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MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

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MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK ¦ BOSTON ¦ CHICAGO
DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

MYSTICISM
AND THE CREED

BY
W. F. COBB, D.D.
RECTOR OF ST. ETHELBURGa's IN THE CITY OF LONDON
AUTHOR OF
' ORIGINES JUDAICAE,' ' THE PSALMS,* * THEOLOGY OLD AND NEW,' ETC.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1914

COPYRIGHT

PREFACE
There is no dearth of works on the Creed, and the
names of Caspari and Kattenbusch, of Harnack and
Zahn, Burn and McGiffert in recent times, and of
Pearson earlier, are enough to show the activity
of scholarship. But the works of these authorities ^
are for the most part concerned with the form or
history of the Creed, and only secondarily, if at all,
with its content and meaning. And it is diflficult
to find any work in recent days which makes a
systematic attempt to state the meaning of the
Apostles' Creed from a point of view which modern
thought has made to be that of the ordinarily well-
instructed Christian. In the absence of anything
better supplying the demand for such a work the
following pages have been written, and are offered
with diffidence to those who feel an imperative
necessity for reconciling somehow their thought
and their feeling in religion.
For we are living in a new world. In the half-
dozen centuries during which the Apostles' Creed
was moulded into its present form, the presupposi
tions of religious philosophy were widely different
from those which now prevail. It would, of course,
be foolish to speak disparagingly of days which
were made brilliant by the disciples of Socrates,
' With the exception of Pearson, of course.

vi MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and Carneades,
and by the Neo-Platonic school. It was not that
there was any dearth of the power of abstract
thought ; what was wanting was that accurate
knowledge of Nature and its laws which Aristotle
tried to discover and modern science has secured.
Ancient thought proceeded along the high a priori
road ; modern has stooped to observe patiently
the phenomenal world. And while observing the
world of not -self, it has been led to understand
better the Self which did the observing. Hence
has arisen a science of the physical world, and also
a science of logic and epistemology, which have
made it possible for Dr. Bosanquet to declare
recently ^ that in the main the philosophic work of
showing the connection between importance and
reality has been done. If this is a correct diagnosis,
then it would seem imperative that the Christian
Church which deals with " importance and reality " ^
should seriously ask herself how far the inter
pretation of her Creed may be affected by the
philosophic spade-work which Descartes initiated.
One far-reaching difference between ancient
and modern thought is alone important enough to
force us to reconsider our Creed. Ancient thought
was discursive, dualistic, materialistic. To the
Stoics, for example, NoO? was indeed immaterial
but not immaterial in the modern sense. Its sole
importance lay in its being a mover of matter.
And the soul, too, was of a material nature. As
Zeller says ' : " Upon clearer examination, the
difference between the materialistic and idealistic
1 The Principle of Individuality and Value, Preface.
2 From another view-point, it is true, than that of philosophy, but
from one which has even more pressing consequences.
' Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, p. 146.

PREFACE vii
description of God vanishes. God, according to
Stoic principles, can only be invested with reality
when He has a material form. Hence when He
is called the Soul, the Mind, or the Reason of the
World, this is only done on the assumption that
these conceptions have a material form." More
over, though Reason, or Zeus, ruled all things, as
the noble hymn of Cleanthes puts it, yet it was not
certain that that Reason was secure in itself from
arbitrariness. Hence exceptions might occur at
any moment, and in the popular belief they were
always happening. The miraculous, therefore, in
the only legitimate sense of the word, viz. the
arbitrary, was believed in then. It has become
impossible for anybody with a tincture of modern
thought to believe in it now. The serious Theist,
of course, holds that NoO?, Reason, Will, is a vera
causa, that God is the active causa causarum, and
that whatever is done upon earth He does it Him
self. And he sees no contradiction of this pro
position in Mill's statement, that " to constitute a
miracle a phenomenon must take place without
having been preceded by any antecedent pheno
menal conditions sufficient again to reproduce it,"
for he regards this definition as a testimony to the
trustworthiness of God's acting.
That the Law of Causality, then, however con
stituted by us, rules without exception in the whole
field of our experience is now an axiom based on
centuries of painful observation and reflection,
and it is not at all likely that this axiom will again
be seriously questioned. It is true that our most
brilliant living philosopher insists on Life as
essentially indeterminate, but he at the same time
also insists that Life itself works invariably through

viii MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
mechanism. Or, as Lotze puts it, the mission
which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of
the world is as absolutely universal as it is at the
same time completely subordinate. That is to say,
Freedom is characteristic of Life, but the range of
Freedom does not extend so far as to enable it
when it manifests itself to defy the law of mechanical
necessity. In other words, the miraculous as a
violation of the experienced Law of Causality is
impossible to modern thought.
Nor can the force of this conclusion be evaded
by pointing to a continuous miracle, for that is a
contradiction in terms, nor to a continuous series of
miracles, for if the members of such a series show
a uniformity of sequence they cease to be miracles,
and if they do not we should simply ask whether
they did or did not contradict established laws of
science. If they did contradict them we should
call in question the evidence adduced, and if they
did not we should seek for the at present undis
covered law of sequence. In any case the man of
to-day would proceed on the presupposition that
nothing was hkely to confiict in reahty with the
Law of Causality, and hence that the belief in a
miracle as an event in itself transcending the
mechanism of Nature is a superstition. Nor is he
shaken in his conviction by any cheap jibe, such as
that which says that, " if miracles do not happen
it is a miracle if they do not," for he rightly regards
this apophthegm as the embodiment of a puzzle-
headed play on words. And in this connection
it is interesting to note the modern tone of the
argument used by Chrysippus, that all things
happen Kad' el/xap/jJv7j<;, since divination would
be impossible were not all things foreordained.

PREFACE ix
The history of modern science and philosophy
is the history of the gradual conquest of the con
tingent by Reason. Our forefathers lived in a
wonder- world, full of good and evil spirits, the laws
of whose activities, if there were any, were unknown,
who at the best were accessible by magic alone.
But as science extended its boundaries the realm of
contingency grew smaller. First magic, as a device
for utilising the unknown power, or powers, in
human interests was shown to be irrational —
incoherent, that is, with firmly established know
ledge ; and then came the turn of the miraculous,
or capricious acts of the one Supreme Power. And
of this it is now true to say that its disappearance
has been due to a more refined and a more complete
sense both of the Wisdom of God and the immediacy
of His working. Men cannot believe any more in
miracles, as defined above, not because they think
less of God, but because they think more. We
shall have no repetition of mediaeval miracles for
the simple reason that Faith in God has ousted
Credulity in Nature. And the term which stamps
the new attitude is Evolution, which has been
defined as a " natural history of the cosmos includ
ing organic beings, expressed in physical terms as
a mechanical process," a definition, however, which
both the theist and the moral philosopher might
properly seek to correct by adding the proviso that
Evolution can describe the process, but not the
Life which produces the process. That Life, whether
it be the Life of the Supreme Spirit, or of our finite
spirits, is self-determined in itself, and only submits
to the mechanical process when it goes out of itself
into objectivity.
It is in this inner world of subjectivity where the

X MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
essential truth which once it was sought to set out
by the miraculous finds itself at home. Man as a
member of the phenomenal order is by God's
appointment under Law, that is mechanical
necessity. God, too, as working in and through
that same order is, because He is what He is, self-
bound by the same Law. But though God is in
Duration and man in Time, yet the full statement
of the metaphysical riddle of Time is that Time-
distinctions are not transcended in the sense that
they are negated or abolished, but that they form
the modifications of a Being who in the abstract
is out of Time and in Eternity. The " Unconscious"
is timeless, but when it comes down into conscious
ness it bakes upon it the mantle of Time, and evolves
in Time. So the subject, before thought sets in,
though not yet an actual subject at all is to be
thought of as out of time.
On the other hand, the only Subject we know
as a concrete thing is always in Duration, or true
Time, and yet is subject to the law of necessity.
The paradox is that man is free, and yet as soon
as he exercises his freedom he ceases to be free.
And this paradox seems insoluble.
Hence the capacity for self-determination which
men sought once to establish in the phenomenal
order in the guise of the miraculous, has now been
transferred to its true home in the Timeless. And
it would seem that the task before Christian thought
to-day is to show how the self-determination which
man must maintain, or else cease to be man, is to
be reconciled with the uniformity of Nature. He
cannot be content to be merely part of the mechanism
of Nature, nor can he wholly cut himself off from
Nature's dictatorship. He finds himself a denizen

PREFACE xi
of two worlds at once, and to him comes the Christ
through His Church promising to show him an
effectual way of unifying these two worlds. For
this is what is meant by the discredited term.
Salvation. The following pages will, it is hoped, throw some
little light on the problem set to the ordinary
Christian to-day when he is called on to express
his belief in terms of the Apostles' Creed. For
good or for evil he encounters a fixed form in a
world where it is of the very nature of forms to be
alterable as men's needs alter. He may have no
wish to expose this particular form to the incidence
of this law of change and growth, but in that case
it is the more necessary that the thought which
interprets the form should be proportionately the
more free. For if both form and content are made
alike immobile a creeping paralysis at once sets in.
And the end of that is the death of religion.
How {a) to conserve the treasures of past
duration, which is what a fixed Creed seeks to do,
while {b) at the same time retaining freedom to
create the future anew, is the problem set to any
body who sets himself seriously to consider what
he means when he says his Creed. Nor will he
solve his problem by ignoring either of its two
members. Both have to receive their due, and
both must have the place that is their due in any
new synthesis the student may make. But this
is only to say that the difficulty of holding to the
dialectic process in the interpretation of the Creed
is but a particular case of the difficulty which faces
us in our interpretation of Life as a whole.
It will be observed that throughout the following
pages the assertion reappears, sometimes explicitly,

xii MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
but more often implicitly, that what thought loses
in concreteness by the abandonment of the miracul
ous as capricious it will be found to regain in a more
comprehensive and more invulnerable theology
founded on Mysticism. But to many Mysticism
is but a word of reproach covering every conceivable
kind of credulity and looseness of thought and
expression. And it must be confessed that the
suspicion has much foundation.
But, on the other hand, the word does stand for
a mode of consciousness which is as well attested
as any other. It may be true that the mode of
consciousness in which God is the object is less
frequently met with than that which brings with
it the pleasures of a City dinner. But what matters
is not the quantity of the testimony, but the char
acter of the witnesses, the tests to which they have
been subjected, and the worth of the content of their
testimony. From this point of view nobody need
be ashamed for placing credence in St. Francis of
Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Bernard, Thomas
a Kempis, St. Thomas of Aquino before his crucifix,
William Law, Jacob Boehme, or even that most
wooden of all mystics, Emanuel Swedenborg. Nay,
we may go further. As Mr. Sharpe says : " The
Apostles were certainly mystics in the fullest sense ;
and the mystical tendencies of sub-apostolic times
are evidenced and fairly represented by the
' Shepherd ' of Hermas and the writings and
authentic acts of many of the early martyrs. The
self-chosen title of St. Ignatius, deo(f>6po';, the God-
bearer, implies a claim to the possession of mystical
experience of the most far-reaching kind. But
mysticism — or at least the temperament which
seeks knowledge by means of illumination rather

PREFACE xiii
than discursive reasoning — belongs essentially to
human nature, and appears, under one form or
another, wherever thought is free." ^ This witness
from a Roman Catholic writer may be supplemented
by the witness of another — Father PouUain. In
his The Graces of Interior Prayer he opens with a
definition : " We apply the term mystic to those
supernatural acts or states which our own industry
is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even
momentarily," and afterwards in explaining why he
introduced the words he has italicised he says that
they give expression to an idea which is implied
by all mystic writers, viz. the impossibility of
procuring the mystic state for ourselves.
The two points insisted on by these two writers
severally are important for the purpose of these
pages, if indeed it be not found that in the final
analysis they run into one. The mystic experience
is not the fruit of conscious endeavour, or self-
discipline, or continued prayer or meditation.
These may fit the soul for the gift, but when it comes
it comes from Another. On the other hand, we
might be reminded that there is nothing out of the
ordinary in this particular mode of experience.
For even on the ordinary level of sensuous experi
ence we are powerless to perceive without an object
of perception, and when we do perceive we do so
in virtue of faculties which no labour of ours pro
duced by themselves.
And on the higher ranges we find that the activity
which we put forth in thought is accentuated, if
anything, and that the object of thought is yet not
created by us. The Ego is the meeting-point of
subject and object, but the Ego is incomprehensible
1 Mysticism, p. 56.

xiv MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
without its ground, which is God. In every act of
personality God so far from being the sleeping-
partner is the Unseen Companion who shapes the
end which the Ego does but rough hew. Which is
but to say with Father PouUain that every mystic
act is supernatural, because God is concerned in
producing it, and with Mr. Sharpe that it is natural,
in the sense that the " inner circle of the devotees
of any cult " is not bounded by any hard and fast
circumference separating the devotees from the
main body of their fellow-worshippers.
Mysticism means certainly the capacity for
immediate communion with a higher Power which
is considered to be Supreme, but this communion
may be accompanied by any one of every possible
degree of fervour. The flame of mystic union may
burn steadily and with lustre hardly perceptible,
or it may be a fire of enthusiasm carrying all before
it, and it may rise to the heights of self-oblivious
ecstasy. But to confuse the mystic experience
with the abnormal, the eccentric, the occult, or
the vague is to miss its whole meaning. It may
perhaps be said to be as a sixth sense, or a second
group of senses, whose working is interlaced with
the working of all our senses, and all our scientific
and artistic activities. Those who see into an
event, a movement, a set of circumstances, a
person ; the people of shrewd common sense, the
inventor, the artist, the poet, the enthusiast of
humanity, all who see the hidden connection of
things, their deeper meaning, above all, those who
have an unfailing tact for the world of values inside
the world of appearances compose the mystics of
humanity, and by virtue of their mystic vision, its
natural leaders.

PREFACE XV
It is to be feared that while the method of this
work may be impugned by common sense as tending
to throw doubt on the credibility of the historical,
the mystic on the contrary may object to it on the
ground that it introduces too much philosophy.
To these two we would reply briefly. To the first,
that history is an accident of Religion, and not its
differentia, that, therefore, the truth of the history
— its correspondence with fact — does not necessarily
affect the truth of the Religion — its correspondence
with Reality. Further, that the truth of the
history may be accepted and even fought for in
the name of Religion without Religion itself being
concerned at all. And again, that history at its
best and highest is but form and not life. It is the
expression of a Mind or Minds, the moment in a
process, and derives all its value from the Mind or
the process. If history is to be connected with
Religion at all it must be in the humble capacity of
a hewer of wood and drawer of water, and must be
content if on occasion its services may even be
dispensed with. It must submit to Amiel's dictum :
" Le deplacement du christianisme de la region
historique dans la region psychologique est le voeu
de notre epoque " ; and to Goethe's
Alles vergangliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis.
History is but an adjective to the substantive
Religion whenever the two enter into union.
To the second we reply that the condition of all
sane Mysticism is that it submits itself not only to
the " primacy of the practical reason," but also to
the critique of the pure reason. For only so can
it be saved from exaggeration, perversion or ex-

xvi MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
travagance. It is no doubt correct to say that
Mysticism is concerned with the further side of the
line " where mortal and immortal merge and human
dies divine," and is at home there only. But in
this world nobody is allowed to stay at home ; he
is condemned to wander abroad, and Mysticism is
not free from that law. It must submit to the
fetters imposed by Reason, and become discursive
under the guidance of Logic. And whereas it would
be glad to be allowed to end with the declaration :
" Omnia exeunt in mysterium," it must bear to pass
the rider : " Omnia exeunt in philosophiam."
One subsidiary point belonging to a lower sphere,
the sphere of history, will also claim our attention.
How far are we justified in maintaining the vener
able belief that the origin and explanation of
Christianity are to be sought, if not entirely, at all
events chiefly and preponderatingly in the soil of
Jewish religion ? No doubt we will remind our
selves that so long ago as 1741, Dr. Conyers Middle-
ton, Principal Librarian of the University of
Cambridge, published a little volume entitled A
Letter from Bome, showing an Exact Conformity
between Popery and Paganism, or the Religion of
the Present Romans derived from that of their
Heathen Ancestors, and that the theme of this
volume has been a commonplace of Protestant
controversy ever since the sixteenth century. But
it is suggested in the following pages that we must
go much further, and enquire whether the main
doctrines of generally accepted Christian theology,
the main conceptions and ideals enshrined in its
system both in East and West, both in Protestant
ism and Romanism, are not better explained by
reference to ethnic antecedents than to Jewish.

PREFACE xvii
If it appear that this can be shown more easily of
the course of things on the Catholic side than on
the Protestant, this fact will not necessarily lower
the value of the former, as it may be due to the
further fact that Protestantism has in its own
self-interest borrowed its ethos and methods from
Judaism. To be consistent, it may seem that
Protestantism should go but a short step further
than it has gone in its most advanced representa
tives, and break the few remaining links by which
it is connected with the early days of Christianity.
If it can be shown, however, as in the following
pages it is sought to be shown, that the intellectual
and institutional and devotional forms of historic
Christianity derive from Paganism, we shall succeed
in placing it on a surer because a broader foundation,
and shall thereby show that it is the religion which
embraces all the truth and goodness and beauty
which the Spirit of Jesus Christ could claim as His
own in " the dispensation of Paganism." And
certainly the Church will be the purer and stronger
from the banishment of yet one more superstition.
For more and more those who insist on tracing the
distinctive facts of the Gospel to Jewish antecedents
are being driven to find those antecedents in other
places than the O.T. — in Rabbinical doctrines, in
late developments and in that syncretistic Judaism
which was penetrated so thoroughly with foreign
elements, and especially with elements which had
been transplanted from Persian and Babylonian
soil to take root in that Hellenistic garden in the
midst of which Judaism found itself. It makes
little difference whether we see a direct or an indirect
influence. The crucial point is the influence itself.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
Mysticism and Tradition
The Individual and the Community
The use of the Creed by Puritans, by Catholics
The use of the Creed by the Mystic
The conflict between Prophet and Priest
Pantheism and Theism .....
Psycho-physical Parallelism and the Soul
Mysticism and Tradition .....
Appearance and Reality . ...
Mysticism and Miracles .....
Answer to the objection that Miracles transcend Law
The true realm of self-determination
All discriminate in the Creed between its form and its content
The Mystics and theology. . . . . .

PAGE 1
2 3
4 5
67 8
1011
121516

CHAPTER II
The Mystical Base of Christianity

The nature of Christianity : mystical or historical
The fallacy of the ambiguous use of the term form
The essential characteristic of Christianity
Judaism in New Testament times syncretistic .
Christianity as a Mystery-religion
Some axiomatic truths ....

1819
20 21
2227

CHAPTER III
The Nature of Mysticism
Mysticism as a protest against Formalism
Mysticism as transcending Thought
Mysticism and Feeling ....

313232

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

XX
PASE
Mysticism as immediacy of apprehension ... 33
Mysticism as the result in the Soul of the direct act of God 34
Mysticism sometimes regarded as mere passivity . . 34
Mysticism as identical with sacramentalism ... 36
Mysticism as the individualistic factor in Religion . 37
But Mysticism also is the sole foundation of a religious
community ....... 38
The Mysticism of Jesus Christ and the Apostles . . 39
Mysticism as the Ground of all forms .... 41

CHAPTER IV
Mysticism and the Creed
Interest in the form and its content apt to vary inversely
The use of the Creed by the Mystic
Presumption that the Creed embodies mystic Experience
General occurrence of triadic divisions .
Mysticism and the historical articles of the Creed
Christianity as the expression of the ideal Man
Christianity as the dialectic of the Christian notion .
Mystical interpretation of the Creed a need of to-day
Mysticism the spring of missionary zeal
Religion and coercive jurisdiction incompatibles

44444546 4748 50 515353

CHAPTER V
The First Article
/ believe
The Creed the confession of faith of the individual
Yet even so it is a socialising document
The import of wiareOa ds
The ground of interested attention, whence derived
The meaning of " belief in God "
Believing in Jesus identical with being baptized into Him
The voluntarist nature of Faith ....

58596061 6263 64

CHAPTER VI
The First Article {continued)
God the Father Almighty

The triune formula.
Fatlier as a term of Mysticism

6667

CONTENTS xxi
PAGB
Father as a religious term proper to Hellenism . . 68
The N.T. meaning of the term Father .... 71
The use of Father by the Synoptists and the Fourth Gospel 72
Fatherhood of nature or of grace ? . . . .75
Descent and ascent correlatives ..... 76
The meaning of Omnipotent ..... 77
Almighty in the Creed better rendered Alt-governor . . 78
The field of God's sovereignty — Nature and Man . . 81
The world of inner Freedom most clearly reveals God's
sovereignty ....... 83

CHAPTER VII
The Second Article
In Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord
The Incarnation a perennial fact ....
The truth better expressed as " God as man " than as " God
and Man ".....
Christ the interpreter of God and not conversely
Man explained by a trichotomy or a dichotomy ?
The meaning of the personal Name, Christ Jesus
An examination of Phil. ii. 5-11 .
Some arguments for the pre-existence of Souls
The Incarnation an eternal process
The witness of the Fourth Gospel
Something in the name Jesus not in the name Christ
The work of Jesus is salvation through a gift of Life
Distinction between our sonship and that of Jesus
God as Unmanifest the Father, as Manifest the Son ,
Is the Universe in its essence Personal ?
The necessity not only for Thought but also for Religion
of the Other ......
The unknown origin of the term Christ .
Is a term of psychology before it is a term of history
Christ is Lord within ; Jesus is Lord without ; and the two
are one .......
Additional Note on Pre-existence and Reincarnation

102 104105 106 107 107
109109 110 111
112 114115116 117 120121 122 124

CHAPTER VIII
The Third Article
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost ; born of the Virgin Mary
The Article devised to assert the Manhood rather than the

Godhead

134

xxii MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
No single account in the N.T. of the " mystery of the In
carnation " .
Reasons for omitting all discussion of the fact of the Virgin
birth .....••
Yet the story of the Virgin-birth is no gratuitous legend
The true nature of a symbol ....
The matter of the symbol derived from experience, its form
alone unique ......
The relation of Ecstasy and Art ....
The Virgin-birth if a religious moment must be a symbol
Analogies in other cults to the Virgin-birth
The permanent truth which inheres in all " myths " .
The story of the Virgin-birth is typical of Regeneration in
general .......
The meaning of the phrase " conceived by the Holy Ghost
The ethical importance of the term Virgin
The significance of the symbol of Mother-and-Child .

135 135137138139139 140141144145147 150153

CHAPTER IX
The Fourth Article
Suffered
The Law of Progress and Suffering . . . .155
This Law exemplified in the vegetable and the animal worlds 157
Moral failings are forms of suffering, and are therefore called
Passions ....... 158
The Spiritual Man suffers more acutely because his interests
are wider ....... 159
With the Law of Suffering goes the Law of Compensation . 159
All resistance to conation involves pain, and the resistance
to desire for God the utmost pain . . . .160
So the life of Jesus Christ is under this Law of Suffering 161
This is illustrated (a) by His " temptations in the Wilderness " 161
And (6) by the symbolic description given in Luke xviii. 31-34 167

CHAPTER X
The Fourth Article (continued)
Under Pontius Pilate
Pontius Pilate to be regarded as a typical figure . . 171
The part played by Satan . . . . .172

CONTENTS
The explanation of the problem of Evil suggested by Evolu
tion .......
The Law of Manifestation is progress through Duality
All dualities may be regarded as special cases of Attraction
and Repulsion .....
In the moral sphere Jesus and Satan are opposites .
Satan is the Power resisting and to be resisted
Hence one cliief function is that of the Tester of men
Ecclesiastical systems as a form of evil .
Herod as the type of official cynicism .
Judas Iscariot as an instrument of the Great Tester .
Pontius Pilate as representing the Evil known as the " State '

xxm
PAGE 172173174174175177178179180181

CHAPTER XI
The Fourth Article {continued)
Was crucified, dead, and buried
The Cross a mystical symbol ....
Its connection with similar symbols, burial, resurrection, and
ascension ......
Crucifixion is the Christian name for the supersession of
Egoism by Love .....
The Egoist in La Rochefoucauld and in George Meredith
Crucifixion not to be identified with " Asceticism " .
Crucifixion as a law of the Divine Life .
Crucifixion as a law of Creation ....
This is the explanation of suffering in the world
Crucifixion of the Christ .....
What in Nature is Necessity becomes in Him Freedom
Crucifixion as the law of Christian life .
Crucifixion as the at-one-ment of the inner nature

192193194 194
196197199
200200201 202204

CHAPTER XII
The Fourth Article (continued)
Dead and Buried

Death and Life correspond to the bodily and the spiritual
"ZUbfia S^(Ua ....... 205
The meaning of the saving of the soul .... 206
The paradox of saving the soul by losing it . . . 207
Salvation consists in self-transcendence .... 208

xxiv MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
PAGE
Burial is a threefold process ..... 209
The Burial of God in His world constitutes its secret . .210
And explains the Nature-worship of antiquity . . 210
Is the explanation of the Beauty seen in Nature . .211
The Burial of the Spirit of man in his earthly Nature . 211
This the explanation of the sense of sin . . .212
And is the ground of our Freedom .... 213
It is, moreover, the explanation of the authority of Conscience 214
The Burial of the " Old Man " a negative process . .216
The positive side of this Burial is the inner presence of the
hving Christ ....... 216
Why the tomb of the Christ was called a new tomb . . 217
CHAPTER XIII
The Fifth Article
He descended into Hell
The Descent into Hell foUows naturally on the Burial . 218
Connection with the truth of the Incarnation . . .218
Necessity of the Incarnation to our Salvation ex suppositione 219
Answer to the objection that the Descent is only historical
not mystical .... . . 219
This objection is fatal to all well-grounded Theology . 220
For all Theology at bottom rests on the Analogy revealed by
Mysticism ....... 221
By Analogy, then, we see the Descent to mean also Descent
into the presence of Sin ..... 221
This means the harrowing of Love by its intimacy with
Egoism ........ 222
But the Spirit also suffers a quasi-death and a Descent . 222
The Christ's Descent into the Soul-abyss . . . 223
In a sense also the Descent pertains to the physical realm 226
For Man might through posse non mori have attained to non
posse mori ... ... 226
Physical death a consequence of a prior psychical death . 227
CHAPTER XIV
The Fifth Article {continued)
The third day He rose again
The mystical meaning of the number Oiree in the Bible . 229
Three is the signature of Divinity .... 230
Three, therefore, in connection with the Resurrection stamps
it as a Divine event . . . 231

CONTENTS xxv
PAGE
Difference of use between iyelpia and avlaTi]ixi . . , 231
Immortality not an inherent right but an added gift . 233
It, however, grows out of our Nature as its matter . . 233
But the power which bestows Immortality effects it by con
tinuous action ...... 234
Immortality of man cannot depend on physical resurrection
of Jesus ....... 235
Man's Immortality depends on the union of God and man . 236
The true meaning of 1 Cor. xv. 12-18 is mystical . . 237
The relation of this interpretation to " conditional im
mortality " .... . . 238
The difficulty this raises met by reincarnation. . . 239
CHAPTER XV
The Fifth Article (continued)
The third day He rose again (continued)
The main issue here is as to the nature of the Risen Life . 241
The mystery of the Risen Life . . . . 242
The mystery of superconsciousness illustrated by sub
consciousness ....... 243
The Risen Life is characterised by Love . . . 243
The Risen Life is, therefore, a life of Service . . 244
The story of Emmaus sets out the Risen Life as a quest for
Truth  246
But in this quest Intuition must come to the help of Reason 248
The Risen Life as a Life of Penitence .... 248249250251252253254
255256257259

Penitence the seed-bed of Humility and disinterestedness
The vision seen by Mary Magdalene adapted to a penitent
The stages of enlightenment ....
The Risen Life and the Life of Contemplation
Contemplation as the exclusion of alien influences
The wounds in the body of Christ — their import
The double peace and the strength for service.
The Risen Life gives Understanding
The Risen Life and Life aeonian.
The shore of the Sea of Tiberias typical of Eternity
CHAPTER XVI
The Sixth Article — Part I
He ascended into Heaven
The Ascension part of the original evangel . . 262
Variations as to its date ...... 262

xxvi MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
PAGE
The Ascension as a religious transaction . . . 263
More ascended than descended ..... 263
Christ not the subject of Necessity but of Freedom . . 264
The Gnostic treatment of the Descent .... 265
Man's history as truly the history of a descent as of an ascent 266
Inadequacy of categories of Thought to set out truths of
Religion  267
The use of the present tense proper to Mysticism . 269
Descent and Ascent are related as Satan and Christ . . 271
The Ascension an integral part of the Life-story of Jesus 272
And of the Life-story of the Disciple .... 272

CHAPTER XVII
The Sixth Article — Part II
He sitteth at the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty
The two keynotes of the Article are Authority and Worth . 274
The Authority is not of this world .... 275
Not exercised ah extra ...... 275
Jesus has authority over all the activities of men . . 276
Industrial unrest in its purity springs from His Life . . 277
To StUl this unrest there is wanted a reUgious belief in God
and the Soul ....... 377
If the true Authority is rejected a false will usurp the throne 280
In State affairs if Jesus does not rule " Satan " steps in . 281
The Session at the right hand of God is the picturing of the
Christian Ideal ...... 283
" Reason " includes " values," but not so " Understanding " 284
The problem of the higher and the lower Self . . . 285
This illustrated by " self-control " . . . . 286
CHAPTER XVIII
The Seventh Article
From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead

Two aUied facts here — the parousia and the judgment
Nature of the figurative language of Holy Scripture .
The mystical truth contained in the imagery of " clouds '
Jesus coming in the " clouds " is a real coming
The force of the present tense here used
The parousia spiritualised by the Fourth Evangelist .

288289 290291292294

CONTENTS xxvii
PAGE
The Second Coming is the Session made operative . . 294
His coming to the Soul gives the sense of " values " . . 295
The part played in our nurture by angels . . . 295
The object of the " coming " is judgment . . . 297
Judging is more than punishing ; it includes sifting of evi
dence, or testing ...... 297
This testing is carried out in the events of daily life . . 298
" Quick and dead " has a moral, not a temporal meaning 300
Some illustrations of this fact from the N.T. itself . . 301

CHAPTER XIX
The Eighth Article
/ believe in the Holy Ghost
The Article in its earliest form non-theological
Hence its value, first and last, is purely religious
The primitive Christian was conscious of being in touch with
a heavenly Spirit
Having the Spirit the article of a standing or falling Church
Not action but " inaction " the test of greatness
The super-man is one who is great through the Spirit
The high place of prophecy in the early Church
Present eclipse of the gifts of the Spirit
Gifts of heaUng especiaUy in evidence to-day
The nature of the gift of tongues
The relation of the Spirit to the " world "
The nature of the sin of which the " world " is convinced
The work of the Spirit in inducing repentance
The question of what righteousness is before God
The nature of the " prince of this world " and his judgment

305306
308
309 310310312314316317
319 320
320321325

CHAPTER XX
The Ninth Article — Part I
The Holy Catholic Church
The heavenly nature of the Church in Hermas and 2 Clement
The similar teaching about the Church given by Gnostics
Gnosticism and its traces in the N. T. .
The Barbelo and the Valentinian systems
The doctrine of Sophia in the Wisdom-literature
The Ecclesia is the community of " sons of the widow "

328 331
332336337337

xxviii MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
PAGE
Gnostic teaching that Christos redeemed Sophia . . 338
One system introduces the " Fall " into the Pleroma. . 340
The religious side of Gnosticism ..... 341
The key supplied by history fashioned in pre-Christian days 342
Gnostic " impieties " are really poetic parables . . 343
Early Christianity taught, therefore, an ideal not an empiri
cal Church ....... 345
The ideal Church is constitutive of State action . . 346
The empirical Church either one with the ideal Church or a
civil institution ...... 348
The relation between the empirical Church and the ideal
Church  349
The steps by which the latter gave way to the former . 350
Infallibility and fanaticism related extremes . . . 351
The folly of demanding perfection in any empirical Church . 352
The equal foUy of solipsism . . . . 353

CHAPTER XXI
The Ninth Article — Part II
The Four " Notes " ofthe Church
The flrst of the " notes " to be emphasised was holiness . 356
Faith cannot hold these " notes " so far as they represent
actualities ....... 357
Hence the four Notes are notes of the ideal Church . . 358
Unity wrongly sought in the phenomenal order by Anglicans 358
The same error made by the Roman Church . . . 360
And also by the Orthodox Church of the East . . 361
Why the search for union on a phenomenal basis is futile . 362
Lotze on duality and contrast ..... 363
Unity is not the negation of dualism but the subsumption of it 364
The unity given to thinking by conation the type of all union 365
Two meanings to the Biblical word " saint " . . . 366
The Church " holy " as consecrated to a " holy " end . 367
The Church of the Apostles' Creed is the ideal Church . 369
Frequently figured as a mountain or as " Jerusalem " . 369
The loss of the sense of ideality led to an ecclesiastical " holi
ness " . . . . . . . . 373
The term Catholic also is a term of art, importing ideality 374
The ecclesiastical use of " apostolic " . . . . 381
Ambiguity in the N.T. use of the word apostle . 384
The Apostolic Church is the Church in the Heavens . . 386
The angels are its " apostles " . . . . . 387

CONTENTS

XXIX

CHAPTER XXII

The Ninth Article — PxVrt III
The Communion of saints
Six different meanings of tliis article possible .
The meaning of the term Kowavla
The Article a corollary to that of the Holy Ghost
Possession of the Spirit the condition of Church membership
and not vice versa .....
The decay of Prophecy not whoUy to be deplored
Communion with the saints departed
The witness of Faustus of Rhegium
The historical antecedents to the cult of the departed : (a) the
distant date of the martyrs ; (b) pagan cults of the dead
(c) the cult of heroes ; (d) the popular belief in Im
mortality ......
The scientific basis for the cult of the departed
Communion in holy things is especially concerned with
Baptism and Holy Communion
The Pagan origin of the form of Baptism, e.g. the Tauro
bolium .......
Many detaUs of Catholic Baptism found also in Pagan
A form of blessing of oil .
Summary of relations between Catholic and Pagan baptism
The Eucharist not traceable to Judaism
The " eating of his God " a phrase abhorrent to the pious Jew
Tliis phrase and its thing at home throughout Paganism
The syncretism of the beginning of our era a predisposing
cause .......
St. John vi. is evidence for the pagan fUiation
" My " is the distinctive word in " This is My Body "

PAGE 389 390391 392 394 395 396

397 400 403 405 409411 411 412414415 416 418419

CHAPTER XXIII
The Tenth Article
The Forgiveness of sins
The connection of " Forgiveness of sins " with Baptism . 422
A higher and a lower conception of Forgiveness . . 423
The popular view of sins was that of uncleanness through
contact with evil spirits ..... 424
Water a general means of purification .... 424

XXX

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

PAGE
Some forms of exorcism ...... 425
Supported by the Fathers . ... 427
The higher view synchronous with the lower . . . 429
This makes forgiveness identical with union with God . 430
IUustrated by the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant 430
And by that of the Prodigal Son .... 431
Forgiveness marks a passage from the psychical to the
spiritual stage ....... 431
Forgiveness of sins through " Penance " marks a declension 433
The mediaeval machinery of " Penance " . . . 435
Indulgences an extra to that machinery . . 435

CHAPTER XXIV
The Eleventh Article
The Resurrection of the body
Originally this Article asserted the Resurrection of this flesh
The N.T. and the early Fathers at variance
Influence of Egypt to be suspected
But native Egyptian thought further from Christian than
was Alexandrian
Alexandrian thought leaned towards Orphism
The early Fathers dependent, directly or indirectly, on
Persia .....
So also was Jewish apocalyptic beUef .
Different views about the nature of the Resurrection
The service to Christianity rendered for a time by Chiliasm
The Article of the Resurrection insists on the ultimate per
fection of the whole man ....
It is hostile, therefore, to Puritanism
The difficulty caused by substantialising Soul .
The scholastic doctrine of the substantiality of the Soul
The theory of the soul taught by WilUam James
The psychological doctrine of the Self .
The reUgious doctrine of the Soul
The Christian doctrine of newness impUes the surrender of the
Soul to the Spirit ......

438438440
441
442
443443
444
445446447449
450451
452458
460

CHAPTER XXV
The Eleventh Article (continued)
The Resurrection of the body (continued)
The uselessness of the concept of Soul as a tertium quid
The modern doctrine of man's immortality

463
464

CONTENTS xxxi
PAGE
The implicates of the doctrine of Resurrection . . 466
The bearing on it of Gnostic thought .... 467
The conception of different kinds of bodies . . . 468
The development of a spiritual body out of the earthly . 471
This depends on the germinative principle of our permanent
Self . .  471
Wliat is the genesis of St. Paul's thought ? . . . 473
Not Jewish or Persian or Greek or Indian, but Egyptian . 475
The doctrine of a re-embodiment in Egyptian religion . 476
The Judgment and Resurrection no necessary connection in
time ........ 479
The doctrine of an intermediate state .... 479
The doctrine of Reincarnation one form of this . . 479
Ten reasons for belief in the doctrine of Reincarnation . 481
Re-embodiment the genus of which Reincarnation is the
species ........ 495

CHAPTER XXVI
The Twelfth Article
Everlasting Life
The precise meaning of aMyios .... 497
Its usage in the O. T. . . . . . . 497
Its usage in the N. T. . . . . . . 499
The Gnostic use of the term aeon .... 505
Some examples of the use of aeon in early Christian literature 510
The meaning of fw;} in the New Testament . . . 514
" Life " synonymous with " Faith " or " Kingdom of God " 515
The meaning of the phrase believed on Him . . . 517
Henri Bergson's teaching about Life .... 521
Conversion as the entrance on Life .... 523
On negative side it is the bursting the bonds of Self . . 526
Additional Note on the title " The Son of Man " .529

APPENDIX — Some Forms of the Creed . . 541
BIBLIOGRAPHY .  549
INDEX  553

CHAPTER I
MYSTICISM AND TRADITION
The problem of the Creed is but a special case of a\
larger problem — ^the problem of finding the true ¦
balance between any two given complementary
forces. In this case the two forces are freedom and
authority, the freedom of the individual and the
authority of the community, where freedom is a
function of life and authority of form. Hence the |
problem of the Creed may be stated as one form of :
the old problem how to reconcile life and form. 1
The difficulty in finding the solution is due partly
to the obscurity and complexity of the history
which supplies the form, partly to the indeterminate
character of the life with which we are concerned,
viz. the life of religion, but principally to the
imbecility of our human nature, which is apt to
drive us either through impatience to despise the
form, or through sloth to neglect the life.
This two-sided danger may be illustrated by the
discredit into which the Apostles' Creed has fallen
in the two rival camps of modern Christianity.
Among Puritans it has ceased to enjoy any infiuence
as a link binding the present with the past, or as a
useful finger-post pointing the road to any Creed
of the future. So much so that in recent con
troversies on the teaching of religion in elementary
1 B

2 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
schools the Apostles' Creed was rejected by the
Puritanical bodies with substantial unanimity as
being a denominational formula. As a form it
secured little respect.
On the other hand, in the Roman and Anglican
bodies the Creed as a form finds passionate defenders.
Indeed, so devoutly is it as a form held to be sacro
sanct that its champions are careless whether or not
the Creed is accepted as a statement of personal
religion, provided that it be maintained in honour
as a symbol of orthodoxy. The consequence is
that multitudes accept and recite their Creed
without having the slightest intention of ordering
their daily lives by its articles. They are content
to know that their acceptance of the Creed supports
their Church explicitly, and they trouble themselves
very little about the implicits of the Creed itself.
It is difficult to say whether it is at the hands of the
Puritan or the Catholic that the Creed suffers the
greatest indignity, for each by selecting arbitrarily
one-half of the living child secures as a prize what
has been killed in the process. Nowhere, and there
fore not in the Creed, can we afford to dissociate
life and form.
Fortunately there is a third way, and that is the
way of the mystic, not of the one-sided but of the
practical mystic, that is, of the genuine as against
the spurious mystic. His position, stated briefly,
is that he lives his Life and accepts the Form that
is provided. His duty is first to listen to what the
voice of his inner life bids him do, and then to make
full use of the forms that tradition offers him.
Stated in other terms, his imperative duty is to
interpret for himself, and to maintain his right to
interpret for himself, the credal forms which are

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 3
part of his birthright. To abnegate this right
would be tantamount to an assertion either that
the Spirit of God is not any longer at work in the
hearts of believers, or that the Church has so failed
in her historic mission as to have produced no
disciples who can be trusted to walk by the Spirit.
If the Catholic abhors both these alternatives he
has no course open but to admit frankly the mystic's
right to his private judgment, and not merely to
admit, but to affirm and applaud it. For ex
hypothesi the mystic is one who in some degree is
under the Spirit, and the Creed is the product, it
is claimed, of men who were led by the same Spirit.
" Cuius regio eius religio " is surely a maxim of
peculiar force here. The Spirit which created is
the Spirit which has the right to interpret. Or are
we to understand that bishops and priests, with
theologians and doctors of canon law when duly
summoned, are the sole depositaries df the inter
pretative Spirit ? or" else that the authorities who
gave us our Creed were acting as statesmen and
not as men of religion ? If neither of these last
two pleas is put in, then the right of every pious
Christian to interpret his Creed for himself is un
assailable, and any denial of this right on the part
of ecclesiastical authority would be a mark of
Anti-Christ. That that autliority is showing now
adays less and less inclination to interfere with the
right of the individual to interpret for himself is a
hopeful sign of the times and a proof that the
Christian spirit is slowly coming to its own.
Of course, however, authority has its legitimate
and necessary place, for to it are entrusted the
holding together of the community and its protection
from one-sided, premature, or self-willed action on

4 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the part of its members, or of groups of its members.
For it is not the mystic or the prophet alone who
may disturb Israel. But because of the importance
of the half-truth committed to its care Authority
should constantly keep in mind that the other half-
truth has a right to free expression and growth.
The prophet and the bishop must somehow keep
on good terms, lest a St. Francis and a Savonarola
sink to an Alexander and an Innocent.
But though it may not be difficult as a matter
of fact to establish a modus vivendi between prophet
and priest in the concrete, when there is good-will
on both sides, or when one is so much stronger than
the other as to compel an " ego vapulo, tu tantum
pulsas," yet many will feel that the case is different
where the two principles represented by prophet
and priest are at issue. There, it will be urged by
the priest, you have the truth of history as an
established and unchallengeable datum. If the
prophet, to quote Omar's argument, says what is
in accordance with tradition his work is no doubt
good, but it is superfluous ; if, on the other hand,
he says what is opposed to it, he is a priori to be
rejected as a false teacher. Moreover, the case is
even worse with mysticism, seeing that under its
corroding influence the truth of history is consumed,
for if we are to hold, for example, that incarnation
and crucifixion are mystical processes, then we are
compelled to surrender them as historical events,
or at all events as historical events of any potency.
Though this objection disappears under close
examination, yet it is held so widely, though it may
be as a vague feeling rather than as a reasoned
conviction, that it may be worth while to point out
that both the mystical and the historical principle

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 5
may be true at once and that no necessary con
tradiction exists between a process and an event.
But let us first try to see clearly what the
objection really is. It may be said to start from
the conflict of two forces whose activity is known
empirically, even though our intellect is powerless
to explain the ground of their interaction. Theo
logically, the opposition is between the views known
as Pantheism and as Theism. The former (better
called with Hegel, acosmism) sees an underlying,
ever active immaterial Presence at work in every
thing. It is the unitary substratum in which all
processes and all moments inhere, from which they
spring and to which they return. As the anima
mundi, it inspires and moves our universe, and as
the great cosmic unknowable Energy it vivifies
all worlds. Persons, things, and events come and
go, but they are each and all nothing more than a
twinkling of the eye of the Eternal, which persists
unchanged, unmoved, while they for a brief moment
flit across the stage and then return to the nothing
ness which gave them birth.
Theism, on the other hand, shrinks back appalled
before the abyss thus opened up by Pantheism,
for it sees clearly enough that a thorough-going
Pantheism leaves no room for any permanence of
any Form, and, therefore, cuts at the tap-root of
all noble individualism. If I am but a bubble on
the stream of Time, a dewdrop whose fate is to slip
into the ocean of Being and leave no trace, then
why encourage any hope or striving for that which
is more than human ? Why not eat and drink,
or otherwise enjoy ourselves, before the long night
comes ? But does not something within which is
more than racial vanity testify to the enduring

6 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
worth of the individual, and forbid him to be content
with a Creed which makes the world a machine and
man a cog in it ? It is these restless questionings
which give to Theism its hold over men's minds,
and prevent them from resting in an explanation
of the world which explains man out of it by denying
him that property of enduringness which gives him
all his spiritual and moral worth.
Again, philosophically, the same open conflict
meets us in the hypotheses known as psycho
physical parallelism on the one hand and the Soul ^
on the other. The former appears under two
forms. It says either that physical and psychical
happenings are two aspects of one recondite Reality
behind them both, and that it has no idea what is
the relation between the two sets of happenings ;
or it says, reversing Huxley's dictum, that the
psychical is the Reality and that it is the physical
which is the "epiphenomenal." In either case, it
is urged, all things, whether without or within, are
sufficiently explained as objects of an all-sweeping
law of mechanism. On the other hand, those who
uphold the commonsense and scholastic doctrine
of the Soul, and refuse " a psychology without a
soul," do so on grounds which are similar to the
implicits of Theism. They maintain that the facts
of introspective psychology demand something
more than an account of them as " streams of
consciousness," that, on the contrary, there is a
unitary being, or thing, or " substance," which is
the ground of personality, and serves (among many
other things) to give individuality to those " streams
of consciousness," which we have got into the habit
1 For a discussion on the meaning of the term soul see under Chapter
XXIV.

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 7
of calling " I." In other words, the Soul is re
instated in its ancient position as the unifying ground
of individual consciousness as against some psycho
physical thing which fails to preserve the right to
independent existence of the Ego.
Now the same opposition which meets us in
theology as between Pantheism and Theism, in
philosophy between mechanicalism and spiritualism,
meets us in symbolics between mysticism and/
tradition. And the reason is the same in all three]
and the way out is the same. The reason of tha
conflict in all three is that we are faced in them with]
a natural dualism which apparently refuses to be
merged into any larger unity attainable by our
intellect. The way out of the conflict is by the
frank acceptance by life of the truths of both
disputants as being necessary to any sane and true
course of conduct.
Thus Tradition (which may be regarded as the
analogue of Theism, and of psycho-physical parallel
ism in either of its two forms) and Mysticism (which
corresponds to Pantheism and to the doctrine of
the Soul) are not contradictory but complementary
truths. For mysticism sees the world as the mani
festation of a process out of Time, which, therefore,
knows of no time-divisions, or space-separations,
but is always there and always at work. And
consequently, the mystic's aim is to rise out of a
life of change and becoming into the Life which is
life indeed. But ex hypothesi, that Life is here and
now, and needs not to be located in the past, or to
be sought for through the medium of spatial con
ceptions, but is given as a force which is present.
Hence mysticism seems to deny, or to ignore, or at
least to run the risk of passing by the historical as

8 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
comparatively worthless, and hence ecclesiastical
authorities as the Keepers of tradition have always
watched with suspicious eye the rising of every new
mystic star.
, On the other side, the champion of tradition who
appeals to sure facts of history- — always assuming,
of course, that his facts are sure — must admit that
it is not the historical fact alone which is the base
of his Creed. For, to take but one example, tens of
thousands of unhappy men have been crucified by
the cruelty of man who have left no record and
exercised no known influence on subsequent ages.
The eternal Something was not sufficiently creative
in their case to call for remembrance. Hence it
is not the historical fact as such which is critical,
but something which energises through the fact,
and it is that energising thing which forms the
ground on which the so-called historical religion
is builded up. But that inner Life is the very thing
on which the mystic relies, and, therefore, it seems
to follow that the fight between mysticism and
historical dogma is a logomachy rather than a real
conflict of principle.
The conflict, where there is one, may be stated
thus : Subjective faith believes that religion is
found in the process only ; the believer in the
historical holds that it is found in the event only.
Eliminate the falsehood contained in the word only,
and it would seem that no necessary opposition is
left. That caution is necessary in admitting the
grounds on which an exclusive proposition is
accepted is a fact of everyday experience. For
example, it has been argued that the law of the
Conservation of Energy is of universal sweep, and,
therefore, excludes the soul as a source or bestower

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 9
of force, because our universe is a closed universe.
This rests on the assumptions that our world is the
only world there is, and that its laws are all capable
of being stated in terms of mechanics only, and
hence that there is no place left for Soul.
But it is just the true mystic and also the pro
found student of history who would reject equally
the propositions that religion is found in the process
only, or in the event only. Both agree that " both-
and " is a better formula than " either-or," and that
religion, therefore, is to be looked for both in the
process and in the event. Just as in the world of
electricity the power requires both the connecting
wires (the process) and the lamps (the event) before
it can light our streets, so the Life we call Religion
must have its continuous, unperceived process as
well as the formulation of that process in those
moments of manifestation which we call events.
Or to take another illustration which comes from a
sphere nearer to that of religion. Whatever may
be the mysteries which still veil the soul from the
philosopher commonsense philosophy agrees that
the soul is a material or immaterial something in
which inheres a continuous life, and that this life
as a process emerges at every instant out of the dark
unconscious and takes form in the actions of which
all may take note. That soul should subsist without
manifesting itself in formal acts, or that actions,
on the other hand, should come from nowhere, and
have no process behind them are equally incredible
propositions. These considerations should be sufficient to
warn us of the danger of setting mystic-process
and historical-event over against one another as
mutually exclusive. Indeed, so far from incarnation.

\

10 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
for example, as a continuous process excluding
incarnation as a supreme event, it may rather be
said that a supreme act of incarnation presupposes
and rests on a process by which incarnation is daily
in activity. So far from crucifixion as a historical
event excluding a mystic process known as the
mystic crucifixion, it is more true to say that without
the process the historical crucifixion is emptied of
its content. Similarly, the truth of the resurrection
of the body depends on a prior process of resurrec
tion out of the body — ^the dying daily must precede
the final act by which a man dies to the world. And
ascension to the right hand of God would be naturally
incongruous, and so impossible, to anybody who
had not first gone through the mystic process of
fixing his mind on the things which are above.
Every separate act which we call holy is but the
material form of a spiritual process or state known
as holiness. One serious objection of principle may be urged
against this view. It may be said that our argu
ment assumes without proof that the laws of the
spiritual life are capable of formulation in the same
way that the laws of the physical world are capable
of formulation, and that this assumption is fatal to
Religion, seeing that its essence is to be found in
the recognition of a Power or Powers more than
human, whose ways are inscrutable, and, therefore,
not to be brought under any formula of law or
logic. It would be better, therefore, to be content
with the venerable doctrine which has served us so
long, even though it be also a mere assumption,
viz. that the great events of the Christian Creed are
miracles, in the sense that they do not come under
any law, known or unknown, but are direct acts

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 11
of God which do not come under our law of causality,
but spring from the fiat of God's wiU and refuse to
be co-ordinated, or systematised, or in any way
explained by reason.
1. To this objection we would reply, firstly,
that the argument proves too much and in so doing
proves nothing. If it is sound it rules out as
impertinent all discourse about religious things,
all sermons, theological works, works on Christian
evidences, indeed the objection itself. For as the
objection is a logical proposition about a subject
which it affirms is extra-logical it is as futile and
impertinent as the proposition against which it is
leveUed. Indeed, it may be justly described as
religiously vicious, inasmuch as it excludes mind
from the jurisdiction of religion, and enjoins on it
a mere passive indifference to the stimuli it calls
" miracles," Seeing, however, that it is a familiar
property of the Soul (of which Mind is one function)
not merely to be an inert field for sensations but to
co-operate creatively in reacting to stimuli so as to
produce sensation, what ground have we for suppos
ing that a different law prevails where Religion is
concerned ? In Religion, it is generally agreed, a
similar process takes place as in the sensory world.
For the Soul is again acted on by stimuli which come
not now from the outer or lower world, but from
the inner or higher world. Why should it be
assumed that the soul is merely passive to these
any more than she is to the stimuli of the sensory
world ? It is true that a great Master bids us be
" active to the things without and passive to the
things within," but this passivity so far from being
inertness is rather the highest form of activity,
being comparable to that repose which Ruskin has

12 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
reminded us is but Power gathered up for supreme
action. Passive no doubt the soul is before the
coming of its God in the sense that it puts forward
nothing of its own to hinder His approach, but this
very passivity, or receptiveness, involves the highest
possible inhibitory activity. So far, therefore, from
the Soul being reduced to impotence before the
miraculous it is raised to its highest potency in
thought, feeling and will. Its thought, or its
reason, is exalted, not annihilated. The worship
which, it is urged, is the only proper reply of the
soul to the miraculous is not a worship emptied of
all logical content, but a worship where thought is
at its highest, seeing that the object before it is
one which stirs, as nothing else can, the whole
Soul to its depths with its feelings, volitions and
thoughts. 2. But a still stronger reply to the objection is
found when we observe that it is based on a failure
to discriminate between the miraculous as a Ding-
an-sich and the miraculous as a phenomenon,
between the Power which as such is a hidden, un
known and perhaps unknowable thing, and the
Power which voluntarily offers itself within our
field of vision, and so far invites us to put forth our
best endeavours to understand it. No proposition
receives a more general assent than that which
affirms that the root of things is unknowable, unless
it be a second proposition which affirms that the
whole field of the phenomenal, psychical as well as
physical, is a subject proper for reason to deal with.
But if everything at its roots is a mystery, inviting
to wonder and worship rather than to compre
hension, if " omnia exeunt in mysterium," then the
birth of a child is as much miraculous as the birth

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 13
of a world or as the birth of the Son of God. On
the other hand. His incarnation, while as a process
it is beyond reason, moving to worship rather than
to enquiry, yet as a fact in history it is as much a
proper object for reason as is the life of Lord Nelson,
or the sociology of the bee.
The interpretation, therefore, which starts from
assuming in the Creed a mystical order no more
banishes necessarily the Divine activity or cuts at
the root of worship than the current method of
interpretation which also assumes a hidden Power
and an overt act, or series of acts of the Power.
For both assert that the Power is known only in
its manifestations, and that the sum-total of its
manifestations, moreover, so far from exhausting
the Power, form in all probability but an infinitesi
mal fraction of its hidden reserves. Where they
differ is in the emphasis they lay on the relative
importance of the two factors, the mystic and the
historical, and in the nature of the factor called
here " mystic."
Those who set out to interpret the Creeds in
the form generally current trouble themselves as a
rule very little about the mystical background of
the Creeds. They start from the assumption that
certain events are as events miraculous, and
therefore exceptional, and then proceed to explain
dogmatically or historically the various articles
affirming those events. Taking the miraculousness
of the event as a datum which does not lend itself
to discussion, except so far as the evidence for it
may be assailed by criticism, they are content to
dismiss the mystical which lurks behind the history,
as a vague and shadowy thing which can only cause
confusion. In taking this line, it is right to point

\

\

14 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
out, they cannot expect to escape the criticism that
they are adopting the same methods and displaying
the same spirit as those numerous men of science
and philosophy who have discarded the Soul in their
natural history of man, made him for simplicity's
sake a mere machine, and given us a " psychology
without a soul." To omit the mystic background
of the Creed may secure clearness and precision,
just as a mechanistic explanation of the world is
more level to ordinary understanding than a
spiritual explanation, but it gives us an object
without depth and without life. It is the play of
Hamlet with Hamlet left out.
The mystic interpretation of the Creed, on the
other hand, insists that the mystic process lying
behind the whole is as the life of which the historical
events form the body. For convenience' sake you
may dissect the body from which the life has fled
through the process of abstraction, but if you are
to do justice to the Creed you must restore to it its
life, or at all events impress on your students that
they must reconstruct it in imagination as a living
whole — with the life informing the body — if it is to
subserve the uses of religious life. It may be that
this method of interpretation is caviareto the general,
that it will not commend itself to any but a prepared
number, but this if anything is a reason why it
should receive more, rather than less, respectful
attention. As we climb the mountain of life we
see further as we mount higher, and our number
is smaUer as we progress. But this is but a reason
why those at lower levels should trust the reports
of those on higher levels. To reject them on the
ground that they cannot be made to fit in with the
more partial geography of the valley is the blunder

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 15
of those who will only believe what they see, or act
when they fully understand.
3. A third reply to the objection, of less value,
but in some quarters of more efficacy, may be stated
and then left. It is that in dealing with the Creed
as a thing with a mystic soul and a physical body
we are but doing what every orthodox writer on
the Creed does. He postulates a miraculous base
and a historical building, and proceeds to examine
the historical with the object of illustrating the
concealed Power which has projected it in space
and time. Whether it is Caspari collecting all the
documentary evidence, or Kattenbusch discussing
the diffusion of Creeds, or Harnack or Loofs, or
Clemen, or Zahn, or Burn, or Sanday settling moot
points, all are content to deal with the phenomenal
and to postulate the real behind it. They do not
attempt to reduce this Real under law, but only
its manifestations. Similarly, here we make no
attempt to limit or fetter the mystical life by an
intellectual process, but are content to suggest the
meaning of the articles of the Creed as they stand,
on the assumption that they mask living processes
of the life of the Spirit.
One point of difference no doubt exists between
the method of the ordinary expositor of the Creed
and that of the mystical interpreter, which consists
in the different values assigned to tradition. The
former is content to explore and state the opinions
held by men whose position or character entitles
them to exceptional consideration, while the latter
is disposed to emphasise the greater importance of
each individual, whatever his worth, approaching
the subject from his own peculiar standpoint. The
one dwells on the testimony of an Athanasius, a

16 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
Clement, an Augustine, and where they all agree,
on their unassailable authority ; the other listens
respectfully to the authority, and then takes the
liberty of deciding for himself. But this difference
of method must not be allowed to blind us to the
fact that orthodox expositor and mystic interpreter
agree in holding that their subject-matter shows
the same characteristic, viz. that it is the material
manifestation of a hidden Power, the only difference
being that the one regards the working of this
Power as exceptional or miraculous, and the other
as orderly and continuous.
If it be objected further that mystics such as
Tauler, Eckhart, Boehme and George Fox all
shared the orthodox belief of their day, and there
fore took as the base of their thought the miraculous
on which Christianity was considered to be built,
we reply firstly that they did this as theologians,
or as men of unquestioning piety, and not as
mystics ; and secondly, that in so far as they were
mystics they tended to belittle or to ignore, or to
emasculate the miraculous as such, by almost un
consciously transmuting it into the hidden, con
tinuous, uniform working of the eternal Father.
When, for example, the Theologia Germanica (chap.
iii.) says that Adam's fafl " was because of his
claiming something for his own, and because of his
I, Mine, Me and the hke," that " had he eaten seven
apples, and yet never claimed anything for his own,
he would never have fallen " ; and then finds the
remedy in the Incarnation of God, while adding :
" Now if God took to Himself all men that are in
the world, or ever were, and were made man in
them, and they were made divine in Him, and this
work were not fulfilled in me, my faU and my

MYSTICISM AND TRADITION 17
wandering would never be amended except it were
fulfilled in me also," is it not made abundantly
clear that the thought of the unknown author is
more universalistic in its scope and individualistic
in its application than disposed to make much of
the miraculous as such or to give paramount place
to the authority of tradition ? Mysticism is always
individualistic because it lays stress on life, and
because it lays stress on life it makes more of its
underlying oneness than of its phenomenal variety.

CHAPTER II
THE MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY
Before proceeding to enquire into the mystical
meaning of the Creed in detail a few general con
siderations call for some discussion in order that the
Creed as a whole may be properly appreciated.
And the first point to be noticed is its place in
history — its place as a whole, that is to say, and
not the story of its separate articles. We are not
concerned with the dispute whether the origin of
the Creed is to be sought in the East rather than
in the West ; whether it grew gradually, or in the
main was the work of one generation, one Church,
or one brain ; with the dates at which various
additions were made to the number of its articles ;
or with the vicissitudes of its history as a baptismal
document. A much more important question than
all these put together demands an answer of some
sort at our hands, and an answer must be given,
even if it be one to which not certainty but some
compelling degree of probability only attaches.
That question is : Did Christianity emerge as
a religion of a mystical character and afterwards
take a historical setting, or, on the other hand, did
it from the beginning declare itself to be of an
institutional character with prescribed rites, a pre
scribed cult, with appointed officers, and definite
18

o=. n MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY 19
laws, and precise outlines at least of organisation,
with the intent that out of acceptance of all or some
of these the mystic life might in due time take its
rise ?
In answer to this question it might be urged a\
priori that as in general function precedes the
organ, so the Christian life, if this rule is to hold
good, preceded its institutions. But to this a
rejoinder, based also on a priori grounds, might be
made to the effect that we know nothing of the
beginnings of anything, but only of the course of
its development, and that the history of the. develop
ment of any object or event finds its life and its
form already there as data for the enquiry, and that
therefore all attempt to settle their precedence is
futile. While admitting, however, that this rejoinder
has some plausible cogency, it may be pointed out
that it conceals the fallacy of the undistributed
middle. Life and form, the argument runs, always
face us as things given ; life and form lie at the
origins of Christianity ; therefore the life and the
form of Christianity must be taken as coeval.
The fallacy lies in the ambiguous use of the term
form. Form in the major premiss means form in
general, but in the minor premiss it means the
particular form which the enquirer thinks is what
he finds at the threshold. As a matter of fact, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to say what, if any, is
the form of cult, creed, or organisation displayed
by the earliest history of Christianity, So far from
any fixed form meeting us, what does really occur
is a series of kaleidoscopic changes where nothing
continues in one stay.
We are forced, therefore, to come down from the

20 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
heights of a priori reasoning to the broad highway
of history, and observe as best we may the facts as
they pass by. When we do this, one or two things
become clearer.
In the first place, we are barred from adopting
the method of proof adopted by some writers {e.g.
by Bishop Gore in his work on the Christian
Ministry) which finds an existing order in a select
period (say the fourth century), which then proceeds
to give a selection of facts of an earlier date, and
finally asks whether the consistency of these facts
with the selected forms found at a later date does
not give reasonable proof that these forms go as far
back as the cited facts. For it is forgotten that the
very facts which support the proof may have come
into the Church from outside sources, and in that
case are as much proofs of the sensitive pliability
of the early Church as of the uniformity of her
traditions. In the second place, recent research ^ has proved
as convincingly as anything can be proved that so
far from Christianity arising from an exclusive and
closed system of truth in the midst of surrounding
error, it is more true to say that its roots ran deep
into contemporary life, and that there was little
that was new in it, except the higher life which came
down to earth in the person of its Founder. But
in saying this we are almost unconsciously laying
bare the essence of Christianity, for it too is not life
only, nor form only, but, like everything else, life
in form. The life is that of the Christ who came
1 A good example of the strides made by recent research into the
origins of Christianity is afforded by a comparison of the article on Gnosti
cism in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with that on
the same subject in the last edition.

II MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY 21
both as the Revealer of ancient truth and as the
Giver of a new life,^ But the form was already
provided in the ethnic beliefs and customs of the
day, and this form, like all forms, was plastic, and
as a matter of fact has never ceased from changing,
not even during the vulgarly supposed changeless-
ness of the Middle Age, and is changing more
rapidly to-day perhaps than ever before.
If it is urged that Christianity bears every mark
of having been originally a growth inside Judaism
before it underwent a process of " acute Hellenisa-
tion," and that therefore it is illegitimate to seek
to explain its origins from outside Judaism, we
reply that at the beginning of our era Judaism itself
had yielded to the eclectic movement which was
the dominant intellectual force in the Roman
Empire between the death of Alexander the Great
and the birth of Jesus Christ, and had opened its
doors to every religious impulse which was to be
found between India and Spain. So far, then, from
the fact that Christianity appeared as an off-shoot
from Judaism being any proof of its exclusive
character it is much more a proof to the contrary.
Judaism had become the host of all the speculations
of all the existing religions, and these it sought to
cover by the worship of the one God, its 0e6<; Hyjna-TO'i,^
and to compel into a formal unity by the rigidity
with which it made its national life the ground
work of its synagogue organisation. Like the
Roman Church of to-day, it was blandly tolerant
of any creed which did not threaten any danger
1 For Messianic expectations among the Samaritans, Romans, Persians,
and in the SybiUines, see Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, 1903, pp.
211-213. ' Cf. W. F. Cobb, Note on Mdv and "TfiiTTos, 1912 (Donnison & Son).

22 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
to its organisation, or its claim to be the exclusive
bearer of salvation through its Messiah or through
its Torah. As Bousset says, " For the work of
the Christ Judaism paved the way ; nor must we
forget that its preparatory work included the taking
up into itself of essential elements of foreign religions,
and the working them over to some extent. Not
one religion only has contributed to the growth of
Christianity, but it was due to an intermingling of
the religions of the western world of culture, the
period of Hellenistic culture. Alexander the Great
had to come and build the Hellenistic Empire ;
the amalgamation of national cultures from the
Euphrates and Tigris to Alexandria and Rome
must begin so as to create the conditions antecedent
to the becoming of Christianity. Judaism was the
crucible into which the different elements were
thrown together. Then there followed through a
creative miracle the new creation which is the
Gospel." ^
So far, then, is Judaism from having the honour
of being the sole parent of Christianity and of
imposing on its child the independent laws of its
own being that it itself has no title to be re
garded as essentially different from the other
religions of the early Empire, except so far as it
was held more tenaciously than the rest by reason
of the stubborn racial self - consciousness of its
devotees. But a still more significant feature of early
Christianity remains to be considered. Christianity
at first was a secret, mystery-religion. For the first
three hundred years of its existence it was not a
1 Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, 1903, p. 493 ; with this Harnack
agrees, Die Mission und Ausbreitung, 1902, p. 11.

n MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY 23
religio licita. It was condemned by the Jewish
authorities as vigorously as by the Empire, and
both united, according to the Gospel story, in
putting its Founder to death. Its doctrine was
secret, for to its disciples alone were the " mysteries
of the kingdom " given clearly, while to others they
were given in parabolic form only. It used
familiar mystery-terms for its rites ; its baptism
was a ^MTtcr/xo?, and it gave a seal {a-^payk), both
terms being derived from the mysteries. Baptism
was a mystery {fivari^piov), and it was described
as a p-vrja-K, or reXer??, or reXetwo-t?, all mystcry-
terms. " The purified crowd at Eleusis saw a blaze
of light, and in 1;he light were ^represented, in -symbol
life and death and resurrection." Lights, crowns,
the use of milk and honey, and fasting are character
istic alike of Christian baptism and mystery-
initiations. The influence of the mysteries on the
Eucharist was later than their influence on baptism,
if we may judge from the scattered references to the
latter in early days, but it was none the less certain.^
Even the rites themselves bore so suspicious a like
ness to those of the cult of Mithras that Tertullian
was driven to adopt the explanation that the devil
as a " simia Dei " had copied and taught the
Christian mysteries before they came into exist
ence. Christianity had also its " traditio Symboli,"
which was denied to the uninitiated, just as other
mystery-religions had their secret signs and pass
words known to the initiates only. Not before
Baptism was the creed given, and similarly
1 See Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1891, pp. 292-309 ; also Cheetham, The
Mysteries Pagan and Christian, 1897, in which Dr. Hatch's conclusions
are questioned.

24 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the Lord's Prayer was withheld till the first
Communion.^ Its meetings were held in secret, in an upper
room,^ in some place inaccessible to the general
public, according to Pliny, for he was dependent
for his evidence on the admissions extorted from
the Christians themselves ; in the catacombs,
where the worshippers concealed themselves from
the police under the disguise of a burial-guild.
This was true not only of the Christians of Rome
but throughout the Empire. Such a guild would
not consist in all probability of more than a hundred
members, and where the Christians were numerous
the difficulty was met by forming separate guilds.'
Moreover, the canonical scriptures of the early
Church contain innumerable expressions and allu
sions to mystery, or Gnostic theology — ^the two for
j our present purpose are undistinguishable, and
I among them the following seem to demand the
j serious attention of those who maintain that
Christianity stands or falls with any given account
'of its historical birth and growth.
1 Bonwetsch in Realencyk. fur prol, Theol, u, Kirche, 1897, ii. p. 55.
The presence of mystery-terms and conceptions in the Church of the
fourth century is generally admitted ; Zahn and Kattenbusch admit it in
the third century ; Roman writers naturally prefer a still earlier date.
The truth probably is that Christianity from the very first contained the
seeds of all later developments, and that these seeds would spring up or
lie latent according as the conditions were favourable or unfavourable.
As the essence of Christianity is to be found in the Person and Life of
Jesus Christ, it becomes a question of secondary importance whether His
life borrowed its forms from Judaism alone.
2 Acts i. 18 ; cf. Matt. x. 27.
^ " Les Chretiens eurent recours k I'organisation en colleges fun6raires
afin de mettre la loi de leur c6t6, bien loin d'avoir d^sormais ^ la redouter.
Sous le nom de collegia funeraticia ou de collegia ienuiorum les Chretiens
arrivent done k vivre au grand jour et k poss^der des cimetiferes. La
prefecture urbaine ayant refu les declarations requises, chaque college
fonctionne reguli&rement." Cabrol, Dictionnaire d^ archiologie chritienne, iv.
2421.

II MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY 25
(a) " Unto you it is given to know the mysteries
of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not
given." 1 The teaching of Jesus is therefore
esoteric, and this is emphasised in the repeated
warning, " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." ^
" 'Tis the taught already that profits by teaching "
is Browning's statement of the same mystic truth,
and " unto every one that hath shall be given " '
is another. (b) " Where two or three have been brought
together into My name there am I in the midst of
them." When compared with the Logion found
in 1897 : Saith Jesus, " Wheresoever there be
two they are not godless ; and where there is one
only, I say, I am with him. Raise up the stone,
and there thou shalt find Me : cleave the tree, and
there am I," the inference seems inevitable that
" in the midst of them " is the equivalent of " with
in you " in Luke xvii, 21, and affirms that the Christ
is the " Dweller in the Innermost " of the disciple.
The being " brought together " must then be
interpreted ofthe mystic conversion ofthe individual
by which he passes from being enrolled into the
name of the Devil into being enrolled into the name
of the Christ, The appeal is not addressed to a
group, nor even to the outer side of the individual,
but to his deeper self.
(c) " Every one that exalteth himself shall be
humbled ; but he that humbleth himself shall
be exalted." * This is demonstrably untrue if its
limits are those of the present dispensation ; and
therefore humbling or exalting in the present order
will, it is said, be met by exalting or humbling in
1 Matt. xiii. 11. ^ Matt. xiii. 43, Luke xiv. 35.
' Matt. xxv. 29. ' Luke xviii. 14, Matt, xxiii. 12.

26 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the spiritual order. But this contrast is quite in
the Gnostic style.
{d) The title " Son ofthe Man " can be explained
only by means of the Gnostic figure of the Heavenly
Man to whom by regeneration the disciple is trans
ferred.^ {e) The fixing of regeneration and conversion
as the beginning of the Christian life ^ is in accord
with Gnostic teaching.*
(/) " Many last ones shall be first and first last " *
can mean nothing but that the great ones of this
world will be least in the spiritual world, and vice
versa, just as in the Magnificat, Luke i. 52, 53. This
is made clear in Mark x. 31, where it is expressly
said that the poor and despised of this age shall in
the coming aeon receive aeonian life.
{g) The frequent occurrence of the number three
as a symbolical number, as in the three days of
Luke ii. 46, Matt. xv. 32, the three measures of
meal of Matt. xiii. 33, the three disciples of Matt.
xvii. 1, xxvi. 37, the third day of Matt. xvi. 21,
and of Luke xiii. 32, the three tabernacles of
Mark ix. 5, the three loaves of Luke xi. 5, the
three years of Luke xiii. 7, compel almost a ranging
of this " three " with the Gnostic use of the same
number.^
^ Cf.Lietzmann, Der MenscAensoftn, 1896, and Tract No. 1 of the " Society
of Disciples," The Title " Son of Man " (Headley Brothers), 1908.
2 Matt, xviii. 3, Luke xxii. 32, John iii. 3.
' See Hippol. Ref, of all Her. v. 3 passim.
* Matt. xix. 30.
5 " They represent all material substance to be formed from three
passions, viz. fear, grief, and perplexity " (Irenaeus, Ante-Nic. Christian
Liby. Bk. I. v. 4). " They conceive of three kinds of men, spiritual,
material, and animal, represented by Cain, Abel, and Seth " (ibid. I. vii. 5).
So Hippolytus : " They divide (' Adam ') as Geryon into three parts. For,
they say, of this man one part is rational, another psychical, another
earthly " (Ref, v. chap. i.).

n MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY 27
{h) " ' Called ' are many, but ' elect ' are f ew " ^
makes use of two Gnostic technical terms for their
second and third degrees of spiritual development.
{i) " The Way " as a technical term (equivalent
to the " Path " of Buddhism), in Acts ix. 2, xix. 9,
23, xxii. 4, xxiv. 14 (add John xiv. 4-6, 2 Peter ii. 15),^
points to an esoteric body of teaching and mode of
life and to a secret brotherhood.
{j) The use of the word alcov or almvio'; to denote,
not time indefinitely prolonged, but life out of time,
and frequently the personal ruler of timeless realms,
as, e.g., in Ephes. ii, 2, 1 Tim, i, 17, Col. i. 25,
1 Cor, ii. 7, Heb, xi. 3, Ephes. iii, 11, Gal, i, 4.'
It may be convenient to sum up the question at
issue in this chapter in a series of axiomatic pro
positions which will be affirmed (or denied) by all
partisans, but will be no doubt accorded some
respectful attention by all who put truth before
party. 1. Two creeds, or philosophies of life, have been
contending for centuries, due to an optimist and
pessimist disposition respectively, which may for
convenience' sake be described as Greek and Semitic.
2. The latter emphasises the transcendence of
God, depreciates the worth of the visible world,
regards man as corrupted, and upholds a miraculous
system of mediation.
3. The former emphasises the immanence of
1 Matt. xxii. 14.
2 These texts are an authority for treating as technical also the use
of the term Way in Ps. cxix.. Matt. v. 25, vii. 14, xxii. 16, John x. 1, Prov.
(15 times). The ladder of Jacob's vision in xxviii. 12 should probably be
rendered Way,
' Cf. W. F. Cobb, Note on kldiv, 1912 (Donnison & Son). See also
Chapter XXV., below.

28 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
God, exalts the visible world as being sacramental,
regards man as of one substance with God, and in
place of miracle teaches an eternal Pilgrimage.
4. Both systems rest on Faith, not on Reason,
5, Their opposition is set in sharp contrast by
their interpretation of the term " Father " as
applied to God.
6. The modern representative of the pessimist
creed is Catholicism or Puritanism.
7. The optimist creed is represented by Plato,
Philo, the Gnostics, Origen, Plotinus, the Arabian
Philosophy, the mediaeval sects of Paulicians,
Cathari, Patarines, Waldenses, etc., the Gottes-
freunde and other mediaeval mystics, the Cambridge
Platonists and the Quakers, The Renaissance and
the Reformation aided this creed negatively rather
than positively,
8. The central truth of the optimist creed is the
divine nature of the soul as a Fiinklein of the Eternal
Light ; this implies its pre-existence and deathless-
ness. This creed also implies that the Soul is
united with a material form in order to enable it
to become an individual fit for an enriched life in
the Heavens.
9. The pessimist creed is the creed of the
majority by the nature of things ; hence it has
on its side the forces of Conservatism, of the order
established for the time being, of the State, and of
the Church in alliance with the State.
10. From this it follows that leaders of the
optimist creed when strong enough to excite opposi
tion are obnoxious to the physical forces at the
disposal of the established order, and are therefore
visited with ostracism, obloquy, banishment, prison,
or death.

n MYSTICAL BASE OF CHRISTIANITY 29
11. The responsibility for these acts of violence
rests on the community from time to time as a
whole whose organs are social custom and feeling,
the authority of the State, and the authority of the
Church. 12. That the pessimist creed is opposed by nature
to the optimist is shown by the fate under different
conditions of Socrates, Hypatia, Jesus Christ, the
main body of early Christian martyrs, Jeanne
d'Arc, John Huss, Giordano Bruno, Madame
Guyon, Eckhart, the Bohemian Brothers, the
Quakers. 13. One result of the violence to which the
champions of religious humanism have been sub
jected has been the formation of Secret Societies
for common propaganda, with authoritative secret
signs and pass-words.
14. Such Secret Societies were the primitive
Christians, the heretical sects so called of the
Middle Age, and Freemasons' Lodges.
15. These all taught a Brotherhood, because
those who feel they are united under one Father
regard every society founded on the basis of one
Fatherhood as a family.^
16. This accounts for la liberte, fraternite^
egalite, of the French Revolution, and demands
to-day sympathy with all movements which promise
the individual, whether man or woman, similar
freedom of self-expression, brotherly treatment,
and equality of opportunity.
17. The course of development from pessimism
' Cf. " And when they have become Christians they call them (the
slaves) brethren without hesitation . . . for they do not call them brethren
according to the flesh but according to the spirit and in God " (Aristides,
Apology, 15).

30 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohaf. n
to optimism is from Fear through Dependence to
Love. In the first stage, a transcendental God is
feared as being hostile or offended ; in the second.
His transcendence passes into Immanence ; in the
third, the two are harmonised through Love,

CHAPTER III
THE NATURE OF MYSTICISM
Although in the previous chapter we have affirmed
that in the interpretation of the Creed we ought to
proceed on the ground of the priority both in time
and in value of the mystical element over the
historical, yet we have not so far given any definition
of what is meant by mysticism. And it is the more
incumbent on us to do this because of the ambiguity
of the term.
Mysticism in its negative aspect is the appeal
of the soul of man against the formalism of life
and the blurring of ideals, especially when these
are enthroned in organised Churches. Whenever
established cults fail to voice the religious conscious
ness of their day, or to secure by their superior
spirituality the confidence of the people they
profess to guide and to teach, when they sink into
formalism ethically or intellectually, then mysticism
raises its head in public. It was so in the days
when Socrates sought to divert the Athenians from
the study of nature to the study of man ; when
Plato by dialogues which were half-philosophical,
half-poetical, and wholly mystical, offered a sub
stitute for the decaying official religion ; when
Jesus Christ came to make the dead bones of
Paganism live ; when Neo-Platonism opposed the
31

32 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
rationalism of the growing Catholic Church, and
Dionysius was introduced to vivify the Western
Church weary of dialectics ; when in turn there
stood up a Francis, an Abbot Joachim, an Eckhart,
a Tauler, a Suso, a Richard Hampole, a Molinos,
a Pascal, a Madame Guyon, a George Fox, and a
goodly company of prophets of the spirit. It
might almost be said that a strong and vigorous
mysticism of whatever kind when ranged against
established religious bodies is a presumption of their
, deadness in whatever age it occurs.
Mysticism, again, following on the same lines,
is often the name given by philosophic thought to
any attempt to find God by other methods than
, those proper to Reason. "^ The somewhat arrogant
claim to equate Being with Thought, or to regard
Reason exclusively or principally as the one instru
ment by which we escape from Nature to Nature's
God, is a claim which can but arouse other powers
in the soul to make active protest, and these when
they find expression are set on one side contemptu
ously as " mystical."
Or mystical is treated as synonymous with feeling,
as if feeling could ever be apart from thought.
What is probably meant is not that feeling is
formless but that its selective function in determin
ing what objects the soul shall take interest in has
been allowed to hurry it to conclusions without the
steadying criticism of the Reason, and then mysticism
is used as a term of reproach. For examples,
Vaughan 2 says that " Rationahsm overrates reason,
formalism action, and mysticism feeling," which
makes mysticism nothing but feeling run to seed.
' Recejac, The Bases of the Mystic Knowledge, p. 7.
^ Hours wiih the Mystics, Bk. I. chap. ii.

THE NATURE OF MYSTICISM 33
A special case of this " mystic feeling " is to be
found in the attitude of great poets to Nature, of
which Wordsworth may be taken as the type ; it
forms an interesting chapter in Dean Inge's Bampton
Lectures on Christian Mysticism, but in so far as it
is a natural mood of insight, of rapture, and of the
fusion in feeling of subject and object, it hardly
comes under the head of mysticism proper. At its
lowest it is an empty reverie or idle day-dream.
Sometimes mysticism is treated as springing
from an intellectual immediacy of apprehension of
God, as if the soul in addition to its better known
faculties of sensation, perception, apperception,
conation, etc., had yet another as the crown of them
all, to which is given the name of intuition, and as
if, further, the act or habit of putting trust in this
crowning faculty was rightly designated as mysticism.
We are not concerned here with the truth or other
wise of our possessing such a special faculty ; all
we have to point out is that by itself it is not
properly mysticism at all.
Dr. Caldecott defines Mysticism as a method
of founding religious belief in which " analysis
of religious faith is vain, and reference to lower
faculties misleading : Divine things belong to a
realm of their own : Religious belief is experiential,
indeed, but this is in the sense that there is ' experi
ence ' over and above all that is gained in commerce
with the world and from reflection on ourselves :
similarly it is natural in the sense that there is in
our ' nature ' a capacity for direct access to a super
sensible world, in which we can see God." ^
" Mysticism claims to be able to know the unknow
able without help from dialectics, and is persuaded
1 Philosophy of Religion, p. 86. D

34 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
that, by means of love and will, it reaches a point
to which thought, unaided, cannot attain." ^
Recejac, who is concerned lest Mysticism should
remove Reason from its sovereignty, also lays down
that " the synthesis of first principles as made in
the mystic consciousness reaches only to a clearer
and more intense realisation of our moral trans
cendence than is usual in our ordinary state, and
this is the revelation of the Infinite dwelling in our
Freedom." ^ Father Poulain writes : " The real
point of difference (of the mystic union) from the
recollection of ordinary prayer is this : that in the
mystic state God is not satisfied merely to help us
to think of Him and to remind us of His Presence :
He gives us an experimental, intellectual knowledge
of this presence. In a word. He makes us feel that
we really enter into communication with Him." *
" The highest and most divine things which it is given
to us to see and to know," says the Pseudo-Dionysius,
" are in some way the expression of all that which
the sovereign nature of God includes, an expression
which reveals to us that which escapes all thought
and has its seat beyond the heights of heaven." *
? It would be well, then, if the term mysticism
could be rescued from the haziness of its ambiguity
land restricted to denote the condition of the soul
'which has for its correlative the immediate act of
God, This takes two forms. In the one the soul
is merely passive and tries to empty itself actually
of all self-content which could maintain the dis-
' Recejac, Bases of the Mystic Knowledge, p. 7. ^ Ibid. p. 55.
' The Graces of Interior Prayer, 1910, p. 64.
4 De Mystica Theologia, i. 3. Cf. Professor Pringle-Pattison's article
on Mysticism in Ency. Brit,, llth ed., vol. xix. p. 123. Evelyn Underbill,
Mysticism, 1911, does not do full justice to the divine activity over against
man as the determining factor in the mystic union. See esp. Ch. IV.

THE NATURE OF MYSTICISM 35
tinction between God and itself. This is best
exemplified by the attempt of Oriental mysticism
in particular which seeks to get beyond life-in-form
to formless life ; to leave behind all that belongs
to matter or to the separate self, and to rise on the
wings of pure Spirit to a life beyond all experience,
Plotinus achieved this state four times, we are told,
and Dr, Buck has written a somewhat disappointing
book on this topic in his Cosmic Consciousness.
This aiming at ecstasv is not favoured by
ChristiaiT" mystics in general. As Tauler says,
" There be some even at the present time who take
leave of types and symbols too soon before they
have drawn out all the truth and instruction con
tained therein." ^ And in the Theologia Germanica
itself, that ripest product of mediaeval mysticism,
it is not the merging of the creature in the Creator
which is sought for but the abolition of self-will, of
¦' I, Mine, Me and the like," and the joyful proffer
of self to God as an instrument of His will. The
divine nature " without the creature would lie in
His own Self as a substance or well-spring, but
would not be manifested or wrought out into deeds.
Now God will have it to be exercised and clothed
in a form, for it is there only to be wrought out,
and exercised," ^ When then it says, " Be simply
and wholly bereft of Self," * or quotes the proverb,
" Going out were never so good, but staying at
home were much better," * we must interpret it to
mean the aiming not at the melting of self in God,
but at the attainment of harmony with God, where
self and God are not two or one but two in one.
1 Quoted in Theologia Germanica, ch. xiii. ^ Ch. xxxi. ' Ch. xxi.
* Theologia Germanica, ch. ix. Cf. The Imitation of Christ, Bk. I. ch. xx.
§ 2, " No man doth safely appear abroad but he who can abide at home."

36 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
" It hath been said : the more of Self and Me, the
more of sin and wickedness. So likewise it hath
been said : the more the Self, the I, the Me, the
Mine, that is, self-seeking and selfishness abate in
a man, the more doth God's I, that is, God Himself,
increase in him," ^
.-Thf' .cjpfnnd form qj mysticism avoids the danger
of a mere passivity in which form is reduced to a
vanishing point, and holds that the mystic boon
comes as a free gift from the Unseen to the soul
which has practised the art of seeing the invisible
in and with the visible. The main activities in
fitting the soul for the mystic gift are desire, delight,
and love, and apparently any object on which these
faculties in their purity fasten is competent to
secure the end. A wayside flower, the rustle of the
wind in the tree-tops, the blue sky when nothing
* else is seen (as e.g. when lying on one's back on
a hill-top), the sight of suffering, some magnetic
personality, a course of keen intellectual strife, a
deeply-felt injustice, human love and friendship,
these and multitudes of other objects or events
form the praeparatio mystica. Mysticism of this
kind is but another name for the sacramentalism
of the Christian Church which sees in every object
more than appears, sees it as the outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual principle,
as suggesting more than it says, as a gateway out
of form into life.^ It is idle to enquire what the
1 Ch. xvi.
2 " Whatever may be the process by which plurality arises from unity,
it would be contrary to the notion of unity if an accidental indefinite
plurality should arise from it. On the contrary, from the flrst the variety
of the elements will form a complete system, that grasped in its totality
offers an expression of the whole nature of the One " (Lotze, Microcosmus,

THE NATURE OF MYSTICISM 37
machinery may be which brings about this purging
of the inner eye, why the salient examples of its
exercise are so few, while in germ it reposes in
every mind ; what we are concerned with is the
matured product, the inner vision of the seer who,
while retaining his self-identity, beholds the hidden
unity of the world, or of some object in it, in which
life and form, the Idea and its content are no longer
two for Thought but one for Life, j
Mysticism proper then belongs to the super
natural order, and emerges only in the phenomenal
order when the Divinity in things reveals itself to
the Divinity which is enshrined in the soul,^ The
mystic vision is a gift and comes as a surprise as on
St, Paul's Damascus day, or when St, Augustine
heard his " Tolle, lege " ; it comes of faith, and
that, not of ourselves, it is the gift of God.
One property of mysticism, moreover, calls for a
word of notice, and that is its individual ground.
The vision which constitutes mysticism comes to the
individual, and makes him a /4uc7T7??, that is, one
who has seen something which closes his mouth,
whether he will or no, because what he has seen is
so interwoven into the very fibre of his inmost being
that it refuses to be detached and offered to others
as material for mental assimilation, A constant

Eng. trans., 1885, vol. i. p. 446). And again (p. 556) : " The essence of
things could be described by thought proper, if the mental eye ever pierced
to it through the veil of phenomena, though perhaps this description would
contain many forms whose meaning cannot be conceived — only lived.
But whatever this essence might be, it would involve the Idea as the
formless permanent ground of changing forms."
1 " Nihil enim fit visibiliter et sensibiliter quod non de interiore invisibili
atque intelligibili aula summi Imperatoris aut jubeatur aut permittatur
secundum ineffabilem justitiam praemiorum atque poenarum, gratiarum
et retributionum in ista totius creaturae amplissima quadam immensaque
republica " (St. Aug. De Trinitate, lib. iii. 9, Migne, vol. xlii. p. 873).

38 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
peculiarity of the divine vision, or message,^ is its
ordinary, sometimes even its trivial form, conjoined
to a content which is crystal -clear, compelling,
enriching and determining the whole of subsequent
experience, and conferring an exaltation which
lingers in memory as a fragrant perfume. In it the
highest and lowest are made one ; God is incarnated
afresh. It would be a mistake, however, to regard this
experience ofthe individual as purely individualistic,
in the sense that its direct and necessary result is
the formation of a spiritual atomism. It is true
that the mystic is fond of saying, " My secret to
myself" and " I only knew He named my Name," ^
but it is also true that the Power which reveals itself
to him also reveals itself as the Power which is the
hidden ground of the being of all other men. Indeed
it would not be an exaggeration to say that only
when the individual attains consciousness of his
true relation to his own Ground does he attain any
efficient sense of his solidarity with his fellows.
And, as a matter of fact, all the great mystics from
the two Catherines of Siena and Genoa to Oliver
Cromwell and George Fox have been people whose
lives were spent in the service of others. Further,
it would not be difficult to maintain the thesis that
all true socialism is builded, and can be builded
alone, on a foundation of mysticism, and that any
socialism which strives to build otherwise builds
nothing but hay and stubble. So long as the
mystic life ruled in the Apostolic Church communism
» Isaiah blends the two in ch. ii. 1. Cf. Zech. i. 9, -a in'^ri 7|.s'7S,i ; Ixx.
0 XaXwv iv iixol ; Vulg. " qui loquebatur in me."
^ Cf. Browning, " Christmas-eve," vii. :
" Where I heard noise and you saw flame
Some one man knew God called his name."

THE NATURE OF MYSTICISM 39
was possible, and no longer. The Society of Friends 1
has been distinguished equally by its devotion to
the Inner Light, and by its practical benevolence.
For mysticism is a higher third in which the dualism
of ordinary experience finds at once its solution /
and its harmonisation. [
It should now be clear in what sense it is said .
that mysticism holds the Key of all the Creeds, and \
of the Apostles' Creed in particular. Whatever \
its content may be, it is to be traced back to a
mystic vision, a revelation of some sort, in some
way, to an individual or individuals. That the
chiefest of these individuals was Jesus Christ places
no obstacle in the way of this statement, for the
record affirms consistently that He referred all that
He taught and all the authority he exercised to
His " Father in Heaven," i.e. to the Being that
philosophy regards as the hidden ground of existence.
That He felt Himself impelled to be in His Father's
house,^ that at His baptism He saw in vision the
heaven opened and heard a heavenly voice,^ that
a voice spake to Him out of heaven,' that He saw
an angel in Gethsemane* are isolated examples of
the abiding hiddenness of His life in God ; they are
like emergent rocks on a wide plain revealing the //
nature of the soil beneath. I
Moreover His disciples lived by the visions
vouchsafed to them. The three saw their Master
and Moses and Elijah in glory ; ^ the shepherds
had a vision of angels ; ^ Zacharias and Mary saw
Gabriel ; ' Stephen saw the Son of Man standing
on the right hand of God ; ^ Saul heard the voice
1 Luke ii. 49. = Luke iii. 21. » John xii. 28.
¦" Luke xxii. 43. ' Luke ix. 31. « Luke ii. 9.
' Luke i. 11, 26. » Acts vii. 56.

40 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of the ascended Jesus, ^ and Paul was caught up
into the third heaven ; ^ Peter beheld in a trance
the heaven opened ; ' and John the theologian was
in the Spirit on the Lord's day.*
These repeated records of supernormal states of
consciousness forbid us to rest content with any
rationalistic conception of Christianity, or to yield
to the temptation to suppose that the theology of
our religion is ever more than diagrammatic, that
a Creed is more than an imperfect formulation of
the life. If we were called upon for an affirmation
where all is but guess-work, we should say that what
came to the disciples sporadically was the abiding
possession of their Master. If the angels of His
little ones do always behold the face of the Father
in Heaven,^ this perpetual vision was surely also
His, and if so His phenomenal life, while conforming
to that of the ordinary man, masked a consciousness
to be apprehended by those alone to whom in some
degree a similar vision has been given. To the
poet " the meanest flower that blows can give
thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"
while to the clown " a primrose by the river's brim
a yellow primrose is to him, and it is nothing more."
In maintaining, however, that the Christian life
is specifically to be found in a higher consciousness,
we must guard ourselves against being supposed
to suggest that this higher or mystic consciousness
is incompatible with the consciousness of ordinary
life, or that it brings with it a feeling of the un
reality of common things. On the contrary, the
mystic alone is competent to understand the world
we all live in, for he alone sees its meaning and is
1 Acts ix. 4. 2 2 Cor. xii. 2. ^ Acts x. 11.
* Rev. i. 10. 'i Matt, xviii. 11.

THE NATURE OP MYSTICISM 41
able to detect the glory that encompasses every
object dealt with by sentience. With Mr, Balfour
he can " consider the case of bonnets " and see their
law ; ^ with Lotze he can detect the principle which
imposes on us top -hats and high heels ; ^ with
Carlyle he can enter into the philosophy of clothes ;
with Walt Whitman he will call nothing common
or unclean ; and with Jesus Himself he will regard
no man as a fool, because from Him he will have
learned that all men are brethren, whatever their
station or capacity, and that all things in earth as
in heaven declare the glory of God,
From this principle that life in all its degrees of
activity is to be recognised in its maiiifestations
around us, there follows conversely the truth that
life is constantly taking form through every degree
of density of the world of matter. Of this latter
truth a particular case is to be seen in the irresistible
tendency of the mystic life to enform itself in creed
and cult, i.e. in theology and organised worship.
Every vision, every mystic experience, unless it is
to remain sterile must find some means by which
its energy can be brought to bear on others ; in
other words, it must take form. But the form it
takes can never yield its full content to those who
use it, or study it, until they have attained the same
mystic experience of which the symbolic form is the
expression. This is what is meant when we say
that mysticism is the Key of the Apostles' Creed.
At the back of this Creed and of every creed, at the
back of every utterance in the Bible, at the back
of all philosophies, and of all religious practices
there reposes a revelation given at first-hand to him
1 Foundations of Belief, 1895, p. 50.
" Microcosmus, ed. 1885, vol. i. p. 592.

42 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chapih
who in the last analysis is responsible for the creed
or parable or philosophy or ceremony.^
, Hence, though the Apostles' Creed come to us
in the form of statements of historic fact, or philo
sophic doctrine, no interpretation of it can ever
be more than superficial which limits itself to an
enquiry into the evidence for that historic fact, or
into the rational proof of the doctrine, or to an
enquiry into the methods by which the various
articles were thrown together. The confession,
however, has to be made that current works on the
Creed do as a matter of fact so limit themselves,
and that their failure as interpretations, therefore,
is hardly to be excused on account of the critical
acuteness and industry and wealth of knowledge
which they display as a rule on every page, Man
does not live by science alone. He wants, before all
things, life.
^ Rohde suggests that the doctrine of immortality in Greece goes back
to the " enthusiasm " which was produced in the worshippers of Dionysus
by their frenzied dances and by the cries and chants and wild instrumental
music which accompanied the dances. This ecstatic state was felt to be
more than human, and, therefore, god-like. Hence it exalted its subject
to the life of the gods, i,c, to deathlessness (Psyche, 1894, pp. 296 ff.).

CHAPTER IV
MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
In the previous chapters we have discussed the
problem of the interpretation of the Creed as a
particular case of the problem of the reconciliation
of authority and individual freedom ; ^ the question
as to whether Christianity was first mystical then
Catholic, or in some sense both at once,^ and the
nature of mysticism.' There now remains (before
proceeding to a consideration of the articles in
detail) the necessity of showing {a) what precisely
is meant by the assertion that these articles bear
in general the stamp of mysticism, and {b) how
their mystical content is to be harmonised practic
ally with their historical or philosophic form.
{a) Mysticism has been defined above (p. 34) to
be a complex of the supernatural as the active
factor and of the reaction to it of the soul as the
passive, by which everything is excluded from the
definition which does not bear the character of
the supernatural, or (if the term " supernatural " be
objected to) of the Divine. If we ask now what
is likely to be the effect on the percipient soul of
the immediate touch of God, we must answer that
there will be aroused a predominant and permanent
interest in the inner side of things, that is, in the
1 Chapter I. ^ Chapter II. = Chapter III.
43

44 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
soul (or spirit) which informs and animates the world
round us, and especially man himself. It follows
as a corollary from this that interest in the external
side of things will be proportionately diminished,
at all events for a time ; that is to say that the
expression of religion, for example, in creeds and
institutions and cults will be deemed of inferior
importance to the life which the soul itself has
become conscious of, independently it may be of
these forms. The articles of a creed, the facts of
Church history, the rubrics of the institution, or
the beauties of ceremonial worship will either be
despised and left on one side, or used as stimuli
only to that better thing which the soul has already
found within. They will either be dismissed at
once, or at best tolerated as questionably useful
members of an order which is at every moment
ready to vanish away. No doubt a time will come
later when the division between the vision and
the form will be seen to be illegitimate, when the
soul of the Idea and its form will be regarded as
an indivisible whole, but this will not alter the
fact that the mystic will always be supremely
interested, and probably with growing passion, in
the unseen Forces which are masked by that which
appears. Such a person will, when the Creed is put in his
hands, ask himself at once what it has to say, if
anything, about the inner facts of his experience,
and, if he be a member of a Church which offers
it to him, he will be predisposed to believe that it
must have something to say. He will not, therefore,
apply to it primarily his reason but his intuition,
and only when he has convinced himself that the
Creed is incompatible with his intuitive knowledge,

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED 45
or contradictory of it, or out of all relation to it,
will he throw it on one side as useless and without
interest to him.
If, however, he finds that it can be made to give
expression to what he knows already of the spiritual
order, he will honour it and use it, but he will also
insist on interpreting it in terms of his own soul's
experience. Nor will he allow himself to be thrust
from his inherent right to interpret for himself^ a
document which is his by virtue of his membership
in a community which has constructed or taken it
over for its own purposes. Just so did the Christian
martyrs of the Empire die for their right to worship
what God they pleased, resisting to death all
attempts to turn them from mystics into the puppets
of authority, " Here I stand ; I can no further "
is the invincible challenge thrown out by Freedom
against despotism, and by its courageous mainten
ance only is this sad world made better.
Now let us apply these truths to the Creed as
a whole. It wears, it is true, a philosophical or
historical form, but our concern here is not with
either form but with the Life which has revealed
itself to the mystic. That Life has told him only
that it is, but not what it is. He provisionally
assumes, therefore, that his Church would not invite
him to state his experience in terms of its Creed
unless it had good reason for believing that the
Creed would not only be found to agree with what
he knew, but would also help him to give his know
ledge more precision, and to draw from it much
that had hitherto been implicit only,
1 " We may talk about the right of private judgment, or the duty of
private judgment, but a more important thing to insist on is the necessity
of private judgment " (Salmon, Infallibility ofthe Church, 1888, p. 47).

46 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
He will not find any difficulty in its Trinitarian
form, if only for the reason that as a student of the
soul he is already familiar with the Trinitarian
division into thought, feeling, and will, or if he be
a student of St, Augustine into the lover, the loved
and the love which mediates, or into Existence,
Knowledge, and Will,^ If he be familiar with the
facts of comparative religion he will remember that
India has its Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva,
the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, and that
every Egyptian temple had its divine triad. The
fact that the first Christians, or, if you like it better,
the first reflecting Christians were induced to throw
their mystic experiences into a Trinitarian form
will cause no difficulties, but will, on the contrary,
carry with it a presumption that a doctrine so widely
spread owed its prevalence to its agreement with
Reality.^ But, on the other hand, the doctrine
of the Trinity, being a doctrine and not a fact of
1 otherwise, Memoria, intelligentia, voluntas (de Trin. x. 11, 12).
" Dictum est ' tres personae ' non ut illud diceretur sed ne taceretur " (De
Trin. v. 9). Earlier and more concrete images were found in the division
into source, river, current ; root, branch, fruit ; sun, heat, and light. Cf.
also : " Dico autem haec tria : Esse, Nosse, Velle — sum enim et scio et volo :
sum sciens et volens et scio esse me et velle et volo esse et scire, in his igitur
tribus quam sit inseparabilis vita et una vita et una mens et una essentia,
quam denique inseparabilis distinctio et tamen distinctio, videat qui potest.
Certe coram se est ; adtendat in se et videat et dicat mihi, sed cum in
venerit in his aliquid et dixerit, non jam se putet invenisse illud quod supra
ista est incommutabile, quod est incommutabiliter et scit incommutabiliter
et vult incommutabiliter " (Conf. xiii. 11).
" If the number ihree has its home in the heavens it has its counterpart
on the earth, and when John Scotus Erigena says that " the three Persons
of the Trinity are less modes of the Divine Substance than modes under
which our mind conceives the Divine Substance," he is only tracking the
effect to its cause. So Juliana of Norwich says that " our soul is
made trinity-like to the unmade blissful Trinity known and loved from
without beginning, and in the making oned to the Maker " (Revelations
of Divine Love, ch. Iv.) ; and St. Thomas says, " A likeness of the
Divine Trinity is observable in the human mind " (Summa contra Gentiles,
iv. 26).

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED 47
mystic experience,^ cannot escape from the necessity
laid on all products of inferential Reason of being
criticised, and, if necessary, modified and brought
into line with fuller knowledge, if such there be.^
If the mystic attain to fuller knowledge, and know
ledge that carries with it the inner stamp of certainty,
he will not, however, be in a hurry to thrust it
forward, but will feel that as his Church has had to
exercise great patience with him, so he is in honour
bound to be patient in his turn with her. But how
he shall act, and when, must be determined for him
in all cases by the Inner Light which is his.
When our mystic comes to face the more
historical portion of the Creed, viz. that which tells
the life-story of Jesus Christ, he will, if he be true
to himself, see there not so much the story of
a particular life as of a universal and, therefore, a
typical life. And the details that are given of this
typical life he will immediately and necessarily
construe as forming his own ideal life-story, without
troubling himself unduly about the historical side
' " Observe the word self-e'oident, for there hes the truth of the matter ;
for you have no more of the truth of religion than what is self-evident in
you. . . . You can know nothing of God, of Nature, of Heaven, of Hell
or yourself, but so far as all these things are self-evident in you " (William
Law, The Way to Divine Knowledge, 1752, p. 185, quoted by Caldecott,
Philosophy of Religion, p. 281). But direct intuitive apprehension can
only tell us that God is ; it is left to reflective thought to say what He is.
2 But the doctrine having been first established by reflection on the
facts of Christian experience by means of current philosophy, it became
necessary, if the doctrine was again to become religious, for it to be trans
lated back into mysticism. " Das Mysterium der immanenten Trinitat "
(as expounded e.g. by St. Augustine) " ladet zur Pflege einer mystischen,
kontemplativen Frommigkeit ein. Namentlich aber gilt es fernerhin als
unerlasslich, dass man erst einen Blick in dieses ewige Geheimnis getan hat,
ehe man an die glaubige Aneignung der Offenbarung herantritt. Was im
Rilckgang des Denkens von der Offenbarung auf ihren Grund eine letzte
Fol^erung war, wird nun zum Prius fiir das Verstandnis der Offenbarung
selbst" (O. Kirn in Realency. f. prot. Theol. u. Kirche, 1908, Band 20,
p. 116).

48 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of them. He will not be concerned to affirm,
neither will he be concerned to deny the historical
accuracy of the stories of the Virgin birth, of the
Crucifixion, Resurrection, or Ascension, for in so
far as these emerge on the plane of history they
submit themselves to the ordinary laws of historical
criticism, and fall under the jurisdiction of the
critical expert.
He, howeyer, as a man of religion, approaches
them as religious, that is, inner events, and sees,
for example, why the Creed contains no reference
to the baptism of the Christ, viz. because what was
contained in that was already sufficiently set out
by the article of the Virgin-birth. The Crucifixion
as a mere historical event would be of no more note
than the myriad of crucifixions with which the
cruelty of man has studded history, for to the
mystic the Crucifixion recorded in the Creed is in
its essence the inner crucifixion to which the Captain
of our salvation submitted Himself, and to which
each of His followers must also submit. Similarly
the Resurrection to the mystic is no mere re-
animation of a physical body from which life had
before fled, but it is the resurrection of the soul out
of the lower region of human living into the higher
region where the human becomes the superhuman.
The Ascension, too, in its turn is to him not so much
a physical happening — ^though he is not called on
to deny this — ^as the last act in the long drama of
the birth, pilgrimage, and home-coming of the soul,
which out of many tribulations has its life now hid
with Christ in God.
But something more must be said, if the mystic
element in the Creed is to receive due justice. On
the supposition that in Chapter IL there has been

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED 49
given a well-founded account of the essentially
mystical character of Christianity in its origin, then
there follows necessarily the inference that the
truths of the Creed were true before they took shape
in history,^ Virgin-birth, Crucifixion, Resurrection,
and Ascension are not only moments in the life of
one Indi'vidual, but are moments in His because they
have a cosmic significance, and in some degree have
been always part of the world-order. Something of
their power surely was known by Enoch who walked
with God, the just and perfect Noah, Abraham,
the friend of God, and Moses who saw God, by
Elijah in his mystic chariot of fire, by Socrates
who followed his Salp,Q)v to death, by Plato when he
fell in love with eternal beauty, by Gautama who
prepared the intellectual ground for Christianity,
by Spinoza, the " God-intoxicated " Jew, by the
great company who out of all peoples, nations, and
tongues, and out of all religions have endured as
seeing Him who is invisible.
Are we then, it will be objected, to understand
that the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth is a
myth, that the Gospel-story is nothing but frag
ments of forgotten and misunderstood mystic truths
of secret sects which a grosser age has set in the lower
key of history, that Jesus either had no historical
existence, or that if He had His life- value differs from
that of any pious teacher or guide in degree rather
than in kind ? By no means. Here comes in the
consideration already insisted on in Chapter I. (p, 9)
that process and event are not mutually exclusive
but complementary. The cosmic process requires
^ With this may be compared the truth that stealing is forbidden by
the Eighth Commandment beeause it is wrong, and is not wrong because
it is forbidden there. E

50 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
not merely repeated and more or less imperfect
formulations of its life and meaning, but also strives
for a full and perfect manifestation of that life and
meaning which may recapitulate all that is good
and true in the many imperfect forms it takes.
The Christian maintains that such a perfect actualisa-
tion has taken place in the person of Jesus Christ.
Further, if he is asked how he accounts for the
facts of the historical life of Jesus being such as to
fit in easily into the framework of the moments in
the pilgrimage of the soul set out in the mystic
scheme, he will ask how it could be otherwise. If
there are fixed laws which the soul has to obey on
its long pilgrimage, they are the same for all souls,
and no arbitrary harmonising of the gospel-story
with the soul-story of mankind is necessary or even
permissible, for the simple reason that as He was
so are we in this world, and vice versa. Nor would
this position be shaken if criticism succeeded in
discrediting the evidence for the historical Virgin-
birth, or if Jewish polemic proved that Jesus met
His death by stoning (for which there is no evidence).
In that case all that would be necessary would be to
modify the article of the Virgin-birth, but by no
means to reject it, and to explain that from the
point of view of religion a violent death of any sort
would satisfy the mystic's requirement. And this
because a death infiicted by man, and especially
by authority, would itself be a testimony to the
world's hatred of those who follow their own star
instead of its torch,
{b) We have already indicated the theory by
which the mystical and the historical in the Creed
are to be reconciled, by the truth, that is, of the
ubiquitous law which binds life to form. But

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED 51
something more than theory is necessary before we
can hope to gain acceptance or even tolerance for
the claim that the mystical is constitutive of the
historical. How, it may be asked, as things are,
is any member of a Church to-day in which the
Creed is imposed on him by authority to gain
freedom to interpret for himself ? Must he not
sooner or later come into conflict with authority,
or at all events bear the intolerable burden of
a never-ceasing gnawing uneasiness of conscience,
due to the suspicion that he is not loyal ex animo
to his fellows ?
Before answering this question we must inter
polate the caution that the Creed and its interpreta
tion belong to humanity and not only to those
Churches which have adopted it, and that, therefore,
our appeal is to all who care for religion. What
is more, the mystical interpretation should find a
no less sympathetic welcome at the hands of the
large and increasing body of good people who stand
aloof from all forms of organised religion, and of the
large number of those within the Churches who are
crying out for something better than the dry husks
they get. To them both the mystical truth offers
relief, and opens out a promise that they need no
longer be severally self-excommunicated or isolated,
but may take their place side by side with those
who worship God after the manner of their fathers.
Is it not worth while, it may be fairly urged, for
these latter to do something to regain those they
have lost or those they retain with difficulty ?
Should they not remember that all other attempts
have failed, and that they have failed because
they made their appeal to forms, about which we
aU differ, and have a right to differ, instead of to

52 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
life, which alone can solve our anomia and compose
our differences ? It may be affirmed emphatically
that no reunion of Christendom, in whole or in part,
is possible, or even desirable except by a frank and
faithful and courageous acceptance of the supreme
authority of the mystic life.
But, however this may be, it does not solve
the difficulty put in the question above as to the
way in which members of organised Churches
may reconcile their right as free beings with their
position as subjects of authority. Nor would it
be any sufficient answer (at least for them) to point
out that the religion which is mystic, in and for
itself, is not a proper subject for organisation at all,
and indeed never has been organised, and never can
be organised. In Browning's well-known words : ^
. . . my spirit's wonder
Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,
With this sky of thine, that I now walk under,
And glory in thee for, as I gaze
Thus, thus ! Oh, let men keep their ways
Of seeking thee in a narrow shrine —
Be this my way ! And this is mine !
These lines carry the true mystic ring of in
dependence, certainty, and aloofness. But it is
not the whole truth. Another comes to keep it
company in the lines from the same poem : ^
Needs must there be one way, one chief
Best way of worship : let me strive
To find it, and, when found, contrive
My fellows also take their share !
For I a man with man am linked
And not a brute with brutes.
1 " Christmas-eve," v., sub finem.
2 R. Browning, " Christmas-eve," 20.

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED 53
The gregarious instinct must supplement the
individualistic. But observe what is implied in
the full mystic gospel. The basal half of it is the
individual's first-hand knowledge and certainty (no
matter how arrived at), and the complementary
half of it is his duty to help others to share his own
gift. He therefore becomes a missionary with a
propaganda, as did Jesus Christ ; an apostle, as did
St. Paul ; the founder of a community, as did St.
Benedict and St. Ignatius Loyola and St, Francis
of Assisi ; and while the founder with his mysticism
is able to inspire his fellows with his own life all is
well. But as soon as the age of the Epigonoi sets
in, when lower motives rule, and the brotherhood
becomes an institution, then the difficulties of all
who retain the founder's spirit begin. Nor will they
end before the rulers of the institution abnegate, or
leave quiescent, the secular power by which they
rule, and go back to the objects and spirit of their
Chief. To put this truth quite plainly, let us say that
in so far as the officers of any Church which bears
the name of Christ rely on any sort of coercive
authority to compel obedience they are abjuring
for the time being their Master, and are acting
as State officers purely and simply.^ The mystic,
therefore, who finds himself a member of the com
munity they rule suffers a violent injustice when he
is called on to put his soul in their hands, and has a
right to call on them to admonish him as a brother,
on the ground of their joint share in the mystic
life, instead of seeking to compel him as a subject.
1 " There is a story that some Tory Churchman said to the late Professor
Thorold Rogers, ' Religion must be compulsory, or else there will be no
religion at all.' ' I cannot see the difference,' was the answer " (D. G.
Ritchie, Principles of State Interference, p. 148).

54 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Nobody can have his cake and also eat it, and a
Christian Church cannot be at once Christian and
secular. As Christian it is mystic, and can compel
no man ; as secular it is itself a subject of the
State, but to confuse the two is to give to Caesar
the things that are God's. The mystic, therefore,
should set his mind at rest, for it is not he that is
in the wrong in sticking loyally to the truth that
God has given him ; it is his ecclesiastical rulers
{i.e. secular rulers appointed for public offices of
religion) whose consciences should be uneasy when
they and he come into conflict. He may be said
to represent Christianity as it was in the beginning,
they the Christianity as it became after it was
secularised. But a further difficulty may be raised. The
mystic may say that he does not desire to be
left in the cold outside the established Churches,
and that, therefore, while remaining inside he feels
himself bound to observe honestly the obligations
attaching to inside membership. He finds himself,
however, in the unfortunate position of not being
able to accept what the main body of his fellows
hold, what their formularies seem to say, and what
their rulers lay down as the law. Well, in this case,
the reply is that he should first assure himself in
the presence of his God that he is not actuated by
any vanity, restlessness, self-sufficiency, impatience,
or love of singularity, then obey wherever he can,
and as far as ever he can, and where he disagrees
express himself modestly, and in every case make
no attempt to conceal what he holds to be true.^
1 Harnack gave similar advice in 1892 to a number of students who
asked his advice on the advisability of an agitation for the removal of the
so-called " ApostoUkum " from the legal formulae of the evangelical
Church. See Reden und AufsSize, i. p. 221 ff.

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED 55
If he does this he has done his part honestly, and
if he is wrong it is for the community to take action,
not he. It is a species of impertinence for a man
to judge his Church, by voluntarily quitting it,
whether for Rome or Agnosticism. Let the Church
judge.i Let us note finally what it is that we are invited
to accept as Christianity. The religion by which
Jesus Christ lived, i.e. belief in the Fatherhood of
God and in the Brotherhood of Man, as evidenced
by the documents of history, says Dr. Harnack ; ^
the Catholic religion as a going concern, says Abbe
Loisy ; the sacramental system as founded by
Christ, and shown to be valid by the undying
corporation of the Episcopate, says the high
Anglican, all agreeing in one point, viz. that
Christianity is something external to the Christian
and remaining external. Justification by faith
is what saves, says the Lutheran ; the vicarious
Sacrifice and its appropriation, says the revivalist.
All tell the truth, but it is a truth out of focus. It
is not in history, nor in learning, nor in intellect
(" non dialectica placuit Deo salvum facere populum
suum," says St. Ambrose) that our salvation lies,
but in the age-long presence and power of God, the
lover of the souls of men. Who never ceases to
exercise His attracting and uplifting activities on
the spirit He made for Himself.
If it be said that the stoutest champions of
Christianity as a historical religion have never been
1 " Ohne Autoritat kann der Mensch nicht existieren, und doch bringt
sie ebensoviel Irrtum als Wahrheit mit sich ; sie verewigt im Binzelnen,
was einzeln voriibergehen soUte, lehnt ab und lasst voriibergehen, was
festgehalten werden soUte, und ist hauptsachlich Ursache, dass die Mensch-
heit nicht vom Fleoke kommt."
» Das Wesen des Christentums, 1900.

56 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap. iv
so foolish as to maintain that saving power is to
be found in history alone, but rather in history as
the bearer of a Divine activity in the background,
then all that need be said is that this is an admission
of what mysticism contends for. The mystic adds,
however, that the history in Palestine is virtual only,
not effective, until it is translated into terms of inner
experience in the individual.^
^ Cf. SchefHer's beautiful hnes on the " Mystic Catholic " :
" Lo I in the silent night a child to God is born,
And all is brought again that ere was lost or torn ;
Could but thy soul, O man, become a silent night,
God would once more be born in thee, and set all things right.
" Ye know God but as Lord, hence Lord His name with ye ;
I feel Him but as Love, hence Love His name with me !
How far from here to heaven ? Not very far, my friend ;
A single hearty step will all thy journey end.
" Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born.
If He's not born in thee, thy soul is all forlorn ;
The Cross on Golgotha will never save thy soul ;
The Cross in thine own heart alone can make thee whole."

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST ARTICLE
/ believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of
Heaven and Earth
Xltarevo) ets ®eov JJarepa iravro/cpaTopa, irotrjTrjv
o-upavov Kai 777?.
After having discussed in the previous chapters
{a) the dualism in which Mysticism plays its part,
(6) the nature of Christianity as witnessed to by
its earliest documents, (c) the nature of Mysticism,
and {d) the mystic character of the Creed as a whole,
we are now in a position to deal with its twelve
articles in detail with the view of finding out, firstly,
whether they severally bore a mystic sense from the
first, and, secondly, what in any case is the mean
ing which the mystic will put upon them to-day.
Without anticipating the result of enquiry, it may
be hinted beforehand that we shall find in all
probability that what may be called the primary
articles were from the first such as put their mystic
meaning to the front, and that the secondary
are at lea?t patient of a mystical interpretation.
Further, it will most likely become clear to the
unprejudiced reader that whatever the meaning
57

58 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of the articles at the bar of history, the Creed
to-day must either be interpreted mystically or be
abandoned. It is not without significance that the Creed is
put into the mouth of the individual, that it opens
with the word I-believe and not We-believe, for it
makes the road easier to the interpretation of the
mystic, although it does not banish other pilgrims
from the road. For suppose that the man who says
the Creed is just one of those elementary souls who
paint the world in black and white, he will proclaim
that no honest man can get away from the fact that
a thing either is, or is not, that Jesus Christ, for
example, either was crucified on the 15th of Nisan,
A.D. 29, at nine o'clock in the morning on a hill just
outside Jerusalem, or He was not, and that so there
is an end of the matter. The mystic has no desire
to deprive this simple soul of his carbonarian faith,
but he will beg leave to point out that no term
is more ambiguous than the personal pronoun
/, unless it be the most majestic of all terms,
God. For the content of each is determined by the
place in evolution occupied by the speaker. When
a Pascal or a Goethe says /, he is referring to a
symbol which conceals a hidden treasure indefinitely
greater than that covered by the term in the mouth
of a hairy Ainu, so that at the very opening of the
Creed a large number of roads diverge marked each
by its own finger-post. Along one may be seen
walking slowly and with downcast eyes the pale
student of history or philosophy ; down another
marches one who looks like a policeman intent on
seeing that no unauthorised person passes that way ;
here again is a soldier with his Creed inscribed in

THE FIRST ARTICLE 59
black-letter on the scabbard of his sword ; an
antiquary pursues his way with a precious parch
ment on which the Creed is illumined ; on a high
road, well metalled and hedged, ambles on his
palfrey an ecclesiastic with a good word for every
body ; and presently down a blood-stained, craggy
road, filled with nets and gins, a lawyer threads his
way with a volume of Phillimore's Ecclesiastical
Law under each arm, which tells him that his
Creed is in a schedule to an Act of Parliament.
There is, however, one pilgrim who may be found
on all roads (the pedant's perhaps excepted), who
quarrels with no fellow-traveller, and, when asked,
" symbolises " with all because, as he avers, he
holds something which includes the truth of all.
His I-believe subsumes that of all the rest, not
so much because he has nothing to learn from
them, but because his mystic experience has given
him an angle-point from which he can sympathise
with all.
It is precisely in this opening up of sympathetic
understanding that one principal factor of the
mystic's experience is to be found. It is not so
much that he is set by it free from any previously-
acquired bad habits, or that he acquires greater
capacity in art or science than he possessed before,
as that he now is set in living relation with the
Centre, and so knows how to appraise and love every
living thing that he sees at the circumference. For
he sees with each the radius connecting the object
on the circumference with the Living Being at the
centre. How then should not his I-believe include
that of all others, seeing that he brings theirs into
his, fused with his, as the colours of the prism
are fused into one in the white ? The man of

60 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
science, the man of orthodoxy, the missionary, the
lover of the past, the responsible bishop, even the
lawyer, are not to him rivals, but colleagues, each
guarding what is committed to him, but, as he
thinks, men who would be wiser and happier if
they could but see the living heart of what they
carry, the Reality in the Creed which alone gives
it meaning and value. I-believe in.
The overwhelming majority of Christian theo
logians have maintained that the spiritual activity
defined as " belief-in," or rather " believing-into," ^
belongs to the Will as truly as to the Intellect.^
Hence " I believe in " is equivalent to " I choose
to believe in," or "I decide to believe in," which
at once suggests the question what it is that impels
the choice or decision, what train of Thought, what
wave of Feeling, or, to go a step further back still,
what was the efficient cause of the Thought or
Feeling. For unless the Will is set going by Thought
or Feeling (should we not rather say by Thought and
Feeling ?) it remains blind, and unless Thought
^ IliffretJeij' eis rbv Qebv rather than irLtneietv Oetf).
^ E,g, St. Augustine : " Quid est ergo credere in eum ? Credendo
amare, credendo diligere, credendo in eum ire, et ejus membris incorporari "
(In Joh, Evang. traci.29, § 6, Bened. ed., pt. ii., vol. iii. p. 515. Again : " Dicis
' credo.' Fac quod dicis et fides est " (Sermo de temp, p. 237, in Bened. ed.,
V. 271). And again : " Ilie credit in Christum qui et sperat in Christum
et diligit Christum " (Sermo I44 in verbis Ev, Johan,, Bened. ed., v. 693).
Similarly St. Thomas concludes that the act of faith which is expressed
by the phrase " I believe in God " is an act of the understanding moved by
the will, for " voluntas movet intellectum et alias vires animae in finem "
(Summa, ii. ii. 2). In the preceding article also he insists that even
" credere est cum assensu cogitare/' and adds that this belief imports an
activity of the intellect joined to some amount of enquiry and consent of
the will.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 61
or Feeling be stimulated by some cause external
to themselves they remain dormant, St, Paul,
followed by Christian thought in general, says that
the cause is the grace of God, co-operating (as one
important modern school of psychology adds) with
the interested attention of the man himself. There
still remains the difficult question as to how the
interest which compels attention is itself produced.
How do I come to be interested in philosophy rather
than in gardening, in hunting instead of in politics,
in the country more than in the town ? It is little
use to say with Dr. Caldecott ^ that " modern
psychology comes to our aid : the difficulty is
fictitious after all, at least in part," for the part
where it is not fictitious is just the part that causes
the difficulty. What is to make me allow " certain
aspects of experience to enter into the focus of my
interest " ? Before I can pay attention to a thing
I must take a living interest in it. Whence springs
this interest ? for obviously it is not and it cannot
be manufactured to order.
The only rational answer is that our present
interest in a thing, our desire for it and love of it
have been won by past experience, whether in this
life or in previous lives, and that experience is
always the necessary result of the stimulation of our
inner self by our environment. But each object
in our environment is a particular which is also a
phase of the Universal, for " in it as it is abides the
Infinite, whose abundant nature unites the attri
butes, ready with its force to protect them, or to
carry out their alteration." ^ The essential power
1 Philosophy of Religion, 1901, p. 73.
" Lotze, ut supra, i. 384. " For inherent truth and consistency will
compel the Infinite, with every special finite form which it assumes, to fix

62 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
of the Infinite latent in every individual acts
according to fixed laws, one of which is the law
compelling all living finite things to push on towards
the Infinite. Hence if I do not yet believe-in God,
it is only because the stage at which I am does not
yet allow of it ; but if, on the other hand, I am
given, for instance, a friend who insists that I shall
pay attention to God, my interest in my friend is
likely to lead to my taking an interest in time in
God. For God in His world is a purposive force,
who waits but gets His way in the end, and the end
is man's salvation.
From this it seems to follow that not everybody
can say, " I believe-in God," but only the man who
has advanced so far along the Pilgrim's Way as to
recognise in some effective form his relation to God.
The further he has advanced the more thorough
going is the act of " belief," but in every case where
the confession is real and sincere some first-hand
experience is involved, even if it still slumbers in
the mysterious depths of the subconscious mind.
But now what is this believing-in God which we
are so ready to assent to ? The question is one of
the most important that we can be called upon to
answer, and when we have found the answer we
shall find that none save a mystic is able either
to give it or to repeat his Creed in its fullest
meaning. The phrase -TriaTeveLv ek TOV ©ew is character
istic of the Fourth Gospel,^ though not confined to
also the unalterable mode of action to be executed in it, in accordance with
the ideal that presided over the creative moulding of this particular form
as an essential part of its manifestation " (ibid,), Cf. also pp. 643, 649,
651. 1 It occurs in Matt, xviii. 6, Mark ix. 42, Acts x. 43, xiv. 23, xix. 4,
Rom. iv. 5, X. 14, Gal. ii. 16, Phil. i. 29, 1 Peter i. 21, 1 John v. 10, but

V THE FIRST ARTICLE 63
it, and there it is a deliberate substitution for the
phrase which occurs frequently in Acts ^a-n-Ti^eiv ek
TO ovofjiu.^ In the latter the formal side of entrance
on the Christian hfe is emphasised, in the former
the vital side ; the fulness of the act requires both.
In both, however, there is contained the connotation
of passing from one state of existence into another.
To put a thing down to the account of another,
such as a sum of money or a slave would be expressed
by 619 TO ovo/xa, and the same phrase was used
when a human being crossed over from the peculium
of the devil to be the peculium of Christ. " Ye
caimot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of
devils," said St. Paul,^ and similarly he would
say that baptism into the name of Christ trans
ferred a man from the power of the name of the
devil.* The phrase of the Creed and of the Fourth Gospel
is similar except that here it is the subjective side
of the transaction which is emphasised, and this of
set purpose. To believe-away-from the old master
and to believe-to God is to turn " from darkness to
not elsewhere in N.T. except in the Fourth Gospel where it is found over
thirty times. In the N.T. otherwise we have " believe " absolutely,
or with the dative, or with iv ynth the dative, or with iirl with ace. or
dative. ^ " 'Bairrl^eip els ri 6vo/j.a giebt einen (den) Zweck und einen (den)
Erfolg des Taufens an : es besagt, dass der Taufling in das Verhaltnis der
Zugehorigkeit, des Eigentums zu Jesus tritt " (Heitmiiller, Im Namen
Jesu, 1903, p. 127).
2 1 Cor. X. 21.
' " Vor dem Siegel Christi entweichen die iiberwundenen Damonen und
Maohte ; wo er und sein Geist weilen, haben sie keine Statte. Dass auch
diese Seite des Namenglaubens fiir Paulus wirksam gewesen sein kann,
(um nicht zu viel zu sagen) wird deshalb wahrscheinlich, well er nach
Col. i. 13 die Wirkung der Taufe sich auch als Errettung aus der Macht
der Finsternis verstellte " (Heitmiiller, vbi supra, p. 328). Cf. also the
striking phrase in Clem. Al. (Strom, ii. 8. 36) eh yci.p Bfofia 'A.v6ptiirov
rrKaaBeU 'ASi.fi <p6pov irapicxev irpo6vTOS 'AyBpiiirov, ws dr] airbv iv aiiT<fi
Ka$e<XTUT0S.

64 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
light," ^ where it is evident that the word " believe "
is insufficient. For if " belief " as used in the Creed
were nothing but " assent to that which is credible
as credible," were confined to the intellect, the pro
position which implies motion (or the analogue of
motion) from something to something else would
be out of place. But what takes place in this act
of " believing- to " is a transference of the whole
personality, and is, therefore, best stated as belong
ing to the Will, if only it be understood that in the
Will is included also Thought and Feeling. We
should go further. In the act of conversion ^ the
whole phenomenal personality seems to suffer a
spiritual violence at the hands of an inner and
higher Force which drives it into the Kingdom of
Heaven with joy, and then it as the old Ego made
new can say with a fulness it could never use before :
" I have transferred my trust from Self to God ; I
have come to confide in Him ; my times are in His
hands ; I no longer serve Sin, that is Self,* but I am
a member now of the Divine family, I belong to
God and I reckon myself as credited to His account."
May we not then ask whether so tremendous a con
fession as this, involving a complete volte-face, a
snapping asunder of the dearest and most intimate
and most prolonged inner relationships, can be
effected by any power but that of God in His direct
unveiling of Himself to the soul ? In other words
can any but the mystic say confidently and with
• Acts xxvi. 18.
" 'Ecii' ij.^ <TTpa<p7JTe, Matt, xviii. 2.
8 " Adam, the I, the Self, Self- Will, Sin, or the Old Man, the turning
aside or departing from God, do aU mean one and the same thing " (Theo
logia Ger. ch. xxxvi. " Our human affections, without which in this mortal
state we cannot live, are as the feet wherein we are affected by human
affairs " (St. Augustine, Hom. Ivi. on St. John xiii. 10).

THE FIRST ARTICLE 65
intuitive knowledge : " I, my whole being, am now
as a river which is running irresistibly towards
God ? " 1
1 Blass points out (Grammar of N.T. Greek, pp. 122-3) that in the
N.T. els to some extent absorbs iv and answers the question : " where ? "
as well as '" whither ? " But he also points that Matthew is free from this
usage, and that the Epp. and Apoc. " show at least in the local signification
a correct discrimination between els and iv," and concludes that this use
of eis was still a provincialism. He also favours the varied use of els or
iv after iria-Teieip, iXTri^eiv, eiSoKelv, and in connection with 6vop.a as
due to the comprehensive sweep of the Hebrew preposition. But a theo
logical purpose has been at work here in the N.T. as well as a philological
tendency.

CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST ARTICLE {continued)
God, the Father, Almighty
@e6v Harepa iravTOKpaTopa
It is not a question which concerns us specially
whether the first article of the Creed was based on
the baptismal formula of " God, Jesus Christ, and
Holy Spirit," or on the triune formula of Matt, xxviii.
19, " Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," a question
which raises the further question as to whether the
elementary form of our article was : "I believe in
the Father," or " I beheve in God," ^ For in
1 Both McGiffert (The Apostles'' Creed, 1902, pp. 178-186), and Zahn
(The Apostles' Creed, trans, by Burn, 1899, pp. 54-61) agree that the
original form was " 1 believe in one God, the Almighty," and that Father
was a later insertion due, according to McGiffert, to the influence of the
Johannine type of thought, and to Zahn as a protest against third-century
Monarchians. They point out that ee6s ¦n-a.vroKpi.Twp is a better attested
phrase than Harr/p TravroKpdrup, but McGiffert does not account for the
insertion of -n-aripa if, as he says, it meant the " father of the world," for
" God Almighty " already imphes this, nor Zahn for the omission of lva,
if it were original. Though, moreover, it is true that the flrst baptismal
formula ran in the name of Jesus, the triune formula which supplanted it
can hardly be brought down so late as to be wholly posterior to baptism
in the name of God, Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit. Sufficient weight does
not seem to have been given to the fact that the analogy of history makes
it probable that from the first two tendencies were at work in the Church,
a mystical and a theological ; that the former would strike its roots deeper
but be less known, the latter be more vocal ; and that the mystical school
would certainly be more drawn to the formula, " Father, Son, and Spirit,"
and the theological to the formula, " One God, Almighty."
66

€HAP.vi THE FIRST ARTICLE 67
either case the mystic interpretation, though it may
take a different road, will come to the same
goal. We need not delay with any foolish attempt to
explain what we mean by " God," for, as St.
Augustine says of Time, we all know what we mean
by it until we are asked to give an account of it.
The Power that is at once supreme, self-existing,
infinite, spiritual, perfect, immanent, and tran
scendent,^ is what most theists mean by God. In
the Creed it is a datum about which not much is
said, and what is said is partly mystical, partly an
after-thought of theologians.
The mystical element proper to the Creed from
the beginning is expressed in the term Father.
The term is no new term, but is more common in
ethnic religions than in Jewish ; indeed, it hardly
occurs at all in the O.T. as an epithet of God,^ and
all attempts to show that Jesus owed His doctrine
to Jewish doctors is doomed to failure when we
observe that what was distinctive in it is not O.T,
teaching at all. Not only is the Fatherhood of God
practically absent from the O.T., but the title
"Son of Man," in spite of Daniel, cannot be rooted
there ; nor has the baptism, whether of John or the
Church, any precise analogue in the O.T. ; the
ceremonial baptisms insisted on by the Pharisees,
and the ablutions of the Temple officers, offer no
explanation ; the doctrine of regeneration has no
place in Judaism ; the affirmation that in God we

I Caldecott, Philosophy of Religion, p. 1.
2 The only passages which can be quoted are : Ps. Ixviii. 5, Ixxxix. 26,
Isa. ix. 6, Ixiii. 16, Ixiv. 8, Jer. xxxi. 9, Mal. i. 6, ii. 10, 2 Esd. i. 29, Wisd. xiv.
3, Ecclus. xxiii. 1, 4, li. 10, and of these the last four only are relevant, and
yet are far from the N.T. signification.

68 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
live and move and have our being ^ is better suited
to Athens than to Jerusalem ; the statement that
God and man are of one substance ^ is one that the
Jew would regard certainly as meriting death by
stoning. Yet this identity is what Jesus affirmed,
what the Jew denied, and what the O.T. leaves
unsupported. Whence, then, came it to be the
central truth in the religion of Jesus Christ ? We
can best answer this question when we have first
enquired whether it occurs in any other religion
besides His.
In Homer and Hesiod Zeus is frequently described
as Father of gods and men.* Sophocles styles him
Olympian Zeus, father of all.* Euripides makes
Medea say to Jason that she could say many things
in reply to him, if it were not that Father Zeus
knew his sufferings and doings.^ The Hymn of
Cleanthes, line 34, beseeches Zeus as Father to turn
the darkness of error away from the souls of men,
where the whole context shows that the Fatherhood
is one of nature and creation as well as of gover
nance. Epictetus could say : " Slave yourself, will
you not bear with your own brother, who has Zeus
for his progenitor, and is like a son from the same
seeds, and of the same descent from above ? Will
you not remember that they are the offspring of
Zeus ? " ^ Aristotle, however, thinks that in the
relation of father and children there is a form of
1 Acts xvii. 28. The passages quoted in Hastings' Diet, of the Bible, ii.
216 ff., by Dr. J. S. Candlish are not apposite, as he says expressly that the
sonship spoken of there is not attributed on the ground of nature or creation,
but on that of redemption and grace. But it is the former ground that
we are concerned with here. See on the other hand Dalman, Words of
Jesus, 1902, p. 188. i John x. 30.
^ IlarTjp AvSpiov re deutvre.
* Ph. 275, 6 rcijv airdvTuv Zei)s irarijp '0\ijp.7rios.
' Medea line 1349, et p.!] 7,eis Tra.Ti)p -rj-irliXTaTO. ' i. 13.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 69
kingship, and that for that reason Homer introduces
Zeus as Father,^ In the Poimandres it is said that
All-Father Mind, being Life and Light, did bring
forth Man co-equal to Himself, where, however,
" Man " is the Heavenly Man in the realm above,
Zeller sums up the theology of the Stoics in saying
that their whole view of the world is founded " upon
the theory of one Divine Being — begetting from
Himself and containing in Himself all finite
creatures," ^ Seneca says that Hermes, Dionysus,
and Hercules were names of Zeus,* A prayer to
Ptah of the time of Rameses III, addresses him :
" Hail to thee ! Thou art great ; thou art old,
O Tatenen, Father of the gods, etc," * In the so-
called Mithrasliturgie, edited by Dieterich, the
candidate is assured by the hierophant that the way
of the visible gods shall be seen through the disk
of the sun, his father, god,^ Commenting on the
'' Te Kve of Eleusis, Proclus says that in the sacred
rites the worshippers looked up to heaven and called
out vie, and looking down to the earth cried Kvie,
knowing that the birth of all things is from these
two as father and mother,^ The Propator of the
Gnostics is familiar.

1 Eth. Nicom. viii. 10. 4.
2 Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, p. 322.
' Benef. iv. 8. 1, " Hunc (Jovem) et Liberum patrem et Herculem et
Mercurium nostri putant. Liberum patrem quia omnium parens sit."
Cf. Servius ad Georgica i. 5 in Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, xi. 313,
" Stoici dicunt non esse nisi unum deum et unam eandemque potestatem,
quae pro ratione officiorum variis nominibus appellatur. Unde eundem
Solem, eundem ApoUinem, eundem Liberum vocant." So Diogenes
Laert. vii. 135, iv re eXvai 6edv Kal voOv Kal elp.appAvqv Kal Ala.
* Harris Papyr. i. 44. 3 ff., in Reitzenstein, Poimandres, 1904, p. 61.
* P. 6, 1. 12, i) di TTOpela tCiv 6pap,ivoiv 8e&v 5i4 tou Uitkov, irarphs ptov, Qeov
tpavrifferai. « In Plato, Tim. p. 293 C, Sia ro&rav Cos warphs Kal p.r]Tp6s r'qv yiveinv elcoi
livres yiviiiaKOVTes.

70 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
There is no need to labour the point further.
The thought of God being in literal fact the father
of men and of all things dominated the Hellenistic
religion at the beginning of our era. But it was
a thought that was alien to the monotheistic creed
of Judaism as it meets us in the 0,T. God to the
Jews was King and Lord by virtue of His being our
Creator ; He might become Father in the sense of
governor or benefactor, and this is the sense in which
the relation is thought of in the literary Prophets
after the Exile. On Hellenistic ground, however,
the thought of God as Father of men, i.e. as in some
sense their author and producer was at home. And
it was to Stoic Pantheism that St. Paul turned for
his authorities when he sought to convince the
Athenians.^ Since then the doctrine that we also are God's
offspring was widely current when Jesus lived on
earth, we need not scruple to say that so far as its
form went He derived it from ethnic sources. This,
however, is only half the truth. The outside world
does not act on any one of us in such a way as to
produce actively a certain resulting product from
us passively, but to every change in our inner or
outer state we ourselves contribute something
through our inner life. So was it with Jesus ; with
the difference, however, that His response to the
outside stimulus was obviously more energetic and
more autonomous than that of others. Hence when
the Greek world suggested to Him the Fatherhood
1 ToC ykp Kal yivos iap-iv is from Aratus, Phaenom. 5 ; cf. the Hymn
of Cleanthes, iK aov yap yevSp.e<r6a, ffeou p.lprip.a Xaxivres /xovvoi (" we
alone are born from thee, we alone who have been given likeness to God ").
The full text is in Stobaeus, Eel. i. 1, in von Arnim i. 121, and in James
Adam, Vitality of Platonism, p. 104, who gives the text as emended by
Meineke, and points out, p. 134, that the p,ipripa deov consists in our vovs.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 71
of God the suggestion was forthwith transmuted
into something richer by the force of His own
fulness of life. The proof of this may be seen in the
following considerations : —
1. God is called Father by the N.T. writers pri
marily and specifically as the Father of their Lord
Jesus Christ, whose sonship was defined or estab
lished by the power God had put forth in Him to
raise dead souls to life through a spirit of holiness,^
even as He Himself had been raised from out of the
midst of dead souls,^ and so endowed with power
over them that believed. Hence salutations run
from God, " the Father of us and of the Lord Jesus
Christ," * Hence Paul's customary description of
himself is "an Apostle of Jesus Christ through the
will of God," where God is the ultimate authority,
Jesus the proximate. This same order is found
in Ephes. i. 5, where the adoption into the heavenly
family is attributed to Jesus Christ as the agent.
As the door for others the Apocalypse styles Him
" the first-begotten of dead souls," * and in 1 Cor. xv.
21, He is referred to as the man through whom
comes resurrection of dead souls. That the raising
of souls from spiritual death, and not any resurrec
tion of the body is meant in these passages is still
more clear in Rom. vi. 4, where the raising of Christ
from out of the dead stands as a parallel to the
disciples walking in newness of life ; both, therefore,
must belong to the same genus, and that genus is
defined in the context as the death of sin or the life
of grace. In all these passages one leading idea
prevails : the singular endowment of holiness in
1 Rom. i. 4. 2 Gal. i. 1, Ephes. i. 20.
= Rom. i. 7, 1 Cor. i. 3, 2 Cor. i. 2, Ephes. i. 2, Phil. i. 2 ; in Gal. i. 4
the marginal reading of R.V. is the same. * Rev. i. 5.

72 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Jesus Christ was the condition for God bestow
ing on Him both power over the world which
lies in sin, and, in consequence of that, power
to raise others as well. His human sonship con
sisted of an actual impartation by God of His
own divine and superhuman life, so that in a
special sense God was Father of the Man Christ
Jesus. 2, According to the Synoptists, the disciples of
Jesus were to put before them as their ideal their
Father in the heavens, and become perfect like
Him ; 1 they were to pray to Him ; ^ they were to
expect His Spirit to speak through them ; * but it
was the same Spirit which rested on Him ; * He,
too, prayed to the same Father ; ^ He differentiated
between God and Himself ; * and stated their
distinctness and intimacy,' an intimacy not unlike
that of the disciples' angels.^ These passages, so
far as they go, say nothing of any consubstantial
and eternal indwelling in the divine Pleroma, but
take up the truth of the Fatherhood of God, and
tell us that Jesus, out of the depth of His own
intuitive knowledge and sense of oneness with His
Father, raised the ethnic doctrine to a vital act or
habit which enabled Him as man to transcend
ordinary human knowledge of God as far as ordinary
man's does that of his faithful dog. Nor should
we overlook in this connection the fact that all the
Gospels make His baptism of critical importance
to His religious life, and so enable us to understand
why some authorities read the Voice as saying :
1 Matt. V. 45. 2 Mat. vi. 9.
3 Matt. X. 20. « Matt. xii. 18.
5 Matt. xxvi. 42. « Luke xviii. 19.
' Matt. xi. 27. s Matt, xviii. 10.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 73
" Thou art My beloved Son ; this day have I
begotten Thee." ^
3, The fourth Gospel elaborates the thesis that
the truth of the Fatherhood of God was raised by
Jesus to a height of meaning never before attained.
It never itself speaks of Jesus as the Christ, or the
Messiah, but leaves this to others,^ and uses itself
the mystic title " Son of Man." It gives out as
its text the announcement that in Jesus the Logos
had come down to earth, and, therefore, gives us
to understand that the aim of the whole Gospel is
to show the heavenly Truth and Life which have
appeared on earth. Perhaps, if we are to do critical
justice to the Fourth Evangelist, we ought to say,
however, that he does not restrict the self-manifesta
tion of the Logos to His appearance in the historical
Jesus, but strives to show how Jesus represents
typically, even if supremely, the enlightening work
of the Logos in every man that cometh into the
world.
1 Justin Martyr (Dial, cum Trypho, 88) says : " There came a voice
which was uttered also by David when he spoke, personating Christ, what
the Father would say to Him : ' Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten
Thee,' (the Father too) saying that His generation would take place for
men at the time when they would become acquainted with Him : ' Thou
art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee.' " In the Gospel of the
Ebionites, called the Gospel of Matthew, Epiphanius says there was con
tained the statement that " there came a voice from heaven saying, ' Thou
art my beloved Son ' ; and again, ' I have this day begotten Thee,' and
immediately there shone round about the place a great light," Agl. Haer.,
ch. xxx. Clement Al. Paedag, i. 6. 25, says : " Immediately on the Lord
being baptized there sounded from the heavens a voice witnessing to the
Beloved : ' Thou art my beloved Son, I this day have begotten Thee.' "
St. Augustine (De Consensu Evang. ii. 31) says that it is said that the
words " this day I have begotten Thee " do not occur in some older Greek
MSS., from which it is clear that he was acquainted with MSS. which did
contain the phrase. In the Enchiridion ad Laurentium, ch. xlix., Augustine
again quotes the text in the form " Ego hodie genui te " (Bened. ed. vi.
215). * Andrew in i. 41, the Samaritan woman in iv. 25, the multitude in
vii. 31, 41, 42.

74 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
Moreover, the relation of the Son to the Father
in this Gospel is not different from that in the
Synoptists, even though the accent be on a different
place. Jesus has His heavenly food in order that
He may do the will of His Father ; ^ His life of
activity is moulded on that of the Father ; ^ He is
so intimately united to His Father through love
that like Him He heals the impotent,* quickens dead
souls,* judges as the Father's surrogate,^ and is the
recipient of the Father's life.* He was sent by
the Father in order that He should give life to all
whom the Father drew to Him,'' and it required a
special revelation to recognize in Him the Father.^
There is no need to qviote all the passages in this
Gospel which refer to God as the Father of Jesus
Christ. It is enough to say that they consistently
affirm three things — the superearthly nature of
Jesus, His subordination to His Father by way of
economy, and His sense of vital oneness with Him.
Further^ He does not exclude others from His own
exaltation. Through Him His disciples become
entitled to be called, and to be sons of the
heavenly Man, or sons of God ; His Father is their
Father, for they, too, are BiBaKTol tov ®eov ; the
authority given to Him He in His turn gives to
them.* The above rapid survey seems to compel us to
say that in the main the N.T. does not invite us to
the fruitless and impossible task of striving to
comprehend God, but puts before us the form of
Him whose name we bear as Man, and bids us
observe how as man He yet shows Himself at least
1 iv. 34. 2 V. 17. ' v. 19.
* V. 21. s V. 22. ' V. 26.
' vi. 44. « vi. 46. » xx. 21.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 75
super-man because of His mystic life, whereby He
and the Father are one in thought, feeling, and will.
But if one in this vital fashion, must there not lie
behind this mystic oneness a yet deeper oneness of
being, of substance ? A reply is hinted at in Phil. ii.
5-11, but the theme is one rather for wonder and
worship than for theology or controversy.
So far, however, as we are concerned — for the
mystic proceeds by the way of the Will rather than
of demonstrative Thought — the confession of the
Fatherhood of God implies that of our substantial
sonship, not a sonship of adoption merely, or of
metaphor, or of any other fictitious analogy by which
men have sought, after the fashion of Uzzah,^ to save
the honour of God at the cost of the intelligibility
of His world, but a sonship of nature which is none
the less real because it is of grace.^ Where this
truth is watered down, or made to square with a
one-sided Transcendentalism, there is produced a
view of life which is at bottom pessimistic, in place
of that optimism which is the natural and necessary
result of a living grasp of the audacious assertion
that we are God's offspring. As Manilius says :
Quis coelum possit nisi coeli munere nosse,
Et reperire Deum nisi qui pars ipse Deorum est ?
Belief in God, a knowledge of God, is only
possible to a being who already has some kinship
of nature Avith God, This is the truth which alone
gives Anselm's famous argument from the idea of
God to His existence its validity. Man being
potentially divine, God having taken form in His
» 2 Sam. vi. 6.
» Cf. St. Augustine, De symbolo, Bened. ed. vi. 547, " Incipitis eum
habere patrem quando nati fueritis per Ecclesiam matrem."

76 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
world that He might raise it to the height of His
purpose for it,^ the idea of God as a being than which
a greater cannot be conceived becomes at once that
necessary thought which the argument requires.
Moreover, this truth develops inevitably into the
further truth that the descent of God into the world
carries with it the descent of man, and that since
God descended that He might also ascend,^ so man
is destined to ascend to where he was before.* In
other words the mystic's creed is an optimistic
creed, a creed of faith in a present and inescapable
God, of hope of a sure possession some day (for
have we not already its ground in ourselves ?) and
of love which sees the hidden good in all.
Let us then conclude, that when the Creed bids
us say that we believe in God the Father we mean,
and are meant to mean by the phrase, that God is
at the root of our being, that in a mystic sense we
are consubstantial with Him, that it is His life
which flows in our veins and functions in our souls,
that we have come down from heaven and not
crawled up out of the slime, and that our souls which
came forth from God are on their way back to God
their home.*
^ *0 A670S (7apf iyivero, IVa Tbv dv$pu3irov deKTiKbv debr-qTos TroiTiffTJ, St.
Athanasius, C, Ar, ii. 59. Cf. Iren. iii. 19, els toOto yhp 0 ASyos B.v6puiros
[iyiveTO^ lva 6 dvOpwiros rbv Abyov x^P'^^as, Kal r^v vloBeulav Xa^wv mbs
yivvriTai. Geou ; and V. Preface, "Jesus Christus factus est quod sumus nos
uti nos perficeret esse quod ut ipse." " Ephes. iv. 10.
^ A striking illustration of this conception is supplied by the well-known
" Hymn ofthe Soul," edited by Dr. Bevan in Texts and Studies, vol. v. No. 3.
* Harnack, in an interesting passage gives three senses in which God
was called Father in the Early Church. But he omits the one given above
which alone unifies his three and is their presupposition : " God is named
the Father, (1) in relation to the Son (very frequent) ; (2) as Father of the
world (the Father and Creator of the whole world (1 Clem. xix. 2) — ^the
Demiurge and Father of the aeons (ibid. xxxv. 3) ; (3) as the merciful One
who has proved His goodness, declared His will, and called Christians to
be His sons, ' the all-merciful and beneficent Father ' (1 Clem, xxiii. 1) ;

THE FIRST ARTICLE 77
Almighty
HavTOKpaTopa
This word is characteristic in the N.T, of the
Apocalypse where it occurs eight times,^ for in the
only other N.T. passage where it occurs it is part
of a quotation from the O.T.^ It is of frequent
occurrence in the LXX, where it represents -^la h^
48 times (31 of which are in Job), also frequently
in the Apocrypha, and in the apostolic fathers,
with whom it is ordinarily joined to God.* Hence
' let us approach Him then . . . loving our kind and affectionate Father '
(Und. xxix. 1) ; 'for He bestowed on us the light when the Father addressed
us as sons and saved us from perishing (2 Clem. i. 4) ; ' so, brethren, doing
the will of the Father and keeping the flesh pure and guarding the com
mandments of the Lord, we shall receive aeonian life ' (ibid. viii. 4 ; cf .
X. 1) ; ' so, brethren, doing the will of God our Father we shall be of the
primal, spiritual Church that was created before the sun and moon ; . . .
let our portion be ofthe Church of life that we may be saved ' (ibid, xiv. 1).
The identity of the Almighty God of creation with the merciful God of
redemption is the tacit presupposition of all declarations about God in
the case of both the cultured and the uncultured " (History of Dogma,
Eng. trans., i. 180).
1 i. 8, iv. 8, xi. 17, xv. 3, xvi. 7, 14, xix. 15, xxi. 22.
2 2 Cor. vi. 18.
' E,g, 1 Clem. i. 2 : " Full of holy counsel, in good zeal, with pious trust
ye stretch out your hands to the all-governing God " (wpbs rbv iravro-
Kparopa .Qebv), It is applied to Hermes ; cf. Anth, P. App. 282. Mon-
tanus audaciously said : ^71!; Kipios b Qebs 0 iravTOKpdTap KaTayivbpevos iv
avSpiiTTip, So Clement Al. (Stromata, iv. 7. 58), Iv p.iv rb dyivvip-ov b
TavTOKpaTop. And Mart. Polycarp, xiv., Kipii 6 0e6s, 6 iravToKparup,
xiv. 1 ; and xix., do^dj^ei rbv Qebv Kal Tlaripa wavTOKpdropa. Polycarp,
Ep. ad Philippenses salutes them : elpijv-q irapd Qeov TravTOKpdropos,
Hermes, Vis, iii. 5, TedefieXlbiTai 5i 6 irOpyos rt^ prip.aTc tov wavTOKpdTopos Kal
iv8b^ov dvbfiaTos. Irenaeus has the full phrase els 'iva Qebv VLaTipa iravTo-
Kpdropa in i. 10. 1, as part of an elaborate creed. The Qebs iravTOKpdToip
occurs again in i. 22. 1 ; iii. 11. 1 ; iv. 33. 7.
On the other hand, KOfffioKpdrwp (which occurs in the N.T. in Ephes. vi.
12 in the phrase " rulers of this darkness ") is used of the HpxovTes tov
Kba-fiov, But these rulers are the planetary gods whose rule in general is
that of elp.app.ivT], or Fate ; they are called sometimes the o-Toixeia.
The claim of the Christian gnostic was that above the world of the seven

78 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
it is better in our Creed to read " God " as the
object of belief, and to treat " Father," " Almighty,"
and " Maker," as three epexegetical terms defining
the conception of God.
The word iravTOKpdTwp, however, does not mean
Almighty, but a\\.-governor, and is to be regarded as
a strengthened form of a word which occurs
frequently in Gnostic writings, Koa-p,oKpdTo)p, or
world - governor. But as K6a-iJ,o<; is ambiguous,
denoting sometimes Nature simply, sometimes this
same Nature as disobedient, and sometimes Nature
as an ordered whole opposed to chaos, so in order
to avoid any misunderstanding iravTOKpaTopa is
substituted for Koap,oKpdTopa in order to make
the all embracing sweep of God's government more
explicit. It is difficult, however, to say what Almighty ^
can mean as applied to God. It sounds as if it
meant that the will of God were not bounded by any
Reason, that it had, as the writer of the Epistle to
the Ephesians would say, no counsel.^ But if there
were no sure reason, or BovXri, all things would be
planets (the Hebdomad) was the world of Freedom (the Ogdoad, or
heavenly Jerusalem), and that Jesus was the Gate or Door which opened
out of the world of Necessity into the world of Freedom. Hence the
" Father of Jesus Christ " is TravTOKpdrwp, in the sense that He is Lord of
all the Ko<rp.oKpdTopes, or rulers of the lower world. Cf. Excerpt, ex
Theodoto, 80, " Who is born of (earthly) mother is brought into death and
into the world ; who is born again through Christ is transferred into life
and into the Ogdoad."
1 As equivalent to omnipotent. In a " Missa in Symboli traditione,"
printed by Neale and Forbes, Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church, 1855,
p. 173, the priest, after reciting the Creed instructs the catechumens :
" Symbolum istud, dilectissimi, non atramento depingitur, sed humanis
cordibus insertum memoria retinetur." Then immediately after he
interprets " omnipotentem " thus : " Omnipotentem vero ideo dixit, quia
omnia potest : cuique nihil impossibile est : quia coelum, terram, mare,
homines adque omnia animalia, non aliquo operis actu aut artiflcio, sed
,solo creavit imperio."
2 KttTil T7]v ^ov\i]v TOU 8e\r)paTOs avrov is his phrase, ch. i. 11.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 79
possible to Him, as they came into His mind, as we
should say. It would have been possible to make
a better world than this ; it would have been possible
to make self-determining beings who could not
choose evil, to blot yesterday out of Time, to make
things to be and not to be in the same sense, to call
good evil, to make the possible a mere matter of
arbitrary choice, in short to make impossibility
possible. All things would be possible because all
is irrational. The matter becomes clearer perhaps, if we
distinguish between what is possible simplieiter,
and what is possible ex suppositione. What is
possible under the former head it is impossible for
us to say. But given some perception of what is
good and rational in our minds we can say what is
incompatible with goodness or reason. That men
should turn sometimes into asses, or that the Law
of Causality should sometimes rule and sometimes
be inoperative, would be neither good nor rational.^
" All admit that God is omnipotent, but to define
the nature of the omnipotence seems difficult. . . .
But a little consideration will show that when we
say that God can do all things, we mean rightly
that He can do whatever is possible. If we say
that we mean by " possible " what is possible to
God's power this is a mere circulatory proposition
affirming that God can do what He can do. We
must say absolutely, therefore, that God can do
all that is possible. But what is possible or im
possible depends on the meaning of the terms we
use," There is a logical possibility or impossibility,
as when we say that Socrates sits down, or that a
man is an ass, and a real possibility or impossibility,
1 Cf. St. Thomas Aq. Summa, 3a, qu. 46, art. 2.

80 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
as when we say that fire burns, or we see a noise.
And St. Thomas concludes : " ea vero quae con-
tradictionem implicant sub divina omnipotentia
non continentur quia non possunt habere possi-
bilium rationem." ^ This conclusion, though it
limits God's omnipotence to whatever does not
involve a contradiction, gives no help in discovering
the metaphysical ground of this impossibility. If
the Absolute suffers no rational contradiction can
He suffer no moral contradiction ? If not, what
other reason can be given but that the Will of God
is self-determined by His Substance, There seems
point in Mr, Bradley's demurrer : " I shall be told
that the Governor of the Universe is omnipotent.
Perhaps ; but as I never could find out what that
means, I can hardly be expected to admit it as true." ^
That God is the governor of the universe is a
conclusion of philosophy ; that He governs me,
and orders all that concerns me is a mystical truth.
Such a truth comes to the soul, not by the round
about road of demonstration or along the thousand
by-ways of experience, but in the same way that
the Law of Identity and the Law of Causation are
recognised as necessary laws of Thought. That
is to say, "It is the actual experiences themselves
which stimulate the mind gradually to unfold its
nature, and in its encounter with things to learn
those modes of action which it finds necessary." *
So the mystic's knowledge that the full sovereignty
of God, extensively and intensively, is a necessary
truth of his spiritual life, comes through the lamp of
experience throwing its bright beams on the dormant
seeds of truth concealed in the soul. But the know-
1 Summa, 1 qu. 25. 3. 2 Mind, O, S. viii. 259.
' Lotze, ubi supra, i. 671.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 81
ledge once acquired is acquired once for all, though
indeed much may have to be done and suffered
before its full content is revealed through un
swerving obedience.
There are two main fields in which our mystic
sees that the sovereignty of God is exercised, in his
environment (including his heredity), and in the
inner field of his spiritual life. Both call for a word
of explanation. Every man finds himself at birth in a world which
he is soon taught by priest and scientist to regard
as an ordered whole. Yet he cannot but be dis
concerted frequently, when he comes to years of
discretion, by the observation that disorder still
seems to spoil the symmetry of the whole. Nature
lives by the ceaseless struggle of one species against
another, and of each individual against other
individuals. A storm destroys in an hour the growth
of six silent months ; an earthquake lays a whole
district in ruins ; a pestilence sweeps off bird and
beast ; tropical heat is fatal to many forms of life,
and arctic to others ; and in temperate zones
weather will be as sporadically destructive as
climate is constantly destructive elsewhere. In
human life, too, since man is under the law of
mechanical necessity, all these maleficent forces
smite blindly, and others are added. Moral evil,
which at best slumbers or dreams in the brute, is
awake and active in man. So that if the world be
a cosmos it is at all events streaked with chaos, and
Persian dualism becomes intelligible, even if it
prove ultimately inadequate.
Moreover, human society, which may be regarded
as God's way of marshalling men, is no less imperfect
than the Nature in the midst of which it is a garden G

82 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
enclosed. The present age is eloquent of its sense
of inequalities, injustices, crudities, and cruelties
exercised by man on man, and is all the more
indignant because it sees at once that it has estab
lished itself all these evils, and is apparently power
less to get rid of its Frankenstein's monster. Mean
while, even apart from social wrongs on the large
scale, the individual often finds himself the impotent
victim of some turn of Fortune's wheel ; or he is
born into a family or a social environment, or a
caste against which every fibre in his being revolts ;
or he is conscious as he grows older that by some
mysterious force he is driven further and further
away from his earlier ideals, and yet imprisoned
by custom and habit in modes of life which he
detests. Nor is this all. A still more insidious and wholly
unavoidable evil accompanies him in his going out
and in his coming in, bearing the name of Heredity.
It is true that he is promised some relief under this
head by the apostles of Eugenics, but he reflects
that the relief will come in his heirs, and therefore
too late for him, and, what is worse, that in any case
hereditary taints are, and have been for untold
ages, a property of the very world of which God,
he is assured, is the All-Governor, Why should
an immortal soul, conscious of its celestial origin, be
doomed to contend with a weak constitution cursed
with a tendency to disease, with an unstable nervous
system, or an inadequate machinery for the purposes
of mental activity, and all through the ignorance
or self-indulgence of ancestors whom he did not
choose for himself ? Ought — he dares to apply the
term to God — ought God to visit the sins of the
fathers upon the children ? And if He does, as

THE FIRST ARTICLE 83
apparently He does, can we say that He is an ideal
All- Governor ?
Now it might be replied that such impatient
questionings are quite proper to youth, but are
gradually silenced with the years that bring the
philosophic mind ; that experience teaches us to
admit that we do not know the plan of the whole ;
to recognise that we are incompetent to say either
how the world came, or why it is what it is ; and
that we are compelled a thousand times a day to
acquiesce in what we are powerless to explain.
These considerations are admirable aids towards
resignation, but they cannot pretend to produce
that rarer temper which is proper to mysticism.
They can help us to suspend our judgment and to
hold our tongue, and to endure with fortitude the
ills we cannot cure, but they cannot bring us into
living union with the All-Governor, in which alone
is peace and understanding.
Secondly, man is not merely a subject of the
outer world of Necessity, but is also a citizen of the
inner world of Freedom. There is his true home,
and this kingdom of Heaven within does not lie open
so that every fool may rush in. It suffers violence,
and must be laboured and fought for. It is no
arbitrary command but the eternal Law which
says : " Ask, seek, knock," if you would enter into
life. God Who made us without our will will not
remake us against our will. But surely it may be
replied, at all events, so soon as our will is for life.
He will at once grant the boon we seek and Himself
remove all obstacles. The ignorance which blinds
the soul's eye, and the weakness which paralyses
its arm will, of course, be done away by the light of
His truth, and the power of His love. That this

84 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
is not so, is the sad confession of all souls and of all
mystics. What God does is to give some token of
His presence for good to His struggling child, no
great thing it may be, but some message he under
stands, some encouragement in his troubled moments
enough to make him know and see that God is on
his side, and that if He does not do more it is not
because He will not, but because, the world being
constituted by Him as it is. He cannot. On that
vision the Pilgrim then lives and presses forward
and fights, even though it be not repeated or supple-
mented through weary years. The heavens, he
remembers in his darkest days, did once open for
him, and he saw their glory, and heard the voice
which spoke to him things he cannot repeat to
others, for the reason that what was said was not
in words of human language, but, like a truth dimly
seen in a dream, or the fabled secret revealed at
Eleusis, it was addressed to that part of him — or
rather to that whole of him — of which thought is
but one function and language one expression.
Nor is it to be thought, in saying this, that this
mystic vision is in any essential respect different
from the intuition by which we judge of values, or
that the sense of God's presence is peculiar to a
chosen few. For the opposite is what is true in
each case. It is no doubt true that it is by a process
of reasoning that we arrive at our moral criterion,
and through critical analysis that we assert it to be
goodness, or pleasure, or both. But it is not reason
ing which informs us what is good, or what pleasure
or happiness is like. The pain of a toothache, the
pleasure of a good dinner, the bliss which comes
from awe, or the " shame of self at thought of seeing
Him," are all immediate data of experience, not in

VI THE FIRST ARTICLE 85
themselves mediated by anything else. Similarly, it
is an intuitive judgment which asserts that love
is better than egoism, loyalty than falsehood,
courage than cowardice, kindness than cruelty.
Nor even if anybody chooses to say that the
intuitive judgment of this sort is the ripe product
of many single experiences and only seems intuitive
because habit has made it instantaneous, does this
affect the question. For, however reached, the
judgment is now intuitive, and unquestionable for
the subject which makes it.
That when the Good is thus intuitively seen it is
right for us, or a duty laid on us to choose it, and
set the Will upon it is a general proposition in ethics
which is necessarily true for the very existence of an
ethical system at all. For this means that the duty
of choosing the Good when recognised is a duty
which has universal objective validity. And this
is only another way of saying that the Being of
God seems to be that alone which is the sufficient
ground of the " categorical imperative " of Duty,
by which we are bidden to do what is right for its
own sake though the heavens fall, to uphold right
as right in scorn of consequences.
This conclusion of ethics is of special importance
at the present time. For those who read the signs
of the times tell us almost unanimously that almost
every nation of the civilised world shows ugly signs
of degeneration. And this not only in the industrial
sphere. What most of all causes disquiet is the
absence of any general sense of Duty, any sub
conscious presupposition of all action that what
matters infinitely more than anything else in a man's
inner life is the habit which issues in his doing what
he ought.

86 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
We see the lack of this stern insistence on
obedience to conscience in the lowered standard of
political morality, in the indifference with which this
lowness of standard is treated, in the tameness with
which non-party iniquities are put up with, in the
easy contentment of " those who have " with the
status quo, and in the impartial failure of all existing
Churches to discriminate in their practice and in
their strivings between that which is and that which
is not essential. There is needed an Elijah to
remind us that no Church and no State can halt
between two opinions without courting disaster ;
that God is the All-Governor, and that what He
reveals as possessing objective ethical validity
reduces to comparative insignificance all intellectual
statements about religion, all historical settings of
religion, and all institutions no matter how venerable
or efficient they may be.
The reasons for this decay of moral sensitiveness
are probably complex, but they certainly include
three which may be easily recognised. In the first
place, comfort, luxury, and material well-being in
general have never been a favourable soil for the
growth either of Spartan simplicity or Stoic stern
ness. It is as true as ever that the rich man can
hardly find the door of the kingdom of heaven, or
even want to find it. But this is not the worst of
the evil. That he gets into the way of imagining to
himself that the moral law is toned down for him,
and that it presses less inexorably on him with his
£100 a week than on his gardener at £l a week, is
a form of self-deception which will suffer as rude an
awakening as no doubt the Grand Monarch experi
enced in spite of his boast that God would think
twice before damning a man of his consequence.

VI THE FIRST ARTICLE 87
In the second place, writers, like Emerson, who
blur the distinction between God and man in their
desire to emphasise the immanence of God in His
world ; systems of thought such as America has
shown herself able to produce in such teeming
abundance — Theosophy, New Thought, Higher
Thought, Christian Science, and others — are all,
with no doubt the best intentions, co-operating
to throw our thought and practice into confusion,
by making God a function of man's thought instead
of the All-Governor to whom each of us must give
account of his doings.
In the third place we may fairly ascribe some
portion of our present ethical anarchy to the
hedonistic philosophy which for two centuries has
ruled English moral philosophy. For if, on the
one side, as Green pointed out, hedonism has taught
politics to count each man as one and one only,
on the other it has depreciated our judgment of
value, and inculcated a view of life which makes
the ordinary man disregard all other sides of the
moral ideal except that which is concerned with the
calculation of consequences in terms of pleasure.
And this, in the long run, seems likely to be fatal to
all robustness of ethical belief.
It is obvious that if sufficient time be allowed,
the habit of mind which sees Evil to be but Good
in the making, and hence views with bland in
difference Good and Evil alike, will inevitably be
fatal to any crisp sense of personal responsibility
or strenuousness of moral endeavour. If all comes
from God then our wisdom will consist not in hating
the evil that is in Evil, but in detecting the good
which it contains, for that is the signature of its
Divinity. And this can only end in moral anarchy

88 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
and in heroic pessimism — ^two evils which seem to
be threatening the very foundations of the Christian
civilisation of to-day.
The way out is the old way of a practical return
to the old ways. God still sitteth above the water-
floods. He is the All-Governor, and any nation,
or Church, or individual which ignores Him, or
thinks to usurp His authority must end by being
broken against the Rock of Ages.

Maker of Heaven and Earth
TTOiTjTrjV ovpavov Kal 7»5?
McGiffert is probably right in saying that this
clause " adds nothing to the sense of the original
article, and really makes its meaning no more
explicit," ^ yet language is not merely an instrument
of thought, but in its higher forms it is also a trans
mitter of feeling. Hence it may be said that the
addition of this clause, by making explicit what
before was implicit only, has the effect of enhancing
our feeling of the majesty of the Father, which may
be all the more necessary because of the intimacy
which the title of Father suggests to the believer.
But a further truth is stated in these words —
one, indeed, which we have already touched on.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem adds, opaTwv re TrdvToyv Kal
dopdTwv, in which he is followed by the Constantin-
opolitan Creed with its clause, " and of all things
visible and invisible." We must take this as not
affirmative of an extra fact, but explanatory of
" heaven and earth " — heaven is the name for
things invisible and earth for things visible. The
* Tlie Apostles' Creed, p. 110 ; cf. Zahn, The Apostles' Creed, p. 111.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 89
antithesis is the familiar antithesis of Life and Form,
Spirit, and Matter, and the assertion that both are
the p.L'oduct of the one God bars out, and is intended
to bar out, any belief in two Principles such as was
taught by Zoroastrianism, and afterwards by its
disciple, Mani, as well as, to all intents and purposes,
by the popular form of belief in the devil which has
lain for centuries heavy on the heart of Christendom.
The word made is the word used by the LXX
for the Hebrew word rendered created in Gen. i.
But what precisely do we mean by creation or
creator ? For to say that it means making the
world out of nothing is to use a phrase without any
one necessary meaning. It may mean that the
process by which the world became is beyond our
understanding altogether, which is a truism. Or
it may mean to deny that God called the world into
existence out of matter which was lying from
eternity ready to His hand, but external to His own
substance. Or again it may mean that God did not
produce the world out of His own substance as the
spider does her web. Or once more it may be meant
by the word creation to deny that the world is (like
God Himself) from everlasting. Or we may intend
only to affirm a belief that God belongs to the
eternal order, the world to the temporal, and that
the two are related as cause and effect, or at any
rate as ground and consequence. In this last case
we are illegitimately applying a category under
Time — that of Causality, to a moment out of Time
— that of Creation. But if we take the wider
category — ^that of ground — then we mean rightly
enough that God and the world are as the end and
the means. " The distinction between means and
end lies not in the fact that the former precede the

90 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
latter, but in the fact that the former is valued for
the sake of the latter." ^ This, then, is but one way
of saying that the world is dependent on God, but
without implying so far that God is dependent on
the world in the sense that if it could cease to be He
would cease to be also.
It is this latter position to which pantheism
seems to commit us, and is denied by the term
maker. " For pantheism God is the immanent
ground of the world, for deism He is the transcendent
ground, for theism He is both."^ The difficulties
for thought in this statement are insuperable. If
God be immanent in His world, and that is all there
is to be said, then He and His world stand or fall
together, which is impossible. If He merely trans
cends His world how is it possible to think of it as
apart from Him, or how can we think at all of an
act which found God and His world at one moment
in relation and ever afterwards out of relation ?
If both are true at once, as theism says, do the two
by turns rule, each abdicating while the other acts,
or are both there all the time, and if so how can that
be transcendent which is at the same time immanent ?
And it would seem, therefore, that the problem is
beyond us, but that the theist's position is nearer
to reality than either of the others.
But if Creation be inconceivable as being before
^ Rashdall, Theory of Good and Evil, ii. 229.
2 James Ward, The Realm of Ends, p. 234 ; Dr. Ward himself solves
the difficulty by pointing out (after Kant) the part that our perception and
our understanding play in constructing the world of our knowledge, which,
of course, as known is still but relative. He says that if we would imagine
our sensory and passive perception of objects replaced by an active, intel
lective " position," and our understanding or discursive synthesis by an
original thesis or intuition we should get a power of " intellective intuition "
which when exercised would be Creation, not the independent manifestation
of an Other but the creation of itself. God is the ground of the objects
that He intuits.

THE FIRST ARTICLE 91
all Time then it must be thought of as outside of
all Time, and its ground will lie in the being and
activity of God as in Himself timeless but yet some
how coming into Time and so submitting Himself
to the continuous movement of Duration. Creation
must then be thought as a continuous act of con
servation, which will be fully intelligible only when
we have found a rational explanation of the relation
of Eternity to Time. Heaven and Earth
A. The scope of this work does not permit of
discussion at any length of the various theories by
which men have tried to explain the interaction
of spirit and matter, or body and mind. It is
enough to catalogue the principal varieties.
(1) Descartes, as is well known, was a pure
dualist and regarded mind and matter as two
created substances characterised severally by
thought and extension as their determining attribute.
The two are ,in a relation of reciprocal negation,
and have nothing in common save this negative
relation. It follows from this that soul and body
are essentially distinct, and have but a mechanical
connection. Man, therefore, is a machine which
happens to be connected internally with something
which thinks, but the thought in the soul and the
extension in the body have again nothing in common.
If the two happen to work peaceably together this
is only because Descartes found an ontological
argument for the existence of God. God is the
one Substance which makes possible the harmony
of its two derivatives.
(2) How this harmony was brought about was

92 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
shown by Geulincx, a disciple of Descartes, and by
Malebranche, and was more thoroughly established
by Spinoza. The first preached the famous doctrine
of Occasionalism, which insists that neither mind
nor body has any independent activity of its own
but that a volition is an occasion by which God
moves the body, and a feeling is an occasion by
which He brings about a presentation of the external
world. In other words, God has chosen to make
two clocks which strike together, but it is His
activity throughout which is the occasion of their
synchronism. Malebranche' s method of explana
tion was somewhat different. He denied that the
two substances had more than a shadowy sub
sistence, and explained them as accidents of the
one Substance which is God.
This view was carried out more thoroughly by
Spinoza, who added as the consequence of his basal
theorem, omnis determinatio est negotio, the denial
of the position of Descartes that body and mind
had peculiar attributes of their own. For, he said,
were the one Substance, which is God, possessed
of attributes, such as extension and thought, then
it is determined, that is, negated. And this is
what Hegel called acosmism ; it abolishes the anti
thesis of spirit and matter, and substitutes for them
something which is neither and both at once, viz.
God. The world disappears to Spinoza's thought.
(3) At the opposite pole of thought to Spinoza
is Leibniz, the founder of modern Pluralism. With
him God is not the one undifferentiated Substance,
but Substance becomes a multiplicity of monads,
each excluding all others, qualitatively alike, in
divisible, and each according to its capacity repre
senting or mirroring the universe by its own spon-

THE FIRST ARTICLE 93
taneous energy. Leibniz then as a mathematician
applies the law of continuity to explain the gradually
ascending scale of perceptive power enjoyed by
the monads ; by his law of the identity of indis-
cernibles he establishes their diversity ; and from
the fact that each monad represents the same
universe he deduces the law of pre-established
harmony which is inherent in the monads and is
not weakened by the fact that they represent the
universe with varying degrees of perfection.
Leibniz's theory of the relation of soul and
body regards body as we ordinarily know it as
being an aggregate of monads. When one of them
perceives the others so clearly that they are in
comparison with it monades nues, it is said to be
the ruling monad because it seems to rule, or other
wise the soul or entelechy of the aggregate or body.
" Each soul or entelechy is surrounded by an
infinite number of monads forming its body ; soul
and body together make a living being, and as their
laws are in perfect harmony — a harmony estab
lished between the whole realm of final causes and
that of efficient causes — we have the same result
as if one infiuenced the other." ^ Locke had main
tained that soul and body mutually influence each
other ; Geulincx that they provided " occasions "
for parallel movement, but Leibniz said they moved
together because of inherent pre - established
harmony. A clock which makes another clock
move illustrates the first ; a clock made by the
mechanician to move when another clock moves
illustrates the second, while Leibniz's theory makes
soul and body like two clocks so perfectly con
structed from the first that they never vary.
^ Nouveaux Essais, p. 714.

94 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
(4) The empirical school of Locke and Hume,
continued by Mill and by defenders of Association-
ism in general, gave rise to the modern Realist
school according to which body is the reality and
mind a by-product of it. If we know nothing but
the states of our mind, and these depend on the
senses, since the senses are physical all we know
consists of disconnected states of our sensory organ
ism. Knowledge is atomistic and phenomenal.
In that case no independent subsistence belongs to
mind. It is to body as its shadow is to the engine,
as the sound of striking is to the bell, that is, it is
a by-product, an epiphenomenon. Hence science
will set itself to explain all change and thought
and feeling in terms of matter and motion, in terms,
that is, of mechanism and not of life. Though
realistic thinkers have contributed largely to the
clearing of the issue they have now little influence
in the philosophic world, and though they will
always hold a considerable place in the history of
thought, they are not likely to be remembered as
having done more than make it impossible ever
again to ignore the universal range of mechanism.
That is, no doubt, a great achievement, but its
very one-sidedness produced the inevitable reaction
of Idealism. (5) Idealism is the philosophic doctrine which
" conceives of knowledge or experience as a process
in which the two factors of subject and object
stand in a relation of entire interdependence on
each other as warp and woof." When this doctrine
takes the form of a neglect of everything but the
Subject and its states of consciousness, whether
the things neglected be the objects of the external
world, or other Subjects than the individual subject.

VI THE FIRST ARTICLE 95
we get what is known as subjective or incomplete
Idealism. And when in its protest against Realism,
Idealism goes beyond its brief in attributing both
mind and matter to an unknown potentiality, such
as Mr. Herbert Spencer's Unknowable, then Ideal
ism in seeking to be more thorough has ceased to
be Idealism in the proper sense of the word. Modern
Idealism has come to us from Berkeley, Leibniz
and Kant through Hegel, and from Hegel all forms
of current Idealism take their colouring and more.
" What Hegel attempts to show is just that the
categories by which thought must determine its
object are stages in a process that beginning with
the idea of ' Being,' the simplest of all determina
tions, is driven on by its own dialectic till it reaches
the idea of self- consciousness." ^ Since Hegel's
work the old dualism of matter and mind has
ceased to have any philosophical importance, and
has been succeeded by the duality of subject and
object, along with which goes the recognition of the
unity which embraces in one both subject and
object, and all subjects and objects in one universal
Mind. " What it (Idealism) cannot accept is the
doctrine that there are two things which are two
in themselves apart from that which makes them
two — which are not two of something." ^
(6) Lastly, to complete the catalogue of schools
of thought which the Apostles' Creed has to allow
for to-day, is the " radical empiricism " or pluralism,
of which the late Professor W. James is the best-
known exponent. Its protest is called forth by
the tendency of some forms of Idealism to a one
sided intellectualism — of which Mr. Bradley is
' Caird, Kant, i. 443.
2 J. H. Muirhead, in Ency. Brit. xiv. 285, llth ed.

96 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
perhaps the most brilliant and Professor Bosanquet
the most thorough - going representative. The
Universe, according to the school of pragmatism,
is not a " block universe," but rather a pluralistic ;
and God, for aught we know, may be not so much a
Person as a Society of persons. Moreover, though
the Will by itself is an abstract, as is Cognition by
itself, yet the synthesis of Will and its object is as
important as the Synthesis of Thought and its
object. If the latter constructs for us our universe
so does the former. In fact our Thought works
only in the interest of our Will, and Will is the
active expression of the needs of Life. The affinity
of the philosophy of M. Bergson to that of Voluntar-
ists of the school of William James is obvious.
A thoroughly intelligent interpretation of the
clause of the Creed " maker of heaven and earth "
must be able to assimilate the mathematical demon
stration of mind and matter given by Descartes,
the rationalistic given by Locke and Hume, the
critical philosophy of Kant, the absolute idealism
of Hegel and the pluralism of pragmatists. For
all are expressions of what Hegel calls dialectic,
the movement of Thought from sameness through
difference to unity, the continuous attempt to give
unity of thought to the manifold of experience, to
see the One in the Many and to find God as in some
sense the " maker of heaven and earth."
An Idealism which has already displaced material
istic Monism, and is already on the way to getting
rid of an agnostic Monism, and offers instead a
philosophy which does full justice to the duality
of subject and object in Thought, and as well to
the duality of Will and object in Conation, is the
philosophy which best accords with the postulates

THE FIRST ARTICLE 97
of the Creed of the Christian. It will also dispose
of the fallacy contained in the saying " Tat tvam
asi," (Thou art That), when understood to abolish
the distinction between God and Man by making
the latter a passing phase of the former. As
Professor James Ward says : " The essential char
acteristic of experience we have found to be a
duality in unity. As dualism is incompatible with
the unity of experience so naturalistic Monism is
incompatible with the duality," ^ so we may say
of the spiritual Monism of India that it ignores the
duality of subject and object. To confound Mysti
cism with this unsatisfactory Monism would be to
do Mysticism a great injustice.
For Christian Mysticism has always held that
the two terms God and Man co-exist. God and
the Ego, while at bottom consubstantial, yet stand
over against one another, for God respects, and, as
the mystic believes, will always respect the Ego
in which he has combined " heaven and earth,"
as a miniature representation of Himself in His
self-revelation. Hence the Christian mystic, while
admitting, nay, insisting that Spirit and Matter
are two terms of a relation the nature of which
defies all rational explanation, yet holds that
another faculty knows how to unify them for all
practical purposes— the faculty of Love — for it
overleaps the distinctions established by Reason
for its own ends, and unites both subject and object,
spirit and matter in a deeper synthesis.
B. In saying this, we have already passed to
the second head which tells how the mystic har
monises " heaven and earth " in his own life.
He refuses to interpret the two terms as spatial,
'¦ Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. 207. H

98 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
but finds instead such an interpretation as that of
St. Augustine more to his mind who, when dealing
with the word " heaven " as it occurs in the Lord's
Prayer, says, humorously enough, that if spatial
relations were intended, the birds in the air, or the
dwellers on the hills, or tall men would have the
advantage of nearness to God. We must, therefore,
obey the religious feeling which assigns to God the
noblest dwelling-place, and say that as heaven is
better than earth, so is soul better than a material
heaven, and a holy soul better than a sinful soul.
Hence the invocation, " Our Father which art in
Heaven," is to One whose dwelling-place. Heaven,
is in the soul which lives in and by love.^
This love of the beautiful thing — less exactly
described as the Beauty in the thing ^ — it is which
explains why the mystic as such regards with some
unmerited disdain the attempt of the philosopher
to give a rational account of the world as distinct
from the judgment of value given by religion. He is
not directly interested, for example, in M. Bergson's
conjecture that matter is spirit inverted (as Satan
has been styled " Deus inversus ") and left behind
in the onward rush of life, so as to serve as a drag
on the wheel or a stick to the rocket, or in the
accompanying conjecture that the species is life
petrified, while the individual (so far as it does not
1 Cf. Sermo lvii., Bened. ed. 333 : " Spiritus noster coelum est, caro
terra." Cf. De Dono Perseverantiae, iii. 6, Bened. ed. x. 824, " Vult
autem ilie doctor et martyr coelum et terram intelligi spiritum et camera " ;
De sermone Domini in Monte, vi. 22, Bened. ed. iii. pt. 2, p. 209, " Fiat
voluntas tua sicut in coelo et in terra — sicut in Sanctis et justis ita etiam
in peccatoribus " ; or, " Sicut in ipso Domino nostro Jesu Christo ita et
in Ecclesia " (ibid. § 24).
' " We have almost ceased to speak of beautiful objects, i.e. we forget
that what we call beautiful is originally a mere adjective determination
not existing apart from a subject " (Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 629).

THE FIRST ARTICLE 99
conform to the species) is an instance of Life
seeking for fuller manifestation.^ Such half-poetic,
half - philosophic imaginings have their strong
appeal to the mystic, but as subsidiary supports
only. Like St. Paul, he has had his Damascus
day, and ever afterwards that experience is the
focus which determines the worth of all other
things. For the Voice that has spoken within is
a voice that had summoned into consciousness
the love for all living things which heretofore had
slumbered, and before Love all other faculties bow
their head.
I found God there, his visible power ;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of the power, an equal evidence
That his love, there too, was the nobler dower ;
For the loving worm within its clod
W^ere diviner than a loveless God.
R. Browning, Christmas-eve, 5.
The same sort of intimate affection colours also
the mystic's interpretation of Maker. The notion
of an outside force brought to bear on an external
object, of God standing, as it were, a handbreadth
off to contemplate His creature, is too frosty and
harsh a conception to satisfy the heart of love by
which the mystic lives. He therefore passes by
instinctively any explanation of the type known
as the " carpenter- theory of the Universe " as un
worthy and therefore unacceptable.
Nor is he much more enamoured of the explana
tion which flourishes in theosophic soil and seeks
1 " It is only among brutes that conformity to the type is regarded as
a perfection ; among men it is more in accordance with the ideal that the
special nature of each individual should impart to his conduct (of which
the general outlines are the same for all) its characteristic tone and colour "
(Lotze, Microcosmus, ii. 24).

100 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
to do the impossible and undesirable task of piercing
to the origin of things by postulating — for proof
is out of the question — a gradation of emanations
from the Supreme God. No matter how indefinitely
large the number of these emanations may be, they
can never be more than luminous mists of specula
tion which conceal the absence of a bridge between
God and the World by diverting the spectator's atten
tion from both sides of the chasm alike. Gnostic
speculations of this sort have their value as diagram
matic settings-forth of rationalistic endeavours to
construct a connected cosmogony, but immediately
their artificial character is taken to be real they
cease to be permissible and become pernicious.
The difficulty is removed by that sacramental
view of the world which is common to all Christian
mystics. Their asceticism takes the form of an
intellectual refusal to deal with the beginning or
end of the world, to search into the unsearchable,
or to anticipate a heaven beyond their reach.
They are content with what has been revealed to
them individually, and they think they see clearly
enough that the vision vouchsafed to one is not
unique, or exceptional, or different in type from the
vision vouchsafed to others, and as the vision came
to them in symbolic form, so does the vision that
comes through things of the external world. God
in His world, in each common thing of that world,
is enough for them ; they shrink equally from any
suggestion to set Him as a subject over against the
world, or to make Him the one end of an emana-
tional chain which by some jugglery changes its
nature before it comes into our hand. By love
they welcomed Him when He spake to their heart, and
the same love enables them to see Him in all things

THE FIRST ARTICLE 101
around them and within them. " We are in Nature,
by essence and destiny, nati ; and only in Nature
is good possible for us and appreciable by us." ^
In saying this the mystic is explicitly accepting
as a postulate the existence of a higher world which
imposes on our reason a standard of values, not as
the results of experience, but as the prius of all
experience. The light that comes to the Reason
from this higher realm through what the school
men called synderesis ^ is what Kant apparently
meant by Vernunft (Reason) as distinguished from
Verstand (Understanding). But it is diagrammatic
thought alone which erects a barrier between thought
and will, as if they were independent faculties. In
reality this higher impulse at once fills the Reason
and stirs the emotional and conative side. It is
supernatural in the sense that the source whence
it comes is other than subjective, and is not due to
the automatic working of the sub-conscious self,
but not supernatural in the sense that the natural
faculties are wholly passive as if indifferent or
suffered no modification, conscious or unconscious
from the impact of the higher force. " Above all
natural objects is the divine presence which is
known — by special divine favour — not as an abstract
idea resulting from meditation, but as the immediate
object of love, in the rapture or exaltation of the
soul above itself which is the effect of love whether
natural or supernatural. Thus ' he that is joined
to the Lord is one Spirit.' " *
1 R6c6jac, Bases of the Mystic Knowledge, 1899, p. 65.
^ St. Thomas Aq. deflnes it thus : " Synderesis non quaedam specialis
potentia est ratione altior, vel ut natura, sed habitus quidam naturalis
principiorum operabilium, sicut intellectus habitus est principiorum
speculabilium, et non potentia aliqua " (Summa, 1. qu. 79, 12).
3 A. B. Sharpe, Mysticism, 1910, p. 79.

CHAPTER VII
THE SECOND ARTICLE
And in Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord
Kat ek ^picrTov 'Injaovv [rbv] Tlov avTov tov piovojevrj
TOV Kvpiov rjfjiav
Man shares with all things around him the dignity
of being a divine Idea which is " the formless
permanent ground of changing forms," ^ and as
such he is an Incarnation of the eternal Word.
The ordinary mind looking at him sees only the
" changing forms," the temperament, the mood,
the fleeting opinion, but the divine eye sees " the
permanent ground " trying to express itself through
the changing forms. A constant type of this
doublesidedness of existence is to be seen in the
union of spirit and body. " There is nothing
which approaches so nearly the incarnation of the
Word as the union of spirit and body . . . and
this resemblance would be even more complete if
the spirit were one and the same for all men as has
been claimed by some. If we accept this hypo
thesis we should only have to say that Spirit had
renewed the act of its union with that which pro
ceeds from human conception. It is in this sense
1 Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 556.
102

oiiAP.vn THE SECOND ARTICLE 103
that we say in the Athanasian Creed : ' As the
reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God
and man is one Christ.' . . . But nevertheless
this comparison is incomplete ; the Word could
unite itself to our nature in a oneness much more
wonderful than that in which the spirit is united
to the body . . . because the intellectual nature
already participates in the Word in an eminent
oneness." ^ Hence it is that the mystery of the
" Incarnation " is the mystery of " Creation."
" The ' passage from the Absolute to pheno
mena,' or, inversely, from ' phenomena to the
Absolute,' is almost the sole content of both the
one and the other. The word ' Creation ' answers
to the mystery of Force, and the supreme mystic
fact, the Christ, answers to the mystery of Reason.
The first would explain how from one came the
manifold, and the second how the manifold returns
to one." ^
If, then, it is true that the mystery of Incarnation
is the mystery of Creation, it is also true that the
mystery of Christ is the mystery of every man.
Man, each man, is the " little flower in the crannied
wall " defying explanation. Nor must we be de
terred from equating these mysteries by the objec
tion that the difference between Jesus Christ and
each of us is a difference not of degree but of kind.
Is it of Him as God or as man that we draw this
1 St. Thomas Aq. Summa contra Gentiles, iv. 41.
2 R^c^jac, Bases of tlie Mystic Knowledge, p. 110. Recejac also adopts
the symbol of the Bride and Bridegroom in John iii. 29, expounding the
Bride as Divine Reason and Christ, the Bridegroom as " the fulness of
intellectual life and the mystical life." He then quotes St. Augustine
(Conf. xi. 8) : " When we are admonished by the mutable creature we are
led to the immutable truth, where we learn indeed, when we stand and
listen to him and rejoice greatly because of the voice of the Bridegroom
restoring us to whence we are."

104 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
distinction ? If as God, then seeing that we are
speaking not of God as Absolute but as manifesting
in man, how can there be a difference of kind between
God manifest in Jesus Christ and God manifest in,
say, Socrates ? If as man, then is not man the
name we give to ourselves as finite forms of the
Infinite ? Would it not be better and more true
to say what the late Professor Moberly said ? " As
God He does this ; and as man He does that, and
another thing partly as God and partly as man.
This distinction has been very prevalent indeed
in the language of Christians. Assuredly, no kind
of irreverence was intended, nor any reality of
dualism. Yet the language, on cross-examination,
will be found to be largely dualistic. The phrase
' God and man ' is of course perfectly true. But it
is easy to lay undue emphasis on the ' and.' And
when this is done — as it is done every day — the
truth is better expressed by varying the phrase.
' He is not two but one Christ.' He is, then, not
so much God and man, as God in, and through,
and as man." ^ We then draw the necessary con
clusion that the difference, where all is divine, is of
degree not of kind, that to each of us is given the
Spirit proportionate to the capacity of our vessel,
but that to Him the Spirit was given not by
measure.^ If we are asked : " What sayest thou of God ? "
we reply that he that would see the Father must
see Him through the Son,^ and if we are then
asked : " What think ye of Christ ? " we can but
first enquire what the enquirer thinks of man. If
he thinks of man as merely a member of the pheno-
1 Atonement and Personality, 1901, p. 96. ^ John iii. 34.
' John xiv. 9.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 105
menal order Christ and God will be empty names.
If, on the other hand, he thinks of man as potentially
Divine he will have struck into a path which will
in time lead him to know what Christ is and what
God is. " The fact is that most of us are not able
to attribute any such meaning to the word ' Divine '
as will enable us to use that word of Christ unless
we have first seen God in Christ Himself. To ask
whether Christ is Divine is to suggest that Christ
is an enigma while Deity is a simple and familiar
conception. But the truth is the exact opposite
to this. We know, if we will open our eyes and
look, the life and character of Christ ; but of God
we have no clear vision, ' No man hath seen God
at any time.' " ^
It will be seen, then, that the interest of the
mystic in Christ (not in Christology) is deep and
close, for his interest in man is more than that of
most, and man's dignity and destiny in turn are
bound up with Christ. For man is, as he believes,
a unitary being with three modes, the psychical,
the spiritual and the Christ, or if the psychical be
split up into the hylic and the psychical proper,
then four. Nor must we think of this triplicity as
consequential, in the sense that each lower stage
must be worked through before the next higher is
reached ; on the contrary, all are there always,
but now one is in the ascendant, now another, but
when that which is perfect is come all will be there
in harmony. Between the psychical and the
spiritual, however, there is less distance than
between the spiritual and the Christ. Between
these two latter is a Death, the death which is the
dark side of a birth. The Christ that is to be is
1 W. Temple in Foundations, 1913, p. 214.

106 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
a glory which casts a bright shadow backwards, and
so illuminates the preparatory stages and enables
us to bear present ills because of the prize they fit
us to receive.
In saying this we have adopted phraseology
which is not quite precise, though in common use.
The Gnostic division of each man and of men in
general was into choic or hylic, psychical and
spiritual with which St. Paul's trichotomy of body,
soul, and spirit is in agreement. If we eliminate
the soul, as in all probability we ought to do,^ on
the ground that it is but a convenient name for a
supposititious Self of ordinary experience, standing
midway between spirit and body and possessing,
as it seems, qualities derived from both, then we
have the two constituent factors of man's being.
For it seems nearest to the facts to say that the
Christ who is represented above as the higher third
to soul and spirit should be regarded rather as the
archetype of which each individual man is the
ectype. He is the universal of which man is the
particular, and the finding by man of himself as an
individual in the proper sense of the word takes
place when the particular rises to the universal
which overshadows him, and the two are synthe-
sised in the man born from above of the Spirit. He
can then say with literal truth that he no longer
lives but Christ lives in him, for by the mystic's
paradox he has laid down his ¦fvxv but only to find
it again, not now as merged or subsumed in his
own individuated spirit, but as lost altogether in
the process which has united that spirit with the
Universal Spirit that we call the Christ. " For the
Lord is that Spirit."
1 See Chapter XXIII. below.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 107
The conjunction of the two terms Christ and
Jesus should not be passed by without a word of
notice.! Indeed, their union leads us to the true
solution of a problem which has divided good men
and still divides them.
The much-discussed passage, Phil. ii. 5-11, gives
us the key. Stripped of all theological after
thoughts, what it says is this : Christians should
exercise humility and mutual service after the
example of Christ Jesus. The supreme instance
of these virtues in Him is to be found not in His
life on earth, but in the Great Act prior to His
existence on earth, in which He quitted His state
of heavenly glory (ei^ i^op(f)§ ®eov) to take on Him
a condition of earthly lowliness {p,op<^riv Bov\ov),
because His desire for service caused Him to
conclude that self-abnegation {eavTov eKevwa-e) was
better than being like to God's being {la-a ©eoS).
Though the whole drift and colour of the passage
is ethical rather than theological, yet it could not
have been written by anybody who did not think of
Christ as not only pre-existent but as pre-existent
Man, even though His Manhood stood above the
summit of our experience, and where, therefore,
we have no foothold. For the context shows that
St, Paul was not thinking of God as God but of the
" historic figure Jesus Christ," nor of any angel, for
he placed Christ as man above the angels,^
1 In St. Paul's Epp. Christ Jesus appears over sixty times and Jesus
Christ about the same number of times, so that it is hazardous to go beyond
McGiffert's statement (Apostles' Creed, p. 114) that in either case what we
have is " simply a proper name to designate the historic figure, Jesus
Christ." " Cf. 1 Cor. vi. 3, Col. ii. 18, Heb. i. 4, 6, Matt. xiii. 41, xviii. 10.
Moreover the N.T. teaching of angels emphasises not their higher
rank but their different condition and their function as ministers of
God to man.

108 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
It is no wonder if this passage has been the
lively centre of controversies about Christology,
and if those controversies have shown that theology
can easily take sides without dishonesty or weak
ness. But it is remarkable that theologians should
have been so anxious to deduce theorems about
the Divinity of Christ Jesus from this passage
as to have overlooked the plain fact that it is
concerned not at all with His Divinity, but solely
with His humanity under two contrasted con
ditions. The reason why their attention was thus
diverted may lie in the fact that the human
pre-existence of Christ Jesus had been already
ruled out of order by a postulate of the sub
conscious mind, because it might seem to bring
back the neglected theory of the pre-existence of
souls. But it is just this theory which alone makes
sense of the passage before us, and not only of this
passage, but of the teaching of the N.T. in general,
and of human life as known empirically. ^
We have too long thought of man in terms of a
life of threescore years and ten, and so been com
pelled to accept logical and moral anomia, which
have left Religion half - dead on the road from
Jerusalem to Jericho. Is a belief held by millions
of devout souls through a hundred generations
worthy of nothing more than a polite or con
temptuous dismissal at the hands of other devout
souls trained differently, or at the hands of
philosophers ? ^
1 This subject will be discussed in Chapter XXIV., but it may be
convenient to anticipate that discussion. See note at the end of this
present chapter.
2 Cf. Lotze, e.g. Microcosmus, i. 390, 471.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 109
The passage before us suggests that a human
Being who afterwards came to be historically known
as Christ Jesus, One who had passed beyond the
human limit, and attained to a transcendent height
in the inner world of Reality, known technically as
the Christ-stage, or as being iv p,op^ri ©eoO, obeyed
the eternal law of Love and left His high estate—
not thinking it a mere personal possession for His
own use — in order that He might take human form,
become incarnated, and so save man in the only
way that salvation can be his, viz., from within and
not merely from without. For the same Law which
urged Him to this act of incarnation must be, as
all religious thinking will insist, the same Law which
gives form to all spirits, and is not to be thought of,
therefore, as acting then for the first time, nor for
the last time. Not for the first time, for the Christ
is defined in the N.T. as the " one who is (ever)
coming " (o epx6p.evo<;) into the world.^ Not for
the last time, because the statement of Matt, xxviii.
18 (whatever its authorship) is true in substance
and in fact, and is the necessary presupposition
of texts like Rom. viii. 10, " if Christ be in you " ;
1 Cor. i. 24, " Christ the power of God " ; Gal. ii. 20,
" Christ liveth in me " ; Gal. iv. 19, " till Christ be
found in you " ; Eph. iii. 17, " that Christ may
dwell in your hearts by faith." What they say is
that the Being who emptied Himself for us men and
for our salvation has thereby acquired as Man the
power of again and again incarnating Himself in
His saints. The power that was His in Palestine,
limited in space and time, has become a power over
all things in heaven and in earth, that pertain to
man's salvation, so that where the soul is worthy
1 Matt. xxi. 9, John i. 27, iii. 31, iv. 25, etc.

110 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the Lord Christ who is the eternal Spirit ^ enters
in and dwells there.^
But is there then no special attribute of the
" Christ Jesus " who descended which may at once
emphasise His Divinity (so far as we may apprehend
it), and help us to understand how when He de
scended He could be given a name, that is an
authority, to which every knee should bow ?
We think there is, and that it is the purpose of
the least understood book in the N.T. — ^the fourth
Gospel — ^to say what it is. Because its purpose
has not been perceived, the denial that the prologue
is an integral part of the Gospel has been possible.
Yet the prologue is the key to the whole. It defines
the dignity of the central figure by assuring us that
the Christ who fills its pages was one with the Logos,
that He was the dp^h (this seems the meaning of
that difficult saying in John viii. 25) in whom the
Logos dwelt, and that, therefore. His life-story
(as that of a concrete historical personage) was
unique, in that it was the life- story of one who
before descending had achieved the mystic marriage
and been united to the eternal Logos. This course
of thought, based as it is on the authoritative
documents, enables us to assert at once the unique
ness of the Manhood, the truth of the Godhead,
and the union of both in a way which, while it
causes wonder and worship, and surpasses our
understanding, yet does no violence to our Reason,
or to any truth that we know.
But so far this has not told us what there was in
the Christ which He possessed when He ascended
and did not possess when He descended. In what
consisted the merit of that self - emptying which
1 2 Cor. iii. 17. ^ John xiv. 23.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 111
won for Him a Name above every name, and a
position of exaltation above all others ? It could
not have consisted in the abjuration only, for
countless others of the human family have forsworn
for love's sake all that they had — and what more
could they do ? — nor yet in the greatness of what
was given up, for in the spiritual life quantity is a
cipher. It must be found, therefore, in the very
nature of the renunciation, in the end for which
the renunciation was made. This is supplied by
the Name itself at which every knee should bow,
the name, Jesus.
At the Annunciation Mary was told that she
was to call her child Jesus,! and to Joseph in a
dream it was ordered that he should call His name
Jesus, for He should save His people from their
sins.^ In accordance with this finger-post, the
four Gospels uniformly in their narrative speak
of Jesus as their subject.*
The Gospels then seem to say as plainly as can
be said (and here the fourth agrees with the others)
that what they are narrating is the story of One
who bore the Name of Jesus defined as one who
should save His people from their sins ; * and it is
1 Luke i. 31. ^ Matt. i. 21.
' The word " Christ " as applied to Jesus occurs in the Synoptists
31 tiraes, in St. John 17, in Acts 29, in Rev. 4, and in the Epp. 293 times.
The ratio between the Gospels and Epistles is not the only striking thing in
these figures ; in the Gospels where " Christ " is not a title it always occurs
in the mouths of others than the Evangelists themselves. John i. 17 is
probably a gloss and xvii. 3c certainly so. It may be thought that the use
of the title Son of Man in the Synoptic Gospels should throw some light on
the name Jesus and the title Christ, The meaning of this title. Son of Man,
is discussed in an additional note at the end of this volume.
* A Ptolemy, an Augustus might save his subjects from their enemies ;
Jesus saves from sins, by conferring a life which lifts its recipient above
the sphere where sin has its field of action. Cf. my article on Forgiveness
in Hastings's Did. of Rel. and Ethics, vol. vi.

112 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
His people He saves, i.e. those elect souls (=the
Israel of the O.T., or the " remnant ") who out of
the mass of men were born again. (Note that all
are potential subjects of this re-birth ; ^ observation,
however, assures us that only a remnant in each
generation are actually partakers of it, which
failure may be taken as a further example of the
necessity of the hypothesis of re-incarnation.) The
importance of this statement lies in the fact that
the Child already was " Christ " in His celestial
state, and, therefore, since there are two poles
between which all worthy human-life ordinarily
swings, self - culture and self - devotion. He had
exhausted the capacities of the former. He was
able, therefore, to devote His whole earthly life
to the service of those whose Elder-brother He had
become, and that too in a department which held
by implication all the rest, viz. in the spiritual
department. He came that His flock might have
life, spiritual life, for so only could they be saved
from their sins, and accordingly He refused the
role of social reformer,^ or civil judge,* or theological
divine,* and restricted Himself to the work of
saving men from physical and psychical ills by the
impartation of Life, that higher life which alone
prevents the lower from disorder, or restores it
when it has been disordered.
This restriction must be taken as regulative of
the " all authority " of Matt, xxviii. 18, that is to
say. His authority continues within the limits
self-imposed from the beginning, and is not directly
concerned with what we call the forces of Nature,
or the mechanical world which hems us in. His
1 1 Tim. ii. 4. " Matt. xxii. 21. ^ Lujjg ^ii. 14.
' Luke XX. 38.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 113
Name still remains " Jesus," for His functions
remain the same, only their capacity is raised to
the n"', and their scope is extended to all who
dwell in the heavens above, or on the earth beneath,
or in the realms beneath the earth.^ To Him,
therefore, are we to look for grace to help in time
of need, for personal communion, for inspiration,
for guidance, for light on our path, for in Him the
Father is seen and known, and through Him " all
the authority " of the Father is exercised. Thus
we are led to a conclusion on the Being to whom
prayers should be directed not at all in accordance
with that of the late Dean Stanley who deprecated
prayer being made to Jesus. We are not bidden
to pray to Him as apart from the Father, but as
one who is, so to say, the very soul of the Father
Himself, for in Him the Eternal Logos has taken
form and then raised that Form to the right-hand
of the Father in the continuous work of drawing
the souls of men out of the realm of darkness into
the glorious liberty of the sons of God.
His only Son
'Yov Tlov avTov tov fiovoyev!)
We are now in a position to say how to interpret
the two clauses, " His only Son " and " our Lord,"
for the preceding remarks have at all events warned
us off the impiety of wading into the depths of the
Divine Being by means of speculative reason.
What the Depth of the Divine Being may hide we
neither know nor can know. But what we may
know is what He has been able to reveal to us, and
1 Phil. ii. 10.

114 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
that is in the last analysis what we ourselves
mystically may have seen and heard, or what
mystics of all peoples and nations and tongues
have experienced and tried to tell us in tradition
by word or deed of theirs. Hence the phrase, tov
Tlov avTov tov p,ovoyev7], " His only-begotten Son,"
must be interpreted to mean that where all men
are sons of God (potentially or actually) Jesus
only is Son of God in the complete sense of that
term. We can say nothing of what sons there may
be in other worlds than ours, still less of what may
be in the bosom of the Infinite, but we are bound to
say, on the strength both of traditional Christianity
and of daily -repeated revelations given to our
brothers and sisters still in the flesh, that Jesus is
Son of God in a sense which no other of the sons of
men are. In Him is dwelling — here and now —
" the full pleroma of the Godhead " so far as body
can embrace it.^
To appreciate fully, however, the dignity con
ferred by the term " Only-begotten," reference
should be made to the conception of God as Un-
' Col. ii. 9. That the title p.ovoyevi]s as applied to Jesus has some
connection with the aeon of the Gnostics is certain, though uncertain what
it is. It occurs five times only as an epithet of Jesus in the N.T. — four
times in the Fourth Gospel and once in 1 John iv. 9. As the Gospel refers
to Beginning, Word, Light, Life, Man, and other Gnostic dignitaries, so
does it to Monogenes, probably to recapitulate them all in Jesus Christ
(Eph. i. 10). " Only," as in Ps. xxii. 20, xxxv. 17 of the one soul of man ;
in Tob.iii. 15, Luke vii. 12, ix. 38, Heb. xi. 17 ofthe only Son ; or " beloved "
in Gen. xxii. 2, 16, and elsewhere must be regarded as weak editions of
" only-begotten." On the other hand, the term both in the Gospel and
in the Creed is not applied to the Logos, but to the historic person Jesus
Christ, and the sense in which the word " begotten " is used is the same
as in the term " first-begotten " in Heb. i. 6, Rev. i. 5, where it refers to
the Christian belief that Jesus Christ was the leader of those who rise from
the life which is death through death to the life which is life indeed. Simi
larly, " only-begotten " would say that His rising is unique in the sense
that it is the formal cause of the rising of all others. The " eternal genera
tion of the Son " is not in question here.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 115
manifest and God as Manifest. The religious name
for the former is Father, and for the latter Son.
Hence, especially in the Greek Fathers, our World,
or if there be others, the totality of Worlds, is the
Son, inasmuch as they in whole and in every part
reveal what the Father has seen fit to reveal. But
as the whole sky can be mirrored as perfectly in the
dewdrop as in the ocean, or as all the colours of
the rainbow may be found in the prism or on the
butterfly's wing, so is the whole Universe as the
cosmic Son of God focused in the historical Jesus
Christ as the human Son of God. The title " Only-
begotten " is intelligible as applied to the Universe,
for how could there be any other competent to
receive it ? and might then be transferred to the
human Son in whom the whole was recapitulated.
Only it must be remembered that for some inscrut
able reason the eternal Person became the Son in
the sense defined above by submitting to the
conditions of His earthly life. As God remains
nevertheless a changeless Being when He by the
very superabundance of His Life enters the World
of Becoming, so the Son, whether cosmic or historic,
does not cease to be of " one substance with the
Father" when like His Father He submits to
form, even though that form be that of a slave.
The law of the macrocosm is the law of the
microcosm.! This conclusion is on all fours with that pre
sumption of an underlying unity in all things from
which mysticism takes its rise, and towards which
1 Philo speaks of " the eldest Logos of God putting on Him the world
as his garment," de profug. xx. (562 M) ; and also says that His garment
is " a variegated product of the rational and sensible powers," De mig.
Abr. xviii. (452 M). See Siegfried, Philo von Alexandria, 1875, pp. 219 ff.

116 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
it is always striving through Love. " That Love
makes two persons become one is the only pledge
we have that the religious passion, the desire of the
individual to become the universe, is not an illusion."
But can two walk together except they be agreed ?
If we talk of our becoming the Universe through
Desire, of becoming one with it through Love, as
two human beings may become one, then we
assume that the Universe itself is Personal, or at
least that it is the Form through which a Person
acts on us. Behind every object that strikes the
mind, behind every individual soul, behind the
whole Universe is the living Idea, at once Thought
and Will, in which they all find their unity. If
the cosmos then is the Son of God, if Jesus Christ
be the Son of God, then for the same reason is every
child of man a son of God, and not only a pheno
menal being on whom sonship will some day
somehow be conferred as a new and strange extra.
" In whatever reason may consist, it is clear that
the soul cannot receive the gift of a new faculty
additional to its nature, unless it be so grounded
in its constitution that it either must of necessity
be evolved from it, or else might be evolved should
favourable conditions supervene." ^ If, as St.
Athanasius says, man may become Divine, then he
already is so in germ, he already has some kinship
with God Himself, and the mystic sense of the
indwelling of God is a first, feeble glimmering ray
of the glory which shines in the cosmic and historical
Son of God. In this way the story of Jesus becomes
the chart of each soul, in which are set out the
principal " stations " on the road of life which each
soul must observe if the " hope of glory " within
' Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 536.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 117
is to become the noonday glory of the Beatific
Vision.! That the thesis here maintained of the identity
of interest and of history between the Christ and
His disciples is no fond thing vainly invented, will
be made clear enough by a few quotations from
authorities of repute. If Jesus Christ could say
with absolute truth, " I and the Father are one,"
is it not the goal set before every man that he too
should attain to consciousness of the same truth
about himself ? From the consciousness of man
should he not strive to attain the consciousness of
God ? But let us call our witnesses.
Clement of Alexandria {Protrep. i. 8) says :
And the Word himself now plainly speaketh to thee,
shaming thy unbelief, the Word of God, I say, which
became man that thou mightst learn from man how
somehow or other man may become God.
Speaking of the way sailors while pulling at an
anchor pull themselves towards it, he says :
So too those who according to the gnostic life pull at
God without intending it draw themselves towards God.
For he that serves God serves himself. Therefore in a
man's own contemplative life whoever diligently worships
God also through his own sincere self-purification beholds
in holiness the holy God. For continence abiding carefully
in its place, watching over and considering itself unceasingly
is made like unto God according to its power (Strom, iv.
23, 152).

1 " However long it may take us to reach the Absolute, it is sometimes
curiously near us in isolated episodes of life, and our attitude towards
certain phases of consciousness, if not our positive actions, may be materi.
aUy aftected by the consideration of the greater or less adequacy with
which those phases embody reality " (J. M. E. McTaggart, Studies in
Hegelian Cosmology, p. 253).

118 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
And again :
In very truth the gnostic is his own creator and
demiurge, and being made like unto God he makes into
a cosmos those who pay heed to his words (Strom, vii. 3, 13).
And in Strom, vii. 10, 56, he says that
gnosis leads to the deathless and final end, teaching
the community of life that is to be between us and gods
according to God.
Divine then is the gnostic and already saintly, bearing
God and being borne by God (ibid. vii. 13, 82).
The same truth is expressed by Hippolytus in the
last sentence of his Refutation :
For thou hast become God ; for God does not act as a
beggar towards thee in having made thee a god to His
glory. And a little before in the same chapter he says even
more explicitly :
These torments thou shalt escape by having been
taught the God Who really is. And thou shalt have the
body deathless and incorruptible, with the soul ; thou
shalt receive a heavenly Kingdom, thou who didst live on
the earth and gain Knowledge of the supercelestial King
dom. In return thou shalt be a companion of God and
fellow-heir of Christ, no longer the slave of lusts, passions,
and diseases. For thou hast become God. For whatever
thou didst suffer as man these regard as proper to thee
as man ; but whatsoever things follow on God, these God
hath promised to provide because thou hast been made
God and art become immortal. This is the meaning of
the saying : " Know thyself " ; that is " Know that
thou hast been made God."
So Irenaeus {Against Haer. iv. 38. 4) :
For we find fault with Him because we have not been
made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men,
then at length gods.

VII THE SECOND ARTICLE 119
And Athanasius says quite as strongly :
The Word became flesh that He might make man
capable of receiving Divinity (Contra Ar. ii. 59).
He came in man that we might be made God (De
Incur. 54).
Augustine in the West interprets similarly the
work of Christ :
It was for our sake that He was made partaker of our
mortality, in order that we might be made partakers of
His Divinity {En. in Ps. cxxxviii., Bened. ed. iv. 1535).
And Origen in his Commentary on John (bk.
xxxii. 27) refers to 2 Cor. iii. 18, and says :
When the Nous has been purified and has ascended
above all material things in order that it may more
thoroughly look into the contemplation of God, then
through the things it contemplates it is divinised.
It would seem then that we shall be in excellent
company if we say that of the perfected Christian
at all events there holds true what is said throughout
this chapter before us of the Christ.

Our Lord
lov iS-vpiov fj/jiOiv
This clause forms a standing protest against
any form of teaching which suggests, explicitly or
implicitly, that man is his own Saviour, and needs
but to develop for himself the powers of his own
dormant Divinity. Such teaching has never been
wholly wanting in earlier or later days, and indeed
it dogs the footsteps of all thought which accentuates
the immanence of God in His world. It is, however,
the effect, not of that truth, but of a one-sided

120 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
application of it, and receives here its necessary
correction in the statement that the Christian is
not his own but is under the orders of another.
That other is his Lord on a twofold ground, on the
ground that He is Jesus, and on the ground that He
is Christ. As Jesus He is the Lord who is active
on the external side of the believer's life ; as Christ
He is the Lord who is active in his inner life.
Let us take the latter first. It has been too
hastily assumed that the title Christ is adequately
explained when it is made to be a Greek translation
of the Hebrew Messiah, and that therefore it would
not have been found at all but for this latter. The
difficulty in accepting this conjecture is to be found
partly in the fact that the figure of the Messiah
occupies so small a place in the O.T.,! ^^^ partly
in the fact that the figure of the Christ in the N.T.
fills the whole stage. It would be quite as probable
that the weak figure of the Jewish Messiah is a
shadow cast backward on Jewish religion by the
all-dominant person of the Christ, as that the
reverse is the case. If another conjecture may be
hazarded where there is nothing certain, it would be
that out of the eclectic mass which lay seething at
the opening of our era in the Jewish crucible there
emerged, under the auspices of the Divine Alchemist,
a conception of a lofty grade of humanity known
as the Christ, and that this was made actual in the
person of the Saviour of the world. And as we are
conjecturing we may as well go one step further,
and say that there is nothing improbable in the
suggestion that we owe to some one or other of the
mystery-brotherhoods then existing this idea of
1 The term occurs in the whole Bible only four times, in Dan. ix. 25, 26,
John i. 41, iv. 25.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 121
the Christ, an idea which they were competent to
form but not to actualise.
However this may be, the references to the
Christ in the N.T. make it clear that whether the
term is used to designate the historic person of
Jesus of Nazareth, or is used in a more subtle sense,
in either case it denotes either One who actualised
a divine Ideal that had become dear to the Greek
soul, or that Ideal itself. The fact that He was
described as the elect of God,! that His sufferings
were ordained,^ that He was the end of the law,^
and the wisdom of God,* was better known not
after the flesh,^ could be formed in disciples,^ is the
head of the Church,' and our life,^ all shows how
the Greek conception of the Christ stands at the
opposite pole to that of the Hebrew conception of
the Messiah, and point us to the recognition of
Christ as an inner principle in us, as synonymous,
let us say, with that Divine thing in us which lies
as the brooding, mysterious background behind our
spirit, as our spirit lies behind our soul.
If this be the sense in which Christ is our Lord,
then He is not Lord merely in the sense that He
excludes all other powers from lording it over us,
or calling on us for obedience, as, e.g. philosophy, or
sensation, or the form-world around us in general,
but still more in the sense that He as a positive
Power sits enthroned in the innermost shrine of our
being to claim us as His own and to rule us as His
agents. Not only is our body His temple, for it
is the "temple of the Holy Ghost,"" and "the
Lord is the Spirit," but so is our soul, and so is our
' Luke xxiii. 35. ^ Luke xxiv. 26, Acts iii. 18. ' Rom. x. 4.
« 1 Cor. i. 24. ' 2 Cor. v. 16. » Gal. iv. 19.
' Eph. V. 23. « Col. iii. 4. » 1 Cor. vi. 19, 2 Cor. iii. 17.

122 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
spirit. We are Christ's as Christ is God's.! jjg
is the hidden Man of the heart,^ which is what the
Hindu means by the little man seated in the pupil
of the eye ; and when Natural Theology speaks of
the voice of conscience it refers, consciously or not,
to this voice as being that of this inner Christ, and
its declaration that this voice speaks with a " cate
gorical imperative " rests on the fact that the
Speaker is one who has the right to speak with
authority. " In Ethics the main conceptions of
the deliverance of the Moral Consciousness are
two : Moral Duty, as imposing obligation ; and
Moral Goodness, as inviting acceptance — ^the con
ception of Law to be obeyed, and the conception
of End to be achieved." ^
We hear also of the Lord Jesus as well as of the
Lord Christ, and though the two titles have a
logical distinction they have none in fact, for both
have the same subject. It was the Lord Jesus to
whom Stephen commended his spirit,* in whose
Name converts were baptized,^ on whom men were
exhorted to believe,^ whose day would be the day
of the Lord.' His form is concrete, as a great
high-priest,^ as a compeller of demons,® as having
His martyrs.!" jjg jg ^^^ thought of as Christ is
thought of, as being the Indwelling God, but as the
transcendent (and descended) God ; as One, there
fore, who wears a human form,!! and appears in it
to His servants on occasion, and will appear again
finally at the consummation of all things. If He
as Christ is the Beauty and compelling Power of
> 1 Cor. iii. 23. = j pg^-g,. ju 4
^ Caldecott, Philosophy of Religion, p. 46. * Acts vii. 59.
' Acts viii. 16. » Acts xvi. 31. ' 2 Cor. i. 14.
« Heb. iv. 14. » Acts xix. 15. '» Rev. xvii. 6.
" Acts vii. 55, ix. 17.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 123
the inner universe, Jesus is the attractive Force
and Wisdom of the universe around us, which He
uses according to the good pleasure of His will as
His manifold instrument in His work as Redeemer
and Saviour. We may not then fable of a Demiurge,
but obey instead Him who ever creates and pre
serves ; we must not allow our proper recognition
of the universality of mechanism to oust our equally
proper recognition of the universality also of the
Purpose which God has for us in the Lord Jesus ;
we must refuse any place to despair or despondency
because we cannot understand the mystery of this
unfathomable world, or the meaning of history with
all its twists and turns, or the plan of our own lives
taken one by one. To acclaim Jesus as Lord is to
rest content with Him teaching us as we are able
to bear it, speaking the word of power, opening our
blind eyes, melting our frozen hearts and hearing
and answering our prayers.
Lastly, it is not to be supposed that the earliest
disciples understood that in the Person of Him
whom they treated as their Lord, i.e. as their
Teacher, was implied One who both as Jesus and
as Christ was destined to be universal Lord.!
Reflection on their experience it was which first
gave them this knowledge, and similar reflection
has prepared a great army of mystics to be fit to
receive in the silence the revelation that Jesus
Christ is not only Lord of all, but to say (what is
far harder) the same thing in the first person
singular : " My Lord and my God."
1 This assumes that Peter's confession of faith in Matt. xvi. 16 is the
product of reflection on the " revelation."

124 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
ADDITIONAL NOTE
ON PRE-EXISTENCE AND RE-INCARNATION
The arguments usually advanced in favour of pre-existence
(and re-incarnation) may be summarised as foUows : (1) The
inequalities of earthly life caused by heredity and environment,
for which the individual is not responsible, and God cannot be
held immediately to have caused without a shock to our moral
sense. (2) The difference in capacities with which children
are born ; these seem best attributable to their own past
experiences. (8) The analogy of the law of gravitation which
suggests that souls are drawn to souls as atom to atom. (4) The
general belief in the immortality of the soul joined to the want
of any evidence that it ordinarily acquires immortality in this
present earthly body ; hence it must have been immortal
before birth if it is after death. (5) As atoms are indestructible
so a fortiori are souls. (6) The psychical base of Memory (for
the physical see Samuel Butler's Life and Habit). (7) The
law that the purpose in Nature is to produce the perfected
Individual, and the observed fact that one life in the body is
insufficient for this purpose. (8) The law which is conterminous
vvith our experience, viz. that spirit is always embodied, and
the inference that so often as the separated spirit needs the
lessons of an earthly body so often will it be afforded the
opportunity. (9) The prize generally accorded to that type
of character which is rich in all-round experiences, and the
impossibility of securing that type in perfection in a single
earth-life. (10) The facts that this doctrine has enthralled
(and does so still) more minds than any rival doctrine, and has
satisfied such minds as Plato's and Origen's. (11) The fact
that it alone gives any rational account of social inequalities,
and alone, therefore, shows how social unrest can be quieted.
(12) The inextinguishable desire to leave some memorial
behind us : " yet in what would the attraction of such forms
consist if it were merely attached to a name which no longer
had an owner ? " and how could the owner take full possession
of his legacy but by coming back for the purpose ? (13) There
can be no philosophy of history, whether history be considered
as the story of the education of mankind or the development
of the Idea of mankind, unless every individual human remains
to the end the subject of that education, or the conscious

THE SECOND ARTICLE 125
spectator of that Idea. These are not supplied by tlic final
judgment, and there is only left the hypothesis of re-incarnation.
Lotze, who rejects this latter hypothesis as a dream, yet holds
to the unity of history " in which all that has been inexorably
divided by the temporal course of history has a co-existence
independent of time ; in which the benefits produced in time
are not lost for those who helped to win but did not enjoy
them " ; and again : " The presentiment that we shall not be
lost to the future, that those who were before us, though they
have passed away from the sphere of earthly reality, have not
passed away from reality altogether, and that in some mysterious
way the progress of history affects them too — this conviction
it is that first entitles us to speak as we do of humanity and
its history " (Microcosmus, ii. 172, 174). The truth of these
passages seems to lend support to re-incarnation.
If the doctrine of the pre-existent humanity of Jesus Christ
be made plausible on other grounds, it may gain support from
the consideration of one or two difficulties which without it
seem insurmountable. According to Heb. iv. 15, Jesus was put
to the test in all points as we are. But a considerable portion
of the tests put to the average man spring out of his sensual
nature. Impulses to the inordinate indulgence of the appetites,
to sloth and ease, play a large part in the discipline of most of
us at some part of our lives. Did Jesus feel them with the
same complacency we feel towards them ? If so how could
the desire to do His Father's will be the master-passion it was ?
Can that will be done, as Jesus did it, by one who is still torn
in two, or liable at any moment to be torn in two by volcanic
forces which rise out of the abyss ? And if He did not feel
their full force as we feel it, in what sense can it be said that He
was tempted in all points as we are ?
Our worship of Him, indeed, seems incompatible with any
conception of His character which represents Him as struggling,
like St. Paul, with some " thorns in the flesh." If He were
under the necessity of such a struggle our sympathy might
possibly be more intense, but our veneration would be in
definitely lessened. Again, the men we know to whom we look
up most unhesitatingly are those who somehow are at home
on heights of purity, bravery, generosity, selflessness and
wisdom, to which we are as yet strangers. Nor is our respect
for such men made any the less by the knowledge that they
have no need to fight for their footing inch by inch. If we

126 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
know that for many generations their ancestors have been
unstained, so that the force of heredity is at its best, and that
their environment has been adapted all along to the production
of the finest type of human character, we are content to ac
knowledge the worth of the resulting product of such heredity
and environment, and do not trouble ourselves with any
reflection that these fine traits would be made more meritorious
had they been attained after a fierce struggle with a tainted
heredity and an unfavourable environment.
Yet a final judgment must surely be built on both factors,
the two determinants on the one side, and inner freedom on
the other. The man of supreme excellence whose goodness
is, abstractedly considered, mechanically determined by the
forces of heredity and environment, is aesthetically higher but
perhaps morally lower than the less perfect character which
still is contending and still bears the scars of recent wounds.
We may admire a Kant, but our affection goes out to a Goethe.
How is the aesthetic judgment to be harmonised with the
ethical ?
The doctrine of pre-existence, with its corollary of re-
embodiment, does at least seem to suggest a way in which this
harmony can be brought about. If all good things grow with
a slowness directly proportionate to the degree of their goodness,
and if at the level of individuation the thing which is now
become a person is capable of taking successive forms, then our
difficulty seems removed. And the first of these pre-supposi-
tions is matter of everyday observation. The second can
hardly be denied by those who believe in a " spiritual body "
with St. Paul, or in the resurrection-body of Jesus Christ.
For, there is nothing more wonderful about a spirit assuming
a new body at birth than about the same spirit resuming a
body it had temporarily ceased to animate.
Hence, if Jesus Christ is to be thought of as at once tempted
all along the line of human temptation, and also as the fair
flower and fruit of human excellence, we seem driven to allow
to His humanity a longer existence than that covered by
thirty-three years. If threescore years and ten are all too
short for our probation would thirty-three be enough for His ?
If we answer this question in the affirmative we can only mean
that the Divinity in Him annuls all question of probation.
In which case He ceases to be our exemplar. But if He was
man to the full, then the logical implicits compel us to infer

THE SECOND ARTICLE 127
that His manhood possessed enough duration for a steady,
orderly, and gradual evolution through experience. In other
words, we must conclude to a previous existence enjoyed by
Him as man. It may, of course, be said that such an existence
does not involve necessarily re-incarnation, and that human
life may, for all we know, be lived under other conditions than
those known to us here. This is so. But as we have no
knowledge, and no authoritative hint even of such modes of
human living, it seems better to stick closely, at all events
till we know more, to what we do know, and to say that re
incarnation is the more probable.
In this case we have time enough on our hands for all our
needs. The type of excellence we revere has no need to defend
itself against sensualism now, but it has fought it in a previous
existence and conquered. Hence our reverence can be tempered
now with sympathy without any loss. On the other hand, the
soul still struggling in the depths and so extorting our sympathy
may at the same time evoke in us some accompanying reverence
from the vision of the excellence it will hereafter attain in some
other form of existence.
It should be observed carefully that no question is raised
by this line of thought which touches on the Divinity of Jesus
Christ. The present writer, in any case, has no doubts or
reservations in connection with that fundamental truth of
Christianity. The only question raised is whether, if we seek
to find a rational explanation at all, we are to choose creationism,
tradueianism, or re-incarnation as the best hypothesis, best
in the sense that it gives a more coherent account of the facts
than any other hypothesis. And it would seem that the laws
of Thought compel us to attempt to rationalise our experience.
So that we come to our judgment of Paris, and are disposed to
conclude, unlike Paris, that all three hypotheses may be in
correspondence with truth, and are each of them indeed but
partial aspects of the whole.
Thus tradueianism explains by common consent the peculi
arities of our physical system, and so is but an older and perhaps
not a better name for heredity. Re-incarnation declares that
the Ego, the bearer of mental and spiritual propria, is not a
Self, such as the extreme Indeterminist dreams of, without a
history or a relative permanence. On the contrary, it maintains
that the evolution of any being presupposes a continuum Avhich
precedes manifestation and remains constant before, through

128 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
and after all manifestation. And as in the case of the Self
this continuum is of an intellectual rather than a sensitive
nature, this affords a further reason for rejecting the theory
that parents do more than provide a physical form for a
persistent entity to manifest through. Lastly, creationism
insists that the act which unites the persistent spiritual principle
to the transeunt body is not merely the meeting-point of blind
mechanical forces, but is a spiritual aet of God's purposive
will, equally inconceivable as that by which all things are being
continuously created, and strictly analogous to it. And it
would seem that this is all that the most earnest supporter of
the Logos-doctrine is concerned to defend. If in this short
note a greater emphasis is laid on the re-incarnation aspect
of the transaction of birth this is only because this is the one
which has been made the Cinderella of the three sisters.
It has, of course, been assumed throughout that whatever
may be the conditions of human life in general these are also
the conditions of the human life of Jesus Christ. That He is
" perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human
flesh subsisting," bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, is so
thoroughly in accord with all Christian experience, so much the
woof to its warp, that it is now an axiom accepted by all.
Hence we are at liberty to pass freely from our conditions to
His, and conversely, when we are attempting to set out a
consistent account of human origins.
The union of God and man in Christ Jesus is, that is to say,
typical of the union of God with every man who comes to share
the Christ-life. Not jealous solitariness, but pre-eminence is
the prerogative of Jesus Christ, and this is set out in the state
ment that He is the first-born among many brethren. i For
the same Spirit which was His Life is also the life of His followers,
and its function is to quicken them, including their mortal
bodies.2 As He was, so are we in this world,^ i.e. He was a
Divine Being subjected to the law of generation, passing
through this world to the world of Reality. The same is true
of us. Whatever difference there is, is one of degree, not of
kind. As Bede says : " The term as imports similarity, not
equahty. For if we were made in the image of God, why are
we not as God ? We are not equal, but are like Him, according
to our capacity."
1 Rom. viii. 29, ^ Rom. viii. 11. ^ 1 John iv. 17.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 129
St. Athanasius says that God became man that man might
become God, and similarly St. Augustine says : " The love of
the world calls : lay hold on Christ, He became under Time
that you may become of the Eternal order." And again :
" If you love earth you will be earth. If you love God — shall
I not say it ? — you will become God. I do not venture to say
this of myself, but let us hear the Scripture, saying : ' I have
said ye are gods and the children of the Most High.' "
But whatever truth there may be in the above arguments
and others like them, we have yet to ask whether the tradition
of the Catholic Church has allowed any place to the doctrine
of Re-incarnation. Did any of the Fathers teach it ? Does
the N.T. teach it ? or does it at least permit it ? !
A certain presumption that it does is offered by the well-
known fact that this doctrine was in some form or other common
to all the lands surrounding that which produced our N.T.
Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India, the Mysteries, the Orphic,
Stoic, and Pharisaic doctors all inculcated it. To use the
words of the late Dr. Liddon with reference to the prevalence
of this doctrine of pre-existence in early Christian days : "It
found its way to Alexandria. It was adopted by the Neo-
Platonist thinkers, and even in the Jewish schools ; it was
taught by Philo, as well as by Plotinus ; it was filtered through
Essenism into the religious philosophy of the Talmud and the
Cabbala ; it entered into more than one type of Gnosticism ;
it appears among the other eccentricities of the eccentric
Origen ; it forms a hnk between the philosophical bishop of
Cyrene, Synesius, and the outer world of Pagan thought "
(Some Elements of Religion, p. 95, ed. 1904). It is somewhat
strange after this to find that the utmost that Liddon can
advance on the other side is that the doctrine " was stoutly
opposed by the immense majority of Christian teachers, and
was finally condemned by the collective Church as an un
tenable error." ^

1 In some of what follows I have followed a discussion of this subject
which appeared in St. Eihelburga's Leaflet for July and August 1912.
" It is said that the fifth General Council held at Constantinople in 553
in its first Canon decreed : "If any one affirms any mythical pre-existence
of souls and any monstrous restitution following on it, let him be anathema"
(Labb6, Councils, vol. ix. col. 395). But there is strong reason for believ
ing that the attribution to the Fifth Council of the fifteen anathemas (of
which that cited above is the first) is a mistake, and that the Canons
K

130 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
If then the N.T. rejected so widely-spread and so funda
mental a doctrine we might a priori expect that the rejection
would be explicit. This, however, is certainly not the case.
Instead, what evidence we have, scanty and ambiguous as it
may be, leans, to say the least, in the direction which favours
the doctrine. The popular belief that Jesus was an Old Testa
ment worthy come back (Matt. xvi. 14), or that He was
John risen from the dead (Luke ix. 7) ; the enquiry whether the
blind man was blind in punishment for some pre-natal sin (John
ix. 2), if not conclusive, do at least, so far as they go, witness
to the prevalence of the belief that the soul is pre-existent
to physical birth. It is undeniable, however, that the N.T.
teaches the pre-existence of Jesus Christ, and this not merely
in the sense that the " Word of God " is pre-existent. The
classical passage for this is of course Phil. ii. 6, which states
quite plainly that Christ Jesus existed, but in a divine form,
before He vouchsafed to assume a human form. But no
Christian thinker has ever suggested that Christ Jesus before
taking our human form belonged to the order of those higher
intelligences whom we classify generically as angels. From
which it seems to follow that He was man before the Incarnation.
But this is only to say that He was a Being who was a per- ,
manent centre of spiritual force, in short, that He was a soul
pre-existing in the " form of God."
The Nicene Creed asserts this pre-existence when it says
that (1) He came down from heaven, which implies that He
was already there before coming down ; (2) that He became
incarnate, i.e. that He added to His human soul a physical
body of the human pattern, and, therefore, that He became
Man phenomenally (and completely) as He was already Man
essentially. This is essentially the position taken up by Weizaeker, who
says that St. Paul's words establish two results : — " In the
first place. He had a personal existence before His human birth,
and in the second. His earlier life was divine, and absolutely
opposed to the dependent life of man upon earth. His Divinity
is here defined as a generic idea by this contrast with a servile
are the reply of the bishops assembled in a Home Synod, under
Mennas, the patriarch of Constantinople, to a tractate of the most
pious Emperor, Justinian, given in Labb6, vol. ix. cols. 487-538. Cf.
Smith, Did, Xtian. Biog., art. " Origenistic Controversies," vol. iv.
pp. 152-6.

VII THE SECOND ARTICLE 131
position, and therein lies the conception of a supramundane
existence which is not inconsistent with the uniqueness of
God the Father, nor for that very reason precludes the notion
of Christ having been created by Him. Had he (St. Paul) not
given his doctrine of Christ this backward extension, the human
life of Christ would have become for him a sort of impersonal
event, and Jesus a mere instrument. His doctrine of the
pre-existence accordingly enables him to look upon Christ's
work as a personal act, and to preserve the bond between Him
and humanity." !
Christian theology, indeed, has always felt instinctively that
all attempts to state the life and work of Christ Jesus in terms
of ordinary human life are to be resisted. It has not, however,
wliile asserting the Divinity of Christ Jesus, done at all times
full justice to His manhood. For the truth of man's pre-
existence, if it be a truth, does undoubtedly add to his stature
and augment his dignity. In any case, the quickening of
consciousness by the Eternal Spirit in us men of to-day has
made it impossible for us to rest content with the exiguous term
of threescore years and ten. We claim kinship with the
angels and hitch our waggons to the stars. As Christians,
moreover, we see in Christ Jesus ourselves ennobled ; His
life-history is our life-history in record and in prophecy — in
record because He has not destroyed in Himself the lowly
elements which are His and ours, but transmuted them ; in
prophecy, because we too shall be raised with Him to the
super-human. If we were invited to ignore Hooker's warning and to wade
into depths beyond our reach, we should be disposed to say,
and to say it with the whispered humbleness of devotion, that
the Logos-doctrine and that of pre-existence are quite con
ceivably compatible. We might suggest that this great human
Soul had become perfect through many lives — whether em
bodied again and again on this planet or elsewhere makes little
difference — and that now being free from the law which subjects
man to " the wheel of nature " He voluntarily offered Himself
to the Eternal Word as a " minister of the circumcision for the
truth of God " and for the salvation of man. This voluntary
self-surrender was at once met with a hypostatic union of the
1 Apostolic Age, Eng. trans, i. 146 ; cf. also Vincent in Internatl, Crit.
Commentary, " Philippians," pp. 78-90.

132 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Eternal Word which lifted the pre-existing soul to a higher
plane, made it to constitute a super-man if we may use (with
a difference) the phrase of Nietzsche, and then sent forth this
super-human soul into the world of generation to be the first
born among many brethren and the father of a new race of
men. Again, Catholic theology has delighted to honour Mary by
asserting that the world's redemption had long waited for the
time to come when a maiden should be possessor of that
purity whieh should enable the Redeemer to be born of her.
But this leads inevitably to the equal and parallel affirma
tion that the world's redemption had waited also for a human
soul of such power and purity that it could be exalted to
the lofty work of Redeemer. When that soul was ready and
was anointed with Divinity it could be hterally said of
it that in it " dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead in bodily
form." But this dwelling with us of God as man was not the con
descension of a superior being who seeks to shame or to allure
to better living by external example, or by precept, or by any
merely external influence. It was rather the formation of a
new and higher type of manhood which might act as a school,
or society, or temple, or body in which every man might find
his place, where the same life might thrill through all, where
every member might go from strength to strength. That
which makes this possible as a pre-condition is the pre-existence
of all that bears the form of man.
The remark made above that Re-incarnation has been
neglected by Christian thought is borne out by the fact that
Origen, almost alone of all the Fathers, taught it explicitly, even
though tentatively. It would be an interesting chapter indeed
in Christian origins which gave the causes for the disappearance
of the doctrine, but the chapter still remains unwritten, nor is
this the place for it.
Origen, commenting on John i. 6, says : " If the CathoHc
opinion holds good concerning the soul as not propagated with
the body, but existing previously and for various reasons
clothed in flesh and blood, this expression ' sent from God '
will no longer seem extraordinary as applied to John." We may
account for the scarcity of such testimony in several ways.
We may say that Origen was more or less heretical and that
little, therefore, should be built on him.

THE SECOND ARTICLE 133
Other statements of Origen bearing on this subject are
contained in the following extracts : —
" With respect to the soul, whether it is derived from the
seed by a process of tradueianism ... or whether it has any
other beginning ; and this beginning itself, whether it be by
birth or not, or whether bestowed upon the body from without
or not, is not distinguished with sufficient clearness in the
teaching of the Church " (De principiis, Preface).
Again discussing the reasons why souls are acted on at one
time by good spirits and at another by bad, and after referring
to the cases of John the Baptist, Jeremiah, and others, he says
that he suspects that the grounds are older than " the bodily
birth of the individual." He concludes that " those who
maintain that everything in the world is under the administra
tion of divine providence can give no other answer . . . than
by holding that there were certain causes of prior existence,"
in consequence of which different souls on account of difterent
merits " are immediately on their birth, or even before it,
assorted by divine providence for the endurance of either good
or evil " (De principiis, iii. 3).!
1 Alger has an interesting discussion of metempsychosis (pt. v. ch. ii.
pp. 475-487) in which he does justice to the extensive, controlling, and
permanent influence of the doctrine, and sums up its species as setting
forth either " a development, a revolution, or a retribution." He accounts
for the prevalence of the belief by early man's consciousness of personal
identity through all change, including therefore that of birth as well as
of death ; by the observed resemblances between men and other animals ;
by that disease of language which takes a metaphor literally ; by dim
memories of similars ; by its power to vindicate the ways of God to men ;
and by the authority of philosophers. He admits that the doctrine is
hard to be resisted ; that it charms the understanding and the conscience ;
that it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deep mystic chambers
of our being, and commands deference and deserves study as the un
disputed creed of millions of our race for perhaps over a hundred and
fifty generations. But he concludes that " based on shadows and on
arbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built of reveries and
occult experiences, fortified by unreliable inferences, destitute of any
substantial evidence, it is unable to face the severity of science," and that
therefore, " a real investigation of its validity by the modern method
dissipates it as the sun scatters fog " (pp. 483-4). It can hardly be said,
however, that Mr. Alger applies to the subject any " real investigation."
But cf. Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, ch. v. ; Beausobre, Histoire du
ManichHsme, lib. vi. ch. iv. ; Helmont, Derevolutione animarum ; Richter,
Das Christenthum und die ctltesten Religionen des Orients, sects. 54-65 ;
E. D. Walker, Re-incarnation.

CHAPTER VIII
THE THIRD ARTICLE
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the
Virgin Mary
Tov jevvTjdivTa eK JIvevfiaTO^ 'Ajiov Kal M.apia<;
Tfj<; irapdevov
" The complete form of this Article in our Creed
is almost unknown in all the Creeds, except those
which can be proved to be derived from it. It
must, therefore, have been peculiar, we do not know
for how long, to the South Gallican Church, to
which we owe our recension of the Creed." ! The
Creed, as given by Irenaeus and Tertullian and in
the form of the Old Roman Symbol, was content
to recite : " Who was born of Mary the Virgin."
In this form, as McGiffert insists, the authors were
more concerned to assert the reality of Christ's
manhood against gnosticism than the truth of His
Divinity.'' The difficulty of accounting for the
later expansion of the article is part of the problem
of the growth of Christology. The N.T. gives
no coherent system on this head, but shows us
plainly that reflection on the marvel of Christ's
Personality had begun but not concluded its work.
1 Zahn, Apostles' Creed, p. 117. ^ Apostles'' Creed, pp. 122-126.
134

cH.vin THE THIRD ARTICLE 135
For example, two solutions of His human great
ness were offered, one scholastic and one popular.
The former, which is that of St. John and St. Paul,
accounted for it, the one by His pre-existence in
a state of heavenly glory, and the other by His
being united to the Eternal Word. On the other
hand, the Gospel of the Infancy as given by St.
Matthew and St. Luke sets out with rare beauty
the poetical interpretation born of popular instinct.!
The latter possesses the advantage of the rule that
the popular judgment is always right in substance
on all matters submitted to it, even though it is
ordinarily mistaken in its judgment on the form,
or in its weighing of evidence, or drawing of con
clusions. On the other hand, the learned hypotheses
of academically trained minds such as those of St.
Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel are apt
to be little more than the expression of a personal
philosophy, though here again we must recollect
that both of these were more and greater than
thinkers — they were devout Christians who had
put their hypotheses to the test in their lives.
It may sound odd to say that it is not necessary
in a work such as this to enter on a discussion of
what is called the Virgin-birth of Christ, but the
omission is justifiable for these reasons :
(1) The question is purely a question of history
and has little or no connection with religion, and
being a question of history it falls to students of
history for investigation. But it may be pointed out
that the truth or otherwise of the historical fact is

1 " The miraculous genesis of Christ in the Virgin by the Holy Spirit
and the real pre-existence are of course mutually exclusive. At a later
period it became necessary, it is true, to unite them in thought " (Harnack,
History of Dogma, i. 105).

136 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
not affected by its subsequent adoption by doctors,
or by the Church generally. The duty would still
remain for the enquirer to set out the extant evidence
and to test it by the ordinary canons of historical
criticism. When this was done it would be found
that the belief rests in the last analysis on the
stories of the Infancy in the first and third Gospels.
But what previous history it had, or whence these
two documents derived their material, remains
still a dark field for conjecture.
(2) It seems clear that the doctrine of the Virgin-
birth was not included in the original evangelical
deposit.! (3) A physical fact in and for itself has no
religious worth. The Divinity of Jesus has no
necessary connection with the mode of His taking
flesh.^ (4) If the ground offered for believing in a physi
cal Virgin-birth be that otherwise the human nature
of Jesus would have no guarantee of purity, a
strong protest should be lodged against the anti-
Christian judgment implicit here which stigma
tises an ordinance of God as unclean, and so passes
over to the Manichaean camp.
(5) Finally, if the emphasis laid on the doctrine
¦^ " The evidenoe of our Lord's birth of a virgin was no part of the
original Apostolic testimony, and still to-day this question is not a ground
on which belief is asked " (Bishop Gore, Lecture at St. Philip's, Birmingham,
December 10, 1902, see Nineteenth Century, November 1904, p. 752). Cf.
also what Dean Armitage Robinson wrote in his famous Open Letter to
the Archbishop of Canterbury : " To say that the historical fact of the
Virgin-birth is a cardinal doctrine of the faith is to use language which no
Synod of Bishops, so far as I am aware, has ever ventured to use. It is
to confuse the Incarnation with the special mode of the Incarnation in a
way for which Christian theology offers no precedent."
^ It is noteworthy that Theodotus, the leather-worker, taught that Jesus
was a man who, by a special decree of God, was born of a Virgin through
the operation of the Holy Spirit.

THE THIRD ARTICLE 137
of the Virgin-birth is due not so much to its historical
character, as to its being the symbol of the unique
moral purity of Jesus Christ, then though the
object aimed at is in every way laudable, yet it is
weakened rather than strengthened by the proof
tendered. A direct presentment of the life has
never failed to win allegiance for the character
and personality of Jesus, while multitudes treat
the Virgin-birth as doubtful, incapable of proof,
or irrelevant. To insist on it for the sake of some
thing which stands firm without it, is paralleled
by the argument that the miraculous must be
maintained, not for itself, but in order to save the
autonomy of God.
Yet none of these considerations touches the
solid fact that two of the Evangelists preface their
narrative with stories the point of which is to set
out not only the supernatural character of the
Child about to be born, but the supernatural method
also of His entrance into this world. These stories
are not inventions, pure fancies, with no meaning
or history behind them, but on the contrary
they contain a truth which we cannot afford to
let go, of which popular theology guards the shell,
knowing that it contains a kernel indeed, but
apparently ignorant as to what the kernel is
like. The difficulties that cluster round this popular
belief are not likely to be removed by purely
biological considerations, for though these by them
selves would only serve to show that partheno
genesis is a power that man long ago dropped (as
he has lost the power of renewing lost limbs, still
possessed, for example, by the crustaceans), and
is not likely to resume even exceptionally, yet to

138 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
approach the subject from this end is to approach
it from the wrong end. It demands approach from
the upper end, from the inner world where is the
process, rather than from the outer where the
event is displayed. If we can find that in this
higher world there is a process which is aptly sym
bolised by the Virgin-birth, then we shall be the
more disposed to find it credible that in the world
of phenomena this process may have its analogue.
It is true that this method of approach may as
well yield us a symbol as a physical event of the
natural order. But have we sufficiently informed
ourselves of the awful character of a symbol, or
learned that a symbol contains at least as much
Reality as an event of the physical plane ? or
understood what St. Augustine meant when he
wrote : " That which is divine is the thing signified
and not the sign " ? !
When God desires to communicate some truth
to a prepared soul He explores the depths of its
mind where all sorts of intellectual treasures lie
hid ready to be called into use by the Imagination
touched by the Divine Spirit, and out of these
treasures He constructs something which we can
describe only as a vision which is not seen, a message
which is not heard, as a symbol by means of which
the desired truth slips into the mind, and unites
in consciousness God and the Soul. Such " symbols
have no efficiency unless they are given to the
mind from within and for it alone. The symbols
which are crystallised in the state of narrative or
painting can only live again in other consciousnesses
1 De Trin, lib. iii. 19. Cf. also his De Magistro, ch. ix. § 25, Bened. ed.
i. 555 : " lam ergo intelligas volo res quae significantur pluris quam signa
esse pendendas."

THE THIRD ARTICLE 139
by reproduction of the mystic fact which originated
them." !
Father Poulain ^ has an excellent passage on
this head : "In visions of Paradise, Purgatory, or
Hell, God only shows in part that reality which
is so far beyond our powers of understanding. He
adapts Himself to our nature by making use of
Symbols. The saints and angels show themselves
to us with bodies which they do not in reality
possess ; they are clothed in rich garments, and
take part in processions or ceremonies. Heaven
becomes a banquet or an exquisite garden. These
pictures appear in accordance with the idea of the
person who sees them, or those of the painters of
his day. We have an example of this in St. Lid-
wine's vision, and in that of the Apocalypse of the
four living creatures round about the Throne. St.
John borrowed its chief features from Ezekiel,
who himself took the imagery from the gigantic
bas-reliefs of the Assyrian palaces which the Jews
had ever before their eyes during the Babylonian
captivity." This same truth of the higher origin of the
symbol, and therefore of its greater reality and
efficacy, meets us in Art. Every true work of Art
is produced in an ecstasy * in which the artist is
compelled by an inner Power greater than himself.
Dante did not sit down and deliberately concoct
the Divina Commedia out of his own self-conscious
mind, but he saw with his immortal eye, and part
of what he saw he wrote down. His own energetic
^ R6c6jac, Bases of tke Mystic Knowledge, p. 143.
2 The Graces of Interior Prayer, p. 329.
= This is the burden of that suggestive little book of Mr. Machen's
called Hieroglyphics,

140 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
and well - stored mind contributed, no doubt, the
materials for his imagery, but the Life which
poured through them was from above. The poet,
like Browning's thrush, sings with a fine, careless
rapture, and if he knows not rapture what he sings
is not music. The Peerless Maid was one of the
greatest among the disciples of the Christ because
of her exalted and whole-hearted surrender to her
heavenly voices. Indeed, all truly great work
comes to us from men who have put their Self
outside of them, and so given admission to a
Power above which waits till self-consciousness
is over-passed before It can use them for greater
works. Whenever it does this it creates the
suitable Symbol as the sign and instrument of its
working. This profound truth of the place of symbols in
the higher life lies at the back of the sacramental
teaching of the Church of Christ, by which there
are excluded at once all worship of the mechanism
of the world and all contentment with formalism,
historical or otherwise. To the opened eye every
thing which stimulates sensation in being what
it is, is also something more. Hence its capacity
for causing in us feelings of awe, reverence, aspira
tion, self-contempt or religious exaltation. " Alles
Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis."
The Virgin-birth then, if it is to take rank as a
religious fact, must be raised to the peerage of
Symbols. As a physical fact it has no connection
with Religion until the physical in it has been used
by the Spirit of God as the material by means of
which a spiritual truth is revealed to the inner eye
of a Seer. That Mary was such a Seer is at least
probable, and we might be content to believe that

THE THIRD ARTICLE 141
such a symbol was hers in the order of the physical
were it not for the assertion of Jesus in Matt. xii.
50, Mark iii. 35, Luke viii. 21, that the spiritual
relation of Master and disciple is closer than
that of mother and son, and for the significant
silence on the point of the whole of the N.T.
outside the Gospel of the Infancy. And yet the
Virgin-birth might well be a God-given symbol of
the first importance for Religion, and in special
for the Christian Religion. To see how this may
be, let us just glance at its analogues in the ethnic
religions as they appeared at the beginning of our
era. Let us turn first to the Gnostics.
The Christ-Mystery, says Hippolytus, " is the
gate of heaven, and the house of God, where the
good God dwells alone ; into which house no impure
man shall come, but it is kept under watch for the
spiritual alone, and when they arrive thither they
must cast away their garments, made sexless through
the virginal spirit. For this is the Virgin big with
child who conceives and bears a son (not psychical,
not fleshly, but a blessed aeon of aeons)." !
"The words virgin, virginity, ever - virginal,
occur on every other page of Philo. It is indeed
Philo who first formulated the idea of the Word,
or ideal-ordering principle of the Cosmos being
born of an ever- virgin soul, which conceives, because
God the Father sows into her His intelligible rays
and divine seed, so begetting His only well-beloved
Son, the Cosmos." ^
In Alexandria was celebrated on January 5 a
feast of the Aeon identified by Epiphanius with
the feast of the Koreion : " If they are asked the
1 Ref, V. 3 sub finem,
2 F. A. Conybeare, Philo on the Contemplative Life, pp. 302-3.

142 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
meaning of this mystery, they answer and say :
' To-day at this hour the Maiden (Kore), that is,
the Virgin, has given birth to the Aeon.' " !
In the Corpus Hermeticum, xiii. (xiv.) Hermes
says that the matter and the womb from out of
which Man is born is Wisdom-that-understands in
silence, and the seed is the true Good, and the sower
is the Will of God. " Whene'er I see in myself,"
he goes on to say, " the simple vision brought to
birth out of God's mercy, I have passed through
myself into a body that can never die. And now
I am not what I was before, but I am born in
mind." In the Apocalypse of John the heavenly Virgin
appears as clothed with the sun, with the moon
under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve
stars (xii. 1). Here, says Gunkel, we have an original
Babylonian myth which has been worked over by
Jewish and Christian authors, and sets out the birth
of Marduk, the young sun-god, from Mamkina ;
and Tiamat is the dragon who seeks to devour the
child.2 So in astronomy (as may be seen by drawing
a " prime vertical " of the zodiacal heavens at our
winter solstice) the sun at Christmas, at midnight,
is in the nadir, and has recently entered Capricorn,
the sign under Saturn the lord of Time, while at
the zenith is Cancer the sign of the Moon or earth-
life ; the sign Virgo has completely risen above the
eastern horizon, and the sign Libra is rising in the
east, followed by Scorpio, " the devil-sign." The
1 Epiph. (Against Haer, li. 22, ed. Dind. vol. ii. p. 483) ; he adds a state
ment that in Petra, the metropolis of Arabia, the same rites are celebrated,
that they hymn the Virgin, calling her " Virgin " and her Son " the only-
begotten of the Lord."
* Schtspfung und Chaos, pp. 385-391.

vm THE THIRD ARTICLE 143
beginnings of the four cardinal signs are seen to
occupy the four quarters of space, forming a great
cross. At this winter solstice, the sun, having
reached its greatest southern declination, appears
to " turn," and proceeds on its northward passage
of six months ; as it does so, the length of the
" day " increases steadily from its minimum in
our northern hemisphere till the maximum is
reached at the summer solstice. These six months
are typified in the " prime vertical " figure by the
movement of the earth on its axis during the first
twelve hours at Christmas, from midnight to noon,
whereby the place occupied by the Sun at midnight
appears to be carried up through the eastern horizon
till the zenith is reached, and what at midnight
was in the zenith is carried down to the nadir. The
picture is of Divine life increasing and earth-life
decreasing proportionately, till at the summer
solstice the Divine life is at the zenith and the
earth-life at the nadir. In other words, as Jesus
the sun of righteousness rises, the star of John the
Baptist, His forerunner, sets (John iii. 30).! g^^
at Christmas the sun, who is, as it were, being born
again, may be said to be born of Virgo who is then
in the East.
Another line of explanation, and on a lower
level, has been followed by those who have seen
in the miraculous birth of the Saviour but another
example of the many similar stories told of great
men of all countries who have captivated the
imagination of men. Thus the Buddha was said to
have been an incarnation of Vishnu through Maya.
Plato was a son of Apollo ; Augustus also.
Alexander the Great made a great point of his
^ I owe this astronomical note to my friend, Mr. J. S. Brown.

144 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
having been declared in the temple of Jupiter
Ammon to be a son of Zeus, and he accordingly
disavowed Philip as his father, and the people of
Egypt believed him. Their minds were, therefore,
predisposed for such a heavenly birth.! A similar
story is told of Scipio Africanus.^ That the
Hellenistic world was pervaded by a belief in the
birth of great men from gods may be seen in the
remarks of Justin Martyr in his First Apology,
that addressed to the Emperor Hadrian, the
Emperor responsible for the deification of Antinous.
He says : " The Son of God, called Jesus, even if
only a man by ordinary generation, yet on account
of His wisdom is worthy to be called the Son of
God ; for all writers call God the Father of men and
gods. And if we assert that the Word of God was
born of God in a peculiar manner, different from
ordinary generation, let this be no extraordinary
thing to you who say that Mercury is the angelic
word of God. . . . And if we affirm that He was
born of a virgin accept this in common with what
you accept of Perseus."^
But so far from the widespread character of
these stories being an evidence that all of them are
false, it is rather a proof that all of them are true.
Only the world in which the truth is to be found
may not be that which the man of naive conscious
ness holds to be alone true, or at all events believes
to be the touchstone of truth elsewhere. For if

1 That this story is part of the Romance of Alexander makes no differ
ence to our estimate of the popular thought of the time.
" Aulus Gellius, Nod, Att, vi. 1.
^ Chapter xxii. It is interesting to be told that in " the Abyssinian
Church to-day there is a theological school which teaches a threefold
birth of Christ, from the Father in eternity, from the virgin, and from the
Holy Ghost at the baptism " (Harnack, History of Dogma, iii. 65).

THE THIRD ARTICLE 145
these stories be " myths," then they are, as the
product of the deep and simple folk-mind, myths
that proceed out of the Great Spirit of Nature her
self. They are not hallucinations (defined as purely
internal images possessing the vividness of those
that come through the senses and so confused with
our sensations) or inventions, but the tribute paid
by the unspoilt mind of the child in us to the
immediate origin from heaven of all great and
demonic personalities.
Yet this method of explanation, borrowed as
it is from the science of comparative religion, and,
therefore, from learning, does not possess an arm
long enough to reach the serene heights of the
Gospel- story. For the contrast so often drawn
between the directness and simplicity of the Canoni
cal Gospels and the Apocryphal Gospels may be as
truly established between the Gospel-story of the
miraculous Birth and the similar stories current
in ethnic religions. And this for the simple and
admitted reason that a great gulf is fixed between
the Life which gives birth to Christianity and the
more partial manifestations of it elsewhere. What
in others was a guess, or a fore -gleam, was in
Christianity true. Tertullian was not so far wrong,
after all, in regarding the rites and doings of other
religions as imitations of those of Christianity;
only their teacher was not the Devil but the Spirit
who was at work on the Praeparatio Evangeliea.
Hence the Christian apologist must not seek
in history or in learning the interpretation of the
Virgin -birth but in the Christian religion itself;
that is, in the inner realm of Reality of which the
world of sensation is the outside. It is not for
nothing indeed that gnostic thought, Babylonian

146 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
cosmogony, and Egyptian and Greek theology
emphasise the greatness of the Virgin-mother and
her child, and that the signs of the Zodiac, the great
Bible in the Heavens, testify side by side with
Matthew and Luke to the divine origin of Jesus,
and to the dignity of His Mother.
For, in the first place, we are dealing here with
an event which is the prototype of many repeated
events in the experience of Christian men and
women in every generation. The fact of conversion
or regeneration is as certain, and as frequently
attested, as any other event in the history of religious
experience, although at the same time it runs more
quickly up into a mystery than others. Moreover
since Christianity has always insisted through its
recognised spokesmen that its power lies in the
presence in its heart of the eternal and living and
active Spirit, and not in the belief of man in what
has been, so the weight of its appeal for acceptance
by men must lie in the constant repetition in human
life of the typical events of the Gospel-story.!
Just as the one valid argument for Christianity
is in the last resort the supernatural lives of Chris
tians, so the proof of the truth of its articles and
dogmas must be sought in the religious experience
of ordinary living Christians. Unless the Virgin-
birth, that is to say, is capable of constant reproduc-
1 To repeat SchefHer's words :
" Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born.
If He's not born in thee, thy soul is all forlorn ;
The Cross on Golgotha will never save thy soul ;
The Cross in thine own heart alone can make thee whole.
" Christ rose not from the dead, Christ is still in the grave.
If thou for whom He died art still of sin the slave.
Hold there ! Where runnest thou ? Know Heaven is in thee ;
Seek'st thou for God elsewhere, His face thou'lt never see."

THE THIRD ARTICLE 147
tion it may indeed vindicate its place in history,
but it ceases to be a religious fact.
But in what sense is it possible to maintain that
" conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary " can be predicated of others beside Jesus
Christ Himself ? And if it can, can we escape
from the charge of taking words in a " non -natural
sense," of using them in one sense of Jesus and in
another sense when applied to others ? Probably
no one can expect to escape from obloquy who
tries to set out truths which are beyond the range
of Vhomme moyen sensuel, but in the case before us
the charge would have no justification. For as
we have tried to show in an earlier place (p. 9) the
assertion that a truth holds, say, in the psychical
order, is no barrier to its repeating itself also in
the physical. Hence, if it can be shown that the
Virgin-birth is true in the higher realm it does not
follow that it is false in the lower realm. But with
this lower realm of physics religion has only an
indirect concern, for it belongs to one of its partners.
Science. Its concern is with the relation of the
Soul of God.
Now it is strictly here where the great truth of
the Article before us is exemplified in Jesus Christ
and in His disciples, in Him pre-eminently and in
them according to their capacity. " Conceived by
the Holy Ghost " is one way of saying that he who
is in the kingdom of heaven has been born from
above ; ! he has been born not of blood, nor of the
will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God,^ that is, by a birth which is not physical, nor
psychical, nor of the higher Reason, but by the
' John iii. 3.
* John i. 13. Cf. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology, p. 290 n.

148 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
impartation by God of His own life. Hence Jesus
insisted repeatedly to His disciples that God was
their Father, as God was His Father ; they were sons
of God as He was the Son of God, because alike
they were conceived by the Holy Ghost.
McGiffert ! has drawn attention to the, at first
glance, somewhat strange fact that the Baptism of
Jesus does not appear as an Article of the Creed.
But this difficulty disappears if we place our present
Article on its proper base. For the Article itself
then says, what the glory of the Baptism can only
repeat more emphatically, viz. that Jesus Christ
was a Being who rose above all the categories of
ordinary thought, and could be described only as
one who belonged primarily to the heavenly order
and only secondarily to the earthly. At the same
time, the Article does not set out to do much more
than a Catholic anathema sets out to do,^ viz.
not so much assert what is true as rule out what
is false. The heavenly, whether in Jesus Himself
or one of His followers, is not defined for thought,
but is declared to be not definable by any expedient
of Reason, only to be outlined, or hinted at (for
those who may have ears to hear), by analogies
drawn from the lower sphere.
" Born of the Virgin Mary." The dweller in
the kingdom must be born of water as well as of
the Spirit ; * not of Spirit alone, nor of soul alone,
1 The Apostles' Creed, p. 120.
' Cf. e.g. in Denzinger, Enchiridion, 5th ed., 1874, p. 345, the Encyclical
of Pius IX. Quanta cura ends thus : " Itaque omnes et singulas pravas
opiniones ac doctrinas singillatim hisce Uteris commemoratas auctoritate
Nostra Apostolica reprobamus, proscribimus atque damnamus, casque ab
omnibus catholicae Ecclesiae filiis, veluti reprobatas, proscriptas atque
damnatas omnino haberi volumus et mandamus." A shorter form is used
in Canones, as e.g. in the third of the Vatican Council of 1870 : " Si quis
dixerit unam eandemque esse Dei et rerum omnium substantiam vel
essentiam : anathema sit." ' John iii. 5.

THE THIRD ARTICLE 149
for Spirit is the Life, soul supplies the form and
body, and under this present dispensation all things
are double one against another,! and the end will
come only when the man is as the woman and the
woman as the man, neither male nor female.^ The
law of duality expressed here is the Law into which
all the laws we know run back ; its sphere is the
phenomenal universe, and in that universe it is
the ultimate law, for the law by which we are com
pelled to seek for Unity belongs to the inner world
which lies behind the outer. The supreme example
of this law of Duality is to be found in the Incarna
tion of Jesus Christ, though of course every birth
into this world exemplifies it.
In the mystical language of antiquity the spirit
is represented by fire, the sun, or gold, the soul by
water, the moon, or silver, and the mention of these
emblematic terms would in those times have called
up the reality signified as inevitably as to us it
calls up the image of the material thing only. It
is just this difference of horizon which makes it
difficult for the scientific and materialistic West
to interpret the documents of the philosophic and
spiritually-minded East. Where we are reminded
of a physical birth, or of baptism in material water,
the Eastern mind collects from the same phrase
ology images of a birth into a higher spiritual order,
or of a " soul-substance " or soul-powers which act
as a " form " when the Holy Ghost descends to
give life. What is contended for here is that this
higher sense of the Article before us is the original
sense, and that the Western interpretation in terms
1 Ecclus. xlii. 24.
2 A logion of Jesus quoted in Pseudo-Clement, § 12, Pat. Ap. Opera,
ed. Gebhardt and Harnack, 1902, p. 40.

150 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of physical life is — whatever the historical truth of
it — partly a concession to the hard sensualism of
the West, and partly an unconscious surrender to
it. Nor is it any valid objection to this contention
to say that the facts of the fourth and even the
third century reveal no trace of the prevalence of
this alleged earlier conception, for it is not pre
tended that the " Peace of the Church " in a.d.
313 sprang into birth uno ietu, like Pallas Athene,
but was the result of a process of approximation
between the Church and the World which began
even in Apostolic times, and is witnessed to by
such passages in the N.T. as emphasise the need
for discipline,! and show us that the Brotherhood
is beginning to pass into a legalistic society, by the
Didache, by the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian.
Fortunately, neither has the Church Catholic
ever insisted on an interpretation of this Article
which is solely or even chiefly physical, nor has the
Church of England yielded to the temptation to
narrow what the Church universal has left open.
In fact her history for three centuries has been
distinguished by an increasing desire to expand
towards truth from whatever quarter it come, to
listen to the voice of Reason, to ignore noisy
fanaticism, and to encourage Religion under every
form, demanding only the proofs of life.
But we must not fail to do justice to the stern
demand made on the reciter of the Creed by the
word Virgin. The end of the Christian religion is
to train souls for God, and its beginning is in being
born of God. But no one can be born from above
who does not come with a virgin-soul, virgin in
the sense of being pure from all self-seeking, at least
1 1 Cor. V. 3, vi. 4 ; Tit. iii. 10 ; 1 John iii. 10.

VIII THE THIRD ARTICLE 151
in desire, and not in the sense of never having
tasted of the forbidden fruit. In the Paradise of
God is place as well for the violet of penitence as
for the lily of innocence ; or shall we say that the
lily of earth must pass into the violet of suffering
before it can be transmuted into the lily of heaven ?
It is not ignorance of evil which fits for heaven, but
the knowledge of it and power over it, born of
resistance and ending in hatred of it. Where that
hatred has become a fixed habit, or even so much
of a habit as God can accept as the germ,! there is
the Virgin-soul ready for the quickening power of
the Spirit, in order that out of the union of the two
the Christ may be born as the hope of the glory
that is to be.^ The beatitude, " Blessed are the
pure in heart," * is for those childlike hearts which
have shed the glamour of self-consciousness, self-
seeking, and self-complacency, and are ready to
hearken when God speaks, and to do whatever
God orders. This may consist, and often does
consist with the presence of many weeds in the
soul's garden, but it is this single-pointed character
of the soul which marks the candidate for the
higher life. Dr. Johnson with his sound common-
sense had this truth in mind when he said of a
carelessly - living man that he was a good man,
seeing that he always took off his hat on passing a
Church. The universe then is of one piece, where the
macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm, or vice
versa ; hence the signs of the Zodiac are also in
the structure of man, and he has his heavenly
mother, his sun-god, and his dragon. The dragon
of the deep is the power of Matter, or of separated
1 Rom. iv. 17. ' Col. i. 27. " Matt. v. 8.

152 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
selfhood which seeks to devour the divinity latent
in man. When the Soul, figured as Eve, listens to
the seductions of sense, i.e. of Life as seeking to act
apart from the Whole, she becomes from generate
degenerate and must become regenerate, i.e. she must
become purified, or single-pointed, and then perfect
her purification by giving birth to the Christ through
the Spirit who is her true husband. Eve must
become Mary, and her Son the St. George bruising
the serpent's head. The Soul is first the daughter,
then the spouse, and finally the Mother of God,
But since the roots of all the Ideas or Forces
or Principles or Persons of the phenomenal order
have their roots in the Divine Being from whom
they proceed, this same law of Duality, so far from
being arbitrary, will appear as the necessary expres
sion in Space and Time of that Unity which is
beyond and behind both. God the Father manifests
as Father - Mother, as Life - Substance, where the
Power which manifests as the substance of all
things is in things above styled the Heavenly Mother
and in things below the Blessed Virgin Mary.
" In the Unmanifest She is the Great Deep, or
Ocean of Infinitude, the Principium or Arche, the
heavenly Sophia, or Wisdom, Who encircles and
embraces all things ; of Whom are dimension and
form and appearance ; whose veil is the astral fluid,
and Who is Herself the substance of all souls." !
1 A. Kingsford, The Perfect Way, Leet. II. p. 34. In the Fourth Gospel
the Prologue contains manifest references to Gnostic speculations in the
terms it uses, such as Beginning, Word, Light, Life, Darkness, Fulness,
Man, Monogenes. Its object appears to be to simplify this doctrine of
aeons by " recapitulating " them in the " only-begotten Son." In this
case it is noticeable that the 'Apx'/] or Principium (St. Augustine treats the
term as personal) is linked with Abyos as NoCs with So^ia, the Heavenly
Mother. The Aiyos or Heavenly Son is in the Xoipla or Heavenly Mother,
while Qebs the Father as the 'H.Tjyi] $eibTi]Tos is the ground of all .

THE THIRD ARTICLE 153
Hence when we come to interpret the article
" conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary," there lies behind us that vast mass of
secular tradition which comes down from the
oldest age and meets us to-day alike in Catholic
ritual and in Goethe's Faust. The Heavenly
Mother, the Divine Wisdom, the Blessed Virgin
Mary, the Ewig-weibliehe are synonymous.
If there is any solid ground in Reality for this
interpretation, the thoughtful mind will view the
relegation of the symbol of the Mother and Child
to obscurity or contumely as a blunder of the first
magnitude on the part of the Protestant world.
The fact that Egypt and Babylon had the grace
to exalt the symbol in pre-Christian days is with
all unprejudiced persons an argument in favour of
its continuance. The further fact that the symbol
has been abused (if indeed it has) in the mediaeval
and in the Roman Church of to-day may suggest
caution and enjoin a sense ofthe proportion of things
but cannot be used as a valid argument for disuse.
In all probability the spirit which began by spitting
on the Divine Mother and Child is the same which
has since proceeded to de-sanctify the home, to
degrade womanhood, to worship force, to justify
prostitution, to seek for wealth and ensue it, and in
general to substitute materialism for Life and Pur
pose, and utilitarianism for Beauty and Goodness.!
1 One result which might be fairly looked for from a wise use of the
symbol of the Mother and Child would be the abolition of the common
but wholly wrong habit of thought, which treats as unholy all that pertains
to parenthood. This disaster might have been avoided if the article
" conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary " had been seen
to emphasise among other things the celestial law which underlies the
ordinary process of conception and birth. Indeed we may say of ordinary
birth even that in every case the true parent is a divine Spirit, a Power of
the Highest God, and that the earthly father is merely a mode of working

154 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chapvui
If the Mother and Child be the supreme symbol of
religion ; if the symbol is bound up with worship —
worship in spirit and in truth — of the Great Reality
which is as truly the eternal Mother as the eternal
Father, then the result in ultimates of its rejection
will be coarseness, pushfulness, egoism, lawlessness,
and social heedlessness and cruelty. The world is
of one piece, and falseness anywhere mars the whole,
the falseness in the soul issues in foulness in the body.
The worship of the eternal Beauty may be re
commended from our pulpits and illustrated by
our choirs, but until it is assigned its equal right
with ethic and thought in deed as well as in word,
that is, until we practical and calculating Anglo-
Saxons eschew our traditional timidity where
Beauty is concerned, and worship it and not merely
use it as an adjunct in our Churches, not till then
shall we begin to lead our fellows to live by admira
tion, hope, and love. In every Church the Mother
and the Child, perhaps in the form of the Sistine
Madonna, should find a place, not as an " idol,"
but as a " book of the unlearned," that is, of all
of us, in which we may see reflected something of
the Divine Love and Beauty which are implicit in
the formula, " conceived by the Holy Ghost and
born of the Virgin Mary."
of this unseen Power. How much more true is this when the " child "
that is being conceived is a holy thing, a Son of God, and how sacred a
thing would earthly parenthood be seen to be if it were realised that a
divine Spirit overshadows those who are becoming parents, and acts as
the Lord and the Giver of Life 1 This awful truth is if anything made still
more awful by observing that in the Gospel-story the conception takes
place at the moment of self-surrender when the soul yields itself with the
words, " Behold the handmaid of the Lord." It is as if all that had
gone before was but the wooing of His Bride by the divine Bridegroom,
and as if the wooing became effective only by the yielding of the human
will to the divine.

CHAPTER IX
THE FOURTH ARTICLE
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified,
dead, and buried
Tov TTaOovTa i'jrl Uovtiov UiXdrov, aTUvpaidevTa,
diroOavovTa Kal Ta(j)evTa
Suffered
Mankind is subject to a double law which compels
it while maintaining the authority of what it knows
of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, to press
forward at the same time to the pursuit of what
is more good, more beautiful, and more true, and
the price it pays for necessary obedience to both
laws is Suffering. For, in the first place, experience
has convinced us that no treasure we have in keep
ing can remain ours for long unless we are prepared
to do violence to our constitutional love of ease,
to our mental and moral vis inertiae, and expend
as much energy in preserving our good as went to
the winning. A fortune won by one man's energy
tends to be dispersed by the third descendant
through ignorance of the conditions under which
it can be held. Similarly, the same vis inertiae
acts perpetually to make us content with what
we already hold, no matter how we may have gained
it, and to prevent us from putting forth energy to
155

156 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
make our possession richer and fuller. The resist
ance that Life as a progressive force makes to this
stubborn conservatism of things is the proximate
cause of Suffering.
Suffering is the feeling of displeasure which
arises when Life feels itself thwarted in its onward
march, that is, whenever consciousness is obstructed
or disabled in its faculty of paying attention.
Monotony, on the other hand, such a multiplicity
as causes distraction, simplicity without variety,
or complexity without unity, disorder when we
expected order, movement when we looked for rest,
defeat or disappointment, morbid sensitiveness to
external things, the enslaving effect of heredity or
environment, all are examples of the displeasure
which comes when " effective attention . . , fails
of exercise owing to the narrowness of the field of
consciousness and the slowness and smallness of
its changes." ! These hindrances to attention (if
we prefer to exalt Thought) or to Will (if we prefer
Will) come from two directions, one within, and
one without ; from within when we are dimly
conscious of desiring more than we have power
to grasp ; and from without when the course of
Nature or of History limits us in the pursuit of
what our innermost being impels us to desire and
to strive for.
Suffering then may be described as the spontane
ous protest of Life against Death, or conversely as
the toll exacted by Death from Life, or as the bridge
which has to be crossed by the " Love " of Hera-
clitus before it can overcome his " Discord." In
the Article before us the " suffering " of Jesus
1 Professor James Ward in art. " Psychology " in Ency. Brit., 9th ed.,
XX. 71 ; cf. stout. Manual of Psychology, 1899, pp. 276-283.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 157
Christ is defined as coming from outside sources,
since it is under Pontius Pilate. Before, however,
attempting to show what this Suffering consisted
in it seems necessary to indicate briefly the uni
versality of this phenomenon of suffering, for the
groaning and travailing in pain of Creation is an
anticipatory illustration of the similar pain of the
sons of God, and of the Son of God Himself.
(o) Even in the vegetable world there occurs a
phenomenon which is analogous to suffering in the
higher kingdoms of Nature. Nowhere else is the
competition for a place to live in more acute than
here. A garden untended will soon be overgrown
with weeds, and the weeds will kill out the more
delicate plants that it may be desired to rear, while,
on the other hand, if these latter are to grow the
former must be ruthlessly exterminated. If you
want your hedges to put out a thick and effective
undergrowth you must clip their tops regularly,
and if your fruit-trees and rose-trees are to bear
fruit and blossom they must be severely pruned,
and sometimes cut back cruelly. All of this shows
that Life is a Force which is constantly seeking
expression, and that it can find its higher forms
(as we consider them) only by suffering the lower
forms to be removed by man as their Deus ex
machina. (6) In the animal world feeling appears as the
expression of its higher life, and cries, as in the case
of the higher vertebrates, dogs, cats, birds, etc.,
make themselves heard as the protest of the animal
against a violent interference with the course of its
natural activities, or violent convulsive movements
as with eels, worms, or frogs. The silent anger of
the sufferer from toothache, or the fortitude of the

158 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
wounded soldier marks the more calm but not less
strenuous judgment that the suffering endured is
as such a hostile invader.
(c) In man's psychic life suffering plays a still
more considerable part, in spite of the curiously-
unnoticed fact that much of it is disguised from the
subject under names which seem to transfer it to
the moral order, although the very term applied
to them, viz. " passions," should be enough to
reveal their true character. Thus vanity is a form
of suffering arising from the necessity felt by the
individual to maintain a sense of his own import
ance in face of the attacks made on it by the en
croaching superiority of others ; quarrelsomeness
is a form of suffering which consists of Egoism
thrown into convulsions by competition for a good
which cannot be shared ; deceit is a form of suffering
undergone by the weaker in order to escape from
the despotism of the stronger ; vengefulness is a
form of suffering which seeks to restore to self-
conceit an equilibrium it has lost ; and obstinacy
is a form of suffering caused by the effort of a man
to persuade himself that he is strong. These and
similar " passions " belong at bottom to the passive
side of the soul ; they are endured not willed, and
appear as the reaction of the soul to stimuli from
without {e.g. from other men) which are thought
or felt to be hostile to the degree of Life then
enjoyed by the sufferer. That Life is prized, and
to maintain it the corresponding suffering is under
gone. {d) In man's spiritual life a still higher grade is
reached, and the same law which enjoins Suffering
also sharpens it and ennobles it at the same time.
For the spiritual man is one whose centre of gravity

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 159
has been shifted from the lower and narrower Self
to the Higher Self, and, therefore, the Life of which
he is the guardian is, as he knows, not his but
common to all. Hence his interests are in the larger
world, in his family, his country, or even in every
one who bears the form of man, and where his
interests are there are his pains. His sufferings
are inexplicable to those on the lower steeps of life,
for they do not centre in his own personality, but
in others and even in remote nations. An Armenian
massacre, an injustice in Calcutta, atrocities in
South America or West Africa, these cause in him
a sense of suffering of the most intense and mordant
kind because such wickednesses are felt as a stain
on the escutcheon of mankind, or a defiance of God,
and a denial of that divine Life which the spiritual
man finds in himself and had hoped to find every
where else.
All these rising grades of suffering show that
Life automatically pays the price demanded of it
whenever anything of its own Truth, Goodness, or
Beauty is assailed. It asserts its right to live in
its chosen form, and to maintain that living form
against all comers. Its suffering is Nature's danger-
signal, and the sign of the individual's response to
the challenge to meet his foe. Similarly it may be
shown that suffering is the toll exacted not only
when anything has to maintain its right to the good
it has, but when it has to push forward in the
quest of a higher good which it has not yet
acquired.! In this latter case the Law of Suffering, how
ever, is interlocked with another Law, the Law of
1 " Joy is the tendency to Unity ; Sorrow is the division of the One "
(St. Augustine, De Lib. Arb. ch. xvi.).

160 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Compensation, of which the rule of asceticism as prac
tised by Oriental hermits and Egyptian monks was
a caricature. For the Law of Compensation lays
down that while the amount of Life-force that the
individual thing can bear to receive and use remains
constant within certain limits, it can grow in one
direction on the condition only of ceasing to grow
in others. Thus, for example, the specialist is great
in his own department but at the cost of the loss
of a more general culture ; physical toil develops
muscle, but not brain ; ambition is incompatible
with a life of passion ; breadth and depth of mental
life are apt to cancel one another ; in short it is not
in religion alone that the service of two masters
is impossible. This Law, then, which seems to exact develop
ment in sections subserves that greater Law which
insists that the progress of a self-purposive being
shall be brought about not merely by constant
effort on his part to reach the ideal, but also by an
equally constant refusal to allow place to isolated
impulsive tendencies. In neither case is the result
brought about without effort, and the more sustained
the effort the higher is its value and the more
probable its ultimate success. But since effort
implies resistance to the Will and every emotion
is disagreeable when the conative tendencies in
volved in it are thwarted,! it follows that pain or
suffering is an inevitable accompaniment of all
endeavour either to maintain or to secure the True,
the Beautiful, and the Good.
The statement, then, in the Creed that Jesus
Christ suffered involves the affirmation that His
life was a truly human life in that it was marked
1 Stout, Manual of Psychology, p. 298.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 161
by an unceasing struggle for its goal, and for the
overcoming of all obstacles in its path. It makes
little difference whether this devotion is called the
doing of the Father's will,! qj. ^he being baptized
with His proper baptism,^ or submission,^ or an
ardent desire,* or a steady purpose,^ or an unmoved
knowledge of the end,** or an eye on the prize,' for
what is clearly taken for granted in the N.T. is
that the life of Jesus was not a life of calm, going
steadily to its destined end with stoic apathy or
Oriental fatalism, but was a real, sincere, genuine
human life filled with the same experience of struggle
and suffering as the lives of other men are, which
could mourn for others' ills,^ and feel an aversion
from suffering." He too learned obedience by the
things which He suffered.!"
His suffering then cannot be properly appraised
if we sever it from His human struggle to maintain
in unbroken continuity the harmony of the two
Wills in Him, or in other words to resist all " tempta
tions," which, if not resisted, would make a breach
between them. The nature of these temptations
may be illustrated by two passages in the story of
His life. His " temptations in the wilderness," !!
and His own description of them.!^
A. The Temptations in the Wilderness. — The
wilderness with its forty days is a familiar Biblical
image for this our mortal life of trial and struggle,
the purpose of which is to bring the elements of our
lower soul-nature (figured by the number four)
into obedience to the law of God (figured by the

1 John iv. 34. " Luke xii. 50. ' Mark xiv. 36.
* Luke xxii. 15. « Luke ix. 51. « Matt. xx. 18.
' Heb. xii. 2. ' Matt, xxiii. 37. ' Luke xxii. 42, Mark xv. 34.
i» Heb. V. 8. " Matt. iv. 1-11. i^ Luke xviii. 31-34. M

162 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
number ten).^ This process has to be brought
about in the wilderness, that is, in a state of the soul
which is a wilderness through want of cultivation,
where the plough of trial and suffering has not
broken up the fallow-ground,^ where the seed of
Divine life is, but is dormant until wakened by the
shock from without. Hence the three " temptations
in the wilderness " are not to be restricted to one
time or one place, but are typical of the tests, or
trials, which came throughout the life down to the
end.^ A very cursory consideration of them should
suffice to show their typical character.
(a) Every initiation into Life is preceded by
tests, and the tests fall under three heads, correspond
ing to the threefold division of man's nature into
body, soul, and spirit, where all three are good
because coming from God. The test is not to see
whether the Ego will yield to the allurements of
sense, but whether it will elect to order its lower
will by the higher will. Not sensuality, not pride
is the root of sin, but self-will. Hence the " first
' The significance of the numbers given in the Bible has not been
sufficiently observed, and when it has it has been too often carried to
absurd extremes, but it may be pointed out briefly that ordinarily one
stands for the Divine Nature as Unmanifest ; two as Manifest ; three is
God as both ; four is the signature of the material world ; five is the sign
of Man's soul struggling with Matter ; six is the number of equilibrium or
of the cessation of activity ; seven (3-1-4) is man's lower self in perfect
harmony with spirit ; eight is the number of a fresh beginning and therefore
of regeneration ; nine (rarely used) is the number which falls short of ten ;
ten is the number of perfect obedience ; eleven of disobedience ; and twelve
of the full, harmonious total of the inner powers of Man. That this inter
pretation is not fanciful may be seen from the example of St. Augustine
and St. Gregory in their interpretation of John xxi. 11, where 153 as the sum
of the first seventeen natural numbers is explained to be the number of
those who in the power of the sevenfold Spirit keep the ten commandments
of God. We must also remember that the O.T. was finally edited and the
N.T. took its rise in a period when Kabbalism and kindred modes of thought
were prevalent.
" Jer. iv. 3. ^ Luke xxii. 28.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 163
temptation in the wilderness " takes the form of a
suggestion that the " end " for which the Christ-
soul is sent here might be attained by the use of
personal capacities, i.e. of real but lower powers.
To turn stones into bread is to raise up sons to God
out of the stony hearts of men,! j^q^- ^^y ^j^g power
of God but independently of God, by means of
powers lodged in the individual. In Matt. iii. 9
it is God who can raise up children, as in 1 Cor. xv.
38 it is God who gives the seed its body, and so
here Jesus replies that it is by God's creative power
that men live. He refuses to allow that eloquence,
learning, political power, social influence, or historic
prestige, or other powers than those flowing out
directly from God are fit weapons for helping
towards the raising up sons of God.^ The Great
Work which all ages have been dumbly crying
out for, and ours not least, can only be done in the
power of obedience and loyalty to the living God.
(&) But if success is not to be sought for along
the road of the dexterous use of natural powers,
may it not be achieved by the use of Magic ? May
not a man separate himself from the crowd, live on
a pinnacle of the temple, master the creatures of
the four elements, develop astral, demonic, Atlanti-
dean powers of terrific intensity, defy the " Dweller
on the Threshold," and compel even angels to do
I Cf. Matt. iii. 9.
^ Is not this a word for " Socialists " as well as others ? The better
sort of " Socialist " hopes that the kingdom of God will be established, or
nt least hastened, by an improvement in our methods of the production
and distribution of wealth, especially ifthe community as a whole regulates
these processes. But they forget that unless human nature be changed
for the better at the same time, the same kind of men will show the same
kind of selfishness under the new conditions, and will therefore change the
form of social evils, but not their character. What is wanted is better
men, not better laws, and to get better men God must be called in.

164 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
his bidding ? Would not such a man be able to
take a short cut to beneficent rule, and compel the
masses to a better life by dazzling them with a
display of his superhuman powers ?
Science may not have yet found the secret of
such powers, but science is not in a position to deny
their existence, or the possibility of their attainment,
nor can we dismiss all legends which tell of them
as products of pure fancy or love of the marvellous.
The reply, too, of Jesus does not affirm or deny
their contingency, but says that admitting their
existence they are not lawful in the sense suggested.
The person who labours to acquire such powers in
his solitary watch-tower, or to use them at his own
discretion, is running a fearful risk in tempting the
Lord his God, committing the one sin which the
Lord's Prayer directs itself against, the sin of
Massah and Meribah, the sin of usurping the
sovereignty of God in deciding without Him to act
as His vicegerent.
The bane of minds which pursue Power apart
from Ethic consists in an extravagant adulation
of a fancied greatness in things, and in the absence
of a sense of proportion of worth in common things.
Cut off from patient and reverent study of the
Actual they invest the world around them with
imaginary potentialities, and long for the acquisition
of powers which they are too impatient or too lazy
to acquire by the patient study of Nature in detaiL
Hence comes the attraction of such offers as a
Mephistopheles offers a Faust, and a Satan to
Jesus. Instead of going to school with Dame
Nature to learn her truths they bid us to impose
our guesses and desires on her, and so compel her
to our will. This critical difference of aim and

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 165
method is what underlies alike the suggestion to
leap down from the pinnacle of the Temple ; the
legends in the ToVdoth Jesu of the conflicts in the
air between Jesus and Judas ; ! the similar conflicts
between Peter and Simon Magus, and the stories
of the Witches' Sabbaths of the Middle Age. The
impatience, or pride, or self-will involved in these
is what Jesus in His lifetime suffered as a tempta
tion, and decisively rejected on the ground of the
duty of obeying, not tempting God.
(c) A still more subtle form of temptation then
came to effect what the others had failed in doing.
The spiritual life has as its property the power of
rising to the inner Mount of Contemplation whence
can be seen in an ineffable way all the kingdoms of
the world and the glory of them in a moment of
time. Few men but can look back to moments
of insight and detachment when the secret heart of
things seemed to be disclosed, the worth of them all
revealed as in a flash, and the possession of them
half-promised. The soul seemed then shivering
on the brink of a new and higher kind of energy
and happiness, and it felt like the Three on the
Mount that it was good to be there, and it desired
to make for itself a tabernacle so as to retain for a
time its bliss. The poet, the seer, the prophet, the
reformer, the devotee, the saint can testify to this
experience, and some of them have also testified
to the subtle temptation which accompanies this
mystic experience to utilise it as material for the
feeding of the Lower-self, to turn into a more
1 This is an imitation of the legend of a conflict in the air between
Simon Ma°gus and Peter, and of another between Moses and Bileam. The
behef in Magic underlies all three stories. See Krauss, Das Leben Jesu
nach judisctien Quellen, 1902, p. 175.

166 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
refined enjoyment what was sent as an invitation
to go up higher.
From this to trusting to be able to control the
higher social forces is a short and easy step. The
seer whose heart is not pure may easily persuade
himself that the exceptional grace accorded him
is proof of his security, and may proceed to com
mit himself for gaining his life's end to the use of
such powers as his character, reputation, influence,
position, or wealth puts within his reach. To trust
to these, however, instead of looking to God to
direct him is to trust to the power of the form-world
of which " Satan " is the Lord. The rejection of
the temptation is secured by the restoration of the
principle that man's duty is to worship not the Lord
of Form, but the Lord of Life and to commit him
self to His hands for service.
These three forms of recurring temptations,
recurring in hydra-headed forms during His earthly
life, called for constant watchfulness and prayer,!
for striving,^ for vehement effort,* for constant
communion with God.* And all this involved
effort and tension, and these in their turn brought
with them suffering.
These typical sufferings, however, are dealt with
in the narrative from their inner side rather than
their outer, as the generalised essential content of
an indefinite number of external attacks. In
another passage we are given another picture of
the Lord's sufferings regarded now from the outside,
and described by means of the persons who in
flicted them, and of the means they used. The
passage is Luke xviii. 31-34, and its parallel
1 Mark xiii. 37. 2 Luke xiii. 34.
= Matt. xi. 12. i Luke vi. 12.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 167
Mark x. 32-34, and it is so remarkable that it
deserves something more than a passing notice.
B. The sufferings are those of the " Son of Man,"
i.e. of Him who is the Son of the Heavenly Man,
and is commissioned to confer the same title on
others, provided that they become friends by
oneness of life (John xv. 15).! With them He is
in the Way, the Way that leadeth to Life, which is
the Way of purity, humility, and obedience trodden
by all who are given to the Son by the Father,^
though in each generation they be few who find it.*
This Way leadeth up to Jerusalem, the City of the
Great King, the goal of every pilgrim, the home to
which the destined " son of man " is a stranger
while he is in exile on earth. But that he is ascend
ing, what is this but that he first descended?
The Pilgrim, like his Master, "cometh from afar,
and the star that riseth with him, his life's star
hath had elsewhere its setting." But no Pilgrim
travels securely unless his Master go before the
twelve. These Twelve represent the completed
personality of every man when he comes to be
perfect as his Master, and are the three gates of
each of the four sides of the heavenly Jerusalem,
the twelve signs of the Zodiac and the twelve tribes
of the 144,000 of the redeemed Israel. The Christ
goes before to show the Way ; the disciple who
so far has not brought to harmony his twelvefold
being depends on Him for guidance and pro
tection. The Son of Man undergoes aU the sufferings
and trials which are necessary for perfecting His
humanity. This Initiation of the human into the
1 Cf. my paper on the Son of Man (Headley Brothers).
= John vi. 37. ' Matt. vii. 14.

168 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
mysteries of Divine life is the goal set before Him —
"He shall be fully initiated "=TeX6<70j?creTat.! In
the early hylic days, long, long before any ideal
was seen or effectively known by rudimentary man,
he learned the value of earth's lower goods by
taking them and enjoying them to the full. Then
he was taught by experience that lower pleasures
do not satisfy, and that he must discriminate as
to the kind, and be prudent as to the quantity of
pleasure he snatched. Next there was slowly
developed out of this self-control joined to the
pressure of social life a sense that each pleasure
offered itself not for acceptance, but as an instru
ment of testing. Out of this recognition sprang
with untold struggle and suffering the Will to push
forward to the goal, to deny the lower Self, and to
embrace cheerfully the sufferings through which
we enter into life. So the Pilgrim is born, so he
suffers, and so he reaches the haven where he
would be.
He has one source of assistance if only he knows
it. The whole course has been mapped out for
him by the " prophets," i.e. by the goodly company
of men who have seen the truth of Life and have
spoken of it to others, not only Bible prophets, but
men of all peoples and languages, men like Isaiah,
Hosea, Amos, Pythagoras, Plato, Aeschylus, Dante,
Kant, Goethe, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning. All
in varying degrees of insight and faithfulness do
but repeat the teaching of the Master of them all
that to attain the life that is life indeed we must be
content to surrender the life which is its shadow,
its dvTifMifiov TTvevfia.
The Man of God is next said to be " handed
1 Luke xviii. 31.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 169
over " ! tothe chief priests and scribes first, and by
them to the Gentiles. The meaning of this pro
cedure will be best discussed under the heading of
" Pontius Pilate," and it is enough here to say that
this declaration will be treated by one or other kind
of rationalist as either an intelligent anticipation,
or a prophecy after the event, but by the mystic as
the definition of the standing attitude towards him
of ecclesiastical and civil authority wherever freedom
does not exist.
The weapons of authority are ridicule ("he shall
be mocked "), insult (" spitefully entreated "),
rejection with loathing (" spitted on "), torture
(" scourged "), and finally the putting to death.
Ridicule is the first form of opposition by con
servatism to what is new, and as " a slight revolt
on the surface of social life " it may have its uses,
but as often as not it is on a larger scale the kind
of criticism to which the sage is subjected by im
mature and raw youths, or the answer of ignorance
to wisdom. Insult is always the expression of a
vulgar mind when irritated by the superiority of
God's aristocrat. Loathing of that which is holy
is equally distinctive of the coarse mind when con
fronted with the Ideal it hates. And torture,
whether physical or psychical, is the only resource
the materialist has against the Idealist.
This is but a brief sketch of the place of suffering
in the higher life. No account has been taken of
the class of suffering which seems an excrescence
on Nature, or as perhaps inherent in the nature of
things, for this is beyond our present scope. It is
suffering as consciously accepted, with its origin
^ It is the same word which is wrongly translated in the story of the
Passion as " betrayed."

170 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.k
and meaning recognised, and endured as a means
to the clearly descried and chosen end with which
the Creed is concerned, the suffering of the Son
of Man, and in their degree of all who follow
Him.

CHAPTER X
THE FOURTH ARTICLE {continued)
Under Pontius Pilate
" It was an improvement on the older form of the
Creed to say ' suffered under Pontius Pilate,' and
then first to add ' crucified ' . . . for Pilate was
not the instigator of the Crucifixion."! -pj^jg jj^_
provement for the history is also an improvement
for its meaning, for just as we are sure to miss the
mark if we sever the death from the hfe, so shall
we also if we concentrate the suffering on the
crucifixion. If " Mysticism is the tendency to
draw near to the Absolute in moral union by
symbolic means," ^ then it is bound to ask what
Pontius Pilate stands for in the Creed. Granted
that he was a historic figure, a procurator of Judaea
on a given date, what moral or spiritual force did
he embody when the course of events involved him
in the history of Jesus Christ ? If he be a type,
what is the content of that type which we may
recognise in its concrete manifestations down the
course of history ?
1 Zahn, The Apostles' Creed, p. 150 : he does not think, however, that
it is Docetic polemic which is responsible for the name, but the desire to
fix the historic reality. McGiffert draws attention (Apostles' Creed, p. 130)
to the fact otherwise known that the needs of exorcism as well as of baptism
stereotyped this historical reference.
2 R6c6jac, Bases of tlie Mystic Knowledge, p. 64.
171

172 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
It will help us to answer this question if we do
not isolate Pilate but consider in connection with
him the other characters which play their part in
the Story of the Passion. The most important of
these are Caiaphas (representing the priests and
scribes), Herod, Judas, and Satan.
The last is the figure which calls for treatment
first, and is a figure which it is the easier to deal
with in thought than it was in the days of Jonathan
Edwards. For men have come to see that
Mazdaean dualism is unthinkable even in the
mediaeval form of God and Devil, and that some
how, unless the ultimate task of Thought is to mock
us, such a dualism in any form must be got rid of.
Nor does it seem enough to point us to the end of
things when the crooked shall be made straight,
and to bid us to wait patiently for the " Day," for
in the first place the Christ's good news was the
coming of the kingdom here and now, and His
coming to the soul whether in the body or out of
the body is " the day of the Lord " which was to
come ; and in the second place the dualism of Good
and Evil is a present fact and demands a present
explanation, or at all events some rational hypo
thesis which may help us for a time to do without
an explanation.
Such an explanation has been borrowed from
the modern hypothesis of Evolution in the form of
the suggestion that Evil is but Good in the making,
which hardly seems to do justice to the fact of the
persistent vitality of Evil and its recurrence on all
planes of existence. Or it has been maintained,
where Oriental influences have penetrated, that
Matter, if not evil in itself, is the cause of Evil as
being a drag on its spiritual partner. This explana-

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 173
tion, however, is divided by too fine a line from the
broad field of Manichaeism to vindicate for itself
a separate existence. Or Evil is said to be Maya,
delusion and ignorance, which declares its form
and mode of working but not its lineage or nature.
Besides, it is arguable that some degree of ignorance
in some circumstances is a boon and a safeguard,
that " where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise."
For there is apparently over us a beneficent Law
called the Law of Illusion which leads us to a truth
while we pursue some shadow as the truth itself.
But none of these suggestions supplies what we are
in search of, viz. a statement of the relations of
Good and Evil in this present world which shall
not diminish aught from God's perfection, or do
violence to our moral sense.
The following professes to provide us with suck
a statement, provided, it says, that we do not
compel it to go further than it professes to go, or
regard it as anything but a provisional solution of
what in the last resort is admittedly insoluble.
The world of phenomena is a world in which the
Divine Unity, in Itself indivisible, appears as dual
for purposes of manifestation. Subject and object ;
active and passive ; here and there ; within and
'wdthout ; thought and feeling ; male and female ;
life and form ; animate and inanimate ; Church
and State ; finite and infinite ; science and art ;
the individual and the community : these are but
a few of the complementary pairs of opposites with
which the empirical world is filled. These conjoined
opposites are given, and, therefore, it is not open
to us to say that either is better or worse, higher
or lower than the other, but only that each is
different from its partner, and that they are mutu-

174 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
ally necessary to one another. That is, that both
are worthy, equally worthy, and that the whole is
to be obtained only by a union of both.
Such pairs of opposites may be brought under
a universal concept if they be regarded for the
moment as special cases of the polaric law of
Attraction and Repulsion — ^the law formulated by
Heraclitus as that of Love and Discord.! An
excellent illustration of this may be seen in the law
which keeps the planets in their orbits, describing
what is practically an ellipse round the sun. The
two foci of this ellipse are constituted by the bright
centre which is the sun himself and a dark centre
without a local habitation, which none the less is
as important to the constancy of the whole planetary
movement as the sun himself. The sun represents
the attractive power, and the dark centre the
repulsive power ; the one power if it acted alone
would destroy the planet's separate existence, and
the other would send it to an eternal exile ; con
joined they give it its place in the Cosmos.
In the spiritual world the " Father in Heaven "
reveals Himself also under this same law of Duality :
" I form the light and create darkness ; I make
good and create evil." ^ And His name as the
attractive power in His human family is Jesus ; to
the repulsive power is given the name of Satan.
If it be objected here (a) that to raise Satan to the
dignity of a Divine potency is to bring " Evil " into
1 " strife is the father of things." And : " The One setting itself at
variance with itself, harmonizes with itself, like the harmony of the bow
and the viol." And again : " Unite the whole and the not-whole, the
coalescing and the not-coalescing, the harmonious and the discordant,
and thus we have the One becoming from the All and the All from the
One." Hippolytus in tracing the heresy of Noetus to Heraclitus takes
oocasion to quote several sayings of this Greek Hegelian (Ref. ix. 3-5).
^ Isa. xiv. 7 ; the good and evil here, however, are hedonistic.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 175
the very heart of God, and {b) to give an account
of him which is inconsistent with his description in
the Bible, it is replied that {a) if Satan exist he is
either dependent on God or independent. If de
pendent his very existence depends also on the fact
that something of God's power is his to keep him
in being, and that something, therefore, is good ;
or he is independent, in which case we are forced
back on what we have already rejected, Manichaean
dualism. Hence God's presence and power are
in Satan as in everything God has called into
existence. (6) To the second objection the rejoinder is
made that it is not wholly or even largely true, or
true to any appreciable extent, except possibly
in that singular book the Apocalypse of St. John.!
Otherwise, where Satan is named his character is
consistent with his being the Resister of God by
God's own appointment.^ And it is pointed out
that "virtue cannot be said to exist until it has
passed through a crisis, or a series of crises, where
the higher good was not merely preferred to some
lower good, but was gained only after a struggle
1 In the forty Bible passages where the name Satan is mentioned
(omitting the seven in Revelation), three only point to him as delighting
in wickedness, viz. Luke xiii. 16, Acts v. 3, 1 Tim. v. 15 ; the rest are
consistent with his character as the Adversary, and leave the question
open whether he is to be regarded as the Power which tests man to make
him see what he is, or as a person who takes pleasure in causing us to fall.
It is worth noting that all the references to Satan, except seven, are in
the N.T.
" Cf. Francis Thompson's lines :
" So still the ruler by the ruled takes rule.
And wisdom weaves itself in the loom o' the fool.
Did not obstruction's vessel hem it in.
Force were not force, would spill itself in vain ;
We know the Titan by his champfed chain." The Child-Woman.

176 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
and self-sacrifice, in which was involved some
measure of real resistance to a force which threw
its sword into the scale of the lower good. The
good action is the outcome of a good-will, and a
good-will is not a mere impulse, but settled know
ledge of what is right, and not only knowledge of it,
but agreement with it, and agreement with it
against stress of opposition.! Hence it would
seem that, if virtue is to be attained at all, the
nature of things must contain some provision for
the opposition required if virtue is to be born and
grow to maturity, just as molar motion requires
the resistance of friction, and a leap into the air
would be impossible but for the resistance of the
ground. This power does exist in the moral order,
and its name in the Bible is " Satan."
That there is much truth in this last account of
Satan or Evil as a cosmic principle will be admitted
probably by most candid minds, but even if it does
account for cosmic Evil, if it does not account for
the evil known in detail by experience, is it entitled
to regard itself as an adequate explanation, and is
it of much practical service, seeing that the evil
that affects us practically is that which occurs in
the single experiences of daily life ? Must not
any theory of Evil to be sufficient tell us why the
lower animals suffer, why so much physical and
mental suffering are to be found which, as far as
we can see, do nothing to aid the growth of virtue,
why the innocent suffer and the guilty escape ?
In short, if we are to hold fast to our belief in God's
perfection in Wisdom and Love, must we not
decide to join ourselves with Leibnitz in rejecting
His omnipotence ? Lastly, the many Biblical refer-
1 Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, ii. 720.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 177
ences to the Devil ! must at least be dealt with
before our theory of Evil is complete, and also —
what can hardly be over-emphasised i — any mere
economic explanation of Evil fails to account for its
malignity. But the common sense of mankind, and
the testimony of all the saints is express on the
malignity of evil.
It is this malignity which forbids us to be content
with the explanation afforded by the undoubted
fact of the Law of Dualism, and forces us to con
jecture that at work in the world somehow are
personal Beings of superhuman, perhaps gigantic
powers, who are so far gone from original righteous
ness as to find their pleasure in thwarting the ends
of Divine Goodness. But this is to confess that the
problem of Evil is ultimately insoluble by us. We
must, therefore, when we attempt to deal with it,
not only allow for the Resister whom God has
appointed, but also for the Lover-of-Evil, whom
God permits. The former is a fact, the latter a
probability. It would be convenient if theological
usage would agree to call the former Satan, and the
latter the Devil.^ We will anyhow take the liberty
of using this distinction here.
The Son of Man then submits Himself to Satan
as the great Tester, even as all things from the
lowest to the highest grow to their perfection by
overcoming the resistance offered to their progress
by their en'dronment. Virtue is the product of a
1 The word " devil " or " devils " occurs seventy-eight times in the Bible,
of which all but four are in the N.T. A simUar proportion occurs in the
use of " Satan." The devil (or devils) is represented as the cause of
various kinds of sickness, of sin, and as (like Satan) the tempter of man.
In Revelation only are the Devil and Satan expressly identified.
" " Diabolus non speciale nomen est, sed commune ; operis enim
nomen est, non naturae " (Quaest, V. et N.T,, quoted by Delitzsch, Biblical
Psychology, 1879, p. 362). N

178 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
happy mean between fostering care and hostile
opposition. As Satan desired to have Peter for
sifting,! gQ ag the "authority of darkness," ^ he
seized his Master, and so does he test each disciple
through his appointed agents. Of these, four bulk
large in the story of the Passion, the scribes and
priests, Herod, Judas, and Pilate.
(a) The Ecclesiastical System. — We must distin
guish under this term two opposite conditions of
Church -life : the ideal, where the Church in its
head and in its members is open-eyed, loyal, truth-
loving, and humane ; the fallen, where the Church
has lost its savour, has made terms with the world,
basks in Court-favour, or manages the " ci'vium
ardor prava iubentium " for its own interests.
The former, some would be disposed to say, is no
empirical body, but is the Church of Christ as it
exists in the Divine Idea, while the latter may
be found represented by every ecclesiastical body
known to history.
The function of the ideal Church is to champion,
to preserve, and to foster among men the principle
of inner Freedom which at its highest is that
" living Love that wills the blessedness of others."
This presupposes of necessity that no other powers
but those of the spiritual order are at its disposal.
It cannot punish by fine or imprisonment, by exile
or excommunication any of its brethren— a Brother
hood such as this knows nothing of governors and
governed, of priests and laymen, — but is bound in
honour and consistency to trust to the persuasive
power of its own inner life, and not even to feel the
temptation to apply any degree or kind of force
whatsoever to the furtherance of its mission. This
1 Luke xxii. 31. ^ Luke xxii. 53.

X THE FOURTH ARTICLE 179
is the truth which the late Count Tolstoy insisted
on, and had he restricted its application to the
Church of Christ instead of extending it to the
State his position would have been unassailable.
But " corruptio optimi pessima." The Church
which is essentially a Brotherhood built up on Love
and Freedom may — ^history almost declares will —
degenerate into an institution of the civil pattern
with officers, laws, penalties, and the whole para
phernalia of political institutions. In the last
resort, such a body rests on force which is either
naked and unashamed as when Calvin burned
Servetus, or cowardly and hypocritical as when the
various Inquisitions used the civil power as their
tool.! Of such a Church Caiaphas is made the
type, and with him are associated Scribes and
Pharisees, chief priests, all men eminent for piety
and respectability, and, therefore, able to carry
with them the popular voice, to appeal, if need be,
to the fact that everything had been done according
to law, and when all was over to go home and thank
God that one prophet the less was left to disturb
their peace.
But evil as such a power is when judged by the
standard of Love and Freedom, yet it is used as
an instrument of Satan, the Tester, in order to
perfect the Son of Man by compelling Him to
resistance to death against all attempts to make
Him false to His trust.
{b) Herod. — Gibbon in a famous remark to the
1 Monsignor Benson, in that wrong-headed book, Ttie Dawn of All,
suggests that a State which is based on the dogmas of the Catholic Church,
as e.g. in Spain, is bound to put to death heretics as bad citizens, seeing
that they strike at the foundation of the State. This contention does not
affect the iniquity of the ecclesiastics who murdered the Albigenses and
burned Jeanne d'Arc.

180 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
effect that to the philosopher all religions are
equally false, to the populace equally true, and to
the magistrate equally useful,! jj^^g j^jt off the
character of Herod. As a half-breed, in touch at
once with Jewish piety and Roman state -craft,
Herod represents that type of culture increasingly
common in days like the present which regards
religion as venerable, picturesque, and doubtful,
but a fit subject for Concordats, Falk Laws, and
Articles of Religion, to be delicately handled when
it is strong, and to be mocked and set at naught
when it is weak. Our only interest in this dilettante
culture is that rotten at the heart though it be it
contributes none the less its tribute of support to
the work of Satan as the Tester of the sons of God.
(c) Judas Iscariot. — This character has received
nothing biit obloquy for the treachery which history
lays to his charge, and for this the word " betray "
applied to his action in the English version is to a
large extent responsible. Yet the word throughout
the narrative is TrapaBlBwpii, " hand over," ^ and
this is patient of a good as well as an evil connota
tion. If we adopt the distinction made above we
may say that in so far as Judas acted as an agent
of Satan, his function consisted in perfecting the
machinery of the final testing ; while in so far as
his personal action was due to unregulated impulses,
or to that evil state of the Self which gives life
to debased desires and aversions (motives) which
are the condition precedent of evil actions, he was
doing the work of the Devil. But our judgment
on the man ought not to restrict itself to the latter
aspect, but also bear in mind that even Judas played
1 Decline and Fall, ch. ii.. Prof. Bury's ed., i. 28.
" Cf. Luke xxii. 4, 6.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 181
a necessary part in the process by which the Son
of Man went as it was written of Him.
{d) Pontius Pilate. — And so lastly we come to
Pilate as the representative of the civil power,
known as the State. The prominent position in
wrong-doing assigned to Pilate is due to the correct
judgment passed by the Early Church, and by
every wise and just-thinking man of every Church,
that the State as such is a monument of Evil, an
excrescence on the community it oppresses under
due forms of law. Just as we saw above that the
true Church is a Brotherhood for the purposes of
the Law of Freedom, but may degenerate into
an ecclesiastical tyrant, so the community, which
should also be a Brotherhood for the purposes of
the Law of Necessity, may also degenerate into
an engine of tyranny, by which a despot, or a ruling
class, or, worst of all, the many oppress the private
citizen and rob him of his legitimate liberty. Of
such a class are all existing governments, and their
evil character is made not a whit the less black
because the people love to have it so. Indeed, it
is on the very virtues of his victims that the modern
Pilate thrives. The ordinary good man has all
Hooker's respect for Law as the voice of God
Himself, and shrinks with righteous horror from
breaking it. But the State exploits this virtue of
the good man, and thunders at him that its decrees
are also " law," whereas they are but emergency
makeshifts (generally noxious), and so he by a
verbal quibble is made to transfer from Law as " a
coherent, harmonious, and logical whole " to law
as a skimble-skamble device the reverence which
is due to the former, and to stifle the indignation
due to the latter.

182 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
The amazing thing about the history of every
Pontius Pilate is that he is supported most whole
heartedly of all people by those who profess and
call themselves Christians, in disregard of the plain
fact that their Master was oppressed by him, and
that, therefore, they should expect to be treated
likewise. If it be said that He bade us give to
Caesar Caesar's we reply that this objection ignores
the sharpness of the irony with which this so-called
injunction was accompanied. " Since you are slaves
who consent to use your master's money," it says
in effect, " give him back what you have borrowed."
But His own rule of conduct was different. When
brought before civil authority, whether the Sanhe
drim,! or Herod,^ or Pilate,* He answered nothing ;
He refused to plead, because He did not admit the
jurisdiction of any civil power over the Freedom
of the individual. He submitted Himself without
complaint to the indignities and cruelties which the
civil power in its various forms saw fit to infiict,
because He knew them to be the work of Satan
as the lord of Form and the Tester of the saints,
but He also saw in them the work of the Devil,
and, therefore, by His silence He declared His
judgment on usurped power, and by this very
declaration laid the axe at the root of the tree of
the State. That He did not come to found a
Religion for Sunday use, or for the cloistered piety
of delicate souls, apart from our ordinary rough-
and-tumble life is seen in the letters of His great
disciple, St. Paul, who, though he counselled obedi
ence to the higher powers,* yet limited their juris
diction by his judgment that they were " of God,"
1 Matt. xxvi. 62. 2 Luke xxiii. 9.
' Matt, xxvii. 14. * Rom. xiii. 1.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 183
and while he appealed himself to Caesar,! jt was
to him as the representative of justice.
Perhaps the recitation of the Apostles' Creed
may be more living (even if less frequent) when it
is realised that the reciter of it pledges himself
when he says that he believes that Jesus Christ
" suffered under Pontius Pilate " to that an-archism
which is the necessary fruit of the Christian life.^
This doctrine of an-archism, some will think,
has been stated here without the many necessary
qualifications which are imposed by the very law
of Duality referred to above. It is not true, it
may be urged, that the Individual can be regarded
as the one and only thing to be considered, or even
that he can be regarded as superior in value to the
community of which he is a member. For society
is an organism, and in any organism each member
is of less importance than the organism as a whole.
The member is a means to that larger good which
properly pertains to the organism alone, and hence
as being the means and not the end it is relatively
inferior. This doctrine has become so fashionable under
the suggestive influence of the conception of Evolu
tion that its fundamental opposition to the Christian
philosophy of life has been quietly overlooked. Yet
the reasons for rejecting it are numerous.
{a) In the first place, the statement that we
call Society an organism because it is the highest
category at our disposal is not in accordance with
1 Acts xxv. 11.
2 Cf . R. Browning, " Luria," sub finem :
" A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one ;
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all."

184 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
fact. A lion or an eagle as organisms are no doubt
higher in the scale of being than a heap of stones.
And if we thought of human society as an aggregate
of atoms, whose only law was that each atom might
do what it liked, provided that it did not encroach
on the equal rights of others, then in comparison
we might say that a society which is an organism
is higher than a society which is an aggregate.
But the comparison made is between two stages
of the actual, two sections of the content of experi
enced Time, and takes no account of the ideal
factor, which, starting from the ethical, looks not
backwards but forwards, and instead of comparing
two existing things tends to create some better
thing. (6) In the second place, the hint of this better
thing has been given us already in the conception of
men as free and self-conscious, that is, self-deter
mining beings. The organism which is society is
in the eyes of its devotees a Fate or Necessity over
against its individual members. And this is a
lower, if not an already obsolete estimate of the
worth of individual man ; it is a return to Nature
as mechanical instead of an ascent to Spirit as
conscious, and as obeying, therefore, the sole law of
Freedom. (c) In the third place the contention that the
Individual is an abstraction and that Society is the
concrete reality is as little an adequate account of
the matter as the opposite contention that Society
is an abstraction and the Individual the concrete
reality. For both contentions embody different
abstractions. The question is not which abstrac
tion contains the greater amount of truth (or the
less amount of error), for to determine this we must

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 185
first know the practical end for which the abstrac
tion is made, and this is not always possible. The
real question at issue is a judgment of value : Is
the Individual as such a more valuable asset to the
Universe than the Society ? We are, of course,
assuming, in asking this question, that both factors
are present and active, that Society has been busy
fashioning the Individual and the Individual active
in reacting on Society. In this case there should
be little hesitation in saying that inasmuch as the
Individual represents the Freedom of the spiritual
life and Society its conditions the Individual is of
the higher worth. For the Individual as being an
ethical expression is superior to anything which is
but a means to ethics. And hence Society has but
a Utilitarian function to discharge, that of sub
serving the highest good of the Individual.
That this question has something more than a
political importance may be seen from the reflection
that it is one of the conjectures of Pluralism that
God may be not so much an individual as a
harmonious Society of persons. This means the
intrusion of a biological conception into a realm
where such conceptions are, if not impertinent, at all
events as inadequate as an attempt to state existence
under four dimensions in terms of existence under
three. " Real universality," says Hegel, " should
not be confused 'with what is held in common," !
and the reason, he says, why man rose so slowly
to the consciousness of universality was that " man
as man was not then recognised to be of infinite
worth and to have infinite rights." And the reason
why slavery has disappeared in Christian Europe
is to be found in the fact that Christianity is the
1 Logic, § 163, p. 252, Wallace's ed.

186 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
religion of absolute freedom. " What the slave is
wanting in is the recognition that he is a person :
and the principle of personality is universality."
If I say that Epictetus is a Person I mean that the
Absolute Idea of personality as a developed universal
concentrates itself into a point which I call Epic
tetus. And it is impossible to allow another
universal called the State to intervene and destroy
the universality of the person. But absorption
would here be destruction.
{d) Further, the history of savage tribes has
made it clear that in primitive conditions of human
life the individual man has no freedom of will
within or action without. " In primitive thought
most of what a man or woman does is actually and
all is potentially taboo." ! Custom, reinforced by
fear, deprives early man of all spontaneity, and the
State, that is the tribe, is master of him at every
turn. Now the history of civilisation is the history
of the emergence of individuality in man, the
growing assertion as against the community of the
right of the individual to be himself, to order his
own life, to choose his o'wn goods and to be free to
develop himself as the Life within him dictates.
This emancipation from outside control has always
been of slow growth and has been continuously
saved, except at rare intervals, from going too fast
by the power still enjoyed by the State. Finally,
there comes a time when the restrictions of taboo
have done their work, when the Individual has out
of the very nettle of his limitations plucked the
flower of personality, and now, unless corruption
set in, on one side or the other, both the Individual
and the Community are in accord because both are
^ Crawley, The Mystic Rose, p. 30.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 187
seen to be mutually serviceable. But the process
is significant for our present purpose, as it shows
a gradual diminution of the taboos of the State,
and a corresponding liberation of the innate powers
of the Individual.
(e) The real relation of the Individual to the
State is that of Life to Form, which is to say that
the two are necessary the one to the other, for Life
without its Form is ineffective and Form without
Life is dead. But the same relation may be ex
pressed as being that of Freedom and Necessity,
and every respectable judgment of value places
the former over the latter. For Necessity is
mechanism and mechanism is always subordinate
to Life. Hence the State is the servant of the
Individual and not his master.
(/) Much of the confusion which envelops this
whole subject seems to be caused by a confusion of
different senses of the two terms Society and State.
That man is a member of society, in hourly contact
with his fellows, acted on by them and reacting
on them in his turn, that, therefore, the very nature
of things insists that some modus vivendi shall be
found to pacify his relations to them is obvious
enough. But what does not seem so obvious, even
to eminent writers on the subject, is that when
Society secures this pacification by coercion, that
is, by laws with sanctions, it is an entirely different
thing from a Society which takes the trouble to
persuade its members of a principle which shall
by its own inner attraction induce them to be just
and unselfish. These two forms of Society are so
radically opposed that they have nothing in common
but the fact that they both consist of a plurality.
Ethically, and from the point of view of efficiency.

188 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
they are to one another as Evil is to Good. For
the one rests on Force, that is, violent encroachment
on the natural rights of the indi'vidual, defined as
the rights which he ought to be allowed to enjoy ;
and the other trusts to Love, or that all-governing
inner principle which more than freedom, more
than justice is the one and only cement of human
society. If we want two names for these two mutually
exclusive forms of Good and Evil, we may call them
Socialism and Democracy, provided that we under
stand that by Socialism is meant State Socialism,
or the system under which the State would be
omnipotent and the Individual a mere object for
regimentation ; and by Democracy not the shoddy
imitation of it we now see around us, but a society
ruling itself by Love, Freedom, and the recognition
of Duty. But this is but to say Christianity.
And this is what is meant by saying that Pontius
Pilate in our story is a type of any Society which
trusts to force and has no practical belief in God
or Love or Duty, which is the kind of Society that
is being industriously cultivated in this country at
present. The ambiguity in the term " State " is parallel
to that in the term " Society." Those who think
biologically like to regard the State as but Society
organised for the common good, and in this way
they get rid of all contradiction between the Indi
vidual and the Community. Were their analogy
of the organism correctly applied it would imply
of necessity that the two spheres of interest, that
of the Indi'vidual and that of the Community,
never had been set in opposition because they
never could be. And this would be absurd, for if

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 189
it were true the French Revolution was a causeless
miracle, Philip of Spain and Alva were after all
but interpreting the wishes of those they murdered
in the Inquisition, and Charles I. was beheaded to
show how heartily Pym and Cromwell agreed with
him. From this absurdity we can escape only by
abandoning the analogy of the State to an organism
as a superstition.
Mr. Wallace says : " The State in the phrase
' state interference ' is generally used to mean the
abstract universal of the State, not looked at as a
germ of development outwards, but as a mere form
of authority or government' — a shell left behind by
the spirit when it takes another shape. The so-
called notion of the State has been arrested in its
development, at the point of abstract universality :
and the mere formula of rule or government has
been taken up by the presentative intellect and
turned into a picture with generalised outlines." ^
But what Mr. Wallace gives here as a dialectic
process of thought meets us also in the objective
world of fact as the process which the State has
unfortunately been the victim of at the hands of
sciolists. Hegel, distinguishing, as he did, the
State from Society, was able to justify his position
that the object of the State is freedom ^ by main
taining the thesis that the State arises from Society
to ensure that the individual shall be fully realised,
chiefly through his own conscious action. The
State guarantees him his individuality which Society
with its self-seeking struggle of competitors tends
to efface. With this we have no quarrel, and need
only add that this sound result is arrived at through
1 Prolegomena to the Logic of Hegel, p. cxliii.
^ Free acts being defined as rational acts.

190 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
no analogy of organism borrowed from biology,
and that the correctness of this theoretical judgment
is no guarantee that the actual State will find in
its functionaries sufficient self-restraint to enable
them to keep their hands off the individual himself.
Most of them seem to want to do the " self -realising "
of the individual for him.! Most of the difficulties
with which these writers deal arise from forgetful
ness of the fact ^ that the State is the term of
earlier and ruder organisations and the seed-bed
for others. Its mission is, like that of John Baptist,
to get through its work as soon as possible and
then make way for some one better.
The other theory of the State maintains that it
is an excrescence on the Community at one stage,
and at a lower stage an institution peculiar to
barbarism. Perhaps we should not look for the
State distinctively in the savage condition, for in
that the individual is as such hardly yet born, and
hence while his tribe is omnipotent over him it
has not yet differentiated itself against him. But
at the barbarous stage the Individual is there,
although he is as yet a slave, and is oppressed by the
man, or the caste, which can manipulate force in
its interest at his expense. And wherever this is
done, as it is done in the State of to-day, we have
a proof that we have not yet to any large extent
shaken ourselves free from earlier barbarism. So
long as the history of a community consists in the
story of a struggle of one class to retain powers of
coercion over the other classes, or of the success
or failure of these other classes to emancipate
1 Cf. D. G. Ritchie, Principles of State Interference, 1902 ; T. H. Green,
" Principles of State Obligation," Works, 1911, vol. ii. pp. 113-136.
^ Emphasised by Green.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 191
themselves, you have a confession that the State
is for both barbarous. And this is what we mean
when we say that Pontius Pilate represents the
State as an " Evil " thing, because he represents
Force as against Love, utilitarianism as against
moral values, and mechanism as opposed to Life.
The " State " in this later sense belongs to Satan ;
the Church ! belongs to Christ. And it is the fate
of the kingdoms of this world to become the kingdom
of our God.
1 In the sense to be discussed later.

CHAPTER XI
THE FOURTH ARTICLE {continued)
Was crucified, dead, and buried
On two occasions before His crucifixion Jesus spoke
of the Cross ! as something which must be accepted
by each of His disciples as a condition of disciple-
ship. He could not have anticipated that all His
disciples would be the victims of literal crucifixion ;
nor could He have been referring (like the Latin
cruciare) to torments or sufferings in general, how
ever caused, for He connects inseparably the Cross
with discipleship. It seems clear, therefore, that
we must look away from the literal if we are to
understand the meaning and place of Crucifixion in
the life of Religion, or at all events must extract
from the literal its hidden meaning if we are to give
it efficacy. In the last chapter we saw reason for believing
that the sufferings of Jesus under Pontius Pilate
were typical life-sufferings, and, therefore, a pre
sumption exists that the Crucifixion is also a life-
process which goes steadily to its climax. This is
confirmed not only by the above references to His
Cross made by Jesus Himself, but from the applica-
1 Matt. X. 38 = to Luke xiv. 27, and Matt. xvi. 24 = to Mark viii. 34,
Luke ix. 23. 192

ohap. XI THE FOURTH ARTICLE 193
tion of it made by St, Paul, He speaks of Christ
crucified as being, qua crucified, the " power of God
and the wisdom of God," and contrasts this power
and wisdom with the signs for which the Jews
looked and with the wisdom beloved by the Greeks,!
A crucified Christ, therefore, transcends the histori
cal and the individual. Again St, Paul says of
himself that he is crucified with Christ ^ where the
similar nature of the act points to a spiritual process
in both. So Christ's disciples are said to have
crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts,*
Self-indulgence is contradictory of the Cross,* In
the suggestive passage, Eph, ii, 11-18, the abolition
of all merely formal differences in religion by the
spiritual living power of crucifixion is emphasised.
Obviously, this power is not to be sought for in
the mere historical but in the spiritual process,
of which the historical crucifixion is the cognate
expression. Moreover, this method of dealing with the Cross
and Crucifixion finds support in analogous references
to other events in the life of Christ, We are
" buried with Him " ; ^ " risen with Him " ; « " dead
with Him " ; ' made to " sit with Him in heavenly
places," ^ It is impossible to interpret such passages
of literal and physical burial, death, resurrection,
and ascension, but they all become crystal-clear
when we realise that they refer to the same spiritual
process which runs its course in the Master and in
the disciple alike. He fought His way through
the Valley of the dark Shadow, and came out of it
triumphantly into the light. They, stimulated by

1 1 Cor. i. 18-25.

^ Gal. ii. 20.

» Gal. V. 24,

" Phil. iu. 18.

= Rom. vi. 4.

• Col. in. 1.

' Col. iii. 3.

» Eph. ii. 6.

194 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
His example, and (which is more potent) helped
by the spiritual power He has now authority to
supply, are engaged in fighting each his own battle,
in killing the lower, dying to self, and, therefore,
they are pari passu rising out of the earth-life and
are ascending to the heavenly.
For the doctrine of the Cross is the doctrine of
the expulsion of Egoism by Love — not of Hatred
by Love, for Hatred and Love are necessary com
plements to one another — ^but of Egoism by Love.
Egoism is the name given to the spiritual principle
of wickedness within, which is recognised most
commonly as selfishness in daily life, and finds
expression in the many failures, sins, and meannesses
with which we are all tainted. If sin be lawlessness,!
lawlessness is rooted in Egoism ; if it is darkness
it is because egoism blinds the eye of the Spirit ; ^
if it is a lie it is because it takes the part for the
whole, and makes itself its own God.*
Two writers have set out for us in different ways
but with masterly skill the natural history of
Egoism : La Rochefoucauld in his Moral Maxims
and Reflections, and George Meredith in the Egoist.
According to the former, " Self-love is the love of
a man's self, and of everything else for his own sake.
It makes people idolaters to themselves and tyrants
to all the world besides, that is, whenever they
have the opportunity of showing it."
" It never rests or fixes anywhere from home,"
but if it does for a moment dwell upon some other
thing, it is " only as bees do when they light upon
flowers, with a design to draw all the virtue there to
their own advantage."
It is " raging and violent " in its desires ; " close
1 dvopia, 1 John iii. 4. '1 John ii. 11. ' Rom. i. 25.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 195
in its Designs," is " concealed from its own self " ;
its inner world is filled with shameful things, " many
of them so monstrous that when they come to birth
it cannot be prevailed upon to own them."
" In a word, all its care is to subsist, and rather
than not be at all it is content to be its own enemy,"
With equal mordancy George Meredith etches
for us in Sir Willoughby Patterne the polished
egoist who treats everybody as mere food for his
vanity and self-pleasing, "Fiercely imaginative
in all that concerns himself the social egoist has
discovered a greater realm than that of the sensual
appetites — a kingdom about which he rushes invad
ing and harrying with all the victorious pride of
an Alexander, He goes forth conquering and to
conquer, to realise, enjoy himself in others,"
Each of these two extraordinary works is the
Egoist's Horn -book, and should be digested by
everybody who wants to understand the disease
from which the Christ saves us. The habit of
looking on our friends, our business, our pastimes,
and on the world in general as a sort of treasure-
house put there for what reasons we know not, but in
any case full of rare and precious things which we
can snatch and enjoy all to ourselves, is the habit
of mind which is sin, darkness, and falsehood. Not
the world as our football — or our oyster which we
will open with our sword — ^but as God's world of
which we are a part ; as a battle-field where our
place and duty are assigned to us ; as a furnace
of affliction in which we are being purified ; as a
thing of beauty in which we may find occasion for
losing ourselves in love and joy — ^that is what
Christ bids us to regard the world as being. We
.are to despise comfort, care nothing for applause.

196 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
cease from self-introspection, and open out the
flower of our soul to the sunshine of God's love.
The process by which Egoism is broken down
in order that Love may replace it is called the
Cross of Christ — ^the Cross that Christ bore, the
Cross that He lays on His followers. It is char
acterised by suffering, limitation, purgation, death.
It is the Power which dispels the darkness that
hides man from himself, which seeks to persuade
him that the course of his evolution upwards out
of body, through soul, to spirit, is a direct copy of
his constitution ; it liberates the Soul from slavery
to the body, and the Spirit from the usurpation of
its rights by the Soul ; it restores man's personality
to the Spirit to which it rightly belongs, and initiates
a process which ends in Peace, But its mode of
working, called Crucifixion, is hard and repugnant
to the psychical man, for like the prisoner in the
Bastille who had learned to love his prison, the soul
it is which will benefit by redemption, and in its
state of sin it resists the redemptive process.
We may, if we please, give the name of asceticism
to the crucified life, if only we remember that
asceticism is not an end but a means, that there is
no virtue in self-denial or self-discipline in and for
itself, but that it is the necessary and imperative
condition of escape from darkness into hght and
from disease into health.! On the other hand —
1 Cf. the lines : " The narrow, thorny path be trod ;
' Come into my joy,' said God ;
The sad ascetic shook his head :
' I've lost all taste for joy,' he said."
And also : " It needs little reflection to show that self-sacrifice for its
own sake is always irrational and immoral. It is the object for which
the sacrifice is made that gives it its moral value " (Rashdall, Theory of
Good and Evil, ii. 70).

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 197
and perhaps the danger here is greater^ — ^we must
remember that without self-discipline no redemption
is effective, for whatever God does for us or offers
to us is not ours without the active co-operation
of our will put forth into action, and this voluntary
action of ours consists in the inhibition of all acts,
whether inner or outer, which are inconsistent with
the Divine Life in us. It would be, however, a
mistake to suppose that Crucifixion in all cases
includes suffering, for if Crucifixion be a law of all
life it has its root in the Divine Nature, and if
suffering as we know it be conditioned by sin, then
the Crucifixion of a sinless being is the Crucifixion
of one who does not suffer because he is himself
personally a sinner. On the other hand, there may
be — ^the highest minds affirm that there is— a suffer
ing through sympathy which far exceeds the suffer
ing caused by sin. Let us see then briefly what is
meant by Crucifixion (a) as a law of Divine Life,
{b) as a law of Creation, (c) as a law of the life of
the Christ, and {d) as the law of regeneration in
ourselves. {a) The Divine Cru,eifixion. — Crucifixion essen
tially is the negation of solitariness and of self-
sufficiency ; or to put it positively, it is the going
out from self and putting our happiness in the keep
ing of another. The ground of this Crucifixion is
in the very being of the Blessed Trinity, apart from
any reference to creation or redemption. For the
very possibility of creation itself rests on the dis
tinction of eternal Energies in the Divine Nature ;
on the Divine Will by virtue of which God desires
eternally an adequate object of His love, and there
fore begets the Son, in whom He knows Himself
completely reflected as His Logos, whereupon the

198 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
same loving Will which had gone out to the Son,
being hypostatised (as is necessary to be thought),
returns to the Father as the Spirit. " If I were to
picture to the senses in a figure the process of the
Trinity, I would paint a fiery circle as the symbol
of the fiery loving will of the Father ; and in this
circle a sunlight centre as the symbol of the Son —
the object of love, which lights the whole infinite
depth of the divine nature of love ; and, proceeding
from this sunlight centre to the circumference of the
fiery circle, an abundance of rays, as the symbol of
the triumph of love going forth from the Father
through the Son, and entirely filling Father and
Son." !
Anselm's famous argument (with a difference)
may be applied here. He argued that the idea of
a Being than which a greater cannot be conceived
"is a necessary idea, and clear as daylight, so to
speak ; one which is an innate possession of the
thinking mind : clear and precise and self-evident.
There must be some explanation of it ; and the
simplest explanation is that it is evoked by the
operation of an Object, of a Reality." ^ Similarly,
we may say that since the idea of God as containing
in Himself all the treasures of the Manifold in a
living Unity, is a higher idea than that of a sterile
God " orbed in self -isolation," and so sundered from
His world to which He stands in a causal relation
only, a relation not vital, therefore the idea of the
Trinity is a higher idea than that of the mono-
1 Fr. Delitzsch, System of Biblical Psychology, 1879, p. 204. Cf. " Sicut
dum Pater se ipsum in essentia sua contemplatur, verbum mentis exprimit
et sic Filium generat : ita dum Pater et Filius se in unitate essentiae
diligunt, affectus voluntatis qui est utriusque amor, simul ab utroque
exprimitur sicque Spiritus Sanctus producitur " (ibid. p. 57).
2 Caldecott, Philosophy of Religion, p. 28.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 199
theistic Allah, or the Jewish Jehovah, The truth
that God is love is a possible truth only if God be
a Plurality ; all that can be deduced from the truth
that God is One alone is that He is force. Hence,
if Crucifixion is essentially the going out of self
through love to another, then it is an inner law of
the nature of God Himself, and all earthly crucifixion,
when purged of its accidental or temporal elements,
finds its root and prototype in the love of the Father
for His Son effectuated by His Spirit,!
{b) Crucifixion as a Law of Creation. — ^Whatever
God does He does freely, under no external com
pulsion, such as the Greeks thought of when they
placed 'AvdyKT] as the Power behind the throne of
Zeus. The freedom of God is indeed a freedom
which is identical with the inner necessity of His
Being ; His will is not arbitrary but is formed by
His counsel,^ and because that " counsel " is perfect
in wisdom God cannot do anything but what is
perfect in goodness, beauty, and truth, or in other
words His actions are not only perfect but necessary ;
they cannot be anything different from what they
are. Hence the cosmos is the necessary expression
not only of God's will but of His wisdom and love,
and in this sense it is true that " everything is for
the best in the best of all possible worlds," for if
a better world were possible God would have called
it into being, and if things could be better in this
actual world God would make them better. Other
wise He would not be God. But every cause finds
itself again in its effect, passes over from itself to
1 " Les perfections de Dieu sont celles de nos ames, mais il les possfede
sans bornes ; U est un oc6an dont nous n'avons re5U que des gouttes. II
y a en nous quelque puissance, quelque connaisance, quelque bonte, mais
elles sont toutes entiferes en Dieu " (Leibnitz, TModicie, Preface).
2 Eph. i. 11.

200 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
it, and hence the world which is the effect of the
unceasing creative act of God is determined in its
nature not only by what God wills but by what
God is, for what He does is the expression of what
He is.! Hence the cosmos is the " Glory of God " ;
" the heavens declare the glory of God and the
firmament showeth His handy- work." ^ " Holy,
holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts : the whole earth
is full of His glory." * "In His temple doth every
one utter ' Glory.' " But if the root of God's
perfection is His love, and if Crucifixion be the
expression of love, then the world proceeding from
God . is His crucifixion and such a crucifixion is
His sevenfold Doxa, or Glory.
From which it follows that the " glory " of the
creature must be consubstantial with the " glory "
of God, and refiect in the laws of its actions the
divine impulse to self-impartation. Perhaps, there
fore, instead of declaiming against Nature as " red
in tooth and claw with ravine," we should see in
this involuntary sacrifice of individuals or of species
for the needs of others an adumbration of that
higher law of self-sacrifice, i.e. of Crucifixion, through
which God the Father eternally gives Himself to
His Son through the Spirit and eternally receives
again through the same Spirit the fulness of His gift
to the bliss of the One and undivided Trinity. On
the egoistic theory this world is a slaughter-house ;
by the law of Crucifixion it is Love's sacrificial altar.
(c) Crucifixion of the Christ. — Jesus Christ, as
we have seen above, is the Eternal Logos appearing
1 " E il ciel cui tanti lumi fanno bello,
dalla mente profonda che lui volve
prende 1' image, e fassene suggello."
Dante, Paradiso, ii. 130-2.
2 Ps. xix. 1. ' Isa. vi. 3, Ps. xxix. 8.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 201
as man, eating, drinking, feeling, thinking, and
willing as man. Like unto us in all things, and
yet unlike us in one grace to which we have not yet
attained. That one thing is the marvellous con
stancy of the power of love in Him, The fulness
and depth of this divine love in Him are to be seen
as truly in His denunciation of the Pharisees for
following a lower rule than that of love as in the
unbroken series of His own loving acts for others ;
as truly in the intellectual asceticism He spontane
ously adopted as in what He did say in praise of
divine charity. For He knew that it is not so
much by what a man says that he influences others
as by what he does, or rather it is by what he is as
the product of all his past acts. Hence when one
of His apostles came to sum up His mode of Life,
he could find no more worthy testimony to give
than that He went about doing good.! g^|- ^j^g
authority He won was not won by the impression
He made on His contemporaries, but in the inner
world where the Father rewards in secret.^ For
the law of Crucifixion, or the law of self-impartation
for the good of others, has for its proper result the
transference of the Ego from being a living soul
{yfrvxv ^(oa-a) to a quickening spirit {-jrvevfia ^a)07roiovv).^
In other words, Jesus Christ was not a mere re
cipient of a derived life which the phrase " living
soul " denotes, but won the right and the power
to be an active centre of life-giving activity for
others. He established His human nature in the
higher realm of the spirit, where is to be found
man's true likeness to God, of which active giving
out to others at all costs to self is the prime character
istic, and not a bland acceptance of all that others
1 Acts X. 38. ' Matt. vi. 4. '1 Cor. xv. 45.

202 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
may offer. Hence by a lifelong obedience to the
law of Crucifixion even at the cost of such suffering
within and without as was entailed by entrance into
a sin-stricken family. He entered on His inheritance
of a Manhood which was now endowed with God's
own attribute of joy in service, of active self-giving
that others too might share His deific life. Through
Crucifixion He became the quickener of others.
{d) Crucifixion as the Law of Christian Life. — It
is in human life that the Law of Crucifixion comes
to its sharpest expression. For in sub-human
levels it is obeyed unconsciously through the pres
sure of the environment, and in super - human it
is obeyed through love, but in the human it is both
known and disobeyed. In consequence the Law
which moves solemnly and smoothly in the celestial
spheres, without repugnance, and therefore with
out suffering, enters when it comes to man into the
cloud and loses its brightness. Thenceforward men
enter through much tribulation into the kingdom
of God, which is the kingdom of righteousness, and
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.! For a fatal
cleft is felt within as soon as the bright beams of
light of the Spirit of God illuminate the darkness
of the psychical man ; with one side of his now
half-awakened nature he longs for the upper air,
but with the other he clings to his egoistic phantasms.
He sees the good and approves it, but he follows the
worse. Conscience, whether as the voice of God
within or the active consciousness of a divine law
imprinted on the inner constitution of man,^ testifies
1 Rom. xiv. 17.
2 The schoolmen named that faculty by which man has an habitual
knowledge of the Divine Will in general synderesis or synteresis, while they
gave the name of conscience to this same faculty when specifically declaring
that knowledge in individual instances.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 203
to what ought to be done, while experience tells
the sad tale of conscience violated, or at best obeyed
reluctantly. But when the grace of God becomes
the effective supporter of conscience the struggle
to obey becomes more and more strenuous, and
victory over the egoistic tendency more frequent.
Hence arises a gradually growing depression of
egoism and a growing exaltation of divine love in
the soul, and though the conflict be protracted
and the final victory seem ever on the horizon, yet
Crucifixion is doing its work and love is entering
on its own.
That this process of Crucifixion demands con
tinual watchfulness and frequent agonies of prayer,
that it insists on the right eye being plucked out
and the right hand being cut off,! is an accident,
not a property of Crucifixion. Such mortification
is incidental to Crucifixion in sinful men because of
the hostility that our deep-rooted Egoism offers to
divine love, but in God and His angels Crucifixion
is not a painful effort but a joy, seeing that the Divine
Nature is essentially expansive and joy-giving^
and that His angels rejoice as He rejoices over one
sinner that repenteth.* So of Jesus Himself it is
said that His life of crucifixion was a joy because of
the well-spring of heavenly hope that refreshed Him
within,* and even in our own sinful condition the
pain of Crucifixion is outweighed with increasing
velocity by the joy which springs up in the wake
of the growing reunion with God and the steady
diminishing of the Turba, or confusion which sin
has introduced into our complex nature.
Crucifixion, viewed under this special aspect
1 Matt. V. 30. a Matt. v. 45.
' Luke XV. 7. ' Heb. xii. 2.

204 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.xi
of its unifying effect, is called the At-one-ment, or
reconciliation of opposites {KaTa\Xa<yrj). The first
at-one-ment and that which is constitutive of all
others is that which takes place between the human
Ego and God ; and as this is the most important
of all, so is it the most mysterious. For what our
Ego is in itself no one knows or can know ; all that
we know of it is relative to the several parts of our
tripartite (or dual) nature — our spirit, soul, and
body — on the one side, and to God on the other.
And even what we know through the first relation
is as darkness if the light of the latter be removed,
the Ego's knowledge of its own spirit, soul, or body,
is wavering and misleading, like wreckers' lights,
if the ceaselessly revolving light of the divine light
house be extinguished. But when the man has
been led by the Spirit to submit to the law of Cruci
fixion, first of all his own spirit begins to surrender
itself to the Spirit of God ; then his soul, which is
the external side of his spirit, becomes one with its
spiritual principle, and lastly the body with all its
powers surrenders to its own proximate principle,
the soul. But the at-one-ment which is wrought
within by the harmonising of spirit, soul, and body
is the fruit and not the pre-condition of the deeper
at-one-ment which through the Crucifixion of the
sinful and dissipated Ego has been made between
the ideal Ego and God.

CHAPTER XII
THE FOURTH ARTICLE {continued)
Dead
A-TToOaVOVTU
As Crucifixion is essentially an inner process, and
only secondarily an outer event, so is death ; indeed,
the " death " of this article is the consummation of
the mystic process of Crucifixion. For as Crucifixion
issues in the at-one-ment of the true Ego with God,
and hence makes it to be a life-giving Spirit, so
on the reverse side it imports the death of the false
Ego with its dvTifii/.iov .TTvev/jia. Being dead to sin
the true Ego is now free with that inner freedom
to live its own native life in God which it was
destined for before it deliberately chose the slavery
of sin. Death and life are inseparably united
because they are the two correlative sides of one
and the same thing. " Death is the veil which those
that live call life," says Shelley, and similarly
Heraclitus says, " While we live our souls are dead
in us, but when we die our souls are restored to life."
The point of view we take is determined by our
spiritual position. Those who find their satisfaction
in egoistic delights regard physical death, or any
accident which robs temporal things of their sweet
ness, as the greatest of all evils, as death indeed in
205

206 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
its full rigour, and for the same reason they must
regard the life of regeneration which others tell of
as death to them. On the other hand, the man
who has once tasted of the powers of the aeon to
come ! finds lower pleasures distasteful and some
times disgusting, and regards those under their
sway as already dead, while he cannot but know
that to him life consists in being dead to these lower
things. Thus the death which follows on Crucifixion
is the negative side of that life into which Crucifixion
is the porch way entrance. It is a sort of spiritual
caUousness to the things which are beneath.
This callousness, however, if we may so call the
Christian's immunity from the lusts of the flesh,
is no mere hardening of the feelings, but is rather
due to their being refined and clarified to such a
degree that a positive delight in the things of the
spirit fills the heart to the exclusion of all the
pleasures of lower ranges of being. Just as when
attention is fixed on one object predominantly
other objects fall into the background of perception
and fail to reach the centre of the field of conscious
ness, so when the stream of inner life has begun to
run steadily in the direction of God, all side-currents
and all under-currents are drawn into its main
movements as tributaries.
The mystic truth then of Death is that which
is stated in the aphorism : " Whosoever shall will
to save his soul shall lose it ; but whosoever shall
lose his soul for My sake shall find it," ^ the force
1 Heb. vi. 5.
2 Matt. xvi. 25, Mark viii. 35, Luke ix. 24. The substantiality of the
Soul cannot be supported by this passage without some risk, since the
term may be but a periphrasis for self, in the absence of any equivalent in
Aramaic for this latter term. " Ye shall find rest to yourselves " is the
meaning of Matt. xi. 29.

xn THE FOURTH ARTICLE 207
of which is brought out by the verse preceding it
in each Synoptic : "If any one wills to come after
Me, let him deny himself, and let him take up his
cross, and (so) let him become My follower." The
whole saying is paradoxical, as all truths of the
spiritual life are, because every such truth tran
scends logic and therefore when expressed in terms
of logic is at once essentially true and apparently
false. The truth which here struggles for expression
is the truth of the Ideal Ego and the Empirical Ego,
to use the terms of philosophy ; the truth of the
spiritual Ego and the psychical Ego, to use the
terms of religion.
Each of us finds himself at birth and afterwards
throughout life in a given position, placed under
the influence of a given environment without any
choice or knowledge of his own. Moreover, we
find ourselves, as we grow in self-knowledge, to be
fenced round not merely by our external circum
stances, but also by a given inner nature, mental
disposition, system of feelings, and individual
conative tendency which limit us and determine
our conduct at every moment. If now we are con
tent to accept this our natural state as a practical
ultimate we take up what is commonly known as
an egoistic attitude, and this in one of two ways.
We either, if we are of proud and independent
spirit, kick against our natural pricks, and refuse
to be bound by our birth's invidious bar, but go
out into the world instead to seize what we can of
its treasures, that so we may add acquired riches
to the volume of our natural inheritance ; or, if
we are of a soft, and easy-going, and slothful dis
position, we immerse ourselves in what we have
somehow come into possession of and make it

208 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
subserve our comfort. In either case we seek to
" save our soul " as the Gospel phrases it, and by so
doing we lose it.
But, on the other hand, the Ego may feel the
touch of a life which is super-sensual — or to use
the phrase suggested by our text, super-psychical,
that is, which does not belong to the " soul " that
has turned its face eagerly, whether with defiance
or subserviency, on the sensual world, but belongs
to a higher realm of Being. This Ego may realise
that self-assertion against the universe is death,
and that life is to be found in a voluntary ranging
of itself among the forces which are here to do the
WiU of God. It may at the same time discover its
own want of inner harmony, and its consequent
inability to do the thing it sees to be right, and so be
led to seek and to find a Presence and a Power
which can restore its lost harmony and strengthen
its feeble will. In other words, it may learn to
transcend the natural life of its soul, and to gain
liberation for its spirit, and by an act of free self-
determination it may then commit itself and its
ways to God, and discover that His service is perfect
freedom. In ceasing to care for its soul the Ego
has in the Biblical sense lost it, or we might reverse
the saying and say that the soul has lost the Ego,
but in exchange the Ego has found the Christ who
is the Dweller in the Innermost, and in finding
Him it has " found its soul," for, for the first time,
that soul can now discharge its task of mediation
between spirit and body freely and fully.
In the language of our Creed, the soul which has
accompanied the whole man through his Crucifixion
is now lifted up to the height of the spiritual life
and is dead to the separateness of Egoism.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 209
Buried Ta(j)6VTa
The burial of Jesus Christ by Joseph of Arima-
thaea is a Divine symbol of a threefold process
of burial in the world : the burial of God in every
thing that has become, the burial of the spirit of
man in his external form, and the burial of the
Old Man by the power of Christ.
{a) The thought that God is present in His world
in the same sense that man's spirit is present in
his body is an example of an anthropomorphism
which is as legitimate as it is necessary. It under
lies all Oriental speculation ; it formed the substrate
of Stoic thought ; it penetrated, as the Wisdom-
literature testifies, even the hard shell of Jewish
monotheism ; it finds expression in St. Paul's " in
Him we live and move and have our being " ; ! it
is implicit in the definition of God as Love,^ for it
is a property of love not to rest content before it
has given itself to the closest intimacy with its
object ; it gives the only rational ground for the
omniscience and omnipotence of God, for how better
can He be thought to know our thoughts long before
than by being Himself the very ground out of which
they spring, the life itself that calls them into life ?
Nor can this truth be set aside by any attempt,
out of reverence for the holiness or immutable
majesty of God, to set up a rigid distinction
between the Spirit which creates and the spirit
which is created, seeing that that which is created
exists only by virtue of the unceasing energy of God
which fills it according to its capacity. " At bottom
1 Acts xvii. 28. " 1 John iv. 16.

210 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
everything finite works only by that in it which
makes it secretly better than it seems, by the
essential power of the Infinite latent even in it ;
the power and capability of action belong not to
the outer wrapping of particular properties, but
solely to the core, in so far as therein developed." !
It is not only man, therefore, that is made like God,
but everything that God has called into existence
possesses, as well as reflects, something of His
goodness, and can persist only in virtue of the
divine substance conferred on it, and of the un
broken continuity of its life which it shares in its
degree with its Creator.
This truth of the burial of God in Nature may
explain many of the curious phenomena of history.
It lies, for example, at the root of the Nature-
worship of antiquity and is its essential justification.
The gods of heaven, Zeus, Phoibos Apollo, Pallas
Athene, and Aphrodite, walked among men in the
Greek world, for they were transcendent deities
visiting this lower world occasionally and ab extra.
But Dionysos had no place in heaven, and could
not always be compelled from his hiding-place on
earth ; Demeter and Kore were for half the year
inaccessible, and chthonian deities such as Asklepios
must be sought for in their own homes. It is true
that such worship of God in Nature was liable to
excesses of feeling and iniquities of action ; it is
1 Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 384. Lotze goes on to show that this imman
ence of God in Nature is quite consistent with the mechanical working of
Nature : " When we reduce all events in Nature to mechanical sequence,
we act in accordance with the spirit of the Infinite, and show reverence to
its ordinance ; we do not set up mechanism in opposition to it as an inde
pendent, hostile power that it has to subdue, but we see in this the true
efficacy of the Infinite, that which it would wish recognised throughout
the world of phenomena as the hand by which its ends are accomplished "
(ibid, i. 387).

xn THE FOURTH ARTICLE 211
true that it did not and could not satisfy men's
thirst for Reality, but yet it has its place as a
" praeparatio evangeliea," and it may be that the
Puritan world has done religion a disservice in
extruding altogether from its precincts the God of
the winds and the waves, of the sunset and the
wayside flowers, of the lilies of the field and the
birds of the air. Though God enshrines Himself
supremely in the spirit of man, yet He is no less
truly present in Nature, and a full- orbed worship
will cause us to prostrate ourselves as well at His
footstool as before His throne.
The poet and the lover of Beauty owe their
inspiration, and indeed their very selves, to their
power to recognise the God buried in His world,
yet speaking from out of its heart, and making His
continuous appeal to man as His elder child to see
Him and respond in love. If Beauty be defined
as the perfect union of spirit and form, then the step
from the scientific affirmation of God's mechanical
action in Nature to His vital presence in each object
of Nature as Beauty is inevitable. For many the
way of escape from utilitarianism or the lower
hedonism is through the gate of Beauty. But no
theory of Beauty which explains it as the result of
contrivance, or as a mere language, or an intrusive
extra, can fully account for its haunting power over
feeling. That Nature is a tomb of the living God,
which He, as it were, uses as His Delphic oracle, to
tell us through what Nature is what He Himself is,
is a postulate which can alone give any rational
account of the Beauty without which stirs the heart
within, (6) Akin to the truth of the burial of God in His
universe is the truth of the burial of man in his soul

212 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
and body. The two are related as the macrocosm
to the microcosm. Man is made in the image and
likeness of God, a likeness which has been dimmed
by sin, but not extinguished or lost utterly. We
may say indeed that the Eternal Logos being the
image of God,! jt is to the Logos that man is made
like, and that, therefore, the Logos became incarnate
in Jesus Christ in order to restore the brightness of
the likeness, to rescue it from its disharmony, and
to endue it with the power of life. But this restora
tion would have been impossible if it were true
that man's likeness to God has been " absolutely
lost through sin." ^ It is true that the N.T. speaks
of a new creature,* but the newness of the spirit is
in both cases relative to the oldness of the egoistic
life, or of the external life, not assertive of a creation
ex nihilo. Therefore as God is buried in His world,
crucified in His world, so in a lower sense is the world
made in His likeness — ^though the phrase itself is
not scriptural the idea is, for it is expressed in the
saying that the invisible things of Him are perceived
through the things that are made.* But so far
as man is concerned, he is said to be made in God's
image, and hence one thing covered by this similarity
is the fact that man too is, qua man, buried in his
external form, as God is to us in His world.
This truth is experimentally found to be true
by the profound dissatisfaction which we all feel
with our actual selves. Were it not for this im
prisoned Deity mankind might have been expected,
after these thousands of years of search, to find
a way in which it might so adjust itself to its
environment as to secure that happiness which most
1 Heb. i. 3. ^ Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology, p. 85.
' 2 Cor. V. 17, Gal. vi. 15. * Rom. i. 20.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 213
moralists agree in defining as one end of all action.
But the fact is asserted on every side and by all
sorts and conditions of men that that happiness has
not been found, and cannot be gained by any skill
of man, that always something is lacking, some
kill- joy is there, that at the best happiness is but
an aching longing for what the heart sees and strives
after but cannot attain. It is always
The httle more, and how much it is !
And the little less, and what worlds away ! ^
The reason surely is that God made our heart for
Himself, and it is restless till it finds its rest in Him.
It is The Desire of the moth for the star.
Of the night for the morrow.
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.^
The same truth, though not necessary indeed to
establish man's freedom, is at all events that which
brings it home to him most nearly and most effectu
ally. For his freedom does not consist in a mere
indifferency of choice, or even in a power to choose
what he may happen to like, still less in a power
to transcend his limits as a creature, but solely and
simply in the power of self-determination for the
purpose of God for him as expressed in his nature.
Being placed, as he is, midway between God within
and the world without, his Ego being through sin
no longer operative in its true home, the spirit, but
only now in the spirit's organ, the soul, he feels in
unequal measure a double attraction, that of God
above and that of the world below. To surrender
1 R. Browning, " By the Fireside," st. 39.
2 P. B. Shelley, " To  ."

214 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
to the latter is to set up a process which all the more
thoroughly degrades and enslaves himself; yet
how is he to escape from bondage, i.e. how recover
his lost freedom ? That consists, as we have just
said, in the uniting of his will with God's, that
God's purpose may be fulfilled in him. And the
inner experience of all saints, and of most of us,
is that from the abysmal depths of personality
there come to the surface " groanings which cannot
be uttered," " fallings from us, vanishings ; blank
misgivings of a Creature moving about in worlds
not realised." Whence come these fugitive voices,
which are as yet too gentle to compel obedience,
and yet are too persistently haunting, too much
akin to our highest moods, to be neglected ? The
answer of Religion is that they are echoes from our
far-off home, herald-voices of our future bliss, and
reminders that, in spite of all, we are even now
partakers of the Divine Nature. God is crucified,
God is buried in us because God is love.
The sa^me tale is told by conscience. It is surely
a gratuitous belittling of the sovereign worth of
conscience to say with Fr. Delitzsch that it " is
not an echo or abode of an immediate divine self-
attestation, but an active consciousness of a divine
law established in man's heart," and it is no sufficient
qualification of this depreciation to add that " the
testimony of conscience certainly rests on a divine
foundation woven in our natural condition, scil. on
a divine law in man, ordained with his created
constitution, the existence of which, its claims and
judgments, are removed from his subjective con
trol." ! But how impossible it is for any writer to
separate God's law from God's presence appears
• Delitzsch, Biblical Archaeology, p. 165.

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 215
from a spontaneous remark elsewhere of Delitzsch
himself that " God the triune dwells omnipotent
in every created thing." ! Add to this a quotation
he gives from Harless : " The unity of the foundation
of all things suggests a homogeneity of the things
with one another, and thus is assured the possibility
of their substantive reciprocal action," ^ and it
becomes still more evident that the immanence of
God, not merely in conscience but in all things, is
an inevitable conclusion of the reason. For if there
be in all things an underlying unity, that unity must
be found not in the variety of forms which differ,
nor in manifestations of life which vary, but in life
itself, that is, in God, from whom proceed all life
and all substance. Nor can this Life be regarded
as an Idea floating in Infinity or in vacuo, but as
the concrete Reality which from the richness of its
content makes everything to be what it is, and so
gives the world its infinite variety. Moreover, the
attempt to account for the " categorical imperative "
of conscience by a divinely implanted law, leaving
the Giver of the law as a merely transcendent,
external force, is shattered on the truth that wherever
a thing acts there it is.* The place where a thing
is is always inferred from what it does, and how ;
and if, therefore, God utters a law in the conscience,
in the conscience God is, buried it may be, yet
indubitably there, even though entombed and
imprisoned. " I feel it impossible," says Newman,
" to believe in my own existence (and of that fact
I am quite sure) without believing also in Him who
lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being
in my Conscience." * Here the burial of God in
* Delitzsch, Biblical Archaeology, p. 226. = Ibid, p. 260 n,
^ Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 293. ^ Apiol, iv. 2.

216 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
the spirit made in His likeness is parallel to the
burial of that same spirit of man in his corporeity.
The two are inseparable.
(c) The Burial of the Old Man. — The tables are
turned, and we have now to record a burial of
another order of worth, though with equal reality,
if of unequal extension. The burial of the Old
Man by the power of the Christ seems to be the
very antithesis and contradictory of the burial of
God in His world or of the burial of man's spirit in
his body. Yet if we look at it from the reverse side
we shall see that it is equally admissible to speak
of the burial of the New Man or of the burial of the
Christ Himself. Indeed it would be better to dwell
on the positive side of the process of which the
burial of the Old Man is the negative. For just as
the thought of God's immanence in the world trans
figures the world to him whose eyes are open, just
as the recognition of the presence of God in man's
spirit dignifies man in his own eyes, so the re
generated man may be strengthened and illuminated
by the knowledge, if only he hold it fast, that con
cealed in his spirit, buried in it, not latent or
dormant, but rather active as a struggling Titan,
inspiring, healing, sanctifying, is the Christ Himself.
This glorious truth is obscured by the constant
reminders we receive of our sinfulness, by the
abiding feeling of our guilt, but nevertheless these
should not be allowed to blot out of consciousness
the celestial truth that our conversation is in
heaven, i.e. with the Christ who dwells in the Holy
of Holies of our spirits. Indeed, it would be but
the expression of a deep Christian truth if we said
that the one sin which is peculiarly anti-Christian
is that of a refusal, or even of a neglect, to recognise

THE FOURTH ARTICLE 217
the New Man within, buried indeed but preparing
to rise to fulness of life.!
The New Man of Eph. iv. 24, Col. iii. 10, is a new
creation,^ and, therefore, the sepulchre in which
Jesus was laid was a new sepulchre " wherein was
never man laid," * and hence the song of the
redeemed is a new song.* Yet the New Man is not
yet completely risen, ^ for he is as yet " being made
new " « with a view to the attainment of the gnosis
which comes of faith, and in order that he may
some day attain to the image of his Creator, i.e.
to the image of the God-man, who in the last
analysis of the inner constitution of man is the
" hidden man of the heart," ' or the hidden wisdom
of God.® Meanwhile, this New Man, though buried
partly under the God-provided forms of existence
here, partly under the debris of the temple that
sin has laid low, yet is growing, and energising more
and more, and gradually taking possession of the
temple of the Holy Ghost which is being rebuilded
through suffering, crucifixion, and death.
^ In the Fourth Gospel particularly sin is regarded as non-recognition
of the Light of the Christ ; cf. ix. 41, xv. 22, 24, xvi. 8, 9, and also the
numerous references to the " truth," the truth being that of the indwelling
of God. The inevitable consequence of this blindness to man's true centre
was the establishment of a false centre. In other words. Egoism replaced
Love. 2 1 Cor. V. 7, 2 Cor. v. 17, Gal. vi. 15.
' John xix. 41.
' Rev. V. 9, xiv. 3, Ps. xxxiii. 3, xl. 3, xcvi. 1.
6 Outside the Gospels the burial of Christ is referred to four times only
in the N.T., viz. in Acts xiii. 29, 1 Cor. xv. 4, Rom. vi. 4, Col. ii. 12. Tlie
two last passages refer to the symbolism of baptism which says in act
that the initiate has been buried to the Old Man and raised to the New Man
in Christ, which is to be explained on the principle that God calleth things
which are in the germ only as though they were already in the ripeness
He foresees for them (Rom. iv. 17).
« Col. iii. 10. ' 1 Peter iii. 4. » 1 Cor. ii. 7.

CHAPTER XIII
THE FIFTH ARTICLE
He descended into Hell
(" Descendit ad Inferos ")
Though Christ's descent into Hades was a Christian
belief of the first century it was not given any
place in the Creed till after the opening of the
fifth century : who inserted the article, or when,
or why, is uncertain.! j^ may be the expression
of a desire for historical completeness, or of the
poetic imagination which loved to play on the un
known, or of a theological exactitude. In any
case, the starting-point of any interpretation must
be the Burial of Christ, and its forward reference
must be to the Resurrection. We have yet to see
the mystical connection of the Descent into Hades
with the Resurrection, and we must not forget this
connection, but it should not be difficult to see how
the Descent is linked on to the burial.
The Descent into Hades is the consummation
of the Incarnation, for in this the Eternal Word,
1 " The purpose of its insertion in the creed we do not know. It was
perhaps intended to emphasise the completeness of Christ's death over
against the subtle docetism of the third and fourth centuries, which had
resulted from the spread of the Logos christology, and which tended to
confine the human nature of Christ to his material body, and so take away
from his death all spiritual significance " (McGiffert, Apostles' Creed, p. 31).
218

cHAP.xiii THE FIFTH ARTICLE 219
united to the archetypal man, descended into this
under-world and tabernacled in our human nature,
as the Shekinah in the Jewish tent where God met
His people. In so condescending He took on Him
the full conditions of human nature and its capaci
ties both for achievement and for suffering. Fore
most among the sufferings to which He became
liable were the confusion into which man's complex
nature had been thrown, and his consequent im
potence, wandering out of the Way, and chronic
sense of defeat. It is conceivable, abstractly con
sidered, that God as a Deus ex machina might have
abolished this confusion of death and all its con
sequences by an act of His will, but it is not con
ceivable that He would or could do so in the case
of beings to whom He had given in potentiality
the supreme gift of Personality, with its property
of self-determination. For though all things are
possible to the counsel of God's will simplieiter, yet
when once that Will has been set in motion, then
nothing is possible which could contradict that
Will. To think otherwise is to deny the Perfection
of God. Hence it follows that if man was to be
regenerated the process of regeneration must re
spect God's gift of freedom, and must not, therefore,
put constraint on him from without but persuade
him from within. But no conceivable way of doing
this is possible except that which God has actually
adopted, viz. the Incarnation in the length and
breadth and depth and height of its marvellous
condescension. It may be objected, before the Descent into
Hades is stated in terms of spiritual life, that that
descent is purely and simply historical, and is
nothing but the fulfilment of every human experi-

220 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
ence during the first five minutes after physical
death. Without denying this latter assertion it is
enough to say that the burden of proof is on him
who uses the phrase " nothing but," Is anything
in the world from the highest to the lowest just its
isolated self, out of all relation to every object,
with one separate and independent set of activities
which concern nothing but itself ? Or is the world
a cosmos, an ordered whole, in which every single,
mean and common thing is knit into close connec
tion with all others, so that wherever and when
ever any action takes place the ripple of it affects
every other member of the cosmos, whether near
or at the furthest boundaries of space ? Philosophy
has no hesitation in replying in the affirmative to
the latter question.
The objection, however, is levelled not so much
against any particular interpretation of any particu
lar article of belief as against the principle of Analogy
in general, which is the same as saying that it is
levelled against religious knowledge in general, i.e.
against Theology. Following Dr. Westcott,! we
say that man has a spiritual faculty which, unless
paralysed by sin, gives us intuitively an immediate
consciousness of God, and that without the exercise
of this faculty God remains for us an outer fact
instead of an inner truth, but that when once the
faculty has been allowed fair-play we are able to
turn round on our world of experience and re
interpret it by the light of truth revealed by this
faculty. The system of truth so attained is what
is called Theology.^ But what is not so often
observed is that the method of Theology is the
1 Gospel of Life, 1892.
" See Caldecott, Philosophy of Religion, p. 315.

xm THE FIFTH ARTICLE 221
method of Analogy. " Religion," says Darmesteter,
" embraces all knowledge and all power which is
not scientific. The unity of this vast field of the
unknowable comes from that unique force which
is the source of its fertility and the great mother of
myth and rite — ^Analogy," ! Theology " proceeds
to form a fresh world-view ; namely, a symbolism
whereby all things are <rr)p,eia, manifesting to us
the way of God, and intelligible in a new way when
so regarded," ^ This is to say that Theology,
building on its mystical apprehension of God as
Self-existing, infinite, personal, perfect, immanent
and transcendent, or any of these, rearranges its
experiences of the phenomenal world under its
mystical categories, and treats the objects of its
knowledge as graded reflections of the Divine
attributes. Hence what is true of one set of objects
becomes by analogy true of another, according as
it is nearer to the centre or further from it. This
may be illustrated by drawing a set of concentric
circles and cutting them with a common radius ;
the point at which this radius cuts each circumfer
ence is analogous to every similar point on the
circumference of the remaining circles. Or if the
Theology be a terraced pyramid, what is true on
each terrace is true analogously on all.
If we say then that Christ descended into Hades
as being a member of the physical order, then the
law of Analogy and the necessary procedure of
Theology, both under the guidance of the mystical
intuition, require that we should extend this consum
mation of physical death to a similar consummation
on other planes of living. For the Hermetic axiom,
" As above so below," is regulative of all Theology..
1 Revue phil., January 1882, t. xiii. p. 76. ^ Caldecott, l.c. p. 316.

222 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
A. Death is essentially the dissolution of the
complex and the resolution of its elements. This
is expressed when the psychical and the physical
were separated in Christ by the statement that
" He descended into Hades." But this is not the
fatal separation He had in some mysterious way to
face and to overcome. If in Him our full humanity,
ideal and actual, our earthly as well as our heavenly,
was recapitulated,! then He was familiar with our
lowest as well as our highest. In some sense even
sin entered like iron into His soul. As microbes
attack the body from within, though not a part of it,
while cancer is said to be a growth out of the tissue
itself, so we may say that sin, as a foreign body
attacking the Personality within, was known to the
Redeemer, and that for the very reason that it was
thus brought so near to His holiness He experienced
its horror more than we ever do, or at present can.
His " Descent into Hades " began then when
His Divine Personality was assailed through His
humanity by the sinister power of Egoism. And
the very sting and bitterness of this Egoism consist
in this, that it is a caricature of a most profound
truth, the truth that God is the one real Ego of
which man's ego is a type and analogue.^ Man's
Ego, therefore, can remain sound and loyal only so
long as it keeps its subordinate place as a likeness
and an organ of the one Divine Ego, and the lie
that was from the beginning is that which has per
suaded the dependent and created ego that it could
1 Eph. i. 10.
^ " In the proper sense of the word. Personality — fUr-sich-sein — can
be predicated only of the Infinite . . . what we call personality, selfhood
in man, is but the dimmest shadow, the faintest eifluence from the source
and fount of Being, in whom alone is perfect Reason, perfect Will " (W. S.
Lilly, The Greal Enigma, 1892, p. 241). See also below. Chapter XXIII.

™ THE FIFTH ARTICLE 223
profitably set up for itself and disregard the law
of cosmic harmony. A question well put is already
half - answered, and when the question is, "Yea,
hath God said ? " ! the answer in act is not far to
seek. It is a cheap and fruitless amusement to
jibe at the naive story of the Fall, but when that
story is stripped of its literalness and interpreted
by the law of Analogy it will be seen to be a profound
presentation of the essential character of man's
age-long sin. For this is nothing less than the
cleaving of a great gulf between the Eternal Ego
and the created ego — and it could hardly succeed
in being anything more. To this is to be traced
back all the misery of man, his impotence, failure,
and broken happiness.
Into this Death Jesus Christ descended by
bringing His Divine Personality into full conflict
with the egoistic impulse of fallen human nature,
and from this conflict waged against Him by
this separative and dissolvent power He emerged
victorious. B, But the Ego of man, i.e. the spark of the
Divine fire in man, is not a fourth function of his
spirit (the three being his higher knowledge, will,
and feeling) ; nor is it an isolated and superior entity
hovering above man's spirit, soul, and body. It is
rather the synthetic unity of the whole being, the
ground of which is in the spirit, the organ in the
soul, and the manifestation in the body. The Ego,
or the Personality, is, as it were, the living heart
of the man, and while this heart beats in unison
with the Divine, man the three-in-one on earth
enjoys the life, light, and love of God, the three-in-
one in heaven. But when the lower ego starts
1 Gen. in. 1.

224 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
aside from the higher Ego the curse of separation
and 8id\vari<; fastens on it as a whole, and on each
part of it.
Hence death attacks not only the ego but also
the spirit. Spirit, indeed, cannot be dissolved
because it is not compounded, nor can it be annihil
ated, for that would write failure against God, but
it can suffer the darkening of its eye, the paralysing
of its will, and the deadening of its sensations. It
can pluck itself by its own choice out of the power
of love and submit instead to the " mind of the
flesh which is enmity against God," ! and introduce
confusion and discord into the palace of the Great
King. Retaining the two characteristic glories of
the Person, self-consciousness and self-determination,
it yet can rob these of what makes their bliss,
their living contact with the Eternal Person, and
their loving conformity to His will, " E la sua
voluntate e nostra pace," ^ Sin, or Egoism, has
brought about a dissolution of partnership, as it
were, and ever since experience has proved more
and more conclusively that the independence, or
separation of men from God, involves a dissolution
or breaking up of even the spiritual life, which is
the second stage of the death which slowly creeps
downwards until it lays hold of every element of
man's being.
Into this Hades also did Jesus Christ descend,
and by maintaining intact the union of His
human spirit with His Divine Personality, He
established for those He is not ashamed to call
His brethren * a fountain of living waters springing
up into aeonian life,*
^ Rom. viii. 7. ^ Dante, Paradiso, iii. 85.
' Heb. ii. 11. « John iv. 14.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 225
C. But once more, as the Ego of man is not by
nature separable from his spirit, so neither are they
both from his soul. " The Lord God," says Gen.
ii. 7, " formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and
man became a living soul." First the body was
formed, then into the body is breathed the spirit
(n'shamah), and, lastly, there becomes the soul as
the organ of the life of the spirit. And just as the
spirit of man is made in the likeness of God, so is
the soul made in the likeness of the spirit, the Trinity
which God is reappearing in reflected form in both
Man's spirit and in his soul. Moreover, just as
God though three in person is one and undivided
in His essence, so is man. His image and likeness,
one and undivided also. Hence if disorder creep
in and find lodging in any part of his being, the whole
is affected. If his spirit retain its communion with
the Father of Spirits, both soul and body remain
sound and sweet ; if, on the other hand, the spirit
loses its connection with God, both soul and body
in their turn suffer from the wrong choice made by
the spirit. This is precisely what has happened to
man's soul, the glory of his spirit. It has left the
straight Way of Life and wandered as a prodigal
son into a far-off country where no news of the
Father's house comes to its forgetfulness of its
origin and place and destiny. It is dead even
while it has the name to live, dead in the sense
that its sense of its heavenly life is atrophied, and
so its threefold being is thrown into confusion ;
it neither knows as it ought, nor wills what is right,
nor feels the goodness and beauty lying 'within it
and around it. Dissolution and the apathy of
death have made it their own. Q

226 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Jesus Christ then descended into the hidden
depths of the Soul, and shared its death by sympathy
and beneficence as He did its life by becoming
incarnate. Had He not so descended, had He,
that is, contented Himself with taking a human
soul in its ideal state of perfection, untouched by
sin, and hence not in the state of dissolution and
discord known as death. He might have been a
philosopher, or a great Teacher, but hardly a Saviour,
a Redeemer, D. Lastly, we come to the physical death which
Jesus descended into. We must, however, be
careful not to limit this to the final separation of
soul and body which is commonly called death,
but extend the operation of the force there triumph
ant to the whole period of the connection of soul
and body. For in a real sense it is true that as
soon as we are born we begin to die, and of this the
going astray and speaking lies ! is one piece of
evidence. But ill-health and the gradual wasting
away of physical vigour with increasing years afford
another, though perhaps a less cogent proof of the
same process. For as a matter of fact, though
death was in the world of vegetable and animal life
from the beginning and, therefore, before the appear
ance of man, yet if the Bible view of man be followed,
death would not have had any power over man at
all had he but remained loyal to the design which
placed him in the garden of his threefold nature
to dress it and to keep it.^ As Jesus when He be
came man was put in the position of posse non
peccare, and by a life which was the antithesis of
Adam's attained the position of non posse peccare,
so Adam was placed in the position of posse non
» Ps. Iviii. 3. 2 Gen. u. 15.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 227
mori that thence might follow non posse mori.
Hence the Biblical antithesis between Eve who
sinned and Mary who gave herself to be God's
handmaid, between the garden of Eden where
Egoism prevailed and the garden of Gethsemane
where Egoism was conquered,! between the first
Adam, a living soul, and the second Adam, a life-
giving spirit. Sin entered into the world and death
by sin,* and this death attaches to the whole man,
to his Ego, his spirit, his soul, and his body, for it
is the breaking up of his divinely-ordained complex
constitution. When, however, death attacks the body, whether
throughout life, or at the last assault, it acts by
withdrawing from it the living forces of the soul.
And these follow the soul as this is indrawn into
the spirit from which it emanates. Hence the
difference between the death of a man and of a
mere animal consists in the fact that when the
latter dies its soul goes back to the reservoir of life
from which it came, while man, who has been given
a higher ground of individuality in that into him
has been breathed the spirit of life,* sinks back, not
into nothingness, but into the unconsciousness from
which he emerged at physical birth — ^to re-emerge,
as reincarnationists hold, at a later birth to resume
his lessons in the school of earthly life.*
1 It is significant that it is the " mystical Gospel " alone which tells
us that the " place " was a garden ; cf. Matt. xxvi. 36 with John xviii. 1.
2 Rom. V. 12. = Gen. ii. 7. d;'" r^am.
* Delitzsch, who argues for tradueianism against creationism (Biblical
Psychology, p. 128 ff.), and condemns whole-heartedly metempsychosis
(p. 548), yet holds that reincarnation is " not in itself repugnant to reason "
(p. 43), though it is " absolutely contrary to canonical scripture " (p. 44).
it is all the more significant, therefore, to find him unconsciously opening
the door for it in the words : " In view of the personality which distin
guishes the human soul from the brute soul, annihilation or remanation of

228 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.xiu
Another fact, to which every physician can bring
testimony, is that physical death is frequently,
perhaps ordinarily, the result of a death-process
which has been already established in the soul.
Where the diagnosis 'writes down thrombosis, shock,
nervous collapse, anaemia, heart-failure, the psycho
therapist might more truly write down soul-with
drawal. More people die because they have ceased
to wish to live than is generally recognised. Hence
a more searching therapeutic will probe the maladies
of the soul as the key to the diseases of the body.!
That Jesus Christ descended into the Hades of
physical suffering and death, is attested by His
works as physician of the bodies of men as well as
of their souls, and is pointed to in the text which
tells us that His healing work was continued after
His physical departure in that like Enoch He went
and preached to the spirits in prison.* Whether
in the visible or in the in'visible world Jesus Christ,
as God our Redeemer, never ceases, never has
failed, and will ever continue to pursue His
healing work on spirit, soul, and body by Himself
descending to the realm where Death, the great
dissolver of what God has ideally joined together,
holds sway.
the former is assuredly an idea of extreme improbability. For personal
freedom is the inexhaustible ground of possibility of an endless develop
ment ; and it is extremely improbable that this development, in its origin,
or broken off in its middle, and the fulness of substance which the human
soul has attained by means of free life, should be forcibly extinguished "
(p. 475). If life's lessons are broken oft in the middle, half-learned, which
is more probable that God should have to devise another school, or that
the lessons should be resumed here ?
1 This is being done with increased thoroughness by the Nancy School
and by Freud and his disciples. Cf. my article, " Faith-healing," in
Hastings' Ency. of Rel. and Ethics, 1912.
2 1 Peter iii. 19 ; cf. Rendel Harris, Expositor, November 1901, where
he suggests that the nominative case, Enoch, has dropped out of the text.

CHAPTER XIV
THE FIFTH ARTICLE {continued)
The third day He rose again
T'rj TpiTy 'ftfJiepa dvaaTdvTa eK veKpSiv
Jesus is said to have risen on the " third day," or
after " three days." ! The variation in the phrase
is hardly to be accounted for by reference to local
usage, or to a difference of translation from the
Aramaic (though Mark always uses dvla-Trifii, and
always says " after three days "), for Luke uses
both verbs, and Matthew both reckonings of time.
It points (if we are concerned with pure history)
to an uncertain tradition, or (if we are seeking
mystical truth) to a hidden mystery ; * and this
latter must be sought in what is common to both
forms, viz. the number three.
That a half-apologetic tone comes easy to any
writer who hazards a suggestion that in the Bible
use of numbers there lurks a hidden symbolism
affords a striking testimony to the decay of a
spiritual interpretation of scripture, and to a
1 " On the third day " occurs in connection with the resurrection ten
times in the N.T., viz. in Matt. xvi. 21, xvii. 23, xx. 19, xxvii. 64, Luke ix.
22, xviii. 33, xxiv. 7, 21, 46, and 1 Cor. xv. 4 ; " After three days " in
Matt. xxvu. 63, Mark viii. 31, ix. 31, x. 34. The verb used in eight of
these passages is iyelpui and in five dvla-Tr]pi.
* Cf. Rev. i. 20, xvii. 5, 7. 229

230 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
corresponding growth of rationalistic. A grammar,
a lexicon, and a history are no doubt valuable aids
to the interpretation of the Bible, but they are as
a microscope to a blind man unless they are used by
the man whose spiritual eye is opened to judge of
the value of what reason offers. It is here, however,
assumed that such a symbolism exists in the Bible,
and that it will repay the search for it, but if any
object to such an assumption, though he may lose
much, he can hardly be blamed in view of the
extravagances of those who have submitted them
selves to the fascinations of the symbolism of
numbers. What, therefore, is said here will be
strictly limited by the necessities of the case, and
by the generally- admitted truths of the Bible.
The number three is the signature of Divinity
and denotes the presence, power, or activity of God
in His world. The three days of the Egyptian
cook and cup-bearer were significant of God's
judgment ; ! the three days' journey were that God
might be worshipped ; * during the three days'
darkness God was hidden ; * three days were
reserved before the Israelites found God in the Land
of Promise,* and the spies hid themselves from
God's enemies three days ; ^ Saul found his asses
and God after three days ; " God sent a three days'
pestilence upon Israel ; '' when God had taken
Elijah the prophets sought for him three days ; '
Jonah was three days in the psychical world before
he found the shore of the spiritual ; ® the multitude
were with Jesus three days before He fed them ; !"

1 Gen. xl. 12, 18.

2 Ex. iii. 18.

3 Ex. X. 22.

* Joshua i. 11.

^ Joshua ii. 22.

« 1 Sam. ix. 20.

' 2 Sam. xxiv. 13.

8 2 Kings ii. 17.

' Jonah i. 17.

i» Matt. XV. 32.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 231
Jesus was found in His Father's temple after three
days,! and Saul spent three days alone after his
conversion.* In all these and similar Biblical
notices of the number three, a little reflection will
show that what is signified is that the threefold
thing mentioned bears the mark of the Divine.
So in the Resurrection-history the space of three
days, or the time which came on the third day, is
put under the signature of three to say to those who
have ears to hear that the work of Resurrection is
the work of God. This is only saying in symbolical
manner what Romans i. 4 says scholastically, when
it states that Jesus Christ had a twofold history ;
on one side He entered the world of Becoming
through the gateway of the seed of David, that
being the way of His flesh or phenomenal manifesta
tion ; on the other side He was marked off as the
Son of God distinct from all others by the power
of God, having passed through the gateway of
resurrection out of the world of the dead, that being
the way into the spirit - world of holiness. The
ascription of the work to God is insisted on in order
that nobody should let himself suppose that when
he turns from darkness to light he may claim any
merit in the operation, seeing that he may read
some five-and-twenty times in his N.T. that even
Jesus was raised up by God the Father.
Nor should we pass over without a word of
comment the difference of meaning between the
two verbs used to denote the act of resurrection —
er^eipw and dvi(^T7ip.i. The former is the more
common word in the N.T.* and points to the
1 Luke ii. 46. ' Acts ix. 9.
3 It is used of Jesus Christ forty-nine times, and its ordinary comple
ment is iK veKpwv,

232 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
transcendency of God's operation, while the latter
(which is the word of St. Mark and our Creed)
favours the immanent power by which the Divine
in Christ Jesus raised Him from the dead.! Perhaps
the word was chosen designedly to emphasise the
spiritual process in the Human Nature itself — and
therefore in ours. For the aTda-i^ of any creature
is its internal nature, its status, that which makes
it to be what it is, the being in all its fulness which
it has received as its Idea from its Creator. The
stasis of an animal differs from that of a plant and
both from that of a man, and so long as anything
retains its natural stasis no blame attaches to it,
But the Bible consistently represents man as having
suffered a KaTaa-Taa-i'i, through sin, a fall, or a
failure to stand fast in the position he was placed
in. Following this line of thought, the ardai';
which constituted the Divine Idea of man, having
given way to a KaTdara<7i<;, the root of which may
be defined as man's false idea of God, it was necessary,
unless the Divine Idea of man was to suffer defeat,
that an amo-rao-t? should come to redress the
balance. And it is precisely this which is the
subject-matter of the Bible and of the Creed.
The restriction of the doctrine of the Resurrection
to that of a literal reanimation of the corpse has
been responsible for a disquieting amount of un
belief in the honesty or spiritual insight of the
Church. The immortality of man has been based
on the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, with
the direst consequences to faith and hope, and in
1 McGiffert points out (Apostles' Creed, p. 133) that " the third day "
does not occur between N.T. times and the emergence of the Roman
Symbol except in Justin Martyr (five times), and then always with dvlarripi.
So far as Justin, therefore, and the Creed go, the immanent aspect is brought
to the fore.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 233
spite of the better example of the Fathers. " The
soul," says Tatian, " is not in itself immortal, O ye
Greeks." So Justin Martyr, " It participates in
life, so far as God wiUs it to live," And Athanasius,
" God alone has immortality, and is Himself
immortality," So the N,T. says that God " alone
hath immortality," ! and says of Jesus Christ that
He has " shed light on life and immortality." *
In the face of such statements we must conclude
that if our human nature now possesses in its Head
or members immortality, then it must be a derived
immortality, one that has been bestowed on it, and
not one that it possesses in its own right. So that
if immortality be our present privilege anastasis
is not merely the restoration of our original stasis,
but imports that, plus the end into which God
intended it to develop.
Again, if immortality be a bestowed gift, since
it cannot be any extra endowment, such as a new
unrelated attribute would be, it follows that it must
depend on the possession of a life, substance, or
status of which it is a natural consequence. And
this seems what is meant in 2 Peter i. 4, where it
is said that through certain great and precious
promises we may become sharers of the Divine
Nature. The promises referred to are attached to
such things as virtue, temperance, and knowledge,
and give the assurance of an entrance into the
aeonian kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ.* Entry into that kingdom then is the
condition of being made sharers of the Divine
Nature. But to enter into that kingdom means
on our side taking up the Cross which kills Egoism
and substitutes Love in its place, and on God's
1 1 Tim. vi. 16. 2 2 Tim. i. 10. = 2 Peter i. 11.

234 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
side the gift of the New Life through Regeneration.
So that immortality on the authority of the N.T.
itself is a human prerogative which follows on a
prius, viz. on the impartation of something of the
Divine Nature itself, i.e. of something which by
its very nature is deathless.
This view is supported by the consideration that
no being is self-existing except God, and that there
fore none can enjoy existence apart from His
support. This support may be regarded as given
once for all at the beginning, much as we wind up a
clock and expect it to go until the force stored up
by winding is exhausted ; or it may be regarded
as a force supplied moment by moment, like gravity
or cohesion or chemical affinity which acts con
tinuously. Although modern philosophy is agreed
that the whole phenomenal world is under the sway
of innate mechanical law, yet it does not say that
this is the only system it obeys. Teleology is as
universal as mechanism. Man is a machine no
doubt, but he is also more than a machine, and it
is in that more that his true nature is found.
But whether machine or organism, it is clear
that the second alternative must be chosen, and
that in either case man (as everything else) is the
product, moment by moment, of the force put forth
by God, or, in other words, creation and maintenance
in being are really one and the same process. God
wills, God speaks, God breathes, express it how
we may, we mean in any case that God's power is
put forth continuously, and so His world, and all
in it, obtains continuous existence. He may put
forth His power in such a way as to give an existence
that is brief, such as that of the insects of a day,
or an existence that though longer is still brief,

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 235
such as that of animal life in general. Or, on the
other hand. He may, for aught we know, give a life
which persists through aeons, and then passes away
into some other form. Or, finally, Pie may impart
something of Himself (I speak as a fool) which carries
with it the attribute of immortality. And this
Something it is which Christianity testifies to. It
declares that the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resur
rection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ issue in a life
of immortality by Divine necessity, because they
are moments in a process of which the deification
of man is the purpose.
But unless we are to delude ourselves with phrases
we must make it clear to our own mind that this Im
mortality, in the first place, is no inherent attribute
of man as man, for this is contradicted by every
text in the Bible which emphasises the sin and death
and wrath under which man suffers.
|In the second place, we must be clear that
Immortality in the sense of an endless continuance
of this earthly life of ours is not taught by Scripture,
is no part of the Christian doctrine, and is contra
dictory of reason, while at the same time, if given,
it would be a dubious boon. Not the quantity
of life, but its quality is what determines its
worth. In the third place. Immortality is not a quality
which can be added to a mortal life either directly
or arbitrarily. God cannot make an insect, nor
indeed any animal, immortal without contradicting
Himself. Nor can He, similarly, bestow Immortality
on mortal man without contradicting Himself.
In the fourth place. Immortality cannot be
imputed, but must be imparted. This is the reason
why the physical resurrection of Jesus in itself can

236 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
have no relation to our Immortality, nor indeed,
if we isolate even such a resurrection as His from
all its implicits, should we be justified in deducing
from it the consequence of Immortality. For it
is precisely in these implicits that the secret lies.
Because He was the Eternal Word in the form of
man ; because in Him dwelt all the pleroma of the
Divine nature embodied ; ! because He interfused
the Divine Nature as a (pdpfiaKov ddavaaia<; into
the nature of Adam ; or, if the phrase be preferred,
because He united indissolubly the Divine Nature
to the human in Himself as its preservative and
quickening partner ; because, in short, there was
implicit in His Resurrection what He was ; Death
had no more dominion over Him.
In the last place, if we are to share His Im
mortality there must take place in us a similar
union of the Divine and human. He must, as we
know He will and does, give us of His fiesh to eat,
and of His blood to drink in a living and heavenly
sense, of which the gift in the Eucharist is an out
standing type and an effectual means.* For unless
we abide in Him and He abide in us, in the literal
sense of a common participation in the higher life,
then we still remain, and shall continue to remain,
under the sentence of death. In some way, the life
which was in Him must be also in us, if we are to
share His immortality.
It is these considerations which should make us
cautious before we stake the saving power of our
religion on the bare historical, or physical, resurrec-
1 Col. ii. 9.
2 " The only sure anchor of all our hope for a joyful resurrection unto
the life of glory is the mystical union which must be wrought here on
earth betwixt Christ's human nature glorified and our mortal or dissoluble
nature " (Thomas Jackson, Comment, upon the Apostles' Creed, 1673, p. 436).

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 237
tion of Jesus Christ. That His Resurrection is
indeed the keystone of Christianity is indubitable,
and it is represented with perfect clearness as such
in 1 Cor. xv. 12-18. Only it is to be noted that it
is not His physical resurrection as such which is
there spoken of, for if it were the conclusion would
not follow from the premisses. This is clear from
the declaration that if Christ be not raised, faith,
confidence, trust has no basis, and sins remain
unforgiven. But how can faith in the physical
resurrection by itself secure the forgiveness of sins ?
The man who believed in it as a fact might hope
that the God who had raised Jesus would at some
time also raise him, but where could he find the link
between the two ? Has " belief in that which is
credible " any religious value ? and if we answer
that question in the negative, are we not driven
to seek for some deeper ground such as that which
finds an eternal principle, an everlasting gospel
given bodily form in the resurrection ? In that
case we shall conclude that the resurrection spoken
of in the passage referred to is one which belongs
to the inner world of Reality before it emerges into
the outer world of history, which is the same as
saying that if Jesus Christ had not risen through
the indwelling power of His Divinity out of the
condition of man as liable to sin and death there
would be no guarantee, or even hope, that we, so
infinitely less endowed, would rise out of actual sin
and actual death within and without into the life
of the New Man, the life which is hid with Christ
in God. That Christ is a living Person influencing
each of His followers for good by the power of God,
and giving them no rest until the Old Man in them
is dead and the New Man alive, is the foundation

238 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of the hope of our Immortality. But not history
alone, nor belief by itself, is the ground of that
hope, but the present possession of the new life
through being born from above, through regenera
tion, new-birth, conversion, the acquisition of the
so - called cosmic - consciousness, or (better) God-
consciousness, it is (and this through the immediate
act of God) which is the pledge in hand of
Immortality. Here there may be stated the objection that if
what has just been said is a true account of the
Christian gospel, then all that it offers is a " con
ditional immortality," which is tantamount to
saying that there are few that are saved. Without
entering a demurrer that labels and set formulae
should not be allowed to be put in, since they are
the deadliest enemies of honest thinking, it should
be enough to enquire as to the reason for saying
that the doctrine of the New-birth involves that
of conditional immortality. If it be replied that
it is only a small minority, if ordinary observation
may be trusted, in each generation who are conscious
of the experience of being born again, we may put
two questions by way of rejoinder. Firstly, does
not experience, as well as the analogy, say of
thought-life and plant-life, assure us that Life for
the most part works in silence and darkness, and
that, therefore, the process which eventuates in
regeneration is operative long before it comes to
consciousness ? and, secondly, what warrant is
there for maintaining the negative thesis that this
present incarnation of ours is the only one allowed
us ? Just as Voltaire said that if there were not a
God, man would have to invent one, — which was
his witty way of describing Anselm's well-known

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 239
proposition, — so we may say that if there is no
evidence for repeated lives in this or some other
body we must find some, for otherwise life as we
know it in its higher reaches remains an insoluble
problem. Once it is admitted that the " wheel
of generation " of James iii. 6 brings in the due
order of its revolutions every soul in its appointed
time to the New - birth, and then the taunt of
" conditional immortality " falls of itself with most
other intellectual difficulties which are raised by
spiritual life. Nor can it be admitted that this
doctrine of many lives in the body is unknown to
Holy Scripture, for the contrary proposition may
be fairly maintained, viz. that the doctrine of re
incarnation (or re-embodiment) lies at the ground
of the whole view of salvation as set out in the
Bible, as the necessary truth which gives coherence
to the whole.
Indeed it may be urged that if it be granted
that the Manhood taken by the Eternal Logos at
the Incarnation of Jesus Christ was not created
ad hoc, nor derived in its entirety by the way of
tradueianism, but had been prepared through the
long and purifying process of many lives, as Phil, ii,
5-11 suggests,! then the crowning act of the
Resurrection shines forth in far greater lustre than
it can on any other hypothesis. Its height is all
the more venerable because of the increased labour
and suffering which must be undergone before it
can be scaled. It is no isolated experience of the
God-man, but in Him it is the exemplary form of
the Resurrection which awaits every man in his turn
and order. It comes, too, as the final act of a long
drama in which every word and every action played
^ See p. 107, above.

240 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap, xiv
their appropriate part, and find their significant
meaning. When all this is seen clearly and assimilated
thoroughly we shall be in a better position for
appreciating the vital importance of the part played
by the body in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and
in our own. But it will be better to defer the con
sideration of this to the time when we deal with the
article in the Creed, " I believe in the resurrection
of the body."

CHAPTER XV
THE FIFTH ARTICLE {continued)
The third day He rose again {continued)
So far we have said nothing of a positive character
about the nature of the Risen Life itself, because it
seemed necessary first to vindicate the majesty of
that Life as the bearer of Immortality from the
neglect it has suffered at the hands of the majority.
Of course it is not easy to define in words, or even
to formulate in thought what that Life in itself is,
any more than the fourth dimension can be stated
in terms of the lower three. Indeed no definition
is attempted in the N.T. — probably because the
unhappy need for definitions had not yet risen.
St. Thomas Aquinas, indeed, does find certain char
acteristics of the resurrection-body, such as subtlety,
brightness, agility, and incorruptibility in the state
ments about it in 1 Cor. xv.,! but these do not
reach to the native home of the Life itself in the
spiritual world. But what the N.T. does do, in a
way which must extort at once our wonder and
our thankfulness, is to set out in a series of symbolic
stories the main characteristics of the Risen Life.
It is hardly too much to say that the failure of
scholars to give any harmony of the ten resurrection-
1 Com. in D. Pauli epp, in loco.
241 R

242 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
stories on grounds of reason or history is a matter
to rejoice over. For their failure suggests a mis
taken point of departure, and invites us to try
another. Such another is offered by Mysticism.
We will endeavour then to point out by the examina
tion of a few of these stories the light they throw on
the Risen Life. But first three general character
istics of it may be noted : the characteristic of
mystery, and of love and of service.
1. The Mystery of the Risen Life. — It is not
without reason that it was before dawn that the
two Maries went to see the sepulchre,! qj. j^g^ ^t
dawn ; * or at early dawn,* or " early," * that
Jesus rose early ; ^ that it was toward evening
when He was recognised at Emmaus ; ^ or evening
when He appeared in the upper-room ; ' or at
break of day on the sea-shore.^ For the implica
tion in all these passages is that while man works
and walks by the light of Reason during the twelve
hours of the light of this world,^ yet there is another
state of consciousness called the " Night " in which
a man stumbles if he attempts to walk by the light
of Reason, and not by the heavenly light belonging
to this higher state. What this higher state of
consciousness is may be illustrated by that lower
state we call sub-conscious.!" This, apparently, is
the sum-total of all our memories and acquired
psychical habits, and is bound up with the sym
pathetic nervous-system as its physical correlate.
It is related to our ordinary waking-consciousness
' Matt, xxviii. 1. ^ Mark xvi. 2. ^ Luke xxiv. 1.
1 John XX. 1. 6 Upal, Mark xvi. 9. ' Luke xxiv. 29.
' John XX. 19. * John xxi. 4. * John xi. 9.
1° One fundamental difference between super-consciousness and sub
consciousness is that the latter is habitual, i.e. mechanical, while the
ormer is consciousness in free relation with a higher Power.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 243
as the stars to the sun — when one sets the others
rise and vice versa, and is cognate to the conscious
ness we have in sleep, whether dreamy or deep.
As everybody knows, the difficulty is not in ascer
taining that we are subjects of these two states of
consciousness, but rather in linking one on to
the other. Between the two a thick curtain
seems to hang, and this is seldom lifted on either
side.! Similarly, the Risen Life transcends ordinary
consciousness, so far as this latter depends on the
stimuli of the external world. The man of naive
sensationalism regards this external world as purely
objective, and is unaware of any subjective relation
ship to it ; the morbid mind, on the other hand,
forgets the objectivity of thought and mingles
confusedly subject and object, until at last it is
unable to distinguish them, and is overtaken by
madness. Ordinarily, however, the man whose
eyes are opened learns that he must keep the
balance true between the vision of the external
world and the vision of the world within. He
knows both, and at first alternates them, but
gradually he comes to know that the two are one
at bottom, that not only is the soul spiritual but
so also is the world, and so he sees the outer world
transfigured by the glory of the inner world. Yet
the mystery of this latter is never lifted, and, if
anything, experience of it serves only to heighten
the mystery of the outer. The child of both is
wonder which rises into worship.
2. The Risen Life as Love. — We have seen that
Crucifixion in its essence is the doing to death of
1 On this whole subject see Carl du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism,
trans, by C. C. Massey.

244 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the life of Egoism, from which it follows that the
Resurrection is the triumph of the life of Love.
And this appears from the fact that when the risen
Lord appears it is for the good of the person He
appears to : He is not so much sought for ; He
appears autonomously, whether to the women, to
Thomas, to the eleven, or to Peter. It is not
merely that every one is given precisely what he
needs, but rather the first significant feature of
each story is the spontaneous action of Jesus
Himself. It is true that the mystery which now
enshrouds Him makes it difficult for the disciples
to recognise Him, but the wonder of His actions
is not different from the wonder of those earlier
actions which consisted in His going about doing
good.! YoY both proceeded from the same spirit of
love. The chief difference is that then He was
limited by the physical conditions of His human
nature, but now those limitations have been re
moved. He can act when and where, and as He
pleases, and what pleases Him is what springs out
of Love.
3. The Risen Life as a Life of Service. — It is also
worthy our notice that to whomever Jesus appears
to them He gives directions to go and do something
for others. His angel tells the two Maries to " go
quickly and tell His disciples " ; * Jesus Himself
orders them to go tell His brethren,* and particularly
in the elaborate threefold commission to Peter
does He insist on service. This is precisely what
might have been expected on the assumption that
the essence of the Resurrection is the triumph of
the Life of Love over the Life of Egoism, for the
1 Acts X. 38. ' Matt, xxviii. 7, Mark xvi. 7.
= Matt, xxviii. 10, John xx. 17.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 245
joyful service of others is the very outward embodi
ment and form of the Life of Love.
There is a reason for this in the nature of things,
if we may use an interesting analogy insisted on by
the late Professor W. James in his Will to Believe.
He points out that in a bodily act there are three
stages, first the impression made from without on
a nerve-fibre, then the reaction at a nerve-centre,
and finally a motor impulse which starts muscular
activity. Similarly, he says, psychologically we have
a perception, thought about what is perceived, and
then an act of Will (in which Feeling is included).
We may apply this analogy to the Risen Life itself
by saying that there is first an appeal made to the
heart of love by the very presence of a human being,
then an inner judgment as to ways and means of
helping, and then a definite act of service. This
applies too to the Mary, or Peter, or whoever it may
be who meets the Christ. The heart is touched,
thought, memory, imagination are quickened, and
finally the whole inner being breaks out in an act of
service. When God appeared to Abraham by the
oaks of Mamre the result was Abraham's supplica
tion for Sodom ; ! when He was seen by Moses in
the bush it was to send him to Pharaoh ; * when
He came to Joshua as captain of the Lord's host
He bade him go and take Jericho ; * He took David
from the sheep-folds that he might feed Jacob His
people ; * the word of the Lord that came to the
prophets invariably had action for its end ; ^
Isaiah's vision ended in " go and tell this people " ; ^
and Saul's first command at his conversion was to
1 Gen. xviii. ^ Exod. iii. 10.
3 Joshua vi. 2. < Ps. Ixxviii. 70.
5 E.g. 1 Kings xviii. 1, xix. 15, etc. " Isa. vi. 9.

246 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
go to Damascus and await his orders.! j,|. jg g^
small but significant confirmation of this law when
we find the late Dr. Westcott, whose whole thought
was dominated by the truths of the Incarnation
and the Resurrection, emphasising repeatedly the
"joy of service," even as St. Paul puts joy among
the fruits of the spirit next after love.
We may now take one or two of the Resurrection-
stories in some detail with the view of showing
how the nature of the Risen Life is illustrated by
them. A, The Risen Life and the Life of Enquiry
(Luke xxiv, 13 ff.). — The two disciples going to
Emmaus are — like the two spies,* the two men in
the camp,* the two olive-trees of Zech. iv. 3, the
two disciples sent by Jesus,* the two men sent to
Peter ^ — the two forces of Wisdom and Love which
are continually engaged in preparing the way of the
Lord. Their goal is Emmaus, where are the springs
of living water.* As they go along the road of life
they reason anxiously about the enigma of Evil,
and state (as does the author of Pss. xlix. and Ixxiii.
and of the book of Job) their perplexity at seeing
the wicked triumphant and the good oppressed.
Their perplexity is, if anything, increased by the
dim hopes and forebodings they feel within, which
are stirred up by feminine intuitions, and confirmed
by stories of angels' visits. They would fain believe,
but their reason is not convinced, and their reason
is not convinced because their inner eyes are holden
so that they cannot see the Truth in that clearness
which carries conviction — " das Klar ist das Wahr."
' Acts ix. 6. ^ Joshua ii. 1.
3 Num. xi. 26. « Mark xi. 1.
= Acts ix. 38. ' Cp. nisn, Hammath, hot spring.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 247
They were familiar with their Scriptures, but the
mystical meaning of them was as yet not opened,
and this for the sufficient reason that they had
approached them only from the side of reason.
Their difficulties were due to the fact that they were
applying Reason to a range of phenomena which
were beyond Reason, that they treated their
Scriptures, as we treat ours, from the evidential
side only, and hence fail to get at their true meaning.
This lies open to the eye of faith enlightened by
love.! But Christ is the living King of Love, and He
knows how to shed abroad His love in our hearts*
through the Holy Ghost, and when He has done this
we learn that the Way of Life is the Way of the
Cross, that through death alone we enter into life,
and that, therefore, evil men who thwart, injure,
and torment us are all unconsciously instruments
in our hands if only we have grace to use them. It
behoves the Christ and every Christian to suffer
before he enters into his glory, and suffering re
quires personal agents for its infliction. This
comes home to our hearts as a practical truth,
honestly and whole-heartedly accepted, only when
the Christ within reveals it to us, as He accompanies
us on our Pilgrim-way towards the village of
eternal life. Is it fanciful to see in the kco/jiT),^ the
village, or resting-place, the state of the soul when
it has left the phenomenal world and is at " home "
1 As Dante says of " la pena che la croce porse " -
" Questo deoreto, frate, sta sepulto
agli occhi di ciascuno, il cui ingegno
nella fiamma d' amor non 6 adulto." Par. vu. 58-60.
' Rom. V. 5.
3 From the same root as Kelp-ai ; cf. our home, Ger. Heim, and the
suffix ham in place-names.

248 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
in the world of Reality ? ! Then Jesus abides (the
word is technical, and is opposed to becomes, as p,evo)
to yLryvo/j-ai) with the soul now opened to the inner
world, and He breaks for it the bread of life which
fills the heart with the joy of complete satisfaction.
Then the eye within is opened completely, and by
the gnosis of faith {iiri'yvmai';) they recognise the
Unknown Companion, who, however, passes beyond
their capacity of vision,* leaving them, as it is said
the Initiates in the ancient Mysteries were left,
with nothing they could tell, inasmuch as what
they had seen was symbolical of things deeper than
thought. All that they could say was that their
hearts burned within them. The Christ by His
Risen Life had shown them the way to transcend
Reason and to overcome its doubts by Faith.
B. The Risen Life and Penitence (John xx. 11-18).
— The " tomb " {fiv^fielov) in which Jesus is hidden
is the Church which has been builded on His death.
It is His " monument," that which bears testimony
to Him, and serves as a solemn call to men to pause
and consider their relation and duty to Him.
Among those who are attached to that Church, and
in their hearts are devoted to its Lord, are the class
of life-long penitents in whom has been aroused
more powerfully than in most the sense of sin.
The type of these is Mary Magdalene, of whom it
was recorded that Jesus had cast out of her seven
devils,* that is, that He had healed her soul of all
the diseases of sin by which she was afflicted. The
Fourth Evangelist, as his manner is, takes up this
1 Cant. V. 2.
' So Dante again : " Si come il sol, che si cela egli stessi per troppa
luce " (Par, v. 133).
' Mark xvi. 9, Luke viii. 2.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 249
record and makes it the base of one of his symbolic
stories. To him Mary Magdalene becomes the type
of the soul which has found healing, but not joy
or peace. Therefore she stands in her mental
attitude outside the Church, much as the poeni-
tentes were compelled to do in the early days, and
bemoans her past sins, heedful no doubt of the
stern fact that though sin may be forgiven, yet
that the soul must endure the limitations imposed
by sin on it in loss of delicacy of feeling, spontane-
ousness of love, and capacity of self-surrender.
The first step towards sharing in the Risen Life
is taken when the soul steps aside ! from brooding
on its condition, and looks instead humbly at the
" monument " left behind Him by Jesus. The
Evangelist seems to emphasise by his choice of
words the necessity for humility as a precondition
of the mystic vision, and we may expand his demand
by saying that when the experience of sin has
taught its bitter lessons the soul attains to a mid
way position of Disinterestedness towards the
things it once desired, and is ready to pass from
this to that humility which is the fruit of the vision
of Goodness. If it be said here that to include the
Supreme Good in a representation is to compel
Him to enter the empirical world, we reply
that man is a member of the higher world of
Freedom in so far as he sees the Good, and that,
therefore, the act by which he sees is not of the
empirical order, does not make use of a repre
sentation, but is an act of the spirit which only
afterwards becomes through self - expression a
member of the empirical world.*
2 This in opposition to Kant, Critique of Practical Reason.

250 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
On man's side then humility is the counterpart
to the gift of God. For when it stoops it beholds,
with the interest and delight of a spectator at the
games, the presence of the Divine in the Church
which is — to employ a kindred metaphor — the body
of Christ.! For the two angels in white are the
surrogate of Jesus Himself, even as the angel of
Jahweh in the O.T. was of Jahweh. They are
clothed in white, for white is the colour of light,
and the Logos is the Light of the world, and God
dwells in light.* They sit one at the head and one
at the feet, as the angels of memory and of hope.
They question the penitent, i.e. they cause her to
put explicitly before her mind the cause of her
sorrow, in obedience to the law which says that
confession is good for the soul. She makes a formal
confession of her desolate state in turning her mind
on her past,* and then the revelation flashes on her
that through the whole period of her egoistic life
Jesus had been standing at the door of her soul
knocking* — that every inmost inspiration had been
His angel undefiled — and she had not known that
it was He.
Even now she is unable to recognise His voice,
so difficult is it for the soul to escape from the pre
conceptions and the timidities and the despond-
1 Eph. i. 23.
2 1 Tim. vi. 16, James i. 17, Acts xxvi. 13 ; but God is also fire (Heb.
xii. 29), that is, in the presence of righteousness He shows Himself as the
light of love, but in the presence of sin as the fire of wrath — to consume
not the sinner but his sin.
' The phrase its rd dirla-w must be rendered, as the similar phrase in
Phil. iii. 13, of things of the mind and not of locality. Cf. the address of
the Shepherd to Hermas (Sim. ix. 2, 7) : ra dwlaw <tou ISelv oi Svv^ ra Si
lp.irpo(TBiv aov jSX^Treis ; Luke xvii. 31, John vi. 66, xviii. 6, in all of
which a deeper interpretation renders " the things behind " as lower stages
of the spiritual life.
^ Rev. iii. 20.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 251
encies which form her damnosa haereditas of sin.
With memories of the past flooding in, the keeper
of the garden, Satan, the Lord of temptation and
of Form, seems to be the speaker as of yore, question
ing her for trial and not to draw her to the central
fire of love. If so, she hardly stands the test, for
no matter how great her love, she still emphasises
her feeling that she is capable by herself of appro
priating Him, that is. His salvation, if once she
knows where to look for Him. This is on a lower
level than that suggested by the first address of
Jesus to her in which He salutes her as " Woman,"
as He had before addressed the Syro-phoenician
woman of great faith,! jjjg Mother at Cana* and
at the Cross.* In each case the implication is
that " Woman " represents the intuitive, receptive,
expectant attitude which stands over against the
Christ offering to Him the chalice of the soul to be
filled with the wine of spiritual life. The higher
judgment contained in the words, " Woman, why
weepest thou ? " is a call such as God is wont to
address to our souls to make ourselves worthy of
the position thus offered, and Mary's reply is typical
of our inability as a rule to make an adequate
response. It is not till the invitation is still more intimately
phrased, until it takes a distinctly personal character
in the naming of her name, Mary,* until the name is
named by God Himself so as to touch the hidden
springs of personality that the trust in self ("I will
take Him away ") is transmuted into the spontane
ous self-surrender implied in the term of adoration,
" Rabboni," which is expressed in the language of
1 Matt. XV. 28. ' John ii. 4.
« John xix. 26 « Cf. Exod. xxxiii. 12, 17.

252 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the heart. And even this is not the final term, for
the personal bond of affection must in its turn yield
to a still more deeply-rooted tie. The personal
must become the super-personal, and the human
Friend and Teacher must be seen as the ascended
Lord (hence the injunction, " Touch me not "),
as the vicegerent of the Father, before the eternal
bond of union, the heavenly marriage, can be estab
lished between God and the soul.
Meanwhile, the feeling expressed in " Rabboni,"
the thought which is to assimilate the transcendency
of the risen Lord, are to find expression in the act
of service for other disciples. She who has been
shown the inner truth is to go out and tell others
that the revelation which Jesus makes of Himself,
and in their degree, therefore, of His disciples, is
that their life consists in a continuous process of
ascending towards His God and Father and theirs.
The story taken as a whole, therefore, is a revela
tion of the effective operation of the Lord through
His Risen Life in the soul, whereby He calls it out
of sin to penitence, from penitence to humility,
and from humility to recognition of Him as Lord
of the soul, and of itself as His servant and
missionary. C. The Risen Life and Contemplation. — The full
mystic meaning of the story in John xx. 19-23 may
be best obtained by regarding the social event there
described as a reflection from the personal life of a
representative Christian, following the numerous
indications of the N.T. which point to Christ as
the inner principle of the spirit of man.! Such a
1 In this case the " disciples " represent the summation of the powers
of the soul — Judas, a representative of the Tempter-side of Nature being
significantly absent from the Life which is now on a plane where Tempta-

^ THE FIFTH ARTICLE 253
Christian obeys the command, " When thou pray est
enter thy innermost chamber " ; ! he withdraws
his mind, that is, from all thoughts and feelings
that are concerned with outward things, he gives
pause even to the unending " discourse of reason "
that fills waking life, he inhibits all inner movements
that are personal in origin or content, and with all
his spiritual powers in active repose he waits to see
what God will say to him. He has learned the
lesson which Moses taught at the Red Sea, " Stand
still and see the salvation of the Lord " ; * and the
Psalmist, " O tarry thou the Lord's leisure ; be
strong and He shall comfort thy heart, and put
thou thy trust in the Lord " ; * and Isaiah, " In
quietness and in confidence shall be your strength," *
the lesson which modern philosophy has missed,
and the modern industrial system scoffs at, viz.
that man's part is a small part compared to God's,
for all that he has to do is to make ready a highway
for God, and then to wait for God to come when
and as He pleases. The denial of this fundamental
truth of religion is the one and only heresy of this,
or of any age, which is of any importance.
In the Gospel-story before us, however, the
lesson has been learned, for the Christian soul has
shut to the doors of its soul lest any Jews, that is,
external persons, things or ideas, should enter, and
so shut out God. And he has his reward in that

tion cannot come. This twelvefold enumeration (when Matthias replaces
Judas) of the powers of the empirical Christian reappears in the Apocalypse
in the description of the holy city, the heavenly Man, the perfect cube,
where no part was wanting and none in excess. (The symbolism of the
four sides and the three gates in each has been ingeniously worked out by
Anna Kingsford in Tlie Perfect Way, 1890, Appendix V., and by St. Bernard
in Migne, t. 184, 1117 ft.)
1 Matt. vi. 6. ' Exod. xiv. 13. ^ Ps. xxvii. 16. * xxx. 15.

254 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Jesus, that is, God in His redeeming (= exalting,
inspiring, and attractive) power, in His own way,
suddenly emerges out of the deepest ground of
Being and moves forward into the foreground or
central point of the innermost, where " mortal and
immortal merge and human dies divine." More
over, He appears as the antithesis of the spirit
which is always Becoming, the spirit which the
Christian soul has been stilling into silence. He is
instead " He who stands, stood and will stand," the
fixed centre of a world in ceaseless motion, and as
such He fills the soul with an ineffable satisfaction ;
His salutation is an effectual gift of Peace (" Peace
be with you "), for the voice of the Lord is mighty
in operation.! The showing of His hands and His side is the
assertion of the profound psychological fact that
the wounds caused by our sins with which the in
dwelling Christ is daily wounded in the house of
His friends* are by a Divine alchemy changed into
dazzling rubies in His heavenly crown. It is true
in the mechanical world of which we are subjects
that no act, good or bad, but leaves its mark on
our psychical substance and endures in our memory,
but that is only one-half of the truth. The other
half is even more important, and that is, that in
the heavenly world of Freedom these records of
the empirical world undergo a change into some
thing rich and rare, so that what began in shame
ends in glory. The Christ, who has been made
bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, now shows
His pierced hands and opened side, not in reproach,
but as dazzling memorials of a Divine love now
clad in deathless beauty. This vision of rhythmic
' Ps. xxix. 4. " Zech. xiii. 6.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 255
beauty, of sadness now vibrating in the major-key
of joy, fills the whole being with rejoicing, for it is
the joy of the Lord Christ in whom the twelvefold
powers of the soul find their unifying point.
Again, the gift of peace comes in double measure
{v. 21) seeing that there is this difference between
earth and heaven, viz. that on earth all pleasure
ends in satiety and in longing for something which
is not pleasure, while in heaven happiness never
cloys, but is ever fresh. This at least is what those
mystics and saints who have found the heaven of
the inner kingdom of God affirm with one voice,
and their testimony on a matter of spiritual fact
is as credible as that of a scientist about a bacillus.
As we have seen, whenever a man is brought
face to face with the Risen Life he is called on for
service, not for inglorious ease. The Christ was
sent from the Father in order that He might minister
to others,! and He in His turn sends His servants
forth on the same errand, clothed with the same
authority. " As my Father hath sent Me, even so
send I you " ; hath sent, and therefore sends still,
for the Father is working still, and so the Christ
is an unceasing worker also.* Moreover, He who
sends the worker supplies him with strength. As
the Lord God formed man's body and then breathed
into it the breath of life, so Jesus by a similar mode
of working breathes into every soul which receives
Him of His own Divine spirit of love and holiness.
Henceforward such souls are as a light shining in a
dark place, as a city set on a hill, or, to use a well-
known image, they become sun-like in that they
harden some as clay and melt others as wax.
Their influence on sinners automatically provokes
1 Mark x. 45. ' John v. 17.

256 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
hostility, and so retains the sins which that influence
stirs into activity ; their influence on those who have
begun to hate their sins melts them into penitence
and desire and love, and so remits, or forgives, or
puts away the accursed thing.
Again we see that the characters of autonomy,
of activity, of love, and of authority of the Risen
Life are illustrated in the way that it crowns of its
own volition the efforts of Contemplatives to find
it, by pouring upon them of the Spirit they are
in search of, and then by commanding them per
emptorily to go forth as agents of the redeeming
Lord Himself.
D. The Risen Life and the Understanding. — The
story of Thomas in John xx. 24-29 need not detain
us long, for from one point of view it is an appendix
to the foregoing, and from another is a double of
the story of the Two Disciples going to Emmaus.
But Thomas is a typical figure with a character all
its own. It will die for the faith it has but not
go beyond it. What others may tell it listens to
without conviction, and demands a proof all to
itself. It is inclined, therefore, to minimise the
social side of religion and the forces in human
nature which drive it towards fellowship with others,
and to omit the argument from the consensus
gentium altogether. You must prove it to me in
black and white, is its demand ; I must see and
feel for myself ; I must ask that a direct and
recognisable stimulus be applied to my own person
ality in its memory of its wounds, before I can
surrender myself in confident trust on Another.
This demand Jesus meets in the power of His
Risen Life. He appears to Thomas, shows him
that He knows his inner mind without enquiry.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 257
as He had once shown Nathanael,! ^nd so wins an
equally whole-hearted surrender. On which there
follows the Beatitude which is the unfailing en
couragement of those who press forward unfalter
ingly towards the higher life without proofs or
sensible signs of God's presence, but in simple,
childlike, unquestioning certainty that God is, and
has a right to claim full obedience. Many are those
who have had no clear inner vision, who have heard
no voice within, such as Elijah heard at Mount
Horeb, or Jesus at Jordan, or the Three on the
Mount of Transfiguration, but yet push forward
bravely and persistently, doing their best, wishing
it were better, and then leaving the rest to God.
Glad souls without reproach or blot
Who do Thy will and know it not
are as much subjects of this Beatitude as those
who honestly and perseveringly try to do it, and
succeed partially only. Certainly the man who
obeys a clear inward call, such as comes to a Thomas,
is blessed indeed, but what we should not have
noticed, unless the Lord of Life had drawn our
special attention to the fact, is that those are more
blessed who commit themselves to Him unhesitat
ingly without demanding signs or proofs. Which
should be a consolation to ordinary Christians when
they encounter persons who tender proofs based
on psychic gifts, or experiences of the sweetness of
God to the soul.
E. The Risen Life and Eternal Life (John xxi.). —
The transcendent life which is the goal of all mani
festation of immanent life here below is nowhere
set forth with more penetration and skill than in
1 John i. 48. S

258 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the last chapter of the Fourth Gospel. Seven
disciples go a-fishing. Seven is the number which
denotes the manifestation of a higher Being. Thus
the seven spirits of God who themselves fill the
Universe are the manifestation of God in His glory.
The sevenfold powers of the soul are the outward
and visible manifestation of the spirit of man, and
similarly the seven disciples are the manifold
radiating divine-human powers by which the Christ
reveals Himself in the world of souls, typified by
the Sea of Tiberias. His work, carried on by the
powers of the souls in which He has incarnated
Himself, is to fish, as He, the Great Fisherman,
had been doing throughout the ages for the souls
of men. Oftentimes His agents go forth to their
work left apparently to their own devices, with no
heavenly light to help them, and all that " night "
they catch nothing. This apparently is to warn
us off all confidence in ourselves, our independent
action, or in our natural or acquired capacities.
Then failure drives us to our Lord right humbly,
and we find Him there all the time standing on the
shore of eternity. He inspires us so that we cast
our nets on the right side of the ship — an important
law of mission- work. His gospel is not to be thrown
to the four winds blindly in the hope that some
where some of it will find lodgment, but only where
there are prepared souls ready for it. Did He not
Himself say something about not giving that which
is holy unto the dogs and not casting pearls before
swine ! even as Ezekiel (xlvii. 10), writing of the
same great fishing of souls, said that " from Engedi
even unto En-eglaim shall be a place for the spread
ing of nets ; their fish shall be after their kinds, as
1 Matt. vii. 6.

THE FIFTH ARTICLE 259
the fish of the great sea, exceeding many " ? The
right side of the ship is dedicated to those fortunate
souls who find themselves, like fishes in the waters,
brought under God's hand to the solemn moment
when, after much moral and mental struggle, they
are ready for the New -birth into the Eternal
World.! It is the Disciple who was loved, and therefore
himself was filled with love, who first discerned the
Wonder-worker, but it was Peter, the man of the
intuitive Faith which goes straight to its object,
who found easily the suitable form for his impetuous
rush through the intervening distance which separ
ated him from his Master.* But no soul goes alone
and on its own quest. It is accompanied by its
companions, and so there is brought to Jesus all
the souls that have been fished out of the psychical
world for Him.
On the eternal shore Jesus stands ready to
receive His own and what He has to give them is
Himself, for He is the Fish lying on the fire — Piscis
assus Christus passus — purified seven times by fire,
as He is the Bread of Life. The number of the
" great fishes," i.e. of great souls — great because of
^ May we not deduce from this passage the inference that Buddhism
and Mohammedanism and all lower religions have their subordinate
place as preparing their devotees for the coming of the Christ to the soul,
and that He may come under the forms provided by any one of these,
even without any assistance from a definitely organised Christian
body? 2 Two hundred cubits, like the two hundred pennies of John vi. 7, the
two hundred pomegranates on the temple pillars, Abigail's two hundred
loaves and cakes of figs (1 Sam. xxv. 18), all seem to symbolise by their
hundreds ( =ten squared) completeness, and by two the world of duality,
so that two hundred cubits of sea-journey typify the sum-total of experi
ences which the soul in its appointed clothing of flesh (iirevSiiT-qv) must
go through in this world where all things are double one against another
(Ecclus. xlii. 24) before it reaches the eternal world where duality is lost
in unity.

260 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
the great tribulations out of which they have come,
—is a hundred and fifty and three.!
The invitation to the morning-feast, the silent
awe of the disciples, the hush, that is, that falls
over all the subsidiary powers of the soul in the
consciousness of the presence of Christ, the giving
of the food of immortality by the risen Lord, are
described in a few broad strong touches so as to
leave on the mind of the reader an impression of
the supernatural unearthly character of the story
as a whole. We are left with a feeling of awe in
the presence of one among us who is the Lord of
the invisible world as well as of the visible.
In giving the above interpretations, however,
of the Resurrection stories, we are far from wishing
to have it supposed that these interpretations
exhaust the meaning of the stories, or give more than
a single aspect of each story. They are finger
posts pointing to the direction in which the meaning
is to be sought and in a way shadowing it out, but
not claiming to be the meaning in its fulness of
breadth and depth. The presupposition of their
treatment as given above is that the stories proceed
from masters of the spiritual life, and that they
^ St. Augustine and St. Gregory both symbolise this number, and we
may take it for certain that they are following the same tradition whieh
the Fourth Evangelist also followed. St. Cyril of Alexandria regards
153 as 100-f 50-f 3. The 100 is the fulness of the Gentiles, the 50, being
half of 100, is "the remnant of Israel according to election," and the 3
is the all-governing Trinity. St. Augustine offers us two interpretations.
The 3 stands for the Trinity and 150 is 50 x 3 ; but 50 is the square of 7-(-l,
and represents the perfection of the sevenfold working of the Holy Spirit
brought to a unity. Or otherwise : 153 is the sum of the flrst seventeen
natural numbers. But 17 is 10+7 ; hence 153 represents the sum-total
of all those who keep the Law (10) by the power of the Spirit (7). St.
Gregory takes 17 as St. Augustine does for those who keep the Law through
the Spirit, multiplies it by 3 to get the jubilee number with one added, for
rest, and by 3 again, which gives us 153, or the number of the citizens of
the heavenly country who have found final rest.

XV THE FIFTH ARTICLE 261
share, therefore, in the inexhaustible depth of that
life. The well is deep, and all our vessels are in
adequate taken together to empty. Each must do
what he can and draw what he may. But when
once the mystical or spiritual nature of the stories
is recognised, all controversy about their meaning
becomes impertinent. For truth can never give
contradictions but only complementary aspects.

CHAPTER XVI
THE SIXTH ARTICLE — PART I
He ascended into Heaven
' Kva^dvTa ek tou? ovpavov<;
That the Ascension of Jesus has been from the very
first as integral a part of the story of His earthly
life as His Resurrection is certain,! ^^^ ^-j^jg jj^
spite of the fact that it too is not marked by definite-
ness of time. The Acts place it forty days after
the Resurrection, Barnabas (xv. 9) on the same
day, and by Valentinians and Ophites it was placed
eighteen months afterwards, according to Ascension
of Isaiah 545 days afterwards, and according to
the Pistis Sophia eleven years later. But this
variation of date does not affect the undoubted
testimony to the fact any more than difficulties in
harmonising the appearances after the Resurrection
throw doubt on the belief that Jesus Christ had
risen from the dead.
1 This is only in appearance contradicted by Harnack when he says
that the narration of Christ's descent into hell and ascent into heaven
rose comparatively late, for he dates them even so from the close of the
first century and derives them from short formulae (such as those of the
Creed) " containing an antithesis . . . descensus de coelo, ascensus in
coelum : ascensus in coelum, descensus ad inferna, which appeared to be
required by O.T. predictions . . . just as it is still naively inferred : if
Christ rose bodily he must also have ascended bodily (visibly ?) into
heaven " (History of Dogma, i. 106). 262

OHAP. XVI THE SIXTH ARTICLE 263
But our concern here is with the meaning of the
Ascension rather than with the Ascension itself
as a historical fact, and the meaning seems to be
suggested by two passages, one from the N.T. and
one from St. Augustine. In Eph. iv. 9 it is said
that the reference to Ascension in Ps, Ixviii. 18
imports a previous descent into the lower parts
of the earth, where the reference is to the Incarna
tion and not to the Descent into Hades as a distinct
act.! So St. Augustine says that the Ascension
is the counterpart of the Incarnation, for in the one
Jesus came out of the invisible world into the visible,
and in the other he returned from the visible world
into the invisible.*
1 It is clear, however, that the two are not like
a plus and minus which cancel one the other, for at
the Ascension something was taken into the in
visible which had not come out of it at the Incarna
tion, unless it may be in germ. For Phil. ii. 9
says that since the Christ humbled Himself at
His lncarna,tion,theref ore God also hyper-exalted Him
{vTrepvyjrQyae), and freely gave Him a Name above every
name. That is. His earthly doings and sufferings
were not mere empty examples for others without
vital relation to Himself, not mere surplusage
^ The genitive in the phrase " lower parts of the earth " is not partitive
but epexegetical. It is the earth itself to which the Christ descended.
The same meaning is to be found in John xii. 32 (v, 33 is a misleading gloss),
where Jesus speaks of Himself as being raised out of the earth, i.e. out of
His earthly and mortal body. Rom. x. 7 is not contradictory of this, for
there the " abyss " takes the place of the " earth."
" This is paralleled in En, in Pss., Ps. xxxviii., Bened. ed., iv. 309 •-
" Est autem haec ascensio [of the Psalm heading] non pedibus, non scalis,
non pennis ; et tamen si interiorem hominem intendas, et pedibus et
scalis et pennis. . . . Sed in rebus corporalibus aliud sunt pedes, aliud
scalae, aliud pennae. Intus autem et pedes et scalae et pennae affectus
sunt bonae voluntatis." But the Ascension of Christ receives very little
notice from St. Augustine.

264 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
which might have been omitted without leaving
His inner life the poorer, but actual achievements
which in some way enriched His human spirit and
soul, and, therefore, gained for Him His hyper-
exaltation. He Himself affords the best commentary
on His maxim that he that humbleth himself shall
be exalted.!
We must not allow ourselves, however, to adopt
the easy and ready explanation that this conquest
and subsequent exaltation are to be explained as
inevitable seeing that His humanity was indis
solubly united to the Eternal Word, and, therefore,
could not but be carried aloft, for this is to deny
to His human Will that noblest prerogative of man,
the power to exercise his freedom to choose God
as his portion. The difficulty this explanation
raises is not got rid of, be it noted, by any reference
to the newness of the human nature taken by the
Incarnate Lord, for if this new humanity was such
that it was beyond the reach of Freedom, then it
lacked, we must say again, the most distinguishing
characteristic of human nature, and so a gulf was
dug between Him and us. On the supposition,
however, that One had pre-existed as man, who
as man had achieved all that was within the attain
ment of man, who as man had surrendered His
personality utterly and entirely to God, so that
it was able to be assumed by the Eternal Logos,
our difficulties disappear. Freedom is respected,
necessity is obeyed, the Catholic doctrine of the In
carnation is made more convincing than ever, and
in particular the famous passage Phil. ii. 5-11 gains
a fuller meed of homage and a more satisfactory
interpretation than it commonly receives.
1 Matt, xxiii. 12.

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 265
The Gnostics as the first Christian theologians !
attempted to apply to Christian belief in Jesus
as God the categories of syncretistic thought. In
doing this they explained that in His descent He
had clothed Himself in each of the successive heavens
He passed through with the form proper to it, and
so had escaped the notice of the aeon, or archon,
who ruled over it, including the " prince of the
power of the air." * The day has gone by for
treating Gnosticism as speculation run mad, in
spite of the Pistis Sophia. For the Hymn of the
Soul has revealed the fact that among the Gnostics,
as among ourselves, was a left wing which used the
phraseology of their school as the bearer of their
mystic experiences, and a right wing which thought
that their theology was an adequate expression of
Reality. The former, we may conjecture with
some confidence, meant by the descent through the
1 Harnack, History of Dogma, Eng. trans. : The Gnostics " were, in
short, the Theologians of the first century. They were the first to trans
form Christianity into a system of doctrines (dogmas). They were the
first to work up tradition systematically. They undertook to present
Christianity as the absolute religion, and therefore placed it in definite
opposition to the other religions, even to Judaism. But to them the
absolute religion, viewed in its contents, was identical with the result of
the philosophy of religion for which the support of a revelation was to be
sought " (i. 227). Gnosticism was the eclectic system of religious thought
and practice which was in possession of the lands round Palestine at the
beginning of our era. It is defined in Excerp, Theod, Ixxviii. : " What sets
us free," says the Valentinian, " is the knowledge of who we were, what
we are become ; where we were, whither we are come for our bodily life
(ive^^e-qpev) ; whither we are hasting, from whence we may attain
redemption ; what birth is and what re-birth." The problem of Evil,
unde malum 1 especially occupied Gnosticism, and according to Anz its
central teaching was concerned with the way by which the soul could
escape from the slavery of the powers of Space and Time (aeons) and
mount beyond all planetary influences into the highest heaven where is
the blessed freedom of the Divine Pleroma. (See Realency, f. prot, Theol.
u. Kirche, vi. 731 ; and W. Anz, " Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des
Gnostizismus, 1897," Texte u. Unter,, Band xv. Heft 4.)
2 Eph. ii. 2.

266 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
various heavens and the taking of a different form
in each, the series of steps by which Jesus assumed
every part of our nature, spirit, soul, and body.
Indeed the single fact that Gnosticism throughout
its whole extent admitted the analogy of the
macrocosm and the microcosm would be alone
sufficient warrant for inferring that the " descent
into the lower parts of the earth " is a descent into
not merely our spirit on its divine side but into the
uttermost depths whether of spirit, soul, or body,
which are to be found in human nature. It is
immaterial whether we adopt the threefold or seven
fold division of the heavens — the Gnostics as a
rule favoured the sevenfold, and St. Paul in 2 Cor.
xii. 2 the threefold division, for in both cases the
essential meaning is the same, viz. that of all the
states of consciousness, or of being, that are proper
to man, Jesus was a participator. Moreover it is
clear that the word heaven or heavens in the N.T.
has passed beyond all spatial conceptions, and
denotes that state of life which is in accordance
with the Being of God — the life of love, joy, and
peace. It is of some importance to emphasise in the
Christian's Creed the implicit assertion of his
descent from above, both in the way of the natural
and the supernatural, seeing how strong a bias a
one-sided statement of the principle of evolution
has given in the popular mind to the materialistic
explanation of the origin of man. No one who has
given even a slight attention to the facts of the
ascent of man physically from lower forms, as
evidenced, for example, in phylogenetic embryo
logy, will wish to throw doubt on man's kinship
with the lower animal world. But at the same time

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 267
no one who considers the mental and spiritual
heights to which man may rise, nay, has risen, can
be content with any merely physical explanation
of his origin. On the form side undoubtedly an
ascent may be charted, but on the side of life a
descent is marked with equal clearness. Man, as
an animal, is under the law of evolution, but, as
man, his true home is in the realm of heavenly
Freedom. He too has descended into the lower
parts of the earth, and also his destiny is
to ascend into the third heaven whence he
came. It would be easy to draw out on the lines of
scientific method a spiritual itinerary of man in his
descent. Such an itinerary would be concerned
to show how from the Idea which proceeded from
God man as spiritual being started on his career ;
how his early stages were marked by self-conscious
ness and self-determination ; how next the spirit
obeyed the law of self-formulation by putting forth
as its image and glory the Soul ; how the Soul
learned of its Spirit to perceive and create sensation,
to feel, to know, and to will ; how to Soul was added
Body as the expression of the Spirit in " ultimates,"
and as the instrument, and also the limiting law
of the Spirit's activities. Then we might, still
following established lines, retrace the Spirit's
path as it turns round on itself to seek the Idea
from which it took its rise ; and then, finally, we
might, if we had full confidence in the all-embracing
sweep of Reason, utilise the scheme so constructed
to illustrate the meaning of the Ascension of Jesus
Christ. And when we had done all this we should
find ourselves somewhat further from the Truth than
when we started.

268 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
For Religion has her own truths, her own logic,
and her own instruments, which not only include
those of Reason, but supply the very light by which
Reason walks. To Religion Thought is not the
last term of the spirit but the middle term between
Feeling and Will. By the tendency of the Will
as directed by Feeling in front and by Thought
following after is the value of man's life decided,
and the earthly life of Jesus Himself submitted
to the same process of testing and judging. It was
not the depth of His feeling, or the unerring aim
of His intuition, or the extent of His acquired know
ledge which fitted Him to be the Redeemer of men,
but the unswerving devotion of His Will to the Will
of His Father in Heaven. Whatever came to Him
as meat, whether of earth or whether it proceeded
out of the mouth of God, was used to fulfil the will
of His Father and to finish His work.! Moreover
this was not a sporadic obedience and devotion,
but unbroken throughout life, so that at the end
He was able to cry triumphantly, " At last it has
been finished, the testing is over, the candidate has
passed every trial, obedience has been proved to the
uttermost, the spirit of Egoism has directed his last
assault. Love has conquered." Then by no arbit
rary decree, but through the very nature of things,
He arose from mortality to immortality, ascended
where He was before, not merely as Christ but
also as Jesus — the Name that is now above every
name. It is inadmissible to press the grammar of the
classical period as regulative of Hellenistic Greek
in face of the many evidences of the process of
detrition which has been at work on the latter,
^ John iv. 34.

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 269
but on the other hand it is hazardous to pass over
all peculiarities by a reference to that process. On
the assumption, which we hope we have shown is
not without some ground, that Christianity is
primarily mystical, we should be on the look-out
for grammatical peculiarities, and when we come
across them should enquire whether they are
intentional, and if they are intentional what is the
reason. One peculiarity occurs frequently in the
N.T., especially in the Fourth Gospel, viz. the use
of the present tense where the future would be not
unnatural.! This occurs in connection with the
Ascension in John xx. 17, which relates that Jesus
said to Mary Magdalene, " I am ascending " ; in
John xvi. 28, " I am leaving the world and I am
journeying to the Father," where the change of
tense from the preceding, " I came forth out of
the Father and I have come into the world," is
remarkable. So the new Jerusalem is said in Rev.
iii. 12 to be the city " which is coming down out of
heaven." " The hour is coming," Jesus tells the
Samaritan woman ; * similarly to His disciples,
" the hour is coming and has come " ; * and " he
that is coming to Me " ; * " the night is coming " ; ^
and the people shouted, " Blessed in the name of
the Lord is the Coming-one." * Akin to this is the
frequent use of the aorist in a gnomic or universal
sense, e.g. in John iii. 33, xv. 6.''
1 See note on p. 292 below. " John iv. 21.
= John xvi. 32.
« John vi. 35, 37, 45. ^ John ix. 4.
« John xii. 13, Mark xi. 9, Luke xiu. 35, xix. 38. Cf. John iu. 31.
' Blass's remark, Gram, of N.T, Greek, p. 194, that " this usage is very
rare in the N.T., and only found in comparisons or in connection with
comparisons," is true only of the Gospels when all but the literal sense is
excluded. It is specially untrue of the Fourth Gospel.

270 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
The result of these and numerous other passages
of a similar kind is to emphasise a process rather
than to narrate an event, and this, as we have seen,
is one note of a mystical outlook. Its relation to
the Article of the Creed before us is obvious. It
declares that when we have come to know of the
Ascension as an event we must proceed to study it
as a process. And when we do this we secure what
Thought demands — that the particular shall show
itself under the category of the universal, or in
default be dismissed as a " dead fact." ! Thus the
Ascension which occurs in Space and Time has its
roots outside Space and Time, and being a process
of Life in obedience to the laws of the Universe, it
cannot be limited by any a priori barriers, but must
rather be regarded as a Force which is constantly
seeking for self-expression and bursts forth whenever
the necessary conditions are present.
If, then, we recur to our previous suggestion
that Descent and Ascent are complementary and
illustrate one another, we should go a step further
and point out that being processes of Life their
relation cannot be understood as antecedent and
consequent, but rather that of two simultaneous
organic movements which go on side by side, or,
closer still, like Ezekiel's " fire infolding itself," *
are involved one in the other, just as in man Thought
and Feeling are one act until they are objectified
for analysis. So that the Son of Man as a Heavenly
Being continually descends and ascends, as is said,
" No man has ascended unto the heaven, except He
1 "What each individual element performs, it performs not as indi
vidual, but only so far as being individual it is yet a phase of the universal "
(Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 385).
a Ezekiel i. 4.

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 271
that comes down out of heaven, the Son of Man
who is in heaven." ! Man's life then may be said
to swing between the two poles of descent and
ascent, just as the planets obey the twin laws of
centrifugal and centripetal forces. Being, however,
in Time the two Forces, which in the aeonian order
are timeless and one, are compelled to keep the
balance true by alternate action. -The soul is
plunged into the business of life, the pleasures of
life, and into external things in general, because on
one side of its being it is descending into Form
continually, and all the more surely so, seeing that
the motion is as imperceptible as that of the earth
round the sun. On the other hand, the soul is as
continually ascending, for it cannot but feel and
obey the attraction of the invisible world, and re
spond by Aspiration, Repentance, and Self-sacrifice,
by all those acts of Religion which, proceeding as
they do from a world above Reason, are so terrible
a stumbling-block to those who worship the Goddess
of Reason. The former of these two Forces belongs as we
have seen to the jurisdiction of " Satan," the Lord
of Form, whose work it is to act as the centrifugal
force in the spiritual world, and by Temptation,
hardship, and the winds of adversity to see that the
individual is built up into a strong, independent,
tough, and stubborn Self, able to resist the evil and
prepared to choose the good. The latter is the
centripetal force which draws back the growing
soul to its source, without forcing its will, by the

* John iii. 13. The gnomic sense of the aorist is required here, seeing
that the " has ascended " does not belong to the temporal order, since
Jesus had not at the time of speaking ascended. If " who is in heaven "
is a gloss, as is likely, it yet says what is true.

272 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
attractive lure of goodness. This is the work
which Religion calls redemption, and its Head is the
Lord Jesus. Obviously no soul is fit for redemp
tion before it has attained some degree of egoistic
self-reliance, and hence " Satan " has his necessary
negative part to play in the dual soul-process of
which the bright and pure side is Redemption.
Now the Bible sets out consistently from its
beginning to its end this simple dualistic conception
without troubling itself to recommend it by any
elaborate intellectual buttressing. It offers us life
or death, the life which is God or the death which
is Egoism, and bids us choose,! and by making
the offer it tacitly says that we have already
had sufficient experience to enable us, if only we
will, to choose rightly. In other words, the Bible
asserts dogmatically the supremacy of the world of
values, it bids us see the inner meaning in every
event, and find the worth of everything by referring
it to the Supreme Goodness set before each of us
as his final end and sovereign desire. As the soul
yields itself to the attraction of this ideal, it ascends
to where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God,
and learns to set its mind on things above.
It thus becomes plain that the Ascension, so far
from being a superfluous item in the life-story of
Jesus Christ, is its necessary consummation, and
that not as a singular and disconnected event but
as the last member of a long series of spiritual
acts which characterised the whole life from the
beginning. What the Incarnation effected on the
side of humility the Ascension counter - weighted
on the side of exaltation. From this there follows
the inference to the life of the disciple, that the true
'¦ Deut. xxx. 15.

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 273
test of his discipleship is to be found, not in the
number or the gravity of the sins he commits, but
in the general trend of his psychical life. If he
sins does he feel indignation, fear, longing, zeal,
and avenging ? ! When courage fails, or his spirits
are depressed, or dryness of soul settles down like
a blight, or spiritual sloth saps "his strength and
kills his joy, does he look up and wait for better
days in hope ? Does he find that egoistic impulses
and delights are losing their hold over him, and love
and the joy of service are slowly making their
footing good ? Does he delight in prayer in his
better moments and fly to it in his worse ? Is he
becoming more and more convinced that he had
better lose the whole world than his own soul ? Is
he rising superior to the attractions of sense, and
feeling more at home in the inner world ? Are
pride, sloth, envy, jealousy, cynicism, worrying,
literalism, and fear, being replaced by humility,
joy, sympathy, love, generosity, contentment,
humour, and confidence ? If these questions can
be answered in the affirmative, even though with
some hesitation and many qualifications, then the
disciple may be certain that in spite of all appear
ances to the contrary, and in spite of all his diffi
dence, he is on the Way, the strait Way, that the
Cross is doing its work, and that if he faint not the
Ascension of his Lord shall find its counterpart in
his own. He whose life is hid with Christ in God
shall after (it may be) many lives ascend into the
hill of the Lord and sit on his appointed throne
and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.
1 2 Cor. vii. 11.

CHAPTER XVII
THE SIXTH ARTICLE — PART II
He sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father
Almighty
Tw Ka6ijp.evov ev Se^ia tov [OeoOJ TiaTp6<i
Y'n'avTOKpdTopo<;\
The two O.T. passages which herald the exaltation
of the Christ are Ps. ii. and Ps. ex., especially the
latter, though their content is different from that
of the N.T. article. In the former the Anointed is
throned that He may rule with a rod of iron, or
wound even kings in the day of His wrath, while
in the latter, though authority is emphasised, it
is exercised not in a physical but in a spiritual
manner, A, There are two keynotes in this Article, one
of which is Authority and the other the Ideal, both
being essential to the balanced and four-square
character of the Christian.
The authority won at the Ascension is asserted
by Jesus Himself in the words, " All authority hath
been given unto Me in heaven and in earth," ^
where it is necessary to note that the authority
referred to is of the spiritual order, for spiritual ends,
^ Matt, xxviii. 18.
274

cHAP.xvn THE SIXTH ARTICLE 275
and that " heaven and earth " are not to be under
stood of localities but of the spiritual order and of
the egoistic order respectively. For if the authority
were not of a spiritual character the assertion of it
would contradict such sayings as John xviii. 36,
" My kingdom is not from this world " ; xix. 11,
" Thou wouldst have no authority against Me unless
it had been given thee from above," which can only
mean that had Jesus as a spiritual being not sub
jected Himself to the " wheel of generation " ! He
would not have been liable to the jurisdiction of
Satan and so of Pilate; Luke xii. 14, "Who appointed
Me a judge or a divider over you ? " and John viii,
23, " I am not of this world," So, too, if " heaven
and earth " is to be taken literally we destroy the
fundamental character of the work of Jesus as
Redeemer, by transforming it into a creative or
preservative activity in the cosmical order, such as
that of Vishnu in India,
The authority, then, of Jesus is not cosmical but
soteriological. The world has been created, and the
human world needs to be re-created. This process
of re-creation, or re-generation, by which the soul, as
a Prodigal Son, is brought back from its far country
and set on the Way that leadeth to eternal life, is
that for which Jesus possesses supreme and universal
authority. If, however, we allowed ourselves to
think of this authority as of the pure transcendent
order, and carried into execution apart from His
personal intervention by some organ, or some
machinery, devised for the purpose, which Jesus
once long since established and is now content to
watch at a distance, we should faU back into the
old, dry deistic belief that there is a Supreme Being
' James iii. 6.

276 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
but that " He does not at all concern Himself with
the government of the world," This belief has long
ago been tried in the balances and found wanting.
Hence, while reverencing the transcendent authority
of Jesus — expressed in the reminder that it is at
the right hand of God, the Creator and transcendent
Ruler of the Universe, that He as Saviour sits — we
shall also insist that His authority is also exercised
through living agents in whom He dwells, as is
required by the belief that God is immanent as
well as transcendent.
In these days when Christianity hardly recognises
itself as it is described by its official exponents,
and, therefore, has been driven to an apologetic
attitude, not wholly unlike that of Uriah Heep, it
sounds mere gratuitous audacity to claim Jesus
as the Head of all rulers, artists, scientists, and
philosophers. Yet this is clearly the claim of the
N.T. Not that His function is to rule them as
rulers, artists, scientists, or philosophers, but
as the giver of the life on which their several
capacities depend for their very existence at all.
It may be worth while to dwell on this for a
moment. The present age is admitted on all sides to be
an age above all things of unrest. The most striking
form of this unrest is in the industrial world, where
the employed are following an impulse which is
driving them with ever-increasing velocity towards
the overthrow of the existing economic order. It
is easy, of course, to dismiss this movement as at
bottom grounded on envy, laziness, and a desire for
more animal enjoyment, and to emphasise the virtues
of the employers, and the necessary part they play
in the production and distribution of wealth. It

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 277
is just as easy, on the other side, to point to the
unequal distribution of the rewards of labour as
between the capitalist and the workman, and to
hold up to scorn the luxury in which many of the
rich spend their days and lose their souls. Both
of these plaintiffs have solid facts at the back of
their pleas, but both alike fail to touch the root
of the mischief with the tips of their little fingers.
For let it be granted fully that the one side is
envious and the other self-indulgent, and that they
are quarrelling sordidly over the division of the
spoils, there still remains the question how force,
whether political or revolutionary, is going to do
anjrthing but transfer some of the envious to the
class of the self-indulgent, and reduce some of those
who are now rich to the ranks of the toilers. Will
society as a whole be any sweeter because the
millionaires have become paupers, and Whitechapel
has moved into Belgravia ? The point of view is
wrong, wrong at both ends, because the eye that
takes it squints.
If there were ruling in our Western world a
deep-rooted subconscious belief in the soul, and
therefore in this world as the soul's testing-place,
and in the fitness of the place for it where each soul
finds itself ; if the rich used their riches as talents
committed to their stewardship, as sorne of them
do, and the poor regarded their poverty as the
furnace which is to purge out their souls' dross,
as some of them also do, then neither would riches
be sought nor poverty be refused, but the commands
of Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father
would be awaited and obeyed.
He that appoints the sentinel his room
Doth license him depart at sound of morning drum.

278 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
If Jesus, as God incarnate, be vested with
authority, then He chooses the precise place on the
social ladder which each of us is to occupy, and
He bids us make our footing sure there before He
calls us to go up higher — if indeed He does. If we
believed in many earthly lives, if we could see that
some souls are very young, and some very old, and
that it is not necessarily the young soul that is
among earth's workers, or the old soul among its
great ones, we should be in possession of a canon
of judgment which would settle automatically all
social or industrial unrest. But it is doubtful
whether we have enough religion in our modern
Western world to compel us to view life from its
inner side, and to consider seriously the possibihty
that a creed which substitutes many earth-lives
for one may be capable of bringing our perplexed
world back to God. The Christian anyhow is
certain that it is forgetfulness of Jesus on the right
hand of God which is the cause of our present
troubles. It is not a better political economy we
want, but Religion.
At the same time, it would be an improper pro
cedure to dismiss the labour-movement of to-day
as iniquitous, irreligious, or iconoclastic. On the
contrary, the assertion may be confidently put
forward that even though the movement itself be
blind, as most great movements are, yet at the back
of it is Jesus Himself as the ruler of the souls of
men. He is no more a judge and divider over us
than He was in the days of His flesh, and, therefore,
His care is not primarily whether we are rich or poor,
but whether we are loving or selfish. He looks
down from His heaven on the children of men who
are rich and well-to-do, and He finds them not

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 279
redeeming their opportunity of doing good, but
using their riches as instruments of pleasure, i.e.
of selfishness, and hugging their social superiority
to their fellows, and accordingly He gives them
rulers who plunder them and a social movement
from the depths which threatens their sheltered
palaces. The rumbling of the storm is already
heard on the horizon ; will they have grace to know,
as their barbarian forefathers once knew, the
thunder for the voice of God, and will they drive
in their cattle betimes — that is, their earthly desires
and pursuits ! — when the hail comes down, into the
land of Goshen, of God's people, where the hail does
not strike ? * The storm will probably break, for
if men do not submit willingly to the spiritual
authority of Jesus they 'will be broken by it, for
His sceptre to those that love Him is as that of
Ahasuerus to Esther,* but it is as a rod of iron to
the heathen to break them in pieces.*
Further, if each soul is placed where it is in this
world that it may be tested, developed, and ad
vanced, it is also endowed with its peculiar gifts
and powers in order that they may be used for the
good of others directly, and only indirectly for the
fuller life of their possessor. If anybody prefer
to regard these gifts and powers as bestowed on
the soul at its one and only birth into this world,
in preference to their slow growth through many
lives under the authority and direction of Jesus,
1 " God makes use of troubles ... to free us from whatever impurity
there is in the sensible, in order to spiritualize it by degrees ; and He does
this only by seeming to sully it. The cattle represent our outward nature,
which is extremely troublesome when it is in revolt against its Creator,
but becomes extremely useful when entirely subjected to Him " (Madame
Guyon, on Gen. i. 25).
2 Ex. ix. 26. ' Esther v. 2. * Ps. ii. 9.

280 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
no difference is made in the conditions of trustee
ship. For the love of beauty and the craftsman
ship of the artist ; the sagacity and cool judgment
of the statesman ; the careful eye and kindled
imagination of the scientist ; the comprehensive
sweep of the philosopher's intellect, are all but
God's treasures committed to earthenware vessels.
The gulf fixed between their use and abuse is very
narrow but very deep ; very narrow, for often it is
impossible for a man to distinguish between the
motive which drives him to use his gifts for his own
gratification or his own glory and that which
dedicates them to the service of others ; very deep
because Love and Egoism are mortal enemies.
The first truth then at which the Article of the
session of Jesus at the right hand of God aims is
that of the establishment of a true Authority over
individuals and over society as well. Where the
true Authority is forgotten a false authority will
usurp the throne. In the case of the individual
the one rival to Jesus on His throne is Egoism, for
every apparent rival is but one of the hydra-headed
forms of this one idol of Egoism. For example,
easy good-nature springs from the love of comfort ;
strife from the desire to snatch life's goods from
others ; peevishness is discontent with what, self
has got ; sloth is the vis inertiae of the material man ;
pride is his self-assertion ; pleasure is the tickling
of his nerve-centres ; cruelty comes from a self-love
which has dulled the sympathetic imagination ;
and the thirst for moulding others for their good is
self-righteousness in disguise. The great lesson we
all are set to learn here, each in his way, is the over
throw of the idol of Egoism and the enthroning of
God in its place, and the Way to this is the Way of

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 281
Crucifixion. None can ascend the hill of the Lord,
and sit with Jesus in heavenly places, who has not
crucified the Ego and opened his heart to God.
The same truth rules our social structures.
Mankind was clearly intended to consist of a number
of families or brotherhoods, making in their totality
one large Brotherhood ; ! and wherever the Spirit
of love moves and governs, there is the Divine
Society. But, as a matter of fact, the Spirit of
Jesus gets for the most part lip-homage only, and
" Satan " in the form of the modern State rules
instead, for what governs nations all over the world
is Force as exercised by a small minority, and Force
is Satan's instrument, not God's. The amazing
thing is that we have been all so completely hypno
tised by the existing rule of " Satan " that we are
unable to conceive of a Society without laws en
forced by sanctions. It is not open to any disciple
of Jesus to question the Satanic character of a
society which rests on force, for He bade him not
to resist evil, that is, the force which makes law-
courts necessary and is the instrument they wield.*
If it be said that the doctrine of Jesus would destroy
society by giving the burglar, the bully, the pro
curer, and the fraudulent company - promoter a
loose rein, the answer is that such men are the natural
result of our present system, and would die a natural
death whenever society worshipped Jesus on His
' " The name signifies the recognition of that spiritual organization
which is given to all of us alike, and of the worth of that personality which
we have to reverence, even in its most insignificant form " (Lotze, Micro
cosmus, ii. 213). It is, however, pernicious to talk, as is commonly done,
of all men as they are being equal. In Christian language the invisible
Christian Church alone is the " Brotherhood " of which local communities
are adumbrations. Men taken apart from their spiritual worth are
" neighbours," but not " brothers."
2 Matt. V. 39.

282 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
throne. We first manufacture our criminals and
then punish them, heedless of the fact that our
iniquity is the same in both processes, seeing that
we are put here to train ourselves for heaven by
love and service, and that we have no authority to
" punish " anybody for anything. Nor is it any
valid excuse to say that our criminal code is milder
than it was once, for where a thing is wrong in
principle, degrees of wrongness count for little.
Whether a society which rests on force call itself
a despotism, an oligarchy, or a democracy makes
no difference, for all are alike instruments of oppres
sion and enemies of true freedom. Indeed, the last
of the three in its present imperfect and fraudulent
form is the most pernicious because the most hypo
critical of all, for in it a minority — a Parliament, a
bureaucracy, a Cabinet — oppress the majority after
having inoculated them with the foolish belief that
they are governing themselves. They are bribed by
the gift of votes to surrender themselves as slaves to
their political masters, and so the foolish interchange
of bribery and slavery is established on which are
built most of our modern governments.
There is no cure, says the Christian, for modern
ills but the acceptance of the rule of Jesus, as sitting
at the right hand of Him Who is eternal justice and
infinite love, and the reconstruction of society on
the basis of the Love for which He lived and died.
If this can only be through a revolution, then wel
come the revolution, for " well roars the storm to
those that hear a louder voice across the storm." !
' R6c6jac questions this condemnation of a society held together by
force in saying that " in order that the Will should detach itself morally
from the ego it is necessary that the Good in its active form of Force
should be reflected in the world over again,'' and goes on to say that
Society should " see to it that none prevail over others except for the Good

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 283
B. Jesus, sitting at the right hand of God, is the
fount of authority because He is the Ideal towards
which man must strive, or perish. Indeed the
Session is but an acute expression of the supremacy
of the Ideal to which Jesus dedicated His life.
When, for example. He said that man does not live
by bread alone but by every word which comes
forth through the mouth of God,! jjg .^g^g enunciat
ing the great law that man belongs by nature and
destiny to the Ideal world, the world of Reality ;
and that the phenomenal world is but the reflection
and instrument of that higher world. No doubt
philosophy in the person of Lotze is well ad'vised
in confessing its utter inability to bridge the chasm
which divides the world of values from this world
of forms,* but Religion in its turn acknowledging
of all." He, however, is forced to admit that on these lines " to the general
habit and opinion Goodness is an exotic," and thinks that this does not
matter. This conclusion stultifies his whole plea for inner Freedom, and
omits to notice that nobody is ever made better by Force (Bases of the
Mystic Knowledge, p. 261).
There is much more point in Dr. Rashdall's acute remark : "I suspect
that when the fear of Hell plays a prominent part in the more ardent and
emotional kind of religious conversion, it does so mainly by breaking down
the apathy and the slavery to immediate sensation which has hitherto
prevented moral reflection. It awakens reflection : after that, it is rather
the sense of the justice of the punishment depicted by authority or imagina
tion than the actual fear of it which effects the moral regeneration, though
the one idea may often be psychologically inseparable from the other "
(The Theory of Good and Evil, ii. 263).
1 Matt. iv. 4.
'' Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 396. In Hegel's philosophy, however, the
bridge is builded and crossed. He reduces all consciousness and hence
all reality to Thought, not Thought in its abstraction but Thought as the
mind's living unity which " naturally protests against any attempt to
break it up into different faculties . . . conceived as independent of each
other." " We simply cannot escape from thought," he says ; " it is present
in sensation, in cognition, and knowledge, in the instincts, and in volition,
in so far as these are attributes of a human mind." "There is only one
reason in feeling, volition, and thought." And Hegel regarded Thought
as conterminous with experience, the " principle in virtue of which experi
ence is an organic and unitary whole." The difference between Lotze

284 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
God's unchangeable laws teaches man to " develop
given existence into a knowledge of its value, and
the value of his ideals into a series of external
forms proceeding from himself." ! Just as we have
seen a moment ago that the Authority which goes
forth conquering and to conquer is to be found in
the Ideal world with Jesus, so that which attracts
and allures man to offer himself a willing and joyful
victim shines also from out that same Ideal world.
The world of Understanding, or Cognition, and
the world of Values stand over against one another,
and though the latter understands the former
because it includes it, yet the former is puzzled by
the emergence of the latter. All the things indeed
which dignify and exalt man belong to the unseen
order. Judged by canons of ordinary Under
standing, love is the foolishest of all things, for it
makes a man surrender what makes life enjoyable
for what appears a spectre or a will-o'-the-wisp.
Honour, for which men have gladly died, is but the
breath of public opinion, except to the man who
feels that all visible things without it are con
temptible. Purity or Modesty, an object which the
libertine regards as to be bought and sold, derives
its value to its possessor from another sphere,
as both Pagan pro-consul and Christian maiden
knew very well, though the latter called it God and
the former called it madness. Courage, prudence
would say, is a foolish thing unless under the control
of a spirit of moderation, but to the mystic it is a
virtue without which no other virtue can be at all,
and Hegel here is to be found in the fact that Lotze was passing in thought
from the universal in " values " to the particular form, while Hegel reverses
the process and insists that the business of philosophy is to discover the
logical implications of all sensuous consciousness.
' Lotze, Microcosmus, i, 401.

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 285
and it derives its imperious right to face and submit
to all dangers, because the Ideal world from which
it springs decides that the self can place no limits
to the duty of self-sacrifice for the Good.
But even psychology finds it necessary to allow
a place for the Ideal world in its inventory of man's
inner goods. The Self we possess is a self-conscious
being, and self-consciousness does not mean that
the subject which is self-conscious has its own
identical self for its object, but rather that one
Self is conscious of another self, or, to put it in
another way, that the total Self is so split up that
" the I and the myself are not quite identical."
But in either case the language used is not precise,
for we do not possess two selves, nor can the one
Self be actually divided. Yet the distinction is
valid between the ideal and the empirical Self, the
higher and the lower, the potential and the actual.
This distinction is not exhausted by saying that
all that the present Self does is to select some given
experience, or sets of experiences, of its own which
are stored up in its memory, in order that it may
posit as the object of its thought its own Self under
the point of view of the bearer of those experiences.
For this would be to offer to the Self as its object
a merely imaginative being who once was, and is
now being re-created in thought, whereas the relation
between the two carries a greater amount of Reality
than imagination can compass. The Self which
is engaged in judging has for its object not a self of
the past but a self which is still in being.
But again when the Self is oblivious of the
element of preteriteness and is merely studying
what it calls itself, as what it is here and now, the
distinction it establishes is real and not apparent.

286 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Unless its eyes are blinded by the dust of some
overmastering passion it is conscious that it, as a
superior being, is passing judgment on an inferior
who yet in some mysterious way is substantially
though not formally identical with itself. " The
good which I would I do not " ; ! the higher Self
sees the good but the lower self refuses to do it. " So
it is no more I that do it but sin which dwelleth in
me." But sin we have seen is egoism, and egoism
is love bound and imprisoned and forced to serve
as a blind Samson the Philistines. " There is
always an antithesis between ourselves as we are
or have been, and ourselves as we wish to be or
wish that we had been." * But this antithesis is
caused by the fact that the Self of man is a denizen
of two worlds at the same time, of heaven where he
is at home and of earth where he is an exile. It is
the heavenly Self which is the ideal Self, which sees
the Good and wills it, but finds that on its earthly
side it is often powerless to practise and serve and
pursue the Good it sees.
The same distinction appears if we enquire what
we mean by Self-control. " Self-control is control
proceeding from the Self as a whole and determining
the Self as a whole. The degree in which it exists
depends upon the degree in which this or that
special tendency can be brought into relation with
the concept of the Self and the system of conative
tendencies which it includes." * But can Professor
Stout tell us how " the special tendency can be
brought into relation with the concept of the Self " ?
or, what is of far more importance, how it can be
brought into harmonious relation to the Self itself ?
1 Rom. vii. 19. ^ stout. Manual of Psychology, p. 529.
' Stout, ut supra, p. 608.

THE SIXTH ARTICLE 287
Can any shaking of the kaleidoscope of the " cona
tive tendencies " guarantee that the right pieces
shall come to the top ? Or again, as our metaphor
hints, must there not be some external force to
shake the kaleidoscope, and that a purposive force ?
In this latter case, we are brought back to the Higher
Self as that which by right controls the lower self,
even though its authority be often defied and
generally maintained with difficulty. But this is
only to say that self-control is not accurately de
fined as control of the whole Self by the whole Self,
but rather that it is the control which proceeds
from the Self as a member of the ideal world, and
determines the self as a member of the empirical
world. The Christian statement of this truth is contained
in the Article that Jesus Christ, the Word of God
become incarnate, the Ideal Man in whose image
and likeness we are made,! jg ^^j^g ground and origin
of our Higher Self which judges our lower, and,
therefore, that the maintenance of our spiritual life
depends on the communication being kept open
between Him and us. " If ye then be risen with
Christ, seek those things which are above, where
Christ is, sitting on the right hand of God." *
• " As the Logos is the basis of all other thoughts and words of God,
so It is the archetype of the human Logos, primarily of the thought of Ego,
wherein man becomes objective to himself as a person — and of the word
for it ; then of every thought or inward speech that is effected on this
ground of the self-consciousness involved in thought and word " (Delitzsch,
Biblical Psychology, p. 214).
2 Col. in. 1.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE SEVENTH ARTICLE
From thence He shall come to judge the
quick and the dead
"Odev epj^eTai Kpivai ^wi/Ta? Kal v€Kpov<;
Two facts are prominent in this Article, (1) the
parousia — the second coming, (2) the judgment ;
and the second is the purpose of the first.
A. It is customary to explain away the N.T.
statements about the second coming in glory as
due to the sharing by Jesus of the mistaken apoca
lyptic views of His time, or to a misinterpretation
of what He really said by the N.T, writers who
shared those views, but it is not customary for us
to lay the blame on our own shoulders by admitting
that it is our own materialistic mode of thought
which has created the difficulty. The Bible is a
book 'written by men of the Orient, and these men
are in the habit of speaking in metaphors, and
thinking in analogies, to an extent which is un
intelligible to the sober sense of us in the West.
And beside this there is the fact that all our thinking
and all our talking about super-sensible things can
be done only by means of analogies drawn from the
world of sense. Thus, if we speak, or the Bible
28S

cHAP.xvm THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 289
writers speak, of God being in heaven, of the earth
being His footstool, of His repenting, using a
stretched-out arm, of looking down from heaven,
of ascending into heaven, of sitting between the
cherubim, of being in a pillar of cloud, and of acting
generaUy as if He were man, we are not to say off
hand that these expressions are but empty meta
phors whose meaning is elsewhere, nor on the other
hand are we to say that these expressions stand for
closed and exclusive ideas. What they say is true,
but it is not the whole truth, for their larger truth
can be got only by applying the canon that every
event or thing is a symbol of a process which is not
exhausted in the production of that event or thing.
Heaven is not merely a place above, nor earth
merely our globe, nor is God's repentance on all
fours with ours, nor does His session between the
cherubim exclude Him from the remainder of His
world, nor is His stretched-out arm a figurative
expression only for some earthly power, such as
the Assyrian Empire. All these and similar expres
sions have a literal meaning, but they have also
a symbolic meaning, and in religion it is the symbolic
meaning which is at once richer and interpretative
of the literal.
We have to apply this truth to the " Second
Coming " of Jesus Christ. There is no good reason
for denying that He said that the sign of the Son
of Man should appear in heaven ; ^ that men should
see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the
Power and coming in the clouds of heaven,* or
with great power and glory.* Nor need we hold
that the author of the Acts of the Apostles had
1 Matt. xxiv. 30. ^ Matt. xxvi. 64, Jlark xiv. 62.
' Mark xiii. 26. U

290 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
nothing to go upon when he told of two angels
affirming that Jesus should return in the same way
that He went into heaven,! Nor again is the trump
of 1 Cor, XV, 52, and 1 Thess, iv, 16, a metaphor
only, or literal only. It is rather a metaphor which
hints at a great truth. But if we say this of a
trumpet why may we not also say it of the clouds,
and proceed to enquire what is the great truth
hinted at by the expression " coming in the clouds
of heaven ? "
In Biblical symbohsm the cloud is the analogical
term for the life of faith and trust to which we are
called. The cloud is the product of the heat of
the sun acting on the waters of the ocean, and
counteracted by the coldness of the atmosphere.
Similarly, the life of faith is produced by the Love
of God acting on the soul, and being counteracted
by the coldness of the spirit. While this mortal
coldness is ours we are unable to bear the light and
fire of the Beatific Vision, and the cloudy life of
faith is therefore not only a mark of our im
perfection, but also a protection from the heat,
just as our physical bodies not only weigh down
the soul, but also protect us from the sinister
spiritual powers * around us, to whom we should
fall a readier prey but for the " coats of skins "
with which the Lord God has clothed us.* To carry
the metaphor one step further, we may add that
as clouds are driven by the winds (or follow the
winds), and as they present the most gorgeous
colours ever seen by the eye of man, so the Ufe of
faith follows the impulse of the spirits of God, and
is the formal cause of all the moral beauties seen
in the life of man, God's bow in the cloud is His
1 Acts i. 11. " Eph. ii. 2. ' Gen. iii. 21.

xvm THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 291
fixed emerald glory,! steadying and engoldening
our souls ; His enveloping cloud is a light to His
saints, a darkness to His enemies;* in the cloud on the
mercy-seat of our spirit He dwells ; * in the daytime
of our pilgrimage He leads us by the cloud of faith ; *
it was to the ear of faith that the voice from out
the cloud came on the Mount ; ^ and similarly Jesus
in His glory is at once hidden and seen by means
of the cloud which is faith.*
If Jesus then is to come in the clouds of heaven
it will be a real coming, and not only a phenomenal
coming ; that is to say, a coming in material form,
Uke a resurrection in material form, is the least
part of the tremendous event, for such a coming,
if that were all of it, would be subject to the law of
change and decay which rules over the world of
Becoming. But if it be urged that the coming is
with glory we reply that this is true, and, therefore,
it is not only material, for the two terms " glory "
and " material " are antithetical. The " glory "
may use the " material " for its organ, but the two
belong to different worlds and appear to different
faculties. The appearing, when it does take place,
will be a real appearing and not only a phenomenal.
It will be in the clouds of heaven, not in the heaven
• Rev. iv. 3. " Exod. xiv. 20. ' Lev. xvi. 2.
• Ps. Ixxviii. 14. ^ Matt. xvii. 5.
• Acts i. 9. Of course the word faith is used here in its Biblical meaning
of that spiritual energy which takes God as the rock of the heart and its
portion for ever (Ps. Ixxiii. 25), or in Eucken's of the recognition of the
inner presence of an infinite energy, being the divine spirit in man reaching
out after, grasping, and absorbing the Divine Spirit, the actio directa of the
soul, the supplex fidueia by which it confidently claims its own from God
its Father. Belief, or " the assent to that which is credible as credible "
of Bishop Pearson, is far removed from the " knowing of God by the heart "
which the Bible caUs faith. Faith is the " life of God in the soul," and is
therefore compared to the grain of mustard-seed, not because it is small,
but because it is alive.

292 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of pure spirit, nor on the earth of matter, but in the
middle world of " faith," where God is apprehended
but not yet comprehended.!
But we should be leaving half-told the story of
the Parousia if we placed it in the future in such a
sense as to overlook its happening in the present,
and moreover, we should be thereby showing our
selves heedless of a hint contained in the Article
itself we are considering. Whatever the reason
may be, it does not say that Jesus shall come but
that Jesus is coming.* It is for those, therefore,
1 " It is to be remarked that God said ' He would appear in the cloud
upon the oracle.' This is an admirable figure. .For it is certain that it
is only through the nakedest faith that the soul truly has a perpetual
access into its centre where God dwells. God covers and envelops, so to
speak, His majesty with a cloud ; everything is done and accomplished in
this divine obscurity in which the soul neither sees, feels, knows, nor
discerns anything but a, profound silence'' (Madame Guyon on Lev.
xvi. 2).
" God covereth with clouds of figures the heaven of the Scriptures "
(St. Aug. En, in Pss,, Ps. cxlvii. 8).
" Not prophets only, but all who with the word of God water souls,
may be called clouds " (ibid, in Ps. xi. 6).
" What are the clouds ? The preachers of the word of God " (ibid, in
Ps. xxxvi. 5). Cf. in Ps. civ. 3 : " The authority of the Scriptures is spread
out over the world, clouds are not wanting, the word of truth is preached,,
all things that are obscure are expounded, that your hearts may ascend
by the clouds."
Mediaeval writers carried on the tradition which identified the clouds
wth the Apostles as men who had been drawn up out of ignorance and
worldliness into the heavenly wisdom of contemplation by the Sun of
Righteousness in order that their doctrine might drop as the rain to
fertilise the earth. This is referred to in the Paris Breviary, Common of
Apostles : " Totum per orbem nuntii,
Nubes velut, citi volant :
Verbo graves, Verbo Deo
Tenant, coruscant, perpluunt."
And Hugh of St. Cher sums up the likeness of Apostles and clouds in two-
pithy hexameters :
" Pulsa notis : procul a terris : mare linguit : in imbres
Solvitur, et tonitrus : volat : et tenuata dat Irim."
2 Cf. p. 269 above. It is no valid objection to this pressing of the full
force of the present tense to say that the Greek of the N.T. period had lost
its classical distinctness and sharp edge, and that this use of the present

xvm THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 293
who interpret the future tense of the N.T. of a
single, isolated event happening on a given date
(as the Creation was once thought to have taken
place) to show cause why this future shoidd not
be rendered as describing a continuous process
beginning immediately after the prophecy of it.
Is there any reason in grammar, or logic, or in
canons of exegesis why Acts i. 11, " This same
Jesus shall so come," should not be understood to
mean, " This same Jesus shall begin at once to
come in Uke manner, and shall continue His visita
tion until the time of restitution of all things ? "
This interpretation has the advantage of combining
the two points of view which are represented
respectively by the use of the present tense and of
the future.!
for the future is but an example of this decadence, for the N.T. itself uses
the future tense of the Second Coming. Cf. Matt. xxiv. 30, xxvi. 64,
Acts i. 11, xvii. 31. The present is used in 1 Thess. v. 2, Eph. v. 6, and
generally in the Fourth Gospel. Both tenses are combined in Rev. i. 7.
The truth really seems to be that both types of mind are represented in
the N.T., viz. that which fastens on the event which is yet future, and the
mystic which sees the process as ever-present. Our Article follows this
latter. In the main Blass supports this conclusion from the philological
view-point. " Classical Greek," he says, " was acquainted with a (lively
and imaginative) present for future, and this present— a sort of counterpart
to the historic present — is very frequent in the predictions of the N.T.
It is not attached to any definite verbs, and it is purely by accident that
ipXop.ai appears with special frequency in this sense. . . . But verbs of
going and coming when used in the present also have the meaning of
being in course of going (or coming), in which case the arrival at the goal
still lies in the future." The present tense denotes an action as (1) in
duration (its progress) or (2) in present time. But in the latter case the
present may embrace the time immediately preceding or succeeding the
time of speech, and this may be more and more lengthened so as to embrace
all time. It is then, we may conclude from the remarks of Blass, a question
of interpretation in each case, whether the present is used in this extended
sense, and this the context and agreed-on postulates must determine
(Blass, Grammar of N.T. Greek, London, 1905, pp. 187, 189). See p. 271
above. 1 " The belief in the duplex adventus Christi formed one of the most
important articles of Church belief in contradistinction to Judaism and

294 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
But in what sense then are we to understand
the assertion that Jesus is ever coming since His
Ascension ? It is here that the Fourth Gospel
comes to our aid with its significant doctrine of
the coming of the Paraclete. In it Jesus implies
that He Himself is the first Paraclete, that is, a
heavenly Being become Man in order to stand by
the side of His brethren to inspire, comfort, and
strengthen them ; in it He says expressly that He
will send, or the Father will send (the two are not
distinguished, except formally), a second Paraclete
to guide Christians into the whole truth,! ^q unveil
the future,* to recall the past,* to dwell in them,*
and to confute the world,^ and He adds that the
second Paraclete is but the first in another
form.® The " second coming," therefore, of Jesus is the
practical and active outcome of the truth of the
authority which is His at the right hand of the
Father, Were this first truth not supplemented
by the second the authority would remain glorious
but ineffective, a joy possibly to the inhabitants
of heaven, but of little use to those fast bound in
misery and iron on earth. But the Article affirms
that He is ever coming to us — we shall see in a
moment what the object of the coming is — and this
fact is the ground of our hope of salvation. For
it requires very little knowledge of our inner life
to know that, left to our own devices, we can but
Gnosticism. . . . But the belief in the return of Christ to this world
necessarily involved the hope of a kingdom of glory under Christ upon
earth, and without this hope is merely a rhetorical flourish" (Harnack,
Hist, of Dogma, Eng. trans, ii. 295). Mysticism adds that hope in its
own form.
1 John xvi. 13. ^ /j^^. s xiv. 26. « xiv. 17. ^ xvi. 8.
• xiv. 18. The same identification is made in 2 Cor. iii. 17.

THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 295
tread a weary round of sin and remorse, like a
donkey at a mill. We are what we are by nature,
and we become different by nurture only ; hence
if the forces which go to nurture us belong to the
world of Nature only there is no hope of our trans
cending Nature and finding the inner world of
Freedom which is the Kingdom of Heaven, It is
not enough to point us to the uplifting powers
issuing from the Bible or from the Church, for
though in both we are brought into contact with
saints in the past (in the Bible) or in the present
(in the Church), yet both are but living forces on
the side of Goodness which in themselves are external
to us and become effective only when the Divine
Life which lies at the ground of our being awakens
from its grave-clothes and seizes on the truth
offered from without. But this Spirit that slumbers
within is the hidden man of the heart,! qj. ^j^g Christ
that liveth in us,* and whenever there comes to our
conscious, or even half-conscious, life in the outer
court a still, small voice from His Holy of Holies
within, to caU us to repentance, to fill us with shame
and confusion of face, to make us lift up our eyes
to the eternal hiUs, and to inspire faith, hope and
charity, then literally and actually we see fulfilled
the prophecy that He should so come as He went
away. He went from the sight of the soul into the
cloudland of faith ; He comes again in the light of
Love, Perhaps there should be added to what has just
been said a reference to the work of angels in our
salvation, both because on the one hand that work
is depreciated or set aside, and also because on
the other it is raised to an eminence to which it is
1 1 Peter iii. 4. 2 Gal. ii. 20.

296 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
not entitled. Where Reason ! is supreme arbiter
the doctrine of angels is banished to the limbo of
ancient superstition with the mythology of primitive
peoples, on the ground that the times in which we
live offer no adequate evidence of the working of
angels, and none, therefore, of their existence.
Hence it says that whatever the Bible or the Church
may say on the subject must be explained as the
idle imaginings of a more poetic age. On the other
hand, where Truth is not worshipped as a chaste
and exacting deity, minds which easily accept as
fact what their inclinations announce to be desirable
run naturally into the lowest depths of super
stition in " a voluntary humility and worshipping
of angels," * The truth as taught in the Bible, and
verifiable, we make bold to say, by any religious
soul which pays sufficient attention to the course
of its inner experience, is that invisible beings do
step into our lives as shapers of their growth, but
that they never penetrate into the adytum of the
spirit where God directly dwells and at times
reveals Himself, God uses the course of this world.
He uses men, whether good or bad. He uses also
invisible beings who being His messengers are well
called angels, that they may all bring to us from
without some stimulus He sees us to need at the
moment ; but His own work within remains His
own, and is delegated to none. The help that is
done upon earth He doeth it Himself, His " second
coming," therefore, to the soul is not the coming
of a delegate, however august, but the approach to
the soul in love of One who is closer to us than
breathing, nearer than hands or feet, the Dweller
in the Innermost, the Hidden Ground of the Soul,
' " Des Teufels Braut, Ratio," as Luther called it. ^ Col. ii. 18.

THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 297
the Light which shines through the " apex " or
Fiinklein of the soul,
B, The " Second Coming " of Jesus is defined
as having for its object Judgment, and the object
of the Judgment is the quick and dead. It is, to
say the least, unfortunate that attention should
have been fixed exclusively on the final act of this
judgment, and that in consequence the process
which results in that climax should have been lost
sight of. For the object of our concern for all
practical purposes is not so much the closing event
as the continuous process which is going on in our
midst here and now, and, moreover, the only
effective preparation for the crisis consists in
present obedience to the law which the process
reveals to us day by day, " Every morning the
Lord bringeth judgment to light," ! and not only
at the end of all things, " Now is the judging of
this world," *
The verb judge is a comprehensive term and
signifies the weighing of the evidence, the decision
of the appointed authority, the expressed sentence,
and the execution of the sentence. The first and
last of these are the salient moments, and the two
intermediary terms are but bridges between the
facts brought forward and the fruit they bear in
the consequences which follow. But inasmuch as
the popular mind is more adapted to deal with the
final result than to understand the process by which
definite acts have issued necessarily in that result,
it has come to pass that to judge means ordinarily
the act by which the person concerned is formally
handed over to the consequences of the sentence,
whether this be favourable or unfavourable. But
1 Zeph. iii. 5. 2 John xii. 31.

298 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
where the springs of action count for more than the
actions themselves it is the weighing of the evidence
which is the all-important factor, for in a world
governed according to unalterable law the other
three factors follow necessarily the direction assigned
them by the facts disclosed.
Hence the Divine Judgment is concerned as a
process in the work of weighing the evidence, that
is, of testing the individual before it. The Kpiaif
which in full measure the Father has given to the
Son,! ^]^g KpLai^ which is even now going on,*
which the Paraclete makes clear,* the Kplixa, or
definite act for which the Christ is come, all centre
round the crucial act of testing. This may lead
to acquittal or condemnation, to happiness or to
misery, but the pivot of the complex action is in
the testing which forms the tongue of the balance,
and leans to the one side or the other as determined
by what the act of testing discloses.
Now this testing is a process which knows no
cessation, but only moments of greater or less
intensity. It is unbroken, as creation and redemp
tion are unbroken. It is commonly said that we
shall be judged not so much by what we have done
as by what we are, and it is added that what we are
is the result of what we have done. Both of these
statements are true, but neither refers to a third
truth of even greater importance, viz. that every
thing we do is our own response at the moment to
a voice of God, and that therefore it is an auto
matic register of the measure of our worth. The
presence of God with us, therefore, and the appeal
which that presence inevitably makes to our Will
(for God is not an inert Object but an active Power),
1 John V. 22. 2 John xii. 31. ' John xvi. 11.

xvm THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 299
constitute the testing for which He comes to us.
" This is the testing," He says, " that the Light
has come into the world," and that some set them
selves against it and some come to it.! Yov it is
the Light which puts all things to the test, and
shows what is their worth ; it is the Light which
manifests everything.*
An easy test of our religious worth is offered by
this Scriptural view of the meaning of the common
events and doings of daily life, and indeed it is
hardly too much to say that the difference between
religion and irreligion consists in just this, viz.
that Religion sees God's purpose in everything,
while irreligion takes things as they come, and
welcomes them or curses them as they are agreeable
or disagreeable to the self. The irreligious man
does not see that while he is passing judgment on
hedonistic lines he is himself being weighed in the
balances and found wanting. The religious man
may but dimly see what the Divine meaning of daily
things and happenings may be, but he sees anyhow
that some purpose there is, of no small importance,*
and he sets himself to find it out, and when found
to conform himself to it. Both are put to the
test, and both co-operate with God in bringing
on themselves the next appropriate test, the
one in his darkness, the other in the Light, for
according to a Rabbinical saying, " the reward
of a commandment is a commandment," and

1 John iii. 19-21. ' Eph. v. 13.
' Cf . for the importance of a lofty value of Christian verities 2 Clem, i.l:
" Brethren, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God, as of the judge
of quick and dead ; and we ought not to think meanly of our salvation."
On the other hand, " we learn that the regula of Apelles closed with the
words, " dviaTT] els oipavbv SBev Kai flice instead of S0ev fpxerai Kpivai fiifras
Kal vexpois " (Harnack, Hist, of Dogma, i. 261).

300 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
similarly we may say that the penalty of a prohibi
tion is a prohibition.
C. The objects of testing, or judgment, are
defined as the " living and dead." The habit of
interpreting this phrase automaticaUy of those who
are still enjoying life in this upper air, and of those
who have joined the " great majority " in the world
of shades is so firmly established that it is seldom
questioned. Yet a little consideration should show
that the distinction between those physically alive
and those physically dead is not a distinction on
which the Gospel lays any stress. For what the
Gospel is concerned with is the spiritual condition
of man, not his physical life, or the negation of it.
The life it emphasises is the life of the spirit, and
the death it delivers from is the death which sin
inflicts on the soul. If it be said, for example, that
Jesus by rising again overcame death, the plain
facts of everyday forbid us to refer this victory to
physical death, for men and women are struck by
it now as before. And if this difficulty is met by
saying that it is not death but the terrors of Death
which Jesus ended, then we rejoin that this conquest
was won then in the spiritual order, by conferring
on man a spiritual exaltation which should enable
him to face Death unconcernedly. But this is to
admit practically that the purpose of the work
of Jesus had nothing directly to do with physical
life and death, but with spiritual life and death only,
Forgetfulness of the distinction between the two
is forgetfulness of the fixed opposition set by the
nature of things between the world of Freedom and
the world of Necessity, and forgetfulness of this
involves shipwreck of the Christian Faith, No
doubt the Christian, like everybody else, is subject

THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 301
to the mechanism of the universe, of which decay,
change, and physical death are expressions, but
he is subject not as a Christian, but as a member
of the phenomenal order. As a Christian his life
is hid with Christ in God, and no power of any
death can penetrate to that hidden tabernacle.
It .would be impossible to refer even to all the
N.T, passages where the living or the dead are
mentioned — the phrase alone occurs some six
hundred times. But one or two passages may
suffice. In Matt, xxiii. 27 dead men's bones are
used to illustrate profaneness and lawlessness. In
Rom. X. 7 the raising of Christ from the dead is
expressly interpreted as the bringing up of religion
out of the depth of the heart. In Matt, xxii, 32
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are declared to be alive
with a life above this present life of Becoming — of
marrying and being married — that is, with a spiritual
life, and therefore the dead are not those in the
non-physical state of being, but those devoid of
spiritual life. In Matt, viii, 22 the unspiritual are
the dead. In 1 Peter iv, 6 it is to men dead in
trespasses and sins to whom the Gospel was preached,
in order that they might be put to the test {Kpidwa-i)
while in the flesh, and so Uve to God in their spirit.
In Col, i, 18 the " first-begotten from the dead,"
who is also " the first-begotten of every creature,"
is so as being One who had stooped to the realm
of souls in spiritual death, and had overcome in His
own Person that spiritual death which held them
fast. In John v, 25 it is the spiritually dead who
there and then were to hear the voice of the Son
of Man, and so gain spiritual life. In the same
chapter it is said plainly that there are two modes
of Being, one which is that of " aeonian life," the

302 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
way into which is through effective hearing of the
Word of God joined to self -committal to that Word,
and the other which is called Death, the character
istic of which is subjection to a testing or judging
process {v. 24), The " hearing " which the disciple
performs is of the same nature as that which the
Word of God also performs for His Father ; and
what the One or the other hears forms the ground
of the testing to which everything else is subjected
{v. 30 ; cf, 1 Cor, ii, 15), The process is a present
process, and is, moreover, automatic, so that it can
be said that when the resurrection from listening
to one's Ego takes place, and instead of it there is
instituted a listening to the Word of God, not only
is the resurrection past, but so is the judgment, for
the man has passed from death into life.
It is true that the testimony of the Fourth
Gospel to the antithesis of spiritual life and spiritual
death in place of physical life and physical death
is more explicit than that of the other N,T, books,
but it would be an unjustifiable inference from the
expUcitness to say that the other books have the
second antithesis in view. They have not, but
they express the same antithesis in a different way,
and even when they express an opinion on physical
death they subsume that death under the more
comprehensive category of a prior spiritual death,!
1 In the parable of the Prodigal Son it was said that he was dead because
He had left his Father (Luke xv. 24, 32) ; in 2 Tim. iv. 1 it is the spiritually
living and the spiritually dead who are to be the objects of judgment at
the epiphany of Jesus, where the placing the event in the future does not
negate its process in the present, or justify us in thinking of the people
referred to as physically alive or dead ; in Luke xxiv. 5 it is said of Jesus
that it was useless to seek Him as the living one among those who were
dead, that is, the sphere of life into which He had risen was so immeasurably
higher than that of the dead of this world that He must be sought else
where.

THE SEVENTH ARTICLE 303
On the whole, then, we must conclude that the
true sense of this important Article is to be arrived
at only by regarding it as the statement of a spiritual
truth before it can affirm what may become an
empirical event. And in assuming this higher
character it only does what every one of the previous
Articles has done. The Creed opens 'with an
affirmation that Reality is of the spiritual order,
and is identical with One who is the Father of Jesus
Christ and in Him of all things ; it regards this
empirical world, therefore, as not itself the Reality,
though it may express Reality. It proceeds to
posit the Force which lies behind this phenomenal
order as the Divinity which as Christ is the hidden
root of aU Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and as
Jesus is the redeeming (or uplifting, attracting,
quickening) Power in the world. It declares next
that through a New Birth alone of Water and
Spirit is entrance afforded to the children of men
into this higher world of which Jesus Christ is Lord
and King ; that this New Birth is completed
through Crucifixion, i.e. through the substitution
of Love for Egoism ; that citizenship in the
Heavenly country is then attained permanently,
to which act of naturalisation is given the name of
Resurrection ; that on Resurrection follows Ascen
sion, or the resumption of the celestial form which
was laid aside in order that through the lessons
learned in the laboratory of this world the potential
might become an actual glory. Next Ascension
involves the right to rule all lower spheres by virtue
of the lofty position given at the right hand of God ;
and the actual exercise of that authority out of the
heavenly world and in the earthly world by the
constant proffer to every soul in the body moment

304 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap, xvm
by moment of the Divine Idea of Goodness, Truth,
and Beauty, which constitutes a perpetual testing,
and so a discrimination between living souls and
dead souls,! between the sheep placed on the right
hand, and the goats placed on the left, the chosen
types of Love and Egoism respectively.*
' Cf. Augustine, Enchiridion, Bened. ed. vi. 217: "The coming to
judge the quick and the dead may be understood in two ways : the
quick may be those whom He will find still in the flesh when He comes
and the dead those who have left the body ; or the quick are the righteous
and the dead the unrighteous, for the righteous also shall be judged."
" The fact that the judging or testing is attributed to Christ as well as
to Satan is no contradiction, but only the setting out the fact from another
point of view. Satan tempts (or tests) in his own limited and subordinate
capacity, and so carries out the tempting or testing which God by His own
inherent right carries out, as e,g, in the case of Abraham. But Satan's
function ends when the test has been applied ; the result of the testing
falls outside his jurisdiction. On the other hand, when Jesus Christ judges
or tests. He does so educationally as part of the discriminative process
v/hich must precede the final judgment. Wliatever this final judgment
may mean it must in any case be understood by what experience teaches
us about the nature of the judgment which is already in process.

CHAPTER XIX
THE EIGHTH ARTICLE
/ believe in the Holy Ghost
Kat et? TTvevfia ayiov
The first noticeable point in this Article is its non-
theological character, which the absence in the
Greek of the definite article denotes. Whether
this indeterminateness points to the formula of
Father, Son, and Spirit, or to that of God, Jesus
Christ, and Spirit, concerns us here very little.!
What concerns us more is the fact that it points
to a comparatively pre - theological period, when
no serious disputes had as yet arisen about the
formulation of belief in the Spirit as the third Person
of the Blessed Trinity, It was enough in the early
baptismal formula which succeeded that of baptism
in the Name of Jesus to express belief in a Divine
Spirit with whose workings every Christian was
personally familiar.* This fluid state of the term,
^ See p. 66, note.
2 Holy Spirit with the definite article occurs forty times in the N.T. and
forty-nine without. 'When the article is used it points for the most part to
a person who puts forth personal acts of revelation (Luke ii. 26), prohibi
tion (Acts xvi. 6), witnessing (Heb. x. 15) ; where the article is wanting the
reference is always to a spirit of holiness of which the believer is made a
partaker (1 Thess. iv. 8 is the only exception). But even where the person
ality of the Spirit is emphasised no indication is given that any Divine
relationship of Persons is contemplated — except in Matt, xxviii. 19 — not
even in 2 Cor. xiii. 13. 305 X

306 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
so far as it goes, favours the hypothesis of the mystic
character of the religion of Jesus Christ in its essence
and first manifestation, and of the consequently
later appearance of its doctrinal or dogmatic expres
sion. This distinction is unfortunately neglected
by Dr, Swete,! who frequently inserts the definite
article in his translation of passages from the Isapos-
tolic writers. Instances of this are : 1 Clem, ii. 2,
p. 12 ; 1 Clem. xlii. 3, p. 13 ; Ignatius, Ad Ephes.
xviii. 2, p. 16 ; ad Mag. xiii. 1, ibid. ; Marty. Polyc.
xiv. 2, 3, p. 17 ; Barn. x. 2, xiii. 5, p. 18 ; Didache,
xi. 7, p. 20, xi. 12, p. 21 ; Hermas, Mand. xi. 2,
p. 23. On page 33 Dr. Swete 'wrongly takes h
¦Trve'UfiaTi d'yio) with KaTa^d<; ; it belongs to opioXoyeiTai
and has no definite article. Similarly Dr. Swete
inserts the article in Justin, Trypho, iv, 7, p. 34 ;
Apol. i. 6, p. 36. This procedure, as Dr. Swete
would be the first to admit, antedates illegitimately
the theological doctrine of the Trinity, and is
responsible for Dr. Swete's wonder that Justin
should have equated " a prophetic spirit " with
the angels. Harnack, Hist, of Dogma, ii, 209, to
whom Dr, Swete refers, admits in a sentence the
justice of this criticism when he says that " we
cannot at bottom say that the Apologists possessed
a doctrine of the Trinity," Still less the Prophets.
The first meaning of the Article then — as it is
the last, the theological being the middle term —
is that the believer knows, and in his capacity grasps,
a Spirit which reveals Itself to him as different from
the spirit which governs the ordinary world of
humanity,* In that world are to be found exempU-
1 The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, 1912.
2 Messrs. Oelsner and Wicksteed in their note on Dante's Paradiso,
xiv. 67-78 (Temple Classics) say of the poet's description of the appearance
of the third circle of the Holy Spirit that " in its dimness at first and

^ix THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 307
fied in the life of every day some one or other of the
sad catalogue of social vices and personal defilement.
Hatred and anger, en-vy and jealousy, fear and
despair, lust and gluttony, cruelty and oppression,
pride and vanity, sloth and idleness prevent the
building of Jerusalem in our green and pleasant
land, and rob the life of those under the sway of
any of them of all its peace and joy. These vices
which occupy so prominent a place in every life
which has not given itself to God were only too
familiar to the world out of which were drawn the
early Christians, and they form the ground of in
vective of all the Christian Apologists which was
directed against the hostility of that world to their
faith. But to suppose that the antithesis of pagan
'viciousness and Christian virtue is the key to
Christianity would be the worst of historical or of
religious blunders. For there came a day when
the Church lost her freshness and purity, and when
Jerome and Salvianus took up the pen of a Juvenal
to lash the vices of Christian men and Christian
women, and when for all that a fundamental
difference yet divided the Christian from the Pagan
world. For all vice rests at bottom on Egoism,
and the Spirit of Egoism is never wholly extirpated
before " the mystic marriage " takes place, and
yet is being as surely supplanted, if slowly, by the

brightness afterwards, there may be a reference to the difficulty that has
always been experienced in finding an adequate philosophical basis for the
doctrine of the Third Person of the Trinity corresponding to the clearness
of the distinction between the conceptions of God in his essence (Father)
and God as manifested (Son) ; whereas to the non -strictly theological
speculation, or rather to the religious experience, the doctrine of the Holy
Spirit (regarded not as the Creator or the Redeemer, but as the Inspirer)
has always had a special vividness."

308 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Spirit of Love which is the peculiar spirit of
Christianity, Thus a convert in Apostolic times, or indeed of
the first three centuries, would be fully aware of
the new force brought to bear upon him in his
baptism into the name of Jesus, Even if his newly-
found joy and exhilaration in his freedom drove
him to exaggerate somewhat the moral evil he had
formaUy set himself against in lea'ving the worship
of Isis or Dionysus for the worship of the Father
of Jesus Christ, yet in broad outlines he knew that
the statement that he had passed from darkness
to light was unutterably true. It was not so much
that he was no longer liable to fall into his old vices
— the N,T, negatives this — but that something had
happened to him which put him in a new relation
to them of hostility and condemnation. His better
and higher self had been roused from its slumber ;
a definite principle of life had been put before him ;
the nearness, as weU as the holiness of God had
been demonstrated in bodily form, and the result
was that there fell from his spiritual eyes, as it had
been, scales, and he saw with his immortal eye the
King in His beauty, and surrendering to Him vowed
to devote the rest of his life to His service.
When we think of the enthusiasm which inspired
those early days, and of the joy even with which
poor men and feeble women went to torture and
death for Christ's sake, the emphasis placed by
Gibbon on the five secondary causes of the triumph
of Christianity is seen to be superficial.! For zeal
1 The rapid growth of the Christian Church " was most effectually
favoured and assisted by the five following causes : (i .) The inflexible, and
if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived,
it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and
unsocial spirit which instead of inviting had deterred the Gentiles from

XE THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 309
is not evoked unless by a principle of life ; nor is
the doctrine of a future life efficacious unless its
first beginnings are already a matter of experience
here ; nor were the so - called miraculous powers
mere hallucinations ; nor did the austerity of
Christian morals spring from nowhere ; nor was
the Christian Church ever guilty in its purer days
of setting up so chaotic a thing as a republic ; it
was a kingdom with Christ as its invisible King,
and His Spirit as His Vicar on earth ; hence the
secret of its strength when assailed by all the
forces, moral or physical, of the older pagan world.
In other words, no account of the triumph of
Christianity which omits the one vera causa, the
acti'dty of the Spirit of God in the hearts and Uves
of Christians, can be satisfactory or coherent or
even intelligible.
This truth, however, is not a truth which con
cerns only or chiefly the Church of the first cen
turies of our era, for there has never ceased to be a
time in which it was the articulus stantis aut cadentis
ecclesiae. Even though the rulers of the Church
may have been caught in their own trap when they
set out to spoil the Egyptians by taking over theif
feast-days, items of their cult, or dogmas of their
philosophy, and when they became as bishops
civil judges, even though in the persons of their
great Schoolmen they lost their Christian way in
the by-paths of Rationalism, and since the Refor-
embracing the law of Moses, (ii.) The doctrine of a future life, improved
by every additional circumstance which could give weight and eflicacy to
that important truth, (iii.) The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive
Church, (iv.) The pure and austere morals of the Christians, (v.) The
union and discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually formed
an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman empire "
(Decline and Fall, ch. xv., 1901, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. ii. p. 2).

310 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
mation have forgotten the art of the categorical
imperative in matters of faith and morals,! yet the
torch of Divine truth has been always kept alight
in the darkest days by the Spirit of truth Himself,
If individual names are cited in support of this
proposition it is not that they are more holy than
thousands of their contemporaries, but only that
they happen to be better known, St, Ignatius of
Antioch is not remembered because of his theories
of ecclesiastical government, but because he died
for his faith, St. Jerome is great, not so much as
a scholar, but as one who sought to take the kingdom
of heaven by violence, St, Augustine was a sug
gestive and subtle thinker, but it was not his
reasoning powers but his life - long passion for
truth which distinguished him ; for one who knows
his De Civitate Dei or his De Trinitate, hundreds
know his Sermons and thousands his Confessions.
Gregory the Great was great as a doctor of the
Church, but greater as a saint. St, Bernard swayed
Popes and Kings, but it is more that he ruled him
self. The Abbot Joachim fascinates us still, not
for his historical schematism, but because he was
an apostle of the Spirit, St, Francis and the
Peerless Maid had the orthodoxy of the heart.
An Eckhart, a Tauler, a Suso, a Thomas More, a
Lancelot Andrews, the two Catherines of Siena
' To do it justice the Roman Church alone has retained this primitive
audacity ; witness the " Constitutio dogmatica prima de ecclesia Christi "
of the Vatican Council, cap. iv. -, " Docemus et divinitus revelatum dogma
esse definimus : Romanum Pontificem, cum ex Cathedra loquitur, id est,
cum omnium Christianorum Pastoris et Doctoris munere fungens pro
suprema sua Apostolica auctoritate doctrinam de fide vel moribus ab
universa Ecclesia tenendam definit ea infallibilitate pollere qua divinus
Redemptor Ecclesiam suam in definienda doctrina de fide vel moribus
instructam esse voluit ; . . . ideoque ejusmodi Romani Pontificis defini-
tiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles esse."

THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 311
and Genoa, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, Ignatius
Loyola, George Fox, John Wesley, William Law,
St. Francis de Sales, and an immense cloud of other
witnesses — who cares how such men expressed
their vision of the Great Secret when the fact is once
estabhshed that they had their vision through the
Spirit which was given to them ? The important
thing to bear in mind is, that it is individuals as
such who are the subjects of the working of the
Spirit, and not communities or voluntary societies
or churches taken in the gross. The Spirit can
and does work on many individuals at the same
time, and where His work is effective a Church is
formed ipso facto, even though it never attain to
form or organisation. And it is the startling as
well as the joyful paradox of the spiritual life that
it wins freedom by self-surrender only, and that
man becomes more of an individual by submitting
to God, the one and only Individual in the fullest
sense that there is. Christ's ser'vice is perfect
freedom — eui servire regnare est.
This, then, is the first affirmation that is made
when the Christian says, " I believe in (the) Holy
Ghost." He makes the most daring venture of
faith that human life affords, for he throws down
his glove in defiance of the whole apparent forces
of the world as it is, and challenges them to move
him if they can from his allegiance to Him who is
his invisible King. And the courage required for
this encounter lies precisely in the fact that from
it there is no discharge. In spite of a low moral
standard on all sides of triumphant wickedness,
or at best of successful pushfulness, and in spite
of what is still harder to recover from, viz. his own
lapses from his ideal, the Christian engages himself

312 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
to speak true, right wrong, and follow this King
in all circumstances. He deliberately defies the
" world," and takes his stand under the banner of
the Christ, and offers himself as an agent of the
Spirit of holiness for the ends of righteousness. No
greater act of faith than this can be made, and
none that calls for loftier courage or greater forti
tude for perseverance in well-doing. Let those
who have made the venture of faith bring forward
their testimony.
But not only as the Spirit of holiness is the Spirit
of God (or of the Father, or of Jesus, as He is
variously called) represented in the N.T. He fiUs
the whole field of religion. He illuminates the
intellect because He is the Spirit of the truth,! The
truth which the Spirit leads the spirit of man into is
the truth about God, about man and the relation
of the two, and His help as guide is needed because
on the one side God is a God who hides Himself
for very greatness, and man is a being whose true
nobility is hidden by sin out of sight.
The method by which the Spirit leads us into
the truth is by inspiration from within, when He
tells us what to say in critical moments without
drawing by premeditation on our own intellectual
stores,* by opening up to intuition the hidden
treasures of our sub-conscious or super - conscious
minds. This is a phenomenon which is familiar to
many, ignored by most, ordinarily despised and
1 John xiv. 17, xv. 26, xvi. 13 ; neither B. Weiss nor Westcott brings
out the force of the definite article before truth in these three passages as
Holtzmann in the Hand-Kommentar does when he says on the last that the
Spirit " wird in den ganzen Zusammenhang der in Christus gegebenen
Wahrheit einfiihren.'' Kreyenbiihl emphasises it also in the title of his
suggestive work Das Evangelium der Wahrheit.
* Matt. X. 20, Luke xii. 12.

^K THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 313
dismissed as a depreciation of Reason. Yet in the
early Church prophets with apostles and teachers
occupy an earlier and a more honourable place than
presbyters or " bishops." They are officers of the
whole Church and not of special communities ;
they are not elected, but are the direct agents of
the Spirit Himself, To them belonged outside the
N,T, Ignatius of Antioch and Hermas,!
1 In the famous passage of the letter of the former to the Philadelphians
the writer expressly says that when he shouted aloud in the assembly,
" Pay heed to the bishop and the presbytery and the deacons," he said
this through the spirit, that is, he spoke as a prophet inspired at the
moment (ch. vii.). For Hermas as a prophet see Harnack, Mission und
Ausbreitung, p. 247. Hermas himself gives a vivid picture of the prophetic
method, " 'When there comes a man who has the divine spirit into an
assembly of righteous men who have faith in the divine spirit, and prayer
is entered upon to the God of the assembly of those men, then the angel
of the prophetic spirit that reposes with him fills the man, and the man
being filled with the holy spirit speaks to the assembly as the Lord wills "
(Mand. xi. 9). The statement of Gregory of Nyssa that the Creed of
Gregory Thaumaturgus was revealed to this latter by the Virgin Mary
and John the Apostle is a later example of theological truths being brooded
over until they are ripe for prophetic utterance. The Creed is given in
Harnack, History of Dogma, iii. 115. Harnack contrasts the " enthusi
astic " triad of Apostles, Prophets, Teachers with that of Bishops, Priests,
and Deacons, and laments that the origin of both triads as well as of the
lesser Orders remains obscure (p. 253). Cf. also his History of Dogma
(Eng. trans.) i. 213 : " The Apostolic age transmitted a twofold organisa
tion to the communities. The one was based on the ' service of the word,'
and was regarded as established directly by God ; the other stood in the
closest connection with the economy of the Church, above all with the
offering of gifts, and so with the sacrificial service. In the first were men
speaking the word of God, commissioned and endowed by God, and be
stowed on Christendom, not. on a particular community, who as ' apostles,
prophets, and teachers ' had to spread the Gospel, that is, to edify the
Church of Christ. They were regarded as the real ' leaders ' in the com
munities, whose words given them by the Spirit all were to accept in faith.
In the second were ' bishops ' and ' deacons ' appointed by the individual
congregation and endowed with the charisms of leading and helping, who
had to receive and administer the gifts, to perform the sacrificial service
(if there were no prophets present), and take charge of the affairs of the
Community." See also Selwyn, Tlie Christian Prophets, 1900, and Si.
Luke the Prophet, 1901, who describes the prophet's method in the common
session : " At this session he solemnly fell into a state of intense thought.
Ecstasy, while collecting the materials ofhis utterance under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit " (Luke the Prophet, p. 25). Thus prophecy may be

314 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
It were much to be desired that more reverence
were shown nowadays to the prophetic message,
while at the same time more care were taken by
the communities which are ministered to by such
prophets as still keep up the tradition to subject
their prophets to the discipline of the Spirit. What
is wanted in all Churches of to-day is less organisa
tion, more of the prophetic spirit to prevent prophets
from overstepping the bounds of truth and charity,
and a deeper recognition of the presence of the
Spirit of God in those who speak as prophets in
His name. In any case " belief in the Holy Ghost "
includes a readiness to hear and to obey the message
He sends by any prophet in our midst.
Prophecy, however, is not the only gift of the
Spirit which has suffered eclipse. In 1 Cor. xii.
appear " powers, gifts of healings, helps, govern
ments, tongues." Of these, " helps " find their
modern equivalent in the numerous body of devoted
men and women — proportionately more numerous,
perhaps, than they have been for 1500 years — who
devote themselves, if not always in the name of
Christ, but in His Spirit, to the care of the poor
and the sick and the downtrodden. " Govern
ments," too, fail not, even though neither in Church
nor State can we always discern the leader of men
who leads because he is called to it by the Spirit
and humbly obeys the call. " Powers," however,
have been for long out of fashion, and when they
do appear it is not always easy at first to say
whether they are from above or below. An age

defined as an utterance about sacred things inspired by the Holy Spirit
and prepared for by silence and meditation. An interesting statement
of the function of this inspiration will be found in Bergson, An Introduction
to Metaphysics, 1913, p. 76 f.

^ THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 315
which is the inheritor of the traditions of two or
three generations of men who worshipped Reason
fondly, and put out their eyes as a sacrifice to their
goddess, is also by the law of rhythm beset in the
swing of the pendulum by a number of pretenders
to supernatural powers who promise great things
and mislead the unwary. The wise Christian will
prove all things, without barring out works of
wonder as impossible ; but he will not attach too
much importance to them, far less indeed than to
holiness and love in common life.
Yet it is impossible to ignore the fact that the
two decades last past have displayed a remark
able recrudescence of a claim to abnormal powers.
Clairvoyance and clairaudience, levitation, psycho-
metry, psychical intuitiveness, telepathy, and various
forms of magic, have sprung up like mushrooms
and won instant acceptance in certain circles. But
observation of their phenomena has shown that
they are due partly to dishonesty, much more to
self-deception, and that they die away under the
cold breath of cold criticism, while, on the other
hand, there is reason for suspecting the existence
of such powers among people to whom they are
too sacred for expression in ordinary conversation.
The former do not concern us under this Article,
but it is the latter class, if any, which is to be attri
buted to the working of the Holy Spirit. It seems
commonly forgotten that even supposing any of
these gifts to be possessed they are but as a sixth
sense, and that the true function of the Holy Spirit
with regard to this sixth sense is to help us to use it
dutifully in precisely the same way as in the case
of the other five senses. Better a disciplined life
without such abnormal powers than an undiscip-

316 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
lined Ufe with them. The powers wherever they
truly exist come, like all powers of all classes, from
Him who is " the Lord and the Giver of Life," but
when they are given they are given as a trust, and
woe to the man who uses them for selfish ends. We
must; be, then, on the one side, careful not to allow
any pre-conceptions or scepticism on our part to
cause us to limit even in thought the powers the
Spirit may see fit to bestow, and, on the other side,
we must be equally careful to weigh the spirits and
see whether they be airs from heaven or blasts from
heU. " Gifts of healings," again, have been emphasised
in recent years, and the credit of their revival on a
large scale can hardly be denied to the movement,
if not inaugurated, at all events nursed into adol
escence by Mrs. Eddy. So large a place has Christian
Science taken in the public eye that whenever faith-
healing is named men's thoughts go immediately
towards this special kind. Yet faith - healing has
never died out in the Christian Church, for not only
are miraculous healings told almost as a matter of
course of all mediaeval saints, but even in the cold
ness of Protestant times the tradition has been
maintained by men like Glanvill, Valentine Great-
rakes, John Wesley, and the Peculiar People, by
Martin Luther, the Moravians, the German Pietists,
and the English Quakers. The truth, therefore,
about Christian Science seems to be that the power
displayed in the cures which it indubitably performs
is not peculiar to it, that is, is not "Christian Science"
at all, but that what is its peculiar glory is the bad
philosophy by which it seeks to set forth the power
which comes from the Spirit and is under the
guardianship of ReUgion.

«^ THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 317
Faith - healing sometimes is confused with so-
caUed magnetic healing, in which " power " goes
forth from the healer ! and heals the patient under
laws of which at present we are in entire ignorance.
That such cures are effected in our midst to-day is
beyond all doubt, but it is difficult to see how they
can be regarded as more directly due to the Holy
Spirit than cures effected in the ordinary way of
medical practice. For they appear to be more
physical than psychical in their nature, and to
have no necessary connection with the saintli-
ness of life which is the special fruit of the Holy
Spirit, In a similar way, the numberless cures
wrought by suggestion, whether made in hypnosis
or given to the waking consciousness, are more
psychical than spiritual, and are no testimony to
the spiritual character of the operator. Again, it
remains true that though the power of the suggester
comes from the Spirit, yet it is a gift and not a
grace, still less a fruit. The loyalty, obedience,
and love which control the power are of infinitely
greater consequence than the healing power itself,
and these spiritual qualities, of course, may be as
truly set forth in mending a pair of boots or sweep
ing a floor as in curing neurasthenia,*
The last of the gifts of the Spirit which seems
alien to modern notions is that of tongues, and
while there seems a general agreement that the
gift is undesirable and had better be left where
we find it, in the pages of history, yet it remains
unsettled whether tongues were a gibberish of
meaningless sounds, whether they dwelt in the
1 Cf. Luke vi. 19, viii. 46.
'' On this whole question of faith-healing see my article under that name
in Encycl. of Religion and Ethics, vol. v., 1912.

318 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
tongue of the utterer or the ear of the hearer, or
whether they were actual foreign languages not
learned empirically but communicated intuitively,
or were due to a kind of hypnotic suggestion. We
venture to add one other suggestion which seems
to cover the whole ground better than any of those
just named, viz. that tongues were akin to prophetic
utterances as being directly inspired, but differed
from them in being more ecstatic, less subject to
logic, more tropical and couched in greater obscurity
of language. The difference between the two was
the difference, say, between Blake and Watts,
Boehme and William Law, Browning and Tennyson,
Ezekiel and Isaiah. That tongues were not gibber
ish is shown by the fact that they were susceptible
of interpretation ; ! that they were not clear is stated
when it is said that the unbeliever would not under
stand them ; * that they subserved a useful end is
implied in the assertion that they were a sign to
unbelievers.* They are best explained of rapturous
or ecstatic utterance which used analogies, parables,
difficult sentences, and all at white heat, and
demanded, therefore, an audience already convinced,
sympathetic, and capable of understanding with a
little help from an interpreter. Some of us, perhaps,
have listened to preachers of unquestionable saintli-
ness whose sermons might well seem to belong to
the department of " tongues," and we have gone
away reflecting that after all the man was more than
his message, that the Spirit was more truly dis
cernible in what the man was than in what he
said. So far we have dealt with the relation of the
Holy Spirit to those on whom he bestows His gifts,
1 1 Cor. xiv. 27. * V. 23. " V. 22.

THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 319
or graces, from whom He demands the fruit of
spiritual living.! There is, however, another sphere
of His activity which is directed toward the " world."
The ethical or spiritual use of this world in the
N.T. is almost peculiar to the writer of the Fourth
Gospel among the Evangelists, and even with him
it does not refer so much to the concrete persons
who stand in opposition to the truth as to the
inner spirit which makes them what they are.
The thought about the men of this world passes
over easily, as is to be expected, into thought about
the spirit of this world. Hence when it is said
that one of the functions of the Paraclete shall be
to appear in the court of spiritual audience as the
advocate representing the accused Christian inspir
ing him and pleading his cause ; when it is also
said that His function shall be not only defensive
but offensive, because He shall bring a counter
charge (and prove it) against the world ; it is in
different whether we interpret these statements of
worldly men in the concrete or of the worldly spirit
in the abstract. The latter is preferable, however,
as being more profitable to the interpreter himself,
for it is easier to acquiesce in a denunciation which
is directed against others than in one which is
levelled against a class of motives by which we are
ourselves swayed. Thus no one is much affected
by our Lord's invective uttered against scribes and
Pharisees until he sees that the scribe and Pharisee
are in himself, in his blind conservatism, self-suffici
ency, worship of form and contempt for others.
Similarly we hold it right and proper that the
Spirit should convict the world, but the case is
altered when the world is seen to be the serpent
1 Gal. V. 22.

320 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
coiled up in our own bosom and loved by us as our
own soul.
" He shall convict the world of sin." Sin, let
us notice again,! jg neither the vice which defiles
the man, nor the crime which offends the com
munity, but the wrongness of heart and will which
denies God and brings in its train vice and crime
in due season. Sin is Egoism, and Egoism is the
last fault which a man is brought to admit to him
self, because it is a spiritual colour-blindness. Just
as a man who wears always green glasses, and is
unaware that he wears them, sees everything green,
and cannot know that things are not all green until
something happens to make him question ; and
just as he has then to begin to distrust his own
sight and to be taught better, so it is with the man
who has slipped into the habit of regarding every
thing in its relation to himself. He cannot see
things as they are ; their meaning and their beauty
and the variety of their relationship to other things
escape his notice, are to him as if they did not
exist ; nor can he bring himself to see his error ;
another must do that by assaulting the very citadel
of his ignorance. The outward course of events
must be so directed as to make Egoism untenable
as a source of satisfaction, and this process needs
to be accompanied by an opening of the inner eye
by which glimpses become possible of the falseness
of the Egoistic postulate. The union of the two —
the inner and the outer — is the condition precedent
for repentance, if repentance be, as the N.T. through
out asserts that it is, not merely the cessation from
certain evil actions, but a turning - round of the
inner man from darkness to light, from the lie of
1 Cf. p. 307.

THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 321
Egoism to the truth of God, which is the Love of
God. This process of conversion is the proper work
of the Spirit, for though He disposes and uses
external things as his chisel on the hard granite of
self, yet since He has to deal with an image of God,
which is, therefore, inwardly free, He must not
trust to compulsion from without only, but must
supplement that compulsion by the appeal of love
from within. And He is able to do this seeing that
as the Divine Spirit He dwells in man as man, as
the stream runs in the river - bed. Man is sus
ceptible of conversion to God because the germ of
divinity was sown in him when He first became
man. Of all men it is true that potentially or
actually they are the temple of the Holy Ghost,
and it is this great truth which makes it possible
to convict the world-in-man of sin, for this is to
awaken the potential and convert it into the actual.
" He shall convict the world of righteousness."
Sin as it has just been defined is the worldly spirit
which withholds itself from the Logos ; now
Righteousness is defined as consisting in a journey
ing to the Father and a consequent transmutation
of meditation {dewpia) into the direct vision of
intuition.! Some definition of this kind is very
1 Cf. the BewpeiTe of John xvi. 10 and xvi. 19 with the ifeaOe of the
latter verse. The root idea of this chapter is that the Word has become
flesh in order to rouse men to an effective knowledge of themselves. They
have to learn what sin is, what righteousness is, and what judgment.
When they have arrived at a particular stage of preparation they can be
informed that the time of study, of thought, and meditation is now almost
over, and in a short time (piKpbv) they shall see. But before that can be
they must go through a process of new-birth which is painful, as are the
birth pangs of an earthly mother, but the pain is more than compensated
when the New-man is born into the world — the Kai.v6v dvdpuirov of Eph.
iv. 24. Then a perfect community of life and action will be established
between the Word of God and His disciples, and what they ask will be not
the expression of their own independent desires, but the outcome of His
Spirit energising in them — it will be iv Tip ivipaTl pov. Y

322 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
much needed if we are to understand the specific
nature of Christian righteousness as distinct from
forensic, ethical, or theological. No doubt at the
root of every use of the term righteousness lies the
idea of being in the right, but what is Right ?
Amongst men we may define right as that which
is recognised by law, or by equity, or by custom,
which is unwritten law.! What it is right for
us to do as members of a community is that
which the community has agreed on as due from
each to the other. The content of this right
may and does vary, but the form of right remains
the same, viz. the general recognition of certain
actions which may not be done at another's
cost. But when we come to ask what is right before
God the question is more difficult to answer. To
do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly* is
one definition ; to have clean hands, a pure heart,
and a true tongue is another ; * to do to others
what we would have them do to us is better still ; *
and best of all is " Love the Lord your God with
aU your heart and your neighbour as yourself." ^
" The only thing," says Lotze, " that is really good
is that living Love that wills the blessedness of
others," * from which it follows that what is in
accordance with that Living Love is religiously
right, and what is not in accordance with it is
wrong. The righteousness of God is then self-
consistency, and the righteousness of man is con-
^ " It is with capacities only that Nature endows us ; a man's right is
something which he first feels as a duty towards others, and hence regards
as being also a duty owed to others by himself" (Lotze, Microcosmus, ii.
527). 2 Micah vi. 8. ' Ps. xxiv. 4. * Luke vi. 31.
^ Mark xii. 30. " Microcosmus, ii. 721.

THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 323
sistency with God.! g^^ ^g q^q gi[\\ igft to find
out what is and what is not in accordance with
the Living Love of God, and one finger-post to
direct us is that which points us to a journeying
to God, and the substitution of open vision for
seeing as in a mirror darkly. The Spirit's work is
to convince the world that true righteousness is
to be found in going to the Father, and in ceasing
to speculate about the Way.*
This is a somewhat singular statement at first
sight, not only because it substitutes an attitude
of the soul for practical conduct, but because the
course of conduct which is impUed by the attitude
moves still among the intellectual virtues rather than
the practical.* But it is at all events consistent
with the general view of the Fourth Gospel which
regards sin as refusal to see the Light and to come
to it, and escape from sin as caused by the Light
shining in the hidden chambers of the heart,*
1 The somewhat unfortunate rendering of SiKaioaiivrj by iustitia is
responsible for the comparatively low view of righteousness in God. His
iustitia is not commutative but distributive only, " quae singulis quod
sibi ad sui complementum spectat tribuere dicitur, ut inde universi ordo
servetur " (Summa, 1 a, quae. xxi. art. 1). In the next it is defined as that
" quae constituit ordinem in rebus conformem rationi sapientiae," which
agrees with Lotze's if wisdom be replaced by love.
" John xvi. 10.
3 I cannot agree with Dr. Sanday that " an intellectualism has been
imported into his (the Fourth Evangelist's) language which is wholly foreign
to it," or that " the ' enlightenment ' of which the prologue speaks is of
the character and will, and only in a very subordinate sense of the intellect ;
and the revelation of God is also the revelation of His will and character,
and has nothing to do with metaphysical speculation " (Contemporary
Remew, October 1891, p. 542). The intellect in the Fourth Gospel is not
subordinate but paramount, only it is not bare intellect, but intellect
informed by mysticism and carrying in its womb the will.
* Nor is this contradicted, but only balanced by the converse statement
that " if any one wills to do His will he shall get to know about the doctrine
whether it is from God or whether I speak of myself " (John vii. 17), for
the same demand is made here that the doctrine shall be first received,
but there is added that the doctrine must then be put to the hazard of

324 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
First the vision, it is said, then the love of what is
seen, then the attempt to actualise it, and lastly
growth into the thing seen so that the subject and
object become one.
But there is no real contradiction between the
intellectual presentment of Truth and the practical
reconstruction of it, for the two are co - operant
parts of one single whole, and mutually complete
one the other. Their relation is that of the two
stages of imitation called by Professor Baldwin
projective and ejective. In the first stage the
imitator, say, a child, projects his own conscious
acts towards the other person whose attraction he
has felt already, and begins to train himself in the
performance of those acts of that other person to
which he feels drawn. Gradually he learns how to
do those things for himself and then he ascribes to
the other person his own experiences, or he ejects
them. " Very many of the particular marks which
I now call mine, when I think of myself, have had
just this origin. I have first found them in my
social environment, and by reason of my social
and imitative disposition have transferred them
to myself by trying to act as if they were true of
me (projection), and so coming to find out that they
are true of me (ejection). And, further, all the
things I hope to learn, to acquire, to become, all —
if I think of them in a way to have any clear thought
of my possible future — are now, before I acquire
them, possible elements of my thought of others,
ofthe social ' alter,' or of what, considered generally,
we may call the ' socius ' " !
action, and that when so tested a man will be in a position to know its
origin and decide whether it is of God or man.
^ Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, p. 11.

THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 325
What Professor Baldwin gives as the analysis
of the acquisition of faculty in general covers the
acquisition of moral and spiritual faculty. The
first step is to see the Truth of God veiled, half-
veiled, or unveiled in the world around us, and then
to set ourselves by projection to imitate it by a life
that models itself on it and tries to get on friendly
terms with it. Next, imitation gradually creates
a second nature akin to that of the Logos itself,
so that now the acts of this new nature become
spontaneous and are by ejection referred back to
the Logos as our own acts as well as Its, and this
interplay between the Self and the Logos continues
until an eternal union of will and action has been
established. That is to say, in the words of our
Gospel, the world in our heart has become con
vinced that the true righteousness consists in imitat
ing the life of the Logos as He journeys through
Time to the Father from whom He came, and so
learning by imitation to acquire that inner intuitive
vision of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful
which is the perfecting of that brooding meditation,
or Oewpia, which is as vision in the making.
" He shall convict the world of judgment,"
The judgment, or testing, consists in the fact that
the Prince of this world has been challenged and
foiled already.! " This world " as opposed to
1 Cf. also John xii. 31, xiv. 30. It is against the whole tenor of the
Fourth Gospel to see in the " Prince of this world " physical death. " Der
Furst dieser Welt," says Kreyenbuhl, " ist der Tod mit seinen Schreck-
nissen, den sich der Verfasser auf das Lebhafteste vergegenwartigt " (Das
Evangelium der Wahrheit, i. 666). Rather the death of the Fourth Gospel
is, as generally in the N.T., not the physical death by which the spirit and
soul of man on the one hand are severed from the body on the other, but
the separation effected by Egoism between God on the one side and man's
spirit and soul on the other. But the Prince who presides over this latter
death is Satan,

326 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
" that world " ! represents an order of things which
is the refiection of the character of its personal
ruler or ap-x^v the aeon of this world, the prince of
the authority of the air of Eph. ii. 2. The Prince
of " that world " on the contrary is the " Prince
of Life," * the " Prince of the Kings of the earth." *
The course of things suggests to nine men out of
ten, and to all of us during nine-tenths of our
waking hours, that the Prince of this world is in
undisturbed possession, and history assures us that
what we see around us has been always here, and
hence all things continue to form one comprehensive
suggestion — a contagion mentale — that any hope for
a better order is without solid foundation, the off
spring of discontented and disgruntled souls who
would do better to make the best of " this world "
and leave " that world " to look after itself. To
this conclusion of Reason and robust common-sense
there is opposed the still small voice of the Spirit
of God which disturbs the complacency of the
" world " within us, by its reminder that in Jesus
and in His followers the Prince of this world has
been not only ideally but actually dethroned. His
power has been broken in the comparatively small
area where the kingdom of heaven has been founded ;
but that area, let us bear in mind, is a growing area,
intensively and extensively, as the trees of God
planted in it strike their roots deeper and stretch out
larger boughs. Indeed, if what has been said before
be in accordance with facts, why should we not say
that in the return to this earth from time to time of

1 The nj,? oyij'? and i<|!? D^iVJ of the Talmud, the 6 aloiv oBtos and 6 aliiv
0 piWav of the N.T. (Matt. xii. 32, Mark x. 30, Luke xviii. 30) ;
cf. Schiirer, Jewish People, div. ii., vol. ii. p. 177 ff.
2 'Apxvyt>v Tfjs ^oiTJs Acts iu. 15. ' Rev. i. 5. * Pp. 124 ff.

4

THE EIGHTH ARTICLE 327
souls which have begun to taste of the fruits of the
tree of life is contained a pledge of the gradual ex
tension of the powers of " that world," and that it is
no mere dream which tells us that in due time the
earth of man's unconverted nature shall be full of the
knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea ? !
Anyhow the pledge of the final victory of good
over evil, of " that world " over " this world," of
Christ over Satan, of love over egoism is to be found,
however the result may be achieved, in the continu
ous activity of the Holy Spirit within us by which
he dispels the clouds of our ignorance, changes
despondency into confidence, sloth into strenuous
spiritual endeavour, and gives us an assurance that
the battle of life against spiritual death is well
worth fighting, and that the victory won by others
is within our reach also, if only we fight as good
soldiers of Jesus Christ. Others have won, the Spirit
reminds us, why not we ? God has placed eternity
in the heart of man ; * therefore He will finally
translate man into eternity. Meanwhile the Spirit
is unweariedly engaged in His work of convincing
the worldly heart that true righteousness consists
in unceasing endeavour after the heavenly ideal.
Thus the work of the Holy Spirit may be summed
up under two heads : He inspires those who belong
in any sense to " that world " ; He convicts of sin,
righteousness, and impending doom those who
belong to " this world."
^ Isa. xi. 9, Hab. ii. 14.
- This is undoubtedly the sense of D^vn,""? o|^3 im in Eccles. iii.
11. The writer is thinking of Gen. i. 26, and he says that the likeness
of man to God is established by the Divine being planted in man. " Das
Gottliche im Menschen nennt er Q^y, Ewigkeit . . . d. i. das Streben und
Vermogen sie sich vorzustellen, den Trieb, uber das bruchstiickartige
Erkennen hinauszugelangen und die Ewigkeit mit seinem Wissen zu
umspannen " (Wildeboer in Kurzer Hand-Kommentar in loco).

CHAPTER XX
THE NINTH ARTICLE — PART I
The Holy Catholic Church !
Et? [/it'ai'j diyiav KadoXiKrjv 'EKKXricriav
In the Shepherd of Hermas the prophet relates *
how a certain woman saluted him in a vision out
of the opened heaven while he was praying, and
reproached him for his wickedness and then left
him ; then how after an interval there came to
him an aged woman in a shining garment and
explained to him that his continence and temperance
and sincerity and innocence availed him nothing
so long as he failed to turn his household to the
Lord.* A year after he had another vision of this
^ " We are bound to believe that there is one Holy Catholic Church ;
but with regard to the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, we not only
believe them, but also beheve in them ; and hence when speaking of each
dogma, we make use of a different form of expression professing to believe
the holy, not in the Holy Catholic Church " (Catechism of the t^ouncil of
Trent, p. 79). There is not any shadow of a foundation for this distinction
in the text or true meaning of the Creed itself, nor is the existence of the
Church subject - matter for Faith. The conception of the Church has
first been materialised, and then a distinction read into the Creed itself
in order to justify a false gloss. It is the ideal Ecclesia which is the subject
of the Article, and this is believed in because it is ideal. Zahn, therefore,
is wrong in saying that we believe " a holy Church, Forgiveness of sins,
Resurrection of the flesh." We believe in the Holy Ghost as being the
Life of the Church, as bestowing forgiveness, and in bestowing resurrection.
The emphasis is on the will rather than on the intellect, as throughout the
rest of the Creed. " Vis. i. 1. 4. ^ Vis. i. 2. 3.
328

oh. XX THE NINTH ARTICLE 329
same aged woman,! ^j^q repeated her exhortation,
after which in his sleep a youth appeared to Hermas
and informed him that the aged woman was not the
Sibyl, as he supposed, but the Church, and that she
came as an aged woman because the Church was
the first of all things to be created, and on her
account the world was fashioned.* Later in the
book the Shepherd says to Hermas that he wishes
to show him what was shown to him by the holy
spirit which spake with him in the form of the
Church, " for the spirit is the Son of God " ; * he
does this by taking him to a lofty mountain and
showing him a great tower in building, on which
were engaged a large number of workmen under
the superintendence of twelve maidens and six
glorious youths. Finally, after trial, the tower is
approved, and then it is declared to be the Church,
and the twelve maidens in linen gowns to be " holy
spirits," " powers of the Son of God " ; * their
names are given ^ as Faith, Continence, Power,
Long-suffering, Sincerity, Innocence, Purity, Joy,
Truth, Understanding, Concord, Love.
With this view of the Church as a heavenly being
agrees 2 Clem. xiv. : " So then, brethren, if we do
the will of God our Father we shall be of the Church,
the primal spiritual Church which was created
before the sun and moon. ... I do not suppose
that you know not that the living Church is the body
of Christ (for the Scripture saith : ' God made man
male and female ; the male is Christ, the female
the Church), and that the books and the apostles
[belong to] not the Church that now is, but the
Church which is from above. For it is spiritual as
1 Vis. ii. 1. 3. ^ Vis. u. 4. 1. ^ Sim. ix. 1. 1.
« Sim. ix. 13. 2. = Sim. ix. 13. 2.

330 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

chap.

is our Jesus, but is manifested in these last days
to save us. But the Church being spiritual is
manifested in the flesh of Christ, showing us that
if any of us keep it [the Church] in the flesh, and
do not corrupt it, he shall receive it in the holy
spirit. For the flesh is the anti-type of the spirit ;
no one, therefore, who destroys the antitype shall
be partaker of the original. So then, brethren, he
says this, ' Keep the flesh, that ye may partake
of the spirit.' Now, if we say that the flesh is the
Church and the spirit Christ, surely he who insults
the flesh insults the Church. Such a one shall be
no partaker of the spirit which is Christ. Truly,
great is the life and immortality which this flesh can
partake of, that is, of the holy spirit which is joined
to it, nor can any one declare, or utter, what the
Lord has prepared for his chosen." !
It is difficult to mistake the kinship of this circle
' Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 103, 325, is content to explain the
pre-existence stated here as an ideal pre-existence, as " foreknown by
God before the creation of the world," and he equates it with the descrip
tion of Christ as the " first-born of all creation " and " the principle ofthe
creation of God." We must, he suggests, remember that the Church is
to be conceived as pre-existent quite as much as Christ, and treat the
whole conception as being limited to a " religious view " of their objects.
If Harnack means that foreknowledge by God is equivalent to an Idea in
God, and that an Idea in God is the Reality of which the phenomenal is
the shadow, we may agree with him. But his denial of any but a religious
interest in these descriptions, and his assertion that they are " not intro
duced for the explanation of cosmological problems," but rest on " shifting
conceptions of existence " make it clear that they have in his judgment
but a logical, not a real, worth. The explanation is that Hermas and the
author of 2 Clement find Reality in a different world from Harnack's.
The values are reversed. Nor can we assent to Harnack's dictum that
these descriptions " have absolutely nothing Hellenic in them but rather
have their origin in the Apostolic tradition," unless we are prepared to
make " Apostolic " cover " Gnostic." The fact, to which he himself
draws attention, contradicts his conclusion. The Apologists, he says,
made no use of it, but Clement Al. and the Gnostics and the Greeks held it
fast. That is, the former, representing tradition, did not find the doctrine
of pre-existence in their sources, but with the latter it was on its own
ground.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 331
of thought with the Gnostic. When, for example,
Irenaeus tells us ! that the Valentinians read out
of the prologue of the Fourth Gospel the Ogdoad
in two tetrads, viz. in the first. Father and Charis
and Monogenes and Aletheia, and in the second
Logos and Zoe and Anthropos and Ecclesia, the
emergence of Ecclesia without textual authority
can be accounted for only by such a preconceived
system as meets us in Hermas and 2 Clement.*
At the root of both lies the Hellenistic thought of
the pre-existence of the Idea in God, and its sub
sequent enformation on earth, the Idea being not
merely inert but Thought charged with Energy.
This is expressed by Heraclitus in the saying,
" Join together that which is whole and that which
is not whole, that which agrees and that which
disagrees, the concordant and the discordant :
from All comes One and from One comes all." *
On which the late Mr. James Adam comments :
" Now what is this One which is at the same time
Many, this Many which is at the same time One ?
What is the Unity in which all opposites are
harmonised ? Heraclitus himself gives the answer
quite plainly in two fragments, ' It is God who
is day and night, winter and summer, war and
peace, satiety and hunger.' And again, ' To God
all things are beautiful and good and right, but man
believes that some things are wrong and others
right.' " *
1 i. 8. 5.
^ Cf. C. Barth, Die Interpretation des N,T, in der valentinianischen
Gnosis, 1911, p. 93. ' Frag. 59.
* Vitality of Platonism, 1911, p. 165. Professor Bergson says that the
intellect " installs itself in the immutable, it posits only ideas. Yet
becoming exists : it is a fact. How, then, having posited immutability
alone shall we make change come forth from it ? " (Creative Evolution,
1911, p. 333). But if the heart posit God as the living Energy in the Idea,

332 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Without committing ourselves to any specific
result of Gnostic interpretation, we may at any rate
say that the interpretation of the N.T. as it stands
is becoming more and more difficult for anybody
who starts with the postulate that nowhere in the
N. T. is the Gnostic outlook to be allowed expression.!
The exact contrary, viz. that there is no book in it
which does not betray Gnostic forces at work, is
nearer to the facts. Fortunately Gnostic tendencies
do not stand there in isolation, but are balanced
by historical counterpoises and are regulated by
the recognition of an all-embracing purpose of
God in the salvation of man. But the method
and the intellectual expression of that salvation
can hardly be reached without the light that is
thrown upon them by the system known as
Gnostic. Hence we shall not dismiss Hermas and 2
Clement summarily as deserving only the degrada
tion they were subjected to when they were no
longer read in the Christian assembly, but rather
take their " pneumatic " character as illustrating
the age of the prophet before it was finally ousted
by that of the bishop. When we do this, we shall
see that the doctrine concerning the Church — and
not concerning the Church only — has been arrived

as the living cause of each phenomenon, then the difficulty vanishes, and
the world of Becoming is seen to be the superabundant overflow of the
Energy of the Being of God. Cf. Deussen, Metaphysics, 1909, p. 144.
^ An illustration of this is offered by Dr. Swete's recent volume (The
Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, 1912) in which, referring to 2 Clem.,
he says : " It is not easy to follow this preacher ; his metaphors are mixed,
and his thought is at times inconsequent " (p. 30). Similarly the doubt
expressed on p. 33, whether Aristides (Apol. 15) " intends to represent the
Holy Spirit as the Agent of the Conception," would not arise if the passage
had been rightly translated (see p. 306, note, above) and set in the light
of antecedent gnostic thought.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 333
at by first intellectualising the pronouncements of
the prophets, and then secondly by erecting the
intellectual proposition so obtained into a dogma.
Then, if we go a step further back, we shall have to
admit that in the prophetic utterance was contained
a human content as well as a dynamic of the Spirit,
and that the human content cannot be separated
from the infiuence of the surrounding Hellenism.
If we apply St. Paul's dictum here that the psychical
comes first and the spiritual second in historical
development,! we shall say that the earlier Hellen
istic philosophy (including the Corpus Hermeticum,
the Orphic Hymns, the Stoic speculations, the
Mithraic and other mystery-religions, and the whole
corpus of syncretistic or Gnostic thought) was the
psychical prius, and that it was the spiritual
dynamic of the Lord Jesus Christ which raised
Hellenistic strivings to the spiritual level. But
in the ideal, or real, world it is the spiritual which
comes first, and the psychical follows, partly as the
degradation and partly as the necessary actualisa-
tion of the Idea, in order that the Idea and its
historical form may together work towards the final
purpose of God.
Hence further, if we are to be consistent in our
spiritual interpretation of the Article on the Church,
we must not start with the empirical Church, but
with the Ideal Church as hid in God's foreknowledge,
as, that is to say, possessing real existence in Him.
In other words, 2 Clement and Hermas are better
guides than, say, Cyprian or Tertullian, to anybody
who desires to regard the Church sub specie aeterni-
tatis. For just as the adjective " Catholic " was
added in the Creed to the noun Church at a com-
1 1 Cor. XV. 46.

334 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
paratively late date,! g^ .^yg^g ^j^e characterisation
of the Church as a visible organisation an after
growth which imposed itself on an earlier and less
concrete idea of the nature of the Church,^ to
which should be added the reflection that if this
process from the ideal to the actual can be traced,
and is admitted by competent authority in the
case of one Article of the Creed, viz. in the use of
the term Catholic, this affords a presumption that
the remaining Articles have undergone the same
process, by which a religious or mystical truth
^ " The adjective " catholic ' in the article on the Church appears in
the Creed as early as the fourth century and was very common from the
fifth century on. The addition of the word was very natural, as the
phrase ' Holy Catholic Church' was a current phrase. At the time when
it was inserted in the Creed it had already acquired an exclusive meaning,
and it was that meaning, therefore, which attached to it in the Creed,
belief being expressed not in the holy church universal, but in the particular
institution which was known as the Catholic Church and was distinguished
from all schismatic and heretical bodies, the orthodox catholic church
which was in communion with the see of Rome. The common Protestant
interpretation of the article in the Creed which makes it refer to the holy
church universal is therefore historically incorrect " (McGiffert's The
Apostles' Creed, p. 32). With this historical judgment Zahn agrees, but
he considers that the identification of the " truly universal Church with the
Church on earth of that period together with her bishops and constitutions "
was inadmissible (The Apostles' Creed, p. 184).
^ " If we compare the Church about the middle of the third century
with the condition of Christendom 150 or 200 years before, we shall find
that there is now a real religious commonwealth, while at the earlier period
there were only communities who believed in a heavenly Church, whose
earthly image they were, endeavoured to give it expression with the
simplest means, and lived in the future as strangers and pilgrims on the
earth, hastening to meet the Kingdom of whose existence they had the
surest guarantee. We now really find a new commonwealth, politically
formed and equipped with fixed forms of all kinds. . . . We find a Church
as a political union and worship institute, a formulated faith and a sacred
learning " (Harnack, Hist, of Dogma, i. 45). Harnack holds that the
presuppositions for this new order are to be sought in the Greek spirit
which came into the Church with the Gentile converts and substituted,
for example, for the paaiXela tov Qeov, both the concepts of fwi; aWvios
and of the ^/cjcXija-ia, and for the Messiah the Divine Teacher and the Word
manifest in the flesh (ibid. p. 51). It is quite possible that the reverse
order is nearer the facts.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 335
has hardened into a historic fact or a dogmatic
proposition. What, then, is the nature of this ideal Ecclesia
which appears so abruptly and with such lofty
claims in Hermas and 2 Clement ? The Church,
says the latter, is the flesh of Christ, a phrase which
reminds us of Eph. i, 23, " the Church which is His
Body," His fulness, i.e. which makes Him full or
complete. In both passages the underlying idea
is that the Church is that which expresses, or gives
form to that inner Power which is called Christ.
This can be none other than the company of the
7rv€vp.aTiKoi, or spiritual men who have passed
through the " third gate," and being united to the
Lord are one spirit with Him. Hermas agrees with
this in representing the Church under the image
of a tower (otherwise a Domus, or a City of God)
which is fashioned of living stones under the
direction of twelve virtues, or holy spirits, or powers
of the Son of God. It is the function of this " flesh
of Christ " to lead to the spirit by which immortality
is gained, and it is, therefore, to be kept or taken
care of. But yet the Church is in some sense distinct
from the flesh, for the Church is manifested in the
flesh, and is to be kept or cared for in the flesh. It,
therefore, pre-existed the flesh as Christ did, and
was manifested in the flesh as Christ was. It was,
therefore, some heavenly Being in close connection
with Christ, making with Him a unity of comple
mentary powers, such as is made by a marriage of
sympneumata,! We are thus directed to the well-known aeon-
^ 'fls ydp rb ffiXTjpa tov Qeov Ipyov iarl Kal tovto Kbapos bvopd^erai, oStu)
Kal ri poi\r]pa ainov dvBpilnroiv ioTl aiarqpla, Kal tovto f/c/cXi)<r/a K^xXijrai
(Clem. Al. Paidag. i. 6. 27).

336 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
doctrine which has exercised as powerful an influence
on Christian theology as its methods of influence
have been obscure. In the system of the Barbelo-
gnostics, for example,! Logos and Ennoia, Christos,
and Aphtharsia, Thelema and Zoe-aionios, Nous
and Prognosis, Anthropos and Gnosis are all set
forth, and may be all regarded as variant pairs of
a primal divine duality.* Irenaeus adds, without
any attempt to explain the connection, that " from
the first angel who stands by the side of Monogenes
the Holy Spirit proceeded whom they also term
Sophia and Prunicus." This gives the independent
pair of Monogenes and Sophia.
In the Valentinian Gnosis the primal pair is
made up of Bythus and Sige from whom proceeds
Nous who is also called Monogenes and Aletheia.
Nous and Aletheia procreated Logos and Zoe and
they Anthropos and Ecclesia, These make the
supreme Ogdoad.* The difference between this
scheme and that of Barbelognosticism is formal
only. Both account for the origin of the world by
postulating a series of pairs of emanations which
are interchangeable because each stage of descent
from the highest heaven is a precise reflection of
the preceding. Hence it is immaterial whether
1 Irenaeus, i. 29. 1.
2 " Denn dass die Ecclesia, die Gemeinde der Pneumatiker, und die
Gnosis im barbelognostischen System identisch sind, diirfte klar sein "
(Bousset, Die Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, p. 164). Bousset's scheme
identifies the four aeons proceeding from Christos and Aphtharsia and
their four syzygies proceeding from Thelema and Zoe-Aionios with the
four heavenly powers who uphold the four corners of the heaven ; it then
assumes that at the head of the system was the triad of Father-of-all (Pure
Light, or Primal-Man), Barbelo and Christ (Heavenly Man or Adamas) ;
that then to Christ are added the three aeons of Nous, Logos and Thelema,
and to Barbelo the four female aeons named above, making two sets of
five syzygies. This is ingenious, but conjectural only.
' Iren. i. 1. 1.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 337
we speak of Ennoia, or Aphtharsia, or Zoe, or
Gnosis, or Aletheia, or Sophia, or Ecclesia. They
are all similar, and are the super-sensual realities
which have their counterparts " in ultimates," that
is, on the physical plane. The gnostic-Christian,
therefore, was one who, when such terms were used,
instinctively referred them to the patterns of earthly
things in the heavens.!
The cryptic expressions, then, of Hermas and
2 Clement, in which they describe the Church,
become clear only when they are illustrated by the
parable of the Sophia which occurs so frequently
in early Christian literature. By Sophia were all
things made,* and the earth founded ; * the Lord
created her as His dp%^ ; * she is a spirit of Jahweh ; ^
she is the holy spirit from above ; ^ she was present
when the world was made,' and reacheth from one
end to another mightily,* In the grossly mis
understood teaching of Simon Magnus divine wisdom
was his companion,* It is quite easy to disentangle
the truth from the ridiculous travesty of it which
Irenaeus gives, Epiphanius tells us that Simon had
the audacity to call his prostitute syzygy " a holy
spirit " ; and that she was called also Prunicus, and
Barbero or Barbelo, and that by her he made the
angels.!" -j^bis Barbelo, or Sophia, or Heavenly
Mother, is the supreme Deity on its mother-side.
In the Valentinian system the supreme Triad was
"the Father, Truth, and Man {dvdpaiTro^). This
last had for his partner Ecclesia, The reason is
obvious : to the avdpmiro'i, who rises victoriously
1 Heb. ix. 23. ' Ps. civ. 24. => Prov. iii. 19.
4 Prov. viii. 22. ^ Isa. xi. 2. ^ Wisd. ix. 17.
' Wisd. ix. 9. * Wisd. viii. 1. » Irenaeus, i. 23. 2.
10 Haer. xxi. 2.

338 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
out of Matter, into which he had been plunged,
belongs the community of the Spiritual which
follows him on this path." !
But there is another chapter in the history of
Sophia, which itself has apparently two sections.
According to the system of Bardesanes, Light and
Darkness, eternal Spirit and uncreated Matter
stand opposed. The primary dualism of the Light
principle is the Father and the Mother- of -Life
(otherwise the Holy Spirit) ; from them proceed
the Son-of-Life and his syzygy Sophia. But Sophia
has a double on a lower plane, called Chakmut, or
Achamoth, or the fallen Sophia, whose mission it
is to mediate between the two kingdoms of Light
and Darkness. She presides over the " seven "
and the " twelve " as Mother, the seven of the Sun,
Moon, and five planets, and the twelve signs of the
Zodiac, i.e. over the moving (planetary) and the
fixed world. These two worlds are under the
jurisdiction of elfiappLevrj, or Fate, or Necessity,
while Achamoth belongs to the higher or spiritual
world of the Ogdoad of Valentinus. The soul of
man Bardesanes derived from the seven or from
the Demuirge at their head, but man's spirit came
from Achamoth, Hence, in accordance with the
main current of Gnostic teaching, the work of
redemption consists in rescuing the spiritual part
of man from its imprisonment in matter, and for
this the lofty Aeon Christ, or " the fruit of the
Pleroma," Jesus, descended that He might rescue
the " fallen " Sophia, and restore her to her place
in the Ogdoad. This has its echo in the statement
of Eph. i. 23, that the " Ecclesia " is the body of
Christ which He quickens and raises to heavenly
1 Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, p. 340.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 339
places,! and in that of 2 Clement that the Church
is His flesh which is made living by partaking in
His Spirit.*
Irenaeus * says that the Gnostics taught that the
Demuirge made man so far as he was material and
psychical, but that Achamoth without his know
ledge implanted in man his spiritual principle.
" This offspring they declare to be the Ecclesia,
an emblem of the Ecclesia which is above. This
then is the kind of man whom they conceive of:
he has his animal soul from the Demuirge, his
body from the earth, his fleshy part from matter,
and his spiritual man from the mother, Achamoth."
The Pistis - Sophia represents the Barbelo of the
thirteenth Aeon as distinct from the fallen Sophia.*
As a rule, in Gnostic thought the second Sophia
appears as a daughter, or sister of the first Sophia,
the latter being the archetype of the former, and
with the heavenly Sophia the Aeon "Av6po)Tro<: is
associated (for which, when the Gnostic system
was sought to be adapted to the Christian life,
Xpto-To? was substituted). The function of the
XpicTTO'i then becomes that of the Redeemer of the
" fallen Sophia." The Ophites, according to
Irenaeus,^ maintained that Christ descended into
this world and clothed first his sister Sophia {i.e.
with the glory of the Light- world) ; that then both
rejoiced together in their refreshment ; and that
this is (the marriage of) the Bride and Bridegroom."
What follows as a description of the relation of
1 Eph. ii. 6.
2 xiv. 5. Cf. HUgenfeld, Ketzergeschichte, 1884, pp. 519-522 ; Ephraem,
Hymn, 51, 53. ^ i- 5. 6.
« Schmidt, Kopt, gnost, Schrif, p. 234, 40, where is described how
Jefl (&v0po)TTos) drew from the invisible world the power which each planet
required for its due working, that for Aphrodite being taken out of the
Pistis, the Sophia, the daughter of Barbelo. ' i. 30. 12.

340 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Christ, the Gnostic Redeemer, to Jesus, the redeem
ing God in Christianity, bears every mark of being
an attempt to graft the Christian creed on the older
Gnostic mythology.!
There is, however, apparently a second and
somewhat different conception of the mode in which
the second Sophia is made to do service in explain
ing the problem of Evil. According to this,*
matter does not stand over against spirit as the
cause of evil, but the Fall, under a monistic scheme
of thought, is made to take place in the Pleroma
itself. For the youngest Aeon of the dodecad
which sprang from Anthropos and Ecclesia became
the victim of an impatient desire to explore the
mysterious secrets of the Father's nature, and was
only prevented from being resolved through this
desire into His absolute essence by another Aeon
called Horos.* But a variant explanation makes
this erring Sophia bring forth an amorphous sub
stance (having no form, such as it was the function
of Horos to supply), which was afterwards extruded
from the Pleroma and fenced off by Horos. Later
on,* Horos is given two functions, one of dividing
and separating (the horizontal bar of the Cross),
called properly Horos, and one of supporting and sus
taining (the upright beam), called properly Stauros.^
1 Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, p. 264.
- Irenaeus, i. 2. 2.
' This Horos or Boundary of the Pleroma is called by Hippolytus
(Ref, vi. 26) Stauros, because " He is fixed inflexibly and inexorably, so
that nothing of the Hysterema can come near the Aeons who are within
the Pleroma." The Stauros, or Cross, had a celestial pre-existence as well
as Ecclesia. * i. 3. 5.
5 The " Perfect Sermon " of the Corpus Hermeticum, xxx., says : " In
the very life of the Aeon is the world moved, and in the living Aeon is the
world-Space ; therefore it will never stop or be destroyed for it is pallisaded
round, and as it were bound together by the eternal Aeon." Cf. Bousset,
ubi supra, p. 342.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 341
It is not legitimate to seek to evade the influence
of Gnostic thought on the Christian Creed by point
ing to the supposed irresponsibility of Gnostic
speculation. The day has gone by when Gnosticism
was regarded as rationalism run mad.! n jg now
generally admitted that Gnosticism was not merely
a philosophy (bizarre or otherwise), but was still
more a religion.* Nor is its claim to respect
weakened by the further fact that it was a mystery-
religion, even though it suffered from the defects
of its qualities, such as " looseness of organisation,
petty sectarianism, and mystery-mongering." For
these defects no more prove the falsity of the religion
which suffered from them, than Catholicism is
proved worthless by the rationalism of its scholastic
theology, or the cruelty of its Inquisitions, or the
inelasticity of its organisation. Moreover, in judg
ing Gnosticism we must recollect that the greater
part of its writings was destroyed by its ecclesiastical
opponents, and we must be on our guard against
supposing that the adverse opinions of Irenaeus,
Hippolytus, or Epiphanius are of any value, or that
they interpret correctly the extracts they give
from Gnostic authorities — on the contrary, these
extracts are the only valuable part of the works
which contain them. The " Song of the Pearl,"
or " Hymn of the Soul," * alone is sufficient to show
1 " Nothing more absurd than these (Gnostic speculations) has probably
ever been imagined by rational beings. . . . By giving loose reins to their
imagination, they built up the most incongruous and ridiculous systems ;
while by deserting the guidance of Scripture, they were betrayed into the
most pernicious and extravagant errors " (Ante-Nicene Christian Liby.,
1868, vol. V. Pref.).
2 " Most ofthe Gnostic schools know only one God, and put all emphasis
on the knowledge of the oneness, supramundaneness, and spirituality of
this God " (Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 143).
3 Ed. Bevan, Texts and Studies, v. 3 (1897).

342 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
that at all events some forms of Gnosticism were
concerned less with speculation than with religion.
Anz has judged correctly on the Naasene Hymn
as proving that " the Gnosis has a practical purpose,
the redemption of man by showing him the way by
which he may escape." ! The escape that was
necessary was from the world of Necessity, ruled
by the seven Aeons of the seven planetary heavens,
into the world of Freedom ruled over by the Ogdoad
or Eighth Power. Gnosticism, unfortunately, how
ever, underwent the same degeneration as Christi
anity. Both began as mystical, that is, as purely
religious, and therefore individualistic ; neither had
at first any recognised authority capable of checking
excesses ; both then, under the stress of historic
circumstances, developed along the line of least
resistance. Gnosticism losing its mystery-character
of practical discipline, and becoming theosophical ;
Christianity losing its mystical or prophetic char
acter, and becoming under Imperial auspices an
institution imperial in its form of government,
rationalistic in its theology and dependent for its cult
on folk-traditions. Already in the days of Justin
and Irenaeus Gnosticism was decaying, and it is on
this decadent stage, only half-understood, that the
condemnation of Gnosticism ever since has rested.
Yet Gnosticism vietus victorem vicit.^ It
1 Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnostizismus, 1897, p. 10 ; Origen,
Contra Cels. vi. 31, confirms this by the description he gives of the Ophites'
teaching that the soul in its upward course has to pass through the seven
doors of the seven heavens, and that its success is due to its possession of
the necessary seven seals, or sacraments.
2 Cf. Dante, Paradiso, xx. 98 :
" Ma vince lei, perche vuole esse vinta
E vinta vince con sua beninanza ; "
and Harnack : " It is no paradox to say that Gnosticism, which is just
Hellenism, has in Catholicism obtained half a victory " (History of Dogma,
i. 227).

THE NINTH ARTICLE 343
succeeded in infusing its spirit into Christian
thought, and the doctrine of the Trinity and the
Christology of the Cathohc Church were formed
under the influence of pre-suppositions contained
in the Gnostic thought of the syncretistic period
which set in powerfully after the death of Alexander
the Great.!
What Dr, Swete says of the doctrine of the Holy
Spirit applies here with equal force : " It is im
perative that any reconstruction or development
that may be attempted by the theologians of our
time be made in full view of the long history that
lies behind the existing forms of belief," * But
this " long history " does not start with Justin
or 1 Clement ; it reaches back through Gnosticism
and the mystery-cults and Stoicism to Greek and
Oriental thought and cult, and therefore it is
impossible to interpret our Creed correctly unless
this long pre-Christian history that lies behind it,
which has helped to fashion it and still is implicit
in it, be kept in fidl view.
When, then, we turn to Gnosticism with the
view of finding what light, if any, it throws on the
Christian doctrine of the Ecclesia, we shall do well
to remember that its speculations so - called in
general were rather of the nature of parables, whose
object was not so much to form a system as to
1 This applies also to the emphasis laid on the Sacraments as necessary
to salvation ; to the rise of the doctrine of Transubstantiation ; to the
cult of the OeoT6Kos ; to the septenary character of the Sacraments,
Orders, virtues (three theological, four cardinal), deadly sins, and Spirits
of God ; to the claim to the possession of esoteric knowledge and an
unwritten tradition ; to purgatory, prayers for the dead, asceticism,
indeed to a great part of the Catholic praxis. These were all adopted
under Gnostic influence and employed in the service of religion. The
substantive rejection of these at the Reformation was in the interest of
politics rather than religion. See Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 263.
' The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, 1912, p. 7.

344 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
illustrate the dualism of the phenomenal world ;
to trace it back to its source in the intelligible world ;
and to tell men how to escape from the world of the
Many, which was under the rule of the Two, into
the world of the One, which was brought into being
and governed by the great and incomprehensible
Propator, the Father of all that is, or exists. It
was only later, when both Gnostics and Catholics
alike perhaps had lost their savour, that the
Gnostics were charged with " blasphemous and
impious opinions," with being " wretched con
trivers of audacious falsehoods," forgers, " miserable
little foxes," " false persons, evil seducers, and
hypocrites," from all of which the inference may
be safely drawn that, on the one hand, the Gnostic
teachers had given occasion for misunderstanding,
and, on the other, the Catholic school had no
capacity for sifting theosophic chaff from the
mystic corn divinely sown.
Avoiding, then, the schematisation which
Irenaeus rightly or wrongly attributed to his
Gnostic opponents, we are on sure ground when
we say that the many celestial pairs which the
Gnostics found in the intelligible world were not
so much graduated members of an orderly series
as variant forms of that principle of Duality which
governs our phenomenal world. Propator and
Ennoia, Bythos and Sige, Nous and Aletheia, Logos
and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia, Christos and
Sophia (or Christos and Holy Spirit) are of the
nature of guesses at truth, convenient names for
beings who were the heavenly side of obscured
earthly facts. " They tell us that the Aeons were
constituted equal to each other in form and feeling,
so that all became as Nous, and Logos and Anthropos

THE NINTH ARTICLE 345
and Christos. The female Aeons, too, became
all as Aletheia and Zoe and Spiritus and Ecclesia." !
This seems to say that the Truth as known here, the
Zoe aionios which draws man onward and upward,
the Spiritus which inspires him, and the Ecclesia
which enfolds him, proceed from spiritual entities
in the heavenly world, and so far from being separate
and independent powers pass and re-pass the one
into the other, so that it is one and the same thing
which is revealed to man's Reason as Truth, to his
Will as Life, to his feeling as Spiritus, and to his
gregarious instinct as Ecclesia. The most favourite
form for this one omnipresent power was Sophia
or Wisdom, and it is this protean Sophia which
Hermas and 2 Clement had in mind when they
spoke of the Church being " the first of all things
to be created, on whose account the world was
fashioned," and of being a spiritual thing " mani
fested in the flesh of Christ," and being His flesh.
They have in their minds the Gnostic conception
of both Christ and Ecclesia as spiritual beings
pre-existing in the unseen world, but manifested
in these latter days, the one in the form of the
historical personage Jesus Christ, and the other in
the form of " die Gemeinde der Pneumatiker," the
spiritual corporation of those who had passed
through " the third gate which is the blessed
Jesus," and so become the mystical body of the
Christ who as the recapitulation of all the aeons
fiUeth all in all.
This is the ideal Church which stands over
against the empirical Church, and it is this ideal
Church to which the Christian beUever gives the
assent of his thought and will when he says, " I
1 Irenaeus, i. 2. 6.

346 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
believe in the holy, catholic Church," ! Having
done this he has still to face the problem of defining
his attitude to the empirical Church with its claims
on his obedience. The correctness of his definition
must depend largely on his firm grasp, (a) of the
nature of the ideal Church, and {b) of its relation to
the empirical Church, and (c) of the law which
forbids the latter to be more than an approximate
representative of the former,
A, The ideal Church is not only the spiritual
life of the empirical Church, but also of all civil
institutions which rightly govern men. To take
first the civil power. Unless the civil power first
submits itself to the laws of eternal justice, and
makes them the basis of all its actions, it becomes
an organised brigandage, a grande latroeinium. Its
concern, however, is with this world, not with that ;
it exists in order to see that men live in communal
life in harmony under law which is a refiection of
the eternal Law, and it becomes a tyrant when it
exceeds by a hair's - breadth this its appointed
function. It may forbid crime, for ex hypothesi
crime is against the Law of God as experimentally
determined ; it may levy taxes for common defence,
or common internal benefits ; but it may not trans
gress the bounds set to it of being the Keeper of
the peace and the guardian of the security of the
1 Harnack, speaking of the early days before Christian religion was
spoiled by Greek philosophy, says : " The Church, considered in its origin,
is the number of those chosen by God, the true Israel, nay, still more, the
final purpose of God, for the world was created for its sake. There were in
connection with these doctrines in the earUest period various speculations
about the Church : it is a heavenly Aeon, is older than the world, was
created by God at the beginning of things as a companion of the heavenly
Christ. . . . The idea of a heavenly origin, and of a heavenly goal of the
Church, was therefore an essential one, various and fluctuating as these
speculations were " (History of Dogma, i. 152). But this is a precise
account of Gnostic doctrine.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 347
whole body.! Hence all interference with the
liberty of the individual, over and above these two
spheres of its action, is arbitrary and tyrannical,
and being against the Law of God which makes the
individual the end and not a means, it may be
lawfully resisted.
We must, however, distinguish again here,* as
neither St. Augustine nor Dante distinguished
adequately, between the community and the State.
The community is necessary to the perfection of the
individual, and members of the community may
and should exercise all their gifts of persuasion on
one another for the higher and the better life, but
to employ force to this end is to deny the inner
freedom of this higher life of morality. Force
belongs to the State which, whether organised as a
monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy is not so
much ordained as permitted because of the hard
ness of men's hearts, is therefore always an evil,
and may not boast of holding its commission direct
from God, but should act when it does employ force
with shamefastness and reluctance, and only when
it is clearly inevitable. That is to say, that while
the community may be rightly described as a moral
entity, the State is at best only concerned indirectly
and partially with morality : indirectly because
though morality may result from its action, yet it
employs an immoral, or at best non-moral, instru
ment, viz. force, in its production ; and partially,
because the sole virtue with which the State as such
is concerned is justice, and that not so much retribu
tive as commutative.
1 FivopivT] piv TOV iijv IveKa, ovaa di tov eS f^v (Arist. Pol. i. 2. 8.
The " living well " here is living in accordance with right Reason, with
that eternal Goodness which manifests itself in Kant's " categorical
Imperative." ' See p. 181 above.

348 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
This important distinction between the State
and the community calls for recognition also when
we are analysing the nature of the empirical Church.
For just as the commxmity is a moral entity in so
far as it sets out by moral means its o'wn growing
moral powers, while the State is not a moral entity
in itself, but an excrescence of the nature of a cancer
which witnesses to some aberrant life-activity in
the organism, so is the empirical Church a spiritual
entity so far as its members assert by appropriate
methods their spiritual life, while ecclesiastical
authority which compels obedience, is always a
mark of imperfection, a standing confession that
the community it exercises its action upon is so
far not spiritual but carnal, demanding the carnal
weapon of force. If the claim of the State to hold
its commission direct from God is inadmissible in
the face of the fact that the State is permitted only
because of existing evil, so is it impossible to suppose
that Jesus Christ, as the Word of God, clothed any
ecclesiastical authority with coercive jurisdiction
in matters either of faith or morals. In so far as
ecclesiastical authority, with or without the co
operation of the State, has sought to compel
heretics to yield to its orthodoxy, to command
Kings, or to enforce common worship or a common
faith by Acts of Uniformity, it has surrendered to
the Prince of this world and confessed its own sub-
Christian belief that spiritual ends are not secured
by spiritual means. In so far as it trusts to canons,
the King's ecclesiastical law, or to canon law in
general, or even feels impelled to set these in action,
it is acting as a civil institution, not as a spiritual
community, and though it may properly plead that
its action is necessary, yet it should take shame to

THE NINTH ARTICLE 349
itself for the necessity. It is not easy to recall to
mind any case, however, in which this necessity
might not have been avoided by the exercise of
charity, sympathy, and humour on both sides.
Unless, then, the true nature of the ideal Church
be persistently kept in mind as constitutive of the
empirical Church, this latter will inevitably sink
into a bad copy of a bad thing — it will seek to
emulate the State, and in all likelihood will
exaggerate the evil which is inherent in the State,
by becoming even more intolerant and more
'dndictive. B. What then should be the relation of the
empirical Church to the ideal Church ? Whatever
form the answer to this question may take, it must
recognise that the two Churches belong to two
different classifications of worth. The ideal Church
has its home and working in the inner world of
Freedom, where words Uke Necessity and Com
pulsion must undergo a radical re-interpretation
before they can be legitimised ; where Life is its
O'wn law, and is by its own inherent power sacro
sanct against every intruder. The empirical Church,
on the other hand, is an attempt made with varying
degrees of unsuccess to establish a religious institu
tion which may reflect the living Truth and Holiness
of the Church which is in the heavens,! Such a
Church undertakes a task of no small difficulty,
because while it must keep one eye on the ideal it
1 " In throwing a protective covering round the Gospel, Catholicism
also obscured it. . . . It permitted the genesis of a Church, which was no
longer a communion of faith, hope, and discipline, but a political common
wealth in which the Gospel merely had a place beside other things. . . .
Catholic Christianity discovered the formula which reconciled faith and
knowledge. This formula satisfied humanity for centuries, and the
blessed effects which it accomplished continued to operate even after it
had itself already become a fetter " (Harnack, History of Dogma, U. 4).

350 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
is seeking to actualise, it must at the same time not
lose touch with the possible. If it loses touch with
the ideal, it ceases to be a Church in any sense of
the word ; while if it aims too high, and seeks to
overleap the boundaries which Time sets to evolution,
and ignores the capacity of human nature under ex
isting conditions, it becomes unpractical, impatient,
and supercilious. The Anglican Church after the
Restoration may exempUfy the former, and the Fifth-
monarchy men of the Commonwealth the latter.
It is easy to trace at least some of the steps
which led historically the evangelical strictness
of the early Church to the laxity of Calixtus, and
so to what was practically a state of Church order
which was in conflict with the original. Had the
earlier view prevailed, the Church would have
remained pure but of restricted influence ; the
Catholic conception illustrates Bacon's remark that
alloy debases the sovereign but makes it work the
better. It is impossible not to see that the change
" depotentiated " the Church, while admitting that
the bishops carried out the secularising process with
" wisdom, foresight, and comparative strictness."
It was the Novatians who fought for the older
conception, as the Montanists did before them and
monks and friars after them ; they aU " opposed
the naturalisation of their religion in the world, and
the transformation of the Church into a political
commonwealth." The truth seems to be with
both parties. The Novatians fought for the ideal
Church ; the Catholics sought to give it form ; but
neither sought to reconcile the difference by a theory
of an invisible Church within the visible,!
On the one side, then, the empirical Church must
1 Cf. Harnack, ubi supra, ii. 113-123.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 351
not act on the assumption that it is identical with
the ideal Church, or has any title to that finality of
authority which belongs to this latter. It may
claim, no doubt, that in the person of its head, its
officers, and its members it is in the habit of living
in such intimacy with the ideal Church that when
it speaks it speaks with the authority of its heavenly
counterpart, but even so it will have to speak
modestly and with reserve, and also admit that its
authority is of the moral order only, and carries
with it no right of compulsion. If this limited
character of ecclesiastical authority be allowed,
it is somewhat difficult to view with equanimity the
claims made persistently by the Papal Curia in the
name of the Unseen to compel private persons and
rulers and nations to obey its decrees on pain of
war, interdict, or the funeral pyre. In so far as it
has taken up the weapon of force it has abandoned
its religious character, and in so far as it has claimed
infallibility for itself (as it has done for 1500 years)
it has confounded the distinction between the ideal
Church and the empirical Church.
If the ecclesiastic has erred in sinking the ideal
in the actual, on the other side, the fanatic errs in
ignoring the actual in presence of his vision of its
ideal.! ^^^j both have agreed in using Force when
they could not attain their ends without it. If
Clement VIII. burnt Giordano Bruno, Calvin burned
1 " What resources have they left but to assert that the kingdom of
heaven itself belongs to the present life in which we now are ? For why
should not this blind presumption proceed to this madness also ? And
what could be more senseless than such an assertion ? For although even
the Church now existing is sometimes called the kingdom of the heavens,
it is of course so called because it is being gathered for the future and
eternal life " (St. Augustine, De Virgin, xxiv.). The doctrine of an aeonian
Church pre-existent in the heavens into which the Church on earth shall
be gathered in the future is needed to complete St. Augustine's thought.

352 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Servetus, and on the same principle — that Truth is
too feeble to maintain itself if its enemies are not
reduced by Force.! We seem slow to learn the
lesson that no power but that of moral life itself
can maintain a moral standard, and that attempts
to establish by Force a standard much in advance
of that which has been reached already can but
throw back the onward march of the moral life.
God never hurries, never interferes, but also He
never ceases His persuasive activity, and our wisdom
is to make our methods square with His, follow His
patience, show His tolerance, and constantly press
forward as quietly as He.
C. From what has been just said it follows that
to expect the perfection of the ideal Church in any
one of the existing Churches is a blunder of the first
magnitude. We hear from time to time of the
transfer of individuals on their own responsibility
from one Church to another, and we may fairly
suspect that the attraction is of a negative character,
that is, that the convert is not so much attracted
by the virtues of the Church he is seeking to join
as repelled by the failings of that which he is re
nouncing. But to act under such an impulse is
not merely a blunder ; it is a sin against light.
Nowhere does God promise faultlessness to any
empirical Church ; the only Church which is without
spot or wrinkle or any such thing is the ideal Church,
or the empirical Church when it shall have ulti
mately merged itself into the ideal. " Infallible
authority belongs to the Church in that degree in
which knowledge of Reality is possible to man :
1 We are reminded again of Professor Thorold Rogers's reply to an
ecclesiastic who had remarked that you must support rehgion by force,
or there WQUld be no religion, that he saw no difference between the two.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 358
it is her ideal attribute ; but the Church as known
to us is but the visible shadow of the civitas superna.
She has truth, trustworthy for all practical purposes,
Catholica Veritas, but never in the sense that it
is accessible to the bare-handed grasp of reason ;
never as ultimate truth. Credo ut intelligam is the
ideal order, but is never adequately realisable in
this life. Here the Church, collectively and in all
her members, is and remains a seeker."^ We need
not deny that God does sometimes call His servants
to come out of the Church of their fathers, and
enrol themselves in another, but the presumption
should always be that it is not His Spirit, but the
False Light which is caUing an unstable soul, and
that presumption should be allowed to hold the
field until expelled by the unquestionable hand of
God, So too isolation, or aloofness from an empirical
Church of some sort, is seldom safe, and is nearly
always a mark of a subtle spiritual pride. To be
able to find no Church between the Roman Catholic
and the Plymouth Brethren which satisfies my
demands is a pleasing proof that my religious
standard is high, higher indeed than that of my
neighbours, and I feel justified, therefore, as
an egoist in holding aloof from their religious
society, " And now since this False Light is nature, it
possesseth the property of nature, which is to intend
and seek itself and its own in all things, and what
may be most expedient, easy and pleasant to nature
and itself. And because it is deceived, it imagineth
and proclaimeth it to be best that each should seek
and do what is best for himself. It refuseth also
1 A. Robertson, Regnum Dei, 1901, p. 217.
2a

354 MYSTICISM AND THE CKJ^HiU chap.
to take knowledge of any Good but its own, that
which it vainly fancieth to be Good. . . . Briefly,
this false and deceived Light fleeth aU that is harsh
and contrary to nature, for this belongeth to it,
seeing that it is nature. And seeing also that it
is so utterly deceived as to dream that it is God, it
were ready to swear by all that is holy, that it
knoweth truly what is best, and that both in
belief and practice it hath reached the very
summit." !
In the empirical Church good and bad are inter
mixed, the bad that they may be taught by the
good, the good that they may be disciplined by the
bad. Hence, even assuming a man's goodness,
we may not permit him to escape from the salutary
discipline of life in common with those possessed
of less goodness, but must insist on the duty of his
taking his part with them that he may fulfil the
law of Christ.* In order to " get beyond all virtue,
all custom and order, all law, precepts and seemli
ness," we must submit ourselves to them, and to
those whose office it is to impress these things on
us, even as Christ took upon Him the form of a slave
and was made a minister of the circumcision.*
Else have we no title to be led by the Spirit of God,
and to need not that any should teach us. In the
religious life man must enter its temple with bowed
head, must stoop to rise, and learn that humility
springs up only when Egoism is weeded out, and
that Egoism needs the discipline of common life
to keep it under and transmute it into the red-rose
of Love's garden. We must accept our place in the
1 Theologia Germanica, ch. xl.
^ " To a false individualism not government but brotherhood is the
true antithesis " (Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 370).
' Rom. XV. 8.

^ THE .NINTH ARTICLE 355
Church as it actually is, not claim to be nearer
perfection than others, judge no man, but do the
best we can, and make it our one aim to be worthy
some day of a place in the ideal Church, the New
Jerusalem which cometh down from above.

CHAPTER XXI
THE NINTH ARTICLE — PART II
The Church {continued)
Tlio'Te'va) ek p,iav djiav aTrocrToXiKrjv Kal KaOoXiKr/v
'^KKXTjaiav !
The " Four Notes " ofthe Church, " One," " Holy,'^
" Catholic," " Apostolic," have grown out of the
living experience of the visible Church — partly out
of the influence of the earlier Church of Judaism,
partly out of reflection on the characteristic pheno
mena of the Church itself, and partly out of the
controversies in which it was engaged. That the
epithet of " holy " is the most salient of the four
" Notes " is evident from the fact that it was the
earliest to appear, while the three others emerge
gradually as the Church's self-assertion against
the separative tendencies which it had to combat.
But even the appearance of the Article on the
Church in the Creed was itself late (probably about
the middle of the third century), while it was during
the following century that emphasis on the unity,
the universality, and apostolic character of the
Church was felt to be necessary.
Unless, however, we are to hold that the Chris-
' Council of Constant, a.d. 381.
356

CHAP. XXI THE NINTH ARTICLE 357
tians of the third and fourth centuries were heedless
of facts and substituted for them their hopes, it is
impossible to believe that it was the stress of con
troversy alone which brought forth just these four
" Notes." And if we do maintain that they were
asserting not so much what was, but what they
thought ought to be, it is but a short step to main
taining that the ideal Church they had in their
minds and desired to see manifested was already
in existence in the ideal world of causes, waiting
only for the happy hour when the actual should
correspond to the ideal. Further, it is not an act
of faith to believe that the Church as it actually is
in any given age realises the characters named in
the four Notes, but it is rather a conclusion of the
reason based on facts of observation, and the power
to draw such a conclusion has only an indirect re
lation to the moral or spiritual character of the
observer, whereas Faith is so closely interwoven
with moral and spiritual excellence as to be often
indistinguishable from it. " It cannot be an article
of faith to believe the palpable fact that the local
communities, whose Bishops were a Polycarp or an
Augustine, possessed the same confessions as the
large Christian communities of other towns and
lands, and were in communion with them." !
Similarly, we may say that it cannot be an article
of Faith that the visible Church is one (except in
an ideal sense), seeing that the actual facts are all
on the contrary side ; and even if the facts were on
the side of the visible unity of the Church, we should
be as far as ever from an act of Faith, for Faith deals
with the things that are unseen.
Again, it is an act of Faith which makes us cling
1 Zahn, The Apostles' Creed, p. 184.

358 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
to the belief that the Church in heaven is " holy,"
but it is an act of reason which makes us apply the
same adjective to the empirical Church, Whether
the actual Church is also " catholic " in any histori
cal sense is again matter of inference, not of Faith,
as is the assertion that it is historically dependent
on the Apostles for its foundation, its authority,
and the purity of its doctrine. But as the Apostles^
Creed is a document which, as we have seen, appeals
to our Faith and not to our reason, except indirectly
and secondarily, therefore we must, in the first
place at least, interpret these four " Notes " by
their reference to the ideal Church, and enquire
in what sense that Church is one, holy, catholic, and
apostolic,
Ei9 fiiav ^KKXrjo-iav
The importance of the note of unity may be
gauged from the fact that all Christian communities
do it homage. The Lambeth Conference of 1888
adopted the following resolution :
That this Conference earnestly requests the constituted
authorities of the various branches of our Communion,
acting, so far as may be, in concert with one another, to
make it known that they hold themselves in readiness to
enter into brotherly conference (such as that which has
already been proposed by the Church in the United States
of America) with the representatives of other Christian
Communions in the English-speaking races, in order to
consider what steps can be taken, either towards corporate
reunion, or towards such relations as may prepare the
way for fuller organic unity hereafter.
The Lambeth Conference of 1897 adopted the
above resolution, and added :

THE NINTH ARTICLE 359
We consider, however, that the time has now arrived
in which the constituted authorities of the various Churches
of our Communion should not merely make it known that
they hold themselves in readiness to enter into brotherly
conference with representatives of other Christian Com
munities in the English-speaking races, but should them
selves originate such conferences and especially arrange for
representative meetings for united humiliation and inter
cession.
The Lambeth Conference of 1888 (endorsed again
by that of 1897) specified four Articles which might
supply a basis on which Home Reunion might be
built, viz. (1) the Holy Scriptures ; (2) the Apostles'
Creed as the Baptismal Symbol, and the Nicene
Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian
faith ; (3) the two Sacraments ordained by Christ
Himself; and (4) the Historic Episcopate.
It should be noticed that the Roman Church as
well as the Eastern Churches are expressly excluded
from these proposals ; ! and that the unity that is
desired is stated to be " organic," because of the
" grievous injury which has been done to Christianity
by the separations which part holy men and women
of various Christian bodies from each other,"
It is instructive to notice, on the other hand, the
1 The Eastern Churches were left out of account because of the want of
assured knowledge of their attitude, and of the terms they might lay down
as the basis of reunion, but the Latin Communion came in for more decided
judgment. " The Committee (of 1897) with deep regret felt that, under
present conditions, it was useless to consider the question of Reunion with
our brethren ofthe Roman Church, being painfully aware that any proposal
for reunion would be entertained by the authorities of that Church only on
condition of a complete submission on our part to those claims of absolute
authority and the acceptance of those other errors, both in doctrine and in
discipline, against which, in faithfulness to God's Holy Word, and to the
true principles of His Church, we have been for three centuries bound to
protest." Perhaps the best thing said by the Conference was its quotation
of Jeremy Taylor's words : May He grant us " uniting principles, reconciled
hearts, and an external communion in His own good season."

360 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
attitude towards reunion taken up by the Roman
Church, Leo XIII. in an Encyclical Letter, dated
June 29, 1896, issued as a sequel to the letter
" Ad Anglos," argues that Jesus Christ " ordained
in His Church a Unity of Faith ; that He did not
trust the Scriptures only to secure this Unity but
left ' another principle ' in the living, authoritative,
and permanent magisterium of the Church," which
has always " regarded as rebels and expelled from
the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on
any point of doctrine different from her own " ;
this supreme authority Christ must have given to
His Church, and He gave it to St. Peter, and to St.
Peter's successors. Therefore, " the holy Roman
Church possesses the sovereign and plenary primacy
and authority over the whole Catholic Church,
which, truly and humbly, it acknowledges to have
received together with the plenitude of power from
the Lord Himself in the person of St. Peter, the
Prince or Head of the Apostles, of whom the Roman
Pontiff is the successor." From all this it follows
quite naturally that the only appeal for unity
from the Pope must take the form of an invitation
to submission. " Let all those, therefore, who
detest the widespread irreligion of our times, and
acknowledge and confess Jesus Christ to be the Son
of God and the Saviour of the human race, but who
have wandered away far from the Spouse, listen to
Our voice. Let them not refuse to obey Our
paternal charity." Leo XIII. in these words is but
faithfully re-echoing the traditional sentiments of
his Church ; witness, for example, the similar claim
of Pius V. in the Bull, Regnans in exeelsis : " He
that reigneth on high, to whom is ascribed all power
both in heaven and earth, hath committed the

THE NINTH ARTICLE 361
absolute government of his One, Holy, Catholic,
and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is no
salvation, to one only upon earth, namely to Peter,
the Chief of the Apostles, and to Peter's successor,
the Bishop of Rome."
In 1895 was published a " Reply of the Holy
Catholic and Apostolical Orthodox Church of the
East to the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. on
Reunion," in which a different basis for reunion
from that put forth by the Anglican Communion,
or that by the Latin Communion, was proposed,
viz. " the teaching of the Gospel and of the Seven,
Holy Oecumenical Councils." The claims of the
Pope were met by the declaration that " the Roman
Church of the day is the Church of innovations, of
the misinterpretation of Holy Writ, of the falsifica
tion of the works of the Fathers, and of the corrup
tion of the Acts of the Councils." It was the " evil
one who , . . breathed into the bishops of Rome
thoughts of overweening arrogance, which gave
birth to divers innovations " ; and caused her to
" sow scandal by means of deceitful workers trans
forming themselves into apostles of Christ," and to
make " use of other guileful devices in order to further
her proselytizing pursuits." Hence the Patriarch
of Constantinople and his Church meet the Pope's
appeal for submission by accusing him of heresy
and schism, and by calling on him to return to
antiquity and abjure his innovations and false claims.
These official documents of the three great
Churches have been quoted in order to show what are
the reasons which animate their spokesmen in seek
ing for reunion. The Anglican states its terms to the
nonconforming bodies around it, the Roman to the
Anglican, and the Eastern to the Roraan, but the

362 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
response is either nothing, or is hostile in each case.
But one point is common to all. They are all
looking for an outward and visible unity, an
" organic unity," one which may be seen and known
of all men, and be proved to be a real unity by formal
acts of the consenting Churches. What, however,
does not seem to have been put forward is the view
that unity does not belong properly to the formal
side of things at all, but is a function of the spiritual
and the spiritual alone.
For duality, that is, division, and the clashing of
opposites are the very foundation-law of the pheno
menal order. The world of Becoming cannot even
be known except under the law of subject and object.
Sensation and perception must unite before cogni
tion is possible ; thought and will are inseparable
but defy identification. Life without form is un
known and unthinkable. Man and woman cannot
escape from one another, any more than the in
dividual and the community. There is not likely
to be a time when Church and State, force and love,
will cease to be opposed, or when science and art
can be divorced without loss. Every here implies
a there, every future a past, every above a below,
every effect a cause, every pain a pleasure, every
failure a success, and every heaven a hell.! Lotze
^ HdvTa dtaad ^v KaTivavTi tov ivbs Kal oiiK iiroirjaev ovSiv ifcKiirtiV
(Ecclus. xlii. 24, where the A.V. hardly brings out the antithesis). Pytha
goras had a saying, " Eat not on a chariot-board " (iirl Slippov, on
which two could stand), that is, apparently, seek thy soul's health in the
One, not in the duad. So Thoth was " .ludge of the two Combatant Gods,
Horus and Set. Heracleitus made Discord and Love the originating
cause of all things.'' Cf. Lotze : " The contrast between corporeal and
mental existence may not be final and irreconcilable — only our present
life is passed in a world where it has not yet been resolved, but yawning
underlies all the relations of our thinking and acting. And, even as it
will always be indispensable to life, it is, at present at least, indispensable
to science " (Microcosmus, i. 467).

THE NINTH ARTICLE 363
in an eloquent passage states admirably the rela
tion of the One and the Two in our present life,
"To us at all times the world of forms seems too
much to conceal the world of values, the realm of
means to eclipse the realm of ends ; we long for
the unity of truest being, in which the ideas have
reality without being tied to the mediation of
instruments, , , , in which immediate understand
ing between minds makes all external modes of
reciprocal action superfluous ; in which finally
Creator and created blend in a community of life,
for whose dim profundity the noblest mysticism
scarce offers adequate expression. . . . But, far as
we are from denying the truth of the unity which
this mystic ecstasy thinks it discerns, this earthly
life of ours assuredly lies, not in its sphere, but in
that of duality and contrast." !
If, then, duality is the hall-mark of the empirical
order, then the visible Church, as part of the visible
order, must be content to bear this mark, and not
strive to escape from its liraits through any desire,
no matter how pure, for the One in which all differ
ences are resolved. The One is assuredly to be
sought for above all things, for He is the object of
the mystic quest, but in the search the Two are not
to be contemned, but honoured as the outpoured
manifestation of the One to our senses and reason.
God " known of the heart " is One, but God ap
proached through the head is Two. His Name,
which we are bidden to learn to hallow, is all that
manifests Him in His world, and its plurality, when
carefully analysed, ranges itself into two caraps
which are rather complementary than hostile.
From this duality which attaches to the world of
1 Microcosmus, i. 400.

364 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
Form seems then to flow naturaUy the exclusion of
unity as to be found there. God is One, but His
world is Two, and in it, therefore, as such unity is
not to be found. Hence the unity of His Church
is not to be found in anything tangible, or recognis
able in ordinary consciousness ; not in a single
authority, such as that lauded by the Popes, not in
acceptance of the decrees of a selected period of
Conciliar activity, not in agreed - on terms of
" organic unity," not indeed in anything but in the
domain of the spiritual. For it is Life as Love
which unites, it is Intellect which divides, and both
have their appointed place, which they should each
be allowed to keep without confusion as without
conflict. The world of Form is the world of
mechanism ; the world of Life is the world of
purpose, and the two are necessary the one to the
other. The reunion of Christendom, however, in the
minds of its champions seeras to ignore this distinc
tion, and to be based on an illegitimate levelling
of formal distinctions, instead of on an independent
service of the common Life of God in which alone
unity is to be found. It is not too much to say that
where that Life is the dominant force in any Church
there the unifying force of the Universe is already
at work, and that therefore any difference of
organisation, or any separation in space or time,
is a matter of indifference, and is even to be wel
comed as affording that variety which is as necessary
to the beauty of the whole as is the unity of the
life-force. Of the three official pronouncements
on the subject of Reunion quoted above, it must be
admitted that that of the Anglican Comraunion is
more in accordance with the cosmic law which

THE NINTH ARTICLE 365
demands both variety and unity. " Quid autem
amo," says St. Augustine, addressing his God,
" cum te amo ? non speciem corporis nee decus
temporis, non candorem lucis ecce istum amicura
oculis, non dulces melodias cantilenarura omni-
modarum, non florum et unguentorura et aromatum
suaviolentiam, non manna et mella, non membra
acceptabilia carnis amplexibus : non haec amo,
cum amo deum meum."! Similarly we may say
that when we love God we are laying the foundation
of Church reunion whether we know it or not, and
that when we love the creature for itself we are
fomenting disunion. Hence union is the fruit of
the love of God, and has no root in a uniforraity
of outward organisation.
This relation of the raulteity of forms to the
unity of life may be illustrated from a sphere which
offers at once the battle-ground for the problems of
philosophy and the materials for their solution,
viz. the consciousness of man. So long as our
ideas are regarded as so many independent things
standing one by one over against an impassive outer
Reality, or as successive states of our inner being
caused (without being valid) by immediate contact
with a Reality that eludes our grasp, or as universals
making thinking possible, all unity or approach to
unity is barred. But when the conative impulse
in its living unity comes with its selective, and
therefore exclusive, activity to weld into one the
complex of neural and psychical dispositions which
else had remained a chaos, then the problem of
how the Many may become the One which pure
Thought finds insoluble is solved, and any inner
act by which the outer Many become the inner One
1 Conf, X. 6.

366 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
is symbolical of the sirailar act by which the world
is subsumed in the unity of God. So the will of the
Spirit in the Church seizes the separate minds of
its merabers, and raakes thera into that living
whole which can never be the product of a mere
collective assertion that outer forras raust be
abolished or raerged if outward reunion is to be
attained. Unity, to which union is ancillary, is of
Life rather than of form.!

Et? dyiav '^kkXtjctiuv
In Hebrew two words are used for saint, \SMp^
and Tpn, rendered in Greek by dyia and oVto? re
spectively. In their plural forms they represent,
the former, those called into covenant relation with
God, and the latter, those whose piety is the fitting
correlative to that call. In the O.T. therefore
ot iiyioi is the name of the Jews as being called by
1 " The world as a whole is an individual fact, not merely by virtue
of the completeness of the contents of the Absolute Experience, but by
reason of the definiteness of the selection of that object which shall be
permitted to fulfil the final meaning. No significant purpose, no element
of meaning that finite ideas demand as necessary for their own fulfilment,
could indeed be wholly ignored from the absolute point of view. But,
on the other hand, the very perfection of the fulfilment would logically
require of the divine will the sort of determination of purpose of which
we too are conscious when we deal with the objects of the exclusive affec
tion. It is will, then, in God and in man that logically determines the
consciousness of individuality. The individual is primarily the object
and expression of an exclusive interest, of a determinate selection. From
this point of view, the world in its wholeness might indeed be regarded as,
so to speak, an only-begotten son of the central purpose — an imique
expression — ^unique not merely by reason of its wealth, but of its exclusive
ness. And thus the category of individuality would be fulfilled in the
whole precisely in the sense in which a finite affection presupposes its
fulfilment in individual cases " (Royce, The World and the Individual,
1900, p. 459). Cf. Bradley : " Thinking is the attempt to satisfy a special
impulse, and the attempt implies an assumption about reality " (Appear
ance and Reality, 1893, p. 153).

XXI THE JNINTH ARTICLE 367
God's special favour to be His peculiar people,
while in the N,T, it represents Christians as having
stepped by individual selection into the place
vacated by the Jewish Church and nation,! jj^
both the 0,T, and the N,T. the objective character
of the word is maintained in accordance with the
indispensable note of all genuine religion which
emphasises the act of God as the decisive factor
and man's piety as the natural sequel of God's
grace. For the same reason the title ot Sa-ioi falls
into the background in the O.T, and almost dis
appears in the N,T, Christians are specifically
such, as being " saints by way of call " rather than
of hereditary privilege, and certainly not as con
tributing anything to win their position. Piety,
penitence, righteousness, and holiness are regarded
as the natural response in the believer to the gracious
calling of God, but the relationship is never reversed.
It is in this sense that the Ecclesia is called holy.
It, like the Jewish Church, is a creation of God,
and is therefore a separate or consecrated thing,
belonging to the eternal order properly and to the
phenomenal order secondarily only. In this latter
capacity it exhibits every mark of imperfection,
and its members are warned against every sin that
man is guilty of, while yet it is implied that their
sinfulness does not destroy their calling. On the
contrary, the norraal process of salvation, while
starting from God's act of choice, allows of the
continuance of sin which calls for purgation :
1 " Quemadmodum Israelitae nomen tuv dyluv sibi vindicarunt ut quos
Deus sibi a ceteris populis segregaverit vitam ipsi acceptam acturos ip-
siusque favore ac tutamine gavisuros, ita hoc praedicatum saepissime in
N.T. transfertur ad Christianos quos Deus iK toC Kbapov selegerit ut
Spiritu Sancto imbuti pietate et probitate salutis in regno Dei participes
redderentur " (Wilk-Grimm, Lexicon, s.v.).

368 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
" Whom He foreordains them He also calls ; whom
He calls them He justifies ; whom He justifies He
also glorifies," ! So in 1 Peter ii, 9 Christians
are a " holy nation." The phrase eKKXr^ala dyla
occurs in the inscription of the letter of Ignatius
to the Trallians, and the phrase t^? ayta? Kal
KaOoXiKfj'i eKKXTjcria'; in that of the Martyr Polycarp,
and T9)? dylat; eKKXr^aia^; in Hcrmas, Vis. i. 1. 6.
In all these passages the meaning of the adjective
holy as applied to the Church is that of Divine in
stitution, of being a thing which was separated off
by its origin and nature from any humanly founded
society. The Church is holy for the same reason
the Spirit is holy, viz. that it belongs to the Divine
order, and not that of this perishing world here
below. But in so far as the Church takes shape and
substance in this world it ranges itself alongside
other objects which occupy space and time and
are subject to the planetary powers, and so runs the
risk of being confounded with thera. A Church
which fights for its own hand, accepts property,
enjoys prestige and wields power, which enters into
controversy and uses the weapons of earthly warfare,
may be rightfully fulfilling its mission, but can
hardly complain if it is charged with being of the
earth earthy. When Richard Lionheart captured
the Bishop of Beauvais in battle, and when he was
called on by the Pope to release his captive without
1 Rom. viii. 30, where the aorists are gnomic, describing the process,
or else point to a definite act in the ideal world. The use of dyla in Eph.
V. 27 might seem to contradict the use of the word as meaning consecrated,
until it is observed that it is not the future which the writer has in view
but the present ("id valet suo modo iam de hac vita," Bengel). He
ineans : " Christ's love for His Church is such that He gives Himself for
its good, consecrates it and purifies it, that He may Himself (and not
somebody else) present it to Himself as a consecrated and spotless being
here and now. Such should be the love of the husband for his wife."

THE NINTH ARTICLE 369
ransom as being a son of the Church, he sent the
Bishop's armour to his Holiness with the caustic
remark, " Know now whether this be thy son's
coat or no, which aptly raised the question of the
liberty of the Church to identify herself with the
world. Hence the necessity of frequent and public
proraulgation of the fact that the Church that
Christian members believe in is not the empirical
Church, but the ideal Church, the Jerusalera which
is above, which is the raother of thera all.!
This truth has been eraphasised often enough.
The ideal Church already existent is called " Mount
Sion," the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem,* built on the " hill of the Lord " of
Ps. xxiv. 3, the Mount of Contemplation to which
Moses, Lot, Aaron, Abraham, Elijah, ascended,
whence Jesus spoke His sermon, on which He was
transfigured, and from which He ascended.* So
^ Gal. iv. 26. It is forgetfulness of this which made possible the lines :
" In days of old
Cross of wood and bishop of gold ;
But now they have altered that law so good
To cross of gold and bishop of wood."
2 Heb. xii. 22.
' Origen in Joann., tom. ii. 6, gives a sentence from the Gospel of the
Hebrews : " Just now my Mother, the Holy Spirit, took me by one of my
hairs, and carried me off to the great mountain. Tabor." Cf. Resch,
Agrapha, pp. 238-240 ; Bel and the Dragon, v. 36 ; in the Acts of John it
is on the Mount where John is shown the spiritual crucifixion ; in the
Gospel of Eve, according to Epiphanius, it was on a lofty mountain that
the seer was standing when he saw a Great Man and another maimed man
(Haer, xxvi. 3 ; Resch, Agrapha, p. 266) ; Hermas was carried by the
angel to Arcadia to a certain small round mountain, and was placed on
its summit (Sim. ix. 1. 4) ; in the Corpus Hermeticum, xiii. (xiv.), in the
" Secret Sermon on the Mountain," Tat speaks of becoming a Suppliant
of Hermas, and of being led by him " upon the pass of the mountain "
(iirl TTJs TOV 6povs peTa^daem), i.e, from intellectual knowledge to the
summit of intuitive ; so Jesus led His disciples to the Mount of Olives
and there left them (Acts i. 12), and appeared to them on the mountain
He had appointed (Matt, xxviii. 16). A hill, or mountain, is the mystic
name for the state of consciousness known as contemplation (Rev. xxi. 10).
2b

370 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
a promise was made to the Church in Philadelphia
that the victor should receive a triple name, the
name of God, of the City of God, " the new Jerusalem
which is (ever) descending out of heaven from God,"
and the new name — all of which form one name.!
Here Jerusalera is transcendental in its essence but
iramanent in its activities, for it is continuously
descending to earth. Just as the Logos becomes
man so does the Ecclesia becorae " flesh." The
book of 4 Esdras, in its fourth Vision, sets the
heavenly Jerusalem over against the earthly, and
the Apocalypse of Baruch * says that the destroyed
Jerusalem was not the true Jerusalem, for this was
kept by God frora the beginning of the world, and
was seen by Moses on Mount Sinai.* " Dost thou
remeraber," says the Lord, " what that city is of
which I said, ' I have graven thee upon the palm
of my hands ' ? " " No earthly city this, but a
heavenly mystic one, prepared before the world
was made, shown to Adam before he fell in Paradise,
but withdrawn, as Eden itself, after he had sinned.
Abraham too beheld it when he kept watch be
tween his victims slain ; and to Moses it was
revealed on Mount Sinai, when he received the
communication touching the Tabernacle and its
1 R. Samuel says that R. Jochanan said that three are called by the
name of God, the righteous, the Messiah, and Jerusalem. " It is often
incorrectly said that the victor receives three names — of God, of the
Church, and of Christ ; but the real meaning is that a name is written on
him which has all three characters, and is at once the name of God, the
name of the Church, and the new name of Christ " (Ramsay, Tlie Letters
to the Seven Churches, 1904, p. 412). Better, however, to say that the
new name, like the " new song," belongs to the new man, and that it
marks him as new-born into the family of God, the pre-existent Church.
2 Chap. iv.
' Cf. the Zohar (Genes, F. 69) : " Deus innovabit mundum suum et
aedificabit Hierosolyma, ut ipsam desoendere faciat in medium sui de
coelo ita ut numquam destruatur."

THE NINTH ARTICLE 371
appurtenances. Since then it has been kept in the
secret place of God till the time of its disclosure
should arrive," !
That the " holiness " of the Church was found
in its Divine appointment, and not only in its moral
character, is further evidenced by the foUowing
passage from Hermas : " Behold, the God of the
Powers, who by his invisible power and might and
great understanding created the world, and by his
glorious counsel threw round his creation the
mantle of beauty, and by his strong word established
the heaven and founded the earth on the waters,
and by his own wisdom and foreknowledge created
his holy Church, which also he blessed, lo, he re
moves the heavens and the mountains and the hills
and the seas, and all things become level for his
elect," *
In Justin Martyr * a word of Jesus is cited :
Ka6cb<; eiprjKev iv oiipavco Trjv KaToiKriaiv rjfiwv virdp'^eiv.
Echoes of this agraphon are to be found in
Phil, iii, 20 : " Our citizenship is in heaven "
{¦n-oXiTev/jia for KaToiKTjcrit;) ; also in 2 Cor, V, 1,
" We have a building from God, an aeonian house
in the heavens " {oiKoSofirjv oiKiav alwviov iv rot?
ovpavok) ; and in Heb, xiii, 14, " We have not here
an abiding city " {pAvovo'av iroXiv dXXa ttjv p,eXXovaav
im^riTov/jiev) ; and John xiv, 2, " In my Father's
bouse are many mansions," *
This doctrine of the holiness of the ideal Church

1 W. J. Deane, Pseudepigrapha, 1891, p. 161 ; cf. 2 Esdras iii. 6, vii.
26, xiii. 36 ; Exod. xxv. 40.
" Vis. i. 3. 4 ; cf. also iii. 3. 3.
^ De resurr. 9. in Preuschen, Antileg., 1905, p. 51.
* With the above should be compared Luke xvi. 9, Eph. ii. 12, Phil.
i. 27, and Ep. ad Diognetum, v. 9 : Christians " spend their time on earth,
but their citizenship is in heaven " ; Resch, Agrapha, 1906, p. 103.

372 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
existent in the heavens held the members of the
Church on earth so long as they retained the con
sciousness of having been bom again into the
heavenly order by an inner act of God, While this
formed the basis of their religion it was just the holy
Church unseen which occupied their thoughts and
secured their devotion, and the Church, or com
munity of Christians on earth, was but a projection
into the world of space and time of the unseen and
real Church, " Holy Spirit and holy Church were
inseparably connected. The Church, or, in other
words, the community of aU believers, attains her
unity through the Holy Spirit, This unity mani
fested itself in brotherly love, and in the common
relation to a coramon ideal and a common hope.
The assembly of all Christians is realised in the
Kingdora of God, viz, in heaven ; on earth Chris
tians and the Church are dispersed and in a foreign
land. Hence, properly speaking, the Church her
self is a heavenly community inseparable from the
heavenly Christ, Christians believe that they be
long to a real superterrestrial commonwealth, which
from its very nature cannot be realised on earth," !
The primitive idea of the Church, then, was suffi
ciently marked by its oldest and most constant
predicate, holy, which marked it out as being on
earth a stranger and a pilgrim, but being in reality
a denizen of the intelligible sphere, appearing indeed
in time, but dwelling in the aeonian world, " AU the
lofty designations which Paul, the so-called Apostolic
Fathers, and Justin gathered from the 0,T, and
applied to the Church relate to the holy community
which originates in heaven and returns thither," *
1 Harnack, History of Dogma, ii. 73 ; cf. Ep. ad Diognetum, v. 5.
^ Harnack, l.c. ii. 74.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 373
When, however, the Church began to draw
increasing members into its ranks the holiness of
the ideal Church graduaUy retired into the back
ground, and was replaced by a holiness which was
found in the possession of a divinely-given formula
of faith and a divinely-appointed organisation.
The centre of gravity was shifted from within to
without ; a law or regula fidei was imposed in place
of the truth inwardly embraced ; the brotherhood
disappeared in the political commonwealth ; quality
gave way, as so often happens, to quantity. The
Church came to be no longer the holy Church of
Jesus Christ, but two parties, one offering and one
accepting salvation. Obedience to the Church,
i.e. its authorities, becarae a prime Christian virtue,
" The Church is a holy institution in virtue of the
gifts with which she is endowed," not because her
abiding-place is in heaven, in the sanctuary of God,
This transformation may be said to have been
effected for aU practical purposes by the beginning
of the fourth century, and it is registered in the
Edict of Milan of a.d. 313,

El? KadoXiKrjv 'EKKXTjcrlav
The previous sections on the epithets one and
holy have created a presumption that the third
epithet of catholic 'will prove to be in its present
acceptation the degraded form of an earlier ideal
concept. Just as the unity flashed out by one was
and is found in the ideal Church alone, and just
as holy points with equal clearness to the Divine
side of the Church, so we may expect that catholic
will prove to have descended from the ideal world
into the empirical. But it is not enough to rest on a

374 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
presumption ; we must examine also the examples
of its actual use. There is no question about the
later use ; our business is to discover whether this
later use is on a level with the earlier, or is a lower
form of it.
The earliest ecclesiastical use of the term KaOoXiKOf
is in Ignatius : ! "Be followers, all of you, of the
bishop, as Jesus Christ of the Father, and of the
presbytery as of the apostles ; give heed to the
deacons as to the command of God, Apart from
the bishop let no one do anything of the things
which pertain to the Church, Let that eucharist
be regarded as valid which is under the bishop, or
which he comraands. Wherever the bishop is
there let the coramonalty be, just as where Christ
Jesus is there is the catholic church," Elsewhere *
Ignatius asserts explicitly that it was the Spirit
who caused him to " shout aloud in their midst
with a loud voice, the voice of God, saying :
' Do nothing without the bishop ; keep your flesh
as the teraple of God ; love unity, flee di'd-
sions ; be imitators of Jesus Christ as also He
was of His Father,' " And* he promises to write,
" especially if the Lord reveal anything," and
goes on to exhort his readers as he had done
those of Smyrna to " obey the bishop and the
presbytery with undistracted mind, eating one
bread, the medicine of immortality, an antidote
against death, but the food of life in Jesus Christ
for ever,"
Frora these passages it is clear that : (1) Ignatius
based his doctrine about the Church on direct
revelation frora the Spirit, probably in an ecstasy ,^
1 Ad Smyrn. viii. 2. 2 j^^ Phil. vii.
' Ad Eph. XX. 1.

^i THE NINTH ARTICLE 375
which then he gave forth afterwards as a prophet ;
(2) the Church he would fain see established was an
image of the Church in the heavens ; there the
Father was the source of all authority and unity ;
Jesus Christ was obedient to the Father, and in
dissolubly connected with Him were the Apostles
and the angels. On earth, therefore, the bishop
who represented the Father must have unquestioned
obedience ; the Church on earth must be as in
separably united with the bishop as the Church in
heaven with the Father, and the presbytery and
the deacons raust be revered because of their
heavenly originals. The parallel between the ideal
and the erapirical Church is drawn point by point,
and includes, therefore, the use of the term catholic.
It, too, has its origin and home in heaven, and in so
far as it has descended to earth it is as a reflection
of the heavenly reality.
What then does Ignatius mean by catholic as
descriptive of a heavenly quality ? Referring to
the passage to the Smyrnaeans just quoted, Harnack
says : "In this passage these words do not yet
express a new conception of the Church, which
represents her as an empirical commonwealth.
Only the individual earthly communities exist
empirically, and the universal, i.e. the whole Church,
occupies the same position towards these as the
bishops of the individual communities do towards
the Lord." ! But Ignatius knew nothing of a
" universal " Church as the sum of local communities
held together externally ; hence he uses the word
catholic, or universal, in its logical sense as denoting
the universal against the particular, the principle
against specific embodiments of it, or the ideal
1 History of Dogma, ii. 74.

376 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
against the actual,! j^ jg therefore a mistake
to interpret the term catholic whenever it occurs
in the first three centuries as denoting a large
geographical extension as against a sraaller. It
possesses at least another, and an earlier meaning,
not far removed frora that of an Idea of Plato,
It is not easy, however, to find our way back
through the forest of ecclesiastical history to this
primitive fastness, so persistently and dogmatically
and vociferously has the term catholic been claimed
for a different and a lower setting of fact,
" Catholic," it has been often urged, denotes the
Church as meant for all peoples and not the Jewish
in special, a definition, it might have been thought,
which at once invited some consideration of what
it was which constituted the universality of the
Church, Or it was used in disparagement of the
heretical bodies, by way of assigning to them a
partial or local importance over against the " Great
Church," or the community of Churches, which
claimed to stand on the ancient paths, and this
without analysing sufficiently the grounds on which
catholicity fell to the army with the bigger battalions.
Or it came to be synonymous with primitive, -with
" quod semper," as denoting that which a selected
early period held and professed authoritatively,
though the reasons which lay behind the selection
of the age of the four great Councils, or of the seven,
or of the first six centuries, were never clearly put
into the light. Or the term Catholic has been
annexed by the " Holy, Roman Church " to express
' So yevixbs is opposed to eldiKbs, as general to special ; Kado\iK<p 'Koyf
(Arist. Plant, ii. 6. 1) is to speak generally ; so rb KaBSXov is a universal
as opposed to rb /card piipos, a particular ; the universal in metaphysics,
however, so far as it is not a mere logical abstraction, is the ideal which
is constantly seeking expression in actuality.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 377
her claim to universal dominion, and the wide
spread acceptance of that annexation is proof of
the thoroughness with which the claim has been
maintained. Lastly, the word " Catholic " has
been degraded to a loose and shadowy usage which
equates it with dilettantism in taste and an un
discriminating liberalism in speculation.
What, however, all these lower uses of the term
prove is not that they are not correct in their
various special meanings, but that they register the
level of religion in the body or writer by whom they
are used. With the Greek religion is conservatism,
with the Roman dominion, with the Anglican
antiquity, with the Puritan bodies liberalism. And
all, through their very variations, confess that the
one thing of which they are severally variants must
be sought elsewhere.
We have already shown cause for holding that
the Church on earth is the reflection of the Church
pre-existent in the heavens ; and we have also
shown that the use of the term Catholic by Ignatius
presupposes the same truth. So far, therefore, is
Ignatius frora countenancing the later appeal to
it in favour of ecclesiasticism that he rather makes
against it, as in his mouth its base is prophetic and
not institutional. But Ignatius is not our sole
witness, St, Cyril of Jerusalem in his Catechetical
Lectures certainly identifies the Church with the
empirical Church, but yet the explanations he gives
of the epithet Catholic carry him far away from the
-visible Church to the ideal. For the Church is
adorned with all virtues, it teaches all doctrines
to all men, cures all diseases of soul or body, and
possesses all gifts and graces.! ApoUinaris, Bishop
1 Cat. xviii. 22-27.

378 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
of Hierapolis at the time of Marcus Aurelius,! wrote
to Avircius Marcellus a letter against the Montanists
in which he complained that they prophesied in a
way different from the custom whicii was in accord
ance with the tradition and teaching of the Church
received from above.* But if the Church received
its teaching from above, then that teaching takes
its origin from the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit and
the Church belong to the same Di'vine supernatural
order.* The most striking illustration of the use of the
word Catholic to express the necessary and universal
truth whose home is the ideal or intelligible world
is found in the famous passage in which Irenaeus
1 See Harnack, Die altchrist. Lit, i. 243 f.
* Ilapd rb KaTa irapddoaiv Kal KaTa diadoxv'^ dvwdev ttjs iKK\'r]alas idos.
AiaSoxrji' is, I think, an error for didaxvv. The phrase in Clem. Al. (Strom.
iv. 2. 2), TOV Kavbvos, Tijs 'ItjitoS XptaTov Kara SiadoXTJv tuk dwoarbT^wv
oipavLov iKKX-qalas, is not parallel, and dvoiSev is not " from of old," as
Canon Selwyn renders it (The Christian Prophets, 1900, p. 17), but as in
John iii. 3, " from above," i.e. i^ ovpavov or iK Qeov. " Das spatere
Schlagwort der Mysterien ' Renatus in aeternum ' (so hiess in Rom, wer der
grossen Mutter und dem Attis Taurobolium und Kriobolium dargebracht
hatte) liegt immer noch naher als A.T. Analogien " (H. J. Holtzmann in
Hand-Komment. iv. 63).
' Cf. Tertullian : " Ipsa ecclesia proprie et principaliter ipse est spiri
tus . . . atque ita exinde etiam numerus omnis qui in hanc fidem eon-
spiraverint ecclesia ab auctore et consecratore censetur. Et ideo ecclesia
quidem delicta donabit, sed ecclesia spiritus per spiritalem hominem non
ecclesia numerus episcoporum " (De pudic. 21). Clement Al. says the same :
" As the will of God is a work, and this is called cosmos, so His counsel
is the salvation of men, and this has been called ecclesia " (Paed. i. 6. 27).
So " the earthly Church is an image of the heavenly Church, ttjs oipavlov
iKK\t]alas (Origen, De princip, iv. 2. 2, also speaks of t] oipdvios ^/cxXijirio),,
therefore we pray 'thy will be done on earth as in heaven'" (Strom.
iv. 26. 172). I do not understand how Harnack sees (Strom, vii. 17. 107)
a clear formulation of the empirical Church in the words : " I suppose it
has become plain that the true Church which is really from of old (ti} 6vti
dpxalav) is one, into which the righteous are gathered according to (God's)
purpose ; for God is one and the Lord is one . . . and the one Church,
then, has attained her lot by the very nature of unity." For this is proper
to the Church above, but it is the division into heresies which is the lot
of the Church below (fjv els TroXXis KaTaripveiv ^idt^ovrai alpiaeis). Cf.,
Harnack, History of Dogma, ii. 81.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 379
insists that he and his gnostic opponents agree on
one point, at all events, viz. the number four as
determining the only possible number of the Gospels,
His ground is that " God has made all things in due
proportion and adaptation," i.e. after the pattern of
heavenly things. Hence the Cherubim were four-
faced in order that they might fitly represent the
fourfold aspects of the eternal Word, heaven has
" four Catholic spirits," ! the Church has four
Gospels, and God gave four Teaa-apai KaOoXiKal
Bid6r}Kai, viz, to Noah, Abrahara, Moses, and
Jesus Christ. Because then there is a fourfold
pattern in the heavens, the Gospels, he concludes,
must be neither more nor less than four,* Catholic
then means first what is Real, hence necessary, and
then, on the phenomenal plane, universal.
The older and the higher meaning of the Church
still shines out in Clement Al. He says that it is
not the Church which is Mother, but it is the Divine
gnosis and wisdom,* although in Paed. i, 6, 42 he
says that "the universal Father {6 twv 6Xwv UuTijp)
is one, and one the universal Word ; and the Holy
Spirit is one and the same everywhere, and one is
the only virgin-mother. I love to call her the
Church." Here the " catholicity " of the Church
is equated with the catholicity of the Father and
of the Word. Similarly, in Paed. i. 5. 21, he says
that " the mother draws the children to herself, and
we seek our mother, the Church." He then goes on
to interpret the sporting of Isaac and Rebekah told
of in Gen. xxvi. 8 as typifying our rejoicing (Isaac =
laughter) over our salvation 'with the Church to
whom the stable name of endurance is given
1 Tiaaapa KaBoXiKo, TveipaTa, which can hardly be the four winds.
« Adv. Haer. iii. 11. 8. ' Strom, vi. 16. 146.

380 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
(Rebekah, however, is taken ordinarily to mean
a cord), " for this cause surely, because she alone
remains to all generations, rejoicing ever, subsisting
as she does by the endurance of us believers, who
are the merabers of Christ." But what remains
to all generations belongs to the eternal order, not
to the world of Becoming ; in other words, Clement
regards the catholicity of the Church as being ideal,
and as being only partially and gradually embodied
in the Church visible on earth.
From the time of Origen onwards the conception
of the Church as our heavenly Mother, though never
wholly lost, receded more and more into the back
ground. It has a leading place in the teaching of
St. Augustine, and especially when piety rather
than polemic was his immediate object. " That
we believe ' in remission of sins through the Holy
Church,' that ' he cannot have God for his Father
who has not the Church for his Mother,' that salva
tion is in the Church alone, ' extra ecclesiam nuUa
salus,' were ideas in full currency very long before
Augustine's time, and he simply entered upon them
as part of the traditional heritage of Cathohc
belief." ! But what is certain is that the heritage
entered on by Augustine was the damnosa haereditas
of the compromise made between the Church and
the World, which had thrown the shadow of eclipse
over the heavenly side of ecclesiastical institutions,
and had succeeded in identifying in most minds
the empirical, existing Church with the ideal, pre
existing Church, 'with the result that there was
transferred to the former the attributes of the latter,

' Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 186 ; Dr. Robertson, however, earlier
(p. 183) does justice to the element of " abstract idealism " in Augustine's
utterances.

XH THE NINTH ARTICLE 381
to the confusion of men's minds and the dechris-
tianising of their doings. Thus the maxira, " extra
ecclesiam mdla salus," which is an axiom when
applied to the Church in heaven, became an instru
ment of tyranny when appUed to the Church on
earth. The Divine truth was changed into a human
falsehood, and frora the falsehood sprang the auto-
da-fe. Similarly the catholicity which is the pre
rogative of the heavenly Mother in virtue of the love
which makes her draw to her heart all the sons of
men, when transferred to the empirical Church is
prostituted into a thirst for dominion which has
been the fertile mother of division, wars, greed, and
cruelty.!
Et? diroa-ToXiKtjv '^KKXr/a-iav
The adjective " apostolic " as applied to the
Church is at once the latest of the four " Notes," and
the most useful to the ecclesiastic. In its current
usage it bears every mark of having been coined for
the defeat of heretics. For the heretic equally
with the orthodox appealed to the Scriptures and
clairaed to possess the Spirit. Hence it was
necessary to set up another authority which was
beyond the reach of attack by the heretic. This
was found in the Catholic Church as founded by
the Apostles, having an apostolic rule of faith, a
collection of apostolic writings, and an apostolic
organisation. The creation of these three " apostolic " canons
is the peculiar glory of the Church of Rome, and
1 " Have you ever, when riding near sunset or soon after sunrise,
noticed the shadow of yourself and your horse on the road before you ?
Such a ridiculous shadow is the visible Church of the invisible " (Coventry
Patmore, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, p. 187).

382 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
they form the triple weapon with which, as the
legitimate heir of the imperial spirit of the Roman
Empire, she smote down emergent heresies and
schisms. The needs of other Churches and the
dangers of the tirae brought help to the Roman
bishops, and brought it so effectuaUy that in the
end the " apostolic Church " not only stamped out
heresy but subjugated also its sister-churches as
well.! 'Where it was insufficient to appeal to a
common canon of writings, or a common rule of
faith, recourse was had to the authority of those
Churches which could claim an apostle as their
founder, and could state the line of bishops who
derived from him. As the Roman Church was the
only Church in the West which possessed this dis
tinction, and since it, moreover, was the Church of
the city with the greatest prestige and influence, its
bishop naturally came to be the occupier of the
" Apostolic See," par excellence, and the canon he
approved, the regula fidei he used, and the cult he
presided over assumed, at any rate for the Western
Churches, a preponderant authority.
This is what Irenaeus is referring to in the famous
passage : " Ad hanc enim ecclesiam propter poten-
tiorera principalitatem necesse est [dvayxTj not Set]
omnem convenire [resort to = perhaps iravTaxodev
crvvTpi'^eiv ; in iii. 11, 8 and i. 16. 2 TravTU'xoOev
is rendered undique ; in iii, 18, 3 travTaxov is
rendered ubique] ecclesiam (hoc est, eos qui sunt
undique fideles) in qua semper, ab his qui sunt
undique [not uhiqus\ conservata est ea quae est ab
apostolis traditio." Rome, he says, is a place where
1 TertuUian pithily puts the case for apostolicity : " Constat omnem
doctrinam quae cum ecclesiis apostolicis matricibus et originalibus fidei
conspiret veritati deputandam, id sine dubio tenentem quod ecclesiae ab
apostolis, apostoli a Christo, Christus a deo accepit " (De praescr. ch. xxi.).

XXI THE NINTH ARTICLE 383
Christians from all sides are compelled to resort for
business, and henee it is there where we can most
easily deterraine what is of apostolic origin by the
testiraony of the many witnesses who may be there
interrogated. The reason which made Irenaeus
exalt Rome was the same which moved Cyprian to
say, " Quoniam pro magnitudine sua debeat Cartha-
ginem Roma praecedere " {Ep. 52. 2). The claim to
apostolic authority took its rise from the exigencies
of ecclesiastical or party struggles, and would never
have attained the vigour it displayed for centuries
had its practical value been less.!
When, however, we enquire into the history of
those apostles to whom the later Church gave such
decisive authority we are faced with difficulties,
some of which are refractory to all research. In the
first place two sets of Apostles, or two conceptions
of the apostolic office, meet us. In the Gospels the
word " apostles " occurs eight times only ; * the
first four occur in the account of the sending of the
twelve disciples out as missionaries ; the fifth is
perhaps a reminiscence of an O.T. passage ; * and
the last three only use the term apostles as a technical
term for the immediate circle of disciples. On the
other hand, the twelve is the constant name for that
circle, and is used in all four Gospels (in all thirty
tiraes), in Acts vi. 2, 1 Cor. xv. 5, Rev, xxi. 14, and
does not occur elsewhere in N.T.
1 Cf. Harnack's Lecture, 1893, on Das Zeugniss des Irenaeus iiber das
Ansehen der romischen Kirche, in which he takes a different view. He
argues that convenire may as well represent avppalveiv els as avvTpixei.v,
and that the credal agreement so affirmed is a necessity to every Church
because of Rome's unique position, being a Church " maxima, antiquissima,
ab omnibus cognita, a Paulo et Petro fundata." It is, however, interesting
to note that he cites Iren. iii. 11. 8, where principales is rendered KaBoKiKa.
2 Matt. X. 2, Mark vi. 30, Luke vi. 13, ix. 10, xi. 49, xvii. 5, xxii. 14,
xxiv. 10. ^ Perhaps from 2 Chron. xxxvi. 16. Cf. xxiv. 19.

384 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
But the term apostle is used in a wider sense to
denote anybody who was sent out as a missionary.
Thus Paul calls himself an apostle of Christ Jesus ; !
he caUs Barnabas * and Silvanus,* and Andronicus
and Junias apostles, and alludes in indignant tones
to " false apostles " * and in irony to " superlative
apostles," ^ Barnabas, too, is called an " apostle "
in Acts xiv, 4, 14, and in Rev, ii, 2 is an allusion
to some who called themselves apostles and were
not. It is not unimportant to note that the Jewish
Church possessed an apostolic organisation before
the institution of the Christian Church, and that
Said was one of its representatives. It was the
duty of these Jewish apostles to collect the temple-
tribute from the Jews of the Dispersion ; to bear
encyclical letters from Jerusalem to the local syna
gogues ; to execute disciplinary measures, and to
form a council for the Patriarch,* These Jewish
apostles, according to Justin and Origen, undertook
the task of disseminating the adverse judgment of
the Jewish authorities on the Christians,
Further, Eph, ii, 20, speaks of the community
being builded " on the foundation of the apostles and
prophets," where the genitive is not one of posses
sion, nor of the author, nor objective, but of apposi
tion. The Gentile believers were stones in the
same building as the Jewish dyioi, and they were
both aUke built into the building of which apostles

1 Rom. i. 1, 1 Cor. i. 1, 2 Cor. i. 1, Gal. i. 1, etc., Rom. xi. 13, 1 Cor.
iv. 9, ix. 1, etc.
2 1 Cor. ix. 4, 6. " 1 Thess. i. 1. i 2 Cor. xi. 13.
5 Oi iiTepXiav dirbaroKoi, 2 Cor. xi. 5, xn. 11.
« See Justin, Dial. 17. 108 ; Euseb. in Isa. xviii. 1 ; Epiph. Haer.
xxx. 4 ; and Harnack's discussion in Mission und Ausbreitung, 1902, pp.
230-239.

XXI THE NINTH ARTICLE 385
and prophets were themselves the foundation. We
cannot take apostles here in any sense but that of
messengers of God in general, who went from Church
to Church " edifying " each, just as prophets were
those Christians who received revelations directly
from the Spirit and then gave them forth to any
Church they might visit.
What the N.T. suggests, then, is that prophets in
the wider sense were indefinitely many, but that in
the narrower sense the Christian Church at Jeru
salem, as the mother of all others, was regarded as
the centre of all, and possessed a council which went
by the name of " the Twelve." This might have
been the number and designation of the apostolic
body at the disposal of the Jewish Patriarch, and
in that case the Christian Twelve would be modelled
on the Jewish Twelve ; and this might also have
determined the choice of " the Twelve " by Jesus
Christ. In any case, it is clear that the number was
determined by the number of the twelve tribes of
Israel.! The number, too, is apparently of more
importance than any precise body making it up,
for in the Blessings of Moses in Deut. xxxiii. Simeon
is omitted, and in Rev. vii., Dan ; in Num. ii. Levi
is not reckoned, nor in Ezek. xlviii. 1-29, but in
w. 31-34 he is included.
The ambiguity in the New Testament use of the
term " apostle " is caused by the same historical
conflict between the ideal and the actual in the early
Church which has met us already several times.
The earliest Church was mystical, unorganised, and
formless. Later it borrowed the forms it felt to be
1 See Matt. xix. 28, Luke xxii. 30, Acts vii. 8, xxvi. 7, Jas. i. 1, Rev.
vu. 5 f., xii. 1, xxi. 12 f., xxu. 2.
2c

386 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
necessary to it from the world around it. From
being mystic predominantly it became Catholic
predominantly. And in the former condition it
was apostolic in a sense which was lost, or if not
lost, made subordinate in the latter. In the earlier
condition apostolic emphasised the inner and Divine
authority with which the messenger was invested.
In the later it distinguished the officer of a historical
and orthodox Church from the upstart representa
tive of a Church which could not trace its ancestry
to the beginning, and was at the same time heretical.
It is the earlier sense which is the permanent and
more important sense. The latter filled a want for
a time, and has long ceased to have any religious
value. But why should the Church in the heavens be
called apostolic ? Surely, it might be urged, here,
if anywhere, we strike on a solid rock of historic fact
which is fatal to all mystical alchemy. We think
not. In Luke xi. 49,! ^^ read : " Therefore also
said the Wisdom of God, I Avill send unto them
prophets and apostles." * This saying of the
Wisdom of God is certainly not a direct quotation
from the Old Testament, and it is a mere conjecture
to refer it to some unknown writing of Old Testa
ment times, or to an earlier saying from Jesus
Himself. Whatever the original, however, the
meaning is clear enough. It states the general law
which the stubbornness of the Jews exemplified.
God is ever sending His messengers to us, and we
as constantly ill-treat them. If we kill them that

1 Cf. 2 Chron. xxxvi. 16, and xxiv. 19.
2 In the parallel passage. Matt, xxiii. 34, it is " prophets, wise men,
and scribes," where apostles are elaborated, after the manner of the first
Gk)spel, into two classes.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 387
is only possible when they come in the flesh, but it
belongs to the universality of the saying that we
include also those apostles and prophets of God who
are not in the flesh. We thus get as our residt :
God never leaves Himself without witness, for He
is ceaselessly engaged in sending us messengers,
unseen or seen, who by virtue of the nature of their
office are caUed prophets, and by virtue of the source
of their authority are called apostles. Every prophet
is first an apostle.
We rise, therefore, from the particular to the
universal, as we ought to do. The prophets and
apostles whom the Jews slew are representative of
a great army out of all peoples, nations, and tongues,
who were God's messengers, from Socrates dying
frora his heralock to Christ on the rood. Their
importance was not so much in that they were
killed as in that they came from God. And, there
fore, they represent also the angels, who cannot
indeed be killed, but can meet with opposition out
of the same obstinacy which, where men are con
cerned, leads to murder.
This brings us to the recognition of a " note "
of the" Church which is both of importance and is
also of one piece with the view. of the Church we
have already taken on other grounds. The Church
we believe in is the Church of the angels and of the
spirits of just men raade perfect who are la-dyyeXoi,
equal to the angels,! and hence are ministering
spirits sent out * for service. In short, the Church
of the Creed is, among other things, a Church which
is not only founded on apostles, but is also main
tained continually by the ministry of " apostles,"
being sent out, whether in the flesh or not,
1 Luke XX. 36. ^ 'A-n-oareWbpeva.

388 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.xxi
This conclusion may be and should be carried
one step further. The instinct of the Church
Catholic here on earth has always driven it to be a
missionary Church, an apostolic Church, nor could
it well be otherwise. For in proportion as any
concrete society on earth is a reflection in ultimates
of the society which is eternal in the heavens it is,
like God's love, expansive. It must carry to others
the chance of sharing what it has itself received.
This, however, is not to say that the living Light of
Christianity which is to be passed on, as the light
of a torch is passed on from one to another, is to be
confined to a set of lamps manufactured after any
one pattern. The forms of the Church militant
cannot without grievous loss be transported to
lands accustomed to other forms as of equal worth
with their content. And the " apostle " of the
Church is given the Ught of Life to kindle through
the sacrament of his own transmuted personality,
and it is at least doubtful whether any other sacra
ment, whether of word or act, can be put on the
same level as that. This light of Life for us has
been put into vessels fashioned by the Paganism of
Western Asia and the Mediterranean lands, and
these have served and serve still our needs. But
why should not China or India do now what
Hellenism did for Christianity nineteen centuries
ago — furnish native forms of Creed, cult, and
discipline ? Is the Lord's arm shortened that it
cannot save, or His Spirit withdrawn ? If He be
still the unseen Guide into all the truth may He not
be trusted to lead His apostolic Church by the Way
it should go ?

CHAPTER XXII
THE NINTH ARTICLE — PART III
The Communion of Saints
'Ayia)v Koivaiviav
The origin and primary meaning of this Article
are obscure. None of the Creeds before a.d. 400
possess it ; it is not clear what " communion "
stands for — whether for an act or a concrete object ;
whether the word rendered " saints " refers to
things or persons, or if to persons whether it relates
to those in the flesh, or those out of it, or both.
Nor is there any certainty whether the good thing
described in the Article is a present possession or
a future gift. That is to say, the Article may mean
one or all of the following :
(a) An inner participation by all Christians of
the one life which informs the Church ;
(6) A continued communion of spiritual life with
the faithful departed ;
(c) A hope for such communion when the Christian
himself passes over to Paradise ;
{d) A belief that ultimately all blessings will be
given to the Christian to the full ;
{e) A participation in the Sacraments and other
goods of the Church Catholic ;
389

390 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
(/) An affirmation that the undivided Catholic
Church is a community of saints.
The last is that favoured by the Donatists in early
tiraes, and by Luther later,! "ji^g j-gg^ f^n under
the two heads of (a) comraunion with or in the saints,
and (&) communion in holy, i.e. sacred things. And
under {a) come (1) a reference to the saints in the
flesh, and (2) to the saints departed. We propose
to discuss this Article under each of these three
heads. I. Communion with Saints on Earth
The term Koivoivia, which is almost certainly
the original Greek term here translated communion,
occurs twice only in the LXX., viz. in Lev. vi. 2,
where it means bargain, a " mutuura commercium
data manu initura " ; and in Wisd. viii. 18, where
it is said of divine Wisdom that " there is glory in
the communion of her words." The cognate verb
Koivavio), however, occurs twelve times, and in these
passages the dominant meaning is that of fellow
ship, common membership in a society, similarity
of living. The noun occurs twenty times in the
N.T., and the verb eight tiraes, and the dominant
meaning in these is that of participation in a common
good. The participation, however, is not made
explicitly to rest on a prior membership in the same
society. The Creed, according to the Church of Alexandria
of the fourth century, is constructed out of various
authorities in Denzinger,* and the latter part of it
1 " Ubi est fides sancta ibi est et sancta communio," in App. Augustine,
Sermon 241, vol. v. 395 Bened.
2 Enchiridion, p. 7.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 391
runs according to Athanasius : " And we believe
in the Holy Ghost, of a substance not different frora
that of Father and Son, but of one substance with
the Father and Son, uncreated, perfect, paraclete ;
who spake in the Law, and in the Prophets, and
in the Gospels ; who descended on the Jordan,
preached to the Apostles, dwelleth in the Saints.
And we believe in one catholic and apostolic
Church, in one baptisra of repentance and reraission
of sins, in resurrection frora the dead, in aeonian
judgment both of souls and bodies, in the Kingdora
of heavens and aeonian life."
From this and parallel versions of the Creed
one fact is plain, viz. that the doctrine of the Holy
Ghost pervades the whole of the concluding section.
He is represented not only in His supermundane
majesty, but in His relations to the saints on earth.
He is the inner form of the Church — originally He
was identical with the Church ; He indwells in each
individual member {oIkovv iv dyloi^) ; His is the
transmuting power which works through baptism,
raises souls from the abode of them that are dead,
is the efficient cause of judgment, admits to the
Kingdom and raises to the life of heaven. Hence
one principal meaning of the Article, " I believe
in the communion of saints," will be belief in the
participation by all merabers of the Church in the
life of the Spirit,
It was, however, assumed rather than proved
that this fellowship in the Spirit involved member
ship in a visible body, the Church. Strictly speak
ing, to have the Spirit and to be a member of a local
community were not logically identical, although
as a matter of fact the two went together ordinarily.
But as time went on, and as the visible Church

392 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
struck deeper roots, the tendency grew more and
more strong to turn the logical distinction into an
actual identity, which led naturally to a denial of
the Spirit to all who were not of the visible com
munity. But originally it was not membership
in the Church which mediated the Spirit, but
possession of the Spirit which constituted member
ship in the Church. The incestuous man whom
St. Paul delivered to Satan ! had by his very wrong
doing shown that he did not possess the Spirit, and
therefore he ceased ipso facto to be a member of the
Church, and the excommunication ordered by St.
Paul was but the formal registering of a spiritual
fact which had already happened. The man who
ceased to follow the Spirit ceased to have any
direct interest in the communion of saints.
The reversal of this natural order was the term
of a tendency the first beginnings of which we
observe in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. But
in him the tendency was but beginning to feel its
way, and in his unsystematic thought there is
placed side by side an appeal to the Spirit who
spoke through him and an attempt to give to his
prophetic utterances through the Spirit the force of
ecclesiastical law.* So Irenaeus declares that
" where the Church is there is also the Spirit of
God, and where the Spirit of God is there is the
Church and all grace." * But the ambiguity in
this proposition is removed by the context, from
which it is abundantly clear that Irenaeus thought
of the gift of the Spirit as being conditioned by
merabership of the Church. Salvation is through
faith, and that is received from the Church, guarded
by the believer and kept ever fresh by the Spirit.
1 1 Cor. V. 4. 2 4^ p/jj;_ vii_ 3 jij_ 3g_ -^

XXII THE NINTH ARTICLE 393
The process thus begun continued in spite of
Montanism, Monasticisra, and Gnosticism until the
necessities of government, the decline of religious
fervour, and assimilation of the secular spirit
produced the Christian Empire and the Peace of
the Church. It is a coramon practice to represent
the outlines of settled episcopal government as
having been laid down from the first by Jesus Christ,
and so to treat the after history of the visible Church
as a perpetual struggle of the Church against the
encroachments of the Civil power. Hence the
decay and final disappearance of prophecy and the
prophetic spirit are accounted for as due to the
proper opposition of the authorities to unregulated
prophecy,! But the reverse is a truer statement.
Christianity was from the first a prophetic religion,
depending, that is, on the spiritual life with which
its devotees were immediately in touch, and as
this life was gradually crusted over with forms of
cult, creed, and law it ceased to be the guide into
the truth, and gave way to the ecclesiastical Rule
of Faith. In other words, the article, the Com
munion of Saints, no longer was understood to
mean primarily that all the Saints were, as such,
joint-partakers of the Spirit of God, but that the
fellowship they had was firstly in the visible Church,
and then, as mediated through that visible Church,
in the Spirit.*
^ This is the line taken by Dr. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient
Church, 1912, pp. 70 ff., and by Bishop Robertson, Regnum Dei, 1901,
pp. 136 ff.
2 Cf. Irenaeus, ubi supra ; " For this gift of God (the Spirit) was en
trusted to the Church, just as the breath was breathed into the creature
formed, in order that all the members receiving it might be quickened."
On the other hand, the deeper conception of the Church flnds expression in
Nicetas of Romatiana : " What is the Church but the assembly of the
Saints ? All from the very beginning of the World, be they patriarchs

394 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
It would, however, be a mistake to regard the
changed interpretation put on our Article as an
unmixed evil. On the contrary, Prophecy obeyed
a law of Nature in setting itself to find for itself
fitting forms, and it is no discredit to it either that
it spoke less emphaticaUy, or that it borrowed its
forms from the world in which it found itself.
Within and underneath the growing systera of
Catholic forms there lay biding its time the Life
which is Christianity. It might seem that CouncUs
and Popes, imperial donations, perfected organisa
tion, canon law, and creeds ever becoming raore
rigid would not so much form a channel as block
it up. And yet the Montanist movement, Marcion,
Origen, and the Alexandrian school, one side of
St, Augustine's activities, the Albigensian and
allied enthusiasms. Abbot Joachim, St. Francis of
Assisi, the Council of Constance, LoUardy and
German mysticism, all show that the force of Life,
though encumbered, was by no means inert.
In fact, the history of mediaeval Christianity
is the exemplification of a law which the enthusiast
finds irksome, viz. that Life must come by its own
through struggle with the hostility of the Lord of
Forra, If those who were perfecting the Form
crystallised their creed in the motto " Extra

such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or Prophets, or Martyrs, or other
righteous men, who have been, who are, who shall be, are one Church,
because they, sanctified by one faith and one conversation, sealed by one
Spirit, are one body whose head is Christ. I say even more, the angels
also and all the heavenly powers and dominions are included in the covenant
of this one Church " (Caspari, Anecdota, p. 356). And also in Augustine :
" From the beginning of the human race whoever have believed on Him,
and have in any way known Him and lived piously and righteously ac
cording to His precepts, wherever and whenever they may have been,
through Him were undoubtedly saved " (Ep, 102. 12 in Bened. ed. ii.
277).

THE NINTH ARTICLE 395
ecclesiam nulla salus," they only succeeded in
making those who held Life more important than
Form more conscious of the nature of the gift
entrusted to them, and more resolute in its defence.
Before we could rise to the conception of the Church
as a communion of saints of all churches we had to
go to school in a Church which excluded or ignored
all others, and was content to find the communion
of saints within its own borders alone.!

II. Communion with Saints departed
" The appearance and the original meaning of
the clause ' the communion of saints ' is most
obscure. An attempt has been raade to bring it
into connection with the descent into hell. In the
one would be meant the heavenly fellowship of the
saints, in the other of the Old Testament righteous
who were brought out of Plades. But this connec
tion is artificial, and even if it had really occurred,
it is late. We must consider the clause on its
own merits." * The clause was of Western origin,
probably of South Gallican, and apparently is not
' Professor Briggs (Fundamental Christian Faith, 1913, p. 194) holds
that we cannot regard the clause as simply epexegetical of " Holy Catholic
Church," to which Harnack's objection, viz. that such an equating clause
is foreign to the structure of the Creed, and that Faustus is against it
(History of Dogma, v. 244) seems fatal. Dr. Briggs' words are : " This
interpretation (of communion in the saints) is the one which has come
down as an overwhelming tradition compared with which the other inter
pretations have little weight. This interpretation is also favoured by the
addition of this phrase to the article holy Catholic Church ; it is an ad
ditional predicate of the Church as a Church in which there is a communion
of saints." From this point of view, then, the article distinguishes between
the visible Church, consisting of good and bad, and the invisible Church
within the other consisting of the saints. And this is practically the
view taken above.
2 Harnack, Reden und AufsStze, 1904, i. 251.

396 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
much older than the time of Faustus of Rhegium.!
The Church of North Africa in Augustine's time
did not read this clause in its creed, and it is not
likely, therefore, that " the communion of saints "
was in apposition to " holy catholic Church " with
an anti-Donatist force, or that Augustine had it
in his mind when he used the phrase " communio
sacramentorum " or " sacramentorum participatio." *
It remains that we follow the testimony of
Faustus for the contemporary meaning of the
clause. He gives it in his interpretation of the
creed. " Let us pass on," he says, " to the ' Com
munion of Saints.' This sentence confounds those
who blasphemously declare that the ashes of the
Saints and Friends of God ought not to be held
in honour, who do not believe that the glorious
memory of the blessed martyrs is to be celebrated
with honour shown to their resting-places. These
men deal with the Creed dishonestly, and have
broken their pledge given to Christ in Baptism, and
by this denial of their faith have laid open a place
for death in the very bosom of Life." *
The Article, then, of the Communion of Saints,
though it may have acquired later meanings — ^just
as the phrase apart from the Creed may have earlier
(as with Augustine) been used to denote relationship
to the empirical Catholic Church — yet, if Faustus
is to be believed, was introduced into the Creed as
a protest against the dishonour shown by Vigilantius
1 t Circa 490.
2 " The Church of the living God tolerates in the communion of the
sacraments the wicked who are at the end to be separated " (Sermon
ccxiv. 11, Bened. ed. v. 948) ; in De catech, rudibus, c. viii. he speaks of the
educated man who comes for participation in the sacraments after having
made the acquaintance of the Christian scriptures (ed. Bened. vi. 268).
^ Given in Caspari, Quellen, iv. 273 ;] cf. his second Homily, ibid,
Anecdota, p. 338.

TIIE NINTH ARTICLE 397
to the martyrs. The saints, therefore, are specially
the martyrs of Christ, and our Article affirms that
they are to be had in honour.
Several lines of tendency converged to emphasise
this duty. In the first place, the Church had long
enjoyed peace under the Empire when the fifth
century ended. The martyrs, therefore, were in
the haze of the past which surrounds historic figures.
As early as the second century indeed they were
held in high honour, and their bodies were treasured
when possible as precious relics. St. Polycarp
enjoyed an anniversary festival at Smyrna immedi
ately after his death. In fact, the honour of
festival days was bestowed on martyrs before it
was bestowed on Apostles, and the custom of so
honouring them spread from the East to the West
so rapidly that " frora the beginning of the third
century the celebration of the anniversary becarae
a matter of universal observance." ! Originally
these celebrations were purely local, but later as
the fame of a martyr spread his cult also found
other centres. This diffusion of cults was largely
aided by the practice of the translation of
relics. In the second place, the way to the Christian
cult of martyrs was paved by the current worship
of the dead in the pagan world. The Parentalia
were succeeded by the birthdays of Martyrs, and
the ceremonies of the one afforded the base for the
ceremonies of the other. Monica was wont in
Africa to offer pottage and bread and wine at the
memorials of the saints.* " The numerous legends
of the fourth and fifth century are but Christian
1 Duchesne, Christian Worship, Eng. trans. 1903, p. 284.
^ Aug. Conf. vi. 2.

398 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
variants of stories and doings of ancient piety." !
" The curses on tombstones by which the grave
was secured against violation were often copied
with slight alterations from the formulas in use
among Pagans." *
Dr. Bigg finds another connection. " There
are so many coincidences between the Pagan
doctrine of the Demons and the Christian doctrine
of Angels and demons that we are justified in
assuming a close historical connection between the
two." * All the reverence paid by antiquity to
ancestors was transferred in the Christian Church
of the fifth century to the martyrs, and quite
naturally. For as the family clustered round its
ancestor as its guardian and continuator so did the
local Church as the Christian family find itself
represented, and its genuine spirit displayed at its
best by the martyr who now was its intercessor in
the unseen world and its protector from unknown
foes. We observe the same borrowing in similar
practices or beliefs to those just mentioned. The
germ of transubstantiation appears in Clement Al.*
"Purgatory, prayers for the dead, and many other
1 B. Schultze, Griech.-rom. Heident. ii. 351 ; cf. also for another similar
borrowing Hermann Jordan, Gesch. der altchrist. Liter., 1911, p. 83 ff. :
" But indeed they (the official protocols) form the literary antecedent for
all histories of martyrs, so that also here again an old narrative-form
exercises decisive influence on the Christian literature. Hence a group of
Christian histories of martyrs appears to be nothing but more or less
thorough adaptations of these protocols, as, e,g,, the stories of the Martyr
dom of tfie Scilitani and Justin and his Companions," Jordan, however,
expressly guards himself against being supposed to hold that Christianity
contributed nothing original. For an example of the use by Christians
of a heathen protocol, see Eusebius, K,G. ii., where is quoted a letter of
Dionysius of Alexandria couched in the form of a protocol.
3 Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 2nd ed. 116 n,
3 Ibid. p. 308.
* Excerpta ex Theodoto, 82.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 399
things . . . are found in Coptic Gnostic writings,
and are then met with again in Catholicism." !
Even the prevailing system of allegorical inter
pretation which filtered down from Origen and the
Alexandrines through Gregory, Augustine, Hilary,
the Victors, and Bernard, and dominated mediaeval
exegesis, was derived from the Stoics who used it
in order to modernise Homer. It is not iraprobable
that we may yet find that as the later developraent
of the hierarchy into archbishops, metropolitans,
patriarchs, and primate followed the civil system,
so the early episcopacy and its growth into
raonarchical episcopacy sprang not frora Jewish
synagogal discipline, but frora the mystery-religions.
In the third place. Paganism gave Catholicism
yet another impulse towards the cult of the martyrs
by the reverence it paid to heroes. The hero was
neither God nor man, but was sprung from both,
and was akin therefore to both. So the martyr
was man, but no longer of ordinary human stature.
He was in some way admitted to a closer comraunion
with God, and was favoured with peculiar powers
and graces. He was not indeed to be honoured
as God, but, on the other hand, he was not to be
classed with sinners. " When the martyrs are
comraeraorated at the altar of God we do not pray
for thera, for it is wrong to pray for a martyr to
whose prayers we ought to comraend ourselves." *
And again : " Whatever religious obsequies are con
ducted in the places of the Martyrs are ornaments
of the Meraorials, not sacred rites or sacrifices of the
dead, as though they were thought to be gods." *
' Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 263.
2 Aug. Sermon 159, ed. Bened. v. 765 ; cf. De dv. Dei, viii. c. 26.
' De civ. Dei, viii. 27.

400 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
The filiation of this honour paid to martyrs on
the pagan cult of heroes is made clear by Cleraent
of Alexandria ! when, in quoting the dictura of
Heraclitus that " gods and men fear those slain in
battle," and of Plato,* that " he who dies gloriously
in war is ofthe golden race," he says that the golden
race is with the gods of the heaven and the fixed
sphere, who in special have the government of the
providence which concerns men. He denies, how
ever, that those who rush on death are true martyrs
or attain to the golden race.
To the martyrs were soon added the Confessors,
those who without being put to death for their faith
yet made a good confession with or without torture.
" Those who were bold to profess Christ before the
magistrates, and for His sake incurred the loss of
health, or goods, or honours, were denominated
confessors." *
An inference of some importance may be drawn
from this early cult of martyrs and confessors. It
rests obviously on the prior belief in personal
persistence through death, in a translation accord
ing to merit to another sphere of being, and in the
possibility of help being given to those left behind
by heroic souls. Death is the pathway to Reality,
to Ignatius of Antioch the supreme Pathway, the
gate of true discipleship.* This earthly life, there
fore, is but the vestibule of that on the other side,
and " death is the veil which those who live call
life." Hence the Christianity of the fifth century
1 Strom, iv. 4. 16. ^ Repub, v. 468.
^ Mosheim, Eccl, History, pt. i. ch. v. 10 ; for an expurgated edition
of Acta Martyrum, see Riiinart, Seleda et sincera Martyrum acta, Amster
dam, 1713.
^ Ad Eph, iu. 1 ; ad Trail, v. 2 ; ad Rom, iv. 2 ; cf., however, Clem.
Al. Strom, iv. 4. 16.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 401
which inserted in the Creed the article of the
Communion of Saints was largely concerned with
the religion of the " other side," and not disposed
like the present age to confine itself to the service
of " this side." Moreover, it assumed without
questioning the popular belief enshrined in the
Mystery-religions that man had, or was, soul or
spirit which persisted through death. Hence it
looked for inspiration and help not merely to the
example of the saints departed, but much more, and
with growing fervour as time went on, to their
actual help administered personally from that
" other side." The development of this belief in
the " golden race " of the saints no doubt brought
with it exaggerations and abuses, and established
in the Middle Ages something not easily distinguish
able from the Egyptian cult of the dead. And it
was doubtless the sense of this one-sidedness and
of the practical abuses which attended it which
caused the Reformers to set their faces against the
Invocation of Saints and Masses for the Dead.
It would no doubt be a nice question to enquire
how far with this protest was mingled a leaven of
irreligion. If religion is based on belief in the
invisible, of which the visible order is the effect,
then, other things being equal, belief in a dead saint
is more religious than belief in a living sinner, unless
indeed the two are at bottom the same thing, which
they may very well be. It would be then a blunder
ofthe first magnitude in religion to abandon devotion
in some form and degree to the saints, and (to use
Stowe's phrase) to "unsaint our Churches." Belief
in prayer is quite likely, especially in a scientific
age, to go when belief in saints goes. For science
holds that all effects have a cause — not merely a
2d

402 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
First Cause, for of this science can know nothing —
and where the effect is produced through a spiritual
activity invoking a spiritual being, science will look
to an adequate and proxiraate cause, if it deigns
to look at all, and such a cause can be posited
nowhere but in a finite centre of spiritual force.
But this is the ancient doctrine of angels and saints,
perhaps, too, of devils. And it would seem that
try as Protestant thought will it cannot rid us of
belief in these invisible beings. From which it is
not a hazardous corollary that the belief is in
expugnable, not because men are naturally and
hopelessly superstitious, but that saints and angels
(and devils) occupy a place in the universe, and
somehow succeed in persuading us of their existence.
Of this fact the article of the Comraunion of Saints
is one standing reminder, whose force it is almost
too late now to escape from.
For consider for a moment. When an attempt is
made to form a rational conception of the way in
which prayer works it takes one of three forms.
Either (1) God is thought of as immanent in the
world, in which case prayer is regarded as a stirring
into activity, through the spirit of the person who
prays, of the life-force with which he is in organic
relationship. Or (2) God is thought of as a distant
Being to whom a prayer travels through space
through the appropriate mediura, in rauch the same
way that the ether transmits light-waves. Or else
(3) God's state is thought of as Kingly ; thousands
at His bidding speed, and post o'er land and ocean
without rest, and when prayer is made, it may be
thought that its " answer " comes through the
mediation of one of these ever-ready agents of the
Most High. Probably, each of these three modes

THE NINTH ARTICLE 403
of expressing the truth contains part of it, while
the whole truth still remains hidden from us while
the body we wear is that of our " humiliation." If
so, then the doctrine of the Communion of Saints
touches the doctrine of prayer at a vital spot,
III. Communion in Holy Things
This Article " does not occur as a member of the
Creed anywhere on Greek soil ; translated literally
into Greek the expression ' communion of saints '
would mean ' participation in holy things,' that is,
in worship, especially in Holy Communion." ! This
interpretation, though favoured by Zahn,* can
hardly give the original meaning in the face of the
words of Faustus of Rhegium cited above. But,
on the other hand, it is not to be dismissed summarily,
therefore, as wholly alien to the Article. For the
dyia Tok dyioi<; of the Eastern Liturgies would
give to dyia cvcu in the West a reference to the
gifts of the Eucharist. The Didache, ch. ix., refers
the TO dyiov of Matt. vii. 6 to the Eucharist, which
was reserved as a holy thing for those alone who
had been baptized into the name of the Lord. The
" Nicene " Creed places an article about the one
baptism after that about the Church. The Creed
of the Church of Jerusalem * prefixes one on
baptisra to another on the Church. Athanasius
also connects the two. The very interesting Creed
of Aphraates * joins belief in the coming to life of
the dead with belief in the mystery of Baptism.^
1 Harnack, Reden und AufsStze, 1904, i. p. 251.
' Articles of tfie Apostles' Creed, p. 199.
3 Denzinger, Enchiridion, p. 10.
•> Hom. i. 19.
^ See F. C. Burkitt, Early Christianity, 1899, p. 34.

404 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
In the face of these testimonies to rule out the
interpretation before us as an after-thought of
theology would be arbitrary, and especially so, if
we remember that the ancient Church held the two
sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion in
far higher honour than any non-Roman Church in
the West does to-day. We cannot, however, do
raore here than indicate the source and nature of
this honour. And first as to Baptisra.

Holy Baptism
The origin of Baptism as a Christian Sacrament
raust be sought in the pure command of Jesus Christ,
or must be traced to antecedent Jewish practice,
or regarded as a loan from Pagan practice. The
first of these three hypotheses is no longer held
seriously by anybody, seeing that it is admitted
that both Jews and Pagans administered baptism
in some sense before the time of Jesus. With regard
to the practice of the Jews a dispute has prevailed
as to whether the custom of baptizing " proselytes
of righteousness " was pre-Christian, and in any
case it seems difficult to believe that it was much
earlier than the days of Hillel and Sharamai. In
this case the emergence of baptism in Jewish and
in Christian circles was practically contemporaneous,
and the origin of both most likely must be sought
elsewhere. Moreover, the ceremonial purifications
of the Jews after incurring uncleanness have nothing
in coraraon with baptisra as an initiatory rite, which
alone concerns us here.!
1 See Schiirer, Jewish People, Eng. trans. II. ii. p. 321, where is a full
list of authorities, and Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus, 4th ed. ii.
745-7.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 405
We are referred, therefore, to the Pagan world
which surrounded both Judaism and Christianity
for an explanation of the origin of initiatory
baptism. And at first sight it might seera terapting
to look to Mandaean example, seeing that John
Baptist, who is a link between Jew and Christian,
and is connected with Jordan and the district
beyond it, raay very likely have been influenced
by the Nazoraei. But these practised a daily
baptism, and John's stands in the history as a
baptism submitted to once for all as a symbol of
entrance on a new life, while frora the beginning
Christian baptism has been " one." There remains
the initiatory baptisms which raeet us in Pagan cults.
The raost striking of these is the faraous Tauro
bolium (or CrioboUura), a rite in which the celebrant
— priest or layman, man or woman — " clad in a
toga worn cinctu Gabino, with golden crown and
fillets on his head, takes his place in a trench
covered by a platform of planks pierced with fine
holes, on which a bull, magnificent with flowers
and gold, is slain. The blood rains through the
platform on to the priest below, who receives it on
his face, and even on his tongue and palate, and
after the baptism presents himself before his
fellow-worshippers purified and regenerated, and
receives their salutations and reverence." !
It was in the worship of Rhea-Cybele, the Great
Mother of the Gods, that this baptism most
commonly took place, though it is found also in
the worship of Attis, Adonis, Artemis, Isis, and
Athene.* It reached Rome from the East in the
^ Ency, Brit, llth ed. s.v.
2 Pauly, Real-Ency., 1852, s.v. ; Prudentius, Carmina, Peristepli. x.
1066 f. describes the ceremony ; Firmicus Mat. De errore, pag. 28.

406 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
age of the Antonines, i.e. three centuries after the
introduction there of the cult itself of the Mater
Magna. According to an inscription (now in the
Naples Museum) found at Puteoli (?), the earliest
extant evidence we have, a taurobolium was
celebrated at Puteoli in a.d. 134 in honour of Venus
Coelestis, this Venus being a Syro - Phoenician
goddess. Esperandieu ! gives eleven taurobolic inscriptions
dated in the year 176 and nine of the year 241,
seven of which latter narae a woman as receiving
the taurobolium. Of these twenty, all but one
name the deity (in that one the name is raissing),
and the deity is the Mater Magna throughout. In
the inscriptions the taurobolium is usually said
to be offered on behalf of the Emperor, as e.g.
in the following, taken from Esperandieu at
random : " Pro salute et incolumitate domus
divinae r[es] p[ublica] Lactorat[ium] tauropol[ium]
fecit." According to Franz Cumont, by the end of the
second century the taurobolium was to be found
in Gaul, Italy, Africa, but not in Greece or Asia
Minor. He goes on to suggest that the sacrifice
belonged originally to Anahita, the Iranian goddess
of fertilising waters, whose cult spread at an un
known date across Chaldaea and Asia Minor to
Lydia, and was easily identified with the kindred
cult of the Mater Magna, especially as both were
goddesses of fertility, and were both worshipped
with the sacrifice of a bull. " In fact, about the
year 100 of our era, following on the conquest and
organisation of the oriental provinces, the Mazdean
ideas spread in the Latin world ; the history of the
^ Inscriptions antiques de Ledoure, Paris, 1892.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 407
cult of Mithras proves this. Like this, the cult of
Anahita, before being imported into Italy, mingled
in Asia Minor with the cults indigenous there for
long centuries." !
Although there is no reason for supposing that
the taurobolium was an original feature of the
cult of Mithra, yet his religion and that of the Mater
Magna " lived in intimate comraunion. . . . Men
alone could participate in the secret cereraonies of
the Persian liturgy, at least in the Occident. Other
mysteries, to which women could be admitted, had
therefore to be added in order to complete them,
and so the mysteries of Cybele received the wives
and daughters of the Mithraists," * Hepding, again,
maintains that " the course of religious thought
both in the taurobolia and in the other initiatory rites
of the cults of Cybele and Attis was the same, and
that we have no ground for denying the Phrygian
origin of the taurobolia." * Whatever alien
thoughts or alien usages may have attached them
selves to the taurobolia (as e.g. their use as a peace-
offering for the Emperor), their constant burden
is that of individual purification, the hope of
salvation, or re-birth — ^the candidate was " renatus
in aeternum " * — of death with the god and re
surrection with him, of reconciliation through his
blood, of participation in his vires. But it is obvious
that this series of ideas runs parallel point by point
with that which meets us in the explanations given
authoritatively of Christian Baptism, and we are
forced to conclude, therefore, that whatever the
1 Revue arcMolog. xu., 1888, pp. 132-6, but see Hepding, Attis, 1903,
p. 201. 2 Cumont, Oriental Religions, 1911, p. 65. ' Ibid.
« It was usually for twenty years.

408 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
connection may be between the two series it is at
least not factitious.!
This conclusion is strengthened by the reflection
that a parallel in raany other striking details meets
us between Pagan and Christian forms. Thus it
was in spring, to be precise, on March 24, that the
dies sanguinis of the older and genuine taurobolium
took place, succeeded by the Hilaria ; a mystical
burial took place at initiation ; * milk and honey
were given to the newly-born ; * fasting preceded
1 An inscription of a.d. 376 relates that Ulpius Egnatius Faventinus, a
man of consular rank, public augur of the Roman people of Quirites,
father and sacred herald of the sun-god, the unconquered Mithra,
" archibucolus " of the God Liber, hierophant of Hecate, priest of Isis, the
tauroboUum and criobolium having been received on the ides of August,
consecrated to the Great Gods (the Idaean Mother and Attis), and vowed
that after twenty years he would again slay the " two-horned " with gilded
forehead (C,I,L. vi. 504). In C,I,L. vi. 461 an altar is dedicated to the
God Liber and given to " Spira," " a mystical college particularly devoted
to the Bacchic religion " ; in C,I,L, vi. 462, the same God is called " Liber
ter Bromius " and " Silviger " ; in CI.L. vi. 467 he is " Magnus Liber,
Pater et Adstator et Conserbator " of the place ; in 468 " Liber Pater
Sanctus " ; in 488, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496 etc., the Great Mother
is honoured ; 497-504 also speak of her as worshipped with the tauro
bolium, while 490 is dedicated to Bellona. " Attis, Menotyrannus "
occurs also in 499, 500. Even a cursory inspection of these inscriptions is
enough to reveal the strength of Paganism in Rome in the fourth century
— ^just before its official proscription by Theodosius, and the confiscation
of its property by Gratian in 382. Cf. also Cumont, Rev. d'histoire et
de Utt. rel, viii. 417 ft. Cf. S. Dill, Roman Society in the last Century of the
Western Empire, 1898, especially ch. iv. Esperandieu, Inscriptions
antiques de Ledoure, pp. 112-118, gives a list of inscriptions in which the
taurobolium occurs, and pp. 119-128 tables of names of offerers and objects.
In two only (CI.L, vi. 510, 736) does the phrase "in aeternum renatus"
occur, which Esperandieu explains by suggesting that both offerers were
too old to expect to live for twenty years. Cumont's remark, however (ubi
supra, vi. 109), that the idea of regeneration had attached itself to the rite in
Asia Minor long before its introduction into the Roman Empire seems
more probable. Cf. also Zippel, Festschrift zum Dodorjubilamn Ludw,
Friedlander, 1895, p. 489 ff.
2 Proclus, in Plat, theol. iv., e,g,, speaks of the celebrants ordering the
candidate to be buried, all except the head, in the most sacred ceremony
of the initiations.
3 Usener, Rhein, Mus., 1902, 57, 177 ft. ; Sallust, Of Gods and the World,
c. 4. " Another Romano - Alexandrian peculiarity unknown to the

THE NINTH ARTICLE 409
initiation ; ! forgiveness of sins attached to both ; *
the baptismal day (later the day of martyrdom or
of ordination also) was " natalis sacer " ; exorcism,
signing with the Cross, anointing, suffiation and
the abrenuntio are all lineal descendants of practices
of Paganism which were rooted in the belief of a
corporeal entry by demons into the person of the
initiand.* Indeed, the raore thoroughly the student steeps
his mind in the beliefs and practices of pre-Christian
religion, and the more closely he familiarises himself
with the implicits of the early Christian practice of
baptism,* as witnessed to, for example, by a
Tertullian, the more clear becomes the dependence
of the latter on the forraer.
But this fact, however well assured, is but half
of the story, and perhaps not the most important

Oriental and Gallican rites, was the drink of milk and honey given to the
neophytes after their first conimunion," Clement Al. Paed, i. 6. 35 ;
Duchesne, Christian Worship, 1903, p. 333 ; Duchesne, however, prefers
to seek the original in the milk and honey of the Promised Land.
^ Cf. Didache, vii.
^ Cf. Tertullian, De bapt, c. 5 : " Certe Iudis ApolUnaribus et Eleu-
siniis tinguuntur, idque se in regenerationem et impunitatem periuriorum
suorum agere praesumunt."
^ Cf. HeitmuUer, Im Namen Jesu, 1903, pp. 304-313 ; cf. Porphyrins, De
phil. ex orac. haur., p. 148 ; Wolff, in Euseb. Praep, evan,, iv. 22 : " When
the priests drive out demons through the gift of the breath or blood of
animals and through beating of the air, it is in order that, these departing,
the coming of the god may take place. The house is full of them, and
therefore they banish and drive them away when they call on God." See
Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1910, p. 99.
* The " Elkesaites " attached supreme importance to baptism, which
was performed in the name of the highest God and of His son, the Great
King ; and the candidate pledged himself to a pure life, calling on the
seven witnesses — ^heaven, water, the holy spirits, the angels of prayer,
oil, salt, and earth. That this exalted estimate of baptism rests on a
Gnostic-mythic foundation is to be inferred from the statement of Epi
phanius (Haer, 53) that the Elkesaites ' worship water as a god,' saying
that from it came forth life " (O. Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, Eng.
trans., 1910, iii. 139-140).

410 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
half. For while it records the part played by the
Epigoni it omits the part of the Lord and His
immediate disciples. He came to an age in which
the boundary-lines between Greek and barbarian,
Jew and Gentile were well-nigh obliterated, in
which the religions of the Mediterranean basin and
of West Asia were mingled in the crucible of a
syncretistic philosophy, and by the magic of a
spirit which was one with the Father, He drew out
of them their permanent and spiritual essence and
gave to that the full weight of His authority. And
this He appears to have done without rejecting the
existing forms decisively. It was enough to stamp
them as subordinate and mutable, and then to
leave those who had learned from Hira what was
essential to use their own discretion in the choice
of fit forras and the rejection of unfit.
But this discrimination demands a choice of
materials and presupposes a development and a
refining process. In early culture no fixed line of
demarcation exists between thoughts and things.
Both are ruled by spirits and proceed from them,
or are even inhabited by them. And one all-
prevalent way of reconciling them with the spirit-
world is by the use of water, oil, fat, or blood. All
of these appear to have been used for religious or
" magical " purposes as far back as our evidence
goes, but as refinement of taste advanced blood
found a surrogate in oil, and water retained its
pristine force while enlarging its jurisdiction.!
Thus there may be traced a steady progress from
what sounds like materialistic conceptions to pure
ethical or spiritual aims. We say " what sounds
like materialistic conceptions," for it is not by any
' Jevons, Introduction to ihe History of Religion, 1896, p. 285.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 411
means certain that all who heard the Pope's words
in blessing the oils would take them at their face
value. Emitte, quaesumus Domine, Spiritum sanctum Para-
clitum de caelis in hanc pinguedinem olei, quam de viridi
ligno producere dignatus es ad refectionem mentis et
corporis, et tua sancta benedictione sit omni ungenti,
gustanti, tangenti, tutamentum mentis et corporis, animae
et spiritus ad evacuandos omnes dolores, omnem infirmi-
tatem, omnem aegritudinem mentis et corporis, unde
unxisti sacerdotes, reges et prophetas et martyres, Chrisma
tuum perfectum a te, Domine, benedictum, permanens
in visceribus nostris in nomine Domini nostri lesu Christi.!
That the crude view here expressed does not
exclude a more refined raay be conjectured from
TertuUian's words :
The flesh is washed that the soul may be cleansed ;
the flesh is anointed that the soul may be consecrated ;
the flesh is signed that the soul may be fortified ; the
flesh is shadowed by the laying-on of the hand that the
soul may be illuminated by the spirit ; the flesh is fed by
the body and blood of Christ that the soul may be fattened
for God.*
We may conclude then this scanty notice of a
great subject by repeating that Jesus (1) found to
His hand a pre - existing ceremony of initiatory
baptism ; (2) that He distinguished what in it was
of the eternal order and what of the temporal ;
(3) that having impressed on His immediate disciples
this distinction He left them to express it in the
terms they thought best ; and (4) that as a matter
of fact they expressed His truth in terms borrowed
* Duchesne, ubi supra, p. 306.
2 De resurr. 8.

412 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
from pre-existing cereraonies ; ! to which may be
added (5) that even if Pagan and Christian are found
using the same expressions it does not follow that
they meant the same thing.
So far as Baptism implied the subsequent fulness
of Christian blessings the Article of the Com
munion of Saints, in the sense in which we are
now considering it, would affirm that Christians
enjoyed as such a common share in the Spirit
bestowed in Baptism.*

Holy Communion
The " holy thing " par excellence which members
of the Church share in common is their Holy Com
munion, and the source from which the forms of this
have been borrowed is even more obviously Pagan
than in the case of Baptism. This appears nega
tively from the complete failure of every writer,
from Zwingli to the " Catechism of the Council of
Trent," to trace any even plausible connection
between the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish
Passover. In this latter a lamb was slain and eaten,
according to the orthodox explanation, in order to
commemorate a great historical deliverance of the
Israelites, and so far it was not necessarily more
1 " Depuis quelques annees, les recherches de plusieurs savants ingenieux
ont mis hors de doute que le christianisme des premiers sifecles, moins juif
qu'hell6nique dfes 1' origine, a 6te fortement impr^gne d'orphisme " (S.
Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, 1906, ii. 83).
2 Cf. Esperandieu, ubi supra, p. 97 : " Towards the end of the republic,
and in the early days of the Empire, doubt in matters of religion gave way
to the need of belief, which completely transformed Paganism and pre
pared the way for the religion of Christ by furnishing it with a soil on which
its teaching could not but bear fruit." Cf. Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 66 ;
Tertullian, De bapt. 5, and De praescr. haer. 40. Both the Church and
Mithraism borrowed their forms from earlier cults, but each put into the
forms its own spirit, and this was difterent.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 413
religious than a Trafalgar- day celebration. To
it a meal was adjoined which was partaken of by
each family at home after the lamb slain in the
Temple had been brought home — its blood having
been first caught in a golden bowl and " jerked in
a jet at the base of the altar." ! The dilemma in
which those are caught who trace the Eucharist to
this cereraony as celebrated at the tirae of Christ
is this : if, as with scholastic theology, the religious
side is given due weight, as indeed it should be, then
the phrase, " This is My Body," in which a Divine
sacrifice is enshrined, is one which to Jewish piety
is anathema. If, on the other hand, the ceremony
is eviscerated and its religious heart reraoved, as
Protestant theology has done, then nothing is left
for the student of religion to take note of. The
anthropologist raay refer the social meal, the Lord's
Supper, to similar feasts of good fellowship, but he
can hardly find anything in it specifically religious.
We shall have saved the Jewish parentage by
rejecting the Christian meaning.
Nor is the case altered if we refer the Passover
as celebrated in the first Christian century to a
conflation of (1) an early Jewish tribal harvest-
sacrifice connected with the moon, and (2) a blood-
rite which appeased the Hausgotter. For this gives
us on one of its two sides a chag, i.e. " a mirthful
festival with dances and processions and joyous
sacrificial meal," in no way different from the feasts
of Paganism held universally at the vernal equinox.
On its other side, we meet another world-wide
cereraony which uses blood as the most efficacious
and most mysterious instrument of establishing
communion with the Deity. In neither case, there-
'¦ Edersheim, Life and Times, ii. 488.

414 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
fore, are we dealing with a ceremony which bears
a peculiarly Jewish character.!
But it may be said that in any case the fact
remains that this great world-wide system of feast
and sacrifice, common to Pagan and Jew, did at all
events percolate into the Christian Church through
the Jewish channel. To this the answer is that no
Jew, as a Jew, could possibly regard a phrase which
implied the eating of his God as other than a
blasphemy. He might indeed think of God as the
house-father providing a feast and inviting him
to be His guest, but unless he had first abjured his
national raodes of thought he could not think of
God offering His own body to be eaten. Yet this
is what is meant by the words " This is My Body,"
and scholastic theology has been at once more true
to history and more honest in insisting that the
phrase means what it says. Protestant theology,
on the other hand, is neither honest nor true to
history in taking the phrase in a non-natural sense,
and the shifts it has been put to are sufficient proof
of the unsoundness of its presupposition.*
It is only when we step on to a larger stage that
the antecedents of the Christian form declare them
selves. In all ethnic religions the sacrificial meal
bears a uniform meaning, and confers a uniform
gift. Man is by nature compelled to seek union
with his God, and in the savage and in the barbarian
1 " It would seem that the influence of the Paschal feast on the Christian
rite was not direct. It was necessary to revert from it to an earlier point
in the main stem of sacrificial beUef, and thus Pagan Mystery had closer
analogy than Jewish rite " (Percy Gardner, Exploratio evangeliea, 1899,
p. 457). 2 " Paul cannot have drawn his doctrines of the mystical ceremonies
of Baptism and the Lord's Supper from the tradition of the Christian
community, because this tradition before his time knew nothing of these
doctrines " (O. Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, Eng. trans., 1910, i. 63).

THE NINTH ARTICLE 415
stage he has sought to effect this union with his
God by eating Him.! " ^]^q sacrificial and sacra
mental meal, which from the beginning has been the
centre of all religion, has frora the beginning also
always been a moment in which the consciousness
has been present to man of communion with the god
of his prayers — without that consciousness man
had no motive to continue the practice of the rite.
In the beginning, again, the sacramental meal
required, for the annual renewal of the blood-
covenant, that the worshipper should partake of
the body and blood of the victim." * So to drink
the blood of sacrifice was to secure the indwelling
of the god who gave the prophecy. To anoint a
stone with blood, fat, or oil made the stone a shrine
in which the god came to dwell. To dress an idol
in the skin of the sacred victim " ensured the god's
actual presence in the idol." Father Acotsa's
account of the native religion he found in Mexico
makes it clear that the Mexicans killed the god
Huitzilopochtli so that his body might be eaten ;
this was done to a dough idol which was shown to
the people, then broken in pieces and distributed
to the communicants. Certain Saracens, whose
sacrifice is described by Robertson Smith, after
Nilus,* killed a camel, hacked off pieces of the
quivering flesh and devoured them raw, and all
between the rising of the morning star and the
rising of the sun. But there is no need to illustrate
^ " Ce n'etait pas seulement une allusion a la passion de Zagreus et k
son d^membrement par les Titans ; comme le taureau est une des formes
de Dionysos, c'etait le corps du dieu dont se repaissaient symboliquement
les initios, c'etait son sang dont ils s'abrcuvaient dans ce banquet mystique.
lis croyaient ainsi faire descendre en eux Dionysos et remplir son ame de
sa divinite " (Decharme, Mythologie de la Grece, p. 438).
2 Jevons, ubi supra, p. 285.
3 Religion of the Semites, p. 338.

416 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
further a raode of thought which is now familiar
and abundantly supported by evidence.!
But we are not dependent on distant cults for
explanation of the Christian Comraunion. At the
beginning of our era the " Mysteries " of Asia
Minor, Syria, and Egypt were widely spread through
out the Roman Empire,* and all three countries
figure in the accepted history of the origins of
Christianity. Moreover, the syncretistic process
had advanced so far that the various deities were
regarded as doubles of one another, or as aspects
of one supreme Power, or as subordinates of one
Most High God — Hypsistos. It was impossible
that the new religion could start free from all
relationship to these omnipresent cults. Cumont,*
for example, draws attention to the strange fact,
for which no satisfactory explanation has as yet
been furnished, " that a priest of Sabazius was
buried in the Christian catacomb of Praetextatus,"
and he adds, " undoubtedly he belonged to a Jewish-
pagan sect that adraitted neophytes of every race
to its mystic ceremonies. In fact, the Church
itself formed a kind of secret society sprung from
the synagogue but distinct from it, in which
Gentiles and the Children of Israel joined in a
1 Jevons gives other instances, ubi supra, ch. xii.
^ According to the unknown author of the Ambrosiaster (circa 374-382),
Pagan rites were openly practised at Rome in his time ; the tumultuous
orgies of the Bacchanals were celebrated ; the dog-headed Anubis was
carried through the streets in the processions of Isis, and in dark caves
Mithras tested and initiated his votaries, while the Galli of the Mater
Magna commemorated the death of Attis by a taurobolium on March 24
— tlieir dies sanguinis — followed by the Hilaria. St. Jerome's words are
well known : " Bethlehem nunc nostram lucus inumbrabat Thamuz, id
est, Adonidis, et in specu, ubi quondam Christus parvulus vagiit. Veneris
amasius plangebatur " (Ep. 58 in Migne, PI. xxii. 581). Similarly, Firmicus
Maternus testifies that in his time the Cretans celebrated the trieterica of
Dionysos, and ate the sacrificial bull alive, c. 6. 5.
3 Oriental Religions, p. 65.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 417
common adoration." If we substitute Christian
for Jewish in this quotation and eliminate the
reference to the synagogue the explanation will at
all events be less difficult.
Thus we find Sabazius confounded with Attis
or equated with Osiris, and Isis identified with
Cybele. Moreover, the title Hypsistos in coraraon
use at the beginning of our era points if not to
raonotheism at all events to monolatry. " The
goatherds and shepherds think that one god (rules)
this world, whether he be Hypsistos, or Adonis, or
Sabaoth, or however they prefer to name him,"
is the dictura of Celsus.! Now one rite coramon to
the ethnic cults which surrounded Christianity at
its birth was that of attaining union with the god
by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the
animal in which he was thought to be incarnate.
First conceived under the crude idea that so his
life, his vires, was imparted to the worshipper, it
was afterwards raised to a religious concept by
being made the vehicle of a higher life. From the
circle of generation it rose to the circle of regenera
tion. As men's conception of the nature of deity
was refined, so their conception of the nature of
the sacrificial feast also grew more exalted. And
it is just here that Christianity stepped in and
spoiled the Egyptians by borrowing their jewels
and placing them at the service of a higher God.
It has been pointed out already that the practice
of " eating the god " is alien to Jewish soil and
native to Pagan, and that therefore Christian
1 Origen, Contra Celsum, i. 24 ; cf . CI.L. vi. 509, which gives an inscrip
tion from an altar at Naples, dated a.d. 370. Its first two lines run :
" To Rhea, mother of all things . . . and parent.
And to Attis Hypsistos and sustainer of the whole."
2e

418 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
expressions which refer to the eating the body
and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ cannot
proceed from a Jewish source. The failure of
nearly all exegetes to recognise the ethnic origin of
the supernatural nature of the Eucharist accounts
for the unconvincing character of their exposition
of passages such as John vi. 51-57. This passage
is, from any point of view, remarkable for its un
compromising and almost harsh assertion that the
body and blood consumed are real body and real
blood. It is not, indeed, until we take the context
into account that we realise that the writer is
moving in the mystical upper-air, and that to him
reality is in the ideal world. The Son of Man
whose flesh is given for food is essentially a spiritual
being clad in a cognate body. Hence His flesh is
not physical flesh nor His blood physical blood,
but a higher flesh and blood of which the lower and
ordinary are analogues. The eating and drinking
are not figurative eating and drinking, as a sterile
Protestantism pretends, but are actual.! In the
inner sphere of existence are a real food, a real
drink, and a real eating and drinking ; their
analogues on the plane of ordinary experience are
shadowy in comparison, as the " heaven " from
which the " flesh " comes down is more real than
the " earth " which breaks with its teeth this
" flesh," and so assimilates it.
It is singular that in the voluminous disputes
about the meaning of the phrase, " This is My
Body," emphasis is seldom, if ever, laid on the
1 It is noteworthy that a particularly coarse word, rpiiyav, is de
liberately chosen in vv. 54, 56, 58, so as to emphasise the actuality of the
process of eating, and to exclude all merely imaginative or figurative modes
of explaining away the mystery.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 419
distinctive word. What noun this is to be attached
to, what is meant by body, and whether is is a mere
copulative verb of undefined content are each
disputed, but it does not occur to anybody to point
to the fact that the governing word is " My." The
nature of the Person determines the nature of the
body broken and given. If that Person were of
" earth " His body would be palpable and divisible ;
but if He be of Heaven it can be neither. And it
would seera that it is nothing but our ingrained
habit of feeling (I do not say thinking) that the
material is real and the spiritual unreal which
shuts our eyes to the true raeaning of " This is My
Body." This raeaning would be clear enough if it were set
against the Dionysiac and sirailar liturgical feasts
as the writer of the Fourth Gospel sets it. For, in
these feasts the worshipper in eating the sacred
victim extracted from it the life of the god who
had identified himself with the victim. At the
meal of the Thesmophoria the worshippers partook
of the body of Demeter when they eat swine's
flesh ; ! so the fact that fish were sacred to Demeter,*
and were eaten on Friday in honour of Venus,
illustrates the original reason for eating fish on
certain days ; * " the rending and devouring of live
1 Frazer, Golden Bough, 1890, ii. 47 ; the worshippers of Attis and
presumably of Adonis did not in ordinary life kill or eat pigs, but this
" does not exclude the possibility that in these cults the pig was slain on
solemn occasions as a representative of the god, and consumed sacra-
mentally by the worshippers " (ibid. p. 51) ; the same is true of the Israel
ites, at least sometimes, and perhaps in the beginning ; " once a year the
Egyptians sacrificed pigs to the moon and to Osiris, and not only sacrificed
them, but ate of their flesh " (ibid. p. 52).
2 Pausanias, i. 38.
' Cf. Hepding, Attis, p. 189 ; and Cumont, Oriental Religions, p. 246.
It is as god, not as animal, that the totem furnishes the sacrificial meal
(Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 154).

420 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
bulls and calves appear to have been a regular
feature of the Dionysiac rites." !
Now if we set over against the N.T, sayings
about eating the body and drinking the blood of
the Son of Man the numerous parallels frora ethnic
cults which the industry of Mannhardt, Frazer,
Cumont, Hartland, Farnell, and many other scholars
have collected, it would seem impossible to avoid
the conclusion that the two sets belong to the same
circle of thought. From which it would follow
that while the Christian retains its connection
with the older religious beliefs and practices, it yet
transcends them by fulfilling them. In a profound
sense it came " unto a dispensation of the fulness
of the times,* and bestowed the aeonian life upon
the ancient forms which men of older times had
dimly felt after, and vaguely expressed in the forms
which were to be one day fulfilled when the Lord
of life appeared." *
The " Communion in holy things," then, while
covering the whole ground of religious truths and
ordinances, which are common to the Christian
1 Frazer, ubi supra, i, 326.
2 Eph. i. 10.
^ " It is perhaps worth remarking that the fact of certain elements
being common ground between Christianity and other religions may be
regarded, not as discrediting those elements, but rather as proving their
essential congruity with a universal instinct of religious humanity " ( A. E. J.
Rawlinson, in Foundations, p. 401 n,), A more thorough-going criticism
meets us in the Ecce Deus of W. B. Smith, 1912, p. 124 : " This weighty
thought of complete appropriation of the ' New Doctrine ' under the
emblems of wine and bread (of life) has found impressive symbolic ex
pression in the Eucharist." Cf. Philo, Leg, Alleg. iii. 26 (1. 103) : " But
let Melchizedech give wine instead of water, and refresh and strengthen
souls that they may be possessed by a divine intoxication more sober than
' sobriety ' itself." Clement Al. refers to this passage in Strom, iv. 25,
in saying that Christ is the King of Peace, who gives bread and wine as
the consecrated food in the Eucharist. But in Philo and Clement alike
this food is Light, Gnosis, Knowledge of God given by Logos, priest of
the Most-high God.

THE NINTH ARTICLE 421
community, seems to put prominently forward the
two Sacraments, and to use them as comprehensive
of all the rest. In doing this it, however, does not
directly raise the question what, if any, part of
these sacraments is of ethnic origin, or how such a
part is to be brought into union with that which
is specificaUy Christian, But seeing that the
question cannot be put on one side we reply that
the form belongs to the world-reUgions while the
spirit and meaning and efficacy belong to the Spirit
of Christ,! Mutatis mutandis, the same holds good
of the Sacraments,
1 Cf. the Rev. W. Temple in Foundations, 1912, p. 258 : " Our analogies
break down. We may help ourselves towards an understanding of His
Divinity by means of the formula, ' The form of His consciousness is
Human, whUe its content is Divine ' ; we may help ourselves towards
an understanding of His Humanity by interpreting its inclusiveness in
the terms of our social nature ; but we know that neither attempt leads
us to the heart of the mystery."

CHAPTER XXIII
THE TENTH ARTICLE
The Forgiveness of Sins
"A^eaK djMapTiwv
In a letter of Charlemagne written to the Bishops
of Spain in connection with the Council of Frankfort
in A.D. 794 is the phrase : " We preach one holy
Church of God scattered throughout the whole
world, though separated in place, united in faith
and charity ; and a true remission of sins in the
same Church whether through baptisra or penance,
the Divine grace giving it, and Man's will co
operating." ! The reference here to two modes of
obtaining forgiveness of sins is useful as combining
two explanations of the insertion of the Article
in the Creed. According to Briggs, " the remission
of sins of the Creed is the remission of sins connected
with baptism and the entrance into the Christian
Church, as is evident from the specification of
the remission of sins given in several creeds and
contemporary writers." * McGiffert, on the other
hand, points out that in the Creeds of Irenaeus and
1 " Praedicamus unam sanctam Dei ecclesiam toto orbe diffusam, locis
separatam, fide et caritate coniunctam, et veram remissionem peccatorum
in eadem ecclesia sive per baptismum sive poenitentiam, divina donante
gratia et bona voluntate hominis cooperante " (Mansi, xiu., 1905 ; Lumby,
History of the Creeds, 1873, p. 235).
- Fundamental Christian Faith, p. 196.
422

cH..p.x.xm THE TENTH ARTICLE 423
Tertullian no reference to remission of sins is made
at all. It is also lacking in the Didascalia and in
Origen's references to the Creed, and in the Canones
Hippolyti,! and in all probability in the Old Roraan
Symbol. The Creed of Antioch of the third century
contains remission of sins. The Creed of Jerusalem *
contains it and connects it with one baptism. The
form of Athanasius is " one baptism of repentance
and remission of sins " ; * the Nicene Creed stopped
at the article of the Holy Ghost. The article of
remission of sins was absent from all Creeds before
the time of Cyprian, and the reference to the one
baptism does not appear before the middle of the
fourth century. From which it seems to follow
that the insertions followed the course of ecclesi
astical events, and that McGiffert is right in
referring the insertion of remission of sins to the
Novatian controversy.*
For our purpose, however, we may consider
remission of sins as covering frora the eighth century
onwards both raodes, viz. {a) baptism, and (6)
penance. {a) Forgiveness of Sins through Baptism
We must distinguish two conceptions of forgive
ness corresponding to two conceptions of sin, the one
material or semi-material, and the other spiritual.
The former was tbe belief of the many (whether
educated or uneducated seems to have made little
difference), and the latter was taught by mystics
and apparently by them alone. The Liturgies of
Baptisra and the writers of the early Church witness
with sufficient clearness to the popular view.
1 Duchesne, Christian Worship, 1903, p. 583. ^ Circa 347.
s Denzinger, Enchiridion, p. 7. * The Apostles' Creed, p. 160.

424 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
In this view uncleanness was due to contact
with evil spirits, and purification was the annulling
of the stain they had made. This purification was
effected through exorcism, and exorcism was
thought of as the formal act of a higher power
through which the demons were driven out. This
view was common to Jew and Gentile alike. Tabus,
whatever their name, were found wherever things
were which were thought to convey , contagion.
Birth and death, all things connected with sex,
blood, things belonging to gods or offered to them,
anything, in short, which might have been touched
by demons, and so have transmitted a maleficent
influence, were regarded as tabu and when touched
calling for purification. Sickness in general was
accounted for by the influence of evil spirits, and
the power of a curse lay in the calling-in by it of a
demon. From such uncleanness men were freed by the
due use of appropriate means. Water was in
general use as a purifying instrument, especially
running water or the water of the sea. If the
uncleanness was severe many running streams
must be sought, or, what is the sarae thing, the
sick Naaraan raust dip many times in the same
living stream. Blood might be expiated by blood,
hence sacrifices of human beings or of animals,
and hence the custom of sprinkling blood whether
on the altar or on the person needing to be cleansed.
Rubbing as with squills, fire, the sraoke of sacrifice
or of incense, were all efficacious in the expelling
of deraons.!
1 Rohde, Psyche, pp. 359-368 ; Smend, Alttest, Religionsgeschichte,
148 f. ; Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus, ii. pp. 770-776 ; Heitmiiller,
Im Namen Jesu, 243 ff. ; Dieterich, Abrasax, 136-148 ; Crawley, The
Mystic Rose, 1902.

THE TENTH ARTICLE 425
The conception of infection by demons (or
possession) and the consequent need of purification
from them passed into the Christian Church.
In the Apostolic Constitutions (viii. 6) the deacon
is bidden to say :
Ye energumens, afflicted with unclean spirits, pray,
and let us all earnestly pray for them, that God, the lover
of mankind, will by Christ rebuke the unclean and wicked
spirits, and deliver His supplicants from the dominion of
the adversary. May He that rebuked the legion of demons,
and the devil, the prince of wickedness, even now rebuke
these apostates from piety, and deliver His own workman
ship from his power, and cleanse those creatures which
He has made with great wisdom.
And again in ch. xxix. when the bishop blesses
water and oil Matthias bids him pray :
O Lord of hosts, the God of powers, do Thou now
sanctify this water and this oil through Thy Christ in the
name of him or her that has offered them, and grant them
a power to restore health, to drive away diseases, to banish
demons and to disperse all snares through Christ our hope.
And in ch. xxxii. :
If any one hath a demon let him be taught godliness,
but not received into communion before he be cleansed.!
In Bishop Sarapion's Prayer-book* is a prayer.
No. 17, "in regard to oil of the sick or for bread or
for water " which contains the following :
We pray Thee to send healing power of the only -begotten
from heaven upon this oil, that it may become to those
1 The Apostolic Constitutions is a compilation made in Syria or Pales
tine, in the third century, written in Greek and translated into Syriac.
See Harnack, Die altchrist. Lit., die tjberlief. pp. 515-518, and Hauch,
Realency. i. 734 ff.
* Ed. by Wobberman and Wordsworth, 1899.

426 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
who are being anointed (with it), or are partaking of these
Thy creatures, for a throwing-off of every sickness and
every infirmity, for a charm against every demon, for a
separation of every unclean spirit, for an expulsion of
every evil spirit, for a driving-out of all fever and ague, and
every infirmity, for good grace and remission of sins, for
a medicine of life and salvation, for health and soundness
of soul, body, spirit for perfect strengthening. O Master,
let every Satanic energy, every demon, every device of the
adversary, every plague, every scourge, every pain, every
labour or stroke, or shaking, or evil shadowing, fear Thy
holy name which we have now invoked.
In the Testament of our Lord ^ it is written :
Grant, O Lord, that every proud conception may be
driven away from us by Thy Name which is written within
the veils of Thy sanctuaries, those high ones — a Name
which, when Sheol heareth it it is amazed, the depth is
rent, the spirits are driven away, the dragon is bruised,
tmbelief is cast out, disobedience is subdued, etc.
In a formula for the exorcising of the baptismal
water given by Duchesne * from the Missale Gothi-
cum we read :
I exorcise thee, O creature of water, I exorcise thee,
the whole army of the devil, every power of the adversary,
every shade of demons. I exorcise thee in the name of
our Lord, Jesus Christ the Nazarene, who was incarnate
in Mary the Virgin, to whom the Father has subjected all
things in heaven and in earth. Fear and tremble, thou
and all thy malice : give place to the Holy Spirit, that to
all who may descend into this fount it may be a laver of
regeneration of baptism for the remission of all sins :
through our Lord, Jesus Christ, Who will come in the
throne of the majesty of the Father with His holy angels
to judge thee, thou enemy, and the world by fire, for ever
and ever.
1 Ed. Cooper and Maclean, 1902, p. 74. ^ Christian Worship, p. 322.

THE TENTH ARTICLE 427
What the rites say the doctors also say. For
example, Athanasius, De incarn. Verb. c. 30,
says :
Where Christ is named and His faith thence all idolatry
is purged away, every fallacy of demons is confuted, every
demon is unable to bear the name, but, what is more, on
hearing it only, he takes to flight.
Origen sets the name of Jesus alongside of
Sabaoth, Adonai, or whatever powerful naraes
raight be used for wonder-working among Hebrews,
Egyptians, and Persians, as having plainly shown
its power to cast out demons from souls and bodies.!
Moreover, he hints that a forra of the Creed was
used in exorcisra when he says that the narae of
Jesus with the history about Him had cured raany
from accidents, ecstasies, madnesses, and myriads
of other ills of which neither men nor deraons could
cure thera. The reference is to the use of the name
and the creed in Baptism.*
So Chrysostom says, preaching on Col. iii. 17,
that if you say with faith " In the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost " you have
accoraplished everything. It was through this
terrible narae that the world was overturned,
tyranny ended, the devil trodden under foot, the
heavens opened, and we born again. The reference
is clearly to Baptism.
That this conception of Baptism as the moment
of passing from the power of devils to the service
of Christ is no later corruption of the third or
^ Contra Celsum, i. c. 25.
^ Ibid, in. 24 ; in i. 6, he again speaks of Christians having power over
demons through the name of Jesus, and a proclamation of the histories
about Him, and rejects the assertion of Celsus that they seemed to work
their wonders through enchantments.

428 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
fourth centuries is clear frora Justin Martyr. In
his Dialogue with Trypho (c. 30) he says :
We call Him helper and redeemer, the power of whose
name even demons do fear ; and at this day when they are
exorcised in the name of Jesus Christ, crucified under
Pontius Pilate, governor of Judaea, they are overcome.
A similar assertion of the power of the Name and
of its baptismal use occurs in ch. 85 :
Every demon when exorcised in the name of this very
Son of God — who is the First-born of every creature, who
became man by the Virgin ; who suffered and was crucified
under Pontius Pilate by your nation, who died, who rose
from the dead, and ascended into heaven — is overcome
and subdued.
In the Second Apology (c. 6) Justin says :
Numberless demoniacs throughout the whole world,
and in your city many of our Christian men exorcising
them in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under
Pontius Pilate, have healed and do heal, rendering helpless
and driving the possessing devils out of the men, though
they could not be cured by all the other exorcists and those
who used incantations and drugs.!
Irenaeus does not so clearly refer the expulsion
of demons to baptisra, but suggests rather that it
took place by an exorcisra " in the Narae " prior
to any baptisra, although it often led to baptism
and entrance into the Church.* He also refers to
raen being saved before the coraing of Christ by
invocation of the narae of the Most High and the
Alraighty from evil spirits of all sorts.*
But though the evidence is ample for the pro-
^ Dial, .vlix. Ixxvi., Ap. ii. 8.
' Harvey's Irenaeus, lib. ii. 49. 3.
' Ibid, ii. 4. 6. Cf. also Tertullian, Apol, e. 23.

THE TENTH ARTICLE 429
position that the forgiveness of sins conferred in
Christian Baptism was understood to consist in
the abolition, or washing away, of the taint that
came from contact with demons, yet there is also
ample evidence for the further proposition that
forgiveness of sins as effected by baptism was of
a moral or spiritual order.! And the case is not
to be conceived as though the latter and purer
view grew out of the former and more material,
for the two were synchronous. What is to be
thought is that some held the one view and some
the other in the same group and in the same genera
tion. The upholders of the spiritual view, if we
follow the teaching of all experience, were the
minority, and this minority formed by their very
existence a standing protest against the lower
view. Both are to be found in pre-Christian times,
and both passed over into the Church. The
history of the " forgiveness of sin " in Church
thought then becomes a history of the gradual
suppression of the lower conception by the higher.
We may, if we will, call the latter conception
Christian and the former Catholic, and this gives
us a view of history as the slow transrautation (not
annihilation) of Catholic forras by the Christian
spirit. But the term " Christian spirit " is vague and
' Clement of Alexandria, for example, says : " The Believer received
from the Lord forgiveness of sins (at Baptism) ; but the Gnostic sins no
more, and provides from himself forgiveness " (Eel. Proph, 15). On which
Dr. Bigg's note is : " It should be observed that forgiveness in Clement's
mind signifies not merely the cancelling of a penalty, but the cure of that
ignorance which is the cause and strength of sin. Sin done before Baptism
in darkness does not necessarily imply badness of heart ; hence for this
no remedy is necessary except light. In all other cases the penalty is
itself the earnest of forgiveness " (Christian Platonists of Alexandria,
2nd ed., p. 104).

430 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
unsatisfactory and wanting in precision. There is
no recognisable Christian spirit ; what there is is
the Spirit of Christ, a definite, personal, and real
Spirit which in history was (and is) Jesus Christ
and His Church. This Spirit when placed at the
bar of law, or logic, declines to say a word, because
words and words' souls, thought, cannot compre
hend Him. To Life, however, He stands clearly
revealed, and His authority may be recognised in
the " signs " He does, the truth He illuminates, and
the men He saves.
Yet though Life be superior to reason it must
submit to logic when it enters into the forms of
experience. The Church, therefore, must respect
the requirements of logic if it is to win and retain
men's allegiance, for, as Dr. McTaggart says, " None
ever went about to break logic but in the end logic
broke him."! Hence though forgiveness of sins as
a living process transcends experience it yet as a
fact of experience is amenable to reason. And
Christian experience makes it the third with sin
and repentance as a vital act. Sin it pronounces
to be self-will, and repentance the moving of the
soul under grace out of self-will into Love, and
forgiveness is what happens when the crescent love
within the soul meets the full love of God. When
this takes place the soul has lost itself only to find
itself. Forgiveness is union with God.
Two Parables in the Gospels set out clearly the
nature of Christian forgiveness, viz. those of the
Unmerciful Servant and of the Prodigal Son.* In
the first, forgiveness is based on brotherhood, that
1 Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 292, § 312.
^ In what follows I have made use of an article contributed by me
to Dr. Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. vi., entitled
" Forgiveness, New Testament and Christian."

THE TENTH ARTICLE 431
is, on community of nature as between man and
man, and consequently on the relation of Father
and Son, that is again, on community of nature as
between God and man. For the ground of forgive
ness is the same in both cases. In the Parable of
the Prodigal Son we have set out with equal clear
ness and even raore attractiveness the sarae relation
between love and forgiveness. The Father's love
is always a potential energy waiting for the spring
to be touched which shall release it in action, and
that spring is touched by the desire of the Prodigal
for his home, joined to its expression in his changed
life and return. The elder brother is the analogue
of the unmerciful servant, in so far as his self-
centred habit of soul shuts hira out automatically
from any share in that selfless love which does not
weigh merit or demerit, but gives itself freely where
there is willingness to receive it.
The full force, however, of the N.T. teaching on
forgiveness is not given due expression until it is
correlated with another law of the Christian life.
Nothing is more familiar to readers of the N.T. than
an antithesis which occurs constantly, though in
varied forms. The Publicans are set over against
the Pharisees ; the " Elect " against the " called " ;
the spirit against the flesh ; the son against the
slave ; grace against the law ; heaven against
earth ; faith against sight, and so on. But what
has not been sufficiently observed is that these
different antitheses are expressions for one and the
sarae opposition between two states of the soul.
One of these is described as carnal {e.g. in 1 Cor.
iii. 3) ; or as psychical {e.g. in 1 Cor. ii. 14) ; or
as walking by sight (2 Cor. v. 7) ; or as the lust of
the flesh (Gal. v. 16) ; or as being under law (Gal,

432 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
V. 18) ; or as being a slave (Gal. iv. 7) ; or in dark
ness (Luke i. 79, John i. 5, Acts xxvi. 18, etc.) ; or
in outer darkness (Matt. xxii. 13). The other is
described as the Kingdom of God (Luke xvii. 21,
Rom. xiv. 17) ; as light (1 John i. 7) ; as life
(Rom. viii. 10) ; salvation (Luke iii. 6) ; faith
(Gal. iii. 5) ; Uberty (Rom. viii. 21). The very
richness and variety of the terms used to describe
the two states are an indication on the one hand
that as living processes they do not lend themselves
to definition, and on the other that they express
something which has the mark of reality.
Moreover, other passages indicate a passage from
one state to the other. Christians have passed
from death into life (1 John iii. 14, John v. 24) ;
from darkness to light (Acts xxvi. 18) ; the whole
creation is to pass from bondage to liberty (Rom.
viii. 21) ; the disciples have ceased to be servants
of sin and have become servants of righteousness
(Rom. vi. 17) ; those that were slaves have become
sons (Gal. iv. 5) ; the saints have been translated
into the Kingdom of God's Son (Col. i. 13) ; they
were raised with Christ (Col. iii. 1).
The moment which marks the transition is
defined as being born again (John iii. 3), as regenera
tion (Titus iii. 5), as conversion (Matt, xviii. 3,
Luke xxii. 32, Acts iii. 19), as an opening of the
eyes (Acts xxvi. 18, John ix. 14, Luke xxiv. 31), or
of the heavens (John i. 51, Matt. iii. 16, Acts vu. 56,
X. 11, Rev. iv. 1), or of the understanding (Luke
xxiv. 45). The subjective factor in the transaction
is called ordinarily repentance (Matt. iii. 2, iv. 17,
Luke xiii. 3, Acts ii. 38, iii. 19, xvii. 30, xxvi. 20),
or repentance joined with faith (Acts xx. 21).
The precise character of the process which leads

^^m THE TENTH ARTICLE 433
to forgiveness must be duly emphasised before any
clear conception can be gained of the nature of
Christian forgiveness. From the above it is clear
that two psychological conditions are sharply con
trasted, viz. the psychical and the spiritual, the
former of which is characterised by want of freedom
and the latter by the possession of it. The one
revolves round the lower-self, and the other round
God, and hence one is the realm of disorder and
the other of order, in much the same way that a
geocentric centre of the universe leaves confused
what a heliocentric reduces to order. The act
which " translates " the soul is not man's but
God's, though raan has his work to do in preparing
himself for the re-creative act of God — faith is the
human face of grace. When the cup of the soul is
emptied of self and purified from the dregs of earth
the wine of heaven is poured into it from above,
and the man is born into a new order, the spiritual,
out of the old order, the psychical, and he is a new
creature, for the old things are past and gone, and
all things have become new (2 Cor. v. 17). The
annulment of the old is called in the technical
language of religion forgiveness.^
(6) Forgiveness of Sins through " Penance "
The history of the conception of forgiveness in
days after those of the N.T. is a history of the
struggle of the two forces of Life and Form to
1 " On the merely moral level self-righteousness is possible, on the higher
reUgious level it is not ; hence ' there is joy in heaven over one sinner that
repenteth more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no
repentance.' For such repentance is a. new birth into a higher life ; but
it is not deliverance from innate depravity : it is truly an advance on all
that existed before, not a restoration of pristine innocence " (James Ward,
The Realm of Ends, 1912, p. 371).
2f

434 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
establish an equipoise. It raight be contended
with sorae plausibility that the equipoise was
seldom, if ever, actualised, and that at the best
any approximation to it was due to a more or less
bitter and persistent hostility between different
Churches, or different sections in the same Church.
Nor is it difficult to see why this should be the case,
for the " mystic " nature of forgiveness as portrayed
in the N.T. was too lofty for human nature's daily
food, and hence it might be predicted beforehand
that means would be found to give the inner process
known as " forgiveness " some concrete form or
statement which might be intelligible to the ordinary
Churchman. This was effected as part of that
development of the life of the Church which came
to be known as Catholicism, and was carried out
with growing decision and thoroughness from the
date of the " peace of the Church," a.d. 313. The
dominant form it took was that of the " sacraraent
of penance." The efficient cause of the establishment of this
sacrament was to be found in that secularisation
of the Church which was produced by its recognition
by the Empire and the consequent crowding into
it of raen and women of all grades of piety. The
majority, and especially after the conversion of
the barbarians, were but children in religion and
demanded elementary raethods of discipline and
training. These were found in the authority which
came to be vested in the leaders of the Church by
which they were enabled to exclude from the
community certain classes of sinners for varying
periods, especially those guilty of murder, idolatry,
and adultery. On repentance, however, the ex
comraunicated person might after public confession

THE TENTH ARTICLE 435
and promise of araendraent be reinstated. Out of
this salutary custora of forgiving on terms those
who had confessed and expiated their sins against
the Church there grew gradually a custora of another
kind and more searching activity, viz. the confession
of sins against God in which was involved also the
substitution of the priest for the Church as the
absolving authority.
The machinery thus established lay with a
heavy weight on the mediaeval world. Eugenius
IV. instructed the Armenians that the sacraments
of the new Law were seven, of which the fourth
was Penance ; that the matter of this sacrament
consisted in the three acts of contrition, confession,
and satisfaction, that the words of absolution were
its form, a duly authorised priest its rainister, and
its effect the forgiveness of sins. Martin V. con
demned those who maintained that all exterior
confession was superfluous and useless where the
sinner was duly contrite ; and he also directed that
all Hussites should be interrogated whether they
believed that besides contrition of heart it was
necessary to salvation to confess to a priest only
and not to a layman, however good and devout he
might be. Sixtus IV. condemned the proposition
that there was no obligation to confess evil thoughts
since they were blotted out by aversion to them
without recourse to the Keys ; he conderaned also
the proposition that confession should be secret,
i.e. of secret sins and not of open sins.
To the sacraraent of penance as an instrument
of forgiveness there was added later a system of
indulgences under which the Church dispensed frora
the teraporal pains of Purgatory not merely canoni
cal or notorious sinners, but all, whether living or

436 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
departed, who by themselves, or vicariously, per
formed certain prescribed ecclesiastical exercises,
such as saying given prayers, attending given offices,
or paying fixed sums of money. This forra of
forgiveness of sins, however justified theoretically,
can hardly be recognised as akin to the forgiveness
of sins described in the N.T.
Accordingly, in the sixteenth century, the whole
of the existing ecclesiastical doctrine and practice
in the matter of the forgiveness of sins was chal
lenged in the name of the N.T. It was no accident
which led Luther to direct his attack on Indulgences,
but a true insight into the fact that these were the
logical outcome of a long historical process which
was a corruption rather than a development. The
liberty of every Christian man was destroyed by
the priesthood ; the Church Catholic had banished
or buried the Church of Christ ; ecclesiastical law
had taken over the role of that condemned by
St. Paul ; the transaction of ceremonies had over
laid the piety of the heart ; and a mechanical and
external forgiveness of sins had ousted forgiveness
as dynamic and proper to the individual.
The battle thus begun waged round the word
" justification," which hence bore an extended
connotation, being made to cover the fundamental
difference of Lebensanschauung which marked the
Reformers from the Romans, and was crystallised
by the decrees of the Council of Trent on the one
side, and by numerous Confessions of Faith and
Articles of Religion on the other. Unfortunately
it was a hard necessity laid on the Reformers that
they were compelled to atterapt to solve a religious
problem by logic and by means which St. Paul
called " carnal." Forgiveness, as we have seen

THE TENTH ARTICLE 437
above, is of a spiritual nature, that is, it belongs to
a sphere where Reason is not so much contradicted
as transcended, but it was pulled down by the New
Learning into the world of Reason and sought to
be defended by proof-texts, historical precedents,
philosophical speculations, and similar instruments
of controversy. The result was, and is, that the
true essential nature of forgiveness has been left
obscure by a process which meant only that one
kind of scholasticism was substituted for another.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE
The Resurrection of the body
2,apK6<; dvdaTaaiv
In the Institution of a Christian Man, published in
1537, this article runs : " I believe that at domesday
all the people of the world that ever was or ever shall
be unto that day shall then arise in the self-same
flesh and body which they had while they lived on
earth." In the Baptismal Creed of the Church of
England the article speaks of the " resurrection of
the flesh." Martin Luther in his long Catechism
says : "In good German we should speak of the
resurrection of the body or of the corpse, but this
is of no great iraportance as long as we understand
the word rightly."
These more modern authorities carry on faith
fully an early tradition, though one that does not
rest on the N.T. The N.T. phrase is " resurrection
of the dead," ! For Justin, Irenaeus, and Ter
tullian use the phrase, Justin, for example,* says
that " right - minded Christians on all points are
assured that there will be a resurrection of the
1 'Avdaraais [tSi'] ve/cpfl;'. Matt. xxii. 31, Acts xvii. 32, xxiii. 6, xxiv. 21,
xxvi. 23, 1 Cor. xv. 12, Heb. vi. 2, etc.
» Dial. 80. 438

CHAP. XXIV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 439
dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem which
will then be built, adorned, and enlarged," He
had already, however, a little before admitted that
many " true Christians " thought otherwise. And
in Apol. i. 18 he says that " we expect to receive
again our own bodies, though they be dead and
cast into the earth." Tertullian is still more precise,
for, when speaking of the injunction! to fear Him
who can cast body and soul into Gehenna, he says :
" I understand by the body of man nothing but
this whole mass of flesh which is seen, held and
killed by men . . . the flesh, in fact, which as it
will be destroyed in hell if it has not feared rather
to be destroyed by God, so it will be vivified to
life eternal, if it has preferred to be killed by men." *
But the belief in the resurrection of the fiesh was
the easier for Tertullian because he believed (with
the Stoics) that the soul was also material.* More
over, one of his reasons for maintaining the resur
rection of the flesh was that the flesh was the seat
of raeraory, and raemory the guarantor of personal
identity ; was Marcion to be raised, he asks scorn
fully, in place of Valentinus : " if I do not reraeraber
that it was I who acted meritoriously how shall I
give glory to God ? " *
So 2 Clement '^ is insistent that as we were
called in the flesh we should come in the flesh to
receive our reward : "let no one therefore say that
the flesh itself is not judged nor yet raised." And
so the Shepherd of Hermas ^ says that no one is to
allow the thought to come into his heart that the
1 Matt. X. 28. ^ De resur, carnis, xxxv.
^ " Anima vero corpus, tamen ipsa est corpus non animatum sed animans
potius " (ibid. c. 53).
« Ibid. c. 56. ^ C. ix., cf. also c. xiv.
» Sim, V. 7. 2 ; cf. Ignat. ad Eph, 7 ; ad Smyr, 2.

440 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
flesh is destructible and so may be stained with
impunity. Where did this belief come from which is couched
in terms not native to the N,T,, and indeed is in
contradiction to doctrines of the Gospels and of
St. Paul ? Anybody who will be at the pains to
read John v. or 1 Cor. xv. and then will pass to
Tertullian will feel that he has passed into an alien
intellectual atmosphere. What is the disturbing
force which has entered and given a new setting
to the older order of thoughts ?
Some might be tempted to look to Egypt for
the answer. There the Osiris and its mummy were
not entirely different and distinct, " and the
embalmers equipped the mummy as though it were
called upon to journey forth as the Osiris, The
inherent contradiction in all this arose principally
from the fact that the Egyptian hoped and believed
that shortly after death he would rise again,
complete in flesh and blood as he had lived upon
earth, whereas experience contradicted his creed,
for it showed hira that the mummy never did and
never could leave the earth. He extricated himself
from the dilemma by providing the mumray with
a Doppelgdnger, its own perfect counterpart, yet
not itself. When once we have familiarised our
selves with this singular idea we find in it a simple
key to all the riddles of the Osiris."^ Wiedemann
points out later * that the Egyptian doctrine of
souls reincarnating was not the vulgar doctrine
of metempsychosis stated by Herodotus,* but
instead the doctrine that transmigration " was not
^ Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Immortality, 1895,
p. 47.
2 P. 01. = ii. 123.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 441
the doom of imperfect souls, but a privilege reserved
for such as had already attained perfection," that
the blessed soul could assume any form and visit
any place at will. He was free of the three worlds.
But this power of reincarnating was the reason for
embalming the physical body, for the Osiris in its
return to earth-form would have a special interest
in its old companion, the physical body, and if this
were destroyed it would be deprived of one mode
of manifestation, and that the most natural to it.
We should perhaps remind ourselves before
disraissing Egyptian influences on our Article that
in general Egypt believed that man was the sum-
total of a series of bodies — ^the Ka or double, the
haibit or shadow, the Khu or ghost, the ba or
"soul," and others — held together by the ran
or " Name " which M. Foucart ! interprets as
"Kernels of energy, vibrating, perhaps luminous
(of course material), distinct from and incapable of
dissolving into one another " ; and further, " the
ran, or ' name,' was something like a bundle of
energetic waves, ' rhythmic ' waves, with their
special characteristics — and particularly numbers
which the voice can reproduce if there is ' attune-
ment.' " Though the sahu may not, perhaps, be
regarded as the Egyptian form of the spiritual
body mentioned by St. Paul,* yet the Egyptian
speculations may easily have gone to forra part
of the popular conceptions of which the Christian
doctrine is a simplified edition.
Unfortunately there is no evidence that the
teaching of Irenaeus and Tertullian was derived
directly or indirectly from Egypt, and what there
is runs in the opposite direction. The natural
^ Ency, of Rel, and Ethics, ii. 764. ^ 1 Cor. xv. 44.

442 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
channel for native Egyptian conceptions was
through Alexandria, and the Alexandrians were
moulded by other agencies — Plato, Aristotle, the
Pythagoreans, and the Stoics. They thus regarded
matter as evil against spirit as good ; they believed
in the pre-existence of the soul, and they looked
forward to obtaining through a virtuous life " in
corporeal and immortal life in the presence of
the uncreated and immortal God." ! All these
three doctrines sterilised the Egyptian soil for
the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the
flesh. Nor is the case any better with the Stoic, Orphic,
or Pythagorean doctrines which filled the Greek
world at the beginning of our era. All regarded
the body as the tomb of the soul ; soul and body
differed infinitely in value, for the former was of
Divine origin and nature while the latter was mere
clay, foul and dead. Aristotle alone insisted on
the organic unity of soul and body.* In none of
these schools was anything taught but what set
the scholar on looking for a decisive separation
from the body as soon as possible, and made the
prospect of a reunion of the body to the soul re
pugnant. None of them would have had much
sympathy with the doctrine of Leibniz that " a
disembodied soul would be a deserter from the
general order, which impUes matter and movement
and their laws."
But when we turn to Mazdaism and Jewish
Apocalyptic we feel that the doctrine of the resur-
^ R. H. Charles, Eschatology, 1899, p. 253 ; Philo, De Gigantibus, in.
^ Cf., for example, Seneca, Ep, cii. 22, " Cum venerit dies ilie qui
mixtum hoc divini humanique secernat, corpus hoc ubi inveni relinquam,
ipse me Dis reddam " ; and Ep, cxx. 14, " Scit enim quo exiturus sit qui
unde venerit meminit."

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 443
rection of the flesh is on congenial soil. That the
former exercised a strong influence on the latter
in pre-Christian times is generally admitted. " The
extent of the influence of Parseeism upon the
beliefs of Israel under the Achemenides cannot be
determined, but its existence is undeniable. Some
of its doctrines, as for instance those relating to
angels and demons, the end of the world and the
final resurrection, were propagated everywhere in
the basin of the Mediterranean as a consequence of
the diffusion of Jewish colonies." !
" When the world came to an end the body
also was to share in that happiness [of the gods]
because it was believed as in Egypt that the whole
person would enjoy eternal life. After time had
run its course Mithra would raise all men from the
dead, pouring out a raarvellous beverage of ira-
mortality for the good, but all evil-doers would be
annihilated by fire together with Ahriman himself." *
So, too, Bousset in his Religion des Judentums * has
discussed in detail the influence of the Iranian
religion on later Judaism, and concluded for a
strong infiltration of its ideas, especially on Apoca
lyptic, The Jewish apocalyptic belief in the resurrection
of the flesh depended on its belief in the visible
reign of the Messiah on earth for a limited period.
In Enoch * the Messiah reigns for two weeks before
" the great eternal judgment," In 1 Cor. xv. 23-28
we seem to have an echo of the same thought,
which is afterwards expanded by a discussion of
the transmutation the body will undergo before it
will be ready to enjoy the blessings of the Messianic
^ Cumont, Oriental Religions, p. 138. " Ibid, p. 159.
3 1903, pp. 455-491. * xci. 12-15.

444 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Kingdom. In Rev. xx. 4 the doctrine becomes
explicit. The first resurrection gives the saints a
reign with Christ on earth for a thousand years,
and the second destroys the wicked, and beatifies
the righteous finally. According to 4 Esdras,!
God's son, Jesus, and His own will live and rejoice
for 400 years, and then He and all men will die.
In the Slavonic Enoch the writer " reasons that
since the earth was created in six days, its history
will be accomplished in 6000 years, evidently basing
his view on the O.T. words that ' each day with
the Lord is as 1000 years ' ; and as the six days of
creation were followed by one of rest, so the 6000
years of the world's history will be followed by a
rest of 1000 years." * In the Apocalypse of Baruch
— a document of Jewish orthodoxy contempor
aneous with our Synoptic gospels — are three short
apocalypses ; the first offers plenteousness of corn
and wine when Messiah appears to awaken those
who have fallen asleep in hope of Him ; in the
second, Messiah is a warrior-king who slays Anti
christ and then reigns " until the world of corruption
is at an end " ; in the third, death and sins and
disease and sorrow will be done away, and the
Messiah will " sit down in peace for the age on the
throne of His Kingdom ... for that time is the
consummation of that which is corruptible, and the
beginning of that which is incorruptible," In all
three is offered a Zwischenreich with earthly felicity,
and one reason given for the erection of this kingdom
is that it is " necessary to show to the living that
1 vii. 28, Texts and Studies, iii.. No. 2, p. 27.
^ Charles, Eschatology, p. 261 ; the 400 years of 4 Esdras were based
similarly on the text, " Comfort us again now after the years that thou
hast plagued us," viz. the 400 years spent in Egyptian bondage.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 445
the dead have come to Ufe again, and that those
who had departed have returned," !
Side by side with the Jewish expectations of a
temporary kingdom of " that side " set up on " this
side," an expectation derived frora an older Persian
belief, was a belief which emphasised the resurrec
tion (expressed for example in Ethiopian Enoch) as
effective only at the close of the Messianic kingdom.
The Alexandrines placed the resurrection after
death (when they did not date it from the moraent
of regeneration), and the Pharisees looked for a
resurrection of the soul or spirit in a body unlike
the present, or clothed in the glory of God,
The point, however, which concerns us here is
that the doctrine of " the resurrection of the flesh "
in our Creed is bound up with none of these latter,
but with the apocalyptic belief in chiliasm, which
is defined as the " extra-historical planting of the
transfigured ' that side ' in the imperfection of
this side," * " This fiesh," referred to in the Creed,
was to rise when the Chiliastic kingdom was set
up, but when the doctrine of chiliasm degenerated
into a heresy the doctrine of the resurrection of the
flesh lost its base.
It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that
chiliasm 'with its corollary of the resurrection of
the flesh should be summarily dismissed as an
unhappy aberration of Christian thought. For it
helped effectively to save Christianity from becom
ing a philosophy in place of a religion, " The
Hellenic contrast of ' spirit ' and ' flesh ' could not
become completely developed in Christianity, be
cause the belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ,
and in the admission of the flesh into heaven,
1 Ch. 1. 3. 2 Hauch, Realency. iu. 806.

446 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
opposed to the principle of dualism a barrier which
Paul as yet neither knew nor felt to be necessary.
The conviction as to the resurrection of the flesh
proved the hard rock which shattered the energetic
attempts to give a completely Hellenic complexion
to the Christian religion," !
Nevertheless, while we may admit that the
intrusion of Jewish thought was not an unmixed
evil, as we may admit that the substitution of
Catholicism for Christianity exemplifies once more
Bacon's adage that the mixing of alloy with gold
debases the sovereign while making it work the
better, yet the benefit was greater still when the
alien element was dismissed as having done its
work. The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh
had prevented Christianity from being evaporated
into a speculation, but it also, unless purified,
exposed it to the risk of petrifying the Christian
spirit. It became necessary, therefore, to insist
that the Christian hope was not dependent on the
chiliastic belief, but had a deeper and more enduring
base. This was found in a closer analysis of human
nature, and in an enlargeraent of the conception
of the " flesh," In this latter point the usage of
St, Paul afforded a lead, and in the forraer the
belief in another body {k'Tepov a-ufia) held by the
Pharisees.* From the point of view of the com
parative science of religion we might say that
Christian thought was aided in its escape from
Persian dualism by the activity of germs of thought
introduced from Egypt.
For fiesh in Hebrew, as in Hellenistic Greek, like
most words, was used in a wider as in a narrower
meaning. Chiliasm accentuated the narrower, but
* Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 331. ^ Josephus, JS. J. ii. 8. 14.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 447
in more cultured circles fiesh was the name of the
whole man as a phenomenal being. Philosophy is
in the habit of setting in antithesis flesh and spirit,
or body and mind, but to Religion the opposition
is between man as a creature and God as creator,
or between man as forgetting God and man as "in
God." In the former sense he is called flesh.
Again the whole man is soraetimes described under
the formula of flesh and heart, or flesh and spirit,
where the two elements are not so much opposed
as distinguished in their union. Hence in this
sense the resurrection of the flesh means that the
lower part of man's composite nature shares in the
final glorification of the whole.
It is obvious that the acceptance of this position
is fatal to that Puritanism which has for so raany
centuries been at once a septic and a corrosive in
the Church. For historic Catholicism, from the
days of Montanus and Novatian to Luther and the
" Nonconforraist conscience," has instinctively set
itself against a one-sided spiritualisra. Its moral
code, indeed, has been open to the charge of laxity,
and its attitude to the world has been so friendly
as to seem ambiguous. Yet, as " no people do so
much harm as those who go about doing good," so
it was the feeling of this that led the authorities
of the Church to discourage all violent anticipation
of the judgment day. Certainly they may have
at the same time shown themselves too complacent
to the existing order, but on the other hand it is
doubtful which has done most harm, the worldly
wisdom of the Church which shrank from chal
lenging the world, or the undisciplined zeal of
Puritanism which could never see the good mingled
with the cdl it attacked.

448 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is
the Church's answer to all Puritans who disparage
the material just because it is not spiritual. And
its implication is that just as the spiritual has its
root in the being of God, so too has the material.
It matters little whether you call the process by
which the material as well as the spiritual came
out from God creation or emanation^the difference
is verbal only — for in both cases the idea expressed
is the same, that God is one and beside Him there
is nothing else. Matter is eternal in the same
sense that spirit is eternal, though properly speaking
God alone is eternal, and matter and spirit are
necessary aeonian manifestations of His eternal
Nature. But given this aeonian condition no good
ground is offered for disparaging matter in order
to exalt spirit. They are partners for life and may
not be put asunder without loss, even though their
partnership involve inequality. " The true source
of the life of science is to be found ... in showing
how absolutely universal is the extent and at the
same time how completely subordinate the significance
of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the
structure of the world." ! Mechanism covers indeed
more than what we are accustomed ordinarily to
call matter — thought, for exaraple, is bound by
logic, and the will by raotives, and both logic and
the impulses which form the raw material of motives
obey the mechanism of Causality— but at all events
it covers matter. Spirit, indeed, is free and self-
deterraining, but the instant it acts, that is, the
instant on which it emerges from its home it ceases
to be pure spirit and becomes a mixed thing to
which the name of Soul is given. The soul in this
' Lotze, Microcosmus, i. 16 (the italics are not mine).

XXIV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 449
sense is the complex of the impulses which animate
the organism, and, strictly speaking, has no sub
stantial existence apart frora these.
The fact of the temporal and transitional char
acter of the soul must be made clear if we are to
be free to collocate the two factors of spirit and
body which are the sole determinants of our
problem. The difiiculty in treating of the soul
arises from the ambiguity of its term. The word
occurs but seldom in modern authorities on psy
chology, Mind taking its place. Popularly it
connotes the emotional as distinguished from the
rational part of our immaterial self. In Clement of
Alexandria it stands for the inner man in his
tripartite being, whether of desire, " irascibility,"
and thought,! or of perception, understanding, and
reason.* We have here an echo of Plato, who laid
down that passion * is not a kind of reason, but a
third principle with the rational and the con
cupiscent.* Other'wise he speaks of God putting
intelligence in soul and soul in body,^ Similarly
Aristotle, while defining the soul as " the simplest
actuality * of a physical body which possesses life
potentially (such a body, however, is what we call
' organic ')," ' yet says there may be something in
the soul which may be separable from the body, not
being an actuality of it at all, in much the same way
that a sailor may be in a boat without being an
" actuality " of it. The sailor in the boat is Reason,
active Reason when he is thought of as independent
^ ''Si'jnBvpia, dvpbs, and Xoyiapbs.
* Ala6T]ai.s, '\6yos, vovs ; Strom, ii. 11. 50, and iii. 10. 68 ; Bigg, Christian
Platonists, p. 107.
3 Qvp.6s, * Repub, iv. 441. ^ fim. 30.
' 'KvTe\ixeia = complete existence as opposed to potentiality.
' De anima, ii. 1. 6.
2g

450 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
of the boat,! passive Reason * when he submits to
the limitations of life in the boat. In the language
of Christian philosophy we should speak of the
former as Spirit and the latter as Soul. The latter
alone is known immediately in experience ; the
former is mediated by reflection.*
This doctrine of Aristotle's about the Soul forms
the base of the scholastic doctrine which remained
unchallenged seriously until the days of Descartes.
Indeed, long after his day the simplicity and
substantiality of the soul have been defended by
the philosophy of dualism or of common sense, and
in special by the " Scotch School." With the
Schoolmen it is raaintained that there exists a valid
distinction between substance and accidents that
" in the case of thoughts, volitions, and emotions
we have manifest instances of what we mean by
real accidents : for these even by Divine power
could not exist at all unless they had a subject of
inhesion." * The distinction, however, of substance
and accidents is not the critical distinction here.
The critical distinction is between substance as
" that which exists by itself and does not inhere
in another," while accident is that which inheres
in another.^ And the scholastic contention is that
^ Nous iroiTjTLKbs. ^ Nous TraB-qTiKbs.
' " This Reason it is by which all things become, in the way that light
causes colours that are merely potential to be actual colours. And this
Active Reason may exist independent of the body, unmingled with matter
and unaffected by it. . . . As independent it alone truly is what it is,
and it alone is deathless and eternal ; but as it is unimpressionable we do
not remember through it. The receptive mind, on the other hand, is
corruptible, and without it there is no thought " (De anima, iii. 5. 2 ;
Sir A. Grant, Ttie Ethics of Aristotle, i. 298).
* Rickaby, General Metaphysics, p. 247 ; cf. St. Thomas Aq. : " Sub
stantia est ens tanquam per se habens esse : accidens vero tanquam cuius
esse est inesse " (De potentia, A. vu.).
' In scholastic language, substance is id quod est, while accident is id
quo est, substance is what is, accident what modifies substance ; the one

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 451
the Soul is such a substance that it exists per se,
though not indeed a se. The Soul, it is urged, is
the unknown, simple, substantial essence of which
all thoughts, volitions, and emotions are modifica
tions. Rickaby quotes Henry of Ghent as saying :
" The substance of the soul, which is really one
thing, nevertheless according to its different deter
minations is said to have different faculties of
intellect and sense ; but radically its faculties are
nothing but its simple substance, the diversity of
powers adding nothing over and above its essence,
except a reference to the diversity of its activities
according as their objects vary," !
On the other hand modern Psychologists, like
the late William James, are disposed to convert the
proposition, " the soul is its faculties," into the pro
position, " the faculties are the soul," * The two
parties are at bottom emphasising two insepar
able sides of a duality. Just as in every example
of Causality we have change in a thing which yet
paradoxically remains the same, so in every activity
of the Soul (so-called) we have a modification of
something which has a relative permanency. James
says that all we observe is " a stream of thoughts,
each substantially different from the rest, but
cognitive of the rest and ' appropriative ' of each
other's content " ; we have, therefore, " no need
of reference to any more simple or substantial
is an ens, the other an ens entis. So St. Thomas : " Suhstantiae nomen . . .
significat essentiam cui competit sic esse, id est, per se esse ; quod tamen
non est ipsa eius essentia " (Summa, la. iii. 5 ; cf. la. xxix. 2).
• Summa, p. 255.
' Cf. what Rickaby, ubi supra, ascribes to Duns Scotus : " The sub
stance of the soul is really identical with its faculties," and his approval
(p. 261) of Rosmini's statement that " there can be no modification without
a subject modified." The line of opposition between Rickaby and James
wears very thin as it goes along.

452 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
agent than the present ' Thought,' or section of
the stream." ! But why " substantially different ? '*
This is to introduce a plurality of substances where
one is sufficient, to confuse where else there is union.
And as Professor James rejects Hume's associa-
tionism by which those distinct substances he
called perceptions are bound together, it is for him
to show that his theory of pulses of thought simply
corresponding to brain processes is a better hypo
thesis than that of a Soul (to use his own words)
out of which the brain-processes knock the thought.
That something within us is modified by stimuli
from without is a fact of observation. That that
something is relatively permanent is a necessary
Truth in the sense that if it be not true our intel
lectual life possesses no order, or unity, and forms
no system. Professor James, however, it must be
borne in mind was speaking as a psychologist only ;
and eschewing metaphysics without denying its
validity. When he became metaphysical he said
that he found the notion of some sort of an anima
mundi thinking in all of us to be a more promising
hypothesis than that of a lot of absolutely indi
vidual souls. And there for the present we may
be content to leave him.
We may, however, pursue our quest for the
nature of the Soul by trying to ascertain the meaning
of an allied term the Self. And perhaps we shall
find that as the Soul is an accident and not a
substance, an attribute, that is, of Spirit when it
is more living and of Body when it is less living,
so we may find that the Self at its lowest is identical
with our Body and at its highest with our Spirit. In
neither case would it possess substantial existence.
1 Principles of Psychology, i. 344.

XXIV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 453
Sully! traces the various steps of the develop
ment of the idea of Self. Self stands (a) for
consciousness of body ; then {b) for consciousness
of mental self as distinct from body — a conscious
ness formed by conation and imagination; then
(c) for a consciousness determined by ideation and
helped in its formation by language, as e.g. by the
use of thou ; he quotes Goethe as saying that " the
name is not worn as a dress, but grows on to us
layer upon layer, like our skin " ; next {d) is the
consciousness of Self as enduring, or the sense of
Personal Identity ; this is largely dependent on
the body with its relatively fixed mass of organic
sensation ; * also " our idea of Self is largely a reflec
tion of others' perception of us," * and is partly
based on retention and reproduction. But " the
idea of a personal identity , , . is largely a con
struction, in which the fundamental idea of Self,
viz. of the body, with its concomitant coraplex of
organic sensations which only slowly changes, is a
chief contributing element." Again, " the com
plexity of our mental life . . . seems to lend itself
to the scheme of a duality of selves, a lower im
pulsive, and a higher contemplative Ego (' moi
spectateur '), which are soraehow conjoined with a
single body." Lastly, we have " the attainment of
a consciousness of a personality, that is, an indi
vidual character with certain (relatively permanent)
1 The Human Mind, i. 479 ff.
2 Cf. Aristotle's dictum that " Reason may be looked on as dependent
on conceptions derived from the senses " (p.ri dvev (pavTaalas).
' So CaldweU, Pragmatism and Idealism, 1913, p. 161 : " As for the
adult his ' ego ' or self has a meaning and a reality only in relation to, and
in comparison with the other selves of whom we think as his associates."
And in a footnote he points out, after Payne, that we have reason for
believing that the collective we precedes I in the order of linguistic evolu
tion. " I for one " is prior to " I by myself."

454 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
inteUectual and moral attributes." And, finaUy, to
make Sully's doctrine complete we are told ^ that
" the stimulus of the feeling of Self is the presenta
tion of sorae aspect, feature, or concoraitant of the
Ego or Self, recognised as such, that is to say, as a
part of ' me,' or as ' mine,' which has a distinctly
agreeable or disagreeable character." *
With this agrees Professor Baldwin, who says
that "it is the organisation of the inner control
factors, those of affection and conation and interest,
that becomes the subject-self; and the meanings
determined by these as interests of the Self are the
fulfilments of its cravings, its values or worth."*
And again : " The only thing purely psychic is that
in which body clairas inner meaning, and also that
wherein mind has inner presence. . , , ' Let this
then,' says the Dame (Nature), ' be finally the inner,
the Self of selves, the ' I ' in the nominative case
and with a capital letter ; and let all the rest, body,
mind, mixed mass as it is, persisting in its confusions
and illegitimate acts of commerce, let it all be mere
object in that whole of experience whose subject
the ' I ' is.' " *
James Ward denies that the self that loves
(referring to Bishop Butler's self-love) is absolutely
identical with the self that knows, for "out of
barren identities nothing can come. The self
that I love, that is, the self that I know, is my self
holding intercourse, having reciprocal relations,
with a community of other selves and with an
environment to an indefinite extent resolvable into
1 The Human Mind, u. 97.
2 Similarly, Professor James divides the constituents of the Self into
the material Self, the social Self, the spiritual Self, and the pure Ego (Prin
ciples of Psychology, i. 292-370).
' Thoughts and Tilings, i. 135. * Ibid. i. 259.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 455
selves." ! But this implies that the Self that
knows is the Thinker, the object of whose thought
is the other self that is made objective by social or
intersubjective intercourse.
And a more recent essayist * says : " Even if,
on an analysis of experience similar to Kant's it
should turn out that all experience involves a
conscious centre by which it is experienced, it is
quite unscientific to identify at once this centre
with the historical individual, whom the biographer
and the historian commemorate, who is limited to
a particular corner of space, and whose days are
only threescore years and ten," *
So too Lotze * finds self - consciousness rooted
(as James finds it rooted) in the feelings of pleasure
and pain, that is, in the warmth or intimacy which
accompany the thought of our " me " as against
that of our neighbour. " Not as thought, but as
felt in its immediate value for us does the identity
of the thinker and the thought form the foundation
of our self-consciousness, and once for all lift the
distinction between us and the world beyond all
comparison with the differences by which it dis
criminates between one object and another,"
Mr. Bradley, while maintaining that " no element
of Reality falls outside the experience of finite
centres," also points out that " a centre of experi
ence is not the same thing as a soul, or, again, a
1 Realm of Ends, 1912, p. 343.
^ W. H. Moberly in Foundations, p. 458.
' Cf. Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, ix. 4. 4 : " The thinking faculty would
appear to be each man's proper Self, or more so than anything else." This
voeXv is the synthesis of the active and passive reason, and was afterwards
the basis of the Monopsychism taught by Averroes, according to which
the Active Reason is one and undivided in all men, and gains individuality
through bodily sensation alone.
• Microcosmus, i. 250.

456 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
self. It need not contain the distinction of not-self
from self , , . and a soul is always the creature
of an intellectual abstraction," ! He defines the
soul as " a finite centre of immediate experience,
possessed of a certain teraporal continuity of
existence, and again of a certain identity in char
acter," * And what he means by calling the soul
an ideal construction is that in so far as it is more
than what is given in experience, so far, that is,
as "it is considered to continue in time and to
maintain a certain sameness," * it transcends what
is given. From a certain fact, say a meadow, is
cut loose one of its features, say its greenness.
The idea of this greenness so detached from fact
is then applied to another fact, say an emerald, and
so we pass to the judgment, this emerald is green.
Similarly, we take a present experience, a mass of
actual feeling, and enlarge it by referring other
past experiences to it, so as to raake a unity of
past and present, and when we have so idealised the
present experience we have " constructed " a thing
to which we give the name of Sold, But, Mr,
Bradley contends, this is an appearance and not
reality, a moment in the Absolute but not itself
Being, " In brief, because the existence of the
soul is not experienced and not given, because it
is made by, and consists in, transcendence of the
' present,' and because its content is obviously
never one with its being, its ' what ' is always in
flagrant discrepancy with its ' that ' — ^therefore
its whole position is throughout inconsistent and
untenable. It is an arrangeraent natural and
necessary, but for all that phenomenal and illusive,
' Appearance and Reality, p. 529. ^ jj,i(j. p. 298.
3 Ibid. p. 302.

XXIV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 457
a makeshift, valuable, but still not genuine reality.
And, looked at by itself, the soul is an abstraction
and mutilation. It is the arbitrary use of raaterial
for a particular purpose. And it persists only by
refusing to see more in itself than subserves its
own existence," !
Bergson's contribution to our enquiry is of
rather a dilferent kind. He sees in intuition, not
in analysis, the faculty which reveals the nature of
the Ego, " What is really iraportant for philosophy
is to know exactly what unity, what multiplicity,
and what reality superior both to abstract unity and
multipUcity, the multiple unity of the self actually
is. Now philosophy will only know this when it
recovers possession of the simple intuition of the
self by the self. Then, according to the direction
it chooses for its descent from this summit, it will
arrive at unity or multiplicity, or at any of the
concepts by which we try to define the raoving life
of the self." *
Professor James Ward appears to oppose any
attempt to identify the Self with its states. With
out a person, he says, no property. " Experience
is in this sense property : it is always owned.
Percepts and appetites that nobody has are not
percepts and appetites at all. ... If there is only
& bundle of percepts and motives, but no self to
determine or control, it is obvious that there can
be no self to be determined or controlled." * But
valid as this criticisra is against Associationism it
1 Appearance and Reality,^, SOi, Of course in Mr. Bradley's metaphysic
body and spirit are also " appearances " and " ideal constructions " (pp. 306
and 498), but he is quoted here as an authority for the view that the soul,
¦even when compared with these two other constructions, is but a makeshift.
2 An Introduction to Metaphysics, Eng. trans. 1913, p. 33.
3 The Realm of Ends, pp. 290-291.

458 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
does not affect our present contention that the
" Empirical Ego " of common sense is an illusion,
a reflection from the " Pure Ego " of the higher
sphere, which again is reflected in its turn
from the " Transcendental Ego " of the eternal
order. It would be tedious, perhaps, to labour the point
that philosophy (which is but ordinary thought
purged of looseness and obscurity) is clear that the
soul is no more than the name we give to our existing
Self in its state of being a compound or union of
spirit and body — a state which is never constant in
anybody, but fluctuating as now spirit controls
body or now body limits spirit. It will be more
congenial to many readers to turn to what religion
has to say about the soul.
Buddhism stands alone in India in rejecting the
doctrine that souls exist. It is the union of mental
qualities alone which make the individual. All
things come, all things go, for all things, including
the suppositious soul, are compounds ; they become,
they change, they dissolve, they pass away. In
the Dialogues of the Buddha,^ the Exalted One
rejects all three theories of the soul : that of its
being a material soul, built up of the four elements ;
that of its being an exact copy of the body and
material, but so subtle that it can be described as
made of mind ; and the third, that of being without
form and raade of consciousness, because man
attains to one state of consciousness after another,
and finds no perraanence anywhere.
The Theologia Germanica is insistent on the
truth that all sin is self-will, the claiming to be
somewhat, the turning from the unchangeable
1 Translated by Rhys Davids, 1899, p. 252.

^xiv THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 459
Good to the changeable, and that blessedness lieth
not in much and many, but in One and oneness,
A man, therefore, should if enlightened enough
say : "I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness
what His own hand is to a man," " What is
there," cries the anonymous author, " which is,
and which we may account for somewhat ? I
answer, 'Nothing but that which we may call
God.' "
" I behold," says St, Augustine, " how some
things pass away that others may replace them, but
Thou dost never depart, O God, my Father
supremely good. Beauty of all things beautiful," !
So the incisive meaning of the text which effected
his conversion — " put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ "
— was derived frora the fact that it bade him
substitute the Christ -consciousness for self- con
sciousness,* Similarly, when Augustine heard God's
word saying to him : "I am the food of adults ;
grow and thou shalt eat Me ; nor shall thou change
Me into thyself as thou changest carnal food, but
thou shalt be changed into Me," * we have an
impUcit reference to the impermanence of the soul,
" Deus autem tuus etiam tibi vitae vita est." * In
short, the Confessions of St. Augustine as a whole
spring from one suppressed premiss, that the Soul
or Self of ordinary consciousness is a temporary
illusion, permitted because a necessity in man's
spiritual development, but with no substantial
existence, serving only to link together the two
eternal constituents of man, spirit and body. As
Christ is the Mediator between God and Man, being
at once God and Man, so the soul is the mediator
^ Bk. xi. of the Confessions is devoted to this question.
= Ibid. vin. 12. ' Ibid. vu. 10. ' Ihid. x. 6.

460 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
between spirit and body, partaking of the nature
of both. And as Christ at the end will give up the
Kingdom to the Father so "will the soul give up its
treasures to the spirit. The distinction made by
Aristotle between the Active Reason and the
Passive Reason, which are yet but two aspects of
the one Reason, reappears again here.
But Christian thought can appeal for its doctrine
of the illusory character of the soul to the N.T,
itself. There we are bidden not to save but to
lose our soul,! ^^le aphorism turns on a double
sense of soul and of losing or finding. The soul is
the bearer of the bodily life and also of the spiritual
life. If a man by refusing martyrdom preserves
his soul on its physical side he loses it on its spiritual
and vice versa. The range of the aphorism, however,
goes beyond martyrdom. It governs Christian life as
weU as Christian death. He who keeps his soul as
his own loses it on its higher side, for he loses Christ.
The " for my sake " is critical. " Tota causa ibi
est." *
The same practical objective must be given to
the denying of self in Matt, xvi. 24. It is true that
the immediate reference in the actual setting of the
verse is to physical death, but it is also true that
this reference does not exhaust the meaning of the
saying, and it is by no means a hazardous assertion
that the physical is not the primary reference. The
denial is in any case rejection, not of something
which is an attribute of the self, but of the Self
1 Matt. X. 39.
" Cf. St. Augustine, De dodr. Christ, ui. 24 : " When the Lord says, ' He
who loves his soul shaU lose it,' He is not to be thought as forbidding that
use of it which consists in self-preservation, but as forbidding that perverse
and preposterous use by which it busies itself with temporal things and
does not seek eternal."

XXIV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 461
itself. The empirical Ego must give way to the
pure Ego, the Self to the Christ.
Similarly St. Paul could say, " I have been
crucified 'with Christ ; but it is not I that liveth
any more, but he that liveth in me is Christ."!
This sparkling verse is at once a comment on
taking up the Cross and on the meaning of Con
version. The being crucified with Christ plainly
means the undergoing the mystical crucifixion
which Jesus underwent, not a symbolic or similar
crucifixion, but the same real and therefore mystical
crucifixion. This defines Crucifixion as a spiritual
fact as consisting in the surrender of Self and its
consciousness to the inner and eternal Christ and
His consciousness. And this change took place
when Saul saw the heavenly Christ, and when his
body and soul ceased to be his own, and were taken
possession of by Another, who henceforth acted in
and through Paul.
We arrive at the same result from another class
of passages where the Christian is described as a
new creature * and his life as new wine,* his message
as a new tongue,* his law a new commandment,^
his nature a new lump ; « he himself is a new man,'
bearing a new name,® and a member of a new city,
the new Jerusalem.* This newness is celebrated by
the Psalmists as calling for a new song,!" ^nd the
underlying idea throughout is that of the spiritual
life transforming so radically the old Adam that
the product can be described by no less thorough
going an epithet than new. But that which best
1 Gal. n. 20. ^ 2 Cor. v. 17. ' Mark ii. 22.
* Mark xvi. 17. ' John xiu. 34. ' 1 Cor. v. 7.
' Ephes. u. 15, iv. 24, Col. in. 10. « Rev. ii. 17.
• Rev. xxi. 2.
>» xxxiii. 3, xl. 3, xcvi. 1, xcviii. 1, cxliv. 9, cxlix. 1.

462 MYSTICISM AJND THE CREED chap.xxiv
fulfils this requirement is a new consciousness
depending on a new centre and giving a new
relationship to all persons and things,!
1 " The lamp contains its oil, which it holds securely in its close grasp
and guards from the least loss. Thus is it separate from all other objects
around it and is miserly. But when lighted it finds its meaning at once ;
its relation with all things far and near is established, and it freely sacrifices
its fund of oil to feed the flame " (Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana, p. 76).
Just before Mr. Tagore speaks of the lower and the higher aspects of the
Self as being seen in self-display and self-revelation.

CHAPTER XXV
THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE {continued)
The Resurrection of the body {continued)
This somewhat tedious enquiry into the meaning
of the soul has for its object the removal of an
intruder whose presence seems to disturb the
harraony of the two partners of spirit and body.
It is not intended to throw doubt on the existence
of a continuous self which is implied in all knowledge.
Nor is it meant to blur the distinction between the
individual self and the Universal Self-consciousness
by any one-sided assertion of the kinship of nature
between the two. All that is contended for is that
Soul as antithetical to Spirit is an unnecessary
figment, and at best only a convenient tertium quid,
which may be useful to thought in its attempts to
find a meeting-ground for Spirit and Body. That
it is an eternal third to the eternal pair of Spirit
and Body both scientific psychology and religious
thought seem agreed in denying. We must find,
therefore, in individuated Spirit the ground of the
relatively permanent Self, and in all probability
regard Body as the principle of the individuation,
that which, according to Greek thought, formed
a cosmos out of the chaos of the infinite and un
determined. 463

464 MYSTICISM AJND rtiM, (JKJ^iJiiU CHAP.
Strictly speaking, therefore, we cannot say that
the Church believes in the immortality of the Soul,
unless we mean by Soul, as indeed people often do,
the individuated Spirit. And some would hardly
go as far as this, but would content themselves on
this head with asserting an immortality for such
Spirits alone which had attained a certain level of
worthy life. " The hypothesis of Immortality for
all souls whose actual or potential capacity reaches
a certain level of value is the one which most com
pletely rationalizes the Universe." Hence, " it
is perhaps too dograatic to assert that every
individual will attain Immortality even among
human souls." ! So Lotze : " We have no other
principle for deciding it [Immortality] than this
general idealistic belief : that every created thing
will continue whose continuance belongs to the
meaning of the world, and so long as it does so
belong ; while every one will pass away whose
reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the
world's course. That this principle admits of no
further application in human hands need hardly
be said. We surely know not the merits which
may give to one being a claim on Eternity, nor the
defects which would cut others off." * This is not
necessarily in contradiction of what Lotze says
elsewhere,* that " one can never imagine that any
thing which has once existed can cease to be," for
Lotze would probably retort that that which had
ceased to be had never really been at all. James *
says similarly that " we believe ourselves immortal
because we believe ourselves fit for immortality.
1 Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, u. 352-353.
2 Metaphysik, p. 245. s Microcosmus, ii. 111.
* Principles of Psychology, i, 348.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 465
A ' substance ' ought surely to perish, we think, if
not worthy to survive." What Benedetto Croce
says of the moral man, that he " atrophies certain
organs and suppresses certain vital functions for
universal ends," may be applied mutatis mutandis
to God's dealings with His creatures.! And once
raore James Ward puts hiraself on the " side of the
angels " : " The ideal is there and is to be realised :
it is rational to believe this, and all that it implies,
if it is rational to believe anything. One thing that
it implies in an evolving world like ours is a gradual
advance from the status quo of humanity, whereon
the ideal has dawned, ever forwards into the perfect
day. Humanity already has yearnings and aspira
tions that the flesh-pots of Egypt — material and
temporal well-being — can never content ; is it,
impelled by these longings for higher things,
destined to wander airalessly in the wilderness for
ever unsatisfied ? " * In this they would be sub
stantially in agreement with the Dionysiac devotees
who found their immortality in the partaking of the
life of the gods through the efficacy of orgiastic
rites.* But whether we regard the " proof " of
" immortality " to be drawn frora the nature of the
" soul " as a simple substance, or rest it on a
" judgment of value " that that necessarily persists
1 Philosophy of the Practical, 1913, p. 432.
^ The Realm of Ends, 1912, p. 425.
' Rohde, Psyche, 1894, p. 324, says : " The feehng of their divinity.
their eternity which had suddenly revealed itself to them in ecstasy forced
the soul to the abiding conviction that it was of divine nature, called to
the life of the gods as soon as it quitted the body, the passing experience
here being an earnest of what was there unending." So Professor Gordon,
The Poetry of the Old Testament, pp. 183-184 : " The glad hope of im
mortality rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature of the
soul, but on the sure ground of religious experience. Immortality is, in
fact, a necessary imphcate of personal religion. The man that lives with
God is immortal as He is."
2h

466 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
which is fit to persist, or even leave it a more or less
probable hypothesis,! yet in any case it is the Self
as Spirit that we are speaking of, and not the
shadowy double which in ordinary language (and
often in leamed language also) we call the Soul.*
It seeraed necessary to first clear the " Soul "
out of our way if we were to form any clear con
ception of what should be meant by the " Resurrec
tion of the Body." And we are now in a position
to say that in the first place it means that the man
is not truly or completely man unless and until
{a) he has at his service a body of some sort, and
(&) is at least able to make use of a physical body
at will. Both these conceptions go back to pagan
tiraes, and both have established theraselves in
Christian thought.
A. A familiar passage of St. Paul's speaks of
different kinds of bodies : "If there is a psychical
body there is also a spiritual," * where the if does
not express doubt but the logical ground for a
consequence, as in Col. iii. 1, " If ye were raised
with Christ," which is " since ye were raised."
For in v. 46, he states their relation in time and so
assuraes their actuality : " the spiritual, however,
was not prior, but the psychical " ; and in v. 44,
he also states as a fact that " the body which is
sown is psychical, that which is raised is spiritual."
1 As Mr. Bradley does. Appearance and Reality, p. 510 : " A personal
continuance is possible, and it is but little more."
^ Yet it is difficult to evade the force of Lotze's striking affirmation :
" However much people may attempt to persuade themselves that the
self-conscious Ego is in fact only an event, a vanishing passage between
atoms variously moved, still the immediate consciousness of our personal
reality will always remain invincible to these attempts, and we can never
think of ourselves as melting away in the great receptacle of universal
Nature without thinking too that we shall still be preserved, and go on
existing in it in our dissolved condition " (Microcosmus, ii. 111).
' 1 Cor. XV. 44.

XXV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 467
Similarly, the psychical raan is declared inferior in
capacity to the spiritual man in 1 Cor. ii. 14. And
Jaraes iii. 17 describes the wisdora which coraeth
not down from above as psychical, whUe Jude 19
defines certain sophists as psychical, not having
spirit. The passage, however, in 1 Cor. xv. is the
only passage where it is affirraed that there are two
distinct bodies, one fitted to the ¦fvx'n, and the other
to the TTvevp.a, or as sorae raight prefer to say, one
body changed in order to be fit for a new and higher
" form." Where did St. Paul derive this idea
from ?
Recollecting that when Christianity arose
¦Gnosticism was already rife we shall first enquire
what this Protean system (or a-system) of thought
had to say about the psyche and its body. Clement
of Alexandria, in his Excerpta ex Theodoto, describes
the Valentinian gnosis as teaching a threefold
division of bodies symbolised by Cain, Abel, and
Seth. The first is void of reason, the second
possessed (or capable) of reason and righteousness,
the third is spiritual, and they may be terraed
hylic, psychic, spiritual. " Many are the hylic, not
many the psychical, but few are the spiritual. The
spiritual race is by nature saved, but the psychical
being free have an aptitude for faith and incorrup-
tion, or, according as they choose, for unbelief and
destruction. The hylic race, however, is by its
very nature lost." ! Following the Stoics the
author declares that the soul is a body.* But body
' Excerp. Ivi. 3.
' " Not only does it follow, as a coroUary from the materialistic view
of the world, that the soul must be in its nature corporeal, but the Stoics
took pains to uphold this view by special arguments. Whatever, they said,
influences the body, and is by it influenced in turn, whatever is united
with the body, and again separated from it, must be corporeal. How,

468 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
is not what it seems, for "it is woven out of the
invisible psychical essence, arriving at the sensible
world by virtue of Divine providence."! Corre
sponding with the threefold division of hylic,
psychical, and spiritual, Theodotus says that " the
Saviour taught the apostles the elements typically
and mystically, the later things paraboUcally and
enigmatically, but the third class of things plainly
and nakedly in private." *
But it was not alone in what we might call
orthodox Gnosticism that there was held a doctrine
of other bodies beside the physical. In the Jewish
world we find it, e.g. in the Slavonic Enoch. " The
risen righteous are conceived as possessing a heavenly
body : for they are clothed with the garments of
God's glory. Thus when Enoch was translated,
Michael is directed by God to remove Enoch's
earthly body, and to give hira a body coraposed of
the Divine glory : * ' And the Lord said to Michael ;

then, can the soul be other than corporeal ? " (Zeller, Stoics, Epicureans,
and Sceptics, 1870, p. 198). So Tertullian, De anima, c. v. : " The soul
is a body, and unless it were bodily it would not leave the body." But
he expressly bases himself on Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus.
* Excerp. 59 ; Bergson, in contrasting ancient thought with modern,
says of the former that it melted the conceptions of its science into one.
" Neither was the body then defined by geometrical expression, nor the
soul by consciousness. If the ^t-uxiy of Aristotle, the entelechy of a Uving
body is less spiritual than our ' Soul,' it is because his aCipji, already im
pregnated with the Idea, is less corporeal than our ' body ' " (Creative
Evolution, p. 369).
* Ibid, 66 ; Dr. Bigg, Christian Platonists, p. 61, sees here " a barbaric
Platonism, mingled with Mazdeism, coloured by the influence of the
Ebionites and strangely refracted echoes of St. Paul." It would be better
to say that all alike are fragments of the syncretistic thought of Hellenism,
which in the two centuries before and the two after the opening of the
Christian era ruled the Mediterranean basin. The same threefold division
is given by Irenaeus as taught by the disciples of Ptolemaeus, whose school
might be described as an off-shoot from that of Valentinus, Adv, Haer..
i. 5. 1, i. 5. 5, i. 7. 5, i. 8. 3, and by Hipp. Refut. v. 1.
» xxii. 8-10.

xxv THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 469
Go and take from Enoch his earthly robe, and anoint
him with My holy oil ; and clothe him with the
raiment of my glory.' " ! Josephus says that the
Pharisees believed in a resurrection of the soul
clothed in a body unlike the present.*
In the Apocalypse of Baruch we have a middle
doctrine. The question is asked explicitly as by
St. Paul : " In what shape will those live who live
in Thy day ? " and God replies : " The earth wiU
then assuredly restore the dead, which it now
receives, making no change in their form . . , for
it will be necessary to show the living that the dead
have come to life again," When in this way the
righteous dead have been identified their bodies
will be transformed, " their splendour will be
glorified in changes." It will be the same body
but transfigured.*
It is not clear whether the doctrine of the
Pharisees described by Josephus in the passage
just referred to teaches that the soul passes into a
different, and presumably more glorious body in the
world beyond this, or into another earthly body.
The sentence in Josephus affirms " that every soul
is iraperishable, but that only those of the righteous
pass into another body, while those of the wicked
are, onthe contrary, punished with eternal torraent."
Here the antithesis seems to make it certain that
the body is a higher and better body, as a condition
* Charles, Eschatology, p. 266.
* "Erepoj' o-w/io, De bell, Jud, ii. 8. 14.
' xlix. 2, 3 ; 1. and 11. ; Schiirer, Jewish People, Eng. trans, ii. 2. 180 ;
Charles, Eschatology, 280-281. So, too, the Ethiopian Enoch (Ixii. 15, 16)
expressly says that when the Son of Man appears the righteous will be
clothed with garments of glory, garments of life which will not grow old.
This does not mean that a new, different body or body of a higher order
will be substituted for the earthly body, or grow out of it and then leave
it, but that it is the same body stripped of its infirmities.

470 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
of bliss because it is opposed to the torment of the
wicked, which it could hardly be if the soul were
thought of as reincarnating in an earthly body.
But in another passage ! the Pharisees are made to
hold that eternal imprisonment is appointed for the
vile, but the possibility of returning to life for the
virtuous. Schiirer thinks that this passage is
against the doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
an unintelligible interpretation if by transmigration
is meant reincarnation.* But he insists that this
Pharisaic doctrine was not the raere opinion of a
philosophical school with respect to immortality,
but that upon which depends the direct religious
interest of the personal salvation of each individual.
For this appears to be guaranteed only on the
assumption of a resurrection of the body,*
The Alexandrine school, on the other hand,
tended, in consequence of its acceptance of the
Oriental view of the nature of matter, to deny any
resurrection of the body. It accepted the Orphic
formula awfia aijfia,* and held that when the
soul had done with the body it laid it down and
returned to its own proper region.^ This, however,
it is to be noticed, has never found any place in
Christian thought, which has been content to
symbolise here with St. Paul. Cleraent Al. is quite
clear that the resurrection body is not " this flesh "
as the Chiliasts thought of it, but this flesh purified
by fire and glorified, as wheat is made into bread
by fire, and as Christ Himself rose through fire.*
1 Ant. xviii. 1. 3. ^ Ibid, ii. 2. 13. ^ Ibid. loc. cit.
* " Some say that the body is the grave (o-^M") of the soul which may
be thought to be buried in our present life . . . probably the Orphic poets
were the inventors of the name " (Plato, Cratylus, 400).
» Wisd. viii. 19, 20 ; Philo, De migr. Abrah. ii. 437.
« Paed. i. 4. 10 ; 6. 46.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 471
Irenaeus builds his argument for the resurrection
body being this flesh, with the attribute of incorrup-
tion added, on the three resurrection miracles in
the Gospels, and on 1 Cor. xv. 53, and PhU. in. 21.
The " body of our humiUation " is that which is
" humUiated by being laid in the earth. It is trans
figured when from being mortal and corruptible
it becomes iramortal and incorruptible, not of its
own substance, but on account of the power of the
Lord who is able to add to what is mortal immor
tality, and incorruption to what is corruptible." !
This view directed against Valentinians is com
patible with the Chiliasm held by Irenaeus, and
with that it stands or falls.*
With Origen, the first great constructive Christian
thinker, we pass into a different atmosphere in
which Holy Scripture and Reason both receive
reverent treatment. He held with Scripture that
the resurrection body is the same body as was worn
on earth, and with Reason that it is different. The
connecting link between tbe two is the " germinative
principle." This it is which weaves the body which
belongs to this aeon, and also the body which will
be ours in the next aeon. This doctrine, though
substantially that of St. Paul, yet seems to go one
step further forward in its analysis. According to
1 Cor. XV. a living principle is " sown " in a mortal
frame when a raan is born into this world, and the
power which gives that body is God. The same
continuous living principle is " raised " and again
it is God which gives the body as it pleases Hira.
The analogy quoted to make this process more
inteUigible is that of the grain sown in the earth,
1 Adv. Haer. v. 13. 3 ; Harvey, ii. p. 357.
2 Irenaeus states his Chiliastic views in v. 33 and 34.

472 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
decaying and rising again in a fairer form. Analogy,
however, is not, and is not used here as proof.
Implicit in the teaching alike of St. Paul and of
Origen is the postulate of the union in our personality
of a relatively permanent " Self," and a fleeting
body. The former belongs essentially to the world
of Being, and the latter to the world of Becoraing.
Hence the fact that our present bodies have no
permanence in themselves from moment to moment
— any more than a river has — makes it evident that
the same argument which denies to the resurrection-
body continuity with the earthly body is equally
valid against tbe continuity of this earthly body
from one raoraent to another. That is to say, it is
in the immortal part of us where the ground of
continuity lies both now and then, and hence all
that the doctrine of the resurrection of the body
implies necessarily is that the fact that as man
requires a body now to complete his personality,
so will he require a body then and for the same
reason. Our present body is raade up of atoms
of raatter ; tbe future raay be constructed of light,
or of aether, or of sorae " imponderable," or may
not be compounded at all. All that seeras necessary
to the Christian doctrine is the conclusion that
just as our spiritual, permanent, and germinative
principle now requires a body in keeping with its
environment, so the same numerically identical
principle will require, and will again weave for itself,
a body, or organ, adapted to its new environment.
When we know something about the nature of the
new heaven and the new earth that are then to be
we shaU be better able to say something more
definite about the new body which will correspond
to thera.

XXV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 473
Meanwhile, one further thought should not be
overlooked. The beginnings of the new order are
made in this. When a man turns from Satan to
God, from egoism to love, when he is made partaker
of the Spirit from above, a process of reconstruction
of the whole personality sets in. In this the physical
has its share, as may be easily seen by anybody who
will be at the pains to study the faces, gestures, and
gait of the people be meets. It is not, therefore, a
mere gratuitous guess which suggests that the
resurrection body may be woven from materials
already trained and fitted by the Spirit while it used
a physical body. The process may be unintelligible,
as indeed at bottom all life-processes are, but at all
events it is not essentially different frora the process
by which Life uses the materials of the mineral
world to construct the bodies of plants, and of the
plant world to construct the bodies of animals.
The bodies of aniraals, if this thought be pursued,
may well be used to construct the bodies of those
who are to be the angels, clad in a body of light.
And with this prophetic vision, which is not proof,
nor refractory to proof, we may be content to leave
this part of our enquiry.
There remains, however, still the difficulty of
tracing the genesis of St. Paul's thought. For it
stands alone in the N.T., and has no support in any
recorded words of our Lord's. He spoke of His
second coming, of a catastrophe which would
introduce a new order, of passing frora death to life,
of the dead in the graves hearing His voice and
coming forth to judgment, of the resurrection of the
righteous, and of " that world," but all this is either
the resurrection of Chiliasra as understood by the
apocalyptic, or else a contrast drawn between un-

474 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
spiritual and spiritual living.! ^j^(j ^j^g whole
tenour of Christ's life and teaching raakes for the
latter hypothesis.*
We are driven then to the belief that the doctrine
of the resurrection of the body has its roots else
where than in the Gospel story, and that later
speculations about the nature of Christ's resurrection
body derive ultimately from the same beginnings.*
It would be natural to look to Mithraism with its
many remarkable points of resemblance to Christian
doctrines, and its " doctrine of heaven and hell, of
primitive revelation, of the mediation of the Logos
emanating from the Divine, the atoning sacrifice,
the constant warfare between good and evil, and
the final triumph of the former, the immortality
of the soul, the last judgraent, the resurrection of
the flesh, and the fiery destruction of the universe." *
But Persian thought about the last things is better
represented in Jewish apocalypses than in the
epistles of St. Paul.^ Nor is any support for the
1 " The true antithesis is not between spirit and matter, or between
spirit and form, but between a spiritual and an unspiritual use of the
material vehicles of worship " (A. E. J. Rawlinson in Foundations, p. 390).
2 Cf. Alger, Tfie Doctrine of a Future Life, 10th ed. p. 324 : " The true
resurrection is, to come into the experience of the truth that God is not the
God of the dead but of the living, for all live unto Him. Over the soul
that is filled with such an experience death has no power. Verily, I say
unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead, the ignorant
and guilty, buried in trespasses and sins, shall hear these truths declared)
and they that believe shall lay hold of the life thus offered and be blessed."
The resurrection to life, however, here spoken of as taught by Jesus, is
not the resurrection of the body as taught by St. Paul and affirmed in the
Creed. ' As, e,g,, those of St. Thomas Aquinas In Pauli Epp., when comment
ing on 1 Cor. XV., he finds impassibility, clarity, agility, and subtlety as
the four marks of the resurrection-body in general, where the conclusions
are due as much to Reasoning as to the text.
* Ency. Brit, llth ed. xviii. 624.
^ Cumont, after describing how the soul of the righteous after death
mounted through the seven heavens to eternal bliss in the eighth, goes on
to say : " Une autre croyance, qui s'ajoutait ^ la premifere par une sorte

xxv THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 475
doctrine of the resurrection of the body forthcoming
from Greek thought, and Indian thought in general
denied all reality to the body and confined the evil
which it was to this present order. There reraains
Egyptian religion, and this seems to afford some
support to St. Paul's course of thought.
Egyptian thought and cult united old and new
in a peculiar fashion. When Egypt took over any
thing new it did not allow it to banish or modify
the old, but it merely added the new to the old
whether accordant or discordant. This practice
is seen in the nuraerous variants for the immaterial
part of man, such as the Ba or heart, the Ka or
double, the Sahu or " form," the Khaib or shadow,
and above thera all, the imraortal Self or Osiris,
" Concerning the future state of man there were
at least three wholly contradictory theories — the
Earthly, the Elysian, and the Solar theories ; and
it is probable that the mummy theory is a fourth." !
When the Osiris was separated from his body he
set out on a perilous journey through the under
world fortified by texts from the Book of the Dead,
just as the devout Catholic is fortified by the rites
of the Church. Finally, he was ushered into the
HaU of the Double Truth, and appeared before the
god Osiris and his forty-two assessors. His heart
was weighed, and if it gave a good account of him
he recovered his immortal elements already dis
joined by death and was admitted into the circle of
the gods.
In this blessed condition the man, now become
de superf^tation, leur offrait la perspective de jouissances plus mat^rielles.
La doctrine de I'immortalit^ de I'ame 6tait coinpl6t6e par celle de la re
surrection de la chair," Les Mysteres de Mithra, 1902, p. 121.
1 W. M. Flinders Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt,
1898, p. 49.

476 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Osiris, is free of the three worlds. He is not under
any necessity to reincarnate, but he is free to do so
whenever he wants to. " Again and again the
texts assert that the blessed may assume any form
and visit any place at will ; body and place can no
longer enthral him. . . . The power of the soul to
incarnate itself at pleasure became one of the chief
reasons for embalming the body. . . . The pre
servation of the body was held to be necessary
because the mumray was supposed to be the raaterial
form of which the Osiris was the essential reality.
. . . The soul might soraetiraes visit the mummy,
again take up its abode in its former body, and
animating it anew, return to earth under that form
and thus revisit the spots where once it had dwelt.
To this end it required an earthly and tangible body,
and this was supplied by the mummy. If the
mummy were destroyed, then the soul not only lost
one of the forms in which it might incarnate itself,
but that one with which its interests were naturally
raost closely connected. . . . The destruction of
the mummy did not involve the destruction of the
soul, but it narrowed the soul's circle of activity
and limited its raeans of transmigration." !
This close connection between body and soul
was a ruling thought in Egypt during the period
which saw the gradual formation of the Apostles'
Creed, and it is hardly credible, all things considered,
that its article on the " Resurrection of the Body "
was constructed out of all relation to the Egyptian
doctrine. The magical texts, for example, which
were once classed alraost as a raatter of course under
the head of Gnosticism spring out of this belief in
* A. Wiedemann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Immortality, 1895,
p. 67 f.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 477
the power of the blessed to reincarnate at will, or
when duly commanded by the right word spoken
by the right person at the right time and in the
right way. But the facts of the life of Jesus Christ
as given in the Creed often forraed part of the
magical formula used in rites of sanctification,
purification, or exorcism,! Hence it is, to say the
least, not iraprobable that the Egyptian doctrine
of the freedom and capacity of the blessed dead
helped to crystallise Christian thought when it came
to be reflective.
Nor can this possibility be evaded by any
suggestion that Egyptian thought figured the process
which led to blessedness as setting in immediately
after death and consummated in no long time, while
Christian thought postponed the consummation
till the Judgment Day — a Day still outstanding.
For this Day was not always thought as being far
off, and in the Fourth Gospel it was regarded as
already here. Moreover, " the final judgment and
the resurrection have no necessary connection." *
And again, as the dominant Christian view regards
the resurrection as the consequence of oneness with
God, participation in His Spirit, and as believers
have an " earnest " of this already here in the flesh
there is no reason why the blessedness figured in
Egyptian thought should be postponed necessarily
to the " close of the age." In any case Jesus was
^ Justin, Dial. 30, 85 ; Apol. u. 6 ; Origen, Contra Cels, i. 6, iu. 24 ;
Irenaeus ii. 49. 3 ; see HeitmiUler, Im Namen Jesu, for the use of " the
Name " in N.T. pp. 52-88, and in later times pp. 211 ff.
" R. H. Charles, " Eschatology " in Ency, Bibl, ii. 1375 ; Charles also
points out that " in the writings of Paul " eschatology is in a state of
development ; that he began with an expectation inherited from tradi
tional Judaism, " and entered on a process of development in the course
of which the heterogeneous elements were silently dropped," and that
his thought even in the last did not attain finality.

478 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
held to have already attained this blessedness, and
union with Him was the guarantee of a similar
attainment sooner or later. Christian thought,
while holding fast to this expectation, came eventu
ally to acquiesce in the inability of anybody but
God to know the day or the hour of the " resurrec
tion of the body."
If it be thought that Egyptian eschatology is
too alien from Christian thought to justify us in
connecting the two, the following from so orthodox
a person as Professor C. A. Briggs may be cited :
" The view that best commends itself to me, is that
there is a spiritual body which underlies and gives
shape and organisation to the physical body. This
body is inseparable from the soul, goes forth with
the soul at death, and in the intermediate state
assumes the substance of the intermediate place of
souls. When the final change comes for the ultimate
state of existence at the resurrection, the sarae body
takes to itself the substances of the final place of
its abode : the body, the sarae in forra and structure,
but different in its substance.!
So, too, Weizaeker in discussing the nature of
the appearance of the risen Christ to Peter and in
appealing to the " oldest tradition of Jesus' teach
ing " says : " There can be no doubt that according
to this tradition the souls of the pious were beUeved
to live in a new kind of body, a body of an essentially
heavenly quality. This is expressed in Jesus'
answer to the question of the Sadducees about
marriage, ' They shall there be as the angels of God.'
This is in fact their resurrection. . , . Besides, we
can refer here to the story of the Transfiguration, an
incident exclusively designed to show Jesus trans-
1 Fundamental Christian Faith, p. 209.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 479
formed at this particular moment, even in his
earthly life, into a heavenly form of light." !
It will be by this time clear that as the judgment
has no necessary connection with the resurrection
so neither has the intermediate state. The resurrec
tion might take place immediately after death ;
indeed it raight take place even in the flesh,* and
in either case there would be no intermediate stage
at all. But, on the other hand. Christian thought
came to settle down, as the Parousia was delayed,
to the conviction that there was an intermediate
state, and that it was not a condition of dreamless
sleep, but of activity, though the activity was less
strenuous than in the flesh.*
But another account of the nature of this inter
mediate state has lately been revived in the forra
of the doctrine of reincarnation. It is obvious
that this, too, has no necessary connection with the
resurrection of the body, but is at best only a con
tingent preparation for it. It professes to tell us,
in raore or less intelligible language, a truth which
does away with any intermediate state altogether
by merging it in our present existence in the flesh.
It does indeed borrow from Hindu thought a
doctrine of Devachan,* but though life there is
fabled as lasting through " many thousands of
years," and as being on one side "formless," yet
that life is our night sandwiched in between two
days. We sow here, we reap there, or rather there
we " consume and assiraUate all the pure thoughts
and emotions generated during earth-life " here.
The story of man is the story of " his evolution by
1 Apostolic Age, i. 15. ^ 2 Tim. u. 18.
' This again was a characteristic note of Egyptian eschatology, though
here the working is after the award of Osiris.
* " The theosophical name for heaven."

480 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
repeated incarnations into which he is drawn by
desire, and from which he is set free by knowledge
and sacrifice, becoming divine in potency as he had
ever been divine in latency." !
There is no antecedent improbability in the
doctrine of reincarnation, once there be granted
that there exists a Self, or individual Spirit, or
Thinker which is raan. " None but very hasty
thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent
absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself,
that of transmigration has its roots in the world of
reality ; and it may claira such support as the great
argument frora analogy is capable of supplying." *
Sirailarly Professor Jaraes Ward says : " If the
notion of a merely bodily resurrection was incredible
in Leibniz's day it is still more incredible in our own.
Who expects to see trilobites and ammonites, the
pterodactyle and the diplodocus come to life again ?
... At any rate ' metempsychosis ' in sorae form
seems an unavoidable corollary of thorough-going
' pampsychisra ' so long as we look broadly at the
facts of life as a whole." * Neither of these writers,
of course, expresses any opinion about the question
of mere fact. It should be noticed that the doc
trine of the pre-existence of souls has no necessary
* Those interested in the subject may consult Annie Besant' s Ancient
Wisdom, 1897, a work which can hardly be said to have any scientific
value, since it proceeds on the method of the man who told his interlocutor
that " he was not arguing, he was teUing him " ; the work of " Brother
Atisha," entitled Exposition of the Doctrine of Karma, 1910, and The
Origin and History of Reincarnation, A Symposium, 1912, may be con
sulted. Of theosophical writers in general it is enough to say that they
construe'' marvellous cosmogonies out of the slenderest materials, that
they lean to the mechanical interpretation of things, that they pUe up
their certainties on uncertainties, that their systems have no place for
free-will, worship, or love of God, and that they have a doctrine of un
reality but none of Reality.
2 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1894, p. 61.
= The Realm of Ends, 1912, pp. 212-213.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 481
connection with reincarnation, though it may have
much to do with incarnation.
Among reasons alleged for the hypothesis of
Reincarnation are the following :
1. If souls be created specially for each birth it
is difficult to see any rational ground for the death
of infants. It would have been not impossible to
Divine Wisdom to so arrange the mechanism of the
universe that parents incapable of handing down
a body which could last for more than a short time
should be barred frora handing one down at all.
Can Divine economy be thought of as less efficient
than human ? May there not be reason in the
epitaph on the infant which ran —
I wonder what I was begun for.
Since I so speedily was done for ?
2. The inequalities of life are not necessarily
examples of injustice, for justice does not demand
equality of goods, conditions, opportunities, merit,
social service, or reward, but equality of considera
tion.! Yet the constitution of most coramunities
of which history tells the tale, and of all existing
civilised communities discloses degrees of inequality
which often amount to a negation of good in any
sense. The man whose life is made raiserable and
shortened by inherited tendencies to venereal disease
or drunkenness, or anti-social modes of life, the
child born and bred in a slum, where physical and
moral Well-being are below zero, present problems
1 The rights of man " are all ultimately resolvable into the one supreme
and unconditional right — tfie right to consideration " (Rashdall, Tfie Theory
of Good and Evil, i. 227). Dr. Rashdall restates Bentham's maxim,
" Everyone to count for one and nobody for more than one " in the form :
" Everybody's good to be treated as of equal value with the like good
of everyone else " (ibid. i. 222). 2l

482 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
which shock our sense of justice, however you may
choose to define justice. The Good which is the end
of all truly huraan conduct is beyond their reach
through the whole of their life, and they die without
ever having known that there is a land of eternal
Beauty very far off. On the assuraption that raan
was raade for Good (however Good may be defined),
it is difficult to see that this purpose is adequately
fulfilled in more than a small proportion of human
beings, so long as we hold that one life here is the
only chance man has of qualifying for that Good.
Nor is this shock to our moral sense removed by
the suggestion that the man with the receding
forehead and no chin will be judged by what he
might have done, and not by what he could not do.
For we are still compelled to ask what necessity
there is in the nature of things for some men start
ing as criminally disposed, as idiots, epileptics, or
as tainted in any way. And if it be replied that all
these things happen under Law, and are due to the
violation of Law by some ancestor or other in the
past, or to the carelessness or malevolence of some
contemporary, then we are forced to ask why A
should suffer because B was wicked. Why should
my life be tormented with gout because my great
grandfather drank much port ? That the world is
so constituted that we do suffer for other people's
misdoings to the third and fourth generation is un
questionable, but on what hypothesis can we square
it with the maxim of distributive justice which lays
down that the children's teeth should not be set
on edge because the father's have eaten sour grapes ?
Reincarnation offers just such an hypothesis.
At all events it suggests that the shock to our
moral sense may be lessened if the soul that suffers

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 483
vicariously can be thought of as having for some
reason brought on itself under unbending Law
just this condition under which it now suffers, or
if it can be thought that the ultimate Good for
which it is destined is unattainable except on con
dition of going through just that experience which
we feel to be shocking. Unfortunately this Law
that what a man sows that shall he reap is often
described as an externally - imposed necessity in
fiicted as a punishment by God, a view which springs
from the conception of God as an Assyrian monarch
delighting in cruelty, or a usurer demanding remorse
lessly his pound of flesh. The Law, however, is
less a law than a principle of action inherent in the
nature of the doer, and wjien this principle issues
automatically in the assignment to the soul of what
appears to most to be harsh and loveless conditions,
then we must say that these conditions are not
punishment but discipline. They raay spring out
of past lives, but their purpose is a better future.
The Lord is chastening the soul because He loves it,
and for no other reason. And though we may not
see it while the outward man is thus decadent the
inner man may be drawing spiritual nutriment out
of an environment which appears to be wholly evil.
This view is, of course, nothing better than an
hypothesis, but as all hypotheses are provisional
only it may be worth consideration until a better
appears. The ordinary feeling which evades the
difficulty by saying piously that the ways of God
are inscrutable has doubtless good feeling on its
side, but it is good feeling misdirected, and is less
rational, in any case, than the most ill-founded
hypothesis. For this latter does imply a belief
that the world is rational.

484 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
3. The principle of Evolution which dominates
modern thought is favourable to a theory of Re
incarnation. For Evolution is based on a conscious
or unconscious rejection of Hume's theory of
Causality, and affirms that whatever had " a
beginning raust be accounted for and explained
as the necessary outcome of something already in
existence before that beginning." Its fundamental
dogma is that the history of everything in space
and time contains a continuum which is found as
a constant in all its vicissitudes. Evolution does
not necessarily demand a belief in a closed universe,
though this is often tacitly assumed — as, for example,
in deductions made from the hypothesis of the
Conservation of Energy, — but it does demand a right
to try to trace back the history of every phenomenon
as far as our instruments will serve us to trace
it. And its face is set against any theory which
postulates new departures. It is obvious, therefore,
that the theory of the new departure involved in
" Creationism " as applied to souls must run the
gauntlet of the whole evolutionary school. If, then,
it rejects " Creationism," there seems left only
Tradueianism and Reincarnation. But Tradueian
ism, or the theory which derives soul as well as
body from the parents, is only possible to any
Christian thought known to history if soul is limited
to the anima sensitiva aut vegetativa.^
It is so limited by Alger, for example, who says :
' St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the anima is threefold, vegetative,
sensitive, and rational (Summa, la, q. 78. 1) ; that the vegetative soul
is not created, la, q. 118. 1 ; that neither it nor the sensitive pre-exists
in the semen (ibid,), yet that it is transmuted in the semen (ibid,) ; that
there cannot be several souls in one body (la, q. 76. 5) ; that there is
only one, viz. the rational, which discharges the functions of a soul at
once vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual (ibid, la, q. 76. 3). In all
his body of doctrine be is following the Aristotelian tradition.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 485
" That the soul of the child comes in some way
from the soul of the parent, or is stamped by it, is
also implied by the normal resemblance of children
to parents, not more in bodily form than in spiritual
idiosyncrasies. ... As the body of the child is
the derivative of a germ elaborated in the body of
the parent, so the soul of the child is the derivative
of a developing impulse of power imparted from the
soul of the parent." ! And he endorses the uni
versally accepted scientific theory of epigenesis
first put forward by Harvey according to which
" the formation of the new organism by the process
of generation takes place ... by epigenesis, or
successive differentiation of a relatively homogeneous
rudiment into the parts and structures which are
characteristic of the adult." *
This hypothesis of epigenesis, however, describes
the method only and leaves untouched the motive
power, for in any case whether we regard the soul
as a product of matter as with " epi-phenomenalisra,"
or as newly created, or as pre-existent, and then
infused, the process at the last defies all our intelli
gence. All we are justified in saying under this
heading is that Reincarnation is corapatible with
Tradueianism, and also with epigenesis, and is also
compatible with the spiritual nature of the Soul
which Traducianisra tends, but tends only, to deny.
If the Soul be essentially rational (or spiritual)
we can find nothing contradictory in the proposi
tion that it is created afresh in each case by God,
or that being already in existence it is united
by the Divine Will to a body, but it is contrary
1 The Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 15 ; the alternative " or is stamped
by it " gives away the case.
3 Ency. Brit., llth ed., art. " Evolution," x. 29.

486 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
to truth and fact to trace the growth of the
higher from the lower to the exclusion of all
stimulus from the higher. To the Evolutionist,
therefore, who is also a Theist, Reincarnation is
a more plausible theory than either Creationism or
Tradueianism. 4. An indirect argument for Reincarnation may
be borrowed frora the tendency of current logic to
see the universe as a related whole in which all the
parts share the Reality of the whole and are them
selves, therefore, real. " Without mind no orderly
world " is one - half of its creed ; " without an
orderly world no mind " is the other, and Reality
includes all the experience which the joint opera
tion of these two principles has bestowed on us.
" Subject and object grow together. The power
and vitality of the one is the power and vitality of
the other, and this is so because they are not two
things with separate roots, but are both rooted in
a common reality which, while it includes, is more
than either." ! But this unity of organised know
ledge corresponds to a unity in the nature of things,
and so extradites the dualism of " this world " and
" that world." It certainly leaves room for the
continuance of individuated spirits after they cease
to be visible through union with a physical body,
and so far may afford a theoretic base for Spiritual
ism, but (if sufficient proof were forthcoming) it
would be best exemplified by the reappearance of
such a spirit in a physical body, and by its resump
tion (with whatever modifications necessary) of
its customary relations with the members of the
world of ordinary experience. But this argument
is no more than a presumption, and may be easily
^ Ency. Brit,, llth ed., art. " Idealism," xiv. 285.

XXV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 487
shown to carry no weight, whenever the scales are
otherwise loaded against Reincarnation.
5. The growing sense of the value of Life over
Mechanism testified to by the systems of thought
of Schopenhauer, Bergson, and the Pragmatist
school tends to suggest the conviction that three
score years and ten afford a stage far too sraall for
the full growth of so fine a thing as a human soul.
If an oak-tree take two hundred years to attain its
full strength, will not a Soul require an indefinitely
longer period ? And the question will seem fatal
to any doctrine of human life which restricts
probation to this one present life here and now.
But, of course, it does not exclude the possibility
of a continued probation in different conditions in
the Universe. Other planets, other suns or stars
may afford pasturage and the power to go in and
out ; and for some souls they may be places adapted
to their spiritual needs. But what is characteristic
of this Earth of ours is that it affords opportunities
for the stimulation of spiritual life through the
sense-world, and what is more for the concentration,
and therefore for the perfecting, of that spiritual
life through mastery, negatively and positively,
of the world revealed to and through the senses.
And the law of Nature which consists in the
production of effects through the least possible ex
penditure of force would seem to demand that where
this sense - world has not yet finished its work on
the Soul it should be afforded repeated opportunities
until it has. And this is what is meant by, at all
events, one theory of Reincarnation.
6. Greek thought held that in the beginning
Chaos ruled, amorphous, cloudy, and dark, and
that in due time, as Anaxagoras said, " Nous came

488 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
and set everything in order." The finite, that is,
is superior to the infinite, or in modern language
the actual is better than the potential. It is the
spirit which makes of each human complex an
ordered whole. But, on the other hand, it is
the body which affords the spirit its principle of
individuation. Apply the Orphic notion of the
body being the tomb of the soul, and then at
death you have not freedom but annihilation of
the individual by its being raerged in the Whole.
We can no longer say :
Eternal form shall still divide
Eternal soul from all beside ;
And I shall know him when we meet.^
So that unless we are to accept the notion of the
dew-drop slipping into the ocean we raust raaintain
that the body is as necessary to spirit as spirit is
to body. Without the one no life ; without the
other no Self ; without a brotherhood of Selves no
cosmos. It is true indeed that this course of thought
necessitates a body, but that it does not demand
this physical body.* That is so ; but again (1) so
long as the needs of the spirit can be met by the
physical body of this Earth alone, it would seem
that the Spirit will somehow be assigned repeatedly
such a physical body. (2) The whole course of
progress, so far as man has been able to trace it,
is by the higher carrying with it the lower, not by
1 Tennyson, In Memoriam, 47.
2 " Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.
As the swift seasons roll ;
Leave thy low vaulted past !
Let each new temple, nobler than the last.
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast."
O. W. Holmes, The Chambered Nautilus.

XXV THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 489
its dropping the lower.! " As the smallest grain
of dust is bound up with our entire solar system,
drawn along with it in that undivided movement
of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised
beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do
but evidence a single impulsion, the universe of the
raoveraent of matter, and in itself indivisible. All
the living hold together, and all yield to the sarae
tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on
the planet, raan bestrides animality, and the whole
of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense
army galloping beside and before and behind each
of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every
resistance, and clear the most formidable obstacles,
perhaps even death." * And it does not seem
unreasonable to hold with the Egyptian thought
referred to above (p. 476) that when the higher is
reached the power to enter into possession of the
lower and use it is not abrogated but confirmed
and made permanent. This, too, seems to be what
is involved in the doctrine of the resurrection of
Jesus according to which the body which He takes
is the body of each man who surrenders to Him,
and lets Him now use him as an organ of His will.
It would be a corollary from this doctrine to say
that such free reincarnation is reserved for the
^ " Each higher grade includes and embraces all the lower : minerals
have l^is, plants ffis and (pvcns ; the lower animals l^is, <^iais and i>vxv,
and man efis, </>i}(ris, ^vxi, and i-ous ; so that there is a real solidarity
or unity stretching ' through all the mighty commonwealth of things,'
not merely, as Wordsworth says,
' Up from the creeping plant to sovereign man,'
but from the lowest creations of even inorganic nature up to sovereign
man ; for God, according to the Stoics, is present even in the most
ignoble forms of matter " (James Adam, Vitality of Platonism, 191] ,
p. 156).
2 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1911, pp. 285-286.

490 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
spirits which have attained blessedness, and that
any reincarnation which takes place prior to that
is not of freedom but of necessity, not for action
but for discipline.
On the whole we may say with Professor James
Ward, " Any continuity of life with no continuity
of either organism or environment seems quite
inconceivable." " But there is nothing," he goes
on to say, " in our present knowledge to show that
there cannot be any other mode of embodiment
than that with which we are here familiar, and that
we have not manifold other .relations with our
environment besides those which the organism as
we know it is supposed to explain." !
7. On any noble theory of life a Purgatory some
where and somehow is a necessity. No thoughtful
person nowadays, least of all since Bergson began
to teach, holds the older view that our three-score
years and ten entail either an eternity of bliss or
an eternity of woe. We raay confess that the
boundaries of our knowledge are sadly restricted,
but of one thing we are sure, and that is that such
tremendous issues cannot depend on such inadequate
pre-conditions if the World is the expression of
Reason or Wisdom. Moreover, the extended view
of space and tirae that modern thought offers to us,
joined to a quickened sense of the Evil inherent in
the world as it is, compel us to look for a Purgatory
with sufficient time at its disposal to allow for the
slow elimination of imperfections which we already
see in Nature. But the general feeling of mankind,^
when in a calra hour it sits down to reflect, assures
us that life on this earth offers all the discipline of
thought, feeling, and will necessary for that purifica-
1 The Realm of Ends, 1912, p. 399.

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 491
tion which must precede blessedness. If this be so,
if this life be our Purgatory, it would foUow that so
long as we are stained with Evil, so long raust we be
liable to what St. Jaraes caUs " the wheel of birth." !
The very inequality of the struggle for the moral
life which we see around us suggests insoluble
difficulties if our chance of heaven depends on this
one life. Some seera good by nature, others have
an extraordinary tendency to original sin, but aU
have to struggle for the estabUshraent ofthe " habit "
of virtue. And not only is the struggle unequal
through some competitors being heavily handi
capped, but, as far as we can see, even the most
strenuous does not completely fulfil the conditions
which entitle the victor to the prize. To few is it
given to say, " I have finished the course, I have
kept the faith " ; the average man can hardly
count himself to have apprehended at all, and all
would probably affirm that at death their fight
has but begun. And it is certain that the perfected
life is attained only when the struggle, or the
testing, or the purifying (these are but co-ordinant
aspects of the same thing) is corapleted. If, then,
it is not attained here and now. Nature insists on
the task being taken up where it was laid down.
And this may involve Reincarnation.*
^ tbv Tpoxbv TTjs yeviaews, 36, and see there Mayor's note.
2 Cf. Rashdall, Tfie Theory of Good and Evil, ii. 80 : " It is difficult to
see how, without some struggle, a virtuous character can be formed at all.
Certainly in the absence of temptation the character cannot be tested ;
and untU the character has been tested there would seem to be rather the
potentiaUty of Virtue of character than the actuality of it. The struggle
need not be always kept up, but it must have been gone through." Dr.
Rashdall, however, concludes against the doctrine of the Pre-existence
of Souls (which is not logically the same as the doctrine of Reincarnation)
on the ground that for one difliculty it removes it creates a hundred
(ii. 345-347). This, however, James Ward " makes bold to deny " (Realm
of Ends, p. 404).

492 MYSTICISM AND TIIE CREED chap.
8. Sorae such doctrine as that of Reincarnation
seems necessary if we are to face with hope and
courage some of the most distressing examples of
apparent total failure of souls in this life. The
idiot, unless he has more lives here than the one
he now cannot make adequate use of, is deprived
of all capacity for ever of making the most of life
on our planet. The sensualist who goes to his
grave with untamed passions ; the successful man
of affairs who, heedless to the last of the claim of
brotherhood, rides triumphantly to the Palace of
Mammon over the bodies of the competitors he has
crushed ; or, again, the financier who at last fails
in his calculations, and mad with rage and shame
shoots himself ; a Nietzsche, Weininger, Chatterton,
Byron, Napoleon, and the myriads of strong souls
who have passed away, early or late, but im
perfect ; the great mass of us who do not expect
to die perfected, because we see none who have
finished their education here, — all these leave behind
them the feeling of doubt in the hearts of those
who loved thera, and of anxious questioning as to
their future. Further probation, a more prolonged
education still, if we could be sure that it would
follow, would dispel this doubt and questioning,
and, if it were otherwise raade probable, the
hypothesis of Reincarnation would satisfy the
demands of the moral sense and of the heart.
9. No doubt Truth itself is sufficient reward for
the earnest lover, and the pleasure of a conscience
obeyed needs no further support, and yet the
thought that the end of this life is also the end of
our intellectual or moral treasure, that acquired
qualities, no matter with what labour or merit
made our own, are annihilated at death raust, if

THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 493
dwelt on, paralyse the nerve of effort by the in
ference that if this be so then all is vanity. And
this thought is not to be dismissed summarily as
the care of a part for itself. It springs rather from
the nobler reluctance to admit that Nature is a
spendthrift, and from a feeling that the end requires
the husbanding of all co- operant raeans. But
the supposition that nothing perishes, and that
dexterity and wisdora won in the faithful service
of the Good will fit their possessor for better service
in his next life, will remove all temptation to apathy
based on a suspicion of the futility of life.
" The individual, it may be, that falls out of
the ranks for a time is not dead but only sleepeth,
yet if he return not as the sarae identical person but
only, so to say, as the sarae raetaphysical entity
. . . we are forced once raore to ask what worth
or raeaning is there in such revolutions. ... In a
word without such spiritual continuity as theism
alone seems able to ensure, it looks as if a pluralistic
world were condemned to a Sisyphean task. Per
aspera ad astra raay be its motto, hut faeilis descensus
Averno seems to be its fate." !
There is no reason for demanding that the
returning Soul should remeraber its past life or
lives, and claims to such remembering whenever
made should be subjected to severe criticism. For,
in the first place, the presumption is against them.
Facts of experience are facts of mechanism and not
of life so long as their material is not transmuted
into faculty, and when the faculty is there the fact
is superfluous. A man who spent his life in the
study and practice of music might well begin his
next life as a musical genius and be an " infant
1 James Ward. Tlie Realm of Ends, 1912, pp. 214-5.

494 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
prodigy " at the pianoforte at three years old, but
it would be absurd to say that a recollection of having
played the flute at Epidauros was a raore cogent
arguraent for Reincarnation than the power to
write the Twelfth Mass or the Pastoral Syraphony.
A man's strength is best evidenced by the foot
pound force he can put forth, and is no better
attested by his remembering the dinners and
physical exercises which are now best showing
themselves in his health and vigour. The same
argument, of course, applies to all relationships
which possess no intrinsic significance.
10. There are objects for which a man rightly
lays down his life, such as his honour, the safety
of those dependent on him, the good of his country,
or the cause of humanity. And it may be held that
a man who sacrifices his life for any of these objects
gets all he can well expect in the happiness thus
vicariously enjoyed in those he benefits. But the
plea is unsatisfactory. The whole is not really
benefited by any lowering of the vitality or oppor
tunities of any single one of its raerabers. It is
right, no doubt, that the individual should think
only of the larger life of the community and sacrifice
his own well-being for it. But the whole could
hardly be a moral whole if it could accept the
sacrifice at the expense of its meraber. And the
solution seems to be that the life is laid down only
to be taken up again in a richer and more exalted
degree, that in a very real sense he that lays down
his life for honour, truth, goodness, or love — which
are all attributes of Christ — receives it again thirty-
fold, sixtyfold, or a hundredfold. And though this
enhanced life is not necessarily to be found in
renewed experience in a physical body, yet on the

xxv THE ELEVENTH ARTICLE 495
whole it seems most fit that the crown should be
worn in the arena where the fight took place.
But if the cumulative probability of the above
ten considerations be still thought too slight even
to form a working hypothesis, let us hasten to add
that possibly Re - embodiment is the truth which
lies at the heart of the conjecture of Reincarnation.
And the grounds for this truth, it will probably be
admitted, are far more solid than those on which
Reincarnation rests. It would be better, therefore,
to start the arguraent in support of Re-embodiment,
and if that be shown to be valid then to enquire
what grounds there may be for excluding the
principle of Re-embodiment from acting on this
planet on which we are now living.
However, whether these considerations be
weighty or not — and some of them are less shadowy
than others, — they do not affect directly the doctrine
of the Resurrection of the Body. For this doctrine
belongs to Eschatology, and not to the constant
course of things before the end. And its funda
mental tenet is that in the completed state man
will still be the man we know composed of body
and spirit, so that the " other side " will be found
of a piece with " this side." He who made this
world Divine by entering it also makes that world
human by carrying there the body of His humilia
tion, now a glorious body without spot or wrinkle
or any such thing.

CHAPTER XXVI
THE TWELFTH ARTICLE
Everlasting life
Et? ^o)'^v aicoviov
" The eternal life is the eternal life that follows the
resurrection of the body and the final judgment ;
and not the eternal life which begins, according to
the Gospel of John, with the new birth in this world,
or that which begins immediately after death." !
To show that this threefold division of what is one
and undivided is unwarranted by Christian tradition
will be the object of the following pages. It will
be best to begin with what Professor Briggs wholly
ignores, viz. the precise meaning of the word
rendered in our Creed everlasting.^ AlflN
O.T. Usage
Aeon is a term which is of frequent occurrence
both in the LXX and in the N.T. In the LXX as
^ C. A. Briggs, Fundamental Christian Faith, p. 209.
^ It is true that Professor Briggs when he comes to deal with the Nicene
Creed says : " The phrase the age to come is a richer expression than eternal,
Tlie age to come is the age subsequent to the second advent and resurrection
of the dead, as distinguished from the present age, the age tfiat now is, which
496

CHAP. XXVI THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 497
a translation of olam {ah^s) it denotes " the
beginning of an era, its end or a time whose end or
beginning withdraws itself from perception," from
a root alam {chs), to conceal.! Several meanings
of aeon are distinguishable.*
(1) The Beginning. — The Hebrew, D^hi^ts, is rendered
ott' aiSivo<i, or aTTo tov ala)vo<; in the foUowiiig passages :
Gen. vi. 4, " giants from of old " ; Ps. xxv. 6,
" thy loving - kindnesses which have been from
of old " ; xciu. 2, " thou art from of old " ; cxix. 52,
" thy judgments of old " ; Isa. xlii. 14, "I have
been silent from of old " ; xlvi. 9, " the former
things of old " ; Ixiv. 4, " from of old we heard
not " ; Jer. u. 20, "of old didst thou break thy
yoke." Add to these eight passages Jer. xxviii. 8
and Joel ii. 2. In all these passages the root idea
is that of the beginning of an era as distinct from the
length of time which has since elapsed, and indeed
the same Hebrew phrase is translated dir' dp^fj'? in
Josh. xxiv. 2, Isa. Ixiii. 16, 19. That this is the
precise idea intended becomes more clear in the
phrase of Prov. viii. 23, tt^o toD aiwvo<i, and of Ps.
Ixxiv. 12 ; and from the phrase irph t&v aicovo)v of
Ps. Iv. 19.
(2) The End. — ^The Hebrew, ch^sh, is rendered
ek TOV aiSiva in the LXX 114 times, and the same
Greek phrase is also given as the rendering of
similar Hebrew phrases in 38 other passages, and
in all the implicit sense is " until the end ofthe era."
precedes the resurrection and the second advent that introduces it "
(C. A. Briggs, Fundamental Christian Faith, pp. 266-7) ; but he makes no
atterapt to justify his tacit assumption that Christianity took over the
temporal distinction between this age and that age without, as in other
tilings, raising it to a higher power.
1 But see Driver-Briggs' Lexicon, p. 761.
^ The writer borrows partly in what follows from a Note on Aldiv pub
lished by him in 1911.
2k

498 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
The plural ek tov? at&im?, which is to be regarded
as an intensive forra of the singular, occurs 15
times. Another Hebrew phrase, oSis is, is
rendered eco? toD al&vo'i 50 times in the sense
" until the end of the era," and the same Greek
phrase occurs without the article 5 times. And
in all, though the idea of duration of tirae is certainly
included, yet it seems derivative and not primary.
Or, if the expression be preferred, we may say that
the notion of " time how long " is got at by saying
that it lasts till the end of the era under which we
are now living,
(3) The Nature of Existence. — In the adjectival
form aia>vio<; is an attribute of God as in Gen. xxi.
33, Job xxxiii. 12, Isa. xxvi. 4, xl. 28, lx. 19,
Sus. 42 ; or of His name, Ex. iii. 15 ; frequently of
His law ; ! of His covenant ; * His kingdom, Dan.
iv. 3, vii. 27 ; * His authority, Dan. iv. 34, vii. 14 ;
His mountains, Ps. Ixxv. 4,* Micah ii. 9,^ Hab. iii. 6,
cf. mountains of God, Ps. xxxvi. 6 ; His way,
Job xxii. 15, Ps. cxxxviii. 24, Jer, vi. 16, what He
gives or effects, as e.g. an aeonian reproach, Ps.
Ixxviii. 66 ; Jer. xxiii. 40, xxv. 9 ; Dan. xii. 2 ;
an aeonian place, Isa. xxxiii. 14 ; ® aeonian rejoic
ing, Isa. xxxv. 10, li. 11, Ixi. 7 ; aeonian kindness,
Isa. liv. 8 ; an aeonian name, Isa. Ivi. 5, Ixiii. 12 ;
aeonian love, Jer. xxxi. 3 ; aeonian sleep, Jer. li.
39 ; aeonian desert, Isa. Iviii. 12, Ez. xxvi. 20,
xxxv. 9, xxxvi. 2 ; aeonian salvation, Isa. xiv. 17 ;
aeonian righteousness, Dan. ix. 24 ; and, once only,
aeonian life, Dan. xii. 2. In all these passages the
primary idea seems to be that the thing qualified
1 Twenty-three times, especiaUy in Exodus and Leviticus.
^ Twelve times. ' Cf. Ps. cxlv. 13, " kingdom of all the aeons."
¦' LXX. ^ LXX. « LXX.

XXVI THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 499
is of Divine origin, then that it shares in some Divine
attribute, and only derivatively, therefore, that
it is of aeonian duration. That it is the spiritual
character rather than the duration of things which
is in question throughout is made raore probable
frora Eccles. iii. 11, where the Preacher says that
God gave the aeon in its fulness to the heart of all
things,! where the spiritual character of the aeon
accounts for the difficulty men have in knowing
the thing which God has made. The aeon or
invisible thing in it eludes him.
N.T. Usage
(1) The Beginning. — It is noteworthy that the
N.T. writers maintain a forward look, and while
they refer again and again to what is to be hereafter,
they are almost silent about the beginning. Luke
i. 70, John ix. 32, Acts iu. 21, xv. 18, 1 Cor. ii. 7,
seem to be the only exceptions, and as we shall see
directly they belong to another stratum of thought
— that in which ald>v has a personal meaning.
(2) The End. — Of the 106 passages where the
word alcov occurs in the N.T. by far the greater part
refer it to the future. The phrase usually trans
lated for ever (et? tov al&va), carries with it the
idea of till the end of the age. Thus God's words,
or His righteousness, or His rule hold good to the
end ; * or a fate, or punishment, or threat, or a
resolve, or a gift lasts till the end.* Similarly with
the plural forra (et? tou? ai'wva?) which must be
' njstj, LXX aip-TcavTa rbv aluva.
^ Luke i. 55, Matt. xxi. 19, 2 Cor. ix. 9, Heb. i. 8, v. 6, vi. 20, vu. 17,
21, 24, 28, 1 Peter i. 25.
» Matt. xxi. 19, Mark iii. 29, 1 Cor. viu. 13, 1 John ii. 17, 2 John 2,
Jude 13.

500 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
regarded as a Hebrew intensification of the singular.
God's rule, or glory, lasts through all ages. This
forra is found in Luke i. 33, Rom. i. 25, ix. 5, xi. 36,
xvi. 27, 2 Cor. xi. 31, Gal. i. 5, PhU. iv. 20, 1 Tim. i.
17, 2 Tim. iv. 18, Heb. xiu. 8, 21, 1 Peter iv. 11,
V. 11, Jude 25. In the Apoc. the phrase occurs
13 tiraes as a standing doxology.!
(3) The Nature of Existence.— In the Greek O.T.,
as we have seen, the qualitative character of alwv
is best and most clearly expressed by its adjective
almvio<;. The same is true of the N.T. usage, with
one important difference to which we shall refer
immediately. In addition to the 106 passages where the sub
stantive aeon is used in the N.T. there are 71
passages where the adjective aeonian occurs. It
is an epithet of Life 44 times, including the 17
passages in the Fourth Gospel — where it qualifies no
other term. These are Matt. xix. 16, 29, xxv. 46,
Mark x. 17, 30, Luke x. 25, xviu. 18, 30, the 17
passages in the Fourth Gospel, Acts xiii. 46, 48,
Rom. n. 7, v. 21, vi. 22, 23, Gal. vi. 8, 1 Tim. i. 16,
1 In the Fourth Gospel the time-reference is unfortunately (but wrongly)
suggested by the majority of the texts where the phrase (els rbv alSiva)
occurs being negative, and by their thus suggesting " never " as the readiest
translation. But a closer consideration will show that the author's use
of the phrase is (1) pregnant, and (2) sets the timeless order in antithesis
to the time-order. Thus " he shall five unto the aeon " in vi. 51-58 =he
shall pass from death unto life. " He shall not thirst for the aeon " in
iv. 14=he will be enjoying (and therefore not thirsting for) Divine life ;
the antithesis between the slave and the son in viii. 35 is that the former
has no abiding hold on Divine life such as the latter has ; viii. 51, 52 in the
sentence is pregnant = he shall not have to gaze on death because he has
already passed into the aeonian realm. The same holds good of x. 28,
xi. 26 which = they shall not perish because they already belong to the
aeon ; in xii. 34 the crowd's interpretation is clarified by being equated
with the lifting up of the Son of Man into the Divine realm ; Peter's phrase
in xiii. 8 is corrected similarly, i.e, to have the feet washed els Tbv alCiva=
to have part in the life of the Master ; lastly, in xiv. 16 the work of the
Paraclete is to abide with the disciples and lead them into the Divine life.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 501
vi. 12, Tit. i. 2, in. 7, 1 John i. 2, ii. 25, in. 15, v. 11,
13, 20, Jude 21. And in all these passages aeonian
is qualitative, not quantitative. It describes the
kind of life, not its duration. In that case we are
afforded a strong presumption that in the remaining
passages its use is simUar. Aeonian is used of fire
in Matt. xvui. 8, xxv. 41, Jude 7 ; of discipUne,
Matt. xxv. 46 ; sin, Mark iii. 29 ; dweUings, Luke
xvi. 9 ; times, Rom. xvi. 25 ; 2 Tim. i. 9, Tit. i. 2 ;
God, Rom. xvi. 26 ; glory, 2 Cor. iv. 17, 2 Tim. U.
10, 1 Peter v. 10 ; things, 2 Cor. iv. 18 ; house,
2 Cor. V. 1 ; thing, Philem. 15 ; destruction,
2 Thess. i. 9 ; exhortation, 2 Thess. ii. 16 ; power,
1 Tim. vi. 16 ; salvation, Heb. v. 9 ; judgment, vi.
2 ; redemption, ix. 12 ; Spirit, ix. 14 ; inheritance,
ix. 15 ; covenant, xiii. 20 ; Kingdom, 2 Peter i.
11 ; gospel, Apoc. xiv. 6. In all these passages the
adjective aeonian carries the denotation of heavenly
or spiritual rather than of eternal or everlasting,
and this even in Rom. xvi. 25, 26, 2 Tim. i. 9, and
Tit. i. 2, where the temporal meaning might seem
at first to be the natural if not necessary raeaning.
This heavenly, or spiritual, order is one which is not
postponed to another state of existence, but is
realisable here in the physical body.!
There is, however, one passage which seeras to
stand by itself, viz. Matt. xiii. 22,* where the " care
of the aeon " is set in antithesis to the " word of
the kingdom." But a little reflection will bring us
' The following texts, in which the two aeons are contrasted as two
dispensations which are different in quality, may be consulted with
advantage. Such are : Matt. xii. 32, xiii. 39, 40, 49, xxiv. 3, xxviii. 20,
Mark x. 30, Luke xvi. 8, xviii. 30, xx. 34, 35, Bom. xii. 2, 1 Cor. i. 20, ii. 6,
8, iii. 18, 2 Cor. iv. 4, Gal. i. 4, Eph. i. 21, 1 Tim. vi. 17, 2 Tim. iv. 10,
Titus u. 12.
' Par. Mark iv. 19.

502 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
to see that this is only a particular case of the
Rabbinical opposition of " this world " and " that
world " which becomes in Christian teachers the
opposition between the visible and the invisible.
Self and God.!
(4) Personal. — But just as the raeaning of world-
time in the text just cited shaded off easily into
world - content, so does it pass over with equal
ease into that of world-governor, when once the
idea has gained currency that different ages, or
different states, have over them different rulers.
This personal reference seems clear in texts which
point to inspiration by a person as in Acts xv. 18,
where God's doings are revealed " frora Aeon "
as their source, and in Luke i. 70, Acts iii. 21, where
His prophets derive their inspirations " frora Aeon." *
So in John ix. 32 it is said that Aeon^ has never
been reported as opening the eyes of the blind.
In Eph. ii. 2 the " aeon of this world " is clearly
a personal being, and in 1 Tim. i. 17 God is called
"the King of the aeons." * Nor can any one who
is familiar with gnostic literature doubt that the
aeons of Col. i. 26, from whom " the economy of
the mystery " was hidden, were personal powers.
This conclusion is strengthened, not weakened, by
the addition of geneai here to aeons, for all that this
says is that as the mystery was not known to aeons
so it was not known to a class of inferior beings
1 " When olam came to denote a period of time stretching out from
our now ... in ^hich all our known life is included, the contents of this
sphere would naturally be called by the same name, i.e. the world . . .
the complex of all matter and force, all causes and phenomena which
arrange themselves in uninterrupted temporal sequence and constitute
the life-sphere " (Orelli, Die heb, Syn. der Zeit und Ewig, p. 82).
^ Ps. xciii. 2 is not parallel.
^ I.e, the ruler of this world.
' Cf. 1 Clement, xxxv., ST]piovpybs Kal TrarTjp tuv aliivuv.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 503
called " geneai," just as in Luke i. 48 it is said
that all geneai, that is, all the superhuman geneai,
should caU Mary blessed. (In Eph. in. 21 the
preposition et? of the phrase " to all the geneai of
the aeon of the aeons " raeans " so far as they are
concerned," or " reaching to " ; cf. the use of et? in
Col. i. 16, 29.!) Moreover, in Col. i. 26 the temporal
sense of aeon is not demanded by the now of the
succeeding clause, for the antithesis is between
aeons and saints. What was denied to the former
is given to the latter, and to this primary antithesis
that of past and present is secondary. The same
personal meaning of aeon meets us again in 1 Cor. ii.
7, " before the aeons." In 2 Peter iii. 18 " the
day of Aeon " can hardly be anything else but
a variant of the Hebrew " day of the Lord," in
which case aeon is but another name for God
Himself. In Heb. i. 2 it is said that God created the aeons
by His Son, where again the personal interpretation
is inevitable. Similarly in Heb. xi. 3, the more
rational, if not necessary, interpretation is that by
faith we come to understand that the aeons or
invisible rulers of the world of appearances were
set by the Word of God, and that the visible world
1 But cf. Eusebius (Praep. Evang. i. 10) in his description of " The
Theology of the Phoenicians," according to which Chaos and Darkness
were the boundless principle of the universe. They mingling produced
Desire, which became the principle of creation, and then Spirit and Desire
produced Mot, the mother. From her came the heavenly bodies and all
animals, non-intelligent and inteUigent, and the winds, as is written in the
book of Thoth. From the wind Colpia and his wife Baau (or night) came
Aeon and Primogenitus, both mortals. From these were born Genos and
Genea, who taught men to worship Baalsamin, the heavenly Zeus. Again,
from Genos, son of Aeon and Primogenitus, were born mortals called Light
and Fire and Flame. After this Eusebius goes on to quote from San-
choniathon the story of the origin of arts, of mysteries, and of the gods
in a system where Asiatic, Greek, and Egyptian legends are jumbled
together in confusion.

504 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
is the outcome of their activities as they in their
turn are of God's.
In 1 Cor. x. 11 the personal interpretation does
not exclude the temporal, but neither is it excluded
by it. The end of the aeons may as well be the end
of their rule as of the ages. But in Eph. iii. 11
the case seems clear for aeons as personal rulers
for, as in Col. ii. 26, the antithesis is between the
revelation made through the aeons and that made
through the Church of Christ in accordance with
the establishment (prothesis) of the aeons which He
made in or by Christ Jesus. The Knowledge of
the Church is contrasted with the lesser Knowledge
possessed by the aeons. In Gal. i. 4, already
referred to, the personal sense of " this present evil
aeon " seems preferable.
Another relevant text is 1 Cor. xi. 6, translated
in R.V. as " the rulers of this world," where the
genuine meaning is given by recollecting that St.
Paul's scheme was that of the world being under
an Aeon of wickedness, deliverance from whom
was given by the Saviour. The wisdom which was
effecting this was hidden from the archons of the
Aeon now in possession. An interesting parallel
to this view is afforded by the Freer-logion in which
the sequence is given to Mark xvi. 14, as follows :
" And they replied saying : that this Aeon of law
lessness and unfaith was under Satan who did not
allow them through unclean spirits to receive the
truth of God." ! Here, again, the time-reference
or the secondary raeaning appears less preferable.
The " aeonian sin " and " no remission against the
aeon " of Mark iii. 29 ; the " aeonian honour " of
1 Tim. vi. 16 ; " this aeon and the coming aeon "
1 Dibelius, Forsch. zur Rel. und Lit, des A, u, N,T. Heft xv. 27.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 505
of Matt. xii. 32, all bear a reference to a region ruled
by an Aeon, and if they are patient of a temporal
meaning, are so only because aeons succeed aeons
in heaven as kings do kings on earth. It only
needs to add that in the class of passages quoted
above the word aeon is more often anarthrous as
in Luke i. 70, and that the phrase " prophet of the
Highest," in v. 76, lends support to the interpreta
tion of Aeon in the former text as being " prophets
sent from the Aeon."
This personal reference in the term almv does
not meet us in the LXX, and its origin, therefore,
must be sought elsewhere. And the difficulty
caused by this N.T. usage cannot any longer be
evaded by denying or ignoring the fact that personal
aeons are distinctly believed in and affirmed by
N.T. writers. They are there as a stubborn fact,
and as they did not come there out of the Greek
O.T. we must look for their origin elsewhere. And
the only other place to look to is that complex
known as Hellenism.

Gnostic Usage
Before giving instances of this Hellenistic usage
it may be desirable to point out that the period
immediately preceding and that accompanying the
rise of Christianity was obsessed by the belief in
demons, was tossed about between reverence for
such gods as had survived the assaults of sceptical
philosophy and an inner disbelief in them altogether,
and was gradually settling down to a practical
dualism in which the God of Light and the prince
of darkness were opposed. " Even where the
national gods were looked upon as dead idols — •

506 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ohap.
and that was perhaps the rule . . . one could not
help assuraing that there were raighty deraons
operating behind them, as otherwise the frightful
power of idolatry could not be explained." ! At
the period, however, with which we are concerned
it is important to note that in spite of sorae centuries
of free discussion theological terms were still in a
fluid condition. It is not in the case of aloov alone
as a personal attribute that we shall find this
fluidity. The term God also was a variable. In
one sense every cultured soul was a god even though
circumscribed. Marcus Aurelius speaks of the god
dwelling in man. The Stoics " distinguished, as
Plato had done, between the eternal and immutable
God and gods created and transitory, between God
the Creator and Sovereign of the world and sub
ordinate Gods ; in other words between the uni
versal divine power as a Unity working in the world
and its individual parts and manifestations. The
former they denoted by the terra Zeus ; to the latter
they applied the names of the other subordinate
Gods." * Hence the heroes of antiquity, personified
qualities, the popular gods, the sages and " demons "
were all brought under this second category.
Similarly, Simon Magus could call himself the
" great Power of God " ; the Roman emperors
were addressed as " dorainus ac deus noster," or
as Kaiaap avTOKpdTwp 6e6<;. Great tcachers such
as Diogenes, Heracleitus, Peregrinus were called
gods, and indeed every man so far as he was
inhabited by voO?. God so far as He was one
I Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 181 n. ; in another passage, iii. 126 n.,
Harnack says : " It would be impossible to believe more sincerely in
demons than Christians did in the second century."
2 Zeller, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, p. 328.

XXVI THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 507
was regarded as transcendent. As immanent He
shared His name of God with whatever He showed
His invisible being in in an eminent degree.!
We may now adduce a few passages which show
that aloiv as well as ^eo? was at once an elastic
term and a personal epithet at the sarae time.
In a Hermetic prayer it is said : " His true form
none of the gods can see, since the Aeon of Aeons is
transforraed into them in all the acts of beholding." *
And again : " The great living God who is over the
aeons of aeons " * " commands thee " ; * and again :
" Thou art Lord of hope, wealth-giving aeon, holy
agathodaemon." ^ In another Hermetic prayer Isis
is addressed as the moon-goddess, as Sophia, and as
the aeon : " Thou art the beginning and the end,
and thou above rulest over all, for of thee are all
things and to (thee as) aeon do they run as to their
end." « Again : " God makes the Aeon, the Aeon
makes the World, the World makes Time, and Time
Generation," where Aeon is the power of God, the
Son of God, a second God.'' The Naasene sermon
given by Hippolytus speaks of the virgin having
conceived and borne a Son who was not psychical,
not physical, but the blessed aeon of the aeons.^
In Papyrus 46 in Brit. Mus. the magician says :
" I ara the handmaid of the Aeon." And again
the Creator is invoked as the " unmoved Aeon."
In a Parisian papyrus : " Thee, the One and blessed
One of the Aeons, the Father of the world, I invoke
1 See Harnack's interesting note in History of Dogma, i. 119, and Zeller,
ubi supra, ch. xiu.
' Reitzenstein, Poimandres, xxiii.
^ Eis Tois aluvas rdv aliivuv, which seems to suggest that the same
phrase in the N.T. should be rendered as here.
¦> Reitzenstein, Poimandres, 28. ^ Jbm, p. 30. « Ibid, p. 270.
' Ibid, p. 275. * Ref, v. 3 sub finem.

508 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
with cosmic prayers." In the same papyrus :
" The Sophia which is the Aeon." Irenaeus i. 17,
speaking of the Ophites, refers to the " primal
Sophia and Aeon." Hippolytus also says that
the mighty Aeon hypostatised the sufferings of
Achamoth.! In a Hymn of Hermes * " Seven
planets are driven along the Olympian road of the
Sun, and with them ever revolves the Aeon." In
the great Parisian Zauber-codex again the candidate
declares that he is about to be " exalted by the power
of the Almighty and by the right hand of the Im
mortal, with deathless Spirit, to gaze on the death
less Aeon and lord of the fiery crowns." And again :
" The Aeon shakes, the Heaven will tremble." *
In an inscription of Antiochus of Commagene *
it is said : " Send my soul beloved of God to the
infinite Aeon." The Sibylline Oracles ^ say that
" Hades is guarded by a Key-guardian Aeon of the
great prison " ; and HorapoUo ^ says : " They
describe the sun and moon by the syrabol of an
Aeon through the elements being aeonian."
According to Philo of Byblos,' in the Phoenician
cosmogony Genea is the daughter of the Aeon or
First begotten, and the Aeon's sons are Fire, Flame,
and Light. In the Leyden Papyrus containing
what is called the Monas or Eighth Booh of Moses,
in the section for opening of a door through the
Name, the Power invoked is called " the Aeon of
Aeons, the Only One who by His exceeding power
goes through the place." The double-bodied, lion-
headed figure of Mithras as the Aeon is familiar.
1 Ref, V. 1-32. 2 Stob. Eel, i.
' Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 4 ; Abraxas, p. 53.
4 Michel, Recueil, No. 735, 1-40.
5 vui. 122. « i. 1.
' Eusebius, Praep, Evan. i. 9, 10, iv. 16.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 509
It will be observed that in all these cases the Aeon
is a personal object, a ruler of the world, whether
supreme or subordinate. Similarly, the late Mr.
Jaraes Adara translates Aeon in Pindar {Fragment
131) as the living man, and says that it never means
eternity in Pindar.! Sq^ |^qq^ Rohde * points out
that in Pindar the soul is called " the image of the
aeon," and that this is not merely a synonym for
life, or " for the totality of immaterial powers
regarded as a unitary being or a single concept,"
but is rather the older folk-belief in the soul as
another Self, a Doppelganger, as that part of men
which alone proceeds frora the gods. " The body
follows death who has power over all ; but the
image of the aeon remains living, for it alone is
from the gods." *
There are passages, however, where Aeon may
describe either the ruler or the region he rules, as
in the Naasene Hymn given by Hippolytus * where
Jesus says : " Having the seals I will descend,
through all the Aeons I will journey." When it is
said in the Pistis Sophia, " Get ye back, laldabaoth
and Choncho, ye archons of the third Aeon," ^ the
last word may belong either to the ruler or to his
province,® though the former is raade more probable
by the phrase in another place which refers to being
set free from " the archons of the Aeon and the
Archons of Fate and of the Sphere." ' In the
Excerpta ex Theodoto, 64, the ecstatics are said to
1 Vitality of Platonism, p. 36 ; Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria,
p. 277, says that " the word aliiv in the usage of the Platonists of the time
(second or third century) certainly included the idea of endless, changeless
duration." 2 Psyche, p. 499 n. ' Fr. 131. * Phil. v. 1.
* Cf. Anz, Ursprung des Gnostizismus, p. 27.
8 Schmidt, Kopi.-gnost. Schriften, i. 225.
' P. 25 ; Anz, Ursprung des Gnostizismus, p. 32.

510 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
" enter into the vision ofthe spirit,! j^^q t;jjg rational *
and aeonian marriages of the syzyge," * where there
is no reason for rendering aeon or aeonian as having
the meaning of eternal. It keeps the connotation
of its primary personal character.
The early Christian writers, whether apologists,
exegetes, or apocalyptics, reflect also this conception
of alcov as personal.
In the Death of Joseph,^ Jesus prays that the soul
of Joseph may be guarded past " the seven aeons
of darkness," and Gabriel is described as " the
evangelist of the aeons of light." * Philo ® says
that " God is withdrawn from both ends of Time.
For His Life is not so much Time as Eternity,'' the
archetype and pattern of Time. And in Eternity
there is nothing past and nothing future, but
only present." St. Gregory, Naz. :^ " Eternity* is
neither Time nor a part of Time, nor measurable;
but what Time is to us, as being measured by the
course of the sun, that is eternity !" to things ever
lasting." !! John Daraascene : !* "It behoves us
to know that the raeanings of alcov are many;
for it means the life of each man, a period of a
thousand years, this present order, that which is
to follow it, the endless life after the resurrection,
and again not time nor a part of time " — he then
quotes Naz. as above. " Aeternitas quae Dei
propria est initium excludit et successionem ac
rautabilitatera et postremo finem " (Petavius, De
' Al&ves voepol yevbpeva. 2 Jfoepof.
' Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, p. 129.
* Texts and Studies, iv. 140. ^ ij,ifi_ p, jsg.
' Quod Deus sit immut. 6. ' Aliiv.
' Oratio xxxviii. in Migne, tom. xxxvi. col. 320.
9 Aldiv. "> Aldiv. u 'A'iSlois,
12 De fide orthod. ii. 1.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 511
Deo, in. 3) ; cf. esp. notes to pp. 258-260, ed. 1857,
for reference to Plato.!
Ignatius* says that the virginity of Mary was
hidden from the prince of this aeon, and goes on to
ask how the Lord's coraing was raanif ested to the
aeons, from which two passages it is clear that
archon and aeon are interchangeable.
Irenaeus scoffs at the Marcosians for saying that
they were free frora the judge, and if brought before
hira had only to invoke Sophia as " the assessor of
God and of the raystical Sige who was before the
aeons," where " before the aeons " affords a cora-
ment on 1 Cor. ii. 7, x. 11, Eph. iii. 11.
Cleraent AL* says : "As rauch as the image is
inferior to the living face, so much is the world
inferior to the living Aeon." At the end of the
Paedagogus in hymning the Alone-Father he says :
" for whom in eternity, whose members we all are,
whose glory are the Aeons."
In his Excerp. ex Theod. 47, he speaks of the
" Catholic Saviour " projecting a Divine image of
the Father, who in his turn becomes a Father and
projects first the psychical Christ, and then the
archangels as images of the aeons.* Again, ch.
xxxii., Cleraent says that " each of the aeons,
there being unity in the Pleroraa, has his own
pleroraa (or complement), viz. his syzyge. And
they say that what proceeds from the syzyge
is a pleroma, and what frora one is an image."
Cf, also ch. xii.
i Dieterich, Nekyia, 4, quotes from an Akhmim Apok : " Of which kind
the Aeon is in whom are aU they who have this glory."
2 Eph. 19. ' Strom, iv. 13.
4 Irenaeus, Adv. haer. i. 5. 1, also speaks of the Holy Spirit being
projected for the fruitbearing of the Aeons, and also of the created (yewrj-
To6s) aeons being separated from the uncreated Father.

512 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
In Origen ! we are told of the words which are
to be spoken by the Redeemer in His descent " after
He has passed the gates fastened by the aeon of the
archons." * Epiphanius tells us that the Cainites, as
possessed of the gnosis, could not be injured in their
upward journey by the Maker of this world, but were
hidden frora Him, and transferred to the aeon above.*
It is not necessary for our present purpose to
quote at any length passages from Hellenism to show
that at'cofto? (or alcov) was also used as a synonym
for at'Sto?, perpetuus. The Inscriptions alone
sufficiently testify to this, and no doubt of it exists.*
But our present purpose is to show that ata>z/io? was
in current use before and when the final article of
the Creed was inserted as (1) describing a heavenly
person, or group of persons, and also (2) as
frequently marking the quality of the state or
of the being so described. If the word is used
frequently of duration, it is also used as frequently
of that which alone gives duration its worth, and
1 Contra Celsum, vi. 31.
2 Anz, Ursprung des Gnostizismus, p. 13. Origen himself certainly
used the word altlivios in its temporal meaning of not endless but of
indefinite duration. Cf. In Exodum, hom. vi. 13, where, however, he is
borrowing the Hebrew phrase. In Lei), hom. xiii. 6 he says : " Legitimum
namque et aeternum est omne quod mysticum est," where aeternum
means eternal because Divine.
3 Ibid. p. 24.
* It will be enough to refer to the Apocalypse of Baruch, chs. xl. and
Ixxiii., where the Messiah is spoken of as having a principate, and as sitting
down in peace for the age, els Tbv alwva, and to Diodorus of Sicily, i. 51. 2
and i. 93. 1 ; Deissmann, Bible Studies, 1901, p. 363, compares the " aeonian
kingdom " of 2 Peter i. 11 with an inscribed decree of the inhabitants of
Stratonicea in Caria where the "" aeonian authority " of the Roman lords
is referred to. But it is by no means clear that 2 Peter does not mean by
aeonian divine, Deissmann also prints the Greek text of a tablet of lead
containing an incantation. The tablet was found at Adrumetum in 1890
and contains the following (line 8) : "I adjure thee, the great god, the
aeonian and super-aeonian and all-governor who art above the gods above."
Cf. also Dalman, The Words of Jesus, 1902, pp. 147-158, where the Jewish
usage is discussed ; and Blass, Grammar of New Testament Greek, 1905, p. 83.

XXVI THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 513
even when the primary meaning is that of duration
there will be found implicit in it an a priori judgment
of value. Aeonian life is not merely unending life,
not raerely the ordinary life of men renewed and
continued indefinitely or even infinitely, but a life
which is the life of the world of Reality, the Divine
life, and therefore unending. It is eternity as
defined by Boethius : ! " Aeternitas est intermina-
bilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio." That
this usage is found in the N.T, side by side with
the temporal meaning will be clear to anybody who
will turn back to the quotations referred to above
on pp, 498, 500-1.
The conclusion to be drawn from the above
examination of the word alcovio<; is that " eternal "
is an unsatisfactory rendering, and that " ever
lasting " is at best partial and misleading. It is
the kind of life that is in question, and not its
duration, or rather the duration depends on its
quality. If it be Divine life then eternity is one of
its attributes ; if it be a life which is a gift of God
its duration depends on the nature of the gift and
on the righteousness of God. The gift may be
absolute or conditional on its being justified by
the recipient. In the latter case the duration may
be short, or indefinitely prolonged, or may become
unending : " Eternity appears then not as the pro
longation of time . . . but as an expression for the
permanence of value during the alteration of the
times." * We have now to see what kind of life
we are concerned with.
1 De consol, philosophiae, v. 6.
2 Hoffding, Philosophy of Religion, p. 56 ; cf. the excellent remarks of
James Ward, The Realm of Ends, 1912, p. 476.

2l

514 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Life Tioorj
The word fcoj; occurs in the N.T. 135 times.
In 41 of these it is accompanied by the adjective
at'cii/to?.! In 28 passages ^atrj is defined by the
definite article alone,* frora which it is plain that
life was a synonyra for the Christian religion,
requiring for Christians no nearer description. Or
the life is defined as that in the coming aeon,* or
it is this life,* or the life of Christ,^ or of God,*
or Christ is the life of Christians,'' or the life that
really is.^ In 10 passages only * has the word a
temporal meaning, and of these two are quotations
from the O.T.,!" q^c is frora Paul's discourse to
Greeks,!! Q^e is rejected by the best texts,!* a,nd
the rest merely use the popular term as required
by the context. So that the general conclusion
from the N.T. use of i^ai-q is that it stands for
something definitely known as the prerogative of
Christians, and indeed is alraost a technical term.
This conclusion is made more striking by the
absolute use of the term in the Fourth Gospel,
where it represents participation in Divine Being.!*
1 Of which seventeen are in the Fourth Gospel and six in the first
Epistle of John.
2 A mode of speech which is peculiar to none of the N.T. writers.
» Mark x. 30, Luke xviii. 30. * Acts v. 20.
= Rom. V. 10, vi. 23, 2 Cor. iv. 10, 11, 2 Tim. i. 1.
0 Eph. iv. 18, Rev. xi. 11. ' Col. iu. 4. » 1 Tim. vi. 19.
» Luke i. 75, xvi. 25, Acts viu. 33, xvii. 25, Rom. viii. 38, Phil. i. 20,
Rev. xvi. 3, and Luke xii. 15, James iv. 14, 1 Peter iii. 10.
i» Acts viii. 33 and 1 Peter iii. 10.
" Acts xvii. 25. ^ Luke i. 75.
1' " In Him was Life," i. 4 ; " he shall not see Life," iii. 36 ; " the Father
hath Life in Himself," v. 26 ; " the resurrection of Life," v. 29 ; " that ye
may have Life," v. 40, x. 10 ; " giving Life to the world," vi. 33 ; " ye
have not Life in yourselves," vi. 53 ; " the words are Life," vi. 63.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 515
Now, if this description of the " unspeakable
gift of God " in Christianity lie at the root of all
that is written in the N.T. — and the use of f«j? or
even of ^wrj alcoviof is common to all N.T. writers —
then we are justified in interpreting the phrases
Kingdom of God in the Synoptics and Faith in
St. Paul by it. The Kingdom of God is then some
thing more than society as we know it, but purified
from evil and made happy ; it is something logically
nearer to the universal than is denoted by the
Talraudic idea of the reign or sovereignty of God.
It is not so much earth raised to heaven as heaven
come down to earth.! n jg f^ Kingdom in which
God is the King, but His Kingship consists not so
much in the exercise of power or of moral governor
ship ab extra as in the inspiration to good behaviour
ab intra. It is Life issuing in free obedience, but
it is Life which determines conduct and not conduct
Life. The same conclusion is arrived at if we apply
the conception of Life we have established to
St. Paul's conception of Faith. God's righteousness
is not the central conception of St. Paul's teaching.
That place is reserved for Faith. For just as the
O.T. righteousness sprang out of the conviction
that God was King in Heaven and demanded
obedience on earth, so in the N.T. a new kind of
righteousness appears which is super-legal because
it springs from a Life which is above the region
1 " The world is energized by God. There are constantly streaming,
as it were, down from heaven a number of currents which come straight
from God " (Dr. Sanday in The Journal of Theol. Studies, July 1900, p. 484).
The Umitation to the natural contained in this passage seems to be removed
a little later on when Dr. Sanday says : " This work of God within the
soul . . . begins above in the highest heaven ; it ends below in the hearts
of men. It diffuses itself throughout the world. It passes from one soul
to another."

516 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
where Law rules. That Life, the life of the living
God, is not thought of now as enclosed in heavenly
places. It has corae down to earth and tabernacled
among us, and we have been made partakers of it.
What all N.T. writers call " aeonian life," or " the
Life " as experienced, or what the Epistle of John
calls having the Son, or the Fourth Evangelist calls
" knowing the only true God," that St. Paul calls
Faith. The fruit or manifestation of Faith is no
doubt righteousness, or even the righteousness of
God, but it is Faith which is priraary. Just as the
righteousness of God is what necessarily proceeds
from the life of God, just as His Being is the norm
of His activity, so the Christian's righteousness
partakes of God's because it springs from that Faith
which is the Life of God in the soul.!
We may see how the conception of Life
harmonises St. Paul and the Synoptists if we apply
it to their use of the term Faith.* The power of
Faith to make men whole is due to its being deeper
than intellectual belief, to its being actually Divine
Life acting in the soul, and so overflowing to correct
the aberrations of the bodily organism. The Faith
which can move mountains is compared to a grain
of mustard-seed, not because from small it becomes
great, but because both are in different degrees
endowed with Life. Over against Faith is set the
intellectual process which consists in weighing pros
1 In the interesting article of Dr. Sanday's just quoted this relation
of Faith to Life and to the Kingdom is not set out at all, because it did
not occur to Dr. Sanday to examine the phrase fur; aliivios and its
variants in connection with the Synoptists' Kingdom and St. Paul's
righteousness. It is the thought of the fw)f which acts as the unifying
principle. 2 The terms irlaTis and its cognates share with irvevpa, xpi-arbs, xiipis,
dydirri, and 1x710s the honour of being the characteristic terms of the N.T.
whether the analysis used be qualitative or quantitative.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 517
and cons, and so arrives at a mediated conclusion
which in its nature and mode of genesis is the
antithesis of that iraraediate conviction called
Faith.! When St. Jaraes says * that " the prayer
of the Faith shall save " the sick raan, he clearly
means the prayer which has efficacy to quicken
life because it proceeds frora a principle of Life.
And this agrees with the function of Faith in the
healing of the sick as portrayed in the Synoptic
Gospels. The use of inaTe-ueiv by the Fourth Evangelist
is to be compared with the phrase ^aTrn^eiv ek,
for in both the central idea is that of an inner
spiritual movement from a lower stage of life to a
higher. To be baptized into Christ Jesus is to pass
from outer existence, spent in marrying, getting on,
fighting, and debating, into the inner life where are
the springs of universal energy and joy whose giver
is naraed Christ. Similarly the phrase Trto-Tcveti/
et? denotes the inner raoveraent itself which consists
in exchanging a lower desire for the higher desire,
the world of form for the world of free and initiating
and creative life. And it is just because the process
so described transcends the categories of thought,
and can be grasped only frora within by " syra
pathetic imagination," or rather by actually
experiencing it, that the phrase TriaTeveiv ek can
be rendered by a paraphrase only. A few examples
may serve to make this clear.
1 The verb diaKplveiv in Matt. xxi. 21 is wrongly translated to doubt
or disbelieve. These may be the cause or the result of the process defined
by the verb, but are not the process itself, and in some passages neither
doubt nor disbeUef is in question, e.g. Acts xi. 2, xv. 9, and the confusion
seems responsible for the variant readings in Jude 22. To use modern
language, what is commended is Intuition, and what is to be rejected, or
used cautiously, is Reasoning.
2 V. 15.

518 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED chap.
In John i. 13 the being born " of bloods," i.e.
of such and such physical parentage, or "of the
will of the fiesh," i.e. of huraan institutions, as e.g.
of an initiation of Isis, or " of the will of man," i.e.
of the strong who seek after God, is opposed to the
being born of God. But those who are bom of
God are also described as ot Trto-Tevoj'Te? et? to
ovofia ®eov, where the human correspondence
with the divinely - bestowed birth is described.
We might fully do justice to the phrase if we
rendered it, " those who surrender themselves
in desire and behaviour to God."
In John ii. 11 the rendering " His disciples
believed in Him " fails to give the full meaning.
That can hardly be that the disciples came to believe
on Him because they saw the water turned into
wine, for they were invited to the marriage because
they were already His disciples. Nor is it meant
that their belief was increased on seeing His glory.
The full force of the declaration is obtained by
taking the aorists in the gnomic sense, as it is to
be done so often in this Gospel.! Then the full
meaning of the verse is : " This mystic change of
the life of the soul into the life of the Spirit, as the
beginning and exemplar of the signs he comes to
show, does Jesus continually perform in the free
creative sphere,* and Thus He manifests His glory,
1 " The meaning of past time which generally attaches itself to the
aorist is lost in the case of the so-called gnomic aorist which has greater
emphasis in a general statement than the present which is equally possible "
(Blass, Grammar of New Testament Greek, p. 193). Blass quotes John
XV. 6 as an instance, and says that this use of the aorist is very rare in the
N.T. On the contrary, it is very coinmon, as is readily seen when once
the superstition is escaped from which exalts the historical at the expense
of the mystical.
" Figured as Cana of Galilee, cf. Gen. xiv. 19, 22, Deut. xxxii. 6, Ps.
cxxxix. 13.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 519
and men become His disciples by seeing this glory,
and by therefore coming to Him that they may
have life."
The same mode of interpretation should be
applied also to John ii, 23 : " It is in Jerusalem,
i.e. in the Church which has made its peace with
the world, in the Passover, i.e. in the mystic process
of passing frora the sway of the visible order to that
of the invisible, and in the earthly feast which
shadows out the heavenly, that the first faint
stirrings of desire are caused by reflection on the
signs shown in word and deed, and many ! are
drawn to Hira for His unspeakable gift of Life."
In in. 16 and vi. 40 the " beUeving on Him " and
having " aeonian life " are connected as antecedent
and consequent. In vi. 29 the work of God that
is to be done is said to consist in " believing on Him
whora He sends," while in vi. 35 the " believing
on Hira " is made strictly parallel to " coming to
Him." Of the remaining 98 passages in which the Fourth
Evangelist uses the verb inaTevm,^ 27 show its
absolute use ; in 17 it is followed by the dative ;
in a few the verb is followed by 6ti, and once by the
accusative of the object. But the phrase which
is most frequently used is the verb followed by et?,
and this occurs 36 times. Moreover, a careful
study of the 27 passages in which the absolute use
is found will convince us that these should be added
to the 36 which speak of " believing on."
It is certainly unfortunate that we have no verb
in modern English cognate to the noun faith, for
the want of it has led to the adoption of believe for
1 Cf. vii. 31, viu. 30, x. 42, xi. 45, xii. 42, xvu. 8.
^ He does not use the noun irlaTis at all.

520 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
¦n-ia-Teveiv, whcrc the intellectual element tends to
oust the moral or spiritual movement of Life. And
it is just Life as distinct from the formulation of
Life in Intellect which this verb stands for. Like
the Hebrew paNn it denotes an act of the whole
inner man which is strong in self-surrender to one
who is strong. " The implication seems to be, not
so much that of a passive dependence as of a
vigorous active commitment. He who, in the
Hebrew sense, exercises faith, is secure, assured,
confident, and lays hold of the object of his con
fidence with firm trust." !
Faith, then, in the Christian sense is Life, and
in particular " Life aeonian." But in saying that
life aeonian is faith we have but substituted one
term for another, one mechanical form for another
mechanical form. And what we are dealing with
is something which is the opposite of mechanism.
On the other hand, all attempts to explain what life
is must use dialectic, and dialectic is but logical
mechanism. When this dialectic has done its
utmost it still must confess that the pulsing, moving
thing it set out to catch and hold fast and share
with others has after all escaped, and all that it has
succeeded in getting is a snapshot which gives but
a fleeting aspect of the reality, and demands itself
even to be reinterpreted back into the life impulse
which created it. All that can be usefully said then
may be said by pointing briefly to two out
standing expressions of Life, one contained in the
"¦ Hastings, Did. of the Bible, i. 827 ; Dr. Hastings himself quotes the
Old English verb trow in a connection which would give us the verb we
want. In Archbishop Hamilton's Catechism, xxv., it is said, " He that
trowis and fermely beleifiis in the sone of God hais evirlastand lyfe, in
this warld in hoip, and in the warld to cum in deid " (ibid. iv. 814). Cf.
the first of the Middle-English Creeds given at the end of this volume.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 521
phUosophy of M. Bergson, and the other in the
religious phenoraenon known as Conversion.
A. We should miss the characteristic worth of
M. Bergson's phUosophy if we thought of it only
as a reaction against the exaggerated Intellectualism
of Kant, which undoubtedly it is. For it is much
more. It is a reasoned attempt to carry further
the critical work which Kant began when he
overthrew the " dogmatisra " of his rationalistic
predecessors. The " criticism " of Kant took the
form of an investigation of their theory of know
ledge, and challenged their conclusions by denying
the validity of their methods. His exaraination
of our faculty of knowledge resulted in the two
assertions that we know only phenomena, and not
things in themselves, and that Experience alone
gives knowledge — such knowledge being the product
of the matter of experience, and the form of the
understanding. Now Bergson may be said to take up the problem
of philosophy where Kant and his disciples laid it
down. He applies to the matter of experience a
science of Nature which both in its sweep and
mastery of detail was beyond the reach of Kant,
and he brings to the analysis of the form of the
understanding a conception ! which, though not
alien to the Kritik of the Practical Reason, is
rather latent in it than fully expressed. Blending
in a sense both Kant and Schopenhauer, as Kant
himself had endeavoured to harmonise his pre
decessors, he collocates the Thought of the former
with the Will of the latter by referring them both
to a more fundamental activity, the activity known
as Life.
1 Or shall we say an intuition ?

522 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
We are thus supplied with a new antithesis, viz,
that between Life and Intellect where Intellect is
merely instrumental and Life is the Dictator at once
using Intellect and being thwarted by it. Our
intellect " is only a motionless and fragmentary
view of life which naturally takes its stand outside
of time. Life, on the contrary, progresses and
endures in time." ! Intelligence enlightens action,
but in order to do this effectually it adopts the
rhythm of action, and as action is discontinuous
so, too, does knowledge become. But Life is
continuous ; it has duration ; the past is wholly
in the present, and is always gnawing into the
future. There is, therefore, a fatal chasm between
Life and Intellect, and all that the latter can do
is to give us snapshots, cinematograph views of
the movement of Life which is thus split up into
fragments, while Life is the continuous Reality
between the fragments and in them. Intellect,
therefore, by itself can never give us the Real ; it
can only subserve the practical needs of our lives.
On the other hand, " in order to advance with the
moving reality you must replace yourself within
it. Install yourself within change, and you will
grasp at once both change itself and the successive
states in which it might at any instant be im
mobilized." *
What Bergson puts into the place of Intellect
as the guide to Life is what he calls Intuition, defined
as " instinct that has become disinterested, self-
conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object,
and of enlarging it indefinitely." And again :
" Intuition may bring the intellect to recognise that
life does not quite go into the category of the many
1 Creative Evolution, p. 54. ^ Ibid. pp. 324-5.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 523
nor yet into that of the one ; that neither mechanical
causality nor finality can give a sufficient inter
pretation of the vital process. Then, by the
sympathetic communication which it establishes
between us and the rest of the living, by the
expansion of our consciousness which it brings
about, it introduces us into Life's own domain,
which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly con
tinued creation." !
What M. Bergson calls " sympathetic com
munication," the " tension " which enters into
another's mind through sympathy,* " divining
sympathy," * Christianity calls Love, and in opposi
tion to scholasticism mysticism.'^ But love, or the
mystic temperament, springs frora the depths,' is
free, subject to no constraint, not to be confined
by forraulae, stronger than death, drawing its
reserves frora the superior world in 'wbich our con
sciousness finds itself bathed, and, therefore, creating
its environraent and moulding its opportunities
rather than being moulded by them, or even replying
to them, though that, too, it often freely does.
B. Conversion is a moment in the aeonian life
1 Creative Evolution, pp. 186, 187.
2 Ibid. p. 220. 3 Ibid. p. 185.
* Cf. Rdc6jac, Bases of ihe Mystic Knowledge, p. 7 : " Mysticism claims
to be able to know the Unknowable without help from dialectics, and is
persuaded that by means of love and will, it reaches a point to
which thought unaided cannot attain." There is too almost a ring of
Bergson in his concluding remarks, p. 287 : " Since it is our condition
of ' free-being ' which creates in us the evident excess of Desire over
the Intelligence, there must also be in Freedom reserves of the spiritual
to re-establish the balance ; otherwise we should sin, we alone in the
Universe would be sinful in our very essence. To these priceless reserve
forces we have given the name of Inspiration. The Absolute eludes the
Consciousness, but the Good fills it completely. We need only to love it,
and the truth of Pascal's sentence is fulfilled, ' God known of the heart.' "
Cf. Rudolf Eucken, The Meaning and Value of Life, p. 83.
' Or the heights.

524 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
which does not differ in kind from that which begins
immediately after death or that which follows the
resurrection of the body, whatever Dr. Briggs may
say to the contrary. Indeed it is a pure assumption
that the spiritual, or aeonian life, differs essentially
in its different stages, and neither Dr. Briggs nor
anybody else is able to point to any difference made
in the Bible between the life of the Christian here
and his life hereafter, except of a negative character.
The life is the same throughout essentially, though
in heaven it is freed from the evils which dog it here.
This life is shed abroad in our hearts by a Divine
spirit ; ! it is hid now with Christ in God ; * it is
identical with God's Spirit dwelling in us,* and this
Spirit is the earnest of a better state to come, and
the guarantee that our bodies from being mortal
shall become immortal. So clear is this unbroken
continuity of aeonian life that it would never have
occurred to a learned Professor to question it if he
had not first been misled by a current perversion
of Christian teaching which has first substituted
static, ecclesiastical ordinances for dynamic,
spiritual experience, and then followed blindly
the Judaic thought which set in opposition " this
world " and " that world."
But the case is clear enough when once we follow
Carlyle's advice and " clear our minds of cant."
The whole appeal of Jesus Christ was on behalf of
Life as against the ecclesiastical forms of His day
which choked its free passage. Assuredly it was
not doctrine that He came to give, though He
taught with more authority than Stoic, Orphic, or
Rabbinical teacher. It was not works of wonder
that He performed in order to startle men into
1 Rom. V. 5. 2 Col. iii. 3. ^ Rom. viii. 9.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 525
submission — He who resisted in the Wilderness as
a presumptuous sin the suggestion that He should
work a miracle by leaping from the Temple-height,
and stigmatised as an evil and adulterous generation
the people who sought after a sign. He as little
cared as the Buddha before Him for metaphysics,
so that what He abstained from saying seems as
remarkable as what He did say. Discussions about
the Absolute, about Personal Identity, the Supreme
Good and the Moral Criterion, about the Self and
the Soul, about unity and multiplicity. Pluralism
and Theism, intellectualism and voluntarism are all
alien to His methods. And yet His silence is hardly
that of ignorance, but of fulness of knowledge
acquired and deliberately renounced as useless for
His purpose. What in others raised intellectual
enquiry for Him was a sign-post pointing to God.!
Or out of what others used for self-glorification
He drew a moral stimulus.* The tower of Siloam,
like the man born blind, and analogously all other
events were stimuli to the Practical Reason alone.
For the religion of Jesus Christ is a religion based
on experience and leading to it. It is found in the
individual, but is not confined to him. For what
is given in one man's experience is similarly given
also in another's, and may be given in that of
everybody. All healthy mysticism is the very
reverse of Solipsism,* even though it do maintain
that " a man in himself alone is worth the whole
order of erapirical things." For mysticism is but
the religious man's assertion of the free, creative,
1 John ix. 3. " Luke xiu. 4.
' " The doctrine that all existence is experience, and that there is only
one experient. The Solipsist thinks that he is the one." But as it is
matter of daily knowledge that individual consciousnesses report the same
content solipsism is transcended, that is, it is at best a fragmentary truth.

526 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
and unique character of that " indivisible unity which
forras for us that ' direct sense of self ' in which
Lotze rightly places the positive essence of person
ality." ! But at the same time this assertion, while
affirming that each man's experience is for himself,
goes on to add that the individual as being for him
self is but an abstraction. As a concrete thing he
is a member of a larger system of sirailarly free
creative beings, and there is common to all these
beings that they are " fundamental differentiations
of the Absolute." Hence while " the mystic fact
consists in relations between the Absolute and
Freedora which are incoraraunicable,* yet this
incoraraunicability is qualified by the fact that all
these ' differentiations ' are ' for the unity,' and
possess, therefore, a coraraon ground which in its
turn gives a coraraon sirailarity of experience.
And it is this community of experience, in special of
mystic experience, which establishes the fellowship
of mystics, the City of God." *
Indeed, it would be hardly an exaggeration to
say that the mystic experience is essentially the
bursting the bonds of self-hood by the effective
revelation to the soul of a larger social order of
spirits. The Self which was before content to be
1 McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 1901, p. 83.
2 R6c6jac, The Bases of the Mystic Knowledge, 1889, p. 143.
^ The failure to allow place here and now for this " Christian Socialism "
is the principal blot on R6c6jac's otherwise admirable work. " No social
part," he says (p. 261), " can be assigned to mystic symboUsm. In default,
however, of common symbols, a universal, and in some sort religious object
must be presented to souls capable of social aspirations, this object is
Freedom itself, which renders us susceptible to Mysticism and guarantees
its purity." He insists rightly enough on the integration of souls in the
Absolute and bids us desire the fulfilraent of this integration out of Time,
but he does not see the impossibility of bridging over the gap between the
Timeless and Time unless the integration to be fulfilled in the forraer has
at any rate begun in Time. Mysticism must be building already a Mystic
City.

THE TWELFTH ARTICLE 527
for itself now discovers that it is part of a social
order which in its turn is of a universal character,
and so it loses itself to find itself. Outwardly this
is called Conversion, inwardly Regeneration. The
personal identity remains ; there remains also an
identity of attributes, by virtue of a " permanent
element which persists all through change," but
the change which takes place in Conversion consists
in the bringing to the surface of eleraents which
before were secondary, or even quiescent and un
recognised, especially elements which are themselves
syntheses of other more partial elements. And
the process when regarded frora its inner side, or
that of Regeneration, is a particular case of Epi
genesis, defined as " a causative impulse to a new
and more complex state." We may, if we choose,
say that all Regeneration is in accordance with Law,
a proposition which raeans only that we prefer to
deal with it under the lower category of Law instead
of the higher category of Life. If we use this latter,
then we shall affirra that the Life which was being
kept back while the smaller Self was dominant has
now broken through its barriers, and, while using
the materials provided by that smaller Self, is
building up a more coraplex organisra with more
extended relations to the outside world.
The power which does this has appeared in
history as Christianity, that is, as the power of God
energising in Jesus Christ and in His followers.
As a religious force, therefore, Christianity is most
precisely expressed in Regeneration and its con
sequences, and only indirectly in institutional
forras. These latter have the relative value of
supplying the raaterials out of which the Christian
consciousness constructs its Not-self, but the Life

528 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED ch.xxvi
of the Christ is the permanent, formative, and self-
determining element which raay be called the Ego
of the Church. As such it is the ground of the
identity of the Christian, and the guarantee that
while he evolves, that is, uniformly progresses and
changes, he yet remains the same. In short, it is
the ^airj alcovio'i which at once ennobles, enriches,
continues, and unifies our being. The suggestion
that the mode of our life here is one, that in the
intermediate state another, and that after the
general resurrection a third, is tenable only on the
supposition that they are interconnected stages
in one continuous evolution. But in that case
this is but saying that the ^w^ aicovio<; of the final
stage is identical with that which as Christians we
experience already here.

ADDITIONAL NOTE ON THE TITLE
" THE SON OF MAN "
Reference has been made so often in the preceding pages to
the dependence of Christian thought on previous " Gnostic "
thought that it seems desirable to ask at some length whether
the reference is not justified by the remarkable title " Son of
Man " applied to Jesus by the first three Evangelists. It will
appear, if the facts to be adduced directly are rightly estimated,
that the title is not derivable from Jewish sources but is
borrowed from Hellenism.
The origin and the meaning of the title " Son of Man "
remain still an unsolved problem. Its origin has been referred
to Ezekiel, to Daniel, to the Book of Enoch, to unexplored
apocalyptic societies. It has been held, now to veil, now to
reveal the personality of Him to whom it is applied. It has
been held to be a title. It has been denied to be anything
more than a description. It represents the ideal man ; a
prophetic man ; man in the body of his humiliation ; the
superhuman Being who was to end this dispensation ; it is
the representative man ; or it is a bald synonym for " man " ;
or a surrogate for the first personal pronoun.
This Note is intended to draw attention to a neglected
factor which seems capable of accounting for many of the
difiiculties which surround the subject.
Excluding parallels, the title occurs 39 times in the Synoptic
Gospels and 11 times in the Fourth Gospel (omitting v. 27).i
In the Synoptics twelve passages are found in connection with
the sufferings and betrayal of Jesus ; nineteen refer to the
Last Things (or to the treatment awaiting His disciples) ;
eight describe the authority, behaviour, or condition of the
^ The passages are tabulated in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible,
vol. iii. p. 579.
529 2m

530 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
" Son of Man." The largest group, it will be seen, is that
which relates to eschatology. Further, it is certain that in
some cases {e.g. Matt. xvi. 13) the phrase is a paraphrase for
the pronoun, and is so probably in many more. The inference,
therefore, is that the title was introduced from regions of
speculation and not of history, came down from above and
determined what was below, and not vice versa.
This inference is supported by a little reflection on the
nature of the historical antecedents of the title, as well as by
its actual use in the New Testament, and also by the limitations
on its use revealed in the early Christian literature.
The use of the title in Ezekiel is not relevant, for there
it denotes merely man as distinct from a higher being, as the
man to whom revelation comes over against the angel through
whom the revelation is made.
In Daniel vii. 13, the term is clearly no title, and the Messianic
interpretation of later days is read into it, not out of it.
In the Book of Enoch (xlvi. 2, 8, xlviii. 2, Ixii. 5, 7, Ixix. 26,
27, 29) the term occurs, but even here not as a title, even though
the step towards making it a title may be a short one. Moreover,
it is not certain that the passages referred to have not been
coloured by Christian modifications of the text.
In 4 Ezra xiii. 25, 32, 37, we have merely a reflection of the
passage in Daniel.
There is little historical ground, therefore, for the supposition
that the phrase " Son of Man " was a Messianic title in common
use before the appearance of Jesus Christ.
Did He use it of Himself, or has it been borrowed by the
Evangelists, or introduced into their writings by later scribes ?
Further, are we free to assume that the meaning of the title
in the Fourth Gospel is determinative for its meaning in the
other three ? In that Gospel it bears demonstrably the mean
ing of one — any one — who has been born again into eternal,
i.e. spiritual, life.
Two difficulties confront us as soon as we attempt to frame
any answer to these questions.
One is that according to the almost unanimous consensus of
scholars Jesus spoke ordinarily in Aramaic, not Greek, and
that in the Aramaic bar-nSsha ( = homo, Mensch) the force of
the bar (son) has been lost, so that Son of Man would mean
merely man.
The second difficulty is that the phrase " Son of Man " is

"THE SON OF MAN" 531
not applied to Jesus in the N.T. anywhere outside the Gospels,
except in Acts vii. 56, and there it is hardly possible to regard
its use as historical. Nor is it found in the Shepherd of Hermas,
inthe Epistle of Barnabas, in the Letter of Clement, in the Homily
of Clement, in the Didache, in Polycarp's Letter, or in the Epistles
of Ignatius. On the supposition that Jesus used the title of
Himself as either a veil or a revelation of His Messianic character
such silence is inexplicable, and the more so when its use would
seem in some cases to be called for by the context, if it were a
current title at all (as, e.g., in 1 Cor. xv.).
If, then, the title is not derivable from the Aramaic we are
referred to the Greek, and in this case we are bound to give
more weight than is ordinarily given to the fact that the Greek
phrase is uniformly " the Son of the Man." What is the bearing
of the second definite article here ? It is not a translation
from Hebrew, Aramaic, or Ethiopic. Is it as colourless as the
bar in bar-nSshS, or is it to be construed literally ? The latter
question, it is suggested, should be answered in the affirmative,
and when the records of the Gnostic teachers are brought into
the witness-box it seems certain that not only must the question
be answered in the affirmative, but that the Gnostic interpreta
tion must be regarded as determinative. In that case we may
have to face the further question whether if Gnostic influences
be traceable in moulding the use of the title " Son of Man," the
same influences may not have to be admitted in the development
of other Christian terms.
Our principal knowledge of Gnosticism, it is true, is derived
from the description of their " systems " given us by their
opponents, notably by Irenaeus and Hippolytus. But what
we have is a fragment only of what once existed, and we may
further assume without much hazard that what these Fathers
give us is but the corpse out of which the life has gone. Did
we know Gnosticism as a living force we should probably find
that it was as much religious as philosophic, and that we do it
wrong when we treat it merely as a " system " more or less
unintelhgible or bizarre.
Looking at it in the mass we may say that it was an amalgam
of speculations, with wide differences in detail, but bearing the
impress of a philosophy of dualism in some sort, expressing
itself in the main in the doctrine that man had descended into
the tomb of the bodv from the world above, and had been

532 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
engaged ever since in escaping from his prison that he might
wend his way back to his home.
These speculations were of earlier origin than the first
century of our era, and were not born, therefore, within the
Catholic Church. They should be regarded rather as forming
a part, and a most important part, of that environment in
which the Catholic Church herself was born, and as helping to
mould her thought, her creeds, and her institutions. In the
last analysis they appear as Oriental cults in a Greek dress.
" The cultured," says Harnack, " were in search of a religion,
that is, a firm basis for the results of their speculations, and
they hoped to obtain it by turning themselves towards the
very old Oriental cults, and seeking to fill them with the religious
and moral knowledge which had been gained by the schools of
Plato and of Zeno. The union of the traditions and rites of the
Oriental traditions, viewed as mysteries, with the spirit of Greek
philosophy is the characteristic of the epoch." ^
And again : " The great Hellenic Gnostic schools arose
spontaneously, in the sense of having been independently
developed out of the elements to which undoubtedly the Asiatic
cults also belonged, without being influenced in any way by
Syrian syncretistic efforts." ^
The appearance of Gnosticism on the scene antedated our
Gospels, for " long before the appearance of Christianity
combinations of religion had taken place in Syria and Palestine,
especially in Samaria, in so far, on the one hand, as the Assyrian
and Babylonian religion, with its manifold interpretations, had
penetrated as far as the Eastern Shore of the Mediterranean,
and been accepted even by the Jews, and on the other hand,
the Jewish Messianic idea had spread and called forth various
movements." ^
According to Mr. C. W. King : " The Ophites first assumed
a definite existence about the same time as the Basilidians,
in the middle of the second century, although the elements of
the doctrine are derived from a source much more remote.
That source was the secret doctrines taught in the various
Pagan Mysteries ; and likewise certain philosophic theories of
the Greeks." *
In order to show the prevalence of the conception in Gnostic
' Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 229. " Ibid. i. 248.
3 Ibid, i. 244. * The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 82.

" THE SON OF MAN " 533
circles of the title " Son of Man " it will be necessary to give
quotations at some length from Gnostic writers. It will be
seen from them how audacious and magnificent was their
thought that the unity of the Universe required that God
should be akin to Man, that the first manifestation of the
Eternal was Man, and the Second was the Son of Man.
Hippolytus in describing the system of the Naasenes says
that " the foundation of their doctrine is the man Adam who
was the Man brought forth by the earth spontaneously ; but
he lay without breath, without motion, without stirring, like
a statue, being made after the image of their Adamas above.
. . . The man that is above is of both sexes. ' From what
vast happiness, what height of glory,' then, have we fallen,
from the Primal Man, the Adamas that is above, into this
vessel of clay and become the servants of the Demiurgus, of
Ildabaoth, the God of Fire, the Fourth in number. . . . Yet
it is the Christ that is figured in all the sons of men by the
unfigured Logos. This is the great and profound mystery of
the Eleusinian rites, the cry — ' Ue, Kue, Rain, Conceive.' . . .
Homer speaks of souls like bats falling from their chain, that is,
the souls fallen from the Rock above, namely, from the Adamas.
This is the Adamas, the chief corner-stone, ' which is made
the head of the corner,' because in the head is placed the forma
tive substance, the brain out of which all generation proceeds.
' I will set the Adamant in the foundations of Zion ' is allegorical
for setting the figure of the Man (in the soul). And in the text,
' This Adamas is firmly held by teeth in the wall,' it is the Inner
Man that is signified, the ' stone cut without hands ' which hath
fallen down from the Adamas above into this earthly potter's
vessel, this figure of forgetfulness." !
" Here likewise is the unspeakable secret of the Samothracian
Mysteries which none but we, the ' perfect,' are able to under
stand, for the Samothracians expressly mention the Adamas
who is above — the Primal Man. For in the temple of the
Samothracians stand two naked men; . . . these two statues
represent the Primal Man and the Spiritual Man after he is
' born again and made like unto him every whit.' " *
" The Knowledge of the Perfect Man is very deep and hard
to be attained to. The beginning of perfection is the Knowledge
of man, but absolute perfection is the Knowledge of God. He
' Refutation of all Her. bk. v. ch. 2. ^ Ibid. v. ch. 3.

534 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
(Adamas) is designated by the Phrygians as ' the Green Wheat-
ear cut oft ' ; on this account, at the Eleusinian rites, the
initiated hold up in silence to the Directors the wondrous
mystery, the green ear of wheat. This wheat-ear is the Perfect
Son descended from the Adamas above, the great Giver of
light, like the Hierophant himself."!
" These [Naaseni], then, . . . magnify ... a man and a
Son of Man. . . . And, they say, of this man one part ,is
rational, another psychical, another earthly. And they
suppose that the knowledge of him is the originating principle
of the capacity for a knowledge of God, expressing themselves
thus : ' the originating principle of perfection is the knowledge
of man, while the knowledge of God is absolute perfection.'
All these qualities, however, rational and psychical and earthly,
have . . . descended into one man simultaneously — Jesus,
who was born of Mary. And these three men are ... in the
habit of speaking [through Jesus] at the same time together.
For . . . there are three kinds of existent things — angelic,
psychical, earthly ; and there are three churches — angelic,
psychical, earthly ; and the names of these are elect, called,
captive." ^
The character, then, of the Man who occupies the second
place in the Naasene system is that of the Primal Man descend
ing into matter and then laboriously ascending to where he
was before. " The Thracians call Him Corybas, because He
has come down from above " from the formless One, and has
passed through all the lower worlds without their inhabitants
knowing it. ... " He is in this material world and nobody
knows it." He sits upon the many water-floods of the genera
tion of mortal men [Ps. xxix. 10], and His voice is heard as He
cries from the midst of them to the unfigured Man above. His
is the cry of Ps. xxxv. 17, " Deliver my soul from the lion,"
and to Him is the promise of Isaiah (xii. 8 and xiiii. 1) : " Thou
art my Servant, Israel ; fear not ; when thou passest through
the waters I will be with thee." Psalm xxiv. describes the Ascen
sion of the Primal Man after His descent. And the word of
the Fourth Gospel, " I am the door," is the word of " the
Perfect Man, figured in manifestation, who has come from the
Unfigured Man above." ^
• Refutation of all Her. v. ch. 3.
2 Hippolytus, Ref. v. 1. = Ibid. v. 3.

" THE SON OF MAN " 535
The testimony of Irenaeus concerning the Ophites is similar.
They taught according to him that in the Unutterable Depth
were two great Lights, the First Man, or Father, and His Son,
the Second Man ; and also the Holy Spirit, the First Woman,
or Mother of all hving. . . . The Universal Mother brooded
over the waters ; enamoured of her beauty the First and
Second Man produced from her the third Great Light, the
Christ ; and He, ascending above, formed with the First and
Second Man the Holy Church. . . . But a Drop of Light fell
downwards to the left hand into chaotic matter ; this was
called Sophia, or Wisdom, the World-Mother. . . . Her mere
contact with the Space-Waters had already generated a son,
the chief Creative Power of the Sensible World, laldabaoth. . . .
And laldabaoth was boastful and arrogant, and exclaimed :
" I am Father and God, and beyond me is none other." But
Sophia hearing this cried out to her son : " Lie not, laldabaoth,
for above Thee is the Father of all, the First Man, and Man, the
Son of Man." ^
So of another and little known sect Hippolytus says : " The
followers of Monoimus, the Arabian, assert that the originating
principle of the universe is a primal man and son of man, and
that as Moses states, the things that have been produced were
produced, not by the primal man, but by the Son of that primal
man, and not by the entire Son, but by a part of Him. And
Monoimus asserts that Son of Man is iota, which stands for
ten . . . through which the generation of the world consists.
. . . Inasmuch as what is perfect emanates from what is
perfect . . . whatsoever things the man possesses the Father
of the Son of Man possesses also." ^
In the Koptic Gospel of Mary the highest Godhead has
also the name Primal Man. " This is the Pentad of the Aeons
of the Father, i.e. of the Primal Man." Also of the figure of
Barbelo standing near the Primal Man it is said : " she became
Primal Man " ; or the female coimterpart of the male primal
being. For in this system it is said of the primal Father :
" He thinks His image and sees it in the pure water of Light
which surrounds Him." That Image of the Invisible is called
Barbelo. According to another account [Iren. i. 29. 3], from Barbelo
and the Primal Man proceed Logos and Ennoia, from these

^ Heresies, i. 30. ^ Hippolytus, Refutation of all Her, ^. 13.

536 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Autogenes and Aletheia, from these the perfect and true Man
whom they call Adamas, to whom is given as partner the perfect
Gnosis.^ In Irenaeus [i. 29 and 30] the Barbelo-Gnostics have a
Trinity : Father, Ennoia, and Christ ; or Father, Barbelo, and
Christ, where the title Christ has ousted the title Man. A
surrogate for the Man was with some the fallen Sophia, and
then the Christ, instead of being a name for the Man descended
into matter, becomes the Saviour who voluntarily descends
into matter to rescue out of it the already fallen Sophia ; and
comparison of this scheme with that of the Naasenes as given
by Hippolytus makes clear the conception common to both
systems and their characteristic variations. ^
Clement of Alexandria preserves a genuine fragment from a
letter of Valentinus in which it is said that Adam, created in
the name of " the Man," had struck fear into the demons before
" the pre-existing Man." ^
So in Epiphanius {Panar, 31. 5) it is said that the Father
of Truth bore also the mystical name " Man " : " The Perfect
named Him in a famihar way " Man " because He was an
antitype of the pre-existing Unbegotten." *
But in another passage of Irenaeus " the Man " is a title
given to the Highest [i. 12. 4] : " Others however say that the
Primal Father of all things is called ' Man,' and that this is the
great and hidden mystery, that the Power which is over all
things and is the creative source of all things is called ' Man.' " ^
In the Pistis Sophia JeQ is called the "first Man." The
place in which He is, is almost highest, far above that of the
first " command." The souls must pass through all places
before they reach the Great Man, i.e. to the King of this whole
Light-treasury whose name is Jeu [318, 35 ff.]. " When He
sees that the disciples have done all His works Jeu the Father
of the Light-treasury will rejoice over you, will give you each
His mystery. His seal, and the great Name of the Light-
treasury." ^
An echo of this conception of the Man descending into
matter meets us in the Apocryphal Acts of the Martyrdom of
Peter : " The Primal Man having been introduced by the head
1 Bousset, Die Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 160, 161.
2 Ibid. p. 162. ' Ibid. p. 163.
^ Ibid, p. 164. 6 iiyia. p. 165.
" Schmidt, Koptische Schriften, pp. 185, 4 ; 208, 2 ; 215, 29, 30.

" THE SON OF MAN " 537
brought to light the generation that before was not, for it was
dead, having no motion. Having then been brought down.
He established the whole of the cosmic order." As, then, the
Primal Man had, as it were, come down into matter head-first,
so Peter is represented as desirous of imitating Him symbolically
by being crucified head-downwards.!
From the above we may infer that the Gnostics built on the
maxim : "As below so above." They first regarded man as a
celestial being who has descended into matter, and then trans
ferred his title to the Primal Man, the Son of the Supreme Being
whose descent into matter and his ascent out of matter form
the subject of the world-drama. From the Son the title was
then transferred to the Supreme Being Himself, "the Unfigured,"
who becomes thus in accordance with the same maxim " the
Adam above."
In the Manichean system the Primal Man occupies a leading
place. According to the Fihrist, God, the King of Paradise,
together with the Spirit of His right-hand, with His five worlds
and His twelve Elements, begot a Creature who is the Eternal
Man and summoned Him to His aid in a war against the
Darkness. 2
The same Trinity of Father-Mother-Son appears in another
account of the same act. " The Great Father," according to
this account, " created the Mother of Life ; she created the
Primal Man and He five sons." ^
It is next told of the Primal Man that He armed Himself
for the fight with Matter with His five elements [ = His five
sons], the gentle Breeze, the burning Light, the Water, the
raging Wind, the Fire, and with these encountered the Prince
of Darkness with His five sons. Being worsted in the encounter
He lost a part of His armour.*
In some Greek vmters the Primal Man is called " the soul
of all things " [Titus von Bosra, i. 29], and this World-soul is
mixed with Matter and so subject to birth and death. The
Primal Man being thus imprisoned in the Abyss the Spirit of
Life with His fellows looked down on Him and cried aloud as
quickly as lightning and the Primal Man became another God.
The Spirit of Life then stretched forth His hand to the Primal
Man and drew Him out of the darkness. The Elements,
1 Ada apost. ed. Bonnet, i. 90. = Fliigel, Mani. p. 87.
' Theodor Bar-Kuni, in Pognon, p. 185. * Fliigel, ut supra.

538 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
however, which have formed His accoutrements remained in
the power of darkness, and these Elements form the World-
soul. Their finest parts were formed into the Sun and Moon
and in them the Saviour in the Manichean system had His
principal dwelling. Their Saviour finally was identified with
the Christ of Christian faith.^
In the Greek Hermetic literature a similar conception of the
humanity of God is found. In Poimander the Highest God is
called Nous, a male-female Being. He begets a second Nous,
Demiourgos, a God of Fire, who ii) His turn begets seven
Dioiketai, who span with their circles the whole sensible world.
Then the Highest Father of All begets as His last emanation the
Man. He bears His Father's form, and to Him are committed
all His Father's works. This Man having beheld the World of
the Demiurge, longs to imitate it, inclines to Nature, sees His
own image in the water, falls in love with it, and resolves to
abide there. Thus Nature captured the Man and they became
one. From this union of the heavenly and the earthly arose
earthly man, at once mortal and immortal, under the power of
Fate and superior to it.^
According to Hippolytus, the Gnostics borrowed their
doctrine of the Primal Man from the mysteries of Attis. Attis,
who scorning the love of the Mother of the Gods, turned to the
nymphs and through love to them set the world-process in
motion, is the Primal Man and is specifically called Adamas.
The Gnostic doctrine of the Primal Man then seems to go back
to Phrygia, where Attis, the Primal Man, and Kybele, the
Great Mother, were worshipped.
Also in the unknown Gnostic work of Schmidt is mention
made of the " incomprehensible Man " and of the bodiless
members from which He is formed — the Man whom the whole
universe prays to learn to know.^
Zosimus declares that the Primal Man in the sacred Egyptian
writings is called Thoth, and that the Chaldaeans, Parthians,
Medes, and Hebrews called Him Adam, his second name is
Light, and His hidden name no one knows but the unsearchable
Nikotheos.*

' C. F. Baur, Das manieh. Religionssystem, 214.
^ Reitzenstein, Poimandres, p. 828 ff.
' Schmidt, Kopt.-gnostische Schriften, p. 336.
'^ Reitzenstein, ibid. p. 103.

" THE SON OF MAN " 539
Philo's contrast ^ between the Ideal man and the Adam of
Genesis shows that the later glorification of the latter is probably
due to a clothing of him with the attributes of the former. The
one is of soul and body, man or woman, mortal ; the other is
the idea, the genus, the seal, belongs to the spirit-world, neither
man nor woman. As with the Clementines so with Philo, the
heavenly man is incarnated in the earthly Adam, Enoch,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and lastly in Christ, and a
proof of His presence is the wisdom which enabled Adam to
give the animals names.
" There are two races of men," says Philo again, " the one
made after the Image and the one formed out of the earth." ^
" Men should be at peace one with another," he says in another
place [§ 41] " because they are enrolled after one and the
same Father, who is not mortal but immortal, Man Divine,
being of eternity and of necessity the Word, and incorruptible.^
From the above cursory survey the following conclusions
may be drawn :
(1) That in important Gnostic circles the Primal Man
occupied a prominent place as a Divine Being, and that the
evidence for His worth that we have is but a small portion of
what once existed.
(2) That He was the third member of the Trinity of Father,
Mother, Son.
(3) That His principal function is that of the Divine descend
ing into the Kosmos and dispersing His Light through Matter
in order to collect it again and restore it to its source.
(4) His work is therefore dual — ^to give Soul to the world
and to restore Soul to Spirit. In this latter capacity He
becomes Saviour or Redeemer.
(5) That in orthodox Judaism of the last two centuries b.c.
1 De opificio mundi, 134-144, 148-150.
2 Legum alleg, § 53. Cf. De conf. ling. § 11 (411 M.).
^ An " undesigned coincidence " of the main Gnostic concept occurs in
an unexpected quarter, in the writings of that whimsical genius Mr. G. K.
Chesterton. In Heretics, p. 152, is the following passage :
" As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster with a hundred
arms, a thousand tongues and only one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree,
it does not frighten us at all. It begins to be something alien, to be strange,
only when it looks like ourselves. When a tree really looks like a man
our knees knock under us. And when the whole universe looks like a
man we fall on our faces."

540 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
this Redeeming Being took form as the Messiah, the World-
judge, His rSle as World-former being neglected.
(6) That in Christian circles afterwards this Redeeming
Divine-man was identified with Jesus of Nazareth and the
characteristic qualities of the one were transferred to the other
and bestowed on Him as clothing.
(7) That hence the title the Son of the Man as applied to
Jesus of Nazareth in the Synoptic Gospels marks a stage in
Christian reflection when the Jesus Christ of history is enlarged
to the stature of the Primal Man of Gnostic speculation.
(8) And that hence it follows that the title the Son ofthe Man
was first applied in the Sjmoptics in an eschatological sense,
and was only afterwards extended to the Man as suffering, or
as teaching, wandering about, or Uving as do other men.
(9) And further that the eschatological sayings about the
Son ofthe Man must be regarded as either not genuine words of
Jesus, or if uttered by him, must refer either to a manifestation
of the Second God in an undefined form, or in His own form as
distinct from the personality informing it.
(10) And lastly (on the supposition that Son of Man is of
Gnostic origin), that the title was taken over by Christians
before Catholicism and Gnosticism had become hostile to one
another ; or, in the alternative, by such a compromise as may
be seen in the admission of the Fourth Gospel into the Canon. In
the latter case we may expect a certain amount of re-editing of the
documents, and of this re-editing indeed considerable traces may
still be discerned in all Four Gospels. In either case, the possi
bility is left open for the suspicion that more of Gnostic doctrines
lie hidden in our canonical writings than is ordinarily supposed.
To wliich may be added :
(1) That the Gnostic speculation was based on the Orphic
principle, " As above so below." The mixture of good and evil
in the world and in man represented a prior process of mingling
in the heavenly world, the Son of the Man being their Name for
the Good in all things which is in process of being freed from its
admixture of good and evil ; and
(2) That the veneration paid in Catholic circles with growing
intensity to the Son and also to the Mother has its paraUel in
the Gnostic regard for the Heavenly Mother, the Barbelo,
Ennoia, Heavenly Sophia, side by side with that for the Son,
the Second God, the Primal Man.

APPENDIX
SOME FORMS OF THE CREED
That the Creed as a regula or lex grew out of the Confession
of Faith made by the Catechumen at Baptism, and out of
the fMiiOripa, or teaching, which was an expansion of that
Confession, is generally acknowledged. And it is only
necessary, therefore, to state the successive forms taken
by the Creed as it gradually developed itself into our present
Apostles' Creed.
The earliest Confession of Faith was in Jesus as the Son
of God. This occurs in the spurious verse, Acts viii. 37 :
" Then Philip said, ' If thou believest with thy whole heart
it is permitted.' Then in reply he said :
' / believe ihat the Son of God is Jesus Christ.' "
This Confession of Faith, though an interpolation in
the Acts of the App., is yet a testimony to the practice at
the time when the interpolation was made.
It was a later, though natural, and, all things considered,
a necessary development when belief in the Trinity was
demanded of the candidate in place of belief in Jesus.
And we may conjecture that the material cause in bringing
about the change was the influence of Gnostic thought.
Though authorities are looking for the precise form that
the Trinitarian Confession took on its first appearance,
the following is perhaps very near to it :
I believe in God, Father ; and in Christ Jesus, the Son
after the Spirit, our Lord, who was crucified and rose and
sitteth at God's right hand, whence He cometh to judge.
And I believe in Holy Spirit. 541

542 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
The actual content of such a form would be supple
mented by oral instruction just as the Apostles' Creed
supplements it by incorporating additional clauses as
explicatory notes.
We are on surer ground when we come to the Old Roman
Symbol, composed in Rome about the middle of the second
century, written in Greek, and probably called forth by
the teaching of Marcion. It ran thus :
IltcrTeiJto £ts Qeov IlaTC/aa iravTOKparopa' kol eis XptcTTciv IrjcroCv,
Tctv vlhv avTOV tov povoyevr), rbv K'vpiov rjpuiv, rhv yevvrjdevra Ik
IIv€ij/xaTos Ayiov koi Mantas rrjs rrapOevov, rhv e-irl novTc'ov IltAaTOu
(TTavpoiOevTa Kal rac^evra, tt; TpiTy fifiepc^ dvacrrdvTa Ik veKpwv,
dvafidvTa eis Toiis o'vpavo'us, KaOrj/jLevov iv 8e£i^ toi! Harpos, oOev
ep)(fTai KpZvai ^tovras kcu veKpovi' Kal ets Hvev/ia Ay lov, dylav
eKKXrjo'iav, d(j)ea-LV d/jtapTicav, crapKhis dvdcrTa(Tiv,
In English this would run :
I believe in God the Father Almighty ; and in Christ
Jesus, His only-begotten son, our Lord, who was born of
Holy Spirit and Mary the Virgin, who was crucified under
Pontius Pilate and buried, on the third day rose from the
dead, ascended into the heavens, sitteth at the right hand
of the Father, whence He cometh to judge quick and dead ;
and in Holy Spirit, holy Church, remission of sins, resurrec
tion of flesh.
And in German :
Ich glaube an Gott den Vater, Allmachtigen ; und an
Christus Jesus seinen eingeborenen Sohn, unseren Herrn,
der geboren ist aus heiligem Geist und Maria der Jungfrau,
der unter Pontius Pilatus gekreuzigt und begraben ist, am
dritten Tage auferstanden von den Toten, aufgefahren in
die Himmel, sich setzend zur Rechten des Vaters, woher
er kommt zu richten Lebendige und Tote, und an heiligen
Geist, heilige Kirche, Vergebung der Siinden, Fleisches
Auferstehung.The Latin form runs :
Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem ; et in Jesum
Christum filium eius unicum, Dominum nostrum qui natus
est de Spiritu Sancto et Maria Virgine, sub Pontic Pilato

SOME FORMS OF THE CREED 543
crueifixus et sepultus, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis,
ascendit in coelum, sedet ad dextram Patris, inde venturus
iudicare vivos et mortuos. Et in Spiritum Sanctum,
Sanctam Ecclesiam, remissionem peccatorum, carnis
resurrectionem. This Symbol has a very interesting history. In the first
place, it became about the fourth century the subject of the
legend that its name Apostles' Creed was due to the fact that
the Apostles met on the day of Pentecost and contributed
each an article before starting on their missionary work.!
Thus Peter said : " I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth " ;
Andrew said : " And in Jesus Christ His only-begotten
Son, our Lord " ;
James said : " Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary " ;
John said : " Suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified,
dead and buried " ;
Thomas said : " He descended into Hell, on the third
day rose again from the dead " ;
James said : " He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the
right hand of God the Father Almighty " ;
Philip said : " From thence He shall come to judge the
quick and the dead " ;
Bartholomew said : "I believe in the Holy Ghost " ;
Matthew said : " One holy catholic Church, communion
of saints " ;
1 " Till the middle of the seventeenth century it was the current belief
of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christendom that the Apostles' Creed
was ' membratim articulatimque ' composed by the Apostles in Jerusalera
on the day of Pentecost, before their separation, to secure unity of teaching,
each contributing an article (hence the somewhat arbitrary division into
twelve articles). . . . The first trace of this legend, though without the
distribution alluded to, we find at the close of the fourth century, in the
Expositio symboli of Rufinus of Aquileja. . . . The same view is expressed
with various modifications byAmbrosius of Milan in his Explanatio symboli
ad initiandos ; by John Cassianus, De Incarnal.Dom, vi. 3 ; Leo. M. Ep, 27
Ad Pulcheriam ; Venantius Fortunatus, Exposit. brevis symb. Ap. ;
Isidorus of Seville. The distribution of the twelve Articles is of later date,
and there is no unanimity in this respect " (Schaff, History of the Creeds,
1878, i. p. 22).

544 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
Simon said : " Forgiveness of sins " ;
Thaddaeus said : " Resurrection of the Flesh " ;
Matthias said : " Everlasting Life."
The singular thing about this legend is that, though
devised for the Old Roman Symbol alone as the Baptismal
Confession of the Church in Rome, it yet was later on
attached to enlarged editions of this Confession which were
used in the South Gallican and other Churches in the West
in the ninth century. These Confessions were all daughters
of the Old Roman Symbol, and yet they all contained in
dependent variations. Hence they could not have known,
or at any rate admitted, the legend of the Apostolic author
ship, and therefore it is pretty certain that the legend was
born after the Symbol had been adopted by these Churches.
But the South Gallican Creed of the second half of the
fifth century with which our present Apostles' Creed is
identical is not the Old Roman Symbol, but one of its
daughters. How, then, did the legend of Apostolic author
ship get itself transferred from the mother to the daughter ?
The answer is one of the romances of history.
By the end of the fifth century the barbarian tribes who
had planted themselves in the lands of their Roman allies
had almost all embraced Christianity, but an unfortunate
accident had " infused a deadly poison into the cup of
Salvation." " The Ostrogoths, the Burgundians, the
Suevi, and the Vandals, who had listened to the eloquence
of the Latin clergy preferred the more intelligible lessons
of their domestic teachers ; and Arianism was adopted as
the natural faith of the warlike converts who were seated
on the ruins of the Western empire." ! The Church in
Rome, true to its Catholic traditions, seems to have given
point to the denunciations of its pulpits by adopting the
strongly anti-Arian Creed of Constantinople ^ in place of its
own Old Roman Symbol. The latter an Arian might have
professed ; the Constantinopolitan barred the door of
salvation effectually against him. Or the cause may have
been twofold. By this time the Church in Rome was in
' Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxvii., Bury's ed., iv. 81.
" Our " Nicene " Creed.

SOME FORMS OF THE CREED 545
close dependence on the Byzantine Court, and either fear,
or hope of favour, might have concurred to cause it to
adopt the Creed professed by the Eastern Court. Anyhow
the Old Roman Symbol sank into oblivion for some three
centuries. In the latter part of the eighth century the political
situation was different. The Eastern Empire no longer
dominated the West, and Arianism was no longer a danger
to the Faith. But the star of Charlemagne was in the
ascendant, and as for three centuries Rome had com
placently adopted the Creed of her Eastern master, so she
now adopted that of her Western over-lord. And in doing
this she regained her own Creed, but enlarged and other
wise modified. Thus the South Gallican Creed became
the Baptismal Confession of Rome, and has continued to
be that of the Churches of the West to the present time.
And it is remarkable that none of our three Creeds bears its
own name. Our Baptismal Creed is not the Apostles', the
Nicene is the Constantinopolitan, and the Athanasian is
not from Athanasius.
What additions distinguish the South Gallican Creed
as we have it to-day from the Old Roman Symbol ? The
points of difference are eight :
(1) " Creator of heaven and earth " is added.
(2) " Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary " replaces " Born of the Holy Ghost and Mary the
Virgin." (3) " Suffered " is added.
(4) " Dead " is also new.
(5) " He descended into hell " is inserted.
(6) " Catholic " appears as an epithet of the " Church."
(7) " The Communion of Saints " is made to follow the
" Church." (8) " Eternal Life " is appended finally.
The following form gives a conspectus of the Creed (a)
as it was before the Old Roman Symbol was composed, (b)
the Old Roman Symbol itself, and (c) the Creed as it is :
I BELIEVE in God, Father, Almighty, [Maker of Heaven
and Earth] ;
2n

546 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
And in Christ Jesus, His only Son, our Lord ; who was
born of Holy Ghost and Mary the Virgin ; who under
Pontius Pilate was crucified, [dead] and buried ; [who
descended into Hades] ; who on the third day rose again
from the dead ; who ascended into the heavens, sitteth
at the right hand of [God] the Father [Almighty] ; whence
He cometh to judge quick and dead ;
And in holy Spirit, holy [catholic] Church, [communion
of Saints], remission of sins, resurrection of flesh ; [and
aeonian Life].!
We print two forms of the Middle-English form of the
Creed from the thirteenth century from Maskell's Monu
menta ritualia Eccl. Ang. iii. 251.
Hi true in God, fader hal-michttende, that makede
heven and herdethe : and in Jhesu Krist, is anelepi sone,
hure laverd, that was bigotin of the hali gast, and born of
the mainden marie, pinid under Punce Pilate, festened to the
rode, ded and dulvun, licht in til helle, the thride dai up ras
fra dede to live, ste3 in til hevenne, sitis on his fadir richt
hand, fadir al-waldand, he then sal cume to derne the quike
an the dede. Hy troue hy theli gast, and hely Kirke, the
samnnige of halves, for3ifnes of sinnes, uprisigen of fleyes,
and life withhuten ende. Amen.
And the second runs : —
I bileve in god fadir almichty, sshipper of hevene and
eorthe : and in Ihesus Crist, his onlepi sone, ure loverd,
that is i-vang thurch the holy gost, bore of Marie Mayden,
tholede pine under Pounce Pilat, picht on rode tre, ded
and y-buriid, licht in to helle, the thridde day fram deth
aros, steich in to hevene, sit on his fadir richt honde, God
almichti, thenne is cominde to deme the quikke and the
dede. I bileve in the holy gost, al holy chirche, mone of
alle halwen, for3ivenes of sinne, fleiss uprising, lyf withuten
ende. Amen.
Maskell also prints another Creed from the fourteenth
^ The clauses printed in itahc represent additions to older forms made
in the Old Roman Symbol itself when it was drawn up circa a.d. 135-150 ;
those in brackets are additions to the Symbol made in later times.

SOME FORMS OF THE CREED 547
and another from the fifteenth century as well as that from
the Prymer of 1588. They contain no substantial differ
ence from the two above. In the second, God is " shapere
of heuene and of erthe," and in the first occurs the phrase,
" agenrisying of fleisch."

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550 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
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552 MYSTICISM AND THE CREED
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INDEX

Abide, a technical term, 248
Adam, James, Vitality of Platonism,
331, 489 n,, 509
Aeon, as spiritual Principle, 27,
327 n., 500 ff.
as temporal Principle, 497 ft.
Gnostic use of term, 505 ff.
Alger, R. W., on metempsychosis,
133
on nature of the soul, 484
on resurrection, 474
Analogy, law of, 220 f., 223, 288
An-archism and Christianity, 183
Anaxagoras, 487
Angels, their work, 295 f.
Anselm, 198
Anz, W., 265 n,, 342, 509 n., 512
Aorist, gnomic, 269, 271 n., 368 n.
Aphraates, Creed of, 403
Apostle, its meanings, 384
Aquinas, Thomas, on Faith, 60 n.
on Incarnation, 103
on resurrection-body, 241, 474
on Righteousness, 323 n.
on the Soul, 484 n.
on Substance, 450 f.
on Synderesis, 101 n.
Aristides, Apology of, 29 n.
Aristotle, 449, 450 n,, 453 n,, 255 n.
on State, 347 n.
Ascension a continuous act, 269
variously dated, 262
Asceticism, 196
Associationist school, 94
Athanasius on baptism, 403, 423,
427
on deification, 76 n., 116, 119, 129
Attis, 417
Augustine on appearance and
reality, 37 n., 103 n,
on Ascension, 263 n.
on Baptism of Jesus, 73 n.
on the Church, 351 n., 380
on Conversion, 75 n.
on Deification, 119, 129
on Faith, 60 n.

Augustine on heaven, 98 n,
on honour paid to martyrs, 399
on Judgment, 304 n,
on saved, 394 n., 396 n,
on Self and God, 459, 460 n.
on symbolism of clouds, 292 n.
on the Trinity, 46 n.
Authority, its office, 3

Baldwin, Professor, on " projective"
and " ejective," 324
on the Self, 454
Baptism, its formula, 66, 305
Jewish, 404
John's, 405
of Pagan origin, 405 If.
Barucli, Apocalypse of, 370, 444,
469, 512 n.
Beauty defined, 211
Bede, 128
Belief. See Faith
Bergson, H., Continuator of Kant,
521
on Intellect, 331 n,, 522
on Intention, 457, 522
on Matter, 98
on Progress, 489
Bigg, C, Christian Platonists, 398,
429 n,, 509 n.
Blass, Friedrich, Grammar of N.T.
Greek, 65 «., 269 n., 293 n,,
512 n.
Body, the resurrection-, 472 f.
Bonwetsch on Christian mysteries,
24
Bousset, W., on aeon-doctrine, 336
n., 340
on Judaism, 22, 443
on Messianism, 21
on Son of Man, 536
Bradley, F. H., 80, 455 f.
Briggs, C. A., on aeonian life, 496
on communion of saints, 395 ti,
on remission of sins, 422
on resurrection-body, 478

553

554

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

Browning, R., "By the Fireside,"
213
"Christmas-eve," 38, 52, 99
"Luria," 183 n.
Buddhism, its denial of the Self, 458

Caldecott, Dr. A., on Attention, 61
on ethical consciousness, 122
on God, 67
on Mysticism, 33
on ontological argument, 198
on Theology, 220
Caldwell, Pragmatism and Idealism,
453 n.
" Catholic," its emergence, 334 n.,
446
in Ignatius, 374 f.
its meaning, 376
Charles, R. H., 442, 444, 469 n.,
477 n.
Christ as the Dweller in the Inner
most, 121
not translation of "Messiah,"
120
a term of supremacy, 103, 106
Christianity as a new creation, 461
in the form of burial-guilds, 24
not the child of Judaism, 21, 67,
68
its essence is in the life of Christ,
21
discordant descriptions of it, 55
as Life, 514
a mystery-religion, 22, 24
originally mystical, 19
derived from Paganism, 21, 399,
405
Chrysostom on exorcism, 427
Church, in what sense Apostolic,
386
a Brotherhood, 23, 29, 150, 179,
181
Creation of Holy Spirit, 391
as heavenly Jerusalem, 370
its holiness, 367
the ideal, 335, 345
the ideal and the empirical, 178,
348, 349, 369
according to Ignatius, 374 f.
and Lambeth Conference, 358 f.
and martyrs, 397 ff.
and missions, 388
of Rome and Unity, 360
of Rome, its three weapons, 382
its secularisation, 350, 373
as Sophia, 337 f., 345
and State, 53, 54, 346
and those outside, 51
its unity, true ground of, 362

Cleanthes, Hymn of, 68
Clement of Alexandria, 63 n,, 73 n,,
77 n,, 78 n,, 117, 118, 265 «.,
335, 378 n,, 379, 398, 400, 420 «.,
429, 449, 467, 468 «., 509, 511,
536
Clement of Rome, 77 n,, 343
Clement II., 329, 331, 332, 335, 337,
339, 345, 439
Clouds as symbolic, 290, 292 n.
Cobb, W. F., Note on Aliiy, 21, 27
article on Faith-healing, 317 n.
article on " Forgiveness," 111 n.
Communion, Holy. See Eucharist
Compensation, Law of, 160
Constitutions, Apostolic, 425
Conversion, 523 f., 527. See Re
generation
Corpus Hermeticum, 142, 333, 340 n.,
369 n.
Creation, its meanings, 89, 91, 99
Creationism, 127, 485
Creed, the, relation to History, 8,
48
not based on Miracles, 10
derived from mystic experience,
3, 14, 41, 42
in Protestantism and Catholicism,
1
variously interpreted, 15, 58, 59
Croce, Benedetto, 465
Crucifixion as law of Christ-life,
201 ff.
name for conquest of Egoism, 194,
196
as law of Nature, 200
a mystical process, 193 f., 461
as universal process, 10
Cumont, Franz, 406, 407, 408 n.,
416, 419, 443, 474 n.
Cyril of Jerusalem, on Catholic,
377
Dalman, Words of Jesus, 68 n,,
512 n,
Dante, 200 n,, 247, 248, 306 n.,
342 n,
Darmesteter on Analogy, 221
Dead, the cult of, 397 f.
Death never physical in N.T.,
300 f .
as dissolution of complex, 222
as self-assertion, 208, 222
spiritual, what it is, 224
Degeneration, modern, 86
Deification, 76 n,, 117, 119, 129
Deissman, Bible Studies, 215 n,
Delitzsch, Fr., 198 n,, 214 f., 227 n,,
287 n.
Democracy not yet born, 188

INDEX

555

Demons, 63, 122, 424, 506
Denzinger, Enchiridion, 148 n., 423
n.
Descartes on mind and matter, 91
Devil, not identical with Satan, 177.
iSee also Satan
Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, 69, 409
n., 508 n.
Diognetum, Ep. ad, 371 n., 372 n.
Dionysius, the Areopagite, 34
Dualism, solved by Life, 7
Duality, 97, 173, 272, 431 f.
Duchesne, L., 409 n., 423, 426

Earth, its meaning, 88, 98, 266
Ecclesiasticism a degenerate form
of Christianity, 178 f., 348
its limits, 3
Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus,
413
Ego, the, what it is, 223
Egoism, its many forms, 280
is sm, 268, 307, 327
Eleusis, 23
Emanation-doctrine, 100
Enoch, Book of, 443 f., 468, 530
Epigenesis, 485
Epiphanius, 73 n,, 141, 337, 369 n,,
536
Esperandieu, 406, 408 n.
Eternity defined, 513
Ethics, the objective basis of, 85
Eucharist, Holy, of Pagan origin,
414 ft.
Evil variously defined, 172 f.
questions Omnipotence, 176
Evolution a one-sided doctrine, 266
and Society, 183
Exorcism, 171 n.
Experience and Character, 61

Faith, act of the whole man, 64
identical with Life, 515
its nature, 63, 291 n,, 292, 516,
519 f.
opposed to Intellectualism, 521
Father, a term of Hellenism, 68
its significance with Jesus, 71
its significance in Judaism, 70
a mystical term, 67
includes motherhood, 152
Name of Unmanifest, 115
Faustus of Rhegium, 396, 403
Flesh, its N.T. meaning, 446
Forgiveness, two conceptions of,
434
defined, 430
Foucart on " Word of Power," 441

Foundations, W. H. Moberly on the
Self, 455
A. Rawlinson on religion as uni
versal, 421 n,
A. Rawlinson on spirit and
matter, 474 n,
W. Temple on Divinity of Christ,
105, 421
Frazer, J. G., Golden Bough, 419 n,,
420
Freedom, world of, 83, 295, 342,
349

Geulincx and Occasionalism, 92,
93
Gibbon, his five secondary causes,
308 n.
Gnosticism, its Aeon-doctrine, 114 «.
in Christianity, 24-27, 265, 330 n,,
331, 332, 336 ft., 341, 342
as Religion, 343 f.
its threefold division of man,
106
and Virgin-birth, 141
God buried in His world, 209
Crucifixion of, 197
as Father, 71
as a generic term, 506
alone immortal, 234
Kingdom of, is Life, 515
as Mother, 152
Gore Charles, on Christian Ministry,
20
on Virgin-birth, 136 n.
Gregory Nazianz on altiv, 510
Gunkel, H., 142
Guyon, Madame, 279 n., 292 n.
Harnack, H., on the ApostoUkum,
54 n,, 299
on Ascension, 262 n.
on pre-existence of Christ, 135
on threefold birth of Christ, 144 n.
on rise of Catholicism, 343 n.,
349 n.
on early Church-officers, 313 n.
on pre-existence of Church, 320 n.,
346 n.
on the primitive Church, 372
on transformation in Church,
334 n.
on Communion of Saints, 395
on demons, 506 n.
on use of the term Father, 76 n.
on God as a generic term, 507 n.
on Gnosticism, 265, 341 n., 342 n.,
343 «., 532
on Irenaeus, 383 n.

556

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

Healing, gift of, 316 f.
Heaven, its meaning, 88, 98, 266
Hedonism, 87
Hegel, his absolute Idealism, 95,
283 n.
on the State, 189
on the Universal, 185
Heitmiiller, Im Namen Jesu, 63 «.,
409 n,, 477 n,
Hepding, Attis, 407, 419
Heraclitus, 174 n., 331, 400
Heredity, 82, 127
Hermas, Shepherd of, 313 n,, 328 f.,
331, 332, 333, 335, 345, 368,
369 n,, 439
Herod, type of godless culture,
179 f.
Heroes and Martyrs, cult of, 399
Hill. See Mount
Hippolytus, 26, 118, 141, 340 n,,
507, 508, 509, 533 f., 535
Holmes, O. W., 488 n,
" Hymn of the Soul," 76 «., 265, 341
Hypsistos, 417

Idealism, 94
Ignatius of Antioch, 374 f., 392
Illusion, law of, 173
Immanence, doctrine of, its danger,
87, 90
Immortality not a Christian doc
trine, 235, 464
a contingent gift, 233
Rohde on, 42 n., 465 n.
Incarnation and Ascension, 263
and Descent into Hades, 218
as a universal, 10
Indi'.adual superior to Society, 185,
187
Inge, R. W., 33
Intellectualism opposed to Faith,
520
Irenaeus quoted, 26, 76 n,, 77 n,,
118, 331, 336 f., 339 f., 344,
379, 382 f., 392, 393, 428, 471,
511 n,, 535, 536

James, W., 245, 451 f., 454 n., 464
Jesus, His authority, 112, 275 ft.,
524
God's " only Son," 114
meaning of the term, Xll
on Mount, 369
Opposition to State-authority,
182, 524
as the Paraclete, 294
physical resurrection of, not a,
dogma, 235 ff.

Jesus, pre-existence of, 107, 109, 264
Second Coming of, 289, 293 n,,
109
His silences, 525
as the Super-man, 132
Temptations of, 161 ff.
as transcendent, 123
Virgin-birth of, not a reUgious
fact, 135 f.
Jevons, History of Religion, 410,
416, 419
John Damascene on al(ii:>, 510
Judaism a syncretistic religion, 21
Judgment, its meaning, 297 f.
Justin Martyr, 73 n,, 144, 371, 428,
438, 439, 477 n.

King, C. W., 532
Kingsford, Anna, 152 n,, 253 n.
Kirn, O., on the Trinity, 47 n.
Kreyenbiihl, Das Evangelium der
Wahrheit, 312 n,, 325 n.

Lambeth Conference on Unity, 358f.
Larochefoucauld on Egoism, 194
Law, William, Way to Divine Know
ledge, 47 n.
Leibniz, founder of Pluralism, 92
on nature of God, 199 n.
Liddon, H. C, on Reincarnation,
129
Life and Form, 19, 41, 149, 187,
430, 473
its activities, 246-61
risen, its characteristics, 242-6.
See also Death
Lilly, W. S., 222 n.
Locke on soul and body, 93
Lotze, H., on Beauty, 98 n.
on Brotherhood, 281 n.
on Duality, 283, 363
on experience, 80
on the Divine Idea, 102
on Immortality, 464, 466 n.
on Individuality, 99
on Infinite and Finite, 61 n.,
270 n.
on innate powers, 116
on Mechanism, 448
on Place, 215
on Plurality and Unity, 36 n.
on Rights, 322
on the Self, 455

McGiffert, A. C, 66 n.
McTaggart, J. M. E., on mystic con
sciousness, 117 n.

INDEX

557

ftlcTaggart, J. M. E., on sense of
self, 526
Magic, 163
Malebranche on two substances, 92
Manichaean Son of Man, 537
Manilius, 75
Martyrs, cult of, whence derived,
397-400
Matter, its mission, 448
Mechanism in Nature, 448
Meredith, George, The Egoist, 195
Messiah. See Christ
Miracles not the base of the Creed,
10, 13
not a necessary mode of Divine
activity, 13
sense of the term, 12
Mithras, 23, 333, 407
Moberly, R. C, 104
Monogenes, 114 n., 115
Mother and Child, image of, 153
Motherhood of God, 152
Jlount a type of Contemplation,
165, 369
Mystery-rites, 23, 333, 399, 401,
405 f., 416
Mysticism and authority, 53
Christian, and ecstasy, 35
as feeling, 33
as harmonising force, 59, 171
and history, 44, 47 f., 50
the religion of Jesus, 39
and of His disciples, 39
is individualistic, 17, 37, 45, 53
at once individual and social, 38,
53, 525 f.
as immediate intuition, 33, 40, 84
as Life, 7, 523
as Love, 97, 116, 523
gives the meaning of all things, 40
its negative aspect, 31
as the equivalent of the miracu
lous, 15
its non-rational character, 32
root of Sacramentalism, 36, 100
not in itself theological, 16
true and false, 2
as result of God's working, 34, 43
Myths as truths of poetry, 145, 146,
210

Necessity in Nature, 77 n., 81, 181
as Heredity, 82
Nicetas, 393 n.
Novatians, 350
Numbers, significance of, 46 n.,
162 «., 167, 173, 229 ft., 246,
250, 253 n., 259 n,, 260 n,, 363,
385, 467

" Old Man," 216 f.
Omnipotence, its meaning, 79, 219
Only-Begotten. See Monogenes
Optimism and Pessimism, 27-30
Origen on the Church, 378 n,
on deification, 119
on the descent of Jesus, 512
on exorcism, 427, 477
quotes Gospel of Hebrews, 309 n.
on pre-existenec, 132 f.
on the resurrection-body, 471
on syncretism, 417
use of aluivios, 512
Orphism, 470
Orthodox Church and Unity, 361
Osiris as the Self, 475

Pantheism as acosmism, 5
and Theism, 90
Parallelism, psycho-physical, 6
Patmore, Coventry, J'he Rod, ihe
Root, and the Flower, 381 /;.
Penance, sacrament of, 435 f.
Pessimism and Optimism, 27-30
Pfleiderer, O., 409 n,, 414
Pharisees and Reincarnation,469,470
Philo, 115, 141, 420 n,, 510, 539
Phoenicians, cosmology of, 503
Pistis-Sophia, 339, 509, 536
Poimandres, 69
Polycarp, Epistle of, 77 n,, 368
martyrdom of, 77 n.
Poulain, Father, on Mysticism, 34
on Symbols, 139
Pragmatism, 96
Prayer, how answered, 402
Pre-existence of Jesus, 107, 109,
125 ff., 180
reasons for, 61, 124 f.
Priest and Prophet, 4
Process and event, 8, 49, 147, 270,
289, 293 n.
Prophet and Priest, 4
preceded Priest, 313 n.
Prophets of all religions, 168
Psychical as a Gnostic term, 466 ft.
Puritanism, its one-sidedness, 447

Rashdall, H., on asceticism, 197 n.
on end and means, 90 n,
on pre-existence, 491 n,
on punishment, 283 n.
on rights, 481 n,
Recejac, 32, 34, 101, 103, 139, 171,
282 «,., 523 n,, 526
Regeneration, 518, 527. See Con
version
Reincarnation, 127, 129, 238

558

MYSTICISM AND THE CREED

Reincarnation, not condemned by
the Church, 129 n,
Fr. Delitzsch on, 227 n.
as an intermediate state, 481-
495
and the N.T., 130
as Purgatory, 490. See also Pre-
existence
Reitzenstein, R., Poimandres, 69 n.,
507 n., 538
ReUgion, not subject to formula
tion, 267
Resch, Agrapha, 369 n,, 371 n.
Resurrection, life of, is mysterious,
242
a mystic process, 232
stories of, only intelligible as
mystic, 242
Revolution, French, 29
Rickaby, J., 450 n,
Robertson, A., Regnum Dei, 353,
354 n,
Robinson, J. A., on Virgin-birth,
136 n.
Rogers, Thorold, 53 n,
Rohde, E., Psyche, 42 n,, 465 n,, 509
Royce, Josiah, on Individuality,
366 n.

Saints, cult of, 401
Salmon, George, Infallibility of ihe
Church, 45
Sanday, W., on Fourth Gospel,
323 n.
on Life, 515 f.
Sarapion's Prayer-Book, 425
Satan as an archangel, 174, 271
and the devil, 175 f.
derived from Mazdaean religion,
172
as the Tester, 175, 304 n., 325 f.
See also Devil
Schefder, The Mystic Catholic, 56,
146
Scotus, John, on the Trinity, 46 n.
Self, liigher, 286 f., 526
ideal and empirical, 285, 455, 458,
461
various meanings of, 453
Self-control, 286
Selwyn, E. C, on Prophets, 313 n.,
378 n,
Seneca, 69, 442 n,
Sharpe, A. B., 101
Sin as blindness, 323
as egoism, 286
as self-will, 162
as tendency, 273
Smith, W. B., Ecce Deus, 420 n.

Socialism, 163 n,, 277 ff.
Societies, secret, 23, 24, 29
Society and the Individual, 185
not an organism, 183
and punishment, 282
" Son of Man," 111 n,, 167, 418
Sophia. See Church
Soul as active, 11
as subject to death, 225
its existence doubtful, 106
not in itself immortal, 233
as name for individuated spirit,
449
organ of spirit, 213, 448
as substance, 6, 9
Spinoza, his acosmism, 92
Spirit, Holy, as cause of Christianity,
309, 312, 391
is Spirit of Christ, 430
gifts of, 314 ft.
as creator of holiness, 310
as impersonal, 306
acts on the world, 319 ft.
State, the, a mark of barbarism, 190
its duties, 346
a form of Evil, 181, 187, 281
the servant of the Individual, 187
distinct from Society, 187, 347
Suffering in animal world, 157
of Jesus Christ, 161 ft., 167 ft.
in man's psychic life, 158
in man's spiritual life, 158 f.
as price of progress, 155
in vegetable world, 157
Sully, The Human Mind, 453
Swete, H. B., 306, 332 n,, 343, 393 n.
Symbol, more real than fact, 289
its true nature, 138 ft., 140
Synderesis, 101 n,, 202 n.
Tagore, R., 462 n.
" Tat tvam asi," 97
TauroboUum, 405 f.
Tertullian, 145, 150, 333, 378 n,,
409, 411, 439
Testament of our Lord, 426
Theism, 90
Theodotus on Virgin-birth, 136 n,
Theologia Germanica, 16, 35, 353,
458
Thompson, Francis, 175 n.
ToVdoth Jesu, 165
Tongues, gift of, 317 f.
Tradition, 15
Tradueianism, 127, 485
Trinity, doctrine of, rational not
mystical, 46
Universe as Son of God, 115

INDEX

559

Values, world of, 284 f.
Virgin-birth not a dogma, 135 f.
Harnack on, 135 n,
in paganism, 143 f.
in Philo, 141
a mystical process, 138, 147, 151
a symbol, 140, 153

Wallace, W., 189
Ward, James, on attention, 156
on idealistic Creation, 90 n,
on duaUsm, 97

Ward, James, on ImmortaUty, 465,
493
on other modes of life, 490
on repentance, 433 n,
on the Self, 454, 457
Weizaeker on pre-existence of
Jesus, 1.30
on resurrection-body, 478
Wiedemann, Egyptian doctrine of
immortality, 440, 476,

Zeller, E., on Stoicism, 69, 467 n,, 507

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