: ¦¦-'¦^'^f^^MM^:^.''''^

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE PLACE OF CHRIST

MODERN THEOLOGY

A. M. FAIRBAIRN, M.A., D.D.
PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD; GIFFORD LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITl
OF ABERDEEN; LATE MORSE LECTURER IN UNION SEMINARY, NEW YORK;
AND LYMAN BEECHER LECTURER IN YALE UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1893

M

WW

171, 173 Macdougal Street, New York

THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED TO
MY WIFE,
WHOSE
QUIET HELPFULNESS AND FAIR COMPANIONSHIP
HAVE MADE
THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF OUR WEDDED LIFE
YEARS OF HAPPY LABOUR
AND
GRACIOUS PEACE.
Bathgatb, February 2yth, 1868. Oxford, Fehrnary -jth. 1893.

PREFACE.
TREATISES in Systematic Theology are not so
common as they once were, nor are they so easy
either to write or to read. Criticism has become so
much a mental habit and has changed so many things
that we find it hard to be patient with any process
that is not critical, or to agree with any principle or
method that professes to be constructive. Construction,
indeed, without criticism is sure to be invalid ; but the
criticism which does not either end in construction
or make it more possible, is quite as surely without
any scientific character or function. Hence, though
modern criticism, philosophical, literary, and historical,
has made systematic treatises of the old order im
possible, it has only made a new endeavour at CGa
struction the more necessary. This book does not
profess or claim to be a system of theology, but it is
an attempt at formulating the fundamental or material
conception of such a system ; or, in other words, it is
an endeavour through a Christian doctrine of God at
a sketch ofthe first lines of a Christian Theology.
This endeavour is due to the feeling that criticism

VUl PREFACE.
has placed constructive thought in a more advantageous
position than it has ever before occupied in the history
ofthe Christian Church. It has done this by making
our knowledge more historical and real, and so
bringing our thought face to face with fact. But,
for the Christian theologian, the most significant
and assured result of the critical process is, that
he can now stand face to face with the historical
Christ, and conceive God as He conceived Him.
What God signified to Jesus Christ He ought to
signify to all Christian Churches ; and here all can
find a point from which to study themselves and their
systems. Theology as well as astronomy may be
Ptolemaic ; it is so when the interpreter's Church,
with its creeds and traditions, is made the fixed point
from which he observes and conceives the truth
and kingdom of God. But theology may also be
Copernican ; and it is so when the standpoint of the
interpreter is, as it were, the consciousness of Jesus
Christ, and this consciousness where it is clearest and
most defined, in the belief as to God's Fatherhood
and His own Sonship. Theology in the former case is
geocentric, in the latter heliocentric ; and only where
the sun is the centre can our planetary beliefs and
Churches fall into a system which is but made the
more complete by varying degrees of distance and
differences of orbit.
Of the two Books into which this work falls, the

PREFACE. IX
first is concerned with historical criticism, the second
with theological construction ; but the critical process
is an integral part of the constructive endeavour. We
must understand the factors and forces that have
moved and shaped the theologies of the past before
we can, even in rudest outline, draw the ground-
plan of a theology for the present. Hence came the
necessity for the discussion, even within our narrow
limits, of so large and complex a question as the evolution
of theology and the Church. The origin and action
of elements alien to the consciousness of Christ had
to be discovered, and the development of those native
to it traced. Then, it was no less necessary that we
should follow the course of the speculation and criticism
that have compelled the Churches, often against their
wills and in spite of their own inherent tendencies, to
return to Christ. The two histories — the evolution of
theology on the one hand, and the return through
criticism to Christ on the other — raise the question of
the Second Book : the significance for theological
thought of the Christ who has been, as it were,
historically recovered. And here the Author regrets
that he has been forced to move within limits which
have prevented more detailed discussions and elucida
tions. The omission of these, especially in the third
division of the Second Book, has been to him a real,
though possibly a necessary, act of self-denial.
It remains for him only to thank certain friends

X PREFACE.
who have helped him by kindly reading the proofs,
and with criticisms and suggestions as well as correc
tions ; and among these he would name, in particular,
the Rev. Dr. Mackennal, of Bowdon ; Mr. P. E.
Matheson, M.A., Fellow of New College; and Mr.
Vernon Bartlet, M.A., Tutor of Mansfield College.
In a very special degree he has to thank Mr. J.
Gordon Watt, B.A., of Mansfield College, for two
careful and excellent pieces of work — the Table of
Contents and the Index.

This book appears as the Morse Lecture, but it
contains matter that was also delivered in the Lyman
Beecher Lectures at Yale, besides much matter that
has never been delivered at all. The author does not,
for both literary and scientific reasons, like to see
either the limits or the form of the lecture preserved
in the book ; and so he has not attempted here to
reproduce the lectures, but simply to discuss his
subject in the form and within the limits its importance
seemed to demand. He is grateful for the oppor
tunity here afforded of expressing his sense of the
honour done him both by Union Seminary and Yale
University in the appointment to these Lectureships.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
THE RETURN TO CHRIST.
page
i. The New Element in Theology.
The growth of the historical spirit  3
Its interpretation of Christ and revivifying of theology . . 6
ii. Theology as the Historical Spirit found it.
Schools in theology : the Evangelical and the Anglican . . 9
The theological library as it was.
Its wealth of apologetics  11
Biblical exegesis and dogmatics  13
But lack of any history of Christ  17
iii. The Recovery of the Historical Christ.
The theological library as it is  18
The revivification of the New Testament  19
The significance of the change for theology .... 20
BOOK \.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL.
Div. I.— THE LAW OF DEVELOPMENT IN THEOLOGY AND
THE CHURCH.
CHAPTER I.
THE DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT.
i. On THE History of the Doctrine.
Introduction of term and idea into English theology by Newman 25
History of the doctrine in Protestant and Catholic controversy 27
Newman's theory of development  32
ii The Idea of Development.
Its character dependent on its field of activity . . . 34
Historical development must be biological . . . .35
Newman's theory merely logical  36

Xll TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE
iii Development in the Church.
Its environments : how these affected the interpretation of
Christ  38
iv. The Realm of the Law.
Christ equally for all Churches the test of development . . 42
. The law universal and impartial in its scope .... 44
CHAPTER II.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH.
i. The Creative Organism.
Jesus Christ the creative and normative Person ... 47
His religion, priestly in character, yet priestless ... 48
ii. The Primitive Environments.
Originally Judaic, but soon Gentile  50
Judaism the enemy of Christianity, yet medium for its inter
pretation  52
iii. The Immediate Result.
The sub-Apostolic age guided by vulgar tradition rather than
by Apostolic thought  55
CHAPTER IIL
new factors and new lines of development.
Summary of Positions Determined  58
i. The New Factors : the External.
I. Greek philosophy  59
2. Roman polity  60
3. Popular religion ......... 61
Interpreted through these, Christianity became Catholicism . 62
ii. Ancient Philosophy and Theology.
Two internal factors : Hebrew religion and Christian history . 63
Hebrew religion, through Philo, changes philosophy into
theology .  64
iii. Christian History and Theology.
Christian history creates the problems of Christian theology . 66
Theology Eastern and soteriology W^estern .... 70
CHAPTER IV.
THE GREEK MIND AND THEOLOGY.
L Two Minds and Two Churches.
Greek philosophy and Roman law in the Greek and Roman
Churches  71
Contrast of thought and systems  7,

TABLE OF CONTENTS. xiii
.. _, _ PAGE
11. The Greek and Latin Fathers.
The Greek metaphysical and speculative  75
The Latin political and forensic  76
iii. The Greek Theology.
It continues, completes, and reflects Greek philosophy . . 78
Sketch of ante-Nicene development of theology ... 81
iv. The Terminology.
Derived from Greek philosophy  85
Elaborated and defined through controversy .... 86
V. The Merits and the Defects of the Theology.
God a unity, more metaphysical than ethical .... 89

CHAPTER V.
THE LATIN THEOLOGY AND CHURCH.
i. Their Distinctive Factors.
Organization and thought  93
Imperial Church and legal theology  .94
ii. Tertullian. His Stoic philosophy  95
His Roman jurisprudence  98
His sacerdotalism and forensic soteriology .... 100
iii. The Old Religions and the New.
The Church at its origin without an official priesthood . . 101
The sacerdotal tendency in Tertullian and Cyprian . . . 104
Its Hebrew and Gentile causes  105
iv. Thought and Organization in the Western Church.
The Church supersedes and inherits Roman Imperialism . 107
Summary and Conclusion  no >
CHAPTER VL
SCHOLASTICISM.
*
i. The New Races and the Old.
The seat of the Church in Rome  Ill
Scholastic philosophy provincial, the work of the new Northern
peoples  112
ii. The New Races and the Old Problems.
The problems Augustine's : his innate dualism . . .115
The transitional period significant for polity . . . .117

xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE
iii. Scholasticism. A theological period : Anselm and Aristotle . . . .118
I. The religious question : the relation of Reason and Faith 119
2. The theological question : the Atonement . . . 122
3. The philosophical question : Nominalism and Realism . 124
CHAPTER VII.
THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION.
i. The Time and the Men.
The decay of Medisevalism  127
The Italian and Teutonic Humanisms  130
ii. The Renaissance in Christian Literature: Erasmus.
Contemporary comparison of primitive Christianity and
Catholicism . . . . . . . . -131
Erasmus : his labours on the New Testament .... 132
His criticism of Catholic doctrines and practices . , . 134
iii. The Reformation : Luther.
Protestantism and Humanism  137
Luther, a reformer by necessity : his doctrine of grace . . 138
The new movement : its leaders and its failures . . . 141
iv. Calvin and Geneva.
Calvin and Luther contrasted  144
His doctrine of God ; his unconditionalism in theology and
polity  145
Calvinism the conscious and constructive antithesis to Rome . 148
^ The influence of Geneva  150
CHAPTER VIIL
THE MODERN CHURCHES AND THEIR THEOLOGIES.
The Return to the Religion of the Sources
i. Relation of Church to Theology.
Institutional Theologies and theological Churches
The material conceptions of the modern Churches
ii. Catholicism and Theology.
Catholic theology political and polemical .
Tradition and Scripture 
iii. The Lutheran Theology.
Its determinative idea : justification by faith .
The Scriptures and the Sacraments .
The coTninunicatio idiomatum and scientific Christology

152154155 156158 159161 161

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

XV

The Reformed Theology.
Its determinative idea : the sovereignty of God . . 162
I. The supralapsarian school ...... 163
Its affinity to Stoicism and Pantheism .... 164
2. The sublapsarian school  168
The double criticism of Calvinism.
A. The Arminian : its conditionalism . . . .169
B. The Socinian , . .  172
Consequent modifications in soteriology and theology . .173
The modern evangelical theology  175
Theology and the English Church.
The institutional schools, the High Church and the Broad . 176
The theological schools, the old Puritan and the modern
Evangelical  179
Puritan and Anglican ideals compared  180
Anglican theology  182
Its apologetic and antiquarian character  183
Retrospect and Conclusions.
The modern return to the historical Christ . . . .186
Note to p. 182  188

Div. 11.— historical CRITICISM and THE HISTORY OF CHRIST.

CHAPTER I.

THROUGH LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY TO CRITICISM.
The Anglican Revival and German Criticism . . -191
i. The Beginnings of Historical Criticism: Literature.
1. Lessing, its founder: on revelation and religion . . . 192
2. Schiller  195
3. Goethe  196
ii. Historical Criticism : Romanticism and Theology.
Herder's influence on theology and Biblical study . . . 199
iii. Philosophy and Historical Criticism.
I. Philosophy English and German  203
2. Kant's ethical Theism  205
3. Jacobi's Intuitionalism  206
4. Fichte's Idealism : his Johannean theology .... 207

XVl TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE
iv. Philosophy and the Incarnation : Schelling.
His speculative Christianity ...... 209
The Incarnation, the Church, Redemption . . . .211
V. Philosophy and Historical Christianity: Hegel.
His philosophy historical, but not critical .... 214
The absolute religion, one with the absolute philosophy . . 217
Philosophy transfigures dogmatic  221
vi. Historical Criticism and Theology : Schleiermacher.
His versatility and enthusiasm  223
The feeling of dependence in religion  224
The consciousness of Christ and the Christian consciousness . 226
CHAPTER IL
PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY OF JESUS.
The Beginnings of Criticism of the Gospels . . . 230
i. Strauss and his Masters.
Strauss in Berlin  232
The influence of Hegel and Schleiermacher .... 233
ii. The " Leben Jesu."
Strauss a speculative philosopher  235
The mythical theory  240
iii. The Counter Criticism.
The criticism of panic  242
Relevant criticism  245
iv. Concessions and Conclusion.
His irenical attitude ......... 247
Jesus the religious genius  248
Withdrawal of concessions .... . , 252
CHAPTER III.
LITERARY CRITICISM.— THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL.
i. The Critical Problem and Christology.
Historical criticism corrects speculation  2U
The new Christologies  2 1:7
ii. Ferdinand Christian Baur.
His mental history  2i._
His conversion to Hegelianism  261

TABLE OF CONTENTS. XVII PAGE
iii. How Baur came to his Problem.
His speculative Christology  263
To him the historical problem positive  265
The Pauline and Petrine antitheses  267
iv. How Baur solved his Problem.
The Catholic Church the synthesis of these antitheses . . 269
The theory of tendencies and the Gospels .... 270
The Tubingen School  272
V. Where the Tijbingen Criticism failed, and why.
The criticism subjective and one-sided  273
Its want of historical veracity  , .275

CHAPTER IV.
THE NEWER HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE HISTORICAL CHRIST.
i. Through Criticism to History.
Histories of Christ, French, English, and German . . . 278
" Vie de J6sus ''  278
"Ecce Homo"  279
The New Strauss and other German works .... 280
ii. Through History to Theology.
I. Contemporary history more fully studied .... 286
2. Constructive historical criticism  288
3. The newer literary criticism  291
4. Biblical theology  292
iii. Results and Inferences.
I. The recovery of the historical Christ  294
2. The new feeling for Him in literature  294
3, 4. He is the norm for all Churches  295
5, 6. And the starting-point for criticism and theology . . 296

xvm TABLE OF CONTENTS.
BOOK II.
THEOLOGICAL AND CONiiTRUCTIVE.
Div. I.— the NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION OF CHRIST.
CHAPTER I.
THE EXPOSITORY BOOKS. PAGE
The Interpretation of Christ in the New Testament . 302
i. The Pauline Christology.
A. Historical relations and characteristics .... 303
B. I. The theology.
Jesus, the Messiah  306
His Divine Sonship  ; , 307
II. The soteriology.
I. The system of the earlier Epistles . . . .310
Christ, the Second Adam  310
The Pauline philosophy of history ; the old order
and the new  314
2. The later system  317
The Son, alike Creator and Saviour ; His cosmical
relations  ^ 318
ii. The Christology of Hebrews.
A. Its specific character .  320
B. Its theology : Jesus the Son of God  322
The essential relation of the Son to the Father . . 323
The finality of the New Covenant : a series of contrasts . 324
iii. The Minor Christologies.
A. The Jacobean  328
B. The Petrine  ,-q
C. The Apocalyptic  -,2

CHAPTER II.
THE HISTORICAL BOOKS.
i. The Synoptic Gospels.
A. Mark 
B. Matthew 
C. Luke 

334335337

TABLE OF CONTENTS. Xix PAGE
IL The Fourth Gospel.
A, Relations and characteristics of the Gospel . . . 338
B. Christology : the Word and the Son  341
The history symbolical of the ideal  342
iii. The Ideal Person and the Real History.
Jesus supernatural,- yet human ....... 346
The Temptation : the normal humanity of Christ . . . 348
His supernatural office and work  353
CHAPTER III.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF CHRIST.
i. Significance of His Names.
A. The Christ  358
B. The Son of God  359
C. The Son of man : its personal and its official sense . .361
ii. The Names and the Mission.
The double Sonship ........ 364
Correlation of the terms in the Fourth Gospel .... 365
Sonship and Fatherhood  368
iii. His Person and Place.
His message to man — the interpretation of Himself . . . 369
The necessary, sufflcient, and accessible Mediator . . .371
CHAPTER IV.
THE RELATIONS AND THE REASON OF THE CHRISTOLOGIES.
i. Comparison of the Apostolic Christologies with Christ's.
Affinities, historical, religious, philosophical, and theological . 373
ii. CoNCLUsoRY and Transitional
The Apostolical and naturaUstic interpretations of Christ . 377
The verdict of history on the Person and His work . . . 378
The vindication of the Apostolical theology . . . .381
Its influence on the thought and life of men .... 382
Div. ll.— CHRIST THE INTERPRETATION OF GOD.
CHAPTER L
THE GODHEAD.
L The Doctrine of the Godhead and Revelation.
God and the Godhead  . 385
Revelation changes idea of God into knowledge of the Godhead 386

XX

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

ii. The Doctrines of God and the Godhead.
Their history and function in Christian theology
Consequent conceptions of the sonship of man
iii. Christ and the Godhead.
Father and Son in the Godhead . . . .
The Christian Trinity and ethnic parallels
iv. The Godhead as a Doctrine.
The Sonship of Christ and the sonship of humanity
V The essential distinctions in the unity of God .

388390 391395397398

CHAPTER IL
THE GODHEAD AND THE DEITY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY.
i. God in Theism and Theology.
The philosophical and the religious conceptions of God . .
ii. The Godhead and the Character of God.
Unethicized conceptions of God 
The Christian conception completely ethicized
iii. The Godhead as it affects the Notions of Creator and
THE Creation.
Theistic difficulties : the relation of God to the world
How mitigated by the conception of the Godhead .
The eternal love of God the motive of the creative act
iv. The Godhead and Providence.
Deism and Pantheism ......
Deity transcendent, yet immanent ....
V. The Godhead and the External Relations of God
The instrumental and the personal worlds
Nature a middle term between God and man .
The personal world alone real to God
The creative Will, eternal and universal .
Resultant ethicized conception of the universe .

401 403405

406 408410 41441S417 419421421423

CHAPTER III.
THE GODHEAD AND THE DEITY OF CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY.
i. The Theistic Conception and Theology.
A communicatio idiomatuin between God and the Godhead . 426
ii. The Juridical Deity.
In Catholicism, as political and legal  A^n
In Calvinism, as the sovereign Will  4,0

TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXIPAGE
iii. Whether and in what Sense God is a Sovereign.
Dr. Candlish's position examined  43^
Paternity and sovereignty indissoluble  434
iv. The Sovereignty of Law and of God.
Legal V. paternal sovereignty  436
God in the filial consciousness of Christ  439
V. God as Father and as Sovereign.
The unity of love and righteousness  441
Both necessary to God ........ 443
vi. Paternity and Sonship.
Fatherhood primary and determinative of sovereignty . . 444
The sonship of nature and the sonship of grace . . . 446 /
Div. IIL— A. GOD AS INTERPRETED BY CHRIST THE
DETERMINATIVE PRINCIPLE IN THEOLOGY.
CHAPTER L
THE FATHERHOOD AND SIN.
i. The Formal and the Material Principle of Theology.
The formal, the consciousness of Christ  449 \
The material, the Fatherhood of God  451
ii. The Doctrine of Sin.
Sin how defined and conceived ...... 45^
The peculiar creation of Christianity  454
iii. The Permission and Diffusion of Sin.
Sin and obedience as related to sonship  456 "
Original sin and heredity  45^^
iv. Sin Common and Transmitted.
The sin of nature .  459
The unity and solidarity of the race  460 \
V. Sin and the Regal Paternity.
The Father wills the salvation of man  463
The Sovereign wills the expulsion of sin  465
Neither annihilation nor compulsory salvation .... 466
CHAPTER IL
THE FATHERHOOD AND SOTERIOLOGY.
i. The Incarnation.
Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God  470
The two natures : Sonship involves their affinity , . . 472 v
The attributes of God and the kenosis . . . . . 475 \,
The relation of the natures within the incarnate Person . . 478 i

xxii TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE
ii. The Atonement.
The condemnation of sin the ground of salvation . . . 479
< The sacrifice of the Son and the revelation of the Father. . 483
A new consciousness of God and of sin . . , . . . 4°5
Principles deduced  4°6
iii. The Holy Spirit.
The immanent presence of God in man  487
The Spirit in the teaching of Christ and the Church . . 488
The Holy Spirit, the renewer and revealer .... 491
CHAPTER HI.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION.
i. Religion and Revelation.
Revelation a necessity to rehgion  493
The place of an historical revelation  495
ii. Revelation and Inspiration.
Their correlation and functions  49^
The Scriptures and the Church  498
iii. The Scriptures and Criticism.
Catholic and rationalist poleraic  500
The legitimacy of the higher criticism  502
The authority of the Scriptures as a revelation. ... 504
iv. The Bible as the Authority in Religion.
Function of canonization ........ 506
Authority attribute not of book but of revelation ... 508
V. Whether a Constructive Doctrine be Possible.
The essentials and the accidents of revelation and religion . 509
The Spirit and the Word  510
B.—GOD AS INTERPRETED BY CHRIST THE DETERMINATIVE
PRINCIPLE IN THE CHURCH.
CHAPTER L
THE DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
1. The Conceptions of God and the Church.
The Monotheism of Jesus Christ  513
ii. Christ and the Idea of the Church.
The kingdom of God  cjc
Its ministry not sacerdotal  riy

TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXlll PAGE
iii. The Apostolic Idea of the Church.
The Church OT ecclesia .  519
l.oca\ ecclesiae : their autonomy  520
The universal (J^cfc/a, the body of Christ  522
The mystical Church, the spouse of Christ .... 525
iv. The Church as the Kingdom and People of God.
Ideas of Church and kingdom  528
The Church the filial society  529
v. The Church and its Organization.
Apostolic succession  531
The priesthood  . 533
CHAPTER II.
THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY.
i. The Church and its Polity.
Material and formal character  535
Polity and community  537
Apostolic descent of the Church  540
ii. The Church Visible and Invisible.
Doctrine and difficulties of Augustine  541
Doctrine of Reformers .... ... 543
iii. The Church of God — Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.
His people  545
The Church is as God is  547
Index  549

INTRODUCTION:
THE RETURN TO CHRIST.

Kal 0 GeJs abrhv iTepi</iaa-e, Kal ix'^-P^'^o-i'" aiTif rb ivojia
t6 i-irip -irav ivajxa' tva iv Ttp dm/iari 'ItjctoC rdv ybvv K6,p,\j/-Q
iirovpaviwv Kal eTfyeluv Kal KaraxOovitjiv, Kal Trdcra yXuKstra
i^ofjioKoy-^aTiTai &n Klipios ^Itjitous X/jicrros, els d6^av Qeod
TarpSs, — Paul, Phil. ii. 9-11,

Alio -yap, lis iotKev, Upb, Qeod, Iv p.h Sde 6 Kbaixos, ev qi Kal dpxi-epebs,
6 irpitirbyovos airrov Betos "Kbyos. irepov Si XoryiKT] 'pvx'h, ?' iepebs b irpbs
dX-iiOeiav &v0pa-wos eanv. — Philo, " De Som.," i., § 37 ; tom. i., 653.
Hapa-iruiKilAei yap &v rb rdv &vBpih-irm> yivos, el fa] b irivruv Sea-irbrris
Kal ^oiriip roO 9foO Tibs irapeyeyovei irpbs rb rod Bavdrov t^Xos. —
Athanasius, "De Incar. Verbi," ix. 4.
Hunc ille Platonicus non cognovit esse principium ; nam agnosceret
purgatorium. Neque enim caro principium est, aut anima humana,
sed Verbum per quod facta sunt omnia. Non ergo caro per se ipsam
mundat, sed per Verbum a quo suscepta est, cum Verbum caro factum
est, et habitavit in nobis. — Augustine, " De Civ. Dei," x. 24.
Quatenus autem Christus mundum vivificat : hinc est quod deus
deique filius est, non quod caro est. — Zwingli, "Ep. ad Alberum,"
Opera, vol. iii., p. 595 (1832 ed.).
Der eigentliche Inhalt des Christenthums ist aber ganz allein die
Person Christi: ...Man kann also sagen: In einer Philosophic der
Oifenbarung handle es sich allein oder doeh nur vorziiglich darum, die
Person Christi zu begreifen. Christus iSt nicht der Lehrer, vsrie man
zu sagen pflegt, Christus nicht der Stifter; er ist der Inhalt des
Christenthums. — Schelling, " Philos. der Offenbarung," Vorlesg. xxv.

§1.— The New Element in Theology.
THE most distinctive and determinative element in
modern theology is what we may term a new feeling
for Christ. By this feeling its specific character is at once
defined and expressed. But we feel Him more in our
theology because we know Him better in history. His
historical reality and significance have broken upon us with
something of the surprise of a discovery, and He has, as it
were, become to us a new and more actual Being. It is
certainly not too much to say. He is to-day more studied
and better known as He was and as He lived than at any
period between now and the first age of the Church. There
is indeed this difference between then and now — He is
studied now through the intervening history and in its light ;
He was studied then only in the light of His personal
history and the past that lay behind it. But, apart from
this necessary difference, we feel His personal presence in
all our thinking more in the manner of the apostolic than
of any other age ; and so we are being forced to come
to the theology of the schools and the conventions of the
Churches through Him rather than to Him through these.
This may be said to be the distinction between the old
theology and the new : the former was primarily doctrinal and
secondarily historical ; but the latter is primarily historical
and secondarily doctrinal. The old theology came to history
through doctrine, but the new comes to doctrine through his
tory ; to the one all historical questions were really dogmatic.

4 the RENAISSANCE.
but to the other all dogmatic questions are formally his
torical. This does not mean the surrender of doctrine, but
rather the enlargement of its meaning and scope. For when
history is read through doctrine, the realm of realities is
reduced to the size and beaten into the shape of a very
restricted and rigorously 'ordered world of ideas ; but where
doctrine is read through history, the realm of ideas must
be so widened and articulated as to represent the realm of
realities. Harmony of history with belief was the note
of the one school ; harmony of belief with history is the
note of the other ; and of these harmonies the second, as
the more natural, is at once the more necessary and the
more difficult to attain.
This recovery of the historical Christ, and consequent
new feeling for Him, is due to many causes, mainly to the
growth of the historical spirit. This spirit is not new, though
its methods are ; ' but it is more scientific, sympathetic,
veracious, than of old. In its more modern form it may
be said to have begun with Romanticism, or the attempt
by a poetic interpretation of the past to escape from the
prosaic realities of the present. Romanticism differed from
the classical Renaissance in the field it selected for its
imaginative activity and appreciation, but agreed with it
in the tendency to idealize and in the endeavour to imitate
what it found and admired in its selected field. The ideals of
the Renaissance were all classical ; the literatures of Greece
and Rome were to it the standards of taste, imitation of their
flexible yet stately elegance at once its inspiration and its
despair ; it studied classical art, derived from it all its ideas of
the beautiful, and laboured to embody them in a sculpture and
architecture that were judged to be most excellent when most
like their models. The dream ofthe Renaissance was to escape
from the Italy of the fifteenth century into the Athens of
Pericles or Plato, or into the Rome of Cicero or Augustus.
But the ideals of Romanticism lay in the past of the Western

ROMANTICISM. 5
European peoples and of their religion. Its field was the
Middle Ages ; it glorified their chivalry, legends, poetry, art,
faith, and what it glorified it could not help attempting to
imitate. Literature became disdainful of the cold and artful
elegance of the classic style, and grew warmer, more vehement,
quicker to feel and to reflect the more rudimentary emotions
of human nature, those primitive and spontaneous passions
which culture tends to tame or expel. In Painting there was
formed the pre-Raphaelite school, which studiously aimed at
breaking away from a classicism that had become conven
tional and attaining a more realistic idealism, an art that should
in the interests of the ideal be frankly natural, though in its
members, according to their native tempers, now the natural
and now the ideal predominated. In Architecture the move
ment found expression in the Gothic revival ; ruined abbeys
were curiously studied, old churches incautiously restored, new
churches built in every variety of Gothic, hideous, hybrid,
and historical, and, in general, the idea zealously preached and
industriously realized that Gothic was the only fit style for
the religious edifice. In Worship the imitative mediaevalism
which is known as ritualism came to be, and vestments, acts,
articles, and modes proper to the worship of the period
represented by the buildings were so used as to make the
revival complete.
The course and the phenomena of the classical and the
medizeval revivals are thus exactly parallel ; each is alike
imitative, in each imitation runs into extravagance, and ex
travagance ends in the exhaustion whose only issue is death.
But neither passed away resultless. Out of the Renaissance
came, after the season of imitative subserviency to Greece
and Rome had ceased, the mastery of classical literature and
the knowledge of classical art that have made them the great
instruments of culture, though their power lies in their being
instruments commanded by the mind, not commanding it.
Out of Romanticism there has come, for all save those who

6 THE SUPREMACY OF CHRIST.
are still in the stage of servile reproduction, love of the past,
the knowledge of it that can come only through love, and
the sense of the connection and the continuity of man in all
the periods and in all the places of his being. Both had,
therefore, a kindred though not an identical function ; each,
by creating knowledge of a specific past, helped to supply
history with the ideas and the spirit that made it a science.
They taught us to see events in their relations, to search
into their causes, to study persons through their times and
the times in the persons, to discover the conditions that regu
lated the growth and decay of institutions, to find in what
seemed a chaos of conflicting wills a principle of order and a
law of progress. And just as we have learned to read the
past truly we have come to understand man really ; what
makes the race re-live its life to the imagination makes the
reason know not only the race but the units who compose it.
To penetrate the secret of man is to discover the truth of
God ; in a sense higher than Feuerbach dreamed of anthro
pology is theology.
Now, the historical spirit could not do its now destructive
and now constructive work and ignore the Supreme Person
of history. He has left the mark of His hand on every
generation of civilized men that has lived since He lived, and
it would not be science to find Him everywhere and never to
ask what He was and what He did. Persons are the most
potent factors of progress and change in history, and the
greatest Person known to it is the One who has been the
most powerful factor of ordered progress. Who this is does
not lie open to dispute. Jesus Christ is a name that repre
sents the most wonderful story and the profoundest problem
on the field of history — the one because the other. There
is no romance so marvellous as the most prosaic version
of His history. The Son of a despised and hated people,
meanly born, humbly bred, without letters, without oppor
tunity, unbefriended, never save for one brief and fatal

THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY. 7
moment the idol of the crowd, opposed by the rich, resisted
by the religious and the learned, persecuted unto death by
the priests, destined to a life as short as it was obscure,
issuing from His obscurity only to meet a death of unpitied
infamy. He yet, by means of His very sufferings and His
cross, enters upon a throne such as no monarch ever filled
and a dominion such as no Caesar ever exercised. He leads
captive the civilized peoples ; they accept His words as law,
though they confess it a law higher than human nature likes
to obey ; they build Him churches, they worship Him, they
praise Him in songs, interpret Him in philosophies and
theologies ; they deeply love, they madly hate, for His sake.
It was a new thing in the history of the world ; for though
this humble life was written and stood vivid before the eye
and imagination of men, nay, because it veritably did so
stand, they honoured, loved, served Him as no ancient deity
had been honoured, loved, or served. We may say, indeed.
He was the first being who had realized for man the idea of
the Divine ; He proved His Godhead by making God become
a credible, conceived, believed, real Being to man. And all
this was due to no temporary passion, to no transient madness,
such as now and then overtakes peoples as well as persons.
It has been the most permanent thing in the history of
mind ; no other belief has had so continuous and invariable
a history. The gods of Greece lived an even more changeful
life than the Greek men ; the Zeus of Homer and of Plato,
though one in name, is in character not only two, but two
radical opposites. The history of religion in India is but a
record of the variations and the multiplication of deities. The
mythologies of Mesopotamia and Egypt were never fixed ;
they bewilder by the number and extent of the changes in
the crowd of figures they present for analysis. But the belief
in Christ has for now almost two thousand years lived under
a criticism the most searching and scientific that ever assailed
any idea of mind or fact of history, and yet this criticism

8 CRITICISM AND FAITH.
has only made the belief more active, more vigorous, more
sure of its intrinsic truth and reasonableness. What makes
the result more wonderful is, that the criticism was at its
thoroughest when the faith seemed at its weakest. In the
first centuries of its existence, when it had to suffer from the
reproach of its recent and mean origin, the infamy of its
Founder's death, the poverty and ignorance of its adherents,
and its varied offences against Greek culture and Roman
policy, — it had to bear the malignant yet searching criticism
of Celsus, the witty satire of Lucian, the vindictive and
insolent invective of the rhetors and their schools. Yet the
men of the new religion were, even within the arena of letters,
victorious over the men of the old learning. And both in
the last century and in this, when it seemed weak through
continued supremacy, the exercise of a too secular lordship,
and the reproach of lives which it nominally guided but did
not really command, it received but renewal at the hands of
the subtle scepticism of Hume and the destructive criticism of
Strauss. The wonderful thing in the story is, that what in the
abstract would have seemed impossible romance is in reality
the most sober fact ; while out of the story, when viewed
in relation to the course of human development, rises for
philosophy the problem. Can He, so mean in life, so illustrious
in history, stand where He does by chance ? Can He, who
of all persons is the most necessary to the orderly and pro
gressive course of history, be but the fortuitous result of a
chapter of accidents?
Now, how has this new feeling for Christ affected construc
tive Christian theology? We have just seen that historical
inquiry raises questions that belong to the philosophy of
history, which is but the most concrete form of the philosophy
alike of nature and man. We cannot conceive and describe
the supreme historical Person without coming face to face with
the profoundest of all the problems in theology ; but then
we may come to them from an entirely changed point of view,

SCHOOLS IN THEOLOGY. 9
through the Person that has to be interpreted rather than
through the interpretations of His person. When this change
is effected, theology ceases to be scholastic, and becomes
historical ; and this precisely represents the change which
it has undergone or is undergoing. The speculative counter
part of the new feeling for Christ is the rejuvenescence of
theology. But that we may understand what this new factor in
theology means, we must briefly review the state of theo
logical knowledge and inquiry in the period which saw the
birth of our modern historical criticism.
§ II. — Theology as the Historical Spirit found it.
When the new historical spirit began to concern itself with
theology, the field of dogmatic thought was with us occupied
by two opposed schools — the Evangelical and the Anglican —
theri just entering upon the specific phase known as the
Tractarian. The Evangelical represented the beliefs that
had during the previous century been the most active and
vigorous, the most charged with creative enthusiasm and
recreative energies ; the Anglican represented beliefs that
had been long decadent, and were now blindly and stormily
struggling towards a second birth. The Evangelical, though
touched with a Puritan tendency, had almost lost the
Puritan spirit, having become individualistic in a sense and
to a degree the Puritans would have abhorred ; the Anglican,
though with some Catholic impulses and many claims to
an historical temper, wds still strongly provincial and
arbitrary, not to say violent. The Evangelicals had ac
complished the religious revival of the eighteenth century,
had contended against its sordid earthliness, its low morals,
its sodden and conventional unbelief, and had created the
great philanthropies that improved the prisons, reformed
manners, befriended the lower races, and emancipated the

IO the evangelical AND THE ANGLICAN.
slaves ; but the Anglicans had the spirit and the passion that
were to achieve the distinctive revival of the nineteenth
century. The speech of the Evangelical was of doctrine,
i.e., revealed truth correctly taught, conceived, and received ;
the speech of the Anglican was of dogma, i.e., truth as
defined, formulated, and enforced by the decree of a body
politic, or the heads of such a body. The Evangelical
position, as in essence doctrinal, conceived the relations
of God and man as determined by certain beliefs which,
articulated in fixed formulae, were alternatively represented
as " the truth " or " the Gospel " or " the plan of salvation " ;
but the Anglican position, as in its essence political, con
ceived and represented the relations of God and man as
regulated by certain fixed and persistent institutions, as de
pendent for their happy realization on a specific polity and
certain offices, rites, and instruments variously designated
as " Apostolical Succession," " the Priesthood," " the Sacra
ments," and " the Church." The Evangelical position, as
mainly doctrinal, was intellectual and individualistic ; the
Anglican, as mainly political, was historical and collective :
but the collectivism of the one was less universal than the
individualism of the other. The Evangelical tended, by
his distrust of mere institutions, to a reluctant Catholicity ;
the Anglican, by so emphasizing special offices, persons,
and acts, tended to as reluctant a particularism. They both
agreed in their evidential method or process of proof — it
was an appeal to actual authorities ; but they differed in the
authorities appealed to — the Evangelicals were Biblical, the
Anglicans less Biblical than Patristic. In handling their
authorities they were alike uncritical and unhistorical • the
authority of the Evangelicals was a Bible which the higher
criticism had not been allowed to touch, while the Ano-licans
with more need for science, and a larger yet easier field for its
exercise, were in their use of the Fathers still more strenuously
unscientific. But while they differed as to their authorities

THE THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY AS IT WAS. II
they agreed not only in method but in the principle which
underlay it — viz., what the authority appealed to could be
made to prove must be accepted as the very truth of God.
But the character of the theology will become more
apparent if we survey the then current theological literature.
What were the great books, and what their special questions
and method ? Suppose we had entered while the century was
yet in the thirties a well-stocked clerical library — what should
we have found ? Apologetics would be represented by Butler
and Paley, and the most popular of the Bridgewater Treatises,
especially Chalmers and Whewell. For Theism the argument
from design was in the ascendant ; adaptation was as charmed
a word then as evolution is now ; everything was judged by its
fitness for its end — the more perfect the contrivance the more
irrefragable the evidence. Design was discovered in the
organs of sense, in the hand of man, in the relation between
the functions of digestion and the chemistry of food, in all the
adaptations of man to nature and nature to man. Christianity
was proved to be divine, partly, by its being an instrument or
institution so excellently adapted to the improvement of man,
especially in the conditions in which he here finds himself ; and,
partly, by the testimony of its first preachers, who must be
believed as honest men, because rogues would not and fools
could not have endured the sufferings and made the sacrifices
they did for the sake of the Gospel. It was characteristic that
Butler's " Analogy " "was more esteemed than his " Sermons
on Human Nature "; an argument that proved natural religion
which yet never was a religion of nature, to be more heavily
burdened by intellectual and moral difficulties when taken by
itself than when completed and crowned by revealed, was
much better adapted to the age than one built on the supre
macy of conscience. The latter was so little considered that
its fundamental inconsistency with the doctrine of probability
on which the " Analogy " is based, was never perceived. But
while these were the typical apologetical works others would

12 APOLOGETICS.
not be absent. Hume, of course, as a highly respectable and
deeply subtle opponent, would be there, but flanked by Reid's
reply to his philosophy, possibly supported and supplemented
by James Beattie's " Essay on Truth," and by Campbell's
answer to his argument against miracles. If the deistical
controversy was exceptionally well represented, then Leland
would give the general survey of the field and the men who
had worked in it ; Samuel Clarke would by " the high priori
road " demonstrate the being and attributes of God ; Berkeley
by his new theory of knowledge would show how the vanity
of the new materialism could be exposed and spirit made the
only real thing in the universe ; Sherlock would examine
his witnesses to prove the Resurrection no fraud ; Conyers
Middleton would prove how miracles restricted to the apos
tolic age simplified the controversy, and strengthened the
apologist by relieving him from the cruel necessity of either
defending ecclesiastical miracles or sacrificing to their mani
fold incredibilities the credibility of the Biblical ; Warburton
would maintain his audacious paradox, and argue that the
legation of Moses was revealed and divine, because, while
every other legislation created, ordered, and enforced obedi
ence by the penalties of a life to come, he alone never invoked
the sanctions of a future state ; Jeremiah Jones would tell
how the canon was formed and ought to be defended ; while
Nathanaei Lardner's large and massive scholarship would
bring the cumulative evidence of antiquity to prove the
credibility of the Gospel history. By the help of these the
theologian could do his apologetical work, and marshal his
evidences and his arguments against Voltaire or Bolingbroke,
Collins or Tindal, Hume or Gibbon, Rousseau or Tom Paine,
who, though dead, yet lived in the only infidelity then
known. But apologetics could not stand alone ; the Scriptures must
be explained as well as defended. So Home's " Introduction "
would be on hand, possibly also Michaelis' as Englished

BIBLICAL EXEGESIS. 1 3
augmented, and amended by Marsh ; and if his" Introduction "
was known, so also would be his " Commentaries on the Laws
of Moses," which had been translated by a Scotch minister,
Alexander Smith, of Chapel of Garioch. Commentaries
would be numerous ; the rich collections and erudite disser
tations of the Critici Sacri and the industrious compilations
of the Poli Synopsis Criticorum would be at command ; while
Grotius and Vitringa, Coccejus, Geierus, Calovius, and Clericus,
represented the older scholasticism, Ernesti and Gesenius,
Rosenmiiller and Eichhorn, would shed the newer and drier
light of the rationalism that was just ceasing to be. If the
minister was very venturesome, he might have acquainted
himself with the daring critical speculations of Bretschneider's
" Probabilia," or the ingenious theories of Schleiermacher,
whose essay on Luke a bold young man of the name of Thirl
wall had translated and published in 1825, though even he had
not dared to avow the work. If the library was a scholar's, he
would, of course, have Brian Walton and Mill, and would turn
hopefully to a new critical text of the New Testament which
a young German, Lachmann by name, had just published ;
and he would seek help from the great patristic commenta
tors, Origen, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, Theophy
lact, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Jerome. Or if it was a
working cleric's, he would, according to his taste, have Whitby
and Hammond, or Patrick- and Lowth, Matthew Henry, or
Thomas Scott, or Adam Clarke. There would, of course,
be the classical books on certain special subjects, periods, or
persons. Prideaux " On the Connection of the Old and New
Testaments," Lowth on Hebrew Poetry and on Isaiah,
Home on the Psalms, Luther on Galatians, Brown of Wham-
phray on Romans, Owen on Hebrews, Leighton on Peter.
For his archaeology and philology he would have Lightfoot
and the Buxtorfs, as well as such fresh and unexpected light
as had just been supplied by the lexicons and grammars of
Gesenius and Winer, and by the researches of Robinson, while

14 THEOLOGY SYSTEMATIC
Josephus would be a standing authority, and the sacred text
itself the most certain and fruitful of all his sources.
But what would give its distinctive character to the library
would be its dogmatic theology. If it were an Anglican's,
his books would have much to say about the Calvinistic and
Arminian controversies, the divine origin or the excellent
expediency of Episcopacy, the mind of the Fathers and the
meaning of the Creeds. There would be a curious absence
of what the Lutheran and Reformed Churches understood by
" systematic theology " — great systems, in their sense, being
quite unknown in the English Church. The book that
approaches most nearly to this idea could not but be there ;
it bears the characteristic name, " The Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity " — i.e., religion is considered as institutional, a theory
of social order, a state whose laws may be explicated as
they must be enforced. Beside it, almost as much honoured,
though standing on a far lower plane, would be Pearson
"On the Creed," and.. with him would be Bull, maintaining
against Jesuit and Socinian alike the Nicene orthodoxy ofthe
ante-Nicene Fathers, and Wateriand, with all the apparatus
of a most elaborate and well-equipped scholasticism, vindi
cating the same faith against the Arians of his own Church.
Burnet " On the Articles " would find a less favoured place ;
while Whitby " On the Five Points " and Tomline's " Refu
tation of Calvinism " would be memorials of what was even
then a burnt-out controversy. Of course, as one who held
the faith of Ken, he would hold in peculiar reverence the
Fathers who lived before the division of East and West, and
would study the ancient Church, its constitution and customs,
by the help of Bingham. If, however, the library belonged to
an Evangelical or Presbyterian or Independent, the books
would differ in character and range ; those already named
would almost certainly be present, but amid companions that
modified their speech. The burning controversy was now
the Calvinistic and Socinian, which was very unlike the Arian

AND POLEMICAL. 15
controversy of the days of Wateriand and Clarke. Then
the emphasis fell on the person of the Redeemer, but now it
fell on His work, or on the person just so far as it was con
cerned in the work. The Evangelical revival was largely
responsible for the change ; its watchword had been " Salva
tion," and it had, on the one side, magnified conversion as
its subjective condition, and on the other the Atonement as
its objective ground. Hence came the inevitable question —
In what relation did Jesus Christ, and especially His supreme
act. His sacrifice or death, stand to the forgiveness of sins ?
What was the precise thing it was meant to accomplish ?
And what must it be to accomplish this thing ? The Socinian
said. He is an example, He saves by the moral influence of His
life and death ; the. Evangelical said. He is a sacrifice. He saves
by making expiation on our behalf and propitiating Divine
justice^^i.e., by becoming our substitute He bears our punish
ment, and so enables God justly to forgive our sins. The
books written during the controversy form a library in them
selves. They were, in form at least, largely Biblical. While
the theories of inspiration differed, yet on both sides the
authority of the Scriptures was assumed, the Socinians,
indeed, venturing in their own interests on an " Improved
Version of the New Testament," which was often remarkable
for its deft defiance of grammar. In the doctrinal question
their champions were Priestley and Belsham, Toulmin and
Kentish, Lant Carpenter and Yates, who skilfully made the
worst of their opponents' case and the best of their own,
especially by contrasting the grace and love of the Gospel
with the severities of Calvinism, and by transferring the
rather vindictive jurisprudence of its representatives from the
abstract forms they loved to the concrete which they wished
to avoid — i.e., from impersonal law to personal God. On the
Calvinistic side the critics and apologists were a multitude.
Horsley's charges and letters against Priestley would be sure of
a place, not simply because of their racy and merciless polemic.

l6 THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST,
but as forming the link that connected the new Socinian
with the old Arian controversy. In one of the most striking
pieces of autobiography in the language, Thomas Scott, of
Aston Sandford, makes his own experience testify to the
verity of his beliefs, and certainly his " Force of Truth "
would be among the books of every Evangelical. There, too,
would be his friend, sturdy and stalwart Andrew Fuller, with
his comparison of the Calvinistic and Socinian systems, and
his vigorous assault on the new Unitarians. Archbishop
Magee would be in evidence with his two discourses, which
were brief, and his notes, which were voluminous, in proof
of the scriptural doctrines of the Atonement and Sacrifice.
Edward Williams, too, would unfold his doctrine of Sove
reignty, which showed that God, as rector or ruler of the
moral universe, was bound to uphold law, and could uphold
it only by enforcing its sanctions, though He would, when
His mercy required it and the common good allowed it, so
modify the form of infliction as to accept the sufferings of
an innocent Person in lieu of the penalty due to the guilty.
His distinguished pupil, John Pye Smith, was certain of a
place for his works on the " Priesthood of Christ," which
showed how well he had learned the principles and method
of Williams, and on the "Scripture Testimony to the Mes-
.siah," which showed that he had studied to higher purpose
under ma.^-'ers then much feared because foreign. Beside
him would stand the lectures and treatises of George Payne,
Ralph Wardlaw, Joseph Gilbert, and Thomas Jenkyn, who
all on similar principles, though with various modifications of
method and terms, described, explained, and defended the
theistic grounds, but legal nature, necessity, functions, and
ends, of the Atonement. The relations of God and man were
expressed and explicated through the categories of a special
jurisprudence ; theology was, as it were, done into the
language of the bar and the bench. Yet the system
was not irrational ; indeed, its rationalism was its most

BUT NO HISTORY OF HIM. l^
remarkable feature. It was built up with elaborate care, and
exhibited such rare architectonic skill that one could not
but confess, were the universe a constitutional state which
had broken out in rebellion, and God its monarch, thus and
not otherwise, if He were to be at once merciful and just,
would He be obliged to act. Of course, the principle or
essence of the thought might be correct ; it was the forms
or categories of interpretation that were inadequate.
But what was not found in the library would be to us
more remarkable than what was, especially its poverty in
books dealing with Jesus as an historical person. Books
of a kind would indeed be here abundant. Harmonies of
the Gospels bearing great names, like those of Gerson and
Jansen, or Chemnitz and Lightfoot, or Bengel and Greswell,
and exhibiting extraordinary feats of conciliatory exegesis ;
defences of miracles, and especially the Resurrection, against
deists and deniers of every sort ; poetic presentations of
sacred history, and especially its most dramatic events ;
edifying and devotional works, calling us with a Kempis
or Jeremy Taylor to the imitation of our " Great Exemplar,''
or with Bishop Hall to the " contemplation " of Him. But
hardly a book attempting to conceive and represent Him
just as He appeared in history would have been found.
Of course, Fleetwood was everywhere, especially in the
homes of the people, but seldom read, scarcely worth reading,
certainly not worth a place amid the books of a serious
theologian. If Milner's " Church History '' was taken down,
it began with the Apostles ; if Mosheim, he gave only an
insignificant chapter to Jesus ; if the newer Waddington,
he started with A.D. 6o. It was indeed a strange and
significant thing : so much speculation about Christ, so little
earnest inquiry into His actual mind ; so much knowledge
of what the creeds or confessions, the liturgies or psalmodies,
of the Church said ; so little knowledge of the historical
person or construction of the original documents as sources
2

1 8 THE THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY AS IT IS.
of real and actual history. It is still more significant that the
men who were then most seriously intent on the revival of
religion through the revival of the Church, were the very men
who seemed least to feel or conceive the need of the return to
Christ. They were possessed of the passion to find and restore
the Church of the Fathers, and to the Fathers they appealed
for direction and help ; but in no one of their multitudinous
tracts or treatises is there any suggestion or sign that Christ,
as the Founder, supplied the determinative idea of His own
Church. The men were true sons of their generation, and
for it the historical sense, especially in this province, was not
yet born.
§ III.— The Recovery of the Historical Christ.
But what a contrast does the workshop of a living theo
logian present to the library of the older divine ! Dogmatics
and apologetics have almost disappeared from it, and in
their place stand books on almost every possible question
in the textual, literary, and historical criticism of the Old
and New Testaments. Harmonies have almost ceased to
be, and instead we have discussions as to the sources,
sequence, dependence, independence, purpose, dates, of the
four Gospels. Lives of Christ by men of all schools,
tendencies, churches, abound, each using some more or less
rigorous critical method. Beside these, and supplementary
to them, are histories of New Testament times, which show
us the smaller eddies as well as the greater movements, and
supply both the background and the light and shade needed
to throw the central Figure into true perspective. Then we
have monographs on Jewish and heathen teachers, on Hellen
istic and Talmudic beliefs, on Judaic sects and Gentile schools
and usages, on early heresies and primitive societies, with
the result that the age of Christ and His apostles is ex
periencing such a resurrection as Ezekiel saw in his valley

REVIVIFICATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. I9
of vision. Paul is studied not simply as the pre-eminent
dialectician of the apostolic period, but through his psychology,
his personal experience, his antecedents, discipline, relations
— in a word, as a man who lived among living men ; and in
consequence his work and his epistles have grown full of
meanings once altogether overlooked. The Gospels are no
longer studied simply in relation to each other, but also in
relation to the other literature of the New Testament and
the thought of sub-apostolic times, and so have helped to
make us conscious of the forces that organized and built
up the Christian society. The Apocalypse has ceased to
be read and interpreted as a mysterious prophecy which
conceals even more than reveals all the destinies of all the
empires that rule the Christian centuries, and has become one
of our most significant documents for the interpretation of
the mind of the parties within the primitive Church. The
analytical process is not yet complete, and the synthetic has
hardly well begun ; yet enough has been achieved to warrant
us in saying that the second half of our century may be
described as the period when the history of the New
Testament has, through its literature, been recovered, and
in this history by far the greatest result is the recovery of
the historical Christ.
We are speaking meanwhile only of a result which we owe
to historical criticism ; we are not as yet concerned with its
religious or theological import. The claim does not for the
moment transcend the sphere of historical inquiry and know
ledge. It is neither said nor meant that our age is distinguished
by a deeper reverence or purer love for the Redeemer, or even
a stronger faith in Him. In these respects we might claim
pre-eminence for other ages than our own. In the hymns of
the early and mediaeval Church, of the Lutheran and Moravian
Churches, of the Evangelical and Anglican revivals, there is
a fine unity of spirit, due to all possessing the same simple
yet transcendent devotion to the person of the Christ. This

20 CHRIST IN SONG
devotion it is impossible to excel ; we confess our sense of
its truth, its intensity, elevation, humble yet audacious sin
cerity, by the use of the hymns that were its vehicle. So
true is the faith of those hymns that they compel all Churches,
even the most proudly exclusive, to forget their differences and
divisions, and in the high act and article of worship to realize
their unity. The high Anglican praises his Saviour in the
strains of Luther and Isaac Watts, Gerhardt and Doddridge ;
the severe Puritan and Independent rejoices in the sweet and
gracious songs of Keble and Faber, Newman and Lyte ; the
keen and rigid Presbyterian feels his soul uplifted as well by
the hymns of Bernard and Xavier, Wordsworth and Mason
Neale, as by the Psalms of David. And this unity in praise
and worship which so transcends and cancels the distinctions
of community and sect, but expresses the unity of the faith
and fellowship of the heart in the Son of God. In the regions
of the higher devotion and the purer love all differences cease.
And as in worship so in theology ; the greatest of the older
divines were those who most laboured to do honour to Christ.
The very goal of all their thinking, the very purpose of all
their systems, was to exalt His name, to assist and vindicate
His supremacy in thought and over His Church. Here East
and West are agreed ; Augustine vies with Athanasius, John
of Damascus with Anselm, Luther with Loyola, Calvin with
Bellarmine, Howe with Hooker, Rutherford with Milton. In
the homage of the intellect to Christ no Church or age can
claim to be pre-eminent ; here there has been unity, an almost
passionate agreement, intensest and most real when the Church
or age was most in earnest. The statement, then, that our age
excels all others in the fulness, objectivity, and accuracy of its
knowledge of the historical Christ must not be construed to
mean the superiority of our age in its sense of dependence on
the Redeemer and reverence for. Him. It knows Him as no
other age has done as He lived and as He lives in history,
a Being who looked before and after, within the limits and

AND IN THOUGHT. 21
under the conditions of time and space, influenced by
what preceded Him, determining what followed. What
the theological consequences of this larger and more ac
curate knowledge may be is more than any one can tell as
yet. To deduce or indicate some of these is the purpose of
this book.
Our discussion will fall into two main parts : one historical
and critical, and one positive and constructive. The historical
and critical will deal with two questions : first, the causes that
have so often made theology, in the very process of interpret
ing Christ, move away from Him ; and, secondly, the causes that
have contributed to the modern return to Him. The positive
and constructive will also be concerned with two questions :
first, the interpretation of Christ given in the Christian
sources ; and, secondly, the theological significance of Christ
as thus interpreted.

BOOK I.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL.
DIV. I.— THE LA VV OF DEVELOPMENT IN THEOLOGY
AND THE CHURCH.
DIV. II.-HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY
OF CHRIST.

'Ev dpxv ?" ^ Aiyos, xal 6 \6yos ^v irpbs rbv Sebv, Kal Qebs ^v b Aoyos.
olros fiv iv dpxi irpbs rbv 6foV. irdvra Si airov Iyivero, Kal x<^/>ls airov
iyivero oiSi Iv 6 yiyovev. iv airi^ fiur; ^v, Kal ij fwi; ^v rb (pus ruv
dvBpdiiruv, Kal rb tpus iv tj HKOrlq. (palvei, (ml ^ aKorla airb oi Kari\a^ev.
— John i. 1-5.
Quod initium sancti Evangelii, cui nomen est secundum loannem,
quidam Platonicus, sicut a sancto sene Simpliciano, qui postea Medio-
lanensi Ecclesiae prassedit episcopus, solebamus audire, aureis Iiteris
conscribendum, et per omnes Ecclesias in locis eminentissimis propo-
nendum esse dicebat. — Augustine, " De Civ. Dei," x. 29.
Unicus enim natura Dei Filius, propter nos misericordia factus est
filius hominis, ut nos natura filii hominis, filii Dei per illum gratia
fieremus. Manens quippe ille immutabilis, naturam nostram in qua
nos susciperet, suscepit a nobis; et tenax divinitatis suae, nostrae
infirmitatis particeps factus est; ut nos in melius commutati, quod
peccatores mortalesque sumus, eius immortalis et justi participatione
amittamus, et quod in natura nostra bonum fecit, inpletum summo
bono in ejus naturae bonitate servemus. Sicut enim per unum hominem
peccantem in hoc tam grave malum devenimus; ita per unum hominem
eundemque Deum justificantem ad illud bonum tam sublime veniemus.
— Augustine, "De Civ. Dei," xxi. 15.
Der Sohn kommt von dem Vater herunter zu uns und hanget sich
an uns, und, wir hangen wiederum uns an ihn und kommen durch ihn
zum Vater. Denn darum ist er Mensch worden und geboren von der
Jungfrauen Maria, dass er sich soUt in uns mengen, sehen und h5ren
lassen, ja auch uns also zu sich ziehe und an ihm halte, als dazu gesandt,
dass er die, so an ihn glauben wurden, hinauf zOge zum Vater, wie
er in dem Vater ist. — LutheIi on John xiv. 20.
Die Welt ist eine Blume, die aus Einem Saamenkorn ewig hervor-
geht.— Hegel, "Geschichte der Philos.," iii. 615.

DIVISION I.
THE LAW OF DEVELOPMENT fN THEOLOGY
AND THE CHURCH.

CHAPTER I.
THE DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT.
§ I. — On the History of the Doctrine.
THE term and idea of development were introduced
formally and explicitly into English theology by
Newman. With him, indeed, it was not so much a scientific
doctrine as a form of personal apology, exhibiting, as it were,
the logic of his conversion. With his premisses the logic was
¦ invincible, but its significance is personal and biographical
rather than general and historical. His thought moved
uneasily between two poles, both of which he owed to Butler,
though the one was Butler's own, the other Locke's. Butler's
was the doctrine of conscience, Locke's the doctrine of pro
bability. Conscience was Butler's real contribution to the
philosophy of human nature ; probability was the first principle
of his analogy, or special apologetic for the Christian religion.
The two positions were full of implicit incompatibilities; the
supremacy of conscience made a constitutional authority the
guide of life, but, according to the doctrine of probability,

26 NEWMAN : CONSCIENCE AND PROBABILITY
the guide was a sort of logical calculus. The one doctrine
was transcendental — i.e., conscience meant that human nature
brought with it and had imbedded in it a law for the govern
ance of man or the regulation of his conduct ; but the other
doctrine was empirical — i.e., man had by balancing probabilities
to discover the faith he was to hold, and so the spiritual laws
he was to obey. The imperious but narrow logic of Newman's
mind, quickened by his passionate yet intellectual mysticism,
forced these incompatibilities into sharp antitheses. The
reason could only deal with probabilities, but the conscience
possessed supremacy and authority ; while it was the nature
of the one to question and analyze and weigh, it was the
nature of the other to reign and to command. Now, religion
was associated with the authoritative, not with the ratiocinative,
faculty. Conscience was the source of natural religion, and
its supremacy the one valid authority ; and so the super
session of natural by revealed religion meant the " substitution
of the voice of a lawgiver for the voice of conscience." '
The intellect, as governed by the law of probability, was
naturally critical of authority, and had to be beaten down and
forced under, that it might be disciplined and filled with
religious contents. And so Newman began a quest after
" the invisible Divine Power " or " external Authority " whose
supremacy was "the essence of revealed religion." This
could not be the Scriptures, for they were a book that needed
interpretation, and the real authority was the interpreter
rather than the interpreted. It could not be the Anglican
Church, for it had no organ through which to speak : its
bishops were worse than dumb ; their voices were often con
tradictory, oftener without authority, and too frequently
attuned to the measures of a selfish and worldly wisdom. So
he was forced to turn to the time when there was neither
Anglican nor Roman nor Greek Church, but only the un
divided Church of East and West. In this Church, its Fathers
1 " Development of Christian Doctrine," p. 124 (2nd ed., 1846).

he seeks authority and finds DEVELOPMENT. 27
and its Councils, he found the authority he craved ; what
was then always and everywhere believed by all was the
truth. Skilful and dexterous interpretation made the theory
work awhile ; but though the conversion of a disputant by
his opponents is the rarest of events, yet where they fail
the logic of the situation may succeed. And so it happened
with Newman. The primitive Church was soon seen to be
anything but a united Church ; within it were many minds
and many differences of doctrine and custom, and of it
no living Church was an exact reproduction or reflection.
Compared with it, the Roman was different, but continuous ;
while the Anglican was both discontinuous and different.
In no respect, therefore, could the Anglican be saved or
vindicated through the Church of the Fathers ; but in two
respects the Roman could be vindicated — by its manifest
historical continuity, and by a theory of development which
not only explained the differences, but turned them into
proofs of the Roman claim. This theory became, then, at
once the justification of Newman's consistency, the condem
nation of the Church he forsook, and the vindication of the
Church he joined.
To sketch the history of the theory would carry us far
beyond our present limits. On one side it represented
the victory of Protestant criticism, and confessed that the
Catholicism of Trent was not the Catholicism of the ancient
Church ; but, on the other side, it evaded the Protestant
conclusion by construing the Church, Roman and Catholic,
as a living and therefore growing body, which not only
had the right to defend its life by augmenting or deve
loping its creed, but was bound on due occasion to
exercise the right. The earlier form of the theory resulted
from the controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Calvin,* Flacius and the other Magdeburg
'"Epistola Nuncupatoria," "Inst.,'' pp. 18-25 (ed. 1536). Calvin here
argues that the Reformed is nearer the Fathers than the Roman faith,

28 DOCTRINE PROTESTANT IN ORIGIN,
centuriators,* Chemnitz,^ Amesius,' and Daille,* had strenuously
affirmed what Bellarmine and Baronius as strenuously denied
— that the new Catholicism was not the old Christianity ;
and their evidences and arguments were too cogent to be
which exhibits radical and revolutionary additions to their creed and
customs. It is the negation rather than the development of the patristic
theology. Cf. his " Supplex Exhortatio ad Caesarem Carolum Quintum,''
Opera, vol. vi., pp. 453-534 (in "Corpus Reformatorum "), and "Acta Synodi
Tridentinae. Cum Antidoto," ibid., vol. vii., pp. 365-506 ; but especially
" Inst.," bk. iv., cc. iv.-viii. (ed. 1559).
' " Ecclesias. Historia, integram ecclesiae Christi ideam complectens,
congesta per aliquot studiosos et pios viros in urbe Magdeb." (15 59-1 574).
This was the claim of Protestantism, made in thirteen folio volumes, to
be " historical Christianity." It traced, century by century, the fall of
Catholicism, partly by ignorance and neglect, partly by the potency of
idolatry or sm and evil custom, from the purity and simplicity of the
Apostolic age to the tyrannies and impurities of the Mediaeval Papacy.
Yet it did justice to the saintiiness and truth that had never ceased to
illumine the Church. The man who planned and carried through the
enterprise was Matthias Flacius, often, from his birthplace, named Illyricus.
With him were various coUaborateurs : Wigand, a man most indefatigable
in the theological polemics of his most polemical age, yet whose spirit is
well expressed in his epitaph —
" In Christo vixi, morior vivoque Wigandus :
Do Sordes morti, caetera Christe tibi " ;
IWatthaeus Judex, who died before the work had far advanced ; Basilius Faber;
Andreas Corvinus, Wigand's son-in-law ; and Thomas Holzhuter. To it
belongs the significance of being the first serious appeal to history as a whole,
and as a process of change and enlargement. It was in reply to these
" centuriae Satanae," that had advanced " e portis inferis in Ecclesise
detrimentum,'' that Baronius wrote his "Annales Eccles." ("Gratiarum
Actio Ph. Nereo," tom. viii., p. vii.).
2 " Examen Decret. Concil. Trid." (1565-1573)- The fundamental prin
ciple of this book is " Nostram antiquitatem esse Christum et Sacram
Scripturam" (p. 670, ed. 1641). But he throughout argues: the Fathers,
sp far as representatives of the true and pure antiquity, are against Rome
— its customs and dogmas are not theirs. His arguments are derived
not simply from Scripture, but also " ex orthodox orum Patrum consensu.''
Yet the Fathers are to be judged by Scripture, not Scripture by the
Fathers (cf. pp. 477, 495, 503, 526, 726, 768). For they all, as subject
to the customs and pre-judgments of their time, erred in opinion and in
interpretation ; and while their errors were to be forgiven, they were not
to be imitated (cf. pp. 285, 469, 480-482, 542, 543, etc.).
3 " Bellarminus Enervatus," tom. i., lib. i., c. vi. (1628).
* " Traits de I'Emploi des Saintes Peres pour le jugement des difKrends

BUT ADAPTED TO CATHOLICISM. 29
ineffectual. Petavius '- struck out a happier answer than
Bellarmine. He carried the question out of the region
where there was difference into the region where there was
agreement between the Roman, the Reformed, and the
Lutheran Churches. He said, in effect : — on such vital
matters as the Trinity and the Incarnation, the ante- and
qui sont aujourd'hui en la Religion" (1632). This book has an interesting
history, but what concerns us is its modern spirit. It was written in answer to
the Roman Catholic plea, " We have antiquity and the Fathers," and argues : —
the questions of the Fathers were not ours, and do not decide our con
troversies ; their doctrine was not uniform, and they have often contradicted
one another ; they have not written as representatives of the whole Church,
nor have they ever claimed to be for us authorities in religion, nor are they
ever used as such save for offensive or defensive purposes. Every Church
differs from them, and vindicates, as well as exercises, its right to differ.
Growth everywhere involves change, most of all in religion, and it is mere
pretence, discarded wherever inconvenient, for any Church to say, " We
follow the Fathers," — since by the very nature of the case they can neither
be pure nor ultimate authorities, and as a matter of fact in many funda
mental matters are not treated, nor are even capable of being treated, as
authorities at all.
'"De Theologicis Dogmatibus," published at Paris, 1644-50. It was
republished with additions, mainly from the polemical tracts of Petavius
himself against Grotius, Salmasius, and the Jansenists ; by Clericus under
the pseudonym of Theophilus Alethinus at Antwerp, 1700; and again
under the editorship of Father Zacharia at Venice in 1757. A new and
very sumptuous edition began to appear at Rome in 1857. The book is
classical, the first attempt at a scientific history of dogmata, and is
notable as suggesting to modern theology the term " Dogmatics.'' He
uses dogmata that he may denote Christian ideas, as known through
the Scriptures and tradition, but as formulated by the Church. It was
a well enough understood patristic sense, but prior to its modern use,
there were instructive differences in the nomenclature of the science of
interpretative theology. The first systematic treatise bore the significant
name Uepl apxS>v ; scholasticism began by the use of Lib-ri Sententiaru-m —
i.e., sentences from the Fathers were selected, systematized, and subjected
to dialectical elaboration ; then, as the schoolmen became more indepen
dent of the Fathers and more dependent on Aristotle, their systems took
the name Su-mmce Theologies, which were in scheme and construction
philosophical and deductive rather than inductive and interpretative. The
Lutheran theologians used the name Lod Communes — i.e., their systems
were built on principles or commonplaces derived, not from the Fathers,
but from the Scriptures. The Reformed took the characteristic title Institu-
tiones Christian,CB Religionis — i.e., they conceived their systems as methods

30 CATHOLIC DEVELOPMENTS
the post-Nicene Fathers did not agree.* Measured by the
later and authoritative standards the ante-Nicene Fathers
were almost all on one point or another heretical ; but
they were not heretics because the Church had not spoken,
and it was their very differences and inchoatenesses that
made it necessary for her to speak. She watched and
preserved the truth, whose pillar and ground she was, by
timely definitions and developments.^ Jurieu, from the Pro
testant side, by changing the emphasis, so applied Petavius
that thc differences between the Papal and the Apostolic
and ancient Christianity were from developments translated
into innovations, and a Church that came into its creed
by fragments and in stages proved by the very terms
of its being to be no infallible and immutable Church.'
of education and instruction in the Christian verities. With the name Theo-
logica Dogmata came in the notion of fixed principles variously interpreted
and formulated, therefore with a development and a history. Protestant
theologians did not take kindly to it, though it was used by Reinhart
in 1659, and by Buddaeus in 1724; yet as late as 1780 Doederlein,
" Inst. Theol.," p. 192, complained " theologiam theoreticam male nostris
temporibus dici coeptam esse dogmaticam." And his reason was : " Nam
theologia dogmatica propria est, quae agit de placitis et opinionibus theolo-
gorum." But this did not suit the usage of Petavius. Cf. for the classical
and patristic use of the term C. L. Nitzsch, " Sys. der Christ. Lehre,"
pp. 50-53 I Baur, " Vorles lib. d. Christ. Dogmengesch.," i. 8 ff.
• " De Theol. Dog.," " De Trin.," lib. i., cc. iii.-viii. He holds that the ante-
Nicene Fathers spoke in certain cases " Ariano paene more " ; and, in c. v.,
§ 7, names Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, Tertullian, and Lactantius as
holding that the Son was made (producium) that He might be used as a
kind of assistant or servant (administrum) ; while others, like Origen held
the Father superior in age, dignity, and power to the Word, and, although
made from the substance of the Father, yet He no less than creatures
had had a beginning. In c. viii., § 2, he describes Arius as a "germanum
Platonicum," who followed the dogma of those ancient writers, "qui
nondum patefacta constitutaque re ad eumdem errorem offenderunt." Cf.
Bishop Bull, "Defensio Fidei Nic," Proem., §§ 7, 8.
» " De Theol. Dog.," Prolegomena, c. i., ii. The cautiones he appends are
very instructive. Cf. " De Trin.," Praefatio, and the Appendicula, in which
the editor gives an attempt at an Apologia for the doctrine of his author.
The boldness of Petavius involved him in serious charges of dealings with
heresy ; his doctrine and illustrations exercised great influence on Newman.
" " Lettres Pastorales addressees aux Fiddles de France, qui ggmissent

AND PROTESTANT VARIATIONS. 3 1
Catholic doctrine was often but successful heresy : " The
authors of heresies and superstitions which are rejected are
indeed loaded with infamy, but the makers of those that
are received are canonized and revered." Bossuet did his
best to rid Catholicism of a theory* which so completely
removed the basis from his famous argument against the
Protestants. That argument, so far as it was constructive,
rested on two positive principles — viz., " que la foi ne varie
pas dans la vraie Eglise et que la verite venue de Dieu a
d'abord sa perfection " ^ ; but the doctrine of evolution changed
the first into an historical untruth, the second into a philo
sophical error. But the " Histoire " as a whole is only a
splendid example of a polemic successful by its very want of
truth and reasonableness. It moves upon the same level as
the performances of those modern writers who imagine that
sous la Captivity de Babylon " (2nd ed., 1686). See in particular letters
ii., iii., v., vi. Bossuet had affirmed " rimpossibilite des changemens
insensibles." Jurieu argues — the history of the immutable Church of Rome
has been a succession of variations, insensibly introduced, but slowly
working out a radical revolution. These letters are pathetic reading ;
fugitive leaflets addressed to the dispersed and persecuted Churches of
France, containing now learned discussions in history and doctrine, now
impassioned exhortations to steadfastness, and again sad and touching
narratives of the sufferings and heroisms of the proscribed. It is a signal
example of the waywardness of literary fame ; it is a more learned, more
modern, more scientific book than Bossuet's, yet the militant bishop has
received honours which were denied to his antagonist. Jurieu went to the
root of the matter, formulated a doctrine of development, held that the
Church grew in mind, did not understand its own faith and meaning at
first, learned to understand only by degrees ; illustrated his contention
from the Fathers and from history, and troubled the equanimity of Monsieur
de Meaux by roundly affirming that the man who denied it must have a
brow of brass, or be of a crass and surprising ignorance. The letters were
translated into English and published, with a dedication to the Prince of
Orange, in 1689.
' See the Avertissements to the " Histoire des Variations." They are
instructive reading, full of the arts of the disputant who to evade the issue
starts a false charge against his opponent. They are in extent equal to
a third of the " Histoire," and showed how thoroughly the Aigle de Meaux
had been winged.
' " Hist, des Variations,'' vol. iii., Avert., p. 5 (ed. 1845).

32 NEWMAN'S THEORY.
to exhibit the differences of critics is to refute criticism. The
most perfect work of this type must always remain the least
significant. Such is Bossuet's, and its insignificance is seen
in this — that as the ideas of order and progress in history
became explicit in philosophy, the development he so disliked
reappeared in a new and more scientific shape in theology.
It took a twofold form : the French, which was more social
and political ; and the German, which was more philosophical
and theological, — the former, whose main exponent was Joseph
de Maistre, being due to the speculative tendencies which
culminated in Comte ; the latter, which had in Moehler its
most brilliant representative,* exhibits the combined influence
of Hegel and Schleiermacher. But Newman's theory, though
its real affinities were with Petavius rather than de Maistre
or Moehler, was yet distinctively his own, explicable through
his own history, the peculiar product of his experience, the
logical issue of the position he had years before assumed.
In him, therefore, it is too much a matter of personal
development to stand in need of explanation from without.
What, then, was Newman's theory of development? He
described it as " an hypothesis to account for a difficulty " ^ —
viz., the procession or evolution of Catholicism from what
was in many respects so radically unlike it, as to be its
very opposite, if not contradiction — primitive Christianity. It
" came into the world as an idea rather than an institution,
and has had to wrap itself in clothing and fit itself with
armour of its own providing, and to form the instruments
and methods of its prosperity and warfare."' The process
by which it has done this is called " development," " being
the germination, growth, and perfection of some living, that
' " Symbolik," § 40. Cf. Perrone, " Praelect. Theol.," tom. ii., pp. 165, 166.
' "Development of Doctrine," p. 27.
' Ibid., p. 1 16. This notion Newman owed to Guizot, but he failed to
see how completely it bore the features of Guizot's Protestanism. The
primary and essential thing in Christianity was to Newman the institution
not the idea ; but to Guizot, the idea, not the institution.

TESTS OF TRUE DEVELOPMENT. 33
is, influential, truth, or apparent truth, in the minds of men
during a sufficient period. And it has this necessary charac
teristic — that, since its province is the busy scene of human
Hfe, it cannot develop at all, except either by destroying,
or modifying and incorporating with itself, existing modes
of thinking and acting."* In antithesis to development
stands " corruption," which is defined as " that state of develop
ment which undoes its previous advances," "' a process ending
in dissolution of the body of thought and usage which was
bound up, as it were, in one system," " the destruction of
the norm or type." ^ The " tests " which distinguish " true
development " from corruption are seven — " the preservation of
the Idea," " continuity of principles," " power of assimilation,"
" early anticipation," " logical sequence," '• preservative addi
tions," and " chronic continuance." ' This is an impressive
apparatus for the determination of true developments from,
false, but the moment we attempt to apply the theory to
history we are pulled up with a sudden shock. For it turns
out to be a theory not for historical use, but for polemical
or apologetical purposes. The developments are to proceed
under the eye of " an external authority," ^ which is to be the
only and infallible judge as to whether they are true or false.
But this remarkable provision calls for two remarks : first,
"infallibility" is not an "idea," but a very definite "institu
tion," and so hardly conforms to the terms under which
Christianity was said to have " come into the world " ; and,
secondly, to exempt " the infallibility of the Church " from
the law of development is to withdraw from us the most
flagrant example of its operation. If anything has a history
which exhibits growth, it is this doctrine ; to make one
development the judge of the right or wrong of all the rest,
is to mock us by refusing to enforce at the most critical point
¦ " Development of Doctrine," p. 37.
' Ibid., pp. 62, 63.
» Ibid., 64 ff.
« Ibid., p. 117 : cf. chap, ii., § 2.

34 DEVELOPMENT SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL
the law which has been so solemnly enacted. This may be
expediency, but it is not justice ; and injustice in history is no
service to the cause of truth.

§ II. — The Idea of Development.
The theory of development as formulated and applied by
Newman had three great defects : it was logical and abstract,
not biological and historical or real; its starting-point was
too late, a picture of the created society rather than of the
creative personality ; and its end was a mere fraction or section
of the collective organism isolated from all the rest, and
invested with functions whose origin evolution could well
have explained, but was not allowed to touch. These defects
indicate the lines our exposition of the positive doctrine will
follow. What does development mean ? The term meets us in
all sciences and all branches of inquiry ; it denotes an idea
that is in the air, working, consciously or unconsciously, in all
minds. Darwin did not discover it, nor was it first formulated
by Spencer ; but it is as old as philosophy, and has been
more or less implicit in the methods of all great inquirers.
What is distinctive of to-day is our more conscious or common
use of it, our clearer sense of the problems it sets us, our
greater mastery of the factors necessary to their solution,
and distincter conception of the limits within which we and
our problems move. Development may be defined as at once
a subjective method and an objective process, — as a method
it seeks to conceive and explain a being or thing through its
history ; as a process it denotes the mode in which the being
or thing becomes as a mode of progressive yet natural change
worked by two sets of factors, the inner and outer, or or
ganism and environment In each branch of study it assumes
a form appropriate to the matter which is handled : in
philosophy it becomes either, subjectively, an inquiry into the

OR BIOLOGICAL AND LOGICAL. 35
process by which man comes by his knowledge or grows into
the intelligence he is, or, objectively, a dialectical explication of
the Idea, the Cause, or Force which unfolds or is unfolded into
the system which we name " the universe " or " the known " or
" the manifold of experience " ; in science it is in its subjective
sense the method which seeks in the immanent and correlated
forces of nature a reason for all the changes and variations
which natural things undergo — in its objective sense it is the
process by which out of old forms or species new ones arise,
organs being modified, lost, recovered, or developed in the
struggle for existence ; in history it describes the method
which studies beliefs, customs, institutions, and events through
the factors of their origin and in their reciprocal and corre
lated being, and the process by which out of the simpler
the more complex societies, states, and religions emerge.
But the distinctive element in all the senses may be stated
thus : in development the thing is studied as it grows and
where it grows, and through the causes and conditions of its
growth, in order to the truer knowledge alike of its special
forms and of the forces through whose operation they are.
If this is an approximately correct description of develop
ment, then it must, from its very nature, so far as concerned
with real persons or organisms, be biological — i.e., it must
study life as living, as lived, and as perpetuating life. It
cannot be merely logical — i.e., proceed as if nature could be
reduced, as it were, to the forms of the syllogism, or stated
in its terms. The distinction between logical and biological
development may be represented thus : the one is evolution
conceived as an immanent process, and proceeding either
without any environment or independently of any formative
energies active within it ; but the other is evolution exhibited
in an organism which lives within a living world, affected by
all its forces, and sensitive to its every change. In the field
of history the logical is simply an abstract deductive process
stated and conducted in concrete or historic£d terms — i.e., it

36 NEWMAN'S DEVELOPMENT LOGICAL.
assumes principles and reasons to conclusions that hi.story
may be used to illustrate, but cannot be allowed to decide or
to determine. But the biological or scientific is essentially
concrete and inductive : i.e., it keeps its feet on reality and
studies things in their relations ; begins to observe the
organism or new form at the earliest possible point ; carefully
analyzes and describes the various environments into which
it enters, notes how it is modified by each and modifies each ;
seeks to discover whether the great factors of change are
inner or outer ; and accurately measures and registers at every
definite stage the degree and path of change. Logical
development is a simple process, but biological is most
complex : the former is selective, defines what it wants to
prove, and fixes the conditions and lines of proof ; but the
latter is comprehensive, finds in the facts and phenomena
before it what has to be explained, and attempts, by following
their history, to find the explanation.
Now, Newman's theory revealed its essentially logical and
dialectical character in this— it was an argument which used
historical formula for the maintenance of a given thesis, not
for the interpretation of history. He took what he was
pleased to call the Church out of the world in which it lived
and through which it was organized — so declining to study
these in their correlation and reciprocal action ; and he did
not study either the Christ who created the society, or the
society as it was created by Christ. He indeed elucidated
his theory by historical illustrations ; but though the illustra
tions were historical, they did not constitute history ; they had
all the insignificance of texts isolated for special polemical
purposes from their context. In human as in natural history
the action of the environment is as real as the action of the
organism. They may differ as regards function and quality,
but they agree in being alike efficient as factors of change.
The organism is creative, the seat and source of life • but the
environment is formative, determines the shape which the life

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT BIOLOGICAL. ^y
assumes. Without the organism there would be no life, no
victorious energies, no being that struggles to be more
and more ; without the environment there would be no arena
that at once exercises and disciplines the energies, no field
full of forces that must be now resisted and now assimilated.
This mutual being and correlated activity of organism and
environment is but the form under which, as regards the
question specifically before us, we express this fundamental
principle : — the Church, so far as it exists in all or in any
of its organized forms, lives within the world, subject to the
laws which govern all related being. Its history is a section
of universal history, in the proper sense as secular as the
history of any empire or state. It belongs to time, condi
tions and is conditioned by the agencies active within
it, is inseparable from the other fields of human activity,
moral and social, individual and collective. The history of
belief, of custom, of institutions, of political action and
change, of industry and policy, of personal morals and
international relations, cannot be written apart from the
history of the Church, nor its history apart from theirs ;
at every fundamental and significant point the one shades
into the other. And this interpenetration is independent
of any theory as to the constitution of the Church, or its
relations to the State ; it is as complete on the Presbyterian
as on the Papal, on the Congregational as on the Anglican
theory, and is as little escaped by a voluntary as by an
Erastian Church. But if every Church must so live in the
world as to be a part of its collective being, then it must
always be construed in and through the place and time in
which it lives. Apart from these it can as little be ex
plained or understood as can an organism apart from nature
and its order. In both cases there must be the co-ordination
of the living being and its home in order to any scientific
theory of development.

38 THE CHURCH AS SUBJECT OF DEVELOPMENT.

§ III. — Development in the Church.
Now, in the field of inquiry which concerns us, what has
been termed the organism is not the Church, but the historical
Christ — not the created society, but the creative Personality.
What He involved will be seen by-and-by. What we have
meanwhile to note is this : He entered into a double environ
ment — the society He created, and the 'world within which
it lived. He founded the society, and the society was bound
to interpret Him ; indeed, it was only as He could be made
to live explicated and reasonable to its intellect that He
could command its conscience or abide in its heart. But
the interpretation could not be simply in the terms He
Himself supplied ; to have secured this the world as well
as the society would have had to be made wholly new.
The inherited experiences and instincts of centuries could
not be dissolved and discharged by an act of faith or by
a simple change of associations. The men who entered the
Church did not cease to be Jews or Greeks or Romans ;
though their spirit and temper were changed, yet their
faculties, activities, modes and instruments of thought, re
mained the same. Nothing is so certain or so evident as
the activity of racial idiosyncrasies and the prevalence of
local and provincial varieties within the ancient Church.
These differences affected doctrine, polity, worship, morals—
in a word, the whole field of religion. Judaism was most
varied, a thing of many schools and types ; there was a
Judaism of the Temple and of the synagogue, of the desert
and of the mart, of the rabbinical school and of the ascetic's
cell ; there was a Sadducaic, Pharisaic, and an Essenic Judaism
—a Judaism of Judaea and Galilee, of Jerusalem and Alexan
dria, of Italy and Asia Minor. And traces of all the rich
varieties can be found in ancient Christian literature, in the
history of the Church and the sects. And Hellenism was as

the CHURCH AND ITS ENVIRONMENTS. 39
varied ; the local cults were an innumerable multitude ; the
intellectual tendencies, and as a consequence the types of
philosophical thought, differed almost as much ; the schools
of Athens and Alexandria, of Antioch and Tarsus, were all
as distinct and dissimilar as were their respective races and
histories. And in the West paganism was no less varied ;
North Africa and Gaul, Spain and Italy, alike lived under
Rome, yet in religion each went its own way, retained its
ancient worship, but did not scruple to add new to its
ancient deities. And these local differences affected the local
Churches. They were first organized on the lines of municipal
and provincial or territorial differences, and then on the lines
of imperial and Roman policy. The episcopal constitution
did not rise all at once, nor, when it had risen, did it move
altogether with equal step in all places. In some localities it
sprang into sudden being ; in others the old congregational
and presbyterial simplicity lingered on. Ancient customs
persisted even though the religion changed ; and the longest
struggle Rome had — a struggle in which it has not been even
yet completely successful — was against the old local cults con
tinued in the local Churches. But even more persistent were
the old intellectual tendencies. There is as much ancient
philosophy in Justin Martyr as in Marcus Aurelius, in
Origen as in Celsu.s. The literary spirit of Alexandria, eclectic
yet idealist in philosophy and allegorical in interpretation,
is as evident and active in Clement as in Philo, in the Cate
chetical School as in the New Academy. The history of Neo-
Platonism is Christian as well as pagan ; it had almost as
much to do with the formation of Athanasius and Augustine
as of Plotinus and Porphyry. If Tertullian had not been a
jurist, his theology would not have been what it is, especially
as regards those very elements and terms by which it has
most powerfully affected the development of dogma. His
Greek mind and training make it impossible that Chrysostom
should ever have written the Anti-Pelagian Treatises, while

40 TPIE ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS THE ORGANISM
they are as full as they well could be of the intellectual
principles and tendencies that had once made Augustine a
Manichean. The causes and conditions that so helped to
shape the Fathers helped no less to form the Church whose
mind they made and expressed. Change their philosophy,
and their theology would not have been what it was. With
out Aristotle in the Middle Ages we should not have had
scholasticism, at least not in the distinctive form it now
possesses ; and without ancient philosophy all the many types
and varieties of patristic and scholastic theology would be
different from what they are. If, therefore, the men who made
the thought and formulated the faith of the Church have been
so powerfully affected by external forces, it is evident that its
development cannot be dealt with as if it had been governed
entirely from within. The internal were indeed the creative
forces, but the external were factors of form and of formal
change. This argument, so far as it has proceeded, must not be
construed to mean that the action of the environment was
either illicit or unnecessary. It had, quite as much as the
organism, a place and function in the order of Providence.
If there had been no creative Person there could have been
no society ; if no society, conscious of being a creation and
with faith in its Creator, there could have been no reason
for the interpretation of Him ; if no world with its antece
dent history, there could have been no interpretative faculty,
method, or means. This does not in any way question
the necessity of metaphysics or philosophies, which exist
simply because man is man, and he mu.st always ask a reason
for the being of himself and his universe. And the dogmata
of a Church are but what may be described as its philosophy
of its Founder or of its own being, and as such necessary to
it if it would have a justified or rational existence. Nor is
there any question raised as to the legitimacy of using the
terms philosophy had elaborated and the methods it had

AND IS A FACTOR OF CHANGE. 4I
followed in its quest after truth, nay, such use had the right
which belongs to simple necessity. The past did not accu
mulate its riches in vain : they were made to be used, not
to be lost. The philosophy of Greece had a divine function
in the world as well as the law of the Hebrews, and its
art and polity had a mission as high and as real as its
philosophy. The mere fact, therefore, that religious customs,
or social institutions, or doctrinal forms, or even doctrines
themselves have been borrowed by the Church, or assimilated
and incorporated from without, does not condemn them, —
if it did, what would survive? But it does this — it helps us
to see what they are by showing how they came to be. The
natural history of an organism or an institution is its ex
planation, not its condemnation ; if it cannot bear to be
explained, it wants the most rudimentary of all rights to
being and to belief And here, while the formal factor is
found in the environment, the material factor must be sought
in the organism, and the truth of the one must be tested by
its adequacy as a vehicle or mode of expression for the other.
Christ remains the regulative as He was the originating
mind ; He is, as it were, the eternal norm, the law by which
the spirit, offices, institutions, of the Church must be measured
and judged. It cannot escape from Him, or make Him after
any one of its own changeful moods ; for the literature which
describes His history has made His Presence universal
and immortal. It is as if the ideals of the creative mind
stood disclosed, for comparison with the realities of the
creation. Supremacy and permanence then belong to Him
alone ; the determinations of every man or council or age
have a merely local and temporal character, and the earlier
even more than the later. For Christ must be formed within
that He may be read and articulated without, but the growth
into His spirit has been a matter of centuries and proceeds
but slowly even yet. The literature of to-day is worthier of
Him than the literature of the second or third century ; the

42 CHRIST EQUALLY FOR ALL CHURCHES
religious consciousness has fewer pagan and more Christian
elements now than it had then, and its interpretation of Him,
as it has more accurate knowledge at its command, ought
to have more truth and more validity than belongs to. the
symbols of Nicsa and Chalcedon. If there has been develop
ment, it must mean greater competence to interpret the
Christ, and greater truth in the interpretation.

§ IV. — The Realm of the Law.
But the discussion as to the idea of development and the
action of the material and formal factors in it involves
another — viz., as to its scope or range. The facts and
phenomena to which it ought to be applied may be described
as of two classes — the quantitative or extensive, and the
qualitative or intensive. The quantitative or extensive concern
the evolution not simply of a given Church, but as it were
of Christendom, of the varied forms of thought and society
under which men have attempted to realize the religion of
Christ. This indeed represents an immense area of inquiry,
for the religion is so rich and so multiform as to be almost
incapable of definition or even description. It is not a single
system or organization ; it is a multitude of systems, a crowd
of the most diverse organizations ; yet it is none of these,
but rather the common spirit they all labour to realize, the
common purpose they all endeavour more or less blindly to
fulfil. Newman said * : " Whatever be historical Christianity,
it is not Protestantism," and we may add, still less is it
Catholicism. " If ever there were a safe truth, it is this."
The religion of Christ is too rich, too subtle, too incorporeal
and infinite to be exhausted in any single system, or
embodied even in so finely articulated and rigorous an
organism as the Church of Rome. That Church, immense
' "Development of Christian Doctrine," p. 5.

the test of DEVELOPMENT. 43
as it is, is but a fraction of Christendom ; on the one side
of it lies the Greek, on the other side the Anglican, and
beyond these the Churches, in all their branches and varieties,
that have been in a peculiar degree the creators of the modern
world — the Lutheran and the Reformed. No Church can
claim to' be " historical Christianity " ; for it is equal to all
the Churches, yet it is much more than they all. Each may
have played its own part in history, but its part has been
^ small compared with its Founder's. His religion is co
extensive with His influence ; under its vast canopy the
stateliest Church and the meanest conventicle alike stand,
and in His presence all degrees cease, grandeur is abased, and
lowliness is exalted. But if Churches are to be understood,
it must be not through the claims they make for themselves,
but through their relations to Him ; each is an example at
once of His power and action on the world, and of the world's
power and action on Him through His people. Development
cannot concern itself with less than this. If it did so,
then it could be no theory or law exhibiting the growth of
the faith and life of Christ in man. Both of these have
existed outside as well as inside the Churches, often in
nobler forms without than within ; and everywhere they have
been His and from Him. Certainly, if all good and holy
living be due to Him, it comes dangerously near impiety to
limit His " covenanted mercies " to systems which the hands
of man have built and the vanity of man has called the
Church of Christ.
The phenomena we have called qualitative or intensive
are those attributes or elements which Churches have claimed
as their distinctive characteristics. These may be matters
of polity, or doctrine, or offices and worship, or discipline
and conduct, or all these combined. A scientific theory
of development must seek to explain all the Churches and
theologies of Christendom, with all they claim to be, making
all equally and in all things subjects of investigation and of

44 THE LAW AS APPLIED IN HISTORY
equal investigation. We must carefully guard against as
sumptions which either exempt from its action the phenomena
which it is most needed to explain, or which affirm it in the
region where it is a convenient apologetic while excluding it
from the region where it becomes a reasonable but unwelcome
explanation. Thus Newman's development postulates the
being and claims of the Roman Church, its infallibility and
truth ; but while he skilfully used it in justification of his
Church, he as skilfully avoided its use in the explanation of
its genesis. Concede the Roman claim, and his theory was
an ingenious " hypothesis to account for a difficulty " ; regard
it as a claim which must be read through its natural history as
a problem in evolution, and the " hypothesis " cannot be got
upon its feet ; it is absolutely without reason or function.
Again, it is equally impossible to limit development to a pro
cess of formal without substantial change, which the Church
is said to conduct with a view to adjusting herself to the
changed conditions of the time.* For it is evident that
the Church and its Creed are assumed to be exempted from
its operation — i.e., the developmental process is not one which
can be applied to this Church and Creed, but one which they
direct. Their being and truth must be granted before it can
be called into action, and even then it can act only under
their superintendence. But development must try whether
it can explain the Church and the Creed before they can
be allowed to use development ; and this is the more neces
sary, as "Christian Church" here means not the Church of
Christ, but a specific ecclesiastical body, and " Creed " the
faith of certain among its members.
The theory, then, must be either rigorously applied, or not at
all ; exceptions in favour of particular Churches are impossible.
History must be impartial ; it knows no schism and recog
nizes no dissent ; for it the claims of Churches are subjects
for investigation, not sanctities beyond it. Infallibility may
' Moehler, " S^-mbolik," § 40. Cf. " Lux Mundi," pp. viii., ix.

IS UNIVERSAL IN ITS SCOPE. 45
command or satisfy faith, but it only whets the curiosity of
science by presenting it with a large and complex problem.
The historian sees that the Christian religion is a vaster thing
than any Christian Church, or than all the Churches ; he sees
too that these Churches differ from age to age both in character
and action. He perceives that Catholicism in the early Middle
Ages helped to organize modern civilization, but has been in
later times possibly the most disintegrating of all our social
forces. The countries which most suffer from revolution are
the countries where its rule is or has been most absolute ;
the countries where it has least authority most represent
order and progress. The historian then cannot accept a
Church at its own estimate ; he must study it in relation to
its place and time, ask how and why it came to be, how it
behaves, and with what results. For him its offices, orders,
creeds, councils, its whole systems of polity and belief, are
matters for inquiry and explanation ; and only when nature
has been completely exhausted is there even a possible
apology for an appeal to the supernatural. Start with the
supernatural as a first principle, invest the forms of the
society or its political framework with Divine right or infallible
authority, and it is so lifted out of historical conditions that
it ceases to be an object to which development can be applied.*
' Mr. Gore begins his work on " The Church and the Ministry " by
making two assumptions, one being " the truth of the Incarnation " (p. 6).
But one may, because of his very reverence for " the truth of the Incarna
tion," object to it being assumed as an apology for a polity well known
outside Christianity, and within it easily capable of explanation without
any such assumption. The author who proceeds in this way only assumes
the appearance of the historical inquirer in order the more effectually to do
the work of the dogmatic divine. He acts as would the man of science
who, in order the more conclusively to prove sorae theory of his own, should
begin by solemnly assuming the omnipotence of the Creator, so using his
faith on the one hand to become independent of nature, and on the other
to suggest that the opposite theory means a nature without God. But here
as elsewhere the law of parsimony rules superfluous causes out of court.
Apart from this there is no disproof of Mr. Gore's theory of the Church
so strong as the Incarnation and the terms in which it is stated.

46 IT MOVES IN THE REALM OF SCIENCE.
To speak of it in the terms of evolution is to use language that
has no meaning ; to employ scientific methods in the investi
gation of its origin, behaviour, and growth is to force science
into a region where it has no place and no problem. To
ascribe development to it is only to say that it uses its Divine
attributes to act on fit occasions as becomes the Divine. But
in all this, as there is no nature or law, so there is no room
for the inquirer whose function is to explain nature by the
discovery of her laws.

CHAPTER II.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE .ANCIENT CHURCH.
THE exposition of the idea or doctrine of development has
implied throughout that for it there is only one method
of verification — viz., the comparison and correlation of the
various factors and forms of change. The primitive organism
must be studied till it is known, and so must the primitive en
vironment ; the result must then be examined and compared
with the forces active in organism and environment respectively.
Only by a method like this can we discover what each has con
tributed to the total effect. Of course the old forces will not
remain as old when new-combined ; and so, while the forces
are correlated, the changed or modified structure must always
be compared with the original, in order that we may know
whether there has been variation, and to what degree ; whether
its efficiency has been increased or decreased ; and whether
the organism has been more powerful to subdue the environ
ment, or the environment the organism. All we can do here
is to illustrate the process in outline ; to exhibit it in detail
would be to write a constructive history of the Church.
§ L— -The Creative Organism.
This is the causal Person and Mind, Jesus Christ. The
religion is His creation ; all Churches derive, directly or
indirectly, their being from Him. How we conceive Him and
His Church will appear later. Enough to say here, while He

48 THE CREATIVE PERSON NORMATIVE.
institutes a new society and fills it with His own life. He
gives it no fixed or formal political constitution. He is its
Founder, its Head, its inspiration, its personalized ideal of
religion. His people are intended to be like Him — as it were
His person augmented, immortalized, multiplied into innu
merable hosts, and enduring through all ages. Now, what sort
of religious ideal did He personalize ? What was most distinc
tive of Him was His consciousness of God, the kind of God
He was conscious of, and the relation He sustained to Him.
God was His Father ; He was God's Son. What God was to
Him He desired Him to be to all men ; what He was to God
all men ought to be. In Christ's ideal of religion, then, the
most material or determinative truth is the conception of God.
He appears primarily, not as a God of judgment or justice,
but of mercy and grace, the Father of man, who needs not to
be appeased, but is gracious, propitious, finds the Propitiator,
provides the propitiation. His own Son is the one Sacrifice
Priest, and Mediator, appointed of God to achieve the recon
ciliation of man. Men are God's sons ; filial love is their
primary duty, fraternal love their common and equal obliga
tion. Worship does not depend on sacred persons, places, or
rites ; but is a thing of .spirit and truth. The best prayer is
secret and personal : the man who best pleases God is not the
scrupulous Pharisee, but the penitent publican. Measured by
the standard of a sacerdotal religion, Jesus was not a pious
person. He spoke no word, did no act, that implied the
necessity of an official priesthood for His people : He enforced
no sacerdotal observance, instituted no sacerdotal order, pro
mulgated no sacerdotal law, but simply required that His
people should be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.
And so what He founded was a society to realize His own
ideal, a kingdom of heaven, spiritual, internal, which came
without observation ; a realm where the will of God is law
and the law is love, and the citizens are the loving and the
obedient, whose type is the reverent and tender and trustful

A RELIGION WITHOUT PRIESTS. 49
child, not the hard and boasting man. In its collective being
it has a priestly character, but is without an official priesthood.
It has anroaTokob,^ irpo^-rirai^ eiriaKotroi^ Trpea-^vrepoi,^
TTOt/U.ei'es,' SiSdtrKoXoi,^ StaKovoi,^ eiiayyeXicTTai,^ but no j'e/jet?
— no man, or body of men, who bear the name, hold the
place, exercise the functions, or fulfil the duties of the priest
or the priesthood, as they were known in ancient religions.
It has no temple, save the living man ; no sacrifices, save
those of the spirit and the life ; no sensuous sanctities. Its
Founder -never called Himself a priest ; stood to the priest
hood of His land and time in radical antagonism ; the writer
who applies to Him the name High Priest carefully avoids
applying this or any similar name to any class of His people,
and those who describe His work as a sacrifice never attach
any similar idea to any acts of any officials or their instru
ments of worship. And this may be said to represent on the
negative side the absolutely new and distinctive character of
the religion of Christ. It stood among the ancient faiths as a
strange and extraordinary thing — a priestless religion, without
the symbols, sacrifices, ceremonies, officials hitherto, save by
prophetic Hebraism, held to be the religious all in all. And
it so stood, because its God did not need to be propitiated,,
but was propitious, supplying the only priest and sacrifice
equal to His honour and the sins and wants of man. In that
hour God became a new being to man, and man knew himself
to be more than a mere creature and subject — a son of the
living God.
Here, then, stated in the most general yet distinctive terms,
¦ Luke vi. 13 ; Matt. x. 2 ; Acts i. 2, 26, iv. 33; i Cor. xii. 28, etc.
' I Cor. xii. 28 ; Eph. ii. 20, iii. 5, iv. 11.
3 Acts XX. 28 ; Phil. i. I ; Tit. i. 7.
* Acts xiv. 23, XV. 2, 4, 6, 22, 23 ; i Tim. v. 17.
'¦ Eph. iv. II.
« Acts xiii. I ; I Cor. xii. 28, 29 ; Eph. iv. 11 ; i Tim. ii. 7 ; 2 Tim. I-II.
' I Cor. iii. 5 ; 2 Cor. iii. 6, vi. 4, xi. 23 ; Eph. iii. 7 ; Phil. i. i.
« Acts xxi. 8 ; Eph. iv. 11 ; 2 Tim. iv. 5.

so THE PRIMITIVE ORGANISM
was, as regards its essential character, the religion which Jesus
Christ instituted. But how was it to be realized? und;r
what forms and by what agencies organized ? It was full of
infinite possibilities of all kinds — intellectual, moral, social,
political, religious. It involved new beliefs as to God, as to
its Founder, as to man ; as to their natures, characters, rela
tions ; as to all the religions of the world, their worth, function,
history ; as to all the ideas that most command men and
organize society. It was a source of new moral forces, intro
duced higher and nobler ideals, created a finer sense of obliga
tions towards God, and a more sensitive conscience as regards
man. It formed a brotherhood that was ambitious to embrace
the world. It was bound to feel after the polity or social
framework that should best help it to fulfil all its functions,
and to seek methods of worship and religious association that
would enable it to do justice to all its own possibilities and all
the needs of man. And these elements stood so related to
one another that whatever touched any affected all. Here,
then, is the problem : How did this parent germ or crea
tive organism — i.e., the religion instituted by Christ — behave
in its various environments ? What was their action on it
and its action on them ? How far were the forms it assumed
and the elements it incorporated due to the immanent laws of
its own being or to the action of the medium in which it
lived ? To these questions we must return as clear an answer
as our limits will allow.
§ II. — The Primitive Environments.
The environment in which the religion began to be was
Judaic. Its Founder was of Jewish descent. His theistic,
religious, ethical, social ideals, so far as they have any prior
history, find it in Judaism ; institutions of its creation, as
the school and the synagogue, were used by Him and His
disciples for the spread of the religion ; their termini technici.

and primitive environment. 51
BaaiXela tov Qeov or rwv * ovpavSiv,' BiaO^icr},^ iiCK\r]aia,* I'd/ho?,"
trpofjyrjTeia,^ Trtcrrt?,' BiKaioavvrj,^ a/J-apTia,^ atrotciiXv-t^i^^^ Xpia-
t6?,** Kf'o? TOV dvdpwTTov,^' u(6? TOV 06oi),*^ ^1670?,** cau be con
strued only through the Judaism either ofthe motherland or of
the dispersion. It creates as it were the atmosphere in which
the New Testament as a whole lives ; its terminology, theses,
antitheses, its modes of argument and of proof, its conflicts,
controversies, policies, its local colourings and questions, its
very attempts to break from the bonds of the law and become
spiritual and universal, are all conditioned by Judaism. The
types are many, but the system is one : now it is the Judaism
of Palestine, as in Matthew ; of Asia Minor, as in the Apoca
lypse ; of the tolerant metropolis, as in Romans ; of a narrow
and hot-blooded province, as in Galatians ; of a philosophical
community, which has idealized the worship and history of
the Fathers, as in Hebrews ; but whatever the peculiarity of
local type the thing remains. John and Luke are as full of
it as Matthew and Mark ; it as subtly penetrates Epistles to
Gentile Churches, full of the passion of spiritual universalism,
like Corinthians and Colossians, as those expressly addressed
to Jews, like James and l Peter. But these conditions
hardly outlived the first generation. Two things happened
almost sim.ultaneously : Jerusalem was destroyed, depri\'ing
' Matt. vi. 33, xii. 28 ; Mark i. 15, iv. 11, 26, 30, etc.
' Matt. iv. 17, v. 3, 10, 19, 20, xiii. 11, 24, 31, 33.
' Matt xxvi. 28 ; i Cor. xi. 25 ; 2 Cor. iii. 6 ; Heb. vii. 22, viii. 6, 8, 9, 10,
etc. * Matt xvi. 18, xviii. 17; Acts v. 11, viii. I, xiv. 23, etc.
' Matt. V. 17, vii. 12, xi. 13; Rom. ii. 12, 14, 15, iii. 19, 20, 21, etc.
* I Cor. xii. 10, xiv. 6, 12, etc.
' Rom. i. 5, 17, iii. 22, v. i ; i Cor. xv. 14, 17 ; Gal. i. 23, iii. 9, etc.
* Rom. i. 17, iii. 21, 22, 25, 26, x. 3 ; 2 Cor. v. 21.
9 Mark i. 4, ii. 5 ; John i. 29 ; Rom. v. 12, 13, 20, 21, vii. 7, 8, 14, 17.
"> Rom. xvi. 25 ; I Cor. i. 7, xiv. 6, 26 ; Eph. i. 17, iii. 3.
" Matt xxii. 42; xxiv. 5, 23, xxvi. 63.
>s Matt. xii. 8, 32, 40, xiii. 37 ; Mark ii. 10, 28, etc.
" Matt. xvi. 16, xxvi. 63 ; Mark iii. II ; John i. 34, 50, iii. 18, xi. 27.
" Johni. I, 14; I John i. i.

52 JUDAISM THE ENEMY OF CHRISTIANITY,
the Jewish religion of its Temple and priesthood, and reducing
it to a mere system of customs and instruction accommodated
to the needs of a homeless people ; and the Church, opened by
the preaching of Paul, became more Gentile than Jewish.
This meant a change at once of race and of home ; the cradle
of the religion ceased to be its nursery. So it forgot the
tongue of its birthplace and learned the speech of its new
motherland ; in other words, while it was still in its infancy
all the historical conditions with all their determinative
factors, everything that could be denoted by the terms blood,
language, institutions, associations, traditions, habits, customs,
mind, culture, religious consciousness, literature, history, were
completely changed, with the inevitable result that new evolu
tionary forces were called into being by the new conditions.
And these forces became factors of both formal and material
changes, and their power was enhanced rather than weakened
by the action of old agencies within the new medium.
But while Christianity escaped from Judaism, yet it was not
delivered from the Jews ; they represented its bitterest enemies,
its acutest opponents, the source of its most serious dangers.
The heresies it had most to fear, the differences and divisions
that had been most threatening and most nearly disastrous,
'the tales that had most deeply affronted its ethical and
reverent spirit, had been of Jewish origin.* Hence came an
attitude to Judaism and the Jews^ which had its strongest
possible contrast in the ideal attitude to their history and
religion and Scriptures. Jesus had been born a Jew. He
had come to fulfil the law and the prophets ; to their authority
1 Justin, " Apol," i., cc. 31, 36 ; " Dial," cc. 16, 95 ; " Martyr. Polyc," cc.
17-19 ; Origen, "Contra Cels.," i. 28-39.
' Barnabas, iv. 6-8, says that they lost the covenant as soon as they had
received it; ix. 4, were instructed by an "evil angel"; and xiv. I, did not
receive the covenant because of their sins. So Prmd. Petri, in Clem.
Al "Strom.," vl 5, 41, affirms that they do not know God, and worship,
instead of Him, angels and archangels, moons and sabbaths. Cf. Justin,
"Apol," i. 36, 37, 47, 53; "Didache," viii i; " Ign. Ep. ad Mag.," x. 2.
Judaism is described as rrpi KaKrjv (viiriv Trjv iraKaim6elcrav Km ivo^iiratrav.

YET MEDIUM FOR ITS INTERPRETATION. 53
He and His disciples alike appealed. So while the Gentile
Christian rejected Judaism, he had to do it under sanction of
the Jewish Scriptures,* which were to him canonical, authentic,
and inspired.^ Then, though the Apostolic writings existed,
the New Testament did not; its parts had an isolated or
dispersed being, but they had not been joined into a whole,
collected, canonized, and made authoritative.' The ante
cedents of the sub-Apostolic literature and thought are oral
and actual rather than written and ideal Christianity* — a
Christianity simple, inchoate, as it were intellectually inarticu-
lated, often ill-informed as to its own sources and history,
' Barn., cc. vi.-x. The Old Testament ceremonies are all abolished and
spiritually fulfilled in the new people of God. Clem., 2 Ep. xiv. 2, where
Tti j3i/3Xia denotes the Old Testament Justin, " Dial,"cc. 11, 16, 18, 20, 30,
40-46, argues — Christians are the true Israel, their new law was predicted
and prefigured in the old, and has superseded it. Cf. Harnack,
" Dogmengesch.," vol. i., pp. 146, 147, text and notes ; but especially " Texte
u. Untersch.," vol. i., pt. iii, " Altercatio Simonis," pp. 56-91 ; Engelhardt,
" Das Christenthum Justin's," pp. 245-261 and 310-320.
* The modes of citation are significant. In Clem. R. the Old Testament
is quoted as fi ypa(l>ri, cc. 23, 34, 35; as to ypacfielov, 28; as al lepal
ypaipal, 53. Its words are quoted as Christ's own, spoken Sia rov irveiparos
rov dyiov, 22 ; or as God's own, Xc'yei (sc. Seos, or Kipws) Cf. Barn. i. 7,
iv. 7, II, V. 7.
' Of course, the reference in the text is a strictly limited one ; it does
not deny the use of Apostolic writings in the sub-Apostolic. The extent of
this can be seen from the indexes to Gebhardt and Harnack, or Lightfoot's
" Apostolic Fathers,'' or any good book on the canon — Credner or Reuss,
Holtzmann or Weiss, Westcott or Zahn. What is affirmed is not only that
the New Testament had not been co-ordinated with the Old, but that it did
not exist as a canon or body of authoritative religious books. It is, of
course, the case that certain texts can be quoted as evidence that certain
New Testament books or sayings were referred to as Scriptures (e.g.,
1 Peter iii. 16 — " all the epistles " of " our beloved brother Paul " ; Ep. Polyc.
xii. I quotes Eph. iv. 26 with Psalm iv. 5 as Scriptures, Barn. iv. 14 cites
Matt xxii. 14 with the formula ms yeypairrai, 2 Clem. ii. 4 introduces Matt.
ix. 13 with the phrase Kal erepa de ypa(j>fi Xc'yei, while in xiii. 4 the formula
Xe'yfi d 0e6s is used relative to Luke vi. 32, 35) ; but these in no way affect
the statement of the text. As a simple matter of fact, broadly stated, the
sacred authoritative book of the sub-Apostolic Church was the Old Testa
ment, not the New.
* Cf. Papias ap. Euseb., bk. iii., c. 39.

54 VULGAR TRADITION MORE INTELLIGIBLE
its own reason and significance, full of local varieties and
many gradations of mind and culture. The later is then not
the continuation of the earlier thought, but of something at
once simpler and less primitive, what we may term vulgar
and mixed tradition. This tradition, which represented the
Word as it lived in the memories and mouths of men, was
more intelligible to the new mind than the New Testament,
and so was more capable of interpretation by it.* The Church,
too, was not an organized whole, or even a homogeneous
body ; it did not form the men it incorporated after a single
or uniform type. Hence, though the Gentile became a
Christian, he did not cease to be a Gentile, or to think in
the terms and under the categories he had inherited, and so
he could not construe the religion exactly in the sense of its
first preachers. The difference is not due to purpose, but
as it were to nature and history, and exists where there is
the utmost desire to express and maintain harmony with
the Apostolic mind. It springs from many and complex
causes, which were all natural in their origin and inevitable
in their action. The Gentile Christian did not and could
not come like the Apostles to the New Testament through
the Old, or like the Hellenists to the Church through the
synagogue ; he rather read the Old Testament through t^e
' There is no doctrine more in need of scientific discussion than that ot
tradition. It is most vaguely used in much of the theological literature of
the day. Before there was a New Testament there could not but be a
IlapiSoa-is, but it was the note of a young community and a transitional
age. The longer it continued the more unsafe it grew ; the remoter
from the source the less it could be used as an authority. The written
word is valuable because it remains for ever primitive — the oldest testi
mony crystallized, as it were, in the very act of expression ; but tradition,
so far as it remains oral, ceases to be primitive, is augmented or modified
by time, and ever assumes the hue or tone of the age through which it
is passing. It must always remain more significant of the present that
receives it than of the past whence it professes to come. The only true
parallel to the modern Catholic doctrine — whether Roman or Anglican —
is to be found in the IlapdSoa-is of the Pharisaic and rabbinical schools
(Matt XV. 2, 3, 6; Mark vii. 3, 5, 8, 9, 13; Gal. I 14; Col. ii. 8).

THAN APOSTOLIC THOUGHT. 55
New, the synagogue through the Church, and all through
his inherited consciousness, his Greek philosophy and Roman
polity. § III. — The Immediate Result.
And as were the conditions, such was the theology. If the
Apostolic and sub-Apostolic ages be studied through their
highest and most characteristic beliefs, then we may say — they
are successive rather than continuous, the later is the .sequent
in time but not in thought of the earlier, the legitimate re
sultant of all the factors and conditions, but not a normal or
logical or lineal evolution from the ideal ofthe New Testament.
Its literature is concerned with the same subjects asthe^Apos-
tolic, but almost everything in it is different — the atmosphere,
the altitude, the proportion of parts, the emphasis on terms
or ideas, the regulative principles of thought. It would be
easy so to exhibit differences as to conceal harmonies, or to
draw up a harmony which would mask differences ; what is
difficult is to show the precise significance and exact propor
tion of both.* Of the Apostolic literature we may say — it is
even more important as a body of religious authorities than of
historical documents ; but of the sub-Apostolic — there are no
more important historical documents, but no poorer religious
authorities. What is absent is even more remarkable than
what is present. We have reminiscences of sacred history,
now correct, now incorrect. We have often large explicit use
of the Old Testament and echoes of the New, becoming now
' Bull's " Defensio Fidei Nicaenae " is full of examples of forced harmonies
m the region of dogma. So are some of Newman's tracts, his " History of
the Arians," and his notes to his edition of Athanasius' " Orations." His
" Development," on the other hand, contains examples of an opposite kind.
The differences and agreements between the two ages have equal, yet con
trary, historical significance. The agreements show the continuity of the
society, but the differences exhibit the changes within the society, due to
the changes of men and time and place. Recognition of both is needed if
there is to be any real philosophy of the genesis and history of the Church.

S6 APOSTOLIC AND SUB-APOSTOLIC THOUGHT:
and then, as it were, articulate as distinct quotations. We
have examples of old customs like the weekly assembly or
baptism or the Lord's Supper, either modified or in process
of modification. We have insight into the state of the young
communities ; their offices and their ideas of office ; their
order, troubles, hopes, fears, sufferings ; their mutual relations ;
their manifold differences alike as regards opinion, discipline,
and conduct ; and, above all, we are made to feel the reality
of the new life which has come through Jesus Christ — the
beautiful reverence and pure love for Him that lives in all
hearts, and represents His continuous being in His society.
But the moment we enter the region of thought we feel the
change of atmosphere ; whole classes of beliefs are absent
or inadequately expressed.* We miss the great Pauline or
Johannine conceptions, the unity and continuity of man, sin
and grace, law and gospel, works and faith ; the meaning of
the Son for the Father, of the Father for the world ; the signi
ficance of the Word for God and His work for men. Religious
thought has become more legal and less ethical ; a new emphasis
falls on knowledge ; the antithesis to the Old Testament is lost,
and its ceremonial ideas are seen, disguised as to form but un
changed as to essence, returning to power. The heresies are
different, and so are the orthodoxies. The relation of God to
the world, of spirit to matter, of the Fall and Redemption, of
the beginning, course, and end of the world, are, within as
1 In measuring in the region of theology the difference between the
Apostolic and sub-Apostolic age, two standards must be employed — the
quality of the thought that is absent, and the inadequate character of what
is present. Each has a different yet complementary significance. What
is absent shows how the new mind had failed to grasp not only the whole
truth,. but even some of its most fundamental principles ; what is present
shows that what it did grasp it did not fully understand. This concerns
e.g., such matters as the Pauline doctrines of sin and death (i Clem. iii. 4,
cf. iv.), faith and justification (i Clem, xxxii 4, cf. x.-xil ; Hermas Sim.
V. 3. 1-2-3). The person of Christ and the Holy Spirit are identified
(Hermas Sim., ix. I. I : cf. 12. i, 2 ; v. 2 ff.). The kingdom of God is made
more future and less ethical, and God is conceived in a manner more Judaic
than Christian.

THEIR DIFFERENCES AND AGREEMENTS. 57
without the Church, conceived from a new standpoint, and
determined in the light of other principles. Speaking broadly,
we may say, from the intellectual point of view the men have
hardly begun to understand the alphabet of the religion ;
their world is smaller, meaner, emptier, than the Apostolic, is
in relation to it neither a development nor a decline, but
rather a thing of another order — the first endeavour of the
child-mind to understand the truth. The men are not yet
prepared to know the religion. They excellently illustrate
the influence of tradition without Scripture, and the inability
of an undisciplined and inchoate Christian consciousness to
interpret Christ.

CHAPTER III.
NEW FACTORS AND NEW LINES OF
DEVELOPMENT.
OUR discussions, so far as they have proceeded, have
helped to determine some positions of primary
importance. First, ecclesiastical development, especially as
concerns thought or doctrine, does not begin at the point
where the New Testament leaves us, but, as it were, behind
and outside it — from tradition, the oral Gospel, the narration'
and exposition, often inadequate and ill-understood, of the
wandering prophet.* Secondly, since the men who received
the tradition mostly differed in tongue, mind, ancestry, moral
and religious inheritance, from the men who delivered it, the
change of hands could not but involve some change of mean
ing. Thirdly, this change was made the more serious by the
fact that the Scriptures through which the new men inter
preted the tradition, were mainly those of the Old Testament.
It is curious but significant that the orthodox and heretical
tendencies were here the exact converse of each other ; while
the latter discredited and dismissed the Old Testament and
made their appeal to the New, the former did not so much
co-ordinate the two as subordinate the later to thc earlier
Scriptures, reconveying the legal spirit and idea of the one
into the other. We may say, then, that the thought of the
ancient Church starts rather from the vulgar than from the
Apostolic mind, and so far as it can be placed in relation
1 •' Didache," xi.
58

GRECO-ROMAN FACTORS OF CHANGE. 59
to the latter is rather a mirror of difference than a
point in a line of continuous development. But the full
significance of these positions will appear more in the next
stage of the discussion — viz., the study of the modified
organism and the new environment in their reciprocal and
evolutionary action By the modified organism is meant
the Christian society as affected by those changes in its
conditions, which have been already indicated ; by the new
environment, the Greco-Roman world into which it had
come. The factors of evolution are, so far as they belong
to the former, internal, to the latter, external, but their force
is due to their relation and interdependence, not to their
isolation.
§ I. — The New Factors.
The most potent external factors may be reduced to three :
Greek Philosophy, Roman Polity, and Popular Religion.
I. The philosophy, though Greek in origin and largely
also in form, was yet varied both in distribution and in cha
racter. Eclecticism was then as distinctive of philosophy as
syncretism of religion, and its materials were selected not
simply from philosophical but also from religious or hieratic
systems. In Asia Minor dualisms or theosophies which had
filtered from the farther East, or spontaneously developed
upon the congenial soil, assumed forms at once intellectual and
religious, and became (a) philosophies like the neo-Pythagorean,
ecstatic, theosophic, miraculous, penetrated with the true
Oriental spirit of sensuous asceticism and speculative licence ;
or (/S) mixed systems of thought and ritual like Gnosticism,
dualisms through and through, societies of the initiated divid
ing themselves by their Gnosis from the vulgar crowd, and
God from the world by a multitude of personalized abstrac
tions, by charms protecting themselves from matter, and by
.(Eons protecting God ; or (7) religious doctrines like Mani
cheism, which attempted in the manner of the Zoroastrian

6o PHILOSOPHY, POLITY, AND RELIGION
faith to solve our intellectual and moral difficulties by the
theory of rival deities.* In Alexandria three great tendencies
met : (a) the Egyptian, with its rich and complex symbolism,
its hieroglyphic and hieratic language, its esoteric thought
and ancient priesthood ; (/3) the Jewish, with its theistic
passion and large outlook upon nature and history ; and
(7) the Greek, with its constructive temper, scientific method,
literary education and genius. Here philosophy became
neo-Platonic, possessed of the imaginative idealism which
loves to find nature symbolical and history an allegory, yet
cosmopolitan, eclectic, construing Greek speculation through
Egyptian mysticism, and finding in Hebrew monotheism
the unifying and determinative principle. In Rome and the
West Stoicism reigned, and by its help the ideal man was
studied, virtue cultivated, law magnified, the State made to
experience a sort of apotheosis. The elevated Pantheism
that was its speculative basis was so conceived as to deify
the Empire and make worship of the Emperor a reasonable
service. Thought in all its forms was as active as in the
palmiest days of the Academy, but it was without the old
lucid serenity ; it had become, save in the case of the nobler
Stoics, feverish, sophistic, mystic, curious to know the beliefs
and try the ways of other times and other peoples.
2. While such was the philosophy, the polity was Roman in
the widest sense, imperial, provincial, municipal, social, and
industrial — i.e., the polity of the Empire as a whole, of its
several parts, though as modified by the whole, of the cities
that even when they had become Roman did not cease to
be Greek or Greco-Syrian or African, of the peoples and
classes who endeavoured to preserve their nationalities,
' Of course this refers to the earlier Gnostic schools and the sources of
the elements they compounded. Later the chief seat of their activity
was Alexandria. Cf. Lipsius, " Der Gnosticismus," pp. 105 ff. ; Baur,
" Manichaische Religionssys.," pp. 404-493. As to the neo- Pythagoreans,
there is an interesting discussion in R6ville, " La Religion k Rome sous
les SSvferes," pt. il

BEGIN TO ACT ON CHRISTIANITY. 6 1
protect their rights, husband and distribute their resources
within the limits of the Roman law, provincial and imperial.
With the actual and organised polity must also be taken the
theoretical, the philosophical interpretation and expansion of
the law which was so characteristic of the Roman jurists.
3. The popular religion was the system of worship which
anywhere prevailed, whether as public or private, an affair
of the city and temple and priesthood, or of the home and
the mysteries. The period was a period of syncretism ; the
universalism of the Empire had resulted in a mixture of all
its religions ; the old deities lived no more within their ancient
limits ; the gods of Egypt and Syria, of Phrygia and Persia,
of East and West, invaded Rome, and in their train came
their respective worships.* In the sphere of religion a sort
of assimilative or encyclopaedic frenzy was abroad, and
men and cities did not feel happy or safe unless they had
offered hospitality to some of the many migrating deities.
Now, Christianity could not live amid these varied forces
or tendencies, and remain unaffected by them. Each became
a factor of distinct yet parallel lines of thought, — philosophy
affected doctrine ; polity, organization and thought ; religion,
cultus. Ancient philosophy passed into theology ; Roman
polity survived in an ecclesiastical, which was too wise to
disguise its true descent ; and the old religions were per
petuated in the new worship. Yet they did not all operate
with equal or uniform force within the same areas. The
theological development was most active within what had
been the home of philosophy, the countries of Greek speech
and blood ; the political was at first richest in Syria,'-* but
' R6ville, " La Religion a Rome sous les Sfiveres," pt. i.
' For the irregular distribution in the growth of episcopacy, see Light
foot's essay on "The Christian Ministry," 206 ff His examination of the
causes of its early development in Syria and Asia Minor seems inadequate
and partial. The tendency had rather a common and native than a personal
origin, and the persons involved are, save in one case, little better than
mythical.

62 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY :
was later perfected in the West, mainly in and through
Rome ; the religious was more uniform in its operations,
though as varied in its elements as were the cults within the
Empire. These factors did not indeed in any sense generate
the life of the society, but they determined the forms that its
life assumed. In their collective and correlated action they
by a twofold process secured its naturalization as a citizen of
the world — a process, on the one hand, of interpenetration,
and, on the other, of mediation and reconcilement. It is the
one because the other ; the old and the new faiths inter
penetrate that the new religion may the better win and
master the ancient mind. Catholicism is the interpretation
of the Christian idea in the terms and through the associa
tions of the ancient world, and as such represents on the
largest scale the continuity of religion in history. Its work
was a needed work, for man is incapable of transitions at
once sudden and absolute ; the construction of Christianity
through the media of the older philosophies and religions
was a necessary prelude to its construction by a spirit and
through a consciousness of its own creation. The absolute
ideal had, in order to be intelligible, to use constituted and
familiar vehicles, but only that it might win the opportunity
of fashioning vehicles worthier of its nature and fitter for
its end.

§ II.— Ancient Philosophy and Theology.
But " factor " is a very ambiguous and elastic term, and so
it may be as well here to define the idea it is meant to
denote. This can best be done by the discussion of the
concrete question. In what sense can Greek philosophy be
described as a factor of Christian theology? Theology is
the universe construed through the idea of God ; philosophy
is the universe construed through the idea of man, but man
as mind. Theology is as necessary to faith as philosophy

HOW RELATED AND HOW DISTINGUISHED. 63
to reason. If a man asks. Why and what am I and my
universe ? the result is a philosophy ; if a man or society
asks. What does the truth we believe mean? the result is
a theology. Each is a science of being, but the highest
constructive principle of the science is in the one case the
thought or consciousness of the thinker ; in the other, it
is his highest and most necessary idea. The standpoint ip in
philosophy subjective, a particular reason is made determina
tive of the universal, the means by which truth is to be
discovered and explicated ; the standpoint in theology is
objective, a universal intelligence is made the explanation of
the intelligible world with all its intellects and all their
mysteries. This distinction shows at once their difference
and their relation. They differ because theology starts with
an idea which philosophy has to discover and define ; but
they are related because, while all the problems of theology
do not emerge in philosophy, all those of philosophy emerge
in theology, though in a different order and from a changed
point of view.
Now, the relations of Greek philosophy and Christian
theology illustrate this distinction. These relations were
both historical and material. In history the philosophy
preceded the theology ; the century that saw the one begin
to be saw the other cease from being. In a sense ancient
philosophy died into theology, and for centuries all the life
it had was in this form and under this name. The last of
the Greek philosophers were theologians, Plotinus, Porphyry,
and Proclus quite as much as Clement, Origen, and Dionysius.
But the change in name implied a change in the thing named.
The new theology was not the old philosophy, nor can the
one be stated in the terms of the other and yet remain the
same. The cause of the difference was this : beside Greek
philosophy as an external factor of theology two internal
factors must be placed — Hebrew religion and Christian
history. The philosophy determined all that was formal in

64 HEBREW RELIGION CHANGES
the problems to be solved, and supplied the speculative
faculty, the dialectical temper, the logical and evidential
method, and the scholastic terminology, needed for their
solution. The religion gave the material theistic ideas, the
historical perspective required for their concrete being, and
the literature by which they could be illustrated and verified.
Th^ history furnished the Person and events which alone
could, by being interpreted, interpret the ideas and turn the
highest of all theological into the most fundamental of all
philosophical questions. It was by virtue of the reigious
and historical factors that the new theology differed from the
ancient philosophy.
The action of Hebrew religion was the earlier and pre
paratory, qualifying philosophy for the new work it had to
do. The philosophies that had owed their being to the
Greek genius were made in the image of Greek man, but
even he had too narrow a humanity behind and around as
well as within him to be just to man universal, and so his
systems had feeling enough for the Hellenic individual and
State, but not for mankind, collective and historical. They
were too appreciative of the philosophers who ought to
govern to be just to the manhood which needed government.
They started outside religion, and became religious only by
force of reason and in its terms. Their theistic conception
was metaphysical rather than ethical, never even in its
ethics transcending metaphysics, ever remaining an object
of contemplation or thought, never becoming an object of
worship and conscience. In other words, the Deity was
reached through subjective criticism, and had all the qualities
of an objectified idea. He was more impersonal than per
sonal, a regulative notion rather than a conscious reason and
an active will. This was equally true whether the Divine
was with Plato conceived under the form of the Good or
the True, or with Aristotle, of the End or the Reason, or with
the Stoic, of Law or the immanent Order. The universe

PHILOSOPHY INTO THEOLOGY. 65
interpreted was in a sense as limited as the interpreting
manhood. Now, to this most specifically Greek philosophy
Hebrew religion came, and by filling it with the idea of a
living God gave it a larger life, a nobler and vaster outlook.
This God was what no Greek deity, so far forth as a
religious being, had been conceived to be — the creator of all
things, the ruler of all men. He was no pale abstraction or
personalized idea, but a conscious will which moved in all
things and lived in all, one and personal, ethical and infinite.
The man who brought the two together was Philo. As a
philosopher he cannot be compared with Plato, but for the
history of religion and religious thought he is even more
important. Two streams meet in him, and flow henceforth
in a common bed. From the moment that he attempted to
unite Israel and Greece, Moses and Plato, the prophets and
the philosophers, a new goal was set before the reason, and
philosophy struggled towards theology. The men who came
after him were not as the men who went before ; he made
neo-Platonic and Christian speculation alike possible, and
these two agree in the very point that distinguishes both from
the older Platonism ; it was a philosophy, they are theologies.
And just where they agree, and because of their agreement,
modern is different from ancient thought. God holds a place
in all systems subsequent to Philo such as He had never
held in those prior to him. And this point of distinction
is a sign of pre-eminence. For the thinker who seeks tp
construe man and history through the idea of the one moral
and personal Deity, attempts a grander and more rational
problem than is possible to him who would read the universe
through even Hellenic man. For the universe must be so
conceived as to be worthy of its God, the God so conceived
as to be equal to all the needs of His universe. Where He
runs through all history, its periods must exhibit reason and
law. Where He is equally related to all men they must all
be equal in lowliness and in dignity before Him. In their
S

66 THEOLOGY GROWS LESS TRADITIONAL,
very differences they must be akin, all their truths and all
their religions be of Him and through Him. All is sublimer
and vaster interpreted through a universal God than through
the Greek ideal of man, sublime though it be.
§ III.— Christian History and Theology.
But while Hebrew religion enlarged and enriched all the
problems of philosophy, the Christian history made them
much more concrete, imperious, and acute. This history
must be understood to mean both the creative Person and
the sacred literature which described at once His actual being
and ideal significance. It is necessary to emphasize the place
of this literature ; the rise of a coherent and comprehensive
theology was coincident with its recognition and a symbol
of its function and power. The remarkable phenomena that
meet us at the beginning of the second century, before
the literature, as distinct from tradition, had made its
collective appeal to mind, continue into the middle and
even towards the end. Apostolic Christianity is not appre
hended as a whole, and so far as its parts are apprehended
they are apprehended only in part. It has all the defects of
an apprehension attained through tradition and in fragments
by the unprepared and undisciplined mind, unexercised and
uncorrected by the study of a normative sacred literature.
The apologists are not strictly Christian theologians ; their
thought is Christian, they exhibit Christianity in process of
assimilation by philosophical minds, but the last thing that
can be claimed for them is that their theology is Apostolic.
In Justin there is much more of Plato than of Paul ; indeed,
we may say he is often as antipathetic to the one as he is
sympathetic with the other.i But when we come to the end
' There is a careful and judicial discussion of Justin's relation to Paul
in Engelhardt, "Das Christenthum Justin's," pp. 352-369. Cf. exposition
of the opposed views in Ritschl, " Altkath. Kirche," pp. 303 ff. ; and Baur,
"Kirchengesch. der drei erst Jahrhs.," 140, Eng. trans., vol. l, p. 147.

more BIBLICAL AND ADEQUATE. 67
of the century we find men who have stood face to face
with the Christian history, and endeavoured to construe the
literature. Irenaeus is not a philosopher, but a Biblical theo
logian, the first of the kind, with the Christ and not the
Logos as the centre of his system. Many things had gone
to his making ; he had learned from his early masters how
to love and follow the truth, how to treasure the words of
the holy and the good, from the Gnostics how to value the
intellect in religion, from Marcion how to make a direct
appeal to the Scriptures, yet what to avoid in making this
appeal ; but most of all he had been formed by his study of
the Apostolic mind. He is the earliest example of what has
been illustrated often since — that for the Christian spirit there
is no secret of rejuvenescence like a bath in the original
sources. But tradition enfeebled and obscured his vision.
Though steeped in Paul, and owing to him his noblest and
most characteristic ideas — the avaice(f>a\al(oai,^, the unities
which he opposes to the Gnostic dualisms, the unity of God,
of the person of Christ, of the human race, of history, of
the purpose of God and the plan of salvation, of the Church
— yet he often misses or fails to read aright the Apostle's
mind, or even quite perverts it.* Tertullian and Clement, each
in his own way, illustrate the same truth, but Origen more
than either. He is a Christian thinker because a Biblical
scholar. With him constructive theology begins to be, and
it was but fit that the most learned of all the Fathers should
" Proof of this position would require a more detailed exposition than is
here possible, but the points we should emphasize are these : — What we
may term the residuary dualism which, in spite of his loved unities, still
works within his theistic conception, his whole doctrine of the devil, with
his established and, as it were, recognized place over against God, and
the consequent external and adventitious doctrines of sin and redemption ;
the related legalism in his conception of the Gospel, which makes it not so
much a fulfllment as an enlargement and republication of law, involving a
most unapostolic prominence to the institutional as distinguished from the
fiduciary element in Christianity ; his views as to forgiveness and grace, his
tendency through inadequate appreciation of what they mean to de-ethicize

68 THE PROBLEMS OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY
also be the first systematic theologian and the source of the
most fruitful ideas in Greek patristic thought.
Now, this Christian history was transacted, as it were,
within the Hebrew religion, and incorporated its most funda
mental ideas ; nay, appeared as its historical end and final
cause. As such it came to the philosophy which had already
become theological, demanding to be interpreted and ex
plained. But to attempt this was to read the universe and
all its mysteries from an entirely new point of view. Here
was Christ born as all men are, said to be the Son of
man, yet no man's son. Son of God, second Adam, source
of a new race, Saviour of men, — how, then, was He to be
conceived alike as regards His nature, His person, and His
relation to God and man? Two things were necessary:
His person must be held a historical reality, and must be
so construed as to make God more real, living, credible,
than He had been either in Greek philosophy or Hebrew
religion. The history could not be allegorized or the Person
evaporated into a semblance, resolved into a phantasm
of the imagination or a freak of nature. Allegory was well
known to the current philosophies, especially the Stoic and
neo-Platonic. By its help the most offensive incidents in
the ancient mythologies had become symbolical of hidden
sciences or rarest moral wisdom. Philo had known it, and
so used it as to bring out of the Mosaic histories the philoso
phies of Greece. The Christian Fathers followed the fashion
of their day, and found both history and nature rich in
allegory and ideal symbolisms. But they could not use this
pievailing fashion to turn their sacred history into vehicles
the great Pauline ideas, and by emphasizing the accidents to lose the very
essence of the avaKecpaXalcoa-is. If we regard his historical position and
function, we must speak of his importance in very bold and clear terms ;
but he is in the history of doctrine simply a scholar who has with mingled
success and failure tried to take up a dropped line of development. Cf. the
monograph of Werner (which is, however, rather one-sided and so unjust),
"Der Paulinismus des Irenaeus," in Te^rie u-nd Untersch,, vol. vi., and
Lipsius, '.' Irenaeus," in Dictiona-ry of Christian Biography.

CREATE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 69
for their own too luxuriant ideas. If the Person was not real,
reality could not belong to anything He did or said ; but if
He was real, then His history must be the same. The reality
of the Person and the integrity of the history thus stood
together as complementary and co-essential elements of the
truth. But neither the Person nor His history could be, as it
were, cut out of the bosom of humanity. As the Son of man
His roots were in the whole past of man collective ; as
Creator and Head of the new mankind His branches must
reach into all the future ; as Son of God His organic relations
to all the universe were completed by relations to the God
whose Son He was.
Now, out of this history with its necessary implications came
a multitude of problems, subtler, more penetrating, more
masterful, charged with more vital moral energy and meta
physical meaning than any ancient philosophy had known.
If God had a Son, in what sense was the Son Son, and God
Father? Did the Son begin to be? If He did not, then is
He not the equal of the Father and as old as "He ? How,
then, can He be Son any more ? And does His necessary and
eternal being mean that we have two Gods and not simply one ?
But if He did begin to be, then He must have been created ;
and how do Son and creature, or Sonship and creation, differ ?
Then, if He had necessary being with God, yet became man,
did not this place God in organic relations with man collec
tive as he lived his life in all times and all places. If
God's Son was part of this race— rooted in its past, living in
a recent present, creating its future — then to this race God
must be bound. He in some sense also its Father, it in some
sense His Son. If one who had lived as Son of man was yet
Son of God, then how were God and man related ? in what
sense were they akin ? in what sense different ? Are all the
sons of men, as was this Son of man, sons of God ? And if
they differ, can they belong to the same orders of being — He
man as they are men, or they as He is ? Then does not an

•JO THE QUESTIONS OF TWO KINDS.
organic relation of God to the race imply that the race is
an organism with its every unit connected with every other,
and all with its Father or Head? If God and the Son of
God are thus connected with the race, what is their relation to
evil ? how has it come to be ? how is its being to be ended ?
And what is the relation to it of the organism as a whole
and of all its several units? What was man's primary,
what is to be his ultimate relation to the Father? And as
regards these relations, what function has the Son and His
being in time ?
Such were some of the questions raised by the Christian
history, and it would be hard to find in the whole realm of
thought problems at once more essentially philosophical
or more vitally theological. They fall into two classes :
those specially concerned with God, the Son of God, His
relation to God and man, the constituents and function
of His person ; and those specially concerned with man,
as a unit and as a race, his relation, individual and collective,
to God, to sin, and to salvation. The former were ques
tions in theology, and became the distinctive problems of
the Greek Church ; the latter were questions in anthropology,
and became the problems characteristic of the Latin. The
choice was not accidental, nor without a reason in history.
The theology found its organon in Greek metaphysics,
especially as then cultivated in the eclectic schools, and
continued under new relations problems they had for cen
turies discussed ; the anthropology had in Roman law,
qualified and interpreted by Stoicism, its fit formative
medium.

CHAPTER IV.
THE GREEK MIND AND THEOLOGY.
§ I. — Two Minds and Two Churches.
THE distinction just indicated is of significance enough
to justify more detailed discussion. It will help us
the better to understand the persistence of the classical in the
Christian mind, and show how through the former the latter
achieved some of its most characteristic results. Thought
was as active in the West as in the East, but had other
interests and other objects, and, as a consequence, other
forms. Law was distinctive of the Latin and philosophy of
the Greek people ; the great jurists were as typical of Rome
as the great philosophers were typical of Greece. All the
philosophy of the West was derivative. The most original
Latin philosopher was the poet who
" denied
Divinely the Divine,''
but Lucretius was only the expositor of the Graius homo
he so splendidly praised. The philosophy that may with
best reason be described as native to the Romans was
Stoicism ; but though it had a quite specific character of its
own, yet it was not a native or even a naturalized Roman
philosophy. With Seneca it was more a literary habit, a
mental tendency, a means for the cultivation of character than
a reasoned system ; it is in its ethical tone and form, not
in its intellectual contents, that it has affinity with Paul's.

72 GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND ROMAN LAW
With Marcus Aurelius it was Greek in form and source,
though Roman in spirit ; and of Epictetus we may say the
same. But in law Rome is easily pre-eminent, and the
jurist has his golden age in the second and third centuries
of our era. His jurisprudence, indeed, is not simply positive
and consuetudinary, but is penetrated and organized by great
ideas, illumined, as it were, by the light of nature. Law is
not simply the arbitrary and the conventional, but is what
is always and everywhere equal and good. To know it is
to know things Divine and human, just and unjust, the order
constituted of nature among men. The jurists have thus under
their law a philosophy, and through this philosophy they seek
to read and interpret the law. They stand, indeed, upon the
actual, the positive, the instituted, but labour to bring it into
harmony with the ideal. Yet their nature is the nature
of the jurist ; they do not escape his categories. The function
of all abstract right is to create right institutions ; the state
organized according to a Divine idea is the ultimate achieve
ment of Divine wisdom. The quest, then, of the jurist is
order, as of the philosopher truth ; what thought is to the
one, institutions are to the other. If the philosopher touches
law, it is that he may incorporate an idea ; if the jurist
appeals to philosophy, it is that he may vindicate or inter
pret law. What the one seeks is the interpretation of man
and his universe ; what the other seeks is the creation of
a well-ordered state, with all the relations of man to man
regulated by just la:ws justly interpreted.
Now, the contrast between Greek philosophy and Roman
law is repeated and reflected in the contrast, which is a
commonplace of history, between the Greek and Latin, or
Eastern and Western, Churches. Each by its very name
bears witness to the supremacy of the special factor that
formed it. The one is Orthodox, the other Catholic ; the
note of the first is its theological truth, of the second
its imperial and continuous and comprehensive polity, ever

IN THE GREEK AND ROMAN CHURCH. 73
enlarged and actualized by an ever-living law, because a law
ever anew interpreted. The genius that made philosophy
the creation of cla.ssical Greece made theology the deter
minative basis of the Greek Church. The political strength
and capacity that gave to Rome the sovereignty of
the world, the juridical and forensic genius that made its
law almost ideal, developed the Roman Church into the
Catholic. Each became what it did through the past it
inherited. Without the philosophers the Eastern Church
would never have had her theologians ; without the Csesars
and their jurists the Western Church would never have
had her popes and canonists. It was but natural that
men who had the Greek mind or who had come under its
influence should construe Christianity through the categories
of the reason, and feel its fitness, as it were, for intellectual
manipulation, its capability of being formulated in the terms
of the intellect. And it was no less natural that men who
had the Roman mind, or had been made in its image and
inured into its ambitions and ideals, should see in Chris
tianity a new state, a new form of empire, a new method
of authority and rule. Though these are different, yet they
are not opposites ; nor do they exclude each other. Theo
logical ideas could not live or be formulated and enforced
without a polity ; the polity could not be a coherent and
living whole unless filled and organized by an idea. But
in each case the determinative principle was different — in
the one case a theology, in the other a polity. In the East
the Church is to be obeyed and believed because she
teaches the truth ; in the West the truth or doctrine is to
be believed because defined, delivered, and authenticated
by the Church. The contrast affects the very form and
quality of the doctrines. The system native to the Greek
Church is a doctrine of God and the Godhead ; but the
system native to the Latin is a doctrine of man, his state
and constitution, his relations and duties, government and

74 CONTRAST OF THOUGHT AND SYSTEM,
responsibilities, individual and collective, all forensically con
strued. The Eastern theology was accepted by the West,
but with a modification or change (the filioque') which showed
its feebler metaphysical ability and lower speculative stand
point ; the Western anthropology was never accepted by the
East, and was to it, because of its abiding though weakened
Hellenic ideal of man and the city or state, not only alien,
but incredible. In soteriology the Greek notion was meta
physical and personal, and so found its centre and symbol
in the Incarnation ; but the Latin was legal and forensic,
and .so emphasized justification and atonement, or the Incar
nation so far as it made more possible the apotheosis of the
Church and its Sacraments. The former was the direct
result of the relations between God and man being conceived
in the terms of a philosophy, with its metaphysical categories ;
the latter was due to these same relations being construed
in the terms of a polity, with its principles of civil and
criminal jurisprudence. These differences, then, are neither
superficial nor accidental, but are fundamental and real, due
to causes that are as old as Greece and as Rome. They
do not belong to the religion that came to the men, but
to the men who came to the religion, and who made it
a continuation in the one case of the thought they inherited,
in the other of their realized polity and idealized law.
§ II. — The Greek and Latin Fathers.
But there was between East and West a contrast of person
ality and character no less than of thought and system. The
great Fathers of the East were theologians, men who dealt with
the facts and ideas of their faith in the method of the philo
sopher and in the terms of the schools. The great Fathers of
the West were jurists or statesmen, men who looked at their
faith through the associations and ideals of a society governed
by constituted authorities, settled customs and formal laws,

AND OF PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER. 75
This does not mean that the Greek mind was philosophical
but not practical, the Latin practical but not philosophical — a
position that may be so construed as to be either a superficial
truth or a fundamental falsehood — for in Augustine or even
in Tertullian there is as much philosophy as in any Greek
Father, while in pre-eminence and intellectual influence they
have no rival in the East, unless indeed it be the heretical
Origen. But it means this — that the constructive ideas of the
Greek Fathers were metaphysical, of the Latin political and
juristic. Thus with the Greek apologists as a whole Chris.
tianity was fitted into a framework of Hellenic and Hellenistic
speculation, and dealt with as if it were a philosophy which
differed from all other philosophies only in being revealed, and
so truer to reason. Aristides, Justin, Athenagoras, did not
leave off either the garb or the name or the function of the
philosopher.* The natural parallel of Christ was Socrates,
who was indeed a Christian before Him.^ Pantsenus, the first
known head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, was
educated in Stoicism.' His disciple and successor, Clement,
sees in philosophy the preparation for Christ, holds the truth
he has received to be the true philosophy, and finds perfection
in knowledge rather than faith.* Origen was a scholar of
Clement, and a hearer of Ammonius, and educated in Greek
studies,* and the vivid picture of him as a master which we
owe to the love of a pupil shows him forbidding no subject,
keeping none hidden and inaccessible, that he might the
better lead through heathen to Christian philosophy."
Heraclas and Dionysius, who succeeded Origen in the
school, were one with him in mind and spirit. Athanasius
1 Aristides, " Apol," inscr.; Justin, "Dial," iff. ; "Apol," 11. 13; Tatian
" Orat," 31, 32, 35, 40.
« Justin, "Apol," II. 10, I. 46.
' Euseb., v. 10, cf. vi. 19.
* Strom., i. 5, §§ 28, 32; iv. 21-23; vi. 14, § ii4; 15. §§ 115-123.
' Euseb., vi. 18, 19, cf. 14.
' Greg. Thaum., " Orat. de Orig," vi.-xv.

y6 THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE JURIST :
had carefully studied " Plato and the Greek philosophers in
general," and his earliest book recalls "not in form but
in essence the Platonic dialogue."* The eloquence of Basil
and Chrysostom shows the influence of their common master
Libanius, while the School of Athens left its mark on the
minds of Basil and his friend Gregory.^ The ApoUinares,
elder and younger, studied under Epiphanius of Petra, and
were excommunicated in consequence, some holding pagan
philosophy injurious to true religion.' Theodore of Mop
suestia was also a pupil of Libanius, and educated in rhetoric
and philosophy.* The neo-Platonism of Synesius is, to say
the least, as real as his Christianity, while it was not without
influence on the asceticism of Isidore of Pelusium. Indeed,
of the Greek Fathers as a whole we may say that the
influence of their schools, with their opposed metaphysics,
psychologies, ethics, can be quite distinctly traced in all
their controversies. Dogma in their hands assumes its true
philosophical sense, definition is made to play the same part
in regard to it and to knowledge as in the philosophical sects,
and theology is as much concerned with right thinking as
ever philosophy had been.
The Latin Fathers stand in these respects in marked con
trast to the Greek. Tertullian, though he becomes a Christian,
yet remains in thought and feeling a Roman lawyer ; he
loves his religion because it is so unlike philosophy, and can
speak with so much authority. The more this authority
insulted the pride of reason the more he loved it ; " credibile
est, quia ineptum est; certum est, quia impossibile est."'
Minucius Felix was an " insignis causidicus Romani fori," *
' Moehler, " Athanasius der Grosse," p. loB.
* Greg. Naz., " Orat.," xx.
' Socrates, ii. 46, cf. iii. 16 ; Sozomen, vi. 25.
* Sozomen, viii. 2.
5 " De Carne Christi," 5. The " credo quia absurdum " does not occur in
Tertullian, though he had moods when it would have expressed his mind.
^ Jerome, "DeVir. lUust," Iviii. ; Lact, "Inst.," v. i.

EACH CHARACTERISTIC OF HIS CHURCH. JJ
and his Octavius shows us how empty the Roman concep
tion of Christianity is unless clothed in institutional forms.'
Callistus, whatever view we may take of Hippolytus' nar
rative,'' has no claim to remembrance save as a man of
political and practical gifts. Cyprian, orator and teacher
of rhetoric, has the mind of a Roman patrician, and is a
statesman and administrator, one we can only describe as
the first prince of the Church, which to him, as to all
princes, was not an eicicK-rjffia, but a civitas. Hosius is the
typical diplomatic bishop, active in councils and courts, but
represented in literature by a solitary letter to an emperor.'
Ambrose was the son of a Roman prsefect, and was himself
a lawyer and magistrate before he became a bishop. The
class of orators, whose training and models were as distinctly
legal and forensic as those of the corresponding class in
Greece were literary and philosophical, furnished the names of
Arnobius, Lactantius, Victorinus Afer, and, though he trans
cends all such categories, Augustine ; yet he may be cited
as the palmary example of the philosophic mind governed
by the political idea. The Hilaries, of Poictiers and of Aries,
were intended for secular life, and only later assumed
ecclesiastical office. Leo the Great does not seem to have
been trained in the heathen philosophies or literatures, while
Gregory the Great was by his legal studies educated for his
senatorial rank and duties.
Thus, then, in the Fathers of the Church the characteristics
of East and West appear — the Greek with his literary and
philosophical ambitions, the Latin with his forensic and
political. The sacred literature of the East finds its ante
cedents and models in the schools of the rhetors, of the
' The Octavius has this interest for us : it is the nearest Western
parallel to the Greek apologies, but its point of distinction from them is
its deficiency in all specifically Christian elements. See Kiihn, Inaugural
Dissertation, "Der Octavius des Minucius Felix" (Leipzig, 1882).
» "Refut. Omn. Haeres.," ix. II ff.
' Cf. Athanasius, "Hist. Arianor.," 44.

78 THE THEOLOGY OF THE GREEK CHURCH.
West in the eloquence of the forum and the bar. The
sophist loved to distinguish himself by his skill in handling
the subtleties of logic and thought, but the orator by his
ability so to argue a cause, real or imaginary, as to gain a
verdict. And in each case there survived in the new subject
the old method with all its categories, making the new spirit
work within the forms created by the old.
§ III. — The Greek Theology.
The theology of the Greek Church may, then, be described
as the last characteristic creation of the Greek genius. It
had as natural a genesis as the philosophy in which it was
rooted and out of which it grew. The Hebrew religion and
the Christian history would not of themselves have sufficed
to beget or evoke this theology. Without the Greek mind
with its speculative achievements and capabilities it could not
have been ; with this mind, and because of it, the theology
could not but be. Philosophy had come to be of the very
essence of the Greek spirit ; to it the question was a thing
of nature, the cultivation of centuries had trained it to inquire,
to speculate, to seek causes, to discover ends, or examine
and determine means — in a word, to philosophize. It had
tried many lines of thought, had vigorously developed single
principles into elaborate systems, and now in despair of truth
from any one school was seeking it by combining elements
from all. In its earliest speculative period it had attempted
to explain nature in natural terms, but did not find that
nature grew more intelligible by water or air, fire or atoms,
being made the mother of all things. Anaxagoras had come,
" the sober man among drunkards," and bidden reason mix the
elements ; and then Socrates had collected the evidence of its
action, Plato had speculated as to the creative relation of the
permanent and ideal to the transitory and real, Aristotle had
tried to discover an intelligible order within the actual, a reason

THE CREATION OF THE GREEK GENIUS. 79
and an end that, unmoved, moved all things. The philosophy
that had begun as an attempt to explain nature had cul
minated in the attempt to formulate the notion of its cause.
And precisely at this point was found its supreme difficulty,
yet imperious necessity ; for it was by the attempt to formu
late this conception that the successive Greek philosophies
had lived, and, failing, had died. And the difficulty was
not lessened but rather increased by Hebrew religion and
the Christian history, while the necessity was made more
imperious. God indeed was not now to be reached through
nature; rather thought was to start with Him, and nature was
to be read through God and God through the history ; but
what did this mean save that a new theology, a science of
God through the history and a science of the universe through
God, must be attempted? But did not such a theology
already exist in the sacred literature? True, a theology was
there, but it wanted adaptation or relation to the new mind.
It lived in an element of emotion, of spiritual apprehension,
of religious reminiscence and association that had not yet
become native to the Gentile Christian. God was presented
as a religious idea, but the demand was for a scientific
conception. The minds that made the New Testament were
penetrated with Him ; they lived and thought as in His
presence ; they had no difficulty in conceiving His relation to
them or theirs to Him, or in believing that He was the personal
Creator, Sovereign, Father of men ; in a word, their God was
religious, not metaphysical, revealed in the sweet light of faith,
not hidden in the dark definitions of the schools. But to
the Greek mind God, as distinguished from the gods, was
primarily metaphysical ; He was Being, abstract and infinite,
found and defined by thought, at once its supreme necessity
and difficulty. Without Him an intelligible world could not
be conceived ; but then it was even harder to conceive how He
as infinite could be related to the finite, as perfect could be
in contact with evil, as above all time and space, and yet

80 THE THEOLOGY CONTINUES, COMPLETES,
existing in their forms and under their categories. To the
two minds God was a very different being ; the difficulty of
the Apostolic mind was how to do without Him, the difficulty
of the Greek mind was how to bring Him into the terms
of a rational and coherent conception. And the difficulty
was enormously increased by the new elements which the
Christian history had introduced ; yet how could this history
be believed unless it could be so construed as to leave God
intelligible to an intelligence made by centuries of speculation
a sort of organized yet automatic metaphysic? and how
could God be invested with religious significance unless by
being, as it were, vitalized and transfigured by this history ?
The scientific character, then, and antecedents of the Greek
mind were such that a scientific theology was necessary to it
and necessary in proportion to its very difficulty. If God was
to live in faith. He must be made to live, intelligible and
reasonable, for thought, in harmony with the history on the
one hand, and nature and man on the other. Certain things
were in limine evident. He must remain sole, sovereign,
one, neither multiplied nor lowered nor divided. No return
to the mythological deities was possible ; they were only
personalized forces or passions, mixed in nature, promiscuous
in intercourse, with an innumerable progeny, here of gods, there
of men. Nor must there be any return to the old Judaic
Deism ; there God and the world were so divided that it in
a sense perished in His presence and lived only by His will.
As a monotheism it was cancelled by the political restrictions
of the religion — for a God limited to a single people cannot be
the only God — and as a theism it was denied by the absence
of all recognition as to any organic relation between God and
man. If, now, Christian thought could neither fall back into a
kind of classical mythology allegorically construed, nor into
a Judaic Deism, which would have dissolved or negatived
all the real or characteristic elements in its own history, then
there remained for it only a third course— it must advance to

AND REFLECTS GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 8 1
such a new conception of Deity as would enable it to main
tain His unity, yet His organic connection with man as
Sovereign, Saviour, and Judge. And the only way in which
this advance could be made was by the old dialectic, the
use of the old logical instrument and means. The result was
the formation of those doctrines of the Godhead and the
Incarnation which we owe to the speculative genius of the
Greek theologians.
This theology, then, viewed under its formal aspect and in
relation to its formative factors, must be conceived as a
continuation and expansion of Greek philosophy. It is the
attempt of the Greek mind to formulate the new theistic idea,
to construct in its peculiar method and by its distinctive
terminology a reasonable and reasoned theory of the new
material that had come to it as a religion and in a history.
All the phenomena that attend the genesis and formulation
of philosophical theories attend the genesis of this. It comes
into being by a process of development, explicative of the
idea, determinative of the form. The very process that is ex
hibited in the history of Greek philosophy as a whole, and in
each of the great Greek schools, is repeated here. At first
the idea is imperfectly apprehended ; it is mixed with old
yet alien elements ; its meaning and bearings are not dis
tinctly discerned ; then under discussion it grows clearer,
under analysis purer, through experience more vivid and
real. Attempts at formulation break down, now because too
general, now because not general enough, till a special ter
minology is created, and a consensus secured. But out of
the very formulation new questions rise, which divide the
school into sections, each repeating the process till the pos
sibilities of the philosophy are exhausted, and inquiry or
speculation must proceed on other lines to other and more
scientific results. Thus had philosophy developed, and so
did theology now. The theology of the Apostolic Fathers is
mainly one of reminiscence; they repeat what they have heard
6

82 GNOSTICS THE FIRST THEOLOGIANS ;
or read, yet often so as to show that they have either not heard
aright or not fully understood. The Gnostics are the first
theologians ; their speculations are absurd enough as they lie,
unfolded by the hand of the enemy, in the pages of Irenseus
and Hippolytus ; but they had a reason in them which the
Fathers have carefully not allowed us to see. They attempted
to translate the Christian history into an ethical cosmology.
They did not love evil, but they loved God, especially as an
object of speculation, and they laboured so to separate God
from the world as to save Him from all participation in
its evil. All that was of sense was sin, all that was of
spirit was good ; the movement downward to sense was the
fall, the movement upward to spirit was redemption. This
was instituted by the JEon Christ, and in order to do it
He entered into the man Jesus. These two were distinct
and different. Jesus belonged to the world of sense and
suffering, which was evil ; Christ to the realm of spirit and
knowledge, which was good. The theory made the historical
person of Christ unreal, with all its events, especially the
Passion and Death, God an inaccessible monad, existence
a perplexed dualism. Creator, creation and its history all
evil, escape from sense the one real good ; but it showed
the necessity of a constructive doctrine of Christ and
Christianity based on the New Testament, and not simply
on the Old. The Apologists approached the matter from
another side ; they began with the history ; it was real,
veracious, but it was the history of a teacher, the record
of a philosophy, Jesus was the second and perfect Socrates,
giving the truth to man. But their limitations came out
when they attempted to determine His relations to God.
In Him the Logos became flesh, but this Logos was a sort
of cosmologioal principle, a means of mediating in a philo
sophical sense between God as the object and man as the
subject of knowledge, akin to man who participates in Him,
akin to God whom He makes articulate. He was thus needed

THEN APOLOGISTS AND CATHOLIC FATHERS. 83
rather to enable God to do His work and reveal Himself, and
man to find God and know His truth, than to save from sin.
They did not make their monotheism and history so inter
penetrate as to produce a theology of salvation. Irensus,
as became a Biblical theologian, was more soteriological.
Christ is the Son of God, in Him the Divine and human
natures are united ; but he expressly declines to philosophize
as to the relations these terms imply, and leaves us at the
critical point with unrelated and unarticulated ideas. Ter
tullian, who, though Latin, has here great significance for
Greek thought, is bolder ; he sees, as Irenseus had done,
that salvation must be as real as creation, and therefore
the Redeemer must be as Divine as the Creator ; but he
attempts, as Irenseus did not, to formulate a conception of
God which shall reconcile plurality with unity. " Unitas,"
he says, " inrationaliter collecta haeresim facit, et trinitas
rationaliter expensa veritatem constituit" * But when he
comes to expound his Trinity it turns out to be not
essential, but oeconomical, a matter of disposition in order
to administration.^ The Son once was not, is derivative, a
portion of the Divine essence, " secundus a Deo constitutus." ^
But this oltcovofiia or administrative unity seemed a clumsy
expedient ; was it not simpler to say, " God is one ; it is
the same person who now reigns as Father, now suffers
as Son " ? So said the Patripassian ; but does not the One
so construed make the Incarnation impossible, and the
history a semblance, while there can be nothing in God
correspondent to what is realized on earth ? Origen showed
how both the CEconomical and the Patripassian theory
could be transcended. He emphasized the idea of the
Son : it is the distinction of a son to be born of the
essence of the Father ; their relation is a process of gene-
1 "Adv. Prax.," 3.
' Ibid., 2, 3. See infra, p. 99.
' "Adv. Hermog.," 3 ; "Adv. Prax.," 7, 9.

84 LOGICAL EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA.
ration ; and, since here all the categories are infinite, the
process must be eternal.* In this conception there are
these elements : (a) Father and Son both are and are
real ; (^) unity, both are of one essence ; (7) relation, the
one generating, the other generated ; and (S) eternity, the
process ever has been and ever must be. One notion
proper to absolute Deity was absent— the generation was by
the will of the Father, not by necessity of nature, and hence
the Son was ^eo?, or o SevTepo<; 6e6<;, not o ^eo? or avT66eo<;?
" Exactly so," said Arius ; " then once He was not, i.e., before
the Father willed Him to be ; since made by will He is
made out of nothing ; since made out of nothing He is a
creature, dependent, variable, in need of grace to keep Him
from falling." " Nay," replied Athanasius, " if He is a
creature made by will out of nothing, then He is but as we
are : in coming to Him we do not get to God, nor does
God in Him get to us. He is an anomaly, unequal to
creation, unequal to redemption, a mere divisive person,
whose place in the universe is to keep apart God and man.
We must develop and define our idea of the Godhead.
Generation is not a matter of will, but of nature, therefore
of necessity. The Father did not choose to have a Son ;
Fatherhood and Sonship are of the very essence of God ;
without these there were no God. As they are of the Divine
essence and that essence is one, God is one, and the ' persons '
are consubstantial. This unity gives us a single but not
a simple God ; He is complex, manifold, ever has been, ever
must be, a society, a Godhead; within His unity Paternity
and Sonship are immanent, and as such necessities of His
being."' ' " De Prin.," iv. 28 ; Proem, 4.
2 " In Evang. Joh.," tom. ii., §§ 2, 3, vol. i., pp. 92, 93 (Lomm.) ; " Cont
Gels.," V. 39.
' See the two forms of Arius' Confession of Faith in Hahn, " Bibliothek
der Symb. u. Glaubensreg. der alten Kirche," pp. 188-190.

THE TERMS HAVE A HISTORY 85
§ IV.— The Terminology.
As with the thought so with its form ; its terminology
was slowly elaborated, each distinctive term being tried
disputed, rejected, recalled, and finally adopted and adapted'
in a special sense to a special purpose. The conflict of
terms is but a conflict of ideas, the struggle towards adjust
ment of old and new, and by their use or disuse causes
can be discovered, change marked, and growth measured
Thus 71070? has a history in Greek philosophy before it
has a being in Christian theology. Heraclitus and the
Stoics know it as well as the Apocrypha and Philo, and we
must understand its history outside the theology before
we can understand its usage within it. Justin Martyr
differs as much from John as from Athanasius ; his idea is
inchoate, partly philosophical, partly theological ; his ^16709
is a 0eo? ere/ao?,* created yet divine,^ appointed Creator by
the will of God,' existing wholly in Christ, partially or semi-
nally in man ; * He is innate in all, and in Him all partici
pate.* Theophilus contrasts the X6709 ei/Sta^ero? and the \d709
trpocjioptKoi almost exactly in the Stoical manner ; creation,
providence, and prophecy are but the externalization of the
internal Word " In certain writers the idea of the ylo'709 pushes
into the background the idea of the T(09 ; in others the T«o9
eclipses the .46709, and according as the emphasis falls on the
one or on the other, we have a different set of terms or ideas
1 "Dial.," c. 56, vol ii., p. 184 (Otto): cf. "Apol," i. 63. Engelhardt,
" Justin," p. 277, contrasts the attitude of the Dialogue and the Apologies
to this question. Justin, addressing the heathen, shows that a man may be
the Son of God and an object of worship ; but, addressing the Jew, that
there is " another God " beside the one God.
' "Dial," 61, 62, pp. 204.206, 210.
' "Apol," ii. 6; i. 32, 22.
* Ibid., ii. 8, 10; i. 44.
''Ibid,, i. 46; ii. 8, 13.
' " Ad Autol," ii. 10. Cf. Moller, " Kosmologie," pp. 133 ff. ; Drummond,
"Philo Judasus," vol. I, pp. no ff.

86 THE TERMS USED IN THEOLOGY
defining the relation to the Godhead. Ovaia is a term
common to various philosophical schools.* To the Stoics
the universe was but the ovtria of God ^ ; a thing was only
so far as it participated in the ovala^ and hence in relation
to phenomena it might be described as the ingenerate,
while they were the generated,* though God, who, speaking
strictly, was the alone ayevvrjTO';, could retract it into Him
self and produce it from Himself again.^ With Plutarch
it is the synonym of being, simple, abstract, impassible,
imperishable, from which all that happens or appears pro
ceeds and becomes.* He distinguishes indeed a crcofiaTiKr)
from a votjTrj ovaia, the one being v\:r) or vTroKeifievov, the
other fji'0p(prj or elSo?, and out of the union of these the world
arises.' But the relation of God the creator is not one
apd the same to matter and to soul ; He is in the one case
maker, artificer (vroiJ^Tw), in the other case generator, parent
(traTijp). As regards matter, his mode of action is a 7701770-49,
but as regards souls a yivv7)ai<;, and so they are not so
much His work as a part of Him, have arisen not so much
through Him as from Him and out of Him.^
From philosophy the term passed into Gnostic theology,'
and thence into the terminology of all the Greek schools,
heretical and orthodox.*" With its application to the
' Cf. Hatch's " Hibbert Lectures," pp. 269-279 ; Bigg's, " Christian
Platonists of Alexandria," pp. 163-165, te.xt and notes. Dr. Bigg says:
" Ova-ia is properly Platonic, while vwoa-raa-Ls is properly Stoic." But this
is hardly correct. Oviria, especially in its specific Alexandrian sense, is
more Stoic than Platonic.
^ Diog. Laer., vii. 148.
' Stob., " Eel," ii. 90.
* Diog. Laer., vii. 134.
Ibid., 137 : 'Os (sc. Bcos) 8^ affidapros ia-Ti Ka\ ayevvrjros, Srjpiovpybs
&v rrjs biaKoapfjaeias, Kara xpovav TTOiay irepioSovs dva\ia-Ka>v els eavrov rrjV
airaa-av ovtrlav Ka\ irakiv e^ eavrov yevvatv,
« " De Is.," 45, 53.
' "De An. Procr.," iii. 3, 4. Cf. ibid., ix. i, xxvii. i ; " De Is.," 53, 54.
8 •' Quaest. Plat.," II. I 4ff. ; ii. i, 2. Cf. " De An. Procr.," ix. 6.
' Irenaeus, I. v. i ; Ptolemaeus, ap. Epiphan., xxxiii. 7.
¦"Clem., "Hom.," xx. 3; xix. 12, 13. Melito, in Routh, I 121, where

ARE STILL PHILOSOPHICAL. 87
Christian Deity it took on a specific sense ; He could not
be changed into the world, nor could it or anything within
it be regarded as a modification or individualization of
Him. His ovala was distinct from all created being and
incommunicable to the creature. To affirm that any one
possessed the Divine ovaia was to affirm of Him necessary
existence — i.e., Deity. And as the Deity was one, the
essence was indivisible * ; but as philosophy had construed
the term, a single essence did not exclude the idea of
personal differences and distinctions. To denote these the
terms trpoa-atra and later v-ttoo-t da-el's were used. 'Ttto-
aTaaa had also a history in philosophy, was introduced
into theology by the Gnostics,^ was employed at first and
throughout thc Arian controversy as the synonym .of
ovala,^ but while the latter remained the name for the
more abstract being, as it were the unqualified or un
differentiated Deity, the former came to denote the more
concrete, or Deity realized in personal modes, distinguished
and distributed into personal forms. It was in order to
emphasize their real and abiding, as opposed to a pheno
menal and modal, character that v'jroaTaai'i was substituted
for irpoawTtov^
But the vwoaTtiaeK had not only to be distinguished ; they
had to be related as well ; and this relation was expressed
by the famous term ofioovaioi. It, too, came from philosophy
ras Svo avrov ova-las refers to the two natures of Christ. From this point
onward the term grows ever more common and specific.
¦ Athanasius, "De Synod.," 51 ff.
* Irenasus, I. i. i ; v. 4 ; xv. 5. But Tatian speaks of God, 6 dea-irorrjs
rav oXav, as fj viroa-raa-is rov iravros, "Or. ad Gr.," v.
3 So the Nicene Symb., e^ irepas iiroa-rda-eias rj ovolas. Cf. "Athan. ad
Afros," 4.
< See important notes in Harnack, vol il, pp. 252, 257. Ullmann, "Gre-
gorius von Nazianz.," pp. 246-248. It was in the hands of the three great
Cappadocians that the distinction between oicria and virocrrains became
finally fixed. See Greg. Naz., "Or.," XLII. 16, p. 759. But ijrdo-racris and
¦Kponumov continued to be used interchangeably, though with a distinct
preference for vTroaraa-is.

88 TERMINI TECHNICI OF THEOLOGY
through Gnosticism into theology,* and had there a troubled
history. For using it Paul of Samosata was condemned, and
Arius for not using it.^ The condemnation may or may not
have been right, but what it is cited here to illustrate is this —
the gradual elaboration and articulation of thought within the
Church by the progressive use of terms formed without it, such
terms working their way to enforcement by criticism, adop
tion, and definition exactly as in the schools. The terms,
too, that denote the distinctive properties of the persons
have a similar history. ^Ayevvr]TO<; is by Philo applied to
God so as to distinguish Him on the one hand from man
as yevvrjTOf and on the other hand from the ^16709 who stands
between partaking of the nature of both.' So the Gnostic
Yalentinus describes the Father as fiovo^ aryevvriTo<;, but as He
did not choose to be alone He generated vovv Kal dXr^Oeiav.*
The first real indication of the later usage occurs in the
Clementine Homilies, where the Father and Son are dis
tinguished as respectively unbegotten and begotten, and
affirmed to be outside comparison * ; but even more explicit
is a passage where Ptolemaeus contrasts the begotten God
with the one unbegotten Father.' Over against the /lovo^
' Irenaeus, I. v. I, 5, 6. In those three instances the later usage is exactly
anticipated. So, too, Hippol, "Philos.," vii. 22, 78 ; Clem., "Hom.," xx. 7;
Ptolemaeus "ad Floram," ap. Epiphan., xxxiii 7. Harnack, vol ii., pp. 192,
193, note 7, has called attention to the striking way in which Ptolemaeus
forecasts the ecclesiastical terminology of the future.
2 Athanasius, "De Synod.," 42-53 , Basil, "Ep.," 52 ; Sozo., iv. 15. See
discussions in Routh, iii. 360-365 ; Newman's note, pp. 165-176 of his
translation of the Anti-Arian Treatises, and Harnack, i. 641 ff.
' " Quis Rer. Div. Her.," § 42, p. 502.
* Hippol., " Philos.," vl 29.
' xvi. 16.
6 " Ad Floram," ap. Epiphan., xxxiii. 7. The contrast to the precise
Gnostic use is the undeveloped and incorrect Ignatian, Eph. vii. Cf.
Lightfoot's " Excursus," vol. ii., pp. 90-94. In Justin,' " Apol.," ii. 6, where
the Father is qualified as ayevvrjros and the Son or Logos as yevvapevos, we
see the action of the same philosophical influences as had shaped the Gnostic
terminology. This is only the more emphasized by the doctrine as to the
relativity of the names and knowledge of God which the passage affirms.

COME THROUGH GNOSTICISM. 89
ajevvrjTo<; stands the fiovoyev-ri^, the Father can be Father only
as He has a Son ; and here, too, as regards theological use, the
Gnostics, in direct dependence on John, anticipated the Fathers.*
§ V. — The Merits and the Defects of the Theology.
But it is needless to multiply examples : the facts are
patent enough ; all that we need to do is to see their signi
ficance. The Fathers could not help themselves ; the terms
were there, and they must speak in the language of their
people and day and school. But to use the language was
to admit the thought ; to translate their beliefs into the
formulas of the schools was to make them scholastic formulae,
translated in matter as well as in form. The matter con
strued was not the old scholastic matter, and so the new
definitions and theorems were not identical with the old ;
but they were definitions and theorems all the same, exactly
as scholastic in character, value, and function as those they
superseded. What entered the speculative Greek intellect
a religion and a history came out a theology, as much a
creation of the metaphysical mind as if the place had been
an academy or a school instead of a council. But the theo
logy was as little the ultimate science of the religion or of the
history as Plato or Aristotle is the ultimate science of nature
and man and society. It was simply a philosophy of the
new material in the language of the old schools.
It is no part of our purpose to discuss here the truth or
value of this theology, only to indicate how it came to be. Yet
¦ See a careful analysis of the evidence as to this dependence on John in
Hort, "Two Dissertations," pp. 30 ff. The history of the terms used in
Greek theology has still to be written, and only when it has been will the
continuance within the theology of old philosophical questions be made
apparent. All the contemporary schools, philosophical as well as theo
logical, were grappling with the same questions, hitting upon kindred
solutions, and looking for light along similar lines. The text attempts
neither a history nor an explication of the terms ; it only seeks to indicate
that they belong to theology, because to the speculative tendencies and
endeavours of the time.

go in nicene theology god a unity,
there are two points of view from which it may be regarded :
the philosophy it continued or the material it construed.
From the first point of view the theology of Nicaea and
Chalcedon is a bold and splendid piece of constructive meta
physics, the completion of the ancient Greek quest after a
scientific conception of God and His relation to man. It
combines elements that had before been held to be incom
patible in thought. It endeavours to translate God from
an abstract into a concrete, related, living Absolute ; to con
ceive Him as a Godhead which has within itself all the
constituents and conditions of a real intellectual, moral, and
social existence, as if He were a universe while God. This
is the meaning of its heroic struggle to affirm at once the
unity of the Divine Essence and the distinction of the Divine
Persons. The unity is not a simplicity, but, as it were, a rich
and complex manifold, an absolute which is the home of all
relations, a unity which is the bosom of all difference, the
source and ground of all variety. Such a conception saves
us from the Deism which shuts up God within the limita
tions or impotences of His own infinitude, and from the
Pantheism which loses Him within the multitudinous and
fleeting phenomena of an ever-changing universe. But the
re-articulation of the theistic idea was only one side of the
endeavour ; the other side was the adjustment or adapta
tion to it of the idea of man. This was accomplished in a
twofold way : by a general doctrine of human nature, and
by a special doctrine as to the person of Christ. By the first
the Divine and human natures were made to approximate,
to become sympathetic, capable of related and even allied
being ; by the other, the Divine had actually so realized this
relation with the human that it had come to have a sort
of corporate being in the race. God's transcendence had
stooped to immanence, and by the incarnation of One the
Divine life of the whole had been assured. These gracious
and sublime ideas were the aim rather than the achievement

MORE METAPHYSICAL THAN ETHICAL. 91
of the theology ; they were more what it aspired to than
what it reached. But even so they compel us to regard it
as the completion, under the impulse of the Christian history,
of the quest of ancient thought after a scientific conception
of Deity.
But from the point of view of the material construed the
theory was much more defective. It did most inadequate
justice to the theistic contents of the Christian history.
Metaphysics had triumphed over ethics, scholastic terms
over moral realities. It is hard to say whether the Nicene
theology did more eminent service or disservice to the
Christian conception of God. In contending for the Deity
of the Son, it too much forgot to conceive the Deity through
the Son and as the Son conceived Him. In its hands, and
in consequence of its definitions and authority, the meta
physical Trinity tended to supersede the ethical Godhead.
The Church, when it thought of the Father, thought more
of the First Person in relation to the Second than of God
in relation to man ; when it thought of the Son, it thought
more of the Second Person in relation to the First than of
humanity in relation to God. The immanent relations may
be the essential and real, but they are not interpreted unless
made the basis of the outward and actual. The Fatherhood
in the Godhead loses its moral and religious meaning unless
it be translated into the Fatherhood of God ; the Sonship
within the Trinity is without its most majestic and gracious
sense till it finds its consequent and correlate in the sonship
of man. The Nicene theology failed here because it inter
preted God and articulated its doctrine in the terms of the
schools rather than in the terms of the consciousness of
Christ. It would have better served the Church and the
truth if it had done the first not less, but the second much
more. For. its too metaphysical Godhead injuriously affected
in all its branches all later theology. The persons of the
Godhead, from being metaphysically, came, especially in the

92 METAPHYSICAL UNITIES, ETHICAL DIVISIONS.
hands of Western theology, to be ethically distinguished ; and
on this distinction theories of salvation were based which
represented it as transacted within God, though applied and
carried out in time according to the terms of the eternal
covenant. The division of the Persons within the Godhead
had as its necessary result the division of God from man, and
the exaltation of miraculous and unethical agencies as the
means of bridging over the gulf. The inadequacy in these
cardinal respects of the Nicene theology would be inexplicable
were we to regard it as a creation of supernatural wisdom or
the result of special Divine enlightenment ; but it is altogether
normal when conceived as a stage in the development of
Christian thought. In it Greek philosophy was translated
into Christian theology, and, of course, its translation did not
mean its death.

CHAPTER V.
THE LATIN THEOLOGY AND CHURCH.
§ I.— Thieir Distinctive Factors.
THE action of the Latin mind on Christianity was quite
as characteristic as the action of the Greek. They
differed indeed as tendencies rather than as antitheses — i.e.,
they were not conscious contradictions or even opposites,
but distinct habits and tempers unconsciously working out
dissimilar results. This did not exclude mutual influence.
Tertullian created as to the Godhead modes of thought and
representation that affected the Eastern mind ; Dionysius of
Rome admonished and corrected Dionysius of Alexandria.
If Athanasius was the theologian of the Nicene Council,
Hosius was its diplomatist, and Leo was even more potent
at Chalcedon. On the other side, the Greek apologists
powerfully influenced Tertullian, much as his principles and
methods differed from theirs, while neo-Platonic thought
modified the minds of Victorinus the Rhetor, Hilary, Am
brose, and, above all, Augustine. But this mutual influence
does not exclude independent development ; nay, it helps
us all the more to measure and to value the action of the
different minds and conditions in the creation of ecclesiastical
thought and institutions.
Two quite distinct questions are here before us : the one
touching the relation of Roman polity, taken in its widest
possible sense, to the organization of the Church ; the other

94 organization and thought.
touching the action of the thought which at once accom
panied, conditioned, and sanctioned the movement. It was
here as in the Roman Empire ; as was the jurist to the one,
such was the theologian to the other. While soldiers and
statesmen gave to the Empire visible form, the jurists found
for it a philosophy, which not only idealized the reality, but
helped to secure its stability and the greater happiness of its
citizens and subjects. While the Church was in the process
of formation the Empire was undergoing a sort of apotheosis,
becoming in a sense a church rather than a state. The
worship of the Emperor was only a symbol of the common
reverence for the Empire, a confession that the system under
which they lived was Divine, a religion even more than a
government. Two parallel movements went on, a political
and an intellectual ; the one a development of the State as
an organism, the other of the ideas by which it was pene
trated, illumined, justified ; and the result was a doiible
transformation, a civil and a religious. The more highly
organized the State became the more distinctly it grew into
a religion ; the change in civil organization from what it was
under the later Republic to what it had become under the
Empire at the end of the second century but feebly reflected
the far greater change in religious thought.
As in the Empire, so in the Church ; organization and
thought went hand in hand, each conditioning the other and
both affected by the world in which they lived. As to the
organization, little can here be said ; happily, it has of late
been amply, though far from finally, discussed from various
points of view.* What stands out clear from these discus
sions is this : the organization of the Church has a history,
and is therefore capable of scientific explanation. It can be
^ The literature concerned with this question is far too extensive to be
here noticed. Happily, it is beginning to be discussed with something of
the scientific spirit. Among the works meant in the text are Ritschl's
"Altkathol. Kirche"; Lightfoot's dissertation on "the Christian Ministry " ;
Hatch's " Bampton Lectures " ; Harnack's translation of Hatch, with his

imperial CHURCH LEGALIZED THEOLOGY. 95
seen growing, its growth measured, and the causes discovered
and determined. It does not issue from the mind of the
Master as it now exists in the Greek, the Roman, the
Anglican, or any one of the Reformed Churches ; and what
can be explained by local causes and conditions is only
made inexplicable when traced to miraculous power. Of
these causes the most potent was the polity, public and
private, of the societies, the cities, and the empire into
which it entered. By a process gradual but inevitable it
came to be construed in the language of the State, and so
organized by the empire that it superseded as to be its only
qualified and possible successor. But what concerns us here
is the thought which, developing with the organization,
became, as it were, its immanent reason, the philosophy that
gave it meaning, the spirit that was its power.
§ II.— Tertullian.
The point at which our discussion can best begin is with
the man who, because he was the first, distinctly and lumi
nously, to embody the Western spirit, did so much to shape
its later course : Tertullian. He is a man of marked indivi
duality ; indeed, with him, as with Paul and Augustine,
personal character is the most determinative element in his
history and thought. But the formal factors of his mind
may be described as two : Stoic philosophy and Roman
jurisprudence. We cannot agree with Ritter when he says *
that in Tertullian a more philosophical spirit lived than had
as yet appeared in Latin literature ; but it is certain that,
in spite of his hot and scornful invective against philosophy,
he was one of the very first to philosophize in a Christian
own " Analecten " ; his discussions in the " Dogmengeschichte," in the
"Didache,'' and in various parts ofthe "Texte u. Untersuchn." ; Gore's
"The Church and the Ministry''; Loening's " Gemeindeverfassung des
XJrchristentums," with Loots' review in the Studien u. Kr. for 1890.
" Gesch. der ChristHch. Philos.," vol. I, p. 417.

96 TERTULLIAN STOIC AND JURIST.
sense.* This he did on the basis of Stoicism, though, to
use Neander's phrase, in harmony with the " massive one-
sidedness of his nature."^ He may not always mean so to
use it, but he so uses it all the same. Thus he employs the
term " natura " in the Stoical sense,' which was also the sense
most familiar to the Roman jurists. It denotes the trans
cendental ideal or law or reason embodied in the constitu
tion alike of man and the universe. But, of course, with
Tertullian " natura " never becomes the synonym of God or
supersedes Him ; on the contrary, it simply expresses His
mind and will. And so to act against nature is to disobey
God ; the contra-natural is the ungodly, is sin. God is the
teacher of the reason' ; it testifies before Scripture and inde
pendently of Scripture to His being,^ to the immortality of
the soul," nay, even to the truth of Christianity.' As with
" natura," so with " substantia." This term most frequently
translates the Stoical vtroKeliMevov ; it is the substratum of
things, the essence or basis of all reality * ; as such it is the
corporeal, is body, for what is without body is without being.'
Spirit is a kind of body, and save as body soul is not.*" And
' " Gesch. der Christlich. Philos.," vol i., p. 379.
' " Antignosticus," p. 4.
' " De Corona," 5,6: " Natura quae prima omnium disciplina est." " Quae
rens igitur Dei legem habes communem istam in publico mundi in natura
libus tabulis." " Ipsum Deum secundum Naturam prius novimus." " De
Paenit," I : " Quippe res Dei ratio; quia Deus omnium conditor, nihil non
ratione providit, disposuit, ordinavit, nihil non ratione tractari intellegique
voluit" C£ "De Spect," 2, 18, 23, 27.
* " De Test. An.," 5 : " Magistra Natura, anima discipula. Quicquid aut
illa edocuit aut ista perdidicit, a Deo traditum est, magistro scilicet ipsius
magistrae." ' " Adv. Marc," i. 10 : "Nee hoc ullis Moysi hbris debent Ante anima
quam prophetia. Animae enim a primordio conscientia Dei dos est." Cf.
cc. 13-18.
« "DeTest An.," 2-4.
' "Apol," 17: " O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae."
8 " Adv. Herm.," 34-36; " Adv. Prax.," 7, 9 ; " Adv. Marc," iii. 10.
» " De Carne Chr.," 11 : " Omne quod est, corpus est Nihil est incor-
porale nisi quod non est." Cf. "Adv. Herm.," 35.
"> " De An.,"'7 : " Nihil enim, si non corpus." He finds in the parable

CORPOREALITY OF GOD AND SPIRIT. 97
these categories apply to God as to the soul ; He is body
because He is substance * ; though " substantia," He is
" spiritus," while the soul is " afflatus," which is an inferior
kind of substance.^ Since the soul is corporeal, it is passible ;
because it feels, perceiving ; because it perceives, suffering.'
As our knowledge is sensuous, we can know God only in
part ; the body which fills all space can never be fully per
ceived by a body localized, however well equipped with
senses.* As He is body. He has hands, feet, and eyes * ;
and as He is substance. He is capable, as it were, of distribu
tion without division into various forms or portions"; and
it is because of such distribution or, let us say, specialization
of the Divine substance, that, the Logos or Son arises, who
must possess this substance in order to be Divine, and He
must be corporeal or He could not be. Since, then, substance
is necessarily corporeal, body becomes of the very essence of
humanity ; only in its terms can the Incarnation be stated
on the one hand and the race be conceived and described
on the other. This explains the emphasis he lays on the
flesh, alike as regards Christ ' and man. It supplies, too, the
basis for the legalism and the correlative materialism (for
the one is but the political, the other the metaphysical side
of the same thing) which underlie all forms of sacerdotalism,
of Dives and Lazarus the clearest evidence of the " corporalitas animae.''
Cf. 9-1 1. Augustine animadverts on this dictum, "De Genesi ad Lit,"
lib. X., ad fin.
' " Adv. Prax.," 7 : " Quis enim negabit deum corpus esse, etsi Deus
spiritus est? Spiritus enim corpus sui generis in sua effigie." Cf. the
Stoical trapa eanv 6 ©eos; Clem. Al, " Strom.," I II, § 51.
' " Adv. Marc," il 9. Cf. "De Paenit," 3.
' "De An.," 7.
* "Adv. .Marc.,"il 16; "Adv. Prax.," 14.
' " Adv. Marc," il 16.
^ " Adv. Prax.," 8, 9, 14.
' In resisting Docetism Tertullian fell over into the opposite and equally
serious error of what can only be described as Materialism. His concep
tion alike of the Person and the Passion is much too sensuous to be true
either to the divinity or the humanity. Cf. "Apol," 21; "Adv. Marc,"
iii. 8 ; but especially the treatise " De Carne Chr." 7

98 THE JURIST CONSTRUES THE GODHEAD
especially in its cardinal doctrines of ordination and sacra
ments, and determines all the doctrines touching man and
his native depravity co-ordinated under the generic name
of original sin. With Tertullian these doctrines take their
rise, inchoate in form, but consistent and complete in principle.
The " propagatio animarum per traducem " is with him the
logical consequence of his doctrine of being. If souls are
bodies, they must be capable of propagation. Adam becomes
the common root or womb of mankind ; from him all have
proceeded, in him all were contained.* But if this is so,
then Adam is the unevolved race, the race is the evolved
Adam— he with all its sins and all its souls latent within
him, it with his sin evolved in the evolution of all the souls
that make up its collective and continued being.^
But quite as determinative as his Stoicism is his Roman
jurisprudence. As a theologian he remains a jurist, his
theology, in spite of his Montanism, being stamped with the
image of the forensic mind. Thus it is as a jurist rather
than as a Stoic that he construes the Godhead.' It is to him
" una substantia, tres personae." By the former term God is
distinguished from man. Tertullian was too good a theist to
take " substantia " like the Stoic in a pantheistic or monistic
sense, and so he writes " Deus substantiae ipsius nomen." *
He was not the sole substance ; for " substantia " was rather
the name of an individual existence, " substantia propria est
rei cuiusque," and so denoted difference, while " natura " de
noted what was common.^ It was, by virtue of their respective
substances that God and the world differed, and this difference
was developed in what we can only describe as the terms of
1 "De An.," 9, 20, 21,25-27; " De Res. Car.," 45 ; "De Carne Chr," 11.
' " De Test An.," 3 : " Per quem (Satan) homo a primordio circumventus,
ut praeceptum Dei excederet, et propterea in mortem datus exinde totum
genus de suo semine infectum suae etiam damnationis traducem fecit."
Cf. "De An.," 41.
3 " Adv. Prax.," 2, 3.
¦* "Adv. Herm.," 3.
' " De An.," 32.

IN TERMS FORENSIC AND POLITICAL. 99
jurisprudence. Deus was always " substantia," but not always
" dominus." He became Dominus because of creation, and
Judex because of sin.* But while He exercises rule over
the creature. He has communicated of His substance to the
Son and the Spirit, who constitute together with the Father
the " tres personae." " Persona " is a legal term, denoting the
party or name to a suit, and " substantia " floats between
its legal and philosophical sense. The " personae " differ
" gradu," " forma," " specie," which were all juridical terms,
often used as synonyms ; and they agree " statu," " sub
stantia," " potestate," ^ terms also juridical and synonymous.
The " personae " were thus distinguished, but the '" substantia "
was not divided, a state of things most intelligible to one
who thought as a Roman lawyer ; and this distinction he
conceives as a matter of disposition, dispensation, or ol/covofita.
Under suggestion from this term he passes from legal to
political nomenclature, and speaks of the " persona; " as
"officiales,'' the agents of an administration. The Godhead
is a monarchy, and monarchy signifies nothing else than
" singulare et unicum imperium," but the authority does not
cease to be one by having more than one minister. And so,
speaking like a Roman jurist, he describes the Son and the
Spirit as "consortes substantiae Patris,"' with whom He
speaks " quasi cum ministris et arbitris ex unitate Trinitatis."
To be this were they created, for Son and Spirit alike owe
their being to the Father.* In harmony with this idea of
the Godhead is his notion of man's relation to God. He is
under law, and law positive — to be obeyed, not because it is
right, but simply because it is law instituted by the Supreme
Legislator.' Hence man becomes by sin a criminal ; his sins
1 "Adv. Herm.," 3.
' "Adv. Prax.," 2. SeeDirksen, "ManualeLat.Fon. Jur.Civ. Rom.," sub -w.
' "Adv. Prax.," 3, 4, 12.
' Supra, p. 83.
' " De Paenit," 4: "Neque enim quia bonum est idcirco auscultare
debemus, sed quia Deus praecepit." Cf. Scorp., 2, 3.

ICX) THE FORENSIC SOTERIOLOGY.
are " crimina," " delicta interdicta," punished as such things
must be.* The legal idea Paul struggled so hard to expel thus
returns in a more aggravated form, not as a Divine institution
to purify, but as an instrument of judgment and justice, which
those it condemned could yet propitiate. With it enters the
notion, so offensive to Paul, of merit, and with merit the idea
of the means of creating it, and of its worth or function with
God. Hence comes the belief in a God who needs to be
satisfied, and in penance as a method of satisfaction.^ In
a moment, as twins born of the same idea, forensic theology
and legal morality came to be. Both have a common basis,
a God so much a personalized law that He needs by suffering
to be satisfied for the dishonour done by sin. If the sin be
conceived to be so great that only a God can satisfy God, we
have the scholastic theory of the Atonement. If the offence
be such that satisfaction can be given by the act or suffering
of men, we have the Catholic doctrine of merit and inter
cession. On such a basis and with such ideas, we only need
to have a positive institution to have a system of jurisprudence
translated into a Church.
§ III. — The Old Religions and the New.
But now, in order to include other elements necessai-y to
this discussion, we must turn to the action of the third
factor — the religion.' As the field here is so immense, we
must confine ourselves to a single point — the ministry ;
but, happily, it involves almost all that is essential. Here
our question is not political, concerned with sources,
1 "De Paenit," 3.
* Ibid., 5, 9. The doctrine of merit, or the satisfaction of God by
penances or works, as it appears in Tertullian, deserves a fuller discussion
than we can give to it here. It was simply an adaptation of the principle
of Roman law: " Qui enim accepit satisfactionem, injuriam suam remisit"
("Digest," lib. xlvii 10, 17, § 6: cf. iv. 2, 14, §§ 9, n). But this adapta
tion represents the substitution of the legal for the evangelical idea. See
Harnack, " Dogmengesch.," iii. 16-18, note 1.
' Supra, p. 61.

RELIGIONS PRIESTLY AND PRIESTLESS. IOI
succession, or degrees in office, but material, concerned with
what the ministry was and what it became.*
We begin with the position already stated— the Church at its
origin had no official priesthood.^ Regarded through the rela
tion of its constituent members, it was a family, a brotherhood,
a household of faith ' ; from the standpoint of its privileges
and liberties it was an i/cKXtjaia, or society of the enfranchised,
where every man was free and a citizen * ; from its relation to
God it could be variously described as a "kingdom," an "elect
people," a " royal priesthood," or a " temple built of living
stones." ' As the priesthood was the collective spiritual so
ciety, so all its sacrifices were spiritual or ethical, never sensuous.
Men were to present their bodies a "living sacrifice," which
was a " reasonable service," " holy, acceptable unto God." "
Beneficence and charity are " sacrifices " with which " God is
well pleased." ' " Praise " is a " sacrifice " ^ ; the gifts of love
are " an odour of sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well pleas
ing to God." ^ The special function of the " holy priesthood,"
formed as it is ofthe "living stones" which God has built into
¦ The political and the sacerdotal questions are quite distinct. Both are
historical, but the question as to episcopacy and episcopal succession is
altogether political — i.e., a question of polity or constitution; while the
question as to the priesthood touches the very nature and character of the
rehgion. Men may hold the episcopal theory and deny the sacerdotal;
and they may hold the sacerdotal without accepting the episcopal. Of
works that deal with the specific question there may be named : Ritschl's
"Altkathol Kirche," pp. 362, 368, 394, 461, 555, 560, 576; Rothe, "Vorles.
lib. Kirchengesch.," pp. 208-231, 299-313; Harnack, "Dogmengesch.,"
l 283 ff. ; Hofling, "Die Lehre der altes. Kirche vom Opfer," and an
essay of my own in Jubilee Lectures (1882), on "Ecclesiastical Polity and
the Religion of Christ."
* Supra, pp. 48, 49.
' Eph. iii. 15 ; i Peter il 17; i Thess. iv. 9; Gal vi. 10; Eph. ii. 19.
* I Cor. i. 2; 2 Cor. viii. 19, ei passim.
^ John xviii. 36, 37 ; i Peter ii. 9 ; Titus ii. 14 ; Heb. viii. 10 ; I Peter il 5 ;
1 Cor. iii. 16-19; 2 Cor. vi. 16; Eph. iii. 21.
^ Rom. xii. i.
' Heb. xiii. 11.
' Heb. xiiL 15.
' Phil. iv. 18.

I02 THE HIGHER POLITICAL PRECEDES
a " spiritual house," is to " offer up spiritual sacrifices accept
able to God through Jesus Christ."* This view is common
to all the writers of all tendencies in the New Testament.
James defines " pure religion before God and the Father "
to be this : " to visit the widow and the fatherless in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." ^
And the definition is made the more impressive by his
using a term (dprjaiceia) which denotes the body or outer
form of religion, not its inner essence or spirit.
And these ideas did not at once die, though the process
of deterioration or materialization began very soon. They
live throughout the second century, but in the face of
tendencies at once creative and prophetic of change. We
see them first successful in heresy, which here, as in so
many things — tradition. Apostolic succession, sacramental
theory and practice — anticipates what later becomes ortho
doxy'; while the Apostolic usage survives in the Apostolic
P"athers, though they have no very clear consciousness of
what it involved. The episcopate in Ignatius has high
political or congregational significance, but no sacerdotal.
His bishop is no priest, and to him OvaoaaTripiov and va6<;
are alike spiritual. This was the more remarkable as the
priesthood of the Old Testament was early used as a
standard of comparison or ideal of the order that ought to
be realized by the ministry of the New, which yet is not
invested with priestly character or functions.* In the AiSaxn
the prophet has displaced the priest.^ The apologists
' I Peter ii. 5.
' James i. 27.
' To attempt detailed proof of this position is more than our limits will
allow, but one may say the ecclesiastical significance of Gnosticism is only
beginning to be understood. Since the text was written, Harnack's
examination of the " Pistis-Sophia " has appeared ; and it bears directly
on the points mentioned. See pp. 59 ff. Cf. Koffmane's "Gnosis
nach ihrer Tendenz u. Organisation."
¦* Clemens, i. 40, 43, 44.
* xiii. 3.

THE SACERDOTAL TENDENCY. 103
labour strenuously to explain how Christianity, though with
out the sacerdotalism characteristic of the then recognized
worships, is yet a religion ; how its temples, altars, and
sacrifices are all inner and spiritual, its incense the secret
prayer and the pure conscience, its statuary the new man
with his graces and virtues, its adornments or priestly vest
ments his temperance, courage, wisdom, piety.* To Justin
Martyr, Christians were the true high-priestly race ; they offer
the sacrifices well -pleasing to God, the prayer and thanks
giving which He loves to accept when offered by the worthy."
With Irenaeus the sacerdotal dignity is the portion of the
just, and the sanctified heart, the holy life, faith, obedience,
righteousness, are the sacrifices God loves.' The choicest
altar was the service of the needy ; to minister to man was
to sacrifice to God. Clement of Alexandria refused to regard
any as priest save the Gnostic, him who can offer the sacrifice
of praise and burn the incense of holy prayer.* There was
a distinction of offices, but no sacred order exercising their
functions by virtue of some inalienable grace. The Eucharist
was congregational — it was a common meal and a collective
thanksgiving, not a sacrifice dependent on officials for its
efficacy ^ ; there was " liberty of prophesying " ; the individual
' " Cont Cels.," viii. 17. Cf. vii. 62 ; Minuc. Felix, " Oct.," 8, 10, 32.
* "Dial," 116, 117, vol. il, pp. 392 ff. Cf. "Apol," i. 13, 67.
' iv. 8, 3 ; 17,4: V. 34, 3.
* Strom., vii. 7) § 36: Ovros Spa ovras 6 /SacriXiKoy avSpatiros, ovros lepevs
oaios roC Beov. Cf. iv. 25, ii. 18; Paed., iii 12. For the sacrifice which is
acceptable to God, Str., v. 11.
* Clem. ; i Cor. xii. i ; Did., ix., x., xiv. ; Ig. Smyr., 8 ; Eph., 20 ; Philad., 4 ;
Justin, "Apol," I 65-67. The evidence seems to warrant the inference that
the congregation was necessary to the act, but not a clerical order or person.
The injunctions of Ignatius imply that customs other than those he re
commended prevailed, and his words are hortatory rather than authoritative.
Justin's president is no priest, but one of the brethren : irpoetrriiis rav ahe\<l>S>v,
not lepevs or apxiepeis. Tertullian's words are clear : " Nonne et laici
sacerdotes sumus ? . . . Differentiam inter ordinem et plebem constituit
ecclesiae auctoritas, et honor per ordinis consessum sanctificatus. Adeo
ubi ecclesiastici ordinis non est consessus, et offers et tinguis et sacerdos
es tibi solus Sed ubi tres, ecclesia est, licet laici. . . . Omnes nos Deus

I04 EVOLUTION OF THE PRIESTHOOD
society or church could exercise discipline, could even institute
or depose its officers.
But change is in the air ; the fatal word is spoken by
Tertullian, who in this shows the legal mind below the
Montanist temper. He speaks of the " sacerdotale officium "
which virgins cannot enter,* of a " sacerdotalis disciplina "
and the "jus sacerdotis,"^ of an "ordo sacerdotalis" and the
" sacerdotalia munera." ' He names the bishop " summus
sacerdos " and " pontifex maximus." * Hippolytus in Italy
claims for himself, as successor of the Apostles, the high-
priesthood ^ ; while Origen in Alexandria, though he holds to
the universal priesthood and spiritual sacrifices," yet taxes his
ingenuity to unfold the Hkeness of the new ministry to the
ancient priesthood.' In the Apostolic constitutions the bishop
is frequently designated lepev^,^ and even dp-^^^iepew.^ But it was
the hands of Cyprian that studiously clothed the new clergy
in all the dignities of the old priesthood, and provided it
with appropriate sacrificial functions and intercessory duties.
With him the bishop is uniformly " sacerdos," his colleagues
" consacerdotes," and the presbyters are those " cum episcopo
sacerdotali honore conjuncti." *" But, of course, the creation
of a priesthood involves the institution of a priestly service ;
the " sacerdotium " cannot live unless there be a " sacrificium."
There was only one rite that could be made to serve this pur
pose ; and so the simple and beautiful institution of the Supper
ita vult dispositos esse, ut ubique sacramentis ejus obeundis apti simus "
(" De Exh. Cast.," 7). Cf. " De Monog.," 7, 11, 12.
' " De Virg. Vel," 9.
« "De Monog.," 12 ; "De Exh. Cast," 7.
' " De Exh. Cast.," 7 ; " De Praescr. Haer," 41.
« "De Baptis.," 17; " De Pudic," 1.
=¦ " Refut. Omn. Haer.," Proem, fipels perexovres dpxteparelas re Ka\ Sibaa-
KaXlas. « " Homil in Lev.," ix. 9, 10 (ed. Lom., vol ix., pp. 360.364).
' " In Evang. loh.," tom. I 3 (ed. Lom., vol. i., p. 9).
' ii- 34i 35, 36; vl 15, 18.
' il 27, 57.
" " Ep.," 61, 2. Cf. I, 3 ; 4, 4 ; 65, 2 ; 66, 3 ; 67, i ; 72, 3 ; 73, 7.

CHANGES THE RELIGION. 105
shares the transformation of the ministry. It becomes the
" sacrificium dominicum," and the priests who stand in the
place of Christ offer a true and full sacrifice in the Church
to God the Father, and can say, " Passio est domini sacri
ficium quod offerimus."* While the old and noble conception,
which was so integral an element of the Apostolic Gospel,
of the collective spiritual priesthood, altogether disappears,
the officials become sacrosanct and " dispensatores Dei." ^
The development is not complete, but it is begun. The
ancient ideal died hard ; reminiscences of it may be found
in Cyprian himself, in Augustine, in Leo the Great, even in
Aquinas, nay, in the very Catholicism of to-day, but they
only help to illustrate the continuity of the evolutional
process and measure the vastness of the change.
But, now, what were the causes of this change ? Neander
thinks that the idea of an official priesthood came into
Christianity from Judaism ' ; Ritschl that it was due to
the inability of the Gentile Christians to understand the
Gospel.* Both factors are needed — the one acted upon the
religion from within, the other from without. The men who
interpreted the New Testament through the Old interpreted
first the law and then the priesthood of the Old into the New.
They were made parallel— the later and spiritual was assimi
lated to the older and sacerdotal, the antitype was resolved
into the type, the substance into the shadow. What Cyprian
shows us is a rejuvenescent Judaism, the kingdom of the
truth translated into a kingdom of priests. But this internal
" "Ep.," 63, Ad Caecilium, 14, 17 : cf. 4, 5, 6, 7. 9-
' " Ep.,'' 59, 6. It is hardly possible to measure the distance between
the ideal minister of Christ or the apostle of Paul and the priest of
Cyprian. Indeed, the two things are quite incommensurable ; they belong
to altogether different orders. If we study epistles like the fifty-ninth
or sixty-third after the Gospels or Paul, we feel how the return of the
priest has effected a revolution in the religion.
'"Church History,"!. 270, 271 (Bohn's ed.).
* " Altkathol. Kirche," 394.

I06 HEBRE-W AND GENTILE CAUSES.
factor could not have sufficed without the external. Men
who had never known any but priestly religions could not
easily understand one altogether priestless. At first two
things helped them : its very strangeness, its absolute anti
thesis to the familiar and the received ; and, next, its appear
ing as a new opinion or belief, which spread by preaching
or discourse, and could be taken as a philosophy. But the
more it established itself as a religion, the more men, both
without and within, tended to expect or seek in it the forms
and offices that everywhere else prevailed. They found it
easier to adjust the religion to themselves than themselves
to the religion. Their minds were not sheets of clean white
paper on which its truths could be clearly written, but pages
crowded with the records, habits, customs, beliefs, of im
memorial yesterdays ; and the lines of the new could not
but often mingle and blend with those of the ancient writing.
A rehgion without a priesthood was what no man had
known ; a sacred order on earth seemed as necessary to
worship as the very being of the gods in heaven. The
temple was the centre of the State, but it was idle without
a priesthood, and without it the oracle was dumb. And so
these two forces, inveterate and invariable association and the
Hebrew Scriptures, combined to work the change. With
out the universal sacerdotalism there would have been no
adequate impulse or occasion, without the Scriptures no
sufficient authority or warrant ; it was the correlation of the
two that made the change at once natural and inevitable.*
' Tertullian may be said to represent the heathen tendency, Cyprian the
Hebrew. The former allows himself a large rhetorical latitude, and glides
easily into the use of the same terms for the Christian as for the heathen
office (cf. "Ad. Uxor.," I 6, 7 ; "Scorp.," 7; "Ad Natl," I 7, "De
Monog.," 12; "De leiun.," 16; " De Pall," I 4); but the latter is care
ful and discriminative alike in the terms he uses and his sources and modes
of proof. His thought is governed by the ideal of the Old Testament
priesthood.

THE ECCLESIA BECOMES A CIVITAS. 107

§ IV.— Thought and Organization in the Western
Church.
These indeed so move together as to be different aspects of
one process ; the thought a man expresses in speech or in a
system, a society expresses in its institutions or laws. That
the thought of the most eminent man in the then Christian
society was penetrated by the principles and ideas of Roman
jurisprudence, is evidence that the spirit or genius of Rome
had begun to organize the Church. It was not by chance
that it came to be conceived as a " civitas " ; the name
expressed the simple truth. It was no mere substitution
of a Latin for a Greek term ; " civitas Dei " did not translate
-f) ttoXk deov ^a)VTo<;. IT6X.t9 and " civitas " might alike denote
a society of men organized under a common authority and
governed by common laws, but the -ttoXk was a city of free
men living within defined geographical limits, while the
" civitas " had become a universal empire with its chief
citizen as emperor. The ¦jtoXk could not be without its
micXtjaia, its assembly of free citizens, or the " civitas " with
out its Cassar, even though he might condescend to mask his
power under the forms of the Senate. Now, in the West the
Greek sense and connotation of ttoXk and eK/cX-rjaia were lost,
but the Roman sense and connotation of " civitas " remained ;
and so the Church was conceived not as a society of freeborn
men, .governed by its choicest because wisest sons, but as an
imperium under an Imperator, ruled by ministers he alone
could appoint and he alone depose. In other words, the
clergy became the Church, the Church the religion, and the
religion a transformed Roman Empire, with the Pope for
emperor, bishops for procurators, and the priesthood for the
magistrates and legionaries that levied the taxes, enforced
the laws, upheld the unity, and maintained the peace of the
civilized world. Papal infallibity is but imperial supremacy

io8 the church supersedes the empire,
transfigured and spiritualized. The Catholic Church could not
have been without Christianity, but still less could it have
been without Roman imperialism. It owes its life to the
one, but its distinctive organization to the other. The very
forces that disorganized the civil body helped to organize
the ecclesiastical. Apart from Rome, and Rome decadent,
with the imperial ideal and organism, but without the
imperial spirit, Catholicism could never have come into being.
If the Church had passed the first five centuries of its
existence under an Oriental despotism or amid free Greek
cities, its structure would have been altogether different. It
seemed to vanquish the Empire, but the Empire by assimi
lating survived in it ; the name was the name of Christ
but the form was the form of Cssar.
The more elaborate the organization became, the more it
reacted on thought, demanded idealization and justification
at its hands. The philosophy of Tertullian was worked into
an anthropology, and stated in terms derived from Paul.
Man lived in Adam, bore his nature and inherited his sin.
But now a jurisprudence unknown to Paul and quite alien
to him was so introduced as to create a new and fateful
system of ideas. As the whole race was of one sin because
of one descent, it was also of one guilt — stood before God
culpable, condemned. The individual was lost in the race ;
the collective sin involved personal blame and penalty. At
one stroke, then, humanity in its natural state became a mass
of perdition, and certain of the most distinctively Pauline
positions forgotten or their antitheses frankly affirmed. But
over against this lost mass was placed the saved society,
construed, too, through the law and polity of Rome. The
attributes of Christ were transferred to the Church ; yet
to a Church radically transformed by being made into
a Roman " civitas." To be in it — i.e., to be a naturalized
citizen — was to be saved ; to be outside it was to have no
part or lot in its privileges, to be without all its good. The

AND IS AS the empire IT SUPERSEDES. I09
conditions of entrance were in the hands of its officers ;
baptism naturalized, admitted to citizenship ; the Eucharist
maintained and developed what baptism had given. And,
then, as thought and organization corresponded, they could
be made to justify each other. Augustine argued at one
point : " Men must be by nature guilty and lost, otherwise
the baptism of infants would not be necessary " ; and at
another he with equal conviction and reason argued : " Since
infant baptism is necessary, man must be by nature
depraved and condemned." The race was not so much
sinful in the religious as guilty in the forensic sense, and
the Church which saved it was, while instituted by grace,
yet poHtical in form, legal in method, and juristic in its
regulative principle. Of course the thought and organization
did not stand alone. The East did not cease to influence the
West. Augustine studied theology and the Church through
Plato as well as through Roman polity, and to this source he
OA^ed the lofty idealism which gave to his system all its dignity
and all its power. Indeed, the Roman institution received
its final apotheosis through neo-Platonism at the hands of the
pseudo-Dionysius ; as he conceives it, symbolism reigns in
heaven and on earth, a celestial hierarchy holds the approaches
to God above, an ecclesiastical hierarchy guards and regulates
them below, and men are graduated according to the degree
of their initiation in the holy mysteries which at once reveal
and conceal the ineffable Godhead. No book exercised a
mightier influence on Catholicism, did more on the one
hand to foster its mysticism, on the other to develop its
sacerdotalism. It moulded in an equal degree men so dis
similar as Scotus Erigena and Thomas Aquinas, Hugo of
St. Victor and Thomas a Becket, Grosseteste and Dante ;
and yet it was but neo-Platonism made to speak with the
Catholic tongue.
We may then summarize the results of our discussion
thus : While Greek philosophy, as the main formal factor of

IIO SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.
Greek theology, had worked out a scientific conception of
God, metaphysically rich, though ethically poor, especially
in those elements most distinctive of the Christian religion
and history, Roman polity and law, as the main formal
factors of the Latin mind, had combined to effect the evolu
tion of a system that made the Church a new empire and
man by nature criminal, condemned because of alienation
from his sovereign. The popular had incorporated with the
Christian religion ideas which changed it from a system
priestless and spiritual into one sacerdotal and sensuous. The
result of these changes was a radical change of the religion.
The life it had it owed to its Founder, the form it owed
to its conditions ; and there is nothing that so proves His
divinity as His being able still to live and still to act within
forms so little congenial to His Spirit.

'CHAPTER VI.
SCHOLA STICISM.
WITH the formation of the Greek and Roman Churches
change did not cease. It went on under conditions
and factors old and new. We cannot trace it in the East,
and must be content with the briefest possible sketch of its
course in the West.
§ I.— The New Races and the Old.
As the Church had superseded the Empire, it was but
natural that she should occupy its ancient seat. The place
was a necessary part of the idea. Rome was accustomed
to rule the world, and the world was accustomed to the
rule of Rome. In the capital the habits of direction and
administration had become instinctive, and in the provinces
those of reverence and obedience. And, indeed, with a
conservatism greater than the later empire had known, the
reigning head of the Church lived in Italy, and was selected
almost always from men of Italian birth. And so it
happened that a religion Palestinian in origin and Greek
in theology became as Roman in polity, Roman also in
power. Its Holy Land of reminiscence and imagination
was in the East ; but the Holy Land of its experience, as
seat of the authority it recognized and source of the laws
it obeyed, was Italy. And Italy was satisfied with possessing
the power its inherited ambitions and capacities so well
quahfied it to organize and administer.

112 ROME AS IMPERIAL, POLITICAL,
But alongside the centralization of power stands what
we may call the distribution of thought. While the Empire
survived as the Papacy, philosophy survived as Scholasticism ;
and in obedience to the law which has always governed their
relations, authority resided in the capital, but philosophy
consulted her dignity and independence by living in the
provinces. So it was when the Caesars ruled, so it remained
when the Popes governed. Athens and Alexandria, Tarsus
and Antioch, offered a more congenial home to learning and
philosophy than imperial Rome, and ecclesiastical Rome left
the kindly nursing of Scholasticism to Paris, Oxford, and
Cologne. Authority is apt to be jealous and philosophy
to be critical, and so the two agree best when their respective
seats are distant enough to prevent the shocks of too sharp
and too frequent collision. Philosophy, when remote from
authority, can idealize it, and even render it a generous, be
cause a not too exacting, obedience ; authority, when it feels
free from a criticism too intimate and curious, can tolerate
philosophy and even accept its courteous homage. And so
it has invariably happened that seats of empire have not
been homes of living philosophies ; the men to whom the
machinery of Church or State is everything have, as a rule,
but little taste and less patience for those ideas and ideals
which are at once the puzzle and the joy of the speculative
reason. Hence we have within the bosom of the Latin Church
a distinction between North and South which curiously
reflects and repeats the distinction between East and West.
The newer peoples stood to the intellectual or philosophical
material in the religion more as did the Greek, the older
to the political and administrative more as did the Roman.
Indeed, one of the most remarkable facts in history is the
way in which, as the speculative energies of the old races
decayed, those of the new peoples developed and grew.
What excited their enthusiasm and roused them to strenuous

BUT THE PROVINCES INTELLECTUAL. II3
exertions was the endeavour to translate the belief they had
received into a reasoned philosophy. And so from the eighth
century onward, right through the period of Scholasticism,
the constructive intellect was as specifically Northern as the
political and administrative was Italian. The questions and
controversies that mark the end of the old world and the
beginning of the new are grouped round the names of Baeda
and Alcuin, Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus, Rabanus
Maurus and John the Scot, Gottschalk and Hincmar of
Rheims — men all sprung from the new stock. And their
pre-eminence becomes even more evident in the high days
of Scholasticism. Anselm, though of Italian birth, was of
Northern blood and culture ; the same may be said of Peter
the Lombard ; and of Thomas Aquinas it is enough to say
that he had in his veins the blood of the Norman and the
Hohenstaufen, and his activity as learner and teacher is mainly
associated with Paris and Cologne. Even Bonaventura could
not have been the schoolman he was without Paris and its
great masters. But when we turn from these, the action
of the pure Northern mind on all the tendencies of mediaeval
religious thought is seen to be enormous. Roscelinus and
Abelard were alike sons of Brittany. Of the names con
nected with the famous school of St. Victor, its founder,
William of Champeaux, was a Frenchman, Hugo was a
German, Richard a Scot. The greatest scholar of all the
schoolmen, Albertus Magnus, was a German, and Germans,
too, were the noblest representatives of the highly transcen
dental form of piety we call mysticism, Eckhardt and Tauler,,
Henry Suso, and the anonymous author of the "Theologia
Germanica ; " while of immediate kin were Ruysbroeck,
Thomas a Kempis, and the Brothers of the Common Lot.
England, too, had its famous Schoolmen, — men like Robert
Pulleyn, who, though not the oldest " Magister Sententiarum,"
was yet older than Peter Lombard ; John of Salisbury,
critical, sceptical of speculation and speculative methods, 8

114 THE NEW MIND CONSTRUCTIVE,
but full of admiration for the saintly life ; Alexander of
Hales, who had the strength and the foresight to naturalize
in the Christian schools the Aristotle that had issued, re
habilitated and living, from the Moorish ; Duns Scotus,
acutest of schoolmen, high ideal realist, metaphysical as
became a Scot, yet practical as one to whom the ultimate
reality was the all-efficient Will ; Roger Bacon, student of
nature as of theology, seeking to reform the study of both
by the use of new methods, and to rescue man from the
dominion of a pseudo-Aristotle ; William of Occam, nomi
nalist, yet Franciscan, making his scepticism the more potent
a solvent that it was veiled under the most rigorous respect
for authority. But it would become a mere tedious catalogue
of now-forgotten names were we to attempt to enumerate
the men of Northern blood who served the mediaeval Church
by turning her traditions and her creed into a living philo
sophy. Great as were the services of the Roman Church
to the young peoples, their services to her were greater still.
If she gave them a polity and a ritual, they gave her a
reasoned if not a reasonable faith. She, because of her
imperial ancestry, was able to give the ideas and mechanism
of law, the love of order, the spirit at once of authority and'
obedience ; but they, because of their fresh enthusiasms, un
exhausted and unvexed with centuries of fruitless attempting
to read the riddles of the race, were able to labour at
building her inchoate intellectual material into a living and
articulated body of reasoned beliefs. And theirs was the
nobler work : the Church was but the vehicle of ancient
custom and law ; but the new mind was the first to naturalize
reason in religion, to claim that its whole realm .should lie
open to the searching eye of constructive and interpretative
thought. Its action in the first instance was in the service
of the Roman Church, but only that it might in the last
instance be more effective in the service of the truth.

GIVES NEW READING OF OLD PROBLEMS. II 5

§ II.— The New Races and the Old Problems.
This new mind, then, came, with all its unexercised energies
and untempered curiosities, to the old problems, and endea
voured to solve them by the help of the only factors it knew.
For it the earlier theology of the East could hardly be said
to exist ; it was written in a little-known tongue, used by
men who denied the filioque, and were heretics. The belief
in the dignity and sanity of human nature, in the freedom of
the will, in the affinity of God and man which was native to
Greek theology in its golden age, was foreign to the later
Latin, nor had it the literary and historical sense, so necessary
to the interpretation of a religion that lives by its sacred
books, which had marked the great scholars of the East,
especially Origen, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Chrysostom.
Scotus Erigena had indeed something of the Oriental mystic
ism and speculative audacity, but his system was a theosophy,
not a theology, and his master no veritable Greek Father, but
the late fantastic and hierarchical pseudo-Dionysius. The
man that set the problems of the new mind was Augustine,
and his theology was full of unreconciled antitheses. It
reflects at once his intellect and his history ; the dualism
that was native to his soul is inherent in his system. He
never transcended it in experience, and it always dominated
his thought. The basis of his intellect was, as it were, neo-
Platonic, but the forms under and within which it worked
were Manichean. These, indeed, had many and subtle inter
relations. Neo-Platonism hated matter, feared the senses,
cultivated asceticism and ecstasy as means by which they
could be transcended. The Manichee believed the spirit to
be alone good and real, the flesh to be altogether evil and
devilish. And this dualism remained within the system of
Augustine, but under forms which were determined by his
experience. He read it into Paul, and expressed it in the

II 6 AUGUSTINE: HIS INNATE DUALISM
forms of the Pauline antitheses. He read it into the civil
and ecclesiastical forms which confronted him, and articulated
it into his theory of the two civitates, — of God, which was the
Church ; of man, which was Rome republican and imperial.
He was forced to develop the political form in his con
troversy with the Donatists, and the theological in his
controversy with the Pelagians ; but he never reduced either
his principles or their forms to consistency. His " Confes-
siones " and his " Retractationes " but exhibit from his own
point of view the history of a mind whose external conflicts
were faint echoes of his internal. He never made his theology
penetrate his anthropology, his mysticism qualify and clarify
his ceremonialism, his spiritual create and control his political
ideal. His works are almost all occasional, torn from him
by the necessities of the moment, exhibiting all the one-
sidedness and exaggerations of a singularly rich and restless
mind, that throws itself successively on single aspects of the
truth, and deals with each aspect as if it were the whole.
He had all the excellencies proper to one who is in the field
of controversy perhaps the supremest master ; but his system
has all the defects proper to his pre-eminence in this field —
i.e., it is in no respect a system, but only a succession of
positions polemically maintained.
In a system whose character so corresponds to its genesis,
two things are significant for us here : the polity, or ideal
of the Christian society ; and the theology, or ideal of the
Christian truth. As regards fundamental or determinative
principle, the one was conditional, but the other was ab.solute.
The conditionalism belonged to the very essence of the polity,
because baptism and the Eucharist, while respectively the
means of entrance into the Christian body and the terms of
continuance within it, were also sacraments which men, on
the one hand, could give or withhold, and men, on the other,
accept or refuse. And the absolutism was of the essence of
the theology, because God was conceived as the omnipotent

REFLECTED IN HIS SY.STEM. II7
and ubiquitous Will that fixed all destinies and determined
all events, and man was conceived as unable to will any good
thing till he was changed of God. If the conditionalism of
the polity had been consistently worked out, it would have
qualified the absolutism of the theology ; for if fulfilled con
ditions could incorporate and maintain a man in the body of
the saved, the will of God no longer acted without regard to
the acts of man. And, on the other hand, the absolutism
of the theology, rigorously applied, would have repealed the
conditionalism of the polity ; for where the will of God is
conceived as refusing to act in view of motives or conditions
supplied from without, no system of qualifying acts or rites
can be in place. On this point the history of religious
thought is conclusive ; no real and rigorous sacerdotalism
has been able to build on an absolute theology, and no
absolute theology has been able to make its home within a
real and rigorous sacerdotalism.
Out of Augustine, then, came questions enough for the new
mind, and we can see it from the seventh to the eleventh
century attempting to master the world into which it had
come, and, especially, to work out what we may call the
rudimentary principles of orientation. These were centuries
of great intellectual and political activity. The genius of the
Empire was around and upon and within the Church, working
out its organization. By a series of felicitous fictions laws
were found for its regulation, and history made to authenticate
its claims and authorize its right to the imperial city and seat.
By the wisdom first of statesmen, then of churchmen, the
clergy were schooled, disciplined, and qualified for their place
in the stupendous organism which under the name of the
Catholic Church had now come to be. And the whole went
on without fear of external criticism. The schools of philo
sophy were dead ; the ancient world with its literature and
literary mind had perished ; the realities that lived were those
that belonged to the Church, and these were construed in its

Il8 THE PROBLEMS OF SCHOLASTICISM.
spirit and under its eye. And so, though the questions in
theology were set by Augustine, they were selected, under
stood, and handled in a manner which became the minds thus
situated. Directly out of his Christology, which made Jesus
as Son of man the recipient of grace, rose the controversy
touching the natures and the person of Christ, — whether the
humanity was Son of God by adoption or through the unity
of the person shared in the essential sonship of the Deity.
Out of the anti-Pelagian polemic came the question as to
the " duplex Predestinatio," — whether the will of God was
absolute as to both election and reprobation, or only as to
one ; and, further, whether in matters affecting salvation the
will was in any respect free or altogether bond. Out of his
more spiritual view of the Sacrament, as confronted by the
growing practice of the Church to make the Mass the central
act of worship, came the Eucharistic controversy, whether the
elements do or do not undergo substantial change. The
greatest book * of the period is concerned with this question,
and marks a moment when the development of the political
idea evoked a correlative change in the theological. If these
elements do not become the veritable body and blood of
Christ, how can the Sacrament be His perpetuated sacrifice,
means by which men are reconciled to God and participate in
His life? § III. — Scholasticism.
But if this period was more significant for polity than for
theology, the next, which extends from the twelfth to the
sixteenth century, was more significant for theology than
pohty. The former ends with Gregory VII. ; the latter begins
with Anselm and is governed by Aristotle. The Church could
not escape from ancient philosophy ; when its authority was
most absolute, its dependence on it was most complete. If
' Radbertus, " Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Christi" Migne, " Patrol,"
vol. cxx.

UNITY OF THE CHURCH AND REASON. II9
tradition was the organ of the material factor in theology, thc
Greek mind still supplied the formal. By a curious nemesis
the Aristotle whom the Eastern Fathers had neglected for
Plato, became the Father of Scholasticism. If Churches always
canonized their benefactors, he would long ago have been
at the head of the Roman calendar. There were many
Schoolmen, but they all had one master, and they built by
his help and to his honour systems that even he would have
acknowledged to be encyclopaedic and marvels of architectonic
craft. Their aim was to exhibit the unity in thought which
the Church manifested in society and pohtics ; the Pope was
king of men, theology was queen of knowledge. The hour
of his ascendency and of its coincided. The Papacy and
Scholasticism grew together, lived and decayed together. The
forces that dissolved mediasval thought disintegrated the
Mediaeval Church.
Scholasticism had three great questions — a religious, a
theological, and a philosophical ; but though formally differ
ent, they were all essentially one. The religious concerned
the relations of faith to authority on the one hand and to
knowledge on the other ; the theological concerned the
nature, function, and forms of the redemptive work ; the
philosophical concerned the conditions, the methods, and
the objects of knowledge. Anselm, distinctly the most
original and creative of all the mediaeval theologians, may
be said to have determined either the rise or the special
form of all three.
I. The religious question was directly raised by the relation
of the Church to the awakening intellect. That relation had
become something quite other than it was in the patristic
period. Organization had increased, and, as it were, indi
vidualized authority ; the claim to command kings involved
the right to control mind, to legislate for thought. But just
as this claim became acutest philosophy awoke from its long
sleep, and men were forced suddenly and consciously to face

I20 CREDO UT INTELLIGAM.
the whole furniture and contents of their own minds, and
to ask. Whence? how? in what manner and according to
what order did we come by this wonderful body of beliefs
which we hold, this marvellous structure of doctrine we
confess ? Was reason first ? or was faith — i.e., the Church ?
Do we believe because we know? or do we know because we
believe ? Anselm said : " Neque enim quaero intelligere, ut
credam ; sed credo, ut intelligam." * Abelard replied, in the
words of Jesus, the son of Sirach : " Qui credit cito, levis
corde est," ^ and argued that reason was of God, and had, as
philosophy showed, found God. Men believed not because
a thing was spoken, but because they were convinced of its
truth. Faith alone was the supposition of things not" seen,
but knowledge the experience of the very things themselves ;
and so only through knowledge will faith be made perfect.'
They thus differed as regards the sequence or relative
priority of faith and reason, but not as regards their ultimate
harmony. Without this harmony neither faith nor reason
could be satisfied ; were they to remain in conflict, either the
one or the other must be sacrificed, and the sacrifice of either
would be the sacrifice of something directly created and sanc
tioned of God. Hence Anselm was as anxious to satisfy
reason as Abelard — his intellectual life was one long struggle
to make the objects or material of faith become the content
of the reason — but he wanted to make sure of the objects
before he began the process of reconciliation. Yet his whole
endeavour, alike in the " Cur Deus Homo," the " Monologium,"
and the " Proslogium," was a confession that a satisfied reason
was necessary to the completion, the continuance, or even the
reality of faith. Beneath, therefore, the difference as to the
order or .sequence of the acts, there was agreement as to
their equal necessity and validity ; a faith that could not be
' " Proslogium," I, Opera, p. 30 (ed. 1721).
' " Introd. ad Theol," Opera, p. 105 1 (Migne). Cf. Ecclesiasticus xix. 4.
^ Ibid., pp. 1050 ff. Cf. "Deutsch," Peter Abalard, pp. 96 ff., 433 ff.

INTELLIGO UT CREDAM. 12 1
exphcated by reason and justified to it, neither thinker could
have conceived as of God or possessed of authority over man.
And this remained a characteristic of the great constructive
scholastic systems ; they were essentially rationalisms, at
tempts to make the matter of faith reasonable to the reason.*
And the difference as to the sequence or relative priority
of reason and faith was more apparent than real. It is
evident that here the chronological order is one and the
logical order another. If the first be regarded, Anselm is
right ; if the second, Abelard. In the actual history or
experience of the soul faith precedes reason ; in the logical
or ideal process, where the intellect, by the method of analysis
and synthesis, deals with the material submitted to it, reason
precedes faith. In the realm of experience man begins with
facts ; he believes those who know. He does not start life
with a matured and furnished intellect, but as one who must
believe that he may understand. Parents, school, church — and
parents and school are but a form of church — supply him
with a body of beliefs ; and when he begins to think, he
finds himself in possession of such a body. But these beliefs
become his own by a process of ratiocination, more or less
conscious. They are not the property of his intellect till
they have been by his intellect understood and assimilated.
Should they turn out to be beliefs contrary to his reason, either
they must cease to be his or he must cease to be reasonable ;
should they be agreeable to his reason, then they become the
beliefs of his reason, or, more simply, of the man. What
was first was inherited rather than personal ; what was last
was personal rather than inherited. In the one case faith
' This is admirably expressed by Anselm in the " Cur Deus Homo" as
the aira of his dialectic : " Ut rationabili necessitate intelligam esse oportere
omnia illa, quae nobis fides Catholica de Christo credere praecipit, si
volumus salvari" (Lib. i., §25, p. 86"). Again: "Per unius quaestionis,
quam proposuimus, solutionem, quicquid in Novo Veterique Testamento
continetur, probatum intelligo " ; and this solution is so reached by reason
alone as to be fitted to satisfy both Jews and pagans (il, § 22, p. 96^

122 ON THE BASIS OF FORENSIC THEOLOGY
precedes reason, in the other reason precedes faith. The
first is a preparatory and transitional state ; the second alone
is permanent, personal, and final.
2. The theological question was expressed in the title of
Anselm's best-known treatise, " Cur Deus Homo ? " Its aim,
true to the spirit and tendency of the West, was soterio
logical rather than Christological — i.e., concerned more with
what the Person did than what He was, conceiving the Person
through the work and as a condition necessary to it. With
this treatise constructive theories of the Atonement begin
to be. For a thousand years the Church had lived without
making any approach to a reasonable doctrine of the death
of Christ. Its connection with redemption and the remission
of sins had always been affirmed, but there had been no
discovery of any real or valid reason for the connection.
Eminent and orthodox Fathers, like Irenaeus and Augustine,
had made its final cause the devil rather than God, the
rescue of man by purchase from his power * ; but Anselm
found its final cause in God rather than the devil. He
worked out his theory on the forensic lines familiar to Latin
theology. His cardinal principles were these : Sin withholds
from God the honour that is His due ; it is therefore a debt.
Where such sin is the creditor must either be satisfied or
the debtor punished ; and satisfaction must mean not only
that the original debt is paid, but that compensation is offered
1 This was not indeed, as is so often represented, the uniform doctrine
before Anselm. It was expressly denied by John of Damascus; and
Athanasius had long before him conceived it as a sacrifice for the Father
against whom man had sinned. Yet the notion was a favourite one with
the Greek as well as the Latin Fathers. It t6ok scientific shape with
Origen (in Matt. xvi. 8, tom. iv. 27 : Lom. ed.), though he made the
transaction an illusion operated by God ; it was developed by Gregory
of Nyssa, translated into a "pia fraus" by Ambrose, is stated in more
judicious and respectful language by Augustine : " In hac redemptione
tanquam pretium pro nobis datus est sanguis Christi" — and in Gregory
the Great the humanity of Christ is the bait with which God hooked that
fish. His old enemy, the devil Anselm dismisses this ancient theory very
sharply (i. 7), and with him it may be said to disappear from theology.

A NEW DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT IS BUILT. 1 23
for the loss sustained or the dishonour inflicted by the with
held payment. To give such satisfaction is impossible to
man or any creature, for the utmost the creature can do is to
fulfil the duties of the hour. He can do no more than obey,
cannot collect such a surplusage of merit as would satisfy
man's infinite Creditor. The being -who does it must be
one who has man's nature, that he may act in man's name ;
but he must also have God's dignity, that he may satisfy the
infinite claims of God for the damage inflicted by man's
infinite sin. To do this God became man, and He did it
by His sufferings and death. The theory was throughout
a piece of forensic speculation ; it was the relations of God
and man interpreted in the terms of Roman law, though as
modified by Teutonic, and as applied in the penitential
discipline of the Church.* As such it was fatal to the
kingdom of God as a reign of grace. The satisfaction which
compensated the offended secured the legal quittance of the
offender ; the debt paid could not be a debt forgiven ; to
deny salvation or reward to any man so redeemed was to
' These three sources of the Anselmic idea must be recognised ; in his
discussion elements can be recognized peculiar to each of the three.
Cremer's essay in the Studien u. Krit., 1880, pp. 1-24, lays too much
stress on the affinity with Teutonic law. It may be true that this law
allowed the alternative "aut satisfactio aut poena," but the alternative was
not as unknown to Roman law as Cremer would make out Satisfaction
for a debt could be made by a stranger without the knowledge of the
debtor and even against his will, provided it were, with the free consent of
the creditor, made in his name, and on his account. If the creditor were
satisfied, though he did not receive an exact equivalent for the debt, the
debtor was liberated (cf. Dig., xlvi 3, 17, 23, 52; I 16, 47, and 176).
The processes by which this could be accomplished were significant, as
e.g., "cessio nominum," by which a new creditor took the place of the old,
and "delegatio" or "intercessio," by which a new replaced the old debtor.
Both as regards principle and process the Anselmic theory owed more
to Roman than to Teutonic law. Of the latter Anselm can have known
little ; his legal ideas must have come mainly from the Church courts and
the Norman courts, where the rules were derived through the Prankish
from the Roman legislation. As to "satisfacere" and "satisfactio," see
Dirksen, sub vv., and supra, p. 100.

124 IN THEOLOGY REALISM IS CONSTRUCTIVE,
deny him his most manifest rights. If grace was saved
by God being made to provide the person who satisfied, then
the whole became a preconcerted transaction, a sort of com
mercial drama, a legal fiction sanctioned by the offended
for the good of the offender. Or if the notion of forgiveness
was retained by the act being transferred from the satisfied
Father to the satisfying Son, then the ethical unity of the
Godhead was endangered and the most serious of all heresies
endorsed. Yet defective as was the theory, it was the most
rational word which had been spoken on the question, and
introduced a method of speculation which has endured even
to our own day.
3. The philosophical question was the famous one as to
universals, or Nominalism and Realism. The question was
raised by a passage in Boethius' translation of Porphyry's
introduction to the logical writings of Aristotle, and concerned
at once the nature of general terms and their relation to
individual objects. Anselm, in a polemic against Roscellinus,
denounced those heretical dialecticians " qui non nisi flatum
vocis putant esse universales substantias," * and his influence
made Realism for long the dominant philosophy. There
were three positions ; universalia were either ante rem, in re,
or post re-yn. The first was Platonic Realism, and had as its
representative Duns Scotus ; the second was Aristotehan,
and was held by Aquinas ; the third was Nominalism, and
had as its great exponent William of Occam. The first
and second as both realisms affirmed that universals were
realities — the one that they were before things and creative
of them, the other that they were in things, as it were
the ordering and unifying spirit of the whole. Nominalism,
on the other hand, made universals mere names, abstractions
formed by thought for its own convenience. These terms,
then, implied the questions fundamental to all thought, which
according as they are conceived, stated, and answered, differ-
' " De Fid. Trin.," c. ii.. Opera, p. 42.

BUT NOMINALISM CRITICAL. 125
entiate all schools of philosophy. Scholastic Realism is akin
to our transcendental Idealism. It assumed the priority of
thought, reasoned downwards from the universal to the par
ticular, and explained all phenomena of sense by the action
of the spirit or idea which alone was real and rational. Of
its two forms the one was more speculative, the other more
practical or experimental, — the speculative deducing what is
from the realia, i.e., the ideas ; the experimental using the
ideas to explain the realities. Duns Scotus, because the more
purely speculative or a priori, was more of a rationalist than
Aquinas ; Aquinas, because more experimental, i.e., standing
more on his own experience and the Church's, was more of
a supernaturalist, one who used his speculation to justify his
experience. To Duns the rational was the real, but to
Aquinas the real was the rational. Nominalism, on the other
hand, is hke our empiricism. It started from the priority of
sense, reasoned from below upwards ; held that mind in ac
quiring knowledge proceeded from particulars to universals,
which, as simple generalizations from a multitude of in
dividuals, were mere names.
The two schools acted in the region of theology in accord
ance with their respective principles Realism was more
constructive and conservative. Nominalism more critical and
disintegrative ; and was always most so when its criticism
was skilfully masked under deference to authority. The
system that does not start with a constructive reason
cannot rationally or logically translate religious beliefs into
the terms of the reason. What it does not find within
and has to construe as simply given from without, it can
only regard as a thing more or less arbitrary because more
or less external. On the ground of reason it cannot find
. the most transcendental of all ideas reasonable ; and
, hence, if it accepts them, must accept them on the word
. of an authority which it has somehow been persuaded to
regard as sufficient. This was the position of the later

126 SCHOLASTICISM PHILOSOPHICAL.
and more scientific Nominalism, especially of Occam. He
was more conscious of the difficulties than the faculties
of belief, and his ultimate reason for it was an appeal to
an authority whose words could be more easily quoted
than its right or reason justified. Hence Nominalism was
a sign that Scholasticism, and with it mediaeval Catholicism,
had begun to decay ; the hour had come when the materials
it had so audaciously built into system could be assailed by
a criticism which was most disintegrative when it seemed
most conservative.
Scholasticism, then, in its essential character was a philo
sophy, determined by the philosophies which had been before
it. The world it attempted to interpret was composed of
the Church and such remains of the ancient order as it had
been able to incorporate ; the method it pursued was one it
learned from Aristotle. The limitations that mark it belong
to its world on the one hand, and its method on the other,
but it is only when construed as a sort of belated ancient
philosophy that it can be construed at all. This philosophy
came to it as a logic or dialectic rather than a metaphysic,
affecting the substance through the forms of thought, by
teaching it the art of definition and distinction, of statement
and argument. It was exactly the sort of philosophy the
age needed to construe the material offered to it, the Church
and its tradition receiving at its hands a sort of intellectual
apotheosis. But just as the ne plus ultra of the constructive
endeavour was reached by the schools of absolute and of
modified Realism, or the Scotists and the Thomists, a subtle
and sceptical Nominalism, fatal to the assumptions of both,
came out of the. North, showing thought critical where once
it had been only constructive. And coincident with this
appeared other causes which were to work even more
efficiently for the birth of new than for the death of the
old theologies.

CHAPTER VII.
THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION.
§ I. — The Time and the Men.
OF the causes external to Scholasticism which con
tributed to the decay of the mediaeval system, the
most potent, and for us by far the most significant, was the
Renaissance.' It was made possible by the then state of
the- Catholic Church, and actual by the recovery of the
ancient literatures ; the one may be described as the con
dition, the other as the cause of its being. It found the
Mediaeval Papacy in a state of decay, and it hastened
the decay into a dissolution. If Christianity assimilated
while it dissolved the Greco-Roman world, the resurgence
bf that world dissolved the Papacy, whose energies had
been exhausted in the creation of modern Europe. By the
middle of the fifteenth century it was manifest that the
old system had in every point — thought, polity, religion —
broken down. Just as the intellect had ceased to be con
structive in theology, the Church had ceased to be creative in
religion, or adequate to the realization of even its mediaeval
ideal. In politics the Papal system had lost its ancient im
perialism, had forgotten the high ideals that governed it,
and had degenerated into a cunning statecraft, meddling,
selfish, vicious. The Popes had allowed themselves to be
swept into the whirlpool of Italian intrigue, and, greedy
of power, of patronage, and, still more, of money, fought,

128 THE CLASSICAL WORLD AWAKES
schemed, bribed, betrayed, broke or kept faith, on the purest
Machiavellian principles, and for strictly consonant ends.
The acutest political and most typical Italian mind of the
century calls Italy la corruttela ed il vituperio del mondo, and
so connects its moral debasement with the Church as to show
that patriotism could hardly bear other fruit than the ecclesias
tical revolt. But even more utter was the religious decadence.
There is no need to invent scandal : the literature of the
period is the most scandalous in history, that which concerns
the Papacy the most scandalous of all. The vow of celibacy
was not construed as a vow of chastity, and the obscurest
offender could plead in apology the example of illustrious
princes and heads of the Church. Impure Popes signified
impure courts, cardinals and conclaves that made light of sin.
The dreadful thing about Innocent VIII. or Alexander VI.
was not his personal character, but his election by men
who knew his personal character only too well. The whole
system was moribund, and a decaying body politic is never
a wholesome body, least of all in the head.
This century, then, of decaying mediaevalism was the century
of the Renaissance. Men who lived under a once proud and
noble Church system, now fallen into impotence and unreality,
found themselves face to face with an ancient literature, and,
through it, with an older world. Comparison became not
only possible, but necessary ; through the medium of the
older the newer world came to know and to criticize itself.
The ancient literature was finer, the ancient world fresher,
than anything the moderns knew. Man had changed since
the literature had been lost to him ; and the chanee made
it at its rebirth the more vivid and him the more ready to
learn its lesson. The old world knew no Church and had
no sense of sin ; the new world had been fashioned by the
Church and was possessed with the sense of sin, though the
Church had fallen into feebleness, and sin lived more in
symbol than in sense or conscience. Each world had thus

AND FINDS A CHANGED CHRISTIANITY. 1 29
its naturalism, but with a difference : the nature of the old
world was innocent, and so its naturalism was open and
unashamed ; the nature of the new world was sinful, and
so its naturalism was furtive, guilty, debased. And this
radical difference made minds conscious of many sharp,
unreconciled, even irreconcilable antitheses. The recovered
literature created a sense of style, and the elegant Latinity
of Poliziano made scholastic Latin, and all that had been
written therein, seem barbarous. With the sense for style
the faculty of criticism awoke, and Lorenzo Valla was able
to prove the donation of Constantine a forgery, the tradition
as to the origin of the Apostolic symbol a fable, the language
of the Vulgate faulty and inaccurate. The study of ancient
philosophy proved more educative and ennobling than the
study of mediaeval theology. Aristotle, in the hands of
Pomponazzi, took a subtler and broader meaning than he
had had in the schools ; the heroes and sages of antiquity
were drawn into the circle of the saints — baptized, as it
were, into current ecclesiastical ideas and usages ; Socrates
became a type of Christ, Plato the Attic Moses ; before his
bust, laurel-crowned, Marsilio Ficino kept a lamp burning,
cultivating piety at the shrine of the man he taught to speak
Latin. Pico della Mirandula, loving the old, yet loyal to
the new, strove to reconcile the two, sought the aid of the
Kabbala, and, by the help of cunning allegory, made doctrine
and history and philosophy speak the language he wished.
But an eclectic mysticism, though devout and sufficient for
the individual, is never final or scientific, or sufficient for
the time. The old recovered world could not thus be recon
ciled with the new world on which it had broken. There
were falsities in both, and also veracities in both, and the
veracity in each was to be fatal to the falsity in the other. The
moribund body ecclesiastic was sensitive all over to the touch
of the new historical spirit; nascent criticism showed that
some of the Church's proudest claims were based in fraud ;
9

I30 ITALIAN AND TEUTONIC HUMANISM.
the lofty spirit of Plato, now unsphered, rebuked its empty,
dogmatic formulae ; and a passionate patriot and preacher
of righteousness at Florence stood forward sternly to de
nounce its sins against the liberties of man and the laws of
God. The times were ripe, but the Italy that the Papacy
had so helped to debase could not embody the new thought
in victorious action. The spirit of Machiavelli guided the
policies of Italy ; and out of the mean, ambitious, and selfish
intrigues of princes, uprising and restoration, in any large
sense, political or religious, can never come.
But along with the classical the ancient Christian litera
ture and world were recovered, and became objects of his
torical study and knowledge. And in relation to these two
worlds and literatures the characteristic differences between
North and South were again repeated. The transalpine
was exceedingly unlike the cisalpine Humanism. The
Teutonic, as we may call it, was notable for its intense
ethical seriousness, the religiousness, the Christian temper
and aims of its representative men ; but the Italian for
its unethical character, its spirit of revolt against religion,
its recoil towards classical forms of philosophical belief.
Epicurean, Peripatetic, Platonic, culminating in systems like
the Pantheism of Bruno and the Atheism of Vanini. Primi
tive Christianity was, indeed, not so intelligible to Italian as
to German men. For one thing, it came in a literature that
offended classical taste, that had none of the grand style
which the men of the Renaissance loved, and they feared
that too much study of it might injure the elegance of their
Latinity. And so it was a literature that the great Italian
scholars did not care to edit, or great houses to publish. The
famous presses of Italy sent forth editions of the Greek and
Latin classics, but not one of the Greek New Testament ; intel
lectual centres like Florence affected the Platonic academy
rather than the Christian school. For another thing, Italy
could construe Christianity better as a political than as an

RENAISSANCE IN LITERATURE AND RELIGION. I3I
intellectual system ; the men who knew it only as New Rome
did not care to know it as it had been before it was Roman ;
its roots in the Eternal City were more intelligible to them
than its roots in the paternity of God and the sin of man.
But in the transalpine countries it was altogether different ;
there classical antiquity had immeasurably less significance
and ancient Christianity immeasurably more. The two
Humanisms, then, may be distinguished thus : the Teutonic
Humanism studied classical that it might the better know
Christian antiquity, but the Italian studied the literature that
it might the better imitate the life of the ancient classical
peoples. Hence Italy had scholars and painters, but the
Teutonic countries scholars and reformers. Reuchlin, though
no official theologian, was a Humanist, that he might be
a better divine. He studied language that he might be
qualified to interpret religion. Colet, the most typical Eng
lish Humanist, studied Greek that he might the better
know and teach St. Paul. Erasmus, the purest embodi
ment of Teutonic Humanism, was editor of the first Greek
New Testament published, paraphrased it, annotated it, and
worked throughout his long and laborious life mainly on
early Christian literature. The Teutonic mind made the
literature more of a means, but the Italian made it more of
an end, — where it was more of an end, the characteristic
result was the new birth of art ; where more of a means, the
result, no less characteristic, was the new birth of religion.
§ II. — The Renaissance in Christian Literature :
Erasmus.
The recovered knowledge of Christian antiquity could
thus, as little as the recovered knowledge of classical, remain
without result. Where men profoundly believed their religion,
they could not discover anew its sources without being pro
foundly moved by the discovery. To come suddenly face

132 ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY DISCOVERED
to face with the personalities and ideas creative of the
Christian faith as they lived in the marvellous literature of
the period of creation, was like being translated into a new
and strange world. For while the Christianity the Church
had made was known, the Christianity that had made the
Church was not. And so long as the Church, simply as
Church, was known, man did not feel the need of getting
behind and beneath it to its Maker, did not conceive the
necessity or even the possibility of comparing it with His
mind and purpose. But when they found themselves in pos
session of the original literature, and were able to deal with
it as literature, yet as the sacred and authoritative source of
the Church and her faith, comparison of the parent form and
the living organism became inevitable ; and, of course, could
not but involve judgment as to the degree in which the
organism had departed from the primitive type.
The inevitable though altogether undesigned result of this
return to the sources of the religion was therefore the rise of
such questions as — How did the Church and Churchmen of
to-day compare with Christ and His Apostles and Apostolic
Christianity ? Whether was the difference to the advantage
or disadvantage of religion ? Whether ought the established
order to be accommodated to the primitive law, or the primi
tive law to be superseded and supplemented by the esta
blished order ? We may see the answer of Humanism, more or
less again undesigned, in Erasmus, who was, like Reuchlin,
no Protestant, and, like him, lived and died a Catholic. It is
no reflection on him to say that his primary interest was
literature, his secondary religion. That is but to say that
he was a Humanist, not a reformer. To the work of a
reformer no man was ever by nature less destined, and no
man was ever more obedient to the nature he had. He
loved peace, culture, good society ; he was delicate, fastidious,
sensitive, " so thin-skinned that a fly would draw blood," as
was most truly said of him ; he hated the obtuse, the ignorant,

AND COMPARED WITH MODERN : ERASMUS. 1 33
the vulgar, the men who could not see or feel the sarcasm
within its veil of compliment, or the irony hidden in a
graceful allusion or ambiguous phrase. He feared revolution,
with its sudden release of incalculable forces, the chaos, the
collisions, the brutalities it was certain to evoke. The pos
sible evils incident to radical change more alarmed his
imagination than the evils actual in the existing order touched
his conscience. He loved his esoteric world, desired nothing
better than to be left in possession of it, free to criticize from
its point of view the world exoteric, yet, with due regard to
the benefits of studious peace, always preferring to insinuate
rather than express an opinion, to pronounce a conditional
rather than an absolute judgment. But in spite of the nature
that bound him to the old order, and so held him a Catholic,
no man did more for reform, or formulated principles that
more demanded it. His New Testament was here his
greatest achievement. Some of the great presses had indeed
first and chiefly busied themselves with editions of the Vul
gate, which, as the Church's version of the Bible, stood under
its sanction, raised no question of translation, of criticism, of
relation to prior and creative sources, but was rather, as it
were, its authorized and printed tradition. But with Erasmus'
New Testament it was altogether different. Here stood the
Book in its original speech, with attempts to fix certain
dubious readings, with one most significant text omitted,
with a new version alongside it said to be more elegant
and accurate than the old : how did the sanctioned and
authoritative version translate this original ? and could the
1 No man ever more frankly enthroned authority, or professed the spirit
of submission. At the bidding of the Church he was ready to condemn
his own critical conclusions (Opera ix., p. 864, B.), and he could, he said,
have agreed with the Arians and Pelagians, if the Church had sanctioned
their doctrine. See letter to Wilibald Pirkheimer, "Epistolae," p. 1029
(Leyden ed.). 'We know what confessions of this kind would mean in the
mouth of a cynic — no two things may be nearer allied than submission to-
authority and indifference to truth. He would be a brave man who would
say what they mean in the mouth of Erasmus.

134 CATHOLICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE ORGANISM
translations beside the original be authoritative any more?
Here, too, was the Head and Founder of the Church, the
Church He founded, the men through whom He did it,
all presented in the lucid pages of authentic and con
temporary history : did the Catholic truly represent the
Apostolic Church, embody its spirit, interpret its doctrines,
maintain its laws and institutions ? What of Rome, and
the Papacy, and the priesthood, and the whole sacerdotal
organization was there in the Christianity of Christ and
His Apostles?
These questions were inevitable, and the answers as clear
and emphatic as they could be made by a man of Erasmus'
temper and habits and tastes. Christ was the one Teacher
appointed of God Himself; supreme authority belongs to
Him alone.* He marvels that men should have made Christ's
words to Peter bear exclusive reference to the Pope ; they
refer indeed to him, but to all Christians as well.^ By
Church he does not understand priests, bishops, or popes,
who are merely its ministers, but the whole Christian people
or collective community ' — that is, " A certain congregation
of all men throughout the whole world, who agree in the
faith of the Gospel, who worship one God the Father, who
place their whole confidence in his Son, who are led by the
same Spirit of Him, from whose fellowship every one who
commits deadly sin is cut off." ^ As to the Sacraments, were
1 " Annotationes in Nov. Test.,'' sub loe, Matt, xvii 5.
2 Ibid., Matt xvi. 18. It may be noted that Stunica laid special
emphasis on Erasmus' attitude to the primacy of Peter and the Papal
Chair. The charges were : (l) Erasmus has affirmed that it cannot be
argued from Peter standing first in the Apostolic catalogue in Matthew
that he was the first of the Apostles. (2) He denies that the words,
" Thou art Peter," refer to Peter alone. (3) He maintains that the Pope's
title in earliest times was " Pontifex Romanus," not " Summus Pontifex."
(4) He holds the monarchy of the Pope to be later than Jerome ; the
authority now ascribed to the Roman See was unknown even to Augustine.
— "Apologia ad L. Stunicam," opera ix., p. 381.
^ " Epist.," 1029, A. ; " Adagiorum Chiliades,' p. 589 (Basel ed.).
* " Colloquia " : " Inquisitio de Fide,'' 298 (Amsterdam ed.).

COMPARED AND CONTRASTED. 1 35
it not that the judgment of the Church was adverse, he
would incline to the reformed doctrine ; even as it is, he
does not see any good in a body imperceptible to the senses,
or any use in it, provided only spiritual grace be present in
the symbols.* Besides, no one but the priest can know that
the Host has been properly consecrated, and Erasmus can
find no place in the sacred Scriptures which certainly proves
that the Apostles consecrated bread and wine into the body
and blood of the Lord.^ The elements are but symbols
that signify the indissoluble unity of Christ, the Head, and
His mystical body, the Church. Indeed, the sacerdotal
tendencies and practices of the time, with their inexorable
and demoralizing fetishism, had no more unsparing critic than
Erasmus, and his criticism proceeded from principles that
were fatal to all the penances, claims, and ordinances of
Catholicism. Relic-worship invariably provoked his severest
and most pungent satire, and even moved him to gravest
censure as a new and meaner Pharisaism, which became, even
more than the old, the hideous caricature of godliness.' To
escape from it men must return to the Gospel. The rule is,
men go to Rome to come back worse ; what best ensures
amendment of life is the Word of Truth.* Neglect of
the Gospel has caused a double evil to come upon the
Church, more than heathenism of life and a ceremonial
Judaism in worship. In the ceremonies the whole Papal
system was for the mind and conscience of the day sum
marized ; it was here that it most directly touched life,
subverted morals, debased worship, estranged man from God.
1 " Epist," 941, A.
* Ibid., 1193, D. E. Of course this represents the view of the familiar
epistles — Erasmus' private, confidential opinion, what would have been
most agreeable to his reason. His public view, accepted because of the
judgment of the Church, may be found in the letters to Conrad Pelican
ibid.. 963-966, and his " Detectio Praestigiarum Cujusdam Libelli," oc
casioned by an anonymous German work on this subject.
' "Annotationes in Nov. Test," sub loe, Matt, xxiii. 5.
¦¦ "Colloquia"; "Adolescens et Scortum," p. 251.

136 NEED OF THE PURITAN.
So Erasmus assailed the ceremonies from every point of view.
They were unscriptural : in the whole New Testament
there is no command which refers to ceremonies ; against
them are warnings enough by Christ, arguments enough by
Paul, but nowhere from any one any word of commendation.*
They were irreligious too ; where they flourished, piety,
morality, common decency even, decayed. And the reason
was not far to seek. Positive laws, made by bishops or
councils, popes or orders, could not supersede or set aside
the laws of nature or of God. These had the prior and
higher authority, but they were ever being invalidated or
repealed by the ceremonies. If a priest lets his hair grow
or wears a lay habit he is punished, but if he debauches
himself and others "he is still a pillar of the Church."
Men who would die rather than eat flesh when forbidden,
yet did not scruple to live lasciviously. In language of
appalling plainness he described the obfuscation of con
science by the ceremonies ; they abrogated the law of God,
caused disrespect and disobedience to the most rudimentary,
yet imperative, moral laws, blinded and blunted the moral
sense, created an artificial and utterly unveracious conscience
in persons, orders, and even whole communities.^ No man
had ever less of the Puritan temper than Erasmus ; but no
man so helps us to understand the need for the Puritan
spirit and character. Sacerdotal ceremonialism had done in
Christianity what it has done in every religion it has ever got
control of — what, Erasmus again and again argued, it had done
with most tragic results in Judaism : ended the reign of the
moral ideal, subordinated the Divine categorical imperative to
some trivial positive ordinance, to the ritual or routine of the
caste or the cloister or the school. Humanism, in the light
of the literature it loved, saw the evil, and in its elegant,
' " Ratio Verae Theolog.," p. 94 ; " Enchiridion," pp. 60 ff.
' " Colloquia : 'Ixdvocpayla." This colloquy presents a full and most vivid
view of Erasmus' position.

THE PURITAN APPEARS. 1 37
incisive, satirical, yet humorous way criticized what it saw ;
but criticism, while it may entertain and even amend life,
neither can nor will do what was then most in need of being
done — reform religion.
§ III. — The Reformation : Luther.
But the new reading of history involved a new effort not
only at the interpretation, but also at the realization of the
religion. Hence out of Humanism Protestantism soon came.
Both were creations of the historical spirit — the one in the
sphere of literature, the other in the realm of religion. The
recovered literature of classical and Christian antiquity alike
acted on the imagination, but with a characteristic difference :
in the one case, the imagination was reached through the
reason, in the other the reason was reached through the
imagination and conscience. The result in the former case
was culture, the exercise and enjoyment of balanced and
regulated faculty ; the result in the latter case was religion,
the genesis of new beliefs as to God and man, and the
impulse to embody them in action — i.e., in the creation of
a new world correspondent to the new faith. The historical
spirit in the sphere of literature is objective, handles its
material as facts or phenomena that have to be understood
and criticized, construed and explained ; but the historical
spirit in the realm of religion is subjective, handles its
material as transcendental and eternal realities related to
an immortal subject, as symbols or revelations of the cause
and end of being, and of the law by which life ought to be
ordered. Now, the access to the original sources meant to the
quickened conscience and imagination a sudden coming face
to face with the Christ, who was at once the maker of the
Christian religion and the Saviour of the soul. The more
earnest the man who stood there, the more inevitable would
be the question — Is the Church's way Christ's? Does it

138 LUTHER THE CONSERVATIVE BY NATURE
truly represent Him and realize His religion? This was
Luther's question, but not his only — it was the question of
the time ; yet to understand the form in which it was raised
we must understand him. He was no Humanist, in the strict
sense, though Humanism had contributed to his making.
Some of its brightest sons were amongst his oldest and truest
friends ; but he himself had none of the fastidiousness, the
dubious temper, the love of elegance, the refining, though not
necessarily refined, spirit, which makes the study of literature
a culture and an end in itself He was a stalwart man,
sensuous, passionate, imaginative, tender, easily moved to
laughter or to tears, capable of the strongest love or hate
possessed of the simpler emotions, a stranger to the more
complex, indifferent to the abstract, open to the concrete.
Good had for him no being without God, and evil none
without the devil. He was never meant by nature for
an intellectual innovator ; his changes were never due to
any speculative process or logical concatenation of thought,
though in decisive moments he was often guided by a
supreme, yet courageous, common sense. Like all men of
strong and simple emotions, his instincts were all conserva
tive ; he hated change, changed only under the compulsion
of an over-mastering feeling or need, and with a sort of
convulsion of nature, conservative changes taking always
more or less the form of a catastrophe. Hence the large
dramatic element in Luther's life ; he resisted change till
resistance became impossible, and then he changed with a
noise that startled Europe. So was it with the pubhcation
of his Theses, his burning of the Pope's Bull, his appearance
at Worms, and his marriage. Hence, too, the inconsistencies
of Lutheranism ; it has no logical coherence, is explicable
when studied through Luther's history and experience, but
inexplicable if regarded -as a reasoned and articulated system.
In dealing with justification by faith his mode of handling
Scripture was the freest ; in dealing with the . Supper his

BECOMES THE REFORMER BY NECESSITY. 1 39
method was a slavish literalism. And the case is typical : in
him lay two opposite worlds ; he was a revolutionary without
being a radical, or, as it were, a Protestant under protest,
which means that the work he did grew out of the conflict
between character and position, but was not the spontaneous
outcome of an innovating and reconstructive mind.
Now, this was precisely the sort of man needed to change
the hterary or Humanistic into a religious and reforming
movement. It could not have been done by a designing man,
or a cloistered student, or a malcontent, or a doctrinaire
radical ; it could only have been done by a man compact of
passion and imagination, — of a passion that, when roused,
could move with irresistible force, blind to the obstructions
in its path ; of an imagination that, when quickened, could
see further than the colder reason, and also compel others to
see. We are to imagine a man so constituted possessed of
what is perhaps the most awful and imperious creation of
Christianity, the sense of sin ; and with this sense in kind and
quality and degree as it had been in Paul and in Augustine,
and as it was to be later in Bunyan. Such a sense is at root a
passion for the possession of Deity by a man who feels Deity
too awful in His goodness to be possessed by him. It
does not argue a bad man, but it argues a man who knows
the impossibility of being worthy of God, yet feels the
necessity to him of the God who seems so unapproachable,
so inaccessible. To such a man, reconciliation, to be real,
must be of God and to God, a work of infinite grace ;
and religion to be true must be the way or method of such
reconciliation. The Christian doctrine of sin would be in
tolerable were it not transfigured by the Christian doctrine
of grace ; indeed, it is the splendour of the one that makes
the shadow lie so dark upon the other. Sin without grace is
the creed of cynicism or despair ; it is only through grace
that it becomes an integral part of Christianity.
Such a man was Luther, and to him the New Testament

140 ANTITHESES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT REPEATED.
comes, not as the voice of the Church, but as God's voice. The
first Christian age rises before him, wakes into life, stands
out in vivid contrast to his own. Here are no indulgences,
penances, pilgrimages ; all is simple, of grace, through faith,
without works. He feels affinity with Paul ; new Catholicism
is but old Judaism, with its fathers, traditions, law, ceremonial,
righteousness after the flesh ; and the new must be com
bated by the weapons that had vanquished the old. He
stands in the immediate presence of Christ, and learns that
His conflict with the Pharisees has the same reason and
meaning as Paul's with Judaism. In the light of the New
Testament duty becomes clear : there must be a return to
Apostolical Christianity. For Luther this return was summed
up in the idea of Redemption by the free grace of God in
Christ, justification by faith, without any work or contribu
tory merit on the part of man ; and by this idea he measured
the Church. What he saw before him was an immense
system of salvation by works, the works mere ceremonial,
not ethical, with a merit that came of obedience to positive
or ecclesiastical, not to absolute or Divine law. But such
merit as purely external is a transferable, even purchasable
thing ; while he conceived that what ought to be was a
salvation altogether of God, which allowed no place and no
value to the ceremonial performances of man or the profit
able but unethical enactments of a body ecclesiastical. The
question was not to him as to the modern scholar. How
did the ecclesiastical system come to be? That question
imphes a standpoint much more scientific than his ; one that
can do justice to the Catholic Church even while indifferent
to its claims. But if his method was less scientific, it was
more efficacious than the modern ; for while the modern
seeks to explain, it does not care to overturn or supersede ;
but Luther could only seek to overturn, while he did not
care to explain. For to him it was impossible that both the
New Testament and Rome could be right ; whatever was

HUMANISTS BECOME REFORMERS. 141
wrong, it could not be the New Testament ; there stood the
mind of Christ and the interpretation of His Apostles ; and
to accept the one and attempt to realize the other was the
absolute duty of the Christian man.
To men, then, who believed that for Christianity the mind
of Christ was the creative and normative mind, the appeal to
the sources was irresistible ; and the ranks of the Humanists
soon confessed that it was so. The older men, Reuchlin
and Erasmus, stood aloof, but the younger men were carried
away. Crotus Rubianus, Luther's " Crotus noster suavissi-
mus," the most brilliant of the putative authors of the
" Epistolce Obscurorwm Virorum" though he was later to
repent and return ; Eobanus Hess, " regius poeta et poeticus
rex " ; Philip Melanchthon, scholar and divine, hope and
pride of his famous grand-uncle, designated heir of his
splendid library ; Justus Jonas, most eloquent of the Human
ists and Reformers, Melanchthon's typical " orator," " der
Mann der kann die Worte des Textes herrlich und deutlich
aussprechen, erklaren, und zum Markt richten " ; Ulrich von
Hutten, knight, patriot, man of letters, devoted to a liberty
near akin to licence ; CEkolampadius, erudite enough to be
consulted and esteemed by the great Erasmus ; Camerarius,
perhaps best Grecian of his age, one of the true fathers of
modern scholarship, the fidus Achates of Melanchthon ; and
above all, though he acted from his own initiative, not
Luther's, the most heroic of the early Reformers, Ulrich
Zwingli, — these, and many others, driven by the inexorable
logic of the situation, became leaders in the small but reso
lute army of men who were trying to return to the
Christianity of Christ. If Protestantism was not created by
learning, yet without learning it could not have been ; and
there was nothing more natural or noble or necessary than
that the men who had discovered the use and meaning of
the primitive Christian literature should endeavour to recover
and to return to the religion it revealed.

142 THE NEW ORDER, A VERITABLE CHAOS,
The recovery of the ancient literature had thus resulted
in an attempt to realize the ancient and original idea. But
though the attempt was inevitable, the achievement was not
possible. Facts cannot be annihilated or centuries elimi
nated from the life of man ; the past will control the present,
the present reverence the past, whatever logic may say.
There is nothing so impossible as the restoration of a lost
state ; the attempt is made by men under conditions and by
means of material all so different from the original that, while
it may imitate the old, it can never be the old it imitates. And
here every sort of obstacle stood in the way : Lutheranism
was full of inconsistencies, spared much which ought to have
perished, over-emphasized its great idea, bound itself hastily
to definitions and formulae which produced new divisions and
a scholasticism more bitter, controversial, and unfruitful
than the old. It affirmed man's immediate relation and
sole responsibility to God ; yet it organized, by the help
of German princes, a most Erastian Church. Then the new
movement became a sort of Cave of Adullam ; men resorted
to it whose only reason was discontent with the existing
order of things. It is granted to no revolution to be accom
plished by perfect men, but the religious revolution most
needs good men, and it is hardly judged, often fatally hin
dered, when men figure in it who are not good : its own
misfortunes injure it more than do the mistakes or crimes of
the enemy. Then the most reasonable revolution awakens
unreason, the dissolution of an old order begets the wish for
a dissolution of all order and the reign of chaos. So after
Luther came Carlstadt, after Carlstadt came Miinzer, after
Mlinzer the Peasants' War ; and of course for these the new
return to the old faith was held responsible. Kings, with
faith in their own Divine rights, grew grave ; where the old
ecclesiastic only troubled the new reformer threatened to
overturn — he therefore deserved no mercy. Timid men, too,
who always see double when singleness of eye is most needed,

MAKING OLD SEEM A COSMOS. I43
argued : " The old order was bad, still it was order ; we must
stand by it against these new ideas, which will subvert all
things." The moment of dismay was the opportunity of
reaction. Rome drew herself together and confronted her
disorganized foe. In a system like hers there were and are
recuperative energies of incalculable potency, and these, when
summoned to act, acted. The enthusiasm of her noblest sons
rose in the presence of danger ; the meaning of her idea and
mission dawned once more upon her. She contrasted her
unbroken uniformity with the formless movement that had
risen against her, her venerable doctrines with the mad
imaginations of the German Anabaptists, and asked : " Have
not I ruled the world these fifteen hundred years both bene
ficently and wisely ? But if this Protestantism, which has
produced these lawless and levelling sects, be allowed to
exist and conquer, what will become of our rights, properties,
civilization ? " The question seemed so unanswerable that
kings and nobles, thinking there was no choice between
anarchy and Rome, marshalled armies and fought battles
to end what to them was less a pestilent heresy than a
disorganizing and destructive political movement
§ IV. — Calvin and Geneva.
But in Luther and Lutheranism we have only one form of
the attempt to return to the religion of the sources ; in Calvin
and Calvinism we have another. These two are very different.
The moving impulse was in Luther the sense of sin, but in
Calvin the love of truth alike as ideal and as reality. Luther
finds in the sources a way of escape from sin, Calvin an ideal
which men are bound to realize. Luther's passion was to
believe and teach a true soteriology, Calvin's was to build a
system and a state in the image of the truth of God. In him
the movement has its supreme constructive genius. He is
one of the best-hated men in history ; round his name fierce

144 AVERSIONS CONVERGE ON CALVIN.
controversies have raged, and still rage ; and controversies
begotten of disputatious hate and unreasoning love are things
the judicious, who love to pass for judicial men, do not
care to touch. There is something imposing in the multitude
and variety of aversions that converge on Calvin. He was
hated by the Catholics as the author of the system that
opposed the proudest and most invincible front to Rome ;
by princes and statesmen, as the man who instituted a
Church that acted as a revolutionary force in politics ; by
Anglican bishops and divines, as the father of the Puritanism
that so long disturbed their power ; by Arminian theologians
as the inventor and apologist of a decretum horribile, which
they detested, without always making sure that they under
stood ; by Free Thinkers, as the man that burned Servetus,
who, because he was burned, must have been a saint, and
Calvin, because he burned him, a shameless sinner ; by
Secular Republicans, because he founded a religious State,
and dealt hardly with sins they were inclined to ; by the
sons of Light and Culture, for the imperious ethical temper
that did not leave room for the free play of elements needed
to constitute their whole of life. But the man who has
touched .so many men, discordant in everything but this
concordance of hate, must have been a man of transcendent
power, whose character and work deserve close and impartial
study from all men who would understand the sixteenth and
the later centuries.
Calvin was in almost every respect a contrast to Luther, —
less sensuous and more intellectual ; intenser, but not so
impassioned ; less obstinate and self-willed, but more imperious
and inflexible ; not so amiable, but of a far loftier and more
ethical spirit ; possessed of a severer conscience and more
scrupulous will, but of a nature less roomy and human-
hearted. Luther was ever boisterous, a man of open sense,
of buoyant and irrepressible speech, whose words were half
battles, whose eye was quick to see, whose heart was quick

TIIE TWO REFORMERS. I45
to feel, whose judgment was always in danger of being
mastered by passion or blinded by pity. Calvin, on the
other hand, was a man of invincible calm, of balanced speech,
gentle towards weakness, severe towards vice, severest of all
towards himself, for he had, as Beza tells us in his quaint
French : " Une telle int^grit^ de conscience, qu'en fuyant
toutes vaines subtilitez sophistiques avec toute ambitieuse
ostentation, il n'a jamais cerch^ que la simple et pure verity." '
Calvin could never have been guilty of the mistakes of
Luther, especially such a disastrous blending of the blunder
and the crime as was made in the matter of the Landgrave
Philip ; but Luther could as little have been guilty of the
severities of Calvin. Luther was incapable of conceiving, to
say nothing of approving or enforcing, Calvin's legislation :
his pity for human weakness would have proved stronger
than his love of an ideal that showed it no mercy ; but
Calvin was still more incapable of allowing, with Luther,
the Church to be a creature of the State. To him it was
impossible that the society which existed for the realization
of the Divine law should stand under a society whose laws
were made and enforced by men for strictly temporal or
civil ends. The singular simplicity of his nature made him
love symmetry and system in all things, consistency in
character, the veracity that made conviction, speech, and
conduct all agree. It is characteristic that his fundamental
thought is not, as with Luther, justification by faith or the
mode in which the guilty man may be made right with
God, but it is grace, or the absoluteness and sufficiency
of the will of God, as the gracious will which purposes
and achieves salvation. Calvinism is Stoicism baptized
into Christianity, but renewed and exalted by the baptism.
It has the fortitude of Stoicism, the quality that enables
men to bend without being broken, to submit without being
1 Dedication to the Duchess of Ferrara of the " Petits Traictez de
M. Jean Calvin," Opera, vol v., p. xv (Corpus Ref.). 10

146 CALVINISM BAPTIZED STOICISM.
conquered ; it has its indifference to suffering, its scorn
of the sentiment that simply pities evil and loses love of
existence in horror at pain ; it has its optimism, believes with
it in the efficiency yet benevolence of the universal will, in
moral law as absolute, in obedience as a thing which lies
" non extra omnem modo controversiam, sed deliberationem
quoque." But it far transcends Stoicism, for its will is personal
while infinite, gracious while absolute, so real and efficient
in its working as to have made sure of all its means and all
its ends. Man is placed in time to know and to obey this
will, it is revealed in nature, conscience, grace ; and these are
so related that knowledge of God and of ourselves are not
two knowledges, but one and the same. To be obedient is
but to follow nature in its ideal sense and fulfil the law of
God. In its speculative elements Calvin's theology is one
with Augustine's, but not in its political or ecclesiastical.
In Augustine, as we have seen,* the speculative and the
political are contradictory ; the speculative was an uncon
ditional, but the political a conditional system ; the high
necessities belonging to his theistic thought were qualified,
and indeed negatived, by his regulative sacerdotalism, his
Civitas Roma metamorphosed into a hieratic Ecclesia Christi.
But in Calvin the speculative and the political are so related
that the one is a deduction from the other ; his theology is
the basis of his polity, his polity is the application of his
theology to society and the State. His Church was an
attempt to organize society through his theistic idea, to
build it into a sort of articulated will of God. The defects
of his theistic idea were expressed in his political ideal,
exhibited in their harshest form in his legislation and the
endeavour to enforce it. But the defects were not those
of weakness or earthliness ; they were those of a too lofty
severity, a too unyielding moral rigor, due to the belief that
God's will was gracious in order that man might be righteous,
1 Supra, pp. 115, 116.

ITS ORIGINAL SPIRIT AND IDEAL. I47
and man's duty was so to live as to cause this will to be
realized in himself and by all men. These defects may have
showed ignorance of human weakness, and its strength ; it
has yet to be proved that they showed anything ignoble,
either in the mind that made the system, or in the system
the mind made.
In order to understand the mind and purpose of Calvin
he ought to be studied in the first edition of his " Institutio,"
printed 1535, published 1536. It was written when he
was but twenty-six, an exile from France, who had tried
many places, but found a home in none, yet who had, in
the face of all his danger and unrest, worked out the main
lines of his system. But only the main lines : the first
edition is a mere sketch, yet a sketch which lives, with this
characteristic — that the emphasis lies less on dogma than on
morals, worship, polity. What mainly concerns him is the
new order, what it ought to be, how it best may be. It is
the work of a man penetrated with the conviction that the
new Gospel is a new law, that the law must be embodied in
a new life, individual and collective. The justified man is
elect unto obedience ; the good man cannot be contented
with bad moral conditions ; the perfect person needs a perfect
society ; and so he must labour to bring about the conformity
of all things, but most of all the lives of men and states to the
will of God. The motive of the book stands expressed in
the famous prefatory letter addressed to Francis I. ; it was
meant to be a sort of rudiments by which men touched by
a zeal for religion might be formed ad veram pietatem. But
behind this stands another motive : it is an apology for the
Reformed Faith, which is dying of odium, charged with being
the enemy of order, law, peace, and all things that civilized men
hold dear. He demands that the King hear him ; an unheard
cause cannot be condemned, and the cause is not his ; it is
that of all the godly — nay, of Christ Himself. The graver
the cause the greater the duty of the sovereign, who is bound

148 THE CALVINISM OF CALVIN AS CONSCIOUS
"agnoscere se in regni administratione Dei ministrum." But he
must judge by a fit standard, by the Verbum Dei, interpreted
according to the analogy of faith. So tried the cause is sure
of victory. " Quid enim," he asks, " melius atque aptius fidei
convenit, quam agnoscere nos omni virtute nudos ut a Deo
vestiamur, omni bono vacuos ut ab ipso impleamur, nos
peccati servos ut ab Ipso liberemur, nos c^cos ut ab ipso
illuminemur, nos claudes ut ab ipso dirigamur, nos debiles ut
ab ipso sustentemur, nobis omnem gloriandi materiam de-
trahere, ut solus ipse glorificetur et nos in ipso gloriemur ? "*
He follows up his claim for a hearing by a frank discussion
of the charges against the Reformed Faith. These are : The
doctrine is new, doubtful, and uncertain ; ought to be con
firmed by miracles ; is against the consent of the Fathers
and the most ancient custom ; is schismatical ; and, finally,
may be known by its fruits — the sects, seditions, licence, it
has produced. These charges he answers thus : The doctrine
is as old as Christ and His Apostles, as sure as their word,
is confirmed by their miracles, is supported by the Fathers,
maintains the unity of the true Church, which may exist
without apparent form, and needs no external splendour ; but
is only " pura Verbi Dei praedicatione et legitima Sacramen-
torum administratione." ^ Nor will he allow that sedition or
licence marks the new faith : the men are godly ; loss and
suffering, imprisonment and persecution, have been their only
reward. And here in his book it may be seen what they
believe and mean : they stand by those great realities, the
moral law, which tolerates worship of none but God, and
forbids all sin against Him and against man ; the Apostolic
faith, which stands lucid, simple, sufficient in the Apostolic
symbol ; prayer, which has its perfect type in the Pater
Noster ; the Sacraments which Christ instituted, and the
Church which He founded to secure Christian liberty, both
1 "Inst.," "Epis. Nuncup.,'' pp. 12, 13.
2 Ibid., p. 21.

AND CONSTRUCTIVE ANTITHESIS TO ROME. 149
to man and society. Here, at least, is no Lutheran indi
vidualism, no emotional conservatism, broken into, but not
broken up, by the forces of a moral revolution ; but here is a
constructive work, coextensive with the whole man and the
State. Calvin was as radical as Luther was conservative,
but, while radical, he was also constructive, just as Luther
had the true conservative instinct to retain, but its no less
real impotence either to design or to build.
Calvinism was thus, in a sense quite unknown to Lutheran
ism, the conscious and consistent antithesis to Rome. For
one thing, a rigorous and authoritative system was met by
a system no less rigorous and authoritative. The Roman
infallibility was confronted by the infallibility of the Verbum
Dei; the authority of tradition by the authority of reasoned
yet Scriptural doctrine ; salvation through the Church by
salvation through Christ ; the efficacy of the Sacraments by
the efficacy of the Spirit ; the power of the priesthood by the
power of the ever-present Christ. The strength of Calvinism
lay in the place and pre-eminence it gave to God : it magni
fied Him ; humbled man before His awful majesty, yet lifted
man in the very degree that it humbled him. Catholicism
is essentially a doctrine of the Church ; Calvinism is essen
tially a doctrine of God. In days when men have little
faith in the supernatural and transcendental, Catholicism is
an enormous power ; its appeal to history is an appeal to
experience, and men will cling to its traditions in the very
degree that they have lost faith in God ; but in days when
men are possessed by faith in an all-sufficient Reason that
knows all and never can be deceived, in an all-sufficient Will
that guides all and never can be defeated or surprised, then
the theology that holds them will be the theology that makes
God most real to the intellect and most authoritative to the
conscience. And it was at this point and by this means that
Calvinism so seized and so commanded men, faith in God
being ever a less earthly and a sublimer thing than faith in

I50 THE ORDER OF ROME AND OF GENEVA.
a Church. Then, for a second thing, Geneva served in an
equal degree the cause of freedom and of order. Calvinism
was the very genius of system in theology and of order in
polity. These two stood together ; the one was a logical
corollary from the other, yet appeared also as a copy of the
ancient Scriptural model. But while order was as necessary
to Geneva as to Rome, it was for reasons so different that
the order did not remain the same. The order Rome main
tained was autocratic, personalized in the Pope, incorporated
in the Church, realized by its authority ; the order Geneva
created was democratic, personalized in God, incorporated in
the Apostolic Society, realized by the authority of conscience.
Roman order was external, imposed from without ; Genevan
order internal, evoked from within. Hence while Rome could,
in alliance with an absolute monarch, realize its order, the
Genevan could be realized only by and through the people.
It might be tyrannical in exercise ; it must be popular in
basis, and the basis was determinative ; in it lay all the possi
bilities of freedom and progress. With it a regal supremacy
in things spiritual and ecclesiastical was as incompatible as
a papal ; and where it prevailed, rule based on a single will
became impossible. It thus aUied itself with the rights of
the people and the spirit of political progress, the countries
which were most penetrated by it being precisely the countries
which have become the most conspicuous examples of ordered
freedom. For a third thing, Geneva became the Protestant
city of refuge ; hither came Spanish, Italian, French, German,
Netherlandish, English, and Scotch refugees and exiles. Each
saw the order that reigned in the city, felt Calvin's powerful
influence, acknowledged his superlative genius, beheld his
splendid success. And so each came to admire and love the
Genevan Church model as the most perfect realizable on
earth, and went home determined to labour even unto death
for its introduction and estabhshment. Then Calvin acquired
and exercised a patriarchal authority. He corresponded

THE CITY A CHURCH AND COLLEGE. 151
with all the Churches ; advised, instructed on all questions
of internal organization, doctrine, and discipline ; on the rela
tion to the State, whether friendly or adverse ; on the relation
to other Churches, whether Protestant or Popish ; indeed, on
all subjects which then arose of general or local importance.
And, besides, Geneva was a sort of college, where young men
were trained for the ministry, and whence they were de
spatched to their own countries to teach the new faith. And
of the men trained there Michelet truly says : " If in any
part of Europe blood and tortures were required, a man to
be burnt or broken on the wheel, that man was at Geneva,
ready to depart, giving thanks to God, and singing psalms
to Him." Can we wonder that the faith propagated by men
who feared no human face should have spread so far, and
become so prolific a nurse of heroes?

CHAPTER VIII.
THE MODERN CHURCHES AND THEIR THEOLOGIES.
WE have said that the attempt to return to the religion
of the sources was an impossible attempt ; but this
statement requires a double qualification. First, the Church,
so long as it believes in the divinity of its Founder, is bound
to have a history which shall consist of successive and pro
gressively successful attempts to return to Him. He can
never be transcended ; all it can ever be is contained in Him ;
but its ability to interpret Him and realize His religion
ought to be a developing ability. It was as a little bit of
leaven that the Christian faith entered the consciousness
of pagan man, and only by the slow process of expansion
and penetration can it expel the pagan and create the
Christian. And each attempt to return is at once a condition
and a measure of this growth, springing from a new sense
of the necessity and supremacy of Christ, and exhibiting the
degree in which it has become possible truly to apprehend
Him. Secondly, the causes that in this case made the return
impossible did not prevent the attempt becoming a revolution
that was almost equal to a return. For one thing, it made
other and later attempts both possible and necessary, with
more promise of success for the later. For another thing,
it showed that as the cause of the attempt was the new
knowledge of the sources, so the cause of the failure was the
persistence of the old consciousness. In other words, the
theology remained for all specifically Western, under forms

DETERMINATIVEIDEASINSTITUTIONAL OR THEOLOGICAL. 1 53
more or less Augustinian, though no longer co-ordinated as
in Augustine. It was this change in the co-ordination that
was the significant thing. It is the essence of all revolutions
that nothing continues as it was before ; certain institutions
may survive, but they are not the old institutions ; for they
are made different by the different world they live in, and
where a common change has come there all the old things
have passed away and all things have become new.
§ I. — Relation of Church to Theology.
What we have now to study, then, is how the changed
conditions and the new and different factors affected the
development of theology. With the modern Churches,
their formation, constituents, constitution, history, we have
no concern, save in so far as they are related to our question.
This relation varies according as the determinative idea
belongs to the Church or to the Theology. , We may describe
this idea as, in the former case, political or institutional,
in the latter, intellectual and ethical. If the primary and
material conception is the Church, then the Theology is read
through it, and as authenticated and determined by it ; but if
this conception be the Theology, then the Church is construed
through it, and judged, either justified or condemned, by the
truth it professes to hold and to be bound, to incorporate.
In the one case the society is conceived as possessed of
a given constitution, say monarchical or oligarchical, which
is necessary, not only to its bene esse, but to its very esse;
in the other case certain beliefs are conceived as means
used of God to change and command men and organize a
new spiritual society. Where the political idea comes first,
the Theology has more or less a legal character, appears
as consuetudinary or as constitutional law, — as the one it
is thought or opinion received or allowed ; as the other it
is opinion fixed, formulated, legalized, become dogma. In

154 institutional theologies
dealing with it men have all the latitude and all the limita
tions so familiar to the interpreters of written and unwritten
laws, — some reading the great ecumenical creeds literally, others
liberally, as mere delimitations, marking off the forbidden;
some taking them in the sense of the great constitutional
lawyers— «>., the Fathers and Schoolmen ; others carrying
into them, with more or less regard to the ancient forms,
the sense of their own day. But in every case the idea of
the relation is the same ; the Church is the prior ; Theology
has no being apart from it ; is defined, articulated, authenti
cated by it ; and the function of the theologian is simply
to interpret in terms intelligible to living men what has
been so constituted. He, too, has thus no being apart from
the Church ; he must be of it to have Theology, or to know
and be under the laws which govern its interpretation. And
so it becomes a thing institutional, legal, dogmatic, moving
within the region of positive law. On the other hand, where
the theological idea comes first, the Theology appears as a
body of beliefs or regulative ideas, creative and life-giving
truths which the Church must receive that it may live, study
and explain that it may live more abundantly. In other
words, these truths are at once creative and normative, not so
much the possession as the possessors of the Church, the
medium in and through which it has its being. It receives
them, not once for all, but ever anew, from the hand of
its Creator, and as He is personal they become the means
of cultivating personal relations. And so there emerges a
further distinction ; the institutional can never be historical,
save in so far as history is identical with the being of the
institution, but the theological must be historical, for apart
from its source and its true apprehension and assimilation
of the same it has no right to be. Where the political idea
reigns, the action of God outside the political area is
conceived as irregular, illicit, or uncovenanted ; where the
theological idea reigns, the Church must be as it were His

AND theological CHURCHES 1 55
visible image, — He too large to be confined within the insti
tutions of men, they too hard and narrow to be equal to His
penetrative and expansive grace.
Now, the Churches that emerged at the Reformation may
be divided into three classes, — the strictly institutional, or
Roman Catholic ; the strictly theological, or Lutheran and
Reformed ; and the mixed, where both characters exist as
distinct and conflicting schools, or the Anglican.
These Churches are all at once ancient and modern ; each
represents in a different aspect at once the continuity of
history and the changes effected by the religious revolution.
These changes were equally radical in all the Churches,
though in each differently formulated, the elements, old and
new, being by each specifically combined and organized. In
Catholicism we have the continuity of Western institutions
Roman, political, and ecclesiastical ; in the Reformed com
munities we have the continuity of Western religious
thought ; while in all we have the only real form of Apostolic
succession, the continuity of holy persons, convinced and
reverent Christian men. Rome accepted and developed the
polity of Augustine, but qualified his theology into what he
would have considered its negation. Luther and Calvin both
rejected his polity ; but the one made his theories of human
nature and grace the bases of a doctrine of justification by
faith, the other his theory of the Divine sovereignty and will
the regulative idea of a more consistent and absolute system.
In the Anglican Church the Catholic or institutional school
has least represented the continuity of thought, and the
theological and evangelical has least emphasized the historical
institution. They but exhibit on a diminished scale and in
a more modified form the characteristics and conflicts of the
larger Churches with their larger controversies. Each of
these Churches, then, has its special material and determina
tive conception of the Christian religion ; in Catholicism it
is the Papal Church, in Lutheranism justification by faith, in

156 THE ROMAN THEOLOGY THE YOUNGEST.
Calvinism the sovereignty of God, in Anglicanism now, to
the Catholic, the episcopate in the Church, now, to the Evan
gelical, the doctrine of grace or salvation or the second birth.
The development of Theology in these Churches has been
governed by this material conception conditioned by the
external factors or the events of history.
§ II.— Catholicism and Theology.
Within Catholicism the place and history of theology have
been determined by its essentially political or institutional
character. Catholic Theology is only a branch of Catholic
politics ; it does not transcend the sphere of jurispru
dence, or the scientific interpretation of law, positive or
consuetudinary. The theologian can never get behind the
institution ; it surrounds him, fills him, teaches, guides,
superintends him, allows him as a theologian no independent
being of his own or apart from it. For him to attempt to
return to the sources would be to contradict his material
conception. If he would go, he must be taken by his
Church, to find what it has found, to think what it has
determined. But since the Church is primarily the source
and basis of the Theology, the Theology must be explicative
of the Church, a science of its being, adapted to its character,
suited to its condition and needs. Here, then, is involved a
twofold formal factor, one springing from the character of
the institution, the other from its circumstances. What these
were and how they affected Catholic Theology we must now
seek to understand.
Modern Catholicism dates from the Council of Trent, as
Lutheranism from the Confession of Augsburg, and Calvinism
from the appearance of the " Institutes " and the Genevan
Catechism. The earlier creeds affected the later ; the Roman
is the polemical antithesis of the Protestant ; but though it
professed only to formulate, yet, by the very nature of the

ITS ANTITHESIS TO THE PROTESTANT. 1 57
case, it changed by formulating. A custom ceases to be old
and kindly and fluid when fixed in a hard-and-fast decree.
Besides, it is with a Church as with a country which has lived
for many centuries without a written constitution, but is sud
denly, by a revolution and in face of it, forced for defensive
and offensive purposes alike, to frame a constitution. What
is so extorted will not be a pure, unmixed transcript of the
ancient customs and beliefs, for the State will be unable to
forget the revolution, or do other than adapt its old laws to its
new needs. And so the decrees and canons of Trent mark
the transition of Rome from the freedom of an unwritten to
the bondage of a written constitution. Conflicting views and
interests, indeed, helped by trained diplomacy, made care
fully framed and skilfully qualified formulae mitigate the evil,
but it was too real an evil to be capable of complete miti
gation. In definitions all things are not possible even to the
choicest ambiguity. The institution, with all its anomahes, is
maintained ; the emphasis everywhere falls on it, determining
the place, relation, and form of every doctrine ; but still the
maintenance is quaMfied by being in the face of the enemy.
The claim of the Church to be authoritative and continuous
is never forgotten, but neither is the necessity of opposition
to the Reformed communities. But the polemics were not
always compatible with the continuity, and so the Theology
leans to the semi-Pelagian, as the Reformed to the Augus
tinian. The action and grace of God are limited and con
ditioned by the institution, or the need of finding a place
and a function for the Sacraments. Men, too, must have
some ability as well as reason for obedience to the Church,
and so room has to be found for works and a freedom of will
which the theological soul of Augustine would have loathed.
The value of direct and decided antagonism was well under
stood at Trent, though qualified by the division of mind and
school in the council ; but later it was made efficient by the
policy of the Jesuits. In their hands theology became at

158 BY formulating her doctrine of scripture,
times even Pelagian, that it might the better contradict the
high Augustinianism of Calvin ; and their hostility to Jan
senism was due not only to its affinities with the Reformed
faith, but to their keen insight into its fundamental incom
patibility with the autocratic and sacerdotal institution
which they called the Church.
Then necessities at once political and polemical compelled
the council to formulate a doctrine of the Scriptures and
define their relation to the Church ; and though these neces
sities seemed coincident, they were in reality diverse. If only
Catholicism could have lived under an unwritten constitution,
it might have been capable of indefinite adaptation to its many
and most dissimilar environments ; but to this the written
law set a limit, especially in the doctrine as to the Scriptures.
Tradition and Scripture were made the joint sources of revela
tion ; but the canon and the version that had been in use in the
Roman Church were sanctioned, and the office of interpreter
was reserved for the Church. These were all antitheses to the
Protestant theses. By the first the Church and the Scriptures
were so bound together that neither could be had alone, or
live or be believed alone ; by the second the Apocrypha was
made as canonical as the Hebrew books of the Old Testa
ment or the Apostolic books of the New ; by the third a
most manifestly incorrect version and corrupt text was made
authoritative ; and by the fourth the Church was made master
of the whole situation by being alone possessed of the power
to read what was written. Trent here attempted what no
Church or council had dared to attempt, and the Fathers, by
following their keen political and polemical instincts, lost
their great opportunity. They made the attitude of Rome
to the Bible as abjectly traditional as that of Protestantism
was strenuously historical ; criticism of the Scriptures as
canonized and sanctioned at Trent is as fatal to Catholicism
as the critical use of them is necessary to the continued being
of the Reformed Churches. The Church that is bound to a

ROME LOSES HER OPPORTUNITY. 1 59
given canon, version, and text by its own decisions is more
the slave of the letter than the Church that must find the
spirit within the letter in order to be able to live. The time
came when Rome could have accomplished great things in
polemics and even in science if only Trent had never spoken,
and she had sons enough both able and willing to attempt it,
but its speech compelled their silence. The Nemesis that
overtook it was the inability to handle critically the books its
enemy hved by, for if it had done so the result would have
been the disproof of its own decisions and the invalidation of
its own claims.
This relation to the Church deprives Catholic Theology
of all independent character. In its service men of large
scholarship and polemical genius have worked, but they have
been unable to make it a free and full science of God, because
the first necessity was to make it a servant of their Church.
We ought never to forget our obhgations to the learning of
the Benedictines and the Jesuits, but the necessity of making
every way lead to Rome has prevented the rise of systems
that seek to transcend the institutions of man and to be
worthy of the majesty and grace of God. The development
which is but a form of political activity may have theological
interests, but is not the development of a Theology.
§ III.— The Lutheran Theology.
The Lutheran Theology, on the other hand, created the
Lutheran Church. It was organized by a body of beliefs and
in order to their realization. These beliefs were of a kind
that could not live under Catholicism, nor could it allow them
to live. They were throughout the negation of the right of
a sacerdotal institution to be, to hold any place or exercise
any function as between God and man. Luther, when he
said that justification by faith was the article of a standing
or falling Church, stated the exact truth. He meant to say,

l6o LUTHERAN THEOLOGY NORMATIVE.
in the terms of the New Testament, especially of Paul,
that God in Christ is the sole and sufficient Saviour. He
affirmed what was to him no abstract doctrine, but the most
concrete of all realities, incarnated in the person and passion
of Jesus Christ, drawing from Him its eternal and universal
significance. But because its source and being were so
august, no institution or society of sinful men could Hmit
it, or be the sole channel of its distribution, none could
command the approaches to it, or frame other terms for its
acceptance than God Him.self had framed. Hence the Church
must be adjusted to this fundamental belief; it could not be
accommodated to the rites or laws of any Church.
The Theology, then, was primary and normative, the
Church secondary and normated, which may seem to mean
that the religion had again become an ideal seeking a fit
medium or society in which to live. But in order to see what
it means and how it affected the development of the Theology
we must recall the historical conditions. Luther came to
the principle he found in Paul through his own experience
and the theology of Augustine. The antithesis was the
same in both — sin and grace. He conceived his sin and his
relation to God under forms more or less forensic ; he con
ceived God's relation to him in terms more or less evangelical
— i.e., as relations above law, gracious, spontaneous, immediate.
As guilty he was condemned, deserved nothing but punish
ment ; law could not help him, and he could do nothing to
merit its help. If any help came it must be from God ;
and He could not help because of anything in a creature
who was without merit, but only because of His own free love.
Christ was God's means of sending this help, and faith
the condition of our participation in Him. This faith
was no meritorious act ; it was simply the immediate
opening of the soul to God, enabling God, by changing
all the soul's affections and relations, to make it a changed
soul. The Lutheran theology came into being as a

THE SCRIPTURES, CHURCH, AND SACRAMENTS. l6l
philosophy of these acts and relations ; it is essentially a
soteriology, a science of the Redeemer's person and work,
profoundly conscious of man's sin and the grace by which
he is saved. But this theology had to be worked into
relation with history and experience. It could not recognize
the truth of an institution which had usurped the august
predicates of Christ, and so been guilty of blasphemy against
the most holy God, and it would not divorce the religion
from all forms of realized being. To it two things were
necessary, — the Scriptures, the source of all our knowledge
of the justifying Person ; and the Sacraments, means by which
His people communicated with Him, especially in the act
of His passion and death. As regards the Scriptures, the
early Lutheran doctrine was clear and brave. It did not,
like the Roman, make the Church the slave of the letter.
The Scriptures were our sources, but they must be read in
the light of the central idea. The truth was not true because
they contained it ; they were true because of the truth they
contained. Hence the freedom of the Lutheran criticism ;
it was bound by no ecclesiastical canon, did not commit
the blunder of confounding canonization with inspiration,
but made the sacred literature a living literature, authenti
cated by its power to give life. As regards the Sacrament
of the Supper, transubstantiation was denied; but, owing
to Luther's strong conservative instincts, consubstantiation,
or the presence of the body and blood within the elements,
was affirmed. Hence came certain problems for Lutheran
Christology : How was this presence and distribution of the
body to be conceived ? The Redeemer was in heaven, and
where He was His body must be : how, then, could it be at
once there and here ? The attempted solutions were many,
all centring in the relations of the natures not to the person,
but to each other, elaborate theories of the communicatio
idiomatum taking shape and forming .schools in what seems
the bitterest and most unfruitful controversy of even the
II

l62 INCARNATION ULTIMATE IN LUTHERAN,
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But things are not always
what they seem ; the question represents the great contri
bution of the Lutheran Church to constructive theology. The
Incarnation has been its problem as it has been the problem
of no other Church, not even of the ancient Greek. In the
nineteenth century, as in the sixteenth, it has travailed at a
scientific Christology, though from the opposite end of the
scale. It laboured at it then by attempting to make the man
hood capable of receiving the Deity, but now, by reversing
the process, at making the Deity capable of losing itself,
though only anew and more gloriously to find itself, in the
manhood. In all the kenotic theories there are exaggerations
and suppressions and mysteries, that grow more mysterious
by being looked at ; but one thing they have done — they have
made men see that the Incarnation is the symbol at once
of the highest mystery and the highest truth. It holds the
key to the problem of the relation of God and man ; it is
that problem summarized, recapitulated, impersonated. The
philosophers who have most strenuously handled and most
nearly solved the problem have been sons of the land and
Church of Luther ; and the theologians of other lands and
Churches that have to-day attempted through the Incarnation
to vivify theology and relate it to modern knowledge, are
only paying unconscious* but deserved homage to the faith
and insight of the reformer and his sons.*
§ IV. — The Reformed Theology.
In the Reformed as in the Lutheran Church, the theology
was primary and normative ; but the determinative concep
tion was different. Calvin, like Luther, read theology through
Augustine and without his ecclesiology, but from an alto
gether opposite point of view. Luther started with the an
thropology, and advanced from below upwards ; Calvin started
with the theology, and moved from above downwards. Hence
1 Cf. infra, pp. 257, 258.

WILL OF GOD IN REFORMED THEOLOGY. 1 63
his determinative idea was not justification by faith, but God
and His sovereignty, or the sole and ah-efficiency of His
gracious will. Reformed theology is, therefore, throughout in
character and in essence a doctrine of God, and its history
is but a record of changes or modifications in this ultimate
and normative conception. As God was construed from the
standpoint of the anti-Pelagian Augustine, He was conceived,
under the category of will, as the absolute Imperator or
Sovereign of a revolted state or civitas. While He had the
attributes both of justice and grace, and because of the one
punished and because of the other saved, }'et both were
more qualities of will than of character. As a consequence
there emerged very early two types or schools of thought, dis
tinguished by the different emphasis they laid on the scope
and efficiency of the Divine will — the supralapsarian and the
sublapsarian. The former placed the Divine decrees above
or before the Fall, the latter below it. The schools hold too
important a place in the development both of philosophy
and theology to allow us to pass them over in silence.
I. The supralapsarian is the highest speculative Calvinism,
and may be described as a philosophy based on a rigorous
theory of the Divine will as conditioned and qualified by
the Divine nature, and by nothing else.* The nature of
God determined both His ends and the means necessary
to their realization.^ As it was they must be ; nothing in
the creature could move the Creator, for only an infinite
motive could move the infinite mind, and it did not
^ Zanchius, " De Natura Dei," lib. iii., cap. iv., quaes, xi., thesis iii. : " Quod
Deus suam gloriam, suam bonitatem, d'^nique seipsum velit ; hoc facit
neque ab ulla re permotus neque secundum beneplacitum voluntatis suae
neqae in aliquem finem : sed ex necessitate naturae."
^ Ibid., quaes, vl, thesis : " Quae Deus vult de seipso, necessario
vult: quae autem de creaturis, ea vult libere." This is an important
distinction, but is made in the interests of a doctrine of freedom and
necessity which practically anticipates Spinoza's, ut infra, p. 166. There
must be no constraint or even sufficient motive firom without if God is
to be a perfectly free Being.

164 CALVINISM A STOICAL PANTHEISM.
become the majesty of the Supreme to find reasons for
His action in any realm or form of being below H^is own.*
Hence the ends of God were all contained in the nature of
God ; and as the last or absolute end was His own glory.
His must also be the means to realize it, for only an
infinite will could work out the ends of the Infinite,
and it was impossible that the Sovereign of all could
allow any subject or any number of subjects to frustrate
His purpose. The system was worked out from these
premisses with relentless logic, and a moral severity worthy
of Stoicism. It was Stoical in its ethical temper, in its
ideal at once of obedience and submission, in its love of
virtue and scorn of vice ; while on the inteUectual side it was,
as Stoicism was, Pantheistic in all its fundamental concep
tions. God's was the only efficient will in the universe, and
so He was the one ultimate causal reality.^ Calvin was as
pure, though not as conscious and consistent a Pantheist as
Spinoza,' and some of the inconsistencies that he spared the
later supralapsarians did their best to remove.* While they
conceived God as conscious and voluntary, and therefore per
sonal, yet they cancelled this conception by the now implicit,
' Zanchius, lib. iii, cap. iv., quaes, xl, thesis iii, § 3: "Finis autem ultima,
cujus causa Deus reliqua omnia quae sunt, fecit et facit; fuit sempiterna
ipsius gloria.'' ..." Atque ita deinceps, pulcherrimo ordine, ad hos
primarios fines, omnia voluit et sapientissime ordinavit. Atque omnia
haec sanctissima decreta, ab omni aeternitate facta sunt in voluntate Dei
sapientissima atque justissima. Deinde vero suo tempore veiitum est et
quotidie venitur ad aeternorum istorum decretorum executionem. Ac juxta
ordinem naturae quod primum fuit in intentione (ut solent loqui omnes
scholae), illud postea ultimum fuit et est iu executions Et contra, quod
posterius fuit in intentione ; illud primum in executione fuisse videmus."
2 Amesius, "Theologia," lib. i., cap. vii, § 18 : " Si enim decretum aliquod
Dei penderet proprie ex ejusmodi praevisione, tum Dei Idea adveniret
ei aliunde, quod ejus naturae haudquaquam convenit" . . . § 38: "Hinc
voluntas Dei est prima causa rerum. Per voluntatem tuam sunt et creata
sunt (Apoc. iv. 11). Voluntas autem Dei ut velit operari ad extra, non
praesupponit bonitatem objecti, sed volendo ponit et facit."
' Calvin, " Inst," iii, cap. xxiii, § 8 : " Voluntas Dei est rerum necessitas."
* Turretinus, " Instit. Theol. Elenc," loe. vl, quaes, iii., § i : " Nos vero

ANTICIPATIONS OF SPINOZA. 165
now explicit principle, that His will always was as His nature
was, that if His choices were with a view to His ends, His
ends and therefore His choices ahke depended on His nature,
and could not but be in harmony with it. He was free in the '
Edwardian sense — i.e.. He had not so much freedom of volition
as freedom of action and execution ; all His choices were
necessary, but all His acts were free.
This affinity with Pantheism in fundamental idea is often
represented by agreement in what seem matters of detail.
In Spinoza's system will and understanding — voluntas and
intellectus — were one and the same, and the higher Calvinism
always tended to identify the intellect with the will, fore
knowledge with foreordination. To both the highest good
was the knowledge of God, and clear knowledge became
intellectual love of Him, which was eternal beatitude. Both
had at root the same idea of sin and of virtue, both had the
same sense of the awful majesty of order or law, both came
to the individual through the universal, and read all things
phenomenal in the light of the one substance or the alone
efficient will. Calvin may be said to have anticipated
Spinoza in his notion of God as causa immanens} Spinoza,
omnia sine exceptione, sive caelestia, sive sublunaria, sive magna, sive
parva, sive bona, sive mala, sive necessaria et naturalia, sive libera et
contingentia Providentiae divinae subesse credimus, ut nihil in rerum natura
possit dari vel evenire, quod ab ea non pendeat."
' Calvin, " Instit. Christ Relig.," lib. l, cap. v., § 5 : "Fateor quidem pie
hoc posse dici, modo a pio animo proficiscatur, naturam esse Deum." . . .
Cap. xiii., § 14: "Spiritus divinus, qui, ubique diffusus, omnia sustinet,
vegetat et vivificat in caelo et in terra." One ofthe most distinctive features
of the Reformed theology was the emphasis it laid on the doctrine of the
prcEsentia essentialis, which it apphed alike to man and nature. Thus
Turretinus, loe. iii. quaes, l, § 13 : " Homo non eget longe corrogatis
testibus, vel ut exeat ex seipso, cum habeat in sinu suo domesticum
hujusce veritatis Doctorem. . . . Haec sane imago prototypum suum refert,
et nemo est, qui, si attendere velit, Deum in se praesentem non tantum
audiat et videat, sed etiam quodammodo tangat et palpet." And so also
Zanchius, lib. ii., cap. vii., quaes, iii, § iii 4 : " Sunt autem omnia creata a
Deo non alia quam suae essentije virtute. Quicquid igitur in rebus
creatis a Deo positum est, similitudo ahqua essentiae Dei est ; sicut et

l66 THE DESTINIES OF MEN
in his definition of freedom, " Ea res libera dicetur, quae ex
sola sus naturae necessitate existit, et a se sola ad agendum
determinatur," and in his application of it to God, " Deus
ex soils suae naturae legibus et a nemine coactus agit," *
may be said to have perfected and reduced to philosophical
consistency the Calvinistic conception of Deity.^
But the higher Calvinism was not an abstract system ; it
was developed into an applied theology — i.e., it was made
to explain the history of man with all its anomalies, alike
as regards evil and good. Its high speculative idea was
boldly explicated and articulated into a system that seemed
at once to represent and explain all human experience.
Life was complex, man was varied, the home of evil and
good ; virtue and vice, holiness and sin, lived and con
tended in the individual, while on the broader field of
Esse creaturarum, similitudo quaedam est Esse Dei ; et vita creaturarum,
imago quaedam est vitae Dei." . . . Lib. il, cap. vl, quaes, il, thesis I:
" Deus autem inest rebus a se conditis, ut causa duntaxat efficiens, con-
servans, movens. . . . Quare sic propositionem intelligamus, Deum vere et
reapse in singulis esse rebus sua essentia, et ex consequenti, sua potentia
ac virtute, praesentem."
' " Ethices," pars l, def. vii, propos. xvii.
^ Zanchius, lib. iii, cap. iv., quaes, vl, thesis, § i: "Quando igitur
dicimus, Deum, quae de seipso vult, ea necessario velle : de necessario
absolute et simpliciter dicto, intelligimus; quod nullo scilicet modo se
aliter habere potest suapte natura. Fieri enim simpliciter et absolute non
potest, neque potuit unquam ; quin Deus seipsum, suam bonitatem et
gloriam veht. Neque hoc quidpiam detrahit de Uberrima ipsius voluntate
aut omnipotentia. Non enim est haec necessitas coactionis, sed natura;;
sicut etiam cum dicimus natura bonum esse, et natura genuisse filium."
Burmann, a Dutch theologian, who was born the same year as Spinoza,
and died two years after him in his "Synopsis Theologiae," pubhshed six
years before the "Ethics," thus states his idea of the organic unity of the
universe, vol. I, p. 146: "Nam cum tota rerum natura non sit nisi unicum
ens adeoque homo sit pars natura;, sequitur," etc. And he holds that if
only we knew things as they are we should discover their necessity (ibid.,
p. 145) : " Si homines clare totum naturae ordinem intelligerent, omnia
aeque necessaria reperirent, ac illa quae in mathesi tractantur." The ante
cedents of Spinoza in the Reformed theology— z.^., the theology which was
in his day actively and daringly speculative in Holland— have not been
examined as they deserve. The field would repay the diligent inquirer.

AND THE DECREES OF GOD. 1 67
history they struggled for the possession of the race. Yet
where a Divine will reigned these anomalies could not be
conceived as the result of accident. "Chance," indeed, is
but a term denotive of ignorance ; the man who uses it
confesses that he can find no reason in the universe, and all
that he knows is that things fall out — he knows not how.
But this is a confession that can never be made by the man
who believes in a Divine will efficient in all and over and
through all. He is bound to read all anomalies through the
all-ordering will, and ordered anomalies are anomalies no
more. Hence when the high Calvinist saw that this world
though made by God, was possessed by sin, he said : " The
sin was ordained not as an end, but as a means ; it is here
because there was something God could not accomplish
without it ; what is first in the Divine intention is last in
the Divine execution ; find out this first which is to be the
last, and sin wih be explained." This thing first intended
and last executed was a necessity to the Divine nature, and
could be nothing less than the manifestation of the godliest
qualities of God, the attributes which were His glory and
marked Him off from all created and dependent being ; and
so it was said : " The most essential attributes of God are
holiness — or justice, which is but holiness in exercise — and
grace ; and His most necessary function is sovereignty ; but He
can be seen to be a holy and gracious Sovereign only provided
there are subjects to whom He can show the awful severity
of His holiness and the sweet and saving condescension of
His grace. In order to the exercise of these attributes there
must be men to be judged and men to be saved ; and in
order to the being of such men there must be sin. So God
ordains it as a means, not as an end ; not for its own sake,
but as a condition necessary to the acts that shall most
manifest His glory." Then he saw that some men were
good in spite of most evil conditions, some were bad though
their conditions were good, and so he said : " This evil and

1 68 THE SUBLAPSARIAN CALVINISM
this good are of God, and not of the will of man ; repro
bation and election are both of Him, happen as He has
predestined." Then, as the reasons for this choice could not
be placed in man without conditioning and so cancelling the
absoluteness of the Divine will, without, too, finding motives
outside God which would deprive Him of the freedom and
spontaneity of His action, it was said : " Election is uncon
ditional ; there is and can be nothing in the creature which
moves God to the exercise of His grace ; He saves because
it becomes His mercy, and He judges because it becomes
His justice, though, of course, neither were possible without
sin." The system was thus one where the sole efficient
factor of all things — therefore the one abiding and causal
reahty — was the Divine will. It was audaciously, yet with
fear and awe, worked out in the terms of Divine sovereignty
and human subjection, of sin and salvation, election and
reprobation, into a theology which conceived and represented
the universe, all beings and all the phenomena and accidents
of being as but forms under which the eternal will realized
itself. Man became, if not a mode of the infinite substance,
yet a mode or vehicle of the infinite will, and the universaHzed
Divine will is an even more decisive and comprehensive
Pantheism than the universalized Divine substance.
2. But there was a lower Calvinism — the sublapsarian.* This,
by placing the decrees of God below the Fall instead of above
it, escaped some of the difficulties of the supralapsarian, but
only to encounter those proper to a less thorough and con
sistent system. The Divine will was called into action because
of the conditions created by the Fall ; but while sin had thus a
less intelhgible and, as it were, justified being, the lot of the
sinner seemed at once harder and more inexplicable. The
1 The greatest of the Reformed divines were supralapsarian ; but it
never received confessional expression, not even in the " Formula Consensus
Helvetica." In the Westminster Confession the general outline is supra
lapsarian— z.e., the decrees come in before both the Creation and the Fall ;
but the particular statement is sublapsarian.

A LESS CONSLSTENT SYSTEM. 1 69
Fall became more of an accident, and so sin lost much of
its awfulness, the character it ' had as an evil made necessary
by the infinite ends. The fate of the reprobate appeared all
the darker because God took occasion to act as He did from
the wilfulness of a single, even though he were a representative,
man. The very degree in which evil in its origin ceased to
be necessary was the measure of the Divine injustice in
dealing with it as if it were an infinite offence. And so the
modification increased rather than lessened the openness of
the system to criticism. This criticism was due to a double
reaction against Calvinism within the Reformed Church, the
one assailing it through the idea of man, the other through
the conception of God. The former was the Arminian, the
latter the Socinian movement.
A. The Arminian criticism of Calvinism rested on two main
ideas — that of equity and that of man.* The former made
' The special points on which Calvinist and Arminian differed were five :
(a) Predestination : The Calvinist held it to be absolute and unconditional
— i.e., the decree to elect was without foresight of faith or good works, an
act of the Divine will unmotived from without, moved only from within,
'ex gratia or ex necessitate naturce divince ; while the decree to reprobate
had as condition no special demerit of the sinner, but was just because of
sin, though it was a sin that as common involved all in equal guilt and liability
to penalty. But the Arminian held the decree, whether elective or repro-
batory, to be throughout conditional — i.e., election depended on foreseen
faith, reprobation on foreknown unbelief. (^) Atonement : The Calvinist
held that it was strictly limited, made for the elect alone, and that it so satisfied
Divine justice on their behalf that they could not but be saved ; for were
any lost, then the penalty of sin would be twice inflicted — once on Christ,
and again on the sinner for whom He died, — a thing impossible to Divine
justice. But the Arminian held the Atonement to be universal, designed
and accomplished for all, making the salvation of no man actual, but the
salvation of all men possible, the result being conditional on faith.
(y) Depravity: The Calvinist held it to be total, involving bondage of the
will and inability to all spiritual good ; but the Arminian considered it
as a bias or tendency, which yet left the will free, and so the man respon
sible for his own destiny, belief, or unbelief. (8) Conversion, or the work
of the Holy Spirit : The Calvinist believed grace to be urresistible, the
calhng of God to be both effectual and efficacious, due to the immediate
operation of the Spirit on the soul ; but the Arminian maintained the
Divine action to be mediate, through the truth, and so to be moral and

I70 THE ARMINIAN CRITICISM BASED ON
moral principles or laws condition the Divine will ; the latter
set physical limits to the Divine action. The Calvinistic idea
of justice was based altogether on the supremacy or rights of
God, but the Arminian so construed justice as to place the
rights of man over against God's. Sin had not turned man
into a mere vessel of wrath or of mercy, a creature who was
damned because of guilt he had inherited, or saved by a grace
that acted without reason or any regard to foreseen faith or
good works. The worst criminal had his rights, especially
the right to a fair trial before a fair tribunal ; and these rights
did not cease simply because the judge was God, and the
accused, or even the condemned, was man. The Creator
owed something to the creature He had formed, and these
obligations did "not cease because the first man had sinned.
In a perfectly real sense sin had only increased the duty of
God to be just. If original sin was what Augustine had stated
it to be, and what the Calvinist maintained it was, then it
persuasive as distinguished from physical and necessitating, (e) Per
severance of the saints : The Calvinist held their indefectibility, the men
unconditionally elected, absolutely purchased by the death of Christ, and
irresistibly called out of their depraved and lost estate by the direct opera
tion ofthe Holy Spirit, could not possibly fall from grace ; but the Arminian
maintained their defectibility, as indeed on the basis of his other doctrines
he could not but do. The Arminian positions contradicted the sublapsarian
quite as much as the supralapsarian position, as each was alike rigid so far
as concerned the destiny of man. The exposition in the text is not con
cerned with the special doctrines of the two systems, but with their
underlying and determinative ideas.
In the history of the two systems there are many instructive features.
On the Calvinistic side we have more of the speculative and scholastic
spirit, the intellect is deductive and architectonic ; on the Arminian the
spirit is more humanistic and literary. The great names in Calvinism —
Calvin, Zanchius, Gomarus, Twisse, Rutherford — are all men of specula
tive genius ; but the gre at names in Arminianism — Grotius, Episcopius,
Brandt, Limborch, Le Clere — are all men of literary faculty and humanistic
temper. In the realm of opinion Calvinism did not spontaneously inchne
to toleration, but Arminianism did. Some of its earliest representatives
were among the earliest advocates of religious freedom. There seems a
curious reversal of this, the natural order, in their relations in England,
where the Arminians werd Laudian, with the notable exception of irre
pressible John Goodwin. Why this was so is discussed below.

THE IDEAS OF EQUITY AND OF MAN. 171
would be truer to name it the radical wrong of man. The
race had not been consulted by the first man ; he was not
their representative, for they had no will in his appointment
and no veto on his acts. And so by every law of justice they
ought to be pitied rather than blamed for what they had
suffered in consequence of him ; and it was impossible to con
ceive anything nearer infinite injustice than allowing it to
involve millions of men in every age and of every age in
eternal death. The criticism was irresistible ; the moment
the idea of equity was admitted to a place in the relations of
God to man, the old absolute unconditionalism became un
tenable. If justice reigned, it meant that God must be just to
man, even though man was disobedient to God ; and there
was no justice in condemnation for a sin which came without
personal responsibility, or in a salvation which had no regard
to personal will or choice.
The correlate to the idea of equity was the idea of man.
He was free and rational ; sin had not destroyed either his
reason or his freedom. By the one he had the ability to
believe, by the other the ability to choose'; and in justice
God must deal with him as one possessed of such abilities.
Thus the free will of man came to condition the absolute will
of God. In the realm of nature His omnipotence and all His
physical attributes ruled, but in the realm of mind His love
and moral attributes governed. The destiny of man could
not then be deduced by a logical process from the premiss
that God is the sovereign will which can do as it chooses ; for
He has chosen to make man free and responsible, and His
conduct to man will be conditioned by the nature He has
made. If He has willed to create man moral, it is certain that
He will not deal with him as if he were merely physical. But
if Creator and creature are a]ike moral in character, it follows
that necessitating action on the one side and necessitated on
the other are both excluded. By His own voluntary act
God has limited the range and exercise of His physical

172 THE SOCINIAN CRITICISM
attributes, and .so the tetms which express His relations to
man must be those of reason and freedom, not those of will
and compulsion.
B. But the Socinian criticism struck the Reformed theology
in a still more vital point — viz., the doctrines of the Godhead
and Atonement. These represented the agencies and means
by which the gracious became the redemptive will, at once
efficacious in its action and limited in its extent. This was
accomplished by incorporating the forensic ideas of Western
with the metaphysical ideas of Eastern theology ; but it
was so done that while the metaphysical unity of the
Godhead was preserved the ethical was not. If God was
conceived as Creator, His will was simple and absolute ;
but if as Redeemer, it became complex and conditioned.
But because of the very principles from which the theology
started, the conditioned action must still remain God's — i.e.,
be a transaction within the Godhead, carried out by and
between the Divine Persons. His justice demanded the
punishment of the guilty ; His mercy desired their salva
tion ; but this could be only on terms which satisfied the
justice. The Godhead was made to represent how this hap
pened ; the Father became, as it were, hypostatized justice,
the Son hypostatized mercy, and the Spirit their joint or
resultant will. These united in a sort of pretemporal cove
nant. The justice of the Father was to be upheld by the
Son becoming man and bearing all the penalty of all the sins
of those men whom the eternal council had decreed to save.
Of these no one could be lost, since the penalty could not
be twice exacted, and the Father once satisfied would become
unjust were He to allow the man to be lost. The theology
was an absolute Monotheism, but this soteriology seemed to
involve an ethical Tritheism. S© the Socinian criticism con
centrated itself on two points —the unreality of the hypostatized
distinctions and of the transactions they were made to repre
sent. The will of God was one, and His relation to man

THEOLOGICAL AND SOTERIOLOGICAL. 173
was one. Three dispositions or wills representing different
moral tempers and attitudes within the Godhead were fatal
even more to the ethical than to the metaphysical unity of
God ; and the Son, as more benevolent than the severe and
vindicative Father, was the more Godlike. But apart from
the wills, what was the use of this transaction conducted
within the eternal council ? If God was willing to forgive the
guilty, why should He not? Who could dispute His will? If
man could forgive a penitent son, why could not God ? And
what was Christ but an example of the good man submissive
to God and a pledge of His readiness to forgive?
This Socinian criticism was of value as a severe and
mordant analysis of a formal and scholastic theology, espe
cially as it appeared in certain vernacular versions ; but it
had little independent and no constructive worth. It often
succeeded in criticism because it failed in insight, and it
was too intent on contemporary polemics to be e'ther a
speculative or historical interpretation of Christianity. Nega
tive criticism has its place in history, and it is a place not
to be despised ; its function is to remove the partial or the
perverted, that room may be made for the more adequate
and the truer. The Socinian criticism simply applied to the
profoundest mysteries of theology our every-day logical and
ethical categories. It represented the play of the prosaic
understanding in the region of the speculative imagination.
But for this very reason it was effective, and compelled in
the system it criticized a twofold modification, one in the
theology, the other in the soteriology. The first was effected
by the Subterlapsarian School, which had hypothetical uni
versalism as its note.* The will of God was a will of universal
' This was the school of Saumur, and no school of the seventeenth
century can exhibit a roll of more distinguished names. It took its name
from the Protestant academy or university which the wisdom and munifi
cence of Du Plessis-Mornay had founded at Saumur, and so long as it
was allowed to live it served well the one and common cause of religion
and letters and liberty. Its most distinguished representatives were John

174 HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSALISM
benevolence ; the Godhead desired the salvation of all men,
and the death of Christ was adequate to this desire, atoned
for the sins of the whole world. But in order that it might
not be without effect, the salvation of the elect was decreed ;
theirs, therefore, was necessary, other men's was only made
possible. But to this theory the old doctrine of atonement
did not correspond. According to it, if Christ made absolute
satisfaction for the sins of any man, the man could not be
lost ; if the satisfaction was less than absolute, the man
could not be saved. Hence, if the Atonement was to be
either really or hypothetically universal, some other idea of
its nature must be formed. This other idea represents the
modification in soteriology, and came from the ranks of the
Arminians ; its author was the famous jurist Grotius, and its
character juridical, but based on the notion of political as
distinguished from absolute justice. In effect, it replied to
the Socinian by saying, — We do not live under a system
of rigorous and absolute justice, which would make all atone
ment impossible ; or a system of private benevolence, which
would make one unnecessary ; but of public justice, where
it may be expedient. God is not an individual, a being
with purely personal relations ; He is a Governor, He governs
Cameron, one of several Scotchmen who entered the service of the French
Protestant Church (in the Faculty of Saumur alone there were two besides
Cameron — Mark Duncan and William Geddes), and though he was recalled
and made Principal of Glasgow University, yet he preferred the freedom
of the French to the bondage of the Scotch Church ; Moses Amyraut,
from whom the system got its name of Amyraldism ; and Louis Cappel
(Ludovicus Cappellus, second of the name). The last named was member
of an illustrious Huguenot family which may be said to have served their
religion by the sacrifice of all their worldly goods and the devotion of
their intellect and learning. This Louis was one of the most famous
Biblical scholars in the heroic age of sacred scholarship. It is worthy of
mention that on the recommendation of Cameron he came to Oxford and
studied Arabic. While Amyraut represented Saumur in its freer attitude
to doctrine, Cappel represented its freer attitude to the Scriptures, and
their combined positions occasioned a famous counterblast, the " Formula
Consensus Helvetica," which forms the high-water mark of the Reformed
Church in its doctrine both of the Decrees and the Scriptures.

AND GROTIAN JURISPRUDENCE. 1 75
a very mixed universe, and He must so govern it as to
uphold order, which means the greatest good to the greatest
number. In order to this He must cause law to be re
spected both among those who have and those who have
not broken it, and a law unenforced by sanction and penalty
is not respected ; it is really, if not formally, repealed. But
it is not necessary that He enforce the penalty in the express
form and to the last word threatened, for a threatening differs
from a promise thus : the one must be fulfilled to the letter,
the other need not. The infliction of penalty is therefore a
necessity, but its form and degree may vary. The law may
be relaxed ; the Governor may forgive for a consideration.
The Atonement is such a consideration ; because of it God
can remit the penalty, and save the sinner from the law.
But as there is no absolute satisfaction, only a ground for
relaxation, the result is conditional, the salvation of all men
is made possible, of no man necessr.ry. Only because of
faith does the relaxed law acquit, God forgive, and the man
find acceptance.
The modern evangelical theology may be described as a
fusion of the Saumur hypothetical universalism with the
Grotian jurisprudence. It built on the sovereignty of God ;
but its sovereign was no longer the absolute of the higher
Calvinism, where the power was too sole to be responsible
and too supreme to be qualified, but rather the limited
Monarch of a constitutional universe, where the justice is
public and the benevolence is universal. The defects of
theory are obvious ; it is the interpretation of God and His
highest act in the terms of a forensic school jealous for the
vindication of law and the maintenance of order.* It is a
freer and less rigid law than Tertullian's or Augustine's ; it
is not so calculating and mercantile as Anselm's ; it is the
law of a free and constituted state, benevolently administered ;
it is the law of the Dutch Republic or the English Commoh-
i See supra, pp. 14-17.

176 THE ENGLISH CHURCH : ITS SCHOOLS
wealth, where the law is king, not the law of an empire or an
autocracy where the king is the law. But it is still law, God,
if one may say so, translated into the terms of a lawyer's law,
not law penetrated, transfigured, glorified, by the indwelling
of God. Yet by this very defect the theory illustrated the
truth that every change in Reformed theology has but ex
pressed some modification in the theistic conception. And
here it also expressed in a form now more, now less forensic,
the intense conviction that to man the greatest possible evil
was to be alienated from God, and the greatest possible good
to be reconciled to Him. In spite of its defects the theology
helped to make so many lives holy that we may be sure
that it had a message from God to man.
§ V. — Theology and the English Church.
English theology must be construed through the schools
of the English Church. In that Church there have always
been parties as strictly institutional as the Roman, and parties
as strictly theological as the Lutheran and the Reformed ;
and though their coexistence has often modified their action,
yet it has as often sharpened their doctrinal antitheses.
The institutional school exists to-day in two sections — the
High Church and the Broad ; the theological is also repre
sented by two distinct types — one old and historical, the
Puritan, the other modern and living, the Evangelical.* The
two former have this as their generic characteristic : — they
emphasize the institution, the episcopal body as now con
stituted and now existing within the English State and under
its sanction. But they are distinguished thus : — the High
Church emphasizes the ecclesiastical and traditional elements
in the institution, but the Broad Church emphasizes the civil
and national. What justification by faith was to Luther
the episcopate is to the High Anglican, the article of a
' Supra, pp. 9, 10.

THEOLOGICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL. 177
Standing and falling Church; while in contrast to Calvin,
who held the State to be but the Church in its civil aspect,
the Broad Anglican holds the Church to be the State in its
religious character. The High Anglican so emphasizes all
in the polity that distinguishes the Church from the State,
especially the episcopate and the episcopal succession, with
the sacraments or the articles of adminstration, as to affirm,
or tend to affirm, if not their common and mutual independ
ence, at least the independence of the Church on the State.
But the Broad Anglican so loves not so much to minimize
their differences as to discover their affinities and coin
cidence that he now and then almost loses in the State the
separate being of the Church. Yet widely as they seem to
differ their generic characteristic indicates agreement in
fundamental idea — in each case the Church is political, and
is by virtue of its political qualities. And this agreement
has its historical interest and evidence. .The same " Eccle
siastical Polity " to which the Broad Churchman appeals, is
one of the High Churchman's most loved authorities ; and
the old High Church was as civil in its basis as is the
modern Broad. The ultimate Divine right with Laud, the
ground of all his policy, the warrant of all his action, was
the King's ; and it was by the same party that the headship
of the second Charles over the Church, with all the baneful
tyrannies that flowed from it, was most broadly stated,
fulsomely praised, and strenuously defended. The Act of
Uniformity is a monument of the identity of the historical
High Church with the Broad as regards civil or political!
doctrine. Their distinctive features are, because of this
agreement in fundamental idea, largely due to developments
in civil politics. The modern Broad Church is a theory as
to how the old connection of the civil and ecclesiastical
states may be maintained under a democracy ; the modern
High Church is a theory as to how the Church may, while
living within and under a democracy, yet be independent of
12

1 78 HIGH CHURCH AND BROAD:
it. What occasioned the rise of the two were the same
events differently regarded ; love of the liberalism which
had. gained the ascendency in the State made the Broad
Church, fear of it created the High. Both parties may have
since then learned to temper their feelings, and, as a con
sequence, their judgments, with wisdom or discretion ; but
of the historical fact there can be no doubt. And the fact
is significant of the essentially political character of both
ideals. The institutional character of these two schools is ex
pressed in their respective attitudes to theology, and their
theologies repeat and reflect the differences of their institu
tional ideals. The theology of the Broad Church represented
the revolt against the past, the attempt not to dishonour it,
but to loosen the bonds with which it bound the present ;
but the theology of the High Church represented the revolt
against the present, and the apotheosis of the past with a
view to its control of the new mind. What was to Thomas
Arnold the evidence of God's action in the present — viz.,
its enlarging liberty, widening knowledge, saner morals,
purer love of truth as truth and man as man— was to
Newman, who read it through the ecclesiastical changes he
both hated and feared. Liberalism, or the apostasy of modern
man from God, and constituted the need for bringing out
of a period. when God most manifestly reigned, forces and
motives to restrain and order and govern the present. The
theology of Maurice had its basis in philosophy, and he read
Scripture and history and institutions in the light of illuminat
ing philosophical ideas ; but the theology of Pusey had its
basis in men and documents which he regarded as authoritative
and normative, and his special method of proof was by
catenas of texts — Biblical, patristic, and scholastic — and an
exegesis that was seldom historical, because so often tradi
tional or dogmatic, though when occasion demanded he
could induce his authorities to speak with an opportune or

THEIR AFFINITIES AND DIFFERENCES. 1 79
more modern voice. What appealed to Kingsley was not
the ecclesiastical past of England, but its national and heroic
elements and persons, which were to him therefore religious ;
but what appealed to the Anglican Newman or to Hurrell
.Froude was men who could be described as saints because
they had served the Church rather than the nation or the
people. The scholarship of Stanley was as picturesque and
imaginative as the poetry of Keble, but he always made the
past speak as to a learner who was yet a critic, while Keble
made his attitude to the past a sort of religion, the wisest
and the most pious men being those who most revered the
names sacred to ecclesiastical mythology. And these persons
express tendencies. Theology is to the one class dogma,
something given and defined, something regulated by tradi
tion, creed, or canon- -«'.^., it is here, as in Catholicism, part
of the written or unwritten law of the institution, with no
real or valid existence apart from it ; but theology is to the
other a form of modern thought, personal rather than col
lective, the activity of a mind whose field and obligations
are more civil than ecclesiastical. There are signs that these
distinctions may be transcended. Minds that are High
Church by conviction and association have assimilated a
philosophy that may yet through their theology transform
their ecclesiology.
The Puritans and the Evangelicals are not related like the
High Church and the Broad. They have hardly any his
torical connection, and differ greatly in temper, tendency,
and quality of theological mind. The Puritans were primarily
theologians, possessed with the passion of realizing in personal
and collective life the ideals of their theology ; but the
Evangelicals are primarily pastors and preachers, who accept
the order under which they live as the one which best enables
them to save souls. The Puritan was essentially a son of
the Reformed theology, profoundly convinced of its truth,
conceiving it as a sort of ideal world existing in the mind

l8o PURITAN AND EVANGELICAL.
of God, and by Him communicated to His people that it
might be embodied in the whole of life ; but the Evangelical
is essentially a son of the Evangelical revival, with its intensely
individual spirit, its love of souls, its belief in the truth as the
instrument for saving them, with a certain feeling that things
which do or even might endanger this are evil, and a certain
timid tendency to regard a too inquisitive mind or a too ex
tensive and varied intellectual activity as undesirable or even
possibly profane. Their respective theologies correspond ;
there was a large idealism in the Puritan, as became the
work of men who were no less distinguished as thinkers than
as scholars, and there is an immediate practical and edifi-
catory purpose in the Evangelical, which prevents it ever
becoming as large or as courageous as either its Puritan
predecessor or its High Church contemporary.
This analysis of the English schools may help us to under
stand the various forces that have made English theology so
mixed yet so uniform in character. It has never, save with
some of the Puritans or their immediate scholars, been theo
retical or a priori — i.e., given to constructive speculation ; but
its main interest or determinative idea has been either poli
tical or historical, which indeed is here only another form
of the political. The earliest controversies in the English
Church may be said to have been between two conceptions —
whether the actual Church ought to be brought into harmony
with the ideal, or whether the actual was not the ideal
Church. This of course involved a difference of ideals rather
than of actuals : the ideal in the one case was theological
and abstract, a society constructed according to the mind
and word of God ; but in the other case it was political and
concrete, the society which the wisdom of the past had
created and the piety of the present was bound to preserve
and administer. The former was the Puritan ideal, the latter
the Anglican ; the one was the home of the dynamic forces,
the other of the static, that shaped the English Church,

ANGLICAN AND PURITAN. l8l
though in the end the static proved stronger than the
dynamic. But this difference was not at first due to a
difference in theology — for the prevailing and even official
tendency was Calvinistic — but to the relative primacy of the
theological or political idea. With the Puritan the theology
was primary, and so his doctrine was essentially High
Church ; but with the Anglican the polity was primary, and
so his doctrine was, under the conditions then existing, as
essentially Erastian. The Puritan said : " God is the supreme
Sovereign ; His will ought everywhere to be obeyed, in State
as in Church. He has revealed in His Word and by the
act and process of institution an order or law for the Church
which He has not done for the State ; therefore the Church
must be constituted according to the revealed ideal, and on
it the State cannot be allowed to impose another law or
discipline than those so manifestly Divine. In the kingdom
of God the king is a vassal or minister, who may as a man
be allowed to serve, but who cannot as sovereign or head be
allowed to rule. The headship belongs to Christ, the King ;
and He rules over His saints, and His saints are known by
their obedience to His rule. The Church is the people of
Christ living according to His laws." But the Anghcan
replied : " Harmony is of heaven, law is of God, and the
Church ought to be so ordered by law as to be the home of
harmony. Your discipline would throw all things into chaos ;
but the Church we know is distinguished by seemly and
heavenly liturgies, which the past for good reason created
and the present for good reason has retained. This Church
is composed of the English people ; that people is under
one aspect the State, under another aspect the Church ; the
sovereign is the symbol and organ of their corporate unity,
and therefore it is but reasonable that he should be the
common source of authority, and as the head of the one be
the head of both." These ideals were thus not so much
different as opposite ; they made their appeal, as it were, to

1 82 PURITAN IDEA THEOLOGICAL.
different senses, started from opposed premisses, reasoned
to conclusions which had to the one party all the cogency
of logical deductions from accepted principles, to the other
party all the invalidity of a process whose false beginning
vitiated its logical end. But what is evident is this : the
premiss in the one case was a theology, a God who had
revealed a discipline Plis people were bound to realize and
obey; the premiss in the other case was a polity, a system
rooted in the past, actual in the present, part of the order
which had grown with the people, and at once interpreting
to it and realizing for it the faith by which it ought to live.
The God the Puritan conceived was a being of so absolute
a moral purity that He could not allow His Church to be
merged in the State or controlled by the civil magistrate or
served by ministers of his creation, or composed of any but the
pure in heart and in life ; nor could He love any ceremony,
however beautiful, that might hinder His immediate control of
the conscience, or change the essence or even the emphasis
of service from conscience and reason to sense. But what the
Anglican conceived was a worship so in harmony with the
forms and customs and traditions of the past, and so ex
pressive of common moods and sentiments, that the Church
and its services should, as much as the State, represent in
its own sphere the collective and the continued being of the
people. The differences were thus radical, and the funda
mental point is touched when we say, The determinative
idea was to the Puritan theological, but to the Anglican
political ; in other words, the regulative notion of the one
was the theology, of the other the institution.*
Now, the Anglican or institutional idea, so soon as it'
became defined and, as it were, conscious, acted on theology
in a characteristic manner, modifying all its absolute ele
ments, shrinking, if we may so speak, from the direct and
naked sovereignty of God. There is a remarkable change
' See note at end of chapter, pp. 188-190.

ANGLICAN IDEA POLITICAL. 1 83
in what we may call the official theology of the Church
between Elizabeth and the first Charles. Under Elizabeth
Calvinism was dominant ; the Thirty-nine Articles are in
their doctrine higher than the old Confessio Scoticana ;
the Bishops' Bible, as sanctioned by Elizabeth's bishops,
contains the true Genevan doctrine; Parker and Grindal,
Whitgift and Bancroft, were quite as Calvinistic as Goodman
or Jewel, Cartwright or Perkins ; the Lambeth Articles are
as high as the Genevan Catechism ; Hooker thinks Calvin
" incomparably the wisest man that ever the French Church
did enjoy," and though he opposed the Genevan discipline,
he had nothing to say against the theology. But under
Charles the Anglican tendency was Arminian, the milder
theology and the high polity going hand in hand. The
significance of the change does not so much he in the new
theology as in the more elastic political doctrine it allowed.
Laud was not an Arminian simply because he was able
the better to resist the Puritans by contradicting their
theology, but because his theory of Divine right of kings and
bishops had freer scope and could have a more justified exist
ence under a conditional theology than under one which so
magnified the Divine sovereignty as to leave no room or
place for any absolute sovereignty of man over the people
of God. And Laud did not stand alone ; the Anglicans,
like Jeremy Taylor, Bull, Sancroft, Barrow, became the
severest critics of Calvinism ; and never again do we see, as ,
under Elizabeth and James, the highest offices of the Church
held by Calvinists, and representative theologians sent as
delegates to help a Calvinistic synod to formulate a high,
aggressive, and uncompromising Calvinism.
But this was not the only result of the action of the
now determinative institutional idea. Anglican theology
became, we cannot say historical, for it was too special
and apologetic in its scope to be entitled to this name,
but retrospective, traditional, patristic. It had a twofold

184 THEOLOGY IN THE ANGLICAN
polemic — against the Puritan and against the Catholic ;
and its appeal from both was to the ancient and undi
vided Church — an appeal whose legitimacy the one opponent
might admit, but the other could only deny. Hence the
most characteristic works in Anglican theology became, as
it were, antiquarian rather than constructive. The idea
that a theology was the most comprehensive of all philo
sophies ceased to live for the Anglican — at least, there was
a cessation of all attempts to realize it. The only real
exception to this law was the Cambridge Platonists, but
they were men trained in Puritan colleges during the
Puritan ascendency, and are significant as indicating what
sort of schools this ascendency, if it had continued, would
have developed in the Church. The institutional idea has
so governed the theological development that even questions
of pure and Biblical theology have been read through it.
The Trinity and the Incarnation have been discussed as
branches of patristic, and as determined by the oecumenical
creeds and definitions of the specific period to which the
Anglican made his appeal. The result has been a remark
able difference between the theological activity of the
Anglican and the other Reformed Churches. These latter
have been great in scientific systems, rich in interpretative
ideas, fertile in constructive endeavours. The Lutherans
elaborated the scholastic communicatio idiomatum into a
consistent and logical doctrine ; their attempts at a more
reasonable Christology have instructed all the schools of
Christendom, even those of the later Roman and Anglo-
Catholicism. The Reformed Church had many theologies
that were whole philosophies, seeking to interpret the uni
verse, man with all his good and evil, history with all
its failure and achievement, in the terms of the theistic idea.
From these Churches came the doctrine of the covenants
which did so much to create the notion of order and
progress in history, and a scientific because a historical

AND IN THE OTHER REFORMED CHURCHES. 185
interpretation of the Bible. And they more than any
others have created science in sacred learning, the criticism
that has restored the Scriptures to reason and conscience
and life. But the Anglican has lived within a narrower
range, and has worked for a more specific purpose. He
has made the Fathers and the history of a particular period
emphatically his own, and he has done it that he might
vindicate the polity, the creed which the polity carried with
it, and the political rights and privileges of his own Church.
He may have done well in so doing ; all that concerns us
is to note that he has done it, and has thus given to his
theology its peculiar and distinctive characteristic.

§ VI. — Retrospect and Conclusions.
But, now, what is the significance of this discussion ?
I. We have been able to distinguish the various factors
that at once govern the formation and growth of theology
and determine its specific character in a given period or
Church. The consciousness of the time, whether personal or
collective, supplies the factor determinative of form ; and the
dominant element in the consciousness determines the par
ticular point from which the matter will be construed.
In the ancient Eastern Church the formal factor was
Greek philosophy. Its theology was the endeavour of the
old philosophical mind to construe the new Christian history
in the old philosophical terms. The construction had all the
excellencies and all the defects of the minds in and through
which it took its rise. On the one hand, it fitly closed and
completed the history of Greek philosophy by means of a
scientific doctrine of God and the Godhead, which held
within it the germs of the conciliation of the old antinomies
of transcendence and immanence. On the other hand, it
fitly began a series of endeavours to interpret the highest
truths of the reason through the surest realities of the faith.

i86 summary of argument.
But it was only a beginning, for the construction was more
philosophical than religious, so purely metaphysical that it
failed to preserve and express those august yet gracious
ethical elements that were the very essence of the conception
of God that came in Jesus Christ.
In the ancient Latin Church the formal factor was repre
sented first by Stoical and then by neo-Platonic philosophy
and Roman polity. These acting together, and strengthened
by the popular religion, resulted in the gradual assimilation
of the polity by the Christian society, its apotheosis when
assimilated, and the interpretation of man's relations to God
in the terms of law.
In the mediaeval period the formal factors were the Church,
which had incorporated the Empire while transmitting the
religion. Law, Roman and Teutonic, and Greek Philosophy,
especially as a dialectic or doctrine of logical forms ; and the
result was that we had three great questions due, respec
tively, to the translation of political sovereignty into spiritual
supremacy, the terms of man's reconciliation with God into
those of a legal process, the order and process of our know
ledge into the determinative principle in theology.
In the modern Churches the ancient and mediaeval
formulae have survived, but have been variously articulated
and modified according as the regulative idea was political
or theological.
2. But alongside the formal factor stands the material —
i.e., the matter whose meaning is to be determined. This is
represented by the creative Personality of the Faith and His
authentic history. This history being written, is invariable,
but not so the history of the Christian mind or consciousness
in relation to it. Variation has, from the very nature of the
case, been here the law. The longer the history lives in the
consciousness and penetrates it, the more does the conscious
ness become able to interpret the history in its own terms
and according to its own contents. The old pagan mind into

conclusions and termination. 187
which Christianity first came could not possibly be the best
interpreter of Christianity, and the more the mind is cleansed
of the pagan the more qualified it becomes to interpret the
religion. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the later
forms of faith should be the truer and the purer.
3. Every great period of progress or development in
theology has been marked by the ascendency of the material
and inner over the formal and outer factors ; in other words,
the direct effect of every fresh return to the sources has been
the enlargement and re-formation of religious thought. This
is true in the case of the anti-Gnostic Fathers, whose use of
the sources is seen in the way they transcend rather than
repeat tradition, and leave a theology richer than anything
that had preceded it, especially in those elements most dis
tinctive of the original and Apostolic Word. Augustine
marks another moment of return ; and his pre-eminence over
Tertullian is due to his deeper reading of Paul. The
Reformation is a similar moment, the only possible result
of the recovered knowledge of the Scriptures by men who
believed that they revealed the mind of Christ and His
Apostles. In each of these periods the return to the sources
has enriched the faith and purified the life of all Churches,
even the most resistant.
4. Our day has also been marked by a return to the
sources of a quite specific character, — it has been more dis
tinctly than any other a return to the historical Christ. The
most potent influence in the Scriptures for the anti-Gnostic
Fathers, Augustine, and the Reformers was the Pauline. Paul
has been in all times what he was in his own — the greatest
of all the Apostolic forces that work for evolution and change.
But the modern return is to Christ, and to Him as the Person
who created alike the Evangelists and the Apostles, by whom
He is described and interpreted. He has become the centre
from and through which all are studied, and is not simply
looked at through the eyes of Paul or John.

1 88 CARTWRIGHT AND WHITGIFT.
S. This is not an individual or incidental thing, but repre
sents the tide and passion of the time ; is, as it were, the sum
and essence of the living historical, philosophical, and religious
spirit. This is what we must now attempt to understand and!
describe, that we may see how the consciousness of the time'
has become full of Christ, and its reason been called anew to
His interpretation. He is the end of critical and historical
inquiry, but the starting-point of constructive thought. The
determinative idea of theology is not the Church, but the
Christ. In harmony with His mind must it be built, and by
agreement with Him its truth determined.

note. See p. 182.

The differences between the Puritan and the Anglican positions may
seem to be stated too sharply and antithetically in the text, and with too
little regard to changes of men and times ; but they represent the essential
points that emerged in the controversy between Cartwright and Whitgift,
and determined the later developments of the two tendencies. Cartwright's
positions may be stated thus : the Church is prior in being and superior
in authority to the State, has the right as a distinct and separate and
higher society to make its own laws, appoint its own officers, enforce its
own discipline, frame its own creed, and regulate its own ceremonies ; it
is bound to do so in accordance with the mind and will of its Founder
as revealed in the New Testament, and not to allow any prince or civil
magistrate as such to impose laws upon it or occupy a place in it that
was not assigned to him by Christ. Whitgift's positions were the exact
antitheses of these: "the Church could not as a visible society " with "an
external government " be established without the civil magistrate, who may
also in respect to it as such be called its head by virtue of " the supreme
authority given of God to the prince over his people in all causes " ; he
had therefore those powers as regards laws, ministers, creed, and cere
monies which Cartwright had claimed for the Church alone, though of
course he was not qualified to exercise specifically priestly functions.
Cartwright, indeed, held that in "ruinous decays and overthrows of reli
gion," when there was " no lawful ministry to set good orders," " that
then the prince ought to do it " ; and that even if any " lawful ministry "
agreed to " any unlawful or unmeet order, that the prince ought to stay
that order.'' But his very exceptions define his rule : Reformation was the
duty of every man, especially the man most able to effect it. It was
characteristic that Cartwright maintained that "the Commonwealth must
be made to agree with the Church," but Whitgift that " the Church must

puritan AND ANGLICAN ANTITHESES. 1 89
be framed according to the Commonwealth"; Cartwright that "although
the godly magistrate be the head of the Commonwealth, and a great
ornament unto the Church, yet he is but a member of the same," but
Whitgift that this was to "overthrow monarchies," since it made the
prince " a servant, no master, a subject, no prince, under government, no
governor, in raatters pertaining to the Church " ; Cartwright that " infidels
under a Christian magistrate are members of the Commonwealth, but not
of the Church," nor are known " drunkards or whoremongers," and the
excommunicated, " though sundered from the Church,'' may yet retain his
"burgeship or freedom in the city,'' but Whitgift that while "in the
Apostles' time all or the most that were Christians were virtuous and
godly," yet " now the Church is full of hypocrites, dissemblers, drunkards,
whoremongers." It is this latter that gives its religious significance to
the controversy, and makes apparent the moral passion that was at its
heart. On the Puritan side what they wanted, and were by their theo
logical idea bound to want, was a Church in which the moral will of God
should be supreme.
The operation of the two principles was not on either side uniform. The
Puritan principle took a double line, — one section held to the collective
idea, and wished the Church, without ceasing to be national, to be organ
ized on the Genevan or Presbyterian model; another section adopted
the Separatist idea, and held that the way to proceed was by persons
rather than parishes, or the method of the Apostolic age. The one re
ceived its logical and historical expression at the hands of the Westminster
Assembly ; the other in the societies of the Separatists under Elizabeth
and James, and though they have little real historical connection and are
distinguished by specific differences, in the later Independents whose
representatives are the "five dissenting brethren" at Westminster, and
in John Milton. The note of the former was the place it assigned to the
" civil magistrate " ; it was his duty " to take order that unity and peace be
preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire,
and that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed." Hence toleration
was no part of this creed ; indeed, round it the fiercest of the controversies
within and around the Assembly raged, the Scotch delegates storming
against it with a perfervid zeal the English people have never forgotten,
and Milton has immortalized in the famous sonnet which described " New
Presbyter as old priest writ large." On the other hand, the note of the
early Separatist and the later Independent was that the function of the
" civil magistrate " was, as Robert Browne phrased it, " only to rule the
commonwealth in all outward justice," and not to "compel religion," or
"force submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties."
For as John Robinson, the Pilgrim Father, argued, " civil causes " could
never bring forth spiritual effects"; "compulsive laws" might create
hypocrisy, but not the spirit that " received the Word gladly." And so
John Milton said, " Though the civil magistrate were able, yet hath he
no right to interfere with conscience or anything that pertaineth to the
Church of Christ" " To compel the profane to things holy in his profane-

igo SEPARATIST AND HIGH CHURCH.
ness is all one under the Gospel, as to have compelled the unclean to
sacrifice in his uncleanness under the law.''
The Angl|,can principle also took a double line, according as the power
that established the Church or the established polity — i.e., the episcopate
— was emphasized. In the earlier period Bancroft and Bilson represent
the latter, as Whitgift the former. Bilson denied that princes could
" authorize pastors to preach the Word or to administer the .Sacraments " ;
but though to them the discipline and ministry of the Church are com
mitted, they, are not in a Christian state to do these things without the
consent and help of the " civil magistrate." But the emergence of the
question as to the ultimate authority in the State, king or people, raised
the sarae question as to the Church, with the result that there arose the
theories on the one hand of the double Divine right, king's and bishop's,
characteristically the bishop's being secondary, the king's primary, and on
the other its pppular correlate, that the polity was a matter of indifference,
its specific form a thing to be determined by the people through their
representatives. Laud is the typical name on the one side, John Selden
on the other. Laud is an autocratic or monarchical Erastian, but Selden
a democratic or parliamentary. The Laudian theory made the bishop
depend for his jurisdiction and authority On the king, and out of this came
what can only be described as the apotheosis of the king by the Anglican
theology of the seventeenth century. On the basis it supplied the Act of
Uniformity was passed ; and though the Act still survives, the theory died
before the hard and disillusioning facts of the Revolution Settlement and
the Hanoverian dynasty. As a consequence, the relations between the royal
and ecclesiastical powers were conceived more in the manner of the
Separatists, and indeed their very phraseology was unconsciously re
peated. Thus Leslie's famous treatise on the "Regale " was described in
words strangely suggestive of the document, that may be said to have
occasioned the rise of the name "Independents," as " concerning the
Independency of the Church upon any power on earth, in the exercise
of her purely spiritual authority and power." The modern High Church
is on this point, so far at least as concerns theory, more of the mind of
Cartwright than of Hooker. While they hold with the latter as to the
framework or outward structure of the Church, they hold with the former
as to its separate authority and distinction from the State. In theory,
too, they here agree more with the Separatists than with Laud, and hold
in principle, though not in practice, with the men who refused obedience
to the Act of Uniformity, and agree in practice, though not in principle,
with the men who enforced it

DIVISION II.
HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY
OF CHRP ST.
CHAPTER I.
THROUGH LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY TO
CRITICISM.
THE history of the process which has made the historical
Christ the starting-point of constructive theology lies
outside our present purpose ; but a brief sketch, exhibiting
its relation to modern tendencies, is necessary. While the
ecclesiastical revival in England was making its first blind and
impassioned attempts at a beginning, the philosophical and
critical tendencies that were to do so much for our knowledge
of the primitive Church were in Germany endeavouring to
concentrate themselves on Christ and the literature of the
New Testament. The two movements were in spirit, temper,
design, and agencies very different, and it would have been
well if each could have qualified the other. If the Anglican
men had combined with their own profound love of the
.Church and devotion to its Head, the scientific conscience,
the intellectual courage and veracity, the literary and
historical sense, of the German theologians, they might have
accomplished the most catholic revival in history, without
any of the violences to reason, to truth, and to charity that
attended both the manner and the results of their work.

192 LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE HANDS OF LESSING
If the German critics had, in addition to their own great
qualities, possessed the reverence, the love of the beautiful,
and the sense for the holy that distinguished the Anglicans,
then their work, while no less thorough and fruitful, would
have been more religious. There is nothing that so strikes
a student of the Anglican revival as the complete uncon
sciousness in its representative men of the deepest of all the
problems which their own theory and contentions involved,
and which, for altogether different reasons and purposes, the
greatest of their contemporaries were trying to face and
to formulate ; and there is nothing that so surprises the
student of German criticism as its want of awe in touching
beliefs quick with those loves and hopes that are dearest to
the human heart. Of these two movements, started and
conducted in such total unconsciousness of each other, it is
hard to tell which will have the most enduring influence.
But one thing is evident : knowledge and thought are in the
long-run mightier than institutions and offices, and we may
well leave the issue to the truth of God and the reason of man.
§ I. — The Beginnings of Historical Criticism :
Literature.
But our concern is simply with the critical movement in its
relation to the history and, at least so far as it bears upon
the person of Christ, the literature of the New Testament.
In order to understand this movement we must survey the
tendencies out of which it grew. It belongs to our own
century, and is part of its reaction against the hard and narrow
rationalism of the preceding. It has nothing to do with the
pragmatical and negative criticism ofthe Deists, but represents
the larger and more constructive spirit that distinguishes the
nineteenth from the eighteenth century, especially in all that
concerns philosophy, literature, science, history, and religion.
I. The literary revival preceded the critical, helped to deter
mine both its spirit and its problems, the attitude of the mind

BECOMES historical AND RELIGIOUS. I93
as well to religion as to religious ideas, their forms and their
history. Lessing, though he belongs to the eighteenth, was
the prophet and forerunner of the nineteenth, century ; he,
by his theological no less than his literary activity, stands
between and unites the two worlds. By him the Wolfen-
biittel Fragments, the last words of the dying Deism, were
edited, and by him the new critical thought was first con
sciously expressed.* His earlier intellectual sympathies were
with Deism ; his later, if Jacobi is to be believed, with
Pantheism.^ The shallower minds of his day thought that
religion stood or fell with certain words and events : the Deist
imagined that he had only to prove certain words derived
or erroneous or insignificant, certain events impossible or
fictitious, in order to prove revealed religion false ; the ration
alist, that he had only to prove what were supposed to be
miracles to be unexpected coincidences or the hasty inter
pretations of an unillumined mind, in order to harmonize
religion with nature and maintain the truth of its history ;
the apologist, that he had only to prove the literal veracity of
the word and the probability of the event in order to vindicate
religion and save it altogether. But Lessing endeavoured to
free it from the pragmatic literalism of all three, and sought
' Lessing's attitude to Christianity is too vexed a problem to be discussed
here. Many things make it hard to determine ; so much of his theological
activity was polemical, and so much of his polemic was either yvpvaa-riKas
or simply argumenta ad ho-mines. But as the controversy turned so much
on the function and meaning of the Bible for religion, his contributions
to it bear directly on the questions of criticism and religion. His most
polemical treatises are full of constructive ideas ; but of course it is when
he sets himself to positive work, as in his " Nathan der Weise " and the
" Erziehung,'' that we find him at his best. We should take a more
positive view of his personal religion than Hebler does — "A Christian
non-Christian" (" Lessingstudien," p. 103).
'' Jacobi's " Werke,'' vol. iv., pp. 37 ff. (ed. 1819). But though there are
distinct enough traces of Spinoza in Lessing, yet he is no Pantheist ;
Spinoza influenced him more on the historico-critical than the philo
sophical side. His God was supernatural, though not extra-natural, a
free, conscious Spirit, the eternal Providence who determined His own
ends. 13

194 HIS THEORIES OF REVELATION, THE EDUCATION
its essence in the contents of conscience and the truths of
reason.* The sensuous, whether as written word or miracu
lous act, could neither constitute nor prove the spiritual. Books
could be only transitory vehicles of eternal realities. Religion
had existed before the Bible — could exist without it.^ Revela
tion, which was the communication by God of new or higher
truths to the mind, was necessary because of human weakness,
which without such Divine action would hinder and hamper
human progress. Humanity was a colossal man whose educa
tion was in process, and education was revelation.^ In his
childhood he was instructed by symbols and ruled by laws
whose sanctions were physical rewards and penalties ; in his
youth, by personal authority and motives drawn from a future
life appealing to his imagination and heart. God was the
Educator of man ; the Divine Spirit was active in the race.
But the theory allowed to no positive or revealed religion an
absolute value. Each had only a " paedagogic " worth, was a
sensuous form needed to make the full truths of reason in
telligible to sense-bound man. To speak with the philosophy
of the time, revelation was the method by which the ideas of
religion were conveyed into the intellect and impressed as laws
upon the conscience. And here the fundamental thought of
his " Nathan " comes in to complete his doctrine of revelation
and religion. It pleaded for toleration by vindicating the
right of other religions than our own to exist, based on their
power to produce intellectual veracity and moral excellence.
The three rings, which are the symbols of the three religions,
are in an equal measure gifts of the one Father. A Moham-
^ " Ueber den Beweis des Geistes u. der Kraft," " Theol. Streitschriften,''
pp. 3 ff. (ed. 1867). Here he argues: "Accidental truths of history can
never be evidence for necessary truths of the reason : that Christ raised
a dead man does not prove that God has a Son co-essential with
Himself" (pp. 6, 7). In his doctrine of the relation of the Bible and religion
Lessing was as much opposed to his own Fragmentist as to the orthodox.
Cf. " Axiomata,'' vii.-ix.
2 " Axiomata," the second ofthe Anti-Goeze pamphlets. Cf. Axioms, i.-viii.
' " Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts," §§ 1-5, 17, 26, etc.

OF MAN, AND THE RELIGIONS : SCHILLER. I95
medan or Jew, realizing the ideal truths his religion expresses
is as truly a religious man as a Christian.* And so Lessing
was not a disciple of the Christian religion or the systems
which Churches have built on the Gospel, but only of what
he called the religion of Christ — i.e., the religion which Jesus
as a man knew and practised,^ and which every man can
have in common with him. His whole tendency was to release
the spirit from the letter, and to reconcile the free handling
of sacred histories and records with reverence of mind. For,
according to Lessing, there was no intrinsic or absolute neces
sity for revelation ; once it has perfectly educated man, he
can dispense with it. The letter with its symbolism, which
is a necessity to the man still in the sensuous stage, is a mere
superfluity to the man who has so grown as to be able to
walk according to the spirit. The theory which made religion
so independent of the letter could not but contribute to the
growth of the criticism which was concerned with the written
word. It needed time to show whether it was possible to
handle the letter without touching the spirit.
2. Schiller, too, acted powerfully, if indirectly, on religious
thought. His spirit was too moral to allow him to be other
than a Theist, characteristically of the Kantian type. Life
was full of ethical significance ; the stage, he thought, ought
to be an ethical teacher, showing the world the moral law in
action. And just because the ethical in him was so inten.se
he loved the ideal, though not the actual, Christianity. In its
' Though " Nathan der Weise " seemed to establish a sort of equation
between the three great religions, yet its whole conception was due to the
Christian spirit; within neither of the other two religions could it have
risen. Character is an old test of truth. It is remarkable if we compare
"Nathan" with "Die Erziehung," that in the latter Islam has no place or
function. * This was a distinction which Lessing owed to Reimarus, and made
the title of a suggestive Httle tractate. Lessing has some claim to notice
as a speculative theologian. His construction of the Trinity, " Die Erzie
hung," § 73, contains, indeed, no new element, but it is remarkable as a
forecast of many later attempts at the speculative restoration of what had
been critically dissolved.

196 GOETHE : HIS IDEAL HELLENIC
pure form, the representation of moral beauty, or the incar
nation of the holy,* the Christian religion was in practical life a
depraved, an offensive, and a mean, because broken, representa
tion of the highest. Its distinctive quality or character as ideal
lay in its moral energy, its power to change the categorical
imperative into free inclination, to create the beautiful soul
possessed of the virtue which is nothing else than " an inclina
tion to duty." With it and as its essence he sings the gospel
of the love which impelled God to create man, which uplifts
man to God, and makes all men brothers. But yet its ethical
majesty was not all gain ; the apotheosis of the spirit, by
undeifying nature, impoverished man. He needed the fair
humanities of old religion ; and so, though admiring Mono
theism, the poet mourned the loss of the old gods.
" Einen zu bereichern unter alien
Musste diese Gotterwelt vergehn."'
3. Goethe's influence on the religious province was much
more extensive and intense than Schiller's. He touched life and
thought more deeply, and on more sides, was less ethical, yet
more universal. He conceived the perfect culture to be too
wide, too varied and rich, to be based on a single religion, or
to be realized by the imitation of a single person. His own
ideals were Hellenic, not Hebrew ; but his Hellenism was
not uniform or monotonous — it was variously qualified and
enriched. He owed much to Mysticism, much to Herder, and
much to Spinoza ; they taught him to read order and unity
into nature, and he loved to feel himself in harmony with the
life that filled the universe and became conscious in man.
He could not conceive spirit without matter or matter without
spirit ; God and the world stood together inseparably. He
existing in it — it the woven and flowing garment which at
once hid and manifer'^'^-d His essence.
' " Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe," vol. i., Br. 86, p. 67
(ed. 1881).
* " Die Getter Griechenlands."

QUALIFIED BY PANTHEISM. I97
" Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen."
Spinoza might be to others Atheus, but to him he was
Theissimus et Christianissimus. From him he learned what
he conceived to be the fundamental principle of all religion :
" He who truly loves God must not desire that God love him
in return." There was nothing he more resented than Lavater's
dilemma : " Either Christian or Atheist." He held, on the
contrary, that it was indifferent what a man believed — that he
believed was everything. He would be a Christian in his own
way, but in the way of no other person.* The ordinary
categories were too small for him ; he was at once Polytheist,
Pantheist, and Theist — the first as poet, the second as interpreter
of nature, the third as moral being. God he knew by scientia
intuitiva, and to him blessedness upon earth was to acknow
ledge God, wherever and however He may reveal Himself So
he conceived Christ as one, but not the sole, revelation of God,
the highest in the moral world, but not so sufficient or ex
haustive as to be adequate alone ; and he described himself as
not an unchristian nor an antichristian, but as yet a decided
non-christian * — i.e., he did not, like the first, stand outside
Christianity, nor, like the second, oppose it, nor did he claim to
be all or only what it required, nay, rather he comprehended
so much of it as was good, and much besides. So he said to
Lavater, " You find nothing more beautiful than the Gospel ; I
find a thousand pages written by both ancient and modern
men, graciously endowed of God, quite as beautiful and useful
and necessary to mankind." He believed in the aristocracy
of the cultured rather than in the monarchy of Christ. So he
will not allow His sole or solitary supremacy ; he names it un
righteous and robbery to pluck all the beautiful feathers from
the thousands of birds under heaven in order to adorn a single
bird of Paradise. And as he limits the authority of Christ,
1 " Wahrheit und Dichtung," bk. xiv.
* " Briefe an Lavater," 39, p. 144 (Hirzel).

198 CHRIST AS THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL.
he denies His miraculous character ; an audible voice from
heaven would not persuade him that water burned and fire
extinguished, or that a virgin became a mother, or that a
dead man rose again ; nay rather, he held such things to be
blasphemies against the great God and His revelation in nature
So he conceived Christ to be one in a multitude of forms under
which God was manifested. Yet the God He manifested was
the e-ssence of His own beautiful soul, full of goodness and love.*
He was therefore the highest in His own order, the moral and
spiritual. And this determined his attitude to the Gospels: the
genuine he defined as the really excellent, that which stood in
harmony with purest nature and reason, and contributed even
to-day to our highest development ; the spurious was the
absurd, the hollow, and the stupid, what brought forth no
fruit, at least none that was good. In this defined sense all
four Gospels — though Mark and Luke were written without
immediate experience, and John only in extreme age — he held
to be thoroughly genuine ; for in them there is the radiance of
a majesty which proceeded from the person of Christ, and which
was of as Divine a kind as ever the Godhead has assumed upon
the earth. Before this Christ he bowed in devoutest reverence
as before the Divine revelation of the highest principle of
morality.^ Hence Goethe tended to transfer the idea of the
true from the supernatural in Christ and the historical in the
Gospels to the moral and spiritual in both, and to these as beau
tiful and impressive yet natural creations of the spirit within
the universe. The cross did not and could not signify to him
any act of Divine sacrifice for human redemption, but it grew
into a beautiful symbol of self-renunciation, and life through it.
" Und so lang Du das nicht hast,
Dieses ' Stirb und Werde 1 '
Bist Du nur ein triiber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde."

' Eckermann, " Gesprache mit Goethe," ii. Th., p. 199 (ed. 1 868).
2 Ibid., iii. Th., p. 255.

HERDER : HIS IDEA OF GOD AND MAN. 199
§ II.— Historical Criticism : Romanticism and
Theology.
But the most potent influence in historical theology from
this period and circle was Herder. He was, as has been well
said, the theologian among the classics and a classic among
the theologians.* A many-sided man, open, capable, sus
ceptible on all his sides, he touched and was touched by
literature and art, philosophy and history, as well as theology,
and with him to touch was to quicken and to mould. His
idea of God owed much to Spinoza and to Leibnitz ; for the
former's category of substance he substituted the latter's
category of force — not as material simply, but as rational
and spiritual. God was the absolutely active Being, physical
yet intellectual : " Die selbststandigste Ur- und Allkraft," " Der
Ursprung, Gegenstand und Inbegriff aller Erkenntniss." ^
As such God was to nature no extra or supra ; if He did
not exist in the world, then He existed nowhere ; yet imma
nence did not mean identity ; God was not the world, nor
was the world God. He was the highest, most living, most
active Existence, who had given to His creatures what is
highest — viz., existence, reality. He stood manifested alike
in nature and man, especially man ; yet these two were so
related that man could not be understood save through
nature, or nature perfected save in man. He, indeed, is the
middle term that unites two worlds ; on the one side he is
rooted in the earth, on the other he is a free citizen of the
spiritual and eternal ; and in the unity of his natural and
spiritual being we have a twofold revelation of God. The
God we seek in nature is the same as we find in history,
' A. Werner, in Herzog-Plitt, " Real-Ency.," vol. v., p. 791.
* " Gott, einige Gesprache iiber Spinoza's System," Theol, Werke, viii. ;
cf. pp. 148, 176, 246 ff. (Miillers ed.). Herder set the example of the ext 'a-
vagant praise of Spinoza which became a sort of -mode in the Romanticist
School. Schleiermacher's famous tribute, "Dem Heiligen Spinoza," and
Novahs' much-quoted " Gottertrunkener Mensch," are but echoes of him.

20O HUMANITY AND CHRIST.
and the greatest person in history is the unique Son of God
because the pre-eminent Son of man. The Divine element
in our race is the culture of humanity ; to it every great and
good man, every lawgiver, discoverer, philosopher, poet, artist,
every noble man in his rank and place, in the education of
his family, in the fulfilment of his duties, by example, deed,
and word — has contributed. Humanity is so great that he
knows no nobler word to define and describe man than simply
man himself. This was explicated in religion, which was like
a holy triangle whose several angles were poetry, philosophy,
and religion ; or she was like a goddess, and these repre
sented the priest of her temple, the prophets who revealed
her truth, the providence that exhibited her actions. Religion,
then, is the realized idea of humanity, Christ its highest
embodiment. His religion the purest humanity reached in
the purest way. Humanity is what He proved in His life
and confirmed by His death. What His few words witness
to is the truest humanity. To this religion of humanity He
consecrated His life ; in His heart it was written, " God is
My Father, Father of all men, and all men are brothers."*
Herder emphasized, like Lessing, the distinction between
the religion of Christ and the religion built on and round
Christ; and in order to reach both it and Him his cry was,
" Study the sources, back to the original documents." ^ He
was pre-eminently a Biblical theologian ; the Bible was to
him Divine because it was the most human of books, written
by men for man ; and the man who would read it must be
inspired by it, possessed of a new sense, a new feeling for
the greatness of its contents. Lessing's dictum — revelation is
education — he translates into this more concrete form : revela-
¦ " Ideen zur Philos. der Gesch. der Menschheit." Cf. bks. iv., v., xv.,
xvii., and "Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebrauchen," especially
sect ii.
^ " Briefe, das Studium der Theologie betreffende," pts. i. and ii. These
letters are in the best sense modern : the first part concerns the study of
the Old, the second of the New, Testament.

REVELATION AND RELIGION. 20I
tion is the mother, reason is the daughter.* Neither can take
the other's place, supersede or be superseded. Revelation, so
construed, is of course neither co-extensive nor identical with
a book, but represents the action of God in, on, and through
man in history. It had, as it were, been immanent in man
from the beginning ; not indeed as compacted or articulated
or finished knowledge, but as a form or faculty underlying all
ideas of the reason, the feeling for the invisible in the visible,
the one in the many, the cause in the effects. But to educe
this feeling and tran.slate natural into Divine revelation, God
sends select spirits, men who as His organs become the
guardian angels of our race, with their spirit outshining and
illuminating centuries, with their hearts embracing nations,
with their giant power exalting them even against their wills.
The process which effected the revelation was inspiration,
which was no frenzy or demoniac passion, but illumination,
the reason so awakened and clarified that it can see God face
to face, speak with the God it sees and tell man what it has
seen and heard. The revelation that comes to man comes
through him by exaltation of all his faculties. " He who
formed the eye, must He blind it in order that we may see ?
The Spirit who breathed the breath of life into creation, and
who quickens all our powers, shall He destroy them in order
that He may in their place kindle in us light ? " But what
has so come to educate man by revealing the immanent God
man must ever anew enter into, that he may be educated
and exalted more and more. The Schoolman, the Churchman,
the system-builder, have obscured, have even lost, the Bible ;
we must go back to it as men, read it as the book at once
of the poetry and the religion of humanity. It is Oriental,
and needs imagination and heart for its interpretation. For
Anselm's '' Believe, that you may know," Herder substituted
"Love, that you may understand," for love quickens intelli
gence and appreciation. What men have taken as a prosaic
* " Briefe, das Studium der Theologie betreffende," pt. iii., Bre. 26, 27.

202 RELIGION AND THE NEW TESTAMENT.
or matter-of-fact record of the manner of making the world,
is a Divine poem, which introduces, as it were, the drama of
God's action in history, educating man by means of special
peoples. The actors in this drama are persons, but the force
that moves them is God. To Herder sacred history is not
true because it is miraculous, but because it is and works for
good ; yet the miracle has its place, " the three luminous
points of a heavenly attestation of the Anointed of God "
are the Baptism, the Transfiguration, and the Resurrection.
Since he so conceived the history he was bound to consider
the literature. His attitude to the Gospels was significant
and characteristic. The oldest was Mark, an anticipation of
our latest criticism, more instructive for its reasons than in
itself; the second was the lost Gospel of the Hebrews, and
these together were the two sources used by Luke ; while our
Matthew was a free translation of the Hebrew source with
some omissions and additions. In John we had an echo of
the older Gospels in a higher tone ; * it was the Gospel of the
spirit and the truth. Its speculative and constructive purpose
makes John's the most permanent, the most modern, the
most instructive of all the Gospels.
Our purpose is simply historical, and our expositions are
too brief to warrant criticism. But Herder's defects and
excellences are alike obvious. He enlarged the outlook of
the theologian, filled theology with human interest by inviting
it to occupy the whole field of human history, bound all
its great ideas to great persons and tendencies. He lifted
' "Regel der Zusammenstimmung uns. Evang.," Werke: zur Rei. u.
Theol., vol xii., pp. 54, 55- The discussions on the Gospels in vols. xi. and
xii. are not without their interest even now. It is wonderful how Herder's
literary insight kept him right when more skilled critics went astray. In all
that pertains to external criticism he is long out of date, but in internal he is
still suggestive. His position is : the Gospel existed before the Gospels ;
they are but a written echo of the oldest common tradition, and he sets
hirr,S2lf through their internal characteristics and differences to explain their
origin, order, and purpose. He has most affinity with John, whose use of
miracles as " symbolical facts " was altogether to his mind.

PHILOSOPHY AND CRITICISM. 203
religion out of the hands of the ecclesiastics, placed it above
and beyond as well as within all the Churches, and made the
ideas of God and man approximate and even touch. He
vivified the Bible, changed it from a dead and closed to a
living and open book ; he compelled dogma to return to its
source, and there dissolve its hardened terminology in order
that it might crystallize into truer and more perfect forms.
He showed that to approach Jesus through history was to
make Him a more real, more living, more universal figure,
and that to construe Him was to be forced to deal with the
Gospels as histories and as literature. But his work was
scattered, diffuse, thrown out in fragments and on occasions,
was rhetorical, imaginative, and, where it touched theology,
it was full of the intuitions of genius, but without the archi
tectonic of the reason. Yet where he was weak the philosophy
he did his best to criticize was strong ; not, indeed, so much
in itself as in what it caused to be.
§ III. — Philosophy and Historical Criticism.
Philosophy exercised on theology a far more powerful
influence than either literature or history. There has been
since the Platonic period no more splendid or fruitful cycle in
speculation than that which begins with Kant and ends with
Hegel, or one more governed by religious ideas and problems.
Each of the transcendental philosophies involved a speculative
Christology, and it was the attempt to apply the last and
greatest of these to the history of Christ that resulted in the
birth of modern criticism. We must therefore come to it
through them ; not, indeed, with the minute exposition and
illustrative detail that would be necessary were we writing
a history of religious thought, but with the utmost possible
brevity. I. In England philosophy and theology have stood to each
other in very different relations from those which they have
sustained in Germany. Here they have affected one another

204 philosophy determines THEOLOGY.
more as antagonists than as allies. Hobbes had no place for
religion in his system save as a legalized superstition, whose
source was the belief in witchcraft and in ghosts. Locke was
the parent of English Rationalism and Deism ; his empiricism
could not but tempt men to strip religion of all its mysteries,
in order that it might be reconciled to a reason emptied of
all transcendental contents. Hume had but to use Locke
as modified by Berkeley in order to evolve a scepticism so
universal that it did not spare even the ego. The Mills, father
and son, inherited their full share of the impotences and
aversions of our insular empiricism ; and though it has in
Spencer changed its terminology, and even boldly essayed
to become constructive, yet it remains at heart what it has
ever been ; for Agnosticism is just scepticism become too
proud or too perverse to confess to its own real nature. And
so our traditional philosophy has either attempted to explain
religion out of existence as a congeries of illicit or fictitious
ideas, or it has presented theology with the problem which
produced the distinctive apologetics of the eighteenth century
— how to get religion into a mind which has no religious
constitution or contents. If men would be religious under
such a philosophy it must be by the help of some external
authority which supplies them with a faith and becomes the
guarantee of its truth. The theological evolution of such
philosophy was seen in Newman, the speculative in Hume
and the Mills.
But the tendency in Germany has been exactly the opposite.
It has started with the transcendental in mind, and has
laboured to discover the transcendental in nature and history.
The endeavour has been either to sublime philosophy into
theology, or to make the two so interpenetrate as to become
one ; at least the goal of all its strivings has been the specu
lative and positive interpretation of our religious ideas and
their historical forms. And, as a consequence, the ambition
of the greater German philosophers has been to be speculative

WITH KANT RELIGION IS MORALITY. 205
theologians, and of the theologians to be constructive philo
sophers ; in the one case the philosophical thought has become
religious, in the other the religious has aspired to be philo
sophical. And so every speculative has had its corresponding
theological tendency and crisis. Leibnitz and Wolff made the
theologians ofthe eighteenth century ; were, indeed, themselves
so eminent theologians that the philosophy of the one culmi
nated in a The'odic^e, of the other in a Theologia Naturalis.
Kant created Rohr and Wegscheider ; Jacobi and Schelling
contributed to form Schleiermacher ; Daub and Marheineke
made theology Hegelian in matter and method ; Strauss
was more a philosophical than a theological nursling ; while
all the phases of the neo-Kantian and the neo-Hegelian
philosophies have reproduced themselves in theology. Hence
this relation of the speculative to the religious criticism must
never be left out of sight.
2. The earlier phases of German Transcendentalism which
begin with Kant and end with Fichte, hardly concern us.
In the region of religion Kant could not be said to have
been really waked out of his dogmatic slumbers. He re
mained where the eighteenth century placed him, content
to conceive religion very much in the manner and form of
the current Rationalism. Hence he did not directly accomplish
in the religious sphere anything like the revolution he accom
phshed in the philosophical. The Critique of Pure Reason
tended indeed to paralyze theology ; according to it no real
.science of God was possible. The super-sensuous, as lying
outside experience, lay outside knowledge. But the God
the pure reason abolished the practical restored. Kant was
an ethical Theist, God was the centre of his moral system,
and his categorical imperative made Deity a new power for
the conscience of his time. Religion became a mere vehicle''
of morality, the knowledge of our duties as Divine- ...com
mands. The value of Christianity depended on the purity of
its moral spirit, that again on the person of its Founder. His

2o6 dogmatic is MORALIZED.
historical character was important only so far as it exhibited
a humanity, which, as realizing the Divine ideal of man,
was well pleasing to God. This ideal was eternal, the only-
begotten Son of God, no created thing, but proceeding out
of His essence. His express image, and so in His mind as to
be for ever before Him, His delight, on account of which
He made and now loves the world. Since this ideal so lives
in God, men did not create it, but it descended from heaven
in order to incorporation in man, and in its union with us it
may be represented as the Son of God in a state of humi
liation. Such a descent and humiliation do not imply the
occasional being of the ideal or the miraculous being of the
man who embodies it, since the ideal is implicit in the moral
nature of the normal man. But the man who does realize it
becomes a type generative of a higher humanity by virtue both
of the character He presents for our contemplation and the
society of like-minded persons He institutes. Incarnation in
the Kantian sense was simply the personalization of the moral
ideal, and the Church a society to help towards its realization.
Christ, by embodying this ideal, showed us what God had
created man to be ; and by founding the Church He created
an ethical society, or kingdom of God, which was meant to
train man for a reign of pure reason, and for a morality
under a God who is all in all. Christ is, as it were, the
symbol of religion thus embodied, duty apprehended as thc
Divine will ;* and His Church is an institute for the culti
vation of personal virtues, or for helping to create men of
a similar type to its Founder. That exhausts His and its
significance for man.
3. Jacobi marks a reaction against the Kantian criticism ;
' For Kant's construction of Christianity see, in particular, his " Religion
innerh. der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft." This may be described as a
translation of Christian dogmatics into the terms of a moral Rationalism. It
is curious to see how doctrines like Original Sin, Satisfaction, the Trinity,
the Church, can, by deft manipulation, be made into the empirical modes
and agencies by which a transcendental inorality may be realized.

JACOBI AND FICHTE. 207
Fichte a development of its subjective idealism. For Jacobi
belief, not knowledge, was ultimate.* God was reached by
intuition, by the heart. The issues of the critical philosophy
were escaped by denying the right of the reason to be either
the critic or the architect of faith. Faith was saved by ex
cluding reason from religion ; yet not so much saved as lost.
For Jacobi confessed that, while with the heart a Christian, he
was with the understanding a heathen, and so swam between
two streams, borne up by the one, but sinking continually in
the other. Just because he shrank from every attempt to
express or represent God, he could not allow an)- absolute
worth to historical Christianity. The anthropomorphic was
the idolatrous ; Christ as the God-man was not so much the
creator as the creation of faith. Whatever indeed could be
regarded as Divine, and as such calculated to awaken man to
virtue and a Divine life, might be represented under the image
and by thc name of Christ. But it was only the inner and
ideal Christ that could be so used ; any attempt to transfer
such an idea to the historical was religious materialism, the
humiliation of reason and morality by idolatry.^
4. Fichte's earlier system, egoistic Pantheism as it was, had
this great worth for German religious thought — a pure and
e.xalted morality was its centre and end. Man lived to be
moral ; the world existed as an arena on which his being could
realize its moral ends. These implied a living and active moral
order, which was the only God we needed or could conceive —
an ordo ordinans, not an ordo ordinatus. Religion is faith in the
reality ofsuch an order or law. To do every moment what duty
commands, without doubt or speculation as to consequences, was
' "Idealismus und Realismus," Werke, vol.ii., pp. 124 ff., especially
pp. 156-163. Cf. " Einleitung," which is for Jacobi a rather sober exposition
•of his philosophical principles. But even more characteristic is his discussion,
"Ueber eine Weissagung Lichtenberg's," the said prophecy being: " Our
world will yet becorae so superfine that it will be quite as ridiculous to
believe in God as it is now to believe in ghosts."
' "Von den Gottlieb. Dingen," Werke, vol. iii., pp. 285, 286.

208 THE INCARNATION ETERNAL.
the true faith ; its opposite was Atheism. From this doctrine
it followed that, since the order was realized in and through
men, then in the man who completely surrendered himself
to the order, and embodied it, God Himself was individualized
or incarnated, the Eternal Word became flesh. But Fichte latet
developed a more objective theistic idealism, which involved
a corresponding change in his historical doctrine.* It was
characteristic that for him John's was the only real Christ.
Paul, who supplanted John, remained always half a Je'tv.''
Now, the essential note of the Johannean Christ was this —
God was conceived not as abstract or absolute being (Sein), but
as conditioned (^Dasein) ; consciousness, revelation, knowledge,
was of the essence of God. The idea of a creative act is
a fundamental error, the idea of the eternal consciousness
the standard of all religious truth. John does not say, " In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," but,
" In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God,"
i.e., consciousness or revelation is eternal, and the eternal being
of the Word is the eternal being of man, or of the incarnation
of God, i.e,, the eternal unity of the Divine and human, which
is the innermost essence of religion. In the person of Jesus,
and in a manner belonging to no other man, the eternal ap
peared in time, God became incarnate ; but the radical matter
is the eternal significance, not the temporal appearance.
Fichte's cardinal principle is, only the metaphysical, not the his
torical sense saves ' ; the latter may instruct the intellect, the
former alone redeems the soul. And the metaphysical sense
into which he construed the historical Person was this : in His
real and whole being He is the greatest miracle in the whole
course of creation. It is true that He has both appeared in
time and been generated out of God from eternity ; but mathe
matics and philosophy have also both alike issued out of God
• "Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben," Werke, vol. v-., pp. 476-491.
• " Die Grundziige des gegenwart. Zeitalters," Werke, vol. vii., p. 99.
Cf. vol. v., p. 477.
' Werke, vol. v., p. 485.

SCHELLING'S SPECULATIVE CHRISTIANITY. 209
and been in God from eternity. And Christ's appearance
was a necessity to the order of the world and of history ;
grant law to be in history, and within its being His was
necessarily involved. Without Him the system could not be
realized, or man attain his end as a religious being. Religion
was conceived as the union of God and the soul, and Jesus as
the great miracle in the field of humanity, because the first
to realize this unity. By a Divine genius He was what He
was — personalized religion. He was historically necessary, for
all who attain unity with God do it through Him. In every
one who does so the Logos becomes incarnate.
§ IV. — Philosophy and 'the Incarnation : Schelling.
Philosophical interpretations and reconstructions of Chris
tianity were thus familiar to German Transcendentalism even
in its earlier and subjective phases. But they become much
more characteristic of its later and objective. Religion, as
the highest manifestation of spirit, became its final problem.
Schelling inaugurated the change, led philosophy from
subject to object, from mind to nature, from knowing to
being. He passed through so many phases that it is difficult
to seize and exhibit his precise significance for our history.
But his changes only increase his importance, show philo
sophy becoming ever more conscious of mind as the root
of the universe, of religion as an essential characteristic and
product of spirit. For us two things are important : first,
his doctrine of the Absolute, and his consequent notion of
history ; and, secondly, the way in which he combined these
into a speculative construction of historical Christianity.
The first involved a new conception of God and the world
and their relation to each other. His idea of the absolute
was, on the negative side, a doctrine of indifference, denial
of the antithesis between subject and object ; on the posi
tive side it was a doctrine of identity, the affirmation that
14

210 THE UNIVERSE IS A HISTORY
whatever is, is within, not without, the Absolute. It was
thus not abstract, dead, but concrete, living. Nature and
spirit, like Spinoza's modes of expansion and thought, were
the co-ordinate forms in which the Absolute Identity ap
peared ; they were by a ceaseless self-generation or birth
of the Divine Essence. History, as the field in which spirit
is revealed and realized, becomes the revelation and realiza
tion of God. By this idea two things seemed to be ac
complished ; the dualism which had been the basis of the
eighteenth-century thought, and which survived in the anti
thesis of the pure and practical reason with Kant, was over
come ; and religion ceased to be confined to the moral
relations of man and God, and, as posited in their respective
natures, was necessarily identical and co-extensive with their
reasoned co-existence.
From this point of view Schelling attempted a speculative
construction of Christianity, which was destined to exercise
extraordinary influence on the most dissimilar phases and
schools of thought — critical, catholic, and evangelical.*
Theology he conceived as " the highest synthesis of philo
sophical and historical knowledge," and its positive function
was " the historical construction of Christianity." The funda
mental characteristic of Christianity was that it represented
the universe as history, as a moral kingdom, and so stood in
antithesis to the ancient religions : in other words, they knew
' " Die Methode des academischen Studiums," Vorlesn., viii. and ix. ;
Werke, vol. v., pp. 286-305. Schelling's construction affected Strauss
through Hegel; through Hegel and Schleiermacher, Moehler and the Catholic
Hegelians, the former elaborating it into his doctrine of the Church as a
continued incarnation ; through Moehler it influenced the later Anghcans ;
and in the latest phase of the Anglican theology, which has been, of all
modern theologies, the most changeful, it has, developed by the partially
asismilated philosophy of Green, assumed for a while a more pronounced,
though not a very coherent, form. Its basis is Pantheistic ; its history
properly begins with Spinoza. It is significant that just where neo-
Platonism agrees with German Transcendentalism it inclines to a similar
theory, which shows its presence in a few sporadic texts in certain
Alexandrian Fathers.

WHICH CULMINATES IN THE INCARNATION. 211
a Fate ; it knows a Providence. In Hellenism nature revealed
God, but in Christianity man revealed Him ; and the two
systems were related as nature and spirit. As the sphere of
nature is space, so the field of history is time, and every parti
cular element or force (moment) of time is the revelation of a
particular side of God, in every one of which He is absolute.
In nature God is, as it were, exoteric — the ideal appears
through another than itself ; but in the ideal world, therefore
pre-eminently in history. He lays aside the veil, appears in
His own proper quality as spirit, and His kingdom comes.
Now the difference of the natural and historical is seen in
their supreme acts. Greek religion was essentially the
apotheosis of nature, but the Christian is the incarnation
of God ; and each result is reached by a reverse process :
Hellenism deified nature and placed man on its summit ;
but Christianity, as it were, humanized God. By apotheosis
man is magnified ; but by incarnation the finite, in thc very
act and moment as it were of its highest dignity, is sacri
ficed, overcome by being freely and personally surrendered
and reconciled to the Infinite. These two ideas distinguish
the old world and the new. " The first idea of Christianity
is necessarily the incarnated God, Christ as apex and
end of the ancient world of the gods." But while the idea
has an historical beginning, embodiment in a single Person,
yet it represents an eternal and universal truth, and must be
construed as such. What He expresses has its symbolic
and ideal being continued in the Church, but its real or
essential in collective man. Round its idea the Church has
allowed a mythology to gather, which may have been needed
as a body for the preservation of the soul — viz., the idea ;
but philosophy translates the empirical form into this universal
truth : " The Eternal Son of God, born from the essence of
the Father of all things, is' the finite itself as it exists in
the eternal intuition of God, appearing as a suffering God,
subjected to the fatalities of time ; and this God, in the

212 THE PERSONAL MUST HEAL THE PERSONAL.
moment of His appearance in Christ, ends the world of
finitude and opens that of infinitude, or of the dominion
of the Spirit." * The universalism of this truth is confirmed
by the presence of the idea in religions before and without
the Christian, yet in forms that may be termed immanent—
as really present, though imperfectly realized — and prophetic,
as looking towards a more perfect realization. And as
universal it is eternal, and so independent of all questions
as to whether certain books be genuine or spurious, or certain
histories are real or imagined. Christianity, as speculative
and transcendental, must never be confounded with a series
of empirical facts.
Schelling six years later introduced some modifying
elements into his speculative construction, laying a new
emphasis on the need of redeeming personal freedom from
personal evil.^ The spirit has its Iliad, its tale of struggle
with brutal and natural forces, and then its Odyssey, when
out of its painful wanderings it returns to the Infinite.
This is accomplished by a double act : on the one side, of
revelation — God shows His heart, which is love ; on the other
side, of discovery — man sees it, and surrenders freely his
particular to the universal will. But in order to this a
Mediator in human form is necessary. " For only the
personal can heal the personal, and God must become man
in order that man may come again to God." ' He becomes
man in the archetypal Divine Man, who as in the beginning
with God is by His nature the highest peak or apex of the
Divine revelation. By this Man nature is transfigured to spirit
and God becomes a personal and intelligent Being. But who
is this archetypal Man ? It can only be Christ, but Christ
conceived not as an individual, but as universal, ideal man ;
what is true only of collective humanity cannot be limited to
' Werke, vol. v., p. 294.
^ " Philos. Untersuchungen vib. das Wesen der menschl. Freiheit, "
Werke, vol. vii., pp. 331 ff.
' Ibid,, p. 380.

THE HEALED CONTINUE THE INCARNATION. 213
the historical individual, though without this individual the
truth could not have come to be or to be known. To con
ceive and embrace the ideal principle is to be incorporated
with Christ, to be of His community, realizing His unity of
nature and spirit, participant, as it were, in His incarnation.
His history thus ceases to be single and empirical, and
becomes universal, the history of a Divine Spirit so incorpo
rating itself with humanity as to organize it into a great body
whose head is Christ. History conceived from this point
becomes in consequence of Christ, as it were, the progressive
incarnation of God.
The theory of the Freiheitslehre was by no means Schelling's
last endeavour in this direction, and while growing more
mystical he also grew more Biblical. As his thought ripened
the personal element became more essential to religion, and
so he conceived in a more natural way the historical side of
Christianity. He persisted indeed in construing religious
doctrines as philosophical principles, and in treating Chris
tianity as the exoteric form of his esoteric transcendental
theosophy. But his tendency remained throughout the same.
God and man were not so conceived as to exclude each
other. Divine life was seen active everywhere. Providence
ruled human history. Nature and man were penetrated with
God. Religion was not opposed to morality, or made a
lower and more childish form of it, but treated as the most
splendid and perfect flower of the human spirit. It was not
given to Schelling either in his brilliant youth or in his ' sober
age to read the riddle of the universe, but certainly he was
one of the men who have helped man nearer to it.
§ V. — Philosophy and Historical Christianity :
Hegel.
But now we come to the man and the philosophy which
were by far the greatest formative and reformative forces in
theology. It were folly to attempt to interpret Hegel in a

214 HEGEL AND MODERN THEOLOGY.
paragraph or two ; but it were still greater folly to attempt to
understand modern movements in theology without him, espe
cially those that circle round the history and person of Christ.
It is certain at least that without him we should never have
had the " Leben Jesu " of Strauss, and without it all our modern
developments in theology would have been different. There
may be , room for doubt as to whether Strauss understood
Hegel, or made a logical application of his principles, but
there can be none as to his having learned in the school of
Hegel the principles he attempted to apply. The Hegelians
of the right and centre tried to disown the distinguished
member of the left whose revolutionary radicahsm threatened
the school with disgrace and dissolution, but he defied their
efforts and made good his claim to rank as a representative,
though the side he represented was almost the antipodes of
theirs. Strauss was, as it were, the Frankenstein of the
Hegelian philosophy. The master was sacrificed to the
disciple in fear rather than in fairness, and has not even
yet emerged from the eclipse caused by the man that seemed
his most characteristic child.
With Hegel's philosophy as a whole we have here no concern,
only with its construction of the person and history of Christ.
This, indeed, was fundamental to it, of its very essence, and
may be said to hold within it every element distinctive of
the system as a philosophy both of being and of history.
By a most fateful evolution, the rock on which the school was
shipwrecked was exactly the point which the master most
avoided ; at least, where his speech became most obscure
and oracular. The point which he laboriously emphasized,
the fact and function of incarnation, elicited little but agree
ment and approbation ; the point he touched most delicately,
the relation of the idea and fact of incarnation to the his
torical Jesus, occasioned the storms amid which the school
may be said to have perished. The course of this fateful but
inevitable evolution is what we have to trace.

HIS PHILOSOPHY HISTORICAL, BUT NOT CRITICAL. 21 5
While the Hegelian philosophy was pre-eminently a philo
sophy of history, taken, in the widest sense, as comprehensive
of nature and man, with all his institutions and achieve
ments, yet it was not in the strict and proper sense a critical
philosophy. Hegel's was not a critical mind ; it was too
constructive, loved large and synthetic views too much to
appreciate easily the analytical and dissolving processes of
criticism. He had little sympathy with the Homeric disserta
tions of Wolf, or with Niebuhr's destructive and constructive
feats in Roman history. His dialectical process could be
better illustrated by the main factors and general tendencies
of history than by minute yet often revolutionary inquiries
into its details. His system, as an absolute as distinguished
from a subjective idealism, easily tended to become a mere
theory of the real, a philosophy that justified what was by
finding a sufficient reason for it. This meant that at root it
was an optimism, not emotional like Leibnitz', but intellectual,
using the language of thought rather than of the imagination
or the heart. Hence Hegel did not say, " This is the best of
all possible worlds " ; but he said, " What is real is rational,
and what is rational is real." Yet, unless carefully guarded,
the latter implies a more unqualified optimism than the
former, for it does not apologize for evil by pleading the
necessity that belongs to all created and therefore limited
and imperfect being, but it boldly justifies evil by turning
the actual into the rational. Of course, this did not happen
in Hegel's own hands, but it represented a tendency in his
school. What did happen in his hands, however, was that
his system became more constructive or interpretative of
history than critical of h'storical facts. He was critical
enough of criticism and critics, but not of the literature and
phenomena they handled. His function was to explain these
by relating them to his system, making them parts of a
whole, not by dealing with them specifically and looking at
his system from the standpoint they supplied. Applied to

2l6 GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE.
our question this meant two things : (i) the Christianity he
construed was thc traditional, as it lived in the Scriptures,
the creeds, and the institutions of the Church he knew ; and
(2) he looked at it through his philosophy and as it affected
his philosophy ; he did not look at his philosophy through it
and at it as affected by his philosophy. It was when men
of more purely theological interests and training came to do
this that the revolt and revolution happened.
But this represents only a general attitude and tendency,
not the determinative doctrines of the philosophy. These
touched our question at two points, a formal and a material :
the one was connected with the Hegelian dialectic, or theory
of knowing ; the other with the metaphysic, or theory of being.
Hegel's doctrine as to the process and conditions, or method
and nature, of knowledge determined his notion of religion.
He did not, like Schelling, storm and reach the Absolute by
intuition or immediate knowledge — this, Hegel said, was to
begin with an Absolute that was shot, as it were, out of a
pistol ; but he reached it by a reasoned process which
exhibited the progress of the consciousness from sensuous
perception to pure knowledge — a progress governed by thought
in the successive phases or stages of its evolution. Nor
did he, like Schleiermacher, seek the roots of religion in
feeling, but in thought. The object of religion, as of philo
sophy, was eternal truth, God, and nothing but God, and
the explication of God. They were identical as to matter,
differed only as to form. God existed to philosophy as a
notion, as an object of pure thought in the form of thought,
but to religion as an idea or figurate conception — i.e.,
thought still clothed in a sensuous form. This Hegelian
distinction must here be recognized. Unless it be under
stood subsequent discussions and expositions will be un
intelligible. Strauss selected this distinction as the most
important point for theology in the Hegelian system. The
notion (Begriff) is the highest form of thought, the mind's

THE MATTER AND THE FORM OF THOUGHT. 217
grasp or comprehension of an object in its totality, as it
exists in and for itself The idea ( Vorstellung) is thought
in a picture, a general conceived in an individual, the im
perishable in a transient vehicle, the boundless and eternal in
the conditions of space and time. The notion seizes the truth
as it is in itself, above the limits and forms of the senses ; but
in the idea thought is still bound in the fetters of the sensuous,
floats in continual unrest between perception and pure thought.
What the notion contains in the unity and totality of its
elements the idea exhibits only relatively and subjectively,
on this or that side, and under given relations. The one is
but a reflexion in which the pure light, which is the element
of the other, appears in the most varied colours. Now, the
Hegelian distinction between these forms of thought con
stitutes the Hegelian distinction between philosophy and
religion. The matter was in each case the same ; the forms
under which it was conceived alone differed. Whether the
difference in form did not involve an essential difference
in matter, is a question that need not here be discussed.
Enough to know there was for Hegel, as for Homer, one
speech for the gods, another for men. Religion was the
form in which truth existed for mankind, a lantern here
of horn, there of glass, in which beams of the eternal light
were carried, making humanity, even in its dark course,
conscious of the right way.
Now, this formal involved the material question. Philo
sophy and religion were formally different, but materially
identical : philosophy was religion in the form of thought,
with all its truths reasoned, articulated, explicated ; religion
was philosophy in the form of the idea, with all its truths
expressed in language, customs, and institutions, more or less
sensuous, symbolical, figurative. Religions differ as to the
measure or degree in which they hold or embody the truth,
but the Christian stands distinguished from all others as
the absolute religion — *i.e., one whose substance or contents

2l8 THE ABSOLUTE RELIGION ONE
agree with those of the absolute philosophy, needing, in
order to become it, only to be translated into the terms
of the notion. Now, the point where their coincidence and
material identity becomes most apparent is as regards their
common basis or ultimate object — the Absolute of philosophy
is the God of religion. The Christian religion was nothing
but the realization or embodied activity of the Christian
doctrine of the Godhead, while the philosophy was nothing
but the dialectical explication of the Absolute ; nature and
man were but forms and results of its self-manifestation. As
the Absolute and the Godhead differed in name but agreed
in essence, so did the religion and the philosophy. Hegel's
Absolute was not, like Schelling's, indifference or identity —
that, he said, was but the night in which all cows look black ;
but it was a process, a development, by and out of which
all difference was evolved. In the place of Spinoza's Infinite
Substance he set the Infinite Subject, and instead of its two
mechanically opposed attributes, extension and thought, and
its transient modes, he emphasized the eternal movement of
the Subject, the process by which it died that it might live,
as it were sacrificing its infinitude to finitude, dissolving its
abstract and universal in order to concrete and particular
being, yet ever only that it might return out of the finite and
the particular into the infinite and universal again, though as
articulated and reconciled consciousness. Or, to express it
otherwise, the Absolute as thought must in thinking distin
guish Himself from Himself, make Himself to Himself an ob
ject, must as it were limit and objectify Himself, but only that
He may in this form return to Himself — i.e., know Himself as
thus distinguished and objectified as identical with Himself
But this highest truth in philosophy is only the reasoned
counterpart of the highest truth in religion — the Godhead or
Trinity.* That doctrine was at once the whole substance or
' " Philosophie der Religion," Werke, vol. xii., p. 184. For Hegel's own
exposition of his doctrine see pp. 177-288, and " Phaenomenologie des

WITH THE ABSOLUTE PHILOSOPHY. 219
essence of religion, and a complete philosophy of God and
the world. The Absolute as pure being and pure thought is
the Father ; it belongs to His being, to His very essence, to
be Creator ; thought to be thought must posit an object, must
beget another ; spirit as spirit must reveal itself, revelation is
of its essence, and the process of positing another, of revealing
self, is eternal. Without this process thought would not be
thought ; apart from the eternal generation, God would not
be God. What is posited, generated, sublated, is the Son :
God in eternally distinguishing Himself from Himself eternally
begets Himself as His Son. This Son is the world of finitude
existing in distinction and difference from the Infinite, yet
remaining identical with it. But what is thus differentiated
ever struggles towards return and reconciliation, and this
achieved the difference is overcome, which means that Spirit
knows itself one with the Eternal, and this Spirit is the
Holy Ghost. In the Godhead the whole history of the
universe is thus subsumed ; the Father is God as He exists
in and for Himself, in eternity ; the Son is God as He exists
in the form of another, in time, separated in order that He
may be reconciled ; the Spirit is the other- returned into
oneness, the particular reconciled with the universal. The
process by which the Absolute is evolved into the relative
and the relative returns, reconciled, into the bosom of the
Absolute, represents at once the life of God and the history
of the universe. The former is the latter known and read
from within ; the latter is the former unfolded, explicated,
understood from without. By the doctrine of the Godhead
God and the world are so combined that without the world

Geistes," Werke, vol. ii., pp. 561 ff. Professor Seth (" Hegelianism and
Personality," p. 165) seems to go too far when he says : " Hegel's specula
tive Trinity is, in fact, simply the rehabihtation of that ancient philosopheme
which, at the end of the period of enlightenment, Lessing had laid his
vivifying hand upon, and made a present of to the new German philosophy.''
This is to overlook the genetic development of the philosophy and certain
radical distinctions in the two doctrines.

220 INCARNATION MORE RACIAL THAN INDIVIDUAL.
there could be no God, and in all the world God is and acts ;
its history is but the process by which He distinguishes
Himself from Himself and reconciles Himself to Himself
But now this highly speculative construction, which has in
it elements of the profoundest truth and insight, had to be
applied. The most specific point of application was also the
most dangerous : the Godhead was so construed as to involve
incarnation, but the incarnation it involved was universal,
while the Christian was particular, concerned a specific his
torical Person. Nothing indeed could be more explicit than
Hegel's teaching as to the necessity and actuality of incarna
tion ; it was of the very essence or content alike of his
philosophy and of the absolute religion. By it the unity of
the Divine and human natures was revealed ; each faced the
other, not as opposites, but as cognates, related as universal
and particular, not as isolated and mechanically separated
atoms. Man was the son, the other or object existing in
separateness and distinction from the Subject. But now
in order to bring this idea of a racial or universal incarnation
into relation with the Christian, and specifically with the
per.son of Christ, Hegel called another idea into court — atone
ment or reconciliation. Man is divided from God, and needs
to be lifted from his state of division to one of union. His
empirical being is one of contradiction with his ideal, and
what he needs is to lose the empirical and realize the ideal, or
become consciously one with God. This essential unity must
be presented to the consciousness or interpreted to the expe
rience of man by a manifest fact or sensuous reality in order
that he may through knowledge attain to union. In other
words, in order to save man from his state of division and
estrangement, God must " in an objective manner " enter this
empirical or sensuous present as man's equal or fellow, and so
cause it to appear — and appearance is always for another, and
the other is here the Church or the society of faith — that the
Divine and the human natures are not in themselves different,

RECONCILIATION OF GOD AND MAN. 221
but really alike, akin, able to be in the unity of a person.* So
far good ; but Hegel does not proceed to prove that a given
Individual knew Himself, while man, essentially one with God ;
on the contrary, what he explains is : how the faith in the
God-manhood has arisen — i.e., what he emphasizes is the
origin and reality ofthe faith in the Incarnation, what he does
not emphasize is that a given historical Person was the con
scious, incarnate God. He argues that the Incarnation has
been and is because (i) it is the faith of the world ; (2) the
Spirit as a self-consciousness, i.e. as a real man, is there, a
manifest existence; (3) He exists to immediate certitude ; and
(4) the believing consciousness sees and feels and hears His
Deity. The remarkable thing is the relation of the faith to
the Person rather than the Person to the faith. Christ through
death became the God-man in the faith of the Church, and His
history was written by those who held this faith and upon
whom the Spirit had been poured out. The main thing was
the consciousness not of the historical Christ, but of those
who held Him to be the God-man.
The speculative construction was easy ; its conciliation with
historical fact was difficult. Hegel evaded the difficulty by
dealing with the faith as authenticating the fact rather than
with the fact as creating and justifying the faith. The
evasion, with all that it involved, was not immediately seen ;
theologians were more disposed to be appreciative than to
be critical. The new system widened, enriched, magnified,
fertilized, the old theology ; every dogma seemed as if possessed
of a new spirit, as if it were illumined and transfigured by
having become the abode of Deity. The doctrine of incarna
tion as now construed brought God out of His abstract and
inaccessible solitude and made Him the most concrete and
living of beings ; emphasized His nature as spirit, love,
activity ; dissolved His being as a mere external Deity,
whose home was the other side of nature and man and
1 Werke, vol. xii., pp. 23S-251 ; vol. ii., pp. 586-593.

222 PHILOSOPHY TRANSFIGURES DOGMATIC
history, and made Him present always and everywhere, in
every moment of time and in every soul of man ; lifted man
at once out of the proud yet empty self-sufficiency in which
the older philosophers had placed him, and out of the dust
into which the older theologies had cast him, and made hi.Ti a
veritable son of God, like in nature to the God whose son he
was, created for Him as created by Him, with all nature and
all history so organized and directed as to impel him towards
the God who was his end and home. It was small marvel
that the theologians were grateful for ideas that so vivified
theology. They were delighted to discover that doctrines
translated into the language of the notion became high philo
sophical truths. Men like Marheineke discovered that ortho
dox formulae as to the homoousion and the agennesia were
as golden vessels of eternal truths ministered by consecrated
hands ; they described Sabellianism ais a relapse into Judaism,
Arianism as a return to heathenism, and the doctrine of Atha
nasius as the first speculative development of Christian truth.
His theology was but absolute idealism in an empirical form ;
it had only to be translated into the notional form to be
a system of reasoned truth. Systems of Dogmatic adopted
the new terminology, and distributed their matter in three
divisions : the kingdom of the Father, or God, existing in
Himself; the kingdom of the Son, or God objectified, creating,
revealing Himself, incarnating Himself, and so redeeming
man ; and the kingdom of the Spirit, or God in renev/ed
man or the Church as returned into Himself. God became
the essence of man, man the actuality of God. Theology was
happy at the supreme good fortune that had come to her,
her ability to speak in her own tongue the very identical
thoughts of her old enemy. A beautiful and hopeful day
of peace had dawned on the field of ancient strife. " The old
prophecy of the patriarchs of modern philosophy appeared on
the point of fulfilment, not only as regards religion in general,
but Christianity in particular. A limit seemed set to the

AND SUBMITS TO BAPTISM. 223
long feud between philosophy and religion by the alliance
of the two houses, and the Hegelian system was saluted as
the child of peace and of the promise, with whom a new order
of things was to begin, when the wolf .should dwell with the
lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid. Wisdom, the
proud heatheness, humbly submitted to baptism, and made
a Christian confession of faith ; while faith, on her side, did
not hesitate to certify that Wisdom had become wholly
Christian." *

§ VI. — Historical Criticism and Theology :
Schleiermacher.
But the critical defects of the Hegelian theology could not
escape notice and accentuation. Its aversion to criticism on the
one hand, and on the other its reluctance to bring its conception
of the Incarnation into direct relation with the history and his
torical person of Jesus, were, though not purposely or explicitly,
forced into prominence by one as eminent in theology as Hegel
was in philosophy. Schleiermacher had suffered from Hegel's
not very merciful or just criticism, but no other man had so
quickened and modified religious thought in Germany in all its
phases— speculative, critical, ethical, ecclesiastical. He made
and ruled for many years from his professor's chair the theo
logical mind of the country, attracted and instructed by his
pulpit the educated classes of Berlin, and exercised through
the press a commanding influence on many sections of thought.
He happily escaped the two influences dominant in his early
years — French Illuminism in the State, shallow Rationalism
in the Church. He was born of Calvinistic parents, educated
among the Moravians, and so knew religion on both its evan
gelical and emotional or pietistic sides. It developed, softened,
inspired his always susceptible nature, but it did not save him
' Strauss, " Glaubenslehre," vol. i., pp. I, 2.

224 schleiermacher: the essence of religion
from doubt, rather stimulated the critical side of his intellect.
But it helped him by enlisting his heart on the side of religion
to fight his scepticism, and made him peculiarly susceptible
to the just budding enthusiasm of the Romanticists. He
seemed for a while to become the theological spokesman of
the school, the apologist of intense and emotional religion
against arid Deism, especially as the Schlegels, Novalis, and
Tieck helped to feed the fire and fancy that were in him ; but
he was too many-sided to be a scholar in any one school.
He was a philosopher, a learner from Jacobi, Fichte, and
Schelling, and an enthusiastic student of Plato. He was a
critic, open in mind to the new methods that were breathing
the breath of life into classical studies and rediscovering the
ancient world. And his hand was in each department the
hand of a master. Speculative, theological, critical, philo
logical, ethical treatises came from his fluent pen, each original,
suggestive, penetrative in matter, and fascinating in form.
And besides his own proper work he taught, as Strauss has
happily said, " Plato to speak in German, or his German
readers to think in Greek." *
Schleiermacher helped to create the new epoch in theology.
In the conflict between Rationalism and Supernaturalism he
lifted the old ground from beneath their feet, and raised issues
at once deeper and higher. He took his stand on religion, and
saved it from friends and enemies alike. He resolved it into
a thing essentially human, necessary to man. Religion was
not a thought or volition, the creation of the reason or the
conscience, metaphysics or ethics, conduct or cultus, but a
feeling— the feeling, direct, intuitive, of absolute dependence.
It was the immediate consciousness of the being of everything
finite in the Infinite and through the Infinite, of everything
temporal in the Eternal and through the Eternal ; it was to
feel amid all becoming and change, amid all action and
^ Strauss, " Characteristiken und Kritiken," p. 6.

AND THE historical RELIGIONS. 225
suffering, our very life as life only as it was in and through
God.* With the nature of God it had no concern ; specula
tion concerning Him might be philosophy or theology, but
was not religion. But the feeling, as it was of dependence,
could not live in isolation ; the universe was in ceaseless
activity, revealing itself to us and in us every moment ; and
to be moved by what we thus experienced and felt, not as
separate units, but as parts of a whole, conditioned and
supplemented by all the rest, was religion.'' Feeling then,
while the most individual and arbitrary of things, was yet,
because man was at once a natural and social being, so
interpreted, as to involve both a personal and collective con
sciousness, a feeling of dependence on an Infinite manifested
at once through nature, man, and society.' But while this
was the generic notion of religion, specific religions owed their
being to some creative idea embodied in some creative person,
a fundamental faith realized in a fundamental fact ; their
founders were persons who so realized a new and characteristic
consciousness of God as to create societies in order to its
propagation. Such religions were either sensuous Rr teleo
logical : the sensuous, which had types in Hellenism and
Islam, were religions which subordinated the moral and active
emotions to the natural ; but the teleological, which included
Judaism and Christianity, subordinated the natural emotions
to the moral and active. Of the specifically Christian con
sciousness Christ was the Creator ; it owed its being to Him ;
and as He was necessary to its origin. He was no less neces
sary to its continuance.* His was an absolutely perfect con
sciousness, expressive of an absolutely perfect relation to God,
which meant an absolutely full abode of God in Him ; and
so the more this consciousness, which lived in the society
> " Ueber die Religion," Werke : zur Theol., vol. i., pp. 184, 185.
' Ibid., p. 193.
• Ibid., p. 207. But in particular Rede V.
« "Glaubenslehre," §§ 7-11. IS

226 THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF CHRIST
and was propagated by it, became man's, the more perfect
would both the man and his religion be.
Now, it is from this point of view that we must understand
Schleiermacher's construction both of the person and the
history of Christ. He did not, like Hegel, come to the
question from a speculative system in order to incorporate
the religion with his philosophy and translate it into its terms ;
but he came to it from the existence and the experience of
the religious person and society, in order the better to inter
pret the source or cause of their religious being. They seem
to have this point in common : Hegel approached Christ
through the faith of the Church and Schleiermacher through
what he termed the Christian consciousness. But this
apparent agreement veiled a deep difference : faith was to
Hegel something intellectual, objective, and formulated ; while
consciousness was to Schleiermacher at once moral and
emotional, subjective, experienced, as it were the concrete
soul of the man and the society, and its history. Then once
Hegel had the faith he had no need for the Person — indeed. He
was to hifti only a growing burden which could be best got
rid of by being forgotten ; but Schleiermacher's need for the
Person grew with his interpretation of the consciousness —
without Him it could not be, nor any of its phenomena be
explained or maintained. His method may be described as
one of correlation and comparison ; the consciousness was
an effect, the Person the cause, and so he analyzed the
elements and motives of the consciousness that he might
discover the forces by which they were caused. The primary
elements were two — sin and redemption, or guilt and grace :
sin belonged to the consciousness of our collective natural
being, redemption or grace to the consciousness of our
renewed life. The creator of this latter was Christ ; through
the community with God which He established the faith
in His Godhead lived.* In Him activity and dignity are
' "Glaubenslehre," §§ 91-105.

AND THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS. 227
inseparable; it were vain to attribute to the Redeemer a
higher dignity than the activity ascribed to Him warrants
or demands, but all it does warrant must be ascribed. Well,
then, in the collective life of the society redemption is worked
by the sinless perfection of Jesus ; this perfection He had and
has communicated. His consciousness having become, as it
were, communicable, transmissible, heritable. His character'
therefore, is archetypal, the original of a type He not only
created, but perpetuates. If neither the Church as a whole
nor any single member realizes His sinlessness, still the very
abiding of the consciousness of the historical Archetype,
with the ever-renewed impulses to good and renewal it
creates, is witness to its being and its power. The arche
typal Person has thus become an ever-operating moral cause ;
His transcendental yet historical being, which created His
society, has become an immanent yet ever-active, impulsive,
and propulsive being maintaining His society. Whence came
His sinlessness ? It could not possibly come out of sinful man
kind, could not therefore have a natural source, — must, then,
have had a supernatural, been due to a creative act of God.
And as His sinlessness was not simply a thing of His special
nature, but a permanent possession, expressed in His whole
character and all His conduct, then the creative power must
have continued ; His consciousness was ever full of God,
God possessed Him without measure, in Him God had literal
being. But did this not take from Him all identity with
man ? Nay, it made Him the normal man ; for sin is against
the essence of maUj and he was made to be a home of God.
The personality of Jesus, then, means that the innermost
force, whence all His activity proceeded, was the being of God
in Him, a Divine indweUing so real that His humanity formed
only an organism for its operation and realization. His
consciousness of God was therefore absolute and perfect,
making Him the completion of the old and the beginning
of the new creation — a real man, yet so penetrated and

228 THEOLOGY IS CHRISTOLOGY.
possessed of Deity that He became, as it were, in His own
right a creator of a race or society which He was to fill as
full of Himself as He was of God, in order to the realization
of God's kingdom on the earth.
Schleiermacher's theology was thus essentially a Christo
logy, a theory as to the necessity of the historical person of
Jesus to the being of the Christian religion. It was God,
man, and history interpreted through Him. But its distinctive
feature was its starting-point and standard of interpretation,
the Christian consciousness. This was, indeed, not an indi
vidual or arbitrary consciousness, but one collective and
normal, the note of the new humanity as distinguished from
the old, with its naturalism and sinfulness. But this starting-
and standing-point involved important consequences. Christ
was approached through the Church, yet not the Church of
tradition or formulated dogmas or of fixed institutions, but
of living experience, of loving and exercised reason, of free
inquiry and revereqt thought. Then the qualities most
essential to Him were those most necessary to the being of
the consciousness of a society redeemed by His sinlessness
from its sin. As a consequence the emphasis did not fall on
the attributes and acts which the old apologetic and the older
dogmatic had made so essential to His person and so demon
strative of His divinity — the miracles, the supernatural con
ception, the Resurrection, the Ascension ; but it fell upon what
was ethical, spiritual, religious in Him — His sinlessness, His
archetypal character, His absolute consciousness of God.
These gave to Him His pre-eminence, His peculiar signifi
cance. His historical being bound Him to time. His arche
typal nature and character to eternity. Through the former
only could His society — i.e.. His religion — be explained;
through the latter only could His nature, reason, end, be
determined. It was characteristic that, while the speech of
the Hegelian School was all of the God-man, Schleiermacher's
was all of the Redeemer. In his religious system Jesus held

THE SINLESS REDEEMER, 229
the same place as God held in the practical system of Kant :
in the one case God was a necessity to the conscience, in the
other Jesus was a necessity to the consciousness ; but while
the former had all the severity of an inflexible moral law, the
latter had all the beauty and all the grace of the Redeemer
and Saviour of mankind.

CHAPTER II.
PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY OF JESUS.
SO far, then, all the Christologies passed in review have
had one quality in common : they were speculative
and, in a sense, a priori. They reasoned upwards, either from
an abstract philosophy or a concrete society, to a doctrine of
the creative personality or fundamental fact ; they did not
begin with the history, construe the Person through it, and
then work their way downwards to the philosophy or the
society. Schleiermacher's method, though it seemed his
torical, was really the most subjective of all ; he carried from
the idealized consciousness an ideal Christ back into the
Gospels, and then by its help performed a critical process
which preserved all that was necessary to his ideal and sur
rendered all that seemed superfluous. While the speculative
Christology had been so active, historical and literary
criticism had been almost, though not altogether, idle. In
the literary field various notable theories had indeed been
propounded. Eichhorn had shown a more excellent way
than was known to the old harmonistic by his hypothesis
of an Urevangelium, or primal Gospel, which, already existing
in various recensions, had been worked up by our Synoptists,
Griesbach had attempted to explain Mark as a series of
excerpts from Matthew and Luke, while Hug accepted the
canonical as the chronological order, and conceived the later
as making use of the earlier Evangelists. Gieseler had found
the common source in oral tradition, and Schleiermacher him-

CRITICISM AND THE GOSPELS. 23 1
self had turned the oral into written sources, which the three
Synoptists had in different orders connected and arranged.
The criticism of the Fourth Gospel had been begun by Vogel,
and Bretschneider's " Probabilia " had definitely raised the
question of its authenticity. But the speculative Christology
made its appeal to John, and would not argue the question
of his authorship. His Christ was its Christ : Herder, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, all agreed with Luther that
the fourth was the golden Gospel, the very temple and pillar
of the truth. And speculation was as independent of
history as of criticism. While Schleiermacher had in 1821
in Berlin begun to lecture on the Life of Jesus, and Hase
in 1823 in Tiibingen and in 1828 in Leipzig had done the
same, yet the only published works were Hase's " Handbuch "
and Paulus' " Leben Jesu." As to the latter, its hard
Rationalism — often more grotesque in its prosaic matter-
of-factness than Romanticism in its most whimsical fantasies
— has insight and enlightenment for no human soul. One
of the driest of books, it has yet come to be one of the
most amusing, illustrating the miraculous vagaries of an
exegesis that must discover authentic facts, but can allow
nothing supernatural in the evangelical narratives. It is
written with the double purpose of proving that in the
Gospels all the history is real, but all the miracles false,
\\'hich means that for every miracle there is a natural ex
planation, though the explanation is often more remarkable
than the miracle. The marvel is that any one should have
thought the history under such conditions worth saving
or Jesus a person deserving either of belief or reverence.
^^'ell said Schleiermacher, years indeed before Paulus pub
lished his " Leben " : " How a Jewish Rabbi of philanthropic
mind and somewhat Socratic morals, with a few miracles, or
at least what others took for such, and the ability to utter
some clever gnomes and parables — how One who was this and
nothing more, and who, were He only this, were not fit to

232 SPECULATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HISTORICAL
Stand before Moses or Mohammed, could have caused such an
effect as a new religion and Church, — to be able to conceive how
this were possible one must first take leave of his senses 1 "
§ I. — Strauss and His Masters.
Let us see, then, how matters stood : there were several large
and bold Christologies, but no corresponding criticism of the
Gospels or study of their history. There were highly abstruse
yet comprehensive doctrines of the Incarnation, but no funda
mental inquiry into the mind or life of the historical Person
who was said to have revealed or realized it. The Redeemer
was elaborately constructed out of the Christian consciousness,
and the picture of Him in the sources adapted to this ideal
rather than the ideal made and fashioned according to the
sources. In one respect this state of matters Was not excep
tional ; on the contrary, it might be described as normal. In
England the old dogmatic was quite as remote from historical
study of the historical Person, and the new Anglo-Catholics
were still more remote ; indeed, as regards the latter, there is
nothing so startling in their early literature as the absence of
all, not to say scientific, but even intelligent, study of the Scrip
tures, and especially of the creative Personality of the faith.
Measured by such standards the German mind was at this
period fruitfully active in this field. But what made the state
of things extraordinary and unstable was the audacity of so
much speculative construction without any correlative research
or inquiry into the history of the Person construed. The
inquiry was bound to come, and was no less bound when it
did come to be of a revolutionary character. The man who
opened it was David Friedrich Strauss. He had come to
Berlin to study philosophy and theology under the two great
masters, who from difference of nature, as well as of doctrine
and method, cordially inter-despised each other. They, with
scholars almost their equals, lectured in the University : Hegel
• " Reden iib. Rei.," v., note 14.

person without historical criticism. 233
now massive, majestic, like a swollen river running between
bank and bank and bearing down whatever stood in its
course, and now strung, tense, like a charged catapult shooting
out a criticism in a metaphor or an argument in a sentence
that went straight and strong through any defensive armour ;
Schleiermacher nimble, subtle, graceful, like the streamlet
that leaps as it runs, making beauty for the eye and music for
the ear. The schools divided the city, emulation quickened
thought. Collision sharpened their antitheses, contact deep
ened their contrasts. Marheineke applied absolute Idealism
to theology, interpreted religious doctrines into their notional
form, made the person of Jesus the point where the unity of
God and man, the Divine essence in its human realization,
became visible, and so manipulated idea and notion that
the Augsburg Confession and the new philosophy, Luther's
catechism and Hegel's logic were different only as to form,
but were as to matter the same. Neander, the last of the
Fathers, as his disciples loved to call him, childlike, erudite,
wise by his very unworldliness, a Protestant monk or saint,'
but no ascetic, embodied in himself and applied to Church
history what, in a sense, might be termed the fundamental
principle of Schleiermacher — Pectus est, quod tJteologum facit.
Men from all parts of the country — parsons from their
quiet vicarages, students, tutors, doctors from the Universities
— came to Berlin, ardent, admiring, to drink at the fountain-
head from the undefiled wells of pure thought and the rehgious
consciousness. Of these no man was thirstier, from toilsome
wandering along the rugged way that led from Kant to Hegel,
than Strauss. But to his dismay the cholera soon after his
arrival carried off Hegel, and he had to fight his perplexities
without the master's aid. What began his trouble was the
distinction between the idea and the notion, as equal to the
distinction between religion and philosophy, which had been
said to involve formal, but not material, difference. But this,
¦ Schwartz, " Geschichte der Neuesten Theol.," p. 42.

234 THE NOTION AND HISTORY.
in the mind of one who had been trained to study and to
teach the Scriptures as well as philosophy, inevitably raised
the question : — In what relation do the historical contents of
the Bible, especially of the Gospels, stand to the notion?
Do they belong to the matter which is the same for both
idea and notion, or only to what as form is dissolved by
the disembodying action of thought? Is the pre-eminent
evangelical fact or Person only a concentration for the
religious consciousness of the idea in its process of realiza
tion, or has it unique and absolute value for speculative
thought? The Hegelians argued from the unity of the
Divine and human natures to the reality of the incarnation in
Christ. In Him the idea of the God-man had been actualized.
But what warrant was there for this individualization ? The
philosophy that resolved the Absolute into a process could
not concede to a single person universal and permanent and
exclusive being. The maxim, too, " Whatever is actual is
rational," applied to theology, justified all its doctrines, made
the formulated and the persistent the valid, and so left thought
no freer than before. But had not criticism questioned the
credibility of the evangelical facts, the veracity of the sources,
the accuracy of the narratives ? Berlin was ringing with the
fame of certain lectures on the life of Jesus which Schleiermacher
had been delivering. He had shown how the person of Christ
could I be constructed from the Christian consciousness, had
subtlyi analysed documents, transposed narratives, involved
the once certain in uncertainty. Strauss had heard the master
lecture, had notes of the lectures taken in two different years,
though these could be as little transcribed as a dancer in
full swing could be photographed.* But this critical method
applied to the Gospels with a freedom that only a very mature
and independent Christian consciousness could justify, sug
gested the question : — Can I not by its help work the " Life of
Jesus '' into harmony with the new philosophy ? He thought
' " Der Christus des Glaubens," p. 8.

THE "LEBEN JESU." 235
he could, and here is the original design: "(l) Positive or
traditional— an objective exhibition of the life of Jesus accord
ing to the Gospels, an exposition as to how He lives in
believers, and the reconciliation of both sides in the second
article of the Apostles' Creed. (2) Negative or critical — the
history of Jesus dissolved for the most part as history. (3)
Dogmatic restoration of what had been destroyed."* The
critical part was only the preliminary condition of the con
structive ; the facts were to be abolished to leave thought free
scope. The man was only twenty-four, but he had mapped
out his work. His soundings were hardly well begun when he
resolved to draw up a chart contradicting and invalidating
those that had been made before. Three years later the
scheme was realized on a much larger scale than the original
design and with momentous issues in the " Leben Jesu."
§ II.— The " Leben Jesu."
This book has now to be understood. Exposition is here
criticism. The work was fundamentally vitiated, falsified in
character and method, by its starting-point and end. It pro
fessed to be critical, but was throughout a pure creation of
the philosophical imagination. Its critical theories had been
created, its exegetical method was applied, to work out a
foregone conclusion. Certain narratives, which were regarded
as historical, were incompatible with a given speculative
doctrine, and blocked the way to a speculative end. So
a critico-historical theory was invented to disintegrate the
narratives and dissolve the facts. And as was the genesis
such was the elaboration of the work, arbitrary, daring, skilful,
most dogmatic where it ought to have been most critical.
The man was a speculative, constructive thinker, blind to
probabilities, forcing history to become the vehicle of an
d priori system. The criticism never becomes scientific ;
' " Streitschriften," pt. iii., p. 59.

236 STRAUSS NEITHER HISTORIAN NOR CRITIC,
realities are nothing, idealities everything. The critic has no
historical sense ; seeks only to abolish, not to construct or
restore. The Person whose hfe he means to write becomes
shadowy, illusive ; escapes us almost altogether. We follow
from negation to negation, but never get to positive or sub
stantial fact. There is no living background, no actual world
of loving, hating, thinking men : Jews factional, fanatical, full
of hopes created by the written Word, of thoughts coined in
the schools and circulated by tradition ; Romans supercili
ously pitiful to the conquered, contemptuously indulging the
common hatred to sectaries. There is no delicate eye for
light and shade, no realizing imagination, no attempt to live
in the land and time of Jesus, or in the generation when the
so-called mythical process was going on and working into
final form in the evangelical narratives. The great realities
for Strauss are neither the narratives nor the facts, but his
antagonists, the older critics and historians on the one hand,
and the theories on the other. He never forgets his specula
tive basis and conclusion, his critical doubts, his mythical
theory as means to the end, the hard, far-fetched naturalistic
explanations of Paulus, the strained and improbable conjec
tures and conjunctures of the harmonists. So he is no critical
historian, but a dogmatic controversialist, in the might of a
speculative principle so bearing down upon living men and
living beliefs as never to get face to face with the facts that
must be known before they can become objects of thought.
The work was thus least scientific where most negative, and
positive only where speculative. The speculation was too
violent and arbitrary to find what it sought — the universal and
permanent truth represented by the history. The criticism
cleared the ground of old critical structures, and so made
new ones at once possible and necessary, but it did no more.
The speculative basis on which Strauss built was simply
the Hegelian doctrine of the Absolute, specifically developed
and applied. The disciple narrowed ideas that the master

BUT A SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHER. 237
had made large and indefinite. Hegel meant his philosophy
to explain what had been and is ; Strauss used it to determine
what must be or have been. The eternal process became the
immanent God reahzing Himself in the invariable and necessary
order of nature. Deity was impersonal, miracle impossible,
and so the supernatural incredible. The chain of finite causes
was inviolable. Strauss declared that philosophic studies
had freed him in feeling and thought from the religious and
dogmatic presuppositions which biassed even the most acute
and learned theologians. But whether speculative are more
scientific than theological assumptions is a question which
need not meanwhile be discussed.
His speculative end was also given him by the Hegelian
philosophy. The evangelical facts expressed in the sen
suous form truths which he wished to translate into the
notional. He did not see why men should be satisfied with
the lower when they could by a critico-speculative process
reach the higher form. So he considered his work a real
service to Christianity — at least the ideal and absolute Chris
tianity of the learned. He says : " The author knows that the
essence of the Christian faith is entirely independent of his
critical inquiries. The supernatural birth ofChrist, His miracles.
His resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, however
much their reality as historical facts may be doubted. Only
the certainty of this can give to our criticism calmness and
dignity. . . . Inquiries of this kind may inflict a wound on
the faith of individuals. Should this be the case with theo
logians, they have in their science the medicine for such
wounds, as, if they would not remain behind the development
of their age, cannot be spared them. The subject is not yet,
of course, properly prepared for the laity, and therefore this
book has been so written that unlearned laymen will soon
, and quickly perceive that it is not designed for them." * To
• the uninitiated the old facts were still necessary ; but to those
» " Leben Jesu," Vorrede (ist ed.), pp. vi, vii.

238 CHRISTOLOGY BECOMES ANTHROPOLOGY.
who had penetrated into the Hegelian penetralia, the mythical
theory, "with the sacrifice of the historical reality of the
narrative, held fast its absolute truth." *
What, then, was the eternal truth which was the kernel of
the historical shell thus mercilessly broken and cast away?
The Hegelian conception so construed as to be reduced to
consistency ; in other words, the dismissal of the historical
, Person in order to the complete articulation of the idea. The
notion ofthe God-man was universalized ; the attributes which
the Church had ascribed to Christ were made the property
I of the race. The unity of the Divine and human natures
was realized in man, not in a man. The Incarnation was the
self-manifestation of God, the realization of the Idea, not in
a single person, but in humanity ; not at a particular point
of time, but from eternity. " This is the key to the whole of
Christology, that as subject of the predicates which the Church
assigns to Christ an idea is set for an individual, but a real
idea ; not one Kantian, unr.eal, subjective. Conceived in an
individual, a God-man, the attributes and functions which the
Church doctrine ascribes to Christ contradict each other ; in
the idea of the race they agree. Humanity is the union of
the two natures, God become man, the infinite Spirit emptied
into the finite, and the finite recollecting its infinitude.
Humanity is the child of the visible Mother and the invisible
Father — of Nature and Spirit ; it is the Miracle-Worker, in
so far as in the course of human history the Spirit becomes
ever more perfectly Master of Nature, which is forced under
it as inert material for its activity. It is the sinless, inasmuch
as the process of its development is blameless ; defilement
cleaves to the individual, but is, in the species and its history,
abohshed. Humanity is the one that dies, rises again, and
ascends to heaven, since from the negation of its natural there
proceeds always a higher spiritual life ; from the abolition of
its finitude a? personal, national, and earthly spirit there issues
' " Leben Jesu,'' vol. i., p. 52.

GOD INCARNATE IN kAN. 239
its union with the infinite Spirit of heaven. By faith in this
Christ, especially in His death and resurrection, man is justified
before God ; that means, the individual becomes participant
in the Divine-human life of the species, by having the idea of
humanity created and vivified within him. And this happens
mainly because the negation of the natural, which is itself the
negation of the Spirit, therefore the negation of the negation,
is the only way to true spiritual life for man." * " If we know
the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, the duplex negatio
affinnat, as the eternal circulation, the endless pulsation,
always repeating itself, of the Divine life, what single fact,
which is but a sensuous symbol of this process, can claim pre
eminent importance ? To the idea in the fact, to the race
in the individual, our age wishes to be led. A theological
systeiii, which in its doctrine of Christ stands by Him as an
individual, is no system, but a sermon."^
But if this transcendental construction was to stand, then
the historical reality of the evangelical narratives must be
sacrificed, for the universal could not assume the attributes
of the particular Person if He were to remain, in the full
and strict sense, an historical reality. But how was the
sacrifice to be performed ? By the old Deistic method,
which charges Jesus with unveracity and imposition, the
Evangelists with falsehood and fabrication? To adopt it
was for many reasons impossible. It was a discredited and
discreditable method, had broken down in the hands of the
men who had used it. Then the speculative construction
required the ideal truth of the facts, the ideal veracity of
the narratives. To translate conscious fictions into trans
cendental truths had been to build an elaborate palace on
shifting sands. 'A system which claimed to be true could
never be based on intentional falsehoods. A theory thus
became necessary which sacrificed the letter, but retained
> "Leben Jesu," vol ii., pp. 734, 735.
• Ibid., p. 738.

240 THE MYTHICAL THEORY.
the spirit ; denied the real, but affirmed the ideal truth of
the Gospels. The mythical theory seemed to do so — exactly
fitted the mechanism of the work. It made the evangelical
facts unconscious creations — the symbols or investitures of
primitive Christian ideas. The creations were unconscious,
and so written down as historical in all good faith. They
were the products of the collective spirit of a people or
Church, and so clothed or expressed their actual thoughts
and beliefs. The myths were created by the normal action
of the spirit, and so while historically false were ideally true.
The theory needed but a small substratum of reality. It
was only necessary to believe that Jesus had grown up at
Nazareth, had been baptized by John, had called disciples,
gone about Judea teaching, set Himself against the Pharisees,
introduced the Messianic kingdom, and been crucified — the
victim of Pharisaic hate.* His death disappointed but did
not disperse the disciples. They had Oriental imaginations
and Jewish hopes. Their literature and traditions were full
of promises and prophecies to be fulfilled in the Messiah,
and these so mingled with their reminiscences and thoughts
of Jesus that the attributes and actions of the ideal became
those of the actual person. The Messiah of their dreams
and desires was gradually rounded into the historical Christ,
His character adorned with the qualities, His life with the
achievements, His mission with the ends attributed to the
long-predicted and long-expected national Deliverer. The
Messiah was to be a lawgiver, prophet, priest, and king, and
Jesus was represented as having been or being each of these,
in each pre-eminent over all His predecessors. The shining
of the face of Moses was eclipsed by the Transfiguration.
The miracles of Elijah and Elisha suggested, but paled
before, the feeding of the five thousand, the raising of the
dead, and the Ascension. Whatever extraordinary thing Jesus
* " Leben Jesu," vol. i., p. 72.

HISTORY DISSOLVED BUT TRUTH PRESERVED. 24 1
«
said or did had its suggestive source in the Old Testament
or tradition. He was little more than a lay figure dressed
out in Messianic prerogatives. The mythical theory, indeed,
did with prophecy very much what evolution has done with
design. The Messianic hope, struggling under certain con
ditions for life, made Jesus into the Christ.
Strauss elaborated his hypothesis with extraordinary inge
nuity. The air was full of mythological theories. Wolf's
" Prolegomena" had started many questions — critical, mythical,
religious — as to the Homeric poems and primitive Greece.
Niebuhr had carried a new light into the history of ancient
Rome. Heyne had enunciated the principle, A mythis omnis
priscorum hominum cum historia tum philosophia procedit ; and
he and Hermann had, though under specific differences, re
solved mythology into a consciously invented and elaborately
concealed science of nature and man. Creuzer had made it
a religious symbolism, under which was hidden an earlier
and purer faith. Ottfried Muller, in a finer and mcfre scien
tific spirit, had explained myths as created by the reciprocal
action of two factors, the real and ideal, and had traced in
certain cases their rise even in the historical period. The
same tendency had existed in Scriptural as in classical studies.
Mythical interpretations had been applied long before to
certain sections of the Old Testament. Eichhorn and Bauer,
Vater and De Wette, had employed it with greater or less
freedom and thoroughness. It had even been carried into
the New Testament, and made to explain the earlier and
later events in the life of Jesus, those prior to the Temptation,
and those subsequent to the Crucifixion. Strauss thus only
universalized a method which had been in partial operation
before ; made the myth, instead of a portal to enter and
leave the Gospels, a comprehensive name for the whole. In
doing so it was not enough to build on old foundations.
The enormous extension of the structure needed a corre
sponding extension of the base. The man could not but
16

242 THE CRITICISM OF PANIC

»

fail at the end whose work at the beginning was not simply
ill done but not done at all.
§ JII. — The Counter Criticism.
In order to complete our history and analysis of the book,
it will be necessary to throw a hurried glance over the five
stormful years that followed its appearance. It was the
signal for the outbreak of an angry and bewildered contro
versy of the sort distinctive of religious panics. Men known
and unknown, schools old and new, clergy and laity, every
one who could carry a stick or even spring a rattle,* joined
in the meUe. The Prussian Government proposed to place
the book under ban, but Neander protested : " Let it be
answered by argument, not by authority." The Pietists and
High Lutherans hailed it as the caput ¦mortuum of the specu
lative and critical schools, and began the reaction they called
revival. The Hegelians, anxious to disown their too radical
confrhe, made a valiant effort to affiliate him to Schleier
macher, but the sons of the divine victoriously vindicated
his true descent. And the storm of words did not come
alone ; more material penalties followed. Strauss was cast
out of the university where he had given and tasted the
promise of a brilliant career, and had to face a world
which had for him little praise and less promise. He was
not a man to bear criticism in silence, and his speech
now was most characteristic. He replied to his critics by
counter-criticism, repelled their assault by assailing them
selves. He selected from the hosts opposed to him certain
men, representatives of various tendencies, and fell on them
in the most vigorous way. The selected were Steudel,
Tiibingen professor, supernaturalist, and traditional theo
logian ; Eschenmayer, philosopher and physician, a believer
in animal magnetism, demoniacal possession, and other things
' " Das Leben Jesu fiir das Deutsche Volk," p. 157.

what WAS SAID BY IT AND TO IT. 243
ghostly ; Wolfgang Menzel, literary critic and mythologist, a
layman who acted the severe moralist ; Hengstenberg, High
Lutheran, standing by the letter of the Scriptures and the
creeds ; Bruno Bauer, just beginning his changeful career,
for the moment an orthodox Hegelian, conciliator of know
ledge and faith ; Ullmann, a theologian, modern, irenical,
anxious to give to reason the things that are reason's, to
faith the things that are faith's.
Strauss's criticism,* save in Ullmann's case, to whom he
was studiously courteous, spared neither the men nor their
writings. Steudel, dolorous, incompetent, was a Pietist per
meated with Rationalism, heir to a past he had not mind
enough to inherit or courage to renounce ; Eschenmayer
was but a succession of ever-repeated incoherences and con
tradictions ; Menzel was a literary Ishmaelite, a critic without
insight, who but blundered when he judged ; Hengstenberg
was full of latent Pantheism ; and Bruno Bauer under-
' The replies and counter-criticisms, first published in 1837, were in
1 841 issued in a collective form under the title: "Streitschriften zur
Vertheidigung meiner Schrift iiber das Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik
der gegenwartigen Theologie." The replies were in three parts. The
first was the answer to Steudel and his school, that of a rational and
reasoned supernaturalism, and was certailily a very merciless exposure of
the self-illusions it had indulged. The second part contained the reply
to Eschenmayer and Menzel. Eschenmayer is best known by his con
tributing through Schelling to the alliance of Natural and Transcendental
Philosophy. He and Strauss met as antagonists on another field —
spiritualism, or what would be now so called. Eschenmayer, in a book
on " The Conflict between Heaven and Hell," sketched in a distantly
Dantesque style the nether regions, where he places those who corrupt
and falsify the Word, assail, deny, and blaspheme the Son of man Hira
self. There, of course, Iscariot is sent, and the Mythicists in general,
who cry, " Great is the Goddess Idea of Berlin." Strauss thought such
superfine wit imbecile and laughable where not disgusting (v. " Charakter. l;.
Krit.," pp. 355, 376). The third part contained answers to Hengstenberg, the
Hegelians, and the theologians of the conciliatory school, the men of the
"Studien u. Kritiken." The criticism of the Hegelians is of considerable
autobiographical worth, and the letter to Ullmann is most pacific in tone
and purport. A positive and constructive part was intended to follow,
but it was embodied in the third edition of the " Leben Jesu.''

244 eschenmayer, menzel, hengstenberg,
stood neither Hegel nor theology. Literary amenities seldom
distinguish theological controversies, but in this case the
truculence was transcendent. Strauss compared his critics
to women set a-scre'aming by the going off of a gun.*
Eschenmayer, who had denounced him as the modern
Iscariot, guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost,^ was
described as no inspired man of God, the Spirit not being
given to plagiarism, even from himself,' while his book was
characterized as the child, bom in lawful wedlock, of theo
logical ignorance and religious intolerance, consecrated by a
somnambulating philosophy.* Wolfgang Menzel thought his
author like the devil, without conscience,^ and Strauss could
not read Bruno Bauer's speculations without feeling as if he
were in the witches' kitchen in Faust, listening to the clatter
of a whole choir of a hundred thousand fools." Hengstenberg
said the prophecy of Lichtenberg was fulfilled — the world
had got so fine as to think the belief in God as ridiculous
as the belief in ghosts.^ Strauss was a man without a heart,
or had one like Leviathan ' — " as firm as a stone, and hard
as a piece of the nether millstone." But, in this case, behind
the verbal ferocities was a mind that knew the enemy it
faced, and delighted in his absolute antagonism. Hengsten
berg thoroughly understood the " Leben Jesu." To vanquish
its speculative Pantheism the old Lutheran theology must
be revived, subscription to the confessions, in their literal
sense, enforced. To conquer the mythical theory, historical
reality must be claimed for the narratives alike of the Old
and New Testaments. If it was allowed a foothold in the
• " Leben Jesu," 2 Anfl., Vor.
2 " Streitschriften," pt. ii., p. 3. Eschenmayer's critique bore the title
" The Iscariotism of our Day."
^ " Streitschrilten," pt. ii., p. 10.
* " Leben Jesu " (ist ed.), vol. ii., Vor,
• "Streitschriften," pt. ii., p. 3.
* Ibid., pt. ii., p. log.
' Ibid., pt. iii., p. 9.
' Ibid., pt. iii., p. 18.

THOLUCK, AND SCHWEITZER. 245
one, it could not be held out of the other. The spirit of the
age was to be met not by conciliation, but by contradiction.
To mediate was to be faithless. The Church, suckled on its
old creeds, was to do its old work. The strength given by
a narrow aim and definite belief favoured for a while the
reaction ; but the times proved too strong even for Hengsten
berg. Churches, after an intellectual revolution, can as little
return to their old confessions as countries, after a political,
can go back to their old constitutions.
Relevant criticism was at first hardly possible. But two
or three attempts at it showed insight. Tholuck * achieved
more than a brilliant occasional success, and struck Strauss
on his weakest point. He argued that a critical theory of
the history must rest on a scientific criticism of the Gospels,
and therefore that the inadequate criticism of the sources
made the critical life of Jesus uncritical, left its mythical
theory a castle in the air. Strauss flung a scornful compli
mentary sneer at the high horse of his many-sidedness,^ the
jewelled spoils from the ancient and modern classics sprinkled
over his pages,' but the sting in the sneer did not neutralize
the sting in the criticism. Alexander Schweitzer,* leader of
Schleiermacher's left wing, took another line : Persons were
the main factors of change and progress in history. It was
not true that the first was often the least and the last the
most perfect form in an historical process ; the reverse was
more often the case. Personal attributes transferred to the race
were mere figures of speech — abstract, impotent, capable of
nothing but exercising the mind ; they must be concentrated
in a person if they are to mean or to accomplish anything.
' " Die Glaubwiirdigkeit der Evangel. Geschichte," 1837. F. C. Baur,
whose own criticism Tholuck in a dim way anticipated, later characterized
this book as "a masterpiece of scientific charlatanry and pettifogging'"
(Rabulisterei) " Kirchengesch. des Neunzehn, Jahrh.," p. 367.
s " Leben Jesu " (3rd ed.), Vor., p. iv.
' " Streitschriften," pt. iii., p. 13.
< "Studien u. Kritiken," 1837, pp. 459-510.

246 DE WETTE, ULLMANN, NEANDER.
He thus argued for the historicity of Christ by vindicat
ing the reality and rights of creative personalities in every
province of thought and action, but especially the religious.
The Founder made the rehgion, not the religion the Founder.
Its eminence was but a reflection and consequence of His.
Individual genius was here as everywhere the creative force.
De Wette,* the then most authoritative critic in the depart
ment of sacred literature, pronounced against the uncritical
method and position of the " Leben Jesu," especially as to
the Fourth Gospel. Ullmann ^ criticised the mythical theory,
analysed the idea of myth, distinguished its varieties, argued
that the Gospels may be histories with mythical elements
without being mythical histories. Nor were they our only
sources. Outside the Gospels were most important witnesses.
There was Paul, a writer of epistles full of history, a history in
himself, man and system alike being in need of explanation ;
not capable of being explained if the Christ he so trusted,
served, interpreted, had been only an obscure rabbi of
Nazareth in process of formation into a transcendental object
of faith by the mythicizing imagination. Then, too, there
was the primitive Church, an historical reality if such a thing
ever was— hov/ could it be what we know it to have been
if its faith and all its creative facts were but dreams of an
idealizing spirit? Paul and the primitive Church had been
ignored, but they show a faith rooted in fact. Christ created
the Church, not the Church Christ ; the seed grew into the
plant, not the plant into the seed. Neander' opposed the
historical to the mythical Christ. He was arbitrary and
subjective, too anxious to find an ideal and modern in the
real and ancient Christ, expected too much from a change
of the contra- into the supra-natural. But his work had
¦ " Erklraung des Ev. Johannis," Schlussbetrachtung.'' Cf. " Leben Jesu,"
(3rd. ed.), Vor. ; "Charak. u. Krit.," Vor.
' " Studien und Krit," 1836, pp. 776 ff.
¦'' Neander, " Das Leben Jesu Christi," 1837.

STRAUSS MAKES CONCESSIONS. 247
one pre-eminent quality — it was an honest effort, marked by
sympathetic insight into the character portrayed, to get face
to face with the facts, to construe evangelical as actual
history ; and so it tended to create in the reader a con
sciousness of reality that could confront the mythical theory
undismayed.
§ IV.— Concessions and Conclusion.
As the controversy proceeded some points personal to
Strauss emerged, which are not without historical interest.
He defended his work as a scientific search after truth, and for
science there did not exist the holy, but only the true.* He
was not the enemy, but the apologist, of the Christian faith,
and had proved its essence independent of critical inquiries.
He had not wished to destroy the faith of the people, only
to translate its transcendental matter into a scientific form.
Hence he had written for the learned alone. Why not in
Latin then ? ^ That had been to put new wine into old
bottles, with the usual certain result. He did not mean to
be unchurched, was thoroughly happy and at home in the
Christian religion ; could be refreshed in spirit from its old
yet perennially young sources.' The critic did not write for
edification, but for science ; and science, while it denied the
reality of the facts, affirmed the reality of the faith. Miracles
were unreal, but the faith in them was not. The great point
was not the occurrence of the Resurrection, but the belief in
it.* He wished the clergy to preach Christ, not Schleier
macher and Hegel. But the irenical spirit apparent in these
personal apologetics soon became much more pronounced.
The consensus eruditorum, joined with his present loneliness
' " Streitschriften," pt. i., p. 92.
" Ibid., pt. i., p. 88 ; pt. iii., p. 132.
' Ibid., pt. i., p. 9.
* Ibid., pt. i., pp. 33-48; pt. iii., p. 41. This position was later elabo-
borated by Baur.

248 jesus the religious genius,
and cheerless outlook for the future, constrained him into
concessions and efforts at conciliation. In his third " Streit-
schrift" (1837), in the third edition of his "Leben Jesu"
(1838), and in the "Zwei Friedliche Blatter" (1839), he
successively and increasingly modified the cardinal points of
hjs position, the criticism of the sources, the mythical theory,
and the speculative Christology.
In the third edition of the " Leben " the critical attitude to
the Fourth Gospel was changed. Strauss confessed that his
zeal against the theologians had made him unjust to John ; he
now doubted his own denials, could as little say John's Gospel
is genuine as that it is spurious.* And with these doubts as
to the sources, the mythical theory could hardly retain its
old rigour. Jesus became more historical ; his speeches, even
the Johannine discourses, more genuine, the latter giving, not
the master's ipsissima verba, but the ideas they had given
to the scholar.^ But the less nebulous Jesus grew, the more
extraordinary He became ; as the range of the unconsciously
creative phantasy was limited, the reality of the consciously
creative person was increased. While the speculative Chris
tology was allowed to stand, the individual had his rights
conceded by Jesus being raised into the world's pre-eminent
religious genius, creator of the Church, maker of Christianity,
the empirical or real as distinguished from the absolute or
ideal Christ. At the head of all world-historical events
individuals stood, were the subjectivities through whom the
absolute substance was realized.' In the field of religion,
especially where Monotheistic, the grand creative forces had
been individuals. And Christianity was the product of a
creative individuality. "Certainly this does not again bring
Christ into the peculiar Christian sanctuary, but only places
' " Leben Jesu " (3rd ed.), Vor., p. v.
2 Ibid., vol. ii., p. 740.
' Ibid., vol. ii., pp. 770-779. This conciliatory and conclusory chapter
embodied the views and modifications of the third " Streitschrift," and
replaced a chapter in the first edition which had given special offence.

supreme in his own order. 249
him in the chapel of Alexander Severus, where, with Orpheus
and Homer, he has to stand beside not only Moses, but
also Mohammed, and must not be ashamed of the society of
Alexander and Caesar, Raphael and Mozart." But this dis
quieting co-ordination was qualified by two considerations :
first, religion is not only the highest province in which the
Divine creative power of genius can be manifested, but is
related to the others as centre to circumference. Of the
rehgious genius in a sense quite inapplicable to poet or
philosopher can it be said, " God reveals Himself in him."
Secondly, as Christianity is the highest religion its Author is
supreme in the circle of religious cripators.
But this new standpoint received its most perfect expres
sion in the second of the " Zwei Friedliche Blatter." * This
is one of Strauss's most perfect compositions, an irenical
soliloquy, a far-off echo of Schleiermacher's " Monologen "
and " Reden," which muffled, as it were, the sigh for peace
of a man who was trying to conquer his own worst doubts,
and wished to live in friendship with the new culture and
the old faith. Culture seemed to him to be not so much
hostile as indifferent to faith ; and for Christianity to become
superfluous was worse than to be vanquished. As a child
of the culture, who had also been a son of the old faith,
he could not but seek to reconcile the two, especially as a
basis existed in a philosophy which was more Christian than
primitive Christianity, conceived God and man as united, not
at one or a few points, but everywhere and always. The
new spirit could not believe in everlasting rewards and
penalties ; could be moral without them ; needed only an
immortality of conscious growth. The resurrection of Christ
was an eternal and ideal truth clothed in a form suitable to
' "Vergangliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum" ("The Transitory
and Permanent in Christianity"). It was published in 1839 along with a
genial and beautiful paper on Justinus Kerner, Strauss' mystic friend, but
had first appeared the year before in the " Freihaven"; in 1845 an English
translation was published.

250 THE WORSHIP OF GENIUS
childhood, but without worth for manhood. His death was
no atonement, only the absolute submission of a righteous
spirit to God. His works were not miracles, the -miraculum
was only the mirabile. The Incarnation was incompatible
with the nature of God, who could be revealed in a single
person as little as the essence of harmony in a single tune-
"The only worship — one may lament or praise but cannot
deny it — the only worship which from the religious ruins
of the past remains to the cultured mind of to-day is the
worship of genius."* Must, therefore, the doom of Chris
tianity be written ? No ; Christ descends from the throne
of Divine Sonship only totassume the sovereignty of religious
genius. Genius redeems and rules the world, saves humanity
from ignorance and impotence, and helps it to realize its
ideal. Religion is the highest creation of spirit, Christianity
the highest religion, and Jesus the supreme genius of the
world, who never has been, never can be, either in kind or
degree, surpassed. Beyond Him no future can go: —
" As little as man will ever be without religion will he be
without Christ. For to think to have religion without Christ
were no less absurd than to think to enjoy poetry irrespective
of Homer, Shakespeare, and their kind. And this Christ,
so far as He is inseparable from the highest form of religion,
is an historical, not a mythical, person, a real individual,
no mere symbol." ^
" There is no fear that He will be lost to us, even though
we are forced to surrender much that has been hitherto
named Christianity. He remains to us and to all the more
secure and stable the less we anxiously hold fast doctrines
and opinions which may be to thought an occasion of
apostasy. But if Christ remains to us — remains, too, as the
highest we know and can conceive in things religious, as
He without whose presence in the heart no perfect piety
» P. 106.
' P. 131.

NO WORSHIP OF CHRIST. 25 1
is possible — then there also remains to us in Him the essential
truth of Christianity." *
But Strauss's career as the prophet of Christ, the religious
genius, was doomed to find sudden pause. His irenical
attitude was too full of incompatibilities to be long main
tained. The notion that the first could be the most perfect
form in religion, or any other creation of spirit, was alien
to the Hegelian philosophy as Strauss had construed it. His
new conception of Christ involved admissions as to the
Gospels fatal alike to the mythical theory and the critical
conclusions that made it possible. It was an approach to
Schleiermacher, Alexander Schweitzer more than hinting
that it was a crib from himself. It was neither an appro
priate termination to the old structure, nor a buttress built
to support its weakest side, but simply a fragment from a
foreign school of architecture planted against the outer wall,
a pillar from the florid Gothic cathedral of the Romanticists
placed at the end of the severe and classic temple of the
new philosophy. And the pillar was in a new revolution of
thought, coincident with a revulsion of feeling, cast down
and thrown out. In the spring of 1839 Strauss was invited
to a professorship at Ziirich. The election was the work
of the Radicals, who were then in power. It alarmed the
Church ; the clergy roused the people to revolt and political
reaction. Strauss strove to assuage the storm, explained he
did not mean " to use the position given him in the uni
versity to undermine the established religion," or " to disturb
the Church in her faith and worship." He meant to hold
himself " within the limits of his scientific vocation," and
"endeavour to make the fundamental Christian verities
esteemed." But the oil did not smooth the waters, and
Strauss soon ceased to pour it.^
' P. 132.
' The letters connected with the Zurich affair throw considerable
light on the irenical attitude and mental history of Strauss. They

252 THE CONCESSIONS RECALLED.
Whether he would or could have fulfilled his scientific
vocation without disturbing the Church or its faith is a
matter on which it is useless to speculate. He had hardly
the stuff in him to be an exoteric Conservative while an
esoteric Radical. Our modern instincts are against the
opinion Augustine attributes to Varro : " Multa esse vera,
quae non modo vulgo scire non sit utile, sed etiam tametsi
falsa sunt, aliter existimare populum expediat."* Last
century, indeed, knew more than one professor a Voltaire
privatim, but a Warburton publice. The relations between
conviction and expression in our century are — though not
what they ought to be — healthier and more honest. Later
on Strauss admired in Reimarus " the martyrdom of silence " ^
which the Deist suffered that he might enjoy the fame and
emoluments of a Christian. But he himself was saved by the
Ziirich affair from a similar or worse martyrdom. The preface
to the irenical " Blatter" is dated March 15th, 1839 ; his call to
Zurich was cancelled March i8th, and in the August follow
ing, in the preface to his " Charakteristiken und Kritiken,"'
he withdrew his critical concessions and all they implied.
Next year the " Leben Jesu " came out in a fourth edition,*
purged from everything concessive and irenical ; the section
may be found in a very wooden and wearisome little book : Boden's
" Geschichte der Berufung des Dr. Strauss an die Hochschule von Ziirich,"
1840. Cf. Hausrath's " David Friedrich Strauss und die Theologie seiner
Zeit.," vol. i., apps. iv.-xi.
' " De Civitate Dei," lib. iv., c. xxxi.
^ " H. S. Reimarus und seine Schutzschrift fiir die vernunftigen Verehrer
Gottes," p. 6.
^ The volume contains his early essays in three divisions : Theology,
Belles Lettres, and the Night-side of Nature, or Spiritualism. The essay
of greatest value is one on Schleiermacher and Daub, marked by genial
insight, nice discrimination, grace, and force of style.
* On this edition Strauss used to look back with pleasure as giving the
fullest and most adequate expression of his early views. The English
translation by Miss Evans, published in three volumes by Chapman (1841),
is from this edition. The third edition was also translated into English
but in a second-hand way from the French. It could find no London
publisher, but made its appearance at Birmingham.

THE MYTHICAL THEORY REAFFIRMED. 253
on Christ the religious genius omitted, the Fourth Gospel
pronounced spurious, its discourses " free compositions of the
Evangelist." He was in those days caustically compared
to a physician who rushed from his house, sword in hand,
and assailed the people passing along the street ; but who,
taking fright at seeing so many done almost to death,
retreated within doors, though only to sally forth the next
moment, bandages in hand, to bind up his victims.

CHAPTER III.
LITERARY CRITICISM.— THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL.
WE have seen how speculation made historical criticism
necessary ; we have now to see how the criticism
corrected the speculation, especially during the years 1840-60
when the Tiibingen criticism reigned.
§ I. — The Critical Problem and Christology.
The " Leben Jesu " had indeed accomplished a revolu
tion ; up till its appearance the speculative construction
of Christ's person had been the main thing, but now the
supreme problem was His historical reality. His place and
function in history, the character and claims of the litera
ture which described Him and the society He founded. It
was a new thing to see the most rational of all tran
scendental philosophies culminating in a doctrine of the
Incarnation, and through it reading all religions and the
whole of history. But it was due to two things : (i) the
larger and more constructive spirit of the new philosophy,
which saw it must explain not simply physical nature and
the individual man in their correlated being and reciprocal
action, but the whole of nature and the whole of man alike
in the past which represented his becoming and in the
present which represents what he has become ; (2) the new
knowledge and quickened imagination which had so enlarged
the past and made it to re-live its life under the eye of

history corrects SPECULATION. 255
the poet and thinker. As a necessary result to interpret
man was to interpret his religion, and no philosophy of
religion was possible without recognition of the place and
meaning of the supreme religious Person of history. Hence
the Transcendentalisms that rose out of two such apparently
opposed, yet really convergent, streams as the criticism of Kant
and the humanism of Herder, especially as modified by the
Romanticists, could not but attempt the speculative construc
tion both of Christianity and Christ. But the Christ it
laboured to construe was the Christ of doctrine and tradi
tion ; His name to it was but a symbol, a formula, which
had simply to be accepted and translated into the language
of the school in order to be made the very crown and apex
of the philosophy. Strauss took the matter in full earnest,
and, that the school might be free to deal with the formula
as it listed, he undertook to do away with the historical
Person, dissolving Him into a mythical creation, which only
the more therefore embodied the Idea. He was thus but a
speculative thinker disguised as an historian ; he had used
his philosophy to get rid of the historical reality and to trans
late it as a religious idea into the terms of the transcen
dental notion. His criticism ought never to be taken as a
serious performance ; its real significance was not in what
it did, but in what it caused to be done. It followed a
twofold method : as literary it was a hostile analysis of cur
rent views as to the Gospels ; as historical it was a dissolu
tion of the history into myths. But in neither respect was
it independent ; in both it was too much governed by a priori
considerations to have any scientific worth whatever. Yet
its very failure was its greatest service to science ; the noise
it had made was a direct invitation to architectonic minds
of every type to arise and build.
This call was equally heard on two sides — the side of faith
and of science. They both for different reasons lay under
the same necessity — the moral and intellectual compulsion to

256 RECONSTRUCTION BY CRITICISM.
seek and, if possible, discover the historical truth. They
started from very different principles, pursued somewhat dif
ferent methods with altogether different hopes ; biit the quest
of each was the same — the real history of Christ with all that
pertained to His person, words, and work. On the one side,
the men of faith suddenly found themselves confronted with
the most awful of all possible losses — the going out, in the
interests of the Absolute Idea, of the one Divine Person in
history. If all the institutions that had grown round Him,
all the doctrines that had been formulated concerning Him,
all the modes of doing Him honour and rendering Him ser
vice, were to live while He Himself were to die or be as one
who had never lived the Divine life save in the imaginations
of men, then the life in all these institutions, doctrines, and
forms of homage would be but a deeper death, with His
going all that invested them with power and meaning would
also go. Hence men who so felt were bound to rise and
attempt to build the altar which had been destroyed ; but
with true instinct they saw that, while destruction had come
by the path of speculation, reconstruction must come by
the way of historical inquiry and literary criticism. On the
other side, the men of science were equally clear as to their
duty. Strauss had solved no problem, had instead raised a
multitude, had made the most remarkable moment and the
greatest event in history less intelligible than ever they had
been before. It was, therefore, necessary by new methods,
and from fresh points of view, to begin the work of research
and discovery. In a constructive and positive regard the latter
tendency was more important than the former ; the Tiibingen
School contributed, directly or indirectly, more to the accurate
knowledge of the primitive history, and to the new sense in
its reality, than did the men they were accustomed to de
scribe and to despise as apologists. The claim to be free
from assumptions and partialities is made by almost all
schools, but is true of few, if of any, and certainly of no

the new christologies.

257

modern school is it so little true as of Tubingen. Yet in
spite of its assumptions it accomplished work that has made
all Christendom its debtor.
But before we touch it something must be said as to other
tendencies in theology and historical criticism. The period
was one of remarkable activity in Christology. The men
who had received their intellectual impulse from Hegel and
Schleiermacher did not cease to think because Strauss had
written, rather their speculative energy was absorbed by the
doctrine of the Incarnation, and their critical by the history of
Christianity and its sources. The tendency was common, the
subject absorbed men of all schools and parties, so much so that
this century has earned the right to be regarded as one of the
great periods of constructive Christology. Of course, this has
always been a great Lutheran doctrine,* so discussed as to
involve the question not only of the relation of the Divine and
human natures in Christ, but of God to nature and to man.
It was the Lutheran cotnmunicatio idiomatum that made
Schelling and Hegel, as well as Schleiermacher, possible. If
the Divine attributes could be so communicated to the
humanity that it could, without ceasing to be human, become,
as it were. Divine, then certainly a basis was laid for a
philosophy which affirmed the identity of the natures, and
translated the individual or singular into a collective sonship.
If, too, the consciousness of God could be so communicated to
Christ and be so possessed by Him that it could be described as
absolute, then the communicated was the communicable, what
He had received He had only to transmit, and it became the
consciousness of His society, which, by possessing, as it were.
His immanent presence, became articulated into Him. And
so, as Christological doctrine had been done into the philoso
phies, it was but natural that the philosophies should be done
back into Christological doctrine again, with types corre
sponding to the philosophies that had given the impulse. The
' Cf. supra, pp. 160, 161. 17

^ 258 THE PHILOSOPHIES DONE INTO THEOLOGIES.
result was the emergence of three schools, though each had
within it many subordinate varieties : one started from the
Hegelian idea, and, emphasizing the identity of the human
with the Divine, endeavoured to relieve the humanity from the
restraints and attributes of finitude ; the second, starting from
the same idea, but emphasizing the identity of the Divine
with the human, endeavoured by a theory of kenosis to
impose certain of the categories of finitude upon the Deity ;
the third, by emphasizing the ethical elements in God and
man, found in a new society or humanity, possessed of
Divine life, evidence that an absolute miracle, a creative and
therefore Divine personality, had appeared in a human form
and performed what corresponded to His personality, an
- absolute miracle — viz., created the society that, as it were,
perpetuated both His being and His activities. The first
of these tendencies used more or less the categories of
Hegel ; the second forced them into a Biblical and confes
sional formula ; the third blended the principles of Schelling
and Schleiermacher with the method of Hegel. We may
term these respectively the philosophical, the kenotic, and
the historical Christologies, but to attempt to deal with any
in detail would carry us far beyond our present limits. It
is enough for our purpose to indicate their significance. They
showed (i) that in positive theology the Incarnation had
for all parties become the centre of gravity ; (2) that it could
not be construed without reference both to the historical
Person and the faith in Him and the life from Ilim which
had together persisted in His society ; (3) that critical
activity as to the sources had only stimulated speculative
activity as to the Person ; and (4) that, apart from the
historical reality of the Person and the veracity of the
sources, every attempt at dogmatic construction was but a
byplay in a philosophical movement, without the religious
value and function that could alone justify its being in a
living theology.

BAUR NO SECOND STRAUSS. 259
§ II.— Ferdinand Christian Baur.
We turn now to the Tubingen School, that we may under
stand how it contributed towards the solution of the questions
raised, but left undiscussed and unanswered, by Strauss. It
was the creation of a man, whose death was also its dissolu
tion, yet it had distinguished disciples, and certain of these so
important as to be in name and achievement hardly inferior
to the master. It was a progressive school, learned from
experience and experiment, had a mind that was educated by
research and modified by discovery. Its founder, Ferdinand
Christian Baur, was in various ways most unlike Strauss. He
did not reach his position, as it were, at a bound, by the
sudden spring of a daring and aggressive intellect, but slowly,
progressively, by the path now of speculation, now of historical
investigation, now of critical inquiry, and each new position
he reached supplemented or qualified his earlier inferences.
And so the changes that came to him were logical, the result
of broadening knowledge or deepening insight. His mental
history was not, like that of Strauss, a series of impulsive
revolutions, changes of mind due more often to revulsions of
feeling than to the slow process of conviction or conversion,
but was a consistent growth, governed throughout by rare
integrity of intellect. He and his criticism are therefore much
more significant, though the two were often placed in the
inverse relation ; he was Strauss' schoolmaster at Blaubeuren,
his professor at Tiibingen, and it used to be said that the
master became the scholar's pupil. This had in it enough
of the appearance of truth to pass with the thoughtless for
true. Meanwhile we must know something of the man that
we may understand his school.
Baur was born in 1792, was the son of a German pastor,
reared in severe simplicity and obedience, nursed in the
pecuhar mystic yet evangelical piety of Swabia. He was
educated at Blaubeuren and Tiibingen, while the idealisms of

26o THE HISTORY OF HIS MIND
Fichte and Schelling were in the ascendant. He qualified
himself for the mastery of the moderns by a deep and
sympathetic study of Plato, and found the Academy the best
propaedeutic for theology. He was an ideal student, had no
enjoyment outside his study. One of his most brilliant pupils,
Friedrich Vischer, has described him as to the very heart
modern in spirit and work, but ancient in worth, near kinsman
to the reformers, a patriarch while a modern, heroic in his
industry and patient love of truth, great, simple, good, with a
voice whose very tones spoke ofinmost sincerity and simplicity.
His influence was immense, at once stimulating and unsetthng.
On these points there is emphatic testimony. An extraor
dinary proportion of his pupils became either distinguished or
well-known men. Of the nine who in Strauss's time were the
elite of the forty seminarists, all, with one exception, after a
longer or shorter trial of the Church, sought and found their
way out of it into teaching or literature* — a curious prophecy
of the fate which in the later days of its founder was to befall
the new Tiibingen School.
The history of his mind explains the genesis of his school.
He began his theological studies penetrated with the lofty
visions and a priori constructions of idealistic thought.
Schleiermacher was then dominant in theology, and his
" Glaubenslehre " helped Baur out of the old Tiibingen
scholasticism into a system which allowed his critical faculty
freer play. He was one of the men in whom many tendencies
meet, and whose strongly assimilative yet independent minds
unify the conflicting currents into a single and homogeneous
stream. While Strauss was his pupil, Baur published in
1824 a work on symbolism and mythology.^ It is an attempt
to discuss and exhibit, as to matter and form, the so-called
'• Strauss, "Christian Marklin," p. 24.
2 "Symbolik und Mythologie, oder die Natur-religion des Alterthums "
(Stuttgart, 1824-25). The work was in three volumes, but in two parts, a
general and a special. The first was taken up with questions as to

AND THE GENIUS OF HIS SCHOOL. 26 1
heathen religions. Its principles are those of the idealistic
philosophy as qualified by Schleiermacher, its tools those of
Creuzer. A symbol is the representation of an idea through
a simple picture or image given in space ; a myth the figura
tive representation of an idea through an act, an event in
time. The form of the symbol is nature ; of the myth,
history and the persons who act in it. The essential element
in both is the idea represented, which in the race as in the
individual is perceived in a concrete before it can be con
ceived in an abstract form. Symbol and myth are necessary
as forms to religion. It is given immediately through the
spiritual nature of man, but finds its positive realization
in history. History is a revelation of the Godhead, mytho
logy one of its elements or members. Monotheism is the
highest stage in the evolution of religion ; Christianity the
highest point Monotheism has reached — an ethical Idealism,
which, while revealed in historical acts and events, is yet to
be construed as a matter of innermost self-consciousness.
But he did not long remain in the school of Schleiermacher ;
he was soon caught in the fine yet strong network of the
Hegelian dialectic,* and it became to him at or^ce a philosophy
of history and of religion and an historical meth&d. In har
mony with it he construed history as the development and
mythology and history, the second with an analysis of the main elements
and ideas of the religion. The work was written before Baur had been
called to Tubingen.
' The date of his transition to Hegel can be fixed with tolerable pre
cision. His reply to Moehler's "Symbolik" (" Der Gegensatz des Katholi-
cismus und Protestantismus") appeared first in 1833 (second edition 1836),
and exhibits in curious but instructive combination Schleiermacher's con
sciousness of dependence and Hegel's doctrine of the Absolute. This
is a work of remarkable breadth and power. Moehler's "Symbolik" has
been translated, yet Baur's reply, which has never been so honoured, is its
superior in everything but style. The two books have this in common —
both are eclectic. Moehler owed almost everything distinctive in his book
to the German Protestants under whom he had studied. His theory of
tradition and the Church is but a modification of Schleiermacher, his theory
of the Church and the Incarnation a modification of Schelling. In Baur's

262 THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC APPLIED
the explication of the Idea. Thought stood where God or
Providence used to stand ; instead of an order created by a
personal will we had the successions and relations of a dia
lectical movement. Facts, events, persons, were but bearers
of the idea, factors in its unfolding and articulation. Philo
sophy had to do with the unity or subject which was the
cause of all change ; history had to do with the forms, indi
viduals, acts, occurrences, which were its varied vehicles and
ministers. The function of the thinker was so to study
history as to discover and to be able to exhibit the unity in
the multiplicity of its manifestations. The manifold of nature
existed to sense, the manifold of history to imagination ; but
thought, reason, was bound to seek under all its complex mani-
foldness the organising idea, the causal subject, the rational
unity. As a result Christianity could not be conceived as an
accident ; it represented a necessary stage in the evolution of
thought ; it was so built into the order of things that it could
not but be. To study its phenomena and development was
not to study a chaos or a succession of more or less fortunate
chances, but an ordered and an orderly movement of mind. But
a further and more important result was this — its phenomena
could not be interpreted in isolation, but only as an organized
and organic whole ; as their cause was one, they, too, constituted
a unity; the idea was explicated only when it was realized and
known. Thus the polity of the Church could not be construed
without the doctrine, or the doctrine and polity without
the worship, or the doctrine, polity, and worship without the
literature, or the literature without the manners and customs,
work one of the most instructive things is its success in showing how easily
the absolute sovereignty of Calvinism can be translated into the Hegelian
Absolute, and how simply the. evangelical principle, that good works
can never avail before God, can be turned into the philosophical for
mula — the human creature in himself is nothing before God. Whatever
attributes to man independence of God or reality of being before Him,
contradicts the principle of Protestantism. — "Der Gegensatz,' p. 49
(2nd ed.).

TO HISTORY AND DOCTRINE. 263
or all these together without the men in and through whom
they had lived ; and though these all differed, yet ah were
necessary to the realization of the idea, and the idea in all
was the same. And so, as a still further result, the most vital
element in religion was its thought ; indeed, thought was its
very essence, the one thing that was expressed in all its forms
and gave unity to their infinite variety Indeed, no man ever
had a deeper or truer conception than Baur of the relation of
dogma to the Church and to religion, and it was in this field
that he did his really valuable and permanent work. His great
monographs on the history of dogmas, on the Manichean
religious system, on the Christian Gnosis, on the Atonement,
on the Trinity and Incarnation, his Handbook, his Lectures,
and his chapters on dogma in his Church history, are all
remarkable for their solid research, patient and lucid exposi
tion, penetrative thought and criticism. He is not always to
be trusted (no man is) ; his philosophy often makes him wise
above what is written, or tempts him to interpret ancient
doctrines as provisional and anticipatory forms of modern
principles, and to lay an exaggerated emphasis on the action
of antitheses, their power, by contradicting, to develop each
other till comprehended in a higher synthesis. But in
extenuation of these defects much could be said. There is
so much of Hegel in neo-Platonism, and consequently in the
contemporary Christianity, that it would have been astonish
ing if a Hegelian had not found much of his own mind in
certain ancient dogmas. Yet the very reading of an old
doctrine by a new mind is a condition of its better interpre
tation.

§ III. — How Baur came to his Problem.
Baur was engaged in this field of study when the " Leben
Jesu " appeared, and he remained an almost silent spectator
of the controversy it caused. That work had had for him

264 THE INCARNATION NOT HISTORICAL,
nothing new,* as he had watched its growth and discussed
every point in the process with its author. This sheds light on
a significant literary coincidence. The " Leben Jesu " and the
most suggestive of all Baur's books on the history of religious
thought appeared in the same year (1835), and they express on
the fundamental matter of the speculative Christology views
that, while almost identical, yet exhibit most characteristic
differences.^ " All that Christ is as God-man He is only in
faith and through faith '' ; " what lies behind faith as historical
reality is veiled in mystery." " The God-man is indeed the
object of faith, but not its necessary presupposition; what
faith presupposes is not Christ as God-man, but as mere
man, an empirical human being." The judgment of faith is
therefore a subjective process, though it finds its occasion in
an historical appearance. In order to be justified, faith must
become knowledge ; and this happens not through any outer
history, but by philosophy, which is knowledge of the Absolute
Spirit, God as the Triune, and the identity of man with God.
The knowledge of Christ as God-man is the truth as to the
unity of the Divine and human natures. " Everything which
relates to the appearance and life of Christ has its truth only
therein, that in Him was manifested the essence and life of
the Spirit ; but what the Spirit is and does is no affair of
history. For faith, therefore, the appearance of the God-man,
the incarnation of God, His birth in the flesh, may be an
historical fact ; but to speculative thought the incarnation of
God is no single event which once happened, but an eternal
' Baur, " Kirchengeschichte des Neunzehn. Jahrhundts.," p. 397.
2 Cf. " Die Christliche Gnosis,'' pp. 707-721, with the conclusory disserta
tion of the ' ' Leben." On the question of priority this ought to be stated : the
second volume of the " Leben," which contains the speculative Christology,
did not appear till 1836, while " Die Christliche Gnosis " had appeared the
year before. On the connection between the speculative question and the
method of historical proof, see Ritschl in the " Jahrb. f. deuts. Theol.,"
vol. vi., pp. 433 ff. He there replies to an article by Zeller on the Tubingen
School which had appeared in Von Sybel's " Hist. Zeitschrift," but has
since been published in the first volume ofthe " Vortrage."

BUX ETERNAL AND UNIVERSAL. 265
determination of the essence of God, by virtue of which God
only in so far becomes man in time (in every individual man)
as He is man from eternity. The finitude and humiliation
and passion which Christ as God-man endured God at every
moment suffers as man. The atonement mauj by Christ is
no temporal performed act, but God reconciling Himself with
Himself eternally ; and the resurrection and exaltation of
Christ is nothing else than the eternal return of the Spirit to
Himself and to His truth, Christ as man, as God-man, is man
in His universality ; not a single individual, but a universal
individual." As regards their speculative Christology, Baur and Strauss
were near enough to be described as agreed, but in the
application to the personal Christ the significant differences
emerged. Strauss too utterly dissolved His historical
reality to leave Him any function, but Baur allowed Him
too important a function to be able to lose historical
reality. He held that it was in Christ that the truth as to
the unity of the Divine and human natures first attained
concrete and self-conscious being, and was by Him expressed
and taught as truth. Here was a double reality : in Him
man achieved the consciousness of the truth and from Him
received it. In respect of the form of knowledge, and in no
other, did the philosopher who knew the absolute stand above
Christ. So to speak of Him was to postulate a fulness and
certainty of historical knowledge much beyond what Strauss
could allow. In other words, the problem to Strauss had
been negative, but to Baur it was positive. The former had
been only anxious to dissolve the sacred history and tura it
into a sensuous form of the absolute philosophy ; but the latter
was minded to discover what the history had really been, and
how out of it so stupendous a fact as Christianity had grown.
Thence came Baur's distinctive problem : how, while agreeing
with the philosophical construction of Strauss, to escape the
negative results of the mythical theory and discover the actual

266 FROM THE HISTORY OF DOGMA
and positive process by which Christianity rose and developed
on the field of history. He saw that Strauss had committed a
double blunder— one in literary, another in historical, criticism :
in literary, because he had attempted a criticism of the
Gospel history without any criticism of the Gospels them
selves ; in historical, because he had neglected the one fixed
and certain point from which the history could be so ap
proached as to be surely and scientifically construed. To do
these two things was the function and end of the Tiibingen
criticism. In the development of Baur's mind, the order in which
he came to the problem was the reverse of that above
stated — i.e.^ the historical preceded the literary. These,
indeed, he so fused as to make the distinction somewhat
unreal. He so construed history through literature, and
literature in history, that one may say all his literary criticism
was historical, and all his historical criticism literary. His
general canon may be stated thus : Find out the oldest
authentic literature, through it discover the strict con
temporary history, then use the knowledge thus gained to
determine the earlier history and the value of its less strictly
authentic literary monuments. In obedience to this canon, he
approached the study of the Gospels from positions obtained
through the study of the Apostolic Epistles and history.
This point of approach is noteworthy, and explains much
in Baur's criticism otherwise unintelligible. It grew out of
his studies as an historian of dogmas which had carried
him back into the post-Apostolic and Apostolic times. The
very subjects he had chosen forced him to face the differences
within Christianity, and to inquire whence had they come,
what were their causes, affinities, distribution. As a result
he came to conceive the early Church as a by no means
homogeneous body, but one in which there were many minds,
shaped by many influences, using ideas and terms, following
customs and forming institutions that had often a long prior

TO THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE. 267
history. From the controversies of the post-Apostolic he
approached the Apostolic age, seeking in the one the germs
of the differences he had found in the other. He had, indeed,
as early as 1 831, in an essay on "The Party of Christ in the
Church at Corinth," argued to the existence of antagonisms
in the Apostolic Church ; but the full extent and meaning
of the differences dawned on him but slowly. In his work
on "The Pastoral Epistles," published in 1835, he, full of
his studies on Gnosticism, argued to their late date, indeed
to their origin in the second century, because they exhibit
so many and so distinct traces of the ideas, the parties, and
the policies of the Gnostic period.
But it was only after he had finished the cycle of his
great monographs in the history of dogma that he applied
himself to the main problem. His work on " Paul," pub
lished in 1845, two years after his "History of the Trinity,"
exhibits with consummate critical skill the conclusions he
had reached. It made an era in New Testament criticism.
The significant points in it were two — one critical and one
historical. The critical was : — in Romans, I and 2 Corin
thians, and Galatians, we have authentic Apostolic docu
ments, genuine Epistles of Paul. They are our best
authorities on every question touching the origin, nature,
and principles of primitive Christianity. The historical posi
tion was : — these authentic documents reveal antithe»->es of
thought, a Petrine and a Pauline party in the Apostolic
Church. The Petrine was the primitive Christian, made up
of men who, while believing in Jesus as the Messiah, did
not cease to be Jews, whose Christianity was but a narrow
neo-Judaism. The Pauline was a reformed and Gentile
Christianity, which aimed at universalizing the faith in Jesus
by freeing it from the Jewish law and traditions. The
universalism of Christianity, and therefore its historical im
portance and achievements, are thus really the work of the
Apostle Paul. His work he accomplished not with the

268 THE PAULINE AND PETRINE ANTITHESES.
approval and consent, but against the will and in spite of
the efforts and oppositions, of the older Apostles, and espe
cially of their more inveterate adherents who claimed to be
the party of Christ. The antithesis was absolute, emerged
at every point. It was petsonal, a conflict as to apostleship —
whether Paul's was or was not as authoritative and Divine
in its origin as that of Peter or James or John ; religious,
whether the Gentiles were or were not as free to Christ as the
Jews ; historical, whether the old dispensation had or had not
been repealed. In it the very essence and whole future of
Christianity was involved ; by it the whole series of Pauline
antitheses was explained — grace and law, faith and works,
flesh and spirit, letter and spirit, old and new covenant, law
and promise, the old man and the new, righteousness by faith
or of law, were but forms under which this conflict as to
the meaning and mission of the Gospel proceeded. The
thing might seem strange, but there it stood written on the
broad face of the documents, yet illustrated in their obscurest
references and minutest details. The men who had been
with Jesus — chosen, called, trained, authorized, and sent out
by Him — did not understand Him, — they knew Christ only
after the flesh ; but the man who had been born out of
due time, the last of the Apostles, had, not by the ordinary
historical way, but by a sort of miraculous divination, by
clear and logical deduction from the cross and death of
Christ, rediscovered the universalism and the freedom that
were in Him, and rescued Christianity from relapsing into
Judaism. Not the unity, therefore, but the differences and
antagonisms, of the Apostolic age is the key to ah its
problems, the point on which the constructive historian
must stand if he would do his work.
§ IV. — How Baur sola'^ed his Problem.
From the position thus won Baur proceeded, by the help
of the Hegelian philosophy and method, to interpret primitive

UNIVERSALISM AND PARTICULARISM. 269
Christianity, or, in other words, explain the rise of the
Catholic Church. This history exhibited, as it were, in
operation the fundamental law of the philosophy, was the
palmary example of the dialectical movement by which out of
difference and contradiction unity was evolved. Theire was
the thesis : — Particularism, Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah,
His religion does not abolish the law, is only a reformed and
ennobled Judaism, preached by Jews to Jews ; then came the
antithesis : — Universalism, Jesus is the Christ the Saviour of
the world, known by faith, preached to all men ; and, finally,
these were harmonized in the synthesis : — the Catholic Church,
which reconciled the discordant elements by finding place
for a new law, a new priesthood, and a new ceremonial, but
at the same time affirmed the Church to be for all, one and
universal. In the light of this law of contradiction and
conciliation primitive Christianity was read and its history
reconstructed. In this work Baur was aided by a distin
guished band of scholars, and so the work became from this
point not simply his, but his school's. Together they used
their principle and method to explain the literature, the
doctrine, and the polity of the Apostolic period, yet these
three so formed a unity that to explain one was to explain all.
As regards the Pauline literature the application was
obvious : the Epistles that showed the antitheses in their
sharpest form were the oldest and most authentic ; the
others had their date fixed according as they exhibited the
antitheses as clear, or as modified, or as in process of being
overcome. But for us the most interesting thing is the appli
cation of this law to the criticism of the Gospels. Baur did
not at once see its bearing upon these ; saw it only after he ^
had made a special study of John. He perceived in it an
ideal purpose ; the history was dominated by an idea, written
in its interest, made its medium or expression. This was a
very different thing from saying that it was mythical. Every
thing mythical is unhistorical, but not everything unhistorical

\

270 TENDENCIES ANTITHETICAL AND CONCILIATORY
is mythical.* Many things that seem to be mythical owe
their form to the free and creative mind of the writer. For
this mind history is an easy and elastic medium ; and so in
the criticism of the Gospels the first question is not. What
objective reality has this or that narrative in itself ? but rather
this. How does the narrative stand related to the conscious
ness of the narrator, by whose means and presumably for
whose ends it has become for us an object of historical
knowledge ? This relation of the narration to the design or
mind of the narrator Baur found most obvious in the Fourth
Gospel, and so he described it as a history with a tendency —
I.e., not so much a history as a free spiritual creation which
made facts the vehicles of the writer's ideas. The Fourth
was in every respect a contrast to the Synoptic or historical
Gospels ; and to do as Strauss had done, use the Synoptics
to discredit John, and John to discredit the Synoptics, was
altogether uncritical. But John, thus appraised and relegated
to a date late in the second century, because representing
the very last stage in the process of conciliation and com
prehension, made the theory of tendencies applicable to the
Synoptics. The application was made in harmony with Baur's
ideas as to the state and relation of parties deduced from
the recognized Pauline Epistles. As each party had its own
notion of the religion, each must have had its own concep
tion of the Master and a history which embodied it. And
so the three Gospels represented the three parties — the par-
ticularist, the universalist, and the mediatory — and each had
its tendency thus determined ; it so selected and arranged
and handled its material as to express the views or serve the
ends of its party. Matthew was the oldest Gospel, the de
pository of the Judaic or Petrine tradition ; Luke was Pauline
in its aims, made its selection of narratives and facts in the
interests of universalism ; while Mark was later and of a
ueutral character, won by dropping the points distinctive of
' " Krit. Untersch. iiber die kanon. Evang.," pp. 72, 73.

MADE CREATORS OF THE CHURCH. 27 1
the Other two. And so the Tiibingen was the very antithesis
of the Straussian criticism, and consisted not in emphasizing
the unconsciously creative mythicizing imagination, but in dis
covering the conscious design, and so using it as to explain the
phenomena ofthe Gospel. The literary criticism thus became
but a form of the historical ; the conflicts and conciliation
that proceeded in the Church created its literature ; its ideal
ized histories were but the mirror of its actual hfe. Baur
blamed Strauss for attempting a criticism of the Gospel
history without a criticism of the Gospels, so building a
structure which floated, foundationless, between heaven and
earth. Baur himself fell into the opposite extreme, gave a
criticism of the Gospels without any correspondingly ade
quate criticism of the Gospel histories — i.e., their histories
were but the conflicts, or a theory as to the conflicts, of
the Apostolic age carried back and made into a life of
Christ. Baur's method was admirably adapted to literary criticism
of a given sort. He studied the sources in the light of his
theory ; searched every document for its peculiarities of style,
thought, narration ; and then strove to determine the time
when and purpose for which it was written. The conflict and
reconciliation of the Petrine and Pauline tendencies accom
plished the most extraordinary feats in the realms both of
Apostolic and post-Apostolic literature. Certain works were
written to promote the first, certain others to promote the
second, while a third class arose to reconcile the two. Every
book, every fraction of a book, had thus its place and purpose
in the historical evolution determined. The results seemed at
first most satisfactory and permanent. The standpoint of
authentic and authoritative history won in the Pauline Epistles
appeared to bring certainty where there had been conjecture,
order where confusion had reigned. The spirit and policy
that united so many conflicting and controversial works into a
single and sacred canon combined the opposed parties into

272 THE WATCHWORDS, DISCIPLES, AND
one Catholic Church, and formulated their contrary and con
tradictory opinions into a body of Catholic doctrine. And all
was done in obedience to the most scientific law the philosophy
of history had been able to formulate. In applying this law
to the primitive Church and its literature certain formulae
came into current use, and pity the man who refused to use
or subscribe them. The damnatory clauses of the Athanasian
Creed were mild in comparison with the judgment he had
to bear. Petrinismus and Paulinismus, Particularismus and
Universalismus, Idea and Appearance, Tendency, Parteismus,
Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, were the keys that unlocked all
knowledge ; to be unwilling to use these or to believe in the
discoveries made by their light was to be adjudged an igno
ramus or a charlatan, or, worst of all, an apologist, which
meant little else than a knave, or one whose only science
was the misuse of knowledge. But the simplicity and ease
of the method, the splendid results it achieved, the happy
yet audacious combinations it enabled men to make, gave to
the men who used it a sense of power and of new discoveries,
and ralhed a brilliant band of scholars round the master.
The new Tubingen School was formed, and in it —
" Et pueri nasum rhinocerotis habent."
Schwegler anticipated the master in the application of his
theory to collective history or the complete evolution of
primitive Christianity, and in a manner which almost sur
passed him in critical and constructive ingenuity, tracing the
Church from its germ in a Jewish sect which believed Jesus of
Nazareth to be the Messiah. Zeller brought his fine historical
sense to bear on the Acts of the Apostles ; Ritschl wrote the
story of the genesis of the primitive Catholic Church ; Kostlin
busied himself with the theology as well as with the history
and criticism of the Gospels. But the limit was soon reached,
the formulae grew emptier the longer they were used, the
system was too symmetrical, and though the explanation was

SPIRIT OF THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL. 273
SO perfect that it ought to have been true, yet somehow it did
not satisfy even those who had so laboriously made it out and
built it up. The scholars did not serve the school with their
matured powers. Schwegler found in the history of Rome a
field for the exercise of his critical faculty ; Zeller, to the great
profit of modem, became the historian of ancient, philosophy ;
Ritschl passed from the left in theology to the right ; and
Kostlin went over to aesthetics. The master was not, indeed,
left alone : distinguished scholars still stood by him, though
more and more asserting by divergences their independence.
But even before his death, in December i860, his school had
in reality ceased to be.
§ V. — Where the Tubingen Criticism failed, and why.
The break-up of the school meant that its work was accom
plished, its hnes of inquiry and possibilities of combination
exhausted. In its earlier stages it had achieved great things ;
in its later it had failed in literary criticism through one-sided
exaggerations, in historical through its inability to explain
the facts. It had indeed forced New Testament criticisni
to become a science ; extended our knowledge of the early
Church, its men, parties, beliefs, purposes ; had given life and
motion to the once dead and rigid features of Apostolic and
post- Apostolic literature ; but it had the faults inseparable from
a school that, while formally historical, was essentially philo
sophical. It failed because the point that was most vital for
the history was least important for the philosophy. It neither
discovered nor cared to discover the Person that created the
processes it described. Paul was more important than Jesus.
Impersonal tendencies were greater than conscious persons.
Internal divisions and jealousies were forces mightier and more
victorious than the enthusiasm of humanity. The genesis of
a literature was made in a manner conceivable, but not the
genesis of a religion, with its ideas and truths and enthusiasms. 18

274 the oversights of the school :
The tendency had demolished the mythical theory. W^hat was
written out of the set purpose to serve a party could not be
a product of the unconsciously creative phantasy. The con
scious invention could not at the same time be an unconscious
creation. But the more conscious the creative process became
the more difficult grew the theory, for it the more distinctly
involved the reality and the veracity of the persons who
conducted the process, and demanded an exhaustive analysis
of the materials with which they worked. The Tiibingen
criticism had this paradoxical character — it was at once most
abstract in its principles and method, and most concrete and
particular in its procedure ; and as a consequence what its
principles and method determined beforehand its critical pro
cess was made to prove. That process was one of internal
criticism, uncorrected by a sufficient analysis of what may be
termed the objective or external conditions. In place of this
stood certain philosophical formulae, and these were fallacious in
the very degree that they were imposing. Thus Particularism
was identified with Christian Judaism, and dealt with as if
it were something uniform and homogeneous. But it com
prehended many varieties : Palestinian ; Hellenistic ; men
who clung to the ceremonialism of the Synagogue, but dis
liked the Temple ; men who held to the Temple and feared
the Synagogue ; men who were of Essenic, of Pharisaic, or
of Sadducaic sympathies ; men whose tendencies were more
universal than national. Paulinism, too, was not so dis
tinctly Gentile, as Baur imagined ; it was full of Judaic
elements, which he overlooked, and, as a consequence,
whose meaning he did not see, either for the universalism
he attributed to Paul, or for the particularism he ascribed
to the pillar Apostles. Then, because of his a priori and
internal criticism, he failed to note the rise and operation of
new elements in the Church of the second century. His
evolutional process was too exclusive ; thought was to him
what the Church is to the Catholic, and in watching or

its inconsistencies and inadequacies. 275
describing its evolution he forgot to study the conditions that
made it possible or necessary.
We must confess, then, that the Tiibingen criticism failed,
almost as completely as the Rationalism and Mythicism it dis
placed, to bring us face to face with the historical realities,
especially the living Person that had created Christianity.
This failure was manifold. Paul was conceived as the man in
whom the Christian principle exists in its purest form, yet,
as also holding that the absolute significance of Christianity
depends on the person of Christ, is indeed essentially identical
with it. But does this sense of the pre-eminence and absolute
value of His person belong to the consciousness of Christ
Himself or only to the mind of Paul ? If to the former, then
the Person must be a vaster factor of change than Baur ever
allowed Him to be ; if only to the latter, all that we have is
the peculiar doctrine of a distinguished man. Then, too, if, as
Baur argues in another connection,* it is the ethical in the
person and doctrine of Jesus which constitutes His signifi
cance, how comes it that the highly metaphysical Paul is His
truest exponent,, while the intensely ethical James is dismissed
as a typical Ebionite ? Then his theory made the rival parties
look real and consistent enough while conceived simply in
relation to each other, but they became less real and consis
tent when conceived in historical relation to Jesus. How did
it happen that the Petrine party, who had known Him and
were the depositaries of the pure original tradition, retained so
little of His spirit and teaching, while the Pauline, who had
never seen Him, retained and evolved so much ? How was it
that two so dissimilar streams flowed from the same source ?
— that Peter so missed and Paul so discovered the import of
Christ ? — that His person and death meant so much to the one,
so little to the other, their ideal thus contradicting, as it were,
their actual relations ? By what title could principles so
antagonistic as legal particularism and evangelical universalism
' " Die Tubinger Schule," pp. 30 ff.

276 THEORY deficient IN HISTORICAL VERACITY,
both claim to be Christian? and how could qualities that
excluded each other be akin in origin and united in end?
But these, though radical, were not. the only failures on the
historical side. The Church, as Baur conceived it, had in its
first age well-known men, but almost no literature ; in its
second a great literature, but almost no known man. How
comes it that the jealous-minded men of the first age, who
wrote so little, are to us distinct and familiar persons, while
the catholic-minded men of the second age, who did and
wrote so much, are shadowy and nameless? How has an
illiterate age been so full of historical personalities, while a
most literate age has hardly one ? By what chance have not
only the Socrates, but the Sophists, in this case become well-
defined characters, living in the full light of history, while
Plato and the Platonic circle have faded into nebulous name
less forms ? A theory that involves violent anomalies can
hardly claim historical veracity. Baur's had enough of the
first to cancel its claim to the second. But the failure of the
Tiibingen School was far from absolute, was indeed in some
essential respects equal to the most splendid success. Their
method and many of their results remain a precious and
inalienable inheritance, which every explorer on the same field
must possess before he can hope to succeed.

CHAPTER IV.
THE NEWER HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE
HISTORICAL CHRIST.
WHAT, then, was the precise result of the Tubingen '
criticism ? Simply this — it had made a more
radical, and therefore a more historical, criticism an im
perious necessity, and had defined as its final yet primary
problem the discovery of the historical Christ. Till He was
known, no single step in the scientific and constructive
interpretation of primitive Christianity could be taken. The
very emphasis that had been laid on the differences in the
Apostolic circle compelled an appeal to the source in which
they were implied. Hence the inquiry into Paulinism,
which had been, as it were, the peculiar quest of Tubingen,
was superseded by one more fundamental and much more
complex. This was an inquiry that from its very character
could not be conducted by the sole light of philosophical
principles and the use of internal evidences as their special
formulae, a sort of new dialectic clothed in a peculiar
technical terminology of its own, but must proceed in the
spirit and method proper to sober yet constructive his
torical science. All that can be done here is to sketch its
main lines and results, but not till we have indicated the
energy with which all schools of thought now turned to
the problem Tiibingen had so carefully masked, yet had
made so inevitable.

278 CRITICISM TURNS FROM PAUL TO CHRIST.
§ I.— Through Criticism to History.
The years that have passed since the death of Baur in i860
may be described as the period of the criticism of the Gospels
and their history. The work in this field has been at once
fruitful and immense. It will be enough, through a few
typical books and names, to indicate its scope and variety.
In 1859 Ewald described the Tiibingen " wisdom " as a " dis
ordered dream," * and he exhibited Christ as the end of the
ancient and the beginning of the modern world, the alone
true Messiah, the eternal King of the kingdom of God, which
He alone founded ; the Son of God, as no other had been
in our mortal flesh and fleeting time ; the purest reflection
and most glorious image of the Eternal Himself^ It is
characteristic that, in the face of all the denials of the
Tiibingen men, he holds that the Johannean authorship of
the Fourth Gospel is " entirely certain," a certainty he had
always maintained, and of late again proved ; and he loses
himself in wonder when he thinks how soon the most
marvellous of histories had found so marvellous an historian.'
In 1863 what has been termed "one of the events of the
century " occurred. Renan's " Vie de Jesus " appeared. Its
faults were flagrant, as were all its qualities ; it was in
adequate, was perfunctory in its literary criticism, violent
and subjective in its historical, selecting and grouping its
material in obedience to an aesthetic faculty that had more
appreciation of the picturesque than of the real. For the
rest it was unctuous, without ethical sense or moral dis
cernment, steeped in false sentiment, extravagant in its
inverted pietism, offensive in its rapturous eulogies of One it
could still represent as in the supreme moments of His life
stooping to imposture. Indeed, it has been but too accu
rately described as the most sacred of all histories done into
^ " Gesch. des Volkes Israel," vol. vii., p. xix.
* Ibid., vol. v., pp. 496 ff.
^ Ibid., vol. v., p. 121 ; vol. vii., pp. 213 ff.

critics : FRENCH, ENGLISH, GERMAN. 279
"a French erotic romance," and the erotics are never so
intense as when the character is most impugned. " The
Sweet Gahlean Vision " was not distinguished by dignity or
truthfulness. But the book was symptomatic ; it was the first volume
of a series that increased in wisdom as it grew in number,
recognizing throughout this truth — that Christianity was to
be explained not through abstract principles, tendencies,
differences, conciliations, but through its most creative Per
sonality. And it was prophetic — in its train came a succession
of remarkable works ; two of these were contributions as
characteristic of Germany and England as the " Vie de Jesus "
was of France. The English * was the work of a scholar,
but not of a theologian ; it had no apparatus criticus, hardly
any sense of the speculative, literary, or historical questions
that had been exercising the theological mind ; but, in part
for these very reasons, it was a fresh and powerful book. It
went, as it were unweakened by metaphysical or critical
hesitancies, straight to the moral heart of the matter, asked
the meaning of the person and message and society of Jesus.
He is so real because so moral ; and His morality, which
seems too ideal to be practical or even possible, is made by
His method and its relation to His personality eminently
real and realizable. This book, indeed, was not the first
attempt to read and appraise the religion through the character
of the Founder ; it had been made long before by the genial
and sympathetic spirit of Ullmann. In the treatise that fitly
, introduced the review that has so long and so excellently
served the reasonable and irenical school he represented, he
with a singularly delicate hand exhibited at once the historical,
religious, and theological significance of the "Sinlessness of
Jesus." ^ This was precisely the sort of field which English
thought could love and cultivate. And so Channing' had
' " Ecce Homo " (1865). * " Studien und Kritiken." (1828), vol. i., pp. 1-83.
' Sermon on the " Character of Christ."

28o THE NEW STRAUSS
argued from the pre-eminence of Christ's character to His
supernatural origin and the truth of His words and mission ;
Young * had expanded it into an argument for His Divinity ;
Bushnell ^ had made it a sort of apologia pro religione sud.
But " Ecce Homo " was strong because so little theological,
so untechnical, the sort of fragment that is created not so
much by labour as by a moment of vivid intuition. It
detached Christ's society from the conventional notions sug
gested by the word " Church," interpreted His words as its
laws, and exhibited its ethico-social idea as the articulated
mind of its Founder. Without the knowledge or the literary
genius of the " Vie de Jdsus," it yet had, in a far higher
degree, the veracity and the realism that come only with
moral insight.
The German work was the new " Leben Jesu." ' It differed
from the old almost as much as Hume from Hegel, Reimarus
from Schleiermacher. It was addressed to the German nation,
the people of the Reformation, whose historical right it was
to lead the advance from the religion of Christ to the religion
of humanity. The tendency in the new is more earthward
than in the old. The child of a transcendental stoops to be
the apostle of an empirical and sensuous age. The love of
truth may be no less, but the hatred of adversaries is more
intense ; and while hatred sharpens the eye for the detection
of pretence, it blinds it to the soul of goodness in things which
seem evil. There is nothing of the Hegelian philosophy
save a faint aroma perceptible here in a term, there in a
turn of thought. The Church is evil, and must be abolished
that the new religion of culture may be realized. The clergy
1 "The Christ of History" (1855).
2 " The Character of Jesus." This is chapter x. in " Nature and
the Supernatural" (1858); but was also published in separate form in
1861. ^ " Das Leben Jesu fur das Deutsche Volk bearbeitet" (Leipzig, 1864).
Translated, and published by Williams & Norgate under the title, " The
Life of Jesus for the People."

COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 28 1
are compared to field mice, set down as the slaves of self-
interest, averse to truth, fighting behind paper battlements
which do not deserve a siege.* Mediating and modern
theologians are written down knaves or fools.^ Even Baur
is not thorough enough, to escape censure, is described as
using the historical interest as a defence against fanaticism,
like the legal fiction which saves the Crown by sacrificing
the Ministry.'
The new Life is in some respects an improvement on the
old. The criticism of the sources is not so utterly inadequate.
It is not indeed original, only derivative, a summary of the
Tiibingen results ; but it is a confession that history without
literary criticism is worthless. The idea of historical per
spective is more developed, the sense for fact keener, the
worth of a background to the person and character he would
portray better understood. The man, in short, is, while less
of a constructive thinker, more of an artist. But while there
are more of the prerequisites of a genuine life, there is almost
as little of the reality. It is like the work of a decipherer,
who, while ambitious to prove the date, alphabet, and language
of an inscription, laboriously leaves its contents half read ;
or like the trick of a renovator, who, while professing to
restore the painting of an ancient master, painfully washes out
its main lines, and leaves only isolated patches of its principal
figure. There is indeed in his Jesus, with His bright and
tranquil Hellenic spirit, while less of flesh and blood, more of
intellectual and spiritual reality, than in the Jesus of Renan.
But the reality is modern and contemporary rather than
historical. Jesus is less a Galilean peasant than a student,
consciously eclectic, receiving into Himself from various
sources material to be built into unity through the action
of His own consciousness. He is, too, at best ill known, has
been so covered with parasites, had His features so eaten
away. His sap so sucked out, as to be little else than a
1 P. 162. ' P. xix. = xiv. 978.

282 A POORER PHILOSOPHY DISSOLVES
hardly recognizable ruin. Of few great men do we know
so little. But enough is known to deprive Him of unique
pre-eminence. He has had predecessors in Israel and Hellas,
on the Ganges and the Oxus, and has not been without
successors. He looks great to the Church because clothed
in clouds. These are not indeed myths in the old sense.
The name remains, but the thing is gone. The mythical
theory is modified out of existence. Myths cease to be
unconscious creations, become more or less intentional in
ventions. The miracles, whether worked by Jesus or on
Him, like the Transfiguration and the Ascension, are myths,
but made as often with as without a distinct intention. The
Resurrection is the creation of subjective visions. The
method is eclectic, Reimarus and Baur having contributed
to it almost as much as the earlier and later Strauss. But
by what it loses in ideality it gains in reality. The new
theory, as less speculative and more historical than the old,
is more amenable to criticism. And so the question, by
being simplified, has come nearer solution.
The philosophical bases and goal of the New Life in some
respects develop, but in general contradict, those of the old.
There is less recognition of transcendental truth, more dis
tinct acceptance of a natural and humanistic faith. The
fundamental conception approximates to ancient Stoicism,
but in its development and application is modified by modern
Empiricism. The only things in Christianity said to be im
perishable are not peculiar to it — "the belief that there is
a spiritual and moral power which governs the world," * and
the conviction that " the service of this power can be only
spiritual and moral, a service of the heart and mind." This
faith can stand, without any supernatural aid, on the natural
order of the world. It needs no future state ; teaches men,
when every hope of life is extinguished, not to comfort the
present by drawing on the future ; to live, if not as saints,
' Vor., xvii.

RELIGION INTO HUMANISM. 283
yet as honourable men ; to die, if not blissfully, yet calmly.
Whatever man needs lies within the terms of nature. Duty
has authority only as evolved from what is involved in man.
Religion is only culture, humanity in its finest bloom.
Thought thus moves on a lower plane in the new than in
the old life. Strauss has fallen back on a narrower and less
exalted conception of the universe. There is less of Deity
in it. Man has ceased to be a revelation of God. There
is not in any proper sense a God to reveal. The " spiritual
and moral power which governs the world " has almost
nothing in common with the Absolute. The idea of God
does not exclude miracles ; the most cogent arguments
against them are Hume's. Spirit does not now reveal itself
in history in changing forms, but in abiding matter. Faith
cannot now be translated into science, Vorstellungen into
Begriffe. Where distinctions before existed contradictions
now emerge ; the Hegelian distinction is superseded by one
rougher but much handier, between sense and nonsense,
science and ignorance. The ideal truth is not saved, while
the historical reality is sacrificed. A speculative Christology
is never essayed. The attributes of Christ perish with Him,
are not transferred to humanity. There is indeed an ideal
Christ, but He is to be construed only as the idea of human
perfection. The idea needs to be dissociated from the
historical person, the religion of Christ exalted into the religion
of humanity. Nothing can be admitted which transcends
nature. Humanism is the final and highest goal of man.
Almost simultaneously with the new " Leben Jesu " two
other Lives appeared : Schleiermacher's* and Schenkel's.''
As to the former something has been already said. Schleier-
' " Das Leben Jesu. Vorlesungen an der Universitat zu Berlin im
Jahre 1832 gehalten. Aus Schleiermacher's handschriftlich. Nachlasse
u. Nachschriften seiner Zuhorer herausgegeben von Riitenik " (1864). His
literary executors had withheld these lectures from publicity for more than
thirty years — from fear, Strauss affirmed, caused by his own early work.
' " Das Characterbild Jesu " (Wiesbaden, 1864).

284 SCHLEIERMACHER AND SCHENKEL.
macher created his Christ out of the Christian consciousness,
while allowing the intellect, as critic and interpreter of the
sources, the freest play. Throughout his favourite source
is John ; while the most transcendental of all the Gospels,
it is the least miraculous, most exalted in its doctrine of
the Person, most sober and natural in the details of His
history. What distinguishes the Christ of John is the vivid
ness and fulness of his consciousness of God, though it does
not involve His identity with the Divine, only the unity of
His thought and will and life with the Father. Strauss
regarded the work as a challenge to criticism, and he
criticised thus : Its Christ is not the Jesus of history,* but
an ideal creation, the last refuge of the ancient faith, built
out of, not confessional, but emotional and imaginative,
material — " a reminiscence from long-forgotten days, as it
were the light of a distant star, which, while the body whence
it came was extinguished years ago, still meets the eye." ^
Schenkel's was mainly remarkable for the way in which
he offended men of all schools, and his preference for Mark
as the oldest and most trustworthy source. Keim ' achieved
higher and better things, his work being throughout dis
tinguished by a keen, at once historical and spiritual, sense.
He set Jesus within a living Judaea, analyzed the forces that
played upon and helped to form Him, and endeavoured to
construe His life from within, to read His history as if it were
an externalization of His mind and spirit, though as such
throughout conditioned by His place and time. In Keim's
attitude there were many conflicting elements ; he wished to
remain within the terms of nature, yet ever seemed to feel as
if his subject transcended them ; the love of the rational and
' " Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte,'' 1865.
' Ibid,, p. 220.
' "Die Menschliche Entwickelung Jesu" (1861), "Die Geschichthche
Wiirde Jesu " (1864), "Der Geschich. Christus" (1865); but mainly the
great work which incorporated all these, " Geschichte Jesu von Nazara in
ihrer Verkettung mit dem Gesamtleben seines Volkes" (1867-1872).

THE NEWER LITERATURE. 285
the sense of the supernatural so contended within him that,
with all its detail, and all its dogmatisms, and all its arbitrari
ness, his book is a book of suggestions rather than of final
determinations. It is filled throughout with the conviction
that in the life which had so mightily affected man there must
be elements which explain its action, and these can never be
understood by the man who shuts himself within a narrow
and prosaic naturalism, excluding from the present he studies
the future it has created.
But detailed or even incidental mention of the really signifi
cant recent works on this field is simply impossible, though
all are marked by the same characteristic conviction — viz., that
literary, historical, and theological criticism must here go
hand in hand. They have been critical and conciliatory, like
Weizsacker's, Weiss's, and Beyschlag's, which, dealing often
freely with the literature, yet regard Jesus as by indefeasible
right of inner being or character belonging to an order
higher than the natural. Or they have been conservative
and apologetic, like the "Jesus Christ" of Pressens^, Gess's
interpretation of the Person through the consciousness,
Steinmeyer's "Contributions to Christology," and Luthardt's
lectures ; or they have been critical and negative, like
Volkmar's "Jesus Nazarenus," or the books of Wittichen
and Lang. And what is no less encouraging is that Catholics
have been as active as Protestants, whether German, like
Grimm and Neumann ; or French, like Dupanloup and
Bougaud, Lasserre and Didon. In England Farrar and Geikie
and Edersheim are familiar names, the last having in his own
line of rabbinical learning made a considerable contribution to
our knowledge of the world which surrounded Jesus. " Super
natural Religion " ought not to be forgotten ; it was as if
Tiibingen had come to life again and assumed in its resurgent
state our English speech, yet with a difference. It had all
the old a priori and doctrinaire method, but its sources
were directly modern, indirectly ancient — i.e., it tried to reach

286 CHRIST AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY.
primitive Christianity through Tiibingen ; but what it reached
was Tubingen rather than Christianity. Taken as a whole —
though it is a whole that admits, as certain of the above
names will show, remarkable rather than weighty exceptions
— we may say that more recent Lives are distinguished by
a growing sense of being on firm historical ground, and of
using sources that the more they are critically handled can
be the more intelligently trusted. It is surely a matter on
which all parties will agree, that what has so restricted the
reign of speculation as to enlarge the area of reality has
brought with it little but pure gain. In the region of the
highest and most potent life nothing but good can come from
the knowledge of the honest truth.
§ II. — Through History to Theology.
But the significant thing is that no examination of Lives
can exhibit the gain ; so many distinct yet convergent lines
of inquiry have helped to make our views more historical.
These may be represented thus : —
I. Contemporary History. — It is but in keeping with
modern scientific method that the environment should be
carefully studied and minutely known in order to the know
ledge of the organism. This means that the New Testament
cannot be studied in isolation, but must be set against its
living background ; or, to vary the figure, planted in its
native soil. But it is not a single picture or plant ; it is a
series of pictures with many and varied backgrounds, a col
lection of plants that grew on many and different soils. The
Gospels move within a limited area, but it is an area crowded
with conflicting forces, very varied in their distribution and
in their values. The main scene of the Synoptic history is
Galilee — of the Johannean, Judaea ; and these differ almost as
much as if they were alien in race and religion — as, indeed,
in great part they were. In Galilee the great institution was

THE JUD^A IN WHICH HE LIVED. 287
the synagogue ; in Judaea, the Temple : where the synagogue
was in power the rabbi was the minister, religion was instruc
tion, the law was ceremonial, the authority was the written
Word and its oral interpretation, and worship the acts and
exercises of a popular assembly ; where the Temple was
supreme the priest was the minister, religion was ritual, the
law was sacerdotal, the authority was the sacred institution
and its customs, and worship the rites and sacrifices of the
altar. In Galilee the Pharisee, in Judaea the Sadducee, was
the authoritative and active person in religion ; the former
had as the peculiar field of his activity the school and the
synagogue, but the latter had as his the Temple ; the scribes
were mainly of the Pharisees, but the priests of the Sad
ducees. Now, differences like these could not but variously
condition life in the two provinces ; the influences, the ques
tions, the ideas and notes of religion were all different ; the
same person could hardly seem the same when transplanted
from the one to the other, and the difference would be in
precise proportion to the strength and intensity of his action
on religion. But insight into these differences and what they
signified is a very recent thing ; accurate discrimination of
the two great parties may be said to have begun only in the
latter half of our century, and the result has been to give us
a more vivid and a more veracious view of the conditions
under which Jesus lived. We know better the influences that
surrounded Him, the forces He had to contend against, the
causes of His changeful fortunes in Galilee, of the final catas
trophe at Jerusalem. Of the many gains two especially
concern us here. We are better able to test the veracity of
the sources and to judge as to the truth and verisimilitude
of the history, and we are better qualified to measure the
forces then active in Judaea, what they could and what they
could not do, whether they were equal to the creation of
either the historical or the ideal Christ, whether He but
impersonated or really transcended His conditions.

288 constructive historical criticism.
Of course, the value of this study is not confined to the
Gospels ; it is even more necessary to our knowledge of the
Apostolic age. By giving knowledge of the various environ
ments into which the new religion passed, it helps to explain
its tendency not to indefinite variation, but to variations of
given types along given lines. Without it Paul could not
be understood ; with it the one-sided and a priori Tiibingen
construction of him is impossible. It is teaching us to know
something ofthe varied forces that modified Judaism at home
and abroad, to distinguish the many types of Hellenism —
Syrian, Alexandrian, Italian, Grecian — to analyze its action
alike on the formation of heretical and catholic thought, of
the separate communities and the organized Church. It is
teaching us no less to study the action of Greek and Roman
cities, their politics, commerce, guilds, schools, customs, on
the Christian societies and their leaders, and is helping us
to understand how kindred germs in different environments
may become very different organisms. On the whole, it has
become manifest that without accurate knowledge of contem
porary history no scientific criticism or construction of ancient
Christianity is in any respect possible.
2. Increased knowledge of contemporary history has made
constructive historical criticism much more possible. To the
new historical temper the Tiibingen method is peculiarly alien,
especially its notion of history as an immanent or a dialectical
evolution of thought by means of antithesis and synthesis, a sort
of naturalism stated in the language of the pure intellect. Its
questions are matters of fact, of evidence and interpretation,
not of the determination and development of the idea. Ritschl *
challenged the right of the criticism that settled the question
of miracles by philosophy, to the name historical. And it was
a question Baur had at the most critical point evaded. The
reality of the faith in the Resurrection had been for him the
main thing ; but for history the main thing — indeed, the only
' "Jahrb. fiir deuts. Theol.," vol. vi., pp. 429 ff.

APOSTOLIC DIFFERENCES IMPLY AGREEMENTS. 289
real thing — was the fact rather than the faith. And this was
typical ; it was only the most flagrant example of his theory
that history was but the evolution of the Spirit, the genesis of
the Church only the conciliation of differences. Historical
criticism followed the reverse process — abandoned theory for
a study and analysis of all the conditions, examined the
organism and environment in their mutual relations with a
view to the exhibition of the final result. If the ancient
Church were so approached, the Pauline differences could not
be made the constructive starting-point ; they were conse
quences rather than causes ; what was necessary was to get
behind them. In the matter of radical belief as to the place
and person of Christ there were indeed differences, but not
contradictions, in the Apostolic circle. And these differences
assumed a sort of unity, or at least received explanation, when
viewed in relation to Him. He had declared that He had come
to found a new covenant over against the old ; and here all
parties were at one.* On this point the Synoptics were more
emphatic than John ; and Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, as
explicit as either Matthew or Luke. But when the Apostolic
men made the attempt to conceive and represent what this
meant, the differences emerged ; and in order to understand
why they did, all the conditions and forces of the time must
be considered. There was a double transformation or de
velopment — viz., of doctrine and of polity — and to each, as;
parallel and correlative, all parties contributed, — the men who'
knew the Old Testament and construed Christ through it quite
as much as the men who came to the Old Testament only
through Christ ; but to both He was equally and essentially
the Christ, founder of their society, source of their faith. This
meant that the personal Christ played not only a much greater
part in the creation of His society than Tiibingen had assigned
to Him, but a part so great that He was everything to it,
source alike of the differences by which it only the more lived
' Ritschl, "Die Entstehung der altkathol. Kirche," pp. 27 ff. (1857).
19

290 PSYCHOLOGY IN HISTORICAL CRITICISM.
and did Him reverence, and of the methods and reason by
which they were overcome.
So much did the new lines of inquiry affect the critics of the
newest Tiibingen School that they abandoned metaphysics and
took to psychology, yet so as only the more to emphasize the
significance now given to the person and work of Christ Thus,
as they could not surrender their fixed point, Paul was
interpreted through his mental constitution ; he became an
epileptic who could not but see visions and mistake them for
realities, or a dialectician so compacted of fterves and reason, of
sensitive flesh and susceptible soul, that he was forced to trans
late his experience into a system of the universe. As a
compound of enthusiast and schoolman his formulae came to
him from various sources — the constructive impulse from his
conversion, but the real material he used from his own ex
perience. Still, psychology carries us but a very little way
in historical criticism. The more Paul's idiosyncrasies were
magnified the more remarkable became the force that caused
him to do what he did. But this certainly, in the very degree
it magnified his peculiar character, tended to exalt the personal
significance of Christ : He becomes more and more evidently
the cause of all that is pre-eminent in Paul and in the Apostohc
age as a whole ; the forces that belittle and deprave rise from the
conditions into which His society enters, not from Him. And
this has further resulted in emphasizing the most cardinal of all
the facts which the Tiibingen men overlooked — the new life that
came in with Christ and through Him. Of this life the thought
which Baur so dwelt on was but the expression. But the life was
more than the thought — its source, reason, the soil out of which
it grew, the energy by which it lived. And the life is a most
manifest effect, existent in all the Apostles, creating a new
literary capability, a new ethical, social, religious spirit, a society
of brother missionaries, possessed of the enthusiasm to heal and
to save. And once thought enters into the meaning of this
new life and its value for humanity, it is forced back on its

THE NEWER LITERARY CRITICISM. 29 1
cause, and compelled to see that without Christ the greatest
movement in history has neither a beginning nor an end.
3. But coincident with the historical has been a new literary
criticism. With the disappearance of the old theory of sharp
antitheses, the arguments which restricted the Pauline Epistles
to four have lost their force, and even critics of the negative
order have allowed both the Thessalonians and Philippians
to find their way into the circle of the authentic. While as
to the others more accurate knowledge as to the forms and
distribution of Gnosticism is shedding new light on their origin,
succession, and meaning. The Apocalypse, too, is seen to
have another value than Baur assigned to it, and the criticism
of the Gospels has simply been revolutionized. By a process
of the most minute and rigidly scientific investigation the
Synoptics have been proved to stand in relations fatal alike
to the order and the tendencies of Tubingen. Mark is now
held to be the oldest, and the discussion as to the sources
and the dependencies of all the three is carrying us, alike
as regards the history and the words of Jesus, to a stand
point where the ancient harmonist and the recent mythicist
alike cease to trouble. The Fourth Gospel, too, is read with
an opener sense, a cycle of tradition that helps to explain
it is being slowly recovered, and a clearer and more
literary conception of the relation of the speeches both to
the speaker and the reporter is being formed, while a broader
notion of its method and function is filling it with a new
historical content In a word, just as the mind which
comes to the New Testament has grown more historical,
it has become more historical to the mind — i.e., the mind has
been able to discover a more historical character in the
literature, has trusted abstract principles less, has studied
the textual, philological, and literary matter and minutiffi
more, with the natural result that the more scientific treat
ment has obtained more assured results. In this field the
services of English scholarship have been conspicuous and

292 BIBLICAL THEOLOGY AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM.
meritorious, and happily complementary to the more auda
cious and brilliant inquiries of Continental scholars.
4. The new historical and literary spirit has produced a
more detailed and skilful handling of the thought or intel
lectual content of the literature. The sacred writers are
not now dealt with as if their personalities had been merged
into one colossal individuality, and as if the very composite
material they had created were a single work which could
be interpreted and quoted as a homogeneous whole. The
new insight into the characters, histories, circumstances, suc
cession of the writers, has necessitated a distinct and special
treatment of their minds and words, which has, as notably in the
case of Paul, enabled us to measure and register the change
and expansion of their thought. " Biblical theology " means
now the theology of the Bible, not of the creeds or schools.
Within the New Testament the most careful and exhaustive
work of this kind has been done. We can now with
reverence, yet with accuracy, speak of " the theology "
or " the doctrine of Jesus." And works like Wendt's* shed
through the theology needed light upon the Person. His
great terms and phrases, like " the Messiah," " the Son of
Man," " the Son," " the Kingdom of God," " the New Cove
nant" — His great sayings, parables, discourses, like the
Sermon on the Mount — His addresses to His disciples —
His warnings to the Pharisees — His prayers in Gethsemane
and words on the cross, — have all been analyzed, compared,
explained ; His speeches in John have been read at once in
comparison and in contrast with those in the Synoptics;
and so we have been invited, as it were, to know Him as He
knew Himself, to understand His mission as it was in His
mind and before it had been touched by the spirit of Paul
or seized by the coarse hands of controversy.
And Paul has been even more elaborately discussed, dis
solved, and, as it were, rearticulated. His own authentic
' " Die Lehre Jesu " (1886 and 1890).

THE MASTER TRANSCENDS THE DISCIPLES. 293
words Still throb with the passion or glow with the love
that filled him as he wrote ; we can follow his swift though
not always obvious logic, and reconstruct his world while
we interpret his mind. Hebrews and John, Peter and James,
have been similarly treated and explained, and we can now
look at the thought of the New Testament in its constituent
parts, in its historical succession, and as a complete, if not
organic, whole. Its differences, the affinities they imply but
cannot conceal, its evolution and its causes, we can now
trace, and one thing is beginning to stand out with a per
fectly new distinctness — viz., the degree in which the mind of
the Master transcends the minds of the disciplcs ; not the
way they develop His teaching, but how they fail to do it ;
the elements they miss or ignore, forget or do not see.
Where Paul is greatest is where he is most directly under
the influence or in the hands of Jesus, evolving the content
of what he had received concerning Him ; where he is
weakest is where his old scholasticism or his new antagon
ism dominates alike the form and substance of his thought.
So with John : what in him is permanent and persuasive
is of Christ ; what is local and even trivial is of himself To
exhibit in full the falling off in the Apostles cannot be
attempted here ; enough to say, their conception of God is, if
not lower, more outward, less intimate, or, as it were, from
within ; nor does it, with all its significance as to the absolute
Paternity, penetrate like a subtle yet genial spirit their whole
mind, all their thought and all their being. They have lost
also, in some measure at least, what is its earthly counterpart —
the social form under which it can be realized in time, the
idea of the kingdom, with all it implies as to the human
brotherhood which expresses the Divine Sonship. Their
ethics have lost the wonderful searching inwardness yet fine
sanity of the Sermon on the Mount ; their conduct is more
mixed, their tempers are more troubled and troublesome ;
they so live as to show more of the infirmities of man and

294 THE CENTURY OF THE RECOVERED CHRIST.
less of the calm which comes of the complete possession of
God. These are differences which Tiibingen overlooked, but
they do more to distinguish and differentiate the schools in
the early Church than any it discovered. But does not this
mean that the very process which has reclaimed Christ for
knowledge has tended to restore Him to faith? He stands
out in a new degree and way the creator of His society,
with thoughts greater than it has been able to assimilate,
source of its continuous progress by making the re-interpre
tation of His person its constant and inevitable problem.
§ III. — Results and Inferences.
I. This history may be described as an inquiry into the
causes and the process by which the historical Christ has been
recovered. It has been due to no single man or book, but
represents a tendency or movement which individuals have
served, but no individual created. Literature, philosophy,
criticism, theology, religion, have all contributed to it, and the
result has been due to their common action, which has been
all the more concordant that it was so undesigned. The
Person that literature felt to be its loftiest ideal, philosophy
conceived as its highest personality, criticism as its supreme
problem, theology as its fundamental datum, religion as its
cardinal necessity. The most destructive efforts became the
conditions of the most constructive achievements, and the
century whose middle decades were marked by a process of
historical and literary disintegration, finds its last decade
distinguished by a process of re-integration, or a new and
profounder sense of the historical reality and pre-eminence of
the Person who had been mythically dissolved or dialectically
construed into a product of conflicting tendencies.
2. The new sense of His historical being and transcendence
is reflected in the changed tone and attitude of literature.
The ethical idealization of Schiller and the rather benevolent

HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE.

295

or condescending allusions of Goethe, as of one speaking from
a lofty height concerning another who had struggled upwards
to a lower standpoint, are now unknown. The two most
illustrious poets of our era were distinguished by their feeling
not for the abstract .and ideal, but for the concrete and
historical Christ But even more significant is the case of the
most typical English man of letters in our generation. Matthew
Arnold was an earnest, though we can hardly call him a serious,
religious teacher. He was, indeed, anything but this at the
outset — classical, almost pagan in his restraint and suppression
of himself towards religion. Goethe was his saint and ideal,
" Europe's sagest head," " the physician of the iron age."
" He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear,
And struck his finger on the place,
And said, Thou ailest here, and here ! "
But the more Arnold came to feel the historical reality of
Jesus, the more he fell under His invincible charm and bowed
before His religious supremacy. And the poet and man of
letters changed his role. He tried to become the interpreter
of Christ, as it were a new apostle, charged to preach His
Gospel, the secret he had found in His Word, to the age of the
Philistines. It might not be a great secret, many had found
it before him, but the remarkable thing was not the quality
or range of his truth, but the fact of his message and the
reality of his vocation as he conceived it. It was a sort of
spontaneous confession by one whose love was culture, that
the sure way to be cultivated was to learn and follow the
secret of Him who in spite of His lowly estate was yet the
finest ideal of humanity.
3. But this historical Christ means much more for the
Church than for literature. We cannot stand as we now do
face to face with Him in a sense and to a degree unknown ,
in the Church since the Apostolic age, and be as we were
before. For this immediacy of knowledge compels the

296 CHRIST IN THE CHURCH,
comparison of our societies, conventions, and systems with His
mind and ideal. As He is the source and the authority of
all the Churches, no Church can refuse to be measured and
judged by Him. No development can be legitimate that is
alien to His spirit and purpose.
4. He thus becomes the determinative idea in ecclesiastical
questions. The Fathers cannot explain Christ, though He
can explain the Fathers. He is ultimate, but they are deriva
tive. Their knowledge is as less historical, more defective,
than ours ; and where knowledge is inadequate the judgment
can never be final. The old Protestant appeal to Paul was
more reasonable than the Tractarian appeal to the undivided
Church of East and West, or the Ultramontane appeal to a
central and infallible authority ; for Paul had the Apostolic
knowledge that was the basis of Apostolic authority, but the
undivided Church could not have the authority, for it did
not possess the knowledge, while the Ultramontane authority
is one the sources can better judge than it can judge the
sources. The authority which the ancient Church was without
the modern Church cannot possess ; and so neither it nor any
branch of it can be the norm of Christ, while He is the norm
of the whole Church, and of all its branches.
5. This return has made evident to us the true historical
method in criticism. It must proceed from the source down
wards, and not simply be contented to judge the source by
what we find far down the stream. Above in the fountain
there is purity, but below in the river impurities that gather
as the course lengthens and the fields tilled and reaped of men
are drained into its waters.
6. But even less than literature and the Church and criticism
can theology remain unaffected by this -return, as it were,
into His very presence. We all feel the distance placed
by fifty years of the most radical and penetrating critical
discussions between us and the older theology, and as the
distance widens the theology that then reigned grows less

IN CRITICISM, AND IN THEOLOGY. 297
credible because less relevant to living mind. Does this
mean that the days of definite theological beliefs are over, or
not rather that the attempt ought to be made to restate them
in more living and relevant terms ? One thing seems clear :
if a Christian theology means a theology of Christ, at once
concerning Him and derived from Him, then to construct
one ought, because of our greater knowledge of Him and His
history, to be more possible to-day than at any previous
moment And if this is clear, then the most provisional
attempt at performing the possible is more dutiful than the
selfish and idle acquiescence that would simply leave the old
theology and the new criticism standing side by side, unrelated
and unreconciled.

BOOK II.
THEOLOGICAL AND CONSTRUCTIVE.
Div I.— THE NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION OF
CHRIST.
Div. 11.— CHRIST THE INTERPRETATION OF GOD.
Div. 111.— THE INTERPRETED GOD AS THE DETERMINATIVE
PRINCIPLE. A. — Of Theology.
B. — Of the Church.

A. Ecce oravi Deum. R. Quid ergo scire vis ? A. Haec ipsa omnia
quae oravi. R. Breviter ea collige. A. Deum et animam scire cupio.
R. Nihilne plus? A, Nihil omnino. — Augustink, "Solil.," Ub. i., c. 2.
Tu verb es quod es : quia quicquid aliquando, aut aliquo modo es :
hoc totus, et semper es. Et tu es qui proprie et simpliciter es : quia
nee habes fuisse, aut futurum esse ; sed tantum praesens esse nee
potes cogitari aliquando non esse. Sed et vita es, et lux, et sapientia
et beatitude, et aeternitas, et multa hujusmodi bona ; et tamen non
es nisi unum et summum bonum, tu tibi omnino sufBciens, et nullo
indigens ; quo omnia indigent ut sint, et ut bene sint. — Anselm,
"Proslogium," u. 22.
Divina bonitas est finis rerum omnium. — Thomas Aquinas, " Summa,"
P. I, Q. 44, art. 4.
In illo summo bono universaliterque perfecto est totius bonitatis
plenitude atque perfectio. Ubi autem totius bonitatis plenitudo est,
vera et summa charitas deesse non potest. Nihil enim charitate melius,
nihil charitate perfectius. Nullus autem pro privato et proprio sui ipsius
amore dicitur proprie charitatem habere. Oportet itaque ut amor in
alterum tendat, ut charitas esse queat. Ubi ergo pluralitas personarum
deest,* charitas omnino esse non potest. — Richard of St. Victor, "De
Trin.," lib. ii., u. 2.
Die christliche Religion hat ihren historischen Grund und Quell-
punkt in der Person Jesu. Diese giebt beidem, dem Christenthum und
seinem Dogma, seinen geschichtlich bestimmten, d. h. positiven
Charakter. Das religiose Verhaltniss, das als objectiv neue Gottesoffenbarung in
der menschlich neuen Thatsache des religiOsen Selbstbewusstseins
Jesu in die Menschheitsgesehichte eingetreten ist und das Realprincip
der christlichen Gemeinschaft und ihres Glaubens ausmacht, ist in der
Gotteskindschaft als der unmittelbaren Selbstaussage des religiOsen
Selbstbewusstseins Jesu ausgedriickt. Der Inhalt dieses Begriffes ist
der Inhalt des christlichen Principes : das Christenthum ist die Religion
der in Jesu fiir die Menschheit real aufgeschlossenen Gotteskindschaft
und damit des in dieser sich realisirenden Gottesreiches als des gOtt-
lichen Endzweckes der Menschheit. — Biedermann, " Dogmatik," §§ 158
and 160.

DIVISION I.
THE NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION OF
CHRIST.
THE questions that fall to be discussed in this Second
Book are mainly of two kinds, — exegetical, concerned
with the source of our Christian conception of God ; and con
structive, concerned with its explication. We use exegesis
that we may think of God as Christ did ; but we construct
a theology when His conception of God is made the idea
through which we interpret the universe. His consciousness
is the source and norm of the conception, but the conception
is the source and norm of the theology. This theology must
then, to use a current term, be, as regards source, Christo-
centric, but, as regards object or matter, theo-centric ; in other
words, while Christ determines the conception, the conception
determines the theology. Hence, what we have to do is, first,
to attempt to interpret God through the history and con
sciousness of Christ ; and, secondly, to elaborate this inter
pretation into the main lines of a Christian theology.

CHAPTER I.
THE EXPOSITORY BOOKS.
THE New Testament as a whole may be described as a
series of co-ordinate rather than successive attempts
at an interpretation of Christ These attempts are either
historical or constructive, and by no means represent one
uniform, simple idea, but rather many ideas, all complex and
manifold. We shall best discover what these are by beginning with
the Epistles. In them there are five main types of thought,
which we may term, after the authors or titles of the several
books, the Pauline, the Hebraic, the Jacobean, the Petrine,
and the Apocalyptic. These all have this in common : they
are attempts to construe the person and work of Jesus Christ
through the history, literature, religion, and people of Israel ;
but they differ in the use they make of these interpretative
media, and the relative values they assign to them and to Him.
Paul interprets Jesus through the Messianic promise and the
prophetic ideal, and mainly in opposition to the literalism of
the rabbinical schools and the Pharisaic law ; Hebrews, through
the idealized religious institutions of Israel, especially the
priesthood and the Temple ; James, through the law as under
stood in the synagogue ; Peter, through prophecy as the organ
of the Messianic hope ; the Apocalypse, through the people of
God, His elect, though hated and persecuted of man. These
all witness to the historical reality of Jesus Christ, to the being
of communities whose life is derived from Him, to a common

TYPES OF THOUGHT IN NEW TESTAMENT. 303
belief in the transcendence of His person, and to a common
necessity of understanding what this transcendence means
and involves. They all imply that His history is known,
and that their readers do not need any information concern
ing it, the emphasis laid on His sinless character, death, and
resurrection being for doctrinal rather than mere historical
reasons. Readers and writers are all monotheists; all believe in
the God of Israel, the reality of Israel's vocation, the authority
of his sacred literature, in the Divine origin of his religion.
Grant all these things, and What are we to think of Jesus
Christ ? may be said to be the problem common to them all.
The very fact that such a problem had at such a stage arisen,
among such a people, and with such beliefs, is remarkable.
What it signifies we may best discuss after we have reviewed
the various interpretations.
§ I. — The Pauline Christology.
A. Before attempting to interpret Paul's conception of
Christ, several things necessary to a proper historical estimate
of him and his theology must be noted.
I. The Epistles which specially concern us may be divided
into three classes : (a) the historical and polemical, including
Galatians, Romans, i and 2 Corinthians ; (/3) the transitional,
Philippians ; (7) the Christological, Ephesians and Colossians.
I do not think that any good reason for the denial of his
authorship of any of these has been made out.
2. The polemical Epistles are, with the probable exception
of the Thessalonians, our oldest authentic Christian literature.
There may be older literary material in the Synoptics, and
even in the Acts, but it is material which cannot with cer
tainty be discovered and detached from its context, while
the books in which it is embedded are all, as books, later than
these Epistles.
3. The relation as regards theology of all these Epistles

304 VARIETY WITHIN PAULINE EPISTLES.
may be stated thus : In material principle the system is
throughout the same, but the later is the more developed, and
is stated with formal differences due to a different antithesis
and purpose. In (a) the antithesis is Judzeo-Christian, and
so the argument assumes a more limited historical form, uses
terms and establishes positions determined not simply by the
thinker, but by the system he opposes. In (/3) the old anti
thesis is present in the soteriology,^ but the Christology,
which rises out of an ethical and is pervaded by a hortatory
purpose,^ escapes from the old Juda;o-historical terminology
into one wider and more general, though behind lies the
memory of the old antagonisms.^ In (7) the antithesis is a
gnosis which has both Hellenic and Hellenistic elements,
requiring a discussion which is now as formally cosmical and
ethical as in (a) it had been historical and Judzeo-scholastic.
We may say, then, that what these Epistles show is a de
veloping system, reflecting the growth of a mind alive to new
problems and affected by changing conditions.
4. Their common characteristic is an interpretation of
Christ of so comprehensive a character as to be both a philo
sophy of man and history and a theology. It is, as it were,
the universe, its cause, course, and end interpreted in the
terms of Christ.
5. This system was not simply formulated, but received
literary expression less than a generation after His death at
the hands of a man who indeed did not know Him "accord
ing to the flesh," but who had lived in the city where He
died, first among the men who had compassed His death, and
then among the men who had known and followed Him.
Paul came through Jesus as He seemed to the Jews to Jesus
as He was to the disciples, and it was while face to face with
the knowledge he had from both sources that his theology
took its rise.
6. The system has not simply an interpretative but an
' Phil. iii. 5-9. 2 Phil. ii. 5. ' Phil. i. 28-30.

PAUL'S PLACE IN THEOLOGY. 305
istorical significance. One or two of His sayings,' and of actual
vents, His descent and birth,^ His institution ofthe Supper,*
lis death, " urial, resurrection,^ may be said to be all of the
iistory these Epistles know. But to represent this as all the
:nowlcdge they give is to make a superficial truth suggest
complete falsehood. They are wholly filled by His person-
lity. Its reality, the conditions under which He lived, what
Ie did, suffered, seemed, and was, are so woven into their
ery texture that without the Gospels we could not make even
show of interfjreting the Pauline Epistles. And what does
his mean but that the history is the very groundwork of the
Apostle's thought, everywhere assumed in it, inseparable from
:, the element in which it lives, moves, and has its being.
7. With the biographical relations and psychological roots
f the Pauline theology we have here no concern, but simply
dth its doctrine of Christ. Yet it may not be irrelevant to
e reminded that its historical worth and action are something
uite distinct from even the most accurate scientific theory as
3 the subjective conditions of its origin.
B. In the Christology we have two questions, — one theo-
igical, concerned with the conception of God as modified by
le doctrine of Christ ; another soteriological, concerned with
le modes and forms under which He is conceived to hve and
:t in time. As regards the former, the doctrine of all the
Epistles is identical ; as regards the latter, formal differences
nerge that wih necessitate distinct discussion.
I. The Theology. — Schultz says : " Paul is the creator
f the theological doctrine of the Godhead of Christ, espe-
ally of the doctrine of the Christ in distinction from the
Dctrine of Jesus as the Christ" ^ This means that he was
le first, not to conceive Jesus as Messiah, but to conceive
' I Cor. vii. 10, II, ix. 14. '" l Cor. xi. 23 ff.
' Rom. i. 3, ix. 5 ; Gal iii. 16, iv. 4. * i Cor. xv. 1-8.
¦¦ " Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi," p. 395.
20

306 THE THEOLOGY A CHRISTOLOGY.
His Messiahship as involving His divinity. This may be
true so far as the dialectic expression of the idea is con
cerned, but it is not true as to the real contents of the idea.
Jesus Himself effected the revolution in the idea, but Paul
elaborated the idea so revolutionized into a theology.
The constructive thought of Paul starts with the historical
person of Jesus, and his primary postulate may be said to be
its truth and reality. This historical Person is to him the one
and only Messiah. In the Gospels Jesus is a personal but
Christ an official name, and the two are never interchanged or
confounded ' ; but in the Pauline Epistles Christ has become
as personal a name as Jesus ^ — i.e., the Person so constitutes
the office and the ofifice is so incorporated in the Person that
distinction has ceased to be possible. Jehovah started as a
denominative and became an appellative, denoted first the
God of Israel in distinction from other gods ; but when the
monotheism grew absolute, it became, as it were, generic, the
synonym of God ; Jehovah could be used only of God, God
only of Jehovah, and other usage in either case was impious
or idolatrous. So the Christ was at first like a predicate
waiting for a subject ; it denoted an office which no one had
as yet filled ; but by the time Paul began to write the office
had been so occupied that it could never again be vacant : the
personal name, Jesus, had become official, signified the Saviour;
the official name, Christ, had become personal, denoted Jesus.
But this inter-incorporation of the Person with the office and
of the office with the Person had a twofold effect — the attri
butes of the office became those of the Person, the qualities of
the Person were conveyed to the office. The rank, the place
of the Messiah in prophecy and promise. His function in
' This distinction gives all their point to the words of Peter, Matt. xvi.
16; the question of Jesus to the scribes. Matt. xxii. 42 ; the question of
the high priest, xxvi. 63, and the words of mockery, 68.
2 Cf. I Thess. ii. 6, iii.' 2, iv. 16; 2 Thess. iii. 5 ; Rom. v. 6, 8, vi. 4, 9,
vii. 4, viii. 9, 10, 11, ix. 3, 5, xiv. 9, 15, 18, xv. 3, 17, 18, etc.

THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 307
Israel and for the world, were seen to belong to Jesus ; the filial
and fraternal spirit, the moral qualities and acts, the passion
and death of Jesus became descriptive of the Messiah. The
incorporation of the office in the Person meant that its history
became His ; the identification of the Person with the office
meant that His character became its.
Now, it is the distinction of Paul that he made this unity,
with all it involved, articulate, and it is also characteristic that
the determinative idea in the system which he elaborated with
so much dialectical passion came from the personality of Jesus
and not from the Messianic office. That idea was His filial
relation. His Divine Sonship. What was to him the primary
fact in the consciousness of Jesus became the constitutive
factor of his own thought. By the revelation of the Son in
him he was made a Christian and an Apostle.' His Gospel
concerned the Son of God,^ who is God's own Son,' His
beloved,* the Son of His love.^ This Sonship did not begin
with His historical existence, but preceded and even deter
mined it God sends forth His Son, who exists before He can
be sent forth,® and comes that He may create in man the
spirit of the sonship He Himself has by nature.'' He,
though rich, yet for our sakes becomes poor.^ He comes out
of heaven, descends from above that He may ascend with
man redeemed." Hence there follows a twofold conse
quence, the one affecting the Son, the other the Father.
As to the Son a place and an eminence are ascribed to
Him that involve Divine rank and honour. In contrast
to the multitudinous deities and lords of heathendom Paul
places the one God and the one Lord, and then co
ordinates while distinguishing the two thus : " All things
1 Gal. i. 15, 16. ' Col. i. 13.
' Rom. i. 3. ^ Gal. iv. 4 ; Rom. viii. 3.
' Rom. viii. 3, 32 ; Gal. iv. 4. ' Gal. iv. 5 ; Rom. viii. 9, 14-17.
* Eph. i. 6. ^2 Cor. viii. 9.
' I Cor. XV. 47 ; Rom. x. 6, 8 ; Eph. iv. 10.

308 IN THE GODHEAD HE FINDS ROOM
are from the Father and we unto Him ; all things are through
the Son and we through Him." ' The Father is the one and
universal source and end ; the Son is the one and universal
medium and actualizing cause. As such He is Lord of all,
" both of the dead and the living," ^ and the confession of this
absolute sovereignty marks the Christian.* And what this
means is made explicit in a most emphatic way : Old Testa
ment texts that refer to Jehovah are applied to Christ,* and
He is made the ultimate standard and end of action.
Whether we live or die it is unto Him.' And so it need
not in any way surprise us that Paul speaks of the Son as
" He who is over all, God blessed for ever." * The doxo
logy was the natural language of such a faith.
And this faith he more fully develops in a passage marked
1 I Cor. viii. 5, 6.
' Rom. x. 12, xiv. 9.
' Phil. ii. II ; i Cor. xii. 3 : cf. i Cor. i. 9 ; Rom. i. 4, v. 21.
* Rora. X. 13, cf. Joel iii. 10; 1 Cor. ii. 16, x. 22, cf. Deut. xxxii. 21.
5 Rom. xiv. 6-9, cf 4; Phil. i. 21.
8 Rom. ix. 5. This is a passage where the grammar admits by a change
of punctuation and emphasis several different interpretations. The late
Ezra Abbot ("Critical Essays," xvi.) enumerates seven possible con
structions, all grammatical, and each representing a distinct phase of theo
logical doctrine. But his classification resolved itself into two main
divisions : (a) where 6 &v, with all that follows, including deos, is referred
to Christ ; and (0) where 6 &v introduces a new sentence and 6e6s denotes
God, the Father, (a) may be termed the Christological, (/3) the doxological
interpretation. Where grammar is so little decisive we must be guided by
exegesis ; and it seems to me as if the Apostle's argument has its natural
culmination in the Christology, while the doxology would be a most un-
Pauline ending to a catalogue of Jewish privileges. Kara a-dpKa is one
side of the very antithesis with which the Epistle opens (i. 3), and has no
meaning without its other member. 'Were there no theological considera
tions in the case, 6 ;(ptcrT(5s would be naturally taken as the antecedent of
6 av ; and this appears also as the connection which the argument requires.
And if Christ can be said to be 6 i>v eirl irdvrmv, then it is a violent bit of
exegesis to erect the last clause into a sentence with a new subject. For
the rest, 6e6s is here taken as predicative, not as denominative, and is in
this sense entirely suitable both to the special argument and to the general
theology. Oecis is the natural predicate of one 6 tt>v eir\ irdvrav. And this
is but a paraphrase of passages already considered.

FOR BOTH FATHER AND SON. 309
by epic fulness and dignity.^ In order to see its meaning we
must seize its argument. It starts from the historical " Christ
Jesus." His reality is assumed, and a common conception of
His person. If the readers did not agree with the writer in
both these respects, his argument would lose all validity. He
is not labouring the proof of a dogmatic position, but is using
a common belief to enforce a neglected duty. He speaks then
of the " Christ Jesus " they knew, who had been " found in
fashion as a man," and was " obedient unto death." He is
the supreme example of sacrifice in order to service, of the
surrender of all that a self might hold dear in order to the
saving of man. Why? Because, although in the form of
God, He did not think the being equal with God a thing
to be clutched at, but emptied Himself for our good. Prior
being is here affirmed, a being so in the form of God that
to be equal with Him is a thing of nature, a being, too
possessed of thought and will ; and a will not bound like
man's to obedience to a higher, but with the power and right
to be a law unto itself, the quality of the will which is law
being evident in the beneficence of the deed. It is when His
prior dignity is considered that His voluntary humiliation,
obedience, arid death appear so wonderful, and His later
exaltation so entirely natural and fit But so to construe
Christ is to modify the whole conception of God. Abstract
monotheism ceases, and is replaced by a theism which finds
within the one Godhead room for both Father and Son.
It is the characteristic of the Pauline theology that it is a
theology of the Fatherhood which is through the Sonship.
Neither can be without the other ; both must be together,
or neither can be at all. The ideas exist in what we may
term a spontaneous rather than an explicated and formulated
unity, but they exist and are co-ordinated.^ The divinity
of both Father and Son was affirmed ; later thought must
' Phil. ii. 6-1 1 ; Meyer, in loe.
' Gal. L I ; I Cor. i. 3 ; Rom. i. 7 ; 2 Cor. i. 2.

310 THE EARLIER SOTERIOLOGY.
determine how their unity could, be conceived and expressed.
The great thing gained was. Fatherhood and Sonship were
as immanent essential to Deity.
II. The Soteriology. — But, now, how did Paul bring his
theological idea into relation with reality ? As the filial idea
which he owed to the Person penetrated, pervaded, and
modified his doctrine of God, so the historical and soterio
logical idea which he owed to the Messianic office affected
his notion of man, past and present, individual and collective.
By investing the Divine Son with all the attributes and
functions of the Christ he brought God and man into
relation ; made God fill and govern all history, and history
become the slow unfolding of His purpose ; made man as
a race appear as an organism or unity over against the one
God, while man as an individual appeared in His sight as
a being of peculiar value and an object of peculiar regard.
It was under this aspect that the theology became a philo
sophy of history as well as a doctrine of redemption, and the
differences between the earlier and later Paulinism emerged.
I. The system ofthe earlier Epistles. — This system is governed
as to form by its double antithesis — Judaism and Judaic
Christianity. He has the history, persons, institutions, terms,
of the Old Testament ever before him, but only that he
may reverse the process of the Judaizers ; read Christ into the
Old Testament instead of the Old Testament into Christ On
this the whole future of Christianity depended. Had they
succeeded, the new religion would have died into the old, but
by his success the new escaped from the old, and lived.
i. In Paul the Christology is, as it were, the synthesis of
the theology and the anthropology ; or, in other words, his
conception of Christ stands organically connected with his
conception of God on the one hand and of man on the other.
One side of this relation we have seen : Christ is God's
Son, existing in the form of God, Divine in name and dignity.
JBut on the other side He is connected with man, born of a

THE TWO HEADS AND THE TWO RACES. 311
woman,* of the seed of David,^ and the stock of Abraham.'
He is thus twofold in origin and nature. According to the
flesh. He is of man, and especially Israel * ; according to
the spirit. He is of God.' On this ground and for this reason
He occupies a unique position ; hke the first man. He is a new
creation, and like him the common source or parent of a race;
but in every other respect they stand as direct and absolute
contrasts. The first man was natural, but the second is
spiritual : the one was of the earth, made from the dust of the
ground ; but the other is " out of heaven," as it were a pure
creation of God. And so Adam was only a " living soul," a
being who hved and moved within the terms of sensuous
nature ; but Christ was a " quickening Spirit," a Being above
nature, who had life and was capable of giving it* And as
were the parents such were their posterities, — Adam's of the
earth, and sensuous ; Christ's of heaven, and spiritual. These
two, and they only, are therefore universal persons, and their
acts correspond alike as regards quality and universality to
their persons. By Adam, the natural or sensuous man, sin
enters into the world, and death by sin ; by Christ, the
heavenly and spiritual man, righteousness comes, and life by
righteousness.' Hence they stand for races, species, kinds : to
be in Adam is to be sinful, under the reign of death ; but to be
in Christ is to be righteous, under the reign of grace and life.^
Each contains a race, and is, in a sense, the race he contains.
Hence what comes to be in each comes to be for all." In
Adam the race lives its natural life, sins, and dies ; in Christ
the race by obedience unto death, by suffering unto sacrifice,
is made capable of escaping from the natural, of being purged
from sin, of attaining the spiritual, of being reconciled to God."^"
In the distribution of their acts there is thus a difference which
' Gal. iv. 4. • I Cor. xv. 45-47
' Rom. i. 2. ' Rom. v. 12-14.
' Gal. iii. 16. ' Rom. v. 19-21.
* Rom. ix. 5. ' I Cor. xv. 2.
' Rom. i. 3-5, viii. 3. " 2 Cor. v. 15-19.

312 SIN GUILTLESS AND GUILTY.
springs from the quality and character alike of the acts and
the actors. The act of Adam is a transgression, but what it
creates is a state rather than an act. This state, which is
named dfiapTla, is distinguished on the one hand from irapd-
^aat<;, which is the transgression of a positive law, and on the
other from TrapdtrTcofMa, which is an act that involves guilt.*
Adam creates no man save himself a transgressor or offender,
though he creates all men sinners ; and while Christ may
be made sin for us,^ He cannot be made transgression or
offence. The act of Adam, then, creates for man a state
of privation, loss, evil, which are all summed up in the term
' These terms Paul used in very distinctive senses, and always with care
ful discrimination. 'Apapria occurs one hundred and seventy-four times in
the New Testament, seventy-one instances being in Paul. Uapdirrapa
twenty-one times in the New Testament, sixteen of them being in Paul.
Tlapd^aa-is five times in Paul and twice in Hebrews. Of the two latter
irapdnrapa is the more general, denotes offence against any law, natural or
revealed ; irapd^aa-is the more special, denotes violation of a positive law,
an express precept with its express sanction. Hapdirraipa is nearer dpapria
than irapdpaa-is. Rom. iv. 25 and i Cor. xv. 3 are examples of coincidence ;
but even here the distinction emerges. 'Apapria could have been used in the
singular, but not irapdirraipa. There is such a thing as collective dpapria,
but irapairrapara are individual, and save as single acts cannot be. Sin
reigns, plays the lord, holds in bondage, has a sort of distinct being of its
own, and is even independent of action, though action is not independent
of it. But irapairrmpara have no being save through choices or as acts of
will. So, too, with wapd^aa-is. Man may be a sinner without being a
transgressor, but he cannot transgress without sinning. Adam's act could
be alternatively described as apapria, -irapd^acris, or irapairrapa, but the con
sequence to his posterity could be expressed by dpapria, but not by either
of the other terms. We raay express the distinction by saying that to Paul
those terms did, but dpapria did not, denote the idea of culpability or guilt.
Hence the fine distinction of phrase, Christ -irapeboBr) hid rd wapairrapara
rjpaiv (Rom. iv. 25), but tov prj yvovra dpapriav virep -qpav dpapriav eirolrjirev
(2 Cor. V. 21). He could be delivered for offences, but not made an offender;
He could be made sin without becoming a sinner. Paul did not mean to
suggest any idea as to the transfer of culpability or guilt. He would have
been greatly shocked if he had imagined it possible that any one could take
his phrase as equivalent to Trapdnrm/ia or irapd^amv eirolrfirev. Nothing could
have been more abhorrent to his mind than the idea of the guiltless made
guilty. * 2 Cor. V. 21.

RIGHTEOUSNESS WITHOUT WORKS. 313
" death " ; but he does not create one of guilt. And out
of this state man can be redeemed, but only by an act
similar in kind, but opposite in quality, to the one which in
volved him in it* The one was an act of transgression, the
other must be an act of obedience. And this act Christ, by
virtue of His place and nature, office and function as the Second
Adam, performs, and alone could perform. And His act be
comes as to man a righteousness, which, like thc sin that comes
through Adam, is a state rather than an act, and can, relative
to its opposite, be described as a state of salvation, or deliver
ance, or title to privilege and to hfe.^ By natural birth or
descent from Adam we inherit the afiapTia, are born into the
state it denotes; by faith, which is the condition of the spiritual
birth that introduces into the family or race of Christ, we
become possessed of the hiKaioavvrj, pass into the state it
describes.' The conduct which becomes the state of sin is
transgression, but the conduct which becomes the state of
righteousness is obedience. The community which realizes the
one is man KaTO, adpKa, bearing the image of the earthly ; the
community which realizes the other is man kuto, Trvev/j,a, made
in the image of the heavenly. The head of the one is Adam ;
the head of the other is Christ. We name Adam's society the
world, but Christ's the Church.*
I Rom. V. 15. ' Rom. v. 16-21.
' Rom. i. 17, iii. 21, 22, v. i ; Phil. iii. 9.
¦" In order to a clear apprehension of the Pauline theology we must never
lose sight of his great antitheses. It is impossible to represent these here
in all their range of significance and relation, but certain main features
ought to be recalled. There is an antithesis —
(i) Of Persons, Adam and Christ.
(2) Of their acts — dpapr'ia and BiKatoirvvr] : sin and righteousness.
(3) Of their consequences — ddvaros and fuij : death and life.
(4) Of the process of redVization^-KaraKpipa and Siicaltopa : condemnation
and justification.
(5) Of the conditions of the process — irapd^aois or rrapa-rrrapa, changing
sin into guilt, and irlaris, or the faith which unites the soul to the righteous
ness which is life.
(6) Of the man in whom the process is realized, or the a-ap^ as the seat

314 PAUL'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
ii. But Paul .does not allow his doctrine to remain simply
abstract, at most personahzed in Adam and Christ ; he boldly
works it into what we have called a philosophy of history—
i,e,, a theory of the laws or forces that have governed the
development of man, individual and collective. For these
two are incapable of separation ; the whole is realized by the
individuals composing it ; the individuals are what they are
through the whole. And here the correlation of the universal
or fontal persons and their respective derivative races assumes
a new meaning. Each fontal person is an epitome of his race;
each race is an expansion of its creative person. And in each
case the person and the race exhibit in a similar manner,
though on an absolutely different scale, the operation of the
laws that first in the region of sense, then in the region of the
spirit, regulate the process and the stages of the racial develop
ment. Adam is man KaTa adpKa, Christ is man /eara wvevfia ;
viewed apart, they typify the dualism within the organic unity,
the war of the flesh against the spirit, of the spirit against the
of sin, and the irvevpa as the seat of righteousness, or the avBpamos rrapKiKos
and the avOpamos irvevpartKos ¦ or the e^a> and the ea-a avdpmiros.
(7) Of the method by which sin and righteousness are respectively
revealed, or the vopos on the one hand, and the kirayyeXla or the evayeyXiov
on the other, or Law and Gospel. The law makes the sinner viroSiKos ra
6e& ; but by the Gospel he attains the SiKaioo-uvrj Sid iria-rea)s, or he is
d diKaios eK rritrrecos.
(8) Of the requirements which these two respectively make, epya and
rriaris, or works and faith.
(g) Of the state which they respectively create — hovXela and eKevdepia or
vio6ea-ia, or bondage and freedom or sonship.
(lo) Of the character and conduct — irapaKorj and viraKorj, or disobedience
and obedience.
(ll) Of the societies — Koapos and eKKXrja-la, or the world and the Church.
(12) Of the ultimate sources or causes of all their respective results —
dpapria on the one hand, and x«P'y or simply fltdj on the other.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that, because Paul so strongly
emphasizes these antitheses, there is no unity in his conception of man and
history. There is the strongest possible unity, but it is realized under the
conditions of conflict, yet a conflict which leaves God and His grace
victorious and supreme.

THE RACE EPITOMIZED IN ITS HEADS. 315
flesh ; taken together, they typify the unity within the dualism,
the natural which precedes the spiritual, the spiritual which
succeeds, supersedes, and perfects the natural. But as the
races interpenetrate, as all, like Christ Himself, must be of
the natural before they can be of the spiritual, it follows
that in alf the race of Adam there is something of Christ,
in all the race of Christ something of Adam. We may repre
sent this by saying that Paul conceives the acts and states
personalized in Adam and Christ as forces active alike in
the race and in aU its members. Sin reigns,* exercises
dominion,^ has a law which it enforces both within and against
the man and in opposition to the law of God.' It operates
within the race as an un divine and a contra-divine power, hides
God from man, darkens his mind, blinds him to the truth,
tempts him to idolatry, so degrades and materializes his
religious ideas that he changes " the glory of the incorruptible
God into the likeness of corruptible man, and birds, and four-
footed beasts, and creeping things." * Once God is expelled
from man, falsehood and lust and all basest passions take pos
session of him, and he becomes the slave of the sin whose end
and whose wage is death.^ But the God who made man in
Christ, building, as it were, the race after Him and Him into
the race, cannot allow this reign of sin to become absolute; and
so He acts against it according to a purpose as old as Himself,
which His foreknowledge guides and His foreordination fulfils.
The realization of this purpose is gradual, and proceeds on a
twofold line — the natural or immanent, and the supernatural or
transcendent. The immanent is a personal yet universal law
within man, which teaches him at once the knowledge of God
and his duties to Him. Every man has this knowledge. God
so works in nature, and nature so manifests God, that reason
can discover through its visible things His invisible. His
' Rom V. 21, vi. 12. ' Rom. vii. 22-25, viii. 2.
• Rom. vi. 14. * Rom. i. 18-32.
' Rom. VL 20-23.

3l6 THE REIGN OF GOD.
eternal power and divinity.* The reason, therefore, is every
where on the side of God and against sin. But the reason
does not stand alone ; there is conscience also. In the heart
of man the law is written. Men judge themselves and judge
their neighbours ; these judgments imply a standard of right
and a knowledge of duty, a law known to all and binding all.
Sin, therefore, holds nowhere undisputed sway ; in every
conscience there is such a witness of God as leaves the sinner
without excuse.^
But the immanent could not live without the transcendent,
and this is represented by the constant action of God with a
view to the realization of His purpose — the coming of the
Christ who is necessary to the completion of the race. This
cannot be done all at once ; man must be prepared for it
The preparation begins with a promise : man is to be saved ;
God is to save him. The promise is made to a person —
Abraham — who believes it, and his faith is counted to him for
righteousness.' But man is as yet too sensuous and infirm a
creature to be saved by so gracious and gentle a thing as the
promise. He still sins, and the law is added because of trans
gressions.* This law comes in not to annul the promise, but to
help towards its fulfilment, and is therefore occasional, pro
visional, transitional.^ It has many functions, some of them
most dissimilar and diverse, yet all of them necessary. It is as
an institution disciplinary, intended to restrain men from sin
ning"; educational, tutorial — on the one hand it is the "paeda
gogus " or schoolmaster of sons who are still pupils,' and on the
other, the " rudiments " by means of which they are educated
and drilled ' ; religious, emphasizing the reign of God and the
duty of obedience ^ ; symbolical, showing what was necessary
' Rom. i. 19, 20: cf Acts xiv. 15-17, xvii. 27. « q^j jjj 33.
'Rora. ii. 15. 6 Gal. iii. 10.
3 Gal. iii. 16 ; Rom. iv. 9 ff. ' Gal. iii. 24, iv. I, 2.
« Gal. iii. 19. e Gal. iv. 3, 4.
• Rom. vii. 7.

THE ELECTION OF GRACE. 317
to the recovery of man, impossible to him, possible only
through God.* But in order to the fulfilment of the promise—
i.e., the coming of Christ — and to the existence of the law, a
people was necessary ; and as these were both from God, the
result of His free and transcendental action, so the people must
also be His creation. He proceeds by the principle of election,
selects Abraham, the man who had believed His promise, to be
" the father of the faithful," and of his sons Isaac, of his sons
Jacob, and of Jacob's sons He constitutes a state, giving to
them the institutions which were necessary to maintain their
separate being.^ They are as His adopted sons, and have the
visible presence, the covenants, the law, the service of God, and
the promises'; they are His organ, entrusted with His oracles * ;
and of them, "as concerning the flesh," Christ is to come.
But they were not equal to the honour they had to bear ;
they took themselves and their institutions for ends rather than
means, and in the name of the law " crucified the Lord of
glory." ** But by this very act their law and their own being were
ended °; for a law which could do nothing better with the Holy
and Just than crucify Him, was by an act of so transcendent
wrong condemned and abolished ; and a people who had so
failed to fulfil its mission as to make a victim of the Promised
Lord, had most surely set themselves against the counsel and
purpose of God.' So by one and the same act the old local
and provisional order which had done its preparatory work
was ended, and the new universal and permanent order,
whose work was never to end, was instituted.
2. The later syste-m. — In the polemical Epistles the anti
theses determine the province as well as the terms of the
discussion ; and while the principles look out into universal
history, the argument moves within the lines drawn by
' Rom. viii. 3, 4 ; Gal. iii. 21, 22. ¦" Rom. iii. 2.
• Rom. ix. 6-18. ' I Cor. ii. 8.
' Rom. ix. 4. ' Gal. iii. 13.
' Rora. x. 3, 4, xi. I ff.

3l8 THE LATER CHRISTOLOGY THE LARGER.
Judaism. In the Christological Epistles these antitheses are
transcended ; thought is, alike as regards form and matter,
universal. Christ occupies not simply an historical, but a
cosmical place ; He is the idea or principle constitutive
and interpretative of the All. In Him, by Him, and
unto Him all things are created.* He is the vital bond
of uncreated and created being; in Him all things are
constituted, and in Him all are re-constituted.^ As the image
of the invisible God ^ He stands in a double relation, — one
essential, to God, whose image He is ; another formal, to man,
who sees the image that he may know God. In Him dwells
all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,* and out of this ful
ness He communicates alike in creation and redemption.^
And the cosmos He creates and governs is not limited to
the Nature we know ; it is as wide as being, comprehends
the heavenly and the earthly, the visible and the invisible,
all dignities and all dominions.® Men are created and are
elect in Him,' but through Him the highest principalities
and powers discover " the manifold wisdom of God." ^ His
significance is absolute ; what He does on earth and in time.
He does for the universe and eternity. His kingdom is
God's,^ and His name is exalted above every name, both in
this world and in the world to come.*"
But these universal acts become the basis and regulative
principle of particular relations and acts. The Creator is
so bound to His creation that He cannot allow it to be
divided from Him by evil, for this would be its ruin.
And so at the touch of evil the cosmology becomes a
soteriology ; for when sin enters the world, the Creator, who is
good, has no choice but to become the Saviour. Hence there
¦ Col. i. 15, 16. ' Col. i. 16, ii. 11 ; Eph. iv. 10.
' Col. i. 17 ; Eph. i. 10. ' Eph. i. 4.
' Col. i. 15. * Eph. iii. 10.
* Col. ii. 9, i. 19. ' Eph. v. 5.
" Eph. i. 23, ii. 19. ¦» Eph. i. 21.

THE INCARNATION IN TIME YET ETERNAL. 319
emerges, alike as regards evil and redemption, a significant
formal difference between the polemical and Christological
Epistles. Evil has as great a place as ever ; it is a thing
of nature, opposed to God, deadly to man.* Yet before it
becomes immanent in man it has a being outside and above
him, exists, as it were, with an organized kingdom and
king of its own, whose spirit, the counterfeit of the Spirit
of God, works in the sons of disobedience.^ The old
antithesis of Adam and Christ is not denied, but it has
disappeared, or been sublimed into a higher — the Son and
the prince of the power of the air, the kingdom of light and
of darkness.^ The categories of time and history have
thus ceased to be here applicable ; sin is no longer an affair
of man or earth, but of the universe. The conflict against
it is extra-temporal ; its field is the whole realm of mental
being, the protagonists God and the devil. The soteriology
is as the cosmology ; the arena and the range of the creative
and the redemptive energies are coincident and coextensive ;
in other words, what had been earlier conceived as a question
of God and man is now conceived as a question of God
and the universe. We may represent the change by saying
that as before all had been historical in form, now all was
cosmical ; yet all is so conceived as to compel sin to testify
to the wonderful continuity of the Divine action. Thus
salvation is the Son's work, just as creation had been.* This
work, while universal in its purpose and results, is local in
its scene. The Incarnation appears an event in time, but
was the fulfilment of an eternal purpose, and so had been
from eternity before the mind of God as an idea, and to
Him idea is the same as reality. The event in time was
for us, not for Him ; and so while outwardly accomplished on
earth, it was yet so above time that on account of it and by

' Col. 1. 21 ; Eph. ii. i. ^ Col. i. 13, ii. 15 ; Eph. iv. 26, vi. 11.
' Eph. ii. 2, vi. 12. ' Col. i. 20, ii. 14, 15.

320 PAUL AND HEBREWS COMPARED.
it as means Christ subdues all things unto Himself.* In
the body of His flesh by death, by means of His cross.
He reconciles the men who had been alienated from the
life of God,^ makes them new men, created after the image
of God, builds them into a new society, becomes the Head
of the society He builds, communicates to it His life, rules
it by love, fills it with peace, and distinguishes it by the
great unities which are the signs of His presence and
victory : " One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and
Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all." ^
§ II. — The Christology of Hebrews.
A. Its Specific Character. — The Epistle to the
Hebrews is in all its formal and in some of its material
aspects a complete contrast to the Pauline Epistles. It
is not so much an epistle as an elaborate treatise. It has
no author's name superscribed, nor any address ; nor can
either author or destination be from internal evidences
clearly discovered. It is signally impersonal, though there
are a few faint biographical traits. The author was no
original disciple, no ear-witness of the Lord * ; knew mem
bers of the Pauline circle,^ some Christians of Italy,* and
was known to the Church he addressed. It is further
clear that his Judaism is not Paul's. Paul's was Pharisaic,
scholastic, the Judaism of the doctors and the schools,
where the law was ceremonial, but not sacerdotal, where
it lived and grew by being interpreted, burdened life by a
routine and custom which were made more irksome by verbal
niceties and more imperious by dialectical rigour ; but our
author's was hieratic and hierarchic, the Judaism of the
priests and the Temple, where the law was sacerdotal,
' Phil. iii. 21, ii. 9-1 1 ; Eph. i. 10. * Heb. ii. 3.
• Col. i. 22. ' Heb. xiii. 23.
' Eph. iv. 5, 6. « Heb. xiii. 24.

the JUDAISM OF THE PRIEST. 32I
realized in worship, concerned with the sanctuary, the ser
vices, and the sacrifices, not with the reading and exposi
tion of the Word. The one was the Judaism of the scribe
and the schoolman, the other of the priest and the Levite,
though not as known in Jerusalem. Our author's is not
the Temple as the sordid and secular Sadducaic spirit had
made it, torn by the factions begotten of a pride all the
meaner that it was so aristocratic, but it was an ideal
temple, the worship of the people as it lived in the fond
imagination of one who construed the Holy City from afar,
and more as she lived in fancy than as she was in reality.
It is such a colonial yet conservative idealization of the
motherland and its religion as we might have expected in
an Alexandrian, and Alexandrian is the method the author
uses to educe the new from the old and to sublime the
old into the new. He is an idealist whose heaven is the
home of all transcendental realities, whose earth is full of
their symbols ; and these are most abundant where earth
is most sacred — in the Temple and worship of his people.*
And so we are here without the sharp antitheses and clear-
cut categories of the schoolman Paul, the contradictions of
Adam and Christ, law and gospel, works and faith, legal
and evangelical righteousness ; but have instead the notions
of type and antitype, shadow and substance, symbol and
reality. The law is not abolished, but fulfilled. The
earthly Temple is transfigured into the heavenly ; the mul
titudinous and historical priesthood is translated into the
one and eternal Priest ; the ever recurring yet never effi
cacious animal sacrifices cease in the presence of the perfect
Sacrifice "offered once for all," and all the sensuous ser
vices find their end in those spiritual realities which they
foreshadowed and foretold. Hence the law is not Paul's
law, nor are its relations to the Gospel his relations ; yet
the positions are not contradictory or even contrary, but
1 Heb. viii. 5, ix. 23. 21

322 THE TEMPLE A SYMBOLISM.
rather supplementary and corrective. Paul's view left the
whole sacerdotal side of Judaism untouched and unex
plained. It was the view natural to one who had been
educated a Pharisee, and had become the Apostle of
the Gentiles. But our author's is the view natural to
one who conceived the Temple to be the sum and
essence of Judaism, and who therefore felt that the new
faith must be read through it and in relation to it
Hence he discovers elements in Christianity Paul had
missed, those realities which had their correlatives in the
sacerdotal system. The view was necessarily more limited
than Paul's, for it had so to move within the terms of
sacerdotal Judaism that it could not stretch back to Adam
or out to the meanest Gentile ; but it was quite as
elevated as his, more emphasized the perfection and per
manence of the Gospel, if it less emphasized its universalism.
Hence Hebrews helps us by its very differences from the
Pauline Epistles the better to measure the range and
value the variety of Apostolic thought, especially in the
point most cardinal to us — the theological significance of
the person of Christ. Not only is the construction made
fuller by this independence of mind and change of stand
point, but its meaning and its philosophy alike become to
ms the more inteUigible. The person is made to guarantee
the truth of the religion ; it owes all its majesty and all
its permanence to its Founder. The men that contemplate
apostasy are brought face to face with Him, and made to
feel the immense renunciation apostasy would involve.
B. Its Theology. — Hebrews, then, presents us with a
quite specific interpretation of Christ, what we may term
a theology of His person as at once the archetype and the
antitype of Levitical Hebraism. As the archetype it and
all it involved were latent in Him ; as the antitype it and
all it signified became patent and were fulfilled in Him.

theology of the sonship.

323

As the first He had a Divine and transcendental being,
as the second He had a human and historical, and these
are both made entirely natural by being through the
Sonship united, the one with the idea of God, the other
with the idea of man. While this is the philosphical basis
of the interpretation, its actual is the belief in the historical
reahty of Christ. What He had said our author knew only
by the testimony of man, but this had been authenticated by
acts of God.* The manhood is strongly emphasized. Jesus
was a partaker in our common " flesh and blood," ^ made like
unto His brethren in all things,^ was tempted as they are,*
prayed and cried as they do.° Although a Son He suffered,
learned obedience, attained perfection," tasted death.^ But
in one thing He stood distinguished from man — He was
" without sin," ^ " holy, guileless, pure, apart from sinners." ^
This moral transcendence is the sign of an essential or
personal, which is expressed by His distinctive name :
"Jesus, the Son of God."*" This Sonship is no mere figure
of speech, but denotes a reality and rank of nature which
qualifies for peculiar and pre-eminent functions. By it His
place and work in the universe, in humanity, and in the
history of Israel are all determined, as well as the per
manence and sufficiency of His religion.
i. As Son He has a certain essential relation to the Father,
which can best be expressed by metaphors : He is " the
effulgence of the glory," " the image," or, as it were, the
stamped or engraved counterpart of Him whom we call
God.** The change of metaphor is not without reason ;
the first means that the Son is the radiance or distributed
light through which the inaccessible " glory " is revealed
I Heb. ii. 3, 4. ° Heb. v. 8, 9, ii. 10.
' Heb. ii. 14. ' Heb. ii. 9.
' Heb. ii. 17. ' Heb. iv. 15.
* Heb. iv. 15, ii. 18. ' Heb. vii. 26.
» Heb. V. 7. ¦» Heb. iv. 14.
" Heb. i. 3.

324 THE SON AND THE ANGELS.
and known, the second that He is a face reflecting a face
we cannot see, a visible being upon whom the exact image
and superscription of a being invisible is stamped. The first
expresses the notion of a relation as inseparable as that
between the centre and seat of light and the hght diffused
from the centre ; the second expresses the notion of a
dependence as absolute as that of the figure on the stamp,
yet of forms as distinct as the stamp and the figure.
The metaphors are changed, then, that the ideas of identity
and difference may be expressed ; and so construed they
are bolder and more explicative phrases than any Paul had
attempted. They were destined to suggest later many kin
dred similes, and, based on the similes, speculations without
end. But the metaphors do not stand alone ; the writer
elucidates them by the deductions he draws. The Father
commands all His angels to worship the Son * ; He is ad
dressed as 6 ^609 ^ ; He makes time and all it doth inhabit,'
sustains all things by the word of His power, and is appointed
heir of all.* In these phrases, as in the metaphors, the ideas
of difference and identity struggle into expression ; Father
and Son are distinguished, yet each is d 6e6<;, without any
conscious breach with monotheism on the writer's part, or
the anticipation of any consciousness of incongruity on the
reader's. And this Son is the Jesus Christ who sums up
in Himself the old covenant and institutes the new, makes
purification of sins, and is exalted to the right hand of
the Majesty in the heavens : ^ ^ Bo^a ei? tovs alo3va<; rav
altijvwv' dfjL^rjV.^
ii. The determinative idea of the Epistle is the Sonship ;
and what it is used to determine is the spiritual pre
eminence, perfection, and permanence of the New Cove
nant, in contrast to the sensuousness, insufficiency, and
1 Heb. i. 6. 3 Heb. i. 2.
» Heb. i. 8. ¦• Heb. i. 3.
' Heb. xiii. 21.

THE SON OF MAN. 325
transitoriness of the Old. The whole matter is stated in
the opening verse: it is the same God who has spoken
to the fathers in the prophets and to us in the Son ;
but their revelation, as became its form, was fragmentary
and partial, while ours, because its form is perfect, has
perfect truth. Hence the Son is the pivot on which the
argument everywhere turns ; and so the opening paragraph
states His significance, defining His relation to God and the
universe. This relation is explicated in a series of contrasts.
(a) The first is between the angels who had given
the Old Covenant and the Son who had instituted the
New.* He was God's Son, had the name, the throne, the
sceptre, the eternity, the authority, of God ; but they were
only creatures, ministers of God's will. But this Being
who was supreme over angels used His supremacy in
the most godlike way, not simply to rule as a Sovereign,
but to succour as a Saviour. The angel remains an angel
for ever, created being can only be what it was created
to be ; but the essence of Sonship is the permanence of
the relation even under variability of form. So, as He
would succour men, and men could be succoured only by
man,^ Jesus is made a little lower than the angels, and
becomes one with those He would save, and in order to
be able to save He suffers and tastes death.' For it was
a thing that became God to qualify the Saviour for saving
by suffering, and a thing necessary to man to have a High
Priest " without sin," yet sympathetic through endurance of
all the trials and temptations common to man.* Hence
among men, as over the angels, Jesus, because the Son, stood
pre-eminent, now Saviour as before Creator and Sovereign.
(/3) But this contrast is general, relates to quality and
rank of being, and on it as a basis there come several
specific contrasts within the sphere of history, and so of
* Heb. i. 4-14. ' Heb. ii. 9, 10.
' Heb. ii. 14-17. * Heb. ii. 17, 18.

326 PRIESTHOODS CHANGEABLE AND UNCHANGEABLE.
religion, especially Israel's. First, He stands distinguished
from Moses as the Son from the servant, as the Builder
of the theocratic house from the house which He builds,
as the One who designed the whole from him who
executes a part* Secondly, as a Priest He stands dis
tinguished from Aaron and his priesthood in many ways ^ ;
He belongs to a different order — viz., that of Melchisedec,
king and priest in one, the direct creation of God, without
any of the accidents of time, independent of descent,
independent of descendants,' alone, sinless, eternal, with
out any needs in Himself, sufficient always for all the
needs and sins of men." Hence He fulfils all priestly
ideas and functions, and by abiding a priest for ever super
sedes and ends man's perishable priests and changeable
priesthood.s.^ But He cannot displace the persons, and leave
all they did and represented standing as before. And .so,
thirdly, the institutions or religions are contrasted, as were
their founders and representatives, yet so as to bring out the
new in the old, the permanent in the transitory. The whole
ancient apparatus of worship is resolved into a symbolism
which dies in the presence of the reality. The Son is
sacrifice as well as priest, and it has all the qualities of His
person, is one as He is one, is spiritual and perfect, eternal
and universal as He is, ends all sensuous sacrifices as He
ends all historical priesthoods with their proud inanities
of succession and descent. Where the priest and sacrifice
are, there must the temple be ; Jesus has passed into the
heavens, and where He is there is the holy of holies, while
the outer and lower courts are where men wait, sure that
the Mediator lives within.* And the men who have this
assurance are men of faith,' and the mention of faith
' Heb. iii. i-6. * Heb. vii. 24-28.
' Heb. vii. 4-22. ' Heb. viii. 3, ix. 11-14, 25, 26, x. 10-14.
^ Heb. V. 5, 6, vi. 20, vii. 1-3. ^ Heb. viii. 1-4, ix. 11, 24, x. 12, 19-22.
' Heb. X. 23, 38.

THE FOUNDER AND THE RELIGION. 327
gives the author the opportunity of transcending these
contrasts of his, and showing that beneath the outward
difference is an inward harmony. Christ did not begin
to be with His birth or incarnation ; He had ever been ;
and the evidence of His permanent being is the being of
His people. Judaism did not create the religious life within
and before it. Its symbols and shadows had not created
spirit or given life. Christ had. What had made the saints
and martyrs was not the priests and sacrifices of the law,
but faith. Hence faith was no new thing ; all the heroes
and the saints under the Old Covenant had been made
heroic and saintly by faith, and not by the sensuous worship.
Faith, which has always and everywhere been the principle
creative of obedience, is as old as man, and those who have
lived by it form a society at once earthly and heavenly,
of all ages and all places, which has been united in Christ,
those before as those after His coming being made per
fect by Him.* And so there is constituted under the new
covenant a new Israel, within a new city of God, where,
without the audible thunder and the visible pomp of the old,
Jesus, the Mediator, lives His gracious life and performs
His gracious work.^ And so, as becomes the Son of God,
eternal in heaven, universal on earth, Jesus Christ remains
"the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."'
The Christology of Hebrews, as of Paul, is thus quite
as much a philosophy of history as a theology — i.e., it is
a means of so uniting God and man that the two cannot
be divorced, of so conceiving our past that it becomes the
realm of His activity. The thought is wonderful for its large
outlook and organic unity. There are relations within Deity
which are the basis of all the relations Deity can ever
sustain. Creation is by the Son and for Him. He is by
nature Mediator, all the relations of the Creator to the
1 Heb. xi. ' Heb. xii. 18-24.
3 Heb. xiii. 8.

328 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF JAMES REPRESENTS
creature and the creature to the Creator are through Him
and because of Him. His Sonship is the condition of man's ;
in order to its apprehension man was trained by legal and
symbolical institutions ; in order to its realization the Son
had to partake of a manhood that did suffer, but did not
sin. And the man who wrote these things was a Jew, and
he wrote them for Jews, and the cause of their being written
was Jesus of Nazareth, who had only a generation before
been despised by the Jews as a man without letters, and
crucified by their chiefs and rulers as a blasphemer against
Moses and against God. Certainly there are things here
that need explanation, if we are to believe in the reason
ableness of man.
§ III. — The Minor Christologies.
A. The Jacobean. — In James we have a complete con
trast both to Paul and Hebrews. Its most remarkable
feature is not — what so offended Luther — the opposition to
Pauline doctrine, but the poverty of its Christology and the
paucity of its references to the historical Christ These
things are organically connected ; it is because the writer
has so little sense of the one that he feels no need for the
other. It is an invariable rule in the primitive as in the
later Church : where the historical sense is least real, the
theological construction is most empty. James, indeed, has
more the spirit and attitude of the liberal synagogue than
of the persuaded Church ; and possibly his book is in the
canon to show how large and tolerant the early Church
was, and all Churches ought to be. His invisible audience
is, as it were, the assemblies of mixed minds, interests,
classes that were properly neither Church nor synagogue,
but had something of both. We are here without the anti
theses of Paul or the contrasts of Hebrews ; the Gospel is
a new law * ; men are to be doers of the Word, and not
' James i. 25.

the SYNAGOGUE WITHIN THE CHURCH. 329
hearers only,* justified as Abraham was by works.^ This
law, indeed, is " the law of liberty," ' but his liberty is rather
a change in thc terms of the law than, like Paul's, " freedom
from its bondage." The attitude was thoroughly charac
teristic of James. He was late in recognizing the Lord,
though he had lived face to face with Him longer than
any other disciple, and he was always morc anxious
about the retention of the old than the acceptance or com
prehension of the new. He is the Apostolical representative
of the historical continuity, that in its devotion to form and
letter forgets substance and spirit The position given to him
on account of his kinship he neither deserved nor had earned,
and it only enabled him to use in government aims and
abilities that hardly qualified him for service. His address
in the Apostolic Council * and his behaviour to Paul ' are
quite in keeping with his Epistle ; and we can well under
stand the feeling of the man who was brave because he
understood Christ, to the man who was timid because of his
failure to understand.^ Yet even in James there are the
germs of a Christology. He describes himself as the " servant
of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,"' a most significant
co-ordination. This same Jesus Christ is " the Lord of
glory." ^ He is the One in whose name men pray, and
who answers prayer.' Of Him 6 KvpLo<; is used in the
most absolute sense,*" and he passes without any feeling of
the unfit from using it of Christ to applying it to Deity.**
Further, He conceives Him as lawgiver and judge,*^ speaking
the word of truth, giving and enforcing the perfect law
of liberty. The Christology is so rudimentary because of
a double defect, — it is not rooted in the historical Person,
• James i. 22. ' James i. I.
* James ii. 21. * James ii. I
' James ii. 12, i. 25. ' James v. 13, 14.
* Acts XV. 13-21. "• James v. 7, 8.
' Acts xxi. 18-25 : cf Gal. ii. 12. " James v. 10, 11.
• Gal. ii. 2, 9. '* James iv. 12, v. 9.

330 PETER CONCEIVES CHRIST
has no element distinctive of His consciousness save the
inwardness of His law as distinguished from the outwardness of
the Pharisaic ; and it has no knowledge of the Sonship, or any
trace of any sense or idea of what it signified and involved.
Yet the thought is significant, as showing how much the living
consensus had affected even so timid and conservative a mind.
B. The Petrine. — In Peter we have a different spirit
and atmosphere. There is a strong sense of the reality of
Christ's person, of His sinlessness,* His sufferings,^ His
meekness yet endurance under trial ^ — qualities that might
well be stamped on Peter's mind — of His death and the
cross on which He died,* of the offence caused by His
death,^ of His resurrection and the effect it had on the
faith and hope of His society." But while his Christology
has a character of its own, it is in the spontaneous rather
than the articulated stage, the product of a man who took
what we may term a vernacular view of both the old and
the new religion. He feels the continuity of God's people
as only one of the people can. He loves to think of the
mode of entering into their number as a new birth,'' of
each member as a " living stone," of the society they con
stitute as a " spiritual house," of the collective being as a
" holy priesthood," and their common function to offer up
"spiritual sacrifices."^ He has no philosophy as to the
vocation or institutions of Israel ; he has only the most
vivid intuition, born of personal experience, into the signi
ficance of Christ, who by faith and hope creates the people
elect of God.^ The fundamental fact is the Sonship ; God
is " the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," and so " abundant
in mercy." *" Though the appearance of Christ is recent, yet,
' I Peter ii. 22, i. 10. ^ I Peter i. 3, 21, iii. 21.
* I Peter i., ii. 21, iv. I. '' \ Peter i. 3, 23.
' I Peter ii. 23. " i Peter ii. 5.
* I Peter ii. 24, iii. 18 ' I Peter i. 2, 5, 9, ii. 4, 9.
* I Peter ii. 4, 7, 8. '» i Peter i. 3.

AS THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 33 1
the reahty He signified is ancient His Spirit was in the
prophets, who were in a sense pre-Christian evangelists,
testifying beforehand of His sufferings and the glory that
was to follow.* In harmony with this he conceived those
sufferings as in a sense extra-temporal. While endured
at a specific moment they had a being in the mind of
God, and were, because of His inspiration, preached by the
prophets before they happened.^ Though manifested only
in these last times. He was foreknown before the foundation
of the world,' had ever been within and before the eternal
mind, as it were the medium through which it saw and
conceived what was to be. This foreknown Lamb who is
without blemish and without spot is a sacrifice ; He bears
our sins in His own body on the tree, and by His stripes
we are healed.* He is, too, the Christ, the Messiah, whose
coming makes the day the prophets had foretold.^ With
Peter, as with Paul, the name has ceased to be official, and
become personal, Christ often occurring alone, Jesus never
without Christ He has passed into the heavens, sits at
the right hand of God, and has angels and principalities
and powers subject unto Him.^ He is the Shepherd and
Bishop of souls,'' the Judge of the world,^ our Lord,
absolutely, like God.' Here, too, citations from the Old
Testament which refer to Jehovah are directly applied to
Him.*" Peter is clear that no inferior dignity can be His,
though he may be unable to tell or even clearly to see
how His high titles affect the old monotheism. One
thing he surely knows — Jesus is to Him now both Lord
and Christ.**
' I Peter i. 10, II. ' I Peter i. ir.
^ I Peter i. 12. ' i P' ter iii 22.
3 1 Peter i. 20. ' i Peter ii. 25.
* 1 Peter i. 18, 19, ii. 24, iii. 18. •> 1 Peter iv. 5, v. 3.
" I Peter ii. 13, cf i. 25.
'" 1 Peter ii. 3, 4, cf Psalm xxxiv. 8; 1 Peter iii. 15, cf Isa. viii. 13.
" Doxology, I Peter iv. 11: cf Acts ii. 36.

332 THE APOCALYPSE A CHRISTOLOGY
C. The Apocalyptic. — The Apocalypse is the most
Jewish book in the New Testament, inspired, as it were,
by a passion for the people rather than for a school or a
system, and its character is stamped into its language
imagery, symbolism, associations, and thought. It loves the
holy people, the holy land, the holy city, the old tribal
divisions, the Temple as the home not of the priesthood,
but of the people's God and His worship. This affects the
forms under which Jesus is conceived and represented. He
is of the tribe of Judah, and, to indicate His Messianic
character, its Lion,* at once the Root and the Offspring of
David,^ the Anointed of the Lord.^ As Son of man He
more resembles the vision of Daniel than the Jesus of the
Gospels, and He is described more in the terms of the altar
and the Temple than of history.* He appears in priestly
garments, and His most loved name is " the Lamb," slain that
He might cleanse by His blood.^ Yet a significant touch is
the use of the historical name, Jesus, qualified now and then
by Lord.^ All the more, because of these characteristics,
is its doctrine of the Person remarkable. Christ is conceived
as the Son of God ; God is in a peculiar and indeed exclusive
sense His Father.'' On the throne beside the Father sits
the Son, and indeed it is expressly named " the throne of
God and of the Lamb." ^ He is the absolute Lord, exalted
above all kings.^ He is the Holy and the True,*" receives
Divine honour and worship ; in the doxologies His name and
the Father's stand together**; the radiance that surrounds
Him is that Divine radiance which no mortal can bear.*^
He is omniscient ; like God, He searcheth the heart and the
' Rev. V. 5. ' Rev. xi. 15, xii. 10.
' Rev. V. 5, xxii. 16. * Rev. i. 13.
' Rev. V. 6, 12, xiii. 8. The term apvlov is applied to Christ twenty-nine
times. ^ Rev. i. 9, xii. 17, xiv. 12, xxii. 20, 21. * Rev. vii. 17, xxii. i, 3.
' Rev. i. 6, ii. 18, 27, iii. 5, 21, xiv. i. ' Rev. i. 5, xvii. 14, xix. 16.
'" Rev. iii. 7, xix. 11. " Rev. i. 5, 6, vii. 10-12. '* Rev. i. 17.

IN VISIONS AND IN SYMBOLS. 333
reins, rules and judges the heathen, breaking their strength
like a potter's vessel.* He is eternal, the beginning of the
creation of God, the Ancient of Days, to whom belongs
the Divine symbols Alpha and Omega, the first and the
last, the unbeginning and the unending.^ These are
extraordinary titles and prerogatives to be claimed by one
who has all the monotheistic passion of the Jew, for one
who has the simple name Jesus, and is still remembered
as the Crucified. Nowhere does the author show any
consciousness that the Divine attributes and functions in
which he has clothed the Christ can in any way injure
either the unity or the supremacy of God. His thought,
indeed, is expressed, but not articulated ; he does not tell
us how to relate or reconcile its antinomies, but simply
leaves us in awed yet tender adoration before the throne
of God and the Lamb.
' Rev. ii. 23, 27, xii. 5, xix. 15.
' Rev. iii. 14, i. 8, 11, 17, xxii. 8, 13.

CHAPTER II.
THE HISTORICAL BOOKS.
WHILE the books hitherto studied have aimed at the
interpretation of the Person, they have simply
assumed His history as known. Now we have to deal with
those whose special concern is the history. The Gospels are
all the work of believers, and are written for believers and in
order to belief. On this point they are frankly sincere, and
their sincerity has its own worth. Scepticism is not veracity,
and of all the mirrors held up to nature it is the least capable
of reflecting nature truly. The guide to truth must himself
be convinced ; honest belief in the person he testifies of does
not disqualify a witness. But what concerns us is, not the
criticism of the books or their authors, but simply this — first,
how do the men who write the history conceive the Person
they describe ? and, secondly, how do they correlate the two —
the Person as they conceive Him and the events which they
narrate ? § I.— Tpie Synoptic Gospels.
A. Mark. — He is our oldest authority. To him Jesus is
the Messiah,* the beloved Son of God,^ who cannot in the
most solemn moment of His life deny either His office or His
Sonship.' The Baptist is the prophet who prepares His way,
» Mark i. I. « Mark i. 2. » Mark xiv. 61, xv. 2

MARK CONCEIVES JESUS AS THE MESSIAH. 335
and tells what His work shall be.* The baptism sets Him
apart, the temptation fits Him by trial for His work, which
He begins by preaching the Gospel, and so instituting the
kingdom.^ His acts, hke His speech, express His Messianic
dignity and power. He casts out unclean spirits, and they
recognize Him.' He forgives sins, which confessedly none can
do but God only.* He claims to be Lord of the Sabbath, and
acts according to His claim.^ The men He called, once they
have learned to know Him, confess that He is the Messiah,
and He then explains the destiny of suffering and death
involved in the office,* His speech growing ever more impres
sive and explicit' The very people come to recognize Him,
and He does not refuse their homage.* His words are to
endure for ever ; He is to return to judgment, to reign in
glory, to gather His elect from the uttermost parts of the earth
and the heaven.^ He founds the new covenant in His blood,
which is shed for many.*" The Gospel, then, may be limited
in its scope, but is clear in its purpose. It is concerned with
no more than the life which unfolds the Messiahship, but what
it does unfold is the life of the Messiah. Its moral is in the
cry of the centurion : " Truly this man was Son of God." **
B. Matthew. — Here we have no clearer a doctrine of the
Messiahship, but we have it more fully unfolded — placed,
as it were, in its historical relations. Matthew sees that the
Person cannot appear suddenly on the stage, without antece
dents in the past, or any prophet but the Baptist, or other
sanction than the Baptism. He was woven into the history
of Israel, was indeed the very end of Israel's being ; and so
the inter-relations are indicated, that He through Israel and
' Mark i. 2-8. ^ Mark viii. 27-31.
« Mark i. 10-15. ' '^a.r'e. ix.12, 31, x. 33, 34, 38, 45.
' Mark i. 23, 24, 34, iii. 1 1, v. 7. * Mark x. 47, 49, 52, xi. 9, 10.
' Mark ii. 5-12. ' Mark xiii. 26, 27, 31, 35-37.
' Mark ii. 27, 28. '" Mark xiv. 24.
" Mark xv. 39.

336 MATTHEW CONNECTS JESUS WITH THE JEW.S,
Israel through Him may alike be justified. This is the
reason of the genealogy which is but an expansion of
positions we have found in Paul and the Apocalypse : Jesus
is of the Jews, the people were elect for Him.* His personal
name is made to express His function,^ and the official name
is used with a caution unknown to Mark.' Incidents at His
birth at once fulfil prophecy and indicate office and rank.*
And this is characteristic ; Hi^ history as a whole and in
its details, ahke as regards His action and His suffering, is a
fulfilment of Prophecy,^ while His work fulfils also the Law.^
This fulfilment dismisses the form that it may realize the
Spirit, and gives to the teaching of Jesus in Matthew a
peculiar ethical quality — it is spiritual and prophetic, as
distinguished, on the one hand, from the rabbinical, and,
on the other, from the sacerdotal.' And this quality in
His teaching gives a distinctive position and authority to
His person. Jesus is in Matthew not so much a prophet
as a new lawgiver and king, the regal elements in the
Messianic idea being those most emphasized.' He is the
standard of action ; deeds done to His are done to Him,
and either condemn or acquit the doer.' His person is
greater than the Temple.*" He has all power in heaven and
on earth, and in His final words the Son is co-ordinated
with the Father and the Holy Spirit** This Gospel then
' Matt. i. I, 17. ' Matt. i. 16, xxvii. 17, 22.
2 Matt. i. 21. ¦* Matt. i. 22, 23, ii. 1-6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23.
' Cf. Matt. viii. 17, xii. 17, xiii. 14, 35, xxi. 4, xxvii. 9, 35.
^ Matt. V. 17, 18. In this passage the idea of "law" hals affinities with
Paul rather than Hebrews, but " fulfil " with Hebrews rather than Paul
— i.e., the law is not Levitical, concerned with the Temple and the priest
hood, but ceremonial, the law as read in the synagogue and interpreted
in the schools. To "fulfil" is to translate its ceremonial form into ethical
terms : cf vii. 12.
' Cf Matt. V. 21 ff, ix. 13, xii. 7, xv. 11-20.
* Matt, xxviii. 20, xvi. 27. Hence the peculiar quality which we find in
Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount, and the prominence he
gives to the later apocalyptic addresses and parables.
• Matt. xxv. 34-46. '" Matt. xii. 6. " Matt, xxviii. 16-20.

BUT LUKE CONNECTS HIM WITH MAN. 337
exhibits Jesus as the end of Israel, the reason and goal of
Israel's history, who by educing the new spirit out of the
old forms does not destroy but fulfils the Law. But while
Matthew brings Jesus through Israel, he does not limit Him
to Israel. The Magi are as symbolical of Matthew as the
prophets ; they mean that Jesus is for Gentile as well as
Jew. Men from the East and West shall sit down with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God.* The
kingdom is to be taken from the Jew and given to the
Gentile.^ The Gospel is to be preached in all the world
for a witness to all nations'; and the risen Christ com
mands His disciples to " teach all nations." * Certainly this
is no mere Gospel for the Hebrews ; there is a universalism
in it which corresponds to its notion of Jesus. Since He was
no accident, but the result of God's action in history, His
work must be as wide as God.
C. Luke. — He places Jesus, not simply, like Matthew, in
relation to Hebrew, but to universal history. His genealogy
does not stop with Abraham, but mounts to Adam, '" which
was the son of God." '" He comes as " a light to enlighten
the Gentiles " * and to create on earth peace.' He bears
from the first the official name, is now Christ the Lord ' and
now the Lord's Christ' Yet His Hebrew descent is not
forgotten ; He is to sit on the throne of His father David,
and reign over the house of Jacob for ever.*" In Him ancient
promises and prophecies are fulfilled.** Jesus, then, comes
through Israel, but for mankind. The rejected of His own
people turns to the Gentiles, and finds room for all *^; but this
not because of their act, but because of His own will and
1 Matt. viii. II. ' Luke ii. 14.
' Mitt. xxi. 43. * Luke ii. II.
' Matt. xxiv. 14. ' Luke ii. 26.
¦• Matt, xxviii. 19. '" Luke i. 32, 33.
» Luke iii. 38. " Luke i. 54, 55, 68-80.
' Luke ii. 32. '* Luke xiv. 22, xiii. 24-30.
22

338 LUKE UNIVERSAL AND SOTERIOLOGICAL.
grace.* In Luke, more than in any other Gospel, Jesus is
severe to privilege and impious pride, but tender and gracious
to the sinner. Here we have the parables, peculiar to this
Gospel, of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, the Prodigal
Son, the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus, the
Pharisee and the Publican, and such incidents as the calling
of Zacchaeus.^ The parables spring out of the conditions
around Him, but they represent His relations to the world.
The Publican is justified in the presence of the Pharisee, the
Samaritan condemns the priest and the Levite, and human
nature, alike in its commonest and noblest instincts, vindicates
the ways of grace. Hence, as Matthew exhibits Christ in His
authoritative and royal functions, Luke exhibits Him more in
His restorative. He is a Saviour, His mission is to the lost ; it
is because of the very essence of His character and work that
He is offensive to the proud Jew and welcome to the Gentile
and the sinner. The emphasis on the soteriology only exalts
the Christology. The more univ^ersal His person becomes the
more special grows His work ; in the degree that He ceases to
be the Jewish Messiah He becomes the Saviour of men.
§ II. — The Fourth Gospel.
As regards the Johannine writings, the distinction of his
torical and expository books can hardly be carried out The
Gospel and the First Epistle are here taken together, as if they
constituted a sort of organic unity.
A. Relations and Characteristics of the Gospel. —
In John we seem to enter into quite another order of ideas
than we find in the Synoptics, but it is an order that has
grown out of theirs. The development is so legitimate
that we may term it inevitable. Mark conceives Jesus as
' Cf the words that mark the beginning and the end of His ministry,
Luke iv. 24-27, xxiv. 47.
' Luke XV., X. 30, 37, xvi. 19-31, xviii. 10-14, xix. l-io.

JOHN universal and THEOLOGICAL. 339
the Christ, the Son of God, holy, miraculous in His action,
extraordinary in His person, designed of God to a special
work. On the basis of this notion Matthew exhibited His
relation to Israel, Luke His relation to man, John His
relation to God. Mark introduced Him as a sort of unan
nounced miracle, Matthew made law and prophecy prepare
for Him, Luke man wait for Him, John God send Him.
There is not so much of the supernatural in John as in
Mark — indeed, there is less — but there is more of God and
His action, though the action is altogether natural to God.
The history of Matthew involves as gracious a cause and
as universal an end as the soteriology of Luke, but the
form is more special, the colouring more local. In order
to do justice to the ideal element in the mind of the
Evangelists we must live in their world. Their nature was
not the narrow and rigid thing defined by modern physical
or scientific law ; it was a nature that lived in eternity and
was alive with God. Our tendency is to confine God within
the laws and limitations of nature ; theirs was to penetrate
and fill nature with the presence and the energies of God.
The more intimately they conceived the New Testament
as related to the Old, the less could they allow the Person
who was the end of the one and the beginning of the other
tp remain a Jew or be regarded as a common man. The
sacred books of Israel began with the narrative of creation-
God created the heavens and the earth, formed all creatures,
breathed the breath of life into man ; and though they
became a special history of Israel, it was only that they
might the better show how God was the God of all. So the
Evangelists, in relating Jesus through history to Israel and
through man to creation, became, as it were, bound to go
forward another step, and relate Him to God. This is the
mere formal logic of their relations, development obeying
its own immanent laws. They, being the men they were,
could not refuse to look at the person and history of Christ

340 JOHN READS HISTORY THROUGH GOD,
in and through the Eternal, and the attempt so to look at
Him is the Gospel of John. We may with all reverence
describe it as the history of Jesus read as a chapter in the
life of God.
The distinguishing feature, then, of the Fourth Gospel is
this : it comes to Jesus and His history through God. But
this statement needs to be corrected and qualified by another —
viz., the distinguishing feature in the mind of the Evangelist
is that he had read God through Jesus before he attempted
to read Jesus through God. The book is a history written
from a standpoint which its subject Himself had supphed.
In the author's conception of God there are two elements
— the one proper to him as a Christian, the other proper
to him as a Jew. The first, which he owed to Jesus, was
the idea of the Son ; the second, which he owed to the
mind and history of his people, was the idea of the Word.
These two elements gave to his conception of God all its
actuality ; he could not conceive God without them, or them
as existing apart from God. Through them God became
to him a real, an active — in a word, a living Being ; through
God they became eternal, the cause and the end of all
things. They were formally differentiated, but materially
identical, modes by which God ceased to be an abstract
simplicity and became a concrete and manifold energy —
as it were, a realm where the only conditions that allow
the reason and emotion, the intellect and heart, to exist,
were essentially existent and everlastingly active : the con
ditions of personal distinctions and reciprocal activity. He
came to these distinctions within the manifoldness of the
Infinite in the only way he could come — from without, through
the idea of Sonship given in Christ and through the idea of
the Word, creative, prophetic, organizing, given in the sacred
literature. Each term was a correlative : Word was the explicit
and articulated reason which could not be unless there
was an implicit and articulative reason ; Son was an object

GOD THROUGH THE SON AND THE WORD. 341
reflective of love which could be only as there was a Father
or subject of love active and creative. These were necessary
to full and absolute or perfect being ; and so, if God were
such a being, they were necessary to God. Deity, then, in
the full and absolute sense, was not Father without Son
or Son without Father — for neither could be without the
other, and if either was both must be. Nor was He Word
without Reason or Reason without Word — for an inarti-
culated reason were not rational, were rather a mere
characterless potentiality, and no realized actual reason.
But He was these as so related and so exercised in their
relations, so active and counteractive in their modes of
being, as to be constitutive of a living whole. And if God
has outward relations, they must, from the very nature of
the case, be due to the explicit Reason or the Word, and
the objectified Love or the Son. Only through these can
He be approached from without, and only through these
can what is within God become outward, constitute a universe
or reach a universe already constituted.
B. Christology. — Now, through his notions of Word and
Son John binds the historical Christ to the eternal God, and
through Him to the whole field of His creative and provi
dential action. The Word, as the vehicle and organ of the
immanent reason, is the Creator and Revealer ; the Son, as
the object and medium of love, is the Saviour and Healer.
And so in the Prologue to the Gospel the Word creates —
"all things were made by Him"; and He illuminates — is "the
light of men." * But He who can be so denoted mUst Him
self be uncreated — therefore eternal ; and so He is described as
existing " in the beginning " and with a self-sufficient being, for
" in Him was life."' The Son is " the Only Begotten," whose
home is " the bosom of the Father " ' ; therefore He has love
as the medium and atmosphere of His being. But as " God
1 John i. 3, 4. ' John i. 2, 4. ' John i. 18.

342 THE WORD LIGHT, THE SON LIFE.
is love,"* the conditions of love must belong to His very
essence — i.e., be as eternal as Himself. And so the Son has been
" from the beginning " ' ; for the eternal being of the Son and
the truth " God is love," are only the concrete and the abstract
forms of the same idea. The process or method by which
this love is realized for man is the Incarnation. The Word
becomes flesh and dwells among us,' the Life which was with
the Father is manifested unto us,* and of course the only
possible means of manifesting life is by means of a living
Person. The Person who incarnates the eternal love or
manifests the eternal life is the historical Christ. He is, as it
were, the Word or Son, appearing under the conditions of
created existence or time and place, in order to the completion
of His work, which, while capable of being formally dis
tinguished into the stages or processes known as creation and
salvation, is yet as essentially one as are the persons of the
Creator and the Saviour. Christ as the incarnate Word is the
light of men, as the incarnate Son is their life. As the first
His symbol is the tabernacle, which was for Israel the home
of the visible presence ; as the second He has the features of
the " Only Begotten of the Father," grace and truth.^ In His
double aspect He " declares the Father " * — i.e., as one who
has been eternally within God He comes to those who are
necessarily without, that they may know God as He is known
from within, see God as He sees Himself, and so learn to love
God with a godlike love.
Now, the history is written as a sort of commentary on the
Prologue ; and so has a twofold character — it describes a real
which represents an ideal world. In it history and thought
become a unity without losing their distinction. The forms
and categories are those of time ; but the ideas, v/hich are
their real contents, are those of eternity. And thus the
• I John iv. 8. < I John i. 2.
' I John i. I ' John i. 14.
'John i. 14. « John i. 18.

THE HISTORY AN ALLEGORY AND A SYMBOLISM. 343
history is a sort of acted parable, whose principle or idea is
stated at the beginning and its moral at the end. The Fourth
Gospel is quite frank as to its purpose ; it is written in order
that men may believe " that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God."* And to the historical Person the author does not
shrink from applying the highest predicates he had used of
the Word and the Son. Thomas recognizes Him with the
cry, " My Lord and my God ! "' And we are never allowed
to forget his meaning or to ignore his purpose. His book is
a work of rarest art ; it is a history, a drama, an allegory,
a more manifold and complex symbolism than the system
so lovingly interpreted in Hebrews. And with his funda
mental idea it could not but be these all together and all
at once. We move as if within the very consciousness of
God ; we feel His love, His attitude to man. His sacrifice to
save him. We see Jesus living under and among all the
most terrible and sordid conditions of space and time, yet
somehow as if He were a being of eternity. He works
miracles, which are, while sensuous events, all symbols of
transcendental truths. He lives in a world which is only
blind and crafty Judaea, but yet it broadens into a universe
where light and darkness, life and death, wage their awful,
unceasing battle. The Jews are real persons, priests and
rulers of the people, but they are no less embodied ideas,
organs of principles ; darkness and hate live in them as light
and love in Christ. His body is but a mortal thing of flesh
and blood ; but it becomes a temple which men destroy,' but
God again more gloriously builds, — a mystic sacramental food
that men may eat and live for ever * ; a victim that cunning
priests do to death for their own safety, but God transforms
into the life of the world.^ His words seem to be but occa
sional, drawn from Him now by a guileless seeker,^ now by
1 John XX. 31. * John vi. 48-51.
' John XX. 28. ' John xi. 49-52.
' John ii. 19. * John i. 49-51.

344 .SIGNIFICANCE OF ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL.
a nightly visitor,* now by a solitary woman void of good yet
hungry for it,' now by accusing Jews, now by curious multi
tudes, now by trustful yet perplexed disciples ; but His
audience is not the men who hear — it is mankind ; the world
listens by looking, for its light has come.' His death seenis
to be the victory of the meanest jealousies and the most
conflicting hates, — priests who through love of ruling forget
the service of God and men ; scribes who in the passion for
words and laws lose the sense of right and the love of truth ;
a people unstable as water, demanding that the idol of one
day be crucified the next because He would not be as they
were ; the judge willing to be unjust where his master was
not concerned, or ready to be relentless where he was. But
the cross was not like these its makers, nor was the death like
these its authors ; the cross was the world's altar, and the
death the sacrifice offered once for all. We are in a world
of realities where yet all is ideal ; the history is from its very
nature an allegory, for it means that God, in the poor vehicle
of a mortal manhood, is accomplishing His most characteristic
work, and the men who attempt to pervert or prevent it
only the more contribute to its accomplishment. What pro
ceeds in time belongs to eternity ; the outward event is the
visible symbol of what is innermost in the Divine nature
and ultimate in the Divine purpose ; and where the prosaic;
senses perceive but the men of a moment, the constructive
imagination reads a parable which reveals to man the secret
of God.
In John, then, we have an interpretation of the Person
expressed in the terms of the life ; and if the Person was
as he conceived Him, the history could not be other than its
interpretation. The real was not indeed the counterpart of
the ideal, but rather its symbolic realization, a thing limited
and futile to him who could not see the spirit for the
' John iii. I ff. ' John iv. 7-26.
' John viii. 12.

CHRISTOLOGY PERSONAL WHILE SPECULATIVE. 345
flesh, but a thing of infinite meaning to him who saw the
flesh transfigured by the spirit So construed, we may say
that John's is, while the most speculative, also the most
personal Christology in the New Testament It is distin
guished from all the others by its personal character ; its
motive is a transcendent enthusiasm for a person, and we
may, in a sense, name it the apotheosis of love. The
theology of Paul is a theology of the intellect He loves
persons as ideas. Jesus Christ is indeed to him the
supreme historical reality, but he loves as he honours
Him KaTO, Tn/eO/xa, and not KaTo. adpKa} He glories in
the cross, but it is even more the cross of idea and doctrine
than of fact and history. Without the fact and history the
idea and doctrine could not have been, and would not be ;
but his immediate consciousness is of the ideal cross, which
has interpreted, transfigured, and glorified the real. With it his
associations are more those of thought than those of experience
and sense. He has seen the cross through the Resurrection ;
he has not known what it was to watch it ringed with fanatic
hate and with no background but death. He lives for Christ ;
but his Christ is not one whose historical form so dwells in
memory and is so beautiful to imagination that he feels the very
place of His feet to be glorious, all the more that over it
fall the shadows cast by the dismal surrounding night. As
with Paul, so with Hebrews. Christ is to him the Arche
type, the Antitype, the Son, the High Priest, the symbol
of the most exalted idea ; but He is not Jesus, handled
with the fondness of a love made tender by memory and
sweet by hope. In John all is different ; his is the theology
of the heart ; the terms in which it is unfolded are those
of the most real, immediate, and reminiscent, yet living love.
And so his speculation is all personal : the Person is never
lost in the idea, the idea is ever incarnated in the Person.
When he speaks in the Epistle, it is as one to whom love is life;
• 2 Cor. V. 16.

346 JESUS A SUPERNATURAL PERSON,
when he speaks in the Gospel, it is as one for whom the love
has lived. For him the ideals of God have been clothed in
flesh ; and. in the process the flesh has not made the ideals
gross, but the ideals have made the flesh divine and glorious.
And thus the abstract terms. Word, Light, Life, Spirit, are
not abstract to him ; they have , all a mystic personal
quality ; out of them looks the face of Jesus, and His look
is love. And so it was but natural that the history should
be to John most real where it was most symbolical. Christ
was to him in very truth the Son of God, and God in
very truth the Father of Jesus Christ And he so read the
Father he had not seen through the Son he had known,
that eternity was but life with the Son made infinite.
§ III. — The Ideal Person and the Real History.
But now we come to our second question : How do the
Evangelists correlate the Person they so conceive and the his
tory they write ? How do they reconcile His ideal with His
actual being? Perhaps the truest reply would be. They do
not feel that there is anything to reconcile. It was in and
through His history that they found the ideal ; and as it
was most ideal where most real — viz., in the Passion — they
were content to speak as witnesses, leaving the task of
conciliation to those who felt it to be necessary. But it
may help us to understand their mind the better if we
attempt to interpret this, as it were, sub-conscious element
of their thought. The positions to be correlated are these : —
I. Jesus is to all the Evangelists a supernatural Person. He
is so altogether apart from any question as to the specific
mode of His coming. The narratives of the Nativity are
peculiar to Matthew and Luke. Mark says nothing as to
His birth, though he knows Mary as His mother.* Nor does
John, though he twice alludes to Joseph as His father,' and
' Mark vi. 3. ' John i. 45, vi. 42.

YET NORMAL HUMAN BEING. 347
makes His relation to His mother much more filial, and so
more natural, than any of the other Evangelists.* He is super
natural simply because of what they have found in Him,
because He is to them the foretold and expected Messiah,
the Son of God and King of Israel. They differ in their dis
cernment and appreciation of what this belief involves, but
not in the fact or matter of the belief Mark may show us it
in its empirical form, and John in its most speculative and
developed, but John's faith in Jesus as the Messiah is no
stronger or more real than Mark's. And this means that
He is to both a person who transcends the order of nature,
one whose very being is miraculous.
2. As miraculous in person, so He is miraculous in act In
all the Gospels He heals diseases, casts out devils, feeds the
multitudes, raises the dead, and is raised from the dead.
These acts correspond to His nature as they have conceived it ;
the natural action of the miraculous Person is the miracle. In
the degree that He Himself transcends nature, it is but normal
that His acts should do the same. So far forth, then, as the
Person who is a miracle works miracles, the conception may
be said to be coherent ; there is at least, as between its two
parts, a certain logical consistency.
3. This supernatural Jesus exhibits in His own person all
the phenomena natural to the normal human being. On
this point the Evangelists are all equally explicit ; if there is
any difference, John may be said to be the most explicit of all.
Jesus is born and grows ; has senses and sensuous experiences ;
has parents who chide Him, because, childlike. He leaves
them and forgets in His own interests their sorrows. He
grows in mind as in body, in wisdom as in knowledge.'
He suffers hunger, thirst, weariness. He experiences joy,
' John ii. 3-5, xix. 25-27.
' It is worthy of notice that the Evangelist who emphasizes this growth
(Luke ii. 40-52,) is also the only one who applies to the historical Jesus
the name proper to the exalted Christ: o Kvpios (Luke vii. 13).

348 HOW ARE PERSON AND MIRACLES RELATED?
pain, anguish, pity, and inner trouble. He weeps. He
is tempted, has to struggle under suffering. Mental is at
tended with bodily pain, death with physical angui.sh,— the
shedding of His blood and the breaking of His heart. These
facts are not concealed, nor is there any sense that they need
concealment ; for there is no feeling that they are in any way
inconsistent with the conception of Jesus as the Christ. On
the contrary, the writers feel as if these things were in
the highest degree consonant with their conception of Him.
He is not the less but the more the Messiah that He suffers,
not the less but the more a Saviour that He dies. And so
they narrate in the simplest way, as if both classes of
phenomena were equally in harmony with their subject, the
acts in which He transcended nature and the sufferings
and fatalities which show Him under it Yet they were not
unconscious of the difficulty, for they themselves had ex
perienced it in the acutest possible form. They had assumed
that He would do other than He did ; and when He did not
as they expected, some doubted, and some even fell away. If
with this keen sense of the contradiction between His trans
cendental person and His actual experiences they yet write as
they do, we have here evidence of two things— first, of the
simple-minded veracity which is incapable of concealment, and,
secondly, that they had reached a point of view where the
contradiction had for themselves not only ceased, but become
a testimony to His truth and reality. They looked at the matter
through the Person they described ; they did not look at Him
through a nature science has interpreted and defined. To them
He was both nature and law, but to us nature tends to become
a law to Him. If we can reach their point of view, we may be
the better able to construe both their idea and their history.
A. Now, in their view Jesus was at once a single and
a universal person ; His being could be construed through
the nature and from the side of man, or through the nature

WHAT MEANETH THE TEMPTATION? 349
and from the side of God. But these were so related that
what was possible to Him as the second depended on what
He was as the first. The Messiah could not be without
the man, and the man must be what all men are to be man
at all. On no basis but a natural could the supernatural
be built. Of course this natural was made of God ; it was
sinless, as it were the veritable manhood God imagined.
But Christ's moral was not so conceived as to involve and
assert His physical transcendence, but rather His obligation
to remain in our limited and normal human state. This
is distinctly the idea conveyed in the important initial inci
dent known to all the Synoptics * — the Temptation. We
can hardly be wrong in construing this as even more an
allegory than an event, and the more real it is made the
more allegorical will it become. It stands between the
Baptism and the Ministry, which means. He to whom
the Messianic consciousness has come must be proved in
order that He may be approved. The Baptism denotes the
Person, the Temptation tests His capabilities, and it is as the
selected and the tested that He begins His ministry.
We can only mean by the reality of the Temptation that
Jesus was really tempted. It was not a drama of which He
was a .spectator, but a tragedy whose stage was His own soul.
Each act in it cost struggle, agony, and sweat of spirit, as in
every conflict of sense and conscience, reason and will. But
it is evident from the terms which describe the event that it
had to do not with tne weaknesses common to man, but with
Himself and His vocation, the work He was called to do,
what He must be to do it, and how or under what modes it was
to be done. We must read its reason in the place it holds and
the forms it assumes. He was no son of the synagogue
or the Temple, no pupil of the scribes or novice of the
' Matt. iv. i-ii; Luke iv. 1-13; Mark i. 12, 13. The text follows the
narrative of Matthew. Cf my " Studies in the Life ot Christ," pp. 80-98 ;
Wendt, " Die Lehre Jesu," vol. ii., pp. 69 ff. (Eng. trans., vol. i., pp. 101 ff.).

350 JESUS AND THE TRADITIONAL MESSIAH.
priesthood ; His way had been His own ; He was the supreme
example of those men call the self-taught, often because they
have no other term by which to denote the taught of God.
But there were traditional ideas of the Messiah and His king
dom — ideas that had worked themselves into the spiritual blood
and bone of Israel ; and He could not be what He was and
stand where He did without feeling their presence and their
power. When, then. His vocation came in the Baptism, and
the mysterious Spirit within Him stood up in face of His
predestined mission. He was, as it were, forced into the conflict
or pursued by the problems which we call the Temptation : —
How are the person and the mission, Jesus and the Christ,
related ? In what form is the Messiah to appear ? Under what
conditions must He do His work? What truth is there in the
traditional idea ? How far can it be used by the transcendental
and incorporated with it? It is through questions such as
these that the Temptation must be understood : without them,
the tempter could have had no part to play ; with them, he
played his part so well as to make the struggle the tragic
reality it was.
So understood, then, the Temptation represents the conflict
through which the Saviour passed relative to Himself and His
ministry, or concerning His person in relation to His work.
From this point of view let us try to read its meaning.
(a) The first temptation was the making of stones into bread.
He was " an hungred," and was invited to work a miracle
in order to satisfy Flis hunger. To what was He tempted ?
To the exercise of miraculous powers for personal ends. It
implied the being of such powers, the capability of using them
for such an end, the occasion for such use in physical hunger,
and the justification for their use in saving from the hunger
and its possible issue in death. But to have yielded and
used the power would have lifted the Person out of the
category of humanity, placed Him above rather than under
nature, made the kinship and obedience and fatalities of

THE SON AND SATAN. 35 1
manhood impossible to Him— in a word, as a being of another
order and another system. He would have been completely
divorced from man. Hence the trial meant, whether He was
to be for Himself as a person filling the office and doing the
work of Messiah, altogether as a man, under nature with all
its limitations and all its disabilities, under law with all its
obligations and all its responsibilities. Jesus was victorious
because He refused to emancipate Himself from law, or to
live otherwise than as under the conditions common to man.
(/3) In the second temptation He was invited to cast Him
self down from the pinnacle of the Temple. What was its
essence? The claim to special conservation and care from
God. It signified that the Person had so peculiar relations
and was of such peculiar value to God, that He could, because
of these, make extraordinary ventures be}^ond the natural, that
He ought to do what He could, and appear before men as
the One miraculously guarded of God. The second was
thus the exact converse of thc first ; it tempted to such
dependence on God as no common man could know. If
this had succeeded, it too would have separated Him from
man ; and its failure meant, that Jesus, while doing His work,
was to claim from God nothing for Himself that should
exempt Him from our common human lot and liabilities.
There was to be for Him no special intervention, no exclusive
providence, nothing that marked Him as the solitary care and
single love of Heaven. He was to take His place in the
ranks of men, live as they lived, under the same conditions,
sons of the one Father, brothers in dependence on God as on
nature ; and if He did a greater work than any other, He was
still to do it not as made of God independent of law, but as
like man bound to all obedience.
(7) The third temptation was, as it were, the other two
reduced by a synthesis to a subtler and more attractive form.
He was to receive the kingdoms of the world if He would
worship the power which was their master — i.e.. He was not

352 FOR ALL ENDS PERSONAL TO HIMSELF.
to take the way of obedience, but of force and self-will. The
question was, whether He would emancipate Himself from God
and take the matter into His own hands, or leave Himself in
God's keeping to do it in God's way. His victory means that
His work is one of obedience, that obedience is the method
all through, and in order to it all the ends and all the ways
must be God's, but all the acts and all the endurance the free
choices of man. He who would be Messiah must be perfect
man ; the manhood broken from below by sin, or from above
by the exercise of miraculous powers or the claim of a special
Providence for any end of the Person — both of which would
only be another form of sin — would be a manhood incapable
of the Messianic office or its essential work. The humanity
of the Saviour must be absolutely real.
Now, the idea expressed in these real yet allegorical inci
dents is this : the terms under which Christ lived His life were
those of our common non-miraculous humanity. We know
no other. To be perfect and whole man must mean that
as regards whatever is proper to manhood He is man,
and not something else. Hence the emphasis which writers
like Paul and the author of Hebrews lay upon His "being
found in fashion as a man," so constituted that He was
the First-born Brother, made like unto His brethren in all
things, except sin. The Synoptics, without formulating the
idea, express it in the strongest possible way — they represent
Christ as doing His work within the terms and under the
conditions of normal manhood. His supernatural powers are
for others, not for Himself. He performs no single self-
regarding miracle. The priests mocked Him because, while
He saved others. He did not save Himself*; and we may add.
He could not both save Himself and be Himself. What had
made Him in so supreme a personal act cease to be man
would have deprived the act of its special character. The
physical limitations really represent the transcendent obliga-
' Matt, xxvii. 42.

HIS HUMANITY NON-MIRACULOUS. 353
tions imposed by His work upon His will. What only a man
could do remained undone unless a man did it ; and so the
manhood must be real that the sacrifice may. be the same. And
this principle is far-reaching ; upon it depends the reality of
the Person and His history. Whatever touches either touches
both. If Christ in His historical life be conceived as a con
scious God who lives and speaks like a limited man, then
the worst of all forms of docetism is affirmed. For it is one
that dissolves Him into infinite unreality. If He knows as
God while He speaks as man, then His speech is not true
to His knowledge, and within Him a bewildering struggle
must ever proceed to speak as He seems, and not as He
is.* If He had such knowledge, how could He remain silent
as He faced human ignorance and saw reason wearied with
the burden of all its unintelligible mysteries ? If men could
believe that once there lived upon this earth One who had
all the knowledge of God, yet declined to turn any part of
it into science for man, would they not feel their faith in
His goodness taxed beyond endurance ? Is not much of
the modern impatience of theology a just Nemesis upon
systems that have in this matter wronged Him they
professed to interpret ? Had the simple method of the
Evangelists been followed, these difficulties would have been
unknown. Christ's humanity was as regards the actions
and ends proper to it as a humanity altogether normal,
and so non-miraculous, subject to all the limitations and
liabilities of the common lot To conceive Him alike in
relation to nature or to God as other than His brethren,
is to misread the lesson of thc Temptation, and so the whole
meaning of His person and work.
¦ Christ recognizes the limitations of His own knowledge (Mark xiii.
32 : cf xiv. 35, 36). He knew, indeed, what was in man (John ii. 25 : cf.
Matt. ix. 4 ; Luke v. 22 ; Matt. xii. 25 ; Luke xi. 17). But this was the note
of the prophet (Luke vii. 39). There were things in man, too, that sur
prised Him (Mark vi. 6 ; Matt. viii. 10) ; so in nature (Mark xi. 13).
23

354 BUT THE UNIVERSAL IS A PERSON
B. But the single was also a universal Person, and had
as such a mission altogether supernatural because altogether
of God. It could be fulfilled only by one whose nature
was human, but it could not be humanly fulfilled. He must
by means of nature be the fit person, but He could only
by means of God do the fit work. His coming was, as it
were, built into history, belonged to the design and action
of God. For it Providence had ruled, prophecy prepared,
elect men lived and died. To it all the earlier ages had
moved ; out of it all the later ages were to proceed. We
must therefore make a distinction : there was a normal
manhood, but a supernatural function, and the function was
made possible by two things — the quality of the manhood
and the quantity of the Divine action. The quality of the
manhood we have seen, but the significance of the action is
what we have now to see. It could not proceed on the broad
field of history, and never touch the special Person — nay, it
must have been in relation to Him that it reached its acutest
point. We may describe this point in the terms of John,
" The Word became flesh " * ; or in those of Luke, " The
holy thing which is to be born shall be called the Son of
God " ' ; or in those of theology, " God became incarnate in
Christ." But what to the Evangelists did incarnation mean ?
It meant the coming to be not of a Godhead, but of a
manhood. Its specific result was a human, not a Divine,
person, whose humanity was all the more real that it was
voluntary or spontaneous, all the more natural that God
rather than man had to do with its making. To the Evangelists
the most miraculous thing in Christ was His determination not
to be miraculous, but to live our ordinary life amidst struggles
and in the face of temptations that never ceased.' One prin
ciple ruled throughout : the motives that governed the Divine
conduct governed also the human. This principle and these
• John i. 14. » Luke i. 35.
' Luke iv. 3, xxii. 28.

SUPERNATURAL TO MAN, THOUGH NATURAL TO GOD. 355
motives may be described as the law of sacrifice. The Father
denied Himself in giving the Son ; the Son denied Himself
in becoming man and in living as the man He had become.
Looking up from below, it was all one infinite kenosis;
looking down from above, it was all one infinite sacrifice.
But kenosis and sacrifice alike meant that, while He assumed
the fashion of the man and the form of the servant, both
the manhood and the servitude, in order to either having any
significance, had to be as real as the Godhead and the
sovereignty. Hence Christ was to the Evangelists at once normal man
and supernatural person — the former in all that pertained to
His personal existence and relations, the latter in all that con
cerned His work. The whole region in which this work lived
and moved was the natural of God, but the supernatural
of man. All that was done was of God and befitted God.
He lived, as it were, in visible presence and audible voice
upon the earth. The truth Christ revealed was not man's,
but God's. The love that abode in Him was Divine. The
life in Him was the uncreated yet creative life. And so,
when He acted not for Himself, but as the called of God,*
His acts were naturally supernatural. His work was a unity,
miraculous not at one point or in one thing, but in all
things and at all points. The miracle was the normal speech
of His will ; the right to forgive sin had as its correlate the
power to heal. His words and person have acted like miracles
in history. His miraculous povver is illocal and universal.
The normal manhood had its home in Judaea and its history
written by the Evangelists ; but the supernatural Person has
no home, lives through all time, acts on and in aU mankind.
The miracle, then, does not belong to the region of His
personal being, but of His official activity. And here it is
essential and integral. Hence we may note three characteristic
facts. First, since He is as Founder of the kingdom super-
' Heb. V. 10.

356 MIRACLES AND THE KINGDOM.
natural, all His acts are here of a piece, and all of God.
Miracle and speech, preaching and heahng, cleansing and
curing men, are signs of the kingdom.* Apart from it
they cannot be ; within it they are in place and have a
function. They are co-ordinate and correlative, express one
energy in Him, aim at one result for man. Secondly, the
conditions of physical help are spiritual ' ; what qualifies
a man to be forgiven qualifies him for healing ; and all
physical help is spiritual good. The miracle is a voice,
a witness, a preacher warning men to repent ' ; the Word
is a miracle, a spirit that quickeneth.* Thirdly, what they
speak of is God, the Divine, the presence of the creative will,
now the re-creative, on earth.°
We may say, then, the miraculous Person is the Person in
His office, at His work, standing in His peculiar relations to
God. Apart from these, hving the personal life. He is the
normal man ; within these He is the Christ of God. It is
here, if such an image may be allowed, as in our English
commonwealth. There can be no sovereign without the
person, but the person is not the sovereign. Office and person
are so mutually necessary that neither can be without the
other. But the person within the office is not as the person
without it. Without it she is but a mortal woman, with all the
characteristics of her kind ; but within it she becomes the
sovereign who can do no wrong, the source of law and justice,
filling and, as it were, possessing the high court of Parliament,
clothed upon with the authorities and the prerogatives proper
to the head of a great state. With Christ we cannot now
' Matt. xi. 5 ; Luke iv. 18-21, xiii. 32.
' Matt. viii. 10, 13 ; Mark i. 40, v. 36, vi. 5.
^ Matt. xi. 21 ; Luke x. 13; John v. 36, x. 25, 32, 37.
* John vi. 63.
* John viii. 28, xiv. 10: cf. Luke v. 17, ix. 43, xvii. 15-18; Matt. ix. 8,
XV. 31. It is therefore Christ's own doctrine that His miracles witness
not to something peculiar in His own humanity, but to the power of God
(Mark v. 19, vii. 34; Matt. xii. 28, xiv. 19; Luke xi. 20).

MESSIAHSHIP THROUGH DISCIPLINE. 357
separate office and person, for these are fused into one. But
the standpoint of the Evangelists was not ours. We know
the accomplished fact, but they saw the process of accom
plishment And the process is reflected in their histories.
The vocation to the Messiahship did not come till the Person
had been disciplined and quahfied. In the period of ob
scurity and preparation the large prerogatives of the end
were not His. It was only when the suffering was past
and the right hand of the Father won, that the Son be
came an object of worship, possessed of all power in heaven
and on earth, able to promise His eternal presence to His
people.* » Matt, xxviii. 9, 17, 18.

CHAPTER III.
THE CHRISTOLOGY OF CHRIST.
BUT how do these varied interpretations of His person
stand related to the teachings of Christ Himself? Have
they any reason or justification in any words or claims of His ?
Is He their creator or only their occasion ? In other words,
how did Jesus conceive Himself?
§ I. — Significance of His Names.
A. The Christ. — Jesus is to Himself from the Baptism
onwards the Messiah. He begins His ministry by a con
fession of faith : in Him prophecy is fulfilled, the Spirit of
the Lord is upon Him, and He is anointed to preach the
Gospel to the poor.* He does the works of thc Messiah,
and to confess Him is to be blessed.' He institutes by His
preaching the Messianic kingdom, and He allows Himself
to be saluted as the Messianic King.' In the presence of
the chief priest and in answer to his solemn abjuration He
declares Himself the Christ* But in taking the name
He changed the idea, and by means of a most significant
question He emphasized the change. How do the scribes
conceive the Christ ? ' "As David's son," they said ; and they
meant that to be his son was to be not simply his descendant,
' Luke iv. 16-21. ' Matt. ix. 27 ; Mark x. 47-49 ; Luke xviii. 39, 40.
2 Matt. xi. 1-6. ' Mark xiv. 61, 62 ; cf Matt. xvi. 16, 20.
*Matt. xxii. 41-46; Mark xii. 35-37. Cf Wendt's "Lehre Jesu," ii. 436 ff.
(Eng. trans., ii. 133 ff ).

WHAT JESUS MEANS BY HIS NAMES. 359
but altogether like him, a king after his kind in a kingdom
such as his. But Jesus asks, " How, then, does David in spirit
call Him Lord ? " and He means : " My view of the Messiah
is exactly the reverse of yours ; to you the main thing is the
Davidic sonship, to David it was the lordship. The lordship
signified a relation to God, which you forget ; but the sonship,
which you remember, involved a relation to David that may
be interesting, but is not vital, and hardly significant."
The change Jesus effected in the Messianic idea was
parallel to the change He effected in the theistic, and the
two must be taken together before either can be understood.
Neither idea could have been without Judaism, but neither
the God nor the Messiah of Jesus was of the Jews. The
element He introduced was the most distinctive and con
stitutive in His thought, and may be described as on
the one side the paternal, on the other the filial, — these
terms being strictly inseparable and correlative, affecting
both the Messianic and the theistic idea. As regards the
former, it had a twofold form — a Godward and a manward ;
the Messiah was Son o'l God and Son of man, and each
in such a sense that it involved the other.
B. The Son of God. — This phrase had in the Old Testa
ment a sort of official sense. It denoted collective Israel, the
son because the elect of God.* It denoted, too, the Messiah,
the theocratic King,' who was in a special sense the creation
and care of God, but it was an official title rather than a
proper name, applied to the King as distinguished from the
man. There are traces of this meaning in the Gospels.
Satan uses it in the Temptation ' ; so do the evil spirits when
they are cast out * ; so do the disciples in the ship after the
' Deut. xiv. I, 2; Exod. iv. 22; Hos. xi. i; Isa. Ixiii. 16; Jer. xxxi. 9,
20 ; Mai. i. 6.
* 2 Sam. vii. 14; Psalm ii. 7, 8. * Matt. viii. 29; Luke viii. 28.
3 Matt. iv. 3 ; Luke iv. 3, 9.

360 THE SON OF GOD
calming of the storm.* The usage of the centurion, on the
other hand, is pagan rather than Jewish.' But it is remarkable
that in the Synoptics Jesus never uses this title ; and His
careful avoidance can only be explained by His aversion to
its official sense.' With Him the personal relation was
primary, the official secondary, and He would not use a name
which could be understood of an office, but which had to Him
no meaning save as applied to a person. To the Jew the
Messianic King was the Son of God, but to Jesus the Son of
God was the Messianic King.* Hence in strong contrast to
His avoidance of the official title is His use of the personal
name " Father " for God. He spoke of God in the most im
pressive forms and exclusive sense as His Father. His usage
is too distinctive and exceptional to be an accident Nothing
so marked Jesus as His feeling of kinship with men. His
brotherhood. His love of standing in their midst while they
prayed " Our Father which art in heaven." All the more on
this account is His action significant when He detaches Him
self from man and distinguishes Himself as in a pre-eminent
sense the Son of God. Thus He warns men that only those
who " do the will of My Father who is in heaven " shall enter
into the kingdom.^ None but those who confess Him before
men are to be confessed before His Father.^ Only those
plants which His Father has planted shall endure.'^ The con
fession of Peter is due to the inspiration of " My Father."^
The angels do always behold His Father's face." His Father
answers prayer.*" The saved are the " blessed of My Father."**
In the awful moments of Gethsemane and the cross it is to
' Matt. xiv. 33.
2 Matt, xxvii. 54 ; Mark xv. 39.
' Cf. His answer to chief priest, and rapid substitution of his own " Son
of man" for the priest's " Son of God" (Matt, xxvii. 64 ; Mark xiv. 62).
* Wendt, ii. 436 (Eng. trans., ii. 133).
' Matt. vii. 21.
« Matt. X. 32, 33. ' Matt, xviii. lo.
' Matt. XV. 13. *° Matt, xviii. 19, 35.
8 Matt. xvi. 17. *' Matt. xxv. 34.

AND THE SON OF MAN. 36 1
His Father that He cries.* But He speaks still more clearly
and impressively. The Lord of heaven and earth is His
Father ; and to Him He claims exclusive and commanding
relations. No one knoweth the Son save the Father, or the
Father save the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal
Him.' Here is mutual knowledge, perfect openness and access
of each to the other, but to none besides ; and all who know
God or get to Him know Him and get to Him through the
Son. It is a son's knowledge, and they who receive it become
as He was who gave it. These are personal relations, and out
of them spring all His official activities and functions. Save
as Son He has nothing to teach concerning God ; as Son He
has such knowledge to communicate as will make all the
world restful and blessed. The last wickedness is to reject
the Son ' ; the highest beatitude is to know Him as He is
known of the Father.
C. The Son of man. — But now in what seems strict yet
complementary antithesis to " the Son of God " stands " the
Son of man.'' It occurs but once in the New Testament on
other hps than His own,* but so often on His that it may be
described as the title of His own peculiar choice.' In the Old
Testament the usage is varied ; it is now generic, and denotes
man in distinction from God, as created, mortal, impotent, im
perfect ^ ; now specific man, as member of a race, with all the
qualities of the race he belongs to ' ; now personal, a man with
' Matt xxvi. 39, 42, 53 ; Luke xxii. 42, xxiii. 34, 46.
' Matt. xi. 25-27 ; Luke x. 21, 22.
' Mark xii. i-ll. . Under the "beloved son" of verse 6 Christ Himself
is to be understood. The ascending dignity of the messengers is to be
noted. *- Stephen, Acts vii. 56. But cf. Rev. i. 13.
' In singular contrast to His avoidance of " Son of God " in the Synoptics
stands His usage of " the Son of man." It occurs in Mattliew thirty times,
in Mark fourteen, in Luke twenty-five.
^ Job xxv. 6 ; Psalm viii. 4 ; Num. xxiii. 19.
' Psalm cxlvi. 3 ; Isa. li. 12.

362 THE OLD NAME FINDS A NEW SENSE.
all the attributes of his kind, directly spoken to and made the
instrument or mouthpiece of God.* But the most significant
use is in Daniel.' He sees one like a Son of man come in the
clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days, and there is given to
him a kingdom which shall not be destroyed. Now, the " Son
of man " is here a symbol or type ; He stands opposed to the
" four great beasts," " diverse one from another," which repre
sented the older empires. They were the symbols of brute
force and cruelty, the ferocious strength that prevailed by
devouring ; but the new kingdom had as its symbol humanity ;
its strength was reasonable justice and truth. In four re
spects it was to stand opposed to the brute empires : first,
they were the creatures of the earth, but it was of Divine
origin, the gift or creation of the Ancient of Days ; secondly,
they rose out of violence and stood in wrong, but it lived
by the human gentleness which best typified Divine grace ;
thirdly, they had only a local, but it was to have a universal
dominion, over " all peoples, and nations, and tongues " ; and,
finally, they were merely temporal, but it was to continue for
ever. Now, while this phrase, which signified so much as to
the Messianic King and kingdom, passed into the apocalyptic
literature, it did not penetrate the Christology of the people
and the scribes ; but Jesus adopted it, enlarged and enriched
all its elements.' In His hands it became at once a personal
and a Messianic title, the one because the other ; the term
" man " defined at once a source and a character, the term
" Son " a relation which expressed at once His nature, function,
and work. The text determinative of His usage is the famous
question to Peter * : " Whom do men say that I, the Son of
' Ezek. ii. 1-3, 8, et passim.
^ Dan. vii. 13.
' The relation to Daniel seems to be indicated in to (rripelov toO YioO tou
avBpairov (Matt. xxiv. 30, 44; Mark xiv. 62, viii. 38).
' Matt. xvi. 13. Cf Mark viii. 27 ; Luke ix. 18.

LOFTY FUNCTION AND LOWLY STATE. 363
man, am ? " The place and time and result of the question are
all significant It was asketi at Caesarea Philippi— ?'.«., in the
region, as it were, of the Gentiles, and in a city whose name
ominously joined the Roman and the Herodian, and so in a
sense in the world and before the face of Rome, the most
terrible and enduring of the ancient empires, and just as He
had turned His face to Jerusalem and the Passion. The agony
and the death were already in His soul, and expressed in His
question. The answer given by Peter was the occasion of
what may be termed the solemn and formal institution of
the kingdom. From that hour it was not only for Him, but
for His people and through them.
This name is made to denote at once the loftiest functions
and the lowliest state. " The Son of man " has power on
earth to forgive sins.* He is Lord of the Sabbath.'' His
coming creates the new age which men so desire to see.'
One day His angels shall attend Him and do His command
ments.* He will reign and judge, fixing the eternal destinies
of men.^ But this official majesty has its contrast in the
personal lowliness ; " the Son of man " lives a humble and
suffering life. In this connection the title is used as if it
were a personal pronoun, yet it never seems so much a name
of majesty as when it connotes the abasement of the Person
it denotes. He is uoorer than the foxes or the birds of the
air, having nowhere to lay His head.* He is reproached
and a cause of reproach.' He lives as a man and not as an
ascetic, and is judged gluttonous and a winebibber.' He
suffers many things, is betrayed, rejected by the chief priests,
goes to His destiny, which is death." But this humiliation
is the way of His majesty ; by its means He seeks that
' Matt. ix. 6; Mark ii. 10; Luke v. 24. • Matt. xxv. 31 ff.
' Matt. xii. 8; Mark ii. 28 ^ Matt. viii. 20; Luke ix. 58.
' Matt. X. 23 ; Luke xvii. 20-22. ' Luke vi. 22.
* Matt xiii. 41, xxiv. 31. * Matt. xi. 19; Luke vii. 34.
9 Luke ix. 22, 26; Matt. xvii. 22, xx. 18, xxvi. 2, 45 ; Mark xiv. 21.

364 THE STOCK AND THE BRANCH.
He may save the lost, and gives His life a ransom for many.*
It is essentially the name of Him who redeems by the
sacrifice of Himself.
The title, then, has at once a personal and an official sense
(a) Construed as personal, it does two things : emphasizes,
(i) the stock whence He springs — man, humanity, mankind ;
the Son of man is no man's son, is as it were the child or
offspring of the race. (2) His own solitude and pre-eminence.
He has no fellow, stands by Himself, is an individual who
is a genus, a person sui generis, not a son, but " the Son
of man." Within the lowliness there lies therefore an extra
ordinary claim ; He transcends every individual, and is, as
it were, the equivalent of man. He is the epitome of
the race at one point, as its common father was its
epitome at another. And as such He is its embodied ideal,
bears not only a normal humanity, but the alone normal ; in
Him man is summarized, and what is alien to man has no
being in Him. (/8) Construed in its official sense the title
emphasizes, (i) the character and relations of Him who fills
the office. As the alone normal man He is sprung from the
collective race, and related to it. (2) The nature and scope of
the office. He who fills it so holds and represents man as to be
able to serve and save, to rule and judge him. And (3) the
forms and terms of service under Him. The normal becomes
the normative man. The citizens of the Messianic kingdom
must be as its Founder : the men He approves are men who
act as He did to those who as men are contained in Him.
§ II. — The Names and the Mission.
How are the terms " Son of God " and " Son of man " re
lated ? Both denote, as it were, on the inward side a peculiar
and exclusive relation — there is this one Son of God and no
other, and no other than this one Son of man ; and both denote
1 Mark x. 45 ; Matt. xx. 28 ; Luke xix. 10.

THE names in the FOURTH GOSPEL. 365
on the outward side a relation personal yet universal — the one
Son of the one God is the sole medium of the knowledge of
Him, but He is a medium for all ; and the one Son of col
lective man is the sole person in whom all men are, and
through whom all manhood is. " God " in the one phrase
and " man " in the other denote each a unity, though the
unity is in the one case personal, in the other organic ;
and " Son " expresses the mode in which each unity is realized
— the one in knowledge, the other in being. To know God
through the Son is to know Him as a Father and so to
become to Him as a son ; and it is in order to this double
result that we have the double sonship of the creative Person.
One who is Son of God is alone able to embody the ideal
of humanity, and only a humanity conscious of Sonship
can be ideal. Man as God conceived him was son, and
so only through the Son can man become as God conceived
him. Hence as Son of God Christ interprets God to man ;
as Son of man He interprets by a process of realization man
to God. The ideal He embodies is to be perpetuated, not
destroyed, and those who are formed after Christ become sons
of God while sons of men. His kingdom is but the multi
phcation of Himself, the realization of the double sonship
in a common brotherhood.
But in order to understand the relation of the two names
and their significance alike for the Person and the mission
we must turn to the Fourth Gospel. Here the organic
relation of the two sonships becomes clearer than in the
Synoptics. The Prologue prepares us for a more impressive
and exalted use of the phrase " the Son of God." It is used
by the Baptist, Nathanaei, Peter, Martha, the Jews, and the
Evangelist himself,* who adds emphasis to his usage by
recurring to the fiovoyevi]<; of the Prologue.^ But Jesus also
employs it, though only three times — twice in argument with
' John i. 34, 50, vi. 69, xi. 34, xix. 7, xx. 31.
» John iii. 16, 18 : cf i. 14-19-

366 FATHER AND SON A UNITY.
the Jews,* and once to His disciples when He heard of the
death of Lazarus.' So far as it has a distinct reference in
those cases, it is either as an interpretation of the term
" My Father," or as associated with the exercise of re
creative power. But much more significant is the use of the
term " the Son " in a sense as distinctive and denominative
as " the Father." " The Father loveth the Son " ; " the Son
quickeneth"; "the Son can do nothing of Himself"; "all
may honour the Son as they honour the Father " ; " the Son
has hfe in Himself"; "the Son shall make you free"; the
Father glorifies the Son, the Son the Father.' The two are
so associated as to be indissoluble ; the correlation involves a
unity, which yet does not become identity. He is in the
Father, the Father in Him ; and to see the Son is to see the
Father,* for they two are one.^ Their being is so concordant
that the Son can do nothing of Himself^ ; and as the Father
has worked hitherto, so He works.' Out of this relation His
mission has come : He is the sent of the Father ' ; His
work is the Father's ' ; to believe Him is to believe the
Father and to possess eternal life.*" His appearance in time
and all that belongs to it flows from His Divine Sonship,
and without it no part of His work could have been
done. But the names are in John in a peculiar sense and degree
epexegetical ; each helps to define and explain the other.
Turning, then, to " the Son of man," we find that it is here, as
in the Synoptics, used exclusively by Jesus, and this is only
the more emphasized by its occurrence as a quotation from
' John V. 25, X. 36.
' John xi. 4. In ix. 35 the reading is more than doubtful: in iii. 18 the
words are manifestly the Evangelist's.
' John V. 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, viii. 36, xvii. I.
^ John xiv. 9-1 1.
5 John X. 30. 8 John v. 36, 37, vi. 38, 39, 44, 57, viii. 16, 18, etc.
" John V. 19. ' John iv. 34, ix. 4, xvii. 4.
' John V. 17. ¦" John v. 24, xiii. 15, 16, xvii. 3.

DOUBLE FUNCTIONS OF THE DOUBLE SONSHIPS. 367
Him in a question by the Jews.* " The Son of man " is the
sign of the open heaven, the body on which the angels of
God ascend and descend.' He is the only one who has
ascended into heaven, because He alone has descended from
heaven.' He is lifted up that men may believe on Him and
live.* Authority to judge has been committed unto Him,^
and to give eternal life.** Men must eat His flesh and drink
His blood that they may have life.'' By His passion and
death He is glorified.^ The connotation is here in every case
union with man, as in the other name it had been union with
God. " The Son of man " is lifted up — the act of man " ; but
" the Son of God " is given or sent — the act of the Father.
The former is palpable — to be discerned and assimilated
through sense ; the latter is spiritual — the mind must believe
and conceive Him. The one expresses the temporal form and
relation of the Person and His work, but the other expresses
His extra-temporal being, with its essential or inherent life.
The Son of God brings the life down from heaven, but the
Son of man distributes the life and is the way to heaven.
The double Sonship thus expresses a double relation — on the
Divine side the unity of Father and Son, on the human the
incorporated being of the Son and man. The one represents
the mode by which God finds access to man, but the other
the mode by which man finds access to God. And this access
is only the same thing seen from different standpoints ; for
the Person is one, though the relations are twofold. It is the
Divine Sonship that makes sacrifice possible to God, but the
human sonship which makes the sacrifice manifest to man.
The real sacrifice is the act and experience of God, the
surrender of the Father, the submission of the Son ; but the
evidential process is the Passion and Death, where the Son of
' John xii. 34. ^ John v. 27.
' John i. 51. * John vi. 27.
3 John iii. 13, vi. 62. ' John vi. 53.
* John iii. 14: cf viii. 28. * John xii. 23, xiii. 31.
' John viii. 28.

368 THE FILIAL IDEA CONSTITUTIVE.
man dies for the man whose Son He is. By the unity of
Father and Son the life of God is communicated ; by the unity
of man and Son the life of God is distributed. The doctrine
of Jesus in John thus completes and explains His doctrine in
the Synoptics. It places the Redeemer in essential relation
with God, the source of redemption, and with man, its subject
Its cause is sufficient, for it is Divine ; its means normal, yet
adequate, for they are human. And so through the one
Sonship what is inmost in God comes to man, and through
the other what is most ideal in man returns to God.
The inference we draw from this analysis and discussion is
simple and obvious : the constitutive idea in the consciousness
of Jesus was the fihal ; round it His thought and character, as
it were, crystallized. The ideal man was the conscious Son
of God, and His function was by the creation of the ideal
consciousness to create ideal men. But the correlative of
the filial in man is the paternal in God ; and so the God
of Jesus is the Father of men. His Fatherhood precedes,
creates, underlies their sonship. It is the basis of all duty,
involving an affinity of nature that makes it possible for
men to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect*
They are to love their enemies, that they may be the sons
of their Father, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil
and the good.' Prayer is the speech of the filial spirit ;
needs, therefore, to be simple, sincere, the murmur of a love
that seeks only the ear of the loved, and fears to be over
heard by the profane.' So when He speaks to men of
God He calls Him "your Father" or "thy Father."*
They are to pray trustfully, for if even sinful men may
be kind fathers, what shall the gracious God be ? * Worship
must be in spirit and in truth, for only so can it be
acceptable to the Father." And the characteristic of
1 Matt. V. 48. * Matt. vii. 11.
2 Matt. V. 45. ' John iv. 23.
' Matt. vi. 5 ff.
* Mark xi. 25 ; Matt. vi. I, 4, 6, 18, 32, x. 29, xxiii. 9; Luke xii. 32.

CHRIST'S INTERPRETATION OF HIMSELF. 369
Fatherhood is, that while it rejoices in the obedient it
cannot surrender the bad. The prodigal does not cease to
be a son, and the Father hails his penitent return with
weeping joy ; and the hard, self-righteous brother is rebuked
into gentleness, that he may be waked to brotherhood.*
God's real relation to man is thus in the view of Jesus
the paternal, and so man's perfect relation to God is the
fihal. Sonship is of the essence of humanity as paternity
of God, and so He who is by nature Son of God appears
as Son of man, that men through Him may attain the
fihal state and spirit and relation. What this means will
be seen later ; meanwhile, it is enough to recognize its being.
§ III.— His Person and Place.
From this analysis of His names we may infer that His
whole message to man was but the interpretation of Himself
And this interpretation represents Him as being at once as
necessary to man and as sufficient for all His functions as if
He were very God. What He held of the Christ in relation to
David,' He held of Himself relative to the saints, the prophets,
priests, and kings of the Old Testament. He transcended
them all. He was greater than Jonah, than Solomon,' than
Abraham.* He was greater even than the most sacred institu
tions — the Temple, the Sabbath, the Law, and the Prophets —
which He at once superseded and fulfilled.^ And He was not
only great as regards the past, but necessary as regards
the future — the one Being needful for all men everywhere
and needful not simply as an official, but as a person. His
very being is a condition of man's chief good. It is not
only as a teacher of truth, as a preacher of the kingdom, or
as a realized ideal of righteousness that He is necessary ;
the necessity is so personal that it is by His relation to
1 Luke XV. II ff. ' Matt. xii. 41, 42.
' Mark xii. 35-37. * John viii. 53-56.
' Matt. xii. 6, 7 ; Mark ii. 28 ; Matt. v. 17, 18, xxi. 34-37.
24

370 CHRIST STANDS ALONE, IS NECESSARY,
men and men's to Him that they are to be judged, saved
or lost If men refuse to hear Him or His, it shall be
more tolerable in the day of judgment for Sodom and
Gomorrha than for them.* To receive or reject Him is to
receive or reject God.' To be ashamed of Him and His
words before men is to have no part or lot in the king
dom of God.' Men who would share His life must bear
His cross, for the sake of Him and His Gospel all must
be sacrificed, and then all will be gained.* The service
must not be outer, ceremonial, vicarious ; must be inner,
real, personal, or it is worthless.^ He is the living bond
of unity, necessary to fellowship among men and worship
of God.* If any one dares to try issues with Him he
will be not simply broken, but ground to powder ' ; but
blessed are they who are not offended in Him.' And as
the necessary He is the solitary ; no one can take His
place or do His work ; He stands alone. As the Son He
only knoweth the Father, and all knowledge is of His
giving." No one cometh unto the Father but by Him.*"
And as necessary and unique He is universal — no local or
provincial person, but One who invites all, and promises
rest to the all He invites.** He is sufficient for every
human need, and becomes through His death only the
more mighty. By being lifted up He is to draw all men
unto Himself.*' Where the office is a necessity, the person
is not ; where the person is a necessity, the office is but
His exercised functions, the creation and consequence of
His being. In the first case the person is but a transient
incident in the being of a perpetual institution ; in the
second case the office is but the form or mode in which a
>¦ Matt. X. 15. ? Luke XX. 18.
^ Mark ix. 37 ; Matt. x. 40. s ^^^^ ^i. 6.
3 Mark viii. 38 ; Matt. x. 32, 33. » Matt. xi. 27 ; Luke x. 22.
* Mark viii. 34, 35, x. 29, xiii. 13 ; Luke xiv. 27. i" John xiv. 6.
' Matt. X. 34-39. II Matt, xi, 28.
" Matt, xviii. 19, 20, xxviii. 20. " John xii. 32.

UNIVERSAL, SUFFICIENT, ACCESSIBLE. 371
perpetual person works. With Christ the person is primary,
the office secondary ; from the perpetuity of His person
has come the perpetuity of His office. And so all that
He is and all that He does must be construed, as it were,
in the terms of His personal being ; and before the con
struction can be speculative it must be historical, the
historical supplying the speculative with all its architectonic
and regulative principles.
But the necessary and sufficient is also an accessible
person. If He was needed by all, it was only fit that He
should be open to all. And so He appears as One who
did not love intermediaries, but desired direct personal inter
course with men. It was easier to reach the Master than
to conciliate a disciple. The disciples would have forbidden
the mothers to present their children ; but by His rebuke
of the men and His reception of the children He justified
the confidence of the mothers.* One of the earliest and
most persistent charges against Him was " the friend of
publicans and sinners," ' " this man receiveth sinners and
eateth with them " ' ; and He vindicated His conduct by what
may be described as at once His most beautiful and most
characteristic parables.* He did not refuse the public homage
of the woman who was " a sinner," ^ or the secret visit of the
man who was " a ruler of the Jews" " ; He mingled with the
crowd, and it pressed upon Him ' ; He was touched by one
within it, and He Himself touched the sick, the palsied, and
the blind.' He met and was met of men in the synagogue,
the Temple, the mart, the street, the highway, the private
house. He spoke to them on the mountain, from the ship,
• Matt. xix. 13-15; Mark -x. 13-16; Luke xviii. 15-17.
' Matt. xi. 19 ; Luke vii. 34.
' Matt. ix. 10, II ; Mark ii. 16 ; Luke v. 32, xv. 2.
* Luke XV. * John iii. 1, 2.
' Luke vii. 37-39. ' Luke vii. 45.
• Mark v. 30; Matt. viii. 3, 15, 29; Mark vii. 33, i. 41; Luke v. 13,
vii. 14, xxii. 51.

372 HIS DIGNITY OWES NOTHING TO MYSTERY.
amid the green fields. He did not deny Himself to Pharisee
or Sadducee, to scribe or priest. The lost sheep of the
house of Israel, the woman of Samaria, the Magdalene of
the city, the inquisitive Greek, the authoritative Roman,
the messengers of John, the men of Galilee — all had access
to Him. He loved to be sought of men. His dignity owed
nothing to mystery ; indeed, the most mysterious thing about
Him is the increase, with increased knowledge, of the feeling
of the awful loveliness and sanctity of His person. And
so men are conscious of nothing but harmony in a picture
which now exhibits Him as " meek and lowly in heart," and
now arrays Him in the dread attributes of the judge. What
He was then He was ever to be — an eternal presence in the
midst of His people,* with all His relations personal and all
immediate, an unmediated but always mediating mediator.
' Matt, xviii. 20, xxviii. 20.

CHAPTER IV.
THE RELATIONS AND THE REASON OF THE
CHRISTOLOGIES.
\ I. — Comparison of the Apostolic Christologies
WITH Christ's.
WE are now in a position to determine how the Apos
tolic Christologies stand related to Christ's, whether
and to what extent His was the source of theirs, theirs the
development and explication of His. We may say of all save
James, who hardly had a Christology, that they so construed
Jesus as the Christ as to evolve not only a new religion out of
the old, but also a new philosophy of history, of man, and of
God. The constitutive ideas were His, but the constructive
endeavour theirs ; with Him all is spontaneous, the expression
of an intuitive or immediate consciousness ; with them all is
reflective, the expression of a mediative consciousness,-' using
the methods of a more or less explicit dialectic. The affinities
may be presented under four heads : historical, religious,
philosophical, theological.
I. The Historical. — The Apostles, like Jesus, conceived the
Messiah as of the Jews, but not as Jewish. To all His
character and office were alike ethical. His method one of
self-denial and obedience, and His end to save from sin
and reconcile to God. He is the end rather than the product
of prior history ; does not so much get meaning from it
as give meaning to it He is before Abraham, and so the

374 CHRIST IS HIMSELF THE SOURCE
patriarch and the promise are made significant by the Son
and the fulfilment The Davidic descent is to Paul, as to
Jesus, a mere outward incident; the material thing is His
being as the Son of God. In the Apocalypse David is
more an effect than a cause ; he is for the Messiah rather
than the Messiah through him. As of the fathers and kings,
so of the people. The Jews are for Christ ; Christ is not
in order to the being of the Jews. But as Paul conceives
it this is a great honour, the very greatest possible, carrying
with it their place in the whole order of Providence, their
election of God, the fathers, the promises, the giving of the
law, the being entrusted with the oracles of God. This was
the reason of their pre-eminence ; they were that Christ might
be. This was the doctrine of Matthew and John as well
as of Paul, and all owed it to Jesus. As with the people,
so with the modes which connected Him with the institutions
and ideals of Israel. The law was in order to Him, and
He by fulfilling it made an end of it. And so Paul con
ceived it as the schoolmaster who instructed and governed
till He came ; Hebrews represented it as the type or shadow
of the good things He was to bring, and the Apocalypse
made the institutions it created the symbols of His perfect
and enduring reign. Jesus claimed to be the fulfilment of
prophecy, and so Peter represented the Spirit of Christ as
in the prophets, who all testified of Him, while Paul and
Hebrews, the Apocalypse and Matthew, all cited their words
as witnesses to the truth. What Jesus terms tradition Paul
often terms the law, which lived by being interpreted in
the school, and to both its dominion was the tyranny of
impotence, which Jesus represented as ended by the lordship
of the Son of man, and Paul by His coming and creating in
us the Spirit of His own Sonship.
2. The Religious. — This concerned His person, in all its
redemptive and normative significance. Jesus predicted His
sufferings from the scribes, His death at the hands of the

OF THE APOSTOLIC CHRISTOLOGIES. 375
chief priests and rulers ; and Paul not only describes the
princes of this world as crucifying the Lord of glory, but
also connects Christ's death under the law, which is the
abstract of chief priest and ruler, with our redemption from
its curse. Christ speaks of His religion as a new covenant
in His blood ; and Hebrews develops His words into the
elaborate contrast of the old covenant and the new, trans
lating all the sensuous elements of the old into their spiritual
counterparts. Jesus represents His body as a temple, which
is to take the place of the one built with hands ; and Paul
applies the figure now to the Church, which is His body,
now to the men, and now to the bodies of the men who
are Christ's ; while in the Apocalypse the Lamb Himself is
the temple, and in Hebrews the High Priest's presence
constitutes the heaven where He is the holy of holies. The
form of the thought is Apostolic, but its essence is of Christ
He preaches the kingdom and founds a society for the realiza
tion of His ideal, and this becomes in all the Apostles the
Church. His society is ethical through and through, and so
the terms in which they describe and express the society are
all ethical : the ancient ceremonialism is the repealed law of
Paul ; the old sacerdotalism is the transcended priesthood and
ritual of Hebrews. At the touch of His hand, the old religion
of the letter has passed away ; all has become of the Spirit
and the truth.
3. The Philosophical, — This element appears mainly in the
new anthropology, which develops the ideas connected with
the name " the Son of man." These ideas may be divided
into two classes — those suggested (a) by its connotation,
(;S) by its absolute sense. He is, as to (a), in harmony with
His own usage, conceived by the Apostles as the end of the
law, and as the normative person who creates a normal society
or kingdom where the law is love. He reigns and judges, dies
for our sins, gives His life a ransom for many, creates a right
eousness by faith which exceeds the righteousness of the law ;

376 THE SON OF IWAN THE NEW ADAM.
in other words, the outer law is superseded by the inner life
He gives. The distinctively evangelical elements in the
Apostolical theology are simply expansions of the ideas which
Jesus had made to cluster round "the Son of man." And
these were justified and explained by the principles educed
from (/S) the absolute sense. He became the ideal Man,
made in all things hke unto His brethren, yet as without
sin in a world where all had sinned, transcending all that
He might help all. As " the Son of man " he became
to Paul the last Adam, the second Man, who stood as a
parallel and yet as an absolute opposite to the first, —
head like him of a race, but a spiritual, not a physical
head ; creator of righteousness, not of sin ; of life, not of death.
Paul's whole elaborate anthropology is but the dialectical
explication of this name. In its light man was seen to be an
organic unity ; the history that divided Adam and Christ
exhibited his evolution under forces that were now of God
and now of the devil ; the deliverance that came by the
second Man was unmeaning without the ruin that had
come by the first But its significance ranged into the
future as well as into the past. The Son of man was the
brother of men, the first-born of the new race. They were
to be conformed to Him, made in His image ; His privileges,
honours, standing, were to be theirs. As was the new Man,
such was to be the new mankind ; His brotherhood meant
man's sonship and God's Fatherhood.
4. The Theological. — Here the regulative idea was supplied
by the supreme or determinative element in his own conscious
ness — viz., the Sonship. The idea of " the Son of God "
penetrated the Apostolic thought, stamped it with its specific
character, created its distinctive theology. Fatherhood be
came essential to God, sonship to man. Jesus Christ is to
all the Son of God, and God the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ. The Father is conceived, studied, interpreted, through
the Son. The men who entered into His consciousness

MONOTHEISM AND CHRISTOLOGY. 377
looked at God with His eyes, thought of God in His way,
learned to speak of God in His terms, and bequeathed to us
as their abiding legacy an interpretation of Christ which was
an interpretation of God.

§ II.— Conclusory and Transitional,
I. This Christology was the work of Jews, men who had
Monotheism as a passion in their blood ; and made its appeal
to men, many of whom were of the same race and had the
same passion. Yet these men join God and the Son of God
together, speak of them with equal honour, and do them equal
reverence, using of the Son terms as descriptive of Deity as
any they ever use of the Father ; and neither they nor the
men they address feel any shock or any sense of incongruity
in such usage. They all think that God has only become
worthier of obedience and love.
2. The Person to whom they ascribe a dignity so transcen
dent, and for whom they claim a reverence so extraordinary,
had a quarter of a century before suffered death on the cross
at the hands of His own people, who were the elect people of
God. This date is taken from those Pauline Epistles which
even the most radical rational criticism has regarded as our
oldest authentic Christian literature ; but this literature is as
high in doctrine as any of the later, and has as its author the
most characteristic Jew of them all. As there was nothing in
the outward state or fortunes of this Jesus to suggest a dignity
so pre-eminent and absolutely singular — indeed, everything to
suggest the very opposite — the result must have been due to
the transcendent qualities of His person, to His consciousness
as expressed in speech, in character, and in action.
3. The Apostolical interpretation of Him was absolutely
opposed to what may be termed the science and the philo
sophy ofthe time. If ever both educated and common sense
would have justified not only scepticism but the most frank

378 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRISTOLOGIES
and brutal denial, it was in this case. Men might well have
resented it as an insult to their belief in God, and to their own
reason ; nay, to their very sense of decency. The marvel is
not that they were so much but so little offended. The
reasonable view seemed to be contained in the scandal of the
Jews and the sceptical mockery of Celsus. This view was in
every respect the direct and flagrant contradiction of the
Apostolic. Jesus was in the broadest sense a child of
nature, skilled in Egyptian magic, and able to deceive the
simple into the belief that He was a god. He had no real
sense of the Divine. The simple people He deceived imagined
themselves the special care of Heaven, the only marvellous
thing being that they were so easily deceived ; yet it was
not so very marvellous, as they were one and all ignorant
and unlearned men. Their apology was His condemnation.
If they had not been men of this order, they would never
have believed in Jesus ; and their belief only helps to make
both them and their religion the more ridiculous.
4. But the two views have a right to be tried at the bar of
history. The question what Jesus Christ is cannot be settled
by an appeal to the New Testament, either to Himself and
His Apostles, or to the Jews and Greeks ; but history has a
contribution to make that may help towards a settlement.
His life is written in the Gospels, but His history is written in
the life of civilized man. And before we can even approxi
mately know Him, what the New Testament said of Him must
be compared with what history has to say. Its verdict may
be summed up in some positions that may be described as
commonplaces of the philosophy of history.
i. Jesus Christ is in His own order — viz., the order of the
founders or creators of religions — the transcendent Person of
history ; and to be transcendent here is to be transcendent
everywhere, for religion is the supreme factor in the organizing
and the regulating of our personal and collective life.
ii. He is the real Creator of Monotheism. Before and apart

BEFORE THE BAR OF HISTORY. 379
from Him we have Naturalisms, Polytheisms, Pantheisms,
and a Henotheism, which is the term most characteristic of
Judaism as it was and is ; but it is only through Him and
within Christendom that Monotheism has come to be and has
been incorporated in a real and realized religion.
iii. He created a religion in its own order as transcendent
as His person, and its order is the universal and ethical. The
one God has as His correlative and counterpart the one
religion, and in its character the religion could not but be as
was the God ; and as were the God and the religion, so did
they design man to be. By making God a new being to man,
man was made a new being for the service of God.
iv. Since the religion was universal and ethical, it stood
differentiated from all previous religions by being, on the one
hand, independent of special polities, able to create the varied
and dissimilar polities or organs needed for its ever-changing
work ; and, on the other hand, capable of living in all places,
under all kinds and orders of government, empires, monarchies,
or democracies. The only thing it could not tolerate was the
government that, either by civil persecution or by the absorp
tion ofthe religion into a civil institution, denied its right to live.
V. By means of His religion He created a new ideal of life,
bound together the service of God and the service of man.
By virtue of the ethical qualities of the God He revealed, love
of Him became the mainspring of an obedience which evoked
universal beneficence. By virtue of the ethical qualities of
His own person, love of Himself became love of all mankind ;
service of Him, service of the race.
vi. It is this religion which constitutes the difference and
measures the distance between the ancient and the modern,
the Eastern and the Western worlds. The contrast between
the ancient and modern, especially in all that concerns the
higher religions and humaner moral ideals, is an impres
sive witness to the personal pre-eminence and grandeur of
Christ. The contrast between the Eastern and Western

380 THE PERSON OF CHRIST
worlds, especially in those forces that work for order and
progress, freedom and mobility, ethical achievement and
public conscience, is an invincible testimony to the per
manence and efficiency of the moral energies which He
embodies. vii. The most remarkable fact in the history of His religion
is the continuous and ubiquitous activity of His person. He
has been the permanent and efficient factor in its extension
and progress. Under all its forms, in all its periods, and
through all its divisions, the one principle alike of reality
and unity has been and is devotion to Him. He is the
Spirit that inhabits all the Churches, the law that rules the
conscience and binds into awed and obedient reverence
the saintly men who live within all the communions that
bear His name.
viii. Love of Him has remained the inspiration and com
manding passion of His Church. Other loves have died, or,
by being embalmed in literature, have become means of
cultivating the imagination ; but this love has been, as it were,
an immortal spirit, incapable of death, though capable of
being incarnated in infinite modes or forms of moral and
social being. It is the only thing in the region of moral
motive that can be described as an imperishable yet con
vertible force, whose changes of form never mean decrease of
energy or loss of power.
ix. This love is even more remarkable for its ethical
quality than for its energy and persistence. It has changed
the bad into the good ; has even created in wise, commonplace,
or even mean and ignoble men emotions so dissimilar as the
passion for holiness, the enthusiasm of huinanity, the zeal to
save, the hatred of oppression, the love of liberty and of
truth. It has quickened the imagination of the poet and
the painter, of the warrior and the statesman, and may be
described as the one love which has been most universal
where most consciously personal : the men who have most

IN THEOLOGY AND THE CHURCH. 38 1
absolutely loved Christ have been also the men who have
most truly loved all men and the whole of man.
x. But its action on the Godward emotions and acts has
been no less marvellous. It has made love of God a reality,
has caused men to feel that they are capable of loving Him
and He capable of being loved. Without the person of Christ
the language of adoration, of gratitude, of wonderment, in
which the Church has for all the centuries of its existence
spoken its love of God, would cease to have any meaning or
any reason or any right to be.
xi. And this means that His person has affected the theistic
conception which He originally created. It has prevented the
Monotheism becoming a mere abstraction, a Pantheism on
the one hand, or a Deism on the other. This is the result
that could least of all have been foreseen. The action of thc
Person might have been expected either to hide the fiL6vo<; ^eo'9
or dissolve Him into a plurality ; but it has done the very
opposite — made the fi6vo<; absolute and the 6e6<; real.
xii. The life of the religion, then, lies in the person of its
Founder; all that it has done for the race is but a form of His
action within and through it. He has given actuality to its
theistic beliefs, has been the motive, impulse, and law to all
its beneficences. The sense or consciousness of His abiding
presence constitutes His Church ; the emotions He awakens
determines all its worship and all its desires. Even where this
seems most concealed, it is yet present as the veritable seat and
principle of life. The Virgin may seem to hold the first place
in what may be called the more vulgar Roman worship ; but
she does it not as woman, but as mother ; she stands there
not in her own right, but by virtue of her Son. The opposite
fault has been committed in many an evangelical sermon ;
the Son has been so preached as to hide the Father, or to
deny Him by absorbing those ethical qualities which are most
distinctively Divine. But here, too, the Son could not be
without the Father, or the Father without the Son ; both were

382 THE CREDIBILITY OF THE ONCE INCREDIBLE.
needed to the being of either ; and so the emphasis on one was
only a crude way of expressing their unity. The historical
fact then remains— the person of Christ has given reality to
the life of the Christian religion, and actuality both to its
belief in God and to the God it has believed in.
5. We come back, then, to consider the two views as they
stand at the bar of history. The world has for now almost
nineteen centuries had experience of the two interpretations
of Christ — the Ethnico-Judaic and the Apostolical, the natural
and the supernatural ; and may we not say with this remark
able result — that the supernatural offers a more reasonable
philosophy of this experience than the natural? For the
attempt to connect Christ with all men and the whole past of
man has been more than justified by His continued creative
presence in what was then future and is now past, and His
easy pre-eminence over the conscience and the conduct of
what is still present. What seemed so incredible then appears
so credible now that apology has become the duty of disbelief
rather than belief ; culture is now almost as coy of denial as it
was then of faith. Something surely is due to the foresight,
or inspiration, or whatever the quality may be called, of these
Apostolical men. If they had been guided by probability,
they could never have believed as they did ; but apologetics
can now argue that all the probabilities are on the side of
the then improbable. History is a scene of order and pro
gress. Failure may belong to the individual, but development
is proper to the whole. Yet if there be ordered movement in
history, then the most necessary person of history is the person
most necessary to the movement and the order. And as it
does not lie open to doubt that this is Jesus Christ, it follows
that He is the last person that can be conceived as an accident
or a creation of chance. And what is the Apostolical theology
but an attempt to explain His place in the providential order
of the world. His necessity on the one hand to God, and on
the other to man ? And have not the very things that made

WISDOM JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN. 383
the attempt seem then absurd become to-day its best vindica
tion ? Wisdom has been justified of her children.
6. The theology which embodied the attempts is marked
by singular originality. Its way is its own. In order to be it
had to effect equal changes in the current and conventional
ideas of God and man. Ofthe.se ideas there were many types,
though only two that could have influenced the New Testa
ment writers — Judaic or Hebrew Deism, and Hellenic Theism
and Mythology ; but the apostolic theology most significantly
differs from both. In its notion of God it is not deistic, like
Judaism ; does not so divide God and man that the two can
be conceived only as opposites, mechanically related — i.e.,
as forces and not as spirits, with natures too different and
opposite to be capable of interpenetrative being. And it is
not on the theistic side monistic, like Greek thought, and on
the historical mythological, like Greek religion — i.e., it docs
not, on the one hand, reduce Deity to the substance that
remains unchanged amid all the changes of phenomenal
existence ; nor, on the other, does it by a process either of
apotheosis or of generation abolish all distinction between
God and man. Apotheosis implied that God and man were
so near in status and in dignity that the gods into whose
ranks the man was admitted were as little creators and as
little by their own might or right immortal as the man ;
while he by entering their society did not cease to be a
creature, nor did he become in any tolerable modern sense
Divine. And so descent from the gods did not involve
Deity as the Apostolic writers understood it or as we under
stand. But the remarkable thing in their theology is that
by the way it took Monotheism was made absolute; yet
the relation of God to man made real, organic, continuous.
God was made man's Father, man God's son ; and the very
notion of their relation involved the affinities of their natures,
the distinctness of their personalities, and the community and
connection of their lives. And where both were so conceived

384 THE THEOLOGY INCARNATED IN DEEDS.
it was really a thing most reasonable, consonant, as it were, to
the higher and universal or common nature, that God by the
method of incarnation should become fully known to man,
and man realize His ideal and organic being before God.
7. The theology did not stand alone ; it is but one of the
many creations which came from the Spirit of Christ. He
created the men who made the theology, the society they
formed, the ideals they followed, the things they achieved.
And their continued being is but the permanent effect wit
nessing to the permanence of the cause. Through faith in
Him faith in God has lived upon the earth ; and the sense
of His presence has been not only the life of His rehgion,
but of all its manifold beneficences. Certainly this theology
cannot be construed as a mere chapter in the history of
speculation, for within it live the forces that have made the
religion of Christ the religion of civilized man and man it has
civilized.

DIVISION II.
CHRIST THE INTERPRETATION OF GOD.

CHAPTER I.
THE GODHEAD.
§ I.— The Doctrine of the Godhead and Revelation.
THE interpretation of God consists of two distinct yet
complementary parts — a doctrine of God and of the
Godhead. God is deity conceived in relation, over against
the universe, its cause or ground, its law and end ; but the
Godhead is deity conceived according to His own nature,
as He is from within and for Himself. God is the Godhead
in action within the sphere of the related and the conditioned ;
the Godhead is God in the region of transcendental existence,
yet with His immanent activities so exercised that His absolute
being is concrete and complex, as opposed to abstract and
simple. God is an object of natural knowledge — i.e.. He can
be known from His works, or by a process of regressive and
analytical thought ; but the Godhead is a subject of super
natural revelation — i.e., can be known only as man is in a sense
taken into the secrets of the Divine nature. By the light of
reason we may know that God is, but what He is we can
know only as He Himself speaks. Yet the natural knowledge
is incomplete without the supernatural. What reason reaches
is an abstraction, or series of co-ordinated qualities, streams
25

386 revelation changes the idea of god
whose course is beneficent, tendencies that make for righte
ousness ; but what revelation discloses is the life within — the
motives, the emotions, the inner nature of Him who speaks ;
in a word, it changes our idea of God into knowledge of the
Godhead. But this means that man no longer looks at God
through the eyes of nature, but rather at nature through the
eyes of God — i.e., he thinks of the Divine in the categories of
the Divine, or through a consciousness of its creation. And
this constitutes the distinction between natural and revealed
religion : the former is God read through nature, or inter
preted in its terms ; the latter is nature read through God,
or interpreted in terms of a consciousness pervaded by His
word. The characteristic of a theology reasoned out from
the principles of a revealed religion may, then, be said to be
this — the inner qualities and constitution of the Godhead are
made so to penetrate the notion of God that all His outer
action is conceived as a transcript of His inner being. The
logical consequence of the revealed doctrine of the Godhead
is thus a new doctrine of God.*
Now, it must be here quite frankly stated that a doctrine of
the Godhead as the basis of a doctrine of God, is possible only
as a result of revelation and through it. We are not here
concerned with a natural theism, but with a theology whose
formal source is a revelation. If we refuse to believe that
God has so acted and spoken as to reveal Himself, we can
have no data for a positive conception of the Godhead, for
we deny that we have any means of knowing what He is.
But if belief in God be in harmony with reason, the belief in
revelation cannot be contrary to it ; nay, the real contradiction
would be disbelief. Agnosticism assumes a double incom-
' Cf Butler on "the essence of natural religion" and "the essence of
revealed," each taken as an "inward principle" — the former consisting "in
religious regards to God the Father Almighty," the latter " in rehgious
regards to the Son and to the Holy Ghost" ("Analogy," pt. ii., c. i). It
seems to me the difference is better indicated by the change worked by the
notion of the Godhead in the doctrine of God.

INTO KNOWLEDGE OF THE GODHEAD. 387
petence — the incompetence not only of man to know God, but
of God to make Himself known. But the denial of competence
is the negation of Deity. For the God \\-ho could not speak
would not be rational, and the God who would not speak
could not be moral ; and so if Deity be at once intelhgent and
moral, there must be some kind or form of revelation. And
this revelation must, from its very idea, be the testimony of
God touching Himself, for what is not this does not reveal.
Nothing that man can learn of nature by research into nature,
nothing that he can discover of truth by the exercise of his
own faculties, however late, unless it be supernaturally com
municated, in his personal or collective history the discovery
may come, belongs properly to the idea of revelation. Were
it, as Lessing conceived it,^ simply education, a means of
hastening and directing human development, then, as adding
nothing to what man can find within the terms of nature, it
could have no right to its name. Then were this its sphere,
its action would be mischievous rather than beneficent
Whatever shortens the course of human development stunts
it The search for truth is the inspiration of reason ; it is
because man knows that he does not know, that he is com
pelled to seek for knowledge. Necessity is the mother of
invention ; without conscious ignorance there would be no
motive to discovery and no discipline from it. Revelation,
then, can only concern what is so above nature as to be
beyond the power of man to discover or of nature to disclose ;
in other words, it must relate to God, proceed from Him, and
be concerned with Him. But though it be His testimony
touching Himself, yet it must enter the consciousness of man
through his history and in the forms of his experience. And
it is here that Christ takes His place. He is the supreme
revelation ; in Him the consciousness of God and man exist in
purity and in perfection. To both He is essentially related.
By virtue of His transcendental relations He has the con-
' Supra, p. 194.

388 DOCTRINE OF GOD HEBREW AND ROMAN,
sclousness which qualifies Him to deliver the Divine testimony
to the Divine ; by virtue of His being in history and within
the terms of our experience. He has the generic or racial con
sciousness which enables Him to deliver His message to man.
He is, as it were, the immanent intelligence of God become a
corporate intelligible to man ; and so is hke a middle term
created by the reason that would be interpreted for the use of
the interpretative reason. He so knows God from within, and
so represents what He knows to the humanity He came to
live within, that for man to interpret Him is to interpret God
as He is to Himself — a Godhead while a God. The inter
pretation of God in the terms of the consciousness of Christ
may thus be described as the distinctive and differentiating
doctrine of the Christian religion.
§ II. — The Doctrines of God and the Godhead.
These doctrines, as they exist in Christian theology, have
each a very different history and function. The belief in the
Godhead is specifically Christian, but the belief in God as
specifically Hebrew. The former was created by the attempt
to understand the person of Christ, or explain and unfold the
contents of His consciousness ; but the latter was inherited, a
gift which Judaism gave to Christianity.* And the processes
which elaborated the beliefs into doctrines were as different as
their sources. The doctrine which conceives God as Law
giver and Ruler had as the main or active agent in its
formation the Latin Church. But the doctrine which con
ceives the Godhead as a Trinity, or a threefold distinction of
Persons subsisting in a unity of essence, had as the active
agent in its formation the Greek Church. Each Church, as we
have seen, exercised its formative activity under different con
ditions, the plastic agency being Roman law and polity in the
one case, and Greek philosophy in the other. The result is
' Supra, pp. 64-66.

of the godhead christian and greek. 389
two distinct and very different conceptions, which have not
only failed to modify or correct each other, but have even
retained what we may term the antipathies of their respective
creators. It is significant that the Greek Church was deter
mined by its conception of Christ's person to its doctrine
of the Godhead, but the Latin Church by its conception of
God to the doctrine of His work. This means that in the
former case the material factor of the doctrine was native
to the religion, but in the latter case it was alien. And
as a consequence the two doctrines have remained in a
remarkable degree independent and unrelated, in a state
of juxtaposition rather than of mutual permeation. The
Latin God has been too forensic, the Greek Godhead too
metaphysical, to be incorporated in a single homogeneous
notion. God, forensically conceived, becomes the Absolute
Sovereign whose will is law, whose function is administration
and judgment ; the Godhead, metaphysically construed, be
comes a number of differentiated Persons, whose unity depends
upon a community of essence. The more the stress falls on
the legal character and relations of God, the less ethical they
grow ; and the more metaphysical the construction of the God
head becomes, it is the more reduced to a series of personalized
abstractions, whose relations are logical rather than real.
Neither was sufficiently determined by the determinative
element in the consciousness of Christ In the Greek theology
Father and Son are so used to denote immanent relations in
the Godhead, that their significance for man as a whole is,
though not lost, yet weakened and impoverished ; and in the
Latin theology the ideas of Sovereign and Lawgiver are so
emphasized that those of Father and son almost disappear.
In the former. Paternity is not allowed to penetrate the whole
Godhead over against man, or Sonship to penetrate man as a
whole over against God ; but Fatherhood is so confined to the
first Person of the Trinity and Sonship to the second, that
God tends to lose the unity and reality of His moral relations

390 IMMANENT ELEMENTS IN THE GODHEAD
to man, and man the unity and reality of his moral being
before God. In the latter, God becomes so much a juristic
and judicial person, and man so much a civil subject, that the
paternal and filial relations are virtually transmuted into
political. As a natural consequence, neither theology did justice to
the affinities and relations of God and man. It is dangerous,
where the field is so vast and the opinions are so varied, to
make broad statements or use too general terms ; but we may
say that to both theologies, though for different reasons, the
Sonship of Christ was so interpreted as to reduce man's from
a reality to little more than a figure of speech. He was Son
by nature, we sons by adoption. He endowed the humanity
He assumed with the filial dignity and rights proper to His
Deity ; and so constituted a new type and instituted a new
and correspondent order of being. As Son by essential Divine
nature. Fie was Only Begotten ; as Son in His assumed human
nature. He was First Born. His Sonship as the /jLovoyev^'i
or " unigenitus " was incommunicable, but His Sonship as the
¦jrpo>T6T0K0<i or " primogenitus " was communicable. As the
property of His humanity man may participate in it, and
become, like Him, a son, but by adoption, not by nature.
But this made the Divine Fatherhood and the human son-
ship alike unreal. He who is no son by nature can never
become a son by adoption. Before a child can be the
adopted son of any man, he must be the real son of some
man ; and so if it was only by adoption that God became
our Father and we His sons, then we could never in any
true sense be His sons nor He in any true sense our Father.*
' The question touched upon in the text is very fundamental for the
interpretation of the Nicene and post-Nicene theology. There are points
that raay be raised in correction of the above exposition that really support
it. Athanasius, fox exaraple, strongly affirms the participation of man in
the nature of the 'V\'ord who created him, but he relates man as a creature
to God through the Word rather than through the Son. This means that
his governing idea is here philosophical rather than religious, that while

NOT FUSED INTO A CONCEPTION OF GOD. 391
And this means that unless Godhead and God be alike
interpreted in the terms of Fatherhood, the interpretation will
remain inadequate and incomplete.
This, then, defines the order of our discussion. We must
first state the doctrine of the Godhead, and then attempt to
bring it into relation with the doctrine of God ; in other words,
through the immanent nature and relations of Deity we must
approach Deity in His outward relations and activities.
§ III.— Christ and the Godhead.
The point, then, from which our constructive endeavour
must start is this — the determinative element in the con
sciousness of Christ is the filial. He directly and intuitively
knew His own Sonship, and by its means He made known
he has on the one hand come through the New Testament to the immanent
relations of the Godhead, he has on the other approached the relation of
man to God through the Schools of Alexandria. Hence the Word makes
man in His own image (xard rrjv eavrov elKova ewoirjaev avroi/s), and gives to
him something of His own power, that he may be able to abide for ever in
beatitude (" De Incar. Verbi," c. 3). And the Maker becoraes the Redeemer,
is made man that men raight be made God, (avrbs ydp evr]v6pimj]<Tev, Iva
rjpeis deonoiridapev) (Ibid., c. 54). Cf " Contra Arian.," I. xi. 39, iXXa Oebs
a>v, vor epov yeyovev avdpanros, tva pdWov rjpds 6eoiroij](7rj. Bat though he,
of course, with every degree of emphasis and insistence identifies Son
and Word, he does not with similar lucid emphasis identify man's par
ticipation by nature in the Sonship with his participation in the Word.
And even this participation is not by nature or real constitution, but by
grace and as a donum superadditum (irXeov n ;faptfd/iei'Of avro'is). Hence
Athanasius is here doubly defective, for he did not bring his philosophy
and his theology into connection and consistency either with each other
or with nature. He does indeed say in a vague way that in Him the
whole creation is created and adopted, (koi ev avra irdira r) Krims Kri^erai
Ka\ vioiroielrai) ("Contra Arian.," III. xxiv. 9); but when he comes to
detailed exposition the filial relation becomes a thing not of nature but
of adoption, created thus rather than restored. Cf " Contra Arian.,"
II. xix. and xxi., §§ 57-61, I. xi. 37; "De Deer.," VII. iii. 9, 10. His
notion of the primary and fundamental relations of God to man are^
therefore, even with his donum superadditum thrown in, more philo
sophical than religious ; he has applied the philosophical idea to Christ
rather than made the religious and filial idea which Christ embodied.

392 FATHERHOOD AND SONSHIP CORRELATIVES,
God's Fatherhood. The two were correlative and mutually
inclusive ; the being of the Son involved the Father's, and
the Father was in character and quality as was the Son.
The regulative element in His mind became the determina
tive idea in the Apostolic. The New Testament interpretation
of Christ is in its ultimate analysis an interpretation of the
Father in the terms of the Son.
In the mind of Jesus, Father and Son were conceived as
forming a unity over against man. The relation the Father'
had to Him He had to no other ; the relation He had to the
penetrate and transform his notions of God, of man, and of their mutual
relations. And this was the common and accepted position of the Greek
Fathers. Cf Greg. Thaum., " Hom.," iv. , aW ovk ea-ri irapd a-e aXKos (fiva-ei
Yibs Oeov ; Cyril. Jer., " Catecheses," vii. 7, — where Christ's Sonship as
Kara tpva-iv is contrasted with man's as Kara Oea-iv, Epiphanius, " Ancor.,"
49, holds that there is no Sonship like Christ's, or that ought to be com
pared with His; other sonships are Kara x^P'") b"' He is the cjiva-tKms
vios. Joh. Dam., " De Orth. Fid.," iv. 8, Kai avBpairos yeyove (6 Yibs rov
Qeov), yeyovapev Se Kal rjpeis 81 avrov uioi Geoii, vloderrjdevres Sid roC ^airrla-
paros' avros 6 <^vorei Yibs rou Qeov, irparoroKOS ev rjpiv rois Qearei KaX xapiri
vlois Qeov yevopevQLS Kal dSe\<j>ois avrov xpriP-riritraai, ycyoi'ei'. We may
express the general idea thus : the primary relation, both as natural and
supernatural, stood in the Word, the renewed or restored relation was
constituted in the Son — i.e., men were creatures by nature, but sons
by grace and adoption. In this case the West followed the East, and
made Fatherhood and Sonship as immanent to Deity real, but as external
adventitious and more or less figurative. The schoolmen introduced a
distinctionJDetween Fatherhood personaliter aad essentialiter : the imman-
ent relations— z>., those of Father to Son within the Godhead— were
personaliter; but the external relations — i.e., those of the whole God
head to man — were essentialiter. This was described as a distinction not
" secundum rem, sed tantum secundum modum " — i.e., the Fatherhood and
Sonship were in each case alike real, though differing as to mode. In the
one case it was a relation of persons within the same essence ; in the other
a relation of essences, the one being causative, the other created: the
whole Trinity was Father of man, man was son of the collective Trinity.
And so under these distinctions room for distinct types of sonship could be
found. But see Pearson on this " vulgar distinction," (" On the Creed,"
Art. I.) Of Patristic thought as a whole we may say, then, it tended so to
emphasize Paternity within the Godhead as to obscure and lose God's
Paternity within the universe.

AND DENOTIVE OF A SOCIAL UNITY. 393
Father no other person had. They two were so related that
each was known only to the other, and could therefore only
by and through the other be made known. The unity was
so real that to see the Son was to see the Father, to know
the Father was to know the Son. Hence, while Jesus con
ceived Father and Son as distinct from each other. He also
conceived them as having a common being and as sustaining
common relations to man. In their mutual relations they were
distinct, but in their common relations they were a unity ; and
in what was mutual there was nothing that involved disrup
tion or division in what was common. The relations were
not voluntary, but necessary ; the distinctions not matters of
choice, but of nature or essence. It is true that in order to
the being of a Son there must be a Father, but it is no less
true that in order to the being of a Father there must be
a Son. Fatherhood is no older than Sonship, the one is
only as the other is ; in other words, if Fatherhood is of
the essence of Deity, Sonship must be the same. And to
Christ God does not become Father — He is Father just as
He is God ; and He Himself does not become Son — He is
Son, and were He not Son He would not be. And what
the Apostolic writers attempt is to express the notion, which
they owed to Christ, of a God who is both Father and Son,
who is a unity which is the home of distinctions, the distinc
tions not dissolving the unity nor the unity cancelling the
distinctions. They remain as consciously and even sternly
monotheistic as the Hebrews, but they are not Hebrew mono
theists. They use language that others may feel inconsistent
with monotheism, but that they do not, for they have felt
their way into an order of ideas which combines and har
monizes elements that would have seemed alien to the older
thought ; but all these elements make Deity infinitely more
rich and gracious and beautiful than any man or any religion
had before imagined Him to be.
What the new order of ideas was we may represent some-

394 IN ABSOLUTE LONELINESS NO LIFE.
what thus : — God is love ; but love is social, can as little
live in solitude as man can breathe in a vacuum. In order
to its being there must be a subject, bestowing love, and
an object, rejoicing in the bestowment ; without the active
forthgoing and the passive reflection and the return it could
not be, for absolute and simple loneliness of being would be a
state of complete lovelessness. If, then, God is according
to His essence love. He must be by nature social ; for
if He were an infinite simplicity, then emotion, with all
its complex relations and mani.''old interactions, would be
to Him unknown. But the same necessities of thought
meet us from another side. God is reason ; but a reason that
has nothing objective is no active intelligence, and has none
of the conditions that make intelligence possible. A speech
less reason would be one in which rationality were either latent,
and so a mere possibility, or impotent, and so a mere passive
reflector, if even so much ; it could not be an infinitely perfect
mind, which cannot be other than infinitely active. But the
mind that is this must have all the conditions and causes of
activity within itself and by necessity of nature. For if they
are outside or external to the nature, then it is not perfect ;
and if they are not by necessity, then as matters of will
they once were not, and before they were Deity would be
imperfect, and they might never have been, which leaves the
perfection of Dei Cyan accident or chance, and so no reality. And
therefore we need to conceive, beside the Logos that ever abides
in God, the Logos that ever goes forth from Him. Without
the one the other could not be ; the being of both is neces
sary to the being of either. So much ancient philosophy had
perceived, but what Christian theology did was to change the
abstract process into the terms of a concrete relation. The
translation of the idea of an articulative Thought and an articu
lated Reason into the notion ofthe Father and the Son, was the
transformation of abstract God into concrete Godhead, which
is no simplicity, but a unity where love and thought are

THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION ORIGINAL. 395
ever in exercise, and all the graces and beatitudes of social
existence are things of the Divine essence, necessary to the
nature of God.
Now, this conception was not reached by a dialectical
process, nor was it a creation of scientific or •elaborative
thought ; but it was the result of intuition or inspiration, or
whatever we may term the process by which the imagination,
possessed and transfigured by a commanding personality,
becomes spontaneously creative of other and higher things
than it had ever dreamed of. It was a conception of remark
able originality, without parallel or analogue in any religion
or philosophy ; yet it gave to the idea of God an actuality
which every religion and every philosophy had felt after
without being able to find. These are matters capable of
clearest historical proof. Parallels to the Christian Trinity
have indeed been sought both by old and recent scholars
and theologians in Greek philosophy and mythology and in
Hindu religion ; but in each case the differences are radical.
The Hindu Trimurti only represents the adaptation of a
Pantheistic idea to historical conditions. The co-ordination
of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is recent, and may be described
as the result of a religious diplomacy, all the more real that it
was unconscious and undesigned, and a metaphysical specula
tion that acted here just as it had acted everywhere. Each
of the deities had a prior and very ancient history. They
run back into the Vedic period, and are the survivals of
different mythological schools and tendencies. Brahma (mas
culine) is the deification of the priestly idea, especially thc
act and efficacy of prayer ; Vishnu is a form of the sun-god,
who as Surya or Savitri moved like a beneficent and radiant
spirit across the face of the sky ; and Siva is the survivor of
the ancient storm-gods, who swept from their homes in the
Himalayas with destructive force down upon the plains.
These do not represent one religion, but distinct religions,
or rather many different religions, each with its own customs,

396 THE GODHE.-VD NEITHER HINDU NOR GREEK.
festivals, modes and objects of worship, and even geographical
distribution. Then the Brahma (neuter) in whom they are
co-ordinated is the universal substance or soul ; of him or it
all phenomenal being is a manifestation. He is no conscious
reason, no»home of ethical relations and distinctions, but only
the ultimate essence or basis of all things. Every god and
every man and every creature is in him as much as the sacred
triad, and in all he appears or becomes incarnate. In other
words, the system is a polytheistic and mythological Pantheism.
But the Christian idea is the opposite of all this. God is
personal, conscious, ethical ; the Godhead expresses this per
sonal, conscious, and ethical being as immanent and essential.
Man cannot be absorbed into God, or God individualized and
distributed in man. The Persons in the Godhead are incap
able of absorption into more abstract forms of being ; they
represent God not as an ever unfolding and enfolding sub
stance, but as a necessary and eternal communion, the home
of life and love.
The affinities with Greece seem more natural, and, so far as
real, they indicated necessities of thought which the Christian
Godhead satisfied. No modern theologian would maintain
with Cudworth that the Christian Trinity could be found in
Plato * ; nor would any modern scholar argue with Vossius that
the Godhead was represented by certain triads in the Greek
and Latin mythologies,' or with Creuzer that there was em
balmed in the figures and songs of the temples an ancient
intuition of a triad or deity which was three-in-one.' But the
affinities are now sought in speculative tendencies and phrases,
especially those ofthe Hellenistic and Alexandrian philosophies,
which show thought feeling after some mode of breaking up,
as it were, the solitude of Deity, and saving Him from the
impotence which clings to a mere isolated Absolute. These
' " Intellectual Sys.," vol. ii., pp. 364 ff
' " De Theol. Gentili.," lib. viii., c. 12.
' " Symbolik und Mythol.," vol. i., p. 45.

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 397
affinities are represented by the ideas of Plato, the logos of
the Stoics and of Philo, and the cEons of the Gnostics ; and
they no doubt signify attempts to discover categories under
which the Infinite could be conceived as related to the finite,
as actual in Himself and as active within it In this respect
they have the greatest possible significance for the need of-the
Godhead in order to the conception of a really living God. But
their meaning is primarily philosophical, while the Christian
idea is primarily religious. It is the creation of our supreme
religious consciousness, and it satisfies our supreme religious
need. The love which the Godhead makes immanent and
essential to God, gives God an altogether new meaning and
actuality for religion ; while thought is not forced to conceive
Monotheism as the apotheosis of an almighty will or an
impersonal ideal of the pure reason.
§ IV.— The Godhead as a Doctrine.
There is indeed to be no attempt made here at a scholastic
or scientific construction of the doctrine. This would not be
a difficult thing to do, for it is easy to combine the ancient
terms into reasonable formulae ; yet our purpose is not to
express in familiar technical language the conclusions of the
schools, but to exhibit and to emphasize the source, signifi
cance, and bearings of those essential ideas which every
doctrine of the Godhead has aimed at expressing, yet has
often failed to express.
I. The doctrine of the Godhead is, in origin and essence,
an attempt to represent to thought the determinative element
in the consciousness of Christ. He is God's Son; and because
Son of God, He becomes Son of man. The filial relation
to man is the temporal form of the eternal relation to God.
This Sonship is so essential to His consciousness that He
would not be what He is without it — i.e.. He would not be
at all.

398 the godhead no modal trinit'v
2. What is true of Him as the ideal Son of man, is true of
the humanity He embodies. It, too, is son of God, exists
before the mind and heart of God as son, and has so existed
ever since it was conceived — i.e., in our time-conditioned
speech, from eternity. But this filial relation of the created
to God is made possible by Fatherhood and Sonship being
eternal in God — i.e., no matters of will, but of nature, facts of
His essence, not results or products of choice or volition. It
is this idea that comes into being with Christ Fatherhood
is the essence of God, therefore Sonship is the same ; and
both are realized in the only forms and under the only
conditions possible where God is concerned — outside or above
the categories of space and time, where all distinctions of here
and there, before and after, alike cease.
3. The distinctions these terms denote are immanent and
essential. No theory of external modes or manifestational
forms and aspects can satisfy the conditions. For what we
need is not a variety in our modes and forms of apprehending
Deity, but such a conception as realizes Deity — as, if we may
so speak, represents Him to the imagination as an organism
whose life is love, active and passive, a loving and being loved.
The SabeUian notion is as shallow as it is false ; it may
satisfy the intellect which thinks that the mysteries of the
Divine nature are amply explained if stated in terms which
can be worked into the processes of formal logic. But the
supreme necessity of faith is one with the ultimate necessity
of thought — viz., a God who can be related to the universe, one
who is not an infinite abstraction or empty simplicity, but
who is by nature a living and, as it were, productive and
producing Being. To be this He must have immanent and
essential modes and forms of activity, and because He has
these He may have outer relations created by energies freely
exercised. 4. These inner and essential modes or forms are not known
to us by nature, but by revelation. Reason may see that

the only significant distinctions real. 399
they must be if God is to be a living God, but what they are
can be known only if He spontaneously speak or reveal
Himself This He did in Jesus Christ ; and what He showed
was the Father-Sonship. There may be other infinite modes
and forms, but here we know only what has been made known.
The terms used are personal, denote personal relations, and
these of the tenderest order ; but they ^re relations realized
under the forms of the Divine and Infinite, not of the finite.
Beside Father and Son one other such personal mode we
know — the Holy Spirit He proceeds from the Father and
the Son, is co-ordinated with them, has the same rank and the
same essential being ; and has the function, so far as the outer
relations are concerned, of being the agent through which
the Fatherhood is ever presented that the sonship may be
reahzed without as it exists within.
5. As the conception is peculiarly and specifically a con
ception of revealed religion, it ought, when articulated into
a doctrine, to be stated as nearly as possible in the terms
and according to the Spirit of the revelation. The Greek
terminology was mainly philosophical, and what it did was to
translate the conception into a philosophy rather than into
a theology. It is well that we distinguish even the most
audacious and brilliant translations from the original and
the reality. Ovaia is the abstract now of God, now of the
Godhead ; but we shall know better what we mean if we keep
to the concrete, and speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as one
God. He is one, but not as the atom or monad is one, but
as the organism. He is a unity ; but a unity and a simplicity
are opposites — the one is the synonym of indiscrete and
undifferentiated being, but the other of being rich, complex,
manifold. An infinite simplicity were incapable of movement
or relation, but an infinite unity must be the bosom of all
distinction and difference. God is a unity, but He is not
a simplicity, and so can be more truly described in the terms
of ethical and concrete than of metaphysical and abstract

400 the new problem.
existence. "Person" may be an excellent name for those
immanent distinctions we know as Father, Son, and Spirit,
who together constitute the unity of God. It does not mean
individual, a single, separated being, incapable of further
division, and so may well denote those modes or forms of
inner being which realize without dissolving the unity. But
we are nearer reality if we conceive God in the terms of the
Gospels than if we define Him in the categories of the
schools. 6. We have now to see how or in what way the notion of
the Godhead affects our conception of God and of the world
to which He stands related, and whether it is capable of being
formulated into the material or determinative principle of a
Christian Theology.

CHAPTER II.
THE GODHEAD AND THE DEITY OF NAIURAL
THEOLOGY.
§ I. — God in Theism and in Theology.
IN order the better to appreciate in what way the notion
of the Godhead has affected the conception of God, we
must distinguish two conceptions — the speculative or philo
sophical, and the positive or religious. There is an idea of
Deity which is the last deduction or final dream of a speculative
Theism, and there is an idea of Deity which is the primary or
material principle of constructive theology ; and these two
ideas are quite as remarkable for their differences as for their
affinities. In the one case Deity is a name for a deduction
from certain necessities of thought, but in the other case
for the ultimate and causal reality of religion. Theism may
be satisfied with the rational basis or scientific form of its
conception, but it has no means or instrument that can
transform it into the soul of a religion. Theology may
assume the legitimacy of the rational processes which have
given the theistic result, but it cannot accept the result a.s
adequate or sufficient for its purpose ; before it can begin to
build it must have a richer and completer doctrine of God.
Theism construes Deity from the standpoint of mind and
nature — conceives nature as an effect which needs to be
explained, God as its cause or sufficient reason, and mind as
the organ which brings the two into reasoned relations or the
26

402 IN THEISM GOD IS ABSTRACT,
unity of an intelligible notion. It has to determine whether
there is any evidence of His existence ; how He is to be
conceived, whether as substance or reason or will ; how He
is related to the world, and whether He exercises over and
within it a controlling activity at once intelligent and moral.
But in these discussions Theism may with equal truth be
described as either the last chapter of a philosophy or the first
of a theology. Its methods, principles, formulae, arguments,
are all philosophical : the systems it criticizes are the philo
sophies ; the authorities it invokes arc philosophers. God is
described in the terms of the schools ; He is either an " Ens
infinitum " or " absolutum " or " unicum," or a " Causa efficiens
prima," or an " Intelligens, a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur
in finem " ; He is either the " Primum et per se agens," or the
" Ultimus Finis," the " Actus Purus," the " Una Substantia," or
" Das Sein " or " Der Geist," or the " Unknown Reality," or the
" Voluntas," by whose energy all things are. As God is in
Theism a metaphysical, so nature is a physical abstraction, as
it were the system of things reduced to a synthesis which
shall more or less co-ordinate and accommodate both the
demands of science and the necessities of religion ; while being
has its qualities denoted by terms like " good " and " evil,"
which have an ethical connotation, but not always an ethical
sense. But in constructive theology the questions and the categories
are altogether different Thought here starts with the data
and the beliefs, the consciousness and the principles, of a
religion and the religious society. God is a being whose
existence is accepted and assumed ; He has been an object of
worship before He has become a subject of thought, and so the
thinker has not to create Him for experience, but to interpret
Him through the experience which He has created. He is not
the unity of physical functions and metaphysical attributes,
which Theism seeks to discover and at once to personalize and
keep impersonal ; but He is the concrete spiritual and ethical

IN TPIEOIOGY HE IS CONCRETE. 403
Being of religion, who is for the intellect because He has been
for the conscience and the heart, who is for thought because
He lives in a religion and has come through a revelation.
And the world theology has to interpret is as concrete as the
God. It is not the abstract nature of Theism, but the world
of actual men, with all that hes as history behind and all that
lives as passion, sin, belief, hope, and reason within them — men
with all their religions and irreligious, states and institutions of
good and evil. Theology, in a word, is the science of a living
God and of His work in and for a living world.
Now, the supreme difficulty of Theism and Theology is one :
How shall we conceive God ? And what we seek from the
doctrine of the Godhead is help towards the solution of this
difficulty. Of all forms of apologetic, what we may term the
tu qiioqite is the most vacant and debased. It is a poor
defence for revealed religion to say, " Natural religion has
difficulties as many and as grave." Two insolubles, a revealed
and a natural, ought to make a man less rather than morc
contented with his faith ; and though revelation does not create
the belief in God, it ought to supply us with a conception of
Him that shall lighten some of the darkness amid which the
spirit gropes when it seeks to see God face to face, and to
know His world somewhat as it is known to Him. And so
we have meanwhile a twofold question : How does the doctrine
of the Godhead affect the conception of God, first, in natural,
secondly, in revealed theology ?
§ II. — The Godhead and the Character of God.
We may describe the change which the notion of the
Godhead effects in the conception of God by saying, that it
completely ethicizes the conception. The history, whether of
rehgion or philosophy, shows that there is indeed nothing
harder to thought than to conceive God as a moral being,
though it is relatively easy to conceive Him as the source

404 THE UNETHICIZED CONCEPTION OF GOD
of all the moralities. He can be the latter as reason or
idea or will, but He can be the former only as it belongs
to His essence or nature to exist in a state of conditioned
and related, or ethical and social activity. God was to
Judaism a lawgiver, the source of His people's morals, but
He was not in the strict sense moral. His nature was
legalized rather than ethicized. The law He instituted was
positive, the creation of His will rather than the transcript
of His nature. On this will His relations to Israel and
Israel's to Him were based ; it was because He so willed that
they were His people and He their God. He was indeed
conceived to be holy and righteous, just and merciful, but
He was these things within the terms of the covenant and
according to the measure of His law. It was not felt to
involve any contradiction to the idea of Him that He should
be the God of the Jews only, though the writer, whose con
ception most nearly approached the ethical, showed signs of
feeling it. It would be much too unqualified to say that He
was to the common mind like the Oriental sovereign, who
may be the source both of law and morality without being
either lawful or moral ; but at least we may say this — that
the law was the regulative idea, and the Divine nature and
relations were conceived under legal rather than moral cate
gories. So inveterate was this regulative idea that Paul could
not quite emancipate himself from it. When he reasons as
a Jew with Jews on the question of their vocation, it becomes
to him a matter of will, settled by an appeal to the Divine
Sovereignty as absolute and ultimate. His argument as to
the election of Israel is a complete contrast to his argument
in proof of the righteousness by faith. The essence of the
one is the conditioned, of the other the unconditioned, action
of God. The field of the action may differ ; in the one case
it may be the history and function of a people, in the other
the change and salvation of a person ; but the significant
thing is, that though both fields are moral, the point empha-

IN ISRAEL AND IN GREECE. 405
sized in the one case is the unmoral power, but in the other
the moral and conditioned grace. The truth is, Paul argues
not as an Apostle with Christians but as a Jew with Jews
when he says, " God is a potter, men are clay ; He can as
He pleases make one vessel to honour and another to dis
honour, and who can resist His will ? " 1 But where Deity is
ethicized He cannot be spoken of as a potter or man as
clay. The use of the figure means that God's power is con
ceived as physical, but where it is conceived as moral the
analogy becomes not only irrelevant but false.
But in Greece the theistic conception, while more abstract
and general, was even less ethicized than in Israel ; as in
the latter it was more political than moral, in the former it
was more metaphysical. The difference was one of nature
because of source. The Hebrew state was a creation of
Deity ; the Greek Deity was a creation of mind. To the
Jew God was the head of his state and the being he
worshipped, but to the Greek the One God was the last
deduction of thought and its supreme object. The reason
that reached Him defined Him ; He was interpreted in its
terms, clothed in its attributes, but did not transcend its cate
gories — i.e.. He remained abstract, logical, impersonal. The
ideas of reason are its ultimate realities ; but it is of their
essence to be ideas, to refuse to become actual, to defy ethical
impersonation. Out of them ethics may be deduced, but they
are themselves metaphysical — beget life, induce action, but
cannot themselves live and act. So Plato's God may be
termed the good, or the beautiful, or the true ; but He is
personalized when the philosopher becomes a poet only to
be depersonalized when the poet relapses into the philo
sopher. The invariable tendency in metaphysics is to the
de-ethicization of a Deity who can be described in terms
neuter and abstract rather than personal and moral.
But in contrast to these stands the Apostolic conception.
¦ Rom. ix. 19-24.

406 THE CHRISTIAN AN ETHICIZED GOD.
God was one to whom Fatherhood and therefore Sonship
were immanent. Personal and therefore moral relation was
of the very essence of His being. A God who could not be
without a Son was a God who could not be without moral
qualities in exercise. The relations that belonged to the very
constitution by virtue of which He was God, involved moral
character, duties, ends. We shall utterly misconceive the
Apostolic mind if we reduce the terms Father and Son
and Spirit into rigid ontological symbols ; the realities they
denote are ethical, metaphors of necessity, but metaphors of
the kind the imagination uses when it speaks of a world
unrealized in the language of the real. Father and Son do
not here denote a Paternity and a Sonship that begin to
be, for in the re;gion of the eternal all the categories of time
cease; but they denote states, relations, that ever were and
ever must be in God. In Him the paternal feeling is eternal,
and the paternal cannot be without the filial ; and for these
to be means that He is the infinite home of all the moral
emotions with all their correlative activities. God conceived
as Godhead is the very manifold of exercised and realized
moral being — a manifold that may be reduced by metaphysics,
whether Theistic or Pantheistic, Nicene or neo-Platonic, to
the barrenness of the wilderness. The main thing is to
adhere to the ethical realities : the thing we cannot afford
to lose is what was won for us from the consciousness of
Christ and its Apostolic interpretation. To hold the eternal
Father-Sonship of God is to hold the essential graciousness
of His being, and the necessary grace of all His acts.
§ III. — The Godhead as it affects the Notions of
Creator and the Creation.
I . The gravest difficulties of Theism are the initial — those
concerned with the idea of the Creator rather than of the
creation. The empirical evidences of His being would be

relation of god to the WORLD. 407
invincible were they not confronted and overpowered by the
more invincible antinomies of the pure reason. The categories
that describe the Deity of pure thought are rather those
of being than of relation and action. The difficulties which
the criticism of Kant so emphasized, in the attempt to rise
from the phenomenal to the transcendental, have their
counterpart in the difficulty of descending from the trans
cendental to the phenomenal. It is harder to connect the
Uncreated with the created than to connect the created
with the Uncreated — i.e., the logical process which seeks to
prove that contingent being must have had an origin and
a sufficient reason, is much simpler and more coherent than
the process which would prove that the primary being is
a personal Cause, who consciously and freely willed to make
the world. For the difficulty in the latter case begins with
the very premiss ; not merely. How shall it be proved ? but.
How shall it be formulated? The creation either was or
was not eternal. If it was, then as it never began to be, it
had no cause, has a being independent, necessary — i.e., is
but a form of the only Divine that is. If it was not eternal,"
then why did it begin to be ? The Creator made it ; but
why did He make it ? and what was He doing before
creation ? Either He was idle or He was active. If He was
idle, then He could not be a perfect or even a good being :
if He was active, then was not this activity creative, and
does not this mean that creation was eternal ? Then what
moved Him to act ? If He was a being of absolute simplicity.
He could have no motive within ; and as there was no
creation, no motive could come to Him from without ; and
even supposing it had come, it could in His absolute simplicity
have found nothing to which it could have appealed. And
even then, if it had been able to move Him, it would, as finite
and shot out of nothing, have represented only the dominion
of chance over the creative and causal Will.
It is evident, then, that the difficulty in the dialectical

408 THE ETHICIZED AS ACTUALIZED DEITY
process that would reason from the First Cause downwards
is initial. If this Cause is conceived to be God, how is God
to be conceived? If we use abstract or impersonal terms,
we may succeed in elaborating a coherent theory. We may
state our notion of the Cause in the terms of Spinoza, and
translate " Deiis " by " Substantia '' ; or in the terms of Hegel,
and, identifying pure Being with pure Thought, resolve creation
into a process of dialectical or logical unfolding ; or in the terms
of Spencer, and make the Ultimate the Unknown which is
manifested to us as persistent force. But these are theories
of being rather than of creation, conceiving phenomena as
modes of the absolute rather than effects of personal will.
If we hold that the Creator is conscious and personal Deity,
yet demand that He be as simple as a form of abstract
and impersonal being, we are at once involved in all the
difficulties of a beginning that cannot be conceived without
a negation of Divine perfection, and of motives and move
ments that cannot be represented in thought without a denial
of the Divine simplicity. These are the difficulties that have
made our Pantheisms, Materialisms, and Agnosticisms seem
so reasonable. From the standpoint of an ordered universe
nothing seems so inevitable as the inference of a causal and
an ordering Mind; but from the infinite Mind as the stand
point or principle of thought, nothing is so full of perplexities
and mutually exclusive or destructive contradictions as the
dialectical process that would relate the creative action, on
the one hand, to the Creator and His past, and, on the other,
the creation to the creative Person or Will.
2. But the Godhead with its completely ethicized Deity
mitigates the gravest of these initial difficulties of Theism.
It does no more than mitigate, for no more is possible ; but
this mitigation represents an immense gain to thought
What increases the conceivability of the Divine action makes
Theism more rationally credible, and so' tends to beget and

IS SOLUTION OF THEISTIC DIFFICULTIES. 409
develop a view as to the order and end of the universe as
moral as the Deity from whom and for whom it is.
A. The Godhead compels us to conceive God as conditioned
in His very being. It belongs to His essence to exist under
and within relations. No abstract of pure thought, no
generalization from our sensuous experiences, can denote or
describe Him. The more we attempt in obedience to some
process of inexorable logic to rarefy our notion of the causal
Being, the less are we able to conceive the Being as cause.
Abstract terms like " Being," " Substance," " the Unknown,"
^'the Unconditioned," "the Absolute," are the results or residue
of mental processes, but represent nothing that can be con
ceived as a real causality. If we speak of simple homogeneous
matter or force, we speak of something we do not know
to exist, that we cannot conceive as existing v/ithout our
own conscious experience, and that no authentic act of the
constructive imagination can make into the cause or sufficient
reason of a varied and reasonable universe. Out of an
abstract of thought we cannot evolve the concrete of ex
perience ; for the very terms that define and express our
ultimate abstraction take from it the power or faculty of
creative movement. But if we take the supreme religious
consciousness of man as our interpretative medium and
conceive God as the Godhead, then our primary and causal
existence ceases to be simple, abstract, dead, and becomes
complex, concrete, living. He is never out of relation ; it
is His nature to be related, and He cannot be without His
related states and distinctions. What we call the Persons
of the Godhead are activities, emotional, intellectual, ethical,
always related and always in exercise. The Absolute is not
mere indifference, or substance homogeneous and indiscrete,
but infinite differences belong to His nature. Creation was
for God not the beginning of action ; He was by essence
active because a Godhead. He did not change from un
conditioned to conditioned being ; His being as related is

4IO ETERNAL FATHERHOOD IS ESSENTIAL LOVE,
conditioned in all its activities. To conceive God as God
head therefore is to escape the paralyzing abstractions of
metaphysics, transcendental and empirical, pantheistic and
agnostic. Our Cause is a concrete of such infinite fulness
and variety that we can well conceive Him as the ideal
home and efficient energy of the universe.
B. But the relations and activities immanent in the
Godhead are less physical than ethical, denoted by terms
expressive of the purest emotions and the most creative
and dependent relations known to man — Fatherhood and
Sonship. These represent love as native to God, and as
eternal as God. For Him it never began to be, for this
is the meaning of the eternal Son.ship. The love of man
has a potential before it has an actual being ; he has the
capability of loving before the reality of love ; but the love
of God had always an actual, never a potential being, for
only so could it be perfect love. In man love is born of
the meeting of susceptible subject and attractive object, but
in God the absolute love had ever perfect reason and room
for active being. Man can never know a father's affection
until he be a father, or woman a mother's love unless she
be a mother. The capacity may be there, but only the
capacity, the aptitude to be, not the actual being. But
the Godhead means that as the Fatherhood and Sonship
have been eternal, so also has the love. It signifies that
God is not the eternal possibility 1 ut the eternal actuality
of love. Hence creation did not mean for God the be
ginning of love, or even any increase of it It might be
an increase in the objects, but not in the affection. The
Son was to the Father the universe ; infinite. He could
absorb without exhausting the affection, while the infinite
affection could be distributed without being diminished or
withdrawn. C. But this eternal love explains the causal impulse, the
beginning of the creation of God. Love may be described as

AND LOVE AN ETERNAL WILL OF GOOD. 41 I
a need that can be satisfied only by giving. What is needed
is another, susceptible, receptive, akin ; what is given is the
best self of the needing, all of himself he has to bestow. Lotze *
has defined "the good in itself" as enjoyed or realized
felicity ; what we term " goods " are means, and become
good only as transmuted into this ; for outside a feeling,
willing, and thinking spirit good has no being. But what
in its nature is this good, this realized felicity ? " It is the
living love which wills the happiness of others.'' And
even this is God ; He is the supreme good which is realized
beatitude, " the living love which wills the happiness '' of all
being. But if He wills its happiness, the life must also be
wihed ; there must be existence that there may be felicity.
And so He wills to create, that the happiness He has willed
may be realized. And this precisely is love, seeking another
that He may give to the other He seeks all within Himself
that is best worth giving. And this love is creation, which
is but God's method of obeying His love in order to the
realization of the felicity He has willed. And so Rothe
argues that love and creation are alike in this — each is
a spontaneous and free giving, a communication of God
Himself, proceeding out of His beatitude in order to the
being of beatitude. Love is no external attribute, needing
created relations in order to its exercise, for it was before
creation, and creation was through it ; and it is no attribute
of pure immanence, for though it lives within Deity, and
has there the necessary conditions of its life, yet it ever
strives from within outwards, struggles, as it were, towards
creation. And so Rothe defines love as the transitive
element in the immanent being of God, and, consequently,
as the bond which binds together His inner and His outer
attributes and action. There must be eternal love that
creation may be. Creation must be that eternal love may
' " Mikrokosmus," vol. iii., p. 608.

412 CREATION NECESSARY, CREATOR NOT NECESSITATED.
realize the happiness it willed. " The whole life and activity
of God ad extra is a loving." *
D. This conception may help us to conceive why and
how creation was necessary while the Creator was not necessi
tated. Franz Hoffmann has most truly said : " Nothing has
given to Pantheism a greater appearance of reasonableness,
and consequently of truth, than the idea that every theistic
theory proceeds necessarily upon the supposition of a certain
contingency of creation, and that the affirmation. Creation is
a free act of God, is identical with the affirmation. It is a
contingent or accidental act of God. But whoever attributes
contingency to God subjects Him, only in a manner exactly
the opposite ofthe pantheistic, to blind fate." ' This is true, for
chance and fate are more nearly synonyms than contraries.
Both terms are expressive of ignorance, inability to explain
the cause or reason of the system or some part of the system
to which we belong. Chance is fate in things individual, falling
out separately, though concurrently ; fate is chance in things
collective, so falling out together as to seem a system. Both are
blind, neither is a reason for the existence or occurrence of any
thing, only an obscure way of saying that no reason is known
or has been found. If, then, we so conceive the Divine will to
create that it appears as arbitrary, or has in it any element of
accident or chance, we do not find in God the suff.cient reason
of creation: He is not the supreme' or the first and final Cause,
but above Him stands some one or some thing which moves
His win, makes Him an instrument, is His God.
This is one of the invincible difficulties of natural Theism
which we may justly expect revelation to solve, or indicate
whether there be any way to a solution. And the solution lies
in the love that must will the happiness of others, and in order
to their happiness must will their being. Julius Muller, indeed,
argued against the position of Rothe, — his man " einer mittel-
> "Theol. Ethik.," vol. i., pp. i66, 167.
' Baader's "Werke," vol. ii., p. 4, footnote by Hoffmann.

PHYSICAL NECESSITY AND MORAL NEED. 413
alterlich romantischen Phantasie," — that "if God had need of the
world, therefore of a being different from Himself, in order to be
what He is according to His essence — viz., love — then this very
love were not absolutely perfect." * This is true enough, for
it is in a sense the premiss of our argument, but it is not here
relevant or in place. What is argued is not that God in order
to be love must create, but something altogether different —
viz., since God is according to His essence love, He could
not but be determined to the creative act There is an
absolute difference between physical necessity and moral
need ; they are not only opposites, but contradictories.
Physical necessity is the negation of freedom ; moral need is
its affirmation. Physical necessity is objective, the com
pulsion of a power without and above ; but moral need is
subjective, a spontaneous and rational movement, obedience
to the idea or law of one's own nature. The imperiousness
of the need, the measure of the constraint, whether it does
or does not leave the possibility of opposed tendencies, depends
on the nature which gives the law. Where in a subject hate
is as possible as love, both nature and love are imperfect; but
where the nature is perfect, so will be the love ; the subject
will have no choice whether he will love or not love — he must
love, the very perfection of his nature not allowing him to do
otherwise. Yet this necessity, if we may now so call it, is
freedom, the act of a Being so perfect that action and essence,
thought and will, intelligence and nature, are unities and
incapable of difference or division. So through the notion of
the Godhead we are able to conceive a Theism which stands
opposed, on the one hand, to an unmotived Deism or reign of
chance, and, on the other, alike to the abstract necessities of
Pantheism and the mechanical necessities of Materialism ; and
affirms that creation is due to the moral perfection of the
Creator, who is so essentially love that He could not but
create a world that He might create beatitude.
• "Christhche Lehre von der Sunde,'' vol. ii., pp. 184, 185.

414 DEISM OR THE ABSOLUTE TRANSCENDENCE.
§ IV. — The Godhead and Providence,
I. The difficulties Theism feels when it tries to conceive
God as Creator meet it in another form when it attempts
to conceive Him as Providence — or as Deity maintaining
relations to the world He has made. How are nature and
God related ? Do they exclude or include each other ? Do
its energies supersede His action ? and are its laws so adequate
to the evolution and maintenance of order as to operate with
out dependence on His will ? Then how does nature affect
God ? Does not the thing made impose limitations on Him
who made it? But can a God so limited by His own creation
be as much the infinite as when He had all infinity to Him
self ? As theistic solutions of these problems we have Deism, or
God's absolute transcendence, and Pantheism, or His absolute
immanence. Deism conceived God as above and apart from the world.
He had so made it that it was a system complete in itself ;
its perfection was seen in its ability to do its work for an
indefinite period independently of Him. Thc proper analogy of
their relations was the watch and its maker. Without the
maker the watch or the world could not be ; His was the idea
of the whole. His the manufacture of the several parts, the cal
culations, the adjustments, and the first construction. Once
fini.shed. His wisdom was seen in the length of time nature
could go on without repairs, and if repairs were needed they
could be done only by acts of " intervention " or " interference,"
stopping the whole or some part of the machine in order to
readjust the mechanism. This is very broadly but truly
stated ; it was the common idea of the eighteenth century,
carried out by the deist to its logical conclusion — the complete
separation or inter-independence of God and the world, modified
with the help of a more or less infirm logic by the apologist, so
as to allow Deity some part and nterest in the world He had
made. But each had at root the same idea : such complete

PANTHEISM OR THE ABSOLUTE IMMANENCE. 415
transcendence, that if God acted in the world at all His action
was miraculous, and must be described or discussed in terms
that implied He was outside the system, and was able to
get inside it only by some process of interference or suspension
of law.
Pantheism, on the other hand, reversed this process : God
was the causa immanens, inside nature, not separable from
it, the eternal ground or substance whose infinite modes are
our phenomena of space and time. Intelligence was the
mode of an infinite attribute which was termed thought, and
body the mode of an attribute termed extension. Deity
must have an infinite multitude of attributes, but these were
the only two revealed in experience, and so all we knew.
But this theory as completely dissolved God in nature as the
other held Him apart from it He was but the abstract
of our concrete experience, the hidden energy conceived not
as energy but as being, which effects or suffers the cycle
of changes we call the universe. He was not the natura
naiurata, the begotten or produced nature, our phenomenal
existence, but natura naturans, the begetting or producing
nature, whose infinite modes were ever forming and ever
dissolving. He alone was ; everything else was but appear
ance, the swiftly formed and dissolved changes of an infinite
kaleidoscope. 2. But to the ethicized notion of God these theories are
both alike inadequate and alien. The complete transcendence
of Deity involves His essential limitation and moral imper
fection. To the extent that He makes nature independent
of Himself He does two things : (a) retracts His energies
or circumscribes His essence, renouncing by the one His
omnipotence and by the other His ubiquity ; and (/3) He
denies Himself all pleasure in His creation and all normal
intercourse with His creatures, so surrendering, as it were, the
very joy of being a God who has created. The nature, too.

4l6 DEITY TRANSCENDENT, YET IMMANENT.
that has no God within it is a mechanical nature ; it may
have had a cause, but it has no reason, and the conception of its
origin is contradicted by the theory as to its course. Then
the complete immanence of Deity is the negation of His being.
He becomes but another term for nature ; is, like nature,
without moral character or freedom ; can only be, not do ;
has attributes, but no action ; modes, but no life. Deity so
construed has ceased to be Divine ; He is but an objectified
abstraction, a personal name used to denote an impersonal
and indeterminable substance. But both Deism and Pan
theism err because they are partial ; they are right in what
they affirm, wrong in what they deny. It is as antitheses that
they are false ; but by synthesis they may be combined or
dissolved into the truth. With Deism we say, God is trans
cendent ; unless He be He is no God. Transcendence
means that He was before and is above nature. It neither
sets limits to Him nor is He contained within its limits, but
as He is before so He is over all. With Pantheism we say,
God is immanent ; unless He be nature has no Divine life or
reason, and He no infinitude of being or excellence. Imma
nence means that He is everywhere in nature, and nature
" has no being save in Him. It does not affirm. He is not apart
from nature ; it only affirms. Nature is not apart from Him.
He is through all and in all ; in Him all live and move and
are. The transcendent God is Creator, the immanent God is
Providence ; the one is necessary to the being, the other to the
well-being of the world. Creation is no greater a miracle than
Providence ; Providence is no more miraculous than creation.
To such an idea of the relations between God and His
universe the implications of the old rationalistic terminology,
whether deistic or apologetical, and the positions of Pantheism
in its abstract and exclusive forms, are alike abhorrent
Where God is immanent. His action can never be inter
ference ; where His presence is conceived as necessary to
the very being of nature, " intervention " is the last word

THE RELATION OF GOD TO NATURE. 417
that can be used to describe it, for the miracle were then
His withdrawal from nature, not His continuance within
it And where God is conceived as transcendent, He can
never be dissolved into nature or become synonymous with
it Distinction and difference are of His essence, belong to the
ground or constitution of His being as ethical ; and if they
are immanent in Him, they make Him transcendent as regards
nature, — at once related to it and different from it ; akin to
all its ethical elements, but alien from all its anti-ethical. If we
believe in a living God, we surely believe in a God who lives ;
but God does not live unless He is every moment and in
every atom as active and as much present as He was in the
very hour and article of creation.
But if God construed through the Godhead becomes, as
we may say, the synthesis of transcendence and immanence,
it is necessary that we discuss and determine more fully the
relations expressed by these terms. In other words, we must
bring the ethicized Deity and His creation more explicitly
together.
§ v.— The Godhead and the External Relations
OF God.
I. It is evident, then, that our conception of the relation
depends upon our conception of the terms related — i.e., as
we conceive God, we conceive the universe ; and as these
are conceived, so also are their relations. The principle
through which we interpret the related terms is this : — The
creature is a being who corresponds in quality and kind to
the causal instinct or creative impulse to which he owes his
existence. God does not love because He created, but He
created because He loved. It follows, therefore, that creation
in its most real and radical sense is the production of a being
capable of being loved, and therefore of loving ; for these
two are strict counterparts ; a being incapable of loving is
27

41 8 TO GOD PERSONS REAL AND OBJECTIVE,
incapable of being loved — may be an instrument to be used
or a thing to be admired, but is no person able to satisfy
affection by giving it.
This distinction between person and instrument is funda
mental and characteristic. The instrument can have no being
apart from the hand that made or uses it ; but the person
is independent in his very dependence, fulfils the end of his
creation by obeying the law given in his being. Without th'^
engineer the engine is a mass of dead material — i.e., is not
an engine ; through him it came into being, and through
him it continues to be, to live, and do its work — so informed
by mind as to seem a living thing. Without the artist the
work of art could not be, and it lives only as seen and realized
by the sympathetic imagination ; change, enlarge, or lessen
our senses, and it is a work of art no more. But the person
is so an end in himself that once he is he has a being apart
from his Maker. The disciple does not die with the master
who formed him ; he becomes independent, a master himself,
his excellence as a teacher but expressing his excellence as a
learner. The home fulfils its functions only as it makes not
instruments that cannot be without the parent, but persons
who grow into the conscious manhood which is possessed of
the energies and foresight creative of new times and new homes.
The instrument is for use, but the person for action and
communion ; what disqualifies for either or both spoils the
personality. The more perfect the instrument grows, the
more necessary to it is the delicate hand or the deft finger ;
but the more perfect the person becomes, the more he is a
causal will and a creative reason, able to form as he was
formed. Thus it is the very essence of the instrument to
have no being apart from the mind that produced or employs
it, but it is no less the essence of the person to have being
only as he stands before the creative mind distinct and
individual, dependently independent.
We may say, then, that to God two worlds exist — one

BUT NATURE INSTRUMENTAL. 419
instrumental and subjective, the other personal and objective.
But of these the former is apparent, the latter alone is real.
What we call matter or nature has no real being to God ; at
best, all the reality it has is relative, such as belongs to the
means which a mind made and minds can use, but which have
no being without mind. The only universe that really exists
to a moral Deity is a moral universe. It alone can exercise
and satisfy the energies that gave it being, for it alone is
capable of the beatitude that can be willed, and the capa
bility of beatitude is one with the capability of loving and
being loved. God can love only a being whose happiness
He can will, for love is but the passion to create happiness
active and exercised, but this means that its object is a moral
person, with a reason and a will of his own. The most perfect
of all possible machines may awaken admiration in Deity as
in man, but for it neither man nor Deity can feel anything
that can be defined as love. God watches sparrows and cares
for oxen, but His love is for men. In their joys He is able
to participate, and they in His ; and when this participation is
mutual and absolute there is beatitude, God and man alike
blessing and blessed.
2. But these distinctions involve a twofold relation of God —
one to nature as instrumental and subjective, and one to man
as personal and objective. The being of the instrument is
in and through the minds that use it. The maker must be
before and above the instrument — i.e., the relation to it is
one of transcendence ; but he must also be in it, his mind or
a mind that understands his as regards the use or function
of this special thing, must be present and active in order to its
being as an instrument — i.e., the relation is one of immanence,
So without God above nature it could not have been, and
without God within nature it could not be. According to
Kant, man makes nature — i.e., without his architectonic
reason it could be no cosmos, a system of order, a realm
where what appear as individual and disconnected pheno-

420 NATURE, THE MIDDLE TERM
mena are reduced to a co-ordinated and intelligible whole.
But if mind is constitutive of the very nature it interprets,
it means that nature is a middle term between minds. What
intelligence finds in it belongs to intelligence as a discovery
rather than as a creation, but what intellects discover intel
lect had created. Thus the cuneiform characters of Babylonia
and the hieroglyphs of Egypt can say nothing to the animal ;
it has no sense to which they can appeal, and they have
no meaning to any sense it has. In a purely animal world
symbols of thought could have no significance, for thought
has no being. But they do exist to reason, and so are
capable of interpretation by it, and it is by virtue of this
capability of interpretation that they are characters or signs.
As they are read, the language they represent is constituted
or restored. But the language could not be reconstituted
by the interpreting mind if it had not been constituted a
language by the mind interpreted. The cries or characters of
the insane are senseless to the sane, and the language of the
reason is unintelligible to the idiot. The condition, then, of
a language being understood is, that it embody understand
ing. No bilingual or trilingual inscription would enable
reason to recover a tongue that had no thought or reason in
it. Hence the nature whose speech is intelligible to man
speaks of the intelligence of its Maker ; its interpretation is
His. And therefore, if mind makes nature, it is because
mind created nature, constituted it a middle term between
two intelligences. But this is only the metaphysical way of
expressing the transcendence and the immanence alike of
God aita man, or of saying that nature is an instrument to
man because one of God. Every act of interpretation is an
act of transcendence, for if man did not so rise above as to
co-ordinate and combine or relate what he reads, he could not
read it ; but it also involves the fact of a twofold immanence
— thought within the thing interpreted, and the interpreted
thing within the consciousness of the interpreter. Hence we

WHICH SPEAKS OF SPIRIT TO SPIRIT. 421
may say that nature as an instrument or middle term has
no being save as constituted by the mutual and correlative
indwelling or transcendence and immanence of God and
man. 3. But if nature be the middle term, with a being that is
only instrumental, persons or spirits represent the beings that
are to God real or objective. With them He can sustain
relations that exercise all His energies, physical and moral,
emotional and intellectual ; and what He can do is what He
will. They are beings capable of good, capable of evil ;
therefore fit subjects for the hourly care of Him who made
them. And this care is but a form of His creative energy.
On the most purely metaphysical grounds we may say that it
is not within the power even of the Omnipotent to make a
being independent of Himself, for that would mean a second
Omnipotent, a created infinite. But omnipotence is not the
synonym of God conceived as Godhead. The terms in which
He is construed are ethical, and the ethical Deity can never
live out of relations, or secluded from those who need Him.
He will not dissolve the relations through which alone He
can work the beatitude He has willed : were He to do so. He
would cancel the very end for which He had made the world.
If this be so, then two things follow : (a) the creative will as
a will of moral good is eternal, and (/8) universal. These terms
but express the same idea — the one under the form of time or
duration, the other under the form of space or extension. Ac
cording to the one, the good-will of God never began to be, and
it can never cease from being, or be other than it has ever been.
According to the other. His moral energies can never be cir
cumscribed in their action, any more than they can cease to act
or be changed in their direction or purpose. God's being is
timeless, as it is boundless : His ubiquity does not know the
distinctions of here and there, propinquity and distance ;
there is no place to Him who cannot remove Himself from
one point to another, or time to Him who knows only

422 IMMUTABILITY METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL.
eternity. What can be measured by years or centuries has
a beginning and will have an end, but where there is neither
end nor beginning there can be no measurement. And so to
say that God is eternal is to say that for Him the categories
of time are not ; He is no older to-day than He was on the
morn of creation, or than He will be when its even has come.
And in the region of space it is as impossible to restrict His
energies as to limit His being. He is pure action as well
as pure thought Creation was for Him no moment of
exceptional activity within a defined area. Providence is
continuous creation. To maintain a world which is more
a process of becoming than a completed result, is as much
creation as was its aboriginal production. And so we must
conceive God to be just as much and as directly concerned
in the becoming and being of every man as He was in the
becoming and being of the first In all time and in all
place God worketh hitherto.
But the moral counterpart of an essence that knows no time
or space is a character that knows no change. Yet ethical is
not as metaphysical immutability. As regards His meta
physical being, God is above our categories of sequence and
position ; as regards His ethical being. He is the home of
relation and activity. The immutability of the former is, as
it were, quantitative, but of the latter qualitative — i.e., in the
one case there never can be less or more, but in the other
there never can be different or opposite. In other words,
metaphysical immutability relates to being and energies, but
ethical to character and end. This distinction involves another :
the modes or forms of activity which express metaphysical
immutability are uniform or invariable, but those which express
ethical are variable or multiform — i.e., the physical attributes
and energies of God have to do with invariable quantities and
relations, but the ethical have to do with variable persons,
with their varying characters and states. In the realm of
physical existence God can never seem different from what

GOD THE ETERNAL WILL OF GOOD. 423
He is— the Almighty, All-present, in a word the Infinite—
but in the realm of moral He often seems different, though
He always is the same. It depends on the state and needs
and character of the person what He will seem, but what He
is and does depends only on Himself The older theology
expressed the same idea when it said. The chief end of God, as
of man, is the glory of God. The idea is right if our conception
of the Divine Being is right ; but this conception is primary.
As we conceive Him, so also must we conceive His actions
and ends. If God be as the Godhead, a Being whose very
life is love, then the only ends worthy of the infinitely Good
are those of infinite goodness. If He acts as becomes Himself
rather than as we deserve, then we shall experience a good
proportioned to His immeasurable grace, not accommodated
to our own measurable merits. Hence Jonathan Edwards
argued that the chief end of God could be expressed in a
twofold form — either as His own glory or as the good of the
creature. These were not two things, but only the same
thing seen from different sides. Yet the glory, as the grander,
was the higher point of view. For God to act in a manner
that became God was surely for the action to be more creative
of good than if He simply regarded a universe which could
never cease to be finite. Where all the ends are infinite, none
of the acts can be mean or limited. The Creator's primary
motive governs His permanent action and determines the
creation's ultimate end ; and all who live in the universe,
and the universe in which they live, will be penetrated with
as much of good as it is able to bear or they are willing to
receive. The ethicized conception of God, which we owe to the
Christian doctrine of the Godhead, has thus resulted in an
ethicized conception of the universe, or of being as related to
God. It has thus lifted us to a higher position than is
possible to a mere philosophical Theism. God is not in
theology, as He is in philosophy, conceived under the

424 THE ETHICIZED DEITV
categories of metaphysical immutability, but under those of
ethical ; and these are defined for us by the terms in which
the revelation came. It came in the Son, through the Only
Begotten who is in the bosom of the Father. And this means
that paternal love, filial love, love communicative, and love
dependent, receptive, reflective, are of the essence of God —
He incapable of being Himself without love, it capable of
describing if not defining His very being. And when we
attempt to translate these immanent ethical realities and
relations into their external counterpart, what can we say but
that the conditions of His inner life constitute the laws and
motives of His outer ? God cannot be other to His universe
than He is to Himself. He did not create to hate, but to
love ; creation continues because He loves, not that He may
hate. His affection is not a perishable emotion, can be as little
lost by sin as gained by service. His love of the created is
something He owes to Himself, not something that can be
earned by merit or achieved by success. Were the reason of
the love in man rather than in God, it would be in ceaseless
change, always mixed, never pure ; but God loves for His
own sake, not for the creature's. Were He to hate even the
devil. He would while the feeling endured have in Him an
element alien to the Divine, and so would be less than God.
It is granted to no being to compel Deity to lose the splendid
happiness of loving even those who disobey and hate Him.
But though the good and the evil may be alike loved, yet the
love is not in the two cases of the same quahty. Quantitatively
there is no more of the love of God in heaven than in hell, but
qualitatively the loves differ as much as hell and heaven.
The love of the good is complacency, but the love of the evil
is pity or compassion. Complacency is twice blessed, gives
the mutual joy that is beatitude, happy 1 eing in a happy
world ; but compassion feels double pain — pain for him who
needs help' and pain for the evil that causes the help to be
needed. Complacency is the double beatitude of God in the

AND THE ETHICIZED UNIVERSE. 425
universe and of the universe in God. Pity, too, is double ; it is
the shadow which evil casts on the Good, and the promise the
Good is ever bound to make to Himself — never to surrender to
evil those who are held by evil. But this promise carries us
beyond natural into the region of positive or constructive
Theology.

CHAPTER III.
THE GODHEAD AND THE DEITY OF CONSTRUCTIVE
THEOLOGY.
\ I. — The Theistic Conception and Theology.
THIS discussion started from the distinction between God
and the Godhead.* The Godhead is Deity as He is
in and for Himself, the infinite Manifold who is by His
very nature, as it were, a society, the home of ethical relations
and activities, of spiritual life and love ; but God is Deity as
He is to and for the universe, in His outward functions and
relations, a unity over against the manifold of finite existence.
The distinctions do not break up the unity, for they are im
manent ; nor does the unity abolish the distinctions, for God
does not cease to be one because His nature is a rich and
complex manifold rather than an absolute and abstract sim
plicity. In other words, God is not a substance or unit or
monad incapable of thought or action ; but an infinite Being,.
with all the conditions of free, personal, ethical, and conscious
existence within Himself. The significance of this notion for
the questions raised by a speculative or philosophical Theism
we have seen ; what we have now to see is its significance
for the primary or material conception of a positive or con
structive theology.
God is here a quantitative but Godhead a qualitative term.
According to the one. He is an indissoluble unity ; according
to the other. He is, to use in a new connotation Butler's term,
* Supra, p. 385"

god's perfection is god's law. 427
an indiscerptible community — i.e.. He is by His very essence
social, possessed of a life which can be common or communal
only as there are personal distinctions. But between God
and Godhead there must be an absolute and reciprocal com
municatio idiomatum. God is capable of receiving the whole
Godhead, and the Godhead of absorbing all the attributes and
exercising all the functions of God. By God the Godhead
is unified ; but the Godhead is, as regards its essential qualities
and life, personalized in God for the government of the
universe. Without this complete interpenetration of the two
ideas our constructive thought would be without its regulative
principle. We may say, then, that as the Godhead is God inter
preted in the terms of the Spirit and consciousness of
Christ, so the special task of Christian theology is to re
interpret God in the terms of the Godhead. What He does
depends upon what He is — i.e., all His functions and actions
relative to the created are only the outward expression of His
inner qualities and character. As Hooker has well said,
putting into English the fundamental principle ofthe Reformed
theology of his day, " The being of God is a kind of law to
His working ; for that perfection which God is giveth per
fection to that He doth." * And the attempt to approach the
doctrine of God through the Godhead means simply that what
we wish to know is " that perfection which God is," in order
that we may the better understand the " law of His working "
and the perfection of His works.
What is fundamental, then, is this : the conception of God
in positive or constructive theology is not as in natural
or speculative ; it has been transformed by the action of
the supreme and normative religious consciousness. This
theology does not start from a philosophical idea, but from
a concrete Person and the Deity as known to Him : in other
1 " Eccles. Pol.," I. i. 2,

428 interpenetration of godhead and god.
words, we come to the Godhead through Christ, and to God
through the Godhead ; and through the God so reached we
interpret our beliefs and organize them into a theology.
Hence the exphcation of this constitutive idea forms at once
the foundation and ground-plan of the whole theological
system. But in dogmatic theology there has been, from causes
already indicated,* a remarkable tendency, if not to keep the
doctrines of the Godhead and God apart, yet to leave them
in a state of incomplete interpenetration. The Godhead has
had greater ecclesiastical than theological or cosmical signi
ficance ; while in soteriology it has been accepted more as the
means or condition of effecting salvation than as the very truth
as to God and His relations to man. The idea of God, on the
other hand, has been so construed as to determine the nature,
necessity, and limits of the salvation which the Persons of the
Godhead have been made to effect. When we think of the
Godhead we speak of the Father, Son, and Spirit ; when we
think of God. we speak ofthe Sovereign, Lawgiver, and Judge.
And under this distinction of speech there has lived a dis
tinction of ideas. While our notion of the Godhead has been
formally Christian, our notion of God has been formally
Hebrew, but materially Roman — i.e., the conception of God
is Jewish in its origin, but into it has been read, upon it has
been impressed, the spirit, the character, and the categories of
Roman law and laws Rome has modified or influenced. And
this forensic Deity, instead of being permeated and transformed
by the ethical qualities of the Godhead, has imposed, as it
were, its yoke upon the Divine Persons, forcing them to serve
as names or factors in a juridical process. In other words, the
Hebraeo-Roman God has so prevailed over the Christian God
head, that instead of the latter expelling the juristic or forensic
element from the notion of the former, the Godhead has
• Supra, pp. 388-91.

THE CATHOLIC CONCEPTION OF DEITY. 429
tended to become mainly significant as a convenient mode
of carrying out a legal process which the legalized notion of
God had made necessary. What is needed is to reverse this
process, and penetrate our conception of God with the life
and qualities of the Godhead.
§ 1 1.— The Juridical Deity.
The juridical conception of Deity has two main forms, corre
sponding to the two main types of theology — the institutional
or political, and the dialectic or constructive. These two
forms have as their principal representatives Catholicism and
Calvinism. The forces that organized the Catholic system
elaborated the Catholic conception of God. The law it
incorporated He was made to embody ; His character and
functions were adjusted to the legislative and administrative
system which came to be known as the Church. The plastic
ideas worked inward, from the circumference to the centre,
rather than outwards, from the centre to the circumference.
The notions of the old law were read into Deity rather than
the notion of Deity articulated into a new law. The peni
tential discipline of the Church organized the idea that law
could be commutative as well as vindicative, that it could
be so satisfied by the loss or suffering of the disobedient as
to remit the severer and more flagrant penalty ; and in the
image of the law God was made. The heavenly and the
earthly hierarchies corresponded, just as the pseudo-Dionysius
had conceived, only the correspondence was not as he con
ceived it ; it was the earthly that gave its form and quality
to the heavenly. In other words, the political character and
expediencies of the Church were so reflected in its Deity that
He was but, as it were, their ideal embodiment ; and the more
magisterial its spirit and methods became the more of a
magistrate He grew. The Papacy is a delegated magistracy,
but the delegates have made the visible authority become a

430 the calvinistic deity
law for the Invisible. To the Catholic mind religion is, alike
as regards faith and conduct, a matter of positive or insti
tuted law. The Deity is as the system is ; the system is one
of ceremonial and sacerdotal legalism, and the Deity is a Being
who can be satisfied by a sacerdotal act or process for any
failure in legality, whether termed disobedience or sin.
The Calvinistic conception of God was reached by a process
exactly the reverse of the Catholic — viz., the dialectical or
deductive. He was in the ultimate analysis the supreme or
sovereign Will ; His highest function was the realization of
Himself and His ends, and this was possible only as He
ordained and created the necessary means. In a deductive
system the essential thing is the premiss ; if it be false or
inadequate, the conclusion can never be right. And a theology
which professes to start with the God given in the conscious
ness of Christ, can never be justified in the attempt to reduce
God to the category of will. And the evil in the initial
assumption was intensified by the efforts at mitigation being
made, as it were, from without — i.e., by setting limits to God
rather than by a change in the conception of Him. As to the
ultimacy of the will Calvin is explicit : men are admonished
" nihil causae quaerere extra voluntatem." * Is He not unjust,
then, when He elects some and reprobates others ? No ; for,
as Augustine taught, those He elects merit no favour, while
those He reprobates deserve punishment ; and so He is " ab
omni accusatione liberari, similitudine creditoris, cuius potestate
est alteri remittere, ab altero exigere." ' The very use of such
a figure ought to have made the falsity of the idea apparent
Calvin holds, indeed, that the Divine will is not, as it were,
mere naked omnipotence, for God " sibi ipsi lex est " ' ; but
this law is more judicial and retributive than gracious and
salutary. And under the infiuences of controversy it tended
more and more to become detached from the Divine nature or
"• " Inst.," iii. 22, II. ' Ibid., iii. 23, II.
' Ibid., iii. 23, 2.

IS THE ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGN. 43 1
character and attached to the Divine function or office. In
other words, God was interpreted through .sovereignty rather
than sovereignty through God. The notion of sovereignty
was not always one or uniform. The Calvinist held it to be
dvevQvvia, absolute and irresponsible ; but the Arminian held it
to be tempered by benevolence : to the one it was a " domi
nium absolutum," * to the other a dominium " partim dignitati
naturas divinae, partim conditioni naturali hominis com-
mensuratum." ' And it was characteristic that men laid
down propositions about the Absolute Sovereign they would
have hesitated to affirm as to God. They claimed for Him
rights such as were then claimed for kings, but were unworthy
of Deity, and defined His relations to man and man's to Him
in language more agreeable to the politics of despotism than
the truth and grace of religion. For the more the emphasis
changed from will to law, from personal power to impersonal
government, the more could they speak of Him in the
language of the current jurisprudence, and hedge Him within
its hard and narrow rules. What Deism did in the physical
realm forensic theology did in the moral and religious. God
was sacrificed to sovereignty, imprisoned within the laws He
' Camero, Opera, p. 41. But especially treatise by Amyraut, " De
jure Dei in creaturas," in " Dissertationes Theologicae.'' It is characteristic
that the more moderate school of Calvinism was the most emphatic in its
doctrine of sovereignty ; they tried to relieve the pressure of their system
on the character of God by substituting for Him and His will theories
forensic and judicial.
^ Episcopius, " Instit. Theol.," iv., sec. ii., c. 28. In this chapter Epi.s-
copius directly sets limits from the side of equity and nature to the
power of God (cf supra, pp. 169-72). He argued, on the one hand,
"justitia haec est voluntatis actionumque divinorum directrix"; and, on
the other, that it followed from the natural congruency and connection
which man has with God " ut jus ac dominium Dei in hominem non sit
infinitum." Cf. Ritschl, "Geschich. Studien zur Christ. Lehre von Gott,"
"Jahrb. fiir Deuts. Theol.," vol. xiii., pp. 67-133. Theories of the Divine
sovereignty had the strictest relation to current theories as to the forms of
government, or the duties and rights of citizens, and the grounds and limits
of the regal power. This means that to the forensic theologian as was the
state, such was the universe and the reign of God.

432 god's PRIMARY RELATION TO MAN
was supposed to have framed, or reduced to the function of
their administrator. In the older Calvinism there was a
majesty as of the Infinite ; in the later there was a hard and
pragmatic spirit as of the lawyer and the law court
§ III. — Whether and in what Sense God is a
Sovereign.
In our modern theology much of the old forensic speech
and idea still survives ; and so it may be as well to examine
its basis in the doctrine of the sovereignty. The last serious
attempt to state and defend it was made by the late Dr.
Candlish. His position consisted of three main parts : —
I. " God's fundamental and primary " relation to man was
that of Creator and Governor; "His rule or government
must be, in the proper forensic sense, legal and judicial";
" absolute and sovereign " ; " of the most thoroughly royal,
imperial, autocratic kind." To conceive it as anything else
were "an inconsistency, an intolerable anomaly, a suicidal
self-contradiction." *
2. The only essential Sonship was that of Christ's Deity,
but by its union with His Deity His humanity became
participant iri the filial relation. And so He was the only
historical Person who was really and by nature the Son of
God 3. The only other sons of God were the elect in Christ,
who became by adoption partakers in the Sonship of the
Only Begotten. Beyond these limits there was no Father
hood, only sovereignty.
The first position is the fundamental ; and with it alone are
we meanwhile concerned. Let us, then, ask What a " strictly
legal and judicial sovereignty," " of the most royal, imperial,
and autocratic kind," means, and How far it is predicable of
God? These are terms borrowed from our political history
and experience, and must by these be interpreted before they
' "The Fatherhood of God," pp. 9, 10, 12, 13, 17 (5th ed.).

various kinds of sovereignty. 433
can be allowed to pass current in theology. Well, then, the
legal sovereign may be either (a) a sovereign made by law, with
all his rights and functions defined, guarded, and maintained
by the law that made him ; or (yS) a sovereign who makes the
law, with ah his rights and authority rooted in power, in the
force which makes the stronger the king of all feebler men.
The sovereigns of the first kind are constitutional, " strictly
legal and judicial " ; the sovereigns of the second kind are
despotic, " imperial and autocratic." As we have the one or
other, we have a different ideal of law and justice, of their
relation to the sovereign and of his relation to them, of the
source, limits, and quality of his power, royal and judicial.
The constitutional sovereign is a creation of law, made by
it for its own ends, an instrument of the order it aims at
securing ; bound, therefore, by its terms ; going beyond them at
his peril ; faced ever by the possible penalty of being unmade
by his very maker. This means that the legal sovereign is
the supreme subject, able to commit treason against the im
personal majesty of the creative law, just as the citizen may
commit treason against the personal majesty of the reigning
monarch. But this sovereignty is a creation of highly civilized
times ; designed not to abolish but to secure the equality of
all before the law, so much so that he who most seems over it
is most bound to live under it if he would live at all. But the
" imperial or autocratic " sovereign is the creator of law. He
is its only source ; it is but his expressed will. He has only to
change his will, and the law is changed. His authority is not
based on law, but law is based on his authority. He is the
ground and condition rather than the instrument of order.
But this " imperial or autocratic " species of sovereignty
may be of two kinds — either acquired or natural. Acquired
power is power gained by some means — conquest or cunning,
force or fraud, which is only a kind of force, viz., the ability
to deceive by seeming to be other than the reality. The
ultimate basis of authority so acquired is superior strength ;
28

434 THE father is the sovereign,
and though it may be transmitted, it can never lose the
character it owes to its source. But while the authority
based on force may be used for moral ends, it is not moral
authority ; while it may be " royal, imperial, autocratic,"
yet it is not in the. strict sense either a moral or religious
government. Indeed, the imperial sovereign is simply the
imperator become the rex, the head of the army changed by
virtue of the force behind and beneath him into the head of
the state. But the natural sovereignty is of a different order ;
its representative or type is the parent or the patriarch. The
primitive or aboriginal natural sovereign was the primitive
father. The first kingdom was the first family, and its natural
head was the first king. That was the sort of kinghood that
rested on creatorship ; but even so it means that fatherhood
is tbe source and basis of sovereignty. The only absolute
natural kingship, therefore, is neither legal, a creation of law ;
nor imperial, a creation of power, personal or organized ;
but paternal, a creation of nature. Unless we deify force, or
leave force to create our deities, we must find in the father
the ideal of the king absolute by valid or natural right.
So far, then, this analysis has not resulted in the discovery
of any " suicidal contradiction " between the ideas of sovereignty
and fatherhood ; on the contrary, in the family, which is the
unit of society and the germ of the state, the terms become,
if not equivalent, yet complementary and coextensive. The
absence of either element involves the imperfection of the
other, and imperils the common good. The more perfect a
father is, the more of a sovereign will he be ; the better he is
as a sovereign, the more excellently will he fulfil his functions
as a father. The forms and sanctions of his authority will
vary, but the less formal it grows the more real it will become.
There is nothing so absolute as the paternal reign in its
earliest form. The infant is the most helpless creature in
nature ; depends for food, clothing, tendance, everything
essential to its continued being, on other hands than its own ;

AND HIS SOVEREIGNTY DOES NOT CEASE. 43S
and the parent's sovereignty is then a sovereignty of care
fulness, a mindfulness which feels every moment that the
child can live only in and through those to whom it owes its
being. Here the law governs the parent, though the law
be love ; and in obedience to it the work, as it were, of
creating a subject still proceeds, and only as it is well and
thoughtfully done can the subject ever be created. But in
due course the new mind and will awake, and sovereignty
then assumes a new form, becomes legislative and adminis
trative, frames laws which the child must be now persuaded,
now compelled, now beguiled to obey. Here the authority is
autocratic, yet with an autocracy which is most tender where
most imperious. But the child becomes a youth, and the
sovereignty again changes its form, becomes flexible in means
that it may be inflexible in end, loving the boy too well to
tolerate his evil, so watching him that he may by a now
regretted severity and a now gracious gentleness be trained
and disciplined to good. And when the youth becomes a
man, the sovereignty does not cease, though its form is
altogether unlike anything that had been before ; it may be
the fellowship by which the old enrich and ripen the young
and the young freshen and enlarge the old ; it may be by a
name which filial reverence will not sully, or a love and a
pride which filial affection will delight to gratify ; or it may
only be by a memory which, as the years lengthen, grows in
beauty and in power. But in whatever form, the sovereignty
of a father who has been a father indeed, is of all human
authorities the most real and the most enduring.
The two ideas therefore of paternity and sovereignty
are not only compatible, they are indissoluble; either can
be perfect only in and through the other. The absolute
sovereign without the father is a tyrant, a despot, the
symbol of the government that can least of all be suffered
by free-born men ; the father without the sovereign is a
weakling, a puppet or thing made rather than a maker, the

436 DISTINCTION OF THE LEGAL SOVEREIGN,
symbol of the feeble good-nature which is so prolific a source
of evil even in the good. Neither function, then, can be well
discharged without the other. A sovereignty without father
hood may create order, but it is the forced order which is
only disguised chaos ; not the order of concordant and
obedient spirits, but of the coerced wills that are most
rebellious when they have to appear most submissive. A
fatherhood without sovereignty may beget persons, but can
never form characters, or build the characters formed into a
happy family or a contented and ordered state. The two.
Fatherhood and Sovereignty, must then live together, and
be incorporated into a living and effective unity, if we are
to have a government of ideal perfection, such as becomes
God and is suitable to a universe full of the realities and
infinite possibilities of good and evil.
§ IV. — The Sovereignty of Law and of God.
There is, then, no absolute antithesis between sovereignty
and paternity ; the only perfect form in which we can have
either is where we have both. The argument which opposes
the two proceeds from the basis, not of nature or ideal truth,
but of the policies and expediencies and experiments of our
perplexed social and civil life. On this ground it is im
possible to reach any clear or coherent conception of God's
rule over men. For if we describe His sovereignty as, " in
the proper forensic sense, legal and judicial," "thoroughly
royal, imperial, autocratic," we simply interpret God in the
terms of the government under which we live, or whose form we
chance to think best. And this, so far from making His action,
as the Christian revelation represents it, more intelligible, really
makes it quite inconceivable. For sovereignty is a radically
different thing when paternal and when legal or imperial;
sovereign, subjects, laws, methods and ends of government,
are all, as regards quality and kind, unlike and dissimilar.

AND THE PATERNAL OR NATURAL. 437
Thus the purely legal or imperial sovereign so reigns as to
strengthen and extend his authority, but the father so rules
as to educate and benefit his child, as to order and bless his
home. The relations of the sovereign are all legal ; persons
to him are nothing save subjects of rights or duties, objects
to be protected or restrained ; law and order are all in
all ; all his ends are political, his methods judicial, his instru
ments most perfect where least personal ; his justice is never
absolute, always relative, tempered by the expediency which
can seldom dare to be abstractly just. But the relations
of the father are all personal ; his ends are to make good
persons ; his means must be adapted to his ends ; and his
reign is prosperous only as he constrains towards the affec
tion that compels obedience or wins from evil by the wisdom
of a watchful love.
And as the sovereigns differ, so do their laws. The legal
authority does not chastise, only punishes ; all its sanctions
are penalties, and they are enforced, not to reform or
restore the criminal, but to compel respect and conformity
to law. But the paternal authority does not so much
punish as chastise ; all its sanctions are chastisements, and
their ultimate aim is to correct and reform, so expelhng
the evil as to make room for the good. This distinction is
fundamental and determinative. Punishment and chastise
ment agree while they differ. They agree in this :— both are
exercised on offenders by those who have the authority to
command and the right to be obeyed, and the power to
execute the judgment which has been passed on disobedience.
But they differ here :— punishment regards what may be
variously described as the maintenance of order, the public
good, the majesty of the law, or the claims of justice ; but
chastisement seeks the good of the offender, certain that if
it secures this all these other things will surely follow. And
this distinction involves another :— under a rigorously forensic
or legal and judicial system all penalties punish, but do not

438 SOVEREIGNTY INTERPRETED THROUGH GOD,
chastise ; they may be vindicative, exhibiting the power or
sufficiency of the law against those who break it, or exem
plary and deterrent, warning those who would do as the
criminal has done of what will be their certain fate : but
under a sovereign paternity all penalties chastise, and do not
simply punish — i.e., while doing the same things that legal
punishments do, they yet aim at doing something more,
so affecting and so placing the offender that he shall cease
from his offences and become dutiful and obedient Hence
emerges a further and final distinction : — a government which
is " in the proper forensic sense, legal and judicial," is punitive,
not remedial ; its agencies and aims are retributory and penal,
not reformatory and restorative : but a paternal sovereignty
is in the true sense remedial in its very penalties ; its methods
and ends are never merely vindicative or retaliatory, but are
always corrective, redemptive. Under a purely legal govern
ment the salvation of the criminal is impossible, but under a
regal fatherhood the thing impossible is the total abandonment
of the sinner. If salvation happens under the former, it is
by other means than the forensic and the judicial ; if loss is
irreparable under the latter, the reason is not in the father.
And so we may say, in judgment the legal sovereign is just,
but the paternal is gracious. The one reigns that he may
prevent evil men from injuring the good, but the other reigns
that evil may cease by evil men being saved.
This argument has not been directed against the Sovereignty
of God, but against the attempt to bring it into the category
of legal, judicial, royal, or forensic governments. These
terms denote ideas of the most relative and variable order,
and their use tends to beget the notion that the universe is a
transfigured court or a magnified forum. There is no inten
tion of denying God's absolute Sovereignty ; on the contrary,
it is here affirmed in the most earnest and emphatic way; but
-what is maintained is, that it must be interpreted through
God, and not through our autocracies and monarchies. It is

BUT NOT GOD THROUGH SOVEREIGNTY. 439
God's Sovereignty, and God must be known that the Sove
reignty may be understood. What was before affirmed as to
theism must now be affirmed as to theology — the Godhead
has completely ethicized the conception of God. And this
was as great a necessity in the one case as in the other. The
Deity of our forensic theologies is legal, but not moral ; by their
systems of jurisprudence they have made actions which were
morally necessary seem legally impossible to Him. Hence
He must be emancipated from legalism that He may be
restored to moral reality and truth. But this means that His
essential qualities are ethical rather than physical, metaphysical
or political. These indeed are necessary to Deity as Creator,
but as servants to obey, not as masters to command. The
moral attributes are, as it were, the God of God, move Him
to act and regulate His action. As such they are the seat
of the causal impulse, while the physical attributes are but
the instruments they impel and guide. The world owes its
existence, not to the omnipotence of Deity, though without
His omnipotence it could not have been, but to the moral
nature that moved and the intellectual that used the omnipo
tence. And as creation was a moral act all its motives and
ends were in God, for only so could they be worthy of Him.
These motives and ends were those of the supreme good. God
willed being that He might will beatitude. The willing was a
sovereign act, but the motives and ends made the act paternal.
It was both at once, and was perfect because it was both. In
other words, the supreme act of Sovereignty was the realiza
tion of Paternity, for these names only denote the obverse
and reverse sides of the same thing. In origin they are
simultaneous, in being coincident, in range coextensive, in
ends identical. The Father is never without the Sovereign,
nor the Sovereign without the Father ; conflict or inconsistency
in their acts is impossible, for they have one will, and what is
done by either is performed by both. There could be no
Sovereignty without subjects or Fatherhood without sons, and

44° GOD IS AS IS THE GODHEAD.
the act that begat the sons created the subjects. But while
Sovereignty may be said to begin with creation, the sovereign
will does not, nor the nature which guides the will — is its
law and determines its end. Hence, we repeat, we must not
construe God through our forensic sovereignty, but the sove
reignty through God, and God through the filial and normative
consciousness of Jesus Christ
Here, then, we emphasize once more the significance of the
Godhead for the conception of God. God is to Jesus essentially
the Father, and He is to Himself as essentially the Son. He
would not be what He is without the Fatherhood, nor would
God be what He is without the Sonship. Were the Sonship
subtracted, there would be no Fatherhood ; were the Fatherhood
denied, there could be no Son. But the unity in which these
relations are is a unity of active and social love. This defines
what God according to His essence is : — Viewed from within,
as Godhead, He is this love in eternal exercise, existing
through personal distinctions, yet in community of life, com
municative, communicated, reciprocated, in ceaseless flow and
ebb, streaming from its source in the eternal subject, retreating
from its bourn in the eternal Object, moving in the un
beginning, unending cycle which is the bosom of the Infinite.
What He is as Godhead He must remain as God ; the energies
exercised without only express the life within. The inward
and the outward face of Deity, if we may so speak, is one
face ; and He whose inner life is a community of love must
be in His outer action creative of conditions correspondent to
those within. Hence He who is by His essence a society will
so act as to create an outward society which shall reflect His
inner relations. The law of the Divine working is the Divine
nature, and as is the nature such must be the work. The
internal Sonship is normative of the external ; and as Father
hood is essential to the Godhead, it is natural to God ; aU the
qualities it implies within Deity are expressed and exercised
in His activity within the universe. And therefore, while

ATTRIBUTES OF FATHER AND SOVEREIGN. 44 1
Jesus speaks of Himself as the Son and of God as the Father,
He teaches men also so to speak. The relation of the only
begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, is, as it were,
the prototype and idea of the many sons who play round the
Father's feet. And so we conclude that God cannot be other
without than the Godhead is within ; the outer action and
relations and the inner being and character must be correlative
and correspondent.
§ V. — God AS Father and as Sovereign.
If, then, we interpret God through the Godhead, the result
will be a conception which, instead of dividing and opposing,
unites and harmonizes the ideas of Fatherhood and Sovereignty.
These terms denote, not so much distinct or contrary functions
which Deity may successively or contemporaneously fulfil for
opposite purposes and as regards different persons, but rather
the attitude and action of a Being who must by nature fulfil
both if He is to fulfil either. We may distinguish them as
we distinguish love and righteousness, which we may term the
paternal and regal attributes of God ; but they are as insepar
able as these, and form as real a unity. We may say alike of
the attributes and the functions, — Were they divorced, both
would be destroyed ; and were either denied to Deity, He
would be undeified. To love is to be righteous ; to be un
righteous is to be incapable of love. Love is righteousness as
emotion, motive, and end ; righteousness is love as action and
conduct. Love is perfect being ; righteousness is perfect be
haviour ; and so they may be described as standing to each
other as law and obedience. It is of the essence of both to
be transitive. Love regards an object whose good it desires ;
righteousness is the conduct which fulfils the desire of love.
Love as it desires another hates the evil that mars his good ;
righteousness as it serves another judges the evil that defeats
the service. Hence love is social, but righteousness judicial ;
the law the one prescribes the other enforces. And so they

442 CONSTITUENTS AND RELATIONS OF LOVE
must exist together in order to exist at all. Subtract love
from righteousness, and it becomes mere rigour, conduct too
inflexible to be living, justice too severe to be just Subtract
righteousness from love, and it ceases to be, becomes mere
sentiment, an emotion too pitiful to combine truth with
grace. Love makes righteousness active and helpful ; right
eousness makes love beneficent while benevolent.
Each of these qualities is of course capable of analysis into
much simpler elements. Love as the causal impulse or need
of another determines the nature of the other that is needed ;
he must be a being whose happiness can be willed, the happiness
of a kind which depends on fellowship with his Maker. For
the other that love needs, it needs for fellowship ; and fellow
ship is made possible by affinities ; it is the communion of
natures akin. Without affinities love cannot live. And so for
God to love man, man must be akin to God ; for man to love
God, God must be akin to man. In all love, then, there must
be sympathy, which is a sort of mutual or inter-incorporation
of being, of the loved in the loving, of the loving in the loved.
In sympathy the soul that loves feels as its own every shadow,
every emotion, every experience that passes over or through
the soul of the loved. It is, as it were, the vicarious principle ;
where it is there is substitution by the absorption, ideally, of
the object into the subject, such an inter-penetration of two
beings that whatever lives in the one or happens to him be
comes a matter of real, vivid, personal experience to the other.
In a world of happiness it creates double beatitude ; in a world
of misery it is to the good the double suffering men call
sacrifice. Where it lives we have " one passion in twin hearts,"
which " touch, mingle, and are transfigured " ; and the result is
" One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One heaven, one hell, one immortality."
But this identifying or inter-incorporating power of love which
we term sympathy involves two opposite elements, whose

AND RIGHTEOUSNESS AS ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 443
being is conditioned on the state of the object— where that
state is good it gives joy, where evil it creates pity. And these
two cannot live inactive and self-centred. - Joy is an emotion
which will not be suppressed, and for it to be expressed is to
be creative, the happiness that does not create happiness
turning into misery in the breast that feels it And pity when
it sees misery becomes mercy, the passion of helpfulness, the
will that has no choice save to end the evil by the creation
of more and higher good. And these two in their one and
common activity constitute grace, which is the spontaneous
yet inexorable impulse of the ever-blessed God to create
beatitude. In this sense grace is only the exercised love of
God, acting in the forms needed by a real and dependent
world as it had acted in a world ideal and Divine.
Love is essentially the attribute of motives and ends, but
righteousness of means and agencies. It may be described
as in a sense the executive of love ; it is, as it were, the will
using the fit means to reach and realize the ends of the heart.
Love regards persons and their states, but righteousness the
methods by which these can be effected for good. So under
stood it is purposive, selective ; wisdom not simply as ad
visory, but as effective and efficient, applied to the realization
of the means that shall best realize the ends. It is thus a
rational will, a power which intelligence guides while love
rules. But the will that purposes creates ; and what it creates
corresponds to its motive and end ; it is therefore, as creative
of good will, the sole efficient will of good. But in doing this
it expresses the moral perfection of Him whose will it is, and
this perfection is holiness, or the absolute agreement of act
and nature, or character and will. But He who exhibits this
agreement cannot demand less than He realizes, and this
demand is expressed in a twofold form, — what we may call
the legislative, embodied in conscience, which shows the law
that governs the will of Deity translated into a law for man's ;
and the administrative, expressed in the order of history.

444 FATHERHOOD BASED NOT ON PHYSICAL ACT,
personal and collective. The former is judgment ; the latter is
justice; and they are related as law enacted and law enforced.
Wisdom as selective determines means, goodness their kind,
holiness their quality, judgment their form, justice their
vindication or enforcement. These are all necessary to the
righteousness of the sovereign will. Remove the wisdom, and
it would not be the best ; remove the goodness, and it would
not be the highest ; remove the holiness, and it would not be
whole or the will of a sound and perfect nature ; remove the
judgment, and it would not be directive ; remove the justice,
and it would not be regnant God as ethical can never
abandon sovereignty ; to be indifferent to the moral state of
His creatures would be to be false to Himself, to His. nature,
to His love, to all the ends for which He created. To think of
God is thus to think of a Being who can never be gentle or
indulgent to sin. The judge does not fear crime as the father
fears the very taint of vice ; the sovereign does not hate the
violation of law as the parent hates the very .shadow of coming
disobedience. Evil is a more terrible thing to the family than
to the state ; and so the theology which reduces God's govern
ment to one " legal and judicial," " in the proper forensic
sense," makes far more light of sin than the theology which
conceives it through His sovereign Paternity.
§ VI. — Paternity and Sonship.
Our conclusion, then, is this : — the antithesis between the
Fatherhood and Sovereignty of God is fictitious, violent, per
verse. The Father is the Sovereign ; and as the Father is such
must the Sovereign be. Hence the primary and determinative
conception is the Fatherhood, and so through it the Sovereignty
must be read and interpreted. In all His regal acts God is
paternal ; in all His paternal ways regal ; but His is not
the figurative paternity of the king, though His is the real
kinghood of the Father.
, How we are to define the notion of Fatherhood is a point

BUT ON ACTS ETHICALLY CONDITIONED. 445
on which there has been much barren dialectic. Pearson *
describes the Divine Paternity thus : " The first and most
universal notion of it, in a borrowed or metaphorical sense,
is founded rather upon creation than procreation " ; and
then he amplifies and develops it by the notions of "con
servation," •' redemption," " regeneration," and " adoption."
The late Dr. Crawford, in his '' Reply " to Dr. Candlish,
framed his definition on Pearson thus : " Fatherhood implies
the origination by one intelligent person of another intelligent
person like in nature to himself, and the continued support,
protection, and nourishment of the person thus originated by
him to whom he owes his being." ' To which Dr. Candlish
sensibly replied, " Such a universal Fatherhood I do not
care to call in question." ^ For all that we have is a figurative
and euphonious way of describing creation and Providence.
But our discussions have throughout proceeded upon this
principle : — P'atherhood cannot here be stated in the terms
of physical creation or procreation, which represents an instru
mental or a secondary cause, but only in the terms of ethical
motive, relation, and end. It is not the physical act as
physical that is constitutive of Paternity, but the act as
ethically conditioned and determined. Man is God's son, not
simply because God's creature and Godlike, but because of the
God and the ends of the God whose creature he is. Father
hood did not come through creation, but rather creation came
because of Fatherhood. The essential love out of which crea
tion issued determined the standing of the created before
the Creator and the relation of the Creator to the created.
Where love is causal, it is paternal ; where it creates a fellow
with whom it can have fellowship, the relation of the created
is filial. Spiritual and personal relations which have their
causes and ends in spiritual and personal needs, cannot be
stated in the terms of physical creation or political institution,
' " On the Creed," sub Art. i. ^ " The Fatherhood of God," pp. 9-10.
^ Candlish's " Reply,'' p. 8.

446 THE FATHERHOOD DEFINED
but only in those of the heart and the life. And the aboriginal
relation of man and God is the universal and permanent ;
within it all later possibilities are contained. It is the emptiest
nominalism to speak of the adoption of a man who never was
a son, for the term can denote nothing real. The legal fiction
has a meaning and a use only where it represents or pretends
to represent something in the world of fact ; but to speak of
the " adoption " of a creature who is in no respect a son, is to
use a term which is here without the saving virtue of sense.
The Sonship must be real to start with if adoption is ever to
be real, and its reality depends on the reality of the Paternity.
If the motives and ends of God in the creation of man were
paternal, then man's filial relation follows, and it stands,
however unworthy a son he may prove himself to be.
Were we, then, to attempt to form a notion of the Paternity,
it would be through the Godhead as determining the act of
God, the kind of creatures it produces, and the peculiar and
special relations in which He and they will stand to each other.
Thus : —
i. The end of creation existed before the creative act
The reXo? was before the actual a'p^)(f], and creation was but a
means for the realization of the end.
ii. The means were in harmony with the end, but the end
in harmony with the Creator. God willed ais He was. The
idea of the election of one from among an infinite multitude
of possible worlds, is a philosophical myth ; the only possible
world was the one realized. The Divine will is not contingent
or arbitrary because it is free ; the free action is spontaneous,
an action into which the whole nature as a whole, as it were,
involuntarily and harmoniously blossoms. God might or
might not have acted ; but if He did act, the way He took
was the only way possible to Him.
iii. The nature which determined the end was the unity
which we speak of as the Godhead. In it Fatherhood and
Sonship were essential and immanent, and so the end may be

AND REALIZED THROUGH SONSHIP. 447
described as the realization of external relations correspondent
to the internal ; in other words, the creation of a universe
which should be to God as a son, while He was to it as a
Father. As within the Godhead so conceived all love was
law, so within the universe He created all law was love.
iv. The universe He thus created is personal and spiritual ;
all its units are capable of loving as of being loved ; and where
such capability exists we can best express the causal relation
by the term Paternity, and the created by Sonship.
V. But these two notions may seem empty and unrelated if
they remain mere notions ; the definition that comes of actual
being can alone make them real. And here emerges the
significance of the historical and normative person of Christ,
which we may exhibit thus : (a) His is the normal humanity,
God's ideal realized. Hence it follows that all the relations
man by nature sustains towards God, He perfectly sustained.
{/3) Of these the most characteristic and fundamental was the
filial. Without it His humanity would not have been perfect,
and so it is as Son that He learns obedience and attains perfec
tion. (7) The Sonship that was necessary to Him is common
to man. He is a unit who is universal ; and what is here true
of His nature is true of man's. On His Sonship His brother
hood is based ; and through His brotherhood man's, as real and
universal, is guaranteed. (S) The Sonship He realized is the
ideal of the race All God was to Him, He was meant to be
and wants to be to every man ; all He was to God, every man
ought to be and may become. The very reason of His being
was to exhibit through the ideal relation of man to God the
actual relation of God to man. (e) The embodied ideal is thc
supreme reality. In Christ we see it, not only within the
terms of finitude, but under the conditions of suffering which
is sorest sacrifice because of the sins and the states of brothers
who will not be sons. Yet we see it that we may be redeemed
by being made partakers of His Spirit, and so qualified for
adoption out of the sonship of nature into the Sonship of grace.

448 THE B'ATHERHOOD THE BASIS OF DUTY.
vi. The truth illustrated by the person is enforced by the
teaching of Christ. He makes the Fatherhood the basis of all
the duties which man owes to God. Supreme love to God is
possible only because God is love. On the ground of mere
sovereignty or judicial and autocratic authority, the first
commandment could never be enjoined. We cannot love
simply because we will or wish or are commanded, but only
because we are loved. Supreme affection is possible only
through the Sovereign Fatherhood. And what is true of this
first is true of all our other duties. Worship is to be in spirit
and in truth, because it is worship of the Father. Prayer is
to be constant and simple and sincere, because it is offered to
the Father. We are to give alms in simplicity and without
ostentation, because the Father sees in secret. We are to be
forgiving, because the Father forgives. Obedience is imitation
of God, a being perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.
In a word, duty is but the habit of the filial spirit ; and it is
possible and incumbent on all men, because all are sons.

DIVISION III.
A.— GOD AS INTERPRETED BY CHRIST THE
DETERMINATIVE PRINCIPLE IN THEOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.
THE FATHERHOOD AND SIN.
§ I. — The Formal and the Material Principle of
Theology.
THE conclusion from the preceding discussion may be
stated thus : — the Fatherhood neither limits nor con
tradicts, but qualifies and determines the Sovereignty ; the
King must be construed through the Father, the Father
cannot be educed from the King. In other words, the
theology which starts from the consciousness of Christ finds
that the determinative element in His idea of God is the
paternal, and in His idea of man the filial. But this con
clusion is only the premiss of a constructive or iriter pret ative
science, and all the positions evolved in the science are in
volved in the premiss. In the older systems there was a
familiar distinction between the principium cognoscendi and
the principium essendi ; in later systems the former appears as
the formal principle or source of theology, the latter as the
material or real principle or source.* The distinction is, as it
• Cf. on this distinction, Dorner, " Gesammelte Schriften," Essay ii.,
pp. 48-152. 29

4SO formal source, CHRIST'S CONSCIOUSNESS;
were, between the fountain whence we draw the water and
the water we draw. Theologies and Churches have differed
both as to the nature and the relation of these sources. The
formal source has been conceived as the Scriptures and
tradition, or the Scriptures and the Church, or as the Church
alone, or as the Scriptures alone. The material source, the
articulus primarius, or fundamentalis, has been conceived to
be the Church, or justification by faith, or the Incarnation, or
the sovereign will of God.* And these sources are so related,
that while the material determines the theology, the formal
determines the material. If a man holds the Church and
tradition to be joint sources of knowledge with the Scriptures,
he cannot possibly find his material principle in justification
by faith or the sovereign will of God ; while if he holds the
Scriptures to be the sole formal source, he cannot possibly
regard the Church or its decrees as the material. Where a
man goes for knowledge really determines what its matter
will be, though not where its emphasis will fall.
In these discussions it has been everywhere assumed that
our formal source is the consciousness of Christ. This is
what we must know if we would find our material or con
structive principle. In order to it the Scriptures are neces
sary, but as a medium or channel which conducts to the
source, not as the source itself. They testify of Christ, are
His witnesses ; but it is as witnesses that they are essential,
and their value is in proportion to their veracity. And our
Tnaterial is- as our formal source. It is the ultimate de
liverance of His consciousness. We cannot accept Luther's
article of a standing or falling Church as our principiu-m
essendi. It is Paul's rather than Christ's ; it may be true,
but it still remains what it was at first — a deduction by a
disciple, not a principle enunciated by the Master. Nor can
we accept the Incarnation as the material and determinative
doctrine. This was made by many Lutheran thinkers deter-
* Supra, pp. 155, 156.

material SOURCE, THE GOD HE REVEALS. 45 1
minative of their position over against the Reformed, as the
older article had determined their antithesis to Rome. And
the later doctrine, as much more central and characteristic,
tended to supersede the earlier. For one thing, it justified
their sacramental theory; for another thing, justification could
be more easily evolved from it than it from justification ;
thirdly, it involved a profounder and truer philosophy of the
relations of man and God ; and, fourthly, allowed stronger
emphasis to fall upon the person of Christ, and through
it upon His work. From the Lutherans the notion has
filtered through various channels into the modern Anglican
consciousness, which loves to describe Christianity as " the
religion of the Incarnation," * the Church as naturally of a piece
with it,^ and as continuing its work.' But whatever the
historical place and function of the person of Christ, it is
clear that the Incarnation cannot be the material or deter
minative principle of Christian thought or theology. For it
is a derivative, or secondary and determined doctrine, not one
primary, independent, determinative. In the consciousness
of Christ the Father is at once primary and ultimate, the
normative and necessary principle ; but the fihal feeling is the
dependent and normated. All He does is done because of
the Father and for Him. The Father sends the Son, works
through Him, abides in Him, raises Him up, and glorifies
Him. The Father is first and last, the cause and end of the
' " Lux Mundi," has as its sub-title, " A Series of Studies in the Re
ligion of the Incarnation." Curiously, the Incarnation is the very thing
the book does not, in any more than the most nominal sense, either
discuss or construe.
3 Gore, " The Church and the Ministry," p. 64.
' Mr. Lock, in " Lux Mundi," p. 367. Cf a fine passage in Hooker
which the idealism of the Reformed Theology has strongly influenced
(bk. v., Ivi. 7). We are in Christ ideally and eternally according to the
Divine foreknowledge ; but from our actual adoption into the body of His
true Church, we are, "by virtue of this mystical conjunction, of Him and in
Him, even as though our very flesh and bones should be made continuate
with His.''

452 SIN DISTINGUISHED FROM ITS COGNATES.
Son's appearance and achievements. Arid so the conclusion
is inevitable : — if we attempt to construct a theology which
shall be faithful to the consciousness of Christ, the Fatherhood
must be the determinative principle of our thought. It is the
architectonic idea ; out of it the whole system must grow ;
with it all elements and deductions must be in harmony : all
else is body ; it alone is the informing soul.
§ II. — The Doctrine of Sin.
The correlative ideas which we have to bring into explicit rela
tions and to explicate into the first lines of a Christian theology
are those of the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of man.
God is by nature Father, and man is by nature son ; and of
these two the normal relation is one of communion or fellow
ship. But the normal is not the actual ; its realization is
hindered by sin. " Sin " is a religious term, intelligible only in
the realm of religious experience and thought. "Evil" is a
philosophical term, and denotes every condition, circumstance,
or act that in any manner or degree interferes with complete
perfection or happiness of being, whether physical, meta
physical, or moral. " Vice " is an ethical term ; it is moral
evil interpreted as an offence against the ideal or law given in
the nature of man : it is the blot or stain left by the departure
from nature. " Crime " is a legal term, denotes the open or
public violation of the law which a society or state has framed
for its own preservation and the protection of its members.
But sin differs from these in this respect : — they may be in a
system which knows no God, but without God there can be
no sin. It belongs to its very essence to be, as it were, trans
cendental and extra-temporal. Evil, as metaphysical, belongs,
whether privative or positive, to being and states of being ;
vice, as ethical, belongs to actions and characters which ought
to be regulated by nature, but are not ; crime, as political
and legal, belongs to acts which can be publicly judged
and punished ; but sin, as religious, is the evil person and

IMPOSSIBLE IN A SYSTEM WITHOUT GOD. 453
vicious or criminal act viewed sub specie csternitatis. Evil
may be collective and common ; vice is personal and private,
crime personal and public ; but sin is at once individual and
collective, a thing of nature and of will, common to a race,
yet peculiar to a person. Evil may be under a sy.stem of
necessity, vice in a state of nature, crime in a social or
pohtical state, but sin only in a system which knows the
majesty and the reign of God. It involves, like evil, the
notions of suffering and loss ; like vice, the notions of dis
obedience and blame ; like crime, the notions of revolt and
wrong, culpability and penalty ; but it enlarges almost to
infinity all these ideas and elements, and combines them into
a unity representative of man's personal and collective being
under a Divine Sovereignty he has denied or forgotten. Sin
has no meaning without God and His purpose concerning
man. It signifies that man has missed the end for which he
was made ; that he is not in character and state, in idea and
reality, in act and function, what he was created to be ; and
that he himself is the cause of this failure. But not to have
God as an end is to have self as centre and law ; what is from
the standpoint of God disobedience, is from the experience
and personality of the creature selfishness. Sin is in its posi
tive character the substitution of self for God as the law and
end of our being ; in its negative character it is transgression or
violation of law. We refuse to obey God's will, and instead we
obey our own— i.e., we make ourselves into our god, and attempt
to force Him and all He has Created into servants to our wills,
means to our ends. There is therefore, to speak with the
older theologians, something infinite in sin. An infinite act
by a finite being, even though done against the Infinite, is
indeed absurd ; but what the phrase means is this : — sin, alike
as act and state, belongs to the relations of man to God, and
partakes of the immensity of these relations ; with them it
lies outside time, and involves issues to which, alike as regards
intensity and duration, limits cannot possibly be set. God's end

454 OTHER RELIGIONS KNOW CRIME AND MISERY,
for man is a state which, as eternal fellowship with Himself,
is an everlasting progression towards the Divine ; and the act
which, by the substitution of self for God, hinders this, has in
it the quality of infinitude. Hence sin stands distinguished
from evil, vice, and crime by ah their elements appearing in
it under the categories of the transcendental and the eternal.
Sin, as thus defined and conceived, is not simply a religious,
but a specifically Christian notion ; indeed, we may describe
it, whether understood as idea or consciousness or both, as
an express and peculiar creation of Christianity. No other
religion knows it or has its precise equivalent Hellenism as
philosophical knew vice, and as religious knew defilement,
which is a ceremonial rather than a moral idea ; but its gods
had too little ethical majesty, and their rule was too void
of ethical character, to allow it to know anything of sin.
Judaism knew crime, which was an offence against the God
who had instituted the state, and uncleanness, which was an
offence against the ritual of the Temple or the traditions of
the schools ; but there was too little of the spirit and the
truth in its Deity to enable it to comprehend the awful idea
of sin. Indeed, nothing so marks the Levitical system, as
a whole, as its inadequate sense of sin and its consequent
defective notion of sacrifice. There are approximations in
Old Testament writers to the Christian idea, but only in
those who have transcended the standpoint of the priest and
the scribe. Brahmanism, again, knows evil, but as meta
physical rather than moral, man's being in a system of illusion,
divided by ignorance from his rest in the Brahma who is the
only and universal reality. Buddhism, which has of ah religions
the most overmastering sense of misery, has also the least
sense of sin. Existence is to it a calamity, or even a kind
of crime ; but in the very degree that it makes misery of the
essence of existence it gets rid of sin, for it transmutes evil
into the victorious or regnant power from which man escapes
only by escaping from the region of personal or conscious

THE CHRISTIAN ALONE KNOWS SIN. 455
being. Lslam, too, has the idea of political revolt or resistance,
punished by such penalties as a political sovereign can inflict ;
but sin is not the essence of its hell or holiness of its heaven.
Indeed, we may say, the more coarsely and cruelly a religion
depicts the pains and miseries of the damned, the less does
it feel the infinity of the evil within the sin ; once it feels this,
it knows that no physical pictures can represent the horror
and the darkness of the lost. And so even within Christendom
sin is never so little feared as when hell most dominates the
imagination ; it needs to be looked at as it affects God to be
understood and feared. It is, as it were, the creature attempt
ing to deny to the Creator the beatitude he was created
expressly to give. If man misses his mark, so in a sense does
God. He may indeed cause even evil to be His minister,
but He can do it only by making manifest to the evildoer
what the evil he does is. And it is in its nature so malignant
that it may for ever divide God from the spirits He created
that He might enjoy their society for ever. For the terms
of the external must be those of the internal fellowship of
God. The eternal beatitude is constituted by the communion
of Father and son ; and beatitude can be to the created only
as the created is son in communion with the Eternal Father.
It is here, therefore, that the significance of our determinative
idea becomes apparent Sin is the reign of unfilial feeling
in the heart that was made for filial love, and where this
reigns the created sonship can never fulfil its end, or the
creative Fatherhood be satisfied with its unrealized ideal.
§ III.— The Permission and Diffusion of Sin.
Out of the many questions which sin, as so conceived,
raises, there are two which concern our notion of God :
(a) Why did He permit sin ? and (/8) Why did He so con
stitute and why does He so govern man that sin has not
only a personal but a collective or racial and native being ?

456 EVIL COULD NOT FORBID CREATION.
(a) " Permit " is a term which has both a physical and
an ethical sense ; in its physical it has here no relevance, in
its ethical it has here no right The term has its physical
sense when construed through omnipotence ; the Almighty
can hinder anything He wills to hinder. He cannot, indeed,
do impossibilities ; the possible alone is possible of accomplish-
\ ment even to the Almighty. And one of the impossibilities
is, having made man free, to compel him to act as if he were
necessitated. To suspend the will when it inclined to sin
were to prevent sin by the destruction of freedom. And sin
were in that case not prevented ; for the will that had meant
to do evil were an evil will, and could never be restored to
being without being restored to evil. Evil once intended may
be vanquished by being allowed ; but were it hindered by an
act of annihilation, then the victory would rest with the evil
which had compelled the Creator to retrace His steps. And,
to carry the prevention backward another stage, if the possi
bility of evil had hindered the creative action of God, then
He would have been, as it were, overcome by its very shadow.
Into this discussion, then, omnipotence cannot enter. It
did not permit sin, nor could it have prevented it save
by either refusing to create or by hastening to uncreate the
new created ; and even then it would have been the moved,
not the motive — the minister that obeyed, not the mind that
commanded. But if " permit " in its physical sense is irre
levant, in its ethical it has here no place. God did not
" permit " sin to be ; it is in its essence the transgression
of His law, and so His only attitude to it is one of oppo
sition. It is because man has contradicted and resisted
His will.
But why did He create a being capable of sinning ? Only
so could He create a being capable of obeying. The ability to
do good implies the capability of doing evil ; and both are
contained in the idea of sonship. To be a son is to be the
image of the father, no mere instrument of his will, but a

POSSIBLE WHERE CREATURES ARE SONS. 457
repetition of himself, constituted after him in nature and
faculty. The engine can neither obey nor disobey, and the
creature who was without this double ability might be a
machine, but could be no child. If, then, there was to be a
world of created sons, it must be a world which had evil and
good, sin and obedience, as possible alternatives ; and the
possibilities could be determined only in one way — by the
action and the experiment of the new natures. Moral per
fection may be attained, but cannot be created ; God can
make a being capable of moral action, but not a being with
all the fruits of moral action garnered within him. Innocence
is the attribute of the created, but holiness of the obedient
And, if we may so speak, these alternative possibilities con
stitute the interest of creation for God ; because of them it
needs Him more, appeals to Him more, calls more of the
resources of His nature into exercise. It may well be that
God experiences a deeper and a diviner joy in winning the
love of a creature that can refuse His love, than in listening
to the music of spheres that cannot choose but play. Nor
are we to think of creation as completed ; it is only in process.
God has mademan, is still making him ; and His dealings with
him can begin only after he is. This thing we call sin has
come to be in the first act of the drama ; we must see the last
before we can judge what it means. But even now we can
see this — through it attributes of God have become known
that could not otherwise have been manifested, and the beatific
vision will be all the richer and the more ecstatic that the
Father it sees is one who loved too deeply to surrender the
lost. In the parable the sins of the sons throw into grander
relief the grace of the father, and the memory of their own
evil must have touched them with a deeper admiration for
his redeeming good. And the reverence of the moral
universe will be in proportion to its knowledge of God ; and
its stability will be in the measure of its reverence and its
love. Only through the possibihty of sin could God have

458 HEREDITY IN SCIENCE, CONTINUITY IN HISTORY,
sons, and it may be that only through the actuality of sin
could the sons know God.
(/3) But why was the race so constituted that sin when it
entered the world became collective or common as well as
personal? This question refers to facts which not only
theology but science recognises and seeks to explain, especially
by the heredity we are all beginning so dimly to understand.
Our inheritance from the past is too ancient for memory to
measure ; and though it has much of good, it has also its
proportion of evil. And the pathetic thing is that the heir
enters upon his inheritance all unconscious of its being or his
own. The home into which he is born, the family in which
he is nursed, the school in which he is educated, the society in
which he lives, evoke and exercise his latent qualities ; and he
discovers that nature is older than his person, the action of
collective forces prior to the operation of the will. Now, the
evil, whether privative or positive, at once in the nature
which incorporates our inheritance from the past and in the
conditions amid which it is realized, represents what theology
has termed original sin, what science knows in part as
heredity, and history as the law of continuity. The principle
which underlies these three things is one and the same ; all
attempt to express the idea that law reigns in nature and in
man — that the present rises out ofthe past, that the forces that
mould the person are older than the person they mould.
But they differ here : — Science and history are empirical and
real, see but the operation of laws within the limits of space
and under the conditions of time, unconcerned with anything
lying beyond sense and the phenomena it knows ; but
theology, as transcendental and ideal, looks at man through
the universal and eternal, measures him in his collective as
in his personal being by no less a standard than the mind
of God. And from this point of view theology sees things
hidden from those who move on a lower plane. Science
knows no holy and profane, only a natural and a real ;

AND COMMON SIN IN THEOLOGY. 459
history knows no eternal and ideal, only a temporal and an
actual ; and their judgments are expressed in the language
of the laws they know. But to theology neither nature nor
time is ultimate ; on the contrary, it has to judge both in the
light of the Divine ideal. And so it finds in nature, as
embodied in man, forces that work for evil — in man, as history
shows him, tendencies that create crime and wrong ; and these
are to it agencies or energies that contend against God, sinful
and factors of sin. Theology were the blindest of all sciences
if it did not see that evil was something more and mightier
than the habits and acts of persons, besetting the will even
before it was awake with potent beguilements. " Natura
corrumpit personam " expresses a fact which science re
cognizes without condemning the nature, but theology so
formulates that the nature may be expressly condemned.
§ IV.— Sin Common and Transmitted.
Now we have here two questions : (i) In what sense is the
common or collective evil sin ? and (2) By what law is its
distribution or transmission or continued operation governed ?
(i) As to the first point, we must return to distinctions
already found in Paul. While the common sin underlies and
precedes all individual transgressions, yet in itself it is not
transgression or offence — i.e., it does not involve culpability or
guilt. It may even, while it stands alone, entail privation or
loss, but not the penalties which follow upon personal blame.
It denotes at once a privative and a potential state ; as
privative it is a state without merit and without demerit — i.e.,
all the qualities proper to personal action are absent, and so
there is nothing upon which final moral judgment can be
based ; and as potential it is a centre or seat of the energies,
all still latent, stored by the past in the new organism, and
waiting only the fit conditions to develop into activity. But
this means that the nature does not conform to an absolute

460 OF WHAT SORT IS COMMON SIN?
standard ; it is not ideal or normal, but has slumbering energies
that may wake in actual transgressions. The defective
compass will not speak truly, the watch that is wrong goes
wrong, and so neither can be trusted ; and we condemn not
merely the single act, but the whole machine. And so God
must judge natures as well as acts. The nature where there
is no positive good and much potential evil has too little of
the Divine in it to be accepted and approved just as it stands.
It has so come through the race as to participate in the evil
pf the race ; and this participation has its sign and seal in the
sufferings and the tendencies common to us all. But while
all men suffer from these defects of nature, yet for them no
man is condemned ; from them every one needs to be saved,
but on their account alone no one will be lost The infant,
whether baptized or unbaptized, will not perish. Christ
calls all little children unto Him, and says, "of such is the
kingdom of heaven." And the way into His kingdom is not
guarded by any sacrament which men may give or withhold.
As the sin is common, the way out of it is common too ; the
God who judges the irresponsible nature sinful will not deal
with it as if it were responsible for its sin. He can only be
gracious provided He is just ; and He who is Father of all will
not forget His Fatherhood where it has been least disowned
and where recognition is most needed.
(2) But this question can only find its solution through the
discussion of the second. The law which governs the dis
tribution and transmission of sin is one with the law which
governs the distribution and transmission of righteousness.
The law is one, though the operation is twofold. If men be
sons of God, then mankind is a family ; and where the family
is a whole there the sin or the good of one is the evil or the
gain of all. This constitution of the race may be represented
by two great ideas — its unity and the solidarity of its con
stituent members. Its unity is at once real and ideal, the
latter being expressed or incorporated in the former. The

UNITY AND SOLIDARITY OF MAN. 46 1
great Being of Positivism was collective Humanity ; but if
Humanity be an organic whole, it cannot be a mere series,
successive or co-ordinate, of detached phenomena or acci
dentally aggregated atoms, but must as an organism embody
ideas, be as it were a structure built by mind. What
Positivism was too unideal to express had been expressed
centuries before under varied forms in the New Testament
The one Creator made all men of one blood and for one
purpose — to feel after and to find Him ; and so they were all
His offspring, constituted, alike as regards origin, nature, and
end, a unity, which, as it were, incarnated the thought of the
constitutive mind. Science has followed with leaden foot and
unquiet eye in the track of faith, and through biology and
language and history discovered the unities which religion
had found through its belief in God. But the more we
conceive the race as a unity, the more are we forced to con
ceive the solidarity of its members — i.e., all lie under the law
of mutual and reciprocal responsibility. We may be uncon-
conscious of its operation, but it operates none the less. In
the home the vice of the father or the virtue of the mother is
a common evil or good ; in the state the character of the
sovereign, the genius of the statesman, the courage of the
soldier, the imagination of the man of letters, the honour of
the merchant, the energy of the industrious, the indigence
of the indolent, the acts of the criminal, affect the common
weal. There is no person so mean or so impotent as to be
without effect on the whole. In universal history the vihain
as well as the hero contributes to the final result And this
law of solidarity finds its supreme illustrations in the sphere
of religion : here creative personalities exercise their mightiest
lordship, and the evil will its most disastrous influence. The
names that in theology embody good and evil for the race are
Adam and Christ ; through the one sin came to be, through
the other righteousness. They are because opposites com
plementary and correlative. If either was to be, both must be

462 THE TWO COLLECTIVES, SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
If Adam and his sin reigned unto death, then it could not
but be that Christ and His righteousness would reign unto
eternal life. This means that we cannot construe common or
collective sin apart or by itself; it must be taken in connection
with the common or collective righteousness. Original sin
would not in any one of its forms be tolerable, were it re
garded either as a complete or an absolute truth. Its uncon
ditional reign over even a single individual, let alone a whole
race, would be abhorrent to the justice which expresses
Fatherhood. Its exists, therefore, only through its antithesis,
and its very being is a symbol that God has not separated
Himself from the race, that He feels its dependence and
claim upon Him, that even His justice is a mode in which He
works within and upon it to prepare it for His mercy. But if
these two, the common sin and the common righteousness,
only represent the operation of a law due to the filial
constitution of the race, then two consequences follow : — First,
the unconscious or irresponsible whose only sin is the common
sin stand both in Christ and in Adam, and share in the good
as well as in the evil. The race was constituted in the Son,
stands together in Him, is His ; and all its undeveloped
personalties are His by right, by His death redeemed, and by
His redemption reclaimed. Secondly, the conscious and the
responsible determine their own relations to the sin or the
righteousness. By transgression the one is developed into per
sonal guilt ; by faith the other becomes a personal possession.
By the one the man belongs to the race whose head is Adam,
by the other to the race whose Head is Christ. The unity of
man is seen in the reign of the common law, with its two
opposite effects ; the principle of solidarity is seen in the
action of the persons whose evil and good the law has dis
tributed. But both were, as regards being and operation,
made possible by the filial constitution of the race.

FATHERHOOD AND SOVEREIGNTY AGAINST SIN. 463
§ V. — Sin AND THE Regal Paternity.
But sin, either ip its personal or coUective form, cannot be
discussed or understood alone ; and so we must look at it
from a higher point of view— viz., God's action relative to it
and to man. In the very degree that it affects man it must
affect God. But in what sense or manner can it be said to
affect Him? Certain things are from the nature of the
case obvious at the very outset. Sin cannot change God's
character or ends : what He was before it He is after it ;
what His ends were they are ; and though His action may be
changed, it can only express unchanged mind and purpose.
Sin is in an equal degree an offence against the paternal love
and the sovereign will, — against the love, for it defeats all the
motives and intentions of the eternal goodness ; against the
will, for it contradicts all the means and ends of the eternal
righteousness. But it can annihilate neither the Fatherhood
nor the Sovereignty, for it cannot annul either the character
or the acts through which they are ; and if these remain, they
must be expressed in fit and relevant action. Hence we are
now concerned with the conduct or methods of the regal
Paternity relative to sin and the sinner.
I. As to the Fatherhood. The God who created out of
love cannot cease to love because His creatures have sinned.
This love must be as immutable and universal as God * ; and
it may be said to have a twofold object — persons, and their
states or characters.
(a) Persons as objects of love have an unchangeable worth
to God. They cannot cease to be to His consciousness, and while
they are they must be loved. Theologies have been written
on the principle that the loss of souls is a loss to the souls
and not to God ; nay, divines have ventured to speak as if by
such loss His glory and the beatitude of His universe could in
some manner be promoted. He created heaven and earth
' Supra, pp. 421 ff.

464 LOVE WILL NOT SURRENDER THE LOVED.
by a word ; by another word could He uncreate them, and
by a third word call into their vacant places new sons of
God, able and willing, like the old, to sing for .joy on the morning
of their birth. But these are only forms under which the
ancient notion survives that the Almighty is the equivalent of
God. It is not possible to a being who has once loved to lose
and to feel as if the loss were not his, or as if it were one that a
new person with the old name could easily repair. It belongs
to the nature of love to allow no substitution, for it lives by
virtue of its inability to surrender what it possesses. Affection
may be transferred, but cannot be distributed ; love is capable
of distribution, but incapable of transference. Into a home a
child may come, live awhile, and die ; to him another may
succeed, bearing the same name, recalling the vanished face ;
but to the mother the new is not the old, and the heart trembles
while it rejoices in the possession of the living, for it re
members the dead. So loss concerns God even more than
man ; the loss of the lost soul is not all the soul's — it is God's
as well ; and where He feels loss He can never be satisfied with
out attempting to regain. The living sorrow is harder to
bear than the dead, for death allows time to heal and distance
to soften and memory to adorn with the beautiful things it
will not forget ; but life allows no healing process to go on,
and turns the very love of the evil or the shiftless into an
open sore of the heart. Yet in one respect there is a happier
difference : with death hope, so far as concerns these modes
of being, has died ; but where life is hope is, and hope lives
because love will not let it die. So the love of God as eternal
and universal will not surrender its object to sin ; to it the
effort after recovery is necessary. To accept the loss were to
cancel the love. He who created, because a Father, must even
in the face of sin, because of His Fatherhood, seek to save the
lost O) But love regards characters and states of being as well
as persons ; and the purer it is as personal, the intenser its

SIN OPPOSED TO HAPPINESS, GOD TO SIN. 465
jealousy of evil. As a will of good to the person, it can be
satisfied with nothing less than his happiness. In his wasted
existence it can never rejoice, nor can it consent to regard
as normal his evil and miserable state. But all sin is misery,
for misery is but the symptom of a being which has failed to
fulfil its end. If man was created for God, then to constitute
himself God's enemy is to be a sinner, and to be separated
from the source of all the good and all the joy of the universe
is to be miserable. But if man fails of his end, God will not fail
of His purpose. WS may, then, conceive sin as presenting to
the Divine will alternative courses, — either man must be aban
doned to it and in consequence to misery, or made happy in
it, or saved from it It was not possible that God could find
a reason in man for the course to be pursued. The motives
must be worthy of Himself, and so could be found only within
Himself, in His nature which gives the law to His will. If
this, then, be our standpoint, it is evident that the misery of
those He loves and will not cease to love, cannot but be
abhorrent to God ; and against its continuance He will
contend with all His moral energies. To abandon souls
He loved, even though they had abandoned Him, would
be to punish man's faithlessness by ceasing to be faithful
to Himself. Nor could He make man happy in sin, for
here there were a twofold impossibility : first, happiness is
not something that can be made — it must be evoked from
within, earned that it may be enjoyed ; and, secondly. His own
happiness is moral, and He can create happiness only by
means of a moral perfection akin to His own. What became
Him, then, was to save man from sin. He so loved the world
that He could do no other than will to save it He so pitied
man that to redeem him He could not spare Himself. To
say " God is love " means He must be the Saviour.
2. As to the Sovereignty. The love which is the paternal
attribute regards souls and their states ; the righteousness
which is the regal attribute regards their acts and qualities. In
30

466 RIGHTEOUSNESS WILL EXPEL SIN,
other words, while the concern of love is happiness, the concern
of righteousness is holiness ; in the one case the emphasis falls
on the sinner, in the other on the sin. Sin, then, wears a some
what different aspect to these attributes : to love it is an outrage,
because an attempt to ruin its objects ; to righteousness it is
an offence, because it creates disorder, introduces wrong,
insult, licence, self-will, turning the act of one into the injury
of all. Now, what is the only attitude righteousness can hold
to sin ? It can never tolerate it or allow that it has any
right to any footing in the universe. The mere existence of
sin is a wrong which righteousness must resist, and seek to
end in the only way it can regard as right or. even possible
—viz., by expulsion. To expel the evil which Tertullian named
the great interloper, must ever remain the aim and the effort
of the eternal righteousness, or evil will become a sort of
naturalized or legitimated citizen of eternity. But how is it
to be expelled ? There is the way of annihilation, expulsion
of sin by destruction of the sinner. But this were a ruthless
remedy, somewhat in the manner of a rude physician, who, in
order to stay a disease, killed his patient And if this were
the method of cure, who would be the victor — God or sin ?
Would not the victory remain with the evil which compeUed
God to uncreate His own creation ? There are no difficulties
connected with the origin of evil at all commensurate with those
connected with the ending of it in a way so unworthy of the
wisdom and foresight and grace of God. The annihilation of
the creature either now or at any moment even inconceivably
distant, were a confession by the Creator of htter helplessness,
an acknowledgment that the universe, or a part of the uni
verse, had so broken down in His hands that He knew no
way of mending it but by ending it Then, if there is any
truth in the Fatherhood, would not annihilation be even more
a punishment of God than of man ? The annihilated creature
would indeed be gone for ever — good and evil, shame and
misery, penalty and pain, would for him all be ended with his

BUT NOT BY ETERNAL DESTRUCTION. 467
being ; but it would not be so with God^out of His memory
the name of the man could never perish, and it would be, as
it were, the eternal symbol of a .soul He had made only to find
that with it He could do nothing better than destroy it If,
then, we cannot conceive destruction as the method of the
Paternal Sovereign, can we conceive the wa}- of penalty ?
Penalty, indeed, there must be. Fatherhood is not infinite
good-nature, oblivious of faults, indulgent to the wrongdoer,
tolerant of wrong. There is something more terrible in the
attitude of the father to sin than of the judge to crime, for
the judge sees in the crime only an offence against law, but
the father feels in the sin the ruin of his son. The judge
regards the criminal only as a person against whom the law
is to be vindicated, but the father regards the son as a person
out of whom sin is to be expelled. Hence comes in the father's
case a severit\- to sin that does not exist in the judge's to crime.
And so sin is the last thing the regal Paternity can be indulgent
to: tobe merciless to it is a necessity; nothing that defiles
purity or threatens obedience can be spared. But this very
necessity prevents penalty ever becoming merely retributive
or retaliatory. God can never be reconciled to the being of
sin, or be anything else than its supreme enemy. Were He
at any point of space or moment of eternity to say, " Certain
sinners must, in order to vindicative and exemplary punish
ment, remain sinners for ever," then He would, as it were,
concede a recognized place and a function to sin. He would
accept it as a thing that must be used, since it could not be
o\'ercome. But the righteousness can never cease from its
conflict against evil till the evil ceases ; and if evil never
ceases, then the confliqt must go on for ever.
But this argument must not be construed to mean that
whether men will or will not they must be saved. Compulsory
restoration is only another form of annihilation. Freedom
is of the essence of man, and he must be freely saved to be
saved at all. W^ere he saved at the expense of his freedom, he

468 NO COMPULSORY SALVATION.
would be not so much saved as lost. For the very seat and
soul of personality is will ; and were the will suspended, espe
cially in the article of its supreme choice, the personality
would be destroyed ; what resulted would be not a new man,
but another man from him who had been before. And the
original man could not be recalled into being ; for were the
old will, suspended that the man might be saved, restored,
the old state would be restored with it. Those alone can
freely stand who have been freely saved ; and without freedom
there can be no obedience, without obedience no beatitude.
Hence the argument as little involves universal restoration as
it allows partial annihilation. What it maintains is an eternal
will of good, and, as a consequence, eternal possibilities of
salvation. God will never be reluctant, though man may for
ever refuse. But to necessitate were as little agreeable to the
regal Paternity as to annihilate. The Fatherhood will ever
love and ever seek to create happiness ; the Sovereignty will
ever govern and ever seek to expel sin and create righteous
ness ; but neither will ever forget that the son is a free citizen,
and must be freely won to submission and obedience. Sin is
not to be vanquished either by the destruction or the com
pulsory restoration of the sinner, but by his free salvation ;
and should this fail of accomplishment, yet God will have
been so manifested by the attempt at it, that all the universe
will feel as if there had come to it a vision of love that made
it taste the ecstasy and beatitude of the Divine.

CHAPTER II.
THE FATHERHOOD AND SOTERIOLOG'i.
OUR argument, then, has led us to this— that God, by
the ethical necessities of His nature, becomes the
Saviour. This does not make His action less, but rather
more gracious and free. It is altogether spontaneous ; for it
has all its motives, though not ah its ends, within Himself
He may be said to obey the gentle constraint of love and the
imperious demand of righteousness ; but in this He is only
obedient to His own nature. Yet while He saves by inner or
moral compulsion. He will not compulsorily save. If man
returns to God, it must be freely ; the way of necessity were
the way of death. But in order to bring man freely back,
God must find some way of so entering his consciousness
as to overpower and expel sin. For the only thing that can
expel sin is possession of God. And this can be no mere
subjective process. More than the sane mind is needed to
restore the insane to sanity ; he must live in a sane world,
be an intelligence to it, while it is an intelligible to him,
for only as the reason within is reconciled with the order
without can existence become reasonable. And so the
process of saving means, not only new persons, but a new
order, all things within and without made new. We pass,
therefore, from the ethical necessities that govern the action
of God to the action itself, or the means by which His
ends are to be realized.

470 CHRIST THE MANIFESTED GOD.
§ I. — The Incarnation.
I. We have learned to think of the surrender of man the
sinner as a thing impossible to God, and of his salvation as
a thing possible only to God and through Him. But if God
is to save man by a process which shall not destroy but
restore and perfeft his nature, then the process must be one
which uses the nature, works upon it and through it ; in other
words. He must reach man through men, heal persons by
persons. Yet He can do this only as the persons are His
agents, as He forms, fills, guides them. Their power to heal
will depend upon the degree in which they are possessed
of Him, for they can communicate only what they are
charged with. Now, in this region degrees of difference
easily become differences of kind. The men who have had
manifest commissions from God to heal man are an in
numerable multitude, and they have done it as His servants,
by virtue of what they transmitted rather than what they
intrinsically were. But Jesus Christ stands here in an order
by Himself; though He appeared as man. His action has
been such as became the manifested God. His religious
supremacy is a matter of personal and historical experience.
From Him has come the God we know, and all of God
that fills our lives. Were He removed, our personal religion
would be altogether different, and our consciousness of
God would lose its specific character. His manhood has
this peculiar attribute — while it shows Him one with us, it
is yet to us the medium through which we feel one with
God. All it has effected as to our ideal of man it has ac
complished through its action on our idea of God, and our
consciousness of relation to Him. And this is no peculiar
experience ; it is common to centuries and to whole races.
He is the regnant Head of the spiritual society which has
been the most efficient agent in the healing of man, and
from Him all its sense of divinity and all its motives to

THE GODHEAD AND THE INCARNATION. 47 1
beneficence have been derived. We may say, then, if any
one has acted as a Deity to the race. He has .so acted ; and
if anything in the life of His society was inevitable, it was
that it should conceive and represent Him as the Divine
yet human person it knew Him by experience to be.
The Incarnation may be said to be the counterpart in
the field of history of the Godhead in the field of thought.
Through the Godhead we conceive Deity as so existing and
conditioned that the Incarnation is possible ; through the
Incarnation we conceive an historical Person as so placed
that He realizes the affinities of God and man, and so con
stituted that He brings them into organic relations. God
conceived as Godhead is a Being with life in Himself, com
municable and ever in process of communication ; Christ
conceived as the incarnate Son is a Person so possessed of
the communicable life of God as to be the inexhaustible
medium of its communication to man. In His being as
such a medium two things are involved — personal unity
(a) with God, and (/S) with man. As (a) He is in possession
of the life which has to be communicated ; as (/3) He is a
fit and capable organ for its communication. Were He cut
off from' God, He could be no source of the life ; and what
life He transmitted as a channel would be, because of His
inadequacy, both quantitatively and qualitatively different
from the Divine. Were He cut off from man. He would
be no normal or natural, and therefore no universal, medium
of distribution. The doctrine of the Incarnation is the theory
which, by the union or coexistence of the two natures in His
Person, explains His sufficiency for His functions as Mediator
and Saviour.
This doctrine may be said to consist of four main divisions
or questions.
(a) In what sense was the Person who became incarnate
God, and in what sense was the incarnate Person man — or
the doctrine of the natures ?

472 AFFINITIES OF THE TWO NATURES.
(/3) In what form did the nature which assumed humanity
exist prior to the act of assumption, and in what form
posterior to it — or the doctrine of the states ?
(7) Did the natures involve the personal unity or the
duality of the incarnate Being — or the doctrine of the
person ?
(8) How were the natures as they coexisted within the
personal unity related — or the doctrine of the communicatio
idiomatum ?
It is impossible to discuss all these questions within our
limits ; all that is possible is to explain and exhibit the idea
of the Incarnation in the light of our determinative principle.
2. It is as well frankly to confess that no doctrine is more
beset with difficulties, all of them grave enough to appal and
oppress the most audacious thinker. Yet the metaphysician,
when he inquires into the genesis and conditions of know
ledge, is confronted by difficulties as many and as grave.
And we ought not to expect for religious truth an immunity
which is granted to no other. In no region of thought or
inquiry do we regard intellectual difficulty as a disproof
either, objectively, of truth, or, subjectively, of truthfulness ;
and least of all ought we to do so in the realm of religion.
Nay, in proportion as a doctrine affects and is affected by
our deeper problems, we ought to feel that it has a greater
value for thought, and a more vital interest for faith. Now,
the Incarnation has an equal significance for religion and for
speculation, though the significance of these two is not equal ;
and as regards both the modern mind has another attitude
than the ancient In speculation there is now a clearer
insight into the affinities of the Divine and human natures,
and in religion a truer perception of the relation which the
Fatherhood and Sonship within God hold to the being
and constitution of man and his world. The affinities of
the natures may be said to be the common principle of
our higher philosophies. It was implied in Des Cartes'

SONSHIP A BASIS OF AFFINITY. 473
attempt to educe from the nature and contents of his
own mind the evidence for the being of the Infinite ; as
- also in Spinoza's endeavour to resolve the phenomena of
space and time, matter and thought, into the modes of a
single substance, which was at once a res extensa and a res
cogitans. The same may be said of Malebranche's theory
of the vision of all things in God, and Berkeley's doctrine
of nature as a visual language, which was spoken by the
creative and translated by the created spirit. The relation
of Kant's subjective forms and categories to the interpretation
of nature, and of his dialectic to the transcendental ideal,
implies, in spite of his own negative criticism, the corre
spondence or reciprocity of the interpretative mind with the
interpreted reality. Schelling's Absolute Identity and Hegel's
Absolute Idealism meant the same thing*; and it has passed
into current thought, philosophical and religious, as the
doctrine of the Divine immanence. For this doctrine signifies
that God does not lose but rather realizes His being by His
immanence in nature and man, and man does not cease to
be but rather becomes himself through the presence and
operation of the immanent God. The natures are not con
tradictory or mutually exclusive, but their affinity or kinship
expresses their reciprocal susceptibility. God is, as it were,
the eternal possibility of being incarnated, man the permanent
capability of incarnation.
But the meaning of this speculative tendency becomes more
apparent when taken in connection with the religious, which
has here only expressed the growing consciousness of our
determinative idea. Affinity of nature has its highest expres
sion in Fatherhood and Sonship. The Creator is the archetype
even more than the architect of the creation ; the Godhead is,
as it were, the idea and model after which it is built. He who
is according to His essence a society, makes a social universe ;
and as the inner society is constituted by the co-ordinated
1 Supra, pp. 209-233.

474 THE INVISIBLE CREATES THE VISIBLE SONSPIIP.
being of Father and Son, the outer is made in the image of
the inner. The ideal is, as it were, the uncreated ;.the real is
its expression, its reflection or shadow. The ideal is eternal,
belongs at once to the essence and the mind of God, where
thought and being are one ; but the real is temporal, has
a history, is a form which expresses the essence out of
which it comes. So the originated nature is like the Origi
nating, spirit as He is Spirit, and they stand related according
to the eternal ideal, which is yet an eternal real, as son and
Father. The affinity of nature and the filial relation are thus
but two sides of the same thing. Man as God's kin is of His
kind, the differences being of degree rather than of nature.
But this affinity and relation are ideal, as conceived and pur
posed of God — not actual, as manifested in man and realized in
history. In fact and through sin God and man are ethical
opposites, though in thought and in intention they are related
and akin. But the very aim of the Divine action is to overcome
the difference, and realize the ideal. Hence we may conclude
from the affinity of the natures that incarnation appears a
possible thing, while from the need of ending their ethical
division it may well become necessary.
For, as we have already argued, the filial is an ethical even
more than a physical relation. Sonship can be realized only
where Fatherhood is known, and Fatherhood can be known
only where it is seen with all its qualities in fullest exercise.
The act of physical generation constitutes only a nominal or
legal Paternity ; duties of another and higher order must be
fulfilled if a man is to be a father indeed. Nor is it enough
to feed and clothe the child — the State can do that ; or to
educate him — the school can do that The child must, as it
were, daily live in the father's soul, be warmed by its generous
heat, quickened by its larger life, moved and expanded by its
wiser love. And if God's Fatherhood is to be a reality to
man, he must see it as it is, know it by experience, by handling
it and being handled by it But the only way in which it can

TUE SON, NOT GOD, BECOMES INCARNATE. 475
thus come to him is in the form of humanity. He must see a
real son, whose knowledge of the Father is inner, and not, like
his own, outer only. He must learn what the Father is from
one who has lived in His bosom. Even in so high a region
personal experience may illustrate a truth. One of the things
time has made most obvious to me is this: — that of all the human
persons that have contributed to the shaping of the character
which is as destiny, the mightiest was that of an obscure man
who died years before I was born. But his daughter was my
mother ; and the daughter so loved and revered the father, so
remembered his sayings, so understood his mind, so believed
the faith that ruled and guided him, that she had no higher
thought for her son than to make him such a man as her
father had been. And so, invisible as he was, he became the
real parent of the spirit and the character of the man who now
writes this book. And if God is to become the real Father of
man, and man the real son of God, then all the energies and
loves and ideals of the unseen Paternity must be incarnated
and organized in a visible sonship, that they may become
creative of a mankind which shall realize the filial ideal. It
is through the one God-man that the many become men of
God. The nature that is in all men akin to Deity becomes in
Christ a nature in personal union with the Deity, and the
unio personalis, which is peculiar to Him, is the basis of the
unio mystica, which is possible to all.
3. To the positive construction of the doctrine we come,
then, through the conception of the Godhead ; for where its
main difficulty lies, there lies also its explanation. We speak
of the incarnation of God, but it were more correct to speak
of the incarnation of the Word or the Son. Jesus Christ
is neither God nor the Godhead incarnate, but He is the
incarnate Son of God. The distinction is cardinal ; the
Father did not become incarnate, nor did the Holy Spirit, and
so far forth as they did not we have an incarnation not of the
whole Godhead, but only of the Son. And the reasons for

476 THE ATTRIBUTES AND THE INCARNATION.
the distinction are fundamental. What was impossible to the
Godhead as a whole may well be possible to the Second
Person. For the Father could not be identified with man as
the Son could. He was the ideal of the actual world ; it
existed in Him before it was ; He was, as dependent and
reflexive and receptive, the symbol of the created within the
Uncreated ; as the Object of eternal love and Subject of eternal
thought. He was the basis of objectivity within the Godhead.
And so it was but fit that He should manifest His ideal in the
forms of actual being, exhibit under the conditions of space
and time those relations of the eternal nature which the
created natures were intended to realize. But in order to
these a supreme renunciation was necessary ; He had to stoop
from the form of God to the form of a servant This act is
described as a kenosis, an emptying of Himself Now, this is
precisely the kind of term we should expect to be used if the
Incarnation was a reality. It must have involved surrender,
humiliation ; there could be no real assumption of the nature,
the form, and the status of the created Son, if those of the un
created were in all their integrity retained. These two things,
the surrender and the assumption, are equal and coincident ;
but it is through the former that the latter must be under
stood. We may express what it means by saying that the
Incarnation, while it was not of the whole Godhead, only of
the Son, yet concerned the Godhead as a whole. And this
carries with it an important consequence : — Physical attributes
are essential to God, but ethical terms and relations to the
Godhead. In other words, the external attributes of God are
omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence ; but the internal are
truth and love. But the external are under the command of
the internal ; God acts as the Godhead is. The external alone
might constitute a Creator, but not a Deity ; the internal
would make out of a Deity the Creator. Whatever, then,
could be surrendered, the ethical attributes and qualities could
not ; but God may only seem the more Godlike if, in obedience

THE INCARNATION NO ACCIDENT 477
to the ethical. He limit or restrain or veil the physical. We
reverence Him the more that we think the annihilation so
easy to His omnipotence is made impossible by His love. No
such impossibilities would be known to an almighty devil ;
he would glory in destruction as much as God glories in
salvation. We may say, then, that what marks the whole life
of Deity is the regulation of His physical by His ethical attri
butes, or the limitation of God by the Godhead. But this
same principle supplies us with a factor for the solution of our
problem. The salvation of the sinner was a moral necessity
to the Godhead ; but no such necessity demanded that each
of the Divine Persons should every moment exercise all the
physical attributes of God. And this surrender the Son made
when He emptied Himself and assumed the form of a servant,
and was made in the likeness of man. The determinative
Divine qualities were obeyed, and the determined limited ; yet
it was, as it were, the renunciation of the less in order to the
realization of the more Godlike qualities. " The Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us " ; but we only the more " beheld
His glory, glory as of the Only Begotten from the Father, full
of grace and truth." *
So conceived, then, the Incarnation may be described as the
most illustrious example of the supremacy of God's moral
over His physical attributes, and of the relation they hold to
the healing and the happiness of man. As such it is of all acts
the act that most becomes Him, and so the one we can least
conceive as accidental. And therefore, though its special form
may be affected by the fact of sin, yet it were mere imperti
nence to imagine that but for the accident of sin, the universe
would have been deprived of its most invincible evidence of
grace. Luther, in his picturesque way, has said, that Lucifer,
while a good angel, saw in the very countenance of God that
He had from eternity determined to become a man, to assume
in time the nature of men, not of angels ; and hence came the
1 John i. 14.

478 "SEINE EHRE IST SEINE LIEBE."
envy that caused his fall.* But those who see the prophecy
fulfilled, feel that there is nothing so majestic as the condescen
sion of God. For as Luther has also said, " seine Ehre ist seine
Liebe " ; and His honour is so His love that the humiliation
to which His love constrained most awakens our wonder and
our praise. And this exaltation through His moral attributes
has not lessened our sense for His physical. These the Incar
nation does not, any more than external nature, so limit as to
conceal. Between them there is nothing on this point that
deserves to be called radical difference. The physical universe
circumscribes the ubiquity of God ; the divisions of time
annul for us His eternity. There is, in truth, no difficulty
involved in His union with human nature that is not equally
involved in His relation to material nature, which, however
vast, is not so near the Infinite as man, and, however old, has
not so much of eternity within it as his mind. The relation
must indeed assume different forms, because the terms related
are different There can be no personal union with material
nature, for it knows no personality ; but with human nature,
which must be personal to be, the union which does not
become personal is not absolutely real. While, then, the
Incarnation does no more violence to the physical attributes
of God than creation does, it yet so exalts and glorifies
His moral qualities and character that in its presence the
voices of nature may be said to lose their music or die into
silence. 4. The argument, so far as it has proceeded, has been
governed by the determinative idea of God as interpreted in
Christ. But as to Christ Himself as the incarnate Person little
has been said, though much has been implied. The person,
to be real, must be a unity, for two wills or minds were two
persons. But the natures, if He is to be qualified for His work,
must be distinct Only their integrity must not be developed
into antagonism or incompatibility. The union within the
• Opera, vii., pp. 1 544-1 555 (Walch).

INCARNATION AND THE PERSON OF CHRIST. 479
Person is not a work of mere omnipotence, but expresses a
real affinity, ethically mediated, though personally realized.
And the natures in their union condition each other ; because
of their kinship a real and reciprocal communicatio idiomatum
is possible. Hence by its union with the Deity the humanity
is not superseded or diminished, but rather exercised, realized,
and enlarged ; and by its union with the humanity the Deity
is not discharged or lessened, but rather actualized, personalized,
made articulate. For the work designed the manhood was
capable of receiving the Godhood, and the Godhood was
capable of personal union with the manhood. The perfection
of the humanity, while realized in time, expressed what was
of eternity, — the perfection of the Godhood, not the physical
attributes which belonged to the Creator, but the inner
qualities, the hidden loves and energies which were, as we have
said, the God of God. And so He was, in a sense, a double
incarnation — of manhood and Godhood. In Him humanity
was realized before God and revealed to man ; in Him God
was revealed to man by Godhood being realized before him.
The unity of His person symbolized His work as a unity ;
to participate in His manhood is to become a " partaker of
the Divine nature," * " heirs of God, and joint-heirs with
Christ" 2
§ II. — The Atonement.
But the Incarnation had a function, and so we must ask.
Cur Deus Homo ?
I. Whatever its function might have been in a sinless world,
its purpose in ours was to save the soul from personal and
the race from collective sin. In attempting to represent how
it was made to do this, we must be careful to maintain its
true relation to God. If He is the unity of Fatherhood and
Sovereignty, law is not something that can be separated from
' 2 Peter i. 4. ^ Rom. viii. 17.

480 LAW, ROMAN AND HEBREW.
Him, and conceived as a sort of independent entity, with
claims enforced upon the sinner by sanctions and needing to be
satisfied by penalties. The idea of law in the New Testament
has very little in common with the idea of law in our juridical
theologies. The Roman lex was not the synonym of the
Greek v6jxo<;, especially when used to translate the Hebrew
torah. Into lex whole systems of jurisprudence were packed ;
it raised the image of the Ccesar who was its source, "Cci^ judex
who was its interpreter, the procurator who was its guardian,
the lictors with their fasces, and all the apparitores who
waited to be the agents and instruments of justice, when
engaged in its noble but often hard and painful work of
vindicating authority. But to a Jew who, though he used
Greek, thought in Hebrew, voyi.o'i had other and larger associa
tions. It was primarily instruction, a method of discipline
through the truth and ordinances given of God, received and
revealed by prophets and priests, written in the sacred books,
explained, transmitted, and enlarged in the schools, read in
the synagogue, observed in the Temple, incorporated in
the religion. When a Roman jurist, even though he had
become a Christian Father, thought of law, it was as known
in the schools where he had studied and in the courts where
he had practised ; all its associations were judicial, all its
processes forensic, all its judgments aimed at the suppression
of crime and the satisfaction of justice by penalties. But
when a Jewish scholar who had become a Christian Apostle
thought of law, it was as the moral and ceremonial, the social
and sacerdotal system in which he had been instructed as
a religion and as the peculiar revelation granted to his people.
There were points indeed where the ideas touched ; but these
were incidental, while the points where they differed were
essential. Hence if a man reads the Pauline w/iio? as if it
were Roman and magisterial lex, he will radically misread it,
especially in all that concerns its relation to the death of
Christ " Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the

MAN SAVED, BUT HIS SIN JUDGED. 48 1
law " * ; certainly, but this was the law which the Jew loved,
and which was thus for ever abolished, not the universal law
of God. He became " a curse for us " ; certainly, but under
the same law, for by it He was " hanged upon a tree."
But the law that thus judged Him condemned itself; by
cursing Him it became accursed. His death was not the
vindication, but the condemnation of the law. And this is
the characteristic attitude of the New Testament writers.
The law which Christ at once fulfilled and abolished was not
the law of the judge and jurist, but the law of the rabbi
and the priest, the law of ceremonial and service, of works
and worship, of prophecy and type. The language which
describes His relation to it and its to Him cannot be used
to describe His relation to the absolute law or righteousness
of God. This relation we must interpret through our idea of
God, not through our very mixed notions of law and justice.
But this juridical theory gives us a point from which our
discussion may start : — The first step in the process of saving
from sin is to execute judgment upon it, and so to do it that
the judgment, though God's, shall also become, as it were, the
sinner's own. There is not room for two absolute wills — one
God's, another the man's ; one must reign, if action and
character, conduct and being, are to coalesce in beatitude. As
is the nature, so is the will ; the only absolutely good will is
the will of the nature absolutely good. Hence the supremacy
of God's will is the supremacy of good, the union of a holy Being
with a happy state ; while the supremacy of man's were but
the tumult of an infinite multitude of colliding atoms, each
charged with selfish passions and seeking to live by the
destruction of its rivals. Salvation, then, can come only by
sin being vanquished, by the surrender of the sinner to God,
not of God to sin.
This judgment of sin is a necessity. For sin is not a fact
which an act of oblivion can annihilate ; facts are not capable
' Gal. iii. 13. 31

482 THE ATONEMENT EXPRESSES THE JUDGMENT
of annihilation, especially when they are evil deeds that
have by recognition and confession been committed to the
keeping of two memories and two consciences, one accusing,
the other accused. And so forgiveness cannot make a sinner
feel or be as' if he had never sinned ; he cannot so stand in
his own eye, or believe that he shall ever so stand in the
eye of God. And strangely yet justly enough, it is less
easy to forget an unjudged than a judged sin. We are
forced ever to remember what we have never confessed or
been called to account for. We live in fear lest the slumbering
justice we have hitherto eluded should awake and exact ten
fold penalties for the silence added to our sin. And this is
only one side of the necessity for judgment. That could not
be a grave evil which the Author of all good was willing to
pass lightly over. What it cost God no pain to forgive, it
would cost man no pain to repeat. Hence, if man's relation
to sin is to be changed, if the guilty is to be forgiven, it
must be on terms that leave him in no doubt as to the
nature and desert of his sin. And so if God saves man, it
is certain that His method will be so to judge sin as to
condemn and overcome it more completely than would have
been possible by any judicial process or any system of cumu
lative penalties.
But in order to understand how this may be we must
recall the true nature and end of His judgments : they are
not merely retributory or retaliatory, penal or vindictive, in
the judicial sense, but they are corrective, reclamatory, dis
ciplinary. While they vindicate authority, they are intended
to be not simply deterrent and exemplary, but reformatory
and restorative. This affects the function of the Atonement ;
it works in the universe as the manifest and embodied judg
ment of God against sin, but of this judgment as chastening
and regenerative rather than juridical and penal. It is designed
to create in man all the effects of corrective and remedial
sufferings, to do the work of restorative and reformatory

AND ALSO THE PASSIBILITY OF GOD. 483
penalties, only it accomplishes this in a more efficient mode
than could the sufferings themselves. It burns into the soul
of the sinner the sense of the evil and the shame of sin,
forces him to look at it with God's eyes, to judge it with
His conscience, to hate it with His hate— in a word, to
change his own attitude to it for God's. And when this
is the case the sinner is saved, but so saved that his salva
tion is the supreme victory of righteousness and sovereignty
as well as of love and grace. The Atonement may therefore
be described as the method by which God has so judged
sin in the very home of the sinful as to achieve the salvation
of the sinner.
2. In what measure, now, was the Incarnation, with the
passion and death it involved, calculated to fulfil this func
tion, or accomplish these ends ? We have to remember
that it is to us the externalization of what was innermost
in God, the secret of the eternal manifested in time. From
it, therefore, comes, first, the complete revelation of God.
God as He is in Himself and to Himself stood disclosed
to man ; and man knew what he had forsaken and sur
rendered for sin. The Creator and Ruler of the universe
now lived- to faith as the Father, the home of all the most
gracious energies and ends. Secondly, His attitude to man
was revealed — His love of him, purposes concerning. him.
His mercy and truth. And as was His attitude to man,
such was His attitude to sin. He could not love it, nay.
He hated it, and it was, as it were, the sorrow in the
heart of His happiness. Theology has no falser idea than
that of the impassibility of God. If He is capable of
sorrow. He is capable of suffering ; and were He without
the capacity for either. He would be without any feeling
of the evil of sin or the misery of man. The very truth
that came by Jesus Christ may be said to be summed up
in the passibility of God. But, thirdly, to be passible is
to be capable of sacrifice ; and in the presence of sin the

484 THE INVISIBLE SACRIFICE IS THE FATHER'S,
capability could not but become the reality. To confine
the idea of sacrifice to the Son is to be unjust to His
representation of the Father. There is a sense in which
the Patripassian theory is right ; the Father did suffer, though
it was not as the Son that He suffered, but in modes distinct
and different. The being of evil in the universe was to His
moral nature an offence and a pain, and through His pity
the misery of man became His sorrow. But this sense of
man's evil and misery became the impulse to speak and
to help ; and what did this mean but the disclosure of His
suffering, by the surrender of the Son ? But this surrender,
as it was the act, represented the sacrifice and the passion
of the whole Godhead. Here degree and proportion are
out of place ; were it not, we might say the Father suffered
more in giving than the Son in being given. He who gave
to duty had not the reward of Him who rejoiced to do it.
Though we speak but in the limited language of our own
conditions, yet, may we not ask, must not the act by which
the Son emptied Himself have affected and, as it were,
impoverished the Godhead ? The two things are coincident
and inseparable ; here, pre-eminently, one member could not
suffer without all suffering. The humiliation of the Son
involved the visible passion and death, but the surrender
by the Father involved the sorrow that was the invisible
sacrifice. And this is the Biblical doctrine. " God so loved the world
that He gave His only-begotten Son " * ; " He spared not His
own Son, but delivered Him up for us all" ^ ; " Herein is love,
not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His
Son to be the propitiation for our sins." ^ But what do these
verses mean, if not that the essence and act of sacrifice was
the surrender of the Son by the Father ? It was the measure
alike of His love to man and the suffering He endured to
save. And so we may say, without the Fatherhood there
? John iii. 16. ^ Rom. viii. 32. ' i John iv. lo.

THE VISIBLE HUMILIATION THE SON'S. 485
could be no Atoner and no Atonement ; but with the Father
hood the Atoner and the Atonement could not but be. By
their means He, as it were, invited man to come and see sin
as He saw it, and judge its evil by beholding through the
eternal Son the suffering it cost the eternal Father.
We may, then, construe the sufferings and death of Christ
as if they were the sacraments, or symbols and seals, of the
invisible passion and sacrifice of the Godhead. That is a
message they deliver now and will deliver for ever ; but it is not
their only message. They are a revelation of sin as well as of
God ; they show it as nothing else could have done. And
revelation is here judgment ; for sin to be discovered is to be
condemned. In Christ love and righteousness were incarnate :
though hated. He always loved ; though wronged, He always
obeyed. In Him there was nothing akin to evil, or anything
that sin could call its own. But this only made two things
the more manifest — the hatefulness of sin to the good, and
the hate of sin for the good. In the very degree that Christ's
soul was pure He was sensitive to the shame of evil ; its very
shadow was to Him misery ; and it is a thing man cannot
forget that the Sinless bears as His distinguishing name " the
Man of Sorrows." But this purity of His was the very thing
sin could not forgive ; it saw Him only to feel, " Here is a
sacrifice I must offer." And it offered Him, without shame
on its own part, but with such feeling and shrinking on His
that He prayed, " Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass."
But it could not be allowed to pass, for it was necessary to
the saving of man that the inmost essence of sin should be
revealed. And so, with the sanction and by the act of those
who by misrepresenting religion most represented sin. He
was sacrificed. The place was the holy city ; the time was
the morrow of the great feast ; the celebrants were the
priests headed by their chief; the spectators who approved
were the people gathered for the festival. And so they
crucified Him, making Him an offering and a sacrifice. In

486 THE ATONEMENT DOES THE WORK
His soul He carried the sins of men, and for their sins
He died.
And from His death two most dissimilar yet related results
have foUowed^a new consciousness of God, and a new con
sciousness of sin. We have argued that the sense of sin is a
creation of Christianity, and we may now add, the creative
factor was the death of Christ. But does not this mean that it
has achieved the purpose of God, and so expressed His judg
ment against sin that man is slowly becoming possessed by
that judgment, making it his own ? Beforehand the means
might well have been judged unsuitable to the end ; but their
suitability is the very thing that the process of time is making
most apparent.
3. In the Atonement so construed many principles are im
plied that cannot be here made explicit But we note a few.
i. As God is its cause and the Incarnation its organ or
medium, it derives from the one all its validity, from the other
all its reality and adaptation to its end. What owes its being
to God must be well-pleasing to Him ; what is done by One
who represents both God and man must be relevant to both.
ii. As the work of One so constituted and representative
of God and man, it is in nature substitutionary — i.e., so does
the work of the penal yet corrective judgments of God as to
create the very sense of sin and attitude to it that they aim
at. In those who thus feel its action it has accomplished all
the ends of the chastisement that at once vindicates His autho
rity and seeks our correction. God has made us to know sin
by making Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.*
iii. The Atonement has satisfied both the love and the
righteousness of God, — His love, by being a way for the
recovery and salvation of man ; His righteousness, by van
quishing sin within the sinner and vindicating the authority of
the eternal Will. By setting forth Christ Jesus as propitiatory,
through faith in His blood, God has shown forth His right-
¦ 2 Cor. V. 21.

OF PENAL YET CORRECTIVE JUSTICE. 487
eousness in the remission of sins, and proved Himself " just,
while the justifier of him who is of the faith of Jesus."*
iv. The ends of God in the Atonement are those of the regal
Paternity — the creation of an obedient and a happy universe.
If these ends are represented as the glory of God, it means
that the one thing which can glorify a good God is the good
of His creatures ; if as the salvation of man, it means that
the happiness of the universe is the beatitude of the Creator.
The Atonement is, therefore, the creation of grace — does not
create it.
v. Christ, as the Head, is the basis and symbol of a new
mankind, and so of a new order or law for humanity. His
obedience, as racial while personal, is the cause of a collective
righteousness which cancels for the irresponsible and guiltless
the evil of collective sin. But as regards the guilty and re
sponsible, it makes the salvation of no man actual, but of all
men possible, dependent on conditions that men must fulfil.
The righteousness which is without works is not without
faith ; and so the possible salvation is realized by him who
believeth. Hence, even under it, man remains free, respon
sible, saved by grace, but through faith.
vi. This Atonement, in the degree that it exhibits God as
a Being who does not need to be appeased or moved to
mercy, but who suffers unto sacrifice that He may save,
must have exalted in the eyes of all created intelligences
His character and majesty. And the higher the character
of God appears, the greater the happiness of the universe.
And so we may say, the work of Christ has modified for the
better the state of all created being — nay, even of the lost.
§ HI.— The Holy Spirit.
But God as here conceived is not a being whose spiritual
and remedial activities can be hmited to a particular
time or special appearance ; they must be universal and
' Rom. iii. 25, 26.

488 GOD THE EFFICIENT CAUSE OF GOOD.
continuous. Occasional action is only a form of inefficiency ;
permanent energy is needed for effectual work. And in
religion God must always remain the efficient cause, ini
tiating all the good man ever receives. Were man here
the only active or causal person, he would very soon cease
to be religious. If all his prayers were addressed to an
impotent abstraction or an impersonal universe which has
mechanically evolved a being that can know it, but it can
never know, he would soon tire of speaking into a void
that could not even echo the voice of his reason. Mind
feels oppressed by the infinities of space and time. When
we think of the immensity in which we float, the spaces
between star and star that fleet fancy grows weary in
trying to traverse, or the worlds massed by distance into
constellations, we feel with Kant that, like the moral law
within, the starry heaven above fills us with admiration
and awe. When we think of the eternity behind, which
mind cannot measure because thought cannot limit, in whose
presence the age of the oldest planet is only as the life of
the fretful midge to the course of creation, we feel lost
like one who, though he looks before and after, can discover
no limit or end on which the eye can rest. But while
these Infinities may awe and oppress, they cannot evoke
or receive worship, or move man to religion. In it God
must speak as well as man, and our appeal to Him is but
the echo of His appeal to us. The atom is only a form
of the Divine energy, and religion a mode of the Divine
presence. God as power is immanent in nature, as spirit
is immanent in man ; and without the action of His im
manence the Incarnation would be but an isolated inter
vention, marvellous as a detached miracle, but without
universal or permanent influence. .
Now, what does the Spirit mean to Christ? The Baptist
predicted that He should " baptize in the Holy Spirit" * At
' Matt. iii. ii ; Luke iii. i6.

THE SPIRIT AND THE CHRIST. 489
the Baptism the Holy Spirit descended upon Him like a dove.*
Full of the Holy Spirit He returns from the Baptism, and
is by the Spirit led into the wilderness to be tempted.^ In
the power of the Spirit He returned into Galilee, and began
His work by reading, " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me." '
The only consecration He ever had was the anointing of
the Holy Spirit.* By the Spirit of God He cast out devils,
and did His mighty works.^ He was, then, so possessed of
the Spirit that they may be described as co-efficient energies,
or co-essential persons ; neither could without the other be
what He is, or accomplish what He does. For the correlation
means a mutual and common necessity ; Jesus without the
Spirit would not have been the Anointed, the Christ, and
without Christ the Spirit would be without His peculiar
function and work. Hence comes the extraordinary place
the Spirit occupies in the mind both of Jesus and His
Apostles. He is the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who pro
ceedeth from the Father, but is sent by the Son, and
bears witness concerning Him.' He is the Spirit of Truth
who shall come when the Master leaves, teach all things,
convict the world in respect of sin and righteousness and
judgment, glorify Christ, and abide with His people for
ever.' This Spirit God gives without measure.' Christ, too,
breathed on His disciples and said, " Receive ye the Holy
Spirit" * He promised that they should be baptized in the
Holy Spirit ; at His coming they were to receive power
and they were to speak in His name and as He taught.*"
As with Christ, so with His people or Church ; they live, move,
1 Luke iii. 22 ; Matt. iii. 16. ° John xv. 26.
= Luke iv. I ; Matt. iv. i. ' John xiv. 16, 17, 26, xvi. 7, 13, 14.
' Luke iv. 14, 18. ^ John iii. 34.
* Acts X. 38. ' John XX. 22.
5 Matt. xii. 28.
"• Acts i. 5, 8 ; Luke xii. 12. But see on subject of this paragraph
the suggestive discussion of Professor Milligan, " The Heavenly Priesthood
of our Lord," Lee. iv.

490 THE APOSTLES AND THE FATHERS.
and are through the Holy Spirit, yet the Spirit distilled, as it
were, through the Son.
In this sense the teaching of the Master was repeated by
the disciples ; theirs was the dispensation and ministration of
the Spirit, His the Word they preached and the invitation they
gave ; He sealed and sanctified their converts, and they were
baptized and blessed in the name of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit.* His work was as great and as necessary,
and expressed attributes as divine, as those of the Father and
Son — ubiquity, holiness, truth, infinite energy ever exercised
and ever resultful. But the Fathers were slow in discovering
what the Apostles had so clearly seen. In this point,
as in so many others, though perhaps in this point most of
ah, the gap between the New Testament and the first three
centuries of patristic literature is such as no theory of develop
ment can bridge. It is true that in acts and formulze of
worship, in doxologies and simple confessions of faith, the
Holy Spirit took His place beside the Father and the Son ;
but touching His person and work confusion reigned till
late in the fourth century, and did not by any means even
then cease. What became evident was this — salvation, to
be real, must be altogether of God, its cause a unity.
And so Athanasius argued, that He who sanctifies all must
be sanctified by His own nature ; Basil, that He who renews
could not be inferior to Him who saved ; Gregory of Nyssa,
that He who revealed the truth must possess the truth He
revealed ; Gregory of Nazianzen, that the attributes ascribed
to the Spirit were as divine as those of the Father or the
Son. And so the mind ecclesiastical came to formulate its
belief in "the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of hfe, who
proceedeth from the Father, and who with the Father and
the Son together is worshipped and glorified."*
' 2 Cor. iii. 8, 17 ; Acts viii. 15, 17, 19, x. 19, 44, xi. 24, xiii. 2, 4, 9 ; i Cor.
ii. 4, 5, 10, xii. 3 ; 2 Cor. vi. 6 ; Eph. iv. 30 ; 2 Thess. ii. 13 ; 1 Peter i. 2 ;
Matt, xxviii. 19; 2 Cor. xiii. 14. ' " Nicseno-Const. Symbol."

THE THREEFOLD DIVINE CAUSALITY. 49 1
In salvation, then, there is a threefold Divine causahty —
the Father who gives, the Son who is given, the Holy Spirit
who renews and reveals. And these are so united as to
be inseparable in essence and in act. The Father is the
fount, the Son the medium, the Spirit the distributor of
grace. The Father is known, because He is manifested in
the Son ; the work of the Son is a sacrifice, because He is
delivered of the Father ; and the Spirit is now the Spirit
of the Son, and now the Spirit of God. It is the unity of
the whole that constitutes the efficiency of each, yet the
difference is as suggestive as the unity. While the Son
enables us to understand the being and action of personality
within the Godhead, the Spirit enables us to conceive its
being and action without. There is an immanent presence
of God in man, but it represents personal 'agency, not im
personal energy. The God who abides in us is a person
who is of the essence of the Godhead, and is ever trans
lating its inner qualities and life into the forms of our
dependent yet related being. Our good is His creation ;
our truth is of His revealing. Our being is void of Divine
content, save in so far as we allow Him to fill it. His
function is by realizing God in man to keep man open to
God and active in His service. He is, as it were, the energy
of the Father and Son in the process of continuous incar
nation, and He accomplishes it by so revealing truth as to
communicate life and determine conduct. But continuous
incarnation is progressive filiation ; for the Spirit shapes the
later sons, singly, after the image of the First-born, collectively,
into a unity which is on the Godward side a sonship, on
the manward a brotherhood. In other words, what Christ
was essentially, that man throi^h the Spirit ethically and
ideally becomes ; he realizes what we may term the moral
essence or heart of the eternal Sonship, and is constituted
a member of the family or household of God. And so we
may define the work of the Spirit as twofold — concerned both

492 CONTINUOUS INCARNATION THROUGH THE SPIRIT.
with the generation and the organization of life. In connection
with the first. He is the Giver of all truth and the Creator of
all life. The field of His operation is co-extensive with man,
its forms with his religious, moral, and intellectual activities.
All His action is normal, but its degrees and its spheres
vary. He inspires and creates revelation ; He enlightens and
quickens the souls in and for which it lives. In connection
with the second. He renews and creates the Church, inhabit
ing the souls He has renewed and the societies they constitute.
The more intensive His action grows, the holier becomes the
soul and the purer the Church. Through the men He has
renewed and enlightened He reaches man. By ever bearing
witness concerning the Son He is ever creating the spirit of
sonship. But the notiort of the Spirit's action will become clearer in
the discussion of its two great spheres — Revelation and the
Church.

CHAPTER III.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION.
§ I. — Religion and Revelation.
REVELATION is necessary to the being of religion,
and religion is but the symbol of the kindred natures
and correlated energies of God and man. It means that
each nature seeks the other, is capable of finding it, and is
susceptible to its touch. Religion may be described as man's
consciousness of supernatural relations, or his belief in the
reciprocal activities of his own spirit and the Divine. The
activity of the Divine is creative and communicative, of the
human is receptive and responsive. The phenomena corre
spondent to the former are those of revelation ; to the latter,
those of faith, worship, and obedience. So inseparable are
these ideas both in thought and in reality that a religion
can as little exist without something representative of revela
tion as without faith and worship. The great religions have
written revelations, but writing is not necessary to the idea.
The faith of China is embodied in its classical books, of
India in its Vedas, of Buddhism in its Tripitakas, of Persia
in the Zend Avesta, of Islam in the Koran. But the Delphic
Oracle or the O.ik of Dodona was to Greece the voice of its god ;
the augur interpreted the divine will to Rome ; the Book of the
Dead revealed it to the Egyptian ; the priest and the astrologer
to the Babylonian. The veriest savage would neither flatter
nor beat his fetish unless he thought it could communicate with
him. Without, therefore, the belief in revelation, religion

494 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN REVELATION
could not exist ; indeed, so necessary is the one to the other
that even a faith like Positivism, consciously constructed upon
the denial of the supernatural, has to make Le Grand Eire
communicate of his wealth to the unit before the unit can.
either praise or worship. Of every religion, therefore, the idea
of revelation is an integral part ; the man who does not believe
that God can speak to him will not speak to God.
The belief in revelation, then, is not a peculiar creation
either of Judaism or of Christianity ; it is a necessity common
to all religions. And the higher the idea of God they embody,
the more necessary does the belief become. For just in pro
portion as God is conceived to have care for man or the wish
to shape his destiny, will He also be conceived as feeling
the obligation to speak. And a spoken is sure to become
a written word, with an authority high in the very degree
that it is believed to be really God's. And to believe in a
written is as rational as to believe in a spoken revelation.
The two indeed have been represented as opposites. Thus
it has been argued : " The word of conscience is the voice
of God " ; its light is His " revealing and appealing look " * ;
there His speech is imperative, proclaims an absolute law.
This law is so " inseparably blended with the Holy Spirit "
that conscience becomes at once " the very shrine of worship "
and " seat of authority." " Natural religion is that in which
man finds God ; revealed religion is that in which God finds
man." ^ Revelation is, therefore, " immediate, living God
with living man ; spirit present with spirit ; knowing Him,
indeed, but rather known of Him." Revealed religion "is
there by the gift of God, so close to the soul, so folded
in with the very centre of the personal life, that though
it ever speaks it cannot be spoken of"^ It is "an im
mediate. Divine knowledge," "strictly personal and indi
vidual, and must be born anew in every mind." * But
* Dr. Martineau, " Seat of Authority in Religion,'' p. 71.
» Ibid., p. 302. ' Ibid., p. 305. ¦• Ibid., p. 307.

ALIKE NATURAL TO RELIGION AND GOD. 495
does this doctrine exclude, as it is meant to do, or does it
render superfluous, an historical revelation, with the authority
that belongs to it? Is not its logical outcome the very
opposite of the one intended? Is it possible to have such
an authoritative revelation in conscience without having far
more ? The theory is based on the notion of the correlated
and co-essential activities of God and man. Religion can be
as little without the action of God as without the action of
man. Where his action is most unqualified and pure, religion
will possess in the highest degree the character of revelation.
But what God speaks to the man has more than a mere
personal or local significance ; it has a universal. The man
who has most clearly and certainly heard God has done more
than hear Him for himself ; he has heard Him for the world,
and the world ought to be able to hear God in the man. And
may not the word which God has spoken to another become
a word which God speaks directly to me, yet which I never
should have heard but for the older man of finer ear and
clearer soul? If, as Dr. Martineau holds, mind can resolve
cosmical phenomena into the speech of the causal mind, why
may not conscience find men in history who embody the
eternal Will? Are there not persons who have acted, and
still act, like a personalized conscience for the most cultivated
peoples? And is not this one of the clear functions discharged
by Jesus Christ ? And if it is, what is He but an authority
in religion ? And if He is, are not also the men who have
been most conscious of God and His law? But if He and
they are authorities, must not the record of their consciousness
have some value, even of an authoritative kind, for the con
sciences of less inspired men ? Again, the lives which have
been created by the Divine law, imperatively heard, must be
lives of unusual worth, embodying a higher will ; and if worked
into a literature, that literature must possess the quality, as it
were, of the permanent and abiding personalities. Then, do
such men or the literature they create come into being by

496 GOD INSPIRES, BUT MAN REVEALS.
accident? Dr. Martineau holds that " the initiative of all
higher good is with God " ; but if so, then the holiest persons
are those we most owe to His initiative ; and the more clearly
a person is the result of God's initiative, the more of God does
he reveal. In other words, the more evidently a man is an
organ of God for the race, the morc ought we to conceive him
as possessed of the functions and qualities which belong to
such an organ. § II.— Revelation and Inspiration.
I. If, then, God ever speaks to the conscience of any man,
He speaks at the same moment to all men ; and His words
do not by being written lose their aboriginal quality. It
is true they must come to every later as they came to the
first conscience, directly from God ; but old words, when He
speaks, become new, often with a spirit and life proportioned
to their age. The idea, then, of a written revelation may be
said to be logically involved in the notion of a living God.
Speech is natural to spirit ; and if God is by nature spirit,
it will be to Him a matter of nature to reveal Himself But
if He speaks to man, it will be through men ; and those who
hear best will be those most possessed of God. This pos
session is termed " inspiration." God inspires, man reveals :
inspiration is the process by which God gives ; revelation is
the mode or form — word, character, or institution — in which
man embodies what he has received. The terms, though not
equivalent, are co-extensive, the one denoting the process on its
inner side, the other on its outer. According to the quantity
of the inspiration will be the quality of the revelation : the
fuller or larger the one, the more authoritative will be
the other. But if the medium be man, the double process
must be conditioned by the laws which govern human de
velopment. The message that comes to a man, he must
deliver in the language he knows ; as he lives at a given
moment in a given place, he must so speak as to be

functions of inspiration and revelation. 497
understood. What is unintelligible to the age that receives it
will never become intelligible by mere lapse of time. But this
involves the converse : the forms necessary to an earlier may
in a later age, if made into the permanent substance of the
revelation, be a positive hindrance to belief. Thus a scientific
history of creation would have been as incomprehensible,
because of sheer mental unpreparedness, to a Hebrew recently
won from the desert, as the imaginative narrative he could
understand would be, if taken cis sober or veiled science, to
the modern physicist. So, too, the " Ten Words " must
have seemed a most exacting and exhaustive moral law
to the still unsettled tribes of Israel, though their inadequacy
is the thing that most strikes a Christian. Hence if there is
to be any written revelation, flexibility must be as much
the attribute of its form as permanence of its material truth.
Inspiration, then, is not concerned simply with the produc
tion of a record, nor does revelation merely denote the record
so produced ; but the one represents the Godward, the other
the manward side of the creative process in religion. The
creation of a sacred literature is not the only or even the
primary function of this twofold process, but, in the temporal
sense, a secondary. The essential function of inspiration is
the formation of the personalities — both the minds for the
thought and the thought for the minds — through whom the
religion is to be realized ; and the essential function of revela
tion is to embody in historical form — literature, character,
worship, institution — what inspiration has created. The one
represents the creative impulse, the other its achievement.
Hence a written revelation does not simply mean a treasury
of ideas, a sort of higher philosophy, or store-house of the best
thoughts of the best minds. Were it only this, it would be
simply a means of culture, or at most the institutes of religion
according to some eclectic method. But it means a history
which represents God's action in time with a view to a given
result — say, the creation of fitter and happier relations between
32

498 revelation universal and particular.
Himself and man. This means that the action which pro
duced the revelation only the more proceeds because of its
production. Its existence is not a reason why the process
of inspiration should cease, but why it should continue.
For the better the terms of communion are known, the more
intimate ought the communion to be ; the more of God there
is within the man, the more will the raan be possessed of God.
In other words, the conditions necessary to the creation of
the Word are necessary to its permanent activity, which is only
a sort of continuous creation. The inspiration of the men
who read is thus as intrinsic and integral an element in the
idea of revelation as the inspiration of the men who wrote.
Were the Spirit that gave the Word to cease to live or act,
the Word would cease to reveal. The essential idea, then,
is that in revelation the living God speaks, not simply has
spoken, to living man.
2. But so far the discussion has been general, concerned with
the ideas and inter-relations of inspiration and revelation ;
it must now become more special. And here we may note,
that the ideas of a universal or natural and a particular or
written revelation imply rather than exclude or contradict each
other. The universal is not the uniform, nor the particular
the exclusive ; but the one admits many modes and degrees,
the other many qualities and kinds. If God were not
naturally related to all men. He could not be specially
related to any man ; and if He has special relations to
one, it means that He has both common and personal re
lations to all. If all truth is of God, then the truth in
any religion or any philosophy is there by His action
and express will. But the only efficient form of universal
action is particular, and the voice must be personalized in
order to be heard. And so the more strictly we conceive
God to enter into history, the more natural does the idea of
an historical revelation become ; for to affect the whole He
must speak through persons. The most highly specialized

SCRIPTURE MAKES THE PARTICULAR UNIVERSAL. 499
action will, therefore, be the most universal. And this is what
we have in the Christian revelation ; it is a record of the
redeeming activity of God culminating in the history of the
Redeemer. What we term the Scriptures have no meaning
and no function unless as so conceived. They may be
described as the mode by which God as He is in Christ lives
for the faith of the Church and before the mind of the world.
They, as it were, so impersonate, immortalize, and universalize
the consciousness of Christ, that it can exercise everywhere
and always its creative and normative functions. This is a
work they can do, and nothing else can. Tradition could not
do it, for the longer tradition lives the less veracious it be
comes, forgets the more the Original it professes to remember,
and paints Him in the colours of other and later times.
Nor can any of the bodies men call the Church, for Churches
are in their thoughts the creatures of local conditions ; all have
mixed memories, all have fallible prides and painful prejudices,
and all have had seasons of degeneration that would have
ended in death had not the Master issued from the Word,
where, as in a shrine. He lives in immortal youth. The
Church was created by the preaching of the Word ; and the
Scriptures are but this Word made permanent, that it may
be preservative of the Church it created. It died as oral
that it might live as written ; and if it had not so died, it
could not now be alive. And so the Scriptures, as the
impersonated consciousness of Christ, made intelligible by
the background of Hebrew and the foreground of Apostolic
history, remain to-day, as at first, the organ by which He
speaks creatively in and to His Church, rebukes its sin,
measures its progress, judges its character and achievements.
But the Spirit that was necessary to the personal is the
same to the impersonated consciousness. The anointing of the
Holy Ghost constitutes Jesus in faith, as in history, the Christ.
There is still no revelation without inspiration ; and unless
God be heard in the soul. He will not be found in the Word.

500 HOW THE CHURCH AND THE SCRIPTURES,
§ III. — The Scriptures and Criticism.
But we cannot discuss the revelation and ignore the Book
which records it, especially as the Book is passing through
fires that are here thought to purify and are there believed to
consume. It is a Book which has been made to serve many
and dissimilar uses in controversy. In the sixteenth century
the Catholic theologian argued against the Protestant thus :
' You reject the authority of the Church, but accept the
authority of the Scriptures ; yet without the Church you
would never have had the Scriptures ; their creation and
preservation, their arrangement and canonization, the separa
tion of the inspired from the apocryphal books — in a word,
the whole process which constituted the canonical Scriptures,
is the work of the Church ; and surely the mind that formed
is the most able to interpret.' Hence the Protestant was met
with the dilemma : ' If you deny tradition and the Church,
how can you prove the canonicity and the authority of the
Sacred Books? If you admit tradition to be necessary to
the canon, how can you deny its function in theology?'
The purpose of the argument was to maintain the depend
ence of the Scriptures on the Church, in the Catholic sense,
and so the necessity of the Church to authority in religion.
In the seventeenth century the question assumed in the hands
of the Catholic another form, and he argued thus : ' The Bible
is not as necessary to the Church as the Church to the Bible ;
hence those who have the Church are so far independent
of the Bible, but those who deny the Church are completely
dependent on the Bible. But by a process of criticism it is
possible to show its insufficiency as the sole authority and so
prove that the Church is necessary and alone adequate to the
maintenance of faith. Then, too, for ourselves this argument
has many advantages. It is easier to live under a single
authority than under co-ordinate authorities, especially when
the one that survives is so ambiguous, variable, and, as it were,

THE scriptures AND CRITICISM, ARE RELATED. SOI
polyglottic, as to be capable of such diverse disguised personal
interpretations as is " the Catholic creed arid tradition." And,
happily, the very argument that establishes our authority
overturns the one poor pillar of vulgar Protestantism.' But the
tool soon proved dangerously double-edged. Criticism of the
Bible is less possible to a system bound by Catholic tradition
than to a system independent of it — for the one thing you
cannot do with tradition is to allow the critical faculty to play
freely upon it ; and if to the tradition canons and decrees have
been added, then the criticism that proves these inaccurate
may not touch the Bible, but is fatal to the Church. The
thing tradition authenticates must be accepted in the very
terms of the authenticator, or tradition will be even more
discredited than what it was supposed to verify. Hence the
natural course of events brought a double answer to the double
contention : the criticism that affected what was accepted on
the Church's authority affected still more the authority of the
Church, and the inquiry that learned to doubt what tradition
had sanctioned grew into doubt of tradition.
On these points the Catholic has almost ceased to trouble
the Protestant ; but his attitude has still its representatives,
though in men of very different schools. On the one side
stands the rationalist, who argues : ' Criticism has disproved
the traditional view of the Scriptures ; therefore they have
ceased to be an authority in religion.' On the other side
stands the conservative theologian, who argues : ' The tra
ditional view must be maintained, or the authority will go.'
The logic of the situation is in each case the same : 'Grant
that certain conclusions which criticism affirms as to the
Scriptures, are proved valid, then they cease to be the Word
of God, and the only authority which remains to guide our
life and determine our beliefs is the voice which speaks in
conscience and reason.' The theologian who so argues makes
the authority of Scripture in religion depend on questions that,
whatever may be said and done, critical scholarship alone can

502 WHETHER CRITICISM AFFECTS AUTHORITY.
decide, and will decide in its own way, and so decide as to
be ultimately believed. And it is precisely the sort of argu
ment that the older Protestant had to meet from the side of
the older Catholic, and was able to meet victoriously in the
days when his doctrine of the Scriptures had not, from the
exigencies of his own internal controversies, hardened into a
polemical scholasticism. As now used by the conservative
theologian it is an argument of the order that seeks to preserve
tradition at the expense of faith ; it is the kind of defence that
loses the citadel by concentrating the forces on the weakest
and most superfluous outwork. And between the rationalist
and the conservative stands the neo-Catholic, who argues
thus : ' True, it is becoming more and more difficult to believe
in the Bible without believing in the Church. Modern criticism
has made an appeal to it in the old Protestant way as the sole
and sufficient authority in religion impossible ; but this need
not distress us overmuch. We have the Church, and its
authority is strengthened and made more necessary by the
weakened supremacy of the Bible. Critical results have in
them this element of pure gain — they force us to feel the
need and the sufficiency of the Catholic creed and tradition.'
What has created the question in its present form is the
rise and growth of what is termed the higher criticism as
applied to the Sacred Scriptures. What we have, then, is the
same major premiss, though with a changed minor, used to justify
three different conclusions. The common premiss is : Criticism
has affected the authority of the Bible in matters of religion,
— therefore, says the rationalist, since criticism is true, the
authority is at end ; therefore, says the conservative, since the
authority must be maintained, criticism must be resisted
and its decisions rejected ; therefore, says the neo-Catholic,
since, keeping as regards the Bible an open mind, we must
confess the difficulties created by criticism, let us rest in the
authority of the Church. Now, what reply would the older
Protestantism have made to all three positions, for with all

REPLY OF OLDER PROTESTANTISM. 503
three it was perfectly familiar? It would have begun — for it
had Humanism in its blood, and knew too well its obligations
to thought and inquiry — with a plea for the use of learning
in religion, somewhat thus : —
' This higher criticism is but a name for scientific scholar
ship scientifically used. Grant such scholarship legitimate,
and the legitimacy of its use to all fit subjects must also be
granted. Nobody denies, nobody even doubts, the legitimacy
of its application to classical or ethnic literature, the necessity
or the excellence of the work it has done, or, where the
material allowed of it, the accuracy of the results it has
achieved. Without it there would hardly be such a thing
as sequence or order in the older Hindu literature, or any
knowledge touching the authorship or authenticity of certain
Platonic dialogues or Aristotelian treatises. To grant that
many of its conclusions are arbitrary, provisional, or proble
matical, is simply to say that it is a human science, created
by men, worked by men, yet growing ever more perfect with
their mastery of their material. Now, the Scriptures either
are or are not fit subjects for scholarship. If they are not,
then all sacred scholarship has been and is a mistake, and
they are a body of literature possessed of the inglorious
distinction of being incapable of being understood. If they
are, then the more scientific the scholarship the greater its
use in the field of Scripture, and the more it is reverently
exercised on a literature that can claim to be the pre-eminent
sacred literature of the world, the more will that literature be
honoured. ' But if scientific scholarship be legitimate, the higher criti
cism cannot be forbidden — the two have simply moved pari
passu. Hebrew language became another thing in the hands
of Gesenius from what it had been in those of Parkhurst ; the
genius of Ewald made it a still more living and mobile and
significant thing. The discoveries in Egypt and Mesopo
tamia have made forgotten empires and lost literatures rise

504 HIGHER CRITICISM IS HIGHER SCHOLARSHIP.
out of their graves to elucidate the contemporary Hebrew
history and literature. More intimate knowledge of Oriental
man and nature, due to personal acquaintance with them,
has qualified scholars the better to read and understand
the Semitic mind. A more accurate knowledge of ancient
versions, combined with a more scientific archaeology and a
clearer insight into the intellectual tendencies and religious
methods of the old world, especially in their relation to
literary activity and compilation, has enabled the student
to apply new and more certain canons to all that concerned
the formation of books and texts. The growth of skilled
interpretation, exercised and illustrated in many fields, has
accustomed men to the study of literature and history to
gether, showing how the literature lived through the people
and the people were affected by the literature ; and so has
trained men to read with larger eyes the books and peoples
of the past. With so many new elements entering into
sacred scholarship, it is impossible that traditional views and
traditional canons should remain unaffected. If ever any
thing was inevitable through the progress of science, it was
the birth of the higher criticism ; and once it existed it was
no less a necessity that it should have a mind and reach con
clusions of its own. Where scholarship has the right to enter,
it has the right to stay ; and it cannot stay in idleness.
What it does and decides may be wrong, but the wrong
must be proved by other and better scholarship. In other
words, once analysis of the objects or material of faith has
been allowed, a process has been commenced by reason that
only reason can conclude. And this process the higher criti
cism did not begin, but those who allowed that scholarship
had a function in the interpretation of Holy Writ.'
But once the older Protestantism had affirmed that matters
of scholarship must be dealt with by scholars and in the
methods of the schools, undeterred by alarms on the right
hand or the left, it would have proceeded to the more material

CHRIST CREATES SCRIPTURES AND CHURCH. 505
questions, and addressed itself first to the rationalist within
the Catholic thus : ' What you call the Church is not the
Church to me, unless a part can be put for the whole, and
a part not all of which belongs to the whole. But even
granting your notion of the Church, you make a claim for
it which cannot be allowed, for it cannot be made good. So
far as concerns the Bible the real starting-point of the
discussion is not the abstract idea of canonicity, or the
process by which the canon was formed, but the concrete
and historical Christ, His relation to the Scriptures and
theirs to Him. He created the Scriptures as He created
the Church ; both are forms of His activity, valid as they
derive their being from Him, authentic and authoritative only
as possessed of Him and authorized by Him. These two, as
derivative, can be in harmony with each other only as they
are in harmony with Him, and the Scripture whose authority
we obey is not the Book the Catholic Church sanctioned,
but the Word which Christ spoke and by which He created
the Church. Without the Scriptures we could never stand
in the presence of the Founder, know His mind, or see
how He laid the foundation of the society that was to be.
With them the humblest Christian, as much as the stateliest
Church, can reach the Presence, and know and believe. The
Scriptures, then, have the prior existence, owe everything to
the Master, and do everything for the Church. Then, if the
Bible is made to depend on the Church, is it not evident that
it is the Bible conceived as a book, and not as a revelation ?
For these two things are most dissimilar, and indeed opposite.
The authority that belongs to the Bible belongs to it not as
book, but as revelation ; what the canonizing process created
was not a revelation, but a book. In other words, the process
that created the revelation was prior and causal and material,
but the process that created the canon later and sequent and
formal. The revelation did not come to be because of the
canon • the canon came to be because of the revelation.'

506 CANONIZATION IS NOT AUTHORIZATION.
§ IV.— The Bible as the Authority in Religion.
Here our first question is. What gives its authority to the
Bible ? Does this authority belong to the Book as constituted,
or to the constituents of the Book ? The Bible, on any theory,
did not come into being as it is ; it came in many parts,
through many persons, out of many places and times. Now,
what relation has the canonizing or codifying or constitutive
process which inade it a whole, and the whole we know, to
the religious character and authority of the Book as such,
or the several books it contains ? Had a book, or even
a fragment of a book, no religious authority or function till
incorporated and superscribed ? If this was so, then the
canonizing was an authorizing process ; it created the in
spiration and the authority of what it sanctioned. If this
was not so, then how can the tradition which canonized
have affected the intrinsic merits or essential character of
the book ? and how can the criticism which seeks simply
to restore the books to their original form either annul or
lessen or even discredit their inspiration and authority ?
Canonization is like codification ; the formation of a code
implies the existence of the laws. A law does not become
authoritative by being codified ; it is codified because it is
authoritative. So a book does not become inspired by
being authenticated, canonized, or even assigned to an
author. Hebrews, for example, was long outside the canon :
got into a local before it was received into the catholic canon ;
was denied to Paul, then attributed to Paul, and is all but
unanimously denied to him again. But Hebrews was pre
cisely as much inspired, and possessed of exactly as much
authority, though it might be an authority much less recog
nized, before as after its incorporation in the canon, when it
was denied as when it was attributed to Paul. It is not
to their co-ordination and codification that the books owe
their authority, but to their essential character and contents

one infallible needs many INFALLIBILITIES. 507
The tradition or the polemic that obscures these hides the
authority ; the criticism that makes them most manifest
reveals it. To attempt to make a multitude of books, into a
single uniform authority, when almost all the books are, from
the nature of the case, of different values, is the surest way
to discredit even the most authoritative.
But, secondly, if the canonizing process be so inviolable
that one cannot touch it or its conclusions without discredit
ing the Scriptures or reducing the authority of the Word of
God, then let us see who were the canonizing agents, and
with what functions and powers we must invest them.
These agents, and they alone, had power to constitute the
Word of God ; what existed before their action was a
potential, not an actual, revelation ; they translated its poten
tiality into actuality. On this theory, the real organ of God
was not the prophet or apostle who spoke and wrote, but the
body who indorsed and authorized their writings. And what
was this body ? One hard to define ; indeed, incapable of
definition. The Catholic speaks of it as the Church ; but
history knows that the Church which is called Catholic was
only a late factor in the process of canonization. That
process has many factors, some much older than the Church.
It was pursued for the Old Testament in rabbinical or Tal-
mudical schools, following the traditions now of the Temple,
now of the synagogue, now of certain classes and teachers ;
for the New Testament by Fathers and heretics, councils and
custom, local tradition and exegetical schools. If we would
secure the inviolable veracity and authority of the result,
we are bound in logic to affirm the infallibility not onl.\-
of the process, but of all its factors. Were they capable of
erring, we could have no sufficient guarantee of the in
errancy of the result But this becomes an affirmation not
simply of the infallibility of the Bible, but of aU the schools
and agencies that created it as a text and as a book ; above
all, of those most mixed and heterogeneous Jewish bodies

5o8 AUTHORITY OF REVELATION, NOT OF BOOK.
whose action antedated and normated the action of the
Catholic Church. Apart from the infallibility of the creating
bodies, the infallibility of the created results cannot be main
tained. We come back, then, to the position that authority belongs
to the Bible, not as a book, but as a revelation ; and it is a
revelation, not because it has been canonized, but because
it contains the history of the Redeemer and our redemption.
Critical questions lie beyond the scope of this book ; but it is
strictly germane to its theological purpose to say : — Criticism
has, by bringing the sacred books into relation with sacred
history, done something to restore them to their real and
living significance. The negative critic may assail the books
that he may the better assail the higher and more Divine
elements in the history ; but the conservative critic who
identifies the veracity of a late and formal tradition with the
revelation, tends to lose both the inspiration and the history
that are in the book. He may turn the record of God's
redeeming activity in the world into a body of evidences, or
a repository of proof-texts, but only the more will he fail to
see how revelation lives in and through and with the people
of God. Criticism has, by binding the book and the people
together, and then connecting both with the providential
order of the world, given us back the idea of the God who
lives in history through His people, and a people who live
for Him through His Word. The divorce of God and His
people, who must be in each other in order to the continued
being of revelation by a continuous process of inspiration,
has been a calamitous thing for theology and the Church,
especially in their relation to the Bible. The Church has lost
the sense of its own continuity and unity, and its dependence
for both on the continued activity within it of the God who
speaks by His Spirit that He may live in the Word,

QUESTIONS THEOLOGICAL AND LITERARY. 509
§ v.— Whether a Constructive Doctrine be
Possible.
We are now . in a position to define the positive principles
necessary to a constructive theory of the Christian revelation.
i. Its theological basis is the regal Paternity. The God who
loves man will not cease to speak to him ; revelation, in its
widest sense, is the process by which He communicates truth
in order to the creation of life and the communion of spirit
But the supreme act of revelation was the Incarnation, or
the manifestation of the Fatherhood through the sacrifice of
the Father and the self-denial or humiliation or kenosis of the
Son. This act involved the being of the Son under conditions
of humanity, but no less the history that should translate His
existence under these local and temporal conditions into a
universal and permanent being. We know what He is for
ever by knowing what He was then, and to know Him is to
know God.
ii. In order to the universality and permanence of this
revelation a literature is necessary ; it can live only as it is
written. But the conditions necessary to the Person being a
revelation remain needful to the literature. The completion
of the record — i.e., the history that redeems — is not the com
pletion or cessation of the revealing action, but rather the
condition of its continuance. The written Word is a medium
through which the living God and the living soul feel after
and find each other ; but in order to this the word must be
divorced neither from God nor the soul.
iii. Hence the Bible, to be a revelation, must not only
be bound through its books to a completed past, but through
the Spirit of God to a living present. Revelation is thus as
to its accidents a literary question, but as to its essence a
spiritual experience ; it denotes a living process, not simply
a finished product or completed result. The Word of God

5IO revelation lives through the spirit
is a large term ; it does not denote a closed book, but a
living spirit — not something that is dead, a letter that can
be printed in black on white, a book which compositors
have set up and binders have bound and educated people
can read. It is living ; it has no being without the Spirit
of God ; were that Spirit to be withdrawn, the Scriptures
would cease to exist ; where they were, a literature would
remain, but not the Word of the living God. The continuance
of the Spirit, then, is necessary to the being of the Word, and
His continuance is the source and secret of its authority.
Christ is of all historical forces and factors of faith and obedience
infinitely the greatest, yet He lives because the Spirit lives
to speak of Him and show Him unto men. Unless, then,
the Spirit that gave the Word inspire the spirits that hear
and receive it, it can be no inspired Word. Inspiration
belongs to it not as the organized or authorized literature
which we call the Bible, but by virtue of its being at once
the creation of the Spirit and the condition and form of
His continued activity. This was what the Reformers
meant by the testimonium Spiritus sancti internum, and it
was this that made them so independent of the polemic of
Rome and the criticial denials to which it attempted to
drive them.
iv. But the Spirit can continue and the Word can live
only provided each has a medium in and through which to
work. The medium for each is the Church, the region
or society of holy souls, in which holiness is created and
propagated. The Church is a large term ; it does not
denote Churches ; polity is not of its essence, saints and
souls are. The priest and the presbyter, the bishop and
the preacher, are of the accidents of the Churches, not of
the essence of the Church ; the sainted father or mother,
the holy home, the godly man, the living Spirit, are of the
essence of the Church, not of the accidents of the Churches.
And it is through what is of the essence of the Church that

IN THE CHURCH AND FOR THE REASON. 51I
the authority of God is manifested and His truth appre
hended. It is holiness that creates holiness, God in the
priest or preacher or parent that creates godliness and
obedience in the soul.
V. But the Word which thus lives through the Spirit
in the Church has as its function to bring the truth of God
to man. In order to this it must convince the Reason,
which, though once a proud heatheness, has now a redeemed
being. The reason in whose name Martineau criticizes
revelation, and the conscience in which he seats authority,
are not fresh creations ; centuries of nurture are in them ;
much of what he finds there are inherited riches, wealth
derived from remembered and forgotten ancestors to whom
the Scriptures were a living authority. He may be content
with his inheritance, but what his reason and conscience
are, they are by virtue of what he has received, not simply
by virtue of what he is and has attempted. This means
that reason is now so penetrated with Christian elements
that a man even in reasoning against historical revelation
cannot purge himself from what he owes to it ; and it means
more — that he has but to be faithful to his reason to be led
beyond it to the source of the older formative influences.
Certainly, though a man by reason may reject revelation, he
can never without reason either know or accept it And it
is to reason that the living truth makes its ceaseless appeal.
Now, all these elements, concordant and concurrent in
action, are necessary to the being of a living revelation, and its
authority in religion. Without the living and incorporated
unity, realized in and through the Holy Spirit, of a satisfied
reason, an inspired society, and a living God seeking the
living soul, the written revelation will not reveal. And with
out these there can be no reign of authority in religion,
while with these authority cannot but reign. What is needed,
therefore, to a true doctrine of revelation is the restoration

512 WITHOUT THE UNITIES NO REVELATION.
of the organic union, in the Holy Spirit, of God, the
Reason, the Church, and the Scriptures. Without any one
of these the very conditions that make it possible are
absent. Without Gbd the Church has no Head and no end,
the Word no truth and no function, the Reason no goal to
reach and no object to revere ; without the Church the Word
has no medium to live in ; without the Word the Church has
no truth to live by ; without the Reason the Church has no
soul to form, and the Word no subject to address ; and with
out the Spirit no one of them has any capability of being
either real or religious. If the reason alone be emphasized,
we have rationalism ; if the Church, as organized and
hierarchical, we have Catholicism, Roman or Anglican ; if
the Word, as written and a record, we have Scholastic
Protestantism ; but in none of them have we any doctrine
of revelation which makes the authority of God in the sphere
of religion living and spiritual.

B.—GOD AS INTERPRETED BY CHRIST THE
DETERMINATIVE PRINCIPLE IN THE
CHURCH.

CHAPTER I.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT.
§ I.— The Conceptions of God and the Church.
IN the discussion which has just been concluded the
term " Church " has been freely used, and even pro
visionally defined ; but it is too essential to the mind and
religion of Christ to receive only incidental mention. In
its most general sense it may be described as the society
He instituted, and constituted out of those who through
faith in Him were elect unto the life and fellowship of
God. But what this very general idea means can only
become evident when we have discussed certain much more
specific questions — such as. What were the laws of this
society? How was it to be organized, administered, aug
mented, and maintained ? '
Now, in order to bring this question into relation with
1 those already discussed, we must determine the relation in
which the three great ideas of God, religion, and the Church
stand related to each other both in themselves and in the
mind of Christ. A religion ahvays is as its God is, and a
society is as its God and its religion are. In other words, the
qualities of a deity are invariably reflected in the faith and
3Z

514 JUDAISM BY ITS POLITY AN HENOTHEISM.
conduct, the polity and worship of his people. Because
of this indissoluble relation the terms must be interpreted
together — the society through the religion, the religion through
God. Taking these, then, as constituting a living unity, we
may say, Jesus Christ was the Creator of three things which
were yet one — a Monotheism, a religion, and a society, which
were all at once ethical and universal. Monotheism, in the
strict and proper sense of the term, did not exist before
Him. Certain of the prophets of Israel had been Mono
theists, but Judaism was not a Monotheism. For a religion
that is so bound up with a tribe and its polity as to be
incapable of universal realization, does not really know God
as absolutely supreme. The limitations of the polity which
is His sole organ, and of the single temple which is His
exclusive home, are directly imposed upon God. Their
particularism contradicts and cancels His universalism. And
this was what happened in the Jews' religion. It made,
according to one interpretation, the priesthood and the
Temple, according to another, Moses and the law, necessary
to the very being of the religion. In order to be pos.sessed
of God men had to become Jews, for they were the appointed
channels of '' His covenanted mercies." Hence the only way
by which God could become universal was by man being
completely Judaized. But while this may be termed Heno
theism — which may be most accurately defined in the terms
of Paul, "God is the God of the Jews only," i.e., the Deity
which is one, is Deity only for the tribe, — yet it is in no proper
sense Monotheism — which means that alike in idea and reality
God is the God of all men, open and accessible to all. More
over, the Deity who is reduced to the proportions of the
polity which incorporates Him, is a Deity who suffers more
in character than in power, for He is conceived as One who
(a) is the Head of a tribe, whose enmities, jealousies, pride
and even barbarities. His authority is made to sanction, and
who (/3) has consented to let His covenant and His mercies be

CHRIST THE CREATOR OF MONOTHEISM. 515
translated out of the terms of His own infinitude into those
of a tribal finitude. _
We may say, then, that, so far as realized religions were
¦concerned, we had before Christ Polytheisms, Pantheisms,
Henotheisms, but no Monotheism. By one and the same act
He created the conception of one God, one religion, and one
society ; but the first would have been inefficient and incomplete
if it had not been explicated in the second and incorporated in
the third. The religion explicated the God, for it was ethical
in nature as He was in character ; the society incorporated
His ideal, for it was universal as God was one, and filial as He
was Father. What marks antiquity is the pride of race made
invincible by the pride of racial religion ; what marks the faith
of Christ is that the ideas of God and man are so bound
together by the concrete realities of religion and the Church
that they all struggle towards the same end, a relation of
sonship to God that shall be expressed and realized in the
brotherhood of man.
§ 1 1.— Christ and the Idea of the Church.
Now, our first question is, How did Christ conceive and
describe His society? And here we note as most charac
teristic that His familiar phrase was not " the Church," but
"the kingdom of heaven" or "of God," or simply "My
kingdom." The mere figures are significant : the term
" kingdom " is used in the Gospels to denote His society
112 times, and almost always by Himself; but "Church"
only twice. Now, the names are either synonymous or they
are not If they are synonymous, it must be possible to
translate the Church into the terms of the kingdom, and the
kingdom into the terms of the Church. If they are not, then
the kingdom, as Christ's most used, most emphasized, and
most descriptive name for His society, must contain His
determinative idea — i.e., the Church must be construed through

5i6 THE church and the kingdom.
the kingdom, not the kingdom through the Church. If the
first position be chosen, then the neo-Catholics who seem
almost with one consent to have forgotten the kingdom, have
failed to interpret the Church ; if the second, then there is
behind and beneath the Church another notion, as it were,
the aboriginal ideal of the Christian society, to which they
have given no adequate recognition, and for which they have
found no fit place. In the one case, their idea of the Church
is not adequate ; in the other, their Church is not the ultimate
normal polity or social ideal of Jesus.
The idea of the kingdom, then, is primary. He comes to
found or create it His instrument is preaching or teaching* ;
His message is the gospel of the kingdom.^ He is the Sower
who casts the seed, which is the Word, into the hearts of
men.^ He defines it by various terms ; it is " of heaven "* in
contradistinction to the " kingdoms of the world " — i.e., it has
none of the violence, the policies, the evils of the earth ; it is
•' of God " * in distinction from " the kingdom of Satan " — i.e., it
is the realm of healing, harmony, love, and beneficence. It is a
kingdom of the truth * — i.e., He is a King by virtue of His very
being, and He bears witness to the truth, while His citizens
are the men who, being of the truth, hear His voice. It is
present'; men may enter it,* are even within it^ ; the terms of
entrance are obedience to the Word,*" or the child-like spirit.**
It comes without observation,*^ spreads quietly like leaven,*'
grows like seed.*'' It is ethical in character ; to seek it is to seek
the righteousness of God,'^ to pray for its coming is to ask
> Matt. iv. 17, 23.
' Matt. ix. 35 ; Mark i. 14; Luke viii. i.
' Matt. xiii. 3, 19. 23 ; cf xxiv. 7, and John xviii. 36.
* Matt. V. 19, xviii. 4, xix. 12.
' M;itt. xii. 28, cf 26; Luke xi. 20, cf 17, 18.
* John xviii. 37.
' Luke xvii. 21 ; Matt. v. 3, xii. 28 ; Mark x. 14.
' Matt. xxi. 31. '^ Luke xvii. 20.
' Matt, xi 11; Luke vii 28. '' Malt. xiii. 33.
'" Matt. xii. 19, 52. " Matt. xiii. 31, 32.
" Matt, xxiii. 3, xix. 14. " Matt. vi. 33.

THE FOUNDER AND HIS PEOPLE. 517
that the will of God may be done on earth as in heaven.* The
men it honours and rewards are the poor in spirit, the per
secuted for righteousness' sake, those who do the will of God,
confess Christ before men, cultivate His spirit, live His life of
ministry and grace.^ The signs ofthe kingdom are all spiritual
and ethical, relate to gracious helpfulness and service, never
to officers or acts of ceremonial.^ It is universal, open to all
without respect to place or race.*
Now, it is remarkable that in the language of Christ as
to the kingdom the emphasis falls, not upon the officials, if
officials there be, or on Sacramental acts, if such acts there be,
but upon the people, upon persons, their personal qualities,
conduct, character, their state and living before God, their
behaviour and ministry among men. He, indeed, calls dis
ciples and commissions apostles, but He deals with them as
men who must be of a given spirit if they would enter the
kingdom ; their eminence in it depends, not on office, but on
spiritual qualities ; and their rewards, not on dignities pos
sessed, but on range and kind of service — none being sacerdotal,
all spiritual and human.
And this is made more significant by two things — His
example and His instructions. He is their type ; they are to
be as He is and has been — One who heals, helps, saves, a
Minister to all the needy.^ He is a Teacher, a Preacher,
whose word has power. He makes no sacerdotal claim, does
no sacerdotal act. His ministry is more in Galilee than in
Judaea, more in the synagogue and the home than in the
Temple; He is the Rabbi, but never to any man, least of
all to Himself, is He the Priest^ If the ministry is to be
received from Him, and He is to remain the ideal which
all who enter it ought to seek to realize, then it must be
a ministry that neither renders, nor cultivates, nor practises
• Matt. vi. 10. * Matt. viii. 11
* Matt. V. 3, 10, vii. 21, xxv. i, 34 * Matt, xviii. 1-4, xxv. 34-40.
3 Matt. xi. 2-12 ; Luke iv. 18, 19. * Supra, p. 49.

5l8 PETER AND THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM.
sacerdotal sanctities, but is inspired by the enthusiasm for
service, by the love of man, by fear of evil, by the passion
to heal and to save, by the gentle hand, the generous heart,
the gracious presence, the tongue eloquent to persuade the
wicked to become the good. And as was His example,
such were His instructions.* He sent His disciples out to
preach, to heal, to live as He lived, to suffer as He suffered,
to seek His ends, to surrender, as He surrendered, all to God ;
to be prophets, as He was a prophet ; to represent Him, as
He represented God. Yet nowhere is there a phrase or
term that so much as hints at any sacerdotal office, or act,
or qny official accessories. The only text that may seem to
touch on peculiar official functions or powers is the saying
to Peter : " I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of
heaven." ^ But the verse must be read in its connection.
Peter had made his confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God " ; on this rock, this truth confessed. His
Church was to be built ; and the confessor, the man who
stood by this truth, preached it, obeyed it, was, as such, to
have the keys. It was not an absolute promise to an official,
made to a man who holds an office simply because of the
office he holds. Nor is it a promise to his successors, for of
succession or successors there is no word ; but only to a person
who has made a confession, because of the confession he has
made. And this is made apparent by the next paragraph,
where Peter, because he rebukes Jesus for prophesying of His
death, receives the rebuke: "Get thee behind me, Satan.!"'
Each saying is appropriate to the moment, neither is absolute,
nor significant of a permanent character, or inalienable office,
or indefeasible function, but is through and through conditional,
and relevant to the context. Peter, so far forth as he would
dissuade Christ from His supreme act of sacrifice, is Satan,
an enemy and tempter ; so far forth as he confesses the
highest truth as to Christ, has committed to him by Christ the
' Matt. X. 5 ff. 2 Matt xvi. 19. ' Matt. xvi. 21-23.

CHRIST THE IDEAL WHICH IT REALIZES. 519
" keys of the kingdom." Both must be conditional, or both
absolute ; but it were hardly reasonable to conceive Peter
as through all time filling the incompatible offices of Satan
and the Keeper of the keys. And so this instance but em
phasizes the truth. Here is a kingdom without any political
framework, without any machinery of chartered officials, or
spheres of '' covenanted mercies," or " recognized channels,"
or " authorized instruments of grace," but composed of holy
men, distinguished by their love and ministry, extended by
the preaching of the Word, and the persuasive influence of
spiritual character. It represents a unity which no type of
polity can create or express, and which varied and even
dissimilar polities need not break up nor dissolve. It is
visible, yet invisible ; all its springs, motives, ends, the souls
in which it lives, the God who reigns through the conscience
and the conscience in which God reigns, are all unseen ; but
all its evidences and fruits, the evils it cures, the good it does,
the beneficences it works, are seen. Paul defined it through its
distinctive elements once for all : " The kingdom of God is not
meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the
Holy Ghost." * If we seek its nearest analogy, we shall find
it in the visible invisible Church of the Reformers ; if we seek
its deepest contrast, where is this likelier to be found than in
the canonized offices of bodies sacerdotal and ecclesiastical ?

§ III.— The Apostolic Idea of the Church.
We come now to the more familiar and distinctively
Apostolic name for the Society of Christ — the Church. It
occurs in the Acts and the Epistles, including the Apocalypse,
exactly the same number of times as kingdom in the Gospels,
112; while kingdom appears in only 29 cases. This seems
to indicate either a change of idea or a change of term due to
a change of soil. But the latter could not happen without the
* Rom. xiv. 17.

520 THE ECCLESIA OF THE JEW AND GREEK.
former also happening in some degree. However, our first
concern is with its meaning, which will also help us to see the
reason of its later extensive use. In the LXX. eKKX-rjaia had
translated the Hebrew Kahal, the congregation or assembly of
the people ; in Greek it was the assembly of the enfranchized
and qualified citizens met to transact the affairs of the city
or state. Into the New Testament usage both Hebrew and
Greek elements entered, but, owing to associations and ex
perience, the Greek were much more potent than the Hebrew.
It has a double application — a local or particular, and an
illocal or universal ; but in both cases the emphasis falls on
the community — the people — the constituents, as it were, of
the society, rather than the constituted agencies. The local
use admits of the plural, but the illocal of the singular only* ;
and in our interpretation of the term it will be easiest to
proceed from the concrete and definite to the larger and
more comprehensive sense.
i. The local eicicKrjaLai were essentially societies of the
enfranchized or saved. Paul addressed his Epistles, so far
as they were not directly personal, to the collective body or
Church, which is described, now as " all the beloved of God,"
now as " those sanctified in Christ Jesus,'' now as " saints," or
as " called saints," and again as " the faithful brethren." ^ The
ministers are only once specified,' and not as intermediaries
or a necessity to the being of the Church. The very purpose
of his great Epistles is to instruct or persuade free and
autonomous societies. Each body is a unit, but its unity is
not secured by any office ; it is rather because it is a body
' The local usage is very instructive. In cities we have the singular, as
the Church in Jerusalem, Acts ii. 47, v. 11, viii. 1 ; Ephesus, Acts xx. 17;
Caesarea, Acts xviii. 22 ; Corinth, i Cor. i. 2, 2 Cor. i. I : but in districts
we have, as a rule, the plural, as the Churches of Syria and Cihcia, Acts xv.
41 ; of Galatia, 1 Cor. xvi. i. Gal. i. 2; of Judcea, Gal. i. 22; of Asia, 1 Cor.
xvi. 19; of Macedonia, 2 Cor. viii. i. In Acts ix. 31 we have an excep
tional usage, which is the more interesting because of its difference from
the Pauline : cf Gal. i. 22.
2 Rom. i. 7 ; I Cor. i. 2 2 Cor. i. i Eph. i. i ; Col. i. i. » PhiL i. 1.

ITS CHARACTERISTICS IN PAULINE EPISTLES. 52 1
that it has many members with varied ministries.* The lists
of these are significant ; they represent preaching, teaching,
and various beneficences, but nothing sacerdotal, no sanctity
peculiar to the office. The argument in First Corinthians
is specially striking. God has set in His Church apostles,
prophets, teachers, miracles, gifts ; but there is something
more excellent than these, without which these are but
vacant things — the love that never faileth. Each Church
was a brotherhood, for all were sons of God,^ yet each was
a legislative and judicial body. The judgment of a majority
was efficient to punish,^ and " a spirit of meekness " was held
necessary to true discipline.* In an aggravated case Paul
seeks to have his judgment executed, not independently of
the Church, but through it.^ Commendatory epistles were
given by the Church ° ; charities and gifts were its common
act.'' If the Church had a representative, it was by election,
¦XeipoTovrjdel'i viro twv eicKXrjaiwv.^ And in these respects the
Church is in Acts as it is in the Pauline Epistles. The
election of Matthias to the place of Judas was bj' the brethren.'
The seven deacons were chosen by the whole multitude.*" It
was the Church in Jerusalem which sent forth Barnabas as
far as Antioch.** It was before the same Church collectively
{trav TO trXrjdo'i) that Barnabas and Paul declared what God
had done through them, and it was " the Apostles and Elders,
with the whole Church " (auv oXj] ttj eicicX-rjaia) which selected
delegates to bear their message to Antioch.*- The Church
was thus " the multitude of those who believed," or " all who
believed," or "the multitude of disciples,"*^ constituting its
officers, not constituted by them. Power, authority, was in
1 Rom. xii. 4-8 ; I Cor. xii. 12-28. ' 2 Cor. viii. 19.
3 Gal. iii. 26-28. ' Acts i. 15-26.
3 2 Cor. ii. 6. '" Acts vi. 5.
1 Gal. vi. I. '* Acts xi. 22.
6 J Cor. V. 3-7. ** Acts XV. 12, 22.
« 2 Cor. iii. I. " Acts ii. 44, iv. 32, vi. 2,
' Phil. iv. 1 5-20 ; 2 Cor. viii. 1-8, ix. i, 6-14. xix. 18.

522 THE CHURCH AS LOCAL AND ILLOCAL.
the society, not in its ministers. And here we may under
stand one of the two cases where Jesus speaks of the Church.*
The address is to the disciples on offences between brethren.
First, He says, the sufferer is to reprove the sinner alone ; if
the sinner will not listen, two witnesses are to be taken ; if he
still refuses to hear, the Church is to be told ; if he refuse to
hear the Church, he is to be treated as a " heathen man and a
publican." Now, Church is here used in its strict local sense ;
it is a single society, and authority is said to reside in it, not
in any office or officers. And it is of the Church in this sense,
not of the Apostles as a special official body, that Christ uses
the words : " What things soever ye shall bind on the earth
shall be bound in heaven ; and what things soever you shall
loose on the earth shall be loosed in heaven." And it is to
a similar body, the Church he had built on the foundation,
¦' which is Jesus Christ," that Paul said, " Ye are God's
temple," " the Spirit of God dwells in you." ^ The most gracious
sanctities, the severest authorities, the highest dignities belonged
to the Church, not through any official priesthood — for there
was none — but through the personal relation to Christ of the
men who formed it, and His presence in their midst.
ii. The ideal of the local is realized in the illocal Church,
and we must understand it before we can really measure the
dream of the newborn faith with the proud creations of the
historical religion. Within the New Testament thought is not
stationary, and the great example of progressive enrichment is
the idea of the Church. In the earlier Pauline Epistles the
actual Christians fill the foreground ; but the later may be
said to live and move and have their being in the Church,
ideal and illocal. The development begins with an individual
Church, but ends with a universal ; thought, conditioned by
experience, starts with a unit, but works towards a unity. At
first we have what may be termed a mia-ecclesia, but at last a
mon6-ecclesia, and these are at once sequents and opposites.
' Matt, xviii. 15-20. * I Cor. iii. 16

DLSTINCTION OF MIA- AND MONE-ECCLESIA. 523
The Church of Jerusalem is both one and the whole * ; the
Church of the Ephesian and the Colossian Epistles is also one
and the whole ^ ; but the former is single and individual, while
the latter is collective and universal. The one is a unit, which
difference may break and dissolve ; the other a unity, which
variety will only help to realize. If the one had attempted to
become the only Church, no Church universal would have
been possible ; it was through the manifold of experience that
the higher unity was gained.
It is by Paul that the notion of the mond-, as distinguished
from the mia-ecclesia, is expressed and explicated ; it is
doubtful if apart from him it have any representative in
Apostolic literature.' He appears as the very spirit of differ
ence and independence, but he is the Apostle of comprehen
sion and unity. While his controversy with the Judaic party
is most intense, his relations to the Jewish Church are most
brotherly. He recognizes a distinction of Christians, both as
regards race and place,* but he recognizes no distinction in
brotherhood, and only the more serves where he is the less
loved.* In experience the Koivmvia was larger than the local
iicKXrjaiai, and harmonized their differences,^ but in thought
the multitude were so combined as to constitute a richer whole.
The point where we can best study the relation of the real
and ideal, the local and illocal, in the notion of the Church, is
where Paul first elaborates the image of the body of Christ.''
He had first used it of the local Church, as he had before used
the images of the tilled field and the Temple ' ; the local was a
microcosm, the image and mirror of the universal. The
fellowship of the body of Christ suggested the figure of
the Church as His body ; union in the act of remembrance
1 Acts V. II, viii. I, 3. Cf Gal. i. 13 ; i Cor. xv. 9.
2 Eph. i. 22, iii. 10, 21 ; Col. i. 18, 24.
3 In Acts the only verse which has it is Pauline, xx. 28. Of course the
idea may be found elseu here, but not under the form of the Church.
i 1 Thess. ii. 14 ; Gal. i. 22 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 19 ; Rom. xvi. 4.
' I Cor. X 32, xvi. 1-4 ; 2 Cor. ix. I ff.
6 Gal. ii. 9. ' I Cor. x. 17. ' I Cor. iii 9.

524 THE BODY THE MINISTRY OF ITS MEMBERS.
involved the unity of the united. The unity was, therefore, one
of persons ; what all received made all who received it one.
But did this ideal agree with the reality ? In the Corinthian
Church there were manifold differences and even div'sions ;
parties were formed, each with a name as a symbol.* There
had been grave sins, involving serious discipline ^ ; disorder
had reigned in the assembly, even on the most solemn
occasions ' ; violent strife had raged as to the ^apt'cr/Aaxa.''
The actual condition suggested by contrast the ideal, and he pre
sented the one as a rebuke and warning to the other. He called
upon this much-divided society to conceive itself through its
ideal. It was a unity, an organism, a body, the body ofChrist."
Its life was one, but its parts were many ; the meanest part was
as necessary as the noblest, and so neither could dispense with
the other, while the dignity ofthe whole dignified the least noble
member. The essential idea is that Christ is so in all, so needs
all, so works through all, that He is the life of the body, and
the body the realization of His life. Each is necessary to Him,
but He to all. Yet, while Paul explains the unity through
Christ, who is the organizing idea, he explains the differences
between the members through the action of God. He has set
in the Church apostles, prophets, teachers, so bestowing certain
^apiajjMTa. He has created thus the differences ; but why?
With a view to the common good, to the creation of things
more excellent than themselves — the love that never faileth,
the spirit that induces men to hve as if the God who is love
were incarnate in the men. The next use of the figure is
similar.' The many are one body in Christ and severally
members one of another, and the difference of gifts is traced
to God, each being given in order to the efficiency and unity
of the whole. The significant things in both cases are these :
— As regards offices the two lists are not identical. Apostles
* I Cor. i. 12, iii. 4. * 1 Cor. xiv. 26.
* I Cor. v. I fi. ' I Cor. xii. 12-xiii. 13.
' I Cor. xi. 17 ff ^ Rom. xii. 4 ff.

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL AND IDEAL. 525
come first in the one list, but do not appear at all in the
other ; whence it follows that no fixed system of orders was
necessary to the body or known to the Church. Further, no
member or person appears as pos.sessed of any sacerdotal name
or office or function, either with respect to the body or its
activities. Again, the discussion introduces passages that in
the enthusiasm of humanity surpass all others in the Pauline
writings. The Christ that inhabits the body is the Christ
of the Beatitudes and the Beneficences of the Gospels.
Sacramental grace is not here, nor the orders that are its
channels, nor the political organism which defines the sphere
of " the covenanted mercies." What we have here is the grace
and truth which dwelt in Him become active and efficient
in the men who at His call and through love to Him have
gathered into societies, that they may the better, as His incar
nated and organized Spirit, continue His work among men.
iii. In the later Epistles this idea is expanded into a sub
lime universalism, which transcends time as much as space.
The thought ofthe Apostle has risen above its old antitheses,*
and now contemplates all things through the ideal Christ
In Him, through Him, and for Him were all things created ;
in Him they are so constituted as to be an order, a system.^
As He made. He redeems ; His coming is no accident, or
after-thought ; but as He ever was with the Father, man has
for the Father ever been in Him. It is through this new
standpoint, and its vaster and more synthetic outlook, that the
notion of the mystical Church first emerges. It is conceived
more as an ideal, yet without ceasing to be real, and is
personified in an altogether new way. The Church, personal,
yet universal, stands over against the personal yet universal
Christ ; He is the Husband, it is the wife ; He is the Head, it
is the body ; He exercises authority, it lives in subjection and
obedience ; He loves the Church, gives Himself for it, sancti
fies it, exalts it, makes it beautiful, holy, blameless.^ These
1 Cf supra, pp. 316-320. ' Col. i. 16, 17. ^ Eph. v. 23-27.

526 GOD REFLECTED IN HIS IDEAL SOCIETY.
attributes, the affections exercised and received, the ideal
identity and adequacy to each other of the personal Christ
and the personalized Church,* are new, though it may be only
in the sense of being more explicitly developed, elements in
the Pauline theology. With the emergence of the new,
certain old elements have either retreated into the back
ground or been so qualified as to appear in changed propor
tions. Christ is not come as the second Adam or new Head
of the race, but as the Husband and Head of the Church ;
He does not die for all, but gives Himself up for the Church,
or becomes an offering and a sacrifice to God for us.^ Less
emphasis falls on the mind and acts of man, more on the will
and election of God ; instead of the justification by faith and
the reconciliation with God of the polemical Epistles, we
have the creation of a justified and reconciled humanity, a
happy, harmonious, and holy society made after the mind of
God, constituted by Christ, filled, guided, united by His
Spirit Unless these new elements and points of view be
borne in mind, the Church of the later Epistles cannot be
construed. It stands as the symbol of the completed work
of Christ, of all that God through it had meant to accomplish ;
by it was unfolded the mystery of His will ; in it was mani
fested, not simply to earth, but to " principalities and powers
in heavenly places," His " manifold wisdom." ^ The attributes
and achievements of this Church, then, are so vast that no
single institution, or any number of institutions, or even thc
whole field of human history can exhaust its contents, or be
the arena of its full unfolding. It represents the .summing
up, or bringing to a unity in Christ all things in heaven and
upon earth ¦* ; and is presented under a series of images that
strive, as it were, to break the bonds of place and sense
and reach immensity. But this " Gloriosissima Civitas Dei "
struggles towards eternity through time ; the men addressed
1 Eph. V. 28-33. ° Eph. iii. 10.
' Eph. V. 2, 25. * Eph. i. 10.

ALL ITS NOTES ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL. 527
are members of it ; yet, as if to show how the Apostle was
possessed with the universalism and the idealisms of the
Church, he never once in Ephesians uses the term in its local
or realistic sense. Its members are " the called " — i.e., they
are conceived, not in their temporal, but in their eternal
relations ; and the notes that ought to distinguish them
are " lowliness," " meekness," " forbearance," " longsuffering,"
"love," "unity," "peace"* — social virtues all, not sacerdotal
or ecclesiastical. In their collective being they ought to be
an ideal society, for they are " one body and one spirit," have
one hope, " one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and
Father of all, who is over all and through all, and in all."
The unities are all, as it were, universals, as broad as the
sovereignty of God, as penetrative as His ubiquity, as all
distributed as His immanence. And in this society every
member owes his place and his grace to the gift of Christ,
who filleth all in all. And with reference to the perfecting
of His saints, in order to the edifying of His body, He has
created agencies — apostles, prophets, pastors, and teachers ;
but these are persons, not offices ; men created of God, not
orders instituted of men. And the edification of the 'oody is
a growth in love, so towards Christ that the nearer it comes to
Him the more He possesses it. Within this Epistle, then, the
Church is so conceived that the notes of what is called Catho
licism are all absent ; the Church, in the degree that it is
mystical, knows no special polity, consents to no institutional
forms, is distinguished by no sacrosanct orders, and has no
single note that can with any veracity of speech be termed
sacerdotal. The Church is constituted by God in Christ, and
is composed of " the called," " the saints," the men of love and
peace. To it no priest is necessary, or his " instruments of
grace " ; grace is the direct gift of Christ ; what fills the body
is His Spirit ; what moves, unites, and enlarges it is His
love. I Eph. iv. I ff.

528 COINCIDENCE OF CHURCH AND KINGDOM.

§ IV.— The Church as the Kingdom and People
OF God.
If we have rightly construed the Church in its later Pauline
or mystical sense, we ought to be able to understand its rela
tion to the kingdom. The kingdom is the Church viewed
from above ; the Church is the kingdom seen from below.
In the kingdom the society is conceived through its creative
and informing will ; in the Church the will is conceived
through the created and informed society. In the kingdom
the king is emphasized ; in the Church the citizens : in the
one case we see man as he ought tc be before God — poor in
spirit, seeking His righteousness, doing His will, humble,
teachable, without conventional goodness, good only in spirit
and in truth ; in the other case we see man as he ought to be
for God in society — possessed of social virtues, exercising all
the beneficences and charities that redeem and adorn life as
man lives it with man. Hence Jesus preaches the kingdom —
i.e., as King declares Himself, proclaims the kingdom consti
tuted by the presence of the King; but the Apostles, by
founding Churches, edify the Church, call men to become
saints, and to enter into the society of the saved. Hence,
too, come the very different images under which the two are
presented : the kingdom of heaven is as a sower who goeth
forth to sow, or like treasure hid in a field, or like a mer
chantman seeking goodly pearls, or like a net cast into the
sea, or like a seed, or like leaven ; but the Church is a house, or
a temple, or a body,— 2.^., the kingdom represents the idea of a
creative will, and man's relation to it as one of search, or its
action in man as one of growth ; but the Church represents a
structure, the association of once unrelated parts, the organiza
tion or combination of once dead atoms into a living whole.
The coincidence of the two ideas is seen here : the plan after
which the Church is built is the will of God, or the ideal of

AS IS CHRIST, SO IS HIS CHURCH. 529
the kingdom, while the means ¦ by which the kingdom is
realized is the Church and the Churches. But this involves
the correlation of the two ideas : the kingdom is the immanent
Churcb, and the Church is the explicated kingdom, and
nothing alien to either can be in the other. The kingdom is
the Church expressed in the terms and mind and person of
its Founder ; the Church is the kingdom done into living
souls and the society they constitute.
This idea of the Church, as essentially the new humanity,
created and penetrated by Christ, as little dependent for its
being on specific forms of polity as was the old humanity,
might be proved and illustrated from many sides. For ex
ample, this notion of the ideal universal Church is distinctively
Pauline, and belongs to the very texture of his thought. The
old mankind is an organism because of Adam ; the new is a
body because of Christ. Each is as its Head is : the old is
earthly, like the first man ; the new is spiritual, like the Second
Man, — the one partakes in Adam's sin ; the other is possessed
of Christ's righteousness. The mind of Adam penetrates his
race ; the Spirit of Christ dwells in His body. And His Spirit
is the son's ; the Church is the filial society, man become son
of God through the Son of God who became man. And in
this sense it continues the Incarnation — i,e,, incorporates the
ideal Sonship which Christ realized. The Church, as a body,.
is not material, but spiritual, just as is its Head. The old race
was a aS)fia ¦\^v)(iK.6v, but the new race is a aSifxa Trvev/MaTiKov,
with all the qualities and characteristics of Him who is by
pre-eminence the Ttvevfui ^{ooirotovv. To have the Spirit of
Christ is to be His. " As many as are led by the Spirit of
God, they are the sons of God." And " the Spirit itself
beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of
God." * And what are these children in their unity but the
continued incarnation of sonship ? And does not this mean
that as the Head of the Church is spiritual, and its indwelling
1 Rom. viii. 14-16.
34

S30 CHRIST'S CHURCH IS HIS PEOPLE.
power the Spirit, so it is constituted of spirits, and spiritual in
all its constituent elements.
But the conclusion which follows from this discussion of the
Pauline idea is only defined and illustrated by the usage of
the other Apostolic writers. In Hebrews itcKXrjala is used
only as in the LXX. * ; in Peter not at all ; in James and
John and the Apocalypse only in its local sense. But in its
place Hebrews, Peter, and the Apocalypse have the idea of
the people ; they conceive the new through the old society ;
the new is a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's people with
His law written in their hearts, and all the fleshly sacrifices,
official priesthoods, and outer ceremonies of the old abolished
by being translated into the spiritual realities they typified.
The emphasis, again, falls upon the people ; they are a whole
before God, needing no officials to constitute their unity, or
communicate grace by special instruments of the ancient kind.
These writers know nothing of the notion that the Church
depends for its being on a special polity ; to them such a
notion would have seemed like an attempt to change the new
law into the old. They would have found all the elements
essential to it, all the ideas that most distinguish it — its orders,
its authorized channels, its covenanted and uncovenanted
mercies, its priestly claims, and its ceremonial sanctities —
in the law they had escaped from, whose burdens they and
their fathers had not been able to bear. And they would have
.added : the Church is the people of God ; wherever they are
He is, and the Church through Him in them ; and as God's
are a free people. He allows them to organize their own
polities, the best polities always being those most deeply
rooted in love, and so most creative of the spiritual and
redeeming graces.
' Heb. ii. 12, xii. 23. In the latter case the use is figurative, but clearly
based on the Old Testament.

WHAT AUTHORITY HAVE ITS MINISTERS? 531
§ v.— The Church and its Organization.
So much has been said as to the New Testament idea of
the Church that we can give but little space to the questions,
quite distinct yet related, connected with the organization and
administration of the Churches. Only two points need be
noted — the one concerns the Apostles and the Apostolic Suc
cession, the other the character and function of the ministry
as such. The question connected with the first is this : Did
the Apostles constitute and consecrate successors with a view
to the transmission of Apostolic authority or powers along
given lines to given orders, and to these only ? The question
connected with the second point is this : Is the New Testament
ministry a priesthood ? As to these all we can do is to state
conclusions. I. There is no doubt that Christ appointed twelve Apostles,
that the number twelve bore an ideal significance,* and that
they had certain specific and defined functions.^ But that
they were to create or did create a special order of successors ;
that they were empowered to transmit, or did as a matter
of fact either profess or endeavour to transmit Apostolical
authority, — are positions, to say the least, quite incapable of
historical proof; and to be not proven is, in claims of this
sort, to be found not true. The Apostles were preachers of
the kingdom of heaven, messengers of Christ, witnesses of
His resurrection, but ordination is never described either as
their special function, or as their peculiar and exclusive
practice.^ The hands laid on Paul were not those of Apostles,
but first those of Ananias,* a man otherwise absolutely un
known, then those of the prophets and teachers at Antioch ; ^
and he throughout strenuously maintained that he was made
' Matt. xix. 28. ' Acts i. 8-22 ; Matt, xxviii. 19-20 ; Luke xxiv. 48.
' The act and authority in ordination seems to have been rather the
Churches' or their delegates' than the Apostles'. Cf. 2 Cor. viii. 19;
Acts xiv. 23, xiii. 2, 3, i. 15, 16, 23-26.
* Acts ix. 10, 17. * Acts xiii. 1-3.

532 THE APOSTLES AND APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION.
an Apostle neither from men nor through man.* Barnabas
was sent forth, not by the Apostles, but by the Church.^
But, indeed, what does the term " Apostles " mean ? No
corporate body, no college of ordaining officers, no exclusive
order, but simply certain persons whose special function was
the ministry of the Word.^ Hence of the men Jesus appointed,
James, Peter, and John are the only three ever named outside
the Gospels * ; and for the history of the Church and its or
ganization only the two latter are of real significance, and
even their significance is personal rather than official.^ James,
the brother of the Lord, appears as an Apostle,' though he
was not one of the Twelve. Paul seems to associate with
himself in the Apostleship, Apollos,' Timothy, and Silvanus,*
and to apply the name to Andronicus and Junia.* The
Apostles were therefore no fixed order, and had no special
governmental functions — others laid on hands as well as they ;
they were simply messengers and representatives of Christ.
He preached, so did they ; by preaching He established His
kingdom, and they planted Churches ; by the Word they
worked their wonders and did their work. But as to any
transmission of authority there is no word, nor is there any
evidence of the existence of any official body either authorized
or able to transmit it.

' Gal. i. I. ' Acts xi. 22. « Acts vi. 2, 4.
* Of course. Acts i. 1-14 is here regarded as a piece of the Gospel
history ; it is simply the introduction to the Acts of the Apostles, which
really begins with the fifteenth verse. But cf vi. 2.
5 It is very significant that it is the personal eminence and influence, not
the official authority, of Peter, James, and John that Paul emphasizes in
the narrative that describes his intercourse with them (Gal. ii. 6-10). They
were alluded to by name, not as Apostles, but as 01 SoKovvres a-rvXot ehat.
Cf the remarkable way in which he at once distinguishes and co-ordinates
himself and the rest of the Apostles and " the brethren of the Lord,
and Cephas" (I Cor. ix. 5). This latitude in the use of the term is inex
plicable on any theory of the corporate being and authority of a defined
Apostolical body.
« Gal. i. 19. s I Thess. ii. 6. Cf. i. I.
' 1 Cor. iv. 6, 9. 9 Rom. xvi. 7.

THE NEW MINISTRY NO PRIESTHOOD. 533
2. But the other point is more fundamental. It has been
already so far discussed * that we need only say here, the New
Testament ministry is not a priesthood ; in no single feature,
aspect, or office has it a sacerdotal character. It is a small
question what apostle, prophet, teacher, bishop, pastor, pres
byter, deacon, mean, or how some perished and others
survived, and how in the process of survival they were
changed ; but it is a profounder question, full of vaster issues;
how into those that survived the sacerdotal idea penetrated,
and by changing them changed the character of the religion
through and through. There is an exact correspondence
between the ministerial office and the nature of the religion,
or the offices of the Church and its essential character.
Sacerdotalism means that an office is conceived to be so
sacrosanct, and so necessary to man's worship of God and
God's access to man, that without it there can be no perfect
worship on the one side, and no adequate or regular com
munication of life on the other. It means that the priest,
as a priest, and not as a person, and his instruments as his,
or as used by him, are the only authorized and divinely
constituted media through which God reaches man and
man God, or through which the recognized and approved
intercourse of the creature with the Creator can proceed.
Now, in the New Testament no such ideas are associated
with the ministry, or with any person appointed to it
No man bears the priest's name, or professes his functions ;
the studious avoidance of the name by men who were
steeped in the associations of sacerdotal worship is most
significant ; and so is the care with which they translate
sacerdotal customs and ideas into their spiritual antitypes.
The priesthood ceases to be official by being made universal.
The life of the communities is not bound by any priestly
rules or observances,^ but by the new laws of love. The
Church and its ministry, therefore, correspond throughout ;
' Supra, p. 101. * Gal. iv. 9, 10 ; Col. iL 16-23.

534 THE MINISTRY IS AS THE CHURCH IS.
the ministry is one of persuasion, that seeks to move the will
through the conscience, and both through the reason and
heart ; that cares in the new and gracious way of brotherhood
for the poor, the sick, the ignorant, the suffering, the sinful,
and attempts to help, to love, to win by sweet reasonableness ;
while the Church is a society which seeks to realize the beauti
ful ideal of a family of God, or a household of faith, or a
brotherhood of man. The rise of the sacerdotal orders marks
a long descent from the Apostolic age, but is certainly no
thing of Apostolic descent.

CHAPTER II.
THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY.
§ I. — The Church and its Polity.
FROM the discussion as to the idea of the Church in the
New Testament two positive principles may be de
duced : (l) As regards material character the Church is the
people, the society of the sons of God ; and (2) as regards
formal character the Church is described in theocratic, ethical,
and social terms, but not in sacerdotal or ceremonial. What is
meant by the first is that the Church is composed of those
who have the Spirit of the Son ; without the filial Spirit no
man can be within the filial society, but all are within the
society who have the Spirit. This is its substance, this is its
essence — it is a family constituted by the younger sons of God
being conformed to the image of the First-born. What is
meant by the second position is that this society is a theocracy,
governed directly by its Divine and Invisible Head, with all
the relations between its members determined by their relation
to Him. The society of the sons of God is a family of brothers,
where each loves the Father supremely and his brethren as
himself The material character is expressed by the term
eicicXr]aia, and the formal character by the term ^aaiXeCa. The
kingdom is composed of free-born or enfranchized men ; the
Church is ordered and organized by the will and authority of
the King whose love founded it, whose spirit fills and guides,
whose life quickens and whose law rules all its members. The

536 WHAT IS OF THE £SSB OF THE CHURCH.
citizens who constitute the i/cKX^rjaia compose the /SaaiXeia, but
the laws of the ^aaiXeia are the only valid and imperative
principles constitutive of the e/cKXrjaoa. So construed God
is the conception determinative of the Church both on its
material and formal sides. The sons must be as is the
Father— ;holy as He is holy, perfect as He is perfect ; the
kingdom must be as the King — righteous as He is righteous,
the realm where His will is law, and the law is love.
But the idea of the Church may be further defined and
illustrated by being placed in contrast to its antithesis — the
idea that is here called by courtesy the Catholic. This idea
is political and institutional ; but its polity is not the polity
of the kingdom, nor are its constituent members the whole
society of the sons of God. We need not here carefully define
or exhibit in their mutually destructive negations the systems
that call themselves Catholicisms, but simply select what is
common to both — the notion that a given organization or
polity is necessary to the very being of the Church. The
episcopate is "organically necessary to the structure of the
visible body of Christ," — " necessary not merely to its bene esse,
but to its esse." * The society so organized is " the special and
covenanted sphere of His (the Spirit's) regular and uniform
operations." ^ The Church, used in this strictly political sense
and confined to a special body, has a finality which belongs to
its very essence, " expressed in the once for all delivered faith,
in the fulness of the once for all given grace, in the Visible
Society once, for all instituted," " and in a once for all em
powered and commissioned ministry." ^ By virtue of the first
it is the custodian and interpreter of the truth ; by virtue of
the second it possesses the Sacraments, which are its instru
ments for the communication of grace ; because of the third
the Church is a political unity into which man must be
' Liddon, " A Father in Christ," p. 13 (2nd ed.).
' Mr. Gore, "Lux Mundi," pp. 321, 322.
' Mr. Gore, " The Church and the Ministry," pp. 64, 65.

TYPES OF POLITY CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL. 537
incorporated to be truly and effectually saved ; in the fourth
" the instrument of unity " is supplied, " and no man can
share her (the Church's) fellowship except in acceptance of
the offices of her ministry." * Now, of these the last is the
greatest and most essential ; though it may be argued that all
are alike necessary, and distinction between necessities cannot
be drawn ; yet here this distinction exists, the episcopal
ministry is the condition through which the other things are ;
it is primary, they are secondary and sequent ; without it
there can be no unity, no priesthood, no sacramental grace, no
authoritative transmission and definition of truth — in a word,
no Church ; with it these things cannot but be.
Now, is this a doctrine which even approximately ex
presses the idea of the New Testament, and especially the mind
of Christ as to the Church ? Does it do even the remotest sort
of justice either to the filial society on the one hand, or its theo
cratic form on the other ? Is it a theory of the ministry or of
the community ; of the political system or of the people who
live under it, and for whose good it exists ; of the forms under
which communion is decreed to be possible, or of the saints
who hold communion ? The question as to the relation
between the various factors constitutive of the State— the
sovereign and the citizens, the magistracy and the people, the
polity and the community — is as old as the study of politics,
and it is as native and as necessary in the ecclesiastical
as in the civil sphere. In both there are the same types
of political theory, involving questions identical in principle
and substance, though somewhat different in form, as to
the origin, basis, limits, conditions, and ends of authority.
The types may, after Aristotle, be distinguished into three,
each capable of existing in two forms, a legitimate and an
illegitimate — the monarchical, the aristocratic or oligarchical,
and the constitutional or democratic^ (i) If monarchical,
the monarchy may be either absolute or limited ; if absolute,
1 '¦ The Church and the Ministry," p. 86. » " Politics," iii. 7.

538 MONARCHY, OLIGARCHY, AND DEMOCRACY
it will be in the civil sphere an autocracy, but in the ecclesias
tical a papacy, while its attribute in the realm of .civil law wih
be supremacy, but in the ecclesiastical, as the realm of opinion,
infallibility. If it be a limited monarchy, the limitation must
come either from the law, which stands above the king and
makes him a responsible ruler, or from a co-ordinate authority
which stands over against his and qualifies it. In the ecclesias
tical sphere the former is represented by the Galilean theory,
the latter by what we may call the Prankish and the older
Teutonic theories or customs, which governed the relations
between Church and State before the days of Hildebrand and
the Hohenstaufen. (ii) If the political type be oligarchical,
it becomes in the civil system an aristocracy, in the ecclesias
tical either a hierocracy or an episcopacy. Its distinctive
note is that it must be self-perpetuating — i.e., the means of
continuing and propagating the order must be within the
order, and cannot be delegated to any one or anything
without. This is secured in the aristocratic and in certain
hierocratic systems by a rigid law of hereditary inheritance,
but in the episcopal by an equally rigid law of official suc
cession, ordination or consecration of bishops by bishops ;
in other words, accession to office by act and sanction of
those who already hold it Of course, each of these systems
has a theory of origin corresponding to its own peculiar form
and needs. In the civil sphere, where the law of hereditary
inheritance reigns, the theory is, either supernatural, an ordi
nation of God through His Vicegerent, as with Laud and
Filmer ; or natural, due to the superior strength or cunning
of some ancestor, as with Hobbes ; or to the necessities and
will either of the State or of certain classes within it, as with
Aristotle ; or to some imaginary contract, as with Rousseau.
But in the ecclesiastical sphere, the theory of origin must
always be supernatural ; either, where the succession is heredi
tary, the creation or election by God of some special family
or tribe, as with the Jews and the Brahmans ; or, where the

AS METHODS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT. 539
law of official succession reigns, the institution by the Founder
of an order that shall transmit authority and bestow office
as in Catholicism and Buddhism. Levi and all his sons
were in the loins of Abraham when Melchisedec met him ;
all the succeeding bishops were in the spirit of Paul when he
ordained Timothy and Titus, (iii) If, again, the political type
be democratic, it may either be indirect and representative,
where the authority is delegated to certain persons, either of
a special order, or simply as citizens of good repute ; or it may
be direct and collective, where the enfranchized, or simply the
citizens, act together and as a whole. The former has its
counterpart in the civil realm, though only in a very partial
degree, in ancient Rome ; in a fuller degree in our modern
republics ; but in the eeclesiastical it takes shape as presbytery.
The latter may be seen, in its civil form, in the ancie'nt Greek
cities ; but in its ecclesiastical, in the Independent or Congre
gational Churches.
But one thing marks all these political types — they are
polities, methods and forms of government, of immense signifi
cance as such, but as no more. Taken at their very utmost
valuation, they represent the framework of the State, but do not
describe its essence ; they affect and condition, but do not con
stitute its life. A Greek city might change from a tyranny
to an oligarchy, or to a democracy, but it remained Greek
still. Rome did not cease to be when the Republic became
the Empire ; France has tried many polities, but still remains
France. The State is the people ; the polity is the systern
under which they are organized, and which may be changed
without any change of the people. Salmasius said, " It is
absurd to argue that kingdoms were before kings, for it is
through kings that kingdoms are ; did no king reign there
could be no kingdom." But Milton replied, " Kingdoms,
indeed, were not before kings, but peoples were, and it is for
and through peoples that both kings and kingdoms exist. "
And it is in the ecclesiastical as in the civil realm ; it is

540 APOSTOLIC DESCENT OF THE CHURCH
neither the bishops nor the clergy that constitute the Church,
but the Church that constitutes the clergy. The Church
was before they were ; they are by it, and through it, and
for it ; they owe their being and succession to it ; it does not
depend for its unity upon them, but upon its Head and its
relation to Him. The people are His ; without His people
no polity can be. With His people, some polity must be ; but
of what sort it shall be it is for His people, not for any special
order, to determine.
The cardinal vice, then, of this kind of speculation is that it
makes the secondary element primary, the primary secondary,
and by inverting the relations perverts the force and the func
tions of both elements. It turns a mere ecclesiastical polity,
which is not primitive and is without connection or affinity with
Christ's ideal ofthe kingdom, into a substantive doctrine of the
Church. It makes this polity, instead of the people, the con
stituent factor or authority. It affirms the Apostolic descent
of the clergy, but forgets the Apostolic descent of the Church.
It argues concerning the ministry as men in the seventeenth
century used to argue concerning the king ; the Divine rights
once claimed for him are still claimed for priests, and proved
in similar methods by the help of similar assumptions. And
the similarity is not only with F"ilmer's Divine right of the
patriarchal king. The theory represents too deep a tendency
in human nature to be without analogies, as every student of
comparative religion knows only too well, in wider and more
distant fields. But one thing is clear : no theory of either
the Church or its polity can be adequate which forgets the
collective Christian people, through whom and for whom all
polities are. The best polity for a State is the polity that secures
the greatest possible good to the whole, doing completest justice
alike to the obscurest citizen and the most illustrious ; but the
polity that shuts outside the Church as immense a body of
holy men as are to be found within it, is a polity that does no
justice to the ways of God or the actual condition of man. It

SECURES APOSTOLIC DESCENT OF CLERGY. 54 1
is to constitute a state by disfranchizing its free-born citizens,
and degrading them into serfs or helots. The method may
be logical, but it is one of as violent disregard to right and
fact as any known to ancient usurper or tyrant. In all
questions of this sort there are two points of view : Men
may reason downwards from the polity to the people, and say,
" The Maker of the world, the Founder of the society, made
this polity which we embody and administer, and you cannot
be His people unless you live under His polity ; on it, and
our administration of it. His grace so depends that without us
and our instruments it will not be communicated to you.''
Or men may reason upwards from the people to the polity,
and say, " God made the people ; His Spirit renewed them
and inhabits them. The polity must express and represent the
Spirit of God in the people ; articulate, organize, and direct
their energies. They are first, it is second ; proceeds, indeed,
from God, but comes through His sons, and only what is their
creation has His sanction." Of these two points of view, the
former may be termed the high clerical, the latter the high
Church. What begins and ends with the ministry may exalt
the clergy ; what exalts the Church must never lose hold of
the people, the saints called and approved of God.
§ II. — The Church Visible and Invisible.
Enough has been said as to the relation between polity and
Church, but its theological and historical significance may be
illustrated by a phrase which it is the custom of Catholic,
especially neo-Catholic, writers elaborately to despise and to
misunderstand—" The Invisible Church." The date of its origin
is a small matter. New conditions so combine or affect old
ideas as to demand new names. If theology used no terms,
or allowed no ideas save those found in the Fathers, its life
would soon cease, and nowhere sooner than in neo-Catholicism.
One thing is certain, the phrase represents elements and ideas
the Reformers owed to Augustine. His doctrine of the

542 AUGUSTINES CONDITIONAL CHURCH
Church was confronted with two great difficulties, one real
or social, the other ideal or theological, (a) The real was
the presence within it of the unworthy, the impure, or the
hypocritical — men who did not belong to the Society of the
Saved, especially as it existed for the mind and by the will of
its Founder. Hence he had to distinguish between the ideal
and the actual or the real and the counterfeit Church.* The
Reformers had to face this contradiction in a far more aggra
vated form, and they said, " Since these impure, hypocritical
men, though they are visibly within are really without the
Church, let us cease to use false words, and say — Of the
Church as God knows it, they are no members. Our actual
is not identical with God's ideal ; and here the ideal of God
is the alone real." But (^) the theological difficulty was
more serious : Augustine's Church, as sacerdotal, was condi
tional — by acts and sacraments men could be incorporated
into it ; but his theology was unconditional — grace was
absolute, and men were saved not simply by being within the
Church but by the decree or will of God.^ If the decree is
1 " De Doctr. Christ.," iii. 32 : " Non enim revera Domini corpus est, quod
cum illo non erit in aeternum. Sed dicendum fuit, De Domini corpore vero
atque permixto, aut, vero atque simulato, vel quid aliud ; quia non solum
in aeternum, verum etiam nunc hypocritae non cum illo esse dicendi sunt,
quamvis in ejus esse videantur Ecclesia. Unde poterat ista regula et sic
appellari, ut diceretur de permixta (instead of bipartita) Ecclesia." Cf
"Unit. Eccl.," c. XXV., § 74: " Multi tales sunt in sacramentorum communione
cum ecclesia, et tamen jam non sunt in ecclesia." "Cont. Litt. Petit," ii. 10:
" Dico ad semen Abrahae, quod est in omnibus gentibus, non pertinere, si
quid non recte vobis factum est, fortasse a palea dominicae segetis, quae
nihilominus est in omnibus gentibus." This division was so sharp in
Augustine, that he, like the Reformers, was charged with believing in the
existence of duas Ecclesias " Brevic. Coll. cum Donat.," iii. 10). The
criticism was just as valid in the one case as in the other, and no more !
Cf Seeberg, "Studien zur Geschichte des Begriffes der Kirche," § 7;
A. Dorner, " Augustinus," pp. 276-295.
* Cf with above, Angus., "In Joh. Evang.," xiv. 12: "Secundum istam
ergo praescientiam Dei et praedestinationem, quam multae oves foris, quam
multi lupi intus ; et quam multae oves intus, et quam multi lupi foris 1" So
"de Bapt.," V. xxvii. 38 : " Namque in illa ineffabili praescientia Dei, multi
qui foris videntur, intus sunt, et multi qui intus videntur, foris sunt."

AND HIS UNCONDITIONAL THEOLOGY. 543
absolute in a man's theology, he cannot consistently allow
his ecclesiology to make salvation conditional ; yet a con
ditional salvation is of the very essence of a Church that
saves or communicates grace by the sacraments.* Hence
Augustine might have argued that men were predestinated
to baptism, but he could not consistently argue that men
through baptism were regenerated. And as in face of the
facts he could not maintain, as his one doctrine required,
that there were only the elect within the Church and only
the reprobate without, and as in obedience to the other, he
had not only to admit, but to contend that there were
elect as well as reprobates without, and reprobates as well as
elect within, — he had to content himself with affirming' both
positions, leaving them confronting each other as dexterously
concealed, yet unreconciled antitheses, or rather as radical
contradictions. In the last analysis, indeed, " Numerus
certus sanctorum prsedestinatus," or the elect, were the real
members of the Church ; while the non-elect, though in
its communion, were but semblances, weeds in the garden
of God.
Now, what the Reformed theologians did was simply to
develop Augustine's position into logical consistency by con
ceiving the Church through its ultimate constitutive factor,
the will of God. So construed, it became the society of the
elect, or company of the predestinated, or, simply, the Church
invisible, while the visible was the mixed body who lived in
outward profession. But this only showed that the inheritance
of Augustine was divided ; the Catholics succeeded to his
polity, the Reformers to his theology. The anti-Donatist was
the Father of the visible Church, but the anti-Pelagian the
Father of the invisible.^
But this leaves us with the question. What did the
Reformers mean by the phrase "Invisible Church"? We
can easily see what they did not mean. They did not intend
1 Supra, pp. 116-119. * Supra, p. 155.

544 THE INVISIBLE CHURCH AFFIRMED
to reduce, but rather to enhance the reality, necessity, and
importance of the visible Church,* within which the invisible
lived and without which it could not be.^ Nor did they
mean to deny the unity and continuity of the Church ; but
rather to affirm both, though in a form that aimed at being
just to all the facts, and the whole truth as to the redeeming
activity of God.' Nor did they use the phrases, as Bellarmine
with the skilful misunderstanding of controversial genius
maintained, to denote two Churches, but rather to express
two ideas that were related as the body and soul of man.*
The " Invisible Church " was no " Civitas Platonica," nor was
the visible an organized accident, or series of expediences.
Each was necessary to the other, and both to the complete
expression of so rich and complex an idea as the Church of
Christ. In the first place, that could not be an " ecclesia
sensibilis," for did not the Creed say, " I believe in the Holy

' Of it John Calvin said: "Verum quia nunc de visibili ecclesia disserere
propositum est, discamus vel uno matris elogio quam utilis sit nobis ejus
cognitio, imo necessaria ; quando non alius est in vitam ingressus nisi nos
ipsa concipiat in utero, nisi pariat, nisi nos alat suis uberibus, denique sub
custodia et gubernatione sua nos tueatur, donee exuti carne mortali similes
erimus angelis" ("Inst. Rei. Christ.," iv. i, 4. Cf. Catechis. Major, ii.
3. 42).
' Melanchthon, " Loci Communes," i., p. 283 (Detzer's ed.) says : " Quo
tiescunque de ecclesia cogitamus, in tueamur coetum vocatorum, qui est
ecclesia visibilis, nee alibi electos ullos esse somniemus, nisi in hoc ipso
coetu visibili ; nam neque invocari, neque agnosci Deus aliter vult, quam
ut se patefecit ; nee alibi se patefecit, nisi in ecclesia visibili, in qua sola
sonat vox evangelii, nee aliam fingamus ecclesiam invisibilem et mutam
hominum in hac vita tamen viventium." Hence the formula: "Ecclesia
invisibilis non extra visibilem est quaerenda, sed illa huic est inclusa."
3 "Apol. Confes. Angus.,'' art. iv., p. 146.
* The terms denoted distinction, but no division ; and so HoUazius,
p. 1283: "Non asserimus ecclesiam visibilem et invisibilem esse duas
ecclesias specie diversas, aut contrarie oppositas ; sed unam eandemque
ecclesiam diverso respectu dicimus visibilem et invisibilem, visibilem
respectu vocatorum, invisibilem respectu renatorum " ; and he explains
" coetus invisibilis renatorum sub visibili coetu vocatorum continetur."
Cf Luther, Werke, xviii., pp. 12-15 (^d. Walch); Gerhard, "Loci," xi.
81, 82 ; and " Confes. Cath.," p. 207 (ed. 1679).

MADE THE VISIBLE CHURCH REAL. 545
Catholic Church " ? But the things of faith are invisible ;
God who loves, Christ who saves, the Spirit which renews the
soul, are unseen ; unseen, too, is the soul they love and save
and renew, and unseen the society constituted of God out of
this and all the other souls He has saved. In the next place,
the body that claims to be the one Holy Catholic Apostolic
Church does not possess any one of the attributes it so proudly
boasts ; it is not one, for it is divided into many .sects, and has
been the fruitful mother of divisions ; it is not holy, for within
and over it are many evil men ; and to its working evil forces
have contributed almost as powerfully as good ; it is not Catholic,
for it is Roman ; nor is it Apostolic, for it has exchanged the
ministry of service for the functions of empire. Over against
and within this political and juridical body stands the Society
of the Saints of God, enjoying a communion, which, though
informal or unconscious, is real in proportion as it is rooted
in the Divine. Again, the saving of man is an act and work
of grace ; all its terms are spiritual and free ; its very nature
would be changed were it bound to institutions of man's
making and ordering. Justification by an institution is the
very negation of justification by faith ; the more it is .mag
nified the more is the sole ability to justify of the spiritual
Person who impersonates the saving energies of God limited and
lowered ; and the more is His claim to achieve through faith
the saving change in man qualified and conditioned. Then, as
it is persons God saves, it is a people He constitutes ; and as
He loves them, and they love Him, they must be able to
enjoy His fellowship in spite of anything any political society
on earth has done or can do. Under this aspect, there is a
double idea to express — the idea that all who love God form.
a society with and before and under the God they love, and
the idea that this society, as bound to no terms of man's
making, is reahzed in the realm of the transcendental and
eternal. Now, what term can better express this double ideai
than " Invisible Church " ? It lifts us at once into the region
35

546 THE VISIBLE CHURCH CATHOLIC.
where all the realities are transcendental and all are spiritual,
where God is all in all to man, and man lives in conscious
fellowship with God and loving obedience to Him.

§ III.— The Church of God — Holy, Catholic, and
Apostolic.
We have been concerned, not with the truth or falsity of
the idea of the invisible Church, simply with the meaning and
import of the phrase ; but this much may be said : it has
more of the historical and Catholic spirit than the phrase
in whose interest it has been so loudly despised. It was an
attempt to find an idea of the Church as large and deep
as the activity of God, yet as varied and free as the spirit
of man. It endeavoured to rescue the people of God from
bondage to a juridical letter, and restore them to their
rightful place in His spiritual order. There was nothing
Luther more loved to say and to emphasize than this —
Church meant people, saintly. Catholic, Christian, daily being
sanctified and made into a holy Christendom. And in so
speaking he agreed with the Catholicity of the Early Ages.
As Justin counted all truth to be of Christ, as Clement
found prophecy in Hellenic philosophy as well as in the
Hebrew Law, as Augustine believed that there had been
a Christianity before Christ, so Luther held, translating the
Patristic abstract into his own brave concrete, that wherever
the holy soul is, whether under the Papacy or amid the
Turks, there is the Church. And simply because so trans
cendental and Divine, it must have a phenomenal form.
The finite persons who compose it are men ; its Founder
was an historical Person, and defined the elements necessary
to the visible being of His society. These are two, the
Word and the Sacraments, or the Gospel by which men
are saved, and the symbols which at once express their
relation to a common Head and bind them into a common

GOD AND THE CHURCH AGREE. 547
Brotherhood. Where these are there is a Church ; more
than these need not be. Forms of polity are matters to
be determined by saved people, not by consecrated priests.
The people are primary, the polity is secondary, and the
polity which best articulates the religion for the people and
best organizes the people for the purposes of the religion, is
for the time and place the best polity. Particular Churches
with their specific polities do not break the unity of the
Catholic Church visible, while their faith and love constitute
the unity of the invisible. It is only where accidents are
made of the essence of the Church that schisms are created,
for schism is but an ordinance of man turned into an im
perative law of God, and as such forced upon His free
people. The phrase " visible and invisible Church " may
be open to manifold criticisms, for the idea was large, and
human speech is limited, and the ability to read the mind
within it more hmited still ; but surely we may say that in
all the elements of sublimity and Catholicity, official Catho
licism, especially in its more sectional and schismatic forms, is
alongside this belief of "the new sectaries of the sixteenth
century " only eis "moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto
wine." We return then, as we close, to our determinative principle :
the ideal of the Church and the idea of God must agree.
What does not exalt His infinite Majesty and Fatherhood
is but colossal individualism, though it may disguise itself
as Catholicism. God's grace is too rich to be confined to
any one channel, too boundless to be bound to councils or
coteries or orders of men, infirm and fallible like all their
kind. It were to affirm no paradox, but rather a position
capable of the clearest historical proof, were we to maintain
that the higher the theory of the Church the meaner the
conception of God, or that the growth of high Church doc
trine is always coincident with the decay of the highest
theistic belief. For an absolute or infallible Church means

548 CHRIST'S CHURCH IS CHRISTLIKE.
a limited God, a God whose working men condition, whose
mercies they circumscribe, whose grace they regulate and
distribute. Their limitations are imposed on Him ; His
attributes are not transmuted into their energies. They but
repeat on a larger scale the sin of Israel, — God belongs to
their Church rather than their Church to God ; He is accom
modated to its claims rather than its claims humbled only to
be the more exalted in the presence of Plis majesty. For the
more worthily Churches think of God, the more will they feel
the fallibility of all their popes and pastors ; the more they are
possessed with the faith of His sufficiency, the less will they
build on the idea of their own ; the more infinitely good and
gracious He seems, the less will they be able to claim to be
His sole and adequate representatives. The virtue of a Church
does not differ from the virtue of a man : all are but earthen
vessels, even though they be vessels that bear the treasure of
the Lord. The vessel magnified is the treasure depreciated ;
the more the vehicle boasts its own rare workmanship, the less
it glorifies the wealth it was made to bear.
From the strife of the sects we would return into the calm
and gracious presence of Him who is at once the Head and
the Heart of His Church. He has given us His peace, and
it abides with us even amid the collisions and contradictions
of men. These are but of time, while He is of eternity. And
in His presence we may not meet negation with negation, and
affirm of those who say that there is no Church but theirs, that
theirs is no Church of Christ ; on the contrary, we shall draw
no narrower limits than those traced by the hand of the Son
of man : " Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which
is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother."*
' Matt. xii. 50.

INDEX.
Abelard, on reason and faith, i2of
Adam and Christ, the Pauline antithesis, 3iiff, 529; expresses a philosophy
of history, 314, 461 f
Agnosticism in English philosophy, 203 f ; assumes a double incompetence,
387.
Alexandria, influence of its thought in Epistle to Hebrews, 321 ; tendencies
in, 39, 60 ; the catechetical school of, 75.
Anglican school in theology, the, 9f, 14, 155, 176 ff.; compared with the
Puritan, 181 ff., 188 n.; its doctrine of the Church, 176 ff, 536 ff.; its
Arminianism, 183 f; its patristic tendency, 10, 184; on the Incarnation,
451 ; in relation to Newman, 27; its revival, 10, 191 f.
Anselm, the scholastic theologian, 118-126; his problems, ii9ff. ; of
Northern descent, 113. Cf 210 n.
Anthropology, characteristic of the Latin Church, 70, 74, 108 ; the Pauline,
310 ff. ; in relation to Christ's own doctrine, 376.
Apocaljrpse, the, its value to-day, 19 ; its Christology, 302, 332.
Apologists, the, and Christian theology, 66, 82.
Apostolic succession, 531 f , 540.
Aquinas, an Aristotelian Realist, 124; of Northern descent, 113.
Aristotle, his influence in the Middle Ages, 40, 119, 124; his types of
poUtical theory applied to the Church, 537 f
Arius, his theology, 84 ; declines to use homoousios, 88.
Arminianism, a criticism of Calvinism, i69f, 431 ; in the Anglican Church,
184.
Athanasius, his theology, 84, 222, 390 n., 490.
Augustine, his anthropology, 109; his dualism, 115 f-i 542 f. ; his con
ditionalism in polity, 116, 155, 542 ; his absolutism in theology, 116 f.,
I55i I57i 162, 542; his interpretation of Paul, 188; his influence on
Scholasticism, ii5ff, and at the Reformation, 146, I53ff, 541 ff

Baur, F. C, his relation to Strauss, 259, 264 ; founder of Tubingen school,
259; history of his mind, 260 ff ; the historian of dogma, 263; his
Christology, 264 f. ; his problem, 265 ; his antitheses, 267 f , 272 ; his
tendency theory, 270 ff.

550 INDEX.
Biblical exegesis of sixty years ago, 12 f,
,, theology of to-day, 292; in Herder, 200 f.
Bossuet on development, 31 f.
Broad Church, the, compared with the High Church, 176 ff.; its leaders,
178.
Butler, his works, 1 1 ; his doctrine ot conscience in Newman, 25 ; on
revelation, 386 n.

Calvin, 143-151 ; his doctrine of God, 145, 164 f., 430; in relation to
Augustine, 155, 162; on development, 27.
Calvinism, a doctrine of God, 149, 156, 162!., 430 f.; its affinity to Pantheism,
164 ff.; its schools, 163, 168, 173: see Reformed.
Candlish on the sovereignty of God, 432 ff , 445.
Cathohcism, early, 27, 62, 107 f, 527; its rise explained by Baur, 269, 272;
mediaeval, 45, 127; later, 27, 149, 155; its conception of God, 429;
and ofthe Church, 155, 536, 547.
Chemnitz on development, 28 n.^-
Christ, use of the name in New Testament, 306, 336, 337, 358 f. ; the
Christology of, 358-377; the ecclesiology of, 515 ff.; the monotheism
of, 378 ff., 514; the filial consciousness of, 48, 36off, 39off., 440 ff. ;
histories of, 17 f, 235, 248, 278 ff.; the verdict of history on, 378 ff.;
the recovery of the historical, 4, 6, 19 f, 189, 277, 294. See Jesus,
Messiah, Son.
Christology of the New Testament, 302-383 ; of the Ante-Nicene age, 80 ff. ;
of Augustine, 118; of Lutheranism, 161 f, 186, 257 f; of Schleiermacher,
228 ; in Germany subsequent to Strauss, 257 ; see under the Qodhead,
385-400 ; and under Soteriology, 470-486 ; and under Incarnation.
Church, the, doctrine of, 513-548; in relation to theology, I53ff., 450;
in relation to the Scriptures, 450, 499 f, 500 ff; development in,
38 ff
Clement of Alexandria, 67, 75, 103.
Com.?nunicatio idiomatum, in Lutheran Christology, 161 f., 186, 257;
between God and the Godhead, 427 ; in the Incarnation, 479.
Creation, doctrine of, its philosophical difficulties, 406 ; made intelligible
through doctrine of Godhead, 4ioff., 413, 417, 421, 446.
Criticism, historical, 191-297 ; in relation to the authority ofthe Scriptures,
500 ff.
Cyprian, as an administrator, 77 ; his sacerdotalism, 104 f, 106 n.

Daill6 on development, 28 n. *.
Deism, defined, 414, 416, 431; Judaic, 383; English, 204; German, 193,
224; its historical criticism, 192, 239,
Development, the law of, in theology and the Church, 25-190; definition
of 34 ; history of the doctrine in theology, 27 ff.
Duns Scotus, a Platonic Realist, 124.

INDEX. 551
Eastern Church, the, its characteristics, 72 f, 185.
"Ecce Homo," 2791.
English Church, the, and theology, I76ff. See Anglican, Evangelical,
Puritan.
Episcopacy, 102 ff., 536 ff.
Erasmus, and the Renaissance, 131 ff.
Evangelical school, the, 9f, I4f,, 176; its genesis, 175; contrasted with
the Puritan, i79f.

Fatherhood of God, the, in the consciousness of Christ, 48, 360 ff., 390 ff.,
44off. ; in Paul, 309; in John, 34of. ; in Greek theology, 91, 389;
correlative with the Sonship of Christ, 392 ff., 473 ff. ; of the essence
of God, 398, 410; determinative of sovereignty, 434 ff., 444, 449; in
relation to sin, 449-469, 483 ff. ; the material principle in theology, 451.
See Son and Sonship.
Fathers, the Greek, 74 ff.; on the Holy Spirit, 490; the Antignostic, 82 f,
187; the Latin, 74 ff.
Fichte, 207 ff.

Geneva, its influence at the Reformation, 150 f.
Gnostics, the, the first theologians, 82; their terminology, 86 ff.
God, the doctrine of, compared with that of the Godhead, 385 ff., 401,
426 f. ; inherited from Judaism, 64 ff., 388, 428 ; in Greek theology, 90 ff.,
389; in Latin theology, 96 ff., 389, 429; in Calvinism, 145, 149, 156,
163, 430.
God, conception of, in Theism, 401 ; in Hebraism, 404 ; in Greek philosophy,
405.
Godhead, the, 3S5-447; its significance for the doctrine of God, 385, 401,
403, 417, 421 ff., 427, 440; in relation to the Incarnation, 471 ; in Greek
theology, 91, 389, 394; in the Hegelian philosophy, 218 ff.; asrevealed
in history, 261.
Goethe, 196 ff.; his conception ofChrist, 197 f, 295.
Gore, his theory of the Church, 45 n., 536 f.
Gospels, the, criticism of 19, 230 ff. ; by Herder, 202; omitted by Strauss,
235, 266, 271; in the Tubingen school, 258, 266, 270 f; after the
death of Baur, 278 ; the Christology of 334 ff.
Greek Philosophy, a factor in development of theology, 59, 62 ff., 70, 81,
89 ff.; in the ancient Eastern Church, 81 ff., 185; its conception of
God, 405 ; affinities with the Christian Trinity, 396.
Greek Theology, 78 ff., 90 ff., no; the Godhead in, 91, 389, 394; its
Christology, 80 ff.
Hebrew religion, a factor in development of theology, 64 f See Judaism.
Hebrews, Epistle to, its Christology, 302, 320 ff., 345 ; its ecclesiology, 530.
its symbolism, 321, 326 f, 343, 345 ; in relation to the canon, 506.

552 INDEX.
Hegel, 213-223; his importance for modern theology, 214, 221 f; his
influence on Strauss, 214, 216, 222 f, 233, 236 f; and on Baur, 261.
Hegelianism and Christian Dogmatics, 222; and Christology, 258; and
criticism, 215, 236 ff.
Hengstenberg criticizes Strauss, 244 f.
Henotheism, descriptive of Judaism, 379, 515.
Herder, 196 ff.
High Church, the, I76ff. See Anglicanism.
Humanism, at the Renaissance, 128 ff.; its influence on the Reformation,
137 f, 503.
Incarnation, the, as conceived by Paul, 319; by John, 342; by the
Evangelists, 354; in the Lutheran Church, 161 f, 257f, 45of. ; in the
Anglican, 184, 451; doctrine of 470-479; continued in the Church,
529; as held in German philosophy, by Kant, 206; by Fichte, 208; by
Schelling, 211 ff ; by Hegel, 22off; by Strauss, 238 f, 250; by Baur, 264f
Inspiration, the doctrine of, 496 ff.
Invisible Church, the, 541 ff.
Irenaeus, his Biblical theology, 67, 83 ; in relation to sacerdotalism, 103.
Jacobi, 206 f
James, Epistle of its Christology, 302, 328, 373.
Jesus, use of the name in Paul, 306 ; in Hebrews, 323, 325 ; in Peter, 331 ;
in Apocalypse, 332 ; Jesus in John, 344 ff. See Christ.
John, Gospel of, compared with the synoptics, 338 f ; its characteristics,
340, 345 ; the Christology of, 341 ff., 346 ff., 354 ; as viewed by Strauss,
248, 253 ; by Baur, 269, 278 ; by Ewald, 278.
Judaism, its various forms, 38 ; in relation to early Christianity, 50 ff. ; to
Paul, 304, 310, 320, 404; to Hebrews, 320; in the Apocalypse, 332;
its conception of God, 377, 379, 393, 404, 428, 514; of the Messiah,
359 ; and of sin, 454.
Jurieu on development, 30 n. '.
Justin Martyr, his relation to Greek philosophy, 66, 85.
Kant, 205 f.; his influence on Christology, 205, 473; his criticism of
Theism, 407.
Keim's life of Jesus, 284 f
Kenosis, in the Incarnation, 258, 355, 476 ; in the Godhead, 484.
Kingdom of God, or of Heaven, founded by-Christ, 48, 51, 355, 358, 375,
515 ff.; in the synoptics, 335, 337, 356; in relation to the Church,
515 ff., 528 ff. ; in the philosophy of Kant, 206 ; in Hegelian Dogmatics,
222 ; in modern Biblical theology, 292.
Latin theology, 74 ff., 93 ff., 186.
Law, Roman, in Latin theologians, 71 f , 98 f ; in the doctrine of the Atone
ment, 123, 480; in Evangelical theology, 175 ; and in the doctrine of
God, 429, 432 ff., 436 ff.

INDEX. 553
Lessing, 192 ff. ; his theory of revelation, 194 f , 387.
Lotze, on the supreme good, 411.
Love, essential to God, 410, 424, 440 ; and righteousness compared, 441 ff. ;
motive of creation, 410 ff., 417.
Luke, his Christology, 337, 339, 346 ff., 355.
Luther, the Reformer, 137 ff. ; compared with Calvin, 143 ff; on the Incar
nation, 477 f ; his doctrine of justification, 138, 140, 159, 450; ofthe
Supper, 138, 161 ; of the Church, 140, 546; ofthe Scriptures, 161.
Lutheranism, its Church theological, 155, i59ff., 450 f ; its service to
Christology, 161 f., 184, 257 f ; its inconsistencies, 138, 142.
Magdeburg centuriators, the, on development, 28 n. '.
Maistre, Joseph de, on development, 32.
Marheineke applies Hegelianism to theology, 222, 233.
Mark, his Christology, 334 f, 339, 346 ff., 355.
Martineau on revelation, 494 ff., 511.
Material and formal principle in theology, 449 ff.
Matthew, his Christology, 335 f, 339, 346 ff., 355.
Messiah, or Messianic idea, in the consciousness of Jesus, 358 ; how
affected by the Temptation, 349 ff. ; in the Apostolic Christologies,
306, 310, 331, 332, 334f, 335, 373 f
Moehler on development, 32, 2ion. ', 261 n. '.
Monotheism, of the Jews, 377, 393, 514; really created and preserved by
Christ, 378, 381, 514; in relation to the Godhead, 393, 397 ; in relation
to polity and the Church, 514, 547 ; in the philosophy of Baur, 261.
Mythical Theory, the, previous to Strauss, 241 ; as held by Strauss, 240, 248,
253, 255, 265 ; how criticized, 246, 270.
Neander, 233, 246.
Neo-Platonism and Christianity, 39, 76, 109.
Newman, on development, 25, 32 f , 34, 36, 44; his fear of Liberalism, 178 ;
his search for authority, 26 ; on Protestantism, 42 ; his theology ho\'.'
affected by English philosophy, 204.
Nicene theology, characterised, 90 ff., 390 n.
Nominalism, 124 ff.
Occam, William of, a Nominalist, 124 f
Origen, his theology, 83 ; on sacerdotalism, 104.
Pantheism, in Calvinism, 164 f ; in Strauss, 244 ; in Hindu religion, 395 ;
defined, 415 ; its apparent reasonableness, 412.
Papacy, the, 107 f , 112, 127, 130, 429.
Patripassianism, the truth in, 484.
Paul, his Christology, 302-320 ; his conception of the sovereignty of God,
404 ; of sin, 459 ; of the Church, 520 ff., 529 ff. ; his influence on the
Antignostic Fathers, 187; on Augustine, 187; on the Reformers, 160,
187; the Tubingen criticism on, 266 ff.

5 54 INDEX.
Paulinism, according to the Tiibingen school, 270, 272, 274.
Penalty, legal and remedial distinguished, 437 f. ; and the Fatherhood, 467 ;
and sin, 482 ; and Atonement, 486.
Petavius on development, 29 f.
Peter, the Christology of his Epistles, 302, 330; as keeper of the keys, 518.
Philo, importance for Christian theology, 65, 68.
Philosophy, in Scholasticism, 112; in England, 203; in Germany, 204 ff.,
209 f., 214 ff., 224; and historical criticism, 203; and modern theology,
472 f See Greek.
Plato, 65 f , 78, 396.
Polity, Roman, a factor in development of theology, 60, 93 f, no, 187;
and the Church, 529 f , 531 ff., 535 ff.
Positivism, 461, 494.
Priesthood, official, unknown in Apostolic Church, 48 f, 533 ; origin and
action within the religion, 101 ff., and under Sacerdotalism.
Protestantism and development, 27 ; and Humanism, 137, 503 ; its attitude
to Scripture, 1 58, 500 ff.
Pseudo-Dionysius and Catholicism, 109.
Psychology in the new Tubingen school, 290.
Puritanism in the English Church, 179 ff., 188 n.
Realism, Platonic and Aristotelian, 124 f
Reformation, the, 137 ff.
Reformed Church, the, theological, 155, 162, 184; its doctrine of God, 163;
and of the Church, 146, 541 ff.
Religion, Roman and popular, a factor of change in Christianity, 61 ; action
on ideas of priesthood and worship, 100-106.
Religions, historical, 7 ; equivalents in them to conception of .sin, 454 ; their
revelations, 493 ; as viewed by Lessing, 194 f.; by ScheUing, 211 ; by
Hegel, 217 ; by Schleiermacher, 225 ; by Baur, 260 f.
Renaissance, the classical, 4f, 127 ff.
Renan's "Vie de J6sus,'' 278 f, 280.
Revelation, the doctrine of 493-512; necessary to knowledge of the
Godhead, 386 ff., 398 ; in the theology of Les=ing, 194 f, 387.
Roman Imperialism in Catholicism, 107 f, 111 f
,, Law in theology, 71 f, 98 f, 123, 480. See Law.
,, Polity, a factor in Christian development, 60, 93 f, no, 187.
Romanticism, 4f, 199 ff.
Rothe on love and creation, 41X.
Sabellianism, 222, 398.
Sacerdotalism, absent from Christ's idea of religion, 49, 517 ff., 533 f ; and
from primitive Christianity, loi ff., 521, 525, 527, 533 f. ; transcended
in the Epistle to Hebrews, 326 f , 375 ; the growth of in Christianity,
104 ff.
Schelling, 209 ff. ; his doctrine ofthe Absolute, 209 f., 216.
Schenkel's life of Christ, 284.

INDEX. 555
Schiller, 195 f.
Schleiermacher, 223 ff. ; his influence on religious thought, 223 f., 260; his
criticism ofthe Giospels; 230 f, 234; his dictum on Christ, 231 ; his life
of Christ, 283 f.
Scholasticism, iiiff.
Scotus Erigena, 115
Scriptures, the, as the formal source pf theology, 450, 512; in relation to
the Church, 450, 499, 500, 505 ff. ; and to criticism, 500 ff. ; the recovery
ofthe, 131 ff.; the Lutheran doctrine on, 161.
Sin, the Pauline idea of, 3llff. ; distinguished from transgression and
offence, 312 n. ': defined, 452 ff.; as common, 459ff. ; in relation to
the Fatherhood, 449-469 ; and to the Atonement, 479-487.
Socinianism, 169, 172 f.
Son of God, its use by Christ, 359 ff. ; and by writers in the New Testament,
307, 323, 334 f, 340 ; its relation to " Son of Man," 364 ff.
Son of Man, its use by Christ, 361 ff., 364 ; in the Old Testament, 361 f ;
ideas connected with the term, 375 f.
Sonship of Christ, the Divine, in the consciousness of Christ, 48, 360 f. 365
368 f, 376, 390 ff., 397, 440, 447, 451, 471 ff. ; in the New Testament,
307. 310, 323 ff-, 33°. 332. 335 f-i 340S. ; the condition of man's, 328,
390, 447, 529; in relation to the Fatherhood of God, 392 ff., 406, 440,
473 ff. ; as defined by Candlish, 432.
Sonship of men, 48, 328, 368 f , 376, 390, 441, 445 ff., 456 ; in the Nicene
and post-Nicene theology, 390 n. '. ; as defined by Candlish, 432.
Soteriology, of Paul, 310 ff. ; of Luke, 338 ; in the East and West, 74; of
Luther, 140 ; doctrine of, 470-492.
Source, material and formal, of theology, 449 ff.
Sovereignty of God, in Judaism, 404 ; in Greek theology, 81 ; in Latin
theology, 389; in Augustine, 117, 146, 155; in Calvin and Calvinism,
145 f, 149, 155 f, l63f, 431; in Puritanism, 181 ff.; according to
Candlish, 432 ff., 445 ; as material source of theology, 450 ; and sin,
465 ff. ; analogues in earthly sovereignty, 433 ff., 437 i. ; determined by
the Paternity, 434 ff., 444.
Spirit, the Holy, 399, 487 ff.
Stoicism, ancient, 60, 71 f , 85 f , 95 f ; in Calvinism, 145 {., 164.
Strauss, 230-253 ; his " Leben Jesu," 235 ff. ; the mythical theory, 240, 255
influenced by Hegel, 214, 216, 222 f, 233, 236 f; his new "Life of
Jesus," 280 ff. ; dissolves religion into humanism, 283.
Sub- Apostolic age, the, 53, 55 ff.
Sublapsarian theology, 168.
Subterlapsarian, 173 f
" Supernatural Religion," 285.
Supralapsarian theology, 163 ft

Temptation of Christ, the, 349 ff.
Tendency theory, the, 270, 272, 274.

5S6 INDEX.
Tertullian, juristic in theology, 39, 67, 76, 83, 93, 95 ff. ; his Stoicism, 96 ;
on sin, 466 ; his sacerdotalism, 97, 104.
Theism, its conception of God, 401 ; its philosophical difficulties, 406 ff.,
412, 414 ; its relation to theology, 401 ff., 423.
Tholuck criticizes Strauss, 245.
Tradition in the early Church, 54, 57 f ; as defined at Trent, 158; in
relation to the Scriptures, 158, 499, 501 f.
Trent, the Council of 156 ff.
Trimurti, the Hindu, 395.
Trinity, the Christian, 395 ff., 491 ; in Greek theology, 91 ; ethnic parallels
to, 395 ff. ; as held by Hegel, 218; by Baur, 263 f. See Godhead.
Tubingen school, 254-276; later developments of, 289 f. See Baur.
Ullmann criticizes Strauss, 243, 246 ; on the sinlessness of Jesus, 279.
Western Church, the, characteristics of, 72 i. ; its thought and organisation,
107.
Word, the, in the Gospel of John, 340 ff. ; or Logos in Greek theology,
82 f., 85 ; in Tertullian, 97 ; in the doctrine of the Incarnation, 475.

-TT-'— TS5wa"TT:f??vf