended 
 to the other's. This I take to be the root-idea 
 of the woman's movement. It is with us to-day, 
 and will be with us more and more, profoundly 
 influencing the whole life of civilisation. I have 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 28 
 
 j 
 
 already pointed out the connection between the 
 gospel and the origin of any such ideas. We 
 have now to ask if, in any vital sense, the gospel 
 is indispensable in the application of them in 
 our own times. 
 
 As I have said, I am going to touch on only 
 one point. It by no means exhausts the subject, 
 but it is what we want — a crucial test-case; 
 moreover, what is essential to be said upon it 
 can be said in not many sentences. There is 
 nothing which this new relation between men 
 and women, looking at each other with eyes 
 level, will more surely affect, and nothing by 
 which its results will more severely be tested, 
 than the standard of morality between the 
 sexes. Just because it is essentially the claim 
 of personality, it cannot but express itself in 
 this connection; and just because it is a claim 
 for equality in personality, it cannot and will 
 not accept the dual standard — one for man and 
 another for woman — at present generally rec- 
 ognised. Whatever else it may or may not 
 do, the idea of sex-equality (in the sense ex- 
 plained a moment ago) will — not, of course, 
 
284 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 suddenly or immediately, but surely and gradu- 
 ally — make these two codes approximate. 
 Obviously this may result in either of two 
 directions. It may mean that women will more 
 and more claim the licence of the laxer stand- 
 ard now widely tolerated in men; or it may 
 mean that the higher standard, now demanded 
 of women, will more and more be also and 
 equally demanded of men. The former alter- 
 native I do not discuss because it is something 
 to be, wherever it appears, not discussed but 
 simply fought; the one remark I make in pass- 
 ing from it is that, in any section of society 
 which descends to it, it is women who will have 
 to pay the price. But assuming the other alter- 
 native, I wish to press the question of how this 
 is to be maintained otherwise than with the 
 Christian ideal and the Christian law. I cannot 
 see that any merely naturalistic and utilitarian 
 principle of ethic will maintain it — not to say, 
 with any power enforce it. For naturalism, 
 which is with Christianity as regards such 
 things as justice or truth, or even, to some ex- 
 tent, benevolence, is not clearly with it as 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 285 
 
 regards the equal obligation of purity upon man 
 as upon woman. From the point of view solely 
 of natural consequences to the individual, the 
 family, and the state, this obligation may be 
 broken by a man with a degree of impunity 
 which, for obvious reasons, does not apply to 
 a woman. It is just this fact which the natural 
 man has fastened on to his own mean advan- 
 tage, and because of it, defenders (whom I 
 shall not here quote) of that dual ethical code 
 to which reference has been made can, from the 
 purely utilitarian standpoint, make a case, as 
 a case can be made from the wrong point of 
 view for any wrong thing. Therefore, I ask 
 again, how, apart from Christianity, with its 
 commanding principle on this matter and its 
 constraining power, are you going to maintain 
 the higher equal law of purity? There are, 
 of course, very many non-Christians who them- 
 selves are true to it, but this is individual prac- 
 tice. I do not find that our modern non- 
 Christian authors, especially in fiction — and I 
 am thinking not of the baser kind — lay it down 
 as a law. Only Jesus Christ is the law of this. 
 
286 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 By this I mean no merely ecclesiastical or the- 
 ological canon or dogma. I mean that when 
 Jesus Christ is brought into any human life — 
 whether the life of a man or of a woman makes 
 not the least difference — then only one principle 
 is here possible. That is what I mean when I 
 say that Christ is a law in this matter, and He 
 is the only law in it. I shall not pursue this 
 subject further, though I need make no apology 
 for having touched on it, for it is vital both in 
 the woman's movement and for the social 
 future generally. But I think enough has been 
 said or indicated to make clear the point for 
 our present purpose, which is that in this vital 
 issue, which must develop in one direction or 
 the other out of the idea of the equal person- 
 ality of the sexes, the Christian law and ideal, 
 far from being obsolete and useless, are, on 
 the contrary, indispensable if the inevitable 
 future approximation of these two standards 
 of morality is to mean not a levelling down but 
 a levelling up, and is to be the vindication and 
 the victory not of the lower but of the higher 
 law of life. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 287 
 
 This, then, is the conclusion which I think 
 we may reach regarding the permanence of the 
 value of the Christian message for our day as 
 tested by the two specific problems which have 
 been briefly discussed. The conclusion is not 
 that the Christian gospel is of itself the solu- 
 tion of these problems, which in many respects 
 remain problems to be worked out by what I 
 have called the political reason, and God has 
 not given us the gospel to save us the trouble 
 of using our reason. But it is that the gospel 
 is an indispensable element in their solution. 
 To put it even more simply, these problems 
 need Jesus Christ. These 'questions of the day' 
 — of this late twentieth century — cannot be 
 truly answered apart from Him. 
 
 Now if this be true, it is but the exemplifica- 
 tion in two typical instances of a greater general 
 truth with which I shall now draw this chapter 
 and, with it, the book towards an end. 
 
 If these questions need Christ, so does the 
 world. This is to be said of the present age 
 with very special cogency. The world to-day is 
 changing in a way which is making many 
 
288 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 thoughtful men — and among them even those 
 who have no strong personal need of Jesus 
 Christ — realise that momentous issues for man- 
 kind are involved in the place which Chris- 
 tianity may hold in the world of to-morrow. 
 I have space to mention but one aspect of this. 
 The wo/ld is becoming unified. It is not merely 
 that its territory is practically all discovered 
 and delimited, but — what is much more impor- 
 tant — it is being knit into an interrelated whole 
 through, chiefly, the dual factors of education 
 and commerce. Nowhere is the effect of this 
 more profound than in the far Orient, where 
 great nations are passing with extraordinary 
 rapidity through a tremendous transformation. 
 It is hardly too much to say that all the potent 
 forces which in our European history operated 
 singly and with long intervals between them 
 under such names as the Renaissance, the Ref- 
 ormation, the Revolution, the Social Move- 
 ment, the Educational Enlightenment, and 
 others, are to-day operating all at once in 
 India and China and Japan. Amid the vast and 
 varied consequences of this, the effect on 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 289 
 
 religion is inevitable and will be profound. 
 Polytheism and ancestor-worship have no fu- 
 ture in this new era. The prospect therefore is 
 imminent of the opening of the sluice-gates for 
 the flooding of the world with great material- 
 istic civilisations which have discarded the re- 
 straints and reverences of their old faiths, and 
 have found no other instead. The only alterna- 
 tive presented to these nations is the name of 
 Jesus Christ. It is thus that not only particular 
 questions need Christ: it is the world which 
 needs Him. In the most unexpected quarters 
 indications appear of how men feel this to-day 
 about the future of the world, even when (as 
 I have said) they may not feel it in their own 
 personal life; the last indication of it is the 
 recent call of the new Republic of China for 
 the prayers of its Christian people. 1 From all 
 
 1 This remarkable action is not to be represented as meaning 
 more than it does mean. But it means at least a sense that 
 Christianity is an element in the national life which may have 
 something vital or valuable for the nation at its period of 
 crisis. Not dissimilarly, exactly sixteen hundred years ago, 
 Constantine turned the eyes of the pagan Roman empire to 
 Christianity, not so much out of his own personal faith ai 
 with the feeling that this religion was the coming thing, and 
 the hope of the future lay in it. 
 
2 9 o THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 this, and from the facts which give rise to it 
 — into which I cannot now further enter — I 
 draw but two thoughts, one about the world 
 and one about the Church, and so close. 
 
 About the world, it suggests the thought that 
 the real hope of progress is bound up with Jesus 
 Christ. Progress is an idea which the modern 
 mind — exhilarated, as I have already in this 
 chapter suggested, by the strong wine of evo- 
 lution — is apt to assume too easily, as if it 
 were an axiom of life and history which is the 
 pledge of a glorious future. This is not a very 
 far-seeing or accurate view. In the first place, 
 evolution as a secular process has its terrible 
 as well as its inspiring aspect. The disillusion- 
 ing pen of Anatole France reminds us that 'the 
 human race is not capable of an indeterminate 
 progress,' and that some day 'when the sun goes 
 out — a catastrophe that is bound to be' — 'the 
 globe will go rolling on, bearing with it through 
 the silent fields of space the ashes of human- 
 ity.' 1 But if this despairing future seems too 
 distant to impress the mind, let us test the idea 
 
 1 Le Jardin d'Epicure, E. T., by Alfred Allinson, pp. 26-7. 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 291 
 
 of human progress within the narrower area of 
 history. Undoubtedly there has been in human 
 history an immense advance in some things. 
 Of these I will name, as perhaps the chief, these 
 two — knowledge and comfort. The progress 
 of knowledge is such that a schoolboy to-day 
 knows things which were hid from Aristotle : 
 the progress in comfort is hardly less, and the 
 necessities of the people of the twentieth cen- 
 tury are the unheard-of luxuries of the most 
 wealthy of past ages. In these respects, this 
 day — of books and schools, of telephones and 
 motor-cars — is incomparably in advance of 
 days gone by. But neither comfort nor even 
 mere knowledge is the deepest thing in life. 
 Let us test the idea of progress by two deeper 
 things. The two most real tests of life are, 
 I imagine, happiness and character. If, then, 
 we look at the evolution of human history — 
 apart, so far as this is possible, from the law 
 and gospel of Jesus Christ — do we find a real 
 and certain progress in these things? I greatly 
 doubt it. I do not find the non-Christian 
 product of twentieth century civilisation a hap- 
 
292 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 pier thing than some old Greek who lived in 
 Athens in the days of Pericles or, in some 
 quieter spot of Hellas, tended his herds and 
 saw the sunlight on the violet sea. As regards 
 character, a man who to-day casts off the re- 
 straints of the higher morality is easily, and 
 indeed is essentially, a worse man than any 
 example of lust or cruelty in the days of pagan 
 Rome, and certainly merits a deeper damna- 
 tion. In a word I do not find that life and 
 history, apart from Jesus Christ, assure any 
 great happiness or any high ethical elevation 
 for mankind. M. France — in the work from 
 which I quoted a moment ago — summons, as 
 the two truest judges on human life, Irony 
 and Pity. And indeed it is true : these are the 
 two thoughts which the human spectacle leaves 
 in the observant mind. But this is the human 
 spectacle as viewed by one who has never recog- 
 nised its Divine Hero. When with human life 
 and human history is linked Jesus Christ and 
 something of what we have found Jesus Christ 
 to be and to mean for man and for the world, 
 then and then only does the pity deepen into 
 sacrificing and saving love, and the irony is 
 
THE COMMENT OF TO-DAY 293 
 
 transfigured into faith and hope. It is He that 
 is the star of human destiny; and better than 
 any evolutionary law — in part terrible and in 
 part dubious — and its pledge of progress is 
 He who is the Light of the world which shall 
 never set. 
 
 The other thought suggested by what has 
 been said applies more particularly to the 
 Church. The Church of to-day often bewails 
 the spiritual flatness of the age, and its indiffer- 
 ence to religion. I am not disposed to accept 
 all such strictures on the irreligion of this age 
 without qualifications, partly because any one 
 who reads religious history and biography 
 knows how such things are said of many ages, 
 and partly because I would judge the religion 
 of an age, as I would that of a man, by the 
 state of the conscience, and I think the con- 
 science of the present time is indisputably 
 awake as that of many an age — even more 
 orthodox — in the past was not. Still, that 
 there is a flatness in the religious life of the 
 Church to-day is only too evident. Now, in 
 past times, deliverance from such times of flat- 
 ness has come to the Church through great re- 
 
294 
 
 THE FACTS OF LIFE 
 
 vivals of personal religion, when the souls of 
 men were stirred to cry out 'What must I do 
 to be saved?' For this revival many seek the 
 signs; many would even manufacture its ap- 
 pearing. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, 
 and the breath of this spiritual revival does not 
 come. May the reason be this? We ask God 
 to speak to the age. Was there ever an age 
 in history when more distinctly God was speak- 
 ing? He is speaking to the Church to-day — 
 so that, as I have indicated, even the world can 
 hear it — in the great problems of the social cry 
 for justice and in the great need of the heathen 
 world for Christ. That is God's voice as really 
 and as surely as any conviction of guilt in the 
 soul of an awakened sinner. May it not be 
 that only as the Church hears these calls of God 
 will His Spirit again descend upon her with 
 power and blessing? The revival awaiting the 
 Church may be one in which men shall turn 
 again to Christ, saying not only — though this 
 will ever be with the other — that He and He 
 only is the Saviour of their souls, but that He 
 and He only is the Saviour of the world. 
 
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