SUEVIVALS IK OHEISTIAKITY

SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY

STUDIES IN THE THEOLOGY OF
DIVINE IMMANENCE

SPECIAL LECTURES
DELIVERED BEFORE THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL
SCHOOL AT CAMBRIDGE, MASS., IN 1892
BY
CHAKLES JAMES WOOD

Nefo gorft
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON
1893
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1893,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.

NottoDoB tresis :
J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith.
Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

TO
Wqz -Eebeteno Samuel 19. ilfficConnell, 29.
WHOSE LOYAL HEAKT AND QUICKENING
MIND HAVE BEEN FOR ME A
STAY AND A STIMULUS

PREFACE.

This preface is merely explanatory. If an author
thinks he ought to apologise for his book, then he
ought never to publish that book. Besides, the Cer
berus of literary criticism is not mollified by sops of
apology. My purpose in sending forth this book is to help
honest and earnest truth-seekers both to find what is
real and true in the realm of religious thought, and
to accept with equal honesty and intelligence the
Evangel of Jesus the Christ. Whenever men thus
find and accept the truth as it is in Jesus, they will
also realise and rejoice in the organic unity of the
Church, for which I hopefully pray.
In citing the Scriptures of the New Covenant I
have followed Tischendorf's Greek text. I have
made my own translation in order to draw attention

viii PREFACE.
to points which our familiarity with the received
versions causes us to overlook. The notes were
added for the same reason that a short bibliography
was prepared, — to assist those desirous of studying
further into the subject.
Genuine criticism, from "those who know," I do
not deprecate, but welcome. Truth is all, and I am
naught, save only as I yield myself an utterance of
the Living Truth Who abides in the heart of things.
I am glad that I am under obligations to my friend
Mr. E. M. Kingsbury for revising for me the proof-
sheets of this book.
St. Paul's Rectory, Lock Haven, Pa., U.S.A.
St. Matthias' Day, 1893.

CONTENTS. LECTURE I.
The Introduction  5
LECTURE II.
The Idea of God  31
LECTURE III.
The Church  83
LECTURE IV.
The Forgiveness of Sins  143
LECTURE V.
The Resurrection  199
LECTURE VI.
Eternal Life '  249
Bibliography  293
Index  301
ix

THE INTRODUCTION.

Hooker. I know my poor weak intellects, most noble Lord, and
how scantily they have profited by my hard painstaking. Com
prehending few things, and those imperfectly, I say only what
others have said before, wise men and holy ; and if by passing
through my heart into the wide world around me, it pleaseth God
that this little treasure shall have lost nothing of its weight and
pureness, my exultation is then the exultation of humility. "Wis
dom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing
them thoroughly ; but in choosing and in following what conduces
the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory. And
this wisdom, my Lord of Verulam, cometh from above.
Landor, Imaginary Conversations.
Some men distinguish errour from truth by calling their Adver
saries k«u and of yesterday ; and certainly this is a good signe if
it be rightly applied : for since all Christian doctrine is that which
Christ taught his Church and the spirit enlarged, or expounded,
and the Apostles delivered, we are to begin the Christian cera for
our faith and parts of religion by the period of their preaching :
our account begins then, and whatsoever is contrary to what they
taught is new and false, and whatsoever is besides what they
taught, is no part of our religion (and then no man can be preju
diced for believing it or not) ; and if it be adopted into the con
fessions of the Church, the proposition is always so uncertain, that
it is not to be admitted into the faith, and therefore if it be old in
respect of days, it is not necessary to be believed : if it be new, it
may be received into opinion according to its probability, and no
sects or interests are to be divided up on such accounts.
Bp. Jeremy Taylor, Sermon, Of Christian Prudence.
Works, II. 275.

The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the
human understanding, and are deeply rooted in it, not only so
beset men's minds, that they become difficult of access, but even
when access is obtained, will again meet and trouble us in the
instauration of the sciences, unless mankind, when forewarned,
guard themselves with all possible care against them. Four species
of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction's sake)
we have assigned names : calling the first the Idols of the tribe ;
the second, the Idols of the den ; the third, Idols of the market ;
the fourth, Idols of the theatre. Bacon, Novum Organum, I. 38, 39.
St. Clement of Alexandria, referring to the philosopher Hera-
kleitos, wrote, Strom. V. 14 : "If you wish to trace out that saying,
' He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,' you will find it expressed
by the Ephesian in this manner : ' Those who hear and do not
understand are like the deaf,' and, 'eyes and ears are bad witnesses
to men having rude souls.' "
What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow a
number of spiritual currents of distant and various origin : certain
religions, that is to say, of Asia and of Europe, the great ideas of
Greek wisdom, and especially those of Platonism. Neither its
doctrine nor its morality, as they have been historically developed,
are new or spontaneous. What is essential and original in it is
the practical demonstration that the human and the divine nature
may coexist, may become fused into one sublime flame ; that
holiness and pity, justice and mercy, may meet together and
become one in man and in God. What is specific in Christianity
is Jesus — the religious consciousness of Jesus. Amiel, Journal.

SYNOPSIS.
1. A new method in the study of Theology is demanded by the
conditions of the present day, in order to eliminate from popular
religious thought some pagan survivals.
2. Illustration of the mixture of ethnic religious notions with
Christianity in the early centuries of this era.
3. An attempt to give some of the causes of the incomplete
reception of Christianity: Among the Apostles, post-apostolic
Christians, ante-Nicene and mediaeval theologians.
4. This accounts for a survival in Christian Theology of some
incongruous and alien elements which contradict the very essence
of the revelation of Jesus, and enfeeble it as an instrument for
the Salvation of the World.
5. Therefore we should eliminate these Survivals as elements
which are practically injurious. For this purpose a method of
Theological study is here suggested and the outline given.
6. The Subjects are to be treated in five lectures.
7. There is no authority competent to release us from the
demands of a comparative, historico-genetic study of Theology.
All Theology thus examined is seen to be the growth of the relig
ious receptiveness of mankind, the growth of the God-consciousness.
In this sense alone is Christianity an evolution.

THE INTRODUCTION.
Gentlemen : —
If the crudities which may appear in these lectures
were due solely to my own limitations of knowledge
and thought, I should not advert to them, but, with
confidence and tranquillity, leave that task to my
critics. There is, however, a defectiveness due to
the exigencies of the days in which we live.
1. It is easy to call any age a transition period,
because time is always rushing forward, a resistless
current, but surely it is plain enough to any observer
that in an especial and marked way this age is a
transition period in Theology. The cuneiform clay
epistles of Tel-el- Amarna, the slabs of the great Baby
lonian, epic, antiquities of the Nile and Euphrates
valleys, the critical analysis of the Hebrew and Greek
scriptures, and the comparative study of religions are
casting upon Theology a light to which we cannot
and ought not to shut our eyes. The old is passing
away, and behold, all things are becoming new. The
meaning of the higher criticism is manifestly the re
moving of those things that are shaken, as of things
5

6 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
that are made, that those things which cannot be
shaken may remain. We are standing in the bright
ness of the early sunrise of a new day in methods of
Theological study, and these methods are still too
new to escape unripeness. Enough for us if our new
forms of thought have a reality, have a vivid and
vivifying force, and adjust themselves to the new
shapes which the problems of our day assume.
Two props stay my mind in beginning these lec
tures, assuring me that it is worth your while to hear
them, and my while to give them. The first is the
substantial truth of the points taken, but the second,
and all-important matter, is the method which I use.
It is to this method that I bespeak your especial
attention. 2. In order to point out the importance of this
method in the study of Christian doctrine, let me pre
mise an illustration. There stands to-day in the city
of Constantinople the blasted, blackened stump of an
ancient pillar. It is called the Burnt Column, and it
is now about eighty feet high. An unknown Byzan
tine writer1 in the reign of the emperors Arcadius
and Honorius, tells us that the Emperor Constantine
the Great erected this porphyry column one hundred
and fifty feet high. He wound about it a spiral rib
bon of bas-relief like Trajan's Column. He brought
from Delphi the ancient bronze image of Apollo, and
1 Incertus Scriptor, in Orelli's edition of Hesychius Milesius,
295.

THE INTRODUCTION. 7
on the pedestal of this image had inscribed, as if it
were a portrait statue of himself, his own illustrious
name. To the top of this column was then elevated
this sacred image of Apollo-Constantine, and to make
perfectly clear that the old god had been converted
into a Christian numen, about his head they put a
nimbus of darting rays made from nails of the true
cross. Underneath the foundation of this porphyry
column were placed the ancient palladium of the
Roman Empire, that image which fell down from
Heaven, and which iEneas through so many tribula
tions brought from Troy, and together with it the
twelve baskets of the miracle of the loaves and fishes !
Strange conglomeration, apt symbol of the mass of
our popular religious notions and Theology ! Chris
tian and heathen elements are mingled together !
The task of the Christian student in Theology is
therefore clearly indicated. He must try the oracles,
whether they be indeed of God.
3. How came about this mixture of foreign ele
ments with Christian Theology ? Consider a moment,
and it will be clear to you. The extent of the knowl
edge of divine truth in the world of men is a matter
which is measured by revelation and receptiveness.
Receptiveness is gradual, growing, or progressive.
The divine method in the world is not revolutionary,
but evolutionary. The Bible is a record of the pro
gressive reception of divine truth. The Gospel grows
into men's minds as the world grows old. This

8 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
condition of religious knowledge we discover at the
very origins of Christianity. The teachings of Jesus
were not fully understood, if understood at all, even
by His most sympathetic disciples, therefore He was
accustomed to say,1 " I have yet many things to say
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." Even
after the Pentecostal enlightenment the apostles
were obviously not inerrant. Witness the Chiliastic
expectations of the epistle-writers2 of the New Testa
ment. If such were the limitations of the receptive
ness of the teachers whom Jesus chose to deliver His
doctrine, how far more contracted probably were those
limitations in the case of their hearers.
Several causes have helped to an imperfect recep
tion by mankind of the religion of Jesus. The first
is its rapid spread. It is estimated that there were at
the end of the first century five hundred thousand
Christians ; at the end of the second, two millions ; and
at the end of the third century, from seven millions to
ten millions. When we reflect how ingrained and
slow to eradicate are the habits and convictions of a
lifetime, yes, of the lifetimes of the generations of
our ancestors, inbred, fixed, and generated into the
1 St. John xiii. 7 ; xvi. 12, 17 ; St. Mark iv. 33.
2 Weiss, Biblical Theology, I. 305 fi. Jewish Apocalyptic lit
erature, the Books of Enoch, Moses, Isaiah, Solomon, etc., could
not but have been known to Jesus and His apostles. There are
not a few allusions to them in the New Testament, and some quo
tations, e.g. Jude 14.

THE INTRODUCTION. 9
very fibre of our character, is it wonderful that with
all their sincerity, many of those early converts to
the religion of Christ carried over into Christianity
the notions and convictions of their past? It was
inevitable. Let me say, however, at this point, in order to
guard while passing, that Gibbon did not in his
fifteenth chapter offer this conglomerateness of early
Christian doctrine as one of the causes of the rapid
growth of the Church. Should the difficulty occur
to your mind, recollect that Montanism had all the
characteristics pointed out by Gibbon and this adapt
ability also, and yet Montanism was not a success.
Nevertheless sound still are Gibbon's words of caution :
" The great law of impartiality too often obliges us
to reveal the imperfections of uninspired teachers and
believers of the Gospel: and to a careless observer
their faults may seem to cast a shadow on the faith
which they professed. But the scandal of the pious
Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the infidel,
should cease as soon as they recollect not only by
whom, but likewise to whom, the divine revelation was
given." The artists of the Christian Catacombs felt no
scruple at using the figure of Hermes, of Bacchus,
of Orpheus, as a symbol of the Saviour. And the
ancient custom of representing a labyrinth upon the
pavement was continued in Christian churches, and
suggested the devotion of the Stations of the Cross.

10 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
No one can with an impartial mind read the pp.ges
of the isapostolic fathers, and not discern the influence
over their thought of pagan terminology, and the
persistence in their unconscious convictions of pagan
folk-faith. Then, when Constantine became a quasi-
Christian, he cursed the Church, not with the fabled
" Donation," but with an imperial favour which made
it fashionable to profess the Christian religion. Here
again was a cause of an influx of many pagan ideas
into Christian thought. Not at once, when such was
the stuff out of which Christians were made, could
the old pagan idea that religion consisted in the right
performance of ceremonies be done away. Hence
arose the complexities of ritual observance in the
Church, reaching high-water mark in the monastic
churches of Europe of the fourteenth century, and
finding expression in the works of Durandus, Vin-
centius of Beauvais, Gavantus, Buffaldi, Martini, and
the decisions of the Sacred Congregations of Rites ;
in short, in the idea of religious "function." In
western Europe, Karl the Great determined that the
Saxons must be Christians. When the Rhine was
frozen over, he crossed, and forced them all to be
baptised, and then he went back home. The next
summer the Saxons openly returned to their idols.
The next winter Karl returned and made them all
be baptised again ; and so on, year after year, till the
Saxons got to be fixedly Christians.1 Moreover, this
1 Annates Petaviani, Einhardi, etc., in Pertz' Monumenta Qer-
manica.

THE INTRODUCTION. 11
great Christian emperor in his laws allowed monetary
compensation for any crime except that of evading
Christian baptism. For that alone the absolute
penalty was death. How far do you think those
Saxons entered into the religion of Christ? Read
that letter 1 of St. Gregory the Great, where he advises
the missionaries not to destroy the Saxon rites and
Saxon sanctuaries, but to consecrate them to a
Christian use and meaning. In this way the pagan
customs of Christmas and of St. John's day, cor
responding in date to the two Saxon solar festivals,
have long lingered in Christendom, and have given
rise to many Christian legends, invented to account
for survivals 2 whose true origin had been forgotten.
What wonder that Christians have retained many an
idol of the den and of the market! If even the
acute mind of the Greek Christian did not develop
the thought of the eternal birth of Christ, before the
day of Origen3 from whom Athanasius received it,
should we be surprised that the Nibelungenlied,
written at the close of the twelfth century, reveals
Teutonic Christendom almost unaffected in social life
and personal character by the religion of Jesus ?
1 Epistolas 8. Greg. Pap., XI. 71.
2 Picart, Ceremonies Beligeuses, Tome 9 ; Hospinianus, De
Origine Progressu Ceremoniis et Bitibus Festorum, etc. ; Du Cange,
Glossarium, passim.
3 Irenaeus' doctrine of the dual nature of Christ was gnostic in
form. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, I. 516 ; Karl Bartsch, Einlei
tung d. Nibelungenlied.

12 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Again, Christian reception of the teaching of Jesus,
and the development of the same, were modified by
the clericalism of the Church. In the first centuries
of our era clericalism was inevitable from the very
constitution of society. In all ages, clericalism is
a passionate, blind protest against worldliness. It
resulted then, as always, from that antagonism to the
world which from the beginning arose between Chris
tendom and heathendom. ¦ For that idyllic " Peace
of the Church," where the noblest ideals of heathen
dom insensibly merged themselves into Christianity,
as Mr. Pater has so exquisitely suggested in Marius
the Epicurean, if ever a historic fact must have been
limited and momentary, a lull between tempests.
Never can reforming ages be tolerant; the Church
and the world were then hostile. There could be no
compromise, no recognition of half-truths, no general
appreciation in the Church of the dignity and earnest
ness of the old culture. Necessarily, therefore, ecclesi
asticism arose, as phariseeism and the caste systems
had arisen before it, and it went about moulding The
ology to suit its purpose ; for a system of Theology,
and a casuistry with copious index, it must have.
Free thought is its foe. At the demand of the Church,
the Emperor Justinian closed the schools of Neopla-
tonism. Yet St. Justin Martyr had reasoned in the
new school of Plato, and Origen was a pupil of Am-
monius of the' Bag. Neoplatonism has, in spite of
Justinian, always persisted as an element of Christian

THE INTRODUCTION. 13
Theology. It brought Augustine into the Church,
and helped him to formulate opinions which finally
generated Calvin and Calvinistic Protestantism. Also,
the schools of Athens closed, Neoplatonism travelled
eastward and took up its abode in the tents of Shem.
Having allied itself with Arabian philosophy, it went
in that guise westward as far as to Spain, and thence
through Averrhoes and Avicebron,1 gave an impulse
to Meister Eckehart, to Tauler, to Henry of Suso, to
the author of Theologia Crermanica, and to the mys
tics in general of the fourteenth century,2 and so
helped on Protestantism and free religious thought on
the Lutheran side. In the Roman communion, Car
dinal Cusa was an eminent exponent of the same
tendency. 4. The survival of early ideas is one of the most
important subjects in the rational study of Christian
Theology. Such persistence has been commonly
ignored by Christian teachers, yet, under Christian
name, dress, and rite, religious ideas of primitive cul
ture often obstinately survive. A quaint example of
this was given me by a clerical friend, who for a few
years was connected with our Church Mission to the
Sioux Indians at Yankton, Dakota. A chapel had
been built there, and named "The Holy Comforter."
Notwithstanding all teachings, catechism, Bible read
ings, and explanations, it was found that the common
1 Ad. Franek, iStudes Orientates, 367.
2 Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, I. 93-110.

14 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Indian idea of the Holy Spirit was that of an indef
initely large and warm quilt, — comforter. Wide
reaching in past ages has been the splendid cultus of
fire, at least among the Aryan peoples; from the
Vedas with Agni of the holy fire to the Latin Vesta
of the household hearth. Among the Semites were
the sacred fire-menhirs of Moab,1 and the brazen cres
sets2 which Solomon set before the temple. There
was the fire of the gods, which darts from heaven
upon the Soma,3 leaving its fruit to be thereafter
a vehicle of the divine substance, and to be adored
also as a god — teste, hymns of the Rig Veda ;
the altar flame of Manoah,4 which became a messen
ger to God ; and the fire which, coming down from
heaven upon Solomon's altar, afterwards burned per
petually, and remained during the seventy years of
Babylonish captivity unextinguished, though hidden
in a pit of water. Of this august and splendid pagan
ism, I can think of only these survivals in official
Christianity of to-day : the descent of the holy fire at
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem on
each Good Friday, the ceremony of obtaining the new
or Paschal fire, the church altars blazing with lights,
and the never-dying flame of the sanctuary lamp.
1 2 Sam. xxiii. 20.
2 W. Robertson Smith, Beligion ofthe Semites, 469.
" Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie. Soma und Verwandte Gotter,
I. 117-266. 4 Judges xiii.

THE INTRODUCTION. 15
Let me give another instance of what I think is a
survival of primitive folk-faith. Primitive 1 man any
where in the world venerates a boulder, a great rock,
and particularly a meteoric stone. Beside such a
rock as he has selected he puts offerings 2 of fruit,
meat, oil, and wine, and then kindles a fire to con
sume them, pouring thereon oil and distilled liquor.
To this custom we owe the standing stones, menhirs,
scattered over the face of the earth, Carnac in Brit
tany, the Syrian menhirs, the Stonehenge, and finally
the obelisk and the spire. On top the menhirs a
little hollow was made, to receive the offerings to the
stone-spirit. This is the earliest form of an altar.
Nowadays a Mohammedan gravestone has a cup sur
mounting it which receives offerings of food to the
ghost of the dead. A menhir Joshua set up ; 3 at such
a great stone human sacrifice 4 was offered. Samuel
erected 5 a menhir. Religion, which is always con
servative, long tried to preserve these stones uncut.6
A curious religious observance came to be related to
these pillars. In front of the mysterious temple of
Dea Syria, on the site of the old Hittite capitol of
Carchemish, there stood two lofty towers, or obelisks,
resembling perhaps our Washington, or Bunker Hill,
monument. To the summit of these pillars of Dea
1 By primitive man I do not mean primeval man.
2 1 Kings i. 9. 8 Josh. xxiv. 26 ff.
4 2 Sam. xx. 8-10. 6 1 Sam. vii. 11.
R Ex. xx. 25 ; Josh. viii. 31 ; Deut. xxvii. 5. Cf. Ex. iv. 25.

16 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Syria went up her chosen priests, and remained there
seven days in communion with the goddess. Now it is
a matter to note that not far from this spot, and about
four hundred years afterwards, St. Simeon ascended
his pillar, and there remained the rest of his life rapt
in the contemplation of God. After his example
came thousands of stylites, pillar-saints, and to this
day single columns are found scattered over the
Syrian land. It was a menhir that Jacob set up,
pouring oil upon it, and legend tells us how this
same stone had been originally in the altar which
Adam built after his expulsion from Paradise. Upon
it Abel offered his sacrifice. It fell into ruin, but
after the deluge was rebuilt by Noah. Again it fell
into ruin, and again was erected by Abraham. Jacob
gathered the scattered stones of it and put them
under his head for a pillow ; by a miracle these stones
were melted into one. By the Phoenicians this sacred
stone is supposed to have found its way to Spain and
thence to Ireland, where Conn one morning, as he
was going up Tara Hill, stepped upon it. The stone,
as the legend goes on to say, screamed, and out came
a fairy prince who revealed to Conn the future of
Ireland ; hence to the Irish the stone was known as
Lia Fail, — the stone of destiny. Kings were crowned
sitting upon it. Thence somehow it got to Scotland,
because the Stuarts traced their line to Conn of Tara.
At present this stone is underneath the seat of the
coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.

THE INTRODUCTION. 17
I have told this legend in brief, because it admi
rably illustrates the manner in which Christian people
invented myths or legends to account for customs
whose origin they had forgotten. In the Church,
however, the chief survival of stone-worship is de
tected in the demand for a stone altar duly anointed
and consecrated, or at least a stone mensa, or slab,
so prepared, and laid upon the altar for the offering
of the holy sacrifice. Another reason why so many
eccentric doctrines entered the Western Church is
that Latin Christianity set itself to the organisation
of European society, somewhat to the neglect of
Christian thought. The Church of Rome, agreeable
to the conditions of her early environment, became
deeply impressed with the imperial idea of govern
ment, and has never since been able to divest herself
of the conviction that universal sovereignty is hers
hy right.
5. In any adequate study of theology we must first
of all examine the religious opinions which were
already existent in the mental soil when the seed of
Christian doctrine came to be sown broadcast in it.
Thus we may be in the way to discover what early
ideas survived in those nations that embraced the
Christian profession. The correct method of study
ing Christian theology is the historic and compara
tive ; likewise, the right method of studying religions
is the comparative method. Folk-faith, the faith of
the common people, belongs fundamentally to a right

18 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
study of Christian Theology, because the day has
surely arrived when we must be able to compare
without fear Christianity with the ethnic religions,
thereby to demonstrate the supreme truth and unique
divineness of the Christian religion. We need this
method also in order to understand the dispensation
of God to all His children, and, lastly, we need it in
order that in our missionary teaching the true and
the false may be discreetly sundered. Therefore the
first part of my method is an examination of the
environment into which Christianity was projected.
In this examination I have, for the present, been
obliged to neglect two important factors which
should be calculated in any complete consideration
of the reception and subsequent development of the
gospel message ; namely, Philosophy and Law. Con
sideration of those factors would extend these lectures
beyond practical limits. The student may, however,
be referred to Hatch's and Renan's Hibbert Lec
tures, to Maine, Ancient Law, Harnack, Dogmen-
geschichte, Baur, Die Christliche Gnosis, Erdmann's
and Schwegler's Histories of Philosophy.
The next point is to determine, as far as possible,
precisely what was the teaching of Jesus and of the
New Testament writers. This is to be attempted by
means of an unbiassed Biblical theology and exegesis.
I would then trace the development of the seed in
the traditional theology of the Church, pointing out
from time to time some modifications of dogma which

THE INTRODUCTION. 19
have occurred by reason of surviving folk-faith.
This should finally bring us to a true state of the
doctrine as it exists for my consciousness, perhaps also
for yours. But this is not merely a matter of intel
lectual speculation. Life is making imperious de
mands upon theology- that she be a factor as well as
a fact. For example, the monism of Lotze and the
Christian Scientists confronts us. To me they repre
sent a metaphysical extreme which is false. It is
logical enough if only we could be quite confident
that a Jevons' syllogistic machine inside the skull
works unerringly when it gets at conclusions beyond
the gauge of consciousness. When ciphering with
infinities, it is easy to make mistakes. Theology
ought, therefore, to stand the test of present con
sciousness, if it is to be proven. It ought to answer
to the actual requisitions of life, not necessarily to
metaphysical and to traditional authority. The Vin-
centian canon has never met with fulfilment in the
whole history of dogma, unless, perhaps, with the
exception of that of the doctrine of the Trinity. It
is inept, also, to try to force an exact conformity of
the lex credendi with the lex orandi. It is not so
attempted in the Rituale Romanum; it should not be
in a Rituale Anglicanum. It has been said with some
truth that every Roman Catholic becomes a solifidian
Lutheran before he dies. The Book of Common
Prayer is not a body of divinity, but a manual of
devotion. It is a mistake to turn phraseology of

20 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
prayer into creeds and dogmas. The one object
before us, gentlemen, is the salvation of souls, the
proclamation of the gospel, good news. Jesus came
not to propound a theory of things, even of human
nature, but to save a world. This, says the author
of the book of the Acts, He began to do before His
ascension; this work of salvation He continues through
His followers. Theology has always forgotten herself
when she has tried to construct a theory, coherent
and logical though it be, and to substitute it for real
life and actual character. Metaphysical consistency
is impossible. God is too great for my brain. I am
ambitious to be neither a Calvinist nor an Arminian.
What we desire is that which is true, and from truth
we demand no countersign. The world is full of
antinomies which never have been solved. Both
absolute freedom and absolute fate are reductiones ad
absurdum. Nevertheless, human consciousness hymns
in distinct tones the high laws of duty, of righteous
ness, and of holy love. Strenuously, therefore, must
we strive to set forth the principles of Christ's teach
ing, and of the developed ideas of the gospel in such
a manner that they may be saving, that they may be
ethical, as well as intellectual, forces, because in these
last days "the sober majesties of settled, sweet,
epicurean life " are detected as a false element in
Christianity. 6. For your convenience I have chosen the theo
logical articles of the Creed to which to apply the

THE INTRODUCTION. 21
method of the theological study that I have so ear
nestly recommended. What I wish to make clear
may be stated somewhat as follows : —
A. God is not dependent upon revelation, but reve
lation upon God.
B. The Church of the living God is a living Church.
C. Forgiveness of sins, and not of their results alone,
is God's forgiveness.
D. The rise from the dead, which is of Christian
teaching, is not a resuscitation nor a revivifi
cation, but a resurrection.
E. Eternal life is potentially a present fact, and we
have no reason to believe that it will be a fut
ure fact unless it shall have been previously
of this present world.
I desire the teachings of these lectures to be con
sidered by you in their ethical rather than in their
speculative outcome. If you cannot see their saving
value, reject them. Let us not, at all events, sit idly
with Diirer's Melancholia, pondering in pessimistic
dejection, while the night cometh, wherein no man
can work. Study Theology, not to make your pulpit
a professor's chair, but that you may be a true teacher.
Heed not those who in these days are saying that the
study of Theology is useless. The foundation of
a house may remain hidden from sight, and yet be
none the less necessary for the superstructure. Let
your Theology be the foundation of your Sociology.

22 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Study Theology, and that seriously, not that you may
bolster up an opinion, or defend an accepted notion,
or persist in being impervious to all new ideas, but
study to find the truth: to systematise somewhat
correlated truths in order that you may observe their
bearing one upon another, but especially that you may
know how to console the grieving, strengthen the
weak and faint, answer the questioner, and furnish
genuine and healthful moral impulses. Let us be
heedful not to incur the reproach that,
" We teach and teach,
Until like droning pedagogues we lose
The thought that what we teach has higher ends
Than being taught and learned."
At this time of the world no longer can any new ideas
be brought forward. This the student of the history
of religious opinion knows. Neither shall I hope to
define all things clearly. If such is what constructive
or positive teaching signifies, then it does not under
stand itself. That age which can definitely plan out
a " Scheme of Salvation " has spoken its last word.
There is no possibility of a final Theology. Yet
Theology should none the less be positive and up
building. I do not come here to deny, but to affirm,
yet not at all to deliver myself of a dogma. All that
I desire to emphasise is the method of the study of
doctrines which I here present, and illustrate with
such an array of facts and data as my time, my space,
and my limitations allow.

THE INTRODUCTION. 23
7. I know that there is a craving for clearness, for
positive, definite teaching. But, gentlemen, under
stand well, that for living religious teachers this is
not a day for dogma. When a religious idea becomes
a dogma, it is because that idea has spent its force, it
is no longer a living and a growing thought. If any
one of you absolutely must have a neat and coherent
system of Theology, teres atque rotundus, an irresist
ible authority, an infallible guide that he cannot
mistake, whether Church, Bible, Creed, Reason, Sac
raments, or Pope, I do not know where in this life he
can find them. The boasted infallibility of each has in
its turn yielded to the stress of life's demands. No,
divine realities cannot be brought under the rule of
three or under the regimen of Aristotle's categories,
as the Council of Trent brought the dogma of justifi
cation. Whenever this has been attempted, one of
two results has come to pass : either we are, as by
Rome, asked to believe the incredible, or as by Geneva,
what, though credible, ought never to be believed.
In Theology there is no short and easy way, no cut
and dried truth. All truth is from a living, self-
revealing God, to a living, growing humanity.
" But, more than man, God yet is perfect Man,
And, making men, said, ' Let us fashion them
In Our own Image.' He, since time began,
Has been the Soul of man's soul, manhood's Sire,
Of all humanity the Light and Eire,
Passing imagination and desire,

24 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Kindling each spark
Of vital will that's flashed upon the dark
Of this world's night, and ever blazing still
With a fierce purity of Love that will
Consume all evil, offering up love's pain
On the great altar where men's sins are slain."
So the apprehension of the truth is a progress and
a development ; for lo, God is with men unto the con
summation of Time, eta? TJ75 avvTe"Keia<; tov ai&vo^.
Therefore, "the thoughts of men are widened with
the process of the suns " ; in this sense alone is it true
that Christianity is an evolution.

THE IDEA OF GOD.
\

God bears Himself out of Himself into Himself ; the more perfect
the birth, the more is born. I say, God is at all times one. He
takes cognition of nothing beyond Himself. Yet God in taking
cognition of Himself must take cognition of all creatures.
Meistek Eckehaet, Pfeiffer, Deutsche Mystiker, II. 254.
Deus est in Rebus, sicut continens res.
S. Thom. Aq., Summa Theol, I. 1". 1. 8.
In tutte parti impera, e quivi regge,
Quivi e la sua citta, e 1' alto seggio.
Dante, Inferno, I. 127.
Raise thyself to the height of religion, and all veils are removed ;
the world and its dead principle pass away from thee, the very
Godhead enters thee anew in its first and original form, as Life,
as thine own life which thou shalt and oughtest to live.
Fichte, Anweisung.
The conception of sin, it is sometimes said, is at the root of
Christianity. That is a false statement of a truth. For sin only
becomes sin, and is only known to us as sin, in the light of that
which is the heart and centre of Christianity, the belief in a
Personal God, Who is a God of Infinite Love. All other truths of
Christianity grow out of and gather around that central truth — the
doctrine of the Trinity, which safeguards the eternal truth that God
is Love. Aubeet L. Moore, From Advent to Advent.
26

Was war' ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse !
Im ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen,
So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist,
Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst. Goethe.
For so the light of the world in the morning of the Creation was
spread abroad like a curtain, and dwelt no where, but filled the
expansum with a dissemination great as the unfoldings of the air's
looser garment, or the wilder fringes of the fire, without knots, or
order, or combination ; but God gathered the beams in His hand,
and united them into a globe of fire, and all the light of the world
became the body of the sun, and he lent some to his weaker sister
that walks in the night, and guides a traveler and teaches him to
distinguish a house from a river, or a rock from plain field ; so is
the mercy of God ; a vast expansum and a huge Ocean, from eternall
ages it dwelt round about the throne of God, and it filled all that
infinite distance and space, that hath no measures but the will of
God. And the mercy which dwelt in an infinite circle, became
confirm'd to a little ring and dwelt here below, and here shall dwell
below, till it hath carried all God's portion up to Heaven, where it
shall reigne and glory upon our crowned heads for ever and ever.
Bp. Jeremy Taylor, Sermon, The Miracles
of the. Divine Mercy. Works, II. 314.

27

SYNOPSIS.
Introduction :
I. — 1. The Idea of God is innate in its form, but not in
content.
2. Its Content determines the character of Theology and
of Religion.
3. Evolution in folk-faith of the content of the Idea
of God.
Comparative Religion :
a. In the Animistic stage.
6. In the Fetishistic and Shamanistic.
c. The Polytheistic.
d. Monotheism, not a result of evolution ; in its bare
form, not a fixed concept, — in Islam, Brahminism,
Buddhism, Judaism, Modern Deism, . . nor is
e. Pantheism, a fixed concept of God in ancient and in
modern times.
Biblical Theology :
II. — The Revelation of the true content of the Idea of God is
in and by Jesus Christ.
a. Neither Jesus nor His religion a result of evolution.
b. Jesus, Himself, the Revelation of the Unseen God.
c. God thus revealed as essential Love.
d. The identity of Love, Sacrifice, and Life in God.
e. This obscured by survivals of folk-faith,
/. Which have given rise to Sectarianism,
g. And itself has arisen through various degrees of
receptiveness ;
h. Yet receptiveness is the condition of the endless
progress of man, and is conditioned by personal
righteousness.
i. This implies that humanity is a medium of revelation
of the Unseen God, 28

j. Who is immanent, explicitly,
k. According to the New Testament Theology
of St. John,
of St. Paul,
I. And implicitly, according to Old Testament Theology.
Traditional Theology:
III. — • Survivals of Folk-faith in development of the revealed
Idea of God.
a. The tardy reception of the Idea of the Trinity,
b. Which nevertheless is rationally true,
c. As is also the traditional Theology of the personality
of the Holy Spirit.
d. The rational Theology of God as Immanent is not
wholly without traditional testimony ;
e. But survivals from Folk-faith have hindered the
general acceptance of this truth.
IV. — The practical import of the true Idea of God as the
Immanent Triune. 29

THE IDEA OF GOD.
Gentlemen : —
God and Life in the world are final facts. Between
the two, as between a dark dome of skies above,
pierced with palpitating points of vivid light, and
below, an ocean fathomless, inscrutable, sails that
conscious entity we call the soul. The soul frames no
syllogism to prove that sea and sky exist : not with
the assertion " God is," does the Bible begin. Of the
existence of God it spreads out no formal proofs, on-
tological, psychological, cosmological, or teleological.
God is. This the Holy Writings assume as the
foundation of all else. The starting-point of Revela
tion is the infinite and eternal I AM. Before Revela
tion is He who reveals.
I. 1. Not with the Idea of God to acquire does
humanity begin life in the sphere of time.
" Dwelt no power divine within us,
How could God's divineness win us ? " 1
1 War1 nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie konnten wir zur Sonne blicken?
War'' nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie konnt uns Oottliches entzucken ?
Goethe.
31

32 survivals in Christianity.
By nature man is possessed of the Idea of God, by
intuition and observation it is developed ; for man is
in the image of God. We sons of few days are not
forced by searching to find out God. Not with the
lens, not with problem, must we needs go up to the
heights of the flaming suns and whirling stars, nor
with deep-sea dredgings and with inspection of eozoic
strata, down to the deep places of the earth, neither
need we cross the ocean of Time and Space to some
primeval truth unveiled for a brief season in the dawn
of the years, somewhere in the mystic morning-land.
The word is very nigh unto us, even in our heart and
in our mouth.
The Idea of God is innate.1 Not an abstract gen
eralisation of the . perfections of the world, for we
have no notions of partial perfection, save as we
derive them from an absolute Perfection ; not a con
cept of what is contrary to the evil existence, for the
contrary of that which is must be that which is not.
If the Idea of God be ours by immediate perception
or by intuition, why is not it unvarying and invari
able like mathematical actions ? This question does
not follow. My life is to me a matter of immediate
perception, and yet I cannot express it by, say,
1 Bishop Beveridge, Sermon, Omnipresence of God the Best Safe
guard against Sin. Works, V. 89. Were there not danger of mis
construction I should boldly state after Thoniassin, Dogmatum
Theologicorum, de Deo, I. 1, 1, that this innate idea is really God
Himself immanent in the soul and present to consciousness.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 33
cos a = cos b cos c + sin b sin c cos A. The idea is vari
ant because it is a thought form, which is filled in,
informed, and develops by means of observation,
intuition, personal righteousness, and revelation.
Truth flourishes out of the earth, and righteousness
looks down from Heaven. The pure in heart, said
Jesus, are in Heaven and behold God. The growth
or evolution of the Idea of God is conditioned by the
revelation of God, the receptiveness of man.
" Man knows partly, but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid, he may grasp and use,
Finds progress."
2. I begin what I have to say with some words
about the Idea of God, because that Idea is the key
note of all Theology. To begin with Sin, or with
the Church, or with the Incarnation, or with the
Atonement, or with the Eucharist, is to pull out a
strand from the middle, and to tangle the skein of
theologie order. Not without significance do Bible
and Creed begin with God Who is the Origin and
Beginning of all. The Idea of God, in its content, is
absolutely the article by which the Church stands or
falls, because in that Idea is all Theology implied,
and by it the explicit doctrines are shaped and
coloured. 3. In order to account for some singular religious
notions that alloy the teachings of Christ, as they are

34 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
sometimes delivered in the temples and market-places
in this nineteenth century of salvation, I ask you
to turn your attention to divergent developments
of the universal Idea of God.
a. In a primitive state, man feels that the world
is alive.1 He may be able, it is true, to distinguish
between his own life and that of tree and horse, but
in fact he does not always do so. For him there is
present in all things a mysterious living force, imper
sonal, perhaps, but sentient. For the more part he
suspects that the river, the tree, and the sun have
life as he has, a soul like his own, claiming of his
dim intelligence some sort of recognition and service.
His " Untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds or hears Him in the wind."
With the spirit of the water-flood and of the oak
tree he shares what most he values, food and drink,
clothing and fire. He sets a calabash of wine at
the foot of the tree, and oil and maize he sprinkles
on the surface of the river. From this stage of
thought to the vow of Jeptha and the sacrifice of
Iphigenia by the seaside, the way is long, but the idea
which developed is one. To primitive man it seems
that if he should shoot an arrow up into the sky,
1 1 pass over the theory of the concept of luck as the precedent
of the concept of the supernal. This notion has after a fashion
been worked out in The Supernatural, Its Origin, Nature, and
Evolution, by John S. King, 2 vols., 1892.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 35
some drops of blood would fall; if he tear up by
the root a mandragora, or any other plant, it will
groan in pain. Should he, like Midas, whisper his
secret to the river, the reeds will blab. The Kaffir
and the North American Indian understand the lan
guage of birds and beasts,1 but other less fortunate folk
must drink the blood of a Fafnir, or possess Solomon's
pentagraph seal. With St. Francis of Assisi, the
child-man loves his " Sir brother, the sun," Messer lo
frate sole, and praises God for " his sister the moon,"
and is wont to preach to the beasts, birds, and fishes.
Like the Wandering Jew in Dore"'s famous pictures,
the world about him is alive, sentient, intelligent, and
sympathetic or antipathetic, look where he will, on
rock, tree, and grass blades. Every plant is a sen
sitive plant. This sentiment revives in some of our
best poetry, Wordsworth's Rhyme of Peter Bell, Cole
ridge's Ancient Mariner, Shelley's Sensitive Plant,
and Swinburne's Forsaken Garden. The idea is
pretty in poetry, but makes mischief in Theology.
This stage of God-consciousness has been called
Animism. At this point of the growth of the Idea of God,
man does not yet dream of the great Spirit as able to
exist apart from the world, or without food and drink.
The great Spirit is never absent, being, so to say,
adscriptus glebm, but, as the soul of the world, he may,
1 Kaffir Folk Lore, by G. M. Thel, passim ; Reports U. S. Bu
reau of Ethnology.

36 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
conceivably, fall asleep. If offended, he curses the
ground, and it becomes stony ; briars and nettles grow,
the sun scorches, the wind flagellates, and, as an
extreme, the thunder-bolt smites dead. Now what
straightway occurs to the simple mind is to keep the
Spirit in a good humour by giving him the best to eat
and drink. Out of this thought develops the custom
of sacrifice. The Levitical code nowhere explains the
significance of sacrifice, but its symbolism, both in the
priestly code and in the rest of the Old Testament, is
clearly founded upon the notion of a gift of food and
drink, mincha and nesek. The blood, wherein is the
life, was especially due to Jehovah. Against defraud
ing the altar by offerings not fit for food the later
prophets protest.1 Micah assigns even to Balaam a
doctrine which is more spiritual.2
b. The Animistic stage of primitive culture is from
its very character not permanent. Men come to
notice distinctions, and consequently, to their fancy,
life or spirit then appears to ebb away from water and
rock. It still remains in beast and man. So the great
Spirit is moved a little way off from the extremities
of the nerve fibres. Nevertheless at any occasion
when an object is particularly considered it may be
regarded as a focus of the spiritual presence, be that
object a man, a phial of oil, an image, a bone, a coat,
i Zech. vii. 6 ; Mai. i. 7, 10 ; Religion of the Semites, by W.
Robertson Smith, Lect. VI. ; Wellhausen, Prolegomena, c. ii.
2 Micah vi. 6, 7.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 37
a cup of blood or of wine, or a cake of bread. This
is fetishism, and here God is supposed to manifest
Himself by chosen men, priests, prophets, and kings,
and to speak through them, or to dwell in them, giv
ing them peculiar powers of consecration so that they
can cause Him to be specially present in a stone, or a
rag, an image,1 or in the sacrificial food. Upon such a
chosen person it was conceived that the welfare of
the people depended, for he was the tribe's represen
tative,2 the vicar of the god, the gentile-man, forerun
ner of our modern gentleman. Like the Dalai Llama
of Lassa, like the former Mikado of Japan, and like
the Pope in his Vatican, these divine vicegerents
must live in seclusion. Omne ignotum pro mirifico.
If these divinely possessed persons turn the head
incautiously, misfortune will certainly occur. Their
word is infallible ; they control the wind and the rain ;
they are the media of communication between the
god and men. They have a twofold power ; they pos
sess the two swords, and " sword is under sword," as
saith the Bull, Unam Sanctam.
c. This mental attitude removes still farther away
the great Spirit of life ; nevertheless he is yet sup
posed to dwell in chosen objects, images, remote
adyta of temples, and on the tops of high mountains
like Meru, Olympus, Mauna Loa, and Fuji. Every
race has its sacred mountain. With a withdrawal from
1 Becords of the Past, Second Series, III. 42, 43.
2 Frazer, Golden Bough, I. 214.

38 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
the sense of near presence, the concept arising from
the primitive, vague feeling of an omnipresent vital
force takes upon itself human traits and limitations,
and becomes differentiated. The great God of all con
tinues to be borne in memory, but as afar off in some
dark background, where, like Brahm, he slumbers
through the ages. Gods many lord it over the races
of men. The sun, each star, each water spring, each
domestic hearth, and every one of the familiar uses
of life is thought to have its resident manes, genius,
djin, god, or spirit. Wine has its indwelling spirit,
and corn, also, for people of this stage of culture.
Each man, too, has his indwelling manes, or genius,
or spirit, as Socrates has his daimonion. The genius
of the Roman Emperor became the protecting spirit
of the State. Every act of life, every moral trait,
every conceivable thing and combination of things,
had an indwelling spirit, a patron god. Ancient Rome
alone had sixty thousand gods, and no Bollandists.
Victor Hugo remarks,1 with delicate satire, " Singular
is the parallelism of the destinies of Rome ; after a
Senate which made gods comes a Conclave which
makes saints." According to polytheistic notions of
this sort, when a man died, his manes went to join
the gods, and therefore deserved divine honours.
Hence arose ancestor-worship and placation. The
next step in the evolution was the cultus of the
saints. Another notable survival of manes worship is
1 Pensees Melees.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 39
the doctrine Of immediate sanctification after death.
Were we to trust to the ordinary epitaph, we must
infer that the article of death is plenary absolution,
viaticum, sanctification, and canonisation, all in one.
As Animism had its truth, in that it perceived the
immanence of God, so Polytheism had truth, and that
which we particularly note was its truth that God is
not merely some subtle, inexplicable, pervasive force,
or some substance which is impersonal, but that He is
a moral person, who is to be thought of as possessing
in His relation with Humanity all humane qualities.
Polytheism is a forward-reaching sense of the Incar
nation. However, to this stage of religious culture
belongs one mischievous influence ; namely, the notion
of God's wrath, jealousy, rigour, and avarice. For
in Polytheism men think the gods such as them
selves, and to this error the limitations of language
have contributed. Thence arose the customs of gifts
to the gods to keep them in good humour, of votive
offerings or bribes, of propitiations, of barter and eva
sion, of the fear of the vengeance or wrath of gods,
here and hereafter, which might be escaped by cajol
ing with flattery and gift the supernal powers. In
this way the divine potencies, Gottes eigene Kraft, of
man's sacred sonship became frustrate, and life in re
ligion took the form of an ignoble scramble to save
self. Only slowly has the world outgrown the bondage
of these crude ideas. Notwithstanding our Lord

40 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
said, "He who findeth his life shall lose it," some
there are who still think of godliness as at best a
means of placating God and getting something from
Him, and who live as if righteousness consisted chiefly,
if not altogether, in avoiding what might anger God.
If any man's receptiveness in these last days is so
rudimentary that the secret of Jesus' deep unselfish
ness cannot get borne in upon his understanding,
I would suggest for his consideration the following
stanzas of the singularly evangelical hymn of St.
Francois Xavier : —
" My God, I love Thee — not because
I hope for heaven thereby ;
Nor yet because, if I love not
I must forever die.
" Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ,
Should I not love Thee well?
Not for the hope of winning heaven,
Nor of escaping hell ;
" Not with the hope of gaining aught ;
Not seeking a reward ;
But as Thyself hast love"d me,
O ever-loving Lord !
" E'en so I love Thee, and will love,
And in Thy praise will sing ;
Solely because Thou art my God,
And my eternal King."

THE IDEA OF GOD. 41
d. When a truer Idea of God presented itself as
it did to Abraham, the first Monotheist mentioned in
the Bible, it gained prevalence slowly ; but wherever
it did obtain, history has demonstrated that there
was invariably a superior development, both ethical
and spiritual. This led Mr. Matthew Arnold to say
that the Hebrews had a genius for righteousness.
That Monotheism was not solely a product of natural
development, the study of comparative religion goes
to prove. The Folk-faith of the Aryan races, not
withstanding centuries of acute and profound meta-
physic in India, never developed into Monotheism.
Outside the Abrahamic tribes, nowhere was the
religion of the Semites permanently a pure Mono
theism. Even Israel hardly reached the ideal before
500 b.c. Till Aryan peoples accepted its goodly
heritage, pure Monotheism had seldom been estab
lished in a stable form. Even at Sinai the Jews
fell away, and their long history is but a chronicle
of lapses into forms of Folk-faith. Has Islam had a
cleaner record? No sooner had the breath of life
left the body of Mahomet,1 than a desperate effort
was made to fix his deathlessness as a dogma or to
canonise him as a god. Although for the moment
this was averted, yet, says Kuenen,2 Islam degenerated
in a few years after the death of the Prophet into
saint worship and pantheistic Sufism. Even for the
1 Sir William Muir, The Caliphate, c. i.
2 Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, 41 ff.

42 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
rigidly orthodox, Mahomet is now their mediator,
ever pleading with Allah. The bare monotheistic
idea of God, while eliminating from religion grosser
notions of Animism, Fetishism, and Polytheism, ran
to the opposite error of reducing God to remote and
contrahuman power, El, or a blind will, or an litre
Supreme, which is an empty abstraction, or worse, —
Le bon Dieu, an easy, indulgent roi d'Yvetot, exalted
to the throne of the Universe. Or He remains vested
in the more austere and terrific traits of the poly
theistic idea, and these crystallised by an infinite
power and a holiness which must not be questioned.
Does not this Idea of God appear to be that of the
Genevan school? Is God a law unto Himself and
unto the world ? 1 Not only in the long reaches of
antiquity, but in modern times bare Monotheism has
again and again traded its birthright for the pottage
of agnosticism. Brahminism says of the Supreme
God that before creation, — before logically, not tem
porally, — " before creation there was neither entity
1 Does God do a thing because it is right, or is it right because
He does it? The latter term of the dilemma obviously implies
that He is arbitrary and non-moral, that in Him might is right ;
on the other hand we should be forced to admit that there is some
thing outside God, right external to Him, conditioning His existence
and determining His acts. This was the dilemma of the ancient
Monotheist, which modern philosophy solves, by pointing out that
right is not hypostatic, that it has no substance save in the mind of
the divine Being. This reconciles the antinomies by uniting them,
and the former is left as a statement to be used.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 43
nor non-entity." Buddhism of to-day theoretically
finds that infinite perfection is realised in total ex
tinction of individual thought and volition. Jewish
rationalism in the book Zohar attained in the middle
ages to the idea of God as En, nothing.1 The Persian
Sufis teach to-day that God is unlimited naught.
Spinoza's definition of God as Substance is virtually
a negation. In Germany since the Aufklarung, in
England since Deism, and in France since the Voltai
rian cycle, the fruit of those gospels of naked Mono
theism has visibly ripened into Agnosticism and
Nihilism. John Milton, in bitter blindness of soul
and body, developed Calvinistic Monotheism to its
logical result, Deism, and ceased to attend any house
of Christian worship. After two centuries other men
have reached Milton's conclusions, and we are able
to see that the Idea of God as a single person — for
that is what I mean in this place by bare Monotheism —
neutralises or negates itself in the processes of the
human intellect. Plato is justified in saying that
the absolute Unit is unthinkable ; and with this asser
tion Sts. Basil and Gregory Nazianzen agree.2
e. A further form of the divine Idea, which arises
in human consciousness out of the ancient Animism,
will forever remain a fascination to the poet and to
1 Ad. Franck, La Kabbale, 142 ; S. L. M. Mathers, Kabbalah
Unveiled, 16 ff. ; D'Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientate.
2 Apol. ad Ccesarianos, 619, c.

44 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
the mystic. In its more spiritual aspect the Idea has
been nobly expressed in our own day : —
' ' The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains —
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns '?
Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?
Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou f ulfillest thy doom,
Making Him broken gleams and a stifled splendour and gloom.
Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can
meet —
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."
There belongs to the doctrine of God as the One and
the All, to "Ev Kal to Hav, a wealth of bravely beauti
ful suggestions ; the opulence of the Oriental life with
its ecstatic reveries, and the clear flame of Greek
philosophy which burnt through the intensity of Neo-
platonism into the "divine dark" of Dionysius the
Areopagite. As a matter of fact Pantheism always goes to seed.
The degeneration of the Egyptian religion, which
originally was profoundly Pantheistic, might be taken
as a clear type of the development and decay of' the
Pantheistic Idea of God. That development is thus
summarised : —
1. God is conceived to be the God of Nature ; then
2. God is thought of as in Nature ; then
3. Nature is regarded as God ; then
4. It is concluded there is no God, only Nature.1
1 See Renouf , Hibbert Lectures.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 45
It seems probable that the Idea of God went
through the same historical process among the Sum-
mero-Akkadians and their Semitic successors the
Chaldeans. Indeed, among every Pantheistic people
this seems always to be the process, and in the Ger
man philosophy of our day from Schelling to Von
Hartmann, it has been repeated. Nevertheless the
truth of Pantheism remains — God is in His world.
" The One Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull, dense world ; compelling there
All new succession to the forms they wear ;
Torturing the unwilling dross that cheeks its flight,
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the heaven's light."
I think that in these lines Shelley is reaching out
and groping after God, as after One of Whom the
cosmos is a theophany.
II. a. Different from all these theories, different
both in kind and degree, is the manifestation of God
in Jesus Christ. Absurd is the conjecture of Renan,
that Jesus, a child of the people, could construct an
eclectic system out of all the theories of the world.1
That should be sought at the hand of the sages of the
Serapeum of Alexandria, or of the dilettante period
of imperial Rome, and not from a peasant of Palestine.
For one in the rugged stretches of Galilee, where the
1 Vie de Jesus, cc. 1, 2.

46 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ribs of the earth are bare, and anathema is laid upon
the man who keeps swine and teaches his son Greek,
small is the opportunity to combine Mosaism and
Hellenism1 in order to make a new religion.
b. Free yourselves forever from the notion that
Jesus was a doctrinaire, and that Christianity is a lit
erary religion, a set of final opinions about truth,2
and life.3 The heart of the Christian religion is the
fact of a particular personal life. When Philip said
unto Jesus, " Lord, show us the Father," the answer
came straightway,4 " Have I been so long time with
you, and yet thou hast not known me, Philip ? He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." When our
Lord standing before Pilate was asked, " What is
truth ? " He replied not in words, because He was
the answer in fact. The author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews gathers into one statement the whole signifi
cance of the Incarnation, relative to ethnic religions
and Folk-faith, when he begins his homily with say
ing, " God having in so many fragments and many
fashions5 formerly spoken in prophets to the fore
fathers, at the latest of these days has spoken to us
in His Son."

1 Keim, Jesus of Nazara, VI. 426 ; M. Arnold, Culture and
Anarchy, c. iv.
3 d\i}0eia.
8 Tp&l-eis.
4 St. John xiv. 9. Cf. v. 17-19, 26 ; xii. 45 ; xiii. 20.
0 ToXvfiepus Kal iro\vTpbirus, Heb. i. 1, 2.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 47
" And so the Word had breath and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought."
The Incarnation was a revelation and manifesta
tion of the nature of God. Unique is that revelation,
where truths in manhood darkly join, deep seated in
our mystic frame. In fervour the apostle exclaims,
" Great is the revealed mystery of a Holy reverence
Who was revealed in body, rectified in spirit." x This
revealed mystery is the Logos, the Word of God,
which had been " concealed before the ages and gen
erations, but was in the present shown to His holy
ones, to whom the Lord willed to make known what,
among the Gentiles, is the wealth of the glory of this
mystery, Who is Christ among you the hope of
glory." 2
c. This mystery of the nature and being of God
was revealed to be love. Oh, the vastness and
depth of the mystery of love ! For what is love ? Is
not it the essential action of out-yielding self, is it
not fundamentally self-outgoing to another and for
another ? At the bottom this is what desire is, what
1 ptAya £<ttIv rd ttjs ebtrefielas fivcTTfjpiov ' os i<f>avcpfhdn tv trapKl, tdi-
KaiiiSv kv irvev/MTi, k.t.X., 1 Tim. iii. 16. Cf. Cremer's Lex; Winer,
Greek Gram. N. T. 736.
2 to /j.vcT'hpLov rb airoKCKpvpifie'vov airb ruv alibvwv Kal awb ruv yeveCjv,
vvv bk ttpavepdjOn tois dylois avrov, ots 'n.dkXTjo'ev 6 Geds yvuplacu tL
rb itXoOtos ttjs 5o£i;s tov \u)GTr)plov tovtov, k.t.X., Col. i. 26 ff. Cf.
Lightfoot, Comm. on the place.

48 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
appetite is, what life is. The significance of the
Word-made-Flesh is precisely this, the manifestation
of God as love, the substance and law of the Universe
and of souls. Of this the world itself is a revealment,
and the Nativity of Bethlehem a revelation. The
Incarnation was the "Tear of Divine Compassion,"
the supreme manifestation of that process of Divine
Existence which shall culminate in the glory of
Christ in Humanity. Strange is it that Lucretius, in
De Naturd Rerum, should have come so near this
true idea of Divine Love only to lose it in a myth
unbelieved. Strange that Euripides, in the great pas
sion play of Bacehae, should not have discerned that
divine suffering is the ecstasy of God.
d. In itself substantial infinite Love, which God is,
the outgoing of self for other, is sacrifice. That word
sacrifice, I say, expresses the life of God, and of that
life the Incarnation is utterance. The life of the Eter
nal is dynamic, not static. Therefore the Nativity was
as much a part of the Passion of Jesus as His Cruci
fixion. The whole life, from Bethlehem to Golgotha,
yes, to the Mount of Ascension, was the theophany of
unseen Love. In this sense it may be truly asserted
that the Incarnation is the centre of all Theology, the
key of all the creeds. From this revealed mystery of
Love, as being the operation or action of the life of
God, we are given to understand what is the true Chris
tian doctrine of sacrifice. That doctrine is, that sacri
fice is not for propitiation, that it is not piacular, that

THE IDEA OF GOD. 49
it is not vicarious punishment, but that it is simply
Love, the out-yielding of self, a law or process which
is the savour of life unto life and not of death unto
death. Of this, ancient artists were aware when they
depicted the cross of Christ of living green, and Him
upon it, erect, with arms outnung, as though to fold
in embrace the worlds, erect as a King of love upon
His throne, of whom it had been said in ancient
records, "Tell it out among the nations that the
Lord reigneth from the Tree."
e. Such is the glorious doctrine of the sacrifice of
Christ. It is infinite, eternal love. True, " there is
a gloom in deep love as in deep water," but modern
Christianity, still under the spell of a crude Folk-
faith, goes beyond gloom to horror, gives us doleful
symbols of divine Love vanquished,- of a dead God !
Because Jesus is God, His infinite love, manifested
in the sphere of time, He must needs be crucified.1
Jesus became incarnate, not in order to propitiate
a vindictive, and exacting, and wrathful Father, else
Shakspere's Merchant of Venice were a nobler gospel.
But He came, or became, in order to reveal to us
Himself and the Father as one Infinite God, the
Saviour,2 saying, in flesh utterance, " That which may
be known of God is manifest in men." 3 This heart of
the Christian doctrine of God forms the basis of the
1 'EjHZs ipiov io-raiparai, sang the Greek hymn-writer.
2 1 Tim. i. 1 ; ii. 3 ; iv. 10.
8 Rom. i. 19.

50 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Epistle to the Romans, is especially the theme of the
Johannine writings, and incidentally an evidence of
the unity and authenticity of their origin.
/. I am persuaded that if Christian teaching be
adjusted to this revelation of the mystery of Divine
Love, the questions which vex our days, concerning
inspiration, and atonement, and justification, and sac
raments, and sanctification immediate or progressive,
on this or the other side of death, all social and ethi
cal problems, and resurrection, and retribution, and
Church unity — all would vanish. To this, praise
God, the Spirit is guiding us. " It is the historical
task of Christianity to assume with every succeeding
age a fresh metamorphosis, and be forever spiritual
ising more and more her understanding of the Christ
and of salvation."1
g. Because God is perfect love He gives up Self
completely; that is, in one aspect, reveals Himself
entirely. The apostles and early fathers perceived
this. Justin Martyr declares 2 that men of every race,
that Socrates, Heraclitus, and others were Christians,
because they lived according to reason, which is the
divine Word immanent in the world. If the self-
revelation be entire, then it must be that it is man's
Idea of God which is limited in its content3 by his
conscious receptiveness, and that history is the annals
of the education of humanity in the quickening of the
1 Amiel's Journal, 3. 2 Apol. II. 83.
8 St. John xiv. 10, 17.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 51
God-consciousness. The diversity of forms of the
Idea of God is due to the differences of degree of
receptiveness, as through the " soul's east window of
divine surprise," stained and figured, the light enters
coloured and shaped, while outside abideth always the
pure white Light.
" The One remains, the many change and pass ;
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly ;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity."
h. Now this very receptiveness in its incomplete
ness of growth is the condition of endless develop
ment, for receptivity of the Infinite implies infinite
receptivity. So it is a God-like potency in man, the
potency of an endless growth, of an approximation
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of
Christ, of sanctification, and of the dominance of the
spirit unto eternal life. For God-consciousness is
this, — first of all, — to know 1 the true God ; not to
know about God, but to know Him without interven
tion of a minor premise, to know Him also because
He is (if I may use the phrase) lived. A holy life
is a Catholic Creed, and orthodox theology is the
intuition of the pure in heart. Perhaps perfect
receptiveness implies apotheosis. This bold corol
lary Athanasius dared to accept, saying,2 " He (the
1 St. John xvii. 3. 2 De Incarn. c. liv.

52 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Word of God) became humanified in order that we
might become deified." The end is by and by.
i. A survey of the growth of the religious idea
in human consciousness makes us aware of another
syllable, so to say, of the Word-made-Flesh ; another
thought, which is of deep and wide import. There
is revelation and there is revealment. God reveals
Himself to man in man. God in man as in the world
external to man, God in man, a life ever pressing
against the soul's barriers, crying, "Lift up your
heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in." Or, as
our Lord Himself says, " Behold I stand at the door
[of the heart] and knock, if any will hear my voice,
and open the door1 . . . my Father will love him
and we will come unto him and make our abode with
him." 2 God in man, Emmanuel, a light ever shining
and waxing brighter and brighter through the earthen
vase, in divers rites, customs, folk-faith and myths,
as in the liturgic drama of history the Self-revelation
of God outrolls.
j. The advent of our Lord Jesus Christ was not
an arrival from a journey,3 but a manifestation of the
i Rev. iii. 20. 2 St. John xiv. 23.
8 When Jesus is called 6 ipxbptvos, it is always in the sense which
the Rabbinic schools gave the idiom, i.e. the Messiah. The com
ing age, the world to come, meant the epoch of the Messiah. For
the use of <pav4pacris, irapovala, ali>v 6 p.£KKwv, a.woKab.vr'is, see Weiss,
Bill. Theol.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 53
Presence in which we had always been, a parousia,
as Blake symbolises the nearness of that Presence in
his wonderful Inventions to the Book of Job. When
Jesus appeared He made apparent God.1 He was
God, personally acting as man, enabling us to
" Correct the portrait by the living face ;
Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man."
I do not feel called upon to enter into an examina
tion of the Biblical Theology of the Idea of the
Triune God, and of the expansion of human recep
tiveness in relation to that Idea. The manner in
which that has already been done by one of your own
Faculty 2 leaves nothing further for you to desire.
The doctrine of the Trinity now belongs to the con
tent of Christian thought and life, however much the
Aufklarung may be flippant over "a celestial com
mittee of Three." Into the Biblical Theology of the
Immanence of the Triune God we ought to attempt
some little inquiry, for the reason that it is a doc
trine which Christian consciousness has not fully and
universally accepted.
k. Take first the Johannine writings. In Revela
tion 3 the writer takes up the symbol of the ancient
tabernacle of Israel, and shows its fulfilment in the
lives of God's saints. Upon their spirits, says he,
1 ti Zori; itpavepii$v, 1 St. John i. 2.
2 P. H. Steenstra, D.D., The Being of God as Unity and Trinity.
8 vii. 15, o-Krjviiaei iir avrois.

54 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
God shall rest as He rested upon the Mercy-seat;
and in the same book l there cries a voice from the
unseen realm, " Behold the tabernacle of God is with
men, and He shall tabernacle with them, and God
shall be with them, and they shall be His people, and
God Himself shall be with them." As a result of
the erosion of metaphysics and poetry, the word
Truth has come to correspond to a vague abstraction.
To the average mind it connotes little that is clear.
But translate aXrjdeta by actuality or reality, and
therewith read the first Epistle to St. John, and you
will find that the fact of the divine indwelling will
come to be sharply and distinctly focussed out to your
mental vision.2 In the Fourth Gospel it is seen that
the thought is clearly consonant with the teachings of
Jesus. For therein our Lord is recorded as saying
that while on earth He remained in Heaven,3 be
cause He is in the Father and the Father in Him.
As the Father dwelleth in Him,4 so shall the Chris
tians have God, the Spirit, dwell in them and be in
them,5 and as a result Ghristian consciousness will
know that Christ is in the Father, and He in Christ,
and Christ in us.6 In consequence, a perfect divine-
human unity will come to pass.7 From this divine-
1 xxi. 3.
2 M. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 179.
8 iii. 13. * St. John xiv. 10.
6 St. John v. 17. « St. John xiv. 20.
i St. John xvii. 21-24.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 55
human unity and indwelling of God the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, the prologue of the Fourth Gospel
passes to the further thought of the cosmic indwell
ing. " That which was made was life in Him," 1 we
find in the best reading, signifying that through the
immanence of the Logos the universe is alive.
In a word the Johannine thought is that Life (1) is
the manifestation of Rational (2) Will (3) ; Life (1)
is the Spirit, Reason (2) is the Son, and Will (3) is
the Father, and in cosmic relation, Life (1) is the
condition of the world, Reason (2) is the form of the
world, and Will (3) is the substance of the world.
Harmonious was this Idea of God with the gnosis of
St. Paul. We are not surprised, therefore, to find in
his Areopagite Sermon,2 " God is not far from every
one of us " ; or to put the matter in very literal lan
guage, "Even though God be subsistent, not distant
(or apart) from each one of us, for it is in Him that
we live and move and exist." 3 In that most won
derfully profound letter to the Romans, St. Paul
expounds on this basis the philosophy of the world,
guarding against the Buddhist myth of the Veil of
Maya, the world as an illusion, which, nursed in the
cell of the Nitrian monk, and by the mystics of the
Abbey of St. Victor, still survives in many a staunch
Protestant hymn, " This world's a vain and fleeting
show," and other words to like effect. Against such
1 St. John i. 4. 2 Acts xxvii. 27, 28.
8 Cf. Rom. xi. 36 ; 2 Cor. vi. 18 ; Eph. i. 23 ; iv. 6.

56 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
unreality of pietism and metaphysical vagary, St. Paul
asserts, " The unseen things of God," i.e. His nature
and character, "are discerned as thinkable (noumend)
from an observation of the universe of an ordered
world, by means of things made," 2 which a poet of
our day has paraphrased, —
" The Somewhat which we name but cannot know,
Ev'n as we name a star and only see
His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
And ever hide Him and which are not He.'-
In the same strain follow those words from the
homily to the Hebrews, where it is asserted that relig
ious consciousness recognises the indwelling of God
in the world by the manifestation of Him in the
process of history : " By faith we are aware that the
ages (eras) were fitted together by the utterance of
God, so that out from that which is not apparent has
come into existence what we look upon." 2
This is nothing less than the enunciation of the
principle of the divine significance and continuity of
history and of the evolution of the world in life and
thought. But there is an element which belongs
before this, and we find it in the Epistle to the Colos-
1 t& yap abpara avTov airb Krlaews k6<S)u>v tois iroftniairiv vooipjeva
Kadoparai, t\ re atSws avrov diva/us Kal 0ei6Tvs, k.t.X., Rom. i. 20.
Cf . Vaughan on Romans.
2 Heb. xi. 3, tIo-tei. voovfuev KarqpTlaBai robs alums p^/iaTi GeoO,
els t6 p.T] £k (paivop^vuv rb fJ\eirbp.zvov yeyovivai.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 57
sians,1 where it is asserted against the false gnosis
that the Son of God is, before 2 all things, and in Him
all things cohere 3 as the particles cohere in the living
organism. The Logos is the bond of the universe,4
and is the Wisdom who, reaching from one end to
the other, sweetly orders all things.6 Because of this
orderliness, the Greeks called the universe the kos-
mos, the beautiful order. This order, the Pauline
gnosis goes on to say, in development of the idea, is
not stereotyped, is not rigid in death. The Living
One, who is the life of the world, lives, and the world
grows. Hope is the drive- wheel of that growth which
has been called evolution. The destiny of the universe
is to become incorruptible 6 through the mediation of
sons of God, who have thrown off " the brute inheri
tance," and have attained unto God-consciousness.
At present there is going on in nature a fierce
struggle for existence, the contest with environing
forces which make for disorganisation,7 and the uni
verse groans in agony, and in the mounting upward
of life and in the strife before the soul receives its
new birth into the environment of God and righteous
ness, suffers birth-pangs.8 Magnificent is the revela
tion of this cosmic passion, that upon its obverse is
i i. 17.
* irpb, not irplv, before, as the sun is before its light, substance
is in front of phenomena.
8 avvio-TnKtv. i Heb. i. 3. 6 Wis. viii. 1.
6 Rom. viii. 21, tXevBepoiOtfo'eTat airb rijs dov\las ttjS (fiBopas.
7 ibBbpa. 8 o-vvublvei.

58 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
a palingenesis (St. Matt. xix. 28), an everlasting
birth-process, iwige GebUrt, as Meister Eckehart
taught it, where the world finds its resurrection
and eternal life only in spiritualised humanity. Of
this world-process Calvary was an epitome, and the
first Easter a prophecy of its outcome. Nature is
the divine tragedy prolonged. Now all this is
brought, in the mind of the apostle, back to personal
life, wherein continues the redemptive process. " We
have one God, the Father, out of Whom are all things,
and we unto Him tend, and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through Whom are all things, and we through Him."1
Without being further tedious, I think we may clearly
conclude from this much of the Theology of the New
Testament, that the world is in God, and God is in
the world, and that God is the God triune.
1. The immanence of God was not wholly hidden
from the religious consciousness of Israel ; this I am
far from asserting. Witness —
"Whither shall I go then from Thy Spirit? or
whither shall I go then from Thy presence ?
" If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there ; if I
go down to hell, Thou art there also.
" If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in
the uttermost parts of the sea ;
" Even there also shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy
right hand shall hold me." 2
1 1 Cor. viii. 6, note, i% ov rd Trdvra, — els — Si' ov — Si* avrov.
2 Ps. xxxix. 6 fi.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 59
"Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a
God afar off ? Can any hide himself in secret places
that I shall not see him ? saith the Lord.
" Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord.
"I have heard what the prophets said, that
prophecy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I
have dreamed.
" How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets
that prophecy lies ? yea, they are prophets of the deceit
of their own heart." J
But the tendency of the Israelites to revert to ani
mistic and fetishistic ideas of God forbade emphasis
and development of the idea. The heaven of heavens
cannot contain God- The universe where He abides
does not hold Him.2 He transcends all limitations.
He is in the world, yet more than it. Do not associate
mass or size with the idea of the greatness of God.
A point, position without extension, is as adequate a
symbol of Him as unlimited space of four dimensions.
Quantity is not a category of the Infinite.
III. We have thus far examined the soil and the
seed which was cast into the soil ; it remains for us to
find out how it grew. It is true that, in a sense, the
New Testament teaching of the immanent Triune is
synthetic of all the various forms of Folk-faith which
grouped themselves under the head of monotheism,
polytheism, and pantheism. The Idea of the Father,
1 Jer. xviii. 25 ff .
2 Bp. Butler, Fourth Letter to Dr. Clark. Works, Vol. II.

60 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
God in His transcendence, is the truth of monotheism ;
the Idea of the Son, God dwelling in man, is the
truth of polytheism ; and the Idea of the Spirit, God
pervading the worlds, is the truth of pantheism.
Separate, these truths are false, because partial;
united, they are the salvation of life. Therefore the
Lord Jesus sent forth His apostles to baptise all
nations in the name of the Father, and the Son, and
the Holy Ghost.
a. The elementary proclamations of the New Testa
ment develop themselves in the human intellect by
the unavoidable logic into the dogma of the Holy
Trinity. Jesus Christ taught that the Father is God,
the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God, and yet there
are not three Gods, but one God. It took more than
two centuries, however, for Christian thought to solve
this paradox.1 That greatest of the ancient rational
theologians, Athanasius, convinced the world that the
Idea of the Triune God was a truth of other than
speculative import, and that it was rigidly logical;
and for his position the aged fathers of the Nicene
Council gave testimony that such had been the teach
ing of the apostles of the Lord.
1 Not till the fourth century did the Church receive the accurate
formula of the eternal generation of the Logos ; there never was
when He was not, ovk ?jv irore Sre ovk ^v. Chrystal, Six World-
Councils, 191 ff. St. Irenaeus' doctrine of the dual nature of Jesus
was gnostic in form. Harnack, Dogmengesch. I. 516. Fulton, Index
Canonum.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 61
b. God is the eternal Subject who knows the eter
nal Object who is known, and the Love who unites
the two. Endeavour to eliminate from your life all
faith in the Father, or in the Son, or in the Holy
Ghost, and you will find your life distinctly poorer
and less charged with motive, clearness, and hope.
God conceived of as love, is energy, action. Action
must result in somewhat, and of eternal action the
result is eternal. What is that eternal result ? Phi
losophy from Hellas to Hindustan responded that it
was the world. But observation denied that a finite
and changing world could be eternal. Consequently,
God as love must love someone instead of somewhat.
In one there can be no circulation of that love which
is the life, which is the being and substance of God.
Nothing without an object can become manifest itself,
because it would proceed out from self forever. It is
because of this fact that mathematical monotheism
invariably becomes either pantheism or atheism, wor
ship of the divine nothing. Action within one, I say,
is impossible. That is why Brahm appears to be
sunken in a slumber. Action in two is incomplete.
That is why Ormuzd and Ahriman appear in the fir
mament of a Persian dualism, engaged in a struggle
which can never end. Action in three is complete
circulation ; the infinite turn and return of that Life
which is Love. Fitly with this idea ends the high
strain of Dante's mediseval miracle of song, at the
summit of celestial paradise, in the deep heart of the

62 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
aureole rose of the elect saints and angelic hierarchy.
Through the radiant medium of the Divine Humanity,
he says : —
" In the profound and clear subsistence
Of the lofty light appeared to me three gyres
Of colours three and single continuity ;
And one from other seemed to be reflected,
As rainbow is from rainbow,
While the third appeared a fire
AVhich from the one and from the other equally
is exhaled." 1
Let me put this thought again : the Eternal Mind,
conscious to Himself, eternally produces a Logos like
Himself. Because of this likeness the Logos con
scious to Himself and the originating Mind to
gether produce also a Principle which is imperfect2
like Himself, but because the being of the Logos is
derived, what He together with Mind originates is a
procession, which is a process, always going on, but
since it is infinite, always complete. Why, asks one,
should not the third divine principle produce a fourth,
and so on? This was the crux of Gnosticism, and it
1 Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza
DelV alto lume parvemi tre girl
Di tre colori e <f una continenza ;
E V un dall' altro, come Iri da Iri,
Parea riflesso, e il terzo parea fuoco
Che guinci e quindi egualmente si spiri.
Paradiso, xxxiii. 115-121.
2 Not having what theologians term aseity.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 63
produced the theory of emanations. The right answer
is that the third principle does not produce a fourth,
because the subject and object being linked, the three
are complete in one subsistence and " continuity," as
Dante suggests. The Holy Ghost is the life of the
world, and the return of imperfection to perfection
through the Church.1 It is by this doctrine of the
double procession that the Latin Church preserved
itself from the vagaries of a Gnosticism, with its end
less processions of aeons from a father god and a
mother god, which modern Mormonism has revived,
making them with Adam to constitute the Trinity.
The tendency in early ages towards this speculation
was strong. In the Old Testament the Wisdom is
feminine. Origen speaks of the Holy Ghost as a
woman.2 To the mind of the early Church the Holy
Spirit was the feminine principle in God, but a desire
to cut away the ground from under the Gnostics and
to remove from religion that which always imports
into life moral degradation, suppressed the develop
ment of this idea. Nevertheless, as Goethe says in
his Chorus Mysticus at the close of Faust, " It is the
deathless ideal of womanhood which is always uplift
ing humanity," — " Das Ewig Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan,"
1 W. T. Harris, HegeVs Logic, 14.
2 dpri eXa/3e p,e 17 p,i\T-i)p p.ov t& dyiov Tlvevfia iv p.iq, tSiv rpix&v M°«
k.t.X., Comm. St. John, II. 7. 58. Cf. Bigg, Christian Platonists of
Alexandria, 15. n. 1.

64 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
and to supply the want of such an ideal in old days
they had Montanistic incarnation of the Holy Ghost
in a woman, and in modern days we have the pious
opinion of the Assumption and enthronisation of
St. Mary the Virgin, " Our tainted nature's solitary
boast " ; to whom, Wordsworth believed that perhaps,
"Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend."1
c. Traditional Theology is right when, upon the
basis of the New Testament, it insists that the Holy
Ghost is person. That which substantially proceeds
forth from out of person is person.2 We, as con
scious persons, argue thence that God, our Source or
Cause, the All-Father, is person. Thus the circle of
reasoning is completed. Spiritual existence is found
to imply personality as inseparable from it. The
Holy Ghost is more than a pervasive spiritual cur
rent, or atmosphere, or aura, or subtle substance of
some imaginary sort. He is something more than an
effluence from God, a stream from the fountain-head
of Deity; something more than the influence of
Jesus, either as personally near us by His ascension
into the plane of omnipresence, or by reason of the
effect of the example of His historic career. The
1 Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, c. vi., sees in human nature
necessity for the divine motherhood.
2 The notion that the term persona, person, signifies in theology
a role is an error arisen from not considering that the ancient
theologians were not etymologists ; they employed words in their
actual sense. Persona = imbo-rao-is in Greek Theology.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 65
Holy Spirit is not a Zeitgeist, nor a stream" of ten
dency, nor the psychic course of nature. Or if He
be these, He is something more. He is a Person, the
Lord of personal spirits. If God the Father be
immanent in the souls of men, then by virtue of the
circuminsession of the Persons of the Holy Trinity the
Holy Ghost is also immanent. Therefore there must
be some sense in which the Holy Ghost is personally
and substantially the human soul's indwelling source
of life and thought. An apocalypse of this came to
prophet Ezekiel in the Vision of the Holy Waters.
Through the personal Spirit the reason of the
eternal Logos is imparted to men, as Jesus said,
" He shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto
you," and as St. John commented, " The Life was
the light of men."
Somehow thus the Christian consciousness con
ceives of God as triune in His subsistence. His life
and existence are complete within Himself. Conse
quently creation is not necessary to His consciousness
and life. Therefore He is not the ground of evil.
Thus at one and the same time, in removing a neces
sity of an eternal world, the dilemma, atheism, — no
God, or pantheism, no world, — is avoided. God
still remains absolute and yet personal, since His
limitations are within Himself. I regret the neces
sity of appearing in this lecture somewhat transcen
dental. The topic is profound. Thus much on the
rational Theology of the Idea of God. In order to

66 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
indicate the extent to which traditional Theology
received the revelation of the Triune Love in Christ
and in the world, the brief catena which follows is
all my time will allow.
d. I think that it should be said that in each
created thing are the ineffable sacraments of the
Divine dispensation. — Origen, Comm. St. John
xxiii. 3.
The omnipotent Logos pervades the universe,
manifesting His energy throughout it and enlight
ening beings both visible and invisible; them He
holds together and unifies by His powers, giving life
and preserving life for all which exists. — St. Atha
nasius, Against Gentiles, c. xiii.
God is within everything ; He is without it ; above
and beneath, and His substance is not divided. It is
entire and the same throughout. It pervades beings,
dwells around them, dwells alongside and penetrates
them. — • St. Gregory the Great, Morals, Bk. II.
c. 12.God is the fountain of being for all that exists, the
source of life for all things which have vital energy,
and the principal reason for all rational creatures.
He is the limitless Ocean where life exults in ful
ness of being and vastness of extent, — a shoreless
Sea which sole contains itself. — St. John of Da
mascus, Orth. Faith, I. 8, title 1.
All creatures are a theophany. — John Scotus
Erigena, Comm. on St. John.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 67
All things we see should, in relation to God, who
alone truly is, be called accidents. — Card. Cusa,
Exerc. VII.
Reason is the inner light in which God speaks to
us. — St. Thomas Aquinas, Ad. Magis. Joan. Ver-
cell. II. a. 1.
Reason is in man as God is in the World. — Idem,
Be Reg. Princ. Lib. I. c. xii.
God is in all things, not indeed as a part of the
essence or as an accident, but as doing is in that
which does. — Idem, Summa, P., VIII. 1, Resp.
God after a eommon way, by presence, by power,
and by substance, is present in all things ; in some
sense, however, He is said to be present in a way
more intimate, by grace. — Idem, I"., I., VIII. 3
contra. e. From this catena you may see that the Idea of
God as the immanent Triune did to some extent
enter the consciousness of Christian theologians, but
against its full acceptance both folk-faith and philos
ophy combined, and to this day a veil is upon the
heart of many Christian teachers. The old gods,
driven away, linger still upon the frontiers of Chris
tendom, or return masked. Venus and her crew
sallied forth from the Horselberg to ensnare Christian
knights. The valkyrie of Odin became the witches
of Christian Europe. Minucius Felix says that the
gods of the nations were devils, and Milton assists
the permanence of this revival in contemporary relig-

68 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ious thought by making the old gods of classic
paganism the lords of a Christian hell. St. Paul
said: an idol is nothing, and even the Hebrew
poet,1 at a moment of deeper insight, perceived
that the false gods were non-existent. Arianism,
which St. Athanasius and the Nicene fathers feared
would bring back polytheism, did in fact develop
in an opposite direction. The children of Arius and
of Ulfilas have merged into congenial Islam. The
notion of bare transcendence of God in relation to
the world, a pagan element, still survives in the
common acceptance of Socinian and Zwinglian sys
tems. In former times it was this notion which gave
character to the Antiochine school of exegesis, and
suggested to Nestorius his eccentric position. One
form of the notion of bare transcendence is the expan
sion of the concept of divine sovereignty by a dis
proportionate extension of the principle of absolute
foreordination, and by that notion of divine govern
ment, which is known as " preestablished harmony," 2
1 Ps. xcvi. 5, elilim, Heb., lit. nothings. Vulgate translates it
dcemonia. 2 Bouillier, Philosophie Cartesienne, II. 451 ff. Much to answer
for has Leibnitzian speculation with its preestablished harmony, and
that "best of all possible worlds," which used poor Candide so
roughly ; because the theory of Leibnitz and his school brought in
that sterile deism of Voltaire and of Hobbes, which chilled the life
of the Anglican Church of the eighteenth century, till warmed by
the piety of Venn, Newton, Cooper, Walker, Cecil, Simeon, and the
other early evangelicals, together with the fervour of the first
Methodists.

THE IDEA OF GOD 69
as though God had wound up the circling universe
as a watch is wound up, or set it spinning like a top.
Common in our childhood were the ideas of God,
as of one sitting afar off beyond the clouds upon a
white marble seat, looking down upon the revolving
suns and planets, and the busy ant-hill of this world ;
or as in the ancient epic, where it was said that
Zeus had gone away for a twelve-days feast among
the blameless Ethiopians ; or as when Elijah with
immeasurable sarcasm mocks the priests of Baal, —
" Cry aloud : for he is a god ; either he is talking, or
he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradven
ture he sleepeth, and must be awaked."1 When
the notion of the , solitary transcendence of God sur
vives or revives in Christianity, the idea of the trinity
of the Divine Being is implicitly contradicted; the
Father and Son are put in opposition, as the Mani-
chees and Albigensians (and high Calvinists vir
tually) conceived of them. An expiatory and
propitiatory theory of sacrifice, a theory distinctly
heathen, survives from folk-faith; all teaching of
divine omnipresence becomes irrational, incompre
hensible, and futile ; grace becomes a substantial
efflux to bridge over the chasm between God and
His world ; consequently the Church assumes a sacer
dotal, and the grace of the sacraments a material,
nature. The object of religion is, upon this premise,
supposed to be the soothing of divine wrath, and an
1 1 Kings xviii. 27.

70 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
evasion of the penalty of sin, the resurrection to be
a corporeal resuscitation, and everlasting life a combi
nation of precious metals, precious stones, and endless
psalm-singing. The inexorable verdict of history is that the con
cept of the Trinity is the only permanent form of
the Idea of God ; it is the only rational form. It is
the Christian doctrine of God. " It was through the
Christian religion that the absolute Idea of God, in
its true conception, attained consciousness. Here
man, too, finds himself comprehended in his true
nature, given in the specific concept of the Son."1
It is the only basis for the teaching of foreign
missions. Clear away from this idea in the minds of
the people accretions of survivals of primitive folk-
faith. In pagan days of Rome, a temple was erected to
Romulus, and his aid and protection for young and
sick children were invoked by the memory of his own
arduous infancy. That same temple is now standing,
converted into the church of St. Theodoras,2 and in
that church at the present day may be seen Italian
mothers with their infants, in prayer before the high
altar, or making votive offerings, invoking the aid
and intercession of St. Theodorus. Here cultus of
the saints is clearly seen to be a survival of ancestor-
worship, and an ancient god is still worshipped in the
1 Hegel, Phil, of Hist. III. 3.
2 Tylor, Primitive Cult. II. 121.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 71
guise of a Christian modern saint. Likewise in the
popular religion of the Greeks of the present, that
mountain which was anciently held sacred to the
sun, "H\to?, is now reverenced as Mount St. Elias.
Every one knows that St. George of Nicomedia
never existed. His legendary contest with the
dragon is a survival of the myth of Horus and
Typhon, belonging to Egyptian mythology, the
mythos of a never-ending victorious contest of
good over evil, which is the solution of the riddle
of pain and sorrow. Art was the bridge over
which many religious ideas ¦ of heathendom crossed
to Christendom. Especially Gnostic art.1 Notwith
standing St. Paul exhorted the Galatai of his day
to abandon belief and worship of " poor and power
less elementary spirits,"2 contrasting them with the
real and vitalising energy of Christ, nevertheless
to this day the Christianised descendants of these
Galatians offer religious service to the elementary
spirits of mountains, trees, and waters, calling them,
as their ancestors did, stoicheia.3 A survival of
Animism is evident in modern spiritism and occult
ism. Also it lies at the foundation of " Christian

1 Cf. Theodoret, Eccies. Hist. I. 15. Didron, Christian Iconog
raphy, passim. J. P. Lundy, Monumental Christianity. G. W.
King, The Gnostics and their Remains.
2 o-Toixeia, Gal. iv. 9.
8 L. M. J. Garnett, The Women of Turkey and their Folk-Lore,
I. 130.

72 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Science," which is not Christian, and is not Science.
Fetishism is too obviously the characteristic of some
theories of the sacraments and of their operation, to
demand particular illustration. A curious instance
of the development towards polytheism is to be found
in P&re Lacordaire's Letters from Italy, where, having
adopted a "special devotion" to the "Madonna of the
Oak," he writes back to a friend in France whose cult
is the Madonna of some other title, " My Madonna
salutes your Madonna." Extraordinary ! Yet there
is but one Madonna. In the faith of the common
people Our Lady of Loretto is as distinctly another
individual from Our Lady of Sorrows as the Greek
Here was another person from Aphrodite.
In a somewhat like spirit the Proven gal Christians,
the Albigensians, and others, thought of the Eternal
Father as wrathful, hateful. Jesus, whom they loved
and worshipped as mild and merciful, they set over
against the Father. This dualism is a survival of
Gnostic and Manichee influence. The stained win
dows in South French cathedrals have preserved
evidence of the survival of this oriental dualism.1
Modern Romanism has not wholly freed itself from
this dualistic survival ; the cultus of Mary tends to
present her as more benignant than her son. This is
all due to the primitive notion of a divine mediator.
For example, the Christ in the Last Judgment of
Michael Angelo is far from being as lovable as Mary
1 Didron, Christian Lconography, I. 180-191.

THE IDEA OF GOD. 73
in Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin and in
the Madonnas of Botticelli and Luini.
IV. What is the task of Christian teachers on this
standing point? I shall not answer after the manner
of Dr. Bushnell in his famous lectures, when he
advised his hearers to stick close to the old termi
nology, while they privately meant his new interpre
tation of the Atonement. I grant that it is indeed a
serious question whether we can immediately remove
the mythical and pagan elements which survive in
Christian Theology and in popular religion, without
the risk of impairing their ethical force and moral
sanction for the average man. But have we not
had enough of the evils of accommodation ? Modern
thought is already careless of an absentee God.
Wordsworth in despair at the empty deism of his
day, in anguish cries out : —
" Great God ! I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn :
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn."
For my part I accept heartily the thought of Amiel
recorded over forty years ago : " Our century wants
a new Theology; that is to say, a new and more
profound explanation of the nature of Christ and of
the light which it flashes on Heaven and humanity."
Too long, gentlemen, have we been in bondage to
a philosophy which, since Bacon, has put a chasm

74 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
between God and His word ; too long have the faiths
of the childhood of humanity alloyed the pure gold
of the teaching of Christ, and by an extension of the
Vincentian canon have been constituted the ortho
doxy. We have halted between two opinions, the
God revealed in Jesus, and the Baalim. At this
vacillation the world is becoming impatient. When
Plotinus was dying he said, " I am striving to bring
the God which is within me into harmony with the
God of the Universe." This suggests the task of
Christian teachers in the premise. Quicken the God-
consciousness in each soul. Teach men that there is
no truth for any man until he lives it, that only in
so far as men make truth and life, creed and deed,
identical, can they know truth. To know God, do
good. A need of our new age is a profound and ever-
wakeful sense of the presence of God. This can be
received intellectually only as we comprehend with
mind and heart that significance of the Incarnation
expressed in the name Emmanuel, and that signifi
cance is first the sure and real presence of God in
the world and in men, and consequently that man
hood is eternal because of the abiding of an eternal
element in it; that pain and sorrow, the agony of the
world, are evidences not of death, but of the imma
nent Life. If any one thinks that he hears the ebb
of faith's ocean, —

THE IDEA OF GOD. 75
" Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world," —
let him not dream that love of truth, of righteous
ness, that self-control, all merely for their own sake,-
that unselfishness, that assent to " a Power outside us
not ourselves that makes for righteousness," — these
alone, can in this nineteenth century take the room
of Father God. No ; God is something more than a
stream of tendency, more than qualities, wisdom and
goodness. So it is high time that we men should
definitely decide whether Mr. Arnold and Mr. Moody
are the voice of the Zeitgeist in the wilderness of
these latter days. It is high time that we should
confess our divine sonship, in virtue of which alone
we are able from the ground of the heart to say,
" Our Father " ; that from Jesus instead of from meta
physics we should seek the true content of the Idea
of God, and like St. Ignatius to the Romans, confess,
" I am Theophoros, the God-bearer, for I carry Christ
within me." This alone is the basis of that human
brotherhood which arouses the undying enthusiasm
of humanity. Only thus can we come into that
temper wherein we are able rightly to consider the
importunate social problems which press upon us
at this end of the century. This alone is the ground
of a reasonably religious and holy hope. Rest as
sured that when brought to the test of the needs of

76 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
life it will be found that while the speculative idea
of the Holy Trinity may vex the non-philosophical
mind, nevertheless practical life cannot eliminate
from thought, from ideal, from motive, from action,
the idea of God as love infinite and immanent, of
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost. Finally, it is the ground of that personal
devoutness to the immanent triune Love which can
make its prayer —
" Oh, Hidden Love, who now art loving me ;
Oh, wounded Love, who once was slain for me ;
Oh, sun-crowned Love, who art alive for me ;
Oh, patient Love, who weariest not of me, —
Alone of all Thou weariest not of me.
Oh, bear with me till I am lost in Thee,
Oh, bear with me till I am found in Thee."

THE CHURCH.

Nam et Ecclesia proprie et principaliter ipse est Spiritus Sanctus
in quo est Trinitas unius Divinitatis. — Atque ita exinde etiam
numerus omnis, qui in hanc fidem conspiraverit, Ecclesia ab auctore
et consecratore censetur. Et ideo Ecclesia quidem delicta con-
donabit, sed Ecclesia Spiritus per Spiritalem hominem.non Ecclesia
numerus Episcoporum, domini enim non famuli, est jus et arbitrum ;
Dei ipsius non sacerdotis. Tertullian, de Pud. XXI.
It is evident unto all men, diligently reading Holy Scripture and
ancient Authors, that from the Apostles' time there have been these
Orders of Ministers in Christ's Church, — Bishops, Priests, and
Deacons. Which offices were ever more had in such reverend
Estimation, that no man might presume to execute any of them,
except he were first called, tried, examined, and known to have
such qualities as are requisite for the same ; and also by public
Prayer, with Imposition of Hands, were approved and admitted
thereunto by lawful Authority. And therefore, to the intent that
these orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed
in this Church, no man shall be accounted nor taken to be a lawful
Bishop, Priest, or Deacon, in this Church, or suffered to execute
any of the said Functions, except he be called, tried, examined, and
admitted thereunto, according to the form hereafter following, or
hath had Episcopal Consecration or Ordination.
Preface to the Ordinal, Book of Common Prayer.
If any Man therefore shall affirm, either that during the contin
uance of the Old Testament, the Merits of Christ's Death actually
to come, were not sufficient to save all true Believers ; or that there
was then no Catholick Church ; or that at any time there was any
other Rock but Jesus Christ, the blessed Seed upon whom the Cath
olick Church was then built ; or that many of the gentiles were not
always (for aught that is known to the contrary) true members of
the Catholick Church ; or that Christ Himself was not the sole
Head or Monarch all that while of the whole Catholick Church;
or, that the said Catholick Church, after the members of it were
78

dispersed into all the places of the World, was otherwise visible than
per partes ; or, that Noah did appoint any man to be the visible
Head of the said Catholick Church; or, that the High Priest
among the Jews had any more authority over the Catholick Church
of God, than King David had over the Universal Kingdom of God ;
or, that the said High Priest had not greatly sinn'd, if he had taken
upon him, or usurped any such infinite Authority ; he doth greatly
Erre. Bp. Overall's Convocation Book, Canon xxxvi., a.d. 1606.
I beheve that this holy Church is Catholic, that is to say that it
cannot be coarcted or restrained within the limits of any one city,
town, province, region or country, but that it is dispersed and
spread universally throughout all the whole world. Insomuch that
in what part soever of the world, be it Africa, Asia or Europe,
there may be found any number of people of what sort, state or
condition soever they be, which do believe in one God, the Father,
Creator of all things and in one Lord Jesus Christ His Son, and
in one Holy Ghost, and do always profess and have all one faith, one
hope, one charity, according as it is prescribed in Holy Scripture ;
and do all consent in one true interpretation of the same Scripture
and in the right use of the Sacraments of Christ, we may boldly
pronounce and say that there is this Holy Church, the very Espouse
and Body of Christ, the very Kingdom of Christ and the very temple
of God. Institution of a Christian Man, 1537.
Le christianisme historique s'est affirme de tout temps comme
la religion absolue. L'Histoire de ses dogmes n'autorise point
une semblable pretention. Elle nous montre ses docteurs de tous
les ages, depuis les apotres jusqu'aux reformateurs, variant souvent
dans leurs opinions, se contredisant, se combattant sans treve,
affirmant un jour ce qu'ils nieront le lendemain, et construisant
ainsi, piece a piece, au milieu des luttes les plus vives, l'imposant
Edifice de ses doctrines. Haag, Histoire des Dogmes Chretiens.
79

SYNOPSIS.
Introduction :
Nothing in folk-religions closely analogous to the Christian
Church.
Comparative Religion :
I. — The nearest approaches in primitive culture to a Church.
a. Shamanism.
b. Mysteries of Eleusis.
c. Roman Imperialism vs. Protestant Individualism.
Biblical Theology :
II. — The New Testament doctrine of the Church.
a. The teachings of Jesus.
b. The acts of Jesus. He constitutes simultaneously and
together the Church and its ministry.
c. The Church, as such, is visible.
d. Function of Baptism, place of repentance.
Traditional Theology :
III. — Some traditional opinions about the Church. The slow
development of the "four notes" of the article of
the creeds.
IV. — The utter indefiniteness of primitive and early Christian
consciousness as to the nature and essence of the
Church. Christian theologians, however, agree that
the Church is necessary for salvation.
Present Problem :
V. — Critical examination of the "four notes" of the Church
to determine their value and real existence.
a. One — not two or more — communion an outward
sign ; uniformity not requisite ; view of the several
forms of Church government in their relation to
organic unity of Christendom ; their relation to
God as immanent; unity of Christendom cannot
arrive till we have abandoned literalism in Theology
and Biblical interpretation. 80

6. Holy. The witness of History. Holiness of the
Church realised in her individual members, but not
alone in assent to dogma. Holiness then a ter
minus ad quem of the Church in Time. Relation
of Sacraments to holiness. The Church the highest
exponent of that redemptive operation which is
discerned in the cosmic process.
c. Catholic does not denote extension, or exclusive
possession of divine truth, or the life of the world
arising into consciousness ; but does suggest that
Church is living, and that Christian consciousness
of the present is to be accepted as the nearest
approximation to reality. The true place of tra
dition. Catholicity is intensive, not extensive, in
the Church.
d. Apostolic This does not forbid living development
of Theology. What is Apostolic Succession ?
Will it support the " Sacramental System" ? It
is a fact and witness to historic continuity. Con
clusion, that the "four notes" of the Church are
goals or ideals towards which the Church tends.
Practical Teaching :
VI. — Practical import of this idea of the Church; its relation
to various organisations, religious and secular, and
to the realisation of Corporate Unity. The Unity of
the Spirit and the bond of peace.
81

THE CHURCH.
Gentlemen : —
The Church is the unique creation of our Lord
Jesus Christ. Nothing in all ancient heathendom
answers to it in constitution or in institution. Such
a thing as a congregation of faithful men was not
known. Only the telesterion,1 the hall of the initia
tion of the mystai at Eleusis, corresponded to a mod
ern church building. The ancient temple was a
shrine, naos, for the abiding divinity, or a precinct
marked off on ground and sky, temenos and templum,
for the observation of auspices, or simply a sacred
spot, hieron. It was not for the people. The
Parthenon could in its entirety have been set down
inside the nave of Cologne Cathedral. A single
boulder or isolated rock in Hindustan often served
to carve out a complete temple. The vast temples
of Egypt were for priests, pomps, and sacred beasts,
and not for the laity. But the Stoic sects in the
West, and northern Buddhism in the East, were at
an early date so impressed with the methods of
1Dyer, Gods in Greece, 189.
83

84 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
organisation of the Christian Church, that they
adopted some of its external features. Every at
tempt at tracing the evolution of the Christian
Church from the synagogue and theocracy of Israel
will have to be abandoned ; for the inner principle of
the Church, as I expect to show, is distinctly differ
ent from the kahal of Israel l and from the Levitical
hierarchy. While the origin of the Christian Church
may not be discovered in ancient folk-faith and
customs, it is nevertheless evident that precedent
conditions did at the beginning limit the reception of
the Church-idea and shape the development thereof.
I. a. In primitive culture the church is the
priesthood, the shamans or medicine men of the
tribes ; and religion consists in performing ceremo
nial acts.2 Thence flow down, glacier-like, into later
civilisation, two streams of survival, — religious func
tions in the domain of Christian worship and magic,
whether sanctioned for our credence by Pierre
d'Aban, Cornelius Agrippa, and that painful and
godly man the Rev. Cotton Mather, or implied in
ex opere operato doctrines of the Atonement and of
the Sacraments. Also, according to the faith of
primitive folk, the priest or the chief priest is the
representative of his tribe or gens. He is the per-
1 As the school of Vitringa assumes ; cf . Killen, Framework of
the Church.
2 Note, sacrifice, from sacrum facere, to do a sacred thing, and
to do it rite, correctly. Tylor, Primitive Culture, passim.

THE CHURCH. 85
sona gentis, the parson, and because he must, in
this office and capacity, act with careful consideration
for others, he is the prototype of our modern gentle
man. In him is bound up the welfare of his people,
for he is something of a corporation soul of the tribe ;
through him the gods speak, his word is god's-spel,
gospel, and, as such, is infallible. Because he alone
can direct the layman how to appease divine wrath, to
offer acceptable gifts, and to believe right things, the
shaman is regarded as a vicar of the gods and a medi
ator between gods and men.1 In many cases he is
held to be the son of the god, and is not allowed to
grow old or to die in weakness or disease,2 lest the
life of the tribe should thereby wane with him. He is
therefore slain while in his full vigour, and is thought
to carry away with him to the ghostworld the sins
of the tribe. In another sense he the representative
of the corporate life of the tribe ; in a word, the cor
poration soul, by fiction said never to die. O King,
live forever ; the King is dead ; long live the King ;
the King never dies. What divine or singular
powers belong to the priesthood, the primitive priest
1 Clergymen in Cornwall are supposed to be able to drive out
evil spirits. A woman asked one to walk around her and read
some passages of the Bible in order to exorcise the ghost of her
dead sister, who, in the form of a fly, persistently worried her.
Folk-Lore Journal, v. 27. George Fox also was convinced that he
had the power of exorcising the devil. See "Journal." Cf. Re
ports of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, passim.
2 Frazer, Golden Bough, c. 3.

86 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
transmits to his successors through touch or by the
transmission of the sacerdotal insignia of masks,
cloaks, costume, and conjuring apparatus. Accord
ing to the survival of this folk-faith the priesthood
is the Church ; that is to say, the fifth essence of it.
b. The subtle and spiritualising intellect of the
Hellenic peoples took up these crude elements of
earlier thought, and transmuted them into a profound
mytlios of the Eleusinian mysteries, where the story of
Dionysus and of Demeter set forth the highest pagan
idea of the divine Soul of the world and of the secret
of sorrow as revealed in the redemptive issues of life.
But the Eleusinian mysteries were for the select, the
mystai, the initiated, and the adept. Their high
doctrines were strictly esoteric.1 Who cannot per
ceive the survival of this conception in parts of
Christendom of to-day, in the Abyssinian Church,
with fold upon fold of curtains surrounding the altar ;
in the Greek Church, with its veiled altars shut in by
lofty iconastases, from behind which the voice of the
priest is heard muffled, in the proclamation, "Holy
things for the holy," 2 and in the solemn bidding,
twice repeated, "Let the catechumens depart?"
Almost we catch the echo of the herald of the
ancient pagan mysteries, Procul, o procul, este pro-
fani! Not even modern Protestantism, Genevan or
Anglican, has thoroughly relinquished this notion
that the Church of the Lord Jesus is for adepts only.
1 Dyer, Gods in Greece, c. v. 2 rd dyia rois dytois.

THE CHURCH. , 87
e. Another powerful factor in shaping the develop
ment of the Church has been the. tradition of Roman
imperialism. Rome was the inverse of the Jewish
theocracy, and yet by its genius for organisation and
centralisation, Rome has perpetuated in Christendom
the theocratic system of Israel in a Christian form.
Imperial Rome had no Church and no dogma. The
State took the place, and the emperor was Pontifex
Maximus. The civil law prescribed beliefs. Dante,
through a strict imperialist, bewails in one place the
secular survival of Roman imperialism : —
"Ah, Constantine, of how great evil was the
mother, not thy conversion, but that dower, the first
rich pope from thee did capture." x
It was, however, not by a fabled ddt, that Constan
tine, the first Christian emperor, corrupted the Church,
but by impressing it into the form of a monarchy,
making the hierarchy the reverse of that coin whose
obverse bore the image of Csesar.2 The parish and
the diocese were in Constantine's time names of divis
ions of the Christian Church.3 With the theory of
1 Ahi Constantin, di quanto mat fu matre,
Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote
Che da teprese ilprimo riccopatre I
Inferno, xix. 115.
2 Renan, Hibbert Lectures, The Influence of Rome on Christi
anity and the Development of the Catholic Church.
3 Pelliccia, Polity of the Christian Church, Sec. iv. 1, 2 ; Moeller,
History of the Christian Church, 329 ff . ; Fulton, Index Canonum ;
Quizot, History of Civilisation.

88 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Roman imperialism that the State was the Church,
both the Vedas of the Orient, and Plato in his Repub
lic agree, but the bishops of Rome, by the logic of
events more powerful than their own wills, reversed
antiquity. The Holy Roman Empire, through bulls
and interdicts and crusades, exactly inverted, for a
while at least, the pagan imperial idea. Will Rothe's
dream ever become realised, and the Church be merged
in the State ; or further, to adapt Browning's lines, —
" That one Face, far from vanish rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Becomes my Universe and feels and knows ? "
But this is transcendental. Within the bosom of
autocratic Rome there existed an adverse element,
which in due time was to manifest itself in revolt
against all traditional form of church organisation.
I allude to the Roman Collegia, the Greek eraipetai,
and their derivatives, the guilds and brotherhoods of
the Teutonic nations. The principle of these soci
eties was popular and democratic. They elected
their own officers, whose powers derived from the
society ; their object was mutual benefit, charity and
fellowship. Working under the surface of society
and hidden from Church authorities, they finally
emerged into the light of ecclesiastical history as
the congregational forms of church organisation,
such as have arisen in these latter days. These are
our survivals from ancient Rome, — Papacy and Con-

THE CHURCH. 89
gregationalism. Between them lies Anglicanism,
logically inconsistent, yet resting upon a foundation
firmer than logic : these three forms are the only
tenable shapes of ecclesiastical organisation.
II. Into such a field of the world the Divine Sower
went forth to sow His seed. What precisely was the
teaching of Jesus touching the Church ?
a. The Lord came not to teach a new system of
philosophy or of ethics. His purpose was not pri
marily humanitarian, nor ultimately mystical. He
began with a proclamation 1 of the joyful message 2
of God. This is termed " the Gospel of the King
dom," 3 and its burden was, " The Kingdom of
Heaven is at hand ; repent ye,* and believe in the gos
pel.5 From the parable of the sower, it is clear that
at the time these words were spoken the Kingdom
was within Jesus.6 Jesus is the revealment of God ;
that is, God the Saviour self-revealing Himself in an
individual of humanity. That which Jesus is, God
is. Jesus is Saviour, because God in His eternal
and essential character is Saviour. The significance
of the words and deeds of Jesus is found in this,
that He reveals. But to those who are blind, He
cannot make Himself to be a revelation of God
1 Knpvo-o-eiv, St. Mark i. 14. * eiayyiXiov.
3 St. Matt. iv. 23. 4 p^TavoeiTe. 5 St. Mark i. 15.
6 Cf. St. Matt. xi. 27, " No man knoweth the Son but the Father ;
neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and to whom
soever the Son will reveal Him."

90 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
the Eternal. There must be a receptive condition.
For this reason, Jesus cried, " Repent," change your
mental attitude,1 your entire way of looking at life,
and believe in the good message. This effected, God
enters more fully into the life of man. It is not that
the Eternal changes His attitude of favour toward
men.2 He is One, and changeless. In the three par
ables in St. Luke,3 God as the Good Shepherd is
searching for the sheep ; as the woman, is diligently
seeking the coin; and as the father of the prodigal
He always loves and yearns after His child. Truly,
the Triune God, the Kingdom of Heaven, is revealed
to be near at hand, — God within His world, recon
ciling it unto Himself. This Kingdom is not, as the
Jews hoped and supposed, a state with armies and
thrones, and Zion exalted in the place of impe
rial Rome. No, the Kingdom of God cometh not
with observation ; it is a Kingdom of the poor in
spirit. For the Kingdom of God is within ; for God is
within thee, immanent. Now it is, in truth, difficult
sometimes to distinguish in the New Testament
between the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of
Heaven, and the Church. The reason is sound, yet
they are not synonymous. The Kingdom of God is
as leaven which one took and hid in three measures
of meal. Clearly the Kingdom of God is not disem
bodied. Perhaps in this it is true as Spenser sang, —
" For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make " ;
1 peravoeiTe. 2 Is. lix. 1, 2 ; James i. 17 ; Rom. xi. 29. 3 xv.

THE CHURCH. 91
the divine leaven generates the Church, for the King
dom of God is originally God Himself, the immanent
Triune, and the Church arises from the conscious
union of souls with the God within. Our Lord sets
forth His measures of meal ; in plain words, His
Church. At the beginning He says, " I will found My
Church," 1 and every word tells. St. Paul freely devel
ops the thought, and something organic and external
is undeniably implied. In another place 2 the teaching
of Jesus repeats the same figure. This indicates dis
tinctly that He instituted His Church. To His
apostles or disciples He says, " Ye have not chosen
Me, but I have chosen you." 3 The disciples did not
therefore institute a collegium, or society, .or voluntary
club. The purpose of this institution is disclosed by
the Founder, " As the Father hath sent Me, even so
send I you." According to the implied premise, no
mission could be more plenary in power and author
ity. In these days the first elements of the gospel of
Christ are called sociology, so far have we lost the
sense of a Saviour God, a saving Church and what it
actually is to be saved.
b. How was this society constituted ? Not much
can be gained from the memorabilia of Jesus. St.
1 oIkoSo/x^o-oj px>v Tr/x iKKXno-lav, St. Matt. xvi. 18 — olKoSofir/, 1 Cor.
xiv. 12-26 ; olKoSop-eiv, xiv. 4 ; 2 Cor. x. 8, xiii. 10. Rom. xiv. 19,
xv. 2 ; Eph. iv. 29, etc. The Church is built as the world is built,
as a body is built.
2 St. Luke vi. 48. s St. John xvi. 16.

92 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Matthew gives us to understand that upon the prin
ciple, or the consciousness, of divine Sonship the
Church is founded. This means, as the words of this
place show, vital relation with the Holy Spirit within.
From St. John 1 we learn that the apostolate was con
stituted together with the Church. Upon this point
I beg leave to insist. The Church, then, is called a
net, which holds fishes, small and great, good and
worthless. It is also a tree, because, as instinct with
the Spirit of Life, it grows freely with the process of
the years. It is distinctly obvious that Christ's
religion in its organised form is not individual, but
corporate. When on the cross, He declined the
ministry of a single person, but accepted the same
service, when offered by combined endeavour,2 and
His promise is to two who agree touching a petition,
and where two or three are gathered together, there
will He be. The Church, as we shall see, was insti
tuted and constituted together. In St. Luke it is
told how the two returned from Emmaus and found
the eleven and those with them ; 3 and while they
were talking, Jesus appeared in the midst,4 and
breathed upon the assemblage, possibly over five hun
dred, and said, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost." From
1 xv. 16.
2 Cf . St. Matt, xxvii. 48 with St. John xix. 29 ; and Sewall,
Microscope of the New Testament, 111 ff.
3 xxiv. 33, Tot/s ZvSeKa Kal rovs avv avrois.
4 St. John xx. 19.

THE CHURCH. 93
this, as well as from what has preceded, it is evident
that our Lord founded His ministry together with
the Church, and as a component part thereof : 2 not
that it was evolved from the laity according to the
congregational theory, or developed from the hier
archy according to prelatical imaginings. In the
teachings of Jesus concerning His Church we have
its two sides given together and unseparated, the
Spirit and the organic structure, the invisible and
the visible, the Kingdom of God and the Church.
The Kingdom of God is the soul of the Church, God
the Holy Spirit outgoing into the world. The Church
is the special organon of God.
c. While the Kingdom is the inner substance of
the Church, it is the procession and operation of the
Holy Ghost within the individual souls, and within
the corporate organism of the Church. As our Lord
is the pattern of the perfect individual soul and char
acter, so the Kingdom of God is the perfect ideal of
human society. That this ideal might be realised in
the world, the Church was instituted and constituted
in the manner which we learn from the New Testa
ment. The Nineteenth Article of Religion has a
fairly good working definition of the Church suited
to our times. "The visible Church of Christ is a
congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure
Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be
duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance, in
1 Acts xi. 15.

94 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
all those things that of necessity are requisite to the
same." Admirably vague ! I do not like the phrase
" Visible Church," for it is a pleonasm. The Church
is by its institution and constitution visible, except
where extending over those who depart thence in
the Lord.
d. In the relation of the Kingdom and the Church,
there is a double process from without to within, and
from within to without. We are born into the King
dom of God by metanoia,1 repentance, conversion,
change of heart, of mind, of character, of purpose,
and the like. This puts us into vital union with
God, who, in a final sense, is the Kingdom. The
soul is open to the operation of the Holy Spirit.
This begets obedience to Jesus in external acts,
including His sacramental ordinances, and thus we
come into that external or visible fellowship, which
is the Church. On the other hand, we may, by bap
tism, be born into the Church, an environment of
sacred and sanctifying influences which quicken the
God-consciousness, so that we are brought into vital
union with the holy God, which results in metanoia.
The Church is fitly named in the apostles' prayer,
" The fellowship of the Holy Ghost " ; for its oper
ation is to unite man with God, and men with one
1 Metanoia, translated in New Testament by "repentance,"
connotes so much more than the word "repentance" to most
minds that I shall here use the word in English. Metanoia signi
fies not only sorrow for sin and resolve for good, but a change of
the whole mind and character.

THE CHURCH. 95
another, until the Saviour's prayer shall be fulfilled,
" That they all may be one even as we are one, I in
them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made per
fect in one." 1
III. a. The Idea of One Holy and Apostolic
Church, the Communion of Saints, was not early
developed in the consciousness of Christendom. In
the East this article of the Church does not occur in
the creed of St. Ignatius, A.D. 107, nor in that of
Origen at the middle of the third century, nor in the
creed of Lucian of Antioch at the beginning of the
fourth century. It first appears in the private creed
of the arch-heretic Arius, 328. At the middle of the
fourth century St. Cyril of Jerusalem taught his
catechumens to profess faith "in One Holy Catholic
Church " ; and a quarter of a century later, Epi
phanius, the Father of Orthodoxy, says, " We believe
in One Catholic and Apostolic Church." The Nicene
creed has no article of the Church, but in the Nicene-
Constantinopolitan form it appears in all its fulness,
" One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." This
point was reached in the East toward the close
of four hundred years of Christian thought.2 In
the West, owing to the accident of distance from
the centre of living theological thought, tradition
early came to be relied upon. St. Irenseus, at the
close of the second century, begins his creed thus :
1 St. John xvii. 23.
2 Harnack, Dogmengeschichte II. 267, note 1.

96 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
"The Church, though scattered through the whole
world to the ends of the earth, has received from the
apostles and their disciples the faith." And again:
"If the apostles had not left to us the Scriptures,
would it not be necessary to follow the order of
tradition which those to whom they committed the
churches handed down?"1 Upon this notion of
Irenseus, which is nothing more than a question, has
been based the theory of tradition. Nevertheless,
Irenseus goes on to say what is utterly contrary to
traditionalism. Indeed, it looks like rationalism or
mysticism. " To this order," says he, " many nations
of barbarians give assent, those who believe in Christ,
having salvation written on their hearts by the Spirit,
without paper and ink, and guarding diligently the
ancient tradition." After all, Irenaeus may be quoted
for distinctly opposite sides ; controversy drove him
to lay much stress upon Church and tradition.
In this confusion of ideas we see the mingled ten
dencies of the Eastern and Western Churches. Let
us examine more closely the development of the idea
of the Church by the Latin theologians. Tertullian,
at the beginning of the third century, inserts in his
rehearsal of faith no article of the Church. Novatian,
the dissenter, a.d. 230, alludes to the Church, but
makes it no article of his creed. But St. Cyprian, who
controverts the Novatians, asserts strongly, " I be
lieve in the forgiveness of sins and eternal life through
1 Against Heresies, iii. 4, 1.

THE CHURCH. 97
Holy Church." "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus." In
the old Roman creed, A.D. 341, the article of " Holy
Church " occurs, having crossed over from Carthage.
Marcellus of Ancyra, Rufinus, and Augustine A.D.
400 know the article of " Holy Church." Nicetas, in
the middle of the fifth century, inserts in his rehear
sal of faith, "Holy Catholic Church." In the Sacra-
mentary of Gaul, about the middle of the seventh
century, we have "the Holy Catholic Church, the
Communion of Saints " ; but hot until St. Pirmin,
and the middle of the eighth century, do we find that
the Latin Church generally arrived at the formula of
the "Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of
Saints," and at the Apostles' Creed as we now recite
it.1 The Eastern Church to this day has not yet
reached a formulated permanent definition of the
Church.2 But the Greek Church did go so far as to
condemn Cyril Lucar's doctrine that the elect alone
constituted the Church of Christ.
IV. In the old days the question was, " What
sign givest thou?" likewise in the present day the
world requires marks of the Church. If this won
derful organisation, which is called the " Body of
God," be in the world, how shall we recognise it
should we meet it in the highways ? Is the Chris
tian Church the sum of those who acknowledge
1 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, II.
2 Wiener, Confessions of Christendom, 332 ; Moeller, Sym
bolik, II. 7 ff.

98 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Christ to be superior to all other men in wisdom,
power, and goodness ? Is it made up of those who
are born of the water, or of the Spirit, or of both?
Is it a compact, well-defined association with doctrines
and worship completely uniform? Is it endowed
with special and occult powers, and has it a hierarchy
with peculiar gifts not personal but official ? Are all
the members of this society spotless in life, unerring
in their ideas, and with eyes ever fixed on the golden
domes of heaven? If the trumpet of the creeds
gave forth an uncertain sound, we are prepared to
find the early divines of Christendom also vague in
their notion of the Church. In the Ignatian Epistle
to the Smyrneans, a.d. 168 (?), we already find this
strong expression, " Wherever Jesus Christ may be,
there is the Catholic Church " ; 1 but this should not
be hastily quoted for the confusion of ecclesiasticism
by some Martin Marprelate, because in the same sen
tence, and just before these words, the writer had
said, " Wherever the bishop may appear, there let the
congregation be." Evidently this correspondent of
the Smyrneans was not non-prelatical. The eucha-
ristic prayer in the Didache contains a petition that
the Church may be "gathered into the kingdom"
of God, in order that it may be " delivered from evil
and perfected."2 Nothing here of the theory of a
1 Epistle of St. Ignatius to the Smyrneans, viii., Lightfoot,
Apostolic Fathers, 129.
2 The Teachings of the Apostles, cc. ix., x., Lightfoot, ut sup.,
221.

THE CHURCH. 99
Church for the holy and worthy alone, for those alone
who know by experience that they are washed and
sanctified and accepted! St. Irenaaus shows the effect
of his Roman environment when he says, " Wherever
the Church is, there is the Spirit of God." 1 Yet
Irenseus goes on to say, " Where the Spirit of God is,
there is the Church and every kind of grace; but
the Spirit is truth." This throws all again into con
fusion. Could any ecclesiasticism be more arrogant?
Yet observe that in these citations there is nowhere
a definition of the Church. Even the Alexandrine
theologians were vigorous believers in the Church.
The mild Clement writes positively, " As the will of
God is His work and is named Kosmos, so also His
purpose is the salvation of men, and this is called the
Church." 2
The taint of Shamanism must have survived
strongly in the blood of the African churchmen,
Tertullian, Cyprian, Donatus, and Augustine, who,
all of them, define the Church, when they venture
near any definition, as inhering in the clerical order.
St. Cyprian in particular introduced the idea of
Roman imperialism into the Church, in his effort to
get at basis of unity. Personally St. Cyprian con
tradicted his doctrine of the unity of the Church as
sitting in the chair of St. Peter at Rome, just so soon
as the occupant of that chair did not think with
Thascius Csecilius Cyprianus. The Cyprianic idea
1 Against Heresies, iii. 24. 2 Paidagogos, 1, 6.

100 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
obtained. It was congenial to the conditions of its
day. As heathen Rome had conquered heathen Car
thage, so now Christian Carthage came to dominate
and dictate the thought of Christian Rome. With it
all, from St. Polycarp to St. Augustine, the most dil
igent examination discovers only this, the opinion of
the absolute necessity of a Church outside which
there is no salvation. In this opinion, by the irony
of things, both Protestant and Romanist at the present
agree. How any one is to determine clearly what
constitutes this necessity of salvation, they never
agree to say. St. Ignatius thinks that the necessary
element is the Episcopate. Tertullian and St. Cyprian
say it is the realm of Peter's throne till Peter's throne
decides against them; then they think differently.
Origen says the Church is made up of petrine people ; 1
St. Clement, the Alexandrine, of knowing people,2
but not making it clear whether these knowing ones
were speculative or practical knowers of God. The
Montanists, Donatists, Novatians, and the like, all
emphasised the subjective side of the Church. They
were lineal successors of the old collegia and mys
teries. To them it seemed intolerable that any but
the pure, the adepts, the initiated, should be reckoned
in the Christian society. They, by generations of
secret teaching and training, were utterly opposed to
monarchial organisation in Church or out of it. Con
sequently an Episcopacy which was not a temporary
1 irirpoi.

THE CHURCH. 101
office seemed to them arrogant. More outrageous
in their eyes was the extreme development of prelacy
by St. Cyprian. Though we search as carefully as
we can among ancient churchmen and separatists,
nowhere do we find any clear or consistent consensus
about the idea of the Church, consequently nowhere
a Catholic definition. The practical solution of the
question, each polemical theologian made for himself.
St. Augustine called those who did not agree with
him, "sort of Christians" Qquoquomodo Christiani).
And the custom inaugurated by such august author
ity is notoriously still far from obsolete.
V. It has come about in the run of years that
Christendom confesses at length that there is one
Holy and Catholic Apostolic Church. Where is it ?
When was it ? Was it over in Palestine before Paul
withstood Peter because the latter was to be blamed,
and they twain, with their retainers, like Lot and
Abram, set their faces in opposite directions ? Was
it when Athanasius stood against the world ? Was
it in the pusillanimous and ignoble compromise in
the Council of Florence ? Was it in Calvin's harsh
regency of Geneva, or in the servile Convocation
which dared not protest when Henry Tudor styled
himself the Supreme Head of the Church? These
four notes which Theology sounds with deep satisfac
tion are really the scorn of History. As external signs
they have never been realised in all the chronicles of
wasted Time. Yet we do well to believe them, for

102 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
they are the potencies of the Church, the ways of the
Spirit's outworking in the world, syllables of the
word which God in humanity utters, the process of
the operations of God-consciousness, the highest mani
festation of God in the world, reconciling it unto
Himself, and therefore the ideal, the goal of the
evolution of the Church which our blessed Lord
founded. As Jesus, by His kenosis,1 subjected His
divine knowledge and power to human limitations,
a thing the apocryphal gospels convict themselves
in not recognising, so the Church is another kenosis
of God the Holy Ghost ; but through the ages it
increases in wisdom and in stature, and in favour
with God and man.2 The " four notes " are the
marks of the high calling of the Church, the calling
which shall be attained when the Leaven has leavened
the whole of the measures of meal, and the Kingdom
of God has come ; i.e. is evidently manifested as iden
tical with the Church. Then shall Humanity have
become the word and the utterance of God to all the
worlds. a. The Church is one. The Donatist objection
that distinction between visible and invisible, ideal
and real, Churches sets up two or more Churches,
still stands good.3 The Church of Israel was bound
together by kinship: this bond Jesus strongly and
1 Phil. ii. 7, dXXa eavrov iKivuiaev.
2 Aquinas, Summa, III1. 15.
3 Bellarmin, Eccies. Milit. c. ii.

THE CHURCH. 103
repeatedly rejects. In its place, taking the ancient
and world-wide symbol of blood brotherhood esteemed
closer than kinship, He — I will not exactly say sub
stituted, because the soul, the life, the Kingdom of
God, was at first alone His, — He began to generate
the one Church. Because there is one God, one
Lord Jesus Christ, one Spirit, there is one body.
When in any measure that unity is realised in exter
nal signs, they are one Lord as the object of religion,
one faith as the motive of life, and one baptism as
the ceremonial sign of the same. Klee, the Roman
Catholic theologian, tells us 2 that in the early Church
unity was signified and maintained by (1) Letters
of Communion, (2) by the Dyptichs, (3) by the
Eulogia, portions of the eucharistic food sent and
exchanged by bishops and presbyters far removed
from one another, and (4) by the Agapse or Love-
Feasts.2 Here, at all events, we have definite signs
of a definite tangible thing. Unfortunately, however
neat this statement looks, as a matter of fact its prac
tical working served only to signify those who agreed
together. As circumcision was a visible sign of
membership in the congregation of Israel, it is reason
able to conclude that we are correct in our interpre
tation of the gospel story that baptism is the covenant
1 Histoire des Dogmes Chretiens, Vol. I. 82.
2 Cf. with this custom of Love-Feast the ancient avSpeta of the
Spartans, Cretans, and Carthaginians, and the Charistia of the
Romans.

104 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
sign of the Church. Therein shall we not recognise
a form of unity, not perfect but inceptive? Every
person baptised according to the manner and form
dictated by Christ is a member of Christ's Church;
yet since other things belong to the integrity of this
organisation, such a membership of individuals does
not make societies, sacred or secular, Mormon or
Masonic, to which baptised persons may belong, uni
fied into the Church. Unity is not necessarily uni
formity in creed, ritual, or in Church government.
Creeds pass because their language becomes obsolete ;
ceremonies vary, and should vary, according to the
temper and culture of the worshippers. There still
survives among us the taste for the sacred mask dances,
which passed into the Dionysiac rites and gave birth
to the deathless dramas of .ZEschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, and then down through the Middle Ages
in mystery, miracle, and passion plays, and in the dra
matisation of the ceremonies of the Church, to rep
resent before the eyes of simple people the divine
tragedy of the cross. There is, indeed, no lack of
manuals of devotion which for our edification point
out when the celebrant represents Christ in His
betrayal, and when in His trial before Pilate, and
when He bowed the head and died. Now to say
" these things shall not be " is simply to ignore that
human culture and development have several degrees.
To enforce such a law of uniformity would result in
narrowing down the Church to the receptiveness of

THE CHURCH. 105
the " knowing ones," the heirs of all the ages in the
foremost files of time. They are few ; but if they are
spiritually uplifted by the mystical, metaphysical
devotion of a Friends' meeting, in God's name let
them have it. At all events let us now determine
nevermore to waste valuable hours in conventions,
diocesan or general, over rubrics designed to secure
minute and absolute uniformity. That can never be
done so long as minds differ. So long as we are in
bondage to the crudest literalism of Scripture, creed,
and rubric, so long will there be diversity, disunion,
and schism. The Spirit unites ; the letter divides.
There are two broad types of Church organisation,
the episcopal and the congregational. All others are
modifications of one of these. Papacy is an extreme
of prelacy. As an historical development it is quite
intelligible ; as an evolution from the teachings of
Christ, it can offer no respectable claim. Of testi
monies of the fathers for and against the Petrine
Claims 1 1 presume you are weary. I am. The great
1 However, I append some fresh matter in this note. St. Chrysos
tom calls Peter the foremost of the apostles, the mouthpiece of the
disciples, and the leader of the chorus or band. — Com. on St. Matt.
xvi. 19.
In St. Augustine's Sermons, 76, we find this declaration :
" Simon was the name of His foremost disciple before Christ gave
him the name of Peter, the figurative signification of which name
is the Church. Petra, or rock, represents Christ ; Petrus, or the dis
ciple, represents Christian people. Petra, or rock, is the principal
designation, just as Petrus is from Petra, not Petra from Petrus.

106 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
obstacle to the unity of the Church inhering in the
Papacy is the lapses of the Papacy, and present prob
lematical validity of the Pope according to the canon
So in like manner Christ is not called from Christian, but Christian
from Christ. Thou art Petrus, and on this petra which thou hast
confessed, upon this rock which thou hast recognised in saying,
' Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God, ' I will build My Church ;
that is, upon Myself as the Son of the living God, I will build My
Church. Upon Myself I will build thee, not Me on thee. The
Church is not built upon them, but upon Christ." — Opera, V. 479.
In Sermon 270, this doctrine is repeated: "Jesus said to His
disciples, ' But whom say ye that I am ? ' Peter answered, one for
the rest, one for all, ' Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God.' ' Happy art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, etc' ; I say to thee
because thou hast thus spoken of Me, thus confessed Me, receive a
blessing : thou art Petrus, I am Petra ; Petra is not from Petrus,
but Petrus from Petra, just as Christian is not from Christ, but
Christ from Christian; so upon this petra I will build My Church,
not upon the Petrus which thou art, but upon the Petra which thou
hast confessed. But I will build My Church ; I will build thee,
who by this confession bearest this figure of the Church, i.e. repre
sents the Church." — Opera, V. 12, 38, 39.
Still again, in Sermon 295, we have this: "Upon this Petra
which thou hast confessed, upon this which thou hast said, ' Thou
art Christ, the Son of the living God,' I will build My Church, for
thou art Petrus ; but Petra is the rock, Christ, from which Petrus
is derived." — Opera, V. 13, 48, 49.
Of a work extant, which St. Augustine wrote against an epistle
of the heretic Donatus, once a Bishop at Carthage, the author says
this : " In this work I said of the Apostle Peter, that upon him, as
upon Petra, a rock, the Church was founded ; which meaning is
also proclaimed by the mouth of many in the verses of the most
blessed Ambrose, where he speaks of the cock crowing thus : ' This
is that rock of the Church crowing who removes sin.' But I

THE CHURCH. 107
law of the Roman Church. The Presbyterial system
of Church Organisation is a modified form of prelacy.
Presbyter, as Milton perceived, is priest writ large.
The Presbyterial invention mediates between Epis
copacy and Congregationalism. Like all forms of
Puritanism and Papacy, it is substantially a survival
of Judaism. It appeals to the synagogue. One with
as good reason could appeal from Shakspere's Comedy
of Errors to Plautus' Mencechmi. For Scriptural
authority this system has selected an adverb for its
foundation.1 Upon such a foundation can Jerusalem
be built as a city that is at unity with itself ? Method-
remember often afterwards I thus explained what the Lord said :
1 Thou art Peter,' etc. Which is to be understood as upon that
which Peter confessed, ' Thou art the Son of the living God,' and
thus Peter, so called after that rock, or petra, representing the part
of the Church which is built upon this rock, and received the key
of the Kingdom of Heaven. For it is not said to him, Thou art
Petra, but thou art Petrus. But Petra is Christ, whom Simon has
confessed as the whole Church confesses Him, and was hence called
Peter. But which of these two opinions is the more probable let
the reader choose." — Retractationes, Lib. I. c. 21.
Enough of this dreary stuff. The principal presumption in
favour of St. Peter having ever visited Rome is that St. Paul is so
much more portentous a figure that there must have been some
powerful cause why Roman tradition did not settle upon him, since
also there is no question that he resided in Rome.
The most thorough and hitherto unanswered criticism of the
pretension of the papal chair to the supremacy of the Church as
the sole condition of Church unity, will be found in Petrine Claims
at the Bar of History, by the Rev. Dr. R. F. Littledale.
1 puLXio-Ta, in 1 Tim. v. 17.

108 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ism adopts Episcopacy as a form of Church Govern
ment, administers it like the Papacy, and uses the
Presbyterial form of ministry. For Episcopal Church
Government the Protestant Episcopalians make no
actual stand, although in theory they are stiff for it.
We Protestant Episcopalians are practically Congre-
gationalists slightly ameliorated by prelacy. There
fore I do not see in any of these forms of ecclesiastical
organisation a ground promising for unity. Congre
gationalism is the despair of unity. In its logical
extreme it becomes every man a church unto himself.
That ultimate being reached, a fellowship between
churches springs up, and a congregation is formed.
The Congregationalist forgets that Christ in flesh
and in Nature has a method of selection. For
the cause of unity it must be acknowledged that
Congregationalism excels the Papacy in speaking
smooth things and easy to understand.
Shall we choose either autocracy or individualism ?
Ecclesiastical Csesarism or the Zeitgeist? We must
go further on before deciding, and we must take a
retrospect of the road we have thus far travelled.
While the soul of the Church is a kingdom, the
Church is not an autocracy. Divine sovereignty and
divine immanence imply for the Church elements
both monarchic and democratic, and these are not
contradictory the one of the other, any more than
divine omnipotence and human freedom. For divine
sovereignty does not necessarily imply divine sepa-

THE CHURCH. 109
ration. The Head of the Church is Jesus Christ, not
a president God, as the Mormon doctrine says ; nor
does He reign by popular suffrage, as we sing in the
hymn, " Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown
Him Lord of all." This theory fits neatly in with
that speculation about the universe, wherein Dr.
Haeckel talks of citizen atoms diffused throughout
space, and saying, " Go to, let us congregate and
see if anything will come of it." A world came of
it, and the atoms were stupefied. Nay, but in Church
as in world laws of atoms do not account for collo
cation of atoms. These things convince me that
Church union is not an accomplished fact. Because
of schisms from the day of Sts. Peter and Paul, —
because of varying ideas of God and survivals of old
folk-faith, because of extreme bondage to the letter
of Scripture and creeds, — never since Pentecost has
the Church known an external unity. However, the
article of the Creed is credible if we mean one Lord,
one faith, one baptism, one God the Father of all,
who is above all, through all, and in you all. And
as your consciousness of Him grows more vivid you
will attain unto the unity of the Spirit and the bond
of peace. Therefore, I say the unity of the Church
is the goal toward which it moves, the process of its
existence until God shall be all in all. Higher criti
cism, textual criticism, rational theology, and theoso
phy are signs of a movement towards unity of the
spirit which lies beneath the letter.

110 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
b. What age or region will render us a picture of
the Church holy in the blameless lives of all its
members? Was holiness realised in the Robber
Synod, or in the brawls between the blues and greens
in the streets of orthodox Byzantium ? Was holiness
resplendent in the Nitrian monks who with oyster-
shells savagely slew the maiden Hypatia? Is holi
ness exemplified in the Albigensian anomia, and the
crusade which exterminated it, or in the pornocracy
of Rome ? Shall we find it among the Anabaptists of
Minister, or in the Huguenot craft of the Conde's, or
in the cold, pitiless righteousness of the Laudians,
or in the brutality of Cromwell's men, or in the cruel
intolerance of the Massachusetts Bay Colony? Were
the Rev. John Wilson, shaking his fist and calling
down the extreme vengeance of God upon misbeliev
ers whom he had brought to the scaffold, and Mistress
Anne Hutchinson, with her inner light and her ungov
ernable tongue, fruits of the holiness of the Church ?
The holiness of the Church was not more marked
before the Great Schism than in later days. Between
orthodoxy and holiness the connection is not clear ;
but I am far from sure that Protestantism, higher
criticism, and progressive orthodoxy, are doing much
for the realisation of this note of the Church. Per
haps. For in the present, the holiness of the Church
is the life of the Kingdom of God within her, and
the external holiness of the Church consists in the
realisation of the Christ-life in her individual mem-

THE CHURCH. Ill
bers. It lies also in the faith or propositions of truth
which may be comprehended by individual members.
But it does not lie in orthodoxy, for self-conscious
orthodoxy is the eighth deadly sin. Holiness lies in
the faith in personal righteousness of God and man,
and in the common worship, in prayer, in the Word,
and in the Sacraments. It is both outer and inner.
The holiness of the Church is evidently rather a goal
than a starting-point. She begins by saying, "Be
loved, now are we the sons of God.1 She seeks by
worship, instruction, and sacraments to waken the
sense of this divine sonship, in order that she may
manifest to the world the holiness which is the love,
which is the life, which is the power of God, —
namely, God Himself, divine grace.2 The realisation
of the holiness of the Church and its actualisation is
this : to serve as the highest expression of the Soul
of the world, in the world of souls, and to the world
of souls.
The process by which in the Church the individual
soul is made vitally conscious has been called by
various names, repentance, conversion, redemption,
metanoia, justification, sanctification, salvation, and
eternal life. The distinctions are not real; they
belong to the method of scholastic theology. Fun
damentally they are one, are but so many stages of
the process of the soul in becoming Christ-like. It
1 1 John iii. 2. 2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I". viii. 3.

112 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
is a process of growth, of development, and of evolu
tion. Of this process, the Sacraments are signs and
helps. " Covenant sign " does not exhaust the mean
ing of baptism as regeneration. The sign stands also
for a growth in consciousness of holiness. Because
holy baptism represents birth out of an old environ
ment, the world of nature, where the law of life is
self-interest, into a new environment, the Church,
whose law is unself, it is therefore a baptism unto
repentance, metanoia, a new point of view from
which to survey life. We are baptised in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,
not as by a magic formula. " In the name," means
into the character. The term is a Hebrew idiom.
Baptism " in the name " implies an intent to conform
to the character of our Father, God, our Saviour,
Christ, and our life-giving Spirit. But somehow a
survival of a pre-Aryan disposition towards magic,
which the Babylonians inherited from their Ugrian
predecessors, we also have inherited, and we tend to
use the divine name, the saving name, as a spell to
conjure with,1 notwithstanding that the Third Com
mandment expressly forbade such a use of the name
of God.
" There must be in the outward sign of a sacrament
that which properly represents the spiritual operation
of the sacrament," says Aquinas in his reasonable
1 Keim, Jesus of Nazara, V. 371, explains the Hebraism, " in
the name."

THE CHURCH. 113
fashion.1 The sacrament of the Holy Communion,
inasmuch as it is a meal in common, represents first of
all the fellowship of the Spirit, which is the true and
only feasible brotherhood of man.2 The table of the
Lord is a solution of many of the social difficulties of
the present day. In that this sacrament shows forth
the Lord's death, it stands also for the essential
nature of righteousness or eternal life, which is self-
sacrificing love. Of this the Lord's death was the
supreme exponent in time, of the inner and eternal
operation of the Living God, and therefore of godly
life.3 'In that the sacrament of the altar is food, it sig
nifies first a gift of God, and next the assimilation and
appropriation of the divine life by living it. In this
last stage of significance the sacrament represents the
union of the soul with God. The symbol ought not
to be taken as the thing symbolised. In short, the
holiness of the Church is realised in the measure that
we accept the principle of unself as the law of life ; of
unself, I mean, not as the end, but for the sake of
another. This is the foundation of the corporate
character of the holiness which Christ requires. Un
self as an end in itself is a survival or revival of
Buddhistic and like pagan ideals.
By the Holiness is meant the visible manifestation
of the result of the redemptive process, whereby the
1 Summa, III. lx. 3. 2 1 John i. 7.
s Cf. Sup. p. 47, eio-tpeia, 1 Tim. ii. 2.

114 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of
God and of His Christ. To this far-off divine event
the whole creation moves, and sin, and pain, and sor
row are spokes in the vast wheel of life. The Church
is the ideal of the world in its evolution, as Jesus,
God, is the ideal of the Church in its growth towards
true unity. The Church, then, is the highest expo
nent of that stage we have reached in the forward,
upward movement we call the cosmic process, the
clearest development of God-consciousness in the
mind of humanity.
c. It seems difficult in these days to get any defini
tion of Catholicity upon which all Christians or any
considerable majority of them agree.1 Catholicity
is in effect the password of some kinds of Orthodoxy.
1 When Seymour was in Rome fifty years ago, the dignitaries of
the Church thought surely he would become a convert, and every
morning they met with him for conversations on the matter. Their
questions and answers were conducted in writing. One morning
he wrote this proposition : The Roman Church nowhere declares
herself infallible. He met with vehement denial ; but when he
required an authoritative statement of the infallibility of the Roman
Church, the cardinals and doctors could not, he tells us, produce it.
Years after, one of these Roman dignitaries is said to have admitted
(Capes, To Rome and Back) that they had always received un
questioned the infallibility of the Roman Church, and were
astounded when after the carefullest investigation they could find
no authoritative statement of it. I would add that this proposi
tion had been formulated, and it is difficult to believe that the
theologians who conversed with Seymour were not aware of the
assertions of the Bulls of the Popes.

THE CHURCH. 115
For of Orthodoxy there is more than one sort.
Catholicity has been taken to mean that part of the
Church which has "valid orders and valid sacra
ments," or that which adheres to the rule of The
ology laid down by the first six or seven ecumenical
councils, or that which holds a traditional theology,
as for instance of St. Augustine, or that which is
intellectually broad and tolerant, mystical or meta
physical, rational or sceptical. It might seem that
we could accept some one of these positions, such is
their variety, but turn the theologie tube on tube of
lens critical and historical, and these fixed stars of
hope are blurred to mist. It is not so easy as at first
blush it seems, to say what are valid orders, and valid
sacraments, and who have them, what councils were
ecumenical, and what Augustine did really give as
the residuum of his doctrine after his retractations.
Indeed we cannot always understand just what the
Pope means, or the General Assembly, or the General
Convention. Duration of Time and extent of Space
do not gauge the Church's Catholicity. They ma}' in
those years when the earth shall be full of the knowl
edge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, but
not yesterday and not to-day. It is fine to say, like
the late Mr. Arnold, that "the infallible Church
Catholic is really the prophetic Soul of the wide
world dreaming of things to come, the whole human
race in onward progress, discovering truth more
complete than the parcel of truth any momentary

116 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
individual man may seize." The charm is really in
the ingenious adaptation of the beautiful phrase from
Shakspere. The truth of the definition is in God's
cosmical redemptive process, but the definition itself
does not exactly express our Lord's doctrine of the
Church. It is, however, true that the Church is living
as the tree and the grain of mustard seed, because its
soul is the Spirit Who maketh alive. It is the Church
of the Living God, and there is no really assignable
limit to the growth of His body and manifestation.
Again, if by the infallible Church we mean the con
sciousness of Christendom, we mean a fact, not a
dogma ; and this is all there is of truth in the notion
of the infallibility of the Church. It is the utterance
of the God-consciousness. People who doubt the guid
ing of the Spirit of God, call Him Zeitgeist. They go
back to ante-Nicene days to find evidences of the guid
ance of the Holy Ghost; for them He is now virtually
asleep with Brahm, or passive in Nirvana. The
appeal to antiquity has a side which is true, but when
pressed as it has been, is like asking us into " a seed
store to examine the beauty of a flower garden."
Tertullian was right when he said, "Wherever are
the Three, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, there is the
Church, which is the body of the Three."1 So Cath
olicity is inclusive, not exclusive. It inheres in the
Kingdom of God ; that is, in the Infinite God, Who
comprehends and includes all reality. There is this
1 De Baptismo, quoted in Pearson on the Creed.

THE CHURCH. 117
potency, this ultimate of the growth of the Church,
not in the chair of Peter, nor in an Episcopacy, nor in
an accurate form of doctrine, nor in the relation of
the individual with Christ. A study of the history
of dogma shows that any one of these propositions is
a theory which could not stand the test of controversy.
In one sense, present and visible, the Church might
be called Catholic ; that is, in its adaptability to all
nations and all times. In so far as it has received
the true Idea of God it is differentiated from all
ethnic religions and therefore is universal.
d. The Church is apostolic if it continue in the
doctrine of the apostles. By the doctrine of the
apostles I do not exactly mean their limited state
ments or formulas of divine truth and their incom
pletely developed consciousness of God. As Hooker
says, " We must note that he that affirmeth speech
to be necessary among all men throughout the world
doth not thereby import that all men must speak
necessarily one kind of language. Even so, the
necessity of polity and regiment in all churches may
be held, without holding any one certain form to be
necessary for them all." 1 No doubt the Holy Spirit is
still guiding the Church ; nor did He cease with the
Church of the apostles, of the isapostolic fathers, with
the Nicene Council, with the Second Council of Con
stantinople, with Augustine, with Aquinas, with Lu
ther, or with Hooker or with Pusey or with Pearson
i Hooker, Eccl. Pol. III. 2.

118 SURVIVALS LN CHRISTIANITY.
on the Creed, or with Browne on the Articles. As God
is a living God, the Church, His Body, lives, develops,
differentiates in comprehension and in statement of
truth. By the side of natural evolution in the world is
supernatural evolution in the Church. The cosmical
and ecclesiastical processes illustrate one another.
What is developed from apostolic germinal idea
belongs to the doctrine of the Apostolic Church, and
the fundamental and grand all-embracing idea which
we get from the apostolic writings is that of the
immanent Triune.
Apostolicity has been made to inhere in Apostolic
Succession. This theory, Hallam says, began to be
urged about the end of Elizabeth's reign.1 In one
sense the theory is true, and in another it is false.
Bishop Hall distinguished when he wrote, " How fain
would you here find me in a contradiction. While
I onewhere reckon Episcopacy among matters essen
tial to the Church, and otherwhere deny it to be of the
essence thereof ! Wherein you willingly hide your
eyes that you may not see the distinction which I
make expressly between the being and well being of
a Church. . . . No, brethren, to hold their discipline
altogether essential to the very being of the Church,
we dare not be so zealous." 2 Appeal has been made
to the First Epistle of St. Clement to show the con
necting link between the apostles and fathers on
1 Cf. Sir Francis Bacon, Works, II. 5, 14.
2 Bishop Hall, Works, IX. 690.

THE CHURCH. 119
this subject. But Clement1 says nothing more than
that the apostles, foreseeing strife about the office
of oversight in the Church, appointed whom they
thought worthy to succeed them, and left instructions
that when these died other approved men should
succeed them in the ministry. Consequently, says
he, our blame is great " if we eject from the Episco
pate those who have blamelessly and holily fulfilled
its duties." St. Clement says nothing of a tactual
succession, nothing of the grace of Orders. He is
speaking in the interest of orderliness and tranquillity,
and of continuance in Episcopal office of men once
placed therein. St. Irenaeus also is invoked to give
testimony in the same favour, but he speaks of the
succession of the ministry only as being a witness to
those doctrines of the Church which had from the
apostles been handed down. The Apostolic Suc
cession may be true as a fact in history — it cannot
be disproved ; but is a Scotch verdict in its favour
enough to warrant the uprearing upon it of a vast
sacramental system ? The Assyrian when he would
represent the grace of god in the sky towards men
on earth, depicted ropes hanging down from the
symbol of the god. This answers to a popular con
ception of grace, to a notion which is profoundly
materialistic. A widely prevalent theory of the Sac
raments is inhaled with the materialistic atmosphere
which we breathe. A sceptical friend once asked
1 1. 44.

120 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
me, "Why are the clergy so materialistic?" This
cruder theory of grace and of the Sacraments will not
lack traditional authority nor a long catena patrum,
nor th° pat simile of grace flowing through the Sacra
ments as gas through the gas-pipes, or, at any rate, as
electricity along the wires.
The theory of transubstantiation is a survival of
fetishism. I recognise that the dominant theolog
ical thought is consonant with the materialistic
tone of the age, and every day it is becoming more
popular; but is it true? Is not this whole theory
of tactual Succession and sacramental system built
thereon, like a vast pyramid resting upon its apex?
To what did the bishops succeed from the apostles ?
You recollect how, when Aquinas went to Rome, the
Pope showed to him all its splendour and opulence,
and remarked, " Brother Thomas, if Peter was forced
to say, Silver and gold have I none, his successors are
not obliged to say so." — " No," answered Aquinas,
" neither can his successors say, I say unto thee arise
and walk."
I need not apologise for quoting in this place and
at some length the words of the Bishop of Central
New York. They represent a reasonable phase of
present-day ecclesiastical opinion. Bishop Hunting
ton we recognise as one of the most open-minded
and thoughtful of our House of Bishops : "We have
on hand two theories of the Episcopate as to its
working. They should be discriminated, and each

THE CHURCH. 121
should be held in view in discussions about small
dioceses and multiplied bishops. Otherwise, senti
ment will take the place of wisdom, and mistakes
may be made which it will not be easy to correct.
On the one hand is the idea that the bishop is not
only the chief pastor in some real sense, and Pastor
Pastorum, of the diocese, but is in direct and inti
mate pastoral relations with the laity in all the con
gregations. This, or something like it, is loosely in
the notions of many advocates of Episcopal multi
plication. Two results would be unavoidable. Dio
ceses conducted in that way cannot include more
than thirty or forty congregations, whether parishes
or missions, at the utmost, unless human capacities
and endowments are stretched beyond human pre
cedent. Secondly, the prerogative, authority, official
importance, and self-direction of the priest and pas
tor, whom we now call the rector, must be abridged
and curtailed to whatever extent the theory which
makes the diocese a modern Parochia is carried out.
Then rectoral distinctions will be in large part trans
ferred to the bishop. It is he who directs, leads,
decides, in all parish affairs. Guilds, societies, choirs,
plans of work for both sexes, young and old, ser
vices, ritual peculiarities, will be appointed and con
trolled by the bishop. Presbyters are his assistants
or agents, and he entrusts them with more or less
power and liberty, according to his disposition and
views. Human nature is not to be made over to

122 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
accommodate an ecclesiastical experiment. Where
all this is understood and prepared for, where the
clergy are trained and ordained and used to it, it
may work admirably. That it would work without
some friction and some strain in a generation accus
tomed to a different regime is not at all certain.
Two heads are not a physiological or an adminis
trative convenience. In time, the diocese would
come to have a uniform ecclesiastical type and colour.
Clergy not in agreement with the bishop ecclesias
tically or theologically would find it agreeable to
retire. Reliance upon official suasion or personal
magnetism, in such a condition, would prove, at try
ing emergencies, a delusion and a snare. In ritual
there would be in time diocesan ' Uses ' sharply
denned. I am not now arguing for or against this
system, or conjecturing whether it is what the Amer
ican Church desires, but am trying to state what, as
it appears to me, this system would inevitably bring
forth. It would enlarge the House of Bishops four
fold, and the control of the bishop over the rector
in parochial details in much the same proportion.
" The other conception of this office is substantially
that which has prevailed among us hitherto, and pre
vails now. I say substantially, because there is no
fixed standard with which the varying notions about
it, floating in divers minds, can be compared. The
office itself admits of widely different degrees of

THE CHURCH. 123
activity and efficiency, according to the gifts, accom
plishments, and energy of the man who holds it.
Yet, on the whole, the range and limits of its proper
functions are fairly understood. The bishop ordains
and sometimes institutes the clergy, attends by letter
or in person to their call, settlement, removal, and
transfer; receives their requests, complaints, and in
quiries, and other communications ; visits them and
their families pastorally; consults with them after
their difficulties and necessities. He examines, re
ceives, directs, and often assists candidates for Holy
Orders, in many cases personally instructing them
and providing for their expenses. He has to do with
the erection and form of many church buildings, the
care and title of the property, and sometimes the in
surance, frequently assists in obtaining the means to
build, is apt to lay the corner-stone, and consecrates
or opens the edifice. He confirms candidates once
a year in public and private, throughout the diocese.
In special emergencies, or with the good-will of the
rector, he sometimes renders the offices of baptism,
marriage, and burial. He adjusts differences arising
among parishes and ministers, he decides cases of dis
agreement by the interpretation of Church-law or by
arbitration, acting judicially. He is called to organise
or initiate general charities, guilds, societies, benevo
lent work in Church-houses, or to preach at their anni
versaries. In our theory, whatever our practice, the

124 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
three Orders are well defined, as well with respect to
their rights as their duties." 1
Such being the practical condition of things in
this Church, shall we take up the words of Bishop
Andrews, "Though our government be of divine
right, it follows not that a church cannot stand with
out it. He must needs be stone-blind that sees not
churches standing without it." Or the words of
Hooker, "Unto the complete form of Church pol
ity much may be requisite that the Scripture teacheth
not, and much that it hath taught become unrequisite,
sometime because we need not use it, sometime be
cause we cannot. In which respect, for mine own
part, although I see that certain Reformed Churches,
the Scottish especially and the French, have not that
which best agreeth with Sacred Scripture, I mean the
Government that is by Bishops, inasmuch as both these
Churches are fallen under a different kind of Regi
ment; which to remedy it is for the one altogether
too late, and too soon for the other, during their pres
ent affliction and trouble: this their defect and im
perfection I had rather lament in such case than
exagitate, considering that men oftentimes, without
any fault of their own, may be driven to want that
kind of Politie or Regiment which is best; and to
content themselves with that which either the irre-
1 The Rt. Rev. Dr. Huntington, Address to the Diocesan Con
vention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Cen
tral New York, 1880.

THE CHURCH. 125
mediable error of former time, or the necessity of the
present, hath cast upon them." 1
If we cannot find any statement or assertion of a
tactual succession in the Anglican Articles of Religion,
if it was not held by the English reformers, nor in
sisted upon by Cosin, or Jewell, or Andrews, or Hall,
or Whitgift, or even by Saravia, then shall we hold it
to be essential to the being of a church? Nay, we
should in that case out-herod Herod in our exactions,
we should go beyond the Roman Church; for it is
well known that in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth,
in the propositions which Rome made for the "recon
ciliation " of the English Church, there was no require
ment that the clergy should be reordained,2 and yet
we know quite well, as Keble tells us,3 that " numbers
had been admitted into the ministry of the Church
with no better than Presbyterian ordination." Since
the Church was instituted and constituted together,
the order of the ministry must be held as of its integ
rity rather than of its essence, and in this sense we
1 Hooker, Eccl. Pol. III. 11. It should be recollected that the
seventh book of the Ecclesiastical Polity, as we have it, was not
written in full by Master Richard Hooker, but was written from
notes some sixty years after his death. The seventh book should
therefore be interpreted in conformity with the preceding part of
the work, and not the first six books, so that they may agree with
the seventh. Whoever manipulated the notes of the seventh book
was not precisely of the mind of the judicious Hooker.
2 Courayer, Validity of English Ordinations, 234 ff., 323.
3 Introduction to Hooker's Works.

126 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
may understand the words of the seventh book of
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity : " There may be some
times very just and sufficient reason to allow ordina
tion made without a bishop. The whole Church
visible being the true original subject of all power, it
hath not ordinarily allowed any other than bishops
alone to ordain. Howbeit, as the ordinary course is
ordinarily in all things to be observed, so it may be in
some cases not unnecessary that we decline from the
ordinary ways. — And therefore we are not simply to
urge a lineal descent of power from the apostles, by
continual succession of bishops, in every effectual
ordination." We may well ask what is taken as the sign of the
apostolicity of this Episcopal Church. Surely the
" greater works " are not visibly performed in these
post-apostolic days. Do we lay the sick where the
shadow of the Bishop of  may fall upon them as
he passes by ? Do we bring handkerchiefs and nap
kins from the Bishop of  to heal the sick ? Has
the Bishop of  the unique power to deliver over
one bound unto Satan? If, then, the tremendous
assumption of such a succession of ministry as shall
serve for an unbroken conduit for a substantial force
called grace gives no sign of itself, in gifts of healing
and tongues, in the immediate evangelisation of the
world, and in the conviction of the human heart, or
in any other mighty work, we may well ask ourselves
if it be necessary to hold to tactual succession and

THE CHURCH. 127
substantial grace, and if we do, what is the practical
outcome ? These theories, it is true, have been held
by good men, and I suppose still may be held, but no
kite of a theological formula should draw theories from
the upper air of speculation down into a statement
of creed. The one theory, of the ministry, demands
the other, of Sacraments, — and both are without a
scrap of external testimony.1 But Apostolic Succes
sion, as a sign of the historic continuity of the Church
and of its form of organisation, cannot be denied to
be a matter of fact in history. No better method
could be conceived of preserving this sign of conti
nuity than by the ceremony of the laying on of
hands. If the Church inheres in a hierarchy, pres
byterial, episcopal, or papal, then Biblical Theology
must be ignored, History must be ignored, the
phenomena of deep spiritual life in the dissenting
churches must be ignored. Finally, if this theory be
true, the late Dr. Newman was perfectly consistent in
transferring his allegiance from the Bishop of Oxford
to the Bishop of Rome, the Bishop of Bishops; be
cause a hierarchy instituted and constituted in and
by itself as the head of the Church and the source of
its religious life must be like shamanism, and the
Roman hierarchy a survival of shamanism.
1 Episcopacy cannot be set off by itself as an organisation or a
conduit through which grace flows. If in any way the validity of
the Sacraments depends upon Apostolic Succession, it is only sec
ondarily, and because Episcopacy is of the integrity of the Church.
I do not say of the essence. Of this integrity the laying on of
hands is a visible sign.

128 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
This section I will conclude with weighty words
from Professor Shields, of Princeton, writing on the
relation of the Apostolicity to the Unity and Catho
licity of the Church. "But what is the Historic
Episcopate ? It may mean very much or very little,
according to its definition ; and its definition will be
full or meagre, according to our point of view. At
present we can only view it in its external relations,
as a Christian institution appearing among other
Christian institutions and organisations. I do not here
pretend to define it per se as an ecclesiastical dogma ;
much less to give an inside view of its powers and
effects upon those who devoutly receive it. I shall
aim at a little more than a verbal definition of the
phrase itself. Christianity is historic. It has had
organic life and growth from the beginning. It was
more than mere sentiment or doctrine. It was a
Church as well as a gospel. It has ever been visibly
organised with fixed institutions pre-existing from
age to age until the present time. Among these
institutions is the historic Episcopate. Thus viewed,
it may be defined negatively and then more posi
tively. ... As we pass to a positive definition or
description we shall see still more clearly how com
prehensive is this great Christian institution. Not
only did its original structure involve congregational
and presbyterial elements, synagogues, and elders, as
well as bishops, but its historic growth has pervaded
the whole Christian world. As instituted at first by

THE CHURCH. 129
our Lord Himself in the work of the apostles, they
exemplified it in their acts and epistles, while plant
ing and training the first parishes and presbyteries.
Thenceforward, it extended over the entire Church,
through the centuries before the Council of Nice.
After the great schism it was continued in both the
eastern and western sections of Christendom until
the Reformation. At the present day on its Catholic
side, as maintained in the Old World, it embraces the
ecclesiastical principle of the Greek, the Roman, and
the Anglican Churches ; while on its Protestant side,
as developed in the New World, it has also em
braced the ecclesiastical principles of the Lutheran,
the Reformed, the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the
Congregational, the Baptist, churches. It has em
braced them actually, if not consciouslj'' or avowedly.
Without sacrificing the Episcopal principle, it has
incorporated the Presbyterial principle in diocesan
conventions and standing committees, and the Con
gregational principle in free parishes and vestries.
As good Congregationalism and as sound Presbyteri
anism can be found inside the American Episcopate
as outside it. And could our various congregational
and presbyterial denominations now come together
under the same stringent and elastic bond, through
bishops of their own choice, with their creeds and
usages untouched, they would do no violence to their
respective missions in this new age and country. No
other Church system is at once so large and cohesive.

130 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Not the congregational, because of its localising ten
dency and inorganic state ; not the presbyterial,
because of its brittle fragments and lack of central
ising force ; not the episcopal alone without the con
gregational and presbyterial institutions, with which
it must ever be in living connection. The three ele
ments as fitly joined in one organism make an ideal
unity ; and it is a unity which might become actual.
At the centre of our divided and distracted Chris
tianity we have before our eyes the spectacle of
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists,
in all but the name loyally held together in the
catholic faith of Christendom."
Because the Church is living, is dynamic, not
static, its characteristics, Unity, Catholicity, Sanc
tity, and Apostolicity are forces rather than aspects,
are operations rather than results. They cannot be
photographed, even in spirit pictures. They cannot
be measured by rule or weighed in a balance. Life
submits to none of these tests ; they are forms of the
Living One in His manifestation. If men endeavour
to force one of these notes, invariably they silence
another. Press Unity, and you destroy Catholicity ;
exact tests of Holiness, and you destroy Unity;
require formal Apostolicity, and you run the risk of
silencing the note of Holiness. They are notes of
the tones which God sounds, not men. It is the
persistence of the temper of primitive culture which
demands mechanical means of union with God,

THE CHURCH. 131
which, conceiving of Him afar off in space, strives
to construct for Him a substitute here on earth.
It is not the doctrine of earliest Christianity, and
though it were, it is not true.
VI. If we desire to teach the one Holy Catholic
and Apostolic Church, I believe we shall do better
to study the Christendom of the nineteenth century
than that before the great schism. As that sound
old seventeenth century divine, Jeremy Taylor, said
in one of his sermons, "From every sect and com
munity of Christians take anything that is good, that
advances holy religion, and the divine honour; for
one hath a better government, a second a better con
fession, a third hath excellent spiritual arts for the
conduct of souls, a fourth hath fewer errours, and by
what instrument soever a holy life is advantaged, use
that though thou grindest thy spears and arrows at
the forges of the Philistines ; knowing thou hast no
master but Christ, no religion but the Christian,
no rule but the Scriptures, and the laws and right
reason, other things that are helps are to be used
accordingly." 1 The Unitarians stand for the prin
ciple of humaneness in Christianity, and this is the
profoundest significance of the Incarnation. For the
more part they dissent from our dogma, and not
from faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They also
demand that their hope should be reasonable, relig
ious, and holy. If we would break down the middle
1 Christian Prudence, Works, II. 287.

132 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
wall of partition between us, we must emphasise this
principle. The Presbyterians stand for the principle
of personal righteousness. Let us heed their cry.
The Baptists demand a reality of religious life and
consciousness corresponding to the sacramental sym
bols. Be not heedless of their witness. The Metho
dists stand for the principle of a religion of the
affections, and if they went out from us, it may be
that we are lacking in this element of our teaching.
The Congregationals, or Independents, stand for
personal freedom in religious thought and ecclesi
astical organisation, and this gift of God we may deny
no man. We need also to regard the growth of Free
Masonry and kindred orders, of Societies of Ethical
Culture, of Secularism in all its shapes, of Socialism,
and of the Press ; and we should carefully consider
and reflect whether their existence and influence be
not due to something which the Church has left
undone. I say again that the Theology which you
here learn is necessary to your ministerial function,
but you must digest it and reduce it to practice in
religion and religious teaching. Convert your theol
ogy into sociology.
Thus far my purpose has been to demonstrate that
the true idea of God is the idea of Infinite Immanent
Love, that the Church is in some special way the
manifestation or utterance of that Immanent Love,
which is Life. At no time more than the present
does the world demand that the Church shall fulfil

THE CHURCH. 133
truly her function as the organon of God. First of
all, then, the utterance of the Church to the World is
that human life in all its ways should be conformed
to the Divine Life. Now clearly, in that life there
is no room for the principle of self-interest however
enlightened. There is no room for competition and
covetousness as the law of trade; there is no room
for social caste and separation. The social problems
of the age call for your most earnest attention ; the
solution of them is to be found in your Theology.
All the works of human life, even buying and sell
ing, employment and labour, should be sacraments
of human brotherhood. Nowhere in the life of God,
as revealed in the earth-life of the Lord Jesus Christ,
was there a single enunciation of the law of self-
interest and of social separation, as a religious or
economic motive. Nowhere in the Beatitudes is
there a word concerning privileged classes and supe
rior natures. If, then, there be one thing which the
Church must take as its message from the very heart
of God to the men of the world, it is the principle of
love, self-sacrifice for the sake of another, as the very
condition of political, economic, and personal right
eousness. You are not to be ordained to get good
parishes. The world to-day, if ever, demands moral
heroism in the pulpit. In your hands is given the
power of the keys. Whenever you console a grief,
lessen a pain, elect a good magistrate, make a salu
tary law, or a good sewer, you open the kingdom of

134 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
heaven to those in misery and pain. Shall the Church
drop her keys of the kingdom into the hands of Henry
George, Frances Willard, and General Booth? The
Church needs men who submit themselves to be re
ceptive of the Divine, and to fearlessly utter His mes
sage. It needs men who are willing, at the price of a
momentary unpopularity, to rebuke greed, heartless-
ness, and self-will in the guise of Christianity. It
needs men who are able to inspire our social and po
litical conditions with the spirit of the Divine Life.
It will be your duty to teach the world that the good
Lord Jesus has not had His day, but that it is coming,
as Tennyson truly says. Although it may seem little,
yet we ought to be exultantly thankful that we can
say it, Christianity, the Church, has up to the present
time made a good beginning in this world. In gen
eral, the God-consciousness of Christian men is but
just awakening, dogma is becoming ethical. When
we learn to look beneath the letter to the spirit
which is Veritas, then schism will cease. When we
recognise that all authority lies in truth, in reality,
and not in Bible, tradition, hierarchy, or any stan
dard external to itself, then will the Unity and the
rest of the notes of the Church begin to be actualised
in the world of Time. Then shall the Word of God
be distinctly syllabled through and to humanity, and
then shall we catch the first glimpse of the true
" Peace of the Church."

THE CHURCH. 135
" Peace beginning to be
Deep. as the sleep of the sea
When the stars their faces glass
In its blue tranquillity :
Hearts of men upon earth,
Never once still from their birth,
To rest as the wild waters rest
With the colours of Heaven on their breast !
" Love, which is sunlight of Peace,
Age by age to increase
Till angers and hatreds are dead,
And sorrow and death shall cease :
' Peace on earth and good-will ! '
Souls that are gentle and still
Hear the first music of this
Far-off, infinite bliss I "

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS.

He who has yielded to temptation may indeed, by the repentant
feeling of which prayer is the expression, secure himself from
further yielding; but the tendency toward loss of self-control,
initiated by the first surrender, cannot be rendered non-existent by
any ex post facto act of contrition, though its operation may be
counteracted. And if the misdeed, as usually happens, has involved
others than the agent, its evil consequences must endure and ramify,
until they at last disappear through some natural process of equili
bration. No amount of repentance for lying can deprive lies of
their tendency to weaken the mutual confidence of men and thus
to dissolve society. No penance or priestly absolution can do away
with the persistence of force. Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, II. 464.
I think this is the authentic sign and seal
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow ; drops like seed
After the blossom, ultimate of all.
Say, does the seed scorn earth and seek the sun ?
Surely it has no other end and aim
Than to drop, once more into the ground,
Taste cold and darkness and oblivion there :
And thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy,
More joy and most joy, — do man good again.
Browning, Balaustion's Adventure.
For God so pardoned us once, that we should need no more
pardon. He pardoned us by turning every one of us away from our
iniquities. That's the purpose of Christ, that He might safely
pardon us before we sinned ; and we might not sin upon the con
fidence of pardon. He pardoned us not only upon condition we
should sin no more, but He took away our sin, cured our cursed
inclinations, instructed our understanding, rectified our will, forti
fied us against temptation, and now every man whom He pardons
He also sanctifies.
Bp. Jeremy Taylor, Sermon on Miracles of Divine Mercy,
Works, II. 348.
138

A dubious, strange, uncomprehended life,
A roll of riddles with no answer found,
A sea-like soul which plummet cannot sound,
Torn by belligerent winds at mutual strife.
The God in him hath taken unto wife
A daughter of the pit, and — strangely bound
By coils of snake-like hair about him wound —
Dies straining hard to raise the severing knife.
For such a sunken soul what room in Heaven ?
For such a soaring soul what place in hell ?
Can these desires be damned, the doings shriven,
Or in some lone mid-region must he dwell
Forever ? Lo ! God sitteth with the seven
Stars in His hand, and shall not He judge well ?
James Ashcrai-t Noble.
To the truly honourable man the Divine forgiveness of his sin
is the most pressing of all necessities because it is the primary
condition of real liberation from sin. . . . The act of forgiving
consists in God's making the sinner conscious of His own gracious
attitude toward him by actually realising it in his experience. The
sinner experiences, realises, becomes conscious of it.
R. Rothe, The Still Hours.
There is quackery in religion no less than in medicine, and mul
titudes give themselves over to it ; in the foolish hope that by some
merely outward application — some creed accepted, some prayer
said, some penance endured, some action performed, some church
obeyed — they can cure an inward disease. But nature is every
where protesting against such self-deception : and no man who
listens to her voice can abandon himself to such futile methods.
What he requires is that his disease must be cured, and not merely
covered up or condoned. George Harwood, From Within.
139

I have heard my lord say — That no equivocation should be used
either in Church or Law, for the one causes several Opinions to the
disturbance of men's Consciences : the other, long and tedious
suits to the disturbance of men's private Affairs : and both do
oftentimes ruine and impoverish the State.
Life of Wm. Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret,
Duchess of Newcastle, a.d. 1667.
140

SYNOPSIS.
Introduction :
The relation of the Forgiveness of Sins to the purpose of
the Church. Actual vs. forensic forgiveness.
Comparative Religion :
I. — Theories of Forgiveness of Sins in folk-faith.
a. The appeasement of an angry, evil, or non-moral
deity. Origin of commercial theories of forgive
ness. The idea of fate and of fear as a religious
motive.
6. The substitution of another to bear the penalty of sin :
the scapegoat theory in its various forms ; sin-eat
ing ; the worship of the sacrificial victim ; the
divine scapegoat in Jewish theory, in the Norse
Voluspa, and in the Prometheus Bound ; the bear
ing of this theory upon pessimism and the problem
of Pain ; the survivals of the scapegoat and sub
stitutionary theory in modern Theology.
Biblical Theology:
II. — An examination of the New Testament shows that the
purpose and work of Jesus is to remove sins, conse
quently their penalty. Significance of the symbol of
the lamb. The New Testament doctrine of ransom
an ethical doctrine ; its relation to the true idea of
God and to the office of the Church. Was the death
of Jesus a penal satisfaction, a commercial substi
tution ?
Traditional Theology :
III. — In the evolution of Christian Theology survivals of folk-
faith have hindered a full reception and free develop
ment of the teaching of Jesus concerning forgiveness.
But Christian Theologians have not been altogether
without moments of insight into this truth. The
141

opinion of Irenaeus, of Origen, of Justin Martyr, of
Tertullian, and of Anselm. Ritschl's Criticism of the
Anselmic Theory of the Atonement. Further criti
cisms of this theory ; the utility of having a clearly
defined system of the Atonement; the mistake of
beginning Theology with the fall ; survival of pagan
ism.
Practical Aspect :
IV. — a. Turning again to the constructive portion, teach not
this doctrine with too much refinement of formal
Theology and method.
b. Further consideration of fear as a motive to righteous
ness leads us to believe that it belongs to a rudi
mentary stage of the development of human
character.
c. The true idea of pain, a coefficient of redemptive
process.
d. Evil rightly understood is perceived to be privative,
and sin to be generated by the will ; hence forgive
ness is rectification of the will.
e. The psychology of sin suggests the answer to the
historic question, "Cur Deus Homo?" The
essential union of God and man in sacrifice in the
sphere of Christ's mediatorial work. This gives
an ethical force which forensic theories lack.
/. This teaching stands the test of psychological analysis,
g. Of rational scrutiny and of
ft. Human experience. The relation of this actual for
giveness of sin to that fictitious forgiveness which,
founded on legal phraseology, is powerless to
answer the demands of life.

142

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS.
Gentlemen : —
The final form of the ecumenical creed is precisely,
" we confess one baptism for the purpose of removal
of sins." 1 This is the Church's antiphon to the
great commission of the Master. "As ye journey,
make all nations learners, baptising them in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost." 2 The Church of God is a school for learn
ers ; — perhaps it would be better to say with St.
Ignatius, — of those who "hope to begin to learn."
The Church is this because it is, as I have already
stated, a special manifestation of the Triune Love in
Whom we live, and move, and exist, Who is cease
lessly out-yielding Himself, that we may become one
with Him. The process by which that union takes
place is termed variously, Sanctification, Salvation,
Forgiveness of Sins. Because in the Church is the
distinctest consciousness of this redemptive operation
1 els &<peo-iv duapTiuv. We might translate this, "unto the
end that there may be a removal of sins." The difference is inap
preciable. 2 iropevOivres imdvrevo-aTe irdvra ra e8vt], k.t.X., St. Matt, xxviii.
19. 143

144 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
of God in His world, set forth by the Lord Jesus
Christ, the function or office of the Church in a
special way is the removal of the evil of the world,
of society, and the forgiveness of sins. Has the
Church forgotten that her mission is to heal the woes,
and right the wrongs, of the children of men ? Her
mission is a social, because an individual, work. It
is first of all individual. God speaks to humanity in
speaking to each individual soul. Externally, bap
tism, as I have said, is a sign of the Christian cove
nant, and it is a sign of promise. It is the sacrament
of regeneration, because it is the door of birth into a
new environment of prayer, praise, and all sanctify
ing influences, of an attitude of receptiveness towards
God, of removal of sins, which is the state of salva
tion, of deepening the sense of godliness, which is
the beginning of the consciousness of God; the
beginning, I say, for the Eternal is not a mere Begriff
of rectitude. The Church is really a new environ
ment, a supernatural world. The principle of life in
the natural world is self-interest, the principle of the
Church is unselfishness. The gospel of Jesus Christ
is the only true sociology, and we as gospellers should
study the questions of modern sociology that we ma}r
know how to apply the remedy of the gospel to the
ills of the body politic.1 The two worlds are there-
1 I recommend all our younger clergy to enter the Christian
Social Union of the United States. Particulars may be learned
by addressing Prof. Richard T. Ely, Madison, Wis.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 145
fore utterly different. We are born into the natural
world, with its fierce struggle for existence, but this
is a condition of temporary life. To attain endless
ness, we must be born again, into a new environment,
and must learn to conform ourselves to it. To
this end, Baptism wks ordained, that we might be
born into a higher plane of action,1 into a visible
organisation which is an institution, Christ-founded
and God-filled, of which the law is the giving up of
self. This renunciation is a condition of the for
giveness of sins. I freely admit that this has not
been the generally accepted interpretation of this
Article of the Creed, or that doctrine of forgiveness
most in vogue throughout all the nineteen centuries
of Christendom. A magical and not a moral opera
tion has been the notion of Catholicism and Calvinism
1 The Gorham judgment settled nothing for the doctrine of
baptism in the English Church, for the decision was based upon
a statement which the Privy Council attributed to Mr. Gorham,
but which he took special pains to deny. Mr. Gorham's real
position was undoubtedly that of conditional regeneration, in the
old traditional sense of regeneration. His bishop, Dr. Philpotts
of Exeter, possessed of the same traditional idea, affirmed that
baptismal regeneration is unconditional in the case of infants, but
conditional in the case of adults, thus implicitly affirming two bap
tisms, which is contrary to the Creed. Proby, Annals of the Low-
Church Party in England, II. c. 38. This confusion illustrates
the untenability of the notion of substantial grace, imparted or
infused, when brought to any scientific test, and it suggests to us
the necessity of examining carefully the full significance of the
baptismal covenant.

146 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
alike, and upon the Protestant Episcopal Church,
including within it both these mental attitudes, a
double portion of the spirit of this error has fallen.
From the Euskarian predilection for magic and
charms, from the mysteries of Eleusis, where " sea
surges dash all sins away," from the Mithraic tauro-
bolium, from the Norse wise woman, with her potent
philter in a horn scratched with powerful runes, we
have inherited the convictions that forgiveness of
sins is a magical, non-ethical, purely objective wiping
out of a score against us, and a settlement of our
account in Heaven's great ledger, by a free cancella
tion of a debt which could never be liquidated, and
charging the same to the account of another. In
this way, salvation is made a commercial transaction,
where still in the temple of Christian Theology, are
the benches of the moneychangers, and the seats of
those who sell doves. We ask those who press their
proof-texts of commercial redemption, To whom was
the price paid ; to God or to the Devil ? Indeed, we
are bought with a price ; but the price is paid to the
souls of the redeemed. The Good Shepherd brings
home the lamb upon his shoulders.
I. The evolution of Folk-faith reveals that it is the
disposition of men to shift upon another the results
of their sin. A re'sume' of the ruling ideas of sin and
its remission is easily made. The theories of sin, out
side the teaching of Christ, develop themselves in
three or four main lines.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 147
a. In his primitive condition man attributes evil as
well as good to one and the same divine power. He
thinks that with God might makes right, supposing
that God is altogether such an one as himself. He
imagines that God arbitrarily makes one vessel for
honour and another for dishonour ; one human being
for degradation here and eternal agonies hereafter;
another for piety here and the reward of endless joy
hereafter. As Mr. Browning's Caliban ruminates
upon his god, Setebos : —
" Making and marring clay at will ? So He.
'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel : He is strong and Lord.
'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea ;
'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so . . .
As it likes me each time, I do : so He . . .
Conceiveth all things will continue thus,
And we shall have to live in fear of Him
So long as He lives, keeps His strength : no change,
If He have done His best, make no new world
To please Him more, so leave off watching this, —
If He surprise not even the Quiet's self
Some strange day, — or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs grow butterflies : else, here are we,
And there is He, and nowhere help at all."
Perhaps Jacob Grimm is right in saying, " The idea
of the devil is foreign to all primitive religions for
this reason, that in all primitive religions the idea of

148 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
God is the idea of the devil." The savage is domi
nated by fear, — of ferocious beasts, of malignant
enemies, of growing old, of his medicine man and
witchcraft, and, above all, of some awful unseen pres
ence, and of vampires ravenous, and ghosts that
gibber and squeak. Dr. Judson from Alaska,1 and
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson,2 from the South Seas,
assure us that to-day primitive people are afraid of
the dark, and of loneliness, of the sky, and of the for
est, and most of all of something they know not what.
Fear, said the Roman sceptic, made the gods, and it
is an open secret that the concealed god of Rome,
whose name it was death to reveal, was Fear. Fear
must be the sentiment controlling man, when his idea
of God is that of an austere justice up above the
clouds, as an arbitrary, self-satisfying power beyond
the furthest fixed star, who makes and mars by " the 3 ,
eternal and most free purpose of His will," by " the
unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He
extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for
the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures."
Arbitrariness is but another name for chance. Chance
is the real devil of this world. Now, against this
fundamental error of the idea of a self-satisfying,
arbitrary God, the late Canon Liddon wrote : i " Sin
does not contradict an arbitrary law made by God, but
1 Report of Bureau of Education. 2 Ballads.
3 Westminster Confession, III. 6, 7,
4 Elements of Religion, 156.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 149
a law which "is eternal as the nature of His Being.
So old theologians said that were sin (per impossibile)
exaggerated sufficiently it would annihilate God."
Long has survived the appeal to fear to furnish a
religious motive. Protestant revivalists and Roman
Catholic " missioners " still find it useful. It is still
the short and easy method of making men professing
Christians. There is, however, in it this serious de
fect, that it is not the principle of the doctrine of
Christ. His teaching is that the conditions of future
bliss and woe are within the soul, that they belong to
its character. If through character we may be lost
then through character we may be saved. This is
not the same as to assert salvation by character. The
truth is fairly well expressed when old Omar Khay
yam sings through Fitzgerald's verse : —
" I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell :
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd ' I, Myself, am Heav'n and Hell :
" ' Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerg'd from, shall so soon expire.' "
The notion of God as an arbitrary, that is to say non-
moral, Power has been preserved in the ancient symbol
of the Divine Potter, which Egyptologists from Sir
Gardner Wilkinson to the late Miss Edwards have

150 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
noticed and made note of. In the mural pictures
belonging to the early dynasties, we see Knum, the
Divine Potter, shaping man upon a common potter's
wheel. Carlyle abundantly ridiculed this pot- theism,
as he named it, in Christian Theology, and confessedly
the notion does look like a survival from primitive
culture. Prof. Shedd, of Union Theological Seminary,
pointed out that in the Epistle to the Romans 1 the
proof-text of fatalistic pofc-theists, the figure of the
Potter and the pots, is of God as a Saviour, not as a
Creator, and that St. Paul is stating the liberty of
God to save some and ignore others, not from conse
quences of His creative and causative act, but of their
own self-determination. Also, Dr. Hodge says : " In
the sovereignty here asserted, it is of God as a moral
governor and not as a creator." Though we be not
willing to go with these reverend professors even thus
far in their theory of the arbitrariness of God, yet
we cannot but rejoice that supralapsarianism hath
experienced the lifting up of a heel, and that Jacob
Bohmen has been elected to a professorial chair.
" Ay, note that Potter's wheel,
That metaphor ! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, —
Thou to whom fools propound
When the wine makes its round,
' Since life fleets all is change ; the Past gone, seize to-day.'
1 ix. 21.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 151
" Fool ! All that is at all
Lasts ever, past recall ;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure :
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be :
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
" He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest :
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed."
With this interpretation of professors and poet, will,
I hope, vanish this proof-text of a devil-worshipping
element of absolute predestination from the realm
of Christian Theology. I cannot, although I have
already quoted so much, refrain from citing also these
words of good old Jeremy Taylor : " What is the secret
of the Mysterie, that the eternal Son of God should
take upon Him our nature, and die our death, and
suffer for our sins and do our work, and enable us to
do our own ? He that did this is God : Who thought
it no robbery to be equal with God. He came to satisfy
Himself, to pay for Himself the price for His own
creatures ; and when He did this for us that He might
pardon us, was He at that instant angry with us ?
Was this an effect of His anger or of His love, that
God sent His Son to work our pardon and salvation ?
Indeed, we were angry with God, at enmity with the

152 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Prince of Life : but He was reconciled to us so far, as
that He then did the greatest thing in the world for
us : for nothing could be greater than that God, Son
of God, should die for us : here was reconciliation
before pardon: and God that came to die for us did
love us first before He came : this was hasty love." 1
Further discussion of the subject of divine decrees
may be left to those individuals who, if Milton 2 may
be trusted, make this their chief topic of conversation.
Humanity in its childhood, supposing that God is the
Author of evil as well as of good, makes it a matter
of the highest import ; and his chief duty in life to
soothe the wrath and the evil disposition of God.
At first, whatever might be his real opinion, man in
the piety of his heart says what he thinks he ought
to say, — "whatever this God does is good." The
Yezidee, or devil-worshipper, will not allow the devil's
name to be uttered. Pretence is made that he is
good, is God, lest he should take revenge upon men.
The Greeks also from a sense of self-protection, flat
teringly called the Furies, the Eumenides, well dis
posed. In a similar way a crude notion of divine
sovereignty has attempted to persuade itself that the
evils of life are not evil. This shallow optimism,
however pious its motive, justly provoked the derision
of Voltaire.
If a primitive man has had some pleasure, he is
1 Miracles ofthe Divine Mercy, Works, II. 347.
2 Paradise Lost, II. 555 ff.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 153
afraid lest he may have thereby aroused the envy
of the gods, and, consequently, he hastens to
undergo voluntarily some pain as an expiation. To
avert the vindictiveness of these malicious super
nal beings he will devote what he most values in
order to placate them. His fundamental idea of
human life is that it has no right to pleasure or joy.
Just here we perceive the fountain-head of theories
of satisfaction in sacrifice and atonement, of puri-
tanism and the ascetic life, of purgatory and indul
gences, and, in short, of the whole theological system
of a commercial salvation : as though to God some
equivalent must be given for human happiness, and
He must be continually propitiated, and His anger
soothed. b. The next step, after shifting moral responsi
bility to another, is to transfer the guilt and penalty
of sin. Just here we believe that we can detect the
beginning of the idea of substitutionary sacrifice and
vicarious punishment, which in subsequent days has
played so large a r61e in Christian Theology. The
ante-Nicene Church1 held the doctrine of vicarious
suffering, not of vicarious satisfaction. Now vica
rious suffering is an obvious fact of life. Whence,
then, came into Christian Theology the large element
of vicarious satisfaction ? The historian, Gibbon, de
livers one of his sneers at Christianity when, speak
ing of Alboin's invasion of Italy, he adds in a note 2
1 Hagenbach, History of Doctrines, I. 262. 2 C. xiv. n. 14.

154 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
that the goat which the Lombards sacrificed they first
worshipped, and he adds, " I know of but one religion
in which the god and the victim are the same." In
point of fact, Gibbon convicts himself of knowing
very little about any religion whatever, for the idea
which appears to him singular is wellnigh universal,
although in highly developed religions it has been
somewhat obscured. In Mexico they made an image
of God out of maize or of dough, and after this had
been adored, it was distributed among the people.
In the parish of King's Teignton, on each Whitsun-
Monday, a lamb is drawn about in a cart and is gaily
decked. The next day it is killed, roasted whole in
the middle of the village, and all the villagers par
take. The origin of the custom having been for
gotten, a legend about a spring of water has been
invented to account for it.1 The singular aptness of
this survival in the Eastern Church deserves our par
ticular attention. In the " Order of the Holy Proth-
esis, as performed in the Great Church and in the
Holy Mountain," the loaf of the Eucharistic oblation
is set forth, made with a square projection, "seal,"
on the top, called the Holy Lamb. The rite proceeds :
Then the Priest takes in his left hand the oblations,
and in his right the holy spear. In remembrance of
our Lord, and God, and Saviour, Jesus Christ. (This
he saith thrice.) He then thrusts the spear into the
right side of the seal and saith, as he cuts, " He was
1 Ethnology in Folklore, by G. L. Gomme, 30, 125.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 155
led as a sheep to the slaughter." Lnto the left, saying,
" and as a blameless lamb." . . . And the priest, thrust
ing the holy spear obliquely into the right side of the
oblation, raises up the holy Bread, saying, " for His
life is taken away from the earth." The deacon saith,
" Sir, sacrifice." The Priest saith, while he cuts cross
wise, " the Lamb of God is sacrificed." . . . Then they
both adore reverently three times. Again, in the pro-
anaphora (before the consecration) of the liturgy of
St. Chrysostom, there is an adoration of the Sacra
mental Oblation, and these words occur in the prayer,
" For thou art He that offerest, and art offered, and
receivest, and art distributed, Christ our God, and to
thee we ascribe," etc.1 But the Latin Church adores
the Eucharistic food not until after the words of
consecration. Among English, Scotch, and Welsh
peasants, sin-eating, which was once a universal
custom, still in remote localities is occasionally ob
served.2 Though no longer anywhere in Christen
dom, so far as I know, is any one baptised for the
dead, yet at the funerals of these peasants to whom
I have just referred, poor people are hired to eat a
" sin-loaf," and thus to take upon themselves the sins
of the dead. The same custom of sin-eating for the
dead obtains in Turkestan.3 This sin-eating4 was an
1 The Primitive Liturgies, by Neale and Littledale, 106, 180.
2 Ethnology and Folklore, 117. s Golden Bough, II. 155.
4 Cf. Hos. iv. 8., and references below ; also Water of Jealousy,
Num. v. 11-31.

156 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
important element in the rationale of the sacrificial
meal of the priests, according to the Levitical code.
By the eating of the sacrifice over which the sins
had been confessed, and to which, by imposition
of hands, the sins had been transferred, the priest
was supposed to have taken into himself the sin or
the guilt of it. The theory was that the holiness of the
priesthood in this manner neutralised the virus of the
substance of sin. If, however, by the defective holi
ness of the priest, or from any other cause, some sin
remained unneutralised, it passed up to the high
priest, who once a year transferred it by imposition
of hands to a scapegoat.1 An American theologian
has extended this idea of pardon through sin-eating
by asserting that the Eucharist is the Sacrament of
Absolution. In this ancient theory and practice of
sacrifices do we rightly discern the beginning of the
origin of the revelation of a mediator and redeemer.2
The transference of guilt to a sin-bearer is a com
mon element of Folk-faith. When a Moor has a
headache he will sometimes take a lamb or goat and
beat it till it falls down, and he believes that the
headache has then been transferred to the animal.3
1 Willis, Worship of the Old Covenant, I. 43.
2 Professor Robertson Smith, who to me is not perfectly clear,
seems (Religion ofthe Semites, 330 ff.) to dissent from this expla
nation of sin offering.
3 Golden Bough, II. 149. Cf. Lev. xiv. 7, where a bird is let
dy to carry away a taboo.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 157
In Travancore, when the Rajah is very ill, a Brahmin
is brought in who embraces him and voluntarily
assumes the guilt of the Rajah's sin, saying, " Oh,
King, I undertake to bear away all your sins and
diseases ; may your Highness live long and reign hap
pily." The Brahmin sin-bearer is then thrust forth
from the country, to which he may never return.
Superstitious sailors in order to ease their ship of
misfortune will maroon one of their fellows. Jonah's
crew cast him overboard to save themselves, by offer
ing him a sacrifice to the angry god.
This custom of sin-bearing prevails throughout all
races in various forms. It has among Christian
peoples often been relegated to the realm of witch
craft. In 1615, Catherine Bigland1 was tried for
having transferred by magic arts a disease from herself
to a man. The Scotch Baron of Fowlis, being very
ill, in 1588, sent for a witch, who told him that he
could .not recover unless the principal man of his
blood should die in his place. At midnight, at a
place near high-water mark, a grave was dug and the
sick man placed in it ; the grave was then covered
with green turf, and the witch was asked who should
die in place of the baron. She replied that his brother
George should die for him. After this ceremony the
sick man was removed from the grave to his bed.
He recovered, but his brother George died. In the
Highlands it has been customary to wash a cat in
1 Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, 142 ff.

158 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
water which has been used for washing the body of
a sick person, and then the cat is set free to carry off
the disease. A further development of this thought
of sin-bearing led to the saining torch used by the
border troopers at the funeral of one of their fellows.
This torch was made from the fat of a slaughtered
enemy, or at least of a murdered man. Another
vehicle for the expulsion of evils, moral and physical,
between which primitive man does not clearly dis
tinguish, is a little boat. This is the favourite among
the islanders of the Archipelago. In China a kite
bears away sins to Shang-ti, the sky-god ; in Malacca
an ox is driven off into the forest for a tiger to kill ;
in Lhasa, the holy city of Thibet, the sin-bearer is a
man driven forth from the city with such rough treat
ment that seldom he survives.1 Annually was sent
from the sanctuary of Israel a goat devoted to Azazel.
Upon him were concentrated the sins of the sons of
Jacob. That Azazel was in early times a personifica
tion of evil, we may learn from an older document in
the Book of Enoch,2 where Azazel appears as the most
malicious of the fallen angels, the demon who taught
men the sins of lust and sorcery. By the archangel
Raphael this wicked spirit was bound and cast forth
into a deserted region. From the Book of Enoch it
appears also that Azazel filled in early Hebrew folk-
faith and myth the place occupied after the exile by
Satan. To Azazel in desolate regions the high priest
1 Golden Bough, II. 199. 2 Book of Enoch vii-xi.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 159
sent forth the scapegoat laden with the sins of the
people. The Talmud gives us to understand that the
scapegoat's death was caused by being pushed over a
precipice. This reminds us that yearly at the Thar-
gelia, the Athenians threw from the Acropolis a man
and a woman, that they might bear the sins of the
City of the Violet Crown back to the source of sin.
In a like manner victims were hurled from the
Tarpeian rock in Rome, and the legend of Tarpeia
was a subsequent invention when the true origin of
the custom in piacular substitution had been forgot
ten.1 The idea which originally was connected with
this form of sacrifice was the freeing of the tribe from
an impious member. After the original thought had
been forgotten, the doctrine of substitutionary death
entered into the religions of both Aryans and Semites.
In ancient Babylon a young man was selected, and
for a season treated as a god, and afterwards scourged
and crucified, to bear away the sins of the nation.2
In Mexico of ancient days, exactly the same sacrifice
of a human scapegoat was offered yearly. This wide
spread theory of pacifying an angry god by a gift
was evolved from the earlier notion of feeding the
god, a notion which held in its heart the essence of
all effectual sacrifice ; namely, self-sacrifice. But the
1 Cf. 2 Chron. xxv. 12 ; Hosea x. 14. It has been stated that
the late Professor Palmer of Oxford was slain by the Arabs for a
like sacrificial purpose.
2 Golden Bough, I. 226 ; Dio Chrysostom, Orat. 469.

160 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ethical notion was almost universally obscured, and
then supplanted, by the ceremonial rite.
When the Jewish high priest suggested that it was
expedient that one man should die that the whole
nation perish not, he simply proposed to make of Jesus
a human scapegoat, a propitiatory sacrifice, and a piac
ular substitution for the nation. This ancient folk-
faith of primitive peoples has survived in Christian
Theology to our own day, darkening the counsel of
God, and overshadowing the precious and profound
significance of the sacrifice of Calvary, degrading it
from a revelation of God's character into the ignoble
pacification of an irritated God, according to some
bargain made in the midst of Trinal Unity, at
" Heaven's high council-table," where the Eternal
Son agreed to assume all the guilt and punishment
for sins He had never committed, and by a cruel
death to bear them away in accepting vicarious
punishment. Some of the ante-Nicene Christians1
invented another, but scarcely more spiritual theory,
which is, that Jesus, by being sacrificed as a scape
goat to Satan, deceived the arch-fiend, who thereby
lost his power over all men. This common belief
appears in a spirited and picturesque passage of the
Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, a passage which
has been imitated by Milton in his description of
Satan quarrelling with sin.
1 Cf. Hagenbach, History of Doctrines, I. 260 ; Haag, II. 159 ff.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 161
All these scattered forms of folk-faith and myth
came, in course of time, to concentrate in a great
and splendid mythos of the woe of the world. In
the Norse Edda,1 Odin the high god sings : " I mind
me hanging on the gallows-tree nine whole nights,
wounded with a spear, offered to Odin, myself to
myself, on the tree whose roots no man knoweth
[Yggdrasil, the Cosmic Tree symbol]. They gave
me no loaf, they held no horn to me. I peered down,
I caught the mysteries up with a cry, then I de
scended. I learned nine songs of might, ... I got
a draught of the precious mead blent with Odreari
[Inspiration]. Then I became fruitful and wise, and
waxed great, and flourished. Word followed fast
upon word, and work followed fast upon work,
with me." Now, even if it be suspected that
somehow the tragedy of the Christian Gospels had
travelled North, and entered into this myth, just
as in some mysterious way the life of Buddha has
got itself enshrined in the Legenda Aurea,2 in the
chapter about Sts. Barlaam and Josaphat, it is clear
that the Gospel could have in no way had the shap
ing of iEschylus' great tragedy of Prometheus Bound.
The inner idea belongs to what had been felicitously
termed the Eternal Consciousness, for the ethos
which was there upheld for an ideal is that of the
son of a god bound with outstretched limbs upon the
1 Hava-mal, Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale,
I. 25. 2 Ch. clxxx.

162 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
jagged rocks .of the world, and beaten with hot sun-
rays and scourged with icy winds ; and the mythos,
ancient as the Summero-Akkadian days, when the
epic of Izdubar first came to birth ; and the ethos is
as far travelled, if you will have it so, as Dsilyi'
Neyani, the culture hero of the Navajo sacred dance.1
A modern poet makes much in his pessimistic verse
of this mythos of humanity, crucified by god, or by
fate, or by force, or by chance : —
" As once the high God bound
With many rivet round,
Man's saviour, and with iron nailed him through,
* # * *
So the strong god, the Chance
Central of Circumstance,
Still shows him exile who will not be slave."
But God crucifies man never. In sin it is man who
crucifies God ever afresh, by barring out the opera
tion of the Holy Spirit within the soul, grieving the
Holy Spirit of God whereby we are sealed unto the
day of redemption. There is the whole world's width
between the tragedy of Prometheus in the Dionysiac
mysteries, and the Divine tragedy of Calvary. It is
a mistake common to many students of comparative
religion to confuse the ethos, or ethical content, of a
religious custom or myth with its external moral
teaching, and to lose the mytlios, or the fundamental
1 U. S. Reports, Bureau of Ethnology, 1884 ; Sayce, Hibbert
Lectures.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 163
mythical content, in the details of subsequent develop
ments of the myth in the minds of those who had lost
its original motif; in a word, to lose the spirit in the
letter. In the study of Christian Theology, the appli
cation of comparative religion, as well as of the histor
ical development of Christian Doctrines themselves,
calls for careful recollection of these distinctions.
With no more reason can we trace the programme
of the Divine death of the Gospels to the Pro
methean myth, than the origin of Corregio's painting
of the Nativity at Bethlehem to that other divine na
tivity which the master hand of Phidias carved on the
pediment of the Parthenon. A noble Athenian be
lieved that after witnessing the drama of Prometheus
he should be ashamed to go home and nurse his own
petty griefs and vexations. Shall we in the shadow
of the Cross have no higher idea than that another
pays the price for us, another suffers in our stead,
another is our scapegoat? Jesus in His life-long
passion wrought a redemption, but published no the
ology of redemption. Nor did He, as Strauss suggests,
set Himself to fulfil in a spectacular way the pro
gramme of the twenty-second Psalm. All this is an
ancient error which has come down to us from the
highlands of History, confusing and confounding sin
and pain, assuming that pain is the substitute and
recompense for sin, and thereby generating a vast
labyrinth of satisfaction, and merits, and justification,
and indulgences, and of purgatory doctrines from the

164 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
pilgrimage of the Hindu Yama to Dante's Vision and
St. Patrick's Purgatory in Ireland, and suggesting
gross and grotesque notions 1 of soul's torment for sin
in this world and beyond it. One observation alone
is here necessary. If the true Christian idea of sin
be that it is wrong, is what is intrinsically unholy,
immoral, an offence against an absolute principle of
right, then clearly no such idea existed in primitive
culture. Primitive man has no sense of sin ; he has
only fear of penalty. His idea of forgiveness, based
upon this crude notion, has survived in Christianity
to so wide an extent as to have well-nigh obscured
the whole Christian idea of sin and its forgiveness.
Of one thing the idea of the divine immanence assures
us : pain and sorrow are not the manifestation of a
wrathful Deity, and therefore not a satisfaction in
sacrifice. Sorrow is not sorrow's fruit. Pain is joy
seen on the wrong side ; for it is the signal of life, of
that Life which strives within the world, within the
consciousness of each soul with groanings too large
for utterance. Pain, whether of body or of soul, is
1 Every religion which has evolved beyond the stage of fetishism
has its story of purgatory. The Rajah Judsishtar and Yama in
India, the Egyptian land of Amenti, the descent of the Assyrian
Ishtar, the Norse myth of the descent of Baldr, Odysseus, Er the
son of Armenius, iEneas, Perpetua, and Felicitas, the Monk of
Evesham, Alberic of Monte Casino, Hildergarde, St. Bridget,
Drihthelm in Neoght, Dante, Swedenborg, and Mrs. Oliphant's
Little Pilgrim are of the more familiar visitors to the world of the
dead.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 165
the symbol of redemption. Nightly looks down upon
the lands and waters of the earth a dead world ;
upon this side, at any rate, of the moon, life is
extinct; there is no pain. We turn to the Cross,
the supreme symbol of agony ; here is life. Never
forget that this is the significance of the Cross. In
the lands of the Eastern Church you would not be
allowed to forget it, because the Greek Christians
always place a slanting bar across the base of the
cross whenever they set it up in city streets, country
roads, or on church domes. This bar placed slant
wise represents the foot-rest of the Cross, which was
displaced by Jesus in the stress of his extreme agony.
Every pain is a step by which we mount to a higher
plane of life where existence burns more intensely.
If this step be not taken the soul falls back into dis
organisation and death.
II. I do not feel myself called to embark upon the
shoreless ocean of atonement and justification doc
trines. It will be enough to examine the teaching
of Jesus about the Forgiveness of Sins. That this re
moval was His purpose and work is evident from the
very name given to Him.1
St. John Baptist hails Him as the Lamb of God
Who takes away the sins of the world. He was the
Lamb of God, not as propitiatory sacrifice of sin,
because that the typical male lamb of the Levitical
1 St. Matt. i. 21, avrbs yap abaci rbv Xaov avrov dirb rQv dpiapTiQv
avT&v, not from the results of sin, but from sins themselves.

166 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ceremonial never was.1 Neither was He a piacular
Lamb of God in any fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy.
If you read that prophecy attentively you will see that
it alludes to nothing but the meekness and silence of
the suffering Messiah, and not at all to any sacrificial
character or act. Nor is Jesus the Lamb slain in
expiation for sin from the foundation of the world,
because that would imply eternally predestinated sin,
and make God the Author of evil. No ; but the
Lamb of God beheld by the visionary of Patmos in
the midst of the Throne is a symbol of the eternal
and essential self-outyield of God through His Son;
the leonine power of the Omnipotent, manifested
to St. John, and to him visible only as a lamb, only as
love.2 Dispossess your mind for the nonce of tradi
tional exegesis, and you will discern that in the New
Testament the Lamb is everywhere a symbol of love
and the beloved. The sign is congruous with the
thing signified. Therefore the profounder sense of
the Baptiser's misinterpreted phrase is, that Jesus as
the Lamb of God is the manifestation of the essential
character of the indwelling Life of the world, Who is
Eternal Love, God our Saviour, the Forgiver of Sins.3
iLev. xvi. 3-7; iv. 28-36; v. 6; xii. 6 ; xiv. 22, 12. In short,
the sin offering could be almost anything but a male lamb.
2 Rev. v. 5, 6. One of the elders said unto me, behold the
lion . . . and I beheld, and lo, a lamb.
3 This truth was perceived, if I understand his words, by the
founder of the Society of Friends. — Fox, Journal, 28.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 167
This infinite and eternal outyield of self, this inti
mate nature of Life itself, which is essentially expan
sive, abundant, outflowing, this sacrifice which is
named Love, does not necessarily involve pain and
death. x In finite beings this sacrifice may be at
tended with pain, because the outgoing self dashes
against limitations, but in the Infinite the outgo of
self is unlimited, unrestrained, and returns within
1 In the sacrifices of the Israelites the first idea was that of pre
senting food to God. Ex. x. 9, xviii. 12 ; Lev. iii. 11, xxi. 6,8,17 ff.,
xxii. 25 ; Judges vi. 19 ; Ezek. xliv. 3, 7, 15, 16, 29, 30 ; Jer. vi.
20 ; Amos v. 21, etc. Though fruit and drink were offered to God,
animals were preferred, perhaps because they were means of a more
patent transfer of life to God. From the peculiar construction of the
Hebrew in Gen. iv. 7 it might be inferred that an earlier notion of
sacrifice was primarily that it was propitiatory, and that originally
animals alone were held to be acceptable for sacrifice. In animal
sacrifice among the Jews the chief object was the offering of life, by
means of the blood in which the life was supposed to reside. From
the Levitical Code to the Talmud the slaughter of the sacrificial vic
tim was regarded as merely incidental, and it was performed with the
least possible torture to the animal ; no stress whatever being laid
upon pain and death in this sacrificial custom. The offering of the
blood was the matter of highest importance. This offering was not
for a substitution, but for a gift to God of representative life. This
may be seen by an examination of the ceremonials of the Passover,
the Day of Atonement, and the various bloody sacrifices. This idea
of the self-yielding of life, though not unperceived by the Jewish
doctors, was fulfilled by Jesus. All this view of the meaning of the
sacrifice of Jesus might appear to contradict Acts xx. 28 ; Eph. i. 7 ;
Heb. ix. 12 ; 1 Pet. i. 18, 19 ; Rev. v. 9, which have been assumed to
signify unquestionably a commercial ransom. All these texts refer
to the result of Christ's work rather than to the process. The

168 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
the bosom of God as His supreme jubilation. Our
Lord in His double nature felt both the Divine and
the human impulse to sacrifice ; for once He ex
claimed, "I have a baptism to be baptised with, and
how am I pained until it be consummated." x It can
not be denied that such being the significance of
the Lamb symbol, it was inevitable that the Lamb
Himself should be put to death. Yet clear as was
this issue at times in His consciousness, as in the
words just quoted, in other hours His consciousness
became dimmed. In the agony in the garden He
prayed that if it were possible the cup might pass
from Him, and on the cross when He uttered the cry
of extreme dereliction. But because He was the
supreme Revelation, the Parousia of shoreless Love,
of infinite self-surrender of that Life which is self-
subsistent, death was the inevitable goal towards
which He in His true humanity developed. Because
He is the utterance, the Logos of eternal Love, He is
indeed the Lamb of God, but His blood is not a
result, as Theophylact points out, was release from slavery, removal
of bondage. A complete discussion of the terms Xvrpuio-is, KaraX-
Xayn, and IXavubs would involve a dissertation upon Hellenistic
Greek. In Heb. ix. 16, 17, Siad-tiKi) should be translated "cove
nant," and 5ia0<?yiK:/ios "covenanter." Cf. Hatch, Essays in Bibli
cal Greek, 47. A covenant is a mutual agreement, and not of
necessity a bargain involving some ' ' consideration. ' '
1 St. Luke xii. 50, irHs avvixo/iai lois Stov TeXeffBrj. Hvvixopiai con
notes that tension of soul in one who is holding himself prepared
for extreme effort.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 169
symbol of a formal forgiveness of sins any more than
it is of a material fountain of cleansing. But it is,
if the sign fits the thing signified, the effluence of the
life powers of the Son of God, to vitalise .human
spirits, welling up within them as their consciousness
of the reality of God grows more distinct; a foun
tain which, as the hymn hath it, is
" of sin the double cure,
Saves from wrath and makes me pure."
That Jesus perceived His own mediatorial saving
work lay in the actual losing of life, is clear from the
words with which the account of the last Passover
begins: "Having loved His own which were in the
world, He loved them to the end,1 unto completion,
unto consummation of love, which is utter self-sur
render.2 The unvarying teaching of Jesus is that of the re
moval of sin ; 3 and in His parables He makes it clear
that our Father, God, never changes His attitude
towards us, because God is changeless Love. The
ology has termed this changeless Love, 'prevenient
grace,' and ' pardon.' Because God is always love the
pardon is awaiting acceptance, and implies change
in man, not in God. The Immanent God is par
don awaiting reception in the consciousness of the
soul of man.4 The gospel discloses that God is
1 els riXos. Cf. TeriXeo-rai, St. John xix. 30.
2 St. John xiii. 1. 3 &(f>e<ns tQv dp.apTiwv. * Is. lxv. 24.

170 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
seeking man, not that man is looking after God.
It cannot be too often repeated and emphasised
that this is clear from the parables of the Lost
Coin, the Lost Sheep, and of the Prodigal Son,
as elsewhere in our Lord's teachings. When Jesus
by miracle, which is parable in action, teaches His
redemptive and absolving work, He forgives sins
not by a fiction of a forensic declaration or by the
imputation of merits and the pardoning of the guilt
alone, as folk-faith and Roman law have led men
to think, but He absolves sins in fact; that is to
say, He removes them. Then Divine Love, which
is pardon, enters the consciousness of the Soul.
To the paralytic He says in effect, " In order that
men may know that I do remove sins, I remove
your paralysis; arise and walk." Nowhere does
He speak of Himself as a substitute for men. His
life and ministry were the ransom1 of many from
sins. This Jesus distinctly teaches.2 Into the apos
tolic development of the idea of Christ's work as
1 Xvrpov, literally means of loosing.
2 St. Mark X. 45, dX\a StaKovijaat Kal Sovvai ttjv ^vxyv avrov Xvrpov
dvrl woXXCiv. Note here first that Xvrpov, ransom, that is, means
of release, stands in apposition to SiaKovrjtrai., which means to min-.
ister, as well as in apposition to Sovvai ; consequently both are ele
ments of the ransom, and, second, observe Sovvai ryv ipvx^v, to give
the living soul, need not be restricted to the significance of dying,
as has been assumed, as though it were diroSovvai. For the term
covers the whole lifelong out-yield of self which uttered itself in
its consummation on Calvary. Weiss, Bibl. Theol., I. 101 n. 3.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 171
a Forgiver of sins, that is to say, a Remover, Re
deemer, I cannot now enter ; but I venture to beg
you to teach, upon this foundation that I have endeav
oured to uncover, a theology which is ethical, and
above all a doctrine of the Atonement which is ethical.
Jesus suffered, it is true, vicariously, but not substitu-
tionally.1 The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
distinctly puts aside all survivals of primitive folk-
faith whether Semitic or Aryan, and every notion of
Jesus as a propitiatory or substitutionary sacrifice for
satisfaction or for compensation.2 The old sacrifices
were, he says, but shadows having indeed some small
moral sanction, but now that the real ethical Sacrifice
is manifested and established, these old and defective
forms and' notions are removed.3 It is said that Jesus,
because He is the Son , of God, and thus is Infinite,
must suffer in order that by infinite suffering He can
atone or pay the price for our sins which, in their
culpability, are infinite, Godward. But if our sins be
infinite, Godward, then are also our good deeds and
1 Weiss, Bibl. Theol., I. 421, n. 2, 422, n. 4, 424, nn. 6, 7 ; Ritschl,
Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and
Reconciliation, 411. Hodge, Systematic Divinity, II. 470, in
order to escape from the objectionable theory of the equivalent
satisfaction, distinguishes between penal and pecuniary satisfaction.
But further on (II. 540 and III. 175) he, for other exigencies, flatly
contradicts himself ; first he repudiates and afterwards asserts a
grossly commercial theory of the Atonement.
2 Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures on Influence of Apostle Paul.
s Heb. x. 9.

172 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
virtues infinite; and since two infinities are equal,
they cancel one another. However, there is an ob
jection deeper than the dialectic to this theory ; it is
that God does not suffer. Whatever suffers can die
or become more perfect. Men cannot put on them
selves the merits of another, even of the Son of God,
as their remote ancestors masked themselves with the
face of the merciful rain-god, supposing that thus for
the nonce they became holy.1 Our Lord Jesus is the
Mediator of a better covenant. Avoid, therefore, ar
tificial theories of forgiveness and absolution, and
learn your doctrine of the atonement not from Justin
Martyr, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Bushnell,
or Magee, but from the New Testament ; for theolo
gians have been propounding a doctrine of forgive
ness which belongs to that stage of human develop
ment where the savage paints the corpse in order
that in the other world the deceased may appear
righteous, and where for a similar intention Clytem-
nestra covered the face of the murdered Agamemnon
with a golden mask, — if we may believe the late Dr.
Schliemann. III. We ought not to feel surprised that the theo
logians of the early Church were powerfully influ
enced by both their notions of demonology, and by
the tradition of the scapegoat, in their reception of
the redeeming work of Christ. Following the anal-
1 E. R. Emerson, Masks, Heads, and Faces, passim.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 173
ogy of the scapegoat, many of them1 taught that
Jesus was in His death a sacrifice and satisfaction
paid to Satan. Justin MartjT added,2 as it is only
right to say, that the teaching of Jesus was a power
which removed sins of men, and Irenaeus3 also
taught that the life of Jesus, meaning thereby the
life of our Lord, according as it was lived by example,
effected remission of sins. Irenseus goes on to say i
that the purpose of the Incarnation was to reveal to
man the character of God, in order that man might
live according to God. This doctrine of forgiveness
is repeated by Clement the Alexandrian. Origen in
a like manner was conscious of the ethical manner
of Christ's operation in the removal of sins of, says
he,5 "all those who not only believe, but enter
upon the life which Jesus taught, and which ele
vates to friendship with God and to communion
with Him every one who lives according to the
precepts of Jesus." The epistle of Diognetus, if it
belongs to the reign of Marcus Aurelius,6 is a strik
ing example of the early emancipation from the
notion that Christ's death was to propitiate an angry
God, and from the belief that the Divine Sacrifice of
Calvary was a manifestation of eternal wrath. " He
hated us not, nor bore us malice." 7 The idea of sat-
1 Buel, Dogmatic Theology, c. xvi. 2 Apol. I. 23.
3 Against Heresies, II. 22, 4. 4 V. 16, 2.
6 Against Celsus, III. 28.
6 See Bishop Lightfoot's Introduction. 7 Ch. ix.

174 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
isfaction or compensation for sin, in order to satisfy
a principle of justice, dimly implied in Justin Martyr,1
is liberated by Tertullian 2 into a moral and rational
factor. Tertullian applies the term satisf actio "to
such as make amends for their own sins by confession
and by repentance which shows itself in works."3
At this point is the beginning of the doctrine of
Penance, as mutual public acknowledgment of
wrong, exomologesis, was the starting-point of the
custom. It was Anselm, in his Cur Beus Homo, who
fixed upon the later Theology of the Western Church
the dogma that, although there might be other
methods of salvation within the resources of an om
nipotent God, yet, nevertheless, the Eternal Father
did choose the death of Christ to manifest His love
toward man ; and that since Christ was sinless, and
death is God's reward for sin, Christ earned by a sin-
less death a reward, or merit, and as He was infinite,
His merit was infinite. Human nature could not
have been restored to the favour of God, unless com
pensation had been made for its sin, that is to say,
its merit was complete destruction or else infinite
torment; but by the love of Christ, in a bargain
with the Father, His infinite merits were substituted
in place of the infinite demerits of mankind, and so
the price was paid to Justice, and the compensation
1 Dialogue with Trypho, 103.
2 Tertullian, De Prnn. v. et seq.
8 Hagenbach, Hist., I. 260.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 175
accepted. This is the Anselmic scheme of salvation.
This legal theory was the logical outcome of the idea
of a remotely transcendent God, with Whom our
relations are according to the provisions of the
Roman law. " That the satisfaction made to God
should be valid for men ; it was not necessary that
they should be aware of this meaning of the death
of Christ ; all that was necessary was their imitation
of the self-surrender, which was perfectly realised in
Him. The forgiveness of sins on the part of God,
which follows upon the satisfaction made, does not
come through the very person who made the satisfac
tion, but comes, so to speak, alongside of Him." 1
Anselm's notions of Divine ransom were undoubtedly
shaped by the Teutonic custom of Wergeld, blood-
money, whereby the criminal made pecuniary com
pensation for his crime. Abelard reasonably inquired
why it was that our Heavenly Father must needs
have taken this tortuous way of forgiving our sins.
He also observes that if Christ ransomed us from the
power of the devil, His redemption availed for the
non-elect only, because over the elect the devil had
never had any power. If this objection be good,
then that Catechism which terms our Lord " The
Redeemer of the Elect " might be improved in phra
seology. Further into this savage forest, selva selvag-
gia ed aspra e forte, it is not necessary to proceed.
1 Ritschl, History of Christian Doctrine of Justification and
Reconciliation, 34.

176 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Concerning the doctrines of the Atonement on their
Godward side, I am not called in question ; and if I
were, I should be incompetent to give a certain solu
tion. " How and in what particular way it [the sac
rifice of Jesus Christ] has this efficacy [expiation of
sin] there are not wanting persons who have endeav
oured to explain ; but I do not find that the Scrip
ture has explained it. We seem to be very much in
the dark concerning the manner in which the ancients
understood atonement to be made, i.e. pardon to be
obtained by sacrifices. And if the Scripture has, as
it surely has, left this matter of the satisfaction of
Christ mysterious, left somewhat in it unrevealed, all
conjectures about it must be, if not evidently absurd,
yet at least uncertain." 2 The history of the develop
ment of those doctrines, and likewise of theories of the
Sacraments, show how the vast and world-wide institu
tion of propitiatory and expiatory sacrifices inclines
Christian thought to take some formal method of salv
ing the conscience, and to substitute ritual acts for
moral redemption. Has this coil come from beginning
Theology at the wrong end ? I suspect so. Although
the first idea in Holy Scriptures is the idea of God,
for centuries past the world has been taught to begin
its religion with the idea of sin. Perhaps a survival
of the mental disposition of primitive man was the
origin of this error ; perhaps also, if we may say it
without failing in respect to one of the greatest
1 Bishop Butler, Analogy, V. 6.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 177
intellects in the whole history of the development
of Christian Theology, St. Augustine's exceptional
personal experience in unsaintliness had something
to do with the choice of this special point of view.
It has been accepted as an axiom that Augustine
carried into practice the theory of Plato, " Quidquid
a Platone dicitur, vivit in Augustino " ; but in this
special subject it is difficult to see Plato in Augus
tine's theory of sin and its remedy. At any rate,
Christian instruction has been made to begin with —
" Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, aud all our woe."
A candid student finds it difficult to understand
why emphasis was laid upon this narrative, rather
than upon that of the fall of the angels where the pre-
Christian Jews placed it, or upon the sin of Babel,
or upon the deluge, each of which is equally a pre-
Abrahamic, Chaldean antiquity. And so, for genera
tions, even innocent babes and sucklings have been
diligently taught as the first thing which they ought
to know, in order that they might be good, and go
to Heaven, — "In Adam's fall
We sinned all."
One word to close this section. The distinction
between Christianity and paganism lies in this, that
in paganism man is seeking after God, and in Chris-

178 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
tianity it is revealed that God is seeking after man.
To me, most of these atonement theories to which I
have alluded look very like man seeking after God.
It was not the Father God, but the Jews who
cursed Jesus ; it is not the Father God, but the
" father of lies," who destroys both soul and body in
hell. IV. a. How shall we teach Christ's doctrine of
the forgiveness of sins? Hitherto much mischief has
arisen from too much method. The ground of sin,
reatus, peccatum, culpa, poena, original sin, actual sin,
guilt, and penalty, have been harmfully sundered. It
is dangerous to dissect a living man, and vivisection
of the soul always makes mischief in Theology. Let
us cease to seek for precision by this method of
anatomy. Original sin is a fact. Original righteous
ness is equally a fact. Original sin is something
which no one who has observed the result of habit in
shaping the will and moulding the character that pass
from parent to child, would ever think of denying ;
but to take up the words of the Ninth Article of
Religion, and say, in the old traditional sense, that
this of itself is guilt, that these inherited tendencies
are subject to full moral responsibility, and that in
this way they deserve God's wrath and damnation, is
nothing less than to go straight against the Lord
Jesus' rebuke of that very theory of primitive culture
which had been revived by the Jews in the case of
the man born blind. The words of our Lord were :

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 179
" Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but
that the works of God should be made manifest in
him."1 In a sense profoundly true, sins, whether
hereditary or actual, guilt and penalty, are all bound
together in the bundle of life. Godward they are
identical. Time, which belongs to the condition of
human thought, may separate them through the
human apprehension, yet in Eternity they are one.
b. Sin is its own terrible penalty, and the penalty
of sin is sin, an awful impetus of degeneracy,2 which,
if unchecked, goes down to death. It has been said
with approval that guilt is the fear of punishment.3
Better would it be to lay aside this sentiment of
primitive culture and say guilt is the anticipation of
the consequence of sin ; better still, that it is the sense
of self-degradation, the strong desire to sin again,
which the loss of God-consciousness entails. Liability
to penalty is a common definition of sin, but this is
the legal idea. In saying that sin is its own punish
ment, we find guilt to be liable to punishment
translated into terms of personal experience, which
teaches progressive propensity to sin.
c. There is a further lesson in our Lord's words
concerning the man born blind which is timely for
these days of pessimism. Pessimism doubts and de
spairs of life, because' it cannot solve this problem of
1 St. John ix. 3.
2 Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 97 ff.
3 Archbishop Seeker, Works, VI. 146.

180 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
pain in the world, and declares that our earth is the
City of Dreadful Night, whose sole gospel is suicide.
Even this consolation is denied us by Schopenhauer,
on the ground that self-destruction is an assertion of
the " will to live." For him the misery of life lies in
the " will to live," and the world is the " will to live."
How near was Schopenhauer to the mind of Christ
only to completely miss it ! The doctrine of Jesus is
that pain is an element of personal redemption. The
world is the " will to live," but to live aright. The
evolution of life is a grand manifestation of the works
of God as it mounts upward upon the steps of pain,
the world's great altar stairs that slope through dark
ness up to God, where the Hidden Love manifests
Himself in the cosmical process of Sacrifice. It is to
Richard Wagner that modern thought owes a debt
for having brought to its consciousness the almost
forgotten truth of the gospel, that pain is not a curse,
but a way of redemption. This is the answer which
St. Paul made for pessimists of the first century.
Creation is made subject to vanity, not wilfully or
arbitrarily, but by reason of Him who hath subjected
' the same in hope, etc. The old theories, which in
their doctrines of satisfaction confused sin and pain,
had nevertheless in their heart this truth, that pain is
an element in the remission of sins, in the redemption
of the body. It is, however, more an exponent than
a factor in redemption. As I have already said,
wherever in the world is life and growth, there is

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 181
pain. Pain, then, is the evidence of the stress of the
upward movement of life, of the conversion of material
to spiritual. Pain accompanies the forgiveness of
sin, not as a compensation or vengeance, but as that
birth-pang of which St. Paul speaks. The evolution
of the world is an ewige geburt. All progress in the
history of humanity has come from men of sorrows.
The secret of Jesus was to go to meet pain, to take
up the cross ; and the crucifixion is the highest ex
pression of infinite love. The Cross is the revelation
of the nature of the Eternal One. To the pessimism
of our day and of all days the Cross reveals the true
significance of suffering, " That the works of God
might be made manifest." Through suffering, Jesus
Christ, the leader of the drama 1 of history, the leader
of our salvation therefore, is perfected. The Supreme
Sufferer is the sinless sufferer, Immanent Eternal
Love manifested in Time; therefore it could not be
that He is cursed of God. Sin brings suffering, but
not all suffering is brought by sin.
d. Evil in the world, I mean cosmical evil, is only
privative. " Evil is null, is nought, is silence imply
ing sound " ; this is true Augustinian doctrine. Evil
results from finiteness, and it is the inalienable com
plement of present limitations. But when the will
takes up this negative, and, by what I may term a
psychological magic, transmutes evil into sin, then
1 dpxyy&s, Heb. ii. 10 ; xii. 2. cf. Vaughan in loc.

182 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
the quality becomes positive.1 Sin is not a substance
or thing ; it is not a poison or a dye. All Theology
founded on such notions veers away from the realities
of life. Sin is the quality, or the manner, of the
exercise of the will, which results in disturbance of
relations, and in an attitude of disfavour ; that is to
say, of dis-grace towards God the Righteous One. Sin
is a discord which wounds the harmony of the Divine
and human wills. The human will in Him, Christ,
made one, atoned, if you wish it, with the Father's,
" in which will we are made holy." 2
e. Sin deadens the God-consciousness by sunder
ing between God and the conscious soul. This sever
ance results in loss of perception of the good. By
sin we consequently lose faith in God and in man,
faith in moral perfectibility, if not even in moral
possibility, and in our divine sonship. Tennyson, in
his Vision of Sin, and Browning, in his Soul's Trag
edy, trace out this process of a soul's death. To
attain to God-consciousness we must have faith in
Jesus Christ, simply because that consciousness is of
the sort which is effected by the actualisation in
moral and spiritual existence of the individual man,
of the historic life of Jesus Christ.3 St. Paul teaches
1 duaprla nowhere in the New Testament has a negative sense.
— Keim, Jesus of Nazara, V. 408.
* Heb. x. 10, iv $ SeXypLan riyiaap-ivoi i<rp.4v.
3 Indeed, the doctrine of Justification by Faith, when unswathed
from its theological mummy wrappings, is found to be precisely
this rational truth. To this end was his Kivaais, humiliation. Every

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 183
that the man Christ Jesus is our Mediator, as Theo
doret says, iTravdpcoTrrjcras yap iftecriTeverev. This
truth has, from the survival of the pagan notion of
divine mediators, been in danger of oblivion, and so
the New-Testament doctrine of mediation has been
obscured by later theologians.1 If you are interested
in the study of the doctrine of the Atonement, con
sider it from this point, — Jesus the Mediator in His
humanity. In His whole life and death He is the
self-revelation, the visible image of the invisible
Saviour God; hence it is said that the destiny of
man is to live according to the life of God.2 Thus
God and man are at one in will and in purpose ;
they are united in practical consciousness, for God-
consciousness is no mere intellectual illumination or
mystic trance, but a sense of righteousness which
comes from living the Christly life. At its begin
ning it is written, " Ye shall be as gods knowing
good from evil," and at its end, " Be ye perfect, even
as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
/. Since sin is a quality of action caused by choice,
its fundamental relations to life may be defined.
Again, I say life is essentially appetite, desire, will,
love, — all phases of the one thing. Therefore sin
life must pass through the Christ-process, which is a filling up of
the Kenosis, albeit in a less perfect way ; in this He is our only
Mediator and Redeemer : a Mediator of a better covenant than that
of substitutionary and piacular immolation.
1 See Bishop Ellicott's Notes on 1 Tim. ii. 5, 6.
2 1 Pet. iv. 6, jfiv Kara Qeov.

184 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
may be described as life defective, or life distorted,1
which, you perceive, is the same as saying that sin is
love, or will, or desire, or appetite, defective or dis
torted ; for example, hate is love defective ; avarice,
love distorted. In his Lnferno and Purgatorio, Dante
has fully and scientifically illustrated this theory of
sin. Love he symbolises by warmth and fire, the
want of love by torpor and cold. Those who had
sinned by love distorted are tormented with flames,
those by love defective are tortured with cold and ice.
The arch-traitor is the farthest away from God, and
at the point of indifference, the place of intensest
cold. And the love of God which to the sinners is
pain, to the penitents of purgatory becomes a cleans
ing flame ; and in paradise thrills the elect saints
with the warmth and ecstasy from the Divine Life
which is love. Jesus came to supply the life defec
tive, that we might have life, and have it more abun
dantly, to straighten the love distorted by justifying,
or, as we would say, rectifying it ; that is, making it
right or just. This is what it is to take away sins.
In both Greek and Hebrew the words for forgiveness
signify removal, and nowhere do I find them used to
denote a removal of guilt alone or of penalty alone.
g. God Himself cannot forgive sins which are
unforgivable since they remain in the soul. Yet
His love changes not, only we are not receptive of
1 A Theory of Sin, by Orbey Shipley, would be interesting to
read in connection with this.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 185
that love which, relative to sins removed, we name
pardon; the love which abiding in us we become
conscious of only as sins are done away. We may
with more ease forgive those who have wronged us
than those whom we have wronged. In some true
sense, it may be said that we find it hard to forgive
God Whom we have wronged. Only as we yield to
that Divine Life which presses against the soul,
" With scarce an intervention, presses close and palpitatingly ; "
only then are our sins forgiven, and the Divine Life
enters into the soul, and enters according to the
measure that we lift up the gates of the soul by meta
noia and lovingness. This assoilment is ethical, that
is to say, it is actual ; it means that the Life of God
has entered into the consciousness of man ; it means
that man's will is made straight, justified, and that is
the same as to say that he lives according to God.
The greater the metanoia, the deeper the soul realises
or understands the Divine Love ; " for to whom
little is forgiven, the same loveth little." 1 Aris-
tides, in his Apology for the early Christians, says
of them : " Those who grieve them, they comfort
and make their friends." 2 What Heathen or Jewish
1 St. Luke vii. 47. In this place the "for," 84, indicates not
the ground, but the effect of forgiveness.
2 It is curious that in the Septuagint the Hebrew word for
justice, which is usually translated by SiKaioo-ivn, righteousness, is
nine times translated by iXeniwo-vvrj, and three times by eXeos, lov
ing kindness, charitableness, and mercy.

186 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
moralist had ever before dreamed of such a sublime
charity ! It is God's charity revealed in Jesus. It
is the sinner who is to be pitied, not the righteous
who is sinned against. It is the sinner who, in the
quest of the Holy Grail, is lost in blindness, though
the chalice of Divine Life floats ever near him ; for
the blessedness of the Divine Vision is revealed only
to those who are pure in heart. The selfish cannot
grieve because they are blind and dead. The harder
hearted the sinner, the more jocund. Perhaps no
two men ever lived harder, narrower, and more self
ish during their career of success than Charles the
Second of England and Napoleon the First of France.
Millions adored them and would have gladly died
for them. They loved no man. No grief or pain
of sympathy clouded their intense self-satisfaction.
What place in God's providence have such souls?
Where in them is the place of one small seed of self-
redemption? Shall they as bubbles on the infinite
ocean of the Eternal Being burst, and their individ
ual existence be gone forever ? This is one of the
deepest of the deep enigmas of life, and it leads us
to turn with a sense of relief from Philosophy and
History to the Lord Jesus Christ. God seeks for
man. It is the sinner who draws from our Father
God, the " Tear of Divine Compassion " ; it is not
jealousy for his own glory.1
1 Hagenbach, I. 266. Origen, Comm. on St. Matt. vi. 14,
teaches forgiveness of enemies as one of the means of obtaining
forgiveness for one's own sins.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 187
" Alas ! alas I
Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once ;
And He who might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He which is the top of judgment should
But judge you as you are ? "
h. Abstractly speaking, perfect forgiveness of
sin would mean the restoration of things to their
pristine condition. In fact, forgiveness is something
more and something less. It is something more be
cause Divine Life, "our daily bread," has entered
into the soul's consciousness.
" Impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude."
The forgiven sinner, by the stress of his redemp
tive effort, has risen, as St. Augustine has some
where said, upon stepping-stones of his dead self
to higher things. The pardon itself is progressive
because the forgiveness is a process ; is, in short, the
removal of sin. Like Donatello of Hawthorne's
Marble Faun, the man who has passed through sin
and its forgiveness, though he can never again be
innocent, yet, at the same time, with a knowledge of
evil, he has got the knowledge of good, and has tasted
that gracious sense of pardon which accompanies
removal of sin and the quickening of God-conscious
ness. He has learned, also, that he is not a law unto
himself ; that there is a Power outside him not him-

188 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
self that makes for righteousness ; that forces for good
do mysteriously prevail in this world, else long ago
it would have passed away into nothing. An un
noticed sign of the existence of God pervading
the world, is the gradual but evident extermination
of evil from the world. We, individual men, repent
and abandon our sin, and we are assured that in con
sequence our relation to God is right. But what
becomes of the results of our sin, the ever-widening
circle of the wave of a bad influence ? If moral forces
be indestructible, as physical force is said to be, then
long ago the world must have become utterly corrupt
and filled with violence. On the contrary, the history
and the present conditions of human society demon
strate that the world is always growing better, that a
mysterious process of moral and spiritual improve
ment is going on. How can we account for this
removal of moral evil from the world, this extinction
of sin, save by the presence of the Immanent Holy
One, Who somehow neutralises the evils that men do
which live after them, and which they are not able
afterwards to remedy.
The immanence of God in His world is, therefore,
like the presence of the holy waters of Ezekiel's vision,
a presence at once vivifying and purifying. It is only
this which gives us hope, and can save a tender and
loving soul from utter despair. The beautiful idyl
of the gospel brings to us light as from beyond the
years, and hope profound as the fathomless love of
God.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 189
"Is not God i' the world His power first made?
Is not His love at issue still with sin
Visibly, when a wrong is done on earth ? "
Again and again by St. Paul is God named the
Saviour, and yet we forget Jesus is a Saviour, just
because He is the manifestation of the Saviour God.
From this thought man learns also that somehow he
has fallen back in the onward, upward movement of
the universe of that Hidden Love by Whom are all
things, through Whom are all things, and in Whom
are all things. The prodigal returns to his father's
house ; but though thankful for the father's love, the
reformed son can never be as if he had not once
wasted his substance in riotous living. The story of
Eden represents a psychical, if not an historical fact.
Sin means loss, irretrievable loss ; it means also incli
nation to further sin. In Jesus alone we trust.
Against the impulse to sin, which, by the heredity
of original sin is so strong within us, He fought and
conquered, He alone ; the brute inheritance He cast
away. Therefore so can we. Thus He is our soul's
Saviour, our only Redeemer, and in His will, ,as we
make it ours, are we made holy. Let us then against
a despondent pessimism, and an equally desperate
positivism, preach Jesus, Who in His holiness demon
strated moral possibility and human perfectibility, in
the removal of sins, and let us try to make clear what
is that first function of the Church of God. Magnifi
cent were the commission and power with which

190 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Christ endowed His Church,1 when He breathed upon
it and said, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost : whose
soever sins ye remit they are remitted unto them;
and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained."
Not by any potent word of sacramental absolution
are the sins of the world done away ; that word,
at its highest power, is but the assurance of a
hope. But the actual removal of sins and evils
is the serious and solemn work which has been
given to the Church to perform in this world.
The sorrows of human souls, their doubts, their
fears, their desperation, their grief, their moral blind
ness, — these the Church is bidden to remove. The
diseases, the pains, the social injustice and oppres
sion, the inequalities and the harshness of commercial
and social life, and all the manifold ills which in all
days make human life sad, — these it is the duty of
the Church to remove ; these, first of all, gentlemen,
in as far as you are endowed by the Church with a
power of absolution, it is your duty to remove. Too
long has the parousia of Christ been withheld from
the world by the persistence in men's hearts of faith
in survivals of magic and of mechanical religiosity.
Too long the triumph of the Church has been delayed
by the blindness of theologians and their indifference
to social wrongs. " 'Tis not by guilt the onward sweep
Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay ;
1 St. John xx. 22, 23. Cf. St. Matt. xvi. 19 ; xviii. 18, 19.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. 191
'Tis by our follies that so long
We hold the earth from Heaven away."
Let us then in our teaching reduce our Theology,
if I may so say it, to sociology. Let us strive to
make clear the moral, not magical, effect of the
Divine Passion, thus freeing God from the inability
to save His children, where the dogmas of scholas
tic theory have imprisoned Him in that marvellous,
complex, and perplexing edifice of a Theology whose
foundation is a substitutionary sacrifice, and whose
windows are materialistic theories of the Sacraments.

THE RESURRECTION.

Ef5os ydp ti p£ra^oXijs, Kal Trdvruv 'vararov, ij avdaraais 7] re tQ>v
Kar iKeivov rdv xpt>vov irepibvTuv en. irpbs rb Kpeirrov fiera^oXy.
Athenagoras, On Resurrection, XII.
The peculiar doctrme of Christianity is the Resurrection of the
body, not the immortality of the soul.
Edgar, The Gospel of a Risen Saviour.
Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground,
Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around.
Whate'er befell,
Earth is not hell ;
Now, too, as when it first began,
Life is yet life, and man is man.
For all that breathe beneath the heaven's high cope,
Joy with grief mixes, with despondence hope.
Hope conquers cowardice ; joy grief ;
Or at least, faith unbelief.
Though dead, not dead ;
Not gone, though fled ;
Not lost, though vanished.
In the great Gospel and true creed,
He is yet risen indeed ;
Christ is yet risen. A. H. Clough, Easter Day.
194

'AXXd d>vaei oiv tis y/uv, Bvrjrbs <pv<rei iyivero b S.vBpioiros ; ovSap.ws.
tI ovv dBavaros; ovSi tovto <bap.iv. dXXd ipei rls oiSiv oiv iyivero,
ovSi tovto. iyo) [lev, ovre oiv djvaei Bvnrbs iyivero ovre dddvaros. el
yap dBdvarov airbv cur' dpxys iireiroiyKei, Bebv airbv iweiroiyKei • irdXiv
el Bvnrbv airbv ireiroiyKei, iSbKei av b Qebs elvai tov Bavdrov avrov ' ovre
oiv ad&varov airbv iirolwtrev, ovre p.yv Bvyrbv, dX\d KaBuis iiravw irpoei-
p^Kapiev, SeKTiKbv dpuporipoiv Xva pifv iirl rd rijs dBavaatas, T-qpyiras
tt\v ivroXyv tov 9eoC, puaBbv KOfitanrai Trap airov ryv dBavaalav, Kal
yivyrai Qebs • el ff ai rpairrj iirl tc\ tov Bavdrov irpdy/xara, TrapaKovcras
tov Qeov, airbs ia.VT$ atrios 17 tov Bavdrov.
Theophilus of Antioch,
To Autolycus, Bk. II.
Sive ergo caro, secundum communem fidem, sive corpus, secundum
Apostolum, dicitur quod resurget, ita credendum est, sicut Aposto
lus definivit, quia quod resurget, in virtute resurget, et in gloria ;
et incorruptibile resurget et spiritale corpus ; quia corruptio incor-
ruptionem non possidebit.
The Preface of Rufinus to St. Pamphilus' Apology for
Origen, Routh's Reliquiae Sacrce, IV. 341.
Particularly the Resurrection of our bodies, restoring our per
fect manhood to us (a point wholly new to the world, which no
Religion had embraced, no reason could descry), was hereby so
exemplified, that considering it, we can hardly be tempted to doubt
of what the gospel teacheth about it.
Dr. Isaac Barrow, Works, II. 427.
195

SYNOPSIS.
Introduction :
Relation of this subject to what has gone before.
I. — Biblical Theology :
a. The Resurrection of Jesus.
6. The change in His body due to the victory of the
spirit.
c. Peculiarities of the risen body.
d. Relation between the Resurrection of Christ and
the Resurrection of the dead. The apostolic
reception of the idea of the Resurrection.
e. The Pauline development of the Resurrection.
/. Moral Resurrection.
g. Spiritual Resurrection.
h. Cosmical Passion and Resurrection.
The Resurrection an answer to Pessimism.
II. — Traditional Theology:
The development of this Revelation in Historic Christian
ity was from the first not fully received. The opinion
of Clement, of Ignatius, of Justin Martyr, of Epipha
nius, Arius and Eusebius, of St. Irenaeus, of Clement
of Alexandria, of Theophilus of Antioch, and of Hip
polytus touching the Resurrection.
III. — Comparative Religion:
a. Theories of folk-faith which became factors in the
development of the Christian Theology of the
Resurrection. Jewish literalism and material
istic speculation.
6. Early theories about the life of the ghost, in
Semitic folk-faith, in Norse legend, and in
mediaeval and modern superstition.
c. The Egyptian theory of the Resurrection of the
body. 196

d. Its influence upon the popular Religion and the
Theology of the early Christians, and its sur
vival to the present day. Its influence in the
development of the cultus of relics and of some
burial customs. Irreconcilable with the Pau
line doctrine.
e. Gross literalism in the early development of the
Theology of the Resurrection and the influence
of this literalism upon the religion of the
Middle Ages. Aquinas's attempt to develop
the doctrine of the Resurrection. The Resur
rection in modern folk-faith.
/. Some revivals of ancient and primitive theories
offered as substitutes for the Christian doctrine
of the Resurrection.
IV. — Practical Conclusion :
The ethical force of the true teaching of the Resurrec
tion, and its answer to the scientific and moral scep
ticism of the day. The Resurrection the necessary
result of the Immanence of God in human conscious
ness and in the world.

197

THE RESURRECTION.
Gentlemen : —
Because in God we live, and move, and are, because
the kingdom of God is as Leaven hidden in the meal
of humanity, because by forgiveness of sin that vital
ising Power permeates the deeds and the consciousness
of men, transforming them as leaven transforms, it re
sults that there is a Resurrection of the dead,1 as the
symbol of Constantinople correctly words it. It is
congruous that we should come, after determinating
what we mean by asserting the belief of a Triune
God in the Church, and in remission of sins, to the
Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. For such is
the logical development of human receptiveness, and
such is the eternal order in Divine operation. To
believers only, Jesus after His Resurrection appeared.
The sceptics of Emmaus did not discern their Lord
until after their understanding had been opened.
I. a. Just what was the nature of the Resurrection
of Christ? Of this we ought to have some definite
opinion before we go on to discuss the Resurrection of
the dead in general, because our Lord was " the first-
1 dvdaraais veKpCiv.
199

200 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
fruits of them that slept." His first proclamation of
His own Resurrection was under the figure of the
sign of the prophet Jonah,1 who was sacrificed in
order to propitiate a hostile power and yet appeared
alive again. After the first important peculiarity, —
namely, that He is the first to rise from the dead, — the
second point. to be noticed is that this rise shall be2
" after three days," or, on the " third day." This
is the next distinctive characteristic ; but there is a
much larger meaning which demands our atten
tion. b. In distinction from prevailing notions of the
Resurrection, as I shall point out later, our Lord signi
fies that His uprise will be to a higher plane of exist
ence,3 where there is neither birth nor death. This
characteristic of the Resurrection has not received the
attention which its importance demands. This tran
sition through death and Resurrection to loftier or
larger conditions of life Jesus calls 4 a baptism, and
the Resurrection life the new birth,5 because it is a
transition from a lower to a higher environment as
physical birth is conceived to be individualisation of
impersonal life. The Resurrection appears from this
teaching of the New Testament to be a transition,
that is, an ascent into superior conditions of existence.
Yet from our Lord's words, " Destroy this temple, and
1 St. Matt. xii. 40. * St. Luke xii. 50.
2 St. Mark. viii. 31 ; ix. 31 ; x. 34.
3 St. Mark xii. 25. 5 St. Matt. xix. 28, vaXivyeveala.

THE resurrection. 201
in three days I will raise it up," x and, " I have power 2
to lay down my life and power to take it again,"
it is evident that Christ's body is, before the Res
urrection, and afterwards, essentially the same, how
ever different the potencies and attributes. This
body of our Lord underwent a change which we
cannot describe, but of which the effects are definitely
recorded. It was a process beginning with the dawn
of His consciousness, and of this change the Trans
figuration was a revelation. With the quickening of
His God-consciousness those divine powers and oper
ations which, in assuming the limited and progressive
soul of a man as His organon He had relinquished,
He gradually reassumed as these same powers assimi
lated and transmuted the deathfulness of His human
ity. He increased in wisdom and in stature and in
grace Godwards and manwards,3 and learned obedi
ence by the things He suffered in the days of His
flesh.4 This growth in righteousness and in the con
sequent keen discernment of what is righteousness
with the expanding realisation of Infinite and Eter
nal realities, is spiritually the state of divine Sonship,
a sonship born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh
nor of the will of man, but of God,5 and as He is, so
1 St. John ii. 19. 2 St. John x. 18, 19, 4£ovo-la.
3 xfyiri vapd Qey Kal dvBpwirois, St. Luke ii. 52. Winer, Greek
Grammar of N. T. § 48, d.
4 Heb. v. 7, 8. adpi. distinguishes the ante- from the post-
resurrection body. 6 St. John i. 12.

202 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
are we in the world ; 1 that is to say, each man must
pass through the human experience of Jesus Christ
in His inner life. Now with the Incarnate Lord this
growth or process was the gradual victory of the
Spirit over the flesh, so that in some way the centre
of vital energy, of desire and will, was removed from
the exterior court of the body and of the soul, into
the inner sanctuary of the Spirit and the Sanctum
Sanctorum, where is the Shekina of God. This re
moval in one aspect is called metanoia. For this
reason it was said that it was not possible that Jesus,
Whose life's centre was removed into the sphere of
the Eternal within Him, should be holden of death;
because death is the victory of body over spirit.
This vanquishment of body by spirit was utterly con
summated in Gethsemane, and then and there Jesus
became distinctly and abidingly conscious that His
hour was come to pass up into that higher and inte
rior sphere of existence where alone He could perfect
His work of salvation. The death of Jesus was
necessary not only as a supreme manifestation of
whom He is, and whom He reveals, but also as the
means of transition of His Divine-human Person to
the next higher sphere of His humanity, — fore-
glimpse of that far-off divine event to which the
whole creation moves. For His risen Body, which is
identical in substance with the body of His Bethle
hem birth, is nevertheless dominant over limitations
of time, space, weight, impenetrability, and inertia.
1 1 John iv. 17.

THE RESURRECTION. 208
c. It appears that at times His risen Body was lu
minous,1 that He moved with the celerity of thought,2
that He passed through closed doors, through the rock
at the mouth of His tomb, and the swathings of His
dead body, stiffened as they were with unguents,
even retained somewhat the shape3 of His body, as
they lay in the tomb. Yet Jesus did not appear
unclad.4 He did take food,5 and He points out to the
disciples that a spirit, or ghost, has not flesh and
bones 6 as He has.7
1 St. John xxi. 4, irpaias Si fjSn yivoptivys ; Aquinas, Summa, III".
54, 3, et Supplem. LXXXII. 1.
2 Summa, III". 84.
3 St. John xx. 1-9.
4 St. John xx. 15.
5 St. Luke xxiv. 30, 43 ; St. John xxi. 13.
6 St. Luke xxiv. 39 ; St. John xx. 27.
7 So much has been made of this expression "flesh and bones,"
that a portentous structure of theology, the doctrine of the "Pre
cious Blood," has been reared upon it. The curious may read on
the subject De Ponte, V. 24 ; Suarez, III", torn. ii. ; Disp. XLVII.
3 ; St. Tom. Aquinas, IIIa. liv. 2. Aquinas acutely observes,
"Sanguis autem ille qui in quibusdem ecclesiis pro reliquio con-
servatur, non fluxit de latere Christi, sed miracule dicitur effluxisse
de quadem imagine Christi percussa." See also De Maistre, Soi
rees de St. Petersbourg, II. Appendix ; Delitzsch, Bibl. Psychol.,
passim; Bengel, Gnomen, Heb. xii. 24; a Lapide, 1 Pet. 1-19.
The theory is that the blood of Christ arose apart from His body
and is still separate, and beheld in heaven as the glassy flaming
sea before the Throne. The idea has arisen probably from a too
literal interpretation of the sacrificial offering of the blood wherem
was the life, and from too great stress laid upon the death of Jesus
as a propitiatory sacrifice. It is easy to see why Protestants hold-

204 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
d. The actual relation between the resurrection of
Christ and that for which we say in the creed that
we have an anticipation,1 is expressed in His own
words : " I am the Resurrection, and the life : He that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall
never die." 2 By the raising of Lazarus He uttered
the same gospel ; and yet a theology of transcend
ence has been virtually murmuring, " This is a hard
saying ; who can bear it ? " and has gone about to
invent a mechanical upraising for a spiritual upris
ing, — a power acting from without, instead of a
vitalising energy from within. The way the earlier
writers of the New Testament discuss the Resurrec
tion of Jesus is striking, and of deep significance.
They do not go about to prove the fact itself : for
them there can be no more question of its reahty
than of the sun. They are filled with its light and
splendour. Their attention is engaged in what the
ing such a theory of the Atonement as I describe in the last lecture
(see p. 175) lean towards this speculation and allow it to affect
their eucharistic doctrine. Scholastics, after Aquinas, insist that
for the integrity of Christ's risen body the blood must have been
entirely collected and placed in his veins. This doctrine is symbol
ised where you see in old paintings of the crucifixion angels holding
a chalice to catch the flowing blood. On the other hand, the legend
of the Holy Grail, imported into the West from Oriental folk-faith,
shows how ancient and deep-seated and persistently surviving in
the Teutonic mind was the anti-Thomist opinion of the permanent
separation of the body and blood of Christ.
1 irpoo-SbKtauev. 2 St. John xi. 25, 26.

THE RESURRECTION. 205
Resurrection reveals. In the light of Christ's Resur
rection they see light, and the world appears to them
as never before. The character and meaning of the
Resurrection, rather than the bare fact of a miracle,
occupy them. They do not search for evidences of
the Resurrection, because the Resurrection is in itself
to them an evidence of the largest significance. The
Jews had required of Jesus a sign in the natural
world, of His power and authority in the spiritual
realm.1 The apostles confidently gave the signs of
His authority and power in the spiritual world as
proof of His power in the natural world. What
caused this reversal of logic? The mental attitude
of the disciples had been uplifted to a plane where
they endured as seeing Him who is invisible ; they
had mounted to those high, shining tablelands of
spiritual consciousness and comprehension to which
our God Himself is sun and moon. The New Testa
ment-writers exult in the larger thought which had
come to them when Christ said, " Touch me not " ;
for while they flagged not in affection for the Christ
with Whom they had walked in the ways of Galilee,
Samaria, and Judea, they nevertheless beheld, as it
were, the Christ Who is now in the whole world, the
essential Christ Whose law of life became manifest to
them wherever they looked, Whose face, grown large
1 In one instance, at any rate, Jesus afforded this sign, the heal
ing of the paralytic (St. Matt. ix. 6), to which I have already made
reference. The sign had a peculiar significance.

206 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
as the boundless stretch of the heavens, looked down
upon them, — a countenance blessed and beautiful, —
" Aspettata in del beata e bella Anima." Also for us,
again, in these latest days, the ethical and cosmical
resurrection process is become proof J which is suffi
cient, clear, and unshakable of the historic uprise of
Jesus Christ from the dead. Unless, indeed, there
be a Resurrection, the world is a vulgar, paltry,
squalid town of banishment, " where," says one, " with
the shifting dust we play and eat ihe bread of dis
content." Straightway after the Resurrection, or
rather after Pentecost, the apostles proceeded to
develop the grand and inspiring doctrine of the
resurrection of the dead.
e. St. Paul began with asserting that Jesus is the
power of God unto salvation,2 a salvation from
death 3 through the rectification 4 of life, due to our
Lord as a revealer5 of what righteousness is, and
what is its operation unto deathlessness.6 The apos
tle goes on to declare that the inner force which
Jesus has liberated in the world is not a theory or a
doctrine, but a positive power,7 which makes men
saved, safe, sound, healthy, holy,8 and causes the
1 Renan, Les Apotres, 44. 2 Rom. i. 16.
s Rom. v. 18-21. 4 SiKaiao-Ls. 5 Rom. i. 17.
6 St. John vi. 39. 7 1 Cor. iv. 20, Svvaais.
8 Rom. i. 16 ; 1 Thes. v. 9 ; 2 Thes. ii. 13 ; 2 Tim. ii. 10 ; Rom.
iv. 25. Weiss, Bible Theol. I. 434, appears to have forgotten this
when he remarked concerning Jesus, "His Resurrection has not,
like His death, a significance as being the means of procuring salva-

THE RESURRECTION. 207
Resurrection of the dead. Hence St. Paul evidently
doubts 1 a uniform Resurrection of the dead ; he him
self strains every power to attain unto the better
Resurrection by living into the life of Jesus Christ.
Consequently, while St. Paul cannot be said to deny 2
the Resurrection of the wicked, he certainly does
contemplate a distinction between the Resurrection
of the just and that of the unjust; for, to go no
further, he said that every seed would have its own
body, and that one star would differ from another
star in glory, in the Resurrection of the dead. He
also distinguishes former resuscitations ; e.g. of the
widow's sons in the Old Testament from the better
Resurrection3 coming from Jesus, the First-fruits4
of them that slept. The evangelist in recounting
the miracles of Christ's raising from death Jairus'
daughter, the widow's son of Nain and his friend
tion." Without the Resurrection, the death of Jesus could not
atone. The death of Jesus upon which Paul laid stress was a
death unto sin ; this was the atoning death, of which the physical
death was the last number of the series. 2 Cor. v. 19 ; Gal. iii. 13,
iv. 4 ; Rom. viii. 3,
1 Phil. iii. 10.
2 It is not true for Weiss to say, II. 89, 1. 57, that a Resurrection
of the godless may not be assumed from the New Testament, for
see St. John v. 25, or that St. Paul does not know of such a Resur
rection, for see Acts xxiv. 15. The wicked, it is true, are already
judged, Weiss, II. 4, 18, n. 6, but, for that matter, so have the
righteous passed from death unto life.
3 Heb. xi. 35.
4 1 Cor. xv. 20.

208 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Lazarus, uses not the word meaning to resurrect, but
that which signifies to awake or to arouse.1
/. This better Resurrection is a transformation
of the corruptible and psychical into the incor
ruptible and pneumatical body.2 Lotze's observa
tion,3 is therefore strictly in the Pauline spirit,
when he says that a Resurrection of the same mate
rial body would mean only a continuance of this life
during the existence of the body which it animates.
St. Paul teaches a change and a transformation of
the body, but no loss of substantial identity and
continuity. The natural body is evolved in this life
from the Psyche (or soul), the heavenly body is
evolved from the Pneuma (or spirit). Thus much
concerning the Pauline psychology : more would be
beyond our purpose. St. Peter 4 likewise calls atten
tion to the spiritual body of the Resurrection of
our Lord, intimating that it belongs, like baptism,
to the process of the justification, which we have
seen to be the rectification of life. He also shows
that the energy, or dynamic impulse, to Resurrec
tion is essentially within man, and that it resides in
his pneuma, or spirit.5 It is clear that this spirit
ual Resurrection of Jesus is only the starting-point
1 Not dvdo-rao-is, but eyepais, St. Mark v. 41 ; St. Luke viii. 54,
vii. 14; St. John xii. 1. See St. Matt, xxvii. 53, for the eyepo-is, not
dvdo-racns, of the saints at the crucifixion.
2 1 Cor. xv. 43-52. 3 Microcosmos, 480. 4 1 Pet. iii. 21.
s 1 Pet. iii. 18. Cf. Weiss, Bibl. Theol. I. 229, n.

THE RESURRECTION. 209
and the impulse of the general Resurrection of the
body. It is, in fact, the first Resurrection, and men
tion is made of it in Rev. xx. 5. I understand that
it was concerning this spiritual Resurrection, which
is the ground and condition of the bodily Resurrection,
that our Lord spoke when he said of some that [now]
" they have eternal life ; . . . they have [already]
passed from death unto life," and that they will not
taste death because, at the last day, He essentially
having permeated them, will raise them up.1 It was
a misunderstanding of these words concerning the
spiritual process of the Resurrection which anciently
caused Hymenseus and Philetus "to err concerning
the truth, saying that the Resurrection is passed
already," 2 so that no other is to come ; and this obso
lete heresy has in our own day been revived by
rationalism, theosophy, and Christian science.
g. St. Paul after thus evolving the Christian idea
of the Resurrection of the dead, until it is presented
as a rise to a higher plane, by the out-working and
unveiling in Jesus of the hidden Love Who is death
less Life, finds that this wonderful reality has also a
subjective application which is quite true ; a death
unto sin and a Resurrection unto righteousness.
"Yea, the Resurrection and Uprise
To the right hand of the Throne — what is it beside,
1 Weidener, Bibl. Theol. of the New Testament, I. 109 ; Milli-
gan, Revelation of St. John, 226, note b, and Appendix II.
2 2 Tim. ii. 18.

210 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
When such truth, breaking bounds, o'erfloods my soul,
And as I saw sin and death, even so
See I the need and transiency of both,
The good and glory consummated thence."
h. There is in that golden letter attributed to
James, the brother of the Lord, a striking expression,
of which we could easily make too much, as probably
Jacob Bohmen did. St. James alludes to the " wheel
of nature," 1 which, if we might be allowed to use
Hegelian phrase, should be translated the Wheel of
Becoming, i.e. of continually coming into existence.
From a certain attitude, nature has seemed to man
nothing other than such a vast, terrific whirl. To
the. man of sensibility there is something even more
than saddening in this aspect ; the conflict in nature
is a bitter tragedy. The world of animal life is filled
with cruelty, ferocity, and crime. Violence could
almost be termed the condition of lower animal exist
ence. Everywhere the strong preys upon the weak,
everywhere there are terror and flight, rapacity and
pursuit. From the tiniest insect to the strongest
kings of the carnivora, each animal destiny is a
lifelong, incessant warfare. Everywhere nature, like
the Hindu goddess Kali, is smeared with blood and
cruelty. How much better is the aspect when we
mount from wild beasts to the higher stage of civil
ised man, nay, even to the region and history of
religion? Taking a generality familiar to all: At
1 iii. 6, rpoxbs rijs yevicews

THE RESURRECTION. 211
the beginning it seemed for the first six centuries
that Christianity was destined to cover the whole
earth, as the waters cover the sea. The Church
waxed rich and splendid and powerful, kings sat in
her councils and her word went forth into all lands ;
but in the seventh century arose a hostile power,
Islam, that rode forth in the name of the Prophet,
with the scimitar and with fire. Like a tornado or
the forest conflagration, it spread rapidly and irre
sistibly until itself became convinced that its inheri
tance was nothing less than the whole earth. But
Islam, too, was checked in its onward spread, and
for centuries its boundaries have not been enlarged.
Then rose the Papacy of the Middle Ages, the power
and the recognised authority. It ruled the kings of
the earth with a rod of iron, and broke them in
pieces like a potter's vessel. In the days of Gregory
and Innocent and Bonifaqe, men could imagine no
power likely to arise upon earth which could ever
check the sway of God's vice-gerent. But Protes
tantism arose and swept across Europe, sudden, swift
as a whirlwind, and the splendid fabric of the popes
melted away like cloud cities. Scarcely a century had
past when Protestantism, too, had reached its limits,
and to a standstill it came and at a standstill it
has since remained. With the fall of the ideal of
the rule of the Church arose the ideal of the rule of
kings; but that, too, has gone the way of human
theories, and, in our own time, the conflict which has

212 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
arisen is not over the throne of pope* or of king, but
it is the tense, hand to hand, silent, terrific struggle
of class with class. And as Nature in her blindness
is filled with fierce and deadly conflict, so history
demonstrates that human life, in all its various mani
festations, is but a succession of strifes, of bitterness,
and of pain : as one who would seem to have ascended
to the Olympian heights of calm intellectual mood,
and there in philosophic satisfaction had donned his
singing robes, chants to us, —
" Like a vast wheel that spins through humming air,
And time, life, death, are sucked within its breath,
And thrones and kingdoms like sere leaves are hurled
Down to its maelstrom ; for its wind of death
Sweeps the wide skies, and shakes the flaring suns,
So fast the wheel spins, and the glory runs."
The facts of history and of life, such as these,
have brought us in our own days face to face with
a practical problem of thought, with the riddle of
things which has been called " the mystery of pain."
This question which presses upon the teachers of
religion cannot be ignored as one of mere theory.
It is a fundamental question of living thought,
"Why is the world so filled with agony of mind
and of flesh?" It is a question which seems un
answerable, which, in melancholy minds of pessi
mists, has suggested the poetical idea of Weltschmerz.
The philosopher has suggested that it is inconceiv
able that God should have created a world in which

THE RESURRECTION. 213
these very conditions of conflict should not press
upon us, in which gloom and perhaps despair should
not prevail. Pain must predominate in the world ; it
is the potency of life and progress, and must equal,
if it do not outweigh, pleasure ; because of the
pain and lassitude which inevitably follow when the
nervous excitement which we call pleasure ceases.
The exhaustion of the nerve force in pleasure weak
ens the pleasure and becomes pain, so that it is diffi
cult to distinguish between the highest degrees of
pleasure and of pain. We weep for joy as well as
for sorrow; an extremely high musical tone causes
a sensation difficult to discriminate — is it pleasura
ble or is it painful ? " Our sweetest songs are those
that tell of saddest thought." The reason of this
is that pleasure may be characterised as indirect ; it
is relief from pain, and arises simply from the sense
of relativity. Hope, which is the mainspring of all
life, which is the spur to all endeavour, gives but a
momentary satisfaction in the attainment of its end ;
it is the pleasing anxiety of hope, which of itself is
a pain, that makes existence possible. Gratification,
satiation, would result in repose, stagnation, and
consequently in death. Finally, pain, by its very
nature, more easily than pleasure, enters into human
consciousness; hence pain, it would seem, must
always outweigh pleasure.
Now, even if we do not agree with Von Hartmann,
the statement of Mr. Hinton is hardly controverti-

214 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ble : 1 " A life from which everything which has in
it the element of pain is banished becomes a life not
worth having; or worse, of intolerable tedium and
disgust. There is ample proof in the experience
of the foolish among the rich that no course is
more fatal to pleasure than to succeed in putting
aside everything that can call for endurance. The
stronger and more generous faculties of our nature,
debarred from their true exercise, avenge themselves
by poisoning and embittering all that remains."
From this it is clear, that when we carefully exam
ine the contributions of philosophers towards a solu
tion of the problem of pain, we discover that they
do scarcely more than restate the question in terms
which are rigidly positive and pitiless. The ancients,
gazing at the great whirl of life, the relentless turning
of the " Wheel of Becoming," conceived it to be the
manifestation of the wrath of the gods, a vortex of
blind necessity, or the twirl of the distaff of Clotho,
who spins the fate of souls and spheres. But in the
vivid light of the riven tomb, St. Paul discerns that
this universe, which is the progressive utterance
of Infinite Love, is going through a vast passion,
which is the tragic drama of its time history, until,
through the awakening of the divine sonship in each
man, and the consequent spiritualisation of his body,
there will be a passage and a return of the universe
unto the spiritual sphere. If, therefore, we are puz-
1 Mystery of Pain, 47.

THE RESURRECTION. 215
zled by the enigma of life, and by that passion as
manifest in humanity as in nature, by the martyrdom
of man which saddened iEschylus and Buddha and
many a man since, we shall find the only solution
in the principle that St. Paul dwells upon as the
manifestation of the Resurrection.
The passion which is in the heart of Divine Love
reveals itself alike in the heart of man, in the proc
ess of nature, and on the Cross of Calvary.
" God draws a cloud over each gleaming morn, —
Would you ask why ?
It is because all noblest things are born
In agony.
Only upon some cross of pain and woe
God's Son may lie :
Each soul redeemed from self and sin must know
Its Calvary."
The epistle to the Romans contains Paul's rationale
of the struggle for existence, which, based upon the
principle of the Resurrection, is his solution of the
problem of the existence of evil, sin, and death. He
says, " I reckon that the Passion of the present is of
no account in comparison with the glory that shall be
revealed to-usward. For the earnest expectation of
creation awaiteth the revealing of the Sons of God.
For creation was subjected to vanity not of its own
choice, but by reason of Him who hath subjected it
in the hope that even creation shall be liberated from
the bondage of the corruption into the glorious free-

216 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
dom of the children of God. For we know that the
whole creation groaneth together, and suffereth birth-
pangs until now. And not only that, but ourselves
also, though we have the first-fruits of the spirit,
groan together within ourselves awaiting an adoption
which is the emancipation of our body. For we by
hope were saved." 1
I take these words of St. Paul to mean that the
Resurrection through Jesus is that liberation or
emancipation which he terms the redemption of our
body. I never think on these words of St. Paul
without recollecting the admirable exposition of
them made by Mr. Fiske in his Besting of Man, and
afterwards summed up in the Ldea of God : " We
see man still the crown of the universe and the
chief object of divine care, yet still the lame and
halting creature, loaded with a semi-brute inheritance
of original sin, whose ultimate salvation is slowly
to be achieved through ages of moral discipline.
We see the chief agency which produced him, —
natural selection which always works through strife,
1 A.oyl£op.ai yap Sri ovk &%ia rd iradyp-ara tov vvv Kaipov irpbs ryv
pAXXovaav Sb%av diroKaXvtpdijvai els yp.ds. y yap diroKapaSoKta rrjs
KTlaeias Tyv diroKaXvipiv twv vlwv tov Qeov direKSixerai. ry yap
piaraibryTi y ktIgis virerdyy, oiK iKovaa, dXXd Sid rbv virord^avra, i<p
iXirtSi Sioti Kal airy y Krlais iXevBepojByo-erai dirb rys SovXlas tt/s
(pBopds els ryv iXevdepiav rrjs Sb^ys rwv riKvaiv tov Qeov. otSapiev yap
Sri iraaa y Kriais avvarevd^ei Kal avvojSlvei &XPL T°u v^v ' ov P&vov 5^,
dXXd Kal airol ryv dwapxyv tov irveipiaros exovres, ypieis Kal airol iv
eavrois o~Tevd£op.ev vloBeaiav direKSexbpievoi, ryv diroXvrpoiaiv tov atbp,a-
tos yp.wv. ry yap iXiriSi iatiiBypiev. Rom. viii. 18-25.

THE RESURRECTION. 217
— ceasing to operate upon him, so that until human
strife shall be brought to an end there goes on a
struggle between his lower and higher impulses, in
which the higher must finally conquer. And in all
this we find the strongest possible incentive to right
living, yet one that is the same in principle with
that set forth by the great Teacher who first brought
men to the knowledge of the true God." J
Clearlier in the run of the ages is the Divine devel
oped in human consciousness, and the broken spec
trum of the One Light2 loses its dark lines. Modern
science, which some men have distrusted as utterly
godless, is making thought receptive of the most
spiritual teaching of Jesus. The hidden Leaven of
Divine Life is leavening the world, and the Church,
and the souls of men, is solving the dark problem
of evil, and is atoning pain and love. The strife of
the world is a redemptive process, an upward stress
of the Life that permeates and pervades star mists
and saints. Of this interpretation of God in human
destiny an apt symbol was set forth by the magic
hall which Merlin reared for Arthur's court : —
"Four great zones of sculpture, set betwixt
With many a mystic symbol, gird the hall :
And in the lowest beasts are slaying men,
And in the second men are slaying beasts,
And on the third are warriors, perfect men,
And on the fourth are men with growing wings,
1 John Eiske, Ldea of God, 165. 2 1 John i. 5.

218 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
And over all, one statue . . . with a crown,
And peak'd wings pointed to the Northern Star."
Finally, though we do hereupon, with the sanction
of Biblical Theology, affirm the Resurrection of the
dead as a result, or a moment, in that process which
is both individual and universal,1 because of the
nature of the Immanent God, Who is Love, Who is
Life, we no more deny that God raises the dead than
we deny that God creates us ; albeit by the process of
natural generation.
II. Although the apostles, and Paul in particular,
spread out such a grand exposition of the Christian
idea of the Resurrection, yet the sub-apostolic ages
made little further progress ; to that " fugitive and
gracious light shy to illumine " their receptiveness
was blinded. Indeed, owing to the survival of cruder
notions, and also to the influence of philosophy, there
was among the Patristic writers a distinct retrogres
sion of consciousness of the idea of the Resurrection.
The first epistle of Clement draws its argument for
the Resurrection from the worn example of the Phoe
nix, of pagan fable, and cites the Old Testament,
and not the New, in support of the doctrine. It
shows a complete misapprehension of the Resurrec
tion of those who are made alive in Christ. In that
homily, commonly called the Second Epistle of Clem-
1 It is from ignoring this truth of St. Paul's that Weiss finds
Rom. iv. 25 and vi. to be unintelligible, and denies by innuendo a
Resurrection of the wicked. Cf. Bibl. Theol. I. 437, 5.

THE RESURRECTION. 219
ent to the Corinthians, a materialistic theory of Res
urrection is boldly expressed as " in this very flesh." l
St. Ignatius, however, in his opinion of the Resurrec
tion, perceives no distinction between the flesh 2 and
the body.3 Tatian 4 points out that the Christian idea
of the Resurrection differs from that of the Platon
ists, Stoics, and Epicureans. With the Stoics, Tatian
conceives of a cyclic consummation,5 when the dis
persed particles of the body shall be recongregated,
and there will be a Resurrection of bodies.6 In this
theory of Tatian we perceive a survival of the theory
of the Egyptians. According to this view the world
will last only so long as enough shall have lived on
it to require, at the consummation of the cycle, all the
particles of matter to recompose their bodies. What
standing-ground will then be left for the bodies thus
resuscitated ? Justin Martyr had ideas which were
altogether as crude. In one place 7 he teaches a double
Resurrection, and in another 8 a single Resurrection.
His formula is the " resurrection of the dead," 9 and
it is evident that in one place by his reference to St.
Matt. xxii. 29, 31, he may not necessarily mean by
"the dead,"10 corpses. Epiphanius, the Orthodox, is
contented to say " resurrection of dead," u while
1 iv 7-77 aapKl Tavry. 'z <rdp%.
3 o-Zpia. See Bp. Lightfoot's Apostolic, Fathers.
4 c. vi. 5 avvriXeia. ° dvdaraais 0-iqw.rSv.
7 Apol. 81. 8 Apol. 52. 9 avdo-racris r&v veKp&v.
10 veKpol. u avdaraais veKpdv.

220 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Arius, the arch-heretic, and Eusebius, the semi- Arian,
stickle for " resurrection of flesh." 1 The theory that
the Resurrection of the wicked ought to be in the
flesh,2 in order that in the flesh they might suffer
appropriate torments, was certainly the popular Jew
ish opinion of that day, and gained authority from
our Lord's use of the phraseology then in vogue.
Though subtly it implies a dualism, nevertheless it was
adopted by many of the Fathers, and ran its course
through the Middle Ages, as may be seen in many a
painted window, carving, and mural painting in the
Gothic churches. These grotesque fancies of retri
bution were abundantly ridiculed by Rabelais and
Quevedo y Villegas. One has only to read over the
entertaining tales of the Legenda Aurea, and the
quaint dramas of the Middle Ages, to be impressed
with the certainty that these notions of the Resur
rection were nothing better than survivals of ancient
fancies, of Tartarus, of the Egyptian land of Amenti,
of the Hindu abode of the dewas, of the dusty subter
ranean kingdom of the Akkadian god Mul-lil, lord of
the ghost world, and, further back, of the ghost land
of primitive folk-faith.
St. Irenaeus 3 denies that man is essentially immor
tal. Immortality he takes to be the gift of God, Who
by some interior operation of the consecrated ele
ments of the Eucharist,4 will cause the particles of
1 dvdaraais aapKos. s Against Heresies, V.
z <r<£p£. 4 Against Heresies, V. 3.

THE RESURRECTION. 221
the body to reintegrate and be revivified. Perhaps
it was a belief like this which caused the Christians
of the Catacombs to place the Eucharistic food in the
mouth of the corpse before it was walled up in its
narrow bed. St. Irenaeus, speaking of the Resurrec
tion, uses the term " raising from dead." x In one
place,2 the thought of Irenaeus is that the indwelling
Holy Spirit does by His gifts transmute the animal
or psychical (commonly called carnal) into the spirit
ual body ; and again by his expression, " laver that
leads to incorruption," 3 he has been understood to
imply that Holy Baptism is the beginning of that
process which culminates in the Resurrection of the
dead. This we may accept as true, if the inward
and spiritual grace of man corresponds to the out
ward and visible sign. St. Clement of Alexandria 4
does distinctly join immortality with baptismal re
generation. Theophilus of Antioch of all the anti-
Nicene Fathers appears to have afforded to the
teachings of apostolic tradition the most considerable
receptivity. By analogy of the processes of the
natural body, Theophilus indicates what may be con
jectured of the Resurrection of the spiritual body.
Tertullian, who wrote a treatise On the Resurrection
of the Flesh, believed not in a Resurrection, but in a
resuscitation of the flesh, into which the soul is
recalled ; as you might see pictured in the sepulchral
1 eyeptris iK veKpQv. 3 Against Heresies, III. 17, 2.
^•Heresies, I. 10. 4 Paid. I. 6..

222 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
pictures and in the Book of the Dead of ancient Egypt,
where with a magic touch of the crux ansata, the
jackal-headed god Anubis calls back to the mummy
its soul, which is represented in the form of a winged
creature; or as the Greek Hermes Psychopompos
was fancied by the Neoplatonists and like mystics to
resuscitate the dead. The pictures on the walls of the
Catacombs show that these pagan beliefs had passed
over into Christianity. It is by a poor evasion that
Tertullian expounds a Paul's words, " Flesh and blood
shall not inherit the kingdom of God," to signify
only fleshly works. In this he had, however, the bad
example of what Irenaeus had written2 a few years
before. St. Hippolytus says that the unrighteous
will receive their bodies unransomed from the bond
age of disease and pain,3 but the risen bodies of the
godly will be not able to suffer.4 The gross judaising
of the Western theologians in the second century
appears distinctly at the close of Irenaeus' great work 5
where he says that this earth will be renewed in
order that the risen flesh may dwell in it. Since
Irenaeus omits to inform us what earth sinners are to
inhabit, we might infer from this and from other
passages 6 that he did not believe in a Resurrection

1 On Res. 50. 2 Heresies, V. 3, 9.
4 Against Plato. b Against Heresies, V. 36.
6 Against Heresies, II. 34 ; V. Cf. St. Theophilus to Autolicns,
II. 37 ; Tatian, Ag. the Greeks, XIII. ; St. Justin Martyr, Tryph.
V. ; St. Athan., Against the Gentiles, II. 14-16 ; On Incarnation,
III., also IV.

THE RESURRECTION. 223
of the unjust. From all this it is sufficiently evident
that anti-Nicene theology was hindered by survivals
of folk-faith from receiving the gospel of the Resur
rection. From the second century to our own day
the Idols x of the Den and of the Theatre, i.e. folk-
faith and philosophy, have dominated the thought of
the Christian theology of Resurrection.
III. a. Let us now turn and examine this folk-
faith. For the aspiration of the Jew at our Lord's
time, the land of Canaan sufficed for an everlasting
Heaven. The Jew was nothing if not literal. He
read the rolls of the ancient prophets, and from them
he understood that upon his own Mount Zion should
be set up the literal throne of the Messiah, and there
should be his Court and Hall of Audience ; thence
should emanate decrees levying taxes upon all the
nations of the earth for the benefit of the remnant
of Israel. The Messiah's Kingdom which the Jew
of that day expected was a veritable empire of the
world, an autocracy more sublime and opulent than
dreamed of by the Julian Caesars. It was said that
in the Messiah's day it would come to pass that
each Jew would have twenty-eight hundred slaves,
and that his other wealth would be simply beyond
calculation. To this Paradise on earth the good
Jew was to be revivified, said the Pharisee, and that
by means of some indestructible germ of life, some
part of the body which could not decay. The story
goes that a Roman emperor once demanded of a
1 See above, page 3.

224 SURVIVALS JN CHRISTIANITY.
Jewish Rabbi how it was possible that there could
be a Resurrection of the dead after their bodies had
long been completely dissipated through corruption
and decay. The answer given was that there is in
the body a bone called luz, the os sacrum,1 which is
indestructible, and which contains the germ of life,
retaining it to the Resurrection. Then the emperor
made a test; a luz bone was procured, it was boiled,
was put into fire ; with pestle and mortar, with sledge
and anvil, they tried to pulverise and destroy this
bone. No success. Even acids would not eat it.
The emperor was convinced. Some supposed that
the indestructible germ of human life resided in
some bone, in the shape of a small hair-like worm.
Descartes put the seat of the soul in the pineal
gland. Paley and Bishop Courtenay believed that
the mind utterly perished with the body, but at
the Resurrection God called it anew into existence.
1 It is possible that this legend about the os sacrum had an
Egyptian origin, because in Egypt the os sacrum was a symbol of
eternal goodness, as the permanent and imperishable foundation
of all things. This bone, together with a heart surmounted by a
cross, was often pictured upon Egyptian coffins, and in Egypt it
denoted a son devoted to his father. In Christianity the symbol
has in part survived in the cult of the Sacred Heart. The late
Dr. Lundy told me that he was one of a party in Egypt who had
procured a mysterious bundle of some mummified object. After
unrolling many a wind of cloth they found carefully preserved in
the centre an- os sacrum. See Horapollinis Hieroglyphica, II.
10, — Sidri SvairaBis iari rb rod fiiou Sariov ; and Sharp, Vocabulary
of Egyptian Hieroglyphics, 624, 625, 1012.

THE RESURRECTION. 225
To return to Jewish theology: the Rabbi Eleazar
asked, " And will not the righteous that die outside
the land of Israel live again ? " Rabbi Illaa replied,
"They will, by rolling" (underground to the land
of Israel). Rabbi Abba Salla Rabbah put forward
a very forceful question in regard to this, viz. :
" Will not the rolling occasion distress to the right
eous ? " Abaii replied, " Tunnels will be made for
them through the ground." Carna said, "There is
reason in the words, 'And thou shalt carry me out
of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place,'
Gen. xlvii. 30 ; for our father Jacob knew that he
was a perfectly righteous man, and if the dead out
side the land of Israel will live again, why should
he trouble his son to carry him out of Egypt ? The
reason is he feared lest, if buried in Egypt, he might
not be worthy enough to escape the distress of rolling
through the subterranean tunnels from his grave to
the land of Israel." a Such is the Jewish theology
of the Talmud, and I am told that to this very day
Polish Jews will bury wooden forks with their dead
in order that at the last day the dead resuscitated
may burrow their way underground from where they
lie to the land of Canaan, when they will emerge
to the surface of the soil.2 So the Christians of the
Middle Ages would bury in a campo santo, in soil
brought from the Holy Land (as now we use conse-
1 Kelhuboth, fol. Ilia.
2 Hershon, Treasures of thk Talmud, 285.

226 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
crated ground), and they would inter the corpse
with its face to the East, in order that at the Resur
rection the man might face the literal geographical
region whence Christ should come to judge. The
sun-myth has, I grant you, been worn to rags, but
this concept of the coming of Christ from the literal
East is nothing other than a survival of an element
of the solar myth. The early Christians, says Aris-
tides.in his Apology, forbade the burning of bodies as
sacrilegious, for it militated against the idea of the
Resurrection of the body. There is upon the earth
more than one race of mankind which will not eat of
" the sinew which shrank," nervus isehiadieus, because
they believe it to be the germ of the Resurrection
body.1 Shall we therefore wonder that in such an
environment, even the sweet reasonableness of the
Alexandrians was confused, and that Origen, as it
appears, thought that the Resurrection would be due
to the permanence of some organ or atom of the
body, and that the Resurrection body itself would
assume the convenient shape of a globe.
b. Back of this notion of the Resurrection, or
rather resuscitation, through the endurance of the
life principle in some incorruptible material portion
of the body, lies a more ancient concept. The patri
arch Joseph requested that his body should be em
balmed and carried to Canaan in order that he might
sleep with his fathers. This desire, so frequently
1 Religion of the Semites, 360, n. 2 ; Golden Bough, II. 126.

THE RESURRECTION. 227
found expressed in the Hebrew Scriptures, answers
to the actual Semitic folk-faith. It is not a figure
of speech. According to this faith the dead in their
tombs slept, and dreamed, and sometimes became
distinctly awake to the affairs of the world outside
the walls of their vaults. To this folk-faith at least
one reference occurs in the gospels.1 For the Jews
said that when the tribes were carried away to cap
tivity, sounds of weeping and lamentation were
heard, as they passed along by it, from within the
tomb of their great ancestress Rachel. The North
ern nations had a similar belief,2 that the dead dwelt
inside the barrows, the great family burial mounds,
and there in the darkest depth of night they awoke
from their slumber and held unholy revels. Later
on, the people of mediaeval Europe believed that
Charlemagne, crowned and throned in the burial
crypt beneath the dome at Aachen, was only sleep
ing and waiting to start up into life, and at the
last extremity to defend his realm against the Norse
men, who already in his lifetime had caused the
great emperor a foreboding unto tears. Barbarossa,
too, as we all know well, sits in solemn death
slumber, beneath the Kyffhausberg, while the watch
ful eagles circle round the mountain peak, and whis
per in the ear of the dead emperor the course of
events as Christendom passes through the years of
1 St. Matt. ii. 18 ; Jer. xxxi. 15.
2 Corp. Poet. Boreale, II. 4, 14, and elsewhere.

228 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
its history. Thus in the ancient Norse myth the
ravens of Odin, flying in circles about his head, spied
out the doings of the world and reported them to
the All-Father. Our own Western Indians will talk
to the skull of a relative, or they will whisper in the
ear of a corpse the message which they desire to
send to their dead ancestors. We ourselves speak
of our dead as " turning in their graves," when any
thing occurs which we feel sure would have dis
tressed them if still in life. Pins, we know, should
never be put in a shroud, for they are disagreeable
to the dead. In the city of Birmingham, England,
in the year 1886, a dead body was exhumed in order
that the pins that had been put in the shroud might
be removed, and the dead lie in comfort in the
grave.1 In Ireland, to this day, it is believed that
the touch of the hand of a corpse will cause milk to
flow. Among English peasants we are told that it
is not uncommon to seek the cure of disease from
the touch of a dead man's hand ; and it is notorious
in ecclesiastical annals that in Corfu the consecra
tion of the bishop is effected by the imposition of
the dead hand of St. Spiridion, the only extant
Nicene Father. From all this it is clear that the
primitive belief that the soul of the dead remains
attached to the body has never entirely perished out
of modern civilisation. Mediaeval Europe, driven
nigh to madness by wars of Investiture, Crusades,
1 Folklore Journal, V. 162.

THE RESURRECTION. 229
Papal Interdicts, the Black Death, and the Dancing
Mania, saw skeletons rise from their graves, and
with bitter satire dance the dance of death. This
same survival of the pagan theory of the persistent
continuance of the soul with the body is most admi
rably set forth in Robert Browning's poem, The
Bishop orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church,
where the dying man says to his sons : —
" I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest. . . .
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good, strong, thick, stupefying incense-smoke !
. . . Leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers . . .
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone."
c. It was the ancient Egyptian opinion that if the
corpse of a man could be kept from decay for three
thousand years, a cycle during which one of its sev
eral souls, the ba, completed a period of existence in
the land of Amenti, the ghost world, then the ba soul,
and also the ka soul, which had during this period
remained in the tomb, and must be furnished with
food and drink, would return to their former body
and revivify it,1 or in lieu of the body, the ba would
1 J. A. S. Grant Bey, Ancient Egyptian Religion; Renouf,
Hibbert Lectures.

230 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
take up with a clever portrait image and reanimate
it. It is to this belief that we owe the remarkable
realistic statues of earliest Egyptian art, the portrait
statue of the Lady Nefert, who died some six thou
sand years ago, and of Khaf-ra, who departed this
life three thousand six hundred and sixty-six years
before our era,1 leaving a large number of images of
himself in order that when, at the end of the cycle
of three thousand years, the ba soul returned from
the land of Amenti, it might not fail to find at least
one form to inhabit. This doctrine of resuscitation
was the core of the Egyptian theory. Their specula
tive theology was embodied in the myth of Osiris,
and, with their moral theology, in the Book of the
Dead. Both of these were concerned with the
revivification of the body. The lifelong purpose
of the Egyptian was by any means to attain unto
the Resurrection of the dead. The likeness of
the story of the passion, death, and resuscitation
of Osiris to the Christian gospel was recognised by
Tertullian, — and why ? Because Tertullian held not
the Christian idea of Resurrection taught by Jesus,
and rehearsed by Paul, but rather a superstition, not
yet in these days of ours abandoned, that the soul or
spirit is material. Hence Tertullian sees no impro
priety in styling Osiris the Egyptian Christ. It is
1 Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, 37. It is probable that
to this belief the Greeks owed their first Art impulse, for they de
rived their earliest Art from Egypt at this period.

THE RESURRECTION. 231
clear from his treatises J that Tertullian held the
Egyptian doctrine of resuscitation and not the Chris
tian doctrine of Resurrection. Tertullian's phrase2
is " with the restitution of flesh." 3
d. The Catacombs prove that folk-faith rather than
philosophy closed the consciousness, of the Roman
Church at any rate, against the Christian doctrine.
For lamps were shut in with the corpse in the grave,
to light the dead as they lay in the tomb, —
" To chase the spirits that love the night."
The Eucharist was placed in the mouth of the corpse.
From some epitaphs it is evident that opinions not
much differing from the Egyptian obtained also
among the early Christians. Here is one: "I adjure
all holy Christians, and thee, keeper of happy Julian,
by God and by the fearful day of judgment, that his
tomb may never at any time be violated, but may be
guarded even to the end of the world, in order that
I without hindrance may return to this life, when He
shall come to judge the living and the dead." 4 The
feeling that the Resurrection depends upon the preser
vation of the material remains survives in many a
form to this very day. The kings of Spain are dead
and turned to stone that they may not perish utterly.
1 De Virg. Vet., c. i., and Adv. Prax., c. ii.
2 De Prescr., c. xiii.
3 Cum Carnis Restitutione.
i Bennett, Christian Archeology, 256, 529.

232 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Witness the fear recently expressed that somehow
cremation might interfere with the Resurrection.
Strongly was the idea of the epitaph from the Cata
combs repeated in that famous epitaph whose male
diction Miss Bacon dared : —
" Good frend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare :
Blest be ye man y4 spares thes stones,
And curst be he y4 moves my bones."
From the half-realised conviction that somehow
life lingers for a long while, if not forever, in or
about the remains of the dead, has arisen the belief
in the sacredness of the tombs of the saints, the use
of these tombs for Christian altars, or, according to
the Roman Church, the making of every altar into the
tomb of a saint by placing relics therein. Harnack x
traces the development of the cultus of relics, and
points out the survival of fetish and magic elements
therein. To this survival is due also the belief in
the efficacy of the bones or relics of the saints for
miracle working ; among the native Australians the
charm to produce sickness is the yountoo.2 The
yountoo is a small bone from the leg of one man,
wrapped in a piece of flesh cut from another man,
tied with hair from the third man. The Talmud3
says that for " twelve months, as long as the body is
1 Dogmenges. II. 7, u. 2, 41, n. 2, 416.
2 King, Supernatural, 144.
3 Sabbath, xv. 26.

THE RESURRECTION. 233
still uncorrupted, the soul hovers up and down"; but
Maimonides said that for three days the soul hovered
over the body, and then if it found the countenance
unchanged flew away. In my part of the country it
is customary to bury on the third day, not sooner.
Then there remains for us to notice a contrary the
ory which arises from this same notion. This theory
is that the body is a clog to the soul, and should be
burned away in order that the soul may soon be
freed. This thought inquires, —
" Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Wer't not a Shame — wer't not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide ? "
According to this theory every effort to quickly
and completely destroy the body ought to be made.
It is, indeed, a common opinion among Greek
Christians, that in punishment for the sins of the
soul the body of one who has died excommunicate
simply becomes hard and black as iron, and will
never decay until its excommunication is removed
with the full rites of the Church.1 The modern
Greek's curse is, " May the earth not eat you " ; and
if he finds a corpse undecayed, it is to him a sure
proof that the same is a vampire who at night comes
forth from his grave to drink the life-blood of cattle
and of men.2 Vampirism came, we are told, from
1 Picart, III. 125.
2 Garnett, Christian Women of Turkey. The Greek called the
coffin sarcophagus, " flesh-eater."

234 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
the ancient Babylonians who had inherited it from
the prehistoric Summero-Akkadian religion, where
Mul-lil restrained the spirits of the dead from re
turning to the earth and devouring living flesh
and blood and so getting bodies again.1 It is plain
that from this came the popular superstition about
ghouls. The lasting bond between soul and body
implied a notion of a fleshly Resurrection, which
you may see emphasised in the Jewish Apocalyptic
books of the two centuries before our era. Now
against this theory of Resurrection St. Paul deter
minedly girds.2 The Pauline teaching is, at all
events, clearly this, the victory of the spirit, we
might almost without hesitation say the doctrine of
the transformation of matter, an abolition of dual
ism by the uplift of matter to a higher plane. Phi
losophy in the West, with its obstinate adherence to
an obsolete theory of atoms, and to the belief in the
self-subsistence and eternity of matter, coupled with
folk-faith in vampirism and the like, has survived
in the dogma of fleshly revivification, as the Latin
creeds show.
e. The Gnostic Christians, because of their orien
talism and tendency to dualism, revived the notion
of no Resurrection of the dead, and they asserted that
Christ's Resurrection was seeming only, docetic, and
1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures. Consequently rites of necromancy
usually involved the shedding of blood. Cf. Od. XI. 36, 97.
2 Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures.

THE RESURRECTION. 235
that human souls in general would be revived with
out a Resurrection. Both the Gregories, of Nazianzus
and of Nyssa, adopted spiritual ideas of the Resurrec
tion similar to those of Origen. St. John Chrysos
tom improved still further upon the idea of the
theologians who had preceded him. Indeed, he ap
proached the Pauline position ; but the disrepute into
which Origen had fallen caused a reaction from his
reasonable way of developing theological ideas. The
old Roman Creed, instead of saying Resurrection of
the body or Resurrection of the dead, both of which
are the doctrine of Christ, according to Scriptural
and primitive testimony, said " Resurrection of the
flesh." Rufinus went further and said, " Resurrec
tion of this flesh " ; and St. Jerome, not satisfied with
this degree of literalism, went on to reassert with
grossest sensual detail his faith in the resuscitation
of the flesh.1 Even Prudentius, in a hymn, exults
that, without the loss of tooth or nail, the grave
should cast him forth.2 Both Theophilus of Alex
andria and Epiphanius echo this notion of the early
stage of culture. St. Augustine, however, at first op
posed such crude literalism, and denied the resusci
tation of the flesh, stating a Resurrection of the body ; 3
1 Hagenbach, Hist. Doct. II. 91 ; Harnack, Dogmenges. I. 74 ff. ,
151 ff., 223, 232, etc.
2 Nee me vel dente vel ungue Fraudatum revomet patefacti fossa
ulchri. '¦ De Fide et Symb. , c. x.

236 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
but in later life in his Enchiridion1 he gives us a
grotesque picture of the Resurrection, suitable as
a text for the Etruscan gloom and terror of that
Last Judgment in the Campo Santo of Pisa, long
supposed to be the work of Orcagna. "From the
beginning no one in Christian theology," says Har
nack, "taught the naked immortality of the soul.
The Christian doctrine of immortality was bound
up in the thought of the Resurrection." In the
Middle Ages the great rationalist Aquinas made
some effort to develop from the point, where the
Fathers had left it, the Christian doctrine of the
Resurrection, but he was hampered by the Arabian
philosophy of the materiality of the soul, and by
Aristotle's doctrine of form and matter, as it had
been accepted by the Church. The Summa, as is
well known, teaches four principal qualities of the
risen body:2 clarity, agility, impassibility, and subt
lety. The doctrine of the soul's consciousness in
the intermediate state was in the Middle Ages
strongly emphasised and set forth by the effigies of
that time, which were carved with eyes open and
hands joined in prayer. The Bivina Commedia, after
the year 1300, must have made the life of the un
seen world very vivid to Christian imagination, dis
tinct like those glowing domes of incandescent iron,
when Dante first beheld the city of Dis against the
1 c. lxxxviii.
2 Summa Theol. I". 97, III". 54 ff. ; Supplem. 83 ff.

THE RESURRECTION. 237
dense blackness of the subterranean world. Modern
Protestantism represents the dead as though they
were unconscious, "Asleep in Jesus." Look at the
Byzantine or at the pre-Raphaelite paintings of the
dead Christ on His Cross. There you find no pietas,
with limp and powerless body, but Christ upright,
strong, with eyes wide open, that look past you into
the secrets of Eternity,, and a countenance vivid with
a mystic and solemn joy. It is the boast of modern
Spiritism that it revives faith in the dual nature of
man and in the conscious state of the dead, even
though of disembodied spirits. Nevertheless, epi
taphs and hymns still go on asserting the ancient
heresy of the soul's sleep in death, — a notion thor
oughly pagan, even if Athenagoras did broach it,
a notion without foundation in the teaching and
example of the Lord Christ. Nowhere does the
New Testament literally teach that death is a sleep.1
How slowly Christian receptiveness corresponds to
revelation ! How grotesque our survivals of primi
tive folk-faith, in that astonishing structure of Chris
tian theology where, —
" Fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves."
/. As substitutes for the Christian doctrine of the
Resurrection, there have been offered to modern
civilisation some theories of re-incarnation, trans-
i Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. 490.

238 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
migration of souls, and of Karma. These are, all of
them, revivals of a faith belonging to lower stages
of religious culture, and finding response in recep
tiveness of the same grade. Likewise we are ear
nestly bidden to content ourselves with joining, " The
choir invisible of those immortal dead who live
again in lives made better by their presence." Quite
noble, but quite as superfluously impersonal ! sounds
like an invitation to a Barmecide feast. Transmigra
tion is definite. The Jewish Talmud teaches it.
Cain is said to have had three souls: one passed
into Jethro, one into Korah, and the third into the
Egyptian whom Moses slew. The doctrine of Pythag
oras is well known. Plato fancied that souls of
very superior people passed into separate stars, and
his own epigrams upon the soul of his dead son
Aster are among the most touching and beautifully
humane bits of verse in Greek anthology.1 That
there could not always have been among Greeks of
the highest culture and spiritualistic temper of mind
a complete absence of the idea of the revivification
of the body, appears from the use which the Greek
dramatists made of the pathetic stories of Per
sephone and Eurydice, of Alcestis and Medea. In
deed, the Lesser Mysteries of Eleusis, to which the
Greek plays, which were the dramas of the Dionysia,
belonged, must in setting forth their peculiar mythos,
have laid stress upon some idea of the Resurrection ;
1 Bergk, Anthologia Lyrica, 109.

THE RESURRECTION. 239
and we can guess therefrom that the Greater Mys
teries enlarged and intensified the hope. Modern
theosophy endeavours to revive in Western Christen
dom the doctrine of Karma. It was the teaching of
Sakya Muni that to attain blessedness one must
gain extinction of consciousness of existence, at any
rate of individual existence. This attainment is to
be acquired by abandonment of the will to live, that
is, the will to assert self -existence.
" This is the doctrine of the Karma. Learn !
Only when all the dross of sin is quit,
Only when life dies like a white flame spent,
Death dies along with it.
" Say not, ' I am,' ' I was,' or ' I shall be.'
Think not ye pass from house to house of flesh
Like travellers who remember and forget,
Ill-lodged or well-lodged. Fresh
" Issues upon the Universe that sum
Which is the lattermost of lives. It makes
Its habitation as the worm spins silk
And dwells therein."
"Kill out ambition, kill out desire of life, kill out
desire of comfort," says Light on the Path, our mod
ern theosophic treasury of devotion.
" Then Sorrow ends, for life and death have ceased ;
How should lamps flicker when their oil is spent ?
The old, sad count is clear, the new is clean ;
Thus hath a man content."

240 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
According to this theory, it is by annihilation of the
will that blessedness is attained, for the flame of life
is blown out — Nirvana, such was the doctrine of
Gautama Buddha. Now this is the very opposite of
the teaching of Jesus. He says, in effect, " Acquire
the intensest personality, and will of such sort. as
shall re-incarnate itself, not by being born down into
the world in many successive earthly bodies, but up
out of the world in one spiritual, heavenly body, and
upon some loftier level of life." Strictly considered,
Karma is not at all a religious idea, but is merely a
statement of the theory of the permanence of physi
cal force.
IV. We owe thanks to Hegel for putting modern
thought in the way of receiving the Pauline teaching
of the Resurrection of the body. Hegel it was who
pointed out 1 the evidence of a process of Resurrection
in the history of humanity. The theory of the evo
lution of physical life absolutely demands our accept
ance of the fact of a Resurrection, as Robert Browning
shows at large in his poem, Easter Bay. And thus
the Resurrection becomes for us, as I have tried to
show, the only true solution of the mystery of pain.
In the Light of the Cross of Calvary and of the tomb
in the garden, pain and death are beheld as steps in
the stairway to a higher life. In pain and grief we
recognise a sure token of the glorious fulness of the
life to which humanity must eventually attain. The
1 Phil. Hist., 56.

THE RESURRECTION. 241
Resurrection gives us a meaning of life ; not that life
is, as Bunyan so beautifully puts it, but a pilgrimage,
nor that life is a probation, in the sense that God from
His far-off Heaven has reached down an arm and put
us into the world to try us, if perchance we may fail ;
but in the light of the Christian Resurrection life is
seen to be growth ; my own dim life should teach me
this ; life also is an education, God's word teaches me
that and God's world also. Nature, like some august
Sybil of gigantic stature, as Michael Angelo painted
her high on the shadowy vaultings of the Sistine
Chapel, is chanting the oracles of Eternal Wisdom,
who, reaching from one end to the other mightily,
doth sweetly order all things. Growth, says the cos
mic hymn, without Resurrection is impossible. Some
where there must be an open gate to the world, or
the procession of progress is stopped. Somewhere
the stream of life has an outlet into that immortal
sea that brought us hither, else, dammed up, the river
of Life would set back and form dead waters. In the
light of evolution, progress, and growth we lack no
certitude of the Resurrection of the dead. Individ
ual character, or soul, demands that there be a Resur
rection. Unless there be a spiritual uprise, unless a
mastery of spirit and its potencies for righteousness,
over flesh and sense, we could not increase in wisdom
and stature, and favour with God and men.
"Poor vaunt of life, indeed,
Were man but formed to feed
On joy — to solely seek, and find, and feast."

242 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
This is what I alluded to in explaining the process
of the rise in the spirit of the sense of divine sonship,
that manifestation of the sons of God for which the
creation is groaning in birth-pangs, the eternal birth,
a process which Pessimism perceives only as irremed
iable woe : —
" The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here where men sit and hear each other groan."
In the light of the first Easter morn the meaning
of agony in flesh and spirit is revealed to be the con
dition of the ever-continuing birth into the knowledge
of God, which is eternal life, because it is the identity
of truth and life. Knowledge, not existence, is the
description of eternal life which Jesus gave. Thus
it is that God speaks in the soul and through the
soul of man, and the word becomes flesh. Let us so
teach the Resurrection that its ethical import will so
vitalise the dogma, that men may comprehend that it
is something more than an historie fact about which
the Church labours to show that the testimony was
sufficient, something more than an historic fact which
was given as evidence that what Jesus said was true ;
but rather in the apostolic spirit, let us endeavour
to make men comprehend how the Resurrection is
a factor of human life and character, and how the
Resurrection of our Lord Jesus in the measure that
it is actualised in our personal lives becomes the
power unto a Resurrection of the dead. Thus life

THE RESURRECTION. 243
may be clear in its purpose and plain in its conti
nuity, thus that life of the world of nature, that inner
force that works in wondrous ways of unfolding, of
expansion, of dominance over matter and the trans
mutation of it, may be seen to operate in the world
of souls. The soul that grows strong in righteous
ness, the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ,
because it gains the victory of the Spirit, shall rise
from the dead, because it is not possible it shall be
holden of death. Finally, in the unity of the divine
process, we see how pain and death are always and
everywhere the inevitable transition, the resultant
Resurrection unto life. The revelation of God in the
world and in Christ shows us that
" As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead."
Nature therefore in the old sense of the word,
Natura, meant just this process of birth, and natural
science reveals to us that there is going on always
in the world a process of the victory of spiritual over
material elements, and of transference of the centre
of the output of energy from matter to spirit. From
that centre it energises forth, changing and control
ling all from its spiritual force centre, generating that
spiritual body which it is not possible should be
holden of death. Therefore we look for a Resurrec
tion of the dead.

ETERNAL LIFE.

The mere article of a future life is not in itself the test of superi
ority of one creed over another, for besides that it may be grossly
misconceived, the bare image of a futurity is nothing, and merely
shows a different condition of the popular fancy.
J. B. Mozlev, D.D., Lectures.
Now wherever a man hath been made a partaker of the divine
nature, in him is fulfilled the best and noblest life and the worthi
est in God's eyes that hath been or can be. And of that eternal
Love which loveth Goodness as Goodness for the sake of Goodness,
a true, noble, Christ-like life is so greatly beloved, that it will
never be forsaken or cast off. This life is not chosen in order to
serve any end, or to get anything by it, but for the love of its
nobleness and because God loveth and esteemeth it greatly.
Theologia Germanica, c. 28.
Wem Zeit ist wie Ewigkeit
Und Ewigkeit wie Zeit,
Der ist befreit
Von allem Streit. Jacob Bohme.
We think that the way of blessings and prosperous accidents is
the finer way of securing our duty, and that when our heads are
anointed, our cups crowned, and our tables full, the very caresses
of our spirits will best of all dance before Ark, and sing perpetual
Anthems to the honor of our Benefactor and Patron God : and we
are apt to dream that God will make His Saints reign here as
kings in a millenary kingdom, and give them riches and fortunes
of this world, that they may rule over men, and sing psalms to God
forever. Bp. Jebemy Taylor, Sermon, Of God's
Method of Curing Sinners.
246

Faustus. When I behold the heavens, then I repent,
And curse thee, wicked Mephistophilis,
Because thou hast depriv'd me of these joys.
Mephistophilis. Why, Eaustus,
Thinkest thou heaven is such a glorious thing ?
I tell thee, Eaustus, it is not half so fair
As thou, or any man that breathes on earth.
Faustus. How prov'st thou that ?
Mephistophilis. 'Twas made for man, therefore is man more excellent.
Marlowe, Tragical Historie of
Doctor Faustus.

247

SYNOPSIS.
Introduction :
The Christian idea of Eternal Life unique.
I. — Comparative Religion :
Three classes of theories of future life.
a. Transmigration or Re-incarnation.
b. Continuation, on this earth, beyond it.
c. Retribution, — vindictive, compensative, reforma
tory.
II. — Biblical Theology :
Contrast the teaching of Jesus, which is that Eternal Life
is of the present. This is particularly set forth in
St. John's Gospel, which is especially the gospel of
life ; and it follows necessarily that such is the nature
of Eternal Life if God be immanent in this time-
world. A further examination into the nature and
characteristics of Eternal Life.
III. — Obstacles to the Reception of the Gospel of Eternal Life ;
the part played by clericalism and the notion of a com
mercial atonement in nursing survivals of folk-faith in
the eschatology of the Church ; and the tendency to sub
stitute dogma for life as an easier way of making Chris
tians. The force of the moral sanction of rewards and
punishments — now passing away — still measurably
valid where it remains efficient. Eternal Life manifested
on Calvary as the Revealment of the Immanent Love.
God Eternal, because infinitely holy. Jesus gave His
life, rather than His death, for the world. Eternal Life
is to live according to God. This gospel teaching of life
eternal finds modern Science accommodating herself to
it, — and also Philosophy.
IV. — This doctrine of Eternal Life is real, and therefore a saving
doctrine, for which reason we find it helpful to preach
and consoling to teach. 248

ETERNAL LIFE.
Gentlemen : —
The apostle Paul in a profound and richly signifi
cant passage declares that the changeless purpose
and favour of God were given unto men from the
beginning of time, but were clearly manifested by
an Epiphany, which was Christ Jesus, Who rendered
death ineffectual and brought to light life and incor
ruption.1 This signifies the revelation of a new truth, not
the republication of an old idea upon a new and
Divine authority. In order that we may detect the
absolute novelty of this Christian doctrine we must
first examine what ideas of immortality already were
extant in the world, and in the examination we shall
observe their effects upon Christian Theology.
I. The primitive culture of mankind held in its
religious consciousness three typical theories of the
future life.
a. The earliest was the conjecture of the transmi
gration of souls or their re-incarnation, to which I
1 2 Tim. i. 8, 12, fai), dipBapirla.
249

250 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
have already alluded.1 This theory fancied that the
human soul, after leaving its body at death, must
find some other sort of body, and therefore will enter
a tree, a stone, or some beast or man. The Karens
are in constant fear lest they shall become possessed
by the wicked spirit, la, of some one who has died.2
Some of the negro tribes upon the gold coast believe
in three parts of man, — his body, his soul or ghost,
and his indwelling spirit or kra. They suppose that
this kra existed before the birth of the individual
man, and at his death will at its first opportunity
enter into some other body or thing.3 If unable to
find a tenement, it wanders around about the earth
as a malignant demon ; the soul or ghost, however,
at death, proceeds to the land of the dead, and there
remains. The Navajo Indians, likewise, believe man
is body, soul, and spirit, and that the spirit was pre-
existent and is indestructible. Other North Ameri
can Indians, when their little children die, will bury
the bodies along the wayside, in the hope that the soul
of the dead child may re-enter the body of its mother
as she passes by, and so be born again. Negroes
in harsh slavery have been known to commit suicide
in order that they might be born again, and by good
1 Tylor, Prim. Cult. II. c. 12.
2 The Karens ofthe Golden Chersonese, 128 ff.
8 This suggests the probable source of the early Egyptian theory
of the return of the soul after death to reanimate the mummy or a
portrait image.

ETERNAL LIFE. 251
hap into liberty in their own land. The continuation
of family names from generation to generation had,
no doubt, its origin in this belief. The story of the
Pied Piper of Hamlin is a legend which arose from
just this sort of animistic speculation about the soul's
life and transmigration. Many savage peoples be
lieve that everything has its ghost, and that when a
tree dies, its ghost travels to the spirit land. Hindu
philosophy developed this notion of the travelling of
spirits, and their pre-existence, in an ethical way,
making the transmigration of an individual soul up
from the stone to the Buddha, through many thou
sand births, a vast and complicated solution to the
problem of life and the mystery of evil. The low-
caste Sudra hopes, by a righteous life, to be born
again as a Brahmin, who by knowledge of the Vedas,
and meditation upon the same, will ultimately be
absorbed in the Deity as a drop of water in the ocean.1
" Om ! Mani padmi, Om ! the Sunrise comes,
The dewdrop slips into the shining Sea " —
is Sir Edwin Arnold's favourite formula of a Buddha
passing into Nirvana.1 Greek Philosophy heard of
this notion of metempschychosis when on a visit in
Egypt and the East, was charmed with its poetry
and picturesqueness, but never seriously adopted it.
1 At this point Brahminism and Buddhism agree. See Sir
Monier Monier- Williams, Buddhism, passim; Brahminism and
Hinduism, passim.

252 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Individualism was too strong in the bracing air of
Hellas and on those Ionian " Sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea."
With Plato and Pythagoras a theory of metempsychosis
remained an eclectic speculation, held in solution, it
is true, but not definitively colouring their philo
sophical systems. Ritualistic Brahminism taught that
in order to avoid the retribution of the re-incarnation
of the soul in many successive births, men must offer
sacrifice. A singular parallel of the development of
religious thought is observed by comparing the rela
tion of the Brahminic sacrifices to the hymns of the
Rig Veda, with that of the Levitical code to the later
psalms. It is just possible that these two lines of
development were contemporary. From the Sata-
patha-Brahmana, translated by Sir Monier Monier-
Williams, I quote what tells its own story.
" The gods lived constantly in fear of Death —
The mighty Ender — so with toilsome rites
They worshipped, and repeated sacrifices
Till they became immortal. Then the Ender
Said to the gods, ' As ye have made yourselves
Imperishable, so will men endeavour
To free themselves from me : what portion then
Shall I possess in man ? ' The gods replied,
' Henceforth no being shall become immortal
In his own body ; this his mortal frame
Shalt thou still seize ; this shall remain thy own,

ETERNAL LIFE. 253
This shall become perpetually thy food.
And even he who through religious acts
Henceforth attains to immortality,
Shall first present his body, Death, to thee.' " 1
The later Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages
adopted the theory of migration, or gilgul, the rolling
on of souls through successive incarnations ; but this
was evidently an alien importation into Judaism. In
vain will sincere scholarship seek to find the doc
trine of metempsychosis authorised in the New Testa
ment writings. Attempts have been made to see
signs of the Jewish belief in the transmigration of
souls in the words 2 of St. Matthew's gospel, " Some
say that thou art John the Baptist, some Elias, and
others Jeremias, or one of the prophets." Noth
ing more was indicated in these words than the
popular opinion that these men had not really died,
but fallen asleep, and ready to start up to deliver
Israel ; an opinion which perhaps survived in many
a legend of early Jewish Christianity, as, for example,
those of Prester John, and of the Seven Sleepers of
Ephesus. Appeal has been made to St. John's gos
pel,3 " Master, who did sin, this man or his parents,
that he was born blind?" to show that Jesus taught
re-incarnation. The obvious import of the passage is
the rabbinic doctrine of the inherited guilt and its
penalty. This last doctrine has survived in our
1 Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Brahminism and Hinduism, 24.
2 xvi. 14. 3 ix. 2.

254 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
grosser forms of the theology of original sin, in
traducianism, and likewise in the notion of a revivi
fied body, into which, as into a house, the soul shall
enter at the last day, instead of the Resurrection
body concerning which our Lord Jesus Christ taught.
Again, that saying of Christ's, " If ye will receive it
this is Elias which was for to come," 1 has been ex
plained by a rigid literalism in a way to support the
theory of transmigration of souls. Further it is not
worth our while to pursue this form of an evolution
from animism, this dream of the Pantheist and poet,
this brave attempt to solve the enigma of sin and
pain. After the days of the Gnostics and the Mani-
chees the teaching of transmigration of souls fell out
of sight in Christendom. It really belongs to ema
nation theories. Here and there in the history of
Christian thought there have been sporadic survivals
of the notion; for instance, the Druses in the East,
some mediaeval popular sects, Scotus Erigena, the
Knights of the Order of the Temple, probably, and
the peasants of the Slavic churches at the present
time. There have been also revivals of the opinion
by some Platonists, such as Henry More and Thomas
Taylor, and by students of Oriental Theosophy. I
have said thus much only because in this bric-a-brac
age there have been attempts to revive this theory
and to commend it to Christian teachers. The late
Professor Francis Bowen, whose memory I revere, was
1 St. Matt. xi. 14, airbs iaTiv "SXeias b p.4XXiov epxeaBai.

ETERNAL LIFE. 255
of the opinion that a " firm and well-grounded faith
in the doctrine of Christian Metempsychosis might
help to regenerate the world." Professor Bowen has
passed behind the veil, and perhaps now he knows.
For my part I cannot conceive of a doctrine of
metempsychosis which is Christian, which does not
destroy moral responsibility in man, and which is
not totally irreconcilable with that revelation which
our Lord Jesus Christ gave both in Himself and in
His words and works, of the nature of eternal life.
The weakness of all forms of the doctrine of metemp
sychosis is that they make the article of death sacra
mental ; they either present the future as an anti-climax
or as a contradiction to the law of the permanence of
forces ; they presume that the human will raised to
the nth power can neutralise itself; and, finally, they
find for this theory no evidence in the ground of
personal experience or in the analogy of nature. The
Fathers of the Church, Tertulhan, Irenaeus, Augustine,
and Origen, carefully weighed the theory of metemp
sychosis, and agreed in rejecting -it.1 The whole
sjrstem of speculation has, however, been adopted by
individual religious writers as an escape from the
cruder horrors of an arbitrary, ab extra, Tartarus,
which had come down to us from primitive culture.
b. We now consider the common theory of contin
uation. According to this theory of primitive folk-
x Tertull. De Anima, c. xxxi. ; Iren. Hxr. II. 33 ; Aug. Faust.
xx. 21 ; Orig. Cels. VIII. 30, etc.

256 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
faith, the soul goes forth from the body and continues
its existence in the spirit land as a naked, pale, soft,
vague, shadowy thing. This thought has been pre
cisely expressed in the Latin epigram called Hadrian's
Address to his Soul, —
" Little, courteous, wand'ring thing,
Whither wilt thou turn thy wing,
The body's friend and guest ?
Pale and naked, cold as clay,
Forgot, alas ! thy wonted play,
Where wilt thou take thy rest?"1
In some parts of Christendom they will not sweep
the house for days after a death, and they will not
leave sharp-pointed objects lying about, nor will they
shut a door abruptly, for fear of hurting the poor
ghost. In his journey through the threefold world
of the dead, Dante was detected by the resident
ghosts because he cast a shadow and moved what he
touched.2 The souls of the heroes whom Odysseus saw were
but pale presentments of their former selves until
1 Animula, blandula, vagula,
Hospes, comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nee, ut solas, dabis joca ?
2 Siete voi accorti,
Che quel di retro move eid ch' ei tocca?
Cosi non soglion fare i pie de' morti.
Inferno, XII. 80.

ETERNAL LIFE. 257
they had lapped the blood of the sacrifice. Their
occupations in the shadowless land were the same
as they had been under the light of the sun. In
that dream region of the ghosts, says Mr. Tylor,1
the soul of the dead Karen with the souls of his axe
and cleaver, builds his ghost house and harvests his
ghost rice ; the shade of the Algonquin hunter pur
sues the souls of beaver and elk, walking upon the
ghosts of his snow-shoes, which had been buried in
his grave ; the fur-wrapped Kamtchatkan in the spirit
land drives a spirit dog-sled; the Zulu ghost milks
his ghost cows and drives the spirit cattle into their
ghostly kraal. The South American lives on the
spirit lands, sometimes sick and sometimes well, in
pain and in comfort. All these primitive folk expect
to live forever in the spirit land a shadowy continua
tion of their existence in this. In the hills of the
dead, the barrow-tombs of the Scandinavians,2 the
Norse warrior, it was believed, fought and feasted,
feasted and fought on forever. The Ainu believed
that the souls of the dead lingered long near the
grave, and that by contact with them the living became
ceremonially unclean, and, worse than this, that by
character ghosts are universally mischievous. They
endeavour to persuade the goddess of fire to lead the
souls of the dead as soon as possible to the ghost
'Prim. Cult. II.
2 Long Lay of Brunhild, and Excursus I., Sec. 3, Corp. Bor.
Poet. II.

258 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
land, where, it is believed, the soul of the dead will
continue forever to work and play and eat and sleep
as in this life.1 The Jewish souls of the dead, re-
phaim, in their tombs slumbered a half-conscious
trance, or, according to a later notion, remained
semi-somnolent in the hollow caverns of the under
world, and resented all interference from a necro
mancer such as the witch of Endor. So it became a
crime in Israel to rouse the souls of the dead from
their empty slumber — empty ; for, says Koheleth,2
" there is no work, no device, no knowledge, no wis
dom in Sheol." In Egypt, however, by help of the
pictured walls of the serdab of his tomb, the soul
ploughed and reaped in the spirit land of Amenti;
with aid of the same pictures he drove his oxen and
played chess with his wife.
In earlier ages of Egypt both food itself and actual
articles of furniture and implements of life were placed
in the tomb with the dead ; but later on, it was hoped
that the representation of the articles might be suffi
cient for the ghostly representation of the man. In
a like manner, the Chinese who anciently offered to
their dead ancestors all sorts of sacrifices, of things
in themselves, have now concluded that paper repre
sentations are sufficient to burn to the souls of the
departed. The ghost of the ancient Egyptian was
1 J. Batchelor, Ainu of Japan, Chaps. XV., XVI.
2 Eccl. ix. 10, Ps. lxxxviii. 11 ; Robertson Smith, Relig. of the
Semites, 217.

ETERNAL LIFE. 259
supposed to eat the offerings of the dead, food and
drink, placed before the door of his tomb, a door
which had been perforated in order that the ba soul
might come forth and relieve its hunger. Likewise
the Mahometans to this day feed the ghosts of
their dead, and they also place within the tomb a
seat convenient for the angel who comes to judge the
dead shortly after his burial.1 So the soul of the
savage needs his weapons and armour ; even his wives
must be despatched with a bludgeon or their legs
broken, and they thrown into the grave, that they
may accompany him to the land of spirits.2 The
Karens will impoverish themselves in order that the
deceased shall be thoroughly equipped for the next
world.3 When the coffin is lowered into the grave,
everything that a man could need or desire is thrown
in with it, according to the ability of the mourners.
A common consent assigned the country of dead
souls to the regions of the evening land, beyond the
setting of the sun and baths of all the western stars,
or to that realm of fancy, the land east of the sun
and west of the moon. For good ghosts there were
1 See Picart, Tome V., and D'Herbelot, under Akhrat.
2 The London Standard, 1890, gave a long account of the Iu-Iu
rites which occurred at the death of a Calabar king. By accident
English traders entered the village, and discovered the body of the
dead king lying in a great pit, and seven of his wives with broken
limbs placed beside him.
3 A. R. McMahon, Karens of the Golden Chersonese, 419. Cf.
Batchelor, Ainu, 204.

260 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
also the islands of the Hesperides, full of the stately
repose and the lordly delight of the dead, where also
is the tree of the apples of life, wondrous, beautiful,
and serpent-guarded, and where a fountain of eternal
youth is always casting up its sparkling jet. This
creation of fancy we see enter in some form as an
element in the Jewish idea of the Messianic age, and
then pass over into the millenn arian visions of Papias
and the early Christian Church. Of this early form
of the idea of eternal life we have still left in the
Creed the phrase, " Life of the world to come," lit
erally of the " coming age," 1 which phrase is a
Hebraism for the Messianic age, and also the earthly
Paradise of the Millennium for the souls of the right
eous. That dream passed away long centuries ago,
so long that the phrase of the Creed no longer con
notes for us what it did for the early Christians, but
we have a more sure hope. A further development
of this idea reached out beyond the earth. One of
the seers2 of the Enoch writings thought of the world
as a flat disk covered over by a hollow hemisphere.
Just outside the rim of this inverted cup he found
the abode of the spirits, who, if any man went to the
edge of the world and called, would come to him,
whether from the " vasty deep " or elsewhere. Per
haps it was from this pre-Christian Apocalyptic book
that the Manichee developed his picturesque and
1 tov aiXXovros alwvos.
2 Book of Enoch, iv. 1, v. 1, xi. 2, etc.

ETERNAL LIFE. 261
peculiar theory of the redemption and purgation of
souls after death.1 Our Teutonic ancestors imagined
that the dead dwelt beneath the earth in Niflheim,
Nidgard, or in Helheim, a cavernous region where
perpetual gusts of sleet and snow were driven
through the dun air.
In these earlier theories, as thus far you may
have perceived, the ethical characteristic has hardly
emerged clearly into consciousness. The thought
which underlay them was generally that of an impar
tially unmoral necessity of existence. The question
had hardly become evolved beyond the concepts of
pleasure and pain. Consequently these primitive
notions, save by their imagery, have feebly affected
the development of Christian Theology. I suspect
that this shadowy continuation theory, emptied as it
is of moral quality, has somehow subtly survived
in Christian Theology, in the theory of essential or
native immortality, which, notwithstanding the pro
tests2 of Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, Theophilus
of Antioch, Clement the Alexandrine, Arnobius, and
Lactantius, ultimately has dominated Christian Es-
chatology. Possibly also it suggested those nebu-
1 See Archelaus, Disp. with Manes, c. xi.
2 Barnabas, xx. ; Clement of Rome ; 1 Cor. iii., ix., xxxv.,
xvi., xlvii., vii.; Ignatius, To Polycarp, ii., To Romans, vii.;
Hermas, Sim., iii. ; Didache ; Justin Martyr, Tryph., v. ; Apology,
xxxix., xiii., Iii. ; Tatian, Grace, xiii., vii., xv. ; Theophilus, To
Autol. 1. 11, 37 ; Irenaeus, Her. II. 34, etc. ; Clement of Alex., Paid.
I. 3 ; Arnobius, Against Gentiles, II. 14-16, etc.

262 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
lous creations, the limbus infantum and the limbus
patrum, states of neither weal nor woe. For the
theologians have not, I think, determined which of
these lies nearest hell. Universal restoration also, in
so far as it obliterates moral distinction, is a survival
of the same primitive theory. Jesus teaches1 that
few will be saved, — Universalism begs to differ, and
says " all will be saved."
c. Succeeding the notion of a bare continuance
came the higher thought of compensation and retri
bution in the future life. Man got ideas of law
and justice in this world, and projected them into
the other. He figured to himself that God is vin
dictive, or is retributive, or is compensative, or is
reformatory. So in the religions of the reflective
races of the earth, the ethical element — I mean
sin and its consequence in a future life — ever arises
into a great moral motive power. In later days the
Norse warrior came to think that he would be for
ever debarred from Valhalla, should he die peace
fully, and therefore he required that, at least, a spear
scratch should be made on his body, if he found him
self dying of disease. A. similar temper led Chris
tians to seek to die in monastic habit, or with the
cord of St. Francis about them. The newspapers
gave account of a curious custom of the Russian
Church which was recently performed at the funeral
of the Grand Duchess Paul. Before the coffin was
1 St. Matt. vii. 14 ; Luke xiii. 23.

ETERNAL LIFE. 263
finally closed upon the corpse, the Metropolitan
placed in the hand of the dead this writing : " We,
by the grace of God, prelate of the holy Russian.
Church, write this to our master and friend, St.
Peter, the gate-keeper of the Lord Almighty. We
announce to you that the servant of the Lord, Her
Imperial Highness, the Grand Duchess Paul, has
finished her life on earth, and we order you to
admit her into the Kingdom of Heaven without
delay, for we have absolved all her sins and granted
her salvation. You will obey our order on sight of
this document which we put into her hand."
To all Semitic races1 belongs the myth of a sea
of outer darkness which surrounds this world, into
which all that is evil will be cast, when the earth
shall be purified for the abode of the saints. But
the Aryan races, as indeed some of the Semites, con
ceived of a place on the earth, or at the end of it,
where for an aeon, fires should torment the ungodly.
According to the institutes of Vishnu,2 the inhabi
tants of heaven are able freely to inspect the sinners
in hell, who hang head downwards. This arrange
ment serves the double advantage of enhancing the
bliss of the gods and saints, and of increasing the
agonies of the damned.
The Jew, likewise, bade you mark that there was
1 Cf. Izdubar Epic of Chaldea, Book of Enoch, Koran, and
Samaritan Book of Joshua.
2 Hindu Literature, or the Ancient Books of India, 151.

264 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
but a hand-breadth between the flames of Gehenna
and Abraham's bosom. The essence of these doc
trines of a future state is this, which already I have
hinted at as being a survival from a primitive stage of
culture, that physical pain purges away moral evil.
This has always been taken for granted in the de
velopment of religious thought; and Schopenhauer
makes grimly merry that our world offers so much
more material for constructing a graphic image of hell '
than for a definite picture of heaven. Because phys
ical pain has been assumed to compensate for spiri
tual sin, asceticism appeared, whereby, in Hindustan,
a man, or even a demon, may become greater than
the gods ; and in the Roman Church it is believed
that a man is able to accumulate in this way such
a store of merits that Almighty God can refuse him
nothing. This fundamental theory has been accepted
without question, and it lies at the base of some of
the popular doctrines of the forgiveness of sins, and
of the atonement, as it is termed, of our Lord Jesus
Christ. If you believe that the merits acquired by
our Lord by His suffering and death on the Cross
are substituted for our sins, that is, reckoned as our
merits, then logically you ought to believe in the
mediation of saints, in the appropriation of their
merits, and in indulgences, and all the rest of the
system. But if you do accept this system, be quite
clear in your mind about this one thing, that its
fundamental idea arose at that stage of the develop-

ETERNAL LIFE. 265
ment of mankind where man does not distinguish
between moral and physical evil.
Turn to the sacred books of the East, or to the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, or to the pictures and
sculpture on temple and tomb and church, and you
will perceive to what this theory of a retribution ab
extra has led. The thought of the relation between
God and men was thereby everywhere degraded into
the notion of the exaction of a price, or a barter or a
bargain of some sort. Thus while on the walls of the
Egyptian temple 1 were painted the scales of Mat, god
dess of Justice, wherein the human conscience was
outweighed by the feather of truth, so on the walls of
mediaeval churches were painted the great balances
of God, wherein He weighed the good of a soul
against its sin. " It is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that Salvation joins issue with death."
In one sense Dante's theory of rewards and pun
ishments was just and rational, and Dante, we know,
voiced the scholastics. In the Bivine Comedy, God
is seen as Love unaltering and all-pervasive, which
to the holy is warmth and light of profound bliss,
but to the ungodly the same all-embracing Love is
either tormenting flame or cold and darkness. Every
thing depends upon the attitude of the individual soul
towards God. Implicitly, therefore, the " wrath prin-
i See plates in Lepsius' Egypt.

266 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ciple " is human and subjective. In the earlier days
of Christianity the idea of future compensation so
warped the minds of Christian theologians that many
of them could see in the divine death nothing higher
than the payment of a price. This thought survives
in the doctrine of Indulgences. In fact, all theories
of sin which sunder sin and its penalty fall into this
snare of reviving the old idea of compounding for
guilt, and of placating a vindictive God by satisfying
the demand of his iron lex talionis.
Not without some excuse has this theory been
stated as "the immolation of an innocent God, by
an all-loving God, to satisfy a perfectly just God."
We have not so learned the gospel of Jesus. Later
speculations of primitive men went so far as to
evolve 1 the idea of sensuous torments which have no
end, thus setting up an eternal contest between good
and evil. This doctrine, it is said, was brought by
the early Christian theosophists from Persia, and has
been preserved for us in Augustinian theology, which
only transfers the mise en scene to a future world of
heaven and hell. Is not this virtually making an
omnipotent God impotent to overcome evil? Is it
not, in effect, bringing into the theological world Bie
G otter dalmmerung, which Wagner's acute intellect has
seized upon to point out this suicidal element in
Christian Theology. Read, I pray you, Mr. Brown
ing's poem, Ixion. If evil be able to resist God, then
1 Distinguishing between the poena damni and the pcena sensus.

ETERNAL LIFE. 267
it is stronger than God, and by it God is blotted out.
In Wagner's famous opera, the sin of Odin brings on
the conflagration of Valhalla.
To take up the words of Ixion to which I have
already alluded : —
" High in the dome, suspended, of Hell, sad triumph, behold us !
Here the revenge of a God, there the amends of a Man.
Whirling forever in Torment, flesh once mortal, immortal
Made — for a purpose of hate — able to die and revive,
Pays to the uttermost pang, then, newly for payment replenished,
Doles out — old yet young — agonies ever afresh.
" — When Man pays the price of endeavour,
Thunderstruck, downthrust, Tartaros-doomed to the wheel, —
Then, ay, then, from the tears and sweat and blood of his torment,
E'en from the triumph of Hell, up let him look and rejoice !
What is the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture
Pain — and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope?
" What is beyond the obstruction , stage by stage though it baffle ?
Back must I fall, confess, ' Ever the weakness I fled '?
No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed !
Zeus was Zeus — not Man ; wrecked by his weakness I whirl ! "
In this way Mr. Browning illustrates forcibly
the reductio ad absurdum of that subtle dualism
which underlies the theological doctrine of punish
ment of sin by means of sensuous pain. Nobler
and gracef uller was the temper of those old heathen
of the Nile Valley who called none dead but the
wicked : the good man they reverently named " That
yesterday who sees endless days." The ghost world

268 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
of rewards and punishments has filled an immense
space in Christian Theology from the days of the
Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the visions of the
Nitrian monks, the dreams of Furseus, Alberigo, and
of the ecstatic nuns of the Middle Ages. In all
religions, as I have already said, the torments of
the other world have formed the pierce de resistance.
The journey of Odin in the Voluspa, Orpheus,
Odysseus and JEneas, Yama and Gwynnidion, the
visions of Enoch and St. Brandan, Dante and Swe-
denborg, Bunyan and John Miller, are exponents of
this universal mythos. The survival of the primitive
idea of innate and essential immortality, that is of
" an immortal soul," a phrase found nowhere in the
Bible, was with the aid of Platonic philosophy trans
planted into Christian Theology, and gave rise to all
this curious mythology to which I have referred.
II. In distinct contrast to all this system are the
teachings of Jesus. Not the future life, but the
present, He set forth as the motive of righteousness.
He taught the conditions of Eternal Life. Ever-
lastingness is a human corollary of eternity. Nothing
is more striking than our Lord's silence concerning
the scenery of the world unseen. It is true that He
freely makes use of phrases, terms, and popular
fancies then in vogue, to convey His doctrine ; but
in order to indicate that such terms do not literally
answer to the realities, He uses all of them impar
tially, though they are formally contradictory. Of

ETERNAL LIFE. 269
the place and environment of the spirits of the dead
He makes no picturesque revelation. By means of
the parable of Dives and Lazarus He distinctly
declines to allow the fear of future punishment to
be furnished as a motive for godliness. Nowhere in
His teaching does He substitute other worldliness for
un worldliness ; nowhere holds up a scheme of future
rewards and punishments, as a reason for godly and
righteous living in the present time. In the Old
Testament the right life is long. " That thy days
may be long," is the incentive which is given in
the Commandments, repeated in Deut. v. 33 as the
motive for the whole Decalogue ; " that ye may pro
long your days in the land which ye shall possess."
But our Lord starts with a new proclamation, one
which is deeper and more intimate with the very
essence of life. He came that we might have life
and have it more abundantly.1 His kingdom is a
kingdom of Life, and into this kingdom of the new
life each one of us must be born : " Except a man
be born from above2 he is not able to enter into
the kingdom of God." " Except a man be born of
water and the spirit he is not able to enter into
the kingdom of God." Jesus added, " He that be
lieveth on Me hath eternal life " ; 3 " hath eternal
1 St. John X. 10, Kal irepiaabv exoiaiv.
2 St. Jer. iii. 3, idv jm} tis yevvyBy dvoiBev.
3 exei fcyv alibviov. Not only is the present tense emphatic, St.
John vi. 47, but alibviov does not denote duration, whatever it may
connote.

270 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
life," it is a present possession of which Christ is
speaking. He goes on to say further, "He that
heareth My word and believeth on Him that sent
Me hath eternal life,1 and shall not come into con
demnation, but is passed from death unto life." The
statement is here more emphatic. The true believer
now has eternal life, and already has passed out of
the deathful condition into consciousness of life eter
nal, the living, eternal, immanent God. So it is a
matter not of the future, but of the present, because
we are in God now. The Beatitudes were, every
one, given in the present tense. It is an error to
suppose that life eternal is nothing more than a
continuation of this life, brought about either by
a fiat of God, or by a bargain with Him, or because
the soul is essentially indestructible as if it were a
piece of God. God is eternal because He is perfectly
holy. Eternal life is something different from any
continuation of life beyond death ; it is a transforma
tion of a human life (which has consciously sinned),
so that it cannot cease or die. Therein is fulfilled
the old theological dictum : " Man is made able not
to die, in order that he might become not able to
die." Eternal life therefore is the quality rather
than the quantity of life, the quantity being a result
of the quality. Again, when He proclaimed2 Him
self the Bread of Life, He said with intensity, " Verily,
verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me hath
1 exei fwV alibviov, St. John v. 24. 2 St. John vi. 47 ff.

ETERNAL LIFE. 271
everlasting life," etc. ; and, " Whoso eateth My flesh
and drinketh My blood hath eternal life " : therefore,
unless we now have eternal life before the grave, we
cannot with certainty expect to have it afterward.
" No, no ! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun ;
And he who flagged not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing — only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life."
The sinless infant who has never by voluntary sin
and the knowledge of evil been separated from the
consciousness of the indwelling God, may grow in
wisdom and holiness throughout the eternal years,
though his little span of life in this world gave him
no room for effort ; but he who has once barred out
God-consciousness must of himself remove that bar.
In the prologue to his gospel, St. John alludes to
these sayings of our Lord, gathering them up in one
great vision of the meaning of the world and of its
life in relation to God. For he writes,1 " That which
was made was life in Him, and the life was the light
of men, and to as many as receive Him He gave power
to become the sons of God, which were born of God."
This eternal life physical death cannot interrupt, as
1 St. John i. 3, 4, 12, 13, o yiyovev iv airQ fur; iariv, Kal y fur)
%v rb <pws, k.t.X. Cf. the critical note of Tischendorf which estab
lishes this reading.

272 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Jesus says,1 " Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me
shall never die," and of Himself, in a sense which may
be explained at another time, He said,2 " This is the
bread which came down from Heaven that a man
may eat thereof and not die " ; " He that eateth of
this bread shall live forever," or, as He puts the same
idea in other words, " If a man keep My saying he
shall never see death." 3 To this bright positive of
life there is a dark negative,4 " Verily, verily, I say
unto you except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man
and drink His blood ye have no life in you." There
fore we learn that in the present, without waiting
for a future world beyond death, the want of eternal
life signifies that the soul is dead.5
" They pass me by like shadows, crowds on crowds,
Dim ghosts of men, that hover to and fro,
Hugging their bodies round them, like thin shrouds
Wherein their souls were buried long ago :
They trampled on their youth, and faith, and love,
They cast their hope of human-kind away,
With Heaven's clear messages they madly strove,
And conquered, — and their spirits turned to clay :
Lo ! how they wander round the world their grave,
Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed,
Gibbering at living men, and idly rave,
1 We only, truly live, but ye are dead.'
Alas ! poor fools ; the anointed eye may trace
A dead soul's epitaph in every face ! "
1 St. John xi. 26. 2 St. John vi. 50.
3 St. John viii. 51. 4 St. John vi. 53.
6 Cf. Divina Commedia, Inferno, xxxiii. 121-124.

ETERNAL LIFE. 273
Thus Biblical Theology repeats the one and un
varying lesson touching eternal life ; it is life actually
and ethically in the " everlasting now," whether here
or hereafter. This must be true, if indeed in God
we live and move and have our being. Out of the
moral action comes the intellectual conviction, and
at length out of this arises the spiritual conscious
ness of divine sonship and life in God, which is life
eternal. Only by living the kind of life God lives
does man know God. Only by this knowledge of
God does he know his divine sonship ; this is life
eternal to know Him, the only true God and Jesus
Christ whom He hath sent. It was in the perfect
ness of this consciousness that Jesus said, " I am the
life," " I am the Resurrection and the life," " he that
eateth Me the same shall live by Me." : Can we
determine more clearly the nature of this eternal
life? Observe, first, that in the New Testament
between the Greek words soos, safe, and 200s, alive,
there is no vast difference in meaning, and in form
but the difference of a not very different letter.
Radically these two words are the same. In the
gospel of Christ salvation and life are terms so nearly
related as to be almost interchangeable. The life
that is saved is called real or actual life.2 Only he
that hath life is saved, and the life that he has is
eternal. The connection between salvation and life
1 St. John xi. 25. Cf. 1 John iii. 15.
2 1 Tim. vi. 19, y Svras fwi). Cf. Olshausen, Opuscula, 187.

274 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
is that Jesus saving the world from sins (not their
guilt or punishment only) rightens (rectifies or justi
fies) it, and life becomes eternal in the measure it is
rightened or rectified ; it cannot die, and of its own
inherent nature comes to a Resurrection. But what,
more definitely in the terms of Biblical Theology,
are the characteristics of life eternal? First, it is
God-consciousness,1 an abiding recollection of the
Immanent Love. Are we to understand that this
knowledge of God is an intellectual apprehension, or
a speculative idea, a "sensed conversion," or a unio
mystica of rapture and trance ? Is it an Hegelian
out-working of the Immanent Divine Mind into con
sciousness in the heterogeneous world and in the
brains of men ? Is it this the gospel teaches ? Not
at all ! The gospel knowledge or gnosis is the iden
tity of creed and deed : 2 " Hereby we do know that
we know Him if we keep His commandments." We
may approach the understanding of this subject of
eternal life from another side. In St. Matthew's
gospel 3 Jesus makes entry into the kingdom identi
cal with the beginning of eternal life : " If thou wilt
enter into life, keep the commandments." This He
said to the rich young man who had asked, " What
good thing shall I do that I may have life eternal?"
At the end our Lord's comment is, that a rich man
shall hardly enter into the kingdom of God. In St.
1 St. John xvii. 3.
2 St. John vii. 17 ; 1 John ii. 3. Cf . 1 John iii. 7. 3 xix. 16-24.

ETERNAL LIFE. 275
Luke x. 25 the old misconception of eternal life as a
future reward, instead of a present condition, is cor
rected by the parable of the good Samaritan, wherein
eternal life is displayed in the concrete present. In
short, as we have already seen, the kingdom of God
is the obverse, of which eternal life is the reverse,
upon the coin of human life. Again, eternal life is
like a grain of mustard seed because it grows. Such
is the very nature of life, to grow. Eternal life grows
forever. Again, God is the living God, not lifeless
matter, mechanical force, a stream of tendency, or an
abstract first cause. He is living because He is infi
nitely holy. This is the key to the meaning of " eternal
life." They who are unholy are alienated from the
life of God,1 and are therefore dead; they have no
life in them. Eternal life, says St. Peter,2 is to live
according to God, or in St. Paul's phrase,3 to be alive
unto God. This life begins with an altered mind
towards God.4
The second Petrine Epistle 5 contains this further
development of the idea of eternal life, that those
who live according to God, conscious of their divine
sonship, are partakers of the divine nature, that
Christ was God in flesh, and therefore to live accord-
i Eph. iv. 18. 2 1 Pet. iv. 6.
8 Rom. vi. 11. 4 pierdvoia els Qebv.
6 Betas koivoivoI ipvaeois, 2 Pet. i. 4. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psychol. 172,
404; S. Tom. Aq., Summa, I". 1, 13, 9 ; I". 2, 110, 3, et 112, 1, et
113, 9, et 114, 3, etc.

276 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
ing to Christ is to live according to God. Eternal
life, then, is godly life, infinite in its power of growth
and expansion : it is the life of love which God is,
even the life of unself which is love, the boundless
joy of giving self, as it is written, " He that findeth
his life shall lose it ; he that loseth his life for My
sake shall find it." Eternal life is, therefore, not the
addition of anything to the soul, any more than it is
a reward laid up in a future world, but it is a quality
in the character. Eternal life is a manner of life
unto the formation of character. Each man's char
acter is his book of final doom. In this manner of
life, justification and righteousness are met together.1
This is the teaching of the Holy Scripture 2 concern
ing Eternal Life.
III. Simple and clear as are the sayings of our
Lord, when without any bias or prepossession they
are received, how soon the theologians of the Church,
in many instances and bearings, lost the compre
hension of their profound and saving sense ! Recep
tiveness was limited and misshapen by precedent
influences and contemporaneous environment. The
1 If we translate SiKalao-is "justification," we ought to translate
SiKaioavvy "justness"; but if we translate SiKaioavvy "righteous
ness," then we should translate SiKaloiais "rectification," for right
eousness is the result of a life that has been rectified or rightened,
and such a life is eternal.
2 Cf. Le Probleme de i' Immortalite, par E. Petavel-Oliff ; Life
in Christ, by Edward White ; Harnack, Dogmengeschichte ; Mar-
tensen, Dogmatics, Sees. 125-147.

ETERNAL LIFE. 277
old folk-faith persisted in the mental convictions of
the converts to the Christian Church, and it was
impossible that that faith should be at once com
pletely expelled. Moreover, that clerical theory of
the Church which early arose favoured external and
legal methods of apprehending the teachings of
Jesus. A desire for the rapid spread of the Church
found, "rod and candy for child-minded men,"
an easier way of making church-members than the
apparently hopeless task of changing the character
of the candidates. So we encounter early in the
history of Theology a survival of primitive culture
in the notion that life after death has its value and
significance in being a retribution or compensation for
the life before death. The thought of human life, as
growth and progression and as self-retributive, does
not seem to have emerged clearly into Christian con
sciousness. The common notion of the law of life
was that of sordid compensation, " an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth." " All the ancient Fathers," says
Haag,1 " agree in teaching that the souls immediately
after death repair, not to Heaven, for this opinion
was held to be a gnostic heresy, but to Sheol or
Hades, the subterranean world, where they awaited
the last judgment." Men forgot the gospel that
1 Haag, Hist, des Dogmes Chretiens, II. 316. Cf. Hermas,
Pastor, Sim. IX. 16 ; Irenaeus, Her. V. 32 ; Justin Martyr, Tryph.
80 ; Tertullian, De An. lv. ; De Resurrect, xliii. ; Lactantius, In-
stitut. Div. VII. 21.

278 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
future life, or immortality, is the corollary or result
of life being in the present of an eternal character.
It was forgotten also that Jesus taught that the future
is the outcome of the present, not a gift which shall
meet us beyond the door of death. Godliness is great
gain. Men forgot that to be born again was simply
to begin to live spiritually, after the institution and
the example of the godly life of Jesus, historically
manifested. They forgot that to eat His flesh and
drink His blood was, as He explained, to keep His
commandments ; they forgot that this Christ-life was
simply the life of pure and unselfish love, like divine
love, not passional ; and consequently they erected a
formal and external theory of the Sacraments, analo
gous to the Hebrew system of sacrifice, and such
sacraments had but a feeble and notional hold upon
the moral life of man. But this theory exactly
suited the imperialistic idea of the Church, and with
out such a theory the hierarchical system would have
had no raison d"etre. Logical as was that theory, it
had, in any age from Peter Lombard down, one fatal
defect, — it did not save people from their sins pro
portionately to its tremendous assumptions. Its fun
damental defect was a lurking scepticism concerning
the value of human life ; in fact, we might say
that it was subtly atheistical. Hence for the many
Eternal Life — that is to say, righteousness — ap
peared to be impossible in this world ; at any rate, it
was hardly begun before the grave. The effect of

ETERNAL LIFE. 279
the many evils of the .system was that, with all its
intellectual acuteness and forcefulness, it made only
a few unnatural saints, leaving the rest of humanity
almost untouched by influences which make for a
righteous life. This is only too evident to any one
who studies into the details of the European history
up to the sixteenth century sufficiently to discover
what was the social condition of the masses.1
Many of the ante-Nicene apologists 'and contro
versialists were so accustomed to the transcendental
philosophies of their day, that the theosophy rather
than the ethics of Christianity attracted their atten
tion. The tendency, therefore, was to offer to the
cultivated or intellectual, the theoretical gnosis, and
to the more emotional, ignorant classes, the mechan
ical or sensational gnosis. At any rate, of this they
were sure, that knowledge, and not existence, is
eternal life. In this way orthodoxy or speculative
knowledge was offered as a means of salvation in this
world, and a mysterious knowledge of God, called a
beatific vision, was fancied as a reward in the other
world, and substituted for eternal life in this world
or elsewhere. This survival we owe to the shaman's
hysteric trance on the one hand, and to the Neopla-
1 Cf. Lecky, History of European Morals ; La Comedie et les
Mxurs en France au Moyen Age, L. Petit de Julleville ; Lea, Super
stition and Force; Owen, History of Crime in England ; Pearson,
History of England during the Early and Middle Ages; the works
of Rabelais, and the poems of Francois Villon.

280 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
tonic refinements of speculation and transcendental
theosophy on the other. Between folk-faith and phi
losophy the word of Jesus could hardly get a hearing.
Conduct was put in place of character; that is to
say in conventional language, good works were ex
alted above faith. God judges character, yea, it is
self-judged; by faith are we justified or made just.
Let us never in our teaching sunder justification
and righteousness, because essentially they are one.
The fault of the theologians of the early Church,
if we may presume to point it out, is that they
started the evolution of a dogma about salvation,
which has always required an elaborate explanation
to establish for it any bearing upon human life and
character. Therefore the dogma has not been saving.
It has held within it too little of the power of the
personal Christ. The subject of Jesus' teaching was
implicitly and explicitly life, its value, significance,
and purpose. A precise point of His teaching was
consequently this, that unless we have external life
now, unless we are born again now, into a higher plane
of existence, unless now we enter into Christ's life,
will, character, existence, as it was on earth, there can
be no ground to hope for an eternal life hereafter.
" For life does not arise from us, nor from our own
nature ; but it is bestowed according to the grace of
God. And therefore he who shall preserve the life
bestowed upon him, and give thanks to Him Who
imparted it, shall receive also length of days forever

ETERNAL LIFE. 281
and ever. But he who shall reject it and prove him
self ungrateful to his Maker, inasmuch as he has
been created, and has not recognised Him Who
bestowed, deprives himself of continuance forever
and ever."1 There is no longer in Christendom
baptism for the dead, nor forensic imputation of
the qualities of some other soul. Impossible ! Such
notions belong to the religious masked dances and
dramatic representations of a poltroon savagery. No
requiem mass, no sanctification in the article of
death, no solifidian confidence, no probation in the
underworld, is able to be given in exchange for
eternal life. It is a question of the now, as pre
destination is a matter of the now, not of ages past ;
for our God is eternal, and eternity is the ever-pres
ent now. It is quite true that the conditions of sal
vation are in some sense not the least altered by the
restatement of doctrine which I have made. God for
bid that any one should think to alter and to amend
the teachings of Jesus ! But a variant and uncertain
theology, defectively receptive of those teachings, we
may well examine. True, eternal life is still ever
lasting life, the moment we import into it the thought
of duration, but according to the readjustment or
statement in this lecture, is not the whole idea, the
entire meaning, changed? From the standing-point
of this idea of eternal life, formal devices of theology
and religion melt each as a cloud. Life gains vastly
1 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, II. 34, 3.

282 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
in ethical and spiritual import. Indeed, our own
lives, by this truth, become so exalted that their
preciousness and worth make all other considerations
paltry, and most of all the supposition of anything
like a commercial transaction with Him Who is the
Infinite Immanent One, abiding in Eternity, Who
containeth all within Him. From this concept of
life eternal, as a present quality and fact, what peace
and tranquillity come unto us ! The petty cares of
our environment are nothing to the eternity of life.
" Our noisy years seem moments in the being of an
eternal silence." As Bohmen uttered from intuition,
" When [for any soul] time is as eternity, and eter
nity as time, then ceases all strife."
The old theory of rewards and punishments ab extra
has served a use in the world. A theological police
system, it was suited for a stage of imperfect devel
opment of the religious consciousness. This theory
fed the poetry, art, and drama of the Middle Ages,
elevated the papal chair, and sent forth the crusaders.
In one of the chronicles of that time I once read a
story which shows how evident to the paynim was the
motive of the crusades. An old Moslem crone was
seen going through the Christian camp bearing in one
hand a flask of water, and in the other a pot of fire.
When asked her purpose, she answered, " I am
going to burn up the heaven of the Christian and
to drown out his hell, so that these knights will
return home from molesting us." Powerful as has

ETERNAL LIFE. 283
been this doctrine in the past, useful as the turn it
has served, it has nevertheless been an untrue state
ment of the religion of Jesus. Besides, its day
is fast passing away, the temper of the world is
changed. This doctrine has no logical place in
scientific or rational theology. It is not an article
of the Creed. It is not a part of the reasonable,
religious and holy hope of the Christian. No longer
do men clutch the pew in front of them to keep
from falling down into a burning hell, which yawns
just before their terrified imaginations, as some Jona
than Edwards thunders out the wrath of God. The
wrath principle certainly does exist, but it exists in
us, as the distorted medium through which we view
eternal and changeless love. For wrath and fear
and hope of gain are not the motives of that life
eternal which Jesus brought to light. Yet for cen
turies they have been stinging thongs in the whip
which a mistaken theology wielded to keep the child-
men good. Even the heathen Marcus Aurelius had
a nobler and worthier idea of life's meaning. " For
what more dost thou want," said the imperial
moralist, " when thou hast done man a service ; art
thou not content that thou hast done something con
formable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be
paid for it? Just as if the eye demanded a recom
pense for seeing or the feet for walking. For as
these members are formed for a particular purpose,
and by working according to their several constitu-

284 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
tions obtain what is their own, so also as man is
formed by nature to acts of benevolence, when he
has done anything benevolent or in any other way
conducive to common interest, he has acted conform
ably to his constitution, and he gets what is his
own." 1 Reward in the sense of possession, future or
present, is not a part of the gospel of Christ. His
teaching of reward is that it is in being something.
Although the inexorable logic of the expanding con
sciousness of God as Love and Life, pulsing through
out the worlds and the spirits of men, has cast off,
or is casting off, rude and mechanical notions of the
vindictiveness or retribution from God, and of the
future life as something pieced on to this, not devel
oped out of it; nevertheless the moral sanction
remains clear and unweakened. The soul that sin-
neth shall die. The imagery of Christ's teaching
has this true meaning, truer than a conventional
theology nursed in folk-faith has been wont to give ;
a significance, which no imputation theory, no in
vented vicariousness of guilt and penalty, and no
materialised grace can nullify. God destroys the
soul by creating conditions of existence, which, if
not fulfilled, result in destruction, as surely as if He
did it by a sudden and visible thunderbolt of annihi
lation.2 Only, in God's sovereignty there is nothing
1 Meditations, IX. 42.
2 In the Apocalypse fwi) is regularly contrasted with the second
death ; also, read Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World.

ETERNAL LIFE. 285
arbitrary, there are no legal fictions and equivoca
tions, no theological evasions, whereby that which
is unholy shall be counted as though it were holy,
and enter into joy hereafter. Because life is growth
eternal, life is growth and progress in this world
and after it.
" Come up hither. From this wave-washed mound
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ;
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drowned,
Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,
Still, leagues beyond these leagues there is more sea."
The scope for progress is infinite for that life which
is become eternal. Consequently, the development
of individual spirits will be various ; there are differ
ences of progress. Heaven is no dead level of pious
vacuities, nor is it a picturesque arrangement, as we
see in Dante Rossetti's pictures of —
" All the saints above,
In solemn troops and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move."
To the children of the twentieth century this
fancy, I expect, will not be attractive, or, what is of
far more serious import, it will not be the object of a
reasonable, religious, and holy hope. Even a child of
our own day, a fin de siecle spirit, voices the protest
of thousands against the unrealities of popular relig
ious teaching.

286 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
" Behold," says Reynaud, " on the steps of this
strange heaven the elect, seated side by side, all in
rank assigned to them according to their short pil
grimage on earth, absorbed without distraction in the
rigidity of their contemplation, and clothed forever in
their terrestrial bodies, in which they were seized by
death, as by the fatal seal of their eternal mutability.
What are these phantoms doing ? Are they living or
dead ? Ah ! Christ, how this Paradise scares me. I
prefer my life with its lights and shadows, its tribula
tions and pains, to that blank immortality, with its
sanctimonious peace." Now, allowing for a little
of that overcolouring which is characteristic of the
French school, does not his picture represent correctly
enough the ordinary and popular pulpit teaching?
Does he not utter the protest of intelligent people ?
However, if any man does in these days what is right,
solely in order to gain reward of such a heaven, or
escape a burning hell, let that man well know that
he has not Christ's life in him. Let him rest
assured that he seeks his life only to lose it, for he
simply and certainly exalts his own self-seeking to
the throne of the Eternal. Therefore that man, if he
be consistent, will go on and ascribe to the eternally
living God, Who is ineffable love or unself, the
motive of creating the world and men for His own
glory, and good pleasure, " and for the praise of
His glorious justice to ordain them to dishonour
and wrath." No, a thousand times no, to such phra-

ETERNAL LIFE. 287
seology, though it be sanctified by generations of
teaching, and by the blood of the covenanters. The
"place of the skull" is not the altar of wrath; the
death on Calvary was the supreme exhibition of eter
nal love ; for, I repeat it, and with emphasis, the sac
rifice of the Cross is essential to the purpose of Jesus,
essential to His divine human character, essential,
not accidental ; for it was, is, and ever shall be, the
outflowering, the culmination, in its utterance from
eternity into the time-sphere, of the operation of
Divine Love, Who is the heart of all, and beareth
all in His heart. Thus is infinity focussed out of
eternity into time. Having loved His own which
were in the world, He loved them unto the consumma
tion of love.1 Hence the Cross is the essence of
Christianity, as a manifestation of God to man. This
is the purpose of the Incarnation. This is the mani
festation of the very nature of hfe eternal ; this life is
in His Son, the actualisation in conduct and character
of the principle of unself. Again, it has been pointed
out that life means correspondence and conforma
tion to the environment. If this be true, then only
that life which is conformed to such desires, thoughts,
volitions, and deeds, as are from their nature inde
structible, will, when destructible things come to an
end, have any environment. Therefore, from this
point of view, the standing-point of modern science,2
1 See p. 24, above.
2 Recent studies in Biology and in Embryology furnish strong
analogies to the Biblical Theology, of the nature and conditions of

288 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
we apprehend again the profound truth and reality
of Jesus Christ's doctrine of life eternal.
By Philosophy, also, has this teaching been tested.
Spinoza thought that a man would become immortal
only as the elements of deathlessness entered into his
character ; so, when the destructible things pass out
of existence, the man would be left with only inde
structible elements of character, " saved so as by fire."
If nothing eternal or imperishable have entered into
the man, he will simply cease to exist, because in him
there is nothing which will endure. Thus, in the
meaning of the philosopher, as in that of the gospel,
true life, and everlasting life, is eternal life, because
it is that life which cannot be extinguished, to which
death is only a phase, a transition, and which, being
deathless and spiritual, re-arises from the dead, im
mortal, and a spiritual body.
IV. Let us, therefore, teach our people the real
eternal life ; for in this way only shall we help to
build up strong and Christ-like characters. In this
way only can we show life to be wholly solemn and
full of dignity. Let us bid men cultivate a con
stantly abiding sense that life must be eternal now,
if ever. In this way, also, the worth and nobility of
human destiny come to us as a mighty inspiration.
It is a consolation in those hours of depression when
eternal life ; Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World;
Caesar Malan, La Generation Spirituette ; Revue de la Theologie et
de la Philosophie, Mai, 1879.

ETERNAL LIFE. 289
the sense of failure weighs heavily upon the soul,
and the doubt whispers that life for us holds no
further possibilities. Then comes borne in upon the
soul the consciousness of that Love Hidden, yet man
ifest, in all the ways and works of our past. And
the soul responds to the message which comes out
from eternity, when the Spirit and the Bride say
" Come, whosoever will let him drink of the water of
life freely."
" Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, ineffable Name ?
Builder and Maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands !
What, have fear of change from Thee Who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power
expands ?
There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live as
before ;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound :
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good
more ;
On earth the broken arcs, in Heaven a perfect round."
Life eternal inheres not in accomplishment, but in
effort ; not in material success, but in unselfish work ;
not in conduct, but in character. It is godly life,
the life of God, and consequently immortal.
" Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible,
the only wise God, be honour and glory forever and
ever. Amen."

We began at the head of the stream of divine Providence, and
have followed and traced it through its various windings and turn
ings, till we are come to the end of it and see where it issues. As
it began in God, so it ends in God. God is the infinite Ocean into
which it empties itself.
Pres. Jonathan Edwakds, History of the Work of Redemp
tion, Works, edition of 1843, Vol. I. p. 510.
Donee me Dominus Deum Incarnationis potentia faciat. St. Nilus.
My faith in God rests on my faith in Christ as God manifest in
the flesh — not as God and man, but as God in man. It is true
that the argument for a Creator from the creation is by modern
sciences modified only to be strengthened. The doctrine of a great
first cause gives place to the doctrine of an eternal and perpetual
cause ; the carpenter conception of creation to the doctrine of a divine
immanence ; the Latin notion of an anthropomorphic Jupiter,
renamed Jehovah, made to dwell in some bright, particular star
and holding telephonic communication with the spheres by means
of invisible wires which sometimes fail to work, dies, and the old
Hebrew conception of a Divinity which inhabiteth Eternity, and
yet dwells in the heart of the contrite and the humble, takes its
place. But the theological argument is strengthened, not weak
ened, by the doctrine of evolution ; creation is more, not less,
creation because it is the thought, not the mere handiwork, of
God. It is not possible even to state the doctrine of an atheist
creation without using the language of theism in the statement,
but the heart finds no refuge in an infinite or an eternal energy
from which all things proceed. That refuge is found only in the
faith that God has entered a human life, taken the helm, ruled
heart and hand and tongue, written in terms of human experience
290

the biography of God in History, revealed in the teaching of Christ
the truth of God, in the life of Christ the righteousness of God,
in the Passion of Christ the suffering of God. That God is in
nature, filling it with Himself as the spirit fills the body with its
omnipresence, so that all natural forces are but the expressions of
the divine will, and all natural laws but the habits of divine action,
— this is the doctrme of the Fatherhood. That God was in Christ ;
so that Jesus Christ was seen, in the three short years of His public
life, to be what God is in His eternal administration of the Universe,
— this is the doctrine of the Divine Sonship. That God is in human
experience, guiding, illuminating, inspiring, making all willing souls
Sons of God and joint heirs of Jesus Christ, — this is the doctrine
of the Holy Spirit. Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott, Installation Address.
291

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

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Works to which reference is made in the preceding Lect
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Garnett. Vol.1. The Christian Women. 8vo. New York,
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890.
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296 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Die Deutsche Volkssage, von Dr. Otto Henne-am Rhyn. 8vo.
Leipzig, Kruger, 1874.
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Die Deutsche Gbtterlehre, Dr. Paul Herrmanowski. Berlin,
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Records of the Past, edited by A. H. Sayce. 2 Series. Bagster,
London.
Kaffir Folk-Lore, by G. M. Theal. London, Swan Soimenschein,
1886.
Corpus Poeticum Boreale, The Poetry of the Old Northern
Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century,
by Vigfusson & Powell. 2 vols. Oxford and New York,
Macmillan & Co., 1883.
Prologomena to the History of Israel, by Julius Wellhausen.
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Religion of the Semites. First Series. The Fundamental Insti
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& Co., 1889.
Buddhism in its connection with Brahminism and Hinduism
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Brahminism and Hinduism, or Religious Thought and Life in
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Studies of the Gods in Greece at Certain Sanctuaries Recently
Excavated, by Louis Dyer. New York, Macmillan & Co.,
1891.
The Apocryphal Gospels, translated by B. Harris Cowper,
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BIBLIOGRAPHY. 297
The Book of Enoch, translated from the Ethiopic by Rev. G. H.
Schodde. Andover, W. F. Draper, 1882.
Die Gottesbegriffe des Talmud und Zohar, by Dr. Aron Hahn.
Leipzig, Kaufmann, n.d.
The Talmud, Selections, by H. Polano. Philadelphia, E. L.
Stuart, n.d.
Treasures of the Talmud, by P. J. Hershon. 8vo. London,
Nisbet & Co., 1882.
The Kabbalah Unveiled, translated from the Kabbala Denudata
of Knorr Von Rosenroth by S. L. MacGregor Mathers. 8vo.
London, George Redway, 1887.
Bibliotheque Orientale. D'Herbelot. Folio. Maestricht,
MDCCLXXVI.
Le Juif Talmudiste, par M. L'Abbe Rohling. Bruxelles, Vro-
mant et Cie. n.d.
La Kabbale ou la Philosophie Religeuse des Hebreux, par
Adolphe Franck. 8vo. Paris, Hachette, 1889.
Etudes Orientales, par Adolphe Franck. 8vo. Paris, Levy,
1861.
Jesus of Nazara, by Dr. Theodor Keim. Translated. 6 vols.
Williams & Norgate, 1876.
Vie De Jesus, par Ernest Renan. Paris, Levy, 1863.
Novum Testamentum Graece, Editio Octava Critica Major.
2 vols. Const. Tischendorf, Lipsiae.
The Creeds of Christendom, by Philip Schaff, D.D. 3 vols.
New York, 1874.
A Comparative View of the Doctrines and Confessions of
Christendom, by G. B. Winer. Translated by W. B. Pope.
Edinburgh, T. T. Clark, 1881.
Authoritative Christianity, The Decisions of the Six Ecumeni
cal Councils, by James Chrystal, Translator, Editor, and
Publisher. 1st vol. Svo. Jersey City, 1891.
The Apostolic Fathers, Revised Texts, by the late J. B. Light
foot, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Lord Bishop of Durham. 8vo.
London, Macmillan & Co., 1891.

298 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Translations of the Writings of the
Fathers down to a.d. 325, by Rev. Alex. Roberts, D.D., and
James Donaldson, LL.D. Revised by Bishop A. C. Coxe,
D.D. 8 vols. 8vo. Buffalo, Christian Literature Publishing
Company, 1886-1888.
History of Christian Doctrines, by Dr. K. R. Hagenbach.
Translated. 3 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh, Clark, 1883.
Manuel de l'Histoire des Dogmes Chretiens, par Henri Klee.
Traduit de l'Allemand, par l'Abbe Mafire. 2 tomes. Paris,
Lecoffre et Cie, 1848.
Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, von Adolf Harnack. 3 Band.
Freiburg, Mohr, 1888-1890.
Histoire des Dogmes Chretiens, par E. Haag. Paris, 1892.
A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification
and Reconciliation, by Albrecht Ritschl. Translated by
J. S. Black. 8vo. Edinburgh, 1872.
The Philosophy of History, by G. W. F. Hegel. Translated
by Bohn. New York, Macmillan & Co., 1884.
Masks, Heads, and Faces, by Ellen R. Emerson. Boston, 1891.
Die Christliche Mystik nach ihrem geschichtlichen Entwick-
elungsgange im Mittel und in der Neuern Zeit dargestellt,
von Dr. Ludwig Noack. Konigsberg, Gebriider Borntrager,
1853.
A Treatise of Dogmatic Theology, by Rev. Samuel Buel, S.T.D.
2 vol. 8vo. New York, Thomas Whittaker, 1890.
Christian Dogmatics : A Compendium of the Doctrines of Chris
tianity, by Dr. H. Martensen. Edinburgh, Clark, 1860.
Systematic Divinity, by Charles Hodge, D.D. 3 vol. 8vo. New
York, Harpers.
S. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. 8 vols. 8vo. New
York, Benziger Bros., 1875.
Le Christ de la Tradition, par Mgr. Landriot, Evgque de La
Rochelle et Saintes. 2 tomes. Paris, Victor Palme, 1867.
Works of Mr. Richard Hooker in Eight Books of the Laws of
the Ecclesiastical Polity. 1 vol. fol. London, MDCCV.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. 299
A Course of Sermons for All the Sundays of the Year, by
Jeremy Taylor, D.D. 2 vols. fol. London, 1655.
Works of William Beveridge, D.D., Lord Bishop of St. Asaph.
6 vols. Oxford, 1817.
The Works of Joseph Butler, D.C.L., Lord Bishop of Durham.
2 vols. Oxford, MDCCCXXVI.
The Works of Thomas Seeker, LL.D., Archbishop of Canter
bury. 6 vols. 1811.
Bishop Overall's Convocation Book, MDCVI. London, 1690.
The Polity of the Christian Church, by A. A. Pelliccia. Trans
lated. London, Masters, 1883.
A History of Philosophy, by Johann Eduard Erdmann. 3 vols.
London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890.
Handbook of the History of Philosophy, by Dr. Albert Schweg-
ler. Edinburgh, 1874.
Ancient Law, its Connection with the Early History of Society
and its Relation to Modern Ideas, by Henry Sumner Maine.
New York, Henry Holt, 1875.
Christian Archaeology, by C. W. Bennett, D.D. New York
and Cincinnati, 1888.
History of Mediaeval Art, by Dr. Franz von Reber. Trans
lated. New York, Harpers, 1887.
Didron, Christian Iconography.' 2 vols. London, Bohn, 1851,
1886.
History of the Christian Church, by W. Moeller. Translated.
London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1892.
Ecclesiastical Polity of the New Testament, by Rev. G. A.
Jacobs, D.D. New York, Thomas Whittaker, 1878.
The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin, by
John Fiske. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1889.
A System of Biblical Psychology, by Franz Delitzch, D.D.
Translated by Rev. R. E. Wallis. Edinburgh, Clark, 1867.
Biblical Theology of the New Testament, by Dr. Bernard
Weiss. Translated. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh, Clark, 1888.

800 SURVIVALS IN CHRISTIANITY.
The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church containing the
Confession of Faith, the Catechisms, and the Directory for
the Worship of God.
Justini, Philosophi et Martyris, Opera. Item Athenagorae
Atheniensis, Theophili Antiocheni, Tatiani Assyrii, et Her-
mi<e, etc. Colonise, MDLCLXXXVT.
S. Hippolyti, Refutationis Omnium Haeresium Libri X. Duncker
et Scheneidewin. 8vo. Gottingae, 1859.
Firmiani Lactantii Opera, Fritzsche. 12mo. Leipzig, Tauch-
nitz, 1842.
Arnobii adversus Nationes Libri, VII, Oehler. Leipzig, Tauch-
nitz, 1846.
M. Minucii Felicis Octavius. Firmicus Maternus, Paulinus,
Commodianus. Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1847.
Reliquije Sacra;, by M. J. Routh, S.T.P. 5 vols. Oxoni, 1846.
Le ProMeme de lTmmortalite, par E. Patavel-Olliff. 2 tomes.
Paris, Fischbacher, 1892.
Essays in Biblical Greek, by Edwin Hatch, M.A., D.D. Oxford
and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1S89.
La Divina Commedia, di Dante Allighieri. Witte. Berlin, 1862.

INDEX.

INDEX.

Abbott's, Lyman, Statement of the
Theology of Divine Imma
nence, 290.
Abelard, his criticism of the An-
selmic theory, 175.
Absolution. See Forgiveness.
After death, in primitive culture,
227, 277.
in modern common opinion, 237.
Agnosticism, evolution of, 43.
Ainu theory of ghost-world, 257.
Albigensians, 69, 72, 110.
Altars, early, 15.
why of stone, 17.
why relics deposited in, 232.
Amiel, H. F., on the distinctive
element of Christianity, 3.
adjustment of religious teach
ing, 50, 73.
Ancestor worship, 38, 258.
Ancient temple, how different from
a Christian church, 83.
Andrews, Bp., on Episcopal gov
ernment of Church, 124.
Animism, 35, 71.
survival of, in Pantheism, 43.
Anselm, St., on Atonement, 174.
Antiquity, value of appeal to,
2.
Apocalypses, pre-Christian, 8, n. 1. 303

Apocalypses, influence of, on Chris
tian theology, 234.
Apocalyptic writings, their influ
ence on common notion of
heaven, 260.
Apostolic Church, 117.
Apostolic development of doctrine
of the Resurrection, 204-208.
Apostolic Succession, 118. See Con
tinuity, Tactual, and Episco
pacy.
its sign, 126.
relation to the Church, 125.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, on Divine
Immanence, 26, 67.
Arabian philosophy, 13.
Arbitrary God, in primitive folk-
faith, 147.
survival of the notion of, 148.
Arianism, 68.
Arius on Resurrection, 220.
Arnold, Sir E., quoted on Peace of
the Church, 135.
Arnold, M., on decay of Faith, 75.
on Eternal Life, 271.
on Infallibility of the Church,
115.
Art, Byzantine, and the dead
Christ, 237.
of Greece, influence of theory
of Resurrection upon, 230,
n. 1.

304

INDEX.

Art, its influence on early survivals
in Christianity, 71.
of Early Egypt, influenced by
folk-faith, 230.
Aryan Monotheism, more stable
than Semitic, 41.
Athanasius, on deification of hu
manity, 51.
on Divine Immanence, 66.
on Eternal Logos, 60.
Athenagoras on Resurrection, 194.
Atonement, Anselmic doctrine of,
69.
Bp. Butler on, 176.
Atonement, and magic, 84.
Augustine, St., 13.
his influence on the develop
ment of the doctrine of for
giveness of sins, 177.
on the Resurrection, 235.
on the privilege of Peter, 106.
his dualism, 266.
Authority, basis of, 23, 134.
Azazel, predecessor of Satan, 158.
See Scapegoat, Substitution,
Sinbearer. B.
Bacon on human error, 3.
Baptism and resurrection, 221. See
Irenaeus, Justin, etc.
Baptism for forgiveness, 144.
Baptists, distinctive truth of the,
132.
Barbarossa, mediaeval popular be
lief about, 227.
Barrow, Isaac, on Resurrection, 195.
Bible (the) , a record of progressive
reception of truth, 7.
Bohmen, Jacob, on Eternal Life,
246, 282.

Bowen, Professor Francis, on
transmigration of souls, 255.
Brahm, 38, 116.
Browning, Robert, on Renaissance
belief in consciousness of
dead, 229.
on extinction of evil, 267.
on service of man, 138.
on the perfection of the Uni
verse, 289.
on human progress, quoted,
33.
doctrine of cosmic resurrection
process, 240, 241.
on remission of sin from the
world, 189.
on Christ in the world, 88.
Buddhism, 43, 83.
its self-renunciation contrasted
with the Christian self-re
nunciation, 113.
and Brahminism at one in the
doctrine of Absorption of the
soul in God, 251, n. 1.
Burnt Column, the, 6.
Butler, Bp., on Atonement theories,
176. C.
Calvinism and Neoplatonism, 12.
and polytheism, 42.
its idea of God, 148.
and devil worship, 147, 152.
Catacombs, their influence on
Christian doctrine, 9.
their testimony to early Chris
tian belief in resurrection,
231.
their testimony to survivals of
paganism, 222.
See Art.

INDEX.

305

Catholic Church, Antenicene defi
nitions of, 98, 99.
Anglican definitions of, 78, 79,
93.
Matthew Arnold's definition
of, 115.
true members of, 78.
See Apostolic Church.
Catholicity, Jeremy Taylor on, 2,
131.
Ceremonies [see Ritual, Symbol,
Sacrifice] relative to relig
ion, 10.
dramatic, 104.
Charlemagne, mediaeval popular
belief about, 227.
Christianises the Saxons, 10.
Christian religion, spread of, 8.
Christian Science, 19, 56.
Christmas, 11.
Chrysostom, St. John, on Resurrec
tion, 235.
Church, definition of, in XlXth
Article of Religion, 93.
how constituted and instituted,
92.
theory of, in early Latin the
ology, 96.
undergoing a supernatural evo
lution, 118.
relation of individual to, 94.
and State united, idea of Hindu
and Greek thought, 88.
and World, 133.
unity of, 103.
"Notes" of, 97, 101.
See Unity, Holiness, Catho
licity, Apostolicity.
article of, not in early creeds
of East, 95.
of West, 96.
of Rome, effect of politics on, 17.

Clement, St., of Alexandria, on
defective receptiveness, 3.
on forgiveness, 173.
on salvation in the Church only,
99.
his gnosis, 100.
of Rome, on Episcopacy and
Succession, 119.
Clericalism, inevitable, 12.
survival of Shamanism, 84, 127,
252.
Clough, A. H., on resurrection of
society, 195.
Cobbe, F. P., on Mystery of Pain,
215.
Collegia of Rome, survivals in the
Church, 88, 91.
Comparative religion, 17.
Communion with God, 275 aud n. 5.
with the god in Mexican relig
ion, 154.
with God in Hebrew ceremo
nial, 167, n. 1.
Congregational form of polity, a
survival, 88.
Congregationals, their special
truth, 132.
Constantine the Great, 6, 10.
Continuity of the Church, 127,
Conversion, sensible, survival of
adeptism, 86, and of Sham
anism, 149, 279.
Coronation stone, 16.
Cross, symbol of life not of death
only, 165, 240.
Crucifixion in early Art, 49.
Culture, ancient, rejected by the
Church, 12.
Cusa, Nicolas, on Divine Imma
nence, 67.
Cyprian, St., Theory of the Church,

306

INDEX.

Dance of death, 229.
Dante, on uoequality of the Persons
of the Trinity, 62.
on dead souls, 272, n. 5.
influence of his Divine Comedy
on popular conceptions of
state of dead, 236.
on " donation qf Constantine,"
87.
on punishment of sin, 184.
on Immanence of God, 26.
on Rewards and punishments,
265.
Death, eternal, 284, 288.
of Jesus, its significance, 202.
Deism, 43.
Development of doctrine, 2, 20, 51.
Devil worship of primitive man,
147.
worshippers, 152.
Dioceses, small, evils of, 122.
Diognetus, Epistle of, 173.
Dionysiac mysteries and mythos of
the Resurrection, 238.
Dionysius the Areopagite and
patheistic mysticism, 44.
Divine vicegerents aud the papal
theory, 37.
Doctrine of Church Fathers, never
any concensus of, 79.
of the Holy Trinity, the, the
true idea of God, 60-62.
of Christian religion, some
primary postulates, 21.
Christian, Evolution of, 7, 18,
22, etc.
Christian, pagan elements of,
7, 15, 67, etc. (see Survivals).
how to separate paganism from,
73.

Doctrine, Christianity influenced
by philosophy and law, 18.
of sin over-analysed, 178.
Doctrines of the Christian religion,
what are essential, 3, 26.
Dogma. See Doctrine.
Dualism, its basis, 61 ; its survivals,
72.
in materialistic theories of Res
urrection, 220.
E.
Eckehart'sdebtto Neoplatonism, 13.
on Immanence of God, 26.
on St. Paul's doctrine of evolu
tion, 58.
Edda, on Odin's self-immolation,
161.
Edwards, Jonathan, on God the
beginning and end of theol
ogy, 290.
Egyptian Art, originally realistic,
230.
religion, 44.
theory of resuscitation of the
dead, 229.
"Elements" surviving in Chris
tian belief, 71.
Eleusis and the Church, 83.
and doctrine of Resurrection,
238.
Enoch, Book of, on the Millennium
260.
on Azazel, 158.
Emanations, theory, 63.
Episcopacy a basis of unity, 129.
its importance, 124-129.
of the integrity of the Church,
127, n. 1.
historic, 127.
See Apostolicity.

INDEX.

307

Episcopate, historic, asserted in
Book of Common Prayer, 78.
Erigena on Divine Immanence, 66.
Error, religious. See Survivals.
Eternal birth-process, a statement
of Evolution, 181.
See Regeneration.
Eternal death, 284.
from failure to conform to the
Environment, 265, 283, 287.
Eternal life, its raison d'etre, 270,
275.
begins in the present, 271.
progressive, 285, 288.
according to the Theologica
Germanica, 246.
Jeremy Taylor on, 246.
in teaching of Jesus, 269.
in Egyptian folk-faith, 258.
in the Edda, 257. '
ethical doctrine of, 183, n. 2, 280.
and natural law, 287."
a present condition, 270.
Eternity of evil, not possible, 266.
Ethical form of the doctrine of the
Resurrection, 242.
Euripides, his idea of divine sac
rifice, 48.
Everlasting. See Eternal.
Evil is privative, 181.
Eternal, aud Wagner's criti
cism, 266.
Evolution, and Resurrection in
Pauline theology, 208.
St. Paul's statement of, 57.
of the Church, 211.
the cosmic passion, 58.
and theism, 291.
Expiatory sacrifice, its rational
basis, 69.
Extinction of Sin, due to Divine
Immanence, 188.

F.
Fathers of the Church, no con
sensus of doctrines of, 79.
Faith, Catholic, 2.
Fall of Man, a truth of psychology,
189.
Fear, the secret god of Rome, 148.
influence on development of
theology, 153, 277.
in primitive religion, 148.
Feminine principle, 63, 64.
Fetishism, 37, 120.
Fichte, 26.
Fictions, theological, 140, 170.
Fire-worship, 14.
Fiske, John, ou Romans viii. 18-
26, 216.
quoted, on Pardon, 138.
Foreordination, 68.
Forgiveness of sins, in the Creed,
143.
not an evasion of penalty alone,
146.
not magical, 133, 185.
of sins, chief office of the
Church, 144.
See Pardon.
Free-thought, hostility of Church
to, 13.
Franpois Xavier, St., on love of
God, quoted, 40.
G.
Genius of Roman Emperor, 38.
Gibbon, Edw., on absolute revela
tion and conditioned recep
tivity, 9.
error about the eating of the
slain god, 153.
Gilgul, a Rabbinic doctrine, 225, 253.

308

INDEX.

God, primary idea of, 32 seq., 35,
36, 39, 42, 45, 61.
proofs of existence of, 31.
knowledge of, 51, 74.
in His World, Goethe on, 27.
idea of, comprehends all theol
ogy, 33.
God-consciousness, 51.
Fichte on, 26.
Gotterdammerung, its ethos, 266.
Goethe, 27, 31.
Ghost-world in patristic theology,
277 and n. 1.
of primitive man, 250.
of Egypt, 229.
Ghosts, feeding the, 15, 221, 259.
Gorham Case, 145, n. 1.
Gnosticism, 234.
its problem, 63.
Gnosis of the Gospel, 274.
Grace, a theory of, 111, 182.
double aspect, 201, n. 3.
Gregory the Great, St., on Divine
Immanence, 66.
Ground of Authority, 134.
Guilt, inherited, 178.
inherited, a survival of Ancient
Semitic Materialism, 253.

Haag on lack of agreement of the
Fathers, 79.
Hall, Bp., on Episcopacy, 118.
Harnack on cultus of relics, 232.
Hartmann's explanation of the
predominance of pain over
pleasure, 213.
Harwood, G., on actual forgive
ness, 139.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his psychol
ogy of sin and its forgive
ness, 187.

Heaven, 270.
in early folk-faith, 260.
See Eternal Life.
Hell, a dualistic survival, 267.
Hegel on doctrine of the Trinity,
70.
on Resurrection, 240.
Hesperides, 260.
Hierarchial theory of the Church,
a survival of Shamanism,
127.
Higher Criticism and Theology, 5.
Hinton on Mystery of Pain, 214.
Hippolytus, St., theory of two res
urrections, 221.
Historic Episcopate, 127.
See Continuity of the Church,
Apostolic Succession, Tact
ual, St. Spiridion, Ordina
tion.
Holiness of God, the ground of His
Eternal Existence, 275.
the condition of life eternal, 276.
of Church, 105.
distinguished from Nirvana, 240.
Holy Ghost, a person, 64.
Holy Grail in relation to Christian
doctrine, 203, u. 7.
Hooker, quoted on absolute neces
sity of Episcopal form of
government, 117.
on non-Episcopal Ordination,
126.
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 125,
u. I.
Hugo, Victor, on Cultus of Saints,
38.
Human Sacrifice, origin of. See
Scapegoat.
Humiliation. See Kenosis.
Huntington, Bp., on functions of a
bishop, 120 ff.

INDEX.

309

Hymnology, relative to ritual in
development, 252.

I.
Idea of God, innate, 32.
in Monotheism, 42.
Ignatius, St., theory of the Church,
98.
theory of Resurrection, 219.
Illusion, theory of the world, 55.
Immanence of God, 26.
in doctrine of the Fathers, 66-
67.
a Pauline doctrine, 65.
a Johannine doctrine, 54.
according to Ezekiel, 65.
Tennyson quoted, 44.
Shelley quoted, 45.
relative to Incarnation, 27.
taught in O. T., 58.
the actual source of pardon, 169.
relative to forgiveness of sins,
143.
inferred from development of
ethnic religions, 52.
and His transcendence, bearing
upon the organisation of the
Church, 108.
and Eternal Life, 273.
relation to the Church, 132.
relative to Holiness of Church,
111, 114.
the true Philosophy of History,
56.
relation to Unity of Church,
108.
of the Word, 54.
Immanence of Holy Trinity, ra
tional basis, 55.

Immanence versus the world an
illusion, 55.
Immolation of the divine Victim
in Christian Ceremonies, 154.
See Victim.
Immortality, 276, n. 2.
conditional, 196.
conditional in Hinduism, 252.
innate, not Biblical doctrine,
268.
Imperialism, a survival, 17.
of Rome, effect upon the Church,
the Church, 87, 99.
Incarnation, its essential signifi
cance, 48.
and mediation, 181.
Tennyson's statement, 47.
Independents. See Congregation
als.
Indulgences, origin of the doctrine
of, 266..
Infallibility, 23, 37.
of Roman Church, 114, n. 1.
a sign of Catholicity ?, 117.
origin of idea of, 85.
Infallible Church, a comprehensive
definition, 116.
Irenaeus, St., on Apostolic succes
sion, 119.
on Eternal Life, 281.
on forgiveness of sins, 173.
on conditional immortality, 220,
280.
not orthodox on doctrine of'
Christ's natures, 11, u. 3.
theory of the Church, 96, 99.
on Resurrection, 220, 221.
Islam, degeneracy of, 41.
Izdubar Epic on " outer darkness,"
263.
a myth of pain and human prog
ress, 162.

310

INDEX.

Jesus, purpose of, 20.
secret of, 45, 46.
mediation of, 183.
unselfish love, 40.
misunderstood, 8.
doctrine slowly accepted, 11.
doctrine of the Church, 89 ff.
doctrine of the Absolution, 169 ff .
doctrine of the Resurrection,
200 ff.
doctrine of the Heaven, 268 ff.
Jewish theory of Resurrection, 223.
Jews, Polish, their curious burial
custom, 225.
John of Damascus, St., on divine
Immanence, 66.
Justice, love, and mercy identical
in the theology of the LXX.,
185, u. 2.
Justification, doctrine of, 23, 111,
182, n. 3, 276, n. 1.
Justin Martyr, St., 12.
on Forgiveness of Sins, 173.
on Resurrection, 219.
on identity of the Word and
reason, 50.
Justinian, Emperor, 12.

Karens' notion of future life, 257.
Karma, attempt to revive the
theory of, 238, 240.
Karl the Great, proselytism of, 10.
Kenosis of Jesus, 182, n. 3, 102, 201.
Kenosis, Church a kenosis of Holy
Ghost, 102.
of the Holy Ghost, 63.
Kingdom of God, at first known in
person of Jesus only, 90.

Kingdom of God, in parables, 90, 91.
in relation to sociology, 91, 93.
Kingdom of God and the Church,
93, 98.
Kings, origin of theory of divine
right of, 85. L.
Lamb of God, 155, 165, 166.
Landor, W. S., quoted, 2.
Leaven, of parable is God Himself,
217.
Legal theology not saving, 278.
Legends, Christian, origin of, 11.
Leibnitz and preestablished har
mony, 68, n. 2.
Lia Fail, 16. See Stone Worship
and Altar.
Liddon, Canon, denies theory of
an arbitrary God, 148.
Limbo, 262.
Life, its nature, desire, 183.
Eternal. See Eternal.
self-retributive, 277.
victorious over death in nature,
Swinburne's opinion, 243.
omnipresent, in poetry, 34, 35,
43, 56.
omnipresent, in theology, 35.
Logos. See Word of God, Incar
nation.
Lotze, 19.
on resurrection of flesh, 208.
Love, divine, 47, 50, 61.
essentially sacrificial of self, 167.
fundamental Idea of God, 47.
the basis of theology and re
ligion, 26.
Love divine, Lucretius and Eu
ripides on, 48.
Lowell, J. R., on dead souls, 272.

INDEX.

311

Luck, as a religious concept, 34,
n.l.
Lucretius, his idea of divine love,
48.
Luz, the bone, 223. M.
Magic, its origin, 34, 112.
survival among Christians, 84,
228.
and the divine name, 112.
influence on Christian The
ology, 84, 112.
surviving in theories of forgive
ness, 145.
Magical theory of Holy Baptism,
114.
Mahomet, attempt to proclaim him
God incarnate, 41.
Maimonides on soul of the dead, 233.
Manes worship, and cultus of
saints, 38.
Marcus Aurelius, Emperor, on the
true motive of righteousness,
283.
Marlowe, Christopher, on heaven,
247.
Martyrdom of Man, Swinburne,
^Ischylus, and the Gospels
on, 162.
Matheson, A., on basis of the re
ligion of humanity, 23.
Materialism in Theology, 69, 119,
163.
Mediator, Jesus Christ in His hu
manity, 183.
primitive notion of, 72.
Menhirs, 14-16.
Merits, origin of the doctrine of,
264.
Metanoia, definition of, 94, n. 1.

Metempsychosis. See Transmigra
tion.
Method of theological study, 22.
Meth-- dism, its distinctive truth, 132.
Methodist Episcopal, theory of
Episcopate, its early form,
100.
Millennial doctrines, origin, 260, 223.
Milton, on the Fall, 177.
his abandonment of Christian
ity, 43.
Monotheism, pure, negates itself,
43.
not result of evolution, 41.
its truth, 60.
its weakness, 61.
Monism, 19.
Moore, Rev. Aubrey L., on place in
theology of sin doctrines, 26.
Mormonism, 63.
Mountains, sacred, 37.
Montanism, 9.
Mythos, how different from myth,
162.
Myths, invention of, 17.
survivals of, 71.
Mystics of fourteenth century, 13.
Mysteries, Eleusinian, mythos of,
86.
Mystery, Paul's use of word, 47,
notes. N.
Navajo myth of a redeemer, 162.
Necromancy, 256, 258.
Nibelungenlied, 11.
Neoplatonism and Christian be
liefs, 12.
Nirvana, 251.
Noble, J. A., on sin and pardon,
139.

312

INDEX.

Norse folk-faith concerning the
dead, 227.
myth of a redeemer, 161.
Notes of the Church, goal of
Church's progress, 102, 109,
130. See Church.

Ordination of primitive priesthood,
86.
Organisation of Church, 105.
Origen, 12.
on resurrection body, 226.
on Divine Immanence, 66.
on Forgiveness of Sins, 173.
Original sin, 178.
Omar Khayyam on immortality,
233.
" Outer darkness " in Semitic folk-
faith, 263.
Orthodoxy, 51.

Paganism, 70, 71. See Survivals.
Pater, Walter, on peace of the
Church, 12.
Pain, its use, 164.
problem, Von Hartmann's so
lution, 213.
problem of, Browning's solu
tion, 139.
problem of, in relation to For
giveness of Sins, 181.
in relation to Resurrection, 212,
243.
a compensation for sin, influ
ence of this theory on Chris
tian doctrine, 264.
Pantheism, its truth, 60.
its logical and historical evolu
tion, 44.

Pantheism in poetry, 35.
in folk-lore, 35.
Papacy, claims of, 105, n. 1.
Pardon and natural law, 138, 188.
its relation to immanence of
God, 169.
Parousia. See Presence.
Parson, origin of the idea of, 85.
Particular predestination. See
Predestination.
Passion, the, of the universe, 214.
Passion plays, the Greek, 162.
Paul, St., on Cosmic passion, 216.
on the problem of pain, 58.
Paul's, St., answer to pessimism,
181.
Pauline psychology of Resurrec
tion, 208.
Penalty, relation to sin, 179.
Pessimism, 179.
Petrine Claims, 105, n. 1.
Perfection, 32.
Person, a theological term, 64, n. 2.
Pillar saints, a survival of stone
worship, 16.
Plato on souls and stars, 238.
Platonism and Christian theology,
12.
and St. Augustine, 177.
Plotinus, his last words, 74.
Polytheism, 37.
its truth, 60.
survivals of, 39, 72.
Pontifex Maximus, survival of, 87.
Pope, origin of the notion of, 37.
Potter, the divine, Hodge, Shedd,
Carlyle, and Browning on,
150.
the divine, in Egypt, 149.
Power, spiritual and temporal
united, a concept of folk-
faith, 37.

INDEX.

313

Prayer, Book of Common, 19.
Predestination, particular, doc
trine, a survival from early
folk-faith, 149.
Precious Blood doctrine, 203.
Priesthood, its true place in Chris
tian Church, 92.
Presbyterians', distinctive truth,
132.
Presbyterial organisation, 107.
Presence of Christ in the world, 53.
Propitiatory sacrifices, primitive,
36, 39.
sacrifice, basis of idea of, 60.
Protestant Episcopal Church, its
actual organic condition, 108.
Prothesis, Order of, in Eastern
Church, 154.
Psychology of primitive men, 250.
of Sts. Paul and Peter, 206-209.
Purgatory in folk-faith, 164, n.
R.
Ransom, 170, u. 2. See Theophy-
lact.
Rawes, H. A., on immanence of the
Triune God, 76.
Receptiveness relative to true doc
trine, 9.
of mankind, 3.
Redemptive process of life, 214.
Redemption, Jeremy Taylor on,
151.
commercial theory of, 146. See
Scapegoat.
Regeneration, 145.
in Holy Baptism, 112.
Reincarnation. See Transmigra
tion.
Relics, cultus of, its origin magi
cal, 232.

Religion, comparative, Study of,
17, 18.
primitive, 34 ff.
of Christ, in visible and corpo
rate form, 92.
Renan, cited, 45.
Rephaim, 258.
Resurrection of Jesus, 199-204.
of the dead, in Creed, 199.
doctrine peculiar to Christian
ity, 195, 196.
begins in the present, 209.
a change to a higher state, 195.
in nature, Swinburne's thought,
243.
theology of, not yet highly de
veloped in Christian theol
ogy, 218.
different from resuscitation,
207, 208 n. 1.
of the wicked, 207, u. 2.
a moral process in the world,
195.
in patristic theology, 218-223.
in Talmud, 225.
dependent on preservation of
corpse, 229-233.
in Greek folk-lore, 238.
Retribution, 277.
future, subjective, 149.
theory, influence of, on art,
poetry, and drama, 282.
Revelation of God in human prog
ress, 52.
and God, 31.
Rewards and penalties according
to Omar Khayyam, 149.
and punishments, influence of
theology of, in development
of Christendom, 282.
and punishments in folk-faith,
268.

314

INDEX.

Rewards and punishments, why a
popular element of relig
ious teaching, 277, 282.
Reynaud on heaven, 286.
Right, no arbitrary standard of,
42, n. 1, 148.
Ritual, dramatic, a survival, 104.
and religion, 16, 84.
Rossetti, D. G., on progress of soul
after death, 285.
Rothe, R., on forgiveness of sin,
139.
Roman law and doctrine of for
giveness of sins, 175.
Rufinus against resurrection of the
flesh, 196.

Sacerdotalism, origin of, 37.
a survival of Shamanism, 84,
99.
Sacraments, materialistic theory
of, 119.
and magic, 84, 112.
Sacramental Absolution, its power,
190.
Sacred Heart, Symbol of Cultus,
224, n. 1.
Sacrifice, origin of custom, 34, 39.
propitiatory, 259 n. 2.
propiatory, origin, 39.
of Jesus a revealment, 49.
Sacrificial system of Israel, 36,
167, u. 1.
Saining torch, 158.
Saint John's day, 11.
Saints, cultus of, 38, 70, 72.
merits of, 264.
Saint-worship in Islam, 41.
Salvation outside Church impossi
ble, 100.

Sanctification, immediate, a survi
val, 39.
Satisfaction, origin of doctrine,
153.
first appearance in Christian
theology, 174.
Saviour God, Jesus a revealment
of, 89.
Sinew which shrank, why not
eaten, 226.
Scapegoat, human, 85.
in India, 157.
among the Hebrews, 158.
in Thibetan Buddhism, 158.
in Athens, 159.
Rome, 159.
Babylon, 159.
Mexico, 159.
theory responsible for death of
Jesus, 160.
theory in Ante-Nicene theology,
161, 172-173.
Self-interest no part of religion of
Jesus, 284, 287.
and the Church idea, 133.
Self-sacrifice of Izdubar, 162.
Shakspere on God's forgiveness,
187.
Shamanism and revivals, 279.
survival in hierarchial systems,
127.
Schopenhauer, how his theory
differs from teaching of Je
sus, 180.
Shelley on human receptiveness,
50.
on Immanence of God, 45.
Sill, E. R., on evil of Sins of Igno
rance, 191.
Sin-bearer. See Scapegoat.
bearing and witchcraft, 157.
eating, 155.

INDEX.

315

Sin-bearer in Hebrew rites, 156.
doctrine, misplaced by theolo
gians, 26.
Christian doctrine of, not de
rived from folk-faith, 164.
what it is, 183.
place of doctrine of, in Theol
ogy, 33.
transference of, 156, 157.
is positive, 182, u. 1.
and pain confused, survival of
primitive notion, 163.
Social problems and Holy Com
munion, 113.
and the Church, 133.
and the Resurrection, 243.
Sociology and Forgiveness of sins,
144.
Soma, 14. See Transubstantiation.
Spinoza on Facultative Immortal
ity, 288.
Spiridion, St., dead hand of, 228.
Spirit, guidance of Holy, did not
cease with Anti-Nicene
epoch, 117.
Spiritism, 70.
Shields, Professor of Princeton, on
Episcopacy, the ground of
Church unity, 128.
Soul's sleep in death, 237.
Stations of the Cross, origin of, 9.
Stoic sects, relative to Church
organisation, 83.
Stoicheia, 71.
Stones, sacred, 14, 15.
• Strauss, David, mythical theory of
the Passion, 163.
Stylites, 16.
Substitutionary death, origin of
custom, 153, 159.
Substitution, doctrine, of its ori
gin, 153.

Substitutionary sacrifice, in .SSs-
chylus' drama, 161.
Sufism in Islam, 41.
Sun-myth in Church ceremonies,
226.
Survival of folk-faith in theories
of atonement, 176.
of polytheism in Christian The
ology, 67.
Survivals of paganism in theology
of the Resurrection, 220, 234.
of Shamanism, 85, 127.
of magic, 112, 146.
of primitive materialism, 253.
of fire worship, 14.
of fetishism, 120, 232.
of dualism, 37, 73, 267.
in theories of the Church, 99.
of eternal life, 281.
Symbols, pagan, of Christian ideas,
9.
Synagogue did not suggest the
form of Church organisation,
84. T.
Tactual Succession not the doctrine
of Clement of Rome, 119.
of the ministry, not a Roman
Catholic theory, 125.
not an Anglican theory, 125, 126.
Talmud on State of the Dead, 232.
on Resurrection of body, 225.
Tatian on Resurrection, 219.
Taylor, Jeremy, on Divine Imma
nence and Incarnation, 27.
on Comprehensiveness as basis
of Unity, 131.
on Eternal Life, 246.
on pardon, 138.
on true Catholicity, 2.
Telesterion at Eleusis, 83.

316

INDEX.

Tennyson, Lord, on moral evolu
tion of man, 217.
on Pantheism, 44.
Tertullian, non-sacerdotal theory
of the Church, 78.
gross theory of Resurrection,
221.
Testament of Jesus not His last
will, 167, n. 1.
Theodore, St., and Romulus, 70.
Theologica Germanica, 13.
Theology of Church heterogene
ous, 3.
progression in, 22-24.
consistency in, 22, 23.
study, 7.
new methods, 6.
Theophilus on Conditional Immor
tality, 196.
on Resurrection, 221.
Theophylact, on Ransom of Christ,
168.
Thommasin on Immanence of God,
32, n. 1.
Transcendence and Immanence
both true, 59.
bare, a survival, 68.
Transmigration, survival of idea
in Christian legends, 253.
not taught by Jesus, 253.
of souls in folk-faith, 249-251.
in Talmud, 238.
purpose of the doctrine, 254, 355.
Transubstantiation and fetishism,
120. See Soma.
Trinity, doctrine of, 26, 53, 59, 60,
62, 69, 70.
doctrine of, safeguard against
Agnosticism, 65.
Truth, reality, 54.

U.
Uniformity, Hooker on, 117.
in belief and worship impracti
cable, 20.
Unitarianism unreasonable, 43.
Unitarians, their true principle,
131.
Unity, basis of, 104, 105.
of Church, how signified, 103.
of Church, a terminus ad quem,
109.
of Christendom, 134.
Universalism based upon wrong
idea of the nature of Eternal
Life, 262.
Unselfishness, the doctrine of, 113.

Valhalla, the Norse heaven, 262.
Vampirism, Babylonian origin, 234.
Vedas, theory of heaven, 263.
their doctrine, 14.
on efficacy of penance, 252.
Vestis Angelica, or monastic habit
for a death robe, 262.
Vicar of God, in primitive folk-
faith, 85.
Vicarious suffering not vicarious
satisfaction in Ante-Nicene
Fathers, 153.
Victim, slaying of the, Bp. But
ler's criticism of this element
in Christian doctrine, 176.
in Christian theology, 163, 171,,
174, 264.
in Assyrian epic, 162.
in Eastern liturgy, 154.
in Greek drama, 163.

INDEX.

317

Victim in Norse mythology, 161.
in folk-faith, 163.
in the Gospels, 160.
Virgin, cultus of, 64-74.
W.
Watson, William, on Divine Im
manence, 56.
Weregeld, influence on Christian
doctrine, 175.
Wheel of Life, 210.
Word, Eternal Generation of, a
practical truth, 60.
Immanence of, a Johanine doc
trine, 54.
Word of God and reason one. See
St. Justin Martyr.
St. Athanasius on, 66.
the life of the Universe, 271.
Word-made-Flesh, significance of,
48, 52.

Wordsworth, protest against no
tion of bare transcendence,
73.
Works, efficacy of, 74.
Wrath principle human, 266.
Wrath of God, 283.
Anti-Nicene doctrine of, 173.
influence of the idea in Chris
tian Art, 72.
denied by Bp. Taylor, 151.
Y.
Yezidee's idea of God and of evil,
152.
Yountoo, 232. Z.
Zeitgeist idea, 116.
Zohar, nihilism of, 43.
its doctrine of God, 43.

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tion in the light of the facts of human nature and of the teach
ing of the New Testament. It is in no sense polemical, neither
advocating nor combating any special theory of the Atonement.
It is a candid study of the question de novo, conducted with
some degree of independence of the letter, but with devout and
thorough sympathy with the spirit of Catholic thought on the
subject. In its general scope it deals with (1) the nature and meaning
of "Salvation," (2) the work of salvation as actually accom
plished for humanity by the Son of Man, and (3) the means of
Salvation in the positive institutions of the Gospel.
The work as a whole is a fresh, and to some extent novel,
presentation of a great subject which, while necessarily old,
must nevertheless be always new.

"... The Church owes a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. DuBose for
bringing out into clear light the New Testament meaning of the word
[salvation] . Its devout spiritual tone and earnestness will lead many
readers to more honest and real thoughts of the meaning of salvation,
whilst its original and fresh treatment of certain aspects of great
theological mysteries will stimulate thought. . . . The spirit in which
Dr. DuBose has undertaken his task cannot be improved upon. . . .
The style and expression also are alike admirable." — Churchman.
"It is a great satisfaction to take up a thoroughly made book like
this, with the entire plan laid out, and every part complete and fitted
to its place. ... He takes hold of his subject with a firm, manly
grasp, and discusses it vigorously. . . . We find Dr. DuBose eminently
suggestive; a strong, intelligent, and honest reasoner, who grapples
manfully with the difficulties of the subject, and is always to be read
both with respectful attention and with profit." — Independent.
"The work is scholarly, clear, and able." — Boston Traveller.

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JUST PUBLISHED. 12mo. $1.50.

THE CENTRAL TEACHING
OF
JESUS CHRIST.

A STUDY AND EXPOSITION
Of the Five Chapters of the Gospel According1 to
St. John, xiii. to xvii. Inclusive.
BT
THOMAS DEHANT BERNARD, M.A.,
Canon and Chancellor of Wells,
author of
" The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament."
Bampton Lectures, 1864.

... In ranging through the literature of the subject, I did
not find that there is any book which does precisely what is
here intended. Certainly the student has abundant aids, both
exegetical and homiletical. . . . But I doubt whether there is
any one book which at once covers the ground and is conter
minous with it; one that treats it as a whole in itself, in the
way both of interpretation and reflection. If there be no such
book, it is fit that there should be one, and of a kind suited for
reading rather than for reference. Under this impression I
applied myself more willingly to a task which did not appear
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The Memorabilia of Jesus,
Commonly called The Gospel of St. John.
By WILLIAM WYNNE PEYTON,
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" I have titled this book the Memorabilia of Jesus because it
really contains His more memorable thoughts. It is not a his
tory, and it is not a biography ; it has no likeness to the Synop
tic monographs. . . . Life is the masterword of the Memorabilia,
the Eternal, Spiritual, Ideal Life.'' — From Preface.

Revelation and the Bible.
AN ATTEMPT AT RECONSTRUCTION.
By ROBERT F. HORTON, M.A.,
Formerly Fellow of New College, Oxford, Author of "Inspiration and
the Bible." 8vo, cloth, $2.00.
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and the Bible, made him known widely, and was regarded by
many as an example of destructive criticism. The present work
naturally follows the other to define and explain, so as to buttress
faith in any in whom it may have been weakened by the earlier
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Discussions on the Apocalypse,
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" The larger portion of the following volume was originally published in
the year 1886, in the form of appendices to the author's Baird Lectures on
the Revelation of St. John. When a third edition of that book was called
for in the beginning of the present year, it seemed, both to the author and
to the publishers, that it was desirable to separate the appendices from the
lectures, partly because the topics treated in them appealed to a narrower
circle of readers than the lectures; partly because the growing interest in
the subjects discussed appeared to render it necessary to renew the discus
sion and to bring it down to the present time. The lectures were accord
ingly published separately, under the title Lectures on the Apocalypse, and
the promise was given that they would be followed, with as little delay as
possible, by a volume of discussions on the same book. The present vol
ume is an effort to fulfil that promise, and is not to be regarded as a new
work. But the appendices retained have been revised in the light of later
investigation, both on the Continent and in England ; while the appendix on
The Unity of the Apocalypse has been greatly enlarged. . . . Two discus
sions, one on The Relation of the Apocalypse to the General Apocalyptic Lit
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Seven Epistles to the Churches, in Chap, ii., iii., have been added." —
Extract from Preface,
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood
of our Lord.
i2mo, cloth, $1.75.
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NEW THEOLOGICAL BOOKS.
Second Edition of Strauss's Great Work.
THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED. By Dr. David
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GEORGE ELIOT. Second edition. In one volume. 8vo, $4.50.
" The Leben Jesu of David Friedrich Strauss, which was published in the year
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age, and represent typically one of its characteristic tendencies." — From Introduc
tion to this Edition by Prof. Otto Pfleiderer, D.D.
BIRKS. — Horae Evangelicae; or, The Internal Evidence of the
Gospel History. Being an inquiry into the Structure and Origin of the
Four Gospels, and the Characteristic Design of each Narrative. Edited
by the Rev. H. A. BIRKS. 8vo, #4.00.
CALDERWOOD. —Evolution and Man's Place in Nature. By
Henry Calderwood, LL. D., F.R.S. E., Professor of Moral Philosophy
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CHURCH. — Cathedral and University Sermons. By R. W.
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FARMER. — Hymns and Chorales for Schools and Colleges.
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KIRKPATRICK. — The Doctrine of the Prophets. The Warburto-
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occupied with such studies." — Scotsman.
LIGHTFOOT. — Dissertations on the Apostolic Age. Reprinted
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D.C.L., LL.D., Lord Bishop of Durham. 8vo, $3.50.
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subsequently gave in his adhesion to the shorter Greek form ofthe Ignatian Epistles,
and the other consisting of extracts on the episcopate from his later deliverances.
The value of the essay is immensely enhanced by this addition." — Church Times.
7

NEW THEOLOGICAL BOOKS.
MACLAREN. — Paul's Prayers, and other Sermons. By Alex
ander MACLAREN, D.D., author of The Unchanging Christ, etc., etc.
i2mo, cloth, $1.50.
RYLE. — The Canon of the Old Testament. An Essay on the
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kind. It is right to add that, while it is within the reach of the ordinary man, it
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scholars." — Sunday Herald, Boston.
SADLER. — Sermon Outlines. For the Clergy and Lay Preachers.
Arranged according to the Church's Year. By the Rev. M. F. SADLER.
i2mo, $1.50.
SADLER. The Works of the Rev. M. F. Sadler.
The Gospel of St. Matthew.
i2rno, $2.00.
The Gospel of S' Mark. i2mo,
$2.00.
The Gospel of St. Luke. i2mo,
$2.50.
The Gospel of St. John. i2mo,
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The Acts of the Holy Apostles.
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The Epistle of St. Paul to the

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VAUGHAN. — Restful Thoughts in Restless Times. By C. J.
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WESTCOTT. — The Gospel of Life. Thoughts introductory to the
Study of Christian Doctrine. By BROOKE FOSS WESTCOTT, Bishop of
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WILLIAMS. — A Review of the Systems of Ethics founded on
the Theory of Evolution. By C. M. Williams. 8vo, $2.60.
" A very full and able treatment of the whole department of ethics in the light of
the evolution philosophy. . . . The author shows a firm grasp of philosophical
thought, keen powers of analysis, and a mastery of lucid exposition. . : This book
is full of interesting matter. On whatever points it may be possible to differ from the
author, there will certainly be no dispute as to ability and fairness; while as a com
prehensive survey of evolutionary theories in their bearing on ethics, and an exposi
tion of ethical science from the standpoint of the evolutionist, the work is likely
to take a prominent place in the literature ofthe subject." — Scotsman.

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I." r&' ^