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INTERLUDES

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INTERLUDES IN A TIME OF CHANGE
ETHICAL SOCIAL THEOLOGICAL

JAMES MORRIS WHITON, Ph.D. Yale

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER 2 and 3 BIBLE HOUSE
1909

TO
MY WIFE
MY EARLY COMPANION
IN
THEOLOGICAL STUDY

PREFATORY NOTE
Most of the papers in this volume have been used
either in print or in pubhc addresses at various times
during the past dozen years. However dissimilar,
they have a certain unity. They deal with various
aspects of the change which has recently come over
human thought — the greatest change that history
records as effected within the period of a single life —
completely effected already in many minds, while in
many more either incomplete or even unbegun, yet
advancing as irresistibly as the ocean tide. To
contribute his mite to this advance has been the
writer's purpose.
Acknowledgment is due here to the courtesy with
which the publishers of The Forum, The Homiletic
Review, The American Journal of Theology, The New
World and The Outlook have granted permission for
the reprints here included. In the revision required
for this republication some rephrasing and some
expansion have here and there been found desirable.
J. M. W.
New York,
May 24, 1909.

CONTENTS PAGE
I.— Ethical Progress in the^Nineteenth Century . 13
II. — An Ethical Creed  27
HI.— The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church . . 37
IV.— Self-Realization, Not Self-Denial ... 51
V. — Our Great Social Heresy ..... 65
VI.— The Moral Use of Property .... 79
VII. — The Ethical Significance of Money ... 87
VIII.— A Parable for a Time of Change ... 103
IX. — Religious Unity Morally Expressed . . .117
X. — Jesus the Ideal Man  129
XI. — Jesus' God -Consciousness a Human Attainment . 161
XII. — Fallacies Concerning Prayer .... 185
XIII. — The Immanent Answerer of Prayer . . . 207
XIV.— The Ascent of Life  219
XV. — Dynamic Immortality ..... 233
XVI.— The Terrestrial World to Come ... 241
XVII. — Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy and
Science  253
XVIII. — Some Implicates of Theism .... 267
XIX. — Principia of Modern Theology .... 279
XX.— The Prayer of St. Paul .... 285

Ethical Progress in the Nineteenth Century

ETHICAL PROGRESS IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY l
Prom the sidewalk by the south wall of Trinity church
yard, in New York, the passer-by reads among the
graves the name of Alexander Hamilton, the organiser
of our national finances. It may recall that even
fifty years after Hamilton was slain by Burr in a
duel on the opposite shore of the Hudson, in 1804,
a Massachusetts representative felt himself constrained
by an influential opinion at Washington to accept a
challenge to mortal combat with his fellow-congress
man from South Carolina.
In 1818, in a Massachusetts town where I was
inducted into the ministry half a century later, tem
porary booths, erected near the Congregational church,
dispensed ardent spirits for the refreshment of the
crowd assembled there at the ordination of a new
pastor. I have had in my hands bills of sale, by which, a
few years]: before that incident, a minister of the
Gospel in New Jersey conveyed legal title to the
ownership of human chattels, negro men and women.
Such reminiscences suffice to remind us of a fact
1 Address at the inaugural meeting of the New York State
Conference of Religion, November, 1900.
13

Interludes
that we are all aware of — the standard both of private
and pubhc morals is higher at the end of the century
than at its beginning. To-day, as men did three
thousand years ago, when Homer sang,
We vaunt ourselves as greatly better than our fathers were.
Yet to-day what the oracle said to Israel, when
Canaan was but partly mastered, must be said to us :
" There remaineth yet very much land to be pos
sessed." If we record great progress made, it is to
inspire effort for great progress still required.
In attempting to describe in half an hour the advance
that only a volume could adequately record, it may
be regarded in two aspects : (1) Extensively, in an
enlargement of the field of ethical conduct, taking
in new areas of human life, new subjects of ethical
relations, new classes of persons and actions ; (2)
Intensively, in a more thorough cultivation of the
fields previously tilled, substituting subsoil ploughing
for surface ploughing, profounder moral views for
shallower. I. The extensive aspect of ethical progress is the
more obvious to the popular view, as in the temper
ance reform and the anti-slavery reform. The most
salient advance, however, is in that renaissance of
Christian Missions for which our century is not less,
conspicuous than for the new births of science. If
the theological prejudices which adhere to the subject
can be put aside, if the uniform testimony of the
diplomatic representatives of Great Britain and the
United States in Oriental lands can be accepted as
better than the snap-judgments of globe-trotters,
14

Ethical Progress in the Nineteenth Century
if the educational institutions and the medical rehef
for human suffering which missionaries have carried
can be fairly estimated, no landmark of ethical pro
gress is more indisputable and impressive than this
spontaneous uprising to distribute the best things of
Christendom to uplift and purify and enrich the life
of even the lowest and the neediest nations. Yet
many among us still regard it with an apathy that
puts them at a lower ethical level than the oit-quoted
poet of pagan Rome : "I am a man ; nothing that
touches a man fails to touch me."
The world-embracing human interest which thus
illustrates the extensiveness of ethical progress appears
also in its embrace of those formerly regarded as
social outcasts. The whole field of penology has
been taken under ethical treatment. So barbarous
was the criminal law of England at the- beginning of
the nineteenth century that pickpockets and shop
lifters were put to death. It was also a capital offence
there for a soldier or a sailor to beg without a pass
from a magistrate or commander. Not only have
these sanguinary laws been abolished, but the whole
theory of judicial punishments, whether human or
divine, has been ethically born anew, however un
regenerate the practice here and there. Instead of a
vindictive a reformatory purpose has been substituted,
regarding the criminal not as an enemy to be tormented,
but as a lost one to be reclaimed. Formerly a hell,
the prison is now, at least in theory, a hospital, with
moral and rehgious influences as chief among its
reformatory appliances. Yet even now how short
our practice is of theory many a county jail testifies
15

Interludes
to our shame. Two other notable extensions of the
ethical field in the last quarter-century can here only
be put on record — the Social Settlement and the
University Extension ; the former introducing into
the ethical relation of neighbours, and the latter into
that of pupils, large numbers formerly outside.
In 1856 the leading nations of Europe agreed to
abolish privateering, our Government dechning the
compact only because it did not go to the full and
logical extent of granting immunities to private
property at sea equal with those granted on the land.
The formation of the Red Cross Society, in 1864, and
the immunities granted to it by civilized states for
its mitigations of the sufferings of war, mark another
concession of ethical rights to the pubhc enemy.
The work of the Peace Society, with its outcome in
the progress of international arbitration, signalized
especially by the recent Peace Conference at The
Hague, has brought us seemingly within sight of the
coming transformation of the pubhc enemy into a
peaceful litigant in courts of international law — thus
bringing the man across the sea into the same ethical
relationship as the man across the street. The sinister
phenomena that blot this record, the barbarities
still perpetrated in the name of civilization, must
be confessed with shame, but the backward eddies
must not be mistaken for the onward current.
Still other clear signs of ethical progress in an exten
sive view appear in the transfer of lotteries from the
class of respectable to the class of criminal enter
prises, the result, in this country, of more than sixty
years' struggle, crowned with victory in 1893 over
16

Ethical Progress in the Nineteenth Century
the last enemy in Louisiana. They appear in the
lifting of civil disabilities from classes previously
denied civil rights — as Cathohcs till 1829, and Jews
tiU 1858, in Parhament, and, now, in some of our States,
of atheists in courts of justice. They appear in a
long series of legislative acts in civilized countries
by which the rights of women and children, crueUy
invaded by greedy employers, have been taken under
the shield of law. They appear more conspicuously
in the large provisions of pubhc charity for the indigent
sick, for the insane, for helpless children, and other
unfortunates. The munificent educational endow
ments for which our country is admired by the world
proceed from impulses which are predominantly
ethical. The outermost rim of the ethical field has
been reached in the taking even of dumb animals into
an ethical relationship, as claimants of the rights
with which the Father both of men and of sparrows
has invested the humblest of his sentient creatures.
II. We now turn from the extensive to the intensive
aspect of ethical progress, where the advance consists
not in the enlargement, but the better cultivation of
the field, improvement upon the ideas and achieve
ments of our predecessors. Extensively, ethical pro
gress has appeared mainly in the enlargement of
practical philanthropy. Intensively, it appears to
have been mainly, yet by no means wholly, in the
ethicizing of theory in those opposite hemispheres of
thought that are concerned with theology on one
hand, and economics and civics on the other.
In theology the ethical advance has been immense,
17 B

Interludes
if we reckon with its leaders, and not with the loitering
rear-guard, with whom, rather than with the van,
some scientific men have a curious preference for
battle. The potentate theory and the potter theory
of God are fast yielding to the paternal theory. That
intellectual errors about God are morally guilty, a
fallacy that has subjected many a pure soul to cruel
ostracism, or worse, the last quarter-century has
dispatched to the company of its twin, the witch
craft delusion. Schemes of peace with God, so-called
" plans of salvation " based on a forensic and fictitious
righteousness not our own, but legally transferred
to us from a substitute, are giving place to convictions
that there is no real salvation or peace with God
except so far as there is righteousness in personal
character of Jesus' type. The unethical conception
of the Bible, in which sundry rehcs of pagan super
stition and barbarism in the primitive period of
religious development were fancied to be integral
parts of a divine revelation, has been superseded,
except in the cyclone cellars1 of the Church. The
divine inspiration of the Bible has obtained recognition
of its essentially ethical character, as an enlightening
and morally renewing influence, in place of the unethical
estimate of it as a certificate of infallibility of no
practical use except to infallible readers. And last,
but not least, that frightful dogma of an endless
punishment hereafter, which, for the first time in
history, was made an article of rehgion in the year
544 at the instance of the Greek emperor Justinian,
1 Refuges from tornadoes in America.
18

Ethical Progress in the Nineteenth Century
has given place, except in a few mummified creeds
awaiting the undertaker's leisure, to the ethical belief
that " whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also
reap." The conception of divine judgment itself
has been ethicized from a vindictive to a restorative
work, in which judgment becomes a halfway house
on the road of salvation, where the sobered sufferer
may, if only he will, change from the down-grade to
the up-grade. The whole conception of human life,
as related to God, has undergone an ethical transforma
tion, and the best work for this has been done, impartial
critics confess, by the theological heretics, whose
fruits, if not their praise, abound throughout the
churches. Man, instead of being reduced to that
" ethical nonentity " which mediaeval theology made
him, as a creature naturally incapable of aught but
moral offensiveness to God, the prize of an unearthly
struggle between the powers of divine grace and
satanic malignity, has been restored by the ethical
progress of this century to his natural ethical value
as the subject of a divine education, a child of God,
to be trained in the saving knowledge of his Father
through service to his brother men.
With this service the department of economics has
much to do. Here, also, as in the department of
theological thought, the intensive progress of theory
is conspicuous. Yet it has not been so marked in
statement as in the acceptance of statements long
since made. The passionate but silenced claims of
John Ball, Joss Fritz, and the slaughtered peasants
of Wyclif's and Luther's time, are advanced now
from university chairs and cathedral stalls. The
19

Interludes
natural-right doctrines of the French physiocrats of
the eighteenth century, swept away by the cyclone
of revolution, have inspired since the middle of the
nineteenth century the now rapidly growing school of
Christian Socialists, reckoning churchmen and econo
mists of the highest eminence among its leaders.
The very definition of economics has been significantly
ethicized : it is no longer the science of mere wealth,
which reduced man, as Ruskin said, to a mere " covet
ous machine," fit to sit for the portrait of a lost soul,
but, as Professor Ingram says in the " Encyclopaedia
Britannica," of wealth as concerned with the mainten
ance and evolution of society. Facts have begun
to correspond to this definition, and are destined to a
larger correspondence. By a long series of measures
the privileged classes of England, says Mr. Grant
Allen, have been enfranchising and equipping the
unprivileged to compete with them. The two facts
most indicative of the progressive leavening of economic
theories and methods by ethical principles are these :
(1) In a period of unprecedented accumulations of
wealth in a few hands the attention of scientific
economists is now most given to the problems of
equitable distribution. (2) The princely benefactions
of many immensely wealthy men indicate the con
sciousness that such distribution is due, and is better
made by them than for them.
In civics, also, progress has been made intensively,
though practice is as yet even less conformed to
ethical theory than in economics. The exaggerated
assertion of natural rights, inherited from centuries
of conflict with tyrants for a freedom in which citizen-
20

Ethical Progress in the Nineteenth Century
ship was valued more for its worth to the individual
than its worth to society, is being duly balanced
by the discovery that individual rights are not an
end, but a means ; that citizenship is not a private
asset, but a pubhc trust ; that democracy, as Professor
MacCunn says, has missed its mark if it has nothing
but rights to insist on. In many a group of promoters
of good citizenship ; in the civil service reform, initiated
in Great Britain in 1855, much more feebly here in
1872, but now evidently nearing its goal ; in the
stronger regard given by rehgious teachers to civic
obligations as religious duties, may be seen the slow
ripening of the doctrine with which our fellow-citizen,
Francis Lieber, balanced the extreme individualism
of the Jeffersonian period, by declaring that there are
no rights without correlative duties, and no duties
without correlative rights. Yet this clear trend of
nineteenth-century civics toward the primacy of
civic duties, as the end for which civic rights exist,
is entitled to be called progress only so far as it succeeds
in marrying the nineteenth-century extensions of
individual freedom to the truth proclaimed by the
philosophers of classic Greece, that the freeman is
free only that he may the better serve the interests of
the Commonwealth.
In view, now, of this necessarily concise and in
complete record, I dare say that there has been more
ethical progress, both extensive and intensive, during
the nineteenth century than during all the eighteen
centuries preceding. I have said nothing of the
multiplying books on ethics theoretical and practical,
nothing of the ethical-culture movement, so promising,
21

Interludes
especiaUy for provoking healthy emulation in rehgious
societies, which have sometimes seemed to forget
that ethics must be taught as apphed rehgion. That
there are deplorable gaps to be filled in the hne
of progress may be frankly confessed by the most
hopeful. Conspicuous evils menace the foundation of
society in the family. The home is widely desecrated
by the lax treatment of the marriage relation, and
the vile housing of many poor. There is no small
moral anarchy both in business and in politics. Yet
many of the dark areas are not now so black as formerly-
No bank now fails, as in the time of the " wUd cats,"
with $580,000 in outstanding notes and $86„40 in
specie for their redemption. And the darkest areas
of to-day confront a growing pubhc rebuke. A public
sentiment spreads, which Dean Hodges has, expressed
in saying, " Economics, like theology, is 'A httle use
but for character." The ethical forces which have
effected such progress as we have recorded are at
work with a growing momentum, and justify an
optimistic outlook upon the twentieth century.
Finally, none should fail to note the significance
with which the subject of ethical progress appears on
the programme of this Conference, as a preface to its
various topics of practical rehgious interest. This is
doubly significant. It means : (1) That the, very
conception of ethics has been deepened in our time.
To talk now of " mere ethics " is antiquated. Ethics
is no longer a science of mere rules and behaviour,
but the science of moral nature. As such, it has to
concern itself not merely with the moral nature found
on this speck of a planet, but also with the moral
22

Ethical Progress in the Nineteenth Century
nature which inhabits the universe, " the Ancient of
Days," and our relation to the Holy One. Thus ethics
has become, nay must be, religious in order to be
complete. (2) It means also that religion has become
ethical. The theosophizing and incense-burning and
ecclesiasticism that have stolen its garb are being
reduced to transparent impostures by the fast-growing
conviction that our knowledge of God, as Dean
Fremantle has said, " is no greater than what is
shown of it in our worldly relations."
Aristotle said : " Society begins to be, that men
may hve ; it continues to be, that men may live weU."
The practical ends, therefore, of ethics as a social
science, and of rehgion as a social spirit, are identical.
Nothing, then, can be of practical value in rehgion
but what is ethical. This is the amply sufficient
ground of truth upon which aU reaUy religious men,
however various their forms of doctrine, pohty, or
ritual, can unite as allies for the furtherance of what
ever promotes, and the extirpation of whatever
hinders, men's hving weU ; hving as it is man's duty
and man's right to hve. Such a union, exhibited in
this Conference of Rehgion, is one of the most un
mistakable tokens of ethical progress.
Yet must religion, as the mightiest of those divine
inspirations that well up from the subconscious and
primal deeps of our moral nature, furnish the one in
exhaustible motor-force of successful ethical endeavour.
This is a truth less open to question since that
great scientist has set his seal to it, who first coined
the word agnostic to describe his position in theology.
Eighteen years ago, in view of menacing evils threat-
23

Interludes
ening the stabihty of the Republic, a distinguished
professor of pohtical economy declared it urgently
important to call out " the moral reserves." It is
as important to-day as then. That they have not
yet aU been called out, the flagitious administration
of our chief cities shows. Rehgion only can call them
aU out. Only in so doing can rehgion make good
against aU gainsaying her ancient claim to be the
keystone of the arch of human hfe. For, as Dean
Fremantle has said, " When the Church (i.e., as he
meant, Religion) is seen to be the constant inspirer
of human progress, there will be no sceptics but those
to whom human progress is indifferent."

24

An Ethical Creed

II
AN ETHICAL CREED1
Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren) has been saying
that no Church since the primitive days of Christianity
has ventured to formulate " an ethical creed." By
this he doubtless means a creed expressing the
ethical ideals of Christianity with the emphasis given
them in the Scriptures.
Dr. Watson's remark is abundantly corroborated
by a survey of the principal creeds, oecumenical and
Protestant. The former, particularly the Apostles'
Creed and the Nicene, are liturgical affirmations
of the historical and spiritual facts and doctrines of
the Evangehc Tradition, to which the Nicene adds its
metaphysical doctrine of the deity of Christ to fence
out the Arian heresy. In both of these the ethical
element is present more in inference than in expression.
In the Protestant creeds, beginning with the Augsburg
Confession in 1530, the ethical element, though not
wanting, is thrown into the shade by the theological
emphasis on orthodox doctrine, which in some points
is even non-ethical, affirming in the Heidelberg
Catechism that God imputes to the behever in Christ
the perfect righteousness and hohness of Christ.
The duty of " good works " aU Protestant creeds
1 From The Outlook, October 20, 1906.
27

Interludes
affirm, but deny them any rehgious value except
as the fruit of faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ.
Martineau, in his " Types of Ethical Theory," remarks
upon this with some exaggeration : " With the
proclamation and spread of Protestantism the religious
value of morals disappeared."
Furthermore, the ethical standard adopted was
neither the highest nor the most complete. It was
taken from the Pentateuch rather than from the
Gospels, from the law of Moses rather than the life
of Jesus. The Westminster Confession of 1647 affirms
that the moral law of God is set forth in the Ten
Commandments, mainly negative as they are, as
" a perfect rule of righteousness." Thus deficient
ethicaUy, the creeds expend their strength on an
interest for doctrinal knowledge, and overshadow
the things to be done with the things to be believed.
Closely related to this one-sidedness is the fact
noted by a friendly critic, that " the Church has
found it easier to worship Jesus as the Son of God
than to follow him as the Son of man."
The primitive documents of Christianity set it
forth as " the Way " of the godly hfe, with equal
emphasis on its ethical and its religious character
istics. Its subsequently formed creeds exhibit it
in terms of dogma rather than of hfe. A few years
since a seminary professor wrote that the Presby
terian Church existed for the maintenance of the
doctrinal beliefs set forth in its theological standards.
The natural evil consequence of this long magnifying
of the intellectual and dwarfing of the ethical interest
is seen in the inveterate misconception of Christianity,
28

An Ethical Creed
which repels from the churches so many good people
who regard it as a system of doctrines which they
more or less dissent from, rather than as the Way of
the moral and rehgious life which their consciences
approve. A consequence more pernicious is that,
1 outside of the churches, as weU as within, many have
made to themselves idols — a crude morality without
religion, and a crude religion morally deficient.
Such, then, is the urgent need for a creed blending
rehgion and morahty with equal fulness in the indis
soluble union which each requires for genuineness.
The pattern is abundantly clear in the Scriptures.
These illuminate what the creeds obscure. How
closely the Hebrew prophets identified morality
with religion appears in Micah's classic question :
" What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy
God ? " — that is, such justice and such mercy as
accompany converse in humility with God. The
Pauline Epistles give us theology in abundance,
but ethics also with a fulness which the creeds, while
amplifying the theology, have neglected. In St.
Paul's letters theology always flowers out profusely
into moral precepts, and the Anal emphasis is regularly
placed upon the righteous, Christhke hfe. " The
things which befit sound doctrine," as stated in
the Epistle to Titus, are precepts for holy living by
men and women, bond and free. But it is, above aU,
in the life of Jesus that the interpenetration, the perfect
fusion of religion and moraUty is seen in ideal com
pleteness. I believe in Jesus Christ and in following him is the
29

Interludes
most compendious and also most complete creed for
a Christian man. But intelhgent self-direction in
this hne calls for supplementary ethical definition.
General terms require specification. The whole can
be adequately known only by knowing the particulars
that compose it. Theologically, the creeds have
given such knowledge in ample details. Ethically,
it remains to be given in equal amphtude, and even
larger, since conduct counts for vastly more than
knowledge. Faith is simple, but occasions for its
exercise in conduct are manifold. The ethical defi
nition of what it is to beheve in Christ and follow
him must needs be somewhat expansive in detail.
Creed-makers are commonly supposed to have had
their day. Cutting down their inteUectual work to
things essential is supposed to be aU that remains
to do. On the contrary, the ethical field in which
they did so httle is one in which much remains to do.
Ten years ago Dr. Watson himseU made a beginning
in this field. It was widely discussed at the time.
Its expansion of ethical interest with contraction
of the theological caUed forth some protests from
ecclesiastical quarters. Thus it read :
I believe in the Fatherhood of God ; in the words of Jesus ; in
a clean heart ; in the service of love ; in the unworldly life ; in
the Beatitudes. I promise to trust God, and to follow Christ,
to forgive my enemies, and to seek after the righteousness of God.
This statement of a confession in which all Christian
people must agree was offered simply as a basis
for Christian unity. Adequate for that, it is less
adequate for the greater need of the development
of an instructed Christian conscience. This requires
30

An Ethical Creed
more specific affirmations of the various character
istics of Christian life and conduct. AU Christians
theoretically " beheve in the words of Jesus " ; not
aU follow every hne of conduct required by such
behef. AU Christians "beheve in a clean heart";
not aU in every particular of the conduct which
makes the heart really clean. For practical uses
an ethical creed should so explicitly delineate the
Way of life and conduct which the Christian ideal
requires that the ignorant and inexperienced may
comprehend it, and may inteUigently follow it amidst
temptations to various forms of unrighteousness.
While Dr. Watson's brief formulary goes in the
right direction, its generalities need to be particu
larized for pedagogic use.
What this involves has been well expressed in a
paragraph of the declaration of faith adopted this year
for the united church in which Congregationalists,
Methodist Protestants, and the United Brethren
propose to coalesce.1
We believe that, according to Christ's law, men of the Christian
faith exist wholly for the service of man, not only in holding forth
the Word of life, but in the support of works and institutions of
piety and charity, in the maintenance of human freedom, in the
deliverance of all those that are oppressed, in the enforcement
of civic justice, and the rebuke of all unrighteousness.
Excellent as this is, one may question whether it
comes fuUy up to the ideal. An ethical compartment
in a block of propositions does not impart ethical
character to the whole. In any statement whatso-
1 This project has been arrested, at least for a time, when
apparently on the eve of success. 31

Interludes
ever a specifically ethical characteristic is recognis
able only in the purposing of an object of wiU
and endeavour. An ethical creed, therefore, must
not only express the relation of its credenda to agenda,
of belief to action, but this relation must appear
throughout, to give ethical character to the whole.
The ideal creed of this kind is unlikely to be for
mulated by a single hand. But it wiU have to meet
two distinct needs : (1) emphasis on moral ideals rather
than, as in the theological creeds, on inteUectual
ideas ; (2) sufficient detail to avoid both the brevity
that veils and the diffuseness that tires. Some
such specimen as the following may serve for_iUus-
tration of the aim :
We believe in God as the Father of all men, requiring a brotherly
mind and conduct toward all from each.
We believe in Jesus Christ as our divine pattern of sonship to
God and brotherhood to man ; the Captain of our salvation through
warfare against whatever is unbrotherly toward man and unfilial
toward God.
We believe in the Holy Spirit as our Monitor, Quickener, and
Guide into all truth and duty in Jesus' Way of love and faithfulness
to God and man.
We believe in the Bible as the record of the Holy Spirit's work
in bringing men out of darkness into the saving light of Christ,
that we may know the will of God, and do it.
We believe that salvation through Christ is salvation from
a selfish heart and life, wrought out through unselfish service to men,
to be done as for God, and as a necessary part of the true worship
of God.
We believe that the whole duty of man is to seek the Kingdom
of God and his righteousness,
By loving one's neighbour as one's self, and treating as
neighbour whomever we can help in his need ;
By sacrifice at the altar of human need as sacrifice at the
altar of God ; 32

An Ethical Creed
By aiming at goodness as true greatness, and greatness
in unselfish service as the noblest greatness ;
By valuing material goods according to their uses as helps
toward a higher life for ourselves and others ;
By preferring a rich life to a rich living, richness in good
thoughts and deeds to richness in possessions ;
By strictness with ourselves and charitableness to others ;
By forgetting offences, remembering kindnesses, and speaking
truth in love ;
By regarding the good in others rather than the evil, and
making more of our agreements with others than our disagree
ments ;
By abhorring all insincerity, indolence, and cowardice ;
By hating every form of evil in one's self or in the community,
and warring against it ;
By steadfast patience, courage, and sympathy, regardless
of inconvenience or loss, in furthering our Father's will in
ourselves, our neighbourhood, our nation, and our world.
The present time of moral awakening seems to invite
constructive work in this line. The School of Ethical
Culture must no longer be permitted to outdo the
Church. Whatever its religious lack, it has been
studious of the Bibhcal ideals of righteousness, and
the Church may wisely learn from it. FinaUy, in
return to an important point, an ethical creed must,
on the one hand, like any other, be confessional
in its avowal of ideals. On the other hand, its service-
ableness for pedagogic, disciplinary, cultural purposes
is of equal consequence. To secure this, there must
be adequate explication of the implicit content of
the confession in statements plain and terse. Between
vague brevity and wearisome prolixity must be
found the golden mean. This is the point of aim for
the attainment of a satisfying result.

33

The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church

Ill
THE MORAL CRISIS CONFRONTING THE
CHURCH1
Symptoms of moral deterioration in American society
have long been apparent. More than twenty years
ago, in his httle book, " What Social Classes Owe to
Each Other," Professor Sumner, of Yale, speaking
from an economist's standpoint, declared it the duty
of the hour to caU out " the moral reserves " to
avert growing evils. The warning was unheeded
then ; it is beginning to be heeded now. During the
past few years the roar of the cataract has made
itself heard, and the oars have begun to be plied
against the downward drift. Signs of alarm and
earnest effort appear, and with good reason. The
daUy press publishes edifying editorial sermonettes.
Church conventions have begun to improve their
opportunity. The recent two days' meeting of the
Congregational Association of New Jersey headed its
programme, " For a Revival of Conscience."
There are also premonitions of an economic crisis,
as all know, in the strife between capital and labour.
Nothing more need be said of this than that it is at
1 From The Homiletic Review, August, 1906 ; — containing the
substance of various addresses before the New York State Conferenee
of Religion. 37

Interludes
bottom mora], growing out of unrighteous inequalities
in social conditions. That this is so needs no further
evidence than the concurrent testimony of the General
Convention of the Episcopal Church, the National
Council of the Congregational Churches, and the
Positivist leader, Frederic Harrison, all declaring that
the real crisis is not economic but moral.
Such, then, are the conditions which now confront
the churches, the nuclei of the moral forces of the
community, the professed custodians of moral interests,
with a call to cast out devils and enthrone the righteous
ness of God. The honour of moral leadership thus
far the Church can hardly claim. During aU the
years while evils were growing to their pres?int^por-
tentous enormity, the Church in her great assemblies
made httle or no protest against them. Half a do/zen
years ago the late Senator Hoar, in the chak of a
religious conference, affirmed that the pulpit was
lacking in that vigorous treatment of moral questions
which he had observed in former times. However
that may have been, the present fact is that the pulpit
has begun to find its voice, and the Church. is coming
to consciousness, not only of an imminent moral
crisis, but of an imperative call to take the lead in
deciding it, and to vindicate its claim to a divine
mission by a work for righteousness that shaU go deep
enough for permanency. It is not enough that
flourishing iniquities are consumed in a transient
blaze of popular indignation ; the fire will die out ;
iniquity will sprout again. It is just here that the
demand for leadership with which the present crisis
confronts the churches apphes to them a serious.
38

The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church
test, a question how well they are grounded in those
fundamental moral truths through neglect of which the
evil came, and the reahzation of which must bar its
return. It may seem paradoxical to say that the real nature
of morahty is not yet truly understood by many
Christian people — though this is a central point of
rehgious concern. Some rather startling statements
on this point have been made by Christian teachers,
e.g., Professor Bowne, of Boston University, tells us
that " the vast majority of men have no properly
moral aims at all." What he means by this will
become clear as we proceed. Yet sound convictions
as to right and wrong exist, and a considerable degree
of moral sensitiveness undoubtedly prevails, with
general censure of conduct that fails to conform to
the current standard of right. The conventional
standard of morality has been notably advanced.
What elect souls won by struggle and sacrifice is now
accepted as a matter of course by the crowd. Precious
are such gains. We do not undervalue them ; only
they must not sate us, but whet us. Just here is the
fatal fault : conformity to the current moral standard
is supposed to be genuine morality ; but real morahty
is another thing. What it is, the ancient maxim
teaches : " He who ceases to become better ceases
to be good." Paraphrasing this, Thomas HiU Green,
of Oxford, taught : " It is in the continued effort
to be better that goodness consists."
As this is the heart of the matter, it is a point
on which no doubt must linger. What the vital
element of morahty is we see in the history of morahty.
39

Interludes
This is a history of change, of progress from low
conditions up. Practices once tolerated have gradu
aUy been banned as infamous. In times not far
distant rum flowed at church ordinations, lotteries
were authorized for the benefit of Presbyterian
churches in Philadelphia, negroes were sold at auction
in the national capital. Such contrasts with the
higher standard of the present point to the vital
element, without which the lower type of morality
could never have developed into the higher. While
moral standards change, they show an element abiding
constant through all change. This abiding element
is the essential element — an upward look and struggle.
Says Wundt, of Leipzig : " The innermost essence
of morahty is in ceaseless, never-ending effort."
Whether in the New Hebrides among recent converts
from cannibahsm, or in New England among
descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers ; whether in the
saint cultivating the garden of his soul, or in the
reformer striving to purify society, real morality is
seen to be essentiaUy progressive, struggling for
continuous betterment personally and sociaUy, a
dynamic spirit, essentiaUy different from the static,
stagnant conventionalism popularly called moral,
content with the performance of actions reputed to
be good. Stationary morahty, dechning constant
effort to become better than one is, sitting down to
rest and be thankful amid the existing wastes and
burdens of society, while idly boasting that conditions
are better than they were, is the anaemia out of which,
till it be made an end of, moral crises wiU recur with
out end. Said the Bishop of Ripon : " Conventional
40

The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church
standards operate as ethical narcotics." Precious
products are they of past struggles for righteousness ;
they are bulwarks against a relapse into barbarism ;
but resting on them is palsying to the moral nerve
that won them. Thomas HiU Green reminds us that
the present level of morality would never have been
reached, if the temper that now rests content with it
had been universal. Says Professor Bowne : " Refusal
to move onward is to be a traitor to the highest, and
so, finaUy, to the good itseU." The foremost ethical
writers in Europe and America thus teach in unanimity.
Just as a thing that seems to be a seed is not a real
seed unless it is able to produce more seeds, so what
professes to be morahty is not real morahty unless it
is able to produce more morality. There is no more
radical difference in the universe than that which
exists between a dead form and a living. No duty
is now more urgently incumbent on the teachers of
churches than to make plain even to the wayfarer
the unreality of the dead morality that deludes and
contents him.
If this point is gained, all is gained. It is the key
of the situation in a moral crisis. It is like the first
and great commandment, in that it involves a second,
by which its content is illuminated.
Real morahty, always aspiring toward the moral
ideal, is essentiaUy social. Conventional morahty,
devitahzed in its sterile content with the current code,
is not social but individuahstic. Both in the churches
and among the masses merely this — to be free from
private vices, to be honest, truthful, and industrious,
faithful to one's family, kind to neighbours, and
41

Interludes
careful to keep on the windy side of the law, is accepted
as the moral life, the whole of it. In this view the
obhgations of the other-regarding virtues are not
wholly ignored, but are supposed to be discharged
by occasional doles to charity, and by observance of
social decencies and civihties ; the primacy is accorded
to the seU-regarding virtues. " Thy neighbour as
thyseh " is practically treated as a counsel of perfec
tion. Men view it as a snow-clad Alpine summit,
admired on the blue horizon afar from the common
road, and forbidding except to the adventurous few.
But the worst mischiefs punish the abuse of nature.
In the nature of things every legitimate business is
a ministry to human want, a branch of social service.
Society is a mutual benefit organization, citizenship a
trusteeship, public office a pubhc trust. In actual
practice business is the pursuit of selfish interest,
citizenship a private asset convertible to personal
profit, pubhc office a stepping-stone to private ends.
Yet all this substitution of mastery for ministry, of
seh-seeking for social service, anti-social as it is, and
therefore immoral, passes as compatible with a moral
hfe. From this abuse of nature moral crises inevit
ably spring. We see its fruit to-day in practices so
exorbitant as to make men think of devising new legal
preventives ; but no preventive will meet the case
that does not reach this root of aU sorts of evil.
This must be attacked as it has never yet been. In
the New Testament covetousness is put in the same
black hst as fornication. The testimony of the
modern Church against it is mostly limited to the
liturgical repetition of the Tenth Commandment,
42

The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church
which should long ago have been expounded with the
same breadth that Jesus gave, for example's sake,
to the Sixth and the Seventh. But in the modern
pulpit covetousness, the most paralyzing to the
spiritual hfe of any sin, and yet of all sins the most
respectable and deceptive in its disguise as thrift,
has been one of the rarest themes. Here is need of
the axe. In our present social perils the teacher of
morality and of rehgion will do weU to strike at the
great lie which blinds men's consciences — that morahty
unsociahzed is morality, that seU-interested virtue
satisfies the moral demand, that a life planned more
for acquisition than for distribution can be a moral
life ; the great he that is the tap-root of our social
discords and dangers, that makes it possible for men
steeped in anti-social principles and practices to enjoy
social respectability, good standing in churches, and
even honour as Christian philanthropists. Not till
this monstrous fallacy is eradicated will much progress
be made toward the grand desideratum which Roswell
Hitchcock long ago stated as " the christianizing of
Christendom," whose condition even now is closely
parallel to what is recorded in the eighth century
B.C. of those heathen colonists in the Holy Land, of
whom it is said that they " feared Jehovah, and served
their own gods."
Thus incontrovertible is the seeming paradox,
that even in churches it is not yet understood as it
should be what morality really is. Yet this is the
fundamental question to which a moral crisis throws
back all who would meet it adequately. So will the
old Greek proverb be found true : " The beginning is
43

Interludes
half of the whole." Subordinate questions are easily
settled when the fundamental delusion has been
exposed ; when real morality is seen to be other
than the conventional, sterihzed thing so-called,
devoid of all aspiration toward the ideal ; when the
imposture has been unmasked which represents a
hemisphere as the whole globe, pretending that the
individuahstic, unsociahzed virtue of a Ufe devoted to
private interest is the moral life, whose hall-mark
is its devotion to pursuit of the moral ideal, the
righteousness of God.
Not less important is what now remains to be said.
Let a clear perception of the fundamental reality be
gained, and the illusion will vanish, which in most
minds disjoins religion and morality with a false
antithesis, pernicious to their common interest. In
the Old Testament rehgion is defined in terms of
righteousness, — the Biblical word for our modern
term, morahty. The Hebrew prophets treat rehgion
and morahty together as one thing. The Beatitudes
of Jesus describe the Kingdom of the Spirit in an
outhne of moral character. St. Paul describes " the
fruit of the Spirit " in the terms of moral virtues.
Yet there are preachers who think of spirituahty
as something more divine than morality, although
at the same time they regard God as the Moral
Governor of the world, and recognize the perfection
of Deity as consisting in moral attributes. Outside
of the Church are many who deem religion optional
for those that are inclined to it, and morality enough
without it. Within the Church one hears much
disparagement of " mere morahty," as if there were
44

The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church
any such thing. " Mere ethics " is still a current
phrase, in which a smack of Cotton Mather's idea of
ethics survives — " impiety reduced to the form of
art." These contradictions, hardening the one class
of people in irrehgion, hardening the other class in
incomplete rehgion, semi-moralized, spring from the
same root — a false notion of what genuine morahty
is. The " mere morahty " that contents the irreligious
man, while it dissatisfies the healthy instinct of the
rehgious man, is simply the conventional thing that
exhausts itself in compliance with the popular code.
The common error of both parties is in treating as
real that which is not real. Only in common percep
tion of the reality can their contradictions cease.
The truth that ends their strife is, that rehgion and
morahty, though differing in aspect and emphasis —
rehgion emphasizing thought and feeling, morahty
emphasizing wfll — are one. Real morahty is essen
tiaUy rehgious ; religion, real only so far as moral.
" The moral ideal," says Wundt, " belongs to the
realm of the infinite." In equivalent terms Jesus
sums up his spiritual exposition of moral laws : "Ye
shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect."
Thus the modern ethicist and the Head of the Church
concur in recognizing both moral and rehgious aspira
tion as directed alike toward the infinite, and therefore
essentiaUy one. The difference between real religion
and real morality is simply the difference between the
two sides of a coin ; you cannot have the one without
the other. They face differently, that is aU ; but
they are fused together, they make up the one thing.
What ia it that we see in Jesus but just this — religion
45

Interludes
and morahty fused in the unity of a holy enthusiasm
for the righteousness of God ? According to the
indisputable maxim of Dean Fremantle, " Our know
ledge of God is no greater than the reflection of it in
our worldly relations," no man can be any more as
a minister of rehgion than he is as a minister of the
morahty which is the divinely enjoined liturgy of
rehgion. The two cannot be separate in preaching
any more than in hving. We separate them as St.
Paul did not. Mark how the theological chmax of
his letter to the Romans lands the reader at
chapter xii. on the lofty highlands of the moral
life of ihose that walk with God. See also how the
subhme Christology of the first haU of his letter to
the Colossians is made the basis for the elaborate
ethical superstructure erected in the second half.
What, now, is the most common cause of the
rehgious atrophy from which so many nominaUy
Christian people suffer ? It is their mistaken satis
faction with an unreal morality, non-vital, non-pro
gressive, as unhke the real as a cross-section of a tree
is unhke the growing tree. But this is precisely the
stationary morality of paganism, and such is the
inseparable unity of rehgion and morahty that a
pagan morahty atrophies the Christianity that em
braces it. Pagan Greece and Rome have transmitted
to us not only their words for morahty, but the very
sense which they attached to the words, as signifying
conformity to the ethos, the mores, of the time being,
the current popular code of virtue. The distinctively
Christian conception of morality is dynamic, derived
46

The Moral Crisis Confronting the Church
from Jesus' view of its aim as an ideal, the flying
goal of continual pursuit, the holy brotherhood of
perfected individuals in the City of God, as a perfected
society fulfilling the righteous will of the Heavenly
Father, the object and the incentive of their aspiration
and endeavour. In Jesus' rebuking questions, " Do
not even the Gentiles so ? " " What do ye more
than others ? " — in his emphatic warning, " Except
your righteousness shaU exceed the righteousness of
the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven," is a distinct and un
compromising condemnation of the morahty that is
not reaUy moral because of its torpid acquiescence in
moral imperfection, because of its lack of the dynamic
heart of morality, its essential element of aspiration
toward the better and the best.
" Christian civilization," says the author of " The
Rehgion of Christ," " has always preferred the pagan
to the distinctly Christian virtues, finding it easier
to worship Jesus as the Son of God than to follow
him as the Son of man." Even now the fundamental
teaching of Jesus remains for the most part like the
lamp in his parable, put under the bed. The static
notion of morahty that ruled in ancient paganism still
dominates the common mind, and widely infects the
churches with its false and dangerous antithesis
between morahty and religion, putting asunder what
God has joined together. Because of this basal
faUacy Christianity remains but partially morahzed,
and so far is partly anti-Christian in its accommodation
to the way of a world which, ever since the days of
the troglodytes, has been ruled by its preference of
47

Interludes
competition in getting benefit to that competition
in giving benefit which Jesus' Golden Rule enjoins.
Hence, and not from any innovations in theology or
Bibhcal criticism, is what Professor Ladd, of Yale,
points to as a glaring anomaly in the body that bears
the name of the Supreme Moral Teacher — the " rela
tively low and nerveless " moral condition of the
churches. Hence the moral crises that recur from
time to time. There is no final salvation from them
tUl the churches understand and teach the first
principles of the rehgious morahty and the morahzed
religion of their Head. As set forth in his Sermon
on the Mount, they are the indispensable introduction
to the subhme theology of St. Paul and St. John.
The church that does not fully adopt the one
cannot reasonably expect to convince the world of
the other. And so the recent saying of the devout
preacher in the London City Temple is indubitably
true : " The supreme spiritual need to-day is a
strenuous morahty."

48

Self- Realization, Not Self-Denial

IV
SELF-REALIZATION, NOT SELF-DENIAL1
That Christianity requires sacrifice is a truism. Its
symbol, the Cross, proclaims it. This sacrifice is
usuaUy regarded as sacrifice of self. It may be ques
tioned whether a deeper insight justifies this estimate.
Faithful Christian hving must forgo some desires,
and so Christianity is commonly regarded as a self-
denying rehgion. Whether it is reaUy such demands
inquiry. Are its denials denials of seU, or of what
is not the real self ? It is more truly regarded and
more deservedly represented as the religion whose
innermost purpose is seh-realization.
The sum of Jesus' teaching is that God is every
man's Father, that every man is to live as a child of
God should live, and that he himself is, every man's
pattern of such a life. Such a life he represents as a
hfe of service at the altar of human needs, where the
stronger must serve the weaker, even as he gives his
life " a ransom for many." Whatever else this may
mean, it has certainly been illustrated in multitudes
of noble hves redeemed from low and selfish ends by
the inspirations caught from him. Just such lives
he declared it his purpose to inspire to the fullest.
" I am come that they may have hfe, and may have
1 From The Homiletic Review, August, 1904.
51

Interludes
it abundantly." The sum of his precepts is, Believe
in me ; follow me ; count weU the cost beforehand,
but be assured of my joy, my peace, no loss in the
way I lead you on. He never speaks of having denied
himseU anything, but counts it his daily food to do
the wiU and finish the work of his Father. To speak
of the life of Jesus as one of seU-denial or self-sacrifice
is to speak from the point of view that the lazy savage,
who said, " It costs too much to be a white man,"
took of the life of the industrious farmer or mechanic.
It is a life of sublime self-realization as a man among
men that Jesus lived. It is in leading us into just such
a life that he is " the captain of our salvation." The
salvation contemplated by Christianity as embodied
in Jesus is simply the ideal seU-realization of man as a
chUd of God.
The weakness of Christianity to-day is that it is
not regarded in this its true character by the mass of
its representatives. Salvation is often thought of
rather as an escape from the pains of God's displeasure,
conditioned on abandoning things that displease God.
Many a young person thus views the matter : " If I
become a Christian, I must give up this ; I cannot
do that." Looking at the Church collectively, many
a man outside has cause to say, " What do ye more
than others ? " It is not abstinence but achievement
that attracts men and wins a following. Christianity
can convince the world only when manifested in its
true character as the way of self-reahzation. For
self-reahzation is the grand object toward which,
however misconceived, in ways however mistaken, all
men are naturally bent. 52

Self- Realization, Not Self-Denial
The world's general mistake, however, is in its low
notion of the self that needs realization. Here one
may recaU Aristotle's saying, that what is first in the
order of nature is last in the order of time, and St.
Paul's saying : " First the psychical [A.V., " natural "J ,
afterwards the spiritual." NaturaUy we are first
aware of our separate needs, and crave our individual
satisfactions ; but our last discovery is that these
are essential and inseparable components of social
needs and satisfactions ; that is, if we acquire a civi
lized regard and rational preference for the permanent
rather than the fleeting. Well for us, well for the
Commonwealth, if at length we learn that the indi
vidual is but a cell in the social body ; that the health
of the whole depends on the health of the cellular
tissue we term " society " ; that one morbid cell is
a centre of infection which menaces the health of the
social organism. The proverb, " One man is no man,"
meaning the impossibility of a hermit or any com
pletely isolated individual realizing a truly human
life, carries the corollary that the single separate self,
seeking strictly individual satisfactions together with
those of only the extensions of self which are found in
one's own famUy or party or social set, is not the real
and fully human self. This is a broadly social self,
serving and served by the whole social body of which
it is a member, realizing itseU in full development and
permanent satisfaction only as it devotes itseU to
the service of the body by which it is served. Here
we find the cardinal truth of Christianity as the reli
gion of humanity, that self-reahzation is only through
the self-surrender of the part to the whole, the self-
53

Interludes
devotion of the member to its body, which is less
properly caUed seU-sacrifice. Jesus therefore said,
" He that loseth his life shall find it." The reahzation
of the distinctively human or social seU is through
the sacrifice of its competitor, the unsocial, separate,
so-called self that is not the real self. The life that
Jesus speaks of losing is a narrower and lower life
than the life which such losing is the condition of
finding. " Live according to nature " was a cardinal maxim
of the Stoic philosophy, in which the wisdom of ancient
Greece came nearest to Christianity. Yet Christian
thought has objected to this ; and why ? Because
Christian thought tiU recently has taken the low view
of human nature which such a term as self-denial
implies. This term wrongly identifies our nature and
self with the brute underpinning rather than the
human superstructure in which is the distinctive hfe
of humanity. If we adopt the idea of human, nature
which Jesus' cardinal doctrine of God as our Father
imphes, the Stoic maxim is thoroughly right. One
here recalls Emerson's remark, that our consciousness
is a sliding scale, which at one time seems to identify
us with the divine Spirit, and at another time with
the very flesh of our body. Our prime need, if we
would be fuUy human, is to cultivate the higher con
sciousness, that we are all God's children, all brothers
in him. What, indeed, is human in contrast with
animal nature, except that it is distinctively spiritual,
carrying, indeed, an animal inheritance for its service,
but endowed with divine possibilities for its cynosure ?
This treasure, as St. Paul teUs us, we have " in earthen
54

Self-Realization, Not Self-Denial
vessels." It is not the animal, psychical vessel, but
the spiritual treasure in it that is real humanity, as
distinct from the brute stock it budded from. This is
the real nature of which the Stoic maxim should be
•understood ; this the nature according to which man's
true hfe must be lived ; this the true self, begotten
of the Spirit in the hkeness of the All-Father ; this
that demands expression, satisfaction, full realization.
Duly emphasizing this self in living according to this
nature, such terms as self-denial and self-sacrifice lose
aU significance to the aspiring soul. They drop out
of one's vocabulary as out of Jesus' thought, because
of their imphcit falsehood ; because through a trick
of words they tend to reverse one's thought from its
right direction, looking backward instead of forward,
tending to defeat true seU-realization by fixing the eye,
hke the Hebrews in the wUderness, on the fleshpots
of Egypt, rather than on the glory of the land of
promise. We hear a lament that the world is dominated
by self-interest. The lament misses the mark. We
cannot have too much interest for our real self. It is
by a low notion of seU that the world is dominated.
A man beguUes himself into fancying himseU as natur
ally at odds with other selves, and needing the taking
in rather than the giving out of benefits ; bound to
accumulate goods, not to impart good ; enriched by
possession, not by distribution ; satisfied with perish
able and transitory holdings — a notion true enough of
the earthly vessel, false of the heavenly treasure in it,
the true self, that rusts away if not employed in
profitable outlay. Well were it to be dominated by
55

Interludes
self-interest, were this an interest for the realization
of the really human seU, whose real interest is one
with that of every and all selves, the social, co
operating, ministering, brotherly seU, to whose satis
factions aU minister in degree as it ministers to them ;
whose receiving increases with its giving ; whose joys
expand with its services ; whose expectation can
never be cut off, because it never cuts off its own
interest from the common interest of humanity. Here
is the point where the initial sentence of Jesus' Gospel
of the Kingdom, " change your minds " (most im
perfectly translated by the word " repent "), pricks
the grand fallacy of the world, and bids men cultivate
the higher, human consciousness, as if to say, Be
your real selves. Here, too, is the point where the
Greek maxim, " Know thyself," presses home the
highest wisdom of the ancient world. Make no
mistake as to what your true seU is. Understand
yourself, if you would rightly direct your hfe, and
save yourself from self-defeat.
Of his true self no man can make too much. It is
his sacred trust from God, and for it is his prime
responsibihty to God. Jesus' rule, " Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself," imphcitly makes right love
of seU the norm of right love of the neighbour. One
must not love his neighbour in the foohsh way in
which a man often loves himself, but as wisely as he
ought to love himseU. And so when we hear Jesus
say, " Deny thyseU and foUow me," we must not fail
to understand him as stooping to use the world's
language so as to be understood by men who have
only the low notion of self, that certainly was not his.
56

Self-Realization, Not Self-Denial
To obey this precept is simply to abandon selfish
ness as fatal to a right self-love, — courses as far apart
as is the animal from the spiritual. God certainly
loves himseU, for he loves what he is, the eternal
Goodness. Jesus not only loved the world, but loved
himseU, loved himself for others' sake. "For their
sakes," said he, " I sanctify myseU, that they also
may be sanctified in truth." Not for the world only,
but also for fidelity to his own nature, he endured
the cross. Herbert Spencer, in the famous fourteenth
chapter of his " Data of Ethics," has shown that in
the highest range of the moral life love of seU and
love of others blend in one. In such seU-love as that
of Jesus the selfish antagonisms of " mine " and
" thine " — not Christian words, said Luther, certainly
not Christian in their common use — have ceased to be.
In its goal of seU-realization through the reciprocal
love and service in which each seeks another's good
as his own, is fulfilled the prayer of Jesus for his
friends, " That they may all be one."
This is the path pursued by the great saints, heroes,
and benefactors ; this the way which the world's
admiration of them attests as the way of the true
seU, and of " the life which is life indeed." What
the world on its low level shuns as self-denial they
pursue on the uplands of thought as self-reahzation,
and so enter into glory among men and angels. The
Gospel of Jesus' preaching, the Gospel of their obedi
ence, is weU called in Scripture " the glorious Gospel,"
for it turns men from the shame and sorrow of seU-
defeat to the glory of seU-reahzation as the children
of God. Here we come to the first spiritual principle.
57

Interludes
in the higher consciousness of our inheritance in God,
obedient to the heavenly vision of the divine possi
bilities of the spark of his own nature which God
has lodged within us, to. be fostered into the flame
that transfigures the earthly into the heavenly. But
as a veil is said to have hid the glory of Moses' face
when he came down from the mount, where he had
communed with God, so a veil is cast over the glory
of Jesus' Gospel by calhng it a Gospel of seU-denial ;
and so the aspiring, virile, heroic tone that attracts
strong natures is effeminated.
A fundamental faUacy of Christian thought has
been in conceiving of human personahty as essentiaUy
apart from God ; in speaking of " mere man," as if
any such reality existed, and of human strength as
aU one's own ; in exalting to the dignity of the human
seU its servant, the animal nature, with its desires
and passions ; in forgetting the divine germ which
is the real core of our humanity, capacitated for
eternal life, if only discerned and cultivated. A
momentous mistake — this separating of self from
God ! Our finite hfe is ensphered in his infinite life.
Nothing can be external to God. " In him we live,"
said St. Paul. But how feebly does the Church
appropriate this august thought as the radiating
centre of its faith — man in God, and God in man !
A man's conception of what he is powerfuUy influences
what he does, as the French proverb, noblesse oblige,
implies. A king's son, a beggar's son, act as what
each knows himseU to be. The virtue at the base of
all other virtues is a rational seU-respect. From this
aU high endeavour springs. Without this there can
58

Self- Realization, Not Self-Denial
be no seU-realization deserving the name. A proper
presentation of Jesus' glorious Gospel aims, first of
all, to inspire the needed seU-respect that is based on
the higher human consciousness of sonship to God,
which the Gospel appeals to ; it aims to make a man
fully aware of what he is, of the divine element within
him, suppressed and abused as it may be ; of his real
nature and its capacity for grace and glory, as illumi
nated in the world's immortal honour-roll, and by the
Name at its head " that is above every name." Even
then there will be many who despise their birthright —
sensual or slothful souls. Doubtless there will be
many who must be brought to their senses and them
selves in other ways, as by fear and pain and loss ;
for " God fulfils himself in many ways." Many are the
levels of mankind in the uneven world, lower grades
of development, and higher ; many supine, fewer
aspiring souls. But the aspiring must not miss the
characteristic note of the Gospel, appeahng pecu
liarly to them to be their true selves.
In the Church and outside of it there is no more
urgent religious need to-day than that this faintly-
heard keynote of the Gospel of the eternal life be
strongly struck, so that the flame of aspiration may
be kindled in many in whom to our eyes no spark of
it appears. We must often repeat Whittier's lines :
All flesh is frail ; all dust is weak ;
Be thou the true man thou dost seek.
We must often say with Professor Royce, " To assert
the true self is to be saved."
In the narrow evangelicahsm of former days this
note was too faintly heard. The lower, non-social,
59

Interludes
non-human seU, akin to the brute, received too much
recognition ; the higher self, the social and distinc
tively human seU, akin to God, received too httle ;
perhaps because it is infantile, and the other is adult,
and it is the custom of the world to notice adults
more than children. In short, the true emphasis
of the Gospel was lost, and this is what now must be
restored. The higher human consciousness, feeble
though it be, must be roused and fostered. What the
true seU and true seU-reahzation are must be cleared
from a cloud of misunderstanding and faUacy, and
the way of the hfe worth hving must be exhibited
in aU its aUuring glory, appeahng to a man not with
" Deny thyseU," but rather with " Be thyself." That
the effort to be one's true seU involves denials and
sacrifices of some sort, not reaUy seZ/-denial, is so in
accord with universal experience in every hne of
effort that it may once for aU be faced at the outset
as a fact that goes without saying. Whatever any
man aspires to, nothing else attracts the mind set
upon its chosen goal. No man counts it seU-denial
to cast aside what hinders the attainment of his prize.
And so neither Jesus, nor the saintly, beneficent,
heroic lives that have won lasting honour in the world
by following Jesus in his way of seU-realization, have
counted whatever it cost them as anything but — to
use St. Paul's strong word — " dung " in comparison
with what they strove for.
Yet in this common feature of the experience of
every kind of human struggle for every kind of good,
there is also a vast difference to be noted. What the
man of the world sacrifices in pursuit of his objects
60

Self-Realization, Not Self-Denial
is sacrificed for the sake of having and holding what
he can have and hold for only a little while. It is for
the sake of becoming and being what it is in them
to become and be, both now and for ever, that Jesus
and all who foUow him sacrifice, not themselves,
indeed, but whatever stands in their way. This,
then, is the great word of Jesus' Gospel of the Father
hood of God : Become as I am. Be thyself. Be
sons and daughters of your Father, God. We must
beheve in God. But we must also beheve in our
selves as being reaUy more than ourselves, because
God himseU is in his temple of the God-seeking, God-
consecrated soul. Only when we believe fuUy in
God within us do we beheve as we ought in God above
us. We then are strong in him because he is strong
in us. Our real seU is essentially one with him. True
self-reahzation is in the realizing of this truth, and in
the appropriating of its power to overcome aU evil
with good through the divine growth within us of the
hfe that is eternal. Wherefore let us be ourselves, for
only as we reahze ourselves can we reahze our unity
with God in the profoundly ethical sense of Jesus'
saying, " I and my Father are one."

61

Our Great Social Heresy

V
OUR GREAT SOCIAL HERESY1
George Eliot long ago remarked that the considera
tion of interests must give place to that of functions.
This principle has familiar iUustrations in the com
pulsory service of juries, and the subpoenas of witnesses
in courts. Legislatures and courts have extended it
in assertions of public rights in railways privately
built and owned. It awaits still further extensions
that are certain to come. It phrases in modern form
the basic social principle laid down in Jesus' saying :
" The Son of man came not to be ministered unto,
but to minister " — not to be served, but to serve —
a saying as applicable to every man as to him.
But the American mind — to say nothing of European
democrats — has long faced the opposite way. Oui
Declaration of Independence opens with an assertion
that men " are endowed by their Creator with certain
inahenable rights, among which are hfe, hberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." Passing by the fact that the
criminal courts daily pronounce these " inahenable "
rights justly ahenated, one may grant that men
have been thus endowed, but must ask whether
1 An Address before the Women's League for Political Education,
New York, 1897. 65 e

Interludes
this endowment is conditioned or unconditioned ;
whether it is acquired by nature in birth, or by
the fulfilment of natural functions as serviceable
members of the social body. This is the point at
which fatal error begins.
Of course, it was and always wiU be necessary, till
struggles against oppression and tyranny have gained
the goal of freedom, to insist upon certain rights as
of prime consequence for the fulfilment of normal
human functions. Yet this insistence is simply such
leaning against a fierce wind as is needful to prevent
being overblown. When the blast has ceased, the
leaning should cease ; it is not the natural attitude.
That it has not ceased, that the average citizen
stiU harps on interests and rights, with scant concern
for functions and duties, is the present peril of
democracy, a displacement of its moral centre of
gravity which threatens the stabihty of the common
wealth. " The doctrine of individual rights," said
Mazzini, "is mighty to break chains; it has.no
power to knit bonds of co-operation and love."
There are two theories of society — the atomic or
sand-heap theory, and the organic or member-of-a-
body theory. The atomic theory regards society
as consisting merely of individuals bunched together
by force of circumstances, but aheady the possessors of
rights, to guarantee which they agree to form a society.
This was the famous " social contract " doctrine
of Rousseau, whose shaping influence appears both in
our Declaration of Independence and in certain provi
sions of our national Constitution, which apparently
66

Our Great Social Heresy
ban and bar the demands of political socialism.
Rousseau's doctrine has long been relegated to the
realm of fiction, but its radical fallacy still infects the
popular mind with notions of natural rights existing
independently of social functions. A man is widely
beheved to have a natural and inahenable right to
dechne to concern himself with civic interests, to
hve an idle hfe in the pursuit of pleasure high or
low, to enclose as private grounds as much of the earth
as he can pay for, to aggrandize his share of the nation's
wealth ilhmitably, and to transmit his entire holdings
at death to whomsoever he will. As to this illusion,
Professor Ritchie has pointedly observed that the
common appeal to natural right, varying with the
habitat of the claimant — Chinaman, Turk, or American
— merely expresses an individual judgment of what
it should include. From this individual mind,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
we. turn to the masters of thought, whom the world
has hearkened to in ancient and in modern times.
These regard society as an organism consisting of
many members knit together in the unity of a common
hfe, whose soundness and permanence depend on
what the individual members, each active in his
proper function, severally contribute thereto, and in
which the health or disease of any member affects the
entire body. This, the teaching both of ancient
philosophy and of modern science, is also the teaching
famihar to thoughtful readers of the New Testament.
Man, said Aristotle, is " naturally civic." A man
independent of society must be, said he, " either a
67

Interludes
god or a beast." That the individual can have no
real personal interest separable from the social interest
was affirmed by that Marcus Aurelius whom a great
historian has caUed " the whitest soul " in the ancient
heathen world : " What is not good for the swarm is not
good for the bee." The independent individual either
does not exist, or, if existing as a hermit or anchorite,
is an abnormal man. " One man," said Pascal —
i.e., a solitary man, — " is no man." Man did not
make society, it has weU been said ; it is society that
makes man. From this primal fact of human nature
as essentiaUy a social and civic nature, it foUows, as
Thomas Hill Green writes, that no human rights appear
except as the individual man is " (1) a member of a
society, and (2) of a society in which some common
good is recognized by the members as the ideal good
for each of them."
What, now, is the first fact evinced by this natural
relation of the individual to society as a member of the
body ? No right at aU, except a right to fulfil his
proper function as such, and this initial right itself
grows out of the primordial duty of fidelity to the
social function imposed by nature. The first concern
of the individual is to co-operate in nourishing the
organic life and weUare of the society into which he
was born, and in which he finds security and oppor
tunity already provided for his benefit. A pity it is
that this is fairly realized only when an armed enemy
invades. Then self-interest is socialized, and seU-
assertion submerged in seU-devotion to the common
weal. The enemy subdued, aU this is changed. The
time of reaUy greatest social peril is in periods of
68

Our Great Social Heresy
peace, when no external pressure enforces to social
unity, and co-operation in social duty is superseded
by clamour and conflict for selfish interests.
In the fulfilment of the primordial duty into which
every one of us is born rights immediately arise, and
only so. The most obvious of these is the right to
serve the community. That this right is often cruelly
refused the bitter cry of the unemployed in every
centre of the highest present civihzation needs no
corroborative witness. It is for the statesman to
find a way to vindicate this right, whenever frustrated
by the glut in the so-caUed labour market which a
too individuahstic use of the economic law of demand
and supply periodically causes. The teacher of
ethics must insist on the principle which economics, as
the housekeeper of the ethical community, is bound
to apply. Enough here to observe the hint given by
the storage reservoirs which distribute in dry seasons
the irrigation desperately needed then, and only
then. There is always a large variety of deferable
but desirable work for community uses to which sur
plusages of labouring force are capable of application.
EquaUy obvious is the further right : — every one
who loyaUy fulfils the duty of a social partner thereby
acquires the right to demand that every other one shall
be held to the same — otherwise he would be unjustly
burdened with the maintenance of drones. Without
work neither hfe, nor society, nor human development
is possible. The drone is therefore not only his own
enemy, but a foe to all his social partners, a parasite
whom, qua parasite, it is their common right to exter
minate — a right to be enforced not only against the

Interludes
vulgar vagabond, but as well against the gilded
sybarite. But what is the rational object of work ? Certainly
not mere wealth, then more wealth, then wealth
limitless. Wealth is but the material basis of
civilization, and real civilization, as Matthew Arnold
said, is not the external equipage and pohsh
but the humanization of man. The really human
as distinct from the merely animal interest of work
for wealth is to win leisure to rear upon this
material basis of hfe its proper superstructure of
mental and moral development in the culture of
intellectual power and rational feehng. Sane
work, as distinct from insane, has for its supreme
object the making of man, not of money. Out of
such work for leisure to secure these fruits of it grows
another right — the right of every faithful worker
to share equitably in these fruits. Such is the point
of view from which Bishop Westcott said at the
Anghcan Church Congress in 1895 that the relation
of a wage-earner to a wage-payer is not the highest
ideal of Christian economy ; but that we are to look
forward to a time when each citizen wholly devoting
himself to his vocation for the common good shall
thereby acquire a right to participate in all the fulness
of the common wealth.
Rights and duties appear thus to be related to each
other like the two sides of a coin, inseparably attached.
Whatever a man is morally obhgated to do he has a
moral, if not a legal, right to do, and only moral rights
are natural rights. The primordial duty of work
carries with it the primordial right to work — the
70

Our Great Social Heresy
right to serve the community in some form of useful
activity — " the most imprescriptible " of rights, said
Turgot, the finance minister of Louis XVI. For thus
only can the right be secured which the American
jurist, Francis Lieber, declared to be the only natural
right existing — the right of a man to fulfil the nature
of a man. But this is simply the fulfilment of his
proper function as an active social partner, a co
operating member of the social body. In short, to
the truly social spirit rights are duties, and duties
are rights.
The primary concern of ethics, however, is not with
rights, but with duties, inseparably connected and
interdependent in moral unity though they are.
WeU, therefore, do the great ethical teachers agree in
assigning priority to the duties rather than to the
rights of man — a principle which leads straight into
moral sociahsm. Could moral socialism only be
admitted to fuU practice, economic individualism, as
Bosanquet has said, would go weU enough in yoke
with it. But while the conditioned rights are achieved
only as the conditioning duties are fulfilled, we may
still agree with the men of 1776 in viewing them as
God-given, though not in the way they thought of
them as an unconditioned endowment at birth. God-
given they are indeed, since God-given is the nature
that achieves them with its God-given promptings
and powers in fulfilling the duties we are bound to by
being born into God's world in the lap of a social hfe
which we begin in debt for everything there found
ready for the use of hand or mind. If we speak of
71

Interludes
them as natural rights, it must be as only potentially
natural tiU fulfilment of the natural duties condi
tioning them has made them actual. In this Repubhc
we claim seU-government as a natural right. But,
in disallowing it to children tiU the so-caUed age of
discretion is reached, we have ghmpsed the truth
that natural rights are not unconditioned. To think
the contrary concerning whatever is claimed as a
natural right is the great social heresy of our time,
bearing aU manner of evil fruit, whose leaves are the
bane of nations. The moral claim to a right must
be vahdated by its connection with a duty fulfiUed ;
else it is as worthless as the coupon which reads " not
good if detached " from the railway ticket which
validates it. On this principle Dr. Gladden affirmed,
years ago, that there is no moral right to property
except as morally used — substantially what Wyclif
affirmed in his tractate De Dominio. Such a doctrine,
of course, raises a storm of indignation in certain
quarters ; No rogue e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law.
It should be noted here that the principle just stated
does not fail to cover the infant as well as the adult
members of the social body. Even in its unconscious
ness and dependence the infant fulfils its natural
function as the peculiar bond of family unity, and
the pledge of hope for the permanence of the State.
Thus it also begins to acquire rights.
The present need of all citizens of a free State is to
ponder the saying of Professor McCunn : " Democracy
has missed its mark tiU it has brought the citizen
72

Our Great Social Heresy
something more substantial than his rights." The
assertion of rights, necessary in the past, may be
necessary in the present and the future ; but, except
as subordinated and subsidiary to the assertion and
fulfilment of the duties that are prior, it can never
knit together the members of the social body. When
the partners in a firm are looking out each for himself,
the firm has become infirm. As Professor Nash has
observed, covetousness is rightly put by Holy Scripture
beside adultery in the list of cardinal sins, because
each works social disruption. Covetousness breaks
up civic society, the Commonwealth, as adultery
breaks up domestic society, the family.
The same flaw threatens democracy now of which
Mazzini warned his compatriots struggling in 1849
for the hberation of Italy. " I declared," said he,
" that there had long been a divorce between the
rehgious and the pohtical idea, between the Church
and humanity ; that this divorce was fatal . . . that
it was necessary at every cost to reunite earth to
heaven, our earthly life to the conception of the life
eternal, man to God, his Father and Teacher." This
fatal divorce between the rehgious and the political
idea — the rehgious insisting first on duties, the pohtical
insisting first on rights with an exclusive emphasis — is
conspicuous in our imperfectly morahzed society.
This anti-religious, as well as anti-philosophic and
anti-scientific social heresy — that rights are prior to
and independent of duties, that they are given by
birth instead of being acquired by dutiful employment
of our natural powers in the fulfilment of our natural
social functions — still blinds and paralyses human
73

Interludes
sensibihties in a shocking degree to the social waste
and misery that disgrace our nominaUy Christian civi
hzation. It is responsible for the vast inhumanity
chargeable to our present economic system. Pro
nouncing this system " guilty of robbery and con
fiscation of what is the workman's share of the riches
of the land," the British Chancellor of the Exchequer
said pubhcly in 19 08 : "The day wiU come, and it
is not distant, when England will shudder at its
toleration of this state of things when it was rolling
in wealth." The case is not essentially different in
these United States. That great Lutheran theo
logian, Richard Rothe, taking the same ground as
Mazzini, said many years ago : " Christianity is
essentially a pohtical principle, and a political power.
It is constructive of the State, and bears within itseU
the power of forming the State, and of developing it
to its fuU completion." The truth of this has been
repeatedly illustrated in England by the influence of
" the Nonconformist conscience " on pubhc pohcy,
and in this country by the occasional massing of
churches here and there to suppress certain vices by
effective law. But the religion of Jesus, implicated
in a paralysing aUiance with an economic system
based on covetous self-interest, seems to fare like the
fiery oxygen which in combination with cold iron
changes from inflammability to rust and inertness.
Any solution of threatening social problems that
is to be both effective and pacific — if such can be —
can come only through a baptism of the philosophy
of social weUare that the world has heard and neglected
for more than twenty centuries with the moral energy
74

Our Great Social Heresy
of the Spirit of Jesus, its divine Exemplar, transforming
its sages into saints, its lecturers into inspired prophets,
its disciples into heroic apostles. Now is the word
of Jesus being fulfiUed : " Days will come when ye
shaU desire to see one of the days of the Son of man " —
those days when the faith of Jesus in times of social
strain and peril like our own, amid the antagonisms
of exaggerated wealth and atrophied poverty, in
augurated, as Professor Hatch has shown, a social
movement as well as a reUgious revival, religiously
fulfilling the mission of the Son of man " not to be
served, but to serve." But, said Jesus, " ye shall not
see it." The city over whose approaching ruin he
wept had committed herself to the rapids too far to
escape the cataract. That prophecy stands to warn
our modern society, nominally Christian, but torn
by conflicts of selfish interests, gospelling the
" heathen," but guarding the aggrandizement and
security of propertied interests more jealously than
the Ufe, health, and human development of its poorer
and weaker members. The word of our salvation
is the Gospel of the Son of man, with its declaration,
not of rights, but of duties. The great need of this
day of practicable salvation is of prophets to preach
that word, of hearers to spread it, and of believers to
practise it.

7£

The Moral Use of Property

VI
THE MORAL USE OF PROPERTY J
Strange it seems that, fifty years after Frederick
Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley preached social
Christianity, any Christian minister should inveigh
against Sociahsm as anti-Christian. As well call
democracy anti-Christian, for this as well as Socialism
has a sans culotte variety, and even of rehgion there
are kinds that are immoral. There is a school of
Socialists whose motto is that "property is robbery,"
and whose purpose is to abohsh private capital.
The school of Maurice and Kingsley reply to this
in the words of Bishop C. W. Stubbs, that " the
real cure for our social and economic distresses is
not the distribution of wealth, but its moralization."
The moral obligations which are inseparable from the
possession of wealth are too commonly supposed to
be discharged by generosity and charity.
The fault of substituting generosity and charity for
social justice grows from the false assumption that
what is legaUy owned is moraUy all one's own. As
against any individual claimant it may be all one's
own, but not as against the collective claimant called
Society, the divinely instituted partnership to which
we all belong. It is a curious perversion which
1 From The Outlooh, September 5, 1905.
79

Interludes
to-day twists the question with which the vineyard
owner in Jesus' parable asserted his right to be generous,
paying a day's wage for an hour's work — " Is it not
lawful for me to do what I wiU with mine own ? " —
into an assertion of the right to be selfish and even
extortionate, e.g., taking advantage from a tariff law
to make one's countrymen pay twelve doUars a ton
more for steel raUs than the foreigner, and exploiting
a legal opportunity to claim seventy-five thousand
dollars for a share in five months' service in a joint
receivership. How deeply the fallacy of an unlimited ownership
of what we call our own has infected the popular
mind appeared in the remark of a prominent pubhsher,
some twenty years ago, that he thought Shakespeare's
heirs still entitled to enjoy copyright in his works.
The Umitation of copyright to a term of years justly
recognizes the fact that society holds a moral hen
on the hterary craftsman's product for the material
he has borrowed from the common stock accumulated
since the invention of alphabetic writing. The same
fact holds in every other line of production. " All
past men," said Carlyle, " work with the modern
man." The first fire-maker, the first iron-smelter,
the inventor of such primitive mechanical apphances
as the lever and the wheel, the inventor of the Arabic
numerals in which accounts are kept, must not be
omitted in the long hst of contributors to the common
stock of powers of which the modern steel-maker
avails himself. The race whose toil has accumulated
them may justly demand its royalty for their use.
It is simply common sense to say that so far as anything
80

The Moral Use of Property
not one's own has gone into one's product, the pro
duct is not all his own ; there is a lien upon it ; some
thing must come out of it. This lien is not discharged
by tax-paying, which merely keeps things going in
order and safety. More than this is due for the use of
the social plant set up for us to work with. For
this every user of it is a debtor to his silent partner,
the community. What is moraUy his own is what
he calls his own, minus this debt.
To recognize this morally hmited ownership of " our
own " is the prime requisite for that moral use of wealth
which Christian Socialists, like Maurice and Kingsley,
oppose to the demand of the pohticals for its abohtion,
or distribution, or nationalization. In claiming a
right to do as he wiU with his own, no moral man
desires more than his moral right. The legal hmit
of right is steadily contracting toward the moral
boundary. Democracy had to begin with assertions
of individual right against tyranny. It can endure
only by taking security against the growth of new
tyranny out of unbridled claims of individual right.
It had to begin with the claim, " I am as good as
you." It can endure only by granting, in deed,
as well as in word, " You are as good as I." Hence
have already sprung many economic, educational,
and sanitary hmita tions upon individual claims. In
just the degree that individual right goes free of
the claims of social right is the stabihty of demo
cracy insecure.
Extreme Sociahsm, which would curb the exaggera
tion of private interests by putting aU business under
pubUc management, would burn the house to drive out
81 F

Interludes
the rats. Its suppression of individual initiative and
freedom cuts the present motor nerves of social progress.
Admirably as it might work in a perfectly morahzed
society, the best society now existing on earth is far too
imperfectly moralized to bear the moral strain of it.
Extreme individualism, on the other hand, demands the
freedom of the unleashed hound to run down and devour
his prey. As the stabihty of the solar system is in the
equihbrium of the centripetal and the centrifugal
forces, so the stabihty of democracy is in the equihbrium
of individualism and socialism, centred in the principle
of ownership morally limited — a principle apparent
upon any serious reflection on the interdependence
of men. One need not be marooned on an uninhabited
island to realize the helplessness of an isolated indi
vidual, or the reasonableness, amid the weU-defended,
weU-provided hfe secured by social co-operation, of
St. Paul's exhortation to " thanksgiving for all men."
The proper practical form of such thanksgiving is in
honouring the social debt due to the community of
co-operating men.
The American youth enters active life a member
of a society which has made for him out of a wilderness
a rich country, has secured precious rights for him
at large cost of treasure, toil, and blood, has accu
mulated for him stores of gainful knowledge and power,
has trained steam and electricity to serve him, has given
him an education costing much more than his parents
paid for him. Where his predecessors cleared the
forest, and defended their settlement from the savage,
the open doors of an industry, an art, and a commerce
he had no share in creating invite him to share freely
82

The Moral Use of Property
in rich opportunities. One who stands thus on the
shoulders of others, and plucks from the top of the
tree its ripest fruit, and calls it all his own, needs
to remind himself how it came to his hand. Certainly
it is his " own " rather than the " own " of any other
one man. Society permits him for the present to call
it his own by a legal right which it has created, and
so may modify when it wiU ; but his own by moral
right, except in part, it certainly is not. He has
produced it by using the plant of a civilization created
by the social partnership. For what society has put
in society is entitled to take out proportionately
to the product he has garnered from the common
field. The recently introduced inheritance taxes are
an incipient and partial application of this principle.
Our conceptions both of charity and of justice
need revision. What the wealthy as a class bestow
as charity is but a fraction of what would be, as
Immanuel Kant long ago observed, simply a just return
to society for their use of the social field and plant
in fortune-making. When our present " embryonic
morahty," as Professor Bowne calls it, comes to
adolescence, this wiU be confessed. AU reputable
economists now agree that the equitable distribution
of the enormously increased wealth produced by the
industrial revolution of the nineteenth century is the
most baffling problem of their science. What the
State can do toward its solution may be doubted. It
is not doubtful that the Church can do much toward
it by sharpening moral discrimination between what is
and what is not strictly one's own in social equity,
although one's own in law. The spirit of Christianity
83

Interludes
in St. Paul asks, " What hast thou that thou didst
not receive ? " Confucianism declares, " Religion is
reciprocity." Meum and tuum may be, as Luther said,
" not Christian words." But meum and nostrum
are such, and will be shown as such in that just dis
tribution between individual and social rights through
which the moral use of property wiU bring into being
the ideally co-operative society of the future. Re
formers are now talking of the need of setting a legal
hmit to the accumulation of private property. But
the social danger apprehended from unlimited fortunes
needs no surer safeguard than an unhmitedly moral
use of fortunes.

84

The Ethical Significance of Money

VII
THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MONEY *
There are two points of view in which the ethical
significance of money is discovered. The one shows
money as a machine of Protean power, both construc
tive and destructive, and needing safeguards accord
ingly ; the other, as a measure of services given and
received in a just and equal exchange. To the latter
of these two we must hmit attention now, viz., that
money is in its very design a measure of service given
and received in equahty of exchange.
We often hear one say, " I wiU do as much for you
some time." In this phrase we express the common
consciousness that a service received must be balanced
by an equal service given. But this simple exchange
of equal services is far short of supplying all the needs
of a highly speciahzed social system. Like primitive
exchange by barter, it is mostly superseded by the
use of the common medium of exchange called money.
By this services are estimated on a scale of innumerable
gradations from a cent upward, and thereby the
inhabitants of all the continents are made reciprocaUy
serviceable in a commonwealth of mutual interest
and benefits. The doUar I pay to the man who cleans
1 From The Outlook, June 20, 1903, as expanded into an address
at the seventh annual meeting of the New York State Conference
of Religion, November, 1906. 87

Interludes
my windows, the share of the five dollars I pay for my
hat, which goes to each producer of the utilities it
embodies, is reaUy an order for that amount of service
to the bearer to balance the service that has been
performed for me. This is the ethical significance of
every piece of money that passes from hand to hand.
Adam Smith, father of modern pohtical economy,
said : "A guinea may be considered as a biU for a
certain quantity of necessaries or conveniences upon
aU the tradesmen of the neighbourhood." In other
words, a sum of money, large or smaU, is an order
payable to the bearer for a proportionate amount of
service. Men wish to have these orders presented to
them, that they may make a hving by filling them.
This conception of money is the fundamental requisite
for its ethical treatment. It was remarked by Mr.
Gladstone that a man's mental and moral character
is largely revealed in the way he deals with money.
The sentiment of honour stiU rules in the simple
primitive exchange of service between man and man.
SeU-respect scorns to receive service as service without
fuU requital. But when the time and tofl and fatigue
involved in service are screened from observation and
conscience by the dollar held close to the eye, the
point of honour is lost out of mind ; the fuU requital
is not thought of. The man who would despise him
seU did he not balance every good turn done him with
a good turn equivalent, hugs himseU for the largest
income from the smallest output. If he can make the
output fictitious instead of real by " watered " stock,
the returns from which, instead of being the earnings
of labour crystallized in capital, are the tribute of un-'
88

The Ethical Significance of Money
requited human sweat, he congratulates himself the
more. The amount of fictitious capital getting divi
dends for the United States Steel Corporation has been
carefuUy figured as five hundred milhons. What does
this mean for multitudes ? Higher railroad rates, or
higher rentals in costher buildings, or minimum wages
for employees.
Most people think of money simply as a means for
getting themselves served with whatever they desire.
Everybody knows that he cannot, except by robbery,
get the coveted money-order for service without some
giving of service, more or less, real or fictitious. But
to care more for getting the money than for giving its
fuU equivalent in service is to have started on the
down grade to robbery in a predatory state of mind.
That money, when not the gift of affection or honour,
is held by no moral right, except as earned by a propor
tionate amount of service, is an elementary moral
truth. In defiance of it an enormous amount of
predatory wealth has been accumulated in recent
years. According to a carefuUy written financial article in
The New York Times (1902), this non-ethical concep
tion of money has already generated monstrous
enormities. The syndicate that launched the Steel
Trust, with the hundred millions of " water " said to
have been added by it to the aggregate of capital and
" water " in aU its component corporations, is stated
to have received forty miUion doUars for that service.
It must be a hardy and daring imagination that can
dream of any real service rendered to the world by that
operation that is even faintly comparable with the
89

Interludes
amount of service which the holders of such a sum
are empowered to demand of the world in the form of
labour and the innumerable products of labour.
A financial " operator," who coined the phrase,
" frenzied finance," has testified in a Boston court that
he and his partners " made " forty-six miUion doUars
by promoting a certain " trust." Fancy, if possible,
the vast total of services by aU sorts of men to which
that staggering sum gave legal claim ! From such
enormities pubhc indignation, class hatred, and social
danger inevitably spring.
The street-railways of New York City have been
capitahzed, according to Judge Gaynor, at a figure
over four times the value of their reahty. On the
hundreds of miUions of " water " thus injected into
their stock dividends of 6 per cent, are wanted —
i.e., 24 per cent, on the real investment. To pay these
to the exploiters of the pubhc service, for which they
have been given the use of the city streets, every cash-
girl, every labouring man who must travel to daily
work, is taxed in an excessive car-fare a quarter of a
dollar every week, or $13 a year, over and above the
legitimate return for the car-service. The records
of the Charity Organization Society show this often
and patheticaUy. Is it strange that a pohtical adven
turer with the cry of " municipal ownership " was able
in 1905 to all but capture the mayoralty of New York ? L
It may weU be doubted whether the reddest Socialist
1 For a detailed narrative of the scandalous 'manipulations
which in 1907 bankrupted the Metropolitan Street Railway
Company, see various American publications, especially McClure's
Magazine for November and December, 1907, and January, 1908.
90

The Ethical Significance of Money
has done so much to undermine respect for property
rights as the Napoleons of finance, who lay society
under contribution to create fortunes that lack the
solid basis of proportionate services rendered to the
community — even advancing the price of oil 20 per
cent, in 1902, a time of fuel-famine due to the coal-
miners' strike, after dividing profits for the year of
45 per cent.
James Russell Lowell remarked that there is dyna
mite enough in the New Testament to shatter our
social system, if not carefuUy handled. Clear enough,
whUe 1 per cent, of the families of the Republic
possesses more wealth than the remaining 99 per cent.
Jesus' saying, " The Son of man came not to be served,
but to serve," is true of every son of man. " He that
is great among you shaU be your servant " is a funda
mental law of the Republic of God. Essential to
social stabihty as well as to personal integrity is an
ethical valuation of money, as the measure of service
in equal reciprocity between man and man.
This requires the service given to be balanced
by a sum of money good for an equivalent amount
of service received, and no more. The rule is incon
testable. The principle of a just balance between
service given and service received, so flagrantly
repudiated by some who are said to " think in miUions,"
continues to be appealed to in a small way by people
who dispute what they deem exorbitant bills for
services rendered. It is constantly affirmed in the
courts where such disputes are adjudicated. Money
is held to be what it was designed to be — the measure
of actual service, and the legal claim for it is limited
91

Interludes
to the amount of the service it requites. In this
the ethical standard of the law is in advance of the
ethics of the business world, which is prone to look
at " what the market wiU bear " in the hne of extor
tion, rather than at the actual value of the service
rendered, as the measure of demand. This is precisely
what the Bible brands as " covetousness," along with
vices which modern society punishes as crimes. We
think scorn of nations that tolerate sexual immorality.
But how little are those who tolerate the financial
immorality from which vast misery springs entitled
to boast themselves in comparison ! ' Indeed, the
enormous infractions of ethical principle committed
by autocrats of the market in exacting a tribute from
the community exceeding any imposed by ancient
conquerors on subject provinces are, in their way,
as demorahzing to the public conscience of right and
wrong as the most lascivious theatrical shows could
be. These the law suppresses, but in the absence of
adequate legal check upon those it is time that the
churches and their teachers were awake to the moral
crisis that threatens the stabihty of the Common
wealth, while it tests the moral quahty of current
rehgion. Such, then, is the ethical significance of money,
as the intended medium and measure of that fair
exchange of service with service which makes society
a mutual-benefit association. It cannot be insisted
on too strenuously as vital to the stabihty of the
Republic. Neglect of it tends to make society an
arena of mutual spohatidn, in which democracy and
rehgion perish together. 92

The Ethical Significance of Money
In applying any principle whatever we encounter
problems, and so in the present case. Of these it
now remains to speak.
As an order for service passes from hand to hand
in the form of money, the ethical significance of the
transaction rests upon the principle of justice as
expressed in the ancient Roman formula, " To each
his own " ; no more, no less. Here, then, is the
crucial problem. What may he who renders a service
justly demand for it as his own ? Is there any criterion
of the amount of service in return — as expressed in
money value — that is justly his ? There are but two
supposable criterions. One is the benefit value to
the receiver of the service given ; the other is the
cost value to the giver of it. Which of these is required,
and which forbidden, by the social spirit of justice,
intent always on gluing man to man in equity and
good wUl ? What may the giver of service demand as
justly his ?
The service rendered has saved life or limb. Shall
its just compensation be measured by the value of
hfe or hmb ? It has saved an estate, it has vindicated
a good name, by bringing the spoiler or the slanderer
to justice. Is the benefit value of such service to its
receiver the true criterion of the compensation due ?
To affirm this is simply to charter extortion, limited
only by the resources of its victims, hke the recently
reported charge by a New York surgeon of seven
thousand dollars for operating on a common case of
appendicitis, or the bill of four figures said to have
been presented to a foreign prince by an American
dentist for two or three hours of service.
93

Interludes
It is true that this principle is recognized in law.
The salvors of an endangered vessel and its cargo are
legaUy entitled to proportion their claim to the value
of the property rescued. Accordingly, the Pacific
Commercial Cable Company filed a claim in September,
1906, of $300,000 for hauhng off the liner Manchuria
from the reef near Honolulu, thereby saving a property
valued at $2,500,000. Yet the same logic would
justify a physician in making a proportionately
larger demand for saving the hfe of a capitahst, on
whom great financial interests were depending, than
for the same service to his bookkeeper. But the law
is based on a false principle. I do not forget that
I am a lay critic of the law, but a learned judge in a
neighbouring State publicly endorsed my criticism
when made in his presence. The claim to profit
proportionately to the peril or distress which service
may relieve is an inhuman claim, commending itseU
only to coiners of cash out of human woe, hke the
cartmen who demanded a dollar a minute for salvage
service while Baltimore was burning. The only
criterion compatible with the social spirit of unsophisti
cated humanity is the cost value of the service to its
giver. This only is what he may require as justly
his own.
This statement is a necessary coroUary of the
fundamental social law of rehgion, " Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyseU," and it is as indisputable
as that. The only plausible ground for a demurrer to
it is that it is practicaUy unworkable. It certainly
coheres iU with common thought and practice. But,
said LoweU : 94

The Ethical Significance of Money
In vain we call old notions fudge,
And bend our conscience to our dealing :
The Ten Commandments will not budge,
And stealing will be always stealing.
The difficulty is not with the working, but with the
will to work, and to find a way to work. Whether in
mechanics or in ethics, a sound principle prescribes
but one condition of efficiency — a loyal wiU to work
with it. For this it can afford to wait tUl the recalci
trant yields, as finaUy he must. I repeat, then, that
the only ethical criterion of the just compensation
for service rendered is the cost value to the giver of
service.1 In so saying it is not forgotten that service-givers
differ in efficiency. One wiU spend two days in doing
what another wiU do in one. The cost of inefficiency
is not to be added to the cost of service. Neither is
the law of supply and demand to be set aside, but
rather to be moraUy used. A product of labour which
nobody wants, whatever it costs to produce it, is of
no value, simply because it is of no service. We may
stiU buy cheap in the tropics, and sell dear in the far
North. But to buy cheap and sell dear without regard
to the causes of cheapness and dearness is immoral.
The remark of a recent writer is indisputably true :
" A price for necessary commodities or services, which
does not secure the economic rights of the producer to
wholesome conditions of life, is essentially immoral."
1 President Roosevelt's idea of ascertaining the physical value
of railroad property, often alleged to be over-capitalized, as a
basis for estimating the reasonableness of railroad rates, is a signifi
cant recognition of the principle that the cost, not the benefit, of
service is the just criterion of proper compensation for service.
95

Interludes
But one cannot here discuss the multitudinous
particular applications of the general principle which
none who accepts the authority of the Supreme Moral
Teacher of the world can consistently deny. As in
the case of his Golden Rule, loyalty to the principle
must be trusted for its practical working out. It may
be said here in passing, that a large class of cases he
outside of it under the general name of " fancy goods,"
as when $1,500 is asked and given for a rare old
postage-stamp. In this region of fictitious values,
created and inflated by mutual desire, the law of the
cost value of service does not hold.
One caution, however, is to be borne in mind : the
cost value of service must be as comprehensively
reckoned for the weaker as for the stronger givers of
service. That it is not yet so an unimpeachable
economic authority has observed. Says President
Carroll D. Wright : " Capital charges to the consumer
the depreciation of property and machinery. Why
should not the depreciation of human machinery,
its hands, its brain, its body, be included in the final
cost ? " The hst is suggestively incomplete. Should
not the labourer's cost of service include also provision
for a sanitary home, and for the exemption of his
children from being prematurely taken out of school
to earn their bread ? How inordinately, in contrast
with the scrimping of the weaker part of the com
munity, the cost of service has been figured for the
profit of the stronger, has recently been glaringly
revealed upon the witness-stand in a famous legisla
tive investigation of certain hfe-insurance companies.
It even poses as " reform," when the President of a
96

The Ethical Significance of Money
company organized for the benefit of widows and
orphans accepts a salary reduced to a sum eight times
larger than the salary of the Governor of the Bank
of England. The salary of the President of the
Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company, in Newark,
New Jersey, one of the three American companies
making the largest returns to policy-holders, is $25,000.
Right across the street is the Prudential, whose busi
ness is selhng hfe insurance to the poor, for his services
in which its President, devoting part of his time to
the paid functions of a United States Senator, takes
$65,000. A few years ago the press gave wide notice
to the fact that for two years' service as executor of
the Pullman estate Robert T. Lincoln received
$412,000, a larger sum, it was stated, than his father
had received during his entire hfe, including his com
pensation whUe President of the Nation.
But men greatly vary in ability, and ability enhances
the value of service to the receiver. Does it not
deserve proportionate return to the giver ? In a
moral estimate this depends on what it has cost the
giver. So far as his ability is the product of laborious
and expensive preparation and culture, it has cost
him something, and has justly earned a proportionate
return. But so far as it is a gift of nature, it has cost
him nothing. Then it can hardly be thought to have
earned a money claim to service, unless natural
inequalities were designed to create or perpetuate
artificial inequahties. Despotism derives its claim
to service from having been born in the purple.
Democracy cannot. It seems morally preposterous
to think of divine endowments as given for private
97 o

Interludes
emolument, or for any other purpose than social
benefit, and so enabhng their possessor to gain the
social rewards which make his feUows no poorer to
give. The greater the service, the greater the due
reward. But the highest rewards are not, except by
the sordid, counted in cash. Napoleon's famous
sneer at England as "a nation of shopkeepers "
carried this much of moral truth — that the social
rewards for which the soldier risks limb and hfe are
a nobler prize than money, and the pursuit of them
nobler than the pursuit of money. Social esteem and
honour outshine and outlast aU other wealth. In a
more humanized period than the present, when man's
wit, if not, as once, his weapons, is sharpened against
his neighbours, and when men shah no more be
divided into the eaters and the eaten, these wiU be
the only recognized prize for competition. Already
is this presaged by the physician discovering some new
preservative of hfe, who prefers the honour of giving
it to the world to the profit of a royalty upon its use.
Medical ethics strenuously forbids any other course.
The opposite principle is iUustrated by the patent-
medicine makers who oppose pure-drug legislation.
In comparison with the social honours won by a
Lister or a Pasteur, how ignoble a reward is mere cash !
Dr. Lyman Abbott has recently said : "A man may
be a successful leader of industry who measures his
success by the pecuniary reward it gives him, but no
man can be a successful soldier, or statesman, or
teacher, or preacher, who adopts any such standard " ;
nor, I may add, will history inscribe any such man's
name upon its roU of honour. 98

The Ethical Significance of Money
An eminent writer in The, North American Review
said, last June : " Excessive gains, Uke excessive
salaries, are inherently dishonest, and the men who
seek them cannot possibly be of any genuine value
to the American people. . . . Whoever has a dollar
for which a doUar's worth in property or service has
not been given, has a dishonest doUar ; and, if he
keeps it, he is a dishonest man, no matter by what
fine phrases he seeks to cover such dishonesty."
One of our prisons is said to display to its inmates
this inscription conspicuously placed : " The worst day
in the life of a young man is the day he gets the idea
that he can make a dollar without doing a doUar's
worth of work for it." Better taught late than never ;
but why not early, in the school, the home, and the
church ?
AU reputable economists agree that the present
problem of their science is a more equitable distribu
tion of wealth, that is, of the material basis of health,
opportunity, and weUare. In other words, our
present economic system is such that a few secure
orders in the form of money for much more service
than they have given, whUe many can only secure
considerably less. Ten million people in this wealthy
country are reported as having ari income insufficient
to maintain merely physical efficiency for work. In
the nature of things any system so prolific of injustice
is doomed to downfaU, and aU who would perpetuate
it are doomed to share its downfaU. But our present
concern is to strike at the tap-root of its injustice —
an immoral estimate of money as merely a means
for commanding service, rather than as the measure
99

Interludes
for a just exchange of service. The capitahst scores
the workman for caring more for the quantity of
wage than for the quality of the work he gives for it.
But he himseU, in many instances, cares more for hia
dividends than for the service aUeged to earn them.
Both are tarred with the same brush. The difference
in the practical result of their immoral idea of money
is the difference between grand and petty larceny.
Here, then, is fallow ground for moral and reUgious
teachers to break up, and to sow with some elementary
moral truths. Not more do the arid lands of the
far West need irrigation than the torpid moral sense
of a money-hunting community needs to be sensitized
to a moral estimate and use of money as the measure
of services given and received in just exchange.
Society is based on this just exchange in equal reci
procity. He who attempts, by the acquisition of
money, to command more service from his fellows
than he renders them, is unconsciously working for the
disruption of the social bond, and the ruin of the
Commonwealth,

100

A Parable for a Time of Change

VIII
A PARABLE FOR A TIME OF CHANGE a
Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, etc.
Matthew xxv. 1-13.
This parable has a close apphcation to the modern
Church that needs to be better understood. Indeed,
one may say that it has hardly begun to be under
stood. It is usually taken, as a familiar hymn takes
it, to apply to the individual soul.
£, Behold, the bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night,
And well for him whose loins are girt, whose lamp is burning bright.
That is, the death-angel comes to each unexpectedly ;
let each be ready for the caU. This is sound doctrine,
but it is not taught in this parable. That the parable
speaks to the Church as a body is a fact on the face
of it. It gives the story of an association of girls
banded for a purpose, a company gathered for a
wedding march and celebration. That, as we shall
see, precisely fits the primitive Church, which during
the first century was looking for the immediate coming
of Christ to set up in triumph his kingdom in the
world. According to the parable, there was a delay.
The bridegroom did not come as soon as the company
1 From The Homiletic Review, May, 1908.
103

Interludes
expected. MeanwhUe they aU fell asleep. When
the caU came, some were not ready to join in the pro
cession ; they lost their share in the rejoicings that
the others were ready for. These are the sahent and
instructive features of the story — a company with
common expectations, a time of waiting in drowsy
unconsciousness of what was coming on, a sudden
crisis supervening, which only a part were ready
to respond to, whUe a part had to faU out of the
ranks, disappointed. All this finds a close parallel
in the history of the Church. Unmistakably is the
parable addressed to the Church as a body, the Church
of that time, and equaUy the Church of our time ;
particularly to the Church at any such time of tran
sition and change as that time was, and as our time is.
The great mistake made in the first century, and
made in the present century, is to suppose that the
parable enjoins readiness for a winding up and end
of things. The primitive Church thought of the end
of the world as near, and that they must be ready for it.
The modern Church thinks not so ; but thinks of
individual hfe as hable to end at any moment, and
that each must be prepared. True as this is, it is not
the truth Jesus teaches here. What he wanted his
Church to be prepared for was not a closing up, either
of the world's history or of individual life. It was,
on the contrary, an opening out into an advancing
career of power and of joy, for the Church, and so for its
individual members, in new triumphs of the heavenly
Leader. Just this is what we shaU see in the history of the
primitive Church. We find there an experience which
104

A Parable for a Time of Change
so closely corresponds to the prophetic description
in the parable that it leaves no room to doubt what
the parable means. The key that fits the lock is
this history. There is no better commentary on
the teaching of Jesus than the experience of his
disciples This, as given in the Acts and in the Epistles of
Paul, shows two distinct groups in the Church, Jewish
and Gentile. Jewish Christians preferred to hold on
to the ritual of Judaism ; Gentile Christians thought
this burdensome, and under Paul's teaching let it go,
deeming brotherly love and a pure hfe in imitation
of Christ enough. At first these two groups were not
so sharply parted as later. The infant Church was
unconscious of the crisis that was to come ; its unity
was still unbroken ; the wise and the foolish " all
slumbered and slept," tiU the ripe hour came with its
caU for an advance.
It was some fifteen years after Jesus that the crisis
appeared. A council was caUed to consider it. Was
Christianity to become a world-religion ? Then it
must give up the ancient sacrament of circumcision,
and other pecuhar ordinances of Judaism. But how
stubbornly this was opposed Paul found to his cost.
The Acts and his Epistles teU what he suffered as the
leader of the GentUe section of the Church, its eman
cipator from the yoke and fetter of the Mosaic ritual.
Pass over a century now. See how things turned
out. The Jewish-Christian group is found dwindling,
and presently is lost to view. The Gentile-Christian
group is found including nearly aU who bear the
Christian name, established in the populous centres of
105

Interludes
the Roman world, and weU organized for its victorious
career. Evidently, this is a history of the wise and
the foohsh among Christ's disciples — the wise who
made, fhe foolish who refused to make, the great renun
ciation of some venerable and ancient rites in order
to make the religion of Christ a religion for mankind.
Here seems to be a clear and close correspondence
between the sahent features of the parable and the
salient facts of history. The key fits the lock. Jesus
was surely aware of the revolutionary tendencies of
his teaching. And if he had intended to forewarn of
the crisis that in time would come, with a caU to foUow
where his teachings led, he could hardly have made a
parable that would prove truer to experience than this.
Nowhere does the prophetic foresight of Jesus receive
a finer iUustration than in this parable as interpreted
by history.
Were this only ancient history, it need not detain us.
It is modern history also, and we need to pursue it
further. But, especiaUy for the present practical
lesson, the question must be answered here, What is
meant in the parable by the oU which the wise had,
but the foohsh lacked ? What was the one thing
needful, the having or not having of which made aU
the difference between the wise and the foolish —
between faUure and success ?
Only moderate acquaintance with the Bible is
enough to show that oil is a frequent symbol of the
divine Spirit, as the source of hght, insight, wisdom.
Kings, priests, and prophets were anointed, to signUy
the Spirit's gift of hght and leading. So Jesus him
seU was named the Christ, i.e., the Anointed One,
106

A Parable for a Time of Change
spirituaUy gifted. And the spirit of the Christ was
manifestly a sacrificial spirit, freely devoting its best
to its great hope and endeavour, the estabhshment
of the Kingdom of Heaven, the divine order upon
earth. The facts show that just this sacrificial spirit
was the oU which the wise and ready had, the foolish
and unready had not, when the crisis came with its
caU to advance.
Refer again to the history. The crisis that Paul
faced was to settle whether the rehgion of Jesus should
break away from the hmitations of Leviticus, and
sacrifice whatever Jewish ordinances hindered it from
being adopted by aU mankind. The crucial question
for every Jewish evangelist was this : Was he ready
to surrender much of his Judaism that he was attached
to, for the sake of making Christian disciples among
the Gentiles ? We easily underestimate the struggle
that it must have cost a patriotic Jew hke Paul, " a
Hebrew of the Hebrews," to part with much that the
past had hallowed, to say even of the great sacra
ment of his hereditary faith, " Circumcision is nothing,"
that he might win the Greeks to Christ. But this
great surrender of the partial to the universal interest
was the proof of his wisdom. Only so could he and
his Jewish helpers have become the fathers of churches
that overspread the Roman world. And it was just
because his Judaizing opposers could not surrender
their precious ritual to the exigencies of the crisis,
that their churches feU into dechne and withered up.
Thus it was as in the parable : " The foohsh took
no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels
with their lamps " — the oil of the sacrificial spirit,
107

Interludes
the spirit of the Cross, without which there may be
much rehgiosity, but little rehgion.
It is the way of history to repeat itseU. The ex
perience of the Church in Paul's time reappeared
in the Church of Luther's time, with the same con
trast of wise and foohsh, the ready and the unready
to respond with a sacrifice to the caU for an advance.
In the sixteenth century, as in the first, these two
groups appear in the Cathohc Church, all unconscious
of the nearing crisis. Each group desired reform of
intolerable abuses. But the root of evils was in the
Papacy itseU, with its claim to lordship over the
conscience. To break with it was necessary for any
radical reform. But to break with the Pope was to
cut oneself off from the venerable organization outside
of which most men then beheved there was no sal
vation from heU-fire. To become a Protestant, a
come-outer, was to become excommunicated from the
Church of one's parents and ancestors, to defy the
censure of the Christian world. In coming out from
Romanism, Luther faced conditions essentiaUy the
same as Paul faced in coming out of Judaism. He
met them with a sacrifice as great. How great the
sacrifice of each, we who inherit its fruits quite poorly
appreciate. Only those who had the oil in their lamps
could have made it. As for those who lacked the oil
for the great emergency — the spirit of sacrifice that
alone can light the path of progress — history tells of
these foohsh ones, as of the wise. The issue on which
they parted was fraught with a sequel which runs
through the after-history of the Protestant nations
on one side, and the Roman Catholic on the other.
108

A Parable for a Time of Change
Pass over the glaring contrast between these national
groups, the progressive and the laggard nations, and
contrast their Churches in their influenoe on the hfe
of the people. What do we find in any Protestant
country as compared with any country where Roman
ism has had the field to itseU ? Compare England
with Spain, the United States with any Spanish-
American repubhc. In which does the Church count
much, in which Uttle, for education, general inteUi-
gence, the popular standard of morality ? Said the
rector of the University of Salamanca in 1904 : "In
Spain to-day the majority of the people are iUiterate,
or Uttle more, and the education given by the majority
of the rehgious orders is generaUy detestable." Thus
we see in fact what the parable shows in foresight ;
the open door for the wise, who have oU in store for
the caU to move onward, the shut door for the foolish,
who have no oil.
Other such contrasts, though on a smaUer scale,
might be traced. One of these may be briefly men
tioned. It appears in the history of the Church of
England. In the seventeenth century she drove out
the Puritans, in the eighteenth century she drove out
the Methodists. To-day she retains less than half
the population of England ; her branch in our own
country includes barely one per cent, of our people,
and the twenty-five milhon Methodists dispersed
through the world are permanently lost to her com
munion. How different it might have been ! What
if, at the critical moments now noteworthy in the past,
as in the time of James I., in the time of Charles II. ,
in the time of Wilham and Mary, in the time of Wesley,
1Q9

Interludes
she had exercised the sacrificial, instead of the per
secuting spirit, ready with the oil of sacrifice, prevent
ing schism with charity, concihation, concession, how
enlarged her influence in the world might have been
to-day ! On the other hand, the early history of
Puritanism and of Methodism is a history of wise
sacrifice, but its sequel is a story of power and progress,
both in Church and State.
We may weU beUeve that a parable thus repeatedly
Ulustrated in Church history is destined to further
Illustration. There is reason to think further iUus-
tration is not far away. The history which gives us
the key to the parable has shown us that, whUe the
old is ripening for change into the new, men are un
conscious of what is coming. New thoughts are
striking root in many minds, new opinions are gaining
headway, repugnance to existing conditions and
yearnings for better are deepening ; but the move
ment is underground. As in the parable, aU slumber
tiU some unexpected event sounds the caU that wakes
aU sleepers to some sort of action : " Behold, the
bridegroom cometh " ; go forth to meet the bringer-
in of the new order.
The attentive student of the world's passing show
can hardly resist the conviction that we have been
moving through just such a period of unconscious
waiting for some momentous change, for which it
deeply concerns the Church to be ready with oil in
her lamps. During the nineteenth century, science
and machinery wrought in industrial, social, and
intellectual conditions a change that was simply revo-
110

A Parable for a Time of Change
lutionary. But it cannot be said that the Church has
adapted herseU to any commensurate change to meet
the new demands. There are signs that she has
lost influence with the toiling machine-workers on
one hand, and the highly educated on the other.
The one class does not find in the Church the sym
pathy and brotherhood found in the union or the
lodge. The other class finds the Church indifferent
or hostUe to the conclusions which science constrains
them to hold. And so it has become to-day a seriously
debated question whether the Church is to retain
or to lose her ancient leadership for the brawn and
brain of the world.
For the Church that is awake to such facts the
question is simply one of readiness to cope with them
— a question of oU in the lamp, or no oil, the sacrificial
spirit of Christ, which alone can cope with the facts,
and satisfy their demands.
If, now, the Church is to serve at God's altar of
human need so effectively as to win men to him
and to his Christ, then the brotherhood of men in
the fuU reUgious equahty of rich and poor, educated
and ignorant, before their Father, God, must be
shown by the Church as clearly as Jesus showed it,
putting aside aU the differences of culture, or wealth,
or race. But to meet the hunger of the multitudes
for the human sympathy they have not yet discovered
in the Church may require some levelUng of social
barriers between class and class, some riddance of
racial antipathies, probably also no small devotement
of great possessions to enlarge the opportunities and
uplift the hfe of the lowly. Ill

Interludes
So, also, if the inteUectual need of the twentieth
century is to be met by statements of rehgious truths
in agreement with the statements of modern learn
ing, then some theological formulas that squared weU
with ancient learning wiU have to be reverently laid
aside in the museum of things once useful, but useful
no more.
As in the time of Paul and in the time of Luther,
so now, the air, long vibrating with the note of change,
is resonant with the caU of a critical moment to the
slumbering Church, " Behold, the bridegroom cometh."
Those who doubt it, who do not hear it, are simply
asleep. The need of to-day is to heed the lesson
writ so large in the history of the Church as com
mentary on this parable, for every time of change
when the old order is beginning to blossom into the
new. The open door of feUowship with the divine
Leader of the world's advance, in his victory over aU
that divides, defiles, degrades humanity, awaits the
Church that is ready to respond to his caU with lamps
alight and fuU of oil, wise in the sacrificial spirit to
renounce whatever cuts the nerve of human brother
hood with private interests, or with class distinctions,
or with racial prejudices, and to abandon aU that
burdens Jesus' sole requirement of a loving and a
righteous hfe with the extra demands of creed-makers.
But this lesson for the Church as a body necessarily
carries a lesson to its members one by one. Each
has part in the duty of the whole. Opportunity
comes with the same question both to the society
and to the individual. What can you do to promote
the divine order of the world, the Kingdom of Heaven 1
U2

A Parable for a Time of Change
And the Cross of Christ points to the same answer
as this parable : that our furtherance of the Kingdom
is measured by our effort, our sacrifice, to remove
the hindrances in its way. What is there, then,
each earnest-minded one will ask himseU, in my
conduct, my business, my use of money, my bearing
toward neighbours or rivals, my behaviour toward
servants or dependents, my temper and spirit as a
man with fellow men, that tends to discredit the
fundamental law of the Kingdom, the brotherhood
of man with man that roots in the Fatherhood of
God ? To cast any such stumbling-block out of his
neighbour's way is as effective a thing as anyone
can singly do for the fulfilment of the great hope,
" Thy Kingdom come." Let no one underrate what
he can do for this, or undervalue the power of a good
example. One unselfish action inspires many. One
brave man emboldens a hundred cowards. Nothing
is more contagious than spirit ; nothing more potent
than the spirit of sacrifice for our fellows.
Readiness for this is the oU in the lamp of the wise,
the sign of their wisdom, their passport to the open
door of triumph and of joy.

113

Religious Unity Morally Expressed

IX
RELIGIOUS UNITY MORALLY EXPRESSED l
As astute and unscrupulous poUtician remarked
some time ago that the church vote was neghgible,
but the saloon vote was not, as it could be depended
on to " go sohd." It can hardly be doubted that
religious men generaUy fail to use the power which
a representative democracy gives them, to secure by
their use of the ballot the moral interests of rehgion,
now threatened and invaded at many points. There
is no doubt that the forces that might make for
righteousness in social and civic life are, less unified
than their antagonists, and so are often worsted.
The military maxim, " Divide and conquer," is
based on the experience of the divided. Such experi
ence has made rehgious unity one of the burning
questions of our time.
The supreme problem before rehgious men is the
furtherance and triumph of the moral government of
God in the world. This being a moral problem, the
achievement of the reUgious unity necessary to effect
it is also a moral problem, whose solution must conse
quently be expressed in moral terms. On the threshold
1 From The Homiletic Review, December, 1905.
117

Interludes
of this proposition two unquestionable facts demand
clearer recognition by rehgious men, and, primarily,
by Christian men.
The first fact is, that the very differences upon
which Christian men have divided, more seriously
indeed in the past than in the present happier time of
mutual approach, have reaUy drawn their strength
from the single and supreme interest in which aU were
and are agreed. Let any who doubt it look around
the whole circle of sects in whose centre stands the
Cross. Underneath aU zeal for denominational speciali-
ties what is the one thing that every truly Christian
man, however drawn apart from other Christians,
is most deeply concerned for ? Is it not that he may
do the wiU of God, and get it done by others, in a pure
and benevolent hfe ? SuperficiaUy viewed, he seems
to be chiefly concerned for a creed, a sacrament, a
pohty ; but in a deeper view it is for these only as
means to his main end that he cares, as aids in his
main struggle for the supreme moral interest, that
God's wUl may be done on earth. It is for this that
Christians holding to the doctrine of an endless heU
have separated from Christians beheving in ultimately
universal salvation, through fear that the sanctions
of the moral law were weakened by this behef. For
this, again, the Trinitarian Christian, affirming the
metaphysical oneness of Christ with God, stands aloof
from the Unitarian Christian who writes such hymns
as In the Cross of Christ I glory,
but affirms only an ethical unity ; he fears that this
limitation imperils the supreme moral interest of
118

Religious Unity Morally Expressed
redemption from sin. For this, again, Christians
who deny that any errors can be found in the Bible
have excluded from feUowship Christians who affirm
that there are such, lest tolerance of such an affirma
tion contribute to invahdate the moral authority
of the words of eternal hfe. The same moral interest
underhes the high churchman's unchurching of all
Christians not presided over by bishops episcopally
ordained, because, as he thinks, only through a certain
series of consecrating hands in unbroken succession
from Christ's apostles can flow the spiritual grace from
the divine Head of the Church that is essential to
its moral obedience, guidance, and victory.
With this indubitable fact in view, this unity in
the supreme moral interest of rehgion underlying all
the controversy and disunity that appear on the
surface, the cause of schisms is plain. At one as to
the end, we have been at odds as to the ways and
means. The many specialized forms of our common
Christianity are so many variations of the common
effort to promote the common end — the keeping of
God's commandments, the seeking of his Kingdom
as followers of his Son. This being the real inward
ness of the situation, this moral unity of a common
purpose being implicit in all the diverse creeds and
rites and pohties by which Christians too often have
been unhappily estranged, the prime desideratum
for a closer drawing together of Christian hearts and
forces is simply to recognize the real fact, to lay it to
heart, to insist upon it for aU it is worth. This is
precisely the thing that has faUed to be done. We
have too seldom looked below the broken surface
119

Interludes
to the point whence all hnes of special interest diverge.
By aU means let us foUow our own way of thought
and action for sacred interests, so far as convinced
that it is for us the best way of helping in the work
of the Kingdom of God. In so doing we admit not
only the right but the duty of our brother to do the
same, although it may lead him on a very different
road from our own. But let us never fail amid all
differences to hold fast the reconciling and unifying
conviction, that the Christian brother who adopts
what we reject and rejects what we adopt is neverthe
less pursuing in his way the same central purpose as
we in our way.
Evidently, this is the true approach to the problem
of Christian unity, so far as the subject presents a
problem. Even on the broken surface of thought,
were one to regard it thoughtfuUy, one would see
that our agreements far preponderate over our dis
agreements, if one is disposed to weigh them instead
of counting them ; while at bottom aU disagreements
merge in that unity of desire and purpose which we
aU confess in the common prayer that Jesus gave us
for its expression. The problem of the divided
Church is just this — abetter reahzation of the essential
unity which it already possesses and implicitly con
fesses. Now, of course, when the inward comes out
ward, and the imphcit is made explicit, it must be in
some visible embodiment. And so in hope of a
resurrection of our Christian unity of purpose from
beneath the overlying mass of competing Christian
forms, the question springs to the front, " With what
body doth it come ? " 120

Religious Unity Morally Expressed
Here a second fact stakes the line in which the
answer must be found. The form in which anything
is to be expressed is determined by the nature of the
thing requiring expression. The length of a musical
note is expressed by a measure of time, the length
of a ribbon by a measure of space ; the weight
of a mountain in an estimate of tons, the weight
of an argument in an estimate of reasons ; the sharp
ness of an axe by cut wood, the sharpness of a
tongue by cut feehngs. Now the Christian unity
that needs expression is the unity that the Lord's
Prayer expresses, a unity in love to God, and loyalty
to God, and purpose to do the Will and seek the
Kingdom of God — that is, it is a moral unity ; not an
inteUectual, or governmental, or ritual unity. Trying
to express it by the celebration of a rite, or the
government of a church, or the definition of a doctrine,
is hke trying to express depth of sound by depth
of colour. So then, just as a musical fact must be
expressed in musical terms, a material fact in material
terms, a mathematical fact in mathematical terms,
a moral fact must be expressed in moral terms. Such a
fact is the Christian unity of moral interest and
purpose which we see existing. It is the only unity
that Jesus recognized, or provided for, or thought
of. In saying, " Whosoever shall do the wiU of God,
the same is my brother, and sister, and mother," he
commended it to us with aU possible emphasis. It
is the only unity that is compatible with the vast
diversity of minds and temperaments. According to
the natural and universal law of expression, above
formulated, there is only one way to express it. This
121

Interludes
is in the moral terms of a common affection, aspiration,
and endeavour for the common end aU have at
heart. Compared with this, the proposition for unity
that has been most widely and seriously discussed —
the Chicago-Lambeth " Quadrilateral " — has evidently
foUowed a blind trail. A moral unity cannot express
itseU in the historical and metaphysical statements
of the Nicene Creed (which the present writer accepts
as he interprets it), or in the " historic episcopate " ;
simply because these, however helpful one may find
them for his moral interest, are not of a nature essen
tiaUy moral . These forms we know have been accepted
by many whose aims were far from moral harmony
with Christ's aims.
In a world where nature with her myriad varieties
of hving forms proclaims that umformity of vital
development is unnatural, we have been slow to see
that uniformity of creed, or rite, or organization, is
not the natural expression of Christian hfe in the
divine unity of the spirit. We have been too prone
to think of brethren who do not theologize or ordain
in our way as half-brothers, or brothers Ulegitimate.
It is high time to come to Jesus' mind, regarding
Christian unity as moral unity with him and each
other in trying to get God's WUl done on earth. Let
the fact be grasped, that to express and to foster this
unity he gave us not a creed, but a prayer. Men wUl
always theologize differently, and organize differently,
but they must needs pray in unison, U they pray at
all. For aU true prayer sums itseU up in one aspira
tion, " Thy WiU be done."
Christian unity, therefore, can find its natural
122

Religious Unity Morally Expressed
embodiment only in the activities of fraternal co-opera
tion to enthrone the divine righteousness in human
society. It can come only as we come back to Christ's
thought of his Church as a brotherhood purposing to
make his principles supreme in the hfe of men. This,
however, need not interfere with our interest in our
separate ways, whether of speculation or of administra
tion. Our national progress is better provided for by
forty-six States independently working out social
problems, whUe facing the world as a national unit.
So our variously named Churches are more hkely
to learn of one another while cultivating each its
speciahty. But whUe the truth between opposing
views can be reached only by uncompromising dis
cussion, and while we are bound to be each as zealous
for his own way as his sense of its value requires,
each must remember that " the sanctities of lite are
not in our separations, but in our communications."
Against excess of emphasis on any rehgious speciality
the imperative safeguard is insistence on Christian
character as the ultimate test of either theory or
practice. The real worth of whatever is held to in
the name of rehgion is its moral worth in promoting
the conformity of the human wiU to the divine in
truth, and righteousness, and brotherly love. Im
pressively is this sometimes attested at the grave's
mouth, where the righteous is acknowledged in his
death as a brother-in-God by those who in his lUe
disowned him as such. Witness the prayers for the
soul of Frances WUlard, offered in the Church of the
Immaculate Conception at Minneapohs, a testimony to
the ineradicable human conviction that the righteous
123

Interludes
soul, though declared by the creed an impenitent
heretic, is.still one with aU the faithful in Christ.
Pleas for Christian unity have been urged with
lament that there are about a hundred and fifty
sects in our country. But why should that number
be lamentable ? The student of botany or zoology
learns from nature that the exuberance of her forms
expresses simply the exuberance of the one hfe that
animates aU. We do not regard the fact that there
are nearly five hundred varieties of the humming
bird a discredit to the Creator's wisdom. So should
we regard the diversities of form in which religious
hfe expresses itseU. Their multiplicity is no evU,
but it has been perverted to evil, because reUgious
men have mistakenly emphasized the outward instead
of the inward, have regarded the hvery more than
the hfe, have cared more for a corporation of
saints than for the communion of saints. But
to-day the largest Church corporation on earth,
hoping ultimately to absorb all others, is even more
afflicted with discord between the monastic orders
within its sheU of external unity than our own
Protestantism, externally divided though it be. The
only natural and only possible embodiment of the
unity of spirit which we confess in the Lord's Prayer
is not a corporation, but co-operation. Against the
league of Antichrist in which the forces of covetousness
and corruption, of fraud and vice, face us formidably
together, the need of the time is not a guerilla poUcy,
not a division of Christian forces into separate forts,
but combined effort in an active expression of their
common purpose " to destroy the works of the devU."
124

Religious Unity Morally Expressed
The army that followed the flag of the Union against
the foes of the Union carried after it the various colours
of corps and brigade. So let us be Baptists, Episco
palians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and all the rest,
but only for the common purpose ; and rather than
magnify our isms magnify the common family name
of Christian.
Let it not be unobserved that the facts and principles
here exhibited apply outside the pale of the Church
as weU as within. The Kingdom of God is not conter
minous with the Church as now existing. The sympa
thetic reader can divine what might be said further,
did present hmits permit. Between all who can say
from the heart so much as this : "I believe in God,
the Father Almighty," there exists a massive agree
ment, whose intrinsic importance for God's supreme
requirement, the righteous Ufe, outweighs all dis
agreements in rehgious thought, whatever they be.
"Religion," said Professor Pfleiderer, " is attachment
to God with the will." The central aspiration of the
reUgious spirit under whatever outward form is to
hnk the human will with the divine. Wherever this
aspiration exists, there the fundamental and eternal
bond of unity with aU kindred spirits exists. Exist
ing, it demands its natural expression in oneness
of religious activity with them, in combined endeavours
to promote God's righteousness in the world. The riot
of selfishness and moral anarchy that deranges and
corrupts the industrial, commercial and municipal
life of our people can be queUed only by massing
against it all the rehgious interests that it threatens.
125

Interludes
Acting on this principle, Christians and Jews have
now for years co-operated in the New York State
Conference of Rehgion, in whose meetings is used a
Book of Common Worship, compiled by a committee
consisting of an Episcopalian, a Unitarian, and a Jew.
FinaUy, underneath all the nominal or formal
divisions between men seeming or professing to be
rehgious, there is one both deep and real. It is the
vital difference that separated the Pauhnists from the
Judaizers in the Apostolic churches, the difference
still felt between men of the spirit and men of the
letter. In any line of things, rehgious or non-religious,
unity of spirit dies under the stickling of men of the
letter for form and formulary. These are they who
have led the Church — originally, as that scholarly
churchman, Professor Edwin Hatch, has said, a
society for the amendment of hfe — off from Jesus'
ground of unity in spiritual aspiration and moral
endeavour, to seek it in forms of government and
formularies of doctrine, where their successors still
would detain it. The natural result has been
Phariseeism within the Church and scepticism without ;
on the one side division, on the other derision.
There are signs, however, that this wandering in
the wilderness of delusion is nearing the way out.
Zeal for the spiritual life that unites is outgrowing
fondness for the sectarian hveries that divide. The
frost is coming out of the ground. In the warm
change of competitive into co-roperative Churches
Christianity will rediscover and prove its power for
the heahng of the nations.

126

Jesus the Ideal Man

X
JESUS THE IDEAL MAN1
This proposition obviously raises two questions :
(1) Does the record of the Evangehsts represent Jesus
as the ideal man ? (2) Was he really such ?
Dr. Martineau finds the Gospel portrait of Jesus
somewhat blemished, but ascribes the blemishes
to the fault of the delineators. He ehminates them
by criticism, and obtains thereby a faultless portrait
of an ideal character. It is easily conceivable that
the subject of a biography may suffer in weU-meaning
but unskUful hands, and may be pronounced better
than they represent him. StiU more may he suffer
when their work has been exposed for a long time to
the chances of manuscript through several generations
of copyists ; and he is entitled to the benefits of a
judicious scrutiny of their work. Supposing that the
result handed down to us presents a character not
altogether faultless, criticism must inquire whose
the fault is. To insist that we must stand by what is
written is to join the politician who refuses to go
behind the returns from the polls. Go behind them,
however, one must ; and in fact there is none, even
the most orthodox, who does not to some extent feel
1 From The New World, June, 1897.
129 i

Interludes
the necessity of going behind them. Indeed, an
example of this appears even in one of the Evangehsts,
Luke, whose idealizing tendency has been dwelt on
by so conservative a critic as Dr. A. B. Bruce. Dr.
Bruce points out instances, as in Luke's narrative of
the Temple cleansing. " It seems," he says, " to
be a half -told tale, as if adapted to the capacity of
spiritual minors, who would find it difficult to reconcile
the strenuous conduct of Jesus with their preconceived
ideas of his character."1 In Luke's pages "the holi
ness of Jesus is so zealously guarded that he appears
not only without sin, but even free from all that
bears the most remote resemblance to moral infirmity
in temper, word, or action." 3 This statement of
Luke's tendency will be accepted, even by those who
do not accept this estimate of his result.
A noted case, where orthodox readers always qualify
the record by a mitigating interpretation, is in Jesus'
saying to his mother, " Woman, what have I to do
with thee ? " — words the brusqueness of which has
been a grievance to many a tender heart. One who
takes the narrative as authentic history explains that
the word " woman " is no more a term of disparage
ment here than at the Cross (John xix. 26) ; and,
further, that " what have I to do with thee ? " is
simply a bit of clumsy hteralness on the translators'
part, the original being an idiomatic phrase, sigmfying
" don't interfere." In Luke iv. 34 we find it at once
explained and emphasized by the added word ea, " let
1 " With Open Face," by A. B. Bruce, D.D., p. 57.
2 Ibid., p. 59.
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Jesus the Ideal Man
alone " (R.V. margin). One may assume that Jesus'
tone was gentle, but tones cannot be printed.
But, in any such going behind the returns to correct
the faultiness of the record, the critic has to be on
guardagainst his own subjectivity ; — e.g., Dr. Martineau
thinks that Jesus' tenderly human sympathy with
sinners could never have spoken in such terms of
contempt as these : " Give not that which is holy unto
the dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine."
The friend of pubhcans could not, he urges, have
used words hke " dogs " and " swine," which some
of his hearers were too ready to apply to all outside
the pale of Judaism. So this precept must have
been inserted by a later hand and a lower spirit.
But for this conclusion there is no objective ground
whatever. It is as arbitrary to suppose an exclusive
reference to Gentiles intended by " dogs " in this
passage as it would be in PhUippians iii. 2, or Revelation
xxii. 15, and equally arbitrary to regard the use of
the concrete term instead of the abstract " impure " as
contemptuously intended.
Good criticism may indeed be spun, like the spider's
web, out of wholly subjective material, but it must
have anchorage in objective fact. An instance, in
contrast with the foregoing, is the criticism brought
against the account of Jesus at the Pharisee's table
(Luke xi. 37 ff.). It is certainly in conflict with our
ideal of courtesy for a guest to utter invectives against
his host, as Jesus is here recorded to have done.
But we find some objective ground for justifying the
conclusion that he did not do what we feel that he
could not have done. Portions of what Luke reports
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Interludes
as table-talk Matthew reports as belonging to Jesus'
final discourse in the crucifixion week against the
Pharisees' party. The conclusion is sound that Luke
has mixed things, and represents Jesus as saying at
the hospitable table what he said elsewhere.
Thoughtful readers of the Gospels, if they regard
Jesus as the ideal man, beheve that duly considerate
criticism satisfactorily removes any real or seeming
blemishes in his portrait which are not fairly attribut
able to him. The instances above given are of this
sort, answering to our first question, Does the record
represent Jesus as the ideal man ? Back of this is the
second and larger question, Was he reaUy such ?
In far the larger number of instances there is no
ground for discriminating in the record between
reahty and report, and our judgment of Jesus'
character must be determined by what is written.
In the case of the Pharisee just mentioned, after criti
cism of the record has found good ground for holding
that Jesus did not violate a scene of hospitality with
a diatribe against his host, the fact remains that on
another occasion he gave vent to the most scathing
denunciations of his opponents, and it is aUeged that
the ideal man will never talk as Jesus talks in the
twenty-third chapter of Matthew.
The fault-finder seems to make certain assumptions,
viz., either these people were not as bad as Jesus
represents, or, if they were, it can never be justifiable
to paint men as black as they are ; or, if relatively
to them it may be justifiable, relatively to one's self
it is not, for it cannot be done without roihng one's
seU with personal animosity. In brief, the fault-
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Jesus the Ideal Man
finder seems to understand the situation and the
speaker better than does the speaker himseU. One
who would comprehend the feehngs of Jesus in that
terrible discourse must read in connection with it
Luke's story of his weeping over the city a few days
before. A mother denouncing the corrupter of her
chUd is entitled to reverent and sympathetic judgment.
" Serpents," " brood of vipers," is not scolding, but
truthful description of sanctimonious scoundrels. The
hour of teaching was past ; the hour of a dying testi
mony had come, an hour for indispensable warning
to those who were to take up his work. The objector
sees bitterness in it. That is matter of opinion. The
very exceUences of a man may seem defects to those
who do not understand him. The general answer that
may fairly be made to many criticisms, whether upon
Jesus or other men, is, that they omit to reckon the
paraUax, as astronomical observers on opposite sides
of the earth have to do. They forget that their angle
of vision is not identical with another's. " Dogs "
and " swine " appear to the critic as terms of contempt ;
may not Jesus have used them simply as condemnatory,
and stiU with pity ?
The criticism of Jesus' character as not of ideal
perfection springs in our time, not from desire to
reduce him to a lower level, but rather from higher
perceptions of what an ideal character should be
than those which once satisfied mankind. It may
also be granted that the moral sensibihty of some
who allege moral blemishes in Jesus' character is
more acute than that of some who regard the imputa-
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Interludes
tion as blasphemous. We conceive that the imputa
tion may be both honestly and reverently made in
obedience to a rigorous demand for the highest ideal
of moral excellence, and out of a desire to come at
such an ideal through the study of Jesus' hfe as at
least a near approach to it. Nevertheless, the imputa
tion to Jesus of moral defect and weakness seems t'o
have no better foundation than an imperfect appre
hension of the facts.
But here we seek reconcUiation with those in whom
these words may raise a spirit of dissent. Many,
either on philosophical or critical grounds, are in
trenched in the conviction that Jesus was not an ideal
man. Attempts to remove their objections by specific
criticism of particulars they view as special pleading,
and are impatient of it. Even with such we would
find common ground, if possible, in a central rather
than a peripheral view of Jesus, in his consciousness,
if not in his conduct. The distinctive character of
man, as contrasted with brutes, is in his consciousness.
The specific character of any man is constituted by
his consciousness. What he is, high or low, good or
evil, is determined by the content of his conscious
ness. One who accepts the postulate of the essential
oneness of the human nature and the divine must
admit that whoso most thoroughly reahzes this in
his thought, and aspires to become in the activity of
spirit and will what God in nature has given him to
become, is the ideal man in that which is most central
and vital to man. Now it would seem that this must
be admitted of Jesus. Certainly he was unique in
this respect. No one has so uttered the consciousness
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Jesus the Ideal Man
of a hving unity with God, as sharing one hfe with
God, God in him and he in God, in the unity both
of nature and sympathy and will. Doubtless in this
also, as in less central aspects of character, he was
subject to the law of development. But it was none
the less a development of that which is most funda
mental in human nature. Let it be granted, for the
moment, that in the periphery of conduct and contact
with his environment his development was less than
perfect, so that marks of incompleteness, even infirmi
ties, appear. The ancient question returns, " What
is man ? " Estimate him centrally, not superficiaUy ;
what is he in relation to the Eternal ? That is the true
measure of man. He is the ideal man in that true
measure, who best conceives and reahzes that relation.
He heads the family, who best expresses its relation
to the Father. Jesus, then, may be considered as the
ideal man, because he has best represented the true
idea of humanity as transcending the hmits of the
world and time, a filial hfe from God in time, but eter
nally in God, " the Son in the bosom of the Father."
In this point of view his seU-chosen appellation,
" the Son of Man," is no misnomer. None has so
realized the character of the human son of God. His
consciousness of that filial character is the ideal con
sciousness. In virtue of that consciousness as regnant
in his hfe, he must be deemed the ideal man in what
is most profoundly vital to normal humanity.
But must the concession just made for a moment be
finaUy yielded ? Do defects appear in the round of
Jesus' thought and conduct as contrasted with the
central ideal of character ? Holding the negative, one
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Interludes
is chaUenged to meet a variety of specific objections
with specific answers. The attempt to answer derives
a certain presumption in its favour from what has
been said of Jesus' ideal consciousness of man's rela
tion to God. Right at the centre, was he wrong in the
projection of such a spirit upon the world ? In the
detailed answer which objectors demand one may not
only rest content that what is central and fundamental
has been vindicated. One may also claim further
common ground with them for just judgment upon
the particulars that remain. They aU see in Jesus
much of human sympathy, sweet reasonableness,
moral poise, and a spiritual repose in God far transcend
ing what any of us have attained. This surely requires
us to assign to him, rather than to ourselves, the benefit
of the doubt in whatever is less than certain, and to
deem it, in general, wiser to suspect our own judgment,
as readers of remote and imperfectly related transac
tions, than his judgment as an actor in them.
Set in this hght, a series of objections now demand
examination. Jesus has been accused of harshness to a poor
supphant, the Syrophcenician woman (Mark vii. 27).
He is said to have termed her a dog. So it stands
in our version ; but in the Greek the harsh word,
always denoting reprobation, is avoided for a gentler
one, " doggies," such as were aUowed in the house.
It is not unhkely that Jesus' tone was even gentler
than the word, and possibly not without a touch of
friendly humour, since she catches at it and repeats
it : " Yea, even the doggies under the table eat of the
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Jesus the Ideal Man
children's crumbs." If there is offence here, it must
be to one who feels bound to lay a charge. It is
neither unlikely nor unreasonable to assume that
Jesus wished to prove her spirit, and why not as he
did? Fault has been found also with Jesus' aUeged
violation of property rights, as in the destruction of
two thousand swine (Mark v. 13), the appropriation
of the colt (Mark xi. 2-6), and the upsetting of the
exchangers' money-tables (Mark xi. 15). As to the
first case, whether one regards the narrative as his
torical or as legendary, the swine seem to have been
used to complete the sufferer's cure. By seeing the
malign influence to which he had been subject appar
ently buried in the depths of the lake, he would be
convinced that it would no more return. We do not
ask whose a thing is, when it becomes necessary to
devote it in an emergency to the needs of human
life. As to the second, the context answers the objec
tion : leave to use the colt was granted. As to
the third, the key to the situation is in the words,
" den of robbers " (Mark xi. 17). For details of the
extortion practised there Edersheim's " Life of Jesus "
may be consulted (i. 370 ff .). Such enormities instaUed
in the house of prayer by corrupt priests had no right
to sufferance. Those whose rights to an unpolluted
sanctuary were invaded had right to eject the invader
by a summary process. Jesus fairly represented
these. He constituted himseU a vigilance committee
of one. But he used a whip : this was violence ;
this was in contradiction of his own precepts of non-
resistance. Was the whip, then, used as a weapon,
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Interludes
or only as a symbol ? Those extortioners deserved
stripes according to Jewish law. Moreover, Jesus'
precepts of non-resistance regard personal rather than
pubhc wrongs. The record shows no personal passion,
but zeal for the common right of piety against invad
ing scoundrelism. And the fact of the many retiring
without resistance before the one shows that they
were not beaten out but awed out. It was a case not
of physical but of moral compulsion.
Again, it is charged that Jesus underrated family
duty and affection. There is a seeming harshness in
his denying a would-be disciple's request for permission
to go first and bury his father. But what if the visit
home would turn his mind from the purpose of disciple-
ship, through the dissuasions of kindred representing
the odium or the danger of foUowing Jesus ? Would
it not be better to give up the visit rather than the
discipleship ? This is, of course, conjectural, but the
record leaves us to conjecture, and reasonable conjec
ture is enough to vacate the objection rested on
the non-statement of a reason. But Jesus' hard
sayings about the necessity of " hating " one's nearest
and dearest grate on many a reader. (See Matthew
x. 37 ; Luke xiv. 25, 26.) As to this, it is plain from
Matthew x. 40, and John xiv. 24, that Jesus demanded
no personal preference for himself, but seU-devotion
to the demand of conscience for fidelity to one's con
victions of truth and duty. But to resist the pleading
of kindred, in order to " follow conscience down
Niagara," seems to them like hating them. Doubtless
Jesus had heard it so called, and so takes up the
reproachful word, and declares that men must do
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Jesus the Ideal Man
for the right what may seem hateful to their dearest.
The objector condemns Jesus for requiring the very
conduct for which we honour the Christian martyrs.
But, it is said, we disapprove of him who courts
martyrdom, and Jesus courted it. He gave himself
up in the garden, when he could have avoided seizure,
as he had previously done. He threw away his hfe
by refusing to make a reasonable defence before the
Roman governor. The objection virtually denies that
a man may choose what seems to him the fittest time
to lay down his hfe in a cause for which life may
worthily be laid down. The world, then, has erred in
praising Socrates, Decius, Quintus Curtius, and other
self-immolating heroes. The only question, how
ever, is whether the fit time to lay down life has been
rightly chosen, and this is to be judged by the conse
quences of the action. The objector virtually con
tends that it would have been better for the world had
Jesus not chosen to shorten his hfe as he did. We may
be glad that Jesus thought differently.
In regard to other matters than family duties the
social teachings of Jesus have been pronounced defec
tive, viz., in his attitude to the rich, in a disregard
of civic virtues, an encouragement of cehbacy and
of indiscriminate almsgiving, an impracticable theory
of non-resistance, etc. The objector is as confident
as Alphonso of Castile, who thought that, if he had
been consulted before the world was created, he could
have suggested some improvements to the Creator.
But, when Jesus declared that a rich man could no
more enter the Kingdom of God than a camel could
go through a needle's eye (Mark x. 25-28), he was
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Interludes
stating it as a fact for that time, not as a fact for all
times. It was in the crisis of his career, when it was
rationaUy impossible to expect that men with much
to lose should stake it on what they deemed a lost
cause. But he goes on to refer to what is " possible
with God," as if in faith that it wUl not always be so.
The objector here commits the common fallacy of
mistaking a particular proposition for a universal.
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke xvi.
19-31) is also misunderstood, apparently because
nothing is said of their respective characters. But
the preceding context shows that the greedy rich were
in Jesus' mind. As greedy, and not as rich, he portrays
their retribution. The wealthy young ruler was of
another sort. Of him we read that " Jesus, looking
upon him, loved him " (Mark x. 21). Here one may
caU attention to the fact that the condensed and
fragmentary nature of the record, often reduced to a
meagre outline, gives special opportunity for cavfls
at things for which there is no exphcit statement of
reasons. It were to be wished that the opportunity
also given for considerate and candid intelligence were
oftener exercised by the critic.
The failure of Jesus to inculcate the civic virtues
included in the idea of patriotism has been often
aUeged by those who, with Mr. J. S. MU1, eulogize, in
contrast, the Greek and Roman philosophers. The
objector fails to observe (1) the restriction imposed on
subjects in a tyrannicaUy governed province, as
on an Armenian in Turkey ; (2) the restriction self-
imposed by prudence in view of the zealotry of
Jewish patriots (see John vi. 15), ever hable to explode
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Jesus the Ideal Man
in insurrection if addressed in terms suggesting hope
of a patriotic leader ; (3) that Jesus took a course
which, though indirect, was both the most radical
and the most hopeful. He inculcated those seminal
principles of a sound social order from which alone
can civic virtues symmetrically unfold. His Great
Commandment enjoins each to be for the other,
and aU for God. His Golden Rule admits competition
only as rivalry in mutual benefaction. He taught
that true greatness is greatness in social service. He
required that scrupulous regard for the weakest
individuals in which Greek and Roman philosophers
were signally deficient. To the great question of
social ethics, " Who is my neighbour ? " his parable
of the Good Samaritan gave an extension which the
world stiU fails to adopt. He laid down the principles
which men stiU look to as those of the ideal society
of the future— help to each according to his need ;
service from each according to his abihty. Thus, far
from failing to teach true citizenship and civic virtue,
he supphed its very soil and stimulus, at that time
the thing most wanting, at every time the thing
most necessary. Besides all this he did, as far as
possible under Roman despotism, the very thing
which Mr. MiU says he omitted. When he declared
at the outset that he came " to fulfil the law and the
prophets," he expressly adopted the ideals of civic
righteousness exhibited by such men as Isaiah, and
to-day inculcated in free countries by Christian
preachers as his ideals.
But it is said that society could not hold together,
civilization could not advance, in such neglect of
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Interludes
worldly interests as Jesus recommends, and such
yielding to injustice as he enjoins : " Resist not him
that is evil " (Matthew v. 39) ; " Sell that ye have
and give alms " (Luke xii. 33) ; " Lay not up treasures
on the earth " (Matthew vi. 19). Whether this is
" an idyllic view of the world," which common sense
must reject, depends on what Jesus intended. Did he
intend to lay down a social code, or only the rule of a
propaganda ? The latter is the more probable, in
view of the fact that Christian missionaries, such as
most of the early disciples were, have always observed
these requirements. The waiving of personal rights
for the sake of influence in their work has always
been a main principle with them (1 Corinthians ix.
4-16). But the man who knows that each should be
his brother's keeper cannot waive his brother's rights ;
the principle of non-resistance was not meant to
apply to these. Witness Jesus himseU driving out
the profaners of the Temple. The historical inter
pretation in the example of the missionary Church,
persecuted but unresisting, is the true one.
In this connection we find the criticism that Jesus
enjoined and practised an unethical charity, whose
indiscriminate almsgiving breeds pauperism (Matthew
v. 42). As to what he did, one is not entitled to
assume, in the absence of information, that he made
no discrimination between the deserving and the
undeserving poor. As to the limitation which modern
charities set to Jesus' precept, may it not be said
that the precept itself, occurring in an exposition
of the duty of benevolence, carries its own imphcit
limitation to a giving which is really helpful, not
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Jesus the Ideal Man
demoralizing ? Nor would it be expected that a
wandering and persecuted teacher, in a ministry of
the briefest extent, should inaugurate agencies of
seU-help for the indigent, instead of simply offering
humane relief to immediate needs wherever presented.
But it is charged that Jesus approved of cehbacy
(Matthew xix. 10-12). Did he otherwise than as we
do in certain cases, for the sake of a commanding
interest ? In a later time, enthusiastic ascetics
undoubtedly pressed his saying beyond reason, as did
Origen. St. Paul understood it more sanely, himseU
a ceUbate, but affirming his right to marry, and
censuring the prohibition of marriage as a doctrine of
" seducing spirits " (1 Corinthians ix. 5 ; 1 Timothy
iv. 1-3).
So it is said that Jesus endorsed the old Hebrew
idea of the sinfulness of taking interest on loans.
The objection rests on a mistranslation. The Author
ized Version of Luke vi. 35, " Lend, hoping for nothing
again," has given place in the Revised Version to
" Lend, never despairing " (margin, " despairing of
no man "). The fact is that Jesus made no pro
nouncement on the point supposed.
The immediately foregoing objections to Jesus'
teachings, as defective in a social point of view, lead
on to another of larger scope. It is said that his view
of the world was pessimistic. The world could not
be bettered by gradual improvement, but must be
swept away by catastrophe, and replaced by the
miraculous introduction of a better world from heaven
(Matthew xxiv.). For superficial readers, who do not
143

Interludes
discriminate, as the Revised Version would enable
them to do, between the " end of the world " and
the " consummation of the age," there is a colour of
plausibility in this objection. There can be, however,
httle doubt that Jesus' prophecies of the " end "
referred to the Jewish world, not to the terrestrial
globe. His symbohc descriptions, in imagery derived
from the poetic language of the Hebrew prophets,
of the extinction of the great hghts of the Jewish
Church and State, have been transferred by hterahsts
to astronomical phenomena. One must also reckon
in the probabihty that the Evangehsts' report has
been coloured here and there by the ideas with which
the Jewish mind had been imbued by the apocalyptic
literature of the time concerning the judgment of
the world by the Messiah. Granting this, however,
where would an unbiased mind look for the most
colourless and true representation of Jesus' thought of
the transition from the present order of things to a
better ? In his parables, at least, we should expect
to find it undistorted. Now it is just in these that
Jesus' idea is manifestly that of a gradual growth. See
his parables of the mustard seed and the leaven
(Matthew xiii. 31-34), and of the seed silently unfolding
into blade, ear, and grain (Mark iv. 26-30). The
conception of the " Kingdom of Heaven," the sove
reignty of truth and right, as coming by an evolutionary
process, was as foreign to that age as it is famihar
to this, and it is unmistakably Jesus' own. Says
Dr. E. Caird1 of this : "It is not too much to say
1 " Evolution of Religion," ii., p. 235.
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Jesus the Ideal Man
that in some of his [Jesus'] words the idea, that true
progress is possible only by development, is more
clearly expressed than it ever was by anyone down
to the present century."
Cognate with this allegation of a pessimistic idea
of the existing world is the charge that Jesus repre
sented the opposition of the Jews as resulting from
an arbitrary divine decree that they should not believe.
But one can easily distinguish what Mark reports him
as saying (iv. 11, 12) from what he probably said.
Matthew (xiii. 14) represents the statement which
Mark attributes to Jesus as a statement of Isaiah
quoted by Jesus for illustration. In Isaiah (vi. 8-11)
it appears to be a bit of poetic sarcasm on popular
blindness, not a didactic utterance. Consequently,
the most that Jesus is responsible for is his remark
in the context, that to some it is not given " to know
the mysteries," i.e., the truths imparted by revelation.
But this is a fact of common daUy observation . What
ever bearing this fact may have on the future destiny
of the persons concerned, it is unwarrantable to impute
to Jesus any inference from it. He has drawn none
neither should we.
So also it is mistakenly objected to Jesus that he
taught the thoroughly unethical doctrine of an endless
punishment hereafter. The stronghold of this notion
is in the Authorized Version of the New Testament,
and in the reader's fallacious identification, in the
phraseology of the Revised Version, of " eternal,"
i.e., belonging to or taking place in eternity, with
" endless," i.e., lasting through eternity, thus changing
a qualitative into a quantitative term. That a portion
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Interludes
of the Church under the spell of mediaeval notions stiU
clings to this fallacy may recommend it to cavillers,
but not to enlightened and candid critics, who know
that Christian scholars are among its most strenuous
opponents. It is antecedently improbable that Jesus
borrowed the doctrine of endless punishment from
the Jewish schools, for they taught- no such doctrine.1
His teaching is to be ascertained, not by exegesis of
the Greek word ala>vio<;, but from his explicit
affirmations that God evermore seeks that which is his,
though seemingly lost, and that " aU live unto him "
(Luke xv. and xx. 38).
It is contended, however, that Jesus dweUs unduly
upon rewards and punishments, fails to inculcate
the unselfish love of goodness for its own sake, and
appeals to mercenary motives. It must be admitted
that Jesus habitually appeals to the consequences
of moral choice, and the objection to his so doing
comes inconsistently from any who hold that utili
tarianism is sound ethics. That the utilitarian view
may be unselfishly taken, Mr. Spencer and Mr. J. S.
Mill bear witness. Moreover, a rational self-love is as
obligatory as the love of other selves, its very basis
and norm. What kind of self-love Jesus requires is
shown in Matthew v. 45, and John xiv. 23, as satisfied
in realizing one's filial relation to God. But the
objector forgets that moral development cannot begin
at the high level. In its embryonic stage, before the
habit of goodness is formed, prudential motives are
1 See Emmanuel Deutsch upon the Talmud, quoted in the Rev.
S. Cox's " Salvator Mundi," pp. 70-73.
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Jesus the Ideal Man
indispensable to form it. Only when it is formed can
the habitual good act be desired for its own sake
apart from consequences. What would be thought
of a parent who did not frequently warn a child of
the UI consequences of despising good counsel ?
Or what influence could be gained over a coarse or
brutish nature by appeahng only to the higher motives
to which it is indiff erent ? The motive must corre
spond to the stage of evolution. Prudential motives
are unworthy only as a finality, but not as a means
to progress.
It is objected again that Jesus is a faulty teacher
in giving approval to selfish and even dishonest con
duct. One case is the parable of the Hid Treasure
(Matthew xiii. 44). But note that Jesus limits him
seU to the conduct of the discoverer in making his
discovery available. His further conduct in disposing
of it, whether he was fair and generous to the seUer,
or not, is not touched, and did not require to be.
Ought the discoverer to have given away his discovery,
or was he entitled to benefit by it ? If the latter, was
it not a just way to begin by buying the ground at the
owner's price ? It is only this initial proceeding
that Jesus deals with. The other case looks more
plausible for the objector, as some orthodox expositors
of the parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke xvi. 1-9)
have furnished him his ground. They assume what
he objects to as a dishonest proceeding, viz., that the
steward's abatement of the tenants' rents was made
at his master's cost, although they plead that this
feature of the case was not what Jesus approved, but
rather the prudence of the man in providing for his
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Interludes
time of need. Surely, the objector may say that
Jesus could easily have taken a case of honest prudence
to point his lesson. But it is whoUy gratuitous to
assume that this was a case of dishonest prudence.
The contrary assumption is quite as plausible. What
the steward did was not at his master's cost but his
own, viz., a remission of his extortionate over
charges, which, had he continued in office, he would
furtively have pocketed. That this was the real case
appears from the fact that his master commended
him. Surely, he could not have commended conduct
which would have robbed him of his just dues. This
view of the case, as the prompt undoing of wrong,
is as congruous with Jesus' character as the other
view is incongruous. But here, as elsewhere, some
objectors reason in a circle ; first assuming that
Jesus was ethically imperfect, and then interpreting
him so as to square with that assumption.
Akin to the foregoing is the allegation that Jesus
makes httle account of inteUectual scrupulousness
and honesty. At any rate, he was concerned for
moral scrupulousness, as the Sermon on the Mount,
and not that alone, bears witness ; but moral scrupu
lousness is the root of intellectual. It is also certain
that the vices of publicans and harlots did not draw
from him warnings so frequent and censures so severe
as the hypocrisy of those who taught what they did
not practise, and professed what they did not possess.
From the peasant woman of Samaria to the imperial
governor sitting as his judge, his testimony was
characteristically given for truth : " They that worship
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Jesus the Ideal Man
God must worship in spirit and in truth " ; " To this
end am I come into the world, that I should bear
witness unto the truth " (John iv. 24 ; xviii. 37).
It is not easy to be respectful to an objector who seems
to ignore what is so prominent in the record. Perhaps,
however, it is deemed a fault that Jesus did not always
make his meaning clear to his hearers ; he was often
figurative, enigmatical, paradoxical ; he left false
impressions, and did not correct them. In other
words, a man so far above his contemporaries that
in many cases they could not have understood him
did not attempt the impossible. That he so under
stood the situation he repeatedly intimated : " He
that hath ears to hear, let him hear " ; " Do ye not
yet perceive ? " " Doth this cause you to stumble ?
The words that I have spoken are spirit." Even
among persons of culture and probity the photo
graphing of one's thought on another mind, especially
where the one is a stranger to the experience of the
other, is so difficult that aU bear witness to the poet's
saying : Words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within.
What reason, then, to complain of the spiritual seer,
who, in addressing minds immured in their senses,
their prejudices, or their vices, speaks in figure,
enigma, paradox ? It is not possible always to state
truth to such so that it shall not be paradoxical.
What an enigma, a paradox, Tennyson's address to
the flower in the crannied waU is to the prosaic soul,
to whom the primrose is " a yeUow primrose, nothing
more " ! 149

Interludes
But the objection to Jesus on the score of inteUectual
scrupulousness takes another form. He is accused
of lacking inteUectual balance and sanity. The
charge is rested on two prominent characteristics
of his teaching : his aUeged self-assertion, and his
prediction of his return, or coming again — the so-caUed
Second Advent.
It is said that no man conscious of human weakness
and limitation could sanely say, " I am the bread
which came down from heaven " ; "I am the hght of
the world"; "I am the resurrection and the hfe."
It is said that the fundamental virtue is humility,
and that no genuinely humble man could utter such
extraordinary seU-assertion. The Church has admitted
it, and Canon Liddon, in his Bampton Lectures on
" The Divinity of Our Lord," declares that, U Jesus
were not very God as weU as very man, he could
not have been even a good man. The admission
as weU as the objection must be revised and
withdrawn. The unique and extraordinary feature in the Gospel
sketches of Jesus is, as has already been pomted out,
his consciousness of an eternal humanity, a oneness
of nature and spirit with God, transcending the limits
of time before and after. He seemed to reahze for
himseU, what is doubtless true of human nature
itseU, an existence from eternity in God, as " the
Son of man who is in heaven," " the Son who is in
the bosom of the Father." The Church has explained
this fact of Jesus' consciousness mechanicaUy by
supposing a union of God and man in him effected
through a physiological miracle. We may better
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Jesus the Ideal Man
explain it vitaUy : Jesus was conscious of God as
living in him, and of himself as living in God, in the
unity of the one eternal hfe. The epithet " God-
intoxicated " has been apphed to Spinoza. Much more
fitly might Jesus be called God-enthused. Just judg
ment requires a man to be judged by his peers ;
but who is Jesus' peer in this respect ? And so the
utterance of his calm consciousness of God seems at
least ecstatic to those who share it not ; to the Jews
it seemed blasphemous. Yet a fact of consciousness
is entitled to as much respect as a fact of physics.
ShaU Jesus, then, be pronounced arrogant or insane
for the utterance of a God-consciousness such as no
other man of God has ever shown ?
For it is to be expressly noted that his self-assertion,
so-called, is not seU-assertion, but God-assertion.
Speaking of himself, he repeatedly disclaimed the
knowledge or power which he assigned to God (Matthew
xxiv. 36 ; Mark x. 40). He declared that by himself
he was nothing, nor did he speak from himself, but
from the Father who was in him (John v. 30 ; viii. 28 ;
xiv. 10). This is the vital fact, ignored by the objector
to these utterances of a life whose conscious springs
were all in God. Not as a merely individual man, nor
merely as a man of God, but as a man in God as no
other man has consciously been, does Jesus say,
" I am the hght of the world," reverently explaining
himseU to mean, " Not I by myself, but rather the
Father who is in me."
Jesus' other pecuhar utterance, on which the charge
of lacking inteUectual sanity has been based, is his
prediction of another coming to earth. In this also
151

Interludes
the objector finds his ground prepared for him by the
pretensions of many Christian people, Adventists and
MUlenarians. Not only so, but it is plain enough
from their epistles that the Apostles themselves
expected the return of their Master to earth in the
course of a few years, to be the judge of a world still
abandoned to its sins (e.g., 2 Thessalonians i. 7-10).
Evidently he must have said what they so understood,
but the question is, whether they only were the
subjects of an extraordinary iUusion, or he as well
as they.
On comparing the various statements, we find a wide
difference in the Evangehsts. The Fourth Gospel
makes Jesus speak of a coming again which is evi
dently of a spiritual sort (John xiv. 3, 19, 23). The
other three record his predictions of a coming in the
clouds, and on a throne of glory with attendant
angels (Matthew xxv. 31 ; Mark xiv. 62). If these
contrasted ideas seem incongruous, two questions
arise : (1) Which is more in accord with the real
thought of Jesus ? (2) How are we to account for
the representation given in the first three Gospels ?
As to the first question, it is noteworthy that Jesus
declared that a spiritual return of Ehjah had already
taken place in the advent of John the Baptist, in
whom the bold, fiery spirit of the ancient reformer
lived again. It is remarkable also that this idea
occurs, not in John, but in the Synoptic Gospels
themselves (Matthew xvii. 10-14; Mark ix. 11-14).
If now, as we undoubtedly must, we give preference
to the idea of a return in spirit rather than in form
as the real thought of Jesus, this reference to Ehjah
152

Jesus the Ideal Man
is very significant for his view of his own future
advent. As to the second question, — the genesis of the
Synoptic representation of the return of Jesus in
visible majesty, — what has been already said about
Jesus' teaching of " the end of the world," i.e., the
Jewish, not the terrestrial world, must be borne in
mind. The minds of devout Israehtes were imbued
with the current apocalyptic hterature, in which the
advent of the Messiah to judge the world was a promin
ent trait. It is easily conceivable that Jesus, in pre
dicting the overthrow of the Jewish institutions with
the faU of their holy city, borrowed the symbohcal
language in which the ancient prophets had foretold
a similar catastrophe, prefiguring the quenching of
the great hghts of Church and State as the darkening
of the sun, etc. But the spiritual coming of which
he spoke, progressively reahzed in the diffusion of
the spirit of Christianity through the preaching of
the Gospel, synchronized with this catastrophe of
Judaism, for the Cross rose, as the Temple fell. This
view of the matter, however, hke many of his teachings,
the disciples were unhkely to grasp. The only alterna
tive conception within their reach was the Jewish
apocalyptic fancy of the advent of the Messiah upon
a visible judgment-seat. It is not easy to doubt that
they so construed the matter, and in course of time
coloured their remembrance and report accordingly.
Paul's letter to Thessalonica shows it, and so does
Peter's belief, " The end of all things is at hand."
At any rate, the choice hes for us between this reason
able view of the matter and attributing to Jesus an
153

Interludes
enthusiastic extravagance of thought, to which nothing
else in his teaching bears resemblance. " The whole
teaching of Jesus," says Dr. E. Caird, " might be
described as one continuous effort to extract the
kernel from the husk in which it had to grow ; to
detach the deeper spiritual truth which he sought to
convey from the form in which he was obhged to convey
it ; to raise the Messianic idea above the accidents of
its prophetic vesture, and the cruder sensuous inter
pretation which the popular mind had attached to it."
In the foregoing comments and criticisms notice has
been taken, not of all objections to the character of
Jesus on ethical grounds, but only to such as it might
seem worth while to notice, if even briefly. When,
however, a recent writer goes so far as to declare that
no great rehgious teacher has ever so contradicted
the Fatherhood of God as Jesus has, and that, wherever
the spirit of Christianity survives in its fulness,
there is the enemy of j ustice, of charity, and of human
brotherliness, one can hardly be expected to discuss
such phantasms seriously.
We have now to gather up the results of our review.
The question before us was stated at the outset as
twofold : (1) Whether Jesus as represented in the
record is the ideal man, and (2) whether he was reaUy
such. As to the first, it appears that there are occa
sional features of the record which may be criticized as
moral blemishes, but that the record itseU enables a
duly objective criticism to show these as due to an
imperfect apprehension of the facts, or as belonging
to the record rather than to him. As to the second
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Jesus the Ideal Man
question, it is enough to say, " The things that cannot
be shaken remain." We can discover nothing which
invahdates the judgment of the vast majority of
ethical writers, who agree in recognizing Jesus as the
one perfect teacher and representative of moral truth
and duty. This superiority consisted, as we must still
insist, often as it has been said, not in any completeness
of precepts given, or of concrete relations sustained
in conduct, but in his exhibition of those principles
and that spirit which not only supply all due regulation
as occasion requires, but give unity, consistency and
purity to the moral hfe.
But for a more complete result attention is due to a
further consideration which now emerges. The period
of Jesus' hfe which the record covers is very brief.
His historical career is comprised within three years,
and of these the accounts which have come down to
us include httle more than a month in all of separate
days. In view of this it is asked whether upon so
fragmentary accounts we can claim to have demon
strated the sinlessness of Jesus throughout his lUe.
Clearly we cannot. Whatever inference anyone may
think himseU able to draw is merely an inference of
debatable probabihty. It must be frankly admitted
that the material does not exist for any induction
of facts to the sweeping generahzation that from first
to last Jesus' hfe was a faultless hfe. There are even
indications that make this somewhat questionable.
Luke states (ii. 52) that in his youth Jesus " advanced
in favour with God and man." Matthew says (iii. 15)
that he sought John's " baptism of repentance "
(Luke in. 3) with the declaration, " Thus it becometh
155

Interludes
us to fulfil all righteousness " — words back of which
there may or may not have lain some rueful memory.
To this the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews adds
that " he learned obedience," and was " made perfect."
Upon such statements we must not dogmatize on
a priori grounds. We have no ground to assert that
in his immaturity Jesus was altogether exempt from
every fault into which a spirit aspiring toward perfect
purity may fall. In our utter ignorance of the facts,
this must be candidly admitted. But the question
before us concerns the historical period of his hfe,
and that only. Was he, or was he not, for that period,
or rather in the portions of it put before us in the
record, the perfect teacher, the faultless example,
the ideal man, whom many generations of saints have
revered as such ? We know that the moral ideals of
the past have not proved adequate to the demand of
growing moral insight. And so we must sympathize
with the questioner, who, in longing for the truly perfect
ideal, earnestly scrutinizes the ancient record for
verification of the traditional belief in Jesus' moral
perfectness. But the record, when criticism has done
its legitimate work thereon, fuUy sustains the behef.
In confirmation of this judgment one may compare
Kant's formula for moral action, " Act so that the
maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold
good as a principle of universal legislation," with the
saying of Mr. J. S. Mill, that a man could not have a
better rule of conduct than so to act as to obtain the
approval of Jesus Christ. The universahty thus recog
nized is a decisive trait of the ideal.
But here one encounters a final objection. " What
156

Jesus the Ideal Man
we require to know," says a recent writer,1 " is not
only, was Jesus' hfe righteous, pure-hearted and
loving, but that it reached ideal perfection. It must
have been throughout and every moment surcharged
with the absolute consciousness of the presence of
God. There must have been never a faU from the
heights of perfect sympathy, trust, hope, enthusiasm."
But " he was subject to waves of depression, as the
man sure of divine approval is not." This seems
to forget that the ideal man is ideal in his coping with
human conditions, not in his exemption from them.
Exempt he cannot be from that law of periodicity
to which the earth itself and all hfe upon it are subject.
The shores of thought and being know
The Spirit's tidal ebb and flow.
What concerns us is, not the ideal man in heaven,
but the ideal man on earth, where it is sometimes
night ; not the ideal man in his ultimate, consummate
state, but rather in his present, advancing state,
advancing through struggle. The essential requisite
in this ideal man is that he should be imitable, through
a sympathy the ground of which is in the experience
of a common condition. It is precisely in this point
of view that the New Testament represents Jesus as
the ideal man, because at once subjected to earthly
limitations and vicissitudes, yet ever victoriously
rising above them. The demand for an ideal not thus
subjected is a seU-defeating demand. The ideal which
it contemplates would be no ideal at all, simply because
unearthly, and so inimitable.
1 The Rev. C. F. Dole, in The New World, September, 1896.
157

Interludes
FinaUy, to leave at the end of this discussion a
clear conception of the position which it has simply
endeavoured to free from objections, what has been
said most admirably by Dr. E. Caird, in his lecture
on " The Divine and the Human," T may be succinctly
quoted : "By him [Jesus], as by no other individual
before, the pure idea of a divine humanity was appre
hended and made into the great principle of hfe.
... In fact, it was through Jesus Christ that that
capacity of men to become sons of God, which was
in humanity from the first, was actuahzed or clearly
revealed. . . . Christ is divine just because he is the
most human of men, the man in whom the universal
spirit of humanity has found its fuUest expression ;
... on the other hand, he is the ideal or typical man,
the Son of Man, who reveals what is in humanity,
just because he is the purest revelation of God in
man." 1 " Evolution of Religion," ii., pp. 230, 231, 233.

158

Jesus' God-Consciousness a Human
Attainment

XI
JESUS' GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS A HUMAN
ATTAINMENT l
An eminent Trinitarian3 has called attention to the
imitableness of Jesus as a long-lost and recently
recovered truth, and to its recovery as a " vast service
that Unitarianism has rendered to the Christian
behef of the century." It is, as he says, a truth
which " has far less to fear from the avowed enemies
of a high morality than from a narrow rehgious zeal."
It is inseparable from the truth of the normal humanity
of Jesus, a truth hkewise long submerged, and but
recently regained. If in any point Jesus were not
normaUy human throughout, were he not wholly as
subject as we to human conditions in the ability to
draw upon divine resources of knowledge and power,
then, of course, he could not be entirely imitable.
The question of his entire imitableness is therefore
more than a problem of theology ; it is also a funda
mental question of practical discipleship to him,
and is here taken up with that interest mainly in view.
It is far from being a settled question, vital as it is.
The central problem presented in the life of Jesus
hes in his asseverations of intimate relationship and
1 From The American Journal of Theology, April, 1905.
2 Dr. George A. Gordon, in " The Christ of To-day," pp. 70, 71.
161 L

Interludes
entire unity with God. Many would deny that there
is a problem here. Here, they would say, are simply
the utterances of an exceptional being, who comes to
us from a higher world. Nevertheless, a problem is
apparent stiU. For the extraordinary consciousness
of God which is discovered in Jesus is the product of a
mind genuinely and thoroughly human, weU poised
and sane. As a phenomenon of such a mind there is
at least no prima facie ground for denying it to be
essentiaUy reproducible. The problem must therefore
be approached in entire detachment from dogmatic
prepossessions and controversial interests. This is
the first condition of a trustworthy judgment.
The second condition is, that clear distinction be
made between the actual and the potential in human
nature. Whenever we contrast present conditions
with the past, whether remote or comparatively
recent, we recognize the progress of a great ethico-
spiritual development, of which, as Tennyson's weU-
known poem says, we even now see " dawn, not day."
Those who in this discern the fact that he affirms
Man as yet is being made,
and that the spiritual creation of man is stiU in its
early stages, cannot reasonably affirm that what is
superhuman now, as compared with the present
spiritual level, wiU be superhuman to " the crowning
race " of men who have worked out the beast, and " let
the ape and tiger die." Admitting this, however,
we must also admit, with that free critic of tradi
tional behefs, Professor Wernle : " It is impossible
that a time should ever come when any single Christian
162

Jesus' God-Consciousness
should acquire for his fellow Christians the significance
of Jesus."
That Jesus made upon the disciples whose thoughts
of him are on record the impression of a transcendent
being is undeniable. Greater than Moses was he to
them. His post-crucifixion appearances, whether they
were corporeal or apparitional, were of a sort which
convinced them that he had risen into the heavens
from the common mansion of the dead in the supposed
underworld. Whether the Gospel saying, "lam the
resurrection and the Ufe," be his very words, as the
Church beheves, or, as some critics say, the expression
of a mind that had deeply imbibed his thought, they
seemingly express the consciousness of a personality
transcending human Umits. Granting this, it cannot
be granted as determinative of our present problem.
Holding to the discrimination already made between
the actual and the potential in human nature, we must
reasonably hold this also, that the verdict of those
first disciples is not absolute, but relative to their stage
and time. Dr. Gordon, indeed, asserts that, as com
pared with Jesus, " incompleteness must be the
note of our human existence through aU time." For
this no conclusive ground has ever been adduced.
When the Roman Catholic poet Faber writes :
We share in what is infinite, 'tis ours,
he evidently transcends the limit of Hebrew thought,
even among the Apostles. Here is a fact positively
adverse to regarding any present stage of experience as
the final limit of the God-consciousness that has grown
thus far. That the truth of its unhmited growth was
163

Interludes
glimpsed by the foremost imitator of Jesus, certain
sayings of St. Paul1 evince.
Under these conditions of clear thinking and trust
worthy judgment we have now to reflect further on
the final question concerning the imitableness of Jesus :
Is there any limit to it ? Is it reproducible in con
sciousness as well as in conduct ?
His imitableness, an axiom of primitive Christianity,
has been reinstated in Christian conviction, at least
in the sphere of conduct, as a principle essential
to the development of Christian character. But
conduct is not the whole of character. Conduct
is the embodiment of consciousness ; it is motived
and sustained by consciousness. Imitableness that
goes no deeper than conduct is not worth effort or
consideration. Unless Jesus be fully imitable in
consciousness, it does not appear how he can be
fuUy imitable in conduct. A practical question
of fundamental ethical importance is thus involved
in the present inquiry.
We approach the heart of this question in making
account of two facts : ( 1 ) Jesus was born into a rehgious
community which had always given exclusive emphasis
to the divine Transcendence, and that of an extra-
mundane sort ; (2) Jesus for the first time laid equal
emphasis upon the divine Immanence— God in him,
as weU as beyond him. Of this truth Jesus makes
himseU the representative, especially in the extent
1 Ephefians iii. 19 ; iv. 13; Philippians iii. 12-14.
164

Jesus' God-Consciousness
to which he carries his use of the terms " father "
and " son " to express the relation between God and
himseU. Domestic affection and human sympathy
have familiarized the world with the ideal of
Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.
In transferring this ideal from time to eternity, in
extending it to include humanity and deity in spiritual
unity, Jesus has set himseU apart from all other
rehgious teachers, while joining them all in reverential
recognition of the divine transcendence : " My Father
is greater than I." How foreign his thought of God
to the thought of his hearers appears in their impulse
to stone him for blasphemy when he said : "I and the
Father are one." His uniqueness essentiaUy consists
in this peculiar consciousness, from which issue the
expressions of his entire unity with God that still
excite the world's wonder : " What my Father does
I do. What I say he says through me. We two are
one. Would you know his mind ? Behold mine.
Would you know what he requires ? See what I do."
Conceivable enough in the sympathetic friendship of
man with man, such a consciousness of unity in thought
and deed is declared untransferable to the relations
of humanity and deity.
On the one hand, it has been held, since the time
of the early oecumenical creeds, that deity and humanity
are essentially different natures, and that such a
consciousness is impossible except in a person in
whom the two natures are conjoined, as it is affirmed
they were conjoined in Jesus, the one and only " God-
man." 165

Interludes
On the other hand, it is affirmed by many modern
critics that the expressions of a peculiar consciousness
of God which, especiaUy in the Fourth Gospel, are
ascribed to Jesus, are of doubtful authenticity.
Accordingly they rule the present inquiry out of order
until the authenticity has been settled by critical
investigation. To such summary closing of the
question there is a reasonable demurrer. One may
have grave doubts of the authorship of the Fourth
Gospel, and yet claim that a question of spiritual or
ethical authority is wholly independent of any con
clusion about its literary vehicle. The question
which any one of the so-caUed " lost arts " raises as
to its reproducibihty depends not at aU on identifica
tion of the forgotten artist. And so, when many, as
now, declare the Fourth Gospel to be the work of an
unknown religious romancer, and its expressions of
Jesus' God-consciousness to be mere theosophical
speculation, utterly unhistorical, one may with entire
reason rejoin : Even so, the question of the imitable
ness of such a consciousness is not thereby settled.
To discard these controverted sentences does not
annihilate them. Even U no part of Jesus' history,
they are stUl historical, for they exist, and have long
been before the world in manuscripts centuries older
than any others now existing. Ascribed to Jesus,
they are ascribed to him as a man in peculiar relation
to God, a Jew whom favourably disposed contem
poraries, like Nicodemus, classing him as a rabbi,
addressed as " a teacher come from God." The
sayings in question exist in the story of a human
life, whose varying conditions of activity and trial
166

Jesus' God-Consciousness
seem to say, in the words of the Roman procurator,
" Ecce homo." Constantly they breathe forth the
feeling of an ideal sonship to God, closer and dearer
than any other that any literature has preserved.
Even were they, as contended, not identifiable with
any human name, yet simply as an ideal would they
possess, especially to whomsoever the thought of
filial relationship to God is dear, the imperativeness
which conscience accords to every pure and high
ideal, when once presented. They demand imitation,
if not of the real Jesus, then of one who has been
supposed to be Jesus. Such considerations not only
justify but require the ruhng out, as irrelevant to
the present inquiry, of the demand that the authorship
of the document presenting such an ideal shall be
settled before it can be treated as of practical
importance. But something more than that it is now irrelevant
must be said of the contention that such sayings of
Jesus are " unhistorical." A noteworthy specimen of
them is in a sentence of Jesus' prayer for his disciples
at the Last Supper : " The glory which thou hast given
me I have given them, that they may be one, even
as we are one ; I in them, and thou in me, that they
may be perfected into one." l Observe the dominating
note here ; it is practical, not theosophical, the unifica
tion, the solidarity of the disciples, in hves aU centred
in God, with the moral purpose that is given in the
context, " Keep them from the evil." Here it is
strikingly significant that the underlying ideas are
1 John xvii. 22, 23.
167

Interludes
precisely those to which modern science and philosophy
are bringing the thought of our day — the unity of aU
lives in a common hfe, the identity of moral nature
in man and God, the immanence of deity. But these
were notoriously not the ideas either of the second
century or of the first. Whoever expressed them then
— whether Jesus, or, as some critics allege, a Christian
writer now unknown — they certainly constitute, in
the history of human thought, a phenomenon extra
ordinary at that time, and simply as such entitled
to more recognition than it receives. Whether uttered
by Jesus, or by another, this, at least, is certain' : no
name of that period except Jesus is found elevated
above the mental and spiritual limitations of the
time sufficiently to have been capable of uttering
them. It is mere dogmatism to declare him movable.
Probabihty is largely on the side of the traditioj w^hich
reports them as substantially his. In the following
discussion they may, for convenience, at least, be
reasonably referred to as his, especiaUy as the contention
which would rule them out must be deemed irrelevant
to the main question now before us. Here, however,
may be cited the judgment of Professor Wernle, of
Basel, in a work free from all bias toward orthodoxy.1
This admits, as " the mystery of Christianity," that
the Synoptic Gospels by themselves exhibit in Jesus
" a self-consciousness that is more than merely
human " — a fact, he says, to be accepted as such. In
quoting this recognition in the first three Gospels of
what is here under discussion as predominantly
1 " The Beginnings of Christianity," Vol. I., p. 39.
168

Jesus' God-Consciousness
characteristic of the fourth, its implication is by no
means accepted, that there is any such thing in reahty
as the " merely human " in apartness from God.
That in the view of the Evangehsts Jesus' God-con
sciousness was superhuman can hardly be doubted.
The present question is : Was it absolutely such, or
only relatively to theirs ? In other words, is it fully
imitable ?
The formula most briefly expressing this conscious
ness is Jesus' reiterated saying : " I am in the Father,
and the Father in me." l But sayings of the apostles
exhibit close parallels to this. The first half of it is
closely reproduced in Paul's words : " In him we
hve, and move, and have our being." ~ With the
entire sentence various sayings in John's first epistle
accord — e.g. : " He that abideth in love abideth in
God, and God abideth in him." 3 This concord of the
Apostles and their Master shows in him and in them
the same God-consciousness, but with a difference —
a difference that may explain the peculiar eminence
held by Jesus in the thought of his disciples. It is
one thing to possess a truth, another thing to be
possessed by that truth. Of this we find in ourselves
abundant proof. CaU to mind Tennyson's verses on
" The Higher Pantheism," and its oft-quoted line :
Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.
We thus affirm the immanence of God in ourselves ;
but how feebly we realize our affirmation, how slight
1 John x. 38 ; xiv. 11 ; xvii. 21.
5 Acts xvii. 28. 3 1 John iv. 16.
169

Interludes
and transient its hold on our thought ! Intellectually
we conceive ourselves embosomed in Infinite Being,
but the conception does not so cling to the mind as
to root itself in the feehng which is the subsoil of
clear thought. Is it, then, affirming aught more than
known mental laws warrant, if we say that the intensity
of Jesus' God-consciousness is, in the first place, due
to that intensity of thought which succeeds in seU-
saturation with a subhme truth ? What a raw and
untoward nature might not attain in any such
endeavour, might reward the effort of a refined and
susceptible nature to reahze in itself the Pauhne
conception of being " filled unto all the fulness of
God." 1 What might not be reached by one crowded
with passing interests and cumbered with much
serving, might be attained by another oft in the vigUs
of devotion, as was Jesus, and greatly given to prayer.
Temperament, also, with its variable psychological
conditions, is a factor of large account, as the history
of religious mysticism shows. Imperfect as is our
record of Jesus' life, httle more than a month of days
in all, it credits him with aU the conditions now
conceivable for a rare attainment in the highest
branch of knowledge — the knowledge of God.
There have been many men of God. Here appears
to be a man in God, consciously so as no other has been,
and so speaking consciously out of God as no other
has spoken. From such a consciousness proceeds
what is loosely termed his " self-assertion " : "I
am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life " — not to be
1 Eph. iii. 19.
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Jesus' God-Consciousness
deemed mere self-assertion in one who subjoins :
" The words that I say unto you I speak not from
myself, but the Father abiding in me doeth his works."
If Paul could say of himseU, " We have the mind of
Christ," 1 with no less reason might Jesus say that
he had the mind of his heavenly Father, and spoke
of himself only as God thought of him. In this we
cannot judge him. It is well if we submit to be judged
by one of deeper insight and larger knowledge than
our own. The religious insight of saints and mystics
is not accountable to inteUectual analysis or test.
Feehng, consciousness, ecstatic intuition, are facts
that burst aU prescribed or customary forms. But it
is not to be forgotten here that the fundamental
consciousness uttered in the sentence, " I am in the
Father, and the Father in me," does not, even in a
merely intellectual view, overpass the truths acknow
ledged to-day : the immanence of deity, the identity
of our moral nature with the divine, the unity of life
through all its manifestations from the lowest sentience
and intelligence to the highest. Even that surprising
word, "Before Abraham was I am,"3 might, apart
from any idea of individual pre-existence, conceiv
ably find such vindication as moments of rapturous
insight may obtain ; either, as Professor Gilbert
says,3 in the conception of an ideal pre-existence
in the Eternal Purpose, or else in a conception of the
divinely inbreathed life that in mortal form thinks

1 1 Cor. ii. 16.
2 John viii. 58 ; " was " = was born, R.V. margin.
3 " The Revelation of Jesus," p. 214.
171

Interludes
the thought of God to-day, as being in itseU co-eternal
with the divine life whose thought it thinks.
But, furthermore, it is clear that the God-conscious
ness manifested in Jesus is no merely inteUectual
product, though not without an intellectual ground.
Grounded in an insight verified in our time, though
transcending the thought of his time, which conceived
of man as clay-born, and alien in nature to God,
it is evidently fed and winged by devotional affection.
Jesus does not say with his Apostles, " I am in God,
and God in me," but, " I am in the Father, and the
Father in me." Here the difference between them
and him begins to appear. They noted it from the
first, drawing, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a
contrast between Moses, who was faithful as a servant,
and Christ, who was faithful as a son.1 Mere intensity
of thought to the point of saturation with an idea
might produce the speculative consciousness of a
Spinoza — the " pure inteUectual love," in which he
became " God-intoxicated," as Novalis called him.
But Jesus' consciousness of his Father was marked by
an emotional, filial affection, and is therefore of a
different type. God-consciousness that is merely
speculative gravitates inevitably toward pantheism
hke Spinoza's, like that of Hinduism in Emerson's
weU-known poem, " Brahma " :
They reckon ill who leave me out.
When me they fly, I am the wings :
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
1 Heb. iii. 5, 6.
172

Jesus' God-Consciousness
Speculative thought needs the wings of feehng to
keep it from falling into this blank abyss of indis
tinguishable being ; needs a clear-eyed emotion that
discerns and strives to close with its object as other
than self, and desires it for the satisfaction of self.
The love of God by man, as of one being by another, is
foreign to pantheism. But Jesus is no pantheist.
An emotional element of thought added to, or rather
suffusing, the intellectual is conspicuous in his
consciousness of God. His characteristic appellation
of deity, and the tone of filial sympathy in which
his hps utter the word " Father," attest it. Further
more, nothing less than profound and glowing affection
can absorb the whole man, as Jesus was absorbed in
his thought of his Father and himself as mutually
indweUing in each other, and mutually delighting in
each other. Only the high temperature of ecstatic
filial feehng, raised by hours of vigil and prayer un
interrupted by distracting cares, could conceivably
generate — and one can hardly disbelieve it adequate
to generate — the subhme utterances which to most
have seemed indicative of a descent from heavenly,
rather than of an ascent from earthly conditions. He
is not only the one member of our race who has made
the truth that our humanity eternally exists in God
a dominant regulative of his thought. He is also the
one man to whom this truth has endeared itself in
the depths of feehng, saturating his soul with its
sweetness, and uttering itseU in the expressions of a
filial consciousness as from the bosom of paternal
love. Unique is he in this, but is he also imitable ?
In type and kind, no doubt, he is. So God is
173

Interludes
imitable. Science strives to imitate the way and
work of God in nature, yet with what disparity in
result ! The finest needle-point we can make appears
under the microscope as rough and blunt as a crowbar
beside God's perfect work in the gnat's lancet. Jesus
and his Apostles propose God's work and way in the
moral world as our model : "Ye shall be perfect as
your heavenly Father is perfect." L " Be ye imitators
of God as beloved children." 3 Here also, however
studious imitators in type and kind, how far short are
we in degree and result ! The imitableness of Jesus'
God-consciousness at least in type and kind may not
be doubted. But does not even this admission fix a
point far short of which Christian endeavour seems
content to rest ? One cannot say that any remark
able number of Jesus' disciples have advanced beyond
the Old Testament sage, who realized that " the eyes
of Jehovah are in every place, keeping watch upon
the evil and the good." 3 But the consciousness of
Jesus certainly apprehended much more than the
divine omnipresence. We, too, endeavouring to
realize the Pauline maxim, " in him we hve," have
gone intellectually beyond that in our affirmation of
the divine immanence. In our theology this is now
much set by, but its value and power as factor in
religious feeling, and as fuel for spiritual Ufe, still wait
for appreciation.
The contention that the God-consciousness of Jesus
is forever irreproducible, even in a perfected humanity,
can be maintained only on one ground — a ground
' Matt. v. 48. 2 Eph. v. 1. 3 Prov. xv. 3.
174

Jesus' God-Consciousness
restricting the imitableness of Jesus in conduct also —
the fifth century affirmation of " two natures " in
Jesus, mysteriously conjoined in a union in which the
divine element energized in ways impossible to the
human, so that divine resources were open to Jesus
that are closed to all other men. But modern theism
repudiates that notion of the " two natures in one
person " as a fallacy which, as Professor A. V. G.
AUen has said, " sanctified divorce between the divine
and the human, secular and religious, body and
spirit." x Humanity and deity are one nature. Moral
nature through ah its ranges is one and the same.
LUe, whether in the self-existent fount or in the derived
streamlet, is one. The living God enshrines his
thought in increasing measure in all the forms that
exhibit, from the least to the greatest, the ascent
of the unitary life inbreathed by him. Moreover,
" the image of God " in man, in which the foundation
hnes of his being were laid, is still incomplete — a
thing not of original but of ultimate realization.
Man as yet is being made, and, ere the crowning age of ages,
Shall not »pn after ason pass and touch him into shape ?
StUl, as in the apostohc age, " the earnest expectation
of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons
of God,"2 the God who lives, however unrecognized,
in us, and in whom, however unconsciously, we live.
Who that soberly estimates the present embryonic
or infantile development of spiritual man — barely three
centuries removed, as we are, from the time when
1 " Continuity of Christian Thought," p. 143.
2 Rom. viii. 19. 175

Interludes
Christians were burned for heresy by fellow Christians,
and not yet so advanced but that rehgious men are
still ostracized by rehgious men for differences of
opinion concerning theological mysteries — can reason
ably appeal to experience as certifying denial that the
God-consciousness of Jesus is reproducible in degree
as well as in kind ? More reasonably we may say,
it is reproducible because its conditions are not irre-
producible. On the one hand, the inteUectual ground
of its possibUity exists in the data of an enlightened
theism. On the other hand, the emotional ground is
given in the recorded practices of converse with God
by which Jesus cultivated it, until the sublime truth
which he, not alone among men, possessed, possessed
him, as it has never yet possessed another, raising him
to a peculiar spiritual exaltation as the supreme
revelation of the Eternal Spirit in a human life to a
mortal world.
Here we may not neglect to take account of the fact
that the inteUectual element in Jesus' God-conscious
ness was conditioned by hmited knowledge of the
universe. God's Book of Nature was certainly not so
open to his view as it is to the eye of modern science.
The bright star Arcturus, of which he had read in
Job, was to him, as to his countrymen, a mere cresset
nightly hghted a httle way above the clouds. To us
it is an orb a milhon times outbulking the sun, and
so distant that its light, flashing twelve million miles
a minute, requires one hundred and sixty years to
reach us, while yet it is among the nearer stations of
the steUar universe. Our thought of the Upholding
Spirit, whose might pervades these immeasurable
176

Jesus' God-Consciousness
heights and depths, vastly transcends the thought of
one to whom the All was grouped within narrow
bounds about our tiny world — a limitation which
doubtless helped to bring the Father of aU more
easUy within Jesus' intellectual apprehension. Yet
this can hardly put us at disadvantage emotionally as
compared with him. For Infinite Spirit is as perfect
in one attribute as in another. The immensity of
star-gemmed space doubtless tends at first to oppress
and overwhelm the mind with the physical majesty
of him who generates, guides and governs aU. We
recover fihal confidence in reflecting that his moral
majesty must be proportionate thereto. So thought
the psalmist in looking upon the grandest objects in
his httle world : " Thy righteousness is hke the great
mountains." We must turn to the same reinspiring
thought, that the infinite power revealed to science
in our universe is wielded by an equal greatness of
goodness and love, and that the throne of transcendent
might is also the mercy-seat of an equally transcendent
paternal sympathy.
Finally, it needs be distinctly and seriously recog
nized that it is not merely a speculative interest, but,
still more, a profoundly practical interest, that is
involved in this inquiry. Whoever regards Jesus as
the supreme exemplar of mankind, the ideal man, of
whom John Stuart MiU confessed that there was no
higher rule for human conduct than to aim at approval
by Jesus Christ, may well inquire : What was Jesus'
secret ? How did he become what he has been in aU
after-time ? Even so free a critic as Professor Wemle
177 m

Interludes
goes to the length of saying : " It is impossible that a
time should ever come when any single Christian
should acquire for his fellow Christians the significance
of Jesus." x Does not his secret shine forth in that
consciousness of the divine indwelhng, and that moral
oneness with the Father, which was so uniquely
developed in him as to have made him the spiritual
head of the race to which he wholly belongs ? What
conclusion, then, is more reasonable than this, that all
successful imitation of him in moral effort and religious
aspiration must be sustained, in just the degree that it
approaches its goal, by imitating his cultivation of the
inner source and spring and stimulus of such effort and
aspiration — the consciousness of seU as in God, and of
God as in seU ; nay, more — of what Jesus thought
and felt in filial sympathy and joy, " I am in the
Father, and the Father in me" ?
In the surprises and shocks, the emergencies and
crises of hfe, amid distracting interests and besetting
infirmities, on many a trivial occasion when off one's
guard, who is ever consistent ^to his purpose and true
to his ideal in any line whatever, except through the
poise and the power supphed by a cherished conscious
ness that has rooted itseU with the tenacity of instinct
in the core of his being — a consciousness often Ulus
trated in the records of devoted patriotism, of maternal
affection, of heroic phUanthropy — by which in each
case the good wiU becomes automatic and indeflectible
amid aU the winds of impulse to deviate from its
purposed hne ? As a practicable way of gaining such
1 " The Beginnings of Christianity," Vol. I., p. 38.
178

Jesus* God-Consciousness
stabihty the cultivation of a consciousness of the
divine omnipresence has been recommended — a " prac
tising the presence of God," as it has been called.
Effective as this may be for repression of passion, for
control of desire, for fidelity to duty,
As ever in the Great Taskmaster's eye,
it is doubtful if it rises above the attainment of
self-control; doubtful if it is adequate to full self-
realization ; for this must go along with self-know
ledge, especially, of self as in God, and God as in seU,
knowledge in which feeling is, as it was in Jesus,
the vitalizing factor. If it be true, as has been
said, that " to be ourselves we must be more
than ourselves," we must also know that we
are more than ourselves. Of such self-knowledge
elect souls of various types of greatness have had
glimpses in exalted moments, when they have felt
a power not their own pouring its currents through
aU their faculties, and have confessed that in oneness
with it they were more than themselves. Evidently
the self-reahzation of Jesus, attained through a prayer
fully cultivated consciousness of the embosoming,
indwelhng, and inworking Father, is of this human
type, and therefore not hopelessly and forever beyond
human attainment. It is the glory of Jesus, in
revealing the fundamental truth of the kinship, the
unity, of humanity and deity, that he exhibits in
himseU the power of this truth to uphft the human
to the divine, to irradiate the human with the divine.
What Athanasius said of Jesus, " The Son is the living
Will of the Father," defines the goal of seU-realization
179

Interludes
for every disciple who receives from Jesus the uplift
of his pecuhar thought of God, and the incentive so
to use it that the disciple may be as his Master. One
who caught that thought exclaimed :
Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God.
" I am in the Father, and the Father in me." In
these characteristic words of Jesus none who believes
in the immanence of God can consistently fail to
recognize at least a truth of human nature. It is our
privilege to realize it as a truth of the spirit, a weU-
spring of hfe eternal. Being a truth of nature, why
should we not repeat it often in the hour of prayer
tiU it begins to quicken the spirit, and to possess the
heart with its power and its peace ?
But the first truths of nature are the last truths of
moral reahzation — such a truth, for instance, as the
brotherhood of man. While even such a truth is stiU
hke a foundling lying at a street door, how pertinent is
Jesus' saying to Nicodemus : " If I told you earthly
things, and ye beheve not, how shall ye believe U I
tell you heavenly things ? " : But perhaps in those
" ages to come " of which Paul wrote to the Colossians,
of which Tennyson has sung :
If twenty million summers are stored in the sunlight still,
We are far from the noon of man, there is room for the race to grow,
the mountain-top from which Jesus for nineteen cen
turies has called to the world, " Come unto me," wUl
not seem so inaccessible, nor its air so rarefied and
1 John iii. 12.
180

Jesus' God-Consciousness
unbreathable, as it now appears to the dwellers on
the dusty plains. The way to it hes open. There is
no sign that the way is broken by any impassable
chasm intervening. Jesus' word, " The disciple when
perfected shall be as his master," 1 Paul has re
affirmed in the amplest conceivable terms, pointing
upward, " tiU we all attain unto a full-grown man,
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of
Christ." 2 1 Luke vi. 40. 2 Eph. iv. 13.

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Fallacies Concerning Prayer

XII
FALLACIES CONCERNING PRAYER1
The fact revealed by the spectroscope, that the
physical elements of the earth exist also in the stars,
supports the faith that a moral nature like our own
inhabits the universe. That the moral nature which
is above the world is a supplicable nature, equally
with the moral nature embodied in man, is a thoroughly
reasonable assumption. Prayer, therefore, is grounded
in reason, and needs only a rational development in
thought and in expression.
Professor Joseph Henry has observed that the
whole progress of the physical sciences has been a
series of interrogations of the Author of nature, in
which every intelhgent question has received an
intelligible answer. This is the point of view in
which one may fully accept the saying, " Laborare
est orare." Science and Rehgion offer practically
the same prayer — " Show me thy way, 0 God."
The specific difference is in the characteristic interest
of each. Science, with its prayer of the intellect,
is interested in the progress of knowledge. Rehgion,
with its prayer of the heart, is interested in the progress
of moral sympathy with righteousness.
1 From The Forum, May, 1897.
185

Interludes
But when one begins to argue from the universal
instinct of mankind, that prayer is a proper function
of the hfe which, as the Stoics held, should be according
to nature, one is often withstood by a reference to
savages. " See what sort of deities men naturally
pray to, and what sort of prayers men naturally
offer ! " That men thought to be scientific consider
this a scientific mode of reasoning is a curious phe
nomenon. The truly natural is the raw rather than
the ripe, in men, if not in grapes ! It is as preposterous
to go for light on the subject of prayer to such a fact
as ancient devil-worship, as to turn to the embryo for a
gauge of the genius of Shakespeare.
But whether in the savage who regards his deity as
the physical progenitor of his tribe, or in the philosopher
who thinks of God as the seU-existent Universal
Life, origin of all being, and source of aU change,
prayer assumes community of nature between man and
God as constituting a basis of divine sympathy with
the world in its stress and strain. And so Cardinal
Manning's theory of prayer, that it is a means of
reahzing man's relation to God, is the most natural
one. In this relation, the higher being must be not
only the support and refuge of the lower, but also
the norm and law. And so, just as natural appetite
is necessary to prompt our attention to natural wants,
an instinctive craving for God's help is requisite to
promote remembrance of our duty to him. It is
this craving which gives the first impulse to prayer —
chiefly to the petitionary form of it, against which the
current objections to prayer are mainly urged. While
hunting attention to this, it must be noted that this
186

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
is not the only, or only effective, form of prayer,
any more than asking favours is the only form of
communion among friends. Indeed, it is not unhkely
that in the higher ranges of spiritual development
the petitionary element in prayer will be found to
grow less and less.
For many ages men have been trying by blundering
experiment to realize their relation to God as the
Author and Ruler of physical nature, but with partial
success. Small wonder if less success has foUowed
simUar effort in the moral realm. None, indeed, confess
faUures in prayer more than those who are most given
to it. Such failures prayerful men commonly impute
only to their own ignorance and blundering. It is
quite probable that the majority of all who pray
have not learned to pray rationally any more than
to hve rationaUy ; but that there is rational prayer
is as credible as that there is rational hfe.
The problem of prayer, continually baffling, con
tinuaUy inviting, is not the only such problem before
the world. Science has problems of its own equaUy
tantaUzing. But this is a problem of the moral
nature, which, as embodied in the world, essays to
commune helpfuUy with the kindred moral nature
that is above the world. On such a problem a genera
tion that is stiU, as Professor Bowne remarks in his
" Principles of Ethics," in an embryonic stage of
moraUty wiU be more reasonable in suspecting its
scepticism as raw than in relying on its insight as ripe.
Already, however, the problem has been cleared
of some fallacies by the leaders of religious thought.
Such fallacies are : (1) the conception that prayer
187

Interludes
to God is comparable with prayer to the ruler of a
state, who takes a petition into consideration, and
grants or denies it as he judges best ; (2) the notion
that prayer aims to bring in an interfering power to
alter miraculously the physical order of things ; (3)
the idea, akin to this, that prayer for moral better
ment, as for the forgiveness of sins, seeks to break the
connection of cause and effect, so as to avert the
natural consequences of any breach of physical or
moral law. Some, with whom we go a mUe in this
direction, would have us go twain, and draw from the
rejection of these fallacies equally faUacious conclu
sions. It is with these conclusions that we are now
concerned. As to the first, we assume the reality of a divine
purpose as sufficiently indicated in the evolution of
nature and of man, and that this purpose cannot be
contingent or indeterminate. It follows, of course,
that a prayer which crosses that purpose is, so far as
its object is concerned, a futile effort ; but it does not
follow that the prayer which falls in with that purpose
is superfluous. Such a notion is a vestige of the
na'ive thought of God as external to the world, and
of the WUl of God as static rather than dynamic,
aboriginally complete rather than eternally unfolding.
It is out of date now, when the theist conceives of
all the forces of the universe, in nature or in man,
as divine, and thinks of the divine WUl as the move
ment of "an increasing purpose " through all the
complex interplay of these forces, whether free or
unfree. 188

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
The divine purpose, whatever view we take of it,
is reaUzed through various agencies. The prayer
which is in line with it serves to focus our will in that
hne, and to engage us more actively in pursuing it.
For instance, the thrice-repeated prayer of Jesus in
Gethsemane, " Thy will be done " — so commonly
misunderstood as expressing resignation to the inevit
able — was simple self-devotement to the thing that
was to be done. It nerved him to surrender his life
at a crisis when he might easUy have escaped. The
beneficent consequences which that self-devotement
has produced in the rehgious development of mankind
are evidence, not only of a divine purpose reahzing
itseU through his free act, but also of the objective
efficacy of prayer that is in line with a divine purpose.
To pray daily for help to act with conscientious
uprightness and kindness in daily affairs will be
conceded to be conducive thereto. Many allege,
however, that it is only a reflex effect upon ourselves
which ensues. But this is not a full account of it.
Of course, the primary effect of the prayer for upright
ness is a reflex effect upon the man who prays ; but
even if we regard this alone, we can see that it does
not end there : something more ensues. The reflex
effect in him passes directly outward into an objective
effect produced by the uprightness which the prayer
has promoted. This effect is extended to other
men, and to what they do. It influences the course
of human affairs in ever-widening circles. Conse
quently the reflex effect of prayer upon the prayerful
becomes a determining power in the world for the
promotion of divine ends. Thus far from being
189

Interludes
superfluous is the prayer which accords with the
divine purpose.
As to the second point, there is indeed no inter
ference through prayer with the natural order of
things ; but it is fallacious to conclude from this,
that whatever there is in our prayers of petition for
physical or spiritual benefit is ineffective. Taking up
first the physical, let us see if any interference with
the ordinary laws of causation is necessarily involved
in prayer for the healing of the sick.
Extravagant assertions of the power of prayer for
healing have brought it into some discredit. But it
is as wide of the mark to say that prayer has no power
of that sort, as to say that it has all power. Unquali
fied, indeed, are St. James's words : " The prayer of
faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise
him up." But of course he did not forget that aU
must die. That prayer will have a curative effect
to a certain extent, is the only meaning fairly imputable
to him. Every physician wiU have to say the same,
because he knows that auto-suggestion and expectant
attention have a certain curative effect. When a
bread pill produces the soporific effect of a morphine
pill upon the patient who takes it as morphine, what
we recognize is a psychical cause of sleep substituted
for a physical cause. The bread pill is necessary to
bring the psychical cause into action.
Here we see what it is that prayer for the healing
of the sick may legitimately undertake to effect; viz.,
no breach at all in the order of natural causation,
but simply the substitution of a psychical for a physical
190

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
cause of cure. When the case is one to which a
psychical cause is adequate, the cure will follow. Of
course a condition of its effectiveness is, that the
patient must fully believe in the healing power of
prayer. At least, the prayer tends to caU into activity
the psychical powers of auto-suggestion and expectant
attention. These are, indeed, equally effective,
whether generated through prayer or otherwise ;
but we are now considering the causative power. If
an undevout mind regards prayer in this case as mere
incantation, a reverent mind is nearer the truth in
holding that " there is no power but of God " : whether
in the psychical body or the pohtical, " the powers
that be are ordained of God."
There is good reason for the hope that the present
century wUl chronicle as remarkable an advance in
psychical therapeutics, as the last century did in
physical. Though prayer be no panacea, its thera
peutic value is weU attested. The testimony of
Dr. Hyslop, Superintendent of Bethlem Royal Hospital,
at the annual meeting of the British Medical Associa
tion in 1905 — too long to quote in full — may be
summed up in a sentence : " As an alienist, and one
whose whole life has been concerned with the suffer
ings of the mind, I would state that of all hygienic
measures to counteract disturbed, sleep-depressed
spirits, and all the miserable sequels of a distressed
mind, I would undoubtedly give the first place to the
simple habit of prayer." Psychical therapeutics,
however imperfectly understood, hold a place as
secure — though not yet so large — as the physical,
which a century ago were in a crude state. It is with
191

Interludes
this as yet undeveloped province of the heahng art
that prayer stands in natural affinity. If it prove
inadequate, so do all remedies sometimes. Certain
physical remedies are good for those only with whose
constitutions they agree ; and this much at least can
be said of prayer. It might avail with a believer
where it would fail with an unbeliever. Faith is as
far from being impotent as from being omnipotent.
Vergil said of the winning boat-crew, " They can,
because they think they can." There is no field of
effort in which this does not hold good.
The point just made, that a physical effect results
in certain cases from a psychical cause brought into
action by prayer, suggests some criticism of the asser
tion that it is irrational to pray for rain. This is
usually put forward with such airy and even super
cilious confidence that one who holds no brief for
either side, but is simply concerned for close reason
ing, may be justified in a search for weak points.
To maintain a universal negative, one must either
have universal knowledge, or be able to show an
absolute impossibility. Let us see then what is
actually known about this.
We know that our wiUs are among the causes which
affect the order of nature within certain limits. By
clearing forests we change a climate. By scientific
manipulation of physical elements we produce new
varieties of plants and animals. It is scientificaUy
held possible to produce rain at times and places where
atmospheric conditions are favourable to certain
modes of operation. How much now must one know
to warrant him in saying that he knows, rather than
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Fallacies Concerning Prayer
supposes, it irrational to pray for rain, in a climate
that is not rainless ? He must know : either (a) that
there are no invisible intelligences superior to usj,
or (6) that, if there be, they are not sympathetically
related to us ; or (c) that, if they be so related to us,
they have no such power as ours to effect changes in
physical order according to physical law ; or (d)
that, if they have, they are not susceptible, hke us, to
any telepathic influence, such as the wills of a multi
tude of kindred beings united in fervent prayer might
conjecturaUy exert ; or, (e) if they be susceptible, that
they are positively inhibited, by some limitation of an
unknowable kind, from responsive action ; or, (/) if
this be not the case, that failure to bring them help
fully into action is not due to an imperfect develop
ment of psychical power in us, but to a natural
impossibUity. Until we have adequate knowledge in all these
particulars, it is certainly premature to dogmatize,
either pro or con. Suspense of judgment is certainly
a rational attitude for anyone who bethinks himseU
that there may be more things in heaven and earth
than his philosophy has dreamed of. The rationahty
of prayer for rain is wholly a question of probability.
If indemonstrable, it is also irrefutable. In estimating
the worth of the probabihty, it must be said that
none of the open points above stated involves incredi
bility. At this point, it may be worth noting that
the poets for the most part — certainly aU the great
poets — have firmly held to the objective efficacy of
prayer as a power within the natural order of
things. 193 b

Interludes At any rate,
That there are beings above us, I believe ;
And when we lift up holy hands of prayer,
I will not say they will not give us aid.
Some will probably arch their eyebrows here, and
ask if we are not steering toward the Roman Cathohc
doctrine of the invocation of saints. By no means.
That doctrine locahzes God ; setting him afar, where
he has to be approached by intermediaries. Preferable
is the theism of the pagan poet : " All things are fuU
of Jove." We simply refuse to locaUze God, the
Universal Life, energizing through all the powers of
the unseen environment, with which we come into
conscious correspondence through prayer.
As to the third point : The widespread iUusion, that
prayer for moral betterment may operate as a cut-off
of the evil consequences of an evil hfe, is a dangerous
fallacy ; though many rehgious teachers have coun
tenanced it. But no less faUacious the illusion,
fostered by some esteemed as scientific, that the
prayer, " Create in me a clean heart, 0 God," involves
an appeal for miraculous interference. We are told
that praying for a changed character and for a change
of weather equally attempt the disturbance of natural
causation, since character and weather are ahke
produced by natural causes. Under the term
" natural " we are, of course, to include all moral as
weU as physical causes, however dissimilar these
two orders of nature. Is it then supposed by the
objector that the petitioner for a clean heart is making
no endeavour for it, and fancies that he shall obtain
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Fallacies Concerning Prayer
it without endeavour ? The Scriptures themselves
say interchangeably, " Create in me a clean heart,"
and " Make you a new heart." Why, then, this
phrasing of the duty to make the heart clean into a
petition to God to make it clean ?
The reason is not far to seek. First, this petition
is an expressive confession that man apart from God
is impotent ; that it is not without the divine in-
dweUing and inworking that the normal issues of life
come. Next, this confession is also a pledge of our
proposed concurrence with him to whom we appeal,
and a girding of the wiU to work with him toward the
cleanness of heart we pray for. What more can be
demanded here of natural causation adequate to the
desired effect on character ? Taken merely as words,
" Create in me a clean heart " might be construed as
a plea for a miraculous work. So might " The sun
rises " be construed into assent to the Ptolemaic
astronomy. But, as a matter of fact, they are never
so used except by the foolish or perverse, or those
who from such specimens spin flimsy objections.
The homoeopathic rule, similia similibus, is inapplic
able to the cure of error. On the one hand, many
prayers for moral betterment are open to the objection
that they contemplate a breach of causation. Many
pray for the forgiveness of sins as for a governmental
amnesty, which breaks the hne of causation by arrest
ing the operation of law against past offences. On
the other hand, it is equally faUacious to conclude
that there is no place in the natural order of causation
for the forgiveness of sins, or for the prayer for it.
The question turns on what is intended by the term
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Interludes
" forgiveness." Strictly taken, it is expressive of
personal feeUng. It signifies the restoration of right
feehngs and relations between the offender and the
offended. It is often extended beyond this to mean
the cancelling of certain natural consequences of the
offence. But this we often feel that we must not
do, even when it is in our power. The best interests
of the offender himseU, and the interests of others,
unite in the demand that he shaU abide certain conse
quences of his act, although restored to favour and
goodwiU. How then can it be contended that prayer
for the divine forgiveness must involve the breach of
causation which forgiveness between man and man
does not require ? All that one can reasonably hold
the divine forgiveness as involving is the renewal
of the harmony between the individual wUl and the
Universal WiU that has been broken by human
waywardness. In using anthropomorphic reUgious phraseology it
behoves us to guard against its Ulusive tendency ; but
use it we must — some of it at least — or remain speech
less with risk of becoming thoughtless : for it is all
we have. When we ask a neighbour's forgiveness,
we ask him to change his mind toward us. But we
do not ask God to change ; at least, not if we think
wisely. Our request to our neighbour imphes that
we feel toward him as we ought. This is aU that our
prayer to God can rationaUy imply. It is complete
in its expression of the return of a wayward will to
loyalty and obedience. Doubtless, through various
misconceptions of God, much more is often added
which is either mere verbiage or worse, and thus also
196

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
in need of forgiveness. The divine forgiveness is not
to be begged for, but to be accepted ; as the sunhght
upon the face is to be had by turning to it. But the
desire of it and the acceptance of it demand clear
reahzation in consciousness, and therefore require
expression in prayer. The true norm of such expression
is not " Have mercy upon us miserable offenders " :
it is in the words which Jesus puts into the mouth of
the penitent prodigal, " Father, I have sinned."
Here we have to take account of the deprecatory
element in such a prayer. Some demand that depre
cation shaU be eUminated from prayer, as being a
relic of that seU-mutilation which accompanied
primitive devil-worship. One may well object to
certain expressions of self-abasement in prayer ; as
in Watts's lines :
Great God, how infinite art thou !
What worthless worms are we !
But, on the other hand, in any clear consciousness of
an unattained ideal some self-abasement is both a
common and an inevitable experience. Object, as
we must, to deprecation in the hteral sense of the
word, as an attempt to avert evil by entreaty, there
is at the heart of it a consciousness which must not
be extirpated. Perception of the contrast between
what we are and what we ought to be inevitably
produces that seU-abasement, or, if another phrase is
required, that sincerely felt humility of the imperfect
before the Perfect, which is the condition ahke of
patient effort for better things, and of prayer as
auxiliary thereto.
The objection that prayer for the forgiveness of
197

Interludes
sins involves a breach of the laws of causation, may
be vahd enough against some popular notions, and
some Church teaching, but is of no force against a
rational conception of it. This by no means ignores
the causative relation in which the prayer for forgive
ness stands to the effects of an evil lUe. Our past
deeds are indestructible. Their consequences flow
on without break or cut-off. The penitent and
reformed transgressor's future can never be quite the
same that it would have been, had his past been free
from transgression. What, then, is the utmost that
can take effect directly in and through his prayer for
forgiveness ? Simply the righting of his voluntary
relation to God. This is, of course, a reflex effect ;
but, hke any other effect, it becomes in turn a cause
of further effects. These, however indirect, must be
counted as effects of his prayer, or of the inward
change in him which is both expressed and promoted
by his prayer. Without the least breach of causation,
a new cause has been added to the causes at work in
the past ; and this new factor must somehow affect
the product. Thus the prayer wiU be found, after
all, to have a certain potency for change in the natural
connection of cause and effect. A typical instance is
that of St. Paul, whose past vehemence as a persecutor
became, on his conversion, a spur to zeal as an apostle.
ScientificaUy expressed, it is a clear case of the per
sistence of energy with convertibihty of force.
It is plain here that whUe the evil past counts for
its fuU effect, it counts also in another direction. So
the muck-heap, which counts for poison and death
while it rots above ground, counts for fertihty and
198

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
life when put under ground. The debt of consequences
due to the past must be paid to the last farthing.
But the new-strung will, the aspiration, the hope,
which now face that debt, have changed the condi
tions of deahng with it. Prayer brings these new
factors into the problem. Their efficacy in creating,
as it were, a sinking-fund for that debt must be
credited to the account of prayer. Moreover, such
is the interaction of mind and body, that physical as
well as moral betterment is often discoverable in the
result. Strange that it has not entered the minds of those
who write against the reasonableness of prayer for
physical or moral betterment, that there may be
more tenable ideas than the old and crude notions
against which they direct their polemics. What
would such men of science say, if theologians should
fancy it worth while to combat the defunct theories of
medicine, chemistry and physics, which hne the road
of scientific progress, as the bones of. beasts fringe a
caravan route across a desert ? Theology, as well as
any other science, should be allowed the right to bury
its dead.
A point where controversy has generated more heat
than hght can now be adequately treated. Professor
Tyndall's famous test, proposed for a scientific estimate
of the effectiveness of prayer, assumed that this is
to be proved or disproved according as particular
prayers for specific objects are or are not " answered."
This is a mistake analogous to that of suspending the
question of the divine control of events upon the
199

Interludes
occurrence of miracles in Palestine or elsewhere.
It requires no special cases of " answer " to evince
the effectiveness of prayer : • it is attested by the
ethical development of mankind.
The great pioneers of moral progress, the men who
have wrought most influentially for the moral
enlightenment and reformation of the world, have
habitually communed in prayer with the Unseen
Power. On this they have depended for the replenish
ment of their own inner springs of action and endur
ance. Witness Jesus, following days of active benevo
lence in the city with nights of prayer on the mountain.
The reflex inward effects pass out into the objective
effects wrought by these great hves in the world.
The changes they brought to pass in the thoughts
and actions of mankind must be held as in large
measure resultant from their habitual prayer. Then
there is the host of martyrs of aU kinds, to whose
constancy in evil times it was due that desperate
struggles for truth and righteousness were crowned
with victory. What but the prayerful committal
of their cause to him who judges righteously nerved
them to brave the fire and the sword ? Nor can
account be omitted of the multitude of obscure hves,
to whose conscientious fidehty in common duties
the present order and stabihty of society are due ;
who seek in rehgion the sanctions of morahty ; who
daily look up to God as Father and Judge ; and who
in doing so find the spur to honest successful effort.
This is the true line of sight in which to look for
convincing attestation of the objective as well as
the subjective efficacy of prayer. Like the divine
200

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
control, to which it is in fact subsidiary, it is not an
occasional, but a constant, factor in the unfolding
of the order of the living world, and in fulfilling the
purposes of God.
Thus far our concern has chiefly been to clear the
subject of some fallacies and pseudo-scientific preju
dices. It remains now to indicate some points of a
mainly constructive Une of thought.
Prayer, as Coleridge insisted, is a very different
thing from saying prayers. It is an activity of the
whole man. Real prayer engrosses and focuses feehng
and desire, thought and will, for the direction of the
whole seU upon its object. Here, undeniably, a real
force is apparent, as much as in any movement of
our wiU upon the external world. It is the force
of an ethico-spiritual nature, not isolated, but related
to nature of the same kind, both seen and unseen.
To deem it futUe, " a chimaera buzzing in a vacuum,"
is to escape one difficulty by rushing into a greater —
at least for anyone who remembers that action and
reaction are inseparable.
The records of the Society for Psychical Research
abound in fully verified instances of communications
sped from friend to friend, in a moment across hundreds
of miles, in some supreme crisis which caUed into
momentary action some previously latent energy of
the spirit. Such cases suggest the yet undiscovered
possibilities and limits of prayer, considered simply
as a mode of psychical force moving upon an unseen
psychical environment, through which, as through
the physical, divine forces are ever energizing in the
201

Interludes
interplay of action and reaction. That rehgious
enthusiasm dwells closer than our present science or
phUosophy to the springs of this mysterious force, is
thoroughly credible. The saying attributed to Jesus,
that, U he chose, he could by prayer summon myriads
of spirits to his aid, is not to be thought the idle
fantasy of one unique in spiritual insight and energy.
Much more reasonable is it to suppose that men in an
embryonic stage of moral and spiritual development
are as incapable of employing such a force inteUigently
as are savages of using mathematical instruments.
Viewing prayer as a real force in the complex of
world-forces, Dr. F. H. Hedge has well observed that
it wiU tend to overbear or to be overborne, according
to its intensity. Many prayers, including aU the
merely formal, are, by defect of energy, foredoomed
to failure ; just as many infants die through defect
of vitality. Like other forces, prayer wiU also be
most effective in the line of least resistance. The
prayer must be weak whose force is that of a mere
individual interest, dissociated from, or indifferent if
not antagonistic to the general weUare of the world.
That prayer is strong which blends with the great
tide of aspiration and effort toward divine ends.
What John Stuart MU1 observed of justice is true of
prayer. An interest of personal apart from general
welfare is an element of impurity in it, and therefore
an element of weakness. The Lord's Prayer signifi
cantly conforms to this law of efficiency. How notably
is its reference to the personal and transient sub
ordinated to and uplUted by its interest in the universal
and eternal ! This is characteristic of that effectual
202 .;" -

Fallacies Concerning Prayer
prayer which the New Testament describes as being
in the " name," that is, in the spirit, of Jesus. There
is, of course, an organic relation of human needs to
divine ends which cannot always be consciously
realized, even in prayer. On psychical principles it
would be least reahzed in the automatic uprightness
of the faithful life, which is, as Origen said, the practical
utterance of the Lord's Prayer.
The question which some still think it worth while
to ask, " Why does a loving God, who knows our needs,
require us to petition for their supply ? " both reveals
the fundamental misconception, and brings into
contrast the fundamental truth in regard to the whole
subject. Dr. Edward Caird has noted, as a strange
survival of the pagan mode of thought among Chris
tians, that some of them still conceive of prayer as an
attempt to get God to do man's wiU, rather than as an
aspiration to get God's Will done by men. Jesus
has expressly cautioned us not to think that either
he prays or we pray for the purpose of informing
God about our needs or inducing him to supply them.
What end, then, is served by petitionary prayer for
the things that God knows we need, and that he wills
to bestow ? Surely no thinker is unaware that
verbal expression has much to do with both clearness
of thought and the concentration of attention and
wiU. It is reason enough for engaging in petitionary
prayer, that the confession of our wants in words to
God enables and pledges us in a clearer consciousness
to work out more reverently and patiently the divine
conditions of their supply.
Thus it is that through prayer the individual will
203

Interludes
strives toward unity with the Universal Will. To
impute to the leaders of rehgious thought to-day the
crude, primitive fancy of bending the divine WUl into
line with the human is unworthy of any who profess
to keep abreast of the world's advancing intelligence.
The true function of prayer is to hft the will of man
into line with the WiU of God. This it does by its
effect in clarUying moral insight, deepening reverent
convictions of responsibility, and dedicating seU more
thoroughly to divine ends, which can be accomphshed
in the world no sooner or more fully than men devote
themselves to their fulfilment.
" God, or atoms ! " This is the alternative which
is ultimately forced upon us by the question whether
to pray or not to pray. From inteUectual perplexity
there is no complete escape, whichever solution of tfhe
mystery of hfe we elect. To the moral certauaty
which the problem yields, one of the greatest r*ames
in contemporary science has just left us his posthlimous
testimony that there is "a vacuum in the soul of
man which nothing can fiU but faith in God."1 Of
this faith the vital breath is prayer.
1 G. J. Romanes, "Thoughts on Religion," p. 162.

204

The Immanent Answerer of Prayer

XIII
THE IMMANENT ANSWERER OF PRAYER1
Speak thou to him, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet j
Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet.
Thus Tennyson wrote years ago with profound con
viction of the immanence of God in man. But the
significance of this truth for proper conceptions of
prayer is not yet appreciated. The traditional and
common language of prayer, and consequently the
common thought about prayer, is dominated by
the naturaUy earlier thought of the divine transcend
ence, and this also is imperfectly conceived as merely
outward — above or beyond our bounds. " Let our
prayers come up to thee " ; " Look down upon us " ;
" Send down upon us thy Holy Spirit " ; such phrases
constantly recur in liturgies, and our hymnals abound
in similar expressions. At the antipodes of Tennyson's
lines are Watts's :
Come, dearest Lord, descend and dwell
By faith and love in every breast.
Even the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, drawn
from the Old Testament, may suggest the idea, which
Jesus certainly did not entertain, of a space to be
bridged by prayer. Hardly any rehgious language
1 From The Homiletic Review, July, 1909.
207

Interludes
attests more strikingly* than the current phrases in
which this idea is expressed how poorly the majority
of Christian people have appropriated that cardinal
thought of the New Testament concerning God — " in
him we hve, and move, and have our being."
From this imperfect conception of the Hearer of
prayer some vexing doubts of the answering of prayer
draw nourishment. Even the thought of his nearness
in omnipresence leaves room for such doubts so long
as thought draws any hne which externahzes him
in complete apartness from us. The thought of God
as within us, and in the very centre of our being as
reaUy as in heaven, supphes a missing element in our
rationale of prayer, and to that extent makes the
answering of prayer more intelligible and rational to
the doubting questioner. It is a fundamental truth,
into clear conviction of which all who pray need to
school themselves out of the inveterate habit of
positing God anywhere, in any outsideness or any
apartness from themselves. St. Paul said : " I wiU
pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the under
standing also." We must understand that God is
the immanent as well as the transcendent Answerer
of prayer — transcendent in the Pauline sense of
inexhaustible grace, " able to do exceeding abundantly
above all that we ask or think, according to the power
that worketh in us " — and is to be prayed to as
such. " He that cometh to God must beheve that he
is," and is to be prayed to as what he is.
It is often questioned whether prayer, however
efficacious it be thought, owes its efficacy to any
reaUy divine response. However real the effect, it is
208

The Immanent Answerer of Prayer
aUeged to result merely from a sort of seU-magnetizing
process, with which God has nothing to do except in
having made us capable of it. To this misconception
the truth of God's immanence, involving his immediate
activity, supplies correction.
• That he who is enthroned in the universe is also
enshrined in the soul would seem sufficiently evinced
to reason by the upspringing of his thought in the
thought of man, as when Kepler in his astronomic
enthusiasm cried, " O God, I think thy thoughts after
thee." The highest reach of philosophy in ancient
Greece had anticipated him in its conception of the
universal Reason, one and the same in deity and in
humanity. The modern agnostic agrees to this,
telling us, with Spencer, that the infinite and eternal
energy whence all things proceed wells up within us
in the form of seU-consciousness. These thinkers
bear witness to the Scriptures which declare that the
divine law is written in man's heart, that God is him
seU that law, saying, " Ye shaU be holy, for I am holy,"
and that in him we live. But men are commonly
unconscious of this central truth of their being, nor is
the cause obscure. Environed by visible things
and persons engrossing all attention, each of us dwells,
as it were, in a waUed city, around which hes a rich
country out of sight from its streets. The conditions
of daily life thus form a barrier between an actual
consciousness of the world and a potential conscious
ness of God, But the walled city has gates for
outlet into the surrounding country and inlet for
supphes therefrom. Likewise removable is the barrier
between our consciousness of the visible environment
209 o

Interludes
and recognition of the all-environing and all-sustaining
life in which we live.
To remove this barrier is the function of prayer,
comprehensively defined as communion with God.
Through the prayer-gate God is admitted into active
participation in the thoughts from which action springs.
So far as admitted to our thought he cannot but be
active in our thought. For he is not a passive presence,
but an active power. Not for any miraculous efface-
ment of human limitations, or to obliterate differences
between large inteUigence and small, degrees of
receptivity, and other conditioning elements of the
case ; but, in whatever case, imparting calmness to
feeling, clearness to moral vision, tightness to purpose,
strength to will — all evidently contributory to the
efficacy of the effort put forth in prayer. This is that
gift of the Holy Spirit which, said Jesus, " your
heavenly Father shall give to them that ask him."
This is not theory, it is real experience. Would it
not be an aid to such experience if we should oftener
say, when by ourselves, " Our Father, who art in
heaven, who art in me"?
The same considerations apply, but with a marked
difference, to our prayers for others. God is immanent
in them as in us. In them, as in us, is the same
barrier of the worldly environment, engrossing
consciousness with transient interests, and walling
out from it the Being ensphering all. They, as we,
need lowering or removal of this barrier for his admis
sion as an active factor in their thoughts. Admitted,
he will enter not from afar or above, but from within
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The Immanent Answerer of Prayer
them. In so thinking it is not forgotten that Jesus
bade his Apostles to wait, ere beginning their mission,
until " endued with power from on high." The
significance of this, however, is not in the aboveness
of the transcendent Spirit, but in the transcendency
of the immanent Spirit, of whom Jesus had affirmed,
" He dweUeth with you, and shall be in you." The
power within is inexhaustible because one with the
power above. The power at the human point of
contact is identical with power in infinite plenitude
on high.
What now can the prayer of any but themselves
effect for them ? To give God entrance to their minds
is their affair, yet not so exclusively theirs as to
discourage co-operation with them to that end.
Prayer — not saying prayers, but energetic praying —
is one of the influences which one can exert for this
upon another. This fact was anciently a matter of
faith ; recently it has become matter of experience.
That mind often influences mind without the trans
mission of any sign, that there is such a thing as
thought-transference without word or sound or look,
and this though mUes intervene, is affirmed by psycho
logists of the highest rank, as WiUiam James and
others. Henry Sidgwick, that pre-eminently cautious
critic, eminent both as a psychologist and as a founder
of the British Society for Psychical Research, once
said to the present writer, " Telepathy is scientifically
as well attested as gravitation," With this mysterious
faculty men are differently endowed, as with other
powers, mathematical, musical, etc. ; but it exists,
and in its exercise, however unconscious of the fact
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Interludes
one be, there is an efficacy of prayer for others —
whatever other efficacy may be — an efficacy toward
God not distant in heaven but present in the man
prayed for, in whom God is waiting for the mind to
admit him across the threshold of consciousness.
Such prayer directs its thought of God energetically
toward the friend in whom it would awaken the
same thought. What prayer for one's self effects,
in the measure of its energy, prayer for another seU
in the same measure tends to effect — removal of the
barrier that waUs God out of recognition in conscious
ness for his inlet to activity therein. Among the
conditions of this effect, partly in the one mind,
partly in the other, the fixed and constant one is the
energy of desire and will put forth in the prayer.
Long before modern psychology had helped thus
far toward an understanding of the fact, the fact was
recognized. "Very forceful is a righteous man's
prayer in its energizing," wrote St. James. That
eminent Unitarian divine, sometime Professor at
Harvard, Dr. F. A. Hedge, thus wrote fifty years ago :
" Every genuine prayer is a positive force in the
universe of things. . . . The motion may not reach
to the outward visible result which the prayer con
templates. . . . But every prayer, in proportion to
the force that is in it, tends to that result." x The
only forceful prayer is the prayer of the earnest wUl
in which the whole man strives toward his aim in
purposed unity with the will of God.
Here now we discover the rationale of the strong
' " Reason and Religion," p. 105, 1865.
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The Immanent Answerer of Prayer
emphasis which the New Testament puts on praying
together " with one accord " in concerted co-operative
effort. In prayer, as in every other species of activity,
union is strength, even when only two, as Jesus said,
join forces in prayer. Just as many are deficient in
more common faculties, as imagination, verbal memory,
etc., many are deficient in sensitiveness to telepathic
influence by other minds, and many are deficient in
power to exert it. Resistance, on the one hand,
weakness on the other, constitute convincing reason
for that focusing of many wills in united prayer to
which St. Paul often exhorted the Churches in his
time of arduous struggle with a hostile world. When
modern Christianity draws on this now largely unused
power of co-operative prayer, as modern industry is
beginning to draw on the electric power available in
the waterfall composed of countless raindrops, a new
era of triumphant progress will dawn on the Church
of God.
The transcendence of God is pressed upon us
continually by our very senses in constant contact
with the universe. The immanence of God is revealed
to us in the hour of religious reflection, and the great
struggle of rehgion is to reahze it in practical appro
priation of its inspirational power. For ages it was
kept before the world by a few mystics, prophets of
the wider appreciation it now is gaining. It still
waits for adequate recognition by the Church as the
central fact in man, the grand corrective of many
errors in thought, and many inhumanities in conduct.
The present essay aims merely to promote thoughtful
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Interludes
inquiry into the modification it brings to the usual
conception of prayer, and the confirmation it adds
to ancient faith in the answering God. " God,"
said WiUiam Law, anticipating Tennyson by a century
and a haU, " the only good of aU inteUigent natures,
is . . . more present to and in our souls than our
own bodies." Common consciousness does not admit
this, but will have to be schooled into the truth of it,
as common-sense had to be schooled into the non-
apparent truth it once denied, that the earth revolves
around the sun.
For this no small responsibiUty rests on every
religious teacher, especially in the pulpit. At the
root of rehgious lUe is the idea of God. Study not only
of the words of God in sacred books, but also of the
works of God in his universe, especially in the starry
heavens which declare his glory to the psalmist, must
enrich our thought of him for the spiritualizing of
earthly minds. The wonders of modern astronomy
as now popularized can do more for this than most
Christian people are aware.
The undevout astronomer is mad.
Nothing so much needs culture in the modern Church
as the idea of God, and of our hfe as hved " in him."
With this the public prayer has more constantly to
do than the sermon. God finds us everywhere, but
we find him nowhere if not within ourselves in prayer.
A pastor, widely known some fifty years ago, said he
had often prayed God to forgive him many of his
pubhc prayers. The prayer needs forgiveness which,
in setting God afar on his heavenly throne, faUs to
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The Immanent Answerer of Prayer
recognize his throne in the presence-chamber of
filial spirits.
Since the Oxford Movement began, nearly eighty
years ago, much has been done both in the liturgical
and the non-liturgical Churches for " the enrichment
of worship." Much remains to be done, not outwardly
so much as inwardly through the enrichment of our
idea of God. Our forms of prayer now current,
whether printed or imprinted, need the transfiguration
wrought by the consciousness of meeting the Immanent
Answerer of prayer, " spirit to spirit," in his temple
within the praying soul.

215

The Ascent of Life

XIV
THE ASCENT OF LIFE
Who of us fuUy conceives the large meaning of the
short and common word that stands for the mysterious
reality termed life ? A common word, it includes
aU that hves, from grass to God. Life — it is in the
moss that clothes the rock, in the mind that deciphers
the story of the rock, in the spirit that communes
with the Spirit of the universe, and is conscious of
sonship to the uncreated Life that pervades the spheres
and the ages, and transcends them all. In presence
of Ufe, however lowly its form, even " the flower in
the crannied wall," we face the ultimate and inscrut
able Reahty of the universe. In each of us is this
Reahty, most hidden, most manifest ; nay, in however
meagre or various measure, we are it.
Many have wondered how life ever began to be in
this world of ours, which at different times has been
a shining cloud and a white-hot globe. Life was
never introduced into things; it was rather the
introducer of things ; it was always here ; not,
indeed, at first in organized forms, as now, but as an
organizing power, even in things we call " inanimate "
— a word that simply means lacking breath. In
what is called " dead matter " is discovered that
primary sign of hfe which motion makes in anything
219

Interludes
thought to be hfeless because seeming to be motion
less. A pebble seems to be a hfeless thing. But
scientific research resolves it into immaterial elements
— " ions " or " electrons " — points of electric energy
perpetually vibrating and gyrating. This, to be sure,
is a very rudimentary sign, a sign, nevertheless,
that life is astir where we thought it absent ; was
present in the primitive nebula, preparing to bring
forth in successive ages its myriad births of organized
forms from the least unto the greatest. " Conscious
ness," says the Bishop of Tasmania, " sleeps in stones,
stirs in plants, awakes in animals, and knows that
it is awake in self-conscious, purposeful man." The
same thought flows with religious warmth in verse :
We bless thee for the life that flows
A pulse in every grain of sand,
A beauty in the blooming rose,
A thought and deed in brain and hand.
When life is at length first recognized in growing
things, it is not life beginning but life entering a
new stage of activity. When plant life first sprouted,
whether on the sea bottom or on the sea beach that
first rose above the watery waste, there was first
manifested in this world the real supernatural — a higher
order of nature, endowed with the power of growth, the
product of lUe in a higher degree, life more abundant.
Then, when life had begun to clothe the bare bosom
of earth with its green mantle, there appeared in the
bhnd groping of roots towards the water, and the
unconscious turning of leaves toward the hght, a
dim presage of life still more abundant yet to be.
By-and-by this presage began to become fact.
220

The Ascent of Life
Life ascends to its next higher stage. To motion and
growth is now superadded the sensitive intelligence
in which pleasure and its inseparable shadow, pain,
combine to guide the animal to welfare — to build its
nest, to rear its young, to hunt its food, to defend
itseU from foes. Here also, in the animal world which
hfe brings to birth after the plant world has provided
its store of food, appears a nature supernatural to
aU preexistent nature — the nature of the bee, the
bird, the buUock, in contrast with the nature of the
plant or of the sand — the higher product of the more
abundant hfe. And here again appears a presage
of the further advance of life. The social ants, the
social bees, the horned herds that associate for their
common defence from beasts of prey, point forward
to stiU more fruitful associations of beings more
intelligent for the common service and the common
good. Ages pass, and the unconscious prophecy of lower
natures again finds fulfilment when man appears.
In humanity lUe ascends to a higher stage, conscious
of itself as sensitive and inteUigent. AU preceding
lUe was subject to nature, helplessly exposed to
calamitous change. Witness the extinct mammoths
found entombed in Siberian and Alaskan ice. Human
life alone has been able to dominate nature, and to
thrive where the world is hardest. Slowly at first
inventing implements and arts, man at last makes
his supreme device of written speech, whereby the
experience of each generation is stored for all that
come after. Now the upward movement changes
from slow and arduous to rapid and facile. During
221

Interludes
the few years of infancy and childhood the progeny
of an educated race runs up the long ascent from
savagery to civilization. Once isolated, now men
commune in the records of thought with men of many
lands and distant times ; find and feel feUowship with
the heroes, sages and poets of every age, and the
spirit of a universal brotherhood awakes. All past
generations now, as Carlyle said, work with the
modern man. In this time-long, world-wide kinship
of mind with mind he hves a life more abundant,
supernatural to the embryonic and sub-human Ufe
before it. To the mere savage the civilized explorer
who discovers him is a god.
Life still more abundant is waiting the fulness of
time for its coming forth. Nor have prophetic glimpses
of it been lacking while human hfe in its rawness was
narrowed to its need of subduing the earth to supply
its primary necessities. Before the dawn of written
history we discover hints of a dim feehng that human
hfe connects with something beyond the surroundings
that supply its daUy food and shelter. What mean
those rehcs of funeral feasts beside the burial-places
of the dead on the edge of the prehistoric glaciers —
those implements of husbandry and war found with
skeletons in prehistoric graves ? In this dim idea of
hfe continuing hereafter, which even in its savage
stage marks the great ascent of human lUe above the
hfe of beasts, is seen the grey dawn of a still higher
fellowship than that of the cultured reader with
ancient worthies. Seers and prophets of this higher
life arise in various lands and tongues. Raw pupUs
of the All-Father endeavour to interpret as best they
222

The Ascent of Life
can the suggestions of his immanent Spirit to their
souls. Shy yearnings of the savage,
Unfolding thought by thought,
To holy lives are lifted,
To visions fair are wrought.
Saints and sages shine here and there in many nations.
Among the many one appears preeminently gUted
with the rehgious genius whose passion is to find the
righteous Father of men, and in walking humbly
with him to reahze the hfe abundant which is hfe
indeed. This goal at length is reached. The God-seeking
Hebrew stock bears the consummate flower of humanity
— one who attains, as none before him, to the un
clouded vision of God, and consciously, as has none
other, dweUs in the bosom of the Eternal in whom
all live. In Jesus the final stage is reached in the
time-long ascent of hfe from the lowest to the highest —
from motion to growth, from growth to sensitive
inteUigence, from this to seU-consciousness, from this
to God-consciousness. Well does St. Paul call him
as the type of the ultimate spiritual man, " the last
Adam," as the first Adam was the type of the primary
physical man : " the first man Adam was made a
hving soul ; the last Adam was made a life-giving
spirit." The centuries since the three years' ministry
of that wondrous life, . . . the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue,
the regenerations, the transformations, which he
wrought, continuing to this day in spreading streams
223

Interludes
wherever he is hearkened to, exhibit the most dynamic
uplUt ever given to our humanity. These reaffirm
the Gospel record, " In him was life " — lUe abounding,
supernatural and superhuman to the life that is
absorbed in subduing and enjoying the world of the
senses. Sober history, reasoning back from effect
to cause, reaffirms his recorded saying : " I came
that they might have hfe, and might have it abun
dantly." But not only in quality, in power also is the fulness
of hfe manifested in the spiritual man, of whom
Jesus is the ideal type. It is only he, whose will in
its oneness with the Eternal Will is free of every
fetter ; it is only he, who achieves dominion over the
lower elements of his being. This the mere man of
the world, seU-conscious, not God-conscious, never
attains. He subdues the world of the senses and the
sciences, defies its hostile climates, eradicates its
plagues, harnesses its Niagaras to his miU-wheels,
tames its lightnings to become his messengers. But
the inteUigence that achieves aU this proves powerless
to subdue the inner world of the will, its insurgent
desires and passions. These are the destroyers of
empires, the wreckers of civilizations. These foes of
the spirit — the selfishness, the lusts, the ambitions,
the hatreds — that corrupt and disrupt the moral and
the social life of men, are mastered only by the higher
potency of the hfe whose God-conscious quahty we
term spiritual — potent in its conscious feUowship
with the eternal Spirit, masterful in its conviction of
the lesser worth of the perishable things that men lust
and fight for. For the spiritual life alone the loss
224

The Ascent of Life
or cross that threatens it is bereft of terror by its
assurance of the eternal world it beholds as its own.
With a psalm of triumph over the last enemy it
enters the fire of martyrdom in the certainty of rising
through it to the victor's crown. Thus the evil of the
world, whose vanquishment began with the dawn of
human inteUigence, is put completely under foot only
by the spiritual man in the power of life abundant
for the most exigent demand. The symbol of this
perfect victory is that historic Cross, through whose
inspiring appeal and leadership the conquest of the
selfish heart is effected, its wolfish passions suppressed,
its stormy wiU bridled, its savage tempers tamed,
and the animal man is progressively humanised into
the moral hkeness of his Father, God.
Two great and common errors receive correction
from this survey of the ascent of lUe, especially of
human hfe, from the physical to the spiritual.
(1) A large part of the religious world errs in suppos
ing that the life abundant which Jesus offers to impart
is hfe hereafter, a future blessedness in heaven. But
no such future could ensue except as the fruit of a
present corresponding to it. The seed and the harvest
must be identical in kind ; and no harvest apart from
the seed. What Jesus is intent on is the all-important
thing, the seed. What he presents and calls us to
adopt is the hfe of the spirit here and now. What is
seen of it in this world is the sole but sufficient presage
of its diviner unfolding in a future world. Apart
from what there is of it here, what ground of hope
for any of it there ? 225 e

Interludes
(2) The irreligious world errs in thinking the lUe
of the spirit in imitation of Christ, while agreeable to
those that like it, to be something that a man can do
without. Can do, indeed ! A man can do without
education, without robust health ; can do, in some
sort, as a cripple or a dwarf, but not as a man full
powered, not in tests of capacity or endurance. So
he can do — somehow and for a while — who neglects
to feed his religious nature and starves his spiritual
powers. He is content to dwarf himself in the very
faculties that distinguish human hfe from brute hfe,
and to be but semi-human, a half-man, as compared
with the divine standard of normal humanity.
Serious is the conclusion pointed to by our survey
of the ascent of hfe. What we have seen of the pro
gressive rounding out of life in our world through
phase after phase of increasing fulness, from the
thin crescent of the physical to the full-orbed splendour
of the spiritual, as seen in Jesus, puts an inevitable
and momentous question : At what stage in this
series are we found ? With what grade of lUe are
we, or should we, be content ? This view of hfe" as
a many-storied house puts to each who thinks upon
it the question, whether it is rational to shut one's
seU into its lower rooms. Must not one who cares for
normal and complete humanity live also in its upper
rooms, where there is vision of the sunrise and the
sunset beyond the waUed-in streets, and an outlook
into the breadth of star-lit skies ? Should not a man
be alive at the top as well as at the base of his being 
alive, sensitively and consciously, to the God in whom
all Uves are ensphered, as weU as to the passing show
226

The Ascent of Life
of things that ghtter and are gone ? Many of us
must confess :
'Tis life of which our nerves are scant ;
More life and fuller that I want.
Life that is unresponsive, insensitive to him in whom
all lives are Uved is Ufe truncated, cut off at the top.
It is this haU-human life that Jesus would quicken
into its normal fulness by his appeal to men as children
of his heavenly Father. What we instinctively feel
in presence of any man of noble type we feel in the
highest degree before him — the silent but eloquent
appeal which a superior hfe always makes to an
inferior, to aspire, to imitate, to ascend. We discern
the divineness of the goal he points to — an abiding
and joyous consciousness of the Father who upbears
our mortal struggle in his everlasting arms. We hear
his encouraging caU : Believe in me ; Follow me ;
I came that they might have life, and might have it
abundantly. But let us not fail to hear this call as
appealing to much more than the mere instinct of
imitation. It is pointed with a stimulus keener than
our natural impulse to copy the best that is in sight.
He who freely spends his best to impart his best adds
to the spur of imitation the spur of gratitude and loyal
affection. The historic Cross reminds us of what it
cost Jesus to reveal to men the hfe abundant into whose
fulness he would hft them. No cloistral life is this,
as many fancy ; no recluse meditation on another
world, declining the activities of this. Rather is it
the only full-powered hfe, complete in its contact with
real interests, with hand on the plough, yet as open-
eyed to the sun as to the furrow, both in touch with
227

Interludes
the earthly and in consciousness of the heavenly,-
unifying all human interests in its fidelity both to
the Fatherhood and to the brotherhood that includes
them all. And this is the only undecaying hfe, the
only hfe prophetic of a further ascent in the un
folding of its spiritual powers beyond the bourne of
flesh and blood.
It concerns us, finaUy, to mark the fateful conse
quence attending Jesus' call to the fuU-rounded,
full-powered hfe of the spiritual man whom God would
create, and is thus creating. It separates men into
two classes, with a fateful difference between them.
This difference is in kind the same that we see between
the civilized man and the barbarian. The barbarian
sees the civilized man hard at work, early and late,
and he sees nothing attractive in that. He sees the
colonist wearing clothes, but he wants nothing more
than loin-cloth and beads. He wonders what good
the colonist gets by looking at white paper with black
marks on it an hour at a time. The colonist offers to
teach him to read, but he dechnes it as deadly duU.
He prefers his wild, hand-to-mouth hfe. " It costs
too much to be a white man," said one such barbarian.
Precisely this is the attitude of the irreligious man of
the world toward Jesus' caU to the high level of
spiritual and godlike manhood. " It costs too much."
This is simply spiritual and moral barbarism. And it
is this barbarian content with life deficient in prefer
ence to lUe abundant, that is the sin and the shame
of the irreligious man. " Light is come into the
world," said Jesus, " and men love the darkness
228

The Ascent of Life
rather ; and this is the condemnation." The most
grievously felt condemnation is that which one is
compelled to pronounce upon himself. It must
sometime strike through every soul that sins against
itself in dechning the effort by which the divine
upland of life is ascended. Nature cannot be wronged
with impunity. To starve one's religious nature, to
deaden the spirit toward God, is to atrophy what is
both most human and most divine in man. It is
not possible that this defeat of life can fail to be
ultimately felt with regret for the irreparable.
" What is your life ? " This question of Christ's
Apostle is the fundamental question to be pondered
by every hving man. If conscience must confess
that it is not yet the hfe that God's holy Christ came
to quicken, not yet the abounding life of the spirit
that we might reahze if we cared for it, and that we
are still Uving in the basement, or at the highest, on
the middle floors of our being, with its upper rooms
unfurnished and shut, there is but one way of escape
from that arrest of development which ends in hfe's
disappointment and defeat. It is the way alike of
rational sanity, of moral soundness, and of lUe ascend
ing, to face the hght, and to foUow whither it leads.

229

Dynamic Immortality

XV
DYNAMIC IMMORTALITY1
At East Northfield, Massachusetts, over the grave
of the great evangelist, there is an inscription fraught
with the one invincible assurance of immortality :
" He that doeth the Will of God abideth forever." In
these words the cumulating evidences of the great fact
culminate. It is the proof of proofs. Because the
doing of the WUl of God must go on, the doer of it
must go on in its doing. The Hebrew sage glimpsed
this certainty when he wrote :
In the way of righteousness is life,
And in the pathway thereof is no death.
The WiU of God is the terse Bibhcal term for the
Infinite and Eternal Energy of Love and Truth and
Righteousness. In the saint we see this individuahzed
in a distinct personahty, whose centre of consciousness
is his constant wiU to work with the divine WiU. It
is only as individuahzed in the wiUs of personal agents
that the WiU of God carries forward his work in the
evolution of moral and spiritual hfe in the world.
In view of the personal agents whom we see doing
the WiU of God, the question arises whether their
'From The Outlook, July 20, 1907.
233

Interludes
activity is transient or permanent. We see certain
forms of the Infinite Energy which are transient, and
lose themselves by convertibility into other forms,
while the sum of energy remains incapable of dimi
nution. Motion perishes as motion, and reappears as
heat. Heat, perishing as heat, is converted into
motion. But from these changeful physical forces the
moral forces stand apart and above in the nature of
things as unchangeful. Love, truth, righteousness are
unchangeable. What they are they are forever.
We see them as divine energies incarnated in good
men. Only as individuahzed in good men does their
divine energy become an effective working force for
the furtherance of goodness in the world.
What, then, would result did the saint cease to exist
when his body dies ? The divine energy of love and
truth and righteousness incarnated in him would be
withdrawn from potency into latency, its totahty
irreducible, but its efficiency reduced ; an activity
would be subtracted from the effective working forces
of the moral universe. The impossibihty of this is
what the word immortality signifies. It is impossible
in rational thought that the climax of the saint's
earthly development of insight, power, and service-
ableness in the furtherance of the WiU of God should
be stoppage of that furtherance in his extinction.
The saint needs not to demonstrate that hewiU survive
his mortal hour. The sceptic has to demonstrate
the contrary, U he can.
A good man dies, and all say that the visible world
has lost thereby. The sum of its effective forces
for the increase of goodness has been lessened. But
234

Dynamic Immortality
has the universe lost anything when the saint no
longer walks the earth ? Did any fraction of its
mobUized force for the working out of the Will of
God become non-existent, or even latent and in
operative, when Nero's sword feU upon the neck of
Paul ? Was it an extinction of Paul's activity, or
only a transference beyond the horizon of the senses,
that then took place ? To ask the question is to
suggest the only rational reply. Only if the Will of
God could be thought of as in a measure ceasing
to work for love and truth and righteousness, could the
good man through whom it works be thought of as
ceasing to exist. As often as we see a noble career
of ripely purified and disciplined power for goodness
reaching the inevitable hmit of activity on earth,
this conviction deepens. Only " the fool," who
" says there is no God," can say,
The forces that were Christ
Have taken new forms and fled.
The river which disappears into a mountain cave flows
on elsewhere.
Reasonings on immortality are often faulted because
immortahty is misconceived. It is not mere con
tinuity of existence in personal consciousness that is
in question, but rather the conservation of moral
energy, of active values— values of universal as weU as
of individual worth — efficient factors of the eternal
work of God, the canceUing of which would be in some
measure an abridgment of that work, and a loss of
power to the moral universe. This was instinctively
felt by the primitive Christian consciousness, as
235

Interludes
expressed in Peter's saying that the spirit of Jesus,
released from Calvary, continued his redeeming work
by going to preach to " the spirits in prison."
One who has substituted this dynamic conception
of immortahty for the static notion of an everlasting
rest, which deserves the scepticism it encounters,
does not aspire to future existence, however blissful,
but to future activity. The hymn-writer's hope to be
Where congregations ne'er break up,
And Sabbaths have no end,
does not interest him. He looks for what is far
better than The shout of them that triumph,
The song of them that feast.
There is a mood of Christian thought that takes the
hedonistic view of the future life which in a higher
mood it deems immoral to take of the present. No
such future can content a spirit which has imbibed
Jesus' lesson that " it is more blessed to give than
to receive," and is striving to live the Christly life of
unselfish service to neighbours. Such a one would
not have this supreme blessedness of imparting blessing
to others terminated at the grave. The joyousness
of enlarged activity in such doing of the Father's Will
with freer and fuller power is what gives aU worth to
the immortality which they who have the mind of
Christ aspire to. The glory to which the saint looks
forward is simply " the glory of going on " in the
doing of the WiU of God.
It is an axiom of physics that a moving body will
continue moving till stopped by some opposing force.
Friction and gravitation quickly arrest the flight of
236

Dynamic Immortality
the cannon-shot, but the planet flies for ages of ages
through the frictionless ether. The spiritual world,
no less than the physical, has its axiomatic law of
motion. We see the conscious doing of God's Will in
active progress. There is nothing in the nature of
things to arrest it, for, as Augustine said, " God's Will
is the nature of things." It must simply go on, the
doing, and so the doer. It is this axiom of spiritual
progress which Christian faith asserts in the apostohc
formula, " He that doeth the Will of God continueth
forever."

237

The Terrestrial World to Come

XVI
THE TERRESTRIAL WORLD TO COME
The opposite of what most readers of the Epistle
to the Hebrews in the common version understand
by " the world to come"1 is what it meant to the
writer. It expresses a thought which the modern
mind has lost — " the inhabited earth that is to be."
This, as the closing chapters of the Apocalypse show,
was the dominant thought of the Church during the
first century. Looking for the speedy reappearance
of Christ in visible glory to overwhelm all hostile
power, they expected to see the inhabited earth
made new by that stupendous miracle. This hope,
inspired by oracles hke that quoted by St. Jude3
from the apocryphal book of Enoch, coloured and
dominated their understanding of Jesus' promised
return to earth in glory. Yet by this he must have
meant spiritual, not spectacular glory, just the same
sort of return, not in form but in spirit, which he
taught them had already fulfilled the prophet Malachi's
prediction that Elijah should return by the return of
the Ehjah spirit of reform in the advent of John the
Baptist. Time soon exposed the faUacy of their expectations.
1 Hebrews ii. 5, R.V. margin ; see also vi. 5, R.V.
2 Jude 14, 15. 241 Q

Interludes
So, when the iUusory hope of Jesus' bodily return
faded away, there came in its place what stUl exists —
a transfer of expectation from the earthly world to the
heavenly. This in its turn now needs correction, at
least in the exclusiveness of its interest in other
worldly mansions of heavenly joy.
Our immortal hope, indeed, is incomparably pre
cious. But it was given to brace and hearten faith
fulness in present trial, struggle, and sacrifice with
optimistic conviction and soldierly spirit. Those
pessimistic hymns, stiU used in Christian assembhes,
which style this world a " wUderness," a " vale of
tears," and our lUe a " pUgrimage " through it to " a
land of delight " beyond the Jordan stream of death,
should long since have been discarded. In such
comparisons the present world is wronged ; its pre
sent interests suffer, as weU as those of the coming
generations, when they who are caUed to a holy war
fare as soldiers of the Cross conceive of themselves
rather as wayfarers and sojourners.
Our forefathers dehghted in a book written by good
Richard Baxter two centuries ago, and treasured in
the home of my childhood, " The Saint's Everlasting
Rest." The thought of this moved good Dr. Watts
to write a stanza still dear to some hymn-book editors,
but not to a virile Christian spirit facing the world's
distressful evils and needs :
My willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this,
And sit and sing herself away
To everlasting bliss.
To sit and sing of everlasting bliss took the place of the
Church's proper business of bringing in the Kingdom
242

The Terrestrial World to Come
of God. The result of this exaggerated other-worldh-
ness and its false emphasis is that the present world
is not getting its dues. Where Jesus left his infant
Church facing a world dominated by the Antichrist
of selfishness, a large part of the modern Church stUl
halts, poorer than even that infant in the spirit by
which Jesus intended to transform the world to come
in coming centuries — the spirit of brotherly service
to feUow men. Instead of this we see so-called
Christian nations arming themselves to the teeth
against each other, even preparing for battle in the
air, as weU as on land and sea, and tense with internal
strUe between social classes because of social injustice
and misery. And stiU the missionary service by
which Jesus enjoined his friends to make aU people
his disciples interests but a smaU part of his Church,
and in common experience benevolent enterprises
are chronically short both of men and of money.
Such have been the evil consequences of losing the
New Testament thought of the world to come, the
primitive Christian interest in the inhabited earth
that is to be. For truly Christian hving that lost
thought, that forgotten interest must be reinstated.
Where we emphasize the idea of an unearthly heaven
the Scriptures emphasize the idea of a heavenly earth,
fuU of the hght of the knowledge of God. Jesus,
indeed, expanded the few glimpses given in the Old
Testament of life beyond the grave — but with what
great reserve ! — only to testify that good or evil there
depends on the good or evil direction of life here. The
logic of such reserve is plain : one world at a time ;
use this world rightly. 243

Interludes
Adventists, indeed, may cry that the end of the
world is near, quoting the Bible as they misunder
stand and abuse it. Such fictions our scholars and
scientists have exploded, at least for educated people.
Church choirs stiU sing, perhaps only for the music
accompanying the words :
O Paradise, 0 Paradise !
The world is growing old.
But geology, says Professor Shaler, of Harvard, per
mits us to beheve that the earth will continue habitable
for a hundred milUon years. And Tennyson turns
this insight into song that
Man as yet is being made,
and that
We are far from the noon of man, there is room for the race to grow.
Here we are returning to the hne of the Scriptural
forecasts of the inhabited earth of the future, in
whose closing vision perfected humanity is pictured
as an ideal society, a holy and a glorious city on a
renovated earth, irradiated by God himself.
But is this too remote a vision to appeal to present
interest and effort ? In view of the intervening ages
that must elapse, and unknown changes that must
occur, let it not be forgotten that all the past ages
have contributed to make this world of ours what it is.
In a universe whose every part is related to every
other our momentary day is somehow influential
on the days most distant of the world to come. A
telescopic view of these is shut to eyes that are focused
to a short range within the span of individual memory
244

The Terrestrial World to Come
and foresight. But prophetic science does not leave
us wholly in the dark concerning things to be. The
hght of experience also, gathered from cycle after
cycle of history, enables us to conjecture reasonably
of experience in future successions of cause and effect.
These foregleams, however dim and spectral, of a
world to be realized on earth after we shall have
passed on beyond appeal touchingly to those who are
aware that it is only through struggle and suffering
that our world has become what it is, and to those
especially who now are investing toil and hope in
effort to bring forth a world stiU better. These know
that hope must learn to labour and to wait while
time is slowly ripening harvests. They know that
while the vision tarries, no effort toward it can be
wholly frustrate. " God buries his workmen, but
carries on his work."
The fallen empires of the past, the civilizations that
have been wrecked, all Uved by the sword, and so
died by the sword. In our day a new type of civihza
tion and of empire has been born, best expressing itself
in the American Union, with the olive-branch for its
symbol, and striving to bind the discordant nations
into a partnership of mutual benefit, though still
moved by its fears of Weltpolitik to continue building
battleships. The pacific influences now leavening
our world — commercial, industrial, educational, philan
thropic, moral, rehgious — inspire a valid conviction
that civiUzation, amid all the surviving barbarisms
which stiU disfigure it, has at length secured a stable
base. On this we may weU beUeve that its essential
task, the humanizing of mankind, is to advance the
245

Interludes
coming generations, however slowly, yet surely,
toward the crowning race,
No longer half akin to brute.
Thus history exhibits the growing ascendency of
Christian principles and practices, and confirms the
apostohc faith that Jesus is to sway the world to
come on the inhabited earth.
Yet this vision is like that of distant mountains,
whose azure peaks teU the traveUer nothing of the
canons or the arid plains which intervene. It may
be that successive ploughings-in and replantings must
precede the final ripening of humanity in its last great
harvest-field. It may be that in field after field
successive devastations will spare but a remnant of
choice seed to continue the evolution of man into
" the image of God," until the divine work of spiritual
creation is complete.
Looking backward but a thousandth part of the
period which the geologist assigns to a habitable
earth, we see primeval men overtaken by the rigours
of a glacial period whose mammoth victims are found
entombed in Alaskan ice, and whose southern margin
is marked by the long island of gravel that stretches
eastward from New York. Looking forward, the
Astronomer-Royal predicts that another such icy
shroud will enwrap the present northern abodes of
civUization. Cataclysms drowning wide areas of the
prehistoric human world are commemorated from
Mesopotamia to Mexico in traditions of a deluge, and
in the Egyptian legend of a mighty island kingdom
overwhelmed beneath the Atlantic. That the earth's
246

The Terrestrial World to Come
crust is still unstable its slow subsidences and upheavals
now going on would not permit us to forget, even if
danger-signals were not given by the earthquake.
When a physicist puts among possibilities even a
complete bouleversement of the continents and oceans,
massing in our northern hemisphere the waters now
massed in the southern, we cannot say that even so
tremendous a catastrophe would be incongruous with
the history of our globe. AU that we may be confident
of is that it wiU never lack some habitable regions
beyond the ruin ; the dove let loose from the ark wiU
find a place to nest in. Some fugitives from even a
general wreck will find a field where to replant a new
earth with the seed that shaU again overspread it.
The astronomer Lowell, who has longest and from the
most advantageous positions studied our neighbouring
planet Mars, teUs us that it is a world already in its
old age. What he views as stupendous works of
irrigation, that channel it for water drawn from the
last source of supply left in its melting polar snows,
suggests to us that the struggle for existence, so
arduous in our world, is a cosmic law of hfe.
What the Apostle to the Hebrews wrote of all past
generations, " They apart from us cannot be made
perfect " — cannot reach the goal of the ages of faith —
we in turn may say of aU unborn generations. That
ancient lesson of the unity of the earhest and the latest
of mankind, co-operant in continuous endeavour
toward the one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves,
reinspires with conviction of abiding value and
247

Interludes
efficiency our instinctive feehng of insignificance.
Our brief individual hfe often seems reduced to
nothingness. What is it but a mere atom in the
tremendous mass of generations innumerable covering
miUions of years ?
We pass ; the path that each man trod
Is dim, or will be dim with weeds ;
What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age ? It rests with God.
Ere the hundredth part of the history of the world
to come on earth shall have recorded its story of
catastrophe and restoration, we of this century
shaU seem to men then hving as near the cradle of
humanity as the men of the primeval ages seem to us.
And not unreasonably so. It is not yet a haU-century
since men and women were bought and sold as cattle
in this Repubhc. And what inhumanity stiU festers
near the altars of rehgion, and even offers worship
there ! The humanization of man has indeed begun,
but its dawn is recent, its noonday distant stiU.
Dawn, not day,
While scandal is mouthing a bloodless name at her cannibal feast,
And rake-ruin'd bodies and souls go down in a common wreck,
And the Press of a thousand cities is prized, for it smells of the beast,
Or easily violates virgin Truth for a coin or a cheque.
The humanized world to come wiU have to come forth
from the same old crucible of pain by which thus far
the beast has been partiaUy burnt out of man.
With the making of that world we with larger
powers and wider reach of influence, in touch through
electric nerves with every nation, have much more
to do than the men of long-buried Babylon, whose
work our very clock-dials perpetuate, had to do with
248

The Terrestrial World to Come
the making of our world. All past generations still
work with us in many ways. Some of our very jests
are as ancient as the pyramids. In future ages we
also shall not faU to count for aU that we are per
manently worth. Names perish ; influence abides
with part and power in the mortal world to come.
The hfe which palpitates in us with hopes and fears,
with noble aspiration and brave endeavour to leave
the world better than we found it, may in thoughtless
moments be undervalued. In the more serious
moments which view it as the ante-natal hfe of a
world which we are contributing to mould, no limit
to its far-reaching possibihties of influence appears
short of that outermost bound, where aU mortal
existence shaU merge in the hfe that survives " the
wreck of matter and the crash of worlds."
The solidest structures we can rear must be crumbled
to dust by the tooth of time. The knowledge we
laboriously acquire must be superseded and vanish
before larger and truer. Our names with the stones
on which they are carved above our graves wiU dis
appear. But we shaU live. The net result of our
work on earth wiU endure above in what we have
become in the doing of it. It wiU endure in the world
to come on earth in what our feUow men, in whose
service we have done it, have become thereby. Only
as we are intent on making this world of hving men
what it is to be are we in Jesus' way to the heavenly
hereafter — the glory of going on in immortal happy
service to our fellows and our Father.
We have now ascended, as it were, to a mountain-
249

Interludes
top for its inspiring outlook on a wide horizon. The
greatness or the pettiness of life depends on the
largeness or narrowness of the mental horizon that
satisfies it. We need oftener to chmb from our valley-
business to the mountain-top and its width of vision.
Not always on the mount may we
Rapt in the heavenly vision be ;
The shores of thought and feeling know
The spirit's tidal ebb and flow.
The mount for vision, but below
The paths of daily duty go ;
And nobler life therein shall own
The pattern on the mountain shown.
So Jesus, ere he began his ministry, contemplated
from the mountain-top the world he meant to win
by a higher method than the tempter there suggested.
On another mountain-top he experienced a trans
figuration which fortified his spirit for its last and
sorest conflict. To us the world to come on this
earth of ours, as viewed from the mount of far-reaching
inteUigent vision, should bring a transfiguration of
all indifference and indolence into Christian interest
and activity, devoted to work with God to bring to
pass the good that he wiUs to be. Agencies of im
measurable fruitfulness are often initiated and set
going by small deeds and humble persons. All things
are possible to men of faith and patient courage. It
is the privilege of the weakest to become a channel
of the Spirit who is impeUing all things onward to the
divine goal. 0 Living Will, that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow through our deeds and make them pure.
25fr

Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy
and Science

XVII
THEOLOGICAL BEARINGS OF MODERN
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE1
Professor Calkins, of WeUesley College, in her
fresh and masterly work on the " Persistent Problems
of PhUosophy," calls attention to the fact that
" avowed metaphysics in the last hundred years has
been, at least qualitatively, monistic." That is,
even the plurahst, Professor Howison, for instance,
or Professor James, though stopping at the Many in
his quest for ultimate reahty, and refusing to conclude
with Hegel, and Green, and Royce that it is One,
stiU affirms that the Many are of one kind. Thus
modern metaphysics inevitably tends to clear
theology, as seasoned thought concerning God, of the
ancient and inveterate duahsm, whose extreme form
was presented in Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism,
and which survives in present notions of an eternal
devil and an endless hell of impotent rage against
God. Duahsm, notwithstanding, is an existing fact,
which no sane observer or thinker ignores. God
and the individual man are two beings, not one.
God's Will and man's will are often in opposition.
Piety and profanity are antipodal. But the inspired
insight of St. Paul's declaration to Greek philosophers,
" In him we hve, and move, and have our being,"
1 From The Homiletic Review, January, 1908i
253

Interludes
saw these duahsms transcended in the ultimate
reahty which comprehends the Many in the One.
A consistent Pauhnist must be a monist. In his
recent work on " Bibhcal Dogmatics," Dr. Milton S.
Terry, even if not a thoroughgoing or consistent
monist himseU, recognizes " the profoundest monism "
in the Scriptures.
It is not the spiritual insight of the Pauhne monism,
but inability to solve the problems springing from it;
that hinders some from accepting it in its fulness.
The affirmation, " In God we live," involved the further
affirmation : In him we will ; and this to a non-
Christian audience. How this can be true, even of
ungodly men, is not at once evident. Professor
Royce1 has given an answer to this question which
is worthy of more attention than it has received.
But if one finds the difficulty unyielding, is it not
more rational to ascribe immaturity to one's reasoning
power than to discredit the cardinal proposition, that
the life of man, and consequently his hving wiU, even
when an evil will, exists in God ?
The goal of that love of God " with all the mind "
to which Jesus urges his disciples is a true thought
of God as related to man's world, and especiaUy to
man himself. Here is large shortcoming, not among
rehgious people only, but also their rehgious teachers.
The ancient duahsm, though it has died out of philo
sophy, still lives in the common thought of God and
the world as over against each other, of deity and
' ' See " The Problem of Evil," The New World, June, 1897 ;
also Vol. II. of Gifford Lectures on " The World and the Individual."
See also the discussion on pages 268-70 following.
254

Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy
humanity as natures of essentiaUy different kinds,
and of man in his natural state as extraneous to God :
the Churches jealously maintain this duahsm in
doctrinal standards. The Westminster Confession
enshrines it in the Christological formula of the fifth
century — " two natures and one person." At the
bottom of this is the notion of an essential difference
in kind between divine and human nature. Athanasius
had affirmed this in the fourth century : "He [Christ]
is by nature true God : we are of earth, and become
sons by imitation." The same misconception lay
concealed in the Nicene Creed beneath its sublime
affirmations of the divine nature of the Son — " God
of God, Light of Light, very God of very God ;
begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father "
— a formula which, duahstically construed, effectively
barred out the duahstic Arian Unitarianism of that
day. The equal subserviency of words to funda
mentally different regulative ideas is illustrated by
the fact that to-day the Unitarian of monistic type
(I have such a friend of mine in mind, an idealist in
his philosophy) can apply those sublime words to
Jesus, as to a man naturally born but God-filled, as
unqualifiedly as any orthodox Trinitarian. Long
ago that philosophic Unitarian divine, Dr. Hedge,
reading into the Nicene test-phrase concerning Christ,
" of one substance with the Father," his affirmation of
the oneness of the divine and the human nature,
declared its assertion at Nicsea the fruit of Providential
guidance.1 1 " Ways of the Spirit," p. 76, 1878.
255

Interludes
" Nature is Spirit," said Principal Fairbairn years
ago to an Oxford audience ; and, to one who privately
asked him if he had used these words rhetoricaUy or
literally, said that he had never used any words more
hterally.1 If the saying is true of nature, what is
true of man ? What then must be thought of the
common duahstic phrase, " mere man," so often
employed in theological discussion ? If any clear
meaning is in it, it can denote only a cleavage of the
natural from the supernatural, a pulling apart of
man from the God in whom he has his being, an
ehmination from humanity of the divine spark without
which it would not be human. The Biblical teaching
of the active immanence of God in the human race
bans a phrase burdened with suggestions so untrue.
Yet it is often on the hps of rehgious teachers ; a
survival of the ancient dualism which thought to
glorify God by vilifying man as but " dust and ashes."
Essentially anti-Christian is this phrase, " mere
man " ; for an essential affirmation of Christianity
is the unity of God and man, founded in nature in
order to be completed through grace.
Here is the basis of St. Paul's monism, whose
briefer statement is in Jesus' saying to the Sadducee
deniers of the resurrection, " AU Uve unto him." More
careful study of the seventh chapter of Romans and
of the fifth chapter of Galatians would remove at
least some of its attendant difficulties. For instance,
the unity which we caU human nature, now marred
1 See the present writer's discussion of this dictum in " Recon
siderations and Reinforcements " (James Clarke and Co., London ;
Thomas Whittaker, New York). 256

Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy
by sin, is a complex thing ; two elements appear in
it, a lower, derived from a brute ancestry, and a higher
of much more recent origin, and as yet comparatively
infantile. But this higher element is the specifically
human ; and moral evil, sin, though by itself the
product of neither of these two, each of them divinely
constituted, each obedient to the law of its being,
is the product of the conflict between them, through
which the higher element achieves its human
development. The Pauhne monism abohshes the false cleavage
between the natural and the supernatural. It affirms
that the Infinite is within the finite, as well as without :
Within all, but not shut in ;
Without all, but not shut out.
The natural is the outwardness of the supernatural ;
the supernatural is the inwardness of the natural.
" Nature," said Martineau, " is God's mask, not his
competitor." " AU is natural, and all is super
natural," said Carlyle. To discern this indwelhng
of the Infinite in the finite, as Tennyson saw it in
the flower on the crannied wall, is to discern the
naturalness of the divine incarnation in humanity,
and to recognize it as a time-long process, rather than
as an isolated event, though culminating in the event
which has placed commemoration of the Advent at
the beginning of the Christian year.
In this view it is profitless to inquire whether a
case of parthenogenesis has ever occurred in human
history. The reahty of a divine incarnation in man
is not to be staked on any point of doubt and contro
versy. If we are seeking for the point of view in
257 r

Interludes
which the fullest significance attaches to the Church's
faith in the divinity of Christ, it has been well stated
by Dr. William Adams Brown, of Union Seminary, in
his " Christian Theology in Outhne " : " It is not that
in Jesus we have the manifestation for a brief period
of divine powers and relations normally absent from
human life ; but that in him for the first time there
has been completely revealed in a human hfe that
abiding relation between God and man which gives
life its profoundest significance, and warrants our
faith in the ultimate reahzation of the divine ideal in
humanity." The central affirmation of Christianity, "God was
in Christ," is held both by duahstic and monistic
thinkers in full identity of faith. It is merely a
difference in the intellectual conception of it which
parts them.
Not only does the ascendent modern philosophy
thus lead away from traditional theological ideas, but
science also, both mental and physical. Professor
Ladd, of Yale, said many years ago that modern
psychology was modifying our inherited theology.
By this time " the psychology of religion " (the title
of Professor Starbuck's well-known book) has become
a famihar phrase. To that monistic conception of the
natural and the supernatural, as two aspects of one
process, which we have gained from modern philosophy,
psychology also conducts us. The spiritual develop
ment, which, when normally rounded out, is theo
logically termed conversion, has been shown by such
investigators as President G. Stanley Hall and Professor
258

Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy
Starbuck to be intimately connected with the physio
logical ripening which occurs at puberty. This dis
covery of the subserviency of the physical develop
ment to the spiritual at the awakening of the higher
consciousness with its unselfing impulse, which, under
right guidance, issues in the new birth called regenera
tion, is a discovery of God active as immanent Spirit
in the springs of our life.
Psychology is devoted to the scientific study of
human consciousness. One of our foremost psycho
logists, Professor James, years ago compared our
consciousness to a stream that has depth as well as
surface. Ordinary consciousness, continuous from
day to day, and occupied with current interests, is
merely the surface of the stream reflecting the objects
that hne its banks. Below this lie hidden the sub
conscious depths. Hence now and then emerge un
bidden strange phenomena — visions, hallucinations,
presentiments, flashes of genius, sublime intuitions,
surprising powers. Hence, as from a secret mirror, are
reflected ghmpses of invisible objects, as in clairvoy
ance. It is here that mind effects communication
with mind and makes no sign, as in thought-trans
ference and telepathy. It is here that the hypnotist
exercises command while the surface-consciousness
sleeps. Since psychology has explored these recesses of
our mystic frame, the inteUigent Bible-reader no longer
attributes to communications from heaven phenomena
which science ascribes to clairvoyance or telepathy
as natural endowments of a seer — Elisha, for instance.
The day should have passed when Sunday-school
pupils should be told in their lesson helps to see a
259

Interludes
proof of the divinity of Christ in his telling Nathanael
that he had seen him otherwise than by ocular vision :
" When thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee."
The psychologist exploring the underlying strata
of the mind beheves — and who has right to gainsay
him ? — that he has discovered in its subconscious
deeps the meeting-place of the temporal and the
eternal, where the human spirit feels the immediate
breath of the divine,
Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost,
communicating intuitions, revelations, inspirations,
once attributed to dispatches sent down from a
heavenly throne. Our nature is divinized when God
is found immanent at its centre. Humanity and
deity can no longer be thought of as essentiaUy different
natures, or man as external to God.
On another side of reahty the physicist — Sir Oliver
Lodge, for instance, in his " Life and Matter " — joins
hands with the philosopher and the psychologist in
modifying the ancient forms of rehgious thought.
The stark duahsm which common sense recognizes
between matter and spirit may well seem invincible.
Dr. Samuel Johnson considered the Berkeleian doctrme
of the unreality of matter refuted by kicking at a
stone — the kick encounters resistance ; but this proves
no more than that matter is something which resists
force. That resistance to force is also a property
of an immaterial thing, such as magnetism, we have
known ever since we found a magnet resisting effort
to wrench from it its armature. What, then, if matter
260

Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy
also should prove to be only an embodiment of resisting
force ? This the physicist now asserts.
No more revolutionary conception has been intro
duced into present-day science than that of the
immaterial nature of all that is included under the
term " matter." The old dilemma, " God or atoms,"
is superseded, for the ultimate term of matter is no
longer the atom. This, indeed, is found to be a very
complex and an ethereal thing, a congeries of vibrating
points of electric energy, termed " ions," or " elec
trons," some seven hundred of them in an atom of
hydrogen, and fifty-five times as many in an atom of
gold. This discovery that air, clouds, clods, oceans,
Alps, and hving bodies are all composed of what the
ancients, when they saw it in the dazzling thunderbolt,
caUed " the fire of God," may bewilder the imagination,
but it expels from rational thought the inveterate
dualism between matter and spirit. Principal Fair-
bairn, saying from the standpoint of philosophy,
" Nature is Spirit," is corroborated by Professor
Hyslop, saying from the standpoint of physics, " Matter
is Spirit," and telling us that, except for convenience,
and for historical reasons, the very word " matter "
might be disused. Researches into radio-activity are
now adding fresh confirmation of the fact, and promis
ing further fruitful discoveries in the same hne. While
all this mightily reinforces the ancient faith in the
encompassing and pervading activity of God, it tends
to substitute for the ancient thought of God and
Nature as external to each other the truer thought of
God as in Nature, and of Nature as in God.

261

Interludes
Real though unwitting foes of the ancient faith are
those who in its supposed interest, and having in mind
some atheistic monists, attack monism, suspecting it
of an anti-Christian tendency ; who cry out that
Christianity must die, if its ancient intellectual tene
ment is abandoned ; that it cannot survive transition
to another that promises to be more enduring. More
sane are Holmes's saying :
Build thee more stately mansions, 0 my soul,
and Edward Caird 's : "'Christian' is the permanent
adjective to define the ever-growing ideal of humanity."
There is surely everything to hope and nothing to
fear from philosophy and science as the handmaids of
religion. Their rectifying and clarifying work upon
the intellectual structures of reUgion cannot rationally
be thought to have reached its limit.
The seer and the scientist concur in assuring us
that humanity, comparatively a new occupant of an
ancient planet, has millions of years before it in a
habitable world — a hundred miUion, says Professor
Shaler, of Harvard, and Tennyson says :
If twenty million summers are stored in the sunlight still,
We are far from the noon of man, there is room for the race to grow.
Is it not, then, childish to write " finished " on any
theological fabric, however well it may have served
past generations ? Of future generations the Scrip
ture is true, " that they apart from us should not be
made perfect." But, as Pascal said that the successive
generations of men must be conceived of as one man,
always living and always learning ; so it is true of us,
262

Theological Bearings of Modern Philosophy
that we, apart from those who are to take up the work
of God after us, cannot be made perfect — are not to
perfect God's work in this world. We may, indeed,
imitate the ancient mariners who said : " No more
beyond," as they looked out of the Gibraltar gate
upon the apparently boundless Atlantic ; but we
may better expect the discoverer of a new continent
to come in the fulness of time. The advance of
learning concerning things human and divine must
go on, until aU that is involved in the central Christian
truth of God in man and man in God is fully unfolded
in thought and reahzed in deed.

263

Some Implicates of Theism

XVIII
SOME IMPLICATES OF THEISM1
All things consist3 in God, is the brief statement of
theism. That is, as the Biblical word here
hteraUy rendered means, they hold together or cohere
in him. They exist because he subsists as their
ground. The brief statement of pantheism inverts
this : God consists in all things ; is their sum, not their
ground ; exists because they exist. Theism and
pantheism agree that God is in all things, the immanent
and universal Energy. But theism affirms more ;
pantheism, no more. Pantheism holds that this
energy first becomes conscious when conscious beings
like man proceed from it. That is, consciousness is a
product of evolution. Theism reverses this. It holds
that evolution is a product of consciousness ; that the
energy immanent in all things is also a transcendent
energy, consciously originating and sustaining all,
but inexhaustibly exceeding all that proceeds from it.
This affirmation is the distinctive mark of the theist,
who is sometimes ignorantly criticized as a pantheist
by those who hold a deistic conception of God as a
Maker extraneous to his works. No pantheist could
1 From The American Journal of Theology, April, 1901.
2 For this use of the word see Colossians i. 17 (R.V. margin).
267

Interludes
affirm this more positively than the Apostle Paul.1
But Paul was no pantheist.
Leaving pantheism here, one asks how theism
more precisely understands God's immanence and
God's transcendence.
Under the term immanence the theist expands the
popular idea of the divine omnipresence, as an aU-
seeing eye, into the ' thought of God's aU-energizing
intelhgence, as ever active, dynamic within all visible
forms of existence, giving birth to all being, main
taining aU motion, efficient in the activity of all
hfe, never interfering with the orderly workings of
nature or of mind, while ever absolutely controlhng
them. This statement by no means rules out the
possibility of miracle in the legitimate sense of the
word, denoting, as it does, what is preterhuman, not
in an absolute, but in a relative sense ; relatively, that is,
to the existing range of human knowledge and power.2
The chief problem of theism is to reconcile this con
ception of the immanent divine control of all things
with other conceptions which at first glance seemingly
contradict it — (1) the freedom and responsibility of
human action under this absolute control, and (2)
the benevolence of God notwithstanding the evil of the
world. The solution of this problem may be briefly stated
thus :
I. As to the evil will of a wicked man, the theist
affirms the divine energy as immanent therein, but
1 Acts xvii. 28 ; 1 Cor. xii. 6 ; xv. 28 ; Eph. iv. 6 ; Phil. ii. 13.
2 For discussion of this statement see "Miracles and Super
natural Religion," -by the present writer (Macmillan).
268

Some Implicates of Theism
that the evil will is none the less responsible, because
free. This for the following reasons : (1) Nothing
that exists can be in any way external to the Infinite
Being. " In him we hve " is true of all that hve,
of devils as of saints, though in very different ways.
(2) The impulses even of tigers and vipers are included
in the complex of executive forces by which the world-
process is carried on, a coUective term for which is
the Will of God. So are the tigerish or viperish impulses
in the animalized men whom the higher ethical impulses
faU to control. (3) These lower impulses, being a
part of God's work in nature, are not evil in them
selves, but evil only when antagonizing the higher,
or wiUed in preference to the higher. Appetite and
passion, like fire, are good servants, bad masters.
(4) WiU, whether divine or human, is self-directive
power. The Infinite Self being inclusive of all finite
selves, the Infinite Will must be inclusive of all finite
wiUs. But these, though thus included, are none
the less self-directive, or, as we say, " free." We
virtuaUy admit this whenever exhorting a bad man
to become a better man. Were he not free to do as
exhorted, exhorting him would be foohsh. The con
sciousness of such freedom is an ultimate fact and
irrefutable. (6) FuU scope for such free self-direction
of the finite wiU within the Infinite Will appears given
in the indefinite variety of ways in which it must
be conceived possible for the Divine purpose to realize
itself in an effective but non-interfering control.
(7) The sinner's seU-misdirecting wiU is therefore his
own in enough of freedom to incur responsibility.
The sinner virtually admits this in every self-reproach,
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Interludes
for not having done what he tells himseU he could and
ought. (8) His self -misdirecting will, therefore, in
cluded but free within the Infinite Will, is included
only to be overcome1 in just condemnation for the
misdirection, as guilty as free.
The foregoing considerations may be stated other
wise, and more briefly, thus : (1) But for the continual
supply of divine energy our hfe could not sustain
itself. (2) In a sinful act the sin is the freely per
verted use of this divine energy. (3) This perverted
use is the act of a self-misdirecting or sinful will.
(4) God is immanent in such a wiU simply as immanent
in the man. The man's will is simply the man wiUing.
His self-directive power in wiUing is of God. God is in
it as power, not as direction to evil. (5) Hence,
while the power is God's, the self-direction is the man's
own. Hence his responsibility for it, his guilt in
self -misdirection. Conscience affirms this as an ulti
mate fact. Beyond this —
This main-miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world,
no analysis can go.
II. As to the other half of the problem, the vindica
tion of the divine benevolence, notwithstanding the
seeming contradiction of it by the evil in the world,
the practical solution is in a comparison of the alter
native beliefs, that the Infinite Being is (1) malevolent,
or (2) indifferent.
The decisive considerations are these : (1) A behef
to which great contradictions appear must be accepted,
1 Hebrews x. 29.
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Some Implicates of Theism
if still greater contradictions appear to the alternative
belief. (2) To determine the line of least contra
diction, the apparent dynamic tendency of the whole
course of things thus far must be taken into view, not
the apparently static condition of a given fragment
of it. (3) In such a view there is manifest a steady,
though slow, process of eliminating the evils of the
world ; a slow, but continuous, growth of a benevolent
spirit in the world ; a faith gradually spreading and
increasing, in the face of aU the suffering of the world,
that God is good ; an intense conviction of many of
the greatest sufferers in the sovereignty of the divine
goodness as controlling even the evil for benevolent
ends. (4) On the principle that the whole is greater
than a part, reason must accept this testimony of
the general course of things — a testimony fatal to
the alternatives of malevolence or indifference. Reason
is therefore bound to hold that benevolence controls
the evolutionary process, notwithstanding the seeming
indications of isolated facts to the contrary.
From these problems involved in the immanence
of God we pass to those involved in his transcendence.
The common conception of it seems to be quantita
tive, extensional, an overpassing of all bounds of
space, or time, or human power ; conceptions rooted
in the deistic mode of thought concerning God as
external to his universe. As an attribute of pure
Spirit, the true import of transcendence is not quantity,
but quality of being. It is Ulustrated in the fact
that a Shakespeare is greater than any or all of his
works. In affirming, with a scientist like the late
271

Interludes
Professor Cope, that evolution is the product of
consciousness, theism both affirms and interprets the
transcendence of God. It is the essential quality of
the constant Producer as distinct from that of the
transient product ; of hmitless thought as distinct from
limited things ; of the perfectly conscious as distinct
from the partly conscious or non-conscious ; of Self-
Existence as distinct from derived existence ; of Life
Infinite as distinct from Ufe in finite forms. Only
quahtatively is it properly oonceivable. It is spiritual,
dynamic, vital, belonging to the very idea of an
immanent consoious hfe that is seU-existent and
eternal. Consequently, any supposed distribution of
functions between God transcendent and God imma
nent is wholly illusory. The transcendent is involved
in the immanent, the vital in the mechanical, the
" supernatural " or spiritual in the natural, the infinite
in the finite, the sacred in the secular. " Nature is
Spirit," said Principal Fairbairn. Only as immanent
the transcendent Spirit, as St. Paul said, " worketh
all in all." The forces by which God makes a plant
grow and a rehgion grow differ as the forces which we
exert in mechanical work and in moral work. The
ultimate force is spiritual. Its modes of energizing
differ only as its ends differ.
The Infinite and Eternal Energy whence all things
proceed is identical, as Herbert Spencer declared,
with that which wells up within us under the form of
consciousness. The astronomer Herschel compared
the force of gravitation to the pressure of a Universal
WiU. The ripe theologian goes farther : " AU cosmic
power is will," says Dr. James Martineau. This has
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Some Implicates of Theism
been notably reaffirmed by a great scientist. " The
whole universe," says A. R. Wallace, " is not merely
dependent on, but actually is, the wiU of higher
intelligences or of one supreme intelligence." This
is in striking accord with Augustine's saying : " The
Will of God is the nature of things." To think of
the Divine WiU as an energy outside of the evolutionary
process of nature, and occasionally breaking into it
with interference or cataclysm, is grossly anthropo
morphic. To conceive of the WiU of God as extraneous
to the forces resident in nature, and to divide and
separate these from it, as the unconscious from the
conscious, the material from the spiritual, is fallacious.
The evolution, being the product of consciousness,
must be the product of conscious Will, and the ultimate
" resident force " is therefore spiritual and moral.
Either God is not at aU in the resident forces which
carry on the evolutionary process, or he is consciously
and actively in them as immanent WiU. The drama
of history, no less than the process of nature, exhibits
that " toil co-operant to an end " which evinces control
by Executive Mind — a term identical with Will. Its
mode of working defies analysis. We can affirm only
that it is ever from within outward, from the centre ;
but " God's centre is everywhere, his circumference
nowhere." One who thinks of the Divine WUl as
working in innumerable separate acts of vohtion —
one for every raindrop, etc. — needs to reflect that
our own will, whenever we walk, does not put forth
a separate vohtion for every step, but depends on
the automatic operation of the lower nerve-centres,
which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work.
273 s

Interludes
Furthermore : from the theistic statement that the
evolution is the product of consciousness it follows
that it is not reasonable to think of the highest products
of human consciousness, as ethics and rehgion, as
any more outside of the evolutionary process than
the lowest forms of nature, organic or inorganic.
From the lowest to the highest, in the social organiza
tion of ants, and the mechanic art of beavers, and
no less in the constructions of statesmen and church
men, executive mind, that is, conscious will, is found
working with resident forces termed " lower " because
of the lower nature of their product, to all which it
is related as generic force to specific. Only as one
Universal Will underhes all particular wiUs is there
a basis of unity for all these as co-operant to a common
purpose. But the higher we ascend through the grades
of organized life, the more we find of conscious will
in a free adaptation of means to ends. In man a
range of self-directive power is reached which obtains
for his will, as contrasted with that of beavers, ants,
etc., the name of " free." Yet is his will only a
larger artery than theirs for the controlUng current
of the Universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary
flow constitutes the Self-Revelation of the Eternal
One. Here in this fact of the imperium in imperio of
man in God, a conditioned independence that is
wholly dependent on the conditioning Will, we reach
the cloudhne of the mountain. To the ultimate
question of psychology, What am 1 1 no conclusive
answer, said Lotze, can be returned. Only from the
standpoint of the Absolute, says Professor Seth, can
274

Some Implicates of Theism
we be absolutely intelligible to ourselves. We must
rest in the confession :
Our wills are ours, we know not how ;
Our wills are ours to make them Thine.
Finally, the universe of things and wills is a living
Universe, because springing from one self-existent
LUe, in whom all being grounds. There is a pheno
menal duality of life, as derived and underived ;
no real duahty, as divine and not divine. The hfe
of the insect may seem undivine, because so dim and
rudimentary. Life in its highest range and full
development is seen to be divine, as in the Christ.
Yet even to the humblest form of life, the flower in
the crannied waU, the poet truly said :
. . . if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Nothing finite is only finite. Not only is it in the
infinite, but the infinite, at once immanent and tran
scendent, is in it :
Within all, but not shut in ;
Without all, but not shut out.
And this infinite is an infinite Life. It is infinite,
not as if indeterminate, but rather, says Dr. Edward
Caird, as being inexhaustible. It is infinite, not as if
extended outside of hmits known as finite, but rather,
says Dr. Caird again, as without any limits except
those which it imposes on itseU. The true infinite, then,
is not the unlimited, but the self-limiting. That kenosis,
or self-Umitation of the divine, which St. Paul saw
275

Interludes
in Jesus,1 is the universal characteristic of the infinite
Life which we name God. His kenosis, a humbhng
of the highest to the lowest, is seen, as Dr. Samuel
Harris, of Yale, said, in all the forms of finite existence
that variously manifest the infinite Life from which
aU finite hfe originates. Thus all Ufe is, in its essential
unity, divine. The Life transcendent is ever becoming
life immanent. Life immanent is at the same time
ever one with Life transcendent. The temporal
thus included in the eternal may say, in consciousness
of what it is : " Before Abraham was born,3 I am."

1 Philippians ii. 7.
2 John viii. 58 (R.V. margin).

276

Principia of Modem Theology

XIX
PRINCIPIA OF MODERN THEOLOGY
Our interpretations of the innumerable phenomena
of the world and man are regulated by a compara
tively few fundamental principles, the principia of
our thought. For instance, the two opposite principles
of geocentric and of hehocentric motion generate the
vast diversity between ancient astronomy and modern.
Contradictory theologies spring thus from opposite
principles at the root of thought. The differences in
the religious thinking of such opposites as Thomas
Paine and Edward Caird root in opposite primary
conceptions — an outside God apart from men, and tho
indweUing God, Centre and Soul of every sphere.
In the contrariety of these fundamental conceptions,
the deistic and the theistic, lies the radical divergence
between Judaism and Christianity, and also between
the Judaic Christianity that still is widely prevalent
and the religious thought expressed by Jesus.
The present diversity of thought among religious
thinkers is due to the diversity of their regulative
ideas. When this diversity is reduced to unity in
common conceptions of reahty, men will think as
nearly alike in rehgion as now in astronomy, in which,
notwithstanding agreement in general, there still
remain open questions giving rise to minor differences
279

Interludes
in details, e.g., the " canals " of Mars, the nebular
hypothesis, etc. Progress toward such unity is plainly
perceptible. The nineteenth century furnished thought
with a new universe, material and mental, and so with
a new revelation of the Spirit of the universe. In
evitably, therefore, a distinctively modern theology
supervened upon the mediaeval, slowly, indeed, but
steadily. Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now.
The regulative ideas which fundamentaUy outline
the rehgious thought that conforms to the positions
of modern knowledge may be briefly phrased, though
volumes might be required for their adequate exposi
tion. Correspondence with theological friends promin
ent in different rehgious groups has revealed a larger
consensus of theological opinion than is commonly
supposed. It seems desirable that this fact should
be released from the privacy of personal correspond
ence, for confirmation of the statement just made,
that theologians formerly at variance are drawing
together on the common ground prepared by their
critico-historical, scientific, psychological, and philo
sophical agreements. The group of correspondents
thus drawn into theological agreement by their
agreement in the assured positions of modern learning
includes Baptists, Congregationahsts, Episcopalians,
Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Unitarians,
and Universalists — a significant assemblage, certainly,
in their expression of substantial concurrence in the
theses stated below, to the formulation of which some
of them have been individually helpful in particulars.
280

Principia of Modern Theology
A question raised and answered in the course of
this correspondence — Why is Christology excluded
from these theses ? — deserves its answer to accompany
them here. Christology, as its definitive terms —
Christos, Messiah, Prophet, Priest, King, Saviour,
Shepherd, etc. — imply, is essentially a doctrine of
functions. As such, it strictly belongs to the category
of method, but method is secondary to principia, or
first principles. Theology, said Principal Fairbairn
at the London Congregational Council in 1891, " must
on its doctrinal side be theocentric." The word itself
impUes this. Christocentric is a term apphcable to
theological method only. These theses are intended
to include only the fundamental principles of theo
logy, in distinction from whatever is secondary or
inferential. The profound truth of which Darwin a half-century
ago became the prophet — the unity of Life throughout
its range of forms from the lowest to the highest —
points in accord with inspired Scripture to the
Eternal Life, named by Jesus the " Living Father,"
as the proper starting-point of reasoned thought
concerning the Being " in whom we hve, and move,
and have our being." The thought that theology
in becoming more scientific must become more
biological has recently begun to gain recognition.
In the construction and arrangement of the foUowing
statements this thought has been dominant. Though
dogmatic in form, they are simply theses for thought,
such as may be hoped helpful toward clearer views,
and consequently wider agreement.

281

Interludes
Principia 1
1. Life self -existent, Source of aU lives ; Eternal
Spirit, Ground of aU natures, self-conscious, rational,
purposive, the Fount of human personality, all-
sustaining, all-pervading, BibUcally named " The
Living God," " The Holy One," " Our Father."
2. Nature a hierarchy of natures more or less fully
phenomenal of Life or Spirit, the $wpernatural Reahty.
The natural is the outwardness of the Supernatural ;
the Supernatural the ultimate inwardness of the
natural. 3. Humanity, the fullest known expression of Life,
and so the supreme interpreter of Deity, thus postu
lating some community of thought, and so an essential
oneness with Deity underlying aU difference.
4. Transcendence and Immanence, as predicates
of Deity, being terms of Spirit, are primarily of pur
posive and teleological significance — dynamic concepts.
5. Whatsoever God does he does unceasingly, in
methods accordant with natures, and severally uniform
throughout aU duration.
6. Creation, Incarnation, Revelation, Redemption,
Judgment, Atonement, Salvation, are continuous
processes of immanent Deity, signaUzed by saUent
events. 7. Incarnation (enfleshing), a distinctive type of
Creation, is a corollary of Immanence, and not sporadic,
but universal. 1 Reprinted from The Homilettc Review, August, 1908
282

Principia of Modern Theology
8. Revelation is the process of progressively enabling
men to discover truth, to discern good and evil, right
and wrong, and to think the thought of God, according
to the measure of willingness and capacity.
9. Redemption, a constructive process, is the
dehverance of spiritual hfe from the matrix and
mastery of the physical and psychical, ultimately
perfecting the image of God in man.
10. Judgment, essentially a corrective process, is
naturally auxiliary to Redemption.
11. Atonement (at-one-ment) is the process of
reconcUing man to God, lawlessness to law, through
satisfaction rendered to the demand of God immanent
in conscience for repentance and obedience.
12. Salvation is progressively wrought out through
the conforming of conscience and will to the highest
ideal of goodness, personal and social, within its
horizon. 13. The moral and the rehgious life, really, not
conventionaUy such, are each inspired by an infinite
ideal, and therefore essentially one and inseparable.
14. Ordered harmony (cosmos), as it has super
seded physical disorder (chaos), must ultimately
supersede moral disorder (sin), and consummate the
moral Kingdom of God.

283

" For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom
every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he would
grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be
strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man ;
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith ; to the end
that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to
apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length,
and height, and depth, and to know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled unto all the fulness
of God.
" Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above
all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in
us, unto him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto
all generations for ever and ever." — Ephesians m. 14-21 (R.V.).

284

XX
THE PRAYER OF ST. PAUL l
Ephesians iii. 14-21.
Father, to thee we bow ;
Father of Christ art thou,
Father of all.
In thee we hve and move ;
Thy famUy of love
Is one — below, above ;
Thou, AU in all.
Thy rich and glorious grace
Gird aU our struggUng days
With holy power ;
That so thy Spirit's might,
Filhng our souls with hght,
May lift to cloudless height
Each o'ercast hour.
In us may faith enshrine
Thy Christ — his Cross our sign,
His love our root ;
That power to apprehend
The love which knows no end
From strength to strength may tend
With holy fruit.
1 From The Outlook, January 11, 1908.
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Interludes
We with aU saints would know
The utmost thou wouldst show
In Christ our Lord :
All lower longings stilled,
From him would we be filled
Full as thy grace hath wiUed,
Fulness of God.
To thee, who more canst bless
Than prayers or thoughts express
With powers divine,
Thy Church in Christ doth raise
Her fihal hymn of praise :
Through everlasting days
All glory thine.

286

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